Comment by benoau
16 hours ago
They blocked Perplexity via agreements, amongst many agreements to fortify their monopoly, the legality of which has been challenged in court and this testimony is to demonstrate that this agreement also belongs in the "illegal" bucket.
Google Cloud has also gotten a huge boost from large retailers who, understandably, don't want to run their software on Amazon owned AWS.
When I asked out of curiosity why not Azure, especially given that these companies almost all use Office, Teams, Outlook, etc. several have told me it's because of Google Shopping and SEO. Though never formally stated or part of the contract it's often mentioned by Google that "They already have a relationship" with these companies via the feeds they provide for those products. And there are consistent talking point among the GCP sales reps about how they "help deliver you customers" and you "shouldn't fund a competitor".
Obviously not the same thing but it does indicate that Google isn't afraid to leverage their search monopoly in the other parts of their business.
> And there are consistent talking point among the GCP sales reps about how they "help deliver you customers" and you "shouldn't fund a competitor".
I wonder how much of it is Google asking them to do that, versus quotas and incentives that make anything else untenable.
The latter is a well-known phenomenon, if your sales reps are under enough pressure, they will eventually resort to illegal tactics that make your company look bad, even if they're never explicitly told to do so.
Another way to look at this is through an evolutionary lens; the salesmen that do the right thing can't possibly perform as well as those that don't, so they're fired / never promoted. It's not that all salesmen are evil, it's that, in such an environment, only the evil ones have a chance, all without managements knowledge or approval.
HSBC is the most famous example where this happened, to the point of their bank employees knowingly assisting gangs and cartels in laundering money.
I doubt it's because of that. Being a user of those msft products like Teams, it is more likely that they don't want another msft product if they can avoid it. why would you want bugs on top of bugs?
Agreed. Anyone who's tried Azure non-trivially knows why to use GCP.
I think that's most likely something that some sales guy came up with on his own.
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This is wildly wrong. Ever since the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 (1) companies are forbidden from using monopoly powers to force other parties to sign deals, which is the question about which Perplexity is testifying- whether Google is using it's market monopoly power in one area (cell phone operating systems) to force other companies to sign deals that unfairly hurt competitors in a different market (AI assistants). And that's been illegal for a very long time.
1: Named for John Sherman, General William Sherman's younger brother, who was a Senator from Ohio. That's how long this law has been around!
Google could be running foul of antitrust laws if forcing Gemini as default on Android OEM's is part of the standard contract required to use the Android brand.
The use of the android brand is allowed to be used by anything passing the compatibility test suite. That doesn't have any Google specific requirements afaik. Contracts with Google only come into play when trying to utilize Google play services or google play store in your product.
You mean like two people agreeing to sell drugs to each other? Organs? Prostitution?
mmm, which part of the constitution? I remember one explicit delegation to the federal government of the cross border trade, plus a long list of items that people are forbidden from trading freely, plus, recently, a long list of items where the government meddles by imposing taxes on imported trade.
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They are
True, but this just added extra visibility to the anti trust case