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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

#461

Post by dangus »

g15jv2dp wrote: post #433
j_maffe wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in this case it could, simply because all of the competitors are American, none are foreign.

No, there are non-US competitors. Qwant, Mojeek, Seznam... You might reply, "but they're small" or "I haven't heard of them". Well, how do you think that came to be? Besides, I'm replying to a comment about the wider trust case against google. It's not just about search engines.

Seznam took over 10 seconds for me to load start to finish and I'm on gigabit fiber. It has no English language option.

Maybe that's why I haven't heard of them?

Although Qwant looks kind of nice and obviously localized.

I also think it's interesting that I know about Kagi already but don't know about Mojeek despite Kagi using their results.

I fully agree that Google is a monopolist that has been oppressing the search engine market but at some point if you're going to start a company you need to do some marketing. DuckDuckGo is an example of success in that realm, it's nearly overtaken Yahoo.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#462

Post by JumpCrisscross »

kemiller wrote: post #400
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

How’s the stability on Orion lately? I want to use it be plugin compatible was too dicey.

> How’s the stability on Orion lately?

Very good. My only gripes are with the 1Password extension.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#463

Post by azemetre »

chatmasta wrote: post #427
tracerbulletx wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"for some reason" (the reason was 20 billion per year in cash)

I’m surprised that it’s just Google getting hit with this enforcement and not Apple too.

This lawsuit will likely be used for further litigation in other companies.

About time too, nothing more undemocratic than unregulated monopolies.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#464

Post by KolenCh »

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…

I was just listening to this episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/acquired/id1050462261?...

They pointed out that a monopoly is not the sin, the sin is to abuse that market position for unfair advantage.

So your summary of their verdict in a way is what the US view of antitrust is.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#465

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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…

"It is most certainly this difficult by design, that's a lot of revenue to protect."

Reading the early history of Microsoft I once came across a quote from someone that the company intentionally made the possibility of booting different operating systems on the PC difficult by design. What I found interesting is that this was before Linux became popular. They were already contemplating the possibility of booting other operating systems.

Google's argument at trial was something like, "Everyone agrees Google search is the best and that's why they use it exclusively." (Hence it should be set as a "default".) Could we imagine Microsoft arguing, "Everyone agrees Windows is the best and that's why they will never want to boot another operating system."

Maybe some relics of this sort of subtle subterfuge live on today. For example, it was historically difficult if not impossible to dual boot Windows along with non-Microsoft OS without allowing Windows to be first in the boot order, e.g., Windows partition must be the first partition. Even in the UEFI era, I see hints that this issue may still persist:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/u9siuc/how_...

Regardless of whether I have the details exactly right (I used to edit MBRs by hand to set the first active partition and have forgotten much of that knowledge now), the point is that the software/"tech" company tactic of preserving or adding deliberate hassles, i.e., "friction", is an old one. Surely it must work to have persisted for so long.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#466

Post by stephenr »

cletus wrote: post #203
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…

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…

> Google is an outlier among outlier because they do have several golden eggs but one is much bigger than all the others

What "golden egg" do Google have besides an ad-selling business? Last time I looked into it ads of various forms accounted for basically all of their revenue, somewhere around 85% or more.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#467

Post by bdd8f1df777b »

otterley wrote: post #277
SpacePortKnight wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even though Apple hasn’t been sued for Apple Maps, they are not safe from such antitrust charges. The antitrust cases move slowly so it’s possible that they just haven’t gotten to there.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#468

Post by epictluren »

ajross wrote: post #391
epictluren wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [Bing]'s not a profitable enterprise It makes $10+B per year, pennies next to Google of course, but non-negligible. https://backlinko.com/bing-users#

That's a revenue number, not profit. Also the linked article says $6.24B AFAICT.

If you scroll down a bit you could fine this

> In the 2023 fiscal year (ends on June 30), Microsoft reported $12.2 billion in search and news advertising.

Agree it is important to note this is not net, net seems to be about half according to article.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#469

Post by kevindamm »

pradn wrote: post #294
nox101 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was still a common occurrence for google to display incorrect results that weren't common wisdom. I had tons of such experiences. One I remember was searching for "healthy body weight for x of age y" where x was man,woman and y was my age. Google said 50lbs higher than I expected. I clicked through to the article. The article said the average was this high number, not a healthy weight.

Yes, totally. Automated, fallible systems. Ultimately it's a cost issue. If they wanted to, they could fact check the top million question queries - but they don't want to spend on that.

How familiar are you with the knowledge graph update process? There is actually a significant amount of spend going into reviewing the wrong answers to top queries and updating to fix/tweak them.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#470

Post by foobarding »

asddubs wrote: post #213
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…

>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 bri…

Yes this is exactly right. There is an industry of chrome extensions that exist to change the search engine to something truly unwanted (yahoo search anyone?) so that the extension author can extract rev share. They often advertise the extension as something else to trick people into installing. The target is often kids. As someone who worked at Google, I was surprised / shocked to see how many kids get targeted by these extensions. “Want to play this cool game? Just install this extension.” It is a really problematic thing without an obvious solution. Google has to fight against unwanted extensions but absolutely shouldn’t hide behind that acting like it is okay to punish competing search engines in the process.
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