Google fined for abuse of dominant position with Google Maps

It stormed and stormed, and then it rained. Google is no longer the beloved company of the past, as evidenced by the many cases reported daily by the press and specialized media regarding its dominant position. To use a popular saying, Google has pulled the blanket too tight, so much so that it tore.

More news concerning the corporation from Mountain View comes from France, and this time the target is a free service: Google Maps. According to a recent ruling that fined Google(which will appeal) 15,000 euros and ordered it to pay 500,000 euros to the plaintiff company (Bottin Cartographes),  Google Maps competing unfairly with other paid services by being free.

While Google can afford to offer the Google Maps service for free, other small or medium-sized companies whose core business is the sale of maps and cartography cannot. Hence the French court’s ruling.

Google as a good Samaritan is not liked by judges, one might ask? Not so. Google is not a missionary company. The free service of Google Maps has very specific goals that have nothing to do with being free. Encouraging more people to use the service and thus to geolocate means that Google can sell targeted advertising (tailored to the user), which translates to high conversion rates. In short, a free service that primarily serves the money-generating machine of Google, which is advertising.

But Google is not doing well in this period. In addition to unfair competition, recognized by the ruling of the Alpine court, another problem has arisen. The portal Techdows has reported a system of self-censorship by Google on the platform Blogger that leads to blogs being blacklisted in some countries. In essence, something that already happens, if from India one is looking for content on the platform Googleblog.blogspot.com you are redirected to the Indian platform of Blogger and therefore Googleblog.blogspot.in. The self-censorship adopted by Google, emulating what Twitter already does, serves to quickly remove content deemed harmful in countries where specific laws exist regarding it.

And so, one would ask Big G, why was the system not communicated while Twitter made extensive communication about it? The answer is to be found in the poor management of communication by Google which still has not understood, despite the criticism rained down from all over the world, the importance of information and participation.