If you’re a search engine competitor of Google’s, and Google owns the largest browser and mobile OS and pays the remaining browsers to make them the default, your business is vastly less likely to succeed. This holds even if customers could go out of their way to use your service. That’s what I understood this verdict to have determined. Unfortunately the remedy is bad and pointless, but that’s a separate matter.

Cutting Google accounts out of your life, however, is an entirely different undertaking that would take much longer and have a big impact on how you use the web.

If you are in the business of selling goods can you afford to walk away from Google? Remember you as consumer are not the customer but the product.

It is though when you realise 60% of their revenue is from people clicking on "nike" to go to "nike.com".

You cannot have a website anymore without paying tribute to gatekeeper Google.

Consumers can switch any time they want, but there is no incentive for them, they don't have to pay when googling for "nike".

But even though there are only 3 companies in the world that build what I build, all those three companies pay thousands of euros a month so users can find them, even on the exact search terms.

> but if you, literally anyone reading this, can stop using Google search on every device you own in the next 5 minutes,

No you can't do this in 5 mins across all your devices. Not unless you are running some software program to achieve this which will override a tonne of defaults and hidden settings. And some devices will always use Google search.

Maybe if your only device is a barebones Linux PC.

The EU uses the term "Gatekeeper"

What about the special access granted by many websites to the Google scraper?

I agree with this sentiment actually. Now if Meta gets a "slap on the wrist" that, says a lot.

That's the wrong lens to use. Determine monopolies based on the view of a potential competitor.

Say I'm a new search engine startup that has some better tech than Google has, we invented a better wheel. How hard would it be to compete on merit?

We can, but what about all the people who type facebook into the browser address bar to get to Facebook.com per Google?

> literally anyone reading this, can stop using Google search on every device you own in the next 5 minutes

Yeah sure you can avoid typing google.com and think you just ghosted Google forever, but that won't end Google's relationship with you as it runs deeper than you know through its advertisement and tracking platform.

And what about services beyond search at this point?

Youtube, GMail, Google Calendar, GoogleFi, Maps, Play store (movies, apps), Photos, Drive.

I can try stop using those services immediately, but with a huge cost of data and connectivity loss (there's no easy email redirection, accounts are usually tied to emails). You'll also miss out on things that don't have a nice alternative and you are socially pulled into (green/blue messages in iMessage within the US or having WhatsApp abroad), can you stop clicking into links to documents, presentations and videos that people share?

Google should be forced to spin off advertising.

Unfortunately I don't think we're going to get the chance to try again. This, and Apple's upcoming case which they'll probably get off free as well, was our chance.

These companies are now even more emboldened, and with market caps bigger than the GDP of most countries, there is no one to stop them. Every politician has a number, and this administration has shown that open bribes are legal and expected.

Good luck prosecuting any big tech when they can pay billions of dollars to the administration to make anything go away.

Wait, are you trying to blame this decision on Kamala Harris not pre-committing to keeping an anti-trust advocate in the FTC? I'm not sure if you noticed, but Kamala Harris is not president and never made these decisions about the FTC. I guarantee you her decisions would have been night and day better than the fraud currently inhabiting the whitehouse.

Maybe I'm just misinterpreting your words.

In most of these convos I usually see both sides with it being more heavily weighted to being corpo-friendly, but certainly individuals who are tired of monopolies and manipulations by oligopolies. So that's hardly a "beehive mind"

Instead of the blunt hammer of disinvestment of brands, the government should be putting limits on Big Tech's ability to lock consumers and business into their platforms, whether via exclusive search deals, preventing alternative app stores, or hardware-tied communication networks. Those practices are ultimately what harms consumer choice. This decision only seems to address the first of those.

It seems that Big Tech's ingratiation of itself to the current administration using money and lent "credibility" is yielding their desired slaps on the wrists when a spanking was justified by the harm they have done to consumers.

Chrome is the most popular browser, if you disconnect that then you cut off google's guaranteed control of the default search engine. That's just a hunch though. Same with Android which is the most popular mobile OS in the world.

Presumably other search companies will be on a more even footing with google with regards to what they know about you to sell to advertisers if google doesn't also have your complete search history and a complete history of everything you do on your phone.

There's a reason nobody remembers: the DoJ announced it was no longer seeking the breakup of Microsoft on September 6, 2001. A few days later, 9/11 occurred, and all other news was erased.

I'm not suggesting a conspiracy, by the way, just stating the facts.

Only if people keep using them. But user agency is still a thing - and there are alternatives ;)

> let your homegrown champions stay strong and keep getting stronger.

...Until they start getting banned abroad because your government openly tries to manipulate election in ally countries. And once that happens, you're perpetually weaker and your reputation is done for a century.

People arguing for this kind of hard power are just too weak-minded to understand the extent and strength of US' historical soft power.

> markets don't work the way libertarians think.

Well, if you keep pushing down that line, markets won't work at all, and welcome back to 19th century's gunboat policy, except people have nukes now.