This seems stupid to most sane people, but there's a kind of logic behind it.
1) This is clearly bullshit designed to distract from more pressing issues that the French government can't solve or is unwilling to solve.
2) France's notorious protectionism, while immensely irritating to outsiders, does a reasonable job at preserving French language and culture, and creating a local vacuum for French native solutions. Trade and culture protectionism has a long-history of working quite well in many countries seeking to create national identity and industry when used correctly.
These two riffs will continue to get played, with #2 reinforcing #1 while necessary, to try and encourage native French solutions. France is under tremendous economic and cultural pressure from better performing regional partners like Germany and the U.K., and globally by the U.S., China and Japan (pick whichever you think is better performing in terms of economics and cultural expansion).
It kind of sucks, but it's also why, when you go to France, and even Paris, you know you're in Paris and not yet another cosmopolitan mega-city. It's also part of the reason why French culture and ideas continue to be interesting and exportable.
Much of this of course is France's continued decline as a global power. London, New York and Paris used to be a given global triumvirate. And Paris's membership in the top-3 isn't a given any more. It's now in a mix of second-tier alpha cities with Tokyo, Beijing and Dubai.
Outsiders look at this and say "of course Paris is in decline, this kind of behavior is why". Tighter global integration and more openness seems to be the way to the top and maintaining it. But for French leadership, losing cultural identity is not worth it. What if the world thought La Défense = Paris and the rest of the city was just some curious suburb? Is this [1] something that anybody cares about?
As one of the more than 1.6 million French citizen living abroad [1] (2.5% of the French population [2]), I could tell you a lot about the actual effects of attempting to create barriers around the French market.
I'm also not sure French culture is preserved that well in France. Sir Colin Davis was a better Berlioz interpreter than any French conductor I ever heard (and I was born 50km from la Cote St Andre), and even traditional Haute Cuisine is better abroad (particularly in Tokyo - see Apicius).
On the upside, a castle in Normandie or the South West today [3] costs less than a 1 bedroom in the nicer parts of Sydney. And those mostly empty TGVs where first class can be cheaper than second are nice when you need to get between Paris and Geneva and avoid those awful Parisian airports.
Acemoglu and Robinson [4] describe how the descendants of the world-leading Venetian Republicans now serve ice creams on their ancestors' plazas to today's "Venetians", visiting from Houston or Hong Kong. Sometimes, going home for Christmas feels like that. Luckily, London is only 45 minutes away with EasyJet.
As an aside/example, here is an entire fortress fortified by Vauban in 1692, a pillar of French royal power for centuries, practically a small village behind the walls, going for only 2.6m EUR: http://www.patrice-besse.com/chateaux-a-vendre/paca/chateau-...
> I'm also not sure French culture is preserved that well in France. Sir Colin Davis was a better Berlioz interpreter than any French conductor I ever heard (and I was born 50km from la Cote St Andre), and even traditional Haute Cuisine is better abroad (particularly in Tokyo - see Apicius).
You can't drop assertions like that while hoping that being French makes you automatically right about French culture. You have a right to your opinion, but please just don't proclaim them as if they were universal truths.
As a french guy living currently in London, I clearly agree. I hope Paris never becomes a second London. If you live there you will understand why. London just lost almost all it's culture in just a few years, the London you see in movies is long gone. Just the red bricks and a few cultural things from the past are remaining but all the rest is gone. There is hard consequences to accept to become a truly global city, it's clearly not only positive consequences for the city.
For Google, it's quite complicated. The problem is that Google is representing more than 90% of all the requests in France (the usage is also the same for most of european countries anyway). So we can technically say that Google is in a monopoly position for search. The problem is that it's hurting local startups and businesses there. The solution would be to break Google into smaller parts (it's what you do normaly when a monopoly is hurting the free market) but since that's impossible due to the fact that Google is an American company, the government is taking some measures to limit Google's influence. This is one of the measures, the second one which is currently being voted would be to force Google to display competitors on the home page (a bit like Microsoft's ballot screen). I guess that given the current context, they have no other option.
Except here's the thing -- it's not a natural monopoly. There aren't physical wires with no alternative like Ma Bell. There aren't things that google is doing that prevents other search engines from coming into existence -- they can't prevent new web crawls. Even Firefox now uses yahoo by default, and the open crawler data even gives anyone a head start on crawling the web!
Competition, if it were much better, could easily take away search market share. Having better localized results for France could be one of those ways. People aren't using google because they have no other choice, it's because google is genuinely doing a better job. That's not a reason to break up a company.
> London just lost almost all it's culture in just a few years, the London you see in movies is long gone
Having been around London most of my life (51 yrs) I find it hard to think of much culture which has gone. Crappy instant coffee and BT phone boxes which hardly worked spring to mind. Most of the other stuff is there if somewhat modified. I suspect the 'London you see in movies' was a bit fictionalised.
As a French guy who half grew up in London and spent many years there I heartily disagree with you. I think my opinion is more alongside of "Midnight in Paris" - culture changes and evolves all the time and it's not a good idea to try and freeze a particular moment in time.
London has an extraordinarily rich, and international culture. You can go to an Ethiopian restaurant where most people barely speak English and see a coffee ceremony, or have chicken gizzards cooked in chorizo in Victoria served by a Portuguese man who arrived last year; you can even live in South Kensington and be fine never speaking a word of English (as many French expats end up doing, kids at CDG etc.). Even looking at so called "native" English culture, a LOT is influenced by the historical openness of the British Empire to foreign land.
Take Earl Grey: the tea is Chinese and the Bergamot Italian. Or the nation's favorite dish: chicken tikka masala, which is Indian fusion. Or look at the upper classes: who is at the top? Is it the Russian oligarchs fighting for penthouses worth tens of millions? The Chinese billionaires expanding into Europe? The rulers of the financial industry which dominates the economy of a country which is 78% services? Or the increasingly irrelevant land owning aristocracy? In France it's much easier: the elite lives in 16eme or Neuilly and will have studied at the same schools. A true self-made man like Xavier Niel is almost a pariah when in Britain he'd get his own TV show and influence IT policy.
A good point of comparison is architecture: aside from la Defense, Paris is frozen in its Haussmanian redrawing, with most of the cities showing identical streets that were innovative in the late 1800s but struggle to cope with the increasing population today. London on the other hand stretches from the futuristic, Manhattan-like Canary Wharf to the preserved City with a sprinkling of amazing towers (including Europe's most talked about recent skyscraper, the Shard), or the various slices in time such as South Kensington's Victorian architecture or even the Barbican, a testimony to the central planning Brutalist rage of the 60s and 70s.
And the reason for that is squarely the free and encouraged economic migration, the fact that London remains the best city to try your luck in Europe (whose citizen can work anywhere they like within the member states).
A larger version of the phenomenon is Silicon Valley: why don't more companies come from other countries? Because as soon as a decent technologist appears there, he is either scouted and asked to move to the Valley (as happened to the CEO of a Cambridge startup after a 26m USD round, allowing me to grab his flat on the cheap) or he will move there to take advantage of a friendlier environment and the best ecosystem in the world (culture, people, funding, legal framework...). Of course, you hear the same grumbling about the disappearing culture of the "old" San Francisco, even though the city is barely over a century old and has gone through many more booms and busts...
so, google is forced to reveal how it affects and processes search results, at least to the french government (this part was unclear to me). i don't really see what's wrong with that. if google has to approach the market so as to encourage more competition from france, i dont see whats wrong with that either. i dont see why any european company would want to be dependent on an american-based search or really any type of data-handling company at this juncture in international politics. at the very least, reducing google's control on french markets is not a bad thing, and is something google could overcome if it played ball well. if it's not possible to do something fairly, legally, and respectfully, its not worth doing at all.
FRENCH SENATOR (via translator):
"Mr. Page, on page 1123 of Exhibit D we see that a signal component called NewInvSqPR is retrieved from a service of similar name. However, cross-referencing with Exhibit P, we see on page 8987 what appears to be a description of this service. This description leads with the text 'DEPRECATED DO NOT USE TO BE REPLACED BY Q2 2010'. Can you account for the current status of this service, and the provenance of any data it relies upon?
Furthermore, after the NewInvSqPR is retrieved, if that indeed ever does take place, the resulting data is placed into a field in a ranking output message, but it is unclear from where that field is read. On page 6766 of Exhibit E, the field appears to be cleared, but the surrounding functionality looks like it is disabled by a flag. Can you explain to this chamber the meaning of this information, specifically with regards to ranking of Google properties relative to competing vertical search websites?"
They have no concept of how complex ranking is. There are millions of factors being fed into massive machine learning systems that try to predict which results users want (which is different from which they are most likely to click). It's like asking to see the algorithm for a cat.
It's convenient to think our work is so sophisticated, and that lawmakers are simpletons. But that's a naive view.
They want the algorithm disclosed as a legal matter to determine whether competitors are disadvantaged. Which probably means they are more interested in email than source code. There exist hyperintelligent lawyers. Yes, smart enough to understand search. A law firm like Keker and Van Nest [1] could go in there and answer the question. France could be willing to spend a billion to find out, and that's more than they need.
Legislation of technology is frightening to any technologist. But it's much more dangerous if we dismiss the process as ridiculous and refuse to recognize any underlying concerns. Because then technologists won't have any say in the outcome.
EDIT: Paul you're such a prominent guy, I don't mean to speak too strongly, but people really listen to what you say. Entrepreneurs ought to know that legal matters are not so easily dismissed. I do hope, generously speaking, the startups are the ones that call KVN and not the legislators.
Google has (very effectively) played the "oh noes, it's all machine learning" card. But machine learning is nothing more than codified human judgement (yes, I get that for example the conditional expectation minimizes the expected squared error, but who picked the expected squared error to minimize?) The point is, they wish the ranking algorithm to be seen as some divine choice and hence not subject to criticism rather than a mathematical extension of human choices.
So has google put a finger on the scale to rank google properties more highly? Based on their behavior with the results page (vs yelp, for example), I would be surprised if they do, but not very surprised.
Nonetheless, now that google search results are the internet for many people -- and chrome's address bar is used to help blur that distinction -- it's fair that people outside google, represented by governments, start having a say in who shows up and where. That's what happens when you're a monopoly.
It is slightly ironic that bing is the best thing that's happened to google in a decade. Where it not for Balmer deciding to play search engine, google would be known to be a 95+% monopoly in the US as well. Bing allows them to pretend they aren't (though on my blog, for example, 99.28% of ~7k search referral visitors comes from google.)
> It's convenient to think our work is so sophisticated, and that lawmakers are simpletons. But that's a naive view.
I don't think anybody is suggesting they are simpletons. Unfortunately, French lawmakers are fairly tech-illiterate on average (as demonstrated by the recent vote for the mass surveillance law).
That said, I kind of agree with you. Investigating Google is one thing, asking for them to spill their trade secrets is another.
Technologists don't win by fighting in the legal system - the others have centuries of advantages here. If the others call KVN then they need to know that if they answer they better hope they have never used Facebook and that their daughters haven't shared any photos on snap-chat.
What we need is not to be involved in matters of law, but to have a mutual defence treaty that will ensure the law doesn't get to steal and redistribute what we make. France needs Google, but to Google France is just one customer - and they should treat them accordingly.
Unfortunately the generation of politicians that are currently in power are by default tech-illiterate - there will be some who really know what they're talking about, but they will be those people who have needed to actively pick up that information. In general I would not bet on a randomly selected politician being able to describe what a browser is. It's a shame, because well-judged monopolies action is valuable. You can see the potential in the way that the standardization on USB has been nudged and cajoled on tablets, e-reader, phones, and tablets.
Plus those factors and their weightings would be changing on a very regular basis. Then there's also the personalization and localization layers of search. Would each user be able to see the weightings specific to them, or would Google just publish the general algorithm with weightings left unspecified?
Another open question is what degree of disclosure is being requested from Google. Suppose Google just give them the daily dump of weightings and such from the machine learning systems. Does that qualify as disclosure? They may have a hell of a time trying to figure out whether there is any bias in the system using that. They may just refuse to believe how complex the system is, and think that Google is being difficult.
They clearly don't understand the complexity, but just because it's complex doesn't mean it's not biased, and if nobody is allowed to audit it, we will never know.
What does "bias" even mean, in this context? I use Google exactly because I want its bias - the bias towards websites they think are good, and putting answers right in the results page.
So? Why isn't Google allowed to make a biased search algorithm?
And again, you might as well be saying "just because cats are complex doesn't mean they're not biased, and if nobody's allowed to audit them, we will never know". Even Google probably doesn't know the specifics of what their engine has learned.
I'm sorry, but the switch over cost to setting Bing as your home page instead of Google, or using Firefox which defaults to Yahoo, just isn't that much. It's one thing to have a lock on the desktop market where switching over your desktop software (or 10,000 company desktops) is a significant cost.
For users with IE or Firefox they have specifically set the search engine to Google. That means users are actively seeking out Google. Maybe require all French citizens to switch search engines once a year? Make browser vendors randomize the choice of search engine?
I would imagine that people would still use Google, regardless, even if links to Bing, Duck Duck Go and Yahoo were on the page. I like Duck Duck Go, but every once and awhile I go back to Google because they do a better job.
Things I'm more worried about than Google's search hegemony:
1) The fact that new computers may soon be unable to load unsigned kernels
2) You buy a device, like a console, it is illegal for you to root it.
3) Content is locked out region by region, and VPN users are considered pirates.
4) Governments want to incorporate back doors to encryption - leaving all less secure
> 1) The fact that new computers may soon be unable to load unsigned kernels
I am confident in the human race's ability to find an arbitrary code execution vulnerability in all major kernels.
I'm rather more worried by the fact that I'm not confident in the human race's ability to write a major kernel without arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities.
1) Microsoft mandates that PC vendors allow users to disable Secure Boot. In the last rev it's up to the hardware manufacture. Do research before you buy.
2)root is not allowed to be illegal.
3)I've never had this issue but I don't play by the rules.
4)This is two issues a)it will not be less secure it would be the same as having a second key for your front door, or creating a second private key. Just because you have two keys does not mean it's less secure the proof is in the proof (it's math problem). b)government spying/big brother/what have you... I don't know anyone who would like this.
This is a bad analogy (unless you mean to say that this second key would be identical for every door, in which case.. sort of).
A better analogy would be that everyone was forced to install a second entry method to their house that only the government knew how to operate.
The inherent problem with this is that as soon as someone else figures out how to operate it, everything with this entry method installed would be accessible to them until it changes or is fixed.
Totally false. The cost isn't in the action of switching the setting. The cost is in overcoming the effects of Google's marketing, and evaluating re-learning the alternative products.
The cost isn't in the action of switching the setting. The cost is in overcoming the effects of _____ marketing, and evaluating re-learning the alternative products.
So any piece of software ever is a monopoly and should be broken up? First, we are talking about a page with a single text box in the middle and a list of blue links which are displayed after you click Submit. Are you serious? My 6 year old can used a search engine.
Also, exactly what marketing are you speaking of? And how does one "overcome the effects of marketing" anyway? Next we should outlaw the use of google as a verb meaning, 'to search'. Oh, wait, I'm sure the French have already done that.
The funniest thing is this isn't even about Advertisers and AdWords but actually organic search. Boggles the mind...
If France doesn't want its citizens to use Google search, then be straight up and admit that. Why are they playing games and penalizing Google? After all, the people of France prefer it and indeed choose to use it.l, no doubt because it's good at etsy it does. Why on earth would Google reveal its algorithm, it's a vital competative advantage. And why is it illegal for search to be biased. If it's bad then people won't use it. If France wants its citizens to avoid Google, instead of crying about it, it ought to advertise a better solution, or in the extreme case, pass a law barring people from using it. Not all lawyers and politicians are bad, but a lot seem detached from reality and cause serious problems as result of their ignorance.
It doesn't have to be that bad to be uncompetitive. They can steer people towards their properties in a way that won't bother most people, but will do tremendous harm to their competitors.
> And why is it illegal for search to be biased.
It wouldn't be if Google didn't have 95% of the market share. Google got this market share by being better than everyone else no doubt, but at some point you have to admit that's too much power for one company to have.
Right now Google has the power to effectively remove anyone or any company from the internet. So far we've seen no evidence that they've done anything like this, but if history is any indicator, left unchecked the eventually will.
> but at some point you have to admit that's too much power for one company to have
Competition law doesn't punish market power. Punishing success would be insane. The abuse of market power is what is illegal. And abuse needs to be proven.
Yes, Google Maps is the first result if you search for "maps" on Google. Search for "maps" on Bing and the first result is... also Google Maps. So maybe, Google Maps is just the leading mapping service on the Web?
> So far we've seen no evidence that they've done anything like this, but if history is any indicator
So far we've seen no evidence that the defendant has indeed killed anyone, but can we be sure that he hasn't? No, but: In dubio pro reo.
I understand that with so much market share Google has a bigger responsibility to practice good ethics. Which it seems to be doing. No? I'm sure if Google were to actually begin going astray, people would notice websites disappearing. Until clear evidence of this is found, it is unfair to scrutinize them to reveal their competative advantage. In fact doing so suggests malice more than anything. Sure Google may have the power to 'remove' content from the internet, but since when is that justification for accusations of malicious intent? If France was truly benevolent and actually concerned with improving Google equality, threatening a lawsuit is an odd way to address the problem. A good course of action would be to raise the issue with Google in a trustworthy way. Yes, in general, given enough power corruption emerges, but I'm not sure it applies in this case. Power could be wielded without corruption. Large market share does not imply corruption. Perhaps what is ought to be done by Google is to somehow address the issue of transparency without compromising their algorithm. I may be wrong but I feel confident that Google isn't corrupt. However, the people behind this legislation certainly appear to be up to something.
> It wouldn't be if Google didn't have 95% of the market share.
I thought you didn't need a huge market share to be anticompetitive. Apple didn't have a huge market share in ebooks when it colluded with the publishers.
> but at some point you have to admit that's too much power for one company to have.
I don't think we can just get rid of Google or break them up just because we think they're too big. What did they do? Did they do something illegal?
> Right now Google has the power to effectively remove anyone or any company from the internet. So far we've seen no evidence that they've done anything like this, but if history is any indicator, left unchecked the eventually will.
Why would they expose themselves to such scrutiny? What is it that they can do ten years from now that they can't already do? You don't think their market share could get any larger, do you?
It can't possibly be illegal for search to be biased. Search is synonym for bias. Ranking is the definition of bias!
It's like when people claim "discrimination" is illegal, when the definition of discriminating is to recognize a difference or to tell apart. Discrimination is not illegal, discrimination based on a protected class is illegal.
Likewise for anti-trust, what's illegal is if they are abusing their dominant market position in search to suppress competition. Can promoting your own product, in and of itself, be anti-competitive? It seems like stretch. Just like Microsoft installing a browser (an absolutely necessary component of any modern OS) in and of itself is not anti-competitive. I think a company has to go much, much further to warrant this level of scrutiny.
Is Google actively blocking me from accessing superior content? And if they did, what's stopping people from abandoning Google? In the Windows OS case, there literally was no realistic alternative at the time. So people had a gun to their head, and there were APIs which only the IE team could access keeping the competition at bay. Google Search is a very different beast.
I think Google does a fairly good job of keeping the "Chinese Wall" between Search and the other groups. I think the key question is whether they somehow have to open up their meta-search capabilities to third parties. For example, the way the calculator, or word definition lookup, or weather, or airfare search, or even Google+, is now integrated into search, this is a coupling which no 3rd party could ever compete with... I don't know a solution. For now I think we don't need a "solution". I want these features, I use them constantly and appreciate them. If DDG or Bing offered better meta-search / charms I would switch and use them. They are literally a keystroke away, there is nothing stopping anyone from using a competitor. Which I why I tend to think the whole thing is a political farce and a tax on Google's success.
Why is it that so many people misunderstand monopoly/anti-trust? This isn't about search or pagerank, because having a monopoly is generally not illegal. It doesn't matter what the future of the search market might be or the ease in which customers can switch to a different search service. The complaint, according to the article, is:
"...accusation being that it uses this closed code
to promote its own products ahead of rivals.“
Search only matters in how it might be a tool that can be abused to gain influence in other, not-search markets.
Being a monopoly is usually legal. Monopoly status simply means new laws apply relating to how that power is used. Google is patently a search monopoly right now, so France is well within their right to accuse them of abusing that power to take over other markets. Some sort of trial will determine if those charges are true or not.
What is obvious - regardless of the outcome or politics surrounding France's legal action - is that the exact nature of how Google's search algorithms work is the exact evidence needed to properly judge how Google's search service (via the algorithm it relies upon) is unfairly interfering with the markets that Google may also be participating in.
No. Bing is a click away and provides comparable results. A monopoly occurs when the consumer has no choice but the monopolist. That's clearly not the case here.
This is exactly the misunderstanding of antitrust laws that I was talking about. Contrary to popular belief, this is not about how much of the market a given business.
Monopoly starts to be covered by the antitrust acts when "the ability to raise prices above those that would be charged in a competitive market"[1]. Controlling a very large percentage of the market is merely one of the easier ways to demonstrate the existence of that power.
[1] United States v. E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co.
You are forgetting that Google effectively has two groups of "consumers". Ordinary users who use their products, and companies that advertise using Google's products.
Even if ordinary users can switch to Bing the advertisers can't shift so easily as they aren't concerned about accuracy of search results but about the potential market size.
the upper house of parliament yesterday voted to support an amendment to a draft economy bill that would require search engines to display at least three rivals on their homepage
That's just absurd. Can someone acquainted with the situation shed light on why they are doing this? Simple populism and lobbying from local businesses or something else?
Not the answer you're looking for, but French protectionism (agriculture, film, etc.) is consistently stronger than the Western norm in the rest of Europe and the US. In those cases it is to protect domestic interests, which of course comes with its own consequences.
> Can someone acquainted with the situation shed light on why they are doing this?
Hard to explain, even for a french person. That's why I basically want to move ASAP, at least abroad I'll care less about politics.
It tragically funny, there is like 10% unemployment rate in France right now, and instead of trying to give businesses some air, ie less laws and regulations, they keep on coming with ridiculous ones.
I've found that whenever the media or lawmakers get caught up in some absolutely useless bullshit, they're almost always trying to distract from something more important that they can't address (or caused). It seems to hold no matter what country it is.
A bit more absurd. A closer analogy would be if Windows was required to ask you on first startup if you wanted to install Linux (i.e. advertising a competitor to the thing you're using vs. a thing bundled with the thing you're using).
They did it to Microsoft in Windows to do the browser selection, so its a pretty small step in their minds to do it to Google. Its still absurd, but it fits their thinking.
It will potentially be the first time that the effectiveness of the product is impacted by the disclosure. It depends on what the factors are in Google's algorithm, of course, but having to disclose them potentially opens up Google to a whole lot more webspam. If that happened, they would need to fall back more heavily on the "difficult to fake" (eg. reputable links) factors rather than the "everyone can fake" (eg. optimal pattern of keywords on page) factors.
In practice it may negatively impact on the quality of search results, even though in theory their algorithm including more "difficult to fake" factors should result in it being more durable.
Not only this, but I'd think their current, exact ranking algorithm would rank pretty high on their list of important trade secrets to protect.
If a competitor gets ahold of their exact ranking algorithm, that's a huge piece of the formula for building a search engine that is as good as Google Search at finding what someone's looking for.
It is not in Google's interest to flash the true power balance here by cutting off France anyway. They couldn't care less about french revenue, but it would be a global PR disaster, likely resulting in new EU-wide regulations that would then actually hurt Google.
China has 66M google users, while France has 44M. However, if we split HK google users from mainland Google users, it would be pretty clear that Google is toast in China just like Excite in the US.
There are a lot of people in China. Only about half of those use the Internet, and only a small percentage of those want to consume silicon valley internet product. People say excitable stuff about the size of the Chinese market but forget that customes are only customers if they are buying your stuff.
Readit News
1) This is clearly bullshit designed to distract from more pressing issues that the French government can't solve or is unwilling to solve.
2) France's notorious protectionism, while immensely irritating to outsiders, does a reasonable job at preserving French language and culture, and creating a local vacuum for French native solutions. Trade and culture protectionism has a long-history of working quite well in many countries seeking to create national identity and industry when used correctly.
These two riffs will continue to get played, with #2 reinforcing #1 while necessary, to try and encourage native French solutions. France is under tremendous economic and cultural pressure from better performing regional partners like Germany and the U.K., and globally by the U.S., China and Japan (pick whichever you think is better performing in terms of economics and cultural expansion).
It kind of sucks, but it's also why, when you go to France, and even Paris, you know you're in Paris and not yet another cosmopolitan mega-city. It's also part of the reason why French culture and ideas continue to be interesting and exportable.
Much of this of course is France's continued decline as a global power. London, New York and Paris used to be a given global triumvirate. And Paris's membership in the top-3 isn't a given any more. It's now in a mix of second-tier alpha cities with Tokyo, Beijing and Dubai.
Outsiders look at this and say "of course Paris is in decline, this kind of behavior is why". Tighter global integration and more openness seems to be the way to the top and maintaining it. But for French leadership, losing cultural identity is not worth it. What if the world thought La Défense = Paris and the rest of the city was just some curious suburb? Is this [1] something that anybody cares about?
1 - http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2014/067/b/7/skyline_la_de...
I'm also not sure French culture is preserved that well in France. Sir Colin Davis was a better Berlioz interpreter than any French conductor I ever heard (and I was born 50km from la Cote St Andre), and even traditional Haute Cuisine is better abroad (particularly in Tokyo - see Apicius).
On the upside, a castle in Normandie or the South West today [3] costs less than a 1 bedroom in the nicer parts of Sydney. And those mostly empty TGVs where first class can be cheaper than second are nice when you need to get between Paris and Geneva and avoid those awful Parisian airports.
Acemoglu and Robinson [4] describe how the descendants of the world-leading Venetian Republicans now serve ice creams on their ancestors' plazas to today's "Venetians", visiting from Houston or Hong Kong. Sometimes, going home for Christmas feels like that. Luckily, London is only 45 minutes away with EasyJet.
[1] http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ais_%C3%A9tablis_hors...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_France
[3] http://www.patrice-besse.com/ is one of the best sites for castles. http://www.realestate.com.au/ for Sydney prices.
[4] http://www.amazon.com/Why-Nations-Fail-Origins-Prosperity-eb...
Although my favorite is: http://www.patrice-besse.com/chateaux-a-vendre/bourgogne/ven... - for only 3m EUR you get a moat with lifting bridge, gargoyles, and some real towers to shoot your crossbows from. You never know when the peasants might revolt!
You can't drop assertions like that while hoping that being French makes you automatically right about French culture. You have a right to your opinion, but please just don't proclaim them as if they were universal truths.
For Google, it's quite complicated. The problem is that Google is representing more than 90% of all the requests in France (the usage is also the same for most of european countries anyway). So we can technically say that Google is in a monopoly position for search. The problem is that it's hurting local startups and businesses there. The solution would be to break Google into smaller parts (it's what you do normaly when a monopoly is hurting the free market) but since that's impossible due to the fact that Google is an American company, the government is taking some measures to limit Google's influence. This is one of the measures, the second one which is currently being voted would be to force Google to display competitors on the home page (a bit like Microsoft's ballot screen). I guess that given the current context, they have no other option.
Competition, if it were much better, could easily take away search market share. Having better localized results for France could be one of those ways. People aren't using google because they have no other choice, it's because google is genuinely doing a better job. That's not a reason to break up a company.
Having been around London most of my life (51 yrs) I find it hard to think of much culture which has gone. Crappy instant coffee and BT phone boxes which hardly worked spring to mind. Most of the other stuff is there if somewhat modified. I suspect the 'London you see in movies' was a bit fictionalised.
It's not obvious that this is true.
London has an extraordinarily rich, and international culture. You can go to an Ethiopian restaurant where most people barely speak English and see a coffee ceremony, or have chicken gizzards cooked in chorizo in Victoria served by a Portuguese man who arrived last year; you can even live in South Kensington and be fine never speaking a word of English (as many French expats end up doing, kids at CDG etc.). Even looking at so called "native" English culture, a LOT is influenced by the historical openness of the British Empire to foreign land.
Take Earl Grey: the tea is Chinese and the Bergamot Italian. Or the nation's favorite dish: chicken tikka masala, which is Indian fusion. Or look at the upper classes: who is at the top? Is it the Russian oligarchs fighting for penthouses worth tens of millions? The Chinese billionaires expanding into Europe? The rulers of the financial industry which dominates the economy of a country which is 78% services? Or the increasingly irrelevant land owning aristocracy? In France it's much easier: the elite lives in 16eme or Neuilly and will have studied at the same schools. A true self-made man like Xavier Niel is almost a pariah when in Britain he'd get his own TV show and influence IT policy.
A good point of comparison is architecture: aside from la Defense, Paris is frozen in its Haussmanian redrawing, with most of the cities showing identical streets that were innovative in the late 1800s but struggle to cope with the increasing population today. London on the other hand stretches from the futuristic, Manhattan-like Canary Wharf to the preserved City with a sprinkling of amazing towers (including Europe's most talked about recent skyscraper, the Shard), or the various slices in time such as South Kensington's Victorian architecture or even the Barbican, a testimony to the central planning Brutalist rage of the 60s and 70s.
And the reason for that is squarely the free and encouraged economic migration, the fact that London remains the best city to try your luck in Europe (whose citizen can work anywhere they like within the member states).
A larger version of the phenomenon is Silicon Valley: why don't more companies come from other countries? Because as soon as a decent technologist appears there, he is either scouted and asked to move to the Valley (as happened to the CEO of a Cambridge startup after a 26m USD round, allowing me to grab his flat on the cheap) or he will move there to take advantage of a friendlier environment and the best ecosystem in the world (culture, people, funding, legal framework...). Of course, you hear the same grumbling about the disappearing culture of the "old" San Francisco, even though the city is barely over a century old and has gone through many more booms and busts...
What makes this a problem?
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Furthermore, after the NewInvSqPR is retrieved, if that indeed ever does take place, the resulting data is placed into a field in a ranking output message, but it is unclear from where that field is read. On page 6766 of Exhibit E, the field appears to be cleared, but the surrounding functionality looks like it is disabled by a flag. Can you explain to this chamber the meaning of this information, specifically with regards to ranking of Google properties relative to competing vertical search websites?"
LARRY PAGE: "..."
They should go back to working on their own "Google killer" search engine :) http://www.infoworld.com/article/2672709/operating-systems/e...
They want the algorithm disclosed as a legal matter to determine whether competitors are disadvantaged. Which probably means they are more interested in email than source code. There exist hyperintelligent lawyers. Yes, smart enough to understand search. A law firm like Keker and Van Nest [1] could go in there and answer the question. France could be willing to spend a billion to find out, and that's more than they need.
Legislation of technology is frightening to any technologist. But it's much more dangerous if we dismiss the process as ridiculous and refuse to recognize any underlying concerns. Because then technologists won't have any say in the outcome.
[1] http://www.kvn.com/
EDIT: Paul you're such a prominent guy, I don't mean to speak too strongly, but people really listen to what you say. Entrepreneurs ought to know that legal matters are not so easily dismissed. I do hope, generously speaking, the startups are the ones that call KVN and not the legislators.
So has google put a finger on the scale to rank google properties more highly? Based on their behavior with the results page (vs yelp, for example), I would be surprised if they do, but not very surprised.
Nonetheless, now that google search results are the internet for many people -- and chrome's address bar is used to help blur that distinction -- it's fair that people outside google, represented by governments, start having a say in who shows up and where. That's what happens when you're a monopoly.
It is slightly ironic that bing is the best thing that's happened to google in a decade. Where it not for Balmer deciding to play search engine, google would be known to be a 95+% monopoly in the US as well. Bing allows them to pretend they aren't (though on my blog, for example, 99.28% of ~7k search referral visitors comes from google.)
The other has to use force. That's all they know how to use. Its their solution to every problem.
I don't think anybody is suggesting they are simpletons. Unfortunately, French lawmakers are fairly tech-illiterate on average (as demonstrated by the recent vote for the mass surveillance law).
That said, I kind of agree with you. Investigating Google is one thing, asking for them to spill their trade secrets is another.
What we need is not to be involved in matters of law, but to have a mutual defence treaty that will ensure the law doesn't get to steal and redistribute what we make. France needs Google, but to Google France is just one customer - and they should treat them accordingly.
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Another open question is what degree of disclosure is being requested from Google. Suppose Google just give them the daily dump of weightings and such from the machine learning systems. Does that qualify as disclosure? They may have a hell of a time trying to figure out whether there is any bias in the system using that. They may just refuse to believe how complex the system is, and think that Google is being difficult.
Furthermore they already published their search engine algorithm: http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html
And again, you might as well be saying "just because cats are complex doesn't mean they're not biased, and if nobody's allowed to audit them, we will never know". Even Google probably doesn't know the specifics of what their engine has learned.
For users with IE or Firefox they have specifically set the search engine to Google. That means users are actively seeking out Google. Maybe require all French citizens to switch search engines once a year? Make browser vendors randomize the choice of search engine?
I would imagine that people would still use Google, regardless, even if links to Bing, Duck Duck Go and Yahoo were on the page. I like Duck Duck Go, but every once and awhile I go back to Google because they do a better job.
Things I'm more worried about than Google's search hegemony:
1) The fact that new computers may soon be unable to load unsigned kernels
2) You buy a device, like a console, it is illegal for you to root it.
3) Content is locked out region by region, and VPN users are considered pirates.
4) Governments want to incorporate back doors to encryption - leaving all less secure
I am confident in the human race's ability to find an arbitrary code execution vulnerability in all major kernels.
I'm rather more worried by the fact that I'm not confident in the human race's ability to write a major kernel without arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities.
This is a bad analogy (unless you mean to say that this second key would be identical for every door, in which case.. sort of).
A better analogy would be that everyone was forced to install a second entry method to their house that only the government knew how to operate.
The inherent problem with this is that as soon as someone else figures out how to operate it, everything with this entry method installed would be accessible to them until it changes or is fixed.
Not in Windows 10 anymore. And while we're talking, Microsoft has always mandated that Arm vendors disallow it - in other words, mandated a lockdown.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/window...
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So any piece of software ever is a monopoly and should be broken up? First, we are talking about a page with a single text box in the middle and a list of blue links which are displayed after you click Submit. Are you serious? My 6 year old can used a search engine.
Also, exactly what marketing are you speaking of? And how does one "overcome the effects of marketing" anyway? Next we should outlaw the use of google as a verb meaning, 'to search'. Oh, wait, I'm sure the French have already done that.
The funniest thing is this isn't even about Advertisers and AdWords but actually organic search. Boggles the mind...
It doesn't have to be that bad to be uncompetitive. They can steer people towards their properties in a way that won't bother most people, but will do tremendous harm to their competitors.
> And why is it illegal for search to be biased.
It wouldn't be if Google didn't have 95% of the market share. Google got this market share by being better than everyone else no doubt, but at some point you have to admit that's too much power for one company to have.
Right now Google has the power to effectively remove anyone or any company from the internet. So far we've seen no evidence that they've done anything like this, but if history is any indicator, left unchecked the eventually will.
Competition law doesn't punish market power. Punishing success would be insane. The abuse of market power is what is illegal. And abuse needs to be proven.
Yes, Google Maps is the first result if you search for "maps" on Google. Search for "maps" on Bing and the first result is... also Google Maps. So maybe, Google Maps is just the leading mapping service on the Web?
> So far we've seen no evidence that they've done anything like this, but if history is any indicator
So far we've seen no evidence that the defendant has indeed killed anyone, but can we be sure that he hasn't? No, but: In dubio pro reo.
I thought you didn't need a huge market share to be anticompetitive. Apple didn't have a huge market share in ebooks when it colluded with the publishers.
> but at some point you have to admit that's too much power for one company to have.
I don't think we can just get rid of Google or break them up just because we think they're too big. What did they do? Did they do something illegal?
> Right now Google has the power to effectively remove anyone or any company from the internet. So far we've seen no evidence that they've done anything like this, but if history is any indicator, left unchecked the eventually will.
Why would they expose themselves to such scrutiny? What is it that they can do ten years from now that they can't already do? You don't think their market share could get any larger, do you?
It's like when people claim "discrimination" is illegal, when the definition of discriminating is to recognize a difference or to tell apart. Discrimination is not illegal, discrimination based on a protected class is illegal.
Likewise for anti-trust, what's illegal is if they are abusing their dominant market position in search to suppress competition. Can promoting your own product, in and of itself, be anti-competitive? It seems like stretch. Just like Microsoft installing a browser (an absolutely necessary component of any modern OS) in and of itself is not anti-competitive. I think a company has to go much, much further to warrant this level of scrutiny.
Is Google actively blocking me from accessing superior content? And if they did, what's stopping people from abandoning Google? In the Windows OS case, there literally was no realistic alternative at the time. So people had a gun to their head, and there were APIs which only the IE team could access keeping the competition at bay. Google Search is a very different beast.
I think Google does a fairly good job of keeping the "Chinese Wall" between Search and the other groups. I think the key question is whether they somehow have to open up their meta-search capabilities to third parties. For example, the way the calculator, or word definition lookup, or weather, or airfare search, or even Google+, is now integrated into search, this is a coupling which no 3rd party could ever compete with... I don't know a solution. For now I think we don't need a "solution". I want these features, I use them constantly and appreciate them. If DDG or Bing offered better meta-search / charms I would switch and use them. They are literally a keystroke away, there is nothing stopping anyone from using a competitor. Which I why I tend to think the whole thing is a political farce and a tax on Google's success.
Being a monopoly is usually legal. Monopoly status simply means new laws apply relating to how that power is used. Google is patently a search monopoly right now, so France is well within their right to accuse them of abusing that power to take over other markets. Some sort of trial will determine if those charges are true or not.
What is obvious - regardless of the outcome or politics surrounding France's legal action - is that the exact nature of how Google's search algorithms work is the exact evidence needed to properly judge how Google's search service (via the algorithm it relies upon) is unfairly interfering with the markets that Google may also be participating in.
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No. Bing is a click away and provides comparable results. A monopoly occurs when the consumer has no choice but the monopolist. That's clearly not the case here.
Monopoly starts to be covered by the antitrust acts when "the ability to raise prices above those that would be charged in a competitive market"[1]. Controlling a very large percentage of the market is merely one of the easier ways to demonstrate the existence of that power.
[1] United States v. E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co.
Even if ordinary users can switch to Bing the advertisers can't shift so easily as they aren't concerned about accuracy of search results but about the potential market size.
That's just absurd. Can someone acquainted with the situation shed light on why they are doing this? Simple populism and lobbying from local businesses or something else?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/technology/microsoft-once-...
Microsoft is the puppet-master in all of this, it seems.
Hard to explain, even for a french person. That's why I basically want to move ASAP, at least abroad I'll care less about politics.
It tragically funny, there is like 10% unemployment rate in France right now, and instead of trying to give businesses some air, ie less laws and regulations, they keep on coming with ridiculous ones.
Apple 2015 http://qz.com/332059/apple-is-reportedly-giving-the-chinese-...
Microsoft 2003 http://news.cnet.com/China-to-view-Windows-code/2100-1007_3-...
In practice it may negatively impact on the quality of search results, even though in theory their algorithm including more "difficult to fake" factors should result in it being more durable.
If a competitor gets ahold of their exact ranking algorithm, that's a huge piece of the formula for building a search engine that is as good as Google Search at finding what someone's looking for.
If it's not public, then this problem doesn't exist.