[toast0]

The argument goes roughly as follows:

Google is able to use its lead in search to exert undue influence on other markets. Google can (and has) ocassionaly placed banners suggesting a switch to chrome, influencing the browser market. Google showcases YouTube videos above other video results, regardless of the relative merits of the videos. Similar things in other verticals.

Additionally, search dominance leads to dominance in the related search ads and text ads generally space. In part, because of market size, Yahoo was unable to attract the same kind of advertising market as Google, and famously chose to contract that out to Microsoft, which also was unable to make it work well. I was at Yahoo during parts of that time, and my feeling is that market size wasn't a big part of that failure, but it could be argued that it was a part.

Is any of this compelling enough to be worth an anti-trust case? I don't think so, but maybe?

How could you break up Google if this was considered egrigious enough? Split into several actually separate companies: software, containing chrome, android, and chrome os; search, providing web search apis, but not a front end; advertising, providing advertising apis, but not hosting any sites that use then; consumer services, including a web search front end, Gmail, YouTube, etc; business services, including the Google cloud stuff and maybe g suite; I dunno about the alphabet soup bits. Make the search and ads services contracts be on FRAND and public terms.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Google can (and has) ocassionaly placed banners suggesting a switch to chrome, influencing the browser market.

But so can anybody else. Google sells ads on their search engine to anyone. If you asked nicely enough with a large enough pile of money they would presumably even sell you a banner placement.

What is the objection supposed to be? That Google didn't pay itself for the ad space? How would it have changed anything if they did?

[rifung]

> What is the objection supposed to be?

I work at Google; opinions are my own.

I believe the objection is that it's an unfair competitive advantage and hurts competition. The reasoning is similar to that given when Google was fined for Google Shopping in the EU.

> But so can anybody else. Google sells ads on their search engine to anyone. If you asked nicely enough with a large enough pile of money they would presumably even sell you a banner placement.

You could make the same argument about Microsoft with Internet Explorer then no? I'm sure if someone offered to pay many billions of dollars, Microsoft would have gladly included their browser with Windows too.

Being able to do the same thing with a sufficiently large sum of money doesn't imply that something is not an anticompetitive practice. If anything, it may show that it is indeed anticompetitive..

[AnthonyMouse]

> I believe the objection is that it's an unfair competitive advantage and hurts competition.

But the advantage is just having more resources. Mozilla could likewise pay Facebook/Reddit/Yahoo to push Firefox... if they could afford it. You could call it "unfair" that they don't have the money, but that has nothing to do with Google search in particular.

> You could make the same argument about Microsoft with Internet Explorer then no? I'm sure if someone offered to pay many billions of dollars, Microsoft would have gladly included their browser with Windows too.

But that's the opposite of how tying works. The classic tying case is you have a monopoly on cars and you require all your customers to buy your brand of gasoline, so you also monopolize the market for gasoline.

The Internet Explorer case was really bizarre, because they kept talking about the browser market, but what they were really tying to Windows was (web) apps. It was the same thing with Java. Microsoft wanted to tie the app ecosystem to Windows, so you had to use their platform-specific APIs and the app developer and all their customers get tied to Windows. Microsoft never made a dime from the browser market, nor ever intended to.

But Google pushing Chrome is the other side of the coin. They also have no intention to make any money selling web browsers, but their goal isn't to tie Google search to Chrome -- it works fine in Firefox and IE -- their goal was to prevent Microsoft from using dominance in the browser market to tie Google search (the web app) to Windows through the browser. It's an anti-tying move.

To get where Microsoft was they would have to be preventing other browsers from using Google search while preventing Chrome from using non-Google search (as Microsoft interfered with Netscape running on Windows, prevented IE from being removed and discontinued IE for non-Windows platforms as soon as it gained share), and then at the same time filling Chrome with non-standard proprietary APIs with no public spec (as Microsoft did with IE/ActiveX/etc.) so that third party pages would only work in the browser that only worked with Google search, and competing browsers would have no efficient way to know how to produce the same behavior.

Just promoting a free standards-compliant browser with published source code isn't anywhere near that.

[ArchTypical]

> But so can anybody else. Google sells ads on their search engine to anyone.

There's no guarantee (read the demand partner legal disclaimers, there's specifically NO guarantees) that there's an equitable distribution. There have been analyses to show that the algorithm has short-circuits to benefit Google products, featured here on HN and other places. I don't have them onhand, but it's openly discussed (meaning beyond being taboo):

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/21/google-staff-discussed-tweak...

[AnthonyMouse]

> There have been analyses to show that the algorithm has short-circuits to benefit Google products, featured here on HN and other places.

Analyses by competitors who don't like their search ranking. The analyses show a bias alright, but whose?

> I don't have them onhand, but it's openly discussed (meaning beyond being taboo)

That's not a discussion of purposely harming competitors, it's partisans being partisan -- and getting shut down by internal processes designed to prevent exactly that.

Large organizations don't prevent misbehavior by hiring perfect humans. They do it by having layered defenses against it. The fact that the partisans failed is if anything evidence that the internal controls are effective.

[toast0]

How much would Google charge me to put a prominent banner next to the search box saying that Google recomends w3m for the best browsing experience on Google search?

My guess is they would have considered it before they had their own browser, but now that chrome is something they've invested in, it seems like something that is not for sale.

How much of an impact is that placement? I don't really know, but I bet Google has data on it. Discovery on a case like this would be interesting.

Anyway, the point is that's something they can do, because they control so much of search. Bing putting up a banner that says hey, why don't you use Edge, pretty please doesn't have as much impact, because Bing has a smaller market share.

[AnthonyMouse]

> How much would Google charge me to put a prominent banner next to the search box saying that Google recomends w3m for the best browsing experience on Google search?

They're under no obligation to sell their endorsement. And what difference does the specific price make for placement? Suppose it was a lot.

> Anyway, the point is that's something they can do, because they control so much of search. Bing putting up a banner that says hey, why don't you use Edge, pretty please doesn't have as much impact, because Bing has a smaller market share.

How is it different than a company that just has more money and can therefore afford to buy more advertising? It's effectively what they're doing -- they could have sold the space they're using to advertise Chrome to a third party for its market value. By using it themselves they're foregoing that revenue, essentially the Chrome division purchasing the space from the search division.