This is just "Europe trying to somehow regulate big tech chapter #N-plus-one", and while I do actually sympathize with the broader goal, news companies of all people complaining about Google don't deserve any compassion whatsoever.
Also, the major driver of this news is Google's attempts to get Australia to drop legislation. Australia is about as far away from Europe as you can get
This isn't a fair characterization. They want their content to be indexed by Google, and furthermore most of those entities have separate distribution channels (television networks, print newspapers, etc.) that Google can't touch. Most people don't want to buy newspapers or watch news channels, but frankly they are absolutely correct, because 99% of that is freaking garbage no better than your average Facebook group.
> Australia
s/Europe/politicians-worldwide/g
My point wasn't about Europe in particular (just observing that this kind of move, for better or for worse, is more popular in the EU). Again, I do agree that we should do something about Google & friends, but this piece of legislation is the classical politician's fallacy: we should do something, this is something, hence this is good.
I would argue most people don't want to buy newspapers because we have created an expectation that content should be free.
As to the quality of the content, a) that's subjective and b) it can be seen as natural evolution of an industry whose income source has been decimated by Google/Facebook. It's a lot cheaper to produce what you (and I do as well, to be fair) consider garbage than to produce the quality content we would like to see coming from newspapers.
It's like if there were a single supermarket chain and they refused to carry a product. Oh well. Customers don't really like it, but in the grand scheme the supermarket doesn't care.
There are also real issues about value creation and value capture in economies. Some places are good at one and not the other.
Google depends on 'the content of the world' being given to them for free, they'd be nothing without it, by being a 'single point of access' it gives them a lot of power.
So free market arguments apply, but it's still more complicated.
There are basically zero markets in which there is one completely dominant player due to the nature of 'product quality' alone, there are always external factors or even natural artifacts of the system that facilitate a dominant player.
For the same reason that YC companies don't go ahead and just compete with airliner manufacturers such as Boeing whereupon the only competition is derived from massive, state-backed players - it is not possible to complete with Google today.
The barriers to entry towards building a great search engine are likely more insurmountable than even those for airline carriers, the notion that some entity with the 'right stuff' could go ahead and do it is laughable at face value.
Compounded with the fact that Google has entrenched and most likely anti-competitive distribution to market via Android, Chrome - the argument becomes moot.
So first, we need to separate Android, Chrome and Google at very least, and then ensure that access to browsing technologies is on a truly level playing field. That would be a good start.
At this point, frankly, many other browser technologies - even those materially inferior would start to come to the fore - which is probably illustrative of where the 'true power' of Google comes from, i.e. more from distribution dominance than from actual search tech.
While we are at it we can legislate grounds for app competition, platform openness, personal data ownership and the rules concerning the objective self-regulation of social media companies.
At the same time, we shouldn't leave the 'sleeping giant' MS Windows distribution monopoly out of our sights either.
Google has been a barrier to progress for almost a decade now, they are just another Oracle but with pink and green hair.
And yet, Standard Oil put them all out of business somehow.
Your comment fails to address market structure and externalities: Baidu and Yandex are both strategic investments by national players for what are de facto protected industries.
It's futile to compare Baidu and Google on a 'free market basis', ironically, doing so rhetorically will yield for you some understanding of Google's position.
And of course: "Google being popular doesn't stop a competitor from serving the exact same results."
This is false, and if it were true, would undermine your own argument.
DDG/Bing has some good results, but generally not competitive on the whole with G particularly in the long tail - and the tail is very long.
Second - if they did actually have results of 'equal quality' then why would Google own 95% of the market?
Because people just randomly and arbitrarily chose Google over competitors for no reason related to quality?
Or could it be that market structure and distribution (and long-tail quality, which is an insurmountable problem) are impossible to achieve.
Put differently Google is the default option on a lot of platforms, because Google uses it's market power to ensure that.
The analogy would be: "The Supermarket sells one kind of water. It's water. The same as all other water and it's the same price. It's called Google water, it's right there at checkout, you can pick up unlimited quantities" - and if you prompt, and ask about it, you may find out that there are 'other brands' of water available, and yes, it's probably of the same quality, but if you wait a few minutes, the clerk can go into the back and maybe find some'.
Google owns all of the shelf space.
In a close real world analogy - it's for the same reason that you can only get 'Coke' or 'Pepsi' in many situations, and for the same reason there is no '3rd Cola'.
Contemplate the situation with that question: "If DDG etc. produce the same results, why does everyone chose G?" because that will unpack a lot for you.
Because Google is the best search engine in the same way the iPhone is the best phone. That doesn’t mean an Android phone can’t do all the same things an iPhone can. That doesn’t mean DuckDuckGo can’t find you all the things Google can.
You're describing a classic prisoner's dilemma.
That is, it's in the interest of the news industry as a whole to not list their content for free, but if individual news companies do that, they will lose out relative to the alternative, so every individual news company is trapped in a situation they don't prefer.
Google set this prisoner's dilemma to their advantage, using their position as a monopoly power to create it. It's reasonable, then, for the EU and the news industry to seek to remove Google's monopoly advantages.
> It's reasonable, then, for the EU and the news industry to seek to remove Google's monopoly advantages.
Yes, it is. But this legislation does nothing to attempt to break Google's monopoly, while at the same time granting very weird and very specific privileges to the very rich, very well-connected, very corrupt news company owners.
Google is absolutely a monopoly and is absolutely abusing that position. We should stop the monopoly situation, not introduce very weird stuff that just so happens to favor people with no reasonable claims whatsoever except "I'm friends with the regulator".
I agree - and this solution has been agreed by Google because it suits their interests. They now get to collude with other powerful actors without having to worry about the less powerful (and have set this as an available precedent across the EU).
I would find it more satisfying if Australia called Google's bluff and told them where to go.
The second sentence disproves the first. It's effectively a prisoner's dilemma because communication between the players is effectively infeasible through illegality.
And, at the root of it, is ad-based business model. That's one of the many reasons I believe ad-subsidizing should be made illegal: it's anticompetitive and antisocial, in that the moment you start doing it, competitors need to follow suit, and you destroy the possibility of competing using honest, ethically above-board business models.
In some cases we'd probably even benefit, because the news sites will stop being ranked higher than the primary sources themselves. Quite often when I Google the release of a new product or some new government policy the highest ranked results are all news articles. They bury the actual press release that the government or company themselves posted.
No it isn't, because what they do has very little to do with what anybody else does.
If your options are get listed for free or don't get listed at all, you have the incentive to be listed because the traffic makes you more money than not. This is true regardless of what anybody else does. Meanwhile anybody choosing to be listed doesn't hurt the people choosing not to be -- it hurts the other people who are, by providing more news sources in the Google search results and diluting their traffic.
What you're really saying is that if the largest news corporations form a de facto cartel through the use of the legislature to prevent Google from freely linking to everyone, they can monopolize the industry by disabling a discovery mechanism for independent news competitors.
No, they can't. The first answer to the Google issue from the French press was sensible. Individualy they know their content is worth money but individualy they are weak so they try to form a syndicate to negociate with Google in a pay-or-nothing position. But Google argued the French equivalent of fair use allowed them to scrap titles for free.
The French competition regulator had to intervene to force Google to go negociate. You can't negociate in good faith with a monopoly like Google. As the USA has apparently decided it won't apply its antitrust law in order to protect the international competitiveness of its abusive companies, obviously Europe will have to rein them in.
Google doesn't want it. Bing wouldn't accept it. DuckDuckGo wouldn't accept it. Qwant probably wouldn't, for that matter. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and HN wouldn't (in fact, Reddit actively lobbied against the EUCD).
The publishers went after Google because it's both the biggest mark and also the most unpopular.
If they wanted to be principled, they'd apply the same law to Bing, Facebook, Reddit, etc. Except they won't, because Bing, Facebook and Reddit would simply remove any links to French news sites, and they would be hard pressed to make a case for monopoly power when every single content platform reacts the same way.