EU proposes breaking up Google over anti-competition concerns
In a preliminary report into Google's alleged anti-competitive practices, the European Union says it believes breaking up the company could be essential.
The European Commission has been investigating Google's ad business, and specifically its market dominance, since 2021. Following its preliminary report, the EU has now sent Google a statement of objections.
"The Commission preliminarily finds that, in this particular case, a behavioural remedy is likely to be ineffective to prevent the risk that Google continues such self-preferencing conducts or engages in new ones," says the EU Commission in a statement
In other words, the EU does believe that Google's advertising business is anti-competitive -- and that Google will not voluntarily change that.
"The Commission's preliminary view is therefore that only the mandatory divestment by Google of part of its services would address its competition concerns," continues the statement.
"Google has a very strong market position in the online advertising technology sector," says Margrethe Vestager, the EU's Executive Vice-President in charge of competition policy. "It collects users' data, it sells advertising space, and it acts as an online advertising intermediary."
"So Google is present at almost all levels of the so-called adtech supply chain," she continued. "Our preliminary concern is that Google may have used its market position to favour its own intermediation services."
"Not only did this possibly harm Google's competitors but also publishers' interests, while also increasing advertisers' costs," said Vestager. "If confirmed, Google's practices would be illegal under our competition rules."
Vestager and the European Commission are careful to state that the investigation's conclusions are preliminary. Google now has the opportunity to respond to the statement of objections, and there will be a hearing to discuss those.
There is not as yet, though, a specific schedule for what can happen after that. If it finds Google guilty of anticompetitive practices, the EU can fine the company up to 10% of its global sales -- or potentially force it to be broken up.
If Google is to be fined, it's far from the first time the EU has done so.
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Ok, so I have a downer on Google but if you saw the logs of the hack attempts on an almost daily basis originating from Google controlled IP addresses. Do they do anything about it? Do pigs fly?
Their attacks include trying to scan every page on my sites. I have the robots.txt but they simply don't care. All they care is suck, suck, slurp, and suck.
I have blocked every Google IP address but they keep on registering new ones (according to whois)
One European company however, is leading the charge.
Djay a popular DJing app, has already extended its iPad app into VisionOS and said the development process was seamless.
https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=h3qjwosp
The US public elected politicians that created rules to protect companies from being steamrolled by monopolies (votes 51-1, 242-0). Those rules stayed under Trump.
In Europe we have done the exact same thing. We elected politicians directly to the EU parliament and to local parliaments. Together they agreed to the same rules as in the US. Just as in the US we don't want a company to use their size in one area to kill innovation in another area.
This thing about Google, and eventually every other successful and dominant US company, is just more of the same.
THE PROBLEM the EU are trying to address is that Google’s practices *eliminate* competition. So there ISN’T really another platform advertisers can just “go to” if (ha ha ha) their business practices are hurting publishers (like AppleInsider), users (yes, they are very materially hurting you by selling your data to scammers and bad state actors and more — hey, a buck is a buck), and the industry.
In a world of abundance, being the best is rewarded more handsomely than most of us can conceive, and not being the best is bringing fewer rewards than ever before. The competition is at an insanely high level. Those who can identify "the best" and make it available are going to be able to charge more for that service. Google were the first to successfully do it at internet scale; Amazon, facebook and Microsoft are also big players and there are a handful more further down the chain.
It's very similar to the effect large retailers have had over the past hundred years or so, and the legality is murky but the economic effects are crystal clear: get big enough to garner attention and you will earn outsize profits.
Google controls the search so it controls the showing of ads (inside search). Google controls the actual ad company. Google controls the intermediary who is supposed to broker the ads and their placement. So Google control all the various pieces that have to talk to each other , and they also control the data associated with use of the ads. So there is no real competition.
Note: How little Apple camps out in the other gate keepers yards…..
A actual developer perspective on the new Apple Vision Pro device/ecosystem, gives perspective of why Apple is way ahead of the gatekeeper competition.