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Google's response to the European Commission fine

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Re: Google's response to the European Commission fine

#151
post #147

It's interesting how on Hacker News, story about Google getting fined was censored and removed yet PR from Google is still on the front page. It's sad that bias and censorship on here is so strong.

Why do you say it was censored and removed? It's dropped down to page two, but that's perfectly normal once something has been on the front page for a while.

Re: Google's response to the European Commission fine

#153
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, "the words are what I mean them to be". Can't argue anymore then.

There's no need to play semantic games. Let's say I'm looking for a Seagate 10 TB harddrive. The Google Shopping results would look something like this: https://www.google.com/shopping/product/3954751729784172026?... That example "connects me, the user, to the advertisers" . Seriously, without playing the game of "words are anything I want them to mean just to win an argument" ... what would _you_ call the mechanism…

> That example "connects me, the user, to the advertisers".

But did you want to be connected to the advertisers, i.e. those who paid Google to give their product a better placement, or did you want to be connected to the sellers, ranked by how desirable their product is to you?

Re: Google's response to the European Commission fine

#154
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are really twisting the commissions ruling to enact sympathy. "The commission said it did not object to the design of Google's generic search algorithms or to demotions as such, nor to the way that Google displays or organises its search results pages: "It objects to the fact that Google has leveraged its market dominance in general internet search into a separate market, comparison shopping."

So we can expect a similar decision against Apple bundling their own apps in iOS, or Microsoft promoting OneCloud in Windows, or Amazon not selling Google Chrome & heavily promoting their Firestick, or Bing doing exactly the same thing as Google (the only difference I see is the placement)? I think it would be better if Google made it clearer that the shopping search was all adverts, but otherwise this seems idiotic.…

Anti-trust law in US & EU depends upon actually having significant market share. iOS has a significant minority share compared to Android, so it doesn't matter that Apple is bundling their own apps. The same logic applies to Bing, which employs many of the same anti-competitive tactics Google has used historically, though because market share is so low Microsoft will not garner any sanctions/fines (unless it becomes more comparable to Google.)

EDIT: per the OneDrive argument on Windows, I think you might have a point - though Windows is pretty open to deep integration with competitive services like Dropbox or Google Drive, so my guess is that MSFT would just have to offer an easy way to uninstall OneDrive, maybe? (or at least disable it.)

Re: Google's response to the European Commission fine

#155
post #147

It's interesting how on Hacker News, story about Google getting fined was censored and removed yet PR from Google is still on the front page. It's sad that bias and censorship on here is so strong.

Why do you say it was censored and removed? It's dropped down to page two, but that's perfectly normal once something has been on the front page for a while.

It's only been 5 hours since it was posted, and the story has ~450 upvotes. In contrast, I see another story on the front page right now that was posted 18 hours ago and only has ~250 upvotes.

Re: Google's response to the European Commission fine

#156
post #121
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to get down voted out the wazoo for saying it, but I will voice my opinion anyways. The EU has long used 'anti trust fines' as a way of levying tariffs against US companies.

I find comments like yours baffling. The basic tenement of capitalism, as worshipped in US, is that it needs competition to function. If a monopolist prevents competition from functioning (either by hiding their products on the largest search engine on earth, lowering prices under profitable margins or other tactics used by such entities) capitalism degenerates into socialism led by a corporation instead of state. It…

One way of looking at corporations is islands of central planning in a sea of market forces. It is not always entirely obvious which functions should be optimally bundled together inside corporations. This is why you can get a lot of controversy around these decisions.

Re: Google's response to the European Commission fine

#157
post #121
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to get down voted out the wazoo for saying it, but I will voice my opinion anyways. The EU has long used 'anti trust fines' as a way of levying tariffs against US companies.

I find comments like yours baffling. The basic tenement of capitalism, as worshipped in US, is that it needs competition to function. If a monopolist prevents competition from functioning (either by hiding their products on the largest search engine on earth, lowering prices under profitable margins or other tactics used by such entities) capitalism degenerates into socialism led by a corporation instead of state. It…

>So why the heck would you not support an action that stops a giant corporation from stiffling the most important mechanism of capitalism?

Because it's not the government's job to unclog the market. It's the entrepreneur's opportunity to disrupt the market and kick Google's ass.

Re: Google's response to the European Commission fine

#158
One thing I was missing from comments is that the ruling is not passed by courts but by the commission investigated the crime. Is it same as prosecutor sentencing the accused and there by the burden of proof is upon the accused ? Would it be the same if the accused is a person and not a corporation in EU ?

Re: Google's response to the European Commission fine

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say it was censored and removed? It's dropped down to page two, but that's perfectly normal once something has been on the front page for a while.

It's only been 5 hours since it was posted, and the story has ~450 upvotes. In contrast, I see another story on the front page right now that was posted 18 hours ago and only has ~250 upvotes.

It could be the algorithm: Maybe the original EU story got many downvotes from HN users that work at Google?

Re: Google's response to the European Commission fine

#160
post #153
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no need to play semantic games. Let's say I'm looking for a Seagate 10 TB harddrive. The Google Shopping results would look something like this: https://www.google.com/shopping/product/3954751729784172026?... That example "connects me, the user, to the advertisers" . Seriously, without playing the game of "words are anything I want them to mean just to win an argument" ... what would _you_ call the mechanism…

> That example "connects me, the user, to the advertisers". But did you want to be connected to the advertisers , i.e. those who paid Google to give their product a better placement, or did you want to be connected to the sellers , ranked by how desirable their product is to you?

I see your differentiation of advertisers-vs-sellers but it doesn't apply because, yes, I do wanted to be connected to those advertisers. The Google Shopping page clearly shows the message "Sponsored (i)" at the top of the results. Click on the "(i)" for more info and it says: "Products and offers that match your query. Google is compensated by these merchants."

I'm using the Google Shopping as it's deliberately designed: connect me to the advertisers.

I think the confusion is that regular search results (e.g. search for "how to concatenate a string in PHP?") is a "pull" mechanism in which Google spiders webcrawls and scrapes from pages like StackOverflow. You expect some sort of pagerank curation without requiring StackOverflow paying money to Google. Nevertheless, Stackoverflow answers often show up at the top.

On the other hand, the Google Shopping is a "push" mechanism where the advertisers pay to place their links there. The advertiser/sponsor model is basically how all the major comparison shopping sites work.

I don't know of any reputable/reliable price comparison site that uses a "pull" mechanism to scrape prices across multiple retailers that covers most products. If it does "pull" price data, it tries to derive income via techniques like affiliate url links for commissions. Camelcamelcamel uses a pull mechanism but it only scrapes Amazon and not the other retailers like Best Buy, Newegg, etc.

To turn this around, let me ask you... what price comparison website connects me to sellers instead of advertisers? (A site like Ebay connects me to "sellers" but doesn't include results from multiple major retailers such as Amazon.)

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