Is Alphabet-Google 'too big to jail'? The Lords find out Europe's examination of Big Tech's dominant platforms – like Alphabet-Google and Amazon – is only just beginning, but Parliament got a teaser of the battles ahead this week, as two antitrust professors sharply disagreed on the merits of the enquiry. Professors David Evans, of UCL, and Ariel Ezrachi, of Oxford University, at …
Which is why such a commission is needed, but as was pointed out, the industry is changing fast and such commissions are always slow.
That was the problem with the Microsoft story over a decade ago. By the time they got around to doing anything, the market had changed and much of the punishment was irrelevant - by then Firefox had grabbed a substantial share of the market and Chrome and Safari were also there, but MS had to offer the browser ballot, even when their market share had dropped from over 95% to around 50%. All the browser ballot did was annoy users and show how slow and out of touch the monopoly commission was.
The browser ballot would have been the right punishment in 2001, but it was silly by the time it was implemented and in 2014 it was irrelevant.
They need to move quickly in the internet age, they can't procrastinate for half a decade, either they need to react swiftly and decisively or they need to steer clear. As a consumer, I'd like them to react swiftly and either slam the brakes on these organisations quickly or clear them. Having these cases hanging around for half a decade just says that they are out of touch.
I think the public are sophisticated enough to stick with what works for them, while Google delivers better results on average they'll hold their customers, not because the customers are lazy or unsophisticated but because they're making logical and proper choices.
There's a strong element of 'we know better than the public' on display. While that's the foundation for resisting monopolies and the public's willingness to sell their own choice to the them, it can go too far. Listening to Microsoft sponsored lobbying is not helping them make the right decisions.
I strongly suspect the best policy the EU could come up with would (and should) disappoint *everyone* - the mythical level playing field no one lobbying actually wants. They should be looking at what delivers the least harm to users and nothing else.
Right now not having Foundem pop up in search is doing me no harm at all and not having dozens of 2ndary search engines fill the top search results was an improvement I want to see continued.
The problem with a search engine is that you don't know what information you're not getting. Unless you happen to search for something very specific that you already know exists. The consumer can only objectively know an alternative to Google is better by doing A/B comparisons on all searches or be being convinced by, typically, word of mouth from people they trust. Even Google delivers varied results depending on whether you're using your regular PC/account/location. You have little insight or recourse into what it decides to omit or down rank.
"Even Google delivers varied results depending on whether you're using your regular PC/account/location."
Yep - one of the most irritating things about Google is this. There also seems to be time differential as well - same search term, same location but several weeks later - different results.
He blamed it all on Microsoft for "lobbying".
I think that is the crux of the problem. Microsoft and its cronies don't have as good a search engine as Google and are rather miffed about it.
All the others have to do is to become as good as Google ar search and then people may/will use them. Until that happens Microsoft and their cronies should shut up.
The problem is, Google is now so big, you can't get into search, by the time you've built up a decent search engine, you will have gone bust, because you cannot get the traffic away from the major players.
But that isn't where the problem lies, the problem is that Google doesn't just do advertising, I mean search, it also does operating systems, content and services and the argument is that it uses it sway in the search market to push people into using those services.
I can't say I've seen much evidence of this, apart from video results being mainly for YouTube. But it is a question that needs to be cleared up and in this day and age, it needs to be cleared up quickly, not dragged out for half a decade.
Are they guilty of abusing their position? Maybe. But procrastinating over it for years on end isn't going to help one way or another.
Simplest solution, governments should create their own search region based upon a defined set of characteristics and localised to their region. Mandate that it be set as a readily and easily changed default and people are then provided choice.
Quite simply both Google and M$ have proven than searching the internet can not be left up to private corporations as they will distort the search results to favour profitable outcomes for them.
People need honest straight forward search engine which will provide 'neutral' accurate results, better for them and better for business.
Gross invasion of privacy with a view to psychologically manipulating human choice to favour profits at the expense of the people being manipulated is pretty much as evil as it gets.
Under no circumstance would the FTC's overambitious lawyers have won their case vs Google (re)search
Judge Leval and a Unanimous Circuit Court wrote the book on 'transformative use(s)'. Piddly commercial considerations can never override the purpose of copyright, which is to make ideas available for transformation into something more useful. Even now, movies, music, photography, auto-computer-code and soon smells and tastes are being legally-copied by users/device-owners, standardized (like Pantone Colors), digitized and reproduced at a distance for categorization and production of snippets.
Political objections can't stop Google from categorizing the air we breath, even over the objections of the garbage-haulers and poor-people-poisoners.
Users have the right to see all the code they pay for. Every last line of Microsoft, and VolksWagen code can be inspected, categorized and its underlying ideas understood by the user, librarian, et al for the purpose of inventing something better. The only limit on the user with copyrighted material is that the user cannot reproduce the original-work un-transformed by the user for user gain.
Der Spiegel need to turn its mirror on itself.
I can't see any antitrust processes against Google going well.
The name itself has become a genericized trademark meaning "to look up information on the web." One does not say "I'm going to use Google to look for [Info]," they just say "I'mma Google that for you real quick."
And the thing is... Nobody except Google's business rivals wants that to change. Google is, at its core, a search engine. Years and years of refinement, advancements, and more refinements, have lead to it becoming dominant - because it is the best at finding what most people want.
I mean, really, what are regulators going to do? Block connections to google.com? As soon as people get over the initial panic of being unable to search for things and dredge up the vague memory of Bing and Yahoo (which I was surprised this year to learn still exists,) the first thing they'll do is search, using Bing or Amazon, "how to use Google in [country]."
It goes beyond that, though; gmail has become as integral to so many people's lives as Google web-searching. Google Docs/Drive has, too, and while everybody and their mother might offer webmail services, to my knowledge nobody offers what Google Drive does.
Any kind of serious anti-trust actions aimed at disrupting Google would lead to outrage and pandemonium. People's lives would be massively disrupted. Some people might even be outright ruined if, say, they can't get at their vital information on Drives or their Gmail. Android phones would all be in rough shape, too, since they default to the presumption of a lot of these services existing.
Like it or not, through a combination of being That Damn Good and some shady sneaky tactics, Google has become a vital infrastructural component of the everyday lives of more people than I can count. Actually knocking them down would be tantamount to political suicide, and might even lead to hordes of angry voters whose lives have been seriously compromised demanding a rollback of antitrust laws.
So what can be done?
I dunno. I'm not sure ought CAN be done. If they tried some cockamamie scheme to "split up" Google the way they split up Ma Bell, you'd just leave a bunch of orphaned services which are so interdependent upon one another as to be rendered non-functional. I guess you could, say, make a demand that Google set up their services such that you CAN choose to use other search engines to power the search bar, say, using Bing on the YouTube website search bar to search for videos...
But literally nobody would do so, because why the hell would you? What would be the point?
I'm not convinced...while I'd agree Google dominates search, I'm less convinced about GDocs, GDrive or GMail's dominance. Sure, many people have become co-opted into GDrive and GMail because they don't have a choice if they have an Android phone, but I'd be curious to see how many of those have swallowed the Kool-Aid. Consider: despite Google+'s tie-in with the Play Store, customers managed to ignore it enough that it faded away.
Given open APIs for search, advertising, location-awareness, et al, there's no reason why these services can't be run independently and remain as rich. ownCloud, as an example I can immediately think of, offers a very comparable experience, based on pluggable components.
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