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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

#571

Post by ridewinter »

kuschku wrote: post #557
ridewinter wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if Spotify creates a music recognition feature that competes with Shazam, would they need to create an API that allows you to choose your music recognition service from within Spotify? This a very slippery slope!

If spotify is the only app used by 97% of all users, then yes. At that point, spotify also couldn’t refuse to list an interprets album.

Spotify is close to the 50 or 75% threshold. So would they also need to include Shazam's advertisements within their own app? Cause otherwise Shazam would still fail. I'm not understanding how this can work practically.

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

#572

Post by Karunamon »

trevos wrote: post #322

Google's dominance is so complete that for years even their top browser competitor, Firefox, came preset to use an omnibox with Google as the default search engine, meaning that everything one typed into the browser was sent to Google, even if not actually a Google search. This integration with Google is pervasive in Firefox; there are dozens of settings built into the browser that send information to various Google…

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Firefox doesn't have a proper omnibox. It has an explicitly split search and URL field.

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

#573

Post by jolic »

ridewinter wrote: post #536
kuschku wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's another case that's being worked on. The preferred solution of the EU would be that there would be a standardized API between search engines and map providers, shopping providers, etc, and you could simply choose which map provider you'd want, and that'd be shown in every search engine. This is still being discussed, of course, as no solution has been found yet, but in general the idea is based on Android's In…

So if Spotify creates a music recognition feature that competes with Shazam, would they need to create an API that allows you to choose your music recognition service from within Spotify? This a very slippery slope!

Probably not. Someone using Spotify and their hypothetical music recognition service is more like someone using Google Search and Gmail which isn't a problem. This is more like is someone would search Spotify and artists from their own record label (or promotion company) were at the top of the search results.

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

#574

Post by cm2187 »

patrickaljord wrote: post #103

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".

VW and european banks.

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

#575

Post by virtuabhi »

makomk wrote: post #312
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…

It should scare you. The EU just used their regulatory power to force the world's biggest search engine to make their user experience worse in order to benefit other companies. Before Google penalized all the vertical search sites, doing a Google search for certain kinds of products was a terrible experience; page after page of crappy information-free autogenerated sites hoping to make $$$ from ads and referral fees…

I think that it is a form of protectionism by the EU. The EU does not want American companies to have monopoly in Europe. At one point, EU was giving grants to anyone who can build a competitor to Google. With this and similar rulings, EU is twisting the arms of American companies and making it harder to do business in Europe. This strategy is straight out of the playbook of China.

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

#576

Post by [deleted] »

ahallock wrote: post #553
sbov wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if Google did this, and got past the shareholder lawsuits, what would happen? Nothing much. Someone else would step in. Greed and free markets makes the "Atlas Shrugged" scenario nonsense. I'm sure there are millions of smart people who would love it if all the other smart people stopped producing. All it means is more market share for them. I'm guessing you're posting this as someone who is fully sucked into th…

You named a few Google products to be contrarian and think that Google is far from indispensable? I'm calling bullshit because I'm willing to bet most of the non-Google products you use use Google somewhere in the chain.

[deleted]

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

#578

Post by luord »

As usual, an anti-trust regulation puts on display the shortcomings of both capitalism and socialism.

Stifling competition is bad, and it's bad that Google did it.

Trying to meddle in someone's private property and stifling innovation, like the EU just did, is also bad.

And ultimately some win (competitor companies) and some lose (the people who preferred the Google results, even if out of convenience).

I see it as a showcase of how we, and thus our economic models, are flawed and will always be.

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

#579

Post by emidln »

crdoconnor wrote: post #428
emidln wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

That's exactly what they're doing in Brooklyn: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/15/how-a-stre... That would scale just about as well as your crappy elastic search thing would.

I can demo an alternative to Google Search in a weekend. I can throw comparatively small amounts of money to improve it (e.g. add more sites) such that it is extremely useful to find sites that I designate to have crawled (and it's not difficult to crawl the top N sites). My algorithms will be worse, my crawler less efficient, I probably will ignore javascript, my database will be larger than it needs to be, but none of that matters to an end user who wants to type in some text and get a list of results. My product would be worse in every way something can be worse, yet still satisfy the needs for a sizeable majority of users. It can scale out in known ways (way more expensive than google does it, slower than google does it, etc) by largely paying salary and hosting costs.

I absolutely cannot decide I want to install some poles to run electricity through a town without permits, insurance, inspections, and a ton of capital. I can't decide I want to build my own power plant and sell energy to my new grid without jumping through a lot of hoops, some of those hoops only a mountain range of cash can solve (compared to the merely large pile you'd need to run a credible regional alternative to google search for some segment of the population).

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

#580

Post by [deleted] »

merpnderp wrote: post #546
aluhut wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. Really sad to read that here but: 1) They are a quasi monopoly. The word you use to describe searching on the internet is "googling". Most of the phones on this planet run on their OS. So please...don't fool yourself. 2) Who's creating those desires? You think that the desire for millions of useless shit products that drive the global market are created by some neccesity deeply in our DNA? Or maybe by your free…

You're talking about advertising pushing useless shit on people they wouldn't want? But they don't see the advertising until they've already searched for the item ! That's either some magical advertising that makes people search for things before they've seen it. Or you're wrong.

[deleted]
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