This is how I've been told it went by in Germany: there was a law drafted[1] that said publishers should get compensation for snippets of their articles in search results. This was a law apparently drafted directly in response to Google's practices.

So Google sent a letter to most publishers, asking for royalty-free access to their content, or otherwise they would not show up anymore on Google's services. All publishers agreed to sign that, because being removed from Google means losing a decent amount of your ad income.

That's how they get away with it.

[1] https://gigaom.com/2013/03/01/german-parliament-passes-googl...

http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/23/kapitulation/

The German government made themselves look like fools. They were easily manipulated by a literal handful of newspaper magnates (primarily the boss of Axel Springer) whose positions were nonsensical - they were complaining about being in Google News without compensation, but didn't use robots.txt to take themselves out of it. Surely that would have been the start of any normal business negotiation? Why would any change to the law have been needed at all?

So after wasting vast amounts of time in changing the law, the German government learned a hopefully important lesson - they were being used as pawns in a game to try and extract free money from a foreign company and the actual complaints were meritless. A tiny amount of technical literacy would have gone a long way.

Now they are all handing over royalty-free access to Google. But all other companies and people still have to pay. I mean the publishers think they can make at least a bit of money that way. But they again don't seem to realise that this only strengthens Google because all (potential) competitors have to pay...

The Google folks must be really celebrating over this. A law specifically designed to target Google has only strengthened them.

We are talking about the people publishing "Bild", here. It's not actually about being stupid, it's about being blinded by their own evilness.

Would you expect anything different from, say, Murdoch?

Microsoft was forced to include a browser choice screen and not use IE by default on Windows computers sold in the EU. The same happens here - you have different responsibilities when you're in a dominant position.

So you know, abusive companies should be punished. But lets be honest here, politicians are targeting the likes of Microsoft, Google or Apple not for our own good, but because they see a huge pie that isn't theirs and want a piece of it, with people forgetting that these companies have defined the huge markets they are dominating in.

And I'm saying this as a European citizen that had plenty of diatribes against all 3 companies mentioned here - but I do not believe in government interventions when it comes to software and yes, I don't believe in net neutrality either.

For many people in the US, they're completely stuck with Comcast or Verizon and likely will be for decades to come (Google Fiber's complete roll out will obviously take a very long time). They either have to move, or suck it up.

For instance, if there was a rule which legislated minimum standards for transferring services elsewhere, as per your last point, that seems to be something it would be difficult to complain about.

Also, I want to see the text of the adopted statement, because the comments in the press release, and in previous stories, have only said, to paraphrase "regulation may be necessary to unbundle search from commercial services". That doesn't scream "wants to break up the company" to me. Is that really being proposed?

That changes once a company becomes a monopoly, specifically because it leads to market distortion. We've got rules against this sort of thing for a reason…

Is Google Maps a separate product that's being illegal tied to web search? Or is it actually a search engine for physical places, an integrated part of the one unified Google Search Engine? It could be argued either way, but if you try and imagine what it'd take to make Google Maps "pluggable" in google.com search .... well, that would be a tremendous technical challenge. Competitors would have to be able to process every web search Google does, to decide if it contains a location. That's a lot of traffic. And they have to respond as fast as Google's own servers, despite not being in the same buildings. This sort of thing suggests they're really one unified product, but I doubt such technical details would have much impact on what is a fundamentally political process.

Can you link to the EU ruling stating that?