European parliament may propose search services split in threat to Google

Before people start suggesting this is some anti-American agenda from the EU, keep in mind there are many American companies that have been complaining to the EU such as Yelp and Expedia. They want to stop Google&#x27;s tying practices such as using their monopoly in search (another thing to keep in mind is that their market share in the EU is something absurd like over 90%) to benefit other products and services. It&#x27;s not really calling for breaking up the company. Also this is specifically about raising the temperature on the European Commission. Parliament itself doesn&#x27;t do this.<p>This is a signal from politicians to the European Commission that they can go hard.

Google search competitors are not even close with the quality of Google search results. This year I started trying Bing, Yahoo and right now DuckDuckGo as an experiment and none of them has the same quality. Bing is the only one that came closer. That&#x27;s why Google owns search. They may be using shady tactics, but the competitors still need to get better.

Rivals should maybe ask themselves why Google has such an enormous market share in search.<p>Maybe a 90% market share originates simply from better quality?

Following this premise, I guess it&#x27;s time to assess massive trade tariffs on all vehicles manufactured by German companies, either domestically, or imported. Their dominance in the luxury category is really just too much, it needs to be significantly regulated or reduced.<p>For Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Porsche the US is their largest market. Between 20% and 25% of all sales typically come from the US for those automakers.<p>Jobs will be lost? Nah, auto supply will shift to domestics and or Asian manufacturers. The Germans will simply lose a big fat market, and it&#x27;s unlikely all of Europe will agree to strike back against US automakers.<p>Economic war is the only thing that is likely to come out of the EU trying to split Google.

Scale has its advantage, products like Google Now or a Home Robot&#x2F;Assistant is not possible unless there are a ton of data points available to be processed. I thinking breaking up is not a solution, but rather content(headlines included) and data about customer should be traded between companies using APIs. Like a data exchange, just like exchanges for electricity and other utilities. Imagine a time in future when you want a fancy Apple robot, but that robot is dumb unless it has access to all of your current and past data.

I am thinking of a tutorial on search result pages as a settlement.

This is political posturing and grandstanding on steroids, whoever bought the EU parliament (evidently Germany publishers) did a good job.<p>They can’t “break up” Google, it’s an American company! it’s not based there.<p>Also the previous competition chief ridiculed such notions when he was recently asked about it by Parliament citing the utility companies (German ones) that would be first in line for a breakup debate if that was a tool they wanted to use:<p><i>The decision to reopen settlement talks followed vigorous criticism from a widening range of politicians, including the economy ministers of France and Germany. The latter, Sigmar Gabriel, argued in May that a forced breakup of Google should be seriously considered because of its vast market power. Werner Langen, a European lawmaker representing German Chancellor Angela Merkel&#x27;s CDU party, echoed that suggestion, drawing parallels with U.S. efforts to break up monopolies in oil and other industries. &quot;If we don&#x27;t give them a bash we&#x27;re not going to solve the problem,&quot; he said.<p>Mr. Almunia showed little sympathy for such demands. &quot;I would tell you one thing, as a German friend,&quot; he said. &quot;The day I [hear] that the railways will accept unbundling, electricity companies will accept unbundling, and we will discuss [unbundling] with telecom operators and others…let&#x27;s discuss unbundling Google, but not before.</i><p>via <a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/google-must-improve-search-settlement-or-face-charges-eus-almunia-says-1411462097" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;online.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;google-must-improve-search-se...</a><p>The fact that they are drafting a motion targeting one company is so shamelessly political it’s almost a public display of corruption.<p>Not to mention that the ludicrous levels of attention and weigh this issue is getting in the EU is unheard of and unwarranted:<p><i>One technology industry source with knowledge of the motion also called it a &quot;politically-motivated campaign to do something that is a regulatory matter&quot;. He added: &quot;These guys are calling for the break-up of Google. That is not in proportion to the degree of concern articulated by the commission during its investigation.</i>

Perhaps they should be forced to release keywords versus clicked links data to other companies like Duck Duck Go, just like Microsoft was forced to document things like SMB for Samba and the various Office formats.

Google != AT&amp;T

Search is a public utility, just like the Internet itself.