If they didn’t pay so much then Bing or Yahoo would pay a slightly smaller amount to be the default and not Google. Would that be fair?
During setup you have to choose amongst hundreds of options, e.g. does "you.com" make the list?
But I'm really solutionising here, and I'm sure some of the worlds brightest engineers can come up with a solution thats better for users than "we default to whoever pays us the most money".
Should a person not be expected to be able to do that much?
Plenty of non techies are deathly afraid of changing any settings. Google is paying a high price to erect an artificial barrier to entry against less well capitalized competitors looking to target them.
People may not change the default because they
1. find it too difficult
2. they do not believe they are negatively effected by not changing the default
3. they do not even know it is a choice
4. or they prefer Google.
Going into 2022, I would rather governments focus on educating people how to use computing devices than nannying them by barring two businesses from engaging in business. #1 thru #3 can be changed via public education, or even requiring more transparency from search engines to make comparing them easier.
The physical actions of changing the default are not hard.
Yes, thats what most corporations engaged in abusive or anticompetitive business practices say. Credit card companies rake in the dough from abusive interest rates and then feign an interest in helping "educate" the consumers out of being exploited by them to keep regulators off their back and the senators they purchase do the same.
Rinse and repeat, feigning concern for "financial literacy" for 30 years with nothing changing because nothing was supposed to. The system was "working".
I say put the regulators on their backs. If a business transaction is bad for the public then f*king prohibit it. End of story. "Educating users" out of avoiding abusive practices isnt meant to work.
If only life were that easy. Is it bad for the public that Costco and Walmart deliver lower prices to customers via efficiencies if scale? Or is it better to have more inefficient local stores?
Obviously not. Whereas if they could pay local governments money to keep the other one out so they could jack up prices that would be bad.
Or maybe it is worth the lower prices. Or maybe it is not in society’s best interest if Walmart is so big they can force suppliers to cut quality to meet their prices.
Google/Microsoft/etc will donate tons of hardware and software to public schools to ensure teaching kids to use their products become the lesson plan. They're already doing this; they pay schools to be the default just like they pay Mozilla to be the default.
So you still have to solve the same sort of problem, except "company donates computers to school" sounds like a sort of charity and that makes it relatively politically unassailable.
It's in fact so difficult that you'll have an easier time getting people to use your search engine if you ask them to install your extension or even your own browser.
If you want somewhat fair competition that's 'easy and cheap' then it should be possible to prompt for user permission to change the default search engine on any browser. It should be possible to avoid abuse by restricting the search engine change to the domain requesting the change.
Try changing the default search engine on iOS Safari to some search engine that Apple hasn't hardcoded into their settings (e.g. https://ask.moe, https://search.brave.com, etc).
You can't have it both ways - simultaneously argue that market is efficient and we should let it do it's own thing, and that market is stupid to pay for defaults because changing them is so easy.
But to your specific point, this isn't (directly) about harm to users who don't know enough to care what search engine they use. It's about the number of users Google has allowing them to influence policy (privacy, tracking), technology decisions (internet standards), and the market (delisting or downlisting companies, promoting competitor pages, disabling adword accounts which can cascade to android developer accounts, etc).