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0 pointsrifung7y ago0 comments

> What is the objection supposed to be?

I work at Google; opinions are my own.

I believe the objection is that it's an unfair competitive advantage and hurts competition. The reasoning is similar to that given when Google was fined for Google Shopping in the EU.

> But so can anybody else. Google sells ads on their search engine to anyone. If you asked nicely enough with a large enough pile of money they would presumably even sell you a banner placement.

You could make the same argument about Microsoft with Internet Explorer then no? I'm sure if someone offered to pay many billions of dollars, Microsoft would have gladly included their browser with Windows too.

Being able to do the same thing with a sufficiently large sum of money doesn't imply that something is not an anticompetitive practice. If anything, it may show that it is indeed anticompetitive..

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AnthonyMouse7y ago

> I believe the objection is that it's an unfair competitive advantage and hurts competition.

But the advantage is just having more resources. Mozilla could likewise pay Facebook/Reddit/Yahoo to push Firefox... if they could afford it. You could call it "unfair" that they don't have the money, but that has nothing to do with Google search in particular.

> You could make the same argument about Microsoft with Internet Explorer then no? I'm sure if someone offered to pay many billions of dollars, Microsoft would have gladly included their browser with Windows too.

But that's the opposite of how tying works. The classic tying case is you have a monopoly on cars and you require all your customers to buy your brand of gasoline, so you also monopolize the market for gasoline.

The Internet Explorer case was really bizarre, because they kept talking about the browser market, but what they were really tying to Windows was (web) apps. It was the same thing with Java. Microsoft wanted to tie the app ecosystem to Windows, so you had to use their platform-specific APIs and the app developer and all their customers get tied to Windows. Microsoft never made a dime from the browser market, nor ever intended to.

But Google pushing Chrome is the other side of the coin. They also have no intention to make any money selling web browsers, but their goal isn't to tie Google search to Chrome -- it works fine in Firefox and IE -- their goal was to prevent Microsoft from using dominance in the browser market to tie Google search (the web app) to Windows through the browser. It's an anti-tying move.

To get where Microsoft was they would have to be preventing other browsers from using Google search while preventing Chrome from using non-Google search (as Microsoft interfered with Netscape running on Windows, prevented IE from being removed and discontinued IE for non-Windows platforms as soon as it gained share), and then at the same time filling Chrome with non-standard proprietary APIs with no public spec (as Microsoft did with IE/ActiveX/etc.) so that third party pages would only work in the browser that only worked with Google search, and competing browsers would have no efficient way to know how to produce the same behavior.

Just promoting a free standards-compliant browser with published source code isn't anywhere near that.

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