As I understand it, the simmering potential antitrust action against Google is premised on the idea that Google has market power in the search engine market that it exploits by biasing its search engine results in favor of its own content. Well, according to this new study by my colleague Josh Wright, to the extent that Google’s results appear to be biased they are substantially less so than Bing biases its results in favor of itself and Microsoft.
(Disclosure: I am an academic affiliate of the International Center for Law & Economics, which published the study but I have nothing to do with this particular study).
I confess that it is awfully hard for me to see any antitrust harm or consumer harm from Google and until otherwise convinced this looks an awful lot like rent-seeking by Microsoft which is turning the tables in response to being targeted by similar rent-seeking in its own case a few years ago.