Geoff Manne on the Google Search Decision
ICLE President Geoffrey A. Manne was quoted by Ars Technica in a story about the U.S. District Court order in the Google search antitrust trial. You can read the full piece here.
The president of the International Center for Law & Economics, Geoffrey Manne, said in a press release that Mehta’s ruling “relies heavily on contested theories from the field of behavioral economics about the supposed power of defaults” and “fails to demonstrate how the contractual agreements at-issue harm consumers or competition.”
“A default placement is worth very little if your product isn’t any good,” Manne said. “By the same token, Google hasn’t been ousted as the default anywhere, because it has a superior product. The opinion offers no evidence to suggest that Bing would have become a viable competitor under any other set of facts. And that is fatal to the claims in this case, for which the plaintiffs, not Google, bear the burden of proof.”