Google to Comply with EU Search Demands to Avoid More Fines
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2017/06/28/european-authoritie...
"At this point, I need to put some of my cards on the table and admit that I know more about this topic, having worked on the FTC’s investigation which asked some of the same questions. But that investigation was confidential, for good reasons, and I will not violate that confidentiality. All I’ll say is that the FTC had the legal power to compel answers to factual questions about Google’s practices (and an obligation to keep the answers confidential) and, having conducted a thorough investigation, the FTC decided not to bring a case against Google."
FTC applies US rules, the EU Commission applies EU law. You can stay clear of one while still violating the other.
The EU argues that people use the google search function to search for items to buy (but not necessarily from google itself), google has a monopoly on search so this is a reasonable assumption.
The problem is then twofold, google shows it's own (and, argued by the EU, inferior) results above that of established competitors. And that's the rub.
Amazon does not abuse it's monopoly in the sense that people who go there explicitly go there to shop already, amazon itself is already an established seller.
it does not, especially not in european law. a monopoly is defined in the eu as the only possible provider. but the eu comission see's them as a quasi-monopoly, which uses their market strength to weaken other market participants
I recently worked on a project concerning the fee you employer pays you if you have to use your own car for a meeting, and the taxation involved. 8 different cities wanted a digitized solution, the law text involved is around 10 lines of easily understandable text.
Wanna guess how many ways the law was interpreted? 9.
9 because in one city the city council decided to go with their own interpretation rather than what their own legal department advices.
basically there is no "european law" (https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-making-process/overview-la...). Basically they create directives, regulations and make decisions. The countries than need to comply them as a law. However if any nation does not comply they will get "punished", but most of the time the punishment is a joke, so that's basically the biggest problem of the eu and that's what happend in your case.
Btw. what I basically meant with my text had nothing to do with the above. It's just that the Monopoly word under law means that Google would be the only market participant, which of course is wrong and the EU never said "monopoly", they only said Google has market dominance, however most news outlets written monopoly, which in fact is wrong. Btw here is the official text: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-17-1785_en.htm You can even look up what different news outlets written about google, they claimed google as a monopoly, which is nowhere stated by the press information.
Directives are instructions to EU countries to achieve a certain aim but leaves it up to the countries to decide how. Countries will then write their own laws.
Decisions are more executive actions and are binding to whoever it addresses.
Froogle was doing badly (from internal memos), and then when google started treating it differently it started doing well and other competitors started losing market share.
Being in a dominant market position wasn't a problem, and nor was them creating Google Shopping. It was using their dominant market position to give Google Shopping a benefit nobody else could get.
Konkurrenz in German = Competition in English
While I can accept that search services are paid with ad views and associated targeting info, not a free gift (if they were the latter, market power would be nonsense because their would be no market), I think it's pretty clear people do switch out from Google over search’s advertising-related “price”, and increasing that price would lose Google more unit “sales”.
But there's still something worth pointing out about Google's dominant market power: the market isn't search, it's search advertising. And while the public can easily switch search engines, advertisers have nowhere to go. Search advertising is, for many businesses, the only that barely works, and to get to those eyeballs, there's no way around Google.
The press release might help clear some of this up: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-17-1784_en.htm
Every monopoly (or quasi-monopoly which Google is in Europe) should have intense scrutiny by regulators and governments. That doesn't mean nationalisation but it means that these companies will have less freedom to further extend their market power.
If Google has an issue with that they could just do what other conglomerates have done before and split up. The same applies to Amazon where synergies between AWS and the core business are not really clear to me. Only facebook really has only one product, the other companies have a collection of loosely related products.
I try to get away from Google and try Bing regularly (directly or through duckduckgo). For complicated queries, results on Google are clearly superior. Google knows that the whole company indirectly depends on this so that they constantly improve their algorithms. I doubt anyone could reach their quality, even with a few billion € to spend.
Either that or it's the idea the laws of their own country where Google has not fallen foul must clearly be superior to the law in another country where it has.
That's also why Apple has no problem bundling Safari in their OS.
* Apple isn't close to being dominant as a platform. * Allows the default browser to be changed. * Hasn't demonstrated any evidence that they want to stop a competing browser. * Hasn't actively took measures to coerce users to Safari.
Microsoft violated all of these.
Eh, more or less. Forcing browsers to use Apple's engine prevents real competition. The things that made Chrome innovative, for example - multiprocess and V8 - wouldn't be possible on iOS.
Apple controlling what Apple installs on Apple hardware is a completely different ballgame.
Honestly I think Google is more likely to run afoul of this with their "anti-fragmentation" clauses. Google requires that OEMs that want to ship Android may not also ship products that run Android forks. That's not too far off from Microsoft's "per-processor" licensing.
MS was mandating IE being included alongside Windows to other companies.
The opinion of the EU is that Google should be forced to either allow the user to choose the provider of these widgets (maps, weather, etc), or to require Google to rank these widgets at the same position that they would show up in regular search.
For example, in a search for a product, Google returns first a Shopping widget, then the Amazon result (and in it, an amazon widget), then several competitors, and only then Google Shopping.
Google should rank the widgets of each provider the same way as search results, without any bias.
Most widgets do have associated pages, such as shopping search result pages, but they're not the same. They have different interfaces and contain different information, and often they have low PageRank because there's little point in linking to them. If I search "My name is Daniel in Spanish", I would probably like to see a Google Translate widget (or at least some kind of widget), even though the associated page https://translate.google.com/#en/es/My%20name%20is%20Daniel isn't ranked highly.
And some widgets have no associated pages -- if a user searches "96 tablespoons in cups", Google simply shows the answer (6), with no associated page. Should that not be allowed? It would be unfortunate if Google was forced to send users to some conversion website for that.
For example, where I live, Google maps hasn’t updated map data since 2009. They have no transit in it, no integration with taxi or ridesharing companies, nothing.
Here maps has up-to-date maps, with all that in it.
Yet, people use Google maps, and not even consider that there might be a better competitor – because Google maps is the default, and shows up first in search.
A significantly worse product is winning here, and doesn’t even have a market pressure to improve, just because of anticompetitive powers.
You surely can see how that’d be problematic if you’d ever try to disrupt an existing market as startup.
I also don't see why it matters whether there are different business categories involved. If you typed "best search engine" into Bing, and Bing artificially ensured that bing.com was the first result, wouldn't the same criticism apply?
It seems to me that the arguments being made apply to all cross-promotions. You could say that Yahoo is giving Yahoo Mail an unfair advantage by promoting it on their portal. I don't see a meaningful difference.
If you're a minor player, and you cut out a particular competitor from your results, they're not hurt that much and people are less likely to come and use your service.
If you are the main entry point for the vast majority of people, then limiting your results can easily kill whole groups of businesses.
Yahoo only linking to yahoo mail when people search for email providers isn't going to kill off other providers. Google (if almost all results are found through it) doing the same could.
That's ok if Google treat their own services like they treat other people's, and let them compete on merit. But if they use it to just kill competition then that's not good for consumers.
In utilitarian terms, the ratio of benefits and costs to society is the same whether it's Google or Bing that's showing a search widget, so we should allow both or neither.
If Google and Bing had 50/50 market share, then do you think the widgets would be acceptable? Bing also shows shopping widgets, so unaffiliated sellers wouldn't be any better off in that scenario.
We do see things differently based on scale or level of power though, both morally and legally.
We have different standards for people like doctors being in relationships with patients than two regular people, for example.
Thefts will also be treated differently based on scale.
Killing more people is typically seen as worse than killing fewer.
I'm not really sure what you mean about considering things the same irrespective of scale.
> In utilitarian terms, the ratio of benefits and costs to society is the same whether it's Google or Bing that's showing a search widget, so we should allow both or neither.
I don't see how the costs and benefits are the same. The problem is that so many people use Google that having them promote their own product can be enough to completely kill off competition. If they were smaller they'd not have that power.
There's no point stopping Bobs Search Engine with 20 users from not listing Google because he wants to beat them. Google aren't really harmed much by this. Maybe 20 fewer customers come through. Google not listing Bobs search engine because they don't link to him (deliberately because they want to beat him) could mean the difference between being in business and not.
It is my understanding that public transit information has to be offered by the respective Transit Authority, and that does not currently happen with GMaps. Chances are Here is paying top coin for that.
When doing a search on "My Location -> Leipzig HBf", I get oneidentical street routing (google taking construction sites into consideration when calculating the driving duration). Google gives me an alternative strreet route, Here doesn't. Google suggests I can drive to the nearest airport and fly over there (making the trip 3 hours shorter) - and gives me the estimated fare. Here gives me the information about using the train (making the trip two hours longer) - without giving me the fare.
As of now, I do not see an advantage... can you give a more specific example?
So here's a concrete route that made me switch app:
https://www.google.de/maps/dir/Leipzig+Hbf,+Willy-Brandt-Pla... vs. https://wego.here.com/directions/publicTransport/Hauptbahnho...
Google Maps has the data from 2011 on their maps, missing entire streets that have been added since.
At least they have 2011 maps now, before 2014 their maps were from 2004. The entire district was missing.
They did update satellite imagery in early 2017, finally, before that it had been un-updated since 2005.
> It is my understanding that public transit information has to be offered by the respective Transit Authority, and that does not currently happen with GMaps. Chances are Here is paying top coin for that.
Actually, all that data is publicly available online, and the transit authority has a public REST API. Just not in the format Google demands.
I assume that's the one north-east of the city center (Google wants to send me to Ottendorf first). Hm, comparing Google Maps to Here maps, the two look pretty identical - here maps has a few more footpaths. Openstreetmap seems to agree.
> Actually, all that data is publicly available online, and the transit authority has a public REST API. Just not in the format Google demands.
Yeah, I wish. This is a highly shattered provider landscape, some provide no data at all (HNV), some provide some data (MVV), some provide data in an usable format against cash (Bahn after a certain, very low limit) ... some of it is real-time while other is "probably as good as a guess".
A very important part there is a tiny change where a major road was closed off, and due to the Google Maps fault, hundreds of people, including police, and money transporters, got stuck there over the years.
Thanks to a lot of complaints, that tiny part got finally fixed last year, but the missing roads around that are still unchanged.
Neither Amazon, nor any other online retailer, can gain the advantage of being the featured result on Google search.
Google is not a web search engine, it's a search engine. It finds things. The EU's position, taken to its logical conclusion, would push European web search 15 years into the past.
Similarly, Google wouldn't have to remove images or videos, just not embed them directly on top of the web search results. Seems OK to me, and hardly pushing "European web search 15 years into the past."
But your example is also excessively alarmist and obtuse. A competition-respecting voice search client would be configurable. Aka, that it should perhaps be illegal for Google Assistant to automatically play music from Google Play Music, but that it allow you to choose a provider, including Amazon Prime Music, Groove Music, etc. Once a user has indicated their preference, the regular flow would be automatic. This would likely be for product search as well, you might select that you want to look up products via Amazon or Walmart.
Surely piping data from one application into another is not new territory.
Why should a search engine send me to other search engines? Sending someone to Amazon Prime Music for the the query "Play me X" is like following a link from Google to a SERP result, which is what Google already does. I don't see a problem with that.
But that's different than the Product Search example of where Foundem wanted Google to send a query like "Headphone prices" to a SERP page which would include a link which takes the user to yet another SERP page. Users expect searches to yield answers, not more searches. When I want to buy headphones, show me 10 Amazon links if you must that directly link to the landing pages for buying them, but don't show me 10 links, each of which, is a link to another search product search product.
When I ask what the weather is, I don't want to be search to a search box on Weather.com. When I ask if my flight's delayed, I don't want a link to be taken to Flightstatus.com so I can re-run the query.
Google should be required, by law, to permit Amazon Prime Music, Groove Music (Microsoft), and Apple's iTunes to integrate should those companies so choose. Note that when you search for music on Bing [3], it offers up links to buy it Amazon and Apple as well as Microsoft's own service, whereas Google points you to YouTube [4]. Google is playing by a very unfair set of rules compared to most others.
In your weather example, maybe I can pick which weather site provides my preferred weather results. Or Google can pass my flight status request right into flightstatus.com and return information... again, leaving that option open for any of their competitors.
The problem here remains that Google primarily feeds into Google, which is, as the EU has clarified, illegal.
[1] https://support.google.com/googlehome/answer/7030379?hl=en
[2] https://www.wired.com/2016/02/spotify-moves-itself-onto-goog...
[3] https://www.bing.com/search?q=lady+gaga+the+cure
[4] https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&q=lady+gaga+the+cure
From a consumer perspective, that is a one more extra step for me to take I would rather not take. Technology should be about making my life easier, not worse. What I want is reliable data about when the flight will be departing, arriving and if or if not it is delayed, cancelled or on time. I do not want to choose from a myriad of options of websites I do not know how current they keep their data.
From Google's perspective, now they have four thousand flight status websites, some more reliable than others, and each one will have a case to sue them that they do not get shown equally well.
The same can be said about your music example. If I enter an artist / song title, I do want to hear that song, I do not want to choose between different services, some of which require signup (and the one I already signed up for might appear on page three of that SERP). When I wonder if it is going to rain later today, I want a yes/likely/unlikely/no answer, not a choice between different websites who may or may not have the data for me/my location and today, filled with gigabytes worth of ads and self-playing videos.
Pruning worthless competitors (see: price-comparison websites which don't give you the cheapest option, but the option which gives them the most referal revenue) is not problematic, but the beauty in the eye of the customer.
If Google eats all those sites and services up, what stops them from doing all sorts of nasty stuff once they're in the dominant position later on?
How are the little guys supposed to compete with premium-space on Google's search pages? Nothing on this planet is a stronger marketing engine than that.
And if I had wings, I could save me the airline fares. There is zero indication of Google actually being a Bondesque supervillain organization out to destroy the world.
> How are the little guys supposed to compete with premium-space on Google's search pages? Nothing on this planet is a stronger marketing engine than that.
Back in 1997, I used Altavista for search, sometimes Metacrawler, very rarely Yahoo. I got a hint from a friend about this new thing called Google - back then, they were the underdog. They surprised me with their vastly better search results. I never looked back to the "stronger marketing engines" that was Yahoo. Or Metacrawler. Or Altavista.
In truth, marketing engines mean shit if your product is bad. Google today is the company that gives people what they want, at a reasonable quality. If you are a little guy, you can compete if you are better than Google.
Where is Google? Working on raising those walls around its garden that much higher.
I think this difference continues to highlight how Google differs from other companies and warrants antitrust action.
If I build a better comparison shopping service, wouldn't it be good if that could end up at the top in the same format?
> And think about how horrible this would be for voice interfaces: "hey google, where can I buy Doritos" "ok, let me redirect you to voice product search. Hi, I'm voice product search, please restate your question."
Or how good it would be as your query goes through straight to a better product search engine than the one google has.
Runaway "success" in my car's engine doesn't result in my car going fast, it results in my car breaking down. Similarly, success in competitive markets should be lauded as good business, while runaway success should be viewed as a breakdown of competitive markets, leading to suboptimal outcomes.
I'm kind of sick of "capitalism" that tells me the most efficient way to stay warm is burning my house down.
Note that they appear to have responded on the final day allowed. Throughout this process, Google has repeatedly asked for extensions to review the claims or come up with a response for all of these cases. It seems like, knowing the result, Google has attempted to draw out this process as long as legally possible. The PR damage from keeping this case ongoing presumably pales in comparison to the profit from their unlawful conduct.
For instance, if a marijuana company sliced that it would be shutting it's doors to comply with US federal law, I'd very much want to know about it.
It is like a construction company advertising they have built the house "up to code". Maybe it sounds good to them, to me that sounds like "we've done the absolute minimum required and would have majorly cut corners had it not be for those pesky rules about fire safety and such getting in the way".
That is an unreal level of politicking. You can't see any reason why companies might prefer to pay a fine than obey a law?
If you lived in an HOA, and that HOA mandated that all your lawn ornaments must be bright pink by next week, how eager would you be to comply by next week? If the fine for non-compliance was only $1 per year, would you prefer to pay the fine?
I'm trying to illustrate that companies are made up of human beings, not monsters.
There may be a wide gulf depending on the details, but there doesn't necessarily have to be. They are being punished for antitrust practices proven on a legal basis. Without bringing specifics into it, there's no way to tell wither it's moral or not, the same way you can't assume someone on the sex offender registry committed a morally repugnant crime instead of just peeing in public.[1] Don't confuse legal for moral, and if you think the facts of this case support your point, then use those facts to make that point.
1: http://www.menshealth.com/guy-wisdom/you-might-be-sex-offend...
I'm fine saying Google's actions were immoral.
The only way you could construe my comment as saying Google is a mislabeled sex offender is if you completely ignored the actual point in lieu of keywords you chose to focus on.
My prior comment can be reduced to "if you're going to make a moral argument, use evidence of morality in that argument." That you responded with what appears to be an apoplectic fit doesn't really leave your prior argument any better off.
> I'm fine saying Google's actions were immoral.
Obviously. But why? I'll even help you out a bit. There are two parts of this case that are distinct as I see it, that Google suppressed search results of a new search result service they rolled out, and that their supplying their own data from the knowledge graph for shopping results when other services exist it itself monopolistic and punishable. In the former, I agree that's behavior that should not be tolerated or someone in their market position. Of the latter, I think that's a far overreach of any government. If nobody can compete because Google is just doing that much better because they've built the base of audience and information to handle it better, then Google is outcompeting the others in a good way that's better for the general public.
VW is being fined right now. Does that sound like being excused?
And I do see it differently when a companies transparently refuses to obey a law and accepts a fine vs when a company lies.
So your position is that it's worse to lie about breaking the law than it is to actually break it? I'm not sure I understand where you're coming from.
Besides I'm really just asking about the analogy. I think if someone posted "Show HN: My color-changing, license-plate-detecting, HOA-fine-avoiding lawn ornament" we'd all be in there yucking it up at the genius of it. But when VW does the same thing (by your analogy) we're in threads talking about much more serious topics, like individual moral culpability. My point is that your analogy is flawed, it doesn't hold up.
A good instance is jaywalking: it's a minor offense and police don't really care to enforce it. So people decide to break that law all the time.
A law is a contract. Anyone is free to break the contract if they are willing to accept the consequences.
And if it's not, that is pretty noteworthy.
If you disagree with a community’s decision, you can lobby to have them changed, or you can move elsewhere – but you can’t, just because you disagree, disobey them. Or you’ll have to expect that if you try to disobey their decisions, they’ll respond accordingly.
I’m not suggesting anything a society should do as response to a foreign company arriving there, violating laws, and refusing to obey, but generally this simply ends up bad for the company.
I disagree with IP laws, but I can’t just pirate content and sell remixes either, by hiding behind a shell corporation. Not even if I’m willing to pay the fine (Kim Dotcom, for example, made enough profit that he was able, and willing to pay the license fees, and still would have turned a profit, but this was denied).
Citation needed
> (2) Eigentum verpflichtet. Sein Gebrauch soll zugleich dem Wohle der Allgemeinheit dienen.
> (2) Property entails obligations. Its use shall also serve the public good.
In Article 9, it also defines:
> (2) Vereinigungen, deren Zwecke oder deren Tätigkeit den Strafgesetzen zuwiderlaufen oder die sich gegen die verfassungsmäßige Ordnung oder gegen den Gedanken der Völkerverständigung richten, sind verboten.
> (2) Associations whose aims or activities contravene the criminal laws, or that are directed against the constitutional order or the concept of international understanding, shall be prohibited.
If you have the commented version, with comments from the creators and several former and current constitutional court judges, I recommend you read the relevant comments. They specifically discusses these part, and argue that the right to own property, start a group (Vereinigung, including Verein, Unternehmen, etc), own something as a group, etc solely exist to serve society.
This right has obligations, such as the obligation that if you do not need your property, but it can be used to serve society, you can lose the right to it (as has happened in Hamburg in Winter 2015/2016, when a company refused to rent a building to the government so they could use it as refugee accomodation, and, as a result, the building was seized from the company, and used as it anyway).
The comments and quoted constitutional court cases also discuss and outline the limitations, and other situations. For example, if property is seized, then the organization has to be given the market value in return.
I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.
The right of assembly is only given in indoor spaces, which you own, as long as zero aggression happens.
For outdoor assemblies, you'll need approval of the municipal government (and the police can dissolve your assembly, as happened in Hamburg during the G20 protests).
In the same way, as I mentioned, the right to property is frequently limited by nations. In the US, commonly for public projects the state seizes land without repaying the owners, and Germany does similar stuff.
* not in all cases (e.g. Spontandemonstration, where there is no time to file an application)
* the municipal government needs a really good reason to not give approval
* the courts are very sympathetic to virtually any cause should a municipal government decide to forbid a gathering.
> (and the police can dissolve your assembly,
* if there is true danger to the general public. Again, courts are going to slap the police around if they do this just because.
I know how easy it is to use a blanket statement as a base for another blanket statement which is equally one-sided, but please try to build arguments in a less ... attackable way.
Have you looked at even one of the cases in Hamburg with G20?
Spontandemonstrationen that were immediately dissolved with teargas.
No approval for demonstrations without reason, or even situations where courts said the demonstration is legal, and the police dissolved them anyway.
Yeah, I doubt there will be any repercussions, de Maiziere will jail some more left-wing journalists, Merkel will become chancellor again, and in Hamburg instead of the Mayor maybe some low-level police officer will resign.
Although every police officer involved in this said that the ridiculous orders came from high up.
Have a look at Stuttgart. They lost a high-ranking police officer and the MP was not reelected.
For outdoor assemblies you need to inform a designated authority (which is not the same as an approval) and comply with certain restrictions.
[1]: https://www.bundestag.de/grundgesetz The text of the German consitution law
[2]: https://europa.eu/european-union/law/treaties_en The text of the EU treaties
I'm not sure where to look for the precise definition of "fiduciary".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiduciary fiduciary: A fiduciary is a person who holds a legal or ethical relationship of trust with one or more other parties (person or group of persons).
http://dictionary.law.com/Default.aspx?selected=744 fiduciary: 1) n. from the Latin fiducia, meaning "trust," a person (or a business like a bank or stock brokerage) who has the power and obligation to act for another (often called the beneficiary) under circumstances which require total trust, good faith and honesty. 2) adj. defining a situation or relationship in which a person is acting as a fiduciary for another.
http://dictionary.law.com/Default.aspx?selected=745 fiduciary relationship: n. where one person places complete confidence in another in regard to a particular transaction or one's general affairs or business.
http://dictionary.law.com/Default.aspx?selected=599 duty of care: n. a requirement that a person act toward others and the public with the watchfulness, attention, caution and prudence that a reasonable person in the circumstances would use.
So the business judgment rule isn't where any normal person would want to start on this topic, but I think it's wikipedia article probably is the best in terms of defining a few things and then linking you to more resources.
EDIT: after reading the conservapedia entry on Wesley I found this comment a lot funnier. Unfortunately I couldn't be Mouch, it was said of him that "What I like most about you, Mouch, is that you do not talk too much" and I don't think anyone has ever accused me of that. (:
"That's a nice company improving lives everywhere on the world you have there. It would be so regrettable if something ... happened to it."
Also, what is wrong with a company which improves lives to also improve it's bottom line? I prefer that to an openly hostile company who destroys life that improves it's bottom line.
Nothing as long as it obeys the laws of the countries in which it operates.
You're suggesting however that the EU laws are unjust because Google and perhaps others opted to not follow them. Can't say I agree at all.
By that same logic the laws and regulations governing the financial services industry were unjust because banks the world over opted not to follow them, resulting in the financial crash of 2007/2008.
Even just laws aren't followed by individuals or organisations that realise they can make a lot money by not following it, so I'm not sure the point you are trying to make holds any weight.
Sometimes breaking a law and paying the pathetic fine afterwards is just the cost of doing business, which is why I usually argue for genuinely punitive damages and prison time (like in the case of the banks for example).
And all that ex post facto, too. Laws that only applies to one player are by definition unjust.
And I and the EU both disagree with that notion. Monopolists all use the same defence.
> And all that ex post facto, too. Laws that only applies to one player are by definition unjust.
And these laws apply to every company that might reach the same position so again, I'm not sure what point you are making.
Total cash: $48 billion.
Industry: technology.
It's pretty obvious that the EU is only doing this because Google is a US company.
I am quite sure that google considered simply pulling entirely out of Europe. It wouldn't affect them as much as you think - it's the internet, you can run a website from anywhere.
And it's not like the EU would prevent their citizens from buying ads from Google, so their revenues would not be affected all that much. Their EU sales force could be through a third party (so that Google would not have any assets in the EU).
All that Google would lose is EU employees.
The bare fact this this plan I am outlining is even worth considering rather than bow to the EU demands tells you a lot.
It's pretty obvious that Americans are complaining because Google is a US company and they want it to succeed even at the cost of unethical or illegal behaviour as determined by foreign jurisdictions, and that they deem their own laws to be exceptional and superior to those of all other nations.
See? I can make totally unsubstantiated claims too.
The point being all your comment does is serve to distract from the actual issues in question by turning the issue into a tribal us-versus-them conflict. It's tedious and unproductive.
I'd wager if the US's own regulatory agencies were doing their jobs then each of the 'big four/five' tech companies would have faced penalties in the past on various issues.
They haven't because of that thing you mentioned, protectionism.
Some people need to drink less the libertarian kool-aid, Google is still recovering from missing out China and will do anything do anything eventually to satisfy EU
Your comment lacks anything with relationship with real life.
If it is obvious, it will be easy to explain the reasons for it
> I am quite sure that google considered simply pulling entirely out of Europe. It wouldn't affect them as much as you think - it's the internet, you can run a website from anywhere.
I'm quite sure that Google is glad to not have people like you as CEO.
> And it's not like the EU would prevent their citizens from buying ads from Google
Tell me how a company like Google, or Apple or Microsoft can do business with the EU without being there. And please, no't give nonsensical reasons like internet is everywhere, that just shows that you don't know much about economy.