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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.
The bigger problem is not for people who use the engine to find things, it's for owners of things to be found. When a single search engine has 90% of all traffic, whether your business shows up in its search results or not, and if it does, then how high relative to its competitors, can easily become the single biggest determinant of your success. If such placement is not fair (whatever that means), there is an issue.
You sound like a laissez-faire unregulated market proponent, so let me put it this way. Such markets, presumably, work fine when all actors are rational and base their decisions on facts. When a single company becomes in charge of delivering those facts, to the extent that most people implicitly trust them, it becomes trivial for it to skew the market by selectively withholding facts or downplaying their relevance.
Antitrust isn't really about consumers (although arguable it is ultimately) but about making sure the free market is both a market and free.
When the entire industry is subject to a single companies whim, then its a bad thing. Microsofts anticompetitive practices in the 90s and early 2000s held the IT industry back years, because web browsers stop being competitive and for the web industry that meant we where stuck with a bloody awful lowest common denominator (ie6) for nearly a decade. At least until EU sanctions gave firefox a fighting chance, and web browsers had to compete again and we saw real innovation finally.
Wheres the innovation in searching, when the only engine one needs to care about is google. Wheres the innovation in content, when the only rule in web presence is "does googles algorithm like it". One company holds millions of IT workers fates in their hands, and thats not safe and its not a free market, just a market.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
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?
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
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.
It's the EUs market, they can do whatever they want with it. Don't like it? Go somewhere else.
Exactly! Looks like we need to have all the antitrust discussions again - how it's ok to have a monopoly but not ok to use that to grab market share on other markets, how monopoly power does not mean 100% market share etc. Too many are too young to remember from the MS antitrust days or maybe they have forgotten all that.
And if you think that it's wrong of EU to investigate an American company, think about it this way: with EU and US doing these investigations, we can have more faith in that all monopoly abusing companies will be investigated somewhere - even if their home country is turning a blind eye. This is good on both sides - it's not like this will really have a huge effect on Google anyway.
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.
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.
And if you think that it's wrong of EU to investigate an American company, think about it this way:
Google is a European company.
Actually, many European companies.
http://www.google.com/about/company/facts/locations/
Google's European headquarter is in Ireland... well, actually, it's an Irish company that is headquartered in Bermuda.
Google USA licenses its IP to Google Ireland Holdings (headquartered in Bermuda).
In turn, Google Ireland Holdings sub-licenses the IP to its wholly owned subsidiary in the Netherlands: Google Netherlands Holdings B.V.
Then Google Netherlands Holdings B.V. sub-sub-licenses the IP to another Google Ireland Holdings subsidiary: Google Ireland Ltd.
To coordinate all this, Google has a network of corporations in individual EU States, usually just "sales support" staff who run the ad-sales and ad-placements.
TLDR: The EU can't break up Google USA, but they can force Google Ireland Holdings to GTFO or change the way it offers services in the EU.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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).