Hacker News Reader

Comment by elliekelly | Hacker News Reader

> Even in Google Chrome you can pick DuckDuckGo and Ecosia as your default search engine.

And making this argument is exactly why they added search engine selection. They wanted to be able to point to this tiny insignificant detail that might cost them a negligible fraction of Chrome searches and hold it up as market competition when the inevitable antitrust suit came along.

Have you ever heard of a for profit company gifting traffic to their direct competitor? It would be irrational behavior in a competitive market. If anything this is evidence of Google’s search engine monopoly and Google built the selection feature into Chrome it in furtherance of that monopoly power.

View on HN

>Have you ever heard of a for profit company gifting traffic to their direct competitor?

The #3 browser (Firefox) is (was?) massively funded by a half-billion-per-year agreement from the #1 browser's maker (Google) to add Chrome as the default search engine.

Sure, they could pull that deal. Unless you think it's a perfectly balanced deal, though, that feels like one for-profit company gifting traffic to their competitor (either Google giving money to Firefox, or Firefox giving traffic to Google).

It's more niche, but a lot of companies in my market donate to or fund their competitors for the sake of innovation and growing the pie.

Contrary to popular belief, for-profit companies (even those with scary board members in a competitive market) don't inherently have to be cutthroat.

You're saying that both "adding search engine choice" and "removing search engine choice" are monopolistic tools for Google?

I'm saying Google added search engine choice to Chrome in order to create the illusion of competition in a monopolized market. If Google didn't have monopoly power in the search engine market they never would have added search engine choice to Chrome in the first place for the same reason Starbucks stores don't sell bags of Dunkin' Donuts coffee beans. A rational enterprise in a competitive market doesn't benevolently give market share to a competitor.

Kind of like the cellophane paradox[1] I suppose. From Wikipedia:

> As Richard Posner wrote, "Reasonable interchangeability at the current price but not at a competitive price level, far from demonstrating the absence of monopoly power, might well be a symptom of that power; this elementary point was completely overlooked by the court"

But instead of a price denominated in dollars it's in consumer data I suppose.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellophane_paradox

Hm. If I understand the cellophane paradox, it says that the "substitutes exist" does not imply "there is no monopoly".

That seems different from your argument, which I understand to be "only a monopolist would make it easy for consumers to choose a competitor". But again, the conclusion that Google is a monopolist seems to be baked into this logic -- would you really say Google is not a monopolist if they did not offer search engine choice?

> which I understand to be "only a monopolist would make it easy for consumers to choose a competitor"

No, not "only".

The argument is that while non-monopolists have a motivation to add those choices, monopolists have a motivation too.

Therefore seeing the end result isn't very strong evidence for whether something is a monopoly or not.

I agree with your statement. The comment I was responding to does not:

> If anything this is evidence of Google’s search engine monopoly and Google built the selection feature into Chrome it in furtherance of that monopoly power

IE being the mandatory browser played a big role in the antitrust suite against Microsoft. Afterwards they had to build controls to allow other browsers to be the default for the OS. Perhaps that played a larger role in the decision to allow the user to change the default search engine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com