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Comment by alach11 | Hacker News Reader

A lot more information about the case is available here [0]. The ruling is about promoting Google Shopping results above other comparison shopping websites. The fine "has been calculated on the basis of the value of Google's revenue from its comparison shopping service in the 13 EEA countries concerned."

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_17_...

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There used to be a ton of shopping "comparison" and "review" site spam. There still is. For a while google shopping seemed better. I actually liked google's involvement.

Then they seemed to turn into ads? Now I ignore it along with most of the others as I'm sure many folks do and just shop through a few places (which is only marginally better).

i just resent that shopping links are at the top of every image search - jesus google, i’m not always trying to shop

> i’m not always trying to shop

Seducing you into consumption is how Google makes money, isn't it?

And let's not get into the horizontal scrolling UI abomination they've added recently.

Froogle was better.

I think if Google cares about product search quality then it would be good. Now it’s just a paid product rather than trying to organize and present info.

oh man, I'd forgotten about Froogle

Interesting calculation. Did they deduct taxes paid, salaries and dev time?

If not, this was a negative sum game for google.

Would be very curious to know.

I should hope so. The whole point of these fines should be to prevent the behavior rather than just make it a cost of doing business.

If you are willing to read, here's the original decision PDF, including details about fine: https://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/cases/dec_docs/39...

Revenue, not profit, so that by definition doesn't deduct any costs.

Google does not pay significant taxes in EU. Just like other companies they use a lot of tricks to avoid paying taxes.

Sounds like the tax laws needs changing. I don’t know how we can blame companies from leveraging loopholes if they are available.

How you fix a situation when a child company in Country A pays parent company in Country B a given amount for using logos, trademarks?

Put a tax on licence fees for logos and trademarks.

It is less the tax laws and more the trade agreements between countries. Until a few years ago the biggest tech companies used a bit of creative accounting to make sure that all their EU profits would at least on paper be made in Ireland because it had the lowest taxes of all and Ireland had no reason to change that. The EU stepped in once it came out just how far the Irish tax office was willing to go to support that scheme, I think they outright allowed Apple to skip the pretense (and several shell companies) entirely while declaring their profits to be Irish.

One problem with these non-Google price comparison sites is that they don't always show the best or cheapest products but the products that give the best affiliate commissions to the sites.

Even Google shopping doesn't show the cheapest results. It's a paid-for service, and the seller who pays most places first. There used to be a free and paid tier, but now it's all paid.

Quick- name as many other companies in this market as you can.

Heck name a single product comparison shopping search engine.

Well, there are all those suggested by Google – oh, wait.

idealo.de tweakers.net/pricewatch .. in my corner of this earth.

There were / are plenty. Google's idea of being the only game in town is mostly marketing for almost all of their products.

geizhals.de might also qualify.

Was going to post this: Geizhals is amazing, especially to understand and browse variants of the same product. Their database is wonderful.

PriceRunner is big in Denmark.

I used to use shopbot.ca but it became fully useless around 2 or 3 years ago.

Amazon, Ebay, Shopify pages, etc.

It doesn't really matter because google shopping is (or was?) just search ads with pictures. Every item shown was set up and paid for in Ads IIRC.

kelkoo, prisjakt.nu, pricerunner.se

From the top of my head: Ceneo, Cenowarka, Idealo, Skąpiec.

Not commenting on Google, but the problem with monopolies is you don't know what other and potentially better products might exist now if there was fair competition. Companies aren't going to fund a competing product when they know they're against a powerful monopoly.

"But the company being accused of having a monopoly has the best product and I like it" was said about Windows too when they were locking out competition. It's short-sighted.

https://market.yandex.ru (only in Russian). Exists for over 10 years. Was my to go place to shop for electronics due to extensive filtering. It actually still is even after moving to US: I just pick the device there, then order on BestBuy/Amazon/NewEgg.

kieskeurig.nl/be, beslist.nl, kelkoo; all of which are relatively popular in just the Netherlands. Those are the few that survived by focusing on tiny niches; in this case a tiny geographic and language-demography.

Heureka and zbozi.cz are the big ones we use in Czech Reoublic.

When I lived in Czech Republic the local sites for maps (maybe mapy.cz??) and email (seznam.cz) were still quite strong. Is it still the case?

Yep & there are now more sites like news (seznam zpravy) and video streaming (stream.cz, mall.tv). :)

heureka.cz

It's really nice to have thriving local internet.

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