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Comment by ianbutler | Hacker News Reader

Paying to be the default is anti-competitive. Things like this, which directly and blatantly hinder competition, should be legislated away. I can conceive of a smaller but better product which just doesn't have the war chest to pay for positioning. That smaller but better product will have a much harder time growing if by default it is never exposed to the user. That pretty clearly has the potential to harm consumers.

You can argue "defaults can be changed", sure. However, we know from years of study on consumer behavior they don't. The activation energy just isn't there for users to switch defaults, and they likely don't even know they can. Rarely are defaults left because they're just so darn good.

I'd prefer things like this have a pop up during set up with a randomly ordered set of choices. To get on that list of choices might have a token fee (small sums of money are effective at weeding out garbage) required.

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> Things like this, which directly and blatantly hinder competition, should be legislated away.

> I can conceive of a smaller but better product which just doesn't have the war chest to pay for positioning. That smaller but better product will have a much harder time growing if by default it is never exposed to the user. That pretty clearly has the potential to harm consumers.

I don't know how you write this law.

- Are you compelling OS makers to present arbitrary options for various types of application? For search only? If so, why? If not, where does it end? How do you weigh this against free speech concerns in the relevant jurisdictions?

- Why would it only apply to search providers and operating systems? Paying for positioning happens in many, many places. Would we not also need to outlaw sponsorships and exclusivity deals such as "$BRAND_NAME - the official beer of $SPORTS_ARENA"? You can't bring outside beverages in, so you're limited to "the default".

Agree. Coming up with a piece of legislation that actually works seems impossible. There are a zillion commercial agreements around distribution, exclusivity etc and a lot of business doesn't work without it.

Let's get rid of all of it. Those examples all harm me as a consumer.

"Get rid of all of it"? Here's the thing, laws don't remove bad things from society, they add constraints on the bad things and penalties for violating the constraints.

So you're not proposing getting rid of something (which sounds so nice and simple!), you're proposing creating new restrictions on what businesses can do. Those restrictions have to be defined in a clear, unambiguous way to avoid challenges in court.

I'm saying there's probably no version of your hypothetical law that would stand up in court (not to mention pass a legislature).

To your point of consumer harm, businesses have rights (varying by the law of the land) that must be balanced against consumer rights.

I'm being a little more devil's advocate here and playing fast with some of the practical realities than I might personally hold as an actual opinion so keep that in mind, but:

A business should always be subservient to the general citizens who will make up said business. Following that, consumer rights (citizen rights) should always be promoted over the rights of a business. So I don't know that I take your point about balancing those two things. They seem like separate classes of rights with one that is more important. I guess that's technically still balancing, but in a way that business always loses.

As to writing a law to stand up to scrutiny. I don't know that I have to care about that. That's not my problem to deal with, that's our legislators problem. In fact that should be one of their primary problems, writing laws that stand up to scrutiny that protect abuse of general citizens.

It seems more like a lack of will, which I could speculate on.

Edit: I'll say this, as something reflecting my actual opinion. I tend to agree that this has a high degree of complexity and applying a flippant indiscriminate legislation to ban this won't work and won't stand up to legal scrutiny, though I get the sense you know a lot more about why than I do. That said, I do think we can do better, and if you work backwards from an impossibly high ideal, with a lot of time and effort someone can land on a solution that's better than nothing. I don't think that's impossible. I don't think legislation is necessarily the right way to go about it. I was hesitant to add that part to my initial post but went with it anyway. It isn't aligned entirely with my own beliefs about competition, even though I think the practice of pay for play is kind of gross, and imbalanced and doesn't reflect a superior product.

My sibling comment here is right, businesses are more like people than you are allowing, at least when it comes to protection from government interference.

It's easy to fall into a trap where "business" === "huge rich company", but it's just not that simple.

You say it's a lack of will, but I really don't buy that most people hold your position that anything resembling an exclusive arrangement like we've been talking about should be illegal. Personally I absolutely don't support that sort of blanket rule.

That's fair, I don't even hold my own opinion. I like talking about extremes in so much as what I learn from other people and by looking at the thread it seems to have done the job. You have the benefit of not knowing me, but I suspect if you'd ask one of my friends this entire thread is almost distinctly the opposite of my view on business and legislation.

The businesses are legal fictions which are owned by humans and run by humans. In practice, it's just a group of humans. So any time you assume you are putting the rights of citizens ahead of businesses, you are putting the rights of one set of humans over another set.

It's never simple. It's really hard (/impossible) to come up with good legislation. Much of it creates weird incentives or high costs to enforce or high costs to doing business which are passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices and citizens in the form of lower dividend checks in retirement.

Saying "it's not my problem" amounts to "i have no idea how to solve this".

You're right I have no idea how to solve this very large problem in society, I'm flattered that you expected me to. Though I'm not sure in reality I have the responsibility to know the answer to any large problems like this. I don't know much about anything really. I can still express the problem however.

I expect my representatives who I do vote for to know answers like this though and that's not unreasonable, its one of the basis of our current system in fact.

Representatives aren't magicians. If you can't do it, they probably can't. It might be terrifying, but it's true. Representatives being able to do things you can't is not the basis for a political system.

Outside of my above hyperbolics that I was pushing for the sake of discussion:

That doesn't terrify me, it makes me question why have them then? I don't need a paper pusher with a loud voice, I want leaders who can solve problems their constituents think are important and take on responsibility of figuring these things out.

If you gave me time to devote to it, a staff, authority, and the right bipartisanship climate I could figure it out.

I don't have an answer, because I spent less than an hour thinking about this problem, and most of that hour was spent starting to understand the nuances involved from a half assed answer I threw out into the void because I could and I was curious to see what people would say, not because I couldn't arrive at an actual solution given the time and resources. I remain convinced this problem is tractable even if its not through legislative means.

I'm not invested in this problem enough to take action though, I'd rather go back to working on my side projects. I am however, invested enough to spend an hour shooting the shit on a message board.

Historically because it was impossible to have everyone vote on everything all the time.

Nowadays you still have the problem in some sense due to trust in voting systems, but theoretically you could run many of the functions of congress via calling a vote to the general population and they could do it on their smart phone or something. Auth would be hard(ish) from a practical perspective. Knowing enough about a topic could be easily resolved via allowing voters to appoint a proxy on certain bills or writ large.

I would like to provide two quick examples.

Google Chrome is not the default browser on windows, isn’t even installed yet commands > 60% market share worldwide across all platforms, likely higher on windows.

Google Maps on iPhone has reportedly 70% market share, doesn’t come even installed.

This is not to say buying defaults is a good thing, but the premise that being default automatically commands usage and people don’t switch from default would be incorrect in these glaring examples.

Chrome because every time you visit google.com in a non-Chrome browser, it'll blast you with an ad to download Chrome.

Maps because by the time Chrome has pressured you into logging into your Google Account(TM), you've already drank the Kool-Aid (and/or they're pushing it via Google search rich results).

Fair points, I don't really have any data to counter that, but doubt you do either. At the end it can all be shown to be interconnected, whether good products are driving more adoption or just being default is ensuring the cycle continues, I'm not sure google understands it or is too scared to find out and so pays out.

One other thing I'll add is that Chrome doesn't advertise itself on safari (when browsing google.com) on an IOS device, at least all my current attempts to have it do that have failed.

That's because it's the default on Android, an operating system famously purchased and stewarded by Google that makes up globally the broad share of mobile. Please show me the breakdown on Windows, I bet the default is edge and bing and unless you're moderately tech savvy don't bother to change it. If you prove me wrong there I'll take your point, otherwise your point is disingenuous.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl... Here are stats for Desktops, this should exclude Android, and Chrome is 64% share, safari 12.49% share (which is Apple devices exclusive) and Edge 10.6%. If you do some deduction and eliminate Apple here, then it would increase chrome's share to 73% and Edge share to 12.5%,

On mobile edge doesn't show up in top 5, and is .6% on tablets.

Thank you! Okay so yeah looks like people still do choose Chrome independent of the default that is shipped. That would indicate people are making the switch because they like it, fair enough!

These kinds of arrangements are all over the commercial industry. For example, grocery stores charge slot fees to determine which products go on which shelves. Pepsi and Coke have exclusive distribution deals at thousands of retail points-of-sale. Companies have been paying to be included in Bundleware as long as the internet has been around. Medications, towards either generics or brand-names, are defaulted to in all sorts of scenarios. Dealerships only use OEM parts.

Should all of those arrangements be illegal also?

> However, we know from years of study on consumer behavior they don't.

Internet Explorer was the default.

> Internet Explorer was the default.

It still is if you consider Edge to be in the lineage.

> Paying to be the default is anti-competitive.

Paying to be default is competing.

It may be leveraging or protecting a monopoly when you already have one, but otherwise its just a mechanism of competition. (Like most mechanisms of conpetition, it favors those who already have an advantage—especially the particular advantage of a bigger pool of money to spend on it—which is essentially why we have rules conditioned on existing market power in the first place.)

Only if you're a wannabe (or actual) monopolist is it competiton, otherwise the product should compete on it's merits. Practically this doesn't happen, but I can argue ideals for no consequences on a message board. Similarly, I view advertising as largely manipulative and avoid it where possible, while paying for products that I derive value from.

For the record, if I were running a successful business I'd be paying for whatever I thought expanded the success of my company. I'm pragmatic above most other things, and play the game as it stands. That doesn't mean I can't hold on to extreme ideals at the same time. There is acknowledging reality isn't as you want it to be and working with that and then there's ignoring the reality in front of you. That latter one leads to ruin.

> That smaller but better product will have a much harder time growing if by default it is never exposed to the user.

my opinion is that if the product is vastly superior it would gain market share no matter what (we have countless examples for this). but if the new product is just a minor improvement or a minor change over the default choice, then yes, defaults would matter in that case.

If that is true with regard to Google search, why is Google paying so much?

because the differences between competitors are minute. as such the only real differentiator is how much they can afford to pay for being the default. if there was a huge breakthrough product it wouldn’t need to pay anything, people would just flock to it, defaults be damned.

I'm not trying to justify this, but "pay for positioning" is everywhere, even your grocery store.

I don't know that it's a good solution to legislate every little thing including positioning in a UI, but I do think we need to be much, much more aggressive than we are now at stopping monopolies and breaking up these megacorps.

Well it's more like Google is victim of rent seeking. Pay me $26b or Bing will be the default. Google has clear first choice preference across a large swathe of the market.

Microsoft bundled their browser with the OS yet chrome/chromium is the largest browser by market share. People spent 5 minutes downloading and installing another browser. Switching search engines takes 20 seconds. How does defaulting a search engine harm users? Do you users pay more money? Are Google search inferior to other search engines?

Also what happens to Firefox if they can only charge a nominal fee for search engines priority? That is 90% of their revenue.

The way to beat google's search dominance is to build a better search engine. Bing could beat them today if "Browse by bing" didn't take 30+ seconds to get you results. It is vastly superior at finding answers than google search.

> People spent 5 minutes downloading and installing another browser. Switching search engines takes 20 seconds. Are Google search inferior to other search engines?

If that is true then why is Google spending $25 billion with a B per year? Do they like wasting money? Why isn't there a shareholder lawsuit?

The real answer is that they want to kill a chance to build competitors or for them to grow. No?

The real answer is that the browser vendors are abusing their market dominance, to charge incredible amounts of money to search engines in a pay to play scheme.

Can't add an edit to my own post past the time limit: I was pretty hesitant to add the bit about legislating. I'm not entirely convinced of it myself, but it seems to have been divisive enough to get responses while being interesting enough so that those responses aren't just flat out low quality. For a message board I think that's a win.

I stand by the fact I think this is anti competitive, its the big guy throwing weight around to prevent any little guys from emerging. I think that actively harms innovation, and by extension the consumer.

I know that's how things are and will likely continue to be. On the flip side I don't think it's entirely fair to say "Wow you did so well, but now we have to tie your hands as you're ripped to shreds by the hounds." Success should earn you some type of advantage, but I don't think first past the post should get you permanent immunity. Or if the market is so hard to compete in that it is infeasible for someone else, such that its a natural monopoly we have words for enterprises like that: Utility.

Complicated problem for sure.

What you’re saying is true but people will switch defaults easily if the default is much better. It’s just RARELY new products are much better.

For some reason, the other search engines are not really better. Microsoft probably spent millions on Bing and it’s not fantastic. (I haven’t tried Kagi yet).

Pardon me - can I ask analogy to better understand your point of view?

What kind of tires come on your Ford truck?

If Ford chooses the "default" tires you get on your F-150... is that anti-competitive, for all other tire manufacturers?

Must Ford give you the option which tires you want on your new F-150? Must they do it in a way that doesn't start with a "default"?

Or is the problem not that Ford picks a tire manufacturer, but that the tire manufacturer cannot in your mind share the profits back with Ford?

Not the person you are responding to but I think it’s more like if Goodyear had 90 percent of the tire market and paid every single manufacturer to be the default tires. Sure consumers could choose but realistically most people go with the default.

Makes it impossible for smaller incumbents to compete

Poor analogy.

Tires are safety-critical equipment with a minimum bar of performance and externally imposed regulations on them that they function at an acceptable level. This makes them a mostly fungible commodity. Search engines are not, and as Google shows, have no minimum bar of performance that a reasonable person can expect.

Also you buy tires once, and then beyond wear and tear they don’t just randomly degrade one day. With search engines you are continuously subject to the daily whims of Google beancounters.

There's a million other parts of your car that don't have any particular minimum bar of performance, or externally imposed regulation. By what right does Ford get to choose a default glove compartment, or sun flaps, or volume infotainment knob, etc, etc, etc.

What? That’s an even worse analogy. Being integral parts of the Ford truck, it’s like saying that users should have a choice of what programming language Google used for its services, or what brand server it uses in its data centers, or which brand of networking equipment it uses — utterly meaningless.

Tires don't control access to knowledge on an ongoing basis. I also own the tires in perpetuity. Arguably in the grand scheme of things tires are just not that important compared to something like a search engine. Tires are a commodity. Search isn't and so they need to be treated differently.

I don't think I'd entertain putting them at the same level and so the analogy falls apart.

Other examples come to mind:

* Dedicated Netflix button on TV remotes (you can't even change this)

* SiriusXM bundled (with free trial) with car stereos

The difference is that the tyre manufacturers don't pay Ford to stick their tyres on Ford's vehicles.

No, but yes.

They're not paying Ford for putting a Michelin tire on the vehicle, but they are likely getting an above "volume order" discount.

Similar to Search engines, how often do you hear about people changing the brand of tire on their vehicle? How often is it just "I bought another of what I already had"?

Disclaimer: Former Googler, though in Cloud.

Paying to be default is not anti competitive.

Good grief. At the end of the day some orders will be arbitrary.

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