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European Commission fines Google €2.42B for abusing dominance

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Re: European Commission fines Google €2.42B for abusing dominance

#381

Post by frgtpsswrdlame »

lkbm wrote: post #357
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps obvious was not a good choice. Anyways: I would say Google is as close to a natural monopoly as the Bell System was in 1956. If you came to me and said “Hey, I want to start a company to compete with Google in search,” I would say you’re out of your mind and don’t waste your energy or your time or your money, there’s just no way. Classic economics would say that if there’s a business in which there are 35 per…

Crawling the web is easy now. Your point makes sense if the behavioral data they acquire from users makes a huge difference. Maybe it does, but I feel like someone can build a better mousetrap and be better than Google, even without behavioral data. Google, right now, is thought to have the best mousetrap, not simply one well-tuned to a large mouse behavior dataset. Maybe I'm wrong about that--I'm sure ML has become…

> I feel like someone can build a better mousetrap and be better than Google

Where are the someones then? Look through Show HN and you'll see all sorts of cool projects and upstart companies. How many of them are search? We've got a huge flood of companies trying to take down the taxi industry, where's the flood to take out Google? It doesn't exist because everyone knows they can't win.

Here's the Show HN for search: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=show%20search&sort=byPopularit...

Do you see any of these dethroning google? Almost none even bother to compete in general search, just in small specific areas.

Re: European Commission fines Google €2.42B for abusing dominance

#382

Post by baq »

lkbm wrote: post #357
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps obvious was not a good choice. Anyways: I would say Google is as close to a natural monopoly as the Bell System was in 1956. If you came to me and said “Hey, I want to start a company to compete with Google in search,” I would say you’re out of your mind and don’t waste your energy or your time or your money, there’s just no way. Classic economics would say that if there’s a business in which there are 35 per…

Crawling the web is easy now. Your point makes sense if the behavioral data they acquire from users makes a huge difference. Maybe it does, but I feel like someone can build a better mousetrap and be better than Google, even without behavioral data. Google, right now, is thought to have the best mousetrap, not simply one well-tuned to a large mouse behavior dataset. Maybe I'm wrong about that--I'm sure ML has become…

crawling the web is only easy if all you ever do is following hrefs... we're in the world of single-page turing-complete web apps and you're underestimating the amount of pure compute, ingress and egress bandwidth necessary to keep the index up to date. there's a reason google has designed and built their data centers, their server chassis and even power supply.

Re: European Commission fines Google €2.42B for abusing dominance

#383

Post by emidln »

crdoconnor wrote: post #371
throwaway2016a wrote: post #275

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…

>They are not a utility. It actually seems to match the definition of public utility perfectly. The infrastructural cost of building another Google is incredibly high and people rely heavily upon it. You can "just build another google" the same way you can "just build an electricity network" for a large town.

You can build another shitty clone to Google search cheaply. Elasticsearch plus some bots crawling fed off a queue can give you an approximation of Google that is useful to a lot of people (albeit not cheap to keep running). I cannot build even a shitty fascimile of an electrical grid cheaply because I need permits for digging, to deal with existing infrastructure, and I need serious capital (an order of magnitude more, at least) to build and maintain some sort of generation capability.

Re: European Commission fines Google €2.42B for abusing dominance

#384

Post by matthewmacleod »

jlebrech wrote: post #291
matthewmacleod wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a glib answer. Google is free to continue doing business in the EU and is does not 'have no choice but to pay up'. That's simple.

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.

I see no evidence that the EU is legislating in order to extract money from corporations, so the very basis of your idea is flawed.

Re: European Commission fines Google €2.42B for abusing dominance

#385

Post by forgottenpass »

piva00 wrote: post #220
devoply wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay say that this is true, then if you want any sort of decent user experience you MUST let Google track you and analyze your behavior. So many ways for Google to win. So many ways for the user to lose. I do run a bunch of stuff on my Firefox to prevent that, perhaps that's a reasonable explanation as to why. Google owns the server, Google owns the client, Google owns DNS, Google owns domains, Google even owns > 50%…

Yes, you must. Or you will encounter the normal annoying captcha like I do and I don't complain because it's my own decision to not be tracked and I know there are consequences for profiling and live with it. You can't have your cake and eat it too, either you are for privacy and should expect the hassles this create or you want the convenience and have to pay with your privacy for it. I don't really understand why a…

I don't really understand why are you pressing so much on this issue

You're acting like these are immutable laws of the universe rather than properties of google's design decisions.

I think your point wouldn't encounter as much resistance (or at least different resistance) if you just said something to the effect of "devoply, you're in the X% of users that google tolerates providing a sub-standard experience to, and I don't give a fuck either."

Re: European Commission fines Google €2.42B for abusing dominance

#387

Post by Mahn »

zdkl wrote: post #367
Ajedi32 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

As a consumer, I have (much) more trust that my interests are advanced by the EU than google. 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?

Personally, as an EU citizen, I don't believe that Google is advancing my interests and rights, but I also don't believe that the EU commission dictating what Google can or cannot do based on who is lobbying and how much money is at stake has the consumer's best interests in mind. To me these fines seem motivated by money, not consumer rights.

Re: European Commission fines Google €2.42B for abusing dominance

#388

Post by denis1 »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #380
denis1 wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. But that is not what google does. I just did a search for "samsung galaxy s8". Instead of the first result being a link to a Samsung page I got 3 results that where ads (one of them being for the new oneplus).…

That's not what I get at all: https://i.imgur.com/nKpAYKX.png Regardless of what you're seeing though, ads are a necessary part of Google Search; it's how they make their money. IMO it's a little strange to be complaining that Google is showing you ads in your search results.

I mean, I don't expect Google to show the same results to everyone (this is what I get: http://imgur.com/a/go3pU ). Funny thing is that the results changed between my first and second query (there was another unrelated result before the first link to Samsung).

I'm not complaining about ads and this fine is not about ads. It is about Google favoring Google Shopping links instead of competitors even though Google Shopping was inferior when it started. Google basically pushed their product no matter how shitty it was.

If it were not for Google being a near monopoly in search this would not be a problem, but Google is a monopoly, so special rules apply to them.

Re: European Commission fines Google €2.42B for abusing dominance

#389

Post by oskbor »

ko27 wrote: post #298
throwaway2016a wrote: post #275

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…

> I'll probably get down voted Damn, I hate this trend of making you comments appear more controversial. > What's next? You really should not argue this point. We need to stop "big" companies doing "anti-consumer" practices. The reason why those terms are in quotation marks is because when you are discussing antitrust and monopoly laws those terms are not well defined. You should only look at these rulings per-case b…

Don't pretend to speak for "EU citizens". What have we got to do with Brussels and Microsoft stealing money from Google? Google is not a utility, it is a product company and you are free to use other companies products

Re: European Commission fines Google €2.42B for abusing dominance

#390

Post by yellow_postit »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #146
Radle wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure, but the question is, where the line will be drawn. 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 a…

The line was drawn at search results from the article. I get the slippery slope argument buy don't think it's pertinent here.
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