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The EU Has a Plan To Break Up Google
An anonymous reader points out a report at the Financial Times (paywalled) which says the European Parliament is preparing to call for the break-up of Google. According to the draft seen by the FT, a potential solution to ongoing anti-trust concerns with Google is "unbundling search engines from other services." The article notes, "The European parliament has no formal power to split up companies, but has increasing influence on the commission, which initiates all EU legislation. The commission has been investigating concerns over Google’s dominance of online search for five years, with critics arguing that the company’s rankings favour its own services, hitting its rivals’ profits. Unbundling cannot be excluded, said Andreas Schwab, a German MEP who is one of the motion’s backers."
I stopped using Google long ago, and now block all their known IP addresses.
Is somebody forcing people in the EU to use Google? If they don't want to use it, why don't they just... not? There's no possibility of lock in: you can just point your browser to any search engine you want, and away you go. This isn't a problem that needs government intervention.
Starve the beast, and it will die.
As EU citizen, i can only say this is received with a lot of skepticism here too. And the usual anti-EU sentiment.
While i'm pretty `pro-EU`, i indeed think this is bullshit. Yes, Google has some sort of monopoly, however, monopolies are only a problem when abused. I don't see that abuse part. Also, there are plenty alternatives, however, Google is the biggest simply because they are the best at what they do. For them it's core business. For MS and Yahoo it's not their core business.
Anyways. it will blow over i guess. They prefer to launch this kind of bullshit ideas instead of worrying the things they really should worry about; like unemployment rates, poverty, eastern relationships, etc etc.
A glitch a day keeps the bugs away.
But this represents an existential threat - when viewed that way, it's a no-brainer to give up a market, even a huge market, if the price of admission is too high. Also, Google doesn't have to stop serving them, just stop doing business there.
Also, don't forget that Google pulled out of China, and China has a lot more population and will have the biggest GDP shortly. This is far more concerning than a little espionage.
But China was demanding a bit more than the EU who merely wants Google to break up it's operations in the EU into separate business units. China wanted Google to censor web searches and rat out Chinese citizens for regime critical utterances and activities. Pulling out of China in the face of those demands makes sense since Google's position as an information broker depends to a large extent on whether the public trusts them or not. If a large number of people get the notion that Google cannot be trusted, Google could easily see a collapse of it's share of the internet search market. Of course somebody will inevitably ignore this fact and go straight to pointing out that Google feeds information about it's users to the NSA as a matter of course (and as if that was a proven fact) to which I'll respond that I'm no friend of Google, I think they have become a dangerous monopolist, but I'll also consider them innocent of collaborating with the NSA until they are proven guilty.
It's funny that you say EUSSR. The European Central Bank is one of the most fundamentalist free-market neoliberal banking organisations in the world. It puts the Fed and Wall St. to shame (if you think being fundamentalist free-market neoliberal is a good thing). They're prepared to let whole countries go to rack and ruin for the sake of free-market purity.
And Google have an effective monopoly on search and are abusing it. It's a pretty straightforward case for their companies in the EU being broken up. Isn't that one of the functions of small gubbermint in a fundamentalist free-market neoliberal system? You know, to ensure that there's competition and no one entity can become tyranical?
I don't think you understand what a monopoly is, or how antitrust works. Hint: simply bundling applications is not an antitrust violation.