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.
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.
>>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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I do not completely disagree, but I don’t think European legislators like to “punish success”. They respond to an electorate that feels much more strongly about economic disparities than in the US, because they are more painfully aware of their roots: thousands of years of violent oppression by elites, of which we are reminded every day with royal families, castles, abbeys and so on.
A rebellion against a few taxes, hardly thousands of years of exploitation and mass-murder. Europeans have seen more history, there is more cynicism about the consequences of money and power. People in the US still believe grafters can make it big, the American Dream, temporarily embarrassed millionaires, anybody can be President, and all that.
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.
The mandate is to regulate monopolies. Regulation is always easier if the company isn't a key player in your own economy - just compare the fines against Volkswagen in the US and Germany. And honestly, I don't think this is ridiculous at all. At least not more ridiculous than the case against Microsoft for bundling IE with windows. The only ridiculous thing is that the US has stopped any pretence of regulating monopolies by itself.
> The only ridiculous thing is that the US has stopped any pretence of regulating monopolies by itself.
The difference is that US antitrust laws require the consumer to be harmed. I think it's pretty easy to make the argument that everyone uses Google, not because they are compelled to, but because they want to because Google is better than the competition. Consumers are better off with the superior product that Google provides.
On the other hand, EU antitrust laws let them attack companies just for being big. This seems ridiculous to me because, often times, a company is big because consumers prefer it. Having a 'hobble the leader' economy necessarily hurts the consumers that want the better product from the bigger company.
> In September 2012 Oracle and Nokia joined[9] in filing a complaint regarding Android with the European Commission, alleging that its free-of-charge distribution model constituted anti-competitive predatory pricing
A "consumer protection" organization, huh? I do wonder how these lobbying organizations are even legal.
I think the EU position is that companies are gonna lobby anyway, and it's preferable that they are transparent about it. FairSearch seems quite clear in its motives and members.
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.
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.
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.
I’m dead certain that the physical location of the servers is irrelevant. As long as google is taking money from European companies for showing ads to European users, the EU will assert its authority to regulate commerce. Therefore, a hypothetical Google facing crippling fines and unwilling to change, would likely drop service for European customers. Which, in turn, would flock over to competitors who are willing to accept European regulations in order to compete on the European market.
If Google abandoned all corporate presence in Europe, including shutting its offices, datacenters, pops, and corporations, and its officers never visit, the EU would have a hard time asserting anything. Unless they were willing to enforce internet blocking or assess fees against those companies advertising on Google.
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.
These fines are quickly adding up to more than their profit in Europe anyways. Once they reach the point of running profit negative in Europe, wouldn't it actually a better business move to pull out?
>Once they reach the point of running profit negative in Europe, wouldn't it actually a better business move to pull out?
They can respect the EU regulation, stop the crap in the search and Android and continue making money from the products they sell to enterprises. They will lose some profits but the products that are respecting the laws will continue making money.
Except you know that won't make them happy. Take the shopping example. They had a product that benefited consumers and businesses, but in the middle, a very tiny slice of the population (which who were in the business of making product comparison sites) were losing, and they cost Googling billions. The EU didn't even tell Google /what/ the solution was, because there isn't any, they just blindly asked them to change things.
That shows you that it's not about "respecting" regulation. It's about shoving it in their face and forcing them to comply.
Google has a monopoly on search, this means if I do a search say "best programming language/framework for X" and if Google hijacks this and put Google products on top then they are abusing the monopoly. It sucks for them they can't abuse it and they can't push their products and make more money.
I think the idea is simple, do web search, don't promote your video,maps, lanugages,services , don't add special code for Google products/services , and stop prompting people to install Chrome if they search with other browsers.
They make changes to address each of the issues as they crop up, so the question they need to ask is whether the EU will keep finding reasons to hand out record fines. I guess that boils down to the degree to which they attribute the fines to their own behaviour, and the degree to which they attribute them to European/Vestagerian animus.
There is zero evidence for this accusation. The regulations against monopolies are neither new, nor are they enforced in a discriminatory manner against foreign companies. The EU administration is just doing a better job than it’s American counterpart. Which is a shame because historically, the US was pretty good at reigning into anticompetitive monopolies.
And what regulation exactly did they break with the shop comparison issue?
It made consumers lives better, as well as business' lives. The only one losing in there were other shopping comparison sites, but no regulations were broken, yet they still had to pay billions, and the EU /didn't even/ bother telling them what they could change to fix the issue, just that they should do something about it.
The whole "follow regulations" excuse is complete bullshit.
Or rather a tool to break up monopolies? I think they should have acted long time ago. I particulary like the changes they are compelled to make on Android.
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.
You really think a company like google could see a 33% drop in revenue and not experience a free fall in the stockmarket? The mere notion of losing that much revenue indefinetly due to their own fault no less would not shake up the market significantly is laughable.
> Just compare the fines for VW in Europe and the US.
The fines for VW were at the country level, and besides the usual protectionism going on (one of the German states holds a blocking minority in VW by law, go figure) Germany also has a different approach to fines than the US, with much less emphasis on punitive damages.
I'm aware, but "has a different approach to fines" is not really relevant, otherwise this just boils down to "The EU has a different approach to Anti-Trust-Law".
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.
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.
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.
So we just end up with arbitrary enforcement of the rules based on which companies the EU is angriest at.