81–90 of 702 posts
Please enlighten me: What kind of monopoly would that be? Much as I detest an awful lot of Google, I have never once been - and know of noone else who has ever been - forced to use their search against my will. In fact, I get along fine without it, as well as without their analytics and their browser and their cloud stuff, excepting of course that I am often forced to correspond with gmail addresses.
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Actually, I'm not sure you get it. It's not about being big, it's about using a monopoly position in one field to gain entry to another. If you're big but not a monopolist, and you do the exact same thing, then way less of a problem. Hence Apple could bundle Safari with iOS but Microsoft couldn't bundle IE with Windows XP in the exact same way.
I avoided the word "monopoly" for a reason. The internet isn't a finite natural resource, Google doesn't own it, there are other players in the field, and nothing stops new players fron entering. You're also interpreting the word "big" perhaps too literally. In your example, Apple is not big in the sense I mean. Microsoft might be, but that doesn't mean I agree with the judgement against them. If people like your pro…
Which is why the fine is not for 95% of the market using the product, but for abusing that position to unfairly disadvantage competitors.
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Google holding a dominant position or a monopoly on search is not by itself illegal. However, using that position to gain entry in a different market (shopping, in this case) is considered anti-competitive and hence illegal.
No, I realise that. My question is how are they supposed to hold a monoply or dominance, when there is nothing but preference or lazyness stopping anyone from switching to a competing service?
Those two (but especially preference) are extremely strong motivators for humans to choose one product over the other.
But even if it wasn't, the law is there the protect the citizens and their livelihoods, not one company's supposed right to hold a monopoly.
The thing is, personally I prefer getting integrated results from Google's other search services when I do a Google search. I like getting Google Maps results when I search for a location, I like getting Google Flights results etc. When I do a Google search I am not just using it as a simple website search. I want it to use it to search the whole Google suite of services. If they are forced to stop doing this it will…
Not sure I get the logic here. Will they be fined next for showing the Google Maps embed (and street view) when you search for places nearby? What's the difference?
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…
How would Google differentiate between a search and an address without having the Maps product deeply integrated ? Sure they could identify the address and then render the map using say Apple Maps. But what if Apple Maps didn't understand the address or if their API implementation didn't match up.
Seems like it would very much hurt the overall experience.
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so EU can keep knocking on their door because google has no choice but to pay up?
Well, they could consider not engaging in uncompetitive practices. The thing is, if they want to do business in the EU they have to abide by the rules of the EU. It's not that complex!
It's not that complex!
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Absolutely. Next up, the Adsense and Android antitrust cases. How do I know? I googled it: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-google-antitrust-idUSKB...
At this point they are also apparently abusing their capcha. You use it from Firefox, solve like 3 different captcha, my most recent experience with Cloudflare. Use it from Chrome, instant check after failing a login. And it's from the same IP that has done it over and over again. If you were the least bit intelligent you would not do this... unless you were trying to make the user experience of other browsers worse…
That said, as far as I know (I'll keep an eye on it), I haven't always received an instant check in Chrome when dealing with a captcha.
I can see the same happening with many other products and companies and EU point of view here. I can also see Google's points for making a smoother user experience and getting more money by keeping the users longer in Google web stack. It's not a black and white issue at all, instead a balance must be achieved; USA is more pro-enterprise while EU is more pro-citizen/small company.
You might remember the first notorious case that happened: Internet Explorer. At the top of IE usage, EU started mandating Microsoft to give a choice for its users to use the browser that they prefer. This implied in practical terms that all new systems would ask the user on loading the computer the first time what browser they preferred, with the choices including Opera and Firefox.
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Unrestricted capitalism will just converge to one single corporation.
Somewhat related: I'm finding that the prevailing wisdom about conglomerates being a failed experiment is being put to the test and found wanting by Amazon, which has (over the course of the new century) transformed itself into an aggregate of concerns with no obvious interrelation.