You'll see people baffled by this decision and generally happy with the service and products google offers.
It's just a reminder to remember that what doesn't work for you may be pure bliss for other people.
The EU has long used 'anti trust fines' as a way of levying tariffs against US companies.
And that while the reality is that there is a list of European companies/kartels receiving high anti trust fines as well for their behaviour.
The "problem" is that this never receives any interest in the states which only contributes to this blurred image that only US companies are getting fined. That is frankly untrue.
FWIW, companies in the US have long used 'anti trust complaints' as a means of harming companies they can't compete with (e.g. Microsoft, back in the day).
Doesn't alter the fact that Netscape was incapable of competing with Microsoft (in fact I think you sort of made my point, there) once the latter got their arses into gear.
Edited: Wow! The "Viewable With Any Browser" campaign site is still up, in 2017. I wonder if they're keeping it handy for the forthcoming Webkit monopoly ...
No-one will ever know.
Perhaps we're meaning different things by the word 'compete'?
"We can't compete, let's make an anti-trust complaint"
"I can't run as fast as Bolt, so I'll shoot him"
So, yeah in the sense that a five year old Rocky vs Ivan Drago in a boxing match is a competition technically. But no one can honestly say it's really a competition, as in there's any spirit of competition.
U.S. v Microsoft makes it pretty clear. MS'es strategy was break the law and do anything to win. Then it was weather the lawsuit and win or lose, they had years to position IE as the dominant product. So losing hardly mattered they still got what they wanted.
What could Netscape actually do to counter all that? They were practically bystanders in this nearly as much as my grandmother was. Such was MS'es power in the 90's.
Netscape could compete with IE. Netscape couldn't compete with the entire MS empire being dedicated to destroying them.
MS played hardball and were willing to do anything to gain nearly complete dominance in the market. A lot of their strategy was clearly anti-competitive and anti-consumer. It's not even a debate. See U.S. v Microsoft. Netscape couldn't compete with that sort of scorched earth strategy. And it took Google and Mozilla years to make a dent in that and MS had to help by letting their market dominance stagnate for over half a decade and causing endless irritation for a generation of developers who are always going to treat an MS browser as a second class citizen.
So yeah, great for MS, they beat Netscape. But they couldn't beat Google or Mozilla and that's the most recent battle, so the one that actually matters.
I fully expect a future superpower to have strict rules in some new area, say China will only take English-language/law services from legal firms in any country if they are zero carbon.
So why the heck would you not support an action that stops a giant corporation from stiffling the most important mechanism of capitalism?
I think at some point in the discussion, some people have tried to redefine "monopoly" as "state-sanctioned monopoly" and declare everything else fair game as long as the evil government is not involved... Apparently you can get surprisingly far before the logic breaks down.
Because it's not the government's job to unclog the market. It's the entrepreneur's opportunity to disrupt the market and kick Google's ass.
Capitalism is inherently anti-competitive. Larger established companies have more power than the idealized "entrepreneur" that libertarians like to posit. If a competitor appears they can simply force them to shutdown, via dumping, via legal harassment, or simply by virtue of being much larger and being able to do everything more efficiently and with larger margins. Government regulation is needed to prevent monopolies. This is self-evident.
There are multiple search engines providing the same service that Google does and the cost of switching is so negligible as to be almost non-existent.
While I generally appreciate the EU's approach towards protecting the consumer's best interests, this just reeks of making up excuses to extort money from a highly successful company just because they can get away with it.
Do you have anything at all to back up that claim? It seems to me the EU applies these fines fairly equitably between US and EU companies.
What's pure bliss for some people might also be dangerous and cancerous for society. Segregation was "pure bliss" for lots of folks.
I've read through the other thread, I couldn't find a comment that agrees with "connecting our users with thousands of advertisers, large and small, in ways that are useful for both."
The thing is, personally I prefer getting integrated results from Google's
other search services when I do a Google search. I like getting Google Maps
results when I search for a location, I like getting Google Flights results
etc. When I do a Google search I am not just using it as a simple website
search. I want it to use it to search the whole Google suite of services.
If they are forced to stop doing this it will make my search experience
worse for me.
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.>I prefer getting integrated results from Google's other search services when I do a Google search.
One example of "other search services" is Google Shopping. It's the retail advertisers that sponsor their ecommerce buying links to Google Shopping. Hence, the "advertisers connection to users".
Btw, there are also other posters making similar comments about the convenience of Google "connecting users to advertisers". Like the previous example, you won't see it if you're looking for that exact phrasing.
E.g. another comment by cyxxon: "Currently Google's services just so damned conveniently integrated": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14644100
That example "connects me, the user, to the advertisers".
Seriously, without playing the game of "words are anything I want them to mean just to win an argument"... what would _you_ call the mechanism of those Google Shopping results? <Genuinely confused here.>
But did you want to be connected to the advertisers, i.e. those who paid Google to give their product a better placement, or did you want to be connected to the sellers, ranked by how desirable their product is to you?
I'm using the Google Shopping as it's deliberately designed: connect me to the advertisers.
I think the confusion is that regular search results (e.g. search for "how to concatenate a string in PHP?") is a "pull" mechanism in which Google spiders webcrawls and scrapes from pages like StackOverflow. You expect some sort of pagerank curation without requiring StackOverflow paying money to Google. Nevertheless, Stackoverflow answers often show up at the top.
On the other hand, the Google Shopping is a "push" mechanism where the advertisers pay to place their links there. The advertiser/sponsor model is basically how all the major comparison shopping sites work.
I don't know of any reputable/reliable price comparison site that uses a "pull" mechanism to scrape prices across multiple retailers that covers most products. If it does "pull" price data, it tries to derive income via techniques like affiliate url links for commissions. Camelcamelcamel uses a pull mechanism but it only scrapes Amazon and not the other retailers like Best Buy, Newegg, etc.
To turn this around, let me ask you... what price comparison website connects me to sellers instead of advertisers? (A site like Ebay connects me to "sellers" but doesn't include results from multiple major retailers such as Amazon.)
"Not to be confused with Double-talk.
Doublespeak is language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words."
Anyhow, I like google shopping (when I click the google shopping tab, not when im actually on the search tab), I can trust it more than other comparing sites. Also just like other comparing sites, it doesn't have all sources.
You'll also see people (me) baffled by this decision and generally disgusted by the services Google offers.
People were very happy indeed with Microsoft products. Back when Netscape Navigator was better than Internet Explorer in all respects, people were very happy with NN too, and would have been happier if they could have bought Windows computers in which the software preinstalled by the OEM included Netscape. Do you know why they couldn't? MS told the OEMs "you put NN on your computers, you don't get any more Windows licenses at all".
People were also happy with the Java applets NN could execute, but MS made its own incompatible version of Java so that they wouldn't be cross-platform. Same with their version of web standards in IE.
All this is publicly documented by the courts, including the internal communications in Microsoft about it being a deliberate strategy to preserve Windows' monopoly. So, please, don't go up in arms to defend that cause, or imply that history made them justice.
> I'd encourage you (and everyone) to read the comments in the other thread happening today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14643712
> You'll see people baffled by this decision and generally happy with the service and products google offers.
> It's just a reminder to remember that what doesn't work for you may be pure bliss for other people.
Read that, then read my comment, and then read your comment... it makes no sense at all. The person I replied to was defending Google using what I consider to a bullshit argument: using the apparent benefits of the monopoly to defend its existence; this (bad) argument also applies to Microsoft.
In my post, I demonstrated that if that posted truly believed that, then they had better be prepared to defend Microsoft as well. Then you come out of nowhere and try to attack me, as if I was the one making the argument, rather than replying to it? WTF... I absolutely think that both Microsoft and Google are clearly abusive.
This is particularly interesting and annoying as you seem to be going around this thread making the exact same mistake in multiple contexts. As an example, in reply to this other comment from someone else trying to compare the PR spin from Google to that of Microsoft.
It doesn't apply is what I'm saying.
> In my post, I demonstrated that if that posted truly believed that, then they had better be prepared to defend Microsoft as well.
You didn't, because your argument was based on the false premise that MS got in trouble "for having the gall to believe that web browsers should be free" or, as you detail now, that monopolies shouldn't exist and that their benefits aren't enough of a reason for them to exist. Being a monopoly isn't what got MS in trouble, harming consumers to protect that monopoly from competing OS's is what did. There's no need to "defend the existence of a monopoly", because monopolies aren't illegal.
I don't care about your personal attacks. This is a website for discussion, not pissing contests.
Saying "yes, but in this particular edge-case, my actions will be beneficial to society" is a pretty old way to do spins.
Also, as I've said in a different thread, the main problem is not with google's users but the amount of control Google has over 3rd parties (in the case price comparison sites). Of course it's convenient for the users, but's that not the point.
It's still a bad thing.