European Commission fines Google €2.42B for abusing dominance
europa.eu
europa.eu
While it made me angry when Google put their results above ours, I never questioned that they had a right to do that. It is their website. They are not a utility. At what point does a company cross the line and become one that the EU feels can no longer promote their own product?
After all, the actual products here are the products being sold not the comparison sites. If I search for baseball bat the product is the bat not the competing search results.
What's next? Having to give equal ranking to Yahoo! search results in their search page? It sounds extreme but I would have also thought this was extreme until 2 minutes ago.
Or perhaps more accurate... having to completely do away with One Box entirely. After all, when I search for a movie it displays the actor information and movie times before it displays the link to the theater website or IMDB.
I would say Google is as close to a natural monopoly as the Bell System was in 1956. If you came to me and said “Hey, I want to start a company to compete with Google in search,” I would say you’re out of your mind and don’t waste your energy or your time or your money, there’s just no way. Classic economics would say that if there’s a business in which there are 35 percent net margins, that would attract a huge amount of new capital to capture some of that, and none of that has happened. That tells you there’s something wrong.
From: https://promarket.org/google-close-natural-monopoly-bell-sys...
Water companies are a utility because there's a high cost to laying the pipes and the more pipes you lay, the more people you service, the more pipes you can afford to lay. It's near impossible for an upstart water company to come in and displace the incumbent.
Search companies should be a utility because there's a high cost to gathering the data needed to drive good results and the more data you gather, the better results you give, the more data you gather. It's near impossible for an upstart search company to come in and displace the incumbent.
There's a high cost to building a store and the more stores you build, the more customers you serve, the more stores you can afford to build.
There's a high cost to making a movie and the more movies you make, the more people pay to see your movies, the more movies you can afford to make.
Maybe I'm wrong about that--I'm sure ML has become increasingly important in how Google ranks results, but I'm unconvinced that it's a severely anti-competitive factor.
(That said, I do still use Google over DDG largely because of the personalization and the integration with their other services.)
Where are the someones then? Look through Show HN and you'll see all sorts of cool projects and upstart companies. How many of them are search? We've got a huge flood of companies trying to take down the taxi industry, where's the flood to take out Google? It doesn't exist because everyone knows they can't win.
Here's the Show HN for search: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=show%20search&sort=byPopularit...
Do you see any of these dethroning google? Almost none even bother to compete in general search, just in small specific areas.
Making a kickass image editing application like Adobe Photoshop is difficult too (as anyone who has had to suffer GIMP would attest), but that doesn't mean Photoshop forms a natural monopoly.
How did Google displace previous search engines?
Building roads is an example of a natural monopoly. Consumer internet is an example of a natural monopoly. Growing corn is not a natural monopoly.
In the absence of a third-party with IP rights on seed, dominating corn growing means you dominate the seed supply and have the most variety to select from for improved traits (whether yield, hardiness to particular environmental stresses, etc.)
Seems to have a pretty clear feedback loop where dominance breeds dominance in the same way as with network effects. Sure, the source of the feedback loop is different, but it's very much there.
This applies 100% to Google. Even it's closest "startup competitor" hangs off bing's index.
What other websites need to be wary of the same ruling and at what point do they need to focus their efforts on giving their competitors virtual real-estate on their website at the expense of growing their company?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law#Alternatives_to_com...
Be sure to also check out the coloured map at the top :)
[0] it's a bit more subtle, distinctions have blurred a little over time, either legal system adopted some parts of the other. see the wikipedia link for more details (especially the heading "Alternatives to Common Law systems")
The US just oddly decides not to enforce it, then the EU gets shit on for being anti-American when they correctly enforce things that are illegal in both the EU and US.
They enforced it for Microsoft in 2001. Since then tech behemoth political donations have shot up.
It didn't have to be a ballot box but I think users should be able to decide what default browser they want to use on first use. I'd prefer to only be install what browsers I want to use.
IMO Microsoft is just as hostile now, I can't uninstall Edge from Windows 10, I keep getting nagged to use Edge as my default browser, my preferences to never ask again are not honored. my defaults are lost on each upgrade, despite setting my default browser to Chrome the Windows Search box still opens up results in bing with Edge, I need to use my spam hotmail account to log into Windows 10, I tried using a local account but it broke everywhere that launched a Sign Up page which crashed after 1s of an empty screen, which I needed in order to get the latest version of WSL with the bug fix I needed. In the end I had to reinstall Windows 10 and adopt their stupid Internet account policy. Windows 10 has been the most user hostile OS I've used that I'm planning on switching to using a Windows 2016 Server OS on my next install.
From the Wikipedia summary of United States v. Microsoft Corporation[0], "Underlying these disputes were questions over whether Microsoft altered or manipulated its application programming interfaces (APIs) to favor Internet Explorer over third party web browsers, Microsoft's conduct in forming restrictive licensing agreements with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), and Microsoft's intent in its course of conduct."
I feel like this detail is being lost in a lot of the comparisons I've seen made between Google now and Microsoft then. Google promotes their own services on their own website, sure. At the same time, they haven't changed Chrome to not load competing services. They have done nothing to prevent users from using competing search engines in Chrome. They don't prevent competing web browsers from loading Google sites. They don't force web sites that use Google ads to block competing browsers.
So the parallel doesn't work for me. The EU decided these were different markets, I disagree. I'm a user, I use Google to find things on the internet. I use other sites. I search Amazon directly from inside Chrome, I visit other sites without issue... I'm just not seeing the anticompetitive actions.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
(Though google does set up special APIs for Chrome first, like SPDY. But that's done in a responsible way.)
Doesn't seem that different from the case against Microsoft over Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player?
The other is a web page with tons of competitors, many of which work well, deciding what their own computers after you specifically requested them to do so.
While whether you can switch might be important from a user standpoint it's not necessarily a factor from a market standpoint. It's more about how much power you have and how you use that power. It might be very easy to switch to Bing, but Google still have power over >90% of the search market.
Type bing or duckduckgo in and you have switched, how is that hard?
No, they are being forced to give their competitors equal prominence.
The press release literally says: "the Decision orders Google to comply with the simple principle of giving equal treatment to rival comparison shopping services and its own service"
And what happens if Google says, "f* it, we're not providing a utility, we're not taking traffic from European IPs anymore"?
I am no anarcho-capitalist, but I really think more folks should read Atlas Shrugged.
I disagree with Rand on many important issues.
I think your reply is tantamount to an ad hominem fallacy.
Very rarely does acting like a child and "taking your ball and go home" work out.
Nothing much. Someone else would step in. Greed and free markets makes the "Atlas Shrugged" scenario nonsense. I'm sure there are millions of smart people who would love it if all the other smart people stopped producing. All it means is more market share for them.
I'm guessing you're posting this as someone who is fully sucked into the Google ecosystem. I was too. But the only Google product I use anymore is Google maps. No more email, no more search, no more android.
Google is very far from indispensable.
I use Google fairly heavily through work and my personal email, but IDK about "fully sucked into" - I have no smartphone, don't use GCal, etc.
Rather than lauding Google, I meant to criticize the idea that the public has a right to a private service.
Walmart has a hair salon in many of their stores. Walmart's primary business model is not hair but product sales. But obviously Walmart wants you to get their hair cut at their salon. This is similar to the government stepping in and saying that the store must allow other Salon's equal placement in their building. They own the building.
It would be anti-competitive to do something to prevent other salons from opening down the street or lowering the prices in their salon to bellow cost to push out competition. But I don't buy that they can't do what they want in their own store.
Then you're unfamiliar with anti-trust law.
Oh right, no, and what they have in their website promises no expectation of doing what you need.
The website is theirs, but the content they scan through and link to is not theirs. Google Search is of incredible value (to us in form of service _and_ to Google in form of an asset), but it's been built on top other people's content. They took that content for free. Perhaps it gives those "others" some rights in deciding what kinds of things can be done with such a service. It could be done through law, conversation, or applying a fine when a large enough group of representatives of a large market decide that maybe they do something a bit off.
Because it was freely available. As I understand it, Google feed its database with robots surfing the web. Those robots don't steel anything. Moreover, if I'm not mistaken you can explicitly forbid access to those robots with a robots.txt file or something. If you don't, it arguably means you give away your data to everyone.
You can't regulate a company that is bigger than the enforcer of the regulations.
Damn, I hate this trend of making you comments appear more controversial.
> What's next?
You really should not argue this point. We need to stop "big" companies doing "anti-consumer" practices. The reason why those terms are in quotation marks is because when you are discussing antitrust and monopoly laws those terms are not well defined. You should only look at these rulings per-case basis.
If on the other hand you believe in the benefits of the "free for all market", you just have to be aware that this is not an opinion shared by EU citizens.
Point is, representative democracy doesn't mean the action of the representative is the one the population agrees with.
It doesn't work like that. Because of their market dominance, there really are no alternatives. This is a combination of companies simply giving up on competing with Google, but also in terms of SEO, Google is the only one that matters for publishers and advertisers drive profits towards Google as well. Mobile? They now own it.
And btw, if you'll mention DuckDuckGo or Bing, the there's a high probability you're not living in the EU, since those are really, really bad at local or non-English searches.
Then don't use any. You are not entitled to it, nobody has any obligation to have a service that does what you want.
Pure pragmatism.
Google isn't entitled to doing business in the EU either. If they do, then they need to follow the law.
I don't have the freedom to use another search engine with the scale and access to user data that Google has because the barriers to entry in this market are staggeringly high.
Staggeringly high barrier to entry == utility
>stealing money
Google has the freedom to not pay the fine and shut down operations in the EU.
I take it as a way of saying "this will probably be a controversial opinion here, but..." which is totally fine.
Not only that, but the specialized infoboxes at the top of Google's search results were an almost direct response to their competitor Microsoft doing exactly the same thing and promoting it at the main advantage of their search. Microsoft's comparison shopping subsidiary which they used for their search results was one of the companies complaining to the EU about this. Now that Microsoft have convinced the EU to ban Google from doing this, they can once again point to the fact that they offer this extra contextual information as a reason for using them and Google cannot compete.
[Google's response][1] to this ruling suggests they have data which confirms this:
> While some comparison shopping sites naturally want Google to show them more prominently, our data shows that people usually prefer links that take them directly to the products they want, not to websites where they have to repeat their searches.
[1]: https://www.blog.google/topics/google-europe/european-commis...
This is an opinion which I don't feel the need to convert anyone to but I really don't understand the opposite view. Can someone explain why they believe google and other "emerging" power centers saveguard their interests better than the EU?
> There are also high barriers to entry in these markets, in part because of network effects: the more consumers use a search engine, the more attractive it becomes to advertisers. The profits generated can then be used to attract even more consumers. Similarly, the data a search engine gathers about consumers can in turn be used to improve results.
Simply put, the EC believes that Google is a barrier to any viable competition, so there's no ability to develop a competitive service to Google's own.
Search has been Google's core competency since their inception, they were much smaller than the existing Search engines when they started out but were able to create a better product that users preferred and since that time they've been able to amass a wealth of knowledge, experience and resources. Of course any company is going to have a hard time trying to compete with them now, but I don't see why they need to be punished for executing so well on their core mission.
It's not about "punishing" but it is about holding dominant companies responsible for handling the great power that comes with this dominance.
Companies don't usually do this by themselves because like you say, their goals are orthogonal to this.
Doesn't mean it's contrary to their goals (which would be "punishing", in a sense), but "commercial success" or profit just isn't a force that drives ethical behaviour and responsibility. It's not. Things would be so much easier if they were.
Step 2: "more attractive to advertisers"
Step 3: "profits generated can then be used to attract even more consumers"
Wait, why were consumers attracted by the product (search engine) in the 1st step, but were convinced by the profits in the 3rd step?
Just like Toyota in the unintended acceleration problem was quickly found guilty of not being GM or Ford.
Wut?
It's so refreshing to see checks and balances on US multinationals, and I say that as a US citizen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
They live under some sort of bubble of selfishness, where they believe others have to change in order to do to what is best for them. Guess what, as long as Google is committing no crime, why should them?
They have acted against "what people usually prefer" many, many times before when it was beneficial to their own interests.
Additionally, "what people usually prefer" is completely orthogonal to the EU antitrust ruling, which is about holding companies responsible for the power that comes with market dominance.
Companies don't really have ethics or humanity (the way people do), unless we force them to. "We" in this case refers to the whole of society, including the people making up the company. In particular as companies grow very large, even if the people making up the company are ethical, humane and good, THEY are still tasked to wrangle a wild beast that is mostly just hungry for profits, and try to steer it to do Good and not Bad because it doesn't see there is a difference. But even then, they can use help from the rest of society, and regulations can be part of this help.
The same people that brought you that idiotic cookies warning?
See http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm#se...
I suppose the Guardian shouldn't alert people that the NSA listens to their telephone calls, either. (Because every spy agency does it?)
1. Because it's in their long term best interest to have a customer for life (No political cycle) so they are more incentivized than a politician would be to support the interest of the consumer.
2. They have a more insight into user desires and actions on a day to day basis, meaning they can predict and "nudge" users in directions that are mutually beneficial.
The biggest argument I've seen is that people don't like that they aggregate the data you give to them.
This goes to the broader point though that Google wants to service the end user better based on their feedback (most sites are too big/load too slowly), so they created something simple that gives end users a faster, better and cheaper (lower mobile data cost) solution.
In fact Google seems to be moving faster here because companies keep creating large websites to serve rich content that users find annoyingly slow.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/oct/11/google-amp-fac...
There are also many people that actively support Chrome. Does it mean that Chrome dominance is therefore beneficial to the future?
Google long term interest is to increase the margin of their product by increasing their dominance in multiple markets over multiple tiers.
If they do this by using their monopolistic power then they are in violation of the law even when by doing that they provide a service that some of their users see usable.
No, Google users are suppliers of a product (ad views) that Google sells to their customers. But they are suppliers that are paid via in-kind exchange (with Google services) rather than cash, which is exactly equivalent to being customers of Google services that pay with in-kind exchange rather than cash. So, in a very real sense, those users are customers.
Chickens in a farm aren't situated similarly, with respect to the farm, as users are with respect to Google services.
Chickens can't freely choose a different farm, or to use no farm at all.
In addition - open air held chickens could run away but they choose not to.
What if all that happened on chicken farms was one of their feathers got plucked once in awhile?
So the question is - what are the sufficient conditions for a chicken to be raised to the customer status from the equipment status?
Even if chickens would have choice, all they can choose from for their actual survival is another chicken farm.
Over time they have downgraded their ability to survive without support of the chicken farm.
Even if they had some money to pay for the entrance into the chicken farm then collecting their eggs would be much more lucrative business.
It's in Google's best interest to make money. A large userbase and ubiquitous brand is part of that. User happiness is only one possible means to that end.
Finally, you seem to think that search users are Google's customers - as they don't pay anything to Google, they are a resource, or product - not a customer.
Google search is a loss-leader for Google ads - if there's no competition (say paying for product placement at these other sites) - Google gets a bigger share of the ad revenue.
I don't see what magical mechanism there is that would strongly push Google to care for the Google search users "best interest".
That set of users though is what this whole action from the EU is trying to protect. It's only marginally about the other businesses - the end goal is making sure the population of the EU is benefiting.
To that end I have yet to see where or how Google has proven they have the population's interest at mind than the government itself. Google has a much better track record than any government does at listening to the majority of a population's demands based on their behavior (yes even with the deprecation of groups/reader etc...) and responding with their products.
The EU or any other government does less for the population (relative to capabilities, obviously Google doesn't pave roads yet) than Google.
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-15-4780_en.htm
> (...) systematically favouring its own comparison shopping product in its general search results pages. The Commission's preliminary view is that such conduct infringes EU antitrust rules because it stifles competition and harms consumer (...)
> (...) [Google] may therefore artificially divert traffic from rival comparison shopping services and hinder their ability to compete on the market. The Commission is concerned that users do not necessarily see the most relevant results in response to queries - this is to the detriment of consumers, and stifles innovation.
The EU is concerned with regulating the market to favour competition. It's true the underlying implication is that a Free market is a Good market - and so by defending completion it's theorised that the consumer profits. (in my opinion that's a non-seqitor - but that's the principle underlying the EU).
Now you could argue for other models, claiming that the proletariat will be better off - under a strict redistribution model, under an unregulated market, under a monopoly - but don't put EU's cart in front of the horse: it has one principle, a regulated free market.
And I'm saying that not only does the government have a terrible track record, there is no evidence that this actually makes any difference to competition. All it does is show that the government can throw their "weight" around.
Nothing in the historical record of antitrust should make us confident that the court’s dismemberment of one of the most successful companies in history would increase competition.[1]
[1]https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/if-it-aint-broke-dont-bre...
Centralised power generally means a departure from direct democracy, and that's one reason why I'm not a fan of the EU.
For a great view into why a regulated market might just be better than an unregulated one, have read of:
https://www.amazon.com/Gangster-Capitalism-United-Globalizat...
1) They are a quasi monopoly. The word you use to describe searching on the internet is "googling". Most of the phones on this planet run on their OS. So please...don't fool yourself.
2) Who's creating those desires? You think that the desire for millions of useless shit products that drive the global market are created by some neccesity deeply in our DNA? Or maybe by your free will? Or is this just the ad-industry stealing the attention from you and fitting you into a pretty tight frame of the optimal customer while preaching to you: "everybody/your idol loves this, you have to love it too".
Prediction in the age of advertising is just like advertising itself. A convenient lie.
That's either some magical advertising that makes people search for things before they've seen it. Or you're wrong.
And when I google for "an item", like "medium sized dog", for whatever reason that means I already...well, what? Want a dog? Maybe, likely not. Want whatever that particular ad is trying to peddle me with whatever shoddy means and rhetoric, because it might have to do with dogs, or merely claim it does? Nope.
Ok, and? The idea that monopoly is bad - ipso facto - is silly and monopolistic abuse of consumers is largely theoretical. Governments don't like monopolies because they challenge their power, and don't forget nearly every "bad" monopoly was the result of a government license to monopolize. The whole "Trust Busting" trope that underlies the anti-trust act was not because consumers were being hurt, it was a pissing match between the Government and Northern Securities Company [1]. Milton Friedman covered this well [2]
Who's creating those desires?
Companies, friends, acquaintances, media etc... it's not Google.
Or is this just the ad-industry stealing the attention...
Sure, are we debating the existence of an ad-market or Google? Cause I can assure you an ad market will exist irrespective of whatever Google does.
[1]https://books.google.com/books?id=klEeBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA6#v=onep...
What?! Monopolies always abuse their power because they can. I live in a country where we still feel the bad influence of a former monopolist ISP (Telecom/T-Online). THEIR influence on the government hurts the customer and even customers of other ISPs. It even hurts the tax payer who may not even have internet because his money may flow into subsidies for them. For example: they recently started eating up net neutrality in Germany. Because they can.
One of the most misused powers of monopolies is dictating a price. Just like we had a few months ago also in Germany with the biggest breweries. Millions of customers have been cheated.
IT IS ILLEGAL BEHAVIOR. They pay for this. How you can tell something like that "silly" is beyond me.
I would encourage a "follow the money" train of thought when thinking about this.
My question then becomes: if this money (the $2.7bn) did not accrue to the EU, or was not levied at all, do you still think the EU would still pursue this as ferociously as it has, just to protect the consumer?
The websites could have just stopped using tracking cookies.
Google is not a utility, it's not the water company nor the electric company, or even your ISP, it's essentially a website one which you are free to use or not and the price of admission and switching and opportunity costs are nil, same as for all competing websites, so dictating what Google's website can display and declaring it's contents illegal and worthy of billion dollar fines makes zero sense.
One monopoly is no more moral than another simply because the first one has guns and the second doesn't.
But that is not what google does. I just did a search for "samsung galaxy s8". Instead of the first result being a link to a Samsung page I got 3 results that where ads (one of them being for the new oneplus). How does that match the "show what people searched for"? The results where sorted by "how much money did google receive" instead of "what the user intended".
Regardless of what you're seeing though, ads are a necessary part of Google Search; it's how they make their money. IMO it's a little strange to be complaining that Google is showing you ads in your search results.
I'm not complaining about ads and this fine is not about ads. It is about Google favoring Google Shopping links instead of competitors even though Google Shopping was inferior when it started. Google basically pushed their product no matter how shitty it was.
If it were not for Google being a near monopoly in search this would not be a problem, but Google is a monopoly, so special rules apply to them.
Google Shopping links _are_ ads though: https://i.imgur.com/m5rGqLa.png
Compare MS and the bundled Internet Explorer: Yes, it was more convenient for people not to be required to download a browser after installing the OS.
But imagine if MS had been successful, and Internet Explorer had emerged as the only browser: Do you think that would have been in the common interest? (hint: around that time, they tried to get .doc established as the standard, replacing HTML)
That was a non-issue, as OEMs were able (and did often) pre-install any number of software packages on top of Windows. The issue was MS telling them "if you preinstall Netscape Navigator, you won't get any more Windows licenses from us". Among other things that were unequivocally harmful to consumers.
The thing about anti-trust is that being a monopoly is allowed. What's not allowed is using a monopoly position to get a large advantage in another market.
What should or shouldn't come with an OS is not up to bureaucrats to decide.
Going back in time, you can just as well argue that bundling Notepad in Windows is "illegal" or "anticompetitive" or what have you because it might have killed the market for third-party text editors.
Which is great for google, not exactly great for my interests however.
Isn't one of the big refrains here that competition always benefits the consumer?
This situation makes me think of the larger markets: We're wanting the short term benefit (Google prioritizing their results over others) at the expense of the long term benefit (healthy competition in the travel space).
Google is really smart, right? They've done some amazing things with search. Do we believe that Google doesn't know how to display those comparison search results page in a carousel like their own? Or is it that they don't want to?
Think about it for a second. What if Google did that, and they subjected their own comparison search results page to the same generic algorithm that they subjected everyone else's too?
Maybe it's too hard for Google. But they like standards: see AMP. So why not create some standard tags so everyone has a fair chance?
I don't know, it certainly looks like Google was exploiting its market dominance in general internet search to get a leg up in another industry without actually competing. That's not fair.
So is the EU going to fine Apple for not allowing iPhone users to access third-party browsers?
At least Google doesn't force any lock-in with their platform here (the browser or search engine) - you're free to use any search engine you want.
...what?
Google doesn't force any lock-in on their platform, yet the EU fines them. Apple does, but the EU hasn't taken any action.
They are not dominant in the market, but if they were I would hope so.
Not necessarily. I read this as saying that if other players have well marked up content, they should have their listings appear in infoboxes, perhaps alongside Google's. Not that the infoboxes be removed.
See https://commerce.googleblog.com/2012/05/building-better-shop...
Maybe if they tried again they could do better this time; I'm a little skeptical though.
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-nw0uS-CN17o/T8cd822KTBI/AAAAAAAAA...
Also, note that Bing doesn't lock you into their ecosystem in those boxes the way Google does. Take a look at "Uptown Funk":
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=uptown+funk - Links to YouTube and Play Music
https://www.bing.com/search?q=uptown+funk - Places YouTube up top, then links to Groove AND Amazon MP3 (If you search "The Cure Lady Gaga" it also offers iTunes. Apparently it doesn't know that iTunes has Uptown Funk as well. Oops.)
This is a live example of how Google violates antitrust law, but it's competitors do not.
It's really quite simple, if Google's user experience hinges on them abusing their market dominance then they have no business in the EU.
Even if it means we can't have certain "nice things", I am perfectly okay with that.
Companies have power. Companies with market dominance have a disproportionate amount of power. Why should a company be allowed to wield all that power without being held responsible for it? So if you're gonna be a dominant company in the EU, you're going to have to take responsibility and not abuse your power to stifle competition.
It's not like the "before" situation you sketch couldn't have been improved in any other way. It just so happens that this particular way also ("conveniently") stifled competition in shopping sites by abuse of Google's market dominance in Search.
Why is this bad? Because abuse of market dominance doesn't always result in a better user experience or product. And we can't even be sure that was actually the case now, because of this market dominance, no other company got a chance, the only way was Google.
Also, the problem in your "before" situation was Google serving its users search results that were spammed to death with low quality SEO crap. This was Google's problem (sure it's a really hard problem, but it's theirs). That shit could only thrive because of Google's popularity. Any real competition, like normal price comparison sites, were already suffering because of this (or worse, forced to join this dark side).
The thing is, this problem had nothing to do with the actual competition. But Google chose the solution (abuse market dominance) which drove them into obscurity. Eventually SEO-spammers (whose core business was never price comparison sites) found other ways to game and abuse the system.
If Google would've done nothing, people would have stopped using Google for finding price comparison sites (and back then, Google was really very good for many other things) because the SEO spam isn't useful. Then competing price comparison sites would have had a chance, and who knows, maybe Google's actual web-searching user experience (which is terrible today) would have remained better. I mean that's what we lost when Google tried to become the sites it linked to, instead of helping people find them. Not saying this would be the only solution, it's obviously not as profitable as Google has been while abusing their market dominance, maybe they could have found something responsible in between.
Also, we gotta be consistent. If the EU Commission on antitrust could say "we'll allow it this time because we kinda like the end result", THEN you should be scared, really really scared. Arbitrary application of the law is very bad, every time you encounter it, no matter what.
The Commission established that they've been abusing their market dominance since 2011 (or 2008). Market dominance put Google in a special position of responsibility, they are now being held to that.
1. The EC is not asking Google to make their user experience worse.
2. The EC does not have a problem with sponsored search results.
Google's user experience is the generic algorithm that determines what is the most relevant result. Google deliberately did not subject its own comparison shopping service to that algorithm while subjecting competitors' to it. Furthermore, Google took the FIRST result position.
Why would they do this if they have the best user experience and it should come up first anyways?
Contrast with Bing, when I search for "baseball bat": The first 3 results above the fold are organic unpaid SERPs. (Nothing from Bing in the top three spots.) And their shopping ads are displayed to the right of the organic search results.
If Google would've treated these products like ads, then the EC wouldn't have had a problem. But they didn't. And they have a dominant share of the general internet search market.
Google deliberately tried to exploit its market dominance to enter into another market in which it was not competitive.
There's nothing scary about this fine.
If you think those rules and laws have a negative impact, then work to fix them.
The smart play is to skim off the top, maintain some fiction of competition, and horde the loot.
When a company uses a monopoly in one field (web search) to boost their other businesses.
It's the same when Microsoft were convicted in the US of using the desktop OS monopoly to boost their web browser business.
Did your price comparison site at any time seem likely to be able to dominate the entire EU market? (you can find the exact criteria on the EU site)
If no, you got no problem to worry about.
If yes, that's a kind of nice problem to have I think.
> What's next? Having to give equal ranking to Yahoo! search results in their search page?
Why would anything be next? We have this rule, it works well, has worked in the past, what's the incentive to make it worse?
Your Yahoo!Search example doesn't make sense to me. Not in context of this ruling, any way. How would Google abuse their market dominance in order to ... what exactly, because you didn't specify any wrongdoing, just a crazy sanction pulled out of thin air.
It's not the market dominance itself that is illegal. It's just that if you do it, dominate a market to such an extent, you are held to special responsibilities not to abuse that dominance. Which totally makes sense.
From the article:
"""Market dominance is, as such, not illegal under EU antitrust rules. However, dominant companies have a special responsibility not to abuse their powerful market position by restricting competition, either in the market where they are dominant or in separate markets."""
It's just like that famous Spiderman quote.
Also the ruling is not about a particular party (like Yahoo in yours) that got wronged by an illegal abuse of Google's market dominance, it's about all of them, about the responsibility not to actively stifle competition. You can still be better than the competition, Google is obviously allowed to "hurt" Yahoo by providing better search results, that's what it means when they say dominance is as such not illegal under antitrust. It's just that, in some (but not all) cases of market dominance, it comes with additional power by virtue of dominance (not product), that allows a company to stifle competition (not because they're better but because the competition is not dominant), and antitrust law states that companies in such a position have a responsibility not to do this. Yet Google did. I'm not really seeing how Google could do something similar that involves Yahoo in your example.
About your One Box (that's the Google instant result thing yes?) example, if Google were in the theatre business, I'm pretty sure the Commission would investigate that case for antitrust as well. How that ruling would go, will depend on the specifics of that hypothetical situation, and whether it qualifies along the guidelines as stated partially in the article, and fully in EU regulations on antitrust (which you can click to for yourself).
In many ways, they are. They didn't sign up for it, yet here we are..
Nope. It's crazy. You don't go to the most popular restaurant in town and have them tell you to go get desert across the street because the superior food and experience hurt their sales.
Even looking at the commissions fact sheet (Search Engine market share) [0]. 3 of the 4 other companies are billion dollar enterprises. Microsoft decided to make it difficult to switch to Chrome/Google in Windows 10 (no more 1 click). With this consumers are still switching back.
Out of all the bad shit google does, this shouldn't even be on the radar.
For the other end of the story this is an interesting read [1].
[0] - http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-17-1785_en.htm [1] - http://www.foundem.co.uk/Foundem_Google_Timeline.pdf
Which is why they determined Google's market dominance in Search, not shopping sites.
Your analogy should be about the single most popular restaurant guide in town, opening up their own restaurant and then only writing reviews for that.
The quality of Google's in-house shopping business didn't factor into the EU Commission's rulings at all. Which makes a lot of sense because, given Google's market dominance in Search, it is impossible to know if their shopping business is in fact superior or not, because they abused that power (gained from Search, not building a superior shopping business) to stifle any competition.
As the article clearly states, market dominance is not illegal (like your restaurant analogy suggests), irresponsibly abusing the power that comes with it is.
It actually seems to match the definition of public utility perfectly. The infrastructural cost of building another Google is incredibly high and people rely heavily upon it.
You can "just build another google" the same way you can "just build an electricity network" for a large town.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/15/how-a-stre...
That would scale just about as well as your crappy elastic search thing would.
I absolutely cannot decide I want to install some poles to run electricity through a town without permits, insurance, inspections, and a ton of capital. I can't decide I want to build my own power plant and sell energy to my new grid without jumping through a lot of hoops, some of those hoops only a mountain range of cash can solve (compared to the merely large pile you'd need to run a credible regional alternative to google search for some segment of the population).
How exactly would a credible regional alternative to google work and why are there exactly zero of them if it's so easy?
A user of bing's search index with extra features sprinkled on top. It's comparable to one of these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_mobile_v...
They did not build the necessary expensive infrastructure for a search engine, they lease it. This actually kind of proves my point.
A company called Cuil tried to do exactly what you're suggesting. The reason you're probably saying "who?" now kinda proves my point too.
That's the case here, and it was the case when Microsoft got in trouble for bundling IE with Windows.
I'm actually glad to see this ruling. It's nice to know there's at least one place in the world where the government still cares a little bit about not letting giant corporations take advantage of their citizens.
> Google has demoted rival comparison shopping services in its search results: rival comparison shopping services appear in Google's search results on the basis of Google's generic search algorithms. Google has included a number of criteria in these algorithms, as a result of which rival comparison shopping services are demoted. Evidence shows that even the most highly ranked rival service appears on average only on page four of Google's search results, and others appear even further down. Google's own comparison shopping service is not subject to Google's generic search algorithms, including such demotions.
> As a result, Google's comparison shopping service is much more visible to consumers in Google's search results, whilst rival comparison shopping services are much less visible.
Your comment reads like you haven't even read the EC press release. I suggest you do that first.
Are you serious? By this logic Microsoft could do whatever they wanted with Windows. Yes, when you're big enough to absolutely dominate a market you can't just use that to make rules that kick out everyone else.
That's not a significant difference - Google's site renders on your machine too. Google's servers send you computer code (HTML, Javascript) and Microsoft's servers also send you computer code (Windows binaries).
> [Google's site] is free to visit
The use of API calls in Windows is also free. Would you be OK with Windows servicing Chrome and Dropbox several times slower than Microsoft products? There was a huge antitrust case about this in the '90s.
2) Their search algorithm ranks google products at the top of the results.
3) They cannot prove that their products are being held to the same standards as everyone else, because the algorithm they use to rank results is not public.
I think Google could have any two of these, without being in anti-trust domain.
Then, if in future, lets say Google will be the only search engine that is still alive and used by 99% users and Google will choose to get your site/business out of their site/search results (based on what you wrote - it's their website so they can do whatever they want) it will be fine also?
People writing things like this really should read why anti trust laws were introduced in the first place.
Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) and Article 54 of the EEA Agreement prohibit abuse of a dominant position.
Being able to dominate one market enables you possibilities to dominate other markets as well by abusing your dominant position.
Easy: when you have a dominant market position.
It bites everyone, every kind of group where some competition is involved, even smaller companies, and we all agree on that.
However, when Google is touched, we all feel that we don't live anymore in a free world, that communism has won, etc - at least that's the kind of feeling I perceive every time they have to pay for something.
Why the break up of the Bell System [0]. Afterall it's their business, right?
Why was Microsoft forced (back then) to let people choose which browser to install? Same reason.
I don't know if you have ever read the book "Thinking in systems - D. Meadows", there is an interesting chapter about this which explains why such regulations are important.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
Opinions on the decision will sure differ among readers, but I think the decision is in place with the majority of EU citizens' consensus.
Umm, it says so in the article, the googling was unnecessary.
That said, as far as I know (I'll keep an eye on it), I haven't always received an instant check in Chrome when dealing with a captcha.
No, it also works on other browsers. I know because I exclusively use Safari and I encounter this one-click-captcha thing regularly.
The thing is it only works on browsers you use regularly. It looks like they are analysing/tracking the behaviour of your browser (using google ads and other assets embedded in web pages) and determine if your browsing behaviour matches that of a human.
Google owns the server, Google owns the client, Google owns DNS, Google owns domains, Google even owns > 50% of mobile. It's way too much ownership under one roof.
Pretty sweet deal, yeah? 99% of the population gets an easy checkbox, and all the people who care just need to fill out some questions to prove they're not a bot. It's not like you're blocked from using the form.
In what alternate reality ?
Whether or not that number is correct, it's definitely a significant portion of the population doing it.
The worst part is when you need to prove to Google who you are when already logged in to a (non-Google) online store that you have purchased from previously. That is just rediculous and seems to be getting more common. At least those are not impossible, but still. I do not know if Google has anything to do with promoting that use but if they do they should be held responsible for that (as well as the businesses that use such things).
You can't have your cake and eat it too, either you are for privacy and should expect the hassles this create or you want the convenience and have to pay with your privacy for it.
I don't really understand why are you pressing so much on this issue, you have choices with tradeoffs, as most things in life.
You're acting like these are immutable laws of the universe rather than properties of google's design decisions.
I think your point wouldn't encounter as much resistance (or at least different resistance) if you just said something to the effect of "devoply, you're in the X% of users that google tolerates providing a sub-standard experience to, and I don't give a fuck either."
When I tried again with chromium it got instantly verified.
As for the decision, it may seem unfair for Google, but the European commission has to look at the bigger picture: its search dominance is so big that it gives Google an unfair advantage when competing in other business sectors, driving others out of competition even if they have a much better product. That's not good for society in the long run
It now integrates tons of specialized results such as embedded videos and smart answers to direct questions. It will only move further and further away from simple lists of sites as their AI improves.
I fear this fine will deter innovation here as any special results Google adds will be scrutinized heavily. It's also very possible the complex data they need for it's 'smart' results aren't available by integrating with other 3rd party services (at least not initially), which is likely why Google even created these competing services in the first place.
If Google was merely a Yellow Pages style service as it was previously then I'd be more sympathetic to the idea of distorted rankings favouring Google services but that's becoming less and less the typical user experience.
Well, I'm primarily agains the idea of giving a single, non democratically controlled non-international entity, so much power.
To the point where I don't care if Google is forced to stop innovating in being a "one stop shop" for the internet if that means more distributed sources and more distributed (even if lower quality and with fewer resources) innovation.
Sometimes, when it comes to society, it's best to have less technology more uniformly distributed than a single source of highly advanced technology.
Google could partner with other companies to do integration in their search engine for those smart results but then they'd just be giving another company an unfair advantage.
I don't see how you could stop this without crippling the type of answers Google provides. Besides maybe offering open tools they could automously integrate with.
Google pushed for adding metadata so any web developer can add things like star ratings and pricing directly to SERPs. But the adoption has been limited and limited compared to a full custom integration with a web service they control.
But regardless Google is a monopoly that we can't really do much about. Plenty of people have tried to compete and failed so there will be some consequences of that.
Considering how important the tool is to the world I'm quite the opposite. I'd rather let Google have a few specialized subsites which they can dominate a few markets with ease, in exchange for not severely limiting the potential of their technology - a technology we are all stuck using for the foreseeable future.
Maybe or maybe not, but fining seems like a step in the right direction.
>I don't see how you could stop this without crippling the type of answers Google provides.
As I wrote above, I'm all for crippling them if that's what it takes. But turning them into some kind of public infrastructure is another way.
The fine is focused on Google Shopping. I'd say the biggest competitors are Amazon and eBay.
While I'm unsure if the EU can effectively do something about Google as a search engine monopoly, I'm pretty sure Google can be beaten in the e-commerce sector.
Step by step, down the giants. Claiming the resolution of the matter in a single step is unrealistic.
My concern is that even one step like the fine here will significantly chill their innovation with their search service in every category. As they will see adding any special advanced listings in search results as a big risk of being fined.
We're stuck with this giant so I'm not sure why you want to down it when there won't be comparable alternatives popping up in it's place.
This isn't just Google shopping being pushed further down the results ranking but how the shopping subsite is deeply integrated into the search results.
Which is why I said the proposed solution is regressing search engines back to simple directories which harms customers for some neglible gain for other small companies.
Exploiting your existing user base, in order to get traction for your next service, that in your opinion gives an added value, is not what I’d call innovation. If your new product or service is really innovative, then you don’t need this kind of tricks to get traction, users will come to you (because of the added value your new service gives to them).
The early Google was innovative, and won over the other search engines because of that.
If you are not able to get traction without this, then what you call innovation is not innovative, and you’re overestimating your product. For me (and apparently for the eu commission too), the rest is simple propaganda. Some find comfortable to believe it, probably because it’s profitable for them.
I don’t know what is the climate inside Google, but if this is able to significantly chill their “innovation”, then I think that they’re simply waiting for the next big thing in tech.
And it really sucks at web search today, compared to before (~10-15 years ago).
This is personal opinion of course but your argument depends on all this innovation always being an improvement to society. But Google innovates to improve its profits, which sometimes aligns with public interest, and sometimes not.
If it doesn't necessarily improve things for society, why would a company have a right to innovate despite everything else? Especially if you have to weigh it against the abuse of market dominance power to stifle competition (also deterring innovation, btw).
Because of that dominance, it deserves, no, requires scrutiny much, much more than not being deterred innovation. The latter is a "nice thing", the former is a necessity. Sorry but if you're that big, that dominant, of course we're going to scrutinize your responsibilities. If that's going to mean less fancy features, sad but so be it, the alternative is letting Google abuse all that power unchecked!
edit: I think coldtea said it better (in this same subthread) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14645033
I'm more interested in seeing how much of her work will actually hold up in court. Better to focus on 10 good cases, than spread yourself thin on 30 and lose 80% of them. I guess she'll be long gone by then. The joys of politics.
This will kill two birds with one stone--firstly it will correct the economic damage Google has caused by abusing their monopoly position. Secondly it will make it harder for them to maintain and abuse their monopoly in the future.
The software industry today is filled with companies who seek to establish a monopoly so that they can extract monopoly rents. This behavior almost always skirts the boundaries of legality, and it's getting worse. Companies are being created with the explicit business model of throwing huge sums of money at illegal activity in order to establish market dominance--see Uber.
Monopolies are not good for markets and this belief is already reflected in our antitrust laws. We need to give those laws some teeth and come up with creative solutions that don't just punish bad behavior, but also encourage competition.
Even better: Make Google pay them directly. I don't know if that is possible on European level, but here in Germany, fines are often paid directly from the criminal to the non-profit, which is usually chosen in a round-robin-like fashion from the local non-profits in the criminal's (or court's) region.
Random, maybe silly idea. Maybe they could start providing two search streams. One would just be a simpler website search while the other would be a more involved google services search as well as a general website search. This way search users could explicitly say that they want to see direct integrated results from the whole Google ecosystem.
This seems to be the whole point of the fine. Currently Google's services just so damned conveniently integrated that no one uses competitors' services, even if they are better.
The thing is, though, I am totally with you here. I don't want to use one of the other services for maps, or flights, or these snippets for information. They are just search results for me. The integration is more important for me than ... better filtering, or whatnot. I can always go to one of those sites, but there really is no need, And frankly, it would really, really suck if I had to now.
Edit: From the text:
> Google has to apply the same processes and methods to position and display rival comparison shopping services in Google's search results pages as it gives to its own comparison shopping service.
What does that even mean? Right now Google has a link for Maps, Images, Shopping, Videos, ... in the top bar. Do they need to change it to Maps, Images, Shooping (Google), Shopping (Idealo), Shopping (yet another service), ...? Embedding results would not work. Have a link called Shopping that does not list results, but points to more shopping sites, maybe with the search term already preappended? Meh...
Also, I like to draw a line between monopolies imposed by force (eg taxi offering horrible services making competitors illegal through licensing) and those used by people voluntarily because they enjoy the services. Google is used voluntarily, because people enjoy it, like Microsoft during the 90's. As I read elsewhere, Microsoft lost relevance to tech because OSS took servers, web took applications and mobile took the client. Antitrust didn't do much.
With Google, the only thing the EU is doing right now is forcing Google to offer a lower quality service. What should make Google less useful should be innovators making them less relevant and ubiquitous like the web, OSS and mobile did to Microsoft. iOS and Siri already made Google Search much less relevant on mobile, I'm sure there will be more in the future. Monopolies used voluntarily usually don't last long unless they keep innovating, but if they do keep innovating then forcing them to offer lower quality services seems really bad and it doesn't motivate other people to out-innovate them if the government will just help make Google worse, we all lose. Innovation should be bottom up, not top down.
1. They may benefit more from better services. 2. As far as I know Google operates a lot of services which are not profitable by themselfs.
> Also, I like to draw a line between monopolies imposed by force (eg taxi offering horrible services making competitors illegal through licensing) and those used by people voluntarily because they enjoy the services. Google is used voluntarily, because people enjoy it, like Microsoft during the 90's.
Today a lot of people don't know of anything else. The search might even be used voluntarily by many but it's a major information gateway because of its dominance (it's more or less infrastructure). If this is used to cross market other services and even to make competitors harder to find it's a form of mild force. It's a bit like when (in the old days) the major phone company is founding a taxi service and offers you a taxi before calls to competitors are routed through and placing their own service way more prominent inside the phone book.
> iOS and Siri already made Google Search much less relevant on mobile, I'm sure there will be more in the future.
Maybe inside the relatively small Apple world. The mass uses Android where Google makes sure its services stay at the top of everything by forcing all or nothing contracts onto manufactures. They managed to make sure nothing is not an option for most.
> As I read elsewhere, Microsoft lost relevance to tech because OSS took servers, web took applications and mobile took the client.
Microsoft was never that dominant in the server space, Linux and co. mostly replaced the commercial unix offerings. They tried to use their client dominance to push their server OS forward by making it hard for competitors to be compatible, did not work out entirely (and they also got fined by the EU for that later). Web had to be taken from them first, this worked mostly because they got far too lazy with IE (and later a bit of help from, again the EU).
> Antitrust didn't do much.
Antitrust could do more but it is often too slow for the fast world of IT and it is often too weak.
> Monopolies used voluntarily usually don't last long unless they keep innovating,
Microsoft was dominant on the client for over a decade and still is in a lot of areas. It took a long time and a shift to new device categories to partly break that monopoly. And finally what happened is only a shift to a new dominant player called Google.
> unless they keep innovating, but if they do keep innovating then forcing them to offer lower quality services seems really bad and it doesn't motivate other people to out-innovate them if the government will just help make Google worse, we all lose. Innovation should be bottom up, not top down.
They have to innovate a lot less overall. Sure if they do absolutely nothing somebody may beat them regardless but if they do only as much as necessary to keep the friction high enough even innovative competitors are out of luck. Only exceptionally big innovations which are so different to even overwhelm the monopolist have a chance.
So what? Billion dollar companies subsidizing tech for the masses (even selfishly) is not a bad thing. That's one of the best thing about capitalism.
> It's a bit like when (in the old days) the major phone company
No, it's not like that, phone companies were granted monopolies by governments enforced by the law and force of the state. Google is not enforced by the use of government force or law, it's just pleasant to use and so people use it willingly, huge difference.
> this worked mostly because they got far too lazy with IE
You're proving my points, monopolies that are used willingly and not enforced by the government are forced to innovate to survive, if they don't people will check alternatives.
> Microsoft was dominant on the client for over a decade and still is in a lot of areas. It took a long time and a shift to new device categories to partly break that monopoly. And finally what happened is only a shift to a new dominant player called Google.
So a company had a great technology and marketshare that lasted ~15 years only, how is that something to worry about exactly? They had the best tech and grabbed the market until they didn't have the best tech. What's wrong exactly here? Google has the best Search right now and most of the market, if their tech starts lagging, they will lose their marketshare. Again, not seeing the issue here.
> Only exceptionally big innovations which are so different to even overwhelm the monopolist have a chance.
Again, that's exactly my point, trying to bring down monopolies by force only discourages/postpones exceptionally big innovations from happening. Also, Google itself was a huge innovation by itself, why is it a bad thing that only another huge innovation could beat them?
For that matter, Apple only exists today because of Microsoft’s investment, which was in part done only to keep their competitor alive so that they could claim not to have a complete monopoly.
Apple and Google’s products certainly were better, but they would have been crushed by anti-competitive practices if Microsoft had not already lost their antitrust case.
What kind of links they put up is googles decision. If they made a link "Shopping" next to "Maps" and "Images" everything would be fine.
The problem is search results. Consumers expect all results to be shown fairly, by not doing so Google violated it's position.
This is not about linking to products. It's about deceiving the customer.
A "Shopping" link next to "Maps" and "Images" is probably OK, but it's also completely useless. I'd be surprised if more than a fraction of people doing comparison shopping actually clicked that link.
Intentionally pushing down results of competitors via algorithmic criteria is obviously bad, but say they stopped doing that. What about the inline shopping box at the top of search results? That's still putting their own service in a prominent position. Probably bad...
... but then this concern immediately applies to translations, song lyrics, unit conversions, maps, shopping hours, etc. The kind of results that as a user I want to see. Will that be disallowed to? If so, this will make Google Search a significantly worse product.
The point is not that their service was in prominent position, but it was done so that it appeared as natural result of the search.
It's somewhat like doing a search in a search engine and being shown paid results on top, without any indication that they are paid.
From the article the issue is not that Google services appear in the search results, rather it is that they artificially make their own results appear first without regards to normal search algorithms.
"Google has abused this market dominance by giving its own comparison shopping service an illegal advantage. It gave prominent placement in its search results only to its own comparison shopping service, whilst demoting rival services."
ow are they going to fix this now? Show five results, one of which is from Google, four from competitors? Which competitors? How bad can the results be, as long as they are returned by Google's request to their service? Can I exclude competitors? I don't want my data to go to Idealo, for example, I only have an account with Google.
I fear this is just opening a can of worms, becasue ultimately I am searching for something, go to a search engine for this, and want results. If I wanted results from a different search engine, I would have used that one. Now I get mixed results that I did not want to see. Is it really so bad that Google (the search engine) "understands" what I was probably really searching for and offers a specific type of search results - links to shops where I can buy SearchedProduct(tm)?
Here's the thing: they're not really better, because they're not integrated. Google tools tend to suck in many different ways, but their integration usually more than makes up for it.
> The thing is, though, I am totally with you here. I don't want to use one of the other services for maps, or flights, or these snippets for information. They are just search results for me. The integration is more important for me than ... better filtering, or whatnot. I can always go to one of those sites, but there really is no need, And frankly, it would really, really suck if I had to now.
I feel the same way. I described this point further yesterday in AMP thread:
I am definitely not a Google fanboy; I don’t like Android and I’m not big into their cloud apps, but when it comes to search, they are the best. EU companies could try and compete but they haven’t. Has any EU company tried to build a high quality search experience? If they aren’t succeeding then why?
The problem in France, as I see it is government. As an example, DailyMotion rivaled YouTube for a short time, as soon as DailyMotion was about to be acquired for a huge sum by Yahoo, the French government blocked the sale because Yahoo wasn’t French. That immediately sent a signal that if you put a lot of VC/investment into a French company, your exits were subject to the whims of a protectionist government bureaucracy, which makes investing in French companies relatively more risky than investing in American companies in terms of ROI.
Did the DailyMotion deal contribute to the current Google dominance? I think it definitely had a chilling effect on high growth unicorn chasing in the EU which means the “French Google” hasn’t been born because it is much much harder to access funding than a similarly positioned company in the US. I am not saying the French startup scene is dead or bad, but the ultra-high level moonshots that are fairly common in the US are extremely rare in France because of the bureaucratic environment. Blah Blah Car raises $200 million against a $1.6b valuation, but that is pretty much an outlier and likely the result of an investor play against Uber’s French difficulties.
My point: if the EU wants to prevent monopoly situations, member states ought to be doing more to get out of the way of innovation. They can do that by lowering taxes. Even if you have a winning investment in France, an investor gets butchered in capital gains taxes thus requiring a 10x investment to actually be a 25x investment to be worth it. With such a low hit rate for VCs in general what incentive do they have to kneecap themselves by investing in places like France?
Also, I didn't know DailyMotion was French :) Thanks for that bit of knowledge :)
Of all Google's services I don't care about:
- Google Shopping, I never saw a reason to use it and I never did, I prefer to use local shops or Amazon
- Google Maps, I actually prefer Open Street Maps. The amount of detail on OSM is staggering and in many ways, I think the data is much more complete than Google Maps
- Google reviews about restaurants and businesses, I prefer to use TripAdvisor
- Google Books, I prefer using Amazon and Kobo Store
- Google Flights, I was never able to get anything useful out of this service. I usually use Momondo
As you can see, the only thing that is interesting to me about Google is the search engine and yet, it keeps throwing to my face all these services I don't use and that I don't care about.
Worse, it takes the spotlight from the services I actually use. So yes, this is Microsoft all over again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
This could work through cookies that the browser always makes available to certain or all sites that indicate preferences of the user.
Google should be forced to allow you to set your
preferences through your browser, i.e. not forcing
you to login ...
I use Google Shopping for price comparisons across mutliple retailers. (The service was originally named Froogle.) I originally used Pricewatch.com but switched to Froogle/GoogleShopping because it had better results.
Unfortunately, the local shops and Amazon don't offer the same breadth of comparisons. E.g. if I want to buy a new harddrive, Google Shopping tells me whether the lowest price is at Newegg, BHPhoto, or somewhere else.[1]
If there is a superior substitute to Google Shopping, I'd love to know about it.
[1] example: https://www.google.com/shopping/product/3954751729784172026?...
Besides, if you like to use Google Shopping, no one is stopping you.
I have no irrational loyalty to Google Shopping. I was genuinely asking for better price comparison alternatives. Not sure what prompted your petty sniping.
What's the superior European price comparison website you're using that should be ahead of Google Shopping results?
At some point they moved towards Google Checkout (Google Merchant/Wallet?) verification and the number of stores you could actually find with it dropped dramatically.
Now it's just high street retailers, a handful of the bigger online places and eBay. Not only is it not as useful, it's killed off the sites that came before it as they tried to adapt and survive.
So even if you don't believe Google, there's at least some evidence that a lot of people actually do like services showing up.
Yes, and this is exactly what the decision entails, these services should be ranked on their own merit. Google shouldn't be allowed to artificially prioritize their services on searches but let them compete with others.
"It [Google] gave prominent placement in its search results only to its own comparison shopping service, whilst demoting rival services."
While google's tight integration lead to a positive experience for you, it lead to a very poor experience for myself or others who want to use something not google. I'm not asking for the EUC to fine google, I'm asking for choice.
The OP may have been using the Google search results which directly rendered a Google Maps instead of a address link. Not 100% sure either.
Clear down the default intent then
If I buy all my tech at the Apple Store, am I still entitled to a choice among various manufacturers?
I have a similar problem with Google Maps. I don't want it tracking my location history to my Google Account (integration I never asked for), but when I disable this it even refuses to remember my search history for addresses and such (no reason that needs cloud storage except Google wanting to get their hands on this info). Therefore I most often use Open Streetmaps with Maps.me. Which has other advantages too, so it's not all bad.
But honestly, I don't know anyone that is happy with the Google Products service in Germany. They don't even show links to Amazon here, although they often have the best total price (because of free shipping). I even know a lot of people that go directly to Amazon or a price comparison site because the results presented by Google are so crappy.
As results might be different based on country, region and cookie, here is a screenshot comparing idealo (a large price comparison site) with Google Product search (I just picked this specific product randomly): http://imgur.com/a/MByay
But it happened to be part of MS strategy to sideline other browsers, and gain enough power to become the de-facto standard. We got lucky and avoided that, but doing only what's most convenient at any given point in time can be harmful over the longer term. After all, Microsoft at that time tried to established their (patent-covered, binary-blob) .doc as the format for the web, instead of the open HTML.
What do they want to force Google to do now, prohibit being able to advertise on their own platform? give their competitors priority placement for free? How many rival comparison services do they need to show now? There could be hundreds popping up to take advantage of the forced exposure with scam and ad-ridden pages. Does Google have to show them all? Who decides? Will this ruling extend to all other relevant content Google shows around Search results?
Guess we'll have to see, but this ruling could force Google to provide a degraded Customer experience which I guess is one way to make their Services less appealing and allow competition to catch up.
By following the rules & regulations set out, which Google will have been fully aware of. This is explained in the link and should not have required calling it "ridiculous". I also disagree it wasn't previously known to be illegal unless you can show something has been applied retroactively (so a law created in 2008 or later).
> The Commission's fine of €2 424 495 000 takes account of the duration and gravity of the infringement. In accordance with the Commission's 2006 Guidelines on fines (see press release and MEMO), the fine has been calculated on the basis of the value of Google's revenue from its comparison shopping service in the 13 EEA countries concerned.
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-06-857_en.htm?locale...
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-06-256_en.htm?loca...
http://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/legislation/fines....
> What do they want to force Google to do now
> The Commission Decision requires Google to stop its illegal conduct within 90 days of the Decision and refrain from any measure that has the same or an equivalent object or effect. In particular, the Decision orders Google to comply with the simple principle of giving equal treatment to rival comparison shopping services and its own service:
> Google has to apply the same processes and methods to position and display rival comparison shopping services in Google's search results pages as it gives to its own comparison shopping service.
Doesn't mean they have to show terrible shopping pages, they just have to compete with them on an even footing rather than pushing every other comparison site back to almost nowhere in the results.
There was no previous ruling that indicated that displaying their own relevant content on their own Search pages was illegal. It's absurd to think displaying relevant content in the context of what the User is searching for is illegal, or that they should've been investing resources in helping their competitors get more exposure.
These shackles on User Experience are going to give Amazon and Bing an advantage who aren't limited in their ability to provide integrated services or forced competitor placement.
> Doesn't mean they have to show terrible shopping pages, they just have to compete with them on an even footing rather than pushing every other comparison site back to almost nowhere in the results.
Are they going to be able to charge for prominent placement or do competitors get it for free? If there was an Auction Google could just outbid everyone since they're going to keep the bulk of the revenue, which they're unlikely going to be allowed to do, so if they're not forced to give prominent placement for free, they're going to have to charge an amount they wont be able to bid for themselves.
Previous anti-trust rulings seem pretty similar to me. If microsoft gets into trouble for making IE a default browser or bundling windows media player, I'm really not surprised with the way this went.
> It's absurd to think displaying relevant content in the context of what the User is searching for is illegal
It's not absurd to think that using your dominance in a market to heavily push people towards your own other services is illegal.
The Commission also note that it's not just the relevance of the link, but the position that makes a big difference.
> b) Furthermore, the effects cannot just be explained by the fact that the first result is more relevant because evidence also shows that moving the first result to the third rank leads to a reduction in the number of clicks by about 50%.
Since the introduction, it massively increased click-throughs to their already available service, with a corresponding huge decrease to competitors.
Was their own service good?
> Contemporary evidence from Google shows that the company was aware that Froogle's market performance was relatively poor (one internal document from 2006 stated "Froogle simply doesn't work").
So to be clear the problem is that they had a pretty naff service, which when treated similarly to other players lost out. They then promoted it far above other results, resulting in a huge shift towards them and away from their competitors. They did not compete by making the service better, but by using their huge dominance in one market to step into another and significantly harm the other players.
What other Website do you know has been penalized for showing their own content and are being forced to give their competitors prominence? Microsoft had a 95%+ Monopoly on Desktop Operating Systems and wouldn't allow you to remove IE, anyone can easily go to amazon.com, bing.com, ebay.com or visit any other website to do their shopping if they prefer to.
In which case, quite possibly, if
* amazon can be argued to have a very large position, with the vast majority of searches going through it
* it can be shown that people tend to click almost exclusively on the first or first few links
* they are treating their own, different, service more favourably than competitors (and remember when in the context of google, it's how people would find the competitors in the first place)
* you can see them having hugely increased sales for their own product after the introduction, and massively decreased sales for other people
But then my understanding of the regulations comes largely from the links here.
Fundamentally though, if you're big enough to be concerned about this you should be able to afford the legal teams to figure this out or approach the commission to discuss what is and is not within the regulations.
I also just searched for "aaa batteries" and the first hit, after the AmazonBasics ad, were AmazonBasics batteries.
I'm not saying either of these are anti-competitive. I understand that more goes into it than just that. Just offering these little facts in case anyone else is curious.
(I do think that with both Amazon's increasing dominance and seemingly increasing aggressiveness, they're heading for legal issues).
(1) https://www.recode.net/2016/5/31/11826394/amazon-apple-tv-go...
Then they would investigate if they abuse this dominance to stifle competition. Which I think your batteries example would qualify for. They'd probably look a bit further though because I dunno, if it's just batteries :-p So they'd gather more evidence and if they find enough, they too will get an antitrust case.
Just that, market dominance in itself is not illegal, so if Amazon, unlike Google (knowingly!!) did, uses that dominance responsibly, no problem.
What I got from the article, the investigation has been very reasonable and it's beyond doubt that Google went way over the line.
People may question whether this EU regulation is right (but I believe it is), but from the looks of it, at least it's fair: With great market dominance comes great responsibility.
Except this has created quite the slippery slope. What's stopping the EU from deciding it's unfair for a search engine to have it's own maps served prominently when searching an address? What's stopping the EU from deciding it's unfair for Google to provide reverse image search through it's webtool (you used to have to go to tineye if you wanted that)?
You can pretty much apply this ruling to every Google product that is not their basic, text, search engine. It seems like Google is on the edge of simply being classified a utility in the EU.
Are the rivals going to be required to show google results now or is this really not about choice but about crippling google or is it about extracting an easy multi-billion dollar payday?
When I go to the SNCF (French rail) website, are they showing me flight and bus options or only their train results?
Nobody is forcing anyone to visit google. It’s a website. Perhaps if the EU really cared, they’d ask themselves why Europe hasn’t produced a credible Google rival.
That settlement money ought to go directly to funding EU startups. Instead it will likely make its way into CAP agricultural subsidies. The Common Agricultural Policy is about 35% of the entire EU budget despite supporting an industry that that is just 1.6% of EU GDP. It’s clear that the EU prioritizes some industries over others and then they wring their hands when American tech becomes ubiquitous.
> Google has demoted rival comparison shopping services in its search results: rival comparison shopping services appear in Google's search results on the basis of Google's generic search algorithms. Google has included a number of criteria in these algorithms, as a result of which rival comparison shopping services are demoted. Evidence shows that even the most highly ranked rival service appears on average only on page four of Google's search results, and others appear even further down. Google's own comparison shopping service is not subject to Google's generic search algorithms, including such demotions.
There is nothing wrong with Google's integration. The complaint is that Google unfairly promotes its own services at the expense of rivals. When I search for something, I expect the search results displayed to be relevant and fair. I have no problem with Google having that sponsored Google Shopping ad, but demoting other highly relevant results to the fourth page is highly anti-competitive and downright unfair. How many times in the last week have you actually flipped through 4 pages of Google Search results?
They were really not.
For every search you assume you will be given the more popular matches, what they were doing was purposefully bypassing their own algorithm to their advantage, giving doctored results.
There wouldn't have been any problem if they promoted their service making it clear it was not part of the search results.
EDIT: For a counterexample, google "flights price compare".
You will be shown a small form at the top from which you can use their own service.
It is clearly separated from the search results, which show the actual most popular websites for flight comparison.
Where did you get this from?
Google has demoted rival comparison shopping services in its search results: rival comparison shopping services appear in Google's search results on the basis of Google's generic search algorithms. Google has included a number of criteria in these algorithms, as a result of which rival comparison shopping services are demoted. Evidence shows that even the most highly ranked rival service appears on average only on page four of Google's search results, and others appear even further down. Google's own comparison shopping service is not subject to Google's generic search algorithms, including such demotions."
> Google has included a number of criteria in these algorithms, as a result of which rival comparison shopping services are demoted.
Sounds like a jump to conclude they were doctoring results from "they modify their ranking algorithms".
" Evidence shows that even the most highly ranked rival service appears on average only on page four of Google's search results, and others appear even further down. Google's own comparison shopping service is not subject to Google's generic search algorithms, including such demotions."
While it may be the case that today, Google likes to pile all these things into one integrated product (the user benefit of this being really debatable, even if you personally like it), their market dominance was initially acquired from their web search.
If they had historically always been demoting other shopping sites in favour of their own, they would probably not have gotten this dominant at all. One of the features that set Google apart from the other big search engines in its early days was in fact very similar: Other engines would sell rankings and other tricks often favouring profit over relevance. Google didn't do this, partially out of "principle" (which is apparently lost now), partially because their pagerank algorithm was so superior in ranking for relevance that they didn't need to. If they had only returned results for their own shopping business, it wouldn't have gained nearly as much support and wouldn't have been as successful.
But because of this established market dominance, they can get away with it today, because everything is integrated, people just google stuff, even if shopping results are heavily skewed towards their own. And not only does this obscure competition, the competition that does appear far down really sucks, and now you have people arguing that Google Shopping is actually in fact better. Google's web search has deteriorated in quality quite a bit, especially for queries related to "integrated Google products", which makes sense because why bother sorting out a web filled with spam for the good bits (like they used to work very hard at) if you can just push your own product instead?
Finally, regardless of whether Google likes to integrate and pile everything into one heap, Online Shopping and Web Search are different markets.
That's the whole point of this antitrust, just because different businesses in different markets can be grouped under one huge company, doesn't mean it can abuse its market dominance in one market to stifle competition in another.
They have a dominant position in many markets.
What actually happened was that Google removed the need to compete with anyone, by always listing its own other businesses up-front in search results. Since Google has the dominant position in the search market, this guarantees a steady stream of customers to the other businesses, even if they're not as good as other companies' products/services, and means they don't face competitive pressure. Without competitive pressure, quality doesn't get driven up and prices don't get driven down.
Since we want competitive markets to drive quality up and prices down, we have laws which don't allow a company that dominates one type of product/service to use that as a way to achieve dominance in other products/services by avoiding the need to compete.
Yes, apparently they do show bus results. Both from their own bus company and at least one seemingly unrelated one. I know it is similar in Sweden with SJ, which shows trains and buses from other companies.
> Nobody is forcing anyone to visit google. It’s a website. Perhaps if the EU really cared, they’d ask themselves why Europe hasn’t produced a credible Google rival.
Isn't that essentially what they are doing? It might be to late to compete on web search. That doesn't mean Google should have an unfair advantage in other search like price comparison.
> That settlement money ought to go directly to funding EU startups.
Most EU startups will be happy if they just have a chance to compete "pound for pound". US companies have been enjoying single digit VAT and corporate income tax for years. Which is both the result of EU laws and the US leaving their own "loopholes" open to make their companies more competitive.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tax-checkthebox-insigh...
Google's flagship product is the Google search engine,
which provides search results to consumers,
who pay for the service with their data.
Consumers "pay" for Google's services by giving ads attention so the ads have value and Google can sell them.
All the data harvesting is a means to a end: to make the ads more appealing so you'll click. Google don't profit from the data directly; in fact all the data harvesting and processing is a significant cost factor. There are certainly other businesses that resell data and profit directly from data harvesting, but AFAIK, Google is not really one of them.
It's a bit like saying that you pay a café by letting them observe you while you sit in their chairs. A basic misunderstanding of what's actually going on.
The real value of advertising is in showing the right advertisement at the right time at the right person.
Personal data is to advertisement what sugar is to candy.
Your analogy with the café is very misguided and not related at all with the situation.
Consider that Google actually became super profitable well before all the detailed tracking started. You grossly underestimate the synergy of "people searching for products" and "displaying ads". Everything else is an optimization.
You're describing Facebook... which is no where near as profitable as Google, in spite of much more invasive tracking.
If you never click an ad and use an adblocker so you never even see them, your traffic and your data just cost Google money. They may be able to extract some small amount of value by observing your behaviour and using those insights to improve their products, but they don't make any money until someone pays for an ad.
I agree the café analogy isn't perfect. I was just pointing out that outsiders who don't understand what's going on may fundamentally misunderstand the transaction. You can still provide value to the café by sitting in their chairs if you liven up the place and give them feedback on how to make the place nicer.
But if customers never buy anything, the café goes broke. And people stop interacting with ads on Google, Google does too.
Even if you don't use the ads or if simply ignore them, you still represent a group of interests that can be used to feed and train the machine.
Google learns through the searches you make and through the videos you watch and your behaviour will be used to improve the accuracy of ads shown to other people. That's your payment for using Google's services.
The only reason people stop interacting with ads it's because ads don't bring any real value, And any data that Google might collect brings up that value a lot.
I think you underestimate a lot of the number of people unaware of Google's presence and influence when it comes to advertisement. This number is much bigger than the number of people who install adblock on their browser.
I don't think it's a stretch to assert that users that engage with and click on ads are much more valuable to Google than users that don't.
Whether the users that do neither contribute positively or negatively to the bottom line is an interesting question. I suspect they're a net negative, but obviously you disagree.
Google themselves probably know the answer, but I doubt they're telling...
Aside: a supporting data-point for my gut feeling here is that AdSense has always contributed much, much less to Google's revenue than AdWords does. The difference between the two gives a clear indication of how capturing user intent (searching for products) completely dominates how valuable (=effective) the ads are, and is much more important than all the other tracking combined. Google could probably turn off all the tracking and still make tons of money. Some numbers are here: http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/020515/busine...
Advertisers quite literally pay for clicks. That was part of how Google disrupted the market back in the day; most other advertising networks were selling "impressions", but Google was so confident in the relevance of their ads that you got impressions for free and only paid when a customer actually clicked on it.
The click is worth paying for, because it is a signal that the user has seen the ad, thought about the ad, and is interested in the ad. Advertising gold.
Obviously Google have many products (they bought Doubleclick an "impressions" company), and there are analytics value-ads and all sorts of things. But the core of their business is still pay-per-click advertising.
Your idea that advertisers are buying raw data is a misunderstanding.
Google sells targeted advertising, not clicks. Nobody pays for clicks. I do not think advertisers are buying raw data. I think they are buying advertising which is targeted based on that raw data.
In pay-for-click, advertisers are paying for advertising which is effective. The click is how that is measured.
There are other ways to measure effectiveness, but measuring clicks is simple and reliable. No matter how you do it, advertisers ultimately want to pay for ads that work and lead to sales.
Everything else is a means to an end, targeting in particular. Ineffective advertising is a worthless waste of money, no matter how well targeted it is. Untargeted advertising which leads to sales on the other hand, is very valuable.
So sure, advertisers will prefer targeted advertising. But that's because they expect it will work better than the alternative. What matters to them is whether it works, not how.
To the general public the how is critical though. If there was less tracking and spying and data harvesting we'd all be better off. So it's very important to squash the misunderstanding that tracking and targeting itself has intrinsic value for anyone. For society (and for the ad networks), tracking has a significant cost and is in many ways a significant liability. For advertisers it's a tool in their toolbox, and if we could replace it with a more benign one, that'd be good for everyone.
> The German Minister for Interior, Thomas de Maizière, has voiced many of the concerns of Member States over the concept of “private ownership of data” and the risk this might entail for consumer privacy. Minister de Maiziere cautions, “If I can sell ‘my’ data, there is a danger of privacy being up for sale. Then at some point, only the wealthy will be able to afford to opt out, while the economically weaker are effectively forced to put ‘their’ data up for sale”. The DCD proposal also conflicts with the rights and remedies detailed in the UK’s Consumer Rights Act, which become invalidated when consumers exchange personal data in return for access to digital content. While the UK government has stated that it has “no fundamental objection” to applying these rights to situations where consumers exchange personal data for access to ‘free’ digital content, it has also said these rights could “unduly inhibit” that “very innovative business model”. Most recently, Giovanni Buttarelli (EDPS) published an Opinion on the Commission’s proposal, warning that “individuals should not be required to disclose personal data in ‘payment’ for an online service”.
https://cdt.org/blog/ec-proposal-to-pay-with-personal-data-c...
One man's populism is another man's social and economic progress.
It's mostly just fluff, but they do make a good point about the role of Amazon and eBay in product searches. I remember one of the early criticisms of the EU in this case being that they defined the "market" to exclude Amazon and eBay. Anyone know what the EUs reasoning for that is?
> When you shop online, you want to find the products you’re looking for quickly and easily. And advertisers want to promote those same products. That's why Google shows shopping ads, connecting our users with thousands of advertisers, large and small, in ways that are useful for both.
The problem is that when you are shopping for something, you don't want advertisers to be influencing what you see in search results. You generally want the best match to your search, not the product with the biggest advertisement budget behind it.
By upranking others, Google is benefiting themselves, and doing the consumer a disservice. This is what they should be fined for.
But they have a point about Amazon and others doing basically similar things.
So they should remove advertising from google search results altogether?
Like saying TV networks shouldn't put ads/product-placements in their shows because their viewers are only interested in the shows/content.
I like it and hope that Google will stop promoting their services without listing alternatives for lots of things that they promote on the search page (Google Maps, Android, Chrome, Youtube, ...). See 'other cases' in the document that could be next potential steps (ads, Android)
I want google maps, youtube, shopping links, and largely view the search as a portal to the google platform. Removing this is removing a feature customers and the company wants, because other companies want to compete on individual products that may or may not be better while google is providing a platform with products you want integrated to simplify your life.
I'll take simplicity, trust and reliability over a dozen disconnected services from different companies that I don't know what their motives are. I know googles motives, and as a user of their platform otherwise this service is exactly what I want.
Ultimately my argument is if another company came along and did the exact same thing from the start (integrated platform with search etc...) no one would have an issue. the "Issue" is apparently google's existing search dominance. This is why i think it should be opt-in for users, and by default off. I don't think google is wrong for offering the service to users who want it, competitors have to provide a benefit or product that is so clearly better it offsets the benefits of a more integrated platform. That's the market/competition, not the EU's role.
The preferred solution of the EU would be that there would be a standardized API between search engines and map providers, shopping providers, etc, and you could simply choose which map provider you'd want, and that'd be shown in every search engine.
This is still being discussed, of course, as no solution has been found yet, but in general the idea is based on Android's Intent system, where this concept works quite well.
How would Google differentiate between a search and an address without having the Maps product deeply integrated ? Sure they could identify the address and then render the map using say Apple Maps. But what if Apple Maps didn't understand the address or if their API implementation didn't match up.
Seems like it would very much hurt the overall experience.
Microsoft had a dominant position in operating systems. Then they developed a web browser, and rather than compete against other web browsers, simply bundled it into the operating system. This meant they got an instant dominant position in web browsers. But they didn't get it by being better than other web browsers, they got it by being just good enough that people wouldn't bother going to the effort of evaluating other options, since their browser came with the operating system. This effectively ended the competitive market for web browsers.
Google has a dominant position in search. Then they developed a lot of other products and services, and rather than compete against other companies offering those products/services, they simply pushed their own versions to the top of search-result pages. This meant they could get an instant dominant position in the other markets. But not by being better than competitors; they could get it by being just good enough that people wouldn't bother going to the effort of tracking down other options, since Google's version was right there in front of them already. This could effectively end the competitive market for many types of products and services.
Any time a company uses a dominant position in one market to subvert or outright end competition in another market, that's bad. And in many places, including the US and the EU, is also illegal.
I couldn't have said it better myself. That is how to do it.
Oddly, I've found Amazon's rankings for many product categories (not for all) to be very good.
I shouldn't be surprised that so many people support Google using their near monopoly on search to crush their subsidiary's (sibling's ?) competitors in other spheres; after all, I saw people support IBM and Microsoft when they were up to similar shenanigans.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_competition_law
Those two (but especially preference) are extremely strong motivators for humans to choose one product over the other.
But even if it wasn't, the law is there the protect the citizens and their livelihoods, not one company's supposed right to hold a monopoly.
There probably needs to a category of consumer software where the argument "but you could always use an alternative" should not apply, when evaluating monopolies. Once you have network effects for example, you have the foundations for a monopoly. WhatsApp is probably a monopoly by now, for example: if all you're friends are using it, you don't really have a choice, even though there are alternatives.
Dominance is reflected by the reality of market share, not by whether or not someone could theoretically switch search engine. In the EU they have a very dominant position (95% I think?).
It's no different from saying MS had an effective monopoly/dominance in the 2000s, even though you could theoretically install Linux.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law#Dominance_and_...
I not only could, I most certainly did.
The situation was different, though. Microsoft Windows had a kind of real monoply, since it was - and is - difficult to find a retail pc without the damned thing preinstalled and included in the price. No such mechanism exists concerning Google, as long as we politely keep Android out of the picture.
Mind you, my position back then was more or less the same with regard to EU vs MS as it is today, with Google taking over: I dislike both companies. I very much more intensely dislike the monolithic and terrifying EU throwing its weight around.
why do you find the EU terrifying? (also, the EU is not exactly monolithic considering it is not a single entity in many areas, but that is another point entirely).
Economies of scale, network externalities and vertical and horizontal integration means that popular internet services are king of the hill type business. Bigger and larger translates to smaller cost per user, cheaper ads and higher quality. There can be only few really big players and they create natural barriers to entry for anyone else.
All classical barriers of entry apply to Google, FB, Amazon:
* Economies scale production
* Limit pricing
* High set-up costs
* High sunk costs
* Advertising
* brand loyalty
* vertical integration
* horizontal integration
The same way that maps pops up automatically when google search realize that I search for a place (or the weather widget).
Now, I don't use Google shopping very often because in my experience it is meh
Pretty much, you could use the argument you just made against any business that delved into another space. Apple with phones back in the day, Microsoft with Hardware, Walmart and groceries, etc etc etc. There are almost infinite examples, very few businesses haven't expanded their product line and reach. Using their own business to do so is just an obvious solution.
Which monopoly does Amazon have that they're abusing to sell hardware?
> Pretty much, you could use the argument you just made against any business that delved into another space.
Nope; only businesses which are a monopoly.
Amazon has no monopoly, therefore the argument cannot be used against them. Plus nobody is stopping Google from opening a new website (e.g. GoogleShopCompare.com) and doing anything they want, using their huge brand and financial power, what they're saying is wrong is embedding it into their existing monopolistic property to give it an unfair advantage (Google.com).
It is exactly comparable to the Microsoft/Windows issues in the 1990s. Microsoft could sell/give away IE, they just couldn't bundle it with their monopoly (Windows) to give it an unfair advantage. Google previously got into trouble for exactly this due to Google Maps being bundled with Google.com.
Amazon used to only push other's products, now they push their own as well, often making use of their front page to do so. It's the same, if not worse, than what Google is doing.
"Market domination" is in fact defined in the article (and in more specific detail if you follow the links there).
And even if it were about monopoly, whether or not you are forced to use a product or a service is not what determines if it constitutes a monopoly.
Compare the laws here: EU (http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:...) US (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/2)
And whether or not you are forced to use a product is a large part of what it means to have a monopoly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switching_barriers
Sure those users could use ddg but it's not about what users could do, the reality of the matter is that other comparative shopping sites depend(ed) on google and got cheated.
Well I've seen Google's voice search trigger against people's will on many occasions ;)
I know that wasn't your point, though.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2017/04/21/volkswa...
It's almost the same amount, US$2.8B. It's like the EU telling the US "F with our corporations and we'll F with yours".
I think the provided explanation is clear and the punishment reasonable.
By looking at the website do you think they were disadvantaged in Google search because of Google's monopoly or perhaps for MANY other reasons? I mean it doesn't even render on mobile...
> The European Commission has decided to open an antitrust investigation into allegations that Google Inc. has abused a dominant position in online search, in violation of European Union rules (Article 102 TFEU). The opening of formal proceedings follows complaints by search service providers about unfavourable treatment of their services in Google's unpaid and sponsored search results coupled with an alleged preferential placement of Google's own services. This initiation of proceedings does not imply that the Commission has proof of any infringements. It only signifies that the Commission will conduct an in-depth investigation of the case as a matter of priority.
[1]: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-10-1624_en.htm?local...
Although, of course, what VW did is a billions times worse, and actually resulted in deaths.
I'm not going to find it again, but if you check the list of the largest cartel penalties imposed by the EU, 9 of the top 10 are European companies (plus one asian, I believe).
Google has invested significant money, resources, and manpower in the United States government, and at least, during the Obama administration, was perceived as an ally to the general agenda. We have yet to see how much changes under Trump, the rumor is Joshua Wright is already back involved with the FTC, but the Trump administration has lagged on actually getting all these agencies re-staffed, and who knows what'll actually happen: https://theintercept.com/2016/11/15/google-gets-a-seat-on-th...
http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/
"Staff concludes that Google's conduct has resulted - and will result - in real harm to consumers and to innovation in the online search and advertising markets. Google has strengthened its monopolies over search and search advertising through anticompetitive means..."
It went nowhere though:
"The staff recommended bringing a lawsuit challenging certain Google practices. The Commission ultimately voted, 5-0, not to bring charges against Google."
"In accordance with the Commission's 2006 Guidelines on fines (see press release and MEMO), the fine has been calculated on the basis of the value of Google's revenue from its comparison shopping service in the 13 EEA countries concerned."
It would be much better for consumers if the EU applied their fines to more "dangerous to society" type outfits, that can actually do and have done immense damage to economies not just in the EU, but the US and rest of the world.
The EU should apply consumer concern to the banking/finance sector in equal measure as they do with Tech firms. After all, Google cannot crash a society, But the Banking/financial sector can and has done.
Although there is far more support to integrate more fiscal policy across the eurozone (as expressed by both macron, merkel and some minor other EU nations), the legislation simply isn't their yet.
Its odd how Tech which changes my browser search gets heavy regulation EU wide, but not fiscal items, where a currency is shared EU wide.
Antitrust: Commission fines Google €2.42 billion for abusing dominance as search engine by giving illegal advantage to own comparison shopping service
Antitrust rules. The EU decided they broke them. Whether you think they did or didn't is irrelevant.
This is more about politics and EU bragging itself, for doing something "fair", for the people.
In that case, if you win, others can still win as well.
Note, it's not illegal per se. It's not illegal because of a de jure monopoly. It's not even illegal because of the number of users they have. It's illegal because Bing, Yahoo et al are not as relatively successful.
It was the same with browsers. Microsoft were hit for bundling. Apple haven't been though they've done identically the same thing. Why? Because enough people bought Android phones in the EU.
I do find it dubious that, effectively, the primary criteria for illegality is not what the defendant did but what some other actors didn't do. Seems wrong to me.
And it's true - they are. By design.
Also, Many people here seem to forget that we do not, in fact, live in a completely laissez-faire capitalistic society for good reason. Especially compared to the US, the countries in the EU do not view unfetered capitalism as a 'good and just' thing.
You win by being the natural favorite of users' free choice of exchange, not by eradicating the ability of others to compete. We need more penalties like this for those usurping the concept of the market.
This is literally what the board game "Monopoly" is about. Like that, only you can't quit the game and are dependent on it for survival.
Except the carrot is only dangling on the stick and as a donkey, you're not allowed to ever get it - because the moment you do, you stop moving forward. Hence it's imperative to a) convince people they can win, and b) ensure they don't. Because it's not the players that are socially useful, but the game itself.
A 'winner' would mean the end of it.
This fine isn't nearly enough, as Google will have earned much more than that and stands to earn a lot more in the future, simply because they used their overwhelming market share to kill off competitors. They'll just do it again and again because in the long term it profits them way more than playing fair.
On one hand google can do whatever they want because its their service and they don't force anyone to go there.
On the other hand they have big monopoly so people can't really go anywhere else (they don't know better) - they are not really paying taxes in most of the EU countries and many times don't even comply with local laws because EU is just one big thing for them - not individual states.
Let's not forget it is Google who is playing on EU ballpark - not the other way around.
By the way - does anyone still believe that Google / Facebook or even the Internet are not utility? It seems it a lot like water/electricity/roads but for information.
Put another way, if the EU tried to take money from some random e.g. American or Japanese company without a physical presence in the EU, what channels could the EU use to twist their arm across national boundaries?
Somewhat related, there could be good money in providing an explicitly non-hostile legal environment for companies, where they won't get in trouble for e.g. promoting their own services or offering services for free [1].
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/feb/03/google-fi...
The EU could simply seize Google's servers and intellectual property, and sell it to fund this.
Additionally, if you'd create a jurisdiction just to avoid the law, you can expect that no country will protect your copyright. You'd have the EU courts support every person stealing your IP.
You really don't want to pick a fight with a legal system that your entire business depends on.
> abandoning all EU revenue
How ? A corp does not have to exist in EU to recieve payments from EU.
> They'd have to submit to the US tax system instead.
For such tax structring to work, Google just need one non-US IP holding jurisdiction.
So they can cut off physical/legal tie from EU, and they should.
The EU has strong legal institutions, and is a democracy ruled by law, with standards at least as good as the US.
They aren't any more hostile to businesses than the US, which has basically identical antitrust laws. Find the list of EU antitrust actions, and you'll see they take actions against EU companies far more often than companies from non-EU countries, almost perfectly aligned with representation in the EU market. You just don't hear about some Italian steel mill being fined in US media.
The hypothetical friendly nation wouldn't be the US, for the reasons you mention.
I was looking at the highlights of the EU competition commission[0]. Is it just me or is there a theme (with a few exceptions) that runs something like:
+ Large US company XXX gets anti-trust fine.
+ EU company gets state aid approved.
+ rinse and repeat
As an EU citizen, it's nice that the Commission is working hard to reduce my tax bill but I do wonder if this is entirely neutral.
Many opinions here are the "market will solve everything" american way. But what many people fail to mention is how american corps avoid taxes. In my country fb and google are main online services with milions customers yet they pay no taxes.
Its amazing what you can do when you are 2big2fail
This got us 2008 financial crisis, deregulations were the main reason. You need to add greed to every equation you make and then you get different results.
If you're big but not a monopolist, and you do the exact same thing, then way less of a problem. Hence Apple could bundle Safari with iOS but Microsoft couldn't bundle IE with Windows XP in the exact same way.
You're also interpreting the word "big" perhaps too literally. In your example, Apple is not big in the sense I mean. Microsoft might be, but that doesn't mean I agree with the judgement against them.
If people like your product so much that 95% of the market uses it, I don't see the abuse.
... but human attention is.
Which is why the fine is not for 95% of the market using the product, but for abusing that position to unfairly disadvantage competitors.
> it's about using a monopoly position in one field to gain entry to another.
It's not about Google dominating the search market. It's about Google leveraging their dominant position on the search market to promote their comparison shopping service, which is a different product for different market.
Think of the competition laws as nerfing your ability to leverage domination of one market into immediate domination of other markets. Companies don't have natural rights, there are only the arbitrary rules of the market game, that are intended to promote general prosperity in the society.
If you would not have that kind of control (and fines when they break those rules) it would be virtually impossible to beat these kind of entities or they can use their weight to strong-arm them-self in a lot of markets. See what happened in the past with Microsoft.
Freedoms exist only to let companies thrive insofar as that then lets them sell goods that benefit the people. Once that stops, the freedoms stop.
I'm being slightly dry cut, but this is a good rule of thumb when looking at society. It's easy to forget about the bigger picture and think that companies have any type of inherent right to exist. They don't. They're here for us. Of course, theory vs practice, yada yada. but again: rule of thumb for regulations.
If anything, punishing a big company for its potentially big effect on markets values 1) markets above people and 2) competitors' ability to participate on the market above the people.
Banning integration or self-promotion could very well result in a worse product overall that serves people worse.
For example this is my view and the view of most EU citizens:
"punishing a big company for its potentially big effect on markets values 1) people above markets and 2) competitors' ability to participate on the market which is to the benefit of costumers (people)"
That seems completely backwards. Governments have only one purpose—to serve the people.
Companies have only one purpose—to serve its shareholders. Of course, purely pursuing this purpose can lead to perverse outcomes so we have regulation to keep it in check.
> Companies [don't] have any type of inherent right to exist
Huh? In so far as individuals have a right to engage in trade and commerce, and in so far as they have a right to engage in this in coordination with other individuals, companies do have a right to exist.
I hate to split hairs, but no, they don't. Companies are just an arbitrary legal entity.
You can self-promote whatever you want, as long as it's independent of others' promotions.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/22/google-ag...
I assume that Google is attempting to make devs start using a proprietary technology instead of the well-established HTML standard, or:
- somehow lock everyone in with the format
- force people to switch to Chrome since it would run those pages better
- force other browsers to implement the technology (until they sneak in a patented technology once AMP is popular?)
Where can I read a good article about why AMP is bad?
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/07/us/politics/hillary-cl...
You get this:
https://amp.gstatic.com/v/mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/07/us/p...
Now ironically, this is actually safer for a number of websites because it has the side effect of making normal HTTP content HTTPS, but the idea of Google taking over control over the content, the advertising, what methods are used for analytics tracking, and what possible pieces of content can be embedded destroys the whole "the web should be free" concept.
It's not something dramatically new, Facebook started doing it years ago and even Google news was a (more limited) form of it, but just because some things are possible doesn't mean they should be done. For example I can make a website, example.com, where every link gets turned into
example.com/v/yourwebsite.com
And then proxy all the content through my server replacing links like yourwebsite.com/login to example.com/v/yourwebsite.com/login and the majority of users will not notice that the website hasn't changed. And really the only thing that stops people from doing this is copyright law and a shared societal understanding that corporations should be able to control their content, not technical countermeasures.
I would never do that.
I personally run my own mail server and use Mail to move all messages to Google Inbox, so that I can use Google's excellent spam filter and email grouping while still keeping control over my email.
I use both Google Photos and iCloud Photos.
If I had to have Google proxy my website, I would at least give my visitors a CNAME instead of Google's URL, to avoid getting locked in into the technology.
I know a lot of people that would be totally screwed if Google closed their account for some reason: no more email, contacts, photos, etc. etc.
If an AMP equivalent standard came out by Mozilla or Microsoft or Facebook, it would be an uphill task for them to get google to give those pages special treatment in search results.
Hence, there is an argument to be made about AMP being an anti-competitive (search engine dominance used to push it's own diet-html).
For example, Google is already favoring HTML above, say, TXT pages. Demanding TXT to be shown as high as HTML in search results doesn't make much sense.
From the official site: "The Google AMP Cache is a proxy-based content delivery network for delivering all valid AMP documents." In other words, you are welcome to tie yourself to Google infrastructure, not merely to a proprietary software platform that you can at least use on your own (like Windows etc. in the Microsoft antitrust cases).
But doesn't it hold for any market, that as technology advances, the barriers to entry become larger?
For FY16, they had a revenue of approx. $90.27b, that leaves a fine of approx. $12.3m.
*edit: forgot to divide by 365 (days). I apologise.
That would actually be a lot of money even for Google.
Google fans would like to make this about US vs. the EU, because it misdirects away from Google's illegal actions. But multiple US companies asked for and supported this investigation against Google. And I wish our government laid down the same charges against them here.
Is this just a case of lobbying corruption?
The FTC's staff have previously recommended filing charges against Google, and then the people up the ladder buried it.
Most users don't.
I've got to assume you're aware of things like unfair competition, antitrust laws, market distortions and so on. The idea is that a disproportionately influential market participant can cause the market to become less free by virtue of inhibiting competition – competition being a vital part of a free market.
Rules against abusing a dominant market position are there specifically to try and prevent abuse from happening.
I could understand the reasonableness of arguing about the specifics of Google's market dominance or the degree to which this activity was a problem. But "increasingly specious violations and terms" and "absolutely sickening" seem to suggest you haven't really considered the validity of such rules.
Promoting your own services in general is fine. But when a huge, huge majority of the market uses your service for discovery, your decision to promote your own services over competitors' damages competition in the market — users end up with less choice in practice, even though they could theoretically switch to another service.
Those rules exist to try and prevent this sort of abuse happening.
If they had competed and won this share fairly, they wouldn't get a fine.
Remember that EU, during these years was consistently the largest, or the second largest, depending on year, economy of the world, so this 80% is huge and justifies the size of the fine.
There's nothing wrong with Google having a huge market share. But when that market share is used to essentially hide knowledge about competitors, isn't it obvious that the market becomes less free?
Yes, you did. And now you have the de-facto monopoly over the key for the front door. So, what could be wrong with asking for half their life savings if they want to be let out?
And at least the EU commission seems to have come to the conclusion that Google has used its power that it got due to its successful search engine to promote their price comparison site more than it did competing sites, and that not solely based on merits of the site itself.
Whether people could potentially evade the manipulation if they cared enough is irrelevant, just as it is irrelevant whether a fraud victim could have figured out they were being defrauded if they had cared enough.
[0] http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-09-235_en.htm?loca...
This integration with Google is pervasive in Firefox; there are dozens of settings built into the browser that send information to various Google services. Yes, it's possible to change all of them, but probably less than 0.001% of users will do that. This is why it's not possible to take Firefox's claim that they are pro-privacy seriously.
The application of antitrust law (in the US and elsewhere) tends to be rather controversial. Which is why it's interesting...
Well, in one sense that's obviously true: it's no longer a source of controversy. On the other hand, if there is a reason you believe the people who argued against the Microsoft antitrust action - or aspects thereof - in the late nineties would retract their opposition today, I wonder what it is. More to the point, I wonder if you have read any legal scholarship or punditry to the effect of "I was wrong, the Microsoft antitrust case was correctly decided." I don't recall ever seeing anything like that, and I'm interested in this stuff.
(plenty of us thought bundling IE was not an abuse of monopoly power twenty years ago, and still feel that way today)
I've already forgotten the IE case so I might be missing some details but what you wrote is 100% true even if it was probably intended in a ironic fashion.
I really, really don't see a reason why a government should interefe in a voloutery exchange. I kinda like my internet unregulated. Crazy actually how many people will "(+1)" sentences like "the internet should be decentralized, free of government and corporate censorship and open to everyone" but will cheer for the EU when they attempt to force a website to change its content.
Will it be used to compensate the rival companies? Will it be used to compensate European consumers? (And most importantly, it denied European consumers a genuine choice of services and the full benefits of innovation)
Limousine tires, gold leaf on a few rooftops, some agricultural subsidies...
The EU has to defend its producers as much as it defends its consumers.
I wouldn't say that the EU is doing this at the expense of its consumers because I don't think that consumers actually get a better deal because this feature of Google.
Google's initiative only serves to narrow down the options for consumers and funnel them to where Google wants them to go.
Google's business is to steal people's free will and sell it to corporations.
To be fair, I don't think it's much different from what all the other corporations are doing. All advertising ought to be taxed.
Do you have more power to improve your life over the long term in your role as an individual consumer or an individual voter?
If you take the stance that the government is looking out for your interests better than Google is, then by default you must be arguing one of two things:
1. Your act of voting (or political action) is positively correlated to your desires.
or
2. The (collective) Government knows what's better for you than Google could and is implementing that to your benefit.
I find either argument unsubstantiated.
> If you take the stance that the government is looking out for your interests better than Google is...
making a clear implicit counterclaim that Google is looking out for my interests better than the government. But then you say this:
> The entire Lean method and deploy-measure-iterate-deploy cycle, is predicated on a feedback loop between users and products.
As someone who has done a lot of A/B testing over the course of their career, I can say with authority that this argument is completely bogus, to the point that I'm having trouble believing you're making it in good faith. A/B testing rarely has anything to do with matching the product to customer's stated preferences or looking out for their best interests. It's almost always about exploiting various quirks of psychology to increase engagement or spending, in the manner of casinos.
In fact, I'm willing to wager that A/B testing, as it's done today, probably anti-optimizes the product from the perspective of the user's (or society's) best interests (best example: Facebook and the social bubble effect, and how outrage-inducting fake news gets more clicks and engagement than nuanced real stuff)
Contrast this with the history of how well companies respond to consumer's stated preferences. A clear majority of people, when polled, say they want less corporate welfare, companies that treat the environment better, reasonable labor protections, etc.. None of these have happened to any significant degree, unless their hand was forced by (bitterly opposed) regulation.
Now, this is mostly people's own fault, because their spending habits do not match their stated preferences, and businesses follow revealed preference. But that's been my point all along: businesses cannot be trusted satisfy stated preferences. And I'm the rare consumer who does try to put my money where my mouth is, and my preferences still never translate into large-scale change. That's what I mean when I say there's no empirical footing for the claim that businesses can be trusted to look out for my interests.
Bull, it's explicitly about figuring out what people want to do. You can argue all day long that this can be exploited, but in the end you aren't going to take an action you don't want to without coercion. If I show you a delivery donut ad a 1AM, because you've proven 90% more likely to impulse buy a donut at 1AM and then you do it, how is that not directly correlating to your interests? Conversely if I show you a gym ad at 8AM on Tuesday because I know that's when you get out of the meeting with the fit [insert gender] person at work you've always wanted to ask out on a date, how is that not directly in your interests?
businesses follow revealed preference
Yes exactly, stated preferences are worthless. Revealed preferences are priceless. The amount of people who say one thing and do another approaches 100%.
That's what I mean when I say there's no empirical footing for the claim that businesses can be trusted to look out for my interests.
You decide what your interests are by your actions. If I see your actions and then give you more of those, by definition I am looking out for your interests.
I think what you are trying to say is:
"People make terrible decisions and it's up to the government to prevent companies from letting you make those terrible decisions."
In which case, you're implicitly arguing that people make better voting decisions than purchasing decisions and that voting decisions better reflect their true preferences. A silly idea if there ever was one. I don't think this needs a reference in 2017.
As things stand, the Google Shopping results allow smaller, independent e-commerce stores to reach the top of Google's search results.
Take this functionality away, and we risk the top search results being a combination of Amazon + other large retailers for the majority of e-commerce related searches.
I think we're long past that point: https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close...
Well, that makes sense.
(cue "the market will regulate itself")
how much revenue do they make from EU clients?
If Google stopped servicing Europe, one or more European competitors would emerge in days or weeks and Google's dominance would be threatened worldwide within months. It would be a completely suicidal move.
Moreover Qwant is just bing search results repackaged.
Not in France and Germany
The thing is, if they want to do business in the EU they have to abide by the rules of the EU. It's not that complex!
It's not that complex!
What precedent is there for imposing rules this this on other businesses? "You have to design new technology and build custom services that show business information for your competitors on your advertising/websites/properties"?
Yes it was [0].
> If I owned a website that had a search engine and comparison shopping and email, I would not expect that it's somehow wrong if my search engine shows results from my service's comparison shopping and email
If your search engine had a dominant position in the EU market and if you used that dominance to put your shopping product above other competitors', then yes, it would not only be wrong, but also illegal.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_competition_law
It was. There are specific requirements in Article 102 about abusing dominant market positions to "apply…dissimilar conditions to equivalent transactions with other trading parties, thereby placing them at a competitive disadvantage".
If I owned a website that had a search engine and comparison shopping and email, I would not expect that it's somehow wrong if my search engine shows results from my service's comparison shopping and email.
If you owned a massive market-dominating service, then your team of corporate lawyers should expect that.
"You have to design new technology and build custom services that show business information for your competitors on your advertising/websites/properties"?
That's not what happened though – the specific instruction is:
the Decision orders Google to comply with the simple principle of giving equal treatment to rival comparison shopping services and its own service
That's all, and it is not unreasonable to impose these terms of a market dominating force that has used that dominance to crowd out competition.
What precedent is there for imposing rules this this on other businesses?
SO MUCH. http://ec.europa.eu/competition/elojade/isef/index.cfm
The EU economy is bigger than that of the US and Google's position in EU is more dominant. Bing doesn't work well for Europeans, there are no real competitors. Maybe the US market has more marketing spending, compared to Europe.
My guess would be that Google makes about the same in the EU as it does in the US.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/nov/04/google-pays...
Nearly as much as in the US, with the potential to be even higher.
google has the bad habit to sell itself as the saviour, while it is just making its own interests like anyone else... do not hide google...
Google has enough lawyers to know that its internal policy was at risk of triggering competition oversight. If it didn't, it has a horrendously inept legal and regulatory risk compliance structure in place.
As a point, in competition cases, companies will generally try to bite off more than they know the regulators will allow, then use that action to shift the goalposts to negotiate better boundaries for their practices or acquisitions than they would have otherwise obtained.[1]
This is what Google has done. Only most people don't see it because their main competitive advantage hasn't' been in easily analysed assets like high-margin factories or efficient logistics operations. Our language of business is not well structured for discussing the competitive advantage Google has acquired by repeatedly leveraging their search engine into other markets. So we ignore it.
Contrary to what people are saying, it is very clear where the 'line' was crossed from the competition perspective. Google has crossed that line multiple times in the past and gotten away free. It is more shocking, from a competition perspective, that they haven't been hit in the past.
___
[1] To explain the footnoted paragraph further: companies will offer to buy competitors that would bring it well past the market dominance high-water mark (different countries' legislation use different terminology to denote this point, but as a rule of thumb when you hit 40-50% of a given market, competition concerns arise). Companies then apply for regulator blessing for the entire acquisition knowing they won't get it. The hope is that the regulator will allow them to try to and keep all of the high-margin, high-value 'crown jewels' and make a show of disposing of underperforming assets. Doing this allows regulators the ability to say they exercised effective oversight, while the company is able to point to their balance sheet's performance over their competitors. Obtaining this advantage then allows them to raise at lower rates and fund activities to buy market share then rely on organic growth (which regulators don't take action against) to crush their opponents. This is a very standard market consolidation playbook for a player in the market.
Both graduated from same school and both have financial sector background. Both were working in big UK corporations before their career in EU commission.
Stifling competition is bad, and it's bad that Google did it.
Trying to meddle in someone's private property and stifling innovation, like the EU just did, is also bad.
And ultimately some win (competitor companies) and some lose (the people who preferred the Google results, even if out of convenience).
I see it as a showcase of how we, and thus our economic models, are flawed and will always be.
* Ireland is in the EU and contributes towards the EU's coffers.
* The EU is also going after VW ( http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/eu-sues-germ... ), but the responsibility in this case lies with individual member-state governments, rather than any single EU organ, and there is evidence that VW carefully gamed the situation so their defeat-devices were technically legal in the EU ( https://www.ft.com/content/0b9bf1d2-e486-11e6-9645-c9357a758... )
Ireland gave some big corps special tax deals as it's the case with Apple. It's also used by big corps to pass earnings through as it had lower corporate taxes compared to other member states. This is an Irish feature and a flaw in the tax policies of other EU states, which the EU tried to fix with transfer taxes.
What I am saying is that the EU is failing to punish VW while being maybe a little too harsh on US corps. I think we can all agree VW is a much worse offender than Google: selling cars that poison the air and lie about it vs. a few search results clearly labelled as sponsored ads up on the first page.
And b) not motivated by customer protection but by greed alone.
This was not a good thing.
Since the EU is likely more than just 10%/20% of their income, they still make some money here, but I doubt that it was worth it for Froogle…
Glad that Britain is exiting EU .
It is larger then the US by a fair margin.
This strive for a less divided population is probably a reason why right-wing populist (or "undemocratic authoritarian") parties don't appeal to a majority in EU countries.
Well that's just factually incorrect isn't it?
The EU hasn't contributed ANYTHING to the internet, but they are the ones who want to regulate it the most. :(
And if by the EU you mean its countries, you're so wrong it's not even funny, but the US bubble is strong
The company who initiated this lawsuit is http://www.foundem.co.uk/.
This website looks like absolute shit, it doesn't even render properly on mobile, but hey, if they fail they just blame Google search for their mistakes and the EU backs it without second thoughts after the US has fined VW recently for actual fraud.
This isn't really a thing you realize, right? But what is a thing is many European countries wanting to gut encryption. Enjoy your non-secure communications.
> "your extortionate roaming fees when you walk closer to Canada"
What does that even mean? Many carrier plans now include roaming throughout Canada and Mexico by default. That covers over twice the land mass of Europe.
Of top of my head:
1. WWW was created in CERN, which is funded mostly by EU countries [1]
2. Linux which accounts for more than 2/3 of web servers was created in Sweden.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN#Member_states_and_budget
How about Linux?
How about C++?
So while one could very well argue that it was a happy accident, it would not be very wise to argue that EU has not contributed ANYTHING to internet.