331–340 of 702 posts
Funny fact below the article is that 2 contacts - that are in fact British citizens. Ricardo CARDOSO (+32 2 298 01 00) https://www.linkedin.com/in/ricardocardosodeandrade/ Yizhou REN (+32 2 299 48 89) https://www.linkedin.com/in/yizhou-ren-a2950616/ Both graduated from same school and both have financial sector background. Both were working in big UK corporations before their career in EU commission.
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Once you gain a certain amount of market share you no longer have the right to engage in certain kinds of anti-competitive actions. There's nothing extreme about that; the laws have been in place for over a century.
The anti-competitive practices you're talking about is not being able to decide what content gets displayed on your own website, what relevant information you're allowed to show Users in response to their search results and being forced to give your competitors more prominence. AFAIK this has never been written into law or ruled illegal before.
Doesn't seem that different from the case against Microsoft over Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player?
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Americans seem to think this is the US versus the EU.
As an American who wishes his government protected him as well as the EU is protecting their citizens, I kinda resent being grouped in here. Google fans would like to make this about US vs. the EU, because it misdirects away from Google's illegal actions. But multiple US companies asked for and supported this investigation against Google. And I wish our government laid down the same charges against them here.
Is this just a case of lobbying corruption?
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Can you deign to explain why you think so, or is it so obvious that I should just be ashamed for not seeing it?
Perhaps obvious was not a good choice. Anyways: I would say Google is as close to a natural monopoly as the Bell System was in 1956. If you came to me and said “Hey, I want to start a company to compete with Google in search,” I would say you’re out of your mind and don’t waste your energy or your time or your money, there’s just no way. Classic economics would say that if there’s a business in which there are 35 per…
There's a high cost to building a store and the more stores you build, the more customers you serve, the more stores you can afford to build.
There's a high cost to making a movie and the more movies you make, the more people pay to see your movies, the more movies you can afford to make.
I might be in a minority here and I'll probably get down voted but this result scares me... and I used to be CTO one of those competing price comparison sites that show up lower in the results so if anyone should agree it should be me. While it made me angry when Google put their results above ours, I never questioned that they had a right to do that. It is their website. They are not a utility. At what point does a…
It should scare you. The EU just used their regulatory power to force the world's biggest search engine to make their user experience worse in order to benefit other companies. Before Google penalized all the vertical search sites, doing a Google search for certain kinds of products was a terrible experience; page after page of crappy information-free autogenerated sites hoping to make $$$ from ads and referral fees…
Not necessarily. I read this as saying that if other players have well marked up content, they should have their listings appear in infoboxes, perhaps alongside Google's. Not that the infoboxes be removed.
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Except that Google is not a shopping service. Using a dominant position in one market to acquire one in a different market is not allowed.
They're returning relevant information Customers are searching for. If it wasn't relevant or useful people would use a different Service they'd deem more valuable to them. A major part of Google's simplicity is they provide a single search box you can use to search for anything, I don't want to have to go to 100 different sites to search for 100 different things.
> Google has demoted rival comparison shopping services in its search results: rival comparison shopping services appear in Google's search results on the basis of Google's generic search algorithms. Google has included a number of criteria in these algorithms, as a result of which rival comparison shopping services are demoted. Evidence shows that even the most highly ranked rival service appears on average only on page four of Google's search results, and others appear even further down. Google's own comparison shopping service is not subject to Google's generic search algorithms, including such demotions.
There is nothing wrong with Google's integration. The complaint is that Google unfairly promotes its own services at the expense of rivals. When I search for something, I expect the search results displayed to be relevant and fair. I have no problem with Google having that sponsored Google Shopping ad, but demoting other highly relevant results to the fourth page is highly anti-competitive and downright unfair. How many times in the last week have you actually flipped through 4 pages of Google Search results?
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The anti-competitive practices you're talking about is not being able to decide what content gets displayed on your own website, what relevant information you're allowed to show Users in response to their search results and being forced to give your competitors more prominence. AFAIK this has never been written into law or ruled illegal before.
The specifics are unimportant. What matters is that Google was using its dominance in one market to gain an advantage in a different market. That has been illegal for a long time.
I might be in a minority here and I'll probably get down voted but this result scares me... and I used to be CTO one of those competing price comparison sites that show up lower in the results so if anyone should agree it should be me. While it made me angry when Google put their results above ours, I never questioned that they had a right to do that. It is their website. They are not a utility. At what point does a…
When a company uses a monopoly in one field (web search) to boost their other businesses.
It's the same when Microsoft were convicted in the US of using the desktop OS monopoly to boost their web browser business.
As things stand, the Google Shopping results allow smaller, independent e-commerce stores to reach the top of Google's search results.
Take this functionality away, and we risk the top search results being a combination of Amazon + other large retailers for the majority of e-commerce related searches.
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> If Google was merely a Yellow Pages style service as it was previously then I'd be more sympathetic to the idea of distorted rankings favouring Google services but that's becoming less and less the typical user experience. Well, I'm primarily agains the idea of giving a single, non democratically controlled non-international entity, so much power. To the point where I don't care if Google is forced to stop innovati…
Do you think an organization like EU can effectively fine or regulate their way to a more uniform market though? Google could partner with other companies to do integration in their search engine for those smart results but then they'd just be giving another company an unfair advantage. I don't see how you could stop this without crippling the type of answers Google provides. Besides maybe offering open tools they co…
Maybe or maybe not, but fining seems like a step in the right direction.
>I don't see how you could stop this without crippling the type of answers Google provides.
As I wrote above, I'm all for crippling them if that's what it takes. But turning them into some kind of public infrastructure is another way.