The European Parliament has voted in favour of breaking Google up, as a solution to complaints that it favours is own services in search results.
Politicians have no power to enforce a break-up, but the landmark vote sends a clear message to European regulators to get tough on the net giant.
I’m glad they’re keeping a close watch on these powerful companies, but a break-up?
Good luck with that.
It would make sense, though.
It would be even better -this time at the complete opposite of the EU’s stance so far- to push Google Search towards even greater neutrality in the results: no filtering (or the option to disable them) for copyrigth holders and whatnot, no “right to be forgotten” (which as it is, is a “right to be deindexed at will from only one search engine”), no filter bubble, etc.
A search engine should be treated as a public service (I am not asking for it to be privatized, but to be culturally oriented towards service rather than ROI), a tool, nothing else.
Edited 2014-11-27 15:54 UTC
What? Breaking up Google would lead to none of those things.
A large cash cow makes the rest of the company unfocused and ineffective.
Sure Android Lollipop, Glass, + and stuffs have popped out in 2004.
What do you mean ?
At least 90% on what Google makes money on is advertising.
A number I found online says in 2011 96% of their revenue came from advertising.
Google is a multi-headed monster of course.
But search is only generates a portion of that.
They have 33% of the online adveritising market on websites. That is other websites then their own.
So I would think search isn’t their biggest cash cow.
You’d be wrong. Revenue from advertising on Google sites (primarily the search engine) is two to three times more than that from advertising on non-Google sites.
https://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html
Edited 2014-11-27 18:45 UTC
Ahh, so the privileged position of only allowing companies to advertise through Google on Google sites is preventing the prices to go down like on other sites.
Huh? No. Don’t have any idea how you got to that conclusion, what it means to you, how it’s relevant, or what it is supposed to mean to me. Just no.
Instead of just making up stuff you want to think about Google, maybe you should use Google to google Google for 10 minutes to get a better understanding of their financials and what their business is.
Edited 2014-11-27 20:06 UTC
Sorry wrong form.
I should have written it in a question. That was my intention.
Okay… again, not sure why you are spouting off or not doing research for yourself but let’s give a little lesson:
95% of Google’s revenue is from online advertising. About 70% is from Google sites (what Google refers to as the Search Network — this includes YouTube, Maps, Shopping, and other search engines powered by Google), about 25% is from other sites (what Google refers to as the Display Network — this actually includes some Google properties where there is not a strong tie between search, the content, and the effectiveness of the ad). These two separate sources cannot be separated as far as their connection to the primary business of search since even ads on non-Google properties are dependent on Google’s indexing and ranking of keywords. Claiming Google is diversified away from search because of ads on non-Google properties is nonsense (even if it did actually make up a larger share of their revenue) because that non-Google advertising is 100% dependent on the core business of search/indexing.
Ad rates are being depressed across both categories. The disparity in revenue is not a result of competition or lack of competition; it’s primarily a result of the effectiveness and increased targeting. Ad rates are determined by their effectiveness: an ad to buy something on a search result or shopping page is orders of magnitude more effective than the umpteenth display ad on random x site of millions.
Additionally, online ads can be sold several different ways: Google uses CPM (Cost Per impression — the cheapest but hard to measure effectiveness but good for brand advertising), CPC (Cost Per Click — the most common, more effective, more trackable than CPM), and CPA (Cost Per Acquisition — costs are tied to an additional action beyond clicking like a download or purchase — the most effective and trackable but not the most common yet because of programmatic needs to be tied into Google’s API). CPM is the cheapest and its not available on the Search Network; CPM ads can only be purchased for the Display Network. CPC and CPA ads can be placed on the Display Network but since their effectiveness is orders of magnitude less, Display Network ads are more heavily weighted to the cheapest CPM rates. Thus, it is no surprise that the lion share of ad revenue is from Google properties and it has very little to do with competition or monopolization.
I can go into a lot more detail if necessary, but I really would hope that you could do some of this basic research yourself. Do you really not know these things about Google but spout off as if you do? Sad.
The entire point is: No, Google is not the multi-headed monster you think it is — yes, they have gotten into 100s of businesses and sunk billions into innumerable industries, but they are 95% an online advertising/search/indexing company — and, no, online advertising on Google properties is absolutely their primary source of revenue, and even if that were not the case, it is completely illogical to separate ads on non-Google properties from other online advertising as if it were a separate business because it is wholly dependent on the core business of indexing web pages.
Edited 2014-11-27 21:08 UTC
There are 2 reasons I didn’t do my own research, I wasn’t really sure how to get this information.
And to be honest I’m still kind of busy trying to get some work done as well. 😉
You are right, the cheapest is CPM. Most of the others sites is probably just CPM. It’s probably a large number, but less revenue. Forgot about that angle.
Thanks.
No probablies about it whatsoever. And very sad that you don’t know how to google “Google revenue”.
I was just really pessimistic about finding recent and relevant numbers broken down in segments.
Maybe it is just me, but lately it seems like every time I search for business-related information the available information has a really bad signal to noise. Or at times I’m running into stupid paywalls.
But seems these general information about Google is available when I look at bit deeper. Happily surprised.
The first result for “Google revenue” on Google is the current financial statement for Google from Google’s investor site — Google’s reporting is rather opaque but they specifically detail Google vs. non-Google sites. Takes about 20 seconds to discover exactly what you want directly from the source. No need for a “deeper” search. You really suck at search.
Edited 2014-11-27 22:32 UTC
Well, normally I’m ok with search.
If you want to know:
English just isn’t my primary language and I know nothing about finance or business.
I’ve also been doing far to much work the past weeks and today I told work I’m not going to work today because I’m to tired.
The days when a government had the power to break up a corporation (other than a utility company or some other company granted monopoly protections by the government) has long since passed. You work for the corporations, not the other way around. Funny when politicians forget their place as figure heads pretending that capitalism didn’t defeat democracy long ago.
Considering how incredibly unhealthy and destructive that situation would be I’m kinda glad they forgot their place.
The politicians (government) are supposed to work for the people. Instead we have Corporatocracies.
If you take the corporations out of the picture then I think capitalism would work more as it was intended. Capitalism is also a form of democracy in that the market decides who succeeds. Am I wrong?
You built a successful company, so successful that everyone really wants to use it. And what do the Europeans do? They want to punish you for it!
No wonder you can’t built companies like Google/Facebook/LinkedIn/Amazon etc in Europe.
Edited 2014-11-27 19:09 UTC
Agreed. It’s exactly this type of arrogance from European leaders that makes most businesses stay far away from investing there.
While I agree with you to some extent. I really think we must prevent corporations from getting more powerful than a government.
Seven of the top 20 largest companies are European.
In other words, you’re talking nonsense.
I count 6: 3 oil and gas companies, 2 commodities traders, and an automotive company, all largely relics from the imperial era.
Not actually a persuasive argument that Europe is a hot bed of technological innovation; in fact, floating that data point as evidence of such is what is complete nonsense.
Edited 2014-11-27 21:32 UTC
But we’re still cool
Agreed. The amount of wealth that has been generated in Silicon Valley is astonishing to say the least. The European continent has largely been left out. I have a hard time thinking of any European tech start ups, outside of a couple of British ones, that have found similar levels of success as their American counterparts.
Punishing foreign companies for their success is a step in the wrong direction. A better strategy is to make European startups more competitive. Perhaps loosening their archaic labor laws would be a good start.
No the Americans are just far better at chutzpah, hype and BS.
Nearly every major German company has a PhD (engineering or science) qualified CEO or Chairman. The average American ‘technology’ company is actually a slick marketing operation led by an MBA.
Volvo and Mercedes driverless cars are far more advanced than anything the Google has created. The BMW i8 is much more advanced than the Tesla. Airbus makes more advanced planes than Boeing (The biggest selling Boeing is the 737 which has it’s origins in the mid 1950s.) However you’d never know these things from reading any English language publication.
Google, Apple, Uber, Facebook etc are primarily advertising companies that dabble in technology.
I know all of those things and none of those things make me think Europe is a hotbed for technological innovation.
Here’s the Silicon Valley ‘innovation’:
Ebay – newspaper classified advertisements
Facebook – high school yearbook
Google – another search engine
Uber – taxi booking app
Twitter – inane messages in 160 characters or less
However designing composite aircraft that require thousands of major new engineering innovations is not high technology according to you.
Large companies is not a persuasive argument for technical innovation anyway. In fact, it’s probably the opposite. Technical innovation rarely, if ever, happen in large corporations but much more commonly in small, agile ones.
I suggest you check out two things:
1. Date when founded.
2. Do they have deep government ties?
For clarity:
4. Royal Dutch Shell – oil and gas – founded in 1890
6. BP – oil and gas – founded in 1909
9. Vitol – commodities/energy – founded in 1966
10. Volkswagon Group – automotive – founded in 1937
11. Total – commodities/energy – founded in 1924
13. Glencore XStrata – commodities/energy – founded in 1974
20. E.ON – energy utility – founded in 2000 (as a result of mergers, basically Germany’s utility company)
I do have to apologize — there are seven, I had accidentally skipped Glencore XStrata.
Nearly 500 years (498 to be exact but it could easily be more if E.ON was counted differently) between 7 companies, average age — more than 71 years old each. All can be categorized as Imperial, privatized utility, government-subsidized, or Old World conglomerate.
Yeah, nonsense.
Edited 2014-11-27 22:11 UTC
Americans create a phone app to perform some mundane task call. They call it a high tech company and viola it is suddenly a $20billion company (with little revenue and no profits.)
You’re avoiding the point. Did I say every American startup is a brilliant tech innovation that deserves major capitalization through venture founding? No. I said there is no way in hell the 7 of the top 20 largest companies in Europe can be characterized as tech innovators.
You have no idea what you are talking about. If you think that analysing petabytes of geophysical data to find an oil reservoir and drilling a 10,000m deep well using an offshore platform is not high tech you’re an idiot.
Oil and gas exploration is probably the most high tech industry on the planet. The oil industry is largely responsible for the development of supercomputers. They have created some of the most complicated software ever written. They pioneered many advanced techniques in mathematics and statistics used to analyse massive data sets.
Why would you want companies like Facebook, LinkedIn and Amazon? I mean Amazon is a terrific place to shop, but so are so many other web sites, all without the unfair competitive practices, most of them with far better working conditions. Facebook offers nothing but consolidation and lock-in, and LinkedIn is a major source of spam.
Google is a better example of the great things that can come from unbridled capitalism, as both their spookiness and their coolness as a tech company come from the possibilities presented by unlimited access to data.
I suggest you look into Glencore Xstrata and Marc Rich particularly and then just about any of the other companies I’ve listed above.
If you think Amazon, FB, or LinkedIn are unfair, anticompetitive, provide poor working conditions, offering nothing but consolidation and lock-in, and/or source spam… well, the words I would use for the leading European companies would be: Imperial exploitation, cronyism, profiteering, government-sanctioned monopolies, government corruption, military-industrial complex, traitorous, non-democratic, tax evasion, massive environmental pollution, and/or human rights violators… and so on.
Modern privacy, government surveillance, etc. are significant issues but some of your criticism of the leading Silicon Valley tech companies is pretty trivial, 21st-century “white people problems”  — relative to past and continued wrongs by non-American and American concerns alike.
American “unbridled capitalism” doesn’t have a monopoly on the negative — plenty of European concerns with non-free market roots and heavy government regulation have exhibited “unbridled” exploitation and other, general negative side-effects. And it’s not as if they haven’t pursued, continue to pursue, and will go to every effort to continue to pursue economic gain — even if we were to admit it as an importation of the evil American free capitalism, which is silly btw.
Edited 2014-11-27 23:43 UTC
I suspect the reason those old European companies get away with it and US companies like Google don’t is that the US based corporations haven’t bought enough European politicians yet.
A nice good threat is always good for bribes.
Look at Microsoft’s political spending after the anti-trust thing. It went WAY up. And no more noises about punishing Microsoft now that the politicians are getting paid off properly.
I wasn’t suggesting that old European companies get away with something and that new American tech companies don’t. Nor that America is free of its old world companies either.
I’m suggesting that old European companies have their own ills — most were present at or were the beneficiaries of backroom deals with the military-industrial-government complex at a time when they could carve up the world according to outmoded but still-in power ideologies. There are real issues with modern tech companies as well but at least these companies came up in a new time with new rules with little help besides venture capital and ingenuity… and some of the mentioned ills are really petty, modern annoyances.
And, relatively speaking, Europe is almost entirely devoid of any new, innovative, technology companies creating new economic growth.
Edited 2014-11-28 04:22 UTC
What illicit substances are you on?
Silicon Valley is a creation of the military-industrial complex. It is a direct result of military funded research at Stanford. This resulted in spinoff tech companies like HP. The aggregation of electronics and software expertise led to the current situation.
In-Q-Tel(the venture capital arm of the CIA) is responsible for funding hundreds of American tech startups including Facebook and Keyhole (Google Earth). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel
If you define technology by the monetary value of individual companies than the US comes out ahead. However many of the large US ‘tech’ companies are actually massive marketing operations that produce few innovations (IBM being a notable exception).
However the US lags way behind Europe, Japan and South Korea in many aspects of advanced manufacturing technology (which is often far more complex than writing software).
The Europeans have many small
It doesn’t have anything to do with bribes. All nation states throughout history have supported their own businesses abroad, and to a certain degree protected them from competition at home. It’s what governments do.
Two words: Amazon Prime.
I agree.
I was making enough book purchases to make Prime worthwhile. And after I was spending money on Prime it only makes sense to buy more and different things also on Amazon to take advantage of the free shipping.
It was a good move on Amazon’s part.
Never mind Mr. De Boer, he seems to be on of those people who’s looking forward to a Syndicate-esque world.
Yeah, there are no big companies in Europe at all. Nope. No Volvo Group or Ikea or Ericson or Siemens or Eletrolux or Phillips or Thomson or anything. Nope.
Yeah, what was said was there are no big companies in Europe and you schooled him by stating what is obvious and not being contended. Nope.
Edited 2014-11-28 05:01 UTC
So…giving examples of large, global European companies does not provide a counter-point to “there are no big companies in Europe”? Alrighty then…
That’s fine, we have many smaller companies instead of a few very large monopolistic corporations.
This ensures us no big coporation becomes too powerfull and that competition actually works.
Now, let’s compare EU’s GDP to US’s GDP.
The EU composed of 28 member states and 500 million people has a GDP of 16.584 trillion US dollars. The USA, 1 nation, with a population of 316 million people has a GDP of 16.8 trillion US dollars. What was your point?
The US is technically bankrupt. The US has liabilities (USD89.5 TRILLION) greater than the net household wealth (82 TRILLION) of the American people.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-08-04/us-bankrupt-blasts-biderma…
If I am not wrong antitrust is a american invention and many succesfull american companies were broken up (e.g. AT&T)
American are also actively discussing how to break the Internet (ever eard about network neutrality)
We may argue about MPs “stupidity” but I would not restrict this only to europeans…
…it sure would be a shame if something bad were to happen to it.”
I guess the EU must have exceeded their annual withdrawal limit from the Microsoft ATM. So which EU country has run its economy into the ground & is in need of an infusion of protection money-cum-bailout THIS time?
Well, not everyone can overthrow democratically elected governments and install their own puppet ones to further their business interests.