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Europe Accuses Google of Monopoly Abuse
bonch writes "European antitrust regulators are set to issue a 400-page statement of objections accusing Google of 'abuse of dominance' next month, the result of an investigation launched last year after complaints from rivals that Google manipulated ad pricing and barred advertisers from running ads on rival sites. If found guilty, Google could be fined up to 10% of its annual turnover, which is about $3 billion. Microsoft avoided a similar fine when it settled its European antitrust case and included a 'browser ballot' in Windows."
They're using their huge market share to unfairly promote their other products left and right. They have the most dominant position to do this too - the largest search engine on planet. They can put out anyone they want out of business. For years they have scraped smaller websites and then returning their own sites higher in search engine results. They push Google+ to every that comes to Google. How is Diaspore or other smaller social networks ever going to challenge that? They push Chrome to every IE user in a very spammy way, and they always do it in YouTube too. Recently all the flight ticket search engines started fearing as Google introduced their own one and embedded the results directly in search results.
Now with Google+, they're tieing all their products together too. YouTube just got a much more "social" and google+'ish look, and in one of their recent videos they show how search results, maps, calendar, news, music, video and every other Google service will integrate with Google+. Because of their market share that is blatant monopoly abuse and I'm good to see that EU is finally doing something about it. US is still investigating Google, but with Google having bought so many politicans in Washington and friends in NSA and FBI I'd be more surprised to see if they did something.
Look. Google is just flavour of the month.
The very things you are worried about are Google's death knell, they are busy dividing and conquering their own workforce and focus, exactly the way previous giants, like Nokia did, so don't worry about it, it's a natural part of executive narcissism. Someone will come along (out of nowhere it'll seem) in a short while and make billions knocking Google off their pedestal into a has-been like Microsoft.
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Considering how Google launders its money via European countries to gain 2.4% tax rate, that might be quite costly. And that also means giving up tons of business, revenue, users and future monopoly status on search.
Microsoft just reported record fourth quarter and fiscal year 2011 earnings today with yearly revenues at $69,94 billion, representing an increase of 12% from 2010.
If that is losing money all over the place, I wouldn't mind losing it like Microsoft does.
Oh yes EU is soooo biased against US companies that the biggest fine they've handed out so far was to a European company and the majority of fines they are handing out still goes to european countries...
But yes pulling out of europe is certainly a valid option, the only options they do have is to either obey local law OR pull out of Europe.
Or are you trying to suggest that US companies should be above the law?
Oh yes, like fining Google for a few 100 million will solve our crisis. Get real. Unlike in the US, corruption is illegal in Europe, and so misusing monopolies is punished like it should be. And companies are obliged to operate by the prevailing laws. That Google is an American company has nothing to do with it. A few months ago a cartel of European manufacturers of elevators was fined almost one billion euros, but since elevators are not as 'visible' as Google you don't know about that.
-- Cheers!
frankly i don't care if MS exits the search market or not, bing is a horrible product with a horrible name, it's rise in popularity is only because it is the default search in new versions of IE
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
You're confusing a couple of very different issues here. Google does NOT have a monopoly on search and the EU isn't claiming they do. By the very definition if useful alternatives exist then there's not a monopoly. Naturally they push their other services to existing users. Every company does this. Every company that has some common sense and is likely to be in business next financial year anyway. The key thing that differentiates this from normal practice and abuse of power is if the users have choice or not.
For all users there is a choice. I.e. is shipped out of the box with Bing as the default search engine. When you first start Chrome it asks you what your default search engine is. When you go to Google's home page you get a single bar at the top of the page, that's it. Users can all avoid this (and given the latest search numbers quite a few of them do) and thus it is not an abuse of market share.
What Google does have a monopoly in is advertising. They have the single biggest presence for advertising on the internet with facebook a very distant second, and unlike the general user visiting a search engine there's not the same amount of choice out there for advertisers given that Google's monopoly stretches way beyond the search arena and onto websites of partners around the world.
As I said. Microsoft is a has-been.
And it was already demonstrated that they are not. You are predicting that they will be, but until it happens it's just a prediction.
Google will be a has-been shortly.
More worthless predictions.
Google is not the only company providing a search engine, and Google cannot vendor-lock anybody. What is the problem?
Also, how come Microsoft has been allowed to get away with brazen monopolistic abuse, 100 times worse than anything Google could possibly do, for decades?
For example, Microsoft was caught, red handed, bribing officials during the OOXML scam; but that's okay?