[outsideoflife]

> forced to supply results in the way "people want", counter to its financial interests.

I get my water from a private company. Should they be forced to supply me with clean drinking water, counter to it's financial interests? Presumably it would be cheaper to just pump it out of the river into our homes?

And that is the problem, Google has risen to utility level dominance, and utility level importance. Millions of peoples jobs rely on search and search results, time for regulation.

[jonas21]

Water companies are usually granted a legal monopoly to serve an area because it would be a logistical nightmare to have a bunch of companies all trying to install and service their own pipes. In exchange, they're required to serve everyone in the area and to charge regulated rates.

If another water company wanted to come in and install pipes to your house, they would be prohibited from doing so.

Other search engines aren't prohibited from competing with Google -- in fact many countries actively encourage and fund local competitors -- so I don't see how this analogy makes sense.

[scotty79]

Some monopolies are granted, some occur naturally. Example of the likes of Microsoft Bing shows that Google monopoly is even stronger than if it was written into law.

Maybe monopolies should have their products strictly regulated regardless of how they came to be monopolies?

Other way to deal with monopolies is just force them to split up into few companies, but I don't think that users would benefit much from having 10 different search engines to choose from same way they don't need their browser to have 10 different homepages. They need just one, but the one that provides results that they need. Same way like they need one water provider that provides the water of quality that they need.

If you allow Google just to show results from whoever pays the most, that only shows that they are sitting on the bridge and let pass through only the ones that pay the most, no matter how much value their passing brings to everybody else. At some point nobody cares if they built this bridge or not. Their bridge stands on and occupies optimal spot for a bridge so people on both sides of the bridge should and have every right to fight for such agreement that benefits them most, not just the bridge owner/constructor.

[posterboy]

It wouldn't even be in the utility suppliers long term interest.

[Slansitartop]

What are you going to do, switch to another water utility?

They could just wait to clean up their act once they see competition on the horizon (or just go through the motions), which would more than likely scare that competition off. Building a water utility isn't cheap and I doubt there would be enough profit in a competitive environment to justify the cost.

[posterboy]

I mean, taken ad absurdum, they don't want to kill their customer base.

[tantalor]

Is it fair to call a utility what you pay nothing for?

[Slansitartop]

Yes. Google, as literally the main portal to all online information for nearly everyone who isn't in China, has a moral obligation to do a good, impartial job. If it wants to fail at that in order to serve its financial interests, then it ought to be quickly broken up into a million pieces.

[oh_sigh]

Except the switching cost is essentially 0: just type Bing or Yahoo into the address bar

[AlphaSite]

Switching cost for the searcher, not the websites. They have zero recourse.

[oh_sigh]

I'm not sure what you mean...put googlebot in your robots.txt then?

[rtkwe]

Except if you don't exist on Google you don't exist at all for ~75% of searchers. That's what I'm thinking the person was saying.