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Comment by messh | Hacker News Reader

How is this not monopolistic behavior?

Yeah, I read this and immediately thought “tying arrangement.” But they’re not CHARGING separately for search and AI, so I doubt a tying theory would hold up in court.

Their search engine is now integrated with Ai. So either google would need to block the search engine or the school if they don't want Ai. Take your pick.

That's the same argument Microsoft made with Internet Explorer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

A lot of these schools use tablets though. The kids probably use their phones so more likely to be google. Higher grades though use laptops I think so more likely Microsoft then. So far internet explorer is not integrated with Ai but microsoft copilot though is 100% ai and can be used for search.

I'm not talking about Copilot, I'm talking about IE6 back in the 90s, where Microsoft took the "oh woe is us it'll be so hard to undo the deep unnecessary integration we built for this very purpose" tactic.

I agree with that view point.. yup

Billy Gates swore on a bible that Internet Explorer could not be removed and lied his ass off.

Profited very handsomely from his lies.

That happened before some of the readers of this thread were born. A summary for those people, from the fog of distant memories: MS had an Internet Explorer that was not integrated in Windows, it was like any other browser. Then they decided to build it inside Windows. I remember that the Windows desktop got web views like widgets (web view as a name probably did not exist yet) and they called it Active Desktop. I think that it as COM/OLE objects too and the web view was probably one of them. File Explorer itself got an Internet Explorer like skin, probably with single click to navigate directories and open files, as if they were links. Then they claimed that it was impossible to disentangle IE from Windows. That eventually paved the way to the ruling against MS.

When I hear a giant company say that modifying some of its software is impossible I always think about that IE and laugh.

And what was the end result there?

Microsoft was successfully forced to unbundle IE?

Not really? In the US it kept being bundled by default, they just made it possible to disable the front end; the MSHTML rendering engine was unremovable.

It doesn't even exist any more, and they were required to open up APIs to third-party browser makers. We'd be worse off without the settlement.

They just renamed it to Edge when they rebooted the UI. It's still a bundled browser, indeed the bundling is more aggressive than ever.

Edge is Chromium. Their competitor's engine.

It is now, but it initially did use Trident. I was on the IE team when Edge launched.

Does "Microsoft now bundles Google's browser engine" really scream "won the browser wars" to you?

Do you not think the settlement requiring APIs be opened up helped enable Chrome at all?

No, because the post-settlement era was actually the era of consolidated IE dominance. Chrome only started because MS, in their (unbroken by the FTC) dominance had sat around doing nothing for the web, which was bad for a web-based company like Google. Chrome also avoided using platform APIs because they wanted to be cross-platform.

Their search engine will omit "AI" summaries if you add &udm=14 to the query URL.

I added a custom search engine entry to firefox that does this, made it the default, and haven't seen an AI summary from Google since I did that.

That filter does much more, it removes all the "first party" results, AI or otherwise. You are better off with adding "-ai" to the query.

Even then, -ai doesn't always follow directions.

Google has a severe problem with consent.

Obviously they have at least a back-end search service that isn't tangled up with an LLM. When Gemini says "Searching the web..." it isn't chatbots all the way down. Google just needs to make a human UI for the same search Gemini uses.

It depends if you ask it a question or simply specify an object I think.

It’s not integrated, they are lying

Yeah sure "integrated".

Hiding one div is 90% of the solution.

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