[yanw]

Not that tired meme again. No, it's not the same as Windows+IE: in this case both products are free and both you do not own, it's just a website you visit basically. Also you are not trapped into them and Google didn't go about threatening OEMs.

[fred_nada]

You aren't familiar with antitrust laws. Because a company has a free product does not mean it can't be anticompetitive. Free means nothing.

Example: If one company owned 90% of the media content in the world and gave it a way for free because they made money on ads does not mean they can't abuse their power. If you started your own website how would people find out about you? 90% of the search engines wouldn't show you. You couldn't advertise on 90% of magazines, websites or tv shows. And 90% of social networks wouldn't allow links going out of their site. And so on.

This is an extreme example, but free means nothing.

Who was trapped into using Windows? Why couldn't you buy another OS?

Threatening OEMs? The MS abuse I was talking about was having to do with IE only. But Google is not innocent of strong-arming companies either. If Yelp didn't allow Google to use its reviews in Google Places, Yelp would be removed from the index entirely. http://searchengineland.com/yelp-google-told-us-its-our-way-...

[yanw]

Google does not own 90% of the market and their product is free as their competitors' products so there is no harm to consumers.

As for Yelp, they asked to not appear on Places and Google told them to use robots.txt if they don't want to be indexed, and the rest is spin and PR.

[fred_nada]

I would argue on both of your statements, but I don't think you are reading anything I write. :)