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Comment by repolfx | Hacker News Reader

That's Verhofstadt, the head of the EU Parliament.

I don't know what gave you hope about that. It's mafia tactics and confirms the worst suspicions people have had about EU anti-trust enforcement.

What does privacy rules have to do with monopoly or anti-trust? As far as I can tell, nothing. But the EU appears dangerously close to taking an official policy that anti-trust fines are based on whether Guy Verhofstadt and his friends personally like your answers at unrelated hearings. Make Guy happy or you'll be inconveniently re-classified as a monopoly. Never mind the existence of LinkedIn or Google+ or other competing networks.

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>What does privacy rules have to do with monopoly or anti-trust?

They are becoming related.

Monopoly laws traditionally apply to commercial transactions. Facebook's customers are not experiencing a monopoly, they can easily switch to other ad-space vendors.

Many of Facebook's "crop" however happen to be voters who feel new laws are required to deal with Facebook's "network monopoly" especially as it is entirely arbitrary, harmful and very profitable.

Privacy aka legal ownership and control of data is one way to erode that "network monopoly".

The EU Parliament President is Antonio Tajani. Verhofstadt is just a regular MEP, though he is also chair of an European party that commands 7-8% of the MEPs.

Things have always worked like that. Why do you think Google or FB are escaping antitrust despite a behaviour much more egregious than Microsoft ever was ?

Don't fool yourself ; the normal state of affair would have been for them to be torn appart, and the current state is corrupt.

Escaping it where - apparently not in the EU, although it's unclear what monopolies they actually have.

In America they've escaped anti-trust attention because it's hard to prove any consumers have been harmed by their activities.

Well, maybe the EU will prove that such things are easier to see if you actually take a look.

They definitely won't because EU competition law doesn't care about whether there was harm to consumers or not. It's based on different principles to American law, arguably worse ones (harm to competitors, which is sort of the point of competition to begin with).

You may build a faster car engine than your competitor's so that your team can visit and close more prospects per day. You may not blow up the tires of your competitor's car so the other team cannot visit anyone.

Blowing up tires is physical damage and does not require any specific anti-trust laws.

That's the problem with metaphors - sometimes they obscure the reality of things. Anti-trust covers much vaguer and more debatable 'crimes'. For instance Microsoft was rapped over bundling Internet Explorer although every OS comes with a web browser these days and nobody considers it controversial anymore. The main crime was giving exclusivity discounts to customers, but that isn't specifically forbidden as far as I know. It's just an interpretation.

At any rate, the EU doesn't require even the slightest analogue to 'blowing up tires'. They went after Google Shopping although Google was providing search referral and advertising to their own competitors - actually helping them, not hindering them. The existence of other big product search engines like Amazon didn't help, the EU fined them anyway. I didn't believe before that EU anti-trust enforcement was based on the rule of law, and Verhofstadt appears to have confirmed it today.

> For instance Microsoft was rapped over bundling Internet Explorer

...And Google uses all of their products to tell you it's better to use Chrome, frequently destroy businesses by offering their own services in cards at the top of searches, which represent billions in free advertising, force Google store with their android OEMs, etc.

If Microsoft has been condemned for leveraging their dominant position in a market to get advantage in another market, Google should have been condemned years ago, for the same reason.

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