I don't understand how tech people continue to misunderstand the logic of the EU's argument or antitrust law in general, even with the benefit of the history of the Microsoft case.
I don't see a good case that Google has market power (which is distinct from market position) in search; the classic indicator of market power is pricing power (the ability to raise prices without losing unit sales to competitors.)
While I can accept that search services are paid with ad views and associated targeting info, not a free gift (if they were the latter, market power would be nonsense because their would be no market), I think it's pretty clear people do switch out from Google over search’s advertising-related “price”, and increasing that price would lose Google more unit “sales”.
As a sibling comment points out, this case isn't really about that.
But there's still something worth pointing out about Google's dominant market power: the market isn't search, it's search advertising. And while the public can easily switch search engines, advertisers have nowhere to go. Search advertising is, for many businesses, the only that barely works, and to get to those eyeballs, there's no way around Google.
Because Google appologists. Because Google technically isn't a monopoly. And that lessons learnt from Microsoft has began to fade away in the zeitgeist.
Just because one company offers a superior solution, doesn't mean that it cannot be harmful. I also find Google the best search engine for complicated queries (while I use duckduckgo.com for everything else) but I'm still concerned about their market power.
Every monopoly (or quasi-monopoly which Google is in Europe) should have intense scrutiny by regulators and governments. That doesn't mean nationalisation but it means that these companies will have less freedom to further extend their market power.
If Google has an issue with that they could just do what other conglomerates have done before and split up. The same applies to Amazon where synergies between AWS and the core business are not really clear to me. Only facebook really has only one product, the other companies have a collection of loosely related products.
Why doesn’t someone build a competing search engine for Europe? Serious question. Seems like the EU prefers to tax and harm the incumbent but do little in the way of improving tax policy that would encourage US style venture investment and the resulting innovation. It’s very difficult for investors in Europe to make any money — in a place like France, capital gains are punitively taxed and apparently there isn’t a French Google competitor. Go figure.
Microsoft has spent billions trying to beat Google, without much success. They now get a lot of traffic because it's the standard engine in Win10 (basically doing what they did with IE a decade back) but not because of superior quality.
I try to get away from Google and try Bing regularly (directly or through duckduckgo). For complicated queries, results on Google are clearly superior. Google knows that the whole company indirectly depends on this so that they constantly improve their algorithms. I doubt anyone could reach their quality, even with a few billion € to spend.
The crux of the case against Microsoft was that they abused their monopoly position to prevent OEM's from using competing software. The analogy here would be Google forcing ISP's to sign contracts which require them to block Amazon.
A lot of people invested in the Google ecosystem don't like to hear that their chosen tribe might be acting unlawfully.
Either that or it's the idea the laws of their own country where Google has not fallen foul must clearly be superior to the law in another country where it has.
