![]() We've thus got detailed negotiations going on about whether Google can present its own travel results, or hotel booking ideas and so on, in preference to those of other firms, alongside those of other firms or even whether it must privilege the results of other firms. This near monopoly means that the EU should be allowed to specify, on pain of fines for non-compliance (and those fines can be as much as 10% of global turnover) how Google presents search results. Where there was spirited local language competition, like in the Czech Republic, Google barely has a majority of search rather than anything approaching a dominant position). The European Union insists that Google is the dominant search engine (which it is in many markets although not all. Over here in Europe the situation is very different. This is a free speech issue and yes, corporations do have the right of free speech. In the US, as a court agreed last week, Google can display its results any darn way it wants to. However, this change, Mozilla moving from Google to Yahoo, might, if we bother to examine the information that will be available, present us with some actual evidence to help us make up our minds. And which method you support is, at present, most likely determined by your basic attitudes towards commercial freedom and regulation: not anything so annoying as actual evidence one way or the other. However, if we study this change carefully and in detail then we should end up with very interesting, even fascinating, evidence to help us solve a public policy problem.That problem being, well, how much control should we be trying to exert over how Google presents its search results? Currently the answers between the US and the European Union are very different. This is a technological move that doesn't much concern me here. We've the news that Mozilla has dropped Google as the default search engine in favour of Yahoo (and thus Bing). ![]()
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