Forget Apple’s morning announcements and The Beatles: Rock Band; Monopoly’s where it’s at this morning, as Hasbro’s servers buckle under demand for the Google Maps-infused game.
The issue with whether Google is or is not a monopoly isn’t merely its search dominance: It’s Google’s ability to control online advertising and, increasingly, what we read or don’t read.
Christine Varney, head of the Justice Departments antitrust division, famously referred to Microsofts monopoly as “so last century. In her mind, its Google we need to watch out for. [Microsoft is ] not the problem, she said.
San Francisco’s Internet Archive wants to intervene in the $125 million settlement with authors and publishers that gives Google the rights to scan and sell books on the Internet. In a Friday letter to the New York judge handling the case, the digital library claims that if the settlement is approved, it would give Google a monopoly on “orphan works” — out-of-print books whose copyright owner …
Google pulled out of a proposed advertising partnership with Yahoo yesterday after the Justice Department signaled it would oppose the deal because it could help the dominant Web company become a monopoly.
Pointing out that no single entity has the monopoly of good ideas, Internet pioneer Yahoo is betting that its recently introduced open strategy would pave the road for developers to build applications on its soon-to-be-launched overhauled platform.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, California (AP) — When Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google Inc. on September 7, 1998, they had little more than their ingenuity, four computers and an investor’s $100,000 bet on their belief that an Internet search engine could change the world.
