It could be a rough day on Capitol Hill for internet search giant Google, as a Senate committee looks at whether the company is wrongly flexing its muscle against other companies, in possible violation of federal anti-trust law.
"We'll see what they say," said Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who will chair today's hearing, which has the somewhat ominous title of, "The Power of Google: Serving Consumers or Threatening Competition?"
"Google can be expected to respond to questions about its power in the marketplace and how it has used that power," said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), who led an anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft in the 1990s when he was Attorney General of Connecticut.
"It is reminiscent of Microsoft in so much as the anti-trust issues that are involved," Blumenthal told me yesterday just off the Senate floor.
That Microsoft hearing back in March of 1998 reminds me a lot of this Google hearing, which will also feature other companies that will point the finger at Google over its business practices.
As Bill Gates did before the same panel 13 years ago, Google's Eric Schmidt will deny that Google has done anything wrong, arguing that his company has very strong competitors to deal with in a variety of internet businesses.
Ready to point the finger against Google will be executives from several different internet sites with familiar names - Yelp, Expedia and Nextag - as they charge that Google has tried to make sure searches for their sites don't rank high in Google search results.
Back in 1998, the heads of Netscape and Sun Microsystems were playing that role, as they joined lawmakers in arguing that Microsoft was a monopoly that was crowding out legitimate competition.
In one memorable moment, Netscape chief Jim Barksdale asked if anyone at the hearing did not use Microsoft Windows as their operating system - not one hand went up in the committee room.
While Google doesn't have that kind of dominance, one wonders if we'll have a similar moment today about internet searches.
