You're missing the part where the money Google spends comes back to it in even more ad revenue. Google doesn't pay Apple for access to data. They pay it for traffic that makes them ad money.

If Microsoft spent those billions, it would be receiving ad revenue too.

It's not money thrown down the drain. And it's not for "data".

There's nothing anticompetitive here when it comes to Microsoft choosing whether or not to enter the market.

It's not about acquiring some magic level of data. A startup doesn't have data. Microsoft does. It's not an issue.

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keeda a day ago | parent [-]

At this point we are just re-litigating all the things that came out in the trial. Yes, traffic comes with ad revenue, but it also comes with user interaction data which helps it improve its results and maintain its monopoly. Without this data, a competitor cannot offer competitive search results and hence will not be able to command the same ad revenues and hence cannot sustain the level of traffic acquisition costs that Google's monopoly profits can. Google has built an amazing self-reinforcing money-generating flywheel which is effectively a chicken-and-egg problem for everybody else.

Again, the court specifically called this out as a key pillar underpinning Google's monopoly, and this is why the proposed remedies, such as they may be, are all around sharing search and user interaction data.

I'm not sure on what empirical basis you keep asserting that Microsoft has the necessary money and data, but the court's findings, based on tons of evidence, indicate otherwise.

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crazygringo 16 hours ago | parent [-]

I've clearly explained the empirical basis of Microsoft's existing massive data and traffic and money in absolute terms. I don't know what further explanation you want. The court is right that search startups are at a massive data disadvantage. Microsoft unquestionably is not with their massive traffic in absolute terms over a decade and a half. But the judge can't really say Google has to share data with smaller search companies but not Microsoft.

You're confusing startups with one of the largest, richest companies in the world.

	▲	keeda 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Simply pointing to large absolute numbers does not address the fact that all this was brought up during the trial, and it was shown that even Microsoft -- the largest, richest company in the world, with all that data and multiple billions of dollars -- could not compete meaningfully with Google. The ruling has many data points showing those absolute numbers are meaningless compared to the scale of Google. If you want to talk money, MSFT was willing to offer Apple more than 100% of their ad revenues but still could not get the deal because Google could pay so much more. If you want to talk data, some of the findings: - Thirteen months of user data acquired by Google is equivalent to over 17 years of data on Bing - (98.4% of unique phrases seen only by Google, 1% by Bing; 99.8% of tail queries on Google not seen at all by Bing) - "The disparity is even more pronounced on mobile. There, Google receives nineteen times more queries than all of its other rivals put together" The idea that Microsoft simply decided not to "try hard enough" is countered by the fact that the court found that they did try and still failed, which was actually key proof that Google ran an anti-competitive monopoly. You're welcome to disagree with the courts' findings, but ideally you'd do so after considering all the evidence that turned up at the trial ¯\_(ツ)_/¯