>If Google did have a monopolistic advantage, they could refuse to pay the link tax.
Or maybe they think the engineering work to maintain a whole separate search page, and revenue loss from not including links, is less than the amount they stand to pay.
> Like hell they do(have a monopoly)! there are plenty of other searchengines out there, and ther is nothing that forces you towards google...
90% market share.
Besides, I keep hearing that argument but it never made sense to me. The monopoly is not (mainly) about the users of the search engine - they could in theory switch to something else (even though for some mysterious reason, most of them don't. See above.)
The actual monopoly is for the sites that depend on Google to be found. The simple choice for then is to submit to Google's standards or lose the majority of their traffic. So talk of force is justified here.
> There is no such thing as a monopoly on something that does not cost anything.
This is the wrong way to think about it. How much would _Google_ be willing to pay to maintain that position? Well, Mozilla's primary source of revenue, is afaik, from having Google as the default search engine, so at least that much, for whatever percent of the browser market-share.
> Google is very aware that 100% of their userbase (and revenue) are one click away from using another search engine.
Actually, google outperforms all other search engines. It seems some people prefer duckduckgo (as search engine i mean, not just for the other features), but most i heard people couldn't get the same results (including myself).
Secondly, Google is much more than search nowadays. 100% of their income isn't gone just like that.
And they have the means to make a stance against paying extra by informing the public. Not to mention Google Fiber.
> It makes us very dependent on the whims of that monopolist.
Very true. Only allow Google and you are helping them to build their monopoly. And if they have full monopoly they do what they want - including asking you money to be included in the search results.
> are we now arguing Google has a monopoly over google.com? It gets a bit weird
I don't know anyone who's arguing that. But I do see people arguing Google having a monopoly on search. In a lot of domains, a business can be created or destroyed entirely on their Google search rank.
> But Google saves Wikipedia money by requiring less servers to support traffic.
it would be nice if this was a two-party agreement. Google is forcible changing or dictating any potential business model changes Wikipedia might want to make.
Google has most of the search users, creating better data for improving its product (ad targeting and search), so it gets all of the ad budget for search. Data+ad revenue suffocates the competition of users and revenue creating a natural monopoly.
Google has a large share of search activity, but it's not at all clear that they have pricing power on search (the usual yardstock for a monopoly) or that search is even a market at all, since no one pays for it.
Search advertising is a different story, of course.
>Any other company can easily pony up the cash to become the default search engine, if they'd like.
And how many companies have more to spend on that than Google? I don't see how this could be interpreted as anything other than blatantly anti-competitive.
> Google is paying 21B because they expect to lose more than that if they stop.
google is paying that much because otherwise microsoft would be paying close to that. there is no innovation in the search space, there is only a battle of cash.
> Even in Google Chrome you can pick DuckDuckGo and Ecosia as your default search engine.
And making this argument is exactly why they added search engine selection. They wanted to be able to point to this tiny insignificant detail that might cost them a negligible fraction of Chrome searches and hold it up as market competition when the inevitable antitrust suit came along.
Have you ever heard of a for profit company gifting traffic to their direct competitor? It would be irrational behavior in a competitive market. If anything this is evidence of Google’s search engine monopoly and Google built the selection feature into Chrome it in furtherance of that monopoly power.
Or maybe they think the engineering work to maintain a whole separate search page, and revenue loss from not including links, is less than the amount they stand to pay.
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