Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility

Re:Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a... by aetherson on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @04:29PM (#27440350)

Google controls the vast majority of the web search market. More than 90%. What exactly a monopoly constitutes is something that people can disagree about, but "has 90% market share" is not by any means a crazy definition of a monopoly.

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Re:Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a... by minsc__and__boo on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @10:48PM (#27443679)

Just having dominant market share does not make one a monopoly. Google would have to control the supply of all the search engines to have a monopoly (which they don't).

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Re:Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a... by yeetman21 on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @04:34PM (#27440405)

Google doesnt make money of web searches, it makes money off ads, which it competes with fb and others for

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Re:Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a... by loup-vaillant on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @05:34PM (#27441180)

Maybe a lawyer can say that with a straight face, but I'm a human being.

Google ad revenues mostly come from 3 services: Gmail, which holds a disproportionate share of all email for what started out as a federated network. YouTube, which basically holds a monopoly on video sharing. And Google search, which basically holds a monopoly on regular web searches.

I count at least 2 monopolies here, both held by Alphabet. The fact that Facebook is able to make advertisement in some other part of the web is immaterial, the same way TV ads are immaterial.

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Re:Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a... by bananabreakfast on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @04:34PM (#27440408)

But market share of what? No one pays for web search so that's not really a market.

Facebook has 90%+ market share of social media. Do they have a monopoly?

GitHub has a 90%+ market share of open source code hosting. Do they have a monopoly?

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Re:Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a... by cpu_architect on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @04:45PM (#27440549)

Markets are not necessarily based on money; they are about exchange. In the web search market, users exchange their attention for search results.

I don’t know whether this kind of market dominance factors into the legal determination of monopoly, but conceptually I think it makes sense to say that Google has a monopoly in the web search market.

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Re:Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a... by anders_p on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @09:50PM (#27443329)

> But market share of what? No one pays for web search so that's not really a market.

The customer in a web search isn't the USER. It's the BUISINESSES whose ads are placed on the search results page.

THEY are certainly paying for the web search.

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Re:Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a... by ping_pong on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @02:06AM (#27444726)

If a business gets deindexed by Google or its search ranking drops, their income plummets. It's pretty obvious they are a monopoly and have monopolistic power.

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