We have seen a lot of lawsuits
dealing with search engines in the last few years. Most of them
involved trademark, copyright or competition law based claims. Courts had to
decide whether
deep linking is a copyright violation, whether links to infringing content
can lead to
secondary liability of the link-provider, whether the use of
trademarked words as keywords for ads is permissible, etc. But so far
there has been very little discussion about search engines and antitrust law.
This is about to change. Earlier this year,
Google has removed BMW's German web site from its index for violating
Google's guidelines against trying to manipulate search results. Shortly
after removing its
doorway pages (Doorway pages can be used to trick search engines into
sending users to web sites that are not directly related to the search terms
they are searching for), Google has reincluded bmw.de in its index. But the
question remains: Is it possible, that under certain circumstances, search
engines might be obliged to include web sites in their index? This topic has
been discussed at the Search Engine Strategies in Munich 2006 and has become
even more relevant with a
lawsuit brought by kinderstart.com against Google.
KinderStart charges that Google without warning in March 2005 penalized the site
in its search rankings, sparking a "cataclysmic" 70 percent fall in its
audience—and a resulting 80 percent decline in revenue. The suit filed in a U.S.
District Court in San Jose, California, accuses Google of using its monopoly
position to harm competitors by downgrading search-result rankings without
reason or warning.
Under
the German Restraints of Competition Act (GWB), a company with dominant
market power may not inappropriately obstruct or unreasonably discriminate
against other companies in business dealings which are normally open to
other companies. Under this rule, Google might be obliged to include a web
site in its index. If one company’s web site is indexed and its competitor’s
web site is excluded, there is obviously a discrimination. But to have a
valid claim the discriminating search engine must have a dominant market
power. With a market share above 70% in Germany, one might argue that Google
meets this criteria. Google on the other hand will probably claim it has
powerful competitors with Yahoo and MSN. This might be true, but fact is:
Google by far is the most widely used search engine in Germany and as its
competitors are not focused primarily on search technology, their respective
market shares in search engine usage have steadily fallen.
Another
argument Google is likely to bring up in an antitrust lawsuit is that without an
exchange of benefits there is no market and thus no discrimination. This might
be the key element in lawsuits of this kind. No one really doubts that search
engines like Google can drive a lot of traffic to a web site. But it is also
true that there is usually no contract between Google and a web site operator.
Google gets no payment, there is no real legal obligation. So why should
antitrust law be applicable in such a situation after all? I believe the
kinderstart.com lawsuits answers this questions. Antitrust law wants to prevent
discriminatory behavior by dominant companies. Because of its market share a
dominant search engine has the power to ruin businesses. If a web site is not
included in Google, almost no one will find it in Germany (“To exist is to be
indexed by Google”). If your business completely depends on the goodwill of
another company with dominant market power, you should be protected by law in
some way.
So, in my
opinion, dominant search engines are obliged to index web sites under German
antitrust law. If they want to exclude or punish web sites they need a reason
for this discrimination. One reason can be infringing content on a web site
(search engines might risk liability if they don’t remove these sites from the
search results). Another reason can be a violation of the search engine’s
quality guidelines. So one might argue that a web site that uses doorway pages
violates Google’s rules and can be removed. But this is only true in part.
Imagine Google thinking that users don’t like the color magenta, so Google
changes its guidelines and starts dropping sites which use magenta. The point
is: A quality guideline must be reasonable in itself to justify a discrimination
under antitrust law. A dominant search engine is not at liberty to change its
guidelines at will. The kinderstart.com lawsuit also mentions a Google practice
called Sandbox: All new web sites have their ratings placed in a holding tank
until such time is deemed appropriate before a ranking can commence. So the
Sandbox is very similar to a new web site being placed on probation, and kept
lower than expected in search results. This makes it nearly impossible for new
companies to compete successfully online with older companies from the start. Is
this discrimination justified under the aspect of fighting search engine spam?
We will see how courts decide that matter!
Let us
now take a last look at the BMW doorway issue: BMW argued that they created the
doorway pages, because some items on its site were created using Java and so
those items weren't being detected by search engines. So it is obvious that not
all doorway page techniques are misleading users. They can also be designed to
give a search engine an idea of what's on the page. Because one can hardly say,
that web sites that use doorway pages are always evil, a dominant search engine
could be prohibited by antitrust law to remove all of them. Google might argue
it has to use filters to detect doorway pages. It is impossible to check every
use and decide whether it is for describing the content of the page or for
manipulatory purposes. This is true, but once a web site has been removed and
the web site operator sends a reinclusion request stating the reasons for the
use of the doorway pages, anti trust law might be the basis for a legal claim to
get indexed again.
So to
conclude, if a search engine is bound by antitrust law, it is no longer free in
its decision which web sites it includes in its index. It has to rank all sites
according to its algorithm, but can punish them for violations of its
(reasonable) guidelines.
I believe
this first legal analysis of the search engine market and antitrust law to be an
interesting starting point for future discussions. Do we want lawyers /judges to
decide the ranking of web sites? Probably not! Do we want search engines to be
neutral and anti discriminatory? I do!
Google is
said to act very slowly on reinclusion requests. Well, at least if you are not a
big player like BMW.
Wouldn’t it be nice, to have “all web
sites treated equally”, no matter how important the company behind it?
In my opinion Google has not abused
its monopoly in the Search King or in the BMW case. But I do think Google has a
monopoly, that is dangerous and needs to be watched. The legal ramifications of
the monopoly have to be examined more closely.