It's not illegal to have these deals; it's not illegal to have a monopoly. It's illegal to use your monopoly to prevent others from successfully competing.

And again- no one has made the determination that it is illegal. The DOJ believes it's illegal, but the DOJ doesn't decide what's illegal. We're literally having the trial to figure it out.

So, you're relying on overly simplistic assumptions that are misleading you.

You can easily get the legal arguments, they're on Wikipedia, they're on the doj website, they're on the indictments. The information just needs you to go out and get it.

> The information just needs you to go out and get it.

I am definitely going to use that. And since I teach ninth graders, I predict I will be using that on a daily basis. Blessings upon you. (And the curses of ~175 9th graders every year.)

These 9th graders are luck to have you! The skill of taking initiative and finding the drive to look for information is a very powerful one.

Can anyone, anywhere demonstrate a public corporation that has a monopoly and hasn't abused it to keep competitors out?

Bueller?...Bueller....

Exclusive deals can present antitrust issues, but the kicker is that this isn't even an exclusive deal, it's a default deal! Users can still can still use other search engines on iOS devices.

Defaults matter. Google's internal communication indicates that they know this. Microsoft testified that defaults matter and that unless they (or anyone else) could put up more money than Google then they had no shot.

You could innovate and make a better product and it doesn't matter because you can't outbid Google.

In Europe Androids have had user decided default browser/search engine selection in the out of box set up for years. Google still wins massively because users know it is simply a superior product.

Right, which is also arguably why we’ve seen competition from other search engines.

Part of the antitrust issue is that Apple never developed their own search engine because of these payments. Google paid Apple to not compete.

I doubt that the same number of people willingly choose Google, otherwise they wouldn't be paying so much money to be the default. That's a lot of money to throw away.

How is this different from any typical outsourcing arrangement other than the size?

Outsourcing arrangements many different motivations, it’s not just money. Otherwise, basically any outsourcing arrangement can be said to be “throwing away money” for one party.

There would be no choice without that deal either, Apple would simply sell its users to the next highest bidder.

Or Apple would develop a search engine instead, which is exactly what they did with Maps.

> I doubt that the same number of people willingly choose Google

Nobody "chooses" anything, that's the point. If you want to stop using Google on stock iOS, you have to opt-out. Same goes for Android, it's not a market share thing so much as it is an abuse of ubiquity. Defaults are powerful, and a competitor that lets you buy out their defaults is apparently powerful enough to prevent competition.

Google deserves the scrutiny here, but this whole situation really illustrates how hopelessly America is headed towards an antitrust reckoning. FAANG has gone rogue, and foreign regulators have been sounding the alarm for years. The only remaining question is if the FTC has the stomach to butcher their finest pigs.

It's a widespread assumption that defaults matter. But to what degree? I came across it first when I saw Dan Ariely's talk and his work on defaults (may not be the proponent)[1] but my takeaway is that it matters when you don't care about the as much.

For everyone with Windows, you start off with Edge/IE and then Bing as a default search engine. Yet, most switch to Chrome + Google almost instantly. People care about their browsing experience more than we give them credit for. Remember in 2009-10 when Chrome was new, it managed to win market share cos of superior product when it was not the default on Windows/Linux/MacOSX. On mobile too, the behavior is likely going to be there to a certain degree. While Google pays Apple a massive fee, there was an admission earlier in the trial that both Mozilla and Apple would still go ahead w Google (even without the deals) because of superior UX. Not sure if both said it, but one of them certainly did.

[1] https://danariely.com/the-power-of-defaults-in-how-we-eat/

Maybe look at some of the trial exhibits that have been posted on the DOJ website. Google sure as hell thinks defaults matter a lot. And intent matters at trial.

From the trial itself, Google has argued and questioned the expert witness from DOJ if defaults really matter. Whole Microsoft question was raised by them too. Exhibits are good with context, but without supplementing the context they are misleading. Hard to argue for something DOJ did not think would make their case stronger and did not refer to in the trial.

Microsoft lost cases against the EU because they made Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player the default on Windows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._Commission

I believe it's because they were using their monopoly power to give that software away for free, while their competitors couldn't and ended up selling or going out of business.

Or you know, revenue growth to serve the only stakeholders that means anything to them - their shareholders.

Google bought YouTube in 2006. Coincidence they care about YouTube ad revenue so much all of a sudden? I guess they were getting around to it eventually.

How come YouTube doesn't turn a revenue? Is it even possible, it uses so much bandwidth? Any sources?

YouTube makes a profit. Or it did at least, not sure what’s going on with the adblocker stuff.

You can change the default of Safari, but not for Siri. "Search the Internet" voice command always uses Google. I'm personally hoping that either part of this lawsuit or part of their Siri upgrade allows us to change it.

Does Siri show ads?

using Kagi is pretty clumsy. We iOS users get to pick from a pretty limited list. In reality we should be able to set search to any endpiont that handles the ‘q’ param

I don't know the answer to your question, but the fact that the Google-AOL deal was never challenged doesn't mean it was legal. Plenty of illegal things are never challenged.

Generally something is legal until there’s a law saying it isn’t. That’s kind of how it just works in America, and it not just here either.

When that Google-AOl deal Google wasn’t even close to as popular as it is now. It was a simple distribution deal. People are tunneled in on the iPhone because that’s Apple’s juggernaut now but this deal with Apple also goes back to like 2002 when I was still convincing people to switch off Yahoo and MSN to Google. They also made a similar deal with Mozilla which is still basically how Mozilla is still able to operate at all.

I mean 2002 Yahoo probably could have outspent 2002 Google. 2002 Microsoft definitely could have and it’s not like MSN was a juggernaut, but they were complacent. I’ll just say it: Google wanted it more. Search and Advertising was basically all they were at the time, no Gmail, no Google Maps, no YouTube or any of that other stuff we associate with them now, and they went out and took the opportunities they could. They developed a toolbar for IE users, setup distribution deals for the toolbar, put it in the Firefox directory, and sought out new avenues of information to index like when they acquired Deja News and Blogger, and subsequently launched Froogle, Google Blog Search, Google News, Alerts, Images, Patents, GOOG-411, etc. Even acquiring and developing Android was a play that ensured even if their relationships went south and Microsoft came to dominate Mobile in a way that was beginning to look a lot more possible in 2006 (and not so much in 2011) they would never be entirely locked out of Mobile if that ever became a thing (which uh, spoiler alert, it did).

And when did Google really start to look like the juggernaut in the room? Well in Jan 2005 they had 35.1% of the search market to Yahoo’s 31.8% and a year later Google was at 41.4% to Yahoo’s 28.7%.[1] So probably you could say sometime about 2004 around when they IPO’d, maybe, is the soonest you could say they were really a juggernaut. That’s dominance but that sure isn’t anything close to a monopoly, and they were just outcompeting in both quality and distribution and in their search and ad product offerings. Acquiring DoubleClick even after Microsoft bid up the price was also a pretty good hat trick that was like a rocket booster for their ad business, putting Microsoft in a position where they had to spend almost twice as much for aQuantive only to write it down 5 years later.

This is why antitrust law is so scuffed. The DOJ just ends up re-litigating old contracts and continuations of them hoping that in the current political climate they can find an angle for the headshot in front of a friendly judge. They’re going to lose hard while playing up whatever small victories they can get along the way while wasting a lot of money in court and then the administration is going to change again which might continue any cases in progress but is still going to have its political priorities shift.

[1]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/search-engine-market-shares-in...

> The DOJ just ends up re-litigating old contracts and continuations of them hoping that in the current political climate they can find an angle for the headshot in front of a friendly judge

Your whole argument hinges on this and I fail to find a problem in it. What's OK when you have 1% of the market is, by law and reason, not OK when you have 99% of the market. It seems fully logical that that also means old contracts and behavior might need change.

No, my argument is that it’s a weak case, full stop, that hinges on Google growing from a 400 pound gorilla to an 800 pound gorilla by outcompeting their direct competitors in their core business that the company was founded on, making deals, acquiring other businesses in areas they needed to improve upon (or reasonably thought they did) and developing new search and ad products to expand their business. You can’t punish them for making a deal ex post facto because it was the winning strategy and their competitors turned out to be the greatest cultural lobster trap inventors[1] and the Windows company that has basically stopped innovating on the web the moment they stopped perceiving it as a threat (which they were so wrong about).

Google’s core business is search and advertising and they have worked from the company’s inception to acquire users and customers in both, successfully, and more so than their competition both earlier in their history and later and they have developed business partners along the way who value that continued business relationship.

Making deals isn’t illegal and businesses make deals all the time. The Sherman Antitrust Act declares contracts that restrain trade and commerce illegal, but Google isn’t restraining trade: they’re paying a fair market value for user acquisition and their largest competitors both know what that price is and are unwilling to outbid Google.

Up until 2017, Microsoft even had their own deal with Apple where Siri used Bing results and you couldn’t change that (still cant’t control what Siri uses actually, but Siri is garbage). Even so, you can still change the search provider in Safari and Apple only receives money from Google for Safari users when Safari users actually use Google making this more like an affiliate program.

[1]: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2848

> I guess the difference now is that Google is really big. Ok. But is that really the only reason?

So as you are INSINUATING things why not be clear and name it? What is it, corruption? Or do you think that the fact that AOL deal wasn't illegal, no deal ever will be and Apple/Google are free to do as they please? Your idea of justice is quite weird.

I believe OP was genuinely interested in identifying rationale for this discrepancy in legal precedent, regardless of any personal stance they hold on the justice of this business deal.

OP didn't describe any particular legal precedent though, so we don't know why OP thinks the AOL deal was legal. There's a big difference between "nobody cared enough to sue or prosecute X behavior" and "X behavior has been tested in court and was ruled legal".

Can you please not post in the flamewar style? It's quite against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You can make your substantive points without that, so if you'd please do so instead, we'd be grateful.

>Ok. But is that really the only reason?

Sentiment shift. Moral Compass in Silicon Valley ( or more like in the Tech Sector ), Smartphone Revolution and 15 years of zero interest rate.

None of the reported are really "news" apart from the precise 36% figure which is higher than most of our initial estimate. "Customer acquisition cost" isn't new. On a similar note Google also share their Ad revenue with Mozilla / Firefox.

We might not like a lot of what's going on with Google or Apple. But I dont think revenue share is in anyway wrong or illegal.

I think there should be prosecution of Apple based on this, not Google. Because of this huge cut, Apple won't allow other browsers on their platforms, which is anti-competitive.

> Because of this huge cut, Apple won't allow other browsers on their platforms, which is anti-competitive.

That’s not the case, though. What some people complain about is the fact that other browsers must use the WebKit engine, but there is nothing stopping people from putting browsers in the App Store. This is not relevant to this deal. The engine does not matter at all, what matters is the user base.

The engine absolutely matters! If you want to use a feature that is available in Chrome and Firefox, but not in webkit/safari, you are completely out of luck on iOS.

Apple has been holding back web development for many years with this policy. I suspect it is to keep PWAs from being competitive with native apps, but whatever the motivation, that is very much the effect.

> But I dont think revenue share is in anyway wrong or illegal.

It’s a thin line between revenue sharing, which is fine, and anticompetitive bribes to entrench your dominant position and extinguish competition, which is not. I am not saying that it’s the second case, but that’s what the DoJ wants to prove.

> I've not yet seen a legal explanation of why the Apple ad revenue share deal is now "illegal" and yet the AOL deal wasn't.

Do you ever speed on the highway? Have you gotten a ticket for every time you did it? Just because you didn't get caught doesn't mean it's legal.

"Somewhat similar deals also happen with tv networks where they sign exclusive "distribution deals" with sports leagues and they share the money they get from tv commercials (the ads)."

Except the networks pay the leagues to broadcast games. With so-called "tech" companies, this is reversed. Google is paying Apple and Samsung so that no other search engine gets to be the pre-installed default.

Sports leagues do not pay TV networks in order to prevent other leagues from doing deals with the networks. But Google pays hardware manufacturers to be the pre-instaled default and exclude other search engines.