I expect this to be bad for everyone except Google if the ruling holds. Why? Mozilla and Apple will lose significant revenue from having Google as the default search engine and Google will no longer have to pay those billions. What's more, no one else can pay to be the default either (eg the short-lived Mozilla Bing deal).
So what's going to happen? Most users will probably still use Google, nobody is getting paid and Google is saving a bundle.
I get the thinking that you have to prevent lock-in (eg Ticketmaster and venues) but Google didn't buy its way into dominance annd maintain their dominance through exclusivity deals. They simply have a better product and I don't expect anyone to match them anytime soon (cue the DDG "I switched from Google to DDG 78 years ago" crowd).
I disagree. 100% they had a better product, but they have absolutely mangled it over the last few updates. Honestly, if I wanted the opinion of randomnumbers45123 on Reddit, I'd just search Reddit.
Google achieved dominance ~25 years ago by being better than the alternatives, and the other search engines pretty much withered away rapidly. They (Google) are in a very precarious position right now. They will certainly not disappear overnight, but if / when the public becomes aware of something better, the implosion could be spectacular.
By that logic, any product/organization that generates revenue mainly through ads would be an ad company. Search is the product that (probably) carries most of the ads revenues, so that's the main product, and ads are the means for generating revenue around it.
> By that logic, any product/organization that generates revenue mainly through ads would be an ad company.
What logic? The person you’re replying to didn’t explain their reasoning, so any logic you’re seeing is being constructed in your own head and projected onto someone else. In other words, you’re likely responding to an argument you’ve seen (and disagreed with) before instead of what that poster had in mind (which may or may not jive with what is in your head).
Google doesn’t just show ads, they track you and have the infrastructure to sell your information to people who buy ad space. That is fundamentally different from a website that makes money by showing ads, many of which they don’t pick themselves. So yes, Google is an ad company. And they’re one “first” because that’s where their efforts are, not because of the revenue. YouTube, Chrome, their web proposals, it all serves the same goal: ads, ads, ads, and keeping Google’s dominance in the space.
Last I checked Google doesn't 'sell your information to people', but it does offer hyper targeted ads; the ethics of both scenarios are deeply rotten to me.
> Last I checked Google doesn't 'sell your information to people', but it does offer hyper targeted ads
So you understand what I’m talking about. I didn’t mean selling the information directly. Because why would they, they make more money by keeping the data to themselves and selling you out indirectly from the information they gathered over and over.
It's digital pimping. Google are fully-automated, mass-scale digital pimps. They pimp your eyeballs out to Johns who pay for the privilege of mindfucking you, with the help of an extremely sophisticated matchmaking and realtime auction system. In return, you get nice handbags (YouTube) and get your hair did (GMail).
Calling it "ads" and Google an "advertising company" is just making a vague allusion to what's really going on and does not carry the proper connotation of exploitation.
Yes, because they get a competitive advantage when they hold all that information for themselves.
They have your email (gmail), location history (google maps), search history (google), viewing history (youtube) and know pretty much every site you've visited (chrome + ad network).
This is the data they aggregate and sell to advertisers so that their ads can target highly specific groups of people - they don't want the advertisers getting the direct dataset, that would be competition.
First-hand account from me that this is not factual at all.
I worked at a major media buyer agency “big 5” in advanced analytics; we were a team of 5-10 data scientists. We got a firehose on behalf of our client, a major movie studio, of search of their titles by zip code from “G”.
On top of that we had clean roomed audience data from “F” of viewers of the ads/trailers who also viewed ads on their set top boxes.
I can go on and on, and yeah, we didn’t see “Joe Smith” level of granularity, it was at Zip code levels, but to say FAANG doesn’t sell user data is naive at best.
They are obviously not only an ad company, but GP only claimed that they are an ad company "first". Can you please clarify which part you consider oversimplified?
Considering that the recent Google code leak only substantiated that Chrome is the honey pot for surveillance and data harvesting that people long suspected, even any supposedly not ad related work is technically also ad related work.
It’s something people have a really difficult time preaching logically, the veil of deception of many things. Another big example is TV, which are ad sales companies, not TV show distributors, even if they’ve successfully swindled people into a mindset where they actually pay the providers, for the privilege of being sold advertisement.
It’s really a rather interesting and eye opening segment of largely the US society that is both extremely dominant and has effectively been extremely damaging, and yet, people simply cannot see that they are like mindless drones, being programmed and reprogrammed with TV shows and advertisement.
> Considering that the recent Google code leak only substantiated that Chrome is the honey pot for surveillance and data harvesting that people long suspected
I'm vaguely aware of a code leak but haven't delved into the details; I'm curious if you have a link to details about this data harvesting?
Consider the case of a YouTuber who gets most of their revenue through superchats. They regularly upload videos, a couple times a week, and receive ad revenue and the od sponsorship deal. Once a week they do a livestream Q&A which is where the bulk of that superchat revenue comes from.
Are they a livestreaming "first" business-man/company/sole trader?
Revenue sources are not necessarily the be all and end all of determining what your key business concern is, or what your business should put first.
> Are they a livestreaming "first" business-man/company/sole trader?
Maybe, it depends on what they do next. Will they start uploading fewer videos and live-streaming more because they realised that’s where the money is?
> Revenue sources are not necessarily the be all and end all of determining what your key business concern is, or what your business should put first.
Agreed. But Google does put ads first. All the tracking, web proposals, Chrome, it’s all in service of ads. Perhaps you’re using an ad blocker and that’s making you forget, but Google’s services, like search and YouTube, are huge blobs of ads with a few bits of content sprinkled throughout and the ratio is getting worse in the ads’ favour. So yes, Google is an ad company. Not because it makes the most money from it, but because most of its effort is in expanding and defending their ad revenue. Heck, they literally spend billions of dollars just to make sure you search with their engine to see their ads.
True, but in addition to the revenue Google ALSO tailors all their products to facilitate their advertising products. It's sort of like a singer who sells merch. The merch makes money but it also props up the singers singing career and funds tours.
Chrome revolves around ads, android revolves around ads, maps revolves around ads, gmail revolves around ads. If you take a hard look at all their products their all linked to Google's advertisement offerings in one way or another. That, to me, means adtech is their main line of business.
They are the be all and end all in determining the incentives of a company from outside of it, though. If you sell ads I'm not going to trust any other product you have out of simple conflict of interest.
Not at all. In the hypothetical, without getting into the weeds of a business that doesn'tactually exist, if they stop producing the non-livestream content they could quickly find their livestream revenue dry up.
They could perhaps pivot, but at that moment, the superchats only exist because of the non-live content they put out.
So what you're saying is they will drive business decisions to ensure the viability of their livestream revenue stream. I feel like we're all in agreement.
How in the world would they get ads to people without those platforms? Doesn't all the data they use to sell targeted ads come from your search history and phone usage, etc.?
At this point, I think it’s clear that ads create a bunch of messed up incentives. From Cable, to Newspapers, to the Internet.
I guess any information <system? network? Broadcaster?> fares badly against financial consolidation of its <servers / distributors ?>
Advertisements are one part of the fall - it forces a fight for attention, and that is a limited resource.
We know enough about gaming Attention today, and that converges content that drives revenue in a similar direction, creating a conformity of content that is reproduced.
As revenues decline, independent nodes on the network get consolidated, so that you have very similar messages being sent.
——
Counter point: As content generated increases, people turn to trusted sources to find out what’s true.
That said, trusted sources aren’t just the big media houses, it’s whoever people trust.
So some part of the consolidation effect is reduced by having more sources of content.
But the new sources of content exist, because they can afford to exist. So it comes back to the fact that advertising subsidizes independent creators.
——
Guess the final point would be that this evolves into a discussion on resources and orchestrated information dissemination.
For a decade of so I was in charge internal web page for mobile users. I had control over the devices the end users had, the web browser they used, I maintained the back end. In that deployment the best product was Firefox.
There were two major reasons. It could be deployed on all platforms we used (we didn't support iOS). Secondly it was by far the most reliable. We still have the occasional use who would use Chrome on Android or whatever, and at least one or twice a year Chrome would push a broken version. It's odd, as before that I would have put Google's code quality above Mozilla's. At least for Chrome/Firefox it's not, and the difference is large.
I don't think you can scale or compare like that numerically. Every commit isn't a chance for it to break for users because they bundle however many commits into a release and resources required to test the release don't scale per commit.
I think most of the recent breakage has been server side changes and feature flags. Ie "whoops, people who were in this 1% experiment had their browser crash when we pushed an update to the spell check dictionary because we didn't test that combination".
Risks like that scale closer to the number of features/number of Devs, since Devs can be fiddling with server side config outside the release process.
> Honestly, if I wanted the opinion of randomnumbers45123 on Reddit, I'd just search Reddit.
I am not commenting on your whole comment but I noticed I am looking more and more on reddit for randomnumber45123's advice than listicles or press review articles that haven't used for 6 months the product I am considering buying.
Of course I just add "reddit" to my google query. I heard something was going on with google and reddit though (no irony, just hadn't time to check out what it's about yet).
Do you have any examples or types of query of where a free search engine produces better results?
I tried to Google for it, but maybe expectedly, that doesn’t bring up any good examples.
I think free has the be table-stakes for the default search engine, because otherwise you are forcing all users to change or buy a license, so any paid alternatives are out.
Disclaimer: Work at Google; not on search-related things, opinions my own.
Off the top of my head I can't offer examples, only my impression. In general Google seems better at narrowing in on what I'm looking for especially with more complicated queries, but in some cases the DDG results will turn up less spammy/more desirable results in the top few when I search with both.
It absolutely is a disagreement. I don't agree they have the best search engine at the moment. They did until they crippled it with the last 2 big updates.
You forget something. Reddit's search engine has historically been absolute dogshit. In fact there was a short time period it just opened a google window back in the day because they struggled to get it to work. It's gotten better in recent years but it's relatively meh compared to just having google search the reddit domain. Lol
It's not really the point I'm making though. Google search has become defacto Reddit / Quora search, and they haven't been transparent about this to the public. While they did have to do something about all the AI-generated unedited spam, replacing it with random Reddit commenters doesn't seem like it's necessarily any better.
"I expect this to be bad for everyone except Google if the ruling holds."
If the decision will not be bad for Google, then why would Google spend so much money and time to defend against it.^1
Why not just stop making the anti-competitive payments and terminate the agreements. Money saved. Problem solved.
We can now safely say it is not a defense to claim "Google is the best" and that's why people choose it. Anti-competitive conduct is illegal. Whether it is prudent or not. It makes no difference whether the payments were actually "necessary".^2 Google made them anyway, repeatedly.
1. Even more, this "prediction" implies there will be an appeal ("... if this ruling holds."). Why bother with an appeal if this decision has no negative effect on Google.
2. One only needs to show the conduct had an anti-competitive effect.
I think the point is that if Google is not allowed to make such payments, neither is Microsoft (unless they want to risk the same lawsuit against them). Apple will stay with Google since a change would probably be unpopular with users. End result: Default search engines stay the same, but Google doesn't have to pay for it anymore.
I think this ignores Apple could still develop their own search engine, as they did with Maps, and pocket the ad revenue themselves.
They could, and they should, but they definitely won't. Similar to how they use just a ChatGPT anonymized wrapper for their "advanced AI features", they'll just outsource search to some big player as well.
It makes no sense to "expect this will be bad for everyone except Google" based on this opinion. "This" has yet to be defined. The court has not even set a date for the trial to determine the remedy yet. All we know at this point is that Google broke the law. We do not know what will be the consequences.
not necessarily. Google cannot do this because in their case it is "abuse of market power" ... but if a market participant with a small market share does it it likely isn't "abuse of market power".
antitrust is not about market share, it's about abuse of the power that comes with it.
I think the important argument for^1 is that this prevents other search engine from bidding on the slot. It certainly would be an issue for Google if Apple products defaulted to Bing.
Why are so many mergers and acquisitions allowed to go through then? Either the law isn't phrased this way, the DOJ ignores the law, or we need to write new legislation.
HN commenters defending Apple have stated many times that iOS installations do not comprise a majority share of the "smartphone" market.
Can we assume that if Microsoft paid Apple to be the default search engine in iOS instead of Google then Microsoft would have market share, or some other source of monopoly power, sufficient to allow the DoJ and state AGs to bring essentially the same antitrust case against Microsoft.
There is this ridiculous "argument" from HN commenters I see sometimes, too often, when "developers" or so-called "tech" companies they work for are caught doing something wrong. It goes something like, "If we didn't do it, then someone else would have so don't blame us."
Can we assume that if Microsoft paid Apple to be the default search engine in iOS instead of Google then Microsoft would have the same market power as Google. (Without sufficient market power, making a case like this one against Google is not possible)
HN commenter #1:
> Why not just stop making the anti-competitive payments and terminate the agreements. Money saved. Problem solved.
"It's only solved if nobody does it. If Google stops those payments unilaterally MS would just make a slightly cheaper deal with Apple.."
HN commenter #2:
"It's no longer a competitive market. MS can lowball like crazy now"
HN commenter #3:
"I think the point is that if Google is not allowed to make such payments, neither is Microsoft (unless they want to risk the same lawsuit against them)."
it's more complicated than that. if MS paid Apple to be the default that would probably be anti-competitive against even smaller search engines. (but paying for search traffic is likely not in itself anti-competitive. doing it to keep others out of the market is when you are Google. where's the boundary? well, yes, it's complicated, depends on which market, what audience, how easy it is to switch providers, etc.)
Deals are mutually beneficial. If Apple and Mozilla were both taking Google's offer it's because neither felt they had more to gain from developing their own search engine to compete outright in the meantime or from offering someone else's as a default. There might be something to the argument Mozilla isn't in a position to reject the money because they're sort of a shambling corpse at this point but Apple is about as far from a desperate company as you can get.
Yes but Google’s payments still make up around 25% of their net income which is pretty huge. Losing that would have a very significant effect on Apple’s margins and stock price
Apple might make their own search engine. Apple has a team that's been creating a next-generation search engine codenamed Pegasus under John Giannandrea. They already have search engines for App Store, Maps, Apple TV and News and Spotlight.
Apple web search development worked as bargaining chip in pricing negotiations with Google. Google paid them $20 billion per year to not compete as much as keeping other competitors away.
We forget that there was at least a decade of several "Google killers" a year [1]. It's a graveyeard. That was 2009 too. The volume slowed down but people are still trying (and failing) [2].
Microsoft has of course tried but Bing is only really propped up by Microsoft's deep pockets. It's not a profitable enterprise (AFAIK). And this is with Microsoft using every trick they can to bypass EU and US consent decrees and legislation to trick users into Bing. Microsoft has poured billions into Bing.
Apple rejected Google Maps and launched their own Maps product in 2012. Obviously they consider this core to their business so I get it. But even with Apple's resources, it's taken more than a decade for Apple Maps to reach some parity with Google Maps.
It's really hard for a goose to lay a second golden egg. With Microsoft, it's their Windows/Office monopoly. With Apple it's the iPhone. Google is an outlier among outlier because they do have several golden eggs but one is much bigger than all the others (ie search).
Think about it. If Apple makes $300 billion in revenue selling iPhones (made up number), how would as an internal leader try and build a search engine? The iPhone will always take absolute priority, mainly because your search engine is such a drop in the revenue bucket. But without these resources and this priority it'll never grow big. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Sometimes just throwing money at a problem just isn't enough.
You can't seriously bring 2009 as a proof the situation now is the same. In Internet terms, it's like arguing current politics with examples of the time of Charlemagne.
How a search engine looks hasn't fundamentally changed since then. I'd argue the same about other products, like phones, excel, word, or operating systems like Windows. Yes, the newest versions of these have more sophistication than earlier iterations, but they are just extensions of the original basic idea. Sure the iPhone 15's camera is way better than the original iPhone's, but it's still a phone with a camera and a maps app.
Also, states are different than they used to be, but there is still a lot to learn from history, and you often see that similar struggles get fought over and over, or similar mistakes get made. Verdun has been a major battleground in WW1 because that's where Charlemagne's legacy got split up. As another example of a phrase still relevant today, there is "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?".
> Google is an outlier among outlier because they do have several golden eggs but one is much bigger than all the others
What "golden egg" do Google have besides an ad-selling business? Last time I looked into it ads of various forms accounted for basically all of their revenue, somewhere around 85% or more.
>What "golden egg" do Google have besides an ad-selling business?
Google search, Maps, and GMail are the big 3 web services. These don't bring in revenue all by themselves, but they bring users to look at ads which is where they make all their money. There's also Chrome (directs people to Google services and facilitates their use of those services). Finally, there's Android, which is a little different but like Apple, they get revenue from the Play Store on it, and again push users to use their own search engine and browser.
> These don't bring in revenue all by themselves
Thus they're not eggs at all, either golden or otherwise
> but they bring users to look at ads which is where they make all their money
Ad sales is their golden egg. Practically everything else is an egg truck to sell that one thing.
They're absolutely golden eggs, they just don't bring in revenue directly the way other products do.
Ads by themselves aren't a golden egg. Users don't want to look at ads, and certainly aren't going to pay for them. That's why they came up with those other products, to sell ads to advertisers.
It's just like newspapers: historically successful papers like the NYT didn't get rich by doing great journalism and selling papers to people, they got rich selling ads, with the journalism being a way to get people to subscribe to the paper.
Youtube, gmail, photos, etc etc etc - absolutely everything consumer facing is a channel for the ad business.
The only potential outlier is the cloud stuff, but even then I think it's essentially a 'economies of scale' thing, for the same reason Amazon started AWS, rather than a real revenue centre.
> It's really hard for a goose to lay a second golden egg. With Microsoft, it's their Windows/Office monopoly. With Apple it's the iPhone. Google is an outlier among outlier because they do have several golden eggs but one is much bigger than all the others (ie search).
No, in fact, Azure's revenue is higher than that of Windows and Office combined [1]. Microsoft is far more diversified than Google is. Google has been trying for a decade to achieve Microsoft's diversification and has not succeeded (Bard being the latest such failure).
The big difference is that at that point of time Google search used to be really good but now Google search is really bad so if there is a chance for another competitor in the market, that time is now.
Maybe. I recall searching the heck out stuff from 2000-2004 for CompSci looking for solutions to homework problems in code. There were a lot of spam sites.
Yeah Bing really isn't bad. And LLMs are basically search engines for most use cases.
I think Mozilla should just run an ad auction to choose the search engine. Bing/MS would pay to capture market share, and Google would pay to prevent Bing from gaining ground.
if their Internet search engine was as good as their App Store search engine then we would need to wait half a minute to get oranges if we search for tomatoes
They already have a tiny instant search engine which shows 1 result of a url at top.
I’d say its pretty accurate and impressive 95% of the time to the point im impressed at how good its suggestions are considering it’s just the top 1 search.
Funny you're showing up as downvoted, but this is absolutely right. Apple is testing their search abilities with URL autocomplete and it's surprisingly good. It's gotten much better in the last 6 months in particular.
The question is not whether Apple could make a profitable search engine. The question is whether they could make a search engine more profitable than the billions they are getting paid each year by Google to make Google search the default.
If Apple decides to make a search engine and eats $100 billion out of Google's $500 billion profit (made up numbers), Google will just spend back $100 billion (or whatever constitutes a blank warfare check) for year into completely annihilating Apple's presence. They will literally stop people from finding any page that even remotely mentions their 'AppleSearch' and also deprioritize a bunch of other products too unless if you type out, exact word, 'AppleSearch' or whatever it'd be called.
So now you're Apple, here's a question: Will you spend $200 billion fighting back? When will this stop? You're Apple, and this is a stupid move.
Not as profitable as monopoly. Sharing monopoly profit with Google is more profitable for both and loss for the consumers.
Both Apple and Google make less profits if they compete against each other, but consumers benefit from two search engines trying to compete against each other.
Apple does not like to compete. They would rather call it spatial computing and price their product in an astronomical band than risk being seen as yet another VR headset competitor.
They will never make a search engine.
On the other hand, they have already made a search engine. Which you don’t think of as one, and which provides a boost to their ecosystem tie-in.
It absolutely is much harder to make a search engine (at least a good one). The dominance of Google in that space for so long should have made that obvious.
Creating a search engine without stepping in the patent / licensing minefield that Google and Microsoft have put down for each other is not necessarily a profitable or worthwhile venture.
Sure, they could write their own search engine (they also don't do large compute - so they'd be getting it from someone they'd be paying) but Apple would be paying for compute and licensing ... and not have any revenue from it ... and get in trouble with anti-trust or monopoly issues in Europe to boot.
Writing a search engine isn't likely worth the headaches that it would bring to Apple.
Even though Apple hasn’t been sued for Apple Maps, they are not safe from such antitrust charges. The antitrust cases move slowly so it’s possible that they just haven’t gotten to there.
Interestingly, Apple Maps' new beta doesn't work on Linux at all, even with Chrome, so I can't see it. They say it works on Chrome on Windows or Mac, but apparently Apple doesn't like Linux very much.
The problem isn’t that Google has search and makes Android. It’s that they have search and paid android phone makes and Apple oodles of money to make Google search the default.
Apple would not need to pay anyone to make their search (or maps or browser) the default. It would be the default on Apple devices and not used much outside of that.
One would argue that Apple is abusing their monopoly on iOS devices to advance their map business. One could also argue that iOS is not a monopoly since Android has greater market share. Who will win is not settled yet. Right now, the DOJ hasn't come this far, but it is not given that they won't ever go there.
> It would be the default on Apple devices and not used much outside of that.
Would that bother Apple?
Their platform is the most valuable to advertise on. They’ll make money. The question is, will it make as much as Google was paying?
So long as they don't prevent users from switching to Google, I'd honestly like to see that search engine. And on the grand scheme of things, maybe it's good for Google to have some pressure against making choices that lead to search results quality decline.
Search is dead anyways. It’s all SEO nonsense. I would rather have a curated list of validated sights. Like recipes only from actual chefs or publications, news from newspapers and networks, be absolutely sure the address I am looking at is my BANKS website.
All the Reddit, twitter, Pinterest, and blog stuff can stay in the Google wasteland and gotcha ad links.
Search is only dead because it's more profitable for Google this way. They don't care that you end up on an SEO farm as long as you are looking at their ads.
I maintain that the point that Google started going down the drain was when they embraced SEO instead of seeing those that try to game the search engine as adversaries.
> Like recipes only from actual chefs or publications, news from newspapers and networks
are the first-party garbage on the Internet? It's all content marketing written to push ads. Yes, including "recipes only from actual chefs" - chefs have better things to do than to maintain an on-line presence; if you see one, it's most likely a brand where the chef gets paid for the rights to their name, and any actual writing is done by marketing interns mashing together whatever they can find on social media.
In fact, if you really want authentic recipes from real chefs, your best bet is Reddit - there's bound to be a few bored chefs hanging around relevant subreddits, exchanging ideas and providing expert tips, just because it's a fun thing to do.
So yeah, search is bad and the web is a SEO wasteland, but the brands big and small aren't victims here - they're the ones who caused it, and who perpetuate it, because it's easier money than actually delivering something of value.
By actual Chefs I mean like Bobby Flay or Matha Stewart. I don’t expect working chefs to give away their crafted recipes on a website. I am looking for like a simple crepe and meatloaf recipe, and end up with some really odd SEO boosted directions.
I waiting for someone to reinvent Yahoo! (aka human groomed site lists). In my mind I can see a browser plugin (or something similar) that users can Up/Down vote specific sites. You can then follow users and see what they think is cool/useful.
Yeah, the calculus is simple. You just lose 20 billion in potential pure profits. Google is paying you 34% of all search revenue originated by you. You have all the financial structure of your own search engine right there.
Just make your own damn search engine. You could even put Google's own ads on it to make some money that way.
God forbid their advertising looks anything like it does in Apple News. But with their recent Taboola deal it would seem like their standards are falling, not rising.
Tim Cook is merely out to keep the stock price going up just like every other business. Because they had a longer runway from the era of Steve Jobs, they look better by comparison but they will try and do every trick that everyone else has done to keep the next quarter going up.
> They simply have a better product and I don't expect anyone to match them anytime soon
This is a strange statement to be honest. Have you used google search in the last decade?
google search was awesome back in the very early 2000s. If you remember those times, you know how good it was.
That started deteriorating in the 2010s and it has become really useless in the last decade. Today google search results are mostly spam sites with autogenerated content along with sales and advertising sites. It can't find any of the actual user-generated honest content anymore.
It's leaking into Youtube as well, there have been a few times where I have searched for a video using it's exact name and I would have to scroll far down the list to find the correct search result in a sea of irrelevant garbage. You'd think if you search for video "XYZ", video "XYZ" would be the first result and not somewhere at the bottom of the list.
Their only "agenda" is quite leaked at this point, it's to push ads. The more you have to dig, the more ads they get to show you. The more times they can show you ads, the more times they get to charge advertisers those pennies per show.
> What's more, no one else can pay to be the default either (eg the short-lived Mozilla Bing deal).
Not sure if that is true-competition laws often prohibit the dominant market player from doing certain things, yet still allow smaller players to do the same thing.
I assume OP meant in terms of money. Apple will not accept scraps (like tens of Millions) for the default search engine, after getting billions from Google. And no-one else will have the financial resources or be willing to burn these amounts (Microsoft) to offer similar numbers.
They don't need to offer similar numbers? If this ruling prohibits Google, the dominant search engine, from buying their Safari defaults, then Apple has a choice of:
- Zero dollars
- More than zero dollars from a smaller search competitor (Bing? New AI player?)
I suspect Apple will want more than nothing. They also have quarterly financials to report.
Apple's biggest disincentive to continue the practice is that they themselves end up in the monopoly crosshairs from time-to-time, and it doesn't look good in terms of the DOJ targeting them if they continue a practice that was ruled monopolistic with another company. It isn't necessarily monopolistic if they do, but it raises suspicion.
(Personally, I wish monopoly law didn't seem so much like "vibes". It's really hard to answer whether the rule is fair when the same actions have different legal consequences depending on some vaguely-defined categories like "market sector").
Apple creating their own search engine will likely raise more eyebrows than letting an existing Google competitor buy their way into the iPhone ecosystem. In fact the DOJ may prefer a smaller player turn into a bigger competitor to Google, even if that's Microsoft's Bing.
As others have pointed out, these types of deals haven't been ruled illegal, they only apply to Google for abusing its monopoly.
Millions might as well be zero to Apple. There is overhead when it comes to dealing with another company, combined with the potential of damaging your brand. If the number is not in the billions I doubt they would bother. The only companies capable of paying the amounts that would make it worthwhile would be excluded from this option.
- A new deal with another company is actually in the millions. There are a lot of numbers between zero > 20B that's currently being paid for that default setting.
- Said deal remains small and doesn't grow over time, even as a new competitor to GOOG starts eating away at their market share and spreads around search ad revenue.
one of the biggest brands in the world, with how many billions in CASH .. needs the money.. This is the same nonsense that WSJ peddles everyday.. "greed is good" and makes the world go around, details are just in the way.
No, actually.. there are other parts of society that are touched by this, and their children btw.. Apple and Google and whomever are now bumping against the edges of Big Society. There is no predicting what will come out of the woodwork on this IMHO
Disagree. People use Google because it's the default, not because they will go out of their way to keep using it. The minute Apple changes the iPhone default, all but a few iPhone users stop using Google.
> People use Google because it's the default, not because they will go out of their way to keep using it.
Is this actually true?
Microsoft has bent over backwards trying making it inconvenient to get Chrome + Google on any new device. There's even the whole "Edge is the #1 browser to install Chrome" meme. Normies just really like Google.
It's funny you say that because as an Edge user, I constantly get bombarded with popups on Google websites asking me to switch to Chrome. It's all about who's on top and how to keep it that way, not quality.
But can Bing the default for Edge after this suit? I believe even Edge needs to ask which search engine to be used in the beginning. If that happens, possibly even more non techie's may use Google.
Fair point, but I wasn't able to verify the claim that most Windows users are not using Edge since its release. I am curious what the actual % is for new Windows PC installs that are not governed by a corporate policy.
How many stories have you seen with "I search for X, and all the top results are advertisements"? The latest that I recall that I saw on HN was "Now all results above the fold are ads".
Its not uncommon to search for product X, only to find product Z being ranked above the official store of X. Google search is advertisement first, quality second.
Bing may be equally crappy too. Microsoft "welcome to edge" page is a bunch of advertisement for Microsoft products and then in the corner there is a search window. I have not tested bing itself to see if their flood of advertisements are as bad as google, but I sure do not trust Microsoft. Windows start menu being overloaded with advertisements are a cautionary tale of what happen when Microsoft is copying google.
Normies do not like having advertisement being thrown in their face, but they will tolerate it if they have no choice or if the advertisement is hidden enough that they do not know that what they see is a bought listing.
> Its not uncommon to search for product X, only to find product Z being ranked above the official store of X.
I'm surprised there hasn't been a class action racketeering charge brought. And this is exactly how a protection racket works. You wouldn't want some other brand in the top position when they search for your brand term. You should just pay us to make sure that doesn't happen.
> Its not uncommon to search for product X, only to find product Z being ranked above the official store of X. Google search is advertisement first, quality second.
While I was at eBay, there was a company announcement praising one executive who had noticed that eBay spent a lot of money on placing Google ads for searches like "ebay", when obviously someone searching for "ebay" can find it in the search results. He canceled the ads, and it worked! There was no significant decline in traffic.
But that's a problem for Google, and the situation you describe is the obvious solution. If people won't advertise on searches where they should appear in the actual results, the way to get them to advertise is to stop having actual results.
Id wager SEO/AI slop is a much bigger problem for Google than ad load for their userbase. Only 20% of queries have ads so 4 out of 5 times ads won't even be seen. But on those 4 out of 5 do have the chance of turning users away from Google with awful SEO optimized sites and AI slop.
Yes, it has been demonstrated time and time again that most people do not go and change the defaults even if they could. Most people actually prefer having less dials, even if they say they want more dials.
No, because Chrome isn't the default in Windows (ChromiumEdge), MacOS (Safari), iOS (Safari), most if not all the Linuxes (Firefox), and most if not all the BSDs (Firefox). Chrome is only the default browser in Android, but Android is a Google operating system so this shouldn't be a surprise. Also, this is one of the most spectacular exceptions to most people not changing defaults.
People have buy-in to Chrome that I think might be more than the buy-in to the search engine at this point. People like their set of extensions, and know how to use it.
Meanwhile if the search bar works when typing things in and gives you good results, I think a lot of people will be fine with whatever.
For those disagreeing, the power of defaults is incredibly powerful, most users are blissfully unaware on how to, or why they might want to change them. Sure, plenty will change it back, but many won't. We've seen this play out with Apple Maps already — Something that may get Apple in trouble too.
Remember that Google was paying Apple 20 BILLION for the privilege, and a key reason they had an antitrust case against them!
Defaults are incredibly powerful, Safari and Edge are the second and third most popular browsers next to Chrome. Chrome itself is a default on a lot of android devices. Speaking of android devices, Samsung Internet is 4th/5th most popular as it comes default on Samsung devices.
To say defaults don't matter because Chrome is used on Windows is a bit absurd. Chrome in 2012-2014 was still trading blows with IE even after the tremendous shortcomings during the Windows 8 and 8.1 era. This was a time when everyone was telling people to not use IE, and yet it retained ~20% use. Nothing like now where Chrome dominates ~70%.
I think you're confusing defaults with lock-in. Safari, Edge, and Chrome are native browsers tightly coupled to their operating systems. They can't be removed.
Further, anytime a user has to connect to an account for email, calendars, and other essentials, the OS will direct them through the native browser app. This means the so-called "popularity" reflects little more than the number of active devices: Android > iOS > Windows.
Not all browser marketshare statistics are sourced the same way, but often those native redirects aren't included, likewise for things like electron and CEF use.
Also Edge use being far lower in Desktop use indicates that there's little difference between defaults and lock ins functionally.
Obviously, defaults matter to some degree. They have a price. Google and Apple are companies with market caps in the trillions, and at their scale the default has a price in billions, since a small shift redirects a ton of ad revenue. That's fine.
But they're not "incredibly powerful", which implies that most users won't change them. As I pointed out, most users do change from Edge to Chrome.
If defaults were so "incredibly powerful", Edge would be winning. Obviously, therefore, they're not. Defaults have a small-to-medium amount of power. (Which, at Apple+Google scale, happens to be a lot of cash.)
> Google and Apple are companies with market caps in the trillions, and at their scale the default has a price in billions
This is HN's regular reminder that market cap measures the value of the company in the eyes of investors, not its revenue or profit.
Apple had gross revenue of $365 billion and Google $257 billion in 2021, the year in which Google paid Apple $26 billion.
That means that in that year Google paid Apple a solid 10% of their revenue and Google's payment accounted for 7% of Apple's gross revenue. To put that in perspective: that puts this deal on the same scale of importance as a car payment or utilities are for the average US household.
That’s because Chrome is vastly better than Edge and that is an exceptional situation. In most other places you look, you will see people using defaults all the time, because defaults are incredibly powerful.
>They feel pretty similar but Edge support uBlock Origin on manifest V2.
For now. Don't expect it to last: Edge is just a re-skin of Chromium, so after V2 support is completely removed by Google, Edge will have to follow along or fork the code.
Why? What's in it for MS? The only people who will notice are people running ad-blockers, and the intersection of those people and people who willingly use Edge is quite small I think. And ad-blockers still work with MV3, just not as well, so this really only appeals to hard-core ad-blocking people who insist on having the full capabilities of uBO and not uBO Lite. People like that are more likely to just use Firefox, rather than migrating from Chrome (by Google) to Edge (by Microsoft).
What you're proposing just sounds like a lot of extra work for MS, without any measurable gain. Sure, it'd be nice, in the broader interest of reducing Chrome's dominance and promoting browser diversity, but I don't see how there's any incentive for MS to do it.
Launch Edge > Search "Google" > Bing displays Google Search link > Click > Google Search tells user to install Chrome > User installs Chrome > Google maintains browser and search engine monopoly
Defaults matter because many people won't change them, and even people that will change them aren't going to change them every time they touch a new system. Especially when the "defaults" have been that way for decades which brings a sense of gravitational pull back to those tools/sites even if the new defaults change.
Some defaults can absolutely be over ridden by a non-stop barrage of interstitial pages and ad banners imploring your to install Chrome because all the default tools you use are Google sites, which just circles back to defaults mattering.
On top of that, the mindshare of "Googling it" dominates users brains just as much as Kleenex branding does. I'm sure most of us have watched someone use another search engine to look up Google before.
Yeah, I still say "Google it" even though I've been using DDG and more recently Kagi for years - I discovered saying anything else seems to lose people when trying to help them. Even just saying "search for" gives me deer in the headlight responses until I say "search on google".
Have you tried it recently? "Search for" gets me less 'deer in the headlights' looks than "google it", probably because these days most people are searching for things through apps instead of browser. Browsers are quietly becoming a niche technology with wide swaths of the population.
Browse the web as a normie would, without adblocker/etc extensions and other techy web saavy, and it should quickly become apparent why. Telling people to google something is like telling them to wade into a sewer.
Yeah as recently as this last week with tech peers, apparently "search for" came across as "look for this in sharepoint" not to search for it on the internet, but "google it" instantly was understood.
a lot of that is from past intertia. if the default becomes good enough then newer people who don't know what they like will use defaults unless it's so bad/people recommend that they switch
Google leverages their monopoly search position to push people towards Chrome, using messages that, to lay people, imply a lot of websites won't work correctly unless they install Chrome. This is the most charitable reading, assuming they don't deliberately impede compatibility with third party browsers.
On Windows, the default browser is edge, but Chrome is far more popular.
What will happen is that people will use Bing without knowing it and then complain that “Google is broken”. To many people, search is google in the same way that a Kleenex is a tissue.
Perhaps, but it's worth noting that Chrome became the dominant browser on Windows even though Internet Explorer/Edge is the default browser and comes preinstalled.
But your article argues the opposite of your claim.
Your article says that Microsoft themselves were working to move people away from Internet Explorer 6 and encouraging people to upgrade to a modern browser by declaring IE 6 to be at its end of life.
The article says that Youtube displayed a banner recommending users to upgrade to either Firefox, IE 8, or Chrome and that due to concerns by Google's lawyers, the order of the browsers was to be randomized so to avoid the appearance of giving undue prominence to Chrome. Finally the article ends by noting that each of the three options Youtube recommended were chosen equally as opposed to Chrome being the option picked by most people who saw the banner.
This sounds like the exact opposite of shoving it down peoples throats and instead trying to be very careful to move people away from a browser that Microsoft themselves had declared was dead, and onto an alternative option by trying to be as fair as possible.
The significance of your article isn't that Google shoved Chrome down everyone's throat in order to kill off a competitor, it's that due to its popularity and dominant position, Youtube was more effective at getting people to stop using Internet Explorer 6 than Microsoft was, but both companies had the same objective.
Here is an article about Microsoft's own "Friends don't let friends use Internet Explorer 6." which discusses Microsoft's own efforts to get people to stop using IE 6. It's about the same period of time as the article you mentioned.
Fascinating how two people can read the same article and take away two opposite conclusions from it. If anything what Youtube did helped Firefox far more than it helped Chrome, but I suppose from your point of view it's the opposite.
This... this is not ancient history. It happened 10-15 years ago. Unless you're very young, and I've fallen under the curse of the old age:
--- start quote ---
One disorienting thing about getting older that nobody tells you about is how weird it feels to get a really passionate, extremely wrong lecture from a much younger person about verifiable historical events you can personally remember pretty well
That's more the exception that proves the rule, though. Chrome originally came out when IE was still a steaming pile of garbage, and Google spent lots of marketing money promoting it as a better, faster alternative. (Something that Mozilla had been previously somewhat succeeding at, more or less, but they didn't have the same resources and eventually lost their gains and fell behind.)
These days Chrome just has so much mind-share that it overcomes the defaults on Windows. This is by no means a common outcome. This is anecdotal, but I know far more people who use Safari instead of Chrome on macOS than who use Edge instead of Chrome on Windows; Microsoft just has such a bad reputation when it comes to browsers that Chrome is able to get over that defaults hump on Windows. But a lot of people genuinely like Safari, and trust Apple in general, so the effect is (somewhat) lessened on macOS, even though IIRC Chrome still does have the lead in market share there. Just less of one, percentage-wise.
You're right on some points, other points don't match up with my understanding of the issue.
Chrome was a much better browser compared to the default that came installed on Windows, and certainly if someone is going to switch away from the default they will do it towards a much better alternative, on that we agree.
However, despite how much I think Google as a search engine has declined in quality, I still find them to be significantly superior to the alternatives, such as Bing and even DuckDuckGo (which I believe predominantly makes use of Bing) and that people will switch from whatever default search engine Apple sets to Google.
You're also missing the power of reputation. It takes time to build a good reputation, and it takes a really long time to overcome a bad reputation. MS built itself a really bad reputation, especially with browsers, so even if (hypothetically speaking) Edge were as good as Chrome now, it would still take a very long time to overcome the terrible reputation they earned with IE.
Chrome is a complicated case in general because Google poured money into promoting Chrome and had some of the most popular sites on the web promoting it heavily and actively sabotaged Firefox at several key points. I respect a lot of the Chrome team’s early work but it’s very hard for me to see that as a story about fair competition alone.
Not just advertising: Mozilla could not have put a “better in Firefox” button on Gmail or YouTube at any price, or forced Google to follow through on their promise around H.264, etc.
Google also tried to push PC OEMs to pre-install Chrome on their new PCs when Chrome was new.[1] Sony/VAIO is the only manufacturer to have known to take the bait.[2]
Specifically, Google was leveraging their existence as "THE web" to push their web browser. Every single Google property aggressively displayed banners and reminders and nag prompts ensuring you "Gmail is best in Chrome" and other nonsense that "Just one click here to fix".
Yes, putting a single button with vague words in front of users almost always gets a lot of clicks, which we've known for decades, and it turns out, if you have the attention of nearly the entire web-browsing world, you can put that button in front of people's faces way more than your competitors. It should have been considered billions of dollars of free advertising for Chrome that should have been assessed against them somehow.
It's blatantly unfair and should have been shut down in literally days, but nooooooooo we aren't allowed to have regulation here in the states.
Yeah, this is the thing that gets me. Chrome is the (rare) exception when we're talking about defaults generally winning, not the rule.
An interesting thought experiment might be to imagine if Chrome was actually somehow the default browser on Windows and/or macOS. I think we could expect Edge's and/or Safari's market share numbers to be much lower than they are now if that were the case.
Very strange statement to make given a large mobile phone operating system (Android) has Chrome as the default browser. Also the default in some Linux distros such as the Raspberry Pi OS. And many PC builders bundle Chrome with their usual crapware. Other posters have also pointed out Google's own Chromebooks use Chrome by default as well. Quite a significant base especially among people who don't have the money to buy into the Apple ecosystem.
Of course defaults mean very little for tech-savvy people. An average 50 year old who just got a new laptop isn't going to change the search engine because Bing was the default.
Really, really curious how this all plays out WRT Mozilla. Mozilla receives on the order of 80% of their revenue from making Google the default search engine on Firefox. They're going to have to layoff the majority of their employees.
That's entirely on Mozilla and the slew of incompetent CEOs who did nothing but pocket millions and buy out useless products like Pocket instead of directing funds where they should've gone, the development of their browser.
If I could donate to Firefox development, I would've a long time ago for a generous monthly sum, but since I know it's just going to be squandered by becoming another advertising company [1], then I'm not too bothered by it.
There is no one to blame but the leadership at Mozilla for the position they are in. They had a decade+ to try to create additional revenue streams but botched every attempt.
> Google didn't buy its way into dominance annd maintain their dominance through exclusivity deals
That’s just a waste of money then. Why are they paying bilious to Mozilla and Apple? Because they’re good buddies? Wouldn’t people use Google anyway?
Just imagine the Google CFO looking through the finance spreadsheets last year and instead of going “let’s layoff a whole bunch of people” they go with “let’s stop paying Apple and Mozilla” for default search.
Your point stands but there's an argument to be made they paid Mozilla so that they don't collapse and then have to defend a monopoly lawsuit on Chrome.
Google seemed to think the many billions of dollars spent annually to insert Google into other products was necessary in order to maintain dominance in the search market. This wasn't disputed right? I doubt they are relieved now that Bing, OpenAI and others have charismatic products that appear to threaten their core competency right as the business is declared a monopoly.
Google started when the tech sector considered the search problem "solved". You had the likes of Altavista, Yahoo and AskJeeves. There was some variety (eg Yahoo's directory) but no one thought search was going to be a big business.
Then Google came along and ripped them all to shreds from 1998-2006 or so. The most important platform was Windows and Google gained dominance there without paying anyone. Sure, you can argue Microsoft didn't take it seriously (because they didn't).
Then Microsoft did start taking it seriously and the smartphone revolution happened. If you were around at the time, you may remember that many networks simply couldn't handle the anticipated (and actual) Internet traffic from iPhones. IIRC I saw figures that an iPhone user used >8x as much data as the most recent Nokia phone user with Internet connectivity. Why? Because using a browser on an iPhone was a quantum leap forward in terms of power and usability.
Bing was really the only serious threat here simply because Microsoft had deep pockets. So Apple was able to extract (extort) Google to keep it as the default search on iOS.
Bing tried exclusivity deals, most notably with Bing but it was short-lived. Google also pays Firefox but it's less than they earn from that user and no one else can afford that. If no one else can do the same Google wins.
But the main point is that when given a choice, the majority of people choose Google because it is better for most people.
Where exclusivity typically hurts is where it's used to push an inferior product or at least a product where the product isn't preferred.
Now the DoJ could argue that we want to avoid getting to the point where Google has an inferior product but has the market domination and deep pockets to keep out competitors. Maybe that's valid. But I think in the short-to-=medium term, this has simply saved Google billions of dollars a year.
Also, for smaller search engines like DDG, they can never afford the billions Google could Billions was material, even to Apple. What DDG could pay isn't. It's not worth taking.
> Google started when the tech sector considered the search problem "solved". You had the likes of Altavista, Yahoo and AskJeeves. There was some variety (eg Yahoo's directory) but no one thgouth search was going to be a big business.
I don't think the search problem was considered solved. More like unsolvable. Some new search engine would show up every so often and be good, but fall into the same terrible abyss of mediocrity as all the others in 6-12 months. Thus the meta-search engines like DogPile that would search "all" the search engines and give you a blended result.
Google disrupted that by continuing to be good for at least 10 years before it fell into mediocrity. Unfortunately, the web has gotten so big that developing a new search engine is very expensive, and (IMHO) there hasn't been a new good search engine since Google. I've moved to DuckDuckGo, but I think it's only good enough, not good. I was at Yahoo when they launched their self-hosted search in 2004 and it was good, but they couldn't get enough marketshare to keep investing in it.
Discovery in the mid-90s was excruciatingly bad. Google really did rescue the web in that regard.
I remember searching AltaVista for GNU’s website (at the time, they didn’t have their own domain, or weren’t using it) and I’m pretty sure I had to go to page 2 or 3 of the results to find it.
I think they're saying is that in Google's very early days, they gained market dominance against a dozen other search engines simply by being better. It wasn't until years later that they started paying to be the dominant search engine.
Google is not the default search provider on Windows. It is not the default search provider in Edge. Microsoft prompts at varying levels of annoyingness to get you to stay with their solutions. Historically it was even harder with IE. Despite all this, folks often switch to chrome and google search.
IE was so bad and Chrome so much better that Microsoft gave up on IE on their own platform and switched to Chrome as the engine for edge.
I fail to see your reasoning. The court's argument is Google is maintaining this dominance via these default deals, not that it got there through them.
Given the last 25 years of history, Google's product has gotten worse after these default deals. Previously it established the dominance because it found whatever a user searched for. Arguing otherwise just feels unrealistic. They never had any exclusive deals with any provider.
Google never paid Apple to remove Bing from the list of choices. That's what an exclusivity deal would do. But it didn't happen, because this doesn't have anything to do with exclusivity.
It is exclusivity. I've been involved in some of these contracts going all the way back to the Summer of 2004 and they absolutely involve exclusivity. If Safari or Firefox product managers added a new search access point and their business people tried to sell default placement for that new search access point, they'd violate their contract. That's exclusivity. Opera used to do that kind of thing, they had three different search defaults for three different access points in the 2000s but by 2010 Google was no longer allowing that in their contracts because exclusivity.
That might just be overloading the term in a way that clouds the issue though? The exclusive default search provider for a browser vs the exclusive search provider for a browser is pretty different.
Oh yeah, i thought the previous user used them interchangeably. I messed it up. I think it's exclusive in a way that no one else could make the same deal. Not explicitly locking others out, but in a significant way, it implicitly did.
The point was they became a monopoly cos they had a good product, and now the product is not as good after these default deals they made with Apple, Samsung etc.
They don't have a better product, not for a long time, but they do have a famous product, with which most of the people are familiar with, unlike the competitors. They have been matched and over-matched long ago, but since virtually nobody within 99% accuracy makes research on current search engine market before typing into the box, that doesn't matter - people know google, so people go to google, however inferior their product would be. If it's not literally useless, they'll keep using it for a while now.
I had a coworker insist on using ddg for privacy reasons and he was a bit smug about it even though meetings where he was presenting while searching the web always started with a ddg search and ended with him sighing and giving up by using !g to switch to google. I think, even in it's less than ideal state, people still underestimate how much time google's tailored search can save you when you train it to figure out you want to see development/technical documentation.
I've frequently found better results by using the !g when searching for technical docs and other programming-related stuff.
But for more everyday, non-programming things, I've frequently found the regular DDG results (from Bing) actually better and less filled with SEO crap than Google's.
Often when searching with google I stick !g in front of my query without thinking, and only realize when it shows up in the search bar after the page loads.
As if to answer my own question, I just came out of a call which involved me sharing my screen while I searched the web for info on the memory consumption of classes in dotnet. I take it back!
Google is an ad company first. It stands to reason than their results optimize for ad profitability, not to have the best index.
If the goal was to have the best index, they would actively punish sites that use SEO to push sites that are nothing more than auto-generated affiliate links to Amazon products. I quit using Google a while ago, because that’s all I was getting. I use Kagi now, which had no ads. Without this conflict of interest, I find things go better.
I think it's reasonable to assume that google would favor the Ad Sense customer given two results that are otherwise of equal or near equal quality but the notion that google would exclude good results from domains that do not serve Ad Sense ads is absurd.
Why is it absurd? If it's still considered the go-to option by most users, they could afford the slightly worse quality for the extra revenue, no? That's the end result of monopolies, the provider starts to compromise on the service to capitalize on the user's lack of viable options.
The product is more than just the index! The UI has become cluttered with ads that are barely distinguishable from genuine results. The functionality around using quotation marks for exact-match results has now become broken and confusing.
The problem is that when you bundle products, you can maintain your market dominance even when competitors have a better product. Microsoft has shown this to be true countless times, most recently with MS Teams (vs Slack).
Furthermore it doesn’t cut it to be marginally better than Google Search when they’re the default search engine. You have to completely blow them out of the water and for that you likely need long term, sustained investment to pour into R&D. How many VCs are willing to play that long game and invest when you have an incumbent paying $20B+ to block user choice?
The creation of Firefox and Google Chrome are examples of competition that tremendously benefited consumers, but which took many years to play out, after the government ruled against monopolistic behavior.
> it doesn’t cut it to be marginally better than Google Search when they’re the default search engine. You have to completely blow them out of the water.
More than that, it's the de facto default for anyone who can be bothered to change it. It also reminds me of the Dvorak keyboard. It's somewhat better than the competition, but not better enough to justify changing. Google's search competitors are trying, but they're not obviously much better.
>They simply have a better product and I don't expect anyone to match them anytime soon (cue the DDG "I switched from Google to DDG 78 years ago" crowd)
Google search sucks. I didn't switch to DDG. Any competitor is going to have a hard time breaking in because of Google's paid exclusivity deals. That's part of why Google sucks. Google won easily in the early days because it was considerably better in a wide field of competitors it wiped out. It's not too hard to believe that Google would return better results if anyone was competing.
My web search has degraded to only searching for things I know already exist or occasionally fighting Google to try my damndest to get it to do an exact text search which is a stupid amount of struggle.
They had a good product, but have screwed it up. Have you tried Kagi?
I dipped my toes and have never looked back, not once.
It’s quick, it’s good, I have some neat customisation. The less-geeky family have joined me. The downside? It’s paid. But it’s worth it.
Let's think of an alternative where browser are forced to even the playing field: the browser either presents users with a list of search engines in random order, or perhaps it even chooses a random default.
You'd see a world where search engines can run ads that say "click this easy button/download our app/do this really easy thing" to use our search engine.
You would also see smaller search engines being able to get on the Safari search engine list instead of just the ones that can pay Apple what I assume are huge fees.
Let's not forget that iOS and iPadOS commands a huge share of the most affluent customers who would be most willing to use paid search engines. But in the status quo even those willing to do so will find Apple's platforms to be less than accomodating.
What makes you so sure the DOJ won't ask the court for divestment of chrome, android, etc? It's hard to imagine what else would be large enough to impact the finding of a de facto monopoly.
I also left DDG, but have been very satisfied with Brave's search. [1] They also have a nice optional LLM system built in that provides citations to what it says, which is pretty neat. They also have 'goggles' which enable you to apply or create a chosen filter to reorder/refilter results. So e.g. getting news while blocking partisan sites (or indulging our own partisan preferences), searching only tech blogs, blocking big tech sites, searching for video/audio from non-YouTube sources or whatever else. Lots of neat stuff that I'm surprised other sites haven't cloned yet.
I never had good luck with DDG, and found myself using !g to jump over go Google a lot.
I switch to Kagi about a year ago and had a much better experience. My browser defaulted itself back to Google one day, and I didn’t notice the heading but when I looked at the results I recoiled in disgust at how bad it was. I looked at the top of the page and saw it was Google. That was the last time I used Google and it wasn’t even on purpose.
Several times now at work, I’ve joined a call where people had been troubleshooting for hours trying to find an answer to some issues, presumably using Google a lot in the process. I end up using Kagi, finding an answer, and the call wraps up 15 minutes later. This has happened at least 3 times now, and I’m not on these types of calls often.
It’s so nice to be the customer and not the product.
Wow, if Google had hired you, your insight would've saved them many billions every single year! They're such fools for spending all that money when it had absolutely no impact on their position in the market!
Before this ruling: whoever pays the most gets to be the default, so google pays. If they don't someone else does.
After this ruling: since nobody gets to buy being the default whatever users want to be the default will be selected. Judging by market share it will be google for $0.
It's like you didn't understand what this case was about at all. Google isn't paying to be first, Google is paying so nobody bothers making a competitor.
We got some chromebooks at (totally un-tech) work. Some are set with quant, some duckduckgo and some other misterious (to me) search engines. When you open the browser for the first time it gives you a list of ~10 to choose. Knowing the constant days cadence, delay and stress we handle I can easely picture my colleagues picking the closest to mouse to access the web without loosing a second.
Maybe but that would be unproductive : google if full of ads at the top of the page and we would probably need to scroll, loosing precious time. Don’t think coworkers avoid it on purpose though.
Stupid them then. I don't and now I won't have to see Google defaulted to everywhere.
This is great news. If Mozilla can't afford to provide Firefox anymore then they could ask for donations or provide a paid product. I'd pay for firefox if they stripped out the google and pocket crap.
> Apple will lose significant revenue from having Google as the default search engine and Google will no longer have to pay those billions.
there is also Android ecosystem, where DOJ may ask google to prompt user with Search Egnine selection dialog, and Google can easily lose some significant share of traffic to Bing/ChatGPT/etc.
If that was completely true, Google would not be paying billions for the placement. Google is better than the rest, but for most things the others are good enough. I think a large portion of people don't really need amazing results, but Google needs their eyeballs and clicks.
On my phone, I've been using MS Edge for quite a long time, if not since it was released, which of course uses Bing and honestly, it never gets in my way, so I would say that, as far as I use the web, it's equally good to Google.
There is usually a requirement from regulator to present the top N options in random order to the user and it's likely a reasonable number of people will just pick the first in the list resulting in some market share loss for Google.
I was thinking this too, but on second thought, I can't imagine Apple making Google the default for free under any circumstances. That's a ton of free referrals, in a way the best advertising slot that exists on an iPhone.
Google is going to lose money. Their search has been declining for years and the top 1/2 or so of a search is nothing but ads. So, while they may pay for deals, they will likely also lose traffic that helps pay for those deals.
or bing pays to be the default? or apple choose to give some upstart like duckduckgo a chance? Or they produce their own search engine (not that i think they will).
With how the market is looking as of today, the next YC batch might have a promising carrier pigeon startup and a ridesharing blip services that monetizes with ads!
My behavior is either indictative of what's happening now .. the pulse and or what will happen (read many of my downvoted posts which what i say in time comes to fruition most recently in Aug '23 hating on Cruise; bros faking it before u make it with tech that can kill NO NO NO).
Even some of my tech startup .. the ideas behind them were ahead of the times like Wireless Power Share and SpeakerBlast (created in 2013 a month before Samsung announced the same tech to built into their phones). Love to work in a forward thinking tech job like at Meta Ray Ban division. I love these glasses .. smart glasses will be huge tho not as huge as the smart phone because you can not take a selfie with them. They will always be a great companion to your smart phone where you are not taking your phone out of your pocket as much as you use to.
I am sure to get downvoted for this post as i always get downvoted for my thoughts lol
> but Google didn't buy its way into dominance and maintain their dominance through exclusivity deals.
Then they wouldn't have those deals in the first place.
Companies don't just piss off money for no reason. And the reason is simple: They want no competition - they strictly maintain their dominance through them.
Just saying "No" isn't enough. You have to explain why they have those deals if you think this isn't the reason why. Otherwise, anyone reasonable must disagree by default.
> Mehta’s decision is expected to trigger a separate proceeding to determine what penalties Google will face – and the company is also likely to file an appeal
As a Google antitrust watcher, I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop with what remedies the court will actually recommend to correct this monopoly. If you ask 20 experts, who all otherwise agree that Google is a monopoly, you might get 40 different answers about what to actually do to fix that monopoly. It'll take a while to get the answer and to work through all the appeals to this ruling and whatever remedy the court will put forth, and it's not clear or really possible to know ahead of time whether the courts will put forth small, medium or huge changes to the search engine market. Exciting times!
I always thought that the idea behind antitrust laws was that if an entity reaches total market dominance and uses that dominance to keep other out of the game, the entity should be split into competing entities.
What I'm seeing however is nothing more than toothless, political pointing sticks.
Both IBM, Microsoft and Google have clearly at some point obtained total domination of their markets. Consequently they've all found themselves at the antitrust chopping blocks, however these companies have become so important to the economy that actual verdicts are reduced to a "carry on, just don't exert your dominance too much".
Splitting companies that have physical presence is something that is a bit easier to do? That is, my gut would be that the examples you have in your mind for how companies that hit market dominance were split, are dominated by markets that required a bit more physical connection to the consumers they were serving.
You could also see easy ways to force a company that is using a dominant position in one industry to gain an upper hand in another to divest from that expansion.
Most of that falls apart with the nature of these markets, though?
The original Sherman Act specifies imprisonment for 1 year, a $5,000 fine, and the seizure of property due to the violating behavior. It also gives courts the authority to "prevent and restrain such violations". It makes no specific note of splitting up corporations.
Obviously this isn't the modern understanding, and the act was later amended.
FYI, when you share an Apple Podcasts link, anyone reading on an Apple device without the Podcasts app installed cannot do anything with it, even copy the link to open elsewhere-it just turns into a prompt to install "Podcasts." So I don't even know what podcast you're pointing to to find it in the app I prefer.
Sorry, I was on mobile and I got that link from the “share” sheet. I probably know that it is not portable, as I shared Apple News links and found that out before.
Here’s the part of the transcript:
> It is not necessarily illegal to be a monopoly. It is illegal to abuse your monopoly power. This court is examining both of those questions. (1) Is Microsoft a monopoly? (2) Are they abusing their power?
1. Search site.
As a separate product, it would need to earn money.
Improve filtering and the search itself.
It would be able to host ads from other advertising networks (like any other large site).
Make an additional API or tool to regularly update data by certain filters)
You can charge money for all these things.
2. Ads. As a separate advertising network, for which google.com will be just one platform/site, like thousands of others.
3. Mail as a separate service, leave the ability to log in to other sites through this account, so you keep one login for everything (who needs it).
It can also be an advertising platform for any advertising network. You can offer better services for a fee, while keeping the basic functionality free.
4. YouTube as a separate service, as well as a platform where many other advertising networks or advertisers will compete for advertising space. Introduce paid plans for creators, where there will be a certain volume limit after which you will need to pay for the service.
5. Cloud services. Separately.
6. Google Docs. As a separate online document service, you can charge a subscription fee for certain features as in 365.
7. Browser. No need for Manifest v3.
Improvements to the extension store.
You can also sell advertising space and make integrations with various tools, as Opera does, for example.
You can even make some kind of subscription, or make paid extensions that will speed up sites, improve the look, and cut out ads.
This is the first thing that came to mind. This can be thought out better.
This will create competition for other players and for these potentially divided campaigns.
General improvement of products. And all of this can be kept "under one login, in one ecosystem," with the ability to make "one system and one login" in conjunction with other tools.
its uncanny how even people in the industry lives in the make believe world where google is a charity, moving mountains just so you can have a browser with "faster JavaScript" (which it's not, its all prefetch and marketing)
google made more money from the features they normalized by strong arming the w3c via chrome than anything else.
Nothing is ever going to happen. Google, Apple etc are the US's international economic arm that ensures competing countries never develop a threatening IT sector. They're very happy to let any foreign startup be gobbled up, for example. Negative consequences on the domestic market are just an unfortunate byproduct.
No, there are non-US competitors. Qwant, Mojeek, Seznam... You might reply, "but they're small" or "I haven't heard of them". Well, how do you think that came to be?
Besides, I'm replying to a comment about the wider trust case against google. It's not just about search engines.
Seznam took over 10 seconds for me to load start to finish and I'm on gigabit fiber. It has no English language option.
Maybe that's why I haven't heard of them?
Although Qwant looks kind of nice and obviously localized.
I also think it's interesting that I know about Kagi already but don't know about Mojeek despite Kagi using their results.
I fully agree that Google is a monopolist that has been oppressing the search engine market but at some point if you're going to start a company you need to do some marketing. DuckDuckGo is an example of success in that realm, it's nearly overtaken Yahoo.
It may have a lot to do with them not having to develop a search engine from scratch though, since they use the Bing API for their results. Mojeek predates them by some years but does their own crawling/indexing/ranking.
Even Ecosia who are essentially identical on the back-end (Bing results) market themselves on planting trees for every search and I see them mentioned a bunch. Interestingly they don't seem to factor in the energy consumed on Bing's side of the search - where the heavy lifting of data is done.
Also that US investors have a much bigger risk appetite means the likes of Neeva (who IIRC were also using other's results) can spring into existence and seemingly get a love in from the press because of their big tech connection.
It depends instead on the overall health of the Internet.
We are moving away from open commerce and into walled gardens. Once Google makes deals similar to their Reddit deal with Meta and Bytedance, it's going to become basically impossible for an upstart search engine to index anything competitively.
On the flip side once you leave the dark forest you stop needing search engines as much since you're contributing to a community you exist on the inside of.
I’m not really sure how you fix it. Considering it specifically calls out being the default option on iOS, we can assume that’s going to change. However, I could also see Chrome’s market dominance challenged. Maybe they’ll be forced to somehow split that off and Chrome will need to be funded through some combination of donations or selling its own ads/data.
An aspect often overlooked is that the tech giants have an enormous advantage because they have harvested information for decades. In addition, highly targeted advertising creates all kinds of troubles for democracy when done on a scale like Google and Meta.
So, a powerful solution would be to make targeted advertising illegal. This would make it easier for new competitors to enter the market and make it visible if someone abuses the ad industry to push political agendas.
I can envision a gnarly Venn diagram of search, ads, AI, analytics, Chrome. You could easily make this 5 separate companies (ads and analytics were acquired), but you probably just need to split it somewhere in the middle.
It is always the court's problem. A judge does not have arbitrary or absolute authority. If Google can convince an appeals court that the judge has imposed an impossible or unreasonable remedy it will be overturned.
So if you make your anticompetitive business a tangled hairball then you're immune from being broken up because it would be "too hard"? Genius strategy.
Search would just farm out ads or develop their own again: its two sides of the same paper, by necessity.
Chrome is a loss leader and if cut out to it’s own company will die, because browsers are not a business that can make money anymore (same with eg C compilers for x86), AI maybe, but the only advantage AI has at google is that it has a crap-ton of data to train it with. Without that? The market just has one less AI product.
Regardless of how you split it, whomever ends up with search ends up with the value. And I guess the only way to split search would be into a background service api you could query and then have the front page be its own business. Others could then buy access, but the problem with that is that you then have a supplier that has all the power…
But this verdict only involves the search business. All that other stuff is out of scope. And breaking it up like that leaves the search monopoly intact anyway.
Do you know which will happen first? Specifically, will the court put forth its remedies before the appeals begin? Or will those actions happen in parallel? Or what?
After the DoJ vs. Apple suit was mentioned in March, I did some research before about what the DoJ views unfavorably in this arena. My bullet points were useful to a lot of people here then, so perhaps it can help inform some of the conversation here too.
After some research, the practices below may capture much (though not necessarily all) of what the Department of Justice views unfavorably:
* horizontal agreements between competitors such as price fixing and market allocation
* vertical agreements between firms at different levels of the supply chain such as resale price maintenance and exclusive dealing
* unilateral exclusionary conduct such as predatory pricing, refusal to deal with competitors, and limiting interoperability
* conditional sales practices such as tying and bundling
* monopoly leveraging where a firm uses its dominance in one market to gain an unfair advantage in another
Any of these behaviors undermines the conditions necessary for a competitive market. I'd be happy to have the list above expanded, contracted, or modified. Let me know.
Just as Standard Oil used their position to force railroads and other distributors to only carry their oil and not of their competitors', the same case here with Google.
Arguably all these antitrust cases, while better late than never, are at least a decade late. If it was filed in the early 2010s, then possibly there could've been viable competitors to Google, Apple, Amazon, and even Meta. But now these tech titans all have unassailable positions.
Some of these are a bit different in scope to some of your points, but here a few things I believe aren't really covered:
Predatory hiring: Hiring key employees from competitors primarily to weaken them rather than to benefit from the employees' skills.
Patent abuse: Using a large portfolio of patents to stifle competition rather than to protect legitimate innovations.
Regulatory capture: Using influence to shape regulations in ways that benefit the monopolist and create barriers for potential competitors.
Killer acquisitions: Buying potential competitors primarily to eliminate future competition rather than to integrate their technology or talent.
Data hoarding: In digital markets, collecting and refusing to share data that is crucial for competitors to enter or compete effectively in the market.
Self-preferencing: In platform markets, giving preferential treatment to one's own products or services over those of competitors.
Vaporware: Announcing nonexistent or deliberately suboptimal products or features to discourage customers from switching to competitors' existing products.
Predatory hiring - banning this would be preventing competition in the labor market and be extremely bad for workers. Also unproveable.
Regulatory capture - the government regulators are not going to sue themselves
Killer acquisitions - already illegal to engage in acquisition to form monopoly
Data hoarding - the government can't force you to share things for free. That violates the takings clause
Self-preferencing - this is such a long standing and legally permitted practice that it is not plausible to make illegal. e.g. every grocery store has a store brand that they favor.
Vaporware - if this is a provable lie it is already covered by fraud statutes, and it would be such a stupid move by the company that I don't believe it actually happens
We face a number of challenges simply letting our paying customers change their search engine:
1. On iOS the list of allowed search engines is simply baked into OS, we have a fiddly extension that hooks outbound calls to /search and redirects them but I wish we didn't need to.
2. On Chrome, we use an extension to change the default search engine and enable search auto-complete etc, but Google has a policy that such an extension can do one thing and one thing only, and recently removed our extension on account of that [1]. We rebuilt it to meet their needs but had a lot of back-and-forth because we included 'search by image' on a context menu item and the first reviewer felt that was a bridge too far. You'll note that Chrome provides such a context menu item for Google Image search out of the box.
3. On Chrome for Linux, the default search engine API is not available, so Linux users have to configure it manually through a series of silly steps [2]. This is at least in keeping with most Linux experiences.
There are other issues, but I say all this to highlight how surprisingly difficult it is to change this setting in a practical, consumer friendly way. It is most certainly this difficult by design, that's a lot of revenue to protect.
I’m one of the paying Kagi customer who wants to make Kagi my default iOS search engine, but cannot. It’s maddening that even though I paid for both my iPhone / iPad and for Kagi, Apple for some reason makes it impossible for me to make this choice (that I already made by paying for Kagi).
On Chrome at least this is possible, even if it’s additional steps (I have not used the extension though there.)
So far (only an occasional user) it's been solid for me. Though I've only been using it in depth every few weeks, and that's mostly to read manga online while waiting for stuff.
I too am a paying customer. Surprisingly -- at least to me -- it's easy to do with Microsoft's Edge browser on iOS. I use it as default on both iOS and macOS.
They recently decoupled that part (search, but I don't know if they did it for edge too) and made bing in the start menu a store app that can be uninstalled if you don't want it to be available on your system anymore.
The only reason why you can't use google there is because.. Google doesn't care. Just like how they never released apps for the Windows Phone store, they have no intention of touching the one on Windows.
Microsoft has been hit so many times by the EU that they really care to respect our regulations now. Not just the "letter of the law" but the "spirit of the law" too.
The same should (or has already happened, I don't know.. because I actually use Edge and didn't care to look deeper into it) happen for Edge:
Of note, among the things that have changed recently in Windows 11, you can disable the news page from msn on Widgets, and Teams is no longer a part of Windows.
I expect Google will release their implementation when the Windows feature gets into stable. Implementing something 9 years after Windows 10 is released doesn't show "respecting the EU" to me.
Correct. Minute userbase equals no leverage to extract tolls. If they ended up with the sort of dominant position they had at one point with IE on Mac they'd do this very thing and more.
There aren't many shenanigans that MS didn't pioneer in the 90s.
Because the money for it is stuck in weird places. I can't write some small bit of software and just sell that for a decent price. People don't pay for software these days, so my best hope is to give it away for free and then running ads. And then, if it's any good, someone will come by and make an open source clone and give that away for free, tanking sales/ad revenue. So the money in writing software is by working at a huge company that has found money with software, like Google and selling ads.
This is really the most concise (and depressing) explanation of the situation I've seen.
When I was a kid, I dreamt of being a solo programmer that had a few successful desktop programs. Think mIRC, WinAmp, WinRar. Despite the audience for that being >100x larger than it was in the 90s, I'd bet the number of solo shops doing that successfully isn't a whole lot larger than it was then.
I recommend trying out Quiche Browser on iOS, or Orion from Kagi- both will support Kagi as a search option. Spotlight search still goes to Google, but I find that acceptable.
You chose to buy a platform with severe restrictions. It's not like we can blame monopoly power, because Android phones are easy to get. It was legitimately your choice - it seems like for some reason you wanted the restrictions.
Choice seems to be an euphemism for everything related to private IT: For PCs there is Microsoft vs Apple. (I use Linux, but that's not for the broad masses currently.) For phones you either pay a premium to enter the Apple walled garden or you prostitute your digital life and get spied on by Google and its advertising cancer.
What would we say if there were only 2 car makers, 2 grocery chains, 2 companies building houses?
Look no further for evidence than New Zealand. There are two major grocery store chains (Foodstuffs, who own New World, Four Square, and Pak n Save) and Woolworths Group -- obviously we have the smaller Asian marts and produce stores too, but most people only have one of the big stores nearby to their towns.
There are two major building materials suppliers (Carters and Fletchers). There's one manufacturer of drywall (Gib) that is easier to get council plan approval for than any other cheaper manufacturers of drywall because they provide some material strength documents that saves the councils some engineering review time and effort.
We technically have 4 major banks, but 3 of them are just offshoots of big Australian banks and siphon the insane profits offshore.
The government keeps making investigation commissions into breaking these up, but doesn't do anything. The companies just point fingers back and forth at each other blaming "the competition" for price gouging. Meanwhile the recommendation from the politicians is we cut back on avocado toast, lattes, and our Netflix subscription.
Finland is nearly as bad. 20 years ago there were only 3 food chains. All domestic and playing the rules "no price competition". So food prices were about 30% higher than in Germany for example (these a very different countries so lack of competition is only one reason). Then Lidl (discounter of German origin) entered the market. The first years the incumbents fought it with unfair practices, but in the end it led to more price competition with everybody having to offer cheaper choices. 2 of the incumbents have since merged (with some regulatory limitations) so we are back to 3 players, 2 playing "according to the oligopoly book" and one doing things different, at least offering some choice.
Banks are not much better. There are a couple of small players additionally to the 3 big ones, but competition is limited to very few products. If you are interested in something else, choices are very poor.
If the choices are substantially different, you have a choice. Windows or Linux or Mac is a real choice - just because you'd prefer Haiku doesn't mean you don't have a choice. There's a huge range of android phones, and many of them have been reverse engineered enough to run non-google versions of Android (find out before buying). I have a PinePhone, but I don't use it regularly. It runs nearly-mainline Linux. Even things like Apache and X11 if I want it to.
I am typing this on a phone running SailfishOS. Still that's hardly a real choice for me who has worked 20 years as a phone or Linux developer. No banks, no public transit tickets, no city bike, no you name it.
Calls a texts work fine. I didn't try MMS, but on the forums people managed to make it work. Battery life is not very long, 4-5 hours of use or 20 hours of suspend.
I'm really happy to be able to run desktop apps (also on a big screen!) and have full control over my phone.
Compromise on your computing freedom, compromise on your attention and privacy, when both providers are out to fuck you it doesn't really feel like you have a meaningful choice to make. Asking for an environment where fucking your customers isn't allowed feels like the only option.
I have a Pixel with Graphene on it. It's not de-Googled though, because Google successfully entrenched their services as a dependency of the majority of apps on the platform. Graphene makes yet another compromise by installing Play Services in a sandbox, which still lets it spy on you (but less) in exchange for enabling most (not all) Android apps to run. You can't really escape the compromises if you want a capable pocket computer. Compromises borne not of technical requirements or limitations, but of decisions that some of the largest companies in human history have made to fuck you.
Big fan of Graphene! The balance I personally prefer is to use Shelter to create a "work profile" and install Play Services in there along with any apps that must have Play Services. Then, I only enable the work profile when I need to use those apps.
I don't know about "factually incorrect" I believe this[1] is what the OP was vaguely referring to.
Apple says they're not doing CSAM scanning anymore, but there's no way to verify they're being truthful. And given everything known about corporate America, it would be foolish to believe them.
Unfortunately, you lose a significant amount of functionality by degoogling. Any app which relies on Google services, which is a large number, will be broken.
But you do. You get to choose to buy into the other platform, which is significantly more open. If for some reason you choose not to, then you obviously don't value openness very much.
In what sane healthy market is two choices enough?
Imagine saying that about everything else in your life. Don't want to buy a Ford car? You can buy a Toyota. There are no other car brands in the entire world. IHG, Hyatt, Choice Hotels, Best Western, Wyndham, Radisson, they don't exit.
Don't want to stay at the Hilton? You're in luck, you can go to the Mariott, that's it.
Don't want to buy a t-shirt at Target? Well, Walmart sells t-shirts, and nobody else sells any t-shirts.
This would be astoundingly ridiculous anywhere else but technoloy. Even credit card processing networks have four options (Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express).
As an example of how this works in other industries, US antitrust regulators automatically decline any merger/acquisition US airlines that would put their marketshare above 20%. And that's after deregulation!
IMO any market that has less than ~3-5 viable purchase options for customers needs to have extensive government intervention to keep the market fair and innovative.
If only the world was so simple and one dimensional and we never needed to compromise. Lets have 5 phones, each representing the pinnacle of a single attribute I care about, none of them actually meeting my needs.
Yay, capitalism working as intended. The rational buyer can choose to get kicked in the head or in the groin! Vote with your money!
That’s why even Adam Smith himself said that it only works in well-defined markets! It’s the job of governments to define these, and phones are so essential to our lives that they should be thought of as roads, instead of as an average private company.
Apple and Google have a duopoly in the mobile OS markets and mobile app markets. The fig-leaf of choice is between two duopolists. That's not healthy competition or an actual choice.
As someone who worked at Mozilla, on Firefox browsers, I can guarantee you that none of this is a coincidence.
I have never seen the search contract so I don't think I am breaking any kind of NDA but I have been close enough to engineering and browser planning and product management to know that Google dictates (negotiates?) in great detail every aspect of search in the browser. This is not a simple "you can use Google Search" deal, instead Google is basically the product manager and ux designer for the browser and they spell out in the contract how search works, how the navigation works, what the UX looks like, what is allowed and not allowed in terms of competing search engines. On mobile it goes further than that and they also dictate how the browser integrates with Android features related to search and voice search.
Mozilla can't surive without Google cash and I fully believe they negotiated hard for a good fair deal that puts users and choice first but I am also sure that Google got the better hand and that is why Search in Firefox has been largely "product managed" / micro-managed by Google.
Apple probably had much more freedom becsuse of their size and power and I don't really understand why it is not possible to add a custom search engine. There is no advantage for Apple to not allow this. Other than .. Google probably force a good deal in their advantage? Apple taking more money by allowing less choice, or even being forced to accept a new deal?
Not having a search deal is simply not an option. Mozilla would die. Apple would have to explain billions of revenue loss to shareholders. Both are impossible.
Mozilla changed its default search engine to Yahoo during Marissa Mayer times and Mozilla didn't die -- it probably made more money by doing so. Mozilla could switch its default to Bing if Microsoft paid more.
I don't know why people keep speculating that this would be the ruling.
Paying for default placement is a simple commercial transaction that only becomes problematic when you're already a monopoly and can spend 10% of your billions in revenue to stay on top and keep smaller contenders out. Is there anything in what the judge has said that would suggest that they view the simple act of having a paid default as being anti-competitive in and of itself?
> Apple probably had much more freedom becsuse of their size and power and I don't really understand why it is not possible to add a custom search engine. There is no advantage for Apple to not allow this.
I think you're giving Apple too much credit. They are too myopic and too focused on optimizing their current financials, especially under Tim Cook. To build a new search engine would mean 1) tossing away the $20B Google offers, and 2) spend potentially billions to build or acquire something viable.
Would be unacceptable to the Apple institutional shareholders. Akin to what Meta tried to do with their Reality Labs.
It used to be pretty common for computer-illiterate people to add a bunch of extra search bars and other weird hotbars, often of ill-repute, by accident. Maybe Apple just didn’t want to repeat that.
The status quo in fact encourages going back to the toolbar-infested days of yore. The only way to use a non-bribe-paying search engine in Safari is to install a browser extension with access to every webpage. There are standards that work just fine for switching search engines without any extensions or toolbars but Apple explicitly rejects those standards.
There's no excuse for not making search engine management as simple and flexible as Firefox does, especially on the desktop, but I appreciate the hoops you jump through to keep hacks available for browsers with less user choice.
Even Firefox has its issues - they don't sync search settings along with everything else, and the reason is they're worried about interfering with paid search defaults on new installs.
The last time I checked (this may have changed), Firefox also tags the default search engines with URL query parameters indicating that the search came from Firefox. When I tried to change this it would not let me edit the default URLs. I had to add entirely-new versions of Google and DuckDuckGo, with custom names and stripped-down URLs in order to avoid the tagging.
No doubt it is revenue-related, but it's also a privacy problem.
Your question is assuming they're not already locking down as many of the 50 other ways as possible. Yes there are other bad things but that doesn't mean we should add #51 to that list.
I suppose it tells them you searched with the address/search bar instead of navigating to the search website. But I'm not sure why you would care about that.
Firefox makes you jump through hoops too. To enable the UI for adding custom search engines you need to set the undocumented preference "browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh" to true.
This is not really true. The about:config flag you mentioned does add a button in the Settings page allowing the addition of custom search engines, but that's only because the intended method for adding search engines is different. The normal way doesn't require setting anything in about:config, but it might be a little hidden (still found it on my own though, so I dunno).
The regular way is to visit the homepage for the search engine you want to add and click the URL bar. This will show the usual search drop-down with the "This time, search with:" row at the bottom. If you're on the homepage for a search engine which hasn't been added to Firefox, there will be an additional button on that row allowing you to add the site as a search engine, which will make it accessible from the regular settings page like every other search engine.
I meant changing it in Preferences though, and not a drop-down like it used to be. You can add completely new engines, change defaults, and even give them keywords for quick searches without any undocumented change.
That said, keyword searches are awesome and I use them for a whole lot of things, including effectively custom search engines. I have keyword searches against, e.g., internal confluence docs so I only have to enter "con <thing I'm searching for>" and firefox will load the confluence search page, or "people <name>" to bring up our internal phonebook with a search for the employee. I don't think I've ever needed to add my own entirely custom search engine to the browser.
(My impression is that the feature is hidden behind a setting because it's half-baked and not yet ready to replace opensearchdescription xml, add-ons, and bookmark keywords as the official way to add search engines.)
If you were a government party with subpoena power, you'd think the internet was made of tubes. You'd have no idea how tech works, and only rubber stamp things tech companies provide you. Otherwise, you'd be over qualified and too focused on things other than raising money, kissing babies while stealing their lollipops.
To be fair to some of my former colleagues in government, there are some folks who do know about tech in Congress and smattered across federal agencies and the White House. While politicians themselves may not know how the internet works, if they listen to their staffers (which many do on the actual technical part of a topic if not the political or other implications of an issue), they are probably at least somewhat informed.
Kagi on Firefox requires an extension, which is ridiculous. I am about to find a more user friendly browser. Session, bookmarking and history search haven’t seen any meaningful improvement in 15+ years.
Maybe it's changed, but last time I tried to set my Searx instance as a default search provider, it involved rolling my own search provider extension for it.
>2. On Chrome, we use an extension to change the default search engine and enable search auto-complete etc, but Google has a policy that such an extension can do one thing and one thing only, and recently removed our extension on account of that [1]. We rebuilt it to meet their needs but had a lot of back-and-forth because we included 'search by image' on a context menu item and the first reviewer felt that was a bridge too far. You'll note that Chrome provides such a context menu item for Google Image search out of the box.
I guess this is so that unrelated extension X can't also change the default search while it's at it, like in the good old IE days, so it kind of sort of makes sense. though if the extension is named after a search engine it should probably get a pass, and the context menu thing obviously is also related to search.
Yes this is exactly right. There is an industry of chrome extensions that exist to change the search engine to something truly unwanted (yahoo search anyone?) so that the extension author can extract rev share. They often advertise the extension as something else to trick people into installing. The target is often kids. As someone who worked at Google, I was surprised / shocked to see how many kids get targeted by these extensions. “Want to play this cool game? Just install this extension.” It is a really problematic thing without an obvious solution. Google has to fight against unwanted extensions but absolutely shouldn’t hide behind that acting like it is okay to punish competing search engines in the process.
Also in case you were curious what tipped me off was seeing just how common it is for Chromebooks to not have Google as their default search engine. Totally not the intended outcome of Google creating Chrome OS.
"It is most certainly this difficult by design, that's a lot of revenue to protect."
Reading the early history of Microsoft I once came across a quote from someone that the company intentionally made the possibility of booting different operating systems on the PC difficult by design. What I found interesting is that this was before Linux became popular. They were already contemplating the possibility of booting other operating systems.
Google's argument at trial was something like, "Everyone agrees Google search is the best and that's why they use it exclusively." (Hence it should be set as a "default".) Could we imagine Microsoft arguing, "Everyone agrees Windows is the best and that's why they will never want to boot another operating system."
Maybe some relics of this sort of subtle subterfuge live on today. For example, it was historically difficult if not impossible to dual boot Windows along with non-Microsoft OS without allowing Windows to be first in the boot order, e.g., Windows partition must be the first partition. Even in the UEFI era, I see hints that this issue may still persist:
Regardless of whether I have the details exactly right (I used to edit MBRs by hand to set the first active partition and have forgotten much of that knowledge now), the point is that the software/"tech" company tactic of preserving or adding deliberate hassles, i.e., "friction", is an old one. Surely it must work to have persisted for so long.
>Google's argument at trial was something like, "Everyone agrees Google search is the best and that's why they use it exclusively."
Hence the logical question is: why is Google collectively paying billions of dollars to Apple and Mozilla if they are so sure they have the best search engine in the industry? I think they know that they do not have the best search engine possible and they just want to control the whole distribution channel both vertically and horizontally. Imo, long story short; Google is house of cards built of Google Search, Google Chrome and Android and if you take one card out the whole structure would collapse. They came to realize by observing Microsoft that if you control distribution channels, you control the end product and I think their weakest link is Chrome. So anyone who can create better internet browser than Google's Chrome can disrupt Google's dominion over the Web.
> Everyone agrees Google search is the best and that's why they use it exclusively.
What a specious argument. Just because it is the best now[1], doesn't mean it is the best possible, and blocking competition can prevent something that is better from gaining traction.
[1]:which is itself debatable, and I question if any search engine can unilaterally be the best since different engines may be better in different situations
> On iOS the list of allowed search engines is simply baked into OS, we have a fiddly extension that hooks outbound calls to /search and redirects them but I wish we didn't need to.
Wouldn't this be the fault of Apple as it is Apple that controls the list?
The “make search difficult to change” is more obviously anti trust worthy, and if they did make this deal I would not be surprised if they were careful to not write anything down.
(Not to mention google deleting chats against court orders)
sure, but every change away from that default means having the default is that much less valuable. So it sort of seems like it might make financial sense not devoting dev time to making it easy to switch.
That last part requires a nudge and a wink, just like those OEMs who didn't "need" to make it annoying as fuck to turn off secure boot under the terms of their contract with Microsoft but did it anyway because they knew what was good for them.
If these hypothetically had no impact on the rest of the business, and were just an arbitrary payment, they would be the difference between Google having more profit than Apple, and vice versa.
The deal with Google is not a fixed amount. It has a revenue component (ie a share of Google revenue from that user). So the motivation for Apple to make it difficult is clear - a user switching browser costs Apple money as it does not have revenue share deals with others
Google pays to be the default, not for exclusivity as evidenced by the list of SEs Apple provides to swap to.
I never knew what the hell Apple was doing with the extremely limited set of search engines with the only means to change it being to choose one of the others Apple has included on a static list which cannot be modified by the user.
There is no reporting whatsoever that there is any other payment to be in the list of alternatives. There is no evidence that Microsoft pays Apple to include Bing in the list of alternatives.
So nothing whatsoever like that was revealed in the case.
Dude, given you don't have any evidence to the contrary, the correct response here is "wow, I hadn't heard of that, please tell me more", rather than to assume that if you haven't heard of something, it must be false.
I don't know why there was no reporting of this, but it is what Gabriel Wineberg testified to under oath. See the trial transcripts, 2023-09-21, 1:36pm[0].
> Q. And since this agreement was signed in 2014, DuckDuckGo has been one of the built in options that a user can select as their search engine in Safari, right?
> A. Yes.
> Q. DuckDuckGo agreed, through this service integration agreement, to pay Apple a share of the revenue that DuckDuckGo receives from certain search traffic originating from Safari, right?
> A. Yes.
You see how that is DDG paying for being in the list of alternatives, right? And that it was revealed in this case?
Thanks for that, that's very interesting. And indeed, has had no reporting whatsoever as far as I can tell.
Do you know if Microsoft, Yahoo, and Ecosia also pay for placement? Since those are the other options Safari provides?
You're right, I shouldn't have said it was false -- I thought I'd followed this subject very closely, and this is definitely not common knowledge at all. I stand corrected, thanks.
There is proof (not just evidence) that Google paid to be on the list. There is evidence that to be on that list, one needs to pay; therefore, there is evidence that Microsoft also paid to be there.
We actually know it. I told you how we know it, and you ignored it. If that wasn't enough for you, you could have asked for details rather than scold me about not providing tedious details on something that was public knowledge.
Anyway, I've provided said tedious details in a sibling comment.
I use only Kagi on all my devices. Thank you for building a phenomenal search engine.
On iOS my Safari browser is always in private mode. I never use non-private tabs. Kagi integration via the Safari extension works most of the time - but was broken for several months (required re-logging into Kagi when opening a new private tab after a delay). It looks like you fixed it just a couple of weeks ago, so I appreciate that.
I am raising this just so you are aware of this use case - always staying in private mode.
(The fact that iOS doesn't allow setting the default search provider in Safari to anything other than half a dozen of pre-selected partners is abysmal.)
I use Orion exclusively because Kagi is the default search engine. It does have a few more bugs than chrome / safari, but they're well worth putting up with to get native Kagi support. Thank you.
It's interesting though - what is Apple's vested interest in only having native support for certain search engines? I now no longer use their browser because of this - I would think that is _some_ kind of loss for them. Maybe not, since I'm on macOS anyway.
Under these circumstances, it is appropriate to ask who is the customer. Then presume that the company is trying its best to make the customer happy.
Apple has clearly defined that the customer for the "default search engine selection" option is Google and not the users. There is obviously some mediation by regulators in Europe and elsewhere (hence Google's major competitors being included on the list), but the customer is Google. I think that from that fact flows two further inferences:
A) the customer might not want to write down everything, or even communicate in any non-deniable way, all of their preferences (due to those regulators), but can presume that Apple understands their preferences
B) The customer is happy to the tune of 20 billion dollars with the current set-up.
Even if not explicitly conditioned, which I don't believe came out as being the case in this case, there's still an inherent motivation. Google will pay more for a default on an OS where it's hard to switch the default than it will for a default where it's easy to switch away. Google might pay $20 billion for defaults on iOS as-is where 99% of people stick with Google, but if Apple started asking users if they were sure and offering alternatives and Google only remained the default for half of people, they logically would only offer maybe $10 billion to remain default on the same actual terms.
It seems plausible. Mostly I think people should be explicit and clear about their accusations.
Something that doesn’t make a ton of sense to me in this theory is that, despite it being hard to add a new engine (which is not great), it is easy to switch away from Google on iOS. And the big search engines are in their pre-populated list. So it seems Google and Apple have engaged in a conspiracy to keep people from switching… just to the niche engines? That doesn’t make a ton of sense, right? Google is probably not more scared of Kagi than Bing.
My first guess is that Apple lived through the era of confused non-technical people adding a bunch of scam search engines and didn’t want a repeat of that.
> That doesn’t make a ton of sense, right? Google is probably not more scared of Kagi than Bing.
Google certainly should be more scared of Kagi than Bing. Bing is a known quantity that's not going to suddenly shoot ahead of them. A smaller, newer competitor might. Just like how it wasn't Lycos or Jeeves that dethroned Yahoo, it was the two guys in a garage.
No, I’m supposing that Apple knows they have more control if they obfuscate the ability to switch. And more control is more valuable to Google or whoever else wants to pony up to be the “default”.
This is one of those "a wink is as good as a nod to a blind person" situations so that plausible deniability is maintained while getting the desired results
As long as it’s an ongoing relationship nothing needs to be said. Apple knows that if more users swap away from the default then the default setting is less valuable.
If that is what the (vaguely described) conspiracy is, it doesn’t really make a ton of sense, because the pre-populated list of search engines already includes most of Google’s main competitors.
1. That sounds like an Apple issue, not a Google issue
2. That sounds perfectly reasonable. Google doesn't want people to bundle other things for users who want to install just a different default search (and not "your hotbar" like the Netscape days).
3. I'm not sure what you're talking about, is Chrome on Linux default search configured differently than Chrome on Windows?
>2. That sounds perfectly reasonable. Google doesn't want people to bundle other things for users who want to install just a different default search (and not "your hotbar" like the Netscape days).
I suspect it's the other way around. They don't want random extensions to mess with your search engine because they get kickbacks from yahoo or whatever. Though if the extension is named for a search engine I don't think it should apply.
I did have issues on Linux regarding the extension working in private windows due to the official Firefox extension being out-of-date. Using the latest Github release of their extension fixed it, and they promptly submitted the new update for it to propagate through the extension store after a ticket on their feedback forum asked about it[0].
Github releases with .xpi's to install have been removed[1] which is odd but hopefully they keep up with their Firefox extension submissions if this is the route they're going down.
As for Chrome, I only use it for automated/manual testing since that's what everyone uses.
Lets not kid ourselves. This wasn't a random reviewer giving you a hard time, your extension is definitely being "reviewed" way up the chain in order to find any menial reason to not allow you.
I've said this before, but it bears repeating: Kagi should stop blaming Apple or Google and make your own app already. People love apps and would be very happy to search by opening your app instead of using weird and suspicious hacks.
As a for-profit company you cannot fall back on the comfort of blaming outside factors for your problems. You have the best search engine in the world already, so don't make it so difficult for people to become your (paying) users.
I like your product but find the inability to set it as default very aggravating. Your plugin has improved a lot but it’s still janky. I blame Apple as much as Google. They could choose to align with users but instead they made Safari a profit center with Google’s collusion.
While true, it is also notable that ChatGPT is not a search engine, SearchGPT is not live yet, and that AI results have only further diminished the quality of search results in Google Search.
If anything, OpenAI has only served to further exacerbate and accelerate the inevitable decline of Google Search.
> Google’s payments to make its search engine the default option on smartphone web browsers violate US antitrust law, a federal judge ruled Monday, handing a key victory to the Justice Department.
I still find it hard to understand why this makes sense. Don't companies make exclusive deals all the time, and whoever bids higher will get such deals? Why is it different for Google this time?
> Google understands there is no genuine competition for the defaults because it knows that its partners cannot afford to go elsewhere. Time and again, Google’s partners have concluded that it is financially infeasible to switch default GSEs or seek greater flexibility in search offerings because it would mean sacrificing the hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars that Google pays them as revenue share.
[...]
> That was the key takeaway from the testimony of Neeva’s founder and former Google Senior Vice President of Ads and Commerce, Dr. Ramaswamy. The court found him to be a particularly compelling witness. He put it best. When the court asked why Google pays billions in revenue share when it already has the best search engine, he answered that the payments “provide an incredibly strong incentive for the ecosystem to not do anything”; they “effectively make the ecosystem exceptionally resist[ant] to change”; and their “net effect . . . [is to] basically freeze the ecosystem in place[.]” Tr. at 3796:8–3798:22 (Ramaswamy). No one would ever describe a competitive marketplace in those terms. When the distribution agreements have created an ecosystem that has a “strong incentive” to do “nothing,” is “resist[ant] to change,” and is “basically [frozen] in place,” there is no genuine “competition for the contract” in search. It is illusory.
The court is plain silly if it's concluding that multi-billion-dollar deals create resistance or diminishes incentives. If anything, it creates incentives by proving that another search engine could make billions from smartphone fees alone.
It’s an exclusive deal that prevents anyone else from offering a similar deal. Of course it reduces competition. The only question is whether it also violates the monopoly law.
I’d encourage you to read the decision, I just pulled two paragraphs from a pretty exhaustive document.
I highly encourage you to read about monopolies and their mechanisms. Competitors can be incentivized with a monopoly's profits all they want, the amount of money it'd take to enter the space is unfeasible.
They're saying that if Google is willing to pay so much to be the default that there's positive ROI that another search engine could tap given the up-front investment to buy the spot.
This would have been fine if Google was not a monopoly. The key part of the ruling is that judge agrees Google is a monopoly. And it's behavior is maintaining the monopoly illegally.
Because it's a monopoly, and paying over the odds for these placements, it does not allow for a competitive marketplace. These payments create significant barriers to entry for other companies to even try and increase their market share given all the frictionless access points are blocked by Google not because of superior product but payments. These payments from a monopoly have a disproportionate impact on the market by limiting opportunities for everyone else in a significant manner.
(Kind of, in a competitive market, a company can block 1-2 pathways. Here google pretty much blocked every entry point.)
Presumably these deals with Google will be nullified, but can the various browsers just make new deals with someone else? Can Microsoft just just swoop in and make a deal with Apple/Mozilla/Samsung? Mozilla is going to be desperate to find a new partner...
Dont think Apple would make a deal with any other engine. They basically used Microsoft to get a good deal with Google, but never had any intention to use Microsoft.
The thing is the deals are a revenue sharing deal - Google gives 1/3 of the revenue to Apple. With microsoft, the number could be 100% and would still not reach a significant number for Apple. Mozilla would jump at it, and I hope Google still invests in them as part of a grant or something while not getting anything in return.
At least in the short term they probably would. Why not take the basically free money?
Longer term, yeah they'll probably just make their own search engine.
I highly doubt Google would give Mozilla anything. The only reason I think they would would be to appease Chrome monopoly concerns, but I don't think Chrome is even at risk of that. It's not the default browser on any platform other than ChromeOS and some Android devices.
Not necessarily - as it is written, the Sherman anti-trust act and all of the amendments distinguishes between "innocent" and "coercive" monopolies. But the definitions are very loose and hard to pin down.
It's hard to even consistently distinguish a monopoly - is it market share? Earning power? Barriers to entry?
> It's hard to even consistently distinguish a monopoly - is it market share? Earning power? Barriers to entry?
"I know it when I see it," as it is difficult at best to rely on distinctive actions or indicators considering the fluidity of business dynamics and the market landscape.
As soon as they formalized a metric to distinguish a monopoly, it would become something deliberately managed by entities who wished to wield monopolistic power.
It would change the shape, but not the definition.
Does Nvidia negotiate deals for all gaming + crypto + AI companies to use their cards, or do they just provide good hardware + software that consumers want to use?
That would be the difference of an anti-competition monopoly vs just a monopoly.
If you and I, a couple of presumed nobodies, agree to have our respective companies work together exclusively on a thing and maybe trade some money and services, then that's something that can usually be legally just fine.
But if you or I are operate a monopoly (whether a natural monopoly or an artificial monopoly) and we make the same kind of exclusive deal, then: That may not be fine. We have laws (like the Sherman Act) that can restrict this sort of thing only if a monopoly becomes involved.
And to be clear: It's generally OK to have a monopoly (good fuckin' job, mate! you totally own your market! all the spoils for you!). But it's generally not OK to use that monopoly status in an anticompetitive way.
Scale and context matters. No one else could afford to pay anywhere remotely near what Google is paying Apple. If it was truly competitive bidding Google could just offer some small reasonable percentage more than the nearest competitor could afford and Apple would take it. The reason google is paying so much over where a market price would be is because they want to discourage anyone, particularly Apple, from even thinking about competing with them. Google is paying Apple 36% of the revenue (not profit) generated by those users.
A pretty good argument could be made that Apple would likely have built up and/or acquired it's own search engine by now if Google wasn't paying such obscene amounts. Apple was previously involved in talks with Microsoft to purchase Bing, and even acquired an ai search startup founded by ex-googlers (LaserLike).
When you are the primary player in the industry, you're creating a massive, unscalable monopolistic wall that no one else can climb.
They pay Apple alone around 20 billion per year. There is no way anyone else can even think about competing with that. It's not because they happened to get the highest bid. It's because they're paying for the elimination of anyone else getting a foothold.
I feel like the more blatant monopoly abuse by Google is how they use the Google search homepage to shill their other products. They effectively give themselves billions of dollars in free advertising
Because it's much better for the consumer to search for a city, get an interactive map right there on the search results, but no link to jump to Google Maps so they can get an estimate on how long it takes to get there, because that'd be bundling.
I'm talking more about them posting new product launches, I/O livestream, gmail pinned to the top, etc. Embedded stuff in search results is fine for the most part, although their intent their is primarily to prevent click throughs to other sites and increase the chances of an ad click
>They effectively give themselves billions of dollars in free advertising
how the heck is google's " 'giving' themselves something for free", considered wrong? even if it is billions of dollars?
in which alt world is it wrong of you to 'give' yourself a 100 dollars? or even billions? of your own money? or even billions worth of advertising space? both the giver and the receiver are you, right? you are not stealing anything from anyone.
then what the heck is the problem? maybe I am dumb, but I fail to see it.
in your own words, they are giving it to themselves, right?
they are not taking that money away from anyone else.
and note: I am not a Google shill.
I criticized them, with some justifications that I gave, roughly about a day ago. check my comments.
I try to be objective, though of course I may sometimes fail at that.
interested to hear what you have to say about all this.
They're giving themselves money by abusing their monopoly status. Sure, in a totally free market, it looks innocent. There are laws against this because monopolies are damaging to any market it's in and ends up hurting the end user.
>A monopoly (from Greek μόνος, mónos, 'single, alone' and πωλεῖν, pōleîn, 'to sell'), as described by Irving Fisher, is a market with the "absence of competition", creating a situation where a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular thing.
how is Google a monopoly according to the above definition in Wikipedia?
they have competitors like bing, duckduckgo, kagi, and some others that i have read about here on hn recently.
and I do not know about the others, but at least bing and duckduckgo have existed for many years.
j-maffe, it looks to me like you are being disingenuous, because in reply to your earlier comment above, I had quoted the Wikipedia definition of monopoly. my entire subsequent argument was based on that, as you well know. if you want to try to redefine terms, or move goalposts, feel free to do so, but I will not participate in an argument based on such behaviour.
to repeat, quoting from the Wikipedia definition of monopoly:
>A monopoly (from Greek μόνος, mónos, 'single, alone' and πωλεῖν, pōleîn, 'to sell'), as described by Irving Fisher, is a market with the "absence of competition", creating a situation where a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular thing.
(italics mine)
can you really not see the difference between 90% search share held by Google, which means 10% share held by others, vs. absence of competition? it is blindingly obvious.
I am leaving this thread. I don't argue with people who either don't get it, or seem to be operating under false pretences.
Just to be clear, you're saying that the judge [1], the Justice Department [2], and journalists[3] are all wrong?
If you want to be pedantic about it, they have what is called an effective monopoly[4].
I am making a rare exception to my statement about not engaging with you further (because of the crap that you wrote earlier), because of the other crap that you wrote above (only in order to point that crap out to other readers):
half the links (i.e. 1 and 2) you quoted above don't work for me. paywalls or signup required? clever you, eh? not!
and link 4 is too long and verbose. I searched for the word effective, but did not find it in the initial part on the screen.
aaannnddd ... you are quoting journalists (!) as though they are automatically competent authorities? and even judges' decisions sometimes get reversed by higher courts. so effectively you have no point. hee ... hee ... hee ...
looks like, in your arguments, you thrive on appeals to faux authority, and nothing else, particularly not on reasoning.
your ignoring that, or not understanding that, is like a person saying that 10% is equal to 0%. I cannot argue with such people. it's a dead end, and a waste of my time.
they are because a judge just ruled they are. answering questions like this is the reason the courts exist, and they just answered this question.
or they might not actually be a monopoly, there's still a possibility of appeal, but there's really no more definitive answer than a judge's ruling. antitrust law is fuzzy, and depends a lot on the courts to interpret it.
if you want to beleive a wikipedia definition based on historical caselaw, instead of an actual judge's decision, then i guess sure, do whatever you want.
if you're asking how they're a monopoly, i answered you. if you want to debate whether the judge was right or wrong, maybe phrase your question less like a question.
>if you're asking how they're a monopoly, i answered you. if you want to debate whether the judge was right or wrong, maybe phrase your question less like a question.
okay, i will. in fact, i also answered you, so I'll just link to my other answer again:
It is, if you are leveraging one monopoly to attempt to gain more. This is what happened with Microsoft and Internet Explorer (via the Windows monopoly)[1]
Had Microsoft merely provided advertised IE with Windows there never would have been a suit. Even bundling alone would have been a hard case to make. They did far more than just ship IE with Windows.
I still struggle to see the harm, or what a remedy would aim to fix. Of all the possible antitrust fights to pick (Comcast, Apple, Meta, etc.), I'm not sure this would even make my top 10.
Google search is still the best out there. If you want to use a another web search, the switching cost is lower than almost any other product/service (e.g. compared to OS, cell phone network, ISP, etc.). Competitors like Microsoft, Apple, and Meta have ungodly amounts of money, but have barely tried in web search.
Despite Google being a more open and better web citizen than most other players, they have still been hit with actions on the Google Play Store and search. It's hard to make sense of.
The second statement coupled with the fact that google search has declined in quality due to choices by google (not just the admitidely difficult SEO adversaries) is the harm. Google is able to purposefully degrade it's experience because of the lack of competition, and demonstratably has (while still, arguably, being viewed as the best).
I'm with you on the remedies, I can't think of any specific to paying to be the default that don't have multiple negative knock on effects (I'm particuarly worried about what this means for Mozzila funding myself). Still you don't skip chemotherapy just because it's more acute in the short term.
It’s called out that Google pays Mozilla to have Google be the default search engine in Firefox. I worry this ruling will lead to Google ceasing those payments, effectively killing Mozilla as a going concern.
Why would anyone bid for being the search engine in a browser with <4% market share and falling? Everybody will want to be on iPhone/Safari, Android/Chrome, and Windows/Chrome or Edge.
If I set my search engine to DDG and Firefox has a deal with Google, then my browser is going to change my search engine to Google? Of course not. When you install Firefox it defaults to Google. In the past when Firefox had a deal with Yahoo it defaulted to Yahoo.
Are you suggesting that is incorrect because all of that happened?
And at least 50% of this 4% (myself included) use ad blockers. Well, too bad Mozilla put itself in this situation. If it doesn't kill it, it will make it stronger.
Mozilla is effectively being subsidized by Google for the sake of an illusion of browser competitions. If the remedy enforces "a reasonable level of bid" for these kinds of auctions, Mozilla may go bankrupt within 5 years. I hope the court won't include Mozilla in scope since it doesn't really make a dent on the market dominance.
> Mozilla is effectively being subsidized by Google for the sake of an illusion of browser competitions. If the remedy enforces "a reasonable level of bid" for these kinds of auctions, Mozilla may go bankrupt within 5 years. I hope the court won't include Mozilla in scope since it doesn't really make a dent on the market dominance.
Maybe the death of Mozilla, the family of corporate entities, could breathe new life into Firefox, the open source browser. They haven't exactly been great stewards for the last few years. I'm not exactly sure how those vast amounts of money from Google have translated into much tangible progress for the browser.
This. Mozilla is a giant dead tree in the middle of the forest depriving any saplings from the sunlight needed for them to take its place. If the corporation can't exist without Google funding, then it's effectively a department of Google and should be killed off so that other _independent_ orgs take its place.
Exactly. Mozilla CEO salaries might require the Google deal but development of Firefox or alternative browsers does not. Mozilla Corporation was a mistake and I look forward to a time where the leading open browser is developed as a public good again instead of as a product used to sell ads.
You don’t need $500M per year, by far, to continue developing a web browser. Mozilla is conducting all sorts of operations that have little to do with that core task.
Wikimedia is often criticized for asking for donations, while having millions in the bank, but this is exactly why. Mozilla should have taken all the money they could from Google and others, focused on Firefox and MDN (and perhaps Thunderbird) and just continuously saved and invested whatever was left. If/when donation dry up, Wikimedia will hopefully have saved up enough to fund Wikipedia for decades. Once Mozillas income is gone, there's no backup.
Mozilla spend all the money they could each fiscal year (I don't actually know, I didn't check their budgets), trying to build products that would fund the project into the future. It's just that none of those projects made much sense, nor where they ever going to bring the the amount of money required, which really seems obvious from the outside. I can see the VPN maybe bringing in a bit of money, but no where near enough.
> Wikimedia is often criticized for asking for donations, while having millions in the bank, but this is exactly why.
You are omitting the part where Wikimedia spends large parts of that donation money on things barely related to Wikipedia. Not to mention inflated salaries throughout the organization.
Browsers are a special tier of software difficulty. All the recent browser efforts have a non-open source funding model behind it. Which means people believe it takes interesting $ to sustain a promising browser project.
It's Apple who is using their market power in smartphones to dominate search. Apple makes 10's of billions a year out of search. In the search business, they are a distributor. Google doesn't want to pay this money, they are forced to.
No body is forced to do anything. Google can just not pay that money and lose that share of the market. They're not doing that because they want to preserve their monopoly status.
This is silly. People are forced to do all kinds of things. They are forced at gunpoint, they are forced via laws, they are forced via incentives that are so strong they may as well be a gun. As are companies. So, in theory, you are wrong.
In practice, even more wrong. If management decided to not pay this money, and gave up that positioning to a competitor, they would be fired. If the board allowed it to continue, they could be sued. They are forced.
No one at google sits around thinking "i want to preserve our monopoly status". They are thinking "I don't want to be crushed by someone". Google can be crushed just like any other company. Their panic around AI is due to the fact they think it could crush their search business, and they are correct to think so.
How in God's name can someone be forced (compelled by force or necessity : involuntary) by an incentive? No, your usage of the word is against the one used by the code of law regarding market regulation, simple as that.
There is no tight definition of "force" in US market regulation. You are making things up.
The phrase "market forces" is directly quoted in the ruling. Market forces are incentives pushing market participants to behave in certain ways. This is econ 101.
push != force. The definition of the word "forced" (which you used) I gave you is from Merriam-Webster. The definition you're giving is of the word "force" which is different. Google isn't forced to maximize profit at all costs if it breaks the law, no company is. No boards are vulnerable to lawsuits for not maximizing profit either. That's a myth. Having market forces doesn't mean involved companies are forced to do anything illegal. Do you think because it's the same verb that it has the same meaning, or did you just Ctrl+F "force" and copy the first instance you found?
If Firefox dies, the antitrust case against Chrome is sure to follow. The only thing really stopping Chrome from full domination right now is the iPhone, and the EU is going to move that stumbling block out of the way, if they haven’t already. I don’t live there, so I didn’t commit the current state to memory.
According to the judges ruling, Google’s internal data indicated that they would lose up to 80% of searches on Apple devices, resulting in a $30 billion revenue loss, if they gave up their default search position.
While not over they have a tough battle ahead. This was a case brought by the Trump Admin and carried on under Biden. I don't see a conservative Federal judge gutting this ruling any more than I do a liberal one.
I don’t like google and I don’t like the way their shitty search is stuck in every hole.
But denying by court a company a right to honestly pay to another company for distribution of their services has much worse long term consequences and is wrong.
At the very least, I hope the Apple-Google ~~exclusivity~~ default agreement is revoked. I suppose it’ll take another year to figure out the actual remedies though.
I think a year for the remedies is optimistic - could drag on for a while. Also worth mentioning that it is not an exclusivity agreement - it is a default agreement.
> it is not an exclusivity agreement - it is a default agreement.
But it kind of is an exclusivity agreement. Have you ever tried to change the default search on an iPhone? There is only a very small list of curated searches you are allowed to pick from, and you cant add your own.
You’re right, my bad on the terminology. A year is definitely optimistic, I just hope that’s the first draft pending appeals. the longer it stretches on, the greater chance there is of directives being changed, lobbyists influencing politicians, etc.
seems like these days most of the payment is 36% of ads in Google searches, but maybe there is also some money sent specifically for it to be the default.
They get paid a share of ad revenue their users generate if they make Google the default in all of their web search entry points. These are not separate. The deal is 1) "make Google the default" and then 2) "there's a revenue share". No 1 then no 2.
My idea is that they could auction off the right to be the default search engine separately in each state. So google could still win most of the auctions but if some other smaller provider wanted a chance they could concentrate their whole bet into a smaller market like Rhode Island or whatever.
While they are certainly dependent on Google funding, I believe this dependence is a net negative for the long term health of Firefox development. It implicitly skews the incentives of Mozilla leadership, making them comfortable with getting lots of money they didn't really work for and giving them some funny ideas on where their priorities lie.
Presumably a proper non profit would be more incentivized to stick to the projects ideals so they can brag about it in their fundraising activities (with perhaps a little too much of that money going into administrator pockets on the down low). Meanwhile Google's funding creates a status quo where it's pretty much fine with anything so long as Firefox continues to exist as a scarecrow to anti-trust suits. It effectively muscles out all the potential well meaning donors which could have helped steer things in a more positive direction, and acts like a sword of damocles floating over Mozilla's head, engorging the organization in addictive cash they don't deserve, and implicitly discouraging them from ever stepping on Google's toes lest the money hose gets turned off.
These days I'd call Firefox "good enough" from a privacy & open source perspective. It checks the boxes, and while I'm actually pretty open to the UI changes they have made over the years, I've gotten the sense that top Mozilla leadership don't really care about Firefox anymore, even distancing themself from it in certain respects. These days Firefox doesn't really seem to be going anywhere, it does the bare minimum by implementing web standards but all efforts to distinguish it from Chrome seem to be gradually extinguished. I wouldn't even be surprised at this point if they eventually turned off Mv2 support in a few years from now, despite all promises to the contrary, citing complexity or perhaps even "security" like Google's been doing as the reason.
If in the "worst" case Mozilla shutters down or abandons Firefox development after losing their money hose, perhaps the mindshare of the community they have been hoarding away all these years will coalesce around a healthier fork with an organization structure closer to the Linux foundation, maybe then Firefox would actually have a future again.
IMO, this is the best think that could happen for Firefox. Mozilla as an organization has been thoroughly corrupted by huge buckets of money being thrown at them by Google. "The Resource Curse" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse) doesn't only apply to countries.
Just skimmed the ruling [1]. A pillar appears to be that “Google’s distribution agreements are exclusive.” So if Mozilla e.g. auctions off the next N installs default-search engine designation, it might work? (Also, the ruling doesn’t ban exclusive distribution agreements in general.)
I'm struggling to connect how Google's last major browser engine competitor potentially losing it's funding due to a separate monopoly issue is similar to laws being passed to reduce death and hospitalizations.
FOF ¶ 334. Google’s default placements on Firefox generate 80% of Mozilla’s overall operating revenue, demonstrating that the vast majority of query volume on Firefox goes through defaults.
The DOJ is concerned with moving the needle on one specific issue (search monopoly a.k.a. seatbelts) and is not concerned about the side effects on related entities (Firefox a.k.a. undertakers).
The analogy is: Sometimes the one negative outcome (Mozilla & hospitals losing money) is a price well paid for another positive one (regulating monopolies & reduced deaths).
It's not just the "rendering engine" it's the entire software stack from down at the bottom with the IO and networking libraries to mid-layers of JS and core rendering, to very top with the UI toolkit. There's not much in Thunderbird that isn't Firefox and it's almost all custom Mozilla code, about 20 million lines of it, and not heavily reliant on major OS libs like so many other large-scale apps.
Just so you know, the money users donate goes towards political causes not towards Firefox.
When you are donating, you are donating to the Mozilla Foundation (which is a non-profit). All Firefox development is done through Mozilla Corporation (which is a for profit entity). There is no way to donate to Firefox.
So what's going to happen? Most users will probably still use Google, nobody is getting paid and Google is saving a bundle.
I get the thinking that you have to prevent lock-in (eg Ticketmaster and venues) but Google didn't buy its way into dominance annd maintain their dominance through exclusivity deals. They simply have a better product and I don't expect anyone to match them anytime soon (cue the DDG "I switched from Google to DDG 78 years ago" crowd).