The antitrust case against Google Search doesn't seem to add up
techdirt.com
techdirt.com
> As we’ve noted, a key part of the ongoing case was just how much Google was paying for these defaults (over $26.3 billion in 2021). But that seems to actually argue against an abuse of a monopoly position argument. Because if Google were such a monopoly, then it wouldn’t need to pay as much to get those deals. There just wouldn’t be other offerings to compete.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what constitutes a monopoly. It is not just "Google is the only usable search engine, therefore it's a monopoly, therefore it must be fined." A monopoly is typically someone who is already a leader in an industry, using their vast resources to make it incredibly difficult or even nearly impossible for competition. A judge may very well find that what Google is doing with Apple constitutes monopolistic practices.
If it's still not: Users must actively take the step of downloading and installing it. Is this step less difficult than changing the default search engine in Firefox or Safari?
And Google guide people to how to install chrome and majority of people can download some exe and run it with next next while keeping the defaults. And many of them will not change any of the settings. And chrome will take every chance to let you revert back to google search if you happen to change it.
The entire antitrust regime from it's inception, all of the caselaw, is a mixture of judicial activism, chest thumping, and executive branch blackmail. It should all be struct down. Start again.
"Indeed, the article notes that Yahoo agreed to pay nearly $100 million more than Google, which was important revenue for Mozilla.... 'I felt strongly that Yahoo was not delivering the search experience we needed and had contracted for.'"
Yahoo paid nine-figures more than Google to be mozilla's default search engine, but the quality just wasn't good enough. This is a strong hint that quality in this space matters more than just money. How much more would yahoo have had to pay for Mozilla to put up with the decreased quality?
The problem with this whole mess is that monopoly, monopolization, and monopolistic practices were not defined by legislation. Legislation in fact provides no definitions whatsoever. The entirety of Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act is comprised of a single run on sentence.
It's all well and good to be all "it's Mabo, it's justice, it's the vibe" over this, but congress hasn't provided legislation required to regulate competitive markets.
So the answer to your question is: monopolization is illegal according to the the Sherman Act, and the power to regulate markets is well within the (extremely broad) scope of existing laws (including the Federal Trade Commission Act and the Clayton Act).
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
This is pure hyperbole. Changing (default) search engines is incredibly easy. Using a different one is as easy as typing bing.com instead of Google.com in the address bar. Ta da.
Not smoking a cigarette is also as easy as not buying or lighting.
While what Google is paying companies like Apple for is technically just to make Google the default search engine, it's actually having the effect of making these companies (and particularly Apple) not bother to develop their own search engine because it's so profitable for them to just take the money from Google.
Apple is a company that usually prefers to develop its own services rather than use third party services (e.g. see maps), so it's highly likely that it would have created its own search engine by now if it wasn't getting so much money from Google.
If in effect Google is paying companies not to develop search engines (even if they aren't specifically agreeing not to do so), that seems like a pretty big issue when search engines are such an essential part of the internet.
The argument essentially is that Apple and Google are collaborating to collectively wall off the market and share the profits.
Maybe, but for me it struggles to recommend relevant reddit articles, copy+pasted error messages were hit/miss. It just feels like it sometimes misses obvious things, even word for word things, and I type it into google and it's right there. I apologize I dont have any good examples off hand
I started out resorting to it every day. Now it's only maybe every couple or weeks.
Maybe I've just trained myself to phrase questions that return better results on Google than other sites, I don't know.
I do know that I have never, ever gotten a result from DDG that meets or exceeds the same Google search.
Local searches simply don't work. My favorite example is searching for "restaurante" and getting Spanish results, even though I'm from Romania. By comparison, Google understands what I want and delivers a list of "restaurants near me", alongside websites in Romanian.
But it doesn't stop at local searches. Programming-related searches are terrible too. I have to second-guess DDG on every search. The Google search doesn't always yield better results, but it does so enough that it's making me not trust DDG.
Honestly, even the ads on Google are better than DDG's search results. As far as alternative search engines go, Brave Search delivers better results for my search patterns. They are still terrible at local searches, but I'm not noticing the DDG-like blunders. When Brave Search isn't delivering, it's probably due to the size of their index, but at least it's their own index.
"Works for me" doesn't cut it. First, because nobody cares. You all should spend more time with the normies to see how they are using tech. They don't refine the search phrase to make it more specific (even though that doesn't help much with DDG either).
It's also worth considering that DDG is basically just a Bing shell, so I wouldn't consider it competition. If it doesn't have its own crawler, index and ranking algorithm, it's not competing with Google.
I hate the thought of having to go back to Google full time, but it's really looking that way. Has anyone else experienced something similar?
The funny thing about Google Maps is I actually hate their map (and their navigation), and vastly prefer using Apple Maps to actually look at a map or to get to a place, but Google Maps is so far and away better than any competitors in its value-add information about businesses.
The difference between looking for a restaurant on Google's or on Apple's maps products is pretty stark.
I know Kagi supposedly supports both(?) of these, but in my experience, I end up needing to re-search things with !g well over half the time.
To get even more specific to my use cases:
Recently, I've been on the move, so in order to work, I rely on cafes and libraries. Thus, the fewer steps I need to do to see opening hours for a given location, the better.
The most common conversion that I need is timezone, as I work with people in a huge number of different timezones. It's very useful for me to be able to type in something like "almaty time nyc 9pm" without screwing around on one of those time conversion sites.
Off the top of my head, detailed map results and conversions.
I know Kagi supposedly supports both(?) of these, but in my experience, I end up needing to re-search things with !g well over half the time.
To get even more specific to my use cases:
Recently, I've been on the move, so in order to work, I rely on cafes and libraries. Thus, the fewer steps I need to do to see opening hours for a given location, the better.
The most common conversion that I need is timezone, as I work with people in a huge number of different timezones. It's very useful for me to be able to type in something like "almaty time nyc 9pm" without screwing around on one of those time conversion sites.
Kagi has been the only engine where, since setting as default, the only times I've used google search has been on machines I don't control. I have found it to have most of the widgets I tend to like (unit conversions, calculators etc).
Maybe I should've broken that habit to give DDG a fairer shake before switching away to Kagi, but when I switched, I added a custom search engine to my browser with the keyword "!g" that strips out the !g and searches on Kagi.
My experience is that it gives me the results I'm looking for 95% of the time, and for most of the 5% where I don't get good results, Google also fails to give me good results.
In the past year or so, there have been several times where one of my coworkers lamented how bad Google search was, and in almost every example, Kagi performed better.
I did find I used Google's widgets a lot and it took some time to break the habit but for most flows I don't have a first step of opening a browser anymore so actually ended up faster.
But that's me. If it's not working for you, it's not working.
If the default search engine market needs to be made more competitive, then Apple can’t just be free to sell its default to the highest bidder and should be required by law to make every user choose a search engine.
And even then I expect 90% of users to choose Google. The lawsuit makes no sense!
But my main point stands— the lawsuit is against google. If Google is not allowed to pay Apple because of their monopoly status, does that mean MSFT still could pay Apple? Is the goal of this lawsuit just to give Bing a better rate? It just seems weird to focus on Google here when Apple seems to be the more actionable company to sue, since Apple actually controls the market of “default search engine on iOS”.
That doesn’t mean that they weren’t guilty of being a coercive monopolist.
It’s quite possible this means that the Apple/Google deal is not allowed but only if Google is deemed to be abusing their market position.
But in 2023, are there any operating systems that don't ship with a built-in browser? Is there any reality in which the browser isn't an integral part of the operating system?
And then there's also the fact, which people forget, that IExplorer was a technically superior browser to Netscape's Navigator. It took a revamping of the organization, and of the product, to come up with a Firefox that could compete.
Even in the absence of payments, Apple would still be entirely within its rights to set Google as the default search provider, which is why the lawsuit isn’t about Apple. It’s about the set of things that Google has done to inhibit search competition, only one of which is paying Apple for default placement.
For regular search results, I often find myself frustrated that Google seems to prefers ad-heavy sites where any actual content is copied from elsewhere then unnecessarily padded. As an ad company it's probably not in their interest to include it as a factor to rank such sites lower, even when though it legitimately degrades user experience. I've noticed a lot of "[game] wiki" searches on Google give an unmaintained and incomplete Fandom pages, whereas other search engines are better at surfacing the one actively used by the community.
A true blind comparison between results would be interesting. Not just users reacting to the change in site as with the article's example, and also ideally not a marketing campaign like Microsoft's "Bing It On" that dubiously claimed a 2:1 preference towards Bing.
There are currently no versions of reverse image search existing today that are as good as what Google was offering several years ago.
Which have you tried? Finding unwatermarked versions of stock image photos is a pretty low bar that most should be capable of. Some are at the level of finding videos a person appears in based on a blurry photograph of their face, or determining a street/location based on a photograph of a building.
I know I used to be able to upload pretty much any image to Google and get hits of other places the image was used, and now I'll upload an image I found online and get no hits. All the reverse image searches are now trying to do cute AI tricks, like detect a handbag in the photo and show where you can buy it, or the breed of dog. All I want is other places hosting that exact image.
I used to use Google quite a bit for coding issues and now I mostly get my answers from ChatGPT premium. And the answers are getting better at least for my questions. Same for cooking recipes ; I hate going to recipe sites as they are poorly written and crawling with distractions; ChatGPT saves me from this ordeal.
The issue is the internet just has too much garbage now. The SEO arms race has generated an insane amount of bot-generated garbage, mobile devices have made the internet is so accessible that it's filled with people generating garbage. It's garbage all the way down.
Have you ever watched a 0 view YouTube or TikTok video? I end up with them in my feed every once in a while and check them out and it's always garbage. And this is MOST of the content on these platforms! Back in the mid-aughts, YouTube was new and it was still somewhat novel to plug a camcorder into your computer and upload a video file to the site. Now every 8-year-old is walking around with an iPad wirelessly connected to the internet, and a YouTube app with a giant, idiot-proof button to start recording a video and upload it right from the app.
It blows my mind how much server space and bandwidth is being dedicated to host and transmit all this garbage around the world.
We can allow Google to naturally dominate search if it truly can, while still restricting anti-competitive behavior and if that doesn't work you can simply break Google into parts so one company isn't dominating so many search (Google)/video (Youtube)/phones(Android)/browser(Chrome). It's what they did with the phone companies before.
I'm not saying that this is what should happen. I'm just saying the article really misses the issues and what suggested remedies there could be.
Can you elaborate? The article shows that Yahoo outbid Google for the default in Firefox. So the evidence shows companies are competing for these agreements.
Your turning the whole thing on it's head by saying they are competing for the exclusive contract. The competition is for one search engine to be better than another search engine and the user chooses the best. It's not for vendors to compete to limit other vendors access to the market.