The idea that a severance of Google’s alleged monopoly would cause a collapse of the competition actually undermines Mozilla’s point and strengthen’s the US’s point, ironically enough.
there's a history of monopolists supporting weaker firms in order to create the illusion of competition. This shouldn't fool anyone who is well versed in anti-trust history and enforcement.
Bill Gates had enough faith in its effectiveness to do it with Apple (basically handing them free money by buying non-voting shares with a certain arrangement).
There was on-going litigation and cross license negotiations at the time Steve Jobs became CEO, after Apple's the purchase of NeXT. The $150 million investment in stock by Microsoft was part of the settlement.
An interesting factoid, but of course you don't think that Microsoft made that investment in their then-failing competitor because they expected a good return. Right?
> The idea that a severance of Google’s alleged monopoly would cause a collapse of the competition actually undermines Mozilla’s point and strengthen’s the US’s point, ironically enough.
It might strengthen the US's case that there is an antitrust problem, but if the remedies don't actually fix the problem but instead make things worse, it certainly undercuts their case for the remedy.
Is that true? The breakup of Ma Bell probably caused all kinds of short term pain, but in the long term it helped consumers. I don’t think that the short term pain is a great rationale to not enforce antitrust law, if Google indeed meets that standard.
Firefox's waning market share and need to suckle upon Google's teat to survive will only get worse and more dependent with time. So if Google doesn't meet all the qualifications of a monopoly now, it'll be much worse if the US waits to take action.
But they can literally already do that right now. Google just pays more. Nothing forces them to go with Google — they even switched to Yahoo for a bit.
This only ends with Mozilla getting less money since without Google bidding the value of the placement goes down.
If it becomes illegal to pay to set a search engine as default then they wouldn't be able to make those deals. Mozilla would lose all their money and the browser would die.
> If it becomes illegal to pay to set a search engine as default
Just as the Microsoft antitrust case was never about whether it was legal to bundle a browser with an OS, but whether Microsoft's particular act of doing so was illegally leveraging a monopoly in the desktop OS market into other markets, the Google case isn't about whether its legal to pay to set a search engine as a default but whether by doing so Google was illegally protecting an existing search monopoly.
You can't just ignore the relevance of the market power premise of antitrust cases to which it is central and pretend they are about the actions without regard to market power.
If you make it illegal for Google to pay for it but legal for others to pay for it, then you basically enforced that all search engine defaults will not be the most popular one since they will all pay for that position while Google can't. Then the status quo is much better.
