Justice Department to File Antitrust Suit Against Google
wsj.com
wsj.com
This doesn't seem right, technically speaking. I see estimates that globally they process 2 trillion searches per year (70,000 per second). 20% of that, 14,000 searches per second, seems a meaningful number of searches to scale to.
"The government will allege that Google uses billions of dollars collected from advertisements on its platform to pay mobile-phone manufacturers, carriers and browsers, like Apple Inc.’s Safari, to maintain Google as their preset, default search engine."
If the claim is that they are forcing people to use Google Search, reducing that 80% is going to require getting people to choose something else. The way that reducing the market share that is supposed to come from defaults has happened in the past is by forcing users choose which product to use instead. However, I posit that in this case a lot of the 20% comes from situations where there is a non-Google default. For example, one common request from people who notice is how to get Windows/Cortana to use Google instead of Bing. https://www.howtogeek.com/226638/make-the-windows-10-start-m...
I would do some user research about what people want to use before assuming that a massive lawsuit with a remedy intended to give them a choice doesn't result in the same situation. My (small scale) research indicates that more than 80% of people want to use Google.
This is only part of the story. 20% to me is not really meaningful. More importantly, Google wields power to affect the 80%. 20% is a paltry alternative.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herfindahl–Hirschman_Index
This has been in work for over a year. This is not suspicious to anyone that's seen the headlines
Get ready for Mozilla to have to make more cuts and Firefox to fade even more. Mozilla may be able to get Bing or someone else to pay to be their default browser engine but with Google being blocked from competing the amount others will offer for the small market share Firefox now occupies will be far less than Google has been paying.
Even if you give options to users, 90% of them won't care.
Just a non-thought out idea, but the problem with private monopolies is that they are usually unaccountable and irresponsible.
There is nothing exclusive about search - Firefox and many other browsers allow you to choose between multiple search engines at any time without setting a permanent default.
Edit: a lot of people disagreeing with me/don't like what I had to say. At least step up to the challenge: provide a rational definition for a monopoly.
A good example is the airline manufacturing industry. It's extremely difficult for new companies to get into airplane manufacturing because it's difficult and there isn't much incentive to do so.
Monopoly: the exclusive possession or control of the supply of trade in a commodity or service.
Of relevance too is a duopoly: a situation in which two suppliers dominate the market for a commodity or service. A complete and single monopoly isn't required for the market to start being inefficient and appear manipulated.
Every single company sells a commodity or service different to their competitors.
For example, McDonald's sells burgers, as do Burger King. It's arbitrary (and therefore not something that one could determine rationally) where the line is drawn about what will be considered a product or service. If you want to draw the line at Burger there is no monopoly. If you want to draw he line at Big Mac then McDonald's has a 100% monopoly. Is the line Big Mac specifically, burgers, food?
No matter the company and what it sells, you will always be able to come up with a definition of their product narrow or wide enough to find that they sell 100% of that thing when you want to.
An example: Epic's complaints about the app stores. Apple has a monopoly on app stores running on iPhones, but not on mobile devices, not on consumer computer devices, not on computer-based gaming devices, not on entertainment services generally. They could never stop people playing Fortnite, but you could always call Apple a monopolist if you chose your definition appropriately.
Ultimately, the decision is arbitrary and up to the discretion of a bureaucrat. In the absence of a rational method to determine monopolies the decision becomes one of who the bureaucrat decides to shake down.
Even if the above was true, wouldn't someone in a free market be free to form a monopoly if they wanted too? What would prevent them? Other people trying to form a monopoly? How can you assume they wouldn't just give up? It's basically just a faith based belief that someone will always be around to compete against the monopolists. Surely the average citizen has something better to do.
Your argument kind of boils down to, "why would there be competition in the marketplace?" which flies in the face of most fundamental ideas of economics. While you might be correct, you kind of need to be more correct than 200 years of economic thought.
Well, if we're going to make unsubstantiated claims:
That's entirely unfounded and demonstrably false.
> Unless granted by a government, monopolies don't exist in free markets.
You made that claim, it's your responsibility to prove it first, not everyone else's to disprove it after you've made a flat, unsubstantiated claim.
What is your definition of "monopoly" and "free market"?
If I define "free market" as any market which is incapable of forming a monopoly, then yes, your statement is trivially true. But it naturally dis-includes a wide variety of markets that actually exist and may actually have monopolies.
I also refer to my other comment in this thread (long, I refer to Apple and Epic) about why a definition of monopoly is necessary and also impossible.
I will add the exception of a government granted monopoly. In that case the government passes a law in which a company or whomever has the unique privilege to supply a product to the market, the precise definition of which will be given in the government's law.
Whereas you have not given a definition of a monopoly I will define a free market as the array of voluntary transactions between people/groups in a society, absent any threat of violence.
I have yet to say anything, in one direction or another.
You're saying a monopoly cannot exist given a free market. You define what you mean by "monopoly" and I can agree or disagree. You define what you mean by "free market" and I can agree or disagree. We can go from there. But YOU need to start.
Based on your statement "socialism is as bad as genocide" (I'll let Norway, a country which has embraced state ownership or "socialism" while consistently having one of the highest per capita GDP in the world know they're to blame for the Holocaust???), as well as your obnoxious insistence that everyone else do the footwork for you, I don't particularly care what you have to say -- you appear to have disappeared up your own rectum frankly.
For example: "Zuckerberg is cozy with conservative interests" is fine, but using the R word angers people members of the R party.
This is the part I was looking for. Of the tech companies, Alphabet has been the most proactive of creating a business of businesses to avoid antitrust.
A business of businesses isn't a way to avoid antitrust, its just a trust.