Reply to post: Re: What, exactly, are Google supposed to do here?

Streetmap's lawyer: Google High Court win will have 'chilling effect’ on UK digital biz

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: What, exactly, are Google supposed to do here?

To me it is reasonably obvious, Google/search and it's various embellishmentsu such as maps, is to many people their start screen into the web; just as the Windows desktop and it's bundled app's was the start screen to many PC users. So in the past through the various anti-trust cases MS were forced to recognise the existence of third-party browsers and search. Hence why we got the "Browser Choice" update to XP and why in IE you could change the default preferences with respect to search provider, reader/viewers etc.

I think we are getting to a similar place with Google/search. So yes Google can provide their own maps (and other embellishments), but they need to provide the means so that if I want to use Bing, Streetmap, Apple etc. for my geographic search results I can. Yes I doubt many will actually change the default setting, but I see Google might benefit from providing it.

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