This morning’s Wall Street Journal reported on the pending IPO of the travel website Kayak, which has been doing quite well. Kayak’s revenue increased 39%, to $73 million, during the first quarter of 2012 compared to the same period a year earlier. Over that period net income increased to $4 million from a loss of $7 million.
The Kayak IPO follows on the heels of a successful Yelp IPO in March. The review site also has been prospering. Just last week, the Journal reported that Apple was planning to incorporate Yelp into its new mapping application.
The Yelp IPO was preceded by the spinoff of travel site TravelAdvisor from Expedia last December. Since that time, TravelAdvisor’s share price has increased by two-thirds.
What do all these companies have in common, in addition to the fact that they’ve been succeeding? They have all been complaining to the Congress and the FTC about Google’s supposedly anticompetitive practices.
Now it’s possible that they could be doing well in spite of anticompetitive behavior on the part of Google. It’s also possible that they could have done poorly despite lack of anticompetitive behavior. But the fact is, the companies have been succeeding, even in these tough economic times. Perhaps they’re the ones who, by lobbying the government, are competing unfairly.
Thomas Lenard is Senior Fellow and President Emeritus at the Technology Policy Institute. Lenard is the author or coauthor of numerous books and articles on telecommunications, electricity, antitrust, privacy, e-commerce and other regulatory issues. His publications include Net Neutrality or Net Neutering: Should Broadband Internet Services Be Regulated?; The Digital Economy Fact Book; Privacy and the Commercial Use of Personal Information; Competition, Innovation and the Microsoft Monopoly: Antitrust in the Digital Marketplace; and Deregulating Electricity: The Federal Role.
Before joining the Technology Policy Institute, Lenard was acting president, senior vice president for research and senior fellow at The Progress & Freedom Foundation. He has served in senior economics positions at the Office of Management and Budget, the Federal Trade Commission and the Council on Wage and Price Stability, and was a member of the economics faculty at the University of California, Davis. He is a past president and chairman of the board of the National Economists Club.
Lenard is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and holds a PhD in economics from Brown University. He can be reached at [email protected]
