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Comment by bbqfog | Hacker News Reader

This is a great argument for breaking up Google because they've created an anti-competitive environment where other parties cannot succeed without Google gatekeeping them.

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Sincerely asking... help me connect the dots there? Suppose Google is broken up into separate businesses, one for search and one for ads. Is the idea that the search side would have no incentive to show hotel search results on a map? I'm not seeing the connection between the breakup proposal and the features discussed in the post.

No the idea would be that the search would lose its ability to be a monopoly because Chrome + Search + Maps + Android... would stop artificially propping it up in the market. There would be many search engines and the ability for one to drastically impact other industries with UI changes would go away.

>There would be many search engines and the ability for one to drastically impact other industries with UI changes would go away.

Honestly that's just wishful thinking. Generally these monopolies, regardless of 'artificial propping up' tend to be fairly natural monopolies and these sorts of changes just make it harder on people to get the experience they had before and prefer.

Not true, look at what happened to Internet Explorer after MS was forced to allow people to uninstall it.

It's not clear to me what point you're making. What happened to IE specifically when MS was forced to allow people to uninstall it?

The same happens in android, you get a prompt to select your browser in a new phone (not sure if that is eu or not), similar in ios.

But there already are many search engines?

I recently got a couple of new windows laptops and Edge defaulted to Bing, but after changing away from Bing it is relentlessly trying to make me set Bing as the default search engine every few days.

Note that I am using Edge here, not Chrome. Last time I installed Chrome I think it forced me to pick a default search engine, and didn't endlessly harass me to pick Google as its default (I use duck duck go)

I don't see how they could break up Google without forcing MS and Apple to also be broken up too since they're doing the same things with forcing Edge/Bing and Safari on everyone.

MS has all the same issues as Google, this is why they can release inferior product and have it survive in the market. I also use DuckDuckGo as would many other people if you severed Google Search's monopolistic lifelines.

Edge, Bing, and Safari do not have majority market share. It would still please me to see these companies broken up. They have their own obnoxious and/or harmful practices that are the result or of attempts to be monopolistic.

I would be surprised to learn that MS does not have majority market share in desktop OSes. Windows still seems to be the default choice - Mac OS and Chrome must be tiny in comparison?

Edit: Windows is 73%, closest is Mac OS at 15% (which was way higher than I expected) https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...

Presumably the affiliate links (including hotel booking links) would not be there to create a perverse incentive.

what this is showing is simply more of google abusing their monopoly. making linking to maps from search harder and inconvenient for users does not help the users, nor smaller independent companies, nor really anybody at all. but that's because even with complying with the law, google is purposefully using its monopoly to make compliance as annoying and unhelpful as possible.

what should be happening is that the provider of the maps app is nothing to do with google search and then if your favorite map provider can plug-in to the search results in a seamless way it wouldn't be an anti-trust issue at all. it would benefit all parties. instead google opts to, and who can expect different, maximize the annoyance to their already captive users and minimize their negative business impact (e.g. sending anyone to somebody else's map app).

but they certainly aren't going to voluntarily break themselves up because some regulation that can be implemented in a way that's annoying to their users. who still have no viable other options, btw.

the root cause of the annoyances the users are now facing is both caused by googles monopolistic behavior in the first place and then them weaponizing their own captive users to push back on any regulations trying to stem it. a significant contributing factor is regulations like these are do more harm than good.

the right answer for abusive monopolies is to 1) don't let them form and 2) break them up when they do. chicken-shit regulation like this will only have the predictable result - avoidance, annoyance, no-real-change. and, as you alude, simply make everything worse for everyone.

Why should the other parties succeed? IE the aggregator sites? Is it merely because they exist?

If I make an aggregator aggregator, should I be able to demand placement on Google search results above mere aggregator sites?

Other parties should succeed because it's good for me, the consumer. If I need to take a trip, it's not in my interest at all for Google to be in the value chain and for me to pay the monopoly penalty as a consumer.

But Google was prevented from showing you direct links to directly book on the suppliers website. How is forcing users to go through an aggregator(and include them in the value chain) beneficial for users?

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