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Comment by mrkramer | Hacker News Reader

Nothing will happen just like with Microsoft. DOJ is only doing this to scare them to ease and liberal their services.

Google achieved dominant market position through legal and fair market competition. If you want to regulate them introduce Internet Search Engine laws do it the same for Internet Social Networks and Internet Social media. They are not breaking Google up that's for sure.

Listen what Larry Page said "data in data out" with Facebook and with Google. If internet service allows you to export your data and move it to the competing service there are no problems.

"You don't want to be holding your users hostage. We want there to be a competitive market, we want other companies to be able to do things so we think it's important that you as users of Google can take your data and take it out if you need to or take it somewhere else." [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfmQkNKo_0A

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This isn't about search, it's about how Google abuses the profits they get from search. You're not supposed to leverage a monopoly in one area into others. It's near impossible to compete with such companies.

I can't imagine any sane person would say that Google's search itself is a problem.

It was the same problem with MSFT when they tried to leverage their monopoly in OS into browsers, apps.

It is about search and btw companies take their profits and expand their portfolios if it wasn't like that Apple would still be doing PCs and Iphone wouldn't exist.

There are still other search engines and were many more prior to "google" becoming a verb. They won over those because their search results were faster/better. Yet there is no barrier to entry in websearch. As seen with DDG, some people value privacy higher so they have a niche.

I think the real reason why nobody really tries to compete is not upfront money or techinical issues, but that nobody can think of a way to monetize successfully while attractively differentiating themselves from google search.

There are only 9 real (crawler) search engines: Google, Bing, Yandex, Mojeek, Gigablast in English Language plus Baidu, Sogou, Naver (South Korea), Seznam(.cz) https://twitter.com/i/lists/1316046723928805376/members

All other are search services (sometimes called metasearch) and most of those are syndication partners for Bing https://www.searchenginemap.com/

in terms of privacy. i'll say it, google search is a problem.

watch the social dilemma on netflix. many others have this view too.

But Microsoft did change. I have read here, but can't recall the comment, the attitude within MS changed drastically.

Did it? Windows still has very strong monopolistic influence.

The experience is night and day compared to what it was.

Old Microsoft still rears its ugly head, I guess much to the annoyance of everyone in the company who tries - and succeeds - in making money in honest ways, but the difference is still enormous.

Yeah, it got better in some areas (participation in Alliance for Open Media for example is great), but not much better in others where MS still has sickening lock-in (MS still did support Vulkan effort).

The only reason Firefox was able to gain traction over IE in the early 00's was the antitrust case. Without it Chrome and Safari probably wouldn't exist either.

I'm pretty sure you are disregarding the technical improvements that Firefox and Chrome made over IE, and the marketing prowess of Google putting the Chrome installer on their search page. Other browsers were perfectly legitimate to build and install before the antitrust case... Safari is a weird thing to bring up as its primary use case is outside the domain of IE.

Microsoft lost their case and was ordered broken up. They were saved in the DC Circuit who rejected the remedy, and then by the incoming Bush administration who had the DoJ back off the case and settle.

It's very easy to imagine that (as with many things from that era) had a few hundred votes in Florida gone differently Microsoft's windows empire would now be just a memory. It was very close.

It was certainly not the wrist slap you're imagining.

> You don't want to be holding your users hostage.

Except that's exactly want you're doing in case of social media. Even with the ability to move your data, you can't simply move platforms because network effects lock you in. I'm really looking forward to ACCESS Act.

The Larry Page video you reference is almost a decade old (8 years). I'm sure a lot of things have changed inside Google since then.

Maybe they did initially but the Google of the last 5+ years has been resting on their laurels in terms of search, showing subpar results to drive you towards their ad results. Then they abuse their special status on chrome and relationships with mobile providers to keep their position. Read the house report page 77 it sheds light on that.

Edit: Ah yes the random downvotes without replies -- except it doesn't really change the above.

Edit2: "By owning Android, the world’s most popular mobile operating system, Google ensured that Google Search remained dominant even as mobile replaced desktop as the critical entry point to the Internet. Documents submitted to the Subcommittee show that at certain key moments, Google conditioned access to the Google Play Store on making Google Search the default search engine, a requirement that gave Google a significant advantage over competing search engines.417 Through revenue-sharing agreements amounting to billions of dollars in annual payments, Google also established default positions on Apple’s Safari browser (on both desktop and mobile) and Mozilla’s Firefox.418"

As long as Microsoft have an effective 100% market share on desktop operating systems, I'll be remaining skeptical about the DoJ case against Google.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

Windows ~77%

It seems clear to me that MS didn’t just accidentally forget to develop IE for 5+ years in the early 2000s. They did so because they needed to avoid the antitrust inspectors. Given that Chrome exists in its current form today because of a lack of competition, I don’t know how you can claim that the antitrust stuff did “nothing”.

What happened with Netscape? It survived?

It became Mozilla

So what was the point of antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft if current browser/s were able to adapt and evolve.

I think the point was that they were able to adapt and evolve because Microsoft's ability to force IE on users was constrained by the antitrust action. It's possible that without antitrust Mozilla might have died on the vine.

Your logic makes absolutely 0 sense, the success of current browsers is not exogenous to the lawsuit.

Current browser/s were able to adapt and evolve in the context of an anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft.

It's like saying "what was the reason for the Fed taking an expansionary stance in March if the stock market clearly has been doing fine since then?"

My logic makes perfect sense from my economic point of view. I'm a neoliberal economist and I think that hardcore competition benefits customers and consumers since it drives quality of products and services up and it drives prices of products and services down. State intervention is only required if a company is ravaging the economy.

> My logic makes perfect sense from my economic point of view. I'm a neoliberal economist

Naming your particular ideological bent does not make your logic any more convincing.

My understanding was that self-identifying "neoliberals" believed in data-driven policy. As a data engineer, I'm telling you that the causal assumptions you are making are fundamentally faulty. Perhaps they align better with your ideological view, but that doesn't mean it makes "perfect sense."

Because... maybe it worked?

the argument is that they were able to catch up to / surpass IE because Microsoft stopped working on it for 5 years. (I'm not endorsing or rejecting it myself.)

In a manner of speaking, yes. Netscape begot Mozilla, which in turn begot Firefox.

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