The New York Times is running an article by Stephen Labaton this morning about the Obama White House’s plans to get aggressive against corporations which are using market dominance as a tactic to gain more market share and shut out competition.
Head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, Christine A. Varney, will be giving a speech today outlining new policy, or reversed policy, against such companies and strong arm tactics, and will also be speaking to the US Chamber of Commerce this week about the same matter.
Google and Microsoft are some of the first companies in our space which come to mind in such a policy shift (the Bush admin was very pro-BigBiz dominance). Google is currently under antitrust investigation by the Justice Department over its Google Book Search deal that it entered into with publishers and authors as the result of a 2005 class action suit by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers against Google.
The settlement of this suit gives Google the ok to house the books online and make profit from their Google Book Search library, which is to be split between Google, authors and publishers. Critics of this deal say the settlement unfairly gives Google an exclusive license to profit from digitized books.
