Google fined in India for search bias • Hacker News Board

Re: Google fined in India for search bias

#21

Post by pcr0 » Fri, Feb 09, 2018, 5:02 PM UTC

ipsum2 wrote: post #7

It's very absurd that Google is being fined for what it puts on its own website. > The DG also recorded that Google was not required to pay any monetary consideration for its house ads which gave it an additional competitive edge. Yes, it doesn't make sense to give money to yourself. > Google shows two types of commercial units in India: shopping units which display ads for product offers of merchants; and flight uni…

>> Third, the search intermediation agreements prevented publishers from using search services of competing search engines.

> I have no idea what this means. Any ideas?

This refers to widgets on the search results page. E.g. when you search for flights, you'll see flight quotes right in the result page, with data that comes from travel companies. In this case, travel companies that partner with Google aren't allowed to sell their data for similar widgets in the results page of Google's competitors.

Re: Google fined in India for search bias

#22

Post by tyingq » Fri, Feb 09, 2018, 5:05 PM UTC

mcny wrote: post #14

gtirloni wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*> Yes, it doesn't make sense to give money to yourself. At Google's size, there are extra accounting processes that you should follow. You might be looking at Google like a single giant thing while in fact it's a complex arrangement of companies and departments underneath.

> At Google's size, there are extra accounting processes that you should follow. I've always assumed when I see an ad for Google Chrome in the sponsored section in Google web search that it is money coming out of Google Chrome's marketing budget. So, it should technically count as revenue for Google web search. Which is why I think corporate taxes on profit is silly. Taxes should be based on revenue, not on profit. T…

"Taxes should be based on revenue, not on profit"

Net margin varies wildly by industry. That would be hard to implement in a way that wasn't slanted to disproportionately reward high margin industry...further increasing their margins.

Re: Google fined in India for search bias

#23

Post by mcny » Sat, Feb 10, 2018, 12:26 AM UTC

mijamo wrote: post #19

IanCal wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Taxes should be based on revenue, not on profit. This means that every layer in a series of transactions to the customer would add costs. Great for the biggest companies who can do everything in house, terrible for smaller companies acting in a chain. A massive company who buys raw materials and produces everything in house and sells for £1000 would pay tax on revenue of £1000 per widget. A series of small companie…

Now I wonder if we could fix that by taxing only the difference. And we could call it Value Added Tax!

Hm... I am reading the replies and yet again I've grossly oversimplified the problem in my head :(