Ask HN: Is Google abusing its monopoly by advertising in Chrome?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9828950

by dan-silver • 11 years ago

9 2 11 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Google is advertising it's own services on Chrome's default new tab page. Today, they're promoting Google Play Music for example. Is google pushing the legal limits of their empire?

allendoerfer• 11 years ago

Chrome does not have a monopoly. If they were pushing Chrome within the search, depending on the local market they would abuse their search quasi-monopoly but the other way around seems to be perfectly legal.

UnoriginalGuy• 11 years ago

It is "unlikely" Chrome would be considered a monopoly by legal standards as in the US it requires more than 75% of the market. According to W3Counter they have only 46%, SitePoint lists them at 49%, W3Schools lists them at 65%, Wikimedia lists them at 47%, and so on.

I even suspect the W3Schools % is over-estimated, as the types of users visiting the sites are typically web-developers who prefer Chrome for the superior development tooling. When you start to look at business users and non-technical users IE/Safari (on respective platforms) do much better.

If Chrome was a monopoly then doing what you're talking about MIGHT be an anti-trust violation, but that is a complex legal question (for example, everyone remembers IE as an anti-trust violation for Microsoft in the 1990s, but what about all of the other things they pushed which weren't e.g. MSN, Hotmail, Office, etc). Google Music might NOT be because the court has to determine if Google is leveraging their position to give their other products an "unfair" advantage. If Chrome started blocking other music services (or redirecting from them to Google Music) then that would 100% be an anti-trust violation if Google were a monopoly, but an advert? That's for a court to decide, shades of grey...

Ask HN: Is Google abusing its monopoly by advertising in Chrome?

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