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Google Search is an illegal monopoly — what happens now? (www.theverge.com)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

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.)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

Practices like getting Reddit to only work with Google instead of Bing are probably a big part of it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

YouTube has a network effect monopoly as well. Who would use a competing service?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Especially since Google search sucks these days.