> Currently Google's services just so damned conveniently integrated that no one uses competitors' services, even if they are better.

Here's the thing: they're not really better, because they're not integrated. Google tools tend to suck in many different ways, but their integration usually more than makes up for it.

> The thing is, though, I am totally with you here. I don't want to use one of the other services for maps, or flights, or these snippets for information. They are just search results for me. The integration is more important for me than ... better filtering, or whatnot. I can always go to one of those sites, but there really is no need, And frankly, it would really, really suck if I had to now.

I feel the same way. I described this point further yesterday in AMP thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14636642

They're allowed to offer integrated third party results, they're just not allowed to deny this integration to competitors.

Did you read the articel? Google is not allowed to put itself or products from Alphabet higher in the search results than third party products.

What kind of links they put up is googles decision. If they made a link "Shopping" next to "Maps" and "Images" everything would be fine.

The problem is search results. Consumers expect all results to be shown fairly, by not doing so Google violated it's position.

This is not about linking to products. It's about deceiving the customer.

Sure, but the question is, where the line will be drawn.

A "Shopping" link next to "Maps" and "Images" is probably OK, but it's also completely useless. I'd be surprised if more than a fraction of people doing comparison shopping actually clicked that link.

Intentionally pushing down results of competitors via algorithmic criteria is obviously bad, but say they stopped doing that. What about the inline shopping box at the top of search results? That's still putting their own service in a prominent position. Probably bad...

... but then this concern immediately applies to translations, song lyrics, unit conversions, maps, shopping hours, etc. The kind of results that as a user I want to see. Will that be disallowed to? If so, this will make Google Search a significantly worse product.

I personally reckon that making Google Search a significantly worse product is part of the reason why this happened. One of the companies pushing for this is Ciao, a comparison shopping service owned by Microsoft and used to provide the equivalent feature for Bing search results. Microsoft clearly know how useful these kinds of contextual results are, because before Google had them they were promoting them as Bing's big advantage over Google. Now they've managed to get the EU to restrict Google's ability to compete by offering them.

I think the line is drawn pretty clearly.

The point is not that their service was in prominent position, but it was done so that it appeared as natural result of the search.

It's somewhat like doing a search in a search engine and being shown paid results on top, without any indication that they are paid.

>The kind of results that as a user I want to see. Will that be disallowed to? If so, this will make Google Search a significantly worse product.

From the article the issue is not that Google services appear in the search results, rather it is that they artificially make their own results appear first without regards to normal search algorithms.

"Google has abused this market dominance by giving its own comparison shopping service an illegal advantage. It gave prominent placement in its search results only to its own comparison shopping service, whilst demoting rival services."

The line was drawn at search results from the article. I get the slippery slope argument buy don't think it's pertinent here.

I actually read it again. Maybe I misunderstand it, but for me it is about the Google shopping comparison service: "Google has abused its market dominance as a search engine by giving an illegal advantage to another Google product, its comparison shopping service." What that means was this: "When a consumer enters a query into the Google search engine in relation to which Google's comparison shopping service wants to show results, these are displayed at or near the top of the search results."

ow are they going to fix this now? Show five results, one of which is from Google, four from competitors? Which competitors? How bad can the results be, as long as they are returned by Google's request to their service? Can I exclude competitors? I don't want my data to go to Idealo, for example, I only have an account with Google.

I fear this is just opening a can of worms, becasue ultimately I am searching for something, go to a search engine for this, and want results. If I wanted results from a different search engine, I would have used that one. Now I get mixed results that I did not want to see. Is it really so bad that Google (the search engine) "understands" what I was probably really searching for and offers a specific type of search results - links to shops where I can buy SearchedProduct(tm)?

The problem too is that the competing services aren’t even that good. For example, if I search for a specific type of Miele oven from here in France, I can type the model number and Google gives me an array of choices from various stores it was awesome. If Google didn’t do that, then what results should it return? A bunch of other shopping sites on which I would do the exact same thing but not have the same quality of results? French comparison services just outright suck. The interfaces are barely a step up from Minitel.

I am definitely not a Google fanboy; I don’t like Android and I’m not big into their cloud apps, but when it comes to search, they are the best. EU companies could try and compete but they haven’t. Has any EU company tried to build a high quality search experience? If they aren’t succeeding then why?

The problem in France, as I see it is government. As an example, DailyMotion rivaled YouTube for a short time, as soon as DailyMotion was about to be acquired for a huge sum by Yahoo, the French government blocked the sale because Yahoo wasn’t French. That immediately sent a signal that if you put a lot of VC/investment into a French company, your exits were subject to the whims of a protectionist government bureaucracy, which makes investing in French companies relatively more risky than investing in American companies in terms of ROI.

Did the DailyMotion deal contribute to the current Google dominance? I think it definitely had a chilling effect on high growth unicorn chasing in the EU which means the “French Google” hasn’t been born because it is much much harder to access funding than a similarly positioned company in the US. I am not saying the French startup scene is dead or bad, but the ultra-high level moonshots that are fairly common in the US are extremely rare in France because of the bureaucratic environment. Blah Blah Car raises $200 million against a $1.6b valuation, but that is pretty much an outlier and likely the result of an investor play against Uber’s French difficulties.

My point: if the EU wants to prevent monopoly situations, member states ought to be doing more to get out of the way of innovation. They can do that by lowering taxes. Even if you have a winning investment in France, an investor gets butchered in capital gains taxes thus requiring a 10x investment to actually be a 25x investment to be worth it. With such a low hit rate for VCs in general what incentive do they have to kneecap themselves by investing in places like France?

But to be fair, France is quite a lot stricter about this sort of thing than the EU in general.

Also, I didn't know DailyMotion was French :) Thanks for that bit of knowledge :)

This is basically the EU protecting other corporations even if most of the populations benefit from Google's current practices. Corporatism at its worse.

I wouldn't be so sure if they benefit. Not every Google service which is pushed upwards by their tight integration is top notch.Also the better ones may have room for improvement and innovation which we might not see from a monopoly in a comfortable position.

If they didn't benefit, if using those services were a net loss, then people wouldn't be using them.

Also, I like to draw a line between monopolies imposed by force (eg taxi offering horrible services making competitors illegal through licensing) and those used by people voluntarily because they enjoy the services. Google is used voluntarily, because people enjoy it, like Microsoft during the 90's. As I read elsewhere, Microsoft lost relevance to tech because OSS took servers, web took applications and mobile took the client. Antitrust didn't do much.

With Google, the only thing the EU is doing right now is forcing Google to offer a lower quality service. What should make Google less useful should be innovators making them less relevant and ubiquitous like the web, OSS and mobile did to Microsoft. iOS and Siri already made Google Search much less relevant on mobile, I'm sure there will be more in the future. Monopolies used voluntarily usually don't last long unless they keep innovating, but if they do keep innovating then forcing them to offer lower quality services seems really bad and it doesn't motivate other people to out-innovate them if the government will just help make Google worse, we all lose. Innovation should be bottom up, not top down.

Don't underestimate how strong of a bias towards clicking comes from being at position 1 or having a richer looking UX.

> If they didn't benefit, if using those services were a net loss, then people wouldn't be using them.

1. They may benefit more from better services. 2. As far as I know Google operates a lot of services which are not profitable by themselfs.

> Also, I like to draw a line between monopolies imposed by force (eg taxi offering horrible services making competitors illegal through licensing) and those used by people voluntarily because they enjoy the services. Google is used voluntarily, because people enjoy it, like Microsoft during the 90's.

Today a lot of people don't know of anything else. The search might even be used voluntarily by many but it's a major information gateway because of its dominance (it's more or less infrastructure). If this is used to cross market other services and even to make competitors harder to find it's a form of mild force. It's a bit like when (in the old days) the major phone company is founding a taxi service and offers you a taxi before calls to competitors are routed through and placing their own service way more prominent inside the phone book.

> iOS and Siri already made Google Search much less relevant on mobile, I'm sure there will be more in the future.

Maybe inside the relatively small Apple world. The mass uses Android where Google makes sure its services stay at the top of everything by forcing all or nothing contracts onto manufactures. They managed to make sure nothing is not an option for most.

> As I read elsewhere, Microsoft lost relevance to tech because OSS took servers, web took applications and mobile took the client.

Microsoft was never that dominant in the server space, Linux and co. mostly replaced the commercial unix offerings. They tried to use their client dominance to push their server OS forward by making it hard for competitors to be compatible, did not work out entirely (and they also got fined by the EU for that later). Web had to be taken from them first, this worked mostly because they got far too lazy with IE (and later a bit of help from, again the EU).

> Antitrust didn't do much.

Antitrust could do more but it is often too slow for the fast world of IT and it is often too weak.

> Monopolies used voluntarily usually don't last long unless they keep innovating,

Microsoft was dominant on the client for over a decade and still is in a lot of areas. It took a long time and a shift to new device categories to partly break that monopoly. And finally what happened is only a shift to a new dominant player called Google.

> unless they keep innovating, but if they do keep innovating then forcing them to offer lower quality services seems really bad and it doesn't motivate other people to out-innovate them if the government will just help make Google worse, we all lose. Innovation should be bottom up, not top down.

They have to innovate a lot less overall. Sure if they do absolutely nothing somebody may beat them regardless but if they do only as much as necessary to keep the friction high enough even innovative competitors are out of luck. Only exceptionally big innovations which are so different to even overwhelm the monopolist have a chance.

> 1. They may benefit more from better services. 2. As far as I know Google operates a lot of services which are not profitable by themselfs.

So what? Billion dollar companies subsidizing tech for the masses (even selfishly) is not a bad thing. That's one of the best thing about capitalism.

> It's a bit like when (in the old days) the major phone company

No, it's not like that, phone companies were granted monopolies by governments enforced by the law and force of the state. Google is not enforced by the use of government force or law, it's just pleasant to use and so people use it willingly, huge difference.

> this worked mostly because they got far too lazy with IE

You're proving my points, monopolies that are used willingly and not enforced by the government are forced to innovate to survive, if they don't people will check alternatives.

> Microsoft was dominant on the client for over a decade and still is in a lot of areas. It took a long time and a shift to new device categories to partly break that monopoly. And finally what happened is only a shift to a new dominant player called Google.

So a company had a great technology and marketshare that lasted ~15 years only, how is that something to worry about exactly? They had the best tech and grabbed the market until they didn't have the best tech. What's wrong exactly here? Google has the best Search right now and most of the market, if their tech starts lagging, they will lose their marketshare. Again, not seeing the issue here.

> Only exceptionally big innovations which are so different to even overwhelm the monopolist have a chance.

Again, that's exactly my point, trying to bring down monopolies by force only discourages/postpones exceptionally big innovations from happening. Also, Google itself was a huge innovation by itself, why is it a bad thing that only another huge innovation could beat them?

Erm, Microsoft lost it’s dominance in part because it too lost an anti-trust case. Are you saying you wish Microsoft had been powerful enough to stifle Google the way Google is now powerful enough to stifle its competitors? What’s another 15 years?

Microsoft lost because they lost mobile to apple and google because they released better products, same thing for bing etc. Not because of anti-trust.

Nope. Microsoft was forced to discontinue its anti-competitive bundling tactics, which they otherwise would have used to throttle competition as they did with Netscape.

For that matter, Apple only exists today because of Microsoft’s investment, which was in part done only to keep their competitor alive so that they could claim not to have a complete monopoly.

Apple and Google’s products certainly were better, but they would have been crushed by anti-competitive practices if Microsoft had not already lost their antitrust case.