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I don't know the answer to your question, but the fact that the Google-AOL deal was never challenged doesn't mean it was legal. Plenty of illegal things are nev

I don't know the answer to your question, but the fact that the Google-AOL deal was never challenged doesn't mean it was legal. Plenty of illegal things are never challenged.

SllX 3y ago
Generally something is legal until there’s a law saying it isn’t. That’s kind of how it just works in America, and it not just here either. When that Google-AOl deal Google wasn’t even close to as popular as it is now. It was a simple distribution deal. People are tunneled in on the iPhone because that’s Apple’s juggernaut now but this deal with Apple also goes back to like 2002 when I was still convincing people to switch off Yahoo and MSN to Google. They also made a similar deal with Mozilla which is still basically how Mozilla is still able to operate at all. I mean 2002 Yahoo probably could have outspent 2002 Google. 2002 Microsoft definitely could have and it’s not like MSN was a juggernaut, but they were complacent. I’ll just say it: Google wanted it more. Search and Advertising was basically all they were at the time, no Gmail, no Google Maps, no YouTube or any of that other stuff we associate with them now, and they went out and took the opportunities they could. They developed a toolbar for IE users, setup distribution deals for the toolbar, put it in the Firefox directory, and sought out new avenues of information to index like when they acquired Deja News and Blogger, and subsequently launched Froogle, Google Blog Search, Google News, Alerts, Images, Patents, GOOG-411, etc. Even acquiring and developing Android was a play that ensured even if their relationships went south and Microsoft came to dominate Mobile in a way that was beginning to look a lot more possible in 2006 (and not so much in 2011) they would never be entirely locked out of Mobile if that ever became a thing (which uh, spoiler alert, it did). And when did Google really start to look like the juggernaut in the room? Well in Jan 2005 they had 35.1% of the search market to Yahoo’s 31.8% and a year later Google was at 41.4% to Yahoo’s 28.7%.[1] So probably you could say sometime about 2004 around when they IPO’d, maybe, is the soonest you could say they were really a juggernaut. That’s dominance but that sure isn’t anything close to a monopoly, and they were just outcompeting in both quality and distribution and in their search and ad product offerings. Acquiring DoubleClick even after Microsoft bid up the price was also a pretty good hat trick that was like a rocket booster for their ad business, putting Microsoft in a position where they had to spend almost twice as much for aQuantive only to write it down 5 years later. This is why antitrust law is so scuffed. The DOJ just ends up re-litigating old contracts and continuations of them hoping that in the current political climate they can find an angle for the headshot in front of a friendly judge. They’re going to lose hard while playing up whatever small victories they can get along the way while wasting a lot of money in court and then the administration is going to change again which might continue any cases in progress but is still going to have its political priorities shift. [1]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/search-engine-market-shares-in-jan-2006-google-41-4-yahoo-28-7-msn-13-7/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/search-engine-market-shares-in...
- dtech 3y ago
  > The DOJ just ends up re-litigating old contracts and continuations of them hoping that in the current political climate they can find an angle for the headshot in front of a friendly judge Your whole argument hinges on this and I fail to find a problem in it. What's OK when you have 1% of the market is, by law and reason, not OK when you have 99% of the market. It seems fully logical that that also means old contracts and behavior might need change.
  - SllX 3y ago
    No, my argument is that it’s a weak case, full stop, that hinges on Google growing from a 400 pound gorilla to an 800 pound gorilla by outcompeting their direct competitors in their core business that the company was founded on, making deals, acquiring other businesses in areas they needed to improve upon (or reasonably thought they did) and developing new search and ad products to expand their business. You can’t punish them for making a deal ex post facto because it was the winning strategy and their competitors turned out to be the greatest cultural lobster trap inventors[1] and the Windows company that has basically stopped innovating on the web the moment they stopped perceiving it as a threat (which they were so wrong about). Google’s core business is search and advertising and they have worked from the company’s inception to acquire users and customers in both, successfully, and more so than their competition both earlier in their history and later and they have developed business partners along the way who value that continued business relationship. Making deals isn’t illegal and businesses make deals all the time. The Sherman Antitrust Act declares contracts that restrain trade and commerce illegal, but Google isn’t restraining trade: they’re paying a fair market value for user acquisition and their largest competitors both know what that price is and are unwilling to outbid Google. Up until 2017, Microsoft even had their own deal with Apple where Siri used Bing results and you couldn’t change that (still can’t control what Siri uses actually, but Siri is garbage). Even so, you can still change the search provider in Safari and Apple only receives money from Google for Safari users when Safari users actually use Google making this more like an affiliate program. [1]: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2848 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2848

I don't know the answer to your question, but the fact that the Google-AOL deal was never challenged doesn't mean it was legal. Plenty of illegal things are never challenged.

SllX 3y ago

Generally something is legal until there’s a law saying it isn’t. That’s kind of how it just works in America, and it not just here either. When that Google-AOl deal Google wasn’t even close to as popular as it is now. It was a simple distribution deal. People are tunneled in on the iPhone because that’s Apple’s juggernaut now but this deal with Apple also goes back to like 2002 when I was still convincing people to switch off Yahoo and MSN to Google. They also made a similar deal with Mozilla which is still basically how Mozilla is still able to operate at all. I mean 2002 Yahoo probably could have outspent 2002 Google. 2002 Microsoft definitely could have and it’s not like MSN was a juggernaut, but they were complacent. I’ll just say it: Google wanted it more. Search and Advertising was basically all they were at the time, no Gmail, no Google Maps, no YouTube or any of that other stuff we associate with them now, and they went out and took the opportunities they could. They developed a toolbar for IE users, setup distribution deals for the toolbar, put it in the Firefox directory, and sought out new avenues of information to index like when they acquired Deja News and Blogger, and subsequently launched Froogle, Google Blog Search, Google News, Alerts, Images, Patents, GOOG-411, etc. Even acquiring and developing Android was a play that ensured even if their relationships went south and Microsoft came to dominate Mobile in a way that was beginning to look a lot more possible in 2006 (and not so much in 2011) they would never be entirely locked out of Mobile if that ever became a thing (which uh, spoiler alert, it did). And when did Google really start to look like the juggernaut in the room? Well in Jan 2005 they had 35.1% of the search market to Yahoo’s 31.8% and a year later Google was at 41.4% to Yahoo’s 28.7%.[1] So probably you could say sometime about 2004 around when they IPO’d, maybe, is the soonest you could say they were really a juggernaut. That’s dominance but that sure isn’t anything close to a monopoly, and they were just outcompeting in both quality and distribution and in their search and ad product offerings. Acquiring DoubleClick even after Microsoft bid up the price was also a pretty good hat trick that was like a rocket booster for their ad business, putting Microsoft in a position where they had to spend almost twice as much for aQuantive only to write it down 5 years later. This is why antitrust law is so scuffed. The DOJ just ends up re-litigating old contracts and continuations of them hoping that in the current political climate they can find an angle for the headshot in front of a friendly judge. They’re going to lose hard while playing up whatever small victories they can get along the way while wasting a lot of money in court and then the administration is going to change again which might continue any cases in progress but is still going to have its political priorities shift. [1]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/search-engine-market-shares-in-jan-2006-google-41-4-yahoo-28-7-msn-13-7/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/search-engine-market-shares-in...

dtech 3y ago
> The DOJ just ends up re-litigating old contracts and continuations of them hoping that in the current political climate they can find an angle for the headshot in front of a friendly judge Your whole argument hinges on this and I fail to find a problem in it. What's OK when you have 1% of the market is, by law and reason, not OK when you have 99% of the market. It seems fully logical that that also means old contracts and behavior might need change.
- SllX 3y ago
  No, my argument is that it’s a weak case, full stop, that hinges on Google growing from a 400 pound gorilla to an 800 pound gorilla by outcompeting their direct competitors in their core business that the company was founded on, making deals, acquiring other businesses in areas they needed to improve upon (or reasonably thought they did) and developing new search and ad products to expand their business. You can’t punish them for making a deal ex post facto because it was the winning strategy and their competitors turned out to be the greatest cultural lobster trap inventors[1] and the Windows company that has basically stopped innovating on the web the moment they stopped perceiving it as a threat (which they were so wrong about). Google’s core business is search and advertising and they have worked from the company’s inception to acquire users and customers in both, successfully, and more so than their competition both earlier in their history and later and they have developed business partners along the way who value that continued business relationship. Making deals isn’t illegal and businesses make deals all the time. The Sherman Antitrust Act declares contracts that restrain trade and commerce illegal, but Google isn’t restraining trade: they’re paying a fair market value for user acquisition and their largest competitors both know what that price is and are unwilling to outbid Google. Up until 2017, Microsoft even had their own deal with Apple where Siri used Bing results and you couldn’t change that (still can’t control what Siri uses actually, but Siri is garbage). Even so, you can still change the search provider in Safari and Apple only receives money from Google for Safari users when Safari users actually use Google making this more like an affiliate program. [1]: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2848 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2848