361–370 of 702 posts
Google giving an advantage to its shopping service is peanuts. The way Chrome was promoted (not only through search, but other Google services as well) is the real abuse.
If that's the case then they way Microsoft promoted IE before Chrome was the work of Satan himself.
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The specifics are unimportant. What matters is that Google was using its dominance in one market to gain an advantage in a different market. That has been illegal for a long time.
In the US too. The US just oddly decides not to enforce it, then the EU gets shit on for being anti-American when they correctly enforce things that are illegal in both the EU and US.
They enforced it for Microsoft in 2001. Since then tech behemoth political donations have shot up.
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When has this ever happened to a website before?
To my knowledge it hasn't. But that's irrelevant.
What other websites need to be wary of the same ruling and at what point do they need to focus their efforts on giving their competitors virtual real-estate on their website at the expense of growing their company?
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Once you gain a certain amount of market share you no longer have the right to engage in certain kinds of anti-competitive actions. There's nothing extreme about that; the laws have been in place for over a century.
I see your point and actually agree to an extent. But controlling what goes on on the company's own website doesn't sit well to me. Take this example: Walmart has a hair salon in many of their stores. Walmart's primary business model is not hair but product sales. But obviously Walmart wants you to get their hair cut at their salon. This is similar to the government stepping in and saying that the store must allow ot…
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It's still a means to an end. You don't pay with your data, you "pay" by interacting with ads. Consider that Google actually became super profitable well before all the detailed tracking started. You grossly underestimate the synergy of "people searching for products" and "displaying ads". Everything else is an optimization. You're describing Facebook... which is no where near as profitable as Google, in spite of muc…
You are wrong that by stating that if we don't click on ads or use adblockers we are costing money to Google. Even if you don't use the ads or if simply ignore them, you still represent a group of interests that can be used to feed and train the machine. Google learns through the searches you make and through the videos you watch and your behaviour will be used to improve the accuracy of ads shown to other people. Th…
I don't think it's a stretch to assert that users that engage with and click on ads are much more valuable to Google than users that don't.
Whether the users that do neither contribute positively or negatively to the bottom line is an interesting question. I suspect they're a net negative, but obviously you disagree.
Google themselves probably know the answer, but I doubt they're telling...
Aside: a supporting data-point for my gut feeling here is that AdSense has always contributed much, much less to Google's revenue than AdWords does. The difference between the two gives a clear indication of how capturing user intent (searching for products) completely dominates how valuable (=effective) the ads are, and is much more important than all the other tracking combined. Google could probably turn off all the tracking and still make tons of money. Some numbers are here: http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/020515/busine...
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> If Google was merely a Yellow Pages style service as it was previously then I'd be more sympathetic to the idea of distorted rankings favouring Google services but that's becoming less and less the typical user experience. Well, I'm primarily agains the idea of giving a single, non democratically controlled non-international entity, so much power. To the point where I don't care if Google is forced to stop innovati…
Do you think an organization like EU can effectively fine or regulate their way to a more uniform market though? Google could partner with other companies to do integration in their search engine for those smart results but then they'd just be giving another company an unfair advantage. I don't see how you could stop this without crippling the type of answers Google provides. Besides maybe offering open tools they co…
The fine is focused on Google Shopping. I'd say the biggest competitors are Amazon and eBay.
While I'm unsure if the EU can effectively do something about Google as a search engine monopoly, I'm pretty sure Google can be beaten in the e-commerce sector.
Step by step, down the giants. Claiming the resolution of the matter in a single step is unrealistic.
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Or you should be happy, that the EU actually uses their regulatory power to benefit the consumer no matter how big the company they're going against is.
Does it benefit the consumer though? I fail to see how showing links to search results pages from other companies in response to a product query is better for consumers than just showing them a listing of the products they actually searched for. [Google's response][1] to this ruling suggests they have data which confirms this: > While some comparison shopping sites naturally want Google to show them more prominently,…
This is an opinion which I don't feel the need to convert anyone to but I really don't understand the opposite view. Can someone explain why they believe google and other "emerging" power centers saveguard their interests better than the EU?
I might be in a minority here and I'll probably get down voted but this result scares me... and I used to be CTO one of those competing price comparison sites that show up lower in the results so if anyone should agree it should be me. While it made me angry when Google put their results above ours, I never questioned that they had a right to do that. It is their website. They are not a utility. At what point does a…
What would Google have to do to ignore this fine? If they cut any physical presence in the EU, would the EC have any way to enforce this fine? Put another way, if the EU tried to take money from some random e.g. American or Japanese company without a physical presence in the EU, what channels could the EU use to twist their arm across national boundaries? Somewhat related, there could be good money in providing an ex…
Google could remove any presence they had in the EU, at huge expense (closing Google Dublin, abandoning all EU revenue); but that would also remove their ability to use Ireland and the Netherlands as tax havens. They'd have to submit to the US tax system instead.
> abandoning all EU revenue
How ? A corp does not have to exist in EU to recieve payments from EU.
> They'd have to submit to the US tax system instead.
For such tax structring to work, Google just need one non-US IP holding jurisdiction.
So they can cut off physical/legal tie from EU, and they should.
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. :(
> The EU hasn't contributed ANYTHING to the internet Of top of my head: 1. WWW was created in CERN, which is funded mostly by EU countries [1] 2. Linux which accounts for more than 2/3 of web servers was created in Sweden. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN#Member_states_and_budget