I will believe it when I see Google face consequences.
“The courts hereby decide that Alphabet Inc. will pay a fine of… 1.2 million dollars… Out of the billions of dollars they make every year” :)
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.
Android (with GApps installed) and ChromeOS are both very big platforms.
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 already had this trial back in the 2001.
whole lot a good it did, too.
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.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The case — U.S. et al. v. Google — is the federal government’s first monopoly trial of the modern internet era, as a generation of tech companies has come to wield immense influence over commerce, information, public discourse, entertainment and labor.
The case centers on whether Google illegally cemented its dominance and squashed competition by paying Apple and other companies to make its internet search engine the default on the iPhone as well as on other devices and platforms.
Kenneth Dintzer, a 30-year veteran litigator for the Justice Department, will lead the government’s arguments in the courtroom, while John E. Schmidtlein, a partner at the law firm Williams & Connolly, will do the same for Google.
Rivals have long accused Google of brandishing its power in search to suppress competitors’ links to travel, restaurant reviews and maps, while giving greater prominence to its own content.
In its lawsuit, the government accused Google of hurting rivals like Microsoft’s Bing and DuckDuckGo by employing agreements with Apple and other smartphone makers to become the default search engine on their web browsers or be preinstalled on their devices.
Google’s actions had harmed consumers and stifled competition, the agency said, and could affect the future technological landscape as the company positioned itself to control “emerging channels” for search distribution.
The original article contains 1,425 words, the summary contains 215 words. Saved 85%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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.
Google funds Mozilla by paying to be Firefox’s default search engine (and probably other royalties for search-related stuff?). In 2021, payments from Google made up 83% of Mozilla’s revenue.
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:
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Acquiring Competitors: Engaging in a pattern of acquisitions to obtain control over key digital advertising tools used by website publishers to sell advertising space;
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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;
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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
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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.
More details: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-google-monopolizing-digital-advertising-technologies
They they settled another suit yesterday: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/06/states-google-settle-app-store-antitrust-case-00114176
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.
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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.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/20/23731397/neeva-search-engine-google-shutdown
ya, they should break out Google and Chrome or Android or Analytics. This seems like a nothingburger.
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we’re going after them for paying other companies to make them their default search engine
it feels gross because they’re literally banking on people not bothering to change it, so they can collect more and more data with even less barriers
Bust them up
How is it that Apple is so rarely seen in these cases? Apple is literally a vertical monopoly with a huge walled garden for software, massive data collection facilities, explicit planned obsolescence and hundreds of other anti consumer, anti government, anti privacy positions… How are they so rarely the target for these lawsuits and investigations?
Apples policy in the cases where it is targeted are so extreme it should be worrying to everyone.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills every time I read articles like this.
Because Google owns everything. The internet backbones, the search engine of billions of people, the analytics of most companies, the map application most people use, the YouTube streaming service, the phones of most people etc etc.
Apple is almost irrelevant in the context. They sell phones and computers. Not much else.
Wait what? You don’t use Apple products do you?
With the exception of YouTube, every product you mentioned is hard coded default to Apple provided services.
Something like 40% of all maps usage is Apple maps. There does not exist a browser other than Safari and the market share of iPhones vs Android is pretty fairly split along socioeconomic boundaries.
Yes Google is the bigger target but the software ecosystem is significantly less walled garden / monopoly than the apple ecosystem.
Google doesn’t own the Internet, Amazon does (10% Google, 20% Microsoft, 30% Amazon). Do people seriously not know this?
Amazon owns most of the internet? Yeah didn’t know. Where can I read more about this?
Funny but if you think offering cloud services is the same as owning the internet, it’s not really the same.
There are internet backbone cables going under the seas, global name servers, etc, that keeps the actual network up and alive. The people paying for those are the ones who owns the internet.
Like Amazon does?
As much as i hate Apple, you can choose to not use Apple products. if you access any website there’s a huge chance you’re interacting with Google. captcha, ads/tracking, sign in auth, search.
they are currently pushing Web standards that would drive business to their ad platforms and could deny access to web sites if your browser doesn’t support their standard. why can they push these standards? because most Internet access is done through Chrome and web sites want users to access their site.
My point is they are both bad. Google doesn’t force you to use its products. Other people choose to use them which results in you using them. Apple somehow never gets sued for more egregious versions of the same thing Google gets sued for is my point. It’s an obvious double standard.
Google doesn’t force you to use its products.
if you use the Internet as in open a web page you are absolutely being forced to use Google’s products. You just don’t realize it because they are not tangible things you physically use, they’re API calls to make the websites you’re using work.
Other people choose to use them which results in you using them.
because so many people use chrome, they are able to define web standards that feed back into their ad serving platform. What this means is that even if you use Firefox or Safari you may not be able to access websites if those browsers do not support web standards that support Google’s main product, ad serving.
yes apple is bad but i don’t think many people grasp how deep Google’s roots go. everyone using the Internet has a profile in Google somewhere without really knowing or agreeing to it.
What?
This is simply false. Google is in a lot of places. But it isn’t Google forcing 3rd party sites to use Google.
Yes AdSense is terrible. The tracking it does is insane… but Google doesn’t come to other websites and say “you must use me!” There aren’t laws requiring its use.
Companies use Google because it makes them money and it’s easy.
Apple does the same shit that chrome does but they don’t make standards. They make inscrutable shit that people have to reverse engineer or pay for to be able to interact with apples market share.
You talk about how other browsers have to support the standard that Google sets… yes, that happens. Chrome also implements standards others make. Chrome also ports standards to other browsers (especially webkit).
People act like Google always gets it’s way… when it just doesn’t. Google fails at so many things constantly…
The fact that people don’t understand that amazon has more than 3x the influence that Google does in Internet infrastructure… or that Facebook analytics is used nearly 2x more than Google’s or that many of Google web standards that were proposed over the past 10 years have been superseded by open source or secondary solutions not proposed by Google and that Google had to implement them…
My point isn’t that Google isn’t pervasive or that Google isn’t intrusive. My point is that it is hypocrisy to not also sue Apple for the same things… and that hypocrisy is telling.
This is simply false. Google is in a lot of places. But it isn’t Google forcing 3rd party sites to use Google.
it’s the choice of a company not of the end user, which I feel is a more apt comparison to Apple. None of these products are being forced to use but when you look at the current state of things, the companies choose to use Google/Facebook because it makes them money. From a user standpoint there’s not a lot you can do to avoid them if you want to use the Internet.
I think we both agree these companies are monopolies and need to be broken up, but you have to start somewhere. imo Google+Amazon are the biggest threats to consumers followed by meta, apple and Microsoft.
Apple spend a lot of money and owns a huge number of news outlets and editorial sites as well as not farms and such so their influence is rather powerful and unlike companies like Google and Microsoft, Apple has absolutely no transparency whatsoever. They have been doing all the things that Microsoft and Google do but Microsoft and Google have a well intended but resultantly harmful feeling that they need to be honest about everything they can and be transparent to everyone about what they are doing regardless of whether or harms them and Apple simply doesn’t have that at all, they hide everything and persuade everything they need to to make things hush hush but they have no problem shining lights on all their competition
Btw, the New York Times popup can be disabled by disabling inline scripts.
Maybe reader mode works too? (Firefox)
Does anyone knows if this will be just for show or they’ll actually gonna do something?
Always for show.
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