Antitrust Suit Filed Against Google for Being Unfair to Rival Site
February 18, 2009 – 1:42 pmAn antitrust suit was filed Tuesday against Google by a small website operator accusing them of unfairly manipulating its advertising system to harm a potential competitor.
A vertical search engine that provides a service for people looking for business products and services called SourceTool.com, is operated by TradeComent.com. As reported by the NYTimes.com, TradeComent.com is accusing Google of raising their advertising rates considerably after Google found out that SourceTool.com was a potential competitor. If you ask me, that is just wrong and dirty for anyone to do such a thing.
TadeComet has also said that Google had settled on an anticompetitive agreement with Business.com which is a SourceTool competitor but was offered better advertising terms despite Business.com having a similar business model to that of SourceTool.
The history of TradeComet will reveal that Google welcomed SourceTool who purchased ads on Google with the intent of growing traffic. The traffic then reached around 650,000 visits a day and that is when on the following year Google increased the prices that SourceTool had to bid for its ads by upwards of 10,000 percent. That is completely outrageous considering if you raise the value of only $5 by 10,000 percent it would be $2500.
Stories like this have not received much attention in the past mainly because no one wants to battle with the “so-called†big dog, Google. Even in such drastic circumstances, Google does have a proprietary algorithm to assign a type of quality score to advertisers’ sites where a low scoring site may have to pay more for ads vs. a higher scoring site. Many have complained about this in the past especially when it meant for certain site owners to dish out extra money when their competitor got a “lucky breakâ€.
SourceTool urged the Justice Department to block the advertising partnership proposal between Google and Yahoo last year. Shortly afterwards Google dumped the partnership after the Justice Department notified both Yahoo and Google that they planned to file a suit to stop the agreement. Sounds like the typical dog tucking it’s tail when he knows he has crossed the line and done something out-of-the ordinary.
Some others may be skeptical of this situation where other antitrust cases against Google have been dismissed. Maybe this will give the little guys out on the internet something to work with if they want to have any chance of standing up against Google. We might have a David and Goliath story in the making, what do you think?
