[rlongstaff]

Hmm. Somewhat biased presentation in the article with use of the words "the latest in a growing number of competition investigations targeting American technology companies."

Gives the impression the EU is deliberately going after US companies when in fact the majority that are investigated for anti-competitive acts are European.

[mtgx]

It certainly seems most American media sites are reporting it in that way - despite the fact that China and South Korea have either penalized them already or are investigating them now, too.

Maybe it's a conspiracy to "go after American companies" from all of these regions. Or maybe Qualcomm did indeed do something bad.

[kuschku]

Indeed.

We all profit from having a free market, for that to be existing consumers need to have a choice; the market has to be either free of monopolies, or we have to make sure the monopoly on one market (say, web search) doesn’t quickly turn into a monopoly for other markets (say, mobile OS, web maps, etc), too.

[icebraining]

"We have to make sure there are no monopolies" (or that monopolies don't "spread") is a dangerous approach, since it leads to the politician's fallacy. It may not even be possible to keep a relatively free market while making sure of that.

The question to ask is: are these EU investigations effective at reducing the number and spread of monopolies? And if they aren't, what should we do?

Because looking at the Microsoft case, the effectiveness seems dubious.

[kuschku]

In the Microsoft case, the effectiveness was still noticeable.

The concept of the Microsoft case: Make sure that Microsoft can not get a monopoly in the web.

How it was done: Install no browser by default, let people pick. People chose what they had heard of, often Firefox or Chrome.

Result: It led to an almost instantaneous drop in IE market share on new windows installs.

And it most definitely helped end IE’s monopoly over the market.

With Google, it will be far more problematic, and might even end up with Google getting broken up into several companies, or even banned from some markets, or even forced to operate like a governmental monopoly, and integrate competing products equally as they integrate their own.

[icebraining]

The data show no significant long-term change after the BrowserChoice screen was introduced (in March 2010): http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop-browser-eu-monthly-200807...

IE was dropping rapidly before, and it kept dropping more-or-less at the same pace. Firefox actually started dropping right around that time.

People want to believe, but where's the evidence?

[pdabbadabba]

Well, I think it just as strongly implies that American technology companies are increasingly engaging in illegal behavior. (Though this implication is no better then the one you've gotten from it.)