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Comment by digi_owl | Hacker News Reader

The "monopoly" word is irrelevant. It boils down to using a major market position (search) to leverage a position in another market.

The whole hoopla about browser choice in Windows was for much the same, as Microsoft used their OS market position to push Internet Explorer, that in turn pushed IIS.

Frankly the browser war was a proxy for intranet server competition. Netscape was trying to use internet tech to go after corporate networks, and MS was trying to cut them off at the pass.

You don't need to be a monopoly to get slapped with antitrust. All that is needed is for you to be the big dog of the pack, and seen as abusing that position.

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What's the "other market" in this case though?

Flights. Mail. Cloud services. Office suite software. Etc.

Imagine that you search for "orlando new york flight" and the first result is rigged to be Google Flight Search. Or you look for "cloud database" and Google Cloud SQL is first.

Google is trying to get into a lot of markets, and its dominance in search could give its many other ventures an advantage.

I can see that perspective from one angle. But I still come back to the fact that it's trivially easy to not use Chrome or Google search. There is no barrier (such as cost or method of delivery like in the old days of the browser wars) to prevent a user from making the switch.

And wouldn't this all be an issue for a company like Amazon as well? They are a marketplace, yet they also make tablets, e-readers, have a video-streaming service. Aren't they using their position as a online retailer to push their products in other markets over other company's products?

It was actually pretty trivially easy to install Netscape.

It most certainly could affect Amazon. And I would be okay with that.

Several people already told you: it doesn't matter if it's trivially easy not to use google.com or chrome. Anti-trust law is about market realities. Google has a dominant position in several markets and they abuse it to gain advantage in other markets as well.

Anti-trust law is about market realities.

Such as the fact that you can easily use something other than Chrome and Google search on any of devices? I mean, the position is starting to sound like "anti-trust" really means "The government taxes companies who hold a dominant position in the marketplace."

Edit: I can't reply to this thread anymore, so I'll just expand a bit here.

I get that on some level, all regulation/etc is some form of tax. I guess my point is that what constitutes 'anti-trust' is too unclear. It sounds a lot like governments just arbitrarily decide that its time for a certain company to give them money, without adequate justification.

> I mean, the position is starting to sound like "anti-trust" really means "The government taxes companies who hold a dominant position in the marketplace."

Anti-trust is overtly about government placing additional restrictions (which, as they have costs, can be viewed as a kind of taxes) on companies with market power so as to limit the degree to which that market power accelerates within its core market and spreads to other markets denying effective choice.

So, you haven't really discovered anything that isn't exactly the overt point of antitrust law.

> Several people already told you: it doesn't matter if it's trivially easy not to use google.com or chrome. Anti-trust law is about market realities.

From the anti-trust cases I've seen, the existence of viable (in the sense of accessible and sufficient, I think) alternatives is usually one of the market realities taken into consideration. If it is trivially easy not to use Google.com or Chrome, then Google's position is solidified by consumer choice rather than anti-competitive behavior.

The tricky bit is that they are giving a crap ton of code and services away to consumers/customers, while taking payment from other companies for better references etc.

In a sense it can be likened to the drug dealer classic "the first dose is free".

There is also Ara. While one the surface it seems to break down the old consumer facing problems with mobile devices, there is no indication that Google will give up control over the endoskeletons that the modules attach to. Heck, they may set themselves up as sole distributor of modules. Even go as far as tracking modules, under the guise of disabling them if stolen.

Nothing is a giveaway. It's all in exchange for your data, which is what they are profiting off of.

And yes, Ara was an awesome Motorola project that Google will now ruin with walled garden design. The endoskeleton is not intended to be third party-able.

Do you have any evidence that Motorola was going to just give away Ara and not own the ecosystem? You know, the company that was hemorrhaging money and teetering on bankruptcy wasn't going to try and own the IP of the endoskeleton and charge for access to it?

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