While I think net neutrality (as it is defined) is important Google is a serious consolidation risk. Gmail has 1b users the internet has 3.2-3.5. Google probably controls 2/3 of that. Not only is search quality going down, but this is absurdly dangerous. Controlling shopping results is tame compared to the potential for misuse
I wish there would be a similar reaction to Google "skewing" searches in general towards what seems to be the most popular and highly-SEO'd, but also not very useful nor informative sites. When searching for more obscure things I sometimes have to go beyond 3-4 pages to find the good content, repeat with small variations of the query, etc. I often even go to the "last" page of results, without finding anything (and think to myself, "this is the Internet, where all of human knowledge is supposed to be; and yet, why can't I find anything about X?") I also seem to trigger the "you may be a bot" CAPTCHA more frequently than before.<p>Of course, that's unlikely to happen because there's no money in it...<p>IMHO the usefulness of Google as a search engine has decreased rather noticeably within the past few years. It's become less precise, less thorough (they've always been inflating the result count, but recently it seems worse), and nearly hostile to those "advanced seekers" who know exactly what they're looking for. I still remember, many years ago, discovering new and interesting "corners" of the Internet with Google. If Fravia were still alive, he may have something similar to say.<p>To a huge majority of the Internet-using population, Google is <i>the</i> Internet. It holds a huge amount of power in controlling the information people can find, and that's absolutely scary. It's something that governments have always wanted.
Although I don't like advertisement, my understanding is that Google provides massive added value there. So why on earth do they have to skew their results ?<p>Or, maybe I don't properly understand "skew", i.e. the european commission condemned not so much a voluntary bias from Google rather than a "natural" bias from Google...<p>The good news is that if we can constraint Google on economical ground, we can also constraint them on more ethical stuff, such has fight against terrorism...
A fine of this scale sets a dangerous precedent. How hard would it be wrong everything that Google has built with the same logic? Aren't inline word-meanings hurting revenues of the dictionary sites? How about currency conversions?
Google is a private company/website, couldn't they just put a disclaimer up saying something like 'we're only going to show you results from our stores, if you don't like it, go elsewhere'.<p>People aren't forced to use Google, and Google can show you what they like. Is that the real issue, that they were saying they treated all companies fairly but didn't?
You can be quite certain if google recognised their revenue in in France, not Ireland, this would not have happened. Yet another shakedown, no matter what you think of the merits of the case