EU Offers Google Chance To Settle Prior To Anti-Trust Enquiry 119
Fluffeh writes "The EU has accused Google of abusing its dominant position in advertising to benefit its own advertising services at the expense of competitors. In a twist however, rather than initiating formal proceedings, the EU has given Google a chance to settle the whole matter without much fuss. They outlined four changes that Google can make that will put it firmly back in the good graces of the EU. Google has been given 'a matter of weeks' to propose remedies to the four issues — which all tie in with how search results are displayed, their format and their portability to other platforms. This matter has come before the EU based on complaints by a few small companies and Microsoft."
The four issues: Displaying results to their own services specially, use of user reviews from other sites in search results, Advertising "...agreements result in de facto exclusivity requiring them to obtain all or most of their requirements of search advertisements from Google," and concerns that Google is imposing "...contractual restrictions on software developers which prevent them from offering tools that allow the seamless transfer of search advertising campaigns across AdWords and other platforms..."
Re:Did they do [any] investigations? (Score:4, Interesting)
Google may be copying original material from the websites of its competitors such as user reviews and using that material on its own sites without their prior authorisation.
Bah. If their competitors don't know how to use robots.txt, they're not competent enough to be competitors. On the other hand, if Google is ignoring robots.txt, then I think that would count as unauthorized access, and, given Google's monopoly position, a matter of deep concern.
Note: I think a great deal of the anti-Google nonsense that gets posted on slashdot is total nonsense (if not outright astroturfing), but what the EU is looking at here is something I think they are fully justified in investigating: actual potential anti-competitive behavior that would make sense for Google to engage in. But I agree with you that investigate is the key word there.
Re:Google (Score:3, Interesting)
Another case in point is the exclusivity agreement in AdWords. If you want to use AdWords (and you often have to because it's the prominent player and they also own Doubleclick since long time ago), you cannot run your ads on competitors services. It is prohibited in the terms. That is just monopoly abuse.
Mind providing a link to this point? I work at Google, more on the client side-- and have never heard this issue come up, which I find rather odd given that a lot my clients certainly do it. Not saying you're wrong, but I find it hard to believe.
Re:Google (Score:5, Interesting)
The forest for the trees is that a: microsoft does this and b: they're the ones leading this campaign against google and encouraged others to campaign against google. But nice try.
changing search engines is exactly true, and you *can* do that. However, scraping data from "competitors" (which they aren't) - scraping data from sites with good data to aggregate their reviews is not an abuse of position. It's aggregation of information. Taking yelp reviews for google maps reviews is an agreement google had with yelp. That's not discrimination, that's a strawman to call that "competition" or abusing competition.
The adwords thing is something stupid, but it's not any different than Microsoft getting entire corporations to sign up for using windows and requiring that they do not support any other OS (yes, this is in every company wide subscription based windows 7 deployment/office365 agreement).
Nice try to mislead the entire issue, step by step, along with a similar reply. from Neokushan. Can we stop with the obvious shills to just make this sound like it's a real problem? the "I love (thing), but (comments of hate for a product)" is a really old shill technique and we're bored of it. It's like "I'm an MSCE and love windows and do windows deployments all day, but microsoft is evil". We're tired of that kind of shit.
If you had linked to a real article covering the matter [politico.com] you'd see that the EU is just telling google to comply before they look to press charges.
Re:Prepare for a worse experience... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not only that, but the company that complained about Google offering this additional information in search results was Microsoft, who do exactly the same thing in their own search engine Bing. They're fully aware that Google search will be less usable if the EU gets its way, and are effectively using the EU to try and force Google to cripple their search in order to drive users to Bing.
(Well, technically I think it was the Microsoft subsidiary which provides shopping results for Bing which submitted the EU complaint, but it's effectively the same thing.)