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Comment by IMTDb | Hacker News Reader

> Google indisputably has a monopoly over web search: ~93% market share. (I'll never understand why we've done nothing legally about this.)

What do you suggest we do over this ? Forbid some people to search on Google ? Or give each user X queries / day then say "please use another search engine; here are some alternatives ...".

The laws are against monopolies abusing their power. As long as it's trivial to change provider we are in the clear; but the trouble come if a company uses their position to gain an unfair advantage. For example if Google says "You have to un-index you site from bing otherwise we will apply a ranking penalty on your search results".

But "being the default choice with a trivial switch possible" is hardly an abuse of power.

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> What do you suggest we do over this ?

Break it up! That's what you do with monopolies. That's what they did with Standard Oil. That's what they did with AT&T. That's what they talked about doing and should have done with Microsoft.

> but the trouble come if a company uses their position to gain an unfair advantage

Google has leveraged its search dominance to gain dominance in a number of other areas too. For example, whenever I do a Google Search in Safari (without my content blocking extensions running), I see a big popup that says "Google recommends using Chrome". That's an abuse of power. (And naturally, Google is the default search engine of Google Chrome).

Google AMP is an abuse of power, forcing websites to redesign themselves specifically for Google, on penalty of lower search ranking.

I've already mentioned how the two duopolists colluding is an abuse of power.

Google has been accused by Mozilla of systematically sabotaging Firefox in various ways, for example on YouTube.

The list goes on and on.

MS is still "the best" in this case. Searching for Firefox on a fresh Windows install (with Edge) will show Chrome and Opera as first two options (keyword ads), then Firefox. And then, when you download the Firefox installer, you are announced that it could harm your device.

>And then, when you download the Firefox installer, you are announced that it could harm your device.

Is it actually true?

Yes.

Defaults matter. Making Google the default everywhere will cause people to stick with Google, for the most part.

Why is it legal for the monopolist to pay other companies to help it keep its monopoly? If Google couldn't pay Apple or Mozilla to make Google Search the default on their respective browsers, perhaps we'd see other, better defaults, and maybe people would continue using those defaults, eroding Google's market dominance.

> But "being the default choice with a trivial switch possible" is hardly an abuse of power.

The ease of switching isn't all that matters. I suspect if you polled a representative sample of people, they would tell you they believed that Google is the only option for web search. At best, some might admit they've heard of Bing, and then only because it's been the default for IE/Edge for years.

It's not "web search", it's 'web search ADVERTISING'. There's definitely NOT a trivial way to switch to another provider, there isn't one (of equivalent scale, of course.)

I'm immediately reminded of how Google refused to port their YouTube app to Windows Phone back in the day, and when Microsoft cobbled one together itself, Google claimed that doing so violated its ToS.

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