The U.S. Department of Justice’s 10-week antitrust trial against Google is underway, and it has the potential to spell big trouble for the Mountain View tech giant. The Justice Department, along with several individual states, claim that Google was able to reach its status as the dominant company in search through anti-competitive means. Now, the company has reached monopoly status and everything needs to be investigated.
Google, of course, denies that deals like this are anti-competitive. It also argues that even though so much money was paid for this feature placement no effort is made to block users from easily switching to another search engine. Consumers stick with Google because it’s better, and Google Search’s market dominance was reached because it makes a quality product according to Google.
Yeah, thats not how consumers think at all. The consumer gets presented with a default search provider (google) so they will use that. They don’t care about other ways of searching for information, porn, or drama.
Also I don’t think that Google Search is a quality product anymore. Too often do I find Ads in between the results which also are of low quality (some pages are utterly domineering like reddit or fandom wikis).
Just my assumption, not a fact: I think even if consumers were prompted to choose a search engine and Google was on the bottom of the list, the majority would pick Google. Obviously that too is a sign of Google’s dominance.
And while many people seem to get more and more frustrated with the Google search engine, the competition is either not better, Bing or uses Google/Bing in the back.
