谷歌搜索公平性引质疑

ROBERT SIEGEL, host: This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Robert Siegel.

MELISSA BLOCK, host: I'm Melissa Block. And it's time now for All Tech Considered.

Google now draws over a billion visits each month to its websites. It's also the target of a massive antitrust(adj. 反垄断的)investigation by federal regulators.

As NPR's Nina Gregory reports, when it comes to policing monopolies(垄断;完全控制)it's not the size that matters.

NINA GREGORY: It is not illegal for a company to have a monopoly. What experts say is illegal is how a company uses its monopoly.

Mr. BOB LANDE (Director, American Antitrust Institute): Have they unfairly excluded competitors in a way that will hurt consumers?

GREGORY: Bob Lande is a director at the American Antitrust Institute(美国反垄断协会), a noNPRofit research group. He's watching the Federal Trade Commission's investigation of Google closely.

Mr. LANDE: Google has this enormous power, and they have the incentive to unfairly exclude competitors in a way that could harm consumers. And the FTC wants to see whether this has happened.

GREGORY: It will be a difficult case to make. The site is free to users, Google says, and if you don't like its results, you can go elsewhere for information. And despite its dominant market share, Google argues it doesn't have a monopoly. There are other search engines like Bing. But most important, it says the FTC's notion of search is antiquated.

Matt Cutts is a software engineer at Google and explains that search is no longer relegated to just search engines.

Mr. MATT CUTTS (Software Engineer, Google): You can go online and ask your friends whether on Twitter or Facebook you know, hey, I need a recommendation for a good bicycle, or something like that. It's not probably always going to be about the Web. It might be, you know, bringing in things like social. It might be bringing in trusted experts.

GREGORY: Gary Reback is an antitrust attorney in the Silicon Valley. He's credited with spearheading the government's massive anti-trust case against Microsoft in the '90s. He says in the case of Google, the government is also investigating whether the search engine unfairly puts its own results at the top. For example, say you Googled map of Pasadena, a Google map might come up above MapQuest.

Mr. GARY REBACK (Antitrust Attorney): The allegation is that Google brings its own results up to the top of the search results, making them more visible and more valuable than competitors who actually would score higher on the normal relevance tests Google uses to rank search results.

GREGORY: Google denies that it tips the scales in favor of itself. One of the many companies that disagrees is the online travel company, Kayak.com. Robert Birge is the company's chief marketing officer.

Mr. ROBERT BIRGE (Chief Marketing Officer, Kayak.com): We believe there's a very compelling case that Google is abusing its dominant position in search to stifle competition and to extend its control over how information and commerce flows over the Internet.

GREGORY: He offers an example. Say you want to go to Tahiti.

Mr. BIRGE: I think what would happen, you know, if you search for hotels from Tahiti, you're going to see a number of search results that appear to be unbiased search results from the Google search engine, when in fact they're part of a new product that Google has launched in the last year that's their own product and is based on what advertisers are paying them.

GREGORY: Google admits companies are sometimes unhappy with where they turn up in a search result, but not everyone can be first.

There are myriad(无数的,大量的) accusations being made against the company, and given the scope, the FTC probe is ongoing. Similar cases have taken years to sort out. But in this Google investigation, the FTC certainly has plenty of data it has to search through.

Nina Gregory, NPR News.