Yes - and this was based on the assumption that EU commission conclusions were valid. Seeing how they were valid in the past (in e.g. the Microsoft case), it's a reasonable assumption. If not, then that's what we should be discussing.

Note that the guy to whom I initially replied didn't dispute that at all, he just said that they should be able to do whatever the hell they want because it's their product. That was the point I was addressing.

I'm not saying that what they're doing is wrong. I'm saying that, if EU commission findings are correct, then regulating them is the proper course of action (as opposed to "free market will just sort it out").

The consumers are harmed because they end up with fewer choices to pick out of than are actually there. Worse yet, they may not even be aware that the choices they know are not all that is there.

It's truly a horrible sight. The screams of young company branches as they are separated from their parents, the lifeless carcasses of the slaughtered companies as their stock price slowly dribbles down to the ground...

I don't know, you'll have to ask the EU commission about that. TFA says that they have found "potential bias in Google’s search results, ..., agreements with advertisers that may exclude rival search-advertising services, and contracts that limit marketers from using other platforms". I assume the details are in their report.

It doesn't matter how easy it is or not if people aren't doing it, and Google is taking advantage of that. You can achieve a position of market dominance entirely by fair means - by being better than all your competitors - but once you do that, regardless of how it happens, you have to play by some special rules to prevent that dominance from infringing on freedom of competition in other areas.

No, but Google needs to be forced to not abuse its position of dominance.

That's exactly what Microsoft was fined originally in the first place.

Who said anything about search engines? But if, say, they score Google Play higher than iTunes Store and Amazon when searching for MP3s...

(Note, I'm not saying that they do. I'm not familiar with the details of the case. Going by the /. summary of it, though, apparently the EU commission did find something like that.)

On mobile phone markets, definitely not - last I checked Android was dominant there.

I can't say about the digital music market - if I had to guess, Apple is probably #1 there with iTunes, but not to the extent where they can control it.

You can if they are shown to have abused their dominance position, e.g. by using tie-in to promote their other products, or by excluding their competitors. It doesn't really matter how they've gotten into that position in the first place, the damage is the same.

The bigger problem is not for people who use the engine to find things, it's for owners of things to be found. When a single search engine has 90% of all traffic, whether your business shows up in its search results or not, and if it does, then how high relative to its competitors, can easily become the single biggest determinant of your success. If such placement is not fair (whatever that means), there is an issue.

You sound like a laissez-faire unregulated market proponent, so let me put it this way. Such markets, presumably, work fine when all actors are rational and base their decisions on facts. When a single company becomes in charge of delivering those facts, to the extent that most people implicitly trust them, it becomes trivial for it to skew the market by selectively withholding facts or downplaying their relevance.

I assume it's because Apple isn't in a monopoly or market-dominant position.

Your problem is that you're talking in terms of national identity to begin with. The moment you say something like "what Turks are" - painting the entire people with the same brush - you discredit yourself as an unabashed nationalist.

BTW, you do know that Greek army also practiced ethnic cleansing during e.g. the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-20? Names like Gemlik-Yalova, Manisa, Alasehir ring a bell?

Where do you see "their version of LLVM" here anywhere?

I think that "by their proprietary compiler", he was referring to the JIT compiler.

The nice thing about LINQ is that it covers more ground than just basic map/filter/reduce; notably, joins - which makes it possible to actually reasonably translate expression trees to SQL and such. And joins are a pain in the ass to write using raw lambdas, the sugar is very welcome there.

Deep nested queries are also often convenient with sugar, because it has "let" for temporary values.

I don't know if there are any Cruz supporters who would stomach Paul, but I don't think there are many Paul supporters who can stomach Cruz. He's way too far to the right on social conservative stuff for libertarians and such.