Marcelo Thompson

This week, Eric Schmidt told the U.S. Senate Antitrust Subcommittee that Google does not have “separate products and services”, that all of its offerings can be classified under the banner of “universal search”.

Schmidt is absolutely right: any distinction between “search” and other “products and services” is inaccurate. “Search” is not a distinctive relevant market.

Search is an existential experience.

What we now call search is but a topical, contingent[*] form of procuring access (on this, see section III.b here). Competition law is the wrong avenue to address the problem that the U.S. Senate seeks to address — Google’s perhaps excessive concentration of power in the information environment. Ironically, however, such a problem is caused by the same convergence between Google’s various product and service offerings that Schmidt refers to.

Thus, to say that competition law is not the correct avenue does not mean that Google’s information power should not itself be measured and regulated. It just means that it should be regulated for other reasons.

These reasons have to do with the ways in which our personal autonomy is at the same time enabled and constrained by the infrastructure of the information environment. As Benkler notes in the Wealth of Networks, “a concern with autonomy provides a distinct justification for the policy concern with media concentration”.

Such a justification, as I discuss in my recent paper, moves us beyond considering the limits of competitive markets.

…………………..

[*]

“‘It will be included in people’s brains,’ said Page. ‘When you think about something and don’t really know much about it, you will automatically get information.’

‘That’s true, said Brin. ‘Ultimately I view Google as a way to augment your brain with the knowledge of the world. Right now you go into your computer and type a phrase, but you can imagine that it could be easier in the future, that you can have just devices you talk into, or you can have computers that pay attention to what’s going on around them….’

…Page said, ‘Eventually you’ll have the implant, where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you the answer.’”

– Steven Levy, In the Plex