Google Executive Chairman: Amazon Is a Lovely Place to Shop and Search

Usually when a company’s chairman speaks publicly, it is to talk about how great their company is and the everlasting brightness of the future. One notable exception is when the company is big enough and powerful enough to be facing an antitrust inquiry. This brings us to Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman. He used a Berlin speech to talk about Amazon’s success in search, how Facebook crushed Google on social networking and his conviction that somewhere in the world there is a garage-based company that will take out Google. Hovering over all of this, of course, is the European Commission’s long-running antitrust case, which asserts that Google favors search results for its own products over the products being pitched by competitors who use its search engine for traffic.