In my opinion, the search 'monopoly' is just not the best poster child for antitrust cases in the US.
Perhaps the US is too lax on antitrust, but if you, literally anyone reading this, can stop using Google search on every device you own in the next 5 minutes, I just can't see that as a monopoly. Perhaps another word and legislation is required.
You can't even argue the network effect like you can with chat apps or social networks. You can literally cut Google search from your life forever before your lunch break is over.
If you’re a search engine competitor of Google’s, and Google owns the largest browser and mobile OS and pays the remaining browsers to make them the default, your business is vastly less likely to succeed. This holds even if customers could go out of their way to use your service. That’s what I understood this verdict to have determined. Unfortunately the remedy is bad and pointless, but that’s a separate matter.
Everyone else does the same, Microsoft and Apple, it seems like nobody cares. "Its just a bug!" they say, but somehow those bugs always benefit themselves...
Cutting Google accounts out of your life, however, is an entirely different undertaking that would take much longer and have a big impact on how you use the web.
I dont understand. I can browse the internet using a non-Google computer, use a non-Google browser, go to a non-Google website, use a non-Google programming language etc etc.
Nobody, including Google, is stopping you from doing that.
Note, this is different from actual monopoly of railways (I have to use Central Pacific Railroad) or ISP (My city only has Comcast) or electricity (If I want electricity, I have to use PG&E).
The barometer is whether there's meaningful alternative. Can I do X without the $company in question = not a monopoly.
No, they're saying their is an alternative, but it comes at a huge disadvantage. Perhaps not for individual users, as a DDG and Firefox user I'm quite content, but it's definitely an overwhelming disparity for website admins. Even if that admin is not literally in Google Analytics to view their site data (and they probably are), they're still looking at an overwhelming majority of organic traffic coming from Google Search using Google Chrome. And for site publishers and advertisers, Google AdSense or Google Ad[Word]s are enormous.
In 1870, if you wanted to get from Chicago to San Francisco, it would be facetious to claim that Union Pacific did not have a monopoly on that route. No, Union Pacific wasn't forcing you to board their train. Just like you can Ctrl+T over to duckduckgo.com/ or bing.com/ or kagi.com/ in seconds, and never go back to Google. You could avoid the railroad monopoly by 'just' riding a horse, or walking, or taking a boat down the Mississippi and launching a sailing expedition around Cape Horn. That's still a monopoly.
That’s a horrible argument. The difference between riding a horse and riding a train is multiple orders of magnitude. The difference between using an alternate search engine is minimum and the experience is often
better than Google.
And if your entire business strategy is to have a website and depend on Google search results to drive traffic, you are doing it wrong as many news organizations like Buzzfeed found out.
I do occasional self promotion and “thought leadership” bullshit to put my name out there. I go to where the eyeballs are - LinkedIn. It’s far more likely that the people I want to reach are on LinkedIn than my blog that I don’t have a link to anywhere. I just use it as a publicly accessible place to workshop my writing and thoughts before I post them to LinkedIn.
And I will play the world’s smallest fiddle for advertisers even then, if you have a product to sale to consumers, you are probably better off using Amazon or a Meta app to advertised. It’s better targeting and ads are less likely to be blocked.
Is coca cola then a monopoly on soft drinks? I would say obviously yes.
This is the situation the current internet and applications are in. They only service users who utilize Google in some type of way, for the majority of apps.
Its deceptive to say "well it's just that one bank". No, that one bank is an example. That's not the breadth of it, and we both know that.
If I understand correctly, manifest v3 is like what Safari implemented a decade ago and it’s perfectly possible to block Google analytics with Safari content blockers.
How is your argument that you can’t avoid Google supported by the argument that with manifest v3 you can’t block Google analytics even though you can?
In the US, iOS has 60% market share and installing an ad blocker is a matter of going to the App Store and installing it and then enabling in settings. They all walk you through the process. It’s the same on the Mac with the Mac App Store.
And you can change your search engine. If you have evidence that someone Google has quantum computers that allows it decrypt encrypted traffic, I’m sure people would like to know.
But no one has been proposing that Google not be allowed to have underseas cables
You don’t think that’s going deep down the rabbit hole to show that Google is a monopoly to say that it owns a few of the under seas pipes? How much of an American’s traffic do you think goes over Google’s pipelines?
And the other half all put a giant pop-up asking me to sign into Google. I've not yet figured out how to block it, if anyone knows I would love to hear it.
Whether a company has a business relationship with a company you dont like, doesnt make the same argument you're making.
It is like saying, I dont like Coca Cola but when I go to McDonald's to eat food, they only serve Coca Cola. Hence, Coca Cola is.. bad? McDonald's is free to chose any business partner they like, and you insisting that McDonald's shouldnt use Coca Cola sounds silly.
I did this and it's been great. Still use Google search because it's by far the best but I was using DDG for a while. It's not that difficult to de-Google.
I could completely cut Google out of my personal life with no ill effect. I can either use Apple’s iWork or Microsoft’s Office 365, I use ChatGPT as my default search engine now because Google has gotten so bad. I don’t use YouTube regularly except once a year to watch AWS Reinvent videos.
I use Safari on my Mac because Chrome is worse on battery life and doesn’t integrate as well with the rest of my digital life. I use Gmail. But at the end of the day, it’s just another one of my emails.
It is though when you realise 60% of their revenue is from people clicking on "nike" to go to "nike.com".
You cannot have a website anymore without paying tribute to gatekeeper Google.
Consumers can switch any time they want, but there is no incentive for them, they don't have to pay when googling for "nike".
But even though there are only 3 companies in the world that build what I build, all those three companies pay thousands of euros a month so users can find them, even on the exact search terms.
> but if you, literally anyone reading this, can stop using Google search on every device you own in the next 5 minutes,
No you can't do this in 5 mins across all your devices. Not unless you are running some software program to achieve this which will override a tonne of defaults and hidden settings. And some devices will always use Google search.
Maybe if your only device is a barebones Linux PC.
That’s not how unfair monopolies are judged in the US. It’s based on harm to consumers.
As far as how hard is it to compete, it’s not the governments job to force people to use your alternate search engine. Choosing another search engine is literally just a click away.
> literally anyone reading this, can stop using Google search on every device you own in the next 5 minutes
Yeah sure you can avoid typing google.com and think you just ghosted Google forever, but that won't end Google's relationship with you as it runs deeper than you know through its advertisement and tracking platform.
And what about services beyond search at this point?
Youtube, GMail, Google Calendar, GoogleFi, Maps, Play store (movies, apps), Photos, Drive.
I can try stop using those services immediately, but with a huge cost of data and connectivity loss (there's no easy email redirection, accounts are usually tied to emails). You'll also miss out on things that don't have a nice alternative and you are socially pulled into (green/blue messages in iMessage within the US or having WhatsApp abroad), can you stop clicking into links to documents, presentations and videos that people share?
> I can try stop using those services immediately, but with a huge cost of data and connectivity loss
Doesnt this mean that you get certain value from Google. Are you upset that one company is creating products that you find indispensible. Or are you upset that others have not been able to build products that you like?
This is like saying "Apple M series chips are sooo good. Apple sucks"
Think about how easy it became to switch mobile carriers. The state of things in the Internet is closer to mobile companies before phone numbers were easily portable across carriers.
Can I stop using GMail? yes, but not really. Same as I wasn't able to switch phone companies 20 years ago because reliance on the phone number to stay connected (and abusive contracts).
> Doesn't this mean that you get certain value from Google.
Yes, but that's no the issue, otherwise I'd have no reason to use it in the first place, right? The problem is that it's hard to migrate.
Antitrust in US seems more and more of a joke for every new one.
First few literally broke apart big companies, then we have Microsoft with “just don’t make IE default browser” and now basically nothing for google, forget selling off chrome now, not even banned from making search deals, just “maybe in a few years perhaps reconsider the search deals? Totally non binding tho”
This is the kind of knee-jerk reaction that causes lawsuits to fail. There's always nuance, and if you're not willing to be detailed, dont be surprised when things dont go your way.
That's the nuanced compromise. What should really happen is statutorily banning accepting remuneration for displaying or delivering third-party advertisement.
The writing was on the wall when Kamala Harris wouldn't commit to keeping Lina Khan at the FTC. We had some soft Anti-Trust action for the first time in decades, and the Trusts responded. If we get the chance to try again, we should be more clear eyed about what we are up against.
I've de-Googled my life as best I can, but I know how little it actually matters. Now that Google is clearly on the path of closing up Android, I hope the Linux phone effort gets reinvigorated.
Unfortunately I don't think we're going to get the chance to try again. This, and Apple's upcoming case which they'll probably get off free as well, was our chance.
These companies are now even more emboldened, and with market caps bigger than the GDP of most countries, there is no one to stop them. Every politician has a number, and this administration has shown that open bribes are legal and expected.
Good luck prosecuting any big tech when they can pay billions of dollars to the administration to make anything go away.
It does not make any sense to compare market capitalization to GDP.
GDP is a measurement of flow within a certain timespan, market capitalization is a guess by the market of the total potential at a specific point in time.
Wait, are you trying to blame this decision on Kamala Harris not pre-committing to keeping an anti-trust advocate in the FTC? I'm not sure if you noticed, but Kamala Harris is not president and never made these decisions about the FTC. I guarantee you her decisions would have been night and day better than the fraud currently inhabiting the whitehouse.
I'm saying our tenuous attempts towards reestablishing the most basic of anti-trust was dead regardless of who won the election[1].
I think this decision would have been the same regardless of who won. As for the next few years... Harris was clearly signalling that her FTC would be a return to rubber stamping mergers and acting only against the most egregious corporate actions, and even then only when the penalties wouldn't be substantial. I doubt very much that her appointment to FTC Chair would be much different than the current Andrew Ferguson.
Nothing I've written endorses Trump or his actions. But we have to be a little bit more realistic about the interests that Harris was aiming to represent.
We can say that Harris would have been better than Trump in the aggregate, while also prioritizing the interests of Business over those of Consumers. Both these things can be true.
In most of these convos I usually see both sides with it being more heavily weighted to being corpo-friendly, but certainly individuals who are tired of monopolies and manipulations by oligopolies. So that's hardly a "beehive mind"
Instead of the blunt hammer of disinvestment of brands, the government should be putting limits on Big Tech's ability to lock consumers and business into their platforms, whether via exclusive search deals, preventing alternative app stores, or hardware-tied communication networks. Those practices are ultimately what harms consumer choice. This decision only seems to address the first of those.
It seems that Big Tech's ingratiation of itself to the current administration using money and lent "credibility" is yielding their desired slaps on the wrists when a spanking was justified by the harm they have done to consumers.
Chrome is the most popular browser, if you disconnect that then you cut off google's guaranteed control of the default search engine. That's just a hunch though. Same with Android which is the most popular mobile OS in the world.
Microsoft has the most used operating system in the world with a default browser that defaults search to Bing. How is that working out? Being a default doesn't matter when the other options are better and easy to switch to.
Presumably other search companies will be on a more even footing with google with regards to what they know about you to sell to advertisers if google doesn't also have your complete search history and a complete history of everything you do on your phone.
Lol try Bing. I use Kagi on MS Edge. Today Windows updated, and I could only choose to set Microsoft Edge recommended defaults. It disabled my Kagi extension so I had to go re-enable it to get my actually useful search engine back.
I remember back in the day the case against Microsoft looked huge too. I don't remember the details but it "felt like" Bush Jr got elected president and that whole thing went away.
There's a reason nobody remembers: the DoJ announced it was no longer seeking the breakup of Microsoft on September 6, 2001. A few days later, 9/11 occurred, and all other news was erased.
I'm not suggesting a conspiracy, by the way, just stating the facts.
I think the AI reasoning in the ruling has a little bit of truth to it. I have found myself using search quite a bit less. I'm still not sure what that means in the long run, but it does feel like times are changing.
When I do use Google, I end up using that crappy Gemini blurb at the top a lot more than I would like to admit as well, so they are definitely still prime contenders in the AI space even before looking at the Gemini platform itself. Even with all the things it gets wrong (the model in its search is definitely one of the worst), it is often more useful than not to me, and helps point me in the right direction more quickly.
This could all be just another repeat of the browser wars where Chrome overtook Firefox, but it isn't yet set in stone. Google definitely seems a little bit worried about the future with AI.
Something tells me that Google and Meta get backroom deals by "virtue of" allowing their apps and Android to easily be hacked by governments. In particular, by keeping WhatsApp vulnerable, keeping Google Messages vulnerable, stopping the release of AOSP patches, etc.
Any company that receives special federal protections should also be held partially or entirely in trust-ownership by the US government, not shareholders.
Even aerospace has more competition than smartphones: Embraer, Bombardier, Sukhoi, Antonov, Comac, and HAL -- to name just a few alternatives in passenger aviation. And there used to be a lot more manufacturers in Europe and the US as well, before the biggest capital went on a buying spree.
But you seem to be agreeing with me. I was responding to this comment:
> user agency is still a thing - and there are alternatives
Would you say that was an accurate and realistic comment?
You do realize that Android is Google software, right? But if you can name a few vendors that are actually shipping AOSP instead of Google's proprietary tree, I'll be sure to evaluate them.
Of all these generic OEMs you're thinking of, how many do not integrate with Google's Play Store? The only one I know of is Huawei, but that's just another unconstrained megacorp to avoid.
That's the problem with megacorps, people can't just switch. Technical people could, can and do. "Normal users" will use what the broligarchy wants them to use.
What do you work with? The initial comment was never about what someone in the industry can and can't do, most people browse the web without an adblocker.
I don't get how an article showing that 70% of people don't use adblockers is supposed to be a disagreement with the statement that most people don't use adblockers.
They might not need Google, but they can't get away from them anyways. Google has entrenched themselves everywhere.
You're arguing against your own interpretation of what I'm saying. People use the defaults, people use YouTube, people use Google, people use Gmail, people use Google Maps.
30% use adblockers which are manifestv2 style, they won't block anything companies want you to see. You can't block ads in apps.
If you buy an iPhone in 2025 , by default you are not going to have the YouTube App, you’re not going to be setting up a Gmail account by default and you aren’t going to be using Google maps. You will be using Google search unless you go into settings.
Tell me exactly what website ads are not being blocked by my 1Blocker extension? BTW, Safari for iOS has supported more permissive browser extensions for a few years now.
Also, what does ads in apps have to do with Google? 90% of apps that are downloaded and revenue generating directly via in app purchases and I assume ads are games (came out in the Epic v Apple trial). Google isn’t even a player in that category of ads for the most part. They definitely aren’t the dominant player.
Just because in 2025 the defaults don't have YouTube or Gmail doesn't mean they've not already entrenched themselves.
I can't tell you EXACTLY which sites aren't blocked by your domain based adblocker, I'm not an adblock developer.
If you believe Google doesn't deserve antitrust measures for their duopoly with Apple you're free to do so, you're still arguing against things you interpret freely to make your points.
YouTube hasn’t been an included app on iPhone since 2010 and Google Maps hasn’t been included since 2012. Even then, the Google Maps app wasn’t included. Even from the first version of iOS, the Google app wasn’t included. It was the Apple Maps app using Google for the back end. When Apple started using their own data, they still kept your search history and favorites from the earlier version.
> I can't tell you EXACTLY which sites aren't blocked by your domain based adblocker, I'm not an adblock developer.
So in other words you just threw something out there without any evidence…
> If you believe Google doesn't deserve antitrust measures for their duopoly with Apple you're free to do so, you're still arguing against things you interpret freely to make your points.
The case was never about mobile and Google doesn’t have even 50% of the market in the US in mobile. Unless you have some evidence that Apple and Google illegally colluded in the mobile market, there is no law against being part of a “duopoly”.
And you still haven’t said why an iPhone user needs Google or default of having YouTube and using Google Maos data over a decade ago is relevant in 2025.
You're impossible to have a discussion with, you keep neglecting that Google is everywhere and going for lawyer like interpretations when it suits you.
You won’t give specifics. Google may be everywhere in your bubble just like water is everywhere to a fish. I’m asking you to explain to me as an iPhone user - along with 60% of the mobile users in the US - why I need Google, and where is it even a default besides search?
now people suddenly realize why "economics" was referred to as "political economy" when people started studying these things.
unfair maybe on consumers (google customers ie those who pay google, not those who use google products) but a very good and pragmatic decision by the U.S gvt.
let your homegrown champions stay strong and keep getting stronger.
because the alternative if Google got broken up, a foreign competitor would replace google not a homegrown one.
> let your homegrown champions stay strong and keep getting stronger.
...Until they start getting banned abroad because your government openly tries to manipulate election in ally countries. And once that happens, you're perpetually weaker and your reputation is done for a century.
People arguing for this kind of hard power are just too weak-minded to understand the extent and strength of US' historical soft power.
> markets don't work the way libertarians think.
Well, if you keep pushing down that line, markets won't work at all, and welcome back to 19th century's gunboat policy, except people have nukes now.
Perhaps the US is too lax on antitrust, but if you, literally anyone reading this, can stop using Google search on every device you own in the next 5 minutes, I just can't see that as a monopoly. Perhaps another word and legislation is required.
You can't even argue the network effect like you can with chat apps or social networks. You can literally cut Google search from your life forever before your lunch break is over.