At this point, it's not anymore about customer choice, the problem is systemic.
Serving Google with the same kind of antitrust Microsoft got would be highly deserved and beneficial, but unfurtunately google made the political investments that Microsoft lacked.
Which means we get to hear officials say Google is indeed in a situation deserving the antitrust, but it's fine "because their products bring value to customers"...
In the US at least, you must prove that the consumer was harmed in order to have a successful antitrust complaint, and that's going to be pretty hard with google. With microsoft, it was a pretty clear pattern, ie rebates to OEMs to thwart competition. And more recently, disallowing users to change their default browser. Instead, with google, you can bid/get ranked high and you're still able to compete. You can install chrome and change the default search engine easily, etc etc. Google has been pretty careful about avoiding mistakes Microsoft made. And at the end of the day, if you don't like google, you type in "bing.com" and lo and behold, you're using another search engine. You could not (at the time at least)just install a competing OS within seconds.
Antitrust exists to resolve the cases where Google's competitors cannot adequately "punish" Google. The fact that Google currently has competitors that could effectively retaliate is one of the reasons I think it's unlikely that Google is a serious antitrust target; the fact that there's no evidence of overtly predatory behavior on Google's part is another.
I'm not sure I follow you at this point: you don't want to discuss the law, and we agree Google is a bad example of the law applied, so what's your point?
Finally, I object to the way you're portraying my argument. Ridiculous? All I did was translate what Microsoft did to the web. My point is, people look at Google, say "oooh, monopoly!", and start talking about antitrust. But Microsoft wasn't taken to court for doing a great job with Windows 95. They were taken to court for exploiting that success technically, contractually, and financially to suppress entire other markets that concerned them.
Very few reasonable people would disagree that with you that we shouldn't punish companies for their success, even when that success provides a natural monopoly. But unfortunately for your argument, US antitrust law doesn't seem to disagree with you either!
No offense, but to me personally that sounds like wishful thinking. I'd love to see Google broken up but I don't think it will come out of this particular lawsuit.
Microsoft wasn't broken up. Google, when they recently faced a similar (although not identical) lawsuit in EU about search defaults, ended up implementing a search engine choice screen on Android where the position and presence of other search engines were determined by an auction. So something that was previously free, even though inconvenient, was now bringing Google extra money. How's that for antitrust. And as a bonus, DDG was outbid and not present on that choice screen at all, even though before that lawsuit they were the most popular non-Google option that people chose.
I think we need much better, tech-giant-aware antitrust laws before we can take on the likes of Google. Too bad the various levels of government right now are... well, you know.
Well, I guess we'll see how this works out eventually. Speculation can only go so far.
Your point is fair, it's reasonable for Google to consider this options and this is why antitrust regulations are needed. In this, it looks like it's time for the gouvernement to step in.
I'm not sure what we should've done. Google for a long time won users by making almost objectively better products. It's only in the past decade or so that they started to abuse their monopoly.
Putting the blame at government failing to enforce existing and create new anti-trust legislation seems much more sensible than blaming users picking the best products.
The problem is that how the market works is that once a monopoly has been established, that it's very hard for a competitor to challenge that, even if he have a better idea.
Large players make lesser costs due to large vertical integration and bulk discounts.
Even if I were to invent a new search algorithm that would be superior to Google's in terms of satisfaction with most searchers, I would be unable to get a wedge in.
This is not so big a problem with say a power company, but with a search engine, it becomes the front page of the internet through which everyone goes — the end result is that Google commands a great deal of political influence simply with how it decides that it's algorithms should work and what pages to prioritize.
Courts ordered Microsoft in the past to provide Windows users with notice of other web browsers, which was the primary way Internet Explorer lost it's dominance — perhaps it is time to order Google to provide users notice of other search engines and web browsers too as a matter of antitrust.
Sorry but you don't seem to understand how antitrust law works. Today, in the US and many other parts of the world, Google has a monopoly in the search market. Google is using their monopoly in that market to influence a second market (any one of a number of content verticals). It doesn't matter whether the service is free, or not free. Influence and unfair competition - this is the definition of antitrust. (How can any SEO or SEM expert ever compete against Google itself for search rankings or ad placements? They can't.) Microsoft tried to use its monopoly in OS to influence browser choice, and was rightly persecuted for it; this case is not much different.
The problem in the Microsoft case was use of near-monopoly in one market (operating systems) to gain unfair advantage in another market (browsers), though even that seems a bit outdated already since the idea of shipping an OS without a browser built-in seems ludicrous today.
In any case, that concept of using monopoly power in one market to bolster power in another doesn't really apply here with Google.
I share a lot of the unease many people have with the amount of power Google has been able to amass as the de factor curator of the Internet, but I'm also somewhat amazed they are in the position they are in and have been as (mostly) benevolent as they have been. I suspect it is actually pretty hard work just to remain somewhat close to neutral when you are sitting on that much power.
Google has a monopoly, and where are monopolies the normal rules do not apply. Google can impact internet as a whole very greatly. That's why they should care about fairness, simply remember how Microsoft was forced to provide browser choice window and were penalized for pushing IE as a default option.
And even if, say, in Microsoft scenario they might benefited from using they monopoly position more than were penalized (can't for sure claim, because I don't know real numbers), it doesn't mean that companies should't not care about fairness. At the end of the day that is what competition suppose to do - force companies to think about fairness towards their customers.
Well, there's also the fact that Google is currently being prosecuted for antitrust violations on both sides of the Atlantic...
Do you honestly believe that it's OK for Google to just keep being anti-competitive? Or that this is a completely inevitable and unfixable state of affairs?
We can, should, and will hold Google accountable for its monopolistic conduct, and this is absolutely part of that.
I'm not willing to take it on faith that in the industries where Google has dominant market share there was formerly a better ecosystem. Many of these efforts are being driven by lobbyists for newspapers who are sad that they lost their local influence and extortionate local advertising monopolies.
It's also not obvious to me that in the realm of indexing and searching the web it would be better to have numerous worse choices instead of one big one. Say what you want anecdotally about Google search quality, but it is better than anything else on the market in objective terms. What will the searching public lose if you impair Google's ability to pay for search quality?
That's my main beef with the European line of thinking on antitrust, that it considers for some reason the well-being of certain failing companies and doesn't really seem to take into account what the public harms and benefits might be. Whereas in the American approach of the last 40 years, regulators need to show that customers are being harmed, without much regard for competitors.
I'm kind of sour on antitrust as much of a solution for today's issues. If we had five smaller Googles doing the same thing what would that make better?
I think Google is setting itself up for antitrust action. Isn’t this essentially what Microsoft did on the desktop by blocking competitors and priorritizing their own products?
The history is antitrust rulings are what prevents monopolies of the past from dominating the next era.
IBM was constrained by an antitrust ruling. Which gave Microsoft an opening. Microsoft itself was then subject to a similar action 20 years later. So it's been another 20 years since then, so the time is ripe to clip googles wings.
Competition is ultimately good for users. As long as Google isn't using its size in a Microsoft-vs-Netscape capacity to compete unfairly and destroy innovation in a particular market, I think we should welcome this trend.
That's the crazy thing: Antitrust is the best path for everyone who isn't a billionaire corporation. Because not only will those of us who don't want to deal with them have options, but the former trust will be forced to compete again on merit, which means they'll have to step up their game. A lot of Google products coast by on their monopoly status alone, but if they get broken up or even just their behavior heavily restricted, they're going to have to get back to doing what originally made them great: Making the best web apps and services, like they used to.
Serving Google with the same kind of antitrust Microsoft got would be highly deserved and beneficial, but unfurtunately google made the political investments that Microsoft lacked.
Which means we get to hear officials say Google is indeed in a situation deserving the antitrust, but it's fine "because their products bring value to customers"...
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