Privacy

31224 readers

902 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 4 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

457

Google faces a £7 billion lawsuit for blocking search engine competition at the expense of consumers (consumervoice.uk)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

18 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The lawsuit argues that Google has effectively ‘bought’ the UK mobile phone search engine market. Google forced mobile phone handset manufacturers to pre-install the Google Search and Google Chrome browser apps on devices that use Google’s Android operating system in order to obtain a licence to use Google Play.

Google also unlawfully paid billions to Apple to ensure that it was the default search engine on iPhones and other devices that used Apple’s iOS operating system. In 2019, Google paid £1.2 billion to Apple in the UK to be the default search engine on the Safari browser.

It is claimed that Google has used its market dominance to effectively charge advertisers over the odds. Costs were then passed on to such an extent that all consumers ended up paying higher prices for goods and services sold by brands that have advertised on the platform.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I tend to be pretty pessimistic about these cases. Even if the UK Govt win, Google won't change anything, or if they do the change will be subtle enough to not have any impact

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm not so sure, if it is quite expensive and carries on being quite expensive, they may need to make changes to default search or default browsers. If this can help people get Firefox easier, this could start to chip away at the viability of WEI (web DRM).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

quite expensive

this is a £7 billion fine against a company that can afford to pay apple £1.2 billion for a system default...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Because they gain more from it. They pay Firefox for default search. There is a return on investment. $7bn is a larger cost and would need greater revenue from those activities to justify it. Whether they do or not, from the UK market, we'll have to wait and see, but it is a reasonable dint.