[arrosenberg]

It kind of is. If Google divested search and the new company provided utility style access to that data feed, I would agree with you. Webmasters allow a limited number of crawlers based on who had market share in a specific window of time, which serves to lock in the dominance of a small number of competitors.

It may not be the kind of explicit anticompetitive behavior we normally see, but it needs to be regulated on the same grounds.

[paulddraper]

Google's action is to declare its identity.

The website operator can do with that identity as they wish.

They could block it, accept it, accept it but only on Tuesday afternoon.

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"Anticompetitive" would be some action by Google to suppress competitors. Offering identification is not that.

[arrosenberg]

Regardless of whether Google has broken the law, the arrangement is clearly anticompetitive. It is not dissimilar to owning the telephone or power wires 100 years ago. Building operators were not willing to install redundant connections for the same service for each operator, and webmasters are not willing to allow unlimited numbers of crawlers on their sites. If we continue to believe in competitive and robust markets, we can't allow a monopolistic corporation to act as a private regulator of a key service that powers the modern economy.

The law may need more time to catch up, but search indexing will eventually be made a utility.