4 ms·

I wish more reporters had a law background. The article is full of things that are almost true but misleading, and a handful that are flat-out wrong. For exampl

I wish more reporters had a law background. The article is full of things that are almost true but misleading, and a handful that are flat-out wrong. For example: > If Mehta sides with Google, the company's business practices will likely remain the same. If he rules in favor of the Justice Department, it's unclear how he'd sanction Google. It could be anything from fines to a restructuring of the company. Put aside that “sanction” is a term of art that is misused here and focus on the glaring inaccuracy: DOJ cannot request fines as a remedy for the Section 2 allegations they have brought! Add to that the fact that restructuring is vanishingly unlikely and you get a paragraph so misleading that it should be stricken from the article. DOJ, if they win the first part of the trial, is almost certainly going to request injunctive relief to prevent Google from entering into the exclusionary contracts that they challenged in this case. They could also ask for a court-ordered monitoring program to ensure ongoing compliance with the antitrust laws for a period of time. At the extreme, there could be some form of mandated data sharing to rivals to compensate for Google excluding them from search access points and depriving them of the scale DOJ says they need to compete. I'll do some free work for NPR and rewrite their paragraph: > If Judge Mehta sides with Google, the company's business practices can remain unchanged. The Justice Department has not yet revealed what remedies they would request if Judge Mehta rules in their favor, but they are likely to include an order preventing Google from entering into deals that give the company's search engine preferential treatment on iOS, Android, and the FireFox browser. A breakup of the company is unlikely.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
warkdarrior 2y ago
> order preventing Google from entering into deals that give the company's search engine preferential treatment on iOS, Android, and the FireFox browser That would likely be the end of Firefox.
- granzymes 2y ago
  Mozilla submitted a declaration to that effect, and Google mentioned it repeatedly. Google argued that once Microsoft set the precedent that Internet Explorer was free, browsers lost the ability to monetize except by selling default status in their search bar (or being subsidized by a larger platform). Courts are understandably wary of micromanaging companies' behavior, so this is not so much a legal argument as much as it is a "beware of unintended consequences" argument.
- tomjen3 2y ago
  They will just have to request donations in the same way Wikipedia does.
ChuckMcM 2y ago
Thank you for this, I was thinking something similar and I'm not even a lawyer! That said, I have been a competitor[1] to Google in the past. What is missed here in the comment and in the article is that the "monopoly" part is really advertising, NOT search. If the Judge ordered Google to open up their SERPs[2] to other Advertising networks that would change things for the better. The reasoning goes as follows; In order to be cost effective, search advertising needs a lot of views. More traffic equals more views. We measured income as "RPM" or revenue per thousand (SERPs in this case), so if you're nominal advertising rate was $1 per click, and in a thousand views of 10 links each (10,000 links shown) you got one click, you would have an RPM of $1. What isn't as well known is that some advertisements, like credit card sign ups, would pay $100 for a click & signup. That meant you could go 100,000 queries with just one click and still be making $1 RPM :-). Anyway, the reason Google pays $23 billion to Apple to have them send them search traffic is that Apple iPhone users are "high end" and will buy stuff after searching for them. One of the reason's Blekko was lucky to get 10M searches per day was because Google was spending billions to have any search traffic sent to them instead. So if you tell Google they have to allow other people to sell ads using their search results, and they have to provide those results at a reasonable an non-discriminatory price, then it breaks Google's monopoly on search ads. Most people who have a search frontend use Bing's results because they are cheaper and available through the old Yahoo! BOSS api. But if Google offered their results sans Google ad insertions instead. You could make a search website that had Google non-spammy results for cost. People would pay for that, especially people who don't use search to shop but use it to find things. Google's long tail crawl is still better than Bings in that regard. [1] VP Eng/Ops at Blekko a search competitor. [2] Search Engine Result Page (SERP) is the 10 links and 10 snippets describing the page they point to.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

warkdarrior 2y ago

> order preventing Google from entering into deals that give the company's search engine preferential treatment on iOS, Android, and the FireFox browser That would likely be the end of Firefox.

granzymes 2y ago
Mozilla submitted a declaration to that effect, and Google mentioned it repeatedly. Google argued that once Microsoft set the precedent that Internet Explorer was free, browsers lost the ability to monetize except by selling default status in their search bar (or being subsidized by a larger platform). Courts are understandably wary of micromanaging companies' behavior, so this is not so much a legal argument as much as it is a "beware of unintended consequences" argument.
tomjen3 2y ago
They will just have to request donations in the same way Wikipedia does.

ChuckMcM 2y ago

Thank you for this, I was thinking something similar and I'm not even a lawyer! That said, I have been a competitor[1] to Google in the past. What is missed here in the comment and in the article is that the "monopoly" part is really advertising, NOT search. If the Judge ordered Google to open up their SERPs[2] to other Advertising networks that would change things for the better. The reasoning goes as follows; In order to be cost effective, search advertising needs a lot of views. More traffic equals more views. We measured income as "RPM" or revenue per thousand (SERPs in this case), so if you're nominal advertising rate was $1 per click, and in a thousand views of 10 links each (10,000 links shown) you got one click, you would have an RPM of $1. What isn't as well known is that some advertisements, like credit card sign ups, would pay $100 for a click & signup. That meant you could go 100,000 queries with just one click and still be making $1 RPM :-). Anyway, the reason Google pays $23 billion to Apple to have them send them search traffic is that Apple iPhone users are "high end" and will buy stuff after searching for them. One of the reason's Blekko was lucky to get 10M searches per day was because Google was spending billions to have any search traffic sent to them instead. So if you tell Google they have to allow other people to sell ads using their search results, and they have to provide those results at a reasonable an non-discriminatory price, then it breaks Google's monopoly on search ads. Most people who have a search frontend use Bing's results because they are cheaper and available through the old Yahoo! BOSS api. But if Google offered their results sans Google ad insertions instead. You could make a search website that had Google non-spammy results for cost. People would pay for that, especially people who don't use search to shop but use it to find things. Google's long tail crawl is still better than Bings in that regard. [1] VP Eng/Ops at Blekko a search competitor. [2] Search Engine Result Page (SERP) is the 10 links and 10 snippets describing the page they point to.