I have to say I'm disappointed with the focus on defaults here. Defaults are important, but they're also mostly a bidding war. It's not like Microsoft has no money.<p>The real issue is the tying. They build this conglomerated system that all comes together as one blob, and get third parties to depend on various parts of it to prevent them from being swapped out individually. Then to replace one of them you have to be able to replace the others, which makes it very hard for any but the largest corporations to compete.<p>Capturing the search default on Android is a tiny piece of what they do with it, and the part that would barely make any difference to the search market when the alternative would be that they just pay for it. Or let people choose them, since that's the market where they have the strongest brand and it's all the ancillary markets that they might not have dominated where the consequences are greater.<p>And then they wouldn't have to deal with this:<p>> The question that matters most, though, is whether Judge Mehta can be convinced that consumer harm applies to free products like search engines.<p>Because they could get them for the 30% cut on Google Play.<p>Advertising isn't a dissimilar tack when you cast the advertiser as the customer, but then you're stuck trying to prove that Google wouldn't have had a dominant search engine without doing this, when they had one <i>before</i> doing this.