the upper house of parliament yesterday voted to support an amendment to a draft economy bill that would require search engines to display at least three rivals on their homepage
That's just absurd. Can someone acquainted with the situation shed light on why they are doing this? Simple populism and lobbying from local businesses or something else?
Not the answer you're looking for, but French protectionism (agriculture, film, etc.) is consistently stronger than the Western norm in the rest of Europe and the US. In those cases it is to protect domestic interests, which of course comes with its own consequences.
> Can someone acquainted with the situation shed light on why they are doing this?
Hard to explain, even for a french person. That's why I basically want to move ASAP, at least abroad I'll care less about politics.
It tragically funny, there is like 10% unemployment rate in France right now, and instead of trying to give businesses some air, ie less laws and regulations, they keep on coming with ridiculous ones.
I've found that whenever the media or lawmakers get caught up in some absolutely useless bullshit, they're almost always trying to distract from something more important that they can't address (or caused). It seems to hold no matter what country it is.
A bit more absurd. A closer analogy would be if Windows was required to ask you on first startup if you wanted to install Linux (i.e. advertising a competitor to the thing you're using vs. a thing bundled with the thing you're using).
They did it to Microsoft in Windows to do the browser selection, so its a pretty small step in their minds to do it to Google. Its still absurd, but it fits their thinking.
Google hasn't been paying enough campaign contributions in France it seems. Back in the day Microsoft tried to avoid politics, and the US government almost broke them up.
"You may have all the money, Raymond, but I have all the men with guns." (Frank Underwood, House of Cards)
Looks like you're going to have to start paying more attention to the wallets of those with all the guns Google.
Without knowing much about french politicians I'd wager the guess that they receive the same amount of contributions as their colleagues in every other country, just through less public channels.
It's more a party thing, usually (the conservative party has been embroiled in a series of scandals concerning the last presidential elections, and the one before).
> Why is it bad? it's definitely bad for Google but for french citizens I can't see how fomenting diversity in a market hurts.
How is it going to "foment diversity" ? it's not. You want to "foment diversity" ? Remove some of these stupid regulations and make France more business friendly. Forcing google to display 3 of its competitors on its search engine page isn't going to create jobs or new startups in France. Google is the least of France's problems. Its politicans on the other hand.
"Producing an equal or superior product" does not necessarily give the ability to "compete in an open market". That's an idealistic view of capitalism which simply doesn't work. It's merely a factor, and a fairly small one at that.
For all you know, there's plenty of "equal or superior products" to [anything] out there. You've just never heard of them for reasons that have nothing to do with their quality.
There's a very high minimum technical bar for successfully competing with Google in search, and then a mountain of brand awareness and user inertia on top of that.
Do you think forcing google to display a competitor on their homepage will change google monopoly? I agree that diversity is a good point but that way is just a joke. The day google will have competitor on search engine people won't need a stupid law like this to switch. (imho)
Elsewhere is often worse. The US congress is either owned by corporate interests, deadlocked by partisanship, campaigning for next term, or working on personal projects. Representing the People is of no concern.
So the choice is, clowns or crooks. Pick at most two.
No need to be ashamed, French politicians are far better than US ones. It's not the US politicians who have built Google. As US have concentred all the money, Europe's companies have hard time investing in some technology that will not yield revenue immediately. Google got its first revenue few years after its foundation, that's impossible for a EU based company. Europe should create more conditions for its startups, otherwise no new technology will come out Europe.
It is not in Google's interest to flash the true power balance here by cutting off France anyway. They couldn't care less about french revenue, but it would be a global PR disaster, likely resulting in new EU-wide regulations that would then actually hurt Google.
Ah that's a really interesting part of the picture - Google clearly doesn't pay adequate tax on the sales it makes in the EU.
Google are pretty obviously not paying tax like a normal company. To put that more explicitly, they are probably committing massive tax fraud, taking billions in local money and not paying tax on it... that isn't unusual for a mega corporation, and they need local government to continue cooperating. So, the UK gets a big Google office, it's government keeps quiet. I guess France needs one too...
China has 66M google users, while France has 44M. However, if we split HK google users from mainland Google users, it would be pretty clear that Google is toast in China just like Excite in the US.
There are a lot of people in China. Only about half of those use the Internet, and only a small percentage of those want to consume silicon valley internet product. People say excitable stuff about the size of the Chinese market but forget that customes are only customers if they are buying your stuff.
s/want to consume/are willing and able to work around government censorship to consume/
Google explicitly decided not to play ball in mainland China years ago. It will be interesting to see the reaction if this goes through-- both exposing ranking algorithms and pulling out of France seem pretty improbable.
It will potentially be the first time that the effectiveness of the product is impacted by the disclosure. It depends on what the factors are in Google's algorithm, of course, but having to disclose them potentially opens up Google to a whole lot more webspam. If that happened, they would need to fall back more heavily on the "difficult to fake" (eg. reputable links) factors rather than the "everyone can fake" (eg. optimal pattern of keywords on page) factors.
In practice it may negatively impact on the quality of search results, even though in theory their algorithm including more "difficult to fake" factors should result in it being more durable.
Not only this, but I'd think their current, exact ranking algorithm would rank pretty high on their list of important trade secrets to protect.
If a competitor gets ahold of their exact ranking algorithm, that's a huge piece of the formula for building a search engine that is as good as Google Search at finding what someone's looking for.
Absolutly correct, but there is also much more too this, there is page layout and look. There is speed of results depended on ability to trawl and return answers. There are complimentary platforms holing to their ecosystem. There is information they have access to only known to google from past searches or alternate platforms. There are masses of manual non algorithmic overrides. There is simple inertia of typing Google into the address bar for many.
Yes giving up the source algorithm would be a loss. Google have seen this coming for years and have been building the moat so even this information shared wouldn't really help a competitor take any significant chunk of their business in the short to medium term.
Sure it is; Google could stop doing business in France, and direct all traffic from France to a landing page saying that the French government has imposed restrictions they're not willing to comply with, so they're choosing to stop accepting traffic from France, and that you might consider contacting your government representatives if you want more information.
I'd love to see how they define "search engine." Would this require amazon's search functionality to also show links from rakuten or barnes & noble? Would tech crunch's search have to show wired articles?
One difference between politicians & lawyers when compared with scientists & engineers is that politicians & lawyers don't share the same feeling of needing to precisely define what they mean. They tend to write things that are vague and turn to courts when they desire enforcement.
You might be let down if expecting something so specific that Amazon & TechCrunch are clearly included or excluded.
This is certainly true in places with legal systems evolved from that of England. It's less true in France, where precedent is less important and courts don't have the power to make law.
Google should just block French citizens from using any search-related functions on its properties (even things like Youtube search for example). The bill will be repealed in no time.
There's a reason why Google won't do this, and it relates to the purpose of the bill.
Google doesn't want competition, and France wants it to compete. This is the whole point of this action.
French businesses can and will produce competitive search products, and the 90% market leader voluntarily leaving the market would be the perfect opportunity.
That is a statement that reveals more about your own biases than it does about Google. There is no evidence indicating Google doesn't want competition.
If french businesses can and will produce competitive search products then they wouldn't need the market leader to leave the market to give them the opportunity. There is 0 barrier to entry here. Anyone can spider the same pages Google does. Anyone can develop ML algorithms to rank them. The only thing keeping Google at the top of search is how good they are at it.
Google is global leaving France wouldn't hurt them.
Why does any business want competition? I wasn't criticising Google on this particular point; it's an obvious and well-known fact of capitalism.
> The only thing keeping Google at the top of search is how good they are at it.
As far as I'm aware, other search engines are usually competitive in blind tests for quality. Other things keeping Google at the top include: their incumbency; anti-competitive practices such as browser bundling.
I wasn't criticising Google on this point;
it's an obvious part of capitalism.
Except it isn't really. Capitalism the theory may stipulate that an idealized company doesn't want competition but in the real world people run companies and everyone is a different.
Google as a company (speaking from insider experience as a former employee, But not in any official capacity) values competition. It provides a way to measure your success as a company. Google loves measuring things it's so deeply ingrained into their DNA they can't help it. Ranking themselves against other search engines is a vital part of how they work. They would quite possibly be lost without it and very definitely be a different company without it. Google loves competition.
So, when you say Google loves competition, what you mean is that Google would be happy to gain market share and be unhappy to lose market share? OK...
Edited to add: the cost of expressing a dissenting opinion on this site seems to be waves of downvotes followed by a trickle of protective upvotes. Do the downvotes all come from the same place, in this case, I wonder?
When Google measures itself against other search engines it is primarily interested in measuring search quality and not market share.
Google has put a lot of effort into creating test query suites and other systems that can be used to evaluate search results and works to make sure that in each region and language it can out perform competitors. I don't know how effective the measurement is but I can tell you that Google takes providing the best search results seriously.
It's not the genuine article, but reading the title I imagined the effort it would require for Google to teach the French Senate how their algorithm worked. This has an assumption that the algorithm is understandable first by politicians and second by... humans!
I have no firsthand knowledge at all of Google's "algorithm", but I assume given the investment they have in ML that it is on the side of "optimization, feature selection, and tuning" instead of "logical, human-understandable decision process".
That's actually pretty fair. All the big players more or less have a handle on how to do Google-style search. The big differentiator is the data backing that search algorithm.
The primary (not only) reason Google keeps its search algorithm details a secret is to prevent people from having an edge on gaming the system.
I imagine it being of similar difficulty to Microsoft describing how Windows' virtual memory subsystem and similar components work. Imagine trying to explain the intricacies of NTFS to a bunch of politicians who wish to evaluate it.
How curious that being the best in a competition is seen as anti-competitive, and that keeping one's innovations secret is seen as a barrier to entry.
"[T]he English language... becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."
I think that some people misinterpret the premise of a free (or freeish) market to mean that, no matter how successful a player is, barriers to entry should still remain constant and neutral. This appeals to the ideal image of a lone entrepreneur disrupting industries from their garage with pocket money, sweat and genius, but obviously doesn't consider that the last thing any successful company wants is to provide a level playing field for their competitors.
Of course it's "anti-competitive", in a sense, but not unfair. No one is stopping other companies from competing against Google. It just happens that the market decided Google won... years ago. And now they own Youtube and Gmail and the OS that runs on a lot of mobile phones and they have so much money to burn they can try to make cars that drive themselves. No one is stopping people from using other search engines as well, it just happens that people decided years ago that Google worked better than anything else. This is the way it's supposed to work. The superior product wins and dominates, and redefines the market so that everyone has to play on their terms, while everything else dies, or limps along in the shadows hoping not to get eaten. But maybe if you're lucky, you find a niche, or the dinosaurs get wiped out.
Being that Google is essentially the gatekeeper of all content for today's world I kind of think they should publish it freely anyways on their own.
I realize there's a wiki page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank but there's clearly more to it for ranking of all things and it should be maintained by Google itself too.
Part of the reason it works so well is that SEO people who are trying to manipulate the rankings of their site don't know the details of the algorithm. At best they can guess and run experiments.
Google making their algorithm public would result in it being much easier for website owners to inflate their rankings, resulting in lower quality search results, and giving companies who pay enough money to SEO experts an unfair advantage (far more so than is already the case today).
True, but at the same time I think that's also an issue. How many sites get unfair advantages from ex-Googlers or insiders? I don't actually consider it an issue today, but going forward it will only be amplified even more.
google belongs to google and if they want to shape the search results its their FRICKING Search Engine... they can do whatever they want and remove whom ever they want... its THEIRS get it... dont like it... use someone else... build your own.
There is no way they would reveal their most precious secret sauce for the sake of satisfying one country's law and I can only think of one way this can end - Google pulling off another Google News Spain, by shutting down Google.fr.
Forcing Google's hand did not go well neither in Germany nor Spain not too long ago. How are law makers failing to see this? How are even the lobbyists fuelling the whole thing not seeing this?
Google should make a really, really simple alorigthm for search and use that only for french people and show that to the french goverment. I don't see why that should not be allowed, they allready have diffrent alorithm for diffrent places.
No it's not - if I put up more webpages than you, the first random page is more likely to be mine than yours.
The only truly egalitarian algorithm is to send all queries to a state-run committee of experts and have them sort it out.
That said... are the Chinese worse off due to their protectionism that gave Baidu an advantage? I sincerely don't know. When everybody plays dirty, it's hard to know which sequence of dirty moves will let one get the farthest ahead...
(What's really interesting here is how much actual sovereignty the French have, and if it's enough to pull off this particular move. There are trade agreements and even regardless of these, governments intervene to protect their companies.)
They have no concept of how complex ranking is. There are millions of factors being fed into massive machine learning systems that try to predict which results users want (which is different from which they are most likely to click). It's like asking to see the algorithm for a cat.
Algorithm is not the same as the the source code, which is what genes contain. We have obtained them trough gene sequencing, but we still don't know how organisms work and grow.
Plus those factors and their weightings would be changing on a very regular basis. Then there's also the personalization and localization layers of search. Would each user be able to see the weightings specific to them, or would Google just publish the general algorithm with weightings left unspecified?
Another open question is what degree of disclosure is being requested from Google. Suppose Google just give them the daily dump of weightings and such from the machine learning systems. Does that qualify as disclosure? They may have a hell of a time trying to figure out whether there is any bias in the system using that. They may just refuse to believe how complex the system is, and think that Google is being difficult.
They clearly don't understand the complexity, but just because it's complex doesn't mean it's not biased, and if nobody is allowed to audit it, we will never know.
So? Why isn't Google allowed to make a biased search algorithm?
And again, you might as well be saying "just because cats are complex doesn't mean they're not biased, and if nobody's allowed to audit them, we will never know". Even Google probably doesn't know the specifics of what their engine has learned.
The central issue here is whether Google are biased towards their own services, and as such abusing their market position. The rest of the bias doesn't matter.
The former doesn't imply the latter. Thinking of (for instance) Google search and Google maps as two entirely separate products ignores the value of being able to search for an address in the former and automatically embed a map from the latter. That's not an example of biased search results; that's useful integration. And I can't see any possible reason why Google should be forced to make the same integration possible with MapQuest.
> Thinking of (for instance) Google search and Google maps as two entirely separate products ignores the value of being able to search for an address in the former and automatically embed a map from the latter.
It's also useful to open a link from Word. Do you see any reason why Microsoft should make it possible to open it in anything else than IE?
The way the game works is that you can get away with vertical integration and anti-competitive behaviour as long as you are not in a situation of monopoly. Then the rules change.
There's a difference between clicking a link (where "open in default browser" is the obvious behavior, and there's no advantage to forcing any particular browser) and searching for an address (where it makes sense to recognize an address and offer special handling, such as displaying a map, or directions).
Searching for an address is a special case of search. If you search for an address, you're unlikely to get useful results by just searching the web, unless the address happens to be that of a business who lists their address on their site; even then, the result you want from the address is probably a map or directions, rather than the site for the business at that address. So what, precisely, would you suggest Google or another search engine do in that case to continue providing a good user experience? (Answers such as "don't do that" are obviously wrong, as are answers like "go to extra trouble to build a generic search plugin API and make users explicitly select a map provider". Neither of those provides a satisfactory experience for users.)
> There's a difference between clicking a link (where "open in default browser" is the obvious behavior, and there's no advantage to forcing any particular browser) and searching for an address (where it makes sense to recognize an address and offer special handling, such as displaying a map, or directions).
Clearly, there is a competitive advantage in controlling the browser, or Google would not have spend so much money in giant billboards in the Paris subway to explain how Chrome was better than anything.
> So what, precisely, would you suggest Google or another search engine do in that case to continue providing a good user experience?
Agree with map service vendors on a standard API, and make it possible in the settings to select the service to handle an address search. You know, competition and all that.
The reason is that google has established a monopoly on search, and search provides market power over customer's selection of Internet services.
The reason is clear. You might want Google to have that power, or dislike the concept of antitrust, but the reasoning for the action is straightforward.
It is not just that, if we allow that search is Googles domain then maps are also in their domain: maps are information and that is what search is supposed to find.
Why? Because new laws apply when you are the dominant player in the market. Biasing the search would be "tying"[1] if the bias is related to another market Google participates in.
See the Sherman/Clayton antitrust acts and the long list of related SCOTUS rulings.
um. i'm thinking more along the lines like. is toyota allowed to use toyota parts to make toyota cars? or they must buy from all 3rd party suppliers? can toyota force install toyota radios? can blaupunkt ask a court to force toyota to buy blaupunkt radios?
What does "bias" even mean, in this context? I use Google exactly because I want its bias - the bias towards websites they think are good, and putting answers right in the results page.
Unfortunately the generation of politicians that are currently in power are by default tech-illiterate - there will be some who really know what they're talking about, but they will be those people who have needed to actively pick up that information. In general I would not bet on a randomly selected politician being able to describe what a browser is. It's a shame, because well-judged monopolies action is valuable. You can see the potential in the way that the standardization on USB has been nudged and cajoled on tablets, e-reader, phones, and tablets.
It's convenient to think our work is so sophisticated, and that lawmakers are simpletons. But that's a naive view.
They want the algorithm disclosed as a legal matter to determine whether competitors are disadvantaged. Which probably means they are more interested in email than source code. There exist hyperintelligent lawyers. Yes, smart enough to understand search. A law firm like Keker and Van Nest [1] could go in there and answer the question. France could be willing to spend a billion to find out, and that's more than they need.
Legislation of technology is frightening to any technologist. But it's much more dangerous if we dismiss the process as ridiculous and refuse to recognize any underlying concerns. Because then technologists won't have any say in the outcome.
EDIT: Paul you're such a prominent guy, I don't mean to speak too strongly, but people really listen to what you say. Entrepreneurs ought to know that legal matters are not so easily dismissed. I do hope, generously speaking, the startups are the ones that call KVN and not the legislators.
Google has (very effectively) played the "oh noes, it's all machine learning" card. But machine learning is nothing more than codified human judgement (yes, I get that for example the conditional expectation minimizes the expected squared error, but who picked the expected squared error to minimize?) The point is, they wish the ranking algorithm to be seen as some divine choice and hence not subject to criticism rather than a mathematical extension of human choices.
So has google put a finger on the scale to rank google properties more highly? Based on their behavior with the results page (vs yelp, for example), I would be surprised if they do, but not very surprised.
Nonetheless, now that google search results are the internet for many people -- and chrome's address bar is used to help blur that distinction -- it's fair that people outside google, represented by governments, start having a say in who shows up and where. That's what happens when you're a monopoly.
It is slightly ironic that bing is the best thing that's happened to google in a decade. Where it not for Balmer deciding to play search engine, google would be known to be a 95+% monopoly in the US as well. Bing allows them to pretend they aren't (though on my blog, for example, 99.28% of ~7k search referral visitors comes from google.)
The fallacy is, there's mostly likely no one single 'algorithm' anymore. There are most likely hundreds, farmed out in a distributed manner, with the final SERP page coming from merging many different rankings together.
That doesn't matter. At the end of the day, for each query, there is produced a single ranking.
Given access to the data, or more ideally the ability to rapidly batch query, one could ask does being a google owned or rev-share site affect rankings? And if so, up or down? These are the questions statistics is made to answer.
edit -- and it doesn't even necessarily need be hardwired. For example, google could have more visibility into site interactions on google owned or tooled (GA) sites, and that could tend to lead to lower serps. Ie just the presence of certain features, only available to google when google owns or tools a site, could tend to produce lower ratings no matter what those features are. This is, I would argue, dirty pool for what is effectively a monopoly. And statistics can answer these questions.
Imagine if latency was one of the signals Google used to determine ranking. Now imagine that Googlebot gets a ping of half for an application that uses Google App Engine as opposed to someone who uses a raspberry pie at home. Would you say that the makers and users of Raspberry pie now have grounds to sue Google for ranking them lower?
Raspberry Pi was a poor example for him to use, but App Engine (or any Google Cloud solution) was a good example. The Google-hosted sites (including the properties Google owns & operates) will always seem to have lower latency to Google versus everything from AWS down to a Raspberry Pi in a basement. Should that be considered an unfair impartiality in Google's algorithm?
Lower latency to google should have no bearing on serps.
Lower latency to the user should. If, ceteris paribus, google sites are lower ranked then yes, that should be illegal. ie consider regression and compute I[google] + site_speed; after controlling for site speed, being a google owned property shouldn't matter. It's fine if google owned sites tend to be faster and hence are more lowly ranked.
I specifically meant more along the lines of google can view your navigation through GA tooled sites, and there is a wealth of information that can be derived from that.
Moreover, even if you concede that there's a single algorithm at one point in time, there's still not a single algorithm since the Google search result you get today will be the result of a different algorithm than the one that determined the result of the same query last week. It's not only necessary for the French government to ask how the algorithm works, but they'll need a daily changelog or the algorithm description will become stale quite quickly.
> It's convenient to think our work is so sophisticated, and that lawmakers are simpletons. But that's a naive view.
I don't think anybody is suggesting they are simpletons. Unfortunately, French lawmakers are fairly tech-illiterate on average (as demonstrated by the recent vote for the mass surveillance law).
That said, I kind of agree with you. Investigating Google is one thing, asking for them to spill their trade secrets is another.
Technologists don't win by fighting in the legal system - the others have centuries of advantages here. If the others call KVN then they need to know that if they answer they better hope they have never used Facebook and that their daughters haven't shared any photos on snap-chat.
What we need is not to be involved in matters of law, but to have a mutual defence treaty that will ensure the law doesn't get to steal and redistribute what we make. France needs Google, but to Google France is just one customer - and they should treat them accordingly.
for non french, let me remind people what is the political debate in the country : on the left side, people want a state-owned economy, and on the other side, they want a state-governed economy ( "etat stratège", meaning the state takes all the strategic decision).
The belief that a state could stick to ensuring fair competition and simply foster innovation, instead of directly acting on the companies themselves ( or even worse, directly owning them), is shared by less than 5% of the population ( highest score of the "economicaly liberal" party during the past 30 years elections).
If they wanted to hurt google a bit, all they had to do is hit them at the tax level ( they're currently trying that as well, but it has a low chance of working, the main problem being that ireland is both in europe and has 0% tax).
Now, with all that being said, i'm still curious to know what are the true complaints regarding google search engine practices before i completely dismiss the whole affair as another typically french symptom.
This seems stupid to most sane people, but there's a kind of logic behind it.
1) This is clearly bullshit designed to distract from more pressing issues that the French government can't solve or is unwilling to solve.
2) France's notorious protectionism, while immensely irritating to outsiders, does a reasonable job at preserving French language and culture, and creating a local vacuum for French native solutions. Trade and culture protectionism has a long-history of working quite well in many countries seeking to create national identity and industry when used correctly.
These two riffs will continue to get played, with #2 reinforcing #1 while necessary, to try and encourage native French solutions. France is under tremendous economic and cultural pressure from better performing regional partners like Germany and the U.K., and globally by the U.S., China and Japan (pick whichever you think is better performing in terms of economics and cultural expansion).
It kind of sucks, but it's also why, when you go to France, and even Paris, you know you're in Paris and not yet another cosmopolitan mega-city. It's also part of the reason why French culture and ideas continue to be interesting and exportable.
Much of this of course is France's continued decline as a global power. London, New York and Paris used to be a given global triumvirate. And Paris's membership in the top-3 isn't a given any more. It's now in a mix of second-tier alpha cities with Tokyo, Beijing and Dubai.
Outsiders look at this and say "of course Paris is in decline, this kind of behavior is why". Tighter global integration and more openness seems to be the way to the top and maintaining it. But for French leadership, losing cultural identity is not worth it. What if the world thought La Défense = Paris and the rest of the city was just some curious suburb? Is this [1] something that anybody cares about?
As one of the more than 1.6 million French citizen living abroad [1] (2.5% of the French population [2]), I could tell you a lot about the actual effects of attempting to create barriers around the French market.
I'm also not sure French culture is preserved that well in France. Sir Colin Davis was a better Berlioz interpreter than any French conductor I ever heard (and I was born 50km from la Cote St Andre), and even traditional Haute Cuisine is better abroad (particularly in Tokyo - see Apicius).
On the upside, a castle in Normandie or the South West today [3] costs less than a 1 bedroom in the nicer parts of Sydney. And those mostly empty TGVs where first class can be cheaper than second are nice when you need to get between Paris and Geneva and avoid those awful Parisian airports.
Acemoglu and Robinson [4] describe how the descendants of the world-leading Venetian Republicans now serve ice creams on their ancestors' plazas to today's "Venetians", visiting from Houston or Hong Kong. Sometimes, going home for Christmas feels like that. Luckily, London is only 45 minutes away with EasyJet.
As an aside/example, here is an entire fortress fortified by Vauban in 1692, a pillar of French royal power for centuries, practically a small village behind the walls, going for only 2.6m EUR: http://www.patrice-besse.com/chateaux-a-vendre/paca/chateau-...
> I'm also not sure French culture is preserved that well in France. Sir Colin Davis was a better Berlioz interpreter than any French conductor I ever heard (and I was born 50km from la Cote St Andre), and even traditional Haute Cuisine is better abroad (particularly in Tokyo - see Apicius).
You can't drop assertions like that while hoping that being French makes you automatically right about French culture. You have a right to your opinion, but please just don't proclaim them as if they were universal truths.
I'm sorry for making a relatively snarky reply to your (genuine, and partially fair) criticism, but "trust only the qualified" is a particularly noxious part of French culture which is, like graphology as an important criteria for hiring decisions, thankfully slowly disappearing outside the civil service and CAC 40...
As a french guy living currently in London, I clearly agree. I hope Paris never becomes a second London. If you live there you will understand why. London just lost almost all it's culture in just a few years, the London you see in movies is long gone. Just the red bricks and a few cultural things from the past are remaining but all the rest is gone. There is hard consequences to accept to become a truly global city, it's clearly not only positive consequences for the city.
For Google, it's quite complicated. The problem is that Google is representing more than 90% of all the requests in France (the usage is also the same for most of european countries anyway). So we can technically say that Google is in a monopoly position for search. The problem is that it's hurting local startups and businesses there. The solution would be to break Google into smaller parts (it's what you do normaly when a monopoly is hurting the free market) but since that's impossible due to the fact that Google is an American company, the government is taking some measures to limit Google's influence. This is one of the measures, the second one which is currently being voted would be to force Google to display competitors on the home page (a bit like Microsoft's ballot screen). I guess that given the current context, they have no other option.
Except here's the thing -- it's not a natural monopoly. There aren't physical wires with no alternative like Ma Bell. There aren't things that google is doing that prevents other search engines from coming into existence -- they can't prevent new web crawls. Even Firefox now uses yahoo by default, and the open crawler data even gives anyone a head start on crawling the web!
Competition, if it were much better, could easily take away search market share. Having better localized results for France could be one of those ways. People aren't using google because they have no other choice, it's because google is genuinely doing a better job. That's not a reason to break up a company.
In France most of google users does not even know there is an alternative to Google, most of people I met in France that are not under 30 or working in a web related area just does not get it clear what is the difference between a web browser and Google. They launch it, write what they are looking for in the address bar and they just get a google search result which they think is a feature from their browser to enter the web. IMHO that's why there were only 30 congressmen from the existing 577 that came to vote for the last law regarding internet trafic monitoring https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9386820
Chrome doesn't come preinstalled on any OS that I know of. So you're suggesting that users think that they, "Used google to download google so they could do searches on google?"
Yes. I witnessed a user who uses Chrome for Google and IE for everything else. She thought she had to use Google browser to use Google, because Google told her so -- with upgrade to Chrome campaign.
I've started seeing it prejnstalled on a few machines and Google has rather obvious marketing on the Google homepage, enouraging you to 'upgrade to chrome'.
But this isn't because google is using their existing size in a way to punish other people and crowd them out...
The only way that Google could be monopolizing search results were to be if they told companies to put bing/yahoo/etc in their robots.txt and only let Google crawl them or google will drop them. That would be an anti-competitive monopolist practice abusing their size and power. They're not doing this.
When you're talking about LAW, and using law to force competition, it shouldn't be because people don't know the difference between a web browser and google. Educating consumers on how to use your product is something google spent a lot of time doing in the beginning when they weren't the default. That's up to you having such a good product that people type in the name of your service into google to get to it assuming google is already their default engine.
The way I explain how google got a de facto monopoly on search in France (and in Europe) is a combination of :
-being a good product with no real good competitor for european languages (except for russian where Yandex exists)
-set as the default search engine for mozilla, opera and then chrome from the start. Bing is the default one on IE but bing just came along in 2009. Before that I'm not even sure what was the default search engine in europe for IE. Things have changed in the last years but most people configuration once set won't change even if google is not the default search engine for firefox anymore.
I was actually not speaking about using law to force competition but just saying that the general web literacy in France and probably in most of europe is so low that every law that deals with internet does not get any traction with congressmen and in the media because most people doesn't understand an inch of what is as stake therefore they do not care.
> Bing is the default one on IE but bing just came along in 2009. Before that I'm not even sure what was the default search engine in europe for IE
MSN Search -> Live Search -> Bing
> Things have changed in the last years but most people configuration once set won't change even if google is not the default search engine for firefox anymore
If you never changed your default search provider in Firefox it was switched for you after the Yahoo deal.
If the finding is simply that Google needs to offer a ballot screen on Chrome after you install it, to choose the default search engine, that could perhaps be appropriate.
Claiming that people can't understand the difference between a web browser and a search engine therefore Google has a monopoly? That's a farce. First, how did they get Chrome installed anyway if they are that dim?
Well the typical pattern I encounter is this:
John Doe get a problem with its PC, actually most of the time problems with malware on windows. He will reach out to a friend that "knows" about computer. This friend will do some kind of cleaning, if IE does not work anymore because of too many malware installed will get firefox or chrome to get around the problem and have internet working again. At that point John Doe get a link to Chrome on its desktop (sometimes called 'Internet') and this become its new entry to Internet. The only difference is now for every query John Doe is doing it is written Google instead of Bing at the top of the screen. Then sometimes later John Doe got another malware that has the default search engine for chrome to be replaced by another one with an affiliate ID or whatever and John Doe barely notice about it.
I know we are on HN here and this may sound crazy for most of you guys if you don't get the opportunity to witness this behaviour but that's what I witness every time I meet people older than 40 that are not in my web people circle.
> In France most of google users does not even know there is an alternative to Google
I think that would quickly change if a search engine came out that was markedly better than Google. I remember when Google first started gaining traction. It only took a few months to go from first hearing about it to everyone person I knew used it as their primary search engine. I feel confident the same thing will happen when another major leap forward in search happens.
What may happen to a market in the future does not affect the monopoly status of a business today, nor does it change how a monopoly may or may not be abusing their current (or past) position in one market to unfairly influence other markets.
Google probably[1] has a monopoly in some areas. It doesn't matter what will happen in the future or if they wanted this monopoly - in some markets, they clearly are the dominant[2] player that could set up barriers to competition in other markets if they wanted to. This means new laws apply that restrict some business practices that would otherwise be legal, and they might have governments coming after them if those laws are not followed, like France seems to be doing right now.
[1] probability will vary depending on which sovereign's antitrust laws under consideration
So? You haven't made a single relevant point or addressed a single one of his points. Being popular is not a reason to attempt to break up a company, nor is the ignorance of the populace to alternative solutions. Google doesn't own search, it's simply the best at it.
People are not using Google because it's the best one but mainly because it's the default homepage screen. People generally have no idea what Google is, for them, Google is just "the internet". Some people are even confused/lost when they drastically change the homepage during events.
French IT industry should get better organised and stronger as a lobby to influence and educate congressmen first. And I think we actually are going into the right direction here. It will take time to see the impact of it though.
"The problem is that it's hurting local startups and businesses there"
Instead of getting the government to pass laws to do their dirty work, why not just figure out how to compete? We said the same thing with the music, tv, software, and movie industry.
As a French guy who half grew up in London and spent many years there I heartily disagree with you. I think my opinion is more alongside of "Midnight in Paris" - culture changes and evolves all the time and it's not a good idea to try and freeze a particular moment in time.
London has an extraordinarily rich, and international culture. You can go to an Ethiopian restaurant where most people barely speak English and see a coffee ceremony, or have chicken gizzards cooked in chorizo in Victoria served by a Portuguese man who arrived last year; you can even live in South Kensington and be fine never speaking a word of English (as many French expats end up doing, kids at CDG etc.). Even looking at so called "native" English culture, a LOT is influenced by the historical openness of the British Empire to foreign land.
Take Earl Grey: the tea is Chinese and the Bergamot Italian. Or the nation's favorite dish: chicken tikka masala, which is Indian fusion. Or look at the upper classes: who is at the top? Is it the Russian oligarchs fighting for penthouses worth tens of millions? The Chinese billionaires expanding into Europe? The rulers of the financial industry which dominates the economy of a country which is 78% services? Or the increasingly irrelevant land owning aristocracy? In France it's much easier: the elite lives in 16eme or Neuilly and will have studied at the same schools. A true self-made man like Xavier Niel is almost a pariah when in Britain he'd get his own TV show and influence IT policy.
A good point of comparison is architecture: aside from la Defense, Paris is frozen in its Haussmanian redrawing, with most of the cities showing identical streets that were innovative in the late 1800s but struggle to cope with the increasing population today. London on the other hand stretches from the futuristic, Manhattan-like Canary Wharf to the preserved City with a sprinkling of amazing towers (including Europe's most talked about recent skyscraper, the Shard), or the various slices in time such as South Kensington's Victorian architecture or even the Barbican, a testimony to the central planning Brutalist rage of the 60s and 70s.
And the reason for that is squarely the free and encouraged economic migration, the fact that London remains the best city to try your luck in Europe (whose citizen can work anywhere they like within the member states).
A larger version of the phenomenon is Silicon Valley: why don't more companies come from other countries? Because as soon as a decent technologist appears there, he is either scouted and asked to move to the Valley (as happened to the CEO of a Cambridge startup after a 26m USD round, allowing me to grab his flat on the cheap) or he will move there to take advantage of a friendlier environment and the best ecosystem in the world (culture, people, funding, legal framework...). Of course, you hear the same grumbling about the disappearing culture of the "old" San Francisco, even though the city is barely over a century old and has gone through many more booms and busts...
> London just lost almost all it's culture in just a few years, the London you see in movies is long gone
Having been around London most of my life (51 yrs) I find it hard to think of much culture which has gone. Crappy instant coffee and BT phone boxes which hardly worked spring to mind. Most of the other stuff is there if somewhat modified. I suspect the 'London you see in movies' was a bit fictionalised.
so, google is forced to reveal how it affects and processes search results, at least to the french government (this part was unclear to me). i don't really see what's wrong with that. if google has to approach the market so as to encourage more competition from france, i dont see whats wrong with that either. i dont see why any european company would want to be dependent on an american-based search or really any type of data-handling company at this juncture in international politics. at the very least, reducing google's control on french markets is not a bad thing, and is something google could overcome if it played ball well. if it's not possible to do something fairly, legally, and respectfully, its not worth doing at all.
Until recently, I believed that while Google abuses its search dominance in order to promote its own services above the fold, their actual search results are still fair. Then I saw the search results for "domains" and "domain." It is a big stretch to imagine how a fair algorithm can rank recently launched beta of Google Domains #4 and #1 against the competitors, such as GoDaddy or NameCheap, or even against informational websites.
I just searched for domains (from the UK) and the only reference to Google Domains I see is an advert. If you see differently, I guess there's some reason for that, but it doesn't seem to happen everywhere.
That depends on how you define fair, I guess. If this isn't a hardcoded bonus for "google.com" and instead all established, high-PageRank sites receive the same benefit, is it still not fair?
There's a not well-known component of Google ranking that acts sort of like a slow-moving, domain-wide PageRank. And because they launched domains.google.com as a subdomain of google.com, which contains PageRank 10 pages and is therefore very trusted, the assumption is that domains.google.com is also very trusted, even though it currently seems to have no inbound links from other google.com pages.
This effect is usually hidden because it's rare to have a highly ranked page with no obvious inbound links competing on an established keyword.
I think they would be better off taking all they money they would potentially spend on this stupid and putting it up as prize money for a French startup to create a viable Google competitor--encouraging them to view search in a new way. In the very least, it would be a positive message rather than a negative one and maybe an interesting company would come of it. I don't think this will have anything but a negative effect on Google (which does not mean there will magically be a french competitor to jump in a take its place). It also makes the French government look really dumb...
While this story is good feedstock for the Internet noise machine, I feel that if we discussed every stupid idea that came out of one half of a bicameral legislature in any country, we'd be buried in stupidity. An amendment to a draft bill in one house of parliament in a single small country does not amount to a movement.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadThat's just absurd. Can someone acquainted with the situation shed light on why they are doing this? Simple populism and lobbying from local businesses or something else?
Hard to explain, even for a french person. That's why I basically want to move ASAP, at least abroad I'll care less about politics.
It tragically funny, there is like 10% unemployment rate in France right now, and instead of trying to give businesses some air, ie less laws and regulations, they keep on coming with ridiculous ones.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/technology/microsoft-once-...
Microsoft is the puppet-master in all of this, it seems.
"You may have all the money, Raymond, but I have all the men with guns." (Frank Underwood, House of Cards)
Looks like you're going to have to start paying more attention to the wallets of those with all the guns Google.
That's by design: Campaign contributions are heavily regulated in France: http://www.loc.gov/law/help/campaign-finance/france.php
But if someone happens to have a fancy "Cave à Vin", or a week end in Monaco, it's a coincidence
How is it going to "foment diversity" ? it's not. You want to "foment diversity" ? Remove some of these stupid regulations and make France more business friendly. Forcing google to display 3 of its competitors on its search engine page isn't going to create jobs or new startups in France. Google is the least of France's problems. Its politicans on the other hand.
There's nothing preventing a French company from producing their own equal or superior search engine - other than competence or will.
For all you know, there's plenty of "equal or superior products" to [anything] out there. You've just never heard of them for reasons that have nothing to do with their quality.
So the choice is, clowns or crooks. Pick at most two.
Apple 2015 http://qz.com/332059/apple-is-reportedly-giving-the-chinese-...
Microsoft 2003 http://news.cnet.com/China-to-view-Windows-code/2100-1007_3-...
Google are pretty obviously not paying tax like a normal company. To put that more explicitly, they are probably committing massive tax fraud, taking billions in local money and not paying tax on it... that isn't unusual for a mega corporation, and they need local government to continue cooperating. So, the UK gets a big Google office, it's government keeps quiet. I guess France needs one too...
Google explicitly decided not to play ball in mainland China years ago. It will be interesting to see the reaction if this goes through-- both exposing ranking algorithms and pulling out of France seem pretty improbable.
In practice it may negatively impact on the quality of search results, even though in theory their algorithm including more "difficult to fake" factors should result in it being more durable.
If a competitor gets ahold of their exact ranking algorithm, that's a huge piece of the formula for building a search engine that is as good as Google Search at finding what someone's looking for.
Yes giving up the source algorithm would be a loss. Google have seen this coming for years and have been building the moat so even this information shared wouldn't really help a competitor take any significant chunk of their business in the short to medium term.
If it's not public, then this problem doesn't exist.
Just like the output of the recording devices they installed on Air France planes in business class. Those were never turned over to French companies.
You might be let down if expecting something so specific that Amazon & TechCrunch are clearly included or excluded.
http://onlinelaw.wustl.edu/common-law-vs-civil-law/
Google doesn't want competition, and France wants it to compete. This is the whole point of this action.
French businesses can and will produce competitive search products, and the 90% market leader voluntarily leaving the market would be the perfect opportunity.
If french businesses can and will produce competitive search products then they wouldn't need the market leader to leave the market to give them the opportunity. There is 0 barrier to entry here. Anyone can spider the same pages Google does. Anyone can develop ML algorithms to rank them. The only thing keeping Google at the top of search is how good they are at it.
Google is global leaving France wouldn't hurt them.
> The only thing keeping Google at the top of search is how good they are at it.
As far as I'm aware, other search engines are usually competitive in blind tests for quality. Other things keeping Google at the top include: their incumbency; anti-competitive practices such as browser bundling.
Google as a company (speaking from insider experience as a former employee, But not in any official capacity) values competition. It provides a way to measure your success as a company. Google loves measuring things it's so deeply ingrained into their DNA they can't help it. Ranking themselves against other search engines is a vital part of how they work. They would quite possibly be lost without it and very definitely be a different company without it. Google loves competition.
Edited to add: the cost of expressing a dissenting opinion on this site seems to be waves of downvotes followed by a trickle of protective upvotes. Do the downvotes all come from the same place, in this case, I wonder?
Google has put a lot of effort into creating test query suites and other systems that can be used to evaluate search results and works to make sure that in each region and language it can out perform competitors. I don't know how effective the measurement is but I can tell you that Google takes providing the best search results seriously.
I have no firsthand knowledge at all of Google's "algorithm", but I assume given the investment they have in ML that it is on the side of "optimization, feature selection, and tuning" instead of "logical, human-understandable decision process".
The primary (not only) reason Google keeps its search algorithm details a secret is to prevent people from having an edge on gaming the system.
But, of course, Google don't solely use that anymore.
"[T]he English language... becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."
Of course it's "anti-competitive", in a sense, but not unfair. No one is stopping other companies from competing against Google. It just happens that the market decided Google won... years ago. And now they own Youtube and Gmail and the OS that runs on a lot of mobile phones and they have so much money to burn they can try to make cars that drive themselves. No one is stopping people from using other search engines as well, it just happens that people decided years ago that Google worked better than anything else. This is the way it's supposed to work. The superior product wins and dominates, and redefines the market so that everyone has to play on their terms, while everything else dies, or limps along in the shadows hoping not to get eaten. But maybe if you're lucky, you find a niche, or the dinosaurs get wiped out.
I realize there's a wiki page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank but there's clearly more to it for ranking of all things and it should be maintained by Google itself too.
Google making their algorithm public would result in it being much easier for website owners to inflate their rankings, resulting in lower quality search results, and giving companies who pay enough money to SEO experts an unfair advantage (far more so than is already the case today).
Forcing Google's hand did not go well neither in Germany nor Spain not too long ago. How are law makers failing to see this? How are even the lobbyists fuelling the whole thing not seeing this?
The only truly egalitarian algorithm is to send all queries to a state-run committee of experts and have them sort it out.
That said... are the Chinese worse off due to their protectionism that gave Baidu an advantage? I sincerely don't know. When everybody plays dirty, it's hard to know which sequence of dirty moves will let one get the farthest ahead...
(What's really interesting here is how much actual sovereignty the French have, and if it's enough to pull off this particular move. There are trade agreements and even regardless of these, governments intervene to protect their companies.)
They should go back to working on their own "Google killer" search engine :) http://www.infoworld.com/article/2672709/operating-systems/e...
Furthermore they already published their search engine algorithm: http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html
Another open question is what degree of disclosure is being requested from Google. Suppose Google just give them the daily dump of weightings and such from the machine learning systems. Does that qualify as disclosure? They may have a hell of a time trying to figure out whether there is any bias in the system using that. They may just refuse to believe how complex the system is, and think that Google is being difficult.
And again, you might as well be saying "just because cats are complex doesn't mean they're not biased, and if nobody's allowed to audit them, we will never know". Even Google probably doesn't know the specifics of what their engine has learned.
It's also useful to open a link from Word. Do you see any reason why Microsoft should make it possible to open it in anything else than IE?
The way the game works is that you can get away with vertical integration and anti-competitive behaviour as long as you are not in a situation of monopoly. Then the rules change.
Searching for an address is a special case of search. If you search for an address, you're unlikely to get useful results by just searching the web, unless the address happens to be that of a business who lists their address on their site; even then, the result you want from the address is probably a map or directions, rather than the site for the business at that address. So what, precisely, would you suggest Google or another search engine do in that case to continue providing a good user experience? (Answers such as "don't do that" are obviously wrong, as are answers like "go to extra trouble to build a generic search plugin API and make users explicitly select a map provider". Neither of those provides a satisfactory experience for users.)
Clearly, there is a competitive advantage in controlling the browser, or Google would not have spend so much money in giant billboards in the Paris subway to explain how Chrome was better than anything.
> So what, precisely, would you suggest Google or another search engine do in that case to continue providing a good user experience?
Agree with map service vendors on a standard API, and make it possible in the settings to select the service to handle an address search. You know, competition and all that.
The reason is clear. You might want Google to have that power, or dislike the concept of antitrust, but the reasoning for the action is straightforward.
See the Sherman/Clayton antitrust acts and the long list of related SCOTUS rulings.
They want the algorithm disclosed as a legal matter to determine whether competitors are disadvantaged. Which probably means they are more interested in email than source code. There exist hyperintelligent lawyers. Yes, smart enough to understand search. A law firm like Keker and Van Nest [1] could go in there and answer the question. France could be willing to spend a billion to find out, and that's more than they need.
Legislation of technology is frightening to any technologist. But it's much more dangerous if we dismiss the process as ridiculous and refuse to recognize any underlying concerns. Because then technologists won't have any say in the outcome.
[1] http://www.kvn.com/
EDIT: Paul you're such a prominent guy, I don't mean to speak too strongly, but people really listen to what you say. Entrepreneurs ought to know that legal matters are not so easily dismissed. I do hope, generously speaking, the startups are the ones that call KVN and not the legislators.
So has google put a finger on the scale to rank google properties more highly? Based on their behavior with the results page (vs yelp, for example), I would be surprised if they do, but not very surprised.
Nonetheless, now that google search results are the internet for many people -- and chrome's address bar is used to help blur that distinction -- it's fair that people outside google, represented by governments, start having a say in who shows up and where. That's what happens when you're a monopoly.
It is slightly ironic that bing is the best thing that's happened to google in a decade. Where it not for Balmer deciding to play search engine, google would be known to be a 95+% monopoly in the US as well. Bing allows them to pretend they aren't (though on my blog, for example, 99.28% of ~7k search referral visitors comes from google.)
Given access to the data, or more ideally the ability to rapidly batch query, one could ask does being a google owned or rev-share site affect rankings? And if so, up or down? These are the questions statistics is made to answer.
edit -- and it doesn't even necessarily need be hardwired. For example, google could have more visibility into site interactions on google owned or tooled (GA) sites, and that could tend to lead to lower serps. Ie just the presence of certain features, only available to google when google owns or tools a site, could tend to produce lower ratings no matter what those features are. This is, I would argue, dirty pool for what is effectively a monopoly. And statistics can answer these questions.
Lower latency to the user should. If, ceteris paribus, google sites are lower ranked then yes, that should be illegal. ie consider regression and compute I[google] + site_speed; after controlling for site speed, being a google owned property shouldn't matter. It's fine if google owned sites tend to be faster and hence are more lowly ranked.
I specifically meant more along the lines of google can view your navigation through GA tooled sites, and there is a wealth of information that can be derived from that.
The other has to use force. That's all they know how to use. Its their solution to every problem.
I don't think anybody is suggesting they are simpletons. Unfortunately, French lawmakers are fairly tech-illiterate on average (as demonstrated by the recent vote for the mass surveillance law).
That said, I kind of agree with you. Investigating Google is one thing, asking for them to spill their trade secrets is another.
What we need is not to be involved in matters of law, but to have a mutual defence treaty that will ensure the law doesn't get to steal and redistribute what we make. France needs Google, but to Google France is just one customer - and they should treat them accordingly.
The belief that a state could stick to ensuring fair competition and simply foster innovation, instead of directly acting on the companies themselves ( or even worse, directly owning them), is shared by less than 5% of the population ( highest score of the "economicaly liberal" party during the past 30 years elections).
If they wanted to hurt google a bit, all they had to do is hit them at the tax level ( they're currently trying that as well, but it has a low chance of working, the main problem being that ireland is both in europe and has 0% tax).
Now, with all that being said, i'm still curious to know what are the true complaints regarding google search engine practices before i completely dismiss the whole affair as another typically french symptom.
1) This is clearly bullshit designed to distract from more pressing issues that the French government can't solve or is unwilling to solve.
2) France's notorious protectionism, while immensely irritating to outsiders, does a reasonable job at preserving French language and culture, and creating a local vacuum for French native solutions. Trade and culture protectionism has a long-history of working quite well in many countries seeking to create national identity and industry when used correctly.
These two riffs will continue to get played, with #2 reinforcing #1 while necessary, to try and encourage native French solutions. France is under tremendous economic and cultural pressure from better performing regional partners like Germany and the U.K., and globally by the U.S., China and Japan (pick whichever you think is better performing in terms of economics and cultural expansion).
It kind of sucks, but it's also why, when you go to France, and even Paris, you know you're in Paris and not yet another cosmopolitan mega-city. It's also part of the reason why French culture and ideas continue to be interesting and exportable.
Much of this of course is France's continued decline as a global power. London, New York and Paris used to be a given global triumvirate. And Paris's membership in the top-3 isn't a given any more. It's now in a mix of second-tier alpha cities with Tokyo, Beijing and Dubai.
Outsiders look at this and say "of course Paris is in decline, this kind of behavior is why". Tighter global integration and more openness seems to be the way to the top and maintaining it. But for French leadership, losing cultural identity is not worth it. What if the world thought La Défense = Paris and the rest of the city was just some curious suburb? Is this [1] something that anybody cares about?
1 - http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2014/067/b/7/skyline_la_de...
I'm also not sure French culture is preserved that well in France. Sir Colin Davis was a better Berlioz interpreter than any French conductor I ever heard (and I was born 50km from la Cote St Andre), and even traditional Haute Cuisine is better abroad (particularly in Tokyo - see Apicius).
On the upside, a castle in Normandie or the South West today [3] costs less than a 1 bedroom in the nicer parts of Sydney. And those mostly empty TGVs where first class can be cheaper than second are nice when you need to get between Paris and Geneva and avoid those awful Parisian airports.
Acemoglu and Robinson [4] describe how the descendants of the world-leading Venetian Republicans now serve ice creams on their ancestors' plazas to today's "Venetians", visiting from Houston or Hong Kong. Sometimes, going home for Christmas feels like that. Luckily, London is only 45 minutes away with EasyJet.
[1] http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ais_%C3%A9tablis_hors...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_France
[3] http://www.patrice-besse.com/ is one of the best sites for castles. http://www.realestate.com.au/ for Sydney prices.
[4] http://www.amazon.com/Why-Nations-Fail-Origins-Prosperity-eb...
Although my favorite is: http://www.patrice-besse.com/chateaux-a-vendre/bourgogne/ven... - for only 3m EUR you get a moat with lifting bridge, gargoyles, and some real towers to shoot your crossbows from. You never know when the peasants might revolt!
You can't drop assertions like that while hoping that being French makes you automatically right about French culture. You have a right to your opinion, but please just don't proclaim them as if they were universal truths.
For Google, it's quite complicated. The problem is that Google is representing more than 90% of all the requests in France (the usage is also the same for most of european countries anyway). So we can technically say that Google is in a monopoly position for search. The problem is that it's hurting local startups and businesses there. The solution would be to break Google into smaller parts (it's what you do normaly when a monopoly is hurting the free market) but since that's impossible due to the fact that Google is an American company, the government is taking some measures to limit Google's influence. This is one of the measures, the second one which is currently being voted would be to force Google to display competitors on the home page (a bit like Microsoft's ballot screen). I guess that given the current context, they have no other option.
Competition, if it were much better, could easily take away search market share. Having better localized results for France could be one of those ways. People aren't using google because they have no other choice, it's because google is genuinely doing a better job. That's not a reason to break up a company.
In this sense Ma Bell was a natural monopoly. Social networks could be considered natural monopolies for similar reasons.
The only way that Google could be monopolizing search results were to be if they told companies to put bing/yahoo/etc in their robots.txt and only let Google crawl them or google will drop them. That would be an anti-competitive monopolist practice abusing their size and power. They're not doing this.
When you're talking about LAW, and using law to force competition, it shouldn't be because people don't know the difference between a web browser and google. Educating consumers on how to use your product is something google spent a lot of time doing in the beginning when they weren't the default. That's up to you having such a good product that people type in the name of your service into google to get to it assuming google is already their default engine.
I was actually not speaking about using law to force competition but just saying that the general web literacy in France and probably in most of europe is so low that every law that deals with internet does not get any traction with congressmen and in the media because most people doesn't understand an inch of what is as stake therefore they do not care.
MSN Search -> Live Search -> Bing
> Things have changed in the last years but most people configuration once set won't change even if google is not the default search engine for firefox anymore
If you never changed your default search provider in Firefox it was switched for you after the Yahoo deal.
Claiming that people can't understand the difference between a web browser and a search engine therefore Google has a monopoly? That's a farce. First, how did they get Chrome installed anyway if they are that dim?
I know we are on HN here and this may sound crazy for most of you guys if you don't get the opportunity to witness this behaviour but that's what I witness every time I meet people older than 40 that are not in my web people circle.
I think that would quickly change if a search engine came out that was markedly better than Google. I remember when Google first started gaining traction. It only took a few months to go from first hearing about it to everyone person I knew used it as their primary search engine. I feel confident the same thing will happen when another major leap forward in search happens.
Google probably[1] has a monopoly in some areas. It doesn't matter what will happen in the future or if they wanted this monopoly - in some markets, they clearly are the dominant[2] player that could set up barriers to competition in other markets if they wanted to. This means new laws apply that restrict some business practices that would otherwise be legal, and they might have governments coming after them if those laws are not followed, like France seems to be doing right now.
[1] probability will vary depending on which sovereign's antitrust laws under consideration
That's not true. I tried all the search engines, and yes, Google, is the best one.
Remember when Bing had that comparison thing so see which engine you liked better? When I tried it Google won something like 9 times out of 10.
It's not obvious that this is true.
Instead of getting the government to pass laws to do their dirty work, why not just figure out how to compete? We said the same thing with the music, tv, software, and movie industry.
London has an extraordinarily rich, and international culture. You can go to an Ethiopian restaurant where most people barely speak English and see a coffee ceremony, or have chicken gizzards cooked in chorizo in Victoria served by a Portuguese man who arrived last year; you can even live in South Kensington and be fine never speaking a word of English (as many French expats end up doing, kids at CDG etc.). Even looking at so called "native" English culture, a LOT is influenced by the historical openness of the British Empire to foreign land.
Take Earl Grey: the tea is Chinese and the Bergamot Italian. Or the nation's favorite dish: chicken tikka masala, which is Indian fusion. Or look at the upper classes: who is at the top? Is it the Russian oligarchs fighting for penthouses worth tens of millions? The Chinese billionaires expanding into Europe? The rulers of the financial industry which dominates the economy of a country which is 78% services? Or the increasingly irrelevant land owning aristocracy? In France it's much easier: the elite lives in 16eme or Neuilly and will have studied at the same schools. A true self-made man like Xavier Niel is almost a pariah when in Britain he'd get his own TV show and influence IT policy.
A good point of comparison is architecture: aside from la Defense, Paris is frozen in its Haussmanian redrawing, with most of the cities showing identical streets that were innovative in the late 1800s but struggle to cope with the increasing population today. London on the other hand stretches from the futuristic, Manhattan-like Canary Wharf to the preserved City with a sprinkling of amazing towers (including Europe's most talked about recent skyscraper, the Shard), or the various slices in time such as South Kensington's Victorian architecture or even the Barbican, a testimony to the central planning Brutalist rage of the 60s and 70s.
And the reason for that is squarely the free and encouraged economic migration, the fact that London remains the best city to try your luck in Europe (whose citizen can work anywhere they like within the member states).
A larger version of the phenomenon is Silicon Valley: why don't more companies come from other countries? Because as soon as a decent technologist appears there, he is either scouted and asked to move to the Valley (as happened to the CEO of a Cambridge startup after a 26m USD round, allowing me to grab his flat on the cheap) or he will move there to take advantage of a friendlier environment and the best ecosystem in the world (culture, people, funding, legal framework...). Of course, you hear the same grumbling about the disappearing culture of the "old" San Francisco, even though the city is barely over a century old and has gone through many more booms and busts...
What makes this a problem?
Having been around London most of my life (51 yrs) I find it hard to think of much culture which has gone. Crappy instant coffee and BT phone boxes which hardly worked spring to mind. Most of the other stuff is there if somewhat modified. I suspect the 'London you see in movies' was a bit fictionalised.
There's a not well-known component of Google ranking that acts sort of like a slow-moving, domain-wide PageRank. And because they launched domains.google.com as a subdomain of google.com, which contains PageRank 10 pages and is therefore very trusted, the assumption is that domains.google.com is also very trusted, even though it currently seems to have no inbound links from other google.com pages.
This effect is usually hidden because it's rare to have a highly ranked page with no obvious inbound links competing on an established keyword.