Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

541–550 of 761 posts

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#541

Post by stephenr »

ygjb wrote: post #506
stephenr wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google is an outlier among outlier because they do have several golden eggs but one is much bigger than all the others What "golden egg" do Google have besides an ad-selling business? Last time I looked into it ads of various forms accounted for basically all of their revenue, somewhere around 85% or more.

Yeah, less golden eggs, and more golden funnels (Chrome, Android).

Youtube, gmail, photos, etc etc etc - absolutely everything consumer facing is a channel for the ad business.

The only potential outlier is the cloud stuff, but even then I think it's essentially a 'economies of scale' thing, for the same reason Amazon started AWS, rather than a real revenue centre.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#542

Post by aergh345ygq »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #517
cletus wrote: post #31

I 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…

"I expect this to be bad for everyone except Google if the ruling holds." If the decision will not be bad for Google, then why would Google spend so much money and time to defend against it.^1 Why not just stop making the anti-competitive payments and terminate the agreements. Money saved. Problem solved. We can now safely say it is not a defense to claim "Google is the best" and that's why people choose it. Anti-com…

So really it's just a loss for everyone all around. But at least nobody is being anti-competitive I guess.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#543

Post by Zuiii »

troad wrote: post #510
summerlight wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla is effectively being subsidized by Google for the sake of an illusion of browser competitions. If the remedy enforces "a reasonable level of bid" for these kinds of auctions, Mozilla may go bankrupt within 5 years. I hope the court won't include Mozilla in scope since it doesn't really make a dent on the market dominance.

> Mozilla is effectively being subsidized by Google for the sake of an illusion of browser competitions. If the remedy enforces "a reasonable level of bid" for these kinds of auctions, Mozilla may go bankrupt within 5 years. I hope the court won't include Mozilla in scope since it doesn't really make a dent on the market dominance. Maybe the death of Mozilla, the family of corporate entities, could breathe new life i…

This. Mozilla is a giant dead tree in the middle of the forest depriving any saplings from the sunlight needed for them to take its place. If the corporation can't exist without Google funding, then it's effectively a department of Google and should be killed off so that other _independent_ orgs take its place.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#544

Post by somenameforme »

_3u10 wrote: post #485
cletus wrote: post #31

I 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…

I tried to switch to DDG, I even gave myself 90 days. On day 91 I immediately switched back.

I also left DDG, but have been very satisfied with Brave's search. [1] They also have a nice optional LLM system built in that provides citations to what it says, which is pretty neat. They also have 'goggles' which enable you to apply or create a chosen filter to reorder/refilter results. So e.g. getting news while blocking partisan sites (or indulging our own partisan preferences), searching only tech blogs, blocking big tech sites, searching for video/audio from non-YouTube sources or whatever else. Lots of neat stuff that I'm surprised other sites haven't cloned yet.

[1] - https://search.brave.com/

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#545

Post by shiroiushi »

nick__m wrote: post #534
elevatortrim wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s because Chrome is vastly better than Edge and that is an exceptional situation. In most other places you look, you will see people using defaults all the time, because defaults are incredibly powerful.

How is chrome vastly better than Edge ? They feel pretty similar but Edge support uBlock Origin on manifest V2.

>They feel pretty similar but Edge support uBlock Origin on manifest V2.

For now. Don't expect it to last: Edge is just a re-skin of Chromium, so after V2 support is completely removed by Google, Edge will have to follow along or fork the code.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#546

Post by Zuiii »

aristofun wrote: post #179

I don’t like google and I don’t like the way their shitty search is stuck in every hole. But denying by court a company a right to honestly pay to another company for distribution of their services has much worse long term consequences and is wrong.

You don't get to pay other companies to keep out your competitors when you're as big as Google. It's as simple as that.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#547

Post by centum »

cletus wrote: post #31

I 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…

Wow, if Google had hired you, your insight would've saved them many billions every single year! They're such fools for spending all that money when it had absolutely no impact on their position in the market!

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#548

Post by fuzztester »

notatoad wrote: post #505
fuzztester wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they are because a judge just ruled they are. but they are not a monopoly according to the Wikipedia definition that I cited in another subthread, and linked to above, though. and courts can be packed, which, i have been reading, has happened with the us supreme court.

if you want to beleive a wikipedia definition based on historical caselaw, instead of an actual judge's decision, then i guess sure, do whatever you want. if you're asking how they're a monopoly, i answered you. if you want to debate whether the judge was right or wrong, maybe phrase your question less like a question.

>if you're asking how they're a monopoly, i answered you. if you want to debate whether the judge was right or wrong, maybe phrase your question less like a question.

okay, i will. in fact, i also answered you, so I'll just link to my other answer again:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41167248

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#549

Post by shiroiushi »

Maxatar wrote: post #159
kelnos wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's more the exception that proves the rule, though. Chrome originally came out when IE was still a steaming pile of garbage, and Google spent lots of marketing money promoting it as a better, faster alternative. (Something that Mozilla had been previously somewhat succeeding at, more or less, but they didn't have the same resources and eventually lost their gains and fell behind.) These days Chrome just has so mu…

You're right on some points, other points don't match up with my understanding of the issue. Chrome was a much better browser compared to the default that came installed on Windows, and certainly if someone is going to switch away from the default they will do it towards a much better alternative, on that we agree. However, despite how much I think Google as a search engine has declined in quality, I still find them…

You're also missing the power of reputation. It takes time to build a good reputation, and it takes a really long time to overcome a bad reputation. MS built itself a really bad reputation, especially with browsers, so even if (hypothetically speaking) Edge were as good as Chrome now, it would still take a very long time to overcome the terrible reputation they earned with IE.

Apple doesn't have this problem.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#550

Post by alvah »

cletus wrote: post #31

I 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…

"They simply have a better product"

I disagree. 100% they had a better product, but they have absolutely mangled it over the last few updates. Honestly, if I wanted the opinion of randomnumbers45123 on Reddit, I'd just search Reddit.

Google achieved dominance ~25 years ago by being better than the alternatives, and the other search engines pretty much withered away rapidly. They (Google) are in a very precarious position right now. They will certainly not disappear overnight, but if / when the public becomes aware of something better, the implosion could be spectacular.

Post reply on HN