This article explains better WHY someone wants toThe European Parliament Just Voted To Break Up Google
The European Parliament has passed a historic vote to break up US tech giant Google.
The EU doesn’t actually have the power to break up the company, but it does send a message to Google that the EU is unhappy with its business practises.
Legislators in Strasbourg voted 458 to 173 in favour of the proposal.
The European Parliament has never voted to break up a company before, making this a historic decision. The antitrust commission is concentrating on four areas of investigation:
The way Google displays its search services compared to its competitors.
How Google uses content from other websites.
Google’s dominance over advertising on search terms.
Restrictions that surround how advertisers can move their campaigns to other search engines.
There’s no specific mention of Google in the vote, but the decision makes it clear that the EU is unhappy with its search engine’s dominance. Google has been the subject of a four-year anti-trust investigation in Europe, which still hasn’t reached a conclusion.
It’s unlikely that Europe will try and separate Google’s search business from its other products, but the strong message could lead to a resolution in the anti-trust dispute. Google has suggested a series of concessions, but all have been rejected. If the dispute continues, Google could face a fine of up to $US5 billion.
In a statement released to the media, the draft bill’s authors explained the reasoning behind their decision:
In case the proceedings against Google carry on without any satisfying decisions and the current anti-competitive behaviour continues to exist, a regulation of the dominant online web search should be envisaged.
Google dominates the European search engine market, with 90% of web searches passing through Google Search. That’s a far bigger share of the market than the US, where Google accounts for 68% of searches.
The US company has already tried to work with European companies to try and ease their worries about its service.
In October, Google removed thumbnail images and snippets of text from news results belonging to a group of German newspapers. The publisher, Axel Springer, was angry that Google was reposting its content to enhance search results. But the German publishing group later scrapped its plan to reduce its Google results to headlines after traffic plummeted.
A letter published by Axel Springer chief executive Mathias Döpfner claimed that German publishers are “afraid of Google” because of its dominance.
So it seems to be arguing thatGoogle Only Has Itself To Blame If Europe Succeeds In Breaking Up The Company
If Google gets broken up because it’s a monopoly, it will be mostly Google’s fault.
Today, the European Union took the first step in that extraordinary process: EU parliament members voted in favour of breaking up Google in order to end its monopoly in search. In Europe, 90% of search results come from Google.
To be clear: We are a long, long way from actually seeing any part of Google hived off into a competing entity. It probably won’t happen.
But the fact that regulatory bodies here are even considering it tells you just how many enemies Google has made over the years, and how obvious its monopoly is.
Google is more dominant in Europe than in the US, even though it is an American company with a towering stateside presence. Everyone admits that Google is a de facto monopoly. Peter Thiel, the libertarian tech investor, has said so. Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer thinks Google is a monopoly. Yelp has lobbied the EU, arguing the same. The US FTC has investigated Google for monopoly practices, although it has concluded no significant antitrust action needs be taken.
Even Google chairman Eric Schmidt has admitted “we’re in that area.” Schmidt and Page once declined to testify to Congress on the topic of their monopoly status.
The fact that it monopolises search is not in itself a bad thing. Merely being a monopoly is not a transgression, even in Europe. (It’s often a sign of natural success.) Rather, EU antitrust law applies when companies abuse their monopoly to manipulate markets around them unfairly.
On that measure, Google has more than qualified for scrutiny over the way it distorts markets that have nothing to do with search.
(the next section is images, so I suggest you click on the article's link to read the article with images as it makes it more clear)
The best evidence for that came from Yelp and a coalition of companies it has formed who believe they are being screwed out of their natural, “organic” ranking in search results because Google simply dumps its own — often unhelpful — content on top of the “real” search ranking of which sites are best.
Yelp’s evidence was elegant and simple: It used Google’s own search API to create a browser extension that displayed Google search results without results that include promo boxes generated from Google+, the unpopular identity/social network product that Google launched to counter Facebook. The extension shows you the “real” result generated by Google’s algorithm, without the self-promotional fluff that Google layers on top of it.
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The difference is alarming. Hotel review sites like Tripadvisor — which have hundreds of reader reviews per hotel, and are thus good quality search results if you’re looking for hotels — get buried under Google’s own Google+ review boxes, in which only a handful of people have written reviews. It’s difficult to argue that Google is serving the “best” hotel results if its own algorithm is being crammed down under auto-generated promo boxes for Google’s own properties.
You should take this argument with a punch of salt: Yelp is an avowed enemy of Google.
Yet … it’s compelling. Yelp is not alone. Dozens of companies believe Google uses its search might to dictate terms in industries that Google itself does not compete in. Expedia, TripAdvisor, Microsoft and a bunch of smaller companies have complained that Google sets competition rules within their industries.
Even adultery website AshleyMadison has a case: It cannot advertise on certain Google properties, but Match.com can. Google doesn’t run dating sites, but it sets the rules through which they can advertise against each other.
Over the years, all these complainers have piled up into a veritable tidal wave of discontent against Google. The company, because it is so successful and so dominant, has created an army of enemies that want to see it brought down.
In Europe, they’re making progress.
1. Google is using its monopoly to support its businesses in other fields unrelated to the one its having a monopoly in.
This looks similar to the browser wars when Microsoft tried to smuggle Internet explorer with Windows while competing with Netscape
2. Google seems to have some weird rules which limits other companies (in areas it supposedly doesn't compete in) advertising
I don't even know why they would have such limitations if Google doesn't compete with them. Can anyone explain. And what are the ramifications of the EU's decision. Because it seems likely there will be either a fine or some more negotiations.
