A judge ruled that Google’s ubiquitous search engine has been illegally exploiting its dominance to squash competition and stifle innovation.

“WASHINGTON (AP) — A judge on Monday ruled that Google’s ubiquitous search engine has been illegally exploiting its dominance to squash competition and stifle innovation in a seismic decision that could shake up the internet and hobble one of the world’s best-known companies…”

  • xttweaponttx@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    3 months ago

    So stoked to see this. A bit disheartening to read this kinda shit, though=

    “This victory against Google is an historic win for the American people,” said Attorney General Merrick Garland. “No company — no matter how large or influential — is above the law. The Justice Department will continue to vigorously enforce our antitrust laws.”

    Only to be followed a few paragraphs down by

    …a drawn-out appeals process will delay any immediate effects for both consumers and advertisers. The appeals process could take as long as five years…

    Sigh.

  • Eggyhead@kbin.run
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    3 months ago

    Websites and articles that have nothing to do with search or Google have to be designed specifically for Google’s search algorithm. I think that’s pretty crazy.

    • CheeseNoodle@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      3 months ago

      Not to mention googles push for an identification standard that would effectively ban any non chromium browser from all major websites.

    • wuphysics87@lemmy.ml
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      3 months ago

      Interestingly, SEO is increased with semantic HTML which benefits people who need screen readers since it is easier to parse. But, also. Fuck google

      • sandbox@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Unfortunately, people play a lot of weird tricks with semantic tagging for SEO, making them less useful to screen reader users. Not to mention that Google has a very specific, very limited interpretation of the tags, so a lot of tags that would be useful for accessibility are unused or misused.

        • wuphysics87@lemmy.ml
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          3 months ago

          My information must be old, but what you are talking about still better than just span of div of div of span of div right? People still try to have any amount of meaningful structure?

    • Mango@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Did you do a crime? Well as the authority round these parts, you know I get a cut.

    • Phoenicianpirate@lemm.eeEnglish
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      3 months ago

      If the fine is not large enough to impact their business then breaking the law will be a normal business decision and fines a simple business expense. It’s already like that.

  • SomeAmateur@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
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    3 months ago

    It might not be much but it’s still legal precedent that will hopefully help it reach critical mass. Like getting Al Capone on tax evasion

  • Madnessx9@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Bit confused, Google has its own browser, its own search engine, and provides a somewhat easy method to access the majority of the Internet and does it well but some people are upset because they cannot compete? What is the point in doing something so good that you become the best in the business? Everyone comes to you for your service, but you get punished because you’re a monopoly? I’m thinking about Valve here as well. It’s a major retail platform for PC games because nobody does it better. Publishers get upset its top dog, and their shity half arsed clients get no light.

    Is it not the point of a business to make money and be good at their service that they increase revenue yearly and drive innovation?

    • Caveman@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      The problem is not having the monopoly, it’s exploiting it’s qualities. Google for example exploits the fact that they know how much ad revenue each site makes them and thus can rank them higher. They also can rank their own products such as YouTube or Chrome. Another exploitation of their monopoly is that Google is the default search engine of Chrome instead of giving the user choices

      There is no issue with YouTube, another monopoly, since it’s business model is driving engagement and making money from ads but not exploiting its position.

      Valve is another monopoly but it doesn’t block people from putting their own launchers onto their platform. It doesn’t block you from installing another store like Apple does and in general is nowhere near as all-encompassing as Google.

    • Akasazh@feddit.nl
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      3 months ago

      It’s about exploitive behavior. Note that your example, valve, hasn’t been sued successfully about monopolistic behaviour as they don’t try to sit down competition, they just remain better than their competition, which is how it’s supposed to work.

      But shitty businesses who lose customers start interfering in the ability of others to compete with them. F.i. Google cutting a deal with Reddit to be the only search engine to index the site.

      • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
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        3 months ago

        The problem is, if one company dominates search, you have no way to evaluate whether they are doing it well.

        You could just go to other search engines and run the same queries and compare results.

        For example, I did a search on 6 different search engines earlier today looking for a specific Reddit thread related to an update to a certain Skyrim mod without quite naming the mod (because I couldn’t remember the exact name of the mod, and was hoping to find the Reddit thread to get the mod name or Nexus link). All 6 had the Nexus page for the mod itself within the top 3 results, and all of them but Google and Yandex had the Reddit thread in question on the first page.

        • fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de
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          3 months ago

          If one company is stifling competition, then competitors don’t have the resources required to innovate.

          When you look at competitors offerings, you’re seeing the best they can do in a google-dominated market.

          Real competition benefits users.

        • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
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          3 months ago

          Google forces exclusive deals and its popularity means people optimize for it. Other search engines don’t have a chance when people expect Google.

          • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
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            3 months ago

            Who do they have an exclusive deal with? Are there sites you can currently only search on Google? Or browsers or similar that require you to use Google?

    • amenji@programming.dev
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      3 months ago

      I’m with you on this.

      In this thread are people who screams monopoly, thinking they know what it means. One comment said Google is a monopoly, followed by “along with <other giant companies>”

      They’re giants because they’re successful and good at what they do. They’re successful because people are benefiting and find values from the products they use. The moment these giants stops “exploiting” people will be when they stop bringing values to society.

      They’ve confused economic reality with their own ideal reality.

      • Allero@lemmy.today
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        3 months ago

        There’s much more to company’s popularity than just the product quality.

        Google, along with some others, pays money for browser developers to be the default engine - so that people never bother to try something else and actually see how good or bad Google is compared to everything else.

        Facebook (Meta) is known for predatory business practices like forcing startups to sell out or have their concept forcefully stolen and them destroyed.

        Amazon dominates by plunging the prices of their in-house products below payback to drive the competition into bankruptcy, then acts as a monopoly, driving prices up.

        There’s plenty more such examples, but let me stop here for now. Giant corporations have powerful levers that are only available to them as they approach market dominance. And when they get 'em, fair play is over.

      • wvstolzing@lemmy.ml
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        3 months ago

        They’ve confused economic reality with their own ideal reality.

        … and the irony in this statement is overwhelming, after the fairy tale you’ve just outlined about those providing the most value to society gathering the most power & influence.

    • unwarlikeExtortion@lemmy.ml
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      3 months ago

      Google has its own browser, its own search engine, and provides a somewhat easy method to access the majority of the Internet and does it well.

      The problem isn’t that it does it well, it’s that it did it well and it doesn’t anymore.

      They dominate the market and can afford to make the search AI-inflated bullshit without any revenue losses.

      Another part of the problem is the integration. Some google websites are rendered inoperable on Firefox, while others are made to have a worse experience.

      A third part is giving its services preferential treatment onstead of having thekr algorithm be unbiased towards in-house services.

      Edit:

      Once upon a time the best browser game in town was Internet explorer. Similar stuff happened (actually even less blatant then Google). Microsoft basically controlled Web standards. The biggest sin they did was bundle IE with Windows, at least according to the US suit.

  • Barx [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    Wonder what will happen to Firefox if this ruling means Google can’t pay them to default to their search engine. That’s a large chunk of their funding.

    • maniacalmanicmania@aussie.zone
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      3 months ago

      They previously had a big deal with Yahoo! For a few years didn’t they? They’ll just sign with whoever wants to give them money.

    • sovietknuckles [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
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      3 months ago

      Wonder what will happen to Firefox if this ruling means Google can’t pay them to default to their search engine.

      Yahoo was Firefox’s default search engine between 2014 and 2017. It would have lasted longer, but Verizon’s acquisition of Yahoo prompted Mozilla to terminate it. They can sign a deal with another search engine if the deal with Google falls through. In China, Baidu is the default search engine, and in Russia, Yandex is.

      Certainly Google will be more careful after this ruling, but nothing will actually go into effect at least for several years, if it ever does, because Google is appealing.

      That’s a large chunk of their funding.

      That’s true. When Mozilla resumed their search deal with Google in 2017, Google provided 91% of their revenue. But the percent of Mozilla’s revenue derived from Google has decreased every year since then, sitting at 81% as of 2022.

      • ArchRecord@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        And recently, Mozilla has been trying to develop a privacy-preserving ads business.

        I’m not a big fan of ads, but if Mozilla can actually make ads that don’t track users, and are uninvasive, they might be able to garner some market share in the ad space, and distance their revenue from Google even further.

  • BeyondRuby@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I may be misunderstanding but why are people saying take down chromium? Please correct me if I’m wrong but chromium is open source and only invested in largely by Google. Chrome is chromium with proprietary code implemented and in no way (as far as I can tell) do they own the chromium project. I quite like chromium just the de-googled version. I think people may be mistaking Chrome and Chromium for being the same or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe someone can explain if I’m missing something

    Also I’d love to see the downfall of Google but nothing will change the power they have. The names too recognizable it doesn’t matter if given a choice , Grandma or Grandpa or whoever that doesn’t care about this sort of thing is picking Google because out of the common options they’ll probably only recognize Bing or Google maybe some Yahoo too lol

    • flux@lemmy.mlEnglish
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      3 months ago

      I think the main problem is that Chromium still contributes towards the browser engine monoculture, as it is bug-for-bug compatible with Chrome. Therefore if you switch to Chromium, it’s still enough for the web sites to test for Chrome compatibility, which they will, because it has the largest market share. Users of competing browsers suffer, further driving the lure of Chrome (or Chromium).

      On the other hand, if people switched to some other engine, one that does not share the same core engine or even the same history, this will no longer hold: web sites would need to be developed against the spec, or at least against all the browsers they might realistically expect their customers to use.

    • tired_n_bored@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Chromium is open source but not free (as in freedom). In fact, it is developed by Google and only Google has the power to accept or refuse a PR.

      As an example: Manifest V2 is going to be discontinued in favor of V3 on Chromium (and consequently Chrome) despite the outrage of the users and developers.

      • EngineerGaming@feddit.nl
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        3 months ago

        I thought it was not a licensing issue but rather that it if someone wanted to maintain the engine with MV2, it would get increasingly hard to do independently because of the sheer complexity.

        • tired_n_bored@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Yup. Nobody denies you from forking Chromium and maintaining an updated version with MV2, but good luck doing that

      • KubeRoot@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
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        3 months ago

        I don’t think anything you said makes it not free, as long as you can fork it. The same can be said about most FOSS, since somebody, usually the creator, is in control of the repository.

        That’s the point of FOSS - your repository isn’t becoming a democracy by virtue of using a permissive license, but it means somebody could outcompete you with a fork and effectively take over as the dominant project.

          • atro_city@fedia.io
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            3 months ago

            No, I mean the tech behind it, not the concept. The bittorrent application is able to find a file to download from a bunch of other people. Not only the file itself, but parts of it. It’s a distributed search.

            • doodledup@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              This works because it’s the same file just distributed. But in the case of search, every node would need to have the entire index of the web. If not, how would the client decide who’s index is better and which page rank fits better with the search? I really don’t see how this would work.

            • montar@lemmy.ml
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              3 months ago

              torrents have trackers, special servers that keep track of who’s got which parts of a file.

      • /home/pineapplelover@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        Also why? Searxng is a thing. I would argue search wouldn’t need to be federated. Makes sense for social media, web is already connected.

        • atro_city@fedia.io
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          3 months ago

          Isn’t searxng just a proxy for google and bing? Not sure how that “increases diversity” or “adds competition” or “improves search results”…

          • /home/pineapplelover@lemm.ee
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            3 months ago

            It can proxy anything you want to. There are a lot of searxng instances out there who have different setups. You could proxy only google or all the search engines that exist. Up to you. Ideally, I would make it so searxng can operate independently and have their own search engine algorithm but so far, this is the most open source and self hostable option available.

        • atro_city@fedia.io
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          3 months ago

          Had a look: it’s 20 years and maintained by one single dude. Do you think one dude could compete with google? He needs help, and a lot of it.