EU Antitrust Chief: Google "Diverting Traffic" & Will Be Forced To Change

Dupple writes "It looks like the EU is coming close to a decision regarding its investigation of Google. While saying he's 'still investigating,' the head of the European Union's antitrust regulatory body has said that he's convinced Google is 'diverting traffic' and that it will be forced to change its results. From the article: 'Despite the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's move earlier this month to let off Google with a slap on the wrist -- albeit, a change to its business practices, a move that financially wouldn't dent Google in the short term but something any company would seek to avoid -- the European Commission is looking to take a somewhat different approach: take its time, and then hit the company hard.'"

Comments

nonsensical allegations

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell do they mean by "diverting traffic", and why would it not be allowed?

What, exactly, does Google have a monopoly of, and how are they abusing monopoly power in any way?

TFA suggests they have a monopoly on "search" which is nonsensical, since there are many competitors and no barrier to entry, and they give the "product" away for free, so it would hard to claim any monopoly pricing power is even being used or existing.

A more sensible allegation would be that they have some kind of monopoly on advertising or user data collection, since that at least they charge for, except, that as far as I can tell, they don't have that either.

So, all in all, it looks like either a blatant cash grab by the EU, or a bullshit legal attack funded by the likes of Microsoft.

Re:nonsensical allegations

[FireFury03]

What the hell do they mean by "diverting traffic", and why would it not be allowed?

It looks like they're talking about doing stuff like including results from Google Maps in your web search results (whilst not doing the same for results from Bing Maps, etc.).

What, exactly, does Google have a monopoly of, and how are they abusing monopoly power in any way?

They are the dominant search engine, and the EU appears to be deciding that they are using that dominance to help gain dominance in other markets (e.g. the aforementioned maps, amoungst others).

TFA suggests they have a monopoly on "search" which is nonsensical, since there are many competitors

They are the dominant search engine. I think you are misunderstanding antitrust legislation:
- Antitrust legislation doesn't care whether or not you have competitors, it only cares whether you are the *dominant* vendor. As a well known example, Microsoft was found guilty of antitrust violations in their operating system business, but there have always been other operating system vendors. The key was that they were the *dominant* vendor.
- Antitrust legislation doesn't say there's anything wrong with being the dominant vendor (or even the only vendor). All it says is that if you are dominating the market, you're nor allowed to use that dominance to help you gain dominance in other markets. So going back to the Microsoft example, they were dominant OS vendors, and by shipping certain freebies with the OS (e.g. a web browser) they were unfairly using their existing position to gain dominance in the browser market. Netscape, on the other hand, could never have hoped to do this since they weren't shipping anything which already dominated the market, with which to bundle their browser to compete. The EU is saying Google is using their dominance in the search engine market to push their other products in a way that is unfair to their competition.

and no barrier to entry

There's always a barrier to entry - setting up a search engine is going to involve R&D and then a hell of a lot of time and bandwidth to spider the web. However, that isn't what this is about - this isn't about Google doing anything to stop people competing in the search engine business, this is about using their existing search engine position to make it harder for people to compete in other sectors.

and they give the "product" away for free, so it would hard to claim any monopoly pricing power is even being used or existing.

No one said anything about pricing. It isn't relevant to this discussion.

So, all in all, it looks like either a blatant cash grab by the EU, or a bullshit legal attack funded by the likes of Microsoft.

Or the EU is trying to level the playing field for the smaller businesses. Whilst having everything run by a single megacorp is convenient, historically it has always been better for the consumer in the long run to have many smaller businesses offering services. The EU usually takes the attitude that a bit of short term pain (inconveniencing people by preventing the "convenient" integration of services from a single vendor) is better than the long term pain of having a single megacorp in control of huge markets and no chance for a smaller business to survive.

Re:nonsensical allegations

[Anonymous Coward]

No Country Redirect: www.google.com/ncr

Re:nonsensical allegations

[aaron552]

IIRC, the problem is that Google's own services appear to be favoured in search rankings over competitors. I would think that this is primarily be because they're significantly more popular than the competitors, though, and not due to any bias on the part of Google.

A search for "email" on Google returns Hotmail as the first result and "web browser" gives an ad for IE, the wikipedia page for "web browser", Opera, and Firefox before Chrome appears. There doesn't seem to be anything particularly shady on there based on my rather unscientific test.

Re:nonsensical allegations

[Genda]

I just did a search on just "Beer" and the first thing to show up was "Sam Adams", I'm guessing that right there would be enough to start a war with the German's and we all know as goes Germany so goes the EU...

Re:nonsensical allegations

[FireFury03]

So the lesson here is that if you build a business, develop something that's really awesome and becomes the go-to choice for nearly everyone on the planet, your reward is to be considered a monopoly and regulated as a utility?

Your reward is that you have a business that is worth billions. There is a very minor penalty that you have to adhere to slightly stricter regulations as a result. Its good for the consumer for the dominant company to have to work at staying dominant rather than sit back and stagnate since no one can compete.

There are always penalties associated with being successful, but the success generally outweighs the penalties. Or are you going to complain that successful high-profit companies shouldn't have to pay more tax than low-profit businesses because that would be a penalty on their success?

Serious?

[Aeros]

These are just two guys running a simple home grown search engine in their dorm room in college. Give these poor guys a break. Freakin' EU!

Re:No google for u!

[Bengie]

Too bad DDG doesn't track me like Google does. I get much better results from Google because it tracks me and integrates into gmail and G+. I don't see it as much as a privacy concern as much as I do an optimization. Data collected from tracking is highly relevant to my search results.