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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."
Kept on a leash. Lets be honest here, the ONLY thing that keeps someone from using another competing search engine is nothing at all. The only reason people use Google is because it's better, the minute they stop being better and people will quit using it. I don't consider it much of a monopoly when the barrier to entry is almost nothing.
I don't particularly like them fronting their own service but again, no one is forcing anyone to use Google. It's not even the default search engine for the predominant desktop system! This appears to be being driven by the German politicians who are bowing to their own content industry to try to force google to give them a piece of their search business.
I can't help but feel that this entire push is slimy corruption politics typical to Europe where they try to protect local businesses and harm foreign ones using dubious legal means which are often against WTO agreements.
This stupid nonsense is posted every time the EU acts in relation to american companies.
It's among the worst nationalistic hogwash misconceptions ever, easily on par with North Korea rambling about its moon base.
The EU is bigger than the USA in almost every metric, especially on the important ones: Population count (507 mio. vs. 319 mio.) and GDP (18.4 trio. US$ vs. 16.8 trio. US$).
Any big american company deciding to withdraw from Europe would have its board of directors kicked out faster than they can sign the paperwork to make it happen, or watch its stock crash & burn, because they've just not only moved out of its biggest market, they've also given a free playing ground for a global competitor to emerge unchallenged.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
My point is that the EU is a bunch of arrogant idiots who have no business telling an American company to split up.
Like it or not, idiots or not, they do have such business, simply because your poor little "american company" is no such thing. It's an international corporation that was once founded in america, but now does business all over the world, including within the EU and actually quite a lot of it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Not only that, but the EUSSR doesn't seem to understand that an American corporation has nothing to do with European communists. They should go and re-read their history books and remember how close all of Europe was to speaking either German or Russian.
I could have moderated your drivel to hell but that wouldn't help much.
The EU commision can't tell US companies to do anything but they can set conditions for allowing them to operate within the EU. It's called sovereignty and the US does it too all the time. Having a beef with virtual or actual monopolies is not exactly a communist thing either. A monopoly is a direct attack on the free market and therefore upsets true free market believers.
The US have a long, although not resent, history of cracking down on monopolies. The Standard Oil case is the poster child for this kind of policy.
TCAP-Abort
The only barrier to entry is a good search engine that turns out results people want. It's not that hard, but it's far to easy to want to screw up those results to boost revenue, something yahoo was notorious for. Microsoft's biggest expenses related to search were advertising (such as buying Yahoo's search business) and trying to convince people they could be trusted, so far they've mostly failed at both. Even at that Bing is still not as good at returning results as Google is. Maybe that's because Google's entire company is devoted to search and Yahoo and Microsoft are devoted to other things with search being a second class citizen in the company.
You might like putting people in jars but I don't, please don't attempt to classify my political leanings by putting me in a jar, particularly one I despise. The problem with your argument is that the total dominance of Google as you claim could be replaced overnight by people typing a different URL in the bar. There is no barrier to entry other than excellence in search. What I see in search is a very functional and competitive market place. Google messes up once and the lions at their door will eat their market-share in a matter of months. The total lack of barrier's to entry, the ease with which consumers can switch and the fact that prices are falling indicates a healthy free-market, even if one of the players is dominant. All regulations will do in a situation like this is break the functioning market. I'm all for regulating markets, just not doing it to ones that are functioning relatively freely.
European regulations should be focusing on the edges of the market where Google is trying to manipulate things, such as forcing them to randomize product listing instead of always listing their own first. Or making sure they don't turn their Android system into a vehicle to mobile control (but by all reports Europe has a healthier mobile competition than the US with a functional player in Microsoft). Or even leveraging their android wear or android car to gain control of other markets. Again though the touch should be light, by all accounts these markets are free and functional. Overly heavy regulation is as damaging as no regulation at all.
Let me know when the EU get's around to slapping Apple for browser bundling and not providing an install screen to select alternatives.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
The EU commision can't tell US companies to do anything but they can set conditions for allowing them to operate within the EU. It's called sovereignty and the US does it too all the time. Having a beef with virtual or actual monopolies is not exactly a communist thing either. A monopoly is a direct attack on the free market and therefore upsets true free market believers.
Finally at least a reply that contains an actual argument. Thanks for that.
I actually agree with you. The EU can set conditions for allowing a company to operate within the EU. However, they EU should not be in a position to split up a privately owned enterprise. If they feel that Google has too big of a market share, than they should encourage competition. Which, BTW, there is a lot of. Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo, Ask.com (yikes) and many others.
In the case of Microsoft's anti-trust case, there was no such thing. Most people and business needed a Windows PC because (at the time) it was pretty much the only thing that would be compatible with your neighbor's PC. MS controlled the desktop. Switching required a installing a new operating system, and most people didn't even know how to do that let alone that they were even aware of alternatives.
Google does not control your search engine. Internet Explorer defaults to Bing, and soon Firefox will default to Yahoo. It is easy to switch default search engines, all you need is to change a bookmark. However, I prefer Google simply because it's better and a lot of people will do the same.
Having a better product than others doesn't necessarily mean you're an illegal monopoly. Google's perceived monopoly can be gone in six months, as soon as a competitor brings a better product.
Look at Myspace vs Facebook, for example.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
Population count (507 mio. vs. 319 mio.) and GDP (18.4 trio. US$ vs. 16.8 trio. US$).
Given their superior regulatory environment, why does the EU only make less than 70% per-capita of what the US makes? Especially given that many US-headquartered companies are recognizing most of their revenue in Ireland.
Because the EU added several Eastern European nations as members who were, and to some extent still are, recovering from two world wars and 50 years as vassal states of the Soviet Union. Man of these countries are suffering through the usual corruption and political instability issues that plague all young democracies. Just try to imagine that the USA admitted a few dysfunctional South American countries with broken economies and a few tens of millions of poor working class citizens as new states of your union. The per capita economic output of the USA would take a bit of a nosedive. The reason that most US-headquartered companies are recognising their revenue in Ireland is because they are dodging taxes, the EU as a whole does not benefit from that because their corporate slime balls are doing the same thing. The only ones benefitting from the now famous 'double Irish' tax dodge are corrupt Irish politicians.
Successful companies eventually pass a threshold in which their ambitions stop being beneficial to the rest of the economy, and start being exploitative of it. Any company, if too successful, will eventually cause more harm than good.
Slippery-sloping the obvious responses to this observation can cause great economic harm as well. But that doesn't change the facts. Monopolism is bad for the economy, and robs everyone of the benefits that justify capitalism.