[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.)