Aren't anti-trust laws meant to benefit the consumer?
I fail to see how the remedy proposed by the EU (this bidding/auction method) is benefiting me, the consumer, when the most popular Google alternative is eliminated from the options because they don't monetize as aggressively.
Enter Microsofts browser ballot screen that they were required to show in Europe. Broken randomness and half a dozen IE skins to game the requirement. Main requirements should be: do not let the fox guard the hen house.
Is there some threshold? Can any fork of Chromium make it on there? Can a company make 10 different forks to increase their chance? What if someone gets a really bad roll and sees 5 really shitty ones they don't know or like? How is that putting the user first?
Question is: why restrict the # of providers shown at all?
They could show a semi-random segmented ranking:
- split all companies into X buckets by ranking
- pick the top from each bucket from 1 to X, then the second best from each bucket etc.
The winners of the Q4 auction has a lot of companies I've never heard of like PrivacyWall, info.com, and GMX mixed in with Bing, Yandex and DDG, so it does seem like the way it's set up does introduce some variety. Like Yahoo is the #3 search engine, but doesn't even show up in the list.
Can you send the Q4 winner list, or where we can find it? I'm interested in seeing the list. Maybe one of these small search engines will be better in some way.
I'm kind of very curious about some of the small names on it. Like how do they have more money than DDG. PirvacyWall seems to be using the Bing API like DDG, so I just don't see how they'd be about to outspend DDG so easily.
> PirvacyWall seems to be using the Bing API like DDG, so I just don't see how they'd be about to outspend DDG so easily.
They probably are private-equity/venture-funded and are a bet on trying to capture some of the market which they can monetize for more than they spent on the auction.
e: well they appear to be a class B corp, so actually perhaps not
There are two different problems at play. The anti-trust one (Google using its dominance in mobile to boost its own search product) is solved by forcing them to offer alternative defaults. The other problem you are alluding to (user privacy I assume?) is unrelated to this, and there are already laws like GDPR in place to address that.
I fail to see how the remedy proposed by the EU (this bidding/auction method) is benefiting me, the consumer, when the most popular Google alternative is eliminated from the options because they don't monetize as aggressively.