it's anti-competitive. the question is not whether it's hurting consumers directly, but whether it is stifling competition in the spaces that Google enters, wh

it's anti-competitive. the question is not whether it's hurting consumers directly, but whether it is stifling competition in the spaces that Google enters, which then indirectly hurts consumers -- a lack of competition, the theory goes, slows down the pace of innovation, and gives dictatorial control over a market sector to one actor. bundling IE with Windows didn't directly hurt the consumer, either (and for a long time, IE was the best browser available on Windows), but it didn't stop the DOJ from pursuing Microsoft over it. given how steeply traffic falls off as you get farther down a SERP (see, to name the first page I found searching for "serp clickthrough", http://www.pagetrafficbuzz.com/understanding-google-serp-clickthrough-rates/5123/ http://www.pagetrafficbuzz.com/understanding-google-serp-cli...), it's hard to argue that (theoretically) practices which unjustly downrank non-Google properties would not constitute anticompetitive behavior when Google has a 65%+ share of search.