Once upon a time, Congress used to write and pass laws to protect Americans from egregious abuses of power like this. Of course, that time is long gone.

Do you honestly think removing URLs from search results is an "egregious abuse of power?" This is the company that buys credit card transactions from Visa et al. and associates them with your maps and and history for the benefit of advertisers, and you're complaining about them removing a design element 95% of people probably don't care about?

Google is engaged in using its market dominance in one segment to gain or maintain dominance in others, while suppressing the competition. This is illegal behavior for which Google has been fined several times over the past few years.

Just consider that in past Android versions there was a hard-coded Google search bar on the default home screen that you could not remove. Google has been forced to ask users and offer a set of alternative search engines on devices with recent Android versions. Same goes for Chrome and competing browsers [1].

Right now Google Search detects the Firefox for Android user agent and serves a second-tier search experience for Firefox users on Android. They have been doing this for the past 6 years [2].

[1] https://mashable.com/article/google-browser-search-engine-ch...

[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=975444

Their unethical behavior lead me to quit, divest, and delete all of my Google accounts.

Yes, it very obviously is. Google the search engine, and therefore Google, would never have gotten off the ground if it had hidden URL from the beginning.

> and you're complaining about them removing a design element 95% of people probably don't care about?

If so many people don't care about something so basic and crucial to not being a serf in the information age, then that makes the issue even more important, and Google's behaviour even more egregious.

While there's a chance the EU might do something about the behavior, I think it's safe to say that here in the US the odds of anything pro-consumer happening anytime soon are effectively nil.

There are people who could not register to vote in time because reCAPTCHA has blocked them.

300,000 users a month and we don't have any problems. Why do people think this is so critical? Just because TEH GOOGLE convinced us it is in order to push their product?

A load of other anti-spam captchas not owned by Google...

That doesn't mitigate Google's evil, it makes it worse.

  > Keep in mind that not sending your data to Google is not a
  > real option, there are several government services, health
  > care providers and utility companies using reCAPTCHA,
  > you personal data either gets harvested by Google,
  > or you're barred from accessing essential online services.

Using italics by putting asterisks around the quote seems to work reasonably well.

Thanks, I'll try it.

Users also can easily go to another search engine. Why sue Google because users decide not to go anywhere else?

Ease-of-switching puts the onus on the user to recognize corporate violations of anti-trust law rather than upon the company violating anti-trust regulation.

It doesn't really make sense to presume users would or should change their behavior if a provider violates anti-trust law.

So does that mean that Netflix shouldn’t have used its dominance in DVD rentals to get into streaming and just die when another company did? Should Apple not have been allowed to use its dominance in the music/media player business to get into the smart phone business?

Antitrust was traditionally used when a company kept other competitors out. How is Google stopping another competitor from creating a search engine? The fact is that no one is forced to use Google. People can just as easily type bing.com in their browser as google.com.

In fact, the dominant desktop OS, doesn’t have Google as the default search engine and thanks to a consent decree - at least in the EU - Google cant force manufacturers of Android devices to make it the default search engine.

If Microsoft wanted to outbid Google to be the default search engine on iOS devices it could.

> Such conduct constitutes an abuse of a dominant position and hence is in breach of competition law.

> It is not illegal for a company to enjoy dominance in a particular market. However, a company which is dominant in one market can easily use its market power to cement or further expand its dominance, or leverage it into separate markets. [0]

Regarding Netflix and Apple, the answer is "it depends". Cases are determined on a case-by-case basis.

Not sure we disagree (?). My understanding is that Google has a practical monopoly on search. This is not illegal in and of itself. Anti-competitive practices that leverage its dominance in search, however, would likely run afoul of EU and US antitrust regulations. (I'm not an attorney, and My understanding of antitrust law is at the level of layperson. )

[0] https://timesofmalta.com/articles/view/Google-s-abusive-use-...

Make this concept popular and even the layperson will understand what Google is doing to them.

Eventually, like previous major computer companies, its monopoly will weaken, and it will have to play a bit nicer.

I was arguing that Google/Alphabet is subject to the same forces that brought down the reign of other dominant companies in the software industry like IBM and Microsoft* . Eventually Google's reign will crumble too, and probably for the same reasons.

Our actions, albeit small can push in that direction, just like small actions helped to bring down others. Choosing other computer providers made IBM unable to extend its practices to minicomputers and left them vulnerable to MS. Linux played a role in denying server marketshare to MS. Popular opinion aided the antitrust cases against both MS and IBM - it is not commonly known these days there was a massive antitrust case against IBM which lasted even longer than the MS case.

* Note that both of these companies still exist and are very wealthy. I for one, do not seek to abolish Google - just to limit their ambitions to something that can coexist with others.

There are a lot of Google employees (and potential Google employees) on HN.

So if "we" includes them, then yes, "we" could do a lot... like not work for Google.