Google is a very strange monopolist
wsj.com
wsj.com
'The judge says 90% of search queries are run on Google, and its only major general search competitor is Microsoft (now valued at $3 trillion). However, the judge concedes that Microsoft was slow in adapting its search engine for mobile devices, causing it to lose ground.
“Google has not achieved market dominance by happenstance. It has hired thousands of highly skilled engineers, innovated consistently, and made shrewd business decisions,” Judge Mehta writes. “The result is the industry’s highest quality search engine, which has earned Google the trust of hundreds of millions of daily users.”
So what’s the antitrust problem? The judge says Google’s advertising revenue-sharing payments to Apple, Mozilla and others for default placement have made it harder for potential startups and Microsoft to compete.
Yet users can switch to other search engines if they want. And Judge Mehta notes that Apple and Mozilla have “promotional deals” with other search engines. Microsoft pitched Apple “on making Bing the default multiple times.” Startup Duck Duck Go also “made a bid to be the default for private browsing mode searches on Safari,” but neither it nor Microsoft “succeeded in part due to their inferior quality.”
This makes for a very strange monopolist—one that does better by consumers because its search engine is superior. “Google’s partners value its quality, and they continue to select Google as the default because its search engine provides the best bet for monetizing queries,” the judge explains, adding that Google “has continued to innovate in search.”'
This is a very narrow view of what antitrust is all about. Are monopolies essentially fine as long as they don't abuse their power too much?
I think it's more the issue that compatibility extremely difficult in technology in a lot of important ways that makes competition and regulation hard. But more importantly, at least on the internet/search/social media side of things, because it is extremely pervasive and holds huge influence on the population and has a lot of data on the population, which makes it an incredible tool to influence political opinion, so it has become very corrupt.
Historically, in the US, just about all forms of antitrust behavior (resale price maintenance, group boycotts, tying, etc) were considered per-se violations of law. That is, you didn't have to prove it harmed anyone, only that it happened.
There were a few things analyzed under the rule of reason (basically does it do more harm than good to consumers, only considering economic effects).
Since the early 1970's, that has slowly changed, and the number of things considered per-se violations has narrowed considerably. Most things are now analyzed under the rule of reason, and you have to show they really are harming consumers.
So to circle back, being a monopoly in the US is fine[1] on its own.
This is all very different than Europe.
[1] Here's what the DOJ's antitrust division says:
Unilateral conduct is outside the purview of section 2 unless the actor possesses monopoly power or is likely to achieve it.
The mere possession or exercise of monopoly power is not an offense; the law addresses only the anticompetitive acquisition or maintenance of such power (and certain related attempts).
Mere harm to competitors--without harm to the competitive process--does not violate section 2.
Competitive and exclusionary conduct can look alike--indeed, the same conduct can have both beneficial and exclusionary effects--making it hard to distinguish conduct that should be deemed unlawful from conduct that should not.
Because competitive and exclusionary conduct often look alike, courts and enforcers need to be concerned with both underdeterrence and overdeterrence.
This hasn't always been the case though. On both iOS and Android, Google was the un-changeable default for a long time (this has helped google keep its dominant position).
Advertisers can’t. What are the other choices - Bing, maybe Facebook?
Furthermore, search users aren’t even Google’s customers. Advertisers are. So whether users can switch is not an interesting question.
There is a separate suit [2] that is specifically about advertisers, not users. It was brought last year.
You assert that only the second one is an interesting question. I'd say they both are. Contrary to your statement, search users are absolutely Google's customers. But a company can have more than one set of customers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2...
On a separate note, does this mean the end of Firefox? almost 100% of their revenue is from google paying to be the default. Will Microsoft pay anything close to that if they don't need to bid against Google for the space?
But hey Mozilla just announced they are thinking about adding Web Apps to Firefox!