The European Union should be broken up.
When debating pro-against EU, we should never forget how pre-EU Europe looked like. We've been incredibly good at killing each other. I'd pick a huge beauracracy over arms races any day of the week.
Google should be broken up, say European MPs
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Re: Google should be broken up, say European MPs
#12I don't know a lot about the requirements of these operations; how can the European Union guarantee that each Subgoogle does not agree with the rest to provide services to each other that I can't access to? I don't see how they can enforce that any company can be playing a level field against another subgoogle competitor...
That's the real problem; they don't know what to do about it, but they'll rather do anything instead of nothing. Either it's gonna be a lot of hot air or turn out for the worse.
What's funny is that Google already operates as separate legal entities in different European countries (though some countries share one HQ and hence legal identity).
How they plan to further "break it up" I can't imagine.
Re: Google should be broken up, say European MPs
#13I was blocked indefinitely from Adsense by Google's faulty algorithms (without explanation and with appeals rejected without explanation). I lost the revenue I'd earnt that month, and soon realised Google holds a monopoly in this space, and no one else offered a comparable service.
I'm all for Google's stronghold to be broken. reply
Re: Google should be broken up, say European MPs
#14Here is the link to the original press release:
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/news-room/content/2014...
Re: Google should be broken up, say European MPs
#15Google is using its cash cow, search to fund lots of new innovative projects. If you break it up, you lose lots of innovation.
I do think that they should prevent Google from killing nice startups by copying their services (hardly ever happens but it does)
Re: Google should be broken up, say European MPs
#16This would be very difficult legally.
Re: Google should be broken up, say European MPs
#17The European Union should be broken up.
When debating pro-against EU, we should never forget how pre-EU Europe looked like. We've been incredibly good at killing each other. I'd pick a huge beauracracy over arms races any day of the week.
Not only was Europe more violent then, but it was also hugely bureaucratic, probably more than today. You couldn't sell a product in more than one country without dealing with the bureaucracy of each of them independently. Today a company registered in Denmark can sell products in Sweden and Germany without having to register corporations in three separate countries. And they don't have to wait hours at the border to go through a customs checkpoint anymore either.
Re: Google should be broken up, say European MPs
#18Ugh, not this again. The only real monopolies are those which are protected by government regulation or control.
Google is out there on the freewheeling internet competing. It has a broad portfolio of products, but their main revenue stream - ads from search engine - has about the lowest switching costs of any product known to man.
Google is far from an angel, and the days of 'don't be evil' are a quaint memory. But these European Regulators should look in their own backyard, and perhaps spend some time dismantling their own regulatory mess. You never know, undoing some of that red tape might even get their economy to grow. Stranger things have happened.
Re: Google should be broken up, say European MPs
#19If they actually knew what they were talking about, they would be voting to decentralize the internet, not break Google up. I don't think trying to break up Microsoft or fine them for bundling internet explorer achieved a whole lot. They are looking at the problem the wrong way.
> I don't think trying to break up Microsoft or fine them for bundling internet explorer achieved a whole lot.
I don't know. Is Internet Explorer still the most used webbrowser?
Re: Google should be broken up, say European MPs
#20Not that it'd ever happen, but I would very much enjoy watching what would unfold if Google ceased to provide services to these nations. Can you imagine the backlash?
That would result in a backlash about Google going bankrupt rather than ceasing of services from EU.