A judge ruled that Google’s ubiquitous search engine has been illegally exploiting its dominance to squash competition and stifle innovation.
“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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So stoked to see this. A bit disheartening to read this kinda shit, though=
Only to be followed a few paragraphs down by
Sigh.
In other news rain is wet. Damn the legal system is so inept and corrupt. This has been clear for what, like 20 years now. Should have been deemed illegal all along. For profit companies will always seek market domination to maximize profits, always have and always will. It’s the legal system & authorities job to regulate so it doesn’t happen and take swift action when it does.
They should also break up Google’s stranglehold on the browser market but I guess that’ll take another decade or two at least as well. Sadly meanwhile this ruling could lead to Mozilla losing its main funding if Google can’t keep paying to be default search engine which could lead to even less choice in the browser space.
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
That makes sense, thanks for explaining! I saw “makes space” as what’s happening right now, since Android does let you install alternatives for all those, including third party app stores, but it does go farther than that.
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.
I may be misunderstanding but why are people saying take down chromium? Please correct me if I’m wrong but chromium is open source and only invested in largely by Google. Chrome is chromium with proprietary code implemented and in no way (as far as I can tell) do they own the chromium project. I quite like chromium just the de-googled version. I think people may be mistaking Chrome and Chromium for being the same or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe someone can explain if I’m missing something
Also I’d love to see the downfall of Google but nothing will change the power they have. The names too recognizable it doesn’t matter if given a choice , Grandma or Grandpa or whoever that doesn’t care about this sort of thing is picking Google because out of the common options they’ll probably only recognize Bing or Google maybe some Yahoo too lol
Edit: I don’t understand why I’m being downvoted , I was asking a question and explaining what I understood about the project but that’s the internet I suppose haha
I think the main problem is that Chromium still contributes towards the browser engine monoculture, as it is bug-for-bug compatible with Chrome. Therefore if you switch to Chromium, it’s still enough for the web sites to test for Chrome compatibility, which they will, because it has the largest market share. Users of competing browsers suffer, further driving the lure of Chrome (or Chromium).
On the other hand, if people switched to some other engine, one that does not share the same core engine or even the same history, this will no longer hold: web sites would need to be developed against the spec, or at least against all the browsers they might realistically expect their customers to use.
Chromium is open source but not free (as in freedom). In fact, it is developed by Google and only Google has the power to accept or refuse a PR.
As an example: Manifest V2 is going to be discontinued in favor of V3 on Chromium (and consequently Chrome) despite the outrage of the users and developers.
I don’t think anything you said makes it not free, as long as you can fork it. The same can be said about most FOSS, since somebody, usually the creator, is in control of the repository.
That’s the point of FOSS - your repository isn’t becoming a democracy by virtue of using a permissive license, but it means somebody could outcompete you with a fork and effectively take over as the dominant project.
I thought it was not a licensing issue but rather that it if someone wanted to maintain the engine with MV2, it would get increasingly hard to do independently because of the sheer complexity.
Yup. Nobody denies you from forking Chromium and maintaining an updated version with MV2, but good luck doing that
Really, this is just a win for Facebhook?
It already hobbled itself by letting the results quality slide for 15+ years…
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.
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?
For the record Valve is very much not a monopoly. They have very big competitors including Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo and more recently GOG.
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.
… 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.
Ideal reality: Google doesn’t buy advantage from browsers to make their search engine the default. This way, other search engines can compete at the same level, right?
Reality: browser developers will have their income cut down because now their main source of income is dead (see recent news on Mozilla).
Usually these kinds of policies that may or may not come up out of goodwill results in unintended consequences that negatively affect others.
The winner here are the politicians.
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.
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.
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
Search engines other than Google seem to be able to index reddit just fine though. I thought the Reddit deal was about API access to make for easier AI training data, also I hadn’t seen anything saying that such a deal would be exclusive to Google.
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.
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 shut 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.
Websites and articles that have nothing to do with search or Google have to be designed specifically for Google’s search algorithm. I think that’s pretty crazy.
Interestingly, SEO is increased with semantic HTML which benefits people who need screen readers since it is easier to parse. But, also. Fuck google
Unfortunately, people play a lot of weird tricks with semantic tagging for SEO, making them less useful to screen reader users. Not to mention that Google has a very specific, very limited interpretation of the tags, so a lot of tags that would be useful for accessibility are unused or misused.
My information must be old, but what you are talking about still better than just span of div of div of span of div right? People still try to have any amount of meaningful structure?
Not really - what they’ll do is put in the date tag some much more recent date than the date of publication to try and push the content towards search engines to make it more likely to show up, lie about stock levels (say some product is in stock in the metadata, but say on the page it isn’t in stock), cram keywords into metadata, stuff like that. I don’t think it’s really an improvement.
Not to mention googles push for an identification standard that would effectively ban any non chromium browser from all major websites.
Search Engine OptimizationGoogle OptimizationWonder 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.
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 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, most recently 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.
If that was true, duckduck and others wouldve dried up and faded away by now
They are way smaller than Google market share wise
Shatter the company like glass.
They are insanely huge. They should be 10 different companies.
Alphabet is 10 different companies. Google is one of them.
Google is Alphabet.
This distinction is meaningless. It is like arguing that Facebook isn’t a company anymore and Meta is a totally new institution.
It’s Facebook. It’s Google.
Its FAANG companies not MAANA companies.
At least ten, and maintain no logs on their users. All previous logs must be purged and rendered irrecoverable.
Or even better, Google could buy the US government
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It might not be much but it’s still legal precedent that will hopefully help it reach critical mass. Like getting Al Capone on tax evasion
Even if the punishment is largely symbolic and Google only pays a tiny (compared to it’s massive size) fine; I’d still call that a significant win.
Don’t they, err, already do this?
I mean a search engine is literally just a website and absolutely nothing prevents you from just going to duckduckgo.com or bing.com or wherever. Don’t think Chrome prevents you from accessing other search engines in general, and last time I used it (admittedly a while back) it had a setting to change the search engine used by default if you just typed something into the address bar.
No, They don’t. They have stolen that initial choice from you by paying companies to be the “default” choice. They do this to capture those who are lazy or indolent about their choices, or to entrap those who are too un-savvy to change the preference.
You do know there’s a big difference between a “default” option and a “mandatory” setting, right? Specifically that you do, in fact, have a choice to change a default?
Not forcing the user to proactively make a choice is not the same thing as denying the user the ability to choose.
Your argument is irrelevant.
DDGFTW
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It is much cleaner than bing
But yes
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