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Google illegally maintains monopoly over internet search, judge rules (apnews.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

108 comments fedilink hide all child comments

"WASHINGTON (AP) — A judge on Monday ruled that Google’s ubiquitous search engine has been illegally exploiting its dominance to squash competition and stifle innovation in a seismic decision that could shake up the internet and hobble one of the world’s best-known companies..."

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago

It already hobbled itself by letting the results quality slide for 15+ years…

[–] [email protected] 32 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Good, fuck Google. Break up that site.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Never going to happen. Remember when the same thing happened to Microsoft in the 90s?

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[+] [email protected] -18 points 2 months ago (6 children)

Bit confused, Google has its own browser, its own search engine, and provides a somewhat easy method to access the majority of the Internet and does it well but some people are upset because they cannot compete? What is the point in doing something so good that you become the best in the business? Everyone comes to you for your service, but you get punished because you're a monopoly? I'm thinking about Valve here as well. It's a major retail platform for PC games because nobody does it better. Publishers get upset its top dog, and their shity half arsed clients get no light.

Is it not the point of a business to make money and be good at their service that they increase revenue yearly and drive innovation?

[+] [email protected] -6 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I'm with you on this.

In this thread are people who screams monopoly, thinking they know what it means. One comment said Google is a monopoly, followed by "along with "

They're giants because they're successful and good at what they do. They're successful because people are benefiting and find values from the products they use. The moment these giants stops "exploiting" people will be when they stop bringing values to society.

They've confused economic reality with their own ideal reality.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

There's much more to company's popularity than just the product quality.

Google, along with some others, pays money for browser developers to be the default engine - so that people never bother to try something else and actually see how good or bad Google is compared to everything else.

Facebook (Meta) is known for predatory business practices like forcing startups to sell out or have their concept forcefully stolen and them destroyed.

Amazon dominates by plunging the prices of their in-house products below payback to drive the competition into bankruptcy, then acts as a monopoly, driving prices up.

There's plenty more such examples, but let me stop here for now. Giant corporations have powerful levers that are only available to them as they approach market dominance. And when they get 'em, fair play is over.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

The problem is not having the monopoly, it's exploiting it's qualities. Google for example exploits the fact that they know how much ad revenue each site makes them and thus can rank them higher. They also can rank their own products such as YouTube or Chrome. Another exploitation of their monopoly is that Google is the default search engine of Chrome instead of giving the user choices

There is no issue with YouTube, another monopoly, since it's business model is driving engagement and making money from ads but not exploiting its position.

Valve is another monopoly but it doesn't block people from putting their own launchers onto their platform. It doesn't block you from installing another store like Apple does and in general is nowhere near as all-encompassing as Google.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The problem is, if one company dominates search, you have no way to evaluate whether they are doing it well.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (5 children)

The problem is, if one company dominates search, you have no way to evaluate whether they are doing it well.

You could just go to other search engines and run the same queries and compare results.

For example, I did a search on 6 different search engines earlier today looking for a specific Reddit thread related to an update to a certain Skyrim mod without quite naming the mod (because I couldn't remember the exact name of the mod, and was hoping to find the Reddit thread to get the mod name or Nexus link). All 6 had the Nexus page for the mod itself within the top 3 results, and all of them but Google and Yandex had the Reddit thread in question on the first page.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Google has its own browser, its own search engine, and provides a somewhat easy method to access the majority of the Internet and does it well.

The problem isn't that it does it well, it's that it did it well and it doesn't anymore.

They dominate the market and can afford to make the search AI-inflated bullshit without any revenue losses.

Another part of the problem is the integration. Some google websites are rendered inoperable on Firefox, while others are made to have a worse experience.

A third part is giving its services preferential treatment onstead of having thekr algorithm be unbiased towards in-house services.

Edit:

Once upon a time the best browser game in town was Internet explorer. Similar stuff happened (actually even less blatant then Google). Microsoft basically controlled Web standards. The biggest sin they did was bundle IE with Windows, at least according to the US suit.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

It's about exploitive behavior. Note that your example, valve, hasn't been sued successfully about monopolistic behaviour as they don't try to shut down competition, they just remain better than their competition, which is how it's supposed to work.

But shitty businesses who lose customers start interfering in the ability of others to compete with them. F.i. Google cutting a deal with Reddit to be the only search engine to index the site.

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 2 months ago (6 children)

Websites and articles that have nothing to do with search or Google have to be designed specifically for Google’s search algorithm. I think that’s pretty crazy.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 months ago

~~Search Engine Optimization~~ Google Optimization

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Wonder what will happen to Firefox if this ruling means Google can't pay them to default to their search engine. That's a large chunk of their funding.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Wonder what will happen to Firefox if this ruling means Google can't pay them to default to their search engine.

Yahoo was Firefox's default search engine between 2014 and 2017. It would have lasted longer, but Verizon's acquisition of Yahoo prompted Mozilla to terminate it. They can sign a deal with another search engine if the deal with Google falls through. In China, Baidu is the default search engine, and in Russia, Yandex is.

Certainly Google will be more careful after this ruling, but nothing will actually go into effect at least for several years, if it ever does, because Google is appealing.

That's a large chunk of their funding.

That's true. When Mozilla resumed their search deal with Google in 2017, Google provided 91% of their revenue. But the percent of Mozilla's revenue derived from Google has decreased every year since then, most recently at 81% as of 2022.

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 months ago

Mozilla could do search themselves.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

They previously had a big deal with Yahoo! For a few years didn't they? They'll just sign with whoever wants to give them money.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Shatter the company like glass.

They are insanely huge. They should be 10 different companies.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago (2 children)

At least ten, and maintain no logs on their users. All previous logs must be purged and rendered irrecoverable.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

It might not be much but it's still legal precedent that will hopefully help it reach critical mass. Like getting Al Capone on tax evasion

[–] [email protected] 65 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Even if the punishment is largely symbolic and Google only pays a tiny (compared to it's massive size) fine; I'd still call that a significant win.

Google can be REQUIRED to give users A CHOICE of Search Engines.
Google can be FORBIDDEN from giving their OWN ENGINE an advantage in search results or advertising
Google can be FORCED to ALLOW THIRD PARTIES access to the SAME APIs used in Chrome and Chromium.
Google can be FORBIDDEN from BLOCKING THIRD PARTY FRONTENDS from using Google Search, Youtube and more.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Google can be REQUIRED to give users A CHOICE of Search Engines.

Don't they, err, already do this?

I mean a search engine is literally just a website and absolutely nothing prevents you from just going to duckduckgo.com or bing.com or wherever. Don't think Chrome prevents you from accessing other search engines in general, and last time I used it (admittedly a while back) it had a setting to change the search engine used by default if you just typed something into the address bar.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

DDGFTW

[–] [email protected] 103 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This is based on older evidence but the exclusive deal Google just signed with reddit makes it pretty clear the monopoly is planned and ongoing.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The funny thing is that this probably screws Reddit more than anyone. Obviously fuck 'em but funny either way.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It depends on the conditions of the agreement and how much they are being paid. Google's worldwide market share is above 91% so reddit isn't actually losing out on much site traffic by going exclusive.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Sure, but if the argument is that Google is paying to be a monopoly then they're going to have to stop payment.

Google allegedly paid $60 million for access to Reddit for AI purposes. Reddit then disallowed access to all other providers, unless they can promise they won't use the data for AI purposes.

Technically Reddit is the one disallowing access, but if the argument is that Google is paying for special access I don't see why I wouldn't extend to AI.

Reddit now needs to either argue their data is some special intellectual property worth $60 million or is at a price point more accessible and it sure as shit won't be $60 million.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Reddit then disallowed access to all other providers, unless they can promise they won’t use the data for AI purposes.

That's what they said publicly, but even search providers like Mojeek that have no AI capabilities appear to require some sort of "commercial agreement" to allow reddit scraping moving forward. It seems to me that Google was attempting to further distance itself from the competition with the agreement and that reddit went along with it because, in some way, it makes financial sense for reddit too.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

That's what I find so interesting about this result.

For example Apple is paid ~$20 billion, or arguably charges that amount, to be the default search engine. That's REAL money when compared to the Reddit deal.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Google search is a monopoly? It is losing market share. They really should go after Chrome and its clones

[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Just because it's losing market share doesn't mean it's not a monopoly, let alone an illegal one.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (2 children)

True I suppose

I just don't like how Chrome is the "standard"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Then you should also not like how Google has a history of making their sites, which are market leaders in many cases including search, perform worse on browsers other than Chrome. That is considered anti-competitive behavior.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

I agree but that is a different problem

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