How can google be a monopoly if it is that easy to switch away? The truth is competing search engines are at least 90% as good as google, and literally a click away.

People don’t, and there is some browser default lock in, but it’s hardly like an electric grid, water or broadband monopoly. Or Standard Oil for that matter.

I personally agree with you. I also note Google is better at search than the Australian PM - I'd rather not have the Australian parliament forming an opinion on the order of my search results.

However, the monopoly argument would probably be that they are using their superior search engine to hinder competitors in other markets - eg, pushing Chrome/Gmail/Android.

> I'd rather not have the Australian parliament forming an opinion on the order of my search results.

It's sad to hear such opinions about trusting "corporates more than democracy" ...

Given Australian parliaments opinion on encryption and environmental issues I think he's right to not trust them on this....

Then who should they trust? Once people start losing faith in democracy then it's a very slippery slope - everyone needs reminding that democracy isn't just voting, it's your right to speak, organise and protest for change.

Nothing makes me lose faith in democracy faster than when eligible voters uncritically defend government as better than "corporates" because who else should we trust? This only reminds me that democracy isn't about trusting the government, it's about holding the government to account and refusing to give them unearned trust when they do stupid shit like this.

When it comes trusting corporates vs government the choice is actually quite clear - if they have faith in democracy then they know the government is accountable to them, then obviously they can only trust them more. You are right though that a healthy distrust of the government in power is essential for a healthy democracy.

Spot on. We have a direct ability to not just vote but also run for office in Australia. Even if you live in a safe electorate your senate vote certainly matters. Australian governance isn't perfect but it basically works, and Australia objecitvely has succeeded as a result, even when compared against nations with similar contexts e.g. Argentina.

Foreign-owned corporations are in no way subject to Australian citizens other than commercial motives. I don't blame them for that, but I support my government's desires to regular them on my behalf.

When people feel no need to click away, they don't, and stick with the default, and thus Google has a monopoly. A monopoly doesn't mean lock in or that consumers can't switch. A monopoly means domination or near total control of a market. And if Google leaves the Australian search market for others, someone else will probably end up with that monopoly depending on what Chrome's search, Android's search and iPhone search does.

I mean, on one hand I agree with you (I found it pretty easy to not use Google Search). But I think my point is that if this was true for everyone, then we would not really be newsworthy that the PM thinks people can use Bing instead....

One technical aspect to consider is the number of devices/applications where Google is the default search. Does Australia have a plan to force a different default if Google shuts off Search? How would that affect contracts that Google has with other companies (e.g. Apple) to make its Search default?

Not everyone is technically literate enough to know how to change their browser's default search engine. Heck, some people don't know there are other ways to search the internet besides google.com....

I think newsworthiness is a poor proxy for relevance or legal standing.

I assume smartphone companies have an incentive to just switch, given that I don't think Apple et al want to leave their users without a search engine by default. They'll probably just switch over to Bing as well.

Other options are available and are good enough BUT people aren't using those other options. I mean an average guy doesn't even know about DDG and some educated guys do know about Bing but don't bother to use it. In real world, Google is synonymous with search.

I don't have the data available right now but I believe more than 70% Aussies are using Google. That is almost a monopoly.

>Other options are available and are good enough BUT people aren't using those other option

People choosing to not use other options that are easily available doesn't seem like something that should qualify Google as a monopoly that needs to be broken up (am not a lawyer, just a disclaimer).

Like, what is Google supposed to do here? Make their own search engine worse, so that users are incentivized to switch? Show people ads, recommending them to use competing search engines?

Mind you, I am not alleging that Google is not a monopoly or that it shouldn't be broken up. There could be other things that could qualify them for that, like bundling of Google Search as the default search engine with Chrome, semi-mandatory nature of Play Store on android just to be able to use google apps, etc.

However, just the sheer fact alone that most people prefer to use Google search (when there are plenty of easily available alternatives out there that the general public isn't willing to look into) shouldn't be valid grounds for an anti-monopoly lawsuit.

> what is Google supposed to do here?

We've seen this with MS already. Install Chrome - get either a random search engine assigned, or a randomised-order choice box.

Not arguing with you about this one, because I am trying to understand what you meant by "seen this with MS already" first. What did MS do? Asking because when you open the new Microsoft Edge browser, Bing is the default search engine.

I mean the browser antitrust case that forced IE alternatives years ago: https://www.news.com.au/technology/microsoft-windows-forced-...

This could be applied to the default search engine in Chrome (since it's Google owned as well)

I read the article in your link with the ruling regarding IE. All Microsoft had to do as the result was to offer a default browser choice screen during the installation experience for Windows OS (with IE still being there), and only in select 27 EU countries + 3 Scandinavian countries.

And on top of that, they don't have to do it anymore either, and MSFT is able to have (and actually does have) IE set as the default browser in EU again since late 2014 [0]. Which eventually transformed into Edge as the default browser, but you get the idea.

0.https://www.yahoo.com/news/weather/microsoft-no-longer-needs...

I've been using DDG for the last few months. It's okish but sometimes I feel like I don't see the results I expect to find, I google them on Google (do you see what I'm doing? there is a reason for that after all) and I find them.

This is even more true for technical searches in my job (web development, mostly backend.) Google finds the answer, DDG less often so.

I use DDG as my default search engine, and find that the results are usually pretty decent. But there's no question that Google has a larger and more comprehensive index, especially for more obscure "long tail" queries. So I still fall back to a Google search (it's easy -- just add '!g' to your DDG query and resubmit) about 10% of the time.

It wouldn't be the end of the world if I wasn't able (or willing) to use Google.

I didn't know about !g. I'm using Firefox with the old style separated URL and search fields. I click the search field and the Google button on the menu that opens under the search string. However !g is useful when I tweak ed the search string in the DDG page.

Yandex is a much, much better search engine than DDG. The only irritating part about it that since it is Russian, it often shows many Russian sites in the top results. The best part about Yandex is that it also conveniently allows you to also search on Google or Bing if you don't find their result satisfactory. This allows them improve their search while also not upsetting their users.

If the goal of abandoning Google is about privacy, surely picking Yandex is counter-productive? Unless you make the conscious choice of having one entity keep the information from the rest, which I agree can make a lot of sense.

Realistically I don't expect any benevolence from any of the corporates that run all the popular search engines. (Even DDG is a private company with millions of dollars invested in it).

So my choice, as you rightly guessed, is limited to compartmentalising data collection, I also wanted to choose the best non-US competitor of Google - Yandex (Russian), Baidu (Chinese) and (later) Qwant (European). Yandex is the best among them.

To further compartmentalise data collection, I don't use Yandex exclusively and sometimes go directly to specialised sites for the answer. (For e.g. Stackoverflow for programming queries, IMDB for TV and movies, Wikipedia for some queries, etc. ... this is now easy since browsers allow us to add custom search engines to them.)

> sometimes I feel like I don't see the results I expect to find

This gets brought up often but I wonder how much of that is just familiarity. Have you ever tried a different search engine if Google doesn't give you what you expected, or continued to either tweak the query or look further on Google anyway?

You could have a point. I tweak the query. Maybe after 20+ years I speak a query dialect optimized for Google.

but the !g does make it easy to get Google results when needed.

Which would be unavailable if Google didn't provide search in your area.

Google being so good no one can replace them is good.

If Google abused that position so no one could replace them because they're no longer the best but still big, that's a problem. We're not there yet

I think search is important enough that countries should consider it of strategic value to in house.

Australia outsourcing it to American companies leaves them open to media control by foreign governments

I'm quite sympathetic to your point of view. I'd love to see governments ensuring a plurality of media is available and higher quality, factual, pieces are promoted.

Sadly this isn't that. This would further entrench the murdoch empire that's a blight on most English speaking countries' media econ systems.

That's just not true. The proposed legislation does not overtly favour News Corp any more than any other Australian news organisation. News Corp will likely continue to dominate in Australia only because of its reach and it's ability to rely on a real estate website to make the books look good).

SBS, ABC, Guardian, Fairfax/Nine all get their share of the pie in the legislation.

Google Search is so good because it has access to exclusive data it collected in an immaterial way (not through search queries or crawling). Anyone can write a search engine, no one can write a search engine that's based on Google data. And no one can collect data similar to Google data, because this "Google has better quality so we have to use them" argument is also being used in a dozen other verticals.

They're free to do what Google did: spend billions on eb crawlers, offer extensive free services like Gmail and chrome and build their own datasets.

Plus, it doesn't really matter: it's not a problem for someone to offer a good service. It's a problem for them to offer a bad one and then force it on people because they're big.

Yeah, that's pretty much how monopolies (anti-competitive companies) work: you could replicate the entire Google ecosystem, but without doing all of that you can't compete with any segment of Google. It is not reasonable to require of any competitor in the search engine field to offer their own ad network, mail service, cloud service, cloud computing service, enterprise offering. This is illegal, as hopefully the anti-trust lawsuit will show. It's a smart business practice, but once you cross a certain threshold it is regulated by the government because it is no longer good for society.

I agree about barriers to entry helping Google maintain their monopoly. We disagree about whether monopolies themselves are illegal as you say.

From the wiki page laying out the US law in this (feel free to correct me if Aussie law differs?):

>The courts have interpreted this to mean that monopoly is not unlawful per se, but only if acquired through prohibited conduct.

>When enterprises are not under public ownership, and where regulation does not foreclose the application of antitrust law, two requirements must be shown for the offense of monopolization. First, the alleged monopolist must possess sufficient power in an accurately defined market for its products or services. Second, the monopolist must have used its power in a prohibited way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law

I don't think Google meets the second requirement. I believe we agree it meets the first?

Reading right after the end of your quote: "... Second, the monopolist must have used its power in a prohibited way. The categories of prohibited conduct are not closed, and are contested in theory. Historically they have been held to include exclusive dealing, price discrimination, refusing to supply an essential facility, product tying and predatory pricing."

Unfortunately for the prosecutors, the big tech companies have abused their power in ways that couldn't have existed in the past, so they will have to set precedents in these anti-trust cases - but the law does allow for prosecutors to claim that Google's behavior is abusive by the _spirit_ of the law. I hope they do a good job, because we'll need these precedents for the next few decades.

That's a fair response. Would you mind speculating on what Google are doing that breaks the spirit of the law and what new categories of prohibited conduct we might look forwards to?

I think there is something of a reckoning coming for FB, Google, Twitter etc around fake news. But I'd imagine that's a separate issue to antitrust.

I'm not quite sure that we need new categories of prohibited conduct, when existing categories fit.

We could debate the particulars, gray areas abound here, but areas of concern include:

Tying: which is offering unrelated goods or services only as a bundle. Things like Android licensing (effectively) requiring Google search defaults to use the Google Play store (no longer the case in EU); possibly the Google(+) login requirement for YouTube account fits. By tying the otherwise unrelated small product with the big product, the small product gets more market share, and this can be abusive.

Dumping (or predatory pricing): selling (or giving away) a product below cost to drive out competiton. Android or Chrome could fit here; but the case is murky because the US (at least) is looking for harm to consumers, and sees free browsers and free OS for phone reducing the price of the phone as a consumer good. But there's some feedback loops here that aren't great for the consumer.

Something that comes up that's hard for me to put into a category is cross promotion. When Google highlights other Google services on search results, that sometimes feels abusive (or is reported as abusive). Especially when it's not really apropriate for the search query. This is the category news complaints seem to be in.

All answers to this will have to be anecdotes, unless someone has access to internal memos that instruct managers to systematically engage in such manners. My personal belief, based only on friendly conversations with people who work and worked in big tech, is that the culture in those companies (especially Google) convinces employees that these "growth hacks" are valid, and that a winning variation in an A/B test immediately means "this is good for our users".

One example that I like referring back to is from a product manager I interviewed a few years ago. He was very proud that he was part of a team that realized that since Android has a lot of users and Gmail is the default browser, they can show content to people on Gmail on Android to promote other Google mobile products. No competitor of those mobile products could reach that kind of wide advertisements, and why did Google get to advertise there? It isn't like they paid the most for the ad spot, or had the best product (most mid- and low-tier Google products are _awful_) - it's because one group could go to another and tell them "please put this promotion over there".

And one that is more of a conspiracy, but there is evidence that comes up every now and then: Google AdWords has better targeting and data collection capabilities than any other network, because Chrome allows AdWords to collect data that other systems are blocked from collecting "due to privacy concerns". But somehow, AdWords getting that data isn't a privacy concern.

My belief is that this is because Google employees honestly in their hearts are convinced they are the good guys and it's OK for them to have this. I'm sure in some cases there's an exec that weighs in, but in so many cases it's Google's elitist and entitled culture that makes employees think that they are superior and infallible to employees of other companies, so it's OK for them to do this. And yes - there is corporate responsibility and liability for the creation and maintenance of such a culture, when it is so pervasive.

yes, the terminology is getting distorted too much. monopolies are not illegal. the problem is if they are maintained by anticompetitive behavior

I think people are upset about social issues (wealth inequality, changing social structures etc).

I think that becomes anger at big institutions, from government to banks to "big tech".

I think people see Anti Trust as a way to bash big tech.

And no one stops to think "what are we actually trying to achieve here?". They just think something has to be done and this is something...

It's the other shit that Google pushes via their search monopoly that's the problem, not just the search monopoly itself.

That's not really a good indicator of monopoly. If the roles of Bing and Google were reversed here, the story would have been even more newsworthy.

When is the last time you saw someone (who was not using a Microsoft browser) use Bing search? I am not saying there are no Bing fans at all, but I have never met one....

Not sure I understand how it would be a big deal if the PM suggested that Aussies could live without Bing....

I am not saying that many people use Bing. I am saying that this kind of intervention would be a big story either way, because there would be people rightfully complaining that the government actions supports monopolists position.

I use Bing myself. Most of my searches are just hard urls or reddit+topic and Bing doesn't poison my results with amp links that don't retain my setting to use the browser and not the app. If you hate amp links like me then Bing is great.