Contentinople - Erin Barker - News Bits: Google Charms Regulators

Written by Erin Barker

Monday, June 29. 2009 at 11:15 AM EDT Post a comment

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Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) has hired someone to convince us all that despite its massive market share in search and online video, and its $22 billion ad sales in 2008, it's really not that great after all. Don't be so modest, buddy!

As regulators on both sides of the pond increasingly scrutinize Google's every move, Dana Wagner, senior competition counsel (read: flack), is tasked with convincing the world that the search giant is not developing a monopoly. According to The New York Times, the "boyish" Wagner accomplishes this with overhead slides and charming catchphrases like "Competition is a click away!"

Over the past few months, Wagner has been making the rounds in Silicon Valley, New York, and Washington, delivering his "stump speech" to reporters, legal scholars, Congressional staff members, industry groups, and anyone else with some time on their hands.

But not everyone is won over by what NYT calls Wagner's "aw-shucks grin." Advocacy group Consumer Watchdog has posted a marked-up version of his slides, disputing nearly all of his assertions.

"Google's charm and spin should not be allowed to deter anti-trust regulators from seeing the real problems with Google's dominance and setting appropriate limits to protect users," Consumer Watchdog president Jamie Court said in a May press release.

In other news:

Meanwhile, in opposite land, Google's YouTube Inc. seems confident: The video site has doubled the size of videos that users can upload to its servers, from 1 Gbyte to 2, meaning it may not be straining to store video as much as we thought it was. Credit Suisse had warned in April that Google could lose nearly a half a billion dollars from YouTube this year, though RampRate later said the loss would really be more like $174 million. Still, that's a lot of loss to be taking on more costs.

When New York Times reporter David Rohde was kidnapped by the Taliban the paper managed to keep the story out of news -- even out of blogs like Gawker -- for seven months, fearing that publicity would up Rohde's value to his kidnappers and thereby reduce the chances that he would survive. But keeping the story out of Wikipedia took more than a call to an editor: According to NYT, Rohde's Wikipedia page was updated to include news of the kidnapping a dozen times, with a "sanitizing team" led by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales erasing it each time. Several times they froze the page as well.

Tags: Business, Google, Legal, Newspapers, YouTube

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