Microsoft Files EU Competition Complaint Against Google

bLanark writes "In an amazing about-turn, the bully has turned into the bullied. Microsoft, having been on the receiving end of many anti-competition lawsuits, has filed a complaint with the European Commission, saying that Google is using its market dominance to prevent Microsoft from gaining market share."

Comments

Boot, other foot

[Tigger's Pet]

No real surprise here. Exactly what happens in the school playground when somebody turns round and finally stands up to the class bully.

Re:Boot, other foot

[mangu]

How ironical, TFA says "making it difficult for Microsoft's mobile phone software to show videos from YouTube".

This coming from the company who grew up on "embrace and extend" practices. Today the only reason why I have dual boot is because some websites that I must access will not work on any Linux browser.

pwned

[somersault]

Teeheehee. Methinks Google is actually using superior products to prevent Microsoft from gaining market share.

Bing

[mwvdlee]

How can MS claim Google prevents MS from gaining market share when Bing is using Google search results?
Without Google, Bing would have even less market share.

Re:Bing

[gstoddart]

How can MS claim Google prevents MS from gaining market share when Bing is using Google search results?
Without Google, Bing would have even less market share.

Because Microsoft figures it's up to Google to keep handing them everything Google has as a competitive advantage so Microsoft can have equal access to it. Some of the stuff is utterly absurd:

Specifically, the complaint charges that Google hurts competition by "walling off" content on its YouTube site, so other search engines can't display accurate results; by making it difficult for Microsoft's mobile phone software to show videos from YouTube; by blocking access to content owned by book publishers which Google has copied and stored; by not allowing advertisers to use their own data about customers garnered from Google on other sites, such as those owned by Microsoft; by blocking websites from using competing "search boxes"; and by making it expensive for potential competitors to Google to advertise online.

So, First, Google are mean because they have a popular site and haven't made it easy for competitors to use that content (YouTube).

Next, either Microsoft failed to implement something that worked with YouTube, or YouTube is actively trying to make it tough for a Windows Phone to display stuff. Let me guess, the phone only supports WMV files? ;-)

Not giving access to data owned by someone else -- I mean, wow, how dare you not let us access someone else's stuff because that gives you an advantage. Seriously? If this data is owned by book publishers, why does Google have to make it available to Microsoft?

My personal favorite .... I believe that they're whining about the terms of service for the data. So, they want Google to collect it, and then let Microsoft combine that with other data they have, and then use it on their own web sites so they can compete with Google. WTF does Google gain by collecting data for its competitors?

I'm not sure I follow the last one about competing search boxes. I mean, if you're using Google ads, I can see they want you to be using a Google search ... they don't want to sell you advertising clicks, and then have any searches you do get sent somewhere else. Just because Microsoft was forced to allow different search engines and browsers from within their OS doesn't mean that I want to see every web site allowing me to pick the search engine to use.

I don't see this as any legitimate complaint about antitrust behavior. Microsoft has lost the ability to compete in some areas, and they mostly seem to be whining that someone should force Google to make the same data available to Microsoft, which makes no sense.

This reminds me of "energy retailers" we have here ... some genius decided that the power company was a monopoly, and opened it up for a bunch of little companies to essentially re-sell the same stuff as the power company and called it competition. All it really did was to create a bunch of shady companies whose only goal is to convince you to "switch" energy companies and sign up with them for a contract duration. They show up at your door saying they're the "energy company" and try to get you to sign on the dotted line at "locked in rates". (I had to throw one out of my house because he lied to my wife and said he was from our energy company, and we needed to replace the piping for our furnace and get a new hot-water heater.)

There's no actual new competition, and in many ways the consumer is actually harmed by this because the companies can be a bit dubious. But, we get the illusion of a somewhat open market, which makes certain people happy. I fail to understand why letting the parasites sell the product of another company under the guise of "competition" does anything other than create middle-men since these companies don't do anything related to power except to re-sell it.

Re:Bing

[Daengbo]

What about Google's test where they created false search results for random strings of words, then saw the same first results come up in Bing? There's no algorithm there.

Re:Bing

[miffo.swe]

The results was EXACTLY the same, not similar. The fact that they pertained made up search terms that would never had been indexed by either Google or Bing normally cemented the fact that it was wholesale stolen results directly from Google Search.

Re:Bing

[Anthony Mouse]

The toolbar reported home that people were searching for a certain string and this was added to the search results.

The toolbar reported home the Google search results that people clicked on when searching for a certain string and this was added to the search results.

How is that not "Bing is copying Google search results"? I don't think you win much by saying that they only copy the results people click on.

So they said ...

[unity100]

"We tried everything, we pushed our search with our browser, we pushed our browser with our os (which you foiled btw - ballot box), we tried sniffing the best result from google for a query from the users of our browser, but we still failed. Please help us"

is it ....

Re:So they said ...

[PhrostyMcByte]

Woops, I meant to include a link to this blog post at Microsoft that explains it in more detail. It seems Youtube isn't all that they're complaining about.

They're claiming Google is trying to gain exclusive rights to out-of-print books, which prevents Bing and others from searching the content. I seem to recall the latest Books proposal involved non-exclusive rights, so I guess someone didn't get the memo.

And finally they've got a beef with Google Ads. On the advertiser side, Google isn't allowing advertisers to share any data gleamed from Ads with anyone non-Google. On the user side, Google is disallowing competing search bars from being embedded on websites that display Google Ads. Microsoft wants to get its Bing search bar out there, and Google is making it tough.

Re:Almost makes you want to feel pity for Microsof

[KiloByte]

Except here it's a case of Hitler complaining about annexations and racial discrimination.

Lets deal with MS first eh.

[jabjoe]

Google are no angels, but compared with MS they are.
MS make a closed operating system and closed software for that closed operating system. How is that not anticompetitive? (I know this doesn't just apply to MS). It was even found as such in court, they where to be broken in two (a OS business and a software business), but then they got out of it!
MS bully the OEM to force Windows on us, and those of us free of them, end up paying more to not have it!
MS where given a monopoly by IBM from the get go and have maintained it with every trick in the book, and a few new ones they came up with themselves. Many of which come under "dirty trick". I could rant about MS and standards, but it's old ground everyone knows. Even the MS fan boys must be able to see Goolge are less bad by a order of magnitude or two, even through the MS cool aid vision. It Google do go properly evil, we can just change search engine, big deal. Many people aren't ready or able to change OS, in fact they are often deliberately locked in.

Remind me again

[Posting=!Working]

Which of Google's products don't have dozens of competitors right now?

Which of those products has a barrier to entry beyond writing and putting it on the web?

Which competitors have Google actively shut down? (This does not include being better or more popular.)

Did everyone forget that Yahoo was #1 in search not too long ago? That Google took the #1 spot with no advertising? That another company is free to do so if they can come up with a better product?

Google fails every test for a monopoly. I have no idea why people are continually calling for anti-trust investigations other than jealousy.

Re:So is this MS's Chief of Strategy Craig Mundie'

[DoofusOfDeath]

new plan? Don't worry about tablets - we will just cry to governments that we are getting our lunch eaten?

Hey, worked for General Motors.

What's the matter Microsoft...

[QuietLagoon]

... your products not good enough to compete and gain marketshare when you can't use a monopoly to force people to use your products?

Re:So is this MS's Chief of Strategy Craig Mundie'

[marcosdumay]

That said, GM did well to not worry about tablets.

Re:Almost makes you want to feel pity for Microsof

[ultranova]

Except here it's a case of Hitler complaining about annexations and racial discrimination.

He did. "Mein Kampf" is basically one long diatribe about how Jews were trying to destroy Germans, and how Germany's areas had been forcibly taken and annexed to other countries. The last part was actually true, which is part of how Hitler managed to get power.

All of which, BTW, makes an excellent answer to anyone who says "world is not fair, deal with it": the more unfair the world is, the easier it is for the next Hitler/Stalin/Mao to get into power and start World War 3. So go ahead, cut those unemployment benefits and social security, if you feel lucky. Well, do ya, punk?

Microsoft, show os the Details, PLEASE

[xiando]

Microsoft story is that:

First, in 2006 Google acquired YouTube—and since then it has put in place a growing number of technical measures to restrict competing search engines from properly accessing it for their search results. Without proper access to YouTube, Bing and other search engines cannot stand with Google on an equal footing in returning search results with links to YouTube videos and that, of course, drives more users away from competitors and to Google.

YouTube does have a robots file http://www.youtube.com/robots.txt which asks not to index some parts of the website. This should be allowed. I have a robots.txt file on my websites. If you send a spider loose on my servers and ignore it then I may -j DROP you. If you send a spider to my sites and disobey it then I'll also -j DROP you. If you visit the hidden-linked /spider-trap/ then PHP scripts will begin to die('gfy') from your IP. I think this should be allowed, and I am strongly against anyone who wants to dictate who and what I allow on my server.

If Microsoft just thinks YouTube's robots.txt is too restrictive then they can go fsck themselves.

Now, on the other hand, IF Google is serving different pages or denying pages based on Microsoft's spiders user-agent then that is something completely different. That's EVIL. EU and others should strike down upon them with great vengeance and furious anger if they are doing exactly what Microsoft was exposed doing to Opera on their Hotmail service a few years back (yes, they really did serve broken pages to Opera-users based on User-agent).

I would very much like to see Microsoft give out actual technical details on what they believe Google is doing that's so bad and unacceptable. Loose blah blah "google bad" text is not at all helpful, they should show us the technical details behind their claims. It's not that hard. Opera did this when Microsoft intentionally sent Opera-users broken pages when visiting Hotmail, it's actually quite easy to do.