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this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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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?
Because Google is like 90% of the market.
It’s not the bidding part per se 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 AND it uses these not-merits based techniques 🙂
The idea is that if you really want to become almost a monopoly you should not play these games. And being a total monopoly would be illegal in any case
To be fair Google practically modernized the search engine. I sometimes miss the before before times instead of by SEO ranks
sometimes?? God I miss it all the time
Sure, but why now? If it was a problem, why didn't they do something about it 15 years ago or so?
Because for the last 15 years or so the agencies responsible for figuring it out and enforcement were toothless, corrupt, incompetent or all three together.
Well tjen, I think question remains, why now?
every now and then, even on this community, I see praises towards the new leader of FCC (IIRC) who's taking a hard stance agains big tech and elsewhere (Doctorow's blog IIRC again) about the wider "bidenomics" of going out against monopolies and trusts by empowering existing laws and agencies. Guess the answer is "because now there is an administration in power who at least pretends to care".
because now it's in the hands of one party instead of the other one
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.
Absolutely this. I rely on Firefox and this, in a weird twist of fate, could actually hurt Firefox and consolidate Google's (Chrome) monopoly