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Trustbusting in the internet age: Should digital monopolies be broken up? | The Econ... Page 1 sur 3
Trustbusting in the internet age
Should digital monopolies be broken
up?
European moves against Google are about protecting companies, not
consumers
Nov 29th 2014 | From the print edition
ALTHOUGH no company is mentioned by
name, it is very clear which American
internet giant the European Parliament has
in mind in a resolution that has been doing
the rounds in the run-up to a vote on
November 27th. One draft calls for
“unbundling search engines from other
commercial services” to ensure a level
playing field for European companies and consumers. This is the latest and most
dramatic outbreak of Googlephobia in Europe.
Europe’s former competition commissioner, Joaquín Almunia, brokered a series of
settlements this year requiring Google to give more prominence to rivals’ shopping and
map services alongside its own in search results. But MEPs want his successor,
Margrethe Vestager, to take a firmer line. Hence the calls to dismember the company.
The parliament does not actually have the power to carry out this threat. But it touches
on a question that has been raised by politicians from Washington to Seoul and brings
together all sorts of issues from privacy to industrial policy (see article
(http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21635077-online-businesses-can-grow-verylarge-very-fastit-what-makes-them-exciting-does-it-also-make) ). How worrying is the
dominance of the internet by Google and a handful of other firms?
Who’s afraid of the big bad search engine?
Google (whose executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, is a member of the board of The
Economist’s parent company) has 68% of the market of web searches in America and
more than 90% in many European countries. Like Facebook, Amazon and other tech
http://www.economist.com/node/21635000/print
05/12/2014
Trustbusting in the internet age: Should digital monopolies be broken up? |...