Posted on 06/27/2017 3:01:36 AM PDT by Enchante
BREAKING: EU antitrust regulators fine Alphabet's Google $2.7 billion for anti-competitive practices at comparison-shopping service
[Who will get that 2.7billion?]
Perhaps the fine was how they planned to pay their fair share in NATO. It has to come from somewhere.
What is this “Alphabets” Google I keep hearing about?
Alphabet is the name of the parent company now. Google is owned by Alphabet.
Yup, it is a lovely spectacle, so long as it doesn’t bother the rest of us. In this case, I hope that both EU and Google lose. Maybe they will go after Fakebook next!
Print ads, tv and radio commercials are paid for and you have zero chance of seeing/hearing about products/services beyond that advertisement.
There is plenty of "Big Brother" machinations with Google but enabling instantaneous access to the world's data, is a great service and it's free.
Perhaps Google should charge Europeans for access by the click?
It isn’t free. You are the product. They data you willingly enter in is sold, and the data you request is paid for, by ads.
Nothing is free.
well... then they had better start suing all the phone book makers that put the large paid ads and before the free ones!
dont like the google search results?
use another search engine!
what the heck people.
Yeah. But that makes to much sense.
EU seems to have a ‘pay-to-play’ policy when it comes to software/computer companies.
How many times did Microsoft get fined — over IE, over media player, etc.
“...providing a free service to the world.”
Google doesn’t deserve to be honored that way.
Twenty odd years ago, in the dawning of the Internet, Alta Vista may have deserved that honor. Their mission was geared toward serving the end user (the individual PC user doing the search).
Sure, there was sponsorship and they were in it to make money, but their search engine was designed to do what a search engine would be expected to do, namely, return results based on the Boolean search keywords entered, and rank the results honestly according to the statistical occurance of the search keys the user actually entered.
Those days are long gone. Google is engineered geared toward the merchant, not the end user, and providing an honest Internet search function for the end user is the last thing they care about.
Think of it like a department store. In the old days, they wanted the customer to be able to quickly find what they were looking for, and organized the store with that in mind. Today, they want you to be lost and confused like a rat in a maze, with the idea that you will have to walk down every aisle, into every dead end cul de sac, and past every eye catching kiosk.
It’s the same with Google. Their mission is not to provide me and you with access to information - their mission is to provide merchants with access to me and you. We are no longer the hunters, roaming the Internet in search of game. We are the prey, being delivered to slaughter.
I have to problem with Google making money, it’s the false advertising that I object to.
$2.7 billion is a hefty fine. They’re having to make up lost revenue from the climate change gravy train derailment.
The point is that they give preference to paid advertisers in organic searches while claiming paid and organic are entirely separate. (They do the same thing w/ Google+, which has undue influence on SEO.)
If they were up front about it, fine, but they’re not. They lie.
The foreigners dirtbags who own google belong in prison.
Oh, look. The EU is practically turning Google into a public utility.
What a surprise.
um... and they shouldn’t be able to do what ever the hell they want exactly why?
Heck, they could show nothing but google products on all searches if they so wished.
No one can tell them what to show.
If their searches start to bite, people can just as easily type in the address of one of the dozens of perfectly good alternative search engines.
Spot on. Per a recent Barron’s article, Google gets 40 bucks per month per user from ads.
I’m not justifying the EU here, I’m just pointing out that Google is not the neutral deliverer of organic web searches that it pretends to be.
As for your phone book analogy, there’s no equivalency. Phone book business listings had a set price for all comers based on size of listing or ad, and basic listings either cost the same or were free.
Google auctions its ad space, so if you are paying, say, $2.00 per click for certain key words, a competitor can offer Google more money for the same and bid up the cost of an ad. Additionally, Google makes all paid ad activity available for anyone to view so competitors can see each others’ activities real time, allowing large advertisers to quickly shut out smaller competitors by bidding up prices at will. Too few people actually understand the way Google operates and why they’re seeing the search results, paid and organic, that they see.
It is what it is, and Google is free to run its business this way, just as I freely do not use it, either as a consumer or advertiser.
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