Regarding your analogy, it would be more like if you're accused of stealing from your arch rival. Should they be barred from testifying against you on the grounds that there's bad blood between you? Certainly not! It's up to your lawyer to demonstrate their bias and persuade the jury to ignore their testimony.
Edit: to clarify, I believe this is the actual legal basis of anti monopoly legislation. Protection of the interests of the public, not competitor companies.
So, like, if you were arrested for assaulted your neighbor who you had a long-standing rivalry with, you wouldn't expect the court to hear from the neighbor? It's not like you wouldn't have your own chance to give your own testimony...
The defense will have ample opportunity to cross examine and present rebuttal whiteness.
And just because a witness is presented doesn't mean the fact finder (judge or jury) will find them credible.
I'll just add, Bingbot has the same crawling opportunities as Googlebot. Nobody is stopping Bing from driving traffic to their website. It's also been 20+ years: Windows OS is constantly manipulating defaults and Edge is still not uninstallable.
I know your comment is about the bot, but the other side is, yes - Google is absolutely stopping Bing from driving traffic to their website. Not Google's bot, but Google's default deals on iOS, browsers, etc.
Even if Bing's index was measurably better, most folks wouldn't think to switch given how easy it already is to stick with Google.
Otherwise, re: Microsoft - you're absolutely right. The latest examples for me: - Teams as a crappy default - In Windows 11 I can't move my taskbar to another part of my window anymore? What the f. 10+ years of user-preference destroyed with one update.
In general, making contracts with 3rd parties that negatively impact your competitors is sort of looked down upon.
This isn’t about the government trying to help Microsoft or represent their interest.
The whole point of anti-trust is that without competition prices go up and quality goes down.
For the consumer.
Where does it say that?
It was better than Bing...
Two things:
1) HN and elsewhere constantly point out how bad Google Search is lately 2) The introduction of ChatGPT and DALL-E powered Bing into Edge, the new Windows Sidebar and elsewhere has changed the game.
The new Windows 11 Bing/ChatGPT/DALL-E sidebar is so good that my hot-take is that it's going to put a dent into Google's Search dominance at a depth that Bing and others never have.
My final wild out-there prediction: MS ditch the Bing brand and pivot to using Copilot as their search and discovery brand.
Perhaps it’s coz I’ve minimized my footprint in Google ecosystem but then it just goes to show to what extent Google now relies on personal data to serve search results.
The internet is bad. There is a constant amount of good stuff and an exponentially increasing amount of garbage.
I've been reading this on Slashdot back in the days, before HN or Reddit even existed.
Is it?
I just tried a couple of searches on Bing. "Market Size of Apple Watch" Both Bing and Google didn't answer, providing market share instead.
"novak djokovic age when he won first grand slam" both said 20 in an infobox on top.
In my experience it's evened out, with Bing better at image and video search.
OK just tried 3 more. Almost identical with tiny edge to Google, but seriously, not by much. Try 5 searches yourself.
>how many times russia surrendered moscow
Google provides links about the history of Russian wars.
Bing talks about the current Ukrainian affair.
Bing = garbage
But I share your confusion. The case for Microsoft and Google being part of an oligopoly together doesn't really hold water, considering that Google appears to be competing with Microsoft in the consumer market for web browsers, operating systems, office productivity software, and machine learning.
I have been using DDG for several years now and honestly can't stand Google's results anymore. It seems like you can no longer search for an exact term and at every opportunity they try to slip in a merchant selling something as a result.
me: Who's that guy with a big hat?
DDG: showing results for bug hat IN UNITED KINGDOM: 1) Daily Mail woman wearing ladybird hat absolutely destroys woke liberal you won't believe. 2) Best hair cuts for guys who wear hats - generic-seo-spamsite.com. 3) Who's who in the world of business 2023 update. 4) Don't be "that guy"! tips for dating.
me: !g
Google: He's Crocodile Dundee.
me: how the heck did you know that.
Google isn't always that good, but DDG is all too often that bad. It's bad in a very Bing-way with search results that kinda touch on the right words but are low relevance and high SEO/spam. (And adamant that whatever I'm searching for - cat pictures, cities in California, Caesar Salad recipes, prices of things in America, I must want the results from UNITED KINGDOM because that's where I am. Which, incidentally, is a frustration of Google maps: "I wonder whats in California? Google maps, let me see the world..." "THIS IS YOUR HOUSE, THIS IS A ZOOMED IN MAP OF WHERE YOU LIVE, I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE". "Calm down, I know what things look like round here, I live here. I wanted to look somewhere else, like, obviously?").
This makes it literally impossible for anyone to make a competing search engine because millions of doors are slammed in their face. There is no practical way to negotiate access at this scale either leaving no options for small startups — e.g.: AI-based search!
One possible anti-monopoly measure would be to force Google to mask the identity of their bots. E.g.: force them to use a random IP address pool that third parties can also use without their permission.
IMHO breaking up corporations is a bit heavy-handed and not the only remedy available.
Respectfully disagree in Google's case. Indexing is not their only advantage - having full, unfettered access and control over email, maps, Android play, cloud, and the other myriad divisions plus knows what else via side deals is too much and fully justifies breaking up the business.
Your suggestion works if we were still 2002-ish, before they got too big
Bing, Outlook, Bing Maps, Microsoft Store, Azure, Windows, Edge, Office, OneDrive, XBOX division, and more.
If they can't compete with Google, then maybe they aren't offering as good a service for most of these, and it's not for lack of trying to manipulate the market into using their services.
I do agree with what you said though, both Alphabet and Microsoft should be broken up, and I don't mean just having multiple separate companies that operate closely together, but proper separation. This also goes for META and Amazon.
But sure. Kill your software industry. Does the US even know how to do anything else? Does the US even manufacture anything physical anymore? Last I checked tiny little Denmark produces more wind turbines than the US and tiny little Switzerland produces more CNC machines than the US.
First of all, no website owner in their right mind is going to block Bing.
Second of all, they have to detect that you're a bot in the first place. Most sites don't employ sophisticated anti-bot technology. Simply running a headless browser (which you need to do anyways for JavaScript) with a common user-agent, and slow enough browsing not to be rate-limited, will let you index 99.9+% of sites.
If you have a wide low-traffic website then bots of all sorts will make a majority of your traffic and subsequently a majority of your AWS costs.
If you see money spent on search engine X indexing and very few users incoming from that search engine it's a rational decision to block it. Or ask for money (that actually happens).
Overall it's a systematic problem with building a search competitor: 1) Your costs are largely proportional to the size of your index 2) Your income is proportional to your userbase 3) You need a huge index to be competitive even if you don't have any users yet
So, very hard to bootstrap even when you exclude all other advantages of the existing monopoly like browser-based distribution.
Microsoft has the money to beat the indexing problem so they argue about distribution in court but all the small players can't even get to that level of failure.
That can add up to a serious percentage of the web.
The government forcing restrictions on companies that people choose freely is extremely dangerous and will definitely be used for political reasons.
Third parties bake this into things like Web Application Firewall (WAF) rules. For example, Azure App Gateway WAF has a policy category for “known bots” which includes Google but excludes your tiny AI startup.
It’s a moat built by giant corporations to keep tiny players in their place.
Google "helpfully" publishes their bot source IP addresses: https://developers.google.com/static/search/apis/ipranges/go...
AWS also provides named rules such as "bot:name:googlebot": https://docs.aws.amazon.com/waf/latest/developerguide/aws-ma...
These "internal" purposes included growing your social network, monitoring or reverse-engineering the algorithms of competing search engines, and now, it includes training ML.
Which is funny given that when others are doing it to them, they go to great lengths to stop it, and sometimes complain loudly or threaten lawsuits.
I think the main reason the big players don't sue each other is that it's a bit of a Mutual Assured Destruction kind of a deal. Google is doing it to Microsoft, Microsoft is doing it to Google...
Because Googlebot is actually _friendly_.
O boy are there bad bots out there for search engines that often DDOS your site to shit.
Yandex is probably the worst out there from experience. Not only will it hammer you, they put in extremely aggressive retries such that even if you ban it temporarily for 4 hours, the literal second your IP block of their spiders expire, they will flood you with requests, and they don't even know how long the ban is, their bots just keep trying and trying.
The problem is bigger the other way around I would say. That Google, AWS, Azure and so on use the same AS numbers for private and public cloud. It is not easy to detect if it really is the Google bot or some low-lifes performing DOS-attacks from GCP. Many attacks, especially state sponsored attacks, comes from trusted clouds.
I've often said that the "breaking up" of Google that makes the most sense is to split the crawling/indexing service from the rest of the company. Similar to the way telecoms companies were forced -- in some countries -- to open up access to e.g. DSL infrastructure.
How can that be blamed on Google?
Just imagine TikTok, then have that applied to Search, Mail, etc.
Do you want this?
No, I don't think that's true. I am writing a web crawler, not for search purposes, and I haven't seen preferential treatment for GoogleBot compared to others. Sure, some might be banned outright (though bad crawlers just ignore robots.txt and do whatever they want), but in most cases new bots have the same access rights than GoogleBot.
Also, your sentence doesn't pass the sniff test: you claim Google has better access than all other crawlers; but robots.txt is solely in the hands of the webmaster. How does Google coerce most website owners to block other bots? There is no conspiracy at play here.
OK, then why pay Apple close to $20 billion annually to be the "default".
"Mr. Schmidtlein hammered Mr. Nadella with questions about instances in which Bing had been the default on mobile phones, only for users to switch back to Google."
If Google search is so great, and Apple needs to use it as a default, then shouldn't Apple be paying Google.
If users switch without Google paying to be default, then why pay.
Google has special treatment for their services in the search results. I.e. different look for their market, prefers youtube to the search results which has a better text version. Now it shows their hotels booking service instead of actually searching for hotel sites (they had the same thing with online shops). Pretty much killed Yelp by copying features with maps and showing their reviews when searching.
On another hand, MS/FB/twitter do the same.
Last week I installed some Debian and Duck was default in FF... What a unpleasant experience... 90's Yahoo catalog or pre-google "search engines" - all was working as expected. Only with Bing and that so called "privacy preserving" clone you are shocked that trivial things to find/match are absent in results...
So Google search is "ubiquitous", simple the best. But is's trivial to avoid ! Not like Microsoft monopoly on OS-like trap. Or Android :)
I personally would pay for good search app, offline, open-source, with _data_ updates. Or probably app is not needed here, just [pretty legal] data to buy. But Unity had some troubles just previous week... Free stuff is hard to match :>
https://news.microsoft.com/1998/04/09/microsoft-advertisemen...
Both Microsoft and Google abuse their position, they could shut up about it, but instead it looks like Microsoft is defecting. I wonder if Google intends to counterattack. What Google does with Android, Microsoft does it with Windows, but worse.
IANAL and don't particularly care about the minutiae and merits and politics of individual cases in the context of antiquated anti-trust laws. A lucrative monopoly allowed to operate over long periods can and will identify its own weak points and the abilities and competitive threats of the market. It will have more than ample resources to mitigate them. Whether that monopoly dominance is secured in legal, border-line legal or illegal ways is a mute point.
In a healthy economy there should not be any monopolies unless they are very heavily regulated. We should celebrate commercial success up to a point but be deeply suspicious of winner-takes-all degeneration that is justified on the basis of bogus arguments (network effects, superior quality etc).
This rationale is even more important in the context of digital technology where the foundations of the current and future digital economy are being laid. And no, a Google Web [1] is not a good blueprint for the digital economy. Neither is a cozily arranged Google-Microsoft Web for that matter. For this new type of economy to flourish the "web" should be really neutral, not the fiefdom of this or that oligopoly extracting rents and holding everything back.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/willskipworth/2023/10/02/the-in...
There are some deep ironies in this case.
Last Saturday I was searching for something on Google and not getting anything and just for laughs I tried bing. I have been using it for second opinion since. And I don't think bing got any better, but my god has Google got a lot worse.
Nadella tells a court that Bing is worse than Google – and Apple could fix it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37743634 - Oct 2023 (11 comments)
Why is that striking? It's just a repeat of the playbook Microsoft used to great effect in the Activision trial. "Oh, woe is us, we've lost the console wars, we're in distant 3rd place and can't compete". They have absolutely no problem being mock-humiliated due to a supposed failure to compete if it gets them the result they need in court. (Which is the smart play, of course.)
> But in court, Mr. Nadella said that argument was “bogus” because users generally don’t change their default search engine, even if they have the ability to do so.
Oh, huh. Isn't Bing the default search engine for the default browser on Windows? I guess all those Windows users are searching on Bing then.
Though I do wonder why Microsoft gets into the news on a regular cadence about yet again having reset the defaults with a Windows update. Seems like something that they wouldn't need to bother with if nobody changes the defaults.
MS has almost every opportunity that Google has when it comes to search. They fail to compete simply because they aren’t good enough.
Google being default on Chrome the leading browser? Edge freaking comes with Windows and defaults to Bing.
Google being default on iOS? MS has every opportunity to take Google's spot on iOS. The fact that Apple, a major competitor with Google in the mobile space, sides with Google says a lot about Bing's quality - can't be money because MS is worth like 2.4 trillion.
This is why Microsoft won't win. Google obviously isn't going to not use their own search engine on their own browser, and that's totally fine. I'm not sure what Google can even do to reduce the market share of their search engine besides intentionally making it worse than Bing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
That said, I think the parity on most searches is partially due to Google sucking more than it did. Often the thing I'm looking for isn't in the top 10 hits in either.
Same guys...
There is ZERO real competition, at best some internal pet contests.
From this case, I'm concerned, apparently threatened:
(A) I have some expertise in computing, worked in and with computing for decades, written some serious software, taught computer science in college and graduate school of famous universities, and published peer-reviewed original research in artificial intelligence.
(B) Now computing is my main activity and the foundation of my business startup.
(C) From credible quotes in the media and (A) and (B) just above, my opinion is that the lawyers and judges in the Google case (a) are poorly informed on and have no meaningful understanding of computing, (b) are often seriously misinformed on computing, and (c) are on the way to doing serious harm to computing, the economy, and my work.
I see no opportunity for this legal case to do any good and would like the DoJ just to say:
"Sorry, never mind. We made a HUGE mistake and now drop the case."
For example:
(1) Operating System. I use versions of Microsoft's Windows, really want to use only one operating system, considered the choices, and picked Windows.
It seems to me that Microsoft continually makes changes to improve Windows.
Some of the changes are for the user experience and user interface. Mostly I find the changes poorly designed and irritating but not a serious problem.
Other changes are for, e.g., computer security and new hardware, and I like those changes a LOT.
I REALLY LIKE their .NET software and its documentation.
I REALLY like the Windows NTFS file system. And I REALLY like the fact that the basics of Windows has been quite reliable, with lots of utility, for 10+ years.
And I intend to start using Windows Server 2019. Versions of Windows Server may be the most important software in the economy of the world.
(2) I have lots of computer programs installed.
Some of the programs I've written myself in various computer languages.
Of course, for me the most important of these programs is the Web site server program I've written for my startup.
Otherwise my most heavily used program is the text editor KEdit, first written by an IBM employee in France, and for that program I've written dozens of macros.
Next is Rexx written by an IBM employee in England, and for that language I've written dozens of programs.
I have the D. Knuth mathematical word processing software TeX which I use for writing nearly all documents, letters, etc. For TeX I've written dozens of macros.
I have a spell checking program Aspell I use heavily.
I have Adobe's Acrobat installed and use it to read some important PDF files.
To keep up with some changes in email standards, I intend to install a recent version of Microsoft Office.
I am a heavy user of the Internet and, thus, of Web browsers. As I type this, the computer has installed Firefox, Chrome, Brave, and Edge. I use all of them, use Firefox the most, may change to use Brave the most, and may install the current version of Chrome.
So, each of these Web browsers is an installed computer program out of some dozens I have installed.
With these Web browsers, I visit Web sites -- thousands of them.
Some of the Web sites are search engines or other means of finding content. Some of the search engines are Google, Bing, and DDG. But I also do searches at Wikipedia, YouTube, Stackoverflow, etc.
(3) Defaults. The legal case has a lot of emphasis on "defaults" in Web browsers and search engines, and to me this emphasis is, understated and in just one word, bad.
For the only such "default", I have set Firefox as my "default" Web browser, but this setting has almost no effect. E.g., if I am using Adobe's Acrobat to read the PDF (portable document format) file for the paper
"Tensor Programs I: Wide Feedforward or Recurrent Neural Networks of Any Architecture are Gaussian Processes"
and in the Acrobat display click on a URL (uniform resource locator) of a Web page, then Acrobat will use my default Web browser to read and display that Web page. I rarely do any such thing and there are other approaches that are plenty easy.
For a "default search engine", I don't have one.
In recent months I've noticed that I can do some Web searches from an HTML single line text box displayed by Firefox, but so far I've never done this. I don't like this feature by Firefox because I see no reason to use it and it takes up limited space in the Firefox window.
Google is just a Web site, and I get to that site just like I get to any of the thousands of other Web sites I go to. No "defaults" are involved.
DoJ, lawyers, judges, please, Please, PLEASE forget about computing, the Internet, computer operating systems, computer programs, Web browsers, Web sites, and search engines. Just FORGET about them.
PLEASE.
Anything you do will be a threat to the economy, my work, and me.
