Google has allegedly rigged the market in its favour by locking in its search engine as the 'default' choice in a whole range of places.
👉 Background: Google is the absolute behemoth that has brought us search, ads, Chrome, maps, email browser and everything else. But now, the US Department of Justice lawyers are coming after Google in an antitrust lawsuit, or anti-competitive behaviour as we call it in Australia.
👉 What happened: DOJ believe that Google has rigged the market in its favour by locking in its search engine as the 'default' choice in a whole range of places (think: Safari, Firefox and more). Google is reportedly paying more than $10 billion USD per year to these companies for the privilege.
👉 What else: As a result, Google has about 90 per cent of the internet search market and the Department of Justice allege that Google has gained an unfair advantage against competitors.
💡User data is the oxygen for a successful search engine - so when a company can pay for access, it can win the market.
💡Because of its market dominance, Google's search and ad products are better than its rivals can ever hope to be. And, this is a cycle
💡But if Google loses this case, it may be forced to stop paying Apple and other companies for access to becoming the default search engine. And this would break the cycle, and potentially break Google's dominance in the search engine.
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