The Story Behind ShopCity And Its Antitrust Complaint Against Google

The new ShopCity vs Google case appears to resemble previous ones.

This time around, the small company is being represented by Gary Reback, a legendary anti-trust lawyer who directed Microsoft’s campaign against the Google Book Settlement. Reback and Microsoft are likely using ShopCity as a front to help convince regulators and the public that “if there’s smoke, there must be fire” when it comes to Google. But this does not mean that ShopCity’s claim lacks merit. Despite its protestation that “competition is just a click away,” Google does have dominant market power in the search business -- which is the first of a two-part test used to determine if a company is breaching Section 2 of the Sherman Act. The second is whether a company is abusing that dominance, and so far there is no evidence that Google has done so. Legal tests aside, commonsense also suggests that the ShopCity claim is trumped up. The company’s shopping web sites have a content-farm quality, which, as Marketing Pilgrim and others have noted, doesn’t tend to work with search engines or consumers.