I watched about an hour of the live feed from the Senate antitrust hearing on Google and caught about 15 minutes o f Mr. Schmit’s testimony and what I heard wasn’t very good. I felt he did not answer the questions posed very clearly and instead used each answer opportunity as a mini PR piece.
It seems the gossip around the blogesphere is mixed, many think Schmit did a good job at deflection the accusations and many more think Google is going to be facing an official inquiry by the FTC shortly. My personal belief is that Google will come up with a proposal to self-regulate because they definitely don’t want the government dictating what they can do.
Forbes had a good article that was mostly against Google and some of the statements were very powerful, like this one:
The grand disconnect at the Google hearing was that Google was oblivious to the concern that they represented their business as non-threatening with no competitive conflict of interest in order to gain content owners trust and business, the bait, and then they violated that trust by flipping their business model mid-game and switching to be the most serious competitive threat these companies could face – all while publicly denying that they are now competitors at all.
Full article here http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottcleland/2011/09/22/googles-bait-switch-deception-exposed-at-hearing/
This whole bait and switch conspiracy might be a tad far-reaching but there are lots of factual examples to back it up. I think Google would be smart to make a move to bury this whole thing before it reaches the general population because soon the pitch-forks will come out.