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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

#451

Post by fuzztester »

ren_engineer wrote: post #70
hintymad wrote: post #47

> Google’s payments to make its search engine the default option on smartphone web browsers violate US antitrust law, a federal judge ruled Monday, handing a key victory to the Justice Department. I still find it hard to understand why this makes sense. Don't companies make exclusive deals all the time, and whoever bids higher will get such deals? Why is it different for Google this time?

I feel like the more blatant monopoly abuse by Google is how they use the Google search homepage to shill their other products. They effectively give themselves billions of dollars in free advertising

how are they a monopoly, as I asked another person in this same thread, here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41166997

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#452

Post by fuzztester »

TheCleric wrote: post #111
fuzztester wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how is that abuse, though? is it against the law? IANAL, but I would think not. I mean, many people put links to their other products or services on the web page of one of their products or services.

It is, if you are leveraging one monopoly to attempt to gain more. This is what happened with Microsoft and Internet Explorer (via the Windows monopoly)[1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor... .

linking to my answer in other parts of this thread, since the point and my reply are the same:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41166997

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#453

Post by dangus »

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 think this idea is incredibly short-sighted.

Let's think of an alternative where browser are forced to even the playing field: the browser either presents users with a list of search engines in random order, or perhaps it even chooses a random default.

You'd see a world where search engines can run ads that say "click this easy button/download our app/do this really easy thing" to use our search engine.

You would also see smaller search engines being able to get on the Safari search engine list instead of just the ones that can pay Apple what I assume are huge fees.

Let's not forget that iOS and iPadOS commands a huge share of the most affluent customers who would be most willing to use paid search engines. But in the status quo even those willing to do so will find Apple's platforms to be less than accomodating.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#454

Post by notatoad »

causal wrote: post #34
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…

Disagree. People use Google because it's the default, not because they will go out of their way to keep using it. The minute Apple changes the iPhone default, all but a few iPhone users stop using Google.

i guess the fun thing about this is that we're about to find out if you or the person you're replying to is correct

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#455

Post by colechristensen »

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 and I don't expect anyone to match them anytime soon (cue the DDG "I switched from Google to DDG 78 years ago" crowd)

Google search sucks. I didn't switch to DDG. Any competitor is going to have a hard time breaking in because of Google's paid exclusivity deals. That's part of why Google sucks. Google won easily in the early days because it was considerably better in a wide field of competitors it wiped out. It's not too hard to believe that Google would return better results if anyone was competing.

My web search has degraded to only searching for things I know already exist or occasionally fighting Google to try my damndest to get it to do an exact text search which is a stupid amount of struggle.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#456

Post by heavyset_go »

immibis wrote: post #310
gregdoesit wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

You chose to buy a platform with severe restrictions. It's not like we can blame monopoly power, because Android phones are easy to get. It was legitimately your choice - it seems like for some reason you wanted the restrictions.

Apple and Google have a duopoly in the mobile OS markets and mobile app markets. The fig-leaf of choice is between two duopolists. That's not healthy competition or an actual choice.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#457

Post by notatoad »

fuzztester wrote: post #451
ren_engineer wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the more blatant monopoly abuse by Google is how they use the Google search homepage to shill their other products. They effectively give themselves billions of dollars in free advertising

how are they a monopoly, as I asked another person in this same thread, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41166997

>how are they a monopoly

they are because a judge just ruled they are. answering questions like this is the reason the courts exist, and they just answered this question.

or they might not actually be a monopoly, there's still a possibility of appeal, but there's really no more definitive answer than a judge's ruling. antitrust law is fuzzy, and depends a lot on the courts to interpret it.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#458

Post by heavyset_go »

init2null wrote: post #50
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…

There's no excuse for not making search engine management as simple and flexible as Firefox does, especially on the desktop, but I appreciate the hoops you jump through to keep hacks available for browsers with less user choice.

Maybe it's changed, but last time I tried to set my Searx instance as a default search provider, it involved rolling my own search provider extension for it.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#459

Post by 762236 »

o-o- wrote: post #246
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 always thought that the idea behind antitrust laws was that if an entity reaches total market dominance and uses that dominance to keep other out of the game, the entity should be split into competing entities. What I'm seeing however is nothing more than toothless, political pointing sticks. Both IBM, Microsoft and Google have clearly at some point obtained total domination of their markets. Consequently they've a…

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

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#460

Post by Twirrim »

XMPPwocky wrote: post #349
Twirrim wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can change between ones that you have a search tools extension for, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/extensions/category... , but you can't just put your own custom search engine in. That said, keyword searches are awesome and I use them for a whole lot of things, including effectively custom search engines. I have keyword searches against, e.g., internal confluence docs so I only have to enter "con " and…

I have UI to enter a custom URL for search in Firefox for Android, with no extensions beyond Privacy Badger, Unhook, and uBlock Origin- interesting.

Double checked mine, same. How bizarre. Desktop doesn't have it by default but mobile does.
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