Google Officially Declared a Mononpoly (ZZZ)

HOT TAKE: Courts officially label Google a monopoly, something everybody on this planet has known for 25 years. Why?

" […] After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly. It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.

Specifically, the court holds that (1) there are relevant product markets for general search services and general search text ads; (2) Google has monopoly power in those markets; (3) Google’s distribution agreements are exclusive and have anticompetitive effects; and (4) Google has not offered valid procompetitive justifications for those agreements. Importantly, the court also finds that Google has exercised its monopoly power by charging supracompetitive prices for general search text ads. That conduct has allowed Google to earn monopoly profits.” (read more)"

I wonder, what about Microsoft?
I remember back in late 1999 early 2000 there was like an investigation about M$, but they like “forgot” about it when the .com bubble burst, to avoid any further negative impact on the economy!

Just for discussion sake, what defines a monopoly that should be “criminalized”. Should we criminalize:

  • someone who started a pizza restaurant in a remote village or island where there are no pizza restaurants, should he be criminalized for being the sole provider?
  • What if there are some others BUT because of his quality/service/taste/price people flocked to this “new” pizza restaurant and he got 99.99% of the market share, should he be criminalized!

Someone has a clear definition of the “criminalized” monopoly? Does it include the 2 cases above.

Using logic, it would be based on their practices, not their size, location, quality, etc. Doing things like, but not limited to:

  • Actively seeking to buy out the competition
  • Actively ensuring that their product is more accessible in an unfair way (i.e. not in terms of features, but in terms of making it easier to get their product and harder to get another’s)
  • Imposing rules and/or fees that make competition difficult
  • Using their vast resources to gain unfair advantages (e.g. owning most of the materials used in production, and making it so that your competitors have to buy from you)

It is about intent. The same way not all killings are considered murder, to give a way more serious example.

The list goes on and on. You could do a “Google” search to find more. :rofl:

PS: Using “google” as a verb is also technically an example, by the way.

2 Likes

If someone has actual deep fundamental understanding of the laws at play here (any lawyers in our lovely community? :stuck_out_tongue: ), please do share some insight in regards to what that could actually and practically mean in the foreseeable future of enforcing punishment/limitations resulting from the ruling.

My very limited understanding and some guesswork for example, makes me wonder if the court could order that Google is not to pay Mozilla for making it default Search Engine, effectively putting Firefox in “abolutely f*ed” status and Mozilla in general into financial/existential crisis…

1 Like

Adding to what I guessed: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/monopoly.asp#toc-what-is-the-monopoly-meaning

And: https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/single-firm-conduct/monopolization-defined

1 Like

A federal district judge ruled in 1998 that Microsoft was to be broken into two technology companies, but the decision was later reversed on appeal by a higher court. Microsoft was free to maintain its operating system, application development, and marketing methods.5

This is an interesting idea. Can the goverment force a private company to split into two to create “artificial competitors”?

If anyone is interested the context for my post is the ruling decided yesterday. I thought it was unusual because USA gov and State of Colorado are joint plaintiffs vs. Google. It was a 4-year trial that ended yesterday and ended with a big .pdf, a 286-page decision. I am reading it now.

What were they suing Google for? The usual stuff:

“Specifically, the court holds that (1) there are relevant product markets for general search
services and general search text ads; (2) Google has monopoly power in those markets;
(3) Google’s distribution agreements are exclusive and have anticompetitive effects; and
(4) Google has not offered valid procompetitive justifications for those agreements. Importantly,
the court also finds that Google has exercised its monopoly power by charging supracompetitive
prices for general search text ads. That conduct has allowed Google to earn monopoly profits.”

Whenever you distro-hop and launch FF I always pay attention to if Google is the default set search engine. All distros that do this get paid for it, is my understanding.

They would not be “artificial competitors”.

The idea is that by bundling Windows and Microsoft’s apps and services together, all Microsoft-related apps and services gain an unfair competitive advantage over all other apps and services that are available on Windows.

Apple is guilty of this too (in both software and hardware). And so is Google on Android.

So, by splitting them, Microsoft could no longer automatically install any of their apps and services on Windows. This would allow users to firstly, learn about other apps and services, and secondly, pick the ones they want, rather than sticking with what they already have.

So you will have one company which would make the OS and another company which will make the (userspace) software like MS Office? That makes some sense. I was expecting 2 companies each with their own fork of Windows OS. :grinning:

Think of the way most Linux distros work:

The distro maintainers have what they think is the ideal (offline) installation, but they still allow you to choose what you want with an alternative (online) installation.

An example of this is that most are bundled with Firefox by default, but if you choose the alternative installation, you can instead install Vivaldi, Librewolf, Chromium, etc.

1 Like

It’s a little difficult to compare a pizza restaurant directly to the reasons MS were sanctioned for their practices, as a pizza restaurant operates in the middle of a chain that starts at the raw materials for a pizza and ends at a customer with a pizza, but I’ll give it a shot!

The kind of practices you’d undertake as a ‘middle’ entity to become and then be considered to be taking advantage of your monopoly position are somewhat different to that of an original supplier, as @ddnn has highlighted in their post.

In the MS antitrust case, the key point of contention was the bundling of IE with Windows - the allegation here was that if IE was bundled into Windows, users would just use that instead of looking for third-party software, which then gave MS an unfairly inflated share of the browser market whilst cutting out competing companies who also sold web browsers - a key thing to bear in mind is that this was at a time when web browsers weren’t all just free things you could go ahead and download, but boxed software that was being sold on store shelves.

Alongside this there were various issues raised with comments made by MS execs to other partners where they openly talked about the bundling of IE and Windows as being a strategy to drive other software vendors out out business. In tandem with the bundling, they were also found to have deliberately made it more difficult for users to even install competing browser products, something else enabled by their ownership of the dominant OS platform.

The key factor that made these actions ‘criminalised’ (to borrow your phrasing) is that as the biggest player in the OS space, they were leveraging that position to purposely smother competing products rather than allowing their own products to live or die on their own merits: had they been able to provide years of evidence that the bundling of IE was purely to benefit the consumer, and had they not been shown to have deliberately obfuscated and hindered the processes for a consumer to install a third party option, it’s possible that the decision would have been in their favour.

To use your pizza restaurant analogy - Your hypothetical, wildly successful pizza company would have significant deals with suppliers and advertising agencies, in a local area this may constitute a significant portion of those other companies’ revenues. To be considered a ‘criminalized’ monopoly, they may go on to do things like:

  • Go to the company that sells all the pizza ingredients and threaten to find other suppliers if they don’t stop doing business with the other restaurants
  • Tell advertisers that they won’t pay for anymore ads if they continue to also run ads for other restaurants

Your reaction to this may be ‘so what, the other restaurants can just find a new supplier or advertiser’ but that’s where your analogy kind of falls apart as a comparison to MS and Google - in their case, MS aren’t just the pizza place trying to sell the IE Pizza, since they are the company who also supply the Windows ingredients and marketing they’re also the supplier and the advertising agency!

So, consider that scenario - your pizza place now owns and operates the largest pizza ingredient supplier and advertising businesses in your local area. That’s great! But, it could be considered a ‘criminalised’ monopoly if they then went on to:

  • Refuse to sell pizza ingredients to other pizza restaurants who won’t sell pizzas with the exact topping combinations they dictate (The same way that MS signed contracts for vendors who wanted to sell PCs with Windows to exclude third party browsers from their shipped system images)
  • Make it difficult for restaurants to order their toppings from another supplier if they don’t like the ones they supply (The same way that MS made it more difficult for a user to install a third party browser)
  • Perhaps they would even insist that any restaurant that ordered their dough also ordered their toppings (The same way that MS insisted that IE must be bundled with Windows and that the two products were actually inseparable)

I don’t think that’s how that works at all…

If there is variation from distro to distro (which I haven’t tested myself and am not personally aware of), I would guess it’s more so a matter of if the distro ships vanilla Firefox (which would probably have default GSearch due to their business agreement), or a “custom” build of Firefox with a custom configuration or some fork (eg LibreWolf) that doesn’t.

2 Likes

Almost anything to be honest. Basically, the next step will be for them to discuss remedies.

These can be anything from changing business practices to forcing the search business and the ad business to be split out from the rest of google.

There is, of course, also the appeals process still.

maybe the financial end, as the basisof my understanding, was incorrect, but if Vanilla is a simple ‘business agreement’ how do we explain all the distros that ship with the default set to DDG? Seen plenty of those. And I’m talking, FF, not a fork.

You bet. In fact, this year marks the 50th anniversary of the US gov’t having busted AT&T into many smaller regional companies (… some of which subsequently merged again in order to survive :wink: )

While Linux itself is a well-informed “political” statement, not all Linux distros are well-informed. Also, some don’t care.

As such, not all distros will have someone who goes and flicks that switch.

The incentive/payment agreement is for Firefox and Firefox only.

Always gotta remember that everyone is different. There are Linux users with Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge for personal everyday life. They aren’t being forced by their company; they just want it.

The same applies to distro maintainers.

1 Like

I am not a copyright lawyer, but my understanding of the MPL (which is actually a ‘copyleft’ license :smile:) is that it allows anyone to bundle Firefox into a distro with any customisations that they see fit - there’s no requirement on the maintainer of any given distro to have the default search engine set to Google, or any other setting that may otherwise be the case with a vanilla build of Firefox.

The only real requirement it sets out for redistribution of Firefox is that any modified source code be made available under the same licensing terms.

1 Like

that makes sense.

that makes a lot of sense too.

thank you both.

As a very independent (not a partisan) person I always wince when I hear this. I took no political position switching to Linux. I just found MS’s terms of use unreasonable and increasingly insane and I desired no further (voluntary) connection to them.

1 Like

Not you making a political statement of going against the globally accepted standard… :rofl:

I kid.

I say things like this because I want people to realise their choices matter (small and large), even if they didn’t consciously make them or make them for a specific purpose.

1 Like