In an Open Letter To EU's Competition Commissioner, 14 European Shopping Comparison Services Say Google is Not Making the Search For Products Fairer (bbc.com)

Google is not complying with European demands that it must make the search for products fairer, rivals say. In an open letter to the EU's Competition Commissioner on Thursday, they wrote: We are writing to you as leading European comparison shopping services (CSSs) to express our collective view that Google's "compliance mechanism" in the Google Search (Comparison Shopping) case does not comply with the European Commission's June 2017 Prohibition Decision. It has now been more than a year since Google introduced its auction-based "remedy", and the harm to competition, consumers and innovation caused by Google's illegal conduct has continued unabated. We therefore respectfully urge you to commence non-compliance proceedings against Google. BBC offers some background: In June 2017, European competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager ruled that Google had abused its power by promoting its own shopping service at the top of search results, and demanded that it provide equal treatment to rival comparison sites in future. She issued a record fine of $2.7bn -- the largest penalty the European Commission has ever imposed. She also demanded that Google end its anti-competitive practices within 90 days or face further costs. Google is still appealing against the fine, but has come up with a system that it says makes shopping fairer. It changed the shopping box, which is displayed at the top of search results, so that it is no longer populated with just Google Shopping ad results, but gives space to other shopping comparison services, who can bid for advertising slots.

Comments

Re:Contradictory goals

[AmiMoJo]

The shopping stuff isn't part of the search results, it's an advertising box at the top that used to display results from Google Shopping. Now it also displays results from other shopping sites.

Build your own ?

[Crashmarik]

Can't say I like the way google has been going lately but Google's business is part helping people find things, part pointing them at particular things, why in hell anyone would think they should be forced to host their competitors in their place of business is a complete mystery.

Should they give free adds to Amazon ? After all Amazon serves as a shopping service ? What about Ebay ?

The EU has always been horribly obvious about being bought and paid for by European aristocrats, the ancien regime that never really went away, this is just a further attempt by them to shakedown a deep pocket.

Re:Build your own ?

[religionofpeas]

why in hell anyone would think they should be forced to host their competitors in their place of business is a complete mystery.

Because that's what the law says ?

Re:Build your own ?

[AmiMoJo]

The EU's explanation of the ruling is quite enlightening: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-r...

Imagine, you want to look for a product online. You type the product into the Google search engine. What you will see right at the top of the page is a box with Google Shopping's results, with pictures and a selection of deals from different retailers. They are placed above the results that Google's generic search algorithms consider most relevant.

At the same time, Google has demoted rival comparison shopping services in its search results. The evidence shows that even the most highly ranked rival appears on average only on page four of Google's search results. Others appear even further down.

(emphasis mine)

Google abused its position as the dominant search engine by artificially down-ranking rivals and giving its own service top billing. In the EU this is illegal as it leads to massive monopolies and a lack of fair competition.

Note that the solution proposed by Google and accepted by the EU is to auction slots in the special shopping area at the top of the search results page, not to offer anything for free.

Re:Build your own ?

[scamper_22]

Well, in general no, but when you get into 'monopoly' law then it can become a yes.

This is not a new area of law here. Whenever you have a monopoly, you need to handle it to have an open market. They had a lot of caselaw back in the day on rail road monopolies. Would you want a rail road operator preventing certain goods from being shipped? If I'm a railway company and I also own an apply farm, is it right for me to not ship apples from other companies? That's an abuse of monopoly. Network system, especially infrastructure are especially prone to such abuse.

Build your own railroad is not a 'good' answer to apple farmers.
Digital networks/monopolies are more interesting because it is theoretically easier to build a competing product, but in practice it's very similar to railroads. It's not hard to build a google competitor, but it is much harder to get all the users google has.

If google, being the top search engine is classified as being in a monopoly position, then it is reasonable to have measures in place to make sure they don't unfairly mistreat competitors or trump up their own services too much.

The details can work themselves out in the courts and lawyers, but it's a pretty reasonable ask.

Re:Build your own ?

[Anonymous Coward]

why in hell anyone would think they should be forced to host their competitors in their place of business is a complete mystery.

Because society belongs to all of us real people, not to Google. We paid the taxes to fund its services and contribute to its defense. Although, companies like Google have shirked their tax responsibilities so arguably they should have even less say in our society because they haven't paid their fair share towards its maintenance. However, to answer your question, Google can be forced to follow our rules by force of our laws which are backed up by our police and ultimately by our armies. In short, by force of arms and right of victory from which flows sovereignty. Humans have been using violence to organize society and enforce rules since the beginning of history, there's nothing mysterious about that.

Should they give free adds to Amazon ? After all Amazon serves as a shopping service ? What about Ebay ?

They should pay their fair share of taxes and follow the rules. How about we start with that.

The EU has always been horribly obvious about being bought and paid for by European aristocrats, the ancien regime that never really went away, this is just a further attempt by them to shakedown a deep pocket.

On the contrary, the Europeans have rendered us Americans a great service by enacting the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and I salute them for having the courage to do it in the face of corporate lies.

Re:Build your own ?

[jonsmirl]

These companies are complaining that they don't receive free advertising for their 'comparison' services which make all of their revenues via affiliate kickbacks. Maybe there is a reason why people don't use these competing services, ie they don't offer the lowest prices. So their 'remedy' is for Google to spend its resources promoting their service -- which is just a program which generates a website with the affiliate kickbacks embedded in the links.

That's a great business! Can't fail to make money since you have shifted all of your marketing costs onto another entity and all you do is collect the profit.

Re:Build your own ?

[jonsmirl]

Foundem is not an apple farmer it is a competing railroad. They are demanding that since they don't have tracks and Google does then their trains should get to run on Google's tracks for free. Google is willing to allow Foundem trains on its tracks but says they have to pay for the privilege since it is not free to build and maintain tracks.

Re:Build your own ?

[AmiMoJo]

That's why Google created an auction, same as they use for other advertising space. And also stopped down-ranking comparison sites in search results.

Re:Build your own ?

[dryeo]

They went public, so now the unwritten motto is "do whatever necessary to increase the stock price"

This was predicted long ago:

[Anonymous Coward]

"We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers." -- Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, 1998.

Re:Do the complaining sites link to Google?

[AmiMoJo]

No, they are just asking that Google doesn't illegally discriminate against them. The EU found evidence that Google was down-ranking competing sites to page 4 or beyond, while ensuring that its own very similar site appeared at the top of page one.

Re: Contradictory goals

[fred911]

Relevant results are landing pages that provide high utility, functionality, and are trustworthy for the majority of users entering said query for the users location.

  It's really not complicated. Ads are plainly marked. If the service doesn't provide useful results, you are free to use other indexes. Contrary to popular belief, if Google didn't exist the majority of the network would still be (and is) indexed, one way or another. Google IS NOT the network, just the crutch Joe Sixpack has become dependant upon.

  People need to get over their dependency of using one provider for all services. Whereas the said provider does a pretty good job, there are just as useful alternatives for all services they offer.

tcp/ip .. the cat's outa the bag

Re:??? What is wrong with Google's solution

[Luthair]

The people complaining aren't stores they're "comparison" sites, aka sites that have a bunch of generated pages with referral links. These sites were a plague before Google started lowering their page rankings.

I don't see it

[raymorris]

I'm happy to finding thrm anywhere on any of the sites from companies who are complaining. I don't see a link to Google at the top of any of these pages.

http://www.foundem.co.uk/searc...
https://www.redbrain.com/
https://pricespy.co.uk/search?...

The only mention I see of Google is that Redbrain promises advertisers that they can manipulate Google search results for them.

The answer

[Ol Olsoc]

The European Union knows what is fair. The European Union needs to create it's own search engine. This will ensure that the European Union will have exactly precisely, and EU approved search engine that it needs.

Seems so simple, and if fair, Google should be out of business very quickly. Perhaps even blocked in the EU.

Re:??? What is wrong with Google's solution

[SharpFang]

Are you asking what's wrong if your search results are ordered by "paid most to Google" instead of relevancy?