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Comment by cinquemb | Hacker News Reader

At this point, why does the EU even bother with Google? What's stopping them from just funding their own "Google" and forcing all their subjects to use them?

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If funding your own Google was enough to build Google Search, then people would use Bing.

> If funding your own Google was enough to build Google Search, then people would use Bing.

Some people do use Bing. The reason more people don't is that there isn't a lot of reason to. Even if you can get the results to be as good as Google, actually making them better is hard. And it's just trading one giant tech company with privacy issues for another, so that's no advantage either. People need a reason to switch away from the incumbent.

But if you fund the development as public domain research and open source code, that's a different story. Now you're putting it within the capacity of even medium sized organizations to do their own indexing and run their own search with quality results. Instead of two competitors, you open it up to potentially hundreds or thousands.

If the Wikimedia Foundation or similar started doing search indexing, people might actually trust them more on privacy than they do Microsoft or Google.

And the more of them there are, each running their own fork of the code, the harder it is for SEO spammers to pollute the results, and the more advantage the little guys have over an incumbent that spammers will still continue to specifically target as long as they continue to have high market share.

If the code was available for anyone to adopt or modify, you could also get some potentially interesting new domain-specific search engines. There isn't a lot of high quality competition in the video search space, for example, and if there was then that would help to erode the dominance of YouTube by making videos hosted elsewhere more findable.

You would also be likely to see it displacing Google Custom Search pretty quickly if it was free to adopt.

And what's the cost? An amount of money less than they've received from Google in fines? The worst case is that it only helps a little instead of a lot. (And it wouldn't hurt to do the same thing against Windows considering what Windows 10 is doing on the privacy front.)

I knew people could imagine other solutions other than hitting up the rich uncles that never really gave a damn about privacy issues all in but name only.

What you propose actually sounds like it could be a better way than the status quo (privacy issues or not with current providers), and if it fails, you can always go back to hitting up the rich uncles for ransom!

Why would they have to? That is not how this works — if your company offers a service somehere, it needs to stay within grace of the antitrust regulations that happen to exist there. That is why we have antitrusts.

What need would there be for such anti trust regulations if they only allowed for organizations that were completely within their purview from the get go and designated To Big To Be Anti-Trusted?

Companies change all the time, that is why antitrust can only regulate what happens right now, instead of regulate what companies guess will be.

Even if they were to regulate beforehand, any company they would allow could evolve slowly into something that breaks the initial idea of what was allowed.

But since said company would be completely under their control and grace ahead of time, they could do whatever they want with it, at anytime, even if it changes or not. No need to go through the regulatory song and dance.

It’s much easier for everyone if you only look for rule violations when someone suspects they’ve been broken, rather than forcing everyone to check with you first before doing anything.

That would be much easier, if the rules in the first place were a static system made available to everyone on real time and understood by all, and the costs of engaging with were proportionally burdensome to all. But its not, though if people seem fine with cat and mouse game between EU regulators looking for quick cash, and Google et al always seeming one step ahead (with no notable improvements people search experience outside more skinner boxes of compliance sprinkled around), then I guess that's what most people want and are ok with… meh

I wouldn’t say “want” so much as “it’s the worst except for all the others”.

Legal systems are like code, except interpreted by humans and “common sense” instead of compilers — we just don’t have a way to make it simultaneously easy to understand (legalese), hacker-proof (legal loopholes), and future-proof (implications of new tech).

Governments do try to clear out old laws and amend the ones they want to keep, but it looks like it’s as hard for them as preventing databases from leaking is for us.

Because it's easier to fine US companies when they break/skirt the law. And EU citizens can make their own choices, you know. Maybe I want to use Google instead of 'EUgle' that would be censored by default under German law to prevent hate speech.

As a European I wouldn't trust any European search engine either.

I am a dual US|EU national. While I do not actually trust any search engine, I still trust Qwant and Startpage (European search engines) over ones like Google (US based). But, I almost always use DuckDuckGo.

I think of the Internet as a public utility. I think it needs to be regulated as such.

Qwant is using Bing. So much for being a genuine European search engine.

Is it though, if you have to keep going back and fining them with nothing really changing in between except for a thin veneer of "compliance"? Or is it preferable to have it that way, a piggy bank/rich uncle of sorts, one EU regulators and always rely on to get some cash quick for the next EU citizens sanctioned scheme? Who is really benefiting? Is your search experience really getting any more productive/better with this prolonged cat and mouse game?

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