Axel Springer Unit, Others Say Google Still Playing Unfairly, Want EU To Act

Axel Springer's price-comparison shopping service Idealo and 40 other European peers have accused Google of tilting the playing field in its favour and urged EU antitrust regulators to enforce a ruling against the company. From a report: The joint call by the group ratchets up pressure on European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager to take further action against Google, the world's most popular internet search engine, two years after she ordered it to stop favouring its own price comparison shopping service (CSS). The companies, the largest group to take a stand against Google to date, in a joint letter to Vestager seen by Reuters on Thursday said that the U.S. web giant had yet to comply with the 2017 order. Google was also fined 2.4 billion euros ($2.65 billion) at the time. The signatories to the letter are from 21 EU countries and include Idealo, Europe's second largest price comparison shopping service, Polish No. 1 Ceneo, Britain's Kelkoo, and Foundem and Heureka in the Czech Republic.

And the award for the most confusing title

[Anonymous Coward]

this post

You can lead a user to your site..

[Daemonik]

But will they use it? That's the issue nobody seems to be applying in the EU in regards to Google. People are content with Google's services and no amount of nannying them will push them to another service without some life altering reason to move. The only way, at this point, to minimize Google's presence in this segment would be to target them specifically and bar them from offering their own service.

Re: You can lead a user to your site..

[NagrothAgain]

The EU should just start their own search site. With hookers, and blackjack.

Re:

[coofercat]

Yeah, we need it to find these price comparison sites we've never heard of (or indeed people).

Re:

[rtb61]

Likely they will simply rule that you can provide search services and nothing else, because no matter what else you provide those search services will be abused one way or another. Over time, it is likely, that internet search will be defined as a one off activity, you either do that or something else, you can not do that and something else because you will always abuse that search one way or another.

Google well and truly fucked up, when they started secretly baking search results to favour their preferred

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Their search results do appear on Google now... If you don't have an ad blocker. Ad blockers are very common in Europe so I wonder if that's why they are not getting much traffic.

The other probable cause being that their site sucks.

Idealo

[nonicknameavailable]

Idealo is german only

Froogle, RIP

[bill_mcgonigle]

Back in the "don't be evil" days, Froogle was exactly what people wanted, an unbiased price comparison search extracted from the search data.

The "Google Shopping" pay-to-play model goes against the "organize the world's information" mission Google used to profess. It's a step backwards for technology and only an advantage for revenue, but that opens up Google to low-end competitors so it's a dumb strategic move.

Anyway, didn't the EU already bless their current system:

https://ec.europa.eu/commissio... [europa.eu]

Re:

[kqs]

Froogle was exactly what nobody wanted, and therefore nobody used.

Biggest problem: If you don't charge anything for merchant listings, then there is no downside for spammers/fraudsters to duplicate retail sites with fake listings (which, as far as I recall, were about 90% of the Froogle entries). If you charge for listings then you can monitor and block people who misbehave, cancel merchants who break your terms of service, etc.

There is a reason that there are no shopping sites which use completely scrape

Really?

[Jeremiah Smith]

I'm all for slapping huge fines on crooked corporate antics but this is simply absurd... Of course Google would put it's own services first and if these other so great services had their own search engine worth using, they'd be doing the same thing... This is one giant piss and moan, boo hoo from the losing competition. Grow tf up already. Wow...

How 'bout providing a better service?

[guruevi]

All those comparison sites are just bloated with look-alike ads and very clearly biased reviews. If I want a price listing, I want a solid site to go to that categorizes major sites that I can actually buy from which Google is one of the best and in the EU I would probably give Tweakers.net a close second.

The problem with a lot of sites is that they don't recognize that I can't go to a mom-and-pop shop 500km away, I just want to buy online and have it mailed to me. And then the editors on those sites claim

Re:

[Brett Buck]

That all requires someone to do something positive, which sounds like a lot of work. Much better to just whine about it to regulators and get them to outlaw whatever might be causing your problem, then you can continue to be lazy and do nothing and get free money. They *are* Europeans, after all.

Back in the day...

[mykro76]

I don't remember Google complaining about the dominance of Altavista or Yahoo. They just went ahead and made a better search engine.

Re:

[FEEDFACEDEADBEEF]

You are correct, but the improvements to search Google made were substantial and were gladly welcomed by users. To get that kind of improvement now would not be realistic. So, not the same playing field, as they say.