It's ridiculous to label Google a monopoly. People have to go out of their way to type in Googles URL, and anyone can type in something different. Yandex and baidu are valid non-US competitors.
Quality is the reason why people go back to Google. Compare this to the monopolistic practices of Mircosoft; who still viciously fend competitors from installing their software on OEM devices, amongst other horrible business practices. You could also label Apple or Oracle but in comparison they're not that bad.
It boils down to the fact that dodgy tax breaks are good, unless you're not getting a slice of the pie.
Google is the default search engine in Safari, Chrome, Firefox on both mobile and web. Nobody is going out of their way to look for or type Google.com.
And not sure why on earth you are bringing up Yandex or Baidu which are both country specific engines with very strong ties to their respective governments.
I rebut your naked assertion with anecdata. Once a retailer offered to look up something on her computer for me. She opened up internet explorer, the default browser on her operating system. It loaded Bing. Then she typed "Google" into Bing. Then she clicked the first result. Then she typed her question into Google.
The fact that Google search is a free service with no lock in and with many other free alternatives still stands. It's also strange that a search engine is a target of such hostility in the continent. No one is being prevented to visit any website or install any app they like.
Also the political aspect of this situation shouldn't be so easily dismissed, I don't see how tax or intangible privacy concerns have to do with the competitive question, this whole thing boils down to powerful newspaper publishers which have outsized influence on politicians seeking to punish Google, this is not unlike corrupt third world government behaviour.
The hostility comes from Google being the gatekeeper to the internet for most people. And them using that privilege to unfairly promote their products above alternatives.
And you must be deluded if you think the privacy concerns aren't a serious concern for Europeans. The US was implicated in hacking the phones of the German Chancellor and Snowden showed the extent of NSA data capture/mining. What do you expect them to do .. put their head in the ground and do nothing ?
if the europeans were bothered enough by boeing to create airbus, why aren't they bothered enough to create their own search engine?
the chinese don't seem to have a problem not using google..
So google became popular because people have found them to be the most useful. Anyone can switch to a different search engine with a few keystrokes. They haven't forced themselves to become the default browser on anything, nor any quid pro quo I believe.
Yet another comment that seems to hate google since now they are the big guy, and we hate the big guy, since we on HN are the broke little guys. Until of course we become the big guy and IPO.
What is wrong with making google apps get top billing on an an ecosystem provided by them? This is like having your number one sponsor logo front and center of your top donors page. Seems fine to me.
If you're free to use another service at no cost to yourself, then there is no gatekeeper.
If the primary problem (supposed "cost") in switching, is that you have to use an inferior product, then you're proving your position to be wrong to begin with.
Their position is not a privilege, and as such promoting their own products and services with their own service is and should be their right.
Google either owns its property, and has full control over that property, or it does not. If you claim it does not, then you're claiming the right to revoke property rights any time and any place when it's matching with your personal ideology.
Google isn't the gateway to the Internet not in any physical nor even metaphorical sense, it's Facebook were most folks spend most of their time, also the "promote their products above alternatives" is a loaded statement and accusation, when they show shopping results it's not their appliances they are selling, when show maps it's because it's a geographical query, and so on, and when they just show answers and not links it's because that is how search engines are supposed to work.
The perceived importance of privacy is irrelevant when the question is about competition, when other matters entirely are invoked to pressure or punish them then that is just plain old corruption.
>Compare this to the monopolistic practices of Mircosoft; who still viciously fend competitors from installing their software on OEM devices, amongst other horrible business practices
Reference? Google has been paying OEMs to bundle Chrome since a very long time.
It is pretty embarassing that we completely rely on Americans for tech. And that's despite larger population and higher density, better Internet connectivity, free higher education in many places... I don't think it's Google's fault though.
I'm curious why Europe is in such a situation. There seems to be something pathological behind trend. I'm not sure what.
I've seen free higher education, or at least heavily subsided education. There is a great safety-net available too in most European countries. These two should make for a greater tech culture, at least abstractly.
Now I've worked with Americans and Europeans who had an MS or PhD in CS (full disclosure I started to get a MS, but had to stop because I couldn't do that, a marriage and 60 hrs a week for work). Most couldn't code worth a damn. They could probably discuss abstract CS concepts. They couldn't leverage those to solve a problem. It could be that the higher education is perhaps a hindrance to getting things done?
There could be a difference in how the two see failure. America seems to be open to it. Europe seems to be opposed. I think this is reflected in the history of the countries. America wanted the people who felt penned in by their countries hierarchy. Europe wanted those people gone.
Perhaps it's a combination of the two that's lead to the European problems. Education is seen as an end in itself, while the environment is such that people are told not to aim to high lest they melt there wings?
> There is a great safety-net available too in most European countries. These two should make for a greater tech culture, at least abstractly.
Quite the opposite actually. The better your life if you don't take a risk, the less likely it is that you will take a risk. And because people usually overestimate risk, risks are usually worth it.
I agree with this. I've recently started my own company. My wife has a job which covers our bills. I don't have a fear that we're going to get totally wiped out. As a result I don't focus as much as I should on it. Instead I work around the house or get lost on the Internet on HN or Reddit.
1. The internet was developed in the USA.
2. Language.
The first point simply means that whatever was done with the internet, the USA got the first crack at it. In american TV it's common now to tell people two tweet about the show they're watching, with hash tags on screen and whatnot. In germany, europe's technology powerhouse, it's still extremely common for a person to have never even heard of twitter, if they have internet at all.
Further: Anything you do in tech has profits that scale with the audience you can reach. Companies starting out in the USA are able to access all of the USA, all of the UK, and anyone from any other country who has learned one of the most wide-spread languages on the planet; with exactly zero special consideration at any point. Companies in Europe have two choices: Either they build with localization in the product from the start, which is hard, and provide both their local language and english, which also costs more; or they ignore the local market and work entirely in english; or they stick to their own language entirely and ignore the world.
In addition to that, due the great employee safety neat, which also means that employees have protection from things like capricious firings, taking risks is more expensive for european companies.
Whichever way they go, european companies either have to live with less growth potential, less ability to take risks, or spend more to get the same opportunities as their american counterparts.
Why does adding English cost that much? I thought that a good number of European companies have English speaking people in them. They don't have to speak perfect English for a lot of tech. Just enough to label a UI mostly right. Americans will overlook grammatical errors.
Why is the Internet lacking in Germany? Is it because there are few German sites?
@dunmalg I guess that I find odd is that, at least for Java, i18n is really the design goal. Most web frameworks provided that ability. Wicket, Spring, etc. JSPs had tags that knew how to fish out content based on local. Android has is built in with English as the default, but with localization being additive. Heck, I'm doing that right now on my Android app.
As for Engrish, why is that bad on a first release. Yes, American's will laugh at it, but I doubt it will be enough to kill something that provide real value. Heck, Americans produce Engrish. That's never stopped us. If a German company tried to get ok English for their service/app/whatever version 1.0, they could take the money and improve for 1.4.
Adding english costs, depending on what your site is, roughly a half, to two employees, since, for one, the developers have to implement localization, which is not easy, and everything has to be translated. In most german companies i've worked at people were able to understand written english a little, but were unable to produce fluid english. So you have to hire translators. It might be easier in other countries.
> Americans will overlook grammatical errors.
I'm saying without proper translators you end up with engrish.
> Why is the Internet lacking in Germany? Is it because there are few German sites?
General lack of interest, and smaller set of offers.
Keep in mind that the east half of germany didn't even have a telephone net into most people's houses until 1989, when germany was reunified. As for the content: Just recently it was brought up that in the usa elder people increasingly turn to youtube. An example brought up was a wealth of wood-working videos. Trying to find german wood-working videos on youtube only gives you semi-commercial advertisements for big machines.
Localization in general adds a whole additional dimension of complexity. Every place you would normally just stick a word or phrase between quotes now suddenly has to pull that in from an array or database somewhere.
This is the correct answer, and that has cultural and economic system roots that date to the very origin of the United States.
The rest of the answer is that the US possesses an integrated, massive, comprehensive economic system. From capital markets, to VC markets, to every major industry, to the top universities on the planet, to a massive existing infrastructure related to science, engineering, programming, internet services, a total ecosystem from top to bottom. No other country on earth can match the total sum, and Europe as a whole is not integrated well at all.
Not in the search space they don't which is what EU companies have an issue with. It's Google with about 70%, Bing with about 20% and Yahoo with about 10%. The others are basically rounding errors.
When Google puts its own products before organic search results then that clearly is monopolistic behaviour i.e. attempting to extend dominance in one sector to another.
What does "organic" mean, though? Does it include unbelieavbly bad alternatives to stock Android facilities, like the Aptoide market mentioned in the article? I mean that site is just a piece of shit. Every click takes minutes to service! Is it really Google's responsibility to direct users to miserable experiences, just because some Eurocrat wants his pals to make more money? That's all this boils down to really: local bureaucrats trying to use sovereign powers to enrich their friends.
> “We are afraid of Google,” wrote Mathias Döpfner, chief executive of Axel Springer
By quoting him the article has directly made itself extremely suspect, since the publishing house Springer owns the biggest and worst fact- and politics-mangling tabloid in germany, Bild.
I don't know anything about Bild, and only know Springer as the publisher of expensive low-print-run sometimes-poorly-formatted academic books. But isn't this like saying that the Wall Street Journal isn't credible because the same company also publishes the New York Post?
No, it's like saying the Wall Street Journal would be suspect if the same company publishes FOX News, or the Daily Mail. Publications that openly lie, distort and abuse; on a massive scale; to serve their own political slant.
Addendum: To clarify how terrible Bild is, consider this website: http://www.bildblog.de/ It is a blog dedicated to pointing out factual mistakes in the Bild publication. They have been running since 2004.
I was not aware of that, but it leads me to ask a question:
I have seen first-hand that the thinking of Bild extends to other companies owned by Springer, companies that have nothing to do with what Bild does, like the price comparison portal http://idealo.de I have seen this in person when i attended job interviews for programming positions at those companies. That is my reason to not give anything or anyone connected to Bild, directly or indirectly, any iota of trust in their honesty.
Oh, wait, we're trying to protect our freedom. US tech companies are on a rampage attempting to destroy civil rights, consumer rights and labor rights in Europe. Often openly breaking laws that aren't outdated and in need of "disruption", but very much explicitly exist to prevent what these companies are trying to do.
This insanity has got to end at some point. Imagine if a foreign companies started liquor stores across the US that sold alcohol to under 21 year olds, flaunting US law, claiming to be innovative and disruptive, and accusing the US of just trying to protect it's internal market.
We've been pretty fucking tolerant of this shit so far, acknowledging that some things may be up for debate. Regulators have mostly limited themselves to diplomatically urging companies to adjust their practices.
But it's getting ridiculous. Especially Uber has demonstrated that US companies have absolutely no scruples anymore about launching businesses that openly and deliberately break local laws. This isn't business, it's organized crime.
> Imagine if a foreign companies started liquor stores across the US that sold alcohol to under 21 year olds, flaunting US law, claiming to be innovative and disruptive, and accusing the US of just trying to protect it's internal market.
We have literally discussed this idea at work last week. Air France should park their Airbuses in some airport and sell wine there to 18-year-olds during their prom nights since the laws of France are in effect aboard a ship.
