Antitrust and Consumer Protection
Competition: Spring 2014, Vol. 23, No. 1
Content
- Chair's Column
- Do First Amendment Principles Limit the Antitrust Agencies' Ability To Prohibit Enforcement of Standards-essential Patents?
- Editor's Note
- First Amendment Protection For Search Engine Search Results
- Judges Speak Out: the Make-or-break Moment of Certifying a Class With Judges Marsha Berzon, Virginia Phillips, John Wiley, and Curtis Karnow
- Landmark Civil Price-fixing Verdicts of 2013: Lessons From the Vitamin C and Urethanes Trials With Trial Counsel and Observers William a. Isaacson, Daniel S. Mason, Joseph Goldberg, and Michael Tubach
- Lcd Redux: Follow-on Class Action and Direct Purchaser Litigation From 2012'S Doj Criminal Prosecutions Views from Trial Experts Bruce Simon, Howard Varinsky, and Robert Freitas
- Masthead
- Noerr-pennington: Safeguarding the First Amendment Right To Petition the Government
- Regulation of Companies' Data Security Practices Under the Ftc Act and California Unfair Competition Law
- The Irrelevance of the First Amendment To the Modern Regulation of the Internet
- The Market-participant Exception To State-action Immunity From Antitrust Liability
- The Misapplication of Matsushita's Heightened Summary Judgment Standard
- The Supreme Court In Borough of Duryea V. Guarnieri Signals a Retreat From Pre's Broad Deference To the Right To Petition
- Trial By Sample: a Post-game, Locker Room Chat Exploring the McAdams V. Monier Trial: a Roundtable With Trial Counsel Jeffrey Cereghino and William Stern
- Update On California State Antitrust and Unfair Competition Law and Federal and State Procedural Law
- Does the First Amendment Immunize Google's Search Engine Search Results From Government Antitrust Scrutiny?
DOES THE FIRST AMENDMENT IMMUNIZE GOOGLE’S SEARCH ENGINE SEARCH RESULTS FROM GOVERNMENT ANTITRUST SCRUTINY?
Paula Lauren Gibson1
I. INTRODUCTION
For several years now, Google has faced allegations from various fronts of purported violations of the antitrust laws in regards to its manipulation of its vertical shopping search engine results.2 Vertical shopping competitors3 have filed complaints with the FTC and the State Attorneys General.4 Those complaints alleged, among other things, that Google violated the antitrust laws5 by giving itself preferential treatment in the search results of its own properties through the manual manipulation of its search engine algorithm in order to demote the offerings of rivals, notwithstanding in some cases the alleged superior content of the rival pages.6
This article will address only one issue: Whether Google vertical shopping search engine results are "opinions" and, as such, would be protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution7 and/or its state counterparts8 from any regulation based on alleged violations of the antitrust laws?9