To be honest, the entire state of mobile browsers could (and probably should) be an antitrust case in and of itself. It's just that the technical specifics are too complex for your average customer, let alone an aging judge, to understand.
On iOS customers are always locked in on the Safari ecosystem (well, for now, the DMA will probably change that) - all browsers on the app store are just skins of Safari, not meaningfully unique browsers. I hope I really don't need to explain why Apple gatekeeping non-WebKit browser implementations is bad.
Android is slightly better in that on the surface you can switch out the browser for say, Firefox (although Firefox on Android is a disaster), but... then Google does a sneaky thing and make it so that any in-app browsers will still be Chrome thanks to the System WebView. So nobody gets to escape the Google ecosystem. And in recent updates to AOSP, the vendor gets to force the System WebView to be set to the Chromium System WebView (or the Chromium Canary WebView, but that's... just the beta version).
Not that that one matters a whole lot directly considering there are no competing implementations for the System Webview besides Vanadium (which is just a Chrome fork - you also had Bromite in the past but a spat between Vanadium and Bromite means that Bromite System WebView is dead) and a single "just pass through to your regular browser" implementation; Mozilla has a Firefox WebView implementation for Android but largely leaves the choice up to app developers to switch out Chromium WebView instead of making it compatible with the system WebView (so nobody uses it afaict).
Chrome on Android also lacks support for extensions entirely, likely because Google is well aware that overwhelmingly the most popular type of browser extensions are adblockers. There are Chromium based browsers that get around this, but usership of those is low because most people just use the default browser. Seems like a fairly clean cut instance of conflict of interest.
At this point Chromium and Blink should be spun out into a Mozilla-style non-profit, not only due to conflict of interest but also because it's a bad idea to have a single corporation in full control of software that has become critical infrastructure.
Non-Chromium browser picks also don't swap out the system webview, meaning that if you click say, a link in Slack/Discord/whatever other app, you still end up with the Chrome browser anyway.
That's why I mention the system webview in the first place; it's a super insidious browser that solves a meaningful issue ("Electronification", where every desktop app is now running Chromium is solved by it's presence) but conveniently also grants full control back to Google, overriding other browser changes. (I once read some stats about this - system webviews are the majority of browser traffic on phones nowadays, because app developers love them; they can be tracked (the Google system webview reports back data to the main app about user behavior - IIRC the one Apple offers for non-browser apps is more of a black box though) and analyzed to see where users go from their apps, which helps with things like user profiling for advertisements).
Given that Android lets vendors force it to Google's implementation on a kernel level, it's also very much an avenue Google doesn't want users to figure out to change or to have competing implementations for.
> (the Google system webview reports back data to the main app about user behavior - IIRC the one Apple offers for non-browser apps is more of a black box though)
That's correct, SFSafariViewController does not afford app devs any usage information whatsoever, is run out-of-process, and uses separate cookie/localstorage/etc from both normal app webviews and Safari proper making tracking more difficult.
Also unlike Android's Chromium webview, SFSafariViewController utilizes the content blockers and extensions the user has installed unless the user specifically requests otherwise, so there's still some level of ad/tracker blocking happening.
You forget another important need for system webview. It's handled differently but don't forget we've trained users to type oAuth login credentials into random browser popups. The alternative is each app adding their own (potentially malicious) web view which is hard to confirm is safe.
> then Google does a sneaky thing and make it so that any in-app browsers will still be Chrome thanks to the System WebView. So nobody gets to escape the Google ecosystem.
Are you sure about this? I'm able to use (and have been using) Firefox as my Android system webview, just tested now. And this is literally on a Google-designed device. Maybe I'm missing something.
I'm only able to do this with root, which is fine for me, but the percentage of devices that can even be rooted at this point seems to go down every day :(. It's a shame that is not legally protected as well.
I... don't know what you changed because Firefox does not offer a system webview. They just... don't. Firefox offers GeckoView, but that's an app library that also does what WebView does, not a system application. There's not even any Firefox forks that build up a system webview because none of the forks think it's worthwhile after Google locked it down so much.
The closest you'd get to a "firefox webview" is by installing a Magisk module/non-Google ROM that replaces it with a stub application that forwards any "open system webview" call to your regular browser (so it works like clicking an http link). In the past you could just install that stub on any old Android device, but Google locked it down by letting vendors set a signature that a system webview would need to adhere to[0] (as well as a ton of other restrictions).
To be clear, I am not referring to what happens if you just click an http link in an app and the app just calls the browser. That setting respects browser choice. I am referring to the WebView[1] component, which a lot of apps use as a substitute for launching the browser and relies on an underlying app called the Android System WebView[2] to render the pages. For a legitimate usecase; in chat applications (ie. Discord), where a user might visit a website only to then want to immediately go back to the chat itself, the app instead just creates a WebView and... that one is always Chromium, and is nowadays enforced by vendor settings (so it can't be changed without root). In less legitimate usecases, this is done for tracking reasons.
(Another big user of the WebView component for this was Facebook Messenger, but Facebook has switched to using an internal version of this webview component, for reasons only understood by Facebook and it effectively acts as a shadow "fourth internet browser" that is in practice a somewhat outdated version of Chromium.)
Interesting, so for the apps that I've used that open a webview (which specifically says in the menu box "Powered by Firefox", with an option to "Open in Firefox", which opens in the full browser), they've added the library specifically in the app? To be clear, I don't have a rooted phone.
Not trying to be difficult, but I'm seeing this specifically in the Fastmail Android app, and I don't remember ever setting an app-specific setting to use it. I believe I've also seen this "webview" (maybe this isn't what you mean?) in other apps as well.
Edit: Bit of research suggests that this may be the "Custom Tab API"[1] which might be something different, perhaps a newer API?
That one can still be user configured. (As you can see, what Browser gets used on Android when you click a link is just a bit of a mess in general; you have custom tabs, system webview and even bundled webview, which is what Facebook does).
Yep, what you're referring to (the "Powered by <browser>" screen) is done with the Custom Tabs API. Some folks might also refer to it as the in-app browser. Any browser can implement a CustomTabsService and the whole feature respects the default browser setting.
The Fastmail app is actually a good example of something that uses the WebView APIs though. Fastmail's UI is entirely web-based and their whole app is rendered inside of a WebView, provided by the Chromium-based "Android System WebView" app. If I remember correctly, the list of allowed signatures for a WebView provider is baked into the OS, so no third party can provide an implementation without root access.
About a year ago? The main issues I had mostly boiled down to "the app felt clunky to use", pages not rendering nicely, issues while scrolling pages and buttons not being in places where they seem logical. Similarly, the way Firefox handles external links from other apps feels... bad? Like that's really what a lot of it boils down to; Firefox as an app just feels outdated to use.
Then there's the fact that extension support in Firefox Mobile is aggressively locked to the Mozilla extension store and only a whitelist of stuff Mozilla approves (it draws extensions from a collection on the Mozilla extension store, so if your desired extension isn't in it, the only option you have is to override the entire thing by making your own collection and messing in about:config), and that kinda compounds to a strong "I'd not recommend it" for me. Firefox to me is a browser that at it's core should be respecting user choice and the Android implementation on that alone doesn't meed the sniff test; Mozilla lock-in even on minor things like this is a big dealbreaker.
Chrome's feel with the rest of Android, for all the issues I have with it, is really well done. Firefox makes you feel much more like you're constantly struggling against Android to make a square peg fit in a round hole. I personally do use a Chrome fork (Cromite, which is a Bromite fork since Bromite's lead dev is MIA), just so that feel is preserved (while also having a solid adblocker and other privacy oriented features).
Thanks for your detailed answer. I have only ever used firefox on android so I don't really feel its clunkyness and I only know of one major website I use (an e-commerce merchant website) with problems. Sometimes the sharing function is broken (no icons) but I can live with that.
I also wish there were more extensions but as long as ublock is available it's okay for my usage.
I should spend a day or two with Chrome or cromite to see what I am missing.
All that being said, the latest firefox update pisses me of: now when you open a new tab and type news.ycombinator.com it will jump to any tab with the same url. I have >1000 tabs and the new behavior messses up the chronological order in which tabs were opened. It also jumps me back hundred of tabs backward at time. I dig a bit and found the bugzilla bug report, the original problem is about opening a new tab from the home tab and seeing how it took years to get the behavior changed and how the change has unintended consequences and people in the thread are "too much tabs is bad" kind of people I am giving up on reporting it.
I used it for years until the update which removed most add-ons. Not because of that change though, that didn't bother me, but because the interface became and in my opinion remains absolutely awful. Some navigations went from literally 2 presses to more than 8 and I don't understand how people put up with it.
This I think that yeah FF is losing badly on desktop, but it doesn't help that the majority of people use mobile and Google/Apple have created a duopoly on mobile... it very literally should be an antitrust, and quick before it's too late for any other competing engine to catch up.
I think we'll get to the point where they have had monopoly for so long that their policy making that they get to dictate as a result will be so ingrained inside of the web that it will be non reversible.
> then Google does a sneaky thing and make it so that any in-app browsers will still be Chrome thanks to the System WebView
Rubbish. Any app can use your own embedded browser engine - Google is not sneaky. It is just that the WebView is easy to use and you don't need to manage security updates. Apple doesn't give you the choice (I am fairly sure App store rules disallow you from embedding your own WebView implementation into an App).
If anything locking down iOS that much now probably means that Safari remains a viable browser. If people could install Chrome, I imagine we would have more of a monoculture of browsers.
If Safari only is a viable browser because of Apple literally being anti-competitive to it's users in other ways, I'd argue it's hardly viable at all.
The reality is that we're most likely in a monoculture already when it comes to browsers (just on the whole); Firefox gets funded by Google as and Safari only is propped up because Apple does it's own anti-competitive practices in other areas (read: their gatekeeping of the App Store) rather than being a common choice because it's a good browser.
There's also the fact that a lot of this is a tough thing to claim when by all accounts from webdevs... Safari is an unviable browser without Apple's anti-competitive behavior because Safari fucking sucks. It's the modern Internet Explorer of browsers; a lot of modern web APIs that both Firefox and Chrome use just... don't work on Safari because the system has bugs or weird design decisions that don't follow spec, which means they're not widely used because Safari is still there and holding back everyone else.
"Safari fucking sucks. It's the modern Internet Explorer of browsers; a lot of modern web APIs that both Firefox and Chrome use just... don't work on Safari because the system has bugs or weird design decisions that don't follow spec"
Absolute nonsense. The web developers who go off about Safaris are overwhelming terrible webdevs who want to stick a "Made for Chrome" button on their website and be done with having to bother dealing with other browsers. It's actually a bit hilarious when Safari is called Internet Explorer -- there was a time when Internet Explorer offered all sorts of crazy new stuff (just like Chrome today) which threatened the user's privacy and security, but webdevs wanted it so they stuck "Made for Internet Explorer" and dropped a bunch of ActiveX controls on their page. If anything Chrome is the Internet Explorer of the day.
I'm pretty passionate about this because not only is it going to be incredibly damaging for the web when Safari is crushed (Firefox will be crushed simultaneously), it means whatever half-baked nonsense Google pushes out is going to be the norm.
Honestly, I could link you a lot of articles, but... just look at the page on caniuse and see what Firefox and Chrome implement, yet Safari just doesn't bother with.
The main ones of note here really are the AV1 support, OGG Video and WebCodecs though. These aren't "new" technologies; most of them just are objectively good pieces of tech that have been battletested for years now. They just barely see any use because Apple doesn't want to implement them and the iOS browser market can't just be handwaved away. That's Apple refusing to implement certain technologies that make the ecosystem worse for everyone else. That's why I say Safari sucks.
I didn't include CSS in that list but if you enable it, you'll see a similar thing; Firefox and Chrome are both more or less up-to-date (with Chrome running away with certain APIs which is yeah, an issue), while Apple just doesn't support large chunks of it.
Similarly, while not listed on caniuse, their IndexedDB implementation is an infamously buggy mess that often introduces regressions with each update (and back when Web SQL was a thing, their implementation was once again implemented in a way that made it useless; they'd wipe it entirely after a week, meaning nobody ended up using Web SQL).
That one is also compounded by the fact that the Safari release cycle is infamously just... too slow, since Apple insists on tying it to entire OS updates (which means you aren't just supporting the most recent version of iOS but probably the ones from 5 versions ago as well because not everyone can run the latest version of iOS).
This isn't "bad webdevs"; it's Apple being a bad actor and using an external method of leverage (the App Store) to force webdevs to not be able to use actually good technologies.
>The main ones of note here really are the AV1 support
Apple devices -- in fact, most devices -- don't have AV1 hardware support. Meaning playing AV1 content will have a greater impact on battery life or provide a worse experience.
That's why Apple doesn't support it. Any reasonable technology stack is going to sniff what the client supports and serve up AV1 to so equipped clients (which hopefully have hardware support), h265, whatever. That falls in the realm of "complete and utter non-issue".
Google doesn't care about your experience (this has been shown time and time again). They'll toss whatever corpse of a solution they want over the wall and let it bake in the sun of exposure.
Further, notably your comparison includes loads of partials and nones for Firefox as well. Do you also hold that Firefox sucks? Because again, Chrome is Internet Explorer. Google sticks anything and everything in Chrome because it serves Google.
>they'd wipe it entirely after a week
This is actually a telling comment. At the time vendors discovered that they could circumvent cookie blocking/clearing by just stuffing everything into WebSQL. Again, Google just tossed it over the wall and loads of "bad webdevs" exploited it and went wailing and gnashing that Safari did this or Safari did that, why can't they just circumvent your privacy controls like they could on Chrome.
> a lot of modern web APIs that both Firefox and Chrome use just... don't work on Safari because the system has bugs or weird design decisions that don't follow spec, which means they're not widely used because Safari is still there and holding back everyone else
Are these Standards, or are these "standards", ie, Chrome implemented something and now Google is complaining that Apple didn't also implement the thing that Google just came up with?
Apple is blocking an entire market of technologies from its platform outside of their own implementation by abusing the fact that iDevices have a single storefront they control.
It'd be one thing if Apple made it so that the iDevices just are too technically incompatible with Gecko or Blink, but that's not the case. It's literally just a reviewer in their offices going "no, non-webkit browsers are against policy, not allowed".
Like... there, that's it. Apple is abusing their monopoly in one area (the App Store) to force a monopoly in another area (the browser market on their devices). That's textbook antitrust.
Which is realistically only Chromium. Unfortunate as it is Apple’s policies are the only thing keep Google from entirely dominating the browser market.
I use Firefox Focus. It doesn’t block everything but it does stop most annoying ads. I doesn’t support “tabs”, but in vanilla Safari I find tabs to be a graveyard of things that I occasionally clean out but rarely actively use.
Yet another alternative (to those already mentioned) is to run PiHole at home and Wireguard. This way you have one place to add domains, it works across all apps and browsers, and even away from home.
How many gigs of the very finite storage on my mobile device should I, as a user, be required to dedicate to every mom-and-pop browser engine that comes along? Storage is cheap but it ain't free on mobile, and it's not expandable without buying a new phone.
Seriously though: especially if you're a developer, do a quick audit and discover how many copies of entire browser engines you have on your desktop machine. They get squirreled away in testing frameworks, one-off bespoke apps, hardware configuration control panels... I'm not immediately convinced that the phone ecosystem controllers going "No, we don't do that here" is a bad thing.
Assuming you're talking about Android here (given on iOS everything is just WebKit)...
Do note that I have nothing against System Webview implementations. I think they're a great solution to avoid the current Electron hellscape we're seeing play out on the desktop, where every single bespoke application is running an entire copy of Chromium under the hood. The idea of just having a single copy of a browser running in the OS as a sort of backbone for in-app HTML pages/external links without launching the entire browser is a very reasonable approach, especially given phones have historically been much less powerful devices than desktops.
The problem I have is the lack of user choice; you have no control as a user what your System WebView is. Google used to offer that choice, but then quietly let vendors slam the door shut (unless you go the custom ROM route or root, which is beyond the skills of a regular user), and the default they offer (afaict) means most vendors do that, with vendors assuming most users won't care about it, so why would it matter. In fact this is also why I really dislike the Firefox approach of making it something the developer chooses to switch out, not the user - it's just bringing the Electron problem to mobile. The user should be the one making that choice, not the developer.
It really shouldn't be difficult to ask the user to pick from a list of browsers and then to actually respect that list. If a user says "I want to make Firefox my browser", then Firefox should also be the System WebView. Not to quietly put them back into Chrome (and therefore subject to Googles data collection practices) just because they clicked a link in an application.
I wouldn't argue every browser needs to be pre-installed, but as it stands now you can't even choose to install another actual browser engine at all on iOS.
> The New York Times dubbed Pandu Nayak, a Google vice president of search, "the face" of Google's defense, which is that it's not Google's access to more data that keeps Google leagues ahead of competitors in search, it's "brilliant people, working tirelessly to improve its products."
The notion that data isn't absolutely critical is a bold-faced lie and Pandu knows it. The usefulness of any proposed change to the search algorithm cannot be decided without sufficient user traffic to run an experiment. Every single change - even very minor tweaks - goes through user experiments on live traffic. The more traffic you have, the more experiments you can run concurrently and the quicker they converge on statistically significant results. The smartest engineers in the world cannot replace the value of live, experimentable user traffic.
Pandu knows this because he's the one ultimately responsible for the weights of the various metrics used to decide which experiments are launchable, and for enforcing that policies and the culture around running those experiments are in-place and followed.
I mean their defense is ridiculous on its face. "It's our smart enployees" half of which either now work at those competitors or were poached from those competitors. And if we talk about Google's extreme institutional incompetence across its entire portfolio...
Fifteen years ago the claim Google employees are uniquely smart might've held to even minimal scrutiny but not today.
Google absolutely does have some very smart employees, and their research org does amazing work. But as they've grown headcount they've certainly regressed toward the mean.
Sure, Google has some very smart employees, but so does Microsoft, who "can't compete". The reason why is the defaults and the data volume. What Google wants you to believe in this claim is that Google employees are smarter than their competitors' employees, and that is absurd.
I disagree. If I could only have one: Google's engineers, or their deal with Apple, I'd take the former. This is an easy choice for me, too.
I think you are mischaracterizing their argument if you are suggesting that Google is saying lots of queries makes nearly no impact. They would have that regardless of their deal with Apple.
Having been a Google engineer who bootstrapped a new recommendation system with the advantage of existing data and distribution... I'd take the latter any day. :)
It comes down to: engineer A says we should do X to make the system better; engineer B says we should do Y. How do you decide? You run an experiment against some known important metric. Do that hundreds or thousands of time a year and you eventually end up with a pretty decent system.
By buying up Apple's traffic they made it much harder for a potential competitor to form by removing one of the most important tools: enough traffic to run experiments.
I think you're selling yourself and the value of your skills too short!
But more importantly, I hope you see the question isn't whether huge volume matters. It's whether it's nearly the only thing that matters. The quote you cited is quite innocuous, an exec saying they have "brilliant people, working tirelessly to improve its products." Twisting that quote to suggest they are a liar seems really unfair.
I'd also say leadership matters, not just engineers. Microsoft says their shareholders would have struggled to accept the high price tag of a deal with Apple. That's their fault? Either that, or they don't believe their own argument here.
I would like to see an estimate of how much Google earns from the Apple search traffic. The article talks about the payment as if it were pure cost to Google, which obviously isn't the case. They earn truckloads of advertising revenue from it. That's what the $20 billion should be compared to, not $0.
Not can't-can't, but realistically they can't. Per TFA:
> Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified that Google's claim that search users have choice is "bogus," while confirming that efforts to compete for default status for Bing failed, despite Microsoft being willing to take billions in losses. At one point, Microsoft even offered to sell Bing to Apple, but Apple rejected that deal, allegedly because the deal it had with Google was just too good to let go.
There aren't many search engines nowadays. Anyone that does not use Google will probably end up on Bing. DuckDuckGo and Yahoo are still repackaging Bing results last I checked, and alternatives like Brave Search or Kagi are still very niche.
There’s been some good points raised by both sides in the case but there’s still some logic that doesn’t flow.
* Google pays a rev share to Apple for being _default_ search provided and default was key: “no default, no deal”.
Apple turned down more money from Microsoft including offers to buy all/part of Bing.
Samsung also dallied with Microsoft for more money but also turned it down.
* This suggests that there’s some other reason aside from money that Apple is going with Google. After all, as Google points out, if competition is just a click away why wouldn’t Apple click away to another partner? This could be:
Google is just better. If Apple switched their users would notice and suffer/leave Apple.
There’s additional leverage that Google has that it is leveraging e.g. search ranking penalty? Access to other Google services (especially for Samsung), Agree not to compete in other areas (like their previous no-poach agreement they had).
So a couple of key questions:
1. Is Google really that much better to the _average_ internet user (note that HN crowd is not average in this regard)? Is there much risk to Apple to take the money from Bing and make them default?
2. Somewhat dependent on 1, but ff Google knew/know Apple or others are unlikely to switch because Google is that much better than why not exercise their market power and lower the rev share % they pay to others?
Feels strange for both things to be true - that Google is that much better AND that they don’t negotiate down their rev share.
You misread. Google paid Apple more. That's why Apple turned Bing sale offer down.
Google search results are horrible! For some time now they bump dummy websites that copycat original work and simply litter the site with ads. Even with these sifted out, their search isn't better. I use some obscure engine and I'm not missing hits.
The days of altavista are long gone. Alternative engines, like qwant, are good.
So, Apple keeping Google as default because they're good? I don't buy it.
It seems unclear if Microsoft was willing to pay more. From Bloomberg's coverage: "Microsoft business development executive Jon Tinter said that his company weighed making a multibillion-dollar investment in its relationship with Apple in 2016, an effort to outspend Google and make Bing the default option on Apple devices." They also offered to sell part of Bing to Apple it seems.
As to Samsung why else would they consider switching from Google to Bing? According to the WSJ [2] they changed their mind "given concerns over how the switch could be perceived by the market as well as the impact on its wide-ranging business relations with Google." This suggests Microsoft was willing to pay more.
Agreed on 1; people in the court case are saying Google is better.
Given that, why wouldn't Google negotiate a lower rev share?
Consider this from Apple's Eddie Cue: "Cue implied that Bing’s technology was inferior to Google’s, saying that he doesn’t 'know what we would have done” if negotiations with Google ever fell apart.' " [1]
If I were sitting across from Cue at the negotiating table and knew he felt that way I certainly would be looking at a lower rev share and saving some billions of profit for Google...
> Because Bing was far smaller than Google, Microsoft would have had to offer Apple a far larger percentage of the revenue than Google and would have lost money on the deal, at least initially, Tinter said.
Yes, on Desktop users tend to switch to Google. Google could end up benefiting financially from the court ruling these deals illegal. Until the court does so, Apple sells advertising space on their new iPhones in the form of the default search engine choice, and Google offered to pays for this advertisement the most, because they have the biggest gain on such advertisement.
This case makes zero sense to me. If just paying Apple for default automatically makes you the highest quality search engine and number one in the market, why didn't somebody else just do that?
There's a second more interesting argument that Microsoft made that even if they paid more, it wouldn't matter to Apple because they rely so much on Google cooperation for Gmail, etc and that makes at least a bit of sense for a competition issue even though it'd apply to Microsoft products (Office, etc) as well. But to the degree anybody can pay to be #1, that strikes me as an open marketplace.
And why is Google paying Apple to be default worse than Google selecting itself as default on its own devices? Isn't it the same principle?
There's a more insidious implication at play, that the payment constitutes an armistice between Google and Apple so that neither will directly compete with each other further than they already are (avoiding a lose-lose situation where Google is making desktop computers and Apple is developing search engines).
And I think additionally G7 governments see the tech industry as being dangerously too powerful and are picking at scabs in hopes that this industry falls into line before they take more drastic measures, which would be a lose-lose scenario for both the tech industry and governments.
Microsoft, whose testimony has gotten the most attention in this case, has $111.26 B on hand. Google pays Apple between $18 billion to $20 billion a year, supposedly, and of course makes money back in search revenue. And even more by being number one in search.
If you thought I was suggesting a random person on the street would have the money, then you misunderstood.
The actual answer to the question I posed, which you quoted, is that it's actually quite difficult and not a matter of just writing a check.
The article reads to me like Microsoft either didn't think it was worth the high price, or that they couldn't sell the price tag to shareholders. And that contrary to just being an Apple thing, they also didn't want to pay Samsung, undercutting the idea that this is just a matter of Apple and Google being too cozy.
I get the impression Microsoft doesn't believe its own argument that all you need to do is write a check.
Or that they also knew Google, who already has the lead in search revenue, also has 100 billion in cash on hand so trying to buy the market out wouldn't actually work, even with 100 billion yourself.
The implication is that in capitalist society without enough regulation, the monopolies will collaborate to maintain their own monopolies rather than fight each other and try to compete. Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon all could compete, but it's more profitable to have a gentlemen's agreement to not compete and to kill any challengers.
Same as Standard Oil, J.P. Morgan, US Steel, Armour Meats, etc. last century.
I don't have an issue with a law that says companies that create phones have to show X number of search options for the user to select on first startup. But the central argument in this legal case, that just paying to be the default means you then automatically become highest quality and therefore dominate the entire market even on other devices, doesn't strike me as being... true.
"Regulation can be good" is a principle I agree with. That is separate from whether the central argument being made about whether being the default is all it takes to create the highest quality search engine.
That's one of the cruxes of the lawsuit: whether that kind of thing is true, and if it is, whether it constitutes antitrust to take advantage of it. If search engines overlap 99.9% in quality, default might win purely because users are lazy and uninterested in understanding the application domain.
Personal opinion: it sticks in my craw a little if it turns out you can be a monopolist by just working to be the default search engine because users are too lazy to try switching. That's a weird way to interpret the "consumer harm" cornerstone of American antitrust.
> If search engines overlap 99.9% in quality, default might win purely because users are lazy and uninterested in understanding the application domain.
What Microsoft is saying in this case is that their search engine sucks by comparison to google and lacks quality because they don't have the same number of queries since they aren't the default. That whoever has the most queries will automatically be the highest quality and win across all platforms, not just Apple where it's the default. Your argument is very different! You're essentially arguing that Microsoft is wrong about not being nearly as good as Google. See https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/2/23900233/microsoft-ceo-sa...
Ah, okay! That is actually very clever and I tip my hat to their lawyers for coming up with that approach.
Granted, one could I suppose have some concerns with an argument that says " We can't be as good because we don't have the ability to harvest nearly as much private data that users don't just hand you unless you intermediate yourself in their lives..."
... But there's meat on the bones of that being a roundabout way to argue consumer harm.
That’s because it doesn’t make sense, at least if we’re talking about quality. If Google and nobody else had paid Apple a penny to be the default, Apple would still probably have Google as the default because it is still the best of the free options today. Of course the iPhone is so popular that it doesn’t make any sense for somebody to not pay Apple to be the default, and that is a lot of potential traffic that Google would lose out on if they took no action and remained complacent.
And if quality matters to the discussion (which might be a bigger “if” than I’m giving credit for here) Google today is worse than Google in 2009. Bing’s problem isn’t that it isn’t as good as Google today, it’s that they never even matched Google in 2009 and the decay in quality at Google hasn’t made it worse than Bing currently is.
When I took a negotiations course, there was one interesting thing they teach.
It is legal to pay someone to enter the market (e.g. Microsoft paying Apple to make a search engine if they thought most of their users would be former Google users).
It is, however, illegal to pay someone to stay out of the market. Given that Apple was developing a search engine, the DOJ is arguing that Google decided to offer Apple a lot more money than Apple felt they would make with their own search engine. So Apple preferred the Google money to developing their own engine.
While not an explicit deal to stay out of the market, the argument is that it is equivalent to paying Apple to stay out of the market.
Here's a negotiations question: Is Google overpaying or underpaying for "default"?
If you believe the price tag is so high because Google is secretly paying Apple to stay out of the market, then they'd be overpaying what would otherwise be a fair market price.
But the key argument in this case has been that the value of being "default" is so high that companies like Microsoft can't compete, since those extra queries make google way better. In that sense, Google would be UNDERPAYING.
To make your overpaying argument, Microsoft should have been arguing that being default is worthless and that Google was clearly paying Apple for some "other" nefarious reasons, like not developing their own search engine. I actually think that's a much stronger argument because I think there's evidence of it. But it's not the main argument being made in this weird case about how important it is to be default.
They could have just looked at the evidence of a deal between Google and Apple for Apple to not compete and left it at that. They've made this too complicated. The involvement of these other search companies is irrelevant.
A quick search suggests 86% of Mozilla's 2020 revenue came from their Google deal. I haven't heard of any major funding changes at Mozilla, so I would guess that is still the case. 80+% of their revenue up in smoke sounds pretty dire.
They would certainly need to come up with something on the quick.
I've said it before. If Mozilla stopped with their nonsense and charged an optional $9 a month for a Developer build of Firefox (which ALREADY exists mind you) under the guarantee that all proceeds would go to funding Firefox, I would pay it every month. They're not even needing to build a new type of Firefox browser build, Developer edition already exists. If you tell your potential customer base that this would be the case, I'm sure plenty of devs would buy into it. Especially if they invest in dev tool enhancements. There's still so many random things I'm astounded that not even Chrome Dev Tools can capture, like if I'm debugging postMessage, why isn't there a tool to see what messages are going from what document to what host and so on.
It's always been funny to me the hoops the EU had to force the browser vendors to jump through.
"Pop up a selection screen."
"Okay."
"No, you're still listing your favorite partner as the first option. Randomize the options on every install."
"Okay."
I'm partially surprised the commission didn't complain about the choice of randomization algorithm. How much more signal do regulators need that users do. Not. Care?
>They've been keeping that train moving since the Netscape days.
Worth noting though that the Google deal is going since Mozilla corp. was first established (nearly 20 years ago) and before, when was only the foundation, they're being funded by AOL. So since their early days they're relying on a massive donor.
That's the thing, isn't it? There's so many anticompetitive things at play here it's annoying that the DOJ is focusing on just one (default search). From Chrome/Chromium to Gmail making it impossible to run your own email server to it becoming increasingly more difficult to separate the Google services from the AOSP.
Also, if the DOJ is actually concerned about the anticompetitive nature of defaults they need to go after Microsoft's deals with PC vendors. If it's not OK to ship a phone with Google as the default browser why is it OK to ship a PC with Windows (prebundled and already paid for in the price) as the default OS?
At the very least the consumer purchasing a PC should be required to pay for the Windows license separate from the computer itself.
"Order the divestiture of, at minimum, the Google Ad Manager suite, including both Google’s publisher ad server, DFP, and Google’s ad exchange, AdX, along with any additional structural relief as needed to cure any anticompetitive harm"
Something about this feels really weird. I'm supposed to believe Apple lacks agency here? Also, it's funny to suggest that Apple must build or run their own search engine. The solution is more vertical integration monopoly?
The article kind of implies it's Apple's fault, but Google was the well established leader before iPhone launched. Apple did build a Google Maps alternative, but it took a while for it to become good.
Apple expanded the deal for its big upcoming product: the iPhone. When Mr. Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007, he invited Eric Schmidt, Google’s then chief executive, to join him onstage for the first of Apple’s many famous iPhone events.
“If we just sort of merged the two companies, we could just call them AppleGoo,” joked Mr. Schmidt, who was also on Apple’s board of directors. With Google search on the iPhone, he added, “you can actually merge without merging.”
The "web search industry" back then wasn't very large. AltaVista was kind of a PR project at DEC. It took Doubleclick's supposed reverse take-over of Google to crack the nut of how to make money from web search.
Very unlikely that it's a lot of users from at least anecdotal experience (I used to help a lot of regular people with IT a few years ago).
Default settings are very decisive in how most people set up their entire OS really. Very few people ever enter the settings app to customize things to their liking - most just assume any friction that the OS throws at them is just something the magical black box that does the computer things does and the only thing the user wants is to make it go away. Not understand it, just make it go away.
That's what a lot of Google's attempts to become your default {browser,search engine} is also aimed at - irritate a regular user just enough with the idea that if they accept it, all the nagging about that subject goes away. Most users don't fully understand their OS enough to get what decision they're making, so they end up with Google as their defaults.
(This is also super prevalent on Android - try denying say, the Youtube app, access to your notifications. The app will ask for notificaton permissions every single time. Google really wants access to your data and "no" isn't an acceptable answer to them. If this was a real human, you'd probably call that out as being creepy, but people tolerate it with Google for some reason.)
I would seriously guess near zero. People who use Edge are, I would guess, the types of people that just use the default, the people who do not know tech and just know which thing to click for "the internet".
That's a broad brush. I don't really see the value in installing Chrome or any other Chromium based browser when Edge is already there, already updated, and also Chromium based. While in my personal life I used Firefox, I've found no reason for the last 2 years or so to bother with putting Chrome on a work device.
I also then wonder how many people go out and install Chrome. Edge is bundled in. It's the default. Going out and installing Chrome would be considered an even bigger challenge than just changing a setting.
Maybe nobody uses the default anyway and they just type "google" into the bing bar before they do any searches.
This is where Google's multiple monopolies go in. If you have a Gmail account and try to use it on another browser you will get a constant barrage of popups and banners pushing you to Chrome. YouTube, same deal.
If they can trick a user just once into going "okay fine", the Google installer runs and now Google's managing your defaults for everything else. Which is why obviously Microsoft tries so hard to prevent installers from taking over the default browser setting now.
I regularly encounter users who have actively malicious search providers and entire web browsers they do not know how they got. Tricking people into changing over is very much a thing, and actually how Sundar became as popular as he is.
People often forget that Sundar Pichai's entire claim to fame at Google was the Google Toolbar, which was snuck into Flash Player and Reader installs to hijack people's search provider. (The same bundled install trick was, of course, then adapted to growth hack Chrome's numbers as well.)
in the case they said it's in the teens, so that's after crazy level of dark patterns (probably if they do age analysis it's gonna skew towards more single digit share for younger demographic)
I find it curious that these cases are only being heard now, given that we are starting to see competitors like ChatGPT, DuckDuckGo, amongst others. Seems a bit late to me. I personally find the quality of Google to have nose dived in the last 5 years. It feels to me like something along the lines of a 'wordiness' score got added to their algorithm, which I dislike. Every time I search for a recipe, I am presented with a document about the history of the potato, then the recipe, which I find super annoying. My wish is to have a no BS search, which cuts out the wordiness and gets to the point.
That’s kind of the fundamental issue with antitrust law. By the time you’re in court, the case is already pretty much irrelevant to the addressable market the prosecution is representing.
The fear is that someone will dominate a market so thoroughly that they will never have any real competition from an alternative. When you were talking about railroad rights of way and maybe a finite number of salt mines, I mean, fair enough.
But now we fly over those rights of way and finding new places to get mineral resources is generally not that difficult because we either find new physical locations or we develop new technologies to re-exploit sites that were thought to be tapped out (and technically were with just older technology). Plus with electrification we’ve figured out new ways to get large quantities of energy other than drilling for oil.
How do you even define a market for search, when what people were really after was what search engines could get them and there are more ways than ever to get that now?
Yea just Google it, and hope Google does not direct you to some phishing website that steals your private information or that offers you to download malware.
On iOS customers are always locked in on the Safari ecosystem (well, for now, the DMA will probably change that) - all browsers on the app store are just skins of Safari, not meaningfully unique browsers. I hope I really don't need to explain why Apple gatekeeping non-WebKit browser implementations is bad.
Android is slightly better in that on the surface you can switch out the browser for say, Firefox (although Firefox on Android is a disaster), but... then Google does a sneaky thing and make it so that any in-app browsers will still be Chrome thanks to the System WebView. So nobody gets to escape the Google ecosystem. And in recent updates to AOSP, the vendor gets to force the System WebView to be set to the Chromium System WebView (or the Chromium Canary WebView, but that's... just the beta version).
Not that that one matters a whole lot directly considering there are no competing implementations for the System Webview besides Vanadium (which is just a Chrome fork - you also had Bromite in the past but a spat between Vanadium and Bromite means that Bromite System WebView is dead) and a single "just pass through to your regular browser" implementation; Mozilla has a Firefox WebView implementation for Android but largely leaves the choice up to app developers to switch out Chromium WebView instead of making it compatible with the system WebView (so nobody uses it afaict).