
Antitrust+? - raghus
http://parislemon.com/post/15627530949/antitrust
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chc
Google's counterargument that Siegler rejects as "hollow" seems pretty valid
to me. If these other companies choose not to give Google the data it would
need to give them the same treatment, how can you say Google is dealing
unfairly here? If Google offers them the same opportunity but they think the
business upside of getting listed is less than the downside of sharing their
data, then that's their call.

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landyman
I agree that it seems valid. I also think that Google would most definitely
use that data if they had it. Google used to show live twitter results in
their SERPs; but stopped when Twitter took that data away if I remember
correctly.

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monkeyfacebag
I reject the premise, namely, that Google is a monopoly supplier of Internet
search. Bing, Yahoo! and DuckDuckGo are perfectly suitable search engines. I
don't think any of them are necessarily as good as Google, but a) I use Bing
all the time when I'm on IE9 and I hardly notice and b) that's a poor
criterion for monopoly. As a bonus, the switching costs for changing your
search provider are approximately zero.

~~~
chc
Monopoly doesn't mean nothing else exists. At the time when Microsoft was
abusing its monopoly with Windows in the '90s, _many_ other operating systems
existed that people used, like Mac OS, NeXTStep, Linux, BSD, OS/2, BeOS, etc.
It's just that Microsoft had enough users that they could parlay their OS
monopoly into an everything-else monopoly just by cutting competitors out.
Google seems to be in a similar position as far as market penetration goes (to
counter your anecdote, I actually know people who visit Yahoo by typing
"www.yahoo.com" into the Google search box), so the question here is basically
whether Google is doing bad things with its hold over the market.

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pm90
Agreed. However, like mfb mentioned: _> As a bonus, the switching costs for
changing your search provider are approximately zero._ This means that if you
don't like the services that google offers, you can simply choose not to use
google, without _any_ overhead in time or money. In the case of an OS, it is
much more difficult, first to install on your machine, get used to the UI
etcetc. Microsoft could take advantage of this fact to force whatever software
it wanted, and users essentially had no option but to comply.

~~~
chc
That's true as well, but the accusation here is anticompetitive behavior —
they're not complaining that Google is dominant in search, but that Google is
taking unfair advantage of its dominance — so the fact that users can switch
easily is really neither here nor there.

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yanw
I never knew he was an expert on antitrust law!

At least it’s expected from the likes of him, it’s less excepted and much more
disappointing when actual reporters writing for supposedly credible newspapers
start speculating about the law or relying exclusively on quotes from
“experts” which are paid by one interested party or the other.

IANAL either but I asked one, and she thinks that any antitrust issues with
Google results are little more than the product of negative PR and don't have
legal merit.

As for Search+ itself I think that G+ is just a foothold, this feature will
become more useful and interesting when data from one’s calendar, email, voice
messages, saved maps, etc be included in the mix.

