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Google’s $6B Miscalculation on the EU

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Re: Google’s $6B Miscalculation on the EU

#41

Post by levosmetalo »

adventured wrote: post #18
guelo wrote: post #3

If you look at what has happened in China after Google left, how they were able to quickly grow massive web companies, protectionism seems like a no-brainer for every slightly advanced country. Silicon Valley sees the huge first-mover advantages and is moving as fast as possible to move into every liberalized market. But it makes no sense for a country to allow Silicon Valley to take these industries for themselves.…

You can't kick out the Americans without assuming dictatorship-like command powers over the entire EU economic zone. That only functions at all in China - to whatever mediocre extent it is functioning today - because that's a unified market, one country, under one leadership. Any attempt by Europe to try that, would destroy the European economy. Germany is hyper dependent on exports. The US eats most of its own dog f…

> Kick the Americans out? Ok, well now BMW, Porsche, and Mercedes are banned in the US. Germany just lost a huge part of its economy (look up the two biggest markets for their vehicles: the US and China).

As someone living in a German city which is a world leading car manufacturing center, I would actually like to see the end of German auto industry. The whole German economic system is geared towards those big car manufacturers, and it's very hard for small businesses and enterpreneurs to navigate through all of that bureaucratic mess created by big German corporations. Letting them fail would actually help making German economy much healthier in the long run.

Re: Google’s $6B Miscalculation on the EU

#42

Post by vidarh »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #6
dylanjermiah wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the expense of the citizens. Why not let companies compete?

Some countries have no problem banning the best technology so that the best local technology can win, even if it's worse, and even if the best technology did nothing wrong. It's easy enough to make up excuses for that after the fact. It would be nice if at least one such country could just blatantly state their motives up front to be judged on their merits: "We're choosing to prohibit a non-local company to encourage…

Being upfront about it encourages retaliation.

Everyone wants the benefits of protectionism on their own turf without paying the price of everyone else being protectionist and that at a minimum requires pretending you're not being protectionist.

Re: Google’s $6B Miscalculation on the EU

#43

Post by choppaface »

Much of this debate centers on the premonition that Google highlights their own content and services in order to fight competition and maximize their own profits. They are acting intentionally and rationally. But their monopoly is hurting others, so we (er, the EU) convict(s) Google of malice.

However, another plausible position is that Google is merely behaving negligently. There are some studies (paid by competitors, sure) showing users dislike Google promoted content and products. Those products should probably have their A/B tests ended, but nobody has the guts to pull the plug (and willpower to evolve the effort into something else). Knowledge Base has sucked away ~30% of Wikipedia's traffic, which thankfully has not yet hurt donations. Google certainly doesn't want Wikipedia to fall apart.

If we want to draw a parallel to Microsoft's monopoly, we could point out how IE was initially a good product but then fell behind the competition. Pushing it on consumers not only hurt consumer choice, but (over time) locked users into a poor experience. But did we really need to carry out a lengthy (and ineffective) anti-trust case?

Building a legal case is expensive and highly political. If discovery doesn't uncover evidence of malicious intentions, then one must prove competitors and consumers were harmed. But if the monopoly has been held for so long, how can one prove those damages without resorting to small, expensive, and contrived studies?

We should begin to embrace an expectation that the producer of any successful product will eventually become negligent. Protecting consumer choice is not just about fair discovery, but ensuring the diversity needed for markets to evolve (for better or, perhaps in the short term, for worse). Why do we have to go to such effort to show how Google is specifically doing harm? Why can't we say they had their turn, and here are places where they have concentrated marketshare and thus places in need of diversity?

Re: Google’s $6B Miscalculation on the EU

#44

Post by richmarr »

donkeyd wrote: post #25
guelo wrote: post #3

If you look at what has happened in China after Google left, how they were able to quickly grow massive web companies, protectionism seems like a no-brainer for every slightly advanced country. Silicon Valley sees the huge first-mover advantages and is moving as fast as possible to move into every liberalized market. But it makes no sense for a country to allow Silicon Valley to take these industries for themselves.…

> Europe is always fretting about how they need to create their own Silicon Valley but it's easy to do, kick out the Americans! You'll have your own Baidu, Tencent and Alibabas in no time. People seem to forget that Europe is not a country. Europe does not have a single uniting language. What happens, is that every country starts their own smaller versions and they stay mostly within that country. If they want to mov…

I think this view is one-sided

Despite having many different languages, in some ways Europe is a more homogenous market than the US.

For example, an insurance business can operate freely across Europe with only one small piece of additional paperwork. I think it's actually an A4 piece of paper. In the US they'd have to be regulated separately by nearly every state.

Re: Google’s $6B Miscalculation on the EU

#45

Post by simonh »

adventured wrote: post #15
hansibansi wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, the reason why they differentiate product and general search is, because Google injects a carousel at the top of the page, regardless of its relevancy. Thus, the differentiation. Secondly, the big discussion of abusing its market dominance was ultimately triggered by Yelp and other vertical search engines. Google first ripped of Yelp by scraping their content and then added it to their own Google Places…

There was an easy solution for Yelp: opt out of Google search results. What Yelp wants, is to have their cake and eat it too. They want to benefit from what Google offers, and they want Google to behave exactly as they would prefer, assuming control over Google's product through government power. Classic competitor hypocrisy, the same behavior displayed 15 years ago by Microsoft's extremely envious competition. They…

If search results that hit Yelp data linked to Yelp there'd be no problem. However if it links to Google Places because Google scraped the Yelp data and loaded it into the Places database - that's a problem.

Suppose someone launched an 'Encyclopedia Search' service that searched Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britanica, etc and linked to their sites. The the service then started loading the Wikipedia and Britanica content into it's own respository and linked searches to that. It's still searching the same data, and taking you to the same articles, it's just that now you're not going to Wikipedia or Britanica anymore. Would that be ok? If not, what's the difference?

Re: Google’s $6B Miscalculation on the EU

#47

Post by Kurtz79 »

richmarr wrote: post #44
donkeyd wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Europe is always fretting about how they need to create their own Silicon Valley but it's easy to do, kick out the Americans! You'll have your own Baidu, Tencent and Alibabas in no time. People seem to forget that Europe is not a country. Europe does not have a single uniting language. What happens, is that every country starts their own smaller versions and they stay mostly within that country. If they want to mov…

I think this view is one-sided Despite having many different languages, in some ways Europe is a more homogenous market than the US. For example, an insurance business can operate freely across Europe with only one small piece of additional paperwork. I think it's actually an A4 piece of paper. In the US they'd have to be regulated separately by nearly every state.

You are unsing a very specific example do draw a very far-reaching conclusion.

The only fact that the there are some 20 different languages makes the EU a much less omogeneous market than the US.

This withouth considering that each country has its own employment policies, social security services, healthcare system, education system, revenue service...

I'm strongly pro-union, but it's far from perfect, or even efficient, in the current state.

Re: Google’s $6B Miscalculation on the EU

#48

Post by weddpros »

bootload wrote: post #26
dylanjermiah wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the expense of the citizens. Why not let companies compete?

"Why not let companies compete?" foreign company tax avoidance? "Technology giant Google last year paid $11.7 million in corp­orate tax to Australian government coffers, on revenue of $438.7m and profits of $58m." ~ http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/google-admits...

"All" the research and development was done abroad, not in Australia. The products were created abroad, so you can't expect the full added value to reside in Australia...

Re: Google’s $6B Miscalculation on the EU

#49

Post by icebraining »

levosmetalo wrote: post #37
JoshTriplett wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some countries have no problem banning the best technology so that the best local technology can win, even if it's worse, and even if the best technology did nothing wrong. It's easy enough to make up excuses for that after the fact. It would be nice if at least one such country could just blatantly state their motives up front to be judged on their merits: "We're choosing to prohibit a non-local company to encourage…

And what exactly is wrong with that? As long as the price / performance is not totally off, I'd always rather pay a bit more for a slightly worse service if I know VAT money will stay in my city, tax will be paid in my state, salaries would be paid in the same job market where I am, and the profit would be invested in my neighborhood. There are local monopolies everywhere, even in the USA. And they are protected by t…

As long as the price / performance is not totally off, I'd always rather pay a bit more for a slightly worse service if I know VAT money will stay in my city, tax will be paid in my state, salaries would be paid in the same job market where I am, and the profit would be invested in my neighborhood.

Nobody prevents you from buying local right now, so that's a red herring. If you want to force others to do the same, you should pay their increase as well. Are you prepared to do that?

Re: Google’s $6B Miscalculation on the EU

#50

Post by rjaco31 »

kennethh wrote: post #23
guelo wrote: post #3

If you look at what has happened in China after Google left, how they were able to quickly grow massive web companies, protectionism seems like a no-brainer for every slightly advanced country. Silicon Valley sees the huge first-mover advantages and is moving as fast as possible to move into every liberalized market. But it makes no sense for a country to allow Silicon Valley to take these industries for themselves.…

There were many search companies in the start and for a long time all of them did the same, google came and delivered a better product and kept innovation. People came and saw the google homesite with a logo, textfield and a button. This is simple we can make this also without knowing all the stuff behind it. Search is now a mature industry, it is always better to go for the new places where there are no dominant pla…

> it is always better to go for the new places where there are no dominant players

It's funny, I've heard several times the total opposite from startup founders ("It's easier to go for a big market and to chunk some % in order to get viable, rather than going on a totally new market in which you'll have to both be better than the competition and convince the clients that's it's actually a promising market")

> If someone offer you a product cheaper than you can make it yourself, take the offer and find something better to do. Everyone looses(sic) by protectionism.

Uh? Protectionism has historically worked exceptionally well to develop your own industry, as a matter of fact, all the big players heavily used protectionism in their time to nurture their industry before being big (England, USA, China, South Korea). You just cannot compete with an on-going industry while starting from scratch, so your industry will never take off.

Protectionism is only good if you're already the best in town & want to be sure that you keep the upper hand, but it helps in no way the under-developed country.

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