Or it could be like how our competition bureau is being forced to pay $13 million to Rogers Cable for inconveniencing them with an investigation when Rogers Cable decided to buy Shaw Cable. And the deal went through. Can you imagine?
Not that Google doesn’t have it’s problems, but personally I find Microsoft’s actions in regards to bing and bing search to be more abusive of their monopoly than Google. Microsoft is abusing their position as the OS in order to push people into their other products when it isn’t really feasible to switch for most people.
there are so many monopolies now. healthcare, media, internet. We really need to go back to some of the rules we had back in the early 80's but this time don't backtrack on it all.
Microsoft is less subtle about it. But nowadays Google is bigger deal, on PCs at least you can change operating system and there are plenty of options to go without Microsoft, for every of their services there is alternative with relatively low switching cost.
Now is there a phone manufacturer not preinstalling Google apps with system privilages… Apple? That’s it. But Apple is same problem. There are some resellers flashing different flavours of Android, but no top-down product. In my country there are now cashier-less shops you can’t go into without their app from Google Play, banks are making it harder to log it, police is starting to first ask for app ID then for plastic one.
Yeah, companies like Google are too big and have too much influence over society/politics, but calling them a search monopoly seems like a stretch. Of all the evil things companies like Google do, we’re going after them for paying other companies to make them their default search engine? It takes all of 30 seconds to change the default, though I admit most people won’t, mostly because they honestly have no reason to.
I also don’t have an issue with paying for default placement. The suit is much broader than that. Google’s anticompetitive conduct has included:
Acquiring Competitors: Engaging in a pattern of acquisitions to obtain control over key digital advertising tools used by website publishers to sell advertising space;
Forcing Adoption of Google’s Tools: Locking in website publishers to its newly-acquired tools by restricting its unique, must-have advertiser demand to its ad exchange, and in turn, conditioning effective real-time access to its ad exchange on the use of its publisher ad server;
Distorting Auction Competition: Limiting real-time bidding on publisher inventory to its ad exchange, and impeding rival ad exchanges’ ability to compete on the same terms as Google’s ad exchange; and
Auction Manipulation: Manipulating auction mechanics across several of its products to insulate Google from competition, deprive rivals of scale, and halt the rise of rival technologies.
Forcing Adoption of Google’s Tools: Locking in website publishers to its newly-acquired tools by restricting its unique, must-have advertiser demand to its ad exchange, and in turn, conditioning effective real-time access to its ad exchange on the use of its publisher ad server;
More on this is how they’ve treated new web technologies like WebHID. TL;DR is that nobody agreed with Google’s implementation of WebHID but (especially considering it was just “oh hey we wrote some code for it, this is how it should work :)”), since they’re the biggest, went with it anyway and told Mozilla and others to go pound sand. Google has immense influence over what the web actually is, but nobody talks about that.
It sounds like that would just be one of the consequences as the overall issue is abuse of dominant position. It is about all the defaults in Android, making alternatives hidden in the settings, but also the warning messages in browsers to revert back the search engine and paying all other companies for implementing google search as default.
There are other issues with google too, relating to privacy and such, but the above issue is really was is hurting the industry and preventing Google from actually ever being dethroned.
There is a fascinating article on the Verge about Neeva, an attempt at making an actually better search engine and they kind of succeeded but lost due to Google’s influence and power.
Google funds Mozilla by paying to be Firefox’s default search engine
Google funds Mozilla primarily to avoid the exact kind of legislation in this post; monopolies.
Google can point at Firefox and say “look, not only are there alternative browsers anyone can install, but we funded the independent development of that browser”.
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