I was just reading some conversations on Mastodon about whether the antitrust ruling against Google will end up actually hurting them.
As a matter of principle, I am all for these sorts of rulings. I hope that the DOJ has a bunch more cases in the pipeline against the rest of the big tech companies. Maybe we can start making some incremental progress against the ridiculous “Monopolies are fine as long as consumer prices don’t go up” standard.
In the near term, though, I suspect there will be no real change. Even if Google were no longer set as the default search engine in the various browsers they have been bribing, I am highly skeptical that the number of people who even understand that they can select a different search engine is remotely significant.
If you are one of the people who has been following this antitrust case, or one of the people who understands that you can change the default search engine in your browser (and why you might want to), you are in a group the size of which is not going to make a difference to Google’s search business. The people who would have to change their behavior in order to make a difference are the ones who do not understand that a search engine and a browser and an operating system are separate things. They are the people—the vast majority of users, I would wager—for whom their phone or laptop (to say nothing of the OS and software that run on it) is simply a tool. It’s like trying to convince someone that they should change out the speedometer or turn-signal lever in their car.
If presented with a list of search engines to choose from when they start up a new device for the first time, my guess is that most people are going to go with Google anyway, because that’s the one that they know. And sure—that’s the one that they know precisely because of Google’s monopolistic practices, but it’s still the only one they know.
To really make a difference, I think you would have to do something crazy like have browsers randomly choose a difference search engine on startup—or even every time a search is run—and then give users the option to permanently set it to one of their choosing. Otherwise, I think most people are going to just keep going with what they know.