5 ms·

Totally implausible scenario, but what would happen if Google were to say "to hell with this" and just completely pull out of the EU? Like full-stop, nothing Go

by jbob2000 11y ago

Totally implausible scenario, but what would happen if Google were to say "to hell with this" and just completely pull out of the EU? Like full-stop, nothing Google touching the EU. Would there be riots? Would governments try to force Google back? Like, are they so essential to digital life that a complete withdrawal would cause some amount of chaos? And if that's the case, isn't an antitrust suit a bit disingenuous? Isn't that like saying "hey, you guys are dominating over here, we want you to stop, but we also are going to continue to reinforce your dominance by continuing to use all of your services"?

dubcanada 11y ago
They wouldn't, but it's an interesting thing to think about. I mean Google is the #1 search engine basically in the world (excluding some Asian countries who have their own search engines) so if Google was to theoretically block all of Europe, it would be really hard to tell what would happen...
ifdefdebug 11y ago
Google would be shrinking considerably, which is something I think they don't want, so I think antitrust suits are not disingenuous because Google has as much of an interest in operating in the EU as their European users. It's a mutual thing.
LunaSea 11y ago
All the Google services would be replaced by (at first lower quality) European versions. This would create a huge investment and tech sector growth wave. One of the best things to happen to the European tech scene since the beginning of the Internet. You can see this happening in Russia, China and India although for different reasons. Even if this case doesn't change anything I think we will see Google's involvement be reduces drastically in the next 5 years due to European Union laws and restrictions.
- sievebrain 11y ago
  All? At first, lower quality? I think you massively underestimate how much investment is required to produce even a basic search engine, let alone one that eventually catches up to what Google has produced. And that's just search. Now throw in Gmail, Maps, Android, Chrome, etc ... these are international collaborations for a reason.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    There are plenty of replacements for all of those except Android. Multiple browsers, various mapping companies (including OpenStreetMap), multiple email providers, multiple browser vendors. There's also Bing, and the various ancient abandoned former greats of search: Altavista (now Yahoo), Lycos.
    - nostrebored 11y ago
      Pretending that things come close to the richness of features in GMaps is ridiculous. Topographical maps for cyclists, amazing transit maps with descriptions of stops, reliable use internationally (google maps is still amazing in places like Indonesia) and a generally good list of hours, restaurants, queries like 'near me'... I think that other products are far and away worse every time that I am linked to them. Even people on HN who mention trying to use other search engines talk about having to frequently come back to google to find the result that they need. Whether that's us 'learning to Google' or Google being a superior product is up for debate.
    - bad_user 11y ago
      Not sure if you noticed, but all alternative search engines, like Bing and DDG, are absolutely terrible in Europe. And this isn't an overstatement.
  - m_t 11y ago
    There are already working search engine alternative, from Qwant to bing. One can definitely live without google as a search engine.
  - x0x0 11y ago
JoshTriplett 11y ago
That also raises additional questions: there's a process and a set of rules for enforcing such a ruling against a company that a government actually has jurisdiction over (and thus must follow all the operational rules of a "native" company), and a different process and different rules for deciding that an entirely foreign company (with no nexus in the jurisdiction to enforce against) has acted so egregiously that their product should be blocked from importing. Antitrust concerns commonly get enforced against companies within the country raising those concerns, but I don't know of any example of antitrust concerns raised by a country against an entirely foreign company and used to block imports of the company's products.
- scholia 11y ago
  I don't think the EU is too worried about that. It has already imposed very large fines on both Intel and Microsoft, for example. Like them, Google has lots of staff and offices throughout the EU.... although (not uniquely) it uses various methods to avoid paying taxes ;-)
skoczymroczny 11y ago
People would switch to Windows Phones, which are fairly popular in Eastern Europe.
izacus 11y ago
Remember that a huge amount of Google tax evasion is due to EU loophole :)
pjc50 11y ago
In the short term there would be a lot of VPN access as people tried to deal with the chaos of having to transition away from gmail. I'd be very surprised if they just turned it off one day without warning, but if they did that would burn a lot of customer goodwill and provoke a class action from all their datacenter customers. In the medium term? Having a social network with no Europeans on it kills G+ fairly rapidly, or it becomes a minority thing like Orkut. Likewise AppEngine is hobbled if it won't talk to Europe. People will undoubtedly continue to use and buy their Android phones (many of which are not bought from google but third parties) unless Google actively bricks them. Remote-bricking all European Android devices is the nuclear option. Google is sued for billions. Google executives can no longer set foot in the EU without being arrested. International trade war starts. Google is declared an "unlawful combatant" and their HQ is bombed by DGSE.
blablablame 11y ago
Probably seeing the stock lose more than half of it's value by pulling from the biggest market it operates in would see Google reverting their stance quickly. Also, most likely, you would see bing+other local search engines gain traction, same for mail, maps, etc. Lets not forget, that a lot (majority?) of google search users use whatever the search engine is by default on their browsers and aren't really concerned about using google per se. Except search, a lot of folks where I live don't use google products (and if I switched their search engine they probably wouldn't notice that much except for saying it looks different)
- kuschku 11y ago
  Actually, a lot of people already use bing maps instead of Google maps because of poor quality of Google maps in several European markets. In my city in northern Germany (300k population), Google hasn’t updated anything since 2004. Refuses to integrate transit, although transit data is available in the requested format. While Bing and Here maps both have data from last month, with 3D imagery, and realtime transit data. Of course it’s easy to choose which maps app one will use. And all the nice AI features Google has over Bing & Co – like Google Now’s "you have to go 5min earlier to work because of a traffic jam" obviously don’t work without realtime transit and up-to-date maps data.
  - blablablame 11y ago
    Same here. Bing imagery is more current. Apple maps has traffic information. Google maps has.... well.... its slow... that is pretty much it.
  - efdee 11y ago
    Interesting. In Belgium Google Maps is still many times more useful than either Bing or Apple maps. Transit info, realtime traffic, everything.
  - detaro 11y ago
    And for people on foot/bike there is OpenStreetMap, with way better coverage of parks, foot paths and stuff like that. Often even outside the cities, which are covered nearly perfectly.
timthorn 11y ago
You could look to China for an example of what might happen - not quite the same dynamic, but Google did pull out there some time ago. http://www.radiofreemobile.com/google-flavour-of-china/ http://www.radiofreemobile.com/google-flavour-of-china/
matt4077 11y ago
The one good thing is that people may finally stop suggesting it as an option in every discussion of antitrust actions.
fauigerzigerk 11y ago
>isn't an antitrust suit a bit disingenuous? Isn't that like saying "hey, you guys are dominating over here, we want you to stop" That's not what the EC is saying. They're saying "hey guys, you're welcome to dominate over here, but as that dominant player you cannot use such and such licensing practices that we consider anti-competitive"
tacone 11y ago
Existing competitors (Bing, Yandex and so on) jumping in. Massive lawsuits as Google actually sells services that would stop working, or that other vendors depend on. Retaliation from the EU on alledged past violations. Loss of revenue around 30-40% (just a guess) from losing EU customers (500M people market of first world countries) == lawsuits from its own US shareholders. A wave of investments into EU newly found search market from all over the world. Unsustainable political pressure from the US establishment to go back to EU ("we need that data and you're handing it to China or even worst, national states of Europe) Tremendous loss of soft power and influence of the US on the old continent. Financial default of tens of thousands of EU businesses, subsequent EU bailout, subsequent new protectionist measures over Internet businesses- No more stupid comments on Youtube. Who's that guy with a beard asking for money? It's Larry Page. Websites all over EU begin to have a links section again. Android gets banned, Nokia resurrects, with a big advertising campaign praising the long battery life and low radiation. People cannot reach facebook anymore. They cannot look it up on Google and don't know what a domain name is. So they get on the road to ask other people how to reach facebook again. Then they become friend with them. And mate. Twenty years later Europe has now 10 competing search engines, the population had tripled as the result of mating and the average age has halved. They have far more less money than before, and they blame the greeks for that.
gruntled 11y ago
If that's the case, if Google could cause massive disruption by pulling out of the EU, they have effectively monopoly power in that market. So if that's the case, the suit is anything but disingenuous.

dubcanada 11y ago

They wouldn't, but it's an interesting thing to think about. I mean Google is the #1 search engine basically in the world (excluding some Asian countries who have their own search engines) so if Google was to theoretically block all of Europe, it would be really hard to tell what would happen...

ifdefdebug 11y ago

Google would be shrinking considerably, which is something I think they don't want, so I think antitrust suits are not disingenuous because Google has as much of an interest in operating in the EU as their European users. It's a mutual thing.

LunaSea 11y ago

All the Google services would be replaced by (at first lower quality) European versions. This would create a huge investment and tech sector growth wave. One of the best things to happen to the European tech scene since the beginning of the Internet. You can see this happening in Russia, China and India although for different reasons. Even if this case doesn't change anything I think we will see Google's involvement be reduces drastically in the next 5 years due to European Union laws and restrictions.

sievebrain 11y ago
All? At first, lower quality? I think you massively underestimate how much investment is required to produce even a basic search engine, let alone one that eventually catches up to what Google has produced. And that's just search. Now throw in Gmail, Maps, Android, Chrome, etc ... these are international collaborations for a reason.
- pjc50 11y ago
  There are plenty of replacements for all of those except Android. Multiple browsers, various mapping companies (including OpenStreetMap), multiple email providers, multiple browser vendors. There's also Bing, and the various ancient abandoned former greats of search: Altavista (now Yahoo), Lycos.
  - nostrebored 11y ago
    Pretending that things come close to the richness of features in GMaps is ridiculous. Topographical maps for cyclists, amazing transit maps with descriptions of stops, reliable use internationally (google maps is still amazing in places like Indonesia) and a generally good list of hours, restaurants, queries like 'near me'... I think that other products are far and away worse every time that I am linked to them. Even people on HN who mention trying to use other search engines talk about having to frequently come back to google to find the result that they need. Whether that's us 'learning to Google' or Google being a superior product is up for debate.
  - bad_user 11y ago
    Not sure if you noticed, but all alternative search engines, like Bing and DDG, are absolutely terrible in Europe. And this isn't an overstatement.
- m_t 11y ago
  There are already working search engine alternative, from Qwant to bing. One can definitely live without google as a search engine.
- x0x0 11y ago

JoshTriplett 11y ago

That also raises additional questions: there's a process and a set of rules for enforcing such a ruling against a company that a government actually has jurisdiction over (and thus must follow all the operational rules of a "native" company), and a different process and different rules for deciding that an entirely foreign company (with no nexus in the jurisdiction to enforce against) has acted so egregiously that their product should be blocked from importing. Antitrust concerns commonly get enforced against companies within the country raising those concerns, but I don't know of any example of antitrust concerns raised by a country against an entirely foreign company and used to block imports of the company's products.

scholia 11y ago
I don't think the EU is too worried about that. It has already imposed very large fines on both Intel and Microsoft, for example. Like them, Google has lots of staff and offices throughout the EU.... although (not uniquely) it uses various methods to avoid paying taxes ;-)

skoczymroczny 11y ago

People would switch to Windows Phones, which are fairly popular in Eastern Europe.

izacus 11y ago

Remember that a huge amount of Google tax evasion is due to EU loophole :)

pjc50 11y ago

In the short term there would be a lot of VPN access as people tried to deal with the chaos of having to transition away from gmail. I'd be very surprised if they just turned it off one day without warning, but if they did that would burn a lot of customer goodwill and provoke a class action from all their datacenter customers. In the medium term? Having a social network with no Europeans on it kills G+ fairly rapidly, or it becomes a minority thing like Orkut. Likewise AppEngine is hobbled if it won't talk to Europe. People will undoubtedly continue to use and buy their Android phones (many of which are not bought from google but third parties) unless Google actively bricks them. Remote-bricking all European Android devices is the nuclear option. Google is sued for billions. Google executives can no longer set foot in the EU without being arrested. International trade war starts. Google is declared an "unlawful combatant" and their HQ is bombed by DGSE.

blablablame 11y ago

Probably seeing the stock lose more than half of it's value by pulling from the biggest market it operates in would see Google reverting their stance quickly. Also, most likely, you would see bing+other local search engines gain traction, same for mail, maps, etc. Lets not forget, that a lot (majority?) of google search users use whatever the search engine is by default on their browsers and aren't really concerned about using google per se. Except search, a lot of folks where I live don't use google products (and if I switched their search engine they probably wouldn't notice that much except for saying it looks different)

kuschku 11y ago
Actually, a lot of people already use bing maps instead of Google maps because of poor quality of Google maps in several European markets. In my city in northern Germany (300k population), Google hasn’t updated anything since 2004. Refuses to integrate transit, although transit data is available in the requested format. While Bing and Here maps both have data from last month, with 3D imagery, and realtime transit data. Of course it’s easy to choose which maps app one will use. And all the nice AI features Google has over Bing & Co – like Google Now’s "you have to go 5min earlier to work because of a traffic jam" obviously don’t work without realtime transit and up-to-date maps data.
- blablablame 11y ago
  Same here. Bing imagery is more current. Apple maps has traffic information. Google maps has.... well.... its slow... that is pretty much it.
- efdee 11y ago
  Interesting. In Belgium Google Maps is still many times more useful than either Bing or Apple maps. Transit info, realtime traffic, everything.
- detaro 11y ago
  And for people on foot/bike there is OpenStreetMap, with way better coverage of parks, foot paths and stuff like that. Often even outside the cities, which are covered nearly perfectly.

timthorn 11y ago

You could look to China for an example of what might happen - not quite the same dynamic, but Google did pull out there some time ago. http://www.radiofreemobile.com/google-flavour-of-china/ http://www.radiofreemobile.com/google-flavour-of-china/

matt4077 11y ago

The one good thing is that people may finally stop suggesting it as an option in every discussion of antitrust actions.

fauigerzigerk 11y ago

>isn't an antitrust suit a bit disingenuous? Isn't that like saying "hey, you guys are dominating over here, we want you to stop" That's not what the EC is saying. They're saying "hey guys, you're welcome to dominate over here, but as that dominant player you cannot use such and such licensing practices that we consider anti-competitive"

tacone 11y ago

Existing competitors (Bing, Yandex and so on) jumping in. Massive lawsuits as Google actually sells services that would stop working, or that other vendors depend on. Retaliation from the EU on alledged past violations. Loss of revenue around 30-40% (just a guess) from losing EU customers (500M people market of first world countries) == lawsuits from its own US shareholders. A wave of investments into EU newly found search market from all over the world. Unsustainable political pressure from the US establishment to go back to EU ("we need that data and you're handing it to China or even worst, national states of Europe) Tremendous loss of soft power and influence of the US on the old continent. Financial default of tens of thousands of EU businesses, subsequent EU bailout, subsequent new protectionist measures over Internet businesses- No more stupid comments on Youtube. Who's that guy with a beard asking for money? It's Larry Page. Websites all over EU begin to have a links section again. Android gets banned, Nokia resurrects, with a big advertising campaign praising the long battery life and low radiation. People cannot reach facebook anymore. They cannot look it up on Google and don't know what a domain name is. So they get on the road to ask other people how to reach facebook again. Then they become friend with them. And mate. Twenty years later Europe has now 10 competing search engines, the population had tripled as the result of mating and the average age has halved. They have far more less money than before, and they blame the greeks for that.

gruntled 11y ago

If that's the case, if Google could cause massive disruption by pulling out of the EU, they have effectively monopoly power in that market. So if that's the case, the suit is anything but disingenuous.