Google's Extremely Strange Treatment At The Hands Of The European Union

I've been trying to get my head around the way that the European Union is investigating Google and I'm afraid that I can't really quite manage it. If Google is breaking the law great, investigate, find out which law they're breaking, punish them for doing so and make sure they don't do it again. But in this current case, about search engine placement, the EU seems to be demanding that Google make life happy and easy for Google's competitors.

What?

Further, the EU is going and asking Google's competitors what they would like the EU to force Google to do in order to make life happy and easy for said competitors. This is like insisting that Ford make it easy for GM to sell cars. An entirely absurd method of running the economy.

The basic story is here:

The company's co-founders Adam and Shivaun Raff said today the revised proposals "suffer from all the same flaws" as Google's previous submission to the EC - which was rejected after a formal market test attacked the fundamental weaknesses of that offer.

However, the commission - this time around - is seeking the opinions of Google's enemies based on a much tighter criteria, much to their despair.

Why are competitors to Google even being asked what Google must do, let alone being allowed to have a part in policy making? Either Google has broken the law in which case a remedy is obvious or it hasn't in which there is no case to answer.

The actual remedy that Foundem wants to see enshrined is as follows:

“There are two equally important aspects to Google’s search manipulation practices: the systematic promotion of Google’s own services, and the systematic demotion or exclusion of its competitors’ services. Any effective remedies will require explicit commitments to end both aspects; remedying one without remedying the other would simply allow Google to recalibrate the un-remedied practice in order to achieve the same or equivalent anti-competitive effect.

Google’s strict adherence to the following overarching principle would ensure an end to both aspects of Google’s search manipulation practices: Google must be even-handed. It must hold all services, including its own, to exactly the same standards, using exactly the same crawling, indexing, ranking, display, and penalty algorithms.”

Why on Earth should Google be held to that standard? This is like insisting that Ford must give room at a Ford dealership to GM cars on the same basis that the Fords are there on the lot.

I do actually know what's going on here. The European Commission does not see itself as the guardian of the law, of a set of impartial rules. Rather, in the Continental method of governance, they see themselves as brokers of compromises aimed at reaching consensus. Thus if enough of Google's competitors shout loudly enough they will attempt to create such a consensus, whether Google has broken the law be damned.

It's not an attractive system of governance to my mind.

What's really fun about it though is that if Google really did do what Foundem is asking then Foundem would be pretty much nowhere in the Google results. For their entire business model fell over when there was an update to the Google algorithm (Panda I think it was but don't hold me to that) and Foundem was determined, by entirely impartial and exactly the same as applies to everyone else rules, to be indulging in a little too much quoting of other peoples' websites (no, not plagiarism) and a little too little of actual original content and thus down the rankings it slid.

Which I have to admit does amuse: the solution appears to be absolutely the very thing that was first being whined about. On top of that, seriously, why is any company being forced to aid its direct competitors? If people want a different set of results then Bing is only a couple of clicks away after all....