France convicts Google Maps for unfair competition • Hacker News Board

Re: France convicts Google Maps for unfair competition

#101

Post by ceol » Thu, Feb 02, 2012, 6:11 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #84

dlikhten wrote: post #5

Reporter totally misses the point. The point is that google provided google maps for free. That is great. except when all other competition dies (because who can compete with a better, freer version of your product?) google starts charging pretty rediculous rates. That move in itself is what contributed to the ruling. OSM is free for everyone. It is a wiki. If OSM destroys google, bing, etc, and then decides to go on…

So the answer to a monopolist commoditizing a market is... to introduce a cartel? Because this is basically what this judgement argues: Google should charge something in line to what its competitors do, and forget about any downward pressure on prices. I'm not a free-market zealot, but this sort of ruling is really bad for small players. Googlers understand the internet and so they make money while lowering prices fo…

From the second paragraph of the article:

"In a ruling Tuesday, the Paris court upheld an unfair competition complaint lodged by Bottin Cartographes against Google France and its parent company Google Inc. for providing free web mapping services to some businesses."

It looks like the issue isn't that it's free; it's that Google provided free maps services to some businesses while charging others. That's the gist I got from the article, anyway.

Re: France convicts Google Maps for unfair competition

#102

Post by victork2 » Thu, Feb 02, 2012, 6:20 PM UTC

te_platt wrote: post #85

Thomas Sowell gives a nice introduction on predatory pricing here: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0503/6309089a.html From Sowell's article: It is a commentary on the development of antitrust law that the accused must defend himself, not against actual evidence of wrongdoing, but against a theory which predicts wrongdoing in the future. It is the civil equivalent of "preventive detention" in criminal cases -- punis…

Your equivalent is, imho, incorrect.

See it that way, when does predatory begins? As a matter of Fact Google Maps is already the biggest on the market with a price next to 0 for users. If we would compare it to something in real life it would: "Somebody has given to a group of people a serious death threat". Then in that case you'd need a punishment.

Anyway, I read some of the comments on this story and I believe take attacks on websites and companies as personal offense. Nothing could be far from reality. A society has to maintain a balance and competition is GOOD. Allowing Google to phagocyte the whole Maps business is not beneficial at all for society as a whole. Actually it's quite bad, even for users.

The French government is not racist, they don't want to attack or kill Google, they want a favorable ecosystem for innovation and fair competition. Google is a big business that can use its other services to temporarily dump prices on one of its product to totally wipe out competition, there need to be safeguards!

Re: France convicts Google Maps for unfair competition

#103

Post by sahaj » Thu, Feb 02, 2012, 6:22 PM UTC

Would a company get convicted under the same law if it was backed by an entity with unlimited (a lot of) cash and gained a dominant position because of the backing entity?

I'm not defending Google, just wondering if the case I describe above is the same as what Google was doing?

Re: France convicts Google Maps for unfair competition

#104

Post by jlarocco » Thu, Feb 02, 2012, 6:27 PM UTC

olefoo wrote: post #98

te_platt wrote: post #85

Thomas Sowell gives a nice introduction on predatory pricing here: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0503/6309089a.html From Sowell's article: It is a commentary on the development of antitrust law that the accused must defend himself, not against actual evidence of wrongdoing, but against a theory which predicts wrongdoing in the future. It is the civil equivalent of "preventive detention" in criminal cases -- punis…

Predatory pricing does exist, but several conditions have to be true of the commodity being priced. It must be a rival good, it's production has to have high-barriers to entry and it cannot have easy substitutes. In the case of online maps, none of those is true. Which is why so many HN readers are surprised by this.

Actually all 3 of those are true.

I don't know exactly what this company's product is, but if they offer an API for creating maps on a website it would be a rival product.

Next, the barrier to entry for online mapping is huge. The raw data to generate and create maps is not easy to collect. Especially for satellite images and topo data. And then there's the infrastructure required to actually process and serve the data.

Switching mapping APIs is not always trivial. Along with the different interfaces, most of them have slightly different features. Once a site is using a specific mapping API it's anywhere from a hassle to a major PITA to switch to something else.

Re: France convicts Google Maps for unfair competition

#105

Post by patrickaljord » Thu, Feb 02, 2012, 6:29 PM UTC

hokkos wrote: post #73

alexis-d wrote: post #4

I'm French and I really think that's a shame. What's next? Microsoft to sue Google because Docs are free?

It is about antitrust, not about if it is free or not : http://www.numerama.com/magazine/21483-google-condamne-en-fr...

This article is completely biased and titled "a very good decision", its author is known to be anti-google and complains about SERP for his biased website on his twitter account all the time. Pretty pathetic guy.

Re: France convicts Google Maps for unfair competition

#106

Post by mattmanser » Thu, Feb 02, 2012, 6:33 PM UTC

WayneDB wrote: post #100

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netscape open sourced their browser so the browser would survive, not so they would. They were continuing to make money off their server products, but they couldn't justify the large investment in a browser anymore.

Correct. That's exactly what I said and that's what the original commenter said too I thought.

Looking at the comment again I guess you can read it either way, though to be honest it reads more like he was talking about Netscape the company, not Navigator the browser.

As for long term, after taking out Navigator the browser market stalled for 6 years until Firefox started gaining traction. That's why it was a Bad Thing long term.

MS entire strategy was to hold up the development of the web as it made less from that than desktops, thin clients running web apps frightened it silly. It worked. Hence long-term bad thing due to stagnation.

Who knows what version HTML we'd be on if the browsers had stayed competitive for those 6 years. Instead we're almost at a point where maybe rounded corners will be available to all soon.

I never said I thought IE5/6 was crap when they came out, I myself have rolled out the old XmlHttpRequest innovation defence.

The stagnation of IE was the impetus for FF to rise and start MS developing IE again, not Navigator's open sourcing. Had someone been able to make good money on browsers I'd argue we'd be further down this path.

Re: France convicts Google Maps for unfair competition

#107

Post by babarock » Thu, Feb 02, 2012, 6:37 PM UTC

WayneDB wrote: post #100

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netscape open sourced their browser so the browser would survive, not so they would. They were continuing to make money off their server products, but they couldn't justify the large investment in a browser anymore.

Correct. That's exactly what I said and that's what the original commenter said too I thought.

Yes, I'm the original commenter. I was talking about the browser. Actually, my point had very little to do with Netscape itself. I was merely pointing out that an analogous situation has happened before, and ultimately, the browser market (can we call it a market) didn't turn out to be that monopolistic distopia. On the contrary, from the consumer point of view, many browsers are easily available for free. What's to say that it won't be the case with the online maps and GPS systems?

Maybe it's my fault, I expressed myself awkwardly. Or maybe it's the fact that you'll always find some pedantic know-it-all on the web to accuse you of implying a certain position or harnessing some theories by "reinventing history".

Re: France convicts Google Maps for unfair competition

#108

Post by oh_sigh » Thu, Feb 02, 2012, 6:37 PM UTC

oh_sigh wrote: post #77

kolinko wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this what game theory is about? Smaller competitors won't open up, because even if Carrefour has high prices, the chain can lower prices any time to wipe out the competitors again. So, the monopolist can have arbitrarily high prices because nobody will invest in opening shops. This is one of the situations in which free market fails to deliver the optimal (for consumers) solution.

The free market doesn't fail in this case. Consumers fail. Just like when there is traffic on a highway, it isn't networking theory that fails, it is drivers. Consumers choose to shop at Carrefour, and fill their coffers with money to smash smaller chains. Maybe if consumers were smarter, or cared a little bit more, they wouldn't shop there? I can only blame ignorant consumers and not carrefour or the free market in…

Thank you everyone who is providing intelligent rebuttals and not just downvoting me.

Re: France convicts Google Maps for unfair competition

#109

Post by Karunamon » Thu, Feb 02, 2012, 6:46 PM UTC

unreal37 wrote: post #68

Karunamon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(deleted my OP due to people using the down arrow for "disagree") >Do you think that in a market for a service which is very expensive to provide, one participant offering that service for free will encourage competition, or will it drive the others out of business? I'm sorry but I'm finding it very hard to justify the government stepping in and saying "Nuh-uh, you're not charging enough". If this was a case of preda…

I actually have some sympathy for companies that are working solely in an industry like cartography, that have Google come in and offer the same service for free. Yes, on the one hand, it forces the competitors to develop better products and justify charging for them. But on the other, Google is clearly using their billions made from search advertising to dominate another unrelated industry. It was wrong when Microso…

>But on the other, Google is clearly using their billions made from search advertising to dominate another unrelated industry.

That would hold water if the products they were "dominating" were competitive in any way, shape, or form. The competition frankly sucks. I'd believe Google was killing them if they weren't busy killing themselves by offering a completely and totally inferior product at a much higher price.

Re: France convicts Google Maps for unfair competition

#110

Post by msluyter » Thu, Feb 02, 2012, 6:50 PM UTC

oh_sigh wrote: post #77

kolinko wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this what game theory is about? Smaller competitors won't open up, because even if Carrefour has high prices, the chain can lower prices any time to wipe out the competitors again. So, the monopolist can have arbitrarily high prices because nobody will invest in opening shops. This is one of the situations in which free market fails to deliver the optimal (for consumers) solution.

The free market doesn't fail in this case. Consumers fail. Just like when there is traffic on a highway, it isn't networking theory that fails, it is drivers. Consumers choose to shop at Carrefour, and fill their coffers with money to smash smaller chains. Maybe if consumers were smarter, or cared a little bit more, they wouldn't shop there? I can only blame ignorant consumers and not carrefour or the free market in…

I suspect you're getting downvoted because your suggestion suffers from the free-rider problem: everyone who chooses to continue shopping at Carrefour free rides off those who don't, yet they still obtain any supposed social benefits.