I'm dumbfounded. Of all the things in the tech world they chose Google paying Apple, Samsung, et.al. to be the default search engine to sue over. That's not really evidence of Google blocking competition. That's evidence of phone manufacturers using their power in one market (phone sales) to extract cash out of another (search/ads).
Arguably, Google paying such sums is evidence that there IS competition in the search engine space. Otherwise, Google could just say "You know where to find Lycos or AltaVista if you prefer them".
Google pay such sums since otherwise the other search engines would pay billions to be the default search engine. And if we make such transactions illegal Apple will make their own search engine and make that the default since there is too much money left on the table otherwise.
google having so little competition means that phone companies are making a lot less than they would in a healthy market. There's nothing to compare to
Regardless, it feels like a very shrewd approach: very narrow and also the keystone holding up Google's monopolies in other areas. Not all other areas, but a lot of them.
Prohibiting pay-for-placement can be enforced by accountants and lawyers without help from engineers. Would be theoretically much easier to enforce than any other area of scrutiny I've heard discussed.
This would also kill Firefox if it's applied beyond mobile.
Possibly? I didn't see anything in the complaint about the use of their search landing page to push Chrome on people. That could be a problem because Chrome always defaults to Google search.
Honestly... what would Chrome's market share be if Google weren't heavily pushing it on everyone who visits google.com?
> that's evidence of phone manufacturers using their power in one market (phone sales) to extract cash out of another (search/ads).
That's an example of how competition is supposed to work. Phone makers sell their audience to the highest bidder. There's no shortage of phone makers. The issue is that google bought them all.
The issue is the near zero marginal cost of software makes it easy to dominate entire lines business. Technology itself allows businesses to become huge because once they have a solution, they can implement it at near zero cost everywhere and so competitors can’t really compete. Like Walmart/target/Costco versus little Main Street stores, or Home Depot/Lowe’s versus independent hardware stores, etc.
Smaller operators will have high marginal costs and higher prices, and will never be able to compete with bigger operations that can utilize software and other technology to offer the absolute lowest prices.
Although, in other businesses like retail, this results in single digit profit margins at best, whereas in software, due to the minimal labor needed and protections of copyright and obfuscation and network effects, the tech companies can maintain much bigger profit margins.
Yeah indeed the margins are high. In the case of google/FB, they are so high, that paying back users with "free services" doesn't cut it anymore. Even the cost of running those free services has gone way down. At this point users shouldbe getting paid for having their data used. That way, a potential competitor could outright buy the users directly (instead of paying FB/Google for advertising to acquire users). Unfortunately there's no legal framework for that yet.
No other industry except perhaps finance has the potential to cheaply scale as IT. I wonder what antimonopoly actions have been in finance in the past (finance seems to have been a lot more regulated since forever)
Maybe I am all special or something. For me, it is 300 points or more per day.
Yes, a few years back they changed the points ratio on that end. It used to take about 500 points to get a $5 gift card and now it is 5250 points.
But they also fiddled with things on the other end.
At least for me. Maybe Bill Gates likes me or something and told his people "Make sure that pathetic homeless woman can earn $10 per month as my generous gift to her."
I earn a $5 gift card about once every two weeks-ish. I'm poor enough that matters to me, so it is something I am very aware of. That $5 gift card is sometimes still all the money I have for the day, though I'm less desperately poor than when I was homeless.
I don't know what else to tell you. Your info sounds out of date to me, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Maybe you are using Bing on desktop, mobile (iOS), with their extension, making Edge your default browser, and doing all daily bonus activities? So altogether it's selling your info and some of your attention.
I was just doing it passively on one computer without extensions.
The 'anti trust' in this situation would be Google using it's own dominance over Chrome and Android to 'unfairly' promote it's own products.
The most unhealthy thing in these systems is the 'value chain creep' that allows monopoly in one area, to be leveraged into other areas.
Imagine if you owned all the real estate in the state and you had a cracker factory. Hey, just charge your cracker-making competitors 2x the rent. Nobody can make crackers but you.
Or you own all the railways and charge your Oil pumping competitors more to transport Oil - you have an Oil monopoly.
Chrome is not a 'money losing product' - it's absolutely one of the most important products in Google's portfolio - the surpluses are yielded elsewhere, in Search. Arguably same for Android.
If there were an 'anti trust' case it would be to separate Search/Chrome/Android/Cloud in the similar vein that Microsoft would ostensibly be separated from any app software.
Amazon uses AWS surpluses to 'dump' on commercial distribution which is another weird one.
If there is a case to concern over monopoly, it's those.
You could split Google in Search/Chrome/Android/Cloud, and that would help in reducing they monopoly, but if there is one thing I could change it would be to decouple ranking, filtering and targeting from the rest, and open them up.
There should be multiple rankers on top of the index, users should be able to choose and create new rankers. Same for filtering - what gets hidden/censured, put the power back to the users, let them select their filter lists. Instead of one true ranking and filtering, let users customise it as they like.
That's a neat idea, and it might help - but it's not the kind of problem governments would chose to solve.
Or put another way, governments would chose to intervene by helping to create more 'competition' - which creates product variations approximating true market needs - as opposed to trying to 'legislate features'. 'Feature lists today' but something else tommorow. If the market is healthy, it will move in the direction of value, is the idea.
Governments can also help by promoting and supporting standards.
Spidering and building an index is relatively easy. It's not the barrier to creating a search engine, and I don't think you'd find that Microsoft's index is materially smaller than Google's. The hard part is figuring out how to turn that content into relevant results.
Only 2 companies in the US have an independent English based index with the contents of the entire web. Granted, the sheer volume of data is a barrier to making the index but removing that, only 4 US companies have crawled the entire internet. I'm going to have to disagree with you on that one. To write a crawler capable of the scale and timeliness to crawl the entire web in a week or two requires some pretty solid engineering. I don't however disagree that building a good search is also difficult.
Google and Microsoft were not the first web spiders.
A famous example, Yahoo!, didn't walk away from search and partner with Microsoft because of the difficulty of building an index. They did it because it was going to cost billions per year to try to keep up with Google in producing results.
I'm not arguing there's no work to do in building an index, but the problems of crawling and indexing can be solved by cash. They're a moat against small challengers, but not against well capitalized ones. Ranking and filtering require lots of research and tuning. This is the moat against even the well capitalized.
Put another way: do you really disagree that Google would still easily dominate search based on result quality even if small startups got access to their index data?
That's actually the opposite of how it's supposed to work. You're not supposed to be able to use your dominance in one market (cell phone manufacturing) to unfairly compete in another (search).
>>> that's evidence of phone manufacturers using their power in one market (phone sales) to extract cash out of another (search/ads).
>> That's an example of how competition is supposed to work. Phone makers sell their audience to the highest bidder.
> That's actually the opposite of how it's supposed to work. You're not supposed to be able to use your dominance in one market (cell phone manufacturing) to unfairly compete in another (search).
If you read the comment in question, there is no suggestion that the cell phone manufacturers are competing in the search market. They're taxing it, or selling to it.
> Apple 25%, Samsung 34%, Huawei 17%, Xiaomi 10% in Europe
Apple gets 11 billions/year to use Google as the default search engine
The remaining 61% (Samsung+Huawei+Xiaomi) is Android that means Google
Xiaomi defaults to Baidu in China, for example, but everywhere else, where the CPC has no direct control over the wires, they use Google because Google money is good even in China
Given this AG's track record can we really hold on good-faith that this isn't politically motivated? Many conservatives are absolutely desperate to believe there is a conspiracy against them, but why go to lengths of proving it if you can just exact revenge through AT legislation.
> That's not really evidence of Google blocking competition. That's evidence of phone manufacturers using their power in one market (phone sales) to extract cash out of another (search/ads).
No, I think it is a pretty clear example of rent-seeking on Google's behalf.
> phone manufacturers using their power in one market
Who has more market power - the disparate group of phone vendors who are legally barred from coordinating on things like this or the single actor that controls the only operating system package tenable for those phone vendors to use?
> No, I think it is a pretty clear example of rent-seeking on Google's behalf.
If anything, rent-seeking would be the other way, but that's still a big stretch.
The phone manufacturers know that searches are valuable to search engines, so they charge for it even though they're not doing anything but being a broker for their users. But while that is getting a cut (literally seeking rent), calling it "rent seeking" is a stretch, because clearly that brokering and OS space is naturally valuable and the phone companies aren't just injecting themselves into someone else's money-making process.
Google pays off phone manufacturers to sign onerous contract preventing them from installing other app stores or displaying other options on the home screen or during the setup process -> They then collect rent from the companies that have to offer their apps on the Play Store.
From wikipedia, "An example of rent-seeking in a modern economy is spending money on lobbying for government subsidies in order to be given wealth that has already been created." In this instance, the phone vendors are the politicians.
>> Of all the things in the tech world they chose Google paying Apple, Samsung, et.al. to be the default search engine to sue over. That's not really evidence of Google blocking competition. That's evidence of phone manufacturers using their power in one market (phone sales) to extract cash out of another (search/ads).
> No, I think it is a pretty clear example of rent-seeking on Google's behalf.
Not sure what conversation you're having in the above comment, but this is the one that I was responding to :)
Google engages in anti-competitive behavior (ie. using their capital to increase the entry barriers for other app store markets on Android), so that they can then collect rent on their app store (among other things, like search/advertising).
The anti-competitive actions (paying off phone vendors) that Google takes are part of that rent-seeking behavior, just as companies that lobby politicians to increase barriers to entry so they can raise prices are engaging in rent-seeking.
If you want to nit-pick and say the play store pricing is the rent-seeking and the paying off of the phone vendors is the anti-competitive behavior, I wouldn't have a huge quibble with that.
It's not nit picking to say you're giving non sequiturs to the comments you were responding to.
> Google engages in anti-competitive behavior (ie. using their capital to increase the entry barriers for other app store markets on Android), so that they can then collect rent on their app store (among other things, like search/advertising).
There is an argument that could be made that companies taking a 30% cut of app store revenue is rent seeking, but it makes no sense to say that Google is paying Apple per-user search acquisition fees in iOS Safari so that Google can then turn around and collect fees in the iOS App Store (because obviously that's not a thing).
You're absolutely correct, I misread the original comment and doubled-down rather than double-checking, which is my fault. I was thrown off by the reference to the "OS space" in your comment.
I still think what I'm saying is true, but agree that it is not quite the same issue.
It seems like you're both right and we're just looking for the right words... there are anti-competitive as well as rent-seeking behaviors, would the combination of those be racketeering?
>Google pays off phone manufacturers to sign onerous contract preventing them from installing other app stores or displaying other options on the home screen or during the setup process
GOOD
Here's the problem. You want to make it illegal for google to stop phone manufacturers from installing even more crapware than they do already? How would that be a win for anyone besides Samsung/LG/Sony/etc? Encouraging even more fracturing of the Android ecosystem and the lack of updates? Google is protecting consumer welfare. This should be encouraged, not looked at skeptically.
This is not the MS in the 90s situation where manufacturers couldn't install Linux instead of Windows. This would be MS saying you can't install BonziBuddy and sell it with our logo and services on it.
If it was a win for Samsung/LG/Sony to install crap-ware, then they would be doing it already rather than signing lucrative contracts that help Google maintain its monopoly position.
This is definitely not a good example of 'rent seeking'.
'Rent seeking' is real-estate.
You buy a property, you seek 'rent' for the rights to access it.
It's that simple.
It's considered different than other economic activity because it's not productive in nature.
Edit:
1) From Investoopedia: "Economic rent is the income earned from utilization of resource ownership. Entities that own resources can lend them to earn interest rents, lease them to earn rental income, or they may utilize their resources in other income-producing ways."
2) Here is Carl Marx agreeing with literally Adam Smith "Adam Smith correctly defines rent as “the price paid for the use of land” ([O.U.P., Vol. I, p. 162; Garnier,] t, I, p. 299) - in 'Theories of Surplus Value'.
Renting out a plot of land is the easiest, simplest, most obvious example of rent-seeking.
> The ones getting paid tens billions of dollars annually seems like the obvious answer to me.
So what, the seller on any side of a transaction is the one who has the market power?
To make it simpler: if there was one employer in the entirety of Earth and 7 billion people who wanted a job - since the employer is paying the employee, the employee would have the market power?
Microsoft argued it wasn't using monopoly power, because Windows was priced lower than the profit-maximizing price a monopoly would use. The Justice Department argued that was evidence of anti-competitive behavior: Microsoft chose to deter competition with an unnaturally low price.
Perhaps the argument is that Google is overpaying, and that's anti-competitive.
To make you analogy more accurate, this single employer would be paying the employees not to work for anyone else. And in that case, yes, the employees would be the ones that have the power since they are getting money for nothing.
It's not for nothing though - the employer is buying their productive capacity. The fact that the employer chooses to do nothing with it is entirely irrelevant.
Same issue with Google - by using their market power to monopolize search power across devices and OSes, they are effectively locking out any other potential entrants. That this is being done to enhance a completely different line of business (ads) is classic anti-competitive behavior.
What you are describing is a monopsony, they are illegal, and the employer is considered to have the most power in that relation because the employees are atomized.
You're right - I spoke loosely. I still believe my comments apply if you consider the larger bundle that Google is offering and the terms that come with it, plus the fact that they are leveraging their capital to block competitor app stores from even appearing on the home screen or being installed.
> ...they are leveraging their capital to block competitor app stores from even appearing on the home screen or being installed.
If Google weren't paying manufacturers to not install other app stores, other app stores would be paying manufacturers to install them, which could result in a user experience that Google doesn't control but which users would blame Google for ("Android is slow/buggy!" when in fact it's third party software that is causing the performance issues). Their deals are arguably defensible since they don't block third party app stores entirely, just pre-installed ones.
I certainly see the issues with Google parlaying their dominance in the ad market to also dominate the mobile market, but I have a feeling this will be settled with some consent decrees to put up some guardrails in the ad market. The actual harm to consumers from Google's business model is pretty vague and is passed on through marketing expenses that trickle down into product/service prices. If Google disappeared, ads would still cost money and advertising expenses likely wouldn't be drastically lower.
There is no way to uninstall Chrome from Android, the best one can do is disable it. Smells like MSFT and IE back in the day. Which lead to what will probably be very similar hearings and results.
There's an extremely easy way to uninstall Chrome from Android, which is to never install it in the first place. You do that by using the Android open source project.
There are a bunch of Android forks in the wild[1].
>There are a bunch of Android forks in the wild[1].
That's absolutely correct. And some of those forks are significantly better than the Android OEM offerings by the phone manufacturers.
However, that's orthogonal to GP's point. Only a very small percentage[0] of Android users would even consider flashing custom roms, and even fewer would have the knowledge or confidence to do so.
As such, the impact of custom roms/no chrome is most likely rounding error for Google.
I'd point out that I've used custom roms quite a bit, initially because (as usual) my phone vendor stopped providing updates after a year and after that because custom roms are often better than stock roms.
But I'm not your typical user, as I'm technical and it really pisses me off that vendors use the lack of support to pressure folks to buy new phones.
Any time someone buys a document from PACER and has the RECAP extension https://free.law/recap/ installed in their browser it is uploaded so everyone can view it for free on the Court Listener website.
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/7273457/10-20-20-...
https://twitter.com/ZoeTillman/status/1318560860680425474
UPD
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-monop...