> I find it hard to believe that Google just happens to be the default search engine everywhere.
I didn't say there wasn't collusion of any kind. I said Google being the default on android is not collusion with browser vendors.
And on Windows, Bing is the default.
> And if you visit the internet’s home page on anything other than Chrome you get bombarded with popups compelling you to install Chrome.
Self-promotion is not collusion.
Also critical to my point is that collusion to set a mere default is not what the original comment was talking about. You don't need to switch your browser to "lay bare the depth" of a default. They were talking about something much stronger.
The point is there are non-trivial examples where it’s really hard to switch your default search engine away from Google/Bing because all paths lead back to them (via platform self-promotion and paid placement). One might even argue that the dominant search engine owning the dominant user-agent is implicitly illegal (and thus I guess collusive, but I digress). I don’t really know what we’re arguing anymore. I think everyone knows that it’s not universally easy to switch your search engine. The fact that there are good examples like Android does not invalidate the bad examples like *OS and Windows. It’s difficult enough that I can’t believe it’s all natural and organic. Money is changing hands and/or the spirit of existing laws is being ignored to enforce or at least maim the optimal-for-users search experience. Certainly we can agree on that much.
> The point is there are non-trivial examples where it’s really hard to switch your default search engine away from Google/Bing
Bing is the only one you really get stuck with, and that only happens outside of the browser. You can change the search engine for searches started inside of Edge.
Bing is also not an example of collusion. It's Microsoft promoting Microsoft.
> I don’t really know what we’re arguing anymore.
Here is what I'm arguing: If you want to say there is a mixture of different types of collusion and monopolistic self-pushing connected to search engines, I agree with you. But the claim earlier was about a very specific type of [deep] collusion, that would make it difficult to change the search engine that a browser uses, that is easy to see when trying to use Kagi. But that difficulty only exists on iOS. It's not true in general. (And I'm not convinced that the specific issue on iOS is a collusion problem rather than an Apple-knows-best problem.)
I didn't say there wasn't collusion of any kind. I said Google being the default on android is not collusion with browser vendors.
And on Windows, Bing is the default.
> And if you visit the internet’s home page on anything other than Chrome you get bombarded with popups compelling you to install Chrome.
Self-promotion is not collusion.
Also critical to my point is that collusion to set a mere default is not what the original comment was talking about. You don't need to switch your browser to "lay bare the depth" of a default. They were talking about something much stronger.