I've been reading the 2012 FTC memos on why they decided against pursuing antitrust action against Google and the reasons against don't seem great. FTC staff made a case that they should go ahead and FTC economists made the case against.

Economists reasons against include:

G has little power over sites like Yelp because traffic to Yelp from G is small.

Having more data is not a serious advantage.

Mobile search doesn't matter & defaults don't matter (and if they did, RIM and MS have competitive phone OSes).

For example, FTC economists made the case that click data isn't very important.

That's curious because almost all of the search ranking engineers I talked to in that era said that clickstream data was the most important ranking signal.

FTC economists argued, based on PR (a press release plus a puff piece interview), indexing is the most important thing (also, other things are important, therefore one need not worry about clicks).

As we saw with Cuil, having a large index without good ranking is worth little.

That you need to solve the indexing problem as well as the ranking problem and that there are lots of parts to both of these problems makes scale more important, not less, but FTC economists somehow used this to argue that scale isn't important.

The bit on mobile being unimportant is, of course, comical now, but it's not only comical in retrospect; it was absurd at the time.

I was at Google around then and they, like other companies looking at the data, were gearing up all consumer products for "mobile first" design

because it was clear that mobile was going to completely dominate the consumer market in the near future.

The FTC economist memo basically mobile growth would completely stop since it used then-current mobile share to say that mobile search didn't matter.

I can think of quite a few reasonable reasons one might give to argue that the FTC should not have taken antitrust action at the time but none of those are presented and, IMO, the major reasons that FTC economists presented seem quite odd if you understand the industry.

The oddness of the FTC memo makes me wonder:

1. Is it possible for people who actually understand the tech industry to weigh in on FTC or other governmental actions in a way that actually makes a difference?

2. Who's doing this today and how can other people get involved?

If you're interested in more information on this,
has a lot more info.

Even though I think a compelling case could be made against antitrust action, the more I read about the actual case made, the worse the actual case sounds.