
French Senate Backs Bid To Force Google To Disclose Search Algorithm Workings - krisgenre
http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/17/french-senate-backs-bid-to-force-google-to-disclose-search-algorithm-workings/#.dpycrz:HNHc
======
bane
This seems stupid to most sane people, but there's a kind of logic behind it.

1) This is clearly bullshit designed to distract from more pressing issues
that the French government can't solve or is unwilling to solve.

2) France's notorious protectionism, while immensely irritating to outsiders,
does a reasonable job at preserving French language and culture, and creating
a local vacuum for French native solutions. Trade and culture protectionism
has a long-history of working quite well in many countries seeking to create
national identity and industry when used correctly.

These two riffs will continue to get played, with #2 reinforcing #1 while
necessary, to try and encourage native French solutions. France is under
tremendous economic and cultural pressure from better performing regional
partners like Germany and the U.K., and globally by the U.S., China and Japan
(pick whichever you think is better performing in terms of economics and
cultural expansion).

It kind of sucks, but it's also why, when you go to France, and even Paris,
you know you're in Paris and not yet another cosmopolitan mega-city. It's also
part of the reason why French culture and ideas continue to be interesting and
exportable.

Much of this of course is France's continued decline as a global power.
London, New York and Paris used to be a given global triumvirate. And Paris's
membership in the top-3 isn't a given any more. It's now in a mix of second-
tier alpha cities with Tokyo, Beijing and Dubai.

Outsiders look at this and say "of course Paris is in decline, this kind of
behavior is why". Tighter global integration and more openness seems to be the
way to the top and maintaining it. But for French leadership, losing cultural
identity is not worth it. What if the world thought La Défense = Paris and the
rest of the city was just some curious suburb? Is this [1] something that
anybody cares about?

1 -
[http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2014/067/b/7/skyline_la_de...](http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2014/067/b/7/skyline_la_defense_02_by_eolneth-d79d8ck.jpg)

~~~
realusername
As a french guy living currently in London, I clearly agree. I hope Paris
never becomes a second London. If you live there you will understand why.
London just lost almost all it's culture in just a few years, the London you
see in movies is long gone. Just the red bricks and a few cultural things from
the past are remaining but all the rest is gone. There is hard consequences to
accept to become a truly global city, it's clearly not only positive
consequences for the city.

For Google, it's quite complicated. The problem is that Google is representing
more than 90% of all the requests in France (the usage is also the same for
most of european countries anyway). So we can technically say that Google is
in a monopoly position for search. The problem is that it's hurting local
startups and businesses there. The solution would be to break Google into
smaller parts (it's what you do normaly when a monopoly is hurting the free
market) but since that's impossible due to the fact that Google is an American
company, the government is taking some measures to limit Google's influence.
This is one of the measures, the second one which is currently being voted
would be to force Google to display competitors on the home page (a bit like
Microsoft's ballot screen). I guess that given the current context, they have
no other option.

~~~
azinman2
Except here's the thing -- it's not a natural monopoly. There aren't physical
wires with no alternative like Ma Bell. There aren't things that google is
doing that prevents other search engines from coming into existence -- they
can't prevent new web crawls. Even Firefox now uses yahoo by default, and the
open crawler data even gives anyone a head start on crawling the web!

Competition, if it were much better, could easily take away search market
share. Having better localized results for France could be one of those ways.
People aren't using google because they have no other choice, it's because
google is genuinely doing a better job. That's not a reason to break up a
company.

~~~
rihegher
In France most of google users does not even know there is an alternative to
Google, most of people I met in France that are not under 30 or working in a
web related area just does not get it clear what is the difference between a
web browser and Google. They launch it, write what they are looking for in the
address bar and they just get a google search result which they think is a
feature from their browser to enter the web. IMHO that's why there were only
30 congressmen from the existing 577 that came to vote for the last law
regarding internet trafic monitoring
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9386820](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9386820)

~~~
azinman2
But this isn't because google is using their existing size in a way to punish
other people and crowd them out...

The only way that Google could be monopolizing search results were to be if
they told companies to put bing/yahoo/etc in their robots.txt and only let
Google crawl them or google will drop them. That would be an anti-competitive
monopolist practice abusing their size and power. They're not doing this.

When you're talking about LAW, and using law to force competition, it
shouldn't be because people don't know the difference between a web browser
and google. Educating consumers on how to use your product is something google
spent a lot of time doing in the beginning when they weren't the default.
That's up to you having such a good product that people type in the name of
your service into google to get to it assuming google is already their default
engine.

~~~
rihegher
The way I explain how google got a de facto monopoly on search in France (and
in Europe) is a combination of : -being a good product with no real good
competitor for european languages (except for russian where Yandex exists)
-set as the default search engine for mozilla, opera and then chrome from the
start. Bing is the default one on IE but bing just came along in 2009. Before
that I'm not even sure what was the default search engine in europe for IE.
Things have changed in the last years but most people configuration once set
won't change even if google is not the default search engine for firefox
anymore.

I was actually not speaking about using law to force competition but just
saying that the general web literacy in France and probably in most of europe
is so low that every law that deals with internet does not get any traction
with congressmen and in the media because most people doesn't understand an
inch of what is as stake therefore they do not care.

~~~
magicalist
> _Bing is the default one on IE but bing just came along in 2009. Before that
> I 'm not even sure what was the default search engine in europe for IE_

MSN Search -> Live Search -> Bing

> _Things have changed in the last years but most people configuration once
> set won 't change even if google is not the default search engine for
> firefox anymore_

If you never changed your default search provider in Firefox it was switched
for you after the Yahoo deal.

------
thx1139
FRENCH SENATOR (via translator): "Mr. Page, on page 1123 of Exhibit D we see
that a signal component called NewInvSqPR is retrieved from a service of
similar name. However, cross-referencing with Exhibit P, we see on page 8987
what appears to be a description of this service. This description leads with
the text 'DEPRECATED DO NOT USE TO BE REPLACED BY Q2 2010'. Can you account
for the current status of this service, and the provenance of any data it
relies upon?

Furthermore, after the NewInvSqPR is retrieved, if that indeed ever does take
place, the resulting data is placed into a field in a ranking output message,
but it is unclear from where that field is read. On page 6766 of Exhibit E,
the field appears to be cleared, but the surrounding functionality looks like
it is disabled by a flag. Can you explain to this chamber the meaning of this
information, specifically with regards to ranking of Google properties
relative to competing vertical search websites?"

LARRY PAGE: "..."

------
paul
They have no concept of how complex ranking is. There are millions of factors
being fed into massive machine learning systems that try to predict which
results users want (which is different from which they are most likely to
click). It's like asking to see the algorithm for a cat.

They should go back to working on their own "Google killer" search engine :)
[http://www.infoworld.com/article/2672709/operating-
systems/e...](http://www.infoworld.com/article/2672709/operating-
systems/europe-s--google-killer--goes-into-hiding.html)

~~~
paulsutter
It's convenient to think our work is so sophisticated, and that lawmakers are
simpletons. But that's a naive view.

They want the algorithm disclosed as a legal matter to determine whether
competitors are disadvantaged. Which probably means they are more interested
in email than source code. There exist hyperintelligent lawyers. Yes, smart
enough to understand search. A law firm like Keker and Van Nest [1] could go
in there and answer the question. France could be willing to spend a billion
to find out, and that's more than they need.

Legislation of technology is frightening to any technologist. But it's much
more dangerous if we dismiss the process as ridiculous and refuse to recognize
any underlying concerns. Because then technologists won't have any say in the
outcome.

[1] [http://www.kvn.com/](http://www.kvn.com/)

EDIT: Paul you're such a prominent guy, I don't mean to speak too strongly,
but people really listen to what you say. Entrepreneurs ought to know that
legal matters are not so easily dismissed. I do hope, generously speaking, the
startups are the ones that call KVN and not the legislators.

~~~
x0x0
Google has (very effectively) played the "oh noes, it's all machine learning"
card. But machine learning is nothing more than codified human judgement (yes,
I get that for example the conditional expectation minimizes the expected
squared error, but who picked the expected squared error to minimize?) The
point is, they wish the ranking algorithm to be seen as some divine choice and
hence not subject to criticism rather than a mathematical extension of human
choices.

So has google put a finger on the scale to rank google properties more highly?
Based on their behavior with the results page (vs yelp, for example), I would
be surprised if they do, but not very surprised.

Nonetheless, now that google search results are the internet for many people
-- and chrome's address bar is used to help blur that distinction -- it's fair
that people outside google, represented by governments, start having a say in
who shows up and where. That's what happens when you're a monopoly.

It is slightly ironic that bing is the best thing that's happened to google in
a decade. Where it not for Balmer deciding to play search engine, google would
be known to be a 95+% monopoly in the US as well. Bing allows them to pretend
they aren't (though on my blog, for example, 99.28% of ~7k search referral
visitors comes from google.)

~~~
cromwellian
The fallacy is, there's mostly likely no one single 'algorithm' anymore. There
are most likely hundreds, farmed out in a distributed manner, with the final
SERP page coming from merging many different rankings together.

~~~
x0x0
That doesn't matter. At the end of the day, for each query, there is produced
a single ranking.

Given access to the data, or more ideally the ability to rapidly batch query,
one could ask does being a google owned or rev-share site affect rankings? And
if so, up or down? These are the questions statistics is made to answer.

edit -- and it doesn't even necessarily need be hardwired. For example, google
could have more visibility into site interactions on google owned or tooled
(GA) sites, and that could tend to lead to lower serps. Ie just the presence
of certain features, only available to google when google owns or tools a
site, could tend to produce lower ratings _no matter what those features are_.
This is, I would argue, dirty pool for what is effectively a monopoly. And
statistics can answer these questions.

~~~
minot
Imagine if latency was one of the signals Google used to determine ranking.
Now imagine that Googlebot gets a ping of half for an application that uses
Google App Engine as opposed to someone who uses a raspberry pie at home.
Would you say that the makers and users of Raspberry pie now have grounds to
sue Google for ranking them lower?

~~~
x0x0
Because lots of the internet is being served off raspberry pis located in
peoples' living rooms? Don't be deliberately obtuse.

~~~
jfoster
Raspberry Pi was a poor example for him to use, but App Engine (or any Google
Cloud solution) was a good example. The Google-hosted sites (including the
properties Google owns & operates) will always seem to have lower latency to
Google versus everything from AWS down to a Raspberry Pi in a basement. Should
that be considered an unfair impartiality in Google's algorithm?

~~~
x0x0
Lower latency to google should have no bearing on serps.

Lower latency to the user should. If, ceteris paribus, google sites are lower
ranked then yes, that should be illegal. ie consider regression and compute
I[google] + site_speed; after controlling for site speed, being a google owned
property shouldn't matter. It's fine if google owned sites tend to be faster
and hence are more lowly ranked.

I specifically meant more along the lines of google can view your navigation
through GA tooled sites, and there is a wealth of information that can be
derived from that.

------
fullwedgewhale
I'm sorry, but the switch over cost to setting Bing as your home page instead
of Google, or using Firefox which defaults to Yahoo, just isn't that much.
It's one thing to have a lock on the desktop market where switching over your
desktop software (or 10,000 company desktops) is a significant cost.

For users with IE or Firefox they have specifically set the search engine to
Google. That means users are actively seeking out Google. Maybe require all
French citizens to switch search engines once a year? Make browser vendors
randomize the choice of search engine?

I would imagine that people would still use Google, regardless, even if links
to Bing, Duck Duck Go and Yahoo were on the page. I like Duck Duck Go, but
every once and awhile I go back to Google because they do a better job.

Things I'm more worried about than Google's search hegemony:

1) The fact that new computers may soon be unable to load unsigned kernels

2) You buy a device, like a console, it is illegal for you to root it.

3) Content is locked out region by region, and VPN users are considered
pirates.

4) Governments want to incorporate back doors to encryption - leaving all less
secure

~~~
sbarker
1) Microsoft mandates that PC vendors allow users to disable Secure Boot. In
the last rev it's up to the hardware manufacture. Do research before you buy.
2)root is not allowed to be illegal. 3)I've never had this issue but I don't
play by the rules. 4)This is two issues a)it will not be less secure it would
be the same as having a second key for your front door, or creating a second
private key. Just because you have two keys does not mean it's less secure the
proof is in the proof (it's math problem). b)government spying/big
brother/what have you... I don't know anyone who would like this.

~~~
roganartu
> it would be the same as having a second key

This is a bad analogy (unless you mean to say that this second key would be
identical for every door, in which case.. sort of).

A better analogy would be that everyone was forced to install a second entry
method to their house that only the government knew how to operate.

The inherent problem with this is that as soon as someone else figures out how
to operate it, everything with this entry method installed would be accessible
to them until it changes or is fixed.

------
Fando
If France doesn't want its citizens to use Google search, then be straight up
and admit that. Why are they playing games and penalizing Google? After all,
the people of France prefer it and indeed choose to use it.l, no doubt because
it's good at etsy it does. Why on earth would Google reveal its algorithm,
it's a vital competative advantage. And why is it illegal for search to be
biased. If it's bad then people won't use it. If France wants its citizens to
avoid Google, instead of crying about it, it ought to advertise a better
solution, or in the extreme case, pass a law barring people from using it. Not
all lawyers and politicians are bad, but a lot seem detached from reality and
cause serious problems as result of their ignorance.

~~~
learc83
>If it's bad then people won't use it.

It doesn't have to be _that_ bad to be uncompetitive. They can steer people
towards their properties in a way that won't bother most people, but will do
tremendous harm to their competitors.

> And why is it illegal for search to be biased.

It wouldn't be if Google didn't have 95% of the market share. Google got this
market share by being better than everyone else no doubt, but at some point
you have to admit that's too much power for one company to have.

Right now Google has the power to effectively remove anyone or any company
from the internet. So far we've seen no evidence that they've done anything
like this, but if history is any indicator, left unchecked the eventually
will.

~~~
currysausage
_> but at some point you have to admit that's too much power for one company
to have_

Competition law doesn't punish market power. Punishing success would be
insane. The _abuse_ of market power is what is illegal. And abuse needs to be
proven.

Yes, Google Maps is the first result if you search for "maps" on Google.
Search for "maps" on Bing and the first result is... also Google Maps. So
maybe, Google Maps is just the leading mapping service on the Web?

 _> So far we've seen no evidence that they've done anything like this, but if
history is any indicator_

So far we've seen no evidence that the defendant has indeed killed anyone, but
can we be sure that he hasn't? No, but: _In dubio pro reo._

~~~
learc83
>Competition law doesn't punish market power, that would be insane. The abuse
of market power is what is illegal. And abuse needs to be proven.

Regulation doesn't require proof of illegal behavior. Yes to punish Google
executives criminally would require proof of illegal behavior.

But congress could easily pass a law that said search engine companies are
subject to government search algorithm audits, with no proof of illegal
activity required.

>So far we've seen no evidence that the defendant has indeed killed anyone,
but...

This is a regulatory issue, not a criminal trial. I'm not suggesting that any
Google executives be punished for anything.

I'm suggesting that the potential for Google to do harm is too large not to
examine the possibility of regulation. We don't allow private citizens to make
weapons of mass destruction because the potential for harm is too great. In my
opinion we also shouldn't allow private citizens to control the internet.

~~~
currysausage
_> Regulation doesn't require proof of illegal behavior._

Sanctions under competition law do require proof of abuse of market power.

ISP-like regulation, which is a different beast, is usually being justified by
the fact that ISPs are natural monopolies. [1]

 _> In my opinion we also shouldn't allow private citizens to control the
internet._

What makes a search engine useful? The relevance of results. In my opinion,
private companies (Google in particular) do a fairly good job at providing
relevant results. I prefer that over a government-approved "neutral"
algorithm, whatever that would even mean.

If you feel that Google's results aren't relevant, give a competitor a try.
Nothing stops you. Do you run a web site that was blocked by Google without
justification? Go ahead, complain. The mere possibility of abuse doesn't
justify tight regulation.

 _> We don't allow private citizens to make weapons of mass destruction
because the potential for harm is too great._

Yeah, should Google ever choose to sell WMD to my neighbor, switching to Bing
wouldn't really help me.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9400975](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9400975)

~~~
learc83
>Sanctions under competition law do require proof of abuse of market power.

And I'm not promoting sanctions. The only thing I've proposed is some kind of
transparency, like 3rd party auditing.

>If you feel that Google's results aren't relevant, give a competitor a try.
Nothing stops you.

That won't do a thing to mitigate the harm I'm talking about. If 1 company
controls every news organization in the country except for a few college
newspapers, would you tell me that me personally reading the college newspaper
would help the situation?

>The mere possibility of abuse doesn't justify tight regulation.

Publicly traded companies and financial institutions deal with plenty of tight
regulation because of the possibility of abuse. We already force publicly
traded companies to require independent financial auditing, why not require
the gateway to the internet to undergo independent search auditing.

------
pdkl95
Why is it that so many people misunderstand monopoly/anti-trust? This isn't
about search or pagerank, because having a monopoly is generally _not_
illegal. It doesn't matter what the future of the _search_ market might be or
the ease in which customers can switch to a different _search_ service. The
complaint, according to the article, is:

    
    
        "...accusation being that it uses this closed code
        to promote its own products ahead of rivals.“
    

Search only matters in how it might be a tool that can be abused to gain
influence in _other, not-search_ markets.

Being a monopoly is usually legal. Monopoly status simply means new laws apply
relating to how that power is used. Google is patently a search monopoly
_right now_ , so France is well within their right to accuse them of abusing
that power to take over other markets. Some sort of trial will determine if
those charges are true or not.

What is obvious - regardless of the outcome or politics surrounding France's
legal action - is that the exact nature of how Google's search algorithms work
is the _exact_ evidence needed to properly judge how Google's search service
(via the algorithm it relies upon) is unfairly interfering with the markets
that Google may also be participating in.

~~~
somerandomness
> Google is patently a search monopoly right now

No. Bing is a click away and provides comparable results. A monopoly occurs
when the consumer has no choice but the monopolist. That's clearly not the
case here.

~~~
pdkl95
This is exactly the misunderstanding of antitrust laws that I was talking
about. Contrary to popular belief, this is not about how much of the market a
given business.

Monopoly starts to be covered by the antitrust acts when "the ability to raise
prices above those that would be charged in a competitive market"[1].
Controlling a very large percentage of the market is merely one of the easier
ways to demonstrate the existence of that power.

[1] United States v. E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co.

~~~
asher_
Please explain. The suggestion that Google has "the ability to raise prices
above those that would be charged in a competitive market" in the search
market is clearly false. Google's search product is free. Are you suggesting
Google could start charging for search without a significant loss of market
share?

~~~
danieldk
Advertisements. It's no use advertising on other search engines if nearly no
one uses that. The market is probably changing now that Facebook is now also
interesting for ads, but there was definitely a period where internet
advertising meant Google Ads.

Of course, asking to disclose Google's search algorithm borderlines insanity.

~~~
cheald
But there are certainly _plenty_ of non-Google places and means to advertise.
Google could raise prices on AdWords across the board and advertisers would
have plenty of alternative means through which to hawk their wares.

~~~
ryanhuff
Wouldn't you agree that the ad market via search is much different than the
overall web ad market, especially when 90% of users (in some markets) go
through search to find things?

~~~
cheald
No, I don't really think I would. Search is a great place to capture consumer
intent, but it's hardly the only one. Advertising dollars are finite, and
Google absolutely competes against non-search advertising publishers for its
piece of that pie. Why do you think they run the AdSense program?

Even if it _were_ a different market, Google doesn't hold a monopoly on it by
a long shot. Bing is over 20% of search volume in the US, and Yahoo holds
another 13%. Searching for products on either of those will return results for
relevant advertisers; the simple fact that they have paid ads to run is an
empirical contradiction to claims of a search advertising monopoly (or is
empirical proof that a large number of very successful companies are
economically irrational and are throwing money down a money hole, but that
seems highly improbable).

------
purringmeow
_the upper house of parliament yesterday voted to support an amendment to a
draft economy bill that would require search engines to display at least three
rivals on their homepage_

That's just absurd. Can someone acquainted with the situation shed light on
why they are doing this? Simple populism and lobbying from local businesses or
something else?

~~~
vinay427
Not the answer you're looking for, but French protectionism (agriculture,
film, etc.) is consistently stronger than the Western norm in the rest of
Europe and the US. In those cases it is to protect domestic interests, which
of course comes with its own consequences.

~~~
ptaipale
Consequences, like that the last time France had annual budget surplus was in
1974.

~~~
seszett
A time when France was a lot more protectionist and interventionist than
today, actually.

~~~
ptaipale
Like all countries were; however, economic growth has been since stimulated by
opening trade.

------
pmontra
It won't be the first time a company has to disclose its source code to a
government to keep doing business in that country.

Apple 2015 [http://qz.com/332059/apple-is-reportedly-giving-the-
chinese-...](http://qz.com/332059/apple-is-reportedly-giving-the-chinese-
government-access-to-its-devices-for-a-security-assessment/)

Microsoft 2003 [http://news.cnet.com/China-to-view-Windows-
code/2100-1007_3-...](http://news.cnet.com/China-to-view-Windows-
code/2100-1007_3-990526.html)

~~~
jfoster
It will potentially be the first time that the effectiveness of the product is
impacted by the disclosure. It depends on what the factors are in Google's
algorithm, of course, but having to disclose them potentially opens up Google
to a whole lot more webspam. If that happened, they would need to fall back
more heavily on the "difficult to fake" (eg. reputable links) factors rather
than the "everyone can fake" (eg. optimal pattern of keywords on page)
factors.

In practice it may negatively impact on the quality of search results, even
though in theory their algorithm including more "difficult to fake" factors
should result in it being more durable.

~~~
lewisl9029
Not only this, but I'd think their current, exact ranking algorithm would rank
pretty high on their list of important trade secrets to protect.

If a competitor gets ahold of their exact ranking algorithm, that's a huge
piece of the formula for building a search engine that is as good as Google
Search at finding what someone's looking for.

~~~
Gustomaximus
Absolutly correct, but there is also much more too this, there is page layout
and look. There is speed of results depended on ability to trawl and return
answers. There are complimentary platforms holing to their ecosystem. There is
information they have access to only known to google from past searches or
alternate platforms. There are masses of manual non algorithmic overrides.
There is simple inertia of typing Google into the address bar for many.

Yes giving up the source algorithm would be a loss. Google have seen this
coming for years and have been building the moat so even this information
shared wouldn't really help a competitor take any significant chunk of their
business in the short to medium term.

------
nickik
Google should make a really, really simple alorigthm for search and use that
only for french people and show that to the french goverment. I don't see why
that should not be allowed, they allready have diffrent alorithm for diffrent
places.

~~~
ataggart
The only truly egalitarian algorithm is a random sort.

~~~
_yosefk
No it's not - if I put up more webpages than you, the first random page is
more likely to be mine than yours.

The only truly egalitarian algorithm is to send all queries to a state-run
committee of experts and have them sort it out.

That said... are the Chinese worse off due to their protectionism that gave
Baidu an advantage? I sincerely don't know. When everybody plays dirty, it's
hard to know which sequence of dirty moves will let one get the farthest
ahead...

(What's really interesting here is how much actual sovereignty the French
have, and if it's enough to pull off this particular move. There are trade
agreements and even regardless of these, governments intervene to protect
their companies.)

------
tel
It's not the genuine article, but reading the title I imagined the effort it
would require for Google to teach the French Senate how their algorithm
worked. This has an assumption that the algorithm is understandable first by
politicians and second by... humans!

I have no firsthand knowledge at all of Google's "algorithm", but I assume
given the investment they have in ML that it is on the side of "optimization,
feature selection, and tuning" instead of "logical, human-understandable
decision process".

~~~
skj
That's actually pretty fair. All the big players more or less have a handle on
how to do Google-style search. The big differentiator is the data backing that
search algorithm.

The primary (not only) reason Google keeps its search algorithm details a
secret is to prevent people from having an edge on gaming the system.

------
boona
Google hasn't been paying enough campaign contributions in France it seems.
Back in the day Microsoft tried to avoid politics, and the US government
almost broke them up.

"You may have all the money, Raymond, but I have all the men with guns."
(Frank Underwood, House of Cards)

Looks like you're going to have to start paying more attention to the wallets
of those with all the guns Google.

~~~
bildung
_> Google hasn't been paying enough campaign contributions in France it
seems._

That's by design: Campaign contributions are heavily regulated in France:
[http://www.loc.gov/law/help/campaign-
finance/france.php](http://www.loc.gov/law/help/campaign-finance/france.php)

~~~
moe
Without knowing much about french politicians I'd wager the guess that they
receive the same amount of contributions as their colleagues in every other
country, just through less public channels.

~~~
mercurial
It's more a party thing, usually (the conservative party has been embroiled in
a series of scandals concerning the last presidential elections, and the one
before).

------
kalyan02
There is no way they would reveal their most precious secret sauce for the
sake of satisfying one country's law and I can only think of one way this can
end - Google pulling off another Google News Spain, by shutting down
Google.fr.

Forcing Google's hand did not go well neither in Germany nor Spain not too
long ago. How are law makers failing to see this? How are even the lobbyists
fuelling the whole thing not seeing this?

------
bsaul
for non french, let me remind people what is the political debate in the
country : on the left side, people want a state-owned economy, and on the
other side, they want a state-governed economy ( "etat stratège", meaning the
state takes all the strategic decision).

The belief that a state could stick to ensuring fair competition and simply
foster innovation, instead of directly acting on the companies themselves ( or
even worse, directly owning them), is shared by less than 5% of the population
( highest score of the "economicaly liberal" party during the past 30 years
elections).

If they wanted to hurt google a bit, all they had to do is hit them at the tax
level ( they're currently trying that as well, but it has a low chance of
working, the main problem being that ireland is both in europe and has 0%
tax).

Now, with all that being said, i'm still curious to know what are the true
complaints regarding google search engine practices before i completely
dismiss the whole affair as another typically french symptom.

------
thrownaway2424
While this story is good feedstock for the Internet noise machine, I feel that
if we discussed every stupid idea that came out of one half of a bicameral
legislature in any country, we'd be buried in stupidity. An amendment to a
draft bill in one house of parliament in a single small country does not
amount to a movement.

------
ataggart
How curious that being the best in a competition is seen as anti-competitive,
and that keeping one's innovations secret is seen as a barrier to entry.

"[T]he English language... becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts
are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to
have foolish thoughts."

~~~
krapp
I think that some people misinterpret the premise of a free (or freeish)
market to mean that, no matter how successful a player is, barriers to entry
should still remain constant and neutral. This appeals to the ideal image of a
lone entrepreneur disrupting industries from their garage with pocket money,
sweat and genius, but obviously doesn't consider that the last thing _any_
successful company wants is to provide a level playing field for their
competitors.

Of course it's "anti-competitive", in a sense, but not unfair. No one is
stopping other companies from competing against Google. It just happens that
the market decided Google won... years ago. And now they own Youtube and Gmail
and the OS that runs on a lot of mobile phones and they have so much money to
burn they can try to make cars that drive themselves. No one is stopping
people from using other search engines as well, it just happens that people
decided years ago that Google worked better than anything else. This is the
way it's supposed to work. The superior product wins and dominates, and
redefines the market so that everyone has to play on their terms, while
everything else dies, or limps along in the shadows hoping not to get eaten.
But maybe if you're lucky, you find a niche, or the dinosaurs get wiped out.

------
erazor42
As a french i'm ashamed about how useless/bad/mediocre our politics are (all
of them)

~~~
erik14th
Why is it bad? it's definitely bad for Google but for french citizens I can't
see how fomenting diversity in a market hurts.

~~~
adventured
It's bad because they were unable to compete in an open market and must turn
to the government to handicap Google.

There's nothing preventing a French company from producing their own equal or
superior search engine - other than competence or will.

~~~
scrollaway
"Producing an equal or superior product" does not necessarily give the ability
to "compete in an open market". That's an idealistic view of capitalism which
simply doesn't work. It's merely a factor, and a fairly small one at that.

For all you know, there's plenty of "equal or superior products" to [anything]
out there. You've just never heard of them for reasons that have nothing to do
with their quality.

------
zone411
Until recently, I believed that while Google abuses its search dominance in
order to promote its own services above the fold, their actual search results
are still fair. Then I saw the search results for "domains" and "domain." It
is a big stretch to imagine how a fair algorithm can rank recently launched
beta of Google Domains #4 and #1 against the competitors, such as GoDaddy or
NameCheap, or even against informational websites.

~~~
mike_hearn
I just searched for domains (from the UK) and the only reference to Google
Domains I see is an advert. If you see differently, I guess there's some
reason for that, but it doesn't seem to happen everywhere.

~~~
SG-
That might simply be because Google Domains is US only.

------
argc
I think they would be better off taking all they money they would potentially
spend on this stupid ____and putting it up as prize money for a French startup
to create a viable Google competitor--encouraging them to view search in a new
way. In the very least, it would be a positive message rather than a negative
one and maybe an interesting company would come of it. I don 't think this
will have anything but a negative effect on Google (which does not mean there
will magically be a french competitor to jump in a take its place). It also
makes the French government look really dumb...

------
ferongr
Google should just block French citizens from using any search-related
functions on its properties (even things like Youtube search for example). The
bill will be repealed in no time.

~~~
learnstats2
There's a reason why Google won't do this, and it relates to the purpose of
the bill.

Google doesn't want competition, and France wants it to compete. This is the
whole point of this action.

French businesses can and will produce competitive search products, and the
90% market leader voluntarily leaving the market would be the perfect
opportunity.

~~~
zaphar

        Google doesn't want competition
    

That is a statement that reveals more about your own biases than it does about
Google. There is no evidence indicating Google doesn't want competition.

If french businesses can and will produce competitive search products then
they wouldn't need the market leader to leave the market to give them the
opportunity. There is 0 barrier to entry here. Anyone can spider the same
pages Google does. Anyone can develop ML algorithms to rank them. The only
thing keeping Google at the top of search is how good they are at it.

Google is global leaving France wouldn't hurt them.

~~~
learnstats2
Why does any business want competition? I wasn't criticising Google on this
particular point; it's an obvious and well-known fact of capitalism.

> The only thing keeping Google at the top of search is how good they are at
> it.

As far as I'm aware, other search engines are usually competitive in blind
tests for quality. Other things keeping Google at the top include: their
incumbency; anti-competitive practices such as browser bundling.

~~~
zaphar

        I wasn't criticising Google on this point; 
        it's an obvious part of capitalism.
    

Except it isn't really. Capitalism the theory may stipulate that an idealized
company doesn't want competition but in the real world people run companies
and everyone is a different.

Google as a company (speaking from insider experience as a former employee,
But not in any official capacity) values competition. It provides a way to
measure your success as a company. Google _loves_ measuring things it's so
deeply ingrained into their DNA they can't help it. Ranking themselves against
other search engines is a vital part of how they work. They would quite
possibly be lost without it and very definitely be a different company without
it. Google _loves_ competition.

~~~
learnstats2
So, when you say Google _loves_ competition, what you mean is that Google
would be happy to gain market share and be unhappy to lose market share? OK...

 _Edited to add:_ the cost of expressing a dissenting opinion on this site
seems to be waves of downvotes followed by a trickle of protective upvotes. Do
the downvotes all come from the same place, in this case, I wonder?

~~~
arkem
When Google measures itself against other search engines it is primarily
interested in measuring search quality and not market share.

Google has put a lot of effort into creating test query suites and other
systems that can be used to evaluate search results and works to make sure
that in each region and language it can out perform competitors. I don't know
how effective the measurement is but I can tell you that Google takes
providing the best search results seriously.

------
SG-
Being that Google is essentially the gatekeeper of all content for today's
world I kind of think they should publish it freely anyways on their own.

I realize there's a wiki page at
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank)
but there's clearly more to it for ranking of all things and it should be
maintained by Google itself too.

~~~
peterkelly
Part of the reason it works so well is that SEO people who are trying to
manipulate the rankings of their site don't know the details of the algorithm.
At best they can guess and run experiments.

Google making their algorithm public would result in it being much easier for
website owners to inflate their rankings, resulting in lower quality search
results, and giving companies who pay enough money to SEO experts an unfair
advantage (far more so than is already the case today).

~~~
SG-
True, but at the same time I think that's also an issue. How many sites get
unfair advantages from ex-Googlers or insiders? I don't actually consider it
an issue today, but going forward it will only be amplified even more.

------
jsmith0295
They shouldn't comply with this. Better to lose the entire French market than
to set a precedent of allowing themselves to bullied by governments. I would
imagine people would vote to get rid of this once they're unable to use
Google.

------
imh
I'd love to see how they define "search engine." Would this require amazon's
search functionality to also show links from rakuten or barnes & noble? Would
tech crunch's search have to show wired articles?

~~~
jfoster
One difference between politicians & lawyers when compared with scientists &
engineers is that politicians & lawyers don't share the same feeling of
needing to precisely define what they mean. They tend to write things that are
vague and turn to courts when they desire enforcement.

You might be let down if expecting something so specific that Amazon &
TechCrunch are clearly included or excluded.

~~~
umanwizard
This is certainly true in places with legal systems evolved from that of
England. It's less true in France, where precedent is less important and
courts don't have the power to make law.

~~~
jfoster
Interesting; I had no idea that difference existed. Thank you for correcting
me.

~~~
prodigal_erik
"Common law" is the name for a system that is mostly built on consistency with
prior judgments; "civil law" mostly built on legislation.

[http://onlinelaw.wustl.edu/common-law-vs-civil-
law/](http://onlinelaw.wustl.edu/common-law-vs-civil-law/)

------
S4M
Am I missing something? Google search is "just" a very sophisticated algorithm
to ranks the pages on internet matching some criteria. If Google doesn't
disclose its algorithm and doesn't want to pay the fine ("up to 10% of total
global revenue of a search engine business" according to the article), what
could France do? Bane Google from the country? Although it would be possible,
it would result in a massive loss of productivity for the whole country, since
French would have to switch to admittedly inferiors search engines.

I say that as a French expat using duckduckgo as his main search engine.

------
dean
Do Bing, Duck Duck Go and Yahoo also have to disclose their algorithms? Or is
it just Google? Who would want to compete in this space if you have to
disclose trade secrets to do so?

~~~
devcpp
>Who would want to compete in this space if you have to disclose trade secrets
to do so?

Someone who wants money. It's the same argument that Big Pharma presents
against those who want to make the patent system lighter, or any company that
protests against IP freedom. They just don't want fair competition.

------
mark_l_watson
My government (USA) seems to be shooting itself in the foot re: hurting our
tech industries: NSA collections and back doors cause foreign companies to not
use our tech, etc.

France seems to want to catch up with the USA, and hurt its tech industries
and infrastructure also.

I don't understand it, unless it is just putting the interest of government
bureaucracies ahead of the public good.

------
opinali
The worst part will be when they force us to translate all search's source
code and internal docs to French. :)

------
learc83
I'm very concerned with Google's search monopoly. For the vast majority of
users (in western countries), Google is the internet.

That's a lot of power for one company to have, and it's only going to get
worse as more and more transactions move online. Why should we trust one
company with that much power?

~~~
aparadja
You certainly don't have to trust or use Google. However, it would certainly
be weird to order Google to stop because of its popularity.

The Beatles had the number one position in the billboard charts for almost 60
weeks. That's a lot of popularity for one band to have. Should we have told
them to stop making music?

~~~
learc83
You have to look at this practically instead of ideologically. Everything is a
matter of degree. The potential harm a band can do by being too popular is far
less than the potential harm done by effectively controlling the internet.

Certainly you'll agree that their is a market where it is possible for a
company to be "too popular", i.e., the government should step in with
regulation.

Lets look at a very extreme case. What if one company develops a cure for all
forms of cancer, and they won't release the secret (let's assume our
hypothetical country has no drug regulations), and they charge $100k for
treatment. Is it wrong for the government to step in and regulate?

Google is effectively the gateway to the internet, and whether you choose to
use them or not you are beholden to that control. If you want to do business a
web presence is an absolute necessity, but if Google decides they don't like
you, there is no recourse. I'd say that that ability to do harm rises to the
level that we should consider potential regulatory remedies.

I don't necessarily support forcing them to make their algorithm public, but I
would support some kind of government audit.

~~~
sib
_Lets look at a very extreme case. What if one company develops a cure for all
forms of cancer, and they won 't release the secret (let's assume our
hypothetical country has no drug regulations), and they charge $100k for
treatment. Is it wrong for the government to step in and regulate?_

Yes, it is wrong for them to do so (if by regulating you mean setting the
company's price for the product that it developed, rather than just the
standard regulations that are in place). And the fact that there are people
who don't believe it is wrong - probably including politicians - produces a
reduction in the amount of money that would be rational to invest to search
for such cures, thereby reducing the likelihood of finding them.

~~~
learc83
In this hypothetical situation, the government could step in and save
_millions_ of lives per year with a short term loss of profit to one company.

In this situation you'd let millions of people die because you think it
_might_ reduce future medical research outcomes?

So obviously I haven't found a hypothetical situation extreme enough for you
yet. We make policy decisions that limit how much money companies can make
from medical breakthroughs all the time. The FDA approval process, for
instance. If we stopped requiring FDA approval, developing drugs would be much
more profitable, but as a society we agree that drug safety is a good trade
off.

What if drug affordability is a good trade off as well? There's no way to know
without investigation, but that is why I'm opposed to making policy on purely
ideological grounds. What if it turns out that limiting pharmaceutical
profits, decreases medical funding by 10%, but increases access to drugs that
are developed by 100%? Again it may work out exactly opposite, but if you
oppose limiting the price of drugs just because "it's wrong", you'll never
know.

What if it turns out that medical funding isn't the bottleneck in medical
breakthroughs. What if the number of people capable of becoming researchers
is, and what if that amount goes up with more affordable drug access.

Again, I'm not proposing a specific course of action, but I'm saying that
there are situations where the free market doesn't work and regulation is
necessary.

------
20kleagues
They should show minified versions of their code to the senate under closed
doors. Let them make sense of it.

------
simula67
Behind closed doors ? Or will the entire world get to see how Google search
algorithm works ?

------
ape4
PageRank is already public.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank)

But, of course, Google don't solely use that anymore.

------
borgia
Realistically though they merely have to show them _a_ search algorithm.

~~~
gress
And then lose credibility with all government inquiries in all countries into
the future.

------
coliveira
It is interesting that many people who are so devote to open source software
in general are just OK with the software oligopoly of search that is practiced
today by Google and a few other companies. I think it is terrible that we
don't have a clear idea of what is going on within the most used search
engine, and that they are able to change the algorithm without little second
thought. It would be very nice if this lawsuit could bring to the forefront
the issues involved with the way Google is controlling everyone's access to
information.

------
codecamper
i think we'll see more & more government vs. big internet. for now governments
have more power, but I wonder what it will be like 20 or 50 years from now.
after all, they want at least 10% growth and starting from 360 billion, you
become very big at that rate over 20-50 years.

not sure this world will be as awesome as some may think it could be. sure we
don't like our governments & the are incredibly inefficient. maybe that's a
good thing though.

------
jangid
Are we moving towards socialism of the internet?

------
ericfrigot
I will not comment on the debate that exasperates me . However, France is also
very angry with the way Google optimizes (legally) its income to pay very
little tax in France despite substantial profits. It's not fair for the
politicians and also for the whole population that cannot make such
optimization. I think France just wants to hit Google in a manner respecting
its own laws.

------
littletimmy
Good.

This is an unpopular view, but Google is simply too powerful. Anything that
acts against the Google monopoly on search can only be a good thing.

