Also, prior to Google throwing vast sums of money at phone companies, Bing was paying off many EU mobile phone providers to install Bing as the default search engine on all their Android-based devices and lock users out from changing it to anything else. Since those companies were government-enforced oligipolies, this meant ordinary users effectively couldn't get devices that sent their searches to Google or anyone other than Bing in many countries unless they went off-piste and bought their own device online from someone other than their mobile provider (which doesn't work a lot of the time these days with 4G calling). This could well end up substantially reducing consumer choice in a way that directly hurts Google. In fact, an astounding chunk of the Google anti-trust actions from the EU seem aimed at giving Bing unearned advantages...

> What's the difference between Sony requiring you to buy headphones together with the tape player, or Android requiring Google to be the default search?

Sony and headphones together with tape player ... there's a synergy there, when they can sell them together, it's a small one though. (Selling two pieces of hardware together generates more turnover with one transaction.)

With Android requiring Google to be the default search ... in comparison to the headphones there's a huge synergy here, I'd say. Collecting data (via non search software on the Android phone) and adding to it more data from search, makes all data more valuable in a very non-linear way. With the tape player I'd say it's more linear.

So for me, the search data is a quite obvious non-neutrality issue.

> What's the difference between Sony requiring you to buy headphones together with the tape player, or Android requiring Google to be the default search?

Because of the tying of third-parties, I don't think that this is an equivalent comparison. This is more like going into the record store (since we're going back to the 80s with our Walkman) and finding that you think the Walkman comes with garbage headphones. So you pick up a Panasonic player and the headphones you want. Then you pick up a couple of tapes that you wanted to listen to, get to the counter, and the store owner explains that those albums are on the BMG label, so he can't sell them to you. In fact, he can't sell any Sony Music group cassettes unless you own those shitty Sony headphones, because if he does, Sony Music won't let him sell any more Sony Music albums in his store.