A popular meme swirled around the web in 2014, making fun of Internet Explorer’s unpopularity. “If Internet Explorer is brave enough to ask to be your default browser, you’re brave enough to ask that girl out.” Pretty much no one in their right mind — at least no millennial in their right mind — uses Internet Explorer anymore, making the app’s persistence and tenacity laughable.
But it wasn’t always this way for Internet Explorer. In fact, the web browser was once so dominant that its competitors begged the government to intervene. The U.S. Department of Justice took Microsoft to court in 2001 because it feared that Internet Explorer would rule the web browser market forever.
At the time, Microsoft required manufacturers using the Microsoft Windows operating system to install Internet Explorer as the default web browser. Although users could always purchase a different web browser, doing so was expensive and time-consuming. Microsoft was able to offer Internet Explorer for free; its installation added nothing to the cost of Windows. But Microsoft’s competitors demanded that the government stop this behavior, claiming that Microsoft was squashing competition and innovation in the technology market. Sound familiar?
Google was fined $5 billion on Wednesday due to nearly identical claims from the European Union, except it’s Google Chrome and Google Search that are supposedly crowding out competitors, with a boost from the big, bad Android operating system. Google requires cell phone manufacturers using their Android operating system to install Google Chrome and make Google Search the default device search function.
[Also read: The European Union picks a fight with Google]
Approximately 80 percent of smartphones in Europe use the Android operating system, meaning that a supermajority of users receive devices with Google Chrome and Google Search preinstalled. According to the EU, this makes it extremely difficult for the web browsers and search engines that compete with Google to gain market share. After all, why bother installing your own web browser if one is already provided to you?
But don’t forget: The Windows operating system once had an almost identical market share, with estimates ranging from 80 percent to more than 95 percent. Despite Windows’ operating system’s initial dominance, its product still didn’t win the web browser war.
Why? Because another company invented a better product. In July 2008, before Google Chrome was released, Internet Explorer took more than two-thirds of the market. Within three years of Google Chrome’s release, its market share dropped below 50 percent. Now, it struggles along with less than 10 percent market share, while Google Chrome dominates with nearly two-thirds of the market. The “move fast, break things” ethos that governs the tech world ensures that no business in that space will stagnate or unfairly raise prices.
Another problem for the EU is that Google’s business model depends on tying the Android operating system to Google Search and Google Chrome. Google lets manufacturers use Android for free; it recuperates its research and development investment by making money via Google Search ads. If manufacturers don’t give Google a way to make money from its free Android operating system, Google will likely start to charge for it, a cost that will almost certainly be passed along to consumers.
And that’s what antitrust policy should be about: consumers. If a business provides a service that consumers enjoy, if it continues to improve its products despite its market power, and if it keeps prices reasonable, government has no reason to intervene. Antitrust policy in the United States has been consumer-focused for decades, though pushback against this philosophy continues to grow.
“Hipster antitrust” advocates, for example, want to make our policy more like that in the European Union, where regulators are more concerned with protecting a business’s competitors than its consumers. They focus on market concentration as an evil in and of itself — government should “break up” big businesses based not on how they treat their customers, but simply because they hold “too much” power over workers.
But the best way to lay the groundwork for the next Microsoft, the next Google, or the next Facebook is not to bring down these companies by regulation, but to let them be toppled organically by upstart competitors. Entrepreneurship and innovation, not government leadership and regulation, are the keys to a thriving technology sector, the same sector that gives us the ability to make memes about its past-their-prime failures.
Amelia Irvine is a Young Voices Advocate studying economics at Georgetown University. Follow her on Twitter: @ameliairvine3.
