ReadWriteWeb

A spokesperson for European Commission Vice President Joaquin Almunia confirmed to ReadWriteWeb this afternoon from Brussels that the Commission has yet to come to a decision over whether to issue a Statement of Objections to Google, specifically with respect to an official investigation into whether the company weights search results - especially searches for commercial products - against certain sites, including online retailers.

The confirmation comes after a Bloomberg News report this morning appeared to indicate the EC had yet to reach a decision about an investigation concerning whether Google makes arbitrary choices with regard to which sites receive higher-ordered results in Google News. As Comm. Almunia's spokesperson tells RWW, his statement was actually in response to something else entirely: specifically, a question submitted by another commissioner into whether, over a two-year period, the Commission has obtained evidence showing Google actively demotes specific retailers.

The discussion is already nearly five years old, and yet the vacancy in the public conscience persists as if something big had collapsed just last week. Microsoft is no longer the dominating, polarizing force that it was in the previous decade. The mindset of the company that once preached to its employees, "Every line of code that is written to our standards is a small victory; every line of code that is written to any other standard, is a small defeat," has exited out the back door and sneaked past the gaze of European regulators.

And boy, do we ever miss it. From the moment Ycombinator co-founder Paul Graham famously proclaimed "Microsoft is Dead," our casting couches have been warmed by the seats of would-be substitutes. Like it or not, Microsoft fulfilled a latent psychological need in many folks' minds: the need for a strongly polarizing force that made it easier to decide what to like and what to hate.

Populism is a tool that only works in one's defense when one does not appear big or strong enough to wield it by himself. In its rise to fame, Google has been a champion of populist causes, most notably the association of freedom of ideas with freedom in licensing. Up until recently, the company has been adept in utilizing populism to its advantage, including distinguishing itself against Microsoft, and encouraging others to rally around its relative degree of openness with respect to Android, video codecs such as VP8, and HTML5.

But there's a reason the phrase "populist giant" does not appear much in politics, or in technology which has in many ways become the successor to politics in the public mind. Last month, the U.S. Senate had an opportunity to remove the populist veil from Google CEO Eric Schmidt, for whom it clearly no longer fits.

Five years ago, the complaint against Microsoft brewing before the European Court of First Instance was that it was not contributing enough knowledge about Windows' source code to let others develop services for it. That didn't make sense to the European Commission, which openly asked, what good is an operating system if it doesn't operate anything except itself?

Yesterday, the organization responsible for the Free Software-licensed system of file and print services called Samba - the group that had helped keep Microsoft in court for over six years - acknowledged that a distribution that showed up in Samba's respositories on October 11 contained interoperability code for Windows from Microsoft itself.

"Mr. Schmidt, industry stats show that Google runs between 65 and 70% of all Internet searches in the U.S. done on computers and about 95% on mobile devices, and has 75% of all search advertising revenue in the United States," recited Sen. Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman Herb Kohl (D - Wisc.) "Under the common antitrust standards, this kind of a market share is considered to constitute monopoly power. Does Google recognize that as a monopolist or a dominant power? Special rules apply that there is conduct that must be taken and conduct that must be refrained from."

At that moment, the magnitude of the weight of the Google chairman's devious plan, all the millions of little wrongs committed every second against everyday mothers and fathers just trying to earn a living, impacted him like a meteor streaking from the sky. Sen. Kohl's prophetic words, as though carved on the Halls of Justice itself, rang a new chord in Eric Schmidt's heart, which grew three sizes in that very instant. "My lord," the chairman found himself saying, "what have I done? What a monstrous machine have I set forth upon this Earth? Yes... yes, Senator, I do believe! Special rules do apply, and there is conduct that must be refrained from! And to the end of my life, by the sword Excalibur, I shall make this my mission!"

This week, Google chairman Eric Schmidt will testify before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights. The hearing is called "The Power of Google: Serving Consumers or Threatening Competition?" Schmidt will be followed by testimony from Jeremy Stoppelman, co-founder and CEO of Yelp, whose company's treatment by Google exemplifies the ethically touchy parts of Google's search business practices.

In July, Google made its move in local business reviews, pushing results from sites like Yelp down the page below reviews from Google's own Places service. The accusation is that Google's search privileges its own content (and ad businesses) ahead of competitors. These allegations have arisen before in both the U.S. and Europe. But are these practices really anti-competitive under the law?

New data from Searchmetrics indicate that Google is making precise adjustments to their search result algorithms that, at least in some cases, help drive traffic to Google's own Web properties. There's not enough evidence to imply causation, but the noticeable increases in video and image results, both of which are dominated by Google properties, would fit with a pattern of accusations that Google's search results favor its own sites.

The data show sharp increases in the number of image and video results, with video now returning for 60% or more of all searches. The number 1 sites for video and image results are YouTube and Blogger respectively, both of which are Google properties. Google also dominates maps and shopping results.

News surfaced yesterday that Google is facing a Federal Trade Commission antitrust investigation concerning its search practices, specifically the way it features Google products in search results ahead of competitors. Today, Google responded in a blog post, touting the company's transparency and commitment to users.

"It's still unclear exactly what the FTC's concerns are, but we're clear about where we stand. Since the beginning, we have been guided by the idea that, if we focus on the user, all else will follow." While the details of the case are emerging, it's clear Google is not facing a traditional antitrust case the way Microsoft did in the late 1990s. For Google, that could make all the difference.

Google cannot escape the federal government. Every large acquisition that the company makes is scrutinized for months by the feds and now the very nature of Google itself looks like it will go on trial. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Federal Trade Commission will begin serving Google with subpoenas in the start of a broad antitrust investigation into the company's Web and search dominance.

Google's business practices will be put under the microscope, especially the core search product that makes up nearly 66% of search traffic in the United States. One of the key issues, according to The Wall Street Journal, will be if Google "unfairly channels users to its growing network of services at the expense of rivals." Microsoft once went down the antitrust road, and the results were damaging for the software giant. How will Google fare under the federal microscope?

In order to usher the patent system "into the 21st Century", Deputy General Counsel for Microsoft Horacio Gutierrez believes that "global patent harmonization" must happen. In a recent CNET article Andrew Donoghue lists a number of opponents to Microsoft's ever-growing patent power. The Redmond giant has been widely criticized for anti-competitive tactics and has been investigated in a number of antitrust cases. Unsurprisingly, Gutierrez's statements for standardized patent applications and processing have struck a chord with free culture supporters.