Google Unfairly Curbs Web Ads and Skews Search, EU Alleges | Hacker News Reader

Google Unfairly Curbs Web Ads and Skews Search, EU Alleges

bloomberg.com

106 pointsantr178 comments

In this thread a lot of people don't understand the meaning of monopoly and assumes a monopoly is only synonymous with the companies they hate. It has more to do with having a dominant control over a market and abusing that dominant position to own advantage. Google has pulled a lot of stunts in the past that clearly defines this. Remember the only way to have pictures on your search listing was to link your blog/site with Google+? A result with an image next to it had better clicks that the one without. Next was the shopping fiasco: The shopping results that shows up on the top had barely anything to do with ranking, instead it was a set of sponsored listing that was paid for by companies. Hmm the blending out the background of the ads with the rest of the results is another story of its own.

Although my primary search engine is still Google (like the majority here), I still don't agree nor do I encourage the direction Google is taking with their search engine.

> In this thread a lot of people don't understand the meaning of monopoly and assumes a monopoly is only synonymous with the companies they hate. It has more to do with having a dominant control over a market and abusing that dominant position to own advantage.

No, it just has to do with the former (usually defined through possession of pricing power, which is very hard to argue Google has in many of the free services in which it is dominant.) The latter is abusing a monopoly, not having one.

> (usually defined through possession of pricing power, which is very hard to argue Google has in many of the free services in which it is dominant.)

They can dictate AdWords pricing though, no? And where else are you going to go? Bing?

> They can dictate AdWords pricing though, no?

Perhaps; they certainly have a very large share of search advertising and its a paid market, but whether they have pricing power is a fact question that I haven't seen strong reasons to believe either way on. Its pretty clear that there are competing places for online, even search-specific, advertising, and that firms make cost-benefit considerations in choosing these; its not clear to me that there is any range in which Google can increase AdWords prices without losing some business to its competitors, even if AdWords is so attractive at its current price point that it draws the vast majority of spending.

> They can dictate AdWords pricing though, no?

It's an auction model. The buyer literally sets the price.

And Google dictates the rules of the auction marketplace.

In a way that has never been suggested to harm consumers or be even remotely anti-competitive. So your point being?

Point: Google is a monopoly. I don't believe enough research has been done to decide if they've used their monopoly in an anti-competitive manner.

Interested to see what the EU conclusions are.

> And Google dictates the rules of the auction marketplace.

Every company "dictates the rules" on which its sells product. Pricing power -- the key test in antitrust for a monopoly -- requires that they be able to change those rules so as to raise prices within some range without business moving to alternatives; in the case of AdWords, it would mean that Google could make it more expensive for the same results without any net migration to any other advertising vendor.

Is that the case? I don't see compelling evidence either way.

One of the primary characteristics of a monopoly is high customer switching costs. For example, a business running on the Microsoft platform in 1995 could not realistically switch to Apple, Solaris, etc. During the heyday of Standard Oil, you could either buy from them or find a way to get your oil shipped from overseas. If you didn't want to use AT&T in 1975, you'd... uh, have to work at the speed of telegrams?

Meanwhile, if someone builds a better search engine, all of Google's customers could switch to it in ten seconds and never look back.

High switching costs can make monopolies worse. And yes, it is possible to switch away from Google search. But it's still a monopoly, and it's held in place by various means.

For example, the vast majority of people - not tech people like us - do think that they can't switch away. They don't understand the distinction between a web browser, a search engine, email, etc. For them, Google is how they access the internet, and that means google.com, and often also means Chrome and gmail.

The monopoly is also held in place by Android, which defaults to Google services (search, email, etc.) very strongly. Of course, us tech people know how to avoid that if we want, but the majority of people don't even know they can. And even if they do, it's not easy for them.

And Windows defaults to IE and Bing search. I don't see any antitrust case against Microsoft for essentially the same thing you are describing.

Or Apple and Safari.

There was a successful antitrust case against microsoft because of the way they abused their OS to get browser share with IE. I believe that the case was mostly because MS purposefully raised the switching cost by adding non standard features to their browser.

A bigger part was OEM licensing restrictions that prevented other browsers from being pre-installed.

There isn't a single default search that's Google on any OS besides Safari on Apple and Android. Windows defaults to bing, Linux via Firefox defaults to Yahoo. People CHOOSE to use Google. No one is forcing them.

Google is paying Apple billions to be the default search engine on iOS.

I am sure a two person startup can do that. /s

I don't understand how this reply is in any way relevant to its parent comment.

It is countering your assertion that switching costs are low. It is not easy for a new player to enter the market on an equal footing with Google.

The difficulty of a new player entering the market has nothing to do with end-user switching costs.

There are also high barriers to entry if you want to start a cola company with worldwide distribution, but that doesn't mean Coke has a monopoly.

See you are arguing that only a monopoly is illegal and unethical. Fact is, there are forms of non monopolistic market manipulation that are illegal. In the US, you can't form cartels or segment markets by colluding with competitors. Similar laws apply in Europe.

> See you are arguing that only a monopoly is illegal and unethical.

No I'm not; what gave you that impression?

So why argue about what makes a monopoly?

There is a lot to unpack here.

>One of the primary characteristics of a monopoly is high customer switching costs.

The algorithms are of no value and can be duplicated by anyone. The real value google has is the search click data, which can't be obtained or generated. So yes there is actually an extremely high barrier to entry.

>Meanwhile, if someone builds a better search engine, all of Google's customers could switch to it in ten seconds and never look back.

Well, no, because Google's customers are companies. The users are not the customers. The companies will go where the users go. How do the customers take their advertising data to the new search engine? They cant. Also, building a better product matters only sometimes. "Better" here implies that users are rational and are capable of evaluating competing products. If that were the case most companies would be out of business. Thankfully it isn't. Ironically, I suppose there is _some_ hope. Not by building a better product, but using either trends/fads/viral memes/ or pure marketing or other means of attracting users. But yeah, probably several hundreds of millions of dollars would be my guess.

> Meanwhile, if someone builds a better search engine, all of Google's customers could switch to it in ten seconds and never look back.

Google's customers are advertisers. Someone would have to build a more effective advertising platform to get Google's customers to switch.

And that new platform would have to collect and analyze even more product (a.k.a. users) data, which would likely be an even greater perceived invasion of privacy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12096168

>> if someone builds a better search engine, all of Google's customers could switch to it in ten seconds and never look back.

The point here is not that Google is a monopoly, rather that it's treating its competitors unfairly.

The fact that Google has competitors indeed means the "only shop in town" excuse holds no water. Google does have competitors, except they're not in the search business, they use Google's search business. And Google uses this fact to put them out of business and take their customers.

Also- just because you don't have any options when someone puts a gun to your head doesn't mean it's fair for them to do so.

Antitrust law is emphatically about what's best for consumers, not what's best for competitors.

Healthy competition is best for consumers, and a free market is paramount to this... being able to abuse a dominant position to gain dominance in new markets is anticompetitive and bad for the consumer long term.

Now, a single competitor should not necessarily have a leg to stand on, but the acts of a first party like google have sweeping repercussions.

> all of Google's customers could switch to it in ten seconds and never look back.

Google's customers are all the businesses buying ads from Adwords.

And yes, Google is a monopoly, the cost of switching away from Adwords will probably drive you bankrupt in 2016.

We live in a world full of many pressing issues. My google results page is not one of them. What I'd like to know is - how did these regulators prioritize their backlog in such a way that this is the current priority - and everything else is a lesser one. That process is what's broken. Not Google.

This is exactly the same argument as "Why go to space when there are starving children in Africa."

The people who distribute food aid are generally not mostly astronauts. Europe's economy is not without serious problems, yet the same people who would otherwise be charged with considering those instead busy themselves with critical study of search results. That doesn't seem to be exactly the same situation.

The people responsible for the economy are not the same people responsible for regulations.

Did you ever think one of the reasons for the problems could be big companies acting unethically?

What's your point. That space exploration is in principle a good investment? That investing in lowing the cost of living is a bad investment? You're a little sparse on details.

Well, they're also researching other stuff, but Google, for example, saying "you can't have yahoo ads on a page with AdSense ads or YouTube embeds" was kinda problematic.

Luckily, that stopped a few years ago, yet it was still very crazy.

What dumb argument is that? If Google is allowed to just display whatever the fuck they want, then they could easily obliterate the economy of whatever country you reside in. Yes, as long as they don't abuse that, there is no problem, but that's not a reason to not have a law.

Whoa dude. Take a breath and maybe explain your argument in a little more detail?

If Google is allowed to display whatever they want they can obliterate your local economy? Details please..

Not sure what you need an explanation for. By now a quite significant portion of internet traffic is delegated over Google and a quite significant portion of commerce depends on the internet.

Google could decide to suddenly stop displaying links to the webpages of companies in your country, which would severely damage your country's export.

They could filter the search results to only display negative search results for things in your country or even add in some faked articles bubbling up into the Google top results about some contagious disease in your country to wreck tourism.

Other great articles to fake would be about some financial instabilities in your country. Traders have to react quickly when something like that crops up, and so they would probably already try to sell assets in your country before anything is even vaguely confirmed.

Chances are that even some TV shows, newspapers etc. will report about it and give it more credibility, as even journalists today also often just google things and then report whatever sounds somewhat plausible, especially when it sounds like a good story.

> Google could decide to suddenly stop displaying links to the webpages of companies in your country

This is the crux of your argument. Google already pulled out of China because of prohibitive regulation which makes my point exactly. The more regulation that's added to make search "safe" the greater the barrier to entry for new competitors is. This isn't even theoretical free-market mumbo jumbo, this is simply historically evident.

> They could filter the search results to only display negative search results

Sure. If I search for xbox, they could decide to only show me nintendo results. But the result sucks and I'll move to a different search engine. The market is wonderfully magical that way. Consumers don't need Microsoft's benevolent lobbyists to protect us from the dangers of Google.

So my point is, the motivation for these regulators action is not from the interest of the general public - but more like the well financed interests of market competitors who can't win by providing better results.

I have to agree with Sylos that this is a dumb argument.

I don't understand the shopping results argument listed on the top of the pages for search results. I have personally never confused them with actual results, and doesn DuckDuckGo Bing and Yahoo do this? If so, then why single out Google?

I don't really see how this is any different to a supermarket giving better visibility to their own brand generics over branded products. There should be no onus on Google to display anything other than what they want to display on their site.

If a supermarket did give favorable exposure to their generic brand products, the other companies could complain about that and it would be unfair. Usually the generics are on the shelf right next to the brand products for this very reason.

It's also hard to compare Google to a supermarket. Other than towns where Wal-Mart is the only option there's not really a real world comparison to Google. You can say Bing is a real competitor to Google but we all know it barely makes a dent.

The other issue at hand here is Google being misleading, because they present that the rankings are objective/fair to both users and the web sites being listed. If they are skewing in favor of their own products, that's clear misrepresentation.

Your first sentence is not consistent with how supermarkets in the UK, Western Europe or the USA work. Their shelf space is a precious resource, which they monetise through products that sell fast, products that encourage customers to come back to the store, products that have good margins, and products whose distributors or manufacturers are willing to pay listing fees to get exposure on shelves.

What? I live and grew up in the US and go shopping multiple times a week. Every store I go to has generic and branded products next to each other on the shelves.

The only exceptions are Aldi, Trader Joe's and Costco. The first two mostly only sell private label products and the last will often only have one offering of a given type of product (which may be a brand or may be private label.)

But most supermarkets in the US (the big chains like Wal-Mart, Meijer, Kroger, etc.) will have generics and brand products for everything from cough syrup to bread right next to each other on the shelves. This is a silly argument and I really have no idea why you left the reply you did. Yeah shelves are precious but that has nothing to do with what I said.

EDIT:

Some companies will pay to be on the shelves but these are usually brands that are not established yet. Regardless that really has nothing to do with what I was talking about. I wasn't talking about how products get to the shelves, it was about whether stores put their generic products in favorable positions compared to branded products. And at least in the US generally they don't.

If your point is that store shelves are a bad analogy for Google results, I would agree. I'm not the one who came up with it.

Nope, you're incorrect. Here's an article that covers it: http://www.realsimple.com/food-recipes/shopping-storing/more...

That just covers the basics of placement though. Companies will pay to have their products placed at the beginning of aisles, in "special offer" areas, etc etc. There's a whole "science" of supermarket layout.

The sentence to which I was responding ('your first sentence'): "If a supermarket did give favorable exposure to their generic brand products, the other companies could complain about that and it would be unfair."

Fairness is not the reason store-brand and generic products are near each other on the shelves. It's because you get more sales if you organise a store so it's easy for customers to find stuff.

"Yeah shelves are precious but that has nothing to do with what I said."

It does. You proposed one explanation why generic and branded products are next to each other (fairness). I proposed an alternative explanation (maximising the returns from limited shelf space).

True, but I think it has to do with the fact that Google is 90% of the supermarkets in town and most people don't know that there are other supermarkets at all.

That sounds like mainly an education problem. Why can't that be fixed by a public awareness campaign informing people of other supermarkets.

I'm not sure it's an awareness problem? Google works and there just isn't an incentive to go elsewhere.

Except, apparently, the perception that Google manipulates search to its own ends. You'd think that would incentivize people to go elsewhere.

So the alternatives are that it's an awareness problem, or (if it's not, as you're asserting) that people know and don't care, in which case forcing Google to change policy seems like it wouldn't actually be a move benefiting the people. Why restrict a business practice that most people don't actually think is bad?

(So I think lack of awareness is more likely, personally).

My father used this (Google ranking search results to benefit themselves and tracking your searches etc) as argument to try other search engines. He uses Google again now as he the other search engines just don't produce results he was happy with. I think most people will have that experience in a blind test to be honest. But I don't know for sure; I tried others and do try others regularly and they start annoying me quite early on as the results are just not as good.

Disclaimer: could be very personal ; Google tracks what i'm interested in AND my queries are tailored to Google I guess.

> That sounds like mainly an education problem. Why can't that be fixed by a public awareness campaign informing people of other supermarkets.

Someone would need to pay for it and its likely part of what they want money from Google for.

Taxpayer funded advertising? I suspect that will be unpopular.

Except most people say "Google" when they mean "search engine", and many aren't even using google. The default search engine in IE is still Bing, which is still a substantial percentage in the browser market, Firefox defaults to Yahoo, Siri uses Bing.

Google isn't IE in 2000, it's Kleenex or Jello-o.

Firefox defaults to Yahoo

Only in the US. It's Google in most of the world.

Google is very dominant in Europe, 90% is not unrealistic for search.

And how is that relevant? What people refer to as "Google" doesn't change the fact that Google does have pretty much a monopoly in search.

Monopoly = the exclusive possession or control of the supply or trade in a commodity or service.

How exactly does Google possess or control the supply of searches? You are always free to use any of several other search engines: Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Baidu, and quite a few others. Facebook and Apple are getting into the game as well.

That is not true or true only very strictly speaking.

There is this thing called a "dominant position". There are formulas which are used to calculate if a company has a dominant position. If they do have, it is up to the court to decide whether they are abusing their dominant position.

In the U.S., monopolization is defined by the FTC as the ability to prevent competition:

https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

It's not at all clear that anything Google does prevents competition. Indeed, if you google "search engines", Google itself doesn't even appear on the first page. I get DogPile, DuckDuckGo, Bing, and Wikipedia as my top four hits. Then there's something about "say goodbye to Google: 14 alternatives". If I search for "webmail", gmail is the eighth hit. Based on my 16-odd years of daily use of Google, it hardly seems as though Google is trying to limit or downplay the competition.

The EU complaint appears to be that Google displays a pattern of promoting its own products in searches. I doubt they can prove that; it's likely that different results are promoted based on algorithms that target user preferences and history, not an evil plan to make the world buy Google services. Why would Google do that? It's a stupid thing to do and they already have a dominant position as you say, so they don't need to. No one says "let me bing that for you". No one says "just look it up on yahoo". Google has the dominant mindshare and they simply can sit back and enjoy being the success that they are.

Because sometimes those products are vital to Google's survival. Back when they released PLAs, they killed all comparison shopping engines. They were even caught doing it with internal emails showing malicious intent. There is a NYT article with the FTC documents attatched, but I can't find it now.

So cross-promoting is illegal? The New York Times advertises its subscriptions and branded experiences, not those of other papers.

The New York Times does not have a dominant position.

> Monopoly = the exclusive possession or control of the supply or trade in a commodity or service.

That's the common-language definition, but that's somewhat tangential in discussing legal action. The legal criteria in US antitrust jurisprudence is actually pricing power, I think the same is true in the EU (both US and EU antitrust regulations do, though to a lesser extent than monopolies with pricing power, regulate some anticompetitive actions of non-monopolies as well -- the EU, as I understand, goes further than the US in this area.)

They don't control the supply of search services so much as they control the supply of eyeballs.

95% market share in Spain, Italy, 94% in France, 93% in Germany. Seems like it's even worse than IE was. http://www.businessinsider.com/google-europe-market-share-se...

This article is about Europe - I'm guessing you are from the US, based on your Firefox defaulting to Yahoo.

I don't think the supermarket analogy is a fair one since having to drive or catch a bus to the next town would be many degrees more difficult than just using another search engine.

Even if it were not, finding the alternative supermarket is doing exactly the same thing, but not quite as well, may be disappointing?

It is in my opinion a fair analogy, because people don't know that Google is doing it. They won't even drive to the next search engine to begin with, and simply accept Google's highest search ranking as being really popular.

So what if people like one supermarket? If they don't like the product placement they can move on to the next.

Unless they are declared an equal access utility. Stranger things have happened in well regulated markets and this is the EU. In the US and EU "search result neutrality" might happen if there was a monopoly (this is an antitrust allegation).

Personally I don't think the antitrust will stick. It is incredibly easy to change your search engine. They may be required to select a default engine on install of chrome. I switched to duckduckgo.com about a year ago. With duckduckgo, your results aren't as ad laden, they don't track you, they don't randomly insist you turn on intrusive tracking to provide services. I would much rather take an extra step for the 1/100 searches ddg doesn't cut it than see ads above the scroll. Setting a blue/green color scheme in the upper right corner, instead of the default monochrome makes a big difference.

tl;dr: there are options.

It's not about how easy it is to change, it is about the relative market shares of the various offerings.

Is the 1/100 actually accurate for you? I occasionally test if DuckDuckGo is even nearly competent for my daily usage and it always falls incredibly short.

For example, sometimes I want to revisit a HN article I read days or hour ago, and often it's just faster to type it into Google than it is to search from the history. Typing in "hn google skews" into (incognito mode) Google brings up this thread and the actual news post as the first two, while DDG just brings up pages and pages of irrelevant stuff.

It is pretty close. Maybe I just use ddg as more of a bookmarks to major sites. I used to think it was worse, but when I changed the color scheme I realized the results weren't that worse, just the way they are presented.

Edit: I did the same search and for the default results Google showed the news (not hackernews specifically) and ddg didn't. But under the news tab in ddg you get similar results.

you want: !hn google skews

Slightly off-topic, but useful as an anecdotal example: This kind of thing is why people prefer Google.

We had search engines with magic symbols prior to Google. People don't like learning magic search language; finding the right shibboleth of qualifiers, excluders, and "near-word" matches feels a lot like doing the search engine's job for it. Most people seem to prefer Google's approach of making a guess at what you want based on past search history.

This doesn't mean DDG can't succeed. But in addition to their selling point of not remembering your search history and having a mechanically-tunable query, they may want to consider offering a search-history "smart" search at some point in the future.

I agree that magic symbols make for worse experiences in general. However, this isn't a matter of using the in-site or not. The same thing gives the same results in a different tab for duckduckgo. DDG just needs to change their regular web results to include the top result or two of the other tabs. Especially when they are highly scored compared to the plain web results.

with ddg set as default, i just type

    !hn google skews results

into my address bar and i get the story

What does the exclamation point do?

I think it forces the search to hacker news

On google you'd type this for the same behavior:

  site:news.ycombinator.com google skews

Except you don't need to, you can just type "hn" because google knows hn means you want the hacker news website results

Duck duck go could provide the same behavior if they displayed the top search result of "!<first word> search" when I type "<first word> search" if it realizes <first word> is one of these popular keywords or a synonym

It doesn't search HN, rather it redirects you to the search at hn.algolia.com. The same works for many other sites. So for example "foo doesn't work !so" redirects to Stack Overflow search for "foo doesn't work" and "Foo !wfi" redirects to Finnish Wikipedia search for "Foo".

Even if the antitrust does stick, I wonder what the practical results would be. If it requires Google to use a different policy for google.uk, google.fr, &c about how they rank their data, that's something they could do. If it requires them to make changes to google.com, then we have a bit of a problem; google.com is the US search 'face', and European law shouldn't restrict what the company can do internationally. Yet customers in Europe can get to google.com just as easily as google.uk, so would there be any real practical benefit to restricting Google's practices here?

Google already shows different results for all their sites, including google.com depending on your location – both because they want to provide more targeted results and due to legal reasons. Here in Germany I can't see a few results deemed harmful to the youth (which is done more or less voluntarily by Google under a negotiated agreement) or news articles removed under the 'right to be forgotten'. The TLD used is not a good indicator of jurisdiction and regulators would never accept such a solution.

The same search on the same site returns different results as soon as I run my traffic through a US network.

For most people Google is the only supermarket that exists.

I agree. Apple preinstalls their apps on the iPhone because they make iPhones.

Apple does not control 90% of the smartphone market. If they did, they will face the same problems. Much like Microsoft did in the late 90s.

Because Google has such a huge market share in search that they can noticeable damage competition.

If I understand you correctly, the point you are making is the question of obligation. Is Google obliged to us? Well, no, private company, other search engines available, etc. I contend, however, that being a publicly financed entity is not the only path by which a company can, or at any rate should, become obligated to a public. Funds are not the only resource that a public can provide. A public also provides trust, without which a private company wouldn't make money, because the public won't use your product. That trust in my view is public a resource. And acquiring it is important to Google's business, which is why Google wasn't skewing search results in 2000, which is why Facebook wasn't mucking around with the Timeline in 2009. They had the freedom to do it then. Why didn't they? Because the outcome for us, and hence for them, would have been different. We hadn't "invested" our trust in them back then. Now we have, and they can't just fuck around with it just because private company, other brands are available, etc. Google isn't built on their brilliance only, it's built on our usage of their brilliance, and they can't act like we aren't invested in it. We didn't put any of our money in it, but money is not the only thing that a public puts, or could put, in companies. Are we Google owners? No. But are we Google stake holders? Yes we are, hence our demand they don't skew results in favor of some thing or other. I didn't sign up for that, and if I hadn't signed up, Google wouldn't be, would it? Can we resolve this by education? No, because Rome wasn't built in a day. If the govt wanted to shut Google down, can you imagine people protesting? I can. Why, and they don't own Google? Because they're stake holders.

So you agree that Microsoft was fine to put IE as the default browser I guess. I see the same rationale, and I'd be OK as long as we give companies the same fair treatment.

Of course. Private companies are not property of the state.

The difference with IE was that users were at a disadvantage to install alternative browsers over slow connections. Access to Google is exactly the same as access to Bing from the address bar.

Oh, you type www.google.com in your address bar and press enter? I thought you just used the default Google search from the search bar, just like everybody else.

I do use the search bar in Safari, and have it set to Google, but honestly I can't remember if I was prompted to set the default.

Eh, it seems like eligibility for a "monopoly" has shifted in the last 2 decades. Otherwise people would be getting way more bent out of shape for the decisions that both Google and Apple have done on their respective platforms

There is a vendor out there who not just put a default browser on their OS, but forbid browsers that aren't just shells for their default browser's rendering engine.

And last time I checked nearly everyone was like "oh, that's their system, they can do whatever they want with it". Why would it be any different for a weaker case like this?

That is because they aren't a monopoly (40% US market share for phones).

And between 8 and 15% in almost all other markets.

Does Google have monopoly with online searches, though?

Switching search engines in 2016 is much easier than switching browsers in 1998.

The difference is that switching away from Windows in the 1990s was effectively impossible for any established business. Switching your default search engine takes ten seconds.

Well that’s nice and dandy, problem is Google has 70% of the market in search. Which doesn’t bond well with transparency and fair use if they’re promoting their products over competition’s.

... And Google has 70% of the market in search because people like the results! You can search anywhere you'd like for the same price.

I'm not arguing whether they should or shouldn't have such a market share. For example, in Greece where I live Google's share must be north of 80% and that's fair because in localized search their results are far better than the competition's. I'm just stating the obvious. If you have a dominant share in a market the way you operate must be as transparent as possible.

If Google's search results didn't match user requirements, users would go elsewhere. Google shouldn't be hamstrung because the competition isn't up to it.

It's more like 90% in Europe, it's a monopoly in practice. Bing, unlike in the US, has a very low market share.

> Well that’s nice and dandy, problem is Google has 70% of the market in search.

Do they have pricing power in search? If not, what difference does it make that they have 70% of search volume?

Dont read too much into it. This is EU seeing its economy and consumers exposed and looking for better deal.

From https://www.google.com/about/company/philosophy/

  You can make money without doing evil.

  Placement in search results is never sold to anyone, and advertising is not only clearly marked as such, it offers relevant content and is not distracting.

  We don’t allow ads to be displayed on our results pages unless they are relevant where they are shown.

  Advertising on Google is always clearly identified as a “Sponsored Link,” so it does not compromise the integrity of our search results.

[Anybody who uses Google search would know better.]

Why not https://duckduckgo.com/

> [Anybody who uses Google search would know better.

Huh? There are bases for complaint about Google that are reasonable, but the rules you just listed are adhered to afaict. Do you have any concrete examples of what you're talking about or are you just another uninformed commenter in this thread muttering darkly (and vaguely) about "obvious" abuses, but unable to articulate what they are?

In the US, an FTC commission concluded the same thing a few years ago: http://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-u-s-antitrust-probe-o...

So does Amazon. What's the big deal? Anybody ever believe Google results are not skewed? That's kind of the whole point - the results are customized per individual. Of course that includes skewed toward items Google considers more important.

The big deal is - in case that wasn't clear to anybody - that having a de-facto monopoly on search changes things.

If google had a 2% market share in search nobody would care about them pushing their own products but with the market share that google currently has they control what internet users see and can push other parties offering the same or better services out of business (or at a minimum hurt them disproportionally).

Search should be a level playing field, and Google - in spite of their motto - is pushing their own products even when they are not superior and that's a dead giveaway that they are abusing their position.

Market share is voluntary. I use DuckDuckGo. Its there for everybody to use. I didn't pay for either one. So I'm not even sure 'market share' is meaningful, when there is no actual market to begin with.

And as I already noted, search is deliberately not a level anything. Its all about tilting the results to suit an agenda. Always was. Whether its pleasing me by finding stuff I agree with (politically or culturally), or showing me stuff I might be convinced to buy. That's the whole industry right there.

It's not that simple.

Most people never made a conscious choice to use Google they ended up using it for a number of reasons hell most people think that google is the internet.

The threshold for antitrust really ought to be higher than "most people never bothered to learn how the Internet works."

Then it's a good thing it is.

> Market share is voluntary.

No, it really isn't. The fact that you can change does not mean that people will change. Defaults and all kinds of tie-ins have led to google being the way in which people navigate the web.

> I use DuckDuckGo. Its there for everybody to use.

That's an illusion. DuckDuckGo works at the scale that it currently has achieved. If it were to serve even 20% of all search traffic it would collapse. There currently is only one viable technical contender to Google and that's 'bing' and it has a fraction of Google's market share.

> And as I already noted, search is deliberately not a level anything.

It is perceived as such.

> Its all about tilting the results to suit an agenda.

This is quite possibly true today.

> Always was.

And that's true at all.

> Whether its pleasing me by finding stuff I agree with (politically or culturally), or showing me stuff I might be convinced to buy. That's the whole industry right there.

This is confused. If it finds the stuff you need then it is 'good', if it finds you stuff to buy then that's also good if you were looking to buy something.

It certainly isn't good when you're searching for a product offered by party 'B' and party 'G' and you're only shown the product by party 'G' who happens to own the search engine market then that's simply wrong.

Straw man? It never 'only shows' anything. It shows an ordered list. Its all in there. This 'skew issue' is all a bunch of hot air over almost nothing.

The threshold for antitrust really ought to be higher than "it's the default" in an ecosystem where the alternative is as easy to reach as the original.

I'd be more concerned if it were impossible to use an iPhone to search with Bing., or a chrome browser to search with DDG.

> No, it really isn't. The fact that you can change does not mean that people will change. Defaults and all kinds of tie-ins have led to google being the way in which people navigate the web.

"The fact that you can change..." - Isn't this the very definition of "voluntary"?

I don't understand this logic. People are too lazy/ignorant to switch to a different search engine, and that gives them right to tel google what to do with their product?

> That's an illusion. DuckDuckGo works at the scale that it currently has achieved. If it were to serve even 20% of all search traffic it would collapse

I'm not sure if i'm missing anything here, but DDG could very well scale if they see the spike in the traffic. They have a pretty decent revenue model.

And Google participating in EU market is voluntary. If it doesn't like the laws or the power of the EU investigators, it can choose to take its business elsewhere.

Market share is voluntary but our will is limited by many factors. Even if someone invents a better search engine you will not discover it if the "promotion game" is very unfair.

How is there not a market just because you didn't pay with money? You pay with your personal data and your attention to ads.

Not that this would be in any way relevant. Whether you call it "market share" or "user share" or whatever, fact is that Google has a lot of it and can abuse that.

And no, search is supposed to be a level playing field. If something is an ad, then you are required by law to inform your users about that.

That's still not a monopoly on web ads. There are available competitive and substitute services (Facebook and Twitter, for example).

Do you disagree with the first paragraph of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly ? Because I don't see how you can consider Google a "de facto monopoly" by that definition.

Since the original article is about an EU investigation, I would believe the relevant Wikipedia article is this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_competition_law...

In fact, it is not about being a "monopoly" but about having a "dominant position", which is presumed given Google's market share.

> In fact, it is not about being a "monopoly" but about having a "dominant position"

While there is a (apparently nonconclusive) presumption raised by market share, the test for "dominant position" seems to be a power-to-take-action test very similar to the pricing power test for "monopoly" -- "A firm is in a dominant position if it has the ability to behave independently of its competitors, customers, suppliers and, ultimately, the final consumer. A dominant firm holding such market power would have the ability to set prices above the competitive level to sell products of an inferior quality or to reduce its rate of innovation below the level that would exist in a competitive market."

[0] http://www.concurrences.com/Droit-de-la-concurrence/Glossair...

The comment I was replying to claimed that Google has "a de-facto monopoly on search".

That is the claim that my reply is challenging; whether or not Google has "a dominant position" is irrelevant to this subthread.

The only problem I have with these inquiries is that often users want google to skew towards their products. If people search 'email' or 'mail', what is the probability they are an existing customer clicking on gmail in the results? Is that really skewed if thats what people want?

As a data point, I was employed with a Google competitor a few years ago. We had nowhere near the market share of Google of course, still we did bend over backward to make sure we weren't favoring our own verticals over G's in our results.

The thing is, there is a good chance that they aren't explicitly preferring their own products, just that they are the most popular products.

They are trying to find what people want to see when they search. If most people who search "email" want Gmail, then it should be at the top.

It's going to be almost impossible to prove that they aren't just better than the competitors at finding what people want vs manipulating search results in their favor.

I do agree that very likely there is no intent to prefer their own properties.

But if such an intent exists, it is very likely that an email trail would prove it and it might surface during disclosure in a trial.

Anyone running a 5 year probe would consider this. There's no way this is the only evidence they would come up with.

Or... The probe kept going for five years because it failed to turn up anything interesting. The length of an investigation is usually a poor measure of its merit.

I wonder why Russia and South Korea aren't Google dominated.

http://www.ginzametrics.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/searc... http://www.chandlernguyen.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/sea... http://www.chandlernguyen.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/sea...

Note that the data is older by a few years but i doubt that it has changed dramatically.

I recently experienced an anecdote related to Google "abusing" their position. I was looking at Project Fi in the same browser that I had my Gmail/Google account open in. I just looked around without pressing any buttons to sign up or the like. A couple days later I got an email in my main Gmail inbox inviting me to "Complete your sign up to Project Fi". It wasn't solicited, and it wasn't even filtered to Gmail's handy "Promotions" folder.

>It rejected Google’s argument that its chief shopping search rivals are Amazon.com Inc. and EBay Inc.

Really EU?

If I'm googling for something and google offers it then thats probably what I want.

Unfortunately that hasn't been my experience in recent years.While Google and Bing have evolved enormously the internet is so bloated by clickbait website that I have come to rely on community curated content.

On some searches now Google barely displays and real results at all. The map results are gone, adwords are gone and now they show Local Services at the top requesting quotes.

For example: Plumbers in San Francisco

Possibly because of this http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/business/fake-online-lo...

The top result is Yelp, and there's even a widget that lets you search for a plumber that's been certified. What results would you prefer to see at the top instead?

Are we sure that this is not influenced by Google's search result personalization?

Do you get something different?

Why does anyone ever get surprised by this? This is the "do not be evil but you can be sly" way. This is what MBAs call synergies!

A small example:

When I search for browser addons, Chrome addons will appear before Firefox addons. I'm positive Google knows I'm using FF, so why show me an incompatible extension? It makes no sense, and is annoying to boot.

Come on Google, you're better than this. https://i.imgur.com/KiCxyfx.png

Does google's algorithm consider which browser you're using? UAs are complex to parse and easy to spoof, so I'm not sure they're even considered?

If that's the case, isn't it also possible that the chrome extension page has a higher algorithm rank due to chrome being the more popular browser?

Is it possible this isn't a malicious ploy, and is the algorithm doing its job?

Google does consider which browser you're using - on Firefox mobile, you consistently get worse results, and can't change any extended search options.

Yet, if you change your UA to Chrome, suddenly everything works.

According to http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp, Chrome has 3 times the market share as Firefox

New antitrust lawsuit? Wasn't this already started in 2014?

[REDACTED]

Do you have any examples of this? I'm genuinely curious.

EU bureaucrats are jealous of US internet companies. The only big internet companies come from USA and China [1].

They have very high taxes, it's very difficult to fire people and there are tons of other regulations. So, they are losing the future. That is why they are attacking Google - they want to take their money by penalties.

  [1] http://www.statista.com/statistics/277483/market-value-of-the-largest-internet-companies-worldwide/

Or, perhaps, google are abusing their de-facto monopoly position and are quite rightly being investigated for it.

Investigation of anything that large is a responsible thing for a regulatory authority to do.

I'm curious, with a sweeping statement like "EU bureaucrats are jealous of US internet companies", who are you referring to? Is it EU as whole, or individuals who have a personal stake in creating EU internet companies? Because from an outside perspective, this statement seems a lot like tin foil hattery, but if you do have anything to back up your claim, I'm all ears.

Quaero is a dead giveaway. Literally.

While it's not really proof, Obama has said the same thing[0].

Obama:

> In defense of Google and Facebook, sometimes the European response here is more commercially driven than anything else. As I’ve said, there are some countries like Germany, given its history with the Stasi, that are very sensitive to these issues. But sometimes their vendors — their service providers who, you know, can’t compete with ours — are essentially trying to set up some roadblocks for our companies to operate effectively there.

[0] http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/17/8050691/obama-our-companie...

Nearly everything in the EU or Germany is commercially driven. I've didn't seen a new law that didn't screwed the people and didn't helped some businesses.

The anti-GMO laws comissioned by the E.U. are largely a front for trade protectionism from U.S. agriculture (which is mostly GMO):

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/27/opinion/trade-protectionis...

Losing the future of being monitored and manipulated as pawns in corporate games.

The world would continue to exist without Google, don't be scared.

This page loads CPU 100% all the time it opened, even with adblocker (that causes the site to show nag screen). I hope one day Google Safe Browsing will treat such newsshit sites as malicious.

I've lost track of how many antitrust charges the EU has tacked onto Google. They probably think Google is going to roll over to their whims. I foresee a protracted legal battle lasting years in the courts and amounting to very little in the end.

You may allow Google to scrape your website but Google will not allow you to scrape theirs.

you know about robots.txt right?

Sure. You know about reciprocity?

Yeah, it's a request like "Do not track" with no controls to enforce it besides pulling a plug out.

edit:

To _b_'s point: "Info Sharing" is merely the promise of the marketeers', info cloistering/monetizing/weaponizing(?) are the realities.

Are you claiming that Google ignores robots.txt?

Thought experiment:

You have a very large site with large amount of content.

You allow Google to crawl your website and store a copy of all your content in its cache.

This amounts to hundreds of pages. That is, many pages of results in the Google search engine.

Imagine for the thought experiment you later lose your website and all the content.

Can you "crawl Google", e.g., site:website.com, to get it back?

No. You will draw a ban.

Google is in some ways like the Internet Archive but with some very peculiar rules.

The Internet Archive encourages users to crawl it.

Is crawling a special privilege that is only reserved for search engines catering to advertisers?

google is not your backup service, news at 11

The issue is reciprocity as to crawling. There will never be "news at 11" about that.

So ban the googlebot in robots.txt and tell google you'll let them back in when they let you crawl their site.

Or allow Googlebot in robots.txt and then crawl Google.

No, I only find examples of Yahoo & Bing being caught at it. Google hasn't been caught, and they promise not to do evil.

Google is an American company. its responsible for lots of EU businesses giving money to the US. of course, the EU will create a reason to make it pay a hefty tax for that if it is at all possible. If not, it will probably create a law to snatch it. I'm not proud of it but it is what it is. Another reason for TIPP, because then such things would likely be handled by a neutral authority.

While I'm sure that's probably the motivation behind these lawsuits, they won't be able to do anything if Google is not at fault.

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