this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2024
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

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.)

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

Especially since Google search sucks these days.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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

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

YouTube has a network effect monopoly as well. Who would use a competing service?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago

Practices like getting Reddit to only work with Google instead of Bing are probably a big part of it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 49 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 29 points 3 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

Have you tried Kagi?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Honeslty all search engines have gone to shit since the internet got polluted with AI-generated nonsense. Its a very hard problem to solve.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

You're not wrong. The mass proliferation of listacles with the same 5 advertised products stamped behind a novella of filler to appease SEO algorithms has been increasingly problematic for at least 10 years now. The issue has only been compounded with the flood of "AI" generated content and deceptive ads. I almost prefer when every website had sidebars full of blatant advertisements. Sure they were ever present, but they weren't trying to literally trick you into buying something.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Well, its worse because its a firehose that can spit out nonsense at a rate nearly infinitely greater than a finite set of content marketing employees

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