[narism]

>we (google) give our product away for free and so do our competitors.

Search is not Google’s product, it’s a way to get their product. Their product is eyeballs which they sell to advertisers.

>the cost of switching search engines is literally zero: just type Bing instead of Google.

If this is true, why does Google pay Apple billions/year and Mozilla millions/year to make Google the default search? You could be saving that money!

[huitzitziltzin]

The government could make antitrust claims regarding google’s behavior vis a vis advertisers. (I’m sympathetic to some claims that could be made there!)

Monopolization of the ad market is not the issue here, because the specific claim is that google has monopolized the search market. You can read that right in the linked article.

Google’s payments to be the default are (as I already said) not obviously pro-competitive to me. I don’t know if you and I disagree there.

But again… in Google’s defense they are going to say (accurately!) “everyone gives search away for free so consumers are free to switch.”

It’s going to be impossible (IMO) to argue that consumers are harmed in the search market. It just won’t be credible.

The department of justice is likely wasting its time, which is similar to the recent behavior of the FTC under Lina Khan which is (if you are American) wasting taxpayers’ time taking on losing cases, while letting mergers which really deserve critical scrutiny through. Microsoft Activision is a prominent recent example.

And if the Justice Department actually does show up in court with a filing that says: “No, your search engine was awesome, but it’s increasingly ad-filled crap. You’re too powerful, you’re too lazy, and America needs some real competition” (this is a direct quote from Stoller’s article) they are going to be laughed out of town and they will richly deserve it.

So again… I like the attention Stoller pays to antitrust issues but his analysis of the economics (especially in the case of some tech firms) is just bad.

[narism]

> Monopolization of the ad market is not the issue here, because the specific claim is that google has monopolized the search market.

Incorrect. The Stoller article says “government argues that Google has a monopoly of general search and *search advertising*”.

The case in question (1:20-cv-03010) alleges anticompetitive behaviors in multiple interrelated markets: general search services, *search advertising, general search advertising, and general search text advertising*. The other major case (1:23-cv-00108) is about their monopolization of the digital ad market via Doubleclick/Ad Exchange/Google Ads.

[thaumasiotes]

> Microsoft Activision is a prominent recent example.

That was always ludicrous. The only way for the FTC to win that case was to define the relevant market as "games produced by Activision". That would have made the merger anticompetitive by definition... but no more anticompetitive than Activision already was.