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.
This is a huge claim. Do you have any evidence to back it up?