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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

#271

Post by fallingknife »

tootie wrote: post #223
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 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.

But this verdict only involves the search business. All that other stuff is out of scope. And breaking it up like that leaves the search monopoly intact anyway.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#272

Post by otterley »

singron wrote: post #263
fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In a very competitive market, reducing quality slightly could drastically reduce revenue. E.g. if there were two brands of apple at the grocery store and one started putting a tiny worm in each apple, you would expect the worm apples to lose nearly 100% of their revenue.

That's an interesting example of a "slight" quality reduction. In apples, a slight quality reduction might be a bit of discoloration or a small bruise. The presence of a worm, on the other hand, causes the apple to be perceived as unsafe or inedible.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#273

Post by fallingknife »

coliveira wrote: post #253
pklausler wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is not the courts problem. Google needs to solve this before the split.

It is always the court's problem. A judge does not have arbitrary or absolute authority. If Google can convince an appeals court that the judge has imposed an impossible or unreasonable remedy it will be overturned.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#274

Post by magicalist »

asadotzler wrote: post #183
crazygringo wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no exclusivity deals. These are deals around defaults, not exclusivity. Google never paid Apple to remove Bing from the list of choices. That's what an exclusivity deal would do. But it didn't happen, because this doesn't have anything to do with exclusivity.

It is exclusivity. I've been involved in some of these contracts going all the way back to the Summer of 2004 and they absolutely involve exclusivity. If Safari or Firefox product managers added a new search access point and their business people tried to sell default placement for that new search access point, they'd violate their contract. That's exclusivity. Opera used to do that kind of thing, they had three diff…

That might just be overloading the term in a way that clouds the issue though? The exclusive default search provider for a browser vs the exclusive search provider for a browser is pretty different.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#275

Post by troupo »

Maxatar wrote: post #211
troupo wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it was helped by already nearly ubiquitous Google search shoving it down everyone's throat on every page And then ubiquitous Youtube dealing the killing blow: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/05/ex-youtube-engineer-...

But your article argues the opposite of your claim. Your article says that Microsoft themselves were working to move people away from Internet Explorer 6 and encouraging people to upgrade to a modern browser by declaring IE 6 to be at its end of life. The article says that Youtube displayed a banner recommending users to upgrade to either Firefox, IE 8, or Chrome and that due to concerns by Google's lawyers, the orde…

> But your article argues the opposite of your claim.

It's not. The article talks about Youtube nailing the final nail in IEs coffin, which it did.

As for shoving Chrome down everyone's throats I'm amazed no one remembers the ancient history of just 15 years ago:

- showing it on search pages: http://www.webandsay.com/archives/google-is-actively-pushing... - prominently showing it on Youtube: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/11/how-google-promotes...

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#276

Post by warkdarrior »

mrguyorama wrote: post #217
riku_iki wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For-profit corp needs some incentives for such donation.

And just like when we force AT&T to do a bunch of stuff, that incentive should be "encourage and fund a healthy and competitive market or be dismantled with prejudice". We made AT&T basically give away patents to anyone and open up their network to compatibility. People regularly talk about the innovations that came from the labs funded by that agreement. Then they turn around and dismiss government regulation of ind…

> People regularly talk about the innovations that came from the labs funded by that agreement.

Do you have some examples?

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#277

Post by otterley »

SpacePortKnight wrote: post #216
nabla9 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So what's going to happen? Apple might make their own search engine. Apple has a team that's been creating a next-generation search engine codenamed Pegasus under John Giannandrea. They already have search engines for App Store, Maps, Apple TV and News and Spotlight. Apple web search development worked as bargaining chip in pricing negotiations with Google. Google paid them $20 billion per year to not compete as mu…

Apple could make a search engine but by the same logic, they wouldn't be able to make it default on their devices.

Why not? They did it for Maps.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#279

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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’m one of the paying Kagi customer who wants to make Kagi my default iOS search engine, but cannot

FYI, there is a workaround [1]. It's trash that Apple makes us do this. But you can.

Granted, it nudged me to switch to Orion as my main desktop browser.

[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.h...

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