[HN Gopher] U.S. Accuses Google of Illegally Protecting Monopoly
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U.S. Accuses Google of Illegally Protecting Monopoly
Author : 1915cb1f
Score : 1112 points
Date : 2020-10-20 12:32 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| jmnicolas wrote:
| What I wonder is why would you sue Google before Amazon? Yes
| Google is a monopoly, but IMO Amazon is much worse.
|
| I'm not thinking about the cloud business which has plenty
| competition, but the retail stuff. They undercut the competition
| until it dies then they're the sole business around.
|
| Case in point: a couple weeks ago I bought a 16 TB hard drive for
| my personal server. It was something like 420EUR on Amazon and
| about 600EUR on my local Newegg equivalent. While I would have
| bought it locally for a couple dozen euros more, there was no way
| I would spend almost 200EUR more for the same thing.
|
| I know that long term it's bad for me and I hate myself for it
| but I still went with Amazon.
| codersarepeople wrote:
| But Amazon doesn't have anywhere close to a monopoly on retail?
| There are many more options for retail, in particular buying a
| HDD, than there are for search. And while it's clear that
| Amazon does engage in some anti-competitive behavior, the
| pricing you complain about doesn't really have to do with
| Amazon; the seller set that price, not Amazon.
| grumple wrote:
| Not all monopolies are unlawful, and not all laws regarding
| anti trust require a monopoly.
| mediaman wrote:
| Many DOJ attorneys resigned from this case in protest of it being
| brought to bear too quickly. Bill Barr, US Attorney General,
| overruled senior DOJ attorneys who felt that it was impossible to
| bring a strong case against Google by rushing it before the
| election.
|
| As a result, this complaint being brought is considered legally
| weak, and it gives Google's legal team a huge advantage in
| fighting it. If the decision to accelerate the case, at the cost
| of its strength, causes the complaint to fail, it'll probably be
| the last antitrust case against Google we'll see for some time.
|
| Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/03/us/politics/google-
| antitr...
| dmix wrote:
| The ones who resigned didn't happen to have their own political
| motivations as well? These cases always have plenty of time and
| areas for arguments refined.
|
| I can't read anything with politicized names and highly
| question the perfectly placed PRified counter points.
|
| The truth, aka middle ground (if such a thing even exists
| anymore), is the hardest thing to come by these days. Lawyers
| working for a gov agency are the least reputable in this area
| in my books.
| Hokusai wrote:
| > it'll probably be the last antitrust case against Google
| we'll see for some time.
|
| ...in the USA.
| monadic2 wrote:
| It's disheartening to think of how little leverage many
| states have over google compared to the reverse.
| karmasimida wrote:
| Yep.
|
| I doubt not Google has a very competent legal team.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| Barr is going to have his pick of Board seats in 2021.
| davidw wrote:
| I think there are legitimate things worth investigating Google
| for. And other big tech companies too.
|
| But right _now_? Just before an election? Hand it off to career
| DoJ people and let them bring it some time next year.
| Florin_Andrei wrote:
| > _Just before an election?_
|
| It's very obvious that's the whole point.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| The AG could be replaced by a new administration and the case
| could get tabled.
| wbl wrote:
| Adminstrations changing priorities is legitimate. Just ask
| Bill Bar when he's trying to do favors for the president.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Sure, especially when the corporations being scrutinized
| donate to their election campaign.
| bleepblorp wrote:
| If anything, an anti-trust prosecution is more likely to go
| ahead in the unlikely event Biden takes office. The
| Democratic party has a much greater willingness to engage
| in regulatory actions against large businesses than does
| the GOP.
|
| The GOP pushing a rushed (and therefore, weak) case now
| smells of a designed-to-fail effort that will only
| strengthen Google's position by poisoning the well against
| effective anti-trust efforts in the future.
|
| It may also be partisan. Facebook has received considerably
| less attention from Washington as it has become more
| cooperative with Republican demands that conservative-
| oriented fabricated news remain on the platform[0]. Google
| has made no such commitments and might be in the GOP's
| sights as a result. While the DOJ is playing to lose,
| defending the case will cost Google money and this could be
| a lever to encourage them to follow Facebook's lead and
| give preferential treatment to conservative fake news.
|
| [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/business/media/faceb
| ook-d...
| chrisco255 wrote:
| There is no evidence that Biden would go after big tech
| at all. It's not part of his platform. They are
| benefitting bigly from donations and favorable coverage
| from FAANG. Biden himself is prone to sell out to foreign
| companies as evidenced by his son's dealings in China,
| Ukraine, and Russia. You can't expect someone that
| corrupt to go after monopoly corruption.
| acdha wrote:
| You're making two common mistakes, hopefully unwittingly:
| don't confuse the modest leanings of FAANG workers with
| their bosses' - the major tech companies PACs and
| executives heavily donate to whoever they think will be
| able to lighten regulation or give them favorable tax
| breaks. Peter Thiel and Palmer Luckey are not freak
| unicorns but represent a sizable fraction of people and
| money.
|
| Secondly, try to find evidence supporting the wild claims
| going around about either Biden. You'll note that these
| claims tend to be very long on supposition but short on
| evidence and the people promoting them hace significant
| conflicts of interest. Just as when most of the same
| people said Clinton was more corrupt than Trump, they're
| banking on you reading the headline but not critically
| examining the story.
| davidw wrote:
| You'd kind of hope that it's apolitical and solid enough
| that that wouldn't happen? Launching it right now makes it
| more political.
| Njikl wrote:
| The issue I see there is the Democratic establishment is
| pro-corporate before anything else. So yeah, if Biden is
| elected, this will never have seen the light of day.
| munk-a wrote:
| Honestly, America is pro-corporate before anything else -
| neither party is actually a good advocate for labour or
| consumer protection, you only see these things on the
| fringes of the parties.
| dlp211 wrote:
| The Democratic establishment is more pro-corporate than
| the Republican establishment? In what reality is this.
| Like I don't get where this idea comes from that you have
| to be pro-business or anti-business. I can be both pro-
| worker and pro-business, it's not black and white, it's
| shades of gray.
| nostromo wrote:
| > The Democratic establishment is more pro-corporate than
| the Republican establishment?
|
| It depends on the company in question.
|
| And, yes, Republicans right now are much more likely to
| be skeptical of Silicon Valley giants than are Democrats,
| who have been very cozy with Democrats since 2008.
| dlp211 wrote:
| > And, yes, Republicans right now are much more likely to
| be skeptical of Silicon Valley giants than are Democrats
|
| That wasn't the claim raised or addressed.
| nostromo wrote:
| The biggest and most powerful corporations in the world
| right now are tech companies, of which Republicans are
| increasingly skeptical and with which Democrats are
| increasingly cozy. So of course it's relevant to a
| question about how Democrats could be seen as pro-
| corporate.
| leakybit wrote:
| > I can be both pro-worker and pro-business
|
| That's exactly what a establishment Democrat would say.
| minerjoe wrote:
| In my, and many realities, the Democratic and Republican
| establishments are the same establishment.
| dlp211 wrote:
| Not wanting to destroy your countries industries and
| creating a balance between workers and businesses is not
| the same as believing that today's large businesses are
| over regulated and workers have too much power.
|
| If you are anti-capitalist, fine, but your complaint
| isn't the Dems are pro-business, the argument is that
| they are still capitalists.
| makerofspoons wrote:
| That would make sense if the goal was to actually win the
| case. The actual goal is optics and to feed the victim
| complex of one side of the "culture war" ahead of the
| election.
| [deleted]
| logicalmonster wrote:
| The comment about "just before an election" is kind of
| interesting to me. If the law doesn't dictate that the powers
| of the government aren't valid at this time, then shouldn't
| they still be doing their job?
| davidw wrote:
| Would waiting a few months cause large problems in their
| ability to do that job? Would it significantly decrease the
| risk of this being seen as some kind of politicized
| decision?
| ciarannolan wrote:
| Yes, they should do their jobs by not rushing the case to
| court to get a cheap political win.
| iaw wrote:
| Last federal case probably. The Democratic states Attorneys
| Generals mostly have not signed onto the lawsuit because they
| don't want to be bound by unfavorable settlement terms (sorry I
| can't remember where I read that in the last couple days)
| nojito wrote:
| 11 states have joined this case
| geoelectric wrote:
| All Republican-led, at least as of the news article I read
| this morning.
| dmix wrote:
| As gundmc implied[1] it's probably best to wait unto
| after the election when looking for signals of
| credibility from the other party.
|
| It's be foolish to just the merits of the case merely on
| that now.
|
| [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24842390
| charliemil4 wrote:
| Louisiana is Democrat-led
| FemmeAndroid wrote:
| Attorney General of Louisiana is Jeff Landry, a
| Republican.
| gundmc wrote:
| The democratic states said they will look to merge with this
| case in the coming weeks if they determine charges are
| appropriate.
| eiji wrote:
| The questions is if a stronger case would see the light of day
| in the next four years with a change in administration. Maybe
| Barr thinks the answer is no.
| aphexairlines wrote:
| The current administration would still have until January.
| adrr wrote:
| It's going to take a year or two for any decision. MSFT
| antitrust started in 98 and was done till 2001.
| ehsankia wrote:
| Their goal isn't to actually enforce antitrust though, it's
| to appear strong for the election. So anything after
| November is completely useless to them. Your comment
| implies that once Democrats take over, there will be no
| more appetite for an antitrust case, which is not true.
| kyleblarson wrote:
| Of course the answer is no. Big tech have been tripping over
| themselves to help Biden.
| srtjstjsj wrote:
| If the administration changes, and they don't want to pursue
| the case, they can just drop it or flop it. Barr will not get
| a result before Inauguration so he's reliant on the next (or
| re-elected) adminstration regardless.
| kelnos wrote:
| The problem there is that then we'll hear complaints that
| the incoming administration is either incompetent or
| corrupt for the Google probe failing or being dropped.
| karmasimida wrote:
| Or the current administration is acting out not on fully
| legal basis.
| trentnix wrote:
| Puts them on the record, though.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Yeah, puts them on record as bringing forth a weak case
| that's sure to lose.
|
| Sounds to me like the current administration wants anti-
| trust to fail and going Leroy Jenkins on it right now is
| ensuring that a potential Biden administration has no
| hope of getting a strong case together. And if the
| current administration gets another term, they can push
| out a toothless settlement and claim "victory".
| trentnix wrote:
| Maybe. Time will tell.
| thebradbain wrote:
| Not if the administration slow walks it, drags it out and
| then intentionally poorly presents its case as they
| realize its not in their interest to actually win it -
| which, if you spare me the speculation, is what a cynical
| person might say happened in the Oracle v. Google case,
| given that a positive result for Oracle there may mean
| Google now has huge swaths of newly-found copyrightable
| APIs of its own that its sitting on.
|
| Note I say *the administration and not any particular
| candidate. I think both parties could (not to say they
| necessarily would) use this as mostly a political ploy to
| appeal to their bases without changing anything too
| drastic and walk away saying "we tried, blame the other
| side for the outcome" should they want to.
| setpatchaddress wrote:
| Both-sides that shit, man. Both-sides it as hard as you
| can. LOL nothing matters.
| abraae wrote:
| > Google now has huge swaths of newly-found copyrightable
| APIs of its own that its sitting on.
|
| is this really useful to Google?
|
| In Oracle vs Google, yes Oracle stands to make some good
| coin from Google's "theft" of Java APIs.
|
| But how would Google benefit? Which of it's APIs would it
| use to unleash hell on its competitors?
| numpad0 wrote:
| Sets the precedent that this is fine.
| scythe wrote:
| You have three months left to put the next admin "on the
| record". But you only have two weeks left to influence
| the election. I think it's clear from the timing what the
| priority is.
| rodgerd wrote:
| Yeah, that really hurt the Reagan DOJ when it decided to
| tank the IBM anti-trust suit.
| nostromo wrote:
| Exactly, it's a smart move. If a Biden administration
| wants to go easy on Google (and let's be honest: they
| do), now it'll be out in the open for everyone to see.
|
| Democrats for a generation have been tough talkers about
| corporate power when speaking to the public, but doves
| when in private (or at fundraisers). Pinning them down is
| smart politics.
| dlp211 wrote:
| This makes no sense. Bringing a weak case now guarantees
| that DOJ won't pursue another case in the future after it
| gets its ass handed to it in court. There is plenty of
| support for going after big tech on both sides of the
| aisle --albeit for different reasons.
|
| Here's a novel idea, how about we judge Bill Barr on his
| overriding multiple DOJ personnel in the weeks before an
| election instead of what intent you want to ascribe to a
| Biden admin. If the intent was to actually put pressure
| on the Biden admin, he had another 3 months to continue
| to build the case and then announce between the election
| and inauguration.
| trentnix wrote:
| _Bringing a weak case now guarantees that DOJ won 't
| pursue another case in the future after it gets its ass
| handed to it in court_
|
| Simply because a complaint was filed does not mean that
| investigation doesn't continue. It's not as if the
| complaint cannot be amended or new complaints cannot be
| made.
|
| But your question begging aside regarding this being a
| "weak case", if Barr felt (justly or unjustly) that the
| case wouldn't have been brought by a Biden administration
| then this may have been the best opportunity to make the
| complaint. It's not unreasonable to think that a Biden
| administration might be more sympathetic to Google. After
| all, Google was a prominent advising figure during the
| Obama administration and Harris is a San Francisco
| politician with Google relationships. Maybe that's a
| cynical view of the Biden administration or maybe it's
| not sufficiently cynical in evaluating Barr's motives.
| Such is politics and I don't really trust any of them.
| dlp211 wrote:
| It's not just a weak argument, it's a bad one.
|
| > Simply because a complaint was filed does not mean that
| investigation doesn't continue.
|
| While true, it does mean that you think you can make the
| case, which not many people think that they can,
| including a bunch of career prosecutors. I haven't seen a
| single outside analyst that has said this is a good case.
| Let's check in on what the market thinks of this case:
| GOOG: up 1.39% today as of time of this comment.
|
| > that the case wouldn't have been brought by a Biden
| administration then this may have been the best
| opportunity to make the complaint.
|
| Why? Why not November 4, or December 3, or January 14?
| Why now, 2 weeks before an election. It reeks of
| political motivation. Even if that wasn't the intent, it
| has the appearance of that intent which could have easily
| been avoided by simply waiting until after the election
| day.
| trentnix wrote:
| _Why? Why not November 4, or December 3, or January 14?
| Why now, 2 weeks before an election. It reeks of
| political motivation._
|
| There are more types of political motivation than just
| vote seeking, and the timing is certainly political. If
| there's any time to get Biden and/or Harris on the record
| regarding whether they will continue to pursue the
| complaint is now. There will be no motivation for them to
| do so after the election no matter who wins.
| dlp211 wrote:
| > If there's any time to get Biden and/or Harris on the
| record regarding whether they will continue to pursue the
| complaint is now
|
| Huh? How does doing this now, when the Trump campaign
| sucks up all the oxygen in the room going to lead to
| someone asking the Biden campaign about this.
|
| 99% of the people will literally not care what Biden has
| to say about this case, or what an independent DOJ under
| a Biden admin chooses to do with this in 3 months from
| now. It's only value is the current news cycle and hence
| vote seeking.
| jklein11 wrote:
| This seems like a pretty decent hedge on the outcome of the
| election to me. If it a strong case and they win, Barr can
| take credit if Trump stays in office or if Biden wins and
| cleans house.
|
| If they lose the case and Trump is re-elected, Barr can
| lick his wounds and try again in a year or so with a
| stronger case.
|
| If they lose the case and Biden cleans house, he can blame
| the Biden administration for dropping the ball.
| InvaderFizz wrote:
| This case is going nowhere before the election one way or
| another. This will take years to litigate.
| justaguyhere wrote:
| _Many DOJ attorneys resigned from this case in protest_
|
| Wouldn't this give Barr the opportunity to bring in people who
| always agree with him and make the situation worse? Not just
| this case against Google, but in general.
| jaquers wrote:
| Resigned from the case, but not resigned from the dept?
|
| When you argue a case in court, you have to be a "zealous
| advocate" meaning you have to believe what you're arguing. I
| don't think a lawyer even employed by Justice Dept. can be
| compelled to argue a specific case.
|
| Of course he can probably cook up whatever reason to fire
| them.
|
| edit: in case it wasn't obvious, IANAL - thanks for
| clarifications
| justaguyhere wrote:
| I guess it is a difficult position to be in, especially in
| the current administration. If you leave, you know your
| replacement is likely going to be unqualified, yes men. If
| you stay, you conscience will bother you and you won't be
| able to do much good anyway.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > When you argue a case in court, you have to be a "zealous
| advocate" meaning you have to believe what you're arguing.
|
| This is most certainly not true.
| bladegash wrote:
| Attorneys argue positions they do not agree with or believe
| in all the time. Their job is to represent their client and
| bring about the best case possible, in the interests of a
| system designed to be adversarial.
|
| The concept of "zealous advocacy" is such a minor part of
| the ABA's Rules of Professional Conduct to begin with.
| Attorneys just like to use that one term as an excuse to be
| assholes, while forgetting the myriad of other ethical
| requirements in the Rules.
|
| While I commend them for taking a stand, they should
| absolutely be fired for failing to refusing to represent
| their client, aka the Federal government. They have
| effectively terminated their relationship with the client
| and should no longer be representing them.
|
| In fact, the first footnote in Rule 1.3 (where the text for
| "zeal with advocacy" occurs outside the preamble), it
| reads:
|
| "[1] A lawyer should pursue a matter on behalf of a client
| despite opposition, obstruction or personal inconvenience
| to the lawyer, and take whatever lawful and ethical
| measures are required to vindicate a client's cause or
| endeavor."
|
| For private attorneys, you refuse to represent your client
| on ethical grounds, you do not get to continue billing
| them. Not sure why it should be any different here.
| sarah180 wrote:
| They're not private attorneys who have the US as their
| client. They work for an organization (DoJ) that has the
| US as its client. That organization can have whatever
| policies it wants about how cases are allocated among its
| staff.
| bladegash wrote:
| Yes, I am fully aware that they are not private
| attorneys. I am also aware that Federal employment laws
| are unlikely to support firing them on account of
| recusing themselves from a case.
|
| However, that does not mean the ABA's Rules of
| Professional Conduct do not apply to them, nor does it
| mean they should not be fired for choosing to terminate
| representation of their client.
|
| It sets a terrible precedent in a system that is designed
| to have someone willing to fight on each side for their
| client. If the government wants to bring about a weak
| case, let them. The opposing party has their own
| representation point out those weaknesses, if that is
| truly the case.
|
| So whether they can be fired or not, doesn't change the
| fact that they should be, or that they should resign from
| the Department.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| > Their job is to represent their client and bring about
| the best case possible
|
| To be clear, the current issue is not that they do or
| don't believe the case on its merits, but that they don't
| believe they have enough time to push the best case
| possible.
| bladegash wrote:
| Fair enough, but I think that reasoning is akin to a
| public defender saying they won't defend their client
| because they are overworked and didn't have enough time
| to prepare. Someone else is still going to have to do it,
| only now they will have even less time to prepare.
|
| There are legal processes that can be used to continue
| trials and other hearings, which they're fully aware of.
| Their client said to go, it is not their job to decide
| when, only to offer advice against such a decision (in
| theory).
| karpierz wrote:
| It's more like the public defender's boss is deciding
| when to schedule the trial, and deliberately schedules it
| before their performance review instead of scheduling it
| to improve the chance that the case is successful.
| bladegash wrote:
| I'm not sure how that example negates what I said.
| Regardless of the circumstances as to why a case is tried
| sooner than you would like, it's still happening.
| Sometimes it is a judge, sometimes it is a boss,
| sometimes it is a strategic maneuver by opposing counsel,
| etc. That doesn't make it an acceptable excuse to not
| represent their client's interests given the time they do
| have, nor does it make the decision any less impactful to
| the client they represent.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Yes, but that doesn't mean the case will gain the approval of
| judges. Of course, this is why the current administration has
| worked very hard to place as many judges as possible on the
| federal courts, but since federal judges hold lifetime
| appointments they sometimes develop an unexpected degree of
| independent thought once they land on a suitably comfortable
| bench and fail to please their erstwhile patrons, instead
| pursuing the respect of their judicial peers or their legacy.
|
| There's an interview where Barr is asked about his legacy
| that's worth looking up, it's a great example of the conflict
| between short-term expediency and long-term sustainability.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > Since federal judges hold lifetime appointments they
| sometimes develop an unexpected degree of independent
| thought once they land on a suitably comfortable bench and
| fail to please their erstwhile patrons, instead pursuing
| the respect of their judicial peers or their legacy.
|
| Isn't there a contradiction between independent thought and
| pursing the respect of their judicial peers?
|
| > There's an interview where Barr is asked about his legacy
| that's worth looking up, it's a great example of the
| conflict between short-term expediency and long-term
| sustainability.
|
| I think you're referring to him saying "everybody dies",
| and you take this as short-term expediency? I don't agree.
| I think it's a statement of independence: I will not be
| manipulated by the people who write "the first draft of
| history", I'll do what I think is right.
| nostromo wrote:
| You're reading a whole lot into this single sentence in the
| article:
|
| > Some lawyers in the department worry that Mr. Barr's
| determination to bring a complaint this month could weaken
| their case and ultimately strengthen Google's hand, according
| to interviews with 15 lawyers who worked on the case or were
| briefed on the department's strategy.
| jonboy95 wrote:
| 15 lawyers expressed concern ... just because it's contained
| in a single sentence doesn't mean he's reading a lot into it.
| It's an important sentence.
| stvswn wrote:
| It says "some" lawyers expressed concern, according to
| interviews with 15 of them. Nothing about that sentence
| alleges that all 15 they spoke with expressed concern. Some
| could be 2 or 3 and all 15 were aware of the concern.
| wnevets wrote:
| > at the cost of its strength, causes the complaint to fail,
| it'll probably be the last antitrust case against Google we'll
| see for some time.
|
| The conspiracy theorist in me says this was on purpose. Barr
| isn't rushing this case before the election to make it look
| like they're doing something, they're rushing it to sabotage
| any future attempts to rein in Google.
| ecf wrote:
| How are these antitrust lawsuits not partisan hit-jobs?
|
| "...Acting under the direction of the Attorney General Of the
| United States, and the states of Arkansas, Florida, Georgia,
| Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana,
| South Carolina, and Texas..."
| ehsankia wrote:
| It definitely seems like a political hit job. It's unfortunate
| because the Democrats were working on some good stuff too, but
| it seems like Republicans wanted to rush this out before the
| election to help their chances.
| beezle wrote:
| Unfortunately what much of our elected officials (state and
| national) do is based on "like" and "dislike" rather than
| actual law. In the case of Google/FB/Twitter, both have many
| dislikes rooted at best weakly in law (IMO, IANAL)
| tsjq wrote:
| Is this a yet another election stunt ?
| kevmo wrote:
| OK, now do Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and probably half of the
| Fortune 500 as well.
|
| To those saying "Do X first" -- the DOJ Antitrust Division has an
| army of lawyers, and they can bring many cases at once.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| They were about to do this back in May I think [0]. A few months
| back, State AGs were all within days of doing the same too, that
| still hasn't happened either.
|
| Call me when a thing happens.
|
| [0]. https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/15/21260494/google-
| antitrust...
| themgt wrote:
| OK. You only had to wait an hour[1]:
|
| _WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department and 11
| states filed an antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet Inc's Google
| on Tuesday for allegedly breaking the law in using its market
| power to fend off rivals._
|
| [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tech-antitrust-
| google/u-s...
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Pardon me while I eat this humble pie...
| TLightful wrote:
| Obvious, monopoly is obvious.
| tsjq wrote:
| Would the structuring of Alphabet ensure that no solid change
| comes out of this case, even in the best case judgement scenario?
| jonprobably wrote:
| If, on a whim, google blocks your name or business, what do you
| do? I found out by accident, and I think they have too much
| control.
|
| Earlier this year, Google suspended my ad words account. I don't
| know why but think it was their mistake. The sites and ads were
| ethical and well within their terms. Still, I've sent emails and
| letters without progress.
|
| It's frustrating not having an avenue to resolve the issue. Even
| more so because I'm in tech and though I understood these things.
| More so because I worked at google for a long time.
|
| In the suspension dialog they warn all accounts under my name or
| the domain names linked to the ad words account will be blocked.
|
| I don't depend on ad words. If I did, I would be completely out
| of luck. I'm not aware of an alternative ads network or search
| engine.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _How do you survive on the web if google, on a whim, blocks
| your name, or business?_
|
| What, as an individual?
| sova wrote:
| OP likely means "as a company reliant on web discovery for
| clients"
| na85 wrote:
| >Google's a monster. If they don't want you on the net, there's
| nothing you can do.
|
| That's hyperbole. I'm on the net and Google can't stop me by
| any white-hat means. I have a website hosted on non-Google
| infrastructure on a domain name registered with a non-Google
| registrar, and I don't rely on advertising to pay the bills.
|
| Have you considered a more ethical revenue stream that doesn't
| involve advertising and surveillance? There is life after
| AdWords.
| speeder wrote:
| I own a shop that sells industrial parts, many clients of
| ours praised us for giving critical help, being able to find
| parts they needed urgently to keep their also critical
| factory working.
|
| thing is, people find out we exist solely because Google
| search, when something goes wrong on the factory, they google
| for the solution, and finds us... whenever Google changes SEO
| in a bad direction, or ban our ads by mistake (happened more
| than once) our revenue tanks hard.
|
| To be honest it feels terrible, I have no idea how to fix
| this situation.
|
| Note: just so you understand how ethical and important the
| business are, some of the products our clients make and
| needed our emergency help: cheap bread, medicine, medical
| equipment, beverages, work vehicles, etc...
|
| One of our most lucrative sales that came from a google
| search: a truck factory was having countless accidents
| because a clamping tool kept failing and injuring the
| workers, they were desperate for another supplier that knew
| how to fix that issue, instead of just selling replacements
| we actually sent someone to the factory and figured out a way
| to do a certain step during production differently, in a
| safer way.
| jonprobably wrote:
| If you are banned from AdWords, it affects your ranking in
| search.
| tk75x wrote:
| >ethical revenue stream You can also be on the net and not
| have a revenue stream.
| cageface wrote:
| _Attorney General William P. Barr, who was appointed by Mr.
| Trump, has played an unusually active role in the investigation.
| He pushed Justice Department lawyers to bring the case by the end
| of September, prompting pushback from attorneys who wanted more
| time and complained of political influence. He has spoken
| publicly about the inquiry for months and set tight deadlines for
| the prosecutors leading the effort._
|
| I'm not opposed to some anti trust action across the entire
| industry but making this a partisan election issue is just going
| to discredit the whole thing and obscure the real issues.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Especially if it ends up being ineffective due to rushing. It
| is not like Google hires no lawyers.
| toyg wrote:
| I hate Trump but here his admin is right to rush things. Unless
| the issue is put on the books before November, chances are that
| a Dem administration will quietly scrap it (possibly in
| exchange for concessions on the surveillance side, considering
| who represents California...).
|
| Obviously this should have been done sooner, but it's Trump
| we're talking about, it's half a miracle if it gets done at
| all.
| na85 wrote:
| Antitrust suits were brought against Microsoft under the
| Clinton administration, and FTC investigations under the
| Obama administration resulted in changes to AdSense.
|
| What makes you think Democrats are more like to scrap an
| investigation?
| brightlancer wrote:
| > What makes you think Democrats are more like to scrap an
| investigation?
|
| Because of the cozy relationship between the Obama
| administration and Google.
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-makes-most-of-close-
| ties...
|
| https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-
| close...
| Shivetya wrote:
| Well if you look at those "in favor" versus those "thinking
| about it" which is code for no it is easy to see that those
| in the former were pushed aside this primary cycle.[0]
|
| so the concern is real that Google could escape with a slap
| on the wrist pending an administration change. Too many like
| to pretend otherwise but big tech knows whose its real
| friends are and their party likes the money. So expect a song
| and dance with enough exceptions and escape routes to be
| business as usual
|
| [0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/policy-20
| 20...
| cageface wrote:
| Given that this case is likely to drag on for years it seems
| much more important to start it on as solid a legal footing
| as possible than to slip it past the wire before an election.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Why would dems scrap it? That's complete nonsense.
| GenericsMotors wrote:
| >Why would dems scrap it?
|
| https://www.projectveritas.com/news/insider-blows-whistle-
| ex...
| viro wrote:
| Imagine not realizing project veritas is a HORRIBLE
| source. They have littering been caught red-handed
| doctoring videos
| GenericsMotors wrote:
| > Imagine not realizing project veritas is a HORRIBLE
| source.
|
| Imagine casually dismissing a megacorp exec literally
| confessing to wanting to interfere in your country's
| election.
|
| > They have littering been caught red-handed doctoring
| videos
|
| 1. At the very least source your claims.
|
| 2. Point out which parts of the linked post are doctored
| or in any way false.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Veritas is a known alt right group that manufactures
| misinformation.
| GenericsMotors wrote:
| Which part (if any) of the linked post is manufactured or
| disinformation?
| throwaways885 wrote:
| The fact you're criticising the publisher and not the raw
| video footage just _proves_ there 's more to it to me.
| viro wrote:
| Do you know what a Gish Gallop is? Do you know why they
| work? no? lets move on then. The creditability of the
| author MATTERS especially when the author has been known
| to edit videos to make it look like the subject said
| something they didn't. Im not spending 2 hours of my life
| to timestamp every single malicious edit. Do you remember
| that "Who Is America?" show?
| DSingularity wrote:
| Why do you think Barr pushed them against Google?
| conistonwater wrote:
| I think there is clear precedent for this sort of thing. When I
| read _Fatal Risk_ (about AIG 's financial division from 1980's
| to the financial crisis in which it collapsed), there was if I
| remember correctly Eliot Spitzer, the attorney general for New
| York, with a bunch of cases on which he built a career and a
| ton of political support that subsequently failed in the
| courtroom. The result was a complete waste of money and
| resources on shoddy cases, some people got fired in disgrace
| and some people got popular. (In Google's case it would be like
| the CEOs resigning while admitting no wrongdoing and the case
| itself languishing in court before being settled with no
| positive outcome for the society.) Let's hope the Google case
| is not going to turn out that way.
| parasubvert wrote:
| This one was obviously coming. The question is what the specific
| issues outlined in the lawsuit will be, and what possible
| remedies are.
|
| Prominently allowing search engine choice in Chrome, Android,
| etc. may be one part of it. Splitting search off from the rest of
| Google might be another. Regulating search overall might be one
| but that carries a lot of risks.
| tantalor wrote:
| > Prominently allowing search engine choice
|
| That's already happening in Europe:
|
| https://www.blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/updat...
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/02/google-to-let-eu-users-choos...
| nojito wrote:
| They royally screw over DDG
|
| https://spreadprivacy.com/search-preference-menu-
| duckduckgo-...
| sct202 wrote:
| How are tiny names like Info.com and PrivacyWall are able
| to pay for slots over DDG? PrivacyWall has like 3 people on
| LinkedIn. https://www.android.com/choicescreen-winners/
| tantalor wrote:
| DDG complains they can't win the auction:
|
| _search engines who squeeze money out of every last drop
| of people 's personal information (including ISPs and
| arbitrage players that will participate in next year's
| auctions) are easily able to outbid search engines like
| us that respect people's privacy_
|
| https://spreadprivacy.com/search-preference-menu-
| auctions/
| hardtke wrote:
| Has this reduced search market share for Google in Europe? I
| suspect not since Google has a high brand loyalty. In fact
| this complaint may make Google even more profitable by not
| allowing phone manufacturers to charge the for default
| placement. I believe it will likely kill the main revenue
| stream for Mozilla as well.
| Crontab wrote:
| I find it interesting that the Trump administration was only
| joined in this action by Republican-led states.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Nothing will happen just like with Microsoft. DOJ is only doing
| this to scare them to ease and liberal their services.
|
| Google achieved dominant market position through legal and fair
| market competition. If you want to regulate them introduce
| Internet Search Engine laws do it the same for Internet Social
| Networks and Internet Social media. They are not breaking Google
| up that's for sure.
|
| Listen what Larry Page said "data in data out" with Facebook and
| with Google. If internet service allows you to export your data
| and move it to the competing service there are no problems.
|
| "You don't want to be holding your users hostage. We want there
| to be a competitive market, we want other companies to be able to
| do things so we think it's important that you as users of Google
| can take your data and take it out if you need to or take it
| somewhere else." [1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfmQkNKo_0A
| blazespin wrote:
| This isn't about search, it's about how Google abuses the
| profits they get from search. You're not supposed to leverage a
| monopoly in one area into others. It's near impossible to
| compete with such companies.
|
| I can't imagine any sane person would say that Google's search
| itself is a problem.
|
| It was the same problem with MSFT when they tried to leverage
| their monopoly in OS into browsers, apps.
| mrkramer wrote:
| It is about search and btw companies take their profits and
| expand their portfolios if it wasn't like that Apple would
| still be doing PCs and Iphone wouldn't exist.
| beezle wrote:
| There are still other search engines and were many more
| prior to "google" becoming a verb. They won over those
| because their search results were faster/better. Yet there
| is no barrier to entry in websearch. As seen with DDG, some
| people value privacy higher so they have a niche.
|
| I think the real reason why nobody really tries to compete
| is not upfront money or techinical issues, but that nobody
| can think of a way to monetize successfully while
| attractively differentiating themselves from google search.
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| There are only 9 real (crawler) search engines: Google,
| Bing, Yandex, Mojeek, Gigablast in English Language plus
| Baidu, Sogou, Naver (South Korea), Seznam(.cz)
| https://twitter.com/i/lists/1316046723928805376/members
|
| All other are search services (sometimes called
| metasearch) and most of those are syndication partners
| for Bing https://www.searchenginemap.com/
| Grimm1 wrote:
| Maybe they did initially but the Google of the last 5+ years
| has been resting on their laurels in terms of search, showing
| subpar results to drive you towards their ad results. Then they
| abuse their special status on chrome and relationships with
| mobile providers to keep their position. Read the house report
| page 77 it sheds light on that.
|
| Edit: Ah yes the random downvotes without replies -- except it
| doesn't really change the above.
|
| Edit2: "By owning Android, the world's most popular mobile
| operating system, Google ensured that Google Search remained
| dominant even as mobile replaced desktop as the critical entry
| point to the Internet. Documents submitted to the Subcommittee
| show that at certain key moments, Google conditioned access to
| the Google Play Store on making Google Search the default
| search engine, a requirement that gave Google a significant
| advantage over competing search engines.417 Through revenue-
| sharing agreements amounting to billions of dollars in annual
| payments, Google also established default positions on Apple's
| Safari browser (on both desktop and mobile) and Mozilla's
| Firefox.418"
| the-dude wrote:
| But Microsoft did change. I have read here, but can't recall
| the comment, the attitude within MS changed drastically.
| shmerl wrote:
| Did it? Windows still has very strong monopolistic influence.
| [deleted]
| eitland wrote:
| The experience is night and day compared to what it was.
|
| Old Microsoft still rears its ugly head, I guess much to
| the annoyance of everyone in the company who tries - and
| succeeds - in making money in honest ways, but the
| difference is still enormous.
| shmerl wrote:
| Yeah, it got better in some areas (participation in
| Alliance for Open Media for example is great), but not
| much better in others where MS still has sickening lock-
| in (MS still did support Vulkan effort).
| bosswipe wrote:
| The only reason Firefox was able to gain traction over IE in
| the early 00's was the antitrust case. Without it Chrome and
| Safari probably wouldn't exist either.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| It seems clear to me that MS didn't just accidentally forget to
| develop IE for 5+ years in the early 2000s. They did so because
| they needed to avoid the antitrust inspectors. Given that
| Chrome exists in its current form today because of a lack of
| competition, I don't know how you can claim that the antitrust
| stuff did "nothing".
| mrkramer wrote:
| What happened with Netscape? It survived?
| grishka wrote:
| It became Mozilla
| mrkramer wrote:
| So what was the point of antitrust lawsuit against
| Microsoft if current browser/s were able to adapt and
| evolve.
| contextfree wrote:
| the argument is that they were able to catch up to /
| surpass IE because Microsoft stopped working on it for 5
| years. (I'm not endorsing or rejecting it myself.)
| mthoms wrote:
| Because... maybe it worked?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I think the point was that they were able to adapt and
| evolve because Microsoft's ability to force IE on users
| was constrained by the antitrust action. It's possible
| that without antitrust Mozilla might have died on the
| vine.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Your logic makes absolutely 0 sense, the success of
| current browsers is not exogenous to the lawsuit.
|
| Current browser/s were able to adapt and evolve in the
| context of an anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft.
|
| It's like saying "what was the reason for the Fed taking
| an expansionary stance in March if the stock market
| clearly has been doing fine since then?"
| mrkramer wrote:
| My logic makes perfect sense from my economic point of
| view. I'm a neoliberal economist and I think that
| hardcore competition benefits customers and consumers
| since it drives quality of products and services up and
| it drives prices of products and services down. State
| intervention is only required if a company is ravaging
| the economy.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > My logic makes perfect sense from my economic point of
| view. I'm a neoliberal economist
|
| Naming your particular ideological bent does not make
| your logic any more convincing.
|
| My understanding was that self-identifying "neoliberals"
| believed in data-driven policy. As a data engineer, I'm
| telling you that the causal assumptions you are making
| are fundamentally faulty. Perhaps they align better with
| your ideological view, but that doesn't mean it makes
| "perfect sense."
| bhauer wrote:
| In a manner of speaking, yes. Netscape begot Mozilla, which
| in turn begot Firefox.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| As long as Microsoft have an effective 100% market share on
| desktop operating systems, I'll be remaining skeptical about
| the DoJ case against Google.
| strictnein wrote:
| https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
|
| Windows ~77%
| grishka wrote:
| > You don't want to be holding your users hostage.
|
| Except that's exactly want you're doing in case of social
| media. Even with the ability to move your data, you can't
| simply move platforms because network effects lock you in. I'm
| really looking forward to ACCESS Act.
| newacct583 wrote:
| Microsoft lost their case and was ordered broken up. They were
| saved in the DC Circuit who rejected the remedy, and then by
| the incoming Bush administration who had the DoJ back off the
| case and settle.
|
| It's very easy to imagine that (as with many things from that
| era) had a few hundred votes in Florida gone differently
| Microsoft's windows empire would now be just a memory. It was
| very close.
|
| It was certainly not the wrist slap you're imagining.
| RedditKon wrote:
| The Larry Page video you reference is almost a decade old (8
| years). I'm sure a lot of things have changed inside Google
| since then.
| abvdasker wrote:
| The timing of this lawsuit warrants a good deal of skepticism.
| ArtWomb wrote:
| Watershed moment in how we "price" monopolistic power. It's not
| "market share" or "barriers to entry" or even engaging in "anti-
| competitive behavior" anymore. But more about how corporations
| can control the free flow of information. Much harder to make
| that case for the government I should imagine.
|
| What's surprising to me is how un-monopolistic Google's share of
| the Cloud + AI market is under its control, considering how many
| of the techniques were invented there. I'd put it at under 25%.
|
| The real behemoth is NVidia + ARM. GPU shortages are endemic. And
| the cost of a new entrant to the market just to construct a fab
| is probably $20B+. Ask Intel XE how much they are spending just
| to keep up ;)
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > It's not "market share" or "barriers to entry" or even
| engaging in "anti-competitive behavior" anymore. But more about
| how corporations can control the free flow of information.
|
| But that's really the same thing. If Google bans or interferes
| with Fediverse apps because they compete with YouTube, that's
| anti-competitive behavior. If they don't and those apps gain
| share with people whose content keeps getting censored on
| YouTube, they're not very effectively controlling the free flow
| of information.
|
| Censorship by an incumbent is a market opportunity for a
| competitor, so a corporation can only really sustain it through
| anti-competitive actions against the challenger(s).
| bogwog wrote:
| > What's surprising to me is how un-monopolistic Google's share
| of the Cloud + AI market is under its control, considering how
| many of the techniques were invented there. I'd put it at under
| 25%.
|
| I don't find that surprising because Google is a mess. They're
| a very poorly run organization, making decisions that make no
| sense at times. Their inefficiency and/or incompetence is
| probably the only reason why they haven't wreaked havoc on all
| of the markets they have their hand in. And the various
| monopolies they do have are, as monopolies usually are, immune
| to stupid decisions that would kill most other companies.
|
| I think it might be because their corporate culture of being
| the good guy/"don't be evil" is incompatible with the reality
| of their situation. Like cognitive dissonance at a corporate
| level. I wonder how many of their employees in positions of
| power are still living in that fantasy, and making decisions
| based on it?
| curt15 wrote:
| >They're a very poorly run organization, making decisions
| that make no sense at times.
|
| How many messaging apps have they launched and killed?
| plushpuffin wrote:
| Do you mean as of right now, or at the time you posted?
| ilovetux wrote:
| ha
| sjg007 wrote:
| What are some specific examples of being poorly run?
| [deleted]
| basch wrote:
| Personal opinion? And this applies almost equally to
| Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL. But that they all lost
| the messenger wars. Of the four, Google was the best
| positioned to take mobile, really the best positioned of
| any company in the world. And that blunder is probably a
| bigger blunder than Microsoft and Facebook arriving late to
| the mobile world. Because Google WAS the mobile operating
| system, they were the cross platform browser vendor, and
| they completely, absolutely, 100% failed to deliver a
| worldwide mobile first + desktop messaging solution that
| was better than the competition.
| jpadkins wrote:
| how much revenue is in the mobile messaging business?
| sjg007 wrote:
| Interesting.. I've seen the messaging wars start up again
| every 5 years. The current iteration is business oriented
| with slack etc.. but that doesn't mean it won't be
| personal again.
|
| Mobile is all about power management. Apple got that
| right and really nailed the UX.
|
| I don't think Google knew that playbook at that point.
| Maybe Rubin did but even MSFT blew it.
| basch wrote:
| Quite honestly, I think Facebooks play to overlay chat
| ontop of something more addictive was its big win. Then
| having a mobile app to talk to the same people.
|
| None of that matters anymore, because Messenger/IG/WA are
| all mobile apps that most people probably dont chat as
| much through on a desktop/laptop. But at the time, it
| gave people a compelling reason to have the messenger
| product open on screen. Google Talk was similar, being
| overlayed over Gmail, but google squandered having a Talk
| bar over the bottom of every google property. Yahoo as
| well. Yahoo News should have had messenger across the
| bottom of the screen.
|
| On the mobile front, FB Messenger sort of won out because
| people started to like iMessage, but there was still a
| need for a cross platform alternative. I believe Apple
| could have prevented FB Messenger from being a thing, had
| they released an Android client along with a browser
| extension. Apple's best move was releasing iTunes for
| Windows, something they are scared to repeat, and
| shouldnt be.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >On the mobile front, FB Messenger sort of won out
| because people started to like iMessage, but there was
| still a need for a cross platform alternative. I believe
| Apple could have prevented FB Messenger from being a
| thing, had they released an Android client along with a
| browser extension. Apple's best move was releasing iTunes
| for Windows, something they are scared to repeat, and
| shouldnt be.
|
| I wonder what the numbers are on WhatsApp vs FB
| Messenger, because people of all socioeconomic levels,
| languages, ages, country, and tech literacy use WhatsApp
| in my experience, whereas only Americans of a certain age
| group use FB Messenger.
| mattlondon wrote:
| Does this not in fact support the claim that they are not
| quite the monopoly that people make them out to be? That
| it is in fact not that easy to abuse their power in
| owning the platform to gain market share in messaging?
|
| I'm not sure what people want these days: people are
| angry that they have successful products that people use
| more than competitor's prodcts, and also angry that they
| have unsuccessful products that are shut after failing to
| gain traction.
| basch wrote:
| I dont know how the accusation that they are a monopoly
| in search and advertising related to them being poor at
| spending that money to become a monopoly elsewhere.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| From my conversations, Googlers indeed appear to earnestly
| argue for their company in ways that directly ignore or fail
| to recognize the monopoly power they wield. It absolutely
| feels like line employees are unable to grasp what market
| power is and how the company wields it.
|
| Executive level people seem too adept at defending the
| company and avoiding certain phrases or concepts, I believe
| they all know. Things like suggesting routine conversations
| include a lawyer and tagging them as such to try to include
| more conversations in attorney/client privilege shows a
| desire to hide guilty actions.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I've noticed this in many companies, but at Google it does
| seem particularly worse. In private conversations with
| friends, I will at least be cognizant of the bad things
| that the company I work for is doing - it's just a job.
|
| But many Googlers seem to perfectly fit that Upton Sinclair
| quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand
| something, when his salary depends on his not understanding
| it."
|
| That said, I don't think you can see how Alphabet's lawyers
| talk and think that they are somehow living in a bubble or
| are not having these sorts of high-level strategy
| discussions.
| hef19898 wrote:
| I have zero experience at the levels of Google when it
| comes to market dominance. But I do have some for certain
| niche products in the chemical sector, where I worked for
| one of two suppliers in exostence. And there I, a simple
| low level team lead, received dedicated anti-trust
| training. Including what wording to use in e-mails and what
| words to avoid. So I would guess, Google is much more
| prudent and higher management levels, especially since this
| discussion is nothing new.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Googlers are definitely trained what language to use and
| not to use. Though I think there is still a cognitive
| dissonance where they believe they're just avoiding
| problematic statements as opposed to avoiding admitting
| blatantly illegal behavior.
| d1zzy wrote:
| Why would a company believe it's doing illegal stuff?
| That wouldn't make much sense unless it's made out of
| people that are OK with doing illegal stuff (Mafia?). So
| of course most employees don't believe that.
|
| And whether or not such training is meant by executives
| to hide illegal behavior that they are aware of it's also
| catching many cases where people are just dumb and use
| wrong words to mean different things, words that have
| specific meaning in a legal context and that can hurt the
| person and the company although there was no illegal act
| being done.
| v7p1Qbt1im wrote:
| I said this before, but I still believe Larry and Sergei
| removed themselves completely from the company because they
| couldn't care less about the ad or cloud business per se.
| More so they might even view it as dirty. It's a means to an
| end. Amass as much money (ad/cloud) as possible, get the best
| possible experts in CS/AI (so many phd's) and gather every
| last bit of relevant information/data they can get.
|
| It seems kind of obvious. Their goal is to organize the
| worlds information and make it universally accessible and
| useful. What better way to achieve this than to somehow
| create an AGI/ASI. They are certainly the best placed org to
| do it.
| nojito wrote:
| >Watershed moment in how we "price" monopolistic power. It's
| not "market share" or "barriers to entry" or even engaging in
| "anti-competitive behavior" anymore. But more about how
| corporations can control the free flow of information
|
| Once the lawsuit drops I doubt this is the argument they are
| going to make.
|
| This is going to be your run of the mill antitrust lawsuit.
| It's just making news because tech has avoided them for 30+
| years.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Chip is probably one of the few spaces, where oligopoly or
| duopoly makes sense ( though it is still scary ). The entry
| barriers are not artificial. It is genuinely hard to start from
| the ground up just based on the level of progress made thus
| far.
|
| With Google that argument is harder. A person could whip up G
| level search engine, mail, and maybe even youtube equivalent,
| but moving all those people ( but to make them consider your
| alternative would be impossibly painful to do ).
|
| I will admit that NVidia and ARM scares me, but I am not sure
| what can be done here.
| opnitro wrote:
| Regulation and/or state ownership?
| gipp wrote:
| > A person could whip up G level search engine, mail, and
| maybe even youtube equivalent
|
| Hi Dunning, meet Kruger.
| Jugurtha wrote:
| The " _This could be built in a week-end_ " and " _Why don
| 't you just [something that only 1/1000 can do and takes so
| much time]_".
|
| See also: https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Listen. I know people have a tendency to get defensive,
| when they believe someone insults their craft. I am not
| doing that. I am arguing that what google has really
| going for it is inertia. It is similar to the world of
| OS, where Windows still rules supreme. Note that DDG was
| built fast, but it struggles against G search engine
| based on familiarity. But ok, DDG has issues other than
| familiarity. What about Bing? MS had to actually pay
| people to encourage adoption. That is how strong the
| force of inertia really is. So yeah. I do dismiss your
| counter argument, because it does not address the core of
| mine.
| Jugurtha wrote:
| I'm not being defensive and it was not my intention. I
| did not communicate that clearly.
|
| Not going to dismiss the inertia parameter, but neither
| DDG nor Bing ever returned what I was looking for and
| they never were as good as Google Search for _my
| particular searches_ (yes, even in private navigation). I
| 'm not saying they're not good, I'm saying they never
| returned good results for _me_.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I can offer some anecdata. For some reason or another,
| Bing is better than Google for finding otherwise
| copyrighted work ( I was able to find Morty streams after
| new season came out ). My personal pet theory is that
| since Google was first to the game with majority market
| share, copyright holders and the like concentrated their
| effort on it. Needless to say, it is just one person's
| experience. I will admit that DDG still lacks in that
| area, but it has improved.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| >It is similar to the world of OS, where Windows still
| rules supreme.
|
| That's because of drivers, and drivers are because of
| stable kernel API.
| nottorp wrote:
| I think the shortage and performance war is happening only at
| the top and the market is more volatile at the mid-bottom.
| Besides AMD and Nvidia have been trading places if we look
| beyond the last few years. Not enough to base a monopoly
| lawsuit on.
|
| If Nvidia actually gets to buy ARM, that's another matter. But
| again they can't sue based on a purchase that hasn't even gone
| through yet.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| I think parent comment's concern about Nvidia is with respect
| to AI. Nobody wants a GTX 1660 for that kind of work, the
| high end GPU supply is the only part that matters.
| nottorp wrote:
| Don't know if AI is a market that's big enough to catch the
| attention of regulators, no matter how important it is to
| the HN crowd.
| sylens wrote:
| > What's surprising to me is how un-monopolistic Google's share
| of the Cloud + AI market is under its control, considering how
| many of the techniques were invented there. I'd put it at under
| 25%.
|
| That's why the suit is aimed at search and search advertising
| sidibe wrote:
| If they ever break up search and advertising GCP would
| immediately become the biggest cloud because of the cost of
| migrating the other parts of Google.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| Yeah but Nvidia and ARM are luxury goods. There is no point
| breaking up a monopoly of that calibre. They specialize in a
| niche market that affects an even more niche market.
|
| The simple fact that I can say "google it" and colloquially
| anyone in the US and probably Europe would understand what I
| mean kind of states how dominant they are in the market.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It's trivial to use duckduckgo or bing. It's people's choice
| to use google. Also, you can say "kleenex" and "band-aid" and
| "q tip" and "vaseline" or "coke" and everyone would
| understand, but they have no dominance, other than some
| people prefer to use them. I can easily find alternatives to
| all of them right next to them in almost any store I go to.
| Karunamon wrote:
| It was trivial for users to use non-IE browsers on Windows
| in the 90s. Ease of using an alternative is not the
| singular or most important definition of a monopoly.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It wasn't as trivial as today. People may have had to
| install non IE browsers from from a disc or download from
| slow and flaky internet connections. Also, I think a
| central part of that case was also Microsoft wielding its
| power to force other companies to stay away from non IE
| browsers.
|
| Today, we're talking about a few taps to change which
| search website you want to use.
| cma wrote:
| Neither Nvidia nor ARM make fabs.
| helen___keller wrote:
| > Watershed moment in how we "price" monopolistic power. It's
| not "market share" or "barriers to entry" or even engaging in
| "anti-competitive behavior" anymore. But more about how
| corporations can control the free flow of information. Much
| harder to make that case for the government I should imagine.
|
| I don't know if or how this fits within actual antitrust law,
| but it makes sense that the issue was never price gouging, the
| issue was one entity gaining too much power.
|
| In a theoretical dystopian future, a megacorp could own 99% of
| market share of all industries in the country, but
| intentionally offer very low prices on every product to avoid
| "monopoly" concerns. It becomes clear: monopolistic pricing is
| just a symptom, not the real issue. The real issue is _power_.
|
| If this suit (and followup suits on other megacorps) fail, the
| future may call for new laws to define monopolistic power in
| novel ways, as soon as we the people recognize that getting
| search and email and social media for free doesn't mean that
| the megacorps are on our side.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| If you're worried about power, the by far biggest monopolist
| there is the US Federal Government.
| 6510 wrote:
| I was just wondering which is easier, quitting a country or
| google. Initially emigration would be harder but in the
| long run I would be just fine.
|
| One wouldn't be allowed to use iphone or android? It would
| take a lot of manual data entry to migrate my accounts off
| gmail. Youtube obviously wouldn't be allowed but do I get
| to use adsense powered websites?
| Quanttek wrote:
| Governments are still (largely) accountable to the people,
| in contrast to corporations, which are not accountable
| whatsoever (except through gov regulation). Your comment is
| just detraction
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Corporations are accountable to their customers. If
| people stop paying for their products, they cease to
| exist.
|
| Corporations are also accountable to governments, as this
| story illustrates. If US courts and/or legislators decide
| they want it, Google ceases to exist.
|
| Economists think of this in terms of "Exit vs Voice".
|
| With governments, you have a voice - one vote for
| deciding who's in charge - but no way to exit, even when
| your side loses.
|
| With corporations you can exit - stop shopping at Target
| - but no voice in how Target is run.
|
| Both models have pros and cons, and it's good to
| understand how they differ, and what situations they're
| suited for.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Try exiting Google or Amazon. It's borderline impossible.
|
| Basically - how do I exit a company if I'm not the one
| choosing to use their services?
|
| I cannot use the internet and avoid Google's ads.
|
| I cannot use the internet and avoid Amazon's hosting.
|
| I cannot exit the internet because I literally make my
| living with it, the competitive disadvantage of doing so
| is SO great with the way we've structured services and
| life in general that it doesn't really work.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| We probably disagree about how bad that is, but I think
| it's a valid argument within the voice/exit framework.
| 121789 wrote:
| that's interesting. I can delete my FB account or Amazon
| account. how can I do this with my government?
| urtie wrote:
| Move to a different country. Apply for citizenship.
| Renounce your original citizenship. Rules may apply...
| bmelton wrote:
| Note: The cancellation fees for US Citizenship can be
| quite high!
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Vote. By voting you can ditch the old government and
| install a new one.
| [deleted]
| f0rmatfunction wrote:
| That's missing the point. Deleting your FB account
| doesn't affect FB's power or practices. Does it make you
| slightly less directly affected by their nonsense? Sure,
| but it's often a false sense of security. If
| disinformation on FB results in a different outcome to
| your election, or prevents parents from thinking a COVID
| vaccine is safe, or whatever else, that affects your life
| even if you're not on the platform.
|
| You have a say in your government's leadership. Don't
| like the President? Vote them out. Don't like Zuck?
| Nothing you can do about it.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| How do I delete my FB shadow profile? Do I need to create
| an FB account first or what? How do I get onto sites that
| use ReCaptha (that's potentially anything behind
| CloudFlare BTW) without letting Google hoover up a bunch
| of identifying information? How do I delete the data that
| Google collects with ReCaptha?
| paradox242 wrote:
| And yet even deleting these services or choosing not to
| use them yourself does not keep them from tracking you.
| We have long known about "shadow profiles" that for
| example Facebook uses to collect data on individuals that
| don't (yet, they hope) have Facebook accounts.
|
| As far as governments go, we could all become anarchists
| be done with them, but if you think for even a few
| seconds about it you would realize that this enormous
| vacuum of power would be filled by _something_.
| Corporations, rival nations with their government still
| intact, military warlords, or new political factions
| seeking to establish new governments. We have thousands
| of years of history that shows this pattern emerging
| again and again to the point that it is practically a
| natural law of power. The only check on power is greater
| or equal power. Ideally, you want this power to be
| answerable to the greatest number of people that this
| power is intended to serve. You may recall a lot of smart
| people during something called the Enlightenment spending
| a lot of time and energy on experimenting with different
| forms of government that met these criteria and still
| managing to not quite get it right. Many people in the
| West live in societies multiple iterations down the line
| from those established in the 18th and 19th century
| revolutions and there are still glaring issues. What do
| you suggest instead?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| It'd be cool if people spent more time reading basic
| political philosophy, rather than reading one book on
| libertarianism and deciding that that is now their
| philosophy.
|
| Philip Pettit has spent extensive time addressing really
| interesting questions like these, like what might
| distinguish "public" domination from "private."
| hammock wrote:
| >I don't know if or how this fits within actual antitrust
| law, but it makes sense that the issue was never price
| gouging, the issue was one entity gaining too much power.
|
| In the US, there are two major areas of antitrust law and
| enforcement:
|
| 1) Sherman & Clayton Acts (1890, 1914) - outlaws cartels and
| anticompetitive activities (that is, activities that tend to
| lead to monopolies, but doesn't outlaw monopolies
| themselves). Price gouging is not an antitrust issue, but
| predatory pricing and price fixing are (you might have meant
| these terms). This area is primarily established via case law
| and enforced by the courts (and DOJ AD).
|
| 2) Merger guidelines/Federal Trade Commission (1968) -
| wherein key mergers must be reviewed and approved by the FTC.
| This area is more sensitive to political climate / executive
| branch as it's executive-appointed FTC regulators who set the
| guidelines and give approvals. We are now exiting an era of
| historic hands-off-ness.
|
| Source: had a professor who is famous in antitrust world
| burtonator wrote:
| Anti-trust legislation is pointless. It's only enforced
| selectively and for political reasons. It would be FAR FAR FAR
| better to just enforce proper taxation policy so that companies
| like google actually pay taxes.
|
| Right now FANG have completely unfair competitive advantages that
| they SHOULD NOT have.
|
| WTF does Facebook get to build a campus TAX FREE just because
| they are Facebook.
|
| If you tried to do a startup your company wouldn't get these
| advantages.
| kazinator wrote:
| Thus, you must think monopolies and price-fixing cartels and
| whatnot are fine; the only "sin" is tax evasion.
| known wrote:
| "If it moves tax it. If it keeps moving regulate it. And if it
| stops moving subsidize it" --Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)
| use-net wrote:
| way to go!
| dvduval wrote:
| Google used to be more in tune with small businesses. Now they
| are so focused on that ad money (mostly from big corporations),
| that so many small businesses are getting squeezed out. Rather
| than helping small businesses grow, that keep taking parts of the
| market small businesses previously made some or all of there
| revenue from. And of course Google gets tax breaks that are not
| available to small businesses because they can do accounting
| tricks. It's just not a level playing field anymore.
| thisisnico wrote:
| As a small business, this is why I'm focused on Facebook
| Advertising. It's very easy to focus local.
| dvduval wrote:
| If search weren't part of the equation I could see how that
| might benefit some small businesses but definitely there is a
| clear Monopoly on search. Don't you agree?
| baby wrote:
| flagged because people are commenting on the title and not the
| content due to the paywall
| unityByFreedom wrote:
| Regional broadband ISP monopolies should have been dealt with
| first. Change my view.
| feralimal wrote:
| This is surely theatrics, given that Google has always been a
| quasi-governmental/military corporation:
|
| "In-Q-Tel sold 5,636 shares of Google, worth over $2.2 million,
| on November 15, 2005.[9] The shares were a result of Google's
| acquisition of Keyhole, Inc, the CIA-funded satellite mapping
| software now known as Google Earth.[10]"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| While we were competing with Google for search traffic some of
| the points the Justice Department makes became pretty self
| evident.
|
| How could a new startup compete with a company that paid billions
| of dollars a year to have search traffic directed to them? That
| always amazed me that the better the search results of other
| engines the more it costs Google to force that traffic their way.
|
| The other thing which I found hilarious was that "search engine
| marketing"[1] was forbidden by their contracts.
|
| [1] SEM is a practice where you buy a google advertisement on
| search which points to a page about the search query with Google
| ads on it. (except you share the revenue of those clicks).
| Perhaps not surprisingly you can make good money on this with
| highly contested clicks (Mortgages, Credit Cards, Insurance,
| Etc.)
| dang wrote:
| All: there are multiple pages of comments in this thread, and
| likely to be many more as discussion develops. You can reach them
| via the More link at the bottom of each page, or like this:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24836520&p=2
|
| For those wanting the real thing, the Justice Dept complaint is
| here (thanks to r721 below):
|
| https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/7273457/10-20-20-...
| johnghanks wrote:
| Sorry but is it really a monopoly when the reason you're a
| "monopoly" is that your products are just plain better than the
| competition?
| transperceneige wrote:
| Well, maybe they are better because competition doesn't stand a
| chance due to anti-competitive practices?
| jmull wrote:
| I can't help but wonder if this isn't simply a political move.
| woeirua wrote:
| Frankly I'm surprised to see that they're going after Google
| first. Amazon and/or Facebook are much more vulnerable to an
| anti-trust lawsuit, and just based on some of the public
| information that we already have they have likely engaged in
| anticompetitive behavior. I fully expect that antitrust action
| against FB/Amazon will continue regardless of who wins the
| election.
| dleslie wrote:
| Amazon has clear and healthy competitors; Walmart, Cosco,
| Alibaba, Ebay and so on. It would be a struggle to prove that
| they're a monopoly, let alone that they're using their monopoly
| illegally.
|
| Whereas Google has something like 95% of mobile search, and
| actively consumes competitors or, allegedly, wields its
| monopoly to drive traffic away from them.
| closetohome wrote:
| And what would you go after Facebook for? The same thing as
| google - advertising. But their market share is smaller than
| Google's.
| dleslie wrote:
| I mentioned Search, not advertising.
| closetohome wrote:
| I agree with your assessment. My point is just that
| search volume or user volume is an indicator of the size
| of the ad market, which is what any antitrust litigation
| will mostly be about.
|
| They're not concerned with the user experience under
| these companies, they're concerned about economic impact,
| which is mostly felt by people doing marketing on their
| platforms. Facebook is a social media company the way the
| Yellow Pages was a book publisher - it may be the most
| visible product they make, but it's not how they actually
| make money.
| wbl wrote:
| What Amazon is typically accused of, having store brands, is
| what every retailer does. That's hard to win. Maybe there are
| other things, but I haven't heard of them.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| _What Amazon is typically accused of, having store brands, is
| what every retailer does._
|
| This is simply not true and displays a fundamental
| misunderstanding of how retail works. A retailer _pays_ the
| supplier for the stock of inventory that goes on its shelves,
| Amazon does not. (It is only in _very rare_ cases the
| supplier only gets paid for actual sales of retail inventory;
| generally this happens for new products offered on a
| consignment basis to demonstrate market demand.) Frequently,
| retailers will share sales data with their suppliers so that
| the suppliers can make more attractive products, because then
| they can sell more units to end customers or charge higher
| markups.
|
| But importantly, with retail, the _retailer_ is the supplier
| 's customer, not you.
|
| In contrast, Amazon does not buy the inventory from the
| suppliers, instead it _charges_ them money to store their
| inventory in Amazon 's warehouses. On top of that, Amazon
| uses its access to sales data of external suppliers' products
| to design competing products which it then offers for sale,
| utilizing its ownership of the platform to promote its own
| products above competing products. While both of these latter
| two activities are problematic, it is the last one that
| definitely runs afoul of antitrust law (and was what got
| Microsoft into trouble with the EU).
|
| The problem with Amazon: it is using its position as the
| controller of the dominant online marketplace to establish a
| position in the market for individual categories of goods in
| a manner that interferes with the normal dynamics of the
| market.
| nearbuy wrote:
| > In contrast, Amazon does not buy the inventory from the
| suppliers, instead it charges them money to store their
| inventory in Amazon's warehouses.
|
| That part seems entirely reasonable. Would you rather
| Amazon pay sellers for unsold stock? That seems like a sure
| way to get Amazon to reduce the number of 3rd party sellers
| they stock.
| henryfjordan wrote:
| Amazon's model is entirely reasonable until they become a
| 1st-party seller that competes with 3rd parties. Then it
| is all too natural for there to be some market abuse. For
| instance, configuring search ranking to always put the
| Amazon branded option in the top results is Amazon
| abusing their market position as a
| marketplace/distributor to now directly sell goods.
| mabbo wrote:
| Perhaps that practice should be examined at every retailer.
|
| Should we define a line between marketplace operators and
| marketplace competitors? Or at least define rules to better
| ensure fair competition?
| treis wrote:
| Branded and store/white-label products have coexisted for a
| while now. It seems to work for everyone involved. The only
| players that it doesn't seem to work for are those with a
| brand but not anything underlying to differentiate
| themselves. But they're ultimately not driving any economic
| value so it's not that bad when we lose them.
| mathnmusic wrote:
| Retailers do not operate as marketplaces or storefront
| services though, do they?
| sova wrote:
| Right. IF a shopping mall started a competing brand for
| every store in the mall, what would happen?
| hef19898 wrote:
| I'd say some markteplace behaviour is potentially
| problematic. Amazon knows all sales data on every product on
| every seller, if Amazon is then selling the same items,
| Private brand or OEM, it can benefit from a lot of data the
| individual sellers dont have. Plus the possibilitis Amazon
| has by owning the marketplace.
|
| From personal experience so, once Amazon loses the buy box,
| the measures to gain it back are more or less what other
| seller could do as well. No idea how much seller data they
| use in selecting private brand products so.
| actuator wrote:
| Playing the devil's advocate here, Amazon is definitely not
| the only retailer that can use data.
|
| All the retailers have data on what sells in their store,
| they also have the data on how sales are influenced by
| shelf placement.
|
| Amazon to me is a logistics company, along with their
| storefront and AWS. Their focus on margins and their
| competence to use data to drive their logistics chains is
| what's truly scary. They can optimize a lot of
| inefficiencies that exist in logistics right now just
| because of the involvement of different disjoint players.
| hef19898 wrote:
| I totally agree with that. And having seen Amazon and
| various other companies from the inside, I jave to say
| that Amazon was definitely the most extreme, but all the
| most compliant one. They are looking for the legal
| limits, but the they stay within them. If these limits
| aren't clearly defined, they test them. So I would
| suspect that from a legal perspective, Amazon might be
| fine.
|
| Hoe all that translates into anti-trust law, I have no
| idea.
| [deleted]
| adrr wrote:
| Amazon would just point to Walmart as the market leader since
| Walmart has double the revenue.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| Not sure about Facebook, I mean there's reddit, twitter, etc.
| Each w/ it's own niche...but Amazon, and Apple, imho are the
| biggest offenders. Amazon would be first on my list.
| CogentHedgehog wrote:
| Facebook controls Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
|
| If you add those together, Facebook controls an overwhelming
| majority of the social media market share -- way more than
| the relatively tiny niche held by Reddit and Twitter.
|
| Edit: Facebook has 2603 million active users, Instagram has
| 1083M, Reddit has just 430 million. Twitter is estimated at
| 326 million. TikTok is the closest thing to a true Facebook
| competitor with 800M users, and a large share of them are
| probably concentrated in China -- and the Trump
| administration already tried to get them banned. (I'm
| excluding messaging services and YouTube here since they're a
| different niche).
|
| Source is Statista:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-
| net...
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| Reddit has gone significantly more mainstream over the past
| few years. I remember when a reddit post got 2000 upvotes
| that was a big deal. Then suddenly it became 4k, 8k, and
| then I stopped caring it got so large.
|
| Reddit is becoming into a weird beast because I've found
| theres a mentality of people who assume you actively
| subscribe to the stuff set by default hence why people get
| upset when you don't tout the same opinion. I've even had
| people ask me what I was doing in their subreddit, said I
| came from /r/all, and they basically said "yeah right."
| Reddit is probably going to dominate the online forum
| market since it's so much easier to create a subreddit than
| it is make your own website with forums.
|
| My only beef with this is reddit silences things they don't
| like, and not just things that sound reasonable. My
| rationale is let these people be. They're dumb enough to
| discuss this garbage on your platform, so why not collect
| that data and just monitor it? Better than they go
| elsewhere and now you have no idea.
|
| Also reddit trying to take their anonymous platform and
| make it so you act as a community member has always been
| weird to me. That makes sense for public people, not for
| general users. Especially when bot accounts just harvest
| upvotes. Twitter is basically what facebook used to be now.
| CogentHedgehog wrote:
| I edited my comment to add some proper numbers. Reddit
| has grown but it's still almost an order of magnitude
| smaller than Facebook+Instagram. The competition isn't
| even close.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| You need to use actual numbers. The total size of the
| active worldwide userbase on all of Facebook's platforms
| is at least one order of magnitude larger than reddit.
| And the revenue they extract from it is larger still.
| Reddit is merely the world's largest Internet forum. They
| don't have a moat.
| csallen wrote:
| Reddit is a top 20 site, according to Alexa. So they're
| not doing poorly. And any social website has a moat: the
| network effects from social connections.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| It's at #18, below Wikipedia, live.com, Zoom, Yahoo, the
| usual suspects (Google/YouTube/Facebook/Amazon) and a
| bunch of Chinese websites.
|
| All this proves is that the Alexa top N isn't a good
| metric of determining who is or isn't a monopoly. It's
| completely ignoring mobile apps (so Instagram/Whatsapp
| don't make an appearance), and it has no visibility into
| revenue. Reddit's current total valuation is in the small
| single digit billions. It doesn't deserve consideration
| in a conversation about the true gorillas in the field,
| i.e. the ones that are worth three orders of magnitude
| more.
| coldcode wrote:
| Apple is dominant as a monopoly in what exactly? Their own
| store, their own hardware, their own OS, their own services?
| Every business Apple is in has large alternatives. They make
| money selling you things, not from ads. Everything Google and
| Facebook do is designed to ensure they make ad revenue or
| sell your data in some way for money; they need to control
| every thing in their supposed business (search, android,
| social media, etc) to ensure they dominate in collecting
| ad/data revenue which is the only business they make money
| on. Apple only wants to sell you more devices or device
| related services which is their business. You can live quite
| well without any Apple product at all, many people do. Try
| living without Google.
|
| Amazon on the other hand is worse, as they want to control
| all business segments they get into, even totally unrelated
| to their business of being a store that sells things. Using
| your dominance in one type of business to force everyone to
| also support unrelated businesses with no alternatives is one
| common definition of monopoly; think dominating railroads to
| force everyone to use your oil (Standard Oil).
| [deleted]
| hef19898 wrote:
| Amazon and is not t the same time. eCommerce dominant?
| Sure, but then you have Alibaba, Shopify and eBay in
| addition to other marketplaces. Cloud? Surely dominant, but
| you also have Google and Microsoft. Retail? There Amazon is
| still small if you include stationary retail. Logistics? As
| much as everybody is complaining, Amazon Logistics is still
| more of an in-house alternative to UPS, Fedex, DHL,... So
| again, no real dominance of the parcel delivery market.
|
| It kind of gets tricky when you combine all that, but I
| assume that this would be a fun thing to argue infornt of a
| court I guess.
|
| Google seems to me to be much more straight forward, they
| clearly dominate search and web ads. The latter with the
| exception of social, which would be facebooks domain. And
| with Android, Google is the second largest player in Mobile
| if you ignore hthe hardware aspect.
|
| Not saying either company should be broken up, that's for
| couts to decide.
| sidlls wrote:
| I don't see Alibaba or eBay as competitors to Amazon--the
| former because it doesn't really operate in the US
| (almost nobody in the US would know what Alibaba is) and
| the latter because it just serves a completely different
| market with different mechanisms and so on. Shopify might
| be, but it's so tiny in comparison it's hardly
| unreasonable to suggest it isn't a legitimate competitor.
|
| Wal-Mart, on the other hand, might be nearing that status
| as far as eCommerce is concerned.
| cma wrote:
| Apple has >60% dollar share on app purchases.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| What percent of "digital goods" purchases is that?
| Because it's definitely not 60%. Defining a category like
| "app purchases" seems extremely narrow and arbitrary - a
| way to construct a product category that you can then say
| Apple is dominant in. What's the difference between the
| "app" Fornite and Fortnite on the Xbox One and why should
| they be treated as different product categories for the
| purposes of measuring market share?
| stale2002 wrote:
| > Their own store, their own hardware, their own OS, their
| own services?
|
| Apple has 50% of the US smart phone market, in a 2 entity
| duopoly.
|
| That is significant market power.
|
| > to force everyone to also support unrelated businesses
| with no alternatives
|
| Anti-competitive behavior does not require a singular firm,
| in order for it to be illegal. Instead, only significant
| market power is required.
| basch wrote:
| On one hand, theres no way Facebook is a monopoly. On the
| other hand, the question isnt really whether it is, but if
| they are being anticompetitive.
| ToFab123 wrote:
| They hold the power to change an elections. No politicians
| like that.
| sidlls wrote:
| They do? What evidence is there to suggest this?
| Mindwipe wrote:
| Pretty poor evidence generally, mostly on the say so of
| snake oil salesmen trying to convince political campaigns
| to pay them handsomely to do so with extremely uncertain
| results.
|
| I note the conspiracy theory that Cambridge Analytica
| threw the Brexit referendum via Facebook has essentially
| completely collapsed over the last month or so. CA
| certainly wanted their clients to think that such a thing
| was possible. They were fantasists, for money.
| jen20 wrote:
| > theory that Cambridge Analytica threw the Brexit
| referendum via Facebook has essentially completely
| collapsed over the last month or so.
|
| You have to have a pretty warped view on proceedings for
| this to be the case.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| You really don't. I am certainly not trying to argue that
| Brexit is a good thing. But the CA narrative has
| completely fallen apart.
|
| https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/social-
| media/2020/...
|
| https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/2847/docume
| nts...
|
| The ICO spent three years investigating CA, and the
| report is very clear that the findings were that they had
| no effect.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| unless you are changing them in the direction wanted.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Short term, yes, but what guarantee does any political
| group have that the tech companies won't turn on them at
| some point? Facebook in particular has an ever graying
| userbase, which means they're naturally going to continue
| to lean more and more conservative.
| basch wrote:
| >Facebook in particular has an ever graying userbase
|
| I don't buy it. Facebook has always been an adult
| network. It started as something that kept kids out. They
| opened up, but they dont need them. Eventually, when
| people get older they sign up for it. It't not sexy, its
| utilitarian. Their biggest risk to their business is more
| addictive products, not their customer age. People can
| get addicted at any age.
|
| TiKTok, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube are still more
| commoner<>celebrity networks, while Facebook is a
| WhitePages and now a YellowPages too.
| detaro wrote:
| From what I see, it's less important with young adults
| now than it was a few years ago, and it started as
| something only for young adults that spread upwards
| through the age groups. It could be reaching a stable
| point though, true.
| basch wrote:
| The whole "facebook isnt cool anymore" thing has been
| going on for a decade now. Linkedin isnt cool. The
| WhitePages arent cool. Plenty of other properties, like
| twitch, discord, twitter, carve out their niche. Snapchat
| was going to be the facebook killer, people got bored
| with snapchat. But facebook keeps growing. Now TikTok is
| looking like a threat. But no matter what everybodys
| favorite place to hangout is, they also have a facebook.
| And companies keep throwing money into facebook ads.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-
| monthly...
| yeetman21 wrote:
| Politicians only think short term
| blazespin wrote:
| They went after Google, because Google has a monopoly.
|
| Amazon does well from AWS, but hardly has domineering
| marketshare in the way Google does.
|
| The idea that FB has a monopoly is laughable. Until Trump put
| the kibosh on them there was a real threat from TikTok. Zuck
| was getting desperate. Social media is very fickle.
|
| Aapl as well only has a monopoly amongst high paying customers.
| Not sure you can call that a monopoly.
|
| Google is a well defined monopoly.
| johnsillings wrote:
| A great paper on Amazon's anticompetitive practices for anyone
| who's interested:
| https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.p...
| dwhitney wrote:
| From the abstract:
|
| "This Note argues that the current framework in antitrust--
| specifically its pegging competition to 'consumer welfare,'
| defined as short-term price effects--is unequipped to capture
| the architecture of market power in the modern economy"
|
| It's an opinion piece stating that law ought to be changed,
| not that Amazon is doing anything illegal.
|
| I never really quite understand how people think antitrust
| law applies to Amazon. I don't have expert-level knowledge of
| Amazon's various markets, but I don't think they have a
| monopoly in any of them.
| zozin wrote:
| I'm not really sure on what basis you conclude that Amazon
| and/or Facebook are more vulnerable than Google. Google
| controls +80% of search; it dominates desktop browsers with 70%
| market share; it effectively owns the most popular mobile
| operating system and +65% of mobile users use Google's mobile
| browser; it also owns YouTube and Gmail, which tie neatly into
| the rest of its products and lead to even more market
| domination (they read your emails and sell that information to
| advertisers, etc.).
|
| Google has done more to atrophy progress on the Internet than
| any other big tech company. It has used its monopoly position
| on search and ads to crush competition. Google has been "evil"
| for a very long time.
| asciimov wrote:
| You go after Google first, because they have had such dominance
| the longest. Anybody else would just argue "What about Google?"
|
| As friendly as Facebook has been to the republican party, it
| doesn't surprise me that they aren't first in line to be
| prosecuted, if ever.
| andromeduck wrote:
| Meanwhile at Luxottica... absolutely nothing.
| wasdfff wrote:
| What can the doj do to an Italian company
| strictnein wrote:
| Shut down their US operations. Bar them from partnering
| with US corporations.
| Firerouge wrote:
| It would be nice if there were open source prescription
| lens designing tools, and plans for cnc lens crafters/3d
| lens printers.
|
| A good start would be defining a set of standard lens sizes
| so people could at least easily find and print replacement
| frames.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Because Anti-Trust wise Luxottica is less of an issue as
| long as they don't abuse their market power when it comes
| to sunglasses. they could, if they did stuff like forcing
| retailer into certain deals and conditions. But unles sthey
| do things seem to be fne.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| OK. How about this:
|
| "Meanwhile <any phone/mobile/internet/health-insurance
| provider> nothing"
| AlexandrB wrote:
| These are all problems, I'm just happy that there's an
| appetite for anti-trust action at all at the federal
| level. Let's also not forget that phone service providers
| already had a round of anti-trust back in 1982[1], though
| it seems like legislators have forgotten why that
| occurred and let many of the baby Bells re-merge in
| recent years.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T#Breakup_and_refo
| rmation...
| andromeduck wrote:
| They absolutely do. They're the debeers of the glasses
| industry. They make your glasses, they make your lenses,
| they run your vision plan/program. Every optician ever
| has to sign with them to get the standard selection, as
| does any name brand that wants their brand licenced.
|
| But even beyond that, regional monopolies for carriers
| are somehow okay?
|
| I think it's just rent seeking/retributions for favours
| not rendered.
| spelunker wrote:
| I mean do you know how Luxottica acquired Oakley?
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| How did they acquire Oakley? I don't remember any major
| controversy at the time, and reading a few news articles
| and Wikipedia, it just reads like any other corporate
| merger.
| spelunker wrote:
| the short story is Oakley wasn't interested in being
| acquired, but since Luxottica owns most of the sunglasses
| stores you've heard of, was able to turn the screws on
| Oakley by refusing to stock their product, causing it's
| share price to tank and enabled Luxottica to buy Oakley
| cheap.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/agoodman/2014/07/16/theres-
| more...
| hef19898 wrote:
| Which is shitty behavior. Thanks for mentioning it.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > Luxottica purchased Sunglass Hut in early 2001. It
| promptly told Oakley it wanted to pay significantly lower
| wholesale prices or it would reduce its orders and push
| its own brands instead.
|
| > Within months, Oakley acknowledged to shareholders that
| the talks hadn't gone well and that Luxottica was
| slashing its orders.
|
| > The company's stock immediately lost more than a third
| of its value.
|
| https://boingboing.net/2019/03/12/luxottica.html
|
| The fact that this isn't mentioned on Wikipedia might
| mean that Luxxotica has been very good at scrubbing their
| online persona.
| brightlancer wrote:
| > The fact that this isn't mentioned on Wikipedia might
| mean that Luxxotica has been very good at scrubbing their
| online persona.
|
| It's on Wikipedia:
|
| "Luxottica acquired Oakley in November 2007 for US$2.1
| billion. Oakley had tried to dispute their prices because
| of Luxottica's large marketshare, and Luxottica responded
| by dropping Oakley from their stores, causing their stock
| price to drop, followed by Luxottica's hostile take over
| of the company."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxottica
|
| There's even a sub-section on "Monopolistic pricing
| practices".
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Oops, I based that on the Oakley wikipedia article (which
| only mentions vague antitrust concerns[1]) and the
| parent's ignorance about Luxxotica's purchase of Oakley
| (I assumed he looked at the Wikipedia article).
|
| [1] > Luxottica's acquisition of Oakley has been
| criticized as potential violation of Antitrust laws.
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakley,_Inc.)
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| I did read that section, but it's not immediately clear
| to me that those two things are causally related. Yes,
| Luxxotica cut Oakley out of their stores and Oakley stock
| lost a lot of value. But, Luxxotica bought Oakley 6 years
| later. Where's the link exactly? Did Oakley's stock
| continue to decline? Was there shareholder demand to
| sell?
|
| I was in the US Army in the time surrounding the
| purchase. The amount of Oakley product that was purchased
| by both the government and individual soldiers should
| have been enough to keep Oakley afloat all on its own.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Well, not exactly. If there is something fishy behind it,
| Luxotcca definetly deserves a clap on the fingers at
| least.
| tathougies wrote:
| Facebook has been so friendly to the republican party that
| they immediately blocked sharing of accusations against Joe
| Biden for impropriety while serving as the Vice President of
| the United States. Oh I forgot though... simply allowing
| republicans to speak online is nowadays akin to full on
| support for the GOP platform.
| stevespang wrote:
| Bill Gates used the same contracts to maintain Windows monopoly.
| Google is also a bastion of liberals.
| derivagral wrote:
| When they started adding those "This site works better in Chrome"
| popups on their web properties I was fairly shocked; didn't MS
| get in trouble for essentially this & Windows/IE?
| the_only_law wrote:
| I'm guessing I just don't understand the Microsoft/ IE
| antitrust case because everytime I read about it makes no sense
| what was done that was illegal.
| sova wrote:
| Microsoft released an Operating System where the main portal
| of entry to the internet was also their own product.
| Microsoft engaged in anti-competitive behavior to dissuade
| users from having alternative browsers installed -- which is
| similar to a shopping mall starting its own jewelry store to
| compete with outside jewelry stores renting space in the
| mall. There are certain behaviors that are kosher, and there
| are certain behaviors that destroy competition in unsavory
| ways. Ultimately, the illegality was not able to be shown,
| and Microsoft started a [not-so-good] trend of acquiring
| competition rather than dissuading its existence and
| adoption. This is in some ways a lot worse than finding them
| guilty.
| cma wrote:
| It wasn't illegal if they had done it without having a
| monopoly share.
| nycticorax wrote:
| This seems to be getting a lot of downvotes, but I think
| it's correct, strictly speaking. There are a lot of
| business practices that are legal up until the point where
| you've acquired sufficient market power. After that,
| antitrust law applies. Similarly, regulators don't care if
| two companies with negligible market share want to merge,
| but they may care a lot if the two dominant players in a
| market want to merge.
| ehsankia wrote:
| I believe Microsoft got in trouble for bundling IE with Windows
| and doing a lot of things to keep users there.
|
| They still do a lot of shady things actually:
| https://www.theverge.com/21310611/microsoft-edge-browser-for...
|
| Every once in a while I see Edge pinning itself to my taskbar
| after an update, or opening automatically and telling me to
| migrate.
| peacefulhat wrote:
| Depends on how they split it up, but this could be very bad for
| consumers. One of the plans is to spin off Chrome which sounds
| like a total disaster for web standards. Probably go with an
| obnoxious monetization scheme beyond licensing Google search if
| that didn't work out for the smaller Mozilla team.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| The original complaint, from DOJ not the altered one from
| DocumentCloud:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20201020151204/https://www.justi...
| amelius wrote:
| What happens to our data when Google is broken up into small
| companies?
| redm wrote:
| I'm much more interested in the Ad-tech Monopoly. The Doubleclick
| merger should have never been approved.
|
| "Other states are still considering their own cases related to
| Google's search practices, and a large group of states is
| considering a case challenging Google's power in the digital
| advertising market, The Wall Street Journal has reported. In the
| ad-technology market, Google owns industry-leading tools at every
| link in the complex chain between online publishers and
| advertisers.
|
| The Justice Department also continues to investigate Google's ad-
| tech practices." [1]
|
| [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-department-to-file-
| long...
| wannabag wrote:
| Couldn't agree more, the adtech is where the monopoly lies. I
| worked for a doubleclick / ads 360 competitor and it was so
| plain that Google used its dominant position not only to squash
| competitors like us but also to further obscure the auction
| mechanisms. Today it's a challenge to specify exactly what you
| want to bid for a given keyword, in part for the better since
| it dramatically reduces complexity for advertisers but it does
| remove a lot of the control and hands it back to... Google.
| Ultimately the auction is completely irrelevant since Google
| decides which ads will show and by extension whose ad money
| they'll pocket. In addition to that, Google charges premium for
| ad space even in non-competitive markets; I'm talking about
| what you end up paying for a top spot although there are no
| other actors in the auction for a particular keyword (even in
| broader matches). While one could argue that it's up to them as
| a publisher to decide what a spot is worth, this mechanism is
| completely obscure and you will only ever find out in hindsight
| through what you pay for the traffic.
| dlp211 wrote:
| > Google charges premium for ad space even in non-competitive
| markets; I'm talking about what you end up paying for a top
| spot although there are no other actors in the auction for a
| particular keyword (even in broader matches).
|
| Google uses a Vickery Auction, in other words the top bid
| pays what the second bidder bid so while I agree with your
| greater point, this is not based in reality as stated.
| wannabag wrote:
| Yes, I didn't express that correctly; I know about the
| second price auction and what I was referring to is that
| since Google does everything in their power to get you away
| from keyword level bidding and into their "smart bidding"
| solutions you have no _direct_ say in what the traffic
| costs (AFAIK it's still possible to use keyword level
| bidding but Google will email you very regularly to try to
| get you off). This fact is even more obvious in non-
| competitive markets as I was trying to point out.
| jhenkens wrote:
| 2nd price auctions have been dead for 2+ years due to
| header bidding. For anything in which Google has to compete
| against other SSPs or DSPs, I'd imagine it is the same. If
| Google owns the content, such that they are the single
| party SSP/DSP, and header bidding is not possible, then I
| suppose 2nd price could come in.
| thu2111 wrote:
| What is header bidding? I also thought Vickery auctions
| were still in use.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I think it's a way for publishers to simultaneously
| auction the same bit of space in multiple exchanges. I
| guess that this means they have to use first price
| auctions, though I don't have a super great idea as to
| why.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Honestly, how would anyone ever know if Google does what
| they say they're doing? Is there any trusted third party
| auditing Google's ad auctions? If Google says $X was the
| price at auction, how would I ever dispute that?
| AJ007 wrote:
| Thanks to anti-trust actions both from the US and EU, we
| will find out.
| imheretolearn wrote:
| How would anyone ever know that Facebook hasn't designed
| it's algorithms for spreading misinformation and
| disinformation? How would anyone ever know that Apple
| doesn't use your photos to train an AI? How would anyone
| ever know that the Amazon doesn't peek into your RDS
| database?
|
| There are real human beings working on those systems.
| That's how everyone would know if Google does as it says
| Polylactic_acid wrote:
| This is a pretty good point. I spoke to a developer from
| facebook once and they said essentially that there is
| nothing super secretive happening behind the curtains.
|
| Yes they may be evil and doing all this bad stuff, but we
| pretty much know all the evil stuff they are doing
| publicly.
| munk-a wrote:
| I understand the line of reasoning above and would
| normally follow it - but Facebook, Apple and Google have
| all shown that they will do really shady things if they
| can get away with it. The reaction to Project Dragonfly
| was pretty nice to see, but you really have to wonder how
| many things like that make it through without any public
| outcry - I know real human beings and most of them are
| pretty awesome, some of them are sociopaths who'd do
| anything to make a buck though... we're gambling that
| some moral ones get into the decision making process and,
| tbh, if the sociopaths have their way the moral ones will
| remain blissfully ignorant of the shady stuff.
| tclancy wrote:
| Hang on, you think there are individuals who can reason
| about how complex systems work with perfect certainty?
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| If something fishy indeed goes on in a large company, it
| must be on a need-to-know basis.
|
| But the higher access you get, higher the penalties of
| sharing company secrets go.
|
| Snowdens come into the picture every once in a while, but
| most average programmer Joes wouldn't risk being
| internationally manhunted for whistleblowing questionable
| business practices.
|
| So I do not think your argument is valid.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| If you're truly paranoid, you can certainly encrypt data
| in RDS with keys that you have and Amazon doesn't.
|
| But yes, the rest they expect us to take on faith. Or
| trust some boilerplate in their ToS (written by their
| lawyers, to absolve them of liability).
| billiam wrote:
| The encrypted traffic will be the traffic Amazon will be
| most interested in, since you took the trouble; they
| won't peek into the DB but they will be able to infer
| lots about what's going on if they want. It's the Tor
| Paradox.
| asperous wrote:
| They are actually first priced auctioned now
|
| https://www.blog.google/products/admanager/simplifying-
| progr...
| schwinn140 wrote:
| "Ultimately the auction is completely irrelevant since Google
| decides which ads will show and by extension whose ad money
| they'll pocket."
|
| And which Publishers will receive their share of the scraps.
| scumcity wrote:
| Wherefore? FB and other such platforms are much better at
| display ads technology, as they don't care about user privacy
| at all. User tracking is the only real discriminator when it
| comes to display ads, where as search queries are very
| discriminating.
| llimos wrote:
| DuckDuckGo claim to make significantly less money per search
| than Google does, which seems to disprove that search queries
| are enough of a discriminator on their own.
|
| Source: https://spreadprivacy.com/search-preference-menu-
| duckduckgo-...
|
| _Despite DuckDuckGo being robustly profitable since 2014, we
| have been priced out of this auction because we choose to not
| maximize our profits by exploiting our users. In practical
| terms, this means our commitment to privacy and a cleaner
| search experience translates into less money per search. This
| means we must bid less relative to other, profit-maximizing
| companies._
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Search queries are generally enough for ads, but DuckDuckGo
| only makes money on selling those ads, while Google also
| sells your person information connected to the search.
| nopeNopeNooope wrote:
| Where does Google sell personal information?
|
| That would literally be selling the crown jewels for some
| extra pocket money, what makes you think this is the
| case?
| nl wrote:
| This isn't true.
| AJ007 wrote:
| I would like to see data on Google's revenue distribution
| per user, guessing it would be very lopsided. Some users
| are clicking ads for 50%+ of their searches. DuckDuckGo
| users are different because they most likely at minimum
| know the difference between a search result and an ad.
| username90 wrote:
| Could be that DuckDuckGo users just aren't good ad targets.
| The big thing separating them is "hates big corporations",
| I could easily see advertisement for big corporations not
| being a big hit for this crowd.
| dhimes wrote:
| I wonder if DuckDuckGo would be more successful if it was
| easier to find out _how_ to advertise with them. Like, a
| link on the page that says "Advertise on Duck Duck Go."
| I've tried to advertise with them in the past a few times
| and gave up. I posted here before also, as I think
| Gabriel used to read the pages.
|
| I use them for search as my default, and I would have
| used them for ads. I still might if they put a link
| there.
| paulgb wrote:
| Maybe, but one big difference I notice between the two is
| that a search for <brand> on Google often has the top
| result as an ad for that brand, whereas on DDG it will be
| the same result but not an ad. It seems that brands don't
| have to "defend their turf" on DDG by buying ads on their
| own name as they do for Google.
| inopinatus wrote:
| I'm a DDG user. I do not "hate big corporations". I may
| dislike some big corporations. I've enthusiastically
| worked for others.
|
| I _hate_ poverty, injustice, and bigotry. I cannot stir
| up strong feelings about an advertising company.
|
| On the other hand I am a terrible advertising target, not
| impervious to advertising but resistant, in part having
| seen under the bonnet of the sector and found little but
| a morass of grubby lies and folks with broken moral
| compasses.
| [deleted]
| fastball wrote:
| I should certainly hope that DDG makes less per search than
| Google, since they are just repackaging a lot of google
| searches.
| minerjoe wrote:
| Bing.
| fastball wrote:
| Well yes they're getting "their" search data from Bing,
| but I meant how a lot of people seem to just use DDG to
| `!g [search]`.
| [deleted]
| mtgx wrote:
| I agree, considering how much money they still make with
| Display Ads, and its potential to make so much more, it's
| amazing to me how Display Ads are still like 1/10 the quality
| of Facebook ads as a product for advertisers, and Facebook
| Ads is also a mess with all the bugs and random algorithm
| changes they make on a weekly basis, so that's saying
| something.
|
| It's not just about targeting. But the algorithm is also 10x
| worse and the UX is 10x worse, and often it's on purpose to
| get as much "dumb money" as they can, while of course
| shooting themselves in the foot, because the better long
| strategy would be to actually make it a quality product that
| gives people results.
| option wrote:
| Exactly, Doubleclick acquisition should not have been approved.
| I'm wondering if we still have that same approvers still "doing
| their job"
| billiam wrote:
| the level of understanding in government of how the Internet
| was shaping up way back then was really really low; I was
| around then and felt it was crazy but unless the regulators
| can understand and measure an industry, they won't every stop
| an acquisition like Doubleclick.
| uladzislau wrote:
| #splitthemup I would say ;)
| chanfest22 wrote:
| Google does a bunch of things that are less than ideal. What this
| complaint alleges doesn't seem to be one of those things.
|
| Here's Google's response: https://blog.google/outreach-
| initiatives/public-policy/respo...
| permo-w wrote:
| How did google get their own top level domain?
| wmf wrote:
| They bought it. A TLD costs $200K or more.
| ehsankia wrote:
| A lot of other brands have them, but they use it only for
| redirects and not as their main domain like Google does.
| Example: experience.apple
| bduerst wrote:
| Many brands have their own TLDs
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-
| level_dom...
| ayushgta wrote:
| Brand TLD: https://icannwiki.org/Brand_TLD
| hardtke wrote:
| The media reporting as well as Google's response is entirely
| focussed on the consumer monopoly on search, but the DOJ
| complaint focusses equally on potential anti-competitive
| practices in the search advertising market. The DOJ describes
| the situation well here:
|
| 110. There are barriers to entry in these advertising markets
| that protect Google's advertising monopolies. Most critically,
| search advertising of any kind requires a search engine with
| sufficient scale to make advertising an efficient proposition
| for businesses. Specialized search engines require significant
| investment, including the cost of populating and indexing
| relevant data, distribution, developing and maintaining a
| search algorithm, and attracting users. Search advertising of
| any kind also requires (1) a user interface through which
| advertisers can buy ads, (2) software to facilitate the sales
| process, and (3) a sales and technical support staff. The same
| barriers to entry that apply to general search services also
| protect Google's general search text advertising monopoly.
|
| Declaring search advertising an illegal monopoly would not only
| open up the possibility for structural changes (requiring them
| to license the search advertising to other search engines,
| giving aggregators the ability to buy search advertising on
| google.com) but also exposes them potentially to large payments
| to advertisers who have been harmed in the past.
| dariusj18 wrote:
| I think the argument could be made if it is talking about
| it's integration of search advertising with other types of ad
| sales. But yeah, if it's just talking about having the best
| search engine and selling ads on it, that's been the entire
| business of search engines since the beginning of the
| internet.
| actuator wrote:
| These arguments are so weak, if arguments like these hold we
| have similar analogies in other domains.
|
| > search advertising of any kind requires a search engine
| with sufficient scale to make advertising an efficient
| proposition for businesses.
|
| So does creating OSs. Let me make a similar statement on OSs:
| "selling OS of any kind requires certain scale with
| sufficient number of apps, for manufacturers to bundle your
| OS and app developers need the scale of OS to make it
| worthwhile for them to create apps".
|
| Remember Windows Phone Catch 22. They created an OS which was
| reviewed well, seemed like a fresh take on UIs. But apps
| didn't come or came late, often buggy and not fixed in time.
| In the end it was never able to compete on apps.
|
| > Specialized search engines require significant investment,
| including the cost of populating and indexing relevant data,
| distribution, developing and maintaining a search algorithm,
| and attracting users.
|
| Didn't Siri and Alexa do exactly this to entrench their
| position in market. In fact voice search engines(assistants)
| often come as non changeable defaults.
|
| In case of Siri it comes by default on more than a billion
| Apple devices.
|
| The only way we exclude these from our discussion is if we go
| by a very narrow definition of search, these are here to stay
| and will possibly dominate search behaviour.
| dinglejungle wrote:
| Your analogies ignore the advertisement part of what you
| are quoting. Selling an OS doesn't require any particular
| scale at all, selling ads to display within an OS would.
| actuator wrote:
| > Selling an OS doesn't require any particular scale at
| all
|
| It does require scale to build an OS, have appealing
| devices that ship with the OS and have apps that
| developers write because they can make money. How the OS
| is monetized makes no difference.
|
| Look at Kindle as an example. Kindle has an ad subsidized
| model along with no ads one. Would Amazon even make the
| model work if they weren't big and didn't have other
| stuff to sell through it?
|
| Look at game consoles, the cost of device and OS is
| subsidized by the cut Sony and MS receive from games.
| Would this model even work if they had no money or games
| to sell?
|
| I will again circle back to Siri to make my point again.
| Apple is rumoured to be working on a search engine, this
| along with alrwsdy default Siri as a voice search engine.
| How do you think Apple is paying for all the cost of
| building and running this? Revenue they earn by selling
| devices. Can someone even compete to them using the same
| model if they don't have an OS or hardware to sell?
| Definitely no.
|
| If we accept these analogies then a lot of tech companies
| are susceptible to analogous accusations.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Keep in mind, the arguments are likely based on legal
| precedent, and not necessarily popular opinion or
| conventional wisdom.
|
| I'm not disagreeing with you per se. Simply pointing out
| that legal stuff like this is a chess match. It's also
| unlikely the accused would go too far to tip their hand in
| terms of their defense.
| actuator wrote:
| @dang makes sense to add this in the top level comment as well,
| lest people create separate threads for this.
| [deleted]
| mortdeus wrote:
| The stupidity of this argument could be boiled down to the
| government trying to file an antitrust lawsuit on the Rolling
| Stones having an ongoing monopoly on rock music because movie
| directors are still deciding to use their superiorly popular (and
| in my opinion superiorly written) music over all the modern
| hacks.
|
| I dont think this is an issue of antitrust, rather an issue of
| regulation.
|
| You regulate the internal affairs of the oil industry not because
| you still care about the monopoly Standard Oil once hand on the
| market, but rather because you care about how they can directly
| operate in such a way that has been proven to cause more harm
| than good. (e.g. this is why california is so up tight about
| getting your car "smogged")
|
| There is a debate that needs to be had regarding how the power of
| big tech flies in the face of the 1st amendment when it comes to
| how internal bias can harm the public in the same sense that
| somebody yelling "fire" in a crowded theater can cause trouble.
|
| But this doesn't fall under antitrust and I think distracting the
| real issue with this kind of lawsuit is just another way for
| Washington to feint like they are "actively" trying to do
| something about the problem while in reality allowing for the
| problem to persist into the long term future.
| Joeri wrote:
| But to build a competitive search engine you need massive
| engineering, network and hardware resources; or put simply you
| need a lot of money. To fund that very expensive to operate but
| necessarily free search product you need lots of ad revenue,
| for which you need advertisers, which only pay for ads on the
| dominant search engine.
|
| Maybe it is a lot easier for google to stay on top than for
| others to get to that level? And is the market really open when
| competitors face a sky-high barrier to entry?
| comeonseriously wrote:
| Oh, come on. Go after the ISPs!
|
| But, maybe this is retaliation because Google never built Trump's
| COVID website.
| Osiris wrote:
| > Google used "exclusionary agreements and anticompetitive
| conduct"
|
| For a long time, I've felt that any contract that specifically
| prevents a party from engaging in business with any other party
| should be considered anti-competitive and illegal.
|
| I understand why businesses like them, but I can't see how they
| ever benefit customers.
|
| Exclusivity contracts were the backbone of big enterprises
| accused of monopolistic behavior, like Intel and Microsoft, and
| I'm sure many others.
|
| Can anyone give me a good case for why exclusivity contracts
| (contracts that ban a company from engaging with a competitor)
| are good for consumers?
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/mW60L
| summerlight wrote:
| Not sure if this is going to make a strong case in the court at
| least in the current legal framework. For many cases, competition
| is a click away; Search is straightforward, and for Ads it's
| merely a matter of budget allocation (thanks to FB and Amazon,
| there's some real competitions). To prove that this is
| objectively harmful to consumers, a lot more works would be
| required for DoJ. I don't see any good arguments in the filing
| other than ambiguous "reducing consumer choices, stifling
| innovation". Now I can understand why lawyers were concerned with
| this half-baked accusation in a NYT article.
|
| Probably legislation approaches proposed by Democrats is a right
| way to handle this case. I'm afraid that this immature lawsuit
| may give Google and other tech giants political exemptions to the
| future antitrust regulations potentially enabled by the reformed
| bill. Maybe Biden administration will decide to just drop it in
| favor of reforming the bill?
| simonh wrote:
| Note that having a functional monopoly through simply being
| popular is not illegal, it's practices which unfairly protect
| or exploit that market power that can be illegal.
|
| The article goes into some candidates for activities that might
| be judged abuses, such as buying the default search slot on
| iPhones. Another might be unfairly promoting Google properties,
| and artificially burying competitors in search results. Another
| area that might be looked at is Google providing various free
| services such as Gmail and Google Docs, essentially subsidised
| by search revenue, in order to squeeze out competitors from
| possible revenue streams.
|
| Having said that, this is mostly a shakedown. If Google would
| just set up a PAC and cough up I'm sure this will all just go
| away.
| redm wrote:
| In reference to the default search engine partnership between
| Google and Apple:
|
| "Though Google and Apple have been tight-lipped on how much their
| deal is worth, the lawsuit projects that it accounts for between
| 15% and 20% of Apple's annual profits.
|
| That means Google pays as much as $11 billion, or roughly one-
| third of Alphabet's annual profits, to Apple for pole position on
| the iPhone. In return, Apple-originated search traffic adds up to
| half of Google search volume, the government says. Google
| declined to comment on that statistic, and representatives said
| they weren't aware of the "Code Red" language included in the
| lawsuit." [1]
|
| Thats a lot of revenue and if they clouded, this case may have
| legs.
|
| [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-exclusive-search-
| deals-...
| ju-st wrote:
| As comparison: "The new search deal will ensure Google remains
| the default search engine provider inside the Firefox browser
| until 2023 at an estimated price tag of around $400 million to
| $450 million per year." https://www.zdnet.com/article/sources-
| mozilla-extends-its-go...
| spideymans wrote:
| And now we see why Android exists, and how immensely valuable
| it is to Google.
| BearsAreCool wrote:
| Why is it that this is only attacking google search? I'm not that
| well versed in antitrust legal matters but why isn't there
| attempts to break up the broader Alpbabet into sensible smaller
| companies that each do their own thing? In my head that seems
| like it should be simpler.
| maxlamb wrote:
| Because search is the only area where Google has a clear
| monopoly.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Google has monopolies in advertising, mobile, streaming
| video, mapping, and web browsing. The latter gatekeeps all
| other Internet based businesses and allows them to pick
| winners and losers.
| viro wrote:
| streaming video?
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| YouTube is a monopoly. Arguably it's one of the largest
| social networks too. But for most video creators, YouTube
| is the only option to reach an audience. Bear in mind,
| even big movie and TV studios who operate their own video
| streaming platforms... where do the trailers all get
| posted? YouTube, where people can find them.
|
| As someone who's not used Google services since 2016...
| it's still the one Google property I can't really escape,
| because nobody is posting their content anywhere else.
| jldugger wrote:
| > YouTube is a monopoly. Netflix
| Hulu Disney+ AppleTV+ Peacock
| Vimeo Twitch
|
| Youtube fills one particular niche (independent webcam
| operators) well, but is hardly a monopoly in the
| streaming video category.
| crakhamster01 wrote:
| > YouTube is a monopoly.
|
| Maybe in the most narrow of definitions. IG/FB and Tiktok
| are huge competitors in the video space, Tiktok being the
| dominant platform if you focus on short form video.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| To me, it would be disappointing if they broke up the firm to
| the point where R&D has to survive w/o subsidies. US science
| research funding has not kept up. I'm glad the likes of Google
| have kept pace with corporate R&D.
|
| Consider for a moment where self-driving-car technology would
| be w/o Google subsidizing it. Or mapping technology. Or like a
| dozen other technologies. Were these supposed to pop up w/ VC
| struggling from round to round? Many of the VC backed companies
| themselves have a put option of being acquired by Google/FAANG
| -- so if that exit is gone, it would be even worse.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > so if that exit is gone, it would be even worse
|
| Worse for whom? As a customer, I groan every time a product I
| use gets acquired by FAANG because I know it's going to get
| shuttered in a few months.
|
| Edit: Or in the case of large acquisitions like Instagram
| slowly integrated with the parent company's shitty products.
| Aunche wrote:
| This implies that the product wouldn't be shuttered if it
| weren't acquired. Startups aren't extactly know for their
| longevity. Some were intended to be sold to a FAANG on day
| one. As for Instagram, products are cool until their
| investors start expecting them to turn a profit.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| >> Worse for whom?
|
| Worse for those in the real world where you have payroll
| obligations, rent, AWS bills, health insurance, and
| mortgages.
|
| As a customer I feel the same way. However, having been a
| co-founder and CTO of a startup, let me tell you the real
| story:
|
| - Most startups are not like snapchat, they are not once-
| in-a-generation unicorns.
|
| - Most startups have huge burn, especially consumer-
| entertainment type startups (imagine how much network
| bandwidth YouTube was burning before Google purchased
| them.)
|
| - Startups are at the mercy of funding rounds and sometimes
| the market itsself can get away from you, through no fault
| of your own startup
|
| - FAANG provide a put option -- "whats the worse that can
| happen? we get acquired by X" which allows people to take
| on more risk while trying to swing for the fences.
|
| - It is arguable how long darling consumer apps could
| survive as independent when consumers often dont want to
| pay money. It is a catch 22 -- the startup is told the
| product has to be free but they are also not allowed to
| seek bigger coffers to actually subsidize it
|
| So in the end -- sure, I agree with you, but _who pays?_
| Esp if this is something massive with network effects.
| Perhaps I can pay for WhatsApp, but can my grandma pay for
| it with her meager overseas salary? And if she cannot, how
| is the network sustainable?
|
| I'm not saying I disagree with you, but I dont know what
| the solution is other than the current one.
| [deleted]
| kristo wrote:
| God forbid we don't get self driving cars
| nottorp wrote:
| Search is the monopoly, breaking up is the remedy?
| use-net wrote:
| dismantle all monopolies!
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Microsoft was having some antitrust problems when Google was
| founded, so Google said "don't be evil." Now Google got big
| enough and lived long enough to become a villain.
| verroq wrote:
| You either die a hero or live long enough to become a villain.
| wil421 wrote:
| You are either acquired a hero or live long enough to become
| the acquiring villain.
| pb77 wrote:
| I am more concerned about paying money for service and still get
| exploited. Samsung tv is pushing ads and i don't enable network
| service, it still keeps pushing it. Google is pushing to convert
| my nest to google account ( I bought nest before it was google ).
| I am switching my phone from android to iphone. It seems that US
| could pass better laws to govern the interests of paying
| customers. I wanted to buy oculus but with the new facebook
| enforecement of login,i decided to skip it. Ring is used by
| amazon to give your video to police, i am not against giving
| video to police with my consent.
| residentfoam wrote:
| Where was the antitrust in all these years ?
|
| I think it is a little too late now. Companies like Google have
| grown to the size where it is now impossible to stop them from
| being a monopoly.
|
| I don't think there is anything, anyone in the world can do to
| really allow a fair competition in the space.
|
| As for the fines that e.g EU has inflicted to Google in recent
| years, they are simply ridiculous, considering Google's revenues.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Anti-trust law really has broad authority if they can make this
| stick. Just because this is tech doesn't make it special. The
| EU fines were nothing. If this goes well, it would be a forced
| dismantling similar to what happened in the early 1900s. Google
| would have to win the case or cease having any U.S. presence
| whatsoever to get away from this.
| nojito wrote:
| Wow...did not know that Apple has a RSA with Google...that's
| pretty cut and dry exclusionary agreement to preserve their
| monopoly.
| InTheArena wrote:
| This won't last at all. As soon as Biden is elected, Democrats
| will continue to make public statements, but will accept dollars,
| and then magically after the midterms it will go away.
| Fishysoup wrote:
| Under any other administration I'd support this (i still do,
| provided the motivation is legitimate anti-trust concerns). But
| it's pretty obvious that the cheeto prince just doesn't want his
| hate speech banned or his dissidents having a platform.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads into political flamewar. It helps
| nothing and just makes the thread worse (more predictable and
| nasty).
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Would be good for technology if they would be forced to at least
| divest Androidola. Ideally their ad monopoly would be broken but
| it seems a long shot
| ur-whale wrote:
| https://archive.is/mW60L
| libeclipse wrote:
| I hope there's a mention of how Google locks out third party
| browser developers by refusing to let them implement widevine,
| their DRM solution.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| If you are accusing someone of protecting an illegal monopoly,
| you are implying there is an illegal monopoly. Does this mean
| they will attempt to split Google up?
| parasubvert wrote:
| Splitting up is only one remedy. Often it leads to a consent
| decree, which is effectively a negotiated but forced settlement
| (e.g. fines, restructuring, etc.) and contract that binds
| future behavior.
| [deleted]
| Grimm1 wrote:
| I'm obviously biased here given I manage an alternative search
| engine, but I really think this will mean good things for
| competition in the search space. Every other search engine
| besides Google currently has < 10% of market combined and having
| literally founded a search engine because of how bad I found
| Google's results I can't believe that continued domination is
| from a quality standpoint. I wholeheartedly believe they do not
| rank the top results appropriately and that means it actively
| harms consumers in favor of ads and sponsored results.
| bbqmaster999 wrote:
| Antitrust was a disaster for Bell Labs, which gave us inventions
| like the transistor and Unix. Nothing as noteworthy after the
| breakup and string of acquisitions. In the same way I'm worried
| for all the moon shoot projects at these big companies if they
| are broken up. I suggest reading the Idea Factory and then see
| how you feel about breaking up big tech.
| [deleted]
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Go is pretty close to being from Bell Labs, in the sense it's a
| continuation funded by Google of work from Bell Labs, no?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Bell also forced you to rent their telephones if you wanted
| phone service. The old Bell was a disaster for consumers and
| Bell Labs does not excuse their monopolistic practices. As a
| counterpoint consider Xerox PARC, which brought us the GUI and
| Ethernet without Xerox fucking over their customers (too much).
|
| Edit: I find it funny that someone posting on "Hacker" News is
| defending a monopoly that extracts an ad tax from every startup
| and kills many innovative new companies by acquihire.
| bbqmaster999 wrote:
| You really find it funny that someone on HN is defending the
| company whose resources and internal innovation culture lead
| to advances that are foundational to all the technology we
| work on today? So maybe they charged too much for their phone
| service, big deal. I'd argue that their contributions to
| science and engineering outweigh that.
| throwaway2048 wrote:
| name some foundational advances Google has made.
|
| Throwing 100x more resources at AI ideas from the 70s isn't
| an foundational advance.
| throwaways885 wrote:
| MapReduce, GFS and Bigtable are the foundations of big
| data today.
| throwaway2048 wrote:
| Those are good engineering efforts, but its like building
| a bridge vs understanding the theory of gravity.
|
| They are definitely not foundational in anywhere near the
| sense that bell labs was.
| konjin wrote:
| None of those things are new or interesting. Maps were
| used in the 70s and you can find a chapter about them
| being parrapalized in Kthuths original Art of Computer
| Programming.
| tylerhou wrote:
| The original TOACP makes no mention of map
| parallelization.
|
| https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Art_of_Computer_
| Pro...
|
| Nor the second one:
|
| https://www.google.com/books/edition/Art_of_Computer_Prog
| ram...
|
| Nor the third one:
|
| https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Art_of_Computer_
| Pro...
|
| I also searched for "parallel" and couldn't find any
| relevant passages to map parallelization.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Somehow, it's much rarer to see someone on HN defending the
| government, whose resources and internal innovation culture
| lead to advances that are foundational to all the
| technology that we work on today. So maybe they charged too
| much taxes, bid deal. I'd argue that their contributions to
| science and engineering outweigh that.
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| I think this has been a long time coming and probably needs to
| happen. My ad-hoc monopoly test has always been customer service.
| When your a monopoly you don't really care about consumers
| because you don't have to. Look at your local DMV, your local
| cable company, and Google. What do they have in common? They act
| in their own self interest over consumer's interests. They take
| anti-consumer actions with impunity and are dismissive of all
| complaints. They go through great lengths to turn their problems
| into your problems.
|
| I'm hoping that this leads to adblock being fully supported in
| chrome again with all the proper hooks to be able to filter
| content. I also hope this leads to greater privacy and a right to
| be forgotten for all. Most of all I hope this leads to Google
| answering the phone instead of hiding behind their algorithms.
| (Even when I was working at a top 5 web site the only way we
| could contact anyone at Google was Twitter and former college
| roommates that happened to work there).
| nova22033 wrote:
| Airlines have pretty bad customer service. so do most insurance
| companies.
| azinman2 wrote:
| As do many companies even small. Hell, lots of restaurants
| have poor customer service, let alone grocery stores, big box
| stores, etc. That's hardly a unique characteristic to
| monopolies.
| coffeemaniac wrote:
| This is a specious comparison, and you need to consider
| both the consequences to you of a failure of the business
| as well as paths of recourse available to the consumer.
|
| Consider your comparison of google to a restaurant. Google
| can bring your entire business to a halt with no
| explanation, costing you potentially your livelihood. You
| may never get the opportunity to escalate to a point where
| a human will reconsider the matter. They do this as a
| matter of routine.
|
| A restaurant can bring you cold soup or something, and you
| can complain at a waiter right there on the spot (if you're
| so inclined). They'll probably give you a free meal for it.
| Absolute worst case they can give you food which is
| poisoned and there is strong precedent that in this case,
| if you escalate sufficiently, they will be shut down.
| perardi wrote:
| Have you ever tried to cancel a gym membership? It's a
| stretch to imagine any gym has a monopoly, and yet...
| TwoBit wrote:
| Don't you just cancel payment on your credit card and be
| done with it?
| jonny_eh wrote:
| No, business can continually put charges on it. You'd
| need to resort to chargebacks or litigation to stop it.
| perardi wrote:
| Bingo.
|
| In the past (and this was a while ago), you had to pay a
| cancellation surcharge, even if you were month to month,
| unless you found someone to _take over your plan_.
| awakeasleep wrote:
| Airlines are actually heavily monopolized. However, it's the
| _routes_ that are monopolized.
|
| So you appear have your choice of airlines, but if you want a
| direct flight and don't live in a hub, then you don't really.
|
| And, often when it seems like you have a choice, you're
| actually flown by people from a no-name contract airline that
| controls that route no matter which brand is on the plane.
| missedthecue wrote:
| If airlines are heavily monopolized it's never shown on
| their statement of financial position, like, ever.
| sova wrote:
| Inefficiency is often subsidized by the government due to
| lobbying under the guise of public convenience.
| prewett wrote:
| A monopoly is not necessarily profitable. I have a
| monopoly on the distribution of my blog content, but that
| does not make any difference in my annual income.
|
| Assuming that the parent's assertion that airlines have a
| monopoly on the route from airport X to aiport Y is
| correct, it does not give them any pricing power in
| general because they do not have a monopoly on all routes
| from X to Y. There are multiple airlines providing routes
| from X to Y, hence price competition.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Then all he is really saying is that two airplanes cannot
| occupy the same space at the same time. Everyone knows
| this. Infants know this. It's simple physics.
|
| When people talk about monopoly, they mean the absence of
| competition. They're talking about one firm having the
| control over the distribution of some kind of commodity,
| for instance, Standard Oil. But as you say, airlines have
| plenty of competition.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| Quality of customer service and percent of market share are
| inversely correlated, but they're still separate variables, and
| one does not imply the other.
|
| Amazon is an example of a company that, despite having an
| enormous market share of online shopping, has remained
| aggressively aligned with the customer. (They'll happily use
| their market dominance to wring every last penny out of their
| suppliers and their employees, though.)
|
| Simplifying greatly, this is the main difference between
| antitrust laws in the EU and the US: the EU doesn't really have
| the concept of a benevolent monopoly. In the US, you have to
| make a strong case that the company is engaging in
| anticompetitive practices.
|
| Notably, this has less to do with how the alleged monopoly
| treats its own customers than with how it treats other
| companies in the same space.
| ehsankia wrote:
| That seems like a skewed test that is biased companies that
| work at scale. It's much harder to have good customer service
| for every user when you're making pennies per user but bank on
| having billions of users.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Double Click / Google Ads doesn't have billions of users. It
| is unbelievable how much money people spend on Ads and still
| get really bad customer service. I hear things are (somehow)
| even worse with FB Ads customer service.
| lhorie wrote:
| Amazon has pretty good customer service, IMHO. I've even had
| good experiences w/ AT&T of all companies (though presumably
| that's because there's virtually no barrier for switching
| providers in SF)
| ehsankia wrote:
| You get excellent support as a Prime member paying $10+ a
| month, or you've just spend hundreds shopping there. You're
| not a free ad-based user like with Google.
|
| I'm not sure how much these numbers hold up, but a quick
| search claims that they get around 150-250M monthly users.
| That's still a whole order of magnitude away from 1-2B
| Google gets.
| lhorie wrote:
| Honestly, I got good support even for things that
| logically would not yield profits (in my case, I
| erroneously bought a music book for the wrong instrument,
| called in to explain my mistake, and they subsequently
| shipped the right one for free, without even asking me to
| return the other one). I don't have prime and I'm not one
| of those people that always shops amazon.
|
| I read recently that a lot of amazon returns just end up
| in the dumpster. It feels like they consider the
| logistics of returns in their customer retention
| strategy.
| katzgrau wrote:
| > but bank on having billions of users
|
| At the point where you have billions of users, you may just
| be a...
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Silicon Valley might be resistant to admit operating at scale
| is just bad for people. At a certain scale a lot of societal
| harms manage to fall through the cracks.
| ehsankia wrote:
| So what's the solution? Limit who can use Youtube? Charge
| for usage of Youtubes? So only those who can afford it are
| able to get tutorials on how to fix their sink and tie a
| tie but poor people can keep getting poorer?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >So only those who can afford it are able to get
| tutorials on how to fix their sink and tie a tie but poor
| people can keep getting poorer?
|
| does the same logic also apply to the tools you use to
| fix the sink? I really have to laugh about this
| borderline gaslighting attempt that Google and Facebook
| have come up with to justify their ad monopolies. As if
| having to pay for information is any more objectionable
| than having to pay for anything else. The only reason
| they've concocted this terrible argument is because free
| stuff is how they get their fangs into everyone.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| No, I think success in large platforms has depended on
| being able to automate away human problems, ignoring the
| harm that causes. We need to mandate human moderation and
| customer service, as well as a robust and transparent
| appeal process. And we need to strip Section 230 immunity
| so platforms have real liability behind their content
| decisions.
|
| Platforms above a certain scale will either require
| enough manpower to handle them appropriately, or will
| break down at a certain size and lead to a wider market.
| eigenvector wrote:
| It's also much easier to do hard things when you're making
| billions of dollars.
|
| I find the argument that Google et al cannot -afford- to do
| anything but treat their users in an arbitrary, high-hanged
| way unconvincing.
| ehsankia wrote:
| It doesn't matter how much money they make, what matters is
| how much they're making per user, and how much it would
| cost per user to provide them to full customer support. You
| can get decent Google customer support if you pay 1$/month
| and get Google One (one top of extra storage space).
|
| https://one.google.com/about/support
| eigenvector wrote:
| No, at a basic level how much they make per user is not
| the user's problem. That's Google's chosen business
| model.
|
| You cannot sell a defective thing then when the customer
| comes back say "sorry, we actually only made $0.01 on
| that so we don't provide customer service, goodbye."
|
| Your obligation to not, for instance, arbitrarily revoke
| someone's account access causing them measurable harm is
| not dependent on whether you deem yourself to have a
| sufficient level of profit on the transaction.
|
| Companies have obligations that external and not bounded
| entirely by their commercial whims.
| nearbuy wrote:
| That's the reality for companies with high volume and low
| margins. The number of customer service representatives
| per user they can hire is proportional to their profits
| per user. You can't change that with legislation. A
| company making 1/10th the profit per user cannot spend as
| much on customer service. At best, you can make laws that
| effectively ban companies from having low margins.
|
| If I buy something from my local dollar store, they have
| a no return policy. The items are typically low quality.
| But they cost a dollar.
|
| My cell company, on the other hand, charges around
| $60/month for a phone plan, so they have more customer
| service representatives.
| eigenvector wrote:
| In almost every developed country in the world except the
| United States, it would be illegal to sell a defective
| item then refuse to refund or replace it, whether it's $1
| or $10,000. Consumer protection regimes are a real thing
| that exist, although maybe not in your jurisdiction.
|
| So yes, you can legislate that. By making merchants bear
| the cost of defects and take a loss on replacing the
| product, you make it no longer a viable business model to
| constantly sell broken stuff. It's a proper alignment of
| incentives.
|
| In a world where Google is being sued for antitrust in
| part because of a monopoly they built by giving stuff
| away for free, perhaps making it harder to have a "low
| margins, but we aren't accountable for anything" business
| is not a bad thing.
|
| You're also building a strawman - that Google would need
| to spend a lot _per user_ on customer service to start
| actually providing customer service instead of refusing
| to do so for most of its products.
|
| It would need to spend a lot in absolute dollars, sure,
| but the vast majority of users would have precisely zero
| support interactions. No one is saying that Google should
| have an army of 500,000 support reps. Just that it should
| actually be possible to contact Google without knowing
| someone who works there.
| d1zzy wrote:
| This argument doesn't seem correct to me. It's not like Google
| has had great customer support when they started out and later
| on, as they became a monopoly, they stopped doing that so it's
| one of the (many) signals it's a monopoly that doesn't care.
| Google never had customer support, it's whole business was
| built around that model. They are successful BECAUSE of it, not
| IN SPITE of, and only the latter form can be a signal of
| monopoly.
|
| If you want a more accurate signal here go for "Google doesn't
| care about its users as much as it did many years ago" in terms
| of anti-user features and changes it's making all the time now.
| But of course that's a bit harder to show as happening because
| you have to take each such change on a case by case basis and
| show that indeed it's hurting more users than it's helping
| (because many such changes while they seem as they go against
| the prosumer or the HN community, they very much follow what
| the average Joe needs or wants).
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| My DMV in Arapaho County Colorado is efficient and easy. Most
| things can be done online or at a kiosk. If you do need to talk
| to a person the wait is short.
|
| In the rare instances where I have a problem with comcast they
| have been able to solve it pretty quickly and easily. They are
| over priced though.
|
| We use a lot of google services and I've almost never needed
| any kind of customer support because they tend to just work. I
| did have some issues with a Fi line once and chat responded
| immediately.
|
| There are major problems with monopolies, but from my
| experience customer service tends to be fantastic compared to
| smaller organizations.
| arcticbull wrote:
| > Look at your local DMV.
|
| This is IMO the only part of your response I disagree with.
|
| In most of the OECD, DMVs are wonderful, or at least,
| functional and expedient. In most developed countries,
| government work is considered a public service job, and
| respected, appreciated and well paid. 30% of Norway, Sweden,
| Denmark and 25% of Finland is employed by the government.
|
| The DMV being the most utterly soul sucking place on earth has
| little to do with being a monopoly, but rather, Americans
| belief that the government is worthless, manifest. People - and
| services - tend to behave the way you expect them to, and this
| is no exception. While not a uniquely American phenomenon, it's
| not a function of being a monopoly.
|
| As you'll see virtually all Ontario DMV equivalents
| (ServiceOntario, broader in scope than the DMV, handling health
| card issuance, birth certificates, and a many other government
| services [2]) have wait times under 20 minutes [1]. They also
| do manage complaints quite effectively via the Ombudsman
| program [3], and as a last resort, fold neatly under media
| pressure.
|
| [1] https://data.ontario.ca/dataset/serviceontario-wait-times-
| in...
|
| [2] https://www.ontario.ca/page/serviceontario
|
| [3] https://www.ombudsman.on.ca/contact-us
| nhooyr wrote:
| If you've ever been to a DMV in Ontario, it's not good.
| They're horrible in my experience. Interesting to see the
| data suggests otherwise but just google Ontario dmv
| experience, everyone here hates them.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| OJFord wrote:
| As I understand it from the UK, a 'DMV' is the equivalent of
| the DVLA, handling 'licence plates' and driver licensing?
| (And then 'your local' because states.)
|
| So, what do you even need to do so frequently that you care
| how wonderful/expedient/slow/in/efficient your local DMV is?
| (Nevermind it being a 'soul-sucking place', that you actually
| go to?!)
|
| It sounds to me like ours is better/faster simply by doing
| less, some red tape that we either don't have or have
| automated.
|
| My first and last interaction with the DVLA was when I passed
| my test. ..ok maybe I filled out a web form for change of
| address since.
| bluGill wrote:
| I need to get my every 4 years license picture during lunch
| break (In theory this is flexible, but meetings often give
| me just an hour), which includes eating and travel there
| and back.
|
| I also prefer to transfer titles for private sales directly
| at the DMV as this way I know everything was done
| correctly.
|
| None of this happens often, maybe every other year. Still
| enough that I notice how bad some are. Of course my first
| job I often ate lunch next door to a very helpful, fast,
| and friendly DMV office and that started some habits...
| TwoBit wrote:
| My experience with American DMVs is that your experience
| varies depending on location. The DMVs in densely populated
| low socioeconomic areas are overcrowded and take hours of
| waiting and have hostile representatives. Opposite of DMVs in
| less dense high economic areas. The former have to deal with
| much more difficult customers, and 5x the number of them.
| busterarm wrote:
| I remember when I flew in to buy a car in Elyria, OH and
| got my temporary tag from the DMV in and out in 10 minutes
| and was on my way.
|
| Even in suburban SC the DMV there was very painless.
| kempbellt wrote:
| I wish I could agree, but after waiting in line for an hour
| just to be rudely dismissed in 5 seconds for not having the
| "right form", I feel like OP's perspective is pretty
| accurate. At least here - WA State, USA.
|
| I literally got a, "This isn't the right form. _Next_ " type
| response...
|
| Unfortunately, glaring angrily in annoyance at the staff and
| not saying a word until they extended even an ounce of
| courtesy by _getting_ the right form for me, was the only way
| to get through the bureaucratic BS in this situation.
|
| A lot of DMV workers, for reasons beyond me, have a sort of
| "Oh, you forgot to dot one 'i' on this 300 page form. Go back
| to the drawing board, get in line again, and see me when you
| are done" type of attitude. Sure, they don't have the time to
| walk every single person through filling out forms, but a lot
| of times this lack of enthusiasm to help at all is pushed to
| an extreme.
|
| The DMV here has a _very_ strong "You need US more than we
| need you" attitude to it.
|
| It's one of the reasons I've spent more time driving on
| expired licenses or with expired car registration than I
| would care to admit. "Oh, $50 fine? Eh.. Beats waiting in
| line for the DMV and hating my life for a couple days
| afterwards."
| ziml77 wrote:
| Or it's because they're underfunded and have tons of people
| to get through. You had an hour to ensure you had the right
| form and filled it out properly. If they get lax about
| things like that, people will be less careful and it will
| just waste more of everyone's time.
| Supermancho wrote:
| The Renton, WA DMV is lovely, albeit small. The Kent one is
| larger, but it's in Kent.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| I think everyone here agrees that American DMVs are awful.
| The point was that it's not necessary that government (or
| monopoly) services end up that way. As someone that has
| experienced California DMVs and the equivalent in Ontario,
| I can confirm the quality in Canada is much higher.
| mikestew wrote:
| _I think everyone here agrees that American DMVs are
| awful._
|
| I don't, see my sibling reply. I'm perfect content with
| the WA state DMV and the service I receive. I'm a little
| peeved that they recently tack on 3% if you use a credit
| card, but I can understand why.
|
| Indiana and North Carolina, OTOH, only contribute to the
| poor reputation of DMVs in the U. S. and can go suck a
| bag of dicks.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| I feel like that proves the point of this comment thread,
| that DMVs don't need to be awful.
| chowells wrote:
| I also don't. I've never had a problem with service or
| wait times in one. Portland and Seattle, both have been
| fast, comfortable, and helpful.
| [deleted]
| mikestew wrote:
| I have far more positive anecdotes here in WA State, USA.
| The last time I renewed my driver's license, it literally
| took me longer to walk the mile round trip from my office
| than the time I spent inside the DoL (Department of
| Licensing here in WA State, USA). We don't buy cars very
| often, but the last time we transferred title was annoying
| because we had to wait behind one or two others, but it was
| the usual print-print-stamp-stamp-have-a-nice-day ten
| minutes once at the desk.
|
| OTOH, it probably depends greatly on the office one goes
| to.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Same here, WA DoL is quite pleasant, especially with the
| online appointment system.
| bluGill wrote:
| The office makes a big difference. I've learned that if
| you don't get the service you want right away leave -
| there are other offices that might be better. Though it
| depends, in my city there is only one that is a
| reasonable distance away and they are middle of the road.
| I've tried to use some that are slow and hate you, but
| not far away was a nice one that was very fast and
| helpful. After a while locals learn where not to go.
| Splines wrote:
| I would not be surprised if DMV employees were measured and
| rewarded on their throughput, so punting people who have
| anything wrong is incentivized.
| Sevii wrote:
| Funnily enough, the DMV is quite nice in some parts of the
| US.
| DoofusOfDeath wrote:
| This matches my experience as well.
|
| I suspect a big factor is that most civil-service jobs
| don't allow a person to be penalized or rewarded based on
| their general level of friendliness when dealing with the
| public / customers / constituents.
|
| Some people in those positions are friendly despite the
| lack of extrinsic motivation, but not everyone is wired /
| conditioned to be like that.
| [deleted]
| asdfman123 wrote:
| I was shocked how efficient the DMV was in Seattle after
| coming from Houston. It was actually a pleasant experience.
| SilasX wrote:
| Whether the job is respected/well paid, or whether the wait
| times are long, is orthogonal to whether they're a painful
| experience.
|
| Every comment I've heard about European government offices is
| that, yes, they're functional, but you have to be very
| organized, great at following directions, and super
| deferential, or they'll send you down a bureaucratic
| hellhole.
| sjg007 wrote:
| The only way to use the DMV is to make an appointment online.
| If you aren't doing that you will have a bad time.
| bla3 wrote:
| There's tons of tiny companies with terrible customer service.
| Maybe "monopoly" implies "bad customer service", but the other
| direction certainly doesn't hold. It sounds like you're
| suggesting the implication works the other way round.
| amelius wrote:
| Can't we have some minimum requirements for customer service
| which companies have to comply with?
| perardi wrote:
| _My ad-hoc monopoly test has always been customer service._
|
| And who exactly is Google's customer? The Gmail user, or the ad
| buyer?
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| The gmail user is a customer. They may not be paying
| directly, but they are still a customer.
| cmorgan31 wrote:
| If you aren't paying directly then aren't you the product?
| You may be a consumer of a service but the customers are
| primarily other businesses who are trying to get your
| attention so you'll buy something they think you might
| really enjoy like the coffee maker you just bought from
| Amazon a hour ago.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| Pithy saying aside, if you use a free service, you're
| still a customer.
| srtjstjsj wrote:
| No, that's just an HN iamverysmartism.
|
| A product is a something produced. Google provides
| services to users in exchange for their attention to ads.
| It's a barter of value.
| leptons wrote:
| "If the product is free, then you are the product"
| leptons wrote:
| Downvoted for this comment? I swear this place is worse
| than reddit.
| lhorie wrote:
| I've heard a bunch of horror stories from ad buyers over the
| years, FWIW.
| perardi wrote:
| Fair. And you'd think Google would care more there, as
| there's a direct paying relationship.
| ballenf wrote:
| The now-trite "if you're not the customer, you're the
| product" distinction just isn't helpful anymore.
|
| Youtube is a great example where creators, subscribers (both
| Premium and ad-watching) _and_ advertisers are all Google 's
| customers. Google profits by providing a platform for all
| those parties to come together and engage in commerce.
|
| And yet none of those parties are really buying anything
| directly from Google -- even for ads Google is just
| facilitating the placement of ads on creators' content.
| Premium subscribers are paying creators with Google divvying
| up the payment and taking its cut.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Youtube is a great example where creators, subscribers
| (both Premium and ad-watching) and advertisers are all
| Google 's customers. Google profits by providing a platform
| for all those parties to come together and engage in
| commerce._
|
| That makes them users, not customers. As you note, none of
| them are paying Google. A user who does not pay for the
| service is not a customer, because they don't have the most
| important capability that a customer has: taking your money
| elsewhere if you are not satisfied. That means Google
| itself _does not know how much its services are worth to
| their users_ , because it has prevented those users from
| telling it what the services are worth by paying for them.
| And that is why Google is notorious for killing services
| that are valuable to users but don't generate enough ad
| revenue.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Forgot about the monopoly -- how about outright fraud?
|
| As someone who used to operate a domain parking service, I've
| seen evidence numerous times of google taking away publisher
| earnings because of alleged clickfraud, but then not refunding
| advertisers for those same clicks.
|
| I know of three advertisers who were appearing in AdSense ads on
| a publisher page back in 2009 that Google refused to pay out
| because of "click fraud", and none of these advertisers received
| refunds or any indication that they were defrauded. Google took
| the money that was supposed to go to the publisher, kept it, and
| didn't refund the advertisers. They probably never do. I ended up
| paying $800 out of my pocket to compensate my users for the lost
| revenue.
|
| I have also worked with hundreds of advertisers in the SEO space,
| and I have never, ever, seen someone say they had ad money
| refunded because of click fraud, yet I've seen plenty of
| publisher earnings held back because of supposed click fraud.
| Google's fight against click fraud is really just a fight against
| paying out to publishers, full stop.
|
| Google also used to do this crazy shit (don't know if they still
| do as I'm not in that space anymore) where they would change the
| TOS at midnight and then retroactively block the past month's
| earnings on hundreds of accounts that are violating the seconds-
| old TOS. Pretty sure that is illegal as well.
|
| If you think about it, Google has zero incentive to stop real
| click-fraud, especially if their chosen course of action is to
| just keep the money and not have to pay publishers or refund
| advertisers. This space needs regulation, and it's needed it for
| over a decade.
|
| I will happily forward what I have if someone knows how to get in
| touch with investigators.
| extropy wrote:
| I would assume Google just shows more ads on other sites to
| compensate for the fraudent clicks. Why should they give you
| money back when they can just fulfill their side of the
| contract by showing ads to non fraudent users.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| It's funny that never actually occurred to me as a
| possibility. I would have to get in touch with the
| advertisers to see if that data is still in their account
| (which may be possible, I'll see what I can do).
|
| It's also not sufficient even if they do that. Many
| advertisers will run a time-sensitive campaign -- free
| traffic 3 weeks later in those scenarios is worthless. I
| actually doubt google does this because if they did it would
| be most easily implemented as an account credit.
|
| They just keep the money and hope no one ever holds them
| accountable for anything.
| zaphar wrote:
| That isn't the way ad auctions work. They don't make it up
| 3 weeks later. They make it up in real time. The decision
| on where to show an ad is done in milliseconds. If it
| doesn't show up on your site it shows up on a different
| site instead right then.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Click-fraud decisions happen weeks later when it's time
| to send payouts to publishers. It will show $800 pending
| for deposit and then will say removed and you'll get an
| email about click fraud.
| criley2 wrote:
| Shame for anyone who wanted a real shot at this case.
|
| The Trump admin is pushing an un-finished rush-job against Google
| because it's 14 days before the election and the administration
| is desperate for any hail mary to turn the polls around.
|
| Based on this alone, a political rush-job, you have to imagine
| Google will crush this. And there won't really be an opportunity
| to try again.
|
| Hard to not see this as a generational chance for Google to take
| total advantage of the political cluster-F in America and
| dominate the next decade or two.
| newbie578 wrote:
| I do wonder how this will be played out. I cannot see a negative
| outcome for Google, even if there is one, will it trigger a
| domino effect among other monopolies (Apple, Facebook, etc.).
| sciurus wrote:
| Is the text of the DoJ's filing publicly available?
|
| EDIT: Ars Technica is hosting it at
| https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/gov.u...
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Microsoft was sued in 1998, the same year that google was
| founded. So, a startup from 2020 is bound to be the next Google.
|
| DOJ seems to be targeting really where it hurts, their search
| dominance. Google(r) has benefited enormously from the positive
| feedback loop adoption->investment->more adoption, and as the
| similar cases in EU have shown , it's hard to break. Even if
| phones in EU allow you to select an engine, i select google. If
| the DOJ seriously intends to act they will have to come up with a
| plan that allows competitors (all of which will be inferior in
| the beginning) to enter the market and evolve.
|
| It will be interesting to watch the stock market reaction to this
| news. It's probably going to keep going up because it's
| completely decoupled from reality
| ausjke wrote:
| Can I pay for search, like say $15 a month or something like
| that, that let me search with my privacy and free of ads? Ok
| let's call this a premium version of google search.
| treis wrote:
| This doesn't seem like it's going to work. Given a choice between
| search engines pretty much everyone is going to choose Google. I
| think there are definitely areas that Google acts anti-
| competitively. But search? The competitors are a URL away. And
| few use them because Google is just flat out better.
| cwxm wrote:
| The question I would posit is: Do the actions from Google that
| the Justice Department consider to be anti-competitive prevent
| competitors from becoming better?
|
| For example, let's say I could be curious about DuckDuckGo if I
| had to choose a default search engine when I got an Apple
| device instead of Google being the default, then that could be
| revenue to DuckDuckGo for them to improve their search engine.
| d1zzy wrote:
| So what are you going to do, force Apple to sell their search
| default option for less money (whatever DuckDuckGo can afford
| to pay) in order to support more competition? It's really
| Apple's choice and interest what it does with the default
| search, Apple could decide tomorrow to point it to its own
| search engine and there's nothing Google, the DOJ or anyone
| else can do about it.
|
| Not really sure what the DOJ expect Apple or Google to do in
| this situation, it seems to me that 2 companies entered a
| mutually benefiting contract. You can't argue that Google
| "colluded" with Apple, there's a lot of throwing punches
| between each other (all the privacy oriented moves Apple is
| doing are hurting Google's business) and again Apple could be
| making its own search engine anytime they wanted, they
| already replaced Google Maps with their own thing.
| nostromo wrote:
| The monopolized market in this case would be the market for
| default search engines on mobile.
|
| If the only two players (Google and Apple) both use Google
| Search by default, then Google has effectively captured
| 100% of the mobile ad market. (And since Google is paying
| Apple et al for that default state, it is indeed a market.)
|
| The court could require device makers (including Google
| itself) to prompt users to select their search engine
| provider, or potentially ban Google from buying search
| engine defaults from other companies (Apple, Mozilla, etc.)
| as an anticompetitive practice.
| jonas21 wrote:
| That's an interesting scenario. Let's say Google is
| banned from buying search engine defaults. Then Mozilla
| would no longer be able to sell the Firefox default to
| Google.
|
| Sure, they could sell it to someone else, but without the
| biggest player bidding up the price, it'd probably sell
| for a fraction of what it does today -- which could be
| devastating to Mozilla, given that almost all of their
| funding comes from the search deal. What would that do to
| competition in the browser space?
| belval wrote:
| Competition in the browser space is over and Chromium
| won. If this had been regulated earlier by preventing
| Google from preinstalling Chrome on all Android devices,
| we wouldn't be in this situation where Firefox is on life
| support, but here we are.
|
| Using Firefox as a reason not to break up some of
| Google's hold on search seems extremely short-sighted.
| Besides, Edge using Chrome changed the whole browser
| market dynamic as more and more people are using it. Once
| Microsoft reaches a somewhat decent percentage of install
| we will be back at a two (three?) player situation.
| llimos wrote:
| s/an Apple device/Chrome/
| treis wrote:
| Before asking "should we" we need to answer "can we". If
| forcing Google to give users a choice results in them picking
| Google anyways then whether we should do that or not is
| irrelevant. Since it won't achieve it's stated purpose
| there's no point in forcing it.
| ry_co wrote:
| Regarding DuckDuckGo, my understanding is that though they
| have their own web crawler, most of the information is coming
| from Bing and Yahoo, who are the only direct competitors to
| Google.
| [deleted]
| bduerst wrote:
| You're mostly correct.
|
| Yahoo has been Bing for years, and DuckDuckGo pulls from
| Bing and Yandex - the latter being mostly for searches in
| Russian.
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| I concur. https://www.searchenginemap.com/
| goodluckchuck wrote:
| >few use them because Google is just flat out better.
|
| I completely disagree with this part, but you're totally right
| on people continuing to use it.
|
| Search is highly dependent on the query. At first DDG's results
| seemed bad to me, but after a while I think I've changed how I
| write my searches. It's hard to explain, but I guess I'm
| putting more thought into understanding what it is that I hope
| to find.
|
| Now, Google's results seem to just be a listing of whoever did
| the best SEO targeting on the subject, and ultimately that
| means worse results for me. It's less about what I'm looking
| for and more about what Google has to show me... and Google
| always has something relevant to show me. When DDG doesn't, I'm
| forced to re-consider my query and try again, ultimately
| reaching a better destination.
|
| However, "change the way you search" is niche at best. Google
| is satisfying because it's so easy to use, that you almost
| don't even have to write a query. It's like an automatic "I'm
| feeling lucky" based on it's knowledge of you and your location
| and time of day, etc...
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Google's business is ads, not search
| wasdfff wrote:
| What is search these days but an ordered list of
| advertisements matching your keyword
| arrosenberg wrote:
| What if search is that way because Google has a vested
| financial interest in the advertising business?
| cblconfederate wrote:
| wrong! they don't match
|
| I was just searching for "quill", a javascript editor. I
| clicked the first result without really looking (after all,
| i m searching name, right? ) - and it took me to some
| competing product called fro-something. I wasted my time,
| their money , yet google still made money.
| Spare_account wrote:
| This sounds like exactly what the grandfather post (by
| wasdfff) was discussing. A competitor advertised their
| product based on the keywords you searched for.
|
| You didn't buy their product, but Google helped them get
| your gaze briefly.
|
| What is search but a list of adverts associated with your
| keywords?
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Google can do without this "google tax", and imho they
| should. It's unethical , and it's not like a competitor
| putting a sign next to yours. The user is literally
| searching for a brand and is instead driven to click
| another. At best the competitor should be an ad on the
| side in this case. Considering how (especially in
| mobiles) google is often used as a kind of DNS-
| autocorrect in the omnibox, this behavior is unethical on
| the same level as websites with popups. A rich company
| like google would not normally allow it to itself, they
| can easily dispense with such sleaziness. The fact that
| they can do it unpunished is indicative of a monopoly
| position.
| drivebycomment wrote:
| I just tried search for "quill" in incognito, and I got
| quill.com as the first hit (both ads as well as organic
| result) - apparently there's a company called Quill
| Corporation (quill.com). It seems reasonable to return
| that as the first hit. quilljs.com is 5th hit on the
| first page. "quill javascript" has quilljs.com as the
| first hit.
|
| This seems reasonable. What's your suggestion on how to
| make this better ?
| cblconfederate wrote:
| just checked my history, my first result was "froalla",
| happened more than once
|
| (the query must have been "quill js" or "quill editor"
| cant remember -- it's an example of the infamous
| 'google(r) tax' - an obviously keyword-targeted ad)
| eitland wrote:
| Here's another one:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?safe=active&client=firefox-
| b-m...
|
| It is a search for "express-http-proxy" "logging" but at
| leat I got maybe one relevant result and a bunch of
| wildly unrelated ones, despite doublequotes.
| cma wrote:
| Default placement is way more powerful than typing in a URL,
| which most people never do for searching Google.
| ericd wrote:
| There are structural issues that make it very difficult for new
| competitors to gain traction in search. For example, many
| website owners are now hostile to new web crawlers, but they're
| happy to allow Google to hammer their servers because they want
| that sweet, sweet search traffic.
|
| Mandating a commonly accessible crawl, with cached versions of
| the pages, would help new entrants a lot.
|
| Also, there're large network effects with ad networks. It seems
| unlikely that many marketing managers are going to take the
| time to do targeted keyword queries on your search engine with
| 1/1,000,000 the traffic of Google.
| gjs278 wrote:
| made up nonsense
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| We run a search engine crawler at mojeek and have no
| hostility problems
| Grimm1 wrote:
| Hey we do too at Whize, surely you've seen sites that give
| special privilege to Google and or lock the sitemap away.
|
| While I don't know if I'd say "hostility" I would say
| passive aggressive to other crawlers.
| fastball wrote:
| I don't know a single website owner that is hostile to any
| search engine web crawler, unless that web crawler is
| slamming them with so many requests they're effectively
| getting DDoS'd.
| temp667 wrote:
| I do, some third party search crawlers are just badly
| programmed, and after you get burned a bunch of times you
| just want to deny anyone who isn't one of the main players.
| I think they are basically startups with a lot of money to
| spend on crawl compute, but who haven't really figured out
| their crawl engine, and it can go wild on your site.
|
| You also have bots that seem to be credential stuffing,
| bots that seem to be content scrapping (stuff with same
| typos shows up elsewhere after their visits, really obvious
| on new / fresh articles, bots that seem to be exploring for
| copyright claims, rando bots (maybe comment sentiment
| analysis for stock trading) etc.
|
| Google is much more welcome by comparison.
| fastball wrote:
| Right, but that's not Google's fault, that's explicitly
| everyone who does a shit job of crawling's fault.
|
| Generally I wouldn't qualify a lot of those as search
| engine web crawlers but more web scrapers looking to re-
| use data, not just surface it.
| Grimm1 wrote:
| Reddit, twitter, facebook are just three to start. There
| are plenty that disallow crawlers except google. We've
| crawled a significant amount now and just because you are
| unaware of them doesn't mean they don't exist. I can attest
| they're there.
|
| I'll also add plenty of sites don't block any engine but
| confer special privileges to google bot which depending on
| the site and their size are almost the same thing.
|
| Edit: And I'll add to limit confusion Reddit hides the
| sitemap and denies access there's is not an outright ban --
| it just makes it a lot harder.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Can't you just set your useragent to googlebot? Or
| something which _isn 't_ googlebot but which matches the
| most common regexes like "Not-Googlebot/2.1"
| Grimm1 wrote:
| A lot of sites do some variation of these when you set
| googlebot as your UA, certainly the larger more
| sophisticated sites do.
|
| https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80553?hl=en
|
| So unless you have a google domain your sol, it's also
| just generally frowned upon. We have our own UA WhizeBot
| with an email contact so you can let us know if our
| crawler is doing anything you'd rather it not.
|
| There have been a few legal cases that protect scraping
| publicly available information on the web but we'd rather
| follow robots.txt to avoid the potential for shenanigans
| in any case.
| m-p-3 wrote:
| The question is: does any of the competitors stand a chance
| against Google if they can't acquire more users and therefore
| improve their engine with the added revenue? Seems like a
| catch-22, and having Google as the default search engine
| everywhere, including in the web browser they make and that has
| the highest marketshare only exacerbate this.
| beezle wrote:
| Agree (responded in an earlier comment). If DOJ are going to
| look anywhere, it should be the advertising side of things and
| placement in search results (as opposed to sidebar ads). Even
| then, I'm not sure there is any case.
| smeeth wrote:
| I wish this anti-trust action was around their dumping of free
| services (mail, docs, calendar) and not search. But no, thanks to
| Reagan era hand-waving that monopoly power can only harm
| consumers and not companies we can't have nice things.
| ratww wrote:
| But the dumping of free services also did harm consumers. First
| it caused consumers to be left with a single choice, and then
| with none.
| CogentHedgehog wrote:
| Google definitely needs anti-trust scrutiny. The timing is
| suspicious though. Could political motivation be at play here?
|
| And why didn't Facebook get sued too? They're just as anti-
| competitive. Was there an implicit protection agreement reached
| at one of those private dinners Zuckerberg had at the White
| House?
|
| And what about Amazon? There's a whole laundry list of anti-
| competitive practices happening with their online sales and
| marketplace.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Trump's dislike of Jeff Bezos is well known. I doubt Amazon is
| getting any special favors from the White House. Given how
| blatant and extensive Amazon's scummy practices are, I've got
| to wonder if the feds and the state attorneys general are
| letting Amazon keep collecting more and more of the rope that
| will eventually be used the hang them with.
| glenstein wrote:
| >And why didn't Facebook get sued too? >And what about Amazon?
|
| I completely agree, and this has been my main headscratcher
| since we first heard about a possible anti-trust case.
|
| For starters, I still think things like banks, telecom, and
| probably oil, and defense industry companies probably need to
| be broken up, and that they should be much higher priorities.
| To say nothing of the obscure industries we wouldn't normally
| think of (Luxxotica with glasses) that are monopolized. There's
| probably others for obscure things I'm not even thinking of.
|
| And even within tech, I wouldn't even rank Google ahead of
| Amazon, and I'm not 100% that I would rank them ahead of
| Facebook either.
|
| And, if that's not all, I think Google at least serves as a
| check on the other Frightful Five, and subtracting Google will
| serve to further consolidate tech. And if that's not enough, I
| feel that the tech industry has served as a useful check
| against other entrenched industries. Their clash with cable,
| and occasional work to protect an open internet are a healthy
| counterbalance to voices of other monopolized industries.
| agustif wrote:
| Sports in USA have a lot of monopolies which affect it's
| captive users much greater than google/fb/amazon prob
|
| From MMA/WWE to Varsity/Gimnastics
| gamblor956 wrote:
| The NBA, MLB, NFL, and MLS have limited exemptions from
| antitrust law. The MLB has a _complete_ statutory exemption
| from antitrust law. (See
| https://sportslaw.uslegal.com/antitrust-and-labor-law-
| issues...) However, their monopoly status doesn't prevent
| competing leagues from forming; indeed the modern NBA and
| NFL are the results of the merger of smaller leagues. The
| MLS itself is the third iteration of professional soccer in
| the US, the first two having failed quite miserably, and
| multiple professional football leagues have launched and
| failed in just the past decade despite healthy ticket sales
| due to mismanaged spending.
|
| UFC is not a monopoly but does engage in anticompetitive
| behavior, including for example restricting its fighters
| from competing for other promotions, controlling the
| sponsorships they can receive, and even the sponsors they
| may promote in the ring. Their practices affect their
| fighters, but have no discernable effect on their audience.
| You can easily choose to watch one of the other promotions,
| like Bellator.
|
| WWE is the oldest and most successful wrestling promotion,
| but it has a dozen or so major competitors, and there are
| _hundreds_ of wrestling promotions at the local and
| regional levels.
|
| Gymnastics and the other Olympic sports don't have
| monopolies, why do you think they do? Track athletes
| compete in multiple professional events over the course of
| the year (most of which aren't televised in the US due to
| lack of audience but many of which are broadcast globally),
| and most olympic sports, gymnastics included, are not
| commercial draws outside of national championships and
| olympic qualifiers.
| agustif wrote:
| > Gymnastics and the other Olympic sports don't have
| monopolies, why do you think they do? Track athletes
| compete in multiple professional events over the course
| of the year (most of which aren't televised in the US due
| to lack of audience but many of which are broadcast
| globally), and most olympic sports, gymnastics included,
| are not commercial draws outside of national
| championships and olympic qualifiers.
|
| Gymnastics https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24769576
|
| As for I was thinking cheerleading but didn't got the
| words right.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24638896
|
| Also cant find it on hn algolia but the young runner and
| Nike Oregon Project came to mind.
| epc wrote:
| Monopolies are not illegal in the U.S.
|
| Leveraging your monopoly in one market to constrain business
| in another market is.
|
| Microsoft wasn't prosecuted because Windows was a monopoly,
| Microsoft was prosecuted because it leveraged that monopoly
| to block out other competitors (you could not buy a PC
| without a Windows license, even if you wanted to put another
| O/S on it).
|
| IBM wasn't investigated because it dominated mainframes, but
| because it leveraged that domination to control other
| markets.
|
| AT&T wasn't prosecuted for antitrust because of its monopoly
| on phone service in the US...the US government had
| effectively granted AT&T that monopoly in the first place. It
| was prosecuted and broken up because it leveraged that
| monopoly to box out competitors across multiple markets that
| intersected with the telephone system.
|
| Google's weak spots are not their monopolies in search nor
| ads. It's having leveraged those monopolies in the browser
| and mobile phone markets. If I had to guess, they will offer
| to separate ad spots on search results into a separate market
| place, offer to spin off Chrome and Android to foundations
| funded initially by Google but expected to stand on their own
| (ala Mozilla/Firefox) after some time period, offer to
| separate ad placement from ad serving, and generally
| rearrange the chairs and org chart with a series of consent
| decrees requiring regular reporting to Congress or the DOJ.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| fingers crossed it's that and not another stupid
| settlement!
| epc wrote:
| Settlements and consent decrees are not the worst thing
| in the world. IBM was never prosecuted but the fear
| induced by the 1970s antitrust investigation likely
| caused the series of missteps IBM made in the 1980s that
| allowed the personal computer industry to bloom (if there
| was no antitrust investigation, IBM would likely have
| written an operating system for PCs in-house, not call on
| Gary Kildall or Bill Gates).
|
| Big question mark in my mind is if there's hard evidence
| that Google employees required customers of one service
| (say, Cloud) to utilize another Google service (ads, G
| Suite/Workplace, etc.) in order to get a discount or some
| other preference. That's a slam dunk. My suspicion is
| that there'll be a lot of activities that hew extremely
| closely to that line without crossing it.
| nearbuy wrote:
| > Microsoft wasn't prosecuted because Windows was a
| monopoly, Microsoft was prosecuted because it leveraged
| that monopoly to block out other competitors (you could not
| buy a PC without a Windows license, even if you wanted to
| put another O/S on it).
|
| That's what the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit should have
| been primarily about. The central issue in the lawsuit was
| including IE with Windows. Now 20 years later, the idea
| that they shouldn't include a web browser with their OS
| just seems silly.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > banks, telecom, and probably oil, and defense industry
| companies
|
| None of these, with the possible exception of telecom, are
| monopolies or engaging in specific anti-competitive behavior.
| I agree that the pattern of consolidation there is bad, but I
| fail to see
|
| a. how this announcement precludes any other lawsuits against
| the companies you're mentioning b. why the fact that other
| industries also ought to be broken up has any bearing on
| whether Google has engaged in anti-competitive behavior?
| andreilys wrote:
| There's limited staffing and the government will only be
| able to put its best lawyers on some cases.
|
| Trying to bag multiple tech companies seems like a recipe
| for failure.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I don't see how this disagrees with my comment.
|
| > the government will only be able to put its best
| lawyers on some cases.
|
| Also, I think you really underestimate how many competent
| prosecutors the government has - they can handle more
| than one anti-trust case at a time.
| mfer wrote:
| An announcement on one does not mean announcements and cases
| aren't coming against the others.
|
| In the book, The Age Surveillance Capitalism, the case is
| made the Google is actually worse than FB but lesser known
| for many of the things people complain about.
|
| Google may be the easier monopoly case to go after given the
| Doubleclick merger, the way Chrome is used, etc.
| seattletech wrote:
| The vertical integration and domination in the eyeglasses
| space has been a blind spot for anti-trust regulators.
| trentnix wrote:
| I see what you did there. Have an upvote.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _The timing is suspicious though. Could political motivation be
| at play here?_
|
| A reasonable thought on the surface, but this has been pushed
| by many people on both sides of the aisle, including Elizabeth
| Warren.
| CogentHedgehog wrote:
| If lots of people see a clear pattern forming, doesn't that
| make it MORE credible rather than less?
| reaperducer wrote:
| If there was no conflicting evidence, then maybe. But if
| you read the newspaper, you know this has been in the works
| for a very long time, and again from both Republicans and
| Democrats.
| shakethemonkey wrote:
| AG Barr has been pushing to get this out before the
| election, over objections of his own attorneys:
|
| "He [Barr] pushed career Justice Department attorneys to
| bring the case by the end of September, prompting
| pushback from lawyers who wanted more time and complained
| of political influence."[1]
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/technology/google-
| antitru...
| reaperducer wrote:
| You are correct. But that doesn't mean all of the
| Democrats and other Republicans who have been pushing for
| this for years have suddenly vaporized from history.
| croon wrote:
| I think he's saying that many people on a bi-partisan basis
| has been pushing for this for a long time, which would make
| the timing less suspicious as it has been picking up steam
| for a long time.
|
| Ie lots of people pushing a change, not pushing a theory.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| The article actually called out the unusual rush to September
| though.
| yokto wrote:
| > And why didn't Facebook get sued too?
|
| "The rumor is that a suit against Facebook will soon follow"
| [1] said Matt Stoller in his latest BIG, a newsletter about the
| politics of monopoly and finance. It takes a lot of resources
| to file those suits, so don't expect them to be announced at
| exactly the same time.
|
| [1] https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/how-would-president-
| biden...
|
| PS: Since it contains quite a bit of interesting and relevant
| information about the cases against GAFA, I submitted this
| particular newsletter at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24837931
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I agree that the timing is weird, but the lack of action
| against Amazon actually weakens the argument that this is
| political in nature. Trump hates Bezos and has been threatening
| him for a while, so to leave his company out is noteworthy.
| djanogo wrote:
| It's not any more suspicious than announcing it 3 months
| earlier or 3 months later.
|
| There is no right "non-suspicious" timing for this type of
| scrutiny.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| And yet the article says:
|
| "Attorney General William P. Barr, who was appointed by Mr.
| Trump, has played an unusually active role in the
| investigation. He pushed career Justice Department attorneys
| to bring the case by the end of September, prompting pushback
| from lawyers who wanted more time and complained of political
| influence. Mr. Barr has spoken publicly about the inquiry for
| months and set tight deadlines for the prosecutors leading
| the effort."
| 013a wrote:
| Could there be political motivations in politics? I'd expect
| so.
|
| The issue with doing anything during an election is that people
| on the other side accuse the administration of suspicious
| timing. The issue with doing nothing during an election is that
| everyone accuses you of being a lame duck. This is, more or
| less, business as usual for the administration; they've been on
| Big Tech's ass for at least a year now, and finally something
| is coming of it.
|
| Every big tech company needs looked at, and potentially split
| up. And, maybe, they'll all get their turn. But resources are
| limited; when the US went to war with Germany, we didn't
| airdrop troops in Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Munich, and
| Frankfurt on the same day. Actually, we didn't even start with
| Germany. Starting with Google allows some legal precedent to be
| set on some of the very weird, novel antitrust issues the case
| is going to face, which will make future cases easier. I tend
| to think Amazon should have been the first, but Google is
| certainly up there, and probably (IMO) a more potentially
| harmful monopoly than Apple, Microsoft, or Facebook.
| csharptwdec19 wrote:
| You've got this right IMO.
|
| I'll agree that Amazon is Scarier. But I also think that
| Google's behavior is a lot easier to scrutinize/prove in
| court thanks to their actions in/around Android and Search
| abvdasker wrote:
| "Could political motivation be at play here?"
|
| It's wild to me that this is even a question. A lawsuit like
| this a couple weeks before the election from a DOJ which might
| not exist in 4 months is nakedly political. Why is anyone
| taking this seriously?
| matwood wrote:
| Announcing Google today does not preclude others from being
| announced later. Cases take time.
|
| Also, based on the story I saw the Google one is pretty
| straight forward. The deals they have made to force their
| search onto things like the iPhone (with Apple) and Android
| (with the carriers/manufacturers) is the issue.
| cloudwalking wrote:
| Honest question, what is anti-competitive about the iPhone
| deal?
| matwood wrote:
| I don't know, but that's what one of the articles I read
| said the government was looking into.
| testplzignore wrote:
| Yeah, I feel like the case against Google is easy. So many
| different ways to go after them.
|
| For Apple, Amazon, and Facebook, I think similar accusations
| can be made, but it's not as "shooting fish in a barrel" easy
| as Google.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Considering we haven't had effective anti-trust for some
| time... I agree I think focusing on one and seeing where
| the modern limits are is a better move than a shotgun to
| anyone you feel may have skirted a fair system.
| eplanit wrote:
| I think they're going to go after FB and Twitter (and YouTube?)
| with a Section 230 case/argument.
| paradox242 wrote:
| It's not unreasonable to question the motivation of this DOJ,
| nonetheless, that does not mean that there is nothing here,
| even if the green light was given for bad reasons. If we are
| seeing action on Google it could be that they have been
| preparing something for some time now and it was simply the
| case furthest along. I would agree that while Google is not
| entirely clean the behavior of Facebook and Amazon are much
| more egregious.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| How so?
|
| I mean, Amazon definitely has issues, but apart from some
| incredibly good acquisitions and sharp business practices, I
| don't see the anti-trust case against Facebook.
|
| Full disclosure: I own one share of FB.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Agreed. I think that FB is simultaneously one of the least
| liked tech companies among the general public, but also
| probably the one with the weakest anti-trust case against
| them.
|
| The rent-seeking by Google + Apple seems pretty clear to
| me.
| mrkramer wrote:
| They want to reverse Facebook's Instagram acquisition but
| Zuck is merging all backend infrastructure of Facebook
| and Instagram to make it harder for them.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Instagram had like 10mn users when they were acquired,
| and had literally _just_ launched an Android app (like
| the week before the acquisiton).
|
| It's incredibly successful because of the FB acquisition,
| so I'm not sure what the anti-trust concern is.
|
| Now, Whatsapp is a completely different matter, and that
| should probably never have been allowed to happen (and if
| Whatsapp had been popular in the US, I'm not sure that it
| would have been).
| [deleted]
| CydeWeys wrote:
| And don't forget the biggest gorilla of the bunch, Apple, with
| its locked down walled garden that it gets a 30% cut of.
|
| Maybe the next administration will give equal scrutiny to all
| of the big tech companies rather than seemingly targeting just
| one of them.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Apple is barely a monopoly, despite their horrible behaviour.
| Googles complete stranglehold of advertising is much more
| damaging.
|
| - Sent from my android
| iscrewyou wrote:
| That's not a monopoly. It's something to scrutinize but it's
| not a monopoly.
| grapevan wrote:
| It really depends on market definition to be honest. If one
| were to define a market for native app distribution
| services on iOS smartphones, then I think there is a real
| argument that Apple is a monopolist that is extracting
| monopoly rents.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| And there is a strong case for defining the market that
| way, because it represents a discrete set of customers.
| Approximately none of the people who use the iOS app
| store also use Google Play, because it doesn't work on
| their phones. Whereas if you say "the Walmart market for
| windshield wipers" that isn't a discrete set of
| customers, because the same people can walk across the
| street to Target and buy windshield wipers for the same
| car over there.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| How are customers discrete? I own both android and iOS
| devices.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| 99% of people don't, and even you have to use the store
| that corresponds to the device you want to use the app
| with.
|
| If one company actually had a monopoly on windshield
| wipers for cars and another had a monopoly on windshield
| wipers for trucks, that doesn't change just because there
| is somebody who has both a car and a truck. When you need
| windshield wipers for your car, there is still only one
| place you could get them.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Apple has a monopoly on iPhone software, and while it's
| true that users who dislike the App Store can switch to
| Android, there is an _enormous_ cost to switching phone
| ecosystems.
|
| If you don't like Comcast, you could move to an area with a
| different ISP, and there's a certain point where you
| probably _would_ move, if Comcast 's service became
| egregious enough. But I don't usually see this argument
| when people refer to Comcast as a monopoly, because it's
| understood that the switching cost is unreasonably high.
| MegaButts wrote:
| How is switching between Android and iOS remotely
| comparable to moving where you live?
|
| I've switched between iOS and Android before. What's the
| big deal?
| [deleted]
| mythz wrote:
| > Apple has a monopoly on iPhone software
|
| Monopoly's are whether or not a product or service
| dominates a specific sector, industry or market. A
| company can't have a monopoly over its own products which
| by definition would cover most product/service companies.
|
| Given iOS market share is about ~25% of the Mobile OS
| Market, it currently doesn't qualify as a Monopoly
| although it's currently under EU investigation & Epic
| lawsuit which may rule differently.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| But isn't iOS _software_ a specific market? iOS might be
| an Apple product, but "iOS software" is made primarily
| by third parties. That software is exclusively _sold by_
| Apple, but that 's exactly what I find anti-competitive!
|
| Separately, it's worth noting that iOS has ~60% market
| share in the United States[1]. It's lower globally, as
| you pointed out, but I'd argue domestic market-share
| should be what matters in US-based suits.
|
| 1: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-
| share/mobile/united-sta...
| mythz wrote:
| > But isn't iOS software a specific market?
|
| No it's just a software platform that's open to 3rd
| parties to develop for, just like Android, Windows,
| macOS, Linux, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, Smart TV's,
| Speakers, Watches, embedded platforms, etc. you could go
| as far and say that Cloud Providers or even Game Engines
| are software platforms.
|
| But a single platform doesn't define a market, the
| prominent market iOS is in would be smart mobile OS's of
| which Android is apart of. Its 60% US Market share could
| be a determining factor in the US although they do have a
| clear unobstructed competitor in Android - time will tell
| as rulings from current investigations & trials get
| handed down. Of course it's not illegal to have a
| monopoly, only if its dominant Monopoly power position is
| abused for anti-competitive purposes, typically for
| creating a monopoly in a different market, but there are
| a few other abuses.
| treis wrote:
| In every thread someone makes a comment like this. As
| though a duopoly is somehow meaningfully different than a
| monopoly.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| And it doesn't even address anything I actually said.
| It's a deflection at best. The spectrum of corporate
| misbehavior that needs to be regulated is much broader
| than "singular monopoly".
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Good point.
|
| Cable companies and cell companies should be hoisted up
| next.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Cable (or a wire that transmits data) and mobile internet
| should be a utility. It makes no sense for multiple
| fibers to be run to a single home for the sake of
| competition, nor does it make sense to operate multiple
| cell towers transmitting the same data, just like it
| doesn't make sense to run multiple pipes for water and
| electrical lines for the sake of competition.
| foxtr0t wrote:
| Antitrust enforcers care about anticompetitive behavior not
| monopolies. They certainly should care about rent seeking
| behavior that Apple is engaged in.
|
| Saying something is or is not a monopoly is distracting
| from what actually matters. It's deflecting.
| jhawk28 wrote:
| Anticompetitive behavior only matters when it is a
| monopoly.
| foxtr0t wrote:
| This is a patently false statement from first principles.
| Anticompetitive behavior to keep a monopoly is illegal,
| but that is not the only case. Cartels, predatory
| pricing, and price fixing are all illegal with or without
| monopolies and are all considered anticompetitive
| practices.
| CPLX wrote:
| This is a common misconception but is not correct.
|
| Anti-competitive behavior can be illegal all by itself.
| Price fixing is one obvious example but there are plenty
| of others.
| jmisavage wrote:
| Correct Apple and several book publishers got in trouble
| for doing just that years ago in the fight against
| Amazon.
| tzs wrote:
| In addition to most violations of antitrust law being
| from companies that do not have monopolies, it goes the
| other way too. You can have an actual monopoly without
| violating antitrust law.
|
| If you got the monopoly without doing anti-competitive
| behavior, such as by simple having a better product or by
| getting lucky and having competitors that all made stupid
| mistakes that sunk them, your monopoly may be legal.
| CogentHedgehog wrote:
| Apple's app store policies are probably going to be forced to
| change, yeah. But that's an easier change than the other
| ones.
|
| Apple is not in a situation where they need to be broken up
| to ensure a free market like Facebook, Amazon, and perhaps
| Google are.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Realistically I don't see forced break-ups being in the
| cards here. That hasn't happened since, what, AT&T, decades
| ago? My guess would be it's all consent decrees -- what
| they hit Microsoft with, and what they could hit
| Apple/Google/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft with now.
| toyg wrote:
| Dunno about the US, but in Europe several companies in
| the last few decades have been forced to divest some part
| of their operations because of antitrust activity,
| typically (but not limited to) at merger time. Banks and
| telecom providers, for example, have seen quite a bit of
| movement in the Uk. It's just that they don't make
| massive headlines.
| amelius wrote:
| Unless they gobble up the entire supply chain.
| matwood wrote:
| Some people online like to complain about Apple, but they are
| probably the _least_ concerning of the bunch. Android is a
| viable alternative, and 30% from app stores is the norm right
| now.
|
| FB is being used by foreign powers to shape US elections, and
| you think Apple is the biggest problem here?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| 30% from app stores is the norm for app stores that have
| market power in their respective markets, but all that
| tells you is that's the amount of the monopoly rent.
| Compare this to the Microsoft store, where the store itself
| doesn't have market power, and then they _don 't_ take 30%:
|
| https://9to5mac.com/2019/03/06/microsoft-store-revenue-
| share...
|
| But still 30% for XBOX/games where they once again have
| market power in that market.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| Facebook is a viable alterative to Google from an
| advertising perspective. This action is taking place
| despite there being far more competition in search and
| advertising than there is about the abuse of code signing
| permissions by Apple.
|
| Antitrust action has never required the lack of an
| alternative.
|
| > FB is being used by foreign powers to shape US elections,
| and you think Apple is the biggest problem here?
|
| Apple is being used to attack democracy campaigners in Hong
| Kong, mainland China and Belarus, and has a long history of
| attacking sexual minorities and sex education efforts.
|
| Yes, Apple is 100% the biggest problem here.
| nafey wrote:
| Would you make the same argument for PS/XBox/Salesforce
| marketplaces? They have similar restrictions.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Yes, but they're of lower priority. Gaming has increasingly
| moved away from the PC (the only truly open/competitive
| platform) towards the walled gardens of consoles and mobile
| devices. This has a censorious effect in what's actually
| allowed to be released, the big platforms get to do a lot
| of rent-seeking, and crucially, games are increasingly
| going digital, which eliminates a consumer's right to
| resale and loan games to their friends. The gaming
| marketplace would be a lot more competitive and interesting
| without gatekeeping. About the only downside you'd see is
| that the up-front cost for some consoles would need to be
| higher, because selling them as a loss-leader and making
| the money up in back-end licensing fees would no longer be
| allowable.
|
| I would love to see some sort of regulated 10% rake cap on
| digital marketplaces (both mobile and gaming) and ticket
| sales. Note that this would apply only to games being
| distributed through the platform owner's marketplace, and
| that consumers would be allowed to install by right
| software from other sources as well.
| prichino wrote:
| Of course there's politics involved. Who do you think Google's
| owners would prefer to win? Just yesterday came out an expose
| of how Google skews searches of political terms for each party
| in the US.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| > Could political motivation be at play here
|
| That's usually how this stuff works.
|
| > And why didn't Facebook get sued too
|
| You can't make one case against multiple companies, and
| resources are finite. It will take many years for each of these
| cases to play out.
| pydry wrote:
| I remember with Microsoft the antitrust lawsuit got dropped
| as soon as Bush entered office.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if a Biden administration drops this
| too.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| My largest issue with the Obama administration was their
| incredibly corrupt and cozy relationship with Google. It's
| one of the reasons I was really hoping nearly anyone else
| would win the primary.
|
| So yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if Biden drops it, but
| only because he was likely part of the problem to begin
| with. Google wouldn't be the problem it is today if the
| Obama/Biden administration was doing their job.
|
| (Still voting for him, mind you. It's not like we have
| better options.)
| dataminer wrote:
| Can you reference some reading material about the corrupt
| relationship you mentioned, interested to learn more
| about what happened and how.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I recommend, generally, people do their own research,
| it's not a difficult or obscure truth to locate. Here's
| one article though:
| https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-
| close...
|
| But basically, a massive number of Google employees were
| installed in high-level positions of the Obama
| administration, and a lot of Obama administration folks
| got great jobs at Google. Obama installed a professor who
| wrote studies about how Google shouldn't face antitrust
| scrutiny (who was paid by Google to do so) as the FTC
| Commissioner (Joshua Wright, who is now a lawyer at
| Google's preferred law firm... he went from Google shill
| to government official and now back to Google work), and
| an FTC case against Google where staffers recommended
| litigation inexplicably got shoved under the rug.
|
| Then you'd see things like a former Googler in Obama's
| administration announce an initiative to budget billions
| of taxpayer dollars to buy computers for
| schoolchildren... unshockingly, these were intended to be
| Chromebooks, which get kids started early as Google
| account holders. (I believe Congress ended up rejecting
| this particular budgetary line item, or reducing it
| significantly.)
| sushicalculus wrote:
| The DOJ under Obama also looked into antitrust suit of a
| google seven years ago but decided not to act
| nr2x wrote:
| Not sure the downvotes, this is 100% accurate.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| This sort of topic gets a _lot_ of people going on both
| sides of the matter, and people get very loyal to their
| camps. Accuracy often has nothing to do with how people
| vote on these things. We 've got an intersection of
| partisan US politics and Google here, it's voting catnip.
|
| (Bear in mind, my post both speaks ill of Obama, who
| might as well be Jesus to the Democratic Party, and also
| made it clear I'm voting against Trump. So I ingratiate
| myself with very few politically in the parent comment.)
| nr2x wrote:
| I would be _incredibly_ surprised, Harris was advised by
| Jonathan Mayer on privacy issues, the Democratic House just
| released a scathing report on tech monopolies, and Biden
| knows he still needs support from the Sanders /Warren crowd
| who are salivating at the prospect of breaking up Big Tech.
| Facebook's shameless support of the Trump admin may
| likewise be viewed as one of many of Zuck's poorly thought
| out moves. Unlike Obama, who credited Facebook/Google with
| his 2008 victory, and opened a revolving door between
| Google/White House, the appearance of that would be
| absolutely toxic in the present climate.
| nr2x wrote:
| FTC/DOJ/FCC have different, and sometimes complementary,
| powers. DOJ is taking lead on Google right now, but don't
| forget FTC just fined Facebook $5B. DOJ may be at the
| forefront of this particular action because of Trump's
| grievances, but there's no reason to think Biden wouldn't go
| even harder, especially if we get Pai out of the FTC (praise
| be the day). GDPR has been a total wash, it will be funny to
| see the Americans actually do a better job with a far more
| constricted legal toolkit.
| z3ncyberpunk wrote:
| Years... All whole the corporations further entrench their
| power and positions.
| r721 wrote:
| >DOJ's antitrust suit against Google has been filed in federal
| court in DC, here's the complaint:
|
| https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/7273457/10-20-20-...
|
| https://twitter.com/ZoeTillman/status/1318560860680425474
|
| UPD
|
| https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-monop...
| treis wrote:
| I'm dumbfounded. Of all the things in the tech world they chose
| Google paying Apple, Samsung, et.al. to be the default search
| engine to sue over. That's not really evidence of Google
| blocking competition. That's evidence of phone manufacturers
| using their power in one market (phone sales) to extract cash
| out of another (search/ads).
| cblconfederate wrote:
| > that's evidence of phone manufacturers using their power in
| one market (phone sales) to extract cash out of another
| (search/ads).
|
| That's an example of how competition is _supposed_ to work.
| Phone makers sell their audience to the highest bidder. There
| 's no shortage of phone makers. The issue is that google
| bought them all.
| jariel wrote:
| Yes, exactly.
|
| The 'anti trust' in this situation would be Google using
| it's own dominance over Chrome and Android to 'unfairly'
| promote it's own products.
|
| The most unhealthy thing in these systems is the 'value
| chain creep' that allows monopoly in one area, to be
| leveraged into other areas.
|
| Imagine if you owned all the real estate in the state and
| you had a cracker factory. Hey, just charge your cracker-
| making competitors 2x the rent. Nobody can make crackers
| but you.
|
| Or you own all the railways and charge your Oil pumping
| competitors more to transport Oil - you have an Oil
| monopoly.
|
| Chrome is not a 'money losing product' - it's absolutely
| one of the most important products in Google's portfolio -
| the surpluses are yielded elsewhere, in Search. Arguably
| same for Android.
|
| If there were an 'anti trust' case it would be to separate
| Search/Chrome/Android/Cloud in the similar vein that
| Microsoft would ostensibly be separated from any app
| software.
|
| Amazon uses AWS surpluses to 'dump' on commercial
| distribution which is another weird one.
|
| _If_ there is a case to concern over monopoly, it 's
| those.
| visarga wrote:
| You could split Google in Search/Chrome/Android/Cloud,
| and that would help in reducing they monopoly, but if
| there is one thing I could change it would be to decouple
| ranking, filtering and targeting from the rest, and open
| them up.
|
| There should be multiple rankers on top of the index,
| users should be able to choose and create new rankers.
| Same for filtering - what gets hidden/censured, put the
| power back to the users, let them select their filter
| lists. Instead of one true ranking and filtering, let
| users customise it as they like.
| jariel wrote:
| That's a neat idea, and it might help - but it's not the
| kind of problem governments would chose to solve.
|
| Or put another way, governments would chose to intervene
| by helping to create more 'competition' - which creates
| product variations approximating true market needs - as
| opposed to trying to 'legislate features'. 'Feature lists
| today' but something else tommorow. If the market is
| healthy, it will move in the direction of value, is the
| idea.
|
| Governments can also help by promoting and supporting
| standards.
| sarah180 wrote:
| Spidering and building an index is relatively easy. It's
| not the barrier to creating a search engine, and I don't
| think you'd find that Microsoft's index is materially
| smaller than Google's. The hard part is figuring out how
| to turn that content into relevant results.
| Grimm1 wrote:
| Only 2 companies in the US have an independent English
| based index with the contents of the entire web. Granted,
| the sheer volume of data is a barrier to making the index
| but removing that, only 4 US companies have crawled the
| entire internet. I'm going to have to disagree with you
| on that one. To write a crawler capable of the scale and
| timeliness to crawl the entire web in a week or two
| requires some pretty solid engineering. I don't however
| disagree that building a good search is also difficult.
| criddell wrote:
| I always thought YouTube should be the first thing that
| is split from Google.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The issue is the near zero marginal cost of software makes
| it easy to dominate entire lines business. Technology
| itself allows businesses to become huge because once they
| have a solution, they can implement it at near zero cost
| everywhere and so competitors can't really compete. Like
| Walmart/target/Costco versus little Main Street stores, or
| Home Depot/Lowe's versus independent hardware stores, etc.
|
| Smaller operators will have high marginal costs and higher
| prices, and will never be able to compete with bigger
| operations that can utilize software and other technology
| to offer the absolute lowest prices.
|
| Although, in other businesses like retail, this results in
| single digit profit margins at best, whereas in software,
| due to the minimal labor needed and protections of
| copyright and obfuscation and network effects, the tech
| companies can maintain much bigger profit margins.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Yeah indeed the margins are high. In the case of
| google/FB, they are so high, that paying back users with
| "free services" doesn't cut it anymore. Even the cost of
| running those free services has gone way down. At this
| point users shouldbe _getting paid_ for having their data
| used. That way, a potential competitor could outright buy
| the users directly (instead of paying FB /Google for
| advertising to acquire users). Unfortunately there's no
| legal framework for that yet.
|
| No other industry except perhaps finance has the
| potential to cheaply scale as IT. I wonder what
| antimonopoly actions have been in finance in the past
| (finance seems to have been a lot more regulated since
| forever)
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Bing does pay users to use its search. Though the pay out
| is quite modest at about $1.50 a month, in gift cards.
| treis wrote:
| That's actually the opposite of how it's supposed to work.
| You're not supposed to be able to use your dominance in one
| market (cell phone manufacturing) to unfairly compete in
| another (search).
| cblconfederate wrote:
| what dominance?
| srtjstjsj wrote:
| Exclusive control on the one phone each user has.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| that's kind of ridiculous, there is no dominant phone
| maker. Also a lot of ppl have multiple phones/tablets
| treis wrote:
| Samsung and Apple control 75% of the market in the US.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Apple 40%, samsung 25% , LG 10% in the US
|
| Apple 25%, Samsung 34%, Huawei 17%, Xiaomi 10% in Europe
|
| Sounds pretty fine for a market with healthy competition.
|
| Really hard to call any of them a monopoly.
|
| Google(r) has 94+% of mobile search in both US and EU!
| romanoderoma wrote:
| > Apple 25%, Samsung 34%, Huawei 17%, Xiaomi 10% in
| Europe
|
| Apple gets 11 billions/year to use Google as the default
| search engine
|
| The remaining 61% (Samsung+Huawei+Xiaomi) is Android that
| means Google
|
| Xiaomi defaults to Baidu in China, for example, but
| everywhere else, where the CPC has no direct control over
| the wires, they use Google because Google money is good
| even in China
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| >>> that's evidence of phone manufacturers using their
| power in one market (phone sales) to extract cash out of
| another (search/ads).
|
| >> That's an example of how competition is _supposed_ to
| work. Phone makers sell their audience to the highest
| bidder.
|
| > That's actually the opposite of how it's supposed to
| work. You're not supposed to be able to use your
| dominance in one market (cell phone manufacturing) to
| unfairly compete in another (search).
|
| If you read the comment in question, there is no
| suggestion that the cell phone manufacturers are
| competing in the search market. They're taxing it, or
| selling to it.
|
| So.... what are you trying to say?
| mhh__ wrote:
| Given this AG's track record can we really hold on good-faith
| that this isn't politically motivated? Many conservatives are
| absolutely desperate to believe there is a conspiracy against
| them, but why go to lengths of proving it if you can just
| exact revenge through AT legislation.
| ballenf wrote:
| Regardless, it feels like a very shrewd approach: very narrow
| and also the keystone holding up Google's monopolies in other
| areas. Not all other areas, but a lot of them.
|
| Prohibiting pay-for-placement can be enforced by accountants
| and lawyers without help from engineers. Would be
| theoretically much easier to enforce than any other area of
| scrutiny I've heard discussed.
|
| This would also kill Firefox if it's applied beyond mobile.
| Tyr42 wrote:
| So by doing this, they will help Chrome form a monopoly?
| microtherion wrote:
| Arguably, Google paying such sums is evidence that there IS
| competition in the search engine space. Otherwise, Google
| could just say "You know where to find Lycos or AltaVista if
| you prefer them".
| cblconfederate wrote:
| google having so little competition means that phone
| companies are making a lot less than they would in a
| healthy market. There's nothing to compare to
| username90 wrote:
| Google pay such sums since otherwise the other search
| engines would pay billions to be the default search engine.
| And if we make such transactions illegal Apple will make
| their own search engine and make that the default since
| there is too much money left on the table otherwise.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > That's not really evidence of Google blocking competition.
| That's evidence of phone manufacturers using their power in
| one market (phone sales) to extract cash out of another
| (search/ads).
|
| No, I think it is a pretty clear example of rent-seeking on
| Google's behalf.
|
| > phone manufacturers using their power in one market
|
| Who has more market power - the disparate group of phone
| vendors who are legally barred from coordinating on things
| like this or the single actor that controls the only
| operating system package tenable for those phone vendors to
| use?
| magicalist wrote:
| > _No, I think it is a pretty clear example of rent-seeking
| on Google 's behalf._
|
| If anything, rent-seeking would be the other way, but
| that's still a big stretch.
|
| The phone manufacturers know that searches are valuable to
| search engines, so they charge for it even though they're
| not doing anything but being a broker for their users. But
| while that is getting a cut (literally seeking rent),
| calling it "rent seeking" is a stretch, because clearly
| that brokering and OS space is naturally valuable and the
| phone companies aren't just injecting themselves into
| someone else's money-making process.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| The rent seeking is on the other end.
|
| Google pays off phone manufacturers to sign onerous
| contract preventing them from installing other app stores
| or displaying other options on the home screen or during
| the setup process -> They then collect rent from the
| companies that have to offer their apps on the Play
| Store.
|
| From wikipedia, "An example of rent-seeking in a modern
| economy is spending money on lobbying for government
| subsidies in order to be given wealth that has already
| been created." In this instance, the phone vendors are
| the politicians.
| magicalist wrote:
| >> _Of all the things in the tech world they chose Google
| paying Apple, Samsung, et.al. to be the default search
| engine to sue over. That 's not really evidence of Google
| blocking competition. That's evidence of phone
| manufacturers using their power in one market (phone
| sales) to extract cash out of another (search/ads)._
|
| > _No, I think it is a pretty clear example of rent-
| seeking on Google 's behalf._
|
| Not sure what conversation you're having in the above
| comment, but this is the one that I was responding to :)
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Google engages in anti-competitive behavior (ie. using
| their capital to increase the entry barriers for other
| app store markets on Android), so that they can then
| collect rent on their app store (among other things, like
| search/advertising).
|
| The anti-competitive actions (paying off phone vendors)
| that Google takes are part of that rent-seeking behavior,
| just as companies that lobby politicians to increase
| barriers to entry so they can raise prices are engaging
| in rent-seeking.
|
| If you want to nit-pick and say the play store pricing is
| the rent-seeking and the paying off of the phone vendors
| is the anti-competitive behavior, I wouldn't have a huge
| quibble with that.
| magicalist wrote:
| It's not nit picking to say you're giving non sequiturs
| to the comments you were responding to.
|
| > _Google engages in anti-competitive behavior (ie. using
| their capital to increase the entry barriers for other
| app store markets on Android), so that they can then
| collect rent on their app store (among other things, like
| search /advertising)._
|
| There is an argument that could be made that companies
| taking a 30% cut of app store revenue is rent seeking,
| but it makes no sense to say that Google is paying Apple
| per-user search acquisition fees in iOS Safari so that
| Google can then turn around and collect fees in the iOS
| App Store (because obviously that's not a thing).
| whimsicalism wrote:
| You're absolutely correct, I misread the original comment
| and doubled-down rather than double-checking, which is my
| fault. I was thrown off by the reference to the "OS
| space" in your comment.
|
| I still think what I'm saying is true, but agree that it
| is not quite the same issue.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| It seems like you're both right and we're just looking
| for the right words... there are anti-competitive as well
| as rent-seeking behaviors, would the combination of those
| be racketeering?
| jariel wrote:
| This is definitely not a good example of 'rent seeking'.
|
| 'Rent seeking' is real-estate.
|
| You buy a property, you seek 'rent' for the rights to
| access it.
|
| It's that simple.
|
| It's considered different than other economic activity
| because it's not productive in nature.
|
| Edit:
|
| 1) From Investoopedia: "Economic rent is the income
| earned from utilization of resource ownership. Entities
| that own resources can lend them to earn interest rents,
| lease them to earn rental income, or they may utilize
| their resources in other income-producing ways."
|
| 2) Here is Carl Marx agreeing with literally Adam Smith
| "Adam Smith correctly defines rent as "the price paid for
| the use of land" ([O.U.P., Vol. I, p. 162; Garnier,] t,
| I, p. 299) - in 'Theories of Surplus Value'.
|
| Renting out a plot of land is the easiest, simplest, most
| obvious example of rent-seeking.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| In what configuration of rent-seeking is the sued party the
| one paying the rent?
| treis wrote:
| >Who has more market power
|
| The ones getting paid tens billions of dollars annually
| seems like the obvious answer to me.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > The ones getting paid tens billions of dollars annually
| seems like the obvious answer to me.
|
| So what, the seller on any side of a transaction is the
| one who has the market power?
|
| To make it simpler: if there was one employer in the
| entirety of Earth and 7 billion people who wanted a job -
| since the employer is paying the employee, the employee
| would have the market power?
| treis wrote:
| To make you analogy more accurate, this single employer
| would be paying the employees not to work for anyone
| else. And in that case, yes, the employees would be the
| ones that have the power since they are getting money for
| nothing.
| stale2002 wrote:
| Do you know what a monopsony?
|
| Not a monopoly. A monopsony.
|
| Anti trust law prohibits both monopolies and monopsonys
| from engaging in anti competitive behavior.
|
| You are trying to claim that monopsonys engaging in anti-
| competitive behavior are not illegal, when they are.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| What you are describing is a monopsony, they are illegal,
| and the employer is considered to have the most power in
| that relation because the employees are atomized.
| [deleted]
| arrosenberg wrote:
| It's not for nothing though - the employer is buying
| their productive capacity. The fact that the employer
| chooses to do nothing with it is entirely irrelevant.
|
| Same issue with Google - by using their market power to
| monopolize search power across devices and OSes, they are
| effectively locking out any other potential entrants.
| That this is being done to enhance a completely different
| line of business (ads) is classic anti-competitive
| behavior.
| xapata wrote:
| Microsoft argued it wasn't using monopoly power, because
| Windows was priced lower than the profit-maximizing price
| a monopoly would use. The Justice Department argued that
| was evidence of anti-competitive behavior: Microsoft
| chose to deter competition with an unnaturally low price.
|
| Perhaps the argument is that Google is overpaying, and
| that's anti-competitive.
| jariel wrote:
| "I think it is a pretty clear example of rent-seeking on
| Google's behalf."
|
| It's literally the opposite: rent-seeking on the behalf of
| Samsung, Apple - moreover, 'rent-seeking' is not remotely
| illegal.
| mullingitover wrote:
| Google doesn't control the OS, just the services that go
| with it.
| sova wrote:
| There is no way to uninstall Chrome from Android, the
| best one can do is disable it. Smells like MSFT and IE
| back in the day. Which lead to what will probably be very
| similar hearings and results.
| mullingitover wrote:
| There's an extremely easy way to uninstall Chrome from
| Android, which is to never install it in the first place.
| You do that by using the Android open source project.
|
| There are a bunch of Android forks in the wild[1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_custom_Android_
| distrib...
| sova wrote:
| Nice, just root the phone, awesome and straightforward ?
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >There are a bunch of Android forks in the wild[1].
|
| That's absolutely correct. And some of those forks are
| significantly better than the Android OEM offerings by
| the phone manufacturers.
|
| _However_ , that's orthogonal to GP's point. Only a very
| small percentage[0] of Android users would even
| _consider_ flashing custom roms, and even fewer would
| have the knowledge or confidence to do so.
|
| As such, the impact of custom roms/no chrome is most
| likely rounding error for Google.
|
| I'd point out that I've used custom roms quite a bit,
| initially because (as usual) my phone vendor stopped
| providing updates after a year and after that because
| custom roms are often better than stock roms.
|
| But I'm not your typical user, as I'm technical and it
| really pisses me off that vendors use the lack of support
| to pressure folks to buy new phones.
|
| [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19943324/how-
| many-users-... (an old link, but it's not likely that
| much has changed to increase the number of folks using
| custom roms -- quite likely the opposite)
| whimsicalism wrote:
| You're right - I spoke loosely. I still believe my
| comments apply if you consider the larger bundle that
| Google is offering and the terms that come with it, plus
| the fact that they are leveraging their capital to block
| competitor app stores from even appearing on the home
| screen or being installed.
| mullingitover wrote:
| > ...they are leveraging their capital to block
| competitor app stores from even appearing on the home
| screen or being installed.
|
| If Google weren't paying manufacturers to not install
| other app stores, other app stores would be paying
| manufacturers to install them, which could result in a
| user experience that Google doesn't control but which
| users would blame Google for ("Android is slow/buggy!"
| when in fact it's third party software that is causing
| the performance issues). Their deals are arguably
| defensible since they don't block third party app stores
| entirely, just pre-installed ones.
|
| I certainly see the issues with Google parlaying their
| dominance in the ad market to also dominate the mobile
| market, but I have a feeling this will be settled with
| some consent decrees to put up some guardrails in the ad
| market. The actual harm to consumers from Google's
| business model is pretty vague and is passed on through
| marketing expenses that trickle down into product/service
| prices. If Google disappeared, ads would still cost money
| and advertising expenses likely wouldn't be drastically
| lower.
| Aaronn wrote:
| Another place to get all of the documents in this case is
| https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18552824/united-states-...
|
| Any time someone buys a document from PACER and has the RECAP
| extension https://free.law/recap/ installed in their browser it
| is uploaded so everyone can view it for free on the Court
| Listener website.
| op03 wrote:
| This should be done in collaboration with all other countries who
| are claiming the same thing.
|
| Global monopolists have to be handled globally.
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