Google must pay German price comparison platform 465M euros in damages

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/google-must-pay-german-price-comparison-platform-465-mln-euros-damages-court-2025-11-14/

by 1vuio0pswjnm7 • 8 months ago

56 9 8 months ago

reuters.com

sunaookami2• 8 months ago

You are better off using Geizhals instead of Idealo which belongs to Axel Springer that owns the infamous tabloid Bild and is currently trying to make Adblocking illegal in Germany by claiming users are not allowed to alter the HTML because of copyright[1].

[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Copyright-Springer-vs-Adblock-P...

tetris11• 8 months ago

Geizhals/skinflint doesnt have everything though, whereas idealo genuinely does, along with price tracking info

HardwareLust• 8 months ago

That argument doesn't hold any water though.

How is that any different than buying a book and using a highlighter or making pencil notes in the margin? Or using FF to skip past the FBI warning and the trailers on a video tape?

sunaookami2• 8 months ago

Everyone knows that but now try to convince the court.

arielcostas• 8 months ago

Plus adblocking usually works by blocking network requests, right? Or at most, modifying the DOM itself in the browser, not even the HTML received from the site.

And even if it was a "friendly MitM" that altered the HTML before being parsed by the DOM, it would (hopefully) be considered a private copy you're entitled to use however you please (except against the copyright by sharing it, for example)

jesusofsuburbia• 8 months ago

For any tech/electronics stuff I regularly use Geizhals, but it doesn't offer the same for clothes, for which I use idealo.

I've compared prices online for 20 years now, and I can say that Google is objectively worse and you just notice how they push sponsored stuff. Often, the top results from the other 2 are not shown, nor do they show up as comparison alternatives in general.

Whoevet claims that this is an act of EU punishing American companies through stupid policies is just blind. Google failed and continues to fail to offer something better; instead they misuse their monopoly position. I can’t understand why you would defend Google's behavior. Maybe it is due to other motives, some weird nationalism even?

To a consumer, price comparison is a crucial piece for enabling a true market with competition.

deaux• 8 months ago

I can’t understand why you would defend Google's behavior. Maybe it is due to other motives, some weird nationalism even?

I think there's a much bigger one than nationalism; simply that most people find it very difficult to accept that they may have held incorrect beliefs for decades. And on HN particularly, that they've played an active role in helping these companies grow, and that the whole reason behind their personal wealth, and Bay Area dev wages in general, are these practices. People have thought that what they did was almost impeccably clean.

The FAANGs and their compatriots are undeniably very parasitic companies, abusive of market position, often dumping their goods at a loss to monopolize markets - Amazon, Netflix, Uber, likely Google with Gemini, dozens of examples. At the same time, unloading large negative externalities onto society. If a physical goods producing company had done anything similar, they would've been massively tarriffed if not banned decades ago.

It's funny because the average HNer would've been supportive of the trust case against Microsoft back in the day. Yet they often don't see that the these companies taking the same behavior and raising it by a few powers, means that all of these fines don't even begin to repay their debts.

I do hope one day I'll stop seeing "hurr why EU tech so bad and slow and uncompetitive", and people start thinking a bit more about how markets work in general, drawing some parallels with the physical world. If China were to start massive supermarkets in the US and offer everything at half the price of Walmart, taking on the debt, what would happen to Walmart? Or even just at 90% of the price, but with 5x the marketing budget?

Nothing because the US government would block them, otherwise they'd get crushed. Sounds like something the EU should do.

ilaksh• 8 months ago

I think the solution is public efficient protocols, p2p, content centric networking, etc. We have enough technology to be able too avoid having to run searches through centralized services.

Maybe p2p or federalized AI agents, or just decentralized vector indices are one way to move away from that.

Instead of a browser you have an agent client. You type "gadget X" and that is sent to your local router agent. You can switch router agents easily and also easily share your own routing agent.

You can subscribe to other people's agents like RSS feeds. The router agent decides which agents to send queries to. The results automatically display as they come in. The router can hand off to an analysis agent to highlight suggestions.

I'm really tired and I can tell people are going to hate this comment but anyway to continue. Maybe there is a new interface of common tool commands for search, shopping comparison etc. and the internet becomes a whole bunch of loosely connected MCP servers or IPFS vector indices.

Anyway, it's just not necessary for everything to go through giant websites. Good night.

sph• 8 months ago

You can subscribe to other people's agents like RSS feeds. The router agent decides which agents to send queries to. The results automatically display as they come in. The router can hand off to an analysis agent to highlight suggestions.

Build it on top of Nostr and you get 80% of this out of the box.

Google must pay German price comparison platform 465M euros in damages

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