Google has and does block competition, and they've attracted the attention of antitrust regulators for this on multiple occasions.

>Google has and does block competition

Can you share some of these occasions?

Here's some past regulatory attention:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2013/01/googl...

And some upcoming regulatory attention:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/15/technology/google-antitru...

That's not blocking competitors though.

I specifically didn't bring up the Shopping case because EU anti-trust law is very different, and the case doesn't qualify as anti-trust in the U.S.

The blocking of competition was mentioned several times in the links I posted. Here's a couple of quotes:

> Google required direct partners to exclusively use Google's AdSense and could not engage with Google's competitors

> Google required that partners take a minimum number of Google ads and predominately place them above any other advertising, nor could place ads from other services above or alongside Google's ads;

> preventing manufacturers from selling smart mobile devices running on competing operating systems

> Google entered into anticompetitive exclusive agreements for the distribution of Google Search on both desktop and in the mobile arena

> The Commission’s complaint alleges that Google reneged on its FRAND commitments and pursued – or threatened to pursue – injunctions against companies that need to use MMI’s standard-essential patents in their devices and were willing to license them on FRAND terms.

Huh, I did not know about the Adsense one, that's news to me. Interesting to see if it's relevant in the U.S. because it was only with large partner contracts and Google stopped it before the E.U. investigation even began.

Again, the EU anti-trust law is different from the U.S. I already mentioned the Android Play services case already.

Anecdotal evidence, but if you don't offer GoogleADX inventory, your site gets de-ranked in searches. I am very interested in the anti-trust probe for that reason.

They do deliberately slow their sites on Firefox, as has been discussed in many past hn articles. YouTube for example. Pardon my lack of references, you should confirm for yourself with a hn search in case I am mistaken

In addition to this, their use of reCaptcha makes using a non-chrome browser a significantly worse experience on several sites.

This is my biggest issue. I tried using Firefox exclusively for a period of time but experienced a 10x increase in the number of reCaptcha manual verifications I had to complete. Going to the same sites on Chrome has no reCaptcha.

For me, this is blatant anti-competitive practice and should be punished.

I've used both firefox (dev edition) and chrome pretty evenly for a long time (work stuff in chrome, personal in ff), and I haven't noticed any more reCaptchas in firefox than I get in chrome. If you just started using firefox, I could see the extra captchas being due to having "too clean" of a browser, or a different browser that was never used before tripping some sort of anti malware or suspicious login system.

All just speculation, but I haven't noticed the same issue.

This is exactly it. Modern recaptcha is "reputation" based. So if it fingerprint matches you against a known profile, you never see the captcha. One could argue that a residential ip block combined with a common browser should be sufficient to filter most bot traffic, but it's not exactly in googles interest to worry about non-chrome user experience.

Well TIL. This gives me hope. I will put some time back into FF and see if there is an eventual drop in reCaptcha.

As a regular user of multiple browsers, I haven’t noticed this. Could you show a few examples? I’m not doubting your experience at all, I’m just curious to see if there may be a common thread.

Their handling of recaptcha should be criminal. They are the single most annoying thing to deal with this side of popups in their heyday

The YouTube example was a bug from 2018. https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/25/17611444/how-to-speed-up-...

It's since been fixed.

Of course it was a bug. It could only be a bug. Would they really admit if it was intentional? Would they admit that their internal testing around Firefox is not as robust as Chrome? "Oh, whoopsie, no one here uses Firefox so we didn't notice it."

YouTube for me this week, only on Firefox, incidentally only fully loads 1/3 tries. Could be another bug

IIRC that's because YT switched to polymer, and since Mozilla doesn't support the new shadow dom APIs yet, YT serves it with the older version.

My understanding is that the "deliberate slowing" reported, was such that if you have firefox send a chrome user agent, that one gets faster (and functional) results.

Is that consistent with the "it is because FF doesn't support new thing yet" explanation?

No because again, IIRC, sending a chrome user agent to YT in FF breaks a lot of the functionality.

Does it? What stops working, since I haven't noticed anything?

Ah, “the parts that work are faster but a lot of it is broken” does seem like it suggests the benign explanation

I believe it was that YT was using the legacy v0 shadow DOM API that only Chrom[e|ium] supported, with a slow polyfill for other browsers, rather than the much better supported v1 API that all other major browser makers agreed to implement.

Oh, is that why it takes forever to load google search on firefox? how is that allowed? I'm speechless.

That's...not why, and it doesn't. Try clearing your cache, or loading a profile without any addons.

> how is that allowed?

It is not the case.

But who would have the legitimate right to stop it? Do we want government dictating product features?

How is that a feature??

>consumers are choosing to use Google despite the privacy-oriented preferences here on HN.

I'm not sure I'd agree with the word "despite". I still think the majority of the non-tech world is still oblivious to the privacy implications of G,FB,etc. Sure, I'm sure there's a percentage of people that have made the decision they don't care and are fine with it, but there are definitely don't know/understand.

No. It's in all the news. But the truth is people love Google. Google gives them so many services for free that they didn't have before.

In many 3rd world countries, smartphones were the "couple months salary" iPhone or an Android that's literally a tenth the cost.

To most of these people, Google has been an unalloyed good. Google is probably one of the most resilient brands worldwide. Even in America it's well trusted. For good reason.

> Google is probably one of the most resilient brands worldwide. Even in America it's well trusted. For good reason.

Two types of trust though. Trust in the products which they've earned in spades, and trust to moderate political speech which they have not.

This story is suggesting that they are willing to enforce standards set by the Chinese propaganda departments - which is to be expected, really, given their interest in regaining a presence in China. They aren't trustworthy in the political sense.

Huh? So we're supposed to thank them for the cancer they have wrought? Search was a good thing, then it got bastardized into a gaming system. Free email? Sounds great until the day you find out you're not the only one reading the email. Android is an interesting side project that has proven a useful alt to some. Again until you realize it, along with all of the other "useful" products, was just the long con into gathering all of the data to make Ads viable. If these products were just the products they appear on the surface, then maybe I'd say Google was reputable.

And most people are completely fine with having ads targeted at them.

You're just raging that other people have a different opinion about their online activity.

Now imagine you quantify the cost of having Google Search. If you search for florist - Google could charge you $10 for the results(florist CPC is very high) and up to $30 per search for a hotel in NYC.

>cancer

So dramatic. It's an amazing product that billions of people depend on that you don't have to use if you don't want to. Pretend it doesn't exist if it makes you feel better. Try Bing and Proton mail on an iPhone and never look back.

>If these products were just the products they appear on the surface

They're not a charity. If you're not paying for it upfront, you're paying for it with your eyeballs. Don't like it? Take your eyeballs elsewhere.

You are one of those confused HNers.

Monopoly power is different from abuse of monopoly power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly#Establishing_dominanc...

Right, hence the statement about anti-competitive behavior. GP is saying Google is a monopoly based on marketshare though, not monopolistic action, which is not correct.

As of some recent update on the ps4, at least since january, I am unable to enter any text on duckduckgo's search bar in the built in browser. The keyboard pops up briefly then vanishes. It likely works with an external keyboard, but the onscreen one refuses to appear. Google's search bar work's fine, the PlayStation's built in search works fine(but uses google), in site search engines powered by google work fine. But I have been unable to use duckduckgo on the ps4 since at least then.

I was capable of doing this before and regularly did. But, from what i've been able to tell, my web searches must all go through google now, either through the built in search feature or the browser.

If you haven’t already, maybe try the plain HTML [0] or (failing that) Lite [1] version of DDG.

[0]: https://ddg.gg/html

[1]: https://ddg.gg/lite

What about bing?

Well I never tried because the idea of using Microsoft's search wasn't much more appealing and honestly, I just never think about or consider them and kind of forget Bing exists. But it'd be interesting to see if it worked. They're more of a direct competitor to Sony at least in the console market.

A monopoly is not a lack of other options.

Nope. A monopoly is definitely the lack of other options for suppliers, i.e. a single supplier.

Conversely, a monopsony is the lack of other options for buyers. Words matter.

And conversely, other HN'ers get confused by a very narrow definition of what constitutes a market. It is this very definition that is under scrutiny.