> But the real question is, given that Google has around 90% of the search market share, and so has around 90% of the available user data, is the advantage it gives them so unfair that it should be illegal?
In the U.S. it’s not illegal to be a monopoly but to use your monopoly position to prevent competitors from entering the market. (This is why it’s not illegal for a small town to have a single gas station, for example.) If 90% of users freely choose to search with Google that’s fine from a strictly legal point of view. The U.S’s case was that Google was coercing that choice by bidding extremely high amounts to be the default search on web browsers, thus hindering competitors from entering the search market.
They hurt Firefox by giving them money. If not for the big fat google pay check Firefox would have had to be a good browser instead of the piggy bank for the personal projects of its former ceo.
There aren’t a ton of medium-sized successful browsers out there that didn’t take Google’s money, I think funding web browser development is just hard.
IMO the real anti-competitive behavior was iterating so fast on web standards. Chrome seems to be the vanguard on a lot of new web features, and has started up this whole silly JavaScript performance as a figure-of-merit competition.
The fact that Firefox has to pay dozens of full time engineering salaries or whatever just to tread water is the real problem IMO. Because not only can they not do it well, but most groups can’t do it at all.
As a result, the web as a standards-based platform for sharing documents is basically dying, being killed better than Microsoft ever could. And without the obvious appearance of being evil.
The other way a monopoly is illegal is if you use it to try to acquire a monopoly on some other market. (Microsoft using the OS monopoly to try to get a monopoly on browsers, for example.)
In the U.S. it’s not illegal to be a monopoly but to use your monopoly position to prevent competitors from entering the market. (This is why it’s not illegal for a small town to have a single gas station, for example.) If 90% of users freely choose to search with Google that’s fine from a strictly legal point of view. The U.S’s case was that Google was coercing that choice by bidding extremely high amounts to be the default search on web browsers, thus hindering competitors from entering the search market.