[gojomo]

Interesting point!

Google's search team has been famously resistant to any influence by Google's sales/marketing teams on ranking decisions. Search quality gave rise to the 'golden goose', after all, and the self-conception of the team, and its individual members, is based on independence from purely money-grubbing considerations.

But I wonder, what happens when Google's antitrust lawyers came to the ranking team, and say: "soften this penalty [or otherwise tweak these quality-rankings], because otherwise we'll be in more trouble with regulators or leave too much evidence of market-power."

Could the search team still say, "buzz off, we're sticking to what we know from the numbers is what's best for our users"? Or does keeping regulators happy, and avoiding smoking-gun fact-patterns, trump everything? I suspect it often will, because of the unique risks of state enforcement and appearing unlawful. It's also easier to rationalize "we're sacrificing our own idea of what's best because the law seems to require it" (even if the actual risk is fuzzy before losing in a formal legal process) than "we're doing this to make the guys over in ads/mobile/etc a bit more money this quarter".