Where is the line in the sand?
There's been a glut of Google news today, the loose common link being concerns around the growth of Google.
It has just been announced that the European Commission has announced it will formally launch an investigation into antitrust allegations made against Google last February. Nice to see the Commission showing its usual urgency on this matter, which we confidently expect to come to a conclusion within the next decade.
A few sites are republishing a short AP report confirming the investigation is a result of complaints from other search providers that Google promotes its own results above theirs in Google searches. Google reckons the real force behind these complaints is Microsoft, which is trying to take market share from Google with its Bing search engine.
Meanwhile the rumoured Google acquisition of ‘deal of the day' company Groupon is increasingly being reported as fact. As the allthingsd report says, not only is Google going to have to stump up $6 billion for the site, but the acquisition is likely to get a nice lot of antitrust scrutiny.
Not only is Google already attracting plenty of attention for its dominance of the search market, but its acquisition of mobile advertising company AdMob only just squeaked past regulators earlier this year. On top of that there's the proposed acquisition of flight search outfit ITA, which has got other online travel companies crying antitrust.
Google is clearly going to keep pushing things as far as its lawyers will let it. Yet another Google move that continues to cause controversy is Street View, which offers street-level images of many locations, leading many people to feel their privacy has been violated.
Yesterday Google announced the next version of Google Earth - its free ‘interactive digital atlas' - with Street View fully integrated. This means you can now, not only zoom down as far as your own roof-top, you can go down to street-level and explore the immediate environment that way. Oh, and there are also 3D trees for some reason. Here's an image and a vid.
