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> That sounds like an Apple issue True. But guess who’s paying Apple good money in order to remain the default search engine. Who knows what else might be part of this deal?
Everybody who has read the contract. What are you alleging?
Oh, and when they agreed to suppress wages through an anti-poaching agreement, was that explicit in the contract?
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Or maybe Mozilla will focus more on Firefox again.
No we won’t. We all knew this gravy train was coming to an end. In terms of revenue it’s ~500M per year/~80-something %. Once this stops, there’s no way for us to keep funding operations at the level they’re at.
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If it creates a monopoly then no, it's not okay, no matter how normal.
Damn, someone tell the Justice Department that Nvidia exists.
That would be the difference of an anti-competition monopoly vs just a monopoly.
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).…
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Are we supposing that Google made their payment conditional on obfuscating the ability to switch search engines?
As long as it’s an ongoing relationship nothing needs to be said. Apple knows that if more users swap away from the default then the default setting is less valuable.
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> 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…
We forget that there was at least a decade of several "Google killers" a year [1]. It's a graveyeard. That was 2009 too. The volume slowed down but people are still trying (and failing) [2]. Microsoft has of course tried but Bing is only really propped up by Microsoft's deep pockets. It's not a profitable enterprise (AFAIK). And this is with Microsoft using every trick they can to bypass EU and US consent decrees and…
It makes $10+B per year, pennies next to Google of course, but non-negligible. https://backlinko.com/bing-users#
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…
As someone who worked at Mozilla, on Firefox browsers, I can guarantee you that none of this is a coincidence. I have never seen the search contract so I don't think I am breaking any kind of NDA but I have been close enough to engineering and browser planning and product management to know that Google dictates (negotiates?) in great detail every aspect of search in the browser. This is not a simple "you can use Goog…
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Maybe they will allow a level-playing field and allow bids like in a marketplace?
Why would anyone bid for being the search engine in a browser with <4% market share and falling? Everybody will want to be on iPhone/Safari, Android/Chrome, and Windows/Chrome or Edge.
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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.
It's only easy now because Microsoft had a lot of runs in with the US and EU regulators on this specific issue in the past.
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.
Considering this is an antitrust case, those payments are not honest.