8 ms·

Google is a private corporation that runs various free services, i.e. you are the product. You agreed to their terms and services. If you don't like that, you

by beders 6y ago

Google is a private corporation that runs various free services, i.e. you are the product. You agreed to their terms and services. If you don't like that, you can use a competitor. As long as there's an open internet infrastructure, there's no anti-competitive behavior. Everyone can be a google competitor of one of its services. Case in point, DuckDuckGo etc. If you want to regulate something, start with the ISPs and restore net neutrality.

agentdrtran 6y ago
"If you don't like that, you can use a competitor." This ignores the tremendos cost to creating a search engine - DDG is the only one that has been able to even make a dent in Google's monopoly.
- sjroot 6y ago
  DDG, Yahoo, Bing, are all valid alternatives. Why does Google get screwed after the enormous investment they made (with time and money) to index pages on the internet?
  - s3r3nity 6y ago
    > Why does Google get screwed after the enormous investment they made (with time and money) to index pages on the internet? If that was _all_ they did for the past 20 years to get to where they are today, there wouldn't be any problem. The issue is when you leverage this market gain to punish competitors and expand into spaces at below cost (read: negative profits) to wipe out competitors and gain footholds. See examples regarding: Maps (Mapquest), reviews / answer boxes (Yelp), among others. As a parallel example: Amazon reinvested profits to near 0 margins in their core business for years so that they could legally gain market share without resorting to anticompetitive behavior.* That's why you don't see similar breakup dialog against Amazon: they don't use this market dominance as leverage to own other markets in the same way Google has done. (Now, if they had done this for, say, boosting market share for AWS, then it _would_ be problematic.) [*] There have been some examples pointed out regarding using third-party seller data in nefarious ways, but as of current evidence and testimony those examples have been so limited that the impact to market share are virtually nil to marginal at best.
    - beders 6y ago
      It's not regulations we need, it is better education. Especially skeptical thinking. No one would expect Google to not suppress search results that harms its business. It is called capitalism. And internet citizens should know that and actively make use of competing offers. It's like going to a Honda car dealer and expecting to get offered the best deal on a Toyota.
      - s3r3nity 6y ago
        >It's not regulations we need, it is better education. Especially skeptical thinking. As someone who is pretty much exclusively against regulation - I agree with you. However regulation to ensure competitive markets is totally appropriate for government responsibility. >No one would expect Google to not suppress search results that harms its business. It is called capitalism. This is fine if Google were some upstart or new entry to the market. Example: Bing has done this for years with promoting its own products / services like Office 365 in search results. The issue comes when you own a _massive_ share of the market, then in the eyes of the law it becomes anticompetitive. > It's like going to a Honda car dealer and expecting to get offered the best deal on a Toyota. Not quite an apt comparison, as the car market is very competitive, and Honda / Toyota only have ~7-10% market share within the US, respectively. So in your example, YES it would be dumb to assume that. However if Honda had 95% market share and therefore could undercut any price Toyota offered by taking negative profits in the short-term, then it would absolutely be problematic.
    - ISL 6y ago
      If one views Google's market as information-organization, then Google has never left its market niche. Amazon absolutely uses its "flywheels" to dominate other markets. UPS and FedEx are presently facing a competitor with a trillion-dollar market cap, several cash-machine businesses, a decade-scale investing strategy, and a "your margin is my opportunity" focus. Through tenacity and bankroll, Amazon can enter and compete in new markets in ways few existing market participants can oppose. Indeed, I suspect that Amazon has begun to corner the market on long-term investors, too. Why risk investing in a smaller company that intends to duplicate Amazon's strategy when one could, instead, invest in the original zero-margin-so-we-can-take-over-the-world behemoth with a track-record of success?
- beders 6y ago
  It's called capitalism. It would be a monopoly if there's no way for a competitor to enter the market. But you are the market. It is your decision to go try a different search engine. Following your argument, google would have never made it against AltaVista, Lycos...
sjroot 6y ago
Bingo. Every device that I can think of allows you to choose a default search engine. It would be very easy for me to use something other than Google; they have no anticompetitive hold on how I explore the Internet and discover new services. This article is written by someone who would personally profit from Google’s regulation. It’s an ad for his company disguised as virtue signaling.
- shakna 6y ago
  > Every device that I can think of allows you to choose a default search engine. Users, overwhelming, do not change defaults. Period. Unless there is a step where they are shown a range of options and select one, this is not an active choice for them.
  - stickfigure 6y ago
    Citizens (at least in the US), overwhelmingly, don't vote. But that doesn't mean this isn't a democracy.
    - qshqwudhoquc 6y ago
      The second half of that sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting to get your point across.
    - tolbish 6y ago
      You were this close to stumbling on something insightful.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    Which is why Google paid the Mozilla Foundation a shitload of money to be the default search engine when Firefox was still running around 25% market share.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    So we need the government to come in because people don’t know what’s best for them?
LordHeini 6y ago
I would argue that for example Googles push for AMP is anti competitive behavour.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Nobody is charging you by the word. Go ahead and make your argument.
s3r3nity 6y ago
> As long as there's an open internet infrastructure, there's no anti-competitive behavior. While I _really_ want to agree with you here, in all due respect this is a naive view on antitrust theory. Elasticity of demand - the ease at which you as a consumer can switch to competitive offerings if price were to suddenly skyrocket - is only one factor of the calculus regarding whether or not Google is anti-competitive. You also need to look at the elasticity of supply: in this example, is it easy to enter the search market? You can learn to make a SERP or an algorithm for indexing / ranking results in an algorithms 101 class...but let's not pretend there's not a SIGNIFICANT investment needed in indexing BILLIONS of pages of documents just to be a viable competitor. This is not free by any means, and requires $millions (dozens? hundreds?) of upfront capital just to maybe get a few % points market share. In historical experience, part of the disconnect with the latter piece when discussing this with other tech people is that the easy answer is "oh you can compete with Google: you just need a better algorithm." Of which I'm not sure I can fully agree / disagree - but I _would_ press on the fact that the machine learning scale required would still be a significant upfront investment that makes market entry have steep odds.
- pb7 6y ago
  >You also need to look at the elasticity of supply: in this example, is it easy to enter the search market? You can learn to make a SERP or an algorithm for indexing / ranking results in an algorithms 101 class...but let's not pretend there's not a SIGNIFICANT investment needed in indexing BILLIONS of pages of documents just to be a viable competitor. This is not free by any means, and requires $millions (dozens? hundreds?) of upfront capital just to maybe get a few % points market share. This is not as convincing for your argument as you may think. All it sounds like is "you took a big risk, you succeeded, and now that we see it's a pretty neat thing, we're going to take it away from you, thanks, please take more risks and make more cool things so we can take them from you". The fact that this doesn't happen often is why we can have nice things. As soon as you start seizing things that become successful, the nice things stop.
- beders 6y ago
  Yeah, but following your argument, no one can ever build a better car...
ball_of_lint 6y ago
I agree that the US should regulate its ISPs and restore net neutrality, and that that's a more pressing issue than google. However, Google has had a number of practices in the past that were anti-competitive. So much so that the EU fined them 1.5 Billion last year[0]. Anti-trust law is not so simple as "Is there any competition?". In my personal opinion, Google has ongoing anti-competitive practices, but IANAL and I am far from an expert. [0] https://twitter.com/EU_Commission/status/1108324107446300672?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1108324107446300672%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fmashable.com%2Farticle%2Fgoogle-eu-antitrust-fine-ads%2F https://twitter.com/EU_Commission/status/1108324107446300672...
Const-me 6y ago
> You agreed to their terms and services. Search engine web interface doesn't require users to accept anything. Search crawler indexes the web without any contractual relations with web site owners. > you can use a competitor As a search engine user, I can and I do. However, the party most affected by the monopoly is web site owners. They can't do that. > start with the ISPs and restore net neutrality Where I live, I have a choice of 2 wired broadband ISPs, 3 wireless with comparable speeds (30-40 mbit/sec in practice). To my knowledge, none of them filters or prioritizes traffic. I generally support net neutrality but I'm not affected my the lack of these laws. This is unlike search engine monopoly: despite I don't personally use google search, most other people do.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  > Search engine web interface doesn't require users to accept anything. Search crawler indexes the web without any contractual relations with web site owners. robots.txt is obeyed by (ethical) search crawlers, including the ones from big search companies. If you don't want to be indexed, you have many tools to block things or to be served only by specific search engines.
  - Const-me 6y ago
    > If you don't want to be indexed If I had a web site that actually makes money as opposed to only consuming money for domain and hosting, I would want it to be indexed, and I would want search results from that index to be fair. By “fair” I mean I want it to only depend on the content of the site. I’m OK for search results to depend on the content of other pages on the internets which might link to it, helps to rank pages making search results more relevant. I don’t want search results to depend on my choice of web technologies (see AMP), or commercial relations between search engine and third parties. I don’t do web development, but I have some understanding of the tech involved, and I think many people have reasons to be unhappy with the status quo.
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      > I don’t want search results to depend on my choice of web technologies (see AMP), or commercial relations between search engine and third parties. (I work at Google, but not on search). My understanding is that AMP doesn't actually affect ranking. Performance affects ranking, and AMP affects performance. But so do many other things. There's also a similar conversation about placement (the "carousel"), which isn't ranking exactly, and that is affected by web technologies, in that certain placements require certain types of structure in the underlying site (metadata, etc.). AMP is one, but not the only, way to achieve this. > By “fair” I mean I want it to only depend on the content of the site. This is a definition of fairness, but it's certainly not the only one, and it may not be the best one. As a user, I want my search results to be tailored to me, which means that your ranking would depend on third parties (my priors). Like, as an alternative, Google could list all search results alphabetically by url, like a phone book. That's fair too. But probably worse. So discussions of fairness don't make sense, because there are tons of terrible but "fair" ranking strategies, and for basically any query, there's someone who thinks they should be higher and that the reason they aren't is that the system is unfair. > or commercial relations between search engine and third parties. Do you mean ad space, or something else?
rmacqueen 6y ago
> Case in point, DuckDuckGo etc You're missing the point. The anti-competitive behaviour isn't harmful against other search engines - it's against companies in the other domains where Google can leverage its nigh total search engine dominance to push its other products, e.g. Google Flights and Google Shopping. How is a flight booking service supposed to fairly compete with Google Flights when Google owns the top of the funnel where users go to search for these services? It's exactly the same thing that Microsoft did with Internet Explorer in the 90s: leverage their control of the platform (in that case, an OS) to exclude competitors for their other products (web browsers).
- scarface74 6y ago
  The top of the funnel is the url bar. People choose to go to Google.
  - rmacqueen 6y ago
    And people 'chose' to have a Microsoft operating system in the late 90s. What's your point?
    - scarface74 6y ago
      No people didn’t choose to have Microsoft. Microsoft forced OEMs to bundle Windows with all of their computers. Even if the OEM decided not to bundle Windows, they still had to pay a license fee. No personal computer comes with Chrome installed by default unless the OEM made a deal with Google to bundle it along with other crapware. Users have to explicitly download Chrome. It’s a lot easier to change your default search engine than change your operating system. The proof is in Google’s dominance. Google became popular when IE was the default browser on PCs and Safari was the default browser on Macs.
      - rmacqueen 6y ago
        The issue isn't how Google achieved its search engine dominance - it's what it is doing with that dominance. No one denies Google became the search platform of choice because it is genuinely better. That doesn't change the fact that Google is now using that position of near total dominance to stifle competition in other areas, such as e-commerce. That's the (sound) basis for the anti-trust charge.
dumbfoundded 6y ago
Google clearly meets the definition of a monopoly. It comes down to 3 things: Market power, Exclusionary Conduct, and Business Justification (1). Microsoft was charged as a monopoly but you could always just use linux. Ultimately it comes down to the fact that Google is harming the consumer by using their dominate market power in search to push their own, worse products. (1) https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/single-firm-conduct/monopolization-defined https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
- scarface74 6y ago
  How did that work out? 20 years later MS still has the same share of PC operating systems and approximately the same share of the office productivity space.
  - dumbfoundded 6y ago
    It seems to have worked well. I doubt you're using Internet Explorer to respond to me. The antitrust case was about bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. It was called the Browser Wars and related to preventing Netscape from competing. The result is pretty obvious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
    - scarface74 6y ago
      It was also about operating systems and productivity software. Now instead of having an operating system vendor with 80% market share now we have an ad vendor. Win???? Meet the new boss....
      - dumbfoundded 6y ago
        Those investigations were closed. Maybe it's more of a failure of the legal system than anything. The one thing that sticked actually seemed to work in the long run. Isn't this whole conversation around Google being a monopoly? Yes, a new boss and hopefully a new antitrust case. Hopefully more sticks this time.

by beders 6y ago

agentdrtran 6y ago

"If you don't like that, you can use a competitor." This ignores the tremendos cost to creating a search engine - DDG is the only one that has been able to even make a dent in Google's monopoly.

sjroot 6y ago
DDG, Yahoo, Bing, are all valid alternatives. Why does Google get screwed after the enormous investment they made (with time and money) to index pages on the internet?
- s3r3nity 6y ago
  > Why does Google get screwed after the enormous investment they made (with time and money) to index pages on the internet? If that was _all_ they did for the past 20 years to get to where they are today, there wouldn't be any problem. The issue is when you leverage this market gain to punish competitors and expand into spaces at below cost (read: negative profits) to wipe out competitors and gain footholds. See examples regarding: Maps (Mapquest), reviews / answer boxes (Yelp), among others. As a parallel example: Amazon reinvested profits to near 0 margins in their core business for years so that they could legally gain market share without resorting to anticompetitive behavior.* That's why you don't see similar breakup dialog against Amazon: they don't use this market dominance as leverage to own other markets in the same way Google has done. (Now, if they had done this for, say, boosting market share for AWS, then it _would_ be problematic.) [*] There have been some examples pointed out regarding using third-party seller data in nefarious ways, but as of current evidence and testimony those examples have been so limited that the impact to market share are virtually nil to marginal at best.
  - beders 6y ago
    It's not regulations we need, it is better education. Especially skeptical thinking. No one would expect Google to not suppress search results that harms its business. It is called capitalism. And internet citizens should know that and actively make use of competing offers. It's like going to a Honda car dealer and expecting to get offered the best deal on a Toyota.
    - s3r3nity 6y ago
      >It's not regulations we need, it is better education. Especially skeptical thinking. As someone who is pretty much exclusively against regulation - I agree with you. However regulation to ensure competitive markets is totally appropriate for government responsibility. >No one would expect Google to not suppress search results that harms its business. It is called capitalism. This is fine if Google were some upstart or new entry to the market. Example: Bing has done this for years with promoting its own products / services like Office 365 in search results. The issue comes when you own a _massive_ share of the market, then in the eyes of the law it becomes anticompetitive. > It's like going to a Honda car dealer and expecting to get offered the best deal on a Toyota. Not quite an apt comparison, as the car market is very competitive, and Honda / Toyota only have ~7-10% market share within the US, respectively. So in your example, YES it would be dumb to assume that. However if Honda had 95% market share and therefore could undercut any price Toyota offered by taking negative profits in the short-term, then it would absolutely be problematic.
  - ISL 6y ago
    If one views Google's market as information-organization, then Google has never left its market niche. Amazon absolutely uses its "flywheels" to dominate other markets. UPS and FedEx are presently facing a competitor with a trillion-dollar market cap, several cash-machine businesses, a decade-scale investing strategy, and a "your margin is my opportunity" focus. Through tenacity and bankroll, Amazon can enter and compete in new markets in ways few existing market participants can oppose. Indeed, I suspect that Amazon has begun to corner the market on long-term investors, too. Why risk investing in a smaller company that intends to duplicate Amazon's strategy when one could, instead, invest in the original zero-margin-so-we-can-take-over-the-world behemoth with a track-record of success?
beders 6y ago
It's called capitalism. It would be a monopoly if there's no way for a competitor to enter the market. But you are the market. It is your decision to go try a different search engine. Following your argument, google would have never made it against AltaVista, Lycos...

sjroot 6y ago

Bingo. Every device that I can think of allows you to choose a default search engine. It would be very easy for me to use something other than Google; they have no anticompetitive hold on how I explore the Internet and discover new services. This article is written by someone who would personally profit from Google’s regulation. It’s an ad for his company disguised as virtue signaling.

shakna 6y ago
> Every device that I can think of allows you to choose a default search engine. Users, overwhelming, do not change defaults. Period. Unless there is a step where they are shown a range of options and select one, this is not an active choice for them.
- stickfigure 6y ago
  Citizens (at least in the US), overwhelmingly, don't vote. But that doesn't mean this isn't a democracy.
  - qshqwudhoquc 6y ago
    The second half of that sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting to get your point across.
  - tolbish 6y ago
    You were this close to stumbling on something insightful.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Which is why Google paid the Mozilla Foundation a shitload of money to be the default search engine when Firefox was still running around 25% market share.
- scarface74 6y ago
  So we need the government to come in because people don’t know what’s best for them?

LordHeini 6y ago

I would argue that for example Googles push for AMP is anti competitive behavour.

jeffbee 6y ago
Nobody is charging you by the word. Go ahead and make your argument.

s3r3nity 6y ago

> As long as there's an open internet infrastructure, there's no anti-competitive behavior. While I _really_ want to agree with you here, in all due respect this is a naive view on antitrust theory. Elasticity of demand - the ease at which you as a consumer can switch to competitive offerings if price were to suddenly skyrocket - is only one factor of the calculus regarding whether or not Google is anti-competitive. You also need to look at the elasticity of supply: in this example, is it easy to enter the search market? You can learn to make a SERP or an algorithm for indexing / ranking results in an algorithms 101 class...but let's not pretend there's not a SIGNIFICANT investment needed in indexing BILLIONS of pages of documents just to be a viable competitor. This is not free by any means, and requires $millions (dozens? hundreds?) of upfront capital just to maybe get a few % points market share. In historical experience, part of the disconnect with the latter piece when discussing this with other tech people is that the easy answer is "oh you can compete with Google: you just need a better algorithm." Of which I'm not sure I can fully agree / disagree - but I _would_ press on the fact that the machine learning scale required would still be a significant upfront investment that makes market entry have steep odds.

pb7 6y ago
>You also need to look at the elasticity of supply: in this example, is it easy to enter the search market? You can learn to make a SERP or an algorithm for indexing / ranking results in an algorithms 101 class...but let's not pretend there's not a SIGNIFICANT investment needed in indexing BILLIONS of pages of documents just to be a viable competitor. This is not free by any means, and requires $millions (dozens? hundreds?) of upfront capital just to maybe get a few % points market share. This is not as convincing for your argument as you may think. All it sounds like is "you took a big risk, you succeeded, and now that we see it's a pretty neat thing, we're going to take it away from you, thanks, please take more risks and make more cool things so we can take them from you". The fact that this doesn't happen often is why we can have nice things. As soon as you start seizing things that become successful, the nice things stop.
beders 6y ago
Yeah, but following your argument, no one can ever build a better car...

ball_of_lint 6y ago

I agree that the US should regulate its ISPs and restore net neutrality, and that that's a more pressing issue than google. However, Google has had a number of practices in the past that were anti-competitive. So much so that the EU fined them 1.5 Billion last year[0]. Anti-trust law is not so simple as "Is there any competition?". In my personal opinion, Google has ongoing anti-competitive practices, but IANAL and I am far from an expert. [0] https://twitter.com/EU_Commission/status/1108324107446300672?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1108324107446300672%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fmashable.com%2Farticle%2Fgoogle-eu-antitrust-fine-ads%2F https://twitter.com/EU_Commission/status/1108324107446300672...

Const-me 6y ago

> You agreed to their terms and services. Search engine web interface doesn't require users to accept anything. Search crawler indexes the web without any contractual relations with web site owners. > you can use a competitor As a search engine user, I can and I do. However, the party most affected by the monopoly is web site owners. They can't do that. > start with the ISPs and restore net neutrality Where I live, I have a choice of 2 wired broadband ISPs, 3 wireless with comparable speeds (30-40 mbit/sec in practice). To my knowledge, none of them filters or prioritizes traffic. I generally support net neutrality but I'm not affected my the lack of these laws. This is unlike search engine monopoly: despite I don't personally use google search, most other people do.

joshuamorton 6y ago
> Search engine web interface doesn't require users to accept anything. Search crawler indexes the web without any contractual relations with web site owners. robots.txt is obeyed by (ethical) search crawlers, including the ones from big search companies. If you don't want to be indexed, you have many tools to block things or to be served only by specific search engines.
- Const-me 6y ago
  > If you don't want to be indexed If I had a web site that actually makes money as opposed to only consuming money for domain and hosting, I would want it to be indexed, and I would want search results from that index to be fair. By “fair” I mean I want it to only depend on the content of the site. I’m OK for search results to depend on the content of other pages on the internets which might link to it, helps to rank pages making search results more relevant. I don’t want search results to depend on my choice of web technologies (see AMP), or commercial relations between search engine and third parties. I don’t do web development, but I have some understanding of the tech involved, and I think many people have reasons to be unhappy with the status quo.
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    > I don’t want search results to depend on my choice of web technologies (see AMP), or commercial relations between search engine and third parties. (I work at Google, but not on search). My understanding is that AMP doesn't actually affect ranking. Performance affects ranking, and AMP affects performance. But so do many other things. There's also a similar conversation about placement (the "carousel"), which isn't ranking exactly, and that is affected by web technologies, in that certain placements require certain types of structure in the underlying site (metadata, etc.). AMP is one, but not the only, way to achieve this. > By “fair” I mean I want it to only depend on the content of the site. This is a definition of fairness, but it's certainly not the only one, and it may not be the best one. As a user, I want my search results to be tailored to me, which means that your ranking would depend on third parties (my priors). Like, as an alternative, Google could list all search results alphabetically by url, like a phone book. That's fair too. But probably worse. So discussions of fairness don't make sense, because there are tons of terrible but "fair" ranking strategies, and for basically any query, there's someone who thinks they should be higher and that the reason they aren't is that the system is unfair. > or commercial relations between search engine and third parties. Do you mean ad space, or something else?

rmacqueen 6y ago

> Case in point, DuckDuckGo etc You're missing the point. The anti-competitive behaviour isn't harmful against other search engines - it's against companies in the other domains where Google can leverage its nigh total search engine dominance to push its other products, e.g. Google Flights and Google Shopping. How is a flight booking service supposed to fairly compete with Google Flights when Google owns the top of the funnel where users go to search for these services? It's exactly the same thing that Microsoft did with Internet Explorer in the 90s: leverage their control of the platform (in that case, an OS) to exclude competitors for their other products (web browsers).

scarface74 6y ago
The top of the funnel is the url bar. People choose to go to Google.
- rmacqueen 6y ago
  And people 'chose' to have a Microsoft operating system in the late 90s. What's your point?
  - scarface74 6y ago
    No people didn’t choose to have Microsoft. Microsoft forced OEMs to bundle Windows with all of their computers. Even if the OEM decided not to bundle Windows, they still had to pay a license fee. No personal computer comes with Chrome installed by default unless the OEM made a deal with Google to bundle it along with other crapware. Users have to explicitly download Chrome. It’s a lot easier to change your default search engine than change your operating system. The proof is in Google’s dominance. Google became popular when IE was the default browser on PCs and Safari was the default browser on Macs.
    - rmacqueen 6y ago
      The issue isn't how Google achieved its search engine dominance - it's what it is doing with that dominance. No one denies Google became the search platform of choice because it is genuinely better. That doesn't change the fact that Google is now using that position of near total dominance to stifle competition in other areas, such as e-commerce. That's the (sound) basis for the anti-trust charge.

dumbfoundded 6y ago

Google clearly meets the definition of a monopoly. It comes down to 3 things: Market power, Exclusionary Conduct, and Business Justification (1). Microsoft was charged as a monopoly but you could always just use linux. Ultimately it comes down to the fact that Google is harming the consumer by using their dominate market power in search to push their own, worse products. (1) https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/single-firm-conduct/monopolization-defined https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

scarface74 6y ago
How did that work out? 20 years later MS still has the same share of PC operating systems and approximately the same share of the office productivity space.
- dumbfoundded 6y ago
  It seems to have worked well. I doubt you're using Internet Explorer to respond to me. The antitrust case was about bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. It was called the Browser Wars and related to preventing Netscape from competing. The result is pretty obvious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
  - scarface74 6y ago
    It was also about operating systems and productivity software. Now instead of having an operating system vendor with 80% market share now we have an ad vendor. Win???? Meet the new boss....
    - dumbfoundded 6y ago
      Those investigations were closed. Maybe it's more of a failure of the legal system than anything. The one thing that sticked actually seemed to work in the long run. Isn't this whole conversation around Google being a monopoly? Yes, a new boss and hopefully a new antitrust case. Hopefully more sticks this time.