EU hit Google with record fine of €2.4 billion over Google shopping service!

[Deleted]

>EU
>Made US
How ignorant are you on a scale of 1 to derp?

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This is the absolute point on why Globalization is bad. Systematic collectivism sanctioning capitalism and further trying to dismantle the idea of a free market. The Eu should be barred from trying to regulate people outside of their bubble.

Wow, this is the most ignorant and most stupid thing i've read all year.
Do you history at all ? You should try google who settled USA when the native americans where the only one living there... Derp much ? fml...it hurts my brain people can actually be this stupid lol...

Ohh, so EU should be barred from trying to regulate outside of EU ? Sorta like the US is world police and actively regulating businesses and banks well outside of the US due to US imposed sanctions nobody else could give a shit about ?

Jesus man...... Try using google...

[Deleted]

And that's a shame. It's a huge restriction on the free market, and punishes companies for being successful.

seems like a reasonable safeguard to force at least a little competition to me.

[Deleted]

This is stupid because google isn't the only search engine out there. I guess Amazon should be punished next because when you search Amazon it favors its products over it's 3rd party sellers.

Hopefully you can see there difference between google, where people are expecting to get a fair overview of the available results based on an algorithm and Amazon, where people are expecting to see amazon products when they search there?

[Machismo]

It's a regulated market.

Like I said, it's a shame.

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seems like a reasonable safeguard to force at least a little competition to me.

Not to me. They are promoting their own business on their site. Should every company be obligated to advertise for their competitors on their own sitea?

[Deleted]

The EU is just a bit stricter on regulations and such. Its not that American companies are specifically targeted, its just that they don't seem to want to adhere to EU regulations while operating in the EU. It probably seems like American tech companies are being targeted, but really its probably because most of the biggest tech/internet companies are American.

Yep, think this is important to keep in mind.

More than two thirds of the companies fined by the EU are actually European.

[Zelk]

The Americans in this thread being offended by this decision is beyond parody.

[LMuhlen]

What happened to "Don't be evil"?

Bruteforcing into a market with no respect for their laws, aiming for a full internet monopoly sounds pretty evil to me.

[Lahis]

Like I said, it's a shame.

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Not to me. They are promoting their own business on their site. Should every company be obligated to advertise for their competitors on their own sitea?

Depends on the size of the site. Google is so big and omnipresent that their name has turned into a verb meaning "doing an internet search". At that point it is abusing the de facto monopoly when their search results only promote their own products.

[Deleted]

You Europeans go after every American company, Google is just one. Microsoft, what was that over, it had the Microsoft web browser installed by default? Apple and the tax deal they made with Ireland. Amazon and anti-trust, and there are many more.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...ch-giants.html

Politicians know many Europeans don't like American companies so these politicians target American companies to get votes.

Or you know, perhaps american companies are insanely overrepresented in the number of large tech companies and obviously near-monopolistic companies have to adhere to more strict rules since their potential for market manipulation is a lot larger?

How about stop breaking the rules and then complaining when you get caught?

[Deleted]

Like I said, it's a shame.

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Not to me. They are promoting their own business on their site. Should every company be obligated to advertise for their competitors on their own sitea?

they should be obligated not to unfairly obfuscate their competitors.

if i type bing into google, it should show me bing as the first result, not suggest i should use google and it definitely shouldn't say no results found.

[Machismo]

The Americans in this thread being offended by this decision is beyond parody.

It's not about being offended, it's about disagreeing with it at a fundamental level. We have more free markets in the United States, and are not as likely to punish a company for advertising its own products.

[Deleted]

>EU
>Made US
How ignorant are you on a scale of 1 to derp?

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This is the absolute point on why Globalization is bad. Systematic collectivism sanctioning capitalism and further trying to dismantle the idea of a free market. The Eu should be barred from trying to regulate people outside of their bubble.

You understand that as soon as google offers a service to an european citizen they are ''inside the EU bouble'' right?

[Machismo]

What happened to "Don't be evil"?

Bruteforcing into a market with no respect for their laws, aiming for a full internet monopoly sounds pretty evil to me.

Is advertising your product evil?

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Depends on the size of the site. Google is so big and omnipresent that their name has turned into a verb meaning "doing an internet search". At that point it is abusing the de facto monopoly when their search results only promote their own products.

There are alternative products and services, people simply find Google to be better. They are being punished for being the biggest.

[Deleted]

The EU could not show how consumers were harmed, so it's utter bullshit. They are basically punishing Google for promoting itself.

Any citation on that?

I can see very well how consumers could be harmed.

The idea of google is that it gives information based on an unbiased algorithm, if google then goes and promotes their own product that is a form of disturbing the market.

[Machismo]

they should be obligated not to unfairly obfuscate their competitors.

if i type bing into google, it should show me bing as the first result, not suggest i should use google and it definitely shouldn't say no results found.

I did just that, and Bing was the top two picks.

[matt4pack]

It's not about being offended, it's about disagreeing with it at a fundamental level. We have more free markets in the United States, and are not as likely to punish a company for advertising its own products.

Apparently you don't know what a free market actually is. It doesn't involve monopolies with a gravy train of money coming in from those monopolies so no one else can compete.

[Deleted]

And that's a shame. It's a huge restriction on the free market, and punishes companies for being successful.

It isn't a massive restriction on the free market (which isn't ''free'' anywhere), it only prevents google from cross-promoting their services.

Obviously rules are more strict for monopolistic (or near-monopolistic) companies since their ability to disturb the regulated market is far bigger than that of a company which has a 1% market share.

[Machismo]

Any citation on that?

I can see very well how consumers could be harmed.

The idea of google is that it gives information based on an unbiased algorithm, if google then goes and promotes their own product that is a form of disturbing the market.

But can you actually show how they were harmed . I was just listening to BBC, and they discussed how the EU did not display harm.

[LMuhlen]

Is advertising your product evil?

So you have a monopoly on searches. You use your monopoly on searches to aggressively promote other services, quickly gaining a monopoly on everything. Then you own the internet and you have the world at the palm of your hand. You are bigger and more powerful than countries combined.

It's the kind of evil that makes James Bond go after you.

[Mayhem]

Who is going to give them backlash? The people who told them they cant do business in their country unless they do it their way? If I was Google Id say screw you. And doing so would be far from committing suicide. Dont try to pretend that the EU is 95% of Google's market share

They have 92% market share of search engines used in europe... Do you really think they want to give that up?