OK Google, how many billions does the EU want from you?

I asked Siri, Cortana and Alexa they just responded with "sorry, we're laughing our arses off"...

$2.7 billion though. Pocket change for King Slurp, but with the changes the EU are asking for it could dent income ongoing. Most other businesses would be found in an alley vomiting their feet up at such sums though.

I am kind of torn on this. On the one hand, no one is forcing anyone to use google, but on the other they've gone out of way to try an create a de facto monopoly, and if you do that you've got to be careful.

IBM and Microsoft remain the poster children for not knowing when to wind your neck in, so it isn't like they didn't have some historical references there.

They've got some more issues on the horizon too with Android.

Although I did enjoy the moaning that the EU are being unfair to US businesses - Europe can't create similar businesses in such number for various reasons, so it's not that the US companies are being bullied, it's just that Europe can't match the US for such successes.

So it's not some kind of biased punishment at all.

You will notice the EU is only going after American companies for a completely legal practice which most EU companies do as well.

If the EU isn't careful the US is going to harass money out of EU companies in revenge. Hell, the dunces in Brussels are already trying to set off a trade war with their protectionist proposals about Euro clearing. If passed it will not go unresponded to and it will be far easier to break EU unity than American.

I can't name a single EU business that even has the opportunity to employ the same practice.

Having said that, this whole thing is ludicrous. Of course Google was and should still be in their rights to show us whatever page they want to make for us. As long as they aren't lying to us about what made those results, more power to them.

And I mean that literally. I have a lot more trust in Google than in my own or the European government. Please, more power to Google.

Organized and operated from a much freer marketplace - practically the wild west in comparison to sclerotic euroland - has its' costs.
I guess pay the $2 euro-sin tax that penalizes success, they probably need it more than shareholders and other stakeholders anyway.

Google should just cut Europe off.

Oh the pooor widdle babies! /TweetyBird

Now I see why Europe was freaking out when Trump didn't embrace Article 5 or whatever with both arms. If Russia invaded, Europe would lose because all their soldiers are incapable of reloading a gun.

I'd agree if they hadn't gone out of their way to generate an effective monopoly. In some ways Google are a victim of their own success, they provided - by far - the best search engine. Altavista and co were left standing.

And from that they've gained a lot of power over the economics of the internet. Facebook has recognised this, which is why Zuck is having a crack at a "walled garden" of his own.

As a capitalist, I rather like competition as it brings prices down and ensures there are more tailored offers out there. We've got a number of threats to that, and Google is but one.

I wouldn't. Their two-faced attitude to copyright (we'll defend ours to the death, yours? Well, we'd like to make money off that without giving you any) is problematic. YouTube RED was done with tactics more in line with mafioso than business.

And their infiltration - no other word for it - of government departments is creepy as fuck.

A lot of the SV groups dislike the messiness of democracy, it ill suits their idea of progress, and whilst there's no James Bond style New World Order going on, there is a definite increase in influence of technocractic ideas.

I'd agree if they hadn't gone out of their way to generate an effective monopoly. [\quote]
At least theirs is an open portal to the open web, which makes them radically different from Facebook IMO. I don't disagree that their effective monopoly is grounds for some oversight. But the top link for any search can always only be one. The question is not whether you have bias, but what that bias is. The EU stance doesn't seem to understand that. Google's solution in my eyes was elegant and honest.

Where do you see them defending their copyright?

The shopping isn't one link, it's a large carousel containing several links and designed to take up the top 20-25% of the page and is used to forced to competitors down the page. Google know from their analytics that there is a decreasing interest in clicks from top to bottom, so no, it's not that honest.

Well, IP in general. It is currently pursuing Otto/Uber (despite GV being one of the biggest in investors, such are the politics of SV) over the use of LiDAR tech.

Going after the actual thief is one thing, but this is more about spiking Uber's self driving car ambitions in order to reduce competition against Google's own.

I disagree. Uber truly did try to steal billions in intellectual property from Google and the company needs to be punished for that crime.

Well, yes, I'm not disagreeing with that.

I'm pointing out the Google routinely makes large sums from other peoples IP, but gets rather annoyed about people trying to make money from its IP.

Which IP has Google stolen from other people?

Thanks for pointing out this case, I had completely missed that. I would argue that copyright and trade secrets are very different things, though.

As for the carousel: That's exactly why it seems honest to me. Nobody looks at that and thinks it is the best fit the wondrous Google algorithm found for their query.

Speaking of countries which should be cut off... Canadian courts are now demanding that Google censor search results world wide, not just in Canada, a very strong message needs to be sent that this is completely, utterly, totally unacceptable. Canada needs to be punished before any of my search results get censored.

Give them a 48 hour ultimatum to unfuck themselves or the border gets sealed with absolutely nothing getting across until they change this shit and pay restitution for all damages incured. Then watch them piss themselves and squeel.

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN19J27N?il=0

Not stolen. Made money from.

YouTube rakes them in the cash, yet much of the content uses IP from other people.

There are debates to be had about copyright and IP in general, but Google has a history of unilaterally ignoring it (Google Book in the US for example) with an eye to future commercial exploitation.

At their base, they're still forms of intellectual property. I suggest having a good read up on their antics, both in the US and EU. Start with the Maltese MEP who tabled some amendments to EU attempts to modernize copyright - they read like Google's lawyers wrote them

They don't have to think. They click. Which is the point.

The financial evidence already exists from prior cases, once the carousel appeared competing comparison sites saw traffic drop. Some even went of business.

The carousel would've been developed from standard A/B test practices where you can see which gets the most attention.

As honest brokers go, we're in Montgomery Burns territory.

I still see nothing dishonest about this. What false impression is Google giving the user? Do you think they believe these aren't commercial offers? That it isn't a Google service? That other services don't exist?

Imagine going to a supermarket. They've redesigned it now though, all the own brand is there as you go in, well lit, well sign-posted. But you don't want their brand, you want your regular stuff, so you go look for it. And they've moved it, right to the back, not well lit and not made easy to find, and it's a lot less convenient to get to now.

After a week or so, you decide to try the own brand. It's okay, tastes pretty much the same, and it's more convenient than going to find your old brand. So you stick to it.

Or you could think, y'know, I'll go shop another supermarket. But they're all a bit shit, not in a good location like your usual supermarket, can never find what you're looking for. So you go back to the usual one and stick to their own brand from now on.

A month or so later a better brand comes out. It's actually cheaper than the supermarkets own brand and tastes better. But you go in, think you'll never find it, and so pick up the own brand you've now gotten so used to.

Is the supermarket being an honest broker there, or is it leveraging it's prime position to sell it's own goods at the expense of competitors to those goods?

Now you can argue if that ability is morally right or wrong, but in most countries it is illegal.

Yes.

In your scenario, of course, a supermarket doesn't have any obligation to be an honest broker for rivalling products anyway. Google does have some obligation in this regard, but by clearly delineating its supermarket -- 'this is where we try to sell you stuff' -- from its honest brokerage -- 'this is where you can go to other people's shops, sorted not by our preference but by the best algorithm we could build to give you what you and others are looking for with queries such as yours' -- I think it has chosen the best way to go about that. Not just an acceptable one; but the best one I could think of. What other solution would be fairer?

Yeah, they bought youtube so really whining that they are using "other people's IP" when they legally bought it is a nonstarter. Also the library thing passed legal muster last I heard making use of the educational and fair use carve outs.

Google clearly shows the difference between advertisements and search results so there really is no basis for this fine. Unless one believes most people are too stupid to know the difference between something clearly labeled an "Ad" vs the stuff clearly listed under the heading "Search Results".

If you buy a car full of stolen goods, in full knowledge of the fact, are those stolen goods magically no longer stolen?

YouTube's original business model was entirely based on ignoring other peoples IP - music, TV, etc. - which Google turned into a advert machine.

I'm not saying YouTube was stolen - it wasn't - YouTube is the mechanism in which other peoples IP is used, and from which Google generates cash from.

As far as I am aware youtube operates in a fully legal manner and always has.

No, the best one would be Google shopping to be indexed in their own search results, along with the competition. Trying to paint it as anything else as 'honest' goes against studies on heatmaps, CTR/screen position and other forms of SEO nudging.

The use of large carousels has been in vogue for some time, as psychological tests display that people automatically take notice of them before text underneath. We already know that first row links get, on average, 33% of clicks of users with drops beyond that (second place clicks tend to drop to about 17%)

Basically around 20 years of studies designed to extract the maximum amount of revenue from users disagrees with you.

It makes use of a loophole. People upload content, Google makes money from it.

That content can be someone else's songs. It can be pro-ISIS videos. It can be a fair-use clip. Google doesn't really care so long as the money comes in and nobody makes too much noise.

I've been in this industry half my life, and the day Google appeared and squashed the crappy table-based portals world+dog had, and took ages to load up with shitty results, I cheered.

I'm not cheering now. Something is very, very wrong, and Google is very much part of that wrongness. The fun pirate days of Kazaa, watching Lars Ulrich try and justify going after Metallica fans for downloading tracks and making a royal dick of himself in the process has been commercialized, and governments are being subverted to allow that.

And that ain't good.

Not often I cheer the EU, but Google needs to wind itself in a bit.

No, not at all. "Effective" != "dishonest". The reason why it is honest to place comparative commercial offers at the top of the page is because that is what many users want when they enter corresponding queries. What you need to show is that users don't understand what they are clicking, or what the remainder of the page offers -- not that users click on links. If users weren't clicking on links, or returning from those linked pages to look for other results, or looking for other queries or search engines to get different results, or complaining that they were mislead, that would be some signs (among several different imaginable ones) that the links offered are misleading.

I think the actual complaint is that a lot of those uploads are in turn made by yet other people, who aren't receiving compensation. Well, the somewhat rational complaint would be that, at least.

Sorry? When did you turn into Gordon Gecko? This is one of the more twisted definitons of honest I've encountered in a long while.

Google offers a facility to search. It also offers a facility to price compare items. Other companies also offer the facility to compare prices.

When you search for an item, using the search facility, price comparisons may come back in the results, placed according to the PageRank algo.

It is known, by Google and others and, in this case, most definitely by Google as their metrics are the best out there, that page placement is vital to click-through rates.

Google then provides it's own comparison facility an advantage by placing it in prime position in it's search facility, fully in the knowledge that it is providing that service an advantage competitors to that service can not access and that they will suffer from.

It's the very definition of anti-competitive practice.

Had they opened that section up to competitors, not a problem, but the fact they didn't means they knew they were providing unfair advantage.