[pasta_2]

Before people start suggesting this is some anti-American agenda from the EU, keep in mind there are many American companies that have been complaining to the EU such as Yelp and Expedia. They want to stop Google's tying practices such as using their monopoly in search (another thing to keep in mind is that their market share in the EU is something absurd like over 90%) to benefit other products and services. It's not really calling for breaking up the company. Also this is specifically about raising the temperature on the European Commission. Parliament itself doesn't do this.

This is a signal from politicians to the European Commission that they can go hard.

[AJ007]

Ben Edelman, somewhat notorious for being paid by Microsoft, has done a really good excellent job at documenting problems with Google for many years. Irregardless of who paid for the time invested, these problems have been well researched and aren't simply American companies playing cry baby. I'm not a regulator, and am not suggesting a regulatory answer, but I think Peter Thiel has given a fairly honest explanation that Google's rationalizations are largely PR-fud.

There are very profound and far reaching issues here. Imagine if instead of Wikipedia we had some encyclopedia where half of page 1 was sponsored editorial and the rest of what made it on page 1 was done in a totally opaque environment by a company who had commercial interests on what was showing up. If your company operates in a fairly narrow market, has limited retention, and needs to use search traffic vs demographic traffic to build your audience, you are effectively operating day to day with a giant guillotine over your neck.

(Very happy to see DuckDuckGo get some meaningful traction, and for Google's sake with the regulators the better DuckDuckGo does the more room there is to let off some pressure.)

[msabalau]

Thanks for reminding me to avoid ever using Yelp and Expedia, to object their taking advantage of Europe's anti-American industrial policy instincts.