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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

#561

Post by plausibility »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #377
usr1106 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Choice seems to be an euphemism for everything related to private IT: For PCs there is Microsoft vs Apple. (I use Linux, but that's not for the broad masses currently.) For phones you either pay a premium to enter the Apple walled garden or you prostitute your digital life and get spied on by Google and its advertising cancer. What would we say if there were only 2 car makers, 2 grocery chains, 2 companies building h…

> What would we say if there were only 2 car makers, 2 grocery chains, 2 companies building houses? We'd argue endlessly because of pedantry over 'monopoly', whilst the oligopolists sell us down the river.

Look no further for evidence than New Zealand. There are two major grocery store chains (Foodstuffs, who own New World, Four Square, and Pak n Save) and Woolworths Group -- obviously we have the smaller Asian marts and produce stores too, but most people only have one of the big stores nearby to their towns.

There are two major building materials suppliers (Carters and Fletchers). There's one manufacturer of drywall (Gib) that is easier to get council plan approval for than any other cheaper manufacturers of drywall because they provide some material strength documents that saves the councils some engineering review time and effort.

We technically have 4 major banks, but 3 of them are just offshoots of big Australian banks and siphon the insane profits offshore.

The government keeps making investigation commissions into breaking these up, but doesn't do anything. The companies just point fingers back and forth at each other blaming "the competition" for price gouging. Meanwhile the recommendation from the politicians is we cut back on avocado toast, lattes, and our Netflix subscription.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#562

Post by londons_explore »

rstuart4133 wrote: post #559
alvah wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 posi…

For a decade of so I was in charge internal web page for mobile users. I had control over the devices the end users had, the web browser they used, I maintained the back end. In that deployment the best product was Firefox. There were two major reasons. It could be deployed on all platforms we used (we didn't support iOS). Secondly it was by far the most reliable. We still have the occasional use who would use Chrome…

Occasionally pushing a bad update is a symptom of having 10x as many Devs pushing 10x as many features each month.

Even if Googles QA process was triple as good as Mozilla's, the users would still see more breakage.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#563

Post by usr1106 »

immibis wrote: post #477
usr1106 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Choice seems to be an euphemism for everything related to private IT: For PCs there is Microsoft vs Apple. (I use Linux, but that's not for the broad masses currently.) For phones you either pay a premium to enter the Apple walled garden or you prostitute your digital life and get spied on by Google and its advertising cancer. What would we say if there were only 2 car makers, 2 grocery chains, 2 companies building h…

If the choices are substantially different, you have a choice. Windows or Linux or Mac is a real choice - just because you'd prefer Haiku doesn't mean you don't have a choice. There's a huge range of android phones, and many of them have been reverse engineered enough to run non-google versions of Android (find out before buying). I have a PinePhone, but I don't use it regularly. It runs nearly-mainline Linux. Even t…

I am typing this on a phone running SailfishOS. Still that's hardly a real choice for me who has worked 20 years as a phone or Linux developer. No banks, no public transit tickets, no city bike, no you name it.

Not an option for the wide public.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#564

Post by michaelmrose »

londons_explore wrote: post #562
rstuart4133 wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a decade of so I was in charge internal web page for mobile users. I had control over the devices the end users had, the web browser they used, I maintained the back end. In that deployment the best product was Firefox. There were two major reasons. It could be deployed on all platforms we used (we didn't support iOS). Secondly it was by far the most reliable. We still have the occasional use who would use Chrome…

Occasionally pushing a bad update is a symptom of having 10x as many Devs pushing 10x as many features each month. Even if Googles QA process was triple as good as Mozilla's, the users would still see more breakage.

I don't think you can scale or compare like that numerically. Every commit isn't a chance for it to break for users because they bundle however many commits into a release and resources required to test the release don't scale per commit.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#565

Post by Kbelicius »

sitkack wrote: post #241
everfrustrated wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Kagi on Firefox requires an extension

It doesn't.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#566

Post by kortilla »

greenthrow wrote: post #421
utopcell wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've been trying to make a car for the past decade, arguably an easier task than making a search engine.

A car is definitely not easier than a search engine. Also they canceled the car.

It absolutely is much harder to make a search engine (at least a good one). The dominance of Google in that space for so long should have made that obvious.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#567

Post by temporalparts »

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…

I think the important argument for^1 is that this prevents other search engine from bidding on the slot. It certainly would be an issue for Google if Apple products defaulted to Bing.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#568

Post by FMecha »

acdha wrote: post #244
jfoster wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google also tried to push PC OEMs to pre-install Chrome on their new PCs when Chrome was new.[1] Sony/VAIO is the only manufacturer to have known to take the bait.[2]

[1] https://www.crn.com.au/news/google-may-pre-install-chrome-br...

[2] https://thenextweb.com/news/sony-computers-google-chrome-bro...

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#569

Post by usr1106 »

plausibility wrote: post #561
paulryanrogers wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What would we say if there were only 2 car makers, 2 grocery chains, 2 companies building houses? We'd argue endlessly because of pedantry over 'monopoly', whilst the oligopolists sell us down the river.

Look no further for evidence than New Zealand. There are two major grocery store chains (Foodstuffs, who own New World, Four Square, and Pak n Save) and Woolworths Group -- obviously we have the smaller Asian marts and produce stores too, but most people only have one of the big stores nearby to their towns. There are two major building materials suppliers (Carters and Fletchers). There's one manufacturer of drywall…

Finland is nearly as bad. 20 years ago there were only 3 food chains. All domestic and playing the rules "no price competition". So food prices were about 30% higher than in Germany for example (these a very different countries so lack of competition is only one reason). Then Lidl (discounter of German origin) entered the market. The first years the incumbents fought it with unfair practices, but in the end it led to more price competition with everybody having to offer cheaper choices. 2 of the incumbents have since merged (with some regulatory limitations) so we are back to 3 players, 2 playing "according to the oligopoly book" and one doing things different, at least offering some choice.

Banks are not much better. There are a couple of small players additionally to the 3 big ones, but competition is limited to very few products. If you are interested in something else, choices are very poor.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#570

Post by jonny_eh »

meiraleal wrote: post #509
762236 wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you split Google? Any type of split would kill that which makes Google so great.

Chrome, Android and the Play Store being separated companies would be great.

How would Chrome make money? Accepting $1B a year to make Google the default search engine?
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