11 ms·

Google’s dominance under siege: Antitrust trial threatens sweeping changes

153 points by pg_1234 3y ago

mg 3y ago
What is Google's biggest moat these days?
- automatic6131 3y ago
  Every new startup sends their capital to Google to buy ads for their business. You make a new product, want to sell, where do you go? Marketing. Facebook and Google are the two silverback gorillas in online advertising. So, still ads.
- stephc_int13 3y ago
  I'd say either Chrome, Android or YouTube.
  - rasz 3y ago
    porque no los tress
- loveparade 3y ago
  YouTube
- m463 3y ago
  Identification. Google tracks and identifies the world. Notice that many google sub-sites are being folded into google.com? For example, kaiser now references google.com instead of googletagmanager.com so people are tracked individually when handling their medical issues. and they do it offline too.
- lmpdev 3y ago
  The combination of immense capital reserves and existing horizontal integration over a number of industries They have over a quarter of a trillion USD in capital reserves and have acquired (and subsequently given up on) over 250 companies They are in my view, Microsoft in its anti-trust era. This is only amplified by the more pervasive and aggressively anti-consumer industrial-user relations policy settings than the 1990s had
- ricardo81 3y ago
  The whole thing. They garner more revenue per search due to their critical mass of searchers and advertisers and can use this money to pay to be the default search option in browsers and mobile, to the point it would be loss making for any other search engine. Their analytics is present on many top sites so they can use browsing patterns to improve their results, on top of telemetry they get from Chrome. Perhaps only Facebook has something close to rivalling that kind of information. Googlebot and to an extent Bingbot are granted access to most sites that want to be crawled. Any new entrants have to jump through lots of hoops (e.g. Cloudflare) simply to crawl the same web they do. The UK's Competition and Market's Authority estimated that a credible competitor to Google would need to spend $20 billion just to be in a position to compete. There's a couple of companies that could realistically compete with their financial clout, one of them is paid ~$20billion a year to be the search default on iOS.
- devsda 3y ago
  Should be Chrome and Android. It is very difficult for a new player to grow in these areas. Both Chrome and Android are being "improved" with features that are beneficial for Google to build a moat around its search, ad and other businesses. In the early days it was search that drove chrome adoption and now its the other way around. With the low quality of search results, I doubt many would even notice if the default search engine is switched to something else.
  - chrisco255 3y ago
    Chrome isn't really a moat though given that it's been forked by Microsoft, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, and others.
    - turminal 3y ago
      With none of the forks removing any of the harmful features. Except possibly Brave, which replaces them with their own.
      - chrisco255 3y ago
        What harmful features would that be? Virtually all the forks remove Google's integrations.
  - spaceman_2020 3y ago
    Android keeps losing market share among the affluent, monetizable audience. Apple is absolutely tearing Android apart in the Indian “premium” smartphone market right now.
- acatton 3y ago
  Its search index, in my personal opinion. A quarter of the websites on the internet are behind Cloudlfare/Akamai with anti-scraping enabled. Of course they want to end up on Google, so Google/Bing get a green light from Cloudflare. IMHO, that basically makes it impossible for anybody else to spin up an index and compete with Google Search. They cannot just scrape, they also have to work around anti-scraping measure by these CDNs. They have to maintain these workarounds, while trying to scrape as much as google has scraped so far, which is already a feat in itself. Once you have this, you have everything: a critical mass of users, ads, data set for AI, ... I dare anybody to scrape Reddit or Stackoverflow from scratch today.
  - halflings 3y ago
    Like you said, Bing has their own search index. Why isn't everyone using Bing?
    - acatton 3y ago
      Because Google's index is much larger. According to estimates[1], Google indexes ~60 billions pages and Bing is only ~4 billions. If these numbers are close to reality, Bing index is 7% of Google's. IMHO, this leads to all the problems people complain about Bing. The algorithm is shit because they have less data to fine tune it, people use it less because the algorithm is shit or the results don't show up, so they cannot collect data to fine tune the algorithm more, ... [1] https://www.worldwidewebsize.com/ https://www.worldwidewebsize.com/
    - blackhaz 3y ago
      I'd dare to say one of the reasons is quite simple - Bing's ugly UX. When Google was just starting to gain popularity its search results weren't much better than Altavista's. Yet, its interface was much cleaner, it loaded and spewed out results faster, the overall experience was better. Bing is the Altavista. The user is bombarded with cookies, logotypes, ads, maps - all that complex layout right from the start. As a user you feel napalmed by information, and nobody likes that.
      - 3y ago
- mythz 3y ago
  The last Google service I'm likely to always use and pay for is YouTube Premium. I should be able to move off everything else after I retire.
- chrisco255 3y ago
  Android and YouTube. Secondarily I would say Workspace (Gmail, Meetings, Drive, etc for teams) and Cloud.
- notarobot123 3y ago
  I think it's the brand. Google is deeply embedded in schools, workplaces and the public imagination as synonymous with web search and collaborative digital tools. It has a monopoly on the public mindset for what the internet is for and how we can meaningfully use it.
- paulpauper 3y ago
  all of it? Adsense, adwords, youtube, android, chrome, search, gmail, etc.
sylware 3y ago
Not only google, all Big Tech. Major Big Tech share holders must be accountable (vanguard/blackrock).
stephc_int13 3y ago
It would be good, but unfortunately unlikely to happen.
- Technotroll 3y ago
  I think it's safe to say that Google has had a prominent position, and that they have indeed abused that position to gain an unfair market advantage over other companies due to ad placement and strategic cooperations. I'm sure Google will remain the top search engine despite this anti-trust case though, at least if they can keep up with the competition.
  - starbugs 3y ago
    The market is changing. Many people now prefer not to even use search if they can help it, because it's got so messed up. They now have to compete against ChatGPT and they are late in the game. To make things worse, their reputation suffered a great deal with techies who despise their whole image and are actively trying to "degoogle" their lives. This may well be the beginning of a slow downturn since these people have an influence on the tech choices made by more "normal" users. What if it doesn't even matter if they can keep a dominant position of their search engine? These antitrust cases appear to be just a sign of a much larger pile of trouble ahead for Google.
    - omscs99 3y ago
      > Many people now prefer not to even use search if they can help it, because it's got so messed up. According to what exactly? Journalist speculation?
      - starbugs 3y ago
        It's just a logical consequence of search being convoluted with ads and content you aren't interested in (SEO). If your search query resembles anything close to a question, ChatGPT will outperform the plain old search results w.r.t. the time users have to invest to get to an answer or solution. It's something I have experienced myself and observed in my surroundings, including many comments on HN that point to the same direction.
QuesnayJr 3y ago
Would this spell the end of Google paying Firefox to be the default search? What happens to Firefox then?
- silisili 3y ago
  I think Google just pays Mozilla to give the semblance of competition - Firefox usage is a blip on the radar these days. I guess it depends on where Chrome ends up. As part of Google, payments would continue. As an independent venture, not a chance.
  - matthewfelgate 3y ago
    Firefox is to Google as Apple is to Windows.
    - popcorncowboy 3y ago
      As Apple was to Windows.
      - matthewfelgate 3y ago
        Windows desktop share ~80% Mac OS ~10%
        popcorncowboy 3y ago
        Market caps ($B) '01-now: MSFT: $358 -> $2,480 vs AAPL: $8 -> $2,790 Apple is no-one's Firefox.
        matthewfelgate 3y ago
        > Apple is no-one's Firefox. It is in terms of OS market share.
        3y ago
brenainn 3y ago
Under the headline is a video with the tagline "Google Flights has a new feature to help you save money - An upgrade to Google Flights will tell you the best time to book your next getaway." Hilarious.
- stanac 3y ago
  I thought it was related to the article. Probably automatically matched by "google" tag or something like that.
  - b112 3y ago
    Google search is cratering from what I see, and that probably means context for their ads, too. After all, this is all related. Lately, I've been messing with wifi and hostapd. I get massive maps images, and pictures of hotels in the first 1/2 of my respones. I presume "hostapd" is a close mistype to "hotel", and people are searching for high speed wifi, so they may be searching for 80211ac or some such. Or likely google just sees "wifi thing -> wifi", and now I'm apparently searching for "hotel wifi". Great. I can't get anything meaningful, unless I add -hotel. They've gone so overboard with loose context matches, that I can't imagine their ad placement has much value.
    - tyingq 3y ago
      I don't think it's an ad. It looks more like Livenowfox.com's content management platform using post tags to insert 'related videos'.
- echelon 3y ago
  I'm fine with Google having a lackluster flights booking app. I'm not fine with it showing up by default. I'm seriously pissed off when stores (Google Play Store, App Store, Amazon, et al.) show ads when I search for a brand name. Ads show up first for popular item categories, and sometimes take all the space above the fold. I was looking for HBO Max this weekend. Disney came up first. How is that permissable? To sell your competitor's name is wholly uncompetitive. A shakedown of every business with an internet presence. Just because Google was in the right place at the right time shouldn't give it license to continue this shitty behavior -- without innovating or delivering value -- for the rest of all time.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
makomk 3y ago
Historically, Microsoft hasn't just paid to make Bing the default, it's required companies to disable the ability to change that default, meaning that all searches from the built-in search bar on (for example) Android devices from every major mobile carrier in the US went to Bing regardless of what users wanted. I wouldn't be surprised if they look to repeat this if they're allowed to buy the default and Google aren't; Yahoo paid Mozilla to be the default search in Firefox in the USA for a while and it didn't do much for them because people just switched, and the whole reason Google started paying so much to be default on Android devices is basically to stop Microsoft from doing that. That is, the outcome Microsoft seems to be looking for is one where they can reduce both consumer choice and competition by paying to make it more difficult to switch to non-Bing search engines and not allowing Google to pay companies more to make their more widely preferred search engine the default and not lock out the ability to change that default.
matthewfelgate 3y ago
Windows has a dominance of the desktop Operating System market. People can much more easily switch search engines than Operating Systems.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  This is more untrue today than it ever was. Between most things being browser based and the most popular consumer software being subscription based and allowed to be run on multiple platforms, it’s easier to switch now than ever. And then there are Electron apps…
  - matthewfelgate 3y ago
    Easier than opening your browser and going to Bing?
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      Explain?
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    Largely I agree, but going from 99% untrue to just 90% untrue doesn't make it not wrong.
edpichler 3y ago
Maybe it's not related but, talking about search engines, I have been using only DuckDuckGo and I am very happy with the results. I never have to switch back.
- eole666 3y ago
  I tried duckduckgo for a while.. I don't know if it's because my main language is french, but I found the results really worse than google's and so I used the !g bang really often. I switched to startpage (proxy seargh engine giving google results), it was ok but a bit slow. Now I use Kagi search, you have to pay for it, but results are great (often better than google) : less SEO spam, a lot of tuning possible, custom searches, small web searches, good image and map searches. And it is supposed to respect your privacy and private data.
  - PoignardAzur 3y ago
    For what it's worth, I'm French too, and DuckDuckGo works for me 95% of the time. It definitely has a different "flavor" of results though.
- yummypaint 3y ago
  Me too, now I find google outright unusable. The whole first page is ads! Adapting to DDG is a much smaller adjustment than using subject heading search and traditional library tools.
  - spaceman_2020 3y ago
    The other day, I wanted to look up the Asian games medals tally for all the countries. Google kept showing me pages with only the medals tally for my country. Had to use DDG to find the right page.
- ImPleadThe5th 3y ago
  I just recently switched and am surprised how well it works. Ever so often it'll serve me up some completely unrelated stuff, but there's kind of a charm in that. "Oh the thing I am looking for is really not that popular, neat". Unlike google where it'll hit you with tons of seemingly related results.
ankit219 3y ago
The article is full of hyperbole. > it's still too early to tell if U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta will side with the Justice Department and try to handcuff one of the world's most dominant tech companies. Till this point, only DOJ has been arguing their case, and Google will get a chance in a few days according to the schedule. DOJ's entire case rests on the theory of defaults from the arguments they have made. Covered extensively here[1]. Google refuted that with saying how edge and safari are default and yet people switch to chrome. Same with Bing and Google search. So they focused on how mobile makes it hard to switch defaults. Another vector they went to was how Google Search ads is a market in itself. That would be another antitrust case about advertising dominance, but in here they seem like an add on. It is tough to prove Google is abusing it's monopoly and there is a customer harm. At this point it is hard to tell from the outside given only one side has presented it's case. [1]: https://www.bigtechontrial.com/ https://www.bigtechontrial.com/
- iepathos 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - gruez 3y ago
    But the byline says it's from AP?
    - acheron 3y ago
      Yes. Also the site is for a group of local Fox stations, not particularly related to the Fox News cable channel. Some people can't help themselves from foaming at the mouth when they see "Fox" though.
  - friendsfew 3y ago
    [flagged]
factormeta 3y ago
Antitrust trials in US are just for show and limited hang out for the public. No antitrust trials has ever resulted in truly resulted in more competition for the smaller players. Breaking up of Standard Oil, just made the owners more money. Look at what happen to the MS antitrust trial. In fact everything has just consolidated over last few decades. Now we ended up with handful of people owning everything and rigging markets all over the place. What we need to focus on is how to create decentralized open source free(libre) software, networks, hardware and platform alternatives for what FANNGs are offering.
- Garvi 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - hooo 3y ago
    Why don’t you tell us what they’re doing then?
    - Garvi 3y ago
      Because it's always a waste of time for multiple reasons.
  - leereeves 3y ago
    In China, instead of business owners consolidating power, they have government leaders consolidating power.
    - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
      Isn't there a word for statist capitalism?
      - tadfisher 3y ago
        The term is "state capitalism": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism
QuantumG 3y ago
Pixel making too much money.
- oblio 3y ago
  I imagine you're being sarcastic, have to clarify this for folks that aren't aware: Google's mobile devices division is minor, they're probably on the same scale as Sony's mobile devices division, let alone anywhere close to companies like Samsung.
epups 3y ago
Antitrust legislation will only be waived in front of big tech until they agree to cooperate with the government's interests. At the moment, this means content censorship and backdoors, both of which they are complying with as far as we can see. Therefore, I expect absolute nothing to come out of it until this changes, which might be never.
cptaj 3y ago
The real threat to Google is from within. Their search results are crap and a lot of people are noticing. I see people talking about using big chat or even duckduckgo instead everyday
- spaceman_2020 3y ago
  It’s infuriating when Google will completely ignore my keywords and feed me generic stuff tailored for my audience cohort. I get it that Google probably wants to simplify results so that they’re more digestible for the masses, but at least give me a pro mode that doesn’t dumb everything down
  - falcrist 3y ago
    Youtube is the worst with this behavior. Have you done a search on that website recently? There will be around 2-3 actual results, followed by shorts, followed by 2 more real results, then a "People also watched" sections, then a couple more results, then another section, then a couple of results, then a "For you" section, then a couple results, then a "the latest from X" section, then a "From related searches" section. I'm sorry, did I ASK for all of this nonsense? I was looking for a specific video.
    - spaceman_2020 3y ago
      My biggest gripe with Google is how the ranking algorithm has essentially killed any innovation on the content and user experience part of the web. I was searching for some poems by Pablo Neruda. The first few results all had awfully designed pages filled with ads, pop ups, bad fonts - things you don’t want to see when reading a poem. Yet, these awful sites continue to dominate the SERPs for queries like these because they are all ancient, have tons of backlinks from ages ago, and thus in the eyes of Google, are “authoritative”. No one wants to put in the effort to create a website that collects, say, poems with a better user experience because they know that most traffic will come from search and they can’t really rank against these ugly old dinosaurs.
- n_ary 3y ago
spandextwins 3y ago
Just a shakedown for more cash to go someplace except where it's needed.
spaceman_2020 3y ago
Personally, my Google usage has dropped drastically since chatGPT came out. From being the first source, its now become the last source of information for me.
_ea1k 3y ago
In the US, going after Apple would make more sense. Their moves are far more anticompetitive than anything Google is doing. They are also far closer to having monopoly power in key markets.
- endemic 3y ago
  > They are also far closer to having monopoly power in key markets. Which ones are those?
  - _ea1k 3y ago
    Messaging in the US is the biggest area right now. They also have extremely tight control over the app store to a much greater extent than what Google has asserted. They are both problematic, though.
paulpauper 3y ago
ppl have been promising or hoping for anti-trust for a decade , yet Google stock keeps going up , as is dominance and earnings. same for Meta stock (I own shares of both companies because I am still bullish despite these headwinds). Even if something bad does happen, Microsoft's strong post-2000 performance shows it's not a concern for investors anyway. Likely fines or other small concessions. It's not at all "under siege" as the headline says unless by 'siege' you mean like The Mouse that Roared.

153 points by pg_1234 3y ago

mg 3y ago

What is Google's biggest moat these days?

automatic6131 3y ago
Every new startup sends their capital to Google to buy ads for their business. You make a new product, want to sell, where do you go? Marketing. Facebook and Google are the two silverback gorillas in online advertising. So, still ads.
stephc_int13 3y ago
I'd say either Chrome, Android or YouTube.
- rasz 3y ago
  porque no los tress
loveparade 3y ago
YouTube
m463 3y ago
Identification. Google tracks and identifies the world. Notice that many google sub-sites are being folded into google.com? For example, kaiser now references google.com instead of googletagmanager.com so people are tracked individually when handling their medical issues. and they do it offline too.
lmpdev 3y ago
The combination of immense capital reserves and existing horizontal integration over a number of industries They have over a quarter of a trillion USD in capital reserves and have acquired (and subsequently given up on) over 250 companies They are in my view, Microsoft in its anti-trust era. This is only amplified by the more pervasive and aggressively anti-consumer industrial-user relations policy settings than the 1990s had
ricardo81 3y ago
The whole thing. They garner more revenue per search due to their critical mass of searchers and advertisers and can use this money to pay to be the default search option in browsers and mobile, to the point it would be loss making for any other search engine. Their analytics is present on many top sites so they can use browsing patterns to improve their results, on top of telemetry they get from Chrome. Perhaps only Facebook has something close to rivalling that kind of information. Googlebot and to an extent Bingbot are granted access to most sites that want to be crawled. Any new entrants have to jump through lots of hoops (e.g. Cloudflare) simply to crawl the same web they do. The UK's Competition and Market's Authority estimated that a credible competitor to Google would need to spend $20 billion just to be in a position to compete. There's a couple of companies that could realistically compete with their financial clout, one of them is paid ~$20billion a year to be the search default on iOS.
devsda 3y ago
Should be Chrome and Android. It is very difficult for a new player to grow in these areas. Both Chrome and Android are being "improved" with features that are beneficial for Google to build a moat around its search, ad and other businesses. In the early days it was search that drove chrome adoption and now its the other way around. With the low quality of search results, I doubt many would even notice if the default search engine is switched to something else.
- chrisco255 3y ago
  Chrome isn't really a moat though given that it's been forked by Microsoft, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, and others.
  - turminal 3y ago
    With none of the forks removing any of the harmful features. Except possibly Brave, which replaces them with their own.
    - chrisco255 3y ago
      What harmful features would that be? Virtually all the forks remove Google's integrations.
- spaceman_2020 3y ago
  Android keeps losing market share among the affluent, monetizable audience. Apple is absolutely tearing Android apart in the Indian “premium” smartphone market right now.
acatton 3y ago
Its search index, in my personal opinion. A quarter of the websites on the internet are behind Cloudlfare/Akamai with anti-scraping enabled. Of course they want to end up on Google, so Google/Bing get a green light from Cloudflare. IMHO, that basically makes it impossible for anybody else to spin up an index and compete with Google Search. They cannot just scrape, they also have to work around anti-scraping measure by these CDNs. They have to maintain these workarounds, while trying to scrape as much as google has scraped so far, which is already a feat in itself. Once you have this, you have everything: a critical mass of users, ads, data set for AI, ... I dare anybody to scrape Reddit or Stackoverflow from scratch today.
- halflings 3y ago
  Like you said, Bing has their own search index. Why isn't everyone using Bing?
  - acatton 3y ago
    Because Google's index is much larger. According to estimates[1], Google indexes ~60 billions pages and Bing is only ~4 billions. If these numbers are close to reality, Bing index is 7% of Google's. IMHO, this leads to all the problems people complain about Bing. The algorithm is shit because they have less data to fine tune it, people use it less because the algorithm is shit or the results don't show up, so they cannot collect data to fine tune the algorithm more, ... [1] https://www.worldwidewebsize.com/ https://www.worldwidewebsize.com/
  - blackhaz 3y ago
    I'd dare to say one of the reasons is quite simple - Bing's ugly UX. When Google was just starting to gain popularity its search results weren't much better than Altavista's. Yet, its interface was much cleaner, it loaded and spewed out results faster, the overall experience was better. Bing is the Altavista. The user is bombarded with cookies, logotypes, ads, maps - all that complex layout right from the start. As a user you feel napalmed by information, and nobody likes that.
    - 3y ago
mythz 3y ago
The last Google service I'm likely to always use and pay for is YouTube Premium. I should be able to move off everything else after I retire.
chrisco255 3y ago
Android and YouTube. Secondarily I would say Workspace (Gmail, Meetings, Drive, etc for teams) and Cloud.
notarobot123 3y ago
I think it's the brand. Google is deeply embedded in schools, workplaces and the public imagination as synonymous with web search and collaborative digital tools. It has a monopoly on the public mindset for what the internet is for and how we can meaningfully use it.
paulpauper 3y ago
all of it? Adsense, adwords, youtube, android, chrome, search, gmail, etc.

sylware 3y ago

Not only google, all Big Tech. Major Big Tech share holders must be accountable (vanguard/blackrock).

stephc_int13 3y ago

It would be good, but unfortunately unlikely to happen.

Technotroll 3y ago
I think it's safe to say that Google has had a prominent position, and that they have indeed abused that position to gain an unfair market advantage over other companies due to ad placement and strategic cooperations. I'm sure Google will remain the top search engine despite this anti-trust case though, at least if they can keep up with the competition.
- starbugs 3y ago
  The market is changing. Many people now prefer not to even use search if they can help it, because it's got so messed up. They now have to compete against ChatGPT and they are late in the game. To make things worse, their reputation suffered a great deal with techies who despise their whole image and are actively trying to "degoogle" their lives. This may well be the beginning of a slow downturn since these people have an influence on the tech choices made by more "normal" users. What if it doesn't even matter if they can keep a dominant position of their search engine? These antitrust cases appear to be just a sign of a much larger pile of trouble ahead for Google.
  - omscs99 3y ago
    > Many people now prefer not to even use search if they can help it, because it's got so messed up. According to what exactly? Journalist speculation?
    - starbugs 3y ago
      It's just a logical consequence of search being convoluted with ads and content you aren't interested in (SEO). If your search query resembles anything close to a question, ChatGPT will outperform the plain old search results w.r.t. the time users have to invest to get to an answer or solution. It's something I have experienced myself and observed in my surroundings, including many comments on HN that point to the same direction.

QuesnayJr 3y ago

Would this spell the end of Google paying Firefox to be the default search? What happens to Firefox then?

silisili 3y ago
I think Google just pays Mozilla to give the semblance of competition - Firefox usage is a blip on the radar these days. I guess it depends on where Chrome ends up. As part of Google, payments would continue. As an independent venture, not a chance.
- matthewfelgate 3y ago
  Firefox is to Google as Apple is to Windows.
  - popcorncowboy 3y ago
    As Apple was to Windows.
    - matthewfelgate 3y ago
      Windows desktop share ~80% Mac OS ~10%
      - popcorncowboy 3y ago
        Market caps ($B) '01-now: MSFT: $358 -> $2,480 vs AAPL: $8 -> $2,790 Apple is no-one's Firefox.
        matthewfelgate 3y ago
        > Apple is no-one's Firefox. It is in terms of OS market share.
        3y ago

brenainn 3y ago

Under the headline is a video with the tagline "Google Flights has a new feature to help you save money - An upgrade to Google Flights will tell you the best time to book your next getaway." Hilarious.

stanac 3y ago
I thought it was related to the article. Probably automatically matched by "google" tag or something like that.
- b112 3y ago
  Google search is cratering from what I see, and that probably means context for their ads, too. After all, this is all related. Lately, I've been messing with wifi and hostapd. I get massive maps images, and pictures of hotels in the first 1/2 of my respones. I presume "hostapd" is a close mistype to "hotel", and people are searching for high speed wifi, so they may be searching for 80211ac or some such. Or likely google just sees "wifi thing -> wifi", and now I'm apparently searching for "hotel wifi". Great. I can't get anything meaningful, unless I add -hotel. They've gone so overboard with loose context matches, that I can't imagine their ad placement has much value.
  - tyingq 3y ago
    I don't think it's an ad. It looks more like Livenowfox.com's content management platform using post tags to insert 'related videos'.
echelon 3y ago
I'm fine with Google having a lackluster flights booking app. I'm not fine with it showing up by default. I'm seriously pissed off when stores (Google Play Store, App Store, Amazon, et al.) show ads when I search for a brand name. Ads show up first for popular item categories, and sometimes take all the space above the fold. I was looking for HBO Max this weekend. Disney came up first. How is that permissable? To sell your competitor's name is wholly uncompetitive. A shakedown of every business with an internet presence. Just because Google was in the right place at the right time shouldn't give it license to continue this shitty behavior -- without innovating or delivering value -- for the rest of all time.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

makomk 3y ago

Historically, Microsoft hasn't just paid to make Bing the default, it's required companies to disable the ability to change that default, meaning that all searches from the built-in search bar on (for example) Android devices from every major mobile carrier in the US went to Bing regardless of what users wanted. I wouldn't be surprised if they look to repeat this if they're allowed to buy the default and Google aren't; Yahoo paid Mozilla to be the default search in Firefox in the USA for a while and it didn't do much for them because people just switched, and the whole reason Google started paying so much to be default on Android devices is basically to stop Microsoft from doing that. That is, the outcome Microsoft seems to be looking for is one where they can reduce both consumer choice and competition by paying to make it more difficult to switch to non-Bing search engines and not allowing Google to pay companies more to make their more widely preferred search engine the default and not lock out the ability to change that default.

matthewfelgate 3y ago

Windows has a dominance of the desktop Operating System market. People can much more easily switch search engines than Operating Systems.

scarface_74 3y ago
This is more untrue today than it ever was. Between most things being browser based and the most popular consumer software being subscription based and allowed to be run on multiple platforms, it’s easier to switch now than ever. And then there are Electron apps…
- matthewfelgate 3y ago
  Easier than opening your browser and going to Bing?
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    Explain?
- smoldesu 3y ago
  Largely I agree, but going from 99% untrue to just 90% untrue doesn't make it not wrong.

edpichler 3y ago

Maybe it's not related but, talking about search engines, I have been using only DuckDuckGo and I am very happy with the results. I never have to switch back.

eole666 3y ago
I tried duckduckgo for a while.. I don't know if it's because my main language is french, but I found the results really worse than google's and so I used the !g bang really often. I switched to startpage (proxy seargh engine giving google results), it was ok but a bit slow. Now I use Kagi search, you have to pay for it, but results are great (often better than google) : less SEO spam, a lot of tuning possible, custom searches, small web searches, good image and map searches. And it is supposed to respect your privacy and private data.
- PoignardAzur 3y ago
  For what it's worth, I'm French too, and DuckDuckGo works for me 95% of the time. It definitely has a different "flavor" of results though.
yummypaint 3y ago
Me too, now I find google outright unusable. The whole first page is ads! Adapting to DDG is a much smaller adjustment than using subject heading search and traditional library tools.
- spaceman_2020 3y ago
  The other day, I wanted to look up the Asian games medals tally for all the countries. Google kept showing me pages with only the medals tally for my country. Had to use DDG to find the right page.
ImPleadThe5th 3y ago
I just recently switched and am surprised how well it works. Ever so often it'll serve me up some completely unrelated stuff, but there's kind of a charm in that. "Oh the thing I am looking for is really not that popular, neat". Unlike google where it'll hit you with tons of seemingly related results.

ankit219 3y ago

The article is full of hyperbole. > it's still too early to tell if U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta will side with the Justice Department and try to handcuff one of the world's most dominant tech companies. Till this point, only DOJ has been arguing their case, and Google will get a chance in a few days according to the schedule. DOJ's entire case rests on the theory of defaults from the arguments they have made. Covered extensively here[1]. Google refuted that with saying how edge and safari are default and yet people switch to chrome. Same with Bing and Google search. So they focused on how mobile makes it hard to switch defaults. Another vector they went to was how Google Search ads is a market in itself. That would be another antitrust case about advertising dominance, but in here they seem like an add on. It is tough to prove Google is abusing it's monopoly and there is a customer harm. At this point it is hard to tell from the outside given only one side has presented it's case. [1]: https://www.bigtechontrial.com/ https://www.bigtechontrial.com/

iepathos 3y ago
[flagged]
- gruez 3y ago
  But the byline says it's from AP?
  - acheron 3y ago
    Yes. Also the site is for a group of local Fox stations, not particularly related to the Fox News cable channel. Some people can't help themselves from foaming at the mouth when they see "Fox" though.
- friendsfew 3y ago
  [flagged]

factormeta 3y ago

Antitrust trials in US are just for show and limited hang out for the public. No antitrust trials has ever resulted in truly resulted in more competition for the smaller players. Breaking up of Standard Oil, just made the owners more money. Look at what happen to the MS antitrust trial. In fact everything has just consolidated over last few decades. Now we ended up with handful of people owning everything and rigging markets all over the place. What we need to focus on is how to create decentralized open source free(libre) software, networks, hardware and platform alternatives for what FANNGs are offering.

Garvi 3y ago
[flagged]
- hooo 3y ago
  Why don’t you tell us what they’re doing then?
  - Garvi 3y ago
    Because it's always a waste of time for multiple reasons.
- leereeves 3y ago
  In China, instead of business owners consolidating power, they have government leaders consolidating power.
  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    Isn't there a word for statist capitalism?
    - tadfisher 3y ago
      The term is "state capitalism": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism

QuantumG 3y ago

Pixel making too much money.

oblio 3y ago
I imagine you're being sarcastic, have to clarify this for folks that aren't aware: Google's mobile devices division is minor, they're probably on the same scale as Sony's mobile devices division, let alone anywhere close to companies like Samsung.

epups 3y ago

Antitrust legislation will only be waived in front of big tech until they agree to cooperate with the government's interests. At the moment, this means content censorship and backdoors, both of which they are complying with as far as we can see. Therefore, I expect absolute nothing to come out of it until this changes, which might be never.

cptaj 3y ago

The real threat to Google is from within. Their search results are crap and a lot of people are noticing. I see people talking about using big chat or even duckduckgo instead everyday

spaceman_2020 3y ago
It’s infuriating when Google will completely ignore my keywords and feed me generic stuff tailored for my audience cohort. I get it that Google probably wants to simplify results so that they’re more digestible for the masses, but at least give me a pro mode that doesn’t dumb everything down
- falcrist 3y ago
  Youtube is the worst with this behavior. Have you done a search on that website recently? There will be around 2-3 actual results, followed by shorts, followed by 2 more real results, then a "People also watched" sections, then a couple more results, then another section, then a couple of results, then a "For you" section, then a couple results, then a "the latest from X" section, then a "From related searches" section. I'm sorry, did I ASK for all of this nonsense? I was looking for a specific video.
  - spaceman_2020 3y ago
    My biggest gripe with Google is how the ranking algorithm has essentially killed any innovation on the content and user experience part of the web. I was searching for some poems by Pablo Neruda. The first few results all had awfully designed pages filled with ads, pop ups, bad fonts - things you don’t want to see when reading a poem. Yet, these awful sites continue to dominate the SERPs for queries like these because they are all ancient, have tons of backlinks from ages ago, and thus in the eyes of Google, are “authoritative”. No one wants to put in the effort to create a website that collects, say, poems with a better user experience because they know that most traffic will come from search and they can’t really rank against these ugly old dinosaurs.
n_ary 3y ago

spandextwins 3y ago

Just a shakedown for more cash to go someplace except where it's needed.

spaceman_2020 3y ago

Personally, my Google usage has dropped drastically since chatGPT came out. From being the first source, its now become the last source of information for me.

_ea1k 3y ago

In the US, going after Apple would make more sense. Their moves are far more anticompetitive than anything Google is doing. They are also far closer to having monopoly power in key markets.

endemic 3y ago
> They are also far closer to having monopoly power in key markets. Which ones are those?
- _ea1k 3y ago
  Messaging in the US is the biggest area right now. They also have extremely tight control over the app store to a much greater extent than what Google has asserted. They are both problematic, though.

paulpauper 3y ago

ppl have been promising or hoping for anti-trust for a decade , yet Google stock keeps going up , as is dominance and earnings. same for Meta stock (I own shares of both companies because I am still bullish despite these headwinds). Even if something bad does happen, Microsoft's strong post-2000 performance shows it's not a concern for investors anyway. Likely fines or other small concessions. It's not at all "under siege" as the headline says unless by 'siege' you mean like The Mouse that Roared.