
Google could face a $9B EU fine for rigging search results in its favour - Jerry2
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/google-eu-fine-search-9-billion-search-results-rigging-alphabet-shopping-service-a7768621.html
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ticklemyelmo
How is it that Google search results are considered a public service that must
run in any particular way other than their own whim?

Is it simply a matter of scale?

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numerlo
Google is a monopoly in the search engine market and monopolies are heavily
regulated.

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bhauer
But it's not. I never use Google for searching and I do a lot of searching.
It's merely the largest search engine.

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juandazapata
"It's the largest search engine, but I never use it, so it must not be a
monopoly" :slow-clap:

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mohaine
The lack of a viable alternative is the pretty much definition of monopoly.
Just because lots of people use something doesn't mean there is a monopoly.

Def: "the exclusive possession or control of the supply or trade in a
commodity or service."

Google has a very nice search engine but I personally fail to see how they
control the supply enough to be considered a monopoly. Sure most people use
them, but that is by choice. There are viable alternatives.

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frgtpsswrdlame
Standard Oil only maxed out at 90% market share. US Steel only reached 60% of
the steel market. There were banks other than JP Morgan. A more nuanced view
of monopoly has to do with how much power they can wield in the markets.

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mohaine
And of those which ones had successful antitrust litigation against them? Just
Standard Oil I believe.

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pulse7
Just write "translate" and you will get 1) Google's translate service inlined
2) Google Translate Website and then everything else...

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sogen
But you are on Google's site, it's a company, not a public service.

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mattmanser
There are different rules when you use a dominant position in one market to
gain share in another.

This is equivalent to the Microsoft/IE thing.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law)

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tschellenbach
As a European I think it's sad how we spend our efforts fining startups
instead of creating an ecosystem that fosters the creation of break out
companies.

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sasvari

      fining startups
    

does google really still count as a _startup_ (18 years old, 50k+ employees)?

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echlebek
Certainly not, the Alphabet company is a multinational corporation.

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bitmapbrother
The EU fining a company and collecting are two very different things. I expect
whatever fine they decide to be litigated until a favourable outcome is agreed
upon.

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matt4077
That's simply not true. See, for example,
[http://ec.europa.eu/competition/cartels/statistics/statistic...](http://ec.europa.eu/competition/cartels/statistics/statistics.pdf)
Chart 1.2 (fines), compared to Chart 1.4 (Fines adjusted for court rulings)

From 1990 to 2017, they collected 24.4 billion Euro of 26.7 that were imposed:

    
    
        Year            Imposed Fine  Adjusted for Court rulings
        1990 - 1994       539 691 550      344 282 550,00
        1995 - 1999       292 838 000      270 963 500,00
        2000 - 2004     3 462 664 100    3 157 348 710,00
        2005 – 2009     9 414 012 500    7 920 497 226,50
        2010 – 2014     7 921 947 674    7 608 375 579,00
        2015 - 2017.    5 091 156 000    5 091 156 000,00
        total          26 722 309 824   24 392 623 565,50

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bitmapbrother
Of course it is.

>Intel Wins Latest Round in Battle Over $1.17 Billion EU antitrust Fine. Intel
Corp.’s fight to overturn a record 1.06 billion-euro ($1.17 billion) European
Union antitrust fine received a boost from an adviser to the bloc’s top court
in a case that could have ramifications for a growing list of disputes
involving U.S. tech giants from Google to Apple Inc.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-20/intel-
sho...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-20/intel-should-win-
fight-over-1-16-billion-fine-court-aide-says)

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Oletros
Are you aware that your link doesn't prove your point?

> If Intel ultimately prevails, it would be the commission’s first defeat in a
> case concerning so-called abuse of dominance by a company for “very many
> years,” said Trevor Soames, a competition lawyer in Brussels.

~~~
bitmapbrother
I believe it does. My point was that fining a company and collecting are two
different things. The EU has yet to collect a dime from Intel.

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yuhong
I have been thinking of a standard for example for how much space these
results can take on the screen.

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idibidiartists
Do they have proof of that?

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webuser321
What is needed but AFAIK is never discussed is an objective index of what is
on the www.

(Not a _cache_ of the entire www, and _not a full-text search engine_. Rather,
an _index_ , similar to what is in the Yellow Pages (subject, alphabetical),
but going a little further. For example, each site might submit a list of say
5 selected "permanent" URLs where a user could retrieve site information.)

This is not an insurmountable task. And _it need not be conducted by a private
company_. A significant amount of the work is already done with respect to
sites that register domain names, via zone files. But this is only start and
is not comprehensive.

Back in the day, early search engines required operators to _submit_ www sites
to the search engine. That active involvement of www site operators seems to
have been lost.

There could well be a publicly-run directory service for the www. Operators
could submit their site to a public agency instead of a private company. Or at
least make it easy for a very simple crawler to retrieve a sitemap.xml or some
file with a standard format for disclosing site information.

Private companies have difficulty policing overzealous marketing and fraud in
such situations. Today we have one company using "secret algorithms" that
supposedly address the situation. But if a site is submitting information to a
governmental agency instead of a private company maybe it becomes a little
less easy for marketers to bend the truth. There is more opportunity and
incentive to enforce the consumer protection laws. Better for consumers.

Users could still access Google to determine popularity of a given www site
(or "relevance" if you believe that popularity has some bearing on relevance).

Keeping in mind that Google is a private company that encourages a bidding war
between advertisers for a spot to the right of the top popularity ranking for
a given search query. The behind the scenes of the auction process is opaque.
Google has no incentive to be _wholly_ objective.

Give users more choice _how to look up www sites_. (Note this is a little
different than full text search. It is far less complex.)

Site discovery: This is a fundamental problem that _is_ occasionally
discussed. Site discovery. All those sites users never learn about because of
search engine schemes like "PageRank". We see the same phenomenon in an "App
Store". Top 10 are promoted excessively. All the rest are never discovered by
the vast majority of users. Perhaps the only reason someone can make large
sums through selling an app is because if they can get into the top 10, then
all other apps are effectively hidden from most users. This dynamic creates a
certain hype and draws in more contributors all trying to get into the top 10.
Each paying fees to the company behind the "App Store". Can we apply a similar
analysis to Google search and the sale of AdWords? What might fuel demand for
ads? The lure of a #1 rank or an ad to the right of it?

Getting back to the issue: Let user/developers work with a free, objective
index not produced or manipulated by a private company. I can think of many
ways to build efficient search i.e., www site discovery, using such an index.
I believe others would have even better ideas.

We already have a privately-held _cache_ of the entire www.

What we still need is a publicly-accesible _index_ into that cache so that
users can _discover_ www sites by means other that _popularity_.

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strictnein
At some point it seems like the US government needs to step in and somehow
mediate these things. I'm sure it's incredibly popular to fine US companies
huge sums of money in Europe, but this is starting to get out of hand.

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toomuchtodo
Would you say the same thing if America fined China for its companies taking
advantage of US citizens? Or is it selective sovereignty?

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strictnein
If they levied a $9 billion fine because of how a Chinese tech firm possibly
manipulated search results? First, that wouldn't happen. Second, yes, I would.

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javascriptPhD
Google's motto is 'don't do bad things' so I highly doubt there's any merit to
these accusations.

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gthtjtkt
How about a similar fine for rigging search results during the US election?

[http://aibrt.org/downloads/EPSTEIN_et_al_2017-SUMMARY-WPA-
A_...](http://aibrt.org/downloads/EPSTEIN_et_al_2017-SUMMARY-WPA-
A_Method_for_Detecting_Bias_in_Search_Rankings.pdf)

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JustSomeNobody
For all the good it did...

/s

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mtgx
"But your honor, I only _tried_ to kill my wife - I didn't succeed!"

