Googles dominance on search market shall look over by EU

[Mr_NoMemory]

Source: http://www.sweclockers.com/nyhet/19692-googles-dominans-pa-sokmarknaden-ska-granskas-av-eu

Translated by bing:

"A search engineisa windowto the internetandto checkthismarketalso offersvirtuallyendless opportunities forinfluencingusers 'behavior,for example bygiving priority totheir ownservicesat the expense ofcompetitors.AlthoughGoogle is notmentioned by nameis search enginemotorgiant'stotaldominanceinanythingthat concernsthe European Union."

 

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Source: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/news-room/content/20141125IPR80501/html/MEPs-zero-in-on-internet-search-companies-and-clouds

"The European Parliament called on EU member states and the European Commission to break down barriers to the growth of the EU's digital single market in a resolution voted on Thursday. MEPs also stressed the need to prevent online companies from abusing dominant positions by enforcing EU competition rules and unbundling search engines from other commercial services.

The digital single market could generate an additional €260 billion a year for the EU economy, as well as boosting its competitiveness, says the text, which was approved by 384 votes to 174, with 56 abstentions. However, it warns that important challenges, such as market fragmentation, lack of interoperabilityas well as regional and demographic inequalities in access to the technology, need to be tackled in order to unlock this potential.

Enforcing EU rules for online search companies

 

The resolution underlines that “the online search market is of particular importance in ensuring competitive conditions within the digital single market” and welcomes the Commission’s pledges to investigate further the search engines’ practices.

It calls on the Commission “to prevent any abuse in the marketing of interlinked services by operators of search engines", stressing the importance of non-discriminatory online search. "Indexation, evaluation, presentation and ranking by search engines must be unbiased and transparent", MEPs say.

Given the role of internet search engines in “commercialising secondary exploitation of obtained information” and the need to enforce EU competition rules, MEPs also call on the Commission “to consider proposals with the aim of unbundling search engines from other commercial services” in the long run.

Fast track telecoms package

 

MEPs stress that “all internet traffic should be treated equally, without discrimination, restriction or interference”. Parliament urges member states to start negotiations on the telecoms package, so as to “put an end to roaming charges inside the EU, provide more legal certainty as regards net neutrality and improve consumer protection”.

Common standards for cloud computing

 

MEPs call on the Commission “to take the lead in promoting international standards and specifications for cloud computing” so as to ensure that it is privacy friendly, reliable, accessible, highly interoperable, secure and energy efficient.

Procedure:  Non-legislative resolution



REF. : 20141125IPR80501"

[manikyath]

the thing is, google isnt in a monopoly position on any of its services. its just the fact no one wants to use anything else because most alternatives are rather bad (looking at bing here)

also, no one is forced to use google search with any of their other products, i can even set google chrome to use bing when i type in the top bar.

i choose to use the entire google package, because its a collection of services i know wont fail on me (like my ISP's DNS crashing every few weeks, props to them...)

[Zoltan]

False, Google Search has a 90% market domination in some EU countries, that makes it a monopoly.

The argument that it works, is of no consequence, and totally irrelevant. Over the last 14 years, it has been raining complaints about abuse of monopoly position against Google Search in the EU, and some cultural industries have presented some quite convincing proof of extreme abuse of monopoly.

The idea is that the impact of Google Search on the advertising industry is too great because it leaves no place for competitive search-based advertising services, and where there is no competition, the free market economy is endangered, and with it the rights of consumers.

So there is no other option but to force Google to split off it's Search service into a different, independent company, that licenses its Search technology to not only Google, but also to other companies. This is a win-win situation for Google if all Google really cares about is their business, because they obviously would be paid; not only by Google Advertising, but also by other companies, for their Search services.

And not only that, but it would also detach the license agreement for the use of Google Search from the licenses for use of the other Google services. This will make the license agreement for the use of Google Search verifiable against fundamental rights of citizens, and will prevent Google from abusing it, for instance to apply Anglo-American censorship in Continental Europe, which has a big negative impact on culture. The lack of censorship on cultural content is what makes Continental Europe the cultural axis mundi, and what guarantees the tolerance and openness of the population. Another pain point, is the fact that Google Search binds in with other services to spy on users, not only under the Patriot Act a serious problem, but also in terms of human rights violations. This can also only be tackled efficiently if it can be treated as a separate service, that is subject to regulation. A lot of people have serious problems with the political censorship Google Applies in its services, like blanking out war memorials from Google Maps, only providing biased incorrect historic background information on search and map items, etc... and, because of the melange of services, it makes access to Google Maps and Google Search results impossible for many small businesses. Google pretends giving neutral search results, but in fact, it's not a search service, it's a censorship service where businesses have to pay protection money to not be censored. That's just plain illegal.

By the way, Google Services only work well in the Anglo-American world. They are often really bad in many Continental European countries, to the point of leading to dangerous situations. This also holds back Google itself, as for instance, with all of the accidents that have happened because of bad Google Maps and Navigation coverage, the large European car manufacturers, have all but discarded Google for in-car online services, because Google has such a bad reputation.

Another huge problem with Google services, is that Google Search is linked to a number of "free services", which provide the search function with spyware-data, without any record of the sales of that data to the Search service. This definitely needs transparency to facilitate regulation to prevent the massive violations of human rights it causes now. In order to achieve that, the best way is to make sure that the Google Search function is "at arm's length" with other services, in a different company. That way, Google will have to sell the data it gathers through other services, to Google Search, and that data can be estimated and verified, and has to be legal. So Google won't be able to transfer any spyware data "under the table" any more.

There really is not one single valid argument against splitting Google Search from Google Advertising. It would benefit both Google and the citizens/consumers. The ONLY instance that has a problem with it, is probably the NSA and their different lapdogs...

[Phantom.bak]

The argument that it works, is of no consequence, and totally irrelevant. Over the last 14 years, it has been raining complaints about abuse of monopoly position against Google Search in the EU, and some cultural industries have presented some quite convincing proof of extreme abuse of monopoly.

I disagree with this. The only reason that google has a large share of search traffic is because it is so good. Microsoft and Bing have every advantage in this field. The default web browser is IE, and the default search engine is Bing. 

If Bing actually worked well, and supplied decent results, then it would be used. Google is not employing any direct tactics to take bing out of the picture. Google is simply better than all the rest. 

You mention that Google leaves no room for competition, so it's a monopoly, and should be split up. But that isn't Google's fault. It's the fact that they're good at what they do, and the fact that other companies can't keep up.

[Zoltan]

Not in the EU. Microsoft has had to offer customers free choice of browsers for years, since Windows XP, and most have gone with Firefox through the years, and mozilla by default offers Google Search.

The reason why Google Search is good, is because it can mine data through a number of "free services", and has that scam going on for the longest time. That's exactly what's wrong with it also. Also, again, Google services are only good in US English. Google sucks pretty hard in other languages. There's only a small minority of native English speakers in the EU, and those don't speak US English. If companies that do respect human rights could license the Google Search technology and offer competitive searches, that respect the rights of the consumers and don't rely on illegally mined data, that would result in a more usable search service, which can then also be licensed back by Google to put in EU devices for instance, but the very same search service could then also be used by full-FOSS mobile operating systems, so that people aren't forced to use spyware- and malware-infested devices courtesy of Google Inc any more.

It's Google's fault that they are a monopoly, they're not better than anyone else, they just reinforced the Search function by harvesting huge amounts of data whilst not respecting human rights, that's all... and that might be legal in the US, but it sure isn't in Europe. Did you know that many countries in Europe don't have access to paid services from Google or Amazon or the likes? Did you know that Google or Amazon don't have stores set up in Belgium, the capital of Europe? Do not compare the situation in the US with the situation anywhere else in the world, it's just not comparable.

[Eden]

Forgetting the rest of the news and focusing on the one part they are overlooking (the rest is really important though in my opinion)

 

Enforcing EU rules for online search companies

 

The resolution underlines that “the online search market is of particular importance in ensuring competitive conditions within the digital single market” and welcomes the Commission’s pledges to investigate further the search engines’ practices.

 

It calls on the Commission “to prevent any abuse in the marketing of interlinked services by operators of search engines", stressing the importance of non-discriminatory online search. "Indexation, evaluation, presentation and ranking by search engines must be unbiased and transparent", MEPs say.

 

Given the role of internet search engines in “commercialising secondary exploitation of obtained information” and the need to enforce EU competition rules, MEPs also call on the Commission “to consider proposals with the aim of unbundling search engines from other commercial services” in the long run. 

I can understand the concern. In the UK BT has part of its company split (openreach) to provide customers with equal access to ISPs. I can see the similarities, search engines are the way to navigate the internet. And I can see the potential need for search engines to not be biased to the same companies products.

For example, if you look up "docs" on bing, you don't get microsoft skydrive, you get google docs, even though it would be of interest to microsoft to promote their service.

Google services are very popular, and coming up on the top of search results isnt necessarily google padding the results in favour of their own services.

The fact is, search engines are not like openreach, you can easily use a different search engine. Should there be rules for search engines to keep them impartial to the results the provide? Probably. Companies goals are not to provide impartial services, its to make money and time and time again you see them break moral grounds to get what they want.

But Is it a monopoly? No. As long as they provide a decent search engine people with use it, but you can easily use duckduckgo(or any search engine), I argue its a better search engine, nothing stops you.

BTW, Google being split up as a company isn't just to do with search engine impartiality, its to do with the massive amounts of data is collects on citizens and the potential danger of that being held by a single large entity, there was something about that not long ago.

[Eden]

 If companies that do respect human rights could license the Google Search technology and offer competitive searches, that respect the rights of the consumers and don't rely on illegally mined data, that would result in a more usable search service,

I don't think this would work. Googles algorithms.. they rely on additional data, their search engines results are based on what you search for + what it knows about you, in an attempt to give you relevant results.

3rd party companies wouldn't have access to that data, only the algorithm, making it useless. Their results wouldn't be as good as Googles because it is designed to use more than one source of information.

The solutions maybe be to promote other search engines in browsers much like the browser selection thing on the MS OS. It could be argued Googles previous deal with Mozilla to make it a default search engine is anti-competitive and monopolous in nature, but thats no longer the case as Yahoo is now the default.

Other search engines are better, when you take into consideration how google search works and compare it to alternatives, the alternatives provide just as good results without the need for additional personal data crawling. Making google search open for others to make use of imo would only make it more dominant in the market because the only way it would work is if google controlled the data.

 Did you know that many countries in Europe don't have access to paid services from Google or Amazon or the likes?

In their defence, as much as the EU makes things easier to trade in the EU, they still seem to have to deal with each individual country. They don't for example, set up one EU company that ships to all of the EU. Though im not sure why, as this seems like it should be perfectly viable? Though in saying that you loose the tax/market and job benefits if the whole operation is ran out of a single country.