Three times in the past month, government agencies have targeted Google for antitrust reviews. An outstanding private lawsuit alleges that Google tried to kill a business-to-business search engine with predatory pricing. And during the waning months of the Bush administration, soon-to-be Obama antitrust chief Christine Varney declared that Google “has acquired a monopoly in Internet online advertising.” Last month she asserted that the Bush administration had been too lax in combating monopolistic behavior and that the Obama Justice Department would no longer “stand on the sidelines.”That should explain why Dana Wagner, a former Department of Justice antitrust lawyer hired by Google just last year, is rapidly becoming one of the company’s public faces. Along with Adam Kovacevich, a company public-policy spokesman, Wagner has been talking to advertising clients, public officials, reporters and academics in an effort to diffuse the impression that Google has a competition law problem.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/06/AR2009060600056.html
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