Chillin'Competition

Assuming that the whole fuzz around the Google investigation is about tactics seeking to abusively deny search scale to rivals, the remedy to restore competition may not be where the Commission and parties are eyeing.

A less intrusive remedy for Google (and its rivals) exists: Unwind the commitment imposed on Microsoft in 2009 to pre-install competing browsers and in particular Mozilla which has Google as the default search engine.

With this Mozilla, and in turn Google, will lose some traction in search.

A possible alternative would be to force Google to install a “search engine ballot screen” in Chrome to overcome end users’ inertia when placing search words in the engine. One could also think of forcing Mozilla to have Bing as its default search engine for a certain share of the market.  But this, clearly would be less acceptable to Google.

The bottom-line: there’s more than one option to improve competition in internet search.