That wasn’t all. Vestager (pronounced Vestayer) announced a new investigation into whether Google had abused its dominant position with the Android operating system for smartphones. She suggested other cases were possible, too – regarding Google’s expansion into the markets for local search, maps, images, travel, etc. For Google, this was a nightmare portending years of scrutiny, a fine of up to $6 billion, and edicts that could forever limit the effectiveness of its products. The company must file a response to Vestige’s “statement of objections” by Aug. 17.
In the span of just 15 months, Google somehow lost Europe.
I honestly don’t believe this will go that far – I’m sure Google’s learned from Microsoft’s mistakes in Europe, and that it will give in just enough to avoid serious consequences.
It’s a fascinating account but as well as showing Google’s “miscalculation” it also shows how beholden to lobbyists the European Commission is. Google will probably just lobby more commissioners.
Edited 2015-08-07 09:08 UTC
If I know Vestager. They probably tried to lobby her and she got suspicious. She was rather unpopular in Denmark for being completely unbendable, both to industry and voter pressure. She just does what she thinks is right.
Were I being treated this unfairly, I’d just pull out of a market. You’d take a loss, but most likely not as much as you would trying to fight against an investigation such as this when it costs the other side nothing to pursue you. They don’t exactly have much of their own alternatives there (Jolla? lol) and the backlash from the citizens would be enough to curb this crap in the future. Pull out of the market, block all EU users from accessing any Google services, and this crap would stop right quick. Microsoft should’ve done the same several years ago, too, and the EU has even less of a case against Google than they did with Ms.
And for what it’s worth, before I get called some kind of American fanatic, I’d advise the same were Google a European company and the US treating them this way. We can’t let the businesses become too powerful, true, but we can’t let the government get too powerful either.
Edited 2015-08-07 09:30 UTC
Are you the anti christ? When Facebook stopped working for a few million people for a day they were horrified. Now you want to remove access to Google services for a whole continent? Have you put even a single second of thought in this?
Of course, it wouldn’t be a permanent withdrawal. It would last just long enough for users to start rioting and for the nanny state to get the message to back the hell off.
I think other commenters have responded to your other points.
Exactly this. You want to send a message to governments getting too big for their boots. It needs to work the other way around too, of course, but I honestly don’t see that Google have done anything wrong in this case. Heck, if you want to go after a company for forced product bundling and lack of choice, there’s a certain fruit they might take a look at first. I can’t even change the default email client or web browser where the fruit is concerned, and they want to go after Google for what? Supposed monopolistic practices? It’s just money grabbing, and so yes, I think Google should withdraw from the EU for a while and get the users pissed off. They want Google’s services. They’re the most used because most people like using them. Sorry if that upsets Opera or whichever company is really behind this, but that’s how it is. So yes, withdraw.
And to the poster above: not the anti Christ, just a heretic.
What is going on here is that it’s a difference in culture between the US and EU.
You really think Google would pull out of the market where they have their largest market share ?
This seems very unlikely.
When companies get big in the EU they get more scrutinized. To see if they have done this in a way which hurts competition.
For example when Google puts their own content at the top of the search results before the other search results, users get a worse experience and competitors getting pushed aside. Then yes, the EU does want to do something about it.
If you are a large dominating force in a market (monopoly) you get additional responsibilities.
You might think the (EU) governing body is anti-business, but if you don’t regulate you are anti-business. Because it’s much, much harder for smaller players or other competitors to get customer attention when their is a monopoly in place. Even though these competitors might have a better product.
All they are trying to do is give smaller players a fair chance. So better products and services prevail.
Edited 2015-08-07 09:54 UTC
“If you are a large dominating force in a market (monopoly) you get additional responsibilities.”
<politically correct part>
I wish everyone would realize that in Europe the bar is not “monopoly”, but “considerable market power”. That means that if there are 3 parties all with 30 percent they will be put up to higher standards and put under supervision.
It doesn’t matter if those companies are American, Chinese or Dutch they get the same treatment when they become “big”. And this isn’t something new or revolutionary.
<politically incorrect part>
…it just seems that the European politicians are not as deep in the pockets of companies as the US politicians (ducks)
You’re generalizing too much.
First, it’s their search engine, running their own ranking solution, without actually forcing users to use it – besides the sometimes quite obvious superiority in providing relevant results.
Second, the sole fact that they better position their own services doesn’t necessarily mean the users get a worse experience – only, if you can actually prove the others provide better services.
Third, I agree that companies, especially large, dominant ones need to be kept in check, for everyone’s sake. However, regarding Google, very many arguments seem to stem from angry miscalculating second rate competitors, which unfortunately could also mean that by their “winning” the users might just get a worse experience (because of the forced changes in Google’s services).
Concering your first and second point the article points to what Google engineers themselves have said about this:
“Earlier this year every other page of a staff memo written by the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Competition was mistakenly included in the response to a Freedom of Information request made by the Wall Street Journal. The 169-page FTC document quotes liberally from internal e-mails and memos, during the time when Google’s partners were noticing many of these changes to the search engine—and what they contained seemed incriminating.”
“Google engineers wrote that users often preferred websites Google suppressed in search results over its own services. Google employees also expressed concern that price-comparison sites could siphon away users who were the most likely to spend money online. The documents also showed Google executives Page and Marissa Mayer, among others, advocating for favoring Google’s own services, even if its algorithms deemed that information less relevant or useful.”
Every company is allowed to make mistakes. Many users hated the Windows 8 interface. That made the product worse, and therefore should have been a boon for competing products.
If competitors are unable to compete even when Google hobbles their own product, then maybe they should get out of business.
This is about Google competitors in other fields than search being harder to find through Google search.
You just don’t care about the charges, right?
Do you remember when AMD filed a complaint with the European Commision against Intel? When Intel was fined 1 billion euros for it, there was a big uproar calling the EC antiamerican, but guess what? Intel was quick to settle after that with AMD in the states for anticompetitive practices for an additional 1 billion dollars.
That move was cheap for them, AMD had a greatly superior product at the time (K7 vs P4) but was out of market with every major OEM because of monopoly pressures, and the rest is history.
What I want to say is, EC decisions aren’t done with pure especulation, and follow the current EU law. Google has been caught several times doing shady practices, like any other big company, the matter here is absolute market dominance by them, and that kind of behavior prevents competitors with a better product to even stand a chance.
Edited 2015-08-07 10:12 UTC
Well, I’d be the first to cheer for a competitor with a better product (since it would mean I would get better service, which has always the highest importance
), but honestly, the competitors who are currently complaining, are not them.
Withdraw from a market of 450 million people? Not sure the shareholders of Google would see it as a sensible move. Given the lengths they go to to slurp data they wouldn’t give up on such a banquet.
Perhaps, but if the EU continues their shenanigans it may be better in the long run for Google if they did. There’s still plenty of data for them in other markets. If the EU want billions now, they’ll want trillions later and once the price gets too high, Google would have to withdraw anyway. If they do it now, they can apply some very effective pressure that’ll benefit them more in the long term and prevent the need to make a complete withdrawal from the market in the future. Better to dictate the path this takes than to have it forced upon them.
Sweet words so full of wisdom, mankind feels more evolved than ever.
Considering the amount of data Google has on European citizens, I doubt the US government will allow them to pull out of the European market (or maybe Facebook is more worthwile for them?).
Does it look as bad to you as it does to me? Big images, text is on the left in the middle and on the right and stuff moves when you scroll the page! I had to enable reader view.
If I search using Google for the nearest <whatever>, why shouldn’t they put their own Map product as the main link? Why should they link to a competitor to their own products? It’d be like Microsoft being forced to have links to Ubuntu or Fedora in their Windows product page.
This is entirely different to the Microsoft issue. No-one would have minded Windows bundling applications, if competitors could have also written competitive applications that would have been competitive, but MS used all manner of underhanded tricks, like undocumented APIs, to make that harder.
Further, MS were convicted in the US for all manner of illegal practices, not just anti-competitive, but full on extortion (“want to be able to sell any DOS/WIndows PCs? You have to pay us a fee for every PC you sell whether it has DOS or not”).
MS were dealt such a harsh blow (or not, as the case may be) because they were so blatantly illegal and un-remorseful. They personally stalled consumer OS development by about 20 years, and standards based Web development by perhaps 10 years.
Google, on the other hand, have been a (massive) net consumer win. They don’t force me to use their web search, I can use other providers if I like. I use them because I genuinely don’t find fault with their search feature, and I like that it links in with their Maps as appropriate. If I want to use Bing Maps, I can use Bing.
If I want to try a competitor, I’ll do it when they provide a solution as good as, or considerably better than, Google’s solution. I’ve tried bing on my wife’s Win8.1 laptop, and it works, but is no better than Google. If it ain’t broke and all that.
I do agree with you somehow. Microsoft have been not quite elegant, but market ain’t something beautiful, it’s more something about big cash than pink unicorns (Thom would love that one).
Yes, *IF* competition was coherent, they would have been more offer that just the couple Windows/MacOS, Intel/AMD, or so. But don’t forget that people who bought a software with a high price are not keen to pay it again just to switch from one OS to another, provided the other OS is supported as well.
That’s where interoperability shines, like HTML/CSS/JS -> you just need an interpreter. ScummVM someone ? While native application might sound cool in the first hand (speed, compactness), the VM/JIT stuff ensures you can still use you software even when you OS is outdated.
But even ‘universal’ languages like Java or ActionScript (Flash) can have their problems if they do not share their APIs correctly and/or correct their bugs and security issues.
So what is the ultimate solution ?
If I search using Google for the nearest <whatever>, why shouldn’t they put their own Map product as the main link? Why should they link to a competitor to their own products?
(idealist hat on) Probably because in Europe, the ideal is that there is a greater good that a company must consider, and that greater good is not “whatever companies want to do.” That’s for America.
*cough* *cough*
“in Europe, the ideal is that there is a greater good that a company must consider”
*choke* *choke*
Indeed, most eloquently put. I salute you and would mod you up if I were able.
Hey, I was wearing my idealist hat.
We all know the score.
Hey, where do I get some of what you’re smoking? Must be some potent stuff.
Christian, your post is about the clearest and accurate I’ve seen on this site regarding this topic. Thank you for not forgetting the history of Microsoft’s underhanded activities.
hehehe… Just goes to show, I should read all the threads before I post. My message was almost word-for-word the same as yours. I don’t get the issue either. 🙂
Europe through its mischief bankers is broke.
Between the Chinese and Apple products they have in those markets, they have plenty of competition, and Android is open.
Truth of the matter is Europe is and would fine any company with large pockets like Google as it is broke.
This is all coming to a head in the coming year or two and maybe Google should show some “austerity” to Europe and pull out.
I bet that fine would go away real quicky.
Google certainly could leave all the European countries. What could Europe do about it? Close the Internet?
Google removes all of their offices and servers, and Google services would continue to work fine with a little extra latency.
I don’t get this? They complain about Google’s search engine promoting Google’s products. Duh?? But who is forcing them to use goolge.com?? If you don’t like the Google search engine results, use any of the 1000’s of alternative search engines out there. Simple as that.
I don’t see it anything like the case against Microsoft and IE some years ago. In that case the Microsoft operating system was forced on to you by OEM’s thus IE was forced on to you.
But in the case of web browsers, use whatever search engine you fancy, it is the end-users choice – Google forces nothing on you there. All web browsers give a default search engine, but you are free to change it – normally with just a single mouse click.
I had a hard time reading the article because the website is so awful. The graphics and color scheme.
It may have been cool to add in small profiles and collages of pictures, and large 1994 text outlines, but aesthetically, it was awful.
Oh yeah, and the article was okay. Google seems to be getting skewered for no particularly good reason. As long as people are still using ‘google’ in europe for searches, then google hasn’t lost ‘europe’. They make their money on searches and not the other properties though those other properties bring value-add.
Nobody is flocking to bing nor to yahoo. There aren’t any other decent search engines. In the end, maybe that’s what they want — homegrown search engine market to dominate the world.
If Google was headquartered in, say Denmark, this wouldn’t be an issue.
All this is, is an attempt to keep yet another “evil american mega-corp” in line, and to flex their EU muscles (or lack thereof) by attempting to levy outrageous fines as a sign of their bad-assery.
They can’t talk tough and show-up Putin, but yet they’re going to teach an american web services company a thing or two because of highlighted and sponsored links on a web search.