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Comment by monkeyfacebag | Hacker News Reader

I reject the premise, namely, that Google is a monopoly supplier of Internet search. Bing, Yahoo! and DuckDuckGo are perfectly suitable search engines. I don't think any of them are necessarily as good as Google, but a) I use Bing all the time when I'm on IE9 and I hardly notice and b) that's a poor criterion for monopoly. As a bonus, the switching costs for changing your search provider are approximately zero.

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Monopoly doesn't mean nothing else exists. At the time when Microsoft was abusing its monopoly with Windows in the '90s, many other operating systems existed that people used, like Mac OS, NeXTStep, Linux, BSD, OS/2, BeOS, etc. It's just that Microsoft had enough users that they could parlay their OS monopoly into an everything-else monopoly just by cutting competitors out. Google seems to be in a similar position as far as market penetration goes (to counter your anecdote, I actually know people who visit Yahoo by typing "www.yahoo.com" into the Google search box), so the question here is basically whether Google is doing bad things with its hold over the market.

Agreed. However, like mfb mentioned: >As a bonus, the switching costs for changing your search provider are approximately zero. This means that if you don't like the services that google offers, you can simply choose not to use google, without any overhead in time or money. In the case of an OS, it is much more difficult, first to install on your machine, get used to the UI etcetc. Microsoft could take advantage of this fact to force whatever software it wanted, and users essentially had no option but to comply.

That's true as well, but the accusation here is anticompetitive behavior — they're not complaining that Google is dominant in search, but that Google is taking unfair advantage of its dominance — so the fact that users can switch easily is really neither here nor there.

Any such rejection should be based on evidence. That evidence should be in terms of both ratio of query volume and ad revenue.

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