Time may help Google in antitrust cases

BRUSSELS, Feb. 21 (UPI) -- An antitrust investigation of Internet giant Google in Europe has the element of time working against it, a U.S. State Department official said.

"Very, very often, it turns out that dominance doesn't have a very long life," said Philip Verveer, the coordinator for international communication and information policy at the State Department, The New York Times reported Monday.

Verveer said, "It's important from an antitrust perspective to have a certain humility about whether or not activities involving major interventions are necessary."

In effect, technology is reinvented so quickly that an algorithms Google uses to rank companies in its searches could become quickly moot, for example.

In Europe, Google is facing a wide-ranging investigation that began with complaints from three relatively small companies, including British price comparison firm Foundem.

The owners, Adam and Shivaun Raff, said the Web site all but disappeared in searches in 2009.

The Raffs said Google's own price comparison service Google Produce Search, originally named Froogle, was given favorable ranking, while theirs had been demoted.

The Raffs said it took Google more than three years to remedy the problems.

A year ago, Google attorney Julia Holtz said, "We don't whitelist or blacklist" other Web sites, the Times reported.