European Parliament votes in favour of breaking up Google
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
>The manner in which Google displays its own vertical search services compared with other, competing products
> How Google copies content from other websites - such as restaurant reviews - to include within its own services
> The exclusivity Google has to sell advertising around the search terms people use
> Restrictions on advertisers from moving their online ad campaigns to rival search engines
In my opinion, there's zero chance of Google being broken up, what's more likely is that limited regulations get introduced for services as they are provided in Europe. I recall there being a great hoo-haa about the EU breaking up Microsoft, what actually happened were regulations that they unbundle Media Player and Internet Explorer, and provide some networking specifications to allow for third party clients to interface with Windows. I imagine something similar will happen here.
If you actually want to know the justification for the EU doing this you should read this paper by Ben Edelman.
http://www.benedelman.org/publications/google-tying-2014-10-...
He's consulted for various Google competitors but he's also a professor at Harvard Business School, and the argument he makes is sound.
Ben has literally no legal training in antitrust law that i'm aware of, so his opining on it is somewhat interesting.
(I edited this comment because Ben does have a JD from Harvard law that I forgot about, so he does have legal training, just not anything related to antitrust law)
When he's not writing antitrust papers, he's busy writing scare papers about click fraud, or online ad deals.
There are plenty of people who have views i disagree with, and respect. But folks like Ben, whose views seem to change entirely with who is paying him (i've watched him argue the same thing both ways depending on whether MS was doing it or Google was doing it), are not even worth arguing with.
You only have to look at his testimony list to see where his views lie, and have since 2006.
A major omission when attacking someone's legal qualifications.
> When he's not writing antitrust papers, he's busy writing scare papers about click fraud, or online ad deals
Yes, and they're scary because they are true. The insidious thing about click fraud is that consumers are the mules who do the work but generally are only indirectly harmed. Advertisers and merchants really get screwed. Ben has been exposing those situations for a decade.
> You only have to look at his testimony list to see where his views lie, and have since 2006.
Actually I worked with him in 2005 and his views were consistent then as well. If he works on behalf of people who share his views, that's not a bad thing is it? It's fully disclosed, which is more than I can say for many of his attackers.
See, e.g., http://mumbrella.com.au/google-adwords-benjamin-edelman-3700...
In 2004 when the European commission fined Microsoft €497m, I thought the company had good enough lawyers and lobbies to overturn it. This case and the next one in 2008 finally resulted in more than $2bn in fines [1], more than 3% of its global revenue [2].
[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Microsoft_comp...
[2] http://www.statista.com/statistics/267805/microsofts-global-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8666921
Interestingly the above story has comments that are far more scathing about Google, whereas the story I am now commenting on, which HN has favoured has mostly arguments in defence of Google. What's going on, PG?
There's some mention of Green MEPs every now and then which is because she joined their coalition.
(and she voted against)
I would generally expect a pirate party to support free-of-charge publishing of snippets and linking to content on the internet as a basis for the open internet. On the other hand, I wonder whether the German Pirate Party is able to look beyond what may be construed as an interest of German publishing industry.
It's not actually in that industry's interest and even if in were, no, the Piratenpartei is completely opposed.
Noone is seeing any problem with defending google in one instance, and bashing them in another.
There are true monopolistic firms like Comcast or Time Warner, where there are serious logistic/economic barriers preventing other firms from entering the market. This doesn't seem like one of them to me.
Could you explain how an operating system is a natural monopoly?
Development of a new OS isn't cheap, but isn't prohibitively expensive either. It also isn't undesirable AFAICT.
The cost of providing and OS and an entire ecosystem of device drivers and an an entire ecosystem of apps is very high.
But even if you manage to build that, the cost of training a significant percent of the population into using and developing for your platform is much higher. Getting a significant presence in the "brain space" of a population is very expensive. Having people switch to an alternative is even more expensive due to, among others, human network effects.
Driving adoption is a matter for all products in the market, not specific to operating systems. You can make it easier with familiar UI, advertising and bundling your OS with hardware (although that may be anti-competitive practice it seems to be widely accepted where I live).
It's a matter of degree. To simplify, the costs of switching are linear in the complexity of using the product. I apologize that I don't know how to precisely model human network effects (you need to learn the product from someone) on top of it, but intuitively the societal costs are super-linear.
Computer systems are by far the most complex products human kind has ever produced. Given the simplistic model sketch above, the costs of switching in the computer industry are the highest humanity has ever seen, likely by orders of magnitude. Fun times.
Generally, high complexity of the implementation does not necessarily translate into high complexity of the interface.
Yahoo Search is actually powered by Bing since 2009 according to Wikipedia. Their own search engine was not competitive enough. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search
What would be worrisome is if they abuse their market position. Is there strong evidence they do this in search? It'd be more concerning if they did to promote their other products.
What a monopoly really is and whether Google qualifies is a separate question, and I'm recusing myself from commenting on this point.
I agree. It means it's a natural monopoly. These should be regulated, because otherwise there is a tendency for them to abuse their power.
> There are serious logistic/economic barriers to enter
> the search space.
Something particularly interesting about Google is that they just took the industry head-on. I'd guess that there'd be areas where you could build a kind of search engine that was better than the market leader, and focus on carving out a niche. Yandex have done just this with the Russian market. (and there's an example of a commercially-viable post-google search engine business).
But Google just went after being the leading power.
History in general, but in our space in particular, is written by small, well-coordinated teams who can repeatedly execute. If you can get that team together, you can do almost anything.
There is tremendous barrier to entry in the search space - otherwise Bing wouldn't still suck compared to Google. The point of competition is to get good enough to steal market share from the entrenched incumbents or gain new users somehow. If that doesn't happen, for whatever reason, then you don't have strong competition.
I was blocked indefinitely from Adsense by Google's faulty algorithms (without explanation and with appeals rejected without explanation). I lost the revenue I'd earnt that month, and soon realised Google holds a monopoly in this space, and no one else offered a comparable service.
I'm all for Google's stronghold to be broken. reply
Adsense didn't work for you and you are unhappy with the experience. Does some other company solution works better for you? Then switch. If it doesn't then adsense is giving you the best value for your money and I see no reason for inefficient governments to interfere with how efficient companies function.
edit: I don't mind downvotes but I would appreciate some arguments, especially if you don't agree but you are in favor of free market as opposed to heavily regulated one.
Are you implying that there is a sum of money that could dislodge Googles stranglehold on the search (and therefore search advertising) market? Look at Microsofts efforts with showering Bing with money. If VCs could back a potential Google-killer, what is the chance that it could resist becoming swallowed by Google once the threat was apparent?
> Does some other company solution works better for you? Then switch. If it doesn't then AdSense is giving you the best value for your money
If you are reliant on AdSense and are locked out by a mistake, you're screwed. Google has total dominance, no other platform comes close.
Of course there is advantage in being big, apart from the technology. But that advantage comes from many many people choosing this technology over other options.
ad2. No other platform comes close so let's make it worse so that other ones are closer? I know you think you don't want to make it worse but to improve it. But that's your, or some government opinion. And these opinions are not what led to this dominance. It's quite possible that being led by those opinions it would never succeed, and some other, worse platform would be dominant.
This is the problem, and customer service in Google barely solves anything.
Shockingly, Google allocates their CS to people who pay for their service.
I don't expect 24x7 phone support for free services, but god damnit if my YouTube account gets shut down because of bullshit DMCA requests, or my AdSense account is closed because of fault algorithms suspecting bad-play I expect to have SOME recourse without needing to break out a lawyer and trying to take Google to court.
I have used a wealth of free services and products in my lifetime and NONE have had such piss-poor excuses for support.
> Pay for an Apps account.
I'd rather not need to host my email with Google (another problem I have with their account system, you can no longer make a Google account that isn't a gmail account) just get proper support from them. Even then it doesn't get me support for anything but the Google Apps services, the rest of their support is still garbage.
This happened to a friend of mine:
Shut out of their account for some days, with a "we'll look into it" and no good explanation.
Calling did not help
Well, Google's customers are its product, seeing as it lives off ad revenue. :)
I hear what you are saying though, Google doesn't even care about its own services for what they are, just how much data they can collect from them for advertising.
They're in stark contrast to Microsoft who will keep things on life support forever because they think the service provides value to someone since they can prop it up with funds from elsewhere and a little TLC on occasion, because frequently they can spin them differently or make the changes neccesary for them to become profitable on their own (see BPOS to Office 365).
Nobody forces a business to get big. Nobody forces a business to even exist.
Safari rendering engine has 100% market share of ios browsers.
Similarly, massive chunks of the internet rely on Google (and Facebook) for functionality like authentication. Aside from that, I'd struggle to suggest a different mail provider than gmail such is there monopoly in that space.
Outlook.com is great, I love it more than GMail personally, especially since I can pay a relatively affordable $19/year to get rid of the ads and know that my email provider doesn't have programs scanning every word of every email I send or receive.
Privacy is a feature, you don't get that when using Google services.
But Google search is more like a public utility than a service. It has extreme market penetration which they abuse for various reasons like prime placing for their own products. And that not only hurts competitors but in the end also consumers which will end up with only one option for maps, video sharing, etc. And hypothetically speaking, at this point Google could just shove whatever they want down their throats and tell them to deal with it.
Oh wait they already did that with Google+
Assuming they did prime place their own products, this is not a recognized antitrust harm (it is not bundling or tying, despite random claims on HN).
Harmful indeed.
90% market share + hiding competitor sites to eg Google Places is punishable by EXISTING EU law.
Do you think it's ethical or good for society simply because it hasn't yet been ruled illegal?
My opinion on things related to competition/antitrust are based mainly on evolution of law and economic viewpoints.
Basically, over the past hundred years, courts have moved away from (and economists have strongly supported) declaring these kinds of things as "per-se" illegal precisely because evidence has not shown that you can simply point at them and say "yeah, this hurts competition" or "yeah, this hurts consumers", despite what one may think.
In some cases, this evolution of law/economy has pretty clearly turned out bad for consumers price-wise (with the return of folks requiring retailers to sell at certain minimum prices).
In some cases it hasn't.
This particular thing, hard to say.
The second part of your comment only mentioned prices as a factor in terms of what is good or bad for 'consumers'. I realize that you leave room for other ideas of what is good or bad, but in lieu of mentioning anything else, it seems as though this is all you are willing to put forward as a criterion.
I guess I understand a little more about your perspective, but not much.
Truthfully, this kind of stuff is only tangentially interesting to me: Companies without physical resource monopolies (ie oil, diamonds, whatever) tend to come and go despite all efforts to the contrary. I don't expect Google, Facebook, or anyone else will be any different.
Or the new GMail app on the Lollipop ROM for my Nexus 5.
My email address was originally on Google Apps. I switched to Windows Phone from my Palm Pre in 2011 and they discontinued Exchange ActiveSync support shortly thereafter, so I moved everything over to Windows Live Domains, keeping my Google Apps login as my Google account.
I recently took a foray to Android in June and picked up the Nexus 5 I'm currently using, and I had no issues setting up my now Outlook.com account (same email address I used for my Google account) in the stock AOSP email app, I removed GMail and there was no trace of my no longer used Google Apps services on my device. Now with Lollipop, I always see two email accounts, one of which is the Google Apps account that no longer has email routed to it but I have no way to hide, and since it shares the same address getting my Outlook.com account added was a pain in the ass (it errored saying I cannot add multiple accounts with the same email address, had to use my @outlook.com alias).
Google used its search monopoly to wedge its way into other areas, the two big ones being email (I see way more active @gmail.com users than I do @yahoo.com or @hotmail.com/@outlook.com and ISP emails today) and online video (youtube). They then used these markets to push their way into the mobile space, which now has the opposite effect (their mobile OS is pushing people into using Google services exclusively).
Both iOS and Windows Phone use their own account systems (Apple ID and Microsoft Account respectively) to provide access to platform-specific services (Store, Synchronization, etc) but both allow users to sign up without requiring they create an email account with them, and both platforms have easy setup for the wealth of other email/calendar/contact sync services most people use.
Honestly, anyone who DOESN'T see Google abusing their monopoly position to prevent or at least actively discourage people from using competitive services is lying to themselves.
I happen to be a fan of Duck Duck Go. But I think Google can do without Europe more easily than Europe can do without Google.
There's no need to go to extremes, either. Just like Microsoft, Google can simply buy enough of the European Parliament to get them to quietly change their minds.
I believe the goal of this and recent similar decisions is to fracture the internet, allowing for easier law making and rent seeking.
The analogy isn't perfect, but the citizens of the US want drugs. The American government pours untold billions into its War on Drugs, and as a result there are more drugs available in the US than ever before. Similarly, Europe's Internet users want a smart, convenient master index to the Internet; and they're not likely to knuckle under as docilely as the population of China, whose government has been at least partially successful in locking Google out.
Btw, European Parliament is also not the same as Europe government. It has much weaker influence on things than a typical parliament of a country.
Some European governments ship politicians off to Euro-government just to get them out of the way. Perhaps not quite justly, the Euro Parliament is sometimes considered a retirement institution for incompetent politicians.
It was about the EU Parliament being weak even in relation to the other parts of the eurogovernment. I meant the EU Council in particular.
I mean, where you had to deal with one entity, now you have to deal with two. It's more possible that one of them doesn't accommodate to your whims.
A fractured google is easier to control. Right now, the French government could pass certain laws and Google could simply say no with few detrimental effects (French users would simply use a proxy). With a fractured Google, Google would need to hold all infrastructure servicing French search in France, or at least significant infrastructure, allowing the French government more leverage in law making, and rent seeking.
The US has more assets than Europe.
US GDP is growing drastically faster than Europe's GDP. Europe's economy hasn't grown since 2007, with GDP still below those levels. In another year or two, the US will also have a larger GDP than Europe.
It is all the other things that Europe is not taken seriously for. Before the crisis citizen living in Europe had some feeling of being European (see the talk about a social Europe, European constitution, ...). The crisis had made clear that countries in Europe are business partners rather than a "union of countries", hence the recent push of euro-sceptic parties all over Europe and the call for "preserving country X sovereignty" by traditional parties.
The failures of/problem of the EURO currency recently and the weirdo relationship it caused between EURO-zone countries is a confusing point, but in general, from an economic point of view, Europe is quite active and well respected between all the members. ( and do not get confused by the "Brussels made us do it" card politician play in order to apply unpopular decision they nevertheless supported )
and yet 43% of Europeans decided to vote in the last European elections. That is a higher turnout than many local/regional elections across Europe.
I guess Europeans do care.
Mainly because all the real power rests in the (unelected) European commission.
Also Google is not a European company (wasn't it based in the US ?), so what's the point?
Right now Google uses their power to direct traffic to unfairly compete in a lot of areas, so consumers don't get the best product. Looking at web metrics, often 90% of the traffic to a web site is from Google, and companies live or die based on that traffic. So unfairly placing your own products above others kills them.
The EU parliament for some time now has been a mess of fringe politics from both the extreme right and left, all the crazy parties that can't get elected in their own countries join forces and form even crazier pan European parties, and whats worse is that all the crazy (and just plain bad) politicians that can't get elected locally manage to get elected to the EUP...
If the Europeans aren't careful, all they're going to accomplish is a tit-for-tat economic war.
Can you explain how any of those examples are abusing their market dominance?
For example, if Porsche engines only ran on Porsche oil and petrol, available only from Porsche fuel stations which required an annual membership subscription, then that might be a problem.
I'm not sure how that would help refute an accusation that they're abusing their monopoly. It would seem to play right into the accusers' hands.
Google do search better than anyone else. Before Google I would use 2 or 3 search engines but once Google proved their Quality I had no reason to go elsewhere.
Using SEPs for suing others is wrong. Google has learning marketing ploys from IBM, place ads in influential tech blogs, get lots of good PR, the same blogs will call anyone a patent troll but Google.
And because I know this will come up- Patents are not evil- the system is broken sure, people misuse trivial patents, but at the same time, people who put hard work in their work need to be rewarded (for meaningful patents). If I'm an academician and I've spent 5 years coming up in my life with something innovative that would otherwise have taken a lot of time, then I should have the option to sell it to someone who is better equipped to monetize it. It's like an author hiring a publisher. So patent consortiums are not trolls, they are like publishers. Google is because they misused SEPs.
Sidenote: I'm against those kiddish patents that are just about 'describing at technique in which x y z'. I feel the patent overhaul should involve the FTC creating a team that would decide the 'year' validity of a patent, and companies having to pay for it. That notwithstanding, Google is a troll. And just because it gives out free stuff, you guys like it.
Source for that?
... until the mess in the Ukraine started and they had to choose between Russia and the US (again).
(insert snark about replacing one reliance with another via TTIP)
If the EU wants a trade war, then they'll have it.
There is competition but (in my opinion) dont do enough or arnt what i want. There isnt any way i see google stiffling competition that i can see as i have tried quite a few (and do use them on occasion), to me it seems as if its more because their not a european produce (as techdirt originaly noted and seemed to ring true to me).
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141121/17314329218/eu-pa...
And also to the fact that i dont believe they are a monopoly(nor do i think their abusing their position), and as such dont think anyone has any right to demand anything from them - especially breaking the company up.