This seems stupid to most sane people, but there's a kind of logic behind it.

1) This is clearly bullshit designed to distract from more pressing issues that the French government can't solve or is unwilling to solve.

2) France's notorious protectionism, while immensely irritating to outsiders, does a reasonable job at preserving French language and culture, and creating a local vacuum for French native solutions. Trade and culture protectionism has a long-history of working quite well in many countries seeking to create national identity and industry when used correctly.

These two riffs will continue to get played, with #2 reinforcing #1 while necessary, to try and encourage native French solutions. France is under tremendous economic and cultural pressure from better performing regional partners like Germany and the U.K., and globally by the U.S., China and Japan (pick whichever you think is better performing in terms of economics and cultural expansion).

It kind of sucks, but it's also why, when you go to France, and even Paris, you know you're in Paris and not yet another cosmopolitan mega-city. It's also part of the reason why French culture and ideas continue to be interesting and exportable.

Much of this of course is France's continued decline as a global power. London, New York and Paris used to be a given global triumvirate. And Paris's membership in the top-3 isn't a given any more. It's now in a mix of second-tier alpha cities with Tokyo, Beijing and Dubai.

Outsiders look at this and say "of course Paris is in decline, this kind of behavior is why". Tighter global integration and more openness seems to be the way to the top and maintaining it. But for French leadership, losing cultural identity is not worth it. What if the world thought La Défense = Paris and the rest of the city was just some curious suburb? Is this [1] something that anybody cares about?

1 - http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2014/067/b/7/skyline_la_de...

FRENCH SENATOR (via translator): "Mr. Page, on page 1123 of Exhibit D we see that a signal component called NewInvSqPR is retrieved from a service of similar name. However, cross-referencing with Exhibit P, we see on page 8987 what appears to be a description of this service. This description leads with the text 'DEPRECATED DO NOT USE TO BE REPLACED BY Q2 2010'. Can you account for the current status of this service, and the provenance of any data it relies upon?

Furthermore, after the NewInvSqPR is retrieved, if that indeed ever does take place, the resulting data is placed into a field in a ranking output message, but it is unclear from where that field is read. On page 6766 of Exhibit E, the field appears to be cleared, but the surrounding functionality looks like it is disabled by a flag. Can you explain to this chamber the meaning of this information, specifically with regards to ranking of Google properties relative to competing vertical search websites?"

LARRY PAGE: "..."

They have no concept of how complex ranking is. There are millions of factors being fed into massive machine learning systems that try to predict which results users want (which is different from which they are most likely to click). It's like asking to see the algorithm for a cat.

They should go back to working on their own "Google killer" search engine :) http://www.infoworld.com/article/2672709/operating-systems/e...

I'm sorry, but the switch over cost to setting Bing as your home page instead of Google, or using Firefox which defaults to Yahoo, just isn't that much. It's one thing to have a lock on the desktop market where switching over your desktop software (or 10,000 company desktops) is a significant cost.

For users with IE or Firefox they have specifically set the search engine to Google. That means users are actively seeking out Google. Maybe require all French citizens to switch search engines once a year? Make browser vendors randomize the choice of search engine?

I would imagine that people would still use Google, regardless, even if links to Bing, Duck Duck Go and Yahoo were on the page. I like Duck Duck Go, but every once and awhile I go back to Google because they do a better job.

Things I'm more worried about than Google's search hegemony:

1) The fact that new computers may soon be unable to load unsigned kernels

2) You buy a device, like a console, it is illegal for you to root it.

3) Content is locked out region by region, and VPN users are considered pirates.

4) Governments want to incorporate back doors to encryption - leaving all less secure

If France doesn't want its citizens to use Google search, then be straight up and admit that. Why are they playing games and penalizing Google? After all, the people of France prefer it and indeed choose to use it.l, no doubt because it's good at etsy it does. Why on earth would Google reveal its algorithm, it's a vital competative advantage. And why is it illegal for search to be biased. If it's bad then people won't use it. If France wants its citizens to avoid Google, instead of crying about it, it ought to advertise a better solution, or in the extreme case, pass a law barring people from using it. Not all lawyers and politicians are bad, but a lot seem detached from reality and cause serious problems as result of their ignorance.

Why is it that so many people misunderstand monopoly/anti-trust? This isn't about search or pagerank, because having a monopoly is generally not illegal. It doesn't matter what the future of the search market might be or the ease in which customers can switch to a different search service. The complaint, according to the article, is:

    "...accusation being that it uses this closed code
    to promote its own products ahead of rivals.“

Being a monopoly is usually legal. Monopoly status simply means new laws apply relating to how that power is used. Google is patently a search monopoly right now, so France is well within their right to accuse them of abusing that power to take over other markets. Some sort of trial will determine if those charges are true or not.

What is obvious - regardless of the outcome or politics surrounding France's legal action - is that the exact nature of how Google's search algorithms work is the exact evidence needed to properly judge how Google's search service (via the algorithm it relies upon) is unfairly interfering with the markets that Google may also be participating in.

the upper house of parliament yesterday voted to support an amendment to a draft economy bill that would require search engines to display at least three rivals on their homepage

That's just absurd. Can someone acquainted with the situation shed light on why they are doing this? Simple populism and lobbying from local businesses or something else?

It won't be the first time a company has to disclose its source code to a government to keep doing business in that country.

Apple 2015 http://qz.com/332059/apple-is-reportedly-giving-the-chinese-...

Microsoft 2003 http://news.cnet.com/China-to-view-Windows-code/2100-1007_3-...

Google should make a really, really simple alorigthm for search and use that only for french people and show that to the french goverment. I don't see why that should not be allowed, they allready have diffrent alorithm for diffrent places.

It's not the genuine article, but reading the title I imagined the effort it would require for Google to teach the French Senate how their algorithm worked. This has an assumption that the algorithm is understandable first by politicians and second by... humans!

I have no firsthand knowledge at all of Google's "algorithm", but I assume given the investment they have in ML that it is on the side of "optimization, feature selection, and tuning" instead of "logical, human-understandable decision process".

Google hasn't been paying enough campaign contributions in France it seems. Back in the day Microsoft tried to avoid politics, and the US government almost broke them up.

"You may have all the money, Raymond, but I have all the men with guns." (Frank Underwood, House of Cards)

Looks like you're going to have to start paying more attention to the wallets of those with all the guns Google.

There is no way they would reveal their most precious secret sauce for the sake of satisfying one country's law and I can only think of one way this can end - Google pulling off another Google News Spain, by shutting down Google.fr.

Forcing Google's hand did not go well neither in Germany nor Spain not too long ago. How are law makers failing to see this? How are even the lobbyists fuelling the whole thing not seeing this?

for non french, let me remind people what is the political debate in the country : on the left side, people want a state-owned economy, and on the other side, they want a state-governed economy ( "etat stratège", meaning the state takes all the strategic decision).

The belief that a state could stick to ensuring fair competition and simply foster innovation, instead of directly acting on the companies themselves ( or even worse, directly owning them), is shared by less than 5% of the population ( highest score of the "economicaly liberal" party during the past 30 years elections).

If they wanted to hurt google a bit, all they had to do is hit them at the tax level ( they're currently trying that as well, but it has a low chance of working, the main problem being that ireland is both in europe and has 0% tax).

Now, with all that being said, i'm still curious to know what are the true complaints regarding google search engine practices before i completely dismiss the whole affair as another typically french symptom.

While this story is good feedstock for the Internet noise machine, I feel that if we discussed every stupid idea that came out of one half of a bicameral legislature in any country, we'd be buried in stupidity. An amendment to a draft bill in one house of parliament in a single small country does not amount to a movement.

How curious that being the best in a competition is seen as anti-competitive, and that keeping one's innovations secret is seen as a barrier to entry.

"[T]he English language... becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."

As a french i'm ashamed about how useless/bad/mediocre our politics are (all of them)

Until recently, I believed that while Google abuses its search dominance in order to promote its own services above the fold, their actual search results are still fair. Then I saw the search results for "domains" and "domain." It is a big stretch to imagine how a fair algorithm can rank recently launched beta of Google Domains #4 and #1 against the competitors, such as GoDaddy or NameCheap, or even against informational websites.

I think they would be better off taking all they money they would potentially spend on this stupid and putting it up as prize money for a French startup to create a viable Google competitor--encouraging them to view search in a new way. In the very least, it would be a positive message rather than a negative one and maybe an interesting company would come of it. I don't think this will have anything but a negative effect on Google (which does not mean there will magically be a french competitor to jump in a take its place). It also makes the French government look really dumb...

Google should just block French citizens from using any search-related functions on its properties (even things like Youtube search for example). The bill will be repealed in no time.

Being that Google is essentially the gatekeeper of all content for today's world I kind of think they should publish it freely anyways on their own.

I realize there's a wiki page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank but there's clearly more to it for ranking of all things and it should be maintained by Google itself too.

They shouldn't comply with this. Better to lose the entire French market than to set a precedent of allowing themselves to bullied by governments. I would imagine people would vote to get rid of this once they're unable to use Google.

I'd love to see how they define "search engine." Would this require amazon's search functionality to also show links from rakuten or barnes & noble? Would tech crunch's search have to show wired articles?

Am I missing something? Google search is "just" a very sophisticated algorithm to ranks the pages on internet matching some criteria. If Google doesn't disclose its algorithm and doesn't want to pay the fine ("up to 10% of total global revenue of a search engine business" according to the article), what could France do? Bane Google from the country? Although it would be possible, it would result in a massive loss of productivity for the whole country, since French would have to switch to admittedly inferiors search engines.

I say that as a French expat using duckduckgo as his main search engine.

Do Bing, Duck Duck Go and Yahoo also have to disclose their algorithms? Or is it just Google? Who would want to compete in this space if you have to disclose trade secrets to do so?

My government (USA) seems to be shooting itself in the foot re: hurting our tech industries: NSA collections and back doors cause foreign companies to not use our tech, etc.

France seems to want to catch up with the USA, and hurt its tech industries and infrastructure also.

I don't understand it, unless it is just putting the interest of government bureaucracies ahead of the public good.

The worst part will be when they force us to translate all search's source code and internal docs to French. :)

I'm very concerned with Google's search monopoly. For the vast majority of users (in western countries), Google is the internet.

That's a lot of power for one company to have, and it's only going to get worse as more and more transactions move online. Why should we trust one company with that much power?

They should show minified versions of their code to the senate under closed doors. Let them make sense of it.

Behind closed doors ? Or will the entire world get to see how Google search algorithm works ?

PageRank is already public. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

But, of course, Google don't solely use that anymore.

Realistically though they merely have to show them a search algorithm.

It is interesting that many people who are so devote to open source software in general are just OK with the software oligopoly of search that is practiced today by Google and a few other companies. I think it is terrible that we don't have a clear idea of what is going on within the most used search engine, and that they are able to change the algorithm without little second thought. It would be very nice if this lawsuit could bring to the forefront the issues involved with the way Google is controlling everyone's access to information.

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i think we'll see more & more government vs. big internet. for now governments have more power, but I wonder what it will be like 20 or 50 years from now. after all, they want at least 10% growth and starting from 360 billion, you become very big at that rate over 20-50 years.

not sure this world will be as awesome as some may think it could be. sure we don't like our governments & the are incredibly inefficient. maybe that's a good thing though.

Are we moving towards socialism of the internet?

I will not comment on the debate that exasperates me . However, France is also very angry with the way Google optimizes (legally) its income to pay very little tax in France despite substantial profits. It's not fair for the politicians and also for the whole population that cannot make such optimization. I think France just wants to hit Google in a manner respecting its own laws.

google belongs to google and if they want to shape the search results its their FRICKING Search Engine... they can do whatever they want and remove whom ever they want... its THEIRS get it... dont like it... use someone else... build your own.

Does this mean that French politicians are willing to study Computer Science for 4 years?

Good.

This is an unpopular view, but Google is simply too powerful. Anything that acts against the Google monopoly on search can only be a good thing.