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Originally Posted by HarryT
It seems pretty reasonable to me that Google shouldn't be permitted to give favourable ranking to its own commercial enterprises in its search engine, given its dominance of the market.
A good parallel would be the situation with British Telecom (BT) in the UK. BT own the phone network, and sell capacity on their IP network to ISPs, but are themselves also a large ISP. They are not permitted to give their own ISP commercial terms that are more favourable than those they offer to other ISPs.
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That's a legitimate issue, but Google has been discussing it with the EU for some time, and that was going to be part of a settlement agreement (more than one I believe). If that's the only motivation behind this new push to breakup Google, it seems like using a sledgehammer where a scalpel would do.
I can't believe that's the only reason for wanting to breakup Google, but I haven't read anywhere that lists any particular benefits to that action.
As an interesting aside, at least one court in the U.S. has said that a state government can't make Google change its search results, and that those search results are a form of free speech. Obviously that's not particularly relevant to the EU, but it is interesting how different regions balance privacy, free speech and government control.