Swedish court says Google is to pay $1.5B to Klarna in antitrust damages
reuters.com
reuters.com
The article is pretty light on detail about what "favoring their own service" actually meant. Just that it appeared above Klarna's when a user searched BNPL?
It all seems vague and hard to cure. The algorithm is typically very good at surfacing the least shitty option, so if the resolution is "well you have to jumble them now" that's strictly worse for me as a consumer.
Google runs the dominant search engine, which they control the rankings of and sells ads on, while also competing against companies that buy ads from them and fight to maintain a spot on the index is almost immediately suspicious. The potential for abuse is incredibly high, and at one point would probably have been concerning enough to invoke regulators without even acting on the potential for misconduct.
It’s like taking the babysitter out to a fancy dinner alone. It could be something totally normal, but it looks bad enough that you probably wouldn’t do it.
The real answer is that Google would probably need to sell off that arm. There is no configuration where Google retains the control or benefits of the Shopping product without being locked in conflicts of interest around the index. It’s always going to look like the way Standard Oil was setup, because it is set up the way Standard Oil was. They own infrastructure, and they compete upstream against other companies forced to use that infrastructure. There’s no way to resolve that conflict of interest.
And google shouldn't give any special treatment to their own products when ranking search results.
That said, a price comparison tool is essentially a specialized search engine, and it makes a lot of sense to gather price comparison information while indexing for search, and I don't think having price comparison built in to a search engine is necessarily a bad thing. Although, I'm a little distrustful of google shopping results.
TBH it's the same as Google not linking to other search engines' result pages in its search results. Why would it, when it can link directly the content the user wants?
There is nothing that says that Google must exist in every vertical. It would be completely fine if they shirt these things down.
Presumably Google Shopping will be better at matching users to items and be able to big more than most on average, but 3rd parties can still develop an edge in some niches.
Anyway, the EU wasn't satisfied and fined them another 7bn. And obviously competitors like free traffic, not having to pay Google.
I think they have since started removing rich units for things like Flights/Hotels and trying to figure out what product they are allowed to actually provide in the EU.
But in general, they are just going to keep getting sued forever because they have a strong incentive to find the line on how to monetize search and obviously other aggregators do not like this and have the EU on their side.
In general, operating in the EU seems like a mine field where you have to accept that you're going to get shaken down regularly and do the best you can to thread the needle profitably.
I have often had a look at Google shopping results but very rarely clicked one.
I think when searching for an answer ai assist is often sufficient but not for where you are buying?
Pretty sure that tab is all ads, so its all garbage, in some cases some of the results look like scams.
I knew what shoes I wanted, there are plenty of no-name merchants selling them, competing on price (last year's model, so not being sold in big name stores). Click through each of them, find one with the right size, colour, delivery prices. Very painless. If some of the merchants are scams, I wouldn't know, my shoes arrived anyway.
Instead of "all ads, so it's all garbage" this is exactly what I wish all advertising could be.
Not that we've seen any effective enforcement against it...
Fines need to start doubling for every time one of these companies reoffend.
In reality, how many different apps do you need? Do you need 3 million apps? One can probably get by with 50,000 apps. It would still basically be the same in terms of user experience. Most users wouldn’t even know the difference. The only people crying would be other businesses. who want to latch on.
Note: Sony Nintendo over the years get very helpful people, so-called experts who say they must change the way they do things to conform with everyone else, but they never do. still in business, and still kicking Microsoft’s ass.
Google was ruled a monopoly, Apple was not. Every took notes.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jun/27/google-brac...
Klarna bought pricerunner for just under a billion 5 years ago, pretty good deal.
There is no reason why there can’t be a search engine or any other major service or hardware system originating from Europe other than all the red tape, the EU puts in the way they kill small companies before they even get a chance to get bigger You can’t come up with a new idea and monetize it if you have to make it open to everyone from the start.
Arm processors, for example, originated in the EU, the EU, or I should say Europe, has Linux, and there have been other pioneering forms of technology and software and hardware over the years, but the environment in the EU kills off small companies. You can’t share everything at the beginning of a company’s life.
I’m still waiting for Linux on the desktop, Linux running on Arm computers sold by a company with both hardware and software working together as one in a user-friendly manner to the average person, you go to a store or you go online, you buy it, you take it home, you use it. On day one, within the first ten minutes of plugging it in, there really is no excuse.
After thirty-five years, of not having something workable for the average person to use, and there again, I don’t mean what is currently out there which is nothing, And no, it’s not Apple’s responsibility or Nvidia or AMD to make that happen where is that new European start-up up?
Forcing companies of any size to give free infrastructure rides isn’t the way to compete in any industry.
Also, Europe does not have Linux. It does not own it and linux is not exclusive to Europe.
Also, do recall the "Great Firewall". And kindly remember that Social Media, Communications, Search & Information, News Outlets, etc were all banned.
All this protected domestic innovation and the domestic market.
Good for China - this is what all nations trading with the US should have done to avoid extreme US monopoly and influence. China is the nation smiling while the boots of the American Big Bully and Bigger American Oligarchs have become rather tiresome.
These companies got steamrolled by Google because their service wasn't very good. It's all an affiliate marketing play, where they get traffic for keywords through Google organic search (these sides made heavy use of SEO) and Adwords. When you land on the site, everything is an ad, either a merchant product link the merchant pays per click for or less commonly, an affiliate link. Result ranking is tuned between revenue and relevancy.
The problems are it's not really a comparison as much as search results, you're clicking in from a Google SERP to another list of search results, and the results used factors other than relevancy, and the side was designed to encourage click-outs.
Google gave its own price comparison service favorable treatment in search results, thereby abusing their dominance in the search market:
"Google has systematically given prominent placement to its own comparison shopping service: when a consumer enters a query into the Google search engine in relation to which Google's comparison shopping service wants to show results, these are displayed at or near the top of the search results.
Google has demoted rival comparison shopping services in its search results: rival comparison shopping services appear in Google's search results on the basis of Google's generic search algorithms. Google has included a number of criteria in these algorithms, as a result of which rival comparison shopping services are demoted. Evidence shows that even the most highly ranked rival service appears on average only on page four of Google's search results, and others appear even further down. Google's own comparison shopping service is not subject to Google's generic search algorithms, including such demotions.
As a result, Google's comparison shopping service is much more visible to consumers in Google's search results, whilst rival comparison shopping services are much less visible."
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_17_...
It is similar to Microsoft's anti-competitive business practices of the 1990's. There is no legal uncertainty at all -- Google must have know that its conduct was illegal and deserve to pay hundreds of billions in punitive damages.
You can choose to go into debt with them and they make that really easy. But it's a choice in the end. If you can't be trusted running your own finances, don't get a credit card from any bank.
Is this real accountability for anti-competitive behaviour, or just another cost of doing business for Big Tech?
My cynicism is tell me that unfortunately it is the latter.
(I can’t possibly understand this being downvoted.
The downvote button isn’t an “I disagree” button.)
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
and yes, downvoting is a perfectly fine disagree button, what else do you think it is
Anyway, downvote = “This doesn’t belong here.” or “This doesn’t attempt to contribute to the discussion.”
If everyone here downvoted each time they disagreed, there would be few comments alive…and little discussion.
The reply button is the disagree button.
Otherwise, for comments of any length, it isn’t even clear what’s being disagreed with!
That’s what they do. It’s how HN works. I’m pretty sure pg said that a while ago. You can write a reply if you want to engage, you don’t have to. You can downvote or not if you disagree, that’s up to you.
Edit: found it, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
Edit 2: that comment is almost 20y old! Fuck I’m becoming old
That’s what you do.
> You can write a reply if you want to engage, you don’t have to.
Downvoting is engaging - in my opinion,
just incompletely - if nobody else has replied yet enumerating your dissenting viewpoint.
Here’s mine (the reply to the pg comment - their account is older than yours, if that matters): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117237
The former is nigh impossible, the latter is fairly trivial with sufficient will.
Those are just more avenues for Google to collect data to shove ads down everyone's throats.
Good that regulations keeps Google from releasing more pf their shit here. Governments should really tighten the screws there.
If they stop providing value to users, they are putting their ad business at risk. It's never free, providing value to share holders is a top priority.
Them not launching in Europe gives the local market a chance to build up its own players. China was very successful in this thanks to the Great Firewall.
And you think local players are going to look at users with this comically detached worldview and be like "Yeah, we want to build services for that group of people to use"?
Raise your hand if you use an ad blocker.
I rest my case.
Regardless of whether the ads reach you or not, you as a data point add to the count that make the package enticing to advertisers, so you're helping them sell the package anyways.
Ain't nobody buying user data on users who block all ads and trackers, it's worth almost nothing (what are you going to do, show them ads?). Fun aside, the reason why people get so many awful scam and malware ads when they turn off their ad-blocker is exactly because no other advertiser will bid on them, because they have no ad-profile/ad-value.
And yes, people don't like being monetized without the company doing it being transparent about how and what they're doing.
An ad blocker has nothing to do with protecting you from Google fingerprinting and categorizing you.
And yes, there's local players building that are targeting precisely those users. No data harvesting is a major selling point of many European startups. Think of Proton, Mullvad, Nextcloud as a few examples.
It's also great that European startups have privacy services, I pay for proton myself, but none of these guys make any money compared to the ad model giants.
The cattle are free to leave the farm and pay full price for their feed elsewhere and get guarantees. But again, so far virtually zero cattle have been slaughtered at the "free" farm in the last two decades, and the pay-for-feed farms are comparatively vacant.
Exactly! This is what is genius about Trumps tariff strategy, as you correctly point out. Blocking Chinese EVs gives a chance to bully up local players.
They just continued on making bad cars, making no improvements, not adjusting to the new environment, other than begging the government to save them., US steel was the same way. Note the executives at the top of all these companies had no hesitation in blaming their workers on the production line for all their troubles.
The game plan is still not to compete. I sometimes wonder, I should say I believe that no one at Ford or GM at the top even cares about cars. There doesn’t seem to be any love whatsoever. It’s just another MBA at the top making a commodity.
One thing Europe has going for them is that there are a few car companies in Germany and Italy that seem to still care about the joy of driving, of making a good car, although that seems to be disappearing too.
(Even India has fined them 100s of millions of dollars - https://ssrana.in/articles/google-fined-anti-competitive-pra... ).
Internet wont be human steered by the time this is over
Just agents running x402 payments over mcp servers
Why would Google NOT favor it's own service at it's own product? How is that illegal?
Why have local laws in that case? Better we all just adopt American laws to not have to fear the Americans getting pissy when they diverge...
Protectionism works both ways - as it should. So if Sweden disadvantages American companies in the name of protecting domestic companies like Klarna, then it's completely expected that the US will do the same thing against Swedish companies to protect their domestic companies.
All of Europe can't even push back a broken husk of Russia.
Of course if the Russians make it to the German border AfD will welcome them with open arms and the rest of the German public will be too busy debating if raising the debt limit to dig their own graves is acceptable if it means limiting pensions, and if so, what are acceptable working hours for grave diggers, pension plans for grave diggers, and whom should negotiate on behalf of the grave diggers.
Considering Klarna essentially boils down to a lending service for people who want to buy stuff they aren't able to afford in the moment, I don't think this is the dunk you think it is.
1.5B is preferable to being broken up (not that Sweden could enforce that)
Similarly, they bundle Bing as the Web search in the start menu.
At this point can you make a custom task manager and sue Microsoft to propose users to install your task manager on first boot? What about background image providers, why doesn't Microsoft propose to install background images from them at first boot?
It's an absolutely ridiculous idea.
They should not block alternatives, but having to promote them is complete nonsense.
The law isn’t just “what you happen to intuitively think is right”, especially in a jurisdiction where you clearly do not reside.
For instance, if a company started up an ad business, are they going to sue and win, because Google uses their own ad service in Search instead of this new competitor?
That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
A company can create a new search engine and Google Search isn't obligated to even mention it.
The issue is when achieving market dominance and new service is integrated into the dominant product.
You clearly haven't been around long enough to have caught a lot of discussions on this topic over a decade ago.
Google literally is a convicted monopolist in the Search antitrust case. The judge just didn’t impose any remedy or penalty.
Many of the arguments around that case had to do with bundling Search, nothing to do with other products. It was Search.
This is why the Firefox CEO gave Google the testimony they paid for, and retired shortly thereafter. It was quid pro quo.
Firefox was paid for years to include Search so one day they’d show up to court and say “we include Google because they are the best, not because they pay us”. The judge didn’t actually buy it, but that was the deal - we pay you millions, one day you show up and read a script.
The confusing part to the lay person is Google got away with it despite the prosecutions case holding.
Imagine if a person robbed a bank and was convicted. The judge then said, ok you robbed the bank, the prosecution proved it, I rule in their favor.
However, when it comes to the punishment, I’m just going to let it slide, you can go home now.
Also, keep the money you stole, and if you happen to walk by another bank…say Associated Investments (AI), just go ahead and rob that one!
But for example if they're behind a user choice like a click after your search is done, ie click shopping or maps because you want to use googles products in this case, then its likely not over the line. If its still over the line would they be required to unbundle products by for example using different domains? Would that also apply to things like facebook marketplace then?
FWIW, even what you think should be allowed is banned in Europe. On Google Search in the EU there is no "Shopping" or "Maps" tab.
https://www.google.com/shopping is still available, just no link to it, so about as decoupled as a separate domain?
So Google is allowed to favour their own price comparison in, say, Hangouts, but not in Search.
It is now illegal as laws have been introduced with the aim to prevent this from happening again. The effectiveness of these laws, with regards to how well they fit the current era, is a different matter.