When you have a monopoly, you can rule

General Privacy & Security
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Today, well-known cybersecurity news site HackRead (https://www.hackread.com/) has published an article unveiling Google’s shady commercial practices towards its competitors.
Namely, German Tutanota accuses Google of censoring its search results through a technique called shadowboxing (being de-ranked or even disappearing from the Search Engine’s results)
Not only is it unfair, but this could also be illegal and in violation of a new regulation that recently came into force in the EU: the DMA (for Digital Market Act)
Tuta Mail (Tutanota) Accuses Google of Censoring Its Search Results
The DMA aims at promoting fair competitive practices in the digital marketplace. It is a new regulation and it has not been tested in Courts yet.

  • If I was Tutanota, I would file a complaint for anti-competitive manipulation

  • If I were the European Commission, I would readily attack Google for violation of the DMA regulation, in order to test it in court and maybe set a precedent

  • And if I were the German Government, I would acknowledge here a grave problem of Sovereignty and National Interest at stake; I mean: this is a German company operating under German jurisdiction and proposing a service that no US company could ever seriously offer because according to the current legal framework in Germany, Tutanota can provide - by Law - an assurance of Confidentiality and Integrity for its open-source encrypted email service.

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This would be hard to prove, since it’s all “in the system”. For example, imagine that ranking were using AI that is trained on data. Imagine that ranking depended not only on that aspect but also on your details.

I would think that mandatory break-up of Google is the answer. Right now, the Google search engine can be used to achieve a competitive advantage in all the other services that Google offers. With a mandatory break-up, Google Search has the incentive to be the best possible search engine that it can be - and not potentially get side-tracked in artificially altering the rankings to benefit other services.

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