[cwxm]

The question I would posit is: Do the actions from Google that the Justice Department consider to be anti-competitive prevent competitors from becoming better?

For example, let's say I could be curious about DuckDuckGo if I had to choose a default search engine when I got an Apple device instead of Google being the default, then that could be revenue to DuckDuckGo for them to improve their search engine.

[d1zzy]

So what are you going to do, force Apple to sell their search default option for less money (whatever DuckDuckGo can afford to pay) in order to support more competition? It's really Apple's choice and interest what it does with the default search, Apple could decide tomorrow to point it to its own search engine and there's nothing Google, the DOJ or anyone else can do about it.

Not really sure what the DOJ expect Apple or Google to do in this situation, it seems to me that 2 companies entered a mutually benefiting contract. You can't argue that Google "colluded" with Apple, there's a lot of throwing punches between each other (all the privacy oriented moves Apple is doing are hurting Google's business) and again Apple could be making its own search engine anytime they wanted, they already replaced Google Maps with their own thing.

[nostromo]

The monopolized market in this case would be the market for default search engines on mobile.

If the only two players (Google and Apple) both use Google Search by default, then Google has effectively captured 100% of the mobile ad market. (And since Google is paying Apple et al for that default state, it is indeed a market.)

The court could require device makers (including Google itself) to prompt users to select their search engine provider, or potentially ban Google from buying search engine defaults from other companies (Apple, Mozilla, etc.) as an anticompetitive practice.

[jonas21]

That's an interesting scenario. Let's say Google is banned from buying search engine defaults. Then Mozilla would no longer be able to sell the Firefox default to Google.

Sure, they could sell it to someone else, but without the biggest player bidding up the price, it'd probably sell for a fraction of what it does today -- which could be devastating to Mozilla, given that almost all of their funding comes from the search deal. What would that do to competition in the browser space?

[belval]

Competition in the browser space is over and Chromium won. If this had been regulated earlier by preventing Google from preinstalling Chrome on all Android devices, we wouldn't be in this situation where Firefox is on life support, but here we are.

Using Firefox as a reason not to break up some of Google's hold on search seems extremely short-sighted. Besides, Edge using Chrome changed the whole browser market dynamic as more and more people are using it. Once Microsoft reaches a somewhat decent percentage of install we will be back at a two (three?) player situation.

[mike00632]

Apple could actually make more money. Say Google is split into two renamed search engines: elgooGA and elgooGB, with evenly divided assets. They would immediately be two search titans competing for the important Apple contract and would try to outbid one another. Perhaps elgooGA wins Apple, but then elgooGB wins Firefox. Every alternative platform to Apple would stand to get more money. And the users would then become more accustomed to having different default search providers and usage might be split. That is a win for DuckDuckGo and all other competitors.

[ry_co]

Regarding DuckDuckGo, my understanding is that though they have their own web crawler, most of the information is coming from Bing and Yahoo, who are the only direct competitors to Google.

[bduerst]

You're mostly correct.

Yahoo has been Bing for years, and DuckDuckGo pulls from Bing and Yandex - the latter being mostly for searches in Russian.

[ColinHayhurst]

I concur. https://www.searchenginemap.com/

[treis]

Before asking "should we" we need to answer "can we". If forcing Google to give users a choice results in them picking Google anyways then whether we should do that or not is irrelevant. Since it won't achieve it's stated purpose there's no point in forcing it.

[llimos]

s/an Apple device/Chrome/