Google lost the first round of its antitrust suit today. As you may recall, there are two big things you have to prove in order to find a company guilty of antitrust violations. The first is that the company is a monopoly, and Judge Amit Mehta made quick work of that:
Plaintiffs easily have demonstrated that Google possesses a dominant market share. Measured by query volume, Google enjoys an 89.2% share of the market for general search services, which increases to 94.9% on mobile devices. This overwhelms Bing's share of 5.5% on all queries and 1.3 % on mobile, as well as Yahoo's and DDG's shares, which are under 3% regardless of device type. Google does not contest these figures.
Mehta also noted evidence that Google's own research shows that it could degrade quality and it still wouldn't suffer any loss of market share. In short, there's no question that Google holds a monopoly both in search and in search ads, where they have an 88% market share.
But that's not enough. It isn't illegal to be monopoly. It's only illegal if you abuse monopoly power—for example, by making it impossible for new competitors to enter the market. Mehta found a number of ways that Google had abused its power, most noticeably by paying billions of dollars to browser companies in return for making Google their default search engine:
Google controls the most efficient and effective channels of distribution for GSEs [general search engines]. It is the exclusive preloaded GSE on all Apple and Android mobile devices, all Apple desktop devices, and most third-party browsers (Edge and DDG are the exceptions). Rivals cannot presently access these channels of distribution without convincing Google's partners to break existing agreements, all of which are binding for a term of years.... It is also a "realit[y] of control” that Google is the sole default on Chrome.
Under current antitrust doctrine, Google could argue that even if all this was true, it didn't matter as long as customers got a good deal out of it. But if Google is really that great, why do they have to spend billions to essentially force people to use it?
As a matter of fact and law, then, Mehta concluded the following about Google's control of the search market:
- The Exclusive Agreements Cause Anticompetitive Effects in the General Search Services Market
- The Exclusive Agreements Foreclose a Substantial Share of the Market
- The Exclusive Agreements Have Deprived Rivals of Scale
- The Exclusive Agreements Do Not Result in Procompetitive Benefits
And the following about its control of the search advertising market:
- The Exclusive Agreements Foreclose a Substantial Share of the Market
- The Exclusive Agreements Allow Google to Profitably Charge Supracompetitive Prices for Text Advertisements
- The Exclusive Agreements Have Allowed Google to Degrade the Quality of its Text Advertisements
- The Exclusive Agreements Have Capped Rivals' Advertising Revenue
In other words: guilty, guilty, guilty. The judge was also unamused by Google's failure to preserve chat messages:
The court is taken aback by the lengths to which Google goes to avoid creating a paper trail for regulators and litigants. It is no wonder then that this case has lacked the kind of nakedly anticompetitive communications seen in Microsoft and other Section 2 cases.... Google clearly took to heart the lessons from these cases. It trained its employees, rather effectively, not to create "bad" evidence.
Mehta declined to sanction Google for this behavior, but only because it wasn't worth it. They lost the case easily with or without the evidence of internal communications.
It's notable that this case wasn't brought by Joe Biden's administration. Bill Barr and an all-star cast of red states filed the antitrust suit in late 2020, most likely because Trump and other conservatives were convinced Google was censoring them and taking down their ads. If this had ended up being the basis for the suit, it most likely would have lost. Luckily, Joe Biden took over a few months later, and his Justice Department filed a normal, meat-and-potatoes case rather than the bizarre cry for retribution that Trump's people probably would have pursued.
In any case, this isn't nearly over. Next the judge has to announce what price Google will pay, and then Google will surely appeal. Give it a few more years.
Haven't used Google in ages. Duck,duck go works just fine.
I tried to like it, but Duckduckgo just isn't satisfactory. I've tried Qwant. It is better but still not satisfactory (e.g last week I was out of town and searched for restaurants near me; I got page after page of Tripadvisor and Yelp lists instead of actual restaurants). I've used Startpage some. It is basically anonymized Google so it doesn't lessen the Google monopoly.
See, the problem is that Google is fan damn tastic if the only thing you care about is pop culture. Try to find anything else and you have to wade through a mountain of loosely to totally un-related pop culture garbage.
Google's own research shows that it could degrade quality and it still wouldn't suffer any loss of market share
this isn't an academic question; i've noticed a pretty obvious decline in search quality over the last year or so
but whatchagonnado
Yeah, the enshitification has gotten really bad in the last couple of years...
Use another search engine. I switched to duckduckdo and love it.
Lucky you. It never finds what I'm looking for.
The Google algorithm(s) create opportunities to "game the system", mostly by Google, but sometimes by us users. For example about 20 years ago there was a widespread practical joke involving Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. Searching for a non-existent website called something like WMD, resulted in an error message, "WMD cannot be found."
Seriously this feels like the forced breakup of ATT many years ago. It is still pretty hard to see what benefit its break-up had. There may well have been some, but they were not clearly apparent to the ordinary person. Rather than having one lousy phone company, we now have lots of lousy phone companies, all of which are losing out to wireless technologies.
Begs the question of what technology (or, in this case, new killer app) Google and other search engines are losing out to. Also, it isn't clear that, in the event that sometime in the far future Google runs out of appeals, a breakup is the likely remedy. Regional search engines make no sense. Eliminating those exclusive agreements, on the other hand...
We will just insist that search infrastructure be duplicated three or four times and demand that search be distributed round-robin across it…
The break up of ATT did cost us Bell Labs...but you're no longer paying long distance fees of $1/min or more(?) for calls within the US. Yes, the transition was a bit of a mess, and the baby Bells ended up either merging or being bought up. And now, what land lines are still around (phone or cable) are for internet access (maybe a bit of an exaggeration). And high speed internet is making its way to rural areas because of gov't. programs.
(side note: Musk attacks Democrats, but his companies rely on programs started and supported by Democrats to make money, e.g. Tesla selling MPG credits to other car makers)
And loans at the right points, and a customer base willing to demanding to buy decent EVs and access to space and and and.
He didn't build it all himself, but he was lucky that existed for his companies to succeed.
Did Google point out that Bing and Yahoo suck? They objectively do.
Yes, but recently, Google seems to have decided to join them.
Exactly. Nobody goes into a restaurant hoping the default soda is RC Cola. They want a Coke.
Sorry guys, the battle is over. Google won. Nobody wants their iPhone defaulting to duckduckWTF.
Even though Google has a monopolistic lead in both browsers and search engines in the US, it's not the case overseas. This may all be academic, though. The next, possibly largest and final fight in the search engine wars is about to commence: AI.
Querying will become more like what you'd see on Star Trek, no endless attempts at different combinations of search terms to refine and filter your results.
There's no guarantee that Google's monopolistic advantages will carry over into the next generation of search engines, especially since they're not in the lead in AI.
But, I'd like to point out that EU's antitrust is unlike ours. They do not have to prove abuse of a monopolistic power; they just need to show the existence of a monopoly. I think the Biden administration, from Merrick Garland to Lina Khan, has moved towards the EU's position that all monopolies are bad.
What does that imply except distance from competitors’ quality?
Network effects.
As with all these platforms, the customer isn’t you, it’s the advertisers. You’re just the product. Advertisers are the ones who actually fork out and they could easily complain that Google has them by the short and curlies with SEO and online display ads. Where else are you gonna go etc? It’s led to a poor user experience with diminished utility and first page searches filling up with paid-for results. That favours no one but the big G.
Default search engine settings are hardcoded into browsers?
Agreements are not hard code.
Also, no, they're not hard coded. You can totally change these settings. You're just likely to get degraded service in other ways if you do.
Remind me again because I keep forgetting. Do capitalists love competition, or do they love to kill the competition? I keep getting that mixed up.
They love competition in *other* industries and fields of enterprise.
"Capitalists hate capitalists." That's Cory Doctorow, who makes a persuasive case.
For the tech giants in particular, what they practice is not capitalism. It's the return of feudalism.
Article is worth a read.
Google has degraded service.
Can't we just treat them like the utility they are, instead, and require them to not, say, degrade service?
This is interesting:
I wonder if this will get much attention. Because it isn't just Google who does this.
The HugeCo that owns my employer is over 100 years old, they're a household name. They are not at all a "tech company". And one of the first things they did was institute document retention rules, a classification system, and began relentlessly training us about what kind of things you write down and what kind of things you discuss verbally.
I thought everyone big enough to be an attractive lawsuit target did this.
While I expect a lot of these search engine providers to adapt by using an AI work-around, it's still good to see this anti-monopoly effort. We need to see more of it in some other areas.
For example, how much retail grocery store shelf space do a handful of huge companies take for their products to prevent smaller competitors from ever having their products seen or bought?
There are many areas of the economy like this, and just asking a small group of Progressives would yield a long list.