High-Profile Study Turns Up the Antitrust Heat on Google

Google is facing a new high-profile adversary in the roiling fight over whether its monolithic search engine violates antitrust law: Columbia Law School professor and noted Internet theorist Tim Wu.

The author of the influential book The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires co-wrote a paper asserting that Google is engaging in anticompetitive behavior by prominently serving up its own content, like restaurant reviews and doctors office phone numbers, in search results. Wu is an unlikely person to join the antitrust chorus against Google. He’s often been an ally of the company over the years. The new study, which was presented at the Antitrust Enforcement Symposium in Oxford, UK, says the content Google displays at the top of many search results pages is inferior to material on competing websites. For this reason, the paper asserts, the practice has the effect of harming consumers. Wu co-authored the study with Michael Luca, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, and data scientists at the local reviews site Yelp, which has been one of Google's primary opponents in the global antitrust fight. Wu was paid by Yelp for his work on the paper.