141–150 of 702 posts
Someone said once something which really describes this well: The EU hasn't contributed ANYTHING to the internet, but they are the ones who want to regulate it the most. :(
And if by the EU you mean its countries, you're so wrong it's not even funny, but the US bubble is strong
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I just don't understand how surfacing affiliated ads over others on Google own sites is a big deal? They're a revenue generating service, of course they're going to favour ad networks and channels which benefit them the most financially. To fine a private business €2.4bn for conducting pretty standard business practices.
Because the user has an expectation that they'll be shown the best results, not the most self-shilled results.
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I have absolutely no framework for understanding this attitude. I've got to assume you're aware of things like unfair competition, antitrust laws, market distortions and so on. The idea is that a disproportionately influential market participant can cause the market to become less free by virtue of inhibiting competition – competition being a vital part of a free market. Rules against abusing a dominant market positi…
Unless I've misunderstood what the fine was for. Fining a private business €2.4bn for promoting its own affiliates over other networks, how is that in any way an abnormal business practice? I'm not trying to be controversial, I just don't understand how that warrants such a hefty fine.
Promoting your own services in general is fine. But when a huge, huge majority of the market uses your service for discovery, your decision to promote your own services over competitors' damages competition in the market — users end up with less choice in practice, even though they could theoretically switch to another service.
Those rules exist to try and prevent this sort of abuse happening.
I wish they would add an additional 1 billion fine for AMP.
But as far as I understand, AMP is just an open technology, i.e. open for any (search) company to implement. Google is just the company proposing the standard (and coincidentally benefiting most from it).
If an AMP equivalent standard came out by Mozilla or Microsoft or Facebook, it would be an uphill task for them to get google to give those pages special treatment in search results.
Hence, there is an argument to be made about AMP being an anti-competitive (search engine dominance used to push it's own diet-html).
what's stopping google from shutting up shop in the EU. would they have to block EU access? how much revenue do they make from EU clients?
The EU economy is bigger than that of the US and Google's position in EU is more dominant. Bing doesn't work well for Europeans, there are no real competitors. Maybe the US market has more marketing spending, compared to Europe.
My guess would be that Google makes about the same in the EU as it does in the US.
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> If they are forced to stop doing this it will make my search experience worse for me. This seems to be the whole point of the fine. Currently Google's services just so damned conveniently integrated that no one uses competitors' services, even if they are better. The thing is, though, I am totally with you here. I don't want to use one of the other services for maps, or flights, or these snippets for information. T…
Did you read the articel? Google is not allowed to put itself or products from Alphabet higher in the search results than third party products. What kind of links they put up is googles decision. If they made a link "Shopping" next to "Maps" and "Images" everything would be fine. The problem is search results. Consumers expect all results to be shown fairly, by not doing so Google violated it's position. This is not…
A "Shopping" link next to "Maps" and "Images" is probably OK, but it's also completely useless. I'd be surprised if more than a fraction of people doing comparison shopping actually clicked that link.
Intentionally pushing down results of competitors via algorithmic criteria is obviously bad, but say they stopped doing that. What about the inline shopping box at the top of search results? That's still putting their own service in a prominent position. Probably bad...
... but then this concern immediately applies to translations, song lyrics, unit conversions, maps, shopping hours, etc. The kind of results that as a user I want to see. Will that be disallowed to? If so, this will make Google Search a significantly worse product.
what's stopping google from shutting up shop in the EU. would they have to block EU access? how much revenue do they make from EU clients?
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/nov/04/google-pays...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have absolutely no framework for understanding this attitude. I've got to assume you're aware of things like unfair competition, antitrust laws, market distortions and so on. The idea is that a disproportionately influential market participant can cause the market to become less free by virtue of inhibiting competition – competition being a vital part of a free market. Rules against abusing a dominant market positi…
I get that competition is vital for a free-market to function, unless Google gained power in this scenario through external influences such as government, then surely it has gained its position through market competition?
There's nothing wrong with Google having a huge market share. But when that market share is used to essentially hide knowledge about competitors, isn't it obvious that the market becomes less free?
I wonder if that's payback for the US gov fining VW so hard: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2017/04/21/volkswa... It's almost the same amount, US$2.8B. It's like the EU telling the US "F with our corporations and we'll F with yours".
The thing is, personally I prefer getting integrated results from Google's other search services when I do a Google search. I like getting Google Maps results when I search for a location, I like getting Google Flights results etc. When I do a Google search I am not just using it as a simple website search. I want it to use it to search the whole Google suite of services. If they are forced to stop doing this it will…
While google's tight integration lead to a positive experience for you, it lead to a very poor experience for myself or others who want to use something not google. I'm not asking for the EUC to fine google, I'm asking for choice.