EU lawmakers urge regulators to break up Google

They could just double down on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero

What I find rather disturbing is that this isn't so much based on the idea of increasing search competition, but apparently, is being pushed forward because Axel-Springer and others want to charge people for linking and snippets. But if Google had say, 50% marketshare in the EU shared with a competitor, or even a three-way split, it's unlikely to competition would convince anyone to do something as web-breaking as to start paying people for the right to link. Bing already has a sizable marketshare in the US, and yet, neither Google nor Bing are paying the New York Times for search snippets or links.

These publishing orgs are having their business models killed by digital media, you know, models like charging exorbitant pricing for scientific journals behind paywalls, or for school textbooks, or having pricing power of advertising markets, and want to abuse copyright to extract fees from deep pockets. (I'm lumping in Axel-Springer with Springer-Verlag here)

Maybe there is a good argument to be made there should be competition in the EU in search. But protectionism for publishers who want to abuse what has always been assumed a fundamental web freedom, and fair use, I think is a pretty poor reason. The fact that the backers of this motion are also working for the publishers is a huge conflict of interest, and no doubt there's probably intense backdoor lobbying by Microsoft.

"Facebook is eating into Google’s advertising revenue. Despite the success of Android, Google’s mobile platform, the rise of smartphones may undermine Google: users now spend more time on apps than on the web, and Google is gradually losing control of Android as other firms build their own mobile ecosystems on top of its open-source underpinnings. "

(from: the economist article - http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21635000-european-move...)

I read Peter Theil's zero to one, I feel this article is trying to make an effort to some how dress-up Google's search monopoly (just like the way in the book Peter points out Monopolies want to hide by expanding their competition space definition).

I'm gonna say the article "Should Digital Monopolies be Broken Up", in the Economist, is a much more informative article.

Reducing the effectiveness of search does almost nobody any good. If the concern is so great, pool some resources and make an equivalent government sponsored search engine. Which probably no one will use because as much as they mistrust Google, they likely trust their government even less.

Can we keep the hysteria down a bit? The resolution doesn't even mention Google. It merely suggests the European Commission looks into unbundling search-engines for fairly obvious reasons. It's just a resolution from the most toothless parliament on the planet, it has zero actual impact.