[systoll]

> Deliberately breaking an existing feature that caused zero trouble to any past, present, or hypothetical future user is never, in any circumstances, "perfectly reasonable".

It's also not a realistic scenario.

Anyone who bought a Samsung Galaxy S from Verizon got a phone with Bing as the default search engine. Some of the people who bought that phone would've preferred Google.

Because of this feature, there was added additional effort in using the phone due to the need to switch the search engine. And likely some of them didn't even know about the option, and wound up with an experience worse than they would've without it being present.

Adding to this, there is malware that changes this setting.

I think this was a valuable option to have -- but there are no features that cause zero trouble to anyone.

[TeMPOraL]

Isn't this pretty much the same thing Microsoft got fined for with Internet Explorer back in the heyday era of PCs?

[kbenson]

I guess it's less of an issue when the major competition is not just doing something "pretty much" like Microsoft, but one step further in not allowing another browser at all besides Safari.

The competition is enough to get past that I guess. Or we're just in an age where monopolies aren't really litigated much. Either or both seem plausible to me.

[archi42]

That'd exactly my thought as well. Maybe Google Search is not big enough in terms of market share to trigger an investigation? Or the authorities didn't think of it?

[llampx]

Google learned from Microsoft and is much more politically savvy.

[gcb0]

you are complaining exactly about the change Google's anonymous coward added.

if that change wasn't made, you could change the default search in both cases. now thanks to Google greed you are stuck with Samsung choice of bing. suck to be you.