FairSearch.org Adds Former Justice Department Official, Mark Corallo

Mark Corallo, the public affairs director for the Justice Department from 2002 to 2005, and communications director for the House Committee on Government Reform, has joined the FairSearch team as one of the coalition’s spokesmen.

In an interview with Politico’s Kim Hart (currently available only to PoliticoPro Tech subscribers), Corallo said he “hopes to bring more attention to the issue of competitiveness in the search marketplace so that the DOJ, state attorneys general and members of Congress will see the need to increase their scrutiny of Google.”

Corallo continued, explaining that antitrust issues are non-partisan and that, “in an economy like this in which we are struggling to create jobs, we really do need to make sure that certain actors that have incredible dominance are not stifling innovation that leads to more jobs.”

In fact, Hart reports that Corallo told her that “transparency should play a bigger role in how Internet companies like Google operate. Google’s search algorithm is arbitrary, he said, and tweaks to that algorithm have the potential to hurt companies.”

In Corallo’s own words: “’Someone benefits by moving up on the search page and someone gets hurt. They don’t know why and they don’t know how,’ he said. ‘There should be a level of transparency and fairness that doesn’t disadvantage others arbitrarily.’”