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Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

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Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#241

Post by sitkack »

everfrustrated wrote: post #100
init2null wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Kagi on Firefox requires an extension, which is ridiculous. I am about to find a more user friendly browser. Session, bookmarking and history search haven’t seen any meaningful improvement in 15+ years.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#242

Post by devrand »

ankit219 wrote: post #176
devrand wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably these deals with Google will be nullified, but can the various browsers just make new deals with someone else? Can Microsoft just just swoop in and make a deal with Apple/Mozilla/Samsung? Mozilla is going to be desperate to find a new partner...

Dont think Apple would make a deal with any other engine. They basically used Microsoft to get a good deal with Google, but never had any intention to use Microsoft. The thing is the deals are a revenue sharing deal - Google gives 1/3 of the revenue to Apple. With microsoft, the number could be 100% and would still not reach a significant number for Apple. Mozilla would jump at it, and I hope Google still invests in…

At least in the short term they probably would. Why not take the basically free money?

Longer term, yeah they'll probably just make their own search engine.

I highly doubt Google would give Mozilla anything. The only reason I think they would would be to appease Chrome monopoly concerns, but I don't think Chrome is even at risk of that. It's not the default browser on any platform other than ChromeOS and some Android devices.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#243

Post by tsimionescu »

rdsnsca wrote: post #178
mandevil wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to sworn testimony, Apple got over 20 billion dollars from Google in 2022. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-01/google-s-...

That doesn't mean all Apple users use it.

No, it means Google paid Apple and Kagi didn't.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#244

Post by acdha »

jfoster wrote: post #145
acdha wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome is a complicated case in general because Google poured money into promoting Chrome and had some of the most popular sites on the web promoting it heavily and actively sabotaged Firefox at several key points. I respect a lot of the Chrome team’s early work but it’s very hard for me to see that as a story about fair competition alone.

So, to summarize: defaults are powerful, but advertising is more powerful.

Not just advertising: Mozilla could not have put a “better in Firefox” button on Gmail or YouTube at any price, or forced Google to follow through on their promise around H.264, etc.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#245

Post by vdfs »

fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #218
jd3 wrote: post #99

A 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).…

The idea that a 0.66% decline in revenue would be insignificant made me snort. Increasing revenue that much would make many careers - it would justify the existence of a substantial origination. That’s billions of dollars annually.

"It's only a $2B decline"

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#246

Post by o-o- »

knuckleheads wrote: post #37

> Mehta’s decision is expected to trigger a separate proceeding to determine what penalties Google will face – and the company is also likely to file an appeal As a Google antitrust watcher, I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop with what remedies the court will actually recommend to correct this monopoly. If you ask 20 experts, who all otherwise agree that Google is a monopoly, you might get 40 different answers ab…

I always thought that the idea behind antitrust laws was that if an entity reaches total market dominance and uses that dominance to keep other out of the game, the entity should be split into competing entities.

What I'm seeing however is nothing more than toothless, political pointing sticks.

Both IBM, Microsoft and Google have clearly at some point obtained total domination of their markets. Consequently they've all found themselves at the antitrust chopping blocks, however these companies have become so important to the economy that actual verdicts are reduced to a "carry on, just don't exert your dominance too much".

Or have I misunderstood antitrust laws?

Edit: s/excert/exert

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#247

Post by Sakos »

jd3 wrote: post #99

A 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).…

I think there is a clearly anti-competitive component in this, demonstrated by the recent AI training deal between Reddit and Google. The one that went hand in hand with preventing any search engine but Google from indexing Reddit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41057033

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#248

Post by hcurtiss »

gregdoesit wrote: post #215
hugh_kagi wrote: post #21

We 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…

I’m one of the paying Kagi customer who wants to make Kagi my default iOS search engine, but cannot. It’s maddening that even though I paid for both my iPhone / iPad and for Kagi, Apple for some reason makes it impossible for me to make this choice (that I already made by paying for Kagi). On Chrome at least this is possible, even if it’s additional steps (I have not used the extension though there.)

I too am a paying customer. Surprisingly -- at least to me -- it's easy to do with Microsoft's Edge browser on iOS. I use it as default on both iOS and macOS.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#249

Post by tootie »

pklausler wrote: post #239
tootie wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can envision a gnarly Venn diagram of search, ads, AI, analytics, Chrome. You could easily make this 5 separate companies (ads and analytics were acquired), but you probably just need to split it somewhere in the middle.

"easily?" Which one would own Platforms? Which one would own the google3 monorepo?

Haha, I mean they could easily survive as separate companies. Not that separating them would be easy.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#250

Post by mminer237 »

bee_rider wrote: post #234
trentnix wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the circumstantial evidence is sufficient to figure it out.

Are we supposing that Google made their payment conditional on obfuscating the ability to switch search engines?

Even if not explicitly conditioned, which I don't believe came out as being the case in this case, there's still an inherent motivation. Google will pay more for a default on an OS where it's hard to switch the default than it will for a default where it's easy to switch away. Google might pay $20 billion for defaults on iOS as-is where 99% of people stick with Google, but if Apple started asking users if they were sure and offering alternatives and Google only remained the default for half of people, they logically would only offer maybe $10 billion to remain default on the same actual terms.
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