Google's 21-year deal with Apple is the "heart" of monopoly case, judge says

Do note that I have nothing against System Webview implementations. I think they're a great solution to avoid the current Electron hellscape we're seeing play out on the desktop, where every single bespoke application is running an entire copy of Chromium under the hood. The idea of just having a single copy of a browser running in the OS as a sort of backbone for in-app HTML pages/external links without launching the entire browser is a very reasonable approach, especially given phones have historically been much less powerful devices than desktops.

The problem I have is the lack of user choice; you have no control as a user what your System WebView is. Google used to offer that choice, but then quietly let vendors slam the door shut (unless you go the custom ROM route or root, which is beyond the skills of a regular user), and the default they offer (afaict) means most vendors do that, with vendors assuming most users won't care about it, so why would it matter. In fact this is also why I really dislike the Firefox approach of making it something the developer chooses to switch out, not the user - it's just bringing the Electron problem to mobile. The user should be the one making that choice, not the developer.

It really shouldn't be difficult to ask the user to pick from a list of browsers and then to actually respect that list. If a user says "I want to make Firefox my browser", then Firefox should also be the System WebView. Not to quietly put them back into Chrome (and therefore subject to Googles data collection practices) just because they clicked a link in an application.

The reality is that we're most likely in a monoculture already when it comes to browsers (just on the whole); Firefox gets funded by Google as and Safari only is propped up because Apple does it's own anti-competitive practices in other areas (read: their gatekeeping of the App Store) rather than being a common choice because it's a good browser.

There's also the fact that a lot of this is a tough thing to claim when by all accounts from webdevs... Safari is an unviable browser without Apple's anti-competitive behavior because Safari fucking sucks. It's the modern Internet Explorer of browsers; a lot of modern web APIs that both Firefox and Chrome use just... don't work on Safari because the system has bugs or weird design decisions that don't follow spec, which means they're not widely used because Safari is still there and holding back everyone else.

It'd be one thing if Apple made it so that the iDevices just are too technically incompatible with Gecko or Blink, but that's not the case. It's literally just a reviewer in their offices going "no, non-webkit browsers are against policy, not allowed".

Like... there, that's it. Apple is abusing their monopoly in one area (the App Store) to force a monopoly in another area (the browser market on their devices). That's textbook antitrust.

That's why I mention the system webview in the first place; it's a super insidious browser that solves a meaningful issue ("Electronification", where every desktop app is now running Chromium is solved by it's presence) but conveniently also grants full control back to Google, overriding other browser changes. (I once read some stats about this - system webviews are the majority of browser traffic on phones nowadays, because app developers love them; they can be tracked (the Google system webview reports back data to the main app about user behavior - IIRC the one Apple offers for non-browser apps is more of a black box though) and analyzed to see where users go from their apps, which helps with things like user profiling for advertisements).

Given that Android lets vendors force it to Google's implementation on a kernel level, it's also very much an avenue Google doesn't want users to figure out to change or to have competing implementations for.

Then there's the fact that extension support in Firefox Mobile is aggressively locked to the Mozilla extension store and only a whitelist of stuff Mozilla approves (it draws extensions from a collection on the Mozilla extension store, so if your desired extension isn't in it, the only option you have is to override the entire thing by making your own collection and messing in about:config), and that kinda compounds to a strong "I'd not recommend it" for me. Firefox to me is a browser that at it's core should be respecting user choice and the Android implementation on that alone doesn't meed the sniff test; Mozilla lock-in even on minor things like this is a big dealbreaker.

Chrome's feel with the rest of Android, for all the issues I have with it, is really well done. Firefox makes you feel much more like you're constantly struggling against Android to make a square peg fit in a round hole. I personally do use a Chrome fork (Cromite, which is a Bromite fork since Bromite's lead dev is MIA), just so that feel is preserved (while also having a solid adblocker and other privacy oriented features).

The closest you'd get to a "firefox webview" is by installing a Magisk module/non-Google ROM that replaces it with a stub application that forwards any "open system webview" call to your regular browser (so it works like clicking an http link). In the past you could just install that stub on any old Android device, but Google locked it down by letting vendors set a signature that a system webview would need to adhere to[0] (as well as a ton of other restrictions).

To be clear, I am not referring to what happens if you just click an http link in an app and the app just calls the browser. That setting respects browser choice. I am referring to the WebView[1] component, which a lot of apps use as a substitute for launching the browser and relies on an underlying app called the Android System WebView[2] to render the pages. For a legitimate usecase; in chat applications (ie. Discord), where a user might visit a website only to then want to immediately go back to the chat itself, the app instead just creates a WebView and... that one is always Chromium, and is nowadays enforced by vendor settings (so it can't be changed without root). In less legitimate usecases, this is done for tracking reasons.

(Another big user of the WebView component for this was Facebook Messenger, but Facebook has switched to using an internal version of this webview component, for reasons only understood by Facebook and it effectively acts as a shadow "fourth internet browser" that is in practice a somewhat outdated version of Chromium.)

[0]: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/androi...

[1]: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/webkit/WebVi...

[2]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

It comes down to: engineer A says we should do X to make the system better; engineer B says we should do Y. How do you decide? You run an experiment against some known important metric. Do that hundreds or thousands of time a year and you eventually end up with a pretty decent system.

By buying up Apple's traffic they made it much harder for a potential competitor to form by removing one of the most important tools: enough traffic to run experiments.

I guess the real money maker is the hiring department.

Given that, why wouldn't Google negotiate a lower rev share?

Consider this from Apple's Eddie Cue: "Cue implied that Bing’s technology was inferior to Google’s, saying that he doesn’t 'know what we would have done” if negotiations with Google ever fell apart.' " [1]

If I were sitting across from Cue at the negotiating table and knew he felt that way I certainly would be looking at a lower rev share and saving some billions of profit for Google...

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-28/microsoft...

As to Samsung why else would they consider switching from Google to Bing? According to the WSJ [2] they changed their mind "given concerns over how the switch could be perceived by the market as well as the impact on its wide-ranging business relations with Google." This suggests Microsoft was willing to pay more.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-28/microsoft... [2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-is-spared-a-search-engin...

If you thought I was suggesting a random person on the street would have the money, then you misunderstood.

The actual answer to the question I posed, which you quoted, is that it's actually quite difficult and not a matter of just writing a check.

Is google OVERPAYING so that apple won't start their own search engine?

Or is google UNDERPAYING because the power of defaults is so incredibly high?

If you believe the price tag is so high because Google is secretly paying Apple to stay out of the market, then they'd be overpaying what would otherwise be a fair market price.

But the key argument in this case has been that the value of being "default" is so high that companies like Microsoft can't compete, since those extra queries make google way better. In that sense, Google would be UNDERPAYING.

To make your overpaying argument, Microsoft should have been arguing that being default is worthless and that Google was clearly paying Apple for some "other" nefarious reasons, like not developing their own search engine. I actually think that's a much stronger argument because I think there's evidence of it. But it's not the main argument being made in this weird case about how important it is to be default.

They could have just looked at the evidence of a deal between Google and Apple for Apple to not compete and left it at that. They've made this too complicated. The involvement of these other search companies is irrelevant.

I wouldn't much mind or likely even notice if 98% of their other efforts halted (including political activities).

Imagine a world where Mozilla shifted focus solely to creating a technically excellent web browser.

Worth noting though that the Google deal is going since Mozilla corp. was first established (nearly 20 years ago) and before, when was only the foundation, they're being funded by AOL. So since their early days they're relying on a massive donor.

"Order the divestiture of, at minimum, the Google Ad Manager suite, including both Google’s publisher ad server, DFP, and Google’s ad exchange, AdX, along with any additional structural relief as needed to cure any anticompetitive harm"

Maybe nobody uses the default anyway and they just type "google" into the bing bar before they do any searches.

Vertical Tabs and Chromium without Chrome, what's not to like. Oh, and the ChatGPT sidebar.

This might even be the year of DDG on the Desktop! Well, the next year, or whenever the lawsuit and appeals conclude.