Google accused of rigging market to secure dominant search monopoly in biggest US antitrust trial for years::The historic legal battle against federal government lawyers - which comes just a week after Google’s 25th birthday - is set to be the biggest in almost two decades. The outcome of the case could have repercussions for the rest of the tech industry.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A landmark antitrust lawsuit against Google begins today, with the California-based company accused of using illegal means to keep its monopoly power.
The historic legal battle against federal government lawyers - which comes just a week after Google’s 25th birthday - is set to be the biggest in almost two decades, the outcome of which could have repercussions for the rest of the tech industry.
It is alleged Google protects its franchise by shelling out billions of dollars annually to be the default search engine on the iPhone and on web browsers such as Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox.
It argues its rivals range from search engines such as Microsoft’s Bing to websites like Amazon and Yelp, where consumers can post questions about what to buy or where to go.
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Top executives at Google and its corporate parent Alphabet Inc, as well as those from other powerful technology companies, are expected to give evidence during the court case.
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ilmagico@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This has bever been a secret, for years (decades) browsers like firefox, back when it was the dominant browser, would have its default search engine choice given to the highest bidder. At times, it was yahoo, or bing, before google outbid them in the following release of the browser. Obviously the same happens for safari, to noone’s surprise.
So, the real question is: why does this come up only now as potentially illegal?
diffusive@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Because Google is like 90% of the market. It’s not the bidding part the issue, the issue is that the bidding (and possibly other effective strategies) are so successful that Google is almost a monopoly. The illegal part is that google is a bit too successful 🙂
dis_honestfamiliar@lemmy.world 1 year ago
To be fair Google practically modernized the search engine. I sometimes miss the before before times instead of by SEO ranks
ilmagico@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Sure, but why now? If it was a problem, why didn’t they do something about it 15 years ago or so?
seang96@spgrn.com 1 year ago
Firefox gets the majority of it’s funding from this though, depending on how the rule on this they could make Firefox lag behind without funding and make chromium even more of a monopoly.