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Look, I’m not informed or an expert here, but if it’s being given away for free, then the search itself is not the “product”. The way I understand it, Google’s

Look, I’m not informed or an expert here, but if it’s being given away for free, then the search itself is not the “product”. The way I understand it, Google’s monopoly is over the ad market. Stoller wrote a book on the subject which I never properly got through in its entirety, but it included a deep dive on what a monopoly is. You are correct - market share is not an anti-trust violation in it’s own. My assumption is that they will be arguing over whether Google is exercising its total control over the system to prevent competition from emerging, and using that control to extract all the value for itself. All while crippling functionality for the customers, not us search engine users in this case - but the advertisers.

huitzitziltzin 3y ago
The DoJ is welcome to make a claim on monopolizing the ad market. The case here is about monopolizing the search market.
- scyzoryk_xyz 3y ago
  Isn’t the whole point that they’re tightly intertwined? You pay to advertise in the relevant search results of your customers.
  - huitzitziltzin 3y ago
    That’s not the law, so it’s irrelevant to the legal issues.
    - scyzoryk_xyz 3y ago
      I don’t mean the law. I mean how the actual ad/search product actually works. As a Google customer I pay them to present my stuff the way I want it to my customers when they search for stuff about the things I sell. That’s the product, no?
      - huitzitziltzin 3y ago
        That’s not relevant to the monopolization claim here though.
    - HWR_14 3y ago
      On the contrary, antitrust law has a lot of rules about using dominance in one industry to prop up another.
jahewson 3y ago
There’s a 2nd, later case where the DoJ is suing Google over their ad network: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-google-monopolizing-digital-advertising-technologies https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl...
TheCoelacanth 3y ago
> You are correct - market share is not an anti-trust violation in it’s own. I think that entire line of jurisprudence is a tragic mistake. The wording of the law is crystal clear: "shall not monopolize", not "shall not monopolize unless it's just a really good product". A 95% market share should not be allowed under any circumstances.
- huitzitziltzin 3y ago
  There are a whole bunch of edge cases you aren’t thinking about. Markets can be highly local (hospital markets, eg.), firms go out of business, new products enter new markets (smart phones, tablets), even defining “the market” is hard (does Sirius XM have a meaningful “monopoly” on satellite radio?). So your “make 95% market share illegal” idea is quite challenging (actually impossible) to work out
  - flangola7 3y ago
    Difficult but absolutely not impossible. There's whole domains of law dedicated to identifying and defining these kinds of fuzzy edge cases. Anyone that tells you it is impossible has malign motivations.
    - huitzitziltzin 3y ago
      Hey - if you think you can do it go ahead. No one in the economics profession would oppose a usable definition of market which covered all of these cases (or even a subset of them) and made it easy. We aren’t failing to offer definitions here bc we’re in the tank for big tech. To immediately suggest we have malign motivations isn’t charitable. It’s genuinely a hard problem.
    - YurgenJurgensen 3y ago
      Wouldn't fixing all those edge cases defeat the point of something simple like a 95% rule? You'd be at the point where 95% is neither necessary nor sufficient and all of those laws covering the edge cases are the real law.
jsunderland323 3y ago
I don’t think the problem is Google being the best at search. The problem is that you cannot possibly have your user or customer’s best interest at heart when you own the most dominant browser and smartphone os by market share AND when you’re a search engine and ad exchange. Owning those lower level parts of the stack (os and browser), which are network effects loaded, is the anti-competitive piece. Google as a default to other browsers doesn’t bother me. It’s the being the ad broker, the exchange, the browser, the os and the search engine that are problematic. They have demonstrated over two decades that they cannot protect the interests of either their users or the ad buyers. Disabling cookies is essentially meaningless when you’re forced to sign into your browser or os. Absolutely no ad exchange can act in the interest of their users’ privacy when they have a browser or os that mandates you to sign in. And yes, even ad buyers get screwed by Google’s exchange (Google’s real customers). There are many fraudulent publishers that stack ads but get paid out for false impressions, Google still collects on fake impressions and has little interest in decreasing the fraud since they have a 30% take on the impressions. The ideal outcome is that chrome is spun off, android is spun off, and the ad exchange is spun off. Google can keep its suite of productivity tools and search engine and run ad words. That’s a completely reasonable and still extremely valuable business that is highly defensible. I think their interests can align with their users and customers in that scenario. As it is right now, I don’t think you can have the business model they have and not have serious conflicts of interest with users and advertisers.
- huitzitziltzin 3y ago
  Essentially none of the issues you cite are antitrust issues. You could be right or wrong on the merits but they won’t be part of this case about the monopolization of the search market. (There are really important antitrust issues in the ad exchange but that isn’t the case the government brought!)
  - jsunderland323 3y ago
    I was mostly venting into the void (sorry). I admittedly don't know the first thing about antitrust. But to your earlier point: > On the other hand, the case that Google is going to make (and which I think is going to be really hard for the government to overcome) is this: we (google) give our product away for free and so do our competitors. What’s more, the cost of switching search engines is literally zero: just type Bing instead of Google. Don't you think the counter argument to this, is, "No it's not that easy to just go to bing when you buy out the default search on rivals' browsers and operating systems and have the browser and mobile os with the world's largest market shares"? I get that the attack here is directly on search but it would be surprising to me if this wasn't part of the case. It seems insane to bring this case if there isn't a component focused on the browser and OS conflict of interest in search.

huitzitziltzin 3y ago

The DoJ is welcome to make a claim on monopolizing the ad market. The case here is about monopolizing the search market.

scyzoryk_xyz 3y ago
Isn’t the whole point that they’re tightly intertwined? You pay to advertise in the relevant search results of your customers.
- huitzitziltzin 3y ago
  That’s not the law, so it’s irrelevant to the legal issues.
  - scyzoryk_xyz 3y ago
    I don’t mean the law. I mean how the actual ad/search product actually works. As a Google customer I pay them to present my stuff the way I want it to my customers when they search for stuff about the things I sell. That’s the product, no?
    - huitzitziltzin 3y ago
      That’s not relevant to the monopolization claim here though.
  - HWR_14 3y ago
    On the contrary, antitrust law has a lot of rules about using dominance in one industry to prop up another.

jahewson 3y ago

There’s a 2nd, later case where the DoJ is suing Google over their ad network: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-google-monopolizing-digital-advertising-technologies https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl...

TheCoelacanth 3y ago

> You are correct - market share is not an anti-trust violation in it’s own. I think that entire line of jurisprudence is a tragic mistake. The wording of the law is crystal clear: "shall not monopolize", not "shall not monopolize unless it's just a really good product". A 95% market share should not be allowed under any circumstances.

huitzitziltzin 3y ago
There are a whole bunch of edge cases you aren’t thinking about. Markets can be highly local (hospital markets, eg.), firms go out of business, new products enter new markets (smart phones, tablets), even defining “the market” is hard (does Sirius XM have a meaningful “monopoly” on satellite radio?). So your “make 95% market share illegal” idea is quite challenging (actually impossible) to work out
- flangola7 3y ago
  Difficult but absolutely not impossible. There's whole domains of law dedicated to identifying and defining these kinds of fuzzy edge cases. Anyone that tells you it is impossible has malign motivations.
  - huitzitziltzin 3y ago
    Hey - if you think you can do it go ahead. No one in the economics profession would oppose a usable definition of market which covered all of these cases (or even a subset of them) and made it easy. We aren’t failing to offer definitions here bc we’re in the tank for big tech. To immediately suggest we have malign motivations isn’t charitable. It’s genuinely a hard problem.
  - YurgenJurgensen 3y ago
    Wouldn't fixing all those edge cases defeat the point of something simple like a 95% rule? You'd be at the point where 95% is neither necessary nor sufficient and all of those laws covering the edge cases are the real law.

jsunderland323 3y ago

I don’t think the problem is Google being the best at search. The problem is that you cannot possibly have your user or customer’s best interest at heart when you own the most dominant browser and smartphone os by market share AND when you’re a search engine and ad exchange. Owning those lower level parts of the stack (os and browser), which are network effects loaded, is the anti-competitive piece. Google as a default to other browsers doesn’t bother me. It’s the being the ad broker, the exchange, the browser, the os and the search engine that are problematic. They have demonstrated over two decades that they cannot protect the interests of either their users or the ad buyers. Disabling cookies is essentially meaningless when you’re forced to sign into your browser or os. Absolutely no ad exchange can act in the interest of their users’ privacy when they have a browser or os that mandates you to sign in. And yes, even ad buyers get screwed by Google’s exchange (Google’s real customers). There are many fraudulent publishers that stack ads but get paid out for false impressions, Google still collects on fake impressions and has little interest in decreasing the fraud since they have a 30% take on the impressions. The ideal outcome is that chrome is spun off, android is spun off, and the ad exchange is spun off. Google can keep its suite of productivity tools and search engine and run ad words. That’s a completely reasonable and still extremely valuable business that is highly defensible. I think their interests can align with their users and customers in that scenario. As it is right now, I don’t think you can have the business model they have and not have serious conflicts of interest with users and advertisers.

huitzitziltzin 3y ago
Essentially none of the issues you cite are antitrust issues. You could be right or wrong on the merits but they won’t be part of this case about the monopolization of the search market. (There are really important antitrust issues in the ad exchange but that isn’t the case the government brought!)
- jsunderland323 3y ago
  I was mostly venting into the void (sorry). I admittedly don't know the first thing about antitrust. But to your earlier point: > On the other hand, the case that Google is going to make (and which I think is going to be really hard for the government to overcome) is this: we (google) give our product away for free and so do our competitors. What’s more, the cost of switching search engines is literally zero: just type Bing instead of Google. Don't you think the counter argument to this, is, "No it's not that easy to just go to bing when you buy out the default search on rivals' browsers and operating systems and have the browser and mobile os with the world's largest market shares"? I get that the attack here is directly on search but it would be surprising to me if this wasn't part of the case. It seems insane to bring this case if there isn't a component focused on the browser and OS conflict of interest in search.