You say you've heard it all? Maybe not—the company that controls over 92 percent of the worldwide operating system market is all but accusing Google of being a monopoly. In assessing the diversity of the media landscape, the Federal Communications Commission should pay particular attention to the impact of online search engines, says the Microsoft Corporation. Especially the biggest one.

"If a single search engine serves as the dominant gateway between consumers and content—there is a greater risk that economic forces will not exert sufficient discipline to prevent the dominant search engine from altering search results to favor its own interests or viewpoint," Microsoft warned the FCC last week. "Also, because consumers will lack competitive options, it may be impossible for them as a practical matter to determine whether the results reflect hidden biases or whether there is other speech that is not being conveyed."

The company filed the comments in response to the FCC's Future of Media in a Digital Age inquiry, in which the agency asks if "there [are] search engine practices that might positively or negatively affect Web-based efforts to provide news and information."

Although the G-Word is mentioned in several footnotes, Microsoft's filing gingerly avoids identifying the search engine giant in its prose. But we're going to go out on a limb and assume the obvious. Google now handles over 70 percent of searches in the United States. No doubt this post will be tweeted with numerous LOLs, ROFLs, and LULZ. Still, Microsoft is joining a chorus of voices who, in one context or another, say that the search engine market should be carefully watched by regulators.

That, of course, means keeping an eye on Google. "For Internet-based media, the existence of a dominant search provider raises the risk that consumers will be exposed disproportionately to the content and views of the dominant provider or its preferred partners," Microsoft continues.

Don't get too excited about this statement. It's not like the commentary calls for the Department of Justice to get the antitrust whip out. But it pretty much reads like a template for the concerns we're picking up from many directions—thus worth a look.

What is less clear

Microsoft notes that most search engines offer two kinds of results, "natural" and "paid." The "natural" results flow from some kind of algorithm designed to identify websites. The "paid" flow from clients who, well, paid the engine to see their service appear in the search. Most consumers understand that the paid content is there not just because of relevance, but because somebody forked some cash over to the search service.

But "what is less clear," Microsoft warns:

...is whether users understand that even natural search results invariably reflect value judgments by the search provider. These judgments—such as what factors influence determinations regarding which results are more relevant than others, whether to promote popular views or websites over unpopular ones, whether to exclude adult or hateful speech, and many others—are reflected in the search results that the provider generates from queries. A search engine could promote the content of publishers that it favors by placing it high in the search results it returns. It also can demote content from disfavored publishers by placing it low in the rankings it returns—or even by eliminating such content from the results entirely. Thus, search engines by necessity play a certain editorial function in the online experience of most consumers, and they therefore inherently and inevitably influence what most consumers experience on the Internet.

And the search provider in question could also establish dominance through its superiorly positioned advertising network, and "suppress, or even eliminate, smaller speakers who cannot sustain themselves without advertising revenue, or simply return less advertising revenue to all of them in order to enrich its own position."

Shout outs

Microsoft's problem with this (it appears) is not that Google may engage in these practices, but that it controls so much of the market, while the public doesn't know what those practices are. The Internet is a "diversity of channels," the software behemoth suggests. "When a dominant channel makes a value judgment about what content to display without disclosing that judgment to its users, the diversity of voices that is the centerpiece of the Commission’s media policy may be at risk."

This would be less of an issue if "competition existed among several search engines," the filing continues (there isn't much at this point, unless you consider the 15.04 percent and 9.62 percent Yahoo! and Microsoft's Bing engine respectively enjoy a competitive threat). "In the absence of effective competition, however, a dominant provider has the ability to push consumers to content that competes with an existing offering from a competitor and then 'shout over' the competitor simply by causing its search users to believe that its own content is the most popular or relevant."

Microsoft lists two precedents in which Congress moved on similar concerns over the dominance of one or a few media providers. First, the FCC's now defunct Financial Interest and Syndication Rules (FynSyn), which blocked television networks from owning prime time content. Second, the agency's very much alive must-carry/retransmission consent rules, which require the cable companies to hook up local television stations.

The status of both of these regulations are in flux. Indie filmmaking groups want the return of FynSyn, and at least one United States Senator thinks their repeal was a mistake. Meanwhile Time Warner Cable and other groups want reform of the retransmission consent rules.

But Microsoft isn't calling for anything on this scale. What the company does say it wants seems pretty vague—something in the form of "transparency," which would "allow users and other actors in the online ecosystem to know whether a vertically-integrated, dominant search engine is favoring its own content or that of preferred partners in natural or paid search results over competing, unaffiliated content."

The dominant engine in question could do this without publishing its algorithms, the filing claims. But whatever means Google adopted, "the goal would be for users and the government to understand what factors are and are not influencing the dominant provider’s search results and advertising placements and the extent to which the dominant provider makes judgments that could impede diversity in the future of media."

Incentives and abilities

There's absolutely nothing in the Communications Act, of course, that authorizes the FCC to require or even nudge Google to release this sort of information. Google isn't a common carrier or cable company. We're not even sure the agency has the power to send Google a letter of inquiry about its online practices.

The DoJ, on the other hand, has antitrust authority, and is keeping a close eye on negotiations between Google and various publishing groups over Google Books. The Federal Trade Commission has powers in this area too—but it just authorized Google's buyout of AdMob, viewing it as competition for Apple's iAd mobile network.

So it's unclear who is going to do what about this issue in the near future, or how they're going to receive the Godzilla of operating systems warning about unfair trade practices on the 'Net.

"When a single entity achieves dominance and thereby becomes a gatekeeper," Microsoft warns, "there is an inherent risk that it may have both the incentive and ability to place its own interests above consumers' interests in access to a broad and diverse range of content, services and viewpoints."

Yeah, we know—a 64-bit pot calling the digital kettle black. But this issue clearly isn't going away any time soon.