
European parliament may propose search services split in threat to Google - maverick2
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/21/us-google-antitrust-idUSKCN0J525V20141121
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pasta_2
Before people start suggesting this is some anti-American agenda from the EU,
keep in mind there are many American companies that have been complaining to
the EU such as Yelp and Expedia. They want to stop Google's tying practices
such as using their monopoly in search (another thing to keep in mind is that
their market share in the EU is something absurd like over 90%) to benefit
other products and services. It's not really calling for breaking up the
company. Also this is specifically about raising the temperature on the
European Commission. Parliament itself doesn't do this.

This is a signal from politicians to the European Commission that they can go
hard.

~~~
AJ007
Ben Edelman, somewhat notorious for being paid by Microsoft, has done a really
good excellent job at documenting problems with Google for many years.
Irregardless of who paid for the time invested, these problems have been well
researched and aren't simply American companies playing cry baby. I'm not a
regulator, and am not suggesting a regulatory answer, but I think Peter Thiel
has given a fairly honest explanation that Google's rationalizations are
largely PR-fud.

There are very profound and far reaching issues here. Imagine if instead of
Wikipedia we had some encyclopedia where half of page 1 was sponsored
editorial and the rest of what made it on page 1 was done in a totally opaque
environment by a company who had commercial interests on what was showing up.
If your company operates in a fairly narrow market, has limited retention, and
needs to use search traffic vs demographic traffic to build your audience, you
are effectively operating day to day with a giant guillotine over your neck.

(Very happy to see DuckDuckGo get some meaningful traction, and for Google's
sake with the regulators the better DuckDuckGo does the more room there is to
let off some pressure.)

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ricardonunez
Google search competitors are not even close with the quality of Google search
results. This year I started trying Bing, Yahoo and right now DuckDuckGo as an
experiment and none of them has the same quality. Bing is the only one that
came closer. That's why Google owns search. They may be using shady tactics,
but the competitors still need to get better.

~~~
AJ007
The last time someone told me this, I asked them when the last time they ran
with adblocking was -- answer, years.

~~~
ricardonunez
I do. I also use privacy badger and private/incognito browsing. Interpreting
keywords is way ahead of the rest. One thing that's getting worst is geo
targeting though. They are trying way to hard to show you local results for
everything you search.

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mschuster91
Rivals should maybe ask themselves why Google has such an enormous market
share in search.

Maybe a 90% market share originates simply from better quality?

~~~
weinzierl
Google is the only search engine that got their L10n right.

When I search non-local stuff in English I have the choice between at least
Google, Yahoo!, Bing and DDG, which all give decent, comparable results. When
I search for German content or local stuff there is really only Google.

German Google search results are terrible compared to what English speaking
people are used to. For German queries it is the only option.

I guess for other languages spoken in Europe it's similar.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Fascinating. Is this likely to be because of a smaller corpus (seems unlikely
- there must be millions if not billions of pages in most European languages)

Or is it that search algorithms don't cross languages easily - or that the
core developers and testers use English as a lingua Franca anyway?

Still a fascinating point - can you put some kind of example or test up?

~~~
mschuster91
Reliable, reproducible testings are hard because every engine customizes
results for every user, based on history...

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adventured
Following this premise, I guess it's time to assess massive trade tariffs on
all vehicles manufactured by German companies, either domestically, or
imported. Their dominance in the luxury category is really just too much, it
needs to be significantly regulated or reduced.

For Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Porsche the US is their largest market. Between
20% and 25% of all sales typically come from the US for those automakers.

Jobs will be lost? Nah, auto supply will shift to domestics and or Asian
manufacturers. The Germans will simply lose a big fat market, and it's
unlikely all of Europe will agree to strike back against US automakers.

Economic war is the only thing that is likely to come out of the EU trying to
split Google.

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maverick2
Scale has its advantage, products like Google Now or a Home Robot/Assistant is
not possible unless there are a ton of data points available to be processed.
I thinking breaking up is not a solution, but rather content(headlines
included) and data about customer should be traded between companies using
APIs. Like a data exchange, just like exchanges for electricity and other
utilities. Imagine a time in future when you want a fancy Apple robot, but
that robot is dumb unless it has access to all of your current and past data.

~~~
Someone
I think you are making two opposite statements: _" should be traded between
companies using APIs"_ gives me he impression you want to give the companies
control over your^W their data. At the moment there are laws prohibiting the
former, IMO rightfully so.

 _" when you want a fancy Apple robot, but that robot is dumb unless it has
access to all of your current and past data."_ makes it look as if you want
humans to have control over who has access to their data. I think that should
be the norm, and if laws are retired to get there, I think we should get them.

~~~
maverick2
ok, yep let me clear that. What I mean is

-Companies should be able to own and trade their users data with other companies. This should be like a stock or ad exchange. More pull requests for certain data, higher the data connection price.

-Also blogs should be able to charge $0 or some amount for search bots to crawl them. Its demand and supply if. NYT might be able to ask for some price while Buzzfeed can say .. eh we'll set that to free.

-Now for user, Example If I pay $200 for a robot - The company can say, hey it is $10 to use it monthly(because the robot company figures that is avg cost to fetch data, lets say from Goog FB AMZN etc). But some companies can say, the data of their users is owned by them and their user so if the user want to use his/her data then its free. But if the company wants to use to for some other means without user consent then its up for sale.

Its kind of like twitter's firehose, just more universal. Will encourage
companies to develop APIs since now they can charge its use. I'd love a google
now/robot to suggest me what netflix flick I should see based on my Bing
search history.

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yuhong
I am thinking of a tutorial on search result pages as a settlement.

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dkei
This is political posturing and grandstanding on steroids, whoever bought the
EU parliament (evidently Germany publishers) did a good job.

They can’t “break up” Google, it’s an American company! it’s not based there.

Also the previous competition chief ridiculed such notions when he was
recently asked about it by Parliament citing the utility companies (German
ones) that would be first in line for a breakup debate if that was a tool they
wanted to use:

 _The decision to reopen settlement talks followed vigorous criticism from a
widening range of politicians, including the economy ministers of France and
Germany. The latter, Sigmar Gabriel, argued in May that a forced breakup of
Google should be seriously considered because of its vast market power. Werner
Langen, a European lawmaker representing German Chancellor Angela Merkel 's
CDU party, echoed that suggestion, drawing parallels with U.S. efforts to
break up monopolies in oil and other industries. "If we don't give them a bash
we're not going to solve the problem," he said.

Mr. Almunia showed little sympathy for such demands. "I would tell you one
thing, as a German friend," he said. "The day I [hear] that the railways will
accept unbundling, electricity companies will accept unbundling, and we will
discuss [unbundling] with telecom operators and others…let's discuss
unbundling Google, but not before._

via [http://online.wsj.com/articles/google-must-improve-search-
se...](http://online.wsj.com/articles/google-must-improve-search-settlement-
or-face-charges-eus-almunia-says-1411462097)

The fact that they are drafting a motion targeting one company is so
shamelessly political it’s almost a public display of corruption.

Not to mention that the ludicrous levels of attention and weigh this issue is
getting in the EU is unheard of and unwarranted:

 _One technology industry source with knowledge of the motion also called it a
"politically-motivated campaign to do something that is a regulatory matter".
He added: "These guys are calling for the break-up of Google. That is not in
proportion to the degree of concern articulated by the commission during its
investigation._

~~~
t0mas88
Google is not just an American company. As a big "fuck you" to Google: the
majority of revenue runs through Ireland and the Netherlands. Nice tax plan,
but it means they can't easily evade the European Commission.

I actually really applaud this step. Don't get me wrong, this should not be
considered anti-American, but if you run a global company getting revenue from
a lot of countries you should be prepared to follow their laws and pay taxes.
It is that way for physical goods, and it's pure stupid arrogance to think
that delivering online products exempts you from all of it.

~~~
adventured
Can you break out exactly how much revenue goes through Ireland and the
Netherlands?

~~~
t0mas88
Everything that does not originate in the US is run through the tax
construction they have setup going through a po-box firm in Amsterdam and
Ireland. The same construction is used by many others, including Facebook,
Apple and even U2.

Not sure whether they specify this number in their quarterly reports, but
given that it's "the world" vs the US revenue it is definitely a majority.

Edit: 17 billion out of 40 billion (both in euros and 2013 figures) global
revenue runs through Google Ireland Ltd alone and that's reported as ad sales
from Europe only. I did not find a report for the Netherlands, but there is
more revenue from outside Europe taking this route as well since it's the
cheapest route for anything that is not coming from the US.

~~~
adventured
It looks like it's very unlikely that Europe is the majority of Google's
revenue, and I doubt _all_ revenue globally outside the US runs through
Ireland & Co (can you back that up with data?).

For the latest quarter: "Our revenues from outside of the United States
totaled $9.55 billion, representing 58% of total revenues in the third quarter
of 2014, compared to 58% in the second quarter of 2014 and 56% in the third
quarter of 2013."

Unless the rest of the world outside of Europe only has ~8%, and or all global
revenue actually does go through Ireland & Co (again, I'm skeptical it's
100%). That's possible, but it's seems unlikely.

~~~
t0mas88
There is a simple reason all revenue outside the US goes through Ireland and
the Netherlands:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement)

From the Wikipedia page: "The offshore company continues to receive all of the
profits from exploitation of the rights outside the US, but without paying US
tax on the profits unless and until they are remitted to the US.[5]"

So yes: all of it goes through Europe.

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wfjackson
Perhaps they should be forced to release keywords versus clicked links data to
other companies like Duck Duck Go, just like Microsoft was forced to document
things like SMB for Samba and the various Office formats.

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biomimic
Google != AT&T

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gress
Search is a public utility, just like the Internet itself.

~~~
mbreese
How could search be considered a public utility? You can use any search engine
you'd like. If you don't like Google, switch to Bing or something else. That's
not the case with things like water or electricity (usually). Internet service
as a utility? Maybe (in the US at least with limited options). But search?

Don't blame Google because they are really good at what they do. They aren't
stopping you from using another service, nor are they stopping others from
creating their own search engine.

~~~
baq
for vast majority of people, what's the difference between 'the internet' and
'google homepage'? you can theoretically use something else than google, true,
but if you bundle all search engines together and disable every single one of
them, the internet for a great majority of the population that has access to
it becomes completely useless.

~~~
mbreese
For the vast majority of people Goolge doesn't control their web browser. For
some, yes, but it's only a default for Android or Chromebooks.

Browsers can and do change their defaults whenever they'd like: see Firefox
this past week. That's an issue for the browsers, not the search engine. I'm
not aware of any browser (sans Chrome) where the default homepage is
Google.com.

