Posted on 04/14/2015 1:00:38 PM PDT by tcrlaf
Europe’s antitrust regulator has decided to file formal charges against Google Inc. for violating the bloc’s antitrust laws, a person familiar with the matter said on Tuesday, stepping up a five-year investigation that is set to become the biggest competition battle in Brussels since the European Union’s pursuit of Microsoft Corp. a decade ago.
EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager made the decision on Tuesday in consultation with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and will inform her fellow EU commissioners at a meeting on Wednesday, the person said
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
"Such a move would be “very bad news” for Google, said Ioannis Lianos, a Professor of Global Competition Law at University College London"
DUH.. Ya' think?
Time to call in those chits from the Obama Administration.
Yep, these Europeans are showing their socialistic colors.
What they can’t achieve through technological and business competition, they use the POWER OF GOVERNMENT to attain.
WON’T WORK. The consumer loses in the end.
Besides, there are true competitors for many Google products: Bing, Yandex and Weibo for search, Apple Maps, MapQuest, and others for mapping, and Yahoo! Mail and Outlook Mail for web-based email.
EU sued MS to protect EU software companies
EU sued Intel to protect AMD (didn’t help)
Wonder who they are protecting from Google?
I wonder what the cost will be?
Yikes
Zathras knows symmetry!
Google has cash, EU, not so much.
EU try to make even; make everybody broke!
rotsa ruck, EU
The entire theory that because you're successful, provide needed services, that you suddenly become a free advertising vehicle for every other website is just... Well, I guess that's just liberal ideology taken to the next step: success breeds penalties.
There simply isn’t a Google-like search vehicle in Europe....or for that matter...Germany. I live in Germany and can attest to the fact that Google could turn off their service within Germany, and it’d be total chaos. I suspect what they want is some control over the search results and impact upon what comes up.
Google overhead imagery shocked the heck out the Germans a decade ago....they just weren’t willing to accept that much information. I suspect there’s some fear over what new toys or abilities that Goggle might demonstrate in the future.
Before you go too much further in that line of thought ask yourself what business Google isn’t involved in.
I for one think Google is a company that is many times more dangerous than Microsoft ever was given all the information they have been mining and their extensive control over what people see. Minor levels of manipulation of that control can shift the fate of nations that allow Google to dominate the search engine market so excursively is in itself dangerous not merely in the interest of economic stability, but political accountability. There is a good reason democrats have courted Google.
Google needs to be split up into 2 or 3 separate companies.
Apple likewise needs to be split up in to 2 or 3 separate companies.
I’m not usually a proponent of government telling companies how to run their business but so long as Government enforces unreasonable lengthily copy-write and patient rules, that combined with the unfortunate power of branding in a mass market economy leads to an unfortunate corruption in power. We would likely be better off with more than 1 apple and Google on the market competing with each other.
“There simply isn’t a Google-like search vehicle in Europe....or for that matter...Germany. I live in Germany and can attest to the fact that Google could turn off their service within Germany, and it’d be total chaos. I suspect what they want is some control over the search results and impact upon what comes up.”
The objective would be to split Google into more than 1 competing company. Technically this could easily be done with Google.
Obama is way ahead of the EU on the road to socialism
Obama is trying to take over the whole Internet not just Google. Obama unconstitutionally got his FCC to impose Soros manufactured Net neutrality regulations, 400 pages of laws imposed on the Internet to control and ruin it like government ruins everything.
Soros actually manufactured the net neutrality regulations Obama is imposing on the Internet: proof on this link: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3261518/posts
Obama illegally got his FCC gestapo to impose these socialist regulations on the Internet
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