Google responds to the EU

The recent defensive reply by Google to the EU competition issues highlight a complex web of the internet enabled hyper business and its entanglement into large multi-national geopolitical domains.

The arguments presented by Google are complex and essentially split into two areas: How tactical digital businesses like price comparison are distinct from their services, and secondly, its role as a intermediary for traffic to other sites.

My view is they are missing one big point about market size and dominance versus consumer choice of services. Google is not a public utility, or a self appointed one either, and this problem is exacerbated by its own algorithms in search have bee problematic as they walk a fine line between service arbiter and service delivery.

Even the statistical arguments about traffic volumes is not relevant as what's at stake is a separation of utility services and next generation internet of things and 5G type super services and super data highways for smart cities and smart transport. Google is well placed for that next expansion and the EU is on the back foot here. Splitting up google is self destructive and the EU has failed in its single digital market ideas that ironically is to google's advantage. There are several scenarios that may see google create wiggle room to passively work with the EU which will be an suboptimal unstatisfactory stalemate for the EU continued failure to build scalable EU alternatives

#EU #Google #CompetitionRules