Stupidity from a Government Lawyer (of course)

Here we go again. In the Washington Post article Google Ad Deal Is Under Scrutiny, we get the following gem:

“This is a complicated situation, but one of the key questions is very simple,” said David Balto, an antitrust lawyer who was competition policy director at the Federal Trade Commission during the Clinton administration. “What is Yahoo's incentive to continue to compete?”

I said it once, and I’ll say it again: Yahoo! is not in the business of competing with Google. It is in the business of making money.

If the FTC is so damn eager for a Google competitor, either split the company up — oh, wait; you can’t do that because the DoJ refused to split Microsoft — or create an artificial competitor. Neither alternative solves the real problem: the same network forces that keep Windows on your PC keeps Google as the king of search, and nothing short of a radical paradigm shift will change that. (Yahoo! is trying, I’ll give you that.) Microsoft’s traditional business model — wait, copy, then undersell — just doesn’t work for services. Too bad; don’t expect me to weep for Steve Ballmer.

I’m sure Yahoo! would be happy to accept government subsidies to stay in the search game.