And then, towards the end of 2010-early 2011, Google decided to enter the game with its Google Places. They had no people on the ground to collect businesses' addresses and make sure that the advertised phone numbers were actually correct. But, surprise, surprise, in a matter of less than 6 months all of this data was on Google Places. At the time I was actually telling my boss: "hey! at some point the EU is bound to do something! They cannot just rip people off like this". It "only" took the EU ~6years.
To be more specific about my case, I wanted to import into OpenStreetMap the latin names ("romaji") of places from Wikipédia. But I had to check if it was allowed around the world. I read that in Australia it is not a problem, but it is hard to know about the rest of the world.
Instead it's a contract with a nondisclosure clause, and contracts only bind the participants.
It's also not a trade secret, with access being sold so openly.
They just didn't do the groundwork.
And I'm sure copying maps is illegal.
Place information? Hmmm. Maybe it should be too.
You can't directly copy the artistry, things like label sizing and placement, but you can copy every road and city.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
>I didn't say it was illegal.
I'm not commenting directly on the legality. I'm trying to refer to the deeper reasons that lead it to be legal. If it's truly ripping someone off to copy facts that they painstakingly collected through their sweat of the brow, why is there a specific exemption from copyright?
What Yelp wants, is to have their cake and eat it too. They want to benefit from what Google offers, and they want Google to behave exactly as they would prefer, assuming control over Google's product through government power. Classic competitor hypocrisy, the same behavior displayed 15 years ago by Microsoft's extremely envious competition. They didn't want to beat Microsoft in consumer operating systems, they wanted to chain and control Microsoft's operating system to their benefit.
Suppose someone launched an 'Encyclopedia Search' service that searched Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britanica, etc and linked to their sites. The the service then started loading the Wikipedia and Britanica content into it's own respository and linked searches to that. It's still searching the same data, and taking you to the same articles, it's just that now you're not going to Wikipedia or Britanica anymore. Would that be ok? If not, what's the difference?
Using a dominance in search to scrape data from competitors for use in other services and then link to them from search in preference over the data's source may well be anti-competitive, even if the scraping itself isn't illegal.
That would be true if Google didn't have an effective monopoly in search. Because it is an effective monopoly, saying that about Yelp is like saying a citizen that is against any form of socialism but cashes social security checks wants to have his cake and eat too. False. That citizen would prefer that social security doesn't exist, but given that it does, and given that he is forced to pay the costs, isn't going to be stupid and refuse the checks. And I say that as a free-market socialist.
There are two ways to deal with a monopoly:
- break it up
- allow it to continue, but force it to provide equal access, at non-monopolistic rates and terms
Yet in one case (general search) Google has a very large market share, whereas in the other case (e.g. product search), there is still plenty of competition with for example Amazon holding some share of that market. The idea is now that while it’s ok for Google to have such a large market share, it’s not ok for them to use that share in order to get another large market share which they don’t have at the moment. I.e. it’s acceptable for them to have a near-monopoly, but not to use that monopoly to build a second one.
The thing is, if what Google displays as "the most relevant X" is always or predominantly or even merely often a Google site, rather than what is actually the most relevant X, then Google is abusing their dominant position to create advantage in related markets. I do agree that the failed 2014 deal was a piece of crap.
I fundamentally don't believe the rules should suddenly become different when you become sufficiently successful. There's no size threshold above which you ought to have to listen when everyone wants a cut. Now, if you're colluding to suppress other products that are actually better, that's a different matter; that's wrong no matter how big or small you are. But that's not what we're talking about here.
And I say that as someone who uses DDG for search, and voluntarily chose to switch for a variety of reasons.
The problem is the definition of what are 'facts'. Are birthdates? Are consumer good prices? Are classified postings? Airline flight times?
It seems completely ridiculous to call those two different markets. Finding the most relevant X on the web is fundamentally part of the same market no matter what X is.
Now, if they'd accused Google of using their market position in search to promote gmail, for instance, they might have a point. Not a very good point, but at least an understandable point. But calling "general search" and "product search" two different markets? They seem to just be looking for a way to extort concessions out of a company that seems like a tempting target, all the more so for not being an EU company.
Later in the same article is an indignant accusation that Google's display of other types of search results don't label themselves as ads. Of course they're not; if you search for an address, and you conveniently get a map of that address (which is one of the most likely things you were looking for), that's not an ad, that's the content you actually wanted. (By contrast, the garbage next to it telling you about other services related to random keywords in the search terms are ads.)
Now, the crazy 2014 deal that fell through certainly does sound like antitrust-style collusion; it's certainly ridiculous to have competitors bid for the right to appear as a list of competing services at the top of Google search results. But far from the "extortion" it's described as, it sounds a lot more like collusion between multiple large companies to exclude smaller players. The solution isn't to find a way to include more companies; it's to forget that that anticompetitive arrangement was ever proposed, and continue on with the current situation where Google shows users whatever it thinks they're looking for.
(I'm not suggesting that Google has pure and altruistic motives here; far from it. They're out to make money. I'm just saying that they've done nothing wrong here, and more generally that there's no wrong here for anyone to be accused of doing. That some random local company in the EU got annoyed at not being at the top of Google search results should not be Google's problem, or anyone's problem other than that company's.)