Google
CEO Eric Schmidt volunteered that his
company will doubtlessly face deeper antitrust scrutiny in the short term, even
as Google General Counsel Kent Walker confirmed that the search-engine giant was
in talks with the Federal Trade Commission over
Schmidt's service on the boards of both Google and Apple.
"What is changed is that we are more careful about when and
how we do things," Schmidt told reporters May 7 before
the annual Google shareholder meeting.
The
FTC has reportedly expressed interest in
examining Schmidt’s presence on the Apple board of directors, as well as
the seating of Apple board member Arthur Levinson on the Google board. Under
the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, competitors are forbidden from each others’
boards if that reduces competition between the companies.
Google also ran into potential antitrust issues with the FTC
in 2008, when it proposed a non-exclusive advertising deal with Yahoo that the
Justice Department felt would stifle competition. In
addition, a settlement concerning Google Book Search is under antitrust review.
Also at the briefing, according to news reports, Google
executives suggested they were exploring ways to monetize social-networking
technology as well as YouTube. Google has refused to confirm analyst
predictions that the streaming-video site is costing the company nearly half a
billion dollars a year to keep running.
During the meeting, Schmidt suggested that YouTube would one day "be a
successful and profitable business."
According to a recent ComScore study, Google and
YouTube had the largest portion of market-share for the watching of online
streaming video, with 40.9 percent, for March 2009. Fox
Interactive Media came in second with 3 percent, followed by Hulu with 2.6 percent.
Roughly 77.8 percent of the U.S. Internet audience watches
online video, according to the same report, but companies are still trying to figure out ways to
effectively monetize those eyeballs searching out the latest "24"
episode or clips of cats on skateboards. Google has begun including ads into
videos’ stream. In addition, the
enterprise has begun incorporating viral video-monitoring programs into their
products as a way of tracking the dissemination of their messages throughout
the public sphere, potentially opening up another line of revenue there.
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