Best Business Commentary

Google’s anticompetitive canard

Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo! isn’t anticompetitive, no matter what Google claims, says The New York Times in an editorial. Yes, Microsoft has “a troubling history of bullying—and even worse—to undercut all challengers,” but Google’s objections to the deal are “self-serving and disingenuous.” If anyone is the Internet’s “800-pound gorilla,” it’s Google, which dominates the “lucrative search market” and collects more online ad revenue than Yahoo! and Microsoft combined. Antitrust regulators need to stay “eternally vigilant against Microsoft’s baser instincts,” but if Google can’t make more than “vague insinuations” about the deal, it should stop its “empty whining.”

Global economies still need cold medicine

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Economic “decoupling” doesn’t seem to be working, says Andrew Schneider in Kiplinger.com. The theory is that other nations have developed strong enough domestic markets to withstand a U.S. slowdown. But the global effects of recent “bad news” from Wall Street has shown, “sometimes harshly,” other countries’ dependence on U.S. demand—we buy 15 percent of the world’s exports, after all. Thanks to the weak dollar, global trade will actually “soothe,” but not “rescue,” the U.S. economy. But for everyone else, that “old saw about the rest of the world catching a cold when the U.S. sneezes still has more than a little truth to it.”