Microsoft Files EU Competition Complaint Against Google 205
bLanark writes "In an amazing about-turn, the bully has turned into the bullied. Microsoft, having been on the receiving end of many anti-competition lawsuits, has filed a complaint with the European Commission, saying that Google is using its market dominance to prevent Microsoft from gaining market share."
Evidence? (Score:0, Interesting)
Specifically, the complaint charges that Google hurts competition by "walling off" content on its YouTube site, so other search engines can't display accurate results;
First time I've heard of this. Evidence please?
[...] by making it difficult for Microsoft's mobile phone software to show videos from YouTube;
Evidence?
by blocking access to content owned by book publishers which Google has copied and stored;
I bet the book publishers have something to do with that.
by not allowing advertisers to use their own data about customers garnered from Google on other sites, such as those owned by Microsoft;
Because private data ought to be public?
by blocking websites from using competing "search boxes";
Really?
and by making it expensive for potential competitors to Google to advertise online.
News to me.
Microsoft, show os the Details, PLEASE (Score:4, Interesting)
First, in 2006 Google acquired YouTube—and since then it has put in place a growing number of technical measures to restrict competing search engines from properly accessing it for their search results. Without proper access to YouTube, Bing and other search engines cannot stand with Google on an equal footing in returning search results with links to YouTube videos and that, of course, drives more users away from competitors and to Google.
YouTube does have a robots file http://www.youtube.com/robots.txt [youtube.com] which asks not to index some parts of the website. This should be allowed. I have a robots.txt file on my websites. If you send a spider loose on my servers and ignore it then I may -j DROP you. If you send a spider to my sites and disobey it then I'll also -j DROP you. If you visit the hidden-linked /spider-trap/ then PHP scripts will begin to die('gfy') from your IP. I think this should be allowed, and I am strongly against anyone who wants to dictate who and what I allow on my server.
If Microsoft just thinks YouTube's robots.txt is too restrictive then they can go fsck themselves.
Now, on the other hand, IF Google is serving different pages or denying pages based on Microsoft's spiders user-agent then that is something completely different. That's EVIL. EU and others should strike down upon them with great vengeance and furious anger if they are doing exactly what Microsoft was exposed doing to Opera on their Hotmail service a few years back (yes, they really did serve broken pages to Opera-users based on User-agent).
I would very much like to see Microsoft give out actual technical details on what they believe Google is doing that's so bad and unacceptable. Loose blah blah "google bad" text is not at all helpful, they should show us the technical details behind their claims. It's not that hard. Opera did this when Microsoft intentionally sent Opera-users broken pages when visiting Hotmail, it's actually quite easy to do.