No. of Recommendations: 7
My gut tells me this sounds worse than it is. If forced to select a default search engine, I suspect most people would still select google for the name recognition. People who would want something different are probably already using something else. I personally use DuckDuckGo.
I have a similar gut feeling but that might be only because they have not had major restrictions in the past, giving a false sense of confidence.
The following struck me howeve: During the trial Judge Mehta said the evidence at trial showed the importance of the default settings. He noted that Microsoft's Bing search engine had 80 per cent share of the search market on the Microsoft Edge browser. If this is true, it is pretty striking. It indicates not just subtle but very signifiant market share could be lost if Google was not locked in as the predetermined default option.
Asvertising is 50% of their revenue, excluding YouTube advertising which is expect relies very little on the browser’s default search engine (though even here, there can be network effects such as Google search favouring YouTube over Rumble and others, and feeding the popularity).
I want to fact check that the Edge browser really has Bing with an 80% search sharing, owing to Bing being the default search. If this is true then the salient question is what would Google’s search market share fall to if it was not the default search on Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Opera - presently Google is the default search from the address bar of all these browser.
To check proportionality, if the market share fell from 80% to 50% - which is more than I would expect - then that inplies revenue (50% of which is advertising) falling about 19%.
They would conversely benefit by not paying enormous fees to Apple to maintain this monopoly. Google paid Apple $20 billion in 2022 to be Safari's default search engine. With about $282 in 2022 revenue this 20 billion is anyway 7%, which recovers over a third of what would be lost in the previous paragraph. This sanity check does indeed show why Google are willing to pay such a colossal bribe to Apple.
The court is yet to decide on actions required by Google, though they have been deemed as breaking the law in being monopolistic, so unless their appeal is extremely successful they will need to either stop paying gigantic fees to preserve their position as the défaut search, or possibly have an outright ban on being the default search on mobile and desktop.
- Manlobbi
