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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

#681

Post by dmnmnm »

lozenge wrote: post #329
everfrustrated wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And because MS wants to increase its userbase on IOS and macOS. Meanwhile Windows Start Menu is locked to Edge and Bing.

> Meanwhile Windows Start Menu is locked to Bing

Not in the EU market.

They recently decoupled that part (search, but I don't know if they did it for edge too) and made bing in the start menu a store app that can be uninstalled if you don't want it to be available on your system anymore.

And are providing APIs for others to use:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/apps/develop/searc...

The only reason why you can't use google there is because.. Google doesn't care. Just like how they never released apps for the Windows Phone store, they have no intention of touching the one on Windows.

Microsoft has been hit so many times by the EU that they really care to respect our regulations now. Not just the "letter of the law" but the "spirit of the law" too.

The same should (or has already happened, I don't know.. because I actually use Edge and didn't care to look deeper into it) happen for Edge:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/5/23859537/microsoft-windows...

Of note, among the things that have changed recently in Windows 11, you can disable the news page from msn on Widgets, and Teams is no longer a part of Windows.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#682

Post by cueo »

alvah wrote: post #550
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" 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…

> Honestly, if I wanted the opinion of randomnumbers45123 on Reddit, I'd just search Reddit.

Reddit search sucks, in my experience I get much better results using Google vs Reddit search.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#683

Post by jsnell »

crazygringo wrote: post #422
jsnell wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, given you don't have any evidence to the contrary, the correct response here is "wow, I hadn't heard of that, please tell me more", rather than to assume that if you haven't heard of something, it must be false. I don't know why there was no reporting of this, but it is what Gabriel Wineberg testified to under oath. See the trial transcripts, 2023-09-21, 1:36pm[0]. > Q. And since this agreement was signed in 20…

Thanks for that, that's very interesting. And indeed, has had no reporting whatsoever as far as I can tell. Do you know if Microsoft, Yahoo, and Ecosia also pay for placement? Since those are the other options Safari provides? You're right, I shouldn't have said it was false -- I thought I'd followed this subject very closely, and this is definitely not common knowledge at all. I stand corrected, thanks.

I haven't seen any details on what arrangements the other search engines have, this only came up during the DDG testimony.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#684

Post by aergh345ygq »

ffgjgf1 wrote: post #575
aergh345ygq wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So really it's just a loss for everyone all around. But at least nobody is being anti-competitive I guess.

Except Apple and Mozilla for whom it’s a huge part of their profits/revenue respect

Deals are mutually beneficial. If Apple and Mozilla were both taking Google's offer it's because neither felt they had more to gain from developing their own search engine to compete outright in the meantime or from offering someone else's as a default. There might be something to the argument Mozilla isn't in a position to reject the money because they're sort of a shambling corpse at this point but Apple is about as far from a desperate company as you can get.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#685

Post by paulpan »

throwaway88222 wrote: post #283
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…

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…

> Apple probably had much more freedom becsuse of their size and power and I don't really understand why it is not possible to add a custom search engine. There is no advantage for Apple to not allow this.

I think you're giving Apple too much credit. They are too myopic and too focused on optimizing their current financials, especially under Tim Cook. To build a new search engine would mean 1) tossing away the $20B Google offers, and 2) spend potentially billions to build or acquire something viable.

Would be unacceptable to the Apple institutional shareholders. Akin to what Meta tried to do with their Reality Labs.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#686

Post by ImJamal »

aziaziazi wrote: post #581
ImJamal wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome is the default on Chromebooks which has a decent marketshare.

Are you sure about that? As I said in another comment that’s not my experience. Might be wrong, I’ll double check tomorrow at work.

I am 100% positive. Which browser do you think is the default on a Chromebook?

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#687

Post by bdd8f1df777b »

jonhohle wrote: post #495
bdd8f1df777b wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem isn’t that Google has search and makes Android. It’s that they have search and paid android phone makes and Apple oodles of money to make Google search the default. Apple would not need to pay anyone to make their search (or maps or browser) the default. It would be the default on Apple devices and not used much outside of that.

One would argue that Apple is abusing their monopoly on iOS devices to advance their map business. One could also argue that iOS is not a monopoly since Android has greater market share. Who will win is not settled yet. Right now, the DOJ hasn't come this far, but it is not given that they won't ever go there.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#688

Post by paulpan »

xpe wrote: post #96

After the DoJ vs. Apple suit was mentioned in March, I did some research before about what the DoJ views unfavorably in this arena. My bullet points were useful to a lot of people here then, so perhaps it can help inform some of the conversation here too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39782290 After some research, the practices below may capture much (though not necessarily all) of what the Department of Justi…

The premise is actually quite similar to the US vs. Standard Oil antitrust case from a century ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil_Co._of_New_Jersey...

Just as Standard Oil used their position to force railroads and other distributors to only carry their oil and not of their competitors', the same case here with Google.

Arguably all these antitrust cases, while better late than never, are at least a decade late. If it was filed in the early 2010s, then possibly there could've been viable competitors to Google, Apple, Amazon, and even Meta. But now these tech titans all have unassailable positions.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#689

Post by n4r9 »

n4r9 wrote: post #657
brazzledazzle wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

As if to answer my own question, I just came out of a call which involved me sharing my screen while I searched the web for info on the memory consumption of classes in dotnet. I take it back!

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#690

Post by jfdjkfdhjds »

ruszki wrote: post #635
jonny_eh wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would Chrome make money? Accepting $1B a year to make Google the default search engine?

Just like how they do now: selling your data.

thanks for saying out loud.

its uncanny how even people in the industry lives in the make believe world where google is a charity, moving mountains just so you can have a browser with "faster JavaScript" (which it's not, its all prefetch and marketing)

google made more money from the features they normalized by strong arming the w3c via chrome than anything else.

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