Big Tech Faces Ban From Favoring Own Services Under EU Rules (bloomberg.com) 30
Big tech firms could be banned from preferencing their own services in search rankings or exclusively pre-installing their own applications on devices, under new regulations planned by the European Union. From a report: As part of the EU's Digital Services Act, platforms with power to control could also have to share customer data with business rivals, according to internal draft documents obtained by Bloomberg. Due to be unveiled in December by the European Commission, the bloc's executive body, the legislation will seek to modernize rules governing the internet to give platforms greater responsibility for what users post on their sites as well as propose regulation aimed at curbing the power of large platforms. The initiative comes as big giants such as Apple and Google offer services across a widening array of sectors and as competitors increasingly rely on their platforms to offer their own services. Apple has faced heat over policies with its app store, which companies like Spotify complain give an unfair advantage to the iPhone maker's rival music service.
Monopoly? (Score:2)
This appears to just be establishing more or less bog standard anti-monopoly rules, but on the internet.
I wonder why the existing regulations couldn't be used.
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This appears to just be establishing more or less bog standard anti-monopoly rules, but on the internet.
I wonder why the existing regulations couldn't be used.
For the same reason any new regulations won't be used.
Greed N. Corruption doesn't give a shit, and never did.
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When you go in to a bricks-and-mortar store to make a purchase, there isn't really any chance that the store owner can claim that the place where you made the purchase was in a different country. In other words, the consumer laws and tax laws that apply to your bricks-and-mortar purchase are based upon those where the store is physically located. This applies in almost all cases - I think that there is a special case for stor
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Here [publicintegrity.org], and here, [euronews.com] and here. [telegraph.co.uk]
The thing is, once companies like Amazon and Google get their hooks in to a legislator for one item like this, they can go back again and again, because the fact that the legislator was foolish enough to agree once gives the company leverage over them. And we are the ones who pay...
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...I think - I don't know, this is just an educated guess - that this might be one of those scenarios where the corporate lawyers and lobbyists are using laws that they "sponsored" to help them wriggle around the controls that were put in place to try and stop their abuses. But since they have stacked the game in their favour...
There is another way to say all of this.
Greed N. Corruption.
And while regulations (or lack of) may be slightly different between the physical and digital space, the concept of abusing the shit out of the system due to rampant greed and corruption, remains the world over. And it's fucking timeless, as long as we allow it to happen.
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I wonder why the existing regulations couldn't be used.
Good question. Maybe the did not cover non-physical goods and services.
False (Score:1)
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First, the Sherman Act has nothing to do with the EU (which is what the article is about).
Second, your analogy with Target and Walmart is way off the mark. Target and Walmart are retailers. Neither has used their retailing position to muscle into other, unrelated, markets to the exclusion of competitors. For example, mobile phones and payment processing are two completely different markets. Success in one does not mean you can take anti-competitive actions to be successful in the other. That is pretty
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This appears to just be establishing more or less bog standard anti-monopoly rules, but on the internet.
I wonder why the existing regulations couldn't be used.
Because there are no existing regulations. There are only existing laws about abuse of market power, which this would fall under. I.e. for every single individual case you'd need a protracted legal battle to prove infringement and enact change.
Regulations are something different which can simply have someone come out and say "these the rules, you don't follow, we fine you".
By the way there's no such thing as anti-monopoly rules, monopolies aren't illegal. Abusing your monopoly is.
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Arm? The UK was in the EU when this was founded.
ARM was a joint-venture between Acorn computers (UK), Apple (US), and VLSI Technology (US). So, still 2/3 American. Not to mention, currently owned by the Japanese (Softbank), and about the be bought by the Americans (Nvidia). Is that your best attempt?
apple needs let other full web browsers be used! (Score:2)
apple needs let other full web browsers be used!
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apple needs let other full web browsers be used!
Or you can just not use Apple products. Seems easy enough, I've never had an issue.
Or Apple can do whatever it wants on its own store (Score:1)
Absolutely a step in the right direction... (Score:2)
15 years ago. This is still needed of course but things have progressed rapidly. The focus now should be on banning social media.
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This crap never needs to happen. It's supposed to be our data, not theirs to buy and sell - or now just "share."
what? are you going to advertise your opponent? (Score:3)
What a sad joke.
Re:what? are you going to advertise your opponent? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're big enough to be a market, the "recommendation" you're talking about is more properly referred to as "illegal, anti-competitive behavior". You are leveraging your monopoly in one market to prevent your competitors from being able to compete with you in adjacent markets. You can't do that.
It's fine to believe in your products. It's fine to recommend them in ads. It's fine to advertise them in your other products. But if you become a market by dominating it (nothing wrong with that), additional regulatory burdens are placed on you to ensure that your position in that market can't be used to gain undue advantages in other markets. Most often, that would be something like you taking away choices that might lead to competing products, or else or putting up barriers in your dominant products that make it harder for people to find/use your competitors in those secondary market. In the case of search, for instance, it's fine if your other products show up at the top of search results, provided they show up there organically (i.e. they competed their way to the top), rather than because you hard-coded them to show up there (i.e. you used your position in search to give yourself an advantage in that other market).
To answer your subject line question, yes, actually. Microsoft was in this position two decades ago. They made Internet Explorer the default on Windows and practically overnight we went from having a vibrant set of competing, rapidly evolving browsers turn into a market dominated by a single, grossly inferior, slow-moving one. The EU thought it was a bad idea to let Microsoft harm the browser market by leveraging their position as the top dog in OSes, so the EU forced Microsoft to prompt users to select a browser during the Windows install process, with the ordering of the browsers randomized to prevent Microsoft from giving itself a favorable position. Again, practically overnight, IE usage dropped like a rock, competing browsers came back to the fore, and the market began to move quickly once again.
Likewise, Google has been forced to remove the hard-coded appearance of some of its own services from the tops of searches because it was using its position as the dominant search engine to give itself an undue advantage over its competitors in shopping, travel, and other markets unrelated to search. It's generally fine to do something like that when you're a tiny player who doesn't have the capacity to impact other markets, but once you become a market by dominating it, your capacity to unduly impact other markets requires that you face additional regulatory hurdles to prevent you from doings o.
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If you have something you believe in, you should be able to recommend it before your competitor.
In pretty much every country in the world this is legal providing you don't have market power. As soon as you have market power that becomes an anti-trust violation. The only thing it takes is for someone to come out and claim that they are suffering because of your decision.
All the EU is doing is eliminating long drawn out legal battles by putting simple terms on paper up front.
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When you're a little guy, there's no problem with promoting your own services, legally or ethically. When you are so big that everyone HAS to go to you are they die, you are no longer on the same ethical playing field. Now, your "promotion" becomes binding, your "customers" have no choice but to do what you say. Things--things that are right and wrong--do change when you dominate the market.
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So who on Slashdot has abandoned Google and related services? I'm sure many of us have. Doesn't that kind of prove they aren't even a monopoly?
Also, why wouldn't a company suggestion it's other products and services first and foremost? Of course they would. Doesn't mean you can't look at other offers. In fact, if you always take the first offer given to you, no EU law is going to save you from it.
This isn't remotely the same as what Microsoft was doing in the 90s. Back then, Windows was it. They used their
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The slashdot community is hardly a representative sample. Slashdot users know about other search engines. Non-technical people barely know what a search engine is, they just go to Google. But this misses the point. YOU are not Google's customer. Advertisers are. And if you're an advertiser, and you don't go to Google, you miss more than 80% of the market. https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com] So if you want to advertise to search engine users, you are definitely going to Google.
YOU can avoid Google (at least, i
What's next? McDonalds has to sell Whoppers? (Score:3)
Re:What's next? McDonalds has to sell Whoppers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Companies always favored, or sold, their own products
Indeed. And they are legally allowed to do so until they gain "market power". Once they have that, doing so becomes an anti-trust issue in basically every western country.
They aren't punishing American companies, they are simplifying enforcement of laws against dominant companies regardless of where they are from.
Why not apply this reasoning to American fast food chains also?
It would. If American fast food chains suddenly required customers or suppliers to buy their banking service they would get slapped equally hard. Note this regulation doesn't apply to primary product.
In fact I suspect the biggest victim of this in the physical space may be Amazon for it's "Amazon Choice" program.
This is bullying from the EU.
No, it's simply putting in place regulation that already matches the law removing the need for multi-year legal battles which the companies would lose anyway.
Not just monopolies (Score:2)
I'm thinking of Samsung here with their decade-long demand that consumers choose Samsung over Google chrome, Google assistant, Google backup, Google pay, Google fit, Google nest, Google digital garage.