Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

I expect this to be bad for everyone except Google if the ruling holds. Why? Mozilla and Apple will lose significant revenue from having Google as the default search engine and Google will no longer have to pay those billions. What's more, no one else can pay to be the default either (eg the short-lived Mozilla Bing deal).

So what's going to happen? Most users will probably still use Google, nobody is getting paid and Google is saving a bundle.

I get the thinking that you have to prevent lock-in (eg Ticketmaster and venues) but Google didn't buy its way into dominance annd maintain their dominance through exclusivity deals. They simply have a better product and I don't expect anyone to match them anytime soon (cue the DDG "I switched from Google to DDG 78 years ago" crowd).

> Mehta’s decision is expected to trigger a separate proceeding to determine what penalties Google will face – and the company is also likely to file an appeal

As a Google antitrust watcher, I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop with what remedies the court will actually recommend to correct this monopoly. If you ask 20 experts, who all otherwise agree that Google is a monopoly, you might get 40 different answers about what to actually do to fix that monopoly. It'll take a while to get the answer and to work through all the appeals to this ruling and whatever remedy the court will put forth, and it's not clear or really possible to know ahead of time whether the courts will put forth small, medium or huge changes to the search engine market. Exciting times!

After the DoJ vs. Apple suit was mentioned in March, I did some research before about what the DoJ views unfavorably in this arena. My bullet points were useful to a lot of people here then, so perhaps it can help inform some of the conversation here too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39782290

After some research, the practices below may capture much (though not necessarily all) of what the Department of Justice views unfavorably:

* horizontal agreements between competitors such as price fixing and market allocation

* vertical agreements between firms at different levels of the supply chain such as resale price maintenance and exclusive dealing

* unilateral exclusionary conduct such as predatory pricing, refusal to deal with competitors, and limiting interoperability

* conditional sales practices such as tying and bundling

* monopoly leveraging where a firm uses its dominance in one market to gain an unfair advantage in another

Any of these behaviors undermines the conditions necessary for a competitive market. I'd be happy to have the list above expanded, contracted, or modified. Let me know.

We face a number of challenges simply letting our paying customers change their search engine:

1. On iOS the list of allowed search engines is simply baked into OS, we have a fiddly extension that hooks outbound calls to /search and redirects them but I wish we didn't need to.

2. On Chrome, we use an extension to change the default search engine and enable search auto-complete etc, but Google has a policy that such an extension can do one thing and one thing only, and recently removed our extension on account of that [1]. We rebuilt it to meet their needs but had a lot of back-and-forth because we included 'search by image' on a context menu item and the first reviewer felt that was a bridge too far. You'll note that Chrome provides such a context menu item for Google Image search out of the box.

3. On Chrome for Linux, the default search engine API is not available, so Linux users have to configure it manually through a series of silly steps [2]. This is at least in keeping with most Linux experiences.

There are other issues, but I say all this to highlight how surprisingly difficult it is to change this setting in a practical, consumer friendly way. It is most certainly this difficult by design, that's a lot of revenue to protect.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41028924

2: https://github.com/kagisearch/chrome_extension_basic?tab=rea...

> Google’s payments to make its search engine the default option on smartphone web browsers violate US antitrust law, a federal judge ruled Monday, handing a key victory to the Justice Department.

I still find it hard to understand why this makes sense. Don't companies make exclusive deals all the time, and whoever bids higher will get such deals? Why is it different for Google this time?

I still struggle to see the harm, or what a remedy would aim to fix. Of all the possible antitrust fights to pick (Comcast, Apple, Meta, etc.), I'm not sure this would even make my top 10.

Google search is still the best out there. If you want to use a another web search, the switching cost is lower than almost any other product/service (e.g. compared to OS, cell phone network, ISP, etc.). Competitors like Microsoft, Apple, and Meta have ungodly amounts of money, but have barely tried in web search.

Despite Google being a more open and better web citizen than most other players, they have still been hit with actions on the Google Play Store and search. It's hard to make sense of.

It’s called out that Google pays Mozilla to have Google be the default search engine in Firefox. I worry this ruling will lead to Google ceasing those payments, effectively killing Mozilla as a going concern.

It's Apple who is using their market power in smartphones to dominate search. Apple makes 10's of billions a year out of search. In the search business, they are a distributor. Google doesn't want to pay this money, they are forced to.

Rip Mozilla. That google money was necessary to fund whatever increasingly dumb project Mozilla was working on.

What now? Actually focus on Firefox? Impossible.

According to the judges ruling, Google’s internal data indicated that they would lose up to 80% of searches on Apple devices, resulting in a $30 billion revenue loss, if they gave up their default search position.

Remember folks, it isn't over yet, I'd expect Google to appeal this one and this is just about their search dominance.

There is another one on the way with the DOJ going after their Ads business. [0]

[0] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl...

I don’t like google and I don’t like the way their shitty search is stuck in every hole.

But denying by court a company a right to honestly pay to another company for distribution of their services has much worse long term consequences and is wrong.

At the very least, I hope the Apple-Google ~~exclusivity~~ default agreement is revoked. I suppose it’ll take another year to figure out the actual remedies though.

This could be bad for Mozilla?

Has the full opinion been published yet?

Warren Buffet recently sold ~55% of his Apple stock.

I wonder if this was related.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41155376

---

Granted, Buffet also invested $40B and it's worth 9x today.

When you have $320B in gains, it's only prudent to begin to take some of those gains off the table.

https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/6-words-explain-why-warren-bu....

That's why we are developing an alternative to big web search comapanies with our community based search engine at https://beta.mwmbl.org (main site is currently a bit slow due to dev upgrades). Feel free to join our Matrix.

They spent billions of dollars putting their product into other products by default, and meanwhile conglomerate interests make it a worse product every year, while they do in fact maintain a monopoly.

Just when we thought reading multiple double-digit page count terms of service was bad enough, this madlad takes it to the next level with a 277 page legal opinion.

What a time to be alive!

What seems to be missing is discussion of the fact that Google's customers are the advertisers. The search engine users are the product. To what extent does Google monopolize the sales of eyeballs to the advertisers?

And, if Google can't pay to be the default any more, and given that users are the product, maybe the solution is for the search engines to somehow pay us to select them as the default.

Long overdue ruling.

HotBot was my search engine of choice pre google largely due to wired magazine.

Search has gotten better but not at a rate that consistently supersedes its ability to be gamed. That waxes and wanes.

The big loser from this ruling is Mozilla. The Firefox search deal gives them a big chunk of their money and they are already financially not in great shape.

This is a good day for humanity. I had a Ricard and a cigar and thought about how they went from not doing evil to embodying far left ideology.

From BestInternetSearch.com to yahoo and bing, search engine competitors are affected and consumers of these services negatively.

And when we talk about walled garden, fans always said customer chose it.

No, customer is dictated. For walled garden owner billion reasons.

They should just dismantle those super corporations. They are already too big to tame.

Ouch it has not been a good couple years for them since 2021. What did they do then?

Google's not the messiah, and they've been a very naughty boy.

I wonder if this has ramifications on the OpenAI IPhone deal too.

I wonder if their exclusivity deal with reddit contributed at all

This is a good start but all the tech giants need to broken up. Their size alone, and their access to capital, lets them do any number of anti competitive things. The deals/partnerships they make, the acquisitions, the bundling (like Teams and Office), loss leading, reliance on network effects, patent portfolios / giant legal teams, all of it. There isn’t really a great innovation landscape when these companies can just copy your idea and go scorched earth. We also need to regulate some of their products as general public utilities. For example there is no reason YouTube, a basic video hosting platform, should have content that only Google can train AIs on. I really hope Harris and Trump double down on Lina Khan’s direction and not succumb to corporate bribery…I mean lobbying.

What happens now? We unbundle search results? Sounds cool!

10 years too late.

Finally? Google has basically turned search and news into a political-corporate mouthpiece. Android is essentially a vacuum for surveillance capitalism. I rarely even use google to find anything beyond Chinese food and such.

If we could go back to Google 2010 that would be fantastic.

A couple passages of note:

> 112. The integration of generative AI is perhaps the clearest example of competition advancing search quality. Google accelerated and launched its public piloting of Bard one day before Microsoft announced BingChat, the integration of ChatGPT’s generative AI technology into Bing to deliver answers to queries. Id. at 8272:4-7 (Reid); id. at 2670:10–2671:9 (Parakhin). (describing BingChat).

Perhaps a normative assertion on my part, but AI results have not "advanc[ed] search quality" by any metric that I am familiar with; in fact, AI results in Google mark the first time I have ever encountered incorrect or patently untrue information at the top of a Google query.

> This quality-reduction experiment correlated with only a 0.66– 0.99% decline in global search revenue. UPX1082 at 294. In short, this study demonstrates that a significant quality depreciation by Google would not result in a significant loss of revenues.

The original “deal” has Eric Slimy Schmidt vibes all over it

I have never used the URL/location bar as a search. I once was looking over the shoulder for someone that does, and the list of previous searches that popped up was quite revealing. This just reinforced my not wanting to ever use that feature. I'm sure this must look suspicious to anyone that would ever "look into" my machine. My default search therefore is which site I decide to use at the time, but rarely is it ever Google.

I hope the $0.000000001 that the Googs paid for my default setting is worth it. /s

How does this finding actually help consumers, in real life? They get to choose a search engine (spoiler alert: it will be Google), and life moves on. Except, smaller browser projects now miss on that default search revenue, potentially entrenching Chrome as the dominant browser.

I hope searchgpt or perplexity takes advantage of this and try to gain some momentum, gonna be a sad day if perplexity sells out to some incumbent.

Google is getting more terrible by the day. They've been fudging results for political reasons. But aside from that, they just make it harder to find what you need, to sell ads and misdirect to paid landing pages. So in a way, they're stifling human progress. Even if they just waste a billion people's time for one minute every day. It's like 1900 lost years, or 23 lifetimes.

Compare it to ChatGPT which just gives a really good answer right away.

Google didn't payoff the right public sector employees. The Christian and O&G lobbyists were able to buy off politicians and judges to get the right rulings so they can continue to ruin the country (ie, defang regulators so O&G can continue polluting without hurting their bottom line, none to minimal punishment for pushing anti-climate propaganda, pushing "white christian values" to children without consequence, the presence of religion throughout government ranks, abuse of religious tax exempt status, no enforcement on donations to political entities from religious orgs)