US Alleges Google Got Rich Because People Stick With Search Defaults (reuters.com) 72
The Justice Department will press its argument Thursday that Google sought to strike agreements with mobile carriers to win powerful default positions on smartphones to dominate search in an antitrust trial that could change the future of the internet. From a report: The government will wrap up questioning Thursday of Antonio Rangel, who teaches behavioral biology at the California Institute of Technology. Other witnesses will be James Kolotouros, for Google, and Brian Higgins, from Verizon Communications. 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%. The government has also alleged that Google illegally took steps to protect communications about the payments.
The government called witnesses on Tuesday and Wednesday to show that Google, as far back as the mid-2000s, sought to attract a large number of search queries by winning default status on mobile devices. Another witness, Rangel, discussed how powerful default status was, although data he used to show this was largely redacted. Google's clout in search, the government alleges, has helped Google build monopolies in some aspects of online search advertising. Search is free so Google makes money through advertising.
The government called witnesses on Tuesday and Wednesday to show that Google, as far back as the mid-2000s, sought to attract a large number of search queries by winning default status on mobile devices. Another witness, Rangel, discussed how powerful default status was, although data he used to show this was largely redacted. Google's clout in search, the government alleges, has helped Google build monopolies in some aspects of online search advertising. Search is free so Google makes money through advertising.
Not What, but Why are you Hiding. (Score:3)
"paid $10 billion annually to wireless companies like AT&T...The government has also alleged that Google illegally took steps to protect communications about the payments."
If Google wants to maintain their innocence here, they better have a damn good reason why they would have hidden what amounts to a rounding error for them.
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What innocence? They commited a crime and then tried to hide it. In the US, the second part is a separate crime because the US legal system is deeply broken.
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They'll have a hard case to make that people are fine changing the default after also valueing being the default at 10 billion/year.
If people were going to freely change things then money spent would be wasted.
Only Wasted if Competitor Product is Better (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not like the Windows tax where you had to buy a Windows license with your new machine regardless of whether you wanted to use Windows or another OS so even if you used a competing OS you had to support MS first. Changing a default search engine is simple and free.
High view of the technical ability of people (Score:3)
You're assuming people can find where to change the default. This is likely to be untrue for a VERY large proportion of the population. Remember: at least half of the population is of below average intelligence
Re: High view of the technical ability of people (Score:2)
You give them instructions. Most people can follow simple ones.
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Who's the 'we'? Serious question. Of course there will be a youtube demonstration of how to do it, but that won't attract those who don't begin to realise there is an issue.
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Plenty of people seem to be able to ditch Bing as their default search engine. And Edge/Internet Explorer as their browser. Microsoft's decades long failure to become the search engine and browser of choice is Google's best defence.
I'd love to see stats on uBlock Origin installs too.
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While that may be true, you're not seriously trying to tell me you think it's not orders of magnitude more difficult to change from Windows to another OS, are you? More importantly, unlike Google, Microsoft went out of their way to make it more difficult for competitors, yet they barely got a slap on the wrist. Compared to them, Google's transgressions barely register on the anti-trust scale.
Personally, I think the only way this is going to get res
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Changing a default search engine is simple and free.
Go ahead. Say that loud enough for the lazy people in the back to act just like the lazy people in the front ignoring you.
Then really challenge them and provide the step by step instructions to validate how 'simple' that is for the average computing device consumer who wouldn't know what to do with setup.exe with both mouse buttons and Microsoft Bob.
You'll going to find why Google spent billions.
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If people were going to freely change things then money spent would be wasted.
Most of marketing is defined as money wasted. Not sure you have a valid point there.
That said, I'm kind of on Google's side with this. Sure, spending a few billion might be wasteful, but perhaps not when they calculate accurately just how utterly lazy the average computing consumer truly is now.
If options are freely available to every consumer, IS there a legal reason Google should be punished because consumers have never been more lazy and can't be burdened with choice? Makes you wonder...
Is Mozilla relevant to the case? (Score:2)
I don't know why they bought Mozilla as part of the argument. Unless someone is using Desktop Linux, which reached 3% market share only this year, using Firefox is the opposite of sticking to the default. Once a person installs and start using Firefox, changing the default search engine would be expected, unless they don't want to.
Re:Is Mozilla relevant to the case? (Score:5, Informative)
Obviously they donate to Mozilla so they can go "See we're not a monopoly!! Look over there!". Meanwhile they're effectively writing web standards to cripple ad blocking which is core to their business. They're arguably worse than Microsoft was with IE.
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Obviously they donate to Mozilla so they can go "See we're not a monopoly!! Look over there!". Meanwhile they're effectively writing web standards to cripple ad blocking which is core to their business. They're arguably worse than Microsoft was with IE.
This monopoly charge is against their search engine, not browser.
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Obviously they donate to Mozilla so they can go "See we're not a monopoly!! Look over there!". Meanwhile they're effectively writing web standards to cripple ad blocking which is core to their business. They're arguably worse than Microsoft was with IE.
This monopoly charge is against their search engine, not browser.
You must have missed the thing about "defaults" (which is in the title) or do not know what that means.
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Meanwhile they're effectively writing web standards to cripple ad blocking which is core to their business.
What web standards are you referring to? The Topics/Privacy Sandbox stuff won't do anything to prevent adblocking.
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Money is the reason Mozilla is part of the argument. Remember the default search shenanigans? https://techcrunch.com/2017/11... [techcrunch.com]
Re: Is Mozilla relevant to the case? (Score:2)
But is it effective?
As waspleg said, the intent is for Google not to appear to be a monopoly in the browser market, so I think that instead of just donating money to Mozilla, which is would be frowned upon by shareholders and advocates of (aggressive) capitalism, many of whom are also shareholders, they stuck a deal to get more benefit than just giving money to Mozilla.
Mozilla users seem to be the kind of people that won't stick to the default.
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Mozilla users seem to be the kind of people that won't stick to the default.
This isn't even a one data point anecdote, but a pure wild ass guess - but if it is true that "Mozilla users do not stick to the default" then this strengthens the point that it was a diversionary tactic by Google to fight challenges to its monopolistic practices.
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I don't know why they bought Mozilla as part of the argument.
Google pays Mozilla a lot of money -- currently about $450 Million a year -- and in return Mozilla makes Google the default search engine in Firefox. This has been going on for 10+ years.
Total BS.. Google has no monopoly (Score:1)
The ISPs do. Regulate them! Make them offer us a dumb pipe. We have plenty of alternatives for content. The users' choice to stick with the defaults is their own fault
This circle jerk is a distraction
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No one has said Google has a monopoly on content. The monopoly they have is on online search.
No monopoly is required to fall afoul of antitrust regulations.
You post is a distraction.
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But do they really have a monopoly on online search?
Many people are already complaining about Google's search not being good, so if Bing was better they'd soon make Bing their default but Microsoft seems to be trying to be bad at search or something - Windows, Teams, Outlook, Bing, all terrible or crap at search.
If Bing, DDG or whatever is better then lots of people will switch. But sadly they aren't better. DDG is only better in privacy, not on search results.
People have been complaining that Google's search results suck for the last 10+ years. (do a search for "Google's search results suck"). The problem is, Bing, DDG and all the rest suck even worse, so people just stick with Google since it sucks the least. Google wins by default.
Stupidity is not their fault (Score:2)
Ask the average prole: 'Do you know how to change your default search engine?' and I suspect the answer would be: 'You mean there are other search engines?'
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More like, "what's a search engine?"
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It's the way you find the porn you most want?
Oh you mean....
Social Engineering (Score:2)
Google may have been the best search engine and preferred by most internet users due to the quality of search results. But once they had billions of dollars to spend and are really just an advertising company, they started using tactics to prey on users lack of concern or difficulty to choose another search engine, especially in the mobile arena, by paying to have Google as the default search engine.
If Google is still so desirable, they why do they pay billions of dollars to be the default? Wouldn't users
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>>If Google is still so desirable, they why do they pay billions of dollars to be the default?
Because if they don't, someone else will. I'm sure Apple and AT&T would just as gladly take billions from Microsoft to make Bing the default search engine on their products (in fact, they probably used that as a bargaining tactic to drive up the price). Most users lack either the knowledge or incentive to change the defaults, particularly if the default is "good enough".
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The big problem the government with this line of thought is that people have tried to usurp Google as the dominant search engine by changing the defaults. Thinking Microsoft with Bing; Apple with Safari and Apple's Maps product; and Samsung with forks on Android.
Google is the dominant search engine, because people like it.
A better argument might be that Google is like the yellow pages. The yellow pages dominated local search before the internet because everyone had them.
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That is just the inane "arguments" used by lawyers. They basically try out different lies and check which one the can get away with. Then they find some new lies for the ones that did not work.
wow, I wonder how they got popular before phones (Score:2)
I would look to see where the prosecution is tied to Microsoft. My guess is that it's far less than the 7 degrees from Kevin Bacon.
LoB
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BING came out and their search results sucked and to top it off, they would copy results so that search results counts were higher.
That never happened. It just so happens that when two different systems index the same internet you get the same results most of the time.
Also, Bing is not an acronym. It's not spelled "BING."
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Also, Bing is not an acronym.
Yes it is.
Bing Is Not Good.
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I seem to remember someone saying that the acronym was "Bing Is Not Google".
Bing is not an acronym. (Score:2)
I always assumed it was named after the grandfather of the actress who played Tasha Yar.
Duck Duck Go (Score:1)
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The other search engines suck? (Score:3)
Google search became a near monopoly because the other search engines can't compare. When it first launched, it was far superior to the competition at the time (Altavista, Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, Ask Jeeves, etc..) To this day Google search is far superior IMO to the other search engines that exist (Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, etc..). People use Google search because it gives better search results. I personally couldn't care less what default search engine is set in a brower or device; I always changed it to Google if it allowed me to, or ignored the built in search engine and go straight to google if it doesn't permit me to change the default search engine. It just works better IMO.
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Which one is better? Bing was a hot mess and seemed to resort to googling and passing those results off as its own fairly often. Duck Duck Go is fairly half-baked with nothing that even comes close to the added features (gSuite, Voice, News, etc.) that makes Google so useful; and also fit like it resorted to googling and forwarding. And Yandex? No... just... no. I will support Putin and his cronies about the same time Frosty takes up residence in the 7th circle and 777s start landing with a nice, crisp
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It certainly became better, and relatively quickly, but its first route to dominance was the blankness and speed of interface.
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The were other advantages of Google back then, like it's page rank based on links to each page was superior, its index was more comprehensive and it would only show pages with all your search terms, rather than show popular pages with one of your search terms.
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I think they were the first to use ngrams for context too.
There were narrow cases where I would use altavista still since it allowed things like and, or, quotes and stuff (if I remember correctly), but in general Google with page rank was soooooo much better than other search engines that used meta tags to game the search engines.
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Meta-search engines like Metacrawler and Dogpile were the best options for a few years.
Re:The other search engines suck? (Score:4, Informative)
and it would only show pages with all your search terms
Ah, those were the days. Now they delete terms willy-nilly and push deliberately bad search results high in the ranking. Sometimes they will put the terms they chose to ignore in tiny type below the result, but often I find that results with no such indication are still missing one or more terms. Quoting terms helps somewhat I think, but does not suppress this behavior (I am not certain it helps at all, actually).
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and it would only show pages with all your search terms
Ah, those were the days. Now they delete terms willy-nilly and push deliberately bad search results high in the ranking. Sometimes they will put the terms they chose to ignore in tiny type below the result, but often I find that results with no such indication are still missing one or more terms. Quoting terms helps somewhat I think, but does not suppress this behavior (I am not certain it helps at all, actually).
Google Search isn't a term-based query engine any more, because those don't make sense to non-technical people, which are the vast majority of its users. Try typing natural-language questions in. You'll get better results by using the tool the way it's intended.
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Has someone who cut his teeth by first using Gopher and Archie as search engines, I can tell you that it wasn't a legend. In my personal experience, Google search results were far superior to Altavista's pretty much on release.
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That's all fine, I don't disagree that other search engines suck.
But, if Google is really so much better, and users choose Google because it's so much better, why are they paying billions to be the default? Wouldn't user's change the default if they really think it's that much better?
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> Google search became a near monopoly because the other search engines can't compare.
I agree Google search is better, and I make a deliberate decision to primarily use it.
But I don't think it's that clear cut or far ahead. If it were Google wouldn't be donating $10B USD per year to other companies to maintain the default search position.
I also use bing (Score:4, Insightful)
to search for the chrome installer, once, on every new windows install.
Don't Be Evil (Score:1)
Impossible! (Score:2)
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Consumers will settle for the second best if second best is good enough.
Nah - people take the route of least resistance (Score:2)
Ask the average prole: 'How do you change your default search engine?' and they're likely to reply 'There are other search engines?'
Google? (Score:2)
Don't they mean Bing / Edge? I mean that is the default on the 1.2billion Windows PCs.
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Not on Android cellphones.
100% BS (Score:2)
If this was true, then Bing would be the most popular search engine on Windows.
When the reality is the #1 most searched query on Bing, is "google.com"
Too reductive. (Score:2)
* Google became dominant because it simply had the best search engine.
* Google got rich by selling advertising on their dominant search engine.
* Google has continued to be dominant and rich because their search is still high quality, they've built an entire ecosystem of EXTREMELY useful free web-apps, and people haven't been presented with a better solution within their other parameters (privacy, ad clutter, customization, etc.).
Google pays browsers to set their default search engine to Google, but I'm yet
Time to make it a public utility... (Score:1)
Back in the "days of olde" the only way to search for information was to go to the local library and look through the card catalog. If they didn't have the book with the information you needed you could talk to the librarian and they'd check with their university contacts, or other libraries they had sharing agreements with, to see if they had the information.
The library was also operated by your local regional government, it was considered a public good and was funded like a public utility.
Google, and oth
Wow! the DOJ just figured out (Score:2)
Bing Bong (Score:2)
If people always stuck with the defaults, we would all be using Bing on PCs and Safari on Macs.
Users got 'stuck' ??? (Score:2)
search ? Google ! Duckduckgo ? (Score:2)
No-one searches,
they Google
except for oddities like myself who Duckduckgo