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this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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Technology
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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:
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.
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
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.
See: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#webhid
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.
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".
Not to mention all the Chromium-based browsers.
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