I will believe it when I see Google face consequences.
“The courts hereby decide that Alphabet Inc. will pay a fine of… 1.2 million dollars… Out of the billions of dollars they make every year” :)
Or it could be like how our competition bureau is being forced to pay $13 million to Rogers Cable for inconveniencing them with an investigation when Rogers Cable decided to buy Shaw Cable. And the deal went through. Can you imagine?
Not that Google doesn’t have it’s problems, but personally I find Microsoft’s actions in regards to bing and bing search to be more abusive of their monopoly than Google. Microsoft is abusing their position as the OS in order to push people into their other products when it isn’t really feasible to switch for most people.
Microsoft is less subtle about it. But nowadays Google is bigger deal, on PCs at least you can change operating system and there are plenty of options to go without Microsoft, for every of their services there is alternative with relatively low switching cost.
Now is there a phone manufacturer not preinstalling Google apps with system privilages… Apple? That’s it. But Apple is same problem. There are some resellers flashing different flavours of Android, but no top-down product. In my country there are now cashier-less shops you can’t go into without their app from Google Play, banks are making it harder to log it, police is starting to first ask for app ID then for plastic one.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The case — U.S. et al. v. Google — is the federal government’s first monopoly trial of the modern internet era, as a generation of tech companies has come to wield immense influence over commerce, information, public discourse, entertainment and labor.
The case centers on whether Google illegally cemented its dominance and squashed competition by paying Apple and other companies to make its internet search engine the default on the iPhone as well as on other devices and platforms.
Kenneth Dintzer, a 30-year veteran litigator for the Justice Department, will lead the government’s arguments in the courtroom, while John E. Schmidtlein, a partner at the law firm Williams & Connolly, will do the same for Google.
Rivals have long accused Google of brandishing its power in search to suppress competitors’ links to travel, restaurant reviews and maps, while giving greater prominence to its own content.
In its lawsuit, the government accused Google of hurting rivals like Microsoft’s Bing and DuckDuckGo by employing agreements with Apple and other smartphone makers to become the default search engine on their web browsers or be preinstalled on their devices.
Google’s actions had harmed consumers and stifled competition, the agency said, and could affect the future technological landscape as the company positioned itself to control “emerging channels” for search distribution.
The original article contains 1,425 words, the summary contains 215 words. Saved 85%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Yeah, companies like Google are too big and have too much influence over society/politics, but calling them a search monopoly seems like a stretch. Of all the evil things companies like Google do, we’re going after them for paying other companies to make them their default search engine? It takes all of 30 seconds to change the default, though I admit most people won’t, mostly because they honestly have no reason to.
Google funds Mozilla by paying to be Firefox’s default search engine (and probably other royalties for search-related stuff?). In 2021, payments from Google made up 83% of Mozilla’s revenue.
I also don’t have an issue with paying for default placement. The suit is much broader than that. Google’s anticompetitive conduct has included:
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Acquiring Competitors: Engaging in a pattern of acquisitions to obtain control over key digital advertising tools used by website publishers to sell advertising space;
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Forcing Adoption of Google’s Tools: Locking in website publishers to its newly-acquired tools by restricting its unique, must-have advertiser demand to its ad exchange, and in turn, conditioning effective real-time access to its ad exchange on the use of its publisher ad server;
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Distorting Auction Competition: Limiting real-time bidding on publisher inventory to its ad exchange, and impeding rival ad exchanges’ ability to compete on the same terms as Google’s ad exchange; and
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Auction Manipulation: Manipulating auction mechanics across several of its products to insulate Google from competition, deprive rivals of scale, and halt the rise of rival technologies.
More details: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-google-monopolizing-digital-advertising-technologies
They they settled another suit yesterday: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/06/states-google-settle-app-store-antitrust-case-00114176
Forcing Adoption of Google’s Tools: Locking in website publishers to its newly-acquired tools by restricting its unique, must-have advertiser demand to its ad exchange, and in turn, conditioning effective real-time access to its ad exchange on the use of its publisher ad server;
More on this is how they’ve treated new web technologies like WebHID. TL;DR is that nobody agreed with Google’s implementation of WebHID but (especially considering it was just “oh hey we wrote some code for it, this is how it should work :)”), since they’re the biggest, went with it anyway and told Mozilla and others to go pound sand. Google has immense influence over what the web actually is, but nobody talks about that.
It sounds like that would just be one of the consequences as the overall issue is abuse of dominant position. It is about all the defaults in Android, making alternatives hidden in the settings, but also the warning messages in browsers to revert back the search engine and paying all other companies for implementing google search as default.
There are other issues with google too, relating to privacy and such, but the above issue is really was is hurting the industry and preventing Google from actually ever being dethroned.
There is a fascinating article on the Verge about Neeva, an attempt at making an actually better search engine and they kind of succeeded but lost due to Google’s influence and power.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/20/23731397/neeva-search-engine-google-shutdown
Google funds Mozilla by paying to be Firefox’s default search engine
Google funds Mozilla primarily to avoid the exact kind of legislation in this post; monopolies.
Google can point at Firefox and say “look, not only are there alternative browsers anyone can install, but we funded the independent development of that browser”.
Not to mention all the Chromium-based browsers.
Bust them up