Ex-Google Exec Acknowledges Aggressively Seeking Exclusive Mobile Deals 10
The Justice Department sought on Wednesday to show how Google did all it could to get people to use its search engine and build itself into a $1 trillion search and advertising giant on the second day of a once-in-a-generation antitrust trial. From a report: First out of the gate, the government questioned a former Google executive, Chris Barton, about billion-dollar deals with mobile carriers and others that helped make Google the default search engine. Barton, who was at Google from 2004 to 2011, said the number of Google executives working to win default status with mobile carriers grew dramatically when he was with the company, recognizing the potential growth of handheld devices and early versions of smartphones.
Google's clout in search, the government argues, has helped Google build monopolies in some aspects of online search advertising. Since search is free, Google makes money through advertising. The government says the Alphabet unit paid $10 billion annually to wireless companies like AT&T, device makers like Apple and browser makers like Mozilla to fend off rivals and keep its search engine market share near 90%. In revenue-sharing deals with mobile carriers and Android smartphone makers, Google pressed for its search to be the default and exclusive. If Microsoft's search engine Bing was the default on an Android phone, Barton said, then users would have a "difficult time finding or changing to Google."
Barton said on his LinkedIn profile that he was responsible for leading Google's partnerships with mobile carriers like Verizon and AT&T, estimating that the deals "drive hundreds of millions in revenue." Hal Varian, Google's chief economist, told the court that scale, or the number of search queries Google received, was important, but pushed back during questioning on how important. He also acknowledged giving a speech in which he said certain search queries, for instance for a tennis racquet, were important in effectively advertising to the person who made the query and to subsequent ad revenues.
Google's clout in search, the government argues, has helped Google build monopolies in some aspects of online search advertising. Since search is free, Google makes money through advertising. The government says the Alphabet unit paid $10 billion annually to wireless companies like AT&T, device makers like Apple and browser makers like Mozilla to fend off rivals and keep its search engine market share near 90%. In revenue-sharing deals with mobile carriers and Android smartphone makers, Google pressed for its search to be the default and exclusive. If Microsoft's search engine Bing was the default on an Android phone, Barton said, then users would have a "difficult time finding or changing to Google."
Barton said on his LinkedIn profile that he was responsible for leading Google's partnerships with mobile carriers like Verizon and AT&T, estimating that the deals "drive hundreds of millions in revenue." Hal Varian, Google's chief economist, told the court that scale, or the number of search queries Google received, was important, but pushed back during questioning on how important. He also acknowledged giving a speech in which he said certain search queries, for instance for a tennis racquet, were important in effectively advertising to the person who made the query and to subsequent ad revenues.
Why doesn't it work for Edge? (Score:2)
Edge comes pre-installed and is the default browser in Windows, which has about 70% market share on desktop, however it has less than 10% market share. AFAIK, it can't be uninstalled or even disabled. You can't uninstall Google in an Android phone, but you can at least disable it.
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I'm sure M$ is watching this case very closely.
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On my Windows environments, Edge is being forced down my throat.
Because of this, I will never use Edge and never use Bing.
Also "Microsoft Compatibility Telemetry" is a process that should not exist, or be disabled by default. It makes my laptop fan turn on and slows everything down when it is running due to CPU usage.
Also, when disabling the Microsoft Antivirus realtime protection - it should last for a week. Not mere hours. It slows down solution build time and just general usage of my PC.
"Since search is free" (Score:4, Insightful)
This assertion is often made but is not entirely true. Yes: the user does not pay in cash to use a search engine. However the search engine does learn something about what interests the user - this is personal information and has value. This value might be hard to quantify but it is not zero, the search engines put this information to good use.
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And the fix for this problem is to have the tracking removed - by law.
Advertising worked fine without tracking in the past. If everyone had to remove tracking at the same time then there'd be no competitive advantages lost by having to remove it.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Targetting is not tracking.
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