Intellectual Property Law

Microsoft General Council Rebuts Google Officer?s Anti-Trust CommentaryMashable!

Google Senior VP and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond took some time this fine Super Bowl Sunday morning to blog in passive-aggressive opposition to the Microshoo! maneuver, revealed to the public Friday. (He rhetorically claimed that Microsoft could exert inappropriate and and illegal influence over the Internet, rather than would exert inappropriate?.)

And hours later, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith (I presume him to be an individual with a ranking equivalent to the CLO at GOOG) issued an official rebuttal, in which he essentially threw down Google?s own ad revenue statistics in an effort to shame the company responsible for the Adsense-Adwords juggernaut for purporting potentially unfair competition in Microsoft-Yahoo! in the future.

Smith catalogued Google?s market share percentages both in search and online advertising. He stated that Google ?has amassed 75 percent of paid search revenues worldwide and its share continues to grow? and that it currently ?has more than 65 percent search query share in the US and more than 85 percent in Europe.?

He estimated that a purchase of Yahoo! would offer Microsoft only an immediate ?30 percent combined (share) in the US and approximately 10 percent combined in Europe.?

And of course Smith went on to say the expected blah-blah-blah, claiming, ?Microsoft is committed to openness, innovation, and the protection of privacy on the Internet. We believe that the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! will advance these goals.?

Surely Microsoft wishes to play a little more dirty than that, but it seems unlikely that the company?s cutthroat nature in building its businesses will hinder its push for a Yahoo! buyout.

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Full post as published by IP Law Daily on February 03, 2008 (boomark / email).