Facebook After Google: Insights from Google’s Congressional Hearing

As Eric Schmidt sat before the US Senate judiciary committee last Wednesday, CSPAN viewers got a whole lot of insight as to where the company stands on important issues like privacy, search ethics and transparency. More interesting, though, were the things viewers could surmise about congress’ stance on the rapidly changing world of the Internet.

Internet regulation has come up before in various forums: should the government tax the Internet, what is legal and illegal to put on the Internet, how many restrictive policies should be applied to the Internet; the list goes on.

In an age where sharing is caring + everything else, personal data is as good as gold. No two sites have more information about users than Google and Facebook. However, Facebook’s recent F8 conference showcased a strong initiative to integrate applications into the service. Google’s approach is to buy out service providers and fold them into its own operation, which smells a lot like antitrust to some senators.

As Internet titans Google and Facebook clash over ad revenue, Congress releases the Kraken of regulation! Facebook and Google are the two largest cloud services on the planet; both of them free-to-use public utilities that serve hundreds of millions of users daily. Users opt-in to this voluntary service to take advantage of far-reaching technological capabilities including relevant search results, easy-to-use communications software and seamless net integration that combines to create the fabric of the Internet experience as we know it here, in the early 21^st century.

But let’s cut the crap. These companies don’t make billions of dollars each year by redesigning their interfaces every once in awhile. In addition to the aforementioned services they provide to consumers, they are also incredibly deep advertising network utilizing a proprietary Adwords software, and demand side platform, respectively, to offer increasing targeted marketing initiatives for clients the world over.

The substantial offering of applications and business solutions by both of these services makes them especially attractive to advertisers and small businesses who are able to reach audiences of unforeseen vastness, virtually unimaginable in those proud, pre-cloud days.

In Congress’ attempt to glean the afflictions of Google and ensure that the company is not engaging in nefarious practices, they are revealing a chillingly out of date perspective on the way the Internet works in the modern age. They know a lot about anti-trust laws and seem hell-bent on pinning one on Google, despite any real evidence that the company is stacking the deck in favor of its own services.