> To put it another way, the problem is not so much that Google shouldn't be paying to be the default search engine, but that it shouldn't own both the browser and the search engine.
If this is the real crux of the case, then is divesting Chrome going to negatively affect DuckDuckGo and Kagi?
My hunch is “no”, and also that search+browser isn’t the crux of the case. I think the real crux is Google owning browser+ad/surveillance-network.
It's the scale. You can do all kinds of integrations at tiny scale that are not permissible at grand scale. I can own my store and sell my own-brand products in it but if I own most of the stores and use that leverage to force other stores to sell my own-brand products, that's a concern for competition and an opportunity for anti-trust regulation to step in and attempt to fix things.
If this is the real crux of the case, then is divesting Chrome going to negatively affect DuckDuckGo and Kagi?
My hunch is “no”, and also that search+browser isn’t the crux of the case. I think the real crux is Google owning browser+ad/surveillance-network.