In the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google for allegedly monopolizing internet searches, lawyers are arguing in federal court about how many swipes and taps it takes to switch search engines.
Apple’s iPhone has Google as its default search engine. Google paid Apple for that privilege. When a user searches in Safari, Apple’s Web browser, that search is run through Google by default.
The OJ argues that this arrangement is illegal because it means Google is monopolizing searches. Some monopoly: You can change search engines on an iPhone with four taps and a swipe.
Apple senior vice president Eddy Cue walked the court through how to change search engines. Bloomberg reports:
“The Settings app, by default when you buy a new phone, is on the main screen,” he said. “When you tap on that Settings, you get a list.” He went on: “You tap on Safari, and then you have ‘search engine’ listed there. It would show you what the current search engine is that you’re using as the default. And then if you tap it, you get a list of choices, and you can pick any of them.”
“Not a difficult process,” Cue said.
Doesn’t seem too bad. Google’s attorney demonstrated that removing Google’s search widget from the home screen of Google’s own Android phones is even easier, taking only two taps.
“Lawyers for the government and Google have sounded at times over the past month of court proceedings like user-interface (UI) designers, with prosecutors debating the significance of iconography, toggle buttons and drop-down menus,” says Bloomberg. They aren’t UI designers, and they shouldn’t become UI designers.
The consumer-welfare standard should help spare us from this kind of Monday-morning quarterbacking from attorneys in a courtroom. The question that should be guiding the proceedings is whether consumers are harmed by Google’s dominance, not how well it does compared to other search engines.
The people most upset by Google’s search-engine dominance aren’t consumers. It’s Microsoft. The other tech giant’s Bing search engine has failed to catch on with consumers, despite the company’s best efforts over several years. It partly blames Apple for making Google the default search engine on its iPhones.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was a witness for the government. Bloomberg reports:
In his testimony, Nadella suggested there could be profound consequences for innovation in AI and whatever comes next if the tech industry continues on this path of paid-for software placements. He claimed Bing’s own attempts at paying for defaults failed because Microsoft was too late. Habits were hard to break when Google reached 97% market share on mobile: “You get up, you brush your teeth, and you search on Google,” Nadella said.
But wait a minute, Microsoft does that too:
Nadella didn’t argue against defaults altogether. After all, Microsoft uses a similar system of promoting its in-house software. But Nadella accused Google of deploying its defaults to unfairly impair other companies. He gave an example of Google removing its app store if phone makers don’t set Chrome as the default browser on their Android devices. “That is the type of stuff that is impossible to overcome,” Nadella said. “Google has carrots, and it has massive sticks.”
Just like Microsoft used to:
It’s worth remembering that Microsoft effectively leveraged its dominance in similar ways as Nadella accused Google of doing, said Tom Evslin, a former product director at Microsoft in the early 1990s. If Microsoft hadn’t lost its grip on the browser and mobile markets in the following decades, it might still be engaged in the same practices. “For Microsoft to complain just because it’s been losing for a while seems to be somewhat hypocritical,” Evslin said in an interview.
This case is more about rival tech giants trying to settle old scores than it is about what’s good for tech users. The DOJ antitrust division should stick to the consumer-welfare standard and stop trying to redesign apps through litigation.