Isn't the search bar at Amazon.com doing essentially the same thing?
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.
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.
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.
Konkurrenz in German = Competition in English
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.
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”.
The press release might help clear some of this up: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-17-1784_en.htm
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.
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.
MS was mandating IE being included alongside Windows to other companies.
* 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.