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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

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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" I disagree. 100% they had a better product, but they have absolutely mangled it over the last few updates. Honestly, if I wanted the opinion of randomnumbers45123 on Reddit, I'd just search Reddit. Google achieved dominance ~25 years ago by being better than the alternatives, and the other search engines pretty much withered away rapidly. They (Google) are in a very precarious posi…

>I'd just search Reddit.

You forget something. Reddit's search engine has historically been absolute dogshit. In fact there was a short time period it just opened a google window back in the day because they struggled to get it to work. It's gotten better in recent years but it's relatively meh compared to just having google search the reddit domain. Lol

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

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> 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.

Lol, no google isn't out to get you rightwingers.

Their only "agenda" is quite leaked at this point, it's to push ads. The more you have to dig, the more ads they get to show you. The more times they can show you ads, the more times they get to charge advertisers those pennies per show.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

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I think openai is the most notable org taking swings at Google. At least Google seems to feel that way. Might just be the Silicon Valley bubble

While true, it is also notable that ChatGPT is not a search engine, SearchGPT is not live yet, and that AI results have only further diminished the quality of search results in Google Search. If anything, OpenAI has only served to further exacerbate and accelerate the inevitable decline of Google Search.

So you agree?

ChatGPT isn’t marketed as a search engine, but it’s essentially how it’s used. SearchGPT is a recognition of that.

And yeah OpenAI is making Google search worse _and_ providing a solution at the same time.

Sounds like a run at Google to me.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

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> By that logic, any product/organization that generates revenue mainly through ads would be an ad company. What logic? The person you’re replying to didn’t explain their reasoning, so any logic you’re seeing is being constructed in your own head and projected onto someone else. In other words, you’re likely responding to an argument you’ve seen (and disagreed with) before instead of what that poster had in mind (whi…

Last I checked Google doesn't 'sell your information to people', but it does offer hyper targeted ads; the ethics of both scenarios are deeply rotten to me.

> Last I checked Google doesn't 'sell your information to people', but it does offer hyper targeted ads

So you understand what I’m talking about. I didn’t mean selling the information directly. Because why would they, they make more money by keeping the data to themselves and selling you out indirectly from the information they gathered over and over.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

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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 wit…

They could, and they should, but they definitely won't. Similar to how they use just a ChatGPT anonymized wrapper for their "advanced AI features", they'll just outsource search to some big player as well.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#676

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"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.

Isn't it reasonable to assume that one of the consequences will be "Google, and nobody else, can do this," therefore applying OP's logic?

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

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Occasionally pushing a bad update is a symptom of having 10x as many Devs pushing 10x as many features each month. Even if Googles QA process was triple as good as Mozilla's, the users would still see more breakage.

I don't think you can scale or compare like that numerically. Every commit isn't a chance for it to break for users because they bundle however many commits into a release and resources required to test the release don't scale per commit.

More devs writing more code causes more bugs.

Seems to make sense.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

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post #640

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> By that logic, any product/organization that generates revenue mainly through ads would be an ad company. What logic? The person you’re replying to didn’t explain their reasoning, so any logic you’re seeing is being constructed in your own head and projected onto someone else. In other words, you’re likely responding to an argument you’ve seen (and disagreed with) before instead of what that poster had in mind (whi…

Last I checked Google doesn't 'sell your information to people', but it does offer hyper targeted ads; the ethics of both scenarios are deeply rotten to me.

Yes, because they get a competitive advantage when they hold all that information for themselves.

They have your email (gmail), location history (google maps), search history (google), viewing history (youtube) and know pretty much every site you've visited (chrome + ad network).

This is the data they aggregate and sell to advertisers so that their ads can target highly specific groups of people - they don't want the advertisers getting the direct dataset, that would be competition.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#679

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Out of Google's 2023 revenue of 305.63e9 US-$, 77.8% (237.86e9 US-$) was advertising revenue. Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-reven... They are obviously not only an ad company, but GP only claimed that they are an ad company "first". Can you please clarify which part you consider oversimplified?

Consider the case of a YouTuber who gets most of their revenue through superchats. They regularly upload videos, a couple times a week, and receive ad revenue and the od sponsorship deal. Once a week they do a livestream Q&A which is where the bulk of that superchat revenue comes from. Are they a livestreaming "first" business-man/company/sole trader? Revenue sources are not necessarily the be all and end all of dete…

> Revenue sources are not necessarily the be all

True, but in addition to the revenue Google ALSO tailors all their products to facilitate their advertising products. It's sort of like a singer who sells merch. The merch makes money but it also props up the singers singing career and funds tours.

Chrome revolves around ads, android revolves around ads, maps revolves around ads, gmail revolves around ads. If you take a hard look at all their products their all linked to Google's advertisement offerings in one way or another. That, to me, means adtech is their main line of business.

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