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Comment by azinman2 | Hacker News Reader

Except here's the thing -- it's not a natural monopoly. There aren't physical wires with no alternative like Ma Bell. There aren't things that google is doing that prevents other search engines from coming into existence -- they can't prevent new web crawls. Even Firefox now uses yahoo by default, and the open crawler data even gives anyone a head start on crawling the web!

Competition, if it were much better, could easily take away search market share. Having better localized results for France could be one of those ways. People aren't using google because they have no other choice, it's because google is genuinely doing a better job. That's not a reason to break up a company.

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In France most of google users does not even know there is an alternative to Google, most of people I met in France that are not under 30 or working in a web related area just does not get it clear what is the difference between a web browser and Google. They launch it, write what they are looking for in the address bar and they just get a google search result which they think is a feature from their browser to enter the web. IMHO that's why there were only 30 congressmen from the existing 577 that came to vote for the last law regarding internet trafic monitoring https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9386820

chrome, the most popular browser is from google and so therefore there really isn't a difference between the browser and google.

Chrome doesn't come preinstalled on any OS that I know of. So you're suggesting that users think that they, "Used google to download google so they could do searches on google?"

Yes. I witnessed a user who uses Chrome for Google and IE for everything else. She thought she had to use Google browser to use Google, because Google told her so -- with upgrade to Chrome campaign.

I've started seeing it prejnstalled on a few machines and Google has rather obvious marketing on the Google homepage, enouraging you to 'upgrade to chrome'.

But this isn't because google is using their existing size in a way to punish other people and crowd them out...

The only way that Google could be monopolizing search results were to be if they told companies to put bing/yahoo/etc in their robots.txt and only let Google crawl them or google will drop them. That would be an anti-competitive monopolist practice abusing their size and power. They're not doing this.

When you're talking about LAW, and using law to force competition, it shouldn't be because people don't know the difference between a web browser and google. Educating consumers on how to use your product is something google spent a lot of time doing in the beginning when they weren't the default. That's up to you having such a good product that people type in the name of your service into google to get to it assuming google is already their default engine.

The way I explain how google got a de facto monopoly on search in France (and in Europe) is a combination of : -being a good product with no real good competitor for european languages (except for russian where Yandex exists) -set as the default search engine for mozilla, opera and then chrome from the start. Bing is the default one on IE but bing just came along in 2009. Before that I'm not even sure what was the default search engine in europe for IE. Things have changed in the last years but most people configuration once set won't change even if google is not the default search engine for firefox anymore.

I was actually not speaking about using law to force competition but just saying that the general web literacy in France and probably in most of europe is so low that every law that deals with internet does not get any traction with congressmen and in the media because most people doesn't understand an inch of what is as stake therefore they do not care.

> Bing is the default one on IE but bing just came along in 2009. Before that I'm not even sure what was the default search engine in europe for IE

MSN Search -> Live Search -> Bing

> Things have changed in the last years but most people configuration once set won't change even if google is not the default search engine for firefox anymore

If you never changed your default search provider in Firefox it was switched for you after the Yahoo deal.

If the finding is simply that Google needs to offer a ballot screen on Chrome after you install it, to choose the default search engine, that could perhaps be appropriate.

Claiming that people can't understand the difference between a web browser and a search engine therefore Google has a monopoly? That's a farce. First, how did they get Chrome installed anyway if they are that dim?

Well the typical pattern I encounter is this: John Doe get a problem with its PC, actually most of the time problems with malware on windows. He will reach out to a friend that "knows" about computer. This friend will do some kind of cleaning, if IE does not work anymore because of too many malware installed will get firefox or chrome to get around the problem and have internet working again. At that point John Doe get a link to Chrome on its desktop (sometimes called 'Internet') and this become its new entry to Internet. The only difference is now for every query John Doe is doing it is written Google instead of Bing at the top of the screen. Then sometimes later John Doe got another malware that has the default search engine for chrome to be replaced by another one with an affiliate ID or whatever and John Doe barely notice about it.

I know we are on HN here and this may sound crazy for most of you guys if you don't get the opportunity to witness this behaviour but that's what I witness every time I meet people older than 40 that are not in my web people circle.

> In France most of google users does not even know there is an alternative to Google

I think that would quickly change if a search engine came out that was markedly better than Google. I remember when Google first started gaining traction. It only took a few months to go from first hearing about it to everyone person I knew used it as their primary search engine. I feel confident the same thing will happen when another major leap forward in search happens.

What may happen to a market in the future does not affect the monopoly status of a business today, nor does it change how a monopoly may or may not be abusing their current (or past) position in one market to unfairly influence other markets.

Google probably[1] has a monopoly in some areas. It doesn't matter what will happen in the future or if they wanted this monopoly - in some markets, they clearly are the dominant[2] player that could set up barriers to competition in other markets if they wanted to. This means new laws apply that restrict some business practices that would otherwise be legal, and they might have governments coming after them if those laws are not followed, like France seems to be doing right now.

[1] probability will vary depending on which sovereign's antitrust laws under consideration

So? You haven't made a single relevant point or addressed a single one of his points. Being popular is not a reason to attempt to break up a company, nor is the ignorance of the populace to alternative solutions. Google doesn't own search, it's simply the best at it.

People are not using Google because it's the best one but mainly because it's the default homepage screen. People generally have no idea what Google is, for them, Google is just "the internet". Some people are even confused/lost when they drastically change the homepage during events.

France (and others) should start an education campaign to explain what the Internet and WWW are and how they work.

French IT industry should get better organised and stronger as a lobby to influence and educate congressmen first. And I think we actually are going into the right direction here. It will take time to see the impact of it though.

> People are not using Google because it's the best one but mainly because it's the default homepage screen.

That's not true. I tried all the search engines, and yes, Google, is the best one.

Remember when Bing had that comparison thing so see which engine you liked better? When I tried it Google won something like 9 times out of 10.

It depends on the user. I tried Bing/Google blind test and Bing won Google 6 to 4.

Ma Bell was not a natural monopoly either. It was created by law.

That's not what [natural monopoly] means.

A "natural monopoly" is basically any monopoly with a high barrier to entry, for example having a high infrastructure/start-up cost.

In this sense Ma Bell was a natural monopoly. Social networks could be considered natural monopolies for similar reasons.

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