Economics and the FTC’s Google Investigation

We explain the issues in the Federal Trade Commission (FTC’s) antitrust investigation into whether Google’s use of “Universal” search results violated the antitrust laws and assess the role for economics in the FTC’s decision to close the investigation. We argue that the presence of the Bureau of Economics infuses the FTC with an economic perspective that helped it recognize that “Universals” were a product innovation that improved search rather than a form of leveraging. Labeling them as “anticompetitive” would have confused protecting competition with protecting competitors. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015