So ranking measures derived from user behavior: great. Ranking measures designed to prioritize features in your browser, or to push people away from apps (that, just by total happenstance, your dominant competitor does better than you, and which threaten to undercut your dominance in search/display ads): not fine. Which really is classical antitrust: you can't use your monopoly (search) to juice your other businesses (browser, app store).
Users will bounce if they don't like ads, with or without countdown timers. Acting based on observed user behavior is great. If they don't like it, they bounce. If they tolerate it, they don't bounce. Over time, users will migrate to less-annoying sites. Ranking sites on observed bounced rates, whether caused by ads, low quality, or what ever else, is awesome and should have no anti-trust implications. That's not what google did.
After all, if these ads really annoyed users in general, that would show up in their behavior, and thus naturally be picked up on by ranking algorithms, no? (They annoy me, but I'm not all users.)
> without specifying what metrics Google is and is not allowed to use?
Why not? If society depends on something, we regulate it. There are many different possible degrees of regulation, so this is not a boolean condition, even though painting such situations as a boolean choice between pure laissez-faire and nationalizing an industry (instead of merely regulating).
If you don't like this idea, I suggest that Google (or any other business) should find a way on their own to handle the situation (possibly by making their metrics more available, transparent, and verifiable?), or the choice may eventually be taken out of their hands.
However, focusing on my suggestion of transparency and verification misses the point. The method by which Google regains (and maintains) the public trust is their problem, and I'm sure that more than one solution exists.
My point is it would probably be in Google's best interest to fix this problem, because waiting too long has consequences. At some point, the people who feel that are treated unfairly by Google - it doesn't matter if they are correct in that belief - will fight back, which has already started in small, preliminary ways.
> The outcome would be ugly.
The outcome would also be ugly in a future where a socially-necessary service is controlled entirely by a single entity. As usual in these situations, the best situation is somewhere in the middle.
To your broader point, I agree that it's reasonable to want Google regulated to some degree, though I do fear regulators will take on that "transparent algorithm" point of view, which will just make search terrible. Governments generally aren't very good at regulating tech businesses.
In any case, that concept of using monopoly power in one market to bolster power in another doesn't really apply here with Google.
I share a lot of the unease many people have with the amount of power Google has been able to amass as the de factor curator of the Internet, but I'm also somewhat amazed they are in the position they are in and have been as (mostly) benevolent as they have been. I suspect it is actually pretty hard work just to remain somewhat close to neutral when you are sitting on that much power.
Remember them pushing Chrome on you? having ads directly on Google.com? To this day forcing you to use Chrome for Hangouts? And so on?
Do you seriously think Chrome would have caught on if it weren’t for this push of advertisements?
This is direct abuse of near-monopoly in one market (search engines) to gain unfair advantage in another market (browsers).
Seriously, look up "Dear Sophie" to see how many awards it won. Google doesn't do TV, so that's not a monopoly.
It was horrible, and I really believe this was unfair competition. Especially as people using AdSense complained that they got paid next to nothing or nothing for people viewing and clicking Chrome ads.
When they launched chrome, the browser wars had long since been won. Everyone who knew what a browser was had installed firefox, and everyone else thought IE was the internet. Just because you ignored the ads doesn't mean the general public did. It sounds like you're being biased.
If you're going to attribute Chrome's growth to "accidental clicks on ad manipulation" instead of the massive awareness campaign, you're going to need to provide proof.
Several people on this page provided statistics and reports how they got nothing or next to nothing when Google replaced all ads in the AdWords network with their Chrome ads.
As I’m also not interested enough in the topic to research sources just to change your opinion, I don’t care if you’ll downvote me again.
Are you sure you understand what you're talking about?
That's not what you meant.
Windows 7 in Europe.
It's not so much the curating that's the problem, nobody would care if Duck Duck Go did it, the problem is with the regulators that view Google to be the only curator out there.