So what is the resolution supposed to be? Randomize the results whenever a user searches for a vague product category that is also something that Google provides?
The article is pretty light on detail about what "favoring their own service" actually meant. Just that it appeared above Klarna's when a user searched BNPL?
It all seems vague and hard to cure. The algorithm is typically very good at surfacing the least shitty option, so if the resolution is "well you have to jumble them now" that's strictly worse for me as a consumer.
It seems hard to cure because a lot of this is stuff that just probably shouldn’t be done. Ie the structure of the products veers so close to anti-competitive practices that it’s just untenable in the face of regulatory enforcement.
Google runs the dominant search engine, which they control the rankings of and sells ads on, while also competing against companies that buy ads from them and fight to maintain a spot on the index is almost immediately suspicious. The potential for abuse is incredibly high, and at one point would probably have been concerning enough to invoke regulators without even acting on the potential for misconduct.
It’s like taking the babysitter out to a fancy dinner alone. It could be something totally normal, but it looks bad enough that you probably wouldn’t do it.
The real answer is that Google would probably need to sell off that arm. There is no configuration where Google retains the control or benefits of the Shopping product without being locked in conflicts of interest around the index. It’s always going to look like the way Standard Oil was setup, because it is set up the way Standard Oil was. They own infrastructure, and they compete upstream against other companies forced to use that infrastructure. There’s no way to resolve that conflict of interest.
Iirc Google's solution to this was to make the top of page shopping panel something companies could bid on and then conduct arms length auctions where Google Shopping and its competitors get to bid.
Presumably Google Shopping will be better at matching users to items and be able to big more than most on average, but 3rd parties can still develop an edge in some niches.
Anyway, the EU wasn't satisfied and fined them another 7bn. And obviously competitors like free traffic, not having to pay Google.
I think they have since started removing rich units for things like Flights/Hotels and trying to figure out what product they are allowed to actually provide in the EU.
But in general, they are just going to keep getting sued forever because they have a strong incentive to find the line on how to monetize search and obviously other aggregators do not like this and have the EU on their side.
In general, operating in the EU seems like a mine field where you have to accept that you're going to get shaken down regularly and do the best you can to thread the needle profitably.
And google shouldn't give any special treatment to their own products when ranking search results.
That said, a price comparison tool is essentially a specialized search engine, and it makes a lot of sense to gather price comparison information while indexing for search, and I don't think having price comparison built in to a search engine is necessarily a bad thing. Although, I'm a little distrustful of google shopping results.
Google would say they aren't preferencing their product. They are preferencing the merchants who actually sell the products over middlemen who try to extract rents from said merchants. Because they put free links to merchants' product pages in search results.
TBH it's the same as Google not linking to other search engines' result pages in its search results. Why would it, when it can link directly the content the user wants?
Google is a middle man extracting rents from the merchants. I'm pretty sure merchants that pay for google ads get preferential treatment in google shopping results. Is it any worse than PriceRunner? Probably not, although I haven't used PriceRunner so I don't know.
It's not about BNPL, it's about a price comparison service. The same thing exists in travel where Google competes with its own customers and has majorly changed the industry.
There is nothing that says that Google must exist in every vertical. It would be completely fine if they shirt these things down.
People aren't going to like this, but taking a page from Apple, Microsoft, Sony (iPhone, Xbox, Playstation), the solution to constant antitrust charges stemming from competitors on your platform....is to kick them off the platform. You can't be anti-competitive if you have no competitors.
Because of the introduction of AI overview, click-through rates are dropping like crazy. Up to 70% of Google searches now end without any clicks to third party websites. So most search users already stay completely within Google's ecosystem.
That doesn't matter. The reason people are using Google in the first place is because it has access to data from many sites, not their own only. If Google tomorrow removed all websites they don't own from the search index, nobody would use Google. It would be useless.
That was only true before AI overview. Now all that info they scraped from public websites and fed into their models will still be available without anyone ever leaving Google's services.
It worked great for me recently buying running shoes.
I knew what shoes I wanted, there are plenty of no-name merchants selling them, competing on price (last year's model, so not being sold in big name stores). Click through each of them, find one with the right size, colour, delivery prices. Very painless. If some of the merchants are scams, I wouldn't know, my shoes arrived anyway.
Instead of "all ads, so it's all garbage" this is exactly what I wish all advertising could be.
Sony, Nintendo never had any pretense. If you want to be on their system, you basically have to go in and have a personal job interview to be on their system and they make no bones about it that it’s their system, and you’re there for as long as they want you there. Originally Apple was going to be a closed system and originally was just gonna have web apps, but a whole bunch of developers beg them to open up a store and a few years later, a few of the big companies were crying because Apple was successful and wanted special treatment.
In reality, how many different apps do you need? Do you need 3 million apps? One can probably get by with 50,000 apps. It would still basically be the same in terms of user experience. Most users wouldn’t even know the difference. The only people crying would be other businesses. who want to latch on.
Note: Sony Nintendo over the years get very helpful people, so-called experts who say they must change the way they do things to conform with everyone else, but they never do. still in business, and still kicking Microsoft’s ass.
The problem is Google/Apple and these people that
self-identify as platforms" should probably divest from providing any 1st party services on their "platforms".
What Europe needs to do is actually compete. China appears to be successfully competing so much so in certain areas the United States had to ban certain things.
There is no reason why there can’t be a search engine or any other major service or hardware system originating from Europe other than all the red tape, the EU puts in the way they kill small companies before they even get a chance to get bigger You can’t come up with a new idea and monetize it if you have to make it open to everyone from the start.
Arm processors, for example, originated in the EU, the EU, or I should say Europe, has Linux, and there have been other pioneering forms of technology and software and hardware over the years, but the environment in the EU kills off small companies. You can’t share everything at the beginning of a company’s life.
I’m still waiting for Linux on the desktop, Linux running on Arm computers sold by a company with both hardware and software working together as one in a user-friendly manner to the average person, you go to a store or you go online, you buy it, you take it home, you use it. On day one, within the first ten minutes of plugging it in, there really is no excuse.
After thirty-five years, of not having something workable for the average person to use, and there again, I don’t mean what is currently out there which is nothing, And no, it’s not Apple’s responsibility or Nvidia or AMD to make that happen where is that new European start-up up?
Forcing companies of any size to give free infrastructure rides isn’t the way to compete in any industry.
The actual reason for China success is a lot more red tape, whenever an American or European company wants in. Oftentimes, allowing them in only if they give up trade secrets and technologies. To be like China, EU needs to go harder against American companies and then use it as a bargaining chip.
Also, Europe does not have Linux. It does not own it and linux is not exclusive to Europe.
China successfully competed by insisting on a framework of "forced technology transfer" and joint venture requirements. To access the Chinese market, US firms were nearly always required to share proprietary technology and intellectual property with local Chinese partners.
Also, do recall the "Great Firewall". And kindly remember that Social Media, Communications, Search & Information, News Outlets, etc were all banned.
All this protected domestic innovation and the domestic market.
Good for China - this is what all nations trading with the US should have done to avoid extreme US monopoly and influence. China is the nation smiling while the boots of the American Big Bully and Bigger American Oligarchs have become rather tiresome.
No. Platforms are better when the owners of them continue to invest directly in & improve the user experience. Turning them into white label runtimes for apps is something only nerds & bureaucrats with visions of grandeur dream of.
I used to work for a Pricerunner competitor. Not Nextag, but they were the most well-known in the US. They're called "comparison shopping engines," and most were names people would barely remember.
These companies got steamrolled by Google because their service wasn't very good. It's all an affiliate marketing play, where they get traffic for keywords through Google organic search (these sides made heavy use of SEO) and Adwords. When you land on the site, everything is an ad, either a merchant product link the merchant pays per click for or less commonly, an affiliate link. Result ranking is tuned between revenue and relevancy.
The problems are it's not really a comparison as much as search results, you're clicking in from a Google SERP to another list of search results, and the results used factors other than relevancy, and the side was designed to encourage click-outs.
This case was about PriceRunner, a price comparison platform that was suffering from Google prioritizing its own platform in search results. Klarna just happens to be the owner.
This is effectively just a tariff. An extremely large and disproportionate fine on a foreign company so that the local company has a better chance to compete.
This comes years after this fine was upheld about Google shopping in an EU court. I guess prisjakt (another Swedish website that works just like pricerunner) could do the same now.
Quite. At least Google delivers some value to society, despite being mostly evil. Klarna is exclusively parasitic, getting people needlessly into debt and pushing a buy now pay later mentality for luxury products.
I wouldn't say Klarna is exclusively parasitic. Where I am located, Klarna is often the absolutely best choice for payments, and I always pay up front.
Same, I use them because my regular bank are a bunch of muppets when it comes to mobile payments. I use Klarna to pay with my phone. It auto debits from the bank account. I've never paid them any interest. Works fine, other companies are available offering similar services. Key for me: works online/offline, sane process for blocking things, works internationally without getting ripped off on exchange rates, etc. I guess they make some money on deferred payments to vendors. Good for them.
You can choose to go into debt with them and they make that really easy. But it's a choice in the end. If you can't be trusted running your own finances, don't get a credit card from any bank.
There are helpful use cases that aren't parasitic. I use it if I want to buy a bunch of clothes in multiple sizes. I return what I don't need and don't need to splurge up front. The people who get into debt for unnecessary stuff they can't afford will find other ways anyway.
Google gave its own price comparison service favorable treatment in search results, thereby abusing their dominance in the search market:
"Google has systematically given prominent placement to its own comparison shopping service: when a consumer enters a query into the Google search engine in relation to which Google's comparison shopping service wants to show results, these are displayed at or near the top of the search results.
Google has demoted rival comparison shopping services in its search results: rival comparison shopping services appear in Google's search results on the basis of Google's generic search algorithms. Google has included a number of criteria in these algorithms, as a result of which rival comparison shopping services are demoted. Evidence shows that even the most highly ranked rival service appears on average only on page four of Google's search results, and others appear even further down. Google's own comparison shopping service is not subject to Google's generic search algorithms, including such demotions.
As a result, Google's comparison shopping service is much more visible to consumers in Google's search results, whilst rival comparison shopping services are much less visible."
It is similar to Microsoft's anti-competitive business practices of the 1990's. There is no legal uncertainty at all -- Google must have know that its conduct was illegal and deserve to pay hundreds of billions in punitive damages.
IMO the fines do have an effect - Google now withholds a lot of launches from the EU, sometimes temporarily until they have time to have lawyers check them against DMA requirements, but mostly permanently. Ironically the part of Google most likely to persist in launching for the EU is Ads, since money is at stake. All the free, consumer-benefiting services are most likely to be curtailed in the face of aggressive regulation.
If they stop providing value to users, they are putting their ad business at risk. It's never free, providing value to share holders is a top priority.
There are also all the free services that just build goodwill. Those are the most at risk. Of course the "ad carriers" are treated better, since again money is on the line. But any non-essential. feature thereof is also potentially killable.
All of the free services are just part of the ad sales funnel. Never forget, the consumer never benefits, they are only the cattle to be fattened up.
Them not launching in Europe gives the local market a chance to build up its own players. China was very successful in this thanks to the Great Firewall.
The consumer, who have never paid google a cent despite using their services daily for the last 20 years, likley spending a solid portion of their waking life on one of google's platforms, has never benefited?
And you think local players are going to look at users with this comically detached worldview and be like "Yeah, we want to build services for that group of people to use"?
If you use Google search or Gmail, they read everything you write, and aggregate that into data packages not just for ads to show you, but even aggregated demographic data to sell for ad targeting.
Regardless of whether the ads reach you or not, you as a data point add to the count that make the package enticing to advertisers, so you're helping them sell the package anyways.
If google gives you full access to all their services for the $0.001 annually they get from you being part of an aggregate dataset of trillions of points, that's...a cause for outrage?
Ain't nobody buying user data on users who block all ads and trackers, it's worth almost nothing (what are you going to do, show them ads?). Fun aside, the reason why people get so many awful scam and malware ads when they turn off their ad-blocker is exactly because no other advertiser will bid on them, because they have no ad-profile/ad-value.
Has the cattle benefitted from the free food the rancher gave it? I suppose it's a question of perspective.
And yes, there's local players building that are targeting precisely those users. No data harvesting is a major selling point of many European startups. Think of Proton, Mullvad, Nextcloud as a few examples.
How many of those cattle have been slaughtered in the past 20 years? Unless seeing a Coca-Cola ad counts as slaughter. I suppose some could feel that way
It's also great that European startups have privacy services, I pay for proton myself, but none of these guys make any money compared to the ad model giants.
The cattle are free to leave the farm and pay full price for their feed elsewhere and get guarantees. But again, so far virtually zero cattle have been slaughtered at the "free" farm in the last two decades, and the pay-for-feed farms are comparatively vacant.
Google doesn't make money from you "paying a cent". They make money from you paying advertisers who pay Google. So the relevant metric is how much you spent on Google advertisers.
>Them not launching in Europe gives the local market a chance to build up its own players
Exactly! This is what is genius about Trumps tariff strategy, as you correctly point out. Blocking Chinese EVs gives a chance to bully up local players.
local players in Europe or the United States have had 50, 60 years to build up to compete, Ford and GM in the United States, and Chrysler when they were around, didn’t learn anything after the oil embargo in 1972, 73.
They just continued on making bad cars, making no improvements, not adjusting to the new environment, other than begging the government to save them., US steel was the same way. Note the executives at the top of all these companies had no hesitation in blaming their workers on the production line for all their troubles.
The game plan is still not to compete. I sometimes wonder, I should say I believe that no one at Ford or GM at the top even cares about cars. There doesn’t seem to be any love whatsoever. It’s just another MBA at the top making a commodity.
One thing Europe has going for them is that there are a few car companies in Germany and Italy that seem to still care about the joy of driving, of making a good car, although that seems to be disappearing too.
Well, this is plain old protectionism and typically you down the line realize you're falling behind the rest of the market as your domestic products are not subject to the same competition. This is how China fell behind last time, with its reckoning in the beginning of the 20th century. It's hysterical that they have decided on doing the same thing again. It's hysterical that the US has decided to do so as well.
Yay for European sovereign services! A bit through the backdoor, or as a side-effect if you want, but the result is the same. Or could be the same, if it continues like that.
They do treat it as a "cost of doing business" as they do hedge between making a bigger profit through such violations vis the possible fine. But enforced fines like these serve as a warning that the government / regulator / judiciary are serious about enforcing laws and upholding rights. That precedent does discourages such actions because they know future violations will invite similar actions (the punitive fines may be worse for repeat violations) thus making the risks higher. The counter to that is political lobbying, if it is cheaper than the fines, and is also treated as another "cost of doing business".
It is not like you typically can just ignore a court order so Google will need to convince Klarna that they have changed something or Klarna can just go back to the court.
> If everyone here downvoted each time they disagreed
That’s what they do. It’s how HN works. I’m pretty sure pg said that a while ago. You can write a reply if you want to engage, you don’t have to. You can downvote or not if you disagree, that’s up to you.
Because this kind of behavior was rampant in the past - where one company owned everything and could leverage it's size and influence to crush competition across distinct market spaces. It prevented other companies from operating in the same space, which led to stagnation, outrageous human exploitation, inequality, and ultimately the great depression.
It is now illegal as laws have been introduced with the aim to prevent this from happening again. The effectiveness of these laws, with regards to how well they fit the current era, is a different matter.
Well if the Swedish courts stomp on Google in the name of national interest, maybe the US will stomp on Sweden in the name of national interest. Now consider where Klarna gets the most of their money from.
I replied to a comment arguing that courts should pass judgements according to what is in the national economic interest. That would mean courts following other guidelines than the law.
Protectionism works both ways - as it should. So if Sweden disadvantages American companies in the name of protecting domestic companies like Klarna, then it's completely expected that the US will do the same thing against Swedish companies to protect their domestic companies.
> Now consider where Klarna gets the most of their money from.
Considering Klarna essentially boils down to a lending service for people who want to buy stuff they aren't able to afford in the moment, I don't think this is the dunk you think it is.
Don’t count out the Poles, they will fight tooth and nail to the last man, woman, and child. They will die standing before they kneel to a Russian.
Of course if the Russians make it to the German border AfD will welcome them with open arms and the rest of the German public will be too busy debating if raising the debt limit to dig their own graves is acceptable if it means limiting pensions, and if so, what are acceptable working hours for grave diggers, pension plans for grave diggers, and whom should negotiate on behalf of the grave diggers.
I haven't used windows in a long time, but on Android there's a dialog to pick browser and search engine on setup. So I'd assume that they're also bound by DMA in the same way.
You may not like it but I agree it shouldn't be illegal. If competitors aren't happy they can make their own OS.
At this point can you make a custom task manager and sue Microsoft to propose users to install your task manager on first boot? What about background image providers, why doesn't Microsoft propose to install background images from them at first boot?
It's an absolutely ridiculous idea.
They should not block alternatives, but having to promote them is complete nonsense.
Sure, but if I’m understanding this (maybe I’m not), a company could make a service competitive to an Alphabet product, then sue them for not using it?
For instance, if a company started up an ad business, are they going to sue and win, because Google uses their own ad service in Search instead of this new competitor?
But is searching for products a new product line, or just a natural extension of searching for webpages (many of which are about products)? Where do you draw the line between merely improving the monopoly product and abusing the monopoly?
Showing your own product like google maps or shopping at the top of each relevant search result is likely over the line, maybe its ok if its down in the results, still high not always number 1.
But for example if they're behind a user choice like a click after your search is done, ie click shopping or maps because you want to use googles products in this case, then its likely not over the line. If its still over the line would they be required to unbundle products by for example using different domains? Would that also apply to things like facebook marketplace then?
I don't really think of showing rich shopping results as preferring "Google's product". It's just showing links to merchants in a fancier UI. It's fundamentally still search, linking out to 3rd party websites.
FWIW, even what you think should be allowed is banned in Europe. On Google Search in the EU there is no "Shopping" or "Maps" tab.
Did they remove them due to the case they lost in 2017 then? Products is still available, but doesn't work like shopping does which is much more similar to pricerunner.
Google literally is a convicted monopolist in the Search antitrust case. The judge just didn’t impose any remedy or penalty.
Many of the arguments around that case had to do with bundling Search, nothing to do with other products. It was Search.
This is why the Firefox CEO gave Google the testimony they paid for, and retired shortly thereafter. It was quid pro quo.
Firefox was paid for years to include Search so one day they’d show up to court and say “we include Google because they are the best, not because they pay us”. The judge didn’t actually buy it, but that was the deal - we pay you millions, one day you show up and read a script.
The confusing part to the lay person is Google got away with it despite the prosecutions case holding.
Imagine if a person robbed a bank and was convicted. The judge then said, ok you robbed the bank, the prosecution proved it, I rule in their favor.
However, when it comes to the punishment, I’m just going to let it slide, you can go home now.
Also, keep the money you stole, and if you happen to walk by another bank…say Associated Investments (AI), just go ahead and rob that one!
So what is the resolution supposed to be? Randomize the results whenever a user searches for a vague product category that is also something that Google provides?
The article is pretty light on detail about what "favoring their own service" actually meant. Just that it appeared above Klarna's when a user searched BNPL?
It all seems vague and hard to cure. The algorithm is typically very good at surfacing the least shitty option, so if the resolution is "well you have to jumble them now" that's strictly worse for me as a consumer.
It seems hard to cure because a lot of this is stuff that just probably shouldn’t be done. Ie the structure of the products veers so close to anti-competitive practices that it’s just untenable in the face of regulatory enforcement.
Google runs the dominant search engine, which they control the rankings of and sells ads on, while also competing against companies that buy ads from them and fight to maintain a spot on the index is almost immediately suspicious. The potential for abuse is incredibly high, and at one point would probably have been concerning enough to invoke regulators without even acting on the potential for misconduct.
It’s like taking the babysitter out to a fancy dinner alone. It could be something totally normal, but it looks bad enough that you probably wouldn’t do it.
The real answer is that Google would probably need to sell off that arm. There is no configuration where Google retains the control or benefits of the Shopping product without being locked in conflicts of interest around the index. It’s always going to look like the way Standard Oil was setup, because it is set up the way Standard Oil was. They own infrastructure, and they compete upstream against other companies forced to use that infrastructure. There’s no way to resolve that conflict of interest.
Iirc Google's solution to this was to make the top of page shopping panel something companies could bid on and then conduct arms length auctions where Google Shopping and its competitors get to bid.
Presumably Google Shopping will be better at matching users to items and be able to big more than most on average, but 3rd parties can still develop an edge in some niches.
Anyway, the EU wasn't satisfied and fined them another 7bn. And obviously competitors like free traffic, not having to pay Google.
I think they have since started removing rich units for things like Flights/Hotels and trying to figure out what product they are allowed to actually provide in the EU.
But in general, they are just going to keep getting sued forever because they have a strong incentive to find the line on how to monetize search and obviously other aggregators do not like this and have the EU on their side.
In general, operating in the EU seems like a mine field where you have to accept that you're going to get shaken down regularly and do the best you can to thread the needle profitably.
I think the ideal solution is to split up google.
And google shouldn't give any special treatment to their own products when ranking search results.
That said, a price comparison tool is essentially a specialized search engine, and it makes a lot of sense to gather price comparison information while indexing for search, and I don't think having price comparison built in to a search engine is necessarily a bad thing. Although, I'm a little distrustful of google shopping results.
Google would say they aren't preferencing their product. They are preferencing the merchants who actually sell the products over middlemen who try to extract rents from said merchants. Because they put free links to merchants' product pages in search results.
TBH it's the same as Google not linking to other search engines' result pages in its search results. Why would it, when it can link directly the content the user wants?
Google is a middle man extracting rents from the merchants. I'm pretty sure merchants that pay for google ads get preferential treatment in google shopping results. Is it any worse than PriceRunner? Probably not, although I haven't used PriceRunner so I don't know.
In Google the ads are at least segregated from normal results, like for web search.
It's not about BNPL, it's about a price comparison service. The same thing exists in travel where Google competes with its own customers and has majorly changed the industry.
There is nothing that says that Google must exist in every vertical. It would be completely fine if they shirt these things down.
I'd imagine this is about the presence of the google shopping bar you get above the results, like this: https://imgur.com/a/1drEnrm
People aren't going to like this, but taking a page from Apple, Microsoft, Sony (iPhone, Xbox, Playstation), the solution to constant antitrust charges stemming from competitors on your platform....is to kick them off the platform. You can't be anti-competitive if you have no competitors.
Pretty sure Google would loose its search business if Google search only contained websites owned by Google.
Because of the introduction of AI overview, click-through rates are dropping like crazy. Up to 70% of Google searches now end without any clicks to third party websites. So most search users already stay completely within Google's ecosystem.
That doesn't matter. The reason people are using Google in the first place is because it has access to data from many sites, not their own only. If Google tomorrow removed all websites they don't own from the search index, nobody would use Google. It would be useless.
That was only true before AI overview. Now all that info they scraped from public websites and fed into their models will still be available without anyone ever leaving Google's services.
If they didn't introduce AI overview, people would just switch to ChatGPT. You can't ban a new technology, someone else will use it.
But does that apply to shopping?
I have often had a look at Google shopping results but very rarely clicked one.
I think when searching for an answer ai assist is often sufficient but not for where you are buying?
> I have often had a look at Google shopping results but very rarely clicked one.
Pretty sure that tab is all ads, so its all garbage, in some cases some of the results look like scams.
It worked great for me recently buying running shoes.
I knew what shoes I wanted, there are plenty of no-name merchants selling them, competing on price (last year's model, so not being sold in big name stores). Click through each of them, find one with the right size, colour, delivery prices. Very painless. If some of the merchants are scams, I wouldn't know, my shoes arrived anyway.
Instead of "all ads, so it's all garbage" this is exactly what I wish all advertising could be.
It's not all ads. Indeed it's mostly not.
That is even more obviously anti-competitive.
Not that we've seen any effective enforcement against it...
Sony, Nintendo never had any pretense. If you want to be on their system, you basically have to go in and have a personal job interview to be on their system and they make no bones about it that it’s their system, and you’re there for as long as they want you there. Originally Apple was going to be a closed system and originally was just gonna have web apps, but a whole bunch of developers beg them to open up a store and a few years later, a few of the big companies were crying because Apple was successful and wanted special treatment.
In reality, how many different apps do you need? Do you need 3 million apps? One can probably get by with 50,000 apps. It would still basically be the same in terms of user experience. Most users wouldn’t even know the difference. The only people crying would be other businesses. who want to latch on.
Note: Sony Nintendo over the years get very helpful people, so-called experts who say they must change the way they do things to conform with everyone else, but they never do. still in business, and still kicking Microsoft’s ass.
Epic games sued both Apple and Google for anti-competitive behavior on the respective platforms.
Google was ruled a monopoly, Apple was not. Every took notes.
Right? Like the through line for all of this stuff is limp and ineffective enforcement.
Fines need to start doubling for every time one of these companies reoffend.
No? Apple in the EU?
The problem is Google/Apple and these people that self-identify as platforms" should probably divest from providing any 1st party services on their "platforms".
What Europe needs to do is actually compete. China appears to be successfully competing so much so in certain areas the United States had to ban certain things.
There is no reason why there can’t be a search engine or any other major service or hardware system originating from Europe other than all the red tape, the EU puts in the way they kill small companies before they even get a chance to get bigger You can’t come up with a new idea and monetize it if you have to make it open to everyone from the start.
Arm processors, for example, originated in the EU, the EU, or I should say Europe, has Linux, and there have been other pioneering forms of technology and software and hardware over the years, but the environment in the EU kills off small companies. You can’t share everything at the beginning of a company’s life.
I’m still waiting for Linux on the desktop, Linux running on Arm computers sold by a company with both hardware and software working together as one in a user-friendly manner to the average person, you go to a store or you go online, you buy it, you take it home, you use it. On day one, within the first ten minutes of plugging it in, there really is no excuse.
After thirty-five years, of not having something workable for the average person to use, and there again, I don’t mean what is currently out there which is nothing, And no, it’s not Apple’s responsibility or Nvidia or AMD to make that happen where is that new European start-up up?
Forcing companies of any size to give free infrastructure rides isn’t the way to compete in any industry.
The actual reason for China success is a lot more red tape, whenever an American or European company wants in. Oftentimes, allowing them in only if they give up trade secrets and technologies. To be like China, EU needs to go harder against American companies and then use it as a bargaining chip.
Also, Europe does not have Linux. It does not own it and linux is not exclusive to Europe.
China successfully competed by insisting on a framework of "forced technology transfer" and joint venture requirements. To access the Chinese market, US firms were nearly always required to share proprietary technology and intellectual property with local Chinese partners.
Also, do recall the "Great Firewall". And kindly remember that Social Media, Communications, Search & Information, News Outlets, etc were all banned.
All this protected domestic innovation and the domestic market.
Good for China - this is what all nations trading with the US should have done to avoid extreme US monopoly and influence. China is the nation smiling while the boots of the American Big Bully and Bigger American Oligarchs have become rather tiresome.
No. Platforms are better when the owners of them continue to invest directly in & improve the user experience. Turning them into white label runtimes for apps is something only nerds & bureaucrats with visions of grandeur dream of.
Klarna is a buy-now-pay-later company, right? How do they compete with google?
This case is about a subsidiary of them called Pricerunner, which is a price-comparison platform.
https://www.pricerunner.se
I used to work for a Pricerunner competitor. Not Nextag, but they were the most well-known in the US. They're called "comparison shopping engines," and most were names people would barely remember.
These companies got steamrolled by Google because their service wasn't very good. It's all an affiliate marketing play, where they get traffic for keywords through Google organic search (these sides made heavy use of SEO) and Adwords. When you land on the site, everything is an ad, either a merchant product link the merchant pays per click for or less commonly, an affiliate link. Result ranking is tuned between revenue and relevancy.
The problems are it's not really a comparison as much as search results, you're clicking in from a Google SERP to another list of search results, and the results used factors other than relevancy, and the side was designed to encourage click-outs.
This case was about PriceRunner, a price comparison platform that was suffering from Google prioritizing its own platform in search results. Klarna just happens to be the owner.
They bought the website pricerunner.com which aggregates prices from webshops, like google shopping.
Wondering if Google can take out a BNPL plan to cover the damages
This is effectively just a tariff. An extremely large and disproportionate fine on a foreign company so that the local company has a better chance to compete.
This comes years after this fine was upheld about Google shopping in an EU court. I guess prisjakt (another Swedish website that works just like pricerunner) could do the same now.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jun/27/google-brac...
Klarna bought pricerunner for just under a billion 5 years ago, pretty good deal.
This decision is a direct consequence of the EU decision, Pricerunner applied the precedent from that case and claimed that Google discriminated against them in the same way. (https://www.delphi.se/eu-competition-blog/private-enforcemen..., https://www.domstol.se/nyheter/2026/07/google-is-to-pay-dama...)
Didn't Google have a previous lawsuit against foundem? Not a fan of Google but foundem were fucking awful.
Not like klarna are nice
Quite. At least Google delivers some value to society, despite being mostly evil. Klarna is exclusively parasitic, getting people needlessly into debt and pushing a buy now pay later mentality for luxury products.
And burritos
A local pizza place here in sweden puts leaflet in my mailbox and yes you can order pizza and pay with klarna
I wouldn't say Klarna is exclusively parasitic. Where I am located, Klarna is often the absolutely best choice for payments, and I always pay up front.
Same, I use them because my regular bank are a bunch of muppets when it comes to mobile payments. I use Klarna to pay with my phone. It auto debits from the bank account. I've never paid them any interest. Works fine, other companies are available offering similar services. Key for me: works online/offline, sane process for blocking things, works internationally without getting ripped off on exchange rates, etc. I guess they make some money on deferred payments to vendors. Good for them.
You can choose to go into debt with them and they make that really easy. But it's a choice in the end. If you can't be trusted running your own finances, don't get a credit card from any bank.
There are helpful use cases that aren't parasitic. I use it if I want to buy a bunch of clothes in multiple sizes. I return what I don't need and don't need to splurge up front. The people who get into debt for unnecessary stuff they can't afford will find other ways anyway.
This is one of the Price Runner sites: https://www.pricerunner.com/ And this is Google Shopping: https://www.google.com/search?q=laptops&sca_esv=a6fae943e924...
Google gave its own price comparison service favorable treatment in search results, thereby abusing their dominance in the search market:
"Google has systematically given prominent placement to its own comparison shopping service: when a consumer enters a query into the Google search engine in relation to which Google's comparison shopping service wants to show results, these are displayed at or near the top of the search results.
Google has demoted rival comparison shopping services in its search results: rival comparison shopping services appear in Google's search results on the basis of Google's generic search algorithms. Google has included a number of criteria in these algorithms, as a result of which rival comparison shopping services are demoted. Evidence shows that even the most highly ranked rival service appears on average only on page four of Google's search results, and others appear even further down. Google's own comparison shopping service is not subject to Google's generic search algorithms, including such demotions.
As a result, Google's comparison shopping service is much more visible to consumers in Google's search results, whilst rival comparison shopping services are much less visible."
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_17_...
It is similar to Microsoft's anti-competitive business practices of the 1990's. There is no legal uncertainty at all -- Google must have know that its conduct was illegal and deserve to pay hundreds of billions in punitive damages.
$1.5B is significant, but the bigger question is whether this actually changes how dominant platforms rank their own services.
Is this real accountability for anti-competitive behaviour, or just another cost of doing business for Big Tech?
My cynicism is tell me that unfortunately it is the latter.
IMO the fines do have an effect - Google now withholds a lot of launches from the EU, sometimes temporarily until they have time to have lawyers check them against DMA requirements, but mostly permanently. Ironically the part of Google most likely to persist in launching for the EU is Ads, since money is at stake. All the free, consumer-benefiting services are most likely to be curtailed in the face of aggressive regulation.
> All the free, consumer-benefiting services
If they stop providing value to users, they are putting their ad business at risk. It's never free, providing value to share holders is a top priority.
There are also all the free services that just build goodwill. Those are the most at risk. Of course the "ad carriers" are treated better, since again money is on the line. But any non-essential. feature thereof is also potentially killable.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
All of the free services are just part of the ad sales funnel. Never forget, the consumer never benefits, they are only the cattle to be fattened up.
Them not launching in Europe gives the local market a chance to build up its own players. China was very successful in this thanks to the Great Firewall.
The consumer, who have never paid google a cent despite using their services daily for the last 20 years, likley spending a solid portion of their waking life on one of google's platforms, has never benefited?
And you think local players are going to look at users with this comically detached worldview and be like "Yeah, we want to build services for that group of people to use"?
You have paid a lot, if not in money. You paid with your data, that Google read from your emails and searches, and sold for money.
You load google's ads and trackers?
If you use Google search or Gmail, they read everything you write, and aggregate that into data packages not just for ads to show you, but even aggregated demographic data to sell for ad targeting.
Regardless of whether the ads reach you or not, you as a data point add to the count that make the package enticing to advertisers, so you're helping them sell the package anyways.
If google gives you full access to all their services for the $0.001 annually they get from you being part of an aggregate dataset of trillions of points, that's...a cause for outrage?
Ain't nobody buying user data on users who block all ads and trackers, it's worth almost nothing (what are you going to do, show them ads?). Fun aside, the reason why people get so many awful scam and malware ads when they turn off their ad-blocker is exactly because no other advertiser will bid on them, because they have no ad-profile/ad-value.
Has the cattle benefitted from the free food the rancher gave it? I suppose it's a question of perspective.
And yes, there's local players building that are targeting precisely those users. No data harvesting is a major selling point of many European startups. Think of Proton, Mullvad, Nextcloud as a few examples.
How many of those cattle have been slaughtered in the past 20 years? Unless seeing a Coca-Cola ad counts as slaughter. I suppose some could feel that way
It's also great that European startups have privacy services, I pay for proton myself, but none of these guys make any money compared to the ad model giants.
The cattle are free to leave the farm and pay full price for their feed elsewhere and get guarantees. But again, so far virtually zero cattle have been slaughtered at the "free" farm in the last two decades, and the pay-for-feed farms are comparatively vacant.
Google doesn't make money from you "paying a cent". They make money from you paying advertisers who pay Google. So the relevant metric is how much you spent on Google advertisers.
Raise your hand if you have ever intentionally clicked on a Google ad.
Raise your hand if you use an ad blocker.
I rest my case.
>Them not launching in Europe gives the local market a chance to build up its own players
Exactly! This is what is genius about Trumps tariff strategy, as you correctly point out. Blocking Chinese EVs gives a chance to bully up local players.
local players in Europe or the United States have had 50, 60 years to build up to compete, Ford and GM in the United States, and Chrysler when they were around, didn’t learn anything after the oil embargo in 1972, 73.
They just continued on making bad cars, making no improvements, not adjusting to the new environment, other than begging the government to save them., US steel was the same way. Note the executives at the top of all these companies had no hesitation in blaming their workers on the production line for all their troubles.
The game plan is still not to compete. I sometimes wonder, I should say I believe that no one at Ford or GM at the top even cares about cars. There doesn’t seem to be any love whatsoever. It’s just another MBA at the top making a commodity.
One thing Europe has going for them is that there are a few car companies in Germany and Italy that seem to still care about the joy of driving, of making a good car, although that seems to be disappearing too.
Well, this is plain old protectionism and typically you down the line realize you're falling behind the rest of the market as your domestic products are not subject to the same competition. This is how China fell behind last time, with its reckoning in the beginning of the 20th century. It's hysterical that they have decided on doing the same thing again. It's hysterical that the US has decided to do so as well.
If something like Facebook never launched here, we'd be so, so, so much better off as a society.
> All the free, consumer-benefiting services
Those are just more avenues for Google to collect data to shove ads down everyone's throats.
Good that regulations keeps Google from releasing more pf their shit here. Governments should really tighten the screws there.
The ads are getting shoved regardless. The content of the ads are based on personalization data.
Yay for European sovereign services! A bit through the backdoor, or as a side-effect if you want, but the result is the same. Or could be the same, if it continues like that.
They do treat it as a "cost of doing business" as they do hedge between making a bigger profit through such violations vis the possible fine. But enforced fines like these serve as a warning that the government / regulator / judiciary are serious about enforcing laws and upholding rights. That precedent does discourages such actions because they know future violations will invite similar actions (the punitive fines may be worse for repeat violations) thus making the risks higher. The counter to that is political lobbying, if it is cheaper than the fines, and is also treated as another "cost of doing business".
(Even India has fined them 100s of millions of dollars - https://ssrana.in/articles/google-fined-anti-competitive-pra... ).
Absolute numbers with BigTech are never significant. Only viable paths for remedy anre outright divestment or revoking financial license in Sweden.
The former is nigh impossible, the latter is fairly trivial with sufficient will.
It is not like you typically can just ignore a court order so Google will need to convince Klarna that they have changed something or Klarna can just go back to the court.
It was about behavior 9 years ago
Internet wont be human steered by the time this is over
Just agents running x402 payments over mcp servers
Vouched, I feel similarly.
(I can’t possibly understand this being downvoted.
The downvote button isn’t an “I disagree” button.)
Perhaps because the comment didn't add to the discussion? like all those +1 comments in GitHub issues.
The comment was the discussion; it was the only comment, and killed.
From HN guidelines:
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
and yes, downvoting is a perfectly fine disagree button, what else do you think it is
It makes boring reading because the discussion, for those who have cared about it in the past, remains the same.
Anyway, downvote = “This doesn’t belong here.” or “This doesn’t attempt to contribute to the discussion.”
If everyone here downvoted each time they disagreed, there would be few comments alive…and little discussion.
The reply button is the disagree button.
Otherwise, for comments of any length, it isn’t even clear what’s being disagreed with!
> If everyone here downvoted each time they disagreed
That’s what they do. It’s how HN works. I’m pretty sure pg said that a while ago. You can write a reply if you want to engage, you don’t have to. You can downvote or not if you disagree, that’s up to you.
Edit: found it, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
Edit 2: that comment is almost 20y old! Fuck I’m becoming old
> That’s what they do
That’s what you do.
> You can write a reply if you want to engage, you don’t have to.
Downvoting is engaging - in my opinion,
just incompletely - if nobody else has replied yet enumerating your dissenting viewpoint.
I’ve been on HN since a very long time, I can assure you it’s not a me thing. Anyway, given pg‘s comment the topic is pretty much settled
That’s a lame appeal to authority.
Here’s mine (the reply to the pg comment - their account is older than yours, if that matters): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117237
> PriceRunner is considered to have suffered damage as a result of Google having illegally favoured its price comparison service for many years
Why would Google NOT favor it's own service at it's own product? How is that illegal?
When you're a permitted monopoly you have the behave differently, including being fair to competitors.
1.5B is preferable to being broken up (not that Sweden could enforce that)
[dead]
Because this kind of behavior was rampant in the past - where one company owned everything and could leverage it's size and influence to crush competition across distinct market spaces. It prevented other companies from operating in the same space, which led to stagnation, outrageous human exploitation, inequality, and ultimately the great depression.
It is now illegal as laws have been introduced with the aim to prevent this from happening again. The effectiveness of these laws, with regards to how well they fit the current era, is a different matter.
The thing that is illegal is leveraging a monopoly position in one market to give yourself an advantage in another market.
So Google is allowed to favour their own price comparison in, say, Hangouts, but not in Search.
Why would Swedish courts NOT favor their own national economic interests? How is that illegal?
Well if the Swedish courts stomp on Google in the name of national interest, maybe the US will stomp on Sweden in the name of national interest. Now consider where Klarna gets the most of their money from.
So no country can ever take action and enforce their local laws because the USA can retaliate?
Why have local laws in that case? Better we all just adopt American laws to not have to fear the Americans getting pissy when they diverge...
I know you you're being sarcastic but a lot of people probably think that's perfectly ok and is the way everything should be...
I replied to a comment arguing that courts should pass judgements according to what is in the national economic interest. That would mean courts following other guidelines than the law.
Protectionism works both ways - as it should. So if Sweden disadvantages American companies in the name of protecting domestic companies like Klarna, then it's completely expected that the US will do the same thing against Swedish companies to protect their domestic companies.
> Now consider where Klarna gets the most of their money from.
Considering Klarna essentially boils down to a lending service for people who want to buy stuff they aren't able to afford in the moment, I don't think this is the dunk you think it is.
Companies like Klarna are a plague, no disagreement in that.
Let’s wait until USA tacos and offers to pay reperations. How many billions of dollars was it USA was going to secure for Iran in exchange for peace?
The US literally just lost the war in Iran. I don't think they're actually capable of "stomping" on anyone.
Don’t tease the paper tiger, it might be forced to fold again.
Now imagine how bad European militaries are.
All of Europe can't even push back a broken husk of Russia.
Don’t count out the Poles, they will fight tooth and nail to the last man, woman, and child. They will die standing before they kneel to a Russian.
Of course if the Russians make it to the German border AfD will welcome them with open arms and the rest of the German public will be too busy debating if raising the debt limit to dig their own graves is acceptable if it means limiting pensions, and if so, what are acceptable working hours for grave diggers, pension plans for grave diggers, and whom should negotiate on behalf of the grave diggers.
Have you been sleeping under a rock for 30+ years, don’t know what antitrust is, and still feel confident enough to shout about it in a comment?
The law isn’t just “what you happen to intuitively think is right”, especially in a jurisdiction where you clearly do not reside.
The Big Lebowski school of law.
It is illegal to use your monopoly in one area to unfairly distort the market in another. This is one of the core concepts of antitrust law.
Why would Microsoft NOT favor its own products? How is that illegal?
"Why would Microsoft NOT favor it's own browser in it's own OS? How is that illegal?"
Last I checked they still do exactly that. Not sure why that case is used as an example when literally every OS bundles a preferred browser
Have you checked in EU?
Checked what in EU? Do Microsoft not bundle their own browser in Windows in EU?
I haven't used windows in a long time, but on Android there's a dialog to pick browser and search engine on setup. So I'd assume that they're also bound by DMA in the same way.
No
Source? The only news I can find about is EU users can uninstall it.
There used to be a browser chooser app, but it was removed many years ago now. Now you can just uninstall edge instead.
They do. Good luck getting Firefox otherwise, so I don't mind it.
Similarly, they bundle Bing as the Web search in the start menu.
Does IKEA sell it's competitors products too or does Sweden not care about monopolies for them suddenly?
What is illegal is using your monopoly in one area to further your other enterprises.
Oh like having a grocery store and restaurant in your furniture store?
If IKEA was a monopoly then perhaps.
You may not like it but I agree it shouldn't be illegal. If competitors aren't happy they can make their own OS.
At this point can you make a custom task manager and sue Microsoft to propose users to install your task manager on first boot? What about background image providers, why doesn't Microsoft propose to install background images from them at first boot?
It's an absolutely ridiculous idea.
They should not block alternatives, but having to promote them is complete nonsense.
something something monopoly. Even US has laws about this, currently not enforced though.
Sure, but if I’m understanding this (maybe I’m not), a company could make a service competitive to an Alphabet product, then sue them for not using it?
For instance, if a company started up an ad business, are they going to sue and win, because Google uses their own ad service in Search instead of this new competitor?
That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
You're not understanding this.
A company can create a new search engine and Google Search isn't obligated to even mention it.
The issue is when achieving market dominance and new service is integrated into the dominant product.
You clearly haven't been around long enough to have caught a lot of discussions on this topic over a decade ago.
But is searching for products a new product line, or just a natural extension of searching for webpages (many of which are about products)? Where do you draw the line between merely improving the monopoly product and abusing the monopoly?
Showing your own product like google maps or shopping at the top of each relevant search result is likely over the line, maybe its ok if its down in the results, still high not always number 1.
But for example if they're behind a user choice like a click after your search is done, ie click shopping or maps because you want to use googles products in this case, then its likely not over the line. If its still over the line would they be required to unbundle products by for example using different domains? Would that also apply to things like facebook marketplace then?
I don't really think of showing rich shopping results as preferring "Google's product". It's just showing links to merchants in a fancier UI. It's fundamentally still search, linking out to 3rd party websites.
FWIW, even what you think should be allowed is banned in Europe. On Google Search in the EU there is no "Shopping" or "Maps" tab.
Did they remove them due to the case they lost in 2017 then? Products is still available, but doesn't work like shopping does which is much more similar to pricerunner.
https://www.google.com/shopping is still available, just no link to it, so about as decoupled as a separate domain?
No, you are the one not understanding this.
Google literally is a convicted monopolist in the Search antitrust case. The judge just didn’t impose any remedy or penalty.
Many of the arguments around that case had to do with bundling Search, nothing to do with other products. It was Search.
This is why the Firefox CEO gave Google the testimony they paid for, and retired shortly thereafter. It was quid pro quo.
Firefox was paid for years to include Search so one day they’d show up to court and say “we include Google because they are the best, not because they pay us”. The judge didn’t actually buy it, but that was the deal - we pay you millions, one day you show up and read a script.
The confusing part to the lay person is Google got away with it despite the prosecutions case holding.
Imagine if a person robbed a bank and was convicted. The judge then said, ok you robbed the bank, the prosecution proved it, I rule in their favor.
However, when it comes to the punishment, I’m just going to let it slide, you can go home now.
Also, keep the money you stole, and if you happen to walk by another bank…say Associated Investments (AI), just go ahead and rob that one!