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EU To Hit Google With Antitrust Charges
Bruce66423 sends news that the European Union has decided to hit Google with antitrust charges that could lead to fines of over $6 billion. The EU has been investigating Google for five years now. "The European Commission has highlighted four main areas of concern in its investigation: potential bias in Google’s search results, scraping content from rival websites, agreements with advertisers that may exclude rival search-advertising services and contracts that limit marketers from using other platforms." They're also keeping an eye on Android-related business practices.
It's their product, they can do whatever they want with it. Don't like it? Use something else. It's not like you are forced to use Google services. A real antitrust would be if they did backdoor deals to make sure products from the competition were subpar. But with Bing and Yahoo being the main competitor, they don't really need to do anything, do they. Because who in the right mind would use those awful services that never return the right results.
Pretty much captures it. You can also go, with Politicians: They don't care why they'll take your shit anyway, Or "Google didn't bribe enough people in the EU"
No they can't. I know it's hard for Americans with company worship to understand, but companies are held to account for their actions in the EU, and EU consumer laws have the express purpose of limiting the abuse of consumers by sociopathic profit-seekers. Anti-trust is part of that, because anti-competitive behavior screws other companies that are behaving responsibly. The relevant example here is consumer data protection which Google despises.
Sorry, but that's not how it works here. If companies don't want to be a part of EU consumer-friendly civilization, they can go wreak their havoc elsewhere. Here companies are expected to serve the public good, not just seek profit without rules nor accountability.
You wouldn't say Apple has as strong or a stronger hold on the music and mobile phone markets? There's plenty of adequate competition for search engines.
If nobody else even knows about alternative search engines, you can't really hold Google liable for that, can you?
Wonder what the public key field is for?
Those who cannot do - sue.
The entire premise of 'anti-trust' coming from a government, ANY government is laughable in every possible way. The only real monopolies that can abuse power are created by governments and it is government power that is abused by them, as for Google and other companies that compete among each other and may become dominant (for some time) in a market - this is due to the choice of the clients, who collectively vote for that company to be in a more dominant position at that time.
You can't handle the truth.
As soon as I read the headline, I hoped that Google would beat the EU. It took effort to remember the Microsoft anti-trust case of 25 years ago, and how -- for many of the same issues -- I wanted the DOJ to grind MS into the dust.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
You couldn't buy a computer (and still can't) without Windows. You couldn't uninstall IE. Windows was actively preventing users from using competitor's products, and it was costly and time consuming to do so. Google is in trouble for not sufficiently advertising competing products. There's no barrier for entry to use bing instead of Google, or amazon instead of google shopping.
All one has to do to use another search engine is google "search engine".
Google doesn't even return Google when you google "search engine". It does return half a dozen other search engines, including Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yahoo. A market leader perhaps, but not a monopoly.
Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.
Perhaps the reason you feel different is that Google isn't forcing people to use Google. This is a little bit different than Internet Exploder, which MS was forcing people to keep installed when using the OS. But one could just as easily type www.yahoo.com into the URL, or even www.bing.com into the URL. Heck those are easier, less characters. Perhaps people don't want to do this because Google is a better search engine?
Google isn't a Monopoly by any means. At the time of its Anti-Trust case, Microsoft was effectively a monopoly on all PCs, and was acting like a monopolist dickwad. Microsoft well deserved the Anti-Trust treatment. The unfortunate fallout from the Microsoft cases were that governments got the bright idea to bring Anti-Trust lawsuits any tech market leader. Google just happens to be in line this week.
Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.
It's been said before, but bares repeating: If you're using Google's "services" for free, then you are the product and not the consumer/customer.
Such an antitrust case is about protecting Google's consumers/customers from Google's de-facto monopoly in the market.
You (the product) switching from google to another search provider only means that Google has 0.00000001% less product to sell, and is unlikely to impact anyone.
However a business (the customer) switching to another provider, could (and would) cut that business off from over 90% of its potential customers (you). Something that is likely to impact them greatly (if not kill the business).