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Comment by xyzzy9563 | Hacker News Reader

Google is effectively being punished for retaining their earnings and re-investing in tons of software R&D over the years. Their "monopoly" is because people choose to use them, not because they have to. Not to mention they are are being disrupted by ChatGPT and other LLMs anyways right now. There have always been lots of web browsers and search engines, but Google simply did a better job making and refining their software and hiring people to do that.

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No. They are being punished for unfairly limiting competitiveness with repeated monopolistic practices affecting the browser/search markets relation.

But they only have high market share because people want to use Google instead of the competitors. Many consumers switch their search engine to Google when presented with other defaults. Because Google search works the best and people know that.

The aggressive marketing of Chrome on Google Search website to users using other browsers was a significant part of Chrome adoption success.

And no - some people didn't willingly and consciously switched to their search engine. It was pushed down their throats by browser vendors being paid-off by Google for setting it as the default one. Mozilla has overwritten user-changed search engine setting in Firefox with several updates.

Non tech-savvy users simply accept changes made in software they use.

I don't know if you remember but it was just a few years ago that using search engines like bing was a shameful meme.

Nowadays using Google Search is, since they pivoted from from being a "search company" to "adtech company" which resulted in the degradation of Google Search quality.

"Engines like Bing" is an ambiguous term. There are better options than Bing.

When by far the most generous reading of a post is that it’s a low-effort troll, I’d recommend ignoring the poster entirely.

So then why do they pay Apple $25,000,000,000 a year to default search to Google?

Because they have the money and Apple wants them to pay. Why should Google let a competitor pay a lesser amount to be the default?

Because $25 billion is a large amount of money and you just made the claim that people would use Google regardless

Thanks for putting up the good fight, but parent is not arguing from a place of logic.

ok so google paid companies like apple to make google the default search engine. you cannot claim everything was just because their product was good. you can argue that striking the deal with apple was just a smart business move, but google isn't winning just because of their r&d.

It's just a default, you can change it. Did Google coerce Apple into taking that deal somehow? Or did they simply offer them the most compelling deal in a free market?

Keep in mind that if paying to be the default search engine in a browser is illegal, then Firefox's primary revenue source is out the window.

That's exactly what the government wants intentionally or unintentionally: make Firefox's primary revenue stream disappear.

Spoiler: Firefox’s primary revenue source is going to go out the window.

> Their "monopoly" is because people choose to use them, not because they have to.

If I give you only one reasonable option and you choose that, is that selection? What if this one option distinguished others?

It's the only reasonable option because they did the best job making a search engine. The competitors have search engines but their software is worse.

> Google is effectively being punished for retaining their earnings and re-investing in tons of software R&D over the years

They have indeed invested tons in r&d, but with excessively little results. Besides web search it's tough to see succeses that Google didn't buy their way into. Gmail, maps, ... maybe?

Who knows when or if this current AI wave would've happened without Google.

That argument cuts both ways: Who knows how much longer we had to wait for this AI boom because google was sponging up every genius to work on ad selling algorithms.

Google's research departments hyped up DeepMind's success in board games and enabled huge amounts of marketing which makes you believe this. However, DeepMind was a resounding failure after GPT's were released. If you look at the multiple documentaries, they now seem cringeworthy because of Google's arrogance about AI. Google did not simply do a better job, they acquired the companies that did and then convinced you that they were part of Google the entire time so they can take the credit.

I'm really glad that YC brought this against Google but it should be clear that YC also enabled them. It's a lie that YC is independent from Google as it partners and promotes their engineers and Big Tech allies. They see the writing on the wall and their lawyers see this as a hedge against lawsuits against them. "We didn't cause this mess, see look! We're trying to help!" YC also doesn't serve American startups at all and their entrepreneurs strongly favors California or India.

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