[tomvbussel]

Google has a search engine monopoly (at least in Europe), this gives them the obligation not to abuse this. If they're using their monopoly to promote other services (such as when directly show Maps in the results, without offering other providers of maps the same option) or if they're scraping content without linking back (such as with Yelp), they're abusing this monopoly.

[kazinator]

There is no such thing as a "search engine monopoly".

The word "monopoly" doesn't mean "lack of viable alternatives", except colloquially. (Colloquial uses of the term are not appropriate in context; that is equivocation.)

[tomvbussel]

The same can be said about Windows, yet both the European Union and the United States accused Microsoft of abusing their monopoly by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. This antitrust against Google is really similar.

[mckee1]

While I share your sentiment, the case with MS was different because they were coercing hardware manufacturers into not bundling Netscape by threatening to revoke their Windows licence. Google aren't revoking access to their other, primary product if you use Yelp, Bing Maps etc.

[tomvbussel]

They gave Yelp two options: either disable crawling in robots.txt, which means that Yelp won't show up in Google's results at all, or accept that Google will copy Yelp reviews without linking back. This is quite similar to what Microsoft was doing in my opinion.

[kazinator]

The only issue is that people were forced to pay for Windows when buying a PC for running a different operating system. PC hardware OEM's paid royalties to Microsoft whether or not users installed Microsoft systems, and the OEM's passed down this cost indiscriminately. That's an example of monopoly power: users wanted to buy just a PC, without a hundred-something dollar OS, but couldn't.

As for bundling of IE, Microsoft has a right to put whatever they want into their software release. People who use Windows and then complain that it comes deeply integrated with a Microsoft web browser can be safely regarded as supreme morons. An OS needs a browser in the internet age. Ubuntu comes bundled with Firefox. (Browser choice is good for Windows; Microsoft only hurt themselves by integrating IE in annoying ways into the OS. Many people are happy Windows users, yet browse the web with an alternative browser; Microsoft should be happy they are on Windows.)

Moreover, the history of Windows is littered with entitled whiners whose application or utility became irrelevant when Microsoft realized that an OS should ship with that kind of thing and produced an equivalent. According to those litigious nincompoops, the OS vendor has no right to bundle things such as a TCP/IP stack, disk compression or anti-malware utilities, because it threatens their "add-ons" which were there first.

The whole IE thing is like going after Toyota because they install cruise control, air conditioning or decent audio in many of their vehicle models. And cruise control, AC, and audio systems are something you can have installed after-market from third parties, so by Toyota bundling such features into cars, it ruins their business. Moreover those features are slickly integrated into the car (e.g. dashboard/steering wheel controls) and hard to remove and replace with the generic parts. The bundled factory features thus enjoy unfair advantages in integration.

Google, by contrast, only runs a program on some machines in the cloud that only respond when you resolve their name and send them a TCP/IP SYN packet. Every search starts with someone resolving "google.com" (or a related regional domain) and making the first contact. From your IP address, you can similarly reach any other search engine on the planet, if you're in the free world, at least.

[rue]

It’s a business, so yes, it can be a monopoly.