Thank God! It's time to control this unethical and ruthless internet-suppressing evil corporation. Google took over the internet and it thinks it is theirs. Google took over the search. Google took over advertising, a real currency of the internet. And they believe that this currency belongs to them. Google hampers creation and creators on the internet. Google is a world wide surveillance machine. Google controls too much. It's time to break this evil behemoth.
And now let's listen to the Google fans and apologists about how everything is just one click away...
I have news for you, most corporations are unethical because they are not people they do not care for ethics they are literally money making machines and Google is great at making money.
I'm not a Google fan and welcome this investigation but you need perspective.
If true, this will be a landmark case and should scare FB and Amazon as well. Personally, I think this is a good thing and it's past time for the government to at least set some boundaries, but there's no telling how it will play out with the current administration and amount of lobbying dollars flying around.
Considering how the current administration has - or at least feels it has - been treated by social media companies, I’d give good odds that the administration is the impetus behind the investigation.
Why would this have any relevance to FB and Amazon? I realize a lot of people on HN don't like what these companies are doing with their data, but this lawsuit is not about privacy at all so I don't see how it relates to those 2 companies.
Ant-competitive practices? Facebook buying up any and all rivals like WhatsApp and Instagram? They are a juggernaut and shouldn’t be able to own all social media.
Buying a competitor is no more anticompetitive than causing a competitor to shut down because they weren’t competitive enough.
What is supposed to happen to competitors that are actually less efficient and/or produce less appealing products? Do people really expect “competition” to mean a perpetual exact tie between two or more competitors?
> Buying a competitor is no more anticompetitive than causing a competitor to shut down because they weren’t competitive enough.
Well first off, predatory pricing is a thing, where competition shuts down because a market participant is deliberately losing money to gain market share in hopes of raising prices after everyone else gives up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing#United_State...
But a competitor doesn't have to shut down to be bought out. In fact, why would a company ever buy a competitor who's only alternative is shutting down? Seems far simpler to buy the useful assets from the bankruptcy. Here's one possibility I've seen: an inefficient incumbent buys a startup that has been winning procurement bids away from them lately. They have deep pockets from all the contracts not yet up for renewal, and can afford to buy the company now while they only have a few source of cash flow. End result is that prices remain high, and the borg lives on a little bit less cash flow until the contracts they just bought are up for renegotiation.
> What is supposed to happen to competitors that are actually less efficient and/or produce less appealing products?
They sell less, and make changes. Maybe they drop prices, invest in efficiency or pursue some differentiation strategy. It doesn't need to be a 50/50 but winner-take-all markets should not be surprised when regulators come knocking.
There are market concentration regulations. The SEC typically applies a formula to determine if an acquisition results in a single entity owning too much of the market, in which case it would not be approved.
I don't know if this has been considered for these companies, but I suspect it may have been bypassed. At the very least, that's what an investigation would determine.
YouTube, Pinterest, Snapchat, Linkedin, Reddit, Twitch are all major social networks and there are scores of smaller ones. In search it is basically just Google and Bing.
Amazon is not a "trust" in the strictest historical definition, but it's a amoral and terrifying company with incredible reach that frequently can and does snuff any chance any competitor has of using anything else.
If Google is bad for using AMP to try and drive publishers to AMP hosting, then how is Amazon not even worse for ramming crazy terms down publisher's throats while buying or undercutting every other shipping and shopping system in the country? Amazon's pretty much dismantled and eaten the entire American book industry, it's in mid gulp of the American consumer shipping industry, it's already business critical via AWS for a majority of American businesses, and now it's turning to selling "AI" products to government and law enforcement.
As for Facebook, I think maybe Facebook isn't a monopoly. But they shouldn't be allowed to buy Youtube or Twitter.
Amazon is using it's profits from AWS to 'dump' on other, low margin businesses.
The most recent FT Alphachat podcast with an official from the Fed talks about Uber this way: Uber (and Lyft) are taking money from somewhere and undercutting the classical taxi business. This is a problem for competition. They could feasibly try to run losses until 'regular cabs are pushed out' (or largely) and then lock up the business.
Amazon can do this with any number of products, they can do it to shipping companies, to grocers.
More abstractly, Google does it with mobile OS, possibly browsers etc..
In our new world of globalization, it's a serious problem.
All this money from Saudi Arabia, under the control of Softbank is coming back and just throwing markets upside down in what is arguably tantamount to 'dumping' which is a bad business practice generally.
Even we work is like this - it's losing tons of money, ultimately selling stuff below market value.
In some cases it's much more clear than others, but it's going to pose a problem.
This issue very well highlights the problematic idea that business is about 'better products and service' or even 'free markets' due to the fact that so much cash provides leverage that distorts markets quite heavily.
Maybe yelp had to resort to these monetizing tactics because their results were buried by google promoting their own business-ratings copy-cat service?
This WSJ story has details about the FTC recommendation to sue Google (overruled by the commissioners at the time). They accidentally sent the WSJ every other page in a botched FOIA request.
This is just speculation, but I read somewhere recently that alleged that Youtube wasn't the gift to the world it appears to be. While I love Youtube for the most part (Free, High Quality), it is strange that we haven't seen much competition. Maybe it's a loss leader for Google and nobody else can afford the expense, or maybe they're doing something shady to make sure nobody else can afford to compete.
Just one point, but I know that we submitted a complaint to the DOJ about Google’s sudden maps and street view API pricing changes. Their “free until there’s no competition, then we take all of your money” business model fits in the antitrust regulations. We’re hoping they include that.
At least in my opinion, no. Many reasons but the underlying ones that make me not want to interview with or work for, Google are the same as for Microsoft. I can't trust them. I can already hear the argument, 'who can you trust'. That's subjective depending on your criteria. For me, I won't work for a company I do not trust to keep their promises, be it to the community or its employees.
I wonder how severe the backlash is going to be, not just for Google but all the tech giants. Our anti-trust laws were mostly written around monopolies abusing pricing power to rip off consumers, but with the intersection of data and hosting and analytics and everything else the potential to abuse people is far greater than just raising prices. And they have expanded their ability to profile and experiment on individuals worldwide, regardless of whether you create a Google account.
If he or she worked for Google why did they not bother exposing them when he got out. They could do it anonymously through a media outlet in the UK like the Guardian.
I mean I would guess it's pretty much yeah we have everything you have ever typed into Android, almost every site you have visited, a detailed dossier of your porn habits, all your Google Home conversations... All your e-mails. List of your friends. Your driving habits. And we've been pretty much trying to kill all our competition pretending like there are bugs in our software when often it's been intentional... oh and we've been sharing everything with the government so it's been looking the other way.
That is not a likely scenario. There are so many ways through which purposeful anti-competitive behavior masked as accident would get exposed for what it is that it wouldn't work in practice (just look at how many internal posts got leaked around Demore).
As a Googler, that's a sentiment I have never heard expressed, nor have I felt anything even remotely like it myself. My guess would be that most people would feel a lot better about the company if they could see how the sausage gets made. At least, judging by the reactions of my family members when they ask me concerned questions and I explain how things work, that's what would happen.
That being said, it will be interesting to see what comes out of this investigation. I'm curious to know what practices they are going to zero in on. No company should be immune to the law.
It's not how the sausage is made that matters.
The sausage is making ppl sick.
I have no doubt you in your siloed Dev team know very little about what exactly is happening with your final products.
We outside of your bubble are growing tired of your superiors growth at ANY cost company policies.
Take heed bro.
Time is getting kind of short.
The surveillance economy is gonna bust.
I'm gonna help break it- Any way I can.
I'm not the only one thinking Along these lines
I'm sorry if I offended you Daniel.
I offer my sincere apologies as I've seen the good work you do here and know your job is not easy.
That being said I'd also like to add that these parasite corporations who keep pushing the
envelope in regards to maximizing profits due to tracking thier users 24 hours a day
It just needs to stop
I'm sorry if I touched nerve but this needs to be said.
I'm not going to say millions of ppl are worried about this.
I will say that I'm old enough to have followed Google from thier early days( And yes I made a bundle on thier stocks in the 2ktens)
It's a whole new world now.
Google is behaving like a parasite by hoovering up every single data point that they can,and yes it's legal and within thier ToS to do this - it's bad.
It's probably evil.
We could go on and on About it( how they destroy every single thing they touchit-And yes you can call me a hippocrate for using a Gmail Address and I accept your criticism( it's not my only one.
Daniel if you have to shut me down again because I've pinched another nerve,so be it-
Dang please email me and tell me specifically what I've done wrong here.
I'm not trying to shitpost, I m pointing out the obvious
FYI.
Perhaps you could step back little bit and try to understand my point of view before threaten me
You simply need to follow the site guidelines when posting to HN. Would you mind reviewing them? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Your comment upthread broke at least these two:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It destroys intellectual curiosity, which the site exists for."
I'm not sure what rule I've broken here.
Id invite you to review some other comments here and compare them to my own and email me so we can come to a easy conclusion
I just mentioned two rules your comment broke. It wasn't thoughtful or substantive (instead, it was an indignant rant on a divisive topic). And it was a battle comment against an ideological opponent. These are just the things we don't want on HN because they spread flames and kill curiosity.
As a Googler, that's a sentiment I have never heard expressed
I've seen a lot of Googlers coming here lately, professing to be Googlers and stating "this hasn't been my experience".
Asked genuinely: as someone inside the company-with much better access to sentiment, opinion and company culture than I could ever hope to have, is Google truly that open and transparent to employees that you actually had an expectation to see this sentiment "expressed" elsewhere?
(I would pose a similar to question to other FAANG employees who do the "as an employee of faang[]:")
That's fantastic-that employees feel they can express resentment without reprisal, however I'm left feeling that my question wasn't really answered-regarding the sentiment quoted and the context being discussed via the article linked.
"I'm worried that if the rest of America knew what we were actually doing here they would literally come here and kill us..."
This is a VERY specific and very interesting response to the goings on of your employer. My company frequently has feedback surveys prompted by HR for employee satisfaction, I still hear through back-channel mediums a lot of gripes and kvetches that were uttered over libations with the understanding that the discussion doesn't leave the bar.
I'm inquiring how insulated individuals at Google are from even that level of 'resentment' born dialogue between colleagues and coworkers.
I think you're still assuming it's less open than it is. There's a (well documented now) culture of what might be be described as direct and open insubordination when management does things that are not well liked.
I think your question was answered, but you don't really believe it, because it's difficult to believe.
Well, I'd say there's literally no barrier between employees that prevents 'resentment' born dialogue. In fact, there's an internal site which is specialized to accelerating that 'resentment'. (joke, but it's true)
Yes. At least in my part of the company, people are very open about the things that make them unhappy or that they think are stupid. Probably the most-hated thing is how certain migrations are handled. There has also been dissent about certain anticipated large acquisitions, the most egregious of which fortunately did not go through. I have heard statements like, "I don't know why we/they are doing this" many times. I have also heard from current and former Googlers who think very negative things about leadership's approach to product development.
I've heard all this and more. But one opinion I have never heard is that increased visibility into our operations would make people trust us less or dislike us more. I cannot see how anyone could believe that who is familiar with both the internal workings of the company and the external views of it.
No, it isn't. Think of G as an oil company that owns and operates a pipe from the oil source (user data) to countries that need gas and other oil products (companies that pay for targeted ads). G employees have access to a lot of knowledge about how this pipe works, but make no mistake: any attempt to look into the pipe will be retaliated viciously. Employees are strictly not allowed to look at personal user data, even though they can do so by writing a simple SQL query. I really doubt that G sells raw user data. Not because it's kind or nice, but because an oil company makes more profit margin by selling oil products, rather than crude oil.
While I'm all for increased scrutiny of tech companies that have such a large presence in the public sphere, the current administration has been off-and-on pretty hostile towards Google for reasons rather unrelated to antitrust. Given the DoJ's actions in the AT&T/Time Warner merger, it wouldn't be a stretch to suspect a politically motivated ploy here.
Do the ends justify the means? Maybe. Is this causing an unfortunate precedent to be set? Maybe, too.
This could actually turn out to be terrible for we the consumers. It's unlikely that Google would be found to be a monopoly. So we can forget about that. But the anti-competitive nature of their business practices could be targeted successfully I think. (Keep in mind, "I think" means jack in court. The government could very well be laughed out of court. But I think Google does still have some questionable practices.) Google made some superficial changes around 2013-14 time frame, but I don't know if that would be enough for them to get out of hot water.
But the thing we should be concerned with is how the government goes about solving this anti-competitive issue. A breakup is not in the cards since Google is not a monopoly. So the fact that the justice dept has jurisdiction here does not bode well for us. It likely means any remedies will be within the parameters of the current regulatory regime. But what we as consumers really need is a new regulatory regime. What do I mean by that? Well, like the Microsoft case, they may "solve" this whole issue of anti-competitive practices by simply obliging google to allow everyone access to their 'OS', so to speak.
But in this case the 'OS' would effectively be their data.
Which is our data.
Which would be very bad news for us.
All of a sudden, hundreds of companies, all with guaranteed access to our data. Basically, imagine the privacy equivalent of a 9mm round being turned into a shotgun blast for everyone not fortunate enough to be born an EU citizen. (GDPR)
What we really need is a GDPR, not really sanctions against Google. But DOJ can only give us sanctions. I'm starting to believe that somewhere deep in the bowels of the government, there is an extreme aversion to any potential action that might lead to making commerce based privacy infractions illegal.
Interesting. I work for Google as well and I have a somehow opposite opinion here. Working here means you gotta fight through extremely complicated, thorough (and sometime bureaucratic) privacy, security and legal reviews by daily basis. Those teams have a real power to block any launches they don't like; Google give them the power not because of good-will but it's more about decreasing a risk of significant revenue impacting consequences. You got a fancy design which may give you a big revenue boost at the cost of compromising user privacy or legal risks? Good luck with upcoming privacy and/or legal review sessions; they don't care about your product since they have no motivation to do that.
I'm not trying to convince you and HN users to trust Google (which seems to be impossible anyway), but at least for more than 5 years there has been a strong incentive structure for not doing something that might make "the rest of America would literally come to Google and kill them". I think this investigation would enhance this structure even further, which might be a good thing since there's still room to improve especially for keeping high level executives in check.
Where were those teams when whatever the predecessor to G+ was called was launched and started sharing with your abusive ex's, people you had orders of protection taken etc. etc.?
I am sure they do review things quite carefully to avoid something too obviously illegal. But anything more than that? Color me skeptical.
"You got a fancy design which may give you a big revenue boost at the cost of compromising user privacy or legal risks? Good luck with upcoming privacy and/or legal review sessions; they don't care about your product since they have no motivation to do that."
From the outside, it's doubtful that this team exists at all. Or if they do, they must watch YouTube all day instead of doing their jobs, because Google is getting better and better at compromising privacy, thanks to fancy designs/dark patterns: https://www.forbrukerradet.no/undersokelse/2018/every-step-y...
It looks to me like you have no clue what your own company's doing but hurry nevertheless to defend them.
> because Google is getting better and better at compromising privacy, thanks to fancy designs/dark patterns
You're suggesting that the situation is getting worse, which I don't really see much clues from the linked report, though I don't want to spend my weekend on scrutinizing 44 pages report. I don't work for Maps, but AFAIK it used to track you silently and didn't give you control on user history. But now at least it tries to get a consent (even though it's admittedly just a nominal action) and give you some amount of control on your data, which is better than typical web practice on average. Can you explain why this should be considered as going toward "dark patterns"? All those works were strongly pushed by Privacy team. I don't expect you to praise their works, but you still don't have to use that level of derogatory words as well.
I don't necessarily deny that Google's previous (and probably current) business practice has been done in a quite privacy-invasive way. That needs to be corrected. But there's much more things to be considered as well, which slows down the pace for a good reason. So the best thing Google can do is improving the situation carefully rather than breaking everything by changing the fundamental at once.
Let me give you a super simplified example of ads; which privacy invasive practice has gone too far. But it's also true that this has powered the web ecosystem for a decade. Any kind of significant updates would lead to direct revenue impacts on not only Google but publishers and advertisers. This is real existential threats to them; surprisingly many publishers and creators solely depends on ads revenue. There are also indirect impacts on users via garbage ads and more pay-walled contents. Of course, I know what would typical HN user's answer be; "I would rather choose garbage ads than tracking and I will pay money!" But the history shows that most of attempts to prove this kind of people are significant has miserably failed (except very few examples, such as NYT) including Google's own.
BTW, one irrelevant stuff; is there anyone who have a concrete, feasible business proposal to materialize this no-ads-willing-to-pay demands into the reality? Then try a business and be the next Google/Facebook/Amazon. I'm serious. I always have been thinking about a way to do this so the web can run without ads, but because of Dunning-Kruger effect, I'm getting less and less confident about this idea :)
I'm glad we both agree.
There is a lot of work that needs to be done.
The web ran just fine before the surveillance economy took it over.
This needs to change-pronto
You seem to know even less about maps than the bunch of HN users complaining about the tricks and dark patterns Google was using to convince people to share location data.
Just do a search for "dark pattern" + Google on HN.
Your business model is at odds with privacy, you have that much figured out. But for unknown reasons you seem to think that Google can win against market forces and implement privacy-maintaining SW solutions.
That is disproven by Google's entire history. It's gotten particularly clear lately with AMP & Chrome.
One more thing: the world doesn't owe Google a business model. The world can survive just fine without internet ads, Google, Facebook and Amazon.
> Corporate taxes they pay on profits if you invest a ton you can deduct it from profits. Nothing nefarious going on here.
One's definition of "deductions" and "profits" can, of course, depend on how much one spends on tax lawyers, one's appetite for testing the untested boundaries of the relevant tax laws, and one's willingness to do fun and interesting things with structuring international subsidiaries.
The ultimate result may or may not correlate with what the average citizen would accept as legitimate. Whether you think this is okay is a matter of opinion.
Facebook's corporate income tax rate in 2018 was 12.8% ($3.2b) and for 2017 it was 22.6%. About 2/3 of their income taxes are paid domestically. Historically Facebook has paid high income tax rates. In 2014 and 2015 it was near 40%, in 2016 it fell to 19%.
Google's corporate income tax rate in 2018 was 11.9% (2017 had an abnormally high domestic tax payment due to repatriation accounting; 2016 had a 19% rate). About 1/2 of their income taxes are paid domestically.
Europe's average corporate income tax rate in 2018 was 18%, the EU was 21%, the world was 23%. There are eight European nations with corporate income tax rates equal to or lower than what Google and Facebook are paying.
Their rates are low, no doubt about it. They're neither zero (paying no taxes), nor shockingly low given the very low tax rate jurisdictions available to them (eg in Europe).
Amazon is however avoiding taxes successfully. They've managed to temporarily delay the tax hit on their new profit machine. That won't last much longer.
As an ex-Googler: good. Google has done a lot of good in the past, and that continues today, but it's pretty clear nobody should have as much control over "making information universally accessible and useful" as Google does. Especially after they give up any pretense of "don't be evil".
While I think an antitrust suit against Google would be a waste of time, they really need to stop recommending Chrome every time you do a Google search with a different browser. Just stop, that will not play well to a jury.
Your reply almost immediately says you think a jury could be swayed by argument, sentiment or both. Does that not mean an antitrust suit may actually be reasonable, judged by a potently prosecutor?
I think you meant "I don't want them found guilty" which is a different thing. If you really think there is no case to answer I don't think you understand what an antitrust case is about. It's about market dominance and anti competitive behaviour. Something alphabet has already demonstrated they are capable of doing, as in when google, Facebook and apple agreed not to poach Staff and altered the pay rates accordingly, something of which they have already been found guilty.
I wouldn't be so sure. Juries can be convinced of anything if you look at past judgements against Monsanto.
I'm not saying that I think Google is innocent but often the evidence is very difficult for the lay person to interpret (especially when it is absent).
How can you be so sure about the outcome of a jury trial when the investigation hasn't even reached the point of a specific allegation, let alone one that Google wants to defend at trial?
Any antitrust theory against Google would be pretty abstract given that they don’t charge for either search or Chrome. But the pop up trying to get you to switch to Chrome when you go to Google search is pretty much what you’d put in a textbook to illustrate leveraging a monopoly in one sector to gain market share in another. It’s extremely concrete and intuitive. That doesn’t mean it makes the case, of course. But it’s a great starting point for building the overall case.
On that note, even Internet Explorer (IE) was bundled freely, Microsoft never charged a dime for it. Why was anti-trust pursued against Microsoft then?
Honestly, I see no difference between that scenario and this. If anything, Google has been a lot more guilty than for just monopolizing on a browser here.
Competitors did. Netscape charges for Communicator Suite for example. There was a monetization model that involves eventually charging for the product once they had a monopoly in browsers. That’s easier to explain than how browsers are monetized today.
The initial release of IE was sold as a separate product in retail stores. Microsoft only added it to Windows later. If IE had been just another Windows feature from the start then it would have been more difficult to make an antitrust case against them.
What rulings can you point to to support this legal theory? The Sharman Act relates to monopolising any market, it doesn’t make any distinction between markets that are monetised in different ways.
Microsoft specifically targeted Netscape, and there was documentation that that was the goal in the form of emails and the like.
Chrome wasn't seemingly to target anyone. Google generally makes more money if people use the internet more, so spending to make browsers better has some obvious benefits.
> Why was anti-trust pursued against Microsoft then?
One example among the many things the court found they did was to tell OEMs that they wouldn't license Windows to them if they _also_ included Netscape preinstalled in their computers.
The stated purpose, from internal emails, was to prevent Java from becoming the de-facto API for writing applications, which at the time was win32. This was a gigantic barrier of entry that protected Windows' monopoly and they did all those shady things to keep it raised.
You don’t have to charge for your service to be within the scope of the Sherman Act.
> The Sherman Act broadly prohibits (1) anticompetitive agreements and (2) unilateral conduct that monopolizes or attempts to monopolize the relevant market.
You don’t have to get very abstract at all to see how Google may violating it. Microsoft lost their antitrust case in regards to how they distributed Internet Explorer, another free product.
Similar thing drives me nuts in GMail for iPad. Every time I open a link, it asks me to download chrome. I say no thanks, and uncheck the default “remind me later” option, yet few weeks later it happens again.
This is infuriating, and was one thing that motivated me to quit Gmail. I'm much happier now – traditional mail clients like iOS's Mail app work much better with a mail host that implements IMAP properly.
YouTube for iOS does something similar when clicking a hyperlink; it'll give you a popup for what browser, Safari or Chrome, even if Chrome isn't installed.
* If you type Chrome into Bing you'll get a full page ad urging you not to switch.
* If you try to switch to use Chrome as your default browser it will ask you if you're really sure and you have to click the tiny text to actually switch.
* Edge and Windows 10 will send you notifications about Edge being the recommended browser and it's speed/security/whatever.
* If you install Adobe Reader and check "set as my default PDF reader" Windows 10 will send you a notification saying that "there's something wrong with your default reader app" and set it back to Edge.
* In the start menu Edge gets special treatment by having flavor text that says it's the Microsoft recommended browser.
* You have to use 3rd pary hacks to get the start menu search to use anything other than Edge & Bing.
* Microsoft teated a feature on insider builds which intercepted the installers for Chrome and Firefox and displayed a pop-up asking them to use Edge instead.
* Before they got backlash for it, once you switched your default browser to something not Edge Windows would open up your new browser to an ad for Edge.
Questions from someone who doesn't know a lot about antitrust law, in case someone knowledgeable cares to chime in:
To what extent does antitrust law require specific intentional or knowing conduct? Is there some "knew or should have known" standard that would require Google to explain why they didn't anticipate or investigate some suspiciously favorable placement of Google products/services/affiliates? Or can Google basically shrug and say "algorithm" a lot and the Justice Department would have an uphill battle to prove intent?
It requires no intent, and iirc the argument of Standard Oil before their censure was precisely that they didn't mean to stifle trade, they were just better than everyone else at it. The Supreme Court said they didn't really care why or how, they cared that it was a monopoly in fact.
But historically anti-trust suits have usually been about what happens when negative sentiment towards American mega-corporations grows too high. Essentially the rules are different for big companies. In reality, most of the things companies need to do to avoid anti-trust cases are performative. Even more ironically, the super rich at the tops of corporate pyramids often end up profiting from these sorts of actions. All an anti-trust suit can do is mandate companies fracture into multiple legal entities. Usually the same owners retain their ownership, only now over dozens or more of companies which each individually pay upwards.
What's even more distressing about these laws is that they're quite unusable against entities that are at least as frightening, like Amazon (and historically Walmart). Amazon is the omni-company, and now they're gonna get into consumer telecom too. And because they're lateral as opposed to vertical and they choked out the competition during a recession, they don't even have to pretend the're offering a square deal to their resellers.
Amazon could very well be the next target. Their practice of driving out smaller resellers in a category and then jacking up prices could be looked at as an antitrust issue.
Monopolization requires anticompetitive conduct. To prove this, intent evidence is often helpful. For example, in the recent Qualcomm case the judge cited evidence that Qualcomm executives knew their business model created antitrust risk.
But intent evidence is not required. A corporation doesn't have a state of mind. Also, wanting to beat your competitors is fine (and good). So it's tricky to distinguish bad intent from good intent.
Dear Justice Department: Take a look at google AMP and how they use it to strong-arm publishers by linking it to search placement. You'll find some stuff.
There's already some questionable aspects, like the way that Google search query strings are only available if you sign up for Google Analytics. And I would be very interested to hear what Google does with the other data they collect with Analytics...
I agree with lohszvu and given this was made nearly a decade ago, I'm pretty sure their tactics have changed (I don't even think AMP was made in 2010).
If Google we’re truly committed to building a search engine that is useful they would give the user control of ranking. I hope one day we see a search engine not driven by ad incentives....
They don't even have to be that "extreme" about it. Simple tools that would still allow them to "sell" ads but give the user more control.
E.g. Being able to "blacklist" certain domains from results.
Same thing applies to youtube. You can not permanently block/remove/disable channels from being present in the content results/feed.
I think that deep-down Google high-ups "know" that giving some of these "basic" usability features would essentially disable their control of the content that they push to you. E.g. imagine publicly-shared black-lists of bad domains and bad channels that one could subscribe to. Similar to the ad blockings lists that have generated a bit of a thriving ecosystem. I.e. smart people would eventually use this basic "building block" to build content-control that would be more decentralized/democratic and really personal.
People don't seem to understand how this stuff works in the US, Google has full editorial control over their search results protected by the first amendment and that right was affirmed in court time and time again:
If you don't like their free no lock in service go elsewhere, and that's why there is no sherman act case here, which is why if the DOJ actually does anything here it would be a waste of time and resources.
I'm not a lawyer but the first amendment argument is a separate concern than antitrust violations. You can exercise your first amendment rights while still breaching antitrust law.
Depends on what's being investigated here, if the government would actually want to compel Google to alter their search results then it's a first amendment case.
The argument here is its unfair to bias ranking towards a preferred format. In this case, something about excluding competitors, except AMP is completely open-source[1] so...?
The counterargument is yes you can, because it's your pamphlet/newspaper/website and you're the editor, not the government.
Yeah, if AMP is antitrust then so is Facebook's Open Graph.
Despite the hate for both on HN, neither format is targeting competitors or hurting consumers in this case.
I think the antitrust argument against AMP is a bit more subtle. The argument seems to be that Google is abusing it's market dominance to push sites into using AMP. This in turn prevents them from using third party trackers, while the pages will be served via Google caches when accessed from Google search. Hence Google gets to track the visitor, while third party tracking from other providers is prevented. I.e. Google is abusing it's power to thwart competition in the analytics and ad-tech business.
Of course as a consumer, I don't really care whether it's some random company or Google who gets to violate my privacy, and I especially couldn't care less about lack of innovation in the privacy violation business, so I think the antitrust angle here is pretty slim.
You can use Google Analytics through the <amp-analytics> element [1], but since AMP prevents third-party scripts that were not approved by Google, I'm not sure how you would include other trackers in an AMP site.
Yes, the first amendment here does not seem to apply, except if the poster above, has something else in mind? That DOJ even considers going to court, hints that they have a strong case -- given how conservative the DOJ is to betting on a court case and not settling.
No one is reporting that the DOJ is considering going to court nor that they have any "case" let alone a "strong" one if the WSJ reports are to be believed it's very preliminary stuff.
This case is clearly price fixing, not first amendment.
The radio stations weren't broadcasting their prices to consumers, but secretly communicating with competitors to form a cartel, which is forbidden. Doesn't matter if they were radio stations or grocery stores.
The fact that the companies in that suit were radio stations seems irrelevant to the facts of the case; they could have been hamburger restaurants and the legal question would not change.
Google is not a monopoly in terms of consumer choice (we can choose any one of mostly identical search engines), but it is in terms of market share ala internet explorer. It is in a perfect situation to leverage this to force arbitrary policies that mostly benefit it, like amp.
Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren (not exactly a conservative Trump supporter) seems to think that antitrust regulators do indeed have a legitimate role to play:
Warren would appoint regulators who would reverse some of the biggest tech mergers that have taken place in recent years. That would mean the reversal of Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods and Zappos, Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram, and Google’s acquisition of Waze, Nest, and DoubleClick.
lol. well, truthfully, i was trying to make a serious statement.
i figured mentioning a proponent of big tech breakup with valid legal credentials and a different political axe to grind might be useful evidence in deciding whether the antitrust case had any merit.
(i believe the Vox article is trying to be serious as well.)
Indeed. Many people fail to grasp that in the grand scheme of things, this is unlikely to change anything. Google has always been at the center of the tech industry. Some of its services are not only important to the public and vital for the U.S. economy, but also very critical to national security as well. Rest assured that efforts will be spent to ensure Google will continue to remain at this position in the foreseeable future. Actions like these are more likely to serve as a way to calm down the public aka damage control.
I think this is a really simplistic view of how the first amendment applies to businesses. I think the key here is the definition of a 'public space' as what freedoms a business has changes when they provide a public space. It's a bit unclear what defines a public space in the digital world, I'd argue that physical presence isn't a requirement and the key aspects are accessibility and communication. i.e. If anyone can go there, and anyone can communicate there, it's a public space. _If_ this is true, then many sites are public spaces, certainly social media. Search is a bit more unclear since the communication aspect is questionable.
I don't see how after the FTC came up empty the DOJ would fare any better as arguable the sherman act is a much tougher route, and the competition landscape has changed to google's detriment (amazon ads, facebook, etc).
Anyway the article is quite scarce and the source is the WSJ so they might be trying to amplify some stuff or even advocate for it.
In the last ~year Google has admitted to accidentally-but-knowingly stealing $75 million from Adwords customers, and settled a case they had fought four years for $11 million to avoid revealing what happens to a banned Adsense account's unpaid revenue. There is likely several hundred million dollars of fraud just in these two 'edge cases' they ignored handling for decades, so it's definitely time for someone to dig deep into this company.
lets not forget their latest and greatest of releasing chrome for free until it saturated the market and became a monopoly then maliciously making changes to reduce the effectiveness of adblockers like ublock origin
Yes, because before Chrome existed most people used IE which is very slow to create or adopt new web standards and is full of bugs. That makes developing complex websites really difficult.
What company do we know that makes some the most complex web sites out there and would really benefit if the web had... I dunno WebGL so they could make a smooth mapping site, maybe with a 3D mode. Or a new version of HTTP so their sites load faster. Or a new version of TCP that works better on mobile. Or native web components that makes their web framework faster. Or HTML video so their video streaming site is more reliable.
I'll give you a hint - it starts with "Googl".
They created Chrome because IE was holding them back. Not to kill as blockers (did IE ever even support as blockers). Some people here don't use their brains...
Reality was a bit different from what you describe. Firefox was a thing. Its market share was rising slowly but steadily. Google paid leading Firefox engineers such as Ben Goodger and Darin Fisher. It could have doubled down, improved Firefox's performance, marketed it aggressively, and then your narrative would make sense. Instead they pulled the engineers to create Chrome. There was no need at all for that except that Google wanted more direct control over the Internet which the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation ultimately wouldn't give them.
That nobody would do that is contradicted by the fact that Google did it for years, for instance. But Google ended up doing what most for-profit corporations would do. I'm not saying it's particularly immoral. It's pretty normal, for better or worse. What I am saying is that the narrative that Google created Chrome only to further the Web does not add up.
Also, I was not ignoring that IE had 60% market share. That's perfectly in line with what I said, as that market share was in fact shrinking without Chrome.
So, to be clear, you are saying they were being altruistic and purely motivated by the desire to push forward web standards, and that this is entirely unrelated to the business they run?
Good reason for about 5-10% of the internet users with adblockers to switch to Firefox. Which kind of hurts the monopoly argument. Not that I support google being more and more monopolistic these days.
I still don’t think the browser market is a good example right now.
i'm sure a lot of people that would otherwise have been making browsers decided chrome is "good enough" and assumed google wasn't likely to do anything to scummy like this. monopoly is maybe not the best word choice but its overwhelming popularity and use has given it a lot of inertia and influence over the direction of the web
Prediction: In a year, adblocking extensions on Chrome will still block the same percentage of ads from Google's networks as they do on Firefox. Care to make a bet?
And they did all they could to kill Windows Phone (a viable alternative ecosystem at that time) by blocking access to Youtube[1] and providing sub-par experience for their other services.
Now I fear Firefox has a similar sisyphean task at hand, trying to keep their browser usable on google services. And for many of the users, that is same as usability of the browser as a whole.
Microsoft managed to kill Windows Phone by itself and take Nokia, and a more mature more viable smartphone OS, down with it. Windows phone was a "viable alternative" by the end, but in the beginning it was uncompetitive without any hindrances.
Also recall that mobile carriers and OEMs were opposed to Android because it would further degrade their ability to create walled gardens. The carriers lost control of apps, not for lack of trying. Imagine what a world that would be.
The FANG succeed largely instead of a carrier-controlled mobile ecosystem.
You may think that replaces one kind of oppression with another, but if you weaken the internet platforms, you strengthen the carriers who are now off the net neutrality leash, and who see 5G as an opportunity to gain control of a lot of what we now enjoy as an open internet.
Also recall that mobile carriers and OEMs were opposed to Android
I agree with the other claims (about Microsoft killing Windows Phone through their own actions and choices), however this one is a bit weird. Apple gave essentially no ground to carriers, which was a huge change. Which is why carriers all embraced Android, at a time when it was horribly uncompetitive, because it returned control to them, letting them preload any nonsense they wanted, making it undeletable, etc.
Apple updates come through Apple alone. If you have a Samsung phone on a carrier, they still matriculate through your carrier.
Add that of the 30% cut that the Play Store takes for apps and games, historically one half of that went to the carriers (it was always very nebulous, but again was one of the reasons carriers pushed Android when it was not good).
It was tough sledding at first, with just T-Mobile and HTC, both second-tier players, being first to adopt Android. Android's SDK had been released well before this first deal. Android could have turned out to be an interesting but minor embedded OS with a less well run ecosystem of system integrators than Windows CE.
Android was in fact an alternative to iPhone. Google was more amenable to carrier and OEM mods to Android and third-party app stores. But carriers still were hoping the traditional OEM and app store walled gardens would hold, and Apple could be confined to high-end customers.
App store revenue, at that time, was still small for both the carriers' walled garden and for Apple. It was more a matter of control.
Apple and other hardware will not agree. But peope buy devices bacause of the apps. The reason symbian, meego, blackberry, windows et all died was because some of the popular apps where only available on Android and iPhone. Microsoft of course knew this but failed because they where unfriendly to developers. And are now desperately trying to bye goodwill in order to keep Windows on PC relevant.
It's going to be interesting if we have to lie about user agents. If you lie about the UA and it works then something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
I saw a similar complaint video[1] from ZoggfromBetelgeuse but didn't know the problem was pervasive. It is a shame this killed one of the best channels on YT.
The career officials at the FTC recommended antitrust action against Google back in 2012, but the political appointees shut them down.
>When the Federal Trade Commission neared a momentous decision on whether to charge Google with violating antitrust laws in January 2013, the White House was watching closely.
New emails uncovered by the Campaign for Accountability, a public interest watchdog organization, show that a White House advisor met with top Google lobbyist Johanna Shelton and top Google antitrust counsel Matthew Bye twice in the weeks before the FTC announcement.
And minutes prior to the final decision – in which FTC commissioners took the unusual step of overriding their staff’s recommendation to sue, and voted to settle the case instead – the White House official even sought Google’s talking points in the matter.
That's one interpretation by interested parties another would be that enforcement lawyers are always aggressive and those who make the decision in the end would have to weigh the odds of winning in court and unanimously they decides not.
Regardless, the FTC would have had a much better chance than the DOJ as they have specific broad powers more suitable to this case.
Google was also very positively connected to the Obama administration. It was some googlers that stepped in and turned around healthcare.gov for instance. I've heard a lot of rumors that they gave a lot of data access to the campaigns too.
I don't know about data accesse rumors but the fact that a bunch of Googlers did government work during the Obama years is well documented, that said the FTC is an independent agency with commissioners from both parties and they unanimously voted against going to court.
Not only is the amount of revolving door between Google and the Obama administration well documented, but Eric Schmidt was literally part of Hillary's campaign staff and personally funded a company to provide her campaign's development and infrastructure.
Suffice to say, they have a lot less allies in DC this year, and even Democrats are starting to look negatively on them now.
Although this is a minor digression, I always felt that it was very interesting to contrast the overwhelming amount of airtime on the legacy media devoted to throwing fuel on the fire of "Russian interference in the 2016 election" with the scant concern for Alphabet's working relationship with the Clinton Campaign. I know I'm not the only person concerned with the disproportionate influence that companies like Google, Twitter, etc have on modern political discourse. Isn't it frightening that the assistance of such companies can be bought with the promise of regulatory lenience? Even if someone didn't agree with the previous statement, isn't it still of significant concern that the companies controlling the flow of information are participants in partisan politics?
I think you're jumping to a conclusion with that phrasing. It's very likely they happened to also volunteer (or maybe be hired by) the campaign WHILE also happening to be employed by Google.
And Google would allow their employees to build IP for a particular political campaign? That is, they would waive their rights to the IP produced by their employees for the specific benefit of a particular candidate? That seems unlikely.
And he did so in his capacity as a private citizen, not by exercising his influence at Google. By the way, we are quite far afield from the initial claim that Google employees wrote software for a particular political campaign.
> And he did so in his capacity as a private citizen, not by exercising his influence at Google. By the way, we are quite far afield from the initial claim that Google employees wrote software for a particular political campaign.
Google has been providing free services to campaigns it wants to help for over a decade, in the open. This started when Schmidt was CEO.
The Obama campaign was the first to really realize the importance of IT infrastructure, _and_ their whole shtick (more or less neoliberalism with a friendly face) aligns really well with Google's political goals.
I'm not really sure why you seem to think that this is some conspiracy theory, when everyone involved is openly talking about it.
Nothing in that article corroborates any of the claims mentioned by others above. I notice that the farther down in the thread this conversation goes, the more watered down the accusations of political meddling get. Next you’ll criticize Google for letting campaigns use Gmail or something.
Google has various programs under which employees can release code without having to care too much about the broad copyright assumptions in their contracts.
IARC should be quite suitable for projects on "contentious" topics like politics or religion: Google generally stays clear of these topics (so there won't be a conflict of interest in building something like that, as Google just isn't active in that market), and the company won't have to deal with being associated with one team (versus all the others) through some side hustle they can barely control.
(Disclosure: working at Google, but far from the licensing folks. I found them reasonable to argue with, though.)
I would find it surprising that Google would be OK with that, particularly because it could be construed as them contributing to some campaign. An employee writing a check to the campaign? That’s perfectly fine, Google has no say over that. An employee producing IP for a campaign? Well, Google does technically have a say over that and would have to waive their right of ownership of said IP...
They took leaves of absence, with the company's blessing. And Google is incorporated in California, which has strict laws that employees are allowed to develop what they like when they're not on the clock using company resources.
It's interesting people here are calling this a "conspiracy theory" when I guarantee you there are hundreds if not thousands of posters here who remember the TGIF and groups discussions where this came up.
At least admit that your initial statement was unclear at best, and intentionally misleading at worst. You made it sound like Googlers, in their capacity as employees, were working for a political campaign.
>And Google is incorporated in California, which has strict laws that employees are allowed to develop what they like when they're not on the clock using company resources.
Not really. Try to develop a search engine in your spare time and see what happens.
It's not so much an interpretation of what happened as it is a leak of what happened.
>The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday faced renewed questions about its handling of its antitrust investigation into Google, after documents revealed that an internal report had recommended stronger action.
The 2012 report, from the agency’s bureau of competition, said that the agency should sue the Internet search company for anticompetitive practices, according to several people who saw the report but would speak about it only under the condition of anonymity. At least one other staff report, they said, recommended not to pursue a lawsuit. In early 2013, the agency unanimously voted not to bring charges after an investigation.
Google has already lost several antitrust actions in the EU. It's not difficult to imagine that the investigation by FTC career officials found sufficient evidence of wrongdoing to recommend taking action.
The EU has different rules (and extra motivation to go after US companies) they also don't need to win in court, their enforcement action in unilateral.
FWIW: It sounds nefarious, but the DOJ/FTC/etc quite often meet with all parties prior to taking antitrust action.
That's because (at least in the number of times i've been invited to meetings with these sorts of regulators) the relevant folks are not idiots, and in fact are trying to understand all sides of the issue before deciding what they should do.
This is actually what you want them to do, as there are rarely, if ever, truly disinterested parties in these sorts of things.
As an aside, i'm pretty sure Matthew was not the top antitrust counsel at Google at the time. I believe it was Nikhil Shanbhag. Job titles on linkedin seem to confirm my recollection.
I’ll note for the audience that such meetings are common for many types of prosecutions, even for relatively low level criminal ones. If you’ve every watched a TV show about a murder investigation, you know the police will talk to you and get your statement before they arrest you. The SEC will also send a “we’re thinking of suing you” letter (Wells notice), where you can respond with a PowerPoint presentation of “why you shouldn’t sue me.” When you’ve got complex antitrust and securities issues, that up-front discussion becomes even more important.
TV shows are notoriously bad sources of information about the real world. In the real world if the police has anything solid which they believe points at you as the perp, they will arrest you first (possibly after watching you for a while). Extracting information from you is so much easier when you are intimidated and fearful - as anyone would be after marinating for a few days in a cell.
FWIW: Before the preceding comment apologizes and distracts from the real issue, the WH involving itself in the issue is very different from the prosecutor meetings described by the previous comment.
Given that this amazingly nameless "white house advisor"and title is clear spin for their narrative in the same way the "top competition counsel" thing is (and proven wrong by totally trivial fact checking), do you have evidence or anything to back up that this was not a standard meeting?
Notice the "if". My point was that his working for Google shouldn't matter if those conditions are met. Whether or not they were met is another matter.
No, actually.
I've been quite clear on my position on this many times on HN (it's just another fun form of bias people try to use to not have to engage in real discussion on the merits, and convince themselves their position is right), and i'm being totally consistent with that.
Do you have anything substantive to add to the conversation?
Do you want to disagree with anything I said?
In practice, my comment comes more from being in DC for 7 years, not for working for any company.
What i said applies across just about every media outlet these days.
Every unnamed white house advisor (sometimes even "senior advisor", because why not!) who isn't an "anonymous source" is usually unnamed because otherwise you'd be able to point out their job title matches what they were doing and is unrelated to the white house
(or their attachment to the white house is "tenuous at best").
It's true the white house sometimes has people with the job title "advisor" in it, but you will notice when articles mention real names, if you were to go looking, you'd see that was usually their real title (or they failed at fact checking).
That's not just the white house either. Random low level people at companies become "senior executives", etc.
This even spreads, unfortunately, using those things as sources, and later often becomes "truth".
Here, i'll take a totally non-political thing as an example for you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Fredinburg (RIP) was a great person and all around good guy (IME), but he was 100% not a google executive. This is an objective fact, by any definition of executive (including Google's). You can see the sources cited for these claims are news articles.
All of which, in order to play up their narrative on a tragedy, decided to give him that title (and various others!)[1]
Thinking that anything else here is happening, in this, or really any other situation, is just naive (or gross application of variants of gell-mann amnesia).
In the situation in the original article, do you seriously believe that if the current administration had the chance to nail a real former obama whitehouse advisor doing something illegal or untoward, they wouldn't jump at the chance do it?
It's not like they don't have white house visitor logs and plenty of people around the DOJ/FTC/etc who can tell them what happened!
[1] As an aside, i find it pretty sad that it appears people find "google executive" to be a more impressive/etc way to memorialize someone than "good person". If i pass away in a news-worthy event, can y'all make sure it says "good father" or something.
Very fascinating, thanks. Do you have any reading resources I could peruse about these kinds of topics? I read The Power Broker and thought it was an amazing insight into the nuances of politics and media.
I have no opinion on the nature of the meeting but the White House Advisor is named directly in the article and they include screen shots of the emails.
The fact is that the revolving door between Google and our government was spinning pretty quickly during that period.
>The Campaign for Accountability (CFA) this week launched the first two of its Google Transparency Projects. One of the projects – a visualisation of the revolving door between Google, the White House and US government agencies – is so dense, the website suggests viewing it on a desktop display.
As well as Googlers leaving the ad giant to join the administration, there’s also a heavy traffic in the other direction, with federal employees leaving to join Google. The project documents 61 staff taking key public positions after leaving Google, or firms working closely with Google, and 171 leaving public office to join [Google].
Notice that no Googlers have a good response to this or the Eric Schmidt / Hillary Clinton connection. Google’s ties to the Obama administration were deep.
It really shouldn't matter what a public officials prior employment, often domain expertise is often a good or necessary thing. But it unfortunately seems to be a recurring problem worth investigating. There should be some conflict of interest rules around anything related to your former employers. Only if they were previously high up at the company, of course.
The DoJ and other state legal offices have rules about excusing prosecutors from cases but this one seems to not be seen as an issue at these regulatory and broader judicial agencies.
This should matter considering the US is disparaging China for having private companies backed by the powerful government bodies, operating under a different set of rules than everyone else.
Which raises deep suspicions about the political motivations of this "investigation".
Anti-trust is about companies using their market power to exclude rivals, raise prices, and hurt consumers. It's not about consumers overwhelmingly choosing a product because they like it more.
Can anyone really say that Google's practices are more anti-competitive than, say, the dominant players in broadband or health insurance or wireless telecom or household appliances?
The Obama administration shut down and buried the previous FTC investigation. I'd guess not just because of lobbying, but also because google was nice enough to allow a ton of google employees to take some "vacations" to work for the Obama campaign for a bunch of months, and the likes of Eric Schmidt being chummy with Obama[1].
The current investigation is probably motivated not just by those career bureaucrats who had their previous investigation shut down, but also by the Trump administration wanting to hurt SV and Google in particular for being too friendly with Democrats, and to put those social media companies (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter) on notice not to "prosecute" and ban conservatives on their platforms (at leas that's what Trump and a lot of "conservatives" say is happening).
It was shut down. They just call it a "settlement" to avoid it looking suspicious and for the FTC to save face.
So what was this "settlement"? Google promised to be nicer and said mea culpa a bunch of times. They did not pay a fine, did not agree to any hard regulations that would carry a penalty if violated, they did not pay any compensation to the entities they kinda admitted they wronged.
Google isn't, and the fact you're getting responses that are dodging your question just goes more to your point that this is most likely politically motivated.
The lack of competition on commercial infrastructure is a problem which occurs -AFAIK- worldwide. It occurs on wireless such as 4G, it occurs on DSL, and it occurs on cable. It is a real problem which indeed warrants a discussion, but not in a whataboutism-esque distraction. 2 wrongs don't make 1 right. It doesn't matter which one's are more anti-competitive. They both are (IMO); at the very least they're risky and therefore deserve careful analysis.
It does look like their is a strong partisan element here - but that isn't a bad thing in this instance. I think this is an interesting tangent to take.
From a health-of-the-system perspective it really should be intolerable that a few large closed-garden platforms control the flow of information. Information monocultures are a threat to everyone, even if one partisan group feels more threatened than the other at any one time.
I happily take the market-efficiency position on most debates, but the risk of Google being anything but neutral is worrying. They appear to have a political bias in their employee base and are under pressure to make judgements about fact v. fiction (might even be an inherent requirement of choosing a sort order for search results) - that is a position somewhat similar to a conventional media organisation.
I support the concept of media being a special case where the risk of an information monoculture outweighs the damage of being inefficient. Laws that basically make it impossible for one media source to control a market are fine. I'd like to see internet search designated as a market where there legally can't be one dominant player, and details get sorted out as best can be done.
Maybe that is already how the market is, I don't know. There are many alternatives not controlled by Google. But something even stronger than antitrust seems appropriate as a matter of law, even if we don't apply it today. I can't see how a platform like Google can be neutral given the ongoing partisan extremes that have developed in American politics and Google's connections to the Democrats.
On the other hand forcing media to give 50% of time/space to "both sides" leads to silly situations like 50% of media saying vaccines do cause autism, dinosaur fossils were planted by the devil, net neutrality is bad, etc.
You could either keep a blanket rule of 50% coverage excempted from such cases, or you could only mandate 50% coverage rules on particular settings/events, such as Presidential election main-line coverage.
They appear to have a political bias in their employee base and are under pressure to make judgements about fact v. fiction (might even be an inherent requirement of choosing a sort order for search results) - that is a position somewhat similar to a conventional media organization.
Apps and games are media. In 2019, that's a glaring truth which is obvious to many in the industry. It's just that society and the culture haven't caught up with technological reality yet.
> It's not about consumers overwhelmingly choosing a product because they like it more.
And that's not what the charges are about either. You're making it way too simplistic. Google has been involved in actual anti-competitive actions, for which they've already been found guilty in Europe that had nothing to do with "users liking their service more" - Google actually downranked competition in the search engine, and other stuff like that.
There even was a story a while ago on HN about ProtonMail being essentially shadowbanned from Google search for the term "encrypted email" for a year before they made a big scandal about it and Google "admitted its error" (the same bullshit excuse Facebook uses every time it's caught tracking users in a new and more nefarious way).
Also, I can't be bothered to look for a link now, but there is a good story out there about how Google killed a map competitor in the US around that time, too (Skyhook was it?). Once again - nothing to do with "users liking Google's maps more" -- Google took real action to prevent a competitor from existing in the market place.
It's also a super-duper coincidence that Eric Schmidt started working for the Pentagon, while also remaining on Google's board and some kind of technical executive, too, not long before Google started working with the Pentagon on Project Maven.
Either people don't want to admit what's happening or they are being way too naive when they see all of this and think it's "nothing but a coincidence". It was well known that Schmidt was one of Obama's besties at the time. And Google is ranking very high in its lobbying efforts, too.
I may not like it, but it's not an anti-trust concern.
> Google started working with the Pentagon on Project Maven
Google shut this down under pressure from employees. Also, not an anti-trust concern.
> Schmidt was one of Obama's besties
Executives at right-wing media are besties with the current president, but that shouldn't result in a future administration launching anti-trust actions against their firms.
> encrypted mail, Skyhook, etc.
Sounds pretty tenuous, but if there's something here roughly equivalent severity to other anti-trust issues then sure, investigate that.
But it looks to me like a piddling pretext to punish perceived political differences in media and infotech.
By "product", I take it you mean their advertising services? Most of the other products are not paid for. In fact, critics are often fond of pointing out that the consumer is the product in this case.
Whether this action is right or not, parallels can be drawn with the Microsoft investigation: Microsoft allegedly used its position within the desktop to "push" their browser; Google is allegedly using its position within search to "push" their browser.
On a personal note, I'm not convinced that this is grounds enough for antitrust action. There could be a personal data related angle to this, but then again that would not come under antitrust.
Windows didn't get to 90% market share because consumers chose it. Windows achieved overwhelming dominance because Microsoft punished computer manufacturers if they sold any competing operating system.
That's anti-competitive, and Google isn't doing anything like that.
Then Microsoft used their illegally-obtained dominant position in operating systems to bundle their shitty browser, essentially forcing every consumer to install it instead of any competitor. And you couldn't uninstall it if you wanted to.
Again, that's not at all similar to Google and Chrome. Windows, Mac, and iOS don't have Chrome pre-installed. Android manufacturers are free to pre-install Firefox or Opera or anything else they want.
> That's anti-competitive, and Google isn't doing anything like that.
Just this week it was announced that Google will disable important features required to implement ad blockers. Google absolutely abuses their monopolies (browser, search, streaming video, possibly maps) at least as aggressively as MS ever did.
Have you ever tried to watch YouTube on Firefox? That’s a deliberately hobbled experience if I’ve ever seen one.
I’m no fan of Google these days but I have no issues what so ever using YouTube on Firefox. I listen all day long at work from a Slackware laptop and at home on Windows, Slackware and OpenBSD. I don’t have streaming issues and can watch full screen HD, no problems at all.
I don’t think this is the typical experience particularly on Linux. Do you not experience tearing? Excessive page load times? Even on Chromium, getting good YouTube performance on Linux requires tweaks.
Completely off topic at this point but I’m curious what video card you have and if you’re on X or Wayland.
I did nothing to “tweak” Firefox. I did use their binary installer for Linux because I wanted the latest updates and Slackware is a bit conservative with its packages.
My Linux box at work is an HP laptop from several years ago with a pretty basic business class AMD graphics card in it, I did have to install AMD’s binary drivers on this machine.
And, using Slackware, it’s X. Not sure if Wayland is easily installable or not on Slack but it’s certainly not part of the base install or supported by Patrick.
Firefox is the only piece of my install that isn’t part of official Slackware-CURRENT.
Other than running it in Windows all of my other computers that use Firefox are running stock, no fancy desktop versions of Slack or OpenBSD. I use calm window manager on both. (Sorry, this contradicts an earlier statement, I also had to compile and install Calm on Slackware from source, everything else is just part of the supported packages for CURRENT)
Thank you for the great info! I bet it's the AMD graphics card helping. I know Nvidia is a mess (and requires the aforementioned tweaking). I'm glad it's working well for you and I'd love to test a setup like this as I really want off Chromium but haven't had an equal experience with Firefox (on OS X and Linux with Nvidia cards).
I don't see anything wrong with this monetization move. Chrome users don't pay Google for the use, so Google has no obligation whatsoever to make unpaid users as happy as their paid customers. And Goolge has(could) not set any barriers for competitors to come out with superior products. If enough people switch because their dislike, Google will adjust. It's market dynamics
The whole point of a monopoly is that you can leverage it to allow unfair advantages that allow your products to be worse for consumers and they have no choice but to accept it. As long as Google has search and browsers locked down they will have an unfair advantage in the direction of the web, one definitely not in consumer’s favor.
Whether it’s the government’s role to break that up is a political question, but Google is most definitely a classic monopoly and the internet is worse off for it.
Windows didn't get to 90% market share because consumers chose it. Windows achieved overwhelming dominance because Microsoft punished computer manufacturers if they sold any competing operating system.
That's anti-competitive, and Google isn't doing anything like that.
Google was doing exactly this until it was forced to into a consent decree with the EU. Manufacturers couldn’t sell Google licensed Android phones and sell non Google Android variants.
Clearly many traditionally established regional monopolies/oligopolies not being probed into is not a matter of resource scarcity.
Can we argue in this logic that if some companies are not punished by existing applicable laws/regulations for so long a time, that means those set of laws/regulations are acutally juridically invalid and thus can't be applied to other entities as well.
> Anti-trust is about companies using their market power to exclude rivals, raise prices, and hurt consumers. It's not about consumers overwhelmingly choosing a product because they like it more.
Antitrust doesn’t care about how you got market dominance. It cares about what you do with it. To use the browser example I used elsewhere: maybe Google’s dominance in search is because it’s indisputably the best. But that doesn’t mean Google can use its dominance over search to get you to use Chrome.
To address your other examples, say health insurance or cellular, that market dominance is absent. Google has 89% of search market share. Verizon has 35% of cellular. Likewise, no health insurance company has more than 15% market share. That’s a completely different market. And I can’t get a discount on cellular because I’m a FiOS customer, nor can I buy car insurance from my health insurance company.
As I said elsewhere, I don’t think an antitrust case against a Google would succeed at this point in time. But lots of things that are common in the web tech space (cross selling products, giving away products for free, etc.), become potential antitrust concerns when you’ve got 90% market share in an industry. For example, giving away Android for free to push Symbian and company out of the market and cement Google search dominance in mobile. You wouldn’t be crazy to try to make a case out of that.
Huh. The Verizon deal must be new. Not sure if that’s a good idea. The State Farm thing is a “marketing alliance” with Blue Cross. I don’t think State Farm sells health insurance.
You ignore the fact that business operation in many sectors are localized. I don't have numbers, but my impression is the said companies like verizon, healthcare provider, power suppliers all have regional stronghold where their market share is easily a dominant one. I used to live in a valley in west Massachusetts, where you don't have any options to choose from for power supply(believe it's a government regulation issue) so basically you are locked up and have no means to curb the ever raising rate.
Well, the unilateral smackdown they just put on ad blockers with their monopoly position browser when they happen to also be the largest internet advertiser does appear to be market manipulation and doing customer harm in my not-professional opinion. I am not a lawyer.
> Can anyone really say that Google's practices are more anti-competitive than, say, the dominant players in broadband or health insurance or wireless telecom or household appliances?
No, but I'd love to see antitrust litigation against those monopolies/oligopolies too.
Can anyone really say that Google's practices are more anti-competitive than, say, the dominant players in broadband or health insurance or wireless telecom or household appliances?
I guess, "not exactly exonerating, but not exactly damning" is à la mode in 2019.
>>Google’s ties to the Obama administration were deep.
>Which raises deep suspicions about the political motivations of this "investigation".
So, if a company was in bed with politician X, and get investigated under a future (opposition) politician Y, it's the ...political motivations of the investigation that you're concerned about?
That sounds totally backwards...
>Anti-trust is about companies using their market power to exclude rivals, raise prices, and hurt consumers. It's not about consumers overwhelmingly choosing a product because they like it more.
Well, Google uses its power over search results to do all of the above.
Googles entire restructuring into Alphabet was a response to this imo. They knew this could happen and have already organized the business into discrete operating and reporting lines. The battle will be over how much they fracture the big 4 Google services themselves (Maps, Search, Email and YouTube).
This. Obama administration had a lot more googlers than Trump administration has Fox news icons. I still don't why exactly they have ties so deep specifically with Google.
So much for intellectual honesty on this site. New user and I thought this was something praised here. The hypocrisy of upvoting the parent because they're against information propagators being linked to an administration while ignoring the elephant in the room.
I'm not sure what your complaint is about here, but it breaks the site guidelines. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not posting comments like this? If you're concerned about something not being right on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into it.
I wish it was common knowledge that large and influential companies and the government have VERY strong ties. It’s how the entire upper echelon of the world works, for better or for worse.
As were the Obama administration’s early ties to many technology companies. Obama explicitly attempted to bring on “technocrats” into his cabinet as a way to try to modernism the effectiveness of government and leverage the internet. In contrast to many other administrations who lag behind technology, at least Obama was attempting to keep pace with it. I don’t view this as a bad thing.
This dataset includes people like my intern, who left to go join USDS after his internship was up, etc
So there is some amount of flat out silliness here.
It also covers 14 years (2002->2016), and has a fairly small number of people for that number of years.
A significant number are DC people, and, surprisingly, if you want to stay in DC, you are going to work at the government most likely.
During the earlier parts of this timeframe, there was no one other than Google who was local (google opened the office in 2006).
During the middle part, 2006-2013, other tech companies were just staffing up policy orgs.
Over the entire time period, the government is by far the biggest employer in the region.
There were not a lot of even tech companies (let alone local policy orgs for tech companies) in most of that time period, the biggest other one would have been weird things like "livingsocial".
Having been recruiting in DC during the 2006-2012 timeframe , out of the 1000+ resumes i'd reviewed, i'd say 80+% were working at the government.
Like, why is this a conspiracy instead of normal attrition?
In particular: where was it you expected them to go that was more acceptable?
I think you are seriously overestimating the amount of non-governmental jobs they would have been able go to if they wanted to stay local.
It's a little more true now, but even then you'd just see them bounce between tech company policy departments.
Over the same time period, i'm 100% sure as many policy/legal/etc people in MTV/etc went to go work at Facebook, startups, etc (IE whatever the local industry was).
I'm also sure you'd find the same relative number of facebookers/etc in DC (which again, was very small during that time period) left for the administration, etc.
Yeah, this is basically how regulation works. You give whoever a chance to do something reasonable before you bring the hammer down. Threat of regulation is a key part of the process.
Ajit Pai just did this move with robocalls and SHAKEN/STIR:
What is needed are RICO statues not antitrust law. They are clearly engaged in racketeering and cartelization. They follow people around the web and log all user activity to 1e100.net. How can you compete when they illegally eavesdrop on your users ?
Google is the Gambino family of tech, we also have Luchesi and Genovese in the so called FAANG group. They even control the Internet standard groups. Time for inept to be restored to the people.
The mental gymnastics below in the thread where people try to explain why not investigating Google in 2012 was OK and investigating it now is not OK are quite amazing.
Though to be fair, in 2012 Google exerted its monopolistic power far less than it does now.
For the life of me I can't understand why it's good that less than a dozen unelected and non-removable people in this country (Schmidt/Page, Zuck, and the owners of 99% of "independent" media) have the power to decide who wins elections, and what people think about issues.
Distressingly absent from this list is the company that cheerfully collects and sells even more data that Google about the average American's life and collects MUCH more of their money: Amazon.
Everyone who uses AWS essentially gives data signals to Amazon. As they're by far the biggest cloud provider, that's a lot of data. Add that to their physical goods store, their shipping, their payments, their music store, their player apps, their subscription data, their identity and payment data. Amazon's looking at getting into the consumer communications business too.
If I were a bad person asking, "Who's more valuable to Hack for consumer data" I don't know how I could conclude it's anything but Amazon. Google might have your credit card and purchasing patterns, Amazon will. Google might know about your phone, Amazon will.
I may be mistaken but every major cloud provider, from AWS to Azure to Google, has dictated in their SLA that they don't mine your data (as a cloud customer).
The idea that data stored on AWS is equal to data collected by Amazon is ludicrous. There are contracts and laws to govern such relationships. Hundreds of people inside Amazon would know about it, and any one of them could expose them to existentially threatening lawsuits whenever they are even slightly upset with their employer.
Maybe not more data, but perhaps more important data?
"Things you've bought before or looked into buying before" seems like much more useful data to sell ads than "non-shopping things you've searched for." It's definitely a higher signal to noise ratio.
This is true for gmail users, which is about half of the email market in the US. Amazon by dollars has over half the ecommerce market, but by any intelligence we have on sales sales they're much closer to 80%.
Even if Google can get some of that data, its still Amazon's data, Google just happens to get some of it.
Any aggregation or segmentation of emails by ML/AI algorithms, as your article talks about, is analogous to having smarter filters in your inbox. It's tech illiteracy to confuse these perception NNs with data mining for business purposes.
Your employer is collecting this data right now, as my link points out. And it's actually gotten better at it in the last few months, as I purged all of my purchases from Gmail that it detected, and then a few weeks later, it found more, as they'd refined their ability to mine more transactional emails.
It is absolutely mining email, and it's extracting purchase data from it, that isn't even used in Gmail or revealed to users in any visible context, it's buried in settings. What Google uses it for? I don't know, as you said, they claimed they stopped using Gmail data for ad targeting purposes two years ago. But they're definitely working on extracting this very valuable and marketable data... for some reason.
Is it possible that Google generically collects user purchase data, including from Gmail, and then whilst not using "Gmail data" for ad targeting, it does use the "purchase data" which has been generically made part of a user's Google profile? That'd be splitting hairs real close, but it'd probably be good enough for the lawyers.
Again, last time you doxxed me on HN I told you my profile on HN, which you looked at, says my opinions are my own and do not reflect any organization.
It's technical illiteracy to confuse parsing and filtering with data mining for ads. Read the article, or don't, this is just a comment.
I recognize the difference, but they're parsing and filtering the most valuable advertising data, and then just... shoving it in settings and doing nothing with it? There's no clear reason why Google is collecting purchase data from Gmail, and actively working on refining the code used for it. If you look at my comment that you originally responded to, I did not say they used it for ad targeting, merely that they collected it, which is true. Even if they do not use it for ad targeting, the only purpose your article states they won't use that data, it's still very valuable research data to collect.
Not only that, but as the articles about purchase data parsing states, you can't even opt out of it or remove items from Google's purchase history information except to delete the emails themselves. Which, for people entrusting their communications to Gmail, is a drastic step. It's surprising to even have a "remove" button, but for it then to tell you, in order to do so, you have to delete your emails.
As an aside, it's not doxxing someone when you post as your real name, and publish your employer publicly under the same name. The "my opinions are my own" line is a release of Google's legal liability for what you say, which is why a lot of employers suggest or require similar statements. However, it's psychologically impossible for your opinions to not be swayed by the employer who pays you and whom you spend a large percentage of your time with, regardless of whether or not you are "representing" them officially or not.
> Is it possible that Google generically collects user purchase data, including from Gmail, and then whilst not using "Gmail data" for ad targeting, it does use the "purchase data" which has been generically made part of a user's Google profile?
Probably not. Not only because I don't think the courts would agree with that division being real. But also because it's absurdly expensive compared to just purchasing the data from CC providers which explicitly retain the right to sell your transaction history.
I have no special knowledge of why they're doing that, but I have suspicions and they're mostly about enabling the exact same sort of stuff I lacked the means to enable at my fintech startup.
Unless subpoenaed, I doubt they do much more than collect access logs, and even then, I doubt they use those logs for anything outside AWS operations. If they were caught doing this, it would massively erode trust with AWS customers.
What they do with Amazon basics is ripe for antitrust. Using purchase data to find profitable products, and making a basic version of it which they then rank at the top.
Is Amazon Basics any different than any other store brand? It's not like national retailers before amazon were just throwing darts at a printout of their catalog.
I don't understand how Amazon is even in the anti-trust docket. They own like one tiny ass grocery chain, and an online market dwarfed by large retailers. Sure, they have a near monopoly on eBooks, but I don't see how you make the case they used that to break into the discount microfiber towels market.
Amazon does not collect more data than Google does, even by your own definition. In fact, Google uses Amazon to collect even more information than they do innately by mining Gmail for purchase receipts.
Amazon purchases your credit card purchase history from major CC providers, likely as part of reciprocity agreement. They know more about you thank you think.
Source: I was retargeted on Amazon for an impulse buy of an obscure item from Macy's. My CC was the only way to join my data.
Look, I get it — the issues with Google, Facebook, Amazon. But I can’t help but think about how AT&T and other ISPs banded together to claim they shouldn’t be regulated because they are Internet companies just like FANG during the Net Neutrality discussions. When I see just how bad ISPs are acting, in lack of competition, price gouging, content ownership, data monitoring, it really seems they were successful in shifting the focus to FANG and convincing everyone to forget about Net Neutrality.
This is not meant to whataboutism, but the truth is the public/news cycles can only handle so many “tech” related items at one time. People are not “locked in” to any of the FANG companies nearly as much as they are their physical ISPs where they really do not have an option.
It shouldn't be a whataboutism, it's true. They gave too much of a pass to ISPs and that needs to stop. But it doesn't stop by relaxing on tech companies like Google, that would only further normalize it.
I think more importantly, ISPs made a (in my opinion, bullshit) free market argument that resonated with conservatives. At the same time, FANG made themselves an enemy of conservatives. Conservatives are now in power.
You could make the free market argument here too, but it won't appeal to them. Conservatives have a sort of pact with business interests that are otherwise neutral on social issues. They can look after each other because neither care much about the other's priorities. FANG are not reliably neutral in that same way, they are more like Hollywood in terms of "values". Of course their money is just as good as anyone else's and conservatives will take a lot of it where there is a tactical advantage but there can't be a long-term alliance.
You're right, ISP monopolies are a bigger antitrust issue. People are overwhelmingly pro net-neutrality
They will take this action against Google, and meanwhile, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts will continue to take in an average of $100 per customer per month.
This is, quite nakedly, Comcast influencing action against Google for trying to compete in broadband.
It is convenient that Comcast owns NBC while lobbying government for legislation it wants to see.
IDK. Maybe this is not totally relevant, and maybe it's not a valid counterpoint, but I find it interesting that the market capitalizations of AT&T, Comcast and Charter Communications combined are roughly $200 billion less than Alphabet alone.
As an occasional content creator it's impossible not to be aware that the ISPs can limit access to the bandwidth I need, while any of the platforms I might use - PayPal, Ebay, Google/YouTube, Amazon, Apple, even Etsy - can kill an income stream at any time and keep all my earnings just because they want to, with no convincing good-faith resolution procedures and no (affordable) recourse.
> any of the platforms I might use - ... - can kill an income stream at any time
Being able to access the internet at a competitive rate is more important IMO. FANG platforms depend on your ability to reach them.
Net neutrality, I'm convinced, is one of the only unifying political issues today. Breaking up Google isn't going to make people forget the expensive, low quality service from monopolistic taxpayer-funded broadband networks.
You still have a choice about what sites you visit. Maybe FANG just provide a great value for people so they choose them more often. Most people don’t have a choice in what ISP they can use.
Not only the US is affected by Google's actions and ISPs are not evil everywhere. This is why Google is the more important issue from the perspective of the rest of the world. This is a transnational issue.
Just in case one of the downvoters stumbles upon this again, I'd appreciate your reasoning. What part of what I said is untrue (assuming this is the reason you downvoted)?
If, and it is an impossible if, the big nine or ten AI companies (mostly in USA and China) could be split into smaller companies like Judge Green did to AT&T so many years ago, then, I think that would overall be a good thing.
However, it is not right for the large companies in just one country to be split up.
Piketty in Capital in the 21st Century makes good points on how mass amounts of capital earn more money than mass amounts of labor. It is the same winner take all situation in high tech.
It is easy conceptually: governments just need to apply the law fairly. But in my country (USA) corporate interests have almost totally co-opted both main political parties and control most of the regulatory institutions.
Google isn’t a monopoly and using a competing search engine is quite easy.
Pretty sad that providing an excellent service that customers love is seen as a bad thing, especially on HN. Sad bitter people celebrating the thought of Google being punished for being at the top of their game... get a life.
I feel like about 2/3rds of hn commentators are going to be very disappointed when we learn this investigation is whether it's an antitrust violation to regularly list new york times and cnn news results above breitbart's.
The Trump administration has threatened this a couple of times now...
edit: I'm not sure why this is less plausible than the Obama white house personally interceding on the earlier case because they sought Google's "talking points"
439 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 294 ms ] threadAnd now let's listen to the Google fans and apologists about how everything is just one click away...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm not a Google fan and welcome this investigation but you need perspective.
Removing competition is literally the most anticompetitive thing you can do. Like definitionally.
That’s why all major (edit: US) acquisitions take months to years to get approval from the SEC.
What is supposed to happen to competitors that are actually less efficient and/or produce less appealing products? Do people really expect “competition” to mean a perpetual exact tie between two or more competitors?
Well first off, predatory pricing is a thing, where competition shuts down because a market participant is deliberately losing money to gain market share in hopes of raising prices after everyone else gives up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing#United_State...
But a competitor doesn't have to shut down to be bought out. In fact, why would a company ever buy a competitor who's only alternative is shutting down? Seems far simpler to buy the useful assets from the bankruptcy. Here's one possibility I've seen: an inefficient incumbent buys a startup that has been winning procurement bids away from them lately. They have deep pockets from all the contracts not yet up for renewal, and can afford to buy the company now while they only have a few source of cash flow. End result is that prices remain high, and the borg lives on a little bit less cash flow until the contracts they just bought are up for renegotiation.
> What is supposed to happen to competitors that are actually less efficient and/or produce less appealing products?
They sell less, and make changes. Maybe they drop prices, invest in efficiency or pursue some differentiation strategy. It doesn't need to be a 50/50 but winner-take-all markets should not be surprised when regulators come knocking.
I don't know if this has been considered for these companies, but I suspect it may have been bypassed. At the very least, that's what an investigation would determine.
YouTube, Pinterest, Snapchat, Linkedin, Reddit, Twitch are all major social networks and there are scores of smaller ones. In search it is basically just Google and Bing.
After FB manages these acquisitions well, we are now like "FB is evil and anti-competitive".
Are different vocal minorities loudest at different times?
I’m not convinced people is a coherent group.
Does the fact that some people were mocking X at some point in the past negate the validity of antitrust cases against X for ever?
If Google is bad for using AMP to try and drive publishers to AMP hosting, then how is Amazon not even worse for ramming crazy terms down publisher's throats while buying or undercutting every other shipping and shopping system in the country? Amazon's pretty much dismantled and eaten the entire American book industry, it's in mid gulp of the American consumer shipping industry, it's already business critical via AWS for a majority of American businesses, and now it's turning to selling "AI" products to government and law enforcement.
As for Facebook, I think maybe Facebook isn't a monopoly. But they shouldn't be allowed to buy Youtube or Twitter.
Yup. Amazon can legitimately respond to trust and monopoly allegations with "Walmart, Azure, GCP, and Netflix."
The most recent FT Alphachat podcast with an official from the Fed talks about Uber this way: Uber (and Lyft) are taking money from somewhere and undercutting the classical taxi business. This is a problem for competition. They could feasibly try to run losses until 'regular cabs are pushed out' (or largely) and then lock up the business.
Amazon can do this with any number of products, they can do it to shipping companies, to grocers.
More abstractly, Google does it with mobile OS, possibly browsers etc..
In our new world of globalization, it's a serious problem.
All this money from Saudi Arabia, under the control of Softbank is coming back and just throwing markets upside down in what is arguably tantamount to 'dumping' which is a bad business practice generally.
Even we work is like this - it's losing tons of money, ultimately selling stuff below market value.
In some cases it's much more clear than others, but it's going to pose a problem.
This issue very well highlights the problematic idea that business is about 'better products and service' or even 'free markets' due to the fact that so much cash provides leverage that distorts markets quite heavily.
Alphachat with Robert Kapla @ FT:
https://ftalphaville.ft.com/series/Alphachat
> :)
https://twitter.com/lutherlowe/status/1134621790720995328
Maybe yelp had to resort to these monetizing tactics because their results were buried by google promoting their own business-ratings copy-cat service?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-u-s-antitrust-probe-...
I think YT just in the last couple of years went into the black. That’s a lot of bandwidth and they don’t have as many paying subscribers as NFx.
Not a lot of detail.
"I'm worried that if the rest of America knew what we were actually doing here they would literally come here and kill us..."
It's just getting scary at this point.
I mean I would guess it's pretty much yeah we have everything you have ever typed into Android, almost every site you have visited, a detailed dossier of your porn habits, all your Google Home conversations... All your e-mails. List of your friends. Your driving habits. And we've been pretty much trying to kill all our competition pretending like there are bugs in our software when often it's been intentional... oh and we've been sharing everything with the government so it's been looking the other way.
That being said, it will be interesting to see what comes out of this investigation. I'm curious to know what practices they are going to zero in on. No company should be immune to the law.
I don't like the general tone, but agree with the sentiment, and it seems tough to share without addressing the user personally, but was that it?
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It destroys intellectual curiosity, which the site exists for."
Perhaps it would help to read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20013092 in addition to the site guidelines.
I've seen a lot of Googlers coming here lately, professing to be Googlers and stating "this hasn't been my experience".
Asked genuinely: as someone inside the company-with much better access to sentiment, opinion and company culture than I could ever hope to have, is Google truly that open and transparent to employees that you actually had an expectation to see this sentiment "expressed" elsewhere?
(I would pose a similar to question to other FAANG employees who do the "as an employee of faang[]:")
"I'm worried that if the rest of America knew what we were actually doing here they would literally come here and kill us..."
This is a VERY specific and very interesting response to the goings on of your employer. My company frequently has feedback surveys prompted by HR for employee satisfaction, I still hear through back-channel mediums a lot of gripes and kvetches that were uttered over libations with the understanding that the discussion doesn't leave the bar.
I'm inquiring how insulated individuals at Google are from even that level of 'resentment' born dialogue between colleagues and coworkers.
I think your question was answered, but you don't really believe it, because it's difficult to believe.
I've heard all this and more. But one opinion I have never heard is that increased visibility into our operations would make people trust us less or dislike us more. I cannot see how anyone could believe that who is familiar with both the internal workings of the company and the external views of it.
Do the ends justify the means? Maybe. Is this causing an unfortunate precedent to be set? Maybe, too.
But the thing we should be concerned with is how the government goes about solving this anti-competitive issue. A breakup is not in the cards since Google is not a monopoly. So the fact that the justice dept has jurisdiction here does not bode well for us. It likely means any remedies will be within the parameters of the current regulatory regime. But what we as consumers really need is a new regulatory regime. What do I mean by that? Well, like the Microsoft case, they may "solve" this whole issue of anti-competitive practices by simply obliging google to allow everyone access to their 'OS', so to speak.
But in this case the 'OS' would effectively be their data.
Which is our data.
Which would be very bad news for us.
All of a sudden, hundreds of companies, all with guaranteed access to our data. Basically, imagine the privacy equivalent of a 9mm round being turned into a shotgun blast for everyone not fortunate enough to be born an EU citizen. (GDPR)
What we really need is a GDPR, not really sanctions against Google. But DOJ can only give us sanctions. I'm starting to believe that somewhere deep in the bowels of the government, there is an extreme aversion to any potential action that might lead to making commerce based privacy infractions illegal.
I'm not trying to convince you and HN users to trust Google (which seems to be impossible anyway), but at least for more than 5 years there has been a strong incentive structure for not doing something that might make "the rest of America would literally come to Google and kill them". I think this investigation would enhance this structure even further, which might be a good thing since there's still room to improve especially for keeping high level executives in check.
I am sure they do review things quite carefully to avoid something too obviously illegal. But anything more than that? Color me skeptical.
From the outside, it's doubtful that this team exists at all. Or if they do, they must watch YouTube all day instead of doing their jobs, because Google is getting better and better at compromising privacy, thanks to fancy designs/dark patterns: https://www.forbrukerradet.no/undersokelse/2018/every-step-y...
It looks to me like you have no clue what your own company's doing but hurry nevertheless to defend them.
You're suggesting that the situation is getting worse, which I don't really see much clues from the linked report, though I don't want to spend my weekend on scrutinizing 44 pages report. I don't work for Maps, but AFAIK it used to track you silently and didn't give you control on user history. But now at least it tries to get a consent (even though it's admittedly just a nominal action) and give you some amount of control on your data, which is better than typical web practice on average. Can you explain why this should be considered as going toward "dark patterns"? All those works were strongly pushed by Privacy team. I don't expect you to praise their works, but you still don't have to use that level of derogatory words as well.
I don't necessarily deny that Google's previous (and probably current) business practice has been done in a quite privacy-invasive way. That needs to be corrected. But there's much more things to be considered as well, which slows down the pace for a good reason. So the best thing Google can do is improving the situation carefully rather than breaking everything by changing the fundamental at once.
Let me give you a super simplified example of ads; which privacy invasive practice has gone too far. But it's also true that this has powered the web ecosystem for a decade. Any kind of significant updates would lead to direct revenue impacts on not only Google but publishers and advertisers. This is real existential threats to them; surprisingly many publishers and creators solely depends on ads revenue. There are also indirect impacts on users via garbage ads and more pay-walled contents. Of course, I know what would typical HN user's answer be; "I would rather choose garbage ads than tracking and I will pay money!" But the history shows that most of attempts to prove this kind of people are significant has miserably failed (except very few examples, such as NYT) including Google's own.
BTW, one irrelevant stuff; is there anyone who have a concrete, feasible business proposal to materialize this no-ads-willing-to-pay demands into the reality? Then try a business and be the next Google/Facebook/Amazon. I'm serious. I always have been thinking about a way to do this so the web can run without ads, but because of Dunning-Kruger effect, I'm getting less and less confident about this idea :)
Just do a search for "dark pattern" + Google on HN.
Your business model is at odds with privacy, you have that much figured out. But for unknown reasons you seem to think that Google can win against market forces and implement privacy-maintaining SW solutions.
That is disproven by Google's entire history. It's gotten particularly clear lately with AMP & Chrome.
One more thing: the world doesn't owe Google a business model. The world can survive just fine without internet ads, Google, Facebook and Amazon.
Corporate taxes they pay on profits if you invest a ton you can deduct it from profits. Nothing nefarious going on here.
One's definition of "deductions" and "profits" can, of course, depend on how much one spends on tax lawyers, one's appetite for testing the untested boundaries of the relevant tax laws, and one's willingness to do fun and interesting things with structuring international subsidiaries.
The ultimate result may or may not correlate with what the average citizen would accept as legitimate. Whether you think this is okay is a matter of opinion.
Tax laws are what you're looking to change.
Google's corporate income tax rate in 2018 was 11.9% (2017 had an abnormally high domestic tax payment due to repatriation accounting; 2016 had a 19% rate). About 1/2 of their income taxes are paid domestically.
Europe's average corporate income tax rate in 2018 was 18%, the EU was 21%, the world was 23%. There are eight European nations with corporate income tax rates equal to or lower than what Google and Facebook are paying.
Their rates are low, no doubt about it. They're neither zero (paying no taxes), nor shockingly low given the very low tax rate jurisdictions available to them (eg in Europe).
Amazon is however avoiding taxes successfully. They've managed to temporarily delay the tax hit on their new profit machine. That won't last much longer.
Doubt it'll happen in this case...people want blood from Google or FB, and they're going to get it.
Other commenters had it right, though - ISPs, and lobbyists should be hanging next to them.
I also very much hope FB is next.
I think you meant "I don't want them found guilty" which is a different thing. If you really think there is no case to answer I don't think you understand what an antitrust case is about. It's about market dominance and anti competitive behaviour. Something alphabet has already demonstrated they are capable of doing, as in when google, Facebook and apple agreed not to poach Staff and altered the pay rates accordingly, something of which they have already been found guilty.
If this goes to a jury, Google will definitely get off. I seriously hope that doesn't happen.
I'm not saying that I think Google is innocent but often the evidence is very difficult for the lay person to interpret (especially when it is absent).
Which is exactly why they'd get off.
It looks like they also make other browsers pay for ads while they post their own ads for "Google's Official Browser" at no cost:
https://imgur.com/a/exzor1l
https://i.imgur.com/iwymopx.png
Sometimes it's in a new top bar on the page but cannot remember if that's only on Gmail.
Damn, that is some duplicitous ad copy, especially in light of recent events.
Every time I see that pop up, I think “does it block pop ups like this?”
Honestly, I see no difference between that scenario and this. If anything, Google has been a lot more guilty than for just monopolizing on a browser here.
Chrome wasn't seemingly to target anyone. Google generally makes more money if people use the internet more, so spending to make browsers better has some obvious benefits.
One example among the many things the court found they did was to tell OEMs that they wouldn't license Windows to them if they _also_ included Netscape preinstalled in their computers.
The stated purpose, from internal emails, was to prevent Java from becoming the de-facto API for writing applications, which at the time was win32. This was a gigantic barrier of entry that protected Windows' monopoly and they did all those shady things to keep it raised.
> The Sherman Act broadly prohibits (1) anticompetitive agreements and (2) unilateral conduct that monopolizes or attempts to monopolize the relevant market.
You don’t have to get very abstract at all to see how Google may violating it. Microsoft lost their antitrust case in regards to how they distributed Internet Explorer, another free product.
From 2014 though.
defaults write com.apple.coreservices.uiagent CSUIRecommendSafariNextNotificationDate -date 2050-01-01T00:00:00Z
However, if you like to disable the notifications: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/153379/how-do-you-...
Been going on for a year now.
* If you type Chrome into Bing you'll get a full page ad urging you not to switch.
* If you try to switch to use Chrome as your default browser it will ask you if you're really sure and you have to click the tiny text to actually switch.
* Edge and Windows 10 will send you notifications about Edge being the recommended browser and it's speed/security/whatever.
* If you install Adobe Reader and check "set as my default PDF reader" Windows 10 will send you a notification saying that "there's something wrong with your default reader app" and set it back to Edge.
* In the start menu Edge gets special treatment by having flavor text that says it's the Microsoft recommended browser.
* You have to use 3rd pary hacks to get the start menu search to use anything other than Edge & Bing.
* Microsoft teated a feature on insider builds which intercepted the installers for Chrome and Firefox and displayed a pop-up asking them to use Edge instead.
* Before they got backlash for it, once you switched your default browser to something not Edge Windows would open up your new browser to an ad for Edge.
To what extent does antitrust law require specific intentional or knowing conduct? Is there some "knew or should have known" standard that would require Google to explain why they didn't anticipate or investigate some suspiciously favorable placement of Google products/services/affiliates? Or can Google basically shrug and say "algorithm" a lot and the Justice Department would have an uphill battle to prove intent?
But historically anti-trust suits have usually been about what happens when negative sentiment towards American mega-corporations grows too high. Essentially the rules are different for big companies. In reality, most of the things companies need to do to avoid anti-trust cases are performative. Even more ironically, the super rich at the tops of corporate pyramids often end up profiting from these sorts of actions. All an anti-trust suit can do is mandate companies fracture into multiple legal entities. Usually the same owners retain their ownership, only now over dozens or more of companies which each individually pay upwards.
What's even more distressing about these laws is that they're quite unusable against entities that are at least as frightening, like Amazon (and historically Walmart). Amazon is the omni-company, and now they're gonna get into consumer telecom too. And because they're lateral as opposed to vertical and they choked out the competition during a recession, they don't even have to pretend the're offering a square deal to their resellers.
But intent evidence is not required. A corporation doesn't have a state of mind. Also, wanting to beat your competitors is fine (and good). So it's tricky to distinguish bad intent from good intent.
> search quality in general does not use Google Analytics in ranking
> it won't affect your ranking
E.g. Being able to "blacklist" certain domains from results.
Same thing applies to youtube. You can not permanently block/remove/disable channels from being present in the content results/feed.
I think that deep-down Google high-ups "know" that giving some of these "basic" usability features would essentially disable their control of the content that they push to you. E.g. imagine publicly-shared black-lists of bad domains and bad channels that one could subscribe to. Similar to the ad blockings lists that have generated a bit of a thriving ecosystem. I.e. smart people would eventually use this basic "building block" to build content-control that would be more decentralized/democratic and really personal.
https://searchengineland.com/another-court-affirms-googles-f...
If you don't like their free no lock in service go elsewhere, and that's why there is no sherman act case here, which is why if the DOJ actually does anything here it would be a waste of time and resources.
The argument here is its unfair to bias ranking towards a preferred format. In this case, something about excluding competitors, except AMP is completely open-source[1] so...?
The counterargument is yes you can, because it's your pamphlet/newspaper/website and you're the editor, not the government.
[1] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml
Of course as a consumer, I don't really care whether it's some random company or Google who gets to violate my privacy, and I especially couldn't care less about lack of innovation in the privacy violation business, so I think the antitrust angle here is pretty slim.
[1] https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
Go on... example?
https://www.rbr.com/six-broadcast-tv-groups-settle-doj-antit...
No one is saying these broadcast groups don't have 1st amendment rights, just that they were going about it in an anti-competitive way.
The radio stations weren't broadcasting their prices to consumers, but secretly communicating with competitors to form a cartel, which is forbidden. Doesn't matter if they were radio stations or grocery stores.
You're describing any business, that's how business works.
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
Warren would appoint regulators who would reverse some of the biggest tech mergers that have taken place in recent years. That would mean the reversal of Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods and Zappos, Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram, and Google’s acquisition of Waze, Nest, and DoubleClick.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/8/18256192/el...
i figured mentioning a proponent of big tech breakup with valid legal credentials and a different political axe to grind might be useful evidence in deciding whether the antitrust case had any merit.
(i believe the Vox article is trying to be serious as well.)
Are you showing your age?
Remove the cause and not the symptoms!
Basically you have a company and then people like us can upvote areas we think companies are breaking the law.
Anyway the article is quite scarce and the source is the WSJ so they might be trying to amplify some stuff or even advocate for it.
The DOJ enforces the sherman act, which is useless here (no consumer harm).
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-emails-adtrader-lawsu...
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/adsense-lawsuit/248135/
What company do we know that makes some the most complex web sites out there and would really benefit if the web had... I dunno WebGL so they could make a smooth mapping site, maybe with a 3D mode. Or a new version of HTTP so their sites load faster. Or a new version of TCP that works better on mobile. Or native web components that makes their web framework faster. Or HTML video so their video streaming site is more reliable.
I'll give you a hint - it starts with "Googl".
They created Chrome because IE was holding them back. Not to kill as blockers (did IE ever even support as blockers). Some people here don't use their brains...
Also when Chrome was released IE still had a 60% market share. You can't ignore that.
Also, I was not ignoring that IE had 60% market share. That's perfectly in line with what I said, as that market share was in fact shrinking without Chrome.
But since you asked...
https://bgr.com/2019/05/31/google-chrome-update-ad-blockers-...
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evy53j/google-struggles-t...
https://9to5google.com/2019/05/29/chrome-ad-blocking-enterpr...
But I mean, that was a 2 second search. Citations are indeed hard to come by...
I still don’t think the browser market is a good example right now.
There’s far better examples than this.
Now I fear Firefox has a similar sisyphean task at hand, trying to keep their browser usable on google services. And for many of the users, that is same as usability of the browser as a whole.
[1]https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/microsoft_on_the_issues/...
Also recall that mobile carriers and OEMs were opposed to Android because it would further degrade their ability to create walled gardens. The carriers lost control of apps, not for lack of trying. Imagine what a world that would be.
The FANG succeed largely instead of a carrier-controlled mobile ecosystem.
You may think that replaces one kind of oppression with another, but if you weaken the internet platforms, you strengthen the carriers who are now off the net neutrality leash, and who see 5G as an opportunity to gain control of a lot of what we now enjoy as an open internet.
I agree with the other claims (about Microsoft killing Windows Phone through their own actions and choices), however this one is a bit weird. Apple gave essentially no ground to carriers, which was a huge change. Which is why carriers all embraced Android, at a time when it was horribly uncompetitive, because it returned control to them, letting them preload any nonsense they wanted, making it undeletable, etc.
Apple updates come through Apple alone. If you have a Samsung phone on a carrier, they still matriculate through your carrier.
Add that of the 30% cut that the Play Store takes for apps and games, historically one half of that went to the carriers (it was always very nebulous, but again was one of the reasons carriers pushed Android when it was not good).
Android was in fact an alternative to iPhone. Google was more amenable to carrier and OEM mods to Android and third-party app stores. But carriers still were hoping the traditional OEM and app store walled gardens would hold, and Apple could be confined to high-end customers.
App store revenue, at that time, was still small for both the carriers' walled garden and for Apple. It was more a matter of control.
Even I was a happy WP user and but I can't be sure how much of my satisfaction was out of choice-supportive bias.
[1] https://youtu.be/SADDJY7e7cM
>When the Federal Trade Commission neared a momentous decision on whether to charge Google with violating antitrust laws in January 2013, the White House was watching closely.
New emails uncovered by the Campaign for Accountability, a public interest watchdog organization, show that a White House advisor met with top Google lobbyist Johanna Shelton and top Google antitrust counsel Matthew Bye twice in the weeks before the FTC announcement.
And minutes prior to the final decision – in which FTC commissioners took the unusual step of overriding their staff’s recommendation to sue, and voted to settle the case instead – the White House official even sought Google’s talking points in the matter.
https://theintercept.com/2016/08/18/white-house-official-coz...
Regardless, the FTC would have had a much better chance than the DOJ as they have specific broad powers more suitable to this case.
Suffice to say, they have a lot less allies in DC this year, and even Democrats are starting to look negatively on them now.
https://qz.com/823922/eric-schmidt-played-a-crucial-role-in-...
The idea that he utilized Google resources to do the same for Obama while he had more direct influence over Google isn't a crazy idea.
Google has been providing free services to campaigns it wants to help for over a decade, in the open. This started when Schmidt was CEO.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118489524982572543
The Obama campaign was the first to really realize the importance of IT infrastructure, _and_ their whole shtick (more or less neoliberalism with a friendly face) aligns really well with Google's political goals.
I'm not really sure why you seem to think that this is some conspiracy theory, when everyone involved is openly talking about it.
The two most popular are https://opensource.google.com/docs/releasing/ (which is for open source code, with (C) Google, because with open source you mostly don't have to care much about that line) and https://opensource.google.com/docs/iarc/ (author retains copyright, no open source requirement or association with Google at all).
IARC should be quite suitable for projects on "contentious" topics like politics or religion: Google generally stays clear of these topics (so there won't be a conflict of interest in building something like that, as Google just isn't active in that market), and the company won't have to deal with being associated with one team (versus all the others) through some side hustle they can barely control.
(Disclosure: working at Google, but far from the licensing folks. I found them reasonable to argue with, though.)
It's interesting people here are calling this a "conspiracy theory" when I guarantee you there are hundreds if not thousands of posters here who remember the TGIF and groups discussions where this came up.
>And Google is incorporated in California, which has strict laws that employees are allowed to develop what they like when they're not on the clock using company resources.
Not really. Try to develop a search engine in your spare time and see what happens.
>The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday faced renewed questions about its handling of its antitrust investigation into Google, after documents revealed that an internal report had recommended stronger action.
The 2012 report, from the agency’s bureau of competition, said that the agency should sue the Internet search company for anticompetitive practices, according to several people who saw the report but would speak about it only under the condition of anonymity. At least one other staff report, they said, recommended not to pursue a lawsuit. In early 2013, the agency unanimously voted not to bring charges after an investigation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/technology/take-google-to...
Google has already lost several antitrust actions in the EU. It's not difficult to imagine that the investigation by FTC career officials found sufficient evidence of wrongdoing to recommend taking action.
That's because (at least in the number of times i've been invited to meetings with these sorts of regulators) the relevant folks are not idiots, and in fact are trying to understand all sides of the issue before deciding what they should do.
This is actually what you want them to do, as there are rarely, if ever, truly disinterested parties in these sorts of things.
As an aside, i'm pretty sure Matthew was not the top antitrust counsel at Google at the time. I believe it was Nikhil Shanbhag. Job titles on linkedin seem to confirm my recollection.
Talking to the police before you get arrested is just plain stupid. Let the lawyer do the talking. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRNc3Qic-Ks
He is also a laywer, see his profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rayiner
Rayiner may be factually correct, but his comment normalized the great injustice of the situation.
Kid gets caught with a little pot at a parade, and the cops slam his ass to the ground and book him.
Google screws millions and millions daily, and they get a letter.
Lawyers are experts in law... not so much with justice.
Do you have anything substantive to add to the conversation? Do you want to disagree with anything I said?
In practice, my comment comes more from being in DC for 7 years, not for working for any company.
What i said applies across just about every media outlet these days. Every unnamed white house advisor (sometimes even "senior advisor", because why not!) who isn't an "anonymous source" is usually unnamed because otherwise you'd be able to point out their job title matches what they were doing and is unrelated to the white house (or their attachment to the white house is "tenuous at best").
It's true the white house sometimes has people with the job title "advisor" in it, but you will notice when articles mention real names, if you were to go looking, you'd see that was usually their real title (or they failed at fact checking).
That's not just the white house either. Random low level people at companies become "senior executives", etc.
This even spreads, unfortunately, using those things as sources, and later often becomes "truth".
Here, i'll take a totally non-political thing as an example for you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Fredinburg (RIP) was a great person and all around good guy (IME), but he was 100% not a google executive. This is an objective fact, by any definition of executive (including Google's). You can see the sources cited for these claims are news articles.
All of which, in order to play up their narrative on a tragedy, decided to give him that title (and various others!)[1]
Thinking that anything else here is happening, in this, or really any other situation, is just naive (or gross application of variants of gell-mann amnesia).
In the situation in the original article, do you seriously believe that if the current administration had the chance to nail a real former obama whitehouse advisor doing something illegal or untoward, they wouldn't jump at the chance do it?
It's not like they don't have white house visitor logs and plenty of people around the DOJ/FTC/etc who can tell them what happened!
[1] As an aside, i find it pretty sad that it appears people find "google executive" to be a more impressive/etc way to memorialize someone than "good person". If i pass away in a news-worthy event, can y'all make sure it says "good father" or something.
This is the advisor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._David_Edelman
See also https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/author/r-david-ede...
It's not like he was Secretary of State but he also wasn't just an intern.
>The Campaign for Accountability (CFA) this week launched the first two of its Google Transparency Projects. One of the projects – a visualisation of the revolving door between Google, the White House and US government agencies – is so dense, the website suggests viewing it on a desktop display.
As well as Googlers leaving the ad giant to join the administration, there’s also a heavy traffic in the other direction, with federal employees leaving to join Google. The project documents 61 staff taking key public positions after leaving Google, or firms working closely with Google, and 171 leaving public office to join [Google].
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/29/google_transparency...
The DoJ and other state legal offices have rules about excusing prosecutors from cases but this one seems to not be seen as an issue at these regulatory and broader judicial agencies.
This should matter considering the US is disparaging China for having private companies backed by the powerful government bodies, operating under a different set of rules than everyone else.
Anti-trust is about companies using their market power to exclude rivals, raise prices, and hurt consumers. It's not about consumers overwhelmingly choosing a product because they like it more.
Can anyone really say that Google's practices are more anti-competitive than, say, the dominant players in broadband or health insurance or wireless telecom or household appliances?
Google's close ties with the Obama administration makes the Trump administration suspicious!
The truth is that the Obama administration was one of the most corrupt in US history. https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
So, there is no swing in policy, at least among the career officials.
The Obama administration shut down and buried the previous FTC investigation. I'd guess not just because of lobbying, but also because google was nice enough to allow a ton of google employees to take some "vacations" to work for the Obama campaign for a bunch of months, and the likes of Eric Schmidt being chummy with Obama[1].
The current investigation is probably motivated not just by those career bureaucrats who had their previous investigation shut down, but also by the Trump administration wanting to hurt SV and Google in particular for being too friendly with Democrats, and to put those social media companies (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter) on notice not to "prosecute" and ban conservatives on their platforms (at leas that's what Trump and a lot of "conservatives" say is happening).
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/06/obamas-...
It was the political appointees (from both parties) who shut their recommendation that the FTC begin an antitrust action down.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2013/01/googl...
So what was this "settlement"? Google promised to be nicer and said mea culpa a bunch of times. They did not pay a fine, did not agree to any hard regulations that would carry a penalty if violated, they did not pay any compensation to the entities they kinda admitted they wronged.
With Microsoft there were clear injured parties: Netscape, Samba, WordPerfect, and those results created a chilling effect around Windows.
From a health-of-the-system perspective it really should be intolerable that a few large closed-garden platforms control the flow of information. Information monocultures are a threat to everyone, even if one partisan group feels more threatened than the other at any one time.
I happily take the market-efficiency position on most debates, but the risk of Google being anything but neutral is worrying. They appear to have a political bias in their employee base and are under pressure to make judgements about fact v. fiction (might even be an inherent requirement of choosing a sort order for search results) - that is a position somewhat similar to a conventional media organisation.
I support the concept of media being a special case where the risk of an information monoculture outweighs the damage of being inefficient. Laws that basically make it impossible for one media source to control a market are fine. I'd like to see internet search designated as a market where there legally can't be one dominant player, and details get sorted out as best can be done.
Maybe that is already how the market is, I don't know. There are many alternatives not controlled by Google. But something even stronger than antitrust seems appropriate as a matter of law, even if we don't apply it today. I can't see how a platform like Google can be neutral given the ongoing partisan extremes that have developed in American politics and Google's connections to the Democrats.
Apps and games are media. In 2019, that's a glaring truth which is obvious to many in the industry. It's just that society and the culture haven't caught up with technological reality yet.
And that's not what the charges are about either. You're making it way too simplistic. Google has been involved in actual anti-competitive actions, for which they've already been found guilty in Europe that had nothing to do with "users liking their service more" - Google actually downranked competition in the search engine, and other stuff like that.
There even was a story a while ago on HN about ProtonMail being essentially shadowbanned from Google search for the term "encrypted email" for a year before they made a big scandal about it and Google "admitted its error" (the same bullshit excuse Facebook uses every time it's caught tracking users in a new and more nefarious way).
Also, I can't be bothered to look for a link now, but there is a good story out there about how Google killed a map competitor in the US around that time, too (Skyhook was it?). Once again - nothing to do with "users liking Google's maps more" -- Google took real action to prevent a competitor from existing in the market place.
It's also a super-duper coincidence that Eric Schmidt started working for the Pentagon, while also remaining on Google's board and some kind of technical executive, too, not long before Google started working with the Pentagon on Project Maven.
Either people don't want to admit what's happening or they are being way too naive when they see all of this and think it's "nothing but a coincidence". It was well known that Schmidt was one of Obama's besties at the time. And Google is ranking very high in its lobbying efforts, too.
I may not like it, but it's not an anti-trust concern.
> Google started working with the Pentagon on Project Maven
Google shut this down under pressure from employees. Also, not an anti-trust concern.
> Schmidt was one of Obama's besties
Executives at right-wing media are besties with the current president, but that shouldn't result in a future administration launching anti-trust actions against their firms.
> encrypted mail, Skyhook, etc.
Sounds pretty tenuous, but if there's something here roughly equivalent severity to other anti-trust issues then sure, investigate that.
But it looks to me like a piddling pretext to punish perceived political differences in media and infotech.
By "product", I take it you mean their advertising services? Most of the other products are not paid for. In fact, critics are often fond of pointing out that the consumer is the product in this case.
Whether this action is right or not, parallels can be drawn with the Microsoft investigation: Microsoft allegedly used its position within the desktop to "push" their browser; Google is allegedly using its position within search to "push" their browser.
On a personal note, I'm not convinced that this is grounds enough for antitrust action. There could be a personal data related angle to this, but then again that would not come under antitrust.
Windows didn't get to 90% market share because consumers chose it. Windows achieved overwhelming dominance because Microsoft punished computer manufacturers if they sold any competing operating system.
That's anti-competitive, and Google isn't doing anything like that.
Then Microsoft used their illegally-obtained dominant position in operating systems to bundle their shitty browser, essentially forcing every consumer to install it instead of any competitor. And you couldn't uninstall it if you wanted to.
Again, that's not at all similar to Google and Chrome. Windows, Mac, and iOS don't have Chrome pre-installed. Android manufacturers are free to pre-install Firefox or Opera or anything else they want.
Just this week it was announced that Google will disable important features required to implement ad blockers. Google absolutely abuses their monopolies (browser, search, streaming video, possibly maps) at least as aggressively as MS ever did.
Have you ever tried to watch YouTube on Firefox? That’s a deliberately hobbled experience if I’ve ever seen one.
Completely off topic at this point but I’m curious what video card you have and if you’re on X or Wayland.
My Linux box at work is an HP laptop from several years ago with a pretty basic business class AMD graphics card in it, I did have to install AMD’s binary drivers on this machine.
And, using Slackware, it’s X. Not sure if Wayland is easily installable or not on Slack but it’s certainly not part of the base install or supported by Patrick.
Firefox is the only piece of my install that isn’t part of official Slackware-CURRENT.
Other than running it in Windows all of my other computers that use Firefox are running stock, no fancy desktop versions of Slack or OpenBSD. I use calm window manager on both. (Sorry, this contradicts an earlier statement, I also had to compile and install Calm on Slackware from source, everything else is just part of the supported packages for CURRENT)
Maybe my low resource OS’s help?
Whether it’s the government’s role to break that up is a political question, but Google is most definitely a classic monopoly and the internet is worse off for it.
Google was doing exactly this until it was forced to into a consent decree with the EU. Manufacturers couldn’t sell Google licensed Android phones and sell non Google Android variants.
Selective enforcement is arbitrary, politically motivated enforcement.
Antitrust doesn’t care about how you got market dominance. It cares about what you do with it. To use the browser example I used elsewhere: maybe Google’s dominance in search is because it’s indisputably the best. But that doesn’t mean Google can use its dominance over search to get you to use Chrome.
To address your other examples, say health insurance or cellular, that market dominance is absent. Google has 89% of search market share. Verizon has 35% of cellular. Likewise, no health insurance company has more than 15% market share. That’s a completely different market. And I can’t get a discount on cellular because I’m a FiOS customer, nor can I buy car insurance from my health insurance company.
As I said elsewhere, I don’t think an antitrust case against a Google would succeed at this point in time. But lots of things that are common in the web tech space (cross selling products, giving away products for free, etc.), become potential antitrust concerns when you’ve got 90% market share in an industry. For example, giving away Android for free to push Symbian and company out of the market and cement Google search dominance in mobile. You wouldn’t be crazy to try to make a case out of that.
https://www.verizonwireless.com/promos/verizon-fios-installa...
> nor can I buy car insurance from my health insurance company.
https://www.statefarm.com/insurance/health/individual-medica...
and bundling deals: https://www.statefarm.com/insurance/multiline
Google search prefers sites that are fast. Amp makes sites fast.
Non-Amp sites that are equally fast and relevant get equal search ranking.
Is there any evidence whatsoever that Google ranks Amp sites higher because of Amp, instead of speed and relevance?
Nope. Amp ranks above everything else in a page-topping spinner.
No, but I'd love to see antitrust litigation against those monopolies/oligopolies too.
I guess, "not exactly exonerating, but not exactly damning" is à la mode in 2019.
>Which raises deep suspicions about the political motivations of this "investigation".
So, if a company was in bed with politician X, and get investigated under a future (opposition) politician Y, it's the ...political motivations of the investigation that you're concerned about?
That sounds totally backwards...
>Anti-trust is about companies using their market power to exclude rivals, raise prices, and hurt consumers. It's not about consumers overwhelmingly choosing a product because they like it more.
Well, Google uses its power over search results to do all of the above.
Here's one:
This dataset includes people like my intern, who left to go join USDS after his internship was up, etc
So there is some amount of flat out silliness here.
It also covers 14 years (2002->2016), and has a fairly small number of people for that number of years.
A significant number are DC people, and, surprisingly, if you want to stay in DC, you are going to work at the government most likely.
During the earlier parts of this timeframe, there was no one other than Google who was local (google opened the office in 2006). During the middle part, 2006-2013, other tech companies were just staffing up policy orgs. Over the entire time period, the government is by far the biggest employer in the region. There were not a lot of even tech companies (let alone local policy orgs for tech companies) in most of that time period, the biggest other one would have been weird things like "livingsocial".
Having been recruiting in DC during the 2006-2012 timeframe , out of the 1000+ resumes i'd reviewed, i'd say 80+% were working at the government.
Like, why is this a conspiracy instead of normal attrition? In particular: where was it you expected them to go that was more acceptable? I think you are seriously overestimating the amount of non-governmental jobs they would have been able go to if they wanted to stay local.
It's a little more true now, but even then you'd just see them bounce between tech company policy departments.
Over the same time period, i'm 100% sure as many policy/legal/etc people in MTV/etc went to go work at Facebook, startups, etc (IE whatever the local industry was).
I'm also sure you'd find the same relative number of facebookers/etc in DC (which again, was very small during that time period) left for the administration, etc.
Ajit Pai just did this move with robocalls and SHAKEN/STIR:
> Ajit Pai orders phone companies to adopt new anti-robocall tech in 2019 Pai threatens "regulatory" action if carriers don't use Caller ID authentication. (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/02/ajit-pai-orders-...)
Google is the Gambino family of tech, we also have Luchesi and Genovese in the so called FAANG group. They even control the Internet standard groups. Time for inept to be restored to the people.
Though to be fair, in 2012 Google exerted its monopolistic power far less than it does now.
For the life of me I can't understand why it's good that less than a dozen unelected and non-removable people in this country (Schmidt/Page, Zuck, and the owners of 99% of "independent" media) have the power to decide who wins elections, and what people think about issues.
Stop the personalization engines
If I were a bad person asking, "Who's more valuable to Hack for consumer data" I don't know how I could conclude it's anything but Amazon. Google might have your credit card and purchasing patterns, Amazon will. Google might know about your phone, Amazon will.
"Things you've bought before or looked into buying before" seems like much more useful data to sell ads than "non-shopping things you've searched for." It's definitely a higher signal to noise ratio.
Even if Google can get some of that data, its still Amazon's data, Google just happens to get some of it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.html
Any aggregation or segmentation of emails by ML/AI algorithms, as your article talks about, is analogous to having smarter filters in your inbox. It's tech illiteracy to confuse these perception NNs with data mining for business purposes.
It is absolutely mining email, and it's extracting purchase data from it, that isn't even used in Gmail or revealed to users in any visible context, it's buried in settings. What Google uses it for? I don't know, as you said, they claimed they stopped using Gmail data for ad targeting purposes two years ago. But they're definitely working on extracting this very valuable and marketable data... for some reason.
Is it possible that Google generically collects user purchase data, including from Gmail, and then whilst not using "Gmail data" for ad targeting, it does use the "purchase data" which has been generically made part of a user's Google profile? That'd be splitting hairs real close, but it'd probably be good enough for the lawyers.
It's technical illiteracy to confuse parsing and filtering with data mining for ads. Read the article, or don't, this is just a comment.
Not only that, but as the articles about purchase data parsing states, you can't even opt out of it or remove items from Google's purchase history information except to delete the emails themselves. Which, for people entrusting their communications to Gmail, is a drastic step. It's surprising to even have a "remove" button, but for it then to tell you, in order to do so, you have to delete your emails.
As an aside, it's not doxxing someone when you post as your real name, and publish your employer publicly under the same name. The "my opinions are my own" line is a release of Google's legal liability for what you say, which is why a lot of employers suggest or require similar statements. However, it's psychologically impossible for your opinions to not be swayed by the employer who pays you and whom you spend a large percentage of your time with, regardless of whether or not you are "representing" them officially or not.
Probably not. Not only because I don't think the courts would agree with that division being real. But also because it's absurdly expensive compared to just purchasing the data from CC providers which explicitly retain the right to sell your transaction history.
I have no special knowledge of why they're doing that, but I have suspicions and they're mostly about enabling the exact same sort of stuff I lacked the means to enable at my fintech startup.
Source: I was retargeted on Amazon for an impulse buy of an obscure item from Macy's. My CC was the only way to join my data.
This is not meant to whataboutism, but the truth is the public/news cycles can only handle so many “tech” related items at one time. People are not “locked in” to any of the FANG companies nearly as much as they are their physical ISPs where they really do not have an option.
They will take this action against Google, and meanwhile, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts will continue to take in an average of $100 per customer per month.
This is, quite nakedly, Comcast influencing action against Google for trying to compete in broadband.
It is convenient that Comcast owns NBC while lobbying government for legislation it wants to see.
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/10/25/watch-cnbcs-full-inter...
https://www.freepress.net/our-response/expert-analysis/expla...
https://potsandpansbyccg.com/2019/02/13/isps-are-violating-t...
As an occasional content creator it's impossible not to be aware that the ISPs can limit access to the bandwidth I need, while any of the platforms I might use - PayPal, Ebay, Google/YouTube, Amazon, Apple, even Etsy - can kill an income stream at any time and keep all my earnings just because they want to, with no convincing good-faith resolution procedures and no (affordable) recourse.
Being able to access the internet at a competitive rate is more important IMO. FANG platforms depend on your ability to reach them.
Net neutrality, I'm convinced, is one of the only unifying political issues today. Breaking up Google isn't going to make people forget the expensive, low quality service from monopolistic taxpayer-funded broadband networks.
However, it is not right for the large companies in just one country to be split up.
Piketty in Capital in the 21st Century makes good points on how mass amounts of capital earn more money than mass amounts of labor. It is the same winner take all situation in high tech.
It is easy conceptually: governments just need to apply the law fairly. But in my country (USA) corporate interests have almost totally co-opted both main political parties and control most of the regulatory institutions.
Pretty sad that providing an excellent service that customers love is seen as a bad thing, especially on HN. Sad bitter people celebrating the thought of Google being punished for being at the top of their game... get a life.
The Trump administration has threatened this a couple of times now...
edit: I'm not sure why this is less plausible than the Obama white house personally interceding on the earlier case because they sought Google's "talking points"