Just tell Google that if it wants to favour its products then any clicks to its products must take you to a page stating that Google is taking you to this option because they offer it but it may not be the best option and give a list of alternatives like Microsoft has to do with its browser choice and be done with it
Google submits YET ANOTHER offer to fix 'search dominance' in EU
Google, in an effort to resolve the European Commission's competition concerns relating to the company's strong grip on the search market in the EU, has submitted yet another revised set of proposals to Brussels' officials. Antitrust commissioner Joaquin Almunia told Bloomberg that he had received the rejigged offer from …
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Monday 9th September 2013 18:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Antitrust
> Does Coke run a service where by you can purchase other companies products via them yet always offer coke as the first option even when the customer asks for Pepsi?
Erm, well yes in a way: Ever seen those "Coke" fridges donated to shops but explicitly not for the refrigeration of competitors products?
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Monday 9th September 2013 13:38 GMT Fiddler on the roof
Silly
Google werent awarded the number 1 search engine slot, they earnt it! Through their efforts they have come from nothing and got to where they are. Why shouldnt they promote their products? Why shouldnt they be dominant? Why shouldnt they agresively promote their own products and serivces above other peoples? This is a massive crock of Sh1te! If anyone has better products than googles its up to them to gain market share by promoting them well. It's downright laughable to think the idiots in Brussells can come up with something that will make it a level playing field.
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Monday 9th September 2013 14:12 GMT Alister
@AC 12:13GMT
Innovation is monopoly abuse?
Microsoft was innovating when they stuck IE in their OS?
Google are innovating when they put all their products and services first in search results?
I see this comparison a lot and it's completely false. Nobody is under any obligation to use Google as their search engine, and if they do, they don't have to click on the sponsored links, or links to Google products.
The only way your analogy would stack up is if Google ONLY returned search results pointing to their own products, and nobody else's, which is clearly not the case.
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Monday 9th September 2013 18:56 GMT Robert Helpmann??
Re: @AC 12:13GMT
Nobody is under any obligation to use Google as their search engine
Course they do unless they want to use something that sucks (see icon!).
I have tried - really I have - other search providers, but Google really has this nailed. I do not, however, use their other products unless they are good. Simply placing them at the top of a list does not stop me from going through the list for alternatives, though it may skew the odds.
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Monday 9th September 2013 12:02 GMT auburnman
Google should update their frontpage to randomly take X% of visitors to an options page asking: "Would you like to try one of our competitors search products? Yes please, show me the alternatives / No thanks, back to the Google home page"
That way they could reply to the commission that they actively tried to push competitor's products onto people, yet 99.5% of those asked chose to stick with Google (my guess at numbers.)
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Monday 9th September 2013 12:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
EU anti-business yet again
Will the EU be happy when Google and MS pull out of their fascist bloc and let them slip back into the dark ages?
The UK is lucky it never got sucked in as far as France and Germany, high time we severed ties with the EU. Like we need to waste yet more money on people who can't even get their accounts in order.
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Monday 9th September 2013 12:29 GMT Tieger
can't wait for this to be rolled out to other businesses too.
walk into tesco, ask them where the bakery part is, and they're forced to tell me about all the other wonderful bakeries within 20 miles, rather than just direct me to the back left corner of the store.
i mean come on. wtf is the problem with google advertising its own products? Especially when those products ARE the most popular ones.
the reason everyone uses google maps is because its better than its 'competitors' by leaps and bounds, not because its at the top of the list. (and if people really do just select it because its top of the list even though they know they dont like it, then thats a problem with them not with google...).
If i type 'maps' into google, its because i want it to take me to google maps. much like if i walk into a BMW shop and ask them to sell me a car, i'd rather expect them to at least make some efforts to sell me a BMW!
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Monday 9th September 2013 13:00 GMT Eguro
The problem isn't just whether those products are in fact the most popular ones, but also whether they are only the most popular ones because Google abused their monopoly to give those products an advantage.
If you typed maps into Google 3, 4, 5 years ago was it also to get to Google maps? Or was it to get to some map service which was ranked as groovy awesomeness?
If Tescos had service kiosks around towns where people could ask about the area - and these were the primary way for people to find things in the city, then if Tescos - without informing the users - consistently pointed people to their own products, even though others were closer/cheaper/better, then maybe you'd have a Tescos analogy that you could consider using.
The above - very wobbly - analogy might also highlight the problem with Google "advertising" their own services. Namely the claim being that they didn't advertise them - they simply presented them as though they were the best or most popular results, in times when they weren't.
The problem I could see arising now is that Google will have now created a situation where their services are the most popular (perhaps due to monopoly abuse, perhaps due to simply being super duper awesome at stuff) and can now freely go back to displaying most popular results only. In which case changing their practices would mean little, and the only thing that would really have any consequence would be a massive fine.
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Monday 9th September 2013 14:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: popularity of maps
The argument that Google Maps is popular because of abuse of search dominance is seriously undermined by it being one of the top app downloads in the iTunes store. Clearly, even in an environment where the device vendor tries to exploit its monopoly to make Google Maps hard to use, customers still prefer it, because it's best-in-class.
Shopping is a better example to look at. Appropriately, that's where the main complaint comes from. Google's shopping search isn't clearly best-in-class (yet). It is, however, easier to get to.
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Monday 9th September 2013 14:40 GMT wowfood
On the other hand though, are they really blocking out competitors? Lets test this.
First two links are google maps, followed by streetmap, tfl, bing, theAA, and yahoo.
Price compariosn search
top link is google, followed by pricerunner, mysupermarket, moneysupermarket, idealo, moneysaving expert ect.
I would search other things but can't be overly bothered, yes google put their own stuff at the top of the page.
So on the accusations.
Do they promote their own stuff? Yes, as they have every right to.
Do they lowball their rivals? No, actually half the 'rivals' who are complaining are frankly god awful ,figured I'd try each of the sites fo the complaining parties, that UK one was just terrible, no wonder they don't make the front page.
Do they lift material? Probably, BUT if GCHQ and NSA are anything to go by, ripping off the meta is perfectly legal. And there are plenty of things out there to block googles search bots, google even has one itself. It's as simple as adding one line to the HTACESS file, so the problem of lifting material is preventable.
Honestly going by that info, I'd throw out the first two issues in an instant. It's a bunch of crybabies with poor products trying to strongarm their way into the public spotlight by claiming they were repressed, rather than accepting their product is sub par. However the lifting material thing is still an issue which should be looked into further, rather than being looked into by a dozen different states. BUT on the other hand, the lifted material points users to the best deal. These price comparison sites lift information from the hotels etc in order to give a comparison of costs (+ their own little extra) google are then lifting this information from price comparison sites to provide information on which comparison site is the best deal. Is it legal to steal from a thief?
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Monday 9th September 2013 16:19 GMT J.G.Harston
"the reason everyone uses google maps is because its better than its 'competitors' by leaps and bounds"
Hold on while I pick myself up off the floor. Google maps are CRAP and have recently got even worse. And not just that they've decided that motorways should now be coloured orange, but practical usability things like roads vanishing when you zoom out to see what you're looking at in the context of where it is, lots of basic cartographic features completely absent, anything that's not a primary route is white - no distinction between A, B and C roads, presenting them as functionally identical, and that's just off the top of my head without actually going to look at one.
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Monday 9th September 2013 13:02 GMT codeusirae
Googles grip on search in the EU?
"Google, in an effort to resolve the European Commission's competition concerns relating to the company's strong grip on the search market in the EU"
I don't understand, what's stopping the consumers using another search engine?
https://duckduckgo.com/
https://ixquick.com/
http://www.yandex.com/
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Monday 9th September 2013 14:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Hold on... a Second...
The concern is that, while Google earned search dominance perfectly legitimately, they're now using that to get dominance in other areas. If I search for a product, the first search I do will be on Google because it's the best search engine. So far, so good. Now I want to see where I can buy it. There are many price comparison sites, some of which may be strictly better than Google (I don't know), but because Google embeds results from their comparison shopping tool into the search results I've already got, I'm going to use those out of convenience. This is bad because it prevents a potentially superior site from getting traffic.
That convenience of not having to do a second search has a lot of value to users, and if the Google shopping comparison tool is "good enough" then the convenience of not having to do a second search is good for consumers, even if it's still bad for Google's competition. What we all want to see is a level playing field, but getting there by making the competition's site easier to use, not making Google harder to use. That's hard, though, so instead we'll just see customers being harmed in the name of helping big companies which aren't quite as big as Google.
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Monday 9th September 2013 17:02 GMT Otto is a bear.
Sadly
No one has a monopoly on bullshit. More bullshit is spoken about the EU than it actually produces itself.
In this case the EU is trying to overcome the fact that most of us are lazy bastards and can't be bothered to use the non-google version of a service because we don't see any need to, and its there.
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Monday 9th September 2013 17:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
The latest line in Google playmanship is if you go for their corporate google cloud crap and use their crappy hangouts and google+ and shitty docs and substandard mail they will give you preferential search listings...
I have told my company not to drink the koolaid but they (marketing, who run the company basically) seem quite convinced this is a wonderful idea.
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Tuesday 10th September 2013 08:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
I really dont understand this... If I wanted to use something other than Google to search for things, I would. I can set Bing or Yahoo or whatever to be my default search on my Xperia Z Tablet if I want. But its all down to personal preference. I like Google and thats what I use. If other people want to use something else, they can. You are not forced into using Google, but the EU commission seems to think that people are.