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Comment by 8organicbits | Hacker News Reader

Hmm, the robots.txt, IP blocking, and user agent blocking are all policies chosen by the web server hosting the data. If web admins choose to block Google competitors, I'm not sure that's on Google. Can you clarify?

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A nice example is the recent reddit-google deal which gives google' crawler exclusive access to reddit's data. This just serves to give google a competitive advantage over other search engine.

Well yes, the Reddit-Google deal might be found to violate antitrust. Probably will, because it is so blatantly anticompetitive. But if a publication decides to give special access to search engines so they can enforce their paywall but still be findable by search, I don't think the regulators would worry about that, provided that there's a way for competing search engines to get the same access.

Which is it? Regulators shouldn’t worry, or we need regulations to ensure equal access to the market?

regulators wouldn't worry if all search engines had equal access, even if you didn't because you're not a search engine

And if I had wheels, I would be a car. Theres no equal access without regulation.

Nope. That deal was for AI not search.

Antitrust kicks in exactly in cases like this: using your moat in one market (search) to win another market (AI)

This is false, the deal cuts all other search engines off from accessing Reddit. Go to Bing and search for "news site:reddit.com" and filter results by date from the past week - 0 results.

https://www.404media.co/google-is-the-only-search-engine-tha...

What do you think search is

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