We’ve fielded a lot of questions about our pending Competition Tribunal case against Google. Here’s the quick update.
Despite the recent news that Mr. Masie has resigned as country manager of Google South Africa, we are continuing our case against Google. Clearly, although Stafford Masie was particularly brazen in threatening Entelligence in writing, he did not act without the consent or knowledge of Google international. Before we originally filed a complaint with the Competition Commission, I flew to Dublin in an effort to resolve matters, made numerous phone calls & sent many emails to Google Ireland asking them to intervene in what we believe is a pretty obvious bullying attempt (“hand over Yellow Pages or we will switch off your AdWords acounts. Any attempt to create credit card linked accounts to service Yellow Pages will be prevented…”). Despite our many attempts at getting Google to backoff, they did not – so we went public & filed with the Competition Commission.
We are now setting dates for the Competition Tribunal hearing. In the meantime, we will publish our evidence & Google’s evidence here within the next few days.
On a different note, it will be with great interest that we observe Google dancing the jig around SARS after Mr. Masie’s recent acknowledgement in Noseweek that Google does not charge VAT in South Africa (despite the fact that they now even have a server farm & Direct Sales Office here)…
Sean Riley
T Bone said,
18 April 2009 @ 8:31 am
Keep up the cause.
Interesting point about Vat. But what about the payment of Taxes on the R300m plus they have generated a year in SA?
Techcrunch reported on 13 April, 2009 that the recessionproof Google has taken a very conservative stance to employee count, perks, and business investments.
Cuts include reducing usage of ~6,000 contract workers and ~300 full-time employees (our est’s),
cutting some free food cafes, the hours they run, and the people to whom the perk is extended, and
shutting down or discontinuing further development of some businesses. We estimate that these cost cuts will reduce spend by ~$450M in F’09.
Interesting times ahead for the Gogledite (Relative of the infamous Trogledite)
T-Bone