I feel like the more blatant monopoly abuse by Google is how they use the Google search homepage to shill their other products. They effectively give themselves billions of dollars in free advertising
Because it's much better for the consumer to search for a city, get an interactive map right there on the search results, but no link to jump to Google Maps so they can get an estimate on how long it takes to get there, because that'd be bundling.
I'm talking more about them posting new product launches, I/O livestream, gmail pinned to the top, etc. Embedded stuff in search results is fine for the most part, although their intent their is primarily to prevent click throughs to other sites and increase the chances of an ad click
>They effectively give themselves billions of dollars in free advertising
how the heck is google's " 'giving' themselves something for free", considered wrong? even if it is billions of dollars?
in which alt world is it wrong of you to 'give' yourself a 100 dollars? or even billions? of your own money? or even billions worth of advertising space? both the giver and the receiver are you, right? you are not stealing anything from anyone.
then what the heck is the problem? maybe I am dumb, but I fail to see it.
in your own words, they are giving it to themselves, right?
they are not taking that money away from anyone else.
and note: I am not a Google shill.
I criticized them, with some justifications that I gave, roughly about a day ago. check my comments.
I try to be objective, though of course I may sometimes fail at that.
interested to hear what you have to say about all this.
They're giving themselves money by abusing their monopoly status. Sure, in a totally free market, it looks innocent. There are laws against this because monopolies are damaging to any market it's in and ends up hurting the end user.
>A monopoly (from Greek μόνος, mónos, 'single, alone' and πωλεῖν, pōleîn, 'to sell'), as described by Irving Fisher, is a market with the "absence of competition", creating a situation where a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular thing.
how is Google a monopoly according to the above definition in Wikipedia?
they have competitors like bing, duckduckgo, kagi, and some others that i have read about here on hn recently.
and I do not know about the others, but at least bing and duckduckgo have existed for many years.
j-maffe, it looks to me like you are being disingenuous, because in reply to your earlier comment above, I had quoted the Wikipedia definition of monopoly. my entire subsequent argument was based on that, as you well know. if you want to try to redefine terms, or move goalposts, feel free to do so, but I will not participate in an argument based on such behaviour.
to repeat, quoting from the Wikipedia definition of monopoly:
>A monopoly (from Greek μόνος, mónos, 'single, alone' and πωλεῖν, pōleîn, 'to sell'), as described by Irving Fisher, is a market with the "absence of competition", creating a situation where a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular thing.
(italics mine)
can you really not see the difference between 90% search share held by Google, which means 10% share held by others, vs. absence of competition? it is blindingly obvious.
I am leaving this thread. I don't argue with people who either don't get it, or seem to be operating under false pretences.
Just to be clear, you're saying that the judge [1], the Justice Department [2], and journalists[3] are all wrong?
If you want to be pedantic about it, they have what is called an effective monopoly[4].
I am making a rare exception to my statement about not engaging with you further (because of the crap that you wrote earlier), because of the other crap that you wrote above (only in order to point that crap out to other readers):
half the links (i.e. 1 and 2) you quoted above don't work for me. paywalls or signup required? clever you, eh? not!
and link 4 is too long and verbose. I searched for the word effective, but did not find it in the initial part on the screen.
aaannnddd ... you are quoting journalists (!) as though they are automatically competent authorities? and even judges' decisions sometimes get reversed by higher courts. so effectively you have no point. hee ... hee ... hee ...
looks like, in your arguments, you thrive on appeals to faux authority, and nothing else, particularly not on reasoning.
your ignoring that, or not understanding that, is like a person saying that 10% is equal to 0%. I cannot argue with such people. it's a dead end, and a waste of my time.
they are because a judge just ruled they are. answering questions like this is the reason the courts exist, and they just answered this question.
or they might not actually be a monopoly, there's still a possibility of appeal, but there's really no more definitive answer than a judge's ruling. antitrust law is fuzzy, and depends a lot on the courts to interpret it.
if you want to beleive a wikipedia definition based on historical caselaw, instead of an actual judge's decision, then i guess sure, do whatever you want.
if you're asking how they're a monopoly, i answered you. if you want to debate whether the judge was right or wrong, maybe phrase your question less like a question.
>if you're asking how they're a monopoly, i answered you. if you want to debate whether the judge was right or wrong, maybe phrase your question less like a question.
okay, i will. in fact, i also answered you, so I'll just link to my other answer again:
It is, if you are leveraging one monopoly to attempt to gain more. This is what happened with Microsoft and Internet Explorer (via the Windows monopoly)[1]
Had Microsoft merely provided advertised IE with Windows there never would have been a suit. Even bundling alone would have been a hard case to make. They did far more than just ship IE with Windows.
