The #3 browser (Firefox) is (was?) massively funded by a half-billion-per-year agreement from the #1 browser's maker (Google) to add Chrome as the default search engine.
Sure, they could pull that deal. Unless you think it's a perfectly balanced deal, though, that feels like one for-profit company gifting traffic to their competitor (either Google giving money to Firefox, or Firefox giving traffic to Google).
It's more niche, but a lot of companies in my market donate to or fund their competitors for the sake of innovation and growing the pie.
Contrary to popular belief, for-profit companies (even those with scary board members in a competitive market) don't inherently have to be cutthroat.
Kind of like the cellophane paradox[1] I suppose. From Wikipedia:
> As Richard Posner wrote, "Reasonable interchangeability at the current price but not at a competitive price level, far from demonstrating the absence of monopoly power, might well be a symptom of that power; this elementary point was completely overlooked by the court"
But instead of a price denominated in dollars it's in consumer data I suppose.
That seems different from your argument, which I understand to be "only a monopolist would make it easy for consumers to choose a competitor". But again, the conclusion that Google is a monopolist seems to be baked into this logic -- would you really say Google is not a monopolist if they did not offer search engine choice?
No, not "only".
The argument is that while non-monopolists have a motivation to add those choices, monopolists have a motivation too.
Therefore seeing the end result isn't very strong evidence for whether something is a monopoly or not.
> If anything this is evidence of Google’s search engine monopoly and Google built the selection feature into Chrome it in furtherance of that monopoly power
And making this argument is exactly why they added search engine selection. They wanted to be able to point to this tiny insignificant detail that might cost them a negligible fraction of Chrome searches and hold it up as market competition when the inevitable antitrust suit came along.
Have you ever heard of a for profit company gifting traffic to their direct competitor? It would be irrational behavior in a competitive market. If anything this is evidence of Google’s search engine monopoly and Google built the selection feature into Chrome it in furtherance of that monopoly power.