8 ms·

Does Google harm local search rivals? EU antitrust regulators ask

87 points by tareqak 8y ago

ucaetano 8y ago
"Hey kiddo, do you want to skip doing homework and brushing your teeth today?"
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
ariwilson 8y ago
The EU has taken the position that all of these vertical specific search engines are industries that should be treated separately from "general search". I think this is faulty as - from a customer perspective, I just want an answer to my question regardless of the vertical - from an industry perspective every small competitor is of course going to complain that big bad X is taking their business So we just end up with arbitrary enforcement of the rules based on which companies the EU is angriest at.
- onetimemanytime 8y ago
  >>I just want an answer to my question regardless of the vertical You want the best answer and Google was not the best one for local for example. But they stuffed it there because the could. When competition is bankrupt or no one enter the space because Google will not rank you fairly then the problem is bigger. Like hotel bookings, do we know if they are best for shoppers or best for Google's bottom line? with 95% market share come responsibilities.
  - briandear 8y ago
    > Like hotel bookings, do we know if they are best for shoppers or best for Google's bottom line? Sounds like a business opportunity. If the market isn’t being well served, it would seem that someone might try to serve it. You know, like maybe TripAdvisor or Booking.com or Expedia or the numerous similar companies. We are basically saying that nobody will enter the search business because Google is too good? That doesn’t make any sense. Nobody is compelled to use Google. Every browser lets users choose alternatives. That people don’t is probably because they think Google does a pretty good job for their needs. If that isn’t true, then it should be realistic for a competitor to make it better. IBM owned computing until they didn’t — nobody thought competing with IBM was a high percentage play, but people did. If the Europeans want to make some big tech, then perhaps making the investment, M&A, and taxation environment more favorable is a good place to start. Capital gains taxes are so high that there isn’t a huge amount of incentive for moon-shot investments in Europe. Employment law (in France at least,) is so Byzantine that there is a real fear of hiring fast and scaling quickly because the consequences of a misstep are hugely expensive. Investors in Europe look for high percentage 2x companies to fund rather than making big, bold bets on 100x companies. One of the reasons is that you have a tax structure that punishes success so the risk-reward ratio favors safer investments. There is money in Europe, but much of it is through government programs that require government friendly business plans and friends in high places to even be considered. And the money that those programs do provide, it certainly isn’t US-level. It’s extremely rare to raise €50 million in Europe, but it happens all the time in the US. It’s the indefinite pessimism of Europe that’s the root of it. See the book Zero to One for a great explanation of that concept. Google isn’t the problem. It’s a symptom. Look at DailyMotion as a case study. The French government blocked the sale to Yahoo — which would have been a huge payday for the founders and investors — a payday they would have, in the tradition of Silicon Valley, could have been used to start angel or VC investing. (Although the original founders sold to France Telecom for a relative pittance, and France Telecom has the innovation level of a can of peas. So it’s possible to say that the sell to Yahoo wouldn’t have made any ripples in terms of creating new angel investors.) Instead DailyMotion, rather than becoming Yahoo’s YouTube, languished into near obscurity compared to YouTube. https://m.france24.com/en/20130501-france-minister-montebourg-blocks-meyer-yahoo-dailymotion-deal-usa https://m.france24.com/en/20130501-france-minister-montebour... Vivendi finally bought DailyMotion in 2015 at a valuation far below its 2013 levels. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2015/04/07/dailymotion-how-france-is-killing-youtubes-main-competitor/#96e6ae33eacf https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2015/04/07/dailymo... The point of the story is the socialist government of France cared more about some misguided nationalism rather than actually creating an environment for innovation, business and growth. Even in France, YouTube is far bigger than DailyMotion and it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with Google being anti-competitive, but everything to do with this petty provincial bullshit common with European government ministers.
    - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
      How is it an opportunity? There used to be a whole selection of businesses in those niches. Some great, some terrible, some American, some European. Google have been continually adding niches to their web search over the years. All the way back to Froogle that became Google Shopping, that went from a comparison search to paid listings only. Are most people still going to search for price comparison sites when it's right there on a Google tab? Are most people aware that tab may be ad only, when Google have constantly done their utmost to disguise ads, "highlighting" them in almost invisible colours? Not a very compelling business opportunity to enter a market where 90% of the clicks never get outside Google. Half of those who were doing fine in those niches are forgotten, or closed. Just because some search monopoly decided it wanted to grab all those other pies too.
      - dazc 8y ago
        Are there any price comparison sites that are not just disguised ads?
        NeedMoreTea 8y ago
        Probably not now. There were a few, or that openly and cleanly used affiliate links. Then it got fairly scummy. Stuff like bookings would normally take a booking fee.
        ginko 8y ago
        For electronics there's Geizhals in the EU. That collects prices from most online stores and gives you the cheapest offer for any given product. It's also nice for researching gear in general, since it has tons of filtering options.
        kbwt 8y ago
        Also idealo.
      - makomk 8y ago
        I think isthereanydeal.com is still quite popular for price comparison of video game downloads. One of the many problems with more general price comparison sites is that Amazon, the big player in most markets, restricts use of their pricing data on sites which show prices from other sites.
  - AnaniasAnanas 8y ago
    I already get different and irrelevant results that I do not care about when using google in different countries, one can only assume how much worse that would be with different local search engines. I would rather not see results for a local pasta when searching for haskell.
  - fjsolwmv 8y ago
    If Google Search harms consumers, it matters. If it harms *competitors", it's irrelevant. That's what EU regulation theory doesn't understand.
- Eridrus 8y ago
  The Google Shopping case is very interesting atm. Google have given other companies the opportunity to bid on that slot, and have separated out Google Shopping Ads as as it's own profitable entity that has to bid on that slot alongside other companies. Unsurprisingly, most of the companies that were basically surviving due to free traffic from Google have not really bought many of these slots. If the EU does not strike that down, it will provide a template for resolving many of these commercial result complaints in a similar fashion.
srkmno 8y ago
The necessary song and dance to start a process that in a year and change will cost Google a "record fine". That what happens when the unofficale mandate is to counter the success of US tech companies in the eurozone: first endow the commission with broad enforcement powers, then pursue every frivolous complaint. Come to think about it I've built an image search engine recently, maybe I should lodge a complaint about Google for their images "vertical" search function. This whole thing is ridiculous.
- ehsankia 8y ago
  Is there a point as which Google is just running profit negative in Europe, and they are better off just pulling off business from there? I'd love to see how much of their economy would collapse without Google, let alone citizen unrest. Just a small instance of snippet tax was shutdown pretty damn quick to the impact, imagine the impact of all of Google being pulled out of Europe.
  - thomasz 8y ago
    Yes, definitely. There would be unrest, rioting, insurrection, and finally, civil war. Europe would be torn apart, the economy reduced to primitive agriculture. The European people will offer their prettiest daughters to Page and Brin, draped in blue, red, yellow and green veils to win back the favour of their distant and angry masters.
    - joejerryronnie 8y ago
      Don’t forget goats. I can’t imagine how many goats Larry and Sergey would be the proud owners of after this stunt.
  - dazc 8y ago
    People would still use Google though and be unlikely to notice any difference. Plenty of data centres outside of the EU's jurisdiction and many a lot closer to the user than Dublin.
crazy_monkey 8y ago
No, Google's competitors are trash.
- corv 8y ago
  And why is that when many of their employees are from Europe? The antitrust cases were lost for a reason.
thrower123 8y ago
The EU revealed in it's ludicrous capriciousness. I like Europe, but fuck their governments if they want to do stupid things.
- rimliu 8y ago
  Stupid things, n. — things that are not necessarily stupid but I do not agree with them.
cavisne 8y ago
Google should leave the EU. Drop an IP block and be done with it.
- ekianjo 8y ago
  They would probably still find a way to fine Google even if they did that. The WHY is just an excuse.
  - zlynx 8y ago
    If Google had no physical presence in the EU then Google can just ignore the fines. The US won't force them to pay fines levied by a different country. They'd have to win a US court case. Just like China can be upset with Wikipedia. Wikipedia can tell them to pound sand.
    - chillacy 8y ago
      And then China blocks Wikipedia’s IP addresses?
- thefounder 8y ago
  And then what? Loose almost 50% of its value?
  - adventured 8y ago
    All of Europe is about 1/3 of Google's sales. The US is close to 50%. The EU minus the UK is probably more like 25%. They could certainly rationally abandon the EU market if the fines continue to outpace what the entire EU search market is worth in profit. If you're Google and you can stay somewhere close to break-even on the fines, it's worth staying in the market just to suppress potential competition. The ideal solution however is the for the US to respond by targeting EU companies, for example Volkswagen and Deutsche Bank (soon to be nationalized as it's collapsing) as two they've already very clearly gone after.
    - 8y ago
joejerryronnie 8y ago
At this point, US tech should go political full court press on the EU. Just bait Trump into action based on European protectionism and “national security”, sit back and watch it burn. The ironic thing is that eventually, the EU will push out US tech but it will not be replaced with Euro tech. It will be replaced with Chinese tech and good luck to Vestager on squeezing one single penny out of Xi.
- thomasz 8y ago
  There is zero evidence that the EU is trying to push out US technology companies or that there is any plan to run some form of import substitution. These fines are not arbitrary, and they do not hit "tech", they hit tech monopolies with blatantly anticompetitive behavior like intel, Microsoft and Google as well as European breweries, maritime car carriers, cement plants and what not. This is a fantasy, or more likely a projection of your own newly awakened jingoistic tendencies.
mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
It's interesting that complain was made by a US company - Yelp. I'm curious to who the other rivals in the complaints were.
- hahla 8y ago
  Slightly off topic to your commment but... I’m actually concerned watching Google increasingly cut into it’s search results. It’s easy to justify it as one additional feature but take a look how search looked like 10 years ago to what it looks like today. Even companies who provided services in specific verticals are being axed overnight by Google adding a widget to search. Google reviews are growing exponentially in search importance and that’s becuase the priority and UI they can implement to highlight google reviews vs a traditional search result (yelp). The internet landscape will look completely different in the next 10 years.
- onetimemanytime 8y ago
  Did you expect Yelp to sit and watch their listings on into page 3 and not complain because of "patriotism"? It's not the fine that's crippling, it's the changes that must be made. Google might make 20100-like profits in EU

87 points by tareqak 8y ago

ucaetano 8y ago

"Hey kiddo, do you want to skip doing homework and brushing your teeth today?"

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

ariwilson 8y ago

The EU has taken the position that all of these vertical specific search engines are industries that should be treated separately from "general search". I think this is faulty as - from a customer perspective, I just want an answer to my question regardless of the vertical - from an industry perspective every small competitor is of course going to complain that big bad X is taking their business So we just end up with arbitrary enforcement of the rules based on which companies the EU is angriest at.

onetimemanytime 8y ago
>>I just want an answer to my question regardless of the vertical You want the best answer and Google was not the best one for local for example. But they stuffed it there because the could. When competition is bankrupt or no one enter the space because Google will not rank you fairly then the problem is bigger. Like hotel bookings, do we know if they are best for shoppers or best for Google's bottom line? with 95% market share come responsibilities.
- briandear 8y ago
  > Like hotel bookings, do we know if they are best for shoppers or best for Google's bottom line? Sounds like a business opportunity. If the market isn’t being well served, it would seem that someone might try to serve it. You know, like maybe TripAdvisor or Booking.com or Expedia or the numerous similar companies. We are basically saying that nobody will enter the search business because Google is too good? That doesn’t make any sense. Nobody is compelled to use Google. Every browser lets users choose alternatives. That people don’t is probably because they think Google does a pretty good job for their needs. If that isn’t true, then it should be realistic for a competitor to make it better. IBM owned computing until they didn’t — nobody thought competing with IBM was a high percentage play, but people did. If the Europeans want to make some big tech, then perhaps making the investment, M&A, and taxation environment more favorable is a good place to start. Capital gains taxes are so high that there isn’t a huge amount of incentive for moon-shot investments in Europe. Employment law (in France at least,) is so Byzantine that there is a real fear of hiring fast and scaling quickly because the consequences of a misstep are hugely expensive. Investors in Europe look for high percentage 2x companies to fund rather than making big, bold bets on 100x companies. One of the reasons is that you have a tax structure that punishes success so the risk-reward ratio favors safer investments. There is money in Europe, but much of it is through government programs that require government friendly business plans and friends in high places to even be considered. And the money that those programs do provide, it certainly isn’t US-level. It’s extremely rare to raise €50 million in Europe, but it happens all the time in the US. It’s the indefinite pessimism of Europe that’s the root of it. See the book Zero to One for a great explanation of that concept. Google isn’t the problem. It’s a symptom. Look at DailyMotion as a case study. The French government blocked the sale to Yahoo — which would have been a huge payday for the founders and investors — a payday they would have, in the tradition of Silicon Valley, could have been used to start angel or VC investing. (Although the original founders sold to France Telecom for a relative pittance, and France Telecom has the innovation level of a can of peas. So it’s possible to say that the sell to Yahoo wouldn’t have made any ripples in terms of creating new angel investors.) Instead DailyMotion, rather than becoming Yahoo’s YouTube, languished into near obscurity compared to YouTube. https://m.france24.com/en/20130501-france-minister-montebourg-blocks-meyer-yahoo-dailymotion-deal-usa https://m.france24.com/en/20130501-france-minister-montebour... Vivendi finally bought DailyMotion in 2015 at a valuation far below its 2013 levels. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2015/04/07/dailymotion-how-france-is-killing-youtubes-main-competitor/#96e6ae33eacf https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2015/04/07/dailymo... The point of the story is the socialist government of France cared more about some misguided nationalism rather than actually creating an environment for innovation, business and growth. Even in France, YouTube is far bigger than DailyMotion and it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with Google being anti-competitive, but everything to do with this petty provincial bullshit common with European government ministers.
  - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
    How is it an opportunity? There used to be a whole selection of businesses in those niches. Some great, some terrible, some American, some European. Google have been continually adding niches to their web search over the years. All the way back to Froogle that became Google Shopping, that went from a comparison search to paid listings only. Are most people still going to search for price comparison sites when it's right there on a Google tab? Are most people aware that tab may be ad only, when Google have constantly done their utmost to disguise ads, "highlighting" them in almost invisible colours? Not a very compelling business opportunity to enter a market where 90% of the clicks never get outside Google. Half of those who were doing fine in those niches are forgotten, or closed. Just because some search monopoly decided it wanted to grab all those other pies too.
    - dazc 8y ago
      Are there any price comparison sites that are not just disguised ads?
      - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
        Probably not now. There were a few, or that openly and cleanly used affiliate links. Then it got fairly scummy. Stuff like bookings would normally take a booking fee.
      - ginko 8y ago
        For electronics there's Geizhals in the EU. That collects prices from most online stores and gives you the cheapest offer for any given product. It's also nice for researching gear in general, since it has tons of filtering options.
        kbwt 8y ago
        Also idealo.
    - makomk 8y ago
      I think isthereanydeal.com is still quite popular for price comparison of video game downloads. One of the many problems with more general price comparison sites is that Amazon, the big player in most markets, restricts use of their pricing data on sites which show prices from other sites.
- AnaniasAnanas 8y ago
  I already get different and irrelevant results that I do not care about when using google in different countries, one can only assume how much worse that would be with different local search engines. I would rather not see results for a local pasta when searching for haskell.
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  If Google Search harms consumers, it matters. If it harms *competitors", it's irrelevant. That's what EU regulation theory doesn't understand.
Eridrus 8y ago
The Google Shopping case is very interesting atm. Google have given other companies the opportunity to bid on that slot, and have separated out Google Shopping Ads as as it's own profitable entity that has to bid on that slot alongside other companies. Unsurprisingly, most of the companies that were basically surviving due to free traffic from Google have not really bought many of these slots. If the EU does not strike that down, it will provide a template for resolving many of these commercial result complaints in a similar fashion.

srkmno 8y ago

The necessary song and dance to start a process that in a year and change will cost Google a "record fine". That what happens when the unofficale mandate is to counter the success of US tech companies in the eurozone: first endow the commission with broad enforcement powers, then pursue every frivolous complaint. Come to think about it I've built an image search engine recently, maybe I should lodge a complaint about Google for their images "vertical" search function. This whole thing is ridiculous.

ehsankia 8y ago
Is there a point as which Google is just running profit negative in Europe, and they are better off just pulling off business from there? I'd love to see how much of their economy would collapse without Google, let alone citizen unrest. Just a small instance of snippet tax was shutdown pretty damn quick to the impact, imagine the impact of all of Google being pulled out of Europe.
- thomasz 8y ago
  Yes, definitely. There would be unrest, rioting, insurrection, and finally, civil war. Europe would be torn apart, the economy reduced to primitive agriculture. The European people will offer their prettiest daughters to Page and Brin, draped in blue, red, yellow and green veils to win back the favour of their distant and angry masters.
  - joejerryronnie 8y ago
    Don’t forget goats. I can’t imagine how many goats Larry and Sergey would be the proud owners of after this stunt.
- dazc 8y ago
  People would still use Google though and be unlikely to notice any difference. Plenty of data centres outside of the EU's jurisdiction and many a lot closer to the user than Dublin.

crazy_monkey 8y ago

No, Google's competitors are trash.

corv 8y ago
And why is that when many of their employees are from Europe? The antitrust cases were lost for a reason.

thrower123 8y ago

The EU revealed in it's ludicrous capriciousness. I like Europe, but fuck their governments if they want to do stupid things.

rimliu 8y ago
Stupid things, n. — things that are not necessarily stupid but I do not agree with them.

cavisne 8y ago

Google should leave the EU. Drop an IP block and be done with it.

ekianjo 8y ago
They would probably still find a way to fine Google even if they did that. The WHY is just an excuse.
- zlynx 8y ago
  If Google had no physical presence in the EU then Google can just ignore the fines. The US won't force them to pay fines levied by a different country. They'd have to win a US court case. Just like China can be upset with Wikipedia. Wikipedia can tell them to pound sand.
  - chillacy 8y ago
    And then China blocks Wikipedia’s IP addresses?
thefounder 8y ago
And then what? Loose almost 50% of its value?
- adventured 8y ago
  All of Europe is about 1/3 of Google's sales. The US is close to 50%. The EU minus the UK is probably more like 25%. They could certainly rationally abandon the EU market if the fines continue to outpace what the entire EU search market is worth in profit. If you're Google and you can stay somewhere close to break-even on the fines, it's worth staying in the market just to suppress potential competition. The ideal solution however is the for the US to respond by targeting EU companies, for example Volkswagen and Deutsche Bank (soon to be nationalized as it's collapsing) as two they've already very clearly gone after.
  - 8y ago

joejerryronnie 8y ago

At this point, US tech should go political full court press on the EU. Just bait Trump into action based on European protectionism and “national security”, sit back and watch it burn. The ironic thing is that eventually, the EU will push out US tech but it will not be replaced with Euro tech. It will be replaced with Chinese tech and good luck to Vestager on squeezing one single penny out of Xi.

thomasz 8y ago
There is zero evidence that the EU is trying to push out US technology companies or that there is any plan to run some form of import substitution. These fines are not arbitrary, and they do not hit "tech", they hit tech monopolies with blatantly anticompetitive behavior like intel, Microsoft and Google as well as European breweries, maritime car carriers, cement plants and what not. This is a fantasy, or more likely a projection of your own newly awakened jingoistic tendencies.

mrhappyunhappy 8y ago

It's interesting that complain was made by a US company - Yelp. I'm curious to who the other rivals in the complaints were.

hahla 8y ago
Slightly off topic to your commment but... I’m actually concerned watching Google increasingly cut into it’s search results. It’s easy to justify it as one additional feature but take a look how search looked like 10 years ago to what it looks like today. Even companies who provided services in specific verticals are being axed overnight by Google adding a widget to search. Google reviews are growing exponentially in search importance and that’s becuase the priority and UI they can implement to highlight google reviews vs a traditional search result (yelp). The internet landscape will look completely different in the next 10 years.
onetimemanytime 8y ago
Did you expect Yelp to sit and watch their listings on into page 3 and not complain because of "patriotism"? It's not the fine that's crippling, it's the changes that must be made. Google might make 20100-like profits in EU