They could just double down on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero What I find rather disturbing is that this isn't so much

They could just double down on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero What I find rather disturbing is that this isn't so much based on the idea of increasing search competition, but apparently, is being pushed forward because Axel-Springer and others want to charge people for linking and snippets. But if Google had say, 50% marketshare in the EU shared with a competitor, or even a three-way split, it's unlikely to competition would convince anyone to do something as web-breaking as to start paying people for the right to link. Bing already has a sizable marketshare in the US, and yet, neither Google nor Bing are paying the New York Times for search snippets or links. These publishing orgs are having their business models killed by digital media, you know, models like charging exorbitant pricing for scientific journals behind paywalls, or for school textbooks, or having pricing power of advertising markets, and want to abuse copyright to extract fees from deep pockets. (I'm lumping in Axel-Springer with Springer-Verlag here) Maybe there is a good argument to be made there should be competition in the EU in search. But protectionism for publishers who want to abuse what has always been assumed a fundamental web freedom, and fair use, I think is a pretty poor reason. The fact that the backers of this motion are also working for the publishers is a huge conflict of interest, and no doubt there's probably intense backdoor lobbying by Microsoft.