Once you gain a certain amount of market share you no longer have the right to engage in certain kinds of anti-competitive actions. There's nothing extreme about that; the laws have been in place for over a century.
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")
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?
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.
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"
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.)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Very rarely does acting like a child and "taking your ball and go home" work out.
I disagree with Rand on many important issues.
I think your reply is tantamount to an ad hominem fallacy.