Google's online search monopoly is illegal

terence_fdes

terence_fdes

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Google's online search monopoly is illegal, US judge rules​

A US judge has ruled Google acted illegally to crush its competition and maintain a monopoly on online search and related advertising.

The landmark decision on Monday is a major blow to Alphabet, Google's parent company, and could reshape how technology giants do business. .....
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It is unclear yet what penalties Google and Alphabet will face as a result of the decision. The fines or other remedies will be decided in a future hearing.
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Monday's ruling comes after a 10-week trial in Washington DC, in which prosecutors accused Google of spending billions of dollars annually to Apple, Samsung, Mozilla and others to be pre-installed as the default search engine across platforms.

The US said Google typically pays more than $10bn (£7.8bn) a year for that privilege, securing its access to a steady stream of user data that helped maintain its hold on the market.
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I read the articles about Google's monopoly and I still don't understand it. The ruling says that Google paid billions of dollars to be the default search engine on many devices and this is monopolistic. How can It be a monopoly? If Google paid third parties to prevent users from changing the default search engine, then Google would have a monopoly. But that's not what happened here.

Google argued that people use them because they have the best technology. But if the US Justice Department wants other search engines to be the default, how is that not a monopoly? I think Google is the best search engine out there, and that's why people use it. Why don't the competitors improve their search engines and let the people decide?
 
TrexTom said:
I read the articles about Google's monopoly and I still don't understand it. The ruling says that Google paid billions of dollars to be the default search engine on many devices and this is monopolistic. How can It be a monopoly? If Google paid third parties to prevent users from changing the default search engine, then Google would have a monopoly. But that's not what happened here.

Google argued that people use them because they have the best technology. But if the US Justice Department wants other search engines to be the default, how is that not a monopoly? I think Google is the best search engine out there, and that's why people use it. Why don't the competitors improve their search engines and let the people decide?
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All they got to prove is that Google paid money to remove the "choice" from the user. If they can establish that other companies forced users to use Google search, AND did not have a clear option to switch to other search engines, that's damaging. If the choice is open and user can change it, then I don't think Google is wrong there. If we talk about monopoly, I'd say Apple is a worse offender because it forces users to use things in the Apple ecosystem.
I see at any rate a question that might be asked during installations in future "Do you want to use Google as the default search engine?".
 
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TrexTom said:
I think Google is the best search engine out there, and that's why people use it.
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DigitalDude said:
Google themselves are screwing the search.... a decade ago they were much better. Currently I have to put in a lot of effort to get what I want.
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Agree with above, I am using google since 2006 & its performance has been going down since last few years likely because google stopped innovating & improving its search algorithm once it achieved monopoly. The negative impact of this was that other search engines became even worse.
 
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DigitalDude said:
Google themselves are screwing the search.... a decade ago they were much better. Currently I have to put in a lot of effort to get what I want.
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I've found DuckDuckGo and Bing perform much better as actual search engines. Been using DDG since 2019 on my phone and I've never felt the need to switch to another search engine so far.

Also switched to DDG for gaming laptop from 2020, and have been using use Bing on my portable laptop since 2021.
 
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My default search engine in iPhone is Bing. But Siri uses Google and lets me to only search on Google. This is in iOS 18 beta.
I hope this is a bug. If not, this is clear case of monopolistic practice.
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DigitalDude said:
Half the time I'm just adding site:reddit.com
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Me too. There are no good results on google nowadays. Goes to show the promise and reality of AI.
They might be very good at predicting what I want to search, but I already know that. What I don't know is the result, Google doesn't either.

This happens every generation, they talk about big things when a "new" technology comes and when the end result is nothing like what was promised, people move on to new things.
AI is nothing new. This story has happened in the 70s and 80s where there were promises of humanoid robots, but the end result was completely different. Same thing will keep repeating.
 
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