Business Insider: ‘Google Is Trying to Convince Congress It Has Search Competition’

Nick Bastone, reporting for Business Insider:

“In our core search business, consumers can choose among a range of options: Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and many more,” Cohen said. “Specialized search services are strong competitors, too, including companies like Amazon, eBay, Kayak, Travelocity, Yelp, and others.”

But recent statistics paint a different picture. According to StatCounter, Google accounts for over 92% of the search engine market share worldwide as of this June.

Its closest competitor, Bing, accounted for just over 2.5% of the market.

Competition isn’t the right word. Yes, there are competing search engines, clearly. The right word is monopoly, and it’s just as clear that Google has a very strong monopoly on the search engine market. Monopolies aren’t illegal — but monopoly holders are subject to regulations that non-monopoly competitors are not. That’s the issue. Google’s argument shouldn’t be to simply say that they have competition, it should be to say that they compete fairly.

That might be a tough argument for them to make while under oath.

★ Tuesday, 16 July 2019