> At issue is whether the company uses its position as the dominant search engine company to muscle out competition from specialized search services, specifically comparison shopping sites, by prioritizing its own Google Shopping search results.
Google Shopping results suck but when I search for products almost always is an Amazon, Walmart, Target and others linked at the top of the results sometimes higher than the actual company that produces the product. As far as I can tell you can only get their shopping search results by clicking on "Shopping" (at least I can't seem to trigger it without that).
I don't understand the issue here. foundem is behind the initial lawsuit and kinda kicked off this whole thing but they're a search engine. If I owned a search company I certainly wouldn't want to be federating queries and indexing them doesn't make sense; why would I index an index when I can just index the source?
Am I missing something here?
> The European Commission also confirmed that it is opening an investigation into Android as well. Although the operating system is open source, meaning that any manufacturer can install it on the phones and tablets they sell, many core applications, including the Google Play store, are proprietary. Manufacturers must enter into special agreements with Google to include these proprietary apps. The investigation will attempt to determine whether Google is using its position to discourage the inclusion of rival applications on Android-based phones.
I don't understand this one as well. These applications require the use of Google's infrastructure so if you want to use them why shouldn't you agree to handle them as they want? Besides I think Barnes and Noble's nook and Amazon's Fire platforms show this is a non issue.
The issue is that Google by being the default search engine could slowly subsume all the profitable markets that run on the internet.
Once they kill off potential competitors then there is no reason to be competitive on price or quality.
Think of it as sort of a net neutrality for the search engine. People here are totally okay with telling Comcast they can't leverage their ISP near-monopoly to win the video streaming market.
Why should we allow Google to leverage their search monopoly into capturing other internet markets.
Except they're not. The default search engine for Firefox is Yahoo, for IE it's Bing. It's just for Chrome and maybe Safari. They are in no way stopping or even hindering you from using other search engines. Your example of Comcast, however? They actually got several local governments to sign contracts saying no one else could run copper to your home. HUGE difference.
> It's been illegal to get an exclusive cable franchise since the early 1990s.
You're conflating issues here. A cable franchise is using the cable in the ground to deliver television and the fees are paid to the local government yearly. These are regulated differently than internet access AND installing new utilities into communities.
> Google probably has more marketshare than Comcast does (even if you only include areas where Comcast operates).
Marketshare isn't comparable here. You're trying to compare an (arguable) utility versus an online service. The entire analogy if flawed; stop trying to force it.
The initial franchise agreement will cover the costs and fees associated with the initial installation of getting the wires in the ground. It's illegal for municipalities to grant any sort of exclusive telecommunication franchise.
I'm not sure what your point is, but nowhere[1] in America is Comcast legally protected from competition. You can build a new cable network, a new fiber network, or even wireless.
[1]maybe some super old franchise agreement that has been in tact since 1992 still exists but I doubt it. They are usually about 10 years.
>Marketshare isn't comparable here. You're trying to compare an (arguable) utility versus an online service. The entire analogy if flawed; stop trying to force it.
I don't see why categorizing the company as a utility really has anything to do with it. If you want to get technical, ISPs haven't been treated as utilities (and despite what journalists say that really isn't what Title II is about).
I don't see why providing internet access and internet search results are so wildly different that a comparison can't be made.
People here are totally okay with telling Comcast they can't leverage their ISP near-monopoly to win the video streaming market.
Why should we allow Google to leverage their search monopoly into capturing other internet markets.
The easy response is that I don't have a choice to switch to someone other than Comcast. Whereas I can pretty trivially switch to use a search engine other than Google.
ISP choices aren't that much more limited than search engine choice. Google and Bing appear to be the only large-scale commercial search engines running. Ask, Yahoo, AOL, etc. are powered by Google or Bing.
But I don't think that really matters. The fact that you can not use a monopoly doesn't really diminish the monopolies power, especially when the monopoly power is used to attack other markets.
Does the existence of linux make it okay for Microsoft to lockdown desktop applications and charge 30%?
I'm really struggling to see understand your stance here. I think ISP choices is a much different situation from search engine choices and consider it pretty ridiculous to compare them in a meaningful way.
Does the existence of linux make it okay for Microsoft to lockdown desktop applications and charge 30%?
Again, I'm not seeing the comparison. Are you saying that any given user switching search engines is comparative in difficulty to switch from one OS to another?
The difficulty of switching is straw man. In Europe, a monopoly just means a product or a company with a near-100% control of the market. It doesn't have anything to do to the presence of competitors, the difficulty of switching, if the product is a commodity or not, and so on. In Europe, Google Search has >90% market share so it's a monopoly, and thus it is subject to regulations in the way they use their product they wouldn't otherwise subject to. The same will happen to Android as they approach 90% market share; Google will be forced to do things that Apple will fully get away with, because being a monopoly makes you subject to additional regulation.
I'm sure you're aware that switching over to Ubuntu is not nearly so simple, so I don't need to explain hardware compatibility, backing up data, cross-platform app availability, etc. If it were really so simple, System76 and Dell's Project Sputnik would not be such big deals.
Google also competes against Yandex and Baidu, to name just two. That Yahoo uses Bing for their back-end doesn't change the fact that they're a legitimate competitor as well. It's possible Yahoo will revive their in-house search technology once their deal with Microsoft expires, too.
And speaking of counterfactuals, we can't just ignore Bing's existence because "Microsoft may tire of it". Any company would hypothetically be a monopoly if all their competitors gave up...
Indeed. In most markets there are at best, two options. And one of them will likely suck. In Chicago, it's Comcast or AT&T. And AT&T's top speed is Comcast's minimum speed, so your choice is made up.
Chicago is a bad example. I had RCN in both the gold coast and streetville and UVerse access depending on building contracts.
But I'll grant you that most areas it's cable v. DSL. But DSL is a lot cheaper and is plenty fast for most users. It isn't a purely fungible product but it close enough. IMO.
Not a lawyer, but is "could" the threshold here? Because Google "could" behave badly, but isn't yet (presumably, or it "could" would not be the word used), it gets punished?
My next startup could be so successful that everyone uses it for everything. Better outlaw me from doing startups!
The reason you do not understand is simple: there is no logic here. Google is not a monopoly. The parallels drawn here (by EU and by people on HN respectively) are:
1. Microsoft. This is wrong since while it was mostly impossible back then to buy a PC without windows, it is quite possible today to not use google. In fact not using google is easier than using google (you can skip typing google.com into the address bar)
2. Comcast. This is wrong since in many markets comcast is the only internet provider. No markets exist where bing and yahoo are inaccessible.
Really this is just EU punishing google for getting too big. Unfortunately for EU, even their own ridiculous (IMHO) protectionist laws do not have anything about a company being to successful for their liking. I imagine this will be a huge money and time waste for the EU, but in the end they have no real case. Google owns google.com and may display whatever it wants there. Until someone forces EU citizens to use google, or until bing and yahoo die, they are not a monopoly, even as per EU's ridiculous (IMHO) definition.
Google does not owe foo.com or bar.org or baz.info any place in their results page, unless is so chooses. And foo, bar, and baz are only there at google's mercy. Just like EU cannot force _YOU_ to include content _I_ want on _YOUR_ page, no matter how successful and how non-european you are and how unsuccessful and how european I am, it has no real power to force google to index foo, bar, and baz, or place any content of theirs (snippets of text and links to their pages) on google's property that is google.com/...
> The reason you do not understand is simple: there is no logic here. Google is not a monopoly.
Whether Google is a monopoly in the sense relevant in (US) antitrust law is, well, not so easily dismissed. What is relevant isn't the absence of any competition, its market power -- which is usually defined in terms of pricing power (essentially, having some range within which changes in the price at which the firm offers its product in some market will not result in a shift from the firm to competitors.)
And, in any case, EU antitrust law has a less restricted domain than US antitrust law and, AFAIK, while monopoly/market/pricing power is still relevant, is more likely to be violated even before a firm has established market power.
> The parallels drawn here (by EU and by people on HN respectively) are
The EU isn't, AFAICT, "drawing parallels", its directly objecting to specific Google behavior on its own merit, not because it is parallel to Microsoft, Comcast, etc.
> Really this is just EU punishing google for getting too big.
This inflammatory complaint could use some justification.
> Unfortunately for EU, even their own ridiculous (IMHO) protectionist laws do not have anything about a company being to successful for their liking.
What in particular is "protectionist" about the provisions of the law being applied here? AFAICT, the laws at issue are Articles 101 and 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union [0][1], which don't seem particularly protectionist.
> I imagine this will be a huge money and time waste for the EU, but in the end they have no real case.
Have you seen the actual Statement of Objections? If not, what is the basis of the conclusion about whether or not they have a real case?
> Google owns google.com and may display whatever it wants there.
Not if they have dominant power in a market and displaying what they want there constitutes an abuse of that position.
> Until someone forces EU citizens to use google, or until bing and yahoo die, they are not a monopoly, even as per EU's ridiculous (IMHO) definition.
Being a monopoly is not required for a violation of either the EU rules on anticompetitive agreements or the EU rules on abuse of a dominant position.
> it has no real power to force google to index foo, bar, and baz, or place any content of theirs (snippets of text and links to their pages) on google's property that is google.com
That would be possible only if you can reify the notion of freedom from the personal level to that of a company. A large, multinational company has a much greater impact on society and thus needs to be more tightly regulated.
What is a Search Engine? Is this some kind of legally regulated category that says you a) must only return Web results and b) in the form of 10 blue links?
Should a search which a search engine knows the direct answer to (word definitions, the current weather or time, etc) send you to another site for the answer. Why are "search engines" prohibited from direct answers, but voice agents like Siri allowed? Is there something fundamentally different between a text box and a voice input?
Likewise, if a search engine has indexed data and can return deep links to other sites formatted differently, why is that different? For example, if you search for "Playstation 4" and Google simply returned the first 10 hits (Amazon.com, eBay, Walmart, etc) as a page of 10 blue links like it did in 2006, instead of formatting them in a nice box at the top of the screen with summary price extracted, would this still be illegal? Why is it legal to display organic search results as blue links, but if you display them in a box and call it "Product Search", it's suddenly illegal? This makes no sense to me. The only difference between the Google Product Search box at the top, and displaying the links is simply better visual presentation.
The world has moved on from ten blue links. Mobile devices have even more constrained real estate and network latency pushing the need for summarization and smart presentation even further. A new class of consumer expects these devices to almost act like intelligent agents when answering queries.
Is the European Commission saying it will be illegal to build JARVIS or the Star Trek computer, because a smarter search that doesn't delegate to other niche search engines, and instead returns direct answers, is unfair competition?
At the heart of this seems to be the idea that Google search should return links to other shopping comparison engines instead of direct links to Amazon, et al. That frankly seems like a good way to hurt customer experience. If you have a good product comparison engine these days, you're probably going to end up as a native app anyway.
By the time this EU case winds down (Microsoft's took a decade), the traditional web search engine might not even exist anymore.
There is the rather delicate issue of copyright here. If you google for something and the answer is on another page, lifting it from that page is (a) making a copy and (b) potentially depriving the linked page of revenue.
There is also the question of using the threat to ban people from your search results (which is calamitous for most businesses) to resolve your disputes with them.
But the linked page is there. Google is indexing Amazon, extracting the photo, description, and price of the product, displaying it in a box, and making it a link back to Amazon where it got the data from, what's the problem?
Product Search is just another form of summarization/snippeting that just presents the data in more digestable format.
Remember Google Fusion Tables? That was an attempt to extract facts from pages and put them into tables, so if you ask "What's the masses of the planets of the solar system", you could get a table of 8 planets and masses, with the results coming from 8 different sites. But the links could still be there to the original site, it's just formatted as a table instead of as 8 blue links with summary paragraphs, which is harder for humans to process.
Now what if this same system eventually allows the search engine to summarize your web page by 'reading it', and then auto-generating a paragraph that explains what it thought it was about?
There'd be no actual direct copying of text (like there is with search snippets), instead it would be more like a human going to a library, reading a book, and writing a review
That question is moot in the shopping context; the products that show up in that system are fed directly to Google by the owners of the product listings.
Strictly speaking, you are only allowed to connect to a remote computer if you agree with their Terms of Service. I guess there are legitimate round corners, like you need to fetch the ToS first. It's not applicable as-is for the WWW, but you need to accept the websites have a say in how their results should be displayed.
> By the time this EU case winds down (Microsoft's took a decade), the traditional web search engine might not even exist anymore.
Exactly. The court system moves so much slower than the technology industry. It wasn't the US justice department that disrupted IE. Instead it was Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. It took me 5 minutes to install a different, better web browser. It will take me even less time to start using a different, better search engine whenever one comes along.
"Building the Star Trek computer" was always a funny marketing angle for Google, given that the Federation would frown on a greedy corporation controlling the flow of information.
As a user of Google search and Android, I want Google to bundle services. Android would, in my opinion, be impaired if it didn't include Google play, gmail, chrome, and Google Maps.
Similarly, Google search would be worse for me if it didn't present me with instantly relevant results like shopping, wikipedia responses, imdb style results, or quick answers to unit conversions and equations.
Yes Google leverages its dominance in search and mobile to bundle services, but is this something that the EU should fine Google for? As a consumer, I don't think so.
Microsoft said the same back in the day. And it is true - in the immediate term, consumers benefit from a single vendor integrating all their products and limiting competition.
The problem happens when you look a little farther ahead. Anti-competitive measures prevent other companies from offering something even better. Those products might not exist now, but without an open and competitive environment, they won't show up. And consumers are very much hurt if that is the case.
This is where it's not helpful to talk generically about this issue.
I might agree with you on some of the clauses in Android contracts, for instance, but the EU's previously proposed idea mandating cycling through different spammy vertical shopping search engines at the top of the search results helps no one but those spammy search engines, artificially propping a company up for years for the the appearance of competition.
Debating details can be useful, but that is the previously proposed idea.
Until we know what the current proposals will be, we don't have the details to talk concretely. So all we can do for now is talk about the general issue.
That's fair, but my point is that it's easy to talk about "oh, the market should be more competitive", but it turns out finding ways to do that is incredibly difficult without also hobbling the original thing to the point that it becomes simply not a good product.
It's also perfectly possible to propose solutions of our own for the purposes of discussion :)
edit:
> Debating details can be useful, but that is the previously proposed idea
it's also worth pointing out that the cycling vertical shopping search site links proposal was apparently rejected not because it was flawed but because those vertical shopping sites didn't think it went far enough.
What Microsoft did was completely different: They coerced OEMs to not include Netscape Navigator or they wouldn't license Windows to them. They prevented users from uninstalling IE claiming technical reasons that were proven false. And the reason they did those things was, as proven from internal communications, to protect Windows' monopoly from the threat of portable Java applications delivered via Netscape Navigator, by asphyxiating Netscape to death.
I'm of the opinion that even if you don't think Google has been evil with Google Apps / Android licensing so far, there's ample legal room for them to do so.
For example, having prevented anyone from developing high quality mapping alternatives by freely (with license agreement) offering Google Maps to OEMs, they decide that in order to install Maps on Android your device must now do the following:
- include additional tracking information and report same to Google
- include a facility to prevent the user from uninstalling or disabling this tracking functionality
... if you do not agree to this then, we're sorry, you'll have to find another mapping provider. Or ship a mobile device without a mapping solution.
Have they deliberately distorted the market in a way that's beneficial for them in the long term by destroying competition? You'd better bet your ass. They've just done it more insidiously than 90s Microsoft. After all, how evil can something that's given away freely (as in beer) be?
> having prevented anyone from developing high quality mapping alternatives by freely (with license agreement) offering Google Maps to OEMs,
Do you have any proof of this?
> - include additional tracking information and report same to Google
> - include a facility to prevent the user from uninstalling or disabling this tracking functionality
I believe you missed the legal hypothetical wording of my post. Although your first question doesn't really need an answer as I'd expect it to be self-evident.
"It is true that if a company has a dominant product, it may run afoul of antitrust laws if it "ties" that product to another -- for instance, by requiring customers who buy that product to buy another product as well. When a company provides products for free on a stand-alone basis, however, it's not requiring anyone to buy anything. It may take business away from other companies trying to charge users for similar products, but that's hardly an antitrust issue."
Which is to say they (surprise!) concluded in 2009 that there can't be anti-trust concerns because anti-trust laws don't cover free products, and Google is giving the things in question away for free.
Which to me is a clever way of saying "anti-trust laws weren't designed in a digital age where the per-unit production costs of a product (ex-development and up-front costs) can feasibly be zero".
For comparison, here's what Google did in Germany: After a law was passed requiring all search engines to pay newspapers for using "small sections of text", Google gave newspapers two alternatives: Either they gave Google perpetual, royalty-free access to all their content, or they would be removed from search results.
Given how much of their traffic and online revenue comes from Google they all agreed, rendering the law moot.
> Given how much of their traffic and online revenue comes from Google they all agreed, rendering the law moot.
I think "revealing the law was based on a false premise" would be more accurate than "rendering the law moot".
The premise of the law was that by showing snippets, Google was taking something away from the newspapers. If that were true, Google's "give us what we were 'taking' for free or we'll stop taking it" deal would have been rejected out of hand. The fact is, Google was providing the newspapers a valuable service by showing the snippets, which is why, given the choice between Google not doing so at all and Google doing so without paying anything, they chose the latter.
But the value of that service is because of Google's monopoly position in search in Germany (where its market share is in the 90's last I heard; much higher than in the US).
In other words, the newspapers have no choice but to take whatever terms Google offers them. That's a very bad state of competition in the search market. A search monopoly in Germany gives Google a huge amount of power over not only search but other industries, even the news media.
You either have snippet-royalties or you have viable and useful search engines that operate without a paywall. They are mutually exclusive. If royalty negotiations were required for all content before a snippet could be used, either the search engine will index only a few major players (only the head of the long tail), or the cost of obtaining agreements would exceed any potential revenues. It's not because of a monopoly player in the market, the dysfunction applies to all potential search engines. And the minor players in such a regime would be even at a greater disadvantage, lacking the resources to come to arrangements. Be careful what you wish for.
Google News shows headlines and small snippets, but if users are interested in a story, they have to go to the newspaper to read it. It's to the newspapers' own benefit. Google doesn't make money from News directly (no advertising).
What German publisher Axel Springer tried to legislate was the equivalent of forcing Google to pay for sending them traffic: have your cake and get paid to eat it, too.
Now if all sites in the world would join up and ask all the search engines to pay them for indexing, that would be really interesting. Never going to happen though.
> After a law was passed requiring all search engines to pay newspapers for using "small sections of text", Google gave newspapers two alternatives: Either they gave Google perpetual, royalty-free access to all their content, or they would be removed from search results
In the end german newspapers gave Google permission to use snippets of content without paying any royalties. They needed Google News traffic more than Google needed them.
Which is the reason why spanish lawmakers made a similar law but with a mandatory royalties clause. Spanish newspapers cannot give an exemption to any company, under the law paying royalties for using snippets is mandatory regardless of the content owner wishes. This law is not currently being enforced, but the consequences are dramatic all the same: Google has shut down Google News Spain, and other content aggregators are under threat of being hit with fines at any moment.
And that's why I'm not currently allowing feedbunch.com users to subscribe to RSS feeds from spanish newspaper publishers, until the situation changes. Anti-monopoly legislation is fine, but sometimes it can be a hammer that the big players use to hit each other instead of a tool to help new players get in the market.
Germany passed a law intending to make Google pay for using news snippets.
Google simply stopped including snippets from german newspapers.
German newspapers reluctantly gave an exemption to Google so that it would publish snippets from their websites again.
What more evidence do you need? Perhaps only a letter written in blood and signed "give us an exemption or else" accompanied with a horse head would convince you about Google's negotiation tactics here?
What evidence? An evidence that it is not a law that forbids putting snippets,.
The ones doping ultimatum were the German government and the publishers
> Perhaps only a letter written in blood and signed "give us an exemption or else" accompanied with a horse head would convince you about Google's negotiation tactics here?
Perhaps not the bend of reality that you're doing
I suppose that you also think that in the Spanish case the one doing an ultimatum is also google.
I wrote a similar comment once[1], check those that replied to me. Also, here's an article from Reuters[2] with some details. I'm on mobile, so sorry I can't provide better sources.
Those links doesn't support your claim about "Google gave newspapers two alternatives: Either they gave Google perpetual, royalty-free access to all their content, or they would be removed from search results"
What Google did was what the law required. And, by the way, nothing of royalty-free access to all of the content
"Before the [law] came into force on 1 August 2013, Google Germany had written to the press publishers in June 2013. They should tell Google whether they waive all rights under the law on Google News and grant [it] free license. Otherwise, their content would no longer be listed from 1 August in Google News"
From your quote:
> "they waive all rights under the law"
Really, stop, what you're linking is what the German law says, there is no ultimatum from Google.
Google asked the publishers if they will give the right to publish the snippets without paying or not, nothing less, nothing more. Just what the German law was
Original situation: Search engines put snippets of news without paying
Germany passes a law: If you don't pay or reach another agreement you have to stop putting snippets
Google: I don't want to pay, you either let me use snippets free or I will stop as the law says
There, with the gaps filled in you can easily see the ultimatum from Google. In the Spain case there is no ultimatum, Google just shut down. In Germany Google looked at the law and then gave newspapers a final choice.
I think it's a fair point, "I'd like to keep doing X, but if you want me to stop, I will" is not really an ultimatum in the traditional sense, because there's no retaliation. I think it's a stretch to say it's retaliation to not agree to start paying someone for something which was previously free.
Example, I use Google Apps for a while and it's free. One day Google says, guess what we're going to start charging for this service in a couple months, if you want to keep using it, enter credit card details here. I don't enter my credit card details, and stop using the service. Did I just "retaliate" against Google? Perhaps, but I can see where Oletros is coming from.
But they're not just not paying. They're offering to perform a search service in exchange for a brand new license. Your description is a much better fit for the Spain situation.
So to continue my (somewhat strained) example from above... I contact Google and offer to continue using Google Apps, but only if they let me do it for free.
I think in this case they are saying, "if you want to be in Google News, you can be, your choice bro." I just can't see any problem with that.
It's just like robots.txt, except German law made it opt-in instead of opt-out. It was opt-out, the law made it opt-in, so, well, now they gotta opt-in! Google really was a neutral 3rd party to the whole fiasco... in this case.
FTA: "The report lodged several complaints against Google, such as its practice of displaying content from sites such as Yelp and Amazon on its own competing services. “When competitors asked Google to stop taking their content, it threatened to remove them from its search engine,”
Notice that what I was responding to is not what you said:
> Microsoft said the same back in the day. And it is true - in the immediate term, consumers benefit from a single vendor integrating all their products and limiting competition.
Microsoft's actions that lead to its conviction did not benefit consumers in the immediate term. It hurt consumers both immediately and in the long term. And their intention was, as proven in court, to harm competition in the OS market; not to integrate stuff for a better user experience.
I suspect we're overestimating how much end-consumer desire there was for alternatives. Removing the choice of O/S might well have made buying a computer possible ( in terms of internal bandwidth ) for some.
Antitrust arguments famously switch between "harm to competitors" and "harm to consumers" while the empirical case is that with very few exceptions, these are nothing like the same thing.
At least in the '90s, when this really was a thing, people just wanted to go to Best Buy, plonk down their $2k and get on that AOL thingy all the people at work are talking about.
Now? Has anything been more proprietary and closed than iOS? Seems to be perceived as a virtue. When I am among the iOS people, they have trouble with 'em all the time.
Harm to competitors literally means less competition in the market for producing good products for consumers. In the worst case, that means you depend on a single monopoly corporation to produce the best possible product. It is almost a given that that results in lower-quality products for consumers.
Although it might be hard to prove using examples - as the better products that would have existed simply never appear in the first place. It isn't that competitors fail, although that happens too. It is that it is irrational for competitors to even try to spend money on products to compete against a monopoly that will crush them.
I don't know if google stops android phone developers from including a bing maps, or microsoft office app on their phones, in the same way MS was prohibiting OEMs/VARs from including Netscape Navigator or Opera.
I know they require the google experience apps to be kept, or not as a whole in order to be in certain programs though. Just not sure the extent they block other apps from being installed.
Microsoft is reportedly cutting their Android patent fees in return for manufacturers pre-installing apps such as Office, OneDrive, and Skype on Android devices, so it's definitely not prohibited: http://www.androidauthority.com/microsoft-cuts-patent-fees-f...
Samsung is also notorious for pre-installing TouchWiz apps that duplicate functionality provided by Google's apps.
More complex setup is a UX quality loss, so, yes, Android would be impaired by your recommendations. (And, on top of that, giving developers less consistency they could rely on on the platform would also be an impairment resulting from that.)
Whether an improved competitive marketplace would result from the changes and yield long-term benefits that offset the cost of those impairments may be a worthwhile debate, but its not a debate you can even have honestly without recognizing the impairments.
It's actually been really nice to remove all the Google apps and find apps with UIs I actually like rather than the Google-branded blinding-in-the-dark stark-white look they're shoving on everyone these days.
The fact that you are able to do that is a strong indicator that even if the apparent claim that "Google is using its position to discourage the inclusion of rival applications" were to reflect Google's actual intent, it's clearly not working very well.
It's really not, because I'm a career IT specialist, with a degree in software development and a ton of experience. For anyone outside of that, Google makes it very scary and very difficult to do.
Google's "openness" is what I refer to as "just enough rope to hang yourself with". They only are open insofar as they know you can't successfully compete with them.
Android already does ship generic apps and let users install their own app stores, browsers, maps, and so on. In fact, you don't even have to use the Google play store to install them because you can install arbitrary APKs.
In iOS there's no chance of installing an alternate app store by default, and yet with Anroid Amazon was able to make the Kindle devices (fire phone; tablet) that run Android without any hint of Google services.
A user can already choose to purchase a device without those services, it just happens users don't want to. I, as a user, enjoy having Google's services and enjoy that I can install alternatives if I so desire (like alternate and better email apps).
Phone and tablet manufacturers and retailers do with Android whatever they want, by virtue of it being free and open source. If they thought there was any value (greater than the UX harm) in those measures you propose, they'll do it without blinking. They already modify the hell out of any device that's not a Nexus.
If that were the case, there wouldn't be a problem. But it isn't. Google requires phone makers to comply with a stringent set of 'compatibility' guidelines in order to license any of their closed-source apps. See http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-...
Amazon's devices do not have any of Google's services.
However, it's fine... Google isn't doing it for anti-competitive reasons, they're doing it because all of the Google services are needed to have a stable system.
Various custom roms let you install only a subset of the Google services, and that option invariably leads to bugs. Of course Google shouldn't want to support that.
Your complaint is akin to saying that firefox is anti-competitive because to use their XUL interpreter I have to use their mozilla compiler and rendering suite.
There's plenty of freedom already on Android. Plenty of third-party manufacturers bundle their own app stores and users can create and/or install plenty of alternatives.
As it happens, I don't actually believe that Google is being anticompetitive here, I think their actions are pretty reasonable, especially compared to Apple.
But that doesn't mean that every argument that leads to that conclusion must be valid! The statement I was replying to was not. Amazon devices prove the point: as they don't comply with Google's requirements, they are unable to ship any of the Google's proprietary services even as part of the process antsar was suggesting in the GP comment ("part of the setup process [could be] to select an app store" [from a selection including the play store]).
My 2 cents. I had an Android phone since 2011 and an Android tablet since last December. I do use Google Play to install apps and for nothing else. I use Google Maps without being logged in. I don't use Gmail nor Chrome (also on desktop). I search from within Opera (I bet this is very unusual).
I know it's anecdotal but given my experience the only thing that would impair Android is the lack of an app store. Books, movies, music etc don't matter. Only apps. There are alternatives to Google Play and there will be more if for some reason Google decide to shut it down but a search engine and a little QA for apps is convenient. Having to wander through 4 or 5 app stores would be a bad experience (btw, I do use FDroid for some app not on Google's store).
>As a user of Google search and Android, I want Google to bundle services. Android would, in my opinion, be impaired if it didn't include Google play, gmail, chrome, and Google Maps
Even if it was so, the convenience of consumers is less important than having a healthy economic ecosystem.
I think immediate consumer convenience can turn into a bad consumer experience once the company providing it becomes the monopolist. Monopolies do bad things to customers in the long run. So we can end up with large consumer inconvenience and unhealthy economic ecosystem. I prefer a little less convenience now and let competition improve it a little bit or keep it at a reasonable level.
What can Google do? What is the possible negative long term impact here?
We're talking about a website and a phone OS. You can start using another search engine in five minutes and will probably replace your phone in a year or two anyway. There are plenty of alternatives, including forks of Android that will likely work with your current device.
Gmail at least owns its users' addresses. But here they have nothing except being useful. Local grocery store has me in a tighter grip.
Indeed. Consumer choice is more important than consumer coddling. And nobody is saying Samsung or Sony or LG shouldn't be able to choose to ship Google Maps on their devices. Just that it's wrong for Google to force them to.
To me, it's really not different from the television industry bundling their stations for carriers... Oh, you want to be able to carry AB Network? Well you also have to carry X, Y, and Z.
As long as the phone manufacturer isn't prevented from also installing Bing Maps, and setting that to the default, and putting that as the shortcut on the desktop, I don't know that there's a big problem... The experience apps have been a bundle for a long time now.
That being the case, I have a bit of an issue with it. Despite personally preferring the Google apps, I understand the sentiment.. I just see it in more limited scope than what irks some people.
As a paying customer of Google Apps, of Google Drive, of Google Music and as a user of Android, I want to have choice. And for example it is regrettable that CalDAV or CardDAV are not baked into Android, or that the mail app does not support IMAP Idle. Which basically means that the only usable standard on Android is Exchange.
I also love Chrome and Maps. However I'd like the ability of uninstalling them depending on my mood.
This isn't too say that EU's claims are fair or not. But I also feel that Google has lost its way.
> Android would, in my opinion, be impaired if it didn't include Google play, gmail, chrome, and Google Maps.
Why should Google blacklist manufacturers who produce anything Android-based that lacks their services? If you wanted Google services, what would stop you downloading them yourself?
As someone who's been trying to find a way to not use Google, I absolutely think the EU should not just fine, but shatter Google for. Because even when I moved to Windows Phone, Google bought out my NFC payment app and shut it down, telling everyone to get Android and Google Wallet.
If Google can't crush a competitor in the marketplace, they'll just buy it out and kill it. Which is why rumors they might want to acquire Twitter isn't a shock: They've never succeeded at social.
Softcard was shutting down anyways. They really never recovered from heavily investing in branding a product named ISIS and then having to change their name after that budget had been spent. On top of that, the early adopters that would have spread the word of the product were annoyed that the phone carriers were actively blocking Google Wallet installations in order to push ISIS adoption in the beginning. Google Wallet had to change business models and use a reloadable card because the carriers prevented Google from using the secure element on NFC to store the user's actual credit card on their own device. After Softcard began to fold, Google just bought what was left.
Nobody cared about Google Wallet. It was never more than a tech industry niche item (aside from being an account for Play Store purchases), and phone carriers only blocked it because Google was trying to create a monopoly.
If you understand the history behind the secure element, you'd realize that it was those phone carriers which forced Google to adopt HCE, which allows payment options. Google's plan was to be the sole payment provider across the entire industry.
You're off in bizarro land here. The brave carriers blocking evil Google's payment monopoly by allowing only ISIS payments on their phone? I know you're trolling the rest of this thread, but seriously?
That article is not even a source for what you're claiming! It just says Verizon wasn't illegally acting when it blocked Google Wallet on its phones.
Read the article, magicalist. Particularly the bottom few paragraphs. Google mandated exclusive use of the Secure Element for the payment system on Android. This would have prevented carriers from offering a competing payment service.
In short, carriers were not being greedy by blocking Wallet. Google was being greedy by designing Wallet. Carriers, if anything, saved us from a Google Wallet monopoly. Now anyone can make an app that uses NFC.
> Google mandated exclusive use of the Secure Element for the payment system on Android
The article's only claim in that area is that the Secure Element can only contain the credentials for one credit card (which wouldn't incidentally, lock developers out of using NFC). I'm not sure if that's right, but even assuming that, it appears to be a function of the hardware, not some evil plan to monopolize the phone.
The carriers only saved us in the sense that they forced Google to design around the Secure Element (which, notably, they could have also done themselves, another hole in your narrative...), giving a pure software solution and allowing Google Wallet to not ever be blocked on a hardware level.
> Google Wallet is doing something few apps do - asking for direct, exclusive access to a secure piece of hardware in the phone. Not only that, once Google takes over the secure element, it wants total control. Because of the security concerns (and related technical difficulties) involved in sharing a secure element, Wallet and only Wallet is able to utilize the internal secure element on a Wallet-enabled device. That means Google is directly managing every layer of the process.
No, that's exactly what I'm referring to. The article claims that the Secure Element can only be used by one set of credentials. If that's true, that's not locking out other people, that's just using the thing. Note also the "asking" part of that quote: Google Wallet wouldn't have used the Secure Element if you never used Google Wallet.
Meanwhile I'm still not sure how you're rationalizing the carriers as savior thing when they turned around and did exactly that dastardly thing (using the Secure Element) while also mandating that no one be able to decline the use of their payment system and use a different app. It was either ISIS or nothing.
Some proof? I live in South Africa, and last I checked I couldn't use Wallet. Was Google going to force Samsung to install Wallet on my phone? As far as I know, all the Google Apps that came with my phone are on someone else's phone in Australia or US.
Wallet is definitely still US-specific. As is Apple Pay, and was Softcard. I have no idea when and if any of these companies will ever expand NFC payments internationally, though some countries have local providers.
While I am in general a fan of Google (like AppEngine, Android, etc. contracted at Google in 2013), it is important to prevent harming markets due to effective monopolies. One problem is that anti-competitive practices may cause long term harm to markets while making consumers happy short term. Really a tough issue to deal with fairly.
I did notice something odd today in Google search results: I searched for "surface 3" and the link I wanted was a top paid for ad link. In the past, I could look down the page and see similar unpaid links, but not today.
You might be interested in a classic (well, pre-Microsoft antitrust) book written by a professor who has specialized in antitrust law. I've interviewed him a few times. Excerpt:
"Professor Armentano thoroughly researches the classic cases in antitrust law and demonstrates a surprising gap between the stated aims of antitrust law and what it actually accomplishes in the real world. Instead of protecting competition, Professor Armentano finds, antitrust law actually protects certain politically-favored competitors. This is an essential work for anyone wishing to understand the limitations and problems of contemporary antitrust actions."http://www.amazon.com/Antitrust-Monopoly-Anatomy-Independent...
So what? US has signed bilateral trade agreements with EU for that reason. As much as EU may benefit from fines on US companies, it's still a strict application of the law. US also benefits from the strict application of their laws when EU companies try to enter the US market. Actually, EU companies rarely try it. Guess why.
I think my point is that I can't find a case where an EU company has been threatened with antitrust action in the EU (or the US). Do you have a counter example? (Genuinely curious not trolling)
That leads me to believe these laws are "not strictly applied" but politically applied.
It has everything to do with anti-trust. Google's near-monopoly on search is dangerous, and they've abused it multiple times. Google News and Yelp are good examples: they would steal content (not just link to it as they'd have you believe), then threaten to delist the victim's sites if they complained.
Google News shows a snippet + link to original page, just like search. The difference is that it groups articles about the same thing together. I don't understand your argument.
What would be a viable way for Google to fix this that doesn't hurt users?
Sure, have Google Chrome installs start with "What do you want as your default search provider?" But can you do that with Android? How much will it affect Google Now to have it be connecting to a different search provider, and what does that mean? If I enter "1+1", or "weather", or "call Bob" or "navigate home", should it go to my search provider, or to Google Now? (I know the first two currently go to GWS anyway, but why should they?)
And if integration of services like shopping on GWS are a problem, does that mean they should be removing the "Shopping" tab and make it just another result? That would suck. (For me, as a user.) I dunno, maybe long-term it allows for more competition and innovation, but short term I don't see solutions that aren't "make your product worse". Even allowing me to choose plug-in search tabs from other services seems iffy.
>What would be a viable way for Google to fix this that doesn't hurt users?
Assuming that any of Google's business practices needs to be "fixed" (a claim that's debatable and has been rejected by U.S. FedGov), you've put your finger on the difference between the U.S. and Euro regulatory approaches.
The European approach is more inclined to protect competitors that complain about a rival -- in this case Yelp, Microsoft, etc. are doing that. Note protecting competitors from rivals is not the same as protecting competition; in fact, having bureaucrats cripple some firms and favor others can reduce competition and injects politics and lobbying and who-golfs-with-the-commissioner into the process. It also can lead to bizarre results like the lack of a reasonably viable way to "fix" things.
The U.S. approach toward dominant firm behavior (well, since the 1970s) has been different. It focuses on intervening when there's consumer harm, or at least tries to. If consumers are not harmed, the logic goes, there is likely no reason for the Feds to intervene. This is why the FTC did not proceed with its case against Google. U.S. law also emphasizes economic analysis, which stands a better chance of grounding the analysis in marketplace reality.
Note Microsoft enlisted U.S. politicians in its attempt to fend off broad EU antitrust actions; here's my article from 2004: http://news.cnet.com/U.S.-politicos-fire-at-EUs-Microsoft-ru... Google doesn't seem to have the same depth of congressional outreach, especially among Rs predisposed to be skeptical of antitrust actions.
The US's view of Google is inadmissible. Several high positioned White House staff members in tech positions are Googlers, and Google has a massive amount of cash invested in the US Congress as well. Google is at the White House for meetings on a weekly basis. The US Congress' letter to the EU Parliament asking them not to break up Google: Entirely signed by representatives paid by Google.
Are you suggesting that all of this is not publicly documented? The White House has hired multiple high-ranking Google employees in the last two years, and the campaign contributions made by Google to the Congressional representatives lobbying for them are all of public record.
> campaign contributions made by Google to the Congressional representatives...
Sigh. It is illegal for Google, like any other company, U.S. or foreign, to donate even $0.01 to any "congressional representative" (by that I take it you mean candidate for federal office or a current federal office-holder).
Google has never done so, and nobody, except you, has ever accused the company of doing so. Not only is this a slur, is the FUD equivalent of chemtrails, and it has no place on HN.
Those are individuals choosing to donate money, not Google. As I said above, any corporation is prohibited from donating even $0.01 to any candidate for federal office.
And if Sergey Brin and Larry Page and Eric Schmidt are tossing millions of dollars at the government, I'm sorry, but that's Google paying off candidates for federal office. Particularly when those same candidates turn right around and advocate for Google on the international political stage after they're elected.
And what if it's some of the many thousands of people who happen to work at Google donating money? The data you have cited is incapable of distinguishing between the two. A spot-check of the top name shows a politician who just happens to be a candidate to represent an area many Googlers would be expected to live in.
So what you want me to believe, is that the list of Congresspeople going outside of their duties to citizens and asking other governments to not regulate against Google, who also happen to have all collected substantial donations from Google employees are doing that completely objectively and coincidentally?
I'm saying that if you want to make the case that a couple of rich people are buying influence, you need to so better than "BIG NUMBER!". Like evidence on how many people that big amount of money came from. If it all came from two people, you'd have a case. If $85k came from 10000 people, your case might be a lot weaker.
Also, many people would consider advocating for the interests of their constituents to be exactly what the duties of a Congresscritter are.
Promoting local interests is part of the job. Sometimes that might mean dealing with interests in foreign locales. Local interests means the interests of the local people, which does not always mean things that take place in geographically local location.
Putting a smiley face on it doesn't mean you're right. :)
Under federal law Sergey and Larry and Eric can each give a maximum of $2,600 to any federal candidate, $5,000 to a PAC, or $32,400 to a national party committee. This is not "millions of dollars." And, again, the unsupported and false allegation of "paying off candidates" is chemtrail-istic. HN deserves better.
Or, you know, they can pay 25000 to honor a chairman of the FTC, which then proceeds to give you a clean chit in its investigation of their practices despite having previously found evidence of harm :P
Also I guess ocdtrekkie should have linked this other table on opensecrets, showing how Google spends more on lobbying than any other tech company, which is how it's "really done" as opposed to "chemtrail-istic" claims: http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=B12&year...
Android is very simple: Google needs to be banned from mandating OEMs install the whole Google Apps package. Leave it on OEMs to decide what browser, search, etc. apps to package on their devices. The market, and consumers, will decide what works.
The Open Handset Alliance is a blatant example of an illegal trust. A large group of supposed competitors agreeing not to compete.
Android gets raked over the coals for years for bad customer experience.
Google attempts to reign in fragmentation and divergent and inconsistent UI experience, and move more of firmware to Play store so it can issue security updates to customers without carriers and OEMs blocking.
Google raked over the coals for anti-competition.
Meanwhile, Apple ships iTunes and App Store, which can only be used with their own cloud stores. They ship iMessage which only works with their Cloud. Apple Maps. A fitness app. A wallet. A payment system. etc All in a proprietary, single vendor system, closed source.
If every Android phone's out of box experience was a random collection of OEM apps that had no common standard, the consumer experience would be terrible. Switch from a Samsung to an LG device and you might be hit by the fact that the device has none of the apps you were using on your previous phone, you have to delete all of the current apps, and reinstall all of your previous ones, enter all the settings again, all of the login credentials, etc. The switching cost would be huge and it would cause OEM lock in.
The setup process is a factor in consumer choice. If you are faced with an onerous gauntlet of selection dialogs for 10+ apps when you start (it's not just app store, browser, maps, but email, music, video, camera, photos, etc), consumers are going to be very annoyed. I don't want to spend 30 minutes to an hour unboxing my phone and "installing", that's what used to happen on PCs.
And what happens when things go wrong. If the user installs a third party app store, and gets malware, do you think they're going to be blamed, or Google's Android brand will be blamed? Most consumers aren't aware enough to narrow down who to blame.
So in the end, you'd be asking Google to assume all the brand risk, all of the complaints over fragmentation and failure to patch older phones, and making consumer experience worse.
Apple has none of these problems. Say what you will about their locked down platform, the one thing you don't have to worry about is inconsistent getting starting experience or malware from the App Store.
The 'choice' being presented here is the kind of choice hackers and engineers love, but it's not the kind of choice one's parents and relatives may love. It's just hobbling attempts to improve the Android experience.
Spoken like Richard Stallman, which is why GNU/Linux desktop took over the world right?
If you're so interested in freedom, why aren't you picketing Apple Campus too?
The practical effect of your viewpoint is hundreds of millions of unpatchable Android ROMs, exposing vast quantities of devices to viruses, and HARMING actual people.
As far as I know they haven't done this at any Google events, but maybe I just missed it. Either way, the idea that Google is being specially singled out for criticism by the FSF is pretty laughable and you probably need to leave your filter bubble if you genuinely believe it to be the case.
Not much of a fan of Apple, but Apple doesn't have a chokehold on the tech industry.
So Google's doing a good job now? With over half their devices vulnerable to major vulnerabilities that every other OS patched but Google has publicly refused to develop a patch for?
That's an extreme position at one end of a spectrum. I'm sure you realize that it's an opinion held by some but not all.
Apple has built a really quite successful business around limiting user freedom for user experience. There is a market for it. There are a lot of people who find it to be a good thing.
The OHA is basically an agreement between almost every major manufacturer in the industry to not compete on software, which is the majority of the industry's featureset. Additionally, while OEMs actively advertise against iPhone, none of them have ever made ads against each other.
The OHA is, at it's core, an agreement of a whole industry to not compete with Google or each other.
Right. Why don't we see Android forks? Because if you dare ever make one, you are kicked out of the OHA. And if you're kicked out of the OHA, you can't make phones with normal Android and its Play Store.
This is why it was so hard for Amazon to find a manufacturer for the Kindle Fire. Nobody wanted to be kicked out of the OHA.
Luckily, they did find someone who wasn't already making Android phones.
not Foxconn, it was a subsidary of Foxconn who built the phone for a subsidary of Amazon, thereby working around the OHA restrictions :)
They didn't really try to hide it, but they did the motions of some shell companies at least so they were maybe technically in the clear if you squinted enough.
This raises a very difficult question: Given the results are personnalized and the algorithm a secret, how can we bring proof? Same question for many companies who can hide behind the absence of measurable data, because they keep it secret.
There is a decent likelihood the EU court will mandate Google to provide the court this information. With any luck, some of it will end up public, though Google will probably try to leave the EU as a whole before they'd give up their search formula.
> What would be a viable way for Google to fix this that doesn't hurt users?
Its hard to even evaluate the accuracy of the objections, much less propose something that would resolve them, without the actual text of the Statement of Objections rather than news articles and even the original EU press release [0] and fact sheet [1] on the SO.
But, in any case, but for their anticompetitive effect, actions which violate competition laws often benefit users in terms of interaction with the product. The whole point of competition laws is to prevent that short-term benefit from being the source of monopolization which leads both to stagnation and monopoly rents, which harm consumers over the long term.
You can currently change your google now provider.
Firefox Beta, when installed now, registers an intent for search, and when you next do a google-now swipe-up, it'll ask you to pick between google now and firefox beta.
Google already has the solution for android of letting apps register intents, even for core things like maps or search or (hell) even the homescreen.
Google's solution of letting other apps register intents to handle things and prompt the user, while having default apps made by them that fulfill those intents, seems to be the best compromise on usability and extensibility.
In which we see a difference between EU and US law. US antitrust law exists to protect the consumer. EU antitrust law, evidently, exists to protect other competitors.
Thankfully we have leaked documents from the US case.
Excerpt from Ben Edelman, whose done a damn good job over the years not only watching Google but also companies involved in abusive adware and spyware practices:
'At the same time, Google systematically applied lesser standards to its own services. Examining Google's launch report for a 2008 algorithm change, FTC staff said that Google elected to show its product search OneBox "regardless of the quality" of that result (footnote 119, citing GOOGLR-00330279-80) and despite "pretty terribly embarrassing failures" in returning low-quality results (footnote 170, citing GOOGWRIG-000041022). Indeed, Google's product search service apparently failed Google's standard criteria for being indexed by Google search (p.80 and footnote 461), yet Google nonetheless put the service in top positions (p.30 and footnote 170, citing GOOG-Texas-0199877-906).'
Were consumers hurt if Google de-ranked content which by even Google's own standards were better than its own? May be not, but it certainly peels away any idea of the integrity of algorithmic search.
Google's business is under attack from all fronts today. As business owners and those employed by internet businesses we are so fortunate as to not have to rely on Google anymore for our audiences. We have have search from two major app stores, and more if you are international. Social can deliver new users at a greater rate than search. There was a day where Google penalized your company, and the next day you fired everyone.
In the next year or so we may start seeing ultra-cheap Chinese smartphones flood the market with Google free Android. Interesting thing commenters here seem to not know, device manufacturers are not allowed to sell any non-Google Android devices if they sell Google Android.
Idealy some lines are drawn so Facebook doesn't engage in similar abusive behavior against its users and customers. I don't have high hopes. If anything, the ability to avoid US penalties and the EU's late reaction time probably emboldens behavior by market leaders everywhere.
I don't understand what you're getting at. The "product search onebox" does not drive traffic to Google, it drives traffic away from it. For instance if I search for "bicycle helmet" the thing at the top of the page is the product search onebox, it contains five prominent links to sites where I can buy a bicycle helmet.
So I don't see what you are getting at. If anything, the product search onebox is the opposite of what the EU seems to be complaining about.
The question would be, how did those links in the OneBox get there? Is there harm in being the #1 search result, but not the first "result" on the page, because there's a OneBox above you with links from a different source?
As for your other question about being the #1 result but being ranked below paying advertisers, I'm not sure. Nobody deserves the #1 spot, it's not a natural right granted by your creator. In fact "the #1 search result" varies from query to query and from one user to the next based on their own Google account, if they have one.
> Ben Edelman, whose done a damn good job over the years not only watching Google
Ben Edelman is a smart fellow; I've known him for 15 years or so. But he is a paid Microsoft consultant and advisor. Perhaps he's right on some of these points, but I also suspect that if Microsoft would stop writing him checks very quickly if he suddenly started declaring that Google's actions benefited consumers.
You might as well quote a paid Democratic party consultant doing a "damn good job over the years" describing how evil those dastardly Republicans are.
\* Maybe the FTC would not have dropped the investigation despite finding potential evidence of harm [1] if Google hadn't paid to "honor" the chairman during the investigation [2].
\* And maybe the FTC would not have felt politically pressured to drop the investigation of Google didn't pay more millions than any other tech company to "lobby" the government [3].
I notice that whenever Edelman is mentioned Google apologists such as yourself or Googlers like DannyBee resort to ad hominem attacks rather than address any of the actual arguments he puts out. Do you know if anybody has refuted any of his points? Because I'm genuinely curious.
"Interesting thing commenters here seem to not know, device manufacturers are not allowed to sell any non-Google Android devices if they sell Google Android." - This is one of those MADA terms few Google supporters understand. Samsung, for example, is prohibited from releasing Google-free Android unless they wholesale give up on all Google Apps on every device they sell.
This made it difficult for Amazon to enter the tablet market with Kindle Fire: almost all manufacturers were unwilling to make it for them, because Google would kick them out of the OHA if they did, and they'd be unable to make Google-based Android phones.
Actually, the difference is that US antitrust law won't go after companies who are friends of half the White House staff and pay off a decent chunk of Congress, whereas the EU doesn't care how big you are, they'll take you down.
Feel free to provide numerous examples of US companies avoiding anti-trust by paying off a decent chunk of Congress. You need to prove your assertions when they're that outlandish.
Microsoft, IBM, Standard Oil, American Tobacco, Alcoa. Several of the biggest companies in US history, all pursued very aggressively by the US Government on anti-trust. You're clearly wrong.
> At issue is whether the company uses its position as the dominant search engine company to muscle out competition from specialized search services, specifically comparison shopping sites, by prioritizing its own Google Shopping search results.
Anyone else find shopping with Google Search is almost useless and I always follow up with a search on amazon.com and get a better result?
No, but then I don't use either Google Search or Amazon for much online shopping -- mostly, I go directly to an appropriate (more focused than Amazon) retailer, though sometimes I use Google Search to find a retailer if I'm searching for something where I don't already know a set of retailers to check.
I never understood the antitrust angle towards Google search. Is there some kind of browser or app out there that is forcing people to use Google as their search engine on all their devices?
> At issue is whether the company uses its position as the dominant search engine company to muscle out competition from specialized search services, specifically comparison shopping sites, by prioritizing its own Google Shopping search results.
Where are you getting that the 'antitrust angle towards Google search' is a subject of the complaint?
The sentence you quote is referring to antitrust. The laws about using a dominant position to compete unfairly are antitrust laws.
And it is pretty weird. It's really not very analogous to the old Microsoft/IE cases.
(Edit: Obviously, it's an EU case, brought under different laws entirely. There's no particular reason it would or should be analogous, but it does look very odd to US eyes, just because the legal principles are so different.)
Anti-trust law in the US does not exist to promote competition.
Monopolies are not illegal in the US. The violation of anti-trust law generally occurs when the government 'proves' harm to consumers. It's an almost entirely arbitrary decision on the part of the government as to whether they pursue a company on anti-trust grounds.
Intel maintained a near monopoly in personal computer processors for a long time. They were allowed to keep that position, despite the lack of serious competition beyond AMD's small slice of the market. Cisco, eBay, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have also been allowed to keep their overwhelmingly dominate positions over the years. Why? Because anti-trust has nothing to do with promoting competition.
>I never understood the antitrust angle towards Google search. Is there some kind of browser or app out there that is forcing people to use Google as their search engine on all their devices
The fact that most people use the default, and that Google mandates the browser be Chrome and the search be Google for all Chrome web browsers (largest desktop market share) and Android devices (largest mobile market share). And that they then prioritize their own products and services in Search as well.
The issue isn't "everyone is forced to use Google Search" as much as "Google creates a monopoly through connected use of it's various products and services".
> and that Google mandates the browser be Chrome and the search be Google for all Chrome web browsers (largest desktop market share) and Android devices (largest mobile market share)
No, they don't. You're free to use any browser on your desktop. You're free to use any browser on your Android device. And you're free to go into Chrome settings and use any search engine in Chrome on any of these devices.
In my part of the world (Europe) there has been a kind of triple point in March 2012 http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-eu-monthly-200807-201504 Chrome and FF overtook IE, then Chrome kept growing, FF and IE kept falling with FF maintaining an edge over IE.
The "monopoly" word is irrelevant. It boils down to using a major market position (search) to leverage a position in another market.
The whole hoopla about browser choice in Windows was for much the same, as Microsoft used their OS market position to push Internet Explorer, that in turn pushed IIS.
Frankly the browser war was a proxy for intranet server competition. Netscape was trying to use internet tech to go after corporate networks, and MS was trying to cut them off at the pass.
You don't need to be a monopoly to get slapped with antitrust. All that is needed is for you to be the big dog of the pack, and seen as abusing that position.
Flights. Mail. Cloud services. Office suite software. Etc.
Imagine that you search for "orlando new york flight" and the first result is rigged to be Google Flight Search. Or you look for "cloud database" and Google Cloud SQL is first.
Google is trying to get into a lot of markets, and its dominance in search could give its many other ventures an advantage.
I can see that perspective from one angle. But I still come back to the fact that it's trivially easy to not use Chrome or Google search. There is no barrier (such as cost or method of delivery like in the old days of the browser wars) to prevent a user from making the switch.
And wouldn't this all be an issue for a company like Amazon as well? They are a marketplace, yet they also make tablets, e-readers, have a video-streaming service. Aren't they using their position as a online retailer to push their products in other markets over other company's products?
Several people already told you: it doesn't matter if it's trivially easy not to use google.com or chrome. Anti-trust law is about market realities. Google has a dominant position in several markets and they abuse it to gain advantage in other markets as well.
> Several people already told you: it doesn't matter if it's trivially easy not to use google.com or chrome. Anti-trust law is about market realities.
From the anti-trust cases I've seen, the existence of viable (in the sense of accessible and sufficient, I think) alternatives is usually one of the market realities taken into consideration. If it is trivially easy not to use Google.com or Chrome, then Google's position is solidified by consumer choice rather than anti-competitive behavior.
Such as the fact that you can easily use something other than Chrome and Google search on any of devices? I mean, the position is starting to sound like "anti-trust" really means "The government taxes companies who hold a dominant position in the marketplace."
Edit: I can't reply to this thread anymore, so I'll just expand a bit here.
I get that on some level, all regulation/etc is some form of tax. I guess my point is that what constitutes 'anti-trust' is too unclear. It sounds a lot like governments just arbitrarily decide that its time for a certain company to give them money, without adequate justification.
> I mean, the position is starting to sound like "anti-trust" really means "The government taxes companies who hold a dominant position in the marketplace."
Anti-trust is overtly about government placing additional restrictions (which, as they have costs, can be viewed as a kind of taxes) on companies with market power so as to limit the degree to which that market power accelerates within its core market and spreads to other markets denying effective choice.
So, you haven't really discovered anything that isn't exactly the overt point of antitrust law.
The tricky bit is that they are giving a crap ton of code and services away to consumers/customers, while taking payment from other companies for better references etc.
In a sense it can be likened to the drug dealer classic "the first dose is free".
There is also Ara. While one the surface it seems to break down the old consumer facing problems with mobile devices, there is no indication that Google will give up control over the endoskeletons that the modules attach to. Heck, they may set themselves up as sole distributor of modules. Even go as far as tracking modules, under the guise of disabling them if stolen.
Nothing is a giveaway. It's all in exchange for your data, which is what they are profiting off of.
And yes, Ara was an awesome Motorola project that Google will now ruin with walled garden design. The endoskeleton is not intended to be third party-able.
Do you have any evidence that Motorola was going to just give away Ara and not own the ecosystem? You know, the company that was hemorrhaging money and teetering on bankruptcy wasn't going to try and own the IP of the endoskeleton and charge for access to it?
The issue is that Google is default on Chrome. Their charges against Android are coming soon, they've launched an official investigation into Android app bundling as well.
I'm not convinced that's an issue. A user has to specifically choose to down the Chrome browser for free. At which point it defaults to Google search, and you can trivially change it to use another search engine. The "issue" sounds really thin to me.
Their charges against Android are coming soon, they've launched an official investigation into Android app bundling as well.
The "issue" with regard to the browser wars in 201x has always been thin. That idiotic "ballot" thing that European Windows users had to deal with? Yeah. God forbid a modern OS come with a web browser.
Not withstanding that Opera, Firefox, and other browsers are available in the Google Play store for android, you can easily change the default search in the Settings menu. The ease of this change can be compared to changing the default search in Internet Explorer or Safari. [1]
Its not irrelevant; there is clearly a stronger case for anticompetitive behavior if you include an app as default with an OS and prevent alternatives than you if you provide a default but allow alternatives.
OTOH, merely allowing alternatives may not be sufficient, depending on other circumstances, to not run afoul of competition laws in some jurisdictions.
But the landscape has changed quite a bit since the days of Microsoft bunding IE. Changing browsers and search engines is a trivial task nowadays.
Plus, Microsoft's problems were tied to Windows with IE. It appears this is just about Search results and/or Chrome, as they outline Android specifically as something they are now investigating.
It's less irrelevant when the OP used the particular phasing of "mandates", which is quite hyperbolic and doesn't actually forward the discussion, thus the corrections.
I don't think Google should be allowed to dictate clauses like this one from their developer agreement:
4.5 Non-Compete.
You may not use the Market to distribute or make available any
Product whose primary purpose is to facilitate the distribution
of software applications and games for use on Android devices
outside of the Market.
It is. The charges filed today are about Search. And then the EU is opening a separate investigation about Android, though the general concept of the problem is the same: Google relies on bundling and self-promotion to create a walled in and monopolized experience.
Search engine isn't Google's only product. And since you use "app", I presume you mean "any kind of software", in which case yes, it's called Google Analytics. You don't have to ever use any Google's site, but you are still tracked by them almost everywhere.
Although that probably isn't very relevant to this case....
>The investigation will attempt to determine whether Google is using its position to discourage the inclusion of rival applications on Android-based phones.
I don't see any way to even ask the question sensibly about iOS.
Google supplies an OS (Android) to non-Google phone makers, and Google supplies applications to non-Google phone makers. The potential antitrust issue is if Google is using its position as an OS supplier to other companies to influence those other companies to also choose Google for applications.
Apple supplies neither an OS nor applications to non-Apple phone makers. There is no third party that Apple is using iOS to influence toward choosing Apple applications.
It's not really "astroturf"ing when FairSearch prominently displays that it's an organization owned by Microsoft on their about page: http://www.fairsearch.org/about/
(Meanwhile, Google goes out of their way to hide their ownership of the Open Handset Alliance, burying the first mention of their name on like the third page of members.)
No one out there is under any illusion that Google didn't put together and lead this consortium. What else would they do? You make an OS, one that is free of charge and open, and you need hardware and software partners onboard, the only way to do that is to adopt some venue for collaboration.
Have you attended any OHA meetings? You're making quite a lot of unbacked up assertions.
Microsoft for years ran many working groups for hardware partners, for example, the Microsoft groups for DirectX which allowed NVidia, AMD, et al, to influence and collborate on common specs. Microsoft "led" the discussion, but NVidia and AMD were clearly able to influence the specs because the API had to be rationalized around real, existing, and upcoming hardware designs in the pipeline.
You have a habit to attributing negative and conspiratorial agendas to everything.
I'd love to attend an OHA meeting! I'm sure Google's going to open that up. Oh, wait, the OHA is somewhere around as secretive as the NSA. Although at least the NSA can claim it's trying to protect people. Google's just trying to cover their dirty laundry.
That's actually one of the things I'm really hoping for out of these cases. A judge that won't care about your non-disclosure crud and will post that stuff in open court.
But yes, they are. Look at the front page of the OHA site, Google is not named. Nor are they named in the OHA's Overview, like it's about page. You have to go into Members, and then Software Companies, and on that page, four pages deep, Google puts itself as the sixth name down. Bit shifty.
Furthermore, while all other Google websites link directly to Google's terms of service, the OHA site puts a stub page in between, rather than linking directly to it, as would be standard par for the course.
Google takes exceptional measures to distance themselves from control of the OHA, which they most certainly have.
Thanks to Android and Google. If Google had never released Android, you might be looking at an even more locked in monopoly, one far worse than the Wintel Duopoly of the 90s.
And then Apple would be in the same boat Google is in now. Of course, had Google been willing to create an open source OS without using an illegal trust to maintain control of it... well, then everyone would be in the clear.
As an EU citizen and consumer, here's my message to European Commission: SCREW YOU!
I would like to know why is it so hard (and expensive) to buy a car on a foreign EU country and legalize it on other, I don't know why am I still paying robbery-like roaming "costs", I don't how is it possible to be considered fiscal resident simultaneous on 2 different countries and why citizens has still to resort to individual country-to-country specific deals to avoid double taxation within EU.
And I could just keep going on... BUT they are worried with a freaking search engine! Piss off.
I wouldn't be suspicious until I read ".. fine of 6.4 billion .."
What ?
Even BP didn't get that big of a fine when they polluted half of the Atlantic Ocean.
I don't understand what EU's problem is. If they don't like google and android please ask your tech graduates to create their own.
The EU is an funny organization. they are not democratically elected. Their policies is the reason half of EU is bankrupt. The EU should be fined for bankrupting entire generations of young people in Greece and promoting the largest transfer of wealth from poor European nations to rich European nations.
Even assuming Google did participate in behaviour that is anti-competitive that market that google dominates was created by google !
I like china's approach to this where they forced their countrymen to create powerful competitor to google. The emphasis should be promotion of wealth creation and not redistribution. Why doesn't Europe have its own homegrown search giant ? An EU company would clearly have massive advantage due to the language barrier. The EU should be paying people to create companies to compete with google. Or atleast make it a priority to do so. What happens when google refuses to pay the fine and starts backtracing or treating the EU market as "not worth it", has the EU though about how it will effect consumers ?
This is a bit childish. Firstly, the EU is democratically elected: the parliament is elected directly. The commissioners are appointed by democratically elected governments and subject to the parliament's approval.
Secondly the EU competition bureaucracy has never shown a bias against American (or even non-EU) companies. If you check http://ec.europa.eu/competition/cartels/statistics/statistic... (page 3) you'll see that of the 10 highest cartel fines, 9 went against EU companies. One was LG Electronics.
Thirdly, the idea that any company the size of google would abandon the European market in some sort of spiteful retreat is laughable. Europe has a strong track record in terms of the rule of law and google will have a fair chance to present their arguments.
Fourthly, there shouldn't be spaces before punctuation.
Everyone should be fined based on how much damage they have caused on the environment,civilization, etc
Do you seriously think google has done damage worth 6.4 BILLION ?
BP,Shell,Nestle have caused real damage to real humans and the environment and there seems no outrage or investigation towards them.
Banks in germany have clearly destroyed lives of people financially and no one is asking any questions ?
Google allegedly tweaked its algorithm to make it slightly inconvenient for people to use alternative services and now we need to fine google 6.4 BILLION ?
Google has absolutely done more than $6.4 billion worth of damage to society. Google's arbitrary automatic penalty systems put people out of business on a daily basis.
> Even BP didn't get that big of a fine when they polluted half of the Atlantic Ocean.
The fines broke big long after BP's fine. BNP Paribas was fined a staggering $9bn just last year. The fine was selected as the limit of 10% of the annual revenue in the previous year.
The fine amounts being thrown around are mostly bad journalism. The law allows a fine of up to 10% of annual turnover, but even in most hard-core cartel cases, they will not go into the upper bound. And especially in this case, it is not clear if Google will be fined in the end at all - the Motorala SEP case ended without a fine as well: http://www.fosspatents.com/2014/04/eu-settles-sep-antitrust-...
> Even BP didn't get that big of a fine when they polluted half of the Atlantic Ocean.
So? The thing with corporations is, if they do something bad and you give them a small fine, they'll just consider it a write-off expense.
Corporations lack morality. They are not human, they cannot be reformed. If you want them to behave, you have to make their bad actions hurt. You can't just lock them up, either.
Thus, a big fine is the only way to force them to act.
> I wouldn't be suspicious until I read ".. fine of 6.4 billion .."
EU fines for anticompetitive behavior are assessed as a percentage of turnover. As a basic rule, it is set at up to 30% of annual sales related to the infringement (modified by aggravating and mitigating factors) multiplied by the duration of the infringement, plus a base amount of 15%-25%, and capped at 10% of annual turnover.
Writing in their PhD paper in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin described paid advertising as “insidious”, because it “often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results”.
In addition to this, Google currently deprioritizes other video search engines over YouTube because of the recent DMCA algorithm change, as Google forwards DMCA's to YouTube and doesn't impact the search ranking for YouTube per notice. It's completely unfair.
Google's competitors should spend more time improving their products and less time complaining to the EU.
As an example, google flight search is just hands down better than the alternatives. It is ultra fast (a killer feature) and has a simple but intuitive UI.
I am someone who constantly tries out alternative google services. consumers are always looking for better deals.
If there were better search engines, email clients, etc than google people will be switching in droves.
The reality is there isn't and the solution is not to fine these companies but to promote the creation of competitors. Given that there is 60% youth unemployment in may europeans countries I do not see why this is so hard.
This lawsuit just seems like a nice way for lawyers to pocket some money from the wealth that was created by google at the expense of google and the consumers.
Honestly, if you constantly tried out alternative services, you'd probably have left Google already. I did, and I found many competitors' services faster, smoother, higher performance, and more configurable. Unfortunately, they have terrible market share because of Google's anticompetitive business practices.
I actually can't. My response to the above comment was pretty generic. I don't fly often, and when I do, it's generally airline specific because of mileage programs.
Not really. It is blazingly fast, but Momondo also find trips via nearby airports and gives you alternative nearby dates when flights may be cheaper. Momondo is also prettier. Google flight search is instant, though, I'll give them that.
Can you elaborate on your reasons why? I like to hear both sides of an argument.
I see Google not as a monopoly but as a majority holder where people have control of what services they use. Are they abusing this position to the detriment of users and market?
The problem is that people don't have control of what services they use. The vertical integration model, used quite successfully by both Google and Apple, is specifically designed to make it unfavorable or impossible to use competitors.
At least under the US definition, the practice of "tying" is illegal when you use your monopoly position in one market to try to monopolize another market. By using Search to prioritize promoting their other services, they are trying to capture other markets through their dominance in Search. This is what the law was written to prevent. Most of my issues stem with how they do this in Android though, which is a separate investigation the EU is conducting.
Google's Search behavior hurts consumers in a lot of ways. Since Google is the front door to the Internet, effectively, particularly in Europe where their market share is nearly uncontested, being an unfavorable result in Google prevents you from adequately competing. Being "penalized" by Google Search for any reason can put you out of business.
And Google is now trying to exact their will on the entire Internet through penalizing sites in Search as a means of activism. For example, choosing to penalize sites for not using HTTPS, or penalizing sites for not using "mobile responsive" design, which has at best, subjective appeal.
I'm failing to see an issue with penalizing sites for not using HTTPS.
Google has incentive to maintain the quality of their search results by being able to make some guarantees that the sites they send visitors to are what they say they are. It's reasonable to extend that to prioritizing sites that can be verified over sites that are easily MITM'd.
The quality of a local business cannot be determined by whether or not they cough up $70 a year for HTTPS. The quality of content cannot be determined by whether or not they cough up $70 a year for HTTPS.
Penalizing sites for not using it raises the cost of having an opinion or trying to run a business on a nearly arbitrary restriction defined by a monopoly with conflicting business interests who sells web hosting services.
> I see Google not as a monopoly but as a majority holder where people have control of what services they use.
Even if people could switch search engine - which they can't given they have only one competitor which isn't very good - it wouldn't make Google's actions fine. Google has a near-monopoly on search. They are abusing their market share.
> At issue is whether the company uses its position as the dominant search engine company to muscle out competition from specialized search services, specifically comparison shopping sites, by prioritizing its own Google Shopping search results.
Google Shopping results suck but when I search for products almost always is an Amazon, Walmart, Target and others linked at the top of the results sometimes higher than the actual company that produces the product. As far as I can tell you can only get their shopping search results by clicking on "Shopping" (at least I can't seem to trigger it without that).
I don't understand the issue here. foundem is behind the initial lawsuit and kinda kicked off this whole thing but they're a search engine. If I owned a search company I certainly wouldn't want to be federating queries and indexing them doesn't make sense; why would I index an index when I can just index the source?
Am I missing something here?
> The European Commission also confirmed that it is opening an investigation into Android as well. Although the operating system is open source, meaning that any manufacturer can install it on the phones and tablets they sell, many core applications, including the Google Play store, are proprietary. Manufacturers must enter into special agreements with Google to include these proprietary apps. The investigation will attempt to determine whether Google is using its position to discourage the inclusion of rival applications on Android-based phones.
I don't understand this one as well. These applications require the use of Google's infrastructure so if you want to use them why shouldn't you agree to handle them as they want? Besides I think Barnes and Noble's nook and Amazon's Fire platforms show this is a non issue.