Quote:
Originally Posted by CleverClothe
Would you like to explain to the audience why you think you know more than all these guys? |
She doesn't. The NY Times article that is currently the second result in that search makes it relatively clear what is going on: There are several antitrust complaints against Google (the NYT article says they're related, but I don't really see how, since they're all about different things):
- one from the newspaper and magazine publishers for Google using snippets of their articles in displaying the search results, which
might be going beyond fair use (which I would guess is where the complaint is coming from),
- another from Ciao, which looks more like a contract dispute, frankly,
- a third one from that mapping company, which is probably about Google having earned so much money from their ad business that they can afford to cross-subsidize their other services, thus offering them for free when other, smaller companies offering competing services can't afford to do so. Again, the issue here probably isn't directly that Google is offering stuff for free, but that it is cross-subsidizing it, which, depending on what the anti-trust laws look like, may or may not be illegal. I know for a fact that some forms of cross-subsidizing are illegal in Germany, for example, so they might actually have a leg to stand on. But IANAL and all that.