This is very amusing indeed, well, amusing for econ geeks at least. That it should happen in France of all places:
A French commercial court has found Google guilty of abusing the dominant position of its Google Maps application and ordered it to pay a fine and damages to a French mapping company.
In a ruling Tuesday, the Paris court upheld an unfair competition complaint lodged by Bottin Cartographes against Google France and its parent company Google Inc. for providing free web mapping services to some businesses.
The court ordered Google to pay 500,000 euros ($660,000) in damages and interest to the plaintiff and a 15,000 euro fine.
The French company provides the same services for a fee and claimed the Google strategy was aimed at undercutting competitors by temporarily swallowing the full cost until it gains control of the market.
This is just too close to Frederic Bastiat's satire of protectionism for it not to be noted:
We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion (excellent diplomacy nowadays!), particularly because he has for that haughty island a respect that he does not show for us.
Replace the Perfidious Albion with the Americans and the comparison is almost perfect.
It's also worth noting that Google would find it very difficult indeed to raise prices as and when they had crushed the indigenous French manufacturer as both Bing and MapQuest offer exactly the same free to user service. So the French court really has just there insisted that you cannot give away for free what someone else is charging for. I look forward to what the ladies of the night (or as one writer puts it, ladies of negotiable affection) are going to have to say about the modern proliferation of free unmarried and extra-marital sex that recent decades have allowed to flourish.
My thanks to Walter Olson for the pointer and yes, this is just one more proof that Bastiat was the last Frenchman to understand economics, the country's problems stemming from the fact that he died in 1850.
