[ardy42]

> I know that Google is super powerful and has great products but what exactly are (if any) examples of Google showing anti-competitive behaviour?

At least at one point, they nagged you incessantly to install Chrome when you used Google Search. I would attribute Chrome's current dominance [1] to that fact, and that fact alone. That's uncannily like the anti-competitive behavior Microsoft was judged to have used to push Internet Explorer into a dominant position and drive Netscape out of the market.

[1] If Chrome had been allowed to grow its market share organically, I think would have still been popular, just not dominant. Firefox would have a bigger market share than it does now, for instance.

[qwerty456127]

Provided we consider artificial measures against monopolies ok, why not force Google to put Firefox advertisement on their search page now?

[mav3rick]

That is such BS. Microsoft is making it increasingly harder to use a different browser on their OS. No mention of that. When they do it, "it's their OS, it's fair". Google is not forcing anyone to install this browser nor does it auto install when you navigate to Google search.

[ardy42]

> That is such BS. Microsoft is making it increasingly harder to use a different browser on their OS. No mention of that. When they do it, "it's their OS, it's fair".

What's with the attitude? I listed Microsoft as an example of anti-competitive behavior. How did you get from there to thinking I'd penned some kind of endorsement of Microsoft?

> Google is not forcing anyone to install this browser nor does it auto install when you navigate to Google search.

The problem is that they're using (or used) their dominance in one area as leverage to gain dominance in another area.

[eitland]

> Google is not forcing anyone to install this browser nor does it auto install when you navigate to Google search.

Making it so that a number of the worlds largest properties only work in your own browser comes very close to "forcing" in my opinion.

When should a company be forced to make sure its products works with other companies products? Thats not for me to decide but personally I think there's some extra responsibility for very large companies and personally I'm surprised they haven't been hit with one or two major lawsuits over Chrome yet.

[joeshmoe23]

Promoting stuff on one's own website isn't in any way shape or form illegal.

[tomohawk]

In the IBM antitrust case, IBM was forced to separate their OS and App businesses. Their OS business had to publish all of their APIs and was not allowed to communicate non-publicly with their App business. This was to prevent IBM from using their OS monopoly to gain an App monopoly.

Once you are a monopoly, you can expect such restrictions.

What Google is really good at is evading FTC regulation by staying within FCC jurisdiction. The FCC has historically been hand in hand with industry. The FTC has real teeth.

[Youden]

Not true. See the record $2.7b fine Google got for promoting Google Shopping results in its search results.

Also see why: For leveraging a dominant position in one market (search) to intrude on another market (shopping).

This looks suspiciously similar. Google is leveraging a dominant position in search engines to intrude on the browser market.

[joeshmoe24]

I'm talking about the US where google is also protected by the first amendment and not the bizarro world logic the EU uses to justify their protectionism (how are shopping ads different than any other search ads?!).

[personjerry]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act_of_1890

"The Sherman Act broadly prohibits (1) anticompetitive agreements and (2) unilateral conduct that monopolizes or attempts to monopolize the relevant market."

For example, squashing competition by deleting your competitors search results might be interpreted as an attempt to monopolize the market.

In the context of providing a marketplace (i.e. the App Store), we aren't really looking at "private free speech" any more and so the first amendment does not apply here.

[joeshmoe24]

Yes it does: https://searchengineland.com/another-court-affirms-googles-f...

The worst thing about antitrust threads on HN is idiots trying to appear knowledgeable by skimming a Wikipedia article.

[personjerry]

That's an interesting case that I was not aware of.

I think your attitude is suboptimal here.