Google Poised To Settle EU Anti-Trust Probe 55
Rambo Tribble writes "Reuters is reporting that concessions by the Internet giant have paved the way for a resolution to the long-standing European Union investigation into Google's alleged anti-competitive practices. From the article: 'A settlement with the European Union's regulator would mean that Google, the world's biggest internet search engine, would escape a possible fine of as much as $5 billion or 10 percent of its 2012 revenue. Such an outcome would mirror the company's success in the United States last year where it received only a mild reprimand from the Federal Trade Commission, which said Google had not manipulated its website results following a 19-month investigation.'"
10% of Revenue! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:10% of Revenue! (Score:5, Insightful)
They should rather open up an investment bank. If you fuck up there, you actually GET money from the government.
Re:10% of Revenue! (Score:5, Insightful)
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And when the people start to hate you, you can write a column comparing them to the Nazis.
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I'm fairly sure the main reason why bank managers are not strung up by the dozen is simply that none of them is worth even the threat of a nanosecond of jail time.
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I learnt that the "normal" rate for money laundering in countries where corruption is minimal was 50-90 %
That 50-90% is revenue not profit.
What will Marissa Meyer think of this? (Score:2)
I wonder what that Yahoo boss thinks of Google, now that she's out of there.
One thing I can guarantee: This [settlement] won't be enough for Microsoft and its ilk.
Re:What will Marissa Meyer think of this? (Score:5, Funny)
Better idea (Score:5, Interesting)
The EU should increase funding of research into open search technologies.
It is unacceptable that the world's searching and data-mining technology is for the better part originating from one country.
(Yes, this means more projects like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q... [wikipedia.org])
I'm still waiting for a P2P search engine that is efficient, secure, and returns useful results.
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I'm still waiting for a P2P search engine that is efficient, secure, and returns useful results.
So am I. So are many. Google is monolithic, and not to be trusted. Seriously: why don't we talk about creating a start-up ?
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Seriously: why don't we talk about creating a start-up ?
This could be a proposal for Kickstarter. It may be the first crowd-funded project that requires a significant amount of preliminary research though.
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Google have the advantage of some of the most experienced researchers in the field, and a ridiculous amount of hardware capability. Also, they can afford to throw tons of money at long-shot ideas, knowing that only a few will pan out.
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You'll need about 1,000,000,000$ US for your first datacenter. All of the hardware needs to be in close proximity to get reasonable communication latency in your distributed indexing/processing.
There is a reason why competing search engines aren't popping up left and right.
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I was looking into the YaCY P2P search engine ( http://yacy.net/ [yacy.net]âZ ), but I have not given it a go yet. Have you tried that one? What did you find about it that was bad?
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The "antitrust" is in the advertising, travel, and sales markets; their success in Search is just the tool Google used to dominate those fields. By analogy, Microsoft used the dominance Windows to make Internet Explorer the dominant browser; the fixes had to be in the Browser field, not operating systems.
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Well, if the "there" is willing to attempt to take 10% of their gross receipts away from them, I'd say that they would probably abandon the "Land of the Pirates" and come back home and make some money.
As for sharing data with the gov't, you speak of it as if they had a choice... Hint: The choice is an illusion when you're dealing with something as powerful as the US Gov't. Yeah, we need to make the gov't smaller - at least the GOP / right wing of the gov't knows that. Talk to our leftists / communists th
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Doesn't help my mood on this even a little bit that the Euros perform piracy against their own big "bad" businessmen, either. Gov'ts should be _helping_ industries, not persecuting them. And we wonder what the huge unemployment rates are all about? I don't wonder at all, I expect it with behavior such as this from the gov't buccaneers.
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Gov'ts should be _helping_ industries, not persecuting them.
In the case of antitrust it is a conflict of interest between a business and the people.
I think you are completely wrong, the government should side with the people before it sides with corporate interests.
In the case where it is a conflict between a foreign company and a local company the government should first see to what is best for its local people. Do the people and the foreign company have common interests, otherwise, side with the local company.
Just because governments have a tendency to do it the o
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How can the gov't be siding with the people when, again as in the Microsoft IE browser case, the company was giving me a FREE browser if I bought their OS? I mean, it was FREE! The gov't that tries to muck with that is NOT doing _ME_ any favors, its acting on some other company's behalf, quite possibly to my detriment depending on whether it turned out that Microsoft might have been forced to charge, say, $24.99 for their browser just to make things equal. Didn't turn out that way, but why screw with
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Companies, large and small, regularly engage in behavior meant to keep the competition at bay.
The most successful are not the altruistic ones.
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but could not hook into the OS because MS would not allow it to allow them a lead.
If you by "hook into the OS" mean anything technical, that is not what the EU case against Microsoft on IE was about at all. It was about Microsoft having an unfair advantage in the browser market because they could bundle their browser with their market dominating operating system, and the competitors couldn't.
It was only about the OS as a distribution channel competitors didn't have access to, not any form of technical integration advantage or the IE was "deeply integrated into the core of the OS" myth
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I don't think you understand any of the cases and accusations involved. The issue is not that someone dominated the market with a better product; the issue is that someone dominates the market with one superior product (Search, Windows) and then uses that dominant position to ensure the success of a whole bunch of inferior products, or simply the products their partners want to sell, thereby harming customers.
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The US Gov't, under leftist administration in the 90's, persecuted Microsoft for providing too much functionality in Windows, if you can believe it. They integrated Internet Explorer into the operating system, and that was somehow unfair to the competition. Boo-hoo... build a better browser and they will come, as has happened with Chrome and some others. Its not like the OS prohibited the installation of another browser, it just provided a free one. That was nonsense. I don't think I need to look at
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Exactly so. A browser is just another program, and XP would allow the installation of another browser just fine.
Meanwhile, my own gov't was attempting to diminish my computing experience by having to either install IE manually, or some other browser manually, rather than having it just appear after the OS is installed. IOW, its tougher on _ME_ as a customer just to fix a non-problem, when other browser-makers could just have their stuff loaded manually on top of IE. Both IE and their browser would work
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okay you obviously have a few of the facts a bit twisted
1 the MSIE exe was made part of the Windows Explorer exe in later versions of Windows
2 MS actively paid different sites to include MSIE only content and to NOT support anything not MSIE
3 MS used unpublished apis to ensure that anything not MSIE would not be able to do some of the stuff MSIE could
4 they deliberately withheld copies of WINDOWS from OEMs that did not sign contracts barring them from bundling any other browser .
the exact details can be fou
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Also IE was more than just a rendering engine, it allowed them to integrate an whole host of features from network sharing to file exploration.
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How can you "build a better browser and they will come" when reliance on Internet Explorer is built into the operating system itself? I mean, Microsoft actually argued - this was their own defense! - that it was so fundamental to the operating system that you simply could not replace it with someone else' browser.
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Why do you need to replace it? You can just install another browser? How many people uninstall IE even now?