Google has been ruled to be a monopoly. Now the other big tech companies await judgement.
Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O), opens new tab Google broke the law with its monopoly over online searches and related ads, a federal judge ruled on Monday, in the first victory for U.S. antitrust authorities who have filed a string of lawsuits to battle market domination by a handful of Big Tech companies.
The decision is a significant win for the Justice Department, which had sued the search engine giant over its control of about 90% of the online search market, and 95% on smartphones. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta noted that Google had paid $26.3 billion in 2021 alone to ensure that its search engine is the default on smartphones and browsers, and to keep its dominant market share.
“The court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Mehta wrote.
Mehta’s ruling against Alphabet’s major revenue driver paves the way for a second trial to determine potential fixes, such as requiring the company to stop paying smartphone makers billions of dollars annually to set Google as the default search engine on new phone.
When I say “sweat”, I mean “glisten lightly”. Actions to correct their abuse of the market might cost them billions, but that’ll only be a small fraction of their total revenue.
But I do approve the decision.
Sometimes it’s a victory when a judge agrees that water is wet, right?
C&C Music Factory are extremely jealous.
Timmyson @ 1
A succinct summary, but the corporate lawyers will work their asses off to prove water is dryer than Sahara.
Timmyson @ 1
The constitution never mentions whether water is wet and it’s not discussed in the federalist papers. Therefore originalism requires that courts vacate any rulings based on this.
I’m too much of a cynic, resigned to the irreparable corruption of America and the capitalism, to believe that this will result in anything substantive.
Edit: …and of capitalism…
Undoubtedly Google is a monopoly. Given the wording of this judgement, though, I am worried that it could lead to unintended consequences.
Firefox only exists today because Google pays Mozilla nearly half a billion a year to put Google as the default search engine. Stopping Google from paying this would almost certainly mean the end of Firefox and other browsers, i.e. there would be a major contraction of competing browsers possibly leaving only Chrome, Safari, and Edge, an even greater market dominance for Alphabet, Apple, and Microsoft. Besides, it is very easy for the user to change their default search engine.
Only if you assume that people are aware that there are any other search engines, or even know what a search engine is. The fact that the overwhelming majority of people keep using Google even though it’s completely shit makes me doubt that somewhat.
Dunc,
Best as I can tell, it’s no worse than other engines, and so it remains my default.
Seriously, I invite you to try to name one better.
DDG, Bing, Yahoo?
(I’ve tried them; end of the day, it’s the search terms more than the search engine)
Dunc, Google is going downhill as a search engine for sure, partly Google’s fault for prioritising ad revenue over user experience and partly due to deceptive search engine optimisation by external actors (I hasten to add there’s nothing wrong with honest search engine optimisation like putting appropriate keywords in your page header), but it’s still better than the other options I’ve tried. I use DuckDuckGo a fair bit, mostly out of a sense of wanting to help out the competition, but its results are nowhere near as good as Google’s. Bing is intolerable, basically an ad search engine, as if Microsoft thought ‘let’s take the worst aspects of Google and amplify them tenfold.’ If you’ve found any better search engines, I’d be keen to know what they are.
@chrislawson: The reason DuckDuckGo isn’t good is the same reason Bing isn’t good –because DuckDuckGo actually uses Bing search under the covers.
As for other search engines, Brave has one. I’ve also heard good things about Kagi (but I haven’t tried it). Note though that Kagi goes for the subscription model instead of being ad supported.
I’ve been using DDG quite happily for years. It doesn’t serve up paid ads pretending to be search results, and it works just fine for me. Whenever I find myself resorting to Google for some reason, it always seems to serve up huge amounts of self-referential garbage – probably because they have a deliberate policy of making search worse to keep you on their page.
Part of the problem here is ubiquituous tracking, surveillance, and “personalisation” means that different users get wildly differing experiences of the same product, so it’s hard to compare our experiences.
Yeah, me too. Definitely on the list of things to investigate.
No one in my organization would touch that diseased mess that is G00GLE. We use duckduckgo and other honest resources.
It is important to let people know how corrupt and thuglike these huge corporations are, even if it is weakly stated and will never really stop their destructive, unethical behavior.
@9 John Morales wrote: it’s the search terms more than the search engine)
I reply: You hit a most important point there. Carefully worded search terms can mean the difference between getting what you want and superfluous crap. However, we realize that DDGO has limitations, but the search syntax and the fact that they aren’t spyware and throwing results at the top that benefit them are sufficient for us to use them first (but, not exclusively)
@11– Thanks. I didn’t know that. Looking on DDG’s info page, it seems that it uses many sources, but Bing is its primary search engine source. Having said that, DDG gives much better results than Bing in my experience. The conclusion (to me at least) is that Bing throws an impenetrable layer of ad-driven garbage over the top of its search results while DDG uses its other sources to filter a lot of that garbage out.
Dunc@12– thanks for that. I will look into Kagi at some stage.
One bit of irony about “which search engine is better?”: If you’re looking for dodgy content, Google gives better results. Dodgy can mean dubious porn (I really don’t care about the indeterminate-gender purple hedgehogs, as long as they’re consenting adults, but still), various pirated material, xtian-nationalist agitprop, whatever. The exception is that Google is considerably inferior to DuckDuckGo (which although it starts from Bing also crosschecks with other sources) when trying to verify nonprivate personal data like “employment history” and “physical address of front-for-fraud fly-by-night business entities.”
The main reason to avoid Google remains that it doesn’t work nearly as well if your system is set up to block location data. That demonstrates to me anyway that the “advertising focus” is impairing the function and utility of the purported “general search engine” — by itself a sign of misuse of a monopoly position. (But then, I’m a nerd even more skeptical of the subtleties of “combinations in restraint of trade” than was John Sherman.)
Startpage is pro-privacy Google alternative I find pretty useful.
Last I checked, Kagi is paywalled(!), which means it may as well be on the fucking moon for all the good it does.
It’s a subscription service, yes. There’s a very robust argument (which was made by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in their classic 1998 paper describing what would become Google) that the ad-supported model inevitably results in a conflict of interest between advertisers and users which users will always lose:
[The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives]
A shitty and vapid argument, Dunc.
I don’t wanna pay to search.
(Simple as!)
—
Easy enough to test, no?
Put up a pay-for-search engine against the freebies, see how popular it becomes.
Be that as it may, making search go from a household utility to a luxury only available to the wealthier classes is approximately as fucking stupid as making electricity go from a household utility to a luxury only available to the wealthier classes.
Is your electricty supply free, or do you pay somebody for it? I’ve certainly never heard of anybody offering electricity as an ad-supported service free to the end user… How many other household utilities aren’t also paid-for subscriber services in one form or another? What about your water supply, or your internet connection? Is it reasonable to describe any of those services as luxuries only available to the wealthier classes?
Also, it’s not one or the other. It’s not like anybody’s proposing to ban free, ad-supported search. You want to continue using Google, despite its problems? Go right ahead. Nobody going to stop you.
It’s not free, but I don’t have to go into debt just to be able to buy it, and it consumes physically limited resources to provide rather than being just information. If you have a modest income and a checking account you can pay for electricity.
Internet is different. Internet stuff (other than the bandwidth itself) isn’t supposed to have paywalls; and when it does, it is inaccessible to anyone below the six figure white collar top 10% or so of the income distribution, even if the face value is $1.99 a month, because you need a fucking credit card and not just a normal ordinary checking account to pay that $1.99. As a result it is enormously more exclusionary.
It’s different for a second reason. A pay site will always be undercut by a free one. Always always always. Paywalled sites either fail quickly, or are bubbles that seem to do well at first but collapse once the novelty has worn off. Watch for the current substack bubble to pop soon.
You can also get subsidies for your utility payments if you’re poor. But not for online paywalled stuff.
Needless to say, I think whoever it was who decided not to allow people to buy anything online without debt-financing it was stone stupid. But we are, it seems, stuck with the consequences of their decision.
That’s exactly the scenario that I’m afraid of. That the 10% PMC and the actually-rich will get to have decent search again, while everyone else gets warmed-over spam soup. Yet another two-tier system, like what’s happening to the “universal” healthcare now in every country that has it. It’s fucking infuriating that a) this two-tierization goes on at all and that b) people like you who ought to know better keep cheerleading it. It’s just more neoliberal Reaganomics trickle-down bullshit. No one will ultimately benefit except the superrich and the working class just loses and loses and loses. What the Kagi people aren’t telling you when they sell you on this is that what is trickling down isn’t rain, it’s piss …
Oh, and it’s not even just necessities like health and search. Look at how good old fashioned television has been two-tierized. If you’re an urbanite with a credit card you get to continue to enjoy the kind of quality, scripted programming with a decent content to ad ratio and no ad popups during the action that your parents got over the air from CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox; if you are not, so all you have access to are CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, and that new thing with the ever-shifting name presently calling itself CW, what you get is mostly pink-slime filler with dribs and drabs of semi-digestible scripted programming, floating on a sea of advertising that intrudes into the periods that are supposed to be the show rather than a break. Often covering up subtitles, or glaring bright during a dark scene so you can’t see shit until it goes away.
I’m sorry, but this two-tier shit has to fucking stop. The line must be drawn here, at Internet search. What’s next, needing a credit card for fucking DNS?
There’s also a fraud risk differential. If you buy things in a bricks-and-mortar store, or pay for utilities by check, or similarly, you pay what it says on the bill. There’s no sneaky extra bullshit charges, no quagmire of bureaucratic nonsense to make it impossible to cancel later, no hackers impersonating you a few months later to max out your account or wreck your credit rating. The price you see is the price everyone gets. That $2.99 loaf of bread on the shelf is the same $2.99 if you’re you, or your neighbor, or that other guy, if you’re black or you’re white, male or female, and so forth. If you write a check for $450 and give it to some company, they can withdraw exactly $450 from your bank account and not a cent more. If they want more they have to ask for more and give you a damn good reason to agree to fork over more. They can’t just go and withdraw $800 instead of the agreed-upon $450 and then make you fight an uphill battle to claw back the additional $350 they stole.
If you buy things online you get scammed. The business you’re dealing with can show you a $4.99 price tag and show your neighbor a $2.99 one without you being the wiser. They can discriminate and get away with it. They can say they’ll bill you $4.99, or $450, and then charge your credit card $800 and make you have to fight like hell to recover the difference. Or just take the money and run without shipping your order, and have vanished by the time you realize something is wrong. They can pile on hidden extra fees: that $450 that turns into $800 might not even be recoverable, as they might have some fine print they can point to (and a binding arbitration clause to back that up) to justify keeping the extra $350, leaving you without recourse. And of course your credit card number can be intercepted at any point, by malware snuck onto your own machine or hackers breaking into the seller’s, and then used fraudulently by whoever.
So, first of all, even if they offer a debit card that can be used like a credit card but without actually debt-financing the purchase, using it to pay for anything online is stone stupid. Even if it has theoretical fraud protections, the $350-of-hidden-fees-in-fine-print scam still works, and now it drains your main checking or savings account. So does the fraudulent charge by some hacker down the line, and although you can reverse that, having your account even temporarily drained will mean bouncing checks, fines, utilities cut off, possibly even eviction and homelessness. Getting the original fraudulent charge canceled and your credit rating unfucked will be a hollow victory after that happens. Not to mention a lot harder when, in the interim, you’ve no money with which to hire a lawyer.
Paying for stuff online is a luxury for the middle and, especially, upper middle classes who can easily get credit, easily create extra accounts to compartmentalize their spending, and easily weather temporary absences of hundreds and even thousands of dollars without serious inconvenience, as well as afford to lose tens to hundreds more unrecoverably to various kinds of scummy pricing practices. Working class people and people on fixed incomes can not afford any of that and therefore cannot, or at the very least should not, spend money online because even if their area/bank/etc. affords them a mechanism for doing so it will inevitably be very risky for them to actually use it. (Online-usable debit cards, low-limit high-interest-rate credit cards that have lower requirements for reliability and magnitude of income to be approved, etc.)
Basically, as far as I am concerned, credit cards themselves are a scam* and anything else that requires one is a scam-until-proven-otherwise.
Because you have to use them perfectly, not only never actually spending beyond your means but never forgetting or being one moment late paying off the balance every month, to avoid being dinged interest, and they intentionally make it hard-to-impossible to do that; and because they inherently rely on security through obscurity, making them hacker paradise. If lottery fees are a tax on being bad at math, credit card interest payments are a tax on being human (and fool enough to use a credit card).
TL;DR: It is a fact that we can have good search without a paywall, the proof being that for decades we had good search without a paywall. Therefore, search turning crappy and then more and more people (including you and even Cory Doctorow(!), who really ought to know better) suggesting that if we want non-crappy search again we should open our wallets constitutes ex-fucking-stortion. Taking something we had and then demanding money for us to get it back simply Is. Not. Legit.
End of rant.
Well, you’ve clearly got some very strong opinions here… Which mostly seem to boil down to not liking the fundamental nature of modern capitalism. And you know what? I’m on board there. But, until we get our fully-automated luxury space communism, it’s kinda what we have to live with right now.
There’s only one specific point in that wall of text I’m going to address, then I’m going to walk away: When you observe that providing electricity “consumes physically limited resources to provide rather than being just information”, I have to wonder just how the hell you think search (or any other internet infrastructre) works. Server farms do not run on rainbows and unicorn farts. They run on huge amounts of electricity and lots of expensive hardware, much of which has a fairly short lifespan and has to be continually replaced and upgraded. It’s a fucking expensive business, and somebody has to pay for it.
Yes, but the unit cost of “perform one search” is miniscule.
And, as I pointed out, we had good search, free at the point of use, for decades. That alone automatically proves that there is no justification for having to pay. I don’t remember ever having electricity for free, by contrast. So there is a huge difference there, between something that is inherently somewhat pricey and something that isn’t, but which dark forces are trying to take away and then rent back to us at hugely inflated prices.
Glad to see Google taken down a few notches. However this is not particularly good news unless they do a full sweep of all the monopolies at the same time. Otherwise we are just going to see bigger and better ones emerging from this.
Google pays Apple a ton of money. Apple is just going to become an even bigger monopoly in the phone and app market now that they have no reason incentive to hold back. They are already spending millions on ads to convince you not to use Chrome on your iPhone.
Google provides Mozilla about 80% of annual income. Say goodbye to Firefox and all the people employed by them. Google Chrome will now become an even bigger player than it already is.
rydan, Google is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.
You can have my Firefox when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
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Oh, hell, there goes another one …
Dammit, wrong thread. Please delete this and the previous comment.