Facebook and Amazon dropped the dime on Google

The efforts by Amazon and Facebook may have come up short in part because they were relatively new to the Washington influence game. While these two companies were starting to spend on lobbying, Google already had a heavy presence in D.C. and allies in the Obama administration. But the failure to provoke a federal crackdown on Google also contained a long-term benefit for Amazon and Facebook: Washington’s reluctance to battle alleged tech monopolists postponed the two companies’ own turns in the antitrust spotlight. Facebook’s and Amazon’s public silence about their complaints could have been an effort to avoid drawing attention to their burgeoningempires, said Yelp public policy chief Luther Lowe, a Google critic who spoke to FTC staffers multiple times during the probe. Facebook: The Google+ network and phone wars Google’s fledgling social network, Google+, had about 500 million users in 2012 compared with more than 1 billion people on Facebook. (Facebook now has an estimated 2.8 billion users worldwide.) But Facebook said the new upstart had an unfair advantage: Google had structured its search website so that users would see links to Google+ profiles before those from networks like Facebook and Twitter. In a previously unknown March 2012 presentation…
Read More