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1. Today I wrote a story about the only place in the world where Google has to operate in a competitive search market. Russia. And the reason is because the Russian antitrust agency did its job, and did it well. mattstoller.substack.com/welcome
2. Here's the Russian search engine market. Notice how there's competition. There is! There are two big search engines. Yandex, and Google. 
3. Yandex was started in the 1990s by some Russian engineers, at roughly the same time as Google. Google was an awesome search engine, and began dominating the world as it expanded starting in 2000. googlepress.blogspot.com/2000/05/google…
4. In Russia, however, it ran into Yandex, which is the only search engine that was just as good as Google. Yandex indexed the Russian web, and the Russian language is sufficiently different that it could be a better product. It had 60% market share until 2012. Then came mobile.
5. The shift to mobile was an inflection point, and Google owned the mobile phone operating, system, Android. Google tied its Android operating system to its search product, making Google search the default. Yandex share starting collapsing. mattstoller.substack.com/welcome
6. in 2015, both the EU and the Russians brought suit against Google. The Russians were spurred by Yandex, the EU by Microsoft and Yandex. Both the EU and the Russians "won." But only the Russians were effective.
7. The EU was slow, and the case is still on appeal. And @vestager allowed Google to *design its own remedy.* Which of course didn't dent its dominant search market share.
8. The Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service was fast, reaching a decision within a year and a half. Google settled in 2017, and all Russian Android users got a "choice screen" where they could select a search engine. mattstoller.substack.com/p/how-russian-…
9. As users got to choose their preferred search engine instead of going with the default, Yandex recovered its market share. In Europe however Microsoft gave up, calling a truce in 2016.
10. Now the Europeans are stuck with a concentrated market dominated by Google, and headlines about fines. Meanwhile in Russia there are two competing search engines innovating against each other. mattstoller.substack.com/p/how-russian-…
11. The Russian government isn't nice or trustworthy. But in this case, they got it right. Smart policy can happen in unlikely places. mattstoller.substack.com/p/how-russian-…
12. Going forward, the Europeans are learning from Russia. @vestager just adopted something called "interim measures" while investigating Broadcom for monopolization. That's an order saying 'stop bad practices while we investigate.'
13. Americans can do this too. In the Microsoft case, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson could have blocked the bundle of IE and Windows 98 while trial went on. He didn't. So the competitive browser market died.
14. There are many lessons from the Russian FAS case. Move fast. Move decisively. And protect competition where it still exists, because if you don't, it might not exist for long. The end.
15. Let me know what you think. And if you like this story, sign up for my newsletter, Big, where I discuss the politics of monopoly in a longer form version than Twitter. mattstoller.substack.com/welcome
