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Comment by tirant | Hacker News Reader

How is google a monopoly at all? There’s competition and alternative for each of their products. And people can keep using the alternatives if they want.

I can choose iOS over Android. Bing over Google. Yahoo over Gmail. Dailymotion over YouTube.

Why is it a problem that google makes a superior product and people choose it ?

In all studies, when consumers get faced the decision to choose freely any search engine, most of them keep going back to google. Why is that a problem at all?

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Good questions! You can find the answers in this article[1], and follow the sources linked at the bottom for even more information. If you really want to get into the weeds, you can read about US antitrust law here[2], which has a bunch more articles to other caselaw around monopoly abuse in the US.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act_of_1890

Google may not be a pure monopoly but is a monopoly, by some definition of it.

https://www.economicshelp.org/microessays/markets/monopoly/

This article states that 25% of market share may be sufficient. That is not how I learned it in my economics classes: there we said it's 60% and values below that could be oligopoly (a small number of companies holding ~90% market share).

As for why it's bad: a single provider may choose to degrade their service, or increase charges, or create an unacceptable TOS. They would likely not be able to do that if there is an acceptable alternative.

Google owns ~90% of the search market and if you don't play by their rules, you're out of the game. The argument is that there's nothing really superior about their technology today, just market dominance to force everyone to operate in a way that serves their _ad_ interests as opposed to search interests.

So I signed up for Kagi a while back.

I'll be candid, it's good ... it's a hair less annoying than google, the results are just as hit or miss.

Here is the thing, if I need to BUY something Kagi falls flat on its face.

I find myself going back to google to shop, and to be candid it has drawn a contrast for me on spending. The "extra step" to buy has slowed me down.

I dont think breaking up google changes consumer behavior. It creates a hydra out of a snake.

It's that Google can do things like force manifest V3 on users so that ad blockers are rendered useless, allowing Google to push ads onto those users. I.e. use their dominance in one area (web browsers) to benefit another area (ads).

Google pays $20 billion a year to be default search on Apple. Alphabet's net income was $74 billion in 2023. Why would they reduce profit by 20% to get Apple users to use the search engine that they would use anyway?

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