I am not following these testimonies in anti-trust cases where they have a competitor of Google testify against Google. Isn’t testifying all about presenting evidence? If I am accused of theft in a criminal court and my arch rival is brought for testimony against me, it doesn’t sound like a fair process to me. Of course if it’s a substantiated material it would make sense but otherwise it doesn’t just makes sense at all. Google as a search engine is far better than Bing and that’s just a fact.
In an antitrust trial your competitors are by definition victims of the monopolistic behavior that is being alleged. Yes, there will be a conflict of interest in their testimony that needs to be accounted for, but it's not unreasonable for the victim in a court case to testify of the manner in which they feel victimized.
Regarding your analogy, it would be more like if you're accused of stealing from your arch rival. Should they be barred from testifying against you on the grounds that there's bad blood between you? Certainly not! It's up to your lawyer to demonstrate their bias and persuade the jury to ignore their testimony.
The main way that Microsoft has been harmed by Google's actions is that they can no longer pay companies like mobile phone networks to lock search on their devices to Bing and prevent users from changing it, because Google outbid them. Google haven't even blocked users from changing their search engine like Microsoft did because their product is good enough that they don't need to. I think what Microsoft are hoping for is that Google will be legally barred from bidding against them so that they can go back to using this tactic unchallenged.
Edit: to clarify, I believe this is the actual legal basis of anti monopoly legislation. Protection of the interests of the public, not competitor companies.
Exactly. The point of an antitrust trial is not to transfer power and resources to competitors. It's to transfer power and resources to the voting public.
As guilty as Microsoft might be, it's rich of Microsoft with its monopolies (without which a lot of its subpar products like outlook and Teams and Edge would go poof) to be abdicating Google here.
I have used DDG for years, before switching to Kagi a year ago. Really happy with Kagi. I am happy to pay to show that there is a market for paid services.
No it doesn't. There's truth to your statement in the sense that there's now a generation of confused judges that think this is true. But the plain language of US antitrust statutes is pretty clear on this point, simply engaging in certain kinds of anti-competitive behavior is illegal, you definitely do not need to prove that the illegal behavior had specific effects.
The plain language of the statute doesn't matter much once legal precedent is entrenched. This is especially true when the plain language is incredibly underspecified.
For those who don't know, the Sherman antitrust act has only two key paragraphs (and six procedural paragraphs).
> Sec. 1. Every contract, combination in the form of trust or other- wise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is hereby declared to be illegal. Every person who shall make any such contract or engage in any such combination or conspiracy, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding five thousand dollars, or by imprisonment not exceeding one year, or by both said punishments, at the discretion of the court.
> Sec. 2. Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and, on conviction thereof; shall be punished by fine not exceeding five thousand dollars, or by imprisonment not exceeding one year, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court.
If we strip out the penalties, the words defining what's illegal are literally just "contract, ...trust..., or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce" and "monopolize any part of the trade or commerce".
Given that ambiguity, it's inevitable that courts will essentially have to write the law themselves.
The law doesn't clearly state what's illegal. In this case, it barely mumbles and gestures at it. In applying the law, it is inevitable that it will have to be more precisely defined (or, worse, applied inconsistently).
The law isn't particularly confusing. There's just been a multi-decade lobbying effort funded by the most powerful and moneyed interests in the country to muddy the waters about this.
I didn't say "confusing". I said "unclear" and "underspecified". I'm looking I the words of the law myself and I have no idea what should and shouldn't be illegal.
"The consumer welfare standard gradually replaced the rule of reason principle as the dominant legal theory behind antitrust enforcement by the 1980s."
Maybe the judges are confused, but there was a shift in enforcement around the Reagan era. I also think "consumer welfare" in this context is taken to mainly maen low pricing. That is, if a monopoly causes higher prices, then we should go after them. The DOJ going after Google and Amazon is a bit of a return to the former standard. (Source: news programs I listen to such as The Majority Report.)
The other view is that you shouldn't wait until the consumer is harmed, because by then the competition might be so weak it's hard to restore to proper levels.
> If I am accused of theft in a criminal court and my arch rival is brought for testimony against me, it doesn’t sound like a fair process to me.
So, like, if you were arrested for assaulted your neighbor who you had a long-standing rivalry with, you wouldn't expect the court to hear from the neighbor? It's not like you wouldn't have your own chance to give your own testimony...
No, it's more like, if you and your neighbor have competing businesses, and you were accused of fraud, your neighbor testifies that you're an asshole. It's an opinion from someone who hates you/benefits from convicting you. Now, if they had actual evidence it'd be different (I assume not from the title, article is paywalled).
This is an antitrust case. Google's competitors are victims of the alleged monopolistic behavior. If you're going to make the analogy right, then the alleged crime needs to be that you defrauded your neighbor's business. I can't imagine a court barring your neighbor from testifying that you defrauded him just because he'd benefit financially from a ruling against you.
> It's an opinion from someone who hates you/benefits from convicting you.
Hence why the opposing side gets the opportunity to cross-examine the witness, and why it would be a really bad idea to put forward a witness who clearly has a grudge against the accused. In cross you just show they have a grudge and now their testimony is suspect.
> Now, if they had actual evidence it'd be different
It is actual evidence. I don't think you know what evidence is...
If the testimony is easily dismissable, then submitting it would be bad for their case. They wouldn't submit it as evidence unless it could be backed up or was reasonable. It's a serious mistake to underestimate testimony as somehow less useful in a case.
The CCTV recording would be direct conclusive evidence. In the absence of such evidence, testimony that can't be disproven in cross and casts reasonable doubt will work just fine.
Even with a CCTV recording, you can use testimony to cast the CCTV recording in a light favorable to either the prosecution or defense. The circumstances surrounding evidence are weighed in order to come to a verdict or judgement.
Court cases are not about "who has the most incontrovertible proof", they are about convincing a judge or jury of an idea in order to get a specific outcome. Do not underestimate testimony (or really, any evidence that you think is inferior)
In the United States we have an adversarial system of justice. That means the prosecution gets to present their evidence and arguments, and the defense gets to respond and counter.
The defense will have ample opportunity to cross examine and present rebuttal whiteness.
And just because a witness is presented doesn't mean the fact finder (judge or jury) will find them credible.
My local jurisdiction has separate tracks for both vets and addicts. Because handling those cases in the "normal" court is inefficient and unproductive. (eg Most addicts need treatment, not jail time. Vets specific care, not jail time.)
IIRC, there's a separate bankruptcy court. Sounds smart. I don't expect laypersons to understand finance and such.
Methinks we need separate courts for both intellectual property and healthcare. Where the "jury of one's peers" is composed of actual domain expert peers.
I am with you on this one. What the hell is this? Why is DOJ peddling for other trillion dollar companies? Microsft CEO is concerned for _Google's shareholders_? Are you serious? I don't believe a word of this guy.
I'll just add, Bingbot has the same crawling opportunities as Googlebot. Nobody is stopping Bing from driving traffic to their website. It's also been 20+ years: Windows OS is constantly manipulating defaults and Edge is still not uninstallable.
No I am not confused about getting testimony from competitors. I am very interested in hearing from companies that probably have legitimate grievances: DDG, Kagi, Brave, etc. MS is not among those companies.
Because Microsoft is in the game of being a big business, and demonstrably is not in the group that needs a fair market to thrive. MS is/was willing to make the same deals as Google for defaults, it's just Google valued it more. They should be in hot seat #2.
Smaller companies like DDG, Brave, Kagi are the ones trying to build narrow, competitive businesses in the search and browser space. If those are struggling due to anti-competitive practices I want to hear it.
Microsoft's size is part of what makes their testimony so valuable to the government here. If even Microsoft's CEO is willing to testify under oath that Google's practices make breaking into search impossible, that's extremely relevant to the case. Leaving that testimony out because there are smaller companies that are also hurt would be foolish. The ideal witness makeup would be composed of a combination of large, medium, and small competitors all saying the same thing.
I'll be honest and say your interpretation is probably right, and that's how the NY times reporter interpreted it. However, my strong anti-MS + all conglomerates (i.e., bias that would probably would have disqualified me from being on the jury heh) sees a guy only concerned about MS stock, taking a hypocritical jab at his direct competitor.
I am mostly disappointed that it indicates to me (possibly incorrectly) that the DOJ is not simultaneously pursuing MS for related practices. Maybe it's not in the ads space, but MS is not without their own anti-competitive issues. Or maybe they are, and are able to walk and chew gum. But DOJ asking MS to be a witness is just not a good sign to me.
I’ll say what everyone is thinking but won’t say; Bing is a horrible name and is a theme of Microsoft’s lackluster approach to search and, well, anything internet. They slow-follow. So why should they have an easy time competing against Google?
Because Microsoft is doing worse things than what they are accusing Google of, such as forcing users to use Edge and Bing in Windows. Also, considering the fact that Bing's market share did not increase even when Microsoft signed a contract with Apple to make Bing the default search engine on iPhones, and the testimony that Apple did not acquire Bing because of its poor quality, Microsoft's argument is completely unacceptable.
Skipping the nonsense about not investigating and conducting a trial because other people might also be doing a crime.
> Because Microsoft is doing worse things than what they are accusing Google of, such as forcing users to use Edge and Bing in Windows.
Given that Google and other parties will have their chance at giving their evidence and testimony, would it not be better for Microsoft to be involved here where their own testimony will available for exploration?
Given that Bing powers DDG and Brave at least, and I assume Kagi consumes Bing also, I see no reason why the only other competitor to Google (in Search) should not be present.
> Nobody is stopping Bing from driving traffic to their website
I know your comment is about the bot, but the other side is, yes - Google is absolutely stopping Bing from driving traffic to their website. Not Google's bot, but Google's default deals on iOS, browsers, etc.
Even if Bing's index was measurably better, most folks wouldn't think to switch given how easy it already is to stick with Google.
Otherwise, re: Microsoft - you're absolutely right. The latest examples for me:
- Teams as a crappy default
- In Windows 11 I can't move my taskbar to another part of my window anymore? What the f. 10+ years of user-preference destroyed with one update.
Well, actually, Google paying other companies to make Google the default is stopping Bing from getting traffic. That's why we are having this whole case, among other things.
In general, making contracts with 3rd parties that negatively impact your competitors is sort of looked down upon.
I'm no fan of Google, but them bidding to be the default search engine on Apple devices seemed reasonable to me. If paying a third party to be the default is a crime they're both guilty of it. Microsoft and Google both made offers to Apple, Apple went with the one that paid them the most and also arguably offers the superior product. It's not like Bing is outright blocked on Apple devices, it's very easy to change. Satya crying about how Google outbid him seemed pretty disingenuous.
"Do you think Google would continue to pay Apple if there was no search competition? Why would they do that?"
Of course not and the reasons should be obvious. Microsoft being a competent competitor costs Google a lot of money. Lose the search dominance and the place basically shuts down, so they're willing to pay a lot to maintain it.
“I would love an opportunity to sort of not have them pay — maybe on behalf of the Google shareholders.”
Shut down Bing then and save Google shareholders a bunch of money, at the expense of Apple shareholders. He clearly doesn't want to spend what Google does for the same privilege. Google must perceives that the deal is worth it to do for their shareholders.
I imagine his ideal outcome would be something like Microsoft was forced to do with browsers, having a screen during the setup process asking the user what browser (or in this case search engine) they want as the default. I honestly don't think it would move the needle at all unless Bing was demonstrably better than Google.
>Well, actually, Google paying other companies to make Google the default is stopping Bing from getting traffic.
I cannot see how this is true.
Microsoft, with its tens of billions in annual profits, can invest in all the advertising in the world, literally, to let people know how to change the default browser on their iOS or Android device.
It is a trivial setting to change.
What is not trivial, for Microsoft, is creating a competitive search engine and advertising business.
If the search-engine is a tool which creates ad-impressions which company#A can charge to advertisers (creating profit company#A can then spend for making the search-engine the default, perpetually driving even more attention), I don't think breaking this cycle by company#B "just spending more money than company#A earns" is a system of fair competition.
Enough people are willing to change it that just paying to be the default wasn't all that effective for Bing or Yahoo. Microsoft's previous strategy was to pay to make Bing the default and remove people's ability to change it. In particular, they took advantage of the mobile phone provider oligopoly in the US and other countries to pay off all the major providers to do this, so that consumers didn't really have a choice to not have their devices send searches to Bing. Google ruined that strategy by outbidding them without even imposing the same kind of lock-in that Microsoft did, and so Microsoft are trying to get the US government to ban them from bidding.
Sure, let’s change it to “it is trivial for Microsoft to spend its greater than Google’s profit to buy the default search position on Apple devices.”
So they can other have a just as good as Google’s product that they do not want to spend enough on to make default, or they do not offer enough of a value proposition for people to go to settings -> Safari -> default search -> bing.
Maybe I miss-interpreted the quote at the end of the article.
> At the end of Mr. Nadella’s appearance, a Justice Department lawyer asked why he thought Google paid Apple so much money to be the default search engine on Apple’s web browser Safari.
> “That’s a great question,” Mr. Nadella said. “I would love an opportunity to sort of not have them pay — maybe on behalf of the Google shareholders.”
I read that as: Nadella saying it cost Google's shareholders X in expenses. Reading it a second time, he is probably implying it increased Google's shareholders Y in revenue. But either way, CEO of a trillion dollar company making hypocritical remarks on another trillion dollar company. IMO it's just a poor decision of DOJ to use MS as a witness. I'd prefer they bring to light companies that are actually struggling, and not the company that can sign a $10 billion deal to boot strap new features into their competing product.
Further he argued why Bing should be the default, and even makes a pseudo business proposition of how they're prepared to lose $20B to harvest this data. Can't make this up.
> Google as a search engine is far better than Bing and that’s just a fact.
It was better than Bing...
Two things:
1) HN and elsewhere constantly point out how bad Google Search is lately
2) The introduction of ChatGPT and DALL-E powered Bing into Edge, the new Windows Sidebar and elsewhere has changed the game.
The new Windows 11 Bing/ChatGPT/DALL-E sidebar is so good that my hot-take is that it's going to put a dent into Google's Search dominance at a depth that Bing and others never have.
My final wild out-there prediction: MS ditch the Bing brand and pivot to using Copilot as their search and discovery brand.
I switched over to DDG couple of years ago. When I recently used Google search for something I was shocked to see just how bad the entire UI had become, maybe the search result quality hasn’t taken a similar hit but the UI was extremely jarring.
Perhaps it’s coz I’ve minimized my footprint in Google ecosystem but then it just goes to show to what extent Google now relies on personal data to serve search results.
To give the benefit of the doubt to the court, it might be justifiable on the grounds that the big tech giants form an oligopoly, i.e. that they aren't really competing businesses so much as a half-formal conglomerate of corporations whose separateness is a legal fiction to ward off antitrust.
But I share your confusion. The case for Microsoft and Google being part of an oligopoly together doesn't really hold water, considering that Google appears to be competing with Microsoft in the consumer market for web browsers, operating systems, office productivity software, and machine learning.
Why would Google's competitors be barred from testifying in a case that hinges on whether Google is using unfair advantages to beat its competitors? The competition is one of the primary victims of the alleged antitrust violations, of course the government is going to ask them to testify and explain how they've been hurt by Google's behavior!
Is it unfair if they're both scummy companies with infinitely deep pockets? Micro$oft just doesn't pay as much as Google does to make Google the default search, but knowing M$, they'd happily do the same shit if it made sense for them.
If DDG or Kagi were the ones complaining here, then that makes sense because indeed their pockets don't run as deep as Google's or M$'s and that's unfair, but M$ complaining just sounds like the one comically evil megacorp taking advantage of the situation to get the other comically evil megacorp in trouble for shit they're doing themselves on a smaller scale.
> Google as a search engine is far better than Bing and that’s just a fact.
I have been using DDG for several years now and honestly can't stand Google's results anymore. It seems like you can no longer search for an exact term and at every opportunity they try to slip in a merchant selling something as a result.
I have been using DDG for a few years, and most of the time end up doing !g to go to Google and get good answers. Nothing specific comes to mind right now, but the pattern is like this:
me: Who's that guy with a big hat?
DDG: showing results for bug hat IN UNITED KINGDOM: 1) Daily Mail woman wearing ladybird hat absolutely destroys woke liberal you won't believe. 2) Best hair cuts for guys who wear hats - generic-seo-spamsite.com. 3) Who's who in the world of business 2023 update. 4) Don't be "that guy"! tips for dating.
me: !g
Google: He's Crocodile Dundee.
me: how the heck did you know that.
Google isn't always that good, but DDG is all too often that bad. It's bad in a very Bing-way with search results that kinda touch on the right words but are low relevance and high SEO/spam. (And adamant that whatever I'm searching for - cat pictures, cities in California, Caesar Salad recipes, prices of things in America, I must want the results from UNITED KINGDOM because that's where I am. Which, incidentally, is a frustration of Google maps: "I wonder whats in California? Google maps, let me see the world..." "THIS IS YOUR HOUSE, THIS IS A ZOOMED IN MAP OF WHERE YOU LIVE, I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE". "Calm down, I know what things look like round here, I live here. I wanted to look somewhere else, like, obviously?").
Google works better than DDG with natural language questions like that
But if you're like me and never evolved from the oldschool search engines and still use the same format of listing key words, DDG is better than or equal to Google.
Well in some cases, like searching for an error message when troubleshooting, Google's NLP is a hindrance because it will alter or change your query in attempts to provide results.
So for example if I search for "Error 12345: Something bad happened", Google might remove the "12345" because it increases the number of results. They take the stance that more is better.
I know it probably gets tiring to hear it on every thread about search, but Kagi gets just as good results for that hat query, and tends to do better than Google on more serious work. Pinning and blocking domains is a huge deal—it's got a great list of blocked domains natively, and after just a little bit of customization my SEO spam has basically disappeared.
Courts quite frequently convict people based on circumstantial evidence. Conviction is based on the determination of either a jury or a judge, and neither are required to have or use direct evidence.
I mean in the Activision case, the judge took the same person's testimony that they wouldn't make Activision games X-Box exclusives completely at face value, so there's precedent that they are completely honest even when conflict of interests are involved /s
One way Google maintains their monopoly is that many websites block all bots except for the Google indexing bot.
This makes it literally impossible for anyone to make a competing search engine because millions of doors are slammed in their face. There is no practical way to negotiate access at this scale either leaving no options for small startups — e.g.: AI-based search!
One possible anti-monopoly measure would be to force Google to mask the identity of their bots. E.g.: force them to use a random IP address pool that third parties can also use without their permission.
IMHO breaking up corporations is a bit heavy-handed and not the only remedy available.
>IMHO breaking up corporations is a bit heavy-handed and not the only remedy available.
Respectfully disagree in Google's case. Indexing is not their only advantage - having full, unfettered access and control over email, maps, Android play, cloud, and the other myriad divisions plus knows what else via side deals is too much and fully justifies breaking up the business.
Your suggestion works if we were still 2002-ish, before they got too big
Microsoft has all the same services that Google has, including the ones you just mentioned and more.
Bing, Outlook, Bing Maps, Microsoft Store, Azure, Windows, Edge, Office, OneDrive, XBOX division, and more.
If they can't compete with Google, then maybe they aren't offering as good a service for most of these, and it's not for lack of trying to manipulate the market into using their services.
I do agree with what you said though, both Alphabet and Microsoft should be broken up, and I don't mean just having multiple separate companies that operate closely together, but proper separation. This also goes for META and Amazon.
It's not for a lack of trying, but Google has their tentacles everywhere.
You literally can't make a mobile phone today without having support for all Google services. Native support is better than 3rd party. And now all of your user's data is in Google's hands.
Yes, there are some extreme ... fanatics(?), who can live with a phone that doesn't have YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Drive or Play Store in it, but the Joe/Jill Regular will never ever go for that today.
Of all the companies beside Apple, Samsung is the only one I can think of with the muscle to maybe do a device with all of their own services.
> Yes, there are some extreme ... fanatics(?), who can live with a phone that doesn't have YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Drive or Play Store in it, but the Joe/Jill Regular will never ever go for that today.
I would fit your definition of fanatic and I have a friend who does too. The only google service we still use is YouTube because that’s the hardest one to replace entirely unless you want to cut yourself from a lot of very interesting and entertaining content. Otherwise it’s not so hard. Gmail is hardly the best offering on the market, Apple Maps are good enough for most tasks (Google Maps still has better POI data sadly), etc. You don’t need to be a “fanatic” to de-googleify your life, even if only partially.
With Apple it's doable yes. I'm in the same situation, YouTube is the only service of theirs
My point was that there's a snowball's chance in hell for a third party in addition to Google and Apple to come on to the market with a de-googled mainstream device.
Microsoft had a chance with Windows Mobile, but they messed it up.
If you are running a custom rom on Lineage or some other version of android, check out Newpipe on Fdroid. I've installed it for normy android users and they stopped using the normal youtube front end. It's awesome.
It's funny how eager Americans are to break up the Big Tech companies that happen to be the only reason the US economy is not a complete dumpster fire. Look at GDP growth for the US vs. the Eurozone since 2008. The high level of integration, both horizontal and vertical, is what makes the US Big Tech companies so economically productive and valuable.
But sure. Kill your software industry. Does the US even know how to do anything else? Does the US even manufacture anything physical anymore? Last I checked tiny little Denmark produces more wind turbines than the US and tiny little Switzerland produces more CNC machines than the US.
> the only reason the US economy is not a complete dumpster fire.
The US economy is a complete dumpster fire for those of us worth less than seven figures. Big tech monopolization does not strengthen our productive capacity, and breaking up the big tech companies won't weaken it. If anything, it will strengthen the economy by making it more viable to found a tech startup without the explicit goal of being bought out. We aren't "killing" our software industry; we're revitalizing it.
Idk. This makes me super nervous. Look at what the bell breakup did for innovation in software. The transistor was literally invented there before it was broken up. Likewise, I think it's probable that if Google is broken up, you'll not see anything as innovative as the transformer models, GFS, or Spanner anymore. I think quality of life for employees will likely go down, as it did when bell labs was broken up.
Different time. Bell was one of the last great break ups and occurred just before the modern pro-Big Business, ultra-financialized era kicked off in earnest. If Bell weren't broken up, Bell labs would have been shut down or severely trimmed regardless as the execs diverted the R&D spend to stock buybacks or other inefficient use of funds that benefits the shareholders over all else (e.g. Boeing).
I think a better parallel is the late-20s early-30s Robber Baron breakups. There's been much ink and elections spilled over how that anti-trust era contributed directly to the proliferation of post-war innovation (e.g. https://bookshop.org/p/books/goliath-the-100-year-war-betwee...)
Is Google not on the bleeding edge of research into LLMs? Are they not investing billions into cloud? Google research has quantum computers, and is investing in self driving cars, healthcare, and god knows what else.
> The US economy is a complete dumpster fire for those of us worth less than seven figures.
Not sure what you mean, you can invest in VTI, wait 30 years, and hit 7 figures real. The US economy is stronger than almost every other economy on the planet and is so even for the non-rich.
Look at the risks a poorer person in the US has to contend with, many of them life-ending expensive, as well as the difficulty of finding places to live that offer decent job markets, services, amenities, and are affordable.
Life here can get really ugly for people that are well above the 'poverty line'. That's not to say it's really the overall economy making things hard for them, but more like microeconomic constraints. However, that's the lens they see the economy through.
I’m all for breaking them up but I’m not convinced it will revitalize the industry. Google is enormous. Even if it is broken up, the resulting pieces will still be massive, and almost impossible to compete against.
Hey that's a great point! Meanwhile you have China, Russia, Israel, Korea passing all sorts of anti competitive edge AND funding to singular tech companies to corner the GLOBAL market. One need just look at Tiktok and Temu and Huawei
I can buy this argument for Apple, but Google? To me it seems like there is an intuitive split between Search+Ads, GSuite, YouTube, and Android. Why do you believe breaking these up would adversely affect the US economy?
First of all, no website owner in their right mind is going to block Bing.
Second of all, they have to detect that you're a bot in the first place. Most sites don't employ sophisticated anti-bot technology. Simply running a headless browser (which you need to do anyways for JavaScript) with a common user-agent, and slow enough browsing not to be rate-limited, will let you index 99.9+% of sites.
Many website owners do explicitly block Bing and all other crawling bots in their right minds.
If you have a wide low-traffic website then bots of all sorts will make a majority of your traffic and subsequently a majority of your AWS costs.
If you see money spent on search engine X indexing and very few users incoming from that search engine it's a rational decision to block it. Or ask for money (that actually happens).
Overall it's a systematic problem with building a search competitor: 1) Your costs are largely proportional to the size of your index
2) Your income is proportional to your userbase
3) You need a huge index to be competitive even if you don't have any users yet
So, very hard to bootstrap even when you exclude all other advantages of the existing monopoly like browser-based distribution.
Microsoft has the money to beat the indexing problem so they argue about distribution in court but all the small players can't even get to that level of failure.
> Many website owners do explicitly block Bing and all other crawling bots in their right minds.
If by "many" you mean "less than 0.1%". Nearly all sites want traffic, which search engines provide.
And you're moving the goalposts from the commenter I was responding to.
Nobody disputes it takes a large capital investment to create an index in the first place. But this is the business world -- that's what investors are for.
But the idea that websites provide their public content to Google and leave other crawlers with no way to access it is simply untrue. That is not a factor hindering competition.
> Nearly all sites want traffic, which search engines provide.
You don't seem to grasp the problem of indexing. If search engine fetches 100M pages but only brings 100 users it's a net loss for the website because of server costs. This means that a marginal player cannot index a big website.
I'm aware of at least one website from top20 that actively blocked crawlers other than Google citing this as a reason. And this website has tons of high-quality ugc that ranks at the top on many nontrivial queries. A huge blow to search quality when absent.
Having said that, it's true that for big search engines the issue is mostly distribution. However for small players it's distribution AND indexing and in the end they have to resort to buying the search results from big players.
Got any reports/statistics to back this up? I highly doubt websites are not wanting major search engines to index them. AFAIK it's been standard practice to use `User-agent: *` for a long time. There are other anti-crawling measures because the bad crawlers are not going to respect your robots.txt.
It's not necessarily a lot of sites that block non-popular bots - but often it's big sites (i.e. content-centric sites such as Social Media). Think Yelp, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.
That can add up to a serious percentage of the web.
Does Google penalize sites for not blocking other bots? If not, then it is not Google "maintaining their monopoly", it is everyone deciding for themselves to only support Google.
The government forcing restrictions on companies that people choose freely is extremely dangerous and will definitely be used for political reasons.
I would argue the takeaway here is not precisely that this behavior is "maintaining their monopoly", rather that it's incredibly strong evidence that the monopoly exists.
Being only tangentially familiar with the indexing bots…what legal barriers are in place to prevent a competitor from impersonating a google indexing bot? Is it just a matter of the google bot originates from x subnet so that’s the only one webmasters allow? What’s to stop a competitor from running their own bot but sending user-agent: totally-the-google-indexing-bot-and-not-a-competitor?
Source addresses: the Google bot traffic comes from a small set of Google-owned IP address blocks.
Third parties bake this into things like Web Application Firewall (WAF) rules. For example, Azure App Gateway WAF has a policy category for “known bots” which includes Google but excludes your tiny AI startup.
It’s a moat built by giant corporations to keep tiny players in their place.
I agree it’s a moat, but why would azure restrain competition from google? I think it’s just yet another example of an anti-abuse collateral damage, like email anti-spam blocking small unknown servers or Cloudflare blocking unknown IPs.
Because Azure customers want Google to be able to index their sites.
Would you host your e-commerce or social media site on a cloud provider that blocked Googlebot?
It's not Microsoft giving Google a handout out of the goodness of their hearts; it's Azure customers demanding that functionality. (Those Azure customers also don't care about a random little search startup and probably don't want to pay any egress fees to serve traffic to it.)
In the past couple of years, many large tech companies developed a legal theory that scraping the public web for "internal" purposes is OK, and that any ToS-based or technical restrictions are just suggestions that they don't have to follow.
These "internal" purposes included growing your social network, monitoring or reverse-engineering the algorithms of competing search engines, and now, it includes training ML.
Which is funny given that when others are doing it to them, they go to great lengths to stop it, and sometimes complain loudly or threaten lawsuits.
I think the main reason the big players don't sue each other is that it's a bit of a Mutual Assured Destruction kind of a deal. Google is doing it to Microsoft, Microsoft is doing it to Google...
Technology patents create a complex MAD situation. At the end of the day Alphabet will be paying tons of money to Microsoft who will pay it to Apple who will pay it to Samsung who will pay it to probably Nokia or Xerox or Nintendo or whatever. And this goes on for each and every company with wealth in these spaces.
>One way Google maintains their monopoly is that many websites block all bots except for the Google indexing bot.
Because Googlebot is actually _friendly_.
O boy are there bad bots out there for search engines that often DDOS your site to shit.
Yandex is probably the worst out there from experience. Not only will it hammer you, they put in extremely aggressive retries such that even if you ban it temporarily for 4 hours, the literal second your IP block of their spiders expire, they will flood you with requests, and they don't even know how long the ban is, their bots just keep trying and trying.
I think most corps allows known bots. To allow all traffic to a major site is not possible.
The problem is bigger the other way around I would say. That Google, AWS, Azure and so on use the same AS numbers for private and public cloud. It is not easy to detect if it really is the Google bot or some low-lifes performing DOS-attacks from GCP. Many attacks, especially state sponsored attacks, comes from trusted clouds.
Agree on the first part, but I think actually this is an argument for breaking them up along those lines.
I've often said that the "breaking up" of Google that makes the most sense is to split the crawling/indexing service from the rest of the company. Similar to the way telecoms companies were forced -- in some countries -- to open up access to e.g. DSL infrastructure.
I agree. I don't relish the idea of certain other countries' services getting too large in the vacuum that breaking up Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet will do.
Just imagine TikTok, then have that applied to Search, Mail, etc.
> One way Google maintains their monopoly is that many websites block all bots except for the Google indexing bot.
No, I don't think that's true. I am writing a web crawler, not for search purposes, and I haven't seen preferential treatment for GoogleBot compared to others. Sure, some might be banned outright (though bad crawlers just ignore robots.txt and do whatever they want), but in most cases new bots have the same access rights than GoogleBot.
Also, your sentence doesn't pass the sniff test: you claim Google has better access than all other crawlers; but robots.txt is solely in the hands of the webmaster. How does Google coerce most website owners to block other bots? There is no conspiracy at play here.
I like this! But I do think many markets make sense to be heavily regulated, beyond just anti-trust. (For instance, my work involves wholesale power markets, which are heavily regulated by necessity, but in my view remain better than vertically integrated monopoly power providers.)
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
With all due respect to Mr. Lewis, this quote is crap. I have no reason to believe that the robber baron's cruelty may sleep, nor that his cupidity might be satiated, nor that conscience enters into it for that robber baron.
A private monopoly is accountable to only the owner. May as well be feudalism. In a liberal democracy, government monopolies have accountability to the people. When that is subverted or corrupted, it sucks, but at least there's a mechanism.
There's no such mechanism with a private monopoly.
Busting a monopoly is not an exercise in tyranny. Do you weep for Standard Oil or Bell? If anything, the US government is lenient towards monopolies. None of the 21st century behemoths have been busted.
Already has been - what fraction of 'right to be forgotten' requests are actually in the social good, as opposed to just criminals of various levels covering up their crimes?
Of course, "criminals of various levels" "covering up" their, say, stupid 19-year-old mistake drug conviction is exactly why many people favor right to be forgotten things. The idea that it would be in the social good to have easy access to everything someone did or posted for decades seems ludicrous. Privatized ubiquitous surveillance and record-keeping is not a good thing.
Civil society was founded on, and still depends on, public trials and public laws. Since Hammurabi. That has nothing to do with "ubiquitous surveillance", it is the most important and basic record keeping.
It is up then to each person reading the records to decide if a crime is old enough or unimportant enough to not matter. That should not be the decision of internet censors or courts who want to sweep their traces under the rug. Or criminals wanting to do that.
If most people think that drug use is not something a person should be trialed for, then the laws need to be changed. Censoring doesn't remove the fact. It just removes discourse to the realm of gossip.
Are there any request that are actually just criminals of various levels covering up their crimes? Since the right to be forgotten exists I've been hearing about this misuse of this right but never have I seen one case been presented to show how it is being misused. If you don't know of such a case on what is your opinion of this right based then?
"Google has argued that the default positions are not overwhelmingly powerful and that users can switch to a new search engine if they like."
OK, then why pay Apple close to $20 billion annually to be the "default".
"Mr. Schmidtlein hammered Mr. Nadella with questions about instances in which Bing had been the default on mobile phones, only for users to switch back to Google."
If Google search is so great, and Apple needs to use it as a default, then shouldn't Apple be paying Google.
If users switch without Google paying to be default, then why pay.
For me, the fact that Google has >50% market share on Edge is proof that Google is right. Consumers clearly know how to change defaults when they want to.
A large combination of dark patterns have contributed to Chrome's market share. (to name just one: Installing Flash for Firefox or Internet Explorer? Get Chrome installed at the same time (which, guess what, doesn't even need the Flash plugin you just installed, because it embeds its own))
Defaults definitely matter (that's why Google pays Apple for default status), but legally what matters is if the contracts are exclusive. That's what this fight over the "power of defaults" is about. Microsoft and the government argue that they are exclusive because, while consumers can change the default, they don't in practice.
But the fact that consumers clearly know how to change the default on Edge fatally undercuts that argument. And if the contracts with Apple aren't exclusive, Google can't be liable for them under the antitrust laws.
I forgot the scope were so limited in the US. Going back to the Microsoft trials vs the EU, there was no exclusivity limitation, users could use other browser, or install other OSes, the point was solely on what pressure MS put to be the first choice.
Seems like the responses ignore that fact that it’s not illegal to have a monopoly. It’s illegal to unfairly use your monopoly to prevent competition. That’s what this is about.
Google has special treatment for their services in the search results.
I.e. different look for their market, prefers youtube to the search results which has a better text version. Now it shows their hotels booking service instead of actually searching for hotel sites (they had the same thing with online shops). Pretty much killed Yelp by copying features with maps and showing their reviews when searching.
But actually what we want from "search" providers ? What "search" actually is ?? Some OS that monopoly is impossible to avoid ?? Or hardware you can't don't have because your own government or law require it ? Or other dead end, shorter or longer ?
Last week I installed some Debian and Duck was default in FF... What a unpleasant experience... 90's Yahoo catalog or pre-google "search engines" - all was working as expected. Only with Bing and that so called "privacy preserving" clone you are shocked that trivial things to find/match are absent in results...
So Google search is "ubiquitous", simple the best. But is's trivial to avoid ! Not like Microsoft monopoly on OS-like trap. Or Android :)
I personally would pay for good search app, offline, open-source, with _data_ updates. Or probably app is not needed here, just [pretty legal] data to buy. But Unity had some troubles just previous week... Free stuff is hard to match :>
Different CEO, probably different board, probably different majority share holders, different attitude toward customers, different products and principles, essentially a completely different company.
Microsoft is still engaging in vendor lock-in, such as making it difficult to use Microsoft 365 on platforms other than Azure and Windows. In the open source community, Microsoft is also practicing the 3E strategy, such as implementing specific features in .NET only for Microsoft products. In essence, Microsoft is the same today as it was in the past.
It's not super surprising that a company is saying potentially contradicting things (over a period of 28 years) to defend or promote their interests...
Both Microsoft and Google abuse their position, they could shut up about it, but instead it looks like Microsoft is defecting. I wonder if Google intends to counterattack. What Google does with Android, Microsoft does it with Windows, but worse.
A duopoly in search that throws some crumbs to the former big-tech monopoly would be a definite improvement over the current monopoly /s.
IANAL and don't particularly care about the minutiae and merits and politics of individual cases in the context of antiquated anti-trust laws. A lucrative monopoly allowed to operate over long periods can and will identify its own weak points and the abilities and competitive threats of the market. It will have more than ample resources to mitigate them. Whether that monopoly dominance is secured in legal, border-line legal or illegal ways is a mute point.
In a healthy economy there should not be any monopolies unless they are very heavily regulated. We should celebrate commercial success up to a point but be deeply suspicious of winner-takes-all degeneration that is justified on the basis of bogus arguments (network effects, superior quality etc).
This rationale is even more important in the context of digital technology where the foundations of the current and future digital economy are being laid. And no, a Google Web [1] is not a good blueprint for the digital economy. Neither is a cozily arranged Google-Microsoft Web for that matter. For this new type of economy to flourish the "web" should be really neutral, not the fiefdom of this or that oligopoly extracting rents and holding everything back.
Good. It is. For a company that pretended to be a startup as late as 2014, and had the motto Don't Be Evil, they are the reverse of that. They have destructive product handling, regularly destroying alternatives with their own versions then EOL them when the market is destroyed. Their Ads monopoly is awful. Google is a bane on the internet.
Last Saturday I was searching for something on Google and not getting anything and just for laughs I tried bing. I have been using it for second opinion since. And I don't think bing got any better, but my god has Google got a lot worse.
I rarely search these days. Between chatgpt, perplexity.ai and ocasionally bing chat (to get AI results but with sources), google looks mostly outdated. I use it for maps and finding places/businesses, though
I, for one, find myself from time to time wondering, what are these subpar search results I'm getting? And then realize I haven't yet set Kagi as default search engine on this device yet.
> The image of the chief executive of a leading tech rival — Microsoft is one of the world’s biggest public companies, valued at $2.4 trillion — saying it could not easily fight Google was striking.
Why is that striking? It's just a repeat of the playbook Microsoft used to great effect in the Activision trial. "Oh, woe is us, we've lost the console wars, we're in distant 3rd place and can't compete". They have absolutely no problem being mock-humiliated due to a supposed failure to compete if it gets them the result they need in court. (Which is the smart play, of course.)
> But in court, Mr. Nadella said that argument was “bogus” because users generally don’t change their default search engine, even if they have the ability to do so.
Oh, huh. Isn't Bing the default search engine for the default browser on Windows? I guess all those Windows users are searching on Bing then.
Though I do wonder why Microsoft gets into the news on a regular cadence about yet again having reset the defaults with a Windows update. Seems like something that they wouldn't need to bother with if nobody changes the defaults.
I don’t get why he saying “MS can’t compete” matters. It doesn’t mean it’s in any way true.
MS has almost every opportunity that Google has when it comes to search. They fail to compete simply because they aren’t good enough.
Google being default on Chrome the leading browser? Edge freaking comes with Windows and defaults to Bing.
Google being default on iOS? MS has every opportunity to take Google's spot on iOS. The fact that Apple, a major competitor with Google in the mobile space, sides with Google says a lot about Bing's quality - can't be money because MS is worth like 2.4 trillion.
>Google being default on Chrome the leading browser?
This is why Microsoft won't win. Google obviously isn't going to not use their own search engine on their own browser, and that's totally fine. I'm not sure what Google can even do to reduce the market share of their search engine besides intentionally making it worse than Bing.
They can be broken uo so that the entity making the browser is not the same entity operating the search engine anymore. If course, the same would apply to Edge and Bing.
I don't know how the US anti-trust works, but I'm wondering why hasn't Microsoft ever been investigated about being a monopoly in desktop operating systems?
Thanks. I didn't know it. Microsoft is still a monopoly on desktop OS, even after this anti-trust investigation. To me, that's weird. Anti-trust didn't work?
Just having the most popular product doesn't mean you're liable in an anti-trust case, you have to abuse the position as well (IANAL though). There are no viable competitors for a PC desktop OS for them to abuse and haven't been since the 80-90's I guess.
A bit off topic, but to me it's interesting that they couldn't extend their desktop OS dominance to the mobile world when they launched Windows Phone with a huge war chest. That must have demonstrated how huge the disjunction is between desktop and mobile use-cases in general, or the strategy should have worked (and could have re-fuelled the anti-trust aspects)
If I was Facebook or Apple, I’d drop a bunch of cash into common crawl or build my own equiv, give it away virtually for free, and let fancy AI search startups take aim at Google
I mean Bing still sucks compared to Google. I keep giving it a chance, but it is just nowhere as good. Make it better, and people might use Google less?
Just like Windows happens to be on the desktop, regardless of the WinDev and marketing department attempts to mess it up, one cannot win in every front.
I've been using primarily DuckDuckGo for over a year now, and while I agree that for most things it's on par with Google, it's much worse on obscure stuff and on regional stuff (Norway in my case).
That said, I think the parity on most searches is partially due to Google sucking more than it did. Often the thing I'm looking for isn't in the top 10 hits in either.
Yes, I came to the same conclusion. DDG doesn't feel as good as Google once was, but Google is almost unusable now, the entire first screen is almost always 5 paid placements and 5 SEO scam sites.
This post is aimed at the lawyers and
judges in the current DoJ/Google legal
case.
From this case, I'm concerned, apparently
threatened:
(A) I have some expertise in computing,
worked in and with computing for decades,
written some serious software, taught
computer science in college and graduate
school of famous universities, and
published peer-reviewed original research
in artificial intelligence.
(B) Now computing is my main activity and
the foundation of my business startup.
(C) From credible quotes in the media and
(A) and (B) just above, my opinion is that
the lawyers and judges in the Google case
(a) are poorly informed on and have no
meaningful understanding of computing, (b)
are often seriously misinformed on
computing, and (c) are on the way to doing
serious harm to computing, the economy,
and my work.
I see no opportunity for this legal case
to do any good and would like the DoJ just
to say:
"Sorry, never mind. We made a HUGE
mistake and now drop the case."
For example:
(1) Operating System. I use versions of
Microsoft's Windows, really want to use
only one operating system, considered the
choices, and picked Windows.
It seems to me that Microsoft continually
makes changes to improve Windows.
Some of the changes are for the user
experience and user interface. Mostly
I find the changes poorly designed and
irritating but not a serious problem.
Other changes are for, e.g., computer
security and new hardware, and I like
those changes a LOT.
I REALLY LIKE their .NET software and its
documentation.
I REALLY like the Windows NTFS file
system. And I REALLY like the fact that
the basics of Windows has been quite
reliable, with lots of utility, for 10+
years.
And I intend to start using Windows Server
2019. Versions of Windows Server may be
the most important software in the economy
of the world.
(2) I have lots of computer programs
installed.
Some of the programs I've written myself
in various computer languages.
Of course, for me the most important of
these programs is the Web site server
program I've written for my startup.
Otherwise my most heavily used program is
the text editor KEdit, first written by an
IBM employee in France, and for that
program I've written dozens of macros.
Next is Rexx written by an IBM employee in
England, and for that language I've
written dozens of programs.
I have the D. Knuth mathematical word
processing software TeX which I use for
writing nearly all documents, letters,
etc. For TeX I've written dozens of
macros.
I have a spell checking program Aspell I
use heavily.
I have Adobe's Acrobat installed and use
it to read some important PDF files.
To keep up with some changes in email
standards, I intend to install a recent
version of Microsoft Office.
I am a heavy user of the Internet and,
thus, of Web browsers. As I type this,
the computer has installed Firefox,
Chrome, Brave, and Edge. I use all of
them, use Firefox the most, may change to
use Brave the most, and may install the
current version of Chrome.
So, each of these Web browsers is an
installed computer program out of some
dozens I have installed.
With these Web browsers, I visit Web sites
-- thousands of them.
Some of the Web sites are search engines
or other means of finding content. Some
of the search engines are Google, Bing,
and DDG. But I also do searches at
Wikipedia, YouTube, Stackoverflow, etc.
(3) Defaults. The legal case has a lot of
emphasis on "defaults" in Web browsers and
search engines, and to me this emphasis
is, understated and in just one word, bad.
For the only such "default", I have set
Firefox as my "default" Web browser, but
this setting has almost no effect. E.g.,
if I am using Adobe's Acrobat to read the
PDF (portable document format) file for
the paper
"Tensor Programs I: Wide Feedforward or
Recurrent Neural Networks of Any
Architecture are Gaussian Processes"
and in the Acrobat display click on a URL
(uniform resource locator) of a Web page,
then Acrobat will use my default Web
browser to read and display that Web page.
I rarely do any such thing and there are
other approaches that are plenty easy.
For a "default search engine", I don't
have one.
In recent months I've noticed that I can
do some Web searches from an HTML single
line text box displayed by Firefox, but so
far I've never done this. I don't like
this feature by Firefox because I see no
reason to use it and it takes up limited
space in the Firefox window.
Google is just a Web site, and I get to
that site just like I get to any of the
thousands of other Web sites I go to. No
"defaults" are involved.
DoJ, lawyers, judges, please, Please,
PLEASE forget about computing, the
Internet, computer operating systems,
computer programs, Web browsers, Web
sites, and search engines. Just FORGET
about them.
PLEASE.
Anything you do will be a threat to the
economy, my work, and me.
Adobe is just as bad if not worse, and their software has historically been the only reason to suffer through windows. Now that Linux (and Mac) are closing the gap for gamers, less and less people will be forced to suffer through the flaming shit show that is Windows.
so is macos, chromeos, and ubuntu. Debian and Arch shall rise!!
> - that Microsoft is abusing their position by forcing Edge on users and bundling Teams, Outlook, Office365
I'd honestly be interested in 1 of their competitors who isn't doing this.
> - MS software quality is atrocious and I wish we weren't stuck with their garbage. Even bill gates has to agree with this under oath or he would be perjuring himself
No argument there.
finally, what does this have to do with Google's antitrust?
