Isn’t paying to maintain your monopoly illegal? That’s what they were doing, right?

> "Default" search engine is not the same thing as "only" search engine, paying for exposure with cash and a revenue split is a normal business practice, and no one has built a better search engine because the technical challenges are enormous - not because they can't be the default search engine on Safari.

I disagree with this take. The “default” is effectively the same as “only” in practice, as far as its impact on distorting the search engine market and reducing competition, especially because having user data helps create a better product and prevents other competitors. Paying for exposure may be a normal and reasonable business practice when a smaller company does it, but when very large companies do it, you could also just view it as using massive cash reserves to take a loss that other companies could not survive, in order to starve competition before they pose a threat. In other words, it is literally anti competitive. The real solution is all these mega corp need to be broken up or taxed at a much higher rate to create a fair landscape for competition.

Yeah, I could see this going either way. The "default" vs "only" nuance is one that can be exploited by Google in their appeal and even though it's a monopoly one could argue that they simply just became better than competitors. Whether the means used to get there were illegal is a different question.