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What is the point of this vote ? the article says that the European Parliament has no authority to enforce such a break-up. Also Google is not a European company (wasn't it based in the US ?), so what's the point?
To copy from the previous discussion: I was blocked indefinitely from Adsense by Google's faulty algorithms (without explanation and with appeals rejected without explanation). I lost the revenue I'd earnt that month, and soon realised Google holds a monopoly in this space, and no one else offered a comparable service. I'm all for Google's stronghold to be broken. reply
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According to this post, they do. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8620539 It would be nice to have that in a disclaimer in the posts discussing Google or in the HN profile page though.
Sounds awesome. Let's do that for everyone. We can put my NSA affiliation in there too. In the history of this site nobody has ever made themselves look smarter or been more persuasive by accusing another HN commenter of being a shill.
A monopoly should be defined by barriers to entry, not just market share. There's nothing preventing other large companies from entering the search space, and in fact many of them have (yahoo, microsoft, etc). There are true monopolistic firms like Comcast or Time Warner, where there are serious logistic/economic barriers preventing other firms from entering the market. This doesn't seem like one of them to me.
A monopoly should be defined by barriers to entry, not just market share. There's nothing preventing other large companies from entering the search space, and in fact many of them have (yahoo, microsoft, etc). There are true monopolistic firms like Comcast or Time Warner, where there are serious logistic/economic barriers preventing other firms from entering the market. This doesn't seem like one of them to me.
Yahoo Search is actually powered by Bing since 2009 according to Wikipedia. Their own search engine was not competitive enough. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search
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The intention was never to break them up. MEPs calling for it is just to show the EU Commission that they have the political support to take the gloves off. If you actually want to know the justification for the EU doing this you should read this paper by Ben Edelman. http://www.benedelman.org/publications/google-tying-2014-10-... He's consulted for various Google competitors but he's also a professor at Harvard Busi…
If by "consulted", you mean that Ben has been paid to come up with papers exactly like this for various anti-google lobbies, many many times over the past 10 years, then yes, he has "consulted". Ben has literally no legal training in antitrust law that i'm aware of, so his opining on it is somewhat interesting. (I edited this comment because Ben does have a JD from Harvard law that I forgot about, so he does have leg…
A major omission when attacking someone's legal qualifications.
> When he's not writing antitrust papers, he's busy writing scare papers about click fraud, or online ad deals
Yes, and they're scary because they are true. The insidious thing about click fraud is that consumers are the mules who do the work but generally are only indirectly harmed. Advertisers and merchants really get screwed. Ben has been exposing those situations for a decade.
> You only have to look at his testimony list to see where his views lie, and have since 2006.
Actually I worked with him in 2005 and his views were consistent then as well. If he works on behalf of people who share his views, that's not a bad thing is it? It's fully disclosed, which is more than I can say for many of his attackers.
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Sounds awesome. Let's do that for everyone. We can put my NSA affiliation in there too. In the history of this site nobody has ever made themselves look smarter or been more persuasive by accusing another HN commenter of being a shill.
Conflict of interest is very real and full disclosure should be a norm in the community powered media with so much influence on tech industry.
Everyone on HN works for someone. I am not my company. Google has plenty of views i don't agree with, and I have plenty of views they don't agree with.
If you believe comments on HN (or almost anywhere else) should have conflict of interest disclosures, you may as well shut it all down.
Everything here is opinions of people, presented as opinions of people.
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Or people being locked out of their GMail account This is the problem, and customer service in Google barely solves anything.
Which customer service are you talking about?
A monopoly should be defined by barriers to entry, not just market share. There's nothing preventing other large companies from entering the search space, and in fact many of them have (yahoo, microsoft, etc). There are true monopolistic firms like Comcast or Time Warner, where there are serious logistic/economic barriers preventing other firms from entering the market. This doesn't seem like one of them to me.
There are serious logistic/economic barriers to enter the search space. Building a competitive search engine is very expensive. Ask the Bing people. Yahoo Search is actually powered by Bing since 2009 according to Wikipedia. Their own search engine was not competitive enough. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search
What would be worrisome is if they abuse their market position. Is there strong evidence they do this in search? It'd be more concerning if they did to promote their other products.
What is the point of this vote ? the article says that the European Parliament has no authority to enforce such a break-up. Also Google is not a European company (wasn't it based in the US ?), so what's the point?