Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

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This seems stupid to most sane people, but there's a kind of logic behind it.

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...

As one of the more than 1.6 million French citizen living abroad [1] (2.5% of the French population [2]), I could tell you a lot about the actual effects of attempting to create barriers around the French market.

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...

As an aside/example, here is an entire fortress fortified by Vauban in 1692, a pillar of French royal power for centuries, practically a small village behind the walls, going for only 2.6m EUR: http://www.patrice-besse.com/chateaux-a-vendre/paca/chateau-...

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!

> 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).

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.

I'm sorry for making a relatively snarky reply to your (genuine, and partially fair) criticism, but "trust only the qualified" is a particularly noxious part of French culture which is, like graphology as an important criteria for hiring decisions, thankfully slowly disappearing outside the civil service and CAC 40...

As a french guy living currently in London, I clearly agree. I hope Paris never becomes a second London. If you live there you will understand why. London just lost almost all it's culture in just a few years, the London you see in movies is long gone. Just the red bricks and a few cultural things from the past are remaining but all the rest is gone. There is hard consequences to accept to become a truly global city, it's clearly not only positive consequences for the city.

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.

Except here's the thing -- it's not a natural monopoly. There aren't physical wires with no alternative like Ma Bell. There aren't things that google is doing that prevents other search engines from coming into existence -- they can't prevent new web crawls. Even Firefox now uses yahoo by default, and the open crawler data even gives anyone a head start on crawling the web!

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 France most of google users does not even know there is an alternative to Google, most of people I met in France that are not under 30 or working in a web related area just does not get it clear what is the difference between a web browser and Google. They launch it, write what they are looking for in the address bar and they just get a google search result which they think is a feature from their browser to enter the web. IMHO that's why there were only 30 congressmen from the existing 577 that came to vote for the last law regarding internet trafic monitoring https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9386820

But this isn't because google is using their existing size in a way to punish other people and crowd them out...

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.

The way I explain how google got a de facto monopoly on search in France (and in Europe) is a combination of : -being a good product with no real good competitor for european languages (except for russian where Yandex exists) -set as the default search engine for mozilla, opera and then chrome from the start. Bing is the default one on IE but bing just came along in 2009. Before that I'm not even sure what was the default search engine in europe for IE. 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.

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.

> Bing is the default one on IE but bing just came along in 2009. Before that I'm not even sure what was the default search engine in europe for IE

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.

> In France most of google users does not even know there is an alternative to Google

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.

What may happen to a market in the future does not affect the monopoly status of a business today, nor does it change how a monopoly may or may not be abusing their current (or past) position in one market to unfairly influence other markets.

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

If the finding is simply that Google needs to offer a ballot screen on Chrome after you install it, to choose the default search engine, that could perhaps be appropriate.

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?

Well the typical pattern I encounter is this: John Doe get a problem with its PC, actually most of the time problems with malware on windows. He will reach out to a friend that "knows" about computer. This friend will do some kind of cleaning, if IE does not work anymore because of too many malware installed will get firefox or chrome to get around the problem and have internet working again. At that point John Doe get a link to Chrome on its desktop (sometimes called 'Internet') and this become its new entry to Internet. The only difference is now for every query John Doe is doing it is written Google instead of Bing at the top of the screen. Then sometimes later John Doe got another malware that has the default search engine for chrome to be replaced by another one with an affiliate ID or whatever and John Doe barely notice about it.

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.

So? You haven't made a single relevant point or addressed a single one of his points. Being popular is not a reason to attempt to break up a company, nor is the ignorance of the populace to alternative solutions. Google doesn't own search, it's simply the best at it.

chrome, the most popular browser is from google and so therefore there really isn't a difference between the browser and google.

Chrome doesn't come preinstalled on any OS that I know of. So you're suggesting that users think that they, "Used google to download google so they could do searches on google?"

Yes. I witnessed a user who uses Chrome for Google and IE for everything else. She thought she had to use Google browser to use Google, because Google told her so -- with upgrade to Chrome campaign.

I've started seeing it prejnstalled on a few machines and Google has rather obvious marketing on the Google homepage, enouraging you to 'upgrade to chrome'.

People are not using Google because it's the best one but mainly because it's the default homepage screen. People generally have no idea what Google is, for them, Google is just "the internet". Some people are even confused/lost when they drastically change the homepage during events.

> People are not using Google because it's the best one but mainly because it's the default homepage screen.

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 depends on the user. I tried Bing/Google blind test and Bing won Google 6 to 4.

France (and others) should start an education campaign to explain what the Internet and WWW are and how they work.

French IT industry should get better organised and stronger as a lobby to influence and educate congressmen first. And I think we actually are going into the right direction here. It will take time to see the impact of it though.

Ma Bell was not a natural monopoly either. It was created by law.

A "natural monopoly" is basically any monopoly with a high barrier to entry, for example having a high infrastructure/start-up cost.

In this sense Ma Bell was a natural monopoly. Social networks could be considered natural monopolies for similar reasons.

That's not what [natural monopoly] means.

> London just lost almost all it's culture in just a few years, the London you see in movies is long gone

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.

> The problem is that it's hurting local startups and businesses there.

It's not obvious that this is true.

"The problem is that it's hurting local startups and businesses there"

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.

As a French guy who half grew up in London and spent many years there I heartily disagree with you. I think my opinion is more alongside of "Midnight in Paris" - culture changes and evolves all the time and it's not a good idea to try and freeze a particular moment in time.

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...

> The problem is that it's hurting local startups and businesses there.

What makes this a problem?

so, google is forced to reveal how it affects and processes search results, at least to the french government (this part was unclear to me). i don't really see what's wrong with that. if google has to approach the market so as to encourage more competition from france, i dont see whats wrong with that either. i dont see why any european company would want to be dependent on an american-based search or really any type of data-handling company at this juncture in international politics. at the very least, reducing google's control on french markets is not a bad thing, and is something google could overcome if it played ball well. if it's not possible to do something fairly, legally, and respectfully, its not worth doing at all.

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