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Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones
- keepamovin 2y agoOuch it has not been a good couple years for them since 2021. What did they do then?
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- sva_ 2y agoThis could be bad for Mozilla?
- leotravis10 2y agoYes it could very well be although I expect Google to appeal this ruling.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoYes. And seat belt laws are bad for hospitals and undertakers.
- notatallshaw 2y agoCan you please expand or explain on this analogy. I'm struggling to connect how Google's last major browser engine competitor potentially losing it's funding due to a separate monopoly issue is similar to laws being passed to reduce death and hospitalizations.
- aednichols 2y agoThe DOJ is concerned with moving the needle on one specific issue (search monopoly a.k.a. seatbelts) and is not concerned about the side effects on related entities (Firefox a.k.a. undertakers).
- cvhc 2y agoFOF ¶ 334. Google’s default placements on Firefox generate 80% of Mozilla’s overall operating revenue, demonstrating that the vast majority of query volume on Firefox goes through defaults. Ref: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25032745/045110819896.pdf https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25032745/045110819896...
- bagels 2y agoThe analogy is: Sometimes the one negative outcome (Mozilla & hospitals losing money) is a price well paid for another positive one (regulating monopolies & reduced deaths).
- zelphirkalt 2y agoNot using a seatbelt is unhealthy. Using Google search as the default is unhealthy as well.
- account42 2y agoThey are not Google's competitior, they are their partner in crime.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- repelsteeltje 2y agoBad for Firefox, which still relies exclusively on Google sponsorship. Thunderbird, on the other hand, takes user donations.
- JohnFen 2y ago> Thunderbird, on the other hand, takes user donations. And it depends on Firefox, sadly.
- repelsteeltje 2y agoFair enough. In any case, now would probably be a good moment for Mozilla to reconsider user donations on Firefox. Just my €50 of course isn't going to change the future by itself. But I'd happily give it to them if they'd let me. (And I don't even mind manually removing Google and replacing it with DDG.)
- JohnFen 2y agoI've long been baffled at the inability to contribute to Firefox development. It seems crazy to me that this isn't possible.
- mozempthrowaway 2y agoJust so you know, the money users donate goes towards political causes not towards Firefox. When you are donating, you are donating to the Mozilla Foundation (which is a non-profit). All Firefox development is done through Mozilla Corporation (which is a for profit entity). There is no way to donate to Firefox.
- zbentley 2y agoDo you mean it depends on Firefox for money and staff from Mozilla inc/fdn? Or that it uses a Firefox-based browser engine for HTML emails? If the latter, I don’t imagine this will have too terribly much impact. Email clients often lag behind browsers in what they can display.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> could be bad for Mozilla? Just skimmed the ruling [1]. A pillar appears to be that “Google’s distribution agreements are exclusive.” So if Mozilla e.g. auctions off the next N installs default-search engine designation, it might work? (Also, the ruling doesn’t ban exclusive distribution agreements in general.) [1] https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25032745/045110819896.pdf https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25032745/045110819896...
- dwallin 2y agoIMO, this is the best think that could happen for Firefox. Mozilla as an organization has been thoroughly corrupted by huge buckets of money being thrown at them by Google. "The Resource Curse" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse) doesn't only apply to countries.
- yesco 2y agoWhile they are certainly dependent on Google funding, I believe this dependence is a net negative for the long term health of Firefox development. It implicitly skews the incentives of Mozilla leadership, making them comfortable with getting lots of money they didn't really work for and giving them some funny ideas on where their priorities lie. Presumably a proper non profit would be more incentivized to stick to the projects ideals so they can brag about it in their fundraising activities (with perhaps a little too much of that money going into administrator pockets on the down low). Meanwhile Google's funding creates a status quo where it's pretty much fine with anything so long as Firefox continues to exist as a scarecrow to anti-trust suits. It effectively muscles out all the potential well meaning donors which could have helped steer things in a more positive direction, and acts like a sword of damocles floating over Mozilla's head, engorging the organization in addictive cash they don't deserve, and implicitly discouraging them from ever stepping on Google's toes lest the money hose gets turned off. These days I'd call Firefox "good enough" from a privacy & open source perspective. It checks the boxes, and while I'm actually pretty open to the UI changes they have made over the years, I've gotten the sense that top Mozilla leadership don't really care about Firefox anymore, even distancing themself from it in certain respects. These days Firefox doesn't really seem to be going anywhere, it does the bare minimum by implementing web standards but all efforts to distinguish it from Chrome seem to be gradually extinguished. I wouldn't even be surprised at this point if they eventually turned off Mv2 support in a few years from now, despite all promises to the contrary, citing complexity or perhaps even "security" like Google's been doing as the reason. If in the "worst" case Mozilla shutters down or abandons Firefox development after losing their money hose, perhaps the mindshare of the community they have been hoarding away all these years will coalesce around a healthier fork with an organization structure closer to the Linux foundation, maybe then Firefox would actually have a future again. One can only dream.
- diebeforei485 2y agoLong overdue ruling.
- rbera 2y agoAt the very least, I hope the Apple-Google ~~exclusivity~~ default agreement is revoked. I suppose it’ll take another year to figure out the actual remedies though.
- lvzw 2y agoI think a year for the remedies is optimistic - could drag on for a while. Also worth mentioning that it is not an exclusivity agreement - it is a default agreement.
- rbera 2y agoYou’re right, my bad on the terminology. A year is definitely optimistic, I just hope that’s the first draft pending appeals. the longer it stretches on, the greater chance there is of directives being changed, lobbyists influencing politicians, etc.
- alt227 2y ago> it is not an exclusivity agreement - it is a default agreement. But it kind of is an exclusivity agreement. Have you ever tried to change the default search on an iPhone? There is only a very small list of curated searches you are allowed to pick from, and you cant add your own.
- leotravis10 2y agoThis could surely open the door for Apple Search as the silver lining.
- drjasonharrison 2y agohttps://archive.ph/cqPWM https://archive.ph/cqPWM
- rvz 2y agoRemember folks, it isn't over yet, I'd expect Google to appeal this one and this is just about their search dominance. There is another one on the way with the DOJ going after their Ads business. [0] [0] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-google-monopolizing-digital-advertising-technologies https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl...
- nilptr 2y agoWhile not over they have a tough battle ahead. This was a case brought by the Trump Admin and carried on under Biden. I don't see a conservative Federal judge gutting this ruling any more than I do a liberal one.
- NotPractical 2y ago> I don't see a conservative Federal judge gutting this ruling any more than I do a liberal one. Can you explain how free market capitalism and deregulation of corporations is compatible with lawsuits like this one?
- warkdarrior 2y agoIt's "free market capitalism and deregulation" for corporations WE like.
- NotPractical 2y agoWho is "we"? Big Tech?
- babelfish 2y agoHas the full opinion been published yet?
- forrestthewoods 2y agoYes. Viewable here: https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/5/24155520/judge-rules-on-us-doj-v-google-antitrust-search-suit https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/5/24155520/judge-rules-on-us...
- perihelions 2y ago(PDF, 286pp) https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25032745/045110819896.pdf https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25032745/045110819896... via https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/5/24155520/judge-rules-on-us-doj-v-google-antitrust-search-suit https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/5/24155520/judge-rules-on-us...
- howard941 2y agoIMO this item should point to the Verge's piece rather than the paywalled Bloomberg thing
- richwater 2y agoHow does this finding actually help consumers, in real life? They get to choose a search engine (spoiler alert: it will be Google), and life moves on. Except, smaller browser projects now miss on that default search revenue, potentially entrenching Chrome as the dominant browser.
- eastbound 2y agoSo, smaller browsers can’t help entrenching Google Search? Is that a bad thing? Aren’t all of those using the WebKit engine anyway?
- m_ke 2y agoIt gives people room to try, especially now with new entrants like perplexity that might offer better results. Google search went to shit and ruined most of the web with it, by creating an SEO industry that's 100% focused on optimizing for their ranking signals.
- causal 2y agoYup. Google is king because it's the default, not because it's the best. Take away the bribed default position and suddenly better search engines stand a chance - and that's great for consumers.
- diogofranco 2y ago> by creating an SEO industry that's 100% focused on optimizing for their ranking signals. The SEO industry will optimize towards ranking on whatever search engine people are using
- m_ke 2y agoIt would be a lot harder to do if the market had more viable competitors. In a world with 5-6 dominant options and a long tail of niche search engines you'd probably have options that penalize blog spam, aggregators like pinterest and sites with paywalls or millions of ads / affiliate links.
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- mymyairduster 2y ago[dead]
- hugh_kagi 2y agoWe face a number of challenges simply letting our paying customers change their search engine: 1. On iOS the list of allowed search engines is simply baked into OS, we have a fiddly extension that hooks outbound calls to /search and redirects them but I wish we didn't need to. 2. On Chrome, we use an extension to change the default search engine and enable search auto-complete etc, but Google has a policy that such an extension can do one thing and one thing only, and recently removed our extension on account of that [1]. We rebuilt it to meet their needs but had a lot of back-and-forth because we included 'search by image' on a context menu item and the first reviewer felt that was a bridge too far. You'll note that Chrome provides such a context menu item for Google Image search out of the box. 3. On Chrome for Linux, the default search engine API is not available, so Linux users have to configure it manually through a series of silly steps [2]. This is at least in keeping with most Linux experiences. There are other issues, but I say all this to highlight how surprisingly difficult it is to change this setting in a practical, consumer friendly way. It is most certainly this difficult by design, that's a lot of revenue to protect. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41028924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41028924 2: https://github.com/kagisearch/chrome_extension_basic?tab=readme-ov-file#setting-default-search-on-linux https://github.com/kagisearch/chrome_extension_basic?tab=rea...
- hintymad 2y ago> On iOS the list of allowed search engines is simply baked into OS, we have a fiddly extension that hooks outbound calls to /search and redirects them but I wish we didn't need to. Wouldn't this be the fault of Apple as it is Apple that controls the list?
- srcreigh 2y agoApple could be getting paid off by google to keep this aspect of search difficult to change.
- arresin 2y ago$20 billion in 2022 according to the verge via court docs: https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/2/24147007/google-paid-apple-20-billion-in-2022-to-be-safaris-default-search-engine https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/2/24147007/google-paid-apple...
- greatgib 2y ago[flagged]
- thehappypm 2y agoThey're probably sending a hash of the password, not the password itself, but, no opt-out isn't great.
- vinyl7 2y agoSending a hash seems pointless because I assume sites would salt/pepper the password before hashing so the hashes are different. Or maybe I'm naive about sites following best practices
- jjbinx007 2y agoI've converted back to Firefox now. It's not perfect but it's a decent alternative.
- upon_drumhead 2y agoAre they sending the passwords or are they hashing and sending the hashes? I know 1Password's watchtower uses hashes to detect leaked passwords.
- JohnFen 2y agoAlmost certainly they're sending hashes. However, if they don't have a way to disable this, that's a serious problem, hashes or not.
- cletus 2y agoI expect this to be bad for everyone except Google if the ruling holds. Why? Mozilla and Apple will lose significant revenue from having Google as the default search engine and Google will no longer have to pay those billions. What's more, no one else can pay to be the default either (eg the short-lived Mozilla Bing deal). So what's going to happen? Most users will probably still use Google, nobody is getting paid and Google is saving a bundle. I get the thinking that you have to prevent lock-in (eg Ticketmaster and venues) but Google didn't buy its way into dominance annd maintain their dominance through exclusivity deals. They simply have a better product and I don't expect anyone to match them anytime soon (cue the DDG "I switched from Google to DDG 78 years ago" crowd).
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> Most users will probably still use Google, nobody is getting paid and Google is saving a bundle The ruling doesn’t say exclusive distribution agreements are illegal. It says Google can’t enter into them.
- skissane 2y ago> What's more, no one else can pay to be the default either (eg the short-lived Mozilla Bing deal). Not sure if that is true-competition laws often prohibit the dominant market player from doing certain things, yet still allow smaller players to do the same thing.
- the_duke 2y agoI assume OP meant in terms of money. Apple will not accept scraps (like tens of Millions) for the default search engine, after getting billions from Google. And no-one else will have the financial resources or be willing to burn these amounts (Microsoft) to offer similar numbers.
- ProfessorLayton 2y agoThey don't need to offer similar numbers? If this ruling prohibits Google, the dominant search engine, from buying their Safari defaults, then Apple has a choice of: - Zero dollars - More than zero dollars from a smaller search competitor (Bing? New AI player?) I suspect Apple will want more than nothing. They also have quarterly financials to report.
- knuckleheads 2y ago> Mehta’s decision is expected to trigger a separate proceeding to determine what penalties Google will face – and the company is also likely to file an appeal As a Google antitrust watcher, I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop with what remedies the court will actually recommend to correct this monopoly. If you ask 20 experts, who all otherwise agree that Google is a monopoly, you might get 40 different answers about what to actually do to fix that monopoly. It'll take a while to get the answer and to work through all the appeals to this ruling and whatever remedy the court will put forth, and it's not clear or really possible to know ahead of time whether the courts will put forth small, medium or huge changes to the search engine market. Exciting times!
- tootie 2y agoI can envision a gnarly Venn diagram of search, ads, AI, analytics, Chrome. You could easily make this 5 separate companies (ads and analytics were acquired), but you probably just need to split it somewhere in the middle.
- pklausler 2y ago"easily?" Which one would own Platforms? Which one would own the google3 monorepo?
- tootie 2y agoHaha, I mean they could easily survive as separate companies. Not that separating them would be easy.
- coliveira 2y agoThis is not the courts problem. Google needs to solve this before the split.
- fallingknife 2y agoIt is always the court's problem. A judge does not have arbitrary or absolute authority. If Google can convince an appeals court that the judge has imposed an impossible or unreasonable remedy it will be overturned.
- hintymad 2y ago> Google’s payments to make its search engine the default option on smartphone web browsers violate US antitrust law, a federal judge ruled Monday, handing a key victory to the Justice Department. I still find it hard to understand why this makes sense. Don't companies make exclusive deals all the time, and whoever bids higher will get such deals? Why is it different for Google this time?
- causal 2y agoIf it creates a monopoly then no, it's not okay, no matter how normal.
- legitster 2y agoNot necessarily - as it is written, the Sherman anti-trust act and all of the amendments distinguishes between "innocent" and "coercive" monopolies. But the definitions are very loose and hard to pin down. It's hard to even consistently distinguish a monopoly - is it market share? Earning power? Barriers to entry?
- toomuchtodo 2y ago> It's hard to even consistently distinguish a monopoly - is it market share? Earning power? Barriers to entry? "I know it when I see it," as it is difficult at best to rely on distinctive actions or indicators considering the fluidity of business dynamics and the market landscape. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
- ssl-3 2y agoThe definitions mean whatever the judge says they mean.
- svnt 2y agoAs soon as they formalized a metric to distinguish a monopoly, it would become something deliberately managed by entities who wished to wield monopolistic power. It would change the shape, but not the definition.
- woopsn 2y agoThey spent billions of dollars putting their product into other products by default, and meanwhile conglomerate interests make it a worse product every year, while they do in fact maintain a monopoly.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ls612 2y agoThe big loser from this ruling is Mozilla. The Firefox search deal gives them a big chunk of their money and they are already financially not in great shape.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoNothing prevents them from donating to Mozilla.
- riku_iki 2y agoFor-profit corp needs some incentives for such donation.
- mrguyorama 2y agoAnd just like when we force AT&T to do a bunch of stuff, that incentive should be "encourage and fund a healthy and competitive market or be dismantled with prejudice". We made AT&T basically give away patents to anyone and open up their network to compatibility. People regularly talk about the innovations that came from the labs funded by that agreement. Then they turn around and dismiss government regulation of industries as "stifling competition", as if a monopoly has any desire to compete if they do not have to.
- warkdarrior 2y ago> People regularly talk about the innovations that came from the labs funded by that agreement. Do you have some examples?
- fragmede 2y agoUNIX and the C programming language were first released before the agreement but continued to be worked on by the labs after the agreement was signed and took force. C++ had it's first commercial release in 1985 (agreement took force in 1985). Fiber optic transmission which powers the Internet also came from those labs. DSL technology is another one you might have heard of.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- alberth 2y agoWarren Buffet recently sold ~55% of his Apple stock. I wonder if this was related. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41155376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41155376 --- Granted, Buffet also invested $40B and it's worth 9x today. When you have $320B in gains, it's only prudent to begin to take some of those gains off the table. https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/6-words-explain-why-warren-buffett-just-dumped-half-of-his-160-billion-stake-in-apple.html#:~:text=All%20told%20Berkshire%20has%20spent,Apple%20stock%2C%20netting%20%2476%20billion https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/6-words-explain-why-warren-bu....
- fuzztester 2y agothat point also appeared recently in The Guardian, although under a different title.
- poooooog 2y agoI hope searchgpt or perplexity takes advantage of this and try to gain some momentum, gonna be a sad day if perplexity sells out to some incumbent.
- xpe 2y agoAfter the DoJ vs. Apple suit was mentioned in March, I did some research before about what the DoJ views unfavorably in this arena. My bullet points were useful to a lot of people here then, so perhaps it can help inform some of the conversation here too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39782290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39782290 After some research, the practices below may capture much (though not necessarily all) of what the Department of Justice views unfavorably: * horizontal agreements between competitors such as price fixing and market allocation * vertical agreements between firms at different levels of the supply chain such as resale price maintenance and exclusive dealing * unilateral exclusionary conduct such as predatory pricing, refusal to deal with competitors, and limiting interoperability * conditional sales practices such as tying and bundling * monopoly leveraging where a firm uses its dominance in one market to gain an unfair advantage in another Any of these behaviors undermines the conditions necessary for a competitive market. I'd be happy to have the list above expanded, contracted, or modified. Let me know.
- svnt 2y agoSome of these are a bit different in scope to some of your points, but here a few things I believe aren't really covered: Predatory hiring: Hiring key employees from competitors primarily to weaken them rather than to benefit from the employees' skills. Patent abuse: Using a large portfolio of patents to stifle competition rather than to protect legitimate innovations. Regulatory capture: Using influence to shape regulations in ways that benefit the monopolist and create barriers for potential competitors. Killer acquisitions: Buying potential competitors primarily to eliminate future competition rather than to integrate their technology or talent. Data hoarding: In digital markets, collecting and refusing to share data that is crucial for competitors to enter or compete effectively in the market. Self-preferencing: In platform markets, giving preferential treatment to one's own products or services over those of competitors. Vaporware: Announcing nonexistent or deliberately suboptimal products or features to discourage customers from switching to competitors' existing products.
- fallingknife 2y agoMost of these don't make much sense: Predatory hiring - banning this would be preventing competition in the labor market and be extremely bad for workers. Also unproveable. Regulatory capture - the government regulators are not going to sue themselves Killer acquisitions - already illegal to engage in acquisition to form monopoly Data hoarding - the government can't force you to share things for free. That violates the takings clause Self-preferencing - this is such a long standing and legally permitted practice that it is not plausible to make illegal. e.g. every grocery store has a store brand that they favor. Vaporware - if this is a provable lie it is already covered by fraud statutes, and it would be such a stupid move by the company that I don't believe it actually happens
- jd3 2y agoA couple passages of note: > 112. The integration of generative AI is perhaps the clearest example of competition advancing search quality. Google accelerated and launched its public piloting of Bard one day before Microsoft announced BingChat, the integration of ChatGPT’s generative AI technology into Bing to deliver answers to queries. Id. at 8272:4-7 (Reid); id. at 2670:10–2671:9 (Parakhin). (describing BingChat). Perhaps a normative assertion on my part, but AI results have not "advanc[ed] search quality" by any metric that I am familiar with; in fact, AI results in Google mark the first time I have ever encountered incorrect or patently untrue information at the top of a Google query. > This quality-reduction experiment correlated with only a 0.66– 0.99% decline in global search revenue. UPX1082 at 294. In short, this study demonstrates that a significant quality depreciation by Google would not result in a significant loss of revenues.
- larubbio 2y agoI remember this article from 2017 about the google snippet for how long it takes to caramelize an onion. https://gizmodo.com/googles-algorithm-is-lying-to-you-about-onions-and-blam-1793057789 https://gizmodo.com/googles-algorithm-is-lying-to-you-about-... The gist of the story is the author wrote an article debunking the recipe myth that you only need 5 minutes. In their tests it was 25 - 45. Google snippet would report "about 5 minutes" and link to the article as a reference. I think the information summaries at the top of searches have been wrong for a while.
- pradn 2y agoIt's certainly wrong, but its not out of place w/ the sheer number of recipes and blogs saying the same thing. It's parroting "common wisdom" which is wrong. It's not as egregious as some of the generative AI results spewed out by the lowest-cost-inference LLMs they hooked up to Google search a few months back.
- nox101 2y agoIt was still a common occurrence for google to display incorrect results that weren't common wisdom. I had tons of such experiences. One I remember was searching for "healthy body weight for x of age y" where x was man,woman and y was my age. Google said 50lbs higher than I expected. I clicked through to the article. The article said the average was this high number, not a healthy weight.
- retskrad 2y agoAccording to the judges ruling, Google’s internal data indicated that they would lose up to 80% of searches on Apple devices, resulting in a $30 billion revenue loss, if they gave up their default search position.
- prossercj 2y agohttps://archive.ph/cqPWM https://archive.ph/cqPWM
- zombiwoof 2y agoThe original “deal” has Eric Slimy Schmidt vibes all over it
- dukeofdoom 2y agoGoogle is getting more terrible by the day. They've been fudging results for political reasons. But aside from that, they just make it harder to find what you need, to sell ads and misdirect to paid landing pages. So in a way, they're stifling human progress. Even if they just waste a billion people's time for one minute every day. It's like 1900 lost years, or 23 lifetimes. Compare it to ChatGPT which just gives a really good answer right away.
- smugma 2y agohttps://archive.ph/3iNOe https://archive.ph/3iNOe
- aristofun 2y agoI don’t like google and I don’t like the way their shitty search is stuck in every hole. But denying by court a company a right to honestly pay to another company for distribution of their services has much worse long term consequences and is wrong.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- surgical_fire 2y ago> But denying by court a company a right to honestly pay to another company Considering this is an antitrust case, those payments are not honest.
- aristofun 2y agoThat is my point - they _are_ honest (i.e. not stolen or tax evaded, not earned on illegal drugs etc). But a short sighted court decided otherwise for whatever dumb reason they had.
- surgical_fire 2y agoOh, nothing dumb about antitrust. It is an important regulation. Good to see it being upheld.
- Zuiii 2y agoYou don't get to pay other companies to keep out your competitors when you're as big as Google. It's as simple as that.
- bionhoward 2y agoJust when we thought reading multiple double-digit page count terms of service was bad enough, this madlad takes it to the next level with a 277 page legal opinion. What a time to be alive!
- danielmarkbruce 2y agoIt's Apple who is using their market power in smartphones to dominate search. Apple makes 10's of billions a year out of search. In the search business, they are a distributor. Google doesn't want to pay this money, they are forced to.
- j_maffe 2y agoNo body is forced to do anything. Google can just not pay that money and lose that share of the market. They're not doing that because they want to preserve their monopoly status.
- danielmarkbruce 2y agoThis is silly. People are forced to do all kinds of things. They are forced at gunpoint, they are forced via laws, they are forced via incentives that are so strong they may as well be a gun. As are companies. So, in theory, you are wrong. In practice, even more wrong. If management decided to not pay this money, and gave up that positioning to a competitor, they would be fired. If the board allowed it to continue, they could be sued. They are forced. No one at google sits around thinking "i want to preserve our monopoly status". They are thinking "I don't want to be crushed by someone". Google can be crushed just like any other company. Their panic around AI is due to the fact they think it could crush their search business, and they are correct to think so.
- alt227 2y ago>No one at google sits around thinking "i want to preserve our monopoly status". They are thinking "I don't want to be crushed by someone" I guarantee they are thinking both, but both are pretty much the same statment anyway.
- danielmarkbruce 2y agoI spent years there and never saw anyone convey the idea of maintaining a monopoly. I'll agree that to some extent they are the same thing in certain markets - those that naturally tend to 1 or 2 players dominating the entire market.
- AzzyHN 2y agoI wonder if their exclusivity deal with reddit contributed at all
- hnthrowaway0328 2y agoThey should just dismantle those super corporations. They are already too big to tame.
- spidermonk 2y agoThat's why we are developing an alternative to big web search comapanies with our community based search engine at https://beta.mwmbl.org https://beta.mwmbl.org (main site is currently a bit slow due to dev upgrades). Feel free to join our Matrix.
- slater 2y agoFYI the .woff fonts on that site don't load for me in Firefox, with a "ns_binding_aborted" error in the JS console.
- jl6 2y agoIt’s called out that Google pays Mozilla to have Google be the default search engine in Firefox. I worry this ruling will lead to Google ceasing those payments, effectively killing Mozilla as a going concern.
- hrpnk 2y agoMaybe they will allow a level-playing field and allow bids like in a marketplace?
- warkdarrior 2y agoWhy would anyone bid for being the search engine in a browser with <4% market share and falling? Everybody will want to be on iPhone/Safari, Android/Chrome, and Windows/Chrome or Edge.
- meiraleal 2y agoAnd at least 50% of this 4% (myself included) use ad blockers. Well, too bad Mozilla put itself in this situation. If it doesn't kill it, it will make it stronger.
- uabstraction 2y ago4 percent of the browser market is still well over a hundred million users.
- ImJamal 2y agoThese default search deals are only on new installs though. How often will those users reinstall Firefox?
- asadotzler 2y agoNo. You are wrong, either confused or lying. These deals are a revenue share for ad engagement on search results. Stop the lying.
- xyst 2y agoGoogle didn't payoff the right public sector employees. The Christian and O&G lobbyists were able to buy off politicians and judges to get the right rulings so they can continue to ruin the country (ie, defang regulators so O&G can continue polluting without hurting their bottom line, none to minimal punishment for pushing anti-climate propaganda, pushing "white christian values" to children without consequence, the presence of religion throughout government ranks, abuse of religious tax exempt status, no enforcement on donations to political entities from religious orgs)
- fallingknife 2y agoO&G are allowed to do their jobs because the consumers (the real polluter) are also the voters, and there is just about nothing that pisses them off more than high gas prices. And most of that other stuff you complain about is just an insignificant thing we call "free speech." It's not a big conspiracy where everybody is buying judges and politicians.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoThis is a good start but all the tech giants need to broken up. Their size alone, and their access to capital, lets them do any number of anti competitive things. The deals/partnerships they make, the acquisitions, the bundling (like Teams and Office), loss leading, reliance on network effects, patent portfolios / giant legal teams, all of it. There isn’t really a great innovation landscape when these companies can just copy your idea and go scorched earth. We also need to regulate some of their products as general public utilities. For example there is no reason YouTube, a basic video hosting platform, should have content that only Google can train AIs on. I really hope Harris and Trump double down on Lina Khan’s direction and not succumb to corporate bribery…I mean lobbying.
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- zakki 2y agoAnd when we talk about walled garden, fans always said customer chose it. No, customer is dictated. For walled garden owner billion reasons.
- alt227 2y agoThe customer in this case is Google, not the users. The users are the product, and apple are selling their eyes for $20 billion a year.
- convivialdingo 2y agoFinally? Google has basically turned search and news into a political-corporate mouthpiece. Android is essentially a vacuum for surveillance capitalism. I rarely even use google to find anything beyond Chinese food and such. If we could go back to Google 2010 that would be fantastic.
- dylan604 2y agoI have never used the URL/location bar as a search. I once was looking over the shoulder for someone that does, and the list of previous searches that popped up was quite revealing. This just reinforced my not wanting to ever use that feature. I'm sure this must look suspicious to anyone that would ever "look into" my machine. My default search therefore is which site I decide to use at the time, but rarely is it ever Google. I hope the $0.000000001 that the Googs paid for my default setting is worth it. /s
- tiltowait 2y agoThat list (on iOS) is search suggestions, not previous searches.
- xnx 2y agoI still struggle to see the harm, or what a remedy would aim to fix. Of all the possible antitrust fights to pick (Comcast, Apple, Meta, etc.), I'm not sure this would even make my top 10. Google search is still the best out there. If you want to use a another web search, the switching cost is lower than almost any other product/service (e.g. compared to OS, cell phone network, ISP, etc.). Competitors like Microsoft, Apple, and Meta have ungodly amounts of money, but have barely tried in web search. Despite Google being a more open and better web citizen than most other players, they have still been hit with actions on the Google Play Store and search. It's hard to make sense of.
- greycol 2y ago>>I still struggle to see the harm >>Google search is still the best out there The second statement coupled with the fact that google search has declined in quality due to choices by google (not just the admitidely difficult SEO adversaries) is the harm. Google is able to purposefully degrade it's experience because of the lack of competition, and demonstratably has (while still, arguably, being viewed as the best). I'm with you on the remedies, I can't think of any specific to paying to be the default that don't have multiple negative knock on effects (I'm particuarly worried about what this means for Mozzila funding myself). Still you don't skip chemotherapy just because it's more acute in the short term.
- lofaszvanitt 2y ago10 years too late.
- a13o 2y agoWhat happens now? We unbundle search results? Sounds cool!
- Axelmj2006 2y ago[dead]
- Axelmj2006 2y ago[dead]
- gitprolinux 2y agoFrom BestInternetSearch.com to yahoo and bing, search engine competitors are affected and consumers of these services negatively.
- chasil 2y agohttps://archive.ph/3iNOe https://archive.ph/3iNOe
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- rockwotj 2y agoI wonder if this has ramifications on the OpenAI IPhone deal too.
- langsoul-com 2y agoRip Mozilla. That google money was necessary to fund whatever increasingly dumb project Mozilla was working on. What now? Actually focus on Firefox? Impossible.
- al_borland 2y agoIf Firefox dies, the antitrust case against Chrome is sure to follow. The only thing really stopping Chrome from full domination right now is the iPhone, and the EU is going to move that stumbling block out of the way, if they haven’t already. I don’t live there, so I didn’t commit the current state to memory.
- spacebacon 2y agoHotBot was my search engine of choice pre google largely due to wired magazine. Search has gotten better but not at a rate that consistently supersedes its ability to be gamed. That waxes and wanes.
- richrichie 2y agoThis is a good day for humanity. I had a Ricard and a cigar and thought about how they went from not doing evil to embodying far left ideology.
- ricardo81 2y agoGoogle's not the messiah, and they've been a very naughty boy.
- imichael 2y agoWhat seems to be missing is discussion of the fact that Google's customers are the advertisers. The search engine users are the product. To what extent does Google monopolize the sales of eyeballs to the advertisers? And, if Google can't pay to be the default any more, and given that users are the product, maybe the solution is for the search engines to somehow pay us to select them as the default.