5 ms·

Certainly not, Google learned from Microsoft that without friends in Washington to make these problems go away, they'll charge you with random offenses until yo

by fleitz 14y ago

Certainly not, Google learned from Microsoft that without friends in Washington to make these problems go away, they'll charge you with random offenses until you start contributing to their campaigns. "That's a nice business over there, would be a shame if we found you were running a monopoly, why don't you contribute to our campaign and we'll protect you from those DOJ lawyers" If giving a browser away is anti-competitive I wonder what giving an entire operating system + browser away for free is.

mikeash 14y ago
People seem to forget that Microsoft was targeted because of its anticompetitive tactics as a monopoly. At its peak, MS had something like 95% of the market for PC operating systems, and was busily using that monopoly to push its way into other markets where it wouldn't necessarily be competitive on its own. The problem wasn't giving away IE, the problem was giving away IE with their OS so that they could take over the browser market by leveraging their OS monopoly. Until and unless Google (or any other modern player) has a 90+% market share in some area, comparisons with MS's antitrust case are faulty.
- ams6110 14y ago
  And I never saw it this way... IE was legitimately better than Netscape for a while, and consumers gravitated to it. As proof, IE is still the default browser, and Windows is still the dominant PC OS, but IE has fallen from its top position because competing browsers are better. Microsoft's so-called "monopoly" on the desktop did not prevent competition; you could always easily install a different browser, and now that the alternatives are better than IE, people are doing that.
  - code_duck 14y ago
    So, when Microsoft execs were talking about choking Netscape and 'cutting off their air supply', they meant by making a better browser, you're saying?
    - yuhong 14y ago
      Yea, remember that it also affected Opera too.
    - mgkimsal 14y ago
      The air supply was a reference to revenue stream, iirc. Early on Netscape charged for their browser, and also charged for other products around it (NS Server, etc). I think even by the time they got to giving away the browser for free, it was seen as a bit of a 'gateway' product to other paid NS products. Those were threats to MS as well (or were perceived to potentially be).
  - true_religion 14y ago
    > IE was legitimately better than Netscape for a while That's right. IE was free. Netscape was not. I think this is a point a lot of people miss.
    - saraid216 14y ago
      I... actually didn't know that Netscape was a bought product until just now.
    - josephlord 14y ago
      It was free too pretty soon after IE reached OK though if I remember rightly. Netscape did crash far too often though in that time period and was probably better even beyond all the made for IE websites.
  - enraged_camel 14y ago
    >>IE was legitimately better than Netscape for a while, and consumers gravitated to it. As proof, IE is still the default browser Consumers did not gravitate to IE because it was "legitimately better" than Netscape. It never was. They did so because it came installed by default on their computer and most of them were too lazy/ignorant to find alternatives. Heck, most people didn't even know what a browser was. They just knew that double-clicking that blue e icon allowed them to get on the Internet. IE is still around today because of the large number of legacy inhouse applications and websites that were developed for it back in the day. There isn't a single thing it does better than Chrome, Firefox or even Opera.
    - nostrademons 14y ago
      I was a die-hard Netscape loyalist and Microsoft hater until 2000. I finally gave up NS4.7 for IE5.5 then, because Netscape wouldn't work on a large number of pages on the web. It would hang on their Javascript, or misrender page layouts. I'm still a Microsoft hater, but IE did win because it was better. Netscape totally dropped the ball on that.
    - WalterBright 14y ago
      I can vouch for IE being far better than Netscape.
    - rimantas 14y ago
      > Consumers did not gravitate to IE because it was > "legitimately better" than Netscape. It never was. You don't know what are you talking about. IE4 was already better than NN4 with its "layers" and half-assed JS-based CSS implementation. IE6 was far far ahead of Netscape. It was the best browser at the time. The problem is that IE stagnated from that point.
      - winter_blue 14y ago
        > The problem is that IE stagnated from that point. Recently, they've caught up pretty well.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - mikeash 14y ago
    Regardless of the merits of IE, or lack thereof, the point is that it doesn't matter if you get up to anticompetitive behavior similar to what MS was accused of unless you actually have a monopoly on something.
- greenyoda 14y ago
  Microsoft may have had a dominant share in the PC operating systems market, but I don't think they were ever a monopoly. Anyone who wanted an alternative to Windows was always free to buy a Mac. It's not Microsoft's fault that more people didn't do this; it was because Macs were much more expensive than commodity PCs and most buyers didn't think that the extra cost was worth it. If Apple had ever made their operating system run on commodity PCs, they could have taken a large chunk of the OS market from Microsoft. But that wasn't Apple's strategy. As far as bundling Internet Explorer is concerned, one can argue that Microsoft foresaw that a browser was going to become a required piece of software that everyone would want to have on their PC (just like a text editor; nobody every complained that Microsoft was giving away Notepad and Wordpad with Windows). And without a pre-installed browser, you'd have to go to an FTP server just to get a copy of a different browser, something that the average user would be unable to do. Similarly, Apple bundles Safari with every Mac, iPad and iPhone for the same reason: you couldn't sell one of these devices today if they didn't have a browser on them as soon as they came out of the box. Microsoft did engage in real anti-competitive tactics, such as coercing hardware manufacturers to pre-install Windows on all their machines whether users wanted it or not. However, there are laws against "restraint of trade" [1] that apply whether a company is a monopoly or not. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law#United_States_antitrust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law#United_States_...
  - ralfn 14y ago
    >Microsoft may have had a dominant share in the PC operating systems market, but I don't think they were ever a monopoly. Thats the definition of a monopoly. At least in my language. (Dutch).. Dominant market share. Not all monopolies are bad, but any market with high margins and a single vendor with 90+% maketshare is a monopolistic market. Thats just how words and definitions work. Thats not an opinion. Now here comes the opinion part: consumers had little to no choice. Why? Because the core functionality, is compatibility. Who would buy a car that you cant drive on the common road? I make the road analogy, because the difficult aspect of the OS market is that its infrastructure. Imagine a world where cars, gas stations, oil supply and roads were completely unregulated except for the upholding of IP laws (in particular: patents) that enable certain types of incompatibilities to get legal protection. You are driving in a MS car, with special patent-protected tires, that only work on MS roads. They are also the only type of car allowed to drive on those roads. They have a special patent protected triangle shaped gas supply, that only MS fuel stations can resupply. Now, on this road you will only find exits to MS shopping malls, not those of competitors. This could go on and on. Im not in the MS is evil boat, but market regulations in the IT are about 1% of what we actually need. And compared to traffic, snailmail, phone systems, electricity its extremely unregulated. And maybe, if they are all truly forced to compete on quality, we would no longer have this "everything is broken and nobody seems to mind" problem. Because nobody minds, because it is not about getting customers: it is about how to hijack them. How to lock them in. And this is even more true for a connected world ... I cant just move a social life to another social network. I do not have the freedom to do that. If we can not pick indiviually, we should be picking democratically. Or at the very least, regulate it all until there are enforced common fileformats, including application-containers, open communication exchanges and full data liberation. The only other alternative is complete exploitation by a monopolistic bully.
- kenjackson 14y ago
  What's Apples share of the tablet market? Oddly MS argument was that the browser is a core part of the OS that should ship with the OS. I think history has shown this to be true. Browsers are now more commonly bundled in OSes then grammar checkers in word processors.
- nugget 14y ago
  Google controls 90%+ of the search market in almost every European country. In the US, it varies based on how you measure it but is around 80%. Also, the definition of a monopoly is not a strict % test but considers many other factors.
code_duck 14y ago
Being anti-competitive is only illegal if you have an actual monopoly. Microsoft certainly did. I don't really see any area in which Google has one. So, your last statement is not meaningful.
- wslh 14y ago
  AdWords and search market share? what is the distance to being a monopoly?
- josephlord 14y ago
  Under some laws 'significant market power' might be a level that triggers scrutiny of competitive behaviour. Google would reach that level for search, advertising and Android at the very least in my view. If you consider the market for mobile phone/tablet OSes available to OEMs the market is really Android and Windows Mobile and Androids market share may lead it to be regarded as a monopoly. I think that they need to be (and probably are) VERY careful in their behaviour in relation to all the phone manufacturers. Please note I am making no accusation of anti-competitive behaviour by Google but I do believe that they will fall under competition law in several markets so they are not generally immune from such accusations.
anigbrowl 14y ago
You're missing the forest for the trees. There's much healthier competition in the OS market today, and it's easy for consumers to find alternatives to the market leader.
nl 14y ago
Making random accusations of corruption is neither helpful nor does it appear to have much basis in truth. 1) Google does make political donations, but they are quite small (~$5000 per candidate) and primarily towards candidates who - to generalize greatly - are "pro internet" (eg anti-SOPA etc)[1][2][3]. One could argue that these people also generally have a "hands off the internet" approach to internet policy which is favourable to Google. One could also argue that a a "hands off the internet" approach to internet policy is sensible.. 2) Based on your comment If giving a browser away is anti-competitive I wonder what giving an entire operating system + browser away for free is it would appear you don't understand what anti-competitive behaviour is or what happened in the MS case. A company can give away anything they like - it only causes legal problems if they have market dominance in that market and they use that dominance to exclude other competitors. Microsoft didn't get in trouble just for making IE free - they got in trouble for stopping PC manufactures installing Netscape on new PCs if they installed Windows and for manipulating the Windows APIs to favour IE over Netscape.[4] [1] http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/244593-googles-2012-pac-spending-nears-half-a-million http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/244593-g... [2] http://www.google.com/publicpolicy/transparency.html http://www.google.com/publicpolicy/transparency.html [3] http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en//publicpolicy/doc/NETPAC-Contributions-to-US-Federal-Candidates.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust... [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft
- fleitz 14y ago
  It could easily be argued that google is using their search monopoly to exclude less capitalized competitors from developing mobile operating systems by selling below cost, which harms consumers by reducing competition and choice. Using open secrets data does not even begin to cover the ways in which a company can influence politics.
  - nl 14y ago
    It could easily be argued that google is using their search monopoly to exclude less capitalized competitors from developing mobile operating systems by selling below cost, which harms consumers by reducing competition and choice. That sounds almost sensible until one realizes then when you say using their search monopoly what you mean is using the money they make from search. By that logic NO profitable business would ever be able to move into another line of business. Also, that isn't what anti-trust law is about.

by fleitz 14y ago

mikeash 14y ago

People seem to forget that Microsoft was targeted because of its anticompetitive tactics as a monopoly. At its peak, MS had something like 95% of the market for PC operating systems, and was busily using that monopoly to push its way into other markets where it wouldn't necessarily be competitive on its own. The problem wasn't giving away IE, the problem was giving away IE with their OS so that they could take over the browser market by leveraging their OS monopoly. Until and unless Google (or any other modern player) has a 90+% market share in some area, comparisons with MS's antitrust case are faulty.

ams6110 14y ago
And I never saw it this way... IE was legitimately better than Netscape for a while, and consumers gravitated to it. As proof, IE is still the default browser, and Windows is still the dominant PC OS, but IE has fallen from its top position because competing browsers are better. Microsoft's so-called "monopoly" on the desktop did not prevent competition; you could always easily install a different browser, and now that the alternatives are better than IE, people are doing that.
- code_duck 14y ago
  So, when Microsoft execs were talking about choking Netscape and 'cutting off their air supply', they meant by making a better browser, you're saying?
  - yuhong 14y ago
    Yea, remember that it also affected Opera too.
  - mgkimsal 14y ago
    The air supply was a reference to revenue stream, iirc. Early on Netscape charged for their browser, and also charged for other products around it (NS Server, etc). I think even by the time they got to giving away the browser for free, it was seen as a bit of a 'gateway' product to other paid NS products. Those were threats to MS as well (or were perceived to potentially be).
- true_religion 14y ago
  > IE was legitimately better than Netscape for a while That's right. IE was free. Netscape was not. I think this is a point a lot of people miss.
  - saraid216 14y ago
    I... actually didn't know that Netscape was a bought product until just now.
  - josephlord 14y ago
    It was free too pretty soon after IE reached OK though if I remember rightly. Netscape did crash far too often though in that time period and was probably better even beyond all the made for IE websites.
- enraged_camel 14y ago
  >>IE was legitimately better than Netscape for a while, and consumers gravitated to it. As proof, IE is still the default browser Consumers did not gravitate to IE because it was "legitimately better" than Netscape. It never was. They did so because it came installed by default on their computer and most of them were too lazy/ignorant to find alternatives. Heck, most people didn't even know what a browser was. They just knew that double-clicking that blue e icon allowed them to get on the Internet. IE is still around today because of the large number of legacy inhouse applications and websites that were developed for it back in the day. There isn't a single thing it does better than Chrome, Firefox or even Opera.
  - nostrademons 14y ago
    I was a die-hard Netscape loyalist and Microsoft hater until 2000. I finally gave up NS4.7 for IE5.5 then, because Netscape wouldn't work on a large number of pages on the web. It would hang on their Javascript, or misrender page layouts. I'm still a Microsoft hater, but IE did win because it was better. Netscape totally dropped the ball on that.
  - WalterBright 14y ago
    I can vouch for IE being far better than Netscape.
  - rimantas 14y ago
    > Consumers did not gravitate to IE because it was > "legitimately better" than Netscape. It never was. You don't know what are you talking about. IE4 was already better than NN4 with its "layers" and half-assed JS-based CSS implementation. IE6 was far far ahead of Netscape. It was the best browser at the time. The problem is that IE stagnated from that point.
    - winter_blue 14y ago
      > The problem is that IE stagnated from that point. Recently, they've caught up pretty well.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- mikeash 14y ago
  Regardless of the merits of IE, or lack thereof, the point is that it doesn't matter if you get up to anticompetitive behavior similar to what MS was accused of unless you actually have a monopoly on something.
greenyoda 14y ago
Microsoft may have had a dominant share in the PC operating systems market, but I don't think they were ever a monopoly. Anyone who wanted an alternative to Windows was always free to buy a Mac. It's not Microsoft's fault that more people didn't do this; it was because Macs were much more expensive than commodity PCs and most buyers didn't think that the extra cost was worth it. If Apple had ever made their operating system run on commodity PCs, they could have taken a large chunk of the OS market from Microsoft. But that wasn't Apple's strategy. As far as bundling Internet Explorer is concerned, one can argue that Microsoft foresaw that a browser was going to become a required piece of software that everyone would want to have on their PC (just like a text editor; nobody every complained that Microsoft was giving away Notepad and Wordpad with Windows). And without a pre-installed browser, you'd have to go to an FTP server just to get a copy of a different browser, something that the average user would be unable to do. Similarly, Apple bundles Safari with every Mac, iPad and iPhone for the same reason: you couldn't sell one of these devices today if they didn't have a browser on them as soon as they came out of the box. Microsoft did engage in real anti-competitive tactics, such as coercing hardware manufacturers to pre-install Windows on all their machines whether users wanted it or not. However, there are laws against "restraint of trade" [1] that apply whether a company is a monopoly or not. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law#United_States_antitrust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law#United_States_...
- ralfn 14y ago
  >Microsoft may have had a dominant share in the PC operating systems market, but I don't think they were ever a monopoly. Thats the definition of a monopoly. At least in my language. (Dutch).. Dominant market share. Not all monopolies are bad, but any market with high margins and a single vendor with 90+% maketshare is a monopolistic market. Thats just how words and definitions work. Thats not an opinion. Now here comes the opinion part: consumers had little to no choice. Why? Because the core functionality, is compatibility. Who would buy a car that you cant drive on the common road? I make the road analogy, because the difficult aspect of the OS market is that its infrastructure. Imagine a world where cars, gas stations, oil supply and roads were completely unregulated except for the upholding of IP laws (in particular: patents) that enable certain types of incompatibilities to get legal protection. You are driving in a MS car, with special patent-protected tires, that only work on MS roads. They are also the only type of car allowed to drive on those roads. They have a special patent protected triangle shaped gas supply, that only MS fuel stations can resupply. Now, on this road you will only find exits to MS shopping malls, not those of competitors. This could go on and on. Im not in the MS is evil boat, but market regulations in the IT are about 1% of what we actually need. And compared to traffic, snailmail, phone systems, electricity its extremely unregulated. And maybe, if they are all truly forced to compete on quality, we would no longer have this "everything is broken and nobody seems to mind" problem. Because nobody minds, because it is not about getting customers: it is about how to hijack them. How to lock them in. And this is even more true for a connected world ... I cant just move a social life to another social network. I do not have the freedom to do that. If we can not pick indiviually, we should be picking democratically. Or at the very least, regulate it all until there are enforced common fileformats, including application-containers, open communication exchanges and full data liberation. The only other alternative is complete exploitation by a monopolistic bully.
kenjackson 14y ago
What's Apples share of the tablet market? Oddly MS argument was that the browser is a core part of the OS that should ship with the OS. I think history has shown this to be true. Browsers are now more commonly bundled in OSes then grammar checkers in word processors.
nugget 14y ago
Google controls 90%+ of the search market in almost every European country. In the US, it varies based on how you measure it but is around 80%. Also, the definition of a monopoly is not a strict % test but considers many other factors.

code_duck 14y ago

Being anti-competitive is only illegal if you have an actual monopoly. Microsoft certainly did. I don't really see any area in which Google has one. So, your last statement is not meaningful.

wslh 14y ago
AdWords and search market share? what is the distance to being a monopoly?
josephlord 14y ago
Under some laws 'significant market power' might be a level that triggers scrutiny of competitive behaviour. Google would reach that level for search, advertising and Android at the very least in my view. If you consider the market for mobile phone/tablet OSes available to OEMs the market is really Android and Windows Mobile and Androids market share may lead it to be regarded as a monopoly. I think that they need to be (and probably are) VERY careful in their behaviour in relation to all the phone manufacturers. Please note I am making no accusation of anti-competitive behaviour by Google but I do believe that they will fall under competition law in several markets so they are not generally immune from such accusations.

anigbrowl 14y ago

You're missing the forest for the trees. There's much healthier competition in the OS market today, and it's easy for consumers to find alternatives to the market leader.

nl 14y ago

Making random accusations of corruption is neither helpful nor does it appear to have much basis in truth. 1) Google does make political donations, but they are quite small (~$5000 per candidate) and primarily towards candidates who - to generalize greatly - are "pro internet" (eg anti-SOPA etc)[1][2][3]. One could argue that these people also generally have a "hands off the internet" approach to internet policy which is favourable to Google. One could also argue that a a "hands off the internet" approach to internet policy is sensible.. 2) Based on your comment If giving a browser away is anti-competitive I wonder what giving an entire operating system + browser away for free is it would appear you don't understand what anti-competitive behaviour is or what happened in the MS case. A company can give away anything they like - it only causes legal problems if they have market dominance in that market and they use that dominance to exclude other competitors. Microsoft didn't get in trouble just for making IE free - they got in trouble for stopping PC manufactures installing Netscape on new PCs if they installed Windows and for manipulating the Windows APIs to favour IE over Netscape.[4] [1] http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/244593-googles-2012-pac-spending-nears-half-a-million http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/244593-g... [2] http://www.google.com/publicpolicy/transparency.html http://www.google.com/publicpolicy/transparency.html [3] http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en//publicpolicy/doc/NETPAC-Contributions-to-US-Federal-Candidates.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust... [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft

fleitz 14y ago
It could easily be argued that google is using their search monopoly to exclude less capitalized competitors from developing mobile operating systems by selling below cost, which harms consumers by reducing competition and choice. Using open secrets data does not even begin to cover the ways in which a company can influence politics.
- nl 14y ago
  It could easily be argued that google is using their search monopoly to exclude less capitalized competitors from developing mobile operating systems by selling below cost, which harms consumers by reducing competition and choice. That sounds almost sensible until one realizes then when you say using their search monopoly what you mean is using the money they make from search. By that logic NO profitable business would ever be able to move into another line of business. Also, that isn't what anti-trust law is about.