Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

651–660 of 761 posts

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#651

Post by account42 »

asadotzler wrote: post #194
zbentley wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean it depends on Firefox for money and staff from Mozilla inc/fdn? Or that it uses a Firefox-based browser engine for HTML emails? If the latter, I don’t imagine this will have too terribly much impact. Email clients often lag behind browsers in what they can display.

It's not just the "rendering engine" it's the entire software stack from down at the bottom with the IO and networking libraries to mid-layers of JS and core rendering, to very top with the UI toolkit. There's not much in Thunderbird that isn't Firefox and it's almost all custom Mozilla code, about 20 million lines of it, and not heavily reliant on major OS libs like so many other large-scale apps.

Yeah but Thunderbird doesn't really depend on rapid development of that stack. The requirements for MUAs have been basically frozen for decades.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#652

Post by account42 »

notatallshaw wrote: post #29
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. And seat belt laws are bad for hospitals and undertakers.

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.

They are not Google's competitior, they are their partner in crime.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#653

Post by gwervc »

jjav wrote: post #601
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 This is a strange statement to be honest. Have you used google search in the last decade? google search was awesome back in the very early 2000s. If you remember those times, you know how good it was. That started deteriorating in the 2010s and it has become really useless in the last decade. Today google search results are mostl…

Google nowadays is more about hiding and manipulating results to push an agenda than letting users finding was they're searching for.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#654

Post by stephenr »

shiroiushi wrote: post #551
stephenr wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These don't bring in revenue all by themselves Thus they're not eggs at all, either golden or otherwise > but they bring users to look at ads which is where they make all their money Ad sales is their golden egg. Practically everything else is an egg truck to sell that one thing.

They're absolutely golden eggs, they just don't bring in revenue directly the way other products do. Ads by themselves aren't a golden egg. Users don't want to look at ads, and certainly aren't going to pay for them. That's why they came up with those other products, to sell ads to advertisers. It's just like newspapers: historically successful papers like the NYT didn't get rich by doing great journalism and selling…

You're making the mistake of thinking the pair of eyeballs viewing the ad is the customer/user in this.

The pair of eyeballs are an integral part of the ad product that is sold to customers who buy ad spots.

Cows don't want to be eaten but burgers are absolutely McDonalds golden egg.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#655

Post by LoganDark »

fsflover wrote: post #613
usr1106 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Choice seems to be an euphemism for everything related to private IT: For PCs there is Microsoft vs Apple. (I use Linux, but that's not for the broad masses currently.) For phones you either pay a premium to enter the Apple walled garden or you prostitute your digital life and get spied on by Google and its advertising cancer. What would we say if there were only 2 car makers, 2 grocery chains, 2 companies building h…

> For phones you either pay a premium to enter the Apple walled garden or you prostitute your digital life and get spied on by Google There is also a GNU/Linux option here. Sent from my Librem 5. > I use Linux, but that's not for the broad masses currently Unless "broad massses" require some unique MS Office or Photoshop functionality, they can easily switch to Linux. My relatives did and are happy.

> Sent from my Librem 5.

How well is that holding up nowadays, as a phone?

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#656

Post by meinersbur »

n4r9 wrote: post #626
ffgjgf1 wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not just stop making the anti-competitive payments and terminate the agreements. Money saved. Problem solved. It’s only solved if nobody does it. If Google stops those payments unilaterally MS would just make a slightly cheaper deal with Apple..

That sounds bad for Google... ?

I think the point is that if Google is not allowed to make such payments, neither is Microsoft (unless they want to risk the same lawsuit against them). Apple will stay with Google since a change would probably be unpopular with users. End result: Default search engines stay the same, but Google doesn't have to pay for it anymore.

I think this ignores Apple could still develop their own search engine, as they did with Maps, and pocket the ad revenue themselves.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#657

Post by n4r9 »

brazzledazzle wrote: post #527
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 had a coworker insist on using ddg for privacy reasons and he was a bit smug about it even though meetings where he was presenting while searching the web always started with a ddg search and ended with him sighing and giving up by using !g to switch to google. I think, even in it's less than ideal state, people still underestimate how much time google's tailored search can save you when you train it to figure out…

I'm curious, what kind of presentations involve searching the web on the spot?

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#658

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #517
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 expect this to be bad for everyone except Google if the ruling holds." If the decision will not be bad for Google, then why would Google spend so much money and time to defend against it.^1 Why not just stop making the anti-competitive payments and terminate the agreements. Money saved. Problem solved. We can now safely say it is not a defense to claim "Google is the best" and that's why people choose it. Anti-com…

It makes no sense to "expect this will be bad for everyone except Google" based on this opinion. "This" has yet to be defined. The court has not even set a date for the trial to determine the remedy yet. All we know at this point is that Google broke the law. We do not know what will be the consequences.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#659

Post by j_maffe »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #426
j_maffe wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No body is forced to do anything. Google can just not pay that money and lose that share of the market. They're not doing that because they want to preserve their monopoly status.

This is silly. People are forced to do all kinds of things. They are forced at gunpoint, they are forced via laws, they are forced via incentives that are so strong they may as well be a gun. As are companies. So, in theory, you are wrong. In practice, even more wrong. If management decided to not pay this money, and gave up that positioning to a competitor, they would be fired. If the board allowed it to continue, t…

How in God's name can someone be forced (compelled by force or necessity : involuntary) by an incentive? No, your usage of the word is against the one used by the code of law regarding market regulation, simple as that.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#660

Post by [deleted] »

blauditore wrote: post #629
theshrike79 wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People always _always_ forget that Google today is an ad company first. They do search, phones and mobile operating systems as side projects.

By that logic, any product/organization that generates revenue mainly through ads would be an ad company. Search is the product that (probably) carries most of the ads revenues, so that's the main product, and ads are the means for generating revenue around it.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN