5mo ago

Google Search is an illegal monopoly — what happens now?

www.theverge.com Now that Google is a monopolist, what’s next?

It might be a while before we find out.

A federal judge has ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly in the US. “The market reality is that Google is the only real choice” as the default search engine, Judge Amit Mehta said in his decision, and he determined it had gotten that way unfairly. It’s a ruling that could portend big changes for the company, but we yet don’t know how big, and we might not for years.

Mehta declared on Monday that Google was liable for violating antitrust laws, vindicating the Department of Justice and a coalition of states that sued the tech giant in 2020. The next step — deciding on remedies for its illegal conduct — begins next month. Both parties must submit a proposed schedule for remedy proceedings by September 4th and then appear at a status conference on September 6th.

63 comments

What happens now is that Google appeals and then the case will bounce around different courts for years to come, and maybe one day the supreme court will hear it assuming that US lasts that long as a country.
- Yip. I took the government what, 17 years..? from suing to breaking up AT+T, and they were the largest company in America that entire time.
  At+t tried to slap em with some exorbitant long distance charges and Uncle Sam got tired of the fuck around.
  To today; Google's been showing the wrong people the wrong kind of ads. Showing representatives ads for laundromats and daycares that offer drivinga ed after looking up how to launder money and traffic children. NO google, I did NOT mean THAT

I have used Google, DDG, Bing and Ecosia (which is basically Bing) at this point and ingl, none of them really stands out for its results. If anything, I think DDG and Bing beat Google.
Google might be the first company to create a monopoly out money and apathy. The apathy of users who don't care about their search engine enough to even change the default.
- Honeslty all search engines have gone to shit since the internet got polluted with AI-generated nonsense. Its a very hard problem to solve.
  
  I think we should be precise. The badness began before generative AI. Generative AI makes things worse because now you are less sure when you're looking at total junk, but the junk ratio itself doesn't depend on that.
- What you talking about as apathy, that's not what's happening. Google has 90% or more of the search market because it's the default, because it pays to be the default, even when it's worse than alternatives. The only people who are actually apathetic are the ones who know that alternative exist, are relatively easy to switch to, are superior, and still don't. That's not the majority of users.
- Have you tried Kagi?

this could be bad for mozilla / firefox.
if Google can't continue to try to increase / sustain their market share, they may stop paying mozilla to be thw default.
- If they do and Firefox dies, they're getting ANOTHER Antitrust trial (hopefully).
  
  On what grounds would that trial exist?
  They're the only rendering engine? Oh because they stopped paying Mozilla? Due to a court order?
  It's a complicated situation.
- default what?
  
  Google pays Firefox a lot of cash to be the default search engine on their browser.
  
  Default search engine on their browser?
- You can easily change the default.
  
  That's not the point. The point is Google is paying Mozilla to be the default. Google pays them 500M per year to be the default. If at some point Google legally isn't allowed to do so, Mozilla can say bye bye to 500M/year.
- Mozilla already started sending your data to advertisers by default in firefox 128. If Google's money dries up, I can't even begin to imagine what fucked up shit they'll do.
  
  https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution
  Hardly qualifies as "sending your data to advertisers".
- If Mozilla needs Google to survive, they can go down with the ship for all I care. Mozilla are bad actors anyways.
  
  If not Mozilla or Google, what will you use for a browser?

Maybe like a one million dollar fine? That's a lot of money, you know.

Google search opens up to more corps so everyone can get in on the enshittification

Kill Chrome/Chromium and Firefox by proxy. Revert back to pure html websites, live a free life.

Does anyone have a (link to a) good summary of the ruling and rationale?
I find the idea that "Google is the only real choice" kind of odd. There are other perfectly functional and user-friendly search engines. It's not like other monopolies, say, Youtube, where there's no realistic alternative. (I'm not denying that search is a monopoly too.)
- Practices like getting Reddit to only work with Google instead of Bing are probably a big part of it.
- Google pays a lot to stay the default browser.
  The other search engines mostly use overlapping indexes.
  Said search engines are also not anywhere near competition to Google.
  Quite frankly, I can only think of 4. DDG, Ecosia, Bing, and Kagi.
  Most people don't know about Ecosia or Kagi. Most people hardly even know about DDG.
  I wouldn't consider YouTube as much of a monopoly because despite it being mostly the only one, from what I understand they haven't paid out to stay the only one, and don't really leverage market dominance against others (they probably do but I just don't hear about it often.) The main reason alternatives don't exist is simply because of the mass amount of data the YT needs
  
  YouTube has a network effect monopoly as well. Who would use a competing service?
- Especially since Google search sucks these days.

Great, so now we get a Microsoft/Google duopoly. Rejoice..... /sigh
- You'd complain about a ton of gold being too heavy wouldn't you?
  
  I'm complaining about the lack of something real ever happening to these companies. Just because you're too ignorant to understand what is(n't) going on here, doesn't mean that I'm complaining just for the sake of it.
  Duopolys aren't any better than Monopolies, except for the illusion of choice. They'll move lock-step in line with one another, just like duopolys do, they'll still use the same anticompetitive practices, but instead of getting fucked by one dick, now you're getting fucked by two.
  I'm glad you like being fucked so much that you're rejoicing over this news, but I'd rather there be real competition.
- How many companies does it take to not become an -opoly anymore?
  
  It's not really the number of companies that determines this, but rather the lack of any real competition. A small enough number of companies makes this more likely, so there's not likely a hard number of say...over 5 companies isn't an oligopoly, they can still be - so long as they're all focused on each other. If you see 1 company raise it's prices and all 4 others do too, then it's still an oligopoly. Because even though they aren't actively getting together, and saying "hey let's all raise our prices!", (collusion) - the effect is the same.
  It ceases to be that when barriers to entry don't stop new competition from entering, and competition is active. (at least, that's the simplified answer; there's some more nuance to it, but that should at least give an overall understanding)

63 comments