If you look at what has happened in China after Google left, how they were able to quickly grow massive web companies, protectionism seems like a no-brainer for every slightly advanced country. Silicon Valley sees the huge first-mover advantages and is moving as fast as possible to move into every liberalized market. But it makes no sense for a country to allow Silicon Valley to take these industries for themselves. This is the fastest growing industry for the next several decades with the best paying jobs. It only makes sense to nurture the local companies and local talent instead of giving it all away to the Americans. Europe is always fretting about how they need to create their own Silicon Valley but it's easy to do, kick out the Americans! You'll have your own Baidu, Tencent and Alibabas in no time.
>Although she uses Google frequently, Vestager says it doesn’t cloud her view of the case. “Congratulations for being big, but don’t misuse it. For Europeans, this is very fundamental,” she says.<p>>That might be the scariest thing of all for Google. It isn’t dealing with an antitech ideologue or a competition czar consumed with cementing a personal legacy. It faces a straightforward prosecutor in a hostile political climate dominated by powerful local business interests with their own regulatory agendas. Good luck to Google searching for a way out of that.<p>I've been following this story for a while and I watched the press conferences she gave and that's the impression I got from her as well.<p>I think Google is definitely not going to skate by like they did in the US with a slap on the wrist. The investigation into Android is going to be another big one and if they break up Google's ability to bundle/tie in their services, it pretty much neutralizes the entire benefit of Android to Google as a defensive moat.
> “Dominant companies can’t abuse their dominant position to create advantage in related markets,” she said bluntly, formally accusing Google of exploiting its supremacy in general search to dominate the market for online product searches<p>It seems completely ridiculous to call those two different markets. Finding the most relevant X on the web is fundamentally part of the same market no matter what X is.<p>Now, if they'd accused Google of using their market position in search to promote gmail, for instance, they might have a point. Not a very good point, but at least an understandable point. But calling "general search" and "product search" two different markets? They seem to just be looking for a way to extort concessions out of a company that seems like a tempting target, all the more so for not being an EU company.<p>Later in the same article is an indignant accusation that Google's display of other types of search results don't label themselves as ads. Of course they're not; if you search for an address, and you conveniently get a map of that address (which is one of the most likely things you were looking for), that's not an ad, that's the content you actually wanted. (By contrast, the garbage next to it telling you about other services related to random keywords in the search terms <i>are</i> ads.)<p>Now, the crazy 2014 deal that fell through certainly does sound like antitrust-style collusion; it's certainly ridiculous to have competitors bid for the right to appear as a list of competing services at the top of Google search results. But far from the "extortion" it's described as, it sounds a lot more like collusion between multiple large companies to exclude smaller players. The solution isn't to find a way to include more companies; it's to forget that that anticompetitive arrangement was ever proposed, and continue on with the current situation where Google shows users whatever it thinks they're looking for.<p>(I'm not suggesting that Google has pure and altruistic motives here; far from it. They're out to make money. I'm just saying that they've done nothing <i>wrong</i> here, and more generally that there's no wrong here for anyone to be accused of doing. That some random local company in the EU got annoyed at not being at the top of Google search results should not be Google's problem, or anyone's problem other than that company's.)
Im in Germany, i can see no investment to grow a european google. Oh, yes there are great declarations of grandios plans.<p>But my experience in a baker-shop can tell you everything on the european attitude towards technology.
"So what are you doing for a livin?"
"I work as a software developer.."
"Oh, so your company doesent produce anything real?"<p>You cant force a culture to embrace something new that it detests. This doesent mean that this culture will not buy the products, but it will never produce them on the level as californium.<p>Another example? People pay ridiculous amounts of money for public television in germany. And it is bad. Outright horrible. Not regarding production quality, not the acting, execution and direction. Then what is missing to create a german game of thrones? The answer: A diffrent production culture, that doesent view half a hour of screaming drama as a authentic drama, and understands that a joke on the henchmans axeblade makes drama so much more impacting. Will that change come? No. Cultures only adapt when they suffer and europe is not suffering enough.
Much of this debate centers on the premonition that Google highlights their own content and services in order to fight competition and maximize their own profits. They are acting intentionally and rationally. But their monopoly is hurting others, so we (er, the EU) convict(s) Google of malice.<p>However, another plausible position is that Google is merely behaving <i>negligently</i>. There are some studies (paid by competitors, sure) showing users <i>dislike</i> Google promoted content and products. Those products should probably have their A/B tests ended, but nobody has the guts to pull the plug (and willpower to evolve the effort into something else). Knowledge Base has sucked away ~30% of Wikipedia's traffic, which thankfully has not <i>yet</i> hurt donations. Google certainly doesn't want Wikipedia to fall apart.<p>If we want to draw a parallel to Microsoft's monopoly, we could point out how IE was initially a good product but then fell behind the competition. Pushing it on consumers not only hurt consumer choice, but (over time) locked users into a poor experience. But did we really need to carry out a lengthy (and ineffective) anti-trust case?<p>Building a legal case is expensive and highly political. If discovery doesn't uncover evidence of malicious intentions, then one must prove competitors and consumers were harmed. But if the monopoly has been held for so long, how can one prove those damages without resorting to small, expensive, and contrived studies?<p>We should begin to embrace an <i>expectation</i> that the producer of any successful product will eventually become negligent. Protecting consumer choice is not just about fair discovery, but ensuring the diversity needed for markets to evolve (for better or, perhaps in the short term, for worse). Why do we have to go to such effort to show how Google is specifically doing harm? Why can't we say they had their turn, and here are places where they have concentrated marketshare and thus places in need of diversity?
I have seen several comments that basically say "Google puts customers first, but this goes against the EU's strong preference to protect local workers."<p>It is not "customers over workers" it is "customers over local corporations with less developed products". Google has offices in 40 different countries (<a href="https://www.google.com/about/careers/locations/" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/about/careers/locations/</a>). Workers could easily go work for Google without moving to America...and Google offers some of the best, most competitive career prospects of any company. Until this changes, there is no reason to presume that Google's behavior in Europe is somehow hurting "workers."<p>Sure, <i>if</i> Google was providing inferior products, and paying its workers lower-than-market salaries and abusing its dominance to keep better products out of the market, then all of this fuss would make sense. Fear of this happening at <i>some</i> point is not, in my opinion, a good justification for such heavy resistance to Google's activities.<p>We shouldn't confuse the interests of local (i.e. European) corporations with the interests of the people. It being harder for a Danish company, for example, to enter the online search, mapping, or shopping market doesn't mean it is harder for Danish people to <i>work</i> in online search, mapping, or shopping. It also does not mean it is harder for Danish people use high-quality products in these industries. I don't see how Google's actions so far constitute "abuse of dominance" even if you take a protection-of-workers stance...only if you take a "protection of the local corporate CEO" stance.
For a long time, countries agreed that free-trade was the best way to avoid another war. Europe was created as an economic region first, to avoid another war.<p>But today I'm afraid Europe suffers memory loss.<p>They're using coercion against another country (always the same one, the USA) for ideological reasons... which is the very definition of war.<p>The fact they're citing money as the reason only makes it more frightening. Prosperous countries avoid war and favor trade instead, if possible.<p>As a European citizen, I can witness the anti-american mindset: it's growing, nurtured by press and politicians. Don't think "it's not the USA, it's Google/Amazon/Apple/Microsoft/Facebook": they actually cite the USA all day long until Google is a synonym for the USA in people's mind.<p>A quick check with the first article I can find in my Google newsfeed: in the french press, about Apple Music, the article starts with "Le géant américain de l'informatique Apple" (The american IT giant/behemoth Apple)<p>The internet is an amazing promoter of free-trade, so unsurprisingly it's the perfect target for Europe.<p>Please don't call it a conspiracy theory: it's not one, because I hope I'm wrong ;-)
Surprisingly little talk here about the degree to which Google <i>has</i> abused its search market position in ways that push other players out. I would have expected more. Antitrust laws exist for a reason. If Google uses its dominance in search to stop better solutions from having a chance, it hurts everyone--consumers included, but startups especially. It's not just a matter of "protectionism," it's a matter of keeping the market open to innovation.
Does anyone remember Quaero?
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero</a>
In 2005 the French and German governments sponsored a "European" competitor to Google. It failed.