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Innovation leads and regulations continue. Still, efforts to curb the UK’s competitive watchdog Google have come out by Country Miles. There is a potential risk to the advantage of search giants, including large language models such as Open AI, but SlowCoach rules creation is not one of them.
The Competition and Markets Bureau, which listed a series of possible measures against Google on Tuesday, is in familiar territory. The EU, Japan and Australia all impose a variety of restrictions. In the US, the Justice Department has long accused them of monopolizing the digital advertising market.
The CMA case is that Google’s search control (more than 90% of both traffic and ad revenue can withdraw more money from UK advertisers.
It’s true, but otherwise it’s rare. Outsized market share is characterized by its dependence on scale, network effects, data access and computing power. This is a category that also includes social networking and artificial intelligence chatbots. Even in China, an intuitively competitive search market, dominant Baidu hosts more than half of its traffic.
If the CMA chooses to award Google’s strategic market status labels when the probe ends in October, you will need to decide which curbs will bring. Some of the initial suggestions that CMA implements immediately after a specification are wise and easy to implement.
These include making choices rather than Google, your company’s web browser’s defaults, and making sure it is caused by publisher content. More Tricky and More Time: Provides enough transparency for things that aren’t paid in Google rankings and search results.
Further provisions will require further consultation. And the discussion is intense and takes time. Users like convenience, but companies have other concerns. Angry retailer Anne Summers, who turns off the safe search filter, leaves her “basic everyday” lace underwear invisible.
Search engine rules can distort from one set to another without necessarily benefiting consumers. Aggregators like Skyscanner benefited after the EU’s digital market law eliminated Google Flights. However, airline harrumph has seen clicks on free direct bookings fall by 30%. EasyJet even blames this on a slow flight.
Of course, these rules aren’t fun for Google either. Compliance is not only about hiring shallows of lawyers, but also about having many engineers to coordinate products for the global lattice work of rules and regulations.
But if it’s the cost of being a monolith, the benefits still win. Big technology like Big Pharma is always caught up in wrestling matches with sovereigns. Google’s blessing is that, at least in the UK, there’s a balance of strength on its side.
louise.lucas@ft.com
