EU lawmakers urge regulators to break up Google

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/27/eu-google-idUSL6N0TH2FS20141127

by anigbrowl • 12 years ago

21 15 12 years ago

lcuff• 12 years ago

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

ComputerGuru• 12 years ago

The link, to save anyone about 2 seconds on Google: http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21635000-european-move...

jqm3• 12 years ago

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.

j_jochem• 12 years ago

I think the idea here is to split off the search business from Google's other business areas to prevent those from abusing the data collected by Search. Not saying this is a good idea, but the distinction is important.

progress2• 12 years ago

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.

jqm3• 12 years ago

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

sremani• 12 years ago

"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...)

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• 12 years ago

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.

cromwellian• 12 years ago

They could just double down on 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• 12 years ago

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.

freshflowers• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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

dang• 12 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8666932

EU lawmakers urge regulators to break up Google

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