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by lotsofpulp 990 days ago
>Well, actually, Google paying other companies to make Google the default is stopping Bing from getting traffic.

I cannot see how this is true.

Microsoft, with its tens of billions in annual profits, can invest in all the advertising in the world, literally, to let people know how to change the default browser on their iOS or Android device.

It is a trivial setting to change.

What is not trivial, for Microsoft, is creating a competitive search engine and advertising business.
2 comments
rickdeckard 990 days ago
If the search-engine is a tool which creates ad-impressions which company#A can charge to advertisers (creating profit company#A can then spend for making the search-engine the default, perpetually driving even more attention), I don't think breaking this cycle by company#B "just spending more money than company#A earns" is a system of fair competition.
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ffgjgf1 990 days ago
> It is a trivial setting to change.

Most/many people won’t it undeniably gives a massive advantage to google.

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makomk 990 days ago
Enough people are willing to change it that just paying to be the default wasn't all that effective for Bing or Yahoo. Microsoft's previous strategy was to pay to make Bing the default and remove people's ability to change it. In particular, they took advantage of the mobile phone provider oligopoly in the US and other countries to pay off all the major providers to do this, so that consumers didn't really have a choice to not have their devices send searches to Bing. Google ruined that strategy by outbidding them without even imposing the same kind of lock-in that Microsoft did, and so Microsoft are trying to get the US government to ban them from bidding.
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lotsofpulp 990 days ago
Sure, let’s change it to “it is trivial for Microsoft to spend its greater than Google’s profit to buy the default search position on Apple devices.”

So they can other have a just as good as Google’s product that they do not want to spend enough on to make default, or they do not offer enough of a value proposition for people to go to settings -> Safari -> default search -> bing.

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