“Google is using its Android mobile operating system as a ‘Trojan Horse’ to deceive partners, monopolize the mobile marketplace, and control consumer data,” said Thomas Vinje, Brussels-based counsel to the FairSearch coalition. “We are asking the Commission to move quickly and decisively to protect competition and innovation in this critical market. Failure to act will only embolden Google to repeat its desktop abuses of dominance as consumers increasingly turn to a mobile platform dominated by Google’s Android operating system.”

[....] Google achieved its dominance in the smartphone operating system market by giving Android to device-makers for ‘free.’

“I've been doing this almost 40 years, and I've done dozens if not scores of government investigations on both sides, and I have never seen a more unprofessional, incomplete, incompetent investigation,” said Gary Reback, a Silicon Valley lawyer who represented some of Google's complainants before the FTC.

“The FTC's decision to close its investigation with only voluntary commitments from Google is disappointing and premature, coming just weeks before the company is expected to make a formal and detailed proposal to resolve the four abuses of dominance identified by the European Commission, first among them biased display of its own properties in search results.

The FTC’s settlement is by no means the last word in this case, leaving the FTC without a major role in the final resolution to the investigations of Google's anti-competitive practices by state attorneys general and the European Commission. The FTC’s inaction on the core question of search bias will only embolden Google to act more aggressively to misuse its monopoly power to harm other innovators.

State attorneys general who reportedly disagreed with today's announcement by the FTC have an important role to play in ensuring both that Google is not allowed to continue practices that hurt every American business through artificially high advertising costs, and to demand that whatever changes Google is forced to make in Europe also apply for U.S. consumers who risk losing innovation because of Google's aggressive abuse of its dominance.

TRANSPARENCY: Consumers -- not search engines -- should choose winners in the marketplace. Consumers benefit from more choices in the search marketplace competing to win users, innovating to improve products and displaying results transparently. When search providers engage in search discrimination -- manipulating search results to promote a favored product and punish competitors -- consumers pay the price.