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French Court Calls Free Google Maps Unfair Competition
jfruh writes "A French court has ruled that Google is unfairly subsidizing its free mapping products, making for unfair competition with paid services. This might seem ridiculous, but keep in mind that Google started charging for use of its mapping API once the free version had come to dominate the market."
Is Linux unfair competition for Windows because it's given away for free? It's a stupid argument. If a group wants to give something away for free, let them. You can compete with free.
That's not necessarily true. If a company is generating massive revenues from a dominant product (in this case web search advertising), using that revenue to fund development of a free product in another market can be viewed as an anticompetitive abuse of monopoly position. Competitors who don't have a source of monopoly revenues have to offset their costs by charging for their product. To make your comparison more accurate, imagine if Ubuntu supplanted Windows as the dominant desktop OS by giving away a free product, and then once all competitors were completely marginalized, began charging for Ubuntu Linux. People would have little choice but to pay because it would be the dominant OS that everything ran on.
* Google doesn't have a monopoly anywhere, even in search.
Maybe you should stop being a child and trying to insinuate that the only way someone can have a monopoly is by being the only actor. That's not true, and hasn't been for a long time.
* Google Maps is not given away, it sports ads, and the API costs money to access
It was with respect to the developer API, which is what the case is about. You could use that API for FREE, not free + ads. And now that they are the dominant player in the space, and one could easily say they got there because they were free, they are raising their prices. That is the very definition of anti-competitive.
You fail to mention Mapquest, or MS maps. Why just sue Google for its maps? Because it is the best one out there?
Because they're the ones with the legal monopoly.
Why should Bottin be kept alive? Why not Garmin?
Why should Google Maps get to survive by subsidies from other Google divisions? Why can't they compete on their own?
Why don't you read your definition again? According to that, Google most definitely does have a monopoly in search. They are dominant in that area. And what they're getting slapped for is not for having a monopoly on search, which is quite fine, but by abusing that monopoly to edge themselves into other markets and drive out competition.