
Google finally responds to Europe's antitrust charges - known
http://www.economist.com/node/21662618/
======
avmich
"Google argues that the commission's proposed remedies, which include obliging
its website to display ads "sourced and ranked" by rival companies, would only
have a legal basis if it were a monopoly provider of essential supplies such
as gas or electricity."

Interesting. So, Google isn't a monopoly or web search that it provides isn't
essential supply. That means, as I understand, there are plenty of comparable
rivals in the search area - or the search itself isn't particularly important
today.

Is it so? Haven't heard about Europe-based - or anything-based search engines,
which were as successful as Google, or even by half as successful. Similarly,
I don't know many working people who don't search on the Internet daily. May
be they can avoid doing that, but they probably don't want to.

Sounds strange.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
Google is like a convenient highway that everyone takes to work: just because
there are other routes (DuckDuckGo) it doesn't mean people will take them, and
regulatory framework has to, in absence of a legitimate competitor (Japan
prefers Yahoo! for some reason), treat Google as a functional monopoly.

Standard Oil held down prices which was good in theory for customers, but it
was devastating for competitors and their employees, who spent like any other
consumer. Europe's attitude towards Google isn't very free-market minded, but
they are asking what kind of society they want, rather than having the economy
as the be all and end all of their values.

EDIT: If you're going to downvote without explaining why, then you haven't
really helped the conversation, you just made yourself feel less insecure
about your own opinion.

~~~
jbuzbee
>Standard Oil held down prices which was good in theory for customers, but it
was devastating for competitors and their employees

Uh, are you saying that Standard Oil should have made business decisions based
on what was good for their competitors? This starts to get into collusion.

And I understand that the theory was that Standard Oil would hold prices down,
running at a loss in order to kill off all competition, then raise prices as
high as it wanted in a non-competitive market. But this doesn't seem to apply
to Google's situation as customers can easily move to searching Amazon, eBay,
etc. when shopping.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
The problem wasn't just Standard Oil, it was the society around it. A purely
free market society would see what the company was doing and close the books
at that, but the government has a broader base of concerns. Namely,
constituents of oil-producing regions who elected representatives to protect
them.

Think of it like Wal-Mart: it may provide jobs and cheaper goods to a
community, but the wealth is a net outflow towards the Walton family. Local
businesses tend to recirculate their profits within the community through
investment and higher spending, resulting in a broader standard of life
increase.

Europe as a whole is much more concerned with quality of life than America, so
it makes sense to see why they would view Google's homogenization of habit as
a potential threat.

I think it's worth considering other societies' values when debating their
laws compared to your own. There's a lot that America does right that
Europeans want no part of, and vice versa. It really depends on who you are as
a person.

~~~
jbuzbee
> Think of it like Wal-Mart: it may provide jobs and cheaper goods to a
> community, but the wealth is a net outflow towards the Walton family

Providing jobs and cheaper goods to the community sounds like it's putting
wealth into the pockets of the community to me. If you can buy a gallon of
milk for the kids cheaper at Walmart then you can at the corner store, you
have extra money for school supplies, medicine, etc.

>Europe as a whole is much more concerned with quality of life than America

Sorry, I have to roll my eyes at that comment and move on...

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
1: Unless Wal-Mart sells literally everything (health insurance, higher
education, etc), then proprietors of other kinds of businesses will be hurt
because average incomes have gone down. Milk may be cheaper but getting a
contractor to tile my roof isn't.

2: Go to, say, Ravenna, Italy, and try to get a drink after midnight and on a
weekday. You can't. The people there would rather all be on the same schedule
(espresso for breakfast, big lunch with the family, work till evening, late
dinner, then a stroll around town) instead of having their friendships and
families be separated by the graveyard shift. As a hungry American at 2AM it
was an inconvenience, but overall it works and people are happy.

If you're still unconvinced, ask a European what they think of paid parental
leave, month-long vacations (inb4 productivity argument, Germany offers much
longer vacations than America and has higher productivity per worker),
national single-payer health care...I could go on. If Americans really,
_really_ cared about these things, we would have them by now.

~~~
jbuzbee
> 2: Go to, say, Ravenna, Italy

Not to pick on Italy, but:

[http://ycharts.com/indicators/italy_youth_unemployment_rate_...](http://ycharts.com/indicators/italy_youth_unemployment_rate_lfs)

So I wouldn't exactly want to model my economy on Italy.

>If you're still unconvinced, ask a European...

I've spent a lot of time in Europe and had long discussions in the pubs. Great
times, nice folks, and I look forward to visiting again. but I still prefer
the US.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
You're still missing the point.

My family in Gaeta knows the economy has been rough for a while, and yet their
(and Italy's) strong social ties have kept society together in ways GDP and
unemployment figures can't measure.

Contrast with China, where growth is less than double digits and everybody's
losing their mind. GDP doesn't explain why someone on the street dying from a
car crash can be ignored by hundreds of people who walk by because they don't
want to get involved in something that isn't their problem (punitive laws that
potentially transfer liabilities to involved bystanders don't help).

Society is more than economy. People often choose benefits to their society
that tax economic growth, like preventing acid rain. If something seems
irrevocably inconsistent about someone's decision, then I question the extent
to which you choose to think from their perspective.

------
crazy1van
The wheels of the legal system turn so much slower than the fierce competition
and relentless change of technology markets. By the time this is resolved in
the courts, Google probably won't even be dominant in search / ads anymore --
just like Microsoft lost its stranglehold on the browser market before the
antitrust case was resolved.

~~~
toyg
You have your dates wrong. The US antitrust case was settled in 2001. Back
then, there still was no real competitor to IE: Netscape had disbanded and
Mozilla was still releasing only the full suite. Webkit did not exist (its
predecessor KHTML was kinda crappy) and Chrome wouldn't be released before
2008. There is a line of thinking that says MS stopped working on the browser
not just because they had killed Netscape, but because the antitrust case
turned that market into a minefield. In any case, they had a full decade of
dominance post-antitrust.

In any case, the whole process took about 3 years. Quite a lot in technology
terms, but not really that long. 3 years from now, I don't see Google going
anywhere nor any competitor taking over -- technology in search hasn't changed
much in the last 5 years, if anybody could take a real shot at unseating
google they would have done it by now.

------
lilbarbarian
It should be clear to anyone paying attention that Google is using their
dominance in search to support their businesses at the expense of their
competitors.

Just do a search for "Chicago Hotel" on a desktop browser. Unless you have a
gargantuan screen, you will not see a single organic result. You will be given
a list of paid ads, and then links to Google's local results. Clicking one of
those local results will take you to another screen where you will see more
paid ads, a Google Map, and a few seemingly organic results. But if you click
on one of these "organic" results, Google then shows you a page where you can
book a hotel room - and pay Google a fee for that.

~~~
thomasahle
I tried it: [http://i.imgur.com/a45wZdf.png](http://i.imgur.com/a45wZdf.png)

And while the top 'results' were not 'organic', they were not ads either. They
were simply the top rated hotels on google maps near Chicago.

When I clicked on 'More hotel', I was taken to google maps, which showed me
top rated hotels as well as ads for hotels.

In terms of giving me the most relevant results, I think this is pretty close.

~~~
Spivak
You have an ad blocker.

This is what the actual results are on a 1080p screen.

[http://i.imgur.com/5Te0gmG.png](http://i.imgur.com/5Te0gmG.png)

~~~
aruggirello
Isn't it funny Google even states "About 650.000.000 results" in that page!?

