Google’s Search Defaults Prey on Power of Habit, Witness Says

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Antonio Rangel, a behavioral economist and professor at the California Institute of Technology, knows how to get you to grab a cereal box off a supermarket shelf using product placement and consumer habits. And he said Google understands the same tricks, which is why the tech giant has fought so hard to keep itself as the default search engine on mobile phones.

“If I can move your eyes, if I can manipulate your fixations, I can manipulate your choices quite a bit,” Rangel said as an expert witness called by the US government in its landmark antitrust trial against Alphabet Inc.'s Google.

Rangel said in testimony Wednesday and Thursday that his research on the prime placement of cereal boxes in stores was relevant to his assessment of search engine defaults. He found that getting prominent real estate on a web browser or mobile phone discourages people from switching to rival search engines. Consumers are reluctant to change behaviors that have hardened into habit, he said.

“Search engine defaults generate a sizable and robust bias towards the default,” Rangel said. “Defaults have a powerful impact on consumer decisions.” Often consumers don't even realize they are making a choice by default and they don't know how to change it, he said.

Rangel's testimony addresses a key point in the government's biggest tech monopoly trial of the last two decades, which opened Tuesday in Washington. The US Justice Department alleges that Google illegally maintains a monopoly in online search by paying more than $10 billion a year to tech rivals, smartphone makers and wireless providers in exchange for being set as the preselected option, or default, on mobile phones and web browsers. Google argues the company has won market share because it