"Indeed, the article notes that Yahoo agreed to pay nearly $100 million more than Google, which was important revenue for Mozilla.... 'I felt strongly that Yahoo was not delivering the search experience we needed and had contracted for.'"
Yahoo paid nine-figures more than Google to be mozilla's default search engine, but the quality just wasn't good enough. This is a strong hint that quality in this space matters more than just money. How much more would yahoo have had to pay for Mozilla to put up with the decreased quality?
The problem with this whole mess is that monopoly, monopolization, and monopolistic practices were not defined by legislation. Legislation in fact provides no definitions whatsoever. The entirety of Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act is comprised of a single run on sentence.
It's all well and good to be all "it's Mabo, it's justice, it's the vibe" over this, but congress hasn't provided legislation required to regulate competitive markets.
So the answer to your question is: monopolization is illegal according to the the Sherman Act, and the power to regulate markets is well within the (extremely broad) scope of existing laws (including the Federal Trade Commission Act and the Clayton Act).
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
If it's still not: Users must actively take the step of downloading and installing it. Is this step less difficult than changing the default search engine in Firefox or Safari?
And Google guide people to how to install chrome and majority of people can download some exe and run it with next next while keeping the defaults. And many of them will not change any of the settings. And chrome will take every chance to let you revert back to google search if you happen to change it.
The entire antitrust regime from it's inception, all of the caselaw, is a mixture of judicial activism, chest thumping, and executive branch blackmail. It should all be struct down. Start again.
This is pure hyperbole. Changing (default) search engines is incredibly easy. Using a different one is as easy as typing bing.com instead of Google.com in the address bar. Ta da.
Not smoking a cigarette is also as easy as not buying or lighting.
While what Google is paying companies like Apple for is technically just to make Google the default search engine, it's actually having the effect of making these companies (and particularly Apple) not bother to develop their own search engine because it's so profitable for them to just take the money from Google.
Apple is a company that usually prefers to develop its own services rather than use third party services (e.g. see maps), so it's highly likely that it would have created its own search engine by now if it wasn't getting so much money from Google.
If in effect Google is paying companies not to develop search engines (even if they aren't specifically agreeing not to do so), that seems like a pretty big issue when search engines are such an essential part of the internet.
The argument essentially is that Apple and Google are collaborating to collectively wall off the market and share the profits.
> As we’ve noted, a key part of the ongoing case was just how much Google was paying for these defaults (over $26.3 billion in 2021). But that seems to actually argue against an abuse of a monopoly position argument. Because if Google were such a monopoly, then it wouldn’t need to pay as much to get those deals. There just wouldn’t be other offerings to compete.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what constitutes a monopoly. It is not just "Google is the only usable search engine, therefore it's a monopoly, therefore it must be fined." A monopoly is typically someone who is already a leader in an industry, using their vast resources to make it incredibly difficult or even nearly impossible for competition. A judge may very well find that what Google is doing with Apple constitutes monopolistic practices.