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People aren't going to like this, but taking a page from Apple, Microsoft, Sony (iPhone, Xbox, Playstation), the solution to constant antitrust charges stemming from competitors on your platform....is to kick them off the platform. You can't be anti-competitive if you have no competitors.
Not that we've seen any effective enforcement against it...
So what is the resolution supposed to be? Randomize the results whenever a user searches for a vague product category that is also something that Google provides? The article is pretty light on detail about what "favoring their own service" actually meant. Just that it appeared above Klarna's when a user searched BNPL? It all seems vague and hard to cure. The algorithm is typically very good at surfacing the least sh…
Google runs the dominant search engine, which they control the rankings of and sells ads on, while also competing against companies that buy ads from them and fight to maintain a spot on the index is almost immediately suspicious. The potential for abuse is incredibly high, and at one point would probably have been concerning enough to invoke regulators without even acting on the potential for misconduct.
It’s like taking the babysitter out to a fancy dinner alone. It could be something totally normal, but it looks bad enough that you probably wouldn’t do it.
The real answer is that Google would probably need to sell off that arm. There is no configuration where Google retains the control or benefits of the Shopping product without being locked in conflicts of interest around the index. It’s always going to look like the way Standard Oil was setup, because it is set up the way Standard Oil was. They own infrastructure, and they compete upstream against other companies forced to use that infrastructure. There’s no way to resolve that conflict of interest.
This comes years after this fine was upheld about Google shopping in an EU court. I guess prisjakt (another Swedish website that works just like pricerunner) could do the same now. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jun/27/google-brac... Klarna bought pricerunner for just under a billion 5 years ago, pretty good deal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vouched, I feel similarly. (I can’t possibly understand this being downvoted. The downvote button isn’t an “I disagree” button.)
From HN guidelines: > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. and yes, downvoting is a perfectly fine disagree button, what else do you think it is
Anyway, downvote = “This doesn’t belong here.” or “This doesn’t attempt to contribute to the discussion.”
If everyone here downvoted each time they disagreed, there would be few comments alive…and little discussion.
The reply button is the disagree button.
Otherwise, for comments of any length, it isn’t even clear what’s being disagreed with!
Google gave its own price comparison service favorable treatment in search results, thereby abusing their dominance in the search market:
"Google has systematically given prominent placement to its own comparison shopping service: when a consumer enters a query into the Google search engine in relation to which Google's comparison shopping service wants to show results, these are displayed at or near the top of the search results.
Google has demoted rival comparison shopping services in its search results: rival comparison shopping services appear in Google's search results on the basis of Google's generic search algorithms. Google has included a number of criteria in these algorithms, as a result of which rival comparison shopping services are demoted. Evidence shows that even the most highly ranked rival service appears on average only on page four of Google's search results, and others appear even further down. Google's own comparison shopping service is not subject to Google's generic search algorithms, including such demotions.
As a result, Google's comparison shopping service is much more visible to consumers in Google's search results, whilst rival comparison shopping services are much less visible."
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_17_...
It is similar to Microsoft's anti-competitive business practices of the 1990's. There is no legal uncertainty at all -- Google must have know that its conduct was illegal and deserve to pay hundreds of billions in punitive damages.
$1.5B is significant, but the bigger question is whether this actually changes how dominant platforms rank their own services. Is this real accountability for anti-competitive behaviour, or just another cost of doing business for Big Tech? My cynicism is tell me that unfortunately it is the latter.
So what is the resolution supposed to be? Randomize the results whenever a user searches for a vague product category that is also something that Google provides? The article is pretty light on detail about what "favoring their own service" actually meant. Just that it appeared above Klarna's when a user searched BNPL? It all seems vague and hard to cure. The algorithm is typically very good at surfacing the least sh…
And google shouldn't give any special treatment to their own products when ranking search results.
That said, a price comparison tool is essentially a specialized search engine, and it makes a lot of sense to gather price comparison information while indexing for search, and I don't think having price comparison built in to a search engine is necessarily a bad thing. Although, I'm a little distrustful of google shopping results.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vouched, I feel similarly. (I can’t possibly understand this being downvoted. The downvote button isn’t an “I disagree” button.)
Perhaps because the comment didn't add to the discussion? like all those +1 comments in GitHub issues.
So what is the resolution supposed to be? Randomize the results whenever a user searches for a vague product category that is also something that Google provides? The article is pretty light on detail about what "favoring their own service" actually meant. Just that it appeared above Klarna's when a user searched BNPL? It all seems vague and hard to cure. The algorithm is typically very good at surfacing the least sh…
There is nothing that says that Google must exist in every vertical. It would be completely fine if they shirt these things down.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The consumer, who have never paid google a cent despite using their services daily for the last 20 years, likley spending a solid portion of their waking life on one of google's platforms, has never benefited? And you think local players are going to look at users with this comically detached worldview and be like "Yeah, we want to build services for that group of people to use"?
Has the cattle benefitted from the free food the rancher gave it? I suppose it's a question of perspective. And yes, there's local players building that are targeting precisely those users. No data harvesting is a major selling point of many European startups. Think of Proton, Mullvad, Nextcloud as a few examples.
It's also great that European startups have privacy services, I pay for proton myself, but none of these guys make any money compared to the ad model giants.
The cattle are free to leave the farm and pay full price for their feed elsewhere and get guarantees. But again, so far virtually zero cattle have been slaughtered at the "free" farm in the last two decades, and the pay-for-feed farms are comparatively vacant.