> why didn't somebody else just do that
Yeah, who doesn't have a half-decent web search engine a couple of hundred billion dollars lying around.
Yeah, who doesn't have a half-decent web search engine a couple of hundred billion dollars lying around.
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.
Same as Standard Oil, J.P. Morgan, US Steel, Armour Meats, etc. last century.
"Regulation can be good" is a principle I agree with. That is separate from whether the central argument being made about whether being the default is all it takes to create the highest quality search engine.
Personal opinion: it sticks in my craw a little if it turns out you can be a monopolist by just working to be the default search engine because users are too lazy to try switching. That's a weird way to interpret the "consumer harm" cornerstone of American antitrust.
What Microsoft is saying in this case is that their search engine sucks by comparison to google and lacks quality because they don't have the same number of queries since they aren't the default. That whoever has the most queries will automatically be the highest quality and win across all platforms, not just Apple where it's the default. Your argument is very different! You're essentially arguing that Microsoft is wrong about not being nearly as good as Google. See https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/2/23900233/microsoft-ceo-sa...
Granted, one could I suppose have some concerns with an argument that says " We can't be as good because we don't have the ability to harvest nearly as much private data that users don't just hand you unless you intermediate yourself in their lives..."
... But there's meat on the bones of that being a roundabout way to argue consumer harm.
Also worth mentioning Firefox didn't always choose Google's bid historically.
I get the impression Microsoft doesn't believe its own argument that all you need to do is write a check.