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

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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