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I might be in a minority here and I'll probably get down voted but this result scares me... and I used to be CTO one of those competing price comparison sites t

by throwaway2016a 9y ago

I might be in a minority here and I'll probably get down voted but this result scares me... and I used to be CTO one of those competing price comparison sites that show up lower in the results so if anyone should agree it should be me. While it made me angry when Google put their results above ours, I never questioned that they had a right to do that. It is their website. They are not a utility. At what point does a company cross the line and become one that the EU feels can no longer promote their own product? After all, the actual products here are the products being sold not the comparison sites. If I search for baseball bat the product is the bat not the competing search results. What's next? Having to give equal ranking to Yahoo! search results in their search page? It sounds extreme but I would have also thought this was extreme until 2 minutes ago. Or perhaps more accurate... having to completely do away with One Box entirely. After all, when I search for a movie it displays the actor information and movie times before it displays the link to the theater website or IMDB.

surak 9y ago
You are actually wrong, they have been classed as an essential platform, see the discussion in regards to the NIS directive and its application to Google.
frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
Maybe the answer is that Google should be a utility. Search is obviously a natural monopoly.
- jpttsn 9y ago
  Can you deign to explain why you think so, or is it so obvious that I should just be ashamed for not seeing it?
  - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
    Perhaps obvious was not a good choice. Anyways: I would say Google is as close to a natural monopoly as the Bell System was in 1956. If you came to me and said “Hey, I want to start a company to compete with Google in search,” I would say you’re out of your mind and don’t waste your energy or your time or your money, there’s just no way. Classic economics would say that if there’s a business in which there are 35 percent net margins, that would attract a huge amount of new capital to capture some of that, and none of that has happened. That tells you there’s something wrong. From: https://promarket.org/google-close-natural-monopoly-bell-system-1956/ https://promarket.org/google-close-natural-monopoly-bell-sys... Water companies are a utility because there's a high cost to laying the pipes and the more pipes you lay, the more people you service, the more pipes you can afford to lay. It's near impossible for an upstart water company to come in and displace the incumbent. Search companies should be a utility because there's a high cost to gathering the data needed to drive good results and the more data you gather, the better results you give, the more data you gather. It's near impossible for an upstart search company to come in and displace the incumbent.
    - philh 9y ago
      I feel like you're describing growth in general, not natural monopolies specifically. There's a high cost to building a store and the more stores you build, the more customers you serve, the more stores you can afford to build. There's a high cost to making a movie and the more movies you make, the more people pay to see your movies, the more movies you can afford to make.
      - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
        Sure, barriers are a gray area. In society we draw a sort of arbitrary line for when they're high enough to represent a natural monopoly. We've decided that electric and water companies for example represent high enough fixed costs to warrant being a utility. So the question then becomes how much do you think it would cost to build a search engine as good as Google? I'd say that number is probably ginormous, hence why it should be treated as a utility.
      - tripzilch 9y ago
        Sure, and growth in general is not always a good thing.
    - lkbm 9y ago
      Crawling the web is easy now. Your point makes sense if the behavioral data they acquire from users makes a huge difference. Maybe it does, but I feel like someone can build a better mousetrap and be better than Google, even without behavioral data. Google, right now, is thought to have the best mousetrap, not simply one well-tuned to a large mouse behavior dataset. Maybe I'm wrong about that--I'm sure ML has become increasingly important in how Google ranks results, but I'm unconvinced that it's a severely anti-competitive factor. (That said, I do still use Google over DDG largely because of the personalization and the integration with their other services.)
      - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
        > I feel like someone can build a better mousetrap and be better than Google Where are the someones then? Look through Show HN and you'll see all sorts of cool projects and upstart companies. How many of them are search? We've got a huge flood of companies trying to take down the taxi industry, where's the flood to take out Google? It doesn't exist because everyone knows they can't win. Here's the Show HN for search: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=show%20search&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=pastYear&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=show%20search&sort=byPopularit... Do you see any of these dethroning google? Almost none even bother to compete in general search, just in small specific areas.
  - crdoconnor 9y ago
    Public utilities are public because of the vast expense of building and maintaining the infrastructure required to run them and because of how much people rely upon it. This applies 100% to Google. Even it's closest "startup competitor" hangs off bing's index.
- baq 9y ago
  not sure why you're being downvoted, it's a very valid question in the digital age.
bjl 9y ago
Once you gain a certain amount of market share you no longer have the right to engage in certain kinds of anti-competitive actions. There's nothing extreme about that; the laws have been in place for over a century.
- mythz 9y ago
  The anti-competitive practices you're talking about is not being able to decide what content gets displayed on your own website, what relevant information you're allowed to show Users in response to their search results and being forced to give your competitors more prominence. AFAIK this has never been written into law or ruled illegal before.
  - bjl 9y ago
    The specifics are unimportant. What matters is that Google was using its dominance in one market to gain an advantage in a different market. That has been illegal for a long time.
    - mythz 9y ago
      When has this ever happened to a website before?
      - bjl 9y ago
        To my knowledge it hasn't. But that's irrelevant.
        mythz 9y ago
        Of course it's relevant. There is no lock-in preventing you from visiting other Websites which are just a url or hyperlink away. When was Google Search ruled a website monopoly? What were the parameters? Who's defined the boundaries of what a search service can do and what relevant content they can provide? At what point should Google have known they've had to cede control of their own website and invest resources in giving their competitors more prominence? What other websites need to be wary of the same ruling and at what point do they need to focus their efforts on giving their competitors virtual real-estate on their website at the expense of growing their company?
jakubp 9y ago
"While it made me angry when Google put their results above ours, I never questioned that they had a right to do that. It is their website." The website is theirs, but the content they scan through and link to is not theirs. Google Search is of incredible value (to us in form of service _and_ to Google in form of an asset), but it's been built on top other people's content. They took that content for free. Perhaps it gives those "others" some rights in deciding what kinds of things can be done with such a service. It could be done through law, conversation, or applying a fine when a large enough group of representatives of a large market decide that maybe they do something a bit off.
- grondilu 9y ago
  > They took that content for free. Because it was freely available. As I understand it, Google feed its database with robots surfing the web. Those robots don't steel anything. Moreover, if I'm not mistaken you can explicitly forbid access to those robots with a robots.txt file or something. If you don't, it arguably means you give away your data to everyone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard
the6threplicant 9y ago
To me it shows why "big government" is a necessity (as well as a curse). You can't regulate a company that is bigger than the enforcer of the regulations.
- JoeAltmaier 9y ago
  I don't see it. The governor on my engine isn't larger than the engine.
  - specialist 9y ago
    Where is Google's jugular, for that regulatory thumb?
ko27 9y ago
> I'll probably get down voted Damn, I hate this trend of making you comments appear more controversial. > What's next? You really should not argue this point. We need to stop "big" companies doing "anti-consumer" practices. The reason why those terms are in quotation marks is because when you are discussing antitrust and monopoly laws those terms are not well defined. You should only look at these rulings per-case basis. If on the other hand you believe in the benefits of the "free for all market", you just have to be aware that this is not an opinion shared by EU citizens.
- oskbor 9y ago
  Don't pretend to speak for "EU citizens". What have we got to do with Brussels and Microsoft stealing money from Google? Google is not a utility, it is a product company and you are free to use other companies products
  - literallycancer 9y ago
    EU citizens vote in their national elections. EC members are nominated by national governments. If your government appointed someone that you feel doesn't represent your interests and you feel strongly about it, you should vote for someone else in the next election. This is exactly how representative democracy should work.
    - adjkant 9y ago
      Yet polls across the world have shown this logic to be very flawed. The citizens often disagree with the actions of their representatives. That's a flaw of representative democracy itself. Point is, representative democracy doesn't mean the action of the representative is the one the population agrees with.
  - bad_user 9y ago
    > you are free to use other companies products It doesn't work like that. Because of their market dominance, there really are no alternatives. This is a combination of companies simply giving up on competing with Google, but also in terms of SEO, Google is the only one that matters for publishers and advertisers drive profits towards Google as well. Mobile? They now own it. And btw, if you'll mention DuckDuckGo or Bing, the there's a high probability you're not living in the EU, since those are really, really bad at local or non-English searches.
makomk 9y ago
It should scare you. The EU just used their regulatory power to force the world's biggest search engine to make their user experience worse in order to benefit other companies. Before Google penalized all the vertical search sites, doing a Google search for certain kinds of products was a terrible experience; page after page of crappy information-free autogenerated sites hoping to make $$$ from ads and referral fees that were SEO-optimized to the gills, making it impossible to find actual information. Not only that, but the specialized infoboxes at the top of Google's search results were an almost direct response to their competitor Microsoft doing exactly the same thing and promoting it at the main advantage of their search. Microsoft's comparison shopping subsidiary which they used for their search results was one of the companies complaining to the EU about this. Now that Microsoft have convinced the EU to ban Google from doing this, they can once again point to the fact that they offer this extra contextual information as a reason for using them and Google cannot compete.
- denis1 9y ago
  Or you should be happy, that the EU actually uses their regulatory power to benefit the consumer no matter how big the company they're going against is.
  - Ajedi32 9y ago
    Does it benefit the consumer though? I fail to see how showing links to search results pages from other companies in response to a product query is better for consumers than just showing them a listing of the products they actually searched for. [Google's response][1] to this ruling suggests they have data which confirms this: > While some comparison shopping sites naturally want Google to show them more prominently, our data shows that people usually prefer links that take them directly to the products they want, not to websites where they have to repeat their searches. [1]: https://www.blog.google/topics/google-europe/european-commission-decision-shopping-google-story/ https://www.blog.google/topics/google-europe/european-commis...
    - zdkl 9y ago
      As a consumer, I have (much) more trust that my interests are advanced by the EU than google. This is an opinion which I don't feel the need to convert anyone to but I really don't understand the opposite view. Can someone explain why they believe google and other "emerging" power centers saveguard their interests better than the EU?
throwaway201 9y ago
If google can manipulate search results, then ISP companies can manipulate internet traffic. I think the arguements in favour of net neutrality can also be applied to this case.
specialist 9y ago
Incorporation is a charter to do business in the service of society. It's not carte blanche. There is no right to profit(eering). The smart play is to skim off the top, maintain some fiction of competition, and horde the loot.
rmc 9y ago
> At what point does a company cross the line and become one that the EU feels can no longer promote their own product? When a company uses a monopoly in one field (web search) to boost their other businesses. It's the same when Microsoft were convicted in the US of using the desktop OS monopoly to boost their web browser business.
- euyyn 9y ago
  Microsoft never had a "web browser business" they wanted to boost. They had an OS monopoly they preserved illegally like the mob. Not the same.
tripzilch 9y ago
The article seems really pretty clear about that line: market dominance. As another commenter said, it's an extremely well-written and clear article. Did your price comparison site at any time seem likely to be able to dominate the entire EU market? (you can find the exact criteria on the EU site) If no, you got no problem to worry about. If yes, that's a kind of nice problem to have I think. > What's next? Having to give equal ranking to Yahoo! search results in their search page? Why would anything be next? We have this rule, it works well, has worked in the past, what's the incentive to make it worse? Your Yahoo!Search example doesn't make sense to me. Not in context of this ruling, any way. How would Google abuse their market dominance in order to ... what exactly, because you didn't specify any wrongdoing, just a crazy sanction pulled out of thin air. It's not the market dominance itself that is illegal. It's just that if you do it, dominate a market to such an extent, you are held to special responsibilities not to abuse that dominance. Which totally makes sense. From the article: """Market dominance is, as such, not illegal under EU antitrust rules. However, dominant companies have a special responsibility not to abuse their powerful market position by restricting competition, either in the market where they are dominant or in separate markets.""" It's just like that famous Spiderman quote. Also the ruling is not about a particular party (like Yahoo in yours) that got wronged by an illegal abuse of Google's market dominance, it's about all of them, about the responsibility not to actively stifle competition. You can still be better than the competition, Google is obviously allowed to "hurt" Yahoo by providing better search results, that's what it means when they say dominance is as such not illegal under antitrust. It's just that, in some (but not all) cases of market dominance, it comes with additional power by virtue of dominance (not product), that allows a company to stifle competition (not because they're better but because the competition is not dominant), and antitrust law states that companies in such a position have a responsibility not to do this. Yet Google did. I'm not really seeing how Google could do something similar that involves Yahoo in your example. About your One Box (that's the Google instant result thing yes?) example, if Google were in the theatre business, I'm pretty sure the Commission would investigate that case for antitrust as well. How that ruling would go, will depend on the specifics of that hypothetical situation, and whether it qualifies along the guidelines as stated partially in the article, and fully in EU regulations on antitrust (which you can click to for yourself).
- 9y ago
kaeluka 9y ago
> They are not a utility. In many ways, they are. They didn't sign up for it, yet here we are..
- kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
  They are an advertising company blowing money on free inducements to get you to click on their ads. Utilities don't work that way.
  - kaeluka 9y ago
    I think that you understand quite well what I'm saying but you're trying to construct an argument now to protect you from adapting your opinion.
us0r 9y ago
>I might be in a minority here Nope. It's crazy. You don't go to the most popular restaurant in town and have them tell you to go get desert across the street because the superior food and experience hurt their sales. Even looking at the commissions fact sheet (Search Engine market share) [0]. 3 of the 4 other companies are billion dollar enterprises. Microsoft decided to make it difficult to switch to Chrome/Google in Windows 10 (no more 1 click). With this consumers are still switching back. Out of all the bad shit google does, this shouldn't even be on the radar. For the other end of the story this is an interesting read [1]. [0] - http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-17-1785_en.htm http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-17-1785_en.htm [1] - http://www.foundem.co.uk/Foundem_Google_Timeline.pdf http://www.foundem.co.uk/Foundem_Google_Timeline.pdf
- tripzilch 9y ago
  > Nope. It's crazy. You don't go to the most popular restaurant in town and have them tell you to go get desert across the street because the superior food and experience hurt their sales. Which is why they determined Google's market dominance in Search, not shopping sites. Your analogy should be about the single most popular restaurant guide in town, opening up their own restaurant and then only writing reviews for that. The quality of Google's in-house shopping business didn't factor into the EU Commission's rulings at all. Which makes a lot of sense because, given Google's market dominance in Search, it is impossible to know if their shopping business is in fact superior or not, because they abused that power (gained from Search, not building a superior shopping business) to stifle any competition. As the article clearly states, market dominance is not illegal (like your restaurant analogy suggests), irresponsibly abusing the power that comes with it is.
  - wbl 9y ago
    Lots of tourist towns have sponsored free maps that do exactly this.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- 9y ago
mtgx 9y ago
Anti-trust applies when a company has extreme dominance, like over 90% (which Google does have in Europe). Same applied to Microsoft.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
crdoconnor 9y ago
>They are not a utility. It actually seems to match the definition of public utility perfectly. The infrastructural cost of building another Google is incredibly high and people rely heavily upon it. You can "just build another google" the same way you can "just build an electricity network" for a large town.
- emidln 9y ago
  You can build another shitty clone to Google search cheaply. Elasticsearch plus some bots crawling fed off a queue can give you an approximation of Google that is useful to a lot of people (albeit not cheap to keep running). I cannot build even a shitty fascimile of an electrical grid cheaply because I need permits for digging, to deal with existing infrastructure, and I need serious capital (an order of magnitude more, at least) to build and maintain some sort of generation capability.
  - crdoconnor 9y ago
    That's exactly what they're doing in Brooklyn: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/15/how-a-street-in-brooklyn-is-changing-the-energy-grid-215268 http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/15/how-a-stre... That would scale just about as well as your crappy elastic search thing would.
    - emidln 9y ago
      I can demo an alternative to Google Search in a weekend. I can throw comparatively small amounts of money to improve it (e.g. add more sites) such that it is extremely useful to find sites that I designate to have crawled (and it's not difficult to crawl the top N sites). My algorithms will be worse, my crawler less efficient, I probably will ignore javascript, my database will be larger than it needs to be, but none of that matters to an end user who wants to type in some text and get a list of results. My product would be worse in every way something can be worse, yet still satisfy the needs for a sizeable majority of users. It can scale out in known ways (way more expensive than google does it, slower than google does it, etc) by largely paying salary and hosting costs. I absolutely cannot decide I want to install some poles to run electricity through a town without permits, insurance, inspections, and a ton of capital. I can't decide I want to build my own power plant and sell energy to my new grid without jumping through a lot of hoops, some of those hoops only a mountain range of cash can solve (compared to the merely large pile you'd need to run a credible regional alternative to google search for some segment of the population).
jlarocco 9y ago
It's really not hard to understand, and if you're a CTO you should probably be aware of how this works. It's an abuse when a company uses their dominance in one area (like search) to undermine their competitors in a different market (like product comparison and shopping). That's the case here, and it was the case when Microsoft got in trouble for bundling IE with Windows. I'm actually glad to see this ruling. It's nice to know there's at least one place in the world where the government still cares a little bit about not letting giant corporations take advantage of their citizens.
mtgx 9y ago
Okay, but what about when Google actively demotes you, so its products do even better? Are you okay with that, too, because "it's their website", or do you expect more from a "search engine company"? > Google has demoted rival comparison shopping services in its search results: rival comparison shopping services appear in Google's search results on the basis of Google's generic search algorithms. Google has included a number of criteria in these algorithms, as a result of which rival comparison shopping services are demoted. Evidence shows that even the most highly ranked rival service appears on average only on page four of Google's search results, and others appear even further down. Google's own comparison shopping service is not subject to Google's generic search algorithms, including such demotions. > As a result, Google's comparison shopping service is much more visible to consumers in Google's search results, whilst rival comparison shopping services are much less visible. Your comment reads like you haven't even read the EC press release. I suggest you do that first.
zeteo 9y ago
> this result scares me [...] I never questioned that they had a right to do that. It is their website Are you serious? By this logic Microsoft could do whatever they wanted with Windows. Yes, when you're big enough to absolutely dominate a market you can't just use that to make rules that kick out everyone else.
- Kenji 9y ago
  Their site runs on their server and is free to visit. Micosoft runs their products like Windows and Office on YOUR machine. That's the difference.
  - zeteo 9y ago
    > [Google's site] runs on their server [...] Micosoft runs their products like Windows and Office on YOUR machine That's not a significant difference - Google's site renders on your machine too. Google's servers send you computer code (HTML, Javascript) and Microsoft's servers also send you computer code (Windows binaries). > [Google's site] is free to visit The use of API calls in Windows is also free. Would you be OK with Windows servicing Chrome and Dropbox several times slower than Microsoft products? There was a huge antitrust case about this in the '90s.
  - sz4kerto 9y ago
    No. You run their products on your machine.
ouid 9y ago
1) Google has a monopoly on "searching" the internet. 2) Their search algorithm ranks google products at the top of the results. 3) They cannot prove that their products are being held to the same standards as everyone else, because the algorithm they use to rank results is not public. I think Google could have any two of these, without being in anti-trust domain.
lossolo 9y ago
> While it made me angry when Google put their results above ours, I never questioned that they had a right to do that. It is their website. Then, if in future, lets say Google will be the only search engine that is still alive and used by 99% users and Google will choose to get your site/business out of their site/search results (based on what you wrote - it's their website so they can do whatever they want) it will be fine also? People writing things like this really should read why anti trust laws were introduced in the first place. Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) and Article 54 of the EEA Agreement prohibit abuse of a dominant position. Being able to dominate one market enables you possibilities to dominate other markets as well by abusing your dominant position.
gpderetta 9y ago
> At what point does a company cross the line and become one that the EU feels can no longer promote their own product? Easy: when you have a dominant market position.
mk89 9y ago
There are regulations made to prevent monopoly, abuse of market dominance, etc, which are supposed to guarantee a fair market. It bites everyone, every kind of group where some competition is involved, even smaller companies, and we all agree on that. However, when Google is touched, we all feel that we don't live anymore in a free world, that communism has won, etc - at least that's the kind of feeling I perceive every time they have to pay for something. Why the break up of the Bell System [0]. Afterall it's their business, right? Why was Microsoft forced (back then) to let people choose which browser to install? Same reason. I don't know if you have ever read the book "Thinking in systems - D. Meadows", there is an interesting chapter about this which explains why such regulations are important. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
ableton 9y ago
A lot of people wonder why anyone could vote for Brexit. This is exactly why. This kind of regulatory fever unnecessarily burdens people at all levels of society. These regulators are unelected, and so they can make terrible decisions with no accountability. These regulators have essentially said that google can't show ads for products on their site unless they do it in a specific way that also shows their competitors ads for free! That is insane. This kind of crazy decision is common from these regulators, and it's no wonder the Brits got fed up with it.
- lerpa 9y ago
  Nah shut up... we know the Brexit is just neonazis

surak 9y ago

You are actually wrong, they have been classed as an essential platform, see the discussion in regards to the NIS directive and its application to Google.

frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago

Maybe the answer is that Google should be a utility. Search is obviously a natural monopoly.

jpttsn 9y ago
Can you deign to explain why you think so, or is it so obvious that I should just be ashamed for not seeing it?
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  Perhaps obvious was not a good choice. Anyways: I would say Google is as close to a natural monopoly as the Bell System was in 1956. If you came to me and said “Hey, I want to start a company to compete with Google in search,” I would say you’re out of your mind and don’t waste your energy or your time or your money, there’s just no way. Classic economics would say that if there’s a business in which there are 35 percent net margins, that would attract a huge amount of new capital to capture some of that, and none of that has happened. That tells you there’s something wrong. From: https://promarket.org/google-close-natural-monopoly-bell-system-1956/ https://promarket.org/google-close-natural-monopoly-bell-sys... Water companies are a utility because there's a high cost to laying the pipes and the more pipes you lay, the more people you service, the more pipes you can afford to lay. It's near impossible for an upstart water company to come in and displace the incumbent. Search companies should be a utility because there's a high cost to gathering the data needed to drive good results and the more data you gather, the better results you give, the more data you gather. It's near impossible for an upstart search company to come in and displace the incumbent.
  - philh 9y ago
    I feel like you're describing growth in general, not natural monopolies specifically. There's a high cost to building a store and the more stores you build, the more customers you serve, the more stores you can afford to build. There's a high cost to making a movie and the more movies you make, the more people pay to see your movies, the more movies you can afford to make.
    - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
      Sure, barriers are a gray area. In society we draw a sort of arbitrary line for when they're high enough to represent a natural monopoly. We've decided that electric and water companies for example represent high enough fixed costs to warrant being a utility. So the question then becomes how much do you think it would cost to build a search engine as good as Google? I'd say that number is probably ginormous, hence why it should be treated as a utility.
    - tripzilch 9y ago
      Sure, and growth in general is not always a good thing.
  - lkbm 9y ago
    Crawling the web is easy now. Your point makes sense if the behavioral data they acquire from users makes a huge difference. Maybe it does, but I feel like someone can build a better mousetrap and be better than Google, even without behavioral data. Google, right now, is thought to have the best mousetrap, not simply one well-tuned to a large mouse behavior dataset. Maybe I'm wrong about that--I'm sure ML has become increasingly important in how Google ranks results, but I'm unconvinced that it's a severely anti-competitive factor. (That said, I do still use Google over DDG largely because of the personalization and the integration with their other services.)
    - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
      > I feel like someone can build a better mousetrap and be better than Google Where are the someones then? Look through Show HN and you'll see all sorts of cool projects and upstart companies. How many of them are search? We've got a huge flood of companies trying to take down the taxi industry, where's the flood to take out Google? It doesn't exist because everyone knows they can't win. Here's the Show HN for search: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=show%20search&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=pastYear&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=show%20search&sort=byPopularit... Do you see any of these dethroning google? Almost none even bother to compete in general search, just in small specific areas.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  Public utilities are public because of the vast expense of building and maintaining the infrastructure required to run them and because of how much people rely upon it. This applies 100% to Google. Even it's closest "startup competitor" hangs off bing's index.
baq 9y ago
not sure why you're being downvoted, it's a very valid question in the digital age.

bjl 9y ago

Once you gain a certain amount of market share you no longer have the right to engage in certain kinds of anti-competitive actions. There's nothing extreme about that; the laws have been in place for over a century.

mythz 9y ago
The anti-competitive practices you're talking about is not being able to decide what content gets displayed on your own website, what relevant information you're allowed to show Users in response to their search results and being forced to give your competitors more prominence. AFAIK this has never been written into law or ruled illegal before.
- bjl 9y ago
  The specifics are unimportant. What matters is that Google was using its dominance in one market to gain an advantage in a different market. That has been illegal for a long time.
  - mythz 9y ago
    When has this ever happened to a website before?
    - bjl 9y ago
      To my knowledge it hasn't. But that's irrelevant.
      - mythz 9y ago
        Of course it's relevant. There is no lock-in preventing you from visiting other Websites which are just a url or hyperlink away. When was Google Search ruled a website monopoly? What were the parameters? Who's defined the boundaries of what a search service can do and what relevant content they can provide? At what point should Google have known they've had to cede control of their own website and invest resources in giving their competitors more prominence? What other websites need to be wary of the same ruling and at what point do they need to focus their efforts on giving their competitors virtual real-estate on their website at the expense of growing their company?

jakubp 9y ago

"While it made me angry when Google put their results above ours, I never questioned that they had a right to do that. It is their website." The website is theirs, but the content they scan through and link to is not theirs. Google Search is of incredible value (to us in form of service _and_ to Google in form of an asset), but it's been built on top other people's content. They took that content for free. Perhaps it gives those "others" some rights in deciding what kinds of things can be done with such a service. It could be done through law, conversation, or applying a fine when a large enough group of representatives of a large market decide that maybe they do something a bit off.

grondilu 9y ago
> They took that content for free. Because it was freely available. As I understand it, Google feed its database with robots surfing the web. Those robots don't steel anything. Moreover, if I'm not mistaken you can explicitly forbid access to those robots with a robots.txt file or something. If you don't, it arguably means you give away your data to everyone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard

the6threplicant 9y ago

To me it shows why "big government" is a necessity (as well as a curse). You can't regulate a company that is bigger than the enforcer of the regulations.

JoeAltmaier 9y ago
I don't see it. The governor on my engine isn't larger than the engine.
- specialist 9y ago
  Where is Google's jugular, for that regulatory thumb?

ko27 9y ago

> I'll probably get down voted Damn, I hate this trend of making you comments appear more controversial. > What's next? You really should not argue this point. We need to stop "big" companies doing "anti-consumer" practices. The reason why those terms are in quotation marks is because when you are discussing antitrust and monopoly laws those terms are not well defined. You should only look at these rulings per-case basis. If on the other hand you believe in the benefits of the "free for all market", you just have to be aware that this is not an opinion shared by EU citizens.

oskbor 9y ago
Don't pretend to speak for "EU citizens". What have we got to do with Brussels and Microsoft stealing money from Google? Google is not a utility, it is a product company and you are free to use other companies products
- literallycancer 9y ago
  EU citizens vote in their national elections. EC members are nominated by national governments. If your government appointed someone that you feel doesn't represent your interests and you feel strongly about it, you should vote for someone else in the next election. This is exactly how representative democracy should work.
  - adjkant 9y ago
    Yet polls across the world have shown this logic to be very flawed. The citizens often disagree with the actions of their representatives. That's a flaw of representative democracy itself. Point is, representative democracy doesn't mean the action of the representative is the one the population agrees with.
- bad_user 9y ago
  > you are free to use other companies products It doesn't work like that. Because of their market dominance, there really are no alternatives. This is a combination of companies simply giving up on competing with Google, but also in terms of SEO, Google is the only one that matters for publishers and advertisers drive profits towards Google as well. Mobile? They now own it. And btw, if you'll mention DuckDuckGo or Bing, the there's a high probability you're not living in the EU, since those are really, really bad at local or non-English searches.

makomk 9y ago

It should scare you. The EU just used their regulatory power to force the world's biggest search engine to make their user experience worse in order to benefit other companies. Before Google penalized all the vertical search sites, doing a Google search for certain kinds of products was a terrible experience; page after page of crappy information-free autogenerated sites hoping to make $$$ from ads and referral fees that were SEO-optimized to the gills, making it impossible to find actual information. Not only that, but the specialized infoboxes at the top of Google's search results were an almost direct response to their competitor Microsoft doing exactly the same thing and promoting it at the main advantage of their search. Microsoft's comparison shopping subsidiary which they used for their search results was one of the companies complaining to the EU about this. Now that Microsoft have convinced the EU to ban Google from doing this, they can once again point to the fact that they offer this extra contextual information as a reason for using them and Google cannot compete.

denis1 9y ago
Or you should be happy, that the EU actually uses their regulatory power to benefit the consumer no matter how big the company they're going against is.
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  Does it benefit the consumer though? I fail to see how showing links to search results pages from other companies in response to a product query is better for consumers than just showing them a listing of the products they actually searched for. [Google's response][1] to this ruling suggests they have data which confirms this: > While some comparison shopping sites naturally want Google to show them more prominently, our data shows that people usually prefer links that take them directly to the products they want, not to websites where they have to repeat their searches. [1]: https://www.blog.google/topics/google-europe/european-commission-decision-shopping-google-story/ https://www.blog.google/topics/google-europe/european-commis...
  - zdkl 9y ago
    As a consumer, I have (much) more trust that my interests are advanced by the EU than google. This is an opinion which I don't feel the need to convert anyone to but I really don't understand the opposite view. Can someone explain why they believe google and other "emerging" power centers saveguard their interests better than the EU?

throwaway201 9y ago

If google can manipulate search results, then ISP companies can manipulate internet traffic. I think the arguements in favour of net neutrality can also be applied to this case.

specialist 9y ago

Incorporation is a charter to do business in the service of society. It's not carte blanche. There is no right to profit(eering). The smart play is to skim off the top, maintain some fiction of competition, and horde the loot.

rmc 9y ago

> At what point does a company cross the line and become one that the EU feels can no longer promote their own product? When a company uses a monopoly in one field (web search) to boost their other businesses. It's the same when Microsoft were convicted in the US of using the desktop OS monopoly to boost their web browser business.

euyyn 9y ago
Microsoft never had a "web browser business" they wanted to boost. They had an OS monopoly they preserved illegally like the mob. Not the same.

tripzilch 9y ago

The article seems really pretty clear about that line: market dominance. As another commenter said, it's an extremely well-written and clear article. Did your price comparison site at any time seem likely to be able to dominate the entire EU market? (you can find the exact criteria on the EU site) If no, you got no problem to worry about. If yes, that's a kind of nice problem to have I think. > What's next? Having to give equal ranking to Yahoo! search results in their search page? Why would anything be next? We have this rule, it works well, has worked in the past, what's the incentive to make it worse? Your Yahoo!Search example doesn't make sense to me. Not in context of this ruling, any way. How would Google abuse their market dominance in order to ... what exactly, because you didn't specify any wrongdoing, just a crazy sanction pulled out of thin air. It's not the market dominance itself that is illegal. It's just that if you do it, dominate a market to such an extent, you are held to special responsibilities not to abuse that dominance. Which totally makes sense. From the article: """Market dominance is, as such, not illegal under EU antitrust rules. However, dominant companies have a special responsibility not to abuse their powerful market position by restricting competition, either in the market where they are dominant or in separate markets.""" It's just like that famous Spiderman quote. Also the ruling is not about a particular party (like Yahoo in yours) that got wronged by an illegal abuse of Google's market dominance, it's about all of them, about the responsibility not to actively stifle competition. You can still be better than the competition, Google is obviously allowed to "hurt" Yahoo by providing better search results, that's what it means when they say dominance is as such not illegal under antitrust. It's just that, in some (but not all) cases of market dominance, it comes with additional power by virtue of dominance (not product), that allows a company to stifle competition (not because they're better but because the competition is not dominant), and antitrust law states that companies in such a position have a responsibility not to do this. Yet Google did. I'm not really seeing how Google could do something similar that involves Yahoo in your example. About your One Box (that's the Google instant result thing yes?) example, if Google were in the theatre business, I'm pretty sure the Commission would investigate that case for antitrust as well. How that ruling would go, will depend on the specifics of that hypothetical situation, and whether it qualifies along the guidelines as stated partially in the article, and fully in EU regulations on antitrust (which you can click to for yourself).

9y ago

kaeluka 9y ago

> They are not a utility. In many ways, they are. They didn't sign up for it, yet here we are..

kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
They are an advertising company blowing money on free inducements to get you to click on their ads. Utilities don't work that way.
- kaeluka 9y ago
  I think that you understand quite well what I'm saying but you're trying to construct an argument now to protect you from adapting your opinion.

us0r 9y ago

>I might be in a minority here Nope. It's crazy. You don't go to the most popular restaurant in town and have them tell you to go get desert across the street because the superior food and experience hurt their sales. Even looking at the commissions fact sheet (Search Engine market share) [0]. 3 of the 4 other companies are billion dollar enterprises. Microsoft decided to make it difficult to switch to Chrome/Google in Windows 10 (no more 1 click). With this consumers are still switching back. Out of all the bad shit google does, this shouldn't even be on the radar. For the other end of the story this is an interesting read [1]. [0] - http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-17-1785_en.htm http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-17-1785_en.htm [1] - http://www.foundem.co.uk/Foundem_Google_Timeline.pdf http://www.foundem.co.uk/Foundem_Google_Timeline.pdf

tripzilch 9y ago
> Nope. It's crazy. You don't go to the most popular restaurant in town and have them tell you to go get desert across the street because the superior food and experience hurt their sales. Which is why they determined Google's market dominance in Search, not shopping sites. Your analogy should be about the single most popular restaurant guide in town, opening up their own restaurant and then only writing reviews for that. The quality of Google's in-house shopping business didn't factor into the EU Commission's rulings at all. Which makes a lot of sense because, given Google's market dominance in Search, it is impossible to know if their shopping business is in fact superior or not, because they abused that power (gained from Search, not building a superior shopping business) to stifle any competition. As the article clearly states, market dominance is not illegal (like your restaurant analogy suggests), irresponsibly abusing the power that comes with it is.
- wbl 9y ago
  Lots of tourist towns have sponsored free maps that do exactly this.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
9y ago

mtgx 9y ago

Anti-trust applies when a company has extreme dominance, like over 90% (which Google does have in Europe). Same applied to Microsoft.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

crdoconnor 9y ago

>They are not a utility. It actually seems to match the definition of public utility perfectly. The infrastructural cost of building another Google is incredibly high and people rely heavily upon it. You can "just build another google" the same way you can "just build an electricity network" for a large town.

emidln 9y ago
You can build another shitty clone to Google search cheaply. Elasticsearch plus some bots crawling fed off a queue can give you an approximation of Google that is useful to a lot of people (albeit not cheap to keep running). I cannot build even a shitty fascimile of an electrical grid cheaply because I need permits for digging, to deal with existing infrastructure, and I need serious capital (an order of magnitude more, at least) to build and maintain some sort of generation capability.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  That's exactly what they're doing in Brooklyn: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/15/how-a-street-in-brooklyn-is-changing-the-energy-grid-215268 http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/15/how-a-stre... That would scale just about as well as your crappy elastic search thing would.
  - emidln 9y ago
    I can demo an alternative to Google Search in a weekend. I can throw comparatively small amounts of money to improve it (e.g. add more sites) such that it is extremely useful to find sites that I designate to have crawled (and it's not difficult to crawl the top N sites). My algorithms will be worse, my crawler less efficient, I probably will ignore javascript, my database will be larger than it needs to be, but none of that matters to an end user who wants to type in some text and get a list of results. My product would be worse in every way something can be worse, yet still satisfy the needs for a sizeable majority of users. It can scale out in known ways (way more expensive than google does it, slower than google does it, etc) by largely paying salary and hosting costs. I absolutely cannot decide I want to install some poles to run electricity through a town without permits, insurance, inspections, and a ton of capital. I can't decide I want to build my own power plant and sell energy to my new grid without jumping through a lot of hoops, some of those hoops only a mountain range of cash can solve (compared to the merely large pile you'd need to run a credible regional alternative to google search for some segment of the population).

jlarocco 9y ago

It's really not hard to understand, and if you're a CTO you should probably be aware of how this works. It's an abuse when a company uses their dominance in one area (like search) to undermine their competitors in a different market (like product comparison and shopping). That's the case here, and it was the case when Microsoft got in trouble for bundling IE with Windows. I'm actually glad to see this ruling. It's nice to know there's at least one place in the world where the government still cares a little bit about not letting giant corporations take advantage of their citizens.

mtgx 9y ago

Okay, but what about when Google actively demotes you, so its products do even better? Are you okay with that, too, because "it's their website", or do you expect more from a "search engine company"? > Google has demoted rival comparison shopping services in its search results: rival comparison shopping services appear in Google's search results on the basis of Google's generic search algorithms. Google has included a number of criteria in these algorithms, as a result of which rival comparison shopping services are demoted. Evidence shows that even the most highly ranked rival service appears on average only on page four of Google's search results, and others appear even further down. Google's own comparison shopping service is not subject to Google's generic search algorithms, including such demotions. > As a result, Google's comparison shopping service is much more visible to consumers in Google's search results, whilst rival comparison shopping services are much less visible. Your comment reads like you haven't even read the EC press release. I suggest you do that first.

zeteo 9y ago

> this result scares me [...] I never questioned that they had a right to do that. It is their website Are you serious? By this logic Microsoft could do whatever they wanted with Windows. Yes, when you're big enough to absolutely dominate a market you can't just use that to make rules that kick out everyone else.

Kenji 9y ago
Their site runs on their server and is free to visit. Micosoft runs their products like Windows and Office on YOUR machine. That's the difference.
- zeteo 9y ago
  > [Google's site] runs on their server [...] Micosoft runs their products like Windows and Office on YOUR machine That's not a significant difference - Google's site renders on your machine too. Google's servers send you computer code (HTML, Javascript) and Microsoft's servers also send you computer code (Windows binaries). > [Google's site] is free to visit The use of API calls in Windows is also free. Would you be OK with Windows servicing Chrome and Dropbox several times slower than Microsoft products? There was a huge antitrust case about this in the '90s.
- sz4kerto 9y ago
  No. You run their products on your machine.

ouid 9y ago

1) Google has a monopoly on "searching" the internet. 2) Their search algorithm ranks google products at the top of the results. 3) They cannot prove that their products are being held to the same standards as everyone else, because the algorithm they use to rank results is not public. I think Google could have any two of these, without being in anti-trust domain.

lossolo 9y ago

> While it made me angry when Google put their results above ours, I never questioned that they had a right to do that. It is their website. Then, if in future, lets say Google will be the only search engine that is still alive and used by 99% users and Google will choose to get your site/business out of their site/search results (based on what you wrote - it's their website so they can do whatever they want) it will be fine also? People writing things like this really should read why anti trust laws were introduced in the first place. Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) and Article 54 of the EEA Agreement prohibit abuse of a dominant position. Being able to dominate one market enables you possibilities to dominate other markets as well by abusing your dominant position.

gpderetta 9y ago

> At what point does a company cross the line and become one that the EU feels can no longer promote their own product? Easy: when you have a dominant market position.

mk89 9y ago

There are regulations made to prevent monopoly, abuse of market dominance, etc, which are supposed to guarantee a fair market. It bites everyone, every kind of group where some competition is involved, even smaller companies, and we all agree on that. However, when Google is touched, we all feel that we don't live anymore in a free world, that communism has won, etc - at least that's the kind of feeling I perceive every time they have to pay for something. Why the break up of the Bell System [0]. Afterall it's their business, right? Why was Microsoft forced (back then) to let people choose which browser to install? Same reason. I don't know if you have ever read the book "Thinking in systems - D. Meadows", there is an interesting chapter about this which explains why such regulations are important. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System

ableton 9y ago

A lot of people wonder why anyone could vote for Brexit. This is exactly why. This kind of regulatory fever unnecessarily burdens people at all levels of society. These regulators are unelected, and so they can make terrible decisions with no accountability. These regulators have essentially said that google can't show ads for products on their site unless they do it in a specific way that also shows their competitors ads for free! That is insane. This kind of crazy decision is common from these regulators, and it's no wonder the Brits got fed up with it.

lerpa 9y ago
Nah shut up... we know the Brexit is just neonazis