Antitrust, Politics, Economics

As a follow-up to my post yesterday Google Has Learned The Ways of Washington--Government Bureaucrats, Lawyers, Lobbyists, $$$, I couldn't pass up posting an excerpt from the following--

Jenkins: Al Gore Is Good at Rent-Seeking (and Microsoft Isn't) - WSJ.com: " . . . Microsoft still tries to make money by selling consumers products they want, though it has launched some stinkers in this regard . . . its latest stinker was more up Mr. Gore's alley: a multimillion-dollar investment in trying to foment a government antitrust crackdown on Google. That effort went conspicuously bust Thursday when the Federal Trade Commission let Google go with token remonstrances about its business practices. . . . As FTC chief Jon Liebowitz acknowledged this week, antitrust agencies live to bring "big cases." The FTC staff, whose revolving-door career interests would be enhanced by a Google prosecution, was an easy sell. Less so the agency's political appointees who must decide yea or nay. The media wasn't clamoring for a Google crackdown. Congress was less than enthusiastic. The Obama White House, known to be close to Google, was disturbingly mute. Antitrust is supposed to be entirely about clinical economics but never is. FDR's antitrust chief Thurman Arnold once said that antitrust was a collective squeal of resentment against businesses that annoy us with their success. Google hasn't been sufficiently annoying. Notice, by the way, that the astute Arnold went on to found Arnold & Porter, one of the great Beltway law firms . . ."

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