Once again our government is attacking a company for being successful.  Google is on the hot seat at a Senate hearing and being questioned by among others Al Franken.  The charge appears to be that Google is unfairly listing it’s offerings ahead of competing products and services.  Google does between 65% and 75% of all searches and 97% of all mobile searches.  I wonder why that is?  By jove, I bet it is because we find Google searches to be more beneficial than those form competing offerings.  Senator Franken suggested that maybe changes to Google’s search algorithms should be reviewed by some government agency.  Eric Schmidt, Googles CEO, said that Google makes something over 500 changes to the search parameters annually and waiting for government approval would be a serious setback to customer service and usefulness.  But in addition to that,  I wonder why Google should be required to reveal it’s trade secrets.

Let’s look at what Google does wrong.  They provide the service at no cost to us users.  As noted above we appear to find Google searches more beneficial.  Is Google a monopoly – not in the classic sense of the word but from a practical standpoint probably, not because they did anything illegal but because they created a new class of tools and do it better than anyone else.  Having said that, where is the consumer harm? In my mind there is no harm.  Further, I do not think that Google should be held responsible for the success of the others in the search arena.