Re: The best outcome for the general public
Shall we think this through?
This is Mary. Mary is 75 years old, something of a "silver surfer". She's not all that interested in how things work as long as they work. Since everything Mary does on her computer is basically use a browser anyway, she might have a chromebook or an android tablet or anything else.
Whatever Mary uses, you can be 91% certain that she's using Google as a search engine because that's their market share.
Mary doesn't remember URLS, she types things into the bar of her variation of Chrome and then follows the links. And she needs a new washing machine so she types that into her browser bar and the first thing that comes up is Google Shopping. Hooray!
Except -
You know and I know that Google Shopping isn't very good. It might show prices from Amazon but it doesn't show the cheapest prices on Amazon or any other retailer. Most of the initial prices it shows are not what it links to. It is a bad search engine for shopping. Given a reasonable selection, nobody would use it.
But they do, because it's first in the list of things you see when you type in your search criteria. It's first so that Google can make money from it. What was once a good search engine is now a bad search engine where Google offer a service that can sort-of meet your needs (however poorly) because that service will receive priority in your search results, regardless of how used it actually is.
So Mary pays more than she needs to. And Google get more money.
This is called "illegally leveraging a legal monopoly beyond its bounds".
The best outcome for the general public would be for Google not to artificially boost search ratings for its own products. If and when they get good enough to compete fairly, they might make it to the top of the search results on their own merits. Until then, showing them at the top of the page is something very close to fraud.
As for Foundem, well, they're competing against a 91% monopoly. Not easy. If that makes you a horrible parasite then perhaps horrible parasites like OSX and ChromeOS should disappear.