SAN FRANCISCO — Microsoft began the new year harping on a favorite theme: The software maker is arguing that government regulators need to crack down on Google to preserve fair competition in the Internet and smartphone markets.
The latest refrain came Wednesday in a blog post by Dave Heiner, Microsoft’s deputy general counsel. His attack amounted to a last-ditch appeal to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the European Commission as they wrap up wide-ranging investigations into Google’s business practices. Resolutions to those probes are expected early this year, perhaps within the next week at the FTC.
Microsoft fears Google, perhaps its biggest nemesis, will emerge from the antitrust probes without being required to make significant changes.
“Hopefully, Google will wake up to a New Year with a resolution to change its ways and start to conform with the antitrust laws,” Heiner wrote. “If not, then 2013 hopefully will be the year when antitrust enforcers display the resolve that Google continues to lack.”
For the past two years, Microsoft has been among the companies marshaling a campaign aimed at persuading regulators to force Google to changes its ways. Among other things, regulators have been looking into allegations that Google has been highlighting its own services in its influential search results while burying links to competing sites. The investigations also have delved into the way prices are set in Google’s digital advertising system, the Internet’s biggest marketing vehicle, and examined whether Google has been refusing to license key patents to mobile devices vying against gadgets powered by Google’s free Android software.
Heiner mostly rehashed complaints that cast Google as a conniving company that abuses its dominance of Internet search, as well as its leadership in online video and smartphones, to thwart its rivals to the detriment of consumers.
Google Inc. has steadfastly maintained that it hasn’t done anything wrong while trying to give people better access to the information and other services they want.
Microsoft Corp. wrangled with antitrust regulators for much of the 1990s in legal battles that focused on whether it was using its pervasive Windows operating system to squelch other software alternatives.
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