Google uses a GIF of a laughing baby to poke fun at the Wall Street Journal, before firing back against allegations that the search company had been let off easily in antitrust investigation helmed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
The FTC's two-year probe into Google raised concerns that the search company was using monopolistic powers to push competition out of the search market. The WSJ asserted in a March 19 story that the Bureau of Competition's probe yielded contradictory results to those established by the FTC.
The FTC let Google off the hook and, on top of that, the company's employees have been cozying up with White House officials, attending about 230 meetings at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue since President Barack Obama took office, according to the WSJ.
Comcast employees, by contrast, only visited the White House around 20 times over that same stretch, the WSJ stated.
The Mountain View, Calif. company donned its hoodie and shades to start off its retort with this GIF:
After teasing the WSJ with the GIF, Google picked up the mic and dropped counters to several of the points made in the March 19 story.
Over five of those White House visits were service calls to patch technical problems with Healthcare.gov, stated Google. If more than five wasn't an impressive figure, Google pointed to visits to Obama's place by other tech companies.
"Checking through White House records for other companies, our team counted around 270 visits for Microsoft over the same time frame and 150 for Comcast," stated Google.
Google also asserted that its employees "discussed everything but" the antitrust investigation when they visited the White House. Some of those meetings involved other tech companies and even included Microsoft, "the main complainant in the FTC's antitrust investigation."
As far as being too cozy with the FTC, Google points to a March 25 statement released by the commission on the matter.
"The [WSJ's story] suggests that a series of disparate and unrelated meetings involving FTC officials and executive branch officials or Google representatives somehow affected the Commission's decision to close the search investigation in early 2013. Not a single fact is offered to substantiate this misleading narrative," read the statement.
To end what surely isn't the last round of this back and forth, Google dropped that mic mentioned earlier and ended with this GIF:
