Highlights Of The FTC Staff Report On Google & Antitrust Issues

We've dug through the report for you and pulled out parts that seem especially interesting. Come read along!

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March 25, 2015 • 10 minutes read

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    The Wall Street Journal has released the 2012 FTC staff report it received investigating Google on antitrust allegations. By “full,” that is half the actual report. The FTC mistakenly sent it every other page out of a report meant to be private.

    Google’s statement on the report, given to the WSJ, was:

    “We understand that what was sent to the Wall Street Journal represents 50% of one document written by 50% of the FTC case teams. Ultimately both case teams (100%) concluded that no action was needed on search display and ranking. Speculation about consumer or competitor harm turned out to be entirely wrong. On the other issues raised, we quickly made changes as agreed with the FTC.”

    To translate, as we said, the WSJ received half the pages of one FTC staff report, by the FTC’s competition unit. The other report — which hasn’t been released — was by the FTC’s economic unit, the WSJ explains — and that didn’t recommend legal action. The case was eventually settled.

    We’re still going through the report ourselves for follow-up stories. But the live tweet of the highlights I did earlier are rounded-up below:

    https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/580629929584361472

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    Danny Sullivan

    Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land, MarTech, and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

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