- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
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“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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I hope windows will be next
The punishment will be less big than the profit, they won’t stop, as usual.
If the fine is not large enough to impact their business then breaking the law will be a normal business decision and fines a simple business expense. It’s already like that.
Did you do a crime? Well as the authority round these parts, you know I get a cut.
Google gained their initial position fair and square. They had the better search engine, and despite the likes of Bing being actually pretty good they were never able to compete.
All Google had to do was to follow its initial mantra of “don’t be evil”. That’s literally all it needed to do. Sadly, they were evil, and these are the seeds of that evil. I maintain today that Chrome, YouTube, Maps, and Search would still be dominant if Google were to welcome third-parties to compete and take space on their devices.
This, IMO, is a case that is damaging to their CEO above anything else. It shows that over the last few years many of the steps taken that have alienated fans and employees have actually damaged the company too. The exec actions have damaged them, and as such the execs should pay the price or course-correct.
But… Aren’t all of those things still very much dominant?
They’re saying that google services are dominant and anticompetitive, but not dominant BECAUSE they’re anticompetitive.
Even if they were playing fair with competitors, they would still be #1 because they were that good. But because they weren’t okay with giving competitors a fair chance, they resorted to anticompetitive practices that hurt consumers, and now this ruling is going to hurt google in return. They could have played nice and everything would have been better for everyone, but they didn’t so here we are
Yeah…almost like that’s the problem. XD
Many people use the example of Steam to say “well, they’re doing things right”, because they offer a better service to everyone else.
My point is that Google could have welcomed competition and still stayed at the top. Instead, they created walls that welcomed this ruling, and damaged themselves and customers in the process.
If that was true, duckduck and others wouldve dried up and faded away by now
They are way smaller than Google market share wise
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?
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.
It’s about exploitive behavior. Note that your example, valve, hasn’t been sued successfully about monopolistic behaviour as they don’t try to sit 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.
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.
The problem is, if one company dominates search, you have no way to evaluate whether they are doing it well.
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.
Google forces exclusive deals and its popularity means people optimize for it. Other search engines don’t have a chance when people expect Google.
Who do they have an exclusive deal with? Are there sites you can currently only search on Google? Or browsers or similar that require you to use Google?
The biggest one these days is Reddit but there are also cases historically
If one company is stifling competition, then competitors don’t have the resources required to innovate.
When you look at competitors offerings, you’re seeing the best they can do in a google-dominated market.
Real competition benefits users.
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 <other giant companies>”
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.
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.
They’ve confused economic reality with their own ideal reality.
… and the irony in this statement is overwhelming, after the fairy tale you’ve just outlined about those providing the most value to society gathering the most power & influence.
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.
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, sitting at 81% as of 2022.
And recently, Mozilla has been trying to develop a privacy-preserving ads business.
I’m not a big fan of ads, but if Mozilla can actually make ads that don’t track users, and are uninvasive, they might be able to garner some market share in the ad space, and distance their revenue from Google even further.
Mozilla could do search themselves.
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.
After reviewing [evidence from] Google, Microsoft and Apple… Mehta [gave a verdict]
Really, this is just a win for Facebhook?
Good, fuck Google. Break up that site.
Never going to happen. Remember when the same thing happened to Microsoft in the 90s?
Unfortunately yes… I also remember when windows 98 crashed in a demonstration.
We need a federated search engine. Whatever fedia.io runs on but for search.
How do you build a federated search index?
There’s YaCy, it’s just not good
Had a look: it’s 20 years and maintained by one single dude. Do you think one dude could compete with google? He needs help, and a lot of it.
I don’t know how. How do torrents work?
Can it be AI powered with cryptocurrency backend?
Torrent is file sharing. Apples an oranges.
No, I mean the tech behind it, not the concept. The bittorrent application is able to find a file to download from a bunch of other people. Not only the file itself, but parts of it. It’s a distributed search.
This works because it’s the same file just distributed. But in the case of search, every node would need to have the entire index of the web. If not, how would the client decide who’s index is better and which page rank fits better with the search? I really don’t see how this would work.
torrents have trackers, special servers that keep track of who’s got which parts of a file.
Also why? Searxng is a thing. I would argue search wouldn’t need to be federated. Makes sense for social media, web is already connected.
Isn’t searxng just a proxy for google and bing? Not sure how that “increases diversity” or “adds competition” or “improves search results”…
It can proxy anything you want to. There are a lot of searxng instances out there who have different setups. You could proxy only google or all the search engines that exist. Up to you. Ideally, I would make it so searxng can operate independently and have their own search engine algorithm but so far, this is the most open source and self hostable option available.
fr, searxng is the b0ss
I demand federated breakfast burritos!
Next do chromium
The judge said it was a monopoly but there does not seem to be any consequences at this time if ever.
Mehta’s conclusion that Google has been running an illegal monopoly sets up another legal phase to determine what sorts of changes or penalties should be imposed to reverse the damage done and restore a more competitive landscape.
The potential outcome could result in a wide-ranging order requiring Google to dismantle some of the pillars of its internet empire or prevent it from paying to ensure its search engine automatically answers queries on the iPhone and other devices. Or, the judge could conclude only modest changes are required to level the playing field.
Today was not about determining consequences / repercussions. It was only about deciding yes or no on the monopoly issue. The next step in the legal process is determining repercussions for Alphabet, and it seems like there are some pretty dramatic options on the table.
I sincerely hope they get broken up.
Thoughts and prayers. (I don’t even know if I’m being sarcastic anymore)
Betchu they’ll just send a check of 1 B to the FTC and say “that should pay the fine + interest” then go on with their day. Happened in a similar fashion before.
Happy cake day. Yes, I‘m afraid that could happen. We‘ll see.
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.
The funny thing is that this probably screws Reddit more than anyone. Obviously fuck 'em but funny either way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It already hobbled itself by letting the results quality slide for 15+ years…
Google is the best internet search according to Bing.
