Google rejects EU's search abuse complaint | Hacker News Reader

Google rejects EU's search abuse complaint

bbc.com

48 pointsLibertatea58 comments

Google has the right to make whatever content they want appear when you navigate to their website and type something into the search box. Just like you and I have a right to put nearly whatever we want in our private web page.

They are not a public utility.

If you don't like what you see on Google, go search somewhere else.

If you don't like anywhere else, then run your own web crawler and build your own index.

The world does not owe you a spam-free, ad-free, impartial, quasi-complete search index with a query engine that responds in under a second. Such a thing takes a lot of research and money to produce and operate.

>Google has the right to make whatever content they want appear when you navigate to their website

Except they don't. Government can regulate what content can and cannot be shown (e.g. "The right to be forgotten"). I disagree with UE's decisions and the principle behind it (anti-trust policies), but they have the authority to do so. If they should have this authority and how far it should stretch is a rather large debate and prone to flaming.

> Government can regulate what content can and cannot be shown (e.g. "The right to be forgotten")

Sure, and "hate speech" laws and illegal materials.

But they cannot regulate you, for instance, into showing something that you are not showing.

Suppose I run a search engine and some politician is against my organization. I can drop most positive entries related to that politician from my index, keeping mostly the ones that point to negative material.

they can, and they did, for example, for the browser ballot in windows.

This was not a law, and so a very different situation. This was a court ordered remedy for a conviction.

Courts generally have the power to fashion appropriate remedies, and yes, sometimes they involve compelling speech or other things.

(Some of these remedies have been struck down depending on what they have been forced to say or not say).

Warning stickers on cigarettes are mandated by law.

That is a labeling requirement for health, not compelled commercial speech (which again, is about commerce :P). It does not require them to state anything about themselves, just about the risks of the ingredients in cigarettes.

You need to understand these are all very different things in the eyes of the law

Also note the

A. current warning labels were litigated, and tobacco won at the district court level: http://www.news-record.com/content/2012/03/01/article/judge_...

This order was reversed by a divided panel on appeal: http://www.journalnow.com/business/business_news/local/artic...

The supreme court declined to hear the case (which means nothing :P)

B. Requiring phillip morris, et al to make ads stating they deceived the public was not okay. http://www.claimsjournal.com/news/national/2015/05/22/263534...

etc

These are all very complex constitutional free speech issues, and trying to simplify them like you have with a throwaway line doesn't work well in practice.

"Government can regulate what content can and cannot be shown"

Depends on the government. In the US, commercial speech (IE speech for the purposes of engaging in commerce or advertising) is a weird issue. Content-based regulations of commercial speech have to satisfy intermediate scrutiny (instead of strict scrutiny that noncommercial speech would have to satisfy).

Intermediate scrutiny is an odd test, but suffice to say, the government is not going to win in a lot of cases.

Essentially, at least in the US, the government's authority to restrict commercial speech has significant limits, particularly when it comes to content-based regulations.

They can regulate whatever they want. Tomorrow they might pass a law that makes it illegal to display the Google logo. That has no impact on Google's rights.

In some countries, women are not allowed to leave the house unless accompanied by a man. We recognize that women do have the right to do so, and that countries that disagree are stupid and wrong.

You're talking about moral rights here, not legal rights. Moral is highly subjective, you know.

Of course I am. That's the only kind of right it is possible for non-lawyers to have a discussion about, since legal rights either exist or don't.

If you want to operate your business in a market you have to play by the rules set there. Nobody can and wants to force Google to operate their search in the EU, as you noted correctly. But if they wish to do so, there are laws they need to follow. If they operate a quasi-monopoly those laws are stricter than they would be for you and me.

There is certain type of content that you would agree that Google shouldn't be allowed to put on their website. It's just that in the EU there are some more restrictions.

I didn't mean that Google has the right to put, say, child porn on their website.

> If they operate a quasi-monopoly those laws are stricter than they would be for you and me.

To have stricter laws, there should be an actual monopoly. Google have no monopoly, only a "mental monopoly", so called mind-share. When people want to search for something, the first word that pops into their head is "Google".

A monopoly is something else, like not being able to buy a product or service except form a particular vendor, even if you want alternatives.

Also, a monopoly uses its power to prevent entry into the market: vendors who want access to the users who would like alternative vendors are hindered from starting up.

You're not paying anything for Google searches, and there are alternatives.

Google connected a farm of machines to the network, which provide a free service and don't prevent anyone from doing the same. How can that be a monopoly?

That's the reason I used "quasi-monopoly" above and laws talk about "dominant market position".

Under EU law, quasi-monopolies are treated the same as monopolies.

That’s how the ISP market in most EU countries is still competitive: The largest ISP has to rent their lines to competitors at normal market price. They can not refuse.

If Google purports to be a search engine and then gives preference to search results that benefit them, it's ethically similar to an fiduciary adviser recommending things that make him rich without regard for your well being. Google is not in a fiduciary relationship to you, but a similar ethical situation arises because fair competition (which laws protect in most countries - e.g., including anti-trust laws here in the US) is hard to be had when one company is tricking its customers (by making their ads look similar to search results) into thinking they're getting more for less (e.g., getting free search when in actuality they're being led to potentially less desirable products for Google's monetary gain).

If Google instead purported to be a "find products we like to recommend" engine, this situation wouldn't arise. I suspect less people would use their service in this case, and that should illustrated the point: if the value of your service decreases when you tell the truth, then you're, by definition, gaining an a business advantage by being dishonest.

Are these paid shopping comparisons, or whatever Google finds itself and tries to usefully show to users? If it's the latter, your statement should read as follows:

If Google purports to be a search engine and then gives preferences to search results that benefit their users (making Google indispensable), it's ethically similar to an fiduciary adviser recommending things that make his clients rich (making himself indispensable). Being indispensible has its own benefits and value.

People using Google search are not customers. They are visitors to a free web site where you can type stuff into a box, and other stuff appears of that web site's choosing. There are various assurances made or implied about what that stuff consists of. Those come from the website itself, so you're foolish if you completely believe them.

How about people who use other free stuff? People who load up GNU/Linux and log in to a Bash promp --- are they "GNU customers"? Does GNU have a monopoly because the users don't bother to find out about other operating systems and believe all the evangelizing which tells them that GNU/Linux is the best?

That is true. As we all know, if you use Google, you're the product being sold.

Except Google has no fiduciary responsibilities to search consumers.

Google has a search engine monopoly (at least in Europe), this gives them the obligation not to abuse this. If they're using their monopoly to promote other services (such as when directly show Maps in the results, without offering other providers of maps the same option) or if they're scraping content without linking back (such as with Yelp), they're abusing this monopoly.

There is no such thing as a "search engine monopoly".

The word "monopoly" doesn't mean "lack of viable alternatives", except colloquially. (Colloquial uses of the term are not appropriate in context; that is equivocation.)

The same can be said about Windows, yet both the European Union and the United States accused Microsoft of abusing their monopoly by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. This antitrust against Google is really similar.

While I share your sentiment, the case with MS was different because they were coercing hardware manufacturers into not bundling Netscape by threatening to revoke their Windows licence. Google aren't revoking access to their other, primary product if you use Yelp, Bing Maps etc.

They gave Yelp two options: either disable crawling in robots.txt, which means that Yelp won't show up in Google's results at all, or accept that Google will copy Yelp reviews without linking back. This is quite similar to what Microsoft was doing in my opinion.

The only issue is that people were forced to pay for Windows when buying a PC for running a different operating system. PC hardware OEM's paid royalties to Microsoft whether or not users installed Microsoft systems, and the OEM's passed down this cost indiscriminately. That's an example of monopoly power: users wanted to buy just a PC, without a hundred-something dollar OS, but couldn't.

As for bundling of IE, Microsoft has a right to put whatever they want into their software release. People who use Windows and then complain that it comes deeply integrated with a Microsoft web browser can be safely regarded as supreme morons. An OS needs a browser in the internet age. Ubuntu comes bundled with Firefox. (Browser choice is good for Windows; Microsoft only hurt themselves by integrating IE in annoying ways into the OS. Many people are happy Windows users, yet browse the web with an alternative browser; Microsoft should be happy they are on Windows.)

Moreover, the history of Windows is littered with entitled whiners whose application or utility became irrelevant when Microsoft realized that an OS should ship with that kind of thing and produced an equivalent. According to those litigious nincompoops, the OS vendor has no right to bundle things such as a TCP/IP stack, disk compression or anti-malware utilities, because it threatens their "add-ons" which were there first.

The whole IE thing is like going after Toyota because they install cruise control, air conditioning or decent audio in many of their vehicle models. And cruise control, AC, and audio systems are something you can have installed after-market from third parties, so by Toyota bundling such features into cars, it ruins their business. Moreover those features are slickly integrated into the car (e.g. dashboard/steering wheel controls) and hard to remove and replace with the generic parts. The bundled factory features thus enjoy unfair advantages in integration.

Google, by contrast, only runs a program on some machines in the cloud that only respond when you resolve their name and send them a TCP/IP SYN packet. Every search starts with someone resolving "google.com" (or a related regional domain) and making the first contact. From your IP address, you can similarly reach any other search engine on the planet, if you're in the free world, at least.

It’s a business, so yes, it can be a monopoly.

Yes, Google has full control. That's why Google doesn't have to deal with DMCA requests (after all, he's just pointing to other links, right?), that "Right to be forgotten" nonsense and now this thing. /s

When a site is small, it's easy to control its content. When a site is considered to be the standard for something (like Google is for searching the web), then it has to deal with these kinds of things.

> these kinds of things

"These kinds of things" can be articulated as "the sense of entitlement of the collectivist horde".

Otherwise known as the will of democratically elected governments.

It's interesting how libertarians keep confusing their ideology with the law in a democracy.

In the EU, we have a legislation that (at least sometimes) actually evaluates things in the context of the world we live in today as opposed to the 18th century. Thus, it can dynamically react and even proact to situations—such as for example treating a de facto utility (Google search) in the manner of a de jure utility.

To paraphrase some guy, “If Google don't like what it see in EU, it go somewhere else.”

> Google has the right to make whatever content they want appear when you navigate to their website and type something into the search box. Just like you and I have a right to put nearly whatever we want in our private web page.

Having the monopoly in search engines (admit it: they have over 95% of the users in Europe and the US), anti-trust regulation comes into play, and it stops being so simple.

Since when do corporations have rights?

Google will do what the EU tells them to do or the EU will use violence to make them do it.

The only thing that seems suspicious there is the claim that traffic to aggregators has increased by 227% in the last decade. Overall Google traffic has increased by something like 500% in the last decade, so that would indicate a decrease in the percentage of redirections. I'm not sure if shopping aggregators are more or less popular, but that still seems like a deceptive number.

and they only started displaying the product ads in the last 3-4 years. What happened to other shopping site traffic in that period?

Just because overall traffic increased 500% that doesn't imply a decrease if you don't know what the distribution of searches are. If most of that 500% were looking for sports scores for example, then a 227% increase would be very impressive. Without more detailed data I don't think you can draw any conclusions.

Yes, that's what I mean about not knowing if aggregators got more or less popular over the last decade. I'm still not sure, but from a few searches, here's what I got:

Google Shopping is the #1 shopping aggregator according to this site: http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/shopping-websites

The #2 Coupons.com, is going downhill fast: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/coupons.com

The #3, Bizrate.com, is also going downhill fast: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bizrate.com

So it does seem like Google Shopping is taking over traffic from other aggregators.

All 3 aren't widely used in the EU. Especially not in Germany where the people from the EU who said these things coming from. Also the biggest price aggregator from Germany, Austria and others, are still rising and rising according to Alexa. I mean less people go through searches to these sites however thats caused by the fact that they have a really easy name.

What the EU government does is toxic. It does what it get's told by smaller companies that aren't satisfied with their sales. Thats more than toxic since it changes the free market, however thats what the european government always did, they don't make goods for the people they make goods for the money.

Google Shopping isn't usually accessed directly but rather through the main Google search. Good to hear that there are other ones rising too.

Not being familiar with any of those ( probably a sheltered UK life ), I went to www.coupons.com to see what it's about.

At the bottom of the page is an About.. link, but they have infinite scrolling and I'm not fast enough to catch it. Quite an awful UI.

Some background that's related.

http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/img/ftc-ocr-waterm...

One of the interesting counter arguments (one in favor of monopoly) is that Google went from spending $337M a quarter on "paid distribution" (paying people to send their search traffic to Google) in Q1 2011, to $968M/qtr for paid distribution in Q4 2014. So Google is spending nearly $4 billion dollars a year to send traffic to their web site.

They can do that because their ad business is very profitable, but how much of that 'value' is because its worthwhile? And how much because its got the most volume?

One argument would be that Google's dominant position in the search advertising market allows them to fund this giant traffic buy, which prevents competitors from entering the search market. That is the classic Sherman Antitrust violation kind of thing in the US (and I believe much of the basis for the US Microsoft case where things were forced to be bundled by OEMs providing windows on their platforms, using Microsoft's dominant OS position to force their browser (internet explorer) on to the masses.

The trick is search an adjacent market to search advertising or the same market? I don't know, I can imagine arguing either side of that question.

Personally, I see Google's eroding CPC numbers as a sign they are losing their dominant position organically. It may not be happening as quickly as some competitors would like but it seems to be consistent. I also see that squeezing margins and driving changes like Alphabet, but that is simply speculation.

As a shareholder I think their decision to 'fight' here is probably not in their best interest long term (so many companies come out the other side of an anti-trust fight damaged for years and years).

"If users search for "price comparison" they will get Google's own ads before links to rival services"

Ehm no it wont....

If you search for price comparison you get nothing but price comparison sites, if you search for price comparison computers you get nothing but price comparison sites again, if you search for price comparison [buy] computers you will get some direct advertisement with prices.

I've started using Google Shopping in many cases it finds items which are cheaper than Amazon (for the most part discounting Argos and some other bigbox marts the cheapest Retailers in the UK at least as far as London goes). Unlike many price comparison sites it's easy enough to find a local store near you with the item you need in case of an emergency (If it's not on Amazon now ;)) and some times the price difference can be sufficient to not use a service like Amazon (30 days no hassle return is more than worth the occasional premium on Amazon for me). While I understand that this might be driving some people out of business price compression sites are just behind the curve and as "skewing" search results go than those sites are a much bigger offender than Google is.

Heck if i got to Pricegrabber (UK) now and search for "lenovo yoga 2 pro" I only get 1 relevant result on the 1st unfiltered page for what i want for 999gbp if I click the filters on the left and select laptop computers that result wont be shown, that result wont show up and the lowest result will be for 1098 GBP.

If i use Google Shopping i only get relevant results, the cheapest one is for a refurbished 494GBP and the cheapest new one is for 539 for a better model that there is on Pricegrabber....

The price comparison sites are just utter garbage, they don't update the product pages, they don't verify if the product is in stock or not, they don't give you alternative options and they give you an order of magnitude less results.

Google just grabs everything from it's index, the EU complaints is like telling email providers in the 90's that they need to stop offering mail-to-fax services and telegram services because it hurts the postal service...

If pricerunner, pricegrabber and the 1000 other price comparison sites weren't utter garbage this wouldn't be an issue you cannot legislate progress or lack of it.

Wait, was the EU statement of objections only about comparison shopping?

No, not at all.

The statement was mostly about Google scraping data and not linking back.

One case: They post a review about a restaurant on Yelp!

Soon later Google Places displayed the same review text, but did not link back to Yelp!

When Yelp! complained, Google suggested Yelp! should just use robots.txt to unlist their site complete, or put up with the scraping.

In return, Yelp! and other companies went to the EU and complained.

> No, not at all.

> The statement was mostly about Google scraping data and not linking back

That's been somewhat the narrative around here, but that doesn't appear to be true at all:

> The Statement of Objections takes the preliminary view that in order to remedy the conduct, Google should treat its own comparison shopping service and those of rivals in the same way. This would not interfere with either the algorithms Google applies or how it designs its search results pages. It would, however, mean that when Google shows comparison shopping services in response to a user's query, the most relevant service or services would be selected to appear in Google's search results pages.

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-15-4781_en.htm

I didn't realize this. I thought it was more wide ranging.

There is a separate formal investigation on Android currently: http://ec.europa.eu/competition/elojade/isef/case_details.cf...

Additionally, the EC currently looks into Google's "copying of rivals’ web content (known as 'scraping'), exclusivity in its agreements with advertising partners and undue restrictions of advertisers' ability to use competing advertising platforms" (http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_STATEMENT-15-4785_en.ht...) but that hasn't reached the formal stage yet.

So the answer to my question is still "yes", the statement of objections was only about comparison shopping :)

> but that hasn't reached the formal stage yet

and it may never, considering the changes made for the FTC.

I tried to replicate the results of the BBC article to see what the fuss was about, but the search results did in fact list 'rival' price comparison shopping sites. It took me a while to realize that this was because I had adblock turned on.

If that's what this specific set of objections are about, then the article does a spectacularly bad job of explaining the issue.

This seems simple enough to be handled by a site AUP. If Yelp's AUP said their content could only be used be aggregators in the case where it was clearly linked back, then it would be up to Google to comply or not use the data in an infringing manner.

If Google attempts to strong-arm Yelp, it's up to Yelp to capitulate or buckle down, but a case on what someone "threatened" to is different than a case on what was actually done. In the U.S. laws often take a while to challenge in court because they have to actually be exercised before they can be challenged.

Yelp, in the end, after trying to complain to Google (and still only getting referred to using robots.txt) then called the EU commission and asked them to do something about it.

That’s how the whole thing started.

Google – with their new statement – isn’t trying to explain or answer, but to win a PR victory: Tell everyone the EU is doing some new crazy regulation, and hope the EU stops it.

If that's the real issue, then I'm in support of regulation that keeps Google from ignoring attribution in data it shows, but I would be interested in more specifics. I've heard enough horror stories about Yelp! to not take their word for what happened without a grain of salt. The memo you linked makes no mention of this type of issue though, it's about placement of comparison results AFAICT.

Additionally, the first portion of "The Statement of Objections outlines that the markets for general search and comparison shopping are two separate markets. In the latter market, Google faces competition from a number of alternative providers." is something I think is widely debatable. People have comparison shopped with search results from the beginning, Google as been iterating on it steadily and this is the result.

This is interesting: "Google does not apply to its own comparison shopping service the system of penalties, which it applies to other comparison shopping services on the basis of defined parameters, and which can lead to the lowering of the rank in which they appear in Google's general search results pages." I'm not sure what system of penalties they are referring to. The only ones I know of are for blackhat SEO, and if that's what they are referring to that's an interesting argument to make. I wonder how it will go.

That is why we shouldn’t just jump to conclusions, but wait for the investigation, and then we should read what both sides have to say.

Google has shown before that they are very good at using extreme PR to get a benefit, while the EU surely is also influenced by local companies.

That ! cracked me up. I was yelling mentally.

That’s the intention of the Yelp!™ trademark. Not that I agree with it, but I like to, at least, quote properly.

Nobody cares about those trademarks, and just by "obeying" them by writing the marks how they want us to, we are making idiots out of ourselves.

> Wait, was the EU statement of objections only about comparison shopping?

Yes, the Statement of Objections at issue was.

Fact sheet: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-15-4781_en.htm

Reply on news.ycombinator.com