20 ms·

I 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 s

by cletus 2y ago

I 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    They 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.
    - mistrial9 2y ago
      > They also have quarterly financials to report. one of the biggest brands in the world, with how many billions in CASH .. needs the money.. This is the same nonsense that WSJ peddles everyday.. "greed is good" and makes the world go around, details are just in the way. No, actually.. there are other parts of society that are touched by this, and their children btw.. Apple and Google and whomever are now bumping against the edges of Big Society. There is no predicting what will come out of the woodwork on this IMHO
    - shadowgovt 2y ago
      Apple's biggest disincentive to continue the practice is that they themselves end up in the monopoly crosshairs from time-to-time, and it doesn't look good in terms of the DOJ targeting them if they continue a practice that was ruled monopolistic with another company. It isn't necessarily monopolistic if they do, but it raises suspicion. (Personally, I wish monopoly law didn't seem so much like "vibes". It's really hard to answer whether the rule is fair when the same actions have different legal consequences depending on some vaguely-defined categories like "market sector").
      - ProfessorLayton 2y ago
        Apple creating their own search engine will likely raise more eyebrows than letting an existing Google competitor buy their way into the iPhone ecosystem. In fact the DOJ may prefer a smaller player turn into a bigger competitor to Google, even if that's Microsoft's Bing. As others have pointed out, these types of deals haven't been ruled illegal, they only apply to Google for abusing its monopoly. Apple will want more than zero dollars.
    - 2y ago
causal 2y ago
Disagree. People use Google because it's the default, not because they will go out of their way to keep using it. The minute Apple changes the iPhone default, all but a few iPhone users stop using Google.
- chadash 2y ago
  Chrome is not anyone's default browser, but it still has dominance. People will be bothered a little under some circumstances.
  - acdha 2y ago
    Chrome is a complicated case in general because Google poured money into promoting Chrome and had some of the most popular sites on the web promoting it heavily and actively sabotaged Firefox at several key points. I respect a lot of the Chrome team’s early work but it’s very hard for me to see that as a story about fair competition alone.
    - kelnos 2y ago
      Yeah, this is the thing that gets me. Chrome is the (rare) exception when we're talking about defaults generally winning, not the rule. An interesting thought experiment might be to imagine if Chrome was actually somehow the default browser on Windows and/or macOS. I think we could expect Edge's and/or Safari's market share numbers to be much lower than they are now if that were the case.
    - jfoster 2y ago
      So, to summarize: defaults are powerful, but advertising is more powerful.
      - mrguyorama 2y ago
        Specifically, Google was leveraging their existence as "THE web" to push their web browser. Every single Google property aggressively displayed banners and reminders and nag prompts ensuring you "Gmail is best in Chrome" and other nonsense that "Just one click here to fix". Yes, putting a single button with vague words in front of users almost always gets a lot of clicks, which we've known for decades, and it turns out, if you have the attention of nearly the entire web-browsing world, you can put that button in front of people's faces way more than your competitors. It should have been considered billions of dollars of free advertising for Chrome that should have been assessed against them somehow. It's blatantly unfair and should have been shut down in literally days, but nooooooooo we aren't allowed to have regulation here in the states.
JKCalhoun 2y ago
> Most users will probably still use Google Most users will probably use the default. And there's zero reason (zero dollars) saying it will be Google.
akira2501 2y ago
> but Google didn't buy its way into dominance annd maintain their dominance through exclusivity deals This is a huge claim. Do you have any evidence to back it up?
- dmazzoni 2y ago
  I think they're saying is that in Google's very early days, they gained market dominance against a dozen other search engines simply by being better. It wasn't until years later that they started paying to be the dominant search engine.
  - j_maffe 2y ago
    > It wasn't until years later that they started paying to be the dominant search engine. I agree but I that's not what the GP said.
- glzone1 2y ago
  Google is not the default search provider on Windows. It is not the default search provider in Edge. Microsoft prompts at varying levels of annoyingness to get you to stay with their solutions. Historically it was even harder with IE. Despite all this, folks often switch to chrome and google search. IE was so bad and Chrome so much better that Microsoft gave up on IE on their own platform and switched to Chrome as the engine for edge.
- ankit219 2y ago
  I fail to see your reasoning. The court's argument is Google is maintaining this dominance via these default deals, not that it got there through them. Given the last 25 years of history, Google's product has gotten worse after these default deals. Previously it established the dominance because it found whatever a user searched for. Arguing otherwise just feels unrealistic. They never had any exclusive deals with any provider. Edit: Changed exclusive to default.
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    There are no exclusivity deals. These are deals around defaults, not exclusivity. Google never paid Apple to remove Bing from the list of choices. That's what an exclusivity deal would do. But it didn't happen, because this doesn't have anything to do with exclusivity.
gessha 2y ago
> Google didn't buy its way into dominance annd maintain their dominance through exclusivity deals That’s just a waste of money then. Why are they paying bilious to Mozilla and Apple? Because they’re good buddies? Wouldn’t people use Google anyway? Just imagine the Google CFO looking through the finance spreadsheets last year and instead of going “let’s layoff a whole bunch of people” they go with “let’s stop paying Apple and Mozilla” for default search.
- octodog 2y ago
  Not necessarily. At least some of the benefit for Google is that they prevent a competitor from paying to be the default search.
- greycol 2y ago
  Your point stands but there's an argument to be made they paid Mozilla so that they don't collapse and then have to defend a monopoly lawsuit on Chrome.
nabla9 2y ago
> So what's going to happen? Apple might make their own search engine. Apple has a team that's been creating a next-generation search engine codenamed Pegasus under John Giannandrea. They already have search engines for App Store, Maps, Apple TV and News and Spotlight. Apple web search development worked as bargaining chip in pricing negotiations with Google. Google paid them $20 billion per year to not compete as much as keeping other competitors away.
- philistine 2y ago
  Yeah, the calculus is simple. You just lose 20 billion in potential pure profits. Google is paying you 34% of all search revenue originated by you. You have all the financial structure of your own search engine right there. Just make your own damn search engine. You could even put Google's own ads on it to make some money that way.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    God forbid their advertising looks anything like it does in Apple News. But with their recent Taboola deal it would seem like their standards are falling, not rising.
    - DaoVeles 2y ago
      Tim Cook is merely out to keep the stock price going up just like every other business. Because they had a longer runway from the era of Steve Jobs, they look better by comparison but they will try and do every trick that everyone else has done to keep the next quarter going up.
- mucle6 2y ago
  If apple wanted to or thought they could make a profitable search engine, wouldn't they have already done it?
  - nabla9 2y ago
    Not as profitable as monopoly. Sharing monopoly profit with Google is more profitable for both and loss for the consumers. Both Apple and Google make less profits if they compete against each other, but consumers benefit from two search engines trying to compete against each other.
riku_iki 2y ago
> Apple will lose significant revenue from having Google as the default search engine and Google will no longer have to pay those billions. there is also Android ecosystem, where DOJ may ask google to prompt user with Search Egnine selection dialog, and Google can easily lose some significant share of traffic to Bing/ChatGPT/etc.
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
Really, really curious how this all plays out WRT Mozilla. Mozilla receives on the order of 80% of their revenue from making Google the default search engine on Firefox. They're going to have to layoff the majority of their employees.
- mozempthrowaway 2y ago
  Working 10 hours per week was nice while it lasted.
- azemetre 2y ago
  There is no one to blame but the leadership at Mozilla for the position they are in. They had a decade+ to try to create additional revenue streams but botched every attempt.
- sensanaty 2y ago
  That's entirely on Mozilla and the slew of incompetent CEOs who did nothing but pocket millions and buy out useless products like Pocket instead of directing funds where they should've gone, the development of their browser. If I could donate to Firefox development, I would've a long time ago for a generous monthly sum, but since I know it's just going to be squandered by becoming another advertising company [1], then I'm not too bothered by it. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-anonym-raising-the-bar-for-privacy-preserving-digital-advertising/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-anonym-raising-t...
stefan_ 2y ago
It's like you didn't understand what this case was about at all. Google isn't paying to be first, Google is paying so nobody bothers making a competitor.
- fsckboy 2y ago
  people keep bothering to make competitors, they simply have no chance at success having kept getting locked out by Google's anticompetitive practices
- j_maffe 2y ago
  ITT: People not understand the basics of a monopoly.
woopsn 2y ago
Google seemed to think the many billions of dollars spent annually to insert Google into other products was necessary in order to maintain dominance in the search market. This wasn't disputed right? I doubt they are relieved now that Bing, OpenAI and others have charismatic products that appear to threaten their core competency right as the business is declared a monopoly.
- fsckboy 2y ago
  >in order to maintain dominance in the s̶e̶a̶r̶c̶h̶ ̶m̶a̶r̶k̶e̶t̶.... ...advertising market, i.e. selling the users of search to advertisers
greg_V 2y ago
With how the market is looking as of today, the next YC batch might have a promising carrier pigeon startup and a ridesharing blip services that monetizes with ads!
shuntress 2y ago
> They simply have a better product This is the key. I'm not saying Google couldn't be better. But if it were possible to build a better index of the Internet, Google would do it. Spam garbage overrunning the web is the underlying issue.
- beej71 2y ago
  Depends on the definition of "better", I think.
- j_maffe 2y ago
  > But if it were possible to build a better index of the Internet, Google would do it. Not when it's detrimental to their sources of income, i.e. Ad Sense.
  - shuntress 2y ago
    I think it's reasonable to assume that google would favor the Ad Sense customer given two results that are otherwise of equal or near equal quality but the notion that google would exclude good results from domains that do not serve Ad Sense ads is absurd.
    - j_maffe 2y ago
      Why is it absurd? If it's still considered the go-to option by most users, they could afford the slightly worse quality for the extra revenue, no? That's the end result of monopolies, the provider starts to compromise on the service to capitalize on the user's lack of viable options.
- al_borland 2y ago
  Google is an ad company first. It stands to reason than their results optimize for ad profitability, not to have the best index. If the goal was to have the best index, they would actively punish sites that use SEO to push sites that are nothing more than auto-generated affiliate links to Amazon products. I quit using Google a while ago, because that’s all I was getting. I use Kagi now, which had no ads. Without this conflict of interest, I find things go better.
aziaziazi 2y ago
We got some chromebooks at (totally un-tech) work. Some are set with quant, some duckduckgo and some other misterious (to me) search engines. When you open the browser for the first time it gives you a list of ~10 to choose. Knowing the constant days cadence, delay and stress we handle I can easely picture my colleagues picking the closest to mouse to access the web without loosing a second.
- ImJamal 2y ago
  Can't you set a group policy and have it default to Google or whatever search engine you want?
  - aziaziazi 2y ago
    Maybe but that would be unproductive : google if full of ads at the top of the page and we would probably need to scroll, loosing precious time. Don’t think coworkers avoid it on purpose though.
prng2021 2y ago
The problem is that when you bundle products, you can maintain your market dominance even when competitors have a better product. Microsoft has shown this to be true countless times, most recently with MS Teams (vs Slack). Furthermore it doesn’t cut it to be marginally better than Google Search when they’re the default search engine. You have to completely blow them out of the water and for that you likely need long term, sustained investment to pour into R&D. How many VCs are willing to play that long game and invest when you have an incumbent paying $20B+ to block user choice? The creation of Firefox and Google Chrome are examples of competition that tremendously benefited consumers, but which took many years to play out, after the government ruled against monopolistic behavior.
- dehrmann 2y ago
  > it doesn’t cut it to be marginally better than Google Search when they’re the default search engine. You have to completely blow them out of the water. More than that, it's the de facto default for anyone who can be bothered to change it. It also reminds me of the Dvorak keyboard. It's somewhat better than the competition, but not better enough to justify changing. Google's search competitors are trying, but they're not obviously much better.
dangus 2y ago
I think this idea is incredibly short-sighted. Let's think of an alternative where browser are forced to even the playing field: the browser either presents users with a list of search engines in random order, or perhaps it even chooses a random default. You'd see a world where search engines can run ads that say "click this easy button/download our app/do this really easy thing" to use our search engine. You would also see smaller search engines being able to get on the Safari search engine list instead of just the ones that can pay Apple what I assume are huge fees. Let's not forget that iOS and iPadOS commands a huge share of the most affluent customers who would be most willing to use paid search engines. But in the status quo even those willing to do so will find Apple's platforms to be less than accomodating.
colechristensen 2y ago
>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) Google search sucks. I didn't switch to DDG. Any competitor is going to have a hard time breaking in because of Google's paid exclusivity deals. That's part of why Google sucks. Google won easily in the early days because it was considerably better in a wide field of competitors it wiped out. It's not too hard to believe that Google would return better results if anyone was competing. My web search has degraded to only searching for things I know already exist or occasionally fighting Google to try my damndest to get it to do an exact text search which is a stupid amount of struggle.
_3u10 2y ago
I tried to switch to DDG, I even gave myself 90 days. On day 91 I immediately switched back.
- al_borland 2y ago
  I never had good luck with DDG, and found myself using !g to jump over go Google a lot. I switch to Kagi about a year ago and had a much better experience. My browser defaulted itself back to Google one day, and I didn’t notice the heading but when I looked at the results I recoiled in disgust at how bad it was. I looked at the top of the page and saw it was Google. That was the last time I used Google and it wasn’t even on purpose. Several times now at work, I’ve joined a call where people had been troubleshooting for hours trying to find an answer to some issues, presumably using Google a lot in the process. I end up using Kagi, finding an answer, and the call wraps up 15 minutes later. This has happened at least 3 times now, and I’m not on these types of calls often. It’s so nice to be the customer and not the product.
- somenameforme 2y ago
  I also left DDG, but have been very satisfied with Brave's search. [1] They also have a nice optional LLM system built in that provides citations to what it says, which is pretty neat. They also have 'goggles' which enable you to apply or create a chosen filter to reorder/refilter results. So e.g. getting news while blocking partisan sites (or indulging our own partisan preferences), searching only tech blogs, blocking big tech sites, searching for video/audio from non-YouTube sources or whatever else. Lots of neat stuff that I'm surprised other sites haven't cloned yet. [1] - https://search.brave.com/ https://search.brave.com/
eviks 2y ago
If you think nothing changes why did Google waste so much money paying? What were they missing that you don't?
smsm42 2y ago
They don't have a better product, not for a long time, but they do have a famous product, with which most of the people are familiar with, unlike the competitors. They have been matched and over-matched long ago, but since virtually nobody within 99% accuracy makes research on current search engine market before typing into the box, that doesn't matter - people know google, so people go to google, however inferior their product would be. If it's not literally useless, they'll keep using it for a while now.
xyzzy123 2y ago
There is usually a requirement from regulator to present the top N options in random order to the user and it's likely a reasonable number of people will just pick the first in the list resulting in some market share loss for Google.
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
"I expect this to be bad for everyone except Google if the ruling holds." If the decision will not be bad for Google, then why would Google spend so much money and time to defend against it.^1 Why not just stop making the anti-competitive payments and terminate the agreements. Money saved. Problem solved. We can now safely say it is not a defense to claim "Google is the best" and that's why people choose it. Anti-competitive conduct is illegal. Whether it is prudent or not. It makes no difference whether the payments were actually "necessary".^2 Google made them anyway, repeatedly. 1. Even more, this "prediction" implies there will be an appeal ("... if this ruling holds."). Why bother with an appeal if this decision has no negative effect on Google. 2. One only needs to show the conduct had an anti-competitive effect. Please read the decision: https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/f6ab5c368725101c/43d7c2a0-full.pdf https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/f6ab5c36...
- aergh345ygq 2y ago
  So really it's just a loss for everyone all around. But at least nobody is being anti-competitive I guess.
  - ffgjgf1 2y ago
    Except Apple and Mozilla for whom it’s a huge part of their profits/revenue respect
    - aergh345ygq 2y ago
      Deals are mutually beneficial. If Apple and Mozilla were both taking Google's offer it's because neither felt they had more to gain from developing their own search engine to compete outright in the meantime or from offering someone else's as a default. There might be something to the argument Mozilla isn't in a position to reject the money because they're sort of a shambling corpse at this point but Apple is about as far from a desperate company as you can get.
      - ffgjgf1 2y ago
jmspring 2y ago
Google is going to lose money. Their search has been declining for years and the top 1/2 or so of a search is nothing but ads. So, while they may pay for deals, they will likely also lose traffic that helps pay for those deals.
MoneyFight 2y ago
> but Google didn't buy its way into dominance and maintain their dominance through exclusivity deals. Then they wouldn't have those deals in the first place. Companies don't just piss off money for no reason. And the reason is simple: They want no competition - they strictly maintain their dominance through them. Just saying "No" isn't enough. You have to explain why they have those deals if you think this isn't the reason why. Otherwise, anyone reasonable must disagree by default.
brazzledazzle 2y ago
I had a coworker insist on using ddg for privacy reasons and he was a bit smug about it even though meetings where he was presenting while searching the web always started with a ddg search and ended with him sighing and giving up by using !g to switch to google. I think, even in it's less than ideal state, people still underestimate how much time google's tailored search can save you when you train it to figure out you want to see development/technical documentation.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  I've frequently found better results by using the !g when searching for technical docs and other programming-related stuff. But for more everyday, non-programming things, I've frequently found the regular DDG results (from Bing) actually better and less filled with SEO crap than Google's.
  - rendaw 2y ago
    Often when searching with google I stick !g in front of my query without thinking, and only realize when it shows up in the search bar after the page loads.
- n4r9 2y ago
  I'm curious, what kind of presentations involve searching the web on the spot?
  - n4r9 2y ago
    As if to answer my own question, I just came out of a call which involved me sharing my screen while I searched the web for info on the memory consumption of classes in dotnet. I take it back!
  - brazzledazzle 2y ago
    The kind with no agenda
paul7986 2y ago
Google I use 40 percent of the time vs. 60 percent chatGPT. Google is definitely on the start of a decline!
- paul7986 2y ago
  My behavior is either indictative of what's happening now .. the pulse and or what will happen (read many of my downvoted posts which what i say in time comes to fruition most recently in Aug '23 hating on Cruise; bros faking it before u make it with tech that can kill NO NO NO). https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-is-bigger-threat-google-than-us-regulators-2024-08-08/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-is-bigger-threat-g... Even some of my tech startup .. the ideas behind them were ahead of the times like Wireless Power Share and SpeakerBlast (created in 2013 a month before Samsung announced the same tech to built into their phones). Love to work in a forward thinking tech job like at Meta Ray Ban division. I love these glasses .. smart glasses will be huge tho not as huge as the smart phone because you can not take a selfie with them. They will always be a great companion to your smart phone where you are not taking your phone out of your pocket as much as you use to. I am sure to get downvoted for this post as i always get downvoted for my thoughts lol
alvah 2y ago
"They simply have a better product" I disagree. 100% they had a better product, but they have absolutely mangled it over the last few updates. Honestly, if I wanted the opinion of randomnumbers45123 on Reddit, I'd just search Reddit. Google achieved dominance ~25 years ago by being better than the alternatives, and the other search engines pretty much withered away rapidly. They (Google) are in a very precarious position right now. They will certainly not disappear overnight, but if / when the public becomes aware of something better, the implosion could be spectacular.
- rstuart4133 2y ago
  For a decade of so I was in charge internal web page for mobile users. I had control over the devices the end users had, the web browser they used, I maintained the back end. In that deployment the best product was Firefox. There were two major reasons. It could be deployed on all platforms we used (we didn't support iOS). Secondly it was by far the most reliable. We still have the occasional use who would use Chrome on Android or whatever, and at least one or twice a year Chrome would push a broken version. It's odd, as before that I would have put Google's code quality above Mozilla's. At least for Chrome/Firefox it's not, and the difference is large.
  - londons_explore 2y ago
    Occasionally pushing a bad update is a symptom of having 10x as many Devs pushing 10x as many features each month. Even if Googles QA process was triple as good as Mozilla's, the users would still see more breakage.
    - michaelmrose 2y ago
      I don't think you can scale or compare like that numerically. Every commit isn't a chance for it to break for users because they bundle however many commits into a release and resources required to test the release don't scale per commit.
      - 2y ago
centum 2y ago
Wow, if Google had hired you, your insight would've saved them many billions every single year! They're such fools for spending all that money when it had absolutely no impact on their position in the market!
- c2h5oh 2y ago
  Before this ruling: whoever pays the most gets to be the default, so google pays. If they don't someone else does. After this ruling: since nobody gets to buy being the default whatever users want to be the default will be selected. Judging by market share it will be google for $0.
  - smrq 2y ago
    This seems to contradict the testimony. Assisting to tfa, there was no price Microsoft could pay that would have made Apple use Bing by default.
hot_gril 2y ago
I was thinking this too, but on second thought, I can't imagine Apple making Google the default for free under any circumstances. That's a ton of free referrals, in a way the best advertising slot that exists on an iPhone.
jjav 2y ago
> They simply have a better product and I don't expect anyone to match them anytime soon This is a strange statement to be honest. Have you used google search in the last decade? google search was awesome back in the very early 2000s. If you remember those times, you know how good it was. That started deteriorating in the 2010s and it has become really useless in the last decade. Today google search results are mostly spam sites with autogenerated content along with sales and advertising sites. It can't find any of the actual user-generated honest content anymore.
- archerx 2y ago
  It's leaking into Youtube as well, there have been a few times where I have searched for a video using it's exact name and I would have to scroll far down the list to find the correct search result in a sea of irrelevant garbage. You'd think if you search for video "XYZ", video "XYZ" would be the first result and not somewhere at the bottom of the list.
- gwervc 2y ago
  Google nowadays is more about hiding and manipulating results to push an agenda than letting users finding was they're searching for.
  - delfinom 2y ago
    Lol, no google isn't out to get you rightwingers. Their only "agenda" is quite leaked at this point, it's to push ads. The more you have to dig, the more ads they get to show you. The more times they can show you ads, the more times they get to charge advertisers those pennies per show.
locallost 2y ago
If that was completely true, Google would not be paying billions for the placement. Google is better than the rest, but for most things the others are good enough. I think a large portion of people don't really need amazing results, but Google needs their eyeballs and clicks.
lostlogin 2y ago
> They simply have a better product They had a good product, but have screwed it up. Have you tried Kagi? I dipped my toes and have never looked back, not once. It’s quick, it’s good, I have some neat customisation. The less-geeky family have joined me. The downside? It’s paid. But it’s worth it.
account42 2y ago
> Mozilla and Apple will lose significant revenue from having Google as the default search engine This would be a great thing for Firefox. That Google money is toxic in more ways than one.
chii 2y ago
> Most users will probably still use Google or bing pays to be the default? or apple choose to give some upstart like duckduckgo a chance? Or they produce their own search engine (not that i think they will).
uhtred 2y ago
> Most users will probably still use Google Stupid them then. I don't and now I won't have to see Google defaulted to everywhere. This is great news. If Mozilla can't afford to provide Firefox anymore then they could ask for donations or provide a paid product. I'd pay for firefox if they stripped out the google and pocket crap.
LoveMortuus 2y ago
On my phone, I've been using MS Edge for quite a long time, if not since it was released, which of course uses Bing and honestly, it never gets in my way, so I would say that, as far as I use the web, it's equally good to Google.
ezomode 2y ago
Why do you think Google was paying that much to be the default choice on iOS?
darby_nine 2y ago
What makes you so sure the DOJ won't ask the court for divestment of chrome, android, etc? It's hard to imagine what else would be large enough to impact the finding of a de facto monopoly.

by cletus 2y ago

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 ago
I 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 ago
  They 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.
  - mistrial9 2y ago
    > They also have quarterly financials to report. one of the biggest brands in the world, with how many billions in CASH .. needs the money.. This is the same nonsense that WSJ peddles everyday.. "greed is good" and makes the world go around, details are just in the way. No, actually.. there are other parts of society that are touched by this, and their children btw.. Apple and Google and whomever are now bumping against the edges of Big Society. There is no predicting what will come out of the woodwork on this IMHO
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    Apple's biggest disincentive to continue the practice is that they themselves end up in the monopoly crosshairs from time-to-time, and it doesn't look good in terms of the DOJ targeting them if they continue a practice that was ruled monopolistic with another company. It isn't necessarily monopolistic if they do, but it raises suspicion. (Personally, I wish monopoly law didn't seem so much like "vibes". It's really hard to answer whether the rule is fair when the same actions have different legal consequences depending on some vaguely-defined categories like "market sector").
    - ProfessorLayton 2y ago
      Apple creating their own search engine will likely raise more eyebrows than letting an existing Google competitor buy their way into the iPhone ecosystem. In fact the DOJ may prefer a smaller player turn into a bigger competitor to Google, even if that's Microsoft's Bing. As others have pointed out, these types of deals haven't been ruled illegal, they only apply to Google for abusing its monopoly. Apple will want more than zero dollars.
  - 2y ago

causal 2y ago

Disagree. People use Google because it's the default, not because they will go out of their way to keep using it. The minute Apple changes the iPhone default, all but a few iPhone users stop using Google.

chadash 2y ago
Chrome is not anyone's default browser, but it still has dominance. People will be bothered a little under some circumstances.
- acdha 2y ago
  Chrome is a complicated case in general because Google poured money into promoting Chrome and had some of the most popular sites on the web promoting it heavily and actively sabotaged Firefox at several key points. I respect a lot of the Chrome team’s early work but it’s very hard for me to see that as a story about fair competition alone.
  - kelnos 2y ago
    Yeah, this is the thing that gets me. Chrome is the (rare) exception when we're talking about defaults generally winning, not the rule. An interesting thought experiment might be to imagine if Chrome was actually somehow the default browser on Windows and/or macOS. I think we could expect Edge's and/or Safari's market share numbers to be much lower than they are now if that were the case.
  - jfoster 2y ago
    So, to summarize: defaults are powerful, but advertising is more powerful.
    - mrguyorama 2y ago
      Specifically, Google was leveraging their existence as "THE web" to push their web browser. Every single Google property aggressively displayed banners and reminders and nag prompts ensuring you "Gmail is best in Chrome" and other nonsense that "Just one click here to fix". Yes, putting a single button with vague words in front of users almost always gets a lot of clicks, which we've known for decades, and it turns out, if you have the attention of nearly the entire web-browsing world, you can put that button in front of people's faces way more than your competitors. It should have been considered billions of dollars of free advertising for Chrome that should have been assessed against them somehow. It's blatantly unfair and should have been shut down in literally days, but nooooooooo we aren't allowed to have regulation here in the states.

JKCalhoun 2y ago

> Most users will probably still use Google Most users will probably use the default. And there's zero reason (zero dollars) saying it will be Google.

akira2501 2y ago

> but Google didn't buy its way into dominance annd maintain their dominance through exclusivity deals This is a huge claim. Do you have any evidence to back it up?

dmazzoni 2y ago
I think they're saying is that in Google's very early days, they gained market dominance against a dozen other search engines simply by being better. It wasn't until years later that they started paying to be the dominant search engine.
- j_maffe 2y ago
  > It wasn't until years later that they started paying to be the dominant search engine. I agree but I that's not what the GP said.
glzone1 2y ago
Google is not the default search provider on Windows. It is not the default search provider in Edge. Microsoft prompts at varying levels of annoyingness to get you to stay with their solutions. Historically it was even harder with IE. Despite all this, folks often switch to chrome and google search. IE was so bad and Chrome so much better that Microsoft gave up on IE on their own platform and switched to Chrome as the engine for edge.
ankit219 2y ago
I fail to see your reasoning. The court's argument is Google is maintaining this dominance via these default deals, not that it got there through them. Given the last 25 years of history, Google's product has gotten worse after these default deals. Previously it established the dominance because it found whatever a user searched for. Arguing otherwise just feels unrealistic. They never had any exclusive deals with any provider. Edit: Changed exclusive to default.
- crazygringo 2y ago
  There are no exclusivity deals. These are deals around defaults, not exclusivity. Google never paid Apple to remove Bing from the list of choices. That's what an exclusivity deal would do. But it didn't happen, because this doesn't have anything to do with exclusivity.

gessha 2y ago

> Google didn't buy its way into dominance annd maintain their dominance through exclusivity deals That’s just a waste of money then. Why are they paying bilious to Mozilla and Apple? Because they’re good buddies? Wouldn’t people use Google anyway? Just imagine the Google CFO looking through the finance spreadsheets last year and instead of going “let’s layoff a whole bunch of people” they go with “let’s stop paying Apple and Mozilla” for default search.

octodog 2y ago
Not necessarily. At least some of the benefit for Google is that they prevent a competitor from paying to be the default search.
greycol 2y ago
Your point stands but there's an argument to be made they paid Mozilla so that they don't collapse and then have to defend a monopoly lawsuit on Chrome.

nabla9 2y ago

> So what's going to happen? Apple might make their own search engine. Apple has a team that's been creating a next-generation search engine codenamed Pegasus under John Giannandrea. They already have search engines for App Store, Maps, Apple TV and News and Spotlight. Apple web search development worked as bargaining chip in pricing negotiations with Google. Google paid them $20 billion per year to not compete as much as keeping other competitors away.

philistine 2y ago
Yeah, the calculus is simple. You just lose 20 billion in potential pure profits. Google is paying you 34% of all search revenue originated by you. You have all the financial structure of your own search engine right there. Just make your own damn search engine. You could even put Google's own ads on it to make some money that way.
- talldayo 2y ago
  God forbid their advertising looks anything like it does in Apple News. But with their recent Taboola deal it would seem like their standards are falling, not rising.
  - DaoVeles 2y ago
    Tim Cook is merely out to keep the stock price going up just like every other business. Because they had a longer runway from the era of Steve Jobs, they look better by comparison but they will try and do every trick that everyone else has done to keep the next quarter going up.
mucle6 2y ago
If apple wanted to or thought they could make a profitable search engine, wouldn't they have already done it?
- nabla9 2y ago
  Not as profitable as monopoly. Sharing monopoly profit with Google is more profitable for both and loss for the consumers. Both Apple and Google make less profits if they compete against each other, but consumers benefit from two search engines trying to compete against each other.

riku_iki 2y ago

> Apple will lose significant revenue from having Google as the default search engine and Google will no longer have to pay those billions. there is also Android ecosystem, where DOJ may ask google to prompt user with Search Egnine selection dialog, and Google can easily lose some significant share of traffic to Bing/ChatGPT/etc.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

Really, really curious how this all plays out WRT Mozilla. Mozilla receives on the order of 80% of their revenue from making Google the default search engine on Firefox. They're going to have to layoff the majority of their employees.

mozempthrowaway 2y ago
Working 10 hours per week was nice while it lasted.
azemetre 2y ago
There is no one to blame but the leadership at Mozilla for the position they are in. They had a decade+ to try to create additional revenue streams but botched every attempt.
sensanaty 2y ago
That's entirely on Mozilla and the slew of incompetent CEOs who did nothing but pocket millions and buy out useless products like Pocket instead of directing funds where they should've gone, the development of their browser. If I could donate to Firefox development, I would've a long time ago for a generous monthly sum, but since I know it's just going to be squandered by becoming another advertising company [1], then I'm not too bothered by it. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-anonym-raising-the-bar-for-privacy-preserving-digital-advertising/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-anonym-raising-t...

stefan_ 2y ago

It's like you didn't understand what this case was about at all. Google isn't paying to be first, Google is paying so nobody bothers making a competitor.

fsckboy 2y ago
people keep bothering to make competitors, they simply have no chance at success having kept getting locked out by Google's anticompetitive practices
j_maffe 2y ago
ITT: People not understand the basics of a monopoly.

woopsn 2y ago

Google seemed to think the many billions of dollars spent annually to insert Google into other products was necessary in order to maintain dominance in the search market. This wasn't disputed right? I doubt they are relieved now that Bing, OpenAI and others have charismatic products that appear to threaten their core competency right as the business is declared a monopoly.

fsckboy 2y ago
>in order to maintain dominance in the s̶e̶a̶r̶c̶h̶ ̶m̶a̶r̶k̶e̶t̶.... ...advertising market, i.e. selling the users of search to advertisers

greg_V 2y ago

With how the market is looking as of today, the next YC batch might have a promising carrier pigeon startup and a ridesharing blip services that monetizes with ads!

shuntress 2y ago

> They simply have a better product This is the key. I'm not saying Google couldn't be better. But if it were possible to build a better index of the Internet, Google would do it. Spam garbage overrunning the web is the underlying issue.

beej71 2y ago
Depends on the definition of "better", I think.
j_maffe 2y ago
> But if it were possible to build a better index of the Internet, Google would do it. Not when it's detrimental to their sources of income, i.e. Ad Sense.
- shuntress 2y ago
  I think it's reasonable to assume that google would favor the Ad Sense customer given two results that are otherwise of equal or near equal quality but the notion that google would exclude good results from domains that do not serve Ad Sense ads is absurd.
  - j_maffe 2y ago
    Why is it absurd? If it's still considered the go-to option by most users, they could afford the slightly worse quality for the extra revenue, no? That's the end result of monopolies, the provider starts to compromise on the service to capitalize on the user's lack of viable options.
al_borland 2y ago
Google is an ad company first. It stands to reason than their results optimize for ad profitability, not to have the best index. If the goal was to have the best index, they would actively punish sites that use SEO to push sites that are nothing more than auto-generated affiliate links to Amazon products. I quit using Google a while ago, because that’s all I was getting. I use Kagi now, which had no ads. Without this conflict of interest, I find things go better.

aziaziazi 2y ago

We got some chromebooks at (totally un-tech) work. Some are set with quant, some duckduckgo and some other misterious (to me) search engines. When you open the browser for the first time it gives you a list of ~10 to choose. Knowing the constant days cadence, delay and stress we handle I can easely picture my colleagues picking the closest to mouse to access the web without loosing a second.

ImJamal 2y ago
Can't you set a group policy and have it default to Google or whatever search engine you want?
- aziaziazi 2y ago
  Maybe but that would be unproductive : google if full of ads at the top of the page and we would probably need to scroll, loosing precious time. Don’t think coworkers avoid it on purpose though.

prng2021 2y ago

The problem is that when you bundle products, you can maintain your market dominance even when competitors have a better product. Microsoft has shown this to be true countless times, most recently with MS Teams (vs Slack). Furthermore it doesn’t cut it to be marginally better than Google Search when they’re the default search engine. You have to completely blow them out of the water and for that you likely need long term, sustained investment to pour into R&D. How many VCs are willing to play that long game and invest when you have an incumbent paying $20B+ to block user choice? The creation of Firefox and Google Chrome are examples of competition that tremendously benefited consumers, but which took many years to play out, after the government ruled against monopolistic behavior.

dehrmann 2y ago
> it doesn’t cut it to be marginally better than Google Search when they’re the default search engine. You have to completely blow them out of the water. More than that, it's the de facto default for anyone who can be bothered to change it. It also reminds me of the Dvorak keyboard. It's somewhat better than the competition, but not better enough to justify changing. Google's search competitors are trying, but they're not obviously much better.

dangus 2y ago

I think this idea is incredibly short-sighted. Let's think of an alternative where browser are forced to even the playing field: the browser either presents users with a list of search engines in random order, or perhaps it even chooses a random default. You'd see a world where search engines can run ads that say "click this easy button/download our app/do this really easy thing" to use our search engine. You would also see smaller search engines being able to get on the Safari search engine list instead of just the ones that can pay Apple what I assume are huge fees. Let's not forget that iOS and iPadOS commands a huge share of the most affluent customers who would be most willing to use paid search engines. But in the status quo even those willing to do so will find Apple's platforms to be less than accomodating.

colechristensen 2y ago

>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) Google search sucks. I didn't switch to DDG. Any competitor is going to have a hard time breaking in because of Google's paid exclusivity deals. That's part of why Google sucks. Google won easily in the early days because it was considerably better in a wide field of competitors it wiped out. It's not too hard to believe that Google would return better results if anyone was competing. My web search has degraded to only searching for things I know already exist or occasionally fighting Google to try my damndest to get it to do an exact text search which is a stupid amount of struggle.

_3u10 2y ago

I tried to switch to DDG, I even gave myself 90 days. On day 91 I immediately switched back.

al_borland 2y ago
I never had good luck with DDG, and found myself using !g to jump over go Google a lot. I switch to Kagi about a year ago and had a much better experience. My browser defaulted itself back to Google one day, and I didn’t notice the heading but when I looked at the results I recoiled in disgust at how bad it was. I looked at the top of the page and saw it was Google. That was the last time I used Google and it wasn’t even on purpose. Several times now at work, I’ve joined a call where people had been troubleshooting for hours trying to find an answer to some issues, presumably using Google a lot in the process. I end up using Kagi, finding an answer, and the call wraps up 15 minutes later. This has happened at least 3 times now, and I’m not on these types of calls often. It’s so nice to be the customer and not the product.
somenameforme 2y ago
I also left DDG, but have been very satisfied with Brave's search. [1] They also have a nice optional LLM system built in that provides citations to what it says, which is pretty neat. They also have 'goggles' which enable you to apply or create a chosen filter to reorder/refilter results. So e.g. getting news while blocking partisan sites (or indulging our own partisan preferences), searching only tech blogs, blocking big tech sites, searching for video/audio from non-YouTube sources or whatever else. Lots of neat stuff that I'm surprised other sites haven't cloned yet. [1] - https://search.brave.com/ https://search.brave.com/

eviks 2y ago

If you think nothing changes why did Google waste so much money paying? What were they missing that you don't?

smsm42 2y ago

They don't have a better product, not for a long time, but they do have a famous product, with which most of the people are familiar with, unlike the competitors. They have been matched and over-matched long ago, but since virtually nobody within 99% accuracy makes research on current search engine market before typing into the box, that doesn't matter - people know google, so people go to google, however inferior their product would be. If it's not literally useless, they'll keep using it for a while now.

xyzzy123 2y ago

There is usually a requirement from regulator to present the top N options in random order to the user and it's likely a reasonable number of people will just pick the first in the list resulting in some market share loss for Google.

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

"I expect this to be bad for everyone except Google if the ruling holds." If the decision will not be bad for Google, then why would Google spend so much money and time to defend against it.^1 Why not just stop making the anti-competitive payments and terminate the agreements. Money saved. Problem solved. We can now safely say it is not a defense to claim "Google is the best" and that's why people choose it. Anti-competitive conduct is illegal. Whether it is prudent or not. It makes no difference whether the payments were actually "necessary".^2 Google made them anyway, repeatedly. 1. Even more, this "prediction" implies there will be an appeal ("... if this ruling holds."). Why bother with an appeal if this decision has no negative effect on Google. 2. One only needs to show the conduct had an anti-competitive effect. Please read the decision: https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/f6ab5c368725101c/43d7c2a0-full.pdf https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/f6ab5c36...

aergh345ygq 2y ago
So really it's just a loss for everyone all around. But at least nobody is being anti-competitive I guess.
- ffgjgf1 2y ago
  Except Apple and Mozilla for whom it’s a huge part of their profits/revenue respect
  - aergh345ygq 2y ago
    Deals are mutually beneficial. If Apple and Mozilla were both taking Google's offer it's because neither felt they had more to gain from developing their own search engine to compete outright in the meantime or from offering someone else's as a default. There might be something to the argument Mozilla isn't in a position to reject the money because they're sort of a shambling corpse at this point but Apple is about as far from a desperate company as you can get.
    - ffgjgf1 2y ago

jmspring 2y ago

Google is going to lose money. Their search has been declining for years and the top 1/2 or so of a search is nothing but ads. So, while they may pay for deals, they will likely also lose traffic that helps pay for those deals.

MoneyFight 2y ago

> but Google didn't buy its way into dominance and maintain their dominance through exclusivity deals. Then they wouldn't have those deals in the first place. Companies don't just piss off money for no reason. And the reason is simple: They want no competition - they strictly maintain their dominance through them. Just saying "No" isn't enough. You have to explain why they have those deals if you think this isn't the reason why. Otherwise, anyone reasonable must disagree by default.

brazzledazzle 2y ago

I had a coworker insist on using ddg for privacy reasons and he was a bit smug about it even though meetings where he was presenting while searching the web always started with a ddg search and ended with him sighing and giving up by using !g to switch to google. I think, even in it's less than ideal state, people still underestimate how much time google's tailored search can save you when you train it to figure out you want to see development/technical documentation.

shiroiushi 2y ago
I've frequently found better results by using the !g when searching for technical docs and other programming-related stuff. But for more everyday, non-programming things, I've frequently found the regular DDG results (from Bing) actually better and less filled with SEO crap than Google's.
- rendaw 2y ago
  Often when searching with google I stick !g in front of my query without thinking, and only realize when it shows up in the search bar after the page loads.
n4r9 2y ago
I'm curious, what kind of presentations involve searching the web on the spot?
- n4r9 2y ago
  As if to answer my own question, I just came out of a call which involved me sharing my screen while I searched the web for info on the memory consumption of classes in dotnet. I take it back!
- brazzledazzle 2y ago
  The kind with no agenda

paul7986 2y ago

Google I use 40 percent of the time vs. 60 percent chatGPT. Google is definitely on the start of a decline!

paul7986 2y ago
My behavior is either indictative of what's happening now .. the pulse and or what will happen (read many of my downvoted posts which what i say in time comes to fruition most recently in Aug '23 hating on Cruise; bros faking it before u make it with tech that can kill NO NO NO). https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-is-bigger-threat-google-than-us-regulators-2024-08-08/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-is-bigger-threat-g... Even some of my tech startup .. the ideas behind them were ahead of the times like Wireless Power Share and SpeakerBlast (created in 2013 a month before Samsung announced the same tech to built into their phones). Love to work in a forward thinking tech job like at Meta Ray Ban division. I love these glasses .. smart glasses will be huge tho not as huge as the smart phone because you can not take a selfie with them. They will always be a great companion to your smart phone where you are not taking your phone out of your pocket as much as you use to. I am sure to get downvoted for this post as i always get downvoted for my thoughts lol

alvah 2y ago

"They simply have a better product" I disagree. 100% they had a better product, but they have absolutely mangled it over the last few updates. Honestly, if I wanted the opinion of randomnumbers45123 on Reddit, I'd just search Reddit. Google achieved dominance ~25 years ago by being better than the alternatives, and the other search engines pretty much withered away rapidly. They (Google) are in a very precarious position right now. They will certainly not disappear overnight, but if / when the public becomes aware of something better, the implosion could be spectacular.

rstuart4133 2y ago
For a decade of so I was in charge internal web page for mobile users. I had control over the devices the end users had, the web browser they used, I maintained the back end. In that deployment the best product was Firefox. There were two major reasons. It could be deployed on all platforms we used (we didn't support iOS). Secondly it was by far the most reliable. We still have the occasional use who would use Chrome on Android or whatever, and at least one or twice a year Chrome would push a broken version. It's odd, as before that I would have put Google's code quality above Mozilla's. At least for Chrome/Firefox it's not, and the difference is large.
- londons_explore 2y ago
  Occasionally pushing a bad update is a symptom of having 10x as many Devs pushing 10x as many features each month. Even if Googles QA process was triple as good as Mozilla's, the users would still see more breakage.
  - michaelmrose 2y ago
    I don't think you can scale or compare like that numerically. Every commit isn't a chance for it to break for users because they bundle however many commits into a release and resources required to test the release don't scale per commit.
    - 2y ago

centum 2y ago

Wow, if Google had hired you, your insight would've saved them many billions every single year! They're such fools for spending all that money when it had absolutely no impact on their position in the market!

c2h5oh 2y ago
Before this ruling: whoever pays the most gets to be the default, so google pays. If they don't someone else does. After this ruling: since nobody gets to buy being the default whatever users want to be the default will be selected. Judging by market share it will be google for $0.
- smrq 2y ago
  This seems to contradict the testimony. Assisting to tfa, there was no price Microsoft could pay that would have made Apple use Bing by default.

hot_gril 2y ago

I was thinking this too, but on second thought, I can't imagine Apple making Google the default for free under any circumstances. That's a ton of free referrals, in a way the best advertising slot that exists on an iPhone.

jjav 2y ago

> They simply have a better product and I don't expect anyone to match them anytime soon This is a strange statement to be honest. Have you used google search in the last decade? google search was awesome back in the very early 2000s. If you remember those times, you know how good it was. That started deteriorating in the 2010s and it has become really useless in the last decade. Today google search results are mostly spam sites with autogenerated content along with sales and advertising sites. It can't find any of the actual user-generated honest content anymore.

archerx 2y ago
It's leaking into Youtube as well, there have been a few times where I have searched for a video using it's exact name and I would have to scroll far down the list to find the correct search result in a sea of irrelevant garbage. You'd think if you search for video "XYZ", video "XYZ" would be the first result and not somewhere at the bottom of the list.
gwervc 2y ago
Google nowadays is more about hiding and manipulating results to push an agenda than letting users finding was they're searching for.
- delfinom 2y ago
  Lol, no google isn't out to get you rightwingers. Their only "agenda" is quite leaked at this point, it's to push ads. The more you have to dig, the more ads they get to show you. The more times they can show you ads, the more times they get to charge advertisers those pennies per show.

locallost 2y ago

If that was completely true, Google would not be paying billions for the placement. Google is better than the rest, but for most things the others are good enough. I think a large portion of people don't really need amazing results, but Google needs their eyeballs and clicks.

lostlogin 2y ago

> They simply have a better product They had a good product, but have screwed it up. Have you tried Kagi? I dipped my toes and have never looked back, not once. It’s quick, it’s good, I have some neat customisation. The less-geeky family have joined me. The downside? It’s paid. But it’s worth it.

account42 2y ago

> Mozilla and Apple will lose significant revenue from having Google as the default search engine This would be a great thing for Firefox. That Google money is toxic in more ways than one.

chii 2y ago

> Most users will probably still use Google or bing pays to be the default? or apple choose to give some upstart like duckduckgo a chance? Or they produce their own search engine (not that i think they will).

uhtred 2y ago

> Most users will probably still use Google Stupid them then. I don't and now I won't have to see Google defaulted to everywhere. This is great news. If Mozilla can't afford to provide Firefox anymore then they could ask for donations or provide a paid product. I'd pay for firefox if they stripped out the google and pocket crap.

LoveMortuus 2y ago

On my phone, I've been using MS Edge for quite a long time, if not since it was released, which of course uses Bing and honestly, it never gets in my way, so I would say that, as far as I use the web, it's equally good to Google.

ezomode 2y ago

Why do you think Google was paying that much to be the default choice on iOS?

darby_nine 2y ago

What makes you so sure the DOJ won't ask the court for divestment of chrome, android, etc? It's hard to imagine what else would be large enough to impact the finding of a de facto monopoly.