If Google purports to be a search engine and then gives preference to search results that benefit them, it's ethically similar to an fiduciary adviser recommending things that make him rich without regard for your well being. Google is not in a fiduciary relationship to you, but a similar ethical situation arises because fair competition (which laws protect in most countries - e.g., including anti-trust laws here in the US) is hard to be had when one company is tricking its customers (by making their ads look similar to search results) into thinking they're getting more for less (e.g., getting free search when in actuality they're being led to potentially less desirable products for Google's monetary gain).

If Google instead purported to be a "find products we like to recommend" engine, this situation wouldn't arise. I suspect less people would use their service in this case, and that should illustrated the point: if the value of your service decreases when you tell the truth, then you're, by definition, gaining an a business advantage by being dishonest.

People using Google search are not customers. They are visitors to a free web site where you can type stuff into a box, and other stuff appears of that web site's choosing. There are various assurances made or implied about what that stuff consists of. Those come from the website itself, so you're foolish if you completely believe them.

How about people who use other free stuff? People who load up GNU/Linux and log in to a Bash promp --- are they "GNU customers"? Does GNU have a monopoly because the users don't bother to find out about other operating systems and believe all the evangelizing which tells them that GNU/Linux is the best?

That is true. As we all know, if you use Google, you're the product being sold.

Are these paid shopping comparisons, or whatever Google finds itself and tries to usefully show to users? If it's the latter, your statement should read as follows:

If Google purports to be a search engine and then gives preferences to search results that benefit their users (making Google indispensable), it's ethically similar to an fiduciary adviser recommending things that make his clients rich (making himself indispensable). Being indispensible has its own benefits and value.

Except Google has no fiduciary responsibilities to search consumers.

>Google has the right to make whatever content they want appear when you navigate to their website

Except they don't. Government can regulate what content can and cannot be shown (e.g. "The right to be forgotten"). I disagree with UE's decisions and the principle behind it (anti-trust policies), but they have the authority to do so. If they should have this authority and how far it should stretch is a rather large debate and prone to flaming.

They can regulate whatever they want. Tomorrow they might pass a law that makes it illegal to display the Google logo. That has no impact on Google's rights.

In some countries, women are not allowed to leave the house unless accompanied by a man. We recognize that women do have the right to do so, and that countries that disagree are stupid and wrong.

You're talking about moral rights here, not legal rights. Moral is highly subjective, you know.

Of course I am. That's the only kind of right it is possible for non-lawyers to have a discussion about, since legal rights either exist or don't.

"Government can regulate what content can and cannot be shown"

Depends on the government. In the US, commercial speech (IE speech for the purposes of engaging in commerce or advertising) is a weird issue. Content-based regulations of commercial speech have to satisfy intermediate scrutiny (instead of strict scrutiny that noncommercial speech would have to satisfy).

Intermediate scrutiny is an odd test, but suffice to say, the government is not going to win in a lot of cases.

Essentially, at least in the US, the government's authority to restrict commercial speech has significant limits, particularly when it comes to content-based regulations.

> Government can regulate what content can and cannot be shown (e.g. "The right to be forgotten")

Sure, and "hate speech" laws and illegal materials.

But they cannot regulate you, for instance, into showing something that you are not showing.

Suppose I run a search engine and some politician is against my organization. I can drop most positive entries related to that politician from my index, keeping mostly the ones that point to negative material.

they can, and they did, for example, for the browser ballot in windows.

This was not a law, and so a very different situation. This was a court ordered remedy for a conviction.

Courts generally have the power to fashion appropriate remedies, and yes, sometimes they involve compelling speech or other things.

(Some of these remedies have been struck down depending on what they have been forced to say or not say).

Warning stickers on cigarettes are mandated by law.

That is a labeling requirement for health, not compelled commercial speech (which again, is about commerce :P). It does not require them to state anything about themselves, just about the risks of the ingredients in cigarettes.

You need to understand these are all very different things in the eyes of the law

Also note the

A. current warning labels were litigated, and tobacco won at the district court level: http://www.news-record.com/content/2012/03/01/article/judge_...

This order was reversed by a divided panel on appeal: http://www.journalnow.com/business/business_news/local/artic...

The supreme court declined to hear the case (which means nothing :P)

B. Requiring phillip morris, et al to make ads stating they deceived the public was not okay. http://www.claimsjournal.com/news/national/2015/05/22/263534...

etc

These are all very complex constitutional free speech issues, and trying to simplify them like you have with a throwaway line doesn't work well in practice.

If you want to operate your business in a market you have to play by the rules set there. Nobody can and wants to force Google to operate their search in the EU, as you noted correctly. But if they wish to do so, there are laws they need to follow. If they operate a quasi-monopoly those laws are stricter than they would be for you and me.

There is certain type of content that you would agree that Google shouldn't be allowed to put on their website. It's just that in the EU there are some more restrictions.

I didn't mean that Google has the right to put, say, child porn on their website.

> If they operate a quasi-monopoly those laws are stricter than they would be for you and me.

To have stricter laws, there should be an actual monopoly. Google have no monopoly, only a "mental monopoly", so called mind-share. When people want to search for something, the first word that pops into their head is "Google".

A monopoly is something else, like not being able to buy a product or service except form a particular vendor, even if you want alternatives.

Also, a monopoly uses its power to prevent entry into the market: vendors who want access to the users who would like alternative vendors are hindered from starting up.

You're not paying anything for Google searches, and there are alternatives.

Google connected a farm of machines to the network, which provide a free service and don't prevent anyone from doing the same. How can that be a monopoly?

That's the reason I used "quasi-monopoly" above and laws talk about "dominant market position".

Under EU law, quasi-monopolies are treated the same as monopolies.

That’s how the ISP market in most EU countries is still competitive: The largest ISP has to rent their lines to competitors at normal market price. They can not refuse.

Google has a search engine monopoly (at least in Europe), this gives them the obligation not to abuse this. If they're using their monopoly to promote other services (such as when directly show Maps in the results, without offering other providers of maps the same option) or if they're scraping content without linking back (such as with Yelp), they're abusing this monopoly.

There is no such thing as a "search engine monopoly".

The word "monopoly" doesn't mean "lack of viable alternatives", except colloquially. (Colloquial uses of the term are not appropriate in context; that is equivocation.)

The same can be said about Windows, yet both the European Union and the United States accused Microsoft of abusing their monopoly by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. This antitrust against Google is really similar.

While I share your sentiment, the case with MS was different because they were coercing hardware manufacturers into not bundling Netscape by threatening to revoke their Windows licence. Google aren't revoking access to their other, primary product if you use Yelp, Bing Maps etc.

They gave Yelp two options: either disable crawling in robots.txt, which means that Yelp won't show up in Google's results at all, or accept that Google will copy Yelp reviews without linking back. This is quite similar to what Microsoft was doing in my opinion.

The only issue is that people were forced to pay for Windows when buying a PC for running a different operating system. PC hardware OEM's paid royalties to Microsoft whether or not users installed Microsoft systems, and the OEM's passed down this cost indiscriminately. That's an example of monopoly power: users wanted to buy just a PC, without a hundred-something dollar OS, but couldn't.

As for bundling of IE, Microsoft has a right to put whatever they want into their software release. People who use Windows and then complain that it comes deeply integrated with a Microsoft web browser can be safely regarded as supreme morons. An OS needs a browser in the internet age. Ubuntu comes bundled with Firefox. (Browser choice is good for Windows; Microsoft only hurt themselves by integrating IE in annoying ways into the OS. Many people are happy Windows users, yet browse the web with an alternative browser; Microsoft should be happy they are on Windows.)

Moreover, the history of Windows is littered with entitled whiners whose application or utility became irrelevant when Microsoft realized that an OS should ship with that kind of thing and produced an equivalent. According to those litigious nincompoops, the OS vendor has no right to bundle things such as a TCP/IP stack, disk compression or anti-malware utilities, because it threatens their "add-ons" which were there first.

The whole IE thing is like going after Toyota because they install cruise control, air conditioning or decent audio in many of their vehicle models. And cruise control, AC, and audio systems are something you can have installed after-market from third parties, so by Toyota bundling such features into cars, it ruins their business. Moreover those features are slickly integrated into the car (e.g. dashboard/steering wheel controls) and hard to remove and replace with the generic parts. The bundled factory features thus enjoy unfair advantages in integration.

Google, by contrast, only runs a program on some machines in the cloud that only respond when you resolve their name and send them a TCP/IP SYN packet. Every search starts with someone resolving "google.com" (or a related regional domain) and making the first contact. From your IP address, you can similarly reach any other search engine on the planet, if you're in the free world, at least.

It’s a business, so yes, it can be a monopoly.

Yes, Google has full control. That's why Google doesn't have to deal with DMCA requests (after all, he's just pointing to other links, right?), that "Right to be forgotten" nonsense and now this thing. /s

When a site is small, it's easy to control its content. When a site is considered to be the standard for something (like Google is for searching the web), then it has to deal with these kinds of things.

> these kinds of things

"These kinds of things" can be articulated as "the sense of entitlement of the collectivist horde".

Otherwise known as the will of democratically elected governments.

In the EU, we have a legislation that (at least sometimes) actually evaluates things in the context of the world we live in today as opposed to the 18th century. Thus, it can dynamically react and even proact to situations—such as for example treating a de facto utility (Google search) in the manner of a de jure utility.

To paraphrase some guy, “If Google don't like what it see in EU, it go somewhere else.”

> Google has the right to make whatever content they want appear when you navigate to their website and type something into the search box. Just like you and I have a right to put nearly whatever we want in our private web page.

Having the monopoly in search engines (admit it: they have over 95% of the users in Europe and the US), anti-trust regulation comes into play, and it stops being so simple.

Since when do corporations have rights?

Google will do what the EU tells them to do or the EU will use violence to make them do it.

It's interesting how libertarians keep confusing their ideology with the law in a democracy.