Has the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) been seduced by Google’s famous promise to “do no evil”? That’s the question a lot of critics are asking in the wake of the Internet search giant’s antitrust settlement with the FTC last week. The problem, critics say, isn’t simply that Google got off lightly; it’s that the FTC allowed Google to set the terms — both in defining whether the company’s behavior was harmful and in setting the terms of its punishment. “For critics of Google,” NYU Information Law Institute fellow Nathan Newman writes on the Huffington Post, “the FTC decision is not bad news because we disagree with the results, but bad news because it reflects an enforcement agency failing to even ask the right questions.” (MORE: What Google’s FTC Deal Means for the Patent Wars) One of the central questions in the FTC’s antitrust investigation was how exactly to determine whether Google’s dominance in the search-engine business has caused harm — and to whom. Critics suggest that the FTC basically punted on this question, allowing Google to frame the terms of the question in a way that made it look good. As Edward Wyatt notes in the New York Times: Instead of considering harm to people who come to Google to search for information, Google’s competitors and their supporters say that the government should have been looking at whether Google’s actions harmed its real customers — the companies that pay billions of dollars each year to advertise on Google’s site. There’s no question that Google skews its search results to benefit companies and services it has a stake in, or that have paid money for the privilege. If you type a location into Google, for example, your first result will be Google Maps. There’s a certain convenience to this, but there is a downside as well: by boosting its own map service, Google has given itself a giant leg up over competitors like MapQuest — remember them? While in the short term consumers benefit from the convenience of getting an instant map … Continue reading Did Google’s Promise to ‘Do No Evil’ Persuade the FTC to Do Nothing About Its Search Bias?