Google Search is an illegal monopoly — what happens now?
Google Search is an illegal monopoly — what happens now?
It might be a while before we find out.
A federal judge has ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly in the US. “The market reality is that Google is the only real choice” as the default search engine, Judge Amit Mehta said in his decision, and he determined it had gotten that way unfairly. It’s a ruling that could portend big changes for the company, but we yet don’t know how big, and we might not for years.
Mehta declared on Monday that Google was liable for violating antitrust laws, vindicating the Department of Justice and a coalition of states that sued the tech giant in 2020. The next step — deciding on remedies for its illegal conduct — begins next month. Both parties must submit a proposed schedule for remedy proceedings by September 4th and then appear at a status conference on September 6th.
What happens now is that Google appeals and then the case will bounce around different courts for years to come, and maybe one day the supreme court will hear it assuming that US lasts that long as a country.
Yip. I took the government what, 17 years..? from suing to breaking up AT+T, and they were the largest company in America that entire time.
At+t tried to slap em with some exorbitant long distance charges and Uncle Sam got tired of the fuck around.
To today; Google's been showing the wrong people the wrong kind of ads. Showing representatives ads for laundromats and daycares that offer drivinga ed after looking up how to launder money and traffic children. NO google, I did NOT mean THAT
this could be bad for mozilla / firefox.
if Google can't continue to try to increase / sustain their market share, they may stop paying mozilla to be thw default.
Mozilla already started sending your data to advertisers by default in firefox 128. If Google's money dries up, I can't even begin to imagine what fucked up shit they'll do.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution
Hardly qualifies as "sending your data to advertisers".
default what?
Default search engine on their browser?
You can easily change the default.
That's not the point. The point is Google is paying Mozilla to be the default. Google pays them 500M per year to be the default. If at some point Google legally isn't allowed to do so, Mozilla can say bye bye to 500M/year.
Maybe like a one million dollar fine? That's a lot of money, you know.
Kill Chrome/Chromium and Firefox by proxy. Revert back to pure html websites, live a free life.
Google search opens up to more corps so everyone can get in on the enshittification
Does anyone have a (link to a) good summary of the ruling and rationale?
I find the idea that "Google is the only real choice" kind of odd. There are other perfectly functional and user-friendly search engines. It's not like other monopolies, say, Youtube, where there's no realistic alternative. (I'm not denying that search is a monopoly too.)
Practices like getting Reddit to only work with Google instead of Bing are probably a big part of it.
Google pays a lot to stay the default browser.
The other search engines mostly use overlapping indexes.
Said search engines are also not anywhere near competition to Google.
Quite frankly, I can only think of 4. DDG, Ecosia, Bing, and Kagi.
Most people don't know about Ecosia or Kagi. Most people hardly even know about DDG.
I wouldn't consider YouTube as much of a monopoly because despite it being mostly the only one, from what I understand they haven't paid out to stay the only one, and don't really leverage market dominance against others (they probably do but I just don't hear about it often.) The main reason alternatives don't exist is simply because of the mass amount of data the YT needs
YouTube has a network effect monopoly as well. Who would use a competing service?