Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

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 an extension can do one thing and one thing only, and recently removed our extension on account of that [1]. We rebuilt it to meet their needs but had a lot of back-and-forth because we included 'search by image' on a context menu item and the first reviewer felt that was a bridge too far. You'll note that Chrome provides such a context menu item for Google Image search out of the box.

3. On Chrome for Linux, the default search engine API is not available, so Linux users have to configure it manually through a series of silly steps [2]. This is at least in keeping with most Linux experiences.

There are other issues, but I say all this to highlight how surprisingly difficult it is to change this setting in a practical, consumer friendly way. It is most certainly this difficult by design, that's a lot of revenue to protect.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41028924

2: https://github.com/kagisearch/chrome_extension_basic?tab=rea...

It gives people room to try, especially now with new entrants like perplexity that might offer better results.

Google search went to shit and ruined most of the web with it, by creating an SEO industry that's 100% focused on optimizing for their ranking signals.

On iOS it’s only from a pre approved list. Want to use a less censored search like Brave? Nope, unless you use something other than Safari.

Bad for Firefox, which still relies exclusively on Google sponsorship.

Thunderbird, on the other hand, takes user donations.

Can you please expand or explain on this analogy.

I'm struggling to connect how Google's last major browser engine competitor potentially losing it's funding due to a separate monopoly issue is similar to laws being passed to reduce death and hospitalizations.