My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bunjelung Calcottin woman from Gadigol Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.
You start recording, we'll start spitting rhymes. Boo boo, boo boo. Come on, good morning and welcome to the Daily os It's Thursday, the fourteenth of September. I'm Sam, I'm Zara. Google is in court this week facing allegations it is illegally dominating the Internet. A trial pitting the US government against tech giant Google began.
Today, the government's biggest antitrust case against a tech company in more than twenty years.
This is going to be the tech trial of the century, at least so far.
In today's date dive, we're going to look at what's being argued in this case and what it means for you. But first, some more news from Quantas.
That's right, more news this time.
It's that the High Court has found that the airline acted illegally when it sacked roughly seventeen hundred baggage handlers back in twenty twenty. The High Court was considering an appeal from Quantus, who had already lost twice before Quantus accepted the decision and said it deeply regretted the impact the sacking had on the workers.
The federal government's housing Bill has passed the Senate. It comes after the government secured support from the Greens by including an extra one billion with a bee to fund short term social housing projects. It will now be signed off in the House of Representatives before it can become law.
Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong un have met in Russia. Images of the pair show the two leaders shaking hands, with Pudin leading Kim through a tour of a Russian space base. Pudin is expected to ask for North Korean weapons to help Russia's efforts in Ukraine during incoming talks.
And today's good news good news for every Tease Swift fan out there. Taylor Swift has taken out a record nine MTV Video Music Awards on Tuesday. Zara, You're a very curious soul, aren't you?
I mean, I think so.
My partner actually recently told me that he thinks I'm not because I don't try.
New things interesting.
It's a podcast for another time.
Yeah, wow, that's that's the TDA up late podcast. In the case that you are curious and you have Internet browser handy, where do you go to find your answers?
I'd say Google.
Yeah, this is a very typical response, and you won't be surprised to hear that Google accounts for about ninety percent of search engine markets globally.
Now I'm actually surprised. I actually would have thought it was more interesting.
Wow. Well, I think you have to remember that there are other competitors out there. You've got Bing, You've got Duck Duck Go. You've also got a Cozier. I didn't even know that was a thing until today, But there are competitors floating around. And there's this legal case in the US that's investigating where the Google's monopolization of the market breaks antitrust laws by preventing proper competition.
Can you just say that in layperson English, because I feel like there was a lot of jargon in that sentence.
Lots of jargons. So let's break it down. So the Department of Justice, and we'll call them the DOJ, it's suing Google in the US for creating what it says is an unfair playing field that other search engines can't compete in. And when we say anti trust laws, it's basically this body of law in the US that prohibits
anti competitive behavior. It is kind of like the laws that we have here in Australia, and we've spent some time on this podcast talking about them in the last week or so in the context of Qatar Airways and competition in relation to Quantus. Now, in this US case, the DOJ's arguing that Google is a monopoly gatekeeper for the Internet, and they're alleging that the company has used anti competitive techniques to build a search engine empire.
What are some of the techniques that they're suggesting might be anti competitive.
Well, one of the main ways that the DOJ is arguing Google's got this unfair advantage is these deals that Google is doing with the makers of phones and computers in order for those phones and computers to have the default search engine on the devices as Google. Now, according to the DOJ's case, every year Google forks out billions of dollars to companies like Apple and Samsung to make
Google the default browser on their devices. And what that means for you and me is that when we pick up a new phone or we open up a new laptop, we're greeted with a Google homepage as the pre loaded search engine in the browser. So the DOJ alleges that this tactic has effectively eliminated or competition and therefore makes them a monopoly.
I think that's really interesting.
Again, one of those things you don't really think about if you open a new product and Google is just there, like everywhere, so I would never question how it got there. I guess that's why I'm not part of the DOJ. On the flip side, though, what is Google saying? We've heard the DOJ side. How has Google come back in this lawsuit.
Well, it won't surprise you to hear that Google denies the claims made in this case, and it says that the lawsuit is deeply flawed. Google says its agreements with providers like Samsung and Apple to make its search engines the default are totally legal, and that people can easily change their settings on their devices to have a new default. And according to Google, the reason it dominates the market is pretty simple and really doesn't take any legal jargon
to understand. It says it dominates because it's the best.
And in here, I'm going to use that as every defense. Ever, Yeah, it's best.
It's very There's only a couple of companies in the world who could stand up in court and say we are unequivocally the best. And if one was probably going to be able to argue that it is Google. And in one of the opening statements in court, the Google lawyer said users today have more search options and more ways to access information online than ever before. So according to the tech giant, there's plenty of competition out there, they're just not as good as Google.
So if we're to take Google's logic, then it is the best, and I mean you and I use it every single day, multiple times a day. Why is it an issue if Google is saying, well, it's the best, that's why it's everywhere.
Well, this is really the heart of the dilemma that tech has when there's one player that dominates the market, because part of the reason why Google is so good is because we all use it, and this is this idea and technology called the network effect, and what that means is because your entire network is brought into a particular system or software or program that is the secret source. And a really easy way to think about that is
the power of Instagram. Now, Instagram is only good because you know when you log onto Instagram that you're going to see the friends, the family, the daily Oazas if none of your friends and family and daily oss were on Instagram, I doubt that you would be there either.
And so if we transport that logic over to Google, the network effect for Google means that its algorithm is so up to speed and it's so accurate because so many of us use it, that it actually provides us with the best results because it's got the most data to digest.
You just gave me the opposite of an answer to my question because I said what the issue was.
Yeah, So that's why the network effect is good for the consumer. But where it's bad for the consumer is that we stop having real alternative options if we're no longer happy with the status quo. And so in the case this week, the DJ has kind of been playing this out, and what they've been saying is that by limiting competition, Google is putting consumers us searchers in a position where we're going to feel compelled to accept whatever
Google is offering. So when it comes to Google's policies on privacy and data collection, for example, by Google limiting competition, we have fewer options and might therefore feel compelled to use Google even if we don't like what they're doing with our information.
Technology has been around for however long, and I can't imagine this is the first time that the law has had to deal with something like this. I mean, we've had monopolies in the past, and we have many monopolies across tech.
Yeah, And one of the big cases that not only the DJ but a lot of commentators are looking at in the context of this current Google case is back in the late nineties, So you were only a couple of years old, Zara, wandering around the playground, probably reading the Financial Review. The rest of us were right at the beginning of the Internet boom, and the tech world was having this kind of awakening with how to fairly
operate systems and products in this space. But at that point in time, it wasn't Google that was the center of all of this. It was Microsoft. So to put us in the right time. Apple only introduced the iMac in nineteen ninety eight, so at this point it was really Microsoft's that was it when it came to what
devices we could buy to access the Internet. So at the time, Microsoft's Internet Explored was the go to browser, and in a landmark court case, the DOJ argued the company was violating anti trust laws by attempting to crush a competitor called Netscape, And the concerns here were over deals that Microsoft were making with Internet service providers to use Internet Explorer as a default browser instead of Netscape, which is eerily similar to what's being discussed in the
Google case today. Interestingly, at that time, during the Microsoft case, Google a newly founded company at that stage, they alleged Microsoft's behavior was anti competitive. Microsoft was eventually found to have violated anti trust laws, and as a result, the court in the US ordered the company change its practices. And what we're seeing here is that the Microsoft case will be heavily leaned on as a precedent in the current Google case.
So there clearly is precedent.
Then if you were to castonite of the future, what do you think will happen here?
I'm trying to steer away from my somewhat rogue crystal ball predictions, so I'm going to reserve judgment on who wins in this case. It's going to be super interesting to watch how it unfolds, though, and in the same way that that Microsoft case was seen as this big moment in the nineteen nineties, whatever happens in this case is going to be a fascinating precedent for the future.
It could have consequences for other corners of technology and for other major players like Meta, Amazon, and Apple, who were all relatively dominant in their spaces, because if Google is found to be guilty of anti competitive actions, the company could be fined and force change their practices.
Thanks for listening to this episode. If you have any questions or thoughts or feelings about the court case and Google, we would love to hear them. Just pop them in the question box under the show notes in Spotify and we'll be sure to read them how we go day