Microsoft's Role As Accuser In the Antitrust Suit Against Google

HughPickens.com writes Danny Hakim reports at the NYT that as European antitrust regulators formally accuse Google of abusing its dominance, Microsoft is relishing playing a behind-the-scenes role of scold instead of victim. Microsoft has founded or funded a cottage industry of splinter groups to go after Google. The most prominent, the Initiative for a Competitive Online Marketplace, or Icomp, has waged a relentless public relations campaign promoting grievances against Google. It conducted a study that suggested changes made by Google to appease regulators were largely window dressing. "Microsoft is doing its best to create problems for Google," says Manfred Weber, the chairman of the European People's Party, the center-right party that is the largest voting bloc in the European Parliament. "It's interesting. Ten years ago Microsoft was a big and strong company. Now they are the underdog."

According to Hakim, Microsoft and Google are the Cain and Abel of American technology, locked in the kind of struggle that often takes place when a new giant threatens an older one. Microsoft was frustrated after American regulators at the Federal Trade Commission didn't act on a similar antitrust investigation against Google in 2013, calling it a "missed opportunity." It has taken the fight to the state level, along with a number of other opponents of Google. Microsoft alleges that Google's anti-competitive practices include stopping Bing from indexing content on Google-owned YouTube; blocking Microsoft Windows smartphones from "operating properly" with YouTube; blocking access to content owned by book publishers; and limiting the flow of ad campaign information back to advertisers, making it more expensive to run ads with rivals. "Over the past year, a growing number of advertisers, publishers, and consumers have expressed to us their concerns about the search market in Europe," says Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel. "They've urged us to share our knowledge of the search market with competition officials."

Comments

Perhaps not lost on the editor...

[pushing-robot]

Fact of the day: "Satan" is the Hebrew word for "accuser".

Re:Perhaps not lost on the editor...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Fact of the day: "Satan" is the Hebrew word for "accuser"."

Satan is Hebrew for "adversary," not accuser. I think you're mixing up Lucifers original role for God, which was basically going around poking and making sure people weren't just giving lip service to their face. The dude had a serious hardon for Jehovah, and hated pretenders -- it's part of where the whole "lightbringer" name came from. The whole story of Job in older interpretations is him acting in that capacity.

The whole Satan as the devil thing seems to have gotten really mixed up in later generations, amongst a gazillion other things, in the same way jihad is now becoming only seen as a holy war against infidels. At the same, your adversary could be any challenge you faced, even internally, the same with jihad -- your spiritual war with challenges of character or external forces. People would even (and are) named Jihad, in the same way westerners might name a child Hope or Peace.

As a side note: I'm always amazed some of Google's adsense stuff doesn't get more press response. I turned my head on them when people were losing accounts because they used adsense on their sites, and tried out bing on a few pages, which you aren't allowed to do in order to see what works best.

there's a strange bias on slashdot

[circletimessquare]

microsoft is eternal evil , it always does wrong, and google is eternal good, it can never do wrong

this might have made sense 15 years ago, but google has immense power ripe for abuse

google needs to be reigned in and bought to heel on issues where it's power is too complete

i'm glad someone is doing it. i don't really care if microsoft is along for the ride or not, and it doesn't really matter

Re:there's a strange bias on slashdot

[msobkow]

Meh. With any large organization, there will always be those who bleat and whine about the "potential" for abuse, and cry that they're not getting their "fair" share of the market because their product(s) just flat out aren't good enough to earn it.

Don't get me wrong: I don't buy the "don't be evil" mantra, but I don't see Google actually doing anything wrong.

And it's kind of laughable that Microsoft is resorting to whinging about the situation given how shitty the results Bing produces are. I've tried it. Many times. They rarely, if ever, produce results that are even vaguely related to what I'm searching for. They don't have market share because THEY SUCK.

Re:there's a strange bias on slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a really simple equation here. If you want to do business in a country or a region, you follow their laws. Or you pay their penalties. Google can easily afford some of the most skillful corporate lawyers available in the event they are falsely accused of breaking a law.

Portraying a huge multinational corporation as the victim is just plain ridiculous. This isn't some big bully picking on a little guy who can't defend themselves. By pretending that it is, you present three possibilities: 1) you're extremely naive and ignorant, 2) you have bought into some PR/propaganda (likely the finest money can buy, no doubt), or 3) you have a vested interest of some kind in making Google look good, whether you're receiving money from them or you're simply a fanboy.

Re:there's a strange bias on slashdot

[circletimessquare]

the eu can do whatever the fuck it wants

in the eu

frankly, i admire a society that brings corporations to heel

rather than the sick pathetic american society where corporations buy the government, corrupt it, and then propagandized morons think that's actually ok. as the middle class shrinks more and they work harder for less. the morons think that's "capitalism". no it isn't, it's cronyism. healthy capitalism is a strictly regulated market, not the biggest players in the market buying the government, regulatory capture, and then abusing smaller players and consumers

i really don't know why there are so many americans so eager to suck plutocrat cock

exactly as they are robbed and raped by them. and think it's the governments fault. because the corporation controlled media channels tell them that. when it's the corporations corrupting their government

fucking morons

Re:there's a strange bias on slashdot

[storkus]

Oh, please, pot meet kettle:

Google has only been acting really evil in the last few years; for M$, Oracle, and many other companies, doing evil is corporate policy and they have *NEVER* STOPPED being evil. To put it another way, Oracle is the Monsanto of software, M$ is the DuPont of software, and Google is more like factory farms, doing both good and evil at the same time. (I freely admit the Google comparison is weak--please feel free to come up with a better one.)

I have no problem with Google being investigated, but they should go after M$ as well, especially with what they did to Nokia, Linux, and Android; fat chance that'll happen, though.

Re:there's a strange bias on slashdot

[Solandri]

microsoft is eternal evil , it always does wrong, and google is eternal good, it can never do wrong

this might have made sense 15 years ago, but google has immense power ripe for abuse

While I agree Google has immense power ripe for abuse, they are nothing like Microsoft was. If Microsoft in the 1990s were behaving like Google is today:

• They would've released Windows as open source. If you wanted to roll your own version of Windows that competed with Microsoft, you could. The only restriction would've been that Office would only run on Microsoft's version of Windows.
• Windows would be free. So would Office. They'd make money by charging Windows program developers, and selling information to marketers about how Windows and Office were being used.
• When you first tried to run a web browser, it would list every web browser in existence in order of popularity for you to choose. Internet Explorer may or may not have been placed near the top of that list regardless of its true popularity.
• Same for every Windows program made by Microsoft. Office, Publisher, etc.
• If you had your data in the format for Microsoft programs, and decided to switch to a competitor, you could use the Microsoft-provided tools to convert your data into a generic format which could easily be imported into the 3rd party app.
• They would've made subtle changes to Windows to make sure DR-DOS couldn't run it, like Google is making it hard for Bing to index YouTube. Oh wait, Microsoft did do that.
• When an internal audit revealed that they had accidentally collected user information beyond what their user agreement allowed, they would've reported themselves to the regulatory agencies for the privaacy violation.

Maybe you weren't using computers back when Microsoft was pulling their shenanigans in the 1990s. Those of us who were see Google as good because despite a few problems here and there, they've been behaving a helluva lot better than just about any predecessor who was in similar positions of market power.

Re:there's a strange bias on slashdot

[moronoxyd]

Maybe its time for the United States to go after a few EU companies doing business in our country. We can
certainly use the same principle of - we don't like the way you do business. Forget the law.

Except there are laws that Intel, Microsoft and (potentially) Google have broken.

And what people like you love to ignore (or, more probably, don't know, as it doesn't involve Americans): The EU judges European companies by the same standard. A few years back Gaz du France and German E.On where found to break anti-competition laws and had to pay high fines. And there are many other cases not involving American companies.

The problem is NOT that the EU is going against American companies, but that American companies sometimes don't understand that in Europe they have to play by European laws, not by the lawlessness that's the American reality.

Remember M$'s role on SCO?

[Taco Cowboy]

Remember who was behind SCO on its patent claim against Linux?

M$

Do you know that M$ still has patent claims on Linux and Android?

Do you know that Samsung had to pay M$ to use Android on their smartphone?

Do you know that because of the so-called settlement in between M$ and Samsung on the Android patent thing, Samsung is obliged to use Microsoft's apps on its new smartphones?

Re:Remember M$'s role on SCO?

[rtb61]

Now to play the neutral bad guy, at least in both parties eyes. Targeted advertisements, this is what the fight is about, who controls the scam and who makes the most money from it.

Consider this, legal responsibility for targeted adds. Consider you are a type 2 new on the market diabetic and they target you with high sugar content foods, what is their legal liability for purposefully doing and endangering your life, keeping in mind they are either trying to manipulate you into harming yourself or they are claiming advertising does not work.

So who do you blame for obesity, McDonald or the people who promote McDonald and target their ads at people who they also target with dieting ads. They really did open up a whole new can of worms with targeted advertisements, purposefully designed messages to manipulate your choices against your interests to generate income regardless of harm.

Honestly show a sugar rich junk food commercial to a person on record suffering from type 2 diabetes and you should go to jail because you intent is to psychologically manipulate their choices to the point of self harm because GREED.

So M$ or Google, meh, both just as fucking evil as each other. I just preferred the kernel under Android ;).

Re:Remember M$'s role on SCO?

[darronb]

He's talking about targeted advertising, not traditional advertising.

He's saying that if you have so much information about a person that you know they're diabetic, and actually use that as a factor in deciding to show them stuff that statistically they'll go for even though you know it's proven to be harming them... that should be an actionable offense.

I think there's a better example that's less politicized: It's also like working out someone goes to a gambling support group and intentionally serving them a bunch of ads for casinos in Vegas.

That's way different than just showing ads to the public. It's even quite different from having the information somewhere else in the company and not using it in the advertising algorithms.

I actually agree with his point of view to an extent... although it should be easy to avoid doing that sort of thing. Targeted advertising algorithms that include automatic inferences might go there however and eventually need some kind of 'moral guidance' instructions of some kind.

I do not agree that having so much information that you "should" know that Vegas ad was wrong to show to the gambler but didn't use it in the decision process is wrong (the OP might). Right now we're in a glut of data but the analysis and understanding of that data is not mature. I don't think the state of the art makes that negligence. I do think we might get to the point where the algorithms are so advanced that it WOULD be wrong... much like it would be wrong for a human advertiser to go through that thought process and decide to show the ad.

Re:Remember M$'s role on SCO?

[robi5]

It's not "meh, both are evil". Microsoft had been evil long before Google even existed. They didn't just 'not let other large competitors index their stuff'. They went after minuscule companies like Netscape, and emailed among each other how they'd cut off Netscape's air supply, which they did, and as a result, had no real competitor in the browser space for about a decade - even though they copied Netscape's product to begin with. They were charged with abusive monopoly behavior and they were convicted.

I'm always appalled when a guy comes and lazily simplifies corporate wrongdoing saying one is just as evil as the other. No, there are differences. It almost never happens that two entities are equally this or that. Google would have to rule the Internet for like a hundred years to accumulate as much sin as Microsoft had, and Microsoft would need to exlst for a millennium to bring about as much technological progress as Google has already created. Microsoft is the new Computer Associates and the new SCO, all in one.

Re:Remember M$'s role on SCO?

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft didn't copy Netscape. They did worse than that.

They got a company named Spyglass to write it - for a percentage of the sales. These people were the ones that originally wrote Mosaic.

Once MS had the original product, they decided to give it away... as a zero cost. Thus they didn't pay Spyglass their percentage. And in the process put Spyglass nearly out of business, and stole the browser.

Re:Remember M$'s role on SCO?

[ilguido]

So M$ or Google, meh, both just as fucking evil as each other. I just preferred the kernel under Android ;).

This is an example of what in Italian is called "qualunquismo": considering every party the same, so that you don't have to make your choices (because in all-equal world is pointless to choice). The point is that MS and Google are not evil as each other, their respective track records are much different in that regard, and even if they're as evil and it's just that Google is able enough to hide it, there's a huge difference in corporate culture (like there's difference between the corporate culture of Apple and Microsoft) and the corporate culture of Microsoft is one of the most irritating: they're like a naughty, bossy boy, that thinks he can get away with every mischief he does, and when he is caught guilty, he tries only to get revenge (and does nothing to hide it).

Still the worst offender

[amiga3D]

"Microsoft alleges that Google's anti-competitive practices include stopping Bing from indexing content on Google-owned YouTube; blocking Microsoft Windows smartphones from "operating properly" with YouTube; blocking access to content owned by book publishers; and limiting the flow of ad campaign information back to advertisers, making it more expensive to run ads with rivals."

The kinds of actions that Microsoft has been doing for almost 3 decades and still does today. Yes, MS is an expert on dirty competition and using it's monopolistic position to squash any sort of competition. I can't really defend Google but I have to say I'm absolutely flabbergasted at the nerve MS has to accuse Google of anything. It's like Charles Manson accusing Aaron Hernandez of murder. The Gall.

I do not play the 'victim game'

[Taco Cowboy]

So who do you blame for obesity, McDonald or the people who promote McDonald and target their ads at people who they also target with dieting ads

Who do I blame?

Me

I blame myself for being a fucking idiot wasting my hard earned $ on Mickey-D's hamburgers for I, as a consumer, have the choice to *NOT* going to Mickey-D no matter what the ads tell me

Instead of bias, let's consider the specific facts

[raymorris]

Rather than vague statements that say nothing other than what our biases are, let us look at the specific facts of the case.

We can start with one issue mentioned in TFS. Microsoft complains that they aren't able to index Youtube as well as the site can index itself, with direct access to the database. Instead, Microsoft / Bing needs to either a) spider the site like every search engine does on every other site in the world, or b) use the APIs that Google has made publicly available at no charge . Microsoft complains that those APIs are insufficient. Let's consider that, by comparing them to the norms in the industry. How good are the Youtube APIs compared to the APIs that Microsoft provides for MSDN? Well, Google provides an API an Microsoft does not.

It iseasier for Bing to index Youtube than it is for Google to index MSDN.

One can imagine that it might be fair for someone say "you should give us just as good as we give you." Here Microsoft is saying "you give us an API, but we want you to provide a better one, while we provide none at all." A basic concept of fairness is that the expectations are the same for everyone- that one should not demand from others something you are not willing to do yourself. Until Microsoft makes an indexing API available for their own properties, it seems rather strange for them to demand others provide even better APIs to them.

Youtube supports HTML5 video, aka modern browsers. Microsoft complains that they are having trouble pulling YouTube's videos out of the web pages (where the ads to pay for it and track views are) and display them in their own app. Does Microsoft provide their content for free, to be pulled out of their web siye and served up separately? Can Google rip the MSDN content and display it in an app, rather than on Microsoft's web page? Microsoft doesn't allow that, so how can they insist that Google not only allow it, but make it essier for them?

Microsoft patented content scraper ©

[DougPaulson]

"Microsoft alleges that Google's anti-competitive practices include stopping Bing from indexing content on Google-owned YouTube; blocking Microsoft Windows smartphones from "operating properly" with YouTube"

You mean Google won't allow Microsoft to scrape content, like for example they do with Wikipedia. some time ago Microsoft was even caught scraping Google search results and 'incorperating' it into Bing. Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results

Re: Why

[Johnny Loves Linux]

google needs to be reigned in and bought to heel on issues where it's power is too complete

i'm glad someone is doing it. i don't really care if microsoft is along for the ride or not, and it doesn't really matter

Why? I'm being serious here. What's the justification for reigning in google? In Microsoft's case it's obvious how much karma is has burned through and why it needed to be reigned in . Here's the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C....

But what has Google done that was so bad it needs similar treatment? Has it forced anyone to use GoogleOS? Has it forced anyone to use only its browser? Has it forced anyone to use proprietary formats that are patent encumbered and cannot be fully implemented by anyone else? What has it done?

From where I sit all I see is a company that has provided me:

1. An awesome search engine that doesn't mess with me with some lame "best viewed with our lame web browser" message.
2. An awesome maps engine that makes navigation so much easier.
3. A cloud print environment to make it way easy to print to any printer that's cloud print capable and that I have permission to use.
4. A free e-mail service whose spam filter is so good, I have only received 1 spam message in the past 10 years.
5. An easy way to share documents using a FOSS document format.
6. A FOSS operating system for both tablets and phones that does what I need it to do.
7. A FOSS browser whose javascript engine was so good, it spanked every other browser into getting their act together on javascript performance. No chrome, no awesome javascript performance.
8. A Linux based laptop that's so easy to use to browse the internet and at the same I can run my Debian or Ubuntu on it using a chroot if I want. No funkytown licenses. No funkytown registrations. No obnoxious "protect your computer from boogie monster viruses, install/update/stick with our crapware!!!" pop up ads.

So I'm honestly asking again, what exactly has Google done that was so bad? Who has been hurt by its actions?