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French Court Calls Free Google Maps Unfair Competition

Posted by timothy on from the protecting-people-from-benefits dept.

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."

1 of 238 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This was predicted to happen two years ago by bonch · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.