Is Google a Monopoly? Wrong Question

[Commentary] Google responded to European antitrust regulators investigating a long list of claims against the world’s largest search engine. Whether or not the complaints against Google are valid, they may be looking backward.

Increasingly, Google is not a search engine. Yes, Google accounts for 80 percent of all Web searches in Europe. It is facing criticism (some of it prompted by Microsoft) for favoritism toward Google’s own specialty search products -- travel, finance, hotels, restaurants, maps -- that may put its competitors at a disadvantage. In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission has also been investigating Google for the past year. As pressure mounts on Google to change its practices, it’s not clear whether antitrust regulators are asking the right questions. Although European Commission authorities are focused on Google’s familiar Web pages of blue links, and the prominence of Google products on those pages, Google seems to be heading in a different direction. It wants to be whispering to individual users by way of its Google devices. Whether competition law has anything to say about this is an open question. Do we require Chevrolet to allow all car-radio manufacturers to install their devices in its vehicles? (No, we don’t.) What competition law has to say about the personalized, vertically integrated ecosystems now being built by Apple, Facebook and Google is far from clear. Consumers will have a choice of competing handsets, as they do now. But their subsequent options (what calendar, what map, what apps) may be sharply limited. Signing up with a particular brand of personal assistant will lead to a cascade of path-dependent filters, as software learns more about its users and serves them more directly.