Google trumpeted support it has received in the days since...

comments by others that mirror Google’s own messaging. Antitrust law is supposed to protect consumers and the broader marketplace, not companies from competitors, wrote Greg Sterling at the industry blog Search Engine Land. “Google acts as a market facilitator, not market enforcer,” and is “quite transparent” with how it determines the “quality score” that determines ad pricing and placement, said Craig Macdonald, chief marketing officer at search engine marketing firm Covario, at the marketer website Multichannel Merchant. Former FTC antitrust official David Balto from the Clinton administration, now at the Center for American Progress, said on the Huffington Post that a “close examination” of Google’s entry into various consumer markets shows “where Google competes, consumers benefit.” Balto also predicted erroneously that the Google Books settlement with authors and publishers, which faced opposition from the Justice Department and others who said it would give Google a monopoly, would survive judicial scrutiny (WID Aug 12/09 p1). And the free-market Technology Policy Institute’s Tom Lenard and Paul Rubin wrote at Forbes.com that there was “thus far no evidence in the public domain” that Google has taken actions similar to Microsoft’s in the 1990s to draw the Justice Department’s antitrust scrutiny. Google will “quickly” lose its search dominance “if someone can find an even better ranking algorithm,” they said.