> Like hotel bookings, do we know if they are best for shoppers or best for Google's bottom line?

Sounds like a business opportunity. If the market isn’t being well served, it would seem that someone might try to serve it. You know, like maybe TripAdvisor or Booking.com or Expedia or the numerous similar companies.

We are basically saying that nobody will enter the search business because Google is too good? That doesn’t make any sense. Nobody is compelled to use Google. Every browser lets users choose alternatives. That people don’t is probably because they think Google does a pretty good job for their needs. If that isn’t true, then it should be realistic for a competitor to make it better. IBM owned computing until they didn’t — nobody thought competing with IBM was a high percentage play, but people did.

If the Europeans want to make some big tech, then perhaps making the investment, M&A, and taxation environment more favorable is a good place to start. Capital gains taxes are so high that there isn’t a huge amount of incentive for moon-shot investments in Europe. Employment law (in France at least,) is so Byzantine that there is a real fear of hiring fast and scaling quickly because the consequences of a misstep are hugely expensive. Investors in Europe look for high percentage 2x companies to fund rather than making big, bold bets on 100x companies. One of the reasons is that you have a tax structure that punishes success so the risk-reward ratio favors safer investments. There is money in Europe, but much of it is through government programs that require government friendly business plans and friends in high places to even be considered. And the money that those programs do provide, it certainly isn’t US-level. It’s extremely rare to raise €50 million in Europe, but it happens all the time in the US.

It’s the indefinite pessimism of Europe that’s the root of it. See the book Zero to One for a great explanation of that concept. Google isn’t the problem. It’s a symptom. Look at DailyMotion as a case study. The French government blocked the sale to Yahoo — which would have been a huge payday for the founders and investors — a payday they would have, in the tradition of Silicon Valley, could have been used to start angel or VC investing. (Although the original founders sold to France Telecom for a relative pittance, and France Telecom has the innovation level of a can of peas. So it’s possible to say that the sell to Yahoo wouldn’t have made any ripples in terms of creating new angel investors.) Instead DailyMotion, rather than becoming Yahoo’s YouTube, languished into near obscurity compared to YouTube.

https://m.france24.com/en/20130501-france-minister-montebour...

Vivendi finally bought DailyMotion in 2015 at a valuation far below its 2013 levels.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2015/04/07/dailymo...

The point of the story is the socialist government of France cared more about some misguided nationalism rather than actually creating an environment for innovation, business and growth. Even in France, YouTube is far bigger than DailyMotion and it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with Google being anti-competitive, but everything to do with this petty provincial bullshit common with European government ministers.