Or maybe those who think that people are somehow victims for making their own bad decisions are trying to deny their agency.
I can blame Google for having some shitty practices - but not for why those who would seem to know better use them anyway.
By analogy, if I think I deserve more civil treatment from somebody but am beaten, raped, or robbed instead - of course I would feel wronged by their actions. But if I go back to them day after day and it recurs, then in a strictly cause-and-effect sense, I would be greatly contributing to the injustice perpetrated to my person. Clinging to roles based upon the sanctity of perceived victimhood does not change that. People are not what they call themselves, they are what they actually do.
True and of course from the view of economists and regulators there are different types of monopolies. However as @CarlMud has once again beaten me to the punch just above, and as per my previous comments, I find it hard to really see Google’s actions in this specific area as being any sort of monopoly.
Most indeededly. History is littered with examples of former actual or functional monopolies or simply once very clever majority competitors in a particular market.
Note also that even given Google’s dominance in search that does not automatically equate to search in all areas, even shopping.
As an example of what I mean, here in Japan “everyone” goes to kakaku.com for local price searches. Yahoo Japan (huge and dominant) has a shopping gateway and doesnt feed people to kakaku by its search engine, yet a local competitor was able to take the lead from both market leaders for search.
I find myself asking “why couldnt a European company do the same?” Especially since by all measures, a good number of European countries produce software that beats the pants off anything Japan can do. Not to mention the high quality European software used around the world. So why didnt any domestic European price search product succeed in its own market?
This gets me back to my idea that Google isnt a monopoly in this area and that the finding is incorrect and the fine an excessive political signal.
As far as if Google should be regulated to show all possible results equally, it seems that @CarlMud’s bakery/grocery store analogy has the right of it. Both the size and principle are off in my opinion.
I wish the US would protect its small businesses like this. Per EU process, this ruling goes into effect immediately even while any appeal is pending.
Google tweaks left a trail of destroyed companies in its wake. The decision could be a boon to the survivor companies or those who were acquired and continue barebones operations.
Companies can potentially sue for reparations. It might be ideal if laid off employees could get compensated directly but their former employers might have to say “yes, this layoff was directly related to Google.”
The tweaks were initially dressed up as going after “content farmers” but eventually became torpedoes aimed at the ecommerce companies. Nextag, Pricegrabber, Shopzilla, Bizrate, Shopping.com, LowPriceShopper, etc. used to come up frequently in individual product searches on Google and often had better pricing. Sure, you’d have to wade through some garbage and occasionally the pricing wasn’t as accurate/updated as it appeared but in all it resulted in more diverse results not just for those redirect platforms but for all of the ecommerce retailers they pointed to, as well as for the users who could sort on those sites by price and reputation.
Many of those companies/sites have consolidated, are now run only as barebones shadows of their former selves, or folded up shop. Google can continue to argue that they were combating engine manipulation, but the result was conveniently eliminating their competition (remember when Google introduced a commerce/shopping envelope in the late 2000’s and it got no traction). Google has been given 90 days to untweak a decade of algorithmic changes.
[quote=“CarlMud, post:36, topic:103654”]
I don’t think you understand that a book written in the 40s has no frame of reference for the concept of antitrust regulation[/quote]
Oh, for heaven’s sake. Clark’s book was the formal introduction of the notion of effective competition, which has become the key philosophical foundation for all modern antitrust law. It is an explicit contrast to the notion of perfect competition, which is the naive threshold you are suggesting for monopolistic activity.
It’s not to say anything about the book itself, but what the book doesn’t contain - a modern approach to a modern issue - namely information services that by nature can’t actually wield monopoly powers the way a brick and mortar industry company can.
[quote=“CarlMud, post:65, topic:103654”]
what the book doesn’t contain - a modern approach to a modern issue[/quote]
You are suggesting that the analysis in this area on the part of legal and economics scholars hasn’t been ongoing? Do you think that the only people paying attention to these issues with any deep understanding of online commerce are tech bloggers?
by nature can’t actually wield monopoly powers the way a brick and mortar industry company can.
Pretty much everyone with actual expertise in the theory and practice of antitrust regulation would disagree with this statement, which was laid to rest with 253 F.3d 34 and the discussion that ensued.
I’m saying the law hasn’t caught up with it. And I wouldn’t even necessarily trust politicians to write sound law relating to information services. They’ve already screwed up copyright laws as they relate to modern technologies. Whatever position they take will magically benefit corporations and the wealthy by some strange coincidence… The EU has especially shown its lack of understanding of modern technology with the supposed right to be forgotten, which doesn’t actually forget anyone because of how the internet works. It’s probably even a pipe dream to get enough tech savvy politicians elected to entertain the idea that the law will ever be well-informed or versatile enough to handle rapidly changing technologies.
First, a side note - I wouldn’t have had to google the damn case number if you had just typed “United States v. Microsoft Corp.” People don’t tend to memorize case numbers but they do recognize case names.
But that case dealt with bundled software and operating systems, which aren’t as capable of being neutral like an internet connection is. It was in a time when internet connections were slow and unreliable, when browsers weren’t necessarily free, and search engines weren’t more than search engines. It doesn’t directly address issues relevant in this case.
And if you’re going to appeal to authority, I’d like to see a citation from “pretty much everyone with actual expertise in the theory and practice of antitrust regulation” in specific regard to this case.
I’ve never seen a phone which didn’t allow sideloading, but it’s worth pointing out in another sense: Google has been leveraging its position as the steward of Android Open Source Project to try and force you into using Play Services. The majority of actual Android apps haven’t been updated since 2.3 it seems (that’s 7 years ago) and in several cases the official word is “No, this open source app that’s part of android isn’t supported, use the proprietary one which requires Play Services.”
That’s not even bringing up how they leverage their position as owning probably half of the websites you visit regularly to constantly shove Chrome in your face.
[quote=“CarlMud, post:67, topic:103654, full:true”]
I’m saying the law hasn’t caught up with it. [/quote]
That’s quite an assertion. I guess whole vast armies of economists and jurists must be amateurs.
It doesn’t directly address issues relevant in this case.
Of course not, it is a different case, but the idea that you can apply antitrust to things not made of bricks is established by this case (as well as others).
And if you’re going to appeal to authority, I’d like to see a citation from “pretty much everyone with actual expertise in the theory and practice of antitrust regulation” in specific regard to this case.
I can’t imagine an answer that would satisfy you here. I’m comfortable making the assertion as I have firsthand experience discussing these issues with antitrust regulators, and believe they are professionals who know what they are doing and don’t act capriciously in such cases. I don’t think it matters to me or to the EU whether you agree based on reading articles by Cory and Techdirt.
As for citations, I offered a starting point which you immediately rejected. I do not believe the request was made in good faith.
But there’s a difference between an operating system, software, and an information service, and 15+ years of technological development. That’s the level of nuance that can greatly change the scenario, but you’re still pretending a book written before Arpanet existed can relevantly address the issue.
I don’t think it was made in good faith either. It was made in jest, because the assertion that “pretty much everyone with actual expertise in the theory and practice of antitrust regulation” grossly overstates even your claimed experience of talking to antitrutst regulators. You can’t possibly know what that sheer number of people think on this case, no matter how many antitrust regulators you’ve spoken to, so the claim is dubious on the face of it. If you make an absurd claim, expect an absurd response.
It isn’t authority bias to respect the opinion of authorities in their field of expertise.
a book written before Arpanet existed can relevantly address the issue
No, I pointed out that the book is the seminal source on effective competition, which is fundamental to antitrust law, especially the formulation of criteria for what constitutes anticompetitive behavior. These issues are not technical questions about how hard it is for someone to program an internet client, they are economic and legal questions about how to recognize when a company in a dominant position is exploiting that dominance unfairly, and those principles are not tied to specific corporate product.
The fine hasn’t been levied against Google the piece of software you access with your browser, but against a corporate entity known as Google (or Alphabet); this entity doesn’t live on the internet, it lives in international legal contracts which govern the way it does business, and whose applicability will not be determined by software engineers but (rightly) by the courts.
The first question in this sort of analysis is does Google (or any other enterprise) have a dominant position in the market?
In this case Google clearly did and does. Why that is the case is irrelevant. Lets also be clear about this just in case - having a dominant position in the market is not itself a problem or something the regulator gives a stuff about.
The next question is have they abused their dominant position?
In this context abuse includes deliberately directly or indirectly imposing unfair purchase or selling prices or other unfair trading conditions; limiting markets to the detriment of consumers, or applying dissimilar conditions to equivalent transactions with other trading partners thereby placing them at a competitive disadvantage.
Those are examples, not an exhaustive list. Abuse of a dominant position can (obviously) include things that would be perfectly fair practice if the enterprise doing them wasn’t in a dominant position.
Again lets be clear on that - the rules change once you become the 900lb gorilla. Things you could do before, you’re not allowed to do anymore.
That is (one place) where your bakery example falls down. Unless your bakery happened to be the only bakery in existence, it is very unlikely to be in a dominant position. It therefore has no dominant position to abuse, it can basically do what the hell it likes free of worry about the EU regulator.
Ditto your pizza guy.
I would also take issue with your assertion that people who used Google to find price comparisons want (or wanted) to have Google’s price comparison rather than anyone else’s. The evidence suggests otherwise. Google’s offering was tanking.
In addition, you have to bear in mind all this was back in 2004-2008. I’m fairly sure (if only based on my anecdotal experience) that if you asked the average Hausfrau or Monsieur back then about Google, most would say “Was?” or shrug their shoulders in an insouciant gallic fashion and some would have said “oh, the search engine”.
This is way before Google took the sort of central place in terms of offering email, web storage, cloud services and god knows what else (at least as far as most people in Europe’s experience is concerned.
I don’t think you can assume that everyone takes/took the same sort of view you take of what Google is/was.
Yeah, again - this is not the case. The issue isn’t that Google should have provided neutral results as such. The issue is that they created the rules that determine which results show up where. They then entered the market themselves by offering a price comparison service.
That service was crap. People did not want to use it.
Google then used its power of determining which search results show up where to ensure that its offering turned up first and deliberately ensured that rival price comparison results showed up on page 4 at best.
To be clear, the issue isn’t that Google’s offering was great and pissed all over everyone else’s. It didn’t. It didn’t show up top of the list because that was just how Google’s algorithms worked out.
It showed up top of the list because Google didn’t apply its algorithms to it, it just created a rule ensuring its comparison offering would always be top.
That in itself might still have been fine. But they didn’t stop there.
They deliberately tweaked their algorithms to ensure that their rival offerings did not turn up where they would otherwise have done. They made them vanish into complete obscurity.
So to run through them:
No there isn’t. There is an expectation that a company that effectively controls the search market should not act in ways that unfairly distort or prevent competition. If you’re Bing? Do what you like. No one cares. It’s the price of being the Big Guy - you have to be more careful than the little dudes.
Yes it is.
I don’t get this at all. How is this relevant? Is it something to do with your electricity provider using coal or something? If your electricity supplier had to install solar panels, they would still be providing you with electricity just from solar. I don’t get it.
In any event, in my area we used to have a number of regional monopolies on electricity and gas supply. They owned the cables and pipes, you had to pay their prices. That is no longer the case. Now, yes, my local company has to allow other companies access to their market. I can buy my power and gas from any one of hundreds of suppliers.
In practical terms, it’s the same power and gas of course, it all comes from the same power station, etc. just different wholesalers buy it and sell it on to me.
Given that supermarkets are probably the most cut-throat competitors in the European market, this is also a very bad example. Your local grocery store is not in a dominant position.
Regulators do keep a careful eye on supermarkets to ensure that no one operator is getting to the point that they do dominate the market. So far the supermarkets mostly do a good job of scrapping amongst themselves.
Again, no dominant position, no abuse. It would also not be abuse to just carry on serving your own food.
I can’t help but notice that neither you nor @Israel_B answer the question - do you think that Google’s actions here hindered competition? Was the competitiveness of the market higher before or after Google’s actions?
While there is a point that technology moves on and the law generally plays catchup, I am always very wary whenever someone pops up claiming that the technology is such a massive game-changer that judges’ puny little minds just can’t cope.
Every new tech-co comes up with its wonderful new ‘disruptive’ technology. Generally speaking, when you strip away the hype, it turns out in legal terms to be a variation on a fairly well-known theme.
Take uber. We’re so disruptive, we’re not a taxi company, blah-blah.
They may not be a taxi company but the contracts they entered into with the drivers fall into very clear employment categories.
They could have set them up differently to get the results they said they wanted, i.e. no commitments from anybody, no need for worker’s rights, etc. They certainly had enough lawyers to draft decent contracts.
Instead they chose to try and tie the drivers down as much as possible while leaving themselves with no obligations in return. Strangely enough, that has been tried by numerous employers in the past. That is not new and disruptive.
It definitely seems to be the case that the EU has a problem with Google having a dominant position in the market. That’s a sine qua non for the charges.
This contradicts your earlier claim that the dominance isn’t an issue. And there’s a significant nuance between becoming dominant through nefarious anti-competitive business practices and becoming dominant because consumers chose your brand over others. As I’ve said before, Google became dominant through providing a quality service that people liked. Punishing them for that is essentially telling customers (and EU voting citizens) that the government knows better than them what they want.
Let’s try a new analogy:
There are five ice cream parlors in town. All five give away their ice cream for free and sell advertising space on their walls to local businesses that the customers see when they come in to get free ice cream. One particular parlor gives away the best flavors. The other four parlors dwindle in customer traffic because they’re giving away crappy ice cream. Suddenly most everyone in town is getting free ice cream from one place. The mayor, whose brother-in-law owns one of the other parlors in town, now tells the successful parlor that they have to “be fair” and give away his brother-in-law’s ice cream since it’s dominant in the market. The mayor also suggests that, to be fair, customers should be encouraged to go visit the other parlors that they haven’t been interested in.
These statements contradict each other and the second sentence contradicts the nature of a human designed system. Someone, somewhere will always have to determine which and where results show up, whether they do it through intentional placement, algorithmic settings, or even an AI that does the sorting by how it’s programmed. And in this scenario, the EU is saying that the government should be able to determine how and where search results show up, which seems worse than letting a for-profit company do it. You can use a different search service if you don’t like Google’s results, but if the government starts messing with the results in the service you chose to use, they’re substituting your judgement with their own. I don’t want someone in the Trump administration telling Google which sites and services should appear in my search results. The EU may not be as bad as Trump but I’m generally not going to trust bureaucrats and elected officials whose expertise is not information services to determine the nature of my information services.
Solar panels provide their own electricity, thus barring the need for my electricity company to provide me electricity. Companies shouldn’t be forced by the government to help competing businesses, even though Google does list their competitors and links to articles about how to remove Google from your life and articles about “better” alternatives to Google products and services. It’s fine if I want to hire a solar panel company to install my panels when I choose to stop doing business with the local electricity supplier, but the electricity company shouldn’t be forced by the government to help put themselves out of business.
As @Israel_B said, no. In this case, there’s a difference between an information service and a brick and mortar company having market dominance. The choice of consumers to prefer Google and give it market dominance has hindered the competition. To “fix” this issue is to punish not only Google but the consumers who chose Google over its competitors.
There’s also a difference between Google and the internet. Anyone can enter the market and set up their own search engine and anyone can set up their own price comparison site. Google only has control of their own websites. They’re not interfering with ISPs and internet access, DNS services, or web hosting companies. If you could show they were forcing Bing to delist their price comparison competitors or forcing a hosting company to stop serving their price comparison competitors, you’d have a better case. If a consumer doesn’t like Google’s results, they can choose a different service. Or they can google price comparison sites and go to them directly. Google provides links to its competitors if that’s what you’re looking for. When I type Amazon.com into my Chrome browser, Google doesn’t redirect me to Google Shopping.
Search engines are inherently subjective and human-controlled and a search engine doesn’t have to list every website out there. And the fact that the EU has already told Google to delist references to news articles that EU citizens want to be forgotten means that the EU acknowledges that humans are capable of deciding what shows up and what doesn’t. It also shows that the EU thinks the government should have that power over a business despite not being in the information service industry itself.
At least in the US, the cases I’ve seen don’t inspire trust in the judiciary’s ability to understand how technology may change a scenario. Judge Alsup learning to code in Java for the Google Oracle case is about the only heartening news I’ve heard about judges trying to actually obtain the experience and knowledge necessary to be competent to make a ruling, though even he got some things wrong, in my opinion. And the dominance of lawyers and businessmen in legislative positions doesn’t bode well for having laws that understand technology well either.
I’m not going to argue about Uber being a bag of dicks to their drivers. It’s also different since Uber isn’t an information service despite using new technology. They still put wheels on the road, so it’s not as much of a paradigm shift as an intangible information service.
Yep - like location services - android location service work on about half the devices out there - the solution? your forced to integrate play services. Google is killing its android project. Our take cloud messenger, becoming the paid firebase - yikes.
And while’ I’m with you most of the way, sideloading isn’t a practical distribution method for the “next killer app” - and even the process of sideloading has become more complex in the last 7 years (more prompts and settings required).
[quote=“CarlMud, post:76, topic:103654”]
And there’s a significant nuance between becoming dominant through nefarious anti-competitive business practices and becoming dominant because consumers chose your brand over others. [/quote]
You evidently either didn’t read or bother to parse anything I said.
Having a dominant position is not a problem, the problem is abusing the dominant position. Nobody cares how or why the dominant position was achieved. Whether a business is in a dominant position is a factual determination. It is step one in the chain of questions that are asked to see if any action needs to be taken.
This is the same as one of the requirements of say a charge for driving without due care and attention being that you have to have been driving. The fact that you were driving is not why you get punished but it is one of the things a prosecutor would need to establish.
The thing that gets you charged is that you were driving badly. The fact that you were in control of a moving vehicle is itself neutral but is a necessary component of any charge.
Now you could try and argue that what Google did was not an abuse of its position but so far at least you haven’t done that.
You’ve spent a lot of time trying to argue that Google is somehow not in a dominant position simply because it is a tech co. rather than bricks and mortar while at the same time arguing that it is in a dominant position because it is so much better than other offerings that consumers prefer it.
You also don’t seem to understand or wilfully close your eyes to the actual actions Google took. All of your analogies so far miss the point completely. Your latest is particularly bad but might just about be salvageable:
If you drop the weird part about the mayor forcing the shop to give away other shop’s ice cream which really is completely irrelevant to the case in hand and:
add in the fact that 90% of all business done in town is generated through the adverts on the wall of the successful ice cream parlour; and
that one of the businesses is run by the owner of the successful ice cream parlour; and
she takes money from the other businesses in town to advertise their businesses but actually “displays” their adverts down in the cellar (in a disused filing cabinet with a sign on the door saying “Beware of the Leopard” no lights, no stairs, of course) where no one sees them while plastering her business’s adverts all over the walls in the parlour in nice prominent positions;
the mayor (who may or not be related to one of the owners of the other ice cream parlours) tells the successful parlour owner that she has to stop hiding other people’s adverts…
then you get close to the situation here.
I really don’t see why you feel the need to trot out these analogies rather than just using the actual example.
You said:
What I actually said was:
Summary
If you’re going to ignore most of the argument, no wonder you miss the point. The statements when viewed in the context of the entire argument being made do not contradict each other. If you’re not going to view them in that context, there is no point in any sort of discussion, we might as well go back to picking bugs out of each other’s hair and saying “ook” a lot.
Mind you, probably not a bad idea - see the Librarian. Access to a large library and plentiful supply of bananas sounds pretty good right now.
This I can definitely understand.
Again though I think it misses the fact that consumers, in the sense of Joe Blow sitting in front of his computer or swiping his phone, are not the only people with an interest in what Google shows people. The businesses that advertise on Google also have an interest in what results Google shows people and how.
Since you’re saying that you want “the market” to decide everything, well I guess that’s a point of view. It’s not one that has ever really been shown to work that well for people (or businesses either).
Sorry, still don’t see that this has any relevance to the issue at hand.
Moving on, I asked:
You replied:
So, no, nothing Google did by choosing to promote its service and deliberately hiding other offerings in any way hindered competition. Ok.
You also say that there is a difference between an information service and a ‘bricks and mortar’ company having market dominance. What is that difference? I can’t see that you have given any indication of what you think the difference is other than that there is one. What is so magical about information services?
All of which is irrelevant since in practice, people don’t do that. Consumers use Google. The fact that a consumer could do all sorts of other things is not relevant, they don’t (or more accurately didn’t, who knows what they do now).
As for consumers being able to google for price comparison services, how would they be able to do that given that as a result of Google’s actions, any non-Google price comparison service would only show up on page 4 at best while Google’s offering is plastered all over page 1?
Would it be fair to say that your position is that there should be no governmental interference in the internet at all?
If so, fair enough but I think that boat has long since sailed and was never going to be viable in the first place.
As I said to @Israel_B before, I think we’re about at the end of being able to learn anything from each other on this one.
