Trump May Tap Google Critic To Head FTC

by Wendy Davis, Staff Writer @wendyndavis, January 17, 2017

President-elect Donald Trump reportedly is considering appointing Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes as the new chairman of the Federal Trade Commission.

If so, the move could bode poorly for Google. Last year, Reyes and D.C. Attorney General D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine wrote to the FTC to urge the agency to reopen an investigation into whether Google wrongly promoted its own services in the search results.

The FTC closed its probe in 2003 after concluding that Google’s main reason for touting its own offerings was to improve consumers’ experience, as opposed to harming competitors.

Last February, Reyes asked the FTC to weigh reopening the investigation based on new developments, including antitrust charges against Google in Europe. “The issue of local search result fairness is an evolving issue in a fast paced digital economy,” he wrote.

Reyes also pointed to a 2015 study — funded by Yelp, a critic of Google — which concluded that Google potentially “degrades” its search results, to the detriment of users. “Our findings suggest that Google is — in some instances — actually making its overall product worse for users in order to provide favorable treatment to Google content,” states the paper, which was co-authored by legal scholar and net neutrality proponent Tim Wu and Harvard Business School’s Michael Luca.

Reyes previously served as general counsel for the technology company eTAGZ, according to Politico, which first reported that he was a candidate to head the FTC.

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

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