back to article EU Commish demands proof of Google's evil from rivals, customers

It’s the anti-trust case that keeps on giving. The European Commission has sent out yet more questionnaires to Google's rivals to ask about the Chocolate Factory’s alleged anti-competitive behaviour. As always, the Commish refused to confirm on the record any details of the ongoing case, but a source close to the investigation …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    And just what is the Commission going to do with the bias in Bing and the price comparison sites?

    It would help if the commission asked the general public what they thought about the results they get from Google. After all, competitors are always going to be upset no matter what Google does.

  2. ratfox

    The statements of competitors notwithstanding, the only other subject that didn't seem to be solved was the subject of scraping… and that was before the German publishers admitted they preferred Google to scrape and display snippets rather than just display titles.

    Then again, maybe they prefer the Spanish solution.

    1. Daggerchild Silver badge

      I thought the scraping thing fizzled a while back after Google split Googlebot into pieces. These days you can choose which Google service's Googlebot you let in where, which lets you control where your content ends up.

      Interesting this bubbles up just as Google uncompulsoried some Android Google Play apps (which all looked very competitiony).

    2. Ian Michael Gumby

      @ratfox... Not quite...

      The issue was that the scraping was in fact theft, yet if Google ignored those papers, there was a decline in the people who ultimately visited the site after first finding the article on Google. What wasn't know was the statistic of people who just read the scraped data and didn't take any further action.

      It would be interesting to see a web site's ranking with or without a page having google analytics installed or not.

      1. Aedile

        Re: @ratfox... Not quite...

        I disagree with you that scraping is "in fact theft" and would instead call it fair use (provided it is a small snippet). If it had actually been theft then companies could have easily sue the scrapper under existing laws. Since that didn't happened and new laws had to be created it's pretty clear that everyone knows it was in fact not theft.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Microsoft money at work

    Greasing the EU wheels!

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon