European Commission fines Google €2.42B for abusing dominance

I think the more "complex" the EU tries to make it in order to extract money from big corps the harder it can also be for smaller firms if those rules apply to those also.

"Market dominance is, as such, not illegal under EU antitrust rules. However, dominant companies have a special responsibility not to abuse their powerful market position by restricting competition, either in the market where they are dominant or in separate markets." (emphasis added)

I couldn't have said it better myself. That is how to do it.

> If they didn't benefit, if using those services were a net loss, then people wouldn't be using them.

1. They may benefit more from better services. 2. As far as I know Google operates a lot of services which are not profitable by themselfs.

> Also, I like to draw a line between monopolies imposed by force (eg taxi offering horrible services making competitors illegal through licensing) and those used by people voluntarily because they enjoy the services. Google is used voluntarily, because people enjoy it, like Microsoft during the 90's.

Today a lot of people don't know of anything else. The search might even be used voluntarily by many but it's a major information gateway because of its dominance (it's more or less infrastructure). If this is used to cross market other services and even to make competitors harder to find it's a form of mild force. It's a bit like when (in the old days) the major phone company is founding a taxi service and offers you a taxi before calls to competitors are routed through and placing their own service way more prominent inside the phone book.

> iOS and Siri already made Google Search much less relevant on mobile, I'm sure there will be more in the future.

Maybe inside the relatively small Apple world. The mass uses Android where Google makes sure its services stay at the top of everything by forcing all or nothing contracts onto manufactures. They managed to make sure nothing is not an option for most.

> As I read elsewhere, Microsoft lost relevance to tech because OSS took servers, web took applications and mobile took the client.

Microsoft was never that dominant in the server space, Linux and co. mostly replaced the commercial unix offerings. They tried to use their client dominance to push their server OS forward by making it hard for competitors to be compatible, did not work out entirely (and they also got fined by the EU for that later). Web had to be taken from them first, this worked mostly because they got far too lazy with IE (and later a bit of help from, again the EU).

> Antitrust didn't do much.

Antitrust could do more but it is often too slow for the fast world of IT and it is often too weak.

> Monopolies used voluntarily usually don't last long unless they keep innovating,

Microsoft was dominant on the client for over a decade and still is in a lot of areas. It took a long time and a shift to new device categories to partly break that monopoly. And finally what happened is only a shift to a new dominant player called Google.

> unless they keep innovating, but if they do keep innovating then forcing them to offer lower quality services seems really bad and it doesn't motivate other people to out-innovate them if the government will just help make Google worse, we all lose. Innovation should be bottom up, not top down.

They have to innovate a lot less overall. Sure if they do absolutely nothing somebody may beat them regardless but if they do only as much as necessary to keep the friction high enough even innovative competitors are out of luck. Only exceptionally big innovations which are so different to even overwhelm the monopolist have a chance.

Can you deign to explain why you think so, or is it so obvious that I should just be ashamed for not seeing it?