I hope searchgpt or perplexity takes advantage of this and try to gain some momentum, gonna be a sad day if perplexity sells out to some incumbent.
Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones
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Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Important context is that massive sum of money Google pays for such exclusivity.
Google pays to be the default, not for exclusivity as evidenced by the list of SEs Apple provides to swap to. I never knew what the hell Apple was doing with the extremely limited set of search engines with the only means to change it being to choose one of the others Apple has included on a static list which cannot be modified by the user.
It's because the only way to get on that list at all is to pay Apple (as revealed in this very case).
Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones
#93[flagged]
I seem to recall they do this the way other similar things do, which does not involve sending your passwords anywhere. When they do is hash your password, then take something like the first 20 bits and send that to a site that keeps a list of hashes of known leaked passwords. That site returns all the hashes that start with that 20 bits. Chrome than checks that list to see ifthe full hash of your password is on it.
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Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it creates a monopoly then no, it's not okay, no matter how normal.
Not necessarily - as it is written, the Sherman anti-trust act and all of the amendments distinguishes between "innocent" and "coercive" monopolies. But the definitions are very loose and hard to pin down. It's hard to even consistently distinguish a monopoly - is it market share? Earning power? Barriers to entry?
> It's hard to even consistently distinguish a monopoly - is it market share? Earning power? Barriers to entry?
"I know it when I see it," as it is difficult at best to rely on distinctive actions or indicators considering the fluidity of business dynamics and the market landscape.
Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones
#95We face a number of challenges simply letting our paying customers change their search engine: 1. On iOS the list of allowed search engines is simply baked into OS, we have a fiddly extension that hooks outbound calls to /search and redirects them but I wish we didn't need to. 2. On Chrome, we use an extension to change the default search engine and enable search auto-complete etc, but Google has a policy that such a…
> We face a number of challenges simply letting our paying customers change their search engine: I use Kagi's extensions to maintain Kagi as default search across many devices and browsers. It's been seamless across Firefox/Waterfox/etc instances. IIRC, Kiwi and Brave were fairly agreeable (I avoid Chrome, Edge). Opera was a pain because Opera is a pain about everything. I appreciate the effort you+team have put into…
I did have issues on Linux regarding the extension working in private windows due to the official Firefox extension being out-of-date. Using the latest Github release of their extension fixed it, and they promptly submitted the new update for it to propagate through the extension store after a ticket on their feedback forum asked about it[0].
Github releases with .xpi's to install have been removed[1] which is odd but hopefully they keep up with their Firefox extension submissions if this is the route they're going down.
As for Chrome, I only use it for automated/manual testing since that's what everyone uses.
[0] https://kagifeedback.org/d/2234-kagi-extension-api-key-not-p...
[1] https://github.com/kagisearch/browser_extensions/releases
Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones
#96After the DoJ vs. Apple suit was mentioned in March, I did some research before about what the DoJ views unfavorably in this arena. My bullet points were useful to a lot of people here then, so perhaps it can help inform some of the conversation here too.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39782290
After some research, the practices below may capture much (though not necessarily all) of what the Department of Justice views unfavorably:
* horizontal agreements between competitors such as price fixing and market allocation
* vertical agreements between firms at different levels of the supply chain such as resale price maintenance and exclusive dealing
* unilateral exclusionary conduct such as predatory pricing, refusal to deal with competitors, and limiting interoperability
* conditional sales practices such as tying and bundling
* monopoly leveraging where a firm uses its dominance in one market to gain an unfair advantage in another
Any of these behaviors undermines the conditions necessary for a competitive market. I'd be happy to have the list above expanded, contracted, or modified. Let me know.
Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones
#97I expect this to be bad for everyone except Google if the ruling holds. Why? Mozilla and Apple will lose significant revenue from having Google as the default search engine and Google will no longer have to pay those billions. What's more, no one else can pay to be the default either (eg the short-lived Mozilla Bing deal). So what's going to happen? Most users will probably still use Google, nobody is getting paid an…
> but Google didn't buy its way into dominance annd maintain their dominance through exclusivity deals This is a huge claim. Do you have any evidence to back it up?
Google is not the default search provider on Windows. It is not the default search provider in Edge. Microsoft prompts at varying levels of annoyingness to get you to stay with their solutions. Historically it was even harder with IE. Despite all this, folks often switch to chrome and google search.
IE was so bad and Chrome so much better that Microsoft gave up on IE on their own platform and switched to Chrome as the engine for edge.
Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones
#98> Google’s payments to make its search engine the default option on smartphone web browsers violate US antitrust law, a federal judge ruled Monday, handing a key victory to the Justice Department. I still find it hard to understand why this makes sense. Don't companies make exclusive deals all the time, and whoever bids higher will get such deals? Why is it different for Google this time?
I feel like the more blatant monopoly abuse by Google is how they use the Google search homepage to shill their other products. They effectively give themselves billions of dollars in free advertising
how is that abuse, though?
is it against the law?
IANAL, but I would think not.
I mean, many people put links to their other products or services on the web page of one of their products or services.
Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones
#99A couple passages of note:
> 112. The integration of generative AI is perhaps the clearest example of competition advancing search quality. Google accelerated and launched its public piloting of Bard one day before Microsoft announced BingChat, the integration of ChatGPT’s generative AI technology into Bing to deliver answers to queries. Id. at 8272:4-7 (Reid); id. at 2670:10–2671:9 (Parakhin). (describing BingChat).
Perhaps a normative assertion on my part, but AI results have not "advanc[ed] search quality" by any metric that I am familiar with; in fact, AI results in Google mark the first time I have ever encountered incorrect or patently untrue information at the top of a Google query.
> This quality-reduction experiment correlated with only a 0.66– 0.99% decline in global search revenue. UPX1082 at 294. In short, this study demonstrates that a significant quality depreciation by Google would not result in a significant loss of revenues.
Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones
#100We face a number of challenges simply letting our paying customers change their search engine: 1. On iOS the list of allowed search engines is simply baked into OS, we have a fiddly extension that hooks outbound calls to /search and redirects them but I wish we didn't need to. 2. On Chrome, we use an extension to change the default search engine and enable search auto-complete etc, but Google has a policy that such a…
There's no excuse for not making search engine management as simple and flexible as Firefox does, especially on the desktop, but I appreciate the hoops you jump through to keep hacks available for browsers with less user choice.
This would be the same Firefox that changed my default search from Kagi to Google after a routine update?