It's not the first time that I see this being described as "anti-US".

And that while the reality is that there is a list of European companies/kartels receiving high anti trust fines as well for their behaviour.

The "problem" is that this never receives any interest in the states which only contributes to this blurred image that only US companies are getting fined. That is frankly untrue.

I find comments like yours baffling. The basic tenement of capitalism, as worshipped in US, is that it needs competition to function. If a monopolist prevents competition from functioning (either by hiding their products on the largest search engine on earth, lowering prices under profitable margins or other tactics used by such entities) capitalism degenerates into socialism led by a corporation instead of state. It ceases to function and benefit anyone.

So why the heck would you not support an action that stops a giant corporation from stiffling the most important mechanism of capitalism?

I'm always amazed by that thinking as well.

I think at some point in the discussion, some people have tried to redefine "monopoly" as "state-sanctioned monopoly" and declare everything else fair game as long as the evil government is not involved... Apparently you can get surprisingly far before the logic breaks down.

>So why the heck would you not support an action that stops a giant corporation from stiffling the most important mechanism of capitalism?

Because it's not the government's job to unclog the market. It's the entrepreneur's opportunity to disrupt the market and kick Google's ass.

When you come down from the cloud-land of capitalist heaven you will find this is not even remotely what happens.

Capitalism is inherently anti-competitive. Larger established companies have more power than the idealized "entrepreneur" that libertarians like to posit. If a competitor appears they can simply force them to shutdown, via dumping, via legal harassment, or simply by virtue of being much larger and being able to do everything more efficiently and with larger margins. Government regulation is needed to prevent monopolies. This is self-evident.

So if a private company skips regulations, it's not the government's job to enforce them?

One way of looking at corporations is islands of central planning in a sea of market forces. It is not always entirely obvious which functions should be optimally bundled together inside corporations. This is why you can get a lot of controversy around these decisions.

The marketshare of a company(at a point in time) does not determine whether a business is a monopoly or not, high/low barriers to entry in the particular industry do.

There are multiple search engines providing the same service that Google does and the cost of switching is so negligible as to be almost non-existent.

While I generally appreciate the EU's approach towards protecting the consumer's best interests, this just reeks of making up excuses to extort money from a highly successful company just because they can get away with it.

Countries with higher standards 'often' have reasons to monitor and eventually penalise international companies from laxer countries.

I fully expect a future superpower to have strict rules in some new area, say China will only take English-language/law services from legal firms in any country if they are zero carbon.

Starting a post by saying "I'm going to get downvoted for this but..." is against the guidelines. It annoys me to no end.

Do you have anything at all to back up that claim? It seems to me the EU applies these fines fairly equitably between US and EU companies.

Well, if the USA isn't going to enforce its own antitrust laws...

Upvoted.

FWIW, companies in the US have long used 'anti trust complaints' as a means of harming companies they can't compete with (e.g. Microsoft, back in the day).

Yeah, like that pesky Netscape that totally screwed over MS and almost stopped the golden age of web browsers between 2001 and 2006. /s

Hey, I had a 'best viewed with any browser' icon on my sites at the time (in fact http://dougal.sourceforge.net/ still boasts one ...).

Doesn't alter the fact that Netscape was incapable of competing with Microsoft (in fact I think you sort of made my point, there) once the latter got their arses into gear.

Edited: Wow! The "Viewable With Any Browser" campaign site is still up, in 2017. I wonder if they're keeping it handy for the forthcoming Webkit monopoly ...

You keep using that word. But I don't it means what you think it means.

Netscape could compete with IE. Netscape couldn't compete with the entire MS empire being dedicated to destroying them.

MS played hardball and were willing to do anything to gain nearly complete dominance in the market. A lot of their strategy was clearly anti-competitive and anti-consumer. It's not even a debate. See U.S. v Microsoft. Netscape couldn't compete with that sort of scorched earth strategy. And it took Google and Mozilla years to make a dent in that and MS had to help by letting their market dominance stagnate for over half a decade and causing endless irritation for a generation of developers who are always going to treat an MS browser as a second class citizen.

So yeah, great for MS, they beat Netscape. But they couldn't beat Google or Mozilla and that's the most recent battle, so the one that actually matters.

Were they? If it hadn't been bundled for free, what would have happened?

No-one will ever know.

... because Netscape couldn't compete with Microsoft, because Microsoft could give away a browser for free as in beer.

Perhaps we're meaning different things by the word 'compete'?

Yeah you mean "whoever came out on top must have out competed the other" and you don't care if it was by hook or by crook.

So, yeah in the sense that a five year old Rocky vs Ivan Drago in a boxing match is a competition technically. But no one can honestly say it's really a competition, as in there's any spirit of competition.

U.S. v Microsoft makes it pretty clear. MS'es strategy was break the law and do anything to win. Then it was weather the lawsuit and win or lose, they had years to position IE as the dominant product. So losing hardly mattered they still got what they wanted.

What could Netscape actually do to counter all that? They were practically bystanders in this nearly as much as my grandmother was. Such was MS'es power in the 90's.

Yeah, and I can win against Usain Bolt if I just shoot him first.

That's exactly how Netscape and others approached the problem of competing with Microsoft.

"We can't compete, let's make an anti-trust complaint"

"I can't run as fast as Bolt, so I'll shoot him"