Again, I'm not against regulation or breaking up oligopolies. There are good reasons to criticise various aspects of Google's dominant position. But I'm against doing it for the breathtakingly terrible reason that they are posting too many ads.
Breaking up Google wouldn't fix that, and we cannot take all decisions away from users based on the argument that users are somehow manipulated. This is a blanket excuse for taking away any and all freedoms and responsibilities from everybody.
If we regulate Google, it has to be to guarantee a level playing field and to prevent the abuse of a dominant market position. We shouldn't regulate to force certain usability preferences upon users.
I think that if Google was prevented (somehow) to pay for user acquisition that would actually be enough to allow competition in.
They use billions each year to acquire users, even though they are a dominant market share. Why would they do it? They have the users already, and a great product by the way. Reality, however, is that are no really acquiring the users... they are just increasing the price so that no-one else can acquire them and start a "real" competitor.
Breaking up Google could easily fix the large amount of ads.
The market would become competitive again, so if Google 1 started showing less ads than Google 2, people would switch. Right now I'm not switching to Duck for reasons that originate from the fact that Google is a monopoly.
- I'm used to Google's UI (yes, Duck's is similar but I'm sensitive even to subtle changes).
- I would have to change my default search provider on all browsers I use.
- I would have to take some time to verify that Duck is as good as Google.
2. Search quality and features.
- After a quick comparison, Google seems slightly better at search. Another factor is that even if both seemed similar, switching to Duck would give me anxiety that I'm using the worse product because the prior probability that Google is better is high.
- Google has various little features that Duck doesn't, for example search for "pomegranate nutrition" or "trump age".
Google can profitably invest much more into their product than Duck, because they have much more users.
> I'm used to Google's UI (yes, Duck's is similar but I'm sensitive even to subtle changes).
Google's UI also changes from time to time. When that happens next time, use that opportunity to switch since you have to adjust to change anyway.
> I would have to take some time to verify that Duck is as good as Google.
If you start using Duck, and you come across a search where it doesn't give you what you're looking for, just append "!g" to the query to get redirected back to Google. That made switching rather pleasant for me, knowing that the "escape hatch" is only a few keypresses away.
> After a quick comparison, Google seems slightly better at search.
It seems to depend on the person. For technical searches, Duck is usually much better because they embed numerous sources as Instant Answers (Stack Overflow, MDN, GitHub, etc.)
> Google has various little features that Duck doesn't
Breaking up Google wouldn't fix that, and we cannot take all decisions away from users based on the argument that users are somehow manipulated. This is a blanket excuse for taking away any and all freedoms and responsibilities from everybody.
If we regulate Google, it has to be to guarantee a level playing field and to prevent the abuse of a dominant market position. We shouldn't regulate to force certain usability preferences upon users.