Previous chapters have covered how the growth of Google and fears of how it was reshaping the communication landscape led to the application of existing anti-trust laws along with new ones to force a Google breakup in 2010. This chapter looks at the immediate aftermath: the “Baby Googles” or “Googlets” that were formed in the name of greater competition and consumer choice.
The Google brand name remained with the company’s first product, search. Virtually all search-related products were kept part of Google, including enterprise search. Google continued to operate the Google search engine, which itself remains by far the most popular search engine in the United States and in most countries around the world.
What didn’t stay with Google? As covered more in chapter 3, the Search Engine Reform Act of 2009 (SERA) had a fundamental principle that companies with business models around being guides to the web — regardless of the technology or human effort involved to create those guides — were forbidden from also owning content that might be listed in those guides.
“If I buy a restaurant guide, I don’t expect the publisher of the guide to also own or make money off of some of the restaurants in the guide,” said one US senator during debate over the act.
Away went products like Google Knol, as well as Google’s ability to offer an ad brokerage service like AdSense to publishers. Google could still sell ads — indeed, the AdWords program remains the chief source of revenue for Google. However, those ads are restricted to Google’s own search results pages or the search results pages of affiliate partners.
Critics pointed out that it wasn’t illegal under US law for these conflicts to occur in other areas. Movie studios were free to own magazines that might cover their movies, for example. Nor could anyone show solid evidence that Google had allowed the inherent conflicts to become real ones. But the argument of search deserving special regulatory protection won out.
Google was allowed some exceptions to the “no content” rule. Community maps were deemed “search-like,” so Google’s Wikipedia-like social mapping effort could continue. Google News, where pages of “content” are built in an automated fashion, were still deemed to be search-like because of their “discovery” nature and thus were allowed. Local reviews of merchants were also allowed. Hosting of video content through YouTube? That was not deemed a search activity, so YouTube was spun off.
As coming chapters will explain, the changes were not limited to Google. Microsoft and Yahoo both found the act required them to divest and divide up various business units. Ironically, one of the chief backers of the reform act — the newspaper publishing industry — got a rude awakening when they found it applied to them. Plans for a pan-newspaper portal to rival Google News came to a halt when it was deemed in a lawsuit that the portal would violate SERA because, as a search engine, it was listing newspapers that it also would have an interest in favoring.
Understanding that gray areas would come up, the reform act also established the Search Commerce Commission. Among its many duties is serving as an arbiter of whether a search engine has slipped too much into the content-hosting space.
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