[dgdas9]

This is the really problematic assumption the EU made:

*'Comparison shopping services' are fundamentally different from general purpose search engines.

If we take the Comission's POV, yes Google entered a new market and used their dominant position in an existing market to unfairly compete, breaking anti trust law (though wether that's for the benefit of the consumer or not is a fair question as well).

But I don't think they are different markets. If when you search for a web page google shows you the best result, why shouldn't it search for the best/cheapest online retailer? It's searching for the most relevant 'thing' on both cases.

[TeMPOraL]

I'm inclined to agree, at least a bit. They might be reasonably different markets now, but they should not be in the future.

I think all the following searches:

  - web search for "location X"
  - map search for "location X"
  - current weather in location X
  - businesses of type Y near location X
  - cheapest offers for item Z near location X

are all examples of something conceptually the same. I want to be able to make those queries over one interface, and with minimum (i.e. zero) steps between query results and actual information I'm looking for.

As it is, when I search for "cheapest item Z near X", getting links to price comparison services makes about as much sense as if I googled for something and the results were links to search results of Bing, Yahoo and DDG.

--

I appreciate how today those markets may seem different, and I also don't want to see one company dominating most on-line activity, but I also want more integration and interoperability. There needs to be a balance here.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

> I want to be able to make those queries over one interface, and with minimum (i.e. zero) steps between query results and actual information I'm looking for.

Especially with computers, why would that require that they are a single product?

It should be technically outright trivial to have specialized search providers that feed into a common user interface, where earch provider can be swapped out as you prefer.

Isn't that a bit like saying that you don't want ten kinds of wall sockets in your house, therefore, your electricity should be supplied by the company that sells you all your appliances, so you only need to have one type of sockets?

[TeMPOraL]

This has been happening for the past two days in those Google/EU threads. Please help me.

How does "and I also don't want to see one company dominating most on-line activity, but I also want more integration and interoperability" imply that I want one company to handle all of this?

I try to explicitly state in each comment that I don't want that one-company solution. In fact, I very much want what you described - more interoperability through standardization, not through monopoly. Apparently though my comments aren't clear, given that I've been get exactly the same response for days now. Surely I must be making them hard to read somehow.

Could anyone help me discover what's wrong with that particular comment, and in general in what way my comments could be improved so that they more clearly transmit my intent?

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

Hehe, yeah, your comment felt a bit ambiguous.

> They might be reasonably different markets now, but they should not be in the future.

I think that's what made me think you thought it needed to be a one-company solution.

Manufacturers of vacuum cleaners and computers are not in the same market, in the sense that is relevant here, even though both plug into a wall socket. A market is not defined by a common interface, but by whether or not you compete for the same customers. A flight search service is as much a substitute for a mobile phone price comparison service as a vacuum cleaner is for a computer, therefore, those products are not in competition, therefore, they are not in the same market, they are merely technically in some ways similar products with partially overlapping interfaces.

[TeMPOraL]

Thanks. The definition of "the same market" you provided sounds very sensible, and so I retract my belief that those searches should be "the same market" (which is what is relevant to tge EU ruling). I still think they fit the same interface, in the "wall socket" sense.

[IanCal]

> But I don't think they are different markets. If when you search for a web page google shows you the best result, why shouldn't it search for the best/cheapest online retailer? It's searching for the most relevant 'thing' on both cases.

It doesn't though, does it? It certainly doesn't find the cheapest item on amazon when I tried a few examples.

[orsenfelt]

Shopping doesn't crawl the web in any way. Retailers submit their stock data feed to it and can then pay to have specific products show up in the embedded box in search terms.

Which is where the anti-trust issue obviously comes in. All retailers can submit their stock feeds to all comparison engines - but only Google Shopping gives you the opportunity to flow through to a pinned spot at the top of the world's largest search engine too.

[Oletros]

> But I don't think they are different markets. If when you search for a web page google shows you the best result, why shouldn't it search for the best/cheapest online retailer? It's searching for the most relevant 'thing' on both cases.

But in this case this is not what happened.

What Google did was showing their product before every other shopping comparison product despite the rank

[jinushaun]

That makes no sense. That would be like forcing Google to show Bing results inside Google searches. Product comparison is a search category—just like image based search. It's not a different vertical.

[philippoi]

From the EU Commission's perspective, they're different categories and one of the reasons for the case in the first case was due to complaints from EU-based comparison shopping companies who claimed Google was unfairly suppressing their results in general Google search. From the perspective of a European comparison-shopping-only company, it is unfair competition from a company that spans a broader domain, hence the narrower definition used by the commission. For an antitrust case such as this one, it is a key point that Google has such high market share in web search, above 70% in EU searches. For such a dominant network, it's easy to leverage that dominance in other domains, but that's against the EU's antitrust laws.

[DannyBee]

"due to complaints from EU-based comparison shopping companies who claimed Google was unfairly suppressing their results in general Google search"

Replace "comparison shopping" with "image search" or "text result answer". Heck, replace it with "marketing spam company".

It's nonsense. This is why the US definition involves "does this harm consumers", not "does this harm businesses".

Businesses are harmed anytime anyone competes.

This is one of the reasons that the west tends to view the European approach to antitrust as "making it up as they go along" and "targeted at non-european competitors". Because they pretty much never go after european companies, and the rulings seem completely arbitrary depending on the whims of the current commissioners.

[philippoi]

Completely arbitrary is probably an exaggeration. I wrote a paper on this case for a Digital Cultural Policy class over a year ago so I'm a bit fuzzy on the details, but the previous commissioner almost settled the case and thought he had reached an agreement with Google that would pass in the Commission, but it failed to even reach a vote it was so poorly received.

If European businesses catch the ear of the Commission, it's usually to the tune of, "we're being cut off and consumers are thereby being cheated of the best deal." Sure, I omitted that from the previous comment, but the companies complaining know how to make their case, so it's never entirely protectionism in favor of European companies. I don't know if it would be possible to dispel the notion that it is always somewhat protectionism, so I won't go there.

The logic of the case made sense to me, and it follows a protocol that spans several commissioners. There are differences of approach depending on who's sitting in the chair, of course, but that's true of any government.

To return to your "Replace 'comparison shopping' with..." That's not a fair substitution. I see why you make it, I mean, they're tabs in the Google interface so the seem easily interchangeable. But underneath, there isn't a composite result returned on those searches with results from different vertical search engines like there is in shopping results (save "video" where YouTube and others show up), and there isn't the same opportunity for monetization from the search types you mentioned, so it's a monopoly powered search advantage that damages no one as presented on Google's results.

The US authorities are a bad standard in my view. They seem to be defanged puppies of the corporate overlords that bribe them into submission in many cases.

"The west!" How did I almost miss this gem?!? You make it sound as though the Iron Curtain didn't fall under Reagan's might but instead engulfed The Continent! Reminds me of Brick Tamland referring to Flyover Country as the Middle East :)

[Oletros]

> Because they pretty much never go after european companies,

Do you have any stat to back this claim?

> This is one of the reasons that the west

Define the "west"

[Oletros]

The EU was talking about the GENERAL search results, not the category

[matthewmacleod]

But I don't think they are different markets. If when you search for a web page google shows you the best result, why shouldn't it search for the best/cheapest online retailer? It's searching for the most relevant 'thing' on both cases.

I don't think that would be a problem, but it's not what happened. Google has a distinct 'shopping' product, and retailers have to pay to place their product in there. Almost by definition, this means that ranking is broken, and Google is essentially running its own comparison site where retailers pay for listing.