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Comment by ApolloFortyNine | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion, the search 'monopoly' is just not the best poster child for antitrust cases in the US.

Perhaps the US is too lax on antitrust, but if you, literally anyone reading this, can stop using Google search on every device you own in the next 5 minutes, I just can't see that as a monopoly. Perhaps another word and legislation is required.

You can't even argue the network effect like you can with chat apps or social networks. You can literally cut Google search from your life forever before your lunch break is over.

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If you’re a search engine competitor of Google’s, and Google owns the largest browser and mobile OS and pays the remaining browsers to make them the default, your business is vastly less likely to succeed. This holds even if customers could go out of their way to use your service. That’s what I understood this verdict to have determined. Unfortunately the remedy is bad and pointless, but that’s a separate matter.

Cutting Google accounts out of your life, however, is an entirely different undertaking that would take much longer and have a big impact on how you use the web.

I dont understand. I can browse the internet using a non-Google computer, use a non-Google browser, go to a non-Google website, use a non-Google programming language etc etc.

Nobody, including Google, is stopping you from doing that.

Note, this is different from actual monopoly of railways (I have to use Central Pacific Railroad) or ISP (My city only has Comcast) or electricity (If I want electricity, I have to use PG&E).

The barometer is whether there's meaningful alternative. Can I do X without the $company in question = not a monopoly.

>Note, this is different from actual monopoly of railways

You can ride a horse. Ergo, not a monopoly.

>ISP (My city only has Comcast)

You've got starlink. Not a monopoly.

Sounds like a local problem. Even my parent’s small town in south GA has a choice between AT&T Fiber with symmetric 1GB up/down and the cable company.

> You can ride a horse. Ergo, not a monopoly.

Are you really saying that there is no other search engine you can use besides Google?

No, they're saying their is an alternative, but it comes at a huge disadvantage. Perhaps not for individual users, as a DDG and Firefox user I'm quite content, but it's definitely an overwhelming disparity for website admins. Even if that admin is not literally in Google Analytics to view their site data (and they probably are), they're still looking at an overwhelming majority of organic traffic coming from Google Search using Google Chrome. And for site publishers and advertisers, Google AdSense or Google Ad[Word]s are enormous.

In 1870, if you wanted to get from Chicago to San Francisco, it would be facetious to claim that Union Pacific did not have a monopoly on that route. No, Union Pacific wasn't forcing you to board their train. Just like you can Ctrl+T over to duckduckgo.com/ or bing.com/ or kagi.com/ in seconds, and never go back to Google. You could avoid the railroad monopoly by 'just' riding a horse, or walking, or taking a boat down the Mississippi and launching a sailing expedition around Cape Horn. That's still a monopoly.

That’s a horrible argument. The difference between riding a horse and riding a train is multiple orders of magnitude. The difference between using an alternate search engine is minimum and the experience is often better than Google.

And if your entire business strategy is to have a website and depend on Google search results to drive traffic, you are doing it wrong as many news organizations like Buzzfeed found out.

I do occasional self promotion and “thought leadership” bullshit to put my name out there. I go to where the eyeballs are - LinkedIn. It’s far more likely that the people I want to reach are on LinkedIn than my blog that I don’t have a link to anywhere. I just use it as a publicly accessible place to workshop my writing and thoughts before I post them to LinkedIn.

And I will play the world’s smallest fiddle for advertisers even then, if you have a product to sale to consumers, you are probably better off using Amazon or a Meta app to advertised. It’s better targeting and ads are less likely to be blocked.

Around half of all websites use Google analytics so good luck totally avoiding Google.

Just use an ad blocker. O wait all the chromium browsers just made that harder with manifest v3. 75% of browsers are chromium based?

I don’t think it’s fair to compare digital services to something like PGE. Fundamentally different.

Google lost the case. They just weren’t punished how they should’ve been.

Edit: wow and how could I forget 8.8.8.8 or google’s own transmission lines!

> Around half of all websites use Google analytics so good luck totally avoiding Google.

Isnt adding Google Analytics to the website a decision solely and independently made by the website in question?

You said you you can browse the internet independent of Google and I’m saying you can’t because yes other people can force Google onto you

Whether a company has a business relationship with a company you dont like, doesnt make the same argument you're making.

It is like saying, I dont like Coca Cola but when I go to McDonald's to eat food, they only serve Coca Cola. Hence, Coca Cola is.. bad? McDonald's is free to chose any business partner they like, and you insisting that McDonald's shouldnt use Coca Cola sounds silly.

If you went to McDonalds and had to drink Coke just to walk in the door.

If I understand correctly, manifest v3 is like what Safari implemented a decade ago and it’s perfectly possible to block Google analytics with Safari content blockers.

Yes you can still block it’s just stripped down now eg ublock lite.

My point is that it’s incredibly difficult to avoid Google. Especially for people who aren’t nerds.

How is your argument that you can’t avoid Google supported by the argument that with manifest v3 you can’t block Google analytics even though you can?

In the US, iOS has 60% market share and installing an ad blocker is a matter of going to the App Store and installing it and then enabling in settings. They all walk you through the process. It’s the same on the Mac with the Mac App Store.

That’s not my entire argument I just started going a rabbit hole to show how tied in it all is.

Google pays Apple to be the default search engine.

Google transmits our data undersea.

You can’t easily avoid them!

And you can change your search engine. If you have evidence that someone Google has quantum computers that allows it decrypt encrypted traffic, I’m sure people would like to know.

But no one has been proposing that Google not be allowed to have underseas cables

Yeah because metadata isn’t important…

The argument is that you can cut Google out of your life. The reality is you can’t and many don’t even realize how deeply intertwined it is.

You don’t think that’s going deep down the rabbit hole to show that Google is a monopoly to say that it owns a few of the under seas pipes? How much of an American’s traffic do you think goes over Google’s pipelines?

Well apparently it’s around ¾ of the traffic.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.12253

And the other half all put a giant pop-up asking me to sign into Google. I've not yet figured out how to block it, if anyone knows I would love to hear it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/#wiki_g...

I cannot use my bank app without Google Android. This it count like a monopoly?

No, that's an issue with your bank.

Exactly. "McDonald's only serves Coca Cola. So Coca Cola is .. bad?"

I sometimes dont understand the logic of some people.

Imagine if 99% of stores only served coca cola.

Is coca cola then a monopoly on soft drinks? I would say obviously yes.

This is the situation the current internet and applications are in. They only service users who utilize Google in some type of way, for the majority of apps.

Its deceptive to say "well it's just that one bank". No, that one bank is an example. That's not the breadth of it, and we both know that.

It is not an issue with my bank. Apps from all banks fail on any AOSP ROM because the Play Integrity check.

You can change bank

There is no bank app that works outside Google Android. Try any bank on an AOSP ROM and it will fail because Play Integrity.

> i can ...

You are doing the same mistake PP did, projecting from yourself to others. Not everyone can do this or knows the resons why it is important.

If the search market was that flexible, it wouldnt really make sense to spend a fortune to become the default SE.

I could completely cut Google out of my personal life with no ill effect. I can either use Apple’s iWork or Microsoft’s Office 365, I use ChatGPT as my default search engine now because Google has gotten so bad. I don’t use YouTube regularly except once a year to watch AWS Reinvent videos.

I use Safari on my Mac because Chrome is worse on battery life and doesn’t integrate as well with the rest of my digital life. I use Gmail. But at the end of the day, it’s just another one of my emails.

I did this and it's been great. Still use Google search because it's by far the best but I was using DDG for a while. It's not that difficult to de-Google.

If you are in the business of selling goods can you afford to walk away from Google? Remember you as consumer are not the customer but the product.

That would be an antitrust case against Google Ads though, no?

This case was about consumer search.

Can you explain how Google search exists independent of it's trust with Google Ads. What are the other revenue sources?

My understanding is that monopoly law is concerned with a particular market: does the company dominate a market of buyers or sellers.

This case alleges they dominate consumer visiting and searching their website. It does not allege they dominate advertisers buying ads.

It is though when you realise 60% of their revenue is from people clicking on "nike" to go to "nike.com".

You cannot have a website anymore without paying tribute to gatekeeper Google.

Consumers can switch any time they want, but there is no incentive for them, they don't have to pay when googling for "nike".

But even though there are only 3 companies in the world that build what I build, all those three companies pay thousands of euros a month so users can find them, even on the exact search terms.

> but if you, literally anyone reading this, can stop using Google search on every device you own in the next 5 minutes,

No you can't do this in 5 mins across all your devices. Not unless you are running some software program to achieve this which will override a tonne of defaults and hidden settings. And some devices will always use Google search.

Maybe if your only device is a barebones Linux PC.

The EU uses the term "Gatekeeper"

What about the special access granted by many websites to the Google scraper?

Isn't that a decision solely and independently made by the website in question, and not Google?

Isn't having the power to get everyone to do things that favor your service... a monopoly?

What power? What happens if company doesnt use GA and use Plausible? Nothing. So many companies do it.

What happens if a company doesn't use Google maps to show its location on their website? People think they're weird...

We can, but what about all the people who type facebook into the browser address bar to get to Facebook.com per Google?

I agree with this sentiment actually. Now if Meta gets a "slap on the wrist" that, says a lot.

That's the wrong lens to use. Determine monopolies based on the view of a potential competitor.

Say I'm a new search engine startup that has some better tech than Google has, we invented a better wheel. How hard would it be to compete on merit?

That’s not how unfair monopolies are judged in the US. It’s based on harm to consumers.

As far as how hard is it to compete, it’s not the governments job to force people to use your alternate search engine. Choosing another search engine is literally just a click away.

Exactly. It has never been easy to search stuff using non-Google search engines.

You like traditional search engines? Use bing, ddg.

You like AI powered ones? ChatGPT, Perplexity

You want to pay for your search? Kagi

You want to plant trees each you search (!)? Ecosia

There are soooo many choices. But people choosing Google out of free will seems to be a bad thing for Google.

> literally anyone reading this, can stop using Google search on every device you own in the next 5 minutes

Yeah sure you can avoid typing google.com and think you just ghosted Google forever, but that won't end Google's relationship with you as it runs deeper than you know through its advertisement and tracking platform.

And what about services beyond search at this point?

Youtube, GMail, Google Calendar, GoogleFi, Maps, Play store (movies, apps), Photos, Drive.

I can try stop using those services immediately, but with a huge cost of data and connectivity loss (there's no easy email redirection, accounts are usually tied to emails). You'll also miss out on things that don't have a nice alternative and you are socially pulled into (green/blue messages in iMessage within the US or having WhatsApp abroad), can you stop clicking into links to documents, presentations and videos that people share?

Isn't the lawsuit (and the entire discussion) specifically about a search monopoly?

Also, I'm curious, how many of the things you listed would be normally used by a prolific user of Apple hardware and software? Just YouTube, right?

> I can try stop using those services immediately, but with a huge cost of data and connectivity loss

Doesnt this mean that you get certain value from Google. Are you upset that one company is creating products that you find indispensible. Or are you upset that others have not been able to build products that you like?

This is like saying "Apple M series chips are sooo good. Apple sucks"

Think about how easy it became to switch mobile carriers. The state of things in the Internet is closer to mobile companies before phone numbers were easily portable across carriers.

Can I stop using GMail? yes, but not really. Same as I wasn't able to switch phone companies 20 years ago because reliance on the phone number to stay connected (and abusive contracts).

> Doesn't this mean that you get certain value from Google.

Yes, but that's no the issue, otherwise I'd have no reason to use it in the first place, right? The problem is that it's hard to migrate.

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