Google accused of rigging market to secure dominant search monopoly in biggest US antitrust trial for years::The historic legal battle against federal government lawyers - which comes just a week after Google’s 25th birthday - is set to be the biggest in almost two decades. The outcome of the case could have repercussions for the rest of the tech industry.

  • ilmagico@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It is alleged Google protects its franchise by shelling out billions of dollars annually to be the default search engine on the iPhone and on web browsers such as Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox.

    This has never been a secret, for years (decades) browsers like firefox, back when it was the dominant browser, would have its default search engine choice given to the highest bidder. At times, it was yahoo, or bing, before google outbid them in the following release of the browser. Obviously the same happens for safari, to noone’s surprise.

    So, the real question is: why does this come up only now as potentially illegal?

    • diffusive@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Because Google is like 90% of the market.

      It’s not the bidding part per se the issue, the issue is that the bidding (and possibly other effective strategies) are so successful that Google is almost a monopoly.

      The illegal part is that google is a bit too successful AND it uses these not-merits based techniques 🙂

      The idea is that if you really want to become almost a monopoly you should not play these games. And being a total monopoly would be illegal in any case

      • ilmagico@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Sure, but why now? If it was a problem, why didn’t they do something about it 15 years ago or so?

        • jantin@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Because for the last 15 years or so the agencies responsible for figuring it out and enforcement were toothless, corrupt, incompetent or all three together.

            • jantin@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              every now and then, even on this community, I see praises towards the new leader of FCC (IIRC) who’s taking a hard stance agains big tech and elsewhere (Doctorow’s blog IIRC again) about the wider “bidenomics” of going out against monopolies and trusts by empowering existing laws and agencies. Guess the answer is “because now there is an administration in power who at least pretends to care”.

      • seang96@spgrn.com
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        1 year ago

        Firefox gets the majority of it’s funding from this though, depending on how the rule on this they could make Firefox lag behind without funding and make chromium even more of a monopoly.

        • ilmagico@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Absolutely this. I rely on Firefox and this, in a weird twist of fate, could actually hurt Firefox and consolidate Google’s (Chrome) monopoly