[HN Gopher] U.S. states lean toward breaking up Google's ad tech...
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U.S. states lean toward breaking up Google's ad tech business
Author : TangerineDream
Score : 328 points
Date : 2020-06-05 18:12 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
| [deleted]
| moneywoes wrote:
| Does Facebook not bundle their products?
| dr-detroit wrote:
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/social-media-is-a-tool-of-the-c...
| nojito wrote:
| Very interesting!!
|
| I wonder if through the course of the investigation we finally
| get a definitive reason why Alphabet was created.
|
| My gut tells me that it is to hide data sharing between entities.
| enitihas wrote:
| More like lean toward a future where Bing (giving MSFT a monopoly
| on search, OS, Office Suites, browsers and whatnot), or worse,
| giving Chinese companies the lead in the rest of the world, and
| maybe even the US (if the US doesn't regulate them out). I don't
| see how a lot of Google products survive without the ad revenue.
|
| 1. Android -> Difficult to compete against a well financed
| Chinese competitor here for whatever new subpart of Google takes
| over android.
|
| 2. Chrome -> Again, either MSFT or a chinese fork.
|
| 3. Gmail -> Outlook, or maybe some chinese/russian mail service
|
| 4. Google Cloud -> This might be gone fully. I don't see them
| having any advantages if they can't piggyback on the world class
| google Infra.
|
| Even if the US regulates out Huwaei and Alibaba, almost all of
| Asia and Africa will surely be dominated by big Chinese tech,
| rather than small US tech if the US big tech get broken up. Not
| to mention they might dominate Europe too.
| echelon wrote:
| > Africa will surely be dominated by big Chinese tech
|
| What are we waiting on?
| DethNinja wrote:
| I completely disagree with you, in reality more competition
| will open up and smaller US/EU firms will take place of larger
| firms.
|
| This will result in decreasing inequality and help the general
| society as well.
|
| There is a good reason why anti-trust laws exist people.
| Billionaires are already a policy failure, we don't need
| trillionaires in future as well.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| I will say both of the eCommerce businesses I worked at were 100%
| in thrall to google's decisions. Unless you are a brand the size
| of amazon that can get attention directly, everyone just does a
| google search. Which mean's if google decides to do something
| that impacts your ranking or ads you might just be completely out
| of business with in a matter of days, or slowly bleed out. They
| might even decide to compete with you or partner with one of your
| competitors. It's like if the owner of the streets could make a
| deal with walmart to build more lanes there and always have
| construction in front of your building. Or even not have a turn
| off. It controls online commerce basically.
| Mistredo wrote:
| It almost feels like internet search should be a public
| property in the same way roads are.
| kanox wrote:
| I don't understand how a google breakup would work. Would it just
| split off the ad business from ad-supported businesses like gmail
| and youtube?
|
| Some google products could stand on their own (Google Cloud) but
| most would have a lot of trouble. The worst case is open-source
| offerings like Android and Chrome which only make sense as part
| of a wider corporate strategy.
| jldugger wrote:
| Android would probably be spin-offable via the same strategy
| that technically makes Mozilla independent: pay for search
| engine placement. And then pay for all the services it connects
| to like Maps, Gmail, etc.
|
| It'd def be messy to untangle backends though. One imagines
| that the play store relies heavily on CDNs by Google, as one
| random small example from the haystack of papercuts.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| A large part of commercial Android is part of the mysterious
| "Google Play Services." I'm sure that would be a nightmare to
| uncouple from Google.
| summerlight wrote:
| Google Ads will run on Google's infrastructure and pay a lot
| enough to subsidize all the other products. Basically, there
| will be some financial impacts but I don't expect any kinds of
| significant impacts on their business, which proves this attack
| to be pointless.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Would it just split off the ad business from ad-supported
| businesses like gmail and youtube?
|
| Yes. They can still sell ads, just not inhouse.
| TACIXAT wrote:
| It would be really cool for people to be able to make money in
| those markets. It's really lame right now to face competing
| with free offerings. We're in a post chat client scarcity
| world.
| kanox wrote:
| Nobody has made serious money by selling browser because
| nobody is willing to pay for browsers. Without Chrome the web
| would just stagnate.
|
| Nobody is willing to pay for mobile operating systems either.
| Maybe hardware manufacturers would pay to move Android
| forward as an open-source project but most likely outcome is
| a stagnant fragmented mess.
| chx wrote:
| > Without Chrome the web would just stagnate.
|
| Microsoft would take over. They are in position already,
| contributing to Chromium.
| simion314 wrote:
| >Without Chrome the web would just stagnate.
|
| Some people would pay for a better browser. For example I
| pay for Intellij because for what I do is better then the
| free alternatives and honestly I am afraid if Microsoft
| would put them out of business with their free stuff we
| will get stagnation.
| kanox wrote:
| Opera tried that and never got beyond 5%.
| simion314 wrote:
| But if it was profitable then it is enough, you don't
| have to kill the competition. The problem is when a
| corporation puts a lot of money and copies you then
| surpasses you and on top of the ton of developers Chrome
| had they used shitty tactics like promoting their browser
| on the google home page and bundling it with other
| programs.
|
| Opera is a good example. they did a lot of innovation a
| Google like tyrant is not needed.
| rvp-x wrote:
| Microsoft used to have licensing deals with Android phone
| manufacturers for their use of FAT, it was just bundled in
| the cost of the phones sold.
|
| With the choice of Android effectively costing them $5-15
| per device sold, manufacturers still chose it.
|
| https://www.howtogeek.com/183766/why-microsoft-
| makes-5-to-15...
| criddell wrote:
| > Nobody is willing to pay for mobile operating systems
| either.
|
| Why not just bundle it in with the cost of the hardware
| like Apple does?
| awakeasleep wrote:
| The answer to this question will be endlessly fascinating.
|
| To start somewhere, everything that was an acquisition 'should'
| stand on its own, because it began as a complete company. Of
| course things aren't that simple.
| ghaff wrote:
| >To start somewhere, everything that was an acquisition
| 'should' stand on its own, because it began as a complete
| company. Of course things aren't that simple.
|
| In many/most cases, "complete" companies that are losing
| money hand over fist or--in the better cases--have a business
| model but not great long-term prospects.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Both Android and Chrome could be wildly successful independent
| companies. Android could charge a license fee to OEMs in
| addition to the app store business and Chrome could sell search
| default rights like Firefox does.
| spideymans wrote:
| Apple makes billions of dollars off of Safari search rights,
| so I think you're right about Chrome
| nojito wrote:
| Almost no other service line other than Ads is profitable for
| Alphabet.
| tengbretson wrote:
| Maybe we shouldn't allow them to drive a bulldozer through
| other verticals then.
| empath75 wrote:
| Seems like a reasonable split would be third party ads, while
| allowing google to run its own ads on its own sites.
| manfredo wrote:
| > Some google products could stand on their own (Google Cloud)
| but most would have a lot of trouble.
|
| Maybe I'm busting out my tinfoil hat, but I think that's the
| point. YouTube and other businesses wouldn't be able to survive
| without Google's ad money.
|
| In my experience traditional media companies are the ones most
| heavily pushing for Google's breakup. Is this due to genuine
| fear of monopoly, or due to the desire to eliminate a
| competitor encroaching on their revenue sources?
| downrightmike wrote:
| It would accelerate the path to the google graveyard is all.
| missedthecue wrote:
| It's the businessman siccing the government on his
| competition. It's nothing new. Uncle Sam needs to stay out of
| it.
| kart23 wrote:
| I'm still confused at what exactly they're trying to
| accomplish.
|
| So youtube and google drive basically die, some of the most
| useful free services available right now. I think this does
| more bad than good and I don't think any American citizen
| would support this given the effects.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Vysero wrote:
| "companies like Google censor conservative content"
|
| Certainly, isn't all their censoring.. in fact, I am less
| concerned about it than other things.
| coldtea wrote:
| Amen! E.U should do the same...
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Break up to separate countries? We tried it, it sucked.
| mayneack wrote:
| Seems like it just refers to (but doesn't link to)
| https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/05/states-lean-toward-pushing-t...
| dang wrote:
| Yes, that was bad. Changed now. More at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23432441.
| astan wrote:
| I am really worried about Chinese cyberwarfare while we keep
| shooting ourselves in the foot. Just look at how easy it is to
| spy on millions of americans with things like TikTok and Huawei.
| Google could be a lot worse at the size it currently is. I view
| Google as almost a kind of university that tries to enhance
| technology by "poaching" good people and in some sense, allowing
| them to work on whatever they want while guaranteeing them a very
| good wage. Aside from the standard Chrome, Android-tier projects,
| let's think about all the stuff that they've done that has been
| pretty radically useful. I'm not talking about products, they do
| a terrible job with maintenance and shutting down products is
| very infuriating to any user. But it is almost like research
| projects. So let's just focus on technical contributions to the
| software engineering field.
|
| Golang, gRPC, Protobuf, Kubernetes, Tensorflow, WebRTC, QUIC
| protocol, very interesting innovations in camera technology such
| as NightSight, Google Maps which has changed my life completely.
| Furthermore, millions of contributions to open source projects
| and protocols, so many security improvements by the Security &
| Cryptography teams that I have on occasion worked with.
|
| Personally I wouldn't work for Google because I don't enjoy the
| kind of atmosphere where there's no real "mission". But doing
| this much innovation is impossible unless you are funded by the
| government, or have a money printing business.
| tosser0001 wrote:
| Would this benefit China or Chinese companies in any way that
| would be detrimental to U.S. interests?
| jjcon wrote:
| I'll probably get hounded for saying this here but:
|
| I genuinely believe that one of the biggest things harming
| American society right now is adtech. From social media to
| traditional media they have become obsessed with clicks and
| view time. This leads to negativity and extremism getting
| promoted and sensationalism overtaking authentic journalistic
| approaches. Not only that but it means a population that is
| getting constantly bombarded with terrible, often overinflated
| stories. Why? Because all this sells because the human brain is
| wired to focus on danger before all else.
|
| China doesn't have this same problem because it controls the
| media and censors social media. From a purely psychological
| standpoint this is a positive but there are obviously deep
| implications for what that censorship does to a society as
| well.
|
| To answer your direct question, any losses by Google due to
| this will be dwarfed by the positive implications for the
| American society. I'm not saying this will fix the above
| problems but the amount of good it will do (in conjunction with
| other legislation especially, ie link tax and repealing section
| 230) is greater than the amount of bad by a mile.
| keiferski wrote:
| I don't know enough about antitrust law, but it's my (possibly
| wrong) assumption that it is legal to use the profits from
| Product A to subsidize lower prices for Product B, a sort of
| "sell stuff to Peter in order to give Paul a discount."
|
| I imagine it would be difficult to determine if this is
| happening, but it would seem logical to say that if this
| subsidization leads to an unfair advantage over competitors (who
| otherwise couldn't match the low price), it should be regulated,
| at least according to antitrust theory. The problem for Google is
| that this describes a solid chunk of their product portfolio.
| somethoughts wrote:
| I feel like Google would have been better off if they had stayed
| out of the newspaper aggregation business and stuck with Search
| and long tail media content, GCP, GSuite and did R&D in AI
| (Waymo, Verily) and AR/VR. There is just too much baggage when
| wading into politics.
|
| I think there are too many well connected, well funded media
| companies that are lobbying and retaliating behind the scenes as
| they see their news publishing business models get disrupted by
| the Google News aggregator. Couple that with politicians
| frustrated by the Google News opaque aggregation algorithm and
| that leads to anti-trust rulings.
| alecb wrote:
| Their issue isn't that they are in the newspaper business.
| Their issue is that they own almost all of the ad tech business
| from top to bottom.
| spaced-out wrote:
| If that's true, why is their market share in the online
| advertising dropping?
|
| https://www.investopedia.com/news/facebook-google-digital-
| ad...
| somethoughts wrote:
| My general sense is that fewer power brokers in DC would
| complain if they had stuck with the bottom part and
| complemented that with GCP.
|
| Its one thing to serve ads on the bottom (i.e. ads for
| pentalope screw drivers against articles about pentalope
| screw drivers). Its another thing to encroach on establish
| media outlets turf, AMP up their content and sell ads to
| Auto, CPG and Airline companies based on that content.
| meowface wrote:
| And owning almost all of the ad tech business also
| complements well with owning a huge chunk of the tech
| business in general.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| Google, Amazon, FB are not the monopolies that you should be
| worried about. They are fun to talk about and tech is sexy, but
| there are bigger problems - ISPs / telecoms, for example.
|
| Remember the baby bells? In 1982, AT&T (ma bell) lost an anti-
| trust lawsuit and was broken up into 8 companies (the baby
| bells).
|
| Guess what happened since? If you guessed they merged back
| together, you would be correct. The baby bells merged back
| together and became 3 companies - AT&T, Verizon, and CenturyLink.
|
| For those who are customers of AT&T - how do you like your
| service? Is it as good as Google?
|
| Oligopoly is the new monopoly. Financial services, airlines, oil
| majors, media, pharma, auto, etc. Those are the industries that
| need breaking up. You pay for their services / products and they
| price fix (airline baggage fees, overdraft fees, etc), you don't
| even pay for Google. You can easily use duckduckgo and delete
| your FB / Insta with no consequence.
|
| Edit - to address the comments saying that the tech companies
| should be broken up: sure, but how exactly? Google and Facebook
| in particular. You don't even pay for their services, so you (the
| citizens) can't claim consumer protection from their business.
| Only the companies / individuals that pay for Google and Facebook
| ads can.
|
| Again, I get the frustration of the times and misinformation
| sucks, but Google and Facebook are not the cause. They are the
| means of distributing info (including ads that are sometimes just
| fake new), not the root source of all evil.
| foobiekr wrote:
| My few attempts to get customer service from AT&T and Comcast
| went far, far better than the attempts to get help from Google.
| odiroot wrote:
| Didn't literally the same happen with Standard Oil?
| ummonk wrote:
| I'm actually an AT&T fiber user through Sonic and have a
| perfect experience with my service. Installation took some time
| originally because they had to route a line into my house but
| it has been great since.
| sdjkfgsdjkfghjh wrote:
| True. That does not make google/amazon/fb immune though.
|
| Another data point that people stuck overseas because of
| Covid-19: Airlines banded in their oligopoly and divided up the
| world.
|
| AA cancelled all flights but Europe, United in americas, Delta
| in Asia, etc.
|
| Now if you want to fly from one of those places, you must get a
| mile voucher for your return flight, and re-purchase the
| exorbitant one way ticket from the one company from the
| oligopoly that got your current location to explore.
| rb808 wrote:
| Right now in my house I have the choice of 3 different cell
| networks, 2 broadband providers and coming some extra things
| like satellites. All of them can be swapped in or out without
| much trouble. I can move houses or even countries to get
| different options
|
| My email and search though is just a few options and
| realistically most of my family and friends just one option.
| Even if I move to the other side of the world that option is
| still the same.
| speeder wrote:
| My business, despite being quite critical (we sell parts for
| maintenance of machinery, today one of my clients for example
| was a medical equipment factory) relies heavily on ads, people
| come, buy what they want, and if I solves the problem, it is
| over, they don't recommend or talk about us, and often aren't
| return costumers either unless another machine break...
|
| So our clients often are people googling desperately trying to
| make their suddenly stopped factory resume work, then they see
| our ads and buy from us.
|
| It became obvious to us that Google is a threat, they changed
| rules multiple times in the past to encourage fraud (instead of
| stopping fraud), our revenue is directly proportional to the
| Google ads spend, and whenever we find a better ad provider,
| Google buys it.
|
| Only possible competitor for Google is TV, but TV ads are way
| beyond our budget and we have no idea of they would work,
| considering our niche.
|
| So... Google is not only a monopoly, it is an obvious one, and
| they abuse their power freely.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| Yours is a real grievance, though most of the people on this
| thread are complaining from the perspective of a search
| consumer, not from a commercial advertiser.
|
| Lots of businesses use Google ads to great success, and I get
| that it's frustrating when your one source of new business
| changes terms on you, but this is the game. Google now has a
| lot of power over you, that's the market working.
|
| But your relationship with Google is not necessarily
| adversarial. After all, they still bring you new business. As
| long as the cost for ads does not exceed the revenue from new
| business, the relationship you have with Google is mutually
| beneficial, though it might hurt when they change terms on
| you.
|
| That's how business works. It frustrating, but that's the
| game.
| pwdisswordfish2 wrote:
| What if the government breaks up both. The ad tech businesses
| and the telecoms.
|
| The question is whether this type of comment "[Google/Facebook]
| is not the problem..." is a not-so-clever attempt to defend a
| FAANG company or whether it is legitimiate. I have seen this
| type of response many times on HN. It is like someone saying
| "Don't look there, look here." Of course, we can look both here
| and there, one step at a time.
|
| What is a legitimate argument why breaking up Google/Facebook
| prevents the government from later breaking up telecoms, or
| solving any other problem.
|
| Whereas if the telecoms were broken up, how does that improve
| the situation with the ad tech oligarchy. Even if you say
| "Don't look there, look here" eventually we may look "there".
| The harmful effects of Google/Facebook cannot be easily
| overhsadowed by other problems.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| > For those who are customers of AT&T - how do you like your
| service? Is it as good as Google?
|
| Much better. I can phone up AT&T and complain to them when
| something goes wrong; they usually fix it.
|
| Google will either ignore me or close my account (and all other
| accounts with associated Google-owned things)
| jotto wrote:
| >you don't even pay for Google
|
| You don't pay for Google with cash. You pay for Google by
| submitting your free will.
| nojito wrote:
| >Google, Amazon, FB are not the monopolies that you should be
| worried about.
|
| You're right we shouldn't be worried about them...we should be
| afraid of what has transpired these past 10-15 years because of
| them.
|
| A common divergence tactic by those companies is to switch
| focus on the financial services/telcom, etc.
|
| A key difference between those industries and FB, Google, and
| Amazon, is that they are under _extreme_ regulations and
| oversight.
|
| Google, et. al. are free to do whatever they and has resulted
| in billions in damages.
| jariel wrote:
| No, this is totally wrong.
|
| First - airlines, pharma, and financial services are nowhere
| near 'oligarchy' and don't come close to meeting the
| definition, just the opposite, they are very competitive.
|
| With Telcos - the issue is real, but the drawback is mostly
| competitive innovation and price. Stagnant deployments and high
| prices would be the result. FYI - the US has decent broadband
| pricing. See: Canada!
|
| Oil is a special one, but the industry is global and very
| competitive, especially in certain layers of that industry.
| Prices are widely known and understood. There is zero concern
| that 'some big entity' will control all of the oil, certainly
| not in America.
|
| FB, Amazon, Google represent far more existentially problematic
| kinds of 'monopolies' because it bleeds into other aspects of
| life (social, media, information) and into other, adjacent
| industries. These are the real problem.
|
| Search and social also have 'natural monopoly' kind of
| conditions which exacerbates the problems.
|
| The other industry you didn't mention, wherein there is an
| existential problem with competition is 'health insurance'.
| hhw wrote:
| Canadaian broadband pricing is actually quite reasonable,
| especially as you have smaller players that are able to buy
| last mile lines wholesale at/near cost to compete.
|
| Wholesale metro fiber is also considerably less than in the
| US, as public and utilities infrastructure is much more open.
| And there is already municipal fiber in Montreal, Calgary,
| and some suburban parts of Vancouver to name a few.
|
| You also don't have to play games, like with Comcast that
| periodically raises your pricing arbitrarily and can really
| rack up if you're not paying attention. A few years back when
| I kept an apartment in Seattle, I went from $50/mo on
| promotional offer, to $80/mo regular, and ended up at almost
| $120/mo by the time I cancelled less than 2 years later. Such
| practices would never fly in Canada.
| xfer wrote:
| I used to pay $60 for a 30mbps line 2yrs ago in Canada. How
| is this good?
| jariel wrote:
| "especially as you have smaller players that are able to
| buy last mile lines wholesale at/near cost to compete."
|
| The US has just as much as this.
|
| US rates are lower for the more common bandwidth options
| [1][2], and as soon as you consider Purchasing Parity -
| Canadian rates are very high. 'Equipment' / CAPEX is a tiny
| part of the cost of said networks, so it really should cost
| a lot less to manage networks in Canada if salaries are
| lower. Once that factor is taken into consideration
| Canadian prices are very materially higher.
|
| That US companies are cheezy with their 'increasing rates'
| is kind of a different story.
|
| [1] https://mobilesyrup.com/2019/12/18/canada-top-five-
| highest-c...
|
| [2] https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/693.nsf/eng/00169.html
| softwarejosh wrote:
| canada is ultra dependent look at south korea
| dtech wrote:
| South Korea is a positive outlier, it isn't representative
| of most of the western world
| jariel wrote:
| South Korea has a dense population and just came out of a
| centrally planned economy wherein they had to create a
| modern network and just rolled out fiber almost everywhere.
| That's a very special case. At the 'start' of such
| central/social reforms, leaps of progress can often be made
| no doubt, the issue is what happens in the long run.
| dylz wrote:
| I've managed some local networks (remotely) in this
| region for some high traffic sites: quite a handful of
| Asian countries have high bandwidth dense fiber inside
| the country, but it tends to go to crap as soon you exit
| the country/bottleneck heavily.
|
| For example, Japan has 1G being common, SK has 1G being
| common, Taiwan has 500-1G common. They all bottleneck
| quite a bit exiting the country (except for TW, but to
| some destination countries only); and as a side effect,
| many "local" websites are extremely popular as opposed to
| being subject to other countries' laws and media.
|
| SK has side effect of also having an extensive DNS and
| RST/hijacking-based national "great firewall" censorship
| system that is officially deployed for pornography and
| pro-NK articles, but has also been used for anti-LGBT
| rights websites and other purposes in the past, in
| addition to threats of forcing foreign companies to
| comply with heavy surveillance requirements like
| requiring national ID to comment on a blog post.
| Honestly, SK is not a great role model for internet or
| censorship. On top of that, while your "home"
| connectivity is fine, content providers trying to set up
| even CDN/caching nodes in SK are subject to serious
| annoyances, like the KRNIC/KINX crap where they really
| dislike it if your ASN isn't allocated by KRNIC - you're
| literally on the internet exchange already but all Korean
| ASs will not talk to you or give you time of day because
| you're not one of them, and are not present on the route
| server, and you're forced to route traffic that
| originates and terminates in Seoul through the US or
| Hurricane Electric or some other insane route.
| ur-whale wrote:
| The fact that you identified worse offenders doesn't remove the
| initial problem.
| jorvi wrote:
| All the big techs are stifling competition in many markets by
| offering their product in those markets at or below cost and
| supporting those losses with money that comes from elsewhere in
| the company. Look at music streaming: Spotify is the only big
| service that is only in that market. Look at consumer storage:
| Dropbox is the only big service that is only in that market. If
| tech behemoths didn't exist, there would be much more active
| competition and thus technological advancement in those
| markets. They also buy start-ups in emerging markets at a
| breakneck pace.
| designdesign wrote:
| ISPs and telecoms are dangerous due to their level of control,
| but are significantly worse at using their data to influence
| the way you think. I strongly believe that the current
| political climate would be significantly more tepid if not for
| Facebook and YouTube alone... the scale is so hard to
| comprehend.
|
| On the surface social media looks completely benign, but they
| have these far reaching insidious impacts. Our elected
| representatives don't even have a _basic_ understanding of how
| these sites operate... yet you have the majority of the
| population being fed content by these algorithms that determine
| what you see when, and they 're completely opaque. They've got
| scores of analysts and psychologists shaping this stuff full-
| time... no single entity in human history has had this level of
| data and reach into human behavior, and it's all proprietary.
|
| Small intentional changes over time to such wide-reaching
| algorithms can literally shape humanity in ways that may be
| entirely impossible for an outsider to detect.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| But you're _aware_ of this, so the algorithm is obsolete for
| influencing you.
|
| You have adapted. With time, most of us will.
| designdesign wrote:
| That's not true at all! We have little idea how or why it
| influences us outside of the basics (sell ads, make money).
|
| People are looking at these feeds, often daily, for a
| significant amount of time. We don't know if it's
| intentionally showing us more of our racist uncle's posts
| because we buy things when we're angry, for example... and
| that's just one small example in a vast sea.
|
| We can't adapt because there are far too many unseen
| factors to be aware of. And I'll say it again... most
| people do not understand that every post on these networks
| is being fed through a biased algorithm. I've seen large
| numbers of _developers_ on this site agree that Facebook
| should remain neutral when it comes to certain ads /posts,
| without acknowledging that neutrality has been gone from
| every post on Facebook for years and years at this point.
|
| They know who you are, where you are, who you're with, and
| what you do. Data that spans billions of people. For people
| with Facebook on their phones they can essentially track
| your behavior 24/7 and have been doing so for years. This
| type of unseen influence could be dangerous even in
| benevolent hands.
|
| I have not adapted because I don't know what to adapt to.
| I've just removed myself from the environment as completely
| as I can.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| To assuage your concerns, here's a start:
|
| * delete FB and Insta accounts
|
| * delete FB and Insta from your devices
|
| * use Google search for stuff your ok with Google
| knowing; all else, use duckduckgo
|
| * worry more about yourself, less about others
|
| This is what I did.
| KorematsuFred wrote:
| I have never understood American politician's obsession with
| killing their Golden goose. They did the same with many
| manufacturing jobs in past and most of those jobs ended up
| moving to other countries over time. Hurting Google or Facebook
| is not going to make anything better but will lead to job less,
| loss of economic opportunity and competitive advantage to other
| nations.
|
| You are absolutely right that ATT, Comcast etc. are the real
| monopolies that have been established with the help of
| government and they need to be broken.
|
| I guess in 10 years they will do the same to Tesla, SpaceX.
| Avicebron wrote:
| It's not as much America's Golden goose as the auto industry.
| That isn't a complete comparison, the destruction of the auto
| industry broke large swathes of the physical economy (by that
| I mean the many many industries that go into an automobile,
| factories for cables, factories for putting the plastic on
| cables, doors, glass, etc. These are physical locations that
| require many people involved, not to mention the job creature
| surrounding these manufacturing plants.
|
| The tech companies, yes make a lot of money, but the wealth
| is much more concentrated and a lot lot less jobs are
| required to make it work.
|
| These companies need to be broken up to foster
| competitiveness, which leads to more jobs, innovation in
| different sectors. The unified Google vs. China is such a
| tired argument from a company that trying to slowly spread
| their control and negatively leach internet users data. If
| they aren't broken up before they start causing even more
| material harm then who knows, maybe in 10 years when the only
| available GoogSurance denies your claim for medicine because
| they scraped your Ancenstry.com you'll see what I was talking
| about.
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| > Google, Amazon, FB are not the monopolies that you should be
| worried about. They are fun to talk about and tech is sexy, but
| there are bigger problems - ISPs / telecoms, for example
|
| Why not worry about both groups?
| tw000001 wrote:
| FAANG are different a kind of monopoly - an unprecedented one
| for which no legislation exists. They have a monopoly on _data_
| , as brokers they control not only what companies may purchase
| for commercial services, but through curation of search results
| and news/social media feeds they control what information
| reaches the eyes of millions of people.
|
| This is an unprecedented amount of power over society wielded
| by corporations and, in effect, the handful of private citizens
| who own them.
|
| I tend to lean libertarian but I've questioned for a while if
| it's appropriate and/or possible to limit this power in an
| equitable manner...but unchecked Google alone can probably sway
| elections with algorithmic manipulation of search results and
| even selective autocompletion.
|
| That's probably the entire reason that the administration is
| targeting these orgs, and while I don't agree with the
| administration I believe this particular endeavor may be for
| the greater good. When Twitter can delete videos retweeted by
| the president, or add "fact check warnings" which effectively
| (though maybe not truthfully) discredit his statements, Jack
| Dorsey and his board are wielding a more direct, more
| immediate, and possibly more effective power than any of other
| branches of government.
| Avicebron wrote:
| You're being hit hard wherever you go, but I think you've got
| a fair mindset. Small amounts of people have a
| disproportionate amount of final say in how millions of
| people get to group and share information. That has to have
| negative externalizations, it doesn't track that it would
| have absolutely no ill effects. If you have a legitimate
| argument that defends there will be no problems, please
| share, I'm open minded.
|
| If Trump is attacking them cynically out of some tantrum
| relating to how they beat on him and his supporters. Then
| yeah, I disagree he's doing it for the right reasons. But I
| think he has the right directional thrust.
| kube-system wrote:
| > auto
|
| There are more _major_ automakers who sell products in the US
| alone than there ever were baby bells. And there are a ton of
| regional competitors outside of the US.
| playingchanges wrote:
| Pretty simple really. Too big to fail? Break it up.
| Yoofie wrote:
| This is a straight up failure of governments of preventing
| mergers. If you let all these companies merge or acquire each
| other without restriction, this is in the inevitable result
| which ultimately harms the consumer and new entrants to the
| market.
| acituan wrote:
| > Google, Amazon, FB are not the monopolies that you should be
| worried about. They are fun to talk about and tech is sexy, but
| there are bigger problems - ISPs / telecoms, for example.
|
| That is a very misleading comparison. For almost all of the
| industries you've listed a) there are spatial limitations of
| monopolistic outreach (they have to exist in real world and
| can't exist all around the world at once) b) their products and
| services don't grow upon themselves exponentially c) the nature
| of their products and services is rather common knowledge. I'll
| go one by one;
|
| a) Tech doesn't suffer from the spatial dynamics of competition
| and in that has virtually infinite economies of scale. A cable
| company has to fight for the right of physically laying cables,
| which creates a barrier of entry for the next competitor, but
| they have to do this work repeatedly in every other location.
| As long as bandwidth and compute is paid for, tech can be
| instantaneously omni-present around the world. This means the
| monopoly having a planet wide breadth, but also that margins
| required to sustain the monopoly can be much smaller.
|
| b) Econ 101 has this classic output function: labor x capital x
| productivity = output. Tech is _both_ an output and input in
| the form of increased productivity onto itself. This means
| exponential growth. When we talk about cable companies merging,
| it is a merger of homogeneous entities, and in that only a
| merger of capital and labor. The argument here is tech
| companies "merging" with their own, heterogeneous technologies
| to yield even greater exponential growth. They are talking
| about ads and search and chrome "merging". Therefore the
| monopolistic consequences of tech is very different than that
| of commodities and utilities.
|
| c) Tech is constantly innovating on new products and new
| variations of their products, which we can't grasp the effects
| of. It is easier to guess what happens to competition or how
| the end user suffers when other industries have bad actors. Can
| we tell with confidence what the effect of Youtube's,
| Twitter's, Reddit's recommendation algorithms is on our
| collective sense-making capabilities and functioning of the
| democracy? Can we tell if the thousands of A/B experiments
| being run on us is revealing how the products can deliver more
| value or how to exploit the users better? Are users aware that
| they are participating in the largest scale applied-psychology
| lab ever existed? This information asymmetry is again a part of
| the unique dynamics of the monopolistic machinery of tech.
|
| When these three come together, the resulting monopolistic
| dynamics is _unprecedented_ and _incomparable_ to that of
| commodities, utilities and other old-school services, and we
| would be fools to make light of it.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| Please...
|
| > Are users aware that they are participating in the largest
| scale applied-psychology lab ever existed?
|
| _You_ are. I am. Everyone on this thread is. Soon, most
| people will be aware.
|
| > Econ 101 has this classic output function: labor x capital
| x productivity = output.
|
| BS. This is not economic theory, and you are not an
| economist, friend. If so, please quantify with numbers so we
| can compare (don't wast your time).
|
| > When these three come together, the resulting monopolistic
| dynamics is unprecedented and incomparable to that of
| commodities, utilities and other old-school services, and we
| would be fools to make light of it.
|
| Lofty claims here. I'll raise you - people die because they
| can't afford medicine but nobody died because of big tech.
| SEJeff wrote:
| I switched from 3 years of bad Comcast cable to AT&T 1G fiber
| recently. They were professional and ran the fiber from the
| pole to my house in a few hours.
|
| I ran a speedtest on fast.com and got 985Mbps. The service
| uptime and quality has been utterly stellar. AT&T has been
| really good to me, but not everyone has access to 1G fiber.
| gruez wrote:
| Sounds like you had a choice of service providers where you
| live. That might explain why the service was so good.
| Unfortunately, most americans don't have a choice of service
| providers, or only have one fast provider (eg. cable that
| goes to 100mbit, but DSL that only goes to 10mbit).
| rland wrote:
| I mean, what industry is not consolidating at this point? It
| feels like just about every conceivable area is served by a
| handful of gigantic players, with the rest competing for
| scraps.
|
| It's now at the point where new entrants don't even attempt to
| start small. They explicitly dump massive sums in a bid to
| break in. It seems that this is happening even in areas where
| it's not warranted (local food delivery???).
|
| It's as if the culture of every business has become captivated
| by the idea of becoming an oligopoly. My guess is because it's
| extremely attractive -- once you "make it" you don't have to
| compete any more.
|
| It works, right up until it doesn't. I hope at some point, we
| make a big change in the level of corporate consolidation we
| allow.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| > It's as if the culture of every business has become
| captivated by the idea of becoming an oligopoly. My guess is
| because it's extremely attractive -- once you "make it" you
| don't have to compete any more.
|
| I've seen the theory that this is the result of QE's massive
| inflation of asset prices; it is now harder and harder and
| harder to beat the market, but institutions have ever larger
| sums of money that they need to park and invest _somewhere_.
| Like, Softbank actively managing $100B in startups was never
| really going to work, at least not without these startups
| being required to get to ludicrous amounts of scale.
| Xcelerate wrote:
| > QE's massive inflation of asset prices; it is now harder
| and harder and harder to beat the market
|
| This is a really interesting theory that I've never heard
| before, but it makes sense. Does that imply deflation could
| instead encourage innovation?
| jrumbut wrote:
| Maybe, maybe not, but it would be a very painful way to
| do it (particularly since the average person has debt,
| owns some assets, but doesn't park huge sums in savings
| accounts or cash under the mattress like prior
| generations did).
|
| The general proposal to alleviate this problem is to
| increase the supply of assets. This means investing in
| the common good. Basic research to create whole new types
| of things to build, infrastructure to enable businesses
| to reach new markets, and workforce development so
| businesses have more effective employees.
|
| This is also often coupled with renewed enforcement of
| antitrust legislation, to give new players some oxygen
| and to discourage business models that rely on
| unprofitable scaling in order to reap monopolistic
| rewards. Then there is the side benefit that smaller
| companies have a harder time creating the conditions for
| regulatory capture.
| tengbretson wrote:
| I don't actually think the lack of choices is the real problem
| though. The issue I see is that things like AdSense or AWS are
| able to financially prop up Google and Amazon's ventures into a
| myriad of other markets that make them immune to the actual
| market forces in those domains. It ends up having a really bad
| distorting effect on any of the other players trying to run a
| normal business.
| old-gregg wrote:
| You are making a good point, and yet...
|
| > For those who are customers of AT&T - how do you like your
| service? Is it as good as Google?
|
| Since you asked... AT&T is way better, here in Oakland and also
| in Austin (fiber). It's always up and there's actually decent
| customer support you can call. Their cellular service has been
| great too. Meanwhile, Google's search has turned into a content
| marketing delivery machine, and Google Drive web UI still
| cannot catch up to Windows 95 File Explorer
| features&performance.
|
| But if you asked me which company can ruin my life or my
| company's future due to a glitch in an algorithm, the answer
| will be Google, not AT&T. I worry that Google is allowed to
| control both the search and the web browser everyone uses. I
| also worry that as Youtube is becoming increasingly more
| important for video, they'll control the "future of TV" as
| well. I am less worried about "dumb pipes" which is what AT&T
| is to me, especially with the latest migration to encryption
| for everything, even DNS.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _AT &T is way better_
|
| Seconded.
|
| I can also call AT&T and, eventually, reach someone. If I'm
| angry enough, I can ask to be routed to cancellation. (They
| fix things quicker.) If things go awry, I can threaten, and
| act on the threat, to escalate matters to my state regulator.
|
| None of these are options with Google.
| techntoke wrote:
| That is actually false. You have to pay for AT&T. If you
| pay for G Suite then you have access to live support.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Paying for G-Suite is no guarantee your files won't
| suddenly go missing with no backups:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17115643
|
| I pay for G-Suite for a side-project I inherited (I use
| Office 365 as my daily-driver) and while there is human
| support available, they don't make it easy to get to.
| With Office 365 the phone support contact details are 2
| clicks away from any screen.
| andrewxdiamond wrote:
| Based on purely anecdotal data points, it seems to me that
| YouTube is the lagging incumbent in online streaming these
| days. The creators that make their platform valuable are
| slowly either leaving the service, or diversifying their
| content streams to other services.
|
| Twitch, Patreon, Curiosity Stream, etc are all taking the
| parts of the pie that YouTube could have had if they invested
| in understanding the communities that built themselves on top
| of their platform. But instead, smaller, more agile (the verb
| not the noun) companies are responding to the demand while
| YouTube's advertising revenue streams are starting to dry up.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Legally, they were "dumb pipes" until the rollback of net
| national neutrality laws and common carrier status for ISPs.
| old-gregg wrote:
| Agreed, that's why I said that game_the0ry is making some
| good points, monopoly for content delivery is not good (it
| leads to control, not just delivery).
|
| I am just not comfortable with seeing Google as a lesser
| threat.
| deelowe wrote:
| Where I'm at, you can't get ATT gigabit fiber without
| allowing them to do ad injection.
| Panini_Jones wrote:
| How does an ISP do ad injection? Where are the ads shown
| that originate from the ISP?
| novok wrote:
| Probably an obnoxious https mitm certificate that adds
| banners to your web browsing, along with a complete
| recording of your browsing history to sell to
| advertisers, like comcast does.
| negativegate wrote:
| You're saying you can't visit any https sites without
| adding this certificate to your device's trusted
| certificates?
| old-gregg wrote:
| If you mistype a hostname in the browser and DNS lookup
| fails, they return a valid IP for a landing page with an
| ad. AT&T doesn't do it for my service, but at some point
| I had it with Time Warner cable, IIRC. You fix it by
| setting your DNS to (haha) Google's.
| gerdesj wrote:
| Try 9.9.9.9 and 1.1.1.1. There are many other external
| DNS services that don't break AD and eDirectory. You can
| also run your own but I'll grant you that isn't for
| everyone.
| ummonk wrote:
| It does a yahoo search for me which includes ads if I use
| their dns servers.
|
| But yes, this is why you use the DNS service of your
| choice instead of whatever dhcp returns.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| AT&T was just an example. How about the cost of insulin?
|
| If Google's algorithm can ruin your life or your business,
| then I would suggest you figure out how to decouple Google's
| influence on your life and business. I am sure it wont be
| easy, but I am also sure it can be done.
|
| Yes, Google is the new TV. And when we are old, we will be
| telling our children that Youtube "rots your brain," just
| like our parents did.
|
| Adapting your habits is easier to control than breaking up
| Google and Youtube.
| spideymans wrote:
| >Financial services, airlines, oil majors, media, pharma, auto,
| etc. Those are the industries that need breaking up.
|
| Great. Break up Google, in addition to those industries, as
| well.
| SaltyBackendGuy wrote:
| I literally almost wrote this. I am glad I didn't because
| because you framed it better.
|
| My gut tells me that there's no financial incentive for the
| government to target them. I.E. telco lobbies
| game_the0ry wrote:
| Yes, lobbying is the root defect in the operating system of
| governance. This is what happens when business can buy
| legislative outcomes - Americans can't afford medicine when
| the rest of the world gets it cheaply.
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| You and I may not worry about Google/FB etc, but many
| businesses do.
| [deleted]
| kanox wrote:
| Many places have decent telecoms competition with a similar
| number of carriers.
|
| As far as I understand the problem in the US is that many
| locations have just one wired service provider. Meaningful
| competitions would require that most buildings have multiple
| sets of fiber.
|
| Splitting telecoms by geography seems pointless: California and
| Texas ISPs can't compete with each other without huge capital
| spending.
| pottertheotter wrote:
| I think the solution is to have municipally owned fiber that
| is open to many ISPs.
| 1over137 wrote:
| More generally: government owned. i.e. could be provincial,
| federal, etc. Like how water pipes and electricity already
| are (in many places).
| CameronNemo wrote:
| One challenge is that in many places (especially the most
| profitable areas), the last mile is already built out. So
| by saying "municipally owned fiber" you mean laying new
| pipes to replace existing pipes (significant material cost)
| or trying to wrestle control of the existing pipes away
| from large ISPs (significant political cost). A small to
| medium sized city cannot just tell AT&T "give me your
| fiber", and it often lacks the capital to put down new
| fiber. Even if a small project could be completed, the
| dominant ISP in the area would simply lower their prices
| enough to make the project uneconomical, thus preventing
| the project from recouping its costs and staining the idea
| of publicly owned internet infrastructure.
| Avicebron wrote:
| Then maybe more thought should be given to how the
| dominant ISP's as well as other anti-competitive business
| practices have put the local municipalities into a
| position where they 1) don't have the cash to lay down
| their own pipes 2)are put in a position where blatant
| anti-competitive behavior like strangling newly laid
| pipes would not be adjudicated fairly. A two prong
| approach of subsidizing local pipes and pressuring
| existing fiber to behavior fairly.
| philjohn wrote:
| Which is why other countries have gone full in on local loop
| unbundling
|
| In the UK the last mile is either OpenReach, Virgin Media or
| KCOM. Because OpenReach has a virtual monopoly in last-mile
| infra across the country they are regulated and must provide
| access to other ISPs, in the old days through colocated
| DSLAMs in local exchanges (LLU) and now by having a set
| maximum price they can sell wholesale VDSL, FTTP and voice
| lines.
|
| As a result, you have the gamut of ISPs from niche who focus
| on having amazing backhaul and customer service (AAISP) to
| "pile them high" ISPs like Vodafone, TalkTalk and then people
| like Sky who bundle talk, tv and broadband into relatively
| affordable packages.
|
| As a result - there is a lot of competition almost everywhere
| in the country, and I can get a 384Mbps down 37Mbps up
| connection with unlimited usage and no traffic shaping for
| PS50 a month.
| xxpor wrote:
| >I can get a 384Mbps down 37Mbps up connection with
| unlimited usage and no traffic shaping for PS50 a month.
|
| After all of the rest of the comment, that's a pretty
| disappointing result. Fifty quid is currently $63. I can
| get symmetric gigabit FTTH for $65, or docsis 200 mbit for
| $40. This is not uncommon in urban areas in the states.
| mroche wrote:
| Asymmetric plans are really disappointing. Back at my
| family's residence we have Verizon Fios which only offers
| [near] symmetric plans (200/200, 400/400c 940/880) which
| is fantastic. They're looking to upgrade from our legacy
| bundle package of 30/30 to gigabit, which is exciting for
| them.
|
| Where I am, in an urban apartment complex I had two
| provider choices: Frontier and Optimum. Frontier wired
| the building, but their plans were ridiculously
| underwhelming. My Optimum plan is ~$55/m including
| modem/router for 300/35. Their highest offering for
| upload seemed to be 45Mbps (or 35, plan descriptions
| between the site and sales were not consistent).
|
| I'm not in telecom nor a networking expert, but what
| difficulties are there in offering symmetric plans?
| jorvi wrote:
| Someone else more knowledgeable will have to expand on
| this, but I know that on Docsis the lower bands are used
| for upload and those can carry less signal. Something
| about those lower bands makes them more advantageous for
| node > hub communications but exactly what I don't know.
| [deleted]
| ravenstine wrote:
| > Google, Amazon, FB are not the monopolies that you should be
| worried about.
|
| Not at all?
|
| > For those who are customers of AT&T - how do you like your
| service? Is it as good as Google?
|
| Google's "support" for their products has one of the worst
| reputations.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| The problem when you break up a domestic giant is that opens the
| door for foreign giants to enter the market.
|
| What would you rather have, Amazon and Google, or Alibaba and
| Baidu?
| iron0013 wrote:
| Which is preferable, politically "neutral" search results, or
| search results that prioritize truth and accuracy? I prefer the
| latter, which is what google provides now, but I'd be interested
| to hear from those who would prefer the former.
|
| If one party says that little green aliens are going to raise ATM
| fees and another party doesn't, should google be obligated to
| return search results supporting both perspectives?
| theduder99 wrote:
| politically neutral search results? you've got to be kidding.
| guess you don't remember the multiple "auto-complete fiascos"
| involving hillary, obama, trump, etc.
| blockmarker wrote:
| I do not trust Google to give me accurate and truthful results.
| Not the engineers, not the executives, not the company. They
| are my political opponents.
|
| They are people and Google is still a corporation: they can all
| be bought, infiltrated, deceived, manipulated and threatened. I
| would not allow such a centralized point of failure for all
| information and knowledge to be controlled.
|
| Given that not even soft sciences academics, who are supposed
| to be erudites, can separate themselves from their biases and
| look at things objectively, and their whole job is supposed to
| be that, I do not trust that the engineers at Google are able
| to do that.
|
| And finally, simply giving an incredibly small elite what the
| rest of the population can see and know, is a bad idea.
|
| These are the reasons why I oppose prioritizing "truth and
| accuracy". It would not be such thing.
|
| I, personally, would add that just the two American political
| parties deciding what is politically neutral is pretty bad.
| Even if the Republicans are nominally on my side, I do not
| trust such people to treat fairly all other politics than the
| ones chosen by the leaders of each party. And all the other
| points I have raised wholly apply even to those on my side of
| politics.
|
| It would still, however, be better than letting my political
| enemies controlling the internet. If the roles were reversed,
| you would think the same.
| downerending wrote:
| "Truth and Accuracy" sounds like a good name for a government
| ministry. Wonder if it's been done.
| summerlight wrote:
| The core issue here is that this regulation doesn't directly
| introduce any new competition while it only tries to weaken
| Google's network effect. Network effect is a new corporate tool
| to fight against antitrust regulation; it's not that
| straightforward to handle it within the scope defined by the US
| antitrust jurisprudence especially when it actually benefits the
| consumers (in this case, advertisers).
|
| I personally believe that we need to deal with those aggregators
| but not sure if this kind of breaking up will result anything
| other than lost opportunity costs from several years wasted from
| a lawsuit. I hope DoJ to develop a new effective framework to
| regulate aggregators but it's very unlikely since William Barr
| seems to be mostly driven by political motivation.
| mrkramer wrote:
| I think government should not be breaking up big successful
| companies only because they control >50% market share. What
| Microsoft did with IE was nasty but Google acquiring DoubleClick,
| AdMob, YouTube etc. is not nasty at all. If Google for example
| made the same exact product like YouTube and then leveraged its
| massive resources and distribution channel to destroy YouTube and
| claim the market share that would be problematic but otherwise I
| don't see a problem.
|
| Punishing the best student in class only because he or she is the
| best is not cool at all.
| jldugger wrote:
| > Google acquiring DoubleClick
|
| Allowing that was probably a mistake. IDK if it's possible to
| undo, but letting the two biggest advertisers merge was is like
| almost definitionally anticompetitive.
| rch wrote:
| This effort seems fundamentally out of touch, misdirected, and
| politically motivated.
| nickreese wrote:
| What happens to shareholders when a company is broken up? Do they
| end up with shares in both companies?
| esoterica wrote:
| I wonder if any of the tech workers here cheering on the breaking
| up of Google or Facebook realize that the obscene FAANG
| compensation packages are only made possible by their massive
| profit margins, which are in turn enabled by their pseudo-
| monopoly status.
|
| Monopolies are "bad" because they have the pricing power gouge
| their customers at the expense of boosting profits. But Google's
| and Facebook's customers are advertisers! When you support
| "breaking up tech monopolies" you are basically saying
| programmers should get paid less money so advertising companies
| can buy cheaper ads. What an utterly ridiculous and self-
| destructive thing for tech workers to advocate.
| joelbluminator wrote:
| Anyone good with investments here? How worried should I be if I
| own alphabet stocks?
| timwaagh wrote:
| Worried if this is true
| empath75 wrote:
| I'd say not worried at all in the long term and maybe slightly
| worried in the short term. Microsoft is doing fine after a few
| years of bad returns. The successor companies to AT&T and
| Standard Oil did fine.
| mywittyname wrote:
| You will get a stake in any spin-off companies that result from
| DoJ action. So there's no worries from that perspective.
|
| However, this will take years to litigate and a lot can happen
| to a tech company over that timeframe.
| hogFeast wrote:
| The value will go up.
|
| Biggest issue with Alphabet is that it is run like a govt
| bureaucracy. You have one business that is very valuable, and
| to own that you have to pay the tax of owning all the other
| stuff that does nothing but burn cash for the benefit of
| employees.
| austincheney wrote:
| If this works out like it did for the breakup of Standard Oil
| you will be very wealthy.
| mikestew wrote:
| I don't mean to be snarky, but do you think a comparison to a
| company that was dissolved over 100 years ago by people long
| dead is apt?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Standard oil may have a different name now, but it still
| very much exists and those children companies are still
| amongst the wealthiest companies in the world.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| If it works like AT&T though, not so much.
| jedberg wrote:
| If they even decide to go through with it it would be years
| before anything actually happens. But, assuming they do and it
| does, I suspect it would go down like this:
|
| Google is split into Google Ads and Google Data Collection.
| Search, Youtube, and all the other things they use to collect
| data on you will go to DC, and GA will just do ads.
|
| DC will need to find a source of revenue, and will start
| bundling up selling the data they collect on you. One of their
| customers will be GA. But maybe some upstart company or Amazon
| or Microsoft will be their customers too.
|
| GA will lose value because they will have to increase
| payouts/lower prices to compete with their new competitors. DC
| will go up in value because of all their new sources of
| revenue.
|
| You'll be a shareholder in both and probably see your total
| value go up because Data Collection will probably make more
| money than Google Ads loses.
| thoughtstheseus wrote:
| No one knows, it depends how they breakup or regulate. On the
| flip side google will likely stop spending money on random
| projects.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Good decision. Then do the same thing to AWS and Amazon's media
| branch, and then go undo the whatsapp acquisition. Then stop
| platforms from subsidizing competing products while they charge
| competitors high fees like Spotify vs Apple Music.
|
| The increasing trend of large tech conglomerates to use one money
| printing product like AWS or search or the Apple Store to
| tactically snipe competitors to destroy or acquire them is
| absolutely abysmal in the long run. I don't care if it increases
| consumer prices by 10 cents or whatever, it's time to look at the
| long term health of the ecosystem overall. It's really the
| private analog to a state capitalist country subsidizing its own
| firms while foreigners have to compete on a one-by-one basis.
| Everyone considers that to be detrimental when it happens between
| two nations, I don't see why it's not detrimental when it happens
| in the tech industry.
| nova22033 wrote:
| _The increasing trend of large tech conglomerates to use one
| money printing product like AWS or search or the Apple Store to
| tactically snipe competitors to destroy or acquire them is
| absolutely abysmal in the long run_
|
| It doesn't matter what you think..The only thing that matters
| is whether they have the legal authority and can show the
| consumers are harmed.
|
| Amazon selling their in-house brand based on their private
| sales data could meet that threshold. Amazon making money on
| AWS, OTOH, will probably not meet that threshold.
| haecceity wrote:
| Amazon just needs to release their sales data publicly if
| they want to use it and hope they can execute on it better.
| mrharrison wrote:
| The counter argument is that the US needs to keep FAANG
| companies large as a weapon/counter measure against large rival
| Chinese companies.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| People used to make this exact argument in the 80s when it
| came to Japan, and even when it came to the Soviet Union[1].
| There were countless of people who had already written off
| competitive markets in favour of supporting domestic
| industry.
|
| In the car industry people actually listened and enacted
| domestic protection, what did that get the US? Two lost
| decades of shoddy cars. Have Japanese conglomerates overtaken
| the world? Nope.
|
| I think it's an absolute smokescreen and such a blatant
| attempt by Facebook to use nationalism to protect their
| status. In the long run we're better served by trusting in
| innovation than trying to protect domestic business. It was
| always the right bet. And if China continues to prop up
| giants they'll just stagnate. The reason they caught up in
| the first place is because, for at least a short time, they
| allowed free-wheeling fierce competition.
|
| [1]https://www.econlib.org/archives/2009/12/why_were_americ.h
| tm...
| w7 wrote:
| I think there is a profound difference between car
| companies, which produce a "dumb" item that's consumed, and
| "big tech" companies which have shown they can have a major
| cultural and political impact both domestically and abroad
| because their business is information itself. It doesn't
| make sense to discount an argument because of a similar one
| which applied to something almost completely different.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Car companies haven't had a major impact on American
| culture and politics? Have you been to an American city
| or suburb?
| throwaway3563 wrote:
| > because their business is information itself
|
| No they haven't, not in that way.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > In the car industry people actually listened and enacted
| domestic protection, what did that get the US? Two lost
| decades of shoddy cars. Have Japanese conglomerates
| overtaken the world? Nope.
|
| Toyota, Honda, Nissan - they pretty much dominate global
| car sales, but that's because they had a better product.
| [deleted]
| ambicapter wrote:
| Depends on if you want one very large but somewhat lazy
| defender or a swarm of small, fast and aggressive defenders.
| iratewizard wrote:
| Why is Facebook included in that? If Facebook disappeared
| tomorrow, dopamine addicts would switch to a different drug
| and your 3rd cousin would have to put more effort into
| bothering you.
| andreilys wrote:
| All those sound great in theory if the US was an isolated
| nation.
|
| However all these companies compete on a global stage. You
| better believe that Huawei, tencent, Alibaba are going to take
| advantage of weakened US companies.
| thekyle wrote:
| I think the EU provides a pretty good example of what could
| happen. They seem much more aggressive with anti-trust and as
| a result they aren't very competitive on the global tech
| stage.
|
| There are a handful a tech companies from Europe that operate
| globally, but they're usually niche (Spotify, Minecraft,
| Qwant).
| sida wrote:
| Isn't this an example that you don't want to break up the
| companies?
|
| i.e. EU companies are not as competitive, presumably lack
| scale for lower pricing, lack scale to invest into
| expensive R&D
|
| And that's bad for consumers
| dtech wrote:
| Adyen, Booking.com, ASML, Just eat, Nokia, Shazam, Skype,
| Zalando, Hello Fresh, Takeaway.com, NXP, Nginx, Rasberry
| Pi, Waze
|
| Sure, they are no Google or Amazon, but they are or were
| nothing to sneeze at either
|
| I'm also highly doubtful that this is mainly because of
| anti-trust laws.
|
| A much more likely reason to me seems that Europe is much
| more diversified in law and culture, a Paris company has a
| much harder time expanding to London or Berlin than an San
| Fransisco one will have for Los Angeles or New York. This
| naturally leads to more, smaller companies.
| enitihas wrote:
| I think the combined market cap/revenue of all the
| companies you mention would still be less than any of the
| 4 biggest tech companies of the US. Even the Chinese
| companies are way bigger.
|
| > A much more likely reason to me seems that Europe is
| much more diversified in law and culture, a Paris company
| has a much harder time expanding to London or Berlin than
| an San Fransisco one will have for Los Angeles or New
| York. This naturally leads to more, smaller companies.
|
| I am not sure that's the case. The EU car companies had
| overtaken the US car companies, inspite of the above
| scenarios.
| chvid wrote:
| Europe has plenty of very big companies. They are just
| not in tech (as in consumer computing, social media).
| rurp wrote:
| Economic competition is generally a good thing. Breaking up
| monopolies fosters competition within a country, and
| competition promotes progress. Historically, companies in
| free societies have generally performed much better than govt
| granted/allowed monopolies in more centralized countries.
|
| Sure you can get some economies of scale as a monopoly, but
| it comes with a lot of corruption, incompetence, and anti-
| competitive behavior.
| andreilys wrote:
| I agree with everything you're saying.
|
| I also think that a hamstrung western company will be
| steamrolled by international companies with significant
| state backing/support.
|
| This isn't a simple equation, there are second and third
| order effects that we can't appreciate until after the
| fact.
| new_realist wrote:
| That's an argument for a level playing field on trade,
| enforced via regulatory means; what's wrong with that?
| w7 wrote:
| Level playing field how? What's the US going to do,
| regulate other companies in foreign countries? Magically
| convince China to de-integrate its tech companies in the
| same way?
| stickfigure wrote:
| I agree, and let's not stop there! What business did Apple have
| getting into the music player business or the cell phone
| business? They already have a profitable computer business!
| General Electric makes appliances, lightbulbs, jet engines,
| nuclear plants, and a dozen other things, split them up!
|
| We can divide up the world into little boxes and carefully
| decide who is allowed to participate in each box. Hell, we can
| go back to giving people occupational surnames - if your name
| is Smith or Barber or Carpenter, your box is already picked out
| for you. GET BACK IN.
| missedthecue wrote:
| >"The increasing trend of large tech conglomerates to use one
| money printing product like AWS or search or the Apple Store to
| tactically snipe competitors to destroy or acquire them is
| absolutely abysmal in the long run."
|
| That's literally how every company ever in any industry since
| the dawn of commerce has operated. You use profits to grow and
| diversify. You can't perform capital expenditure without
| capital...
| monadic2 wrote:
| That ain't a good thing, it just means this kind of hellscape
| is inevitable.
| kelnos wrote:
| Ok, so you have some spare capital from being successful in
| one market. You want to move into a new market, and that
| spare capital is your ticket in. There's a difference between
| building a sustainable, independent business with that
| capital, and strangling competitors in the new market by
| moving in and charging well below your cost until those
| competitors are dead.
|
| The former benefits consumers by giving them more choice. The
| latter gives consumers lower prices in the short term, but
| then hurts them overall when the competitors are forced out
| and prices inevitably rise again, this time without any
| competitive pressure to keep costs low, margins reasonable,
| and product/service quality high.
|
| And regardless of whether or not the latter is common, or has
| always been common, I maintain that it is a huge negative
| aspect of capitalism that destroys wealth, creates
| inefficiency, and hurts consumers. Regulation that targets
| that practice would be welcome.
| missedthecue wrote:
| >"but then hurts them overall when the competitors are
| forced out and prices inevitably rise again,"
|
| Can you provide a contempory example of this happening?
| TeaDrunk wrote:
| Microsoft?
| missedthecue wrote:
| Microsoft did the opposite. They bundled for free. They
| never pushed up costs
| avianlyric wrote:
| That conclusion is based on the premise that their
| software would have been priced the same if they hadn't
| bundled in "free" software. Not sure we have enough data
| to make that conclusion.
|
| Ultimately you were charged for the "free" bundled
| software, you just couldn't get a line item break down of
| how of the bundle price was made up by that "free"
| software.
|
| Not saying that Microsoft should break down their OS
| prices by bundled software, or that it makes sense. But
| without that breakdown you can't make the assertion that
| "They never pushed up costs".
| londons_explore wrote:
| It's hard to find an example, because no company is
| stupid enough to push out _all_ the competitors. Instead
| they push out most of the competitors, while keeping one
| or two around (so they don 't get into trouble with
| monopoly laws), and building big barriers to entry for
| anyone else.
|
| Then they can increase prices a bit, although the main
| profit source is in reducing unit costs now you have a
| big business and making all your profit through volume.
|
| It's certainly non-ideal for customers, but at the same
| time I think customers usually get a better service for a
| lower price than in a world with hundreds of competing
| companies (where overheads work out much larger)
| meditativeape wrote:
| What would be the ideal situation? Like you said, having
| too many competing companies doesn't lead to great
| services at low cost because of the extra overhead and
| lack of volume, and having a monopoly gives one company
| too much power, then isn't duopoly a nice equilibrium?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| my answer to that is, yes that _is_ how every other industry
| operates, which is why every other industry is _painfully
| slow_. Tech was the rare exception of having the advantage of
| starting from a blank slate a few decades ago, and it was
| insanely innovative. There 's no excuse to let it calcify
| into the state of every other industry, and I'd take your
| point and go further, go to every other industry and do the
| same.
|
| Go to telecommunications and break the big players up and
| create marketplaces in which small players can innovate. Do
| it in news media and undo that awful communications act from
| 96 that led to industry concentration.
|
| We need to take an activist attitude to anti-trust that
| actively seeks to create rabidly competitive markets which is
| what fuelled early tech's growth, instead of letting tech
| slide into the status quo.
|
| And of course all of these companies will still have access
| to capital. They'll just need to convince investors that
| their product is better.
| monadic2 wrote:
| Early markets were fueled by capital, not competition.
| Capital needs to be reigned in with these monopolies or
| we'll just sprout more. Let's not pretend like competitive
| markets are possible with the kind of capital needed to
| compete.
| erichocean wrote:
| > _That 's literally how every company ever in any industry
| since the dawn of commerce has operated._
|
| Not even close to true, you're describing how "financial
| capitalism" works which is relatively modern (in the US, it
| begin in the early 1900s after the creation of the Federal
| Reserve). Until you financialize an economy, businesses can't
| use that kind of strategy to compete. Once you do, only those
| with access to finance can win.
|
| Read up on industrial capitalism which relies on the quality
| of products and services--not access to finance, aka money
| printing--to compete in the marketplace. That's how the US
| was built originally, and what most Americans mean when they
| say they support "capitalism."
| tridentlead wrote:
| This is materially false. Throughout history capital has
| been used to stop competitors. Capital is not necessarily
| money in a practical sense. Regardless, money has decided
| these things for hundreds of years as well. Whether nation
| states rose or fell depended on whether they could pay
| mercenaries to fight for them. The largest brick castle in
| the world, Malbork fell when the Teutonic order was
| besieged and could no longer pay the castles defenders.
| They were then "bought out" by a Polish general. This
| doesn't just apply to mercenary armies, or war, by the way.
| This isn't just some product of "modern capitalism".
| erichocean wrote:
| > _Throughout history capital has been used to stop
| competitors._
|
| Your examples are nations, not businesses. Obviously the
| economics of warfare are different: money (and resources
| more generally) are how you defeat your "enemies."
|
| I'm talking about capitalism, both industrial ( _Wealth
| of Nations_ -style) and modern, financial capitalism.
| metrokoi wrote:
| Deliberately targeting growing competitors using things like
| predatory pricing [0] is not the same as growing and
| diversifying.
|
| [0] https://www.aei.org/technology-and-innovation/who-should-
| ant...
| new_realist wrote:
| That's not the anti-competitive behavior described above.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| Yeah, but these are primates and no primate is evolved enough
| to handle consolidation without turning into a total fuck-off
| tyrant. You know at one point the British Empire controlled
| over a quarter of the entire world? They had a real
| opportunity to usher in a new era of peace and cooperation.
| Did they do it? NOOOOO!!! NO ONE EVER DOES!
| Sevaris wrote:
| It's incredibly anti-competitive behaviour and it's baffling
| that governments are allowing it to go unchecked. Even the
| WhatsApp purchase was greenlit with _caveats_ (not combining FB
| and WhatsApp user data) ... which were promptly ignored by
| Facebook. I seriously want to know who they paid off to get
| that acquisition. There 's no way that was above board.
| stale2002 wrote:
| Boy have things changed.
|
| When the biggest complaint that people have about these
| companies is that their services are _too_ good and _too_
| amazing, and that customers love them _too_ much, that no one
| else can possibly provide as amazing of a service as them...
| Well I think that says something.
| kediz wrote:
| How do you achieve this technically? Monorepo would be a pain to
| break.
|
| Or just break up Google into two but let both of them keep the
| access to the same repo? Then what would this achieve?
| alecb wrote:
| They should have spun off DoubleClick for Publishers and other
| server/ad mediation into separate companies and is likely what
| will happen if the government is successful in their case.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _How do you achieve this technically? Monorepo would be a
| pain to break._
|
| Well, that's Google's problem... Plus, it's not like they can't
| follow an API and versioned libs and have to have it all
| bundled...
| duskwuff wrote:
| The big question would be how you deal with shared
| infrastructure -- compute, data storage, logging, etc. Google
| has a significant amount of highly proprietary code in those
| areas which they're undoubtedly using within their ads
| product; it'd be tricky to figure out how to deal with that
| in a split.
| mayank wrote:
| > Monorepo would be a pain to break.
|
| It's generally acknowledged in technical circles that antitrust
| action is a highly effective way to break up a monorepo.
| kediz wrote:
| It would be a case of LDD (Lawsuit driven development). The
| engineers would need to redo a lot of the infra and products
| toast0 wrote:
| At the time of the breakup AlphabetCereal gets a copy and
| AlphabetSoup gets a copy. If they care, make Soup and Cereal
| pledge to purge the Soup specific or the Cereal specific parts.
| Either way, ban the soup company from selling cereal by consent
| decree and vice versa.
|
| Splitting the datacenters might be trickier, but worst case,
| operate them jointly for 12-18 months, and at the end, each
| datacenter and the contents thereof are the exclusive property
| of one or the other. Or enact a third company to own and
| operate the datacenter under FRAND terms.
| jrockway wrote:
| To some extent, Google broke themselves up when it became
| Alphabet.
| jeffbee wrote:
| It is fairly amazing that this action would come against a player
| with a minority and shrinking share of a market where prices are
| rapidly falling. Antitrust actions under US doctrine are supposed
| to benefit consumers, but how can this action do anything other
| than increase profits for Facebook and Amazon?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Antitrust actions under US doctrine are supposed to benefit
| consumers
|
| Note that the viewpoint that antitrust is SOLELY about benefit
| to consumers, and not also about restricting corporate power,
| is relatively new in US antitrust jurisprudence (around the 80s
| I think), and there are currently many scholars reassessing
| this viewpoint.
|
| Edit: Some more info about current reassessment of the Chicago
| School of Antitrust:
| https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/reassessing-chicago-school...
| ls612 wrote:
| It's a very complicated issue but I thought one of the
| justifications behind that doctrine was that consumer
| benefits/prices was a very objective way to measure corporate
| power (because with lots of power they would be able to raise
| prices freely to hurt consumers and benefit themselves)
| jeffbee wrote:
| Chicago School antitrust doctrine has been the direction of
| US jurisprudence throughout the existence of the online
| advertising industry and predates all of the market
| participants. Even if we throw it out, what's _any_ ethical,
| moral, or legal reason to break up Google's business? Surely
| it can't be that the government has an interest in boosting
| Verizon's market share.
| topkai22 wrote:
| There used to be a pretty strong belief in the separation
| of media production and distribution, originating in the
| break up of the studio system. I'm not a historian or legal
| expert here by any stretch, but at some of the arguments
| supporting this were about ensuring the limited platforms
| (movie studios and broadcasters at the time) would have to
| allow competitive access for distribution of content.
|
| Google is in a position similar to being a major
| broadcaster- it is a gatekeeper of content, whether through
| search, YouTube, or ads. While Google started off with a
| pretty radical view of free speech that resulted on a
| pretty content, that has waned in the last 5-10 years.
|
| The most obvious of this is the de-monetization of YouTube
| channels. While I hardly disagree with their choice to
| distance themselves from many vitriolic personalities, I've
| also seen them demonetize science channels for doing
| experiments involving explosives and smaller channels they
| just didn't want to bother monitoring. The theoretical
| reason for this- their ad partners don't want their ads
| accidently running on offensive content.*
|
| There isn't any real alternative to YouTube. Searching for
| how to videos on google often results in a page of only
| YouTube videos. Content producers cannot directly negotiate
| interstitial ad content. The old-time concerns about a
| single broadcaster dominating the marketplace of ideas is
| absolutely applicable here. Breaking up Content, Search,
| and Ads would go a long way to ensure access to the
| platform.
|
| *As well they should, and I actually kind of LIKE that its
| become harder for offensive crazies to make money, but I'm
| providing the argument for breaking up the content, search,
| and ads.
| chub500 wrote:
| This is pointing to the crux of the issue. Anti-trust action
| against software companies is a sticky issue especially when
| the market exists entirely because of their innovation in the
| first place. I have no love for Google but I also don't see how
| customers' perception of the ad market won't change over time.
|
| Commodity monopolies on the other hand seem to have much more
| obvious detrimental effects longterm.
| ProAm wrote:
| Hopefully they are broken up next.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Is there a precedent for breaking up the top three players in
| a marketplace? By what means would that give relief to ad
| buyers?
|
| If you were to impair the ad business of Google, Facebook,
| and Amazon, wouldn't that simply shift profits to Verizon,
| Microsoft, Snap, ByteDance, etc?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I think it's a huge mistake to group Google, Facebook and
| Amazon all in the same bucket and say "look, they don't
| have a monopoly because they each only have X% of 'total
| digital ad spend'".
|
| If I want to advertise my vacation house for rent, I sure
| as hell am not going to do it on Amazon, and FB would
| hardly make any sense (maybe if I had a whole network of
| houses for rent to do brand marketing, but not if I just
| had one). Google is pretty much the only option that makes
| sense here.
|
| I mean, just ask a digital marketer. While there are some
| potential areas of overlap they all view Adwords, FB ads
| and Amazon ads very differently and not much in
| 'competition'.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Weird example because I am sure Facebook is a major
| outlet for vacation rental marketing. Here's the Vacation
| Rental Management Association's advice on using Facebook:
| https://www.vrma.org/p/bl/et/blogaid=1253
|
| I imagine other large players in vacation rental
| marketing are VRBO, TripAdvisor, and AirBnB.
|
| Anyway if you redefine the online advertising market to
| include only the things that Google dominates, such as
| search ads on Google itself, then sure you can make it
| look anyway you want.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I'm not "redefining" the online advertising market. If
| anything, practically every single digital marketer in
| existence considers, for example, FB ads to be very
| different from Google ads and serve very different
| purposes. It's you who have (oddly, IMO) redefined the
| the market by lumping everything together.
|
| And look at your "other large players in the vacation
| rental market". Perhaps unsurprisingly some of those
| travel brands are among the _largest_ spenders on
| AdWords. See Expedia (parent co of VRBO) Chairman Barry
| Diller 's comments on this exact topic:
| https://skift.com/2018/10/16/expedias-barry-diller-calls-
| on-...
|
| If you look at search marketing, which is unique in its
| ability to target users at the moment of intent, let's
| look at the players. Google is at over 90% and everyone
| else is peanuts. I would agree with you that there is
| overlap with Amazon here, but only in a subset of
| products (i.e. primarily physical, deliverable products,
| not services).
| alecb wrote:
| What does Google have a shrinking share of? This article is
| specifically referencing ad tech, of which DFP has near 100%
| market share, while AdX is greatly outperforming it's rival
| (Facebook audience network pulled support for mobile web in
| April while Amazon's much-ballyhooed A9 platform turned into a
| big Whataburger).
| gundmc wrote:
| "Facebook, Google Digital Ad Market Share Drops as Amazon
| Climbs" - June 2019 [1]
|
| "Amazon is eating into Google's most important business:
| Search advertising" - October 2019 [2]
|
| There are dozens and dozens of articles about this. The
| market as a whole is growing, and Google's market share is
| large, but shrinking as a percentage of the pie.
|
| [1] - https://www.investopedia.com/news/facebook-google-
| digital-ad...
|
| [2] - https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/15/amazon-is-eating-into-
| google...
| ericmcer wrote:
| Can they do this with all sectors? Instead of targeting the last
| sector they haven't completely brought to heel.
| nugget wrote:
| I took a course taught by a former Microsoft exec who worked at
| the company before and after the DOJ's anti-trust settlement. He
| said the settlement profoundly changed the internal culture of
| competitiveness and innovation. Lawyers were embedded on many
| product teams, review cycles became slower, and execs became
| complacent. I think the only way Amazon or Google ever start to
| stagnate is if a similar fate befalls them.
| wtvanhest wrote:
| I worked at Intel for a brief 3 month summer internship in
| finance (2010). One thing that struck me was that I was not
| allowed to put certain words in presentations because they
| didn't want those words used against them in court. Its been a
| long time so I don't remember what words, but that was a long
| time after the first set of anti-trust actions.
|
| Maybe someone that has been there more recently can attest or
| counter my point, but it seemed to at least leave a surface
| wound on the culture.
| refurb wrote:
| I work in healthcare, a highly regulated industry and we do
| the same thing. It's to the point that we've developed
| euphemisms for all these words.
| mrep wrote:
| Not intel, but I definitely have seen training videos about
| not saying "dominate the market" or "crush the competition".
| kudokatz wrote:
| There has been official training at multiple, large tech
| companies other than Intel specifically geared towards
| preventing even accidental use of language that can be taken
| out-of-context. The practice is alive and well.
| riskyfive wrote:
| Uber had training that said you could never call a driver
| an employee or anything related to that, they were 'driver
| partners' or some such with words that imply a platform
| user
| walshemj wrote:
| Thats slightly diferent - there is a lot of law about
| employees status - mainly because the IRS doesn't want to
| lose out any $ not for any liberal concern for employees
| sureshv wrote:
| The entire mentality of the company changed. IMO it affected
| every product group across the company.
| save_ferris wrote:
| That's not exactly an unbiased opinion if he was an executive
| at the company that was subject to anti-trust action.
|
| I'm not suggesting that he's lying, but it's important to
| remember that the anti-trust action likely had a financial
| impact on him, particularly if he had a lot of comp tied up in
| company stock.
|
| Here we are 20 something years later and Microsoft looks to be
| just doing just fine to me.
| nostrademons wrote:
| His complaint wasn't that Microsoft (or himself) didn't make
| money, it's that Microsoft became complacent and lost the
| will to innovate.
|
| Microsoft made plenty of money between 1998 and 2014. They
| also basically ceased innovating. I was a child and teenager
| during Microsoft's glory days from 1985-2000. They were
| basically unstoppable: if you thought you had a good
| software-related idea, Microsoft was already doing it, doing
| it better, and bringing some nasty market-power tricks to
| bear (much like Google in their glory days from ~2000-2015).
| I started my career soon after the DoJ consent decree, and
| Microsoft became a joke. They were the 800 lb. gorilla that
| sat in the corner milking their Windows/IE/Office monopolies
| (and eventually losing them) while the web became a bigger
| platform than Windows ever was.
| loudmax wrote:
| > milking their Windows/IE/Office monopolies (and
| eventually losing them)
|
| Losing them? Nearly all the business workspace I know is
| Windows-only. Maybe not in Silicon Valley or top tech
| schools, but Windows is the norm for most businesses. It's
| not a competitive marketplace.
| save_ferris wrote:
| This may be true, but it doesn't change the fact that a
| powerful executive clearly could have a bias when
| criticizing legal/regulatory action.
|
| Quite often, I see wealthy, influential members of the tech
| community speak out against regulatory function citing
| things like lost innovation, when the reality is that they
| were pretty financially motivated to disparage government
| action in the first place. Again, that's not to say that
| this executive was lying, but he clearly makes negative
| statements around the antitrust case and had a clear
| financial reason for doing so. He's not a neutral party
| making an objective observation here.
| [deleted]
| remarkEon wrote:
| Is your argument that the consent decree preventing
| Microsoft from innovating wrt to the web, or that they were
| afraid to because of the recent anti-trust action? The
| former I have a hard time believing (though I probably
| haven't read enough history on it to make an informed
| decision), but the latter seems very plausible.
| nostrademons wrote:
| More the latter. Same thing happened with IBM: they were
| willing to let Microsoft retain the rights to MS-DOS
| because they were under antitrust scrutiny throughout all
| of the 70s.
| philistine wrote:
| Wow! Can you see what you're arguing for here? A tech
| company under tight scrutiny has to give an opportunity
| for a smaller competitor to unlock incredible wealth
| beyond what the big tech firm could have done on its own.
|
| /r/selfawarewolves
| ksherlock wrote:
| Steve Ballmer was President from 1998-2001 and CEO from
| 2000-2014. Maybe that was more relevant than the consent
| decree?
| topkai22 wrote:
| He (Ballmer rather than Gates) was in that position
| largely BECAUSE of the consent decree. I think Ballmer
| gets a bad rap- for all the complaints about relevance
| Microsoft grew its business from $23B in 2000 to $86B in
| 2014 and greatly increased its presence across a bunch of
| enterprise segments.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| I think you and the executive may agree. It did have an
| impact, because the moribund culture at Microsoft hurt the
| stock for about a dozen years after the anti-trust. All the
| growth has been recent, and has required a massive strategic
| and organizational refocusing of Microsoft away from Windows
| to cloud, where Microsoft does not have to worry about anti-
| trust.
|
| That is not to say it is not worth sending Google through a
| similar period of moribundity until they find new leadership
| and markets to pursue.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Yea Gates said that "Windows Phone" would become Android if
| there wasn't antitrust lawsuit, and that Microsoft would be
| worth $500bn more.
| tropdrop wrote:
| In my impression of Google products (Gmail is a notable
| example), the company has been more on the "stagnation" side
| and less on the "innovation" side already.
| beambot wrote:
| If anyone from Google is reading: Please disregard this
| comment. We like our Gmail exactly how it is. If you want to
| substantially "innovate" on email, please consider a new,
| independent product -- one that you can safely shutter after
| 12 months. Thanks.
| wavepruner wrote:
| I wouldn't mind if they fixed the problem where my old
| profile picture keeps appearing in gmail and calendar. It's
| been changed for over a year now.
| tonyhb wrote:
| True eventual consistency.
| rurp wrote:
| On the off chance anyone from Google is reading and cares,
| I'm a strong vote for some regression in Gmail. The new-ish
| version doesn't straight up break as often as it used to,
| but it's still a slow ugly mess compared to the previous
| one.
| Ididntdothis wrote:
| i don't think the previous poster meant moving buttons
| around and changing icons as "innovation".
| beambot wrote:
| I wasn't referring to basic updates such as minor UI/UX,
| security, etc. I specifically said, "substantially
| innovate."
| dmoy wrote:
| Damned if you do, damned if you don't
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Yes! You can even use a brand name distinctly different
| from Gmail like "Inbox".
| erik_seaberg wrote:
| Too soon, man.
| normalnorm wrote:
| > I think the only way Amazon or Google ever start to stagnate
| is if a similar fate befalls them.
|
| Google has been stagnating for more than one decade. What have
| they created since 2010 that is even remotely interesting, let
| alone in the interest of society?
|
| And Amazon is Rube Goldberg machine of human suffering. Who
| cares?
| bosswipe wrote:
| There's a lot of truth in what you're saying but Google did
| create some interesting products in its second decade, here's
| the list I came up with:
|
| - Google Assistant is advanced magic. Much better than
| Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa, IMO.
|
| - Google Photos is great.
|
| - TensorFlow is close to its industry's standard.
|
| - Chromebooks and Chrome OS are a hit.
|
| - The Pixel line of phones is great, especially their
| industry leading camera innovations.
| Avicebron wrote:
| A little off topic: I had the worst experience with
| Chromebooks, I used one a short time ago and couldn't
| install essentially anything outside of "approved" google
| apps. No package manager, 3d modelling software, my whole
| dev workflow just didn't work. I eventually bit the bullet
| and bought a 2019 macbook pro to get back to some semblance
| of sanity. My 2015 had passed :/. Does anyone do dev work
| on chromebooks?
| izacus wrote:
| No, because Chromebooks aren't meant to be good Dev
| machines. Just like feature phones aren't good at being
| camera replacements.
| catalogia wrote:
| The difference between a camera phone and a professional
| camera is one of hardware. The difference between a
| Chromebook and a useful computer is one of software.
| Installing Debian on my Chromebook Pixel turned a
| pointless toy into a reasonable tool. It doesn't matter
| what software you install on your camera phone, the
| sensor and glass will still be shit.
| specialp wrote:
| I think one thing that makes them stagnate is the sheer
| magnitude of their advertising business. Google is not
| interested in expanding to other things unless it is either
| furthering the amount of data they are collecting for
| advertising, or it has some massive run rate. That is why
| they are infamous for canning projects that are actually
| working, they just are not working big enough for google to
| care past its many billions advertising.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post denunciatory rhetoric to HN. It's tedious.
| Worse, it acidifies the thread. Those two things are a double
| dose of poison for curiosity, which is the entire point of
| this site.
|
| You can make your substantive points thoughtfully without
| damaging this place in the process. Please do it that way
| instead.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| mehrdadn wrote:
| > What have they created since 2010 that is even remotely
| interesting?
|
| Translate has gotten a hell of a lot better and it's been
| helpful for humanity, for one thing.
| einpoklum wrote:
| I think it existed before 2010. But then, several Google
| services have improved since 2010. (Not search though...)
| xnx wrote:
| It's hard to remember exactly what result quality was
| like in 2010, but I'm very satisfied with the utility I
| get form Google search. I can throw a dozen different
| oddball questions at it and either get the answer
| directly (without even needing to click through to an
| often slow and cluttered page), or get what I was looking
| for as the top result. They do all this in an extremely
| adversarial environment where "SEO" people spend the
| majority of their effort trying to boost their pages for
| specific words.
| spydum wrote:
| Kubernetes? BeyondCorp? I'm sure there is plenty. Perhaps
| they just stink at commercializing anything other than their
| ad platforms?
| hyperbovine wrote:
| Your rejoinder makes OP's point better than they did.
| tantalor wrote:
| Chromecast (2013) is pretty great.
| mav3rick wrote:
| Oh yes Photos Tensorflow Spanner ...not even remotely
| interesting. Waymo. I'll wait for you to cherry pick another
| time frame. 99% of people here would work at Google in a
| heart beat but love to write snarky comments here. Many
| admittedly jealous of the fact that they couldn't get in.
| Have fun peddling the hate.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't respond in the flamewar style regardless of
| how wrong or provocative another comment was. It just makes
| the thread even worse, and it's against the site guidelines
| too: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
| WhitneyLand wrote:
| 99% of people here are sitting around jealous of Google?
|
| Sounds doubtful. I would guess there are more people here
| who have already been there done that at one of the big
| tech companies then there are people sitting around
| jealous.
| paxys wrote:
| And yet the Microsoft of today is faster and stronger as a
| company than it was during the antitrust days. Maybe it wasn't
| such a bad thing for them.
| redisman wrote:
| Plus a lot more diversified. Not sure if it's all a good
| thing as the huge companies are making land grabs everywhere.
| Github, Skype, Linkedin Xbox, Nokia phones unit, VSCode,
| basically all my favorite medium-sized game companies
| (inxile, double fine, obsidian). Feels like their presence is
| a lot more oppressive than the Windows 95 and IE days we were
| all freaked out about.
| novok wrote:
| isn't vscode a new product made by microsoft in house?
| redisman wrote:
| Yes I guess I switched from what they bought to what I
| use daily in the middle
| sz4kerto wrote:
| The industry as a whole has grown enormously. Microsoft is as
| big as it was, but relatively speaking it's not even remotely
| as strong. Microsoft used to have the power of FAANG
| together, it was so ahead of everyone else in terms of
| (pricing) power. Nobody was a threat to them before the
| antitrust suit.
| ThrowawayB7 wrote:
| That only came about because a lot of the old guard, like
| Sinofsky, Myerson, Turner, etc., left the company or were
| pushed out in the early '10s. I don't foresee a similar
| revitalization of leadership happening at Google anytime
| soon.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > Lawyers were embedded on many product teams
|
| Perhaps because the natural organizational tendency was to
| conspire to create user lock-in and other nefarious practices?
| 95% of software companies (I am guessing here) don't need to
| consult their lawyers during software development.
|
| > review cycles became slower
|
| "Q: But why can't I force the users to also install Internet
| Explorer?
|
| A: You just can't Johnny, you'll have to rewrite this
| component."
|
| > and execs became complacent
|
| ... after being really sharp and on-it before.
|
| Bottom line: Cry me a river.
| jaywalk wrote:
| 100% of software companies not named "Microsoft" do not have
| to follow the special legal rules that Microsoft does.
| falcolas wrote:
| Perhaps they should. It certainly hasn't killed Microsoft,
| nor stopped them from innovating.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| Fun fact, MSFT and AAPL currently have the exact same market
| cap. The story of Microsoft dying a slow death having missed
| the boat on internet, cloud and mobile is like 10+ years out of
| date. If anything, I'd say the antitrust trial was actually
| beneficial in the long run. It is a much nimbler company now
| than it used to be.
| loudmax wrote:
| And as deeply entrenched as ever in the enterprise work
| space.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Nadella brought life back into MSFT, but they were an also-
| ran from about 2000-2014.
| intended wrote:
| Credit to Ballmer as well - Nadella took over and pushed
| many products and changes that Ballmer had started,
| recognizing that they needed to change.
|
| Not that I'm complaining - the surface line revitalized
| laptop and stylus tech for windows.
| pianoben wrote:
| You know you _say_ that, but during that timespan their
| annual net income rose from $5B to $22B, and global revenue
| for the same timespan from $28B to $86B. Eighty-six billion
| dollars. Can you really call them an also-ran, or Ballmer
| an unqualified failure?
|
| Yes, they missed the mobile boat and were late to
| IaaS/PaaS, but to dismiss them for nearly two decades is
| perhaps unfair.
|
| IMO their biggest failure was losing their developer base.
| DevDiv really seems to have fallen asleep at the wheel - or
| to have been neutralized by the OS group.
|
| [0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/267805/microsofts-
| global...
| nostrademons wrote:
| Innovation is a different skillset from maximizing
| profits of an existing product portfolio. Ballmer was
| pretty good at the latter and sucked at the former. With
| the exception of Azure (which was a little late to the
| party), the business lines that Ballmer milked were all
| initially developed under Gates.
|
| The biggest years of profitability for most tech
| companies come _after_ their innovation heyday (when they
| 've already established their market position and no
| longer reinvest large amounts of cash into new product
| development), but without continued innovation a tech
| business eventually fades away into irrelevance.
| baby wrote:
| That's actually no great for M$ compared to how small Apple
| used to be compared to them...
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Lawyers were embedded on many product teams_
|
| As they should be at a large corporation that was known for
| abusing its market power. It's not like engineers are experts
| in whether a feature breaks the law or not -- nor are they
| supposed to be.
|
| > _review cycles became slower_
|
| Oh come on, legal approval is just one more checkbox along with
| 20 others. And if it's slowing down reviews for a few important
| features or products, that's the _point_ -- that legal
| considerations actually get considered rather than ignored or
| steamrolled over. The same way there are approvals for privacy,
| security, accessibility, and so on that are "slower" -- again,
| that's the _point_.
|
| > _execs became complacent_
|
| I don't believe this for a _second_. Execs at every company
| want to meet /beat metrics, get promoted, and make more salary.
| Nobody's complacent ever. The idea that execs become
| "complacent" because of a single highly targeted regulation is
| _baloney_. It 's a total fiction invented for political
| lobbying purposes. Remember: removing monopoly abuse means a
| company has to work _harder_ to to compete, instead of resting
| complacently on lazy market dominance. If anything, these execs
| were forced to be _less_ complacent. But it 's a nice lie
| they're trying to tell.
| WJW wrote:
| > It's not like engineers are experts in whether a feature
| breaks the law or not, nor should they be.
|
| "Full stack engineer" gets ever more all-encompassing.
|
| > If anything, these execs were forced to be less complacent.
|
| An alternative explanation would be that the hypercompetitive
| win-at-all-costs types left for less regulated pastures,
| leaving the more complacent ones.
| dang wrote:
| The submitted article was https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-
| google/u-s-states-lea.... There's nothing in there beyond "CNBC
| reported on Friday, citing sources". That broke the site
| guidelines, which ask: " _Please submit the original source. If a
| post reports on something found on another site, submit the
| latter._ "
|
| We've switched to the CNBC article now, but it clearly should
| have been the one submitted in the first place.
| 4636760295 wrote:
| I feel strongly that ads are a net-negative to society in their
| current form. They provide some value (a way for people offering
| products to reach an audience) but the current implementation
| doesn't work.
|
| Ads make sense in certain scenarios: for example, if I'm
| explicitly searching for a product I want. But in most cases it's
| just noise and it incentivizes the wrong behaviours.
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