Google Blasted by EU

Today's Wall Street Journal indicates Google is about to have a dust up against the EU over a 5-year investigation that rivals say favors Google's own services in travel, shopping and maps, rather than other on-line services from competitors.  ( see Valantina Pop and Tom Fairless, Europe to Pull Trigger on Google Antitrust Charges, 15 April 2015 ).  

This is not just a legal issue, though Google has enough lawyers around to defend themselves against almost anything.  To me, it is an emotional one.  We could put aside the law and think about this in the context of all the Internet services that people get for free.  As a business principle, if I get something for free, I generally don't quibble about whether it favors its own maps or not.  I even expect that it will, and in Google's case, I prefer that it does, since it has better maps than the upgrades I bought for my old car.  It is hard to see that as anti-trust.  

We remember anti-trust with the oil companies who drove competitors out of business---by force, if necessary.  It became the standard for anti-trust, but nobody stopped buying oil from Standard Oil.  We still buy oil from something called OPEC, which is not called a cartel for nothing.  How about bringing charges for that one?  

Free services, that get their revenue from advertising are everyhwere in the world.  Amazon Kindle has a version that has ads in it.  Google has ads in theirs, some of which I pay for to sell my books.  There isn't a website that I visit regularly that doesn's have ads in it and they get money from those.  I ignore most of them, and stay away from the advertised sites.  Commercial sites all have ads favoring their own products.  The network giants favor their own phones, even have them built for their own networks so they can't be used by competitors.  How about bringing charges for that?  

It smacks of Europe First.  It smacks of hypocrisy.  It took them 5 years to get this investigation done, and I wonder what took that long to figure out that Google gets paid to advertise services of others on their networks.  We expect them favor their customers because they are a business, not a monopoly.  

Maybe the European's should have their own Google, built by the governments of the EU.  It would be free and have no customers except their own countries.  I can just see a browser made by many governments.  The maps would take you somewhere, but it probably wouldn't be to your destination.  You could store documents on it too.  I get tired of the rest of the world telling us to be free and open in how we do business, but not doing the same themselves.  It may not be law as the EU sees it, but as my students used to say, "Denny said it was OK."  Leave Google alone.