Microsoft, German publishers hit Google with anti-trust suits

re: AC @ 16:53 - Real World

If the real world analogy is illegal product dumping, then the same case can be made for EVERY website on the internet that does not charge you to access it.

The Reg doesn't charge you to access it's articles, and host a paper rag does. Since it and it obviously costs something to produce and host the content , it follows that The Reg is "Dumping" their product, and is engaging in illegal anti-competitive behavior - at least according to the definition that you are applying to Google.

Any other website that provides content for free (most of the internet) would run afoul of the same problems.

The reality is that giving stuff away for free or below cost in the brick and mortar world is called "Loss Leading". It is a well-established, consumer-friendly way for a company to gain prospective clients or increase market share.

If Loss Leading didn't exist and wasn't accepted, your "free" cell phone would have cost you $600+ at signup. Instead, by selling the phones at a loss or giving them away the cell carriers were able to increase market penetration with the intention of making up the loss on the back end of the contract.

Google wasn't the first to provide online Mapping, and they are not the best ones in the marketplace, but they provide the service as a loss leader to get you into trying their other services. If you run a mapping service and don't like it, well, you can either throw a tantrum or produce a product that gives the consumer a better value. We can see what the competition did here.

I'm not trying to support Google here - I am trying to support a free Internet, where people can provide or share their content for free if they so desire. If you want to post your vacation pictures online and let others use them, then you shouldn't be sued by stock photography companies because your free picture of an empty beach competes with their ability to sell someone a picture of the same beach.

not dumping if it's the same price as everyone else

Many of the other mapping services were free too. I was an avid mapquest user before google maps became better than theirs.

Same price but better quality. How is that dumping?

Early? lol

Those weren't the early days of the Internet or even the web. In the early days of the web we were using Mosaic and the originally free Netscape betas. In the early days of the Internet there were no web browsers and we used email, newsgroups, ftp and gopher.