European Commission inserts yet another probe into Google. This time it's the job ads service The European Commission is investigating Google for illegally favouring its own job ads service over rivals. Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager yesterday pointed out in a speech in Berlin the Commission had already fined the Choc Factory €1.49bn for abusing its dominance in search to profit its other divisions. …
"The European Commission is investigating Google for illegally favouring its own job ads service over rivals."
I'm anti-Google, but i don't see why Google shouldn't be able to favour it's own services over rivals. There's more than one search engine available. There's even Bing if you're insane enough.
"although some of the firms had admitted that agreeing to follow Google's requirements had improved traffic to their sites"
This really does look like some companies just want to complain about every. single. little. thing.
Let's pretend you own, say a sweet shop on the high st. It's currently doing ok.
Google sweets opens up next door with an unlimited budget.
They give away for free the same sweets you sell for a small profit.
You go bankrupt as who would pay for sweets that you sell?
Now. Google sweets can charge what they want.
Technically, anything that Google tries to answer immediately may be seen as unfair competition. They do unit conversion? That's unfair to unit conversion sites. They give dictionary definitions? Unfair to dictionary sites. Lyrics? Same. And so on...
The fact there are so many examples only illustrates how powerful Google is, just by being the first entity people will query about anything.
Maybe people querry Google first is because it's the default browser/search engine on most devices people own? And it's installed by default as the only browser/search engine? With no easy way to remove?
Please remember we're talking about ordinary people here who expect their devices to just work. You and me and 99% of the readers know how to change the default search engine, install another browser plus the necessary ad/java blocker and so on. But we're a minority so think about the rest of the people out there.
Google is a monopoly (like Microsoft and Amazon) and it needs to be stopped.
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