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Comment by erazor42 | Hacker News Reader

As a french i'm ashamed about how useless/bad/mediocre our politics are (all of them)

No need to be ashamed, French politicians are far better than US ones. It's not the US politicians who have built Google. As US have concentred all the money, Europe's companies have hard time investing in some technology that will not yield revenue immediately. Google got its first revenue few years after its foundation, that's impossible for a EU based company. Europe should create more conditions for its startups, otherwise no new technology will come out Europe.

Why is it bad? it's definitely bad for Google but for french citizens I can't see how fomenting diversity in a market hurts.

> Why is it bad? it's definitely bad for Google but for french citizens I can't see how fomenting diversity in a market hurts.

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.

It's bad because they were unable to compete in an open market and must turn to the government to handicap Google.

There's nothing preventing a French company from producing their own equal or superior search engine - other than competence or will.

"Producing an equal or superior product" does not necessarily give the ability to "compete in an open market". That's an idealistic view of capitalism which simply doesn't work. It's merely a factor, and a fairly small one at that.

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.

There's a very high minimum technical bar for successfully competing with Google in search, and then a mountain of brand awareness and user inertia on top of that.

Do you think forcing google to display a competitor on their homepage will change google monopoly? I agree that diversity is a good point but that way is just a joke. The day google will have competitor on search engine people won't need a stupid law like this to switch. (imho)

Elsewhere is often worse. The US congress is either owned by corporate interests, deadlocked by partisanship, campaigning for next term, or working on personal projects. Representing the People is of no concern.

So the choice is, clowns or crooks. Pick at most two.

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