It’s been reported that Google narrowly escaped being prosecuted by the government in 2012 over its dominance of the search industry. The Federal Trade Commission were investigating complaints about its share of the market. Google were forced to change the way it dealt with some search parameters. A leaked internal report shows that some officials were hoping to prosecute.
Google’s claimed that the review proved their service posed no threat to consumers of its competitors. The probe began in 2011, and nine million documents were obtained, with evidence from companies including Amazon and TripAdvisor being assessed. Some companies had accused Google of taking content from their sites in order to improve their own rakings.
The investigation concluded with the decision that the company had not abused its own position to harm rivals. The leaked report was accidentally sent to the Wall Street Journal after it asked for information about a different FTC investigation.
Google said: “After an exhaustive 19-month review, covering nine million pages of documents and many hours of testimony, the FTC staff and all five commissioners agreed that there was no need to take action on how we rank and display search results”, adding “speculation about potential consumer and competitor harm turned out to be entirely wrong.”
