

Ask HN: Is Google abusing its monopoly by advertising in Chrome? - dan-silver

Google is advertising it&#x27;s own services on Chrome&#x27;s default new tab page.  Today, they&#x27;re promoting Google Play Music for example.  Is google pushing the legal limits of their empire?
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UnoriginalGuy
It is "unlikely" Chrome would be considered a monopoly by legal standards as
in the US it requires more than 75% of the market. According to W3Counter they
have only 46%, SitePoint lists them at 49%, W3Schools lists them at 65%,
Wikimedia lists them at 47%, and so on.

I even suspect the W3Schools % is over-estimated, as the types of users
visiting the sites are typically web-developers who prefer Chrome for the
superior development tooling. When you start to look at business users and
non-technical users IE/Safari (on respective platforms) do much better.

If Chrome was a monopoly then doing what you're talking about MIGHT be an
anti-trust violation, but that is a complex legal question (for example,
everyone remembers IE as an anti-trust violation for Microsoft in the 1990s,
but what about all of the other things they pushed which weren't e.g. MSN,
Hotmail, Office, etc). Google Music might NOT be because the court has to
determine if Google is leveraging their position to give their other products
an "unfair" advantage. If Chrome started blocking other music services (or
redirecting from them to Google Music) then that would 100% be an anti-trust
violation if Google were a monopoly, but an advert? That's for a court to
decide, shades of grey...

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allendoerfer
Chrome does not have a monopoly. If they were pushing Chrome within the
search, depending on the local market they would abuse their search quasi-
monopoly but the other way around seems to be perfectly legal.

