this post was submitted on 26 May 2024
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Google controls one set of roads, people choose which roads to use.
On Android, you're free to install any browser and search engine you wish. For example, "Bing for Android" is already a thing.
People choose not to choose. They're not interested in engaging with the space or technology any deeper than the default.
Exploiting this fact to the point of defacto monopoly should still be considered wrong.
Just because there is a choice doesn't mean that the casual user is aware of it. You could always chose to install Firefox on Windows, but Microsoft still got done for pushing IE as the default.
MS got dinged because they claimed Windows couldn't work without MSIE, which was a lie... and they had a large market share.
Nowadays Apple forces everyone to use Safari on iOS, and nobody bats an eye.
I'm not sure the choice between Bing or Google, two search engines controlled by giant corporations who make money from advertising, is enough of a choice for a truly free Internet. And as the Bing outage last week showed us, most other search engines are just Bing repackaged.
Search engines are not baked into Android, they get exposed through apps like everything else.
The choice is limited to every search engine out there... which are not many, but what can you do, it takes a lot of resources to spin up a search engine.