French Senate Backs Bid To Force Google To Disclose Search Algorithm Workings
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
1) This is clearly bullshit designed to distract from more pressing issues that the French government can't solve or is unwilling to solve.
2) France's notorious protectionism, while immensely irritating to outsiders, does a reasonable job at preserving French language and culture, and creating a local vacuum for French native solutions. Trade and culture protectionism has a long-history of working quite well in many countries seeking to create national identity and industry when used correctly.
These two riffs will continue to get played, with #2 reinforcing #1 while necessary, to try and encourage native French solutions. France is under tremendous economic and cultural pressure from better performing regional partners like Germany and the U.K., and globally by the U.S., China and Japan (pick whichever you think is better performing in terms of economics and cultural expansion).
It kind of sucks, but it's also why, when you go to France, and even Paris, you know you're in Paris and not yet another cosmopolitan mega-city. It's also part of the reason why French culture and ideas continue to be interesting and exportable.
Much of this of course is France's continued decline as a global power. London, New York and Paris used to be a given global triumvirate. And Paris's membership in the top-3 isn't a given any more. It's now in a mix of second-tier alpha cities with Tokyo, Beijing and Dubai.
Outsiders look at this and say "of course Paris is in decline, this kind of behavior is why". Tighter global integration and more openness seems to be the way to the top and maintaining it. But for French leadership, losing cultural identity is not worth it. What if the world thought La Défense = Paris and the rest of the city was just some curious suburb? Is this [1] something that anybody cares about?
1 - http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2014/067/b/7/skyline_la_de...
I'm also not sure French culture is preserved that well in France. Sir Colin Davis was a better Berlioz interpreter than any French conductor I ever heard (and I was born 50km from la Cote St Andre), and even traditional Haute Cuisine is better abroad (particularly in Tokyo - see Apicius).
On the upside, a castle in Normandie or the South West today [3] costs less than a 1 bedroom in the nicer parts of Sydney. And those mostly empty TGVs where first class can be cheaper than second are nice when you need to get between Paris and Geneva and avoid those awful Parisian airports.
Acemoglu and Robinson [4] describe how the descendants of the world-leading Venetian Republicans now serve ice creams on their ancestors' plazas to today's "Venetians", visiting from Houston or Hong Kong. Sometimes, going home for Christmas feels like that. Luckily, London is only 45 minutes away with EasyJet.
[1] http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ais_%C3%A9tablis_hors...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_France
[3] http://www.patrice-besse.com/ is one of the best sites for castles. http://www.realestate.com.au/ for Sydney prices.
[4] http://www.amazon.com/Why-Nations-Fail-Origins-Prosperity-eb...
Although my favorite is: http://www.patrice-besse.com/chateaux-a-vendre/bourgogne/ven... - for only 3m EUR you get a moat with lifting bridge, gargoyles, and some real towers to shoot your crossbows from. You never know when the peasants might revolt!
You can't drop assertions like that while hoping that being French makes you automatically right about French culture. You have a right to your opinion, but please just don't proclaim them as if they were universal truths.
For Google, it's quite complicated. The problem is that Google is representing more than 90% of all the requests in France (the usage is also the same for most of european countries anyway). So we can technically say that Google is in a monopoly position for search. The problem is that it's hurting local startups and businesses there. The solution would be to break Google into smaller parts (it's what you do normaly when a monopoly is hurting the free market) but since that's impossible due to the fact that Google is an American company, the government is taking some measures to limit Google's influence. This is one of the measures, the second one which is currently being voted would be to force Google to display competitors on the home page (a bit like Microsoft's ballot screen). I guess that given the current context, they have no other option.
Competition, if it were much better, could easily take away search market share. Having better localized results for France could be one of those ways. People aren't using google because they have no other choice, it's because google is genuinely doing a better job. That's not a reason to break up a company.
In this sense Ma Bell was a natural monopoly. Social networks could be considered natural monopolies for similar reasons.
The only way that Google could be monopolizing search results were to be if they told companies to put bing/yahoo/etc in their robots.txt and only let Google crawl them or google will drop them. That would be an anti-competitive monopolist practice abusing their size and power. They're not doing this.
When you're talking about LAW, and using law to force competition, it shouldn't be because people don't know the difference between a web browser and google. Educating consumers on how to use your product is something google spent a lot of time doing in the beginning when they weren't the default. That's up to you having such a good product that people type in the name of your service into google to get to it assuming google is already their default engine.
I was actually not speaking about using law to force competition but just saying that the general web literacy in France and probably in most of europe is so low that every law that deals with internet does not get any traction with congressmen and in the media because most people doesn't understand an inch of what is as stake therefore they do not care.
MSN Search -> Live Search -> Bing
> Things have changed in the last years but most people configuration once set won't change even if google is not the default search engine for firefox anymore
If you never changed your default search provider in Firefox it was switched for you after the Yahoo deal.
Claiming that people can't understand the difference between a web browser and a search engine therefore Google has a monopoly? That's a farce. First, how did they get Chrome installed anyway if they are that dim?
I know we are on HN here and this may sound crazy for most of you guys if you don't get the opportunity to witness this behaviour but that's what I witness every time I meet people older than 40 that are not in my web people circle.
I think that would quickly change if a search engine came out that was markedly better than Google. I remember when Google first started gaining traction. It only took a few months to go from first hearing about it to everyone person I knew used it as their primary search engine. I feel confident the same thing will happen when another major leap forward in search happens.
Google probably[1] has a monopoly in some areas. It doesn't matter what will happen in the future or if they wanted this monopoly - in some markets, they clearly are the dominant[2] player that could set up barriers to competition in other markets if they wanted to. This means new laws apply that restrict some business practices that would otherwise be legal, and they might have governments coming after them if those laws are not followed, like France seems to be doing right now.
[1] probability will vary depending on which sovereign's antitrust laws under consideration
That's not true. I tried all the search engines, and yes, Google, is the best one.
Remember when Bing had that comparison thing so see which engine you liked better? When I tried it Google won something like 9 times out of 10.
It's not obvious that this is true.
Instead of getting the government to pass laws to do their dirty work, why not just figure out how to compete? We said the same thing with the music, tv, software, and movie industry.
London has an extraordinarily rich, and international culture. You can go to an Ethiopian restaurant where most people barely speak English and see a coffee ceremony, or have chicken gizzards cooked in chorizo in Victoria served by a Portuguese man who arrived last year; you can even live in South Kensington and be fine never speaking a word of English (as many French expats end up doing, kids at CDG etc.). Even looking at so called "native" English culture, a LOT is influenced by the historical openness of the British Empire to foreign land.
Take Earl Grey: the tea is Chinese and the Bergamot Italian. Or the nation's favorite dish: chicken tikka masala, which is Indian fusion. Or look at the upper classes: who is at the top? Is it the Russian oligarchs fighting for penthouses worth tens of millions? The Chinese billionaires expanding into Europe? The rulers of the financial industry which dominates the economy of a country which is 78% services? Or the increasingly irrelevant land owning aristocracy? In France it's much easier: the elite lives in 16eme or Neuilly and will have studied at the same schools. A true self-made man like Xavier Niel is almost a pariah when in Britain he'd get his own TV show and influence IT policy.
A good point of comparison is architecture: aside from la Defense, Paris is frozen in its Haussmanian redrawing, with most of the cities showing identical streets that were innovative in the late 1800s but struggle to cope with the increasing population today. London on the other hand stretches from the futuristic, Manhattan-like Canary Wharf to the preserved City with a sprinkling of amazing towers (including Europe's most talked about recent skyscraper, the Shard), or the various slices in time such as South Kensington's Victorian architecture or even the Barbican, a testimony to the central planning Brutalist rage of the 60s and 70s.
And the reason for that is squarely the free and encouraged economic migration, the fact that London remains the best city to try your luck in Europe (whose citizen can work anywhere they like within the member states).
A larger version of the phenomenon is Silicon Valley: why don't more companies come from other countries? Because as soon as a decent technologist appears there, he is either scouted and asked to move to the Valley (as happened to the CEO of a Cambridge startup after a 26m USD round, allowing me to grab his flat on the cheap) or he will move there to take advantage of a friendlier environment and the best ecosystem in the world (culture, people, funding, legal framework...). Of course, you hear the same grumbling about the disappearing culture of the "old" San Francisco, even though the city is barely over a century old and has gone through many more booms and busts...
What makes this a problem?
Having been around London most of my life (51 yrs) I find it hard to think of much culture which has gone. Crappy instant coffee and BT phone boxes which hardly worked spring to mind. Most of the other stuff is there if somewhat modified. I suspect the 'London you see in movies' was a bit fictionalised.
Furthermore, after the NewInvSqPR is retrieved, if that indeed ever does take place, the resulting data is placed into a field in a ranking output message, but it is unclear from where that field is read. On page 6766 of Exhibit E, the field appears to be cleared, but the surrounding functionality looks like it is disabled by a flag. Can you explain to this chamber the meaning of this information, specifically with regards to ranking of Google properties relative to competing vertical search websites?"
LARRY PAGE: "..."
They should go back to working on their own "Google killer" search engine :) http://www.infoworld.com/article/2672709/operating-systems/e...
Furthermore they already published their search engine algorithm: http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html
Another open question is what degree of disclosure is being requested from Google. Suppose Google just give them the daily dump of weightings and such from the machine learning systems. Does that qualify as disclosure? They may have a hell of a time trying to figure out whether there is any bias in the system using that. They may just refuse to believe how complex the system is, and think that Google is being difficult.
And again, you might as well be saying "just because cats are complex doesn't mean they're not biased, and if nobody's allowed to audit them, we will never know". Even Google probably doesn't know the specifics of what their engine has learned.
It's also useful to open a link from Word. Do you see any reason why Microsoft should make it possible to open it in anything else than IE?
The way the game works is that you can get away with vertical integration and anti-competitive behaviour as long as you are not in a situation of monopoly. Then the rules change.
Searching for an address is a special case of search. If you search for an address, you're unlikely to get useful results by just searching the web, unless the address happens to be that of a business who lists their address on their site; even then, the result you want from the address is probably a map or directions, rather than the site for the business at that address. So what, precisely, would you suggest Google or another search engine do in that case to continue providing a good user experience? (Answers such as "don't do that" are obviously wrong, as are answers like "go to extra trouble to build a generic search plugin API and make users explicitly select a map provider". Neither of those provides a satisfactory experience for users.)
Clearly, there is a competitive advantage in controlling the browser, or Google would not have spend so much money in giant billboards in the Paris subway to explain how Chrome was better than anything.
> So what, precisely, would you suggest Google or another search engine do in that case to continue providing a good user experience?
Agree with map service vendors on a standard API, and make it possible in the settings to select the service to handle an address search. You know, competition and all that.
The reason is clear. You might want Google to have that power, or dislike the concept of antitrust, but the reasoning for the action is straightforward.
See the Sherman/Clayton antitrust acts and the long list of related SCOTUS rulings.
They want the algorithm disclosed as a legal matter to determine whether competitors are disadvantaged. Which probably means they are more interested in email than source code. There exist hyperintelligent lawyers. Yes, smart enough to understand search. A law firm like Keker and Van Nest [1] could go in there and answer the question. France could be willing to spend a billion to find out, and that's more than they need.
Legislation of technology is frightening to any technologist. But it's much more dangerous if we dismiss the process as ridiculous and refuse to recognize any underlying concerns. Because then technologists won't have any say in the outcome.
EDIT: Paul you're such a prominent guy, I don't mean to speak too strongly, but people really listen to what you say. Entrepreneurs ought to know that legal matters are not so easily dismissed. I do hope, generously speaking, the startups are the ones that call KVN and not the legislators.
So has google put a finger on the scale to rank google properties more highly? Based on their behavior with the results page (vs yelp, for example), I would be surprised if they do, but not very surprised.
Nonetheless, now that google search results are the internet for many people -- and chrome's address bar is used to help blur that distinction -- it's fair that people outside google, represented by governments, start having a say in who shows up and where. That's what happens when you're a monopoly.
It is slightly ironic that bing is the best thing that's happened to google in a decade. Where it not for Balmer deciding to play search engine, google would be known to be a 95+% monopoly in the US as well. Bing allows them to pretend they aren't (though on my blog, for example, 99.28% of ~7k search referral visitors comes from google.)
Given access to the data, or more ideally the ability to rapidly batch query, one could ask does being a google owned or rev-share site affect rankings? And if so, up or down? These are the questions statistics is made to answer.
edit -- and it doesn't even necessarily need be hardwired. For example, google could have more visibility into site interactions on google owned or tooled (GA) sites, and that could tend to lead to lower serps. Ie just the presence of certain features, only available to google when google owns or tools a site, could tend to produce lower ratings no matter what those features are. This is, I would argue, dirty pool for what is effectively a monopoly. And statistics can answer these questions.
Lower latency to the user should. If, ceteris paribus, google sites are lower ranked then yes, that should be illegal. ie consider regression and compute I[google] + site_speed; after controlling for site speed, being a google owned property shouldn't matter. It's fine if google owned sites tend to be faster and hence are more lowly ranked.
I specifically meant more along the lines of google can view your navigation through GA tooled sites, and there is a wealth of information that can be derived from that.
The other has to use force. That's all they know how to use. Its their solution to every problem.
I don't think anybody is suggesting they are simpletons. Unfortunately, French lawmakers are fairly tech-illiterate on average (as demonstrated by the recent vote for the mass surveillance law).
That said, I kind of agree with you. Investigating Google is one thing, asking for them to spill their trade secrets is another.
What we need is not to be involved in matters of law, but to have a mutual defence treaty that will ensure the law doesn't get to steal and redistribute what we make. France needs Google, but to Google France is just one customer - and they should treat them accordingly.
For users with IE or Firefox they have specifically set the search engine to Google. That means users are actively seeking out Google. Maybe require all French citizens to switch search engines once a year? Make browser vendors randomize the choice of search engine?
I would imagine that people would still use Google, regardless, even if links to Bing, Duck Duck Go and Yahoo were on the page. I like Duck Duck Go, but every once and awhile I go back to Google because they do a better job.
Things I'm more worried about than Google's search hegemony:
1) The fact that new computers may soon be unable to load unsigned kernels
2) You buy a device, like a console, it is illegal for you to root it.
3) Content is locked out region by region, and VPN users are considered pirates.
4) Governments want to incorporate back doors to encryption - leaving all less secure
I am confident in the human race's ability to find an arbitrary code execution vulnerability in all major kernels.
I'm rather more worried by the fact that I'm not confident in the human race's ability to write a major kernel without arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities.
This is a bad analogy (unless you mean to say that this second key would be identical for every door, in which case.. sort of).
A better analogy would be that everyone was forced to install a second entry method to their house that only the government knew how to operate.
The inherent problem with this is that as soon as someone else figures out how to operate it, everything with this entry method installed would be accessible to them until it changes or is fixed.
Not in Windows 10 anymore. And while we're talking, Microsoft has always mandated that Arm vendors disallow it - in other words, mandated a lockdown.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/window...
So any piece of software ever is a monopoly and should be broken up? First, we are talking about a page with a single text box in the middle and a list of blue links which are displayed after you click Submit. Are you serious? My 6 year old can used a search engine.
Also, exactly what marketing are you speaking of? And how does one "overcome the effects of marketing" anyway? Next we should outlaw the use of google as a verb meaning, 'to search'. Oh, wait, I'm sure the French have already done that.
The funniest thing is this isn't even about Advertisers and AdWords but actually organic search. Boggles the mind...
It doesn't have to be that bad to be uncompetitive. They can steer people towards their properties in a way that won't bother most people, but will do tremendous harm to their competitors.
> And why is it illegal for search to be biased.
It wouldn't be if Google didn't have 95% of the market share. Google got this market share by being better than everyone else no doubt, but at some point you have to admit that's too much power for one company to have.
Right now Google has the power to effectively remove anyone or any company from the internet. So far we've seen no evidence that they've done anything like this, but if history is any indicator, left unchecked the eventually will.
I thought you didn't need a huge market share to be anticompetitive. Apple didn't have a huge market share in ebooks when it colluded with the publishers.
> but at some point you have to admit that's too much power for one company to have.
I don't think we can just get rid of Google or break them up just because we think they're too big. What did they do? Did they do something illegal?
> Right now Google has the power to effectively remove anyone or any company from the internet. So far we've seen no evidence that they've done anything like this, but if history is any indicator, left unchecked the eventually will.
Why would they expose themselves to such scrutiny? What is it that they can do ten years from now that they can't already do? You don't think their market share could get any larger, do you?
This really, _really_ depends on your philosophy, the way you view companies. In your opinion are they basically structures by which a larger group of people can collaborate on a shared vision/product, another way to serve the community while making a _little_ money on the side? Or are companies inherently self-serving in your opinion, do they exist only to make money regardless of how good increased usage/sales are for society? Is this structure owned by many people, or are founders the only true, and exclusive, owners of a company (not talking about stock here).
I'm not really good at expressing my view on this, so maybe a personal example is more helpful:
I'm all in favour of google being broken up and/or regulated more as a public utility and less as a private company. The reason is that because of the ubiquitousness of 'google' and it's traces in everything related to tech it is more of a public utility than a privately owned company, and should be regulated and restricted as such.
So to explain that in the previous narrative: I think google's importance to society outweighs the rights of the founders/stock holders in regards to who should decide what direction the company should be going in.
Also if you can forgive the snark, there's something more to point out about that sentence:
>I don't think we can just get rid of Google or break them up just because we think they're too big. What did they do? Did they do something illegal?
>I don't think we can just get rid of Google or break them up just because [society decided they are too big]. What did they do? Did they do something [society thinks is wrong]?
Yes, they grew to big.
Not the internet, the whole western world would be closer. I don't know anyone who uses the internet and doesn't use a search engine. And the very large majority use google.
Like I said, it's really how you approach the issue, even determining if there's an issue in the first place.
To me it's not about the company, they come and go. It's about the people, the structures the social aspects of it. No matter if it's Google, Apple or Coca Cola. They're just names and I think people should feel no great sense of loyalty to a company aren't working for or who's ideals they don't believe in.
>This isn't about equality for all
You're right, but you must have missed something. Because, indeed, I don't advocate equality too/for companies and especially not for Google (search). Comprehend for a moment the huge influence a subtle change in search results _could_ have. I don't want that power/chance to lay in the hands of stockholders and/or founders, until such a time that google's usage is down or google is better regulated. Because I feel that they are barely regulated right now. They appear to be able to do whatever they want with their search results. I don't say we should steal google, but they should be prohibited to manipulate current events for example.
Also the reason I'm not too concerned about Coca cola is because there's already rigorous testing and regulation for the foods that you can sell.
Furthermore I don't care about which soda is the most popular, I really, _really_ couldn't care less. I _do_ care about what the most popular search engine is. Because, and it's been said before, the person who controls education controls the future. And Google undeniably has a share in the metaphorical control pie.
As others have commented, if Google had been shown to be malicious with regards to their search results, then I'd say some regulation is in order. But to espouse that we should take control of the direction of their company due to the quality of their product (and the adoption of it, as a result) is, in my opinion, incredibly asinine.
Likewise, if we do break up the company, how would you propose to do that? Because what I think you're going to argue in favor of is treating some of the new pieces as a public utility and leaving other pieces as private corporations.
Is all regulation a slippery slope? Did breaking up AT&T create a chain of events that led to a breakdown of corporate America?
>If Khan Academy is found to be ubiquitous with homeschooling and providing an immense benefit to students, should we strip the leadership of powers lest they teach something we don't think is correct?
If Khan Academy became so popular that nearly all schools closed down and 90% of students were educated solely through Khan Academy, then yes I think Khan Academy should be subject to some pretty tough regulation.
Let's say Disney becomes so popular that they take over every TV channel, every movie studio, and every newspaper. Are you OK with letting them have that kind of power because we are afraid of infringing on the rights of the owners?
It doesn't matter if they did something illegal. Under the interstate commerce act the Federal Government most definitely has the constitutional authority to regulate internet search if they choose to.
The government recently exercised that power to regulate ISPs. The FCC didn't accuse those companies of acting illegally.
>Why would they expose themselves to such scrutiny?
To make more money. If they think they can get away with it, of course they will abuse their monopoly. Show me a monopoly that hasn't done this.
>I thought you didn't need a huge market share to be anticompetitive. Apple didn't have a huge market share in ebooks when it colluded with the publishers.
Their isn't a magical market share that allows anticompetiveness. The key is to look at the potential harm that Google's monopoly allows. As a society we do it all the time. The constitution says we have a right to bear arms, but we still regulate weapons of mass destruction because the potential for harm is so great.
ISPs are natural monopolies. Duplicating the subscriber line network would (usually) be economically inefficient and pointless. "A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which it is most efficient (...) for production to be permanently concentrated in a single firm rather than contested competitively." (Wikipedia)
This is not at all the case with search engines. Develop a superior algorithm and you're in the game. That's how Google once overtook Yahoo, Ask, etc.
There are natural monopolies that aren't strictly regulated. And there are industries that aren't natural monopolies that are strictly regulated.
The key is to examine the potential harm and the desired outcomes.
>Develop a superior algorithm and you're in the game.
That is entirely possible (or it might not be [1]). It doesn't change the fact that right now and for the foreseeable future, Google is the gatekeeper to the internet.
Right now Google directly controls the destiny of millions of people. One minor algorithm change can (and has) wiped out the fortunes of thousands of companies.
[1]Android market share could easily become high enough that Google could retain their monopoly even with inferior search technology.
Like pharmaceutical companies? Like those WMD manufacturers that you mention quite often? Lifes are at stake there. That's another good justification for regulation.
> Android market share could easily become high enough that Google could retain their monopoly even with inferior search technology.
You may not be able to switch the search provider of your Android phone's default home screen (but you can install a different home screen). The European Commission is investigating a potential abuse of market power re Android right now, but that's a different battleground.
As long as there is no indication of abuse concerning Google's algorithm, which is what we were talking about, I believe said algorithm isn't any government's business.
Banks, and publicly traded companies are also heavily regulated.
90% of people will only ever use Google search. To them Google is the internet. Google has just as much power to harm just as many people as a bank does. We regulate the bank to avoid potential financial harm, why can't we regulate Google?
>As long as there is no indication of abuse concerning Google's algorithm, which is what we were talking about, I believe said algorithm isn't any government's business.
That's the point, without any way to audit Google, there is no way to know they aren't abusing their position in ways that are difficult to detect.
When a company has amassed as much power as Google has, I think it's perfectly acceptable to shift the burden of proof to them instead of taking them at their word--force a bit of transparency (without requiring them to release trade secrets to their competitors.)
One minor algorithm change can (and has) wiped out the fortunes of thousands of companies.
This is true, but I don't think one company should have the power to affect so many people.
>It's hard to measure if an algorithmic tweak is good for users, but Google has no incentives to do otherwise.
Google has plenty of incentives to make algorithmic tweaks that aren't good for their users. Left to their own devices, with no fear of regulation, do you think they would ever display a link to Bing Maps even if Bing Maps offered a better service?
Google is a search provider and a content provider, there is an inherent conflict of interest.
Competition law doesn't punish market power. Punishing success would be insane. The abuse of market power is what is illegal. And abuse needs to be proven.
Yes, Google Maps is the first result if you search for "maps" on Google. Search for "maps" on Bing and the first result is... also Google Maps. So maybe, Google Maps is just the leading mapping service on the Web?
> So far we've seen no evidence that they've done anything like this, but if history is any indicator
So far we've seen no evidence that the defendant has indeed killed anyone, but can we be sure that he hasn't? No, but: In dubio pro reo.
Regulation doesn't require proof of illegal behavior. Yes to punish Google executives criminally would require proof of illegal behavior.
But congress could easily pass a law that said search engine companies are subject to government search algorithm audits, with no proof of illegal activity required.
>So far we've seen no evidence that the defendant has indeed killed anyone, but...
This is a regulatory issue, not a criminal trial. I'm not suggesting that any Google executives be punished for anything.
I'm suggesting that the potential for Google to do harm is too large not to examine the possibility of regulation. We don't allow private citizens to make weapons of mass destruction because the potential for harm is too great. In my opinion we also shouldn't allow private citizens to control the internet.
Sanctions under competition law do require proof of abuse of market power.
ISP-like regulation, which is a different beast, is usually being justified by the fact that ISPs are natural monopolies. [1]
> In my opinion we also shouldn't allow private citizens to control the internet.
What makes a search engine useful? The relevance of results. In my opinion, private companies (Google in particular) do a fairly good job at providing relevant results. I prefer that over a government-approved "neutral" algorithm, whatever that would even mean.
If you feel that Google's results aren't relevant, give a competitor a try. Nothing stops you. Do you run a web site that was blocked by Google without justification? Go ahead, complain. The mere possibility of abuse doesn't justify tight regulation.
> We don't allow private citizens to make weapons of mass destruction because the potential for harm is too great.
Yeah, should Google ever choose to sell WMD to my neighbor, switching to Bing wouldn't really help me.
And I'm not promoting sanctions. The only thing I've proposed is some kind of transparency, like 3rd party auditing.
>If you feel that Google's results aren't relevant, give a competitor a try. Nothing stops you.
That won't do a thing to mitigate the harm I'm talking about. If 1 company controls every news organization in the country except for a few college newspapers, would you tell me that me personally reading the college newspaper would help the situation?
>The mere possibility of abuse doesn't justify tight regulation.
Publicly traded companies and financial institutions deal with plenty of tight regulation because of the possibility of abuse. We already force publicly traded companies to require independent financial auditing, why not require the gateway to the internet to undergo independent search auditing.
Who knows? I don't really support the requirement that they make their algorithm public. But I would support requiring that they expose it to government auditors. Or maybe some kind of 3rd party testing that proves their results aren't biased without actually seeing the algorithm.
> Power could be wielded without corruption.
Yes that is possible. But I think a government is certainly within their rights to demand that with a certain level of power a company must prove that they are wielding that power responsibly.
For instance if I build a nuclear power plant, the government will of course require me to prove that it is safe. They won't wait until they have evidence that it is unsafe because the potential harm is too great.
It's like when people claim "discrimination" is illegal, when the definition of discriminating is to recognize a difference or to tell apart. Discrimination is not illegal, discrimination based on a protected class is illegal.
Likewise for anti-trust, what's illegal is if they are abusing their dominant market position in search to suppress competition. Can promoting your own product, in and of itself, be anti-competitive? It seems like stretch. Just like Microsoft installing a browser (an absolutely necessary component of any modern OS) in and of itself is not anti-competitive. I think a company has to go much, much further to warrant this level of scrutiny.
Is Google actively blocking me from accessing superior content? And if they did, what's stopping people from abandoning Google? In the Windows OS case, there literally was no realistic alternative at the time. So people had a gun to their head, and there were APIs which only the IE team could access keeping the competition at bay. Google Search is a very different beast.
I think Google does a fairly good job of keeping the "Chinese Wall" between Search and the other groups. I think the key question is whether they somehow have to open up their meta-search capabilities to third parties. For example, the way the calculator, or word definition lookup, or weather, or airfare search, or even Google+, is now integrated into search, this is a coupling which no 3rd party could ever compete with... I don't know a solution. For now I think we don't need a "solution". I want these features, I use them constantly and appreciate them. If DDG or Bing offered better meta-search / charms I would switch and use them. They are literally a keystroke away, there is nothing stopping anyone from using a competitor. Which I why I tend to think the whole thing is a political farce and a tax on Google's success.
"...accusation being that it uses this closed code
to promote its own products ahead of rivals.“
Being a monopoly is usually legal. Monopoly status simply means new laws apply relating to how that power is used. Google is patently a search monopoly right now, so France is well within their right to accuse them of abusing that power to take over other markets. Some sort of trial will determine if those charges are true or not.
What is obvious - regardless of the outcome or politics surrounding France's legal action - is that the exact nature of how Google's search algorithms work is the exact evidence needed to properly judge how Google's search service (via the algorithm it relies upon) is unfairly interfering with the markets that Google may also be participating in.
No. Bing is a click away and provides comparable results. A monopoly occurs when the consumer has no choice but the monopolist. That's clearly not the case here.
Monopoly starts to be covered by the antitrust acts when "the ability to raise prices above those that would be charged in a competitive market"[1]. Controlling a very large percentage of the market is merely one of the easier ways to demonstrate the existence of that power.
[1] United States v. E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co.
Of course, asking to disclose Google's search algorithm borderlines insanity.
Even if it were a different market, Google doesn't hold a monopoly on it by a long shot. Bing is over 20% of search volume in the US, and Yahoo holds another 13%. Searching for products on either of those will return results for relevant advertisers; the simple fact that they have paid ads to run is an empirical contradiction to claims of a search advertising monopoly (or is empirical proof that a large number of very successful companies are economically irrational and are throwing money down a money hole, but that seems highly improbable).
A hypothetical situation would Google using their monopoly position in the search market to manipulate the results of anybody searching about domain names so Googles registry service is show instead of the various other registries. By abusing their position in the search market, Google would be able to raise their price for a domain name registration. Their search services would remain untouched, or possibly subsidized with the new DNS-registry profits.
Even if ordinary users can switch to Bing the advertisers can't shift so easily as they aren't concerned about accuracy of search results but about the potential market size.
That's just absurd. Can someone acquainted with the situation shed light on why they are doing this? Simple populism and lobbying from local businesses or something else?
Hard to explain, even for a french person. That's why I basically want to move ASAP, at least abroad I'll care less about politics.
It tragically funny, there is like 10% unemployment rate in France right now, and instead of trying to give businesses some air, ie less laws and regulations, they keep on coming with ridiculous ones.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/technology/microsoft-once-...
Microsoft is the puppet-master in all of this, it seems.
Apple 2015 http://qz.com/332059/apple-is-reportedly-giving-the-chinese-...
Microsoft 2003 http://news.cnet.com/China-to-view-Windows-code/2100-1007_3-...
Google are pretty obviously not paying tax like a normal company. To put that more explicitly, they are probably committing massive tax fraud, taking billions in local money and not paying tax on it... that isn't unusual for a mega corporation, and they need local government to continue cooperating. So, the UK gets a big Google office, it's government keeps quiet. I guess France needs one too...
Google explicitly decided not to play ball in mainland China years ago. It will be interesting to see the reaction if this goes through-- both exposing ranking algorithms and pulling out of France seem pretty improbable.
In practice it may negatively impact on the quality of search results, even though in theory their algorithm including more "difficult to fake" factors should result in it being more durable.
If a competitor gets ahold of their exact ranking algorithm, that's a huge piece of the formula for building a search engine that is as good as Google Search at finding what someone's looking for.
Yes giving up the source algorithm would be a loss. Google have seen this coming for years and have been building the moat so even this information shared wouldn't really help a competitor take any significant chunk of their business in the short to medium term.
If it's not public, then this problem doesn't exist.
Just like the output of the recording devices they installed on Air France planes in business class. Those were never turned over to French companies.
The only truly egalitarian algorithm is to send all queries to a state-run committee of experts and have them sort it out.
That said... are the Chinese worse off due to their protectionism that gave Baidu an advantage? I sincerely don't know. When everybody plays dirty, it's hard to know which sequence of dirty moves will let one get the farthest ahead...
(What's really interesting here is how much actual sovereignty the French have, and if it's enough to pull off this particular move. There are trade agreements and even regardless of these, governments intervene to protect their companies.)
I have no firsthand knowledge at all of Google's "algorithm", but I assume given the investment they have in ML that it is on the side of "optimization, feature selection, and tuning" instead of "logical, human-understandable decision process".
The primary (not only) reason Google keeps its search algorithm details a secret is to prevent people from having an edge on gaming the system.
"You may have all the money, Raymond, but I have all the men with guns." (Frank Underwood, House of Cards)
Looks like you're going to have to start paying more attention to the wallets of those with all the guns Google.
That's by design: Campaign contributions are heavily regulated in France: http://www.loc.gov/law/help/campaign-finance/france.php
But if someone happens to have a fancy "Cave à Vin", or a week end in Monaco, it's a coincidence
Forcing Google's hand did not go well neither in Germany nor Spain not too long ago. How are law makers failing to see this? How are even the lobbyists fuelling the whole thing not seeing this?
The belief that a state could stick to ensuring fair competition and simply foster innovation, instead of directly acting on the companies themselves ( or even worse, directly owning them), is shared by less than 5% of the population ( highest score of the "economicaly liberal" party during the past 30 years elections).
If they wanted to hurt google a bit, all they had to do is hit them at the tax level ( they're currently trying that as well, but it has a low chance of working, the main problem being that ireland is both in europe and has 0% tax).
Now, with all that being said, i'm still curious to know what are the true complaints regarding google search engine practices before i completely dismiss the whole affair as another typically french symptom.
"[T]he English language... becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."
Of course it's "anti-competitive", in a sense, but not unfair. No one is stopping other companies from competing against Google. It just happens that the market decided Google won... years ago. And now they own Youtube and Gmail and the OS that runs on a lot of mobile phones and they have so much money to burn they can try to make cars that drive themselves. No one is stopping people from using other search engines as well, it just happens that people decided years ago that Google worked better than anything else. This is the way it's supposed to work. The superior product wins and dominates, and redefines the market so that everyone has to play on their terms, while everything else dies, or limps along in the shadows hoping not to get eaten. But maybe if you're lucky, you find a niche, or the dinosaurs get wiped out.
How is it going to "foment diversity" ? it's not. You want to "foment diversity" ? Remove some of these stupid regulations and make France more business friendly. Forcing google to display 3 of its competitors on its search engine page isn't going to create jobs or new startups in France. Google is the least of France's problems. Its politicans on the other hand.
There's nothing preventing a French company from producing their own equal or superior search engine - other than competence or will.
For all you know, there's plenty of "equal or superior products" to [anything] out there. You've just never heard of them for reasons that have nothing to do with their quality.
So the choice is, clowns or crooks. Pick at most two.
There's a not well-known component of Google ranking that acts sort of like a slow-moving, domain-wide PageRank. And because they launched domains.google.com as a subdomain of google.com, which contains PageRank 10 pages and is therefore very trusted, the assumption is that domains.google.com is also very trusted, even though it currently seems to have no inbound links from other google.com pages.
This effect is usually hidden because it's rare to have a highly ranked page with no obvious inbound links competing on an established keyword.
Google doesn't want competition, and France wants it to compete. This is the whole point of this action.
French businesses can and will produce competitive search products, and the 90% market leader voluntarily leaving the market would be the perfect opportunity.
Google doesn't want competition
If french businesses can and will produce competitive search products then they wouldn't need the market leader to leave the market to give them the opportunity. There is 0 barrier to entry here. Anyone can spider the same pages Google does. Anyone can develop ML algorithms to rank them. The only thing keeping Google at the top of search is how good they are at it.
Google is global leaving France wouldn't hurt them.
> The only thing keeping Google at the top of search is how good they are at it.
As far as I'm aware, other search engines are usually competitive in blind tests for quality. Other things keeping Google at the top include: their incumbency; anti-competitive practices such as browser bundling.
I wasn't criticising Google on this point;
it's an obvious part of capitalism.
Google as a company (speaking from insider experience as a former employee, But not in any official capacity) values competition. It provides a way to measure your success as a company. Google loves measuring things it's so deeply ingrained into their DNA they can't help it. Ranking themselves against other search engines is a vital part of how they work. They would quite possibly be lost without it and very definitely be a different company without it. Google loves competition.
Edited to add: the cost of expressing a dissenting opinion on this site seems to be waves of downvotes followed by a trickle of protective upvotes. Do the downvotes all come from the same place, in this case, I wonder?
Google has put a lot of effort into creating test query suites and other systems that can be used to evaluate search results and works to make sure that in each region and language it can out perform competitors. I don't know how effective the measurement is but I can tell you that Google takes providing the best search results seriously.
I realize there's a wiki page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank but there's clearly more to it for ranking of all things and it should be maintained by Google itself too.
Google making their algorithm public would result in it being much easier for website owners to inflate their rankings, resulting in lower quality search results, and giving companies who pay enough money to SEO experts an unfair advantage (far more so than is already the case today).
You might be let down if expecting something so specific that Amazon & TechCrunch are clearly included or excluded.
I say that as a French expat using duckduckgo as his main search engine.
Someone who wants money. It's the same argument that Big Pharma presents against those who want to make the patent system lighter, or any company that protests against IP freedom. They just don't want fair competition.
France seems to want to catch up with the USA, and hurt its tech industries and infrastructure also.
I don't understand it, unless it is just putting the interest of government bureaucracies ahead of the public good.
That's a lot of power for one company to have, and it's only going to get worse as more and more transactions move online. Why should we trust one company with that much power?
The Beatles had the number one position in the billboard charts for almost 60 weeks. That's a lot of popularity for one band to have. Should we have told them to stop making music?
Certainly you'll agree that their is a market where it is possible for a company to be "too popular", i.e., the government should step in with regulation.
Lets look at a very extreme case. What if one company develops a cure for all forms of cancer, and they won't release the secret (let's assume our hypothetical country has no drug regulations), and they charge $100k for treatment. Is it wrong for the government to step in and regulate?
Google is effectively the gateway to the internet, and whether you choose to use them or not you are beholden to that control. If you want to do business a web presence is an absolute necessity, but if Google decides they don't like you, there is no recourse. I'd say that that ability to do harm rises to the level that we should consider potential regulatory remedies.
I don't necessarily support forcing them to make their algorithm public, but I would support some kind of government audit.
Yes, it is wrong for them to do so (if by regulating you mean setting the company's price for the product that it developed, rather than just the standard regulations that are in place). And the fact that there are people who don't believe it is wrong - probably including politicians - produces a reduction in the amount of money that would be rational to invest to search for such cures, thereby reducing the likelihood of finding them.
In this situation you'd let millions of people die because you think it might reduce future medical research outcomes?
So obviously I haven't found a hypothetical situation extreme enough for you yet. We make policy decisions that limit how much money companies can make from medical breakthroughs all the time. The FDA approval process, for instance. If we stopped requiring FDA approval, developing drugs would be much more profitable, but as a society we agree that drug safety is a good trade off.
What if drug affordability is a good trade off as well? There's no way to know without investigation, but that is why I'm opposed to making policy on purely ideological grounds. What if it turns out that limiting pharmaceutical profits, decreases medical funding by 10%, but increases access to drugs that are developed by 100%? Again it may work out exactly opposite, but if you oppose limiting the price of drugs just because "it's wrong", you'll never know.
What if it turns out that medical funding isn't the bottleneck in medical breakthroughs. What if the number of people capable of becoming researchers is, and what if that amount goes up with more affordable drug access.
Again, I'm not proposing a specific course of action, but I'm saying that there are situations where the free market doesn't work and regulation is necessary.
Twelve different companies which were researching the cure for aging silently shut down...
Maybe. But is the possibility that one of those companies maybe might someday develop a breakthrough justify the preventable deaths of millions of people right now?
And would they really shut down? Any company that produces a truly miraculous cure has to know that government will step in sooner or later. People aren't going to sit by while a company hands out the cure for aging to only the super wealthy. Surely a company researching the cure for aging would have taken this possibility into account before starting.
Medical breakthroughs aren't a linear function of funding. What if making medicine more available slightly slows new drug development but drastically increases quality of life for most people? Would that be worth it?
That only reinforces my point. Several of them never get started, much more silently.
"Medical breakthroughs aren't a linear function of funding. What if making medicine more available slightly slows new drug development but drastically increases quality of life for most people? Would that be worth it?"
That's a very good point, if actually progress is not that much dependant on cash.
It's fine to have these discussions, but let's please not do it with a "Google is 99.998% of search traffic, we have to stop them!" straw man.
[1] http://returnonnow.com/internet-marketing-resources/2013-sea...
[2] http://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-s...
But, of course, Google don't solely use that anymore.
not sure this world will be as awesome as some may think it could be. sure we don't like our governments & the are incredibly inefficient. maybe that's a good thing though.
This is an unpopular view, but Google is simply too powerful. Anything that acts against the Google monopoly on search can only be a good thing.