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by Steven_Vellon 2064 days ago
I have relatively low expectation for this suit to lead to anything substantial. This line of argument surrounding Google being the default search for devices largely mirrors the situation with Microsoft and Internet Explorer. I envision Google being told to stop paying to be the default browser, but that will likely do less to change Google's dominant role in search than it did for IE. People have proven to be willing to change their search option to use google when it gets defaulted to Bing or Yahoo.

More broadly, I find that people's frustrations with large tech platforms aren't really related to monopoly at all. Concern is more about the growing reach and prevalence of tech companies. When I talk to people who are pretty heavily aligned with the "tech-lash" they're rarely talking about market share or leveraging dominance in one market for an advantage in another market. More often they're talking about capricious moderation and enforcement of content policies, and the general increase in the influence of tech companies on the products and media we consume.

Anti-trust has limited ability alter the issues that most people have with big tech companies. Serving a broad customer base invariably leads to appealing to the lowest common denominator: no one set of rules will appease everybody, instead you try to develop rules to maximize the set of happy users and minimize the set of unhappy users. The scale of these tech companies necessitate automated rules enforcement, and this inevitably leads to false positives. I find it hard to see why breaking up tech companies would change this. Sure, if a big social media site was broken up into 4 different sites then each one would have a smaller population to manage. But they'd have commensurately less resources to dedicate to that community management, so they'll probably lean on automation just as much.