[apatters]

> What else could they do?

Mandate that the "choice screen" must display the top 5 search engines in the EU by market share as identified by an established, independent market research firm. If the regulator or a competitor feel that Google is not executing this mandate in good faith they can take Google to court.

Done. Justice works. Pay for placement, my ass.

[cameronbrown]

This has basically the same effect as an auction model except that you totally lock out the smaller search engines like Ecosia.

Is improving the market for startups like Ecosia your goal, or just to decrease Google's marketshare (by increasing the market share of other big tech search engines like Bing/Yahoo/Amazon Product Search)?

Being somebody's search engine is scarcity. As a society we've been solving scarcity for thousands of years with auction-based models.

[apatters]

> Is improving the market for startups like Ecosia your goal, or just to decrease Google's marketshare (by increasing the market share of other big tech search engines like Bing/Amazon Product Search)?

While supporting startups is a good aspiration, it's not the purpose of antitrust action. The job of the regulator should be to punish Google for its illegal conduct, prevent it from committing additional crimes, and create opportunities for competitors so that a free market can re-establish itself.

Whether the competitors are big or small is outside of its purview. A competitive market for general web search in which there are 5 big healthy firms working to win over customers is absolutely an improvement over a monopoly.

Allowing Google to further enrich itself via the remedy does not support these goals and I suspect there's zero chance the EU will let it happen.

Also, the regulator should ensure that Google doesn't do silly things like highlight Amazon Product Search on a screen where you choose which engine you want to search the whole web with. I'm fairly confident they will do their job. These guys are not amateurs.

[cameronbrown]

> While supporting startups is a good aspiration, it's not the purpose of antitrust action.

Antitrust action is about keeping everyone in the market on a level playing field and startups have the most to gain from this. Although to be fair, you're right - the EU ruling did not really tell Google how to implement their decision. Maybe they should've been more specific?

> Also, the regulator should ensure that Google doesn't do silly things like highlight Amazon Product Search on a screen where you choose which engine you want to search the whole web with. I'm fairly confident they will do their job. These guys are not amateurs.

I have zero faith in EU regulators after Article 11/13.