In the present information-based economy, knowledge and technological progress rather than price, is the primary reason for economic benefits. World economy today is driven by Information Communication Technology industry companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google and Facebook and the products they represent.

The marked characteristics of ICT industry are innovation, intellectual property rights, network effects, tipping, switching costs, lockins, compatibility, standards, high sunk costs and low marginal costs. As the industry is driven by innovation and not pricing, competition constitutes of fierce fights to be the next temporary monopolist.

ICT industry is a high risk sector for competition law abuse as access to timely information, compatibility with standard and ability to run on dominant network platform, are of vital importance and a dominant company can seriously damage a company that is producing a complementary product by, for example, withholding timely information, or by denying access to its platform.

Google has in past decade has established itself as a dominant company in the online search market. The FTC, European Commission and Competition Commission of India have launched investigations in the business practices of Google and its alleged violation of antitrust laws.

Competitors and companies that rely on Google’s search result for their business and who fear the power of a dominant search engine, have lobbied since a long time for a prosecution.

The averment, oft repeated, by Google is that not all ICT markets have network effect and for the online search markets, network effects do not exist. However, it is a flawed argument as online search market is a two sided platform and network effects do in fact exist. Moreover, network effects also exist solely in the ‘search’ platform independently of the advertising platform as the high number of user of Google have facilitated it to gather data and make periodical changes and improve its search algorithm and thus maintain its dominant position in the online search market.

In January 2013, a consent decree was entered into between FTC and Google under which Google has agreed to change its certain search practices. Thereafter, Google adopted a new search algorithm in September 2013. FTC has already dropped its investigations and Google has proposed concessions to European Commission with a view to bring the investigations to a conclusion. It will be interesting to observe whether the new search algorithm adopted by Google proves to be a game changer for other Competition law authorities who do not follow FTC’s less stringent approach of generally allowing firms to defend their legally acquired monopoly position through aggressive competitive behaviour.