and the EU is a conglomeration of thugs who makes a lot of their money by suing big companies for free money.
If I had a dollar for everytime someone posts these 100% predicatable pieces of hogwash, I'd put Warren Buffet to shame.
The EU is so crazy corporation-friendly, claiming they're in any way treating corporations badly is like saying the oceans are evil bastards because they're trying to drown all the fish.
What you are referring to while calling it "barrier to entry" is actually "barrier to becoming the top player".
You failed telepathy class, I assume?
No, I meant barrier to entry. You may think that if you put up a website on a free webhosting site that returns results from that MySQL database your single-threaded Perl crawler is filling, you've somehow entered the search market, but I'm pretty sure everyone who's stopped laughing will explain that's not what entering a market means.
You've not entered the furniture megastore market either when you're selling your old sofa on ebay, you know?
it can just be recovered from atmosphere
Most of it escapes into space. It's gone. You can make some more by fusing hydrogen atoms.
What part of this is not true? The EU is operating like a socialist federation these days: they shove EU laws (up to and including a constitution) through their member states' throat and enforce them
You have no idea how EU politics works.
What's being "shoved down member states throats" are almost all laws that the national politicians wanted, but couldn't get through locally because of popular resistance and the media eating them alive. So they push it up to the EU, it comes back a few year later, thanks to short public memory they now claim they have no choice, it's an EU mandate, and they get the laws they wanted.
They should go and re-read their history books and remember how close all of Europe was to speaking either German or Russian.
Funny historic fact: The USA was one vote away from speaking German.
What is happening here is that a bunch of politicians are interfering in the legitimate business of a private enterprise.
Without this naster "interference", those private enterprises wouldn't exist. The government provides the stability, regulation and occasional enforcement of the rules that enables the business world to function at all. Without contract law and courts, do you really think the stock market, stock ownership of corporations and the whole investment sector would exist?
Funny how one kind of "interference" is taken for granted, as long as it benefits you, but as soon as you don't like it, it's evil nasty mafia-style badness.
Not as a result of violating any laws
It's called anti-trust, and yes there are laws about it.
Yugoslavia was no threat to EU, ever. It was a civil war, and within Europe many people consider it a mistake to become involved.
As for Putin - you can think what you want, he's never expressed any desires to expand into Europe. That he got nervous about Ukraine - well, after Kuba you americans shouldn't be talking. What would you do if there was a revolution in Mexico or Canada and the new government is strongly pro-Russia with open, direct and very vocal russian support? Or chinese. Or both. You'd sit on your asses and say "let the people decide", yes?
The EU uses a mafia style shakedown program
Get some help for your paranoia issues.
The EU has become so fucking corporation friendly over the past two decades, we have rising poverty in all developed EU countries, falling real wages, unemployment, high percentages of temporary employment and are busy destroying the middle class that kept Europe stable for six decades. All in the name of protecting banksters and corporate profits, who are breaking records yearly.
Accusing the EU of shaking down corporations is orwellian.
There is no barrier to entry other than excellence in search.
Your entire argument is based on a false assumption. It's like saying that there's no barrier to entry in the space mining business other than excellence in technology.
"Excellence in search" is not very easy, and given the Internets size requires a massive infrastructure by itself. In addition, you can have the best search engine in the world, as long as nobody knows about it, it's worthless. And since a large percentage of Internet users are only dimly aware that they're using a search engine when they type some words into the address bar, it's not as easy as you assume it to be.
All regulations will do in a situation like this is break the functioning market.
You missed the main part, I figure. Nobody is trying to break up the search market. Anti-trust is all about preventing a dominant player in one market from leveraging its dominance to become a dominant player in other markets where it would not prevail on merits alone.
The search market, for all this regulation, would be unchanged.
European regulations should be focusing on the edges of the market where Google is trying to manipulate things, such as forcing them to randomize product listing instead of always listing their own first.
Great idea!
Oh, wait...
That's exactly what they're thinking about.
Tell me, do you really believe it is the anti-trust department that decides upon sanctions? If not, why bring up this strawman when my argument was that this department, at least is working nicely? I didn't say other parts of the EU do.
Old programmers never die, they just hit account block limit.
