The US Department of Justice’s antitrust suit against Google has a familiar ring to those who remember a similar suit against Microsoft 25 years ago. In both cases, the government claimed the companies illegally used their monopolies to kill competition, maintain their dominant market share, and reap billions of dollars in return.
In a strange twist of fate, the DOJ last week called on Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella as a key witness against Google. Nadella outlined the ways in which he says Google has unfairly used its search dominance and deep pockets to make Google the default search engine on hundreds of millions of smartphones around the world, which won’t allow competitors to catch up, or even survive.
Missing from his testimony was this simple fact: Google was following the playbook Microsoft perfected decades ago when it used its globally dominant Windows operating system to kill countless competitors and attempt to become the internet’s gatekeeper.
Now it’s Microsoft’s turn to cry foul. Google has illegally used its market muscle, Nadella claims, not only to own the search market, but to potentially extend its monopoly power to AI as well. And he wants the government to act to stop that — fast.
Google’s search dominance
How dominant is Google in search? As I write this, the latest Statista figures, for July 2023, show that Google had 83.5% of the search market, while Bing had 9.2%. But forget the numbers for a moment. Here’s an even better picture of Google’s ubiquity, taken from Nadella’s testimony in the Google suit: “You get up in the morning, you brush your teeth, and you search on Google.”
How did Google build and maintain such a monopoly? If you believe Google, the answer is simple: Google’s search engine is better than anything out there, and by a wide margin. People flock to it for that reason alone. Build a better search engine and the world will beat a path to your door.
If you believe the DOJ, Nadella, and Google’s other detractors, there’s a very different explanation: Google has strong-armed its way into building and maintaining its search monopoly.
How does it do that? Google pays an estimated $10 billion a year to smartphone manufacturers, browser makers, and wireless carriers, including Apple, Samsung, Verizon, and others, to make Google their default search engine. Kenneth Dintzer, the Justice Department’s lead courtroom lawyer, said on the opening day of the trial that the payments were a “powerful strategic weapon” used to kill upstarts and fend off search rivals.
He added, “This feedback loop, this wheel, has been turning for more than 12 years. And it always turns to Google’s advantage.”
Nadella, during his testimony, said the same thing. Because of those payments and Google’s resulting monopoly, he said, the internet should now be called the “Google web.”
There’s more than a little irony in a Microsoft CEO complaining that Google extended its…
2023-10-13 05:00:04
Article from www.computerworld.com rnrn