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Google Should Be Broken Up, Say European MPs
An anonymous reader is one of many to send word that the European Parliament has voted 384 to 174 in favor of unbundling search engines from other commercial services in order to ensure competition. "The European Parliament has voted in favor of breaking Google up, as a solution to complaints that it favors is own services in search results. Politicians have no power to enforce a break-up, but the landmark vote sends a clear message to European regulators to get tough on the net giant. US politicians and trade bodies have voiced their dismay at the vote. The ultimate decision will rest with EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager. She has inherited the anti-competitive case lodged by Google's rivals in 2010. Google has around 90% market share for search in Europe. The Commission has never before ordered the break-up of any company, and many believe it is unlikely to do so now. But politicians are desperate to find a solution to the long-running anti-competitive dispute with Google."
Why don't the Europeans start their own search and ad engine?
Oh, because they would lose?
What I don't understand here is Google does not have a monopoly on search services. They're just damn good at it and the market, with several other choices including Bing!, votes with its clicks. I'm not sure I see what's wrong with that.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
The whole idea is stupid. What governments should of course be considering instead, if they find biased internet searches so troubling, is to create a government body that provides the same service upon a completely neutral basis. The problem then comes into how to sort the list, who gets first page ranking and who misses out. So hold a conference, invite various groups and individuals and set rules for search sorting and set major penalties for attempting to search optimise, also provide the means for registered end users to readily filter out and promote sites based upon how well they match the search criteria. Do it all ad free, based upon the majority of companies getting better consumer access without bias, on consumers saving time without having to wade through irrelevant search optimised shit search sites, in fact allow users to flag them with a view to prosecution far disrupting user network search activity. Government spending should always have a focus on saving the majority of it's citizens money where that taxation investment is far less than the money citizens save in the more efficient provision of services.
So should internet search be private or public and should citizens have a choice whether to use the private service or the public service. In this case only a handful of private companies benefit and the cost of a huge number or private companies and this cost is inevitably passed onto the consumers.
So should net neutrality extend to search neutrality, well, at least search fully controllable by the end user and their choices of what a good search results and which ones 'search optimisely' suck.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
The whole idea is stupid. What governments should of course be considering instead, if they find biased internet searches so troubling, is to create a government body that provides the same service upon a completely neutral basis.
"Neutral", seriously you want a government imposed Pravda? Or are you just trying to set up such an absurd left wing straw man to get everyone on Google's side? What the EU is generally against is bundling products and services because it hampers competition and creates vertical collusion and hidden costs. Say you buy a car only to find they use IP, warranty terms, secret error codes and such to make sure you only use original parts, authorized service dealers, approved fuel and tires from partners and so on . There's laws curbing such behavior because it's in the consumers' interest that car companies compete on making cars, auto repair companies compete on maintenance and repair and tire manufacturers compete on making car tires. It doesn't mean the government should jump in national everything so everybody gets "fair" maintenance on their cars.
For example, during the first iPhone launch here they tried playing the "exclusive carrier" game bundled with a high monthly cost, but our consumer laws demand you can terminate such a agreement by covering their loss. So those who wanted another carrier would sign up, got their iPhone, insta-canceled, paid for the full price of the phone and was free to sign up with another carrier. That effectively killed it, pretty soon after you could buy it directly with no subscription and sign up with whoever you wanted. And that's how it should be, phone manufacturers compete on phones and carriers compete on being carriers. Companies don't want free markets where prices are low and competition intense, they want dysfunctional markets where they can make huge profits. This is very obvious in software where they want you to buy into the Microsoft stack or the Apple stack or the Google stack. If the bits and pieces were compatible and interchangeable you'd see a lot more competition and many smaller third parties providing a few parts. Bunding is a way for megacorporations to make sure only megacorporations compete.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'm all for breaking up companies that abuse their power of controlling content delivery by favoring their own products (waves to Verizon/Comcast RE: Netflix) however in this case I dont see it. A quick Google search for "tablet" where there is competition between Android, Windows and iOS based devices shows no slanting of any kind in the search results. I'm not in Europe so I can't say that I would get the same results if located there, but I would be interested in exactly what kind of evidence there is to suggest that Google is acting in an anticompetitive manner?
I was a conference, GeoWeb I think it was, in 2008. It was for web-based GIS (Geographic Information Systems), basically cartography & the web. This was maybe a year or two after Google bought out Keyhole, and Michael Jones (I think it was him) from Google was there. Also, Google had just released Chrome so there was a lot of discussion about it. I wanted to pick Jones' brain about some KML eccentricities because I had just written a KML reader & writer. I had to wait behind about five other people who just wanted to talk to him because he was from Google.
One conversation though sticks out. Some guy (who seemed somewhat sycophantic for some reason) was going on & on about how Chrome was going to change the world because it was from Google, and they'd make sure it was awesome and because they could use their influence to make sure everyone used it. I remember that Jones cut him off there (sounding more than a little annoyed) and he told the guy (paraphrasing): "Google can't make anyone use anything we write. The search engine lets us put anything we create in front of their eyes at least once -- that's it. If they try it, it has to live or die on its own merits, we can't force people to try or use it."
Wood Shavings!
- Godai