Judge Mehta’s Google Antitrust Remedies: Threading The Needle Between Overkill And Underkill
from the surprisingly-reasonable,-but-still-messy dept
Last summer, when Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google had violated antitrust laws through its search distribution agreements, I was left wondering what the hell any reasonable remedy would look like. The case always struck me as weird—Google was paying billions to Apple and Mozilla to be the default search engine because users actually wanted Google as the default. Any remedy seemed likely to either do nothing useful or actively harm the very competitors it was supposed to help.
Well, Mehta just dropped his remedial ruling, and honestly? It’s more reasonable than I expected, though still messy in predictable ways.
The Big Picture: No Chrome Breakup Or Android Sell Off, But Real Constraints
The DOJ had pushed for some truly bonkers structural remedies, including forcing Google to sell off Chrome or Android. Mehta wasn’t having it:
Google will not be required to divest Chrome; nor will the court include a contingent divestiture of the Android operating system in the final judgment. Plaintiffs overreached in seeking forced divesture of these key assets, which Google did not use to effect any illegal restraints.
This makes sense. As discussed before, under antitrust law, structural breakups should relate to the actual violation. The problem wasn’t Chrome or Android—it was the exclusive deals that locked up search distribution. Breaking up unrelated business units would be pure punishment without purpose and could (again) do more damage to competitors than to Google itself.
The Exclusive Deals Ban: Logical But Concerning
The core remedy targets the actual problem—Google’s exclusive distribution agreements:
Google will be barred from entering or maintaining any exclusive contract relating to the distribution of Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, and the Gemini app.
This tracks the violation, which is good. But here’s where it gets tricky. The ruling also says:
Google will not be barred from making payments or offering other consideration to distribution partners for preloading or placement of Google Search, Chrome, or its GenAI products.
So Google can still pay Apple and Mozilla, just not exclusively? That seems like a distinction that might not make much practical difference. If Google can outbid everyone else (which they can), and Apple/Mozilla have admitted users get pissed when they don’t use Google as default, what exactly changes here?
The court was clearly aware of this problem. In fact, Mehta’s analysis of the downstream effects reads like a catalog of unintended consequences that would make any antitrust reformer wince:
The complete loss or reduction of payments to distributors is likely to have significant downstream effects on multiple fronts, some possibly dire. They could include:
- Lost competition and innovation from small developers in the browser market. … (stating that for Opera the loss of payments from Google “would make it hard for [it] to continue to invest in innovative solutions that [it] provide[s] for the US audience”). Mozilla, in particular, fears that lower revenue share payments could “potentially start a downward spiral of usage as people defected from our browser, which . . . could at the end of the day put Firefox out of business.” … (“Mozilla has repeatedly made clear that without these [revenue share] payments, it would not be able to function as it does today.”).
- Fewer products and less product innovation from Apple. … (Cue) (stating that the loss of revenue share would “impact [Apple’s] ability at creating new products and new capabilities into the [operating system] itself”). The loss of revenue share “just lets [Apple] do less.”…
- Less investment in the U.S. market by Android OEMs, which would reduce competition in the U.S. mobile phone market with Apple. …(“[I]f [Samsung is] not getting paid from Google in the revenue share that [it’s] currently getting, I think it will probably make [Samsung’s] position much weaker to innovate and provide . . . the latest technology and better services to our customer. . . . [W]e might face . . . a very difficult situation to continue our business.”); … (“If [Motorola] were not to receive [revenue share payments], it would have significant financial burdens on [its] business. . . . [A]dvanced resources in North America . . . would be put at risk if [it] were to lose this funding.”); … (“It is much more costly for [Verizon] to promote an [Apple] device than an Android device . . . . So the more the Android ecosystem loses share in the Verizon customer base, the more costly it is for Verizon, and that weighs on our [profit and loss].”).
- Higher mobile phone prices and less innovative phone features. … (“[S]ome of [Samsung] product[s] could end up increasing prices or defeature our product[s] to manage the profit, which will make our position very weaker in the market and especially in U.S.”); … (“[O]ne of the ways [AT&T] can help offset some of the cost of th[e] device subsidy and make the devices more affordable to consumers is to have the ability to seek distribution or revenue share agreements with search, but also other services.”); … (“[T]hose restrictions would prevent Google from entering into agreements similar to what [T-Mobile] ha[s] with the Android Activation Agreement, . . . the revenues from which [it] use[s] to help prop up the Android ecosystem through subsidies . . . et cetera.”); … (stating that Verizon’s RSA with Google “help[s] and fund[s] the promotion of devices and offset[s]” billions in subsidies).
The court cannot predict to any degree of certainty that one or more of these effects will in fact occur. But the risk is far from small, which is reason enough not to proceed with the remedy.
Think about the weird logic here: Google’s current payment structure has created an ecosystem where cutting off those payments would likely kill Firefox (a key browser competitor), leave Samsung and other Android manufacturers financially weakened against Apple, and potentially raise phone prices for consumers. Meanwhile, Google would save billions in payments and still likely retain most users anyway.
In such a scenario, keeping the money flowing is actually essential to greater competition.
Data Sharing: The Actually Interesting Bit
But here’s where Mehta may have found the real lever for change. Google will have to share search index and user interaction data with “Qualified Competitors”:
Google will have to make available to Qualified Competitors certain search index and user-interaction data, though not ads data, as such sharing will deny Google the fruits of its exclusionary acts and promote competition.
This could be genuinely transformative, but there are lots of questions about how it will actually work in practice. The biggest barrier to competing with Google isn’t just the exclusive deals—it’s the chicken-and-egg problem of needing massive scale to build a decent search index, but needing a decent search index to attract users that create scale. Google’s search index represents decades of crawling, indexing, and learning from user interactions across billions of queries. No startup can replicate that from scratch.
As DuckDuckGo noted in their remedies proposal, access to Google’s search results via API could actually level the playing field in ways that breaking up Chrome or Android never could (though DuckDuckGo has said that this remedy ruling is insufficient in its eyes). A competitor could potentially build a differentiated search experience—better privacy, different ranking algorithms, specialized vertical search—while leveraging Google’s underlying index as a foundation.
The court was careful to limit this:
The court, however, has narrowed the datasets Google will be required to share to tailor the remedy to its anticompetitive conduct.
The key word here is “narrowed.” Mehta isn’t requiring Google to hand over everything—which would raise legitimate privacy and security concerns—but specifically the datasets that flow from the scale advantages Google gained through its anticompetitive conduct. It’s an elegant solution that addresses the actual harm without creating new ones.
Google will also have to offer search and ads syndication services to qualified competitors:
Google shall offer Qualified Competitors search and search text ads syndication services to enable those firms to deliver high-quality search results and ads to compete with Google while they develop their own search technologies and capacity. Such syndication, however, shall occur largely on ordinary commercial terms that are consistent with Google’s current syndication services.
Think of this as mandated training wheels for search competitors. Google has to help rivals build their own search capacity using Google’s infrastructure, but only until they can develop their own. The “ordinary commercial terms” language is crucial—it prevents Google from pricing competitors out while ensuring the remedy doesn’t become a permanent subsidy.
The AI Wrinkle
What’s fascinating is how much generative AI looms over this entire ruling. As Mehta notes (GSEs is “general search engines”):
The emergence of GenAI changed the course of this case. No witness at the liability trial testified that GenAI products posed a near-term threat to GSEs. The very first witness at the remedies hearing, by contrast, placed GenAI front and center as a nascent competitive threat. These remedies proceedings thus have been as much about promoting competition among GSEs as ensuring that Google’s dominance in search does not carry over into the GenAI space. Many of Plaintiffs’ proposed remedies are crafted with that latter objective in mind.
This timing accident may have saved the case from irrelevance. When the DOJ first filed this lawsuit, Google’s search dominance seemed unshakeable. By the time Mehta was crafting remedies, generative AI had created the first credible alternative to traditional search in decades. Suddenly, preventing Google from extending its search monopoly into AI distribution became just as important as addressing its existing dominance.
Dozens of pages are devoted to the rise of LLM technology, as well as chatbots and agents. While it notes the limits of comparing Generative AI tech to search, it also notes how competitive the market is:
The GenAI space is highly competitive. See id. at 503:25–504:4 (Turley) (Q. And let’s talk about the [GenAI] space . . . . You consider that space to be very competitive; correct? A. Yes, absolutely.”); id. at 3335:19-23 (Collins) (“[Q.] How would you describe the current level of competition with respect to foundation models as compared to the course of competition over the years that you’ve seen? A. [It] is the most competitive market I’ve ever worked in.”); id. at 685:4-8 (Hsiao) (“Q. How would you describe the competitive space that the Gemini app occupies? A. I would say I don’t think I’ve seen a more fierce competition ever in my 20-some years of working in technology.”).
There have been numerous new market entrants. See id. at 685:9-13 (Hsiao) (“It’s explosive growth. There’s new entrants. . . . You know, Grok, DeepSeek, all sort of new emerging models that are really, really strong.” …. (Hitt) (“You see entrants like Grok or DeepSeek, that may not have existed six months ago, are now able to reach the level of performance to wind up in the top ten of these models.”); id. at 2459:21-23 (Pichai) (“You have seen over the last few months as many people have launched chatbots. Very quickly, these chatbots reach tens of millions of users.”).
Again, the ruling makes it clear that Generative AI tools and search aren’t exactly direct competitors yet, but there are signs of the market heading that way:
GenAI products may be having some impact on GSE usage. … (Cue) (testifying that the volume of Google Search queries in Apple’s Safari web browser declined for the first time in 22 years perhaps due to the emergence of GenAI chatbots). But GenAI products have not eliminated the need for GSEs. … (“ChatGPT already expanded what is possible for parts of Search, but users don’t yet use ChatGPT for the full range of Search needs.”); … (Hsiao) (testifying that Google tracks so-called “cannibalization” of Google Search by GenAI chatbots and the Gemini app is not diverting queries from Google Search to a significant degree today); … (Cue) (attributing the recent decline in Safari’s search volume to increasing usage of GenAI apps but recognizing these apps must improve to compete with Google Search); … (Opening Arg.) (Plaintiffs’ counsel acknowledging that general search and GenAI “are different but overlapping products” and that GenAI “is not a replacement for [s]earch today);
Again, it seems like Judge Mehta is properly trying to respond to the actual violations here and trying to make sure any remedies match that, without getting in the way of actual market forces at work.
Some Judicial Humility Is Nice To See
Throughout the ruling, Mehta acknowledges the fundamental challenge of antitrust remedies:
Notwithstanding this power, courts must approach the task of crafting remedies with a healthy dose of humility. This court has done so. It has no expertise in the business of GSEs, the buying and selling of search text ads, or the engineering of GenAI technologies. And, unlike the typical case where the court’s job is to resolve a dispute based on historic facts, here the court is asked to gaze into a crystal ball and look to the future. Not exactly a judge’s forte.
This is refreshingly honest. Courts suck at designing technology markets. The best they can do is try to remove barriers and let competition happen, rather than micromanage outcomes.
Still A Long Road Ahead
Of course, none of this matters immediately. Google will likely appeal (though, honestly, the result here might be worth not having to spend on an appeal and the uncertainty it would bring), and we’re looking at years more litigation before anything actually happens. By then, the entire search landscape might have been transformed by AI anyway.
But if this ruling does eventually stick, it’s not the disaster I feared it might be. It targets the actual problem (exclusive distribution deals), creates some potentially useful competitive tools (data sharing and syndication with proper limitations for privacy reasons), and avoids the worst structural remedies that would have helped no one.
The question remains whether any of this will actually create more competitive search engines. But at least it’s not actively making things worse, which, honestly, was my biggest fear going in. I had feared that the court wouldn’t properly thread the needle on remedies, and yet… this seems to have been done very thoughtfully and strikes what is likely a good balance.
Filed Under: amit mehta, android, antitrust, chrome, competition, doj, remedies
Companies: apple, google, mozilla
Comments on “Judge Mehta’s Google Antitrust Remedies: Threading The Needle Between Overkill And Underkill”
.. Nah.
They got off with no actual penalty for what they had been doing. It’s barely a slap on the hand like most corporate violations. They didn’t even have to pay a fine for their profit on this one.
At best what will change is all the deals will totally be non exclusive while being done over signal with plenty of winks and fingers behind backs, until in another decade it will come out that they still kept making exclusive deals and will totally actually get punishment.
As for the api access, I’m sure they will find a way to make that worthless or not useful.
On the note of firefox, etc. So? That’s the same tired fucking bs that gets pushed out every time any company faces problems existing. If firefox can only exist by having google maintain a near monopoly and simply pay some leftovers to them, then let firefox die as they clearly suck and are incompetent.
Re:
You mentioned the very thing which makes funding Firefox a necessity but you failed to make the logical leap why that is. Google has a near monopoly which makes it almost impossible for anyone else to compete in the browser market, and when we have such a distorted market one solution is to make those with a near monopoly carry some of the burden to keep alternatives alive.
Anyone can have the best product ever seen, but if they are competing with a near monopoly it doesn’t matter and we’ll end up with an actual monopoly to the detriment of everyone.
Re: Re:
Edge ships with every copy of Windows, yet Chrome accounts for something like 70% of the Windows browser market. Much of this is from the moat of technical advantages that a Google has built: integration with Android phones to share bookmarks, passwords, etc. A.whole.damn OS built around Chrome.
Despite their home field advance, Edge can’t compete because MSs complete failure to innovate, not to mention absolutely fuck their customers for decades.
And all of this ignores that there is no such thing as a successful, independent, web browser.
Re: Re:
The bigger issue isn’t the payment itself, but how it’s structured. They aren’t being forced to do it- it’s voluntary, and it gives them significant leverage over competitors. Firefox might suck a bit less if it’s budget was say, 10x’d. Other competitors might also be able to step into the space if they weren’t one fight with Google away from having their funding cut, etc. The funding is also tied specifically to promoting it’s own product. This is complicated since usage is high regardless, but it could just be dropped. To the extent that it’s ok to have them shoulder it, it would be better if they were paying without being able to structure it to maximally benefit themselves.
Paying can be fine, but you have to be careful that it doesn’t just propagate the status quo. It’s not actually shouldering the burden, it’s basically just burning a small amount of money to keep the corpse of competitors twitching enough to avoid antitrust scrutiny.
Apple is a bit of a special case, but paying Apple in particular is in some sense worse. Ironically, Apple would have much more incentive (as well as the means, both technically and in terms of forcing defaults) to actually make a viable competitor, if it didn’t get to just sit back and collect (probably above market, but still) rents. It’s done similar with Maps. (Ben Thompson has a nice article on this dynamic )
Re: Re:
No. In case it was not clear enough.
Keeping the status quo just to keep a ton of failed competitors doesn’t do anything meaningful.
Punish google, let them fail. Hell, google just has to not give them money, a choice it can make any time it wants, and they will fail.
As things stand they, nor any of the other competitors will be able to move out of googles shadow.
Re:
Anyone who can’t change their default search engine (or pick one at search time) sucks and should die.
Reasonable?
I mean, it wasn’t paying billions for funsies. It was paying billions because it benefited Google.
I mean, those are parts of the overall problem. There’s a reason Google subsidizes them. They’re funnels towards Google both in data/defaults. There are better/bigger targets, like AdSense, but Chrome/Android are not nothing, either.
(They’re also anticompetitive in their own right. It’s much harder for an OS to compete with say Android being subsidized. That’s a different case, legally, but worth pointing out)
This is a good result but I think that trumps government is unlikely to break up any tech corporations it is easing all regulations on corporation and reducing all tax’s on all USA companys . I think they should have asked google the sell off chrome google is the no 1 search engine and controls most of the ad market around search
Re:
i want to know what asking any company to sell off an open source product is going to accomplish. As if they couldn’t git clone –depth=1 whack whack whackwhackwhackwhackChrome $BuildDir && cd $BuildDir && cmake . && make
Andand release to the wild.
Re: Re:
A court wouldn’t be “asking” Google to do something; it would be ordering it. That’s not a minor difference.
And you’re right that “selling it off” wouldn’t accomplish anything except getting Google some extra money. In theory, there are ways to make something like that work. Google could be made not to have any “special access” to the browser—whereas, right now, various built-in pieces are tied to Google services. But that mostly make sense if the browser is a monopoly being used to prop up search, which is not what the court found; they said the search was the monopoly, and I don’t think Google were found to be abusing that monopoly to promote a browser.
Interesting. Semi-reasonable ruling? Not particularly against Goog funding open source, but almost everyone said something that is utterly bullshit.
Sure, Apple couldn’t innovate anymore without Goog payments. Get the actual fuck out. Samsung? Get the fuck out. Also your unremovable shovelware is shit, and the word “innovate” should put a bullet in your corporate head for abuse. Mozilla? If you ever listened to your users and did not have a history of doing every kind of bullshit other than make your browser better (while buying garbage companies and killing the real moz browser, real add-ons, and attempting to kill Thunderbird) your position might not be quite as dire.
Then we get “Gen AI”. Dear god. There is doubly no such animal, so i guess the humility is a good thing. It cannot compete with normal, less egregiously awful, algorithmic search. Ever. Competition? i guess, if Biggest Fucking Dumpsterfire 5-way tie for first is a competition on your planet.
No, users don't care
The hell they do. Users don’t know what the fsck they want, and don’t care, as long as they can do the search thing and get results.
If users actually cared, they’d realize Google search results are the shittiest of shite sandwiches: a screen of AI Slop, followed by paid adverts, followed by stupid related questions (“People also ask” & “Things to know”) and finally—maybe—a few related sites.
Re:
I have a feeling that many people don’t even know who’s providing the answers to what they’re “googling” for. For example, a lot of people don’t know the difference between URLs and search queries, which is why browsers have combined both fields into one text-entry box. They type something in, some stuff happens, and who knows how it all works?
I bet if some popular browser switched its default, people would be openly wondering online about “has anyone else noticed the results aren’t like they used to be?” Some people would post concurring responses, and eventually a YouTube “explainer” video would reveal the truth about what really happened and how to change it back.
Re:
Most windows users only use Edge to download chrome. They very much want it.
Re: Re:
They were talking about search. But for browsers specifically, it’s worth asking how much of that is habit. Chromium is open source. Putting aside the google-specific integration moats (which are not nothing, but are also antitrust issues) and brand recognition for a second, you can literally build Chrome-with-a-different-logo, in terms of actual functionality. You can if anything beat it, with the lack of tracking (and these days, with adblock compatibility). The fact that essentially no one does, is pretty suggestive. You could probably redirect the Chrome download link to some Chromium derivative and a huge fraction wouldn’t notice or care. Chrome’s weakness on iOS is another suggestive point.
A lot of it is just old “IE bad, Chrome good. Edge is IE with a skin” wisdom carried forward from like a decade ago. And as long as Chrome doesn’t get too shitty, most people aren’t going to bother looking into anything else. The biggest threat to Chrome in the last decade was Manifest V3 and even that seems to have done nothing.
Re: Re: Re:
Chromes weakness on iOS is Apples anticompetitive behaviour. It’s built on Webkit, not chromium.
And the rest of your post elaborates on one of my sentence. Customers are so fucking tired of MSs bullshit that they won’t even try Edge.
Also, the few times I’ve found people using something other that Chrome, it was from them asking how to “get Google on their phone”. And they very specifically meant the search.
Google has done some shady shit, but Chrome has been a wildly successful solution to the massive fuckery that came before.
Re: Re: Re:2
TBH, it’s not so much customers are tired of MS’s bullshit as they have a low income, and thus can’t afford the constant internet connection required to prevent Windows devices bricking themselves, so they shop elsewhere to avoid having to constantly replace new PCs, etc.
Re: Re: Re:3
That is certainly adding to the frustration, but it’s far from the biggest issue. Apple has no problem convincing people to drop real money every year on phones, by making them want it. In contrast, look at the Windows phone. Allegedly a good technology, and would have offered a complete package for Microsoft to push in the enterprise environment. But absolutely nobody took them seriously, on their THIRD smartphone platform that complete abandoned all previously developed software. Again.
So the default enterprise compute setup is a Windows desktop with an iPhone. What a fucking mess.
Re: Re: Re:3
“Shop elsewhere”? Edge and Chrome are not things people buy. People with Windows computers apparently use Edge (already included) to download Chrome (at no cost), and then use only Chrome thereafter. I don’t know if it’s true, or what the reasons are, but I’ve seen and heard that claim pretty often.
Also, I’ve never heard of Windows computers bricking themselves due to being disconnected from the internet. There was a threat of Windows systems doing it if not connected one time for “activation”, and I don’t recall Microsoft even going ahead with that.
Re: Re: Re:4
FYI, you’re talking to someone whose pre-owned laptop is completely non-functional because I can’t get it online. FYI, real life experience trumps word of mouth every single time.
Re: Re: Re:5
Is it an ARM laptop or something? Last I heard, Microsoft required x86 laptop makers to allow users to disable secure boot, which means that a broken operating system would never make the laptop completey non-functional; the operating system could be replaced. (Though, of course, many people wouldn’t know how to deal with a such a semi-functional laptop.)
I’m interested to hear more. What went wrong with the software, and is such a thing publically documented anywhere? I feel like if Microsoft were bricking x86 laptops like that, there’d be online outrage, but I haven’t seen it.
Re: Re: Re:4
And of course the devices they’re preloaded on aren’t bought, either, amirite? Ignorant troll.
Re: Re: Re:5
According to the parent comment, that is correct: people are “shopping elsewhere” to avoid buying the pre-loaded shit. I’d love to see some evidence for that, and to know what “elsewhere” refers to.
But pre-loaded browsers were a different trial, about 25 years ago, with little to do with this latest Google trial.
Re: Re: Re:6
OK. I’ll explain it in a way I hope a grade schooler might understand. Chrome devices are sold with Alphabet apps preloaded, and it’s on that basis the company’s been found guilty of anti-trust despite the fact it hasn’t taken away users’ ability to install competing apps, unlike Microsoft prior to 2001. Basically, Alphabet has been found guilty of a crime it never committed. Simple enough for you?
Re: Re: Re:2
Yeah, but these days there are a lot of other options (albeit most of them Chromium based). People aren’t avoiding just MS/Edge, which is understandable.
Re: Re: Re:3
I actually use both Edge and Chrome. One for work, and one for personal, and really have no problem with either because the underlying technology is the same and MS is no longer playing the proprietary extensions game. Which, to this day, causes me no end of process pain and strokes my seething hatred of MS. Which, to honest was softening up until 18 months ago or so…but they have really snatched defeat from the jaws of victory there.
And if it sounds like I’m a Google fan, but that’s getting farther and farther from the truth. I’m certainly balls deep in their ecosystem, but I’m learning to loathe them as well for having rh honor of paying them money for them to treat me like absolute shit.
The question is, what to do.
Re: Re: Re:4
Except it’s the Chrome/Android device you paid for, not the OS.
Re: Re: Re:
I’m also wondering what the basis for that habit is. Does Google push them toward it somehow, like by giving download links for Chrome when people access their sites with another browser? Is it possible that people don’t even realize that Edge is a web browser and could be used to access Google services?
(My grandmother uses Chrome for her Gmail account and Edge or maybe IE for Facebook, literally just because the desktop has two browser shortcuts with those as their home pages. I don’t think she knows what a browser is or that she has two of them. The parts of the internet not accessible via those sites might as well not exist.)
Re: Re: Re:2
Nailed it in one.
Re: Re: Re:3
Balls. I’ve seen those same links numerous times and have always ignored them, as everybody has the right and ability to do.
Re:
You might be experiencing bias confirmation. People who dislike Google are very vocal about it. People who like it or at worst don’t mind it don’t go on about it. The AI answers are crap, but they’re a relatively new addition and still able to be ignored. Google search results are still better than alternative engines like DuckDuckGo that uses Bing on the backend. I still find things a lot faster with Google and often end up coming back if I try a different search. There’s a very good reason people actively choose it over Edge’s default Bing search on Windows.
Re: Re:
Although, in the context of this thread, one might wonder whether people are just installing Chrome because it gives better search results, without having any idea why. That is, because it uses a different search engine by default.
I’m not sure how much difference that would make to an anti-trust analysis. It might be part of the “A.I. wrinkle” mentioned. Lots of people already write search queries as if talking to a person, such as “who won last night’s sports game?” instead of “sports game results”. So if a browser switched from Google to some “A.I.” service, people might actually like it better. (Especially if Google’s “A.I.” answers are as crappy as stated. Google rarely lets me use their search engine anymore, so I haven’t seen that personally.)
Of course, in that case, the ideal ultimate goal would be to incorporate such a chat-bot directly into the browser interface, such that one does not even have to go to a “results” page. There would be no obvious place to advertise, hence no obvious business model.
Underkill
Literally guillotining every executive that deliberately created or maintained Google’s illegal search and advertising monopolies would, in my opinion, be overkill.
This, and any remedy that fails to break Google into tiny shards, is underkill.
Re:
Right, Google has a monopoly on search in the same way that Heinz has a monopoly on ketchup, Blue Plate has a monopoly on mayonnaise, and Skippy has a monopoly on peanut butter. Get it yet?
Re: Re:
No. There are public recipes for ketchup, and anyone could start selling it today. One could even reverse-engineer Heinz ketchup and sell the same exact thing, because there’s no legal protection.
Search engines have to actually go crawl the web. Which, apart from being expensive and somewhat impractical, requires special permission from the likes of Cloudflare, who specifically try to block crawlers but have exceptions for Google. Attempting to crawl sites without permission has sometimes run afoul of computer “abuse” laws.
As the article notes, “A.I.” services could be competitors to Google. But, in case you haven’t noticed, web site operators are freaking the fuck out about “A.I.” crawlers right now, and doing everything they can to block them, regardless of collateral damage. The data set Google possesses is effectively impossible to re-create now.
Re: Re: Re:
FYI, Google’s code is open source, whereas Heinz has secret recipes, so your little game of “how these things are different” just backfired on you because they’re different in the opposite direction to what you claimed.
Re: Re: Re:2
That code doesn’t appear to be the code for running Google’s web crawler or search engine. Even if Google’s code were actually open source, running their crawler from a non-Google IP address just wouldn’t work; nor would running their search engine without a good web-crawl database. The straightforward evidence is that nobody’s set up a search engine with Google-quality results that’s not simply proxying Google’s results.
Heinz has secret recipes, but so what? Their ketchup has only a 50-60% market share in the USA, and about 15% globally, and everyone knows they can buy fairly similar non-Heinz ketchup from an adjacent shelf in any grocery store. Google Search seems to be upward of 90%, and where’s its private-label equivalent?
Re: Re: Re:3
True, it’s not like there are search engines such as Brave Search, Startpage, or Swisscows, is it? Quit shilling for bad court judgments, already.
Re: Re: Re:4
I’ve used some of those. The results are not nearly as close to Google’s as non-Heinz ketchup is to Heinz. Saying they’re substitutes for Google is like saying mayonnaise is a substitute for Heinz ketchup (even if some people in Europe do use that instead, like those 10% of people using non-Google search engines).
By the way, Startpage is using Google (and also Bing) for its results, which makes it more white-label than private-label. Swisscows, like DuckDuckGo, is using Bing; neither has an index to compete with Google’s. Brave does at least have its own crawler and index. But it’s not hard to come up with searches that should produce useful results and don’t: song lyrics, variable names and code snippets from open-source projects, stuff like that.
I don’t know where you’re seeing any support for last year’s court decision in this thread. The view that Google’s payments to Mozilla are an abuse of monopoly power doesn’t make much sense to me, but the decision’s already been made, and now we’re talking about what to do about it and how the competitive landscape might be affected.
Sorry, but I think his “remedies” aren’t going to do anything useful. The problem with Google is that it’s advertising business has control over both a) it’s search engine and b) it’s browser, AND that it’s become so big that it’s almost impossible for any alternative search engine or browser to gain traction without first having on the same order of magnitude as much revenue as Google’s advertising business. I don’t buy the “but Google’s size is good for consumers” line, the lack of competition alone is bad for consumers regardless of any efficiencies of scale. I also don’t buy the line that it’s fine for Google to be as big as it is and have as much money to throw around as it does as long as it got there legally, the end results are just as bad for consumers regardless of how it got to that size.
The only remedies that’d be effective are, IMO, to separate the search engine itself and the browser from the advertising business (which I include the search site in, since the advertising is what funds the search site). I can see a feasible way to do that for the search engine, just require that the search site pay for access to the search engine on the same terms offered to everyone else. I can’t see any feasible way to do that for the browser that allows development to be funded without giving the advertising business so much control that the exercise is pointless. You’d have to set up a free-software non-profit to own the browser and fund it publicly (ie. through government grants set up to block government control) and have a way to mandate that browser’s use for a segment of the market that web sites and other browsers simply couldn’t afford to ignore.
Wow, such an awful take
Every single anti-monopoly expert recognizes this for what it is: a gift to Google. Not even a slap on the wrist. Literally: “you’re a criminal monopolist, and you’re free to keep at it”. Catastrophic precedent.
Google execs and lawyers are congratulating themselves, cashing in bonuses, and the markets recognize this as a victory for Google (instant 10% bump).
I don’t know… read the room?
Re:
Funny how critics will be critical if they don’t get everything they want and their opinions are of course always 100% correct.
Re: Re:
Isn’t that basically how opinions work? If we were talking about what’s “correct”, we’d be calling them facts (or lies).
Re: Re: Re:
*whooooooooooosh!*
Re: Re:
How about not getting anything at all? Google was found to be an illegal monopoly, and the remedy phase (the punishment for it) amounts to f— all. If this was even a slightly bad thing for Google as a monopoly, their stock would have tanked, which is exactly the opposite of what happened.
No person knowledgeable on the subject, be it anti-monopolist or pro-monopolist, thinks this is good for anti-monopoly and/or bad for Google. Investors are rejoicing, competitors are throwing their hands in the air. The article is not even wrong, just absolutely bonkers.