The deranking in question happened in 2006? Goodness. That’s, what… more than half of the WWW’s lifetime ago? And 7 years since the 2017 judgment?
The wheels of justice turn slow and all, but man… this has to come as awfully cold comfort (assuming, as the courts found, this couple was in fact wronged).
I'm confused, Google deprioritized their site in search results, and then several years later launched their own shopping comparison tool.
And this is the basis of an unfair competition case?
On what basis then should or shouldn't Google deprioritize rankings? If a website offers products for $1 and hides a $99 shipping fee, should they still appear in the search results?
It is anti-competitive to kill the competition before you product launch, if you they have active plans to be in the market or already under product development during the same time .
Clearly Google was unable to show that it wasn't the case, the onus is on them to show that they didn't even think they would ever get into this space. It would be ridiculous proposition to prove for them given that information discovery and aggregation has always been core to their search business, any competent product manager was thinking about it 5 years before at-least.
It is not like they killed competition say in mobile OS space in 2005 and then decided to buy Android couple of years laters to build a competitor to Apple and got sued for that, Search and aggregation of other sites is the foundation of their business .
> I'm confused, Google deprioritized their site in search results, and then several years later launched their own shopping comparison tool.
The first iteration of comparison shopping on Google, then called Froogle, had launched several years prior to their site.
> Created by Craig Nevill-Manning and launched in December 2002, Froogle was different from most other price comparison services in that it used Google's web crawler to index product data from the websites of vendors instead of using paid submissions.
While I'm sure there are good arguments on both sides, stuff like this contributes to why the US dominates high tech and the EU lags. If you start a web service searching for things you don't want to be bogged down in court by your competitors saying your results weren't quite as they'd like them.
I wonder, at what point, the accounting department works out a market becomes unprofitable and Google withdraws. I guess it's good for some local company to take up the reigns. Maybe that's the long term goal of the EU regulation?
Whatever that point is, it's not in any case relevant to the case at hand. The EU hasn't actually levied that many fines on Google. I think it's three significant cases total in the lifetime of the company, none this decade? (Shopping results in search in 2017, Android in 2018, Ads in 2019, the total fines were about 8B euros). Those numbers are big, and enough to act as a deterrent, but even if I've forgotten about some additional case,m they can't be anywhere near big enough to leave a market where they must be making >10B/year in profit.
You're just thinking it's been more frequent than that, because you keep reading reporting on the same fines over and over, as the case works its way through appeals.
And in case it makes you feel any better, based on these comments you're not the only one getting fooled into thinking that this is news rather than a case that ended in 2017.
That is why it is just speculation. A lot of people go 'Google will leave that market if it is a hassle', as long as they can make a buck they will stay. That is a lot of fines to pay before it makes much difference.
Unethical entities being held to account is a good thing, not a bad one. Even the spineless US government is finally reaching their tolerance point and preparing to break Google up.
The whole google shopping case is ridiculous. If you are “big enough” and you change (aka make improvements to) your products you get fined. Foundem could have built a direct relationship with customers but that’s not the direction they went.
Antitrust law does not forbid a company's decision to compete in a new market.
It forbids using your existing monopoly in one market as a weapon against competitors in the new markets you choose to enter.
The conduct that was illegal here was burying their comparison shopping competitor's websites in Google search results, not "making improvements" to something.
I think what GP is arguing here, and that's something I agree with, is that this wouldn't be an issue if Google shopping was available from the start.
If Google launched Shopping on the same day they launched search, they could have continued the product and it wouldn't have been an antitrust violation. However, because they changed the product and introduced Shopping when they were already large, they're being treated differently.
This approach essentially forces large companies to "calcify", because any improvement to their popular product might be seen as an antitrust violation. It also discourages an MVP approach because if you get too popular too quickly, you're limited in how your MVP can grow.
I would agree that the behavior would not have been illegal before Google had a search monopoly that they could use as a weapon against competitors in other markets.
Well, no... You get fined if you make improvements AND use your already big position to bury competition that may compete with your improvement.
Google could've just marketed their option along the competitors but no, they had to get rid of the competitors results in search too, and that's the issue
See it though the lens of 2005 not 2024. Design standards where different, the reaction of users to banner ads or spam was not the same, SEO was still nascent industry, websites designed to game the engine was very small issue if it existed at all, every website looked like that at the point in time.
Yeah but Yahoo's home page was also notoriously spammy in 2005. Nobody was choosing to use Yahoo by then; they were living on unsophisticated users that wouldn't switch (read: your mum).
There were plenty of spam sites like this even in 2005.
No it absolutely doesn't "scream spam" at all. You're just seeing it through 2020s eyes where you assume any site claiming to do price comparisons of broad categories of product couldn't possibly be accurate, impartial, human-curated/checked, not be gamed, swayed by fake/paid reviews, compensated under-the-table or biased by affiliate commissions etc.
You're forgetting very quickly that back in 2006, ~88% of search results were organic and only 12% paid. Things have changed quite quickly.
> No, literally nobody has ever wanted to be directed to "foundem", which is a scam.
Could you defend the statement that "foundem" is a scam? If it really was then that adds important context to the ruling, but I'll need something more concrete than hyperbole.
But Google didn't pay 2 billion to the couple - it went to the EU government. So now they have a civil lawsuit...
The deranking in question happened in 2006? Goodness. That’s, what… more than half of the WWW’s lifetime ago? And 7 years since the 2017 judgment?
The wheels of justice turn slow and all, but man… this has to come as awfully cold comfort (assuming, as the courts found, this couple was in fact wronged).
It's 100 million for every year they've been in business, plus massive free positive publicity. Doesn't sound awful, even if very slow arriving.
Edit: they don't in fact get the money? And have been out of business for 8 years. I take it back, this sucks for them.
I'm confused, Google deprioritized their site in search results, and then several years later launched their own shopping comparison tool.
And this is the basis of an unfair competition case?
On what basis then should or shouldn't Google deprioritize rankings? If a website offers products for $1 and hides a $99 shipping fee, should they still appear in the search results?
> basis of an unfair competition case?
It is anti-competitive to kill the competition before you product launch, if you they have active plans to be in the market or already under product development during the same time .
Clearly Google was unable to show that it wasn't the case, the onus is on them to show that they didn't even think they would ever get into this space. It would be ridiculous proposition to prove for them given that information discovery and aggregation has always been core to their search business, any competent product manager was thinking about it 5 years before at-least.
It is not like they killed competition say in mobile OS space in 2005 and then decided to buy Android couple of years laters to build a competitor to Apple and got sued for that, Search and aggregation of other sites is the foundation of their business .
> I'm confused, Google deprioritized their site in search results, and then several years later launched their own shopping comparison tool.
The first iteration of comparison shopping on Google, then called Froogle, had launched several years prior to their site.
> Created by Craig Nevill-Manning and launched in December 2002, Froogle was different from most other price comparison services in that it used Google's web crawler to index product data from the websites of vendors instead of using paid submissions.
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Shopping
While I'm sure there are good arguments on both sides, stuff like this contributes to why the US dominates high tech and the EU lags. If you start a web service searching for things you don't want to be bogged down in court by your competitors saying your results weren't quite as they'd like them.
I wonder, at what point, the accounting department works out a market becomes unprofitable and Google withdraws. I guess it's good for some local company to take up the reigns. Maybe that's the long term goal of the EU regulation?
Whatever that point is, it's not in any case relevant to the case at hand. The EU hasn't actually levied that many fines on Google. I think it's three significant cases total in the lifetime of the company, none this decade? (Shopping results in search in 2017, Android in 2018, Ads in 2019, the total fines were about 8B euros). Those numbers are big, and enough to act as a deterrent, but even if I've forgotten about some additional case,m they can't be anywhere near big enough to leave a market where they must be making >10B/year in profit.
You're just thinking it's been more frequent than that, because you keep reading reporting on the same fines over and over, as the case works its way through appeals.
And in case it makes you feel any better, based on these comments you're not the only one getting fooled into thinking that this is news rather than a case that ended in 2017.
Annual net income last year was $87B. So they’ve been fined a little over one month of profits.
That is why it is just speculation. A lot of people go 'Google will leave that market if it is a hassle', as long as they can make a buck they will stay. That is a lot of fines to pay before it makes much difference.
Unethical entities being held to account is a good thing, not a bad one. Even the spineless US government is finally reaching their tolerance point and preparing to break Google up.
If Trump doesn't win, maybe. God knows what will happen if he does.
The whole google shopping case is ridiculous. If you are “big enough” and you change (aka make improvements to) your products you get fined. Foundem could have built a direct relationship with customers but that’s not the direction they went.
Antitrust law does not forbid a company's decision to compete in a new market.
It forbids using your existing monopoly in one market as a weapon against competitors in the new markets you choose to enter.
The conduct that was illegal here was burying their comparison shopping competitor's websites in Google search results, not "making improvements" to something.
I think what GP is arguing here, and that's something I agree with, is that this wouldn't be an issue if Google shopping was available from the start.
If Google launched Shopping on the same day they launched search, they could have continued the product and it wouldn't have been an antitrust violation. However, because they changed the product and introduced Shopping when they were already large, they're being treated differently.
This approach essentially forces large companies to "calcify", because any improvement to their popular product might be seen as an antitrust violation. It also discourages an MVP approach because if you get too popular too quickly, you're limited in how your MVP can grow.
I would agree that the behavior would not have been illegal before Google had a search monopoly that they could use as a weapon against competitors in other markets.
You speak as if the fine was issued for no reason, or that no assessment of the facts and law were conducted.
Google did abused their position. That was determined to be true in fact finding.
I believe the point of the case is that a similar feature by another Google product wasn't penalized in search results while they were penalized.
> If you are big and improve you get fined
Well, no... You get fined if you make improvements AND use your already big position to bury competition that may compete with your improvement.
Google could've just marketed their option along the competitors but no, they had to get rid of the competitors results in search too, and that's the issue
"In summary, it is highly misleading to suggest that Microsoft (or ICOMP) initiated or in any way controlled Foundem’s European complaint or any of Foundem’s other initiatives." Source: http://www.searchneutrality.org/uncategorized/foundem-is-not...
That screenshot of Foundem absolutely screams spam. Was it really something you'd want in your search results?
See it though the lens of 2005 not 2024. Design standards where different, the reaction of users to banner ads or spam was not the same, SEO was still nascent industry, websites designed to game the engine was very small issue if it existed at all, every website looked like that at the point in time.
Here is how Yahoo still very much juggernaut in 2005 looked https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/yahoo-2005 for context.
Yeah but Yahoo's home page was also notoriously spammy in 2005. Nobody was choosing to use Yahoo by then; they were living on unsophisticated users that wouldn't switch (read: your mum).
There were plenty of spam sites like this even in 2005.
Gmail launched in April 2005, getting an invite was not easy for most of 2005. Gtalk was couple of years out .
There weren’t many options for Yahoo services like mail and chat let alone other things yahoo was doing in 2005 yet .
No it absolutely doesn't "scream spam" at all. You're just seeing it through 2020s eyes where you assume any site claiming to do price comparisons of broad categories of product couldn't possibly be accurate, impartial, human-curated/checked, not be gamed, swayed by fake/paid reviews, compensated under-the-table or biased by affiliate commissions etc.
You're forgetting very quickly that back in 2006, ~88% of search results were organic and only 12% paid. Things have changed quite quickly.
But it wasn’t, which hints that detection models should be adjusted. It’s a judgement in the same category as “he looks criminal”.
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Does owning the search engine and thus being able to hide your competitors actually make you superior?
Is this actually what the consumer wants, or merely what the consumer gets?
If they were a scam and a competitor, what does that make Google?
> No, literally nobody has ever wanted to be directed to "foundem", which is a scam.
Could you defend the statement that "foundem" is a scam? If it really was then that adds important context to the ruling, but I'll need something more concrete than hyperbole.
Foundem's business model was pay for placement. Paid placement is categorically a scam against the reader.
Not pay-for-inclusion?
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Don't forget EUV lithography
Yeah, it’s surprising how there’s so few judgements against European companies right?
Kinda wonder if there’s some fundamental difference.