Google's Eric Schmidt: “Really, Our Biggest Search Competitor Is Amazon”
The attitudes of European policy makers toward Google seem to have hardened of late. On various regulatory fronts, Google faces vocal critics and well-organized opposition. Google's Eric Schmidt gave …
Context & Ripple Effects
Schmidt's framing is a continuation of an argument he has been running all year: weeks earlier he described competition with Apple as more brutal than ever, and the corpus traces his rival-of-record back through the 2007 showdown with Microsoft to the 2011 argument that Google's biggest threat is itself. Naming Amazon extends that arc from operating systems and engines to commerce.
The timing matters because European policy makers' attitudes toward Google have hardened, with vocal critics and well-organized opposition on multiple regulatory fronts — confirmed in this coverage and echoed by pickups across the BBC, Financial Times, CNET, Computerworld and Business Insider on or about October 13, 2014. Who counts as a 'search competitor' is precisely the question those proceedings turn on.
First-order effects
- Amazon's product listings absorb the highest-value commercial queries — users searching for things to buy — so Google's ad inventory loses pricing power exactly where search monetizes best.
- The statement hands Google's lawyers and lobbyists a ready-made market-definition argument for Brussels and other venues: if Amazon is the biggest search competitor, then 'search' cannot be defined narrowly around general-purpose engines.
Second-order effects
- Regulators weighing complaints against Google must either accept a broadened market that dilutes its dominance claims or rebut the company's own chairman's characterization — both paths reshape the case.
- Amazon gains standing it did not seek publicly: being named the top search rival strengthens its hand with advertisers and merchants deciding where product-discovery budgets go.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, competition analysis of search shifts from counting engines to mapping all points where users start commercial and informational journeys — a structural change in how dominance is measured.
- That broader frame would push Google further toward keeping transactional intent on its own surfaces (shopping, vertical results) rather than ceding it to commerce platforms, deepening the expansionist portrait critics had already sketched in prior years.
The trend: Search competition is being redefined from a contest among engines to a contest over where commercial intent originates, with market definition becoming the central battlefield between Google and its regulators.