161–170 of 702 posts
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".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
This is basically the EU protecting other corporations even if most of the populations benefit from Google's current practices. Corporatism at its worse.
Google's flagship product is the Google search engine, which provides search results to consumers, who pay for the service with their data. anyone else finding the plainness of that last sentence to be staggering? ...
Capitalism is like a competition that when you win you don't ever get to play again.
Except the carrot is only dangling on the stick and as a donkey, you're not allowed to ever get it - because the moment you do, you stop moving forward. Hence it's imperative to a) convince people they can win, and b) ensure they don't. Because it's not the players that are socially useful, but the game itself.
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…
Anecdotal experience: I switched browsers on android because android's default browser kept opening map links in google map. Firefox mobile didn't seem to suffer from that issue. 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.
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…
> 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…
I am definitely not a Google fanboy; I don’t like Android and I’m not big into their cloud apps, but when it comes to search, they are the best. EU companies could try and compete but they haven’t. Has any EU company tried to build a high quality search experience? If they aren’t succeeding then why?
The problem in France, as I see it is government. As an example, DailyMotion rivaled YouTube for a short time, as soon as DailyMotion was about to be acquired for a huge sum by Yahoo, the French government blocked the sale because Yahoo wasn’t French. That immediately sent a signal that if you put a lot of VC/investment into a French company, your exits were subject to the whims of a protectionist government bureaucracy, which makes investing in French companies relatively more risky than investing in American companies in terms of ROI.
Did the DailyMotion deal contribute to the current Google dominance? I think it definitely had a chilling effect on high growth unicorn chasing in the EU which means the “French Google” hasn’t been born because it is much much harder to access funding than a similarly positioned company in the US. I am not saying the French startup scene is dead or bad, but the ultra-high level moonshots that are fairly common in the US are extremely rare in France because of the bureaucratic environment. Blah Blah Car raises $200 million against a $1.6b valuation, but that is pretty much an outlier and likely the result of an investor play against Uber’s French difficulties.
My point: if the EU wants to prevent monopoly situations, member states ought to be doing more to get out of the way of innovation. They can do that by lowering taxes. Even if you have a winning investment in France, an investor gets butchered in capital gains taxes thus requiring a 10x investment to actually be a 25x investment to be worth it. With such a low hit rate for VCs in general what incentive do they have to kneecap themselves by investing in places like France?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I avoided the word "monopoly" for a reason. The internet isn't a finite natural resource, Google doesn't own it, there are other players in the field, and nothing stops new players fron entering. You're also interpreting the word "big" perhaps too literally. In your example, Apple is not big in the sense I mean. Microsoft might be, but that doesn't mean I agree with the judgement against them. If people like your pro…
> If people like your product so much that 95% of the market uses it, I don't see the abuse. Which is why the fine is not for 95% of the market using the product, but for abusing that position to unfairly disadvantage competitors.
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).
From the official site: "The Google AMP Cache is a proxy-based content delivery network for delivering all valid AMP documents." In other words, you are welcome to tie yourself to Google infrastructure, not merely to a proprietary software platform that you can at least use on your own (like Windows etc. in the Microsoft antitrust cases).
Capitalism is like a competition that when you win you don't ever get to play again.
Capitalism implies economic agents that follow fair rules. What this ruling shows is that EU haven't forgot what capitalism is all about.
And it's true - they are. By design.