

EU lawmakers urge regulators to break up Google - anigbrowl
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/27/eu-google-idUSL6N0TH2FS20141127

======
cromwellian
They could just double down on
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero)

What I find rather disturbing is that this isn't so much based on the idea of
increasing search competition, but apparently, is being pushed forward because
Axel-Springer and others want to charge people for linking and snippets. But
if Google had say, 50% marketshare in the EU shared with a competitor, or even
a three-way split, it's unlikely to competition would convince anyone to do
something as web-breaking as to start paying people for the right to link.
Bing already has a sizable marketshare in the US, and yet, neither Google nor
Bing are paying the New York Times for search snippets or links.

These publishing orgs are having their business models killed by digital
media, you know, models like charging exorbitant pricing for scientific
journals behind paywalls, or for school textbooks, or having pricing power of
advertising markets, and want to abuse copyright to extract fees from deep
pockets. (I'm lumping in Axel-Springer with Springer-Verlag here)

Maybe there is a good argument to be made there should be competition in the
EU in search. But protectionism for publishers who want to abuse what has
always been assumed a fundamental web freedom, and fair use, I think is a
pretty poor reason. The fact that the backers of this motion are also working
for the publishers is a huge conflict of interest, and no doubt there's
probably intense backdoor lobbying by Microsoft.

~~~
eru
Google doesn't even care too much about fair use here: any newspaper that
doesn't want it's articles to appear in the search results can already take
them out.

------
sremani
"Facebook is eating into Google’s advertising revenue. Despite the success of
Android, Google’s mobile platform, the rise of smartphones may undermine
Google: users now spend more time on apps than on the web, and Google is
gradually losing control of Android as other firms build their own mobile
ecosystems on top of its open-source underpinnings. "

(from: the economist article -
[http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21635000-european-
move...](http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21635000-european-moves-
against-google-are-about-protecting-companies-not-consumers-should-digital))

I read Peter Theil's zero to one, I feel this article is trying to make an
effort to some how dress-up Google's search monopoly (just like the way in the
book Peter points out Monopolies want to hide by expanding their competition
space definition).

~~~
r109
Smart phones are becoming the ultimate demise of the internet. People want
instant gratification and don't do their research on what they read and
automatically assume the click bait they fell for to be true... Perhaps they
should introduce a PageRank system into their EdgeRank algo to keep the click
bait spammers at bay? Boom Google ded.

------
lcuff
I'm gonna say the article "Should Digital Monopolies be Broken Up", in the
Economist, is a much more informative article.

~~~
ComputerGuru
The link, to save anyone about 2 seconds on Google:
[http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21635000-european-
move...](http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21635000-european-moves-
against-google-are-about-protecting-companies-not-consumers-should-digital)

------
dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8666932](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8666932)

------
jqm
Reducing the effectiveness of search does almost nobody any good. If the
concern is so great, pool some resources and make an equivalent government
sponsored search engine. Which probably no one will use because as much as
they mistrust Google, they likely trust their government even less.

~~~
progress
What Google is doing so far is actually REDUCING the quality of the overall
search, by promoting their own services unfairly more than the competition.

So no, letting them into a monopoly position harms the society more.

~~~
jqm
So how exactly is Google able to be in position to engage in this unfair
promotion? Because they are.....?.

~~~
progress
...a monopoly.

~~~
jqm
I don't think so. But they do have a disproportionate market share. Why?

------
freshflowers
Can we keep the hysteria down a bit? The resolution doesn't even mention
Google. It merely suggests the European Commission looks into unbundling
search-engines for fairly obvious reasons. It's just a resolution from the
most toothless parliament on the planet, it has zero actual impact.

~~~
tonfa
Of course it doesn't mention google but it is pretty obvious google is
targeted given the current investigations by the commission.

