Google admits anti-competitive conduct involving Google Search in Australia

https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/google-admits-anti-competitive-conduct-involving-google-search-in-australia

by _p2zi • 11 months ago

298 239 11 months ago

accc.gov.au

echelon4• 11 months ago

Oh, that's all?

Google is one of the most anticompetitive companies to have ever existed. MaBell has nothing on the new AI overlords.

The browser / web / search / ads thing is insane, and the fact that they've made it so companies have to pay to protect their own brand is beyond fucked. It ought to be illegal.

And they own the largest media company in the world and have a commanding lead in AI and autonomous vehicles. They're bigger than most countries and are poised for world domination.

Break these MFs up already.

To think the government got mad at Microsoft for IE. Jeez. We used to have a spine when it comes to antitrust.

ares623• 11 months ago

That spine belonged to the government, which is now owned by the corporations. To be fair, they still have that spine, probably stronger than ever, but it's being used to protect themselves now.

charcircuit6• 11 months ago

The browser / web / search / ads thing is insane

X does it too. Instagram does it too. TikTok does it too. YouTube does it too. Reddit does it too. LinkedIn does it too.

It's not insane, it's the standard way to monetize a platform. You have an app that takes you to a page to discover content. When discovering content ads are shown. When viewing the content ads are shown from the platform.

echelon4• 11 months ago

Google owns every pane of ingress to the internet. They own the defaults, and that's what matters to 99.9% of normies. They own the web standards and the whole kit and kaboodle. Nevermind app store monopolies, as that's a whole different subject.

If I own a brand, I have to pay Google ads to rank for my own brand. Google doesn't like the concept of a "URL bar". It's a search bar. My closet competitors can pay for placement against my trademarked name and there's not a damned thing I can do to stop it.

One company should not own all of that surface area. That's practically the whole internet outside of social networks and buying off Amazon.

Google just sits there taxing the whole internet. (And half of mobile...)

Fixes? Here are a few:

1. Take Chrome away. That's the lynchpin of this racket.

2. Make Google (and Apple) support non-scare wall app installs from the web as a default. No hidden settings menus. (The EU would be great and enforcing this.) Don't let them own login or payments either.

3. Best yet: break the company into pieces. If it was good enough for MaBell, it'll be good enough for Google. It'll be worth more as parts anyway - so much of that value is locked away trying to be the sum of parts. YouTube alone is bigger than Disney and Netflix.

userbinator• 11 months ago

X doesn't have its own browser, and neither do Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, nor LinkedIn. YouTube is basically a part of Google, and it's a good example of anticompetition when they deliberately degrade the performance of their site on non-Google browsers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345858

avazhi• 11 months ago

Just to be clear, Google makes $55m in profits every 2.5 business hours.

metaphor• 11 months ago

Using bottom line of their most recent quarterly income statement[1], and given Google operates 24/7, then that's more like every 4.3 business hours. /s

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204425...

chillfox4• 11 months ago

Did you account for the $55 being AUD, and the income statement being in USD?

mhh__• 11 months ago

Good deal, search and YouTube are both pretty good

quantummagic• 11 months ago

That really misses the point. That is, fines do nothing if they are a rounding error on revenue.

ulfw• 11 months ago

If they were that good, why would Google have to waste money pre-installing them as defaults?

senectus1• 11 months ago

here is hoping that the penalty means a whole lot less than the precedance...

They have now set a "bar" for acceptable behaviour... the 55million is just a "you've been put on notice"

CobrastanJorji• 11 months ago

If Google has 5 billion users, that's about 5 cents per user per day.

petesergeant• 11 months ago

Sure, but how much of that is from this deal? The goal isn’t to stop Google from doing business, it’s to make this behaviour unprofitable with a little wrist slap too. And also a shot across the bow that if they continue to do it it’ll be enforced much more strongly.

throwawayxcmz2• 11 months ago

That is a bit silly. The goal is to make anti-competitive and all negative conduct net-negative, not just unprofitable when caught. Otherwise, it is like a millions of dollars to none gambling, profits no one caught you, a slap on the wrist if you got caught. Not useful.

SwtCyber5• 11 months ago

Exactly. When you frame it like that, the fine goes from “headline punishment” to “cost of doing business.”

rs186• 11 months ago

$55 million is pocket change for Google.

chillfox4• 11 months ago

yeah, I think those laws should be updated to be a percentage of global revenue.

godelski6• 11 months ago

Hell, even country revenue would be a big boost.

judge123• 11 months ago

Is anyone actually going to switch their default search engine on their phone now? We're so locked into the Google ecosystem. Feels like a slap on the wrist that won't change user habits one bit.

LeoPanthera• 11 months ago

Plenty of people, including me, have no real desire to switch.

ethan_smith• 11 months ago

DuckDuckGo's market share has grown to around 2.5% globally despite the friction, suggesting that a meaningful minority of users will switch when given clearer choices.

godelski6• 11 months ago

I'm one of those people. It seems like all search engines give pretty similar results, so why not use the one with more privacy? I can even do a quick LLM ask on DDG and with different models. Helpful when search terms are not getting the right match.

I think most people's judgement about DDG is from a few uses and from some time ago. It's worth giving it a shot if you haven't in awhile. But give it a real shot, like use it for a few days to get over the "I hate it because it's different" game that our minds play.

And a major benefit now is you don't just get a fucking popup on your phone every time you're just trying to search something. Like seriously, wtf google. Needy much?

weatherlite3• 11 months ago

2.5% is a very small share

GeekyBear• 11 months ago

I changed my default search engine to DuckDuckGo when Google opted me into AI search.

echelon4• 11 months ago

Search is dead to me now. I'm using LLMs, mostly ChatGPT, for most of my inquiries.

It's so laborious to sift through shitty Google search results when ChatGPT will uncover unknown unknowns.

I don't want OpenAI to become the new monopoly de jour, but I'm certainly happier as a user with their platform than I am with Google search.

Google stopped being a powerhouse tool when they dropped advanced search predicates a decade or more ago.

godelski6• 11 months ago

FWIW DDG offers a few LLMs and they have search capabilities. Makes it a bit convenient to switch over if one of the LLMs is being extra dumb that day.

adastra22• 11 months ago

I haven’t been using Google search for years. It is far worse than it used to be.

jader201• 11 months ago

The web is also far worse than it used to be.

Content was so much better 15-20 years ago, when Google’s tooling was also better.

99% of content creators create content for a single reason: to monetize it. Usually through ads.

The end result is that most content, even if decent, is ruined by ads.

cwnyth• 11 months ago

Agreed. It actually is pretty awful now. Unfortunately, I still find it better than the alternatives (chiefly Bing/DDG). Every time I want to try out DDG, I just find it doesn't quite get what I want either, and Google does just a bit better.

tombert6• 11 months ago

I haven't found a good replacement for YouTube that isn't just filled with conservative conspiracy stuff, but for search I've been happy with Kagi.

It cost money but that doesn't bother me too much, because it means they have a means of making money that isn't just selling my data. I also like that I get to rank the results instead of a program trying to predict what to rank at the whims of some kind of marketing.

ViscountPenguin• 11 months ago

It's a natural consequence of YouTube's practices unfortunately. If the majority of banned users are weird racists and the like, the majority of people looking for an alternative will be likewise.

The only other major market is weird tech nerds like us, but tbh, a lot of us would rather setup a peertube node then actually make any content for it.

DaiPlusPlus4• 11 months ago

YouTube that isn't just filled with conservative conspiracy stuff

I often see people complaining about this; but it's just not something I ever experience myself (provided I'm using my account, of course). While I do cultivate my YouTube recommendations using the "Do not recommend again" menu item, I think I've only needed to click that a few times a year - plus most of the videos I watch are from video producers I'm subscribed to (mostly retrotech, sci/tech/edu youtubers and archive film accounts; I do subscribe to a bunch of defence-economics and political youtubers but only because they don't engage in theatrics: it's all very bookish and academic, so that also helps keep the bad content away.

...so if you're seeing extremist and/or conspiratorial content, may I ask if you're clicking the "Do not recommend" menu option (not just the Dislike button) - and have you built a Subscriptions list of consistently non-extremist content? I imagine those are the 2 main things that informs YouTube's recommendation algo.

chillfox4• 11 months ago

I have not used Google for like 4 years now. Their search has not been close to the best for a long time now.

shazbotter3• 11 months ago

I use Kagi on my phone. Pretty easy switch. Will anyone switch? Demonstrably yes?

DaiPlusPlus4• 11 months ago

Do us Kagi users have anything like a denonym? Some name we can use like "Kagi-ers" or "Kagools" - but much cooler-sounding, of course...

ocdtrekkie4• 11 months ago

I will point out that on an iPhone this is not an easy switch, since Apple hardcodes the search engine options and you need to use a browser extension which hijacks your search from another engine to redirect it to Kagi.

thrown-08252• 11 months ago

Speak for yourself, hasn't been the default on any of my devices for a long long time.

BrouteMinou• 11 months ago

Startpage is now my new default. Privacy is their selling pitch.

SwtCyber5• 11 months ago

The ecosystem lock-in is strong

terminalshort3• 11 months ago

Nope. This will benefit Google because now that you can't pay for default status, Google is the de facto default for free.

asadotzler3• 11 months ago

Google has been denied this privilege. Where does it say others have as well?

justinclift• 11 months ago

https://kagi.com/stats

qwertytyyuu• 11 months ago

Damn, it still surprises me that Google search pre installed, is not just a normal thing. As in it is pre install because Google pays for it, not because vendors thinks it’s the better search. Seeems more obvious when written out like this

makeitdouble• 11 months ago

People had the same reaction back in the days when Microsoft was actively paying and bullying PC makers to preinstall Windows.

asadotzler3• 11 months ago

And they got skewered when they began using those contracts to explicitly exclude Netscape from those PCs. It's one thing to pay for distribution, it's another to use your Windows monopoly to bully OEMs into not distributing your competition.

SilverElfin• 11 months ago

Why aren’t these discouraged with such massive fines that the board and shareholders oust executives? Just another example of how weak the laws are from stopping unfair competition by mega corps. Small businesses and even rich startups have the decks stacked against them.

Aurornis2• 11 months ago

If you want a real answer: If one country started implementing fines so massive that it was devastating multi-national companies then many companies would simply stop serving those countries.

We got a little peek into this when the GDPR was rolled out and many small and medium companies simply blocked GDPR countries rather than risk the massive fines spelled out in the GDPR. This has lessened somewhat as it has become more clear that those massive fines aren’t being handed out and the language has been clarified, but I sat through multiple meetings where companies were debating if they should block GDPR countries until the dust settled even though they believed themselves to be compliant. They didn’t want to risk someone making a mistake somewhere and costing the company a percentage of global revenues.

Talking about massive fines that destroy big companies and crush their executives is really popular in internet comment sections but it would be extremely unpopular if people woke up one day and found Google was blocked in their country for fear of violating some law with extreme damages.

throw_a_grenade• 11 months ago

So, iiuc your argument, they're too big to punish by lawful process in democratic countries. Then I argue they should be split up, which is another popular argument.

Where do I sign up to be too big to punish?

jjani7• 11 months ago

No, that's not the real answer at all, it's anything but.

You have no idea just how much revenue Google et. al make from e.g. the EU. The shareholders would absolutely eat Google alive for just walking away from many billions of dollars rather than just complying. I've said this here before:

A point we're still lightyears away from. The lengths they go to in order to operate in China are magnitudes greater than to operate in the EU, yet EU makes them $10+ billion more profit than China.
What would actually happen is that the US would start seriously threatening (blackmailing) the EU to a degree where it's forced to relent long before Apple would pull out.
Apple's estimated operating profit from the EU is around $40 billion dollars. If the US government wouldn't get involved, they could force Tim Apple himself to live on top of the Alps and he'd happily do it rather than lose that $40 billion, or shareholders would vote him out ASAP.

You can substitute Apple for Google or any SV big tech.

We got a little peek into this when the GDPR was rolled out and many small and medium companies simply blocked GDPR countries rather than risk the massive fines spelled out in the GDPR.

So you do "% of global revenue", "gatekeeper/minimum size applicability" and so on. Absolutely trivial stuff, this has been figured out ages ago.

SwtCyber5• 11 months ago

That said, the current slap-on-the-wrist model clearly isn't working either

yfw• 11 months ago

Why would people find it unpopular, they're not a monopoly, there's alternatives. Oh wait

BrenBarn2• 11 months ago

it would be extremely unpopular if people woke up one day and found Google was blocked in their country for fear of violating some law with extreme damages

This may be true, but arresting drug dealers would also be unpopular with a lot of junkies. :-)

The problem is that these kinds of harmful practices (by companies) are like a slow frog-boil. The companies foreground the benefits and hide the costs until people are lulled into dependence and are unwilling to roll it back. But that doesn't mean we don't need to roll it back. It might hurt, but we still need to do it.

lores• 11 months ago

But that's great for capitalism and competition, isn't it? Ethical startups popping up left and right to take over from big evil incumbent. What a market to seize.

StanislavPetrov• 11 months ago

Why aren’t these discouraged with such massive fines that the board and shareholders oust executives?

Because the politicians and "regulators" rotate back into the private sector and earn generational wealth for playing ball.

supermatt• 11 months ago

Because 55m is a rounding error.

jjani7• 11 months ago

For GDPR they already are, it should indeed be made to be the same for anti-competitiveness laws.

https://gdpr.eu/fines/

The less severe infringements could result in a fine of up to €10 million, or 2% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, whichever amount is higher.
These types of infringements could result in a fine of up to €20 million, or 4% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, whichever amount is higher.

And then there's places like China, where the effective fines are "you either comply to the letter or you won't get to operate in this country".

throwaway290• 11 months ago

And then there's places like China, where the effective fines are "you either comply to the letter or you won't get to operate in this country".

It's have friends in the party or just roll over and do as we say. The "letter" does not matter. Remember the letter literally says there's freedom of speech there. And why did Google leave? Haha.

godelski6• 11 months ago

Isn't Apple just not paying those fines? I mean that $2bn (0.5bn?) is what, 1%? Operating Income is ~109Bn[0]

[0] https://www.marketbeat.com/stocks/NASDAQ/AAPL/financials/

matkoniecz• 11 months ago

Has Apple or Google actually paid any of this large GDPR fines?

Atlas66715• 11 months ago

Because capitalism is not able to regulate itself, no matter how much people say it can.

And this has been known for 150+ years and it has been written about extensively, its just not considered acceptable/appropriate knowledge. Marxists study this.

lazide15• 11 months ago

And communism and socialism do so much better?

Just look up all the ecological and environmental disasters in Eastern Europe and Russia, or the insane economic fuckups from the ‘great leap forward’ (or even going on right now!) in China for a breath of fresh air, amiright?

People be people. No system is going to magically solve these problems, but some (anything authoritarian, usually!) can certainly make them worse.

eastbound• 11 months ago

Marxists have been systemically debunked, at this point it’s the flat-earthers of economics. Yet they come back tirelessly.

ben_w2• 11 months ago

The form of capitalism that existed when Marx wrote his thing, stopped being used in most places around the Great Depression era.

Capitalism as we have it today is (roughly speaking) to laissez faire capitalism as modern China is to Maoism.

Marxism isn't as wildly flawed as some want it to be — but it is very, very out of date, a response to a world which we no longer live in.

Turned out there were a lot of ways to regulate capitalism besides all-in on Marxism.

SwtCyber5• 11 months ago

Until the penalties actually hurt, there's zero incentive to stop

rvnx2• 11 months ago

Make management penally responsible like in make other cases, and the largest investors/employees who benefited from the scheme through dividends or stock attribution and then suddenly it will get resolved. They don’t care about civil cases since they are already rich and even if the company dies tomorrow they are going to be fine

dude250711• 11 months ago

More like "not to even start", as I am sure they are just factoring in possible fines upfront.

crtified• 11 months ago

The principle of fines being made proportional to income - and set at a % level that hurts - is one of the few possible paths to fairness in this area.

Like some European country(s) do with personal fines, afaik.

mcintyre1994• 11 months ago

The EU also does this with corporate fines, GDPR violations are up to the higher of 20 million euros and 4% of global turnover.

4gotunameagain• 11 months ago

Like the famous "Finnish businessman hit with €121,000 speeding fine" !

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/finnish-busine...

bko2• 11 months ago

How is it fair? I would think if two parties commit the same crime they should be charged the same. Isn't fairness in law defined as being blind to the perpetrator?

Google doesn't do stuff to be evil. It does so bc it makes economic sense on the margin. It doesn't like paying fines and arbitrary enforcement will just be used politically. You might like this case bc Google bad, but what if NBC gets fined an insane amount by current admin for their interview cropping, to discourage bad behavior, because you know, fairness.

IMO the fairway thing would be to remove as much discretion as possible so not to make things political by either side

Teever• 11 months ago

Exponential growth in the fine value for reoffenders within a a 1-2 time period is also a good mechanism to ensure compliance.

lowwave• 11 months ago

A educated guess would be that the establishments intentionally want to have these monopolies around, so they stand down on the antitrust stuff, and in they would get total control and surveillance. That is how you get these guy like Peter Thiel going to Standford to recommend everyone to start a monopoly as their business model. In reality these guy (groups with low cost access to capital) have no clue how to really run a business they are just heavily subsidize by the establishment.

_DeadFred_• 11 months ago

The punishment should be percentage of government ownership. This dilutes the shareholders shares, which punishes who needs to be punished, but avoids the 'your fines will shut down the company' argument. Also when the government has ownership they have access to much more internal visibility and just general hassle. No company wants that.

seanmcdirmid2• 11 months ago

This was a settlement, if the fines were massive, the settlement wouldn't have come as easily. And then if you start fining companies from other countries a lot, it becomes a trade issue and things get messy. In the worst case those companies just pull out of your market, and you are left with small businesses and startups but that might not make up for the services that the mega-corps were providing, and that might have adverse effects on other businesses in your country.

So what happens is that they wind up going with non-massive fines to enforce compliance as a trade off (like you wouldn't deal out the death penalty for someone who was caught stealing).

ratelimitsteve2• 11 months ago

The problem is that we've taken "you wouldn't deal out the death penalty for someone who was caught stealing" and used it as justification to make the fines significantly less than the profits from breaking the law, thus incentivizing lawbreaking.

ThaFresh• 11 months ago

and the proceeds will be returned to the consumers who were affected by this?....

thrown-08252• 11 months ago

Definitely not anti-competitive in the rest of the world though.

Google is a plague, and the sooner its gone the better.

fblp• 11 months ago

Actually, Google has faced major antitrust enforcement globally for similar conduct:

EU: Already fined Google €8+ billion across multiple cases, including specifically for Android pre-installation requirements. Just issued new violations under the Digital Markets Act.

US: Federal judge ruled in Aug 2024 that Google illegally maintained search monopoly through exclusive default agreements including on mobile. DOJ seeking various remedies including divesting Chrome. This case is still in progress.

thfuran2• 11 months ago

I believe your sarcasm detector is overdue for service.

Aurornis2• 11 months ago

Telstra and Optus to only pre-install Google Search on Android phones they sold to consumers, and not other search engines.
In return, Telstra and Optus received a share of the revenue Google generated from ads displayed to consumers when they used Google Search on their Android phones.

So Telstra and Optus entered into this agreement and profited from it, too. Singling out Google is a strange choice given that all parties profited.

AdieuToLogic• 11 months ago

So Telstra and Optus entered into this agreement and profited from it, too. Singling out Google is a strange choice given that all parties profited.

Kind of like how Microsoft was found[0] to do something similar with PC manufacturers?

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

sethaurus• 11 months ago

Singling out Google is a strange choice given that all parties profited.

Profiting isn't the misdeed, artificially suppressing competition is. Only Google experienced the benefit of suppressed competition, and that's why they were the ones paying the kickback, not receiving it.

asadotzler3• 11 months ago

It's not about who made money directly. It's about Google using its market dominance to increase its market dominance. Telstra and Optus are not accused of abusing their market dominance because they don't have anything like market dominance so they are hardly a concern in this particular situation.

svat2• 11 months ago

If I'm reading this correctly, this is about the deals Google had, between December 2019 and March 2021, with Telstra, Optus and TPG (apparently Australia's three largest telecommunications companies), to be the default (and only) pre-installed search engine on Android phones sold by those companies, and those companies would in return be paid by Google some fraction of its search-ads revenues.

Some things I'm curious about, and would be helpful context:

- Why did they stop in 2021, and is it normal for these things to take 4+ years to resolution?

- Does Google have similar deals in other countries, e.g. in the US does it have similar deals with T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T? If yes are they are similarly anticompetitive, and if not why not?

- Similar question about the agreements Google has with Mozilla and Apple, to be the default search engine on their browsers.

- Roughly how much would this deal have been worth to Google? I imagine it's not very likely the providers would have chosen a different default search engine, though without this deal they'd likely have more options pre-configured so users would have had more choice (and this I imagine is the primary anti-competitiveness complaint in the first place).

ocdtrekkie4• 11 months ago

Google has had these deals in many other countries with both carriers and manufacturers. In many cases, that agreement has already been found completely illegal (possibly why they stopped here).

The deal is the Android MADA and you can find examples of it going back over a decade.

guyomes• 11 months ago

Does Google have similar deals in other countries

Wikipedia has pages on antitrust cases against Google in the world [0] and specifically in U.S. [1,2] and in European Union [3].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google#Antitrust

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_cases_against_Google...

svat2• 11 months ago

Thanks, I was asking specifically about deals with telecom companies to be the default search engine, and your second link [1] seems to be relevant, in that it mentions Verizon, though the deal with Apple seems to have been the core of the case:

Much of the trial centered on Google's deal with Apple to have Google search as the default option on the Safari web browser. Witnesses from Google, Verizon and Samsung testified about the impact of Google's annual payments of approximately $10 billion to maintain default status for Google search.

SwtCyber5• 11 months ago

Pretty wild that it took this long for something so obviously anti-competitive to come to light formally. I mean, locking in default search exclusivity on millions of devices in exchange for ad revenue kickbacks? Classic textbook behavior.

ocdtrekkie4• 11 months ago

It's been well-known since 2014. It's taken a lot of momentum to get to the point governments actually decided to do something about it.

hulitu• 11 months ago

It's taken a lot of momentum

and a lot of lobby money.

Quarrel• 11 months ago

This is for 14 months of behaviour mostly in 2020. The telcos had already settled their side more than a year ago.

It isn't that long in terms of regulator response, believe it or not.

It came about out of an inquiry that released a report in 2021, that was further investigated and reported to government in 2022 and 2023.

Without knowing the inside story, this may have been gearing up to major litigation (the only way to fine someone in Australia), but settled at the last minute. Suing someone like Google comes with a lot of discovery time, particularly if they are trying to not be cooperative (and I have no idea if they were or not in this case).

That said, if you think this behaviour is bad, you should see what they pay Apple per year. Or even Mozilla.

quitit• 11 months ago

It’s my opinion that Telstra, TPG and Optus should also be fined, since they were taking part and a beneficiary of the anti-competitive behaviour - they were willing parties.

This isn’t naive behaviour, this sits neatly under the definition of anti-competitive behaviour and bears similarity Microsoft’s anti-competitive behaviour involving PC vendors.

Nanachi• 11 months ago

To the surprise of no one. Either way, Telstra should never have been privatised and Optus should've been slapped with bigger fines.

elAhmo• 11 months ago

Once there is some meaningful effect on the bottom line, revenue, market cap, criminal liability for shareholders, this is just a waste of time. Googles revenues and profits grew significantly from 2019/2021, even if they get the massive fine, it will be insignificant for the company, as well as for the executives who made the decision to go with something like this.

Similar as with Meta and their MITM approach when they bought Onavo to spy on users.

appstorelottery5• 11 months ago

Back in the iPhone 4 era, I had a simple app on the App Store called "3D Coin Toss" that I wrote in a day. With zero promotion, it brought in a predictable ~$700/quarter from ads and an IAP to disable them.

Interestingly, all my discoverability came from Google. My app was on the first page of search results, which drove users directly to the App Store.

Then, Google decided to compete. Searching for "coin toss" started returning Google's own top-of-page inline coin-tossing app as the very first result. Users could now toss a coin without leaving search results. Unsurprisingly, my user acquisition tanked.

It was my first experience with this, and I remember thinking, "Is this fair? Why is Google competing with me?"

tantalor• 11 months ago

Is this a troll comment?

shadowgovt5• 11 months ago

I doubt it, but it does highlight how weird the notion of "competition" is when juxtaposed with the notion of "a search engine controls its own results page."

(Personally, I resolve the paradox with "The goal is for neither Google nor app developers to 'win', the goal is to make it as easy to flip a coin as possible." Is my keyboard manufacturer competing with both if they put a button in the corner of the keyboard that either lights an LED or doesn't when pressed? Does the coin in my pocket compete with all three?)

appstorelottery5• 11 months ago

No it's not a troll comment.

Google "Coin Toss" or "Toss a coin", before the search results you'll find a google-written in browser-app which allows you to toss a coin and get a result. Google literally entered the coin-tossing software solution market! Lol. But not lol.

Back then I was furious about it, and yet, did nothing. Forget legal action, I didn't even gripe about it online. This is the first time I've posted or told anyone about it outside of a few friends that didn't understand. I felt powerless to do anything about it.

Further - look at AI generated search results being introduced now... same pattern. Why click through when you're got what you need before search results...

CommenterPerson• 11 months ago

G'Day Aussie friends, and thank you. One small step for a country, and in the right direction.

chollida1• 11 months ago

How long till we see someone write G$$GLE like script kiddies do with M$FT?

So we now have META, MSFT, GOOG, AAPL all with major government actions against them.

Maybe its just not possible to get that big without doing something anti competitive?

jpadkins• 11 months ago

Don't Steal. Governments hate competition.

parineum• 11 months ago

In the undertaking, Google commits to removing certain pre-installation and default search engine restrictions from its contracts with Android phone manufacturers and telcos.
The three telcos can configure search services on a device-by-device basis, and in ways that may not align with the settings set by Google. They can also enter into pre-installation agreements with other search providers.

Before we go patting Australia on the back for helping consumers, all they are really doing for the end user is allowing another corporation to set your defaults.

The anticompetitive behavior they are admitting to isn't that they are taking away choice from the end user, it's that they have agreements in place to prevent telocos from forcing their own software on you or signing contracts with Google competitors to force their software on you.

Remember this when you're next phone comes with the non-removable Telstra browser.

Google admits anti-competitive conduct involving Google Search in Australia

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