If you are accusing someone of protecting an illegal monopoly, you are implying there is an illegal monopoly. Does this mean they will attempt to split Google up?
Splitting up is only one remedy. Often it leads to a consent decree, which is effectively a negotiated but forced settlement (e.g. fines, restructuring, etc.) and contract that binds future behavior.
They were about to do this back in May I think [0]. A few months back, State AGs were all within days of doing the same too, that still hasn't happened either.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department and 11 states filed an antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet Inc’s Google on Tuesday for allegedly breaking the law in using its market power to fend off rivals.
Attorney General William P. Barr, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, has played an unusually active role in the investigation. He pushed Justice Department lawyers to bring the case by the end of September, prompting pushback from attorneys who wanted more time and complained of political influence. He has spoken publicly about the inquiry for months and set tight deadlines for the prosecutors leading the effort.
I’m not opposed to some anti trust action across the entire industry but making this a partisan election issue is just going to discredit the whole thing and obscure the real issues.
I hate Trump but here his admin is right to rush things. Unless the issue is put on the books before November, chances are that a Dem administration will quietly scrap it (possibly in exchange for concessions on the surveillance side, considering who represents California...).
Obviously this should have been done sooner, but it’s Trump we’re talking about, it’s half a miracle if it gets done at all.
Given that this case is likely to drag on for years it seems much more important to start it on as solid a legal footing as possible than to slip it past the wire before an election.
Do you know what a Gish Gallop is? Do you know why they work? no? lets move on then. The creditability of the author MATTERS especially when the author has been known to edit videos to make it look like the subject said something they didn't. Im not spending 2 hours of my life to timestamp every single malicious edit. Do you remember that "Who Is America?" show?
Well if you look at those "in favor" versus those "thinking about it" which is code for no it is easy to see that those in the former were pushed aside this primary cycle.[0]
so the concern is real that Google could escape with a slap on the wrist pending an administration change. Too many like to pretend otherwise but big tech knows whose its real friends are and their party likes the money. So expect a song and dance with enough exceptions and escape routes to be business as usual
Antitrust suits were brought against Microsoft under the Clinton administration, and FTC investigations under the Obama administration resulted in changes to AdSense.
What makes you think Democrats are more like to scrap an investigation?
I think there is clear precedent for this sort of thing. When I read Fatal Risk (about AIG's financial division from 1980's to the financial crisis in which it collapsed), there was if I remember correctly Eliot Spitzer, the attorney general for New York, with a bunch of cases on which he built a career and a ton of political support that subsequently failed in the courtroom. The result was a complete waste of money and resources on shoddy cases, some people got fired in disgrace and some people got popular. (In Google's case it would be like the CEOs resigning while admitting no wrongdoing and the case itself languishing in court before being settled with no positive outcome for the society.) Let's hope the Google case is not going to turn out that way.
This one was obviously coming. The question is what the specific issues outlined in the lawsuit will be, and what possible remedies are.
Prominently allowing search engine choice in Chrome, Android, etc. may be one part of it. Splitting search off from the rest of Google might be another. Regulating search overall might be one but that carries a lot of risks.
search engines who squeeze money out of every last drop of people's personal information (including ISPs and arbitrage players that will participate in next year's auctions) are easily able to outbid search engines like us that respect people's privacy
Has this reduced search market share for Google in Europe? I suspect not since Google has a high brand loyalty. In fact this complaint may make Google even more profitable by not allowing phone manufacturers to charge the for default placement. I believe it will likely kill the main revenue stream for Mozilla as well.
Watershed moment in how we "price" monopolistic power. It's not "market share" or "barriers to entry" or even engaging in "anti-competitive behavior" anymore. But more about how corporations can control the free flow of information. Much harder to make that case for the government I should imagine.
What's surprising to me is how un-monopolistic Google's share of the Cloud + AI market is under its control, considering how many of the techniques were invented there. I'd put it at under 25%.
The real behemoth is NVidia + ARM. GPU shortages are endemic. And the cost of a new entrant to the market just to construct a fab is probably $20B+. Ask Intel XE how much they are spending just to keep up ;)
Chip is probably one of the few spaces, where oligopoly or duopoly makes sense ( though it is still scary ). The entry barriers are not artificial. It is genuinely hard to start from the ground up just based on the level of progress made thus far.
With Google that argument is harder. A person could whip up G level search engine, mail, and maybe even youtube equivalent, but moving all those people ( but to make them consider your alternative would be impossibly painful to do ).
I will admit that NVidia and ARM scares me, but I am not sure what can be done here.
Listen. I know people have a tendency to get defensive, when they believe someone insults their craft. I am not doing that. I am arguing that what google has really going for it is inertia. It is similar to the world of OS, where Windows still rules supreme. Note that DDG was built fast, but it struggles against G search engine based on familiarity. But ok, DDG has issues other than familiarity. What about Bing? MS had to actually pay people to encourage adoption. That is how strong the force of inertia really is. So yeah. I do dismiss your counter argument, because it does not address the core of mine.
I'm not being defensive and it was not my intention. I did not communicate that clearly.
Not going to dismiss the inertia parameter, but neither DDG nor Bing ever returned what I was looking for and they never were as good as Google Search for my particular searches (yes, even in private navigation). I'm not saying they're not good, I'm saying they never returned good results for me.
I can offer some anecdata. For some reason or another, Bing is better than Google for finding otherwise copyrighted work ( I was able to find Morty streams after new season came out ). My personal pet theory is that since Google was first to the game with majority market share, copyright holders and the like concentrated their effort on it. Needless to say, it is just one person's experience. I will admit that DDG still lacks in that area, but it has improved.
I think the shortage and performance war is happening only at the top and the market is more volatile at the mid-bottom. Besides AMD and Nvidia have been trading places if we look beyond the last few years. Not enough to base a monopoly lawsuit on.
If Nvidia actually gets to buy ARM, that's another matter. But again they can't sue based on a purchase that hasn't even gone through yet.
I think parent comment's concern about Nvidia is with respect to AI. Nobody wants a GTX 1660 for that kind of work, the high end GPU supply is the only part that matters.
> What's surprising to me is how un-monopolistic Google's share of the Cloud + AI market is under its control, considering how many of the techniques were invented there. I'd put it at under 25%.
That's why the suit is aimed at search and search advertising
If they ever break up search and advertising GCP would immediately become the biggest cloud because of the cost of migrating the other parts of Google.
> What's surprising to me is how un-monopolistic Google's share of the Cloud + AI market is under its control, considering how many of the techniques were invented there. I'd put it at under 25%.
I don't find that surprising because Google is a mess. They're a very poorly run organization, making decisions that make no sense at times. Their inefficiency and/or incompetence is probably the only reason why they haven't wreaked havoc on all of the markets they have their hand in. And the various monopolies they do have are, as monopolies usually are, immune to stupid decisions that would kill most other companies.
I think it might be because their corporate culture of being the good guy/"don't be evil" is incompatible with the reality of their situation. Like cognitive dissonance at a corporate level. I wonder how many of their employees in positions of power are still living in that fantasy, and making decisions based on it?
Personal opinion? And this applies almost equally to Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL. But that they all lost the messenger wars. Of the four, Google was the best positioned to take mobile, really the best positioned of any company in the world. And that blunder is probably a bigger blunder than Microsoft and Facebook arriving late to the mobile world. Because Google WAS the mobile operating system, they were the cross platform browser vendor, and they completely, absolutely, 100% failed to deliver a worldwide mobile first + desktop messaging solution that was better than the competition.
Interesting.. I’ve seen the messaging wars start up again every 5 years. The current iteration is business oriented with slack etc.. but that doesn’t mean it won’t be personal again.
Mobile is all about power management. Apple got that right and really nailed the UX.
I don’t think Google knew that playbook at that point. Maybe Rubin did but even MSFT blew it.
Quite honestly, I think Facebooks play to overlay chat ontop of something more addictive was its big win. Then having a mobile app to talk to the same people.
None of that matters anymore, because Messenger/IG/WA are all mobile apps that most people probably dont chat as much through on a desktop/laptop. But at the time, it gave people a compelling reason to have the messenger product open on screen. Google Talk was similar, being overlayed over Gmail, but google squandered having a Talk bar over the bottom of every google property. Yahoo as well. Yahoo News should have had messenger across the bottom of the screen.
On the mobile front, FB Messenger sort of won out because people started to like iMessage, but there was still a need for a cross platform alternative. I believe Apple could have prevented FB Messenger from being a thing, had they released an Android client along with a browser extension. Apple's best move was releasing iTunes for Windows, something they are scared to repeat, and shouldnt be.
>On the mobile front, FB Messenger sort of won out because people started to like iMessage, but there was still a need for a cross platform alternative. I believe Apple could have prevented FB Messenger from being a thing, had they released an Android client along with a browser extension. Apple's best move was releasing iTunes for Windows, something they are scared to repeat, and shouldnt be.
I wonder what the numbers are on WhatsApp vs FB Messenger, because people of all socioeconomic levels, languages, ages, country, and tech literacy use WhatsApp in my experience, whereas only Americans of a certain age group use FB Messenger.
WhatsApp is the clear winner since it has always been optimized for very old devices. But it's now a FB product anyway. At some point FB will develop a unified messaging product... maybe in response to antitrust.
Does this not in fact support the claim that they are not quite the monopoly that people make them out to be? That it is in fact not that easy to abuse their power in owning the platform to gain market share in messaging?
I'm not sure what people want these days: people are angry that they have successful products that people use more than competitor's prodcts, and also angry that they have unsuccessful products that are shut after failing to gain traction.
I dont know how the accusation that they are a monopoly in search and advertising related to them being poor at spending that money to become a monopoly elsewhere.
I mean the gold standard here is WeChat. QQ is probably the next one. Messaging apps are probably more important than FB for example. The problem right now in the US is friction with using messaging apps for payment. Venmo, apple pay and other apps are making inroads here but we are still mostly confined to credit card interfaces.
From my conversations, Googlers indeed appear to earnestly argue for their company in ways that directly ignore or fail to recognize the monopoly power they wield. It absolutely feels like line employees are unable to grasp what market power is and how the company wields it.
Executive level people seem too adept at defending the company and avoiding certain phrases or concepts, I believe they all know. Things like suggesting routine conversations include a lawyer and tagging them as such to try to include more conversations in attorney/client privilege shows a desire to hide guilty actions.
I have zero experience at the levels of Google when it comes to market dominance. But I do have some for certain niche products in the chemical sector, where I worked for one of two suppliers in exostence. And there I, a simple low level team lead, received dedicated anti-trust training. Including what wording to use in e-mails and what words to avoid. So I would guess, Google is much more prudent and higher management levels, especially since this discussion is nothing new.
Googlers are definitely trained what language to use and not to use. Though I think there is still a cognitive dissonance where they believe they're just avoiding problematic statements as opposed to avoiding admitting blatantly illegal behavior.
Why would a company believe it's doing illegal stuff? That wouldn't make much sense unless it's made out of people that are OK with doing illegal stuff (Mafia?). So of course most employees don't believe that.
And whether or not such training is meant by executives to hide illegal behavior that they are aware of it's also catching many cases where people are just dumb and use wrong words to mean different things, words that have specific meaning in a legal context and that can hurt the person and the company although there was no illegal act being done.
I've noticed this in many companies, but at Google it does seem particularly worse. In private conversations with friends, I will at least be cognizant of the bad things that the company I work for is doing - it's just a job.
But many Googlers seem to perfectly fit that Upton Sinclair quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
That said, I don't think you can see how Alphabet's lawyers talk and think that they are somehow living in a bubble or are not having these sorts of high-level strategy discussions.
I said this before, but I still believe Larry and Sergei removed themselves completely from the company because they couldn’t care less about the ad or cloud business per se. More so they might even view it as dirty. It’s a means to an end. Amass as much money (ad/cloud) as possible, get the best possible experts in CS/AI (so many phd’s) and gather every last bit of relevant information/data they can get.
It seems kind of obvious. Their goal is to organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible and useful. What better way to achieve this than to somehow create an AGI/ASI. They are certainly the best placed org to do it.
>Watershed moment in how we "price" monopolistic power. It's not "market share" or "barriers to entry" or even engaging in "anti-competitive behavior" anymore. But more about how corporations can control the free flow of information
Once the lawsuit drops I doubt this is the argument they are going to make.
This is going to be your run of the mill antitrust lawsuit. It's just making news because tech has avoided them for 30+ years.
> Watershed moment in how we "price" monopolistic power. It's not "market share" or "barriers to entry" or even engaging in "anti-competitive behavior" anymore. But more about how corporations can control the free flow of information. Much harder to make that case for the government I should imagine.
I don't know if or how this fits within actual antitrust law, but it makes sense that the issue was never price gouging, the issue was one entity gaining too much power.
In a theoretical dystopian future, a megacorp could own 99% of market share of all industries in the country, but intentionally offer very low prices on every product to avoid "monopoly" concerns. It becomes clear: monopolistic pricing is just a symptom, not the real issue. The real issue is power.
If this suit (and followup suits on other megacorps) fail, the future may call for new laws to define monopolistic power in novel ways, as soon as we the people recognize that getting search and email and social media for free doesn't mean that the megacorps are on our side.
>I don't know if or how this fits within actual antitrust law, but it makes sense that the issue was never price gouging, the issue was one entity gaining too much power.
In the US, there are two major areas of antitrust law and enforcement:
1) Sherman & Clayton Acts (1890, 1914) - outlaws cartels and anticompetitive activities (that is, activities that tend to lead to monopolies, but doesn't outlaw monopolies themselves). Price gouging is not an antitrust issue, but predatory pricing and price fixing are (you might have meant these terms). This area is primarily established via case law and enforced by the courts (and DOJ AD).
2) Merger guidelines/Federal Trade Commission (1968) - wherein key mergers must be reviewed and approved by the FTC. This area is more sensitive to political climate / executive branch as it's executive-appointed FTC regulators who set the guidelines and give approvals. We are now exiting an era of historic hands-off-ness.
Source: had a professor who is famous in antitrust world
Have we ever "busted up a monopoly" using 2? Is the FTC able to retroactively split up a company that was originally formed via large mergers and acquisitions? Split out e.g. Youtube from Google as it was originally an acquisition? That seems unlikely to me but I don't know much about it at all.
If you can't do that, then you're basically just preventing a monopoly from happening in advance, right? Or trying to at least.
At any rate, I'm assuming US vs. Google will be required to reference precedent set in Sherman & Clayton + subsequent court rulings and _not_ be able to use their own mergers against them as they were approved by the FTC in the first place. Is that also correct?
Governments are still (largely) accountable to the people, in contrast to corporations, which are not accountable whatsoever (except through gov regulation). Your comment is just detraction
That's missing the point. Deleting your FB account doesn't affect FB's power or practices. Does it make you slightly less directly affected by their nonsense? Sure, but it's often a false sense of security. If disinformation on FB results in a different outcome to your election, or prevents parents from thinking a COVID vaccine is safe, or whatever else, that affects your life even if you're not on the platform.
You have a say in your government's leadership. Don't like the President? Vote them out. Don't like Zuck? Nothing you can do about it.
How do I delete my FB shadow profile? Do I need to create an FB account first or what? How do I get onto sites that use ReCaptha (that's potentially anything behind CloudFlare BTW) without letting Google hoover up a bunch of identifying information? How do I delete the data that Google collects with ReCaptha?
And yet even deleting these services or choosing not to use them yourself does not keep them from tracking you. We have long known about "shadow profiles" that for example Facebook uses to collect data on individuals that don't (yet, they hope) have Facebook accounts.
As far as governments go, we could all become anarchists be done with them, but if you think for even a few seconds about it you would realize that this enormous vacuum of power would be filled by something. Corporations, rival nations with their government still intact, military warlords, or new political factions seeking to establish new governments. We have thousands of years of history that shows this pattern emerging again and again to the point that it is practically a natural law of power. The only check on power is greater or equal power. Ideally, you want this power to be answerable to the greatest number of people that this power is intended to serve. You may recall a lot of smart people during something called the Enlightenment spending a lot of time and energy on experimenting with different forms of government that met these criteria and still managing to not quite get it right. Many people in the West live in societies multiple iterations down the line from those established in the 18th and 19th century revolutions and there are still glaring issues. What do you suggest instead?
Corporations are accountable to their customers. If people stop paying for their products, they cease to exist.
Corporations are also accountable to governments, as this story illustrates. If US courts and/or legislators decide they want it, Google ceases to exist.
Economists think of this in terms of "Exit vs Voice".
With governments, you have a voice - one vote for deciding who's in charge - but no way to exit, even when your side loses.
With corporations you can exit - stop shopping at Target - but no voice in how Target is run.
Both models have pros and cons, and it's good to understand how they differ, and what situations they're suited for.
Try exiting Google or Amazon. It's borderline impossible.
Basically - how do I exit a company if I'm not the one choosing to use their services?
I cannot use the internet and avoid Google's ads.
I cannot use the internet and avoid Amazon's hosting.
I cannot exit the internet because I literally make my living with it, the competitive disadvantage of doing so is SO great with the way we've structured services and life in general that it doesn't really work.
It'd be cool if people spent more time reading basic political philosophy, rather than reading one book on libertarianism and deciding that that is now their philosophy.
Philip Pettit has spent extensive time addressing really interesting questions like these, like what might distinguish "public" domination from "private."
I was just wondering which is easier, quitting a country or google. Initially emigration would be harder but in the long run I would be just fine.
One wouldn't be allowed to use iphone or android? It would take a lot of manual data entry to migrate my accounts off gmail. Youtube obviously wouldn't be allowed but do I get to use adsense powered websites?
Yeah but Nvidia and ARM are luxury goods. There is no point breaking up a monopoly of that calibre. They specialize in a niche market that affects an even more niche market.
The simple fact that I can say "google it" and colloquially anyone in the US and probably Europe would understand what I mean kind of states how dominant they are in the market.
It's trivial to use duckduckgo or bing. It's people's choice to use google. Also, you can say "kleenex" and "band-aid" and "q tip" and "vaseline" or "coke" and everyone would understand, but they have no dominance, other than some people prefer to use them. I can easily find alternatives to all of them right next to them in almost any store I go to.
It was trivial for users to use non-IE browsers on Windows in the 90s. Ease of using an alternative is not the singular or most important definition of a monopoly.
It wasn't as trivial as today. People may have had to install non IE browsers from from a disc or download from slow and flaky internet connections. Also, I think a central part of that case was also Microsoft wielding its power to force other companies to stay away from non IE browsers.
Today, we're talking about a few taps to change which search website you want to use.
I work at a company where IE is colloquial with internet. If even mention chrome it's like I just told a homeschooled christian kid that atheists exist.
> It's not "market share" or "barriers to entry" or even engaging in "anti-competitive behavior" anymore. But more about how corporations can control the free flow of information.
But that's really the same thing. If Google bans or interferes with Fediverse apps because they compete with YouTube, that's anti-competitive behavior. If they don't and those apps gain share with people whose content keeps getting censored on YouTube, they're not very effectively controlling the free flow of information.
Censorship by an incumbent is a market opportunity for a competitor, so a corporation can only really sustain it through anti-competitive actions against the challenger(s).
Why is it that this is only attacking google search? I'm not that well versed in antitrust legal matters but why isn't there attempts to break up the broader Alpbabet into sensible smaller companies that each do their own thing? In my head that seems like it should be simpler.
To me, it would be disappointing if they broke up the firm to the point where R&D has to survive w/o subsidies. US science research funding has not kept up. I'm glad the likes of Google have kept pace with corporate R&D.
Consider for a moment where self-driving-car technology would be w/o Google subsidizing it. Or mapping technology. Or like a dozen other technologies. Were these supposed to pop up w/ VC struggling from round to round? Many of the VC backed companies themselves have a put option of being acquired by Google/FAANG -- so if that exit is gone, it would be even worse.
Worse for those in the real world where you have payroll obligations, rent, AWS bills, health insurance, and mortgages.
As a customer I feel the same way. However, having been a co-founder and CTO of a startup, let me tell you the real story:
- Most startups are not like snapchat, they are not once-in-a-generation unicorns.
- Most startups have huge burn, especially consumer-entertainment type startups (imagine how much network bandwidth YouTube was burning before Google purchased them.)
- Startups are at the mercy of funding rounds and sometimes the market itsself can get away from you, through no fault of your own startup
- FAANG provide a put option -- "whats the worse that can happen? we get acquired by X" which allows people to take on more risk while trying to swing for the fences.
- It is arguable how long darling consumer apps could survive as independent when consumers often dont want to pay money. It is a catch 22 -- the startup is told the product has to be free but they are also not allowed to seek bigger coffers to actually subsidize it
So in the end -- sure, I agree with you, but who pays? Esp if this is something massive with network effects. Perhaps I can pay for WhatsApp, but can my grandma pay for it with her meager overseas salary? And if she cannot, how is the network sustainable?
I'm not saying I disagree with you, but I dont know what the solution is other than the current one.
This implies that the product wouldn't be shuttered if it weren't acquired. Startups aren't extactly know for their longevity. Some were intended to be sold to a FAANG on day one. As for Instagram, products are cool until their investors start expecting them to turn a profit.
Google has monopolies in advertising, mobile, streaming video, mapping, and web browsing. The latter gatekeeps all other Internet based businesses and allows them to pick winners and losers.
YouTube is a monopoly. Arguably it's one of the largest social networks too. But for most video creators, YouTube is the only option to reach an audience. Bear in mind, even big movie and TV studios who operate their own video streaming platforms... where do the trailers all get posted? YouTube, where people can find them.
As someone who's not used Google services since 2016... it's still the one Google property I can't really escape, because nobody is posting their content anywhere else.
Maybe in the most narrow of definitions. IG/FB and Tiktok are huge competitors in the video space, Tiktok being the dominant platform if you focus on short form video.
Microsoft was having some antitrust problems when Google was founded, so Google said "don't be evil." Now Google got big enough and lived long enough to become a villain.
Frankly I’m surprised to see that they’re going after Google first. Amazon and/or Facebook are much more vulnerable to an anti-trust lawsuit, and just based on some of the public information that we already have they have likely engaged in anticompetitive behavior. I fully expect that antitrust action against FB/Amazon will continue regardless of who wins the election.
Not sure about Facebook, I mean there's reddit, twitter, etc. Each w/ it's own niche...but Amazon, and Apple, imho are the biggest offenders. Amazon would be first on my list.
Short term, yes, but what guarantee does any political group have that the tech companies won't turn on them at some point? Facebook in particular has an ever graying userbase, which means they're naturally going to continue to lean more and more conservative.
>Facebook in particular has an ever graying userbase
I don't buy it. Facebook has always been an adult network. It started as something that kept kids out. They opened up, but they dont need them. Eventually, when people get older they sign up for it. It't not sexy, its utilitarian. Their biggest risk to their business is more addictive products, not their customer age. People can get addicted at any age.
TiKTok, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube are still more commoner<>celebrity networks, while Facebook is a WhitePages and now a YellowPages too.
From what I see, it's less important with young adults now than it was a few years ago, and it started as something only for young adults that spread upwards through the age groups. It could be reaching a stable point though, true.
The whole "facebook isnt cool anymore" thing has been going on for a decade now. Linkedin isnt cool. The WhitePages arent cool. Plenty of other properties, like twitch, discord, twitter, carve out their niche. Snapchat was going to be the facebook killer, people got bored with snapchat. But facebook keeps growing. Now TikTok is looking like a threat. But no matter what everybodys favorite place to hangout is, they also have a facebook. And companies keep throwing money into facebook ads.
Pretty poor evidence generally, mostly on the say so of snake oil salesmen trying to convince political campaigns to pay them handsomely to do so with extremely uncertain results.
I note the conspiracy theory that Cambridge Analytica threw the Brexit referendum via Facebook has essentially completely collapsed over the last month or so. CA certainly wanted their clients to think that such a thing was possible. They were fantasists, for money.
Facebook controls Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
If you add those together, Facebook controls an overwhelming majority of the social media market share -- way more than the relatively tiny niche held by Reddit and Twitter.
Edit: Facebook has 2603 million active users, Instagram has 1083M, Reddit has just 430 million. Twitter is estimated at 326 million. TikTok is the closest thing to a true Facebook competitor with 800M users, and a large share of them are probably concentrated in China -- and the Trump administration already tried to get them banned. (I'm excluding messaging services and YouTube here since they're a different niche).
Reddit has gone significantly more mainstream over the past few years. I remember when a reddit post got 2000 upvotes that was a big deal. Then suddenly it became 4k, 8k, and then I stopped caring it got so large.
Reddit is becoming into a weird beast because I've found theres a mentality of people who assume you actively subscribe to the stuff set by default hence why people get upset when you don't tout the same opinion. I've even had people ask me what I was doing in their subreddit, said I came from /r/all, and they basically said "yeah right." Reddit is probably going to dominate the online forum market since it's so much easier to create a subreddit than it is make your own website with forums.
My only beef with this is reddit silences things they don't like, and not just things that sound reasonable. My rationale is let these people be. They're dumb enough to discuss this garbage on your platform, so why not collect that data and just monitor it? Better than they go elsewhere and now you have no idea.
Also reddit trying to take their anonymous platform and make it so you act as a community member has always been weird to me. That makes sense for public people, not for general users. Especially when bot accounts just harvest upvotes. Twitter is basically what facebook used to be now.
You need to use actual numbers. The total size of the active worldwide userbase on all of Facebook's platforms is at least one order of magnitude larger than reddit. And the revenue they extract from it is larger still. Reddit is merely the world's largest Internet forum. They don't have a moat.
Reddit is a top 20 site, according to Alexa. So they're not doing poorly. And any social website has a moat: the network effects from social connections.
It's at #18, below Wikipedia, live.com, Zoom, Yahoo, the usual suspects (Google/YouTube/Facebook/Amazon) and a bunch of Chinese websites.
All this proves is that the Alexa top N isn't a good metric of determining who is or isn't a monopoly. It's completely ignoring mobile apps (so Instagram/Whatsapp don't make an appearance), and it has no visibility into revenue. Reddit's current total valuation is in the small single digit billions. It doesn't deserve consideration in a conversation about the true gorillas in the field, i.e. the ones that are worth three orders of magnitude more.
I edited my comment to add some proper numbers. Reddit has grown but it's still almost an order of magnitude smaller than Facebook+Instagram. The competition isn't even close.
Apple is dominant as a monopoly in what exactly? Their own store, their own hardware, their own OS, their own services? Every business Apple is in has large alternatives. They make money selling you things, not from ads. Everything Google and Facebook do is designed to ensure they make ad revenue or sell your data in some way for money; they need to control every thing in their supposed business (search, android, social media, etc) to ensure they dominate in collecting ad/data revenue which is the only business they make money on. Apple only wants to sell you more devices or device related services which is their business. You can live quite well without any Apple product at all, many people do. Try living without Google.
Amazon on the other hand is worse, as they want to control all business segments they get into, even totally unrelated to their business of being a store that sells things. Using your dominance in one type of business to force everyone to also support unrelated businesses with no alternatives is one common definition of monopoly; think dominating railroads to force everyone to use your oil (Standard Oil).
Amazon and is not t the same time. eCommerce dominant? Sure, but then you have Alibaba, Shopify and eBay in addition to other marketplaces. Cloud? Surely dominant, but you also have Google and Microsoft. Retail? There Amazon is still small if you include stationary retail. Logistics? As much as everybody is complaining, Amazon Logistics is still more of an in-house alternative to UPS, Fedex, DHL,... So again, no real dominance of the parcel delivery market.
It kind of gets tricky when you combine all that, but I assume that this would be a fun thing to argue infornt of a court I guess.
Google seems to me to be much more straight forward, they clearly dominate search and web ads. The latter with the exception of social, which would be facebooks domain. And with Android, Google is the second largest player in Mobile if you ignore hthe hardware aspect.
Not saying either company should be broken up, that's for couts to decide.
I don't see Alibaba or eBay as competitors to Amazon--the former because it doesn't really operate in the US (almost nobody in the US would know what Alibaba is) and the latter because it just serves a completely different market with different mechanisms and so on. Shopify might be, but it's so tiny in comparison it's hardly unreasonable to suggest it isn't a legitimate competitor.
Wal-Mart, on the other hand, might be nearing that status as far as eCommerce is concerned.
What percent of "digital goods" purchases is that? Because it's definitely not 60%. Defining a category like "app purchases" seems extremely narrow and arbitrary - a way to construct a product category that you can then say Apple is dominant in. What's the difference between the "app" Fornite and Fortnite on the Xbox One and why should they be treated as different product categories for the purposes of measuring market share?
"This Note argues that the current framework in antitrust—specifically its pegging competition to 'consumer welfare,' defined as short-term price effects—is unequipped to capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy"
It's an opinion piece stating that law ought to be changed, not that Amazon is doing anything illegal.
I never really quite understand how people think antitrust law applies to Amazon. I don't have expert-level knowledge of Amazon's various markets, but I don't think they have a monopoly in any of them.
Because Anti-Trust wise Luxottica is less of an issue as long as they don't abuse their market power when it comes to sunglasses. they could, if they did stuff like forcing retailer into certain deals and conditions. But unles sthey do things seem to be fne.
These are all problems, I'm just happy that there's an appetite for anti-trust action at all at the federal level. Let's also not forget that phone service providers already had a round of anti-trust back in 1982[1], though it seems like legislators have forgotten why that occurred and let many of the baby Bells re-merge in recent years.
They absolutely do. They're the debeers of the glasses industry. They make your glasses, they make your lenses, they run your vision plan/program. Every optician ever has to sign with them to get the standard selection, as does any name brand that wants their brand licenced.
But even beyond that, regional monopolies for carriers are somehow okay?
I think it's just rent seeking/retributions for favours not rendered.
How did they acquire Oakley? I don't remember any major controversy at the time, and reading a few news articles and Wikipedia, it just reads like any other corporate merger.
the short story is Oakley wasn't interested in being acquired, but since Luxottica owns most of the sunglasses stores you've heard of, was able to turn the screws on Oakley by refusing to stock their product, causing it's share price to tank and enabled Luxottica to buy Oakley cheap.
> Luxottica purchased Sunglass Hut in early 2001. It promptly told Oakley it wanted to pay significantly lower wholesale prices or it would reduce its orders and push its own brands instead.
> Within months, Oakley acknowledged to shareholders that the talks hadn't gone well and that Luxottica was slashing its orders.
> The company's stock immediately lost more than a third of its value.
> The fact that this isn't mentioned on Wikipedia might mean that Luxxotica has been very good at scrubbing their online persona.
It's on Wikipedia:
"Luxottica acquired Oakley in November 2007 for US$2.1 billion. Oakley had tried to dispute their prices because of Luxottica's large marketshare, and Luxottica responded by dropping Oakley from their stores, causing their stock price to drop, followed by Luxottica's hostile take over of the company."
Oops, I based that on the Oakley wikipedia article (which only mentions vague antitrust concerns[1]) and the parent's ignorance about Luxxotica's purchase of Oakley (I assumed he looked at the Wikipedia article).
I did read that section, but it's not immediately clear to me that those two things are causally related. Yes, Luxxotica cut Oakley out of their stores and Oakley stock lost a lot of value. But, Luxxotica bought Oakley 6 years later. Where's the link exactly? Did Oakley's stock continue to decline? Was there shareholder demand to sell?
I was in the US Army in the time surrounding the purchase. The amount of Oakley product that was purchased by both the government and individual soldiers should have been enough to keep Oakley afloat all on its own.
Facebook has been so friendly to the republican party that they immediately blocked sharing of accusations against Joe Biden for impropriety while serving as the Vice President of the United States. Oh I forgot though... simply allowing republicans to speak online is nowadays akin to full on support for the GOP platform.
I'm not really sure on what basis you conclude that Amazon and/or Facebook are more vulnerable than Google. Google controls +80% of search; it dominates desktop browsers with 70% market share; it effectively owns the most popular mobile operating system and +65% of mobile users use Google's mobile browser; it also owns YouTube and Gmail, which tie neatly into the rest of its products and lead to even more market domination (they read your emails and sell that information to advertisers, etc.).
Google has done more to atrophy progress on the Internet than any other big tech company. It has used its monopoly position on search and ads to crush competition. Google has been "evil" for a very long time.
What Amazon is typically accused of, having store brands, is what every retailer does. That's hard to win. Maybe there are other things, but I haven't heard of them.
Branded and store/white-label products have coexisted for a while now. It seems to work for everyone involved. The only players that it doesn't seem to work for are those with a brand but not anything underlying to differentiate themselves. But they're ultimately not driving any economic value so it's not that bad when we lose them.
I'd say some markteplace behaviour is potentially problematic. Amazon knows all sales data on every product on every seller, if Amazon is then selling the same items, Private brand or OEM, it can benefit from a lot of data the individual sellers dont have. Plus the possibilitis Amazon has by owning the marketplace.
From personal experience so, once Amazon loses the buy box, the measures to gain it back are more or less what other seller could do as well. No idea how much seller data they use in selecting private brand products so.
Playing the devil's advocate here, Amazon is definitely not the only retailer that can use data.
All the retailers have data on what sells in their store, they also have the data on how sales are influenced by shelf placement.
Amazon to me is a logistics company, along with their storefront and AWS. Their focus on margins and their competence to use data to drive their logistics chains is what's truly scary. They can optimize a lot of inefficiencies that exist in logistics right now just because of the involvement of different disjoint players.
I totally agree with that. And having seen Amazon and various other companies from the inside, I jave to say that Amazon was definitely the most extreme, but all the most compliant one. They are looking for the legal limits, but the they stay within them. If these limits aren't clearly defined, they test them. So I would suspect that from a legal perspective, Amazon might be fine.
Hoe all that translates into anti-trust law, I have no idea.
What Amazon is typically accused of, having store brands, is what every retailer does.
This is simply not true and displays a fundamental misunderstanding of how retail works. A retailer pays the supplier for the stock of inventory that goes on its shelves, Amazon does not. (It is only in very rare cases the supplier only gets paid for actual sales of retail inventory; generally this happens for new products offered on a consignment basis to demonstrate market demand.) Frequently, retailers will share sales data with their suppliers so that the suppliers can make more attractive products, because then they can sell more units to end customers or charge higher markups.
But importantly, with retail, the retailer is the supplier's customer, not you.
In contrast, Amazon does not buy the inventory from the suppliers, instead it charges them money to store their inventory in Amazon's warehouses. On top of that, Amazon uses its access to sales data of external suppliers' products to design competing products which it then offers for sale, utilizing its ownership of the platform to promote its own products above competing products. While both of these latter two activities are problematic, it is the last one that definitely runs afoul of antitrust law (and was what got Microsoft into trouble with the EU).
The problem with Amazon: it is using its position as the controller of the dominant online marketplace to establish a position in the market for individual categories of goods in a manner that interferes with the normal dynamics of the market.
> In contrast, Amazon does not buy the inventory from the suppliers, instead it charges them money to store their inventory in Amazon's warehouses.
That part seems entirely reasonable. Would you rather Amazon pay sellers for unsold stock? That seems like a sure way to get Amazon to reduce the number of 3rd party sellers they stock.
Amazon's model is entirely reasonable until they become a 1st-party seller that competes with 3rd parties. Then it is all too natural for there to be some market abuse. For instance, configuring search ranking to always put the Amazon branded option in the top results is Amazon abusing their market position as a marketplace/distributor to now directly sell goods.
They went after Google, because Google has a monopoly.
Amazon does well from AWS, but hardly has domineering marketshare in the way Google does.
The idea that FB has a monopoly is laughable. Until Trump put the kibosh on them there was a real threat from TikTok. Zuck was getting desperate. Social media is very fickle.
Aapl as well only has a monopoly amongst high paying customers. Not sure you can call that a monopoly.
Amazon has clear and healthy competitors; Walmart, Cosco, Alibaba, Ebay and so on. It would be a struggle to prove that they're a monopoly, let alone that they're using their monopoly illegally.
Whereas Google has something like 95% of mobile search, and actively consumes competitors or, allegedly, wields its monopoly to drive traffic away from them.
I agree with your assessment. My point is just that search volume or user volume is an indicator of the size of the ad market, which is what any antitrust litigation will mostly be about.
They're not concerned with the user experience under these companies, they're concerned about economic impact, which is mostly felt by people doing marketing on their platforms.
Facebook is a social media company the way the Yellow Pages was a book publisher - it may be the most visible product they make, but it's not how they actually make money.
I do wonder how this will be played out. I cannot see a negative outcome for Google, even if there is one, will it trigger a domino effect among other monopolies (Apple, Facebook, etc.).
This doesn't seem like it's going to work. Given a choice between search engines pretty much everyone is going to choose Google. I think there are definitely areas that Google acts anti-competitively. But search? The competitors are a URL away. And few use them because Google is just flat out better.
The question I would posit is: Do the actions from Google that the Justice Department consider to be anti-competitive prevent competitors from becoming better?
For example, let's say I could be curious about DuckDuckGo if I had to choose a default search engine when I got an Apple device instead of Google being the default, then that could be revenue to DuckDuckGo for them to improve their search engine.
Regarding DuckDuckGo, my understanding is that though they have their own web crawler, most of the information is coming from Bing and Yahoo, who are the only direct competitors to Google.
Before asking "should we" we need to answer "can we". If forcing Google to give users a choice results in them picking Google anyways then whether we should do that or not is irrelevant. Since it won't achieve it's stated purpose there's no point in forcing it.
So what are you going to do, force Apple to sell their search default option for less money (whatever DuckDuckGo can afford to pay) in order to support more competition? It's really Apple's choice and interest what it does with the default search, Apple could decide tomorrow to point it to its own search engine and there's nothing Google, the DOJ or anyone else can do about it.
Not really sure what the DOJ expect Apple or Google to do in this situation, it seems to me that 2 companies entered a mutually benefiting contract. You can't argue that Google "colluded" with Apple, there's a lot of throwing punches between each other (all the privacy oriented moves Apple is doing are hurting Google's business) and again Apple could be making its own search engine anytime they wanted, they already replaced Google Maps with their own thing.
The monopolized market in this case would be the market for default search engines on mobile.
If the only two players (Google and Apple) both use Google Search by default, then Google has effectively captured 100% of the mobile ad market. (And since Google is paying Apple et al for that default state, it is indeed a market.)
The court could require device makers (including Google itself) to prompt users to select their search engine provider, or potentially ban Google from buying search engine defaults from other companies (Apple, Mozilla, etc.) as an anticompetitive practice.
That's an interesting scenario. Let's say Google is banned from buying search engine defaults. Then Mozilla would no longer be able to sell the Firefox default to Google.
Sure, they could sell it to someone else, but without the biggest player bidding up the price, it'd probably sell for a fraction of what it does today -- which could be devastating to Mozilla, given that almost all of their funding comes from the search deal. What would that do to competition in the browser space?
Competition in the browser space is over and Chromium won. If this had been regulated earlier by preventing Google from preinstalling Chrome on all Android devices, we wouldn't be in this situation where Firefox is on life support, but here we are.
Using Firefox as a reason not to break up some of Google's hold on search seems extremely short-sighted. Besides, Edge using Chrome changed the whole browser market dynamic as more and more people are using it. Once Microsoft reaches a somewhat decent percentage of install we will be back at a two (three?) player situation.
Apple could actually make more money. Say Google is split into two renamed search engines: elgooGA and elgooGB, with evenly divided assets. They would immediately be two search titans competing for the important Apple contract and would try to outbid one another. Perhaps elgooGA wins Apple, but then elgooGB wins Firefox. Every alternative platform to Apple would stand to get more money. And the users would then become more accustomed to having different default search providers and usage might be split. That is a win for DuckDuckGo and all other competitors.
The question is: does any of the competitors stand a chance against Google if they can't acquire more users and therefore improve their engine with the added revenue? Seems like a catch-22, and having Google as the default search engine everywhere, including in the web browser they make and that has the highest marketshare only exacerbate this.
I was just searching for "quill", a javascript editor. I clicked the first result without really looking (after all, i m searching name, right? ) - and it took me to some competing product called fro-something. I wasted my time, their money , yet google still made money.
I just tried search for "quill" in incognito, and I got quill.com as the first hit (both ads as well as organic result) - apparently there's a company called Quill Corporation (quill.com). It seems reasonable to return that as the first hit. quilljs.com is 5th hit on the first page. "quill javascript" has quilljs.com as the first hit.
This seems reasonable. What's your suggestion on how to make this better ?
just checked my history, my first result was "froalla", happened more than once
(the query must have been "quill js" or "quill editor" cant remember -- it's an example of the infamous 'google® tax' - an obviously keyword-targeted ad)
It is a search for "express-http-proxy" "logging" but at leat I got maybe one relevant result and a bunch of wildly unrelated ones, despite doublequotes.
There was one among the top 10 when I did the search.
As for most of the rest of the first 10, null would have been a valid, more correct and generally better result!
I actually wasted several minutes on one of them right away since I haven't still gotten into the habit of verifying every single Google result to se that it actually is what I asked for and not whatever filler Google decided to use this time. Not that it should be necessary, - they had this sorted back before 2010!
Seriously: why can't Google or DDG get this right anymore?
This sounds like exactly what the grandfather post (by wasdfff) was discussing. A competitor advertised their product based on the keywords you searched for.
You didn't buy their product, but Google helped them get your gaze briefly.
What is search but a list of adverts associated with your keywords?
Google can do without this "google tax", and imho they should. It's unethical , and it's not like a competitor putting a sign next to yours. The user is literally searching for a brand and is instead driven to click another. At best the competitor should be an ad on the side in this case. Considering how (especially in mobiles) google is often used as a kind of DNS-autocorrect in the omnibox, this behavior is unethical on the same level as websites with popups. A rich company like google would not normally allow it to itself, they can easily dispense with such sleaziness. The fact that they can do it unpunished is indicative of a monopoly position.
good god is this overdramatic. This whole thread is. Google is a good citizen, but people on hacker news just love a good story about tearing up big tech. How is society better off with google torn up? Arguments I expect and don't accept:
1. It allows alt search engine or alt browser to succeed. So what? The alt search engines and browsers are worse than the google ones. It doesn't benefit any actual people to have them rise up.
2. Google screwed my friend one time. Every single company (and person) on earth is guilty of this. One swallow does not a summer make.
3. Google is restricting this tech I like, or google is sometimes wrong about their bans. See (2)
And so on. I haven't seen anything compelling in this thread, just a whole lot of hyperventilating.
And to your point. No, search is not a wall of ads. But if you feel that way, literally change your search engine. It's easier than typing this comment you just posted.
Google does have a great service, but calling them a 'good citizen' is a stretch, IMO.
The events of celebritynetworth.com are a good example of why they've not been behaving as a good citizen (there is a thread about that on this forum).
A good number of people have took up your suggestion and changed their search engine, DDG's traffic count continues to rise. The reality is that many users will use whatever is put in front of them, i.e. how many people use the URL bar of their browser for searches, or use a search toolbar for a specific URL? Google knows this well, hence their paying to be the default search engine choice and paying an amount that no other engine can match.
Google's knows they are the best in class when it comes to general search, but to be sure they have been aggressive in ensuring that no one else gets a look in.
The UK's CMA report estimates that an entrant to the market would require around £20 billion of capital to be a credible alternative, as in, a proper crawling search engine, not a meta search engine like DuckDuckGo. That's before paying the likes of Apple billions of dollars simply so that people will use "what is there".
Having such a dominant position comes with responsibility, which is not solely Google's. The social networks along with Google are essentially the gateways to the web and how they present that information is important- and essentially only one point of view. Having room for more competition, choices, algorithms surely is a good thing.
Agree (responded in an earlier comment). If DOJ are going to look anywhere, it should be the advertising side of things and placement in search results (as opposed to sidebar ads). Even then, I'm not sure there is any case.
>few use them because Google is just flat out better.
I completely disagree with this part, but you're totally right on people continuing to use it.
Search is highly dependent on the query. At first DDG's results seemed bad to me, but after a while I think I've changed how I write my searches. It's hard to explain, but I guess I'm putting more thought into understanding what it is that I hope to find.
Now, Google's results seem to just be a listing of whoever did the best SEO targeting on the subject, and ultimately that means worse results for me. It's less about what I'm looking for and more about what Google has to show me... and Google always has something relevant to show me. When DDG doesn't, I'm forced to re-consider my query and try again, ultimately reaching a better destination.
However, "change the way you search" is niche at best. Google is satisfying because it's so easy to use, that you almost don't even have to write a query. It's like an automatic "I'm feeling lucky" based on it's knowledge of you and your location and time of day, etc...
There are structural issues that make it very difficult for new competitors to gain traction in search. For example, many website owners are now hostile to new web crawlers, but they're happy to allow Google to hammer their servers because they want that sweet, sweet search traffic.
Mandating a commonly accessible crawl, with cached versions of the pages, would help new entrants a lot.
Also, there're large network effects with ad networks. It seems unlikely that many marketing managers are going to take the time to do targeted keyword queries on your search engine with 1/1,000,000 the traffic of Google.
I don't know a single website owner that is hostile to any search engine web crawler, unless that web crawler is slamming them with so many requests they're effectively getting DDoS'd.
Reddit, twitter, facebook are just three to start. There are plenty that disallow crawlers except google. We've crawled a significant amount now and just because you are unaware of them doesn't mean they don't exist. I can attest they're there.
I'll also add plenty of sites don't block any engine but confer special privileges to google bot which depending on the site and their size are almost the same thing.
Edit: And I'll add to limit confusion Reddit hides the sitemap and denies access there's is not an outright ban -- it just makes it a lot harder.
So unless you have a google domain your sol, it's also just generally frowned upon. We have our own UA WhizeBot with an email contact so you can let us know if our crawler is doing anything you'd rather it not.
There have been a few legal cases that protect scraping publicly available information on the web but we'd rather follow robots.txt to avoid the potential for shenanigans in any case.
That's "poor man's cloaking". Most people that genuinely care if it's Googlebot or not will verify it appropriately by doing a DNS lookup and a reverse DNS of that IP to ensure it's one of Google's IPs.
'Faking' the UA is much more likely to annoy site owners and end up with a permanent block.
Content kingdoms have their own reasons to be hostile to Everyone searching, including Google. Even when their content is "searchable" by Google, they'll tease you with something and gate almost all content.
They are part of the story of why Google is degrading, not why they're doing well.
I do, some third party search crawlers are just badly programmed, and after you get burned a bunch of times you just want to deny anyone who isn't one of the main players. I think they are basically startups with a lot of money to spend on crawl compute, but who haven't really figured out their crawl engine, and it can go wild on your site.
You also have bots that seem to be credential stuffing, bots that seem to be content scrapping (stuff with same typos shows up elsewhere after their visits, really obvious on new / fresh articles, bots that seem to be exploring for copyright claims, rando bots (maybe comment sentiment analysis for stock trading) etc.
Right, but that’s not really anti-search-engine, that’s anti-people-who-want-our-actual-data.
Like I said in another comment, if you’re someone that just wants to surface Amazon results they love you. It’s the people that want to take advantage of amazon data in some other way they’re trying to stop.
Oh, good to know, thanks. Are you running relatively complete crawls of larger sites at similar rates to Googlebot?
I've definitely seen my share of robots.txt that give special permission to Googlebot, but maybe my corner of the web was unusually aggressive toward crawlers.
No, not complete crawls of any sites, we've aimed to get a wider coverage in place of deeper crawls. This means we have most sites indexed and are now gradually going deeper. We do encounter robots.txt blocks, but we don't see it as a major issue right now.
It’s a bit like saying, in 1911, that given the choice between petroleum companies, everyone is going to choose Standard Oil, to which the answer is a resounding yes, of course they will.
Ask anybody in much of the Midwest where they will choose to buy groceries and they will answer Walmart.
This kind of reasoning is not an argument against the philosophy behind antitrust regulations. Rather, it is emblematic of the situation that monopolies create for themselves, by using their economies of scale to create pricing that cannot reasonably be expected to lose any competition over customers.
The same economies of scale benefit consumers and the economy as a whole as long as the business behaves in a manner consistent with the shared values of society. As soon as they decide to behave differently, though, society is at the mercy of a monopoly because they have consumed the entire market.
It will work most likely. We aren't in 2000 any more and both parties are mad Big Tech. There will definitely be some heads rolling in FAANG in the next few years.
It's not illegal to be a monopoly - especially by providing a superior product or service.
The case hinges on the no-compete, tying, and default placement agreements. If Google didn't pay anyone to be the default search engine, didn't require Android Phone makers to pre-install Google apps and make Google the default search in order to get access to Google services and the store, etc then there's no problem.
The complaint also says that one of the reasons Google's results are better is the network and scale effects that come from owning 80-90% of search. A competitor has a very difficult time no matter how good their algorithm because you need insights you can only get when people use your service at scale. I don't personally know if that is true but that's part of the complaint.
The proposed antitrust violation is likely the combination: using their dominant position to outspend any other players when paying for default placement to ensure they're the only one with the scale to have the best search results. That forms a self-reinforcing cycle: users who do choose pick you because you have the best results and you use that fact to fund no-compete and default placement agreements to ensure you have unmatched scale which further reinforces your ability to deliver the best results.
Again: I don't know if this is true or a valid argument, but it seems to be what the complaint claims.
I wish this anti-trust action was around their dumping of free services (mail, docs, calendar) and not search. But no, thanks to Reagan era hand-waving that monopoly power can only harm consumers and not companies we can't have nice things.
Google definitely needs anti-trust scrutiny. The timing is suspicious though. Could political motivation be at play here?
And why didn't Facebook get sued too? They're just as anti-competitive. Was there an implicit protection agreement reached at one of those private dinners Zuckerberg had at the White House?
And what about Amazon? There's a whole laundry list of anti-competitive practices happening with their online sales and marketplace.
It really depends on market definition to be honest. If one were to define a market for native app distribution services on iOS smartphones, then I think there is a real argument that Apple is a monopolist that is extracting monopoly rents.
And there is a strong case for defining the market that way, because it represents a discrete set of customers. Approximately none of the people who use the iOS app store also use Google Play, because it doesn't work on their phones. Whereas if you say "the Walmart market for windshield wipers" that isn't a discrete set of customers, because the same people can walk across the street to Target and buy windshield wipers for the same car over there.
99% of people don't, and even you have to use the store that corresponds to the device you want to use the app with.
If one company actually had a monopoly on windshield wipers for cars and another had a monopoly on windshield wipers for trucks, that doesn't change just because there is somebody who has both a car and a truck. When you need windshield wipers for your car, there is still only one place you could get them.
But doesn't that mean the basis for the argument is heavily in how you define the market? How people define the market feels entirely arbitrary to me -- supporters of the antitrust investigation scope it to "iOS", while opponents scope it to "smartphones". Both are valid, but it's our personal position that drives how we define market. That seems backwards.
Antitrust enforcers care about anticompetitive behavior not monopolies. They certainly should care about rent seeking behavior that Apple is engaged in.
Saying something is or is not a monopoly is distracting from what actually matters. It's deflecting.
In addition to most violations of antitrust law being from companies that do not have monopolies, it goes the other way too. You can have an actual monopoly without violating antitrust law.
If you got the monopoly without doing anti-competitive behavior, such as by simple having a better product or by getting lucky and having competitors that all made stupid mistakes that sunk them, your monopoly may be legal.
This is a patently false statement from first principles. Anticompetitive behavior to keep a monopoly is illegal, but that is not the only case. Cartels, predatory pricing, and price fixing are all illegal with or without monopolies and are all considered anticompetitive practices.
Apple has a monopoly on iPhone software, and while it's true that users who dislike the App Store can switch to Android, there is an enormous cost to switching phone ecosystems.
If you don't like Comcast, you could move to an area with a different ISP, and there's a certain point where you probably would move, if Comcast's service became egregious enough. But I don't usually see this argument when people refer to Comcast as a monopoly, because it's understood that the switching cost is unreasonably high.
Monopoly's are whether or not a product or service dominates a specific sector, industry or market. A company can't have a monopoly over its own products which by definition would cover most product/service companies.
Given iOS market share is about ~25% of the Mobile OS Market, it currently doesn't qualify as a Monopoly although it's currently under EU investigation & Epic lawsuit which may rule differently.
But isn't iOS software a specific market? iOS might be an Apple product, but "iOS software" is made primarily by third parties. That software is exclusively sold by Apple, but that's exactly what I find anti-competitive!
Separately, it's worth noting that iOS has ~60% market share in the United States[1]. It's lower globally, as you pointed out, but I'd argue domestic market-share should be what matters in US-based suits.
No it's just a software platform that's open to 3rd parties to develop for, just like Android, Windows, macOS, Linux, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, Smart TV's, Speakers, Watches, embedded platforms, etc. you could go as far and say that Cloud Providers or even Game Engines are software platforms.
But a single platform doesn't define a market, the prominent market iOS is in would be smart mobile OS's of which Android is apart of. Its 60% US Market share could be a determining factor in the US although they do have a clear unobstructed competitor in Android - time will tell as rulings from current investigations & trials get handed down. Of course it's not illegal to have a monopoly, only if its dominant Monopoly power position is abused for anti-competitive purposes, typically for creating a monopoly in a different market, but there are a few other abuses.
And it doesn't even address anything I actually said. It's a deflection at best. The spectrum of corporate misbehavior that needs to be regulated is much broader than "singular monopoly".
Cable (or a wire that transmits data) and mobile internet should be a utility. It makes no sense for multiple fibers to be run to a single home for the sake of competition, nor does it make sense to operate multiple cell towers transmitting the same data, just like it doesn't make sense to run multiple pipes for water and electrical lines for the sake of competition.
Realistically I don't see forced break-ups being in the cards here. That hasn't happened since, what, AT&T, decades ago? My guess would be it's all consent decrees -- what they hit Microsoft with, and what they could hit Apple/Google/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft with now.
Dunno about the US, but in Europe several companies in the last few decades have been forced to divest some part of their operations because of antitrust activity, typically (but not limited to) at merger time. Banks and telecom providers, for example, have seen quite a bit of movement in the Uk. It’s just that they don’t make massive headlines.
Some people online like to complain about Apple, but they are probably the least concerning of the bunch. Android is a viable alternative, and 30% from app stores is the norm right now.
FB is being used by foreign powers to shape US elections, and you think Apple is the biggest problem here?
30% from app stores is the norm for app stores that have market power in their respective markets, but all that tells you is that's the amount of the monopoly rent. Compare this to the Microsoft store, where the store itself doesn't have market power, and then they don't take 30%:
Facebook is a viable alterative to Google from an advertising perspective. This action is taking place despite there being far more competition in search and advertising than there is about the abuse of code signing permissions by Apple.
Antitrust action has never required the lack of an alternative.
> FB is being used by foreign powers to shape US elections, and you think Apple is the biggest problem here?
Apple is being used to attack democracy campaigners in Hong Kong, mainland China and Belarus, and has a long history of attacking sexual minorities and sex education efforts.
Yes, but they're of lower priority. Gaming has increasingly moved away from the PC (the only truly open/competitive platform) towards the walled gardens of consoles and mobile devices. This has a censorious effect in what's actually allowed to be released, the big platforms get to do a lot of rent-seeking, and crucially, games are increasingly going digital, which eliminates a consumer's right to resale and loan games to their friends. The gaming marketplace would be a lot more competitive and interesting without gatekeeping. About the only downside you'd see is that the up-front cost for some consoles would need to be higher, because selling them as a loss-leader and making the money up in back-end licensing fees would no longer be allowable.
I would love to see some sort of regulated 10% rake cap on digital marketplaces (both mobile and gaming) and ticket sales. Note that this would apply only to games being distributed through the platform owner's marketplace, and that consumers would be allowed to install by right software from other sources as well.
My largest issue with the Obama administration was their incredibly corrupt and cozy relationship with Google. It's one of the reasons I was really hoping nearly anyone else would win the primary.
So yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if Biden drops it, but only because he was likely part of the problem to begin with. Google wouldn't be the problem it is today if the Obama/Biden administration was doing their job.
(Still voting for him, mind you. It's not like we have better options.)
But basically, a massive number of Google employees were installed in high-level positions of the Obama administration, and a lot of Obama administration folks got great jobs at Google. Obama installed a professor who wrote studies about how Google shouldn't face antitrust scrutiny (who was paid by Google to do so) as the FTC Commissioner (Joshua Wright, who is now a lawyer at Google's preferred law firm... he went from Google shill to government official and now back to Google work), and an FTC case against Google where staffers recommended litigation inexplicably got shoved under the rug.
Then you'd see things like a former Googler in Obama's administration announce an initiative to budget billions of taxpayer dollars to buy computers for schoolchildren... unshockingly, these were intended to be Chromebooks, which get kids started early as Google account holders. (I believe Congress ended up rejecting this particular budgetary line item, or reducing it significantly.)
This sort of topic gets a lot of people going on both sides of the matter, and people get very loyal to their camps. Accuracy often has nothing to do with how people vote on these things. We've got an intersection of partisan US politics and Google here, it's voting catnip.
(Bear in mind, my post both speaks ill of Obama, who might as well be Jesus to the Democratic Party, and also made it clear I'm voting against Trump. So I ingratiate myself with very few politically in the parent comment.)
I would be incredibly surprised, Harris was advised by Jonathan Mayer on privacy issues, the Democratic House just released a scathing report on tech monopolies, and Biden knows he still needs support from the Sanders/Warren crowd who are salivating at the prospect of breaking up Big Tech. Facebook's shameless support of the Trump admin may likewise be viewed as one of many of Zuck's poorly thought out moves. Unlike Obama, who credited Facebook/Google with his 2008 victory, and opened a revolving door between Google/White House, the appearance of that would be absolutely toxic in the present climate.
FTC/DOJ/FCC have different, and sometimes complementary, powers. DOJ is taking lead on Google right now, but don't forget FTC just fined Facebook $5B. DOJ may be at the forefront of this particular action because of Trump's grievances, but there's no reason to think Biden wouldn't go even harder, especially if we get Pai out of the FTC (praise be the day). GDPR has been a total wash, it will be funny to see the Americans actually do a better job with a far more constricted legal toolkit.
Trump's dislike of Jeff Bezos is well known. I doubt Amazon is getting any special favors from the White House. Given how blatant and extensive Amazon's scummy practices are, I've got to wonder if the feds and the state attorneys general are letting Amazon keep collecting more and more of the rope that will eventually be used the hang them with.
If there was no conflicting evidence, then maybe. But if you read the newspaper, you know this has been in the works for a very long time, and again from both Republicans and Democrats.
AG Barr has been pushing to get this out before the election, over objections of his own attorneys:
"He [Barr] pushed career Justice Department attorneys to bring the case by the end of September, prompting pushback from lawyers who wanted more time and complained of political influence."[1]
You are correct. But that doesn't mean all of the Democrats and other Republicans who have been pushing for this for years have suddenly vaporized from history.
I think he's saying that many people on a bi-partisan basis has been pushing for this for a long time, which would make the timing less suspicious as it has been picking up steam for a long time.
Ie lots of people pushing a change, not pushing a theory.
Announcing Google today does not preclude others from being announced later. Cases take time.
Also, based on the story I saw the Google one is pretty straight forward. The deals they have made to force their search onto things like the iPhone (with Apple) and Android (with the carriers/manufacturers) is the issue.
Considering we haven’t had effective anti-trust for some time... I agree I think focusing on one and seeing where the modern limits are is a better move than a shotgun to anyone you feel may have skirted a fair system.
>And why didn't Facebook get sued too?
>And what about Amazon?
I completely agree, and this has been my main headscratcher since we first heard about a possible anti-trust case.
For starters, I still think things like banks, telecom, and probably oil, and defense industry companies probably need to be broken up, and that they should be much higher priorities. To say nothing of the obscure industries we wouldn't normally think of (Luxxotica with glasses) that are monopolized. There's probably others for obscure things I'm not even thinking of.
And even within tech, I wouldn't even rank Google ahead of Amazon, and I'm not 100% that I would rank them ahead of Facebook either.
And, if that's not all, I think Google at least serves as a check on the other Frightful Five, and subtracting Google will serve to further consolidate tech. And if that's not enough, I feel that the tech industry has served as a useful check against other entrenched industries. Their clash with cable, and occasional work to protect an open internet are a healthy counterbalance to voices of other monopolized industries.
An announcement on one does not mean announcements and cases aren't coming against the others.
In the book, The Age Surveillance Capitalism, the case is made the Google is actually worse than FB but lesser known for many of the things people complain about.
Google may be the easier monopoly case to go after given the Doubleclick merger, the way Chrome is used, etc.
The NBA, MLB, NFL, and MLS have limited exemptions from antitrust law. The MLB has a complete statutory exemption from antitrust law. (See https://sportslaw.uslegal.com/antitrust-and-labor-law-issues...) However, their monopoly status doesn't prevent competing leagues from forming; indeed the modern NBA and NFL are the results of the merger of smaller leagues. The MLS itself is the third iteration of professional soccer in the US, the first two having failed quite miserably, and multiple professional football leagues have launched and failed in just the past decade despite healthy ticket sales due to mismanaged spending.
UFC is not a monopoly but does engage in anticompetitive behavior, including for example restricting its fighters from competing for other promotions, controlling the sponsorships they can receive, and even the sponsors they may promote in the ring. Their practices affect their fighters, but have no discernable effect on their audience. You can easily choose to watch one of the other promotions, like Bellator.
WWE is the oldest and most successful wrestling promotion, but it has a dozen or so major competitors, and there are hundreds of wrestling promotions at the local and regional levels.
Gymnastics and the other Olympic sports don't have monopolies, why do you think they do? Track athletes compete in multiple professional events over the course of the year (most of which aren't televised in the US due to lack of audience but many of which are broadcast globally), and most olympic sports, gymnastics included, are not commercial draws outside of national championships and olympic qualifiers.
> Gymnastics and the other Olympic sports don't have monopolies, why do you think they do? Track athletes compete in multiple professional events over the course of the year (most of which aren't televised in the US due to lack of audience but many of which are broadcast globally), and most olympic sports, gymnastics included, are not commercial draws outside of national championships and olympic qualifiers.
It looks like cheerleading is a monopoly in the US based on related articles due to the governing bodies being controlled by the same commercial entity and that entity blocking the formation of competing events.
However, USA Gymnastics is not a monopoly, and there are other entities that organize gymnastics competitions (and most gymnastics competitions are not USA Gymnastics competitions). USA Gymnastics is simply the organization that is tasked with overseeing the national championship and Olympic qualifiers.
There is absolutely no monopoly in running. There are literally thousands of different races around the world, and nearly as many race organizers. Each of the big major marathons is organized by a different company. Each of the major track events is put on by a different company. There are dozens of running shoe and apparel brands. There are hundreds of running clubs like Nike's Oregon Project, many of which were just as, or even more successful, as NOP (see, e.g. North Arizona Elite).
> banks, telecom, and probably oil, and defense industry companies
None of these, with the possible exception of telecom, are monopolies or engaging in specific anti-competitive behavior. I agree that the pattern of consolidation there is bad, but I fail to see
a. how this announcement precludes any other lawsuits against the companies you're mentioning
b. why the fact that other industries also ought to be broken up has any bearing on whether Google has engaged in anti-competitive behavior?
>a. how this announcement precludes any other lawsuits against the companies you're mentioning
I feel like the answer to this is pretty obvious, but to state the obvious, Google exists in the same timeline as the companies in other industries that I listed, and in most cases have arrived later on the timelines and engaged in less egregious offenses than a number of other companies, yet Google were prioritized for anti-trust action ahead of those other companies.
>why the fact that other industries also ought to be broken up has any bearing on whether Google has engaged in anti-competitive behavior?
I think if you read my comment and heard "Google is not engaging in anti-competitive behavior", you heard something I did not write. I think a wide range of companies ought to be challenged for anti-competitive behavior, including Google, and many of them have engaged in much more egregious offenses than Google, yet Google is targeted while others haven't been. Whatever impetus would have lead to prosecuting Google out to have lead to targeting a number of other companies before getting to Google.
The hypothetical possibility that worse companies that ought to have been higher priorities might possibly be prosecuted in the future is not something that I feel is responsive the to point here.
Leveraging your monopoly in one market to constrain business in another market is.
Microsoft wasn't prosecuted because Windows was a monopoly, Microsoft was prosecuted because it leveraged that monopoly to block out other competitors (you could not buy a PC without a Windows license, even if you wanted to put another O/S on it).
IBM wasn't investigated because it dominated mainframes, but because it leveraged that domination to control other markets.
AT&T wasn't prosecuted for antitrust because of its monopoly on phone service in the US…the US government had effectively granted AT&T that monopoly in the first place. It was prosecuted and broken up because it leveraged that monopoly to box out competitors across multiple markets that intersected with the telephone system.
Google’s weak spots are not their monopolies in search nor ads. It’s having leveraged those monopolies in the browser and mobile phone markets. If I had to guess, they will offer to separate ad spots on search results into a separate market place, offer to spin off Chrome and Android to foundations funded initially by Google but expected to stand on their own (ala Mozilla/Firefox) after some time period, offer to separate ad placement from ad serving, and generally rearrange the chairs and org chart with a series of consent decrees requiring regular reporting to Congress or the DOJ.
Settlements and consent decrees are not the worst thing in the world. IBM was never prosecuted but the fear induced by the 1970s antitrust investigation likely caused the series of missteps IBM made in the 1980s that allowed the personal computer industry to bloom (if there was no antitrust investigation, IBM would likely have written an operating system for PCs in–house, not call on Gary Kildall or Bill Gates).
Big question mark in my mind is if there’s hard evidence that Google employees required customers of one service (say, Cloud) to utilize another Google service (ads, G Suite/Workplace, etc.) in order to get a discount or some other preference. That's a slam dunk. My suspicion is that there'll be a lot of activities that hew extremely closely to that line without crossing it.
> Microsoft wasn't prosecuted because Windows was a monopoly, Microsoft was prosecuted because it leveraged that monopoly to block out other competitors (you could not buy a PC without a Windows license, even if you wanted to put another O/S on it).
That's what the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit should have been primarily about. The central issue in the lawsuit was including IE with Windows. Now 20 years later, the idea that they shouldn't include a web browser with their OS just seems silly.
Late reply, but I understand that monopolies aren't per se illegal. I said that the companies listed need to be broken up, not that they fall into the category of "monopoly that's technically not illegal and not leveraging its monopoly to constrain business in another market." There's an awful lot of projection there and I'm not sure how that ended up being the takeaway from what I said.
"Attorney General William P. Barr, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, has played an unusually active role in the investigation. He pushed career Justice Department attorneys to bring the case by the end of September, prompting pushback from lawyers who wanted more time and complained of political influence. Mr. Barr has spoken publicly about the inquiry for months and set tight deadlines for the prosecutors leading the effort."
Could there be political motivations in politics? I'd expect so.
The issue with doing anything during an election is that people on the other side accuse the administration of suspicious timing. The issue with doing nothing during an election is that everyone accuses you of being a lame duck. This is, more or less, business as usual for the administration; they've been on Big Tech's ass for at least a year now, and finally something is coming of it.
Every big tech company needs looked at, and potentially split up. And, maybe, they'll all get their turn. But resources are limited; when the US went to war with Germany, we didn't airdrop troops in Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Munich, and Frankfurt on the same day. Actually, we didn't even start with Germany. Starting with Google allows some legal precedent to be set on some of the very weird, novel antitrust issues the case is going to face, which will make future cases easier. I tend to think Amazon should have been the first, but Google is certainly up there, and probably (IMO) a more potentially harmful monopoly than Apple, Microsoft, or Facebook.
I'll agree that Amazon is Scarier. But I also think that Google's behavior is a lot easier to scrutinize/prove in court thanks to their actions in/around Android and Search
"The rumor is that a suit against Facebook will soon follow" [1] said Matt Stoller in his latest BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly and finance. It takes a lot of resources to file those suits, so don't expect them to be announced at exactly the same time.
PS: Since it contains quite a bit of interesting and relevant information about the cases against GAFA, I submitted this particular newsletter at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24837931
I agree that the timing is weird, but the lack of action against Amazon actually weakens the argument that this is political in nature. Trump hates Bezos and has been threatening him for a while, so to leave his company out is noteworthy.
It's not unreasonable to question the motivation of this DOJ, nonetheless, that does not mean that there is nothing here, even if the green light was given for bad reasons. If we are seeing action on Google it could be that they have been preparing something for some time now and it was simply the case furthest along. I would agree that while Google is not entirely clean the behavior of Facebook and Amazon are much more egregious.
I mean, Amazon definitely has issues, but apart from some incredibly good acquisitions and sharp business practices, I don't see the anti-trust case against Facebook.
Agreed. I think that FB is simultaneously one of the least liked tech companies among the general public, but also probably the one with the weakest anti-trust case against them.
The rent-seeking by Google + Apple seems pretty clear to me.
They want to reverse Facebook's Instagram acquisition but Zuck is merging all backend infrastructure of Facebook and Instagram to make it harder for them.
Instagram had like 10mn users when they were acquired, and had literally just launched an Android app (like the week before the acquisiton).
It's incredibly successful because of the FB acquisition, so I'm not sure what the anti-trust concern is.
Now, Whatsapp is a completely different matter, and that should probably never have been allowed to happen (and if Whatsapp had been popular in the US, I'm not sure that it would have been).
Of course there's politics involved. Who do you think Google's owners would prefer to win? Just yesterday came out an expose of how Google skews searches of political terms for each party in the US.
It's wild to me that this is even a question. A lawsuit like this a couple weeks before the election from a DOJ which might not exist in 4 months is nakedly political. Why is anyone taking this seriously?
If, on a whim, google blocks your name or business, what do you do? I found out by accident, and I think they have too much control.
Earlier this year, Google suspended my ad words account. I don't know why but think it was their mistake. The sites and ads were ethical and well within their terms. Still, I’ve sent emails and letters without progress.
It's frustrating not having an avenue to resolve the issue. Even more so because I'm in tech and though I understood these things. More so because I worked at google for a long time.
In the suspension dialog they warn all accounts under my name or the domain names linked to the ad words account will be blocked.
I don't depend on ad words. If I did, I would be completely out of luck. I'm not aware of an alternative ads network or search engine.
>Google’s a monster. If they don’t want you on the net, there’s nothing you can do.
That's hyperbole. I'm on the net and Google can't stop me by any white-hat means. I have a website hosted on non-Google infrastructure on a domain name registered with a non-Google registrar, and I don't rely on advertising to pay the bills.
Have you considered a more ethical revenue stream that doesn't involve advertising and surveillance? There is life after AdWords.
I own a shop that sells industrial parts, many clients of ours praised us for giving critical help, being able to find parts they needed urgently to keep their also critical factory working.
thing is, people find out we exist solely because Google search, when something goes wrong on the factory, they google for the solution, and finds us... whenever Google changes SEO in a bad direction, or ban our ads by mistake (happened more than once) our revenue tanks hard.
To be honest it feels terrible, I have no idea how to fix this situation.
Note: just so you understand how ethical and important the business are, some of the products our clients make and needed our emergency help: cheap bread, medicine, medical equipment, beverages, work vehicles, etc...
One of our most lucrative sales that came from a google search: a truck factory was having countless accidents because a clamping tool kept failing and injuring the workers, they were desperate for another supplier that knew how to fix that issue, instead of just selling replacements we actually sent someone to the factory and figured out a way to do a certain step during production differently, in a safer way.
Google is a double edged sword. Their search engine is good enough most people, in enterprise or otherwise, will rely on it when they need answers. This results in a centralized system where it is super high value for you to work with and ensure you are taking full advantage of.
That does leave you at the whims of said centralized system. There is no centralized system that can avoid this. If such a centralized system did not exist and people searched on a wide landscape of competing smaller search networks, it would be dramatically more difficult for you to ensure you were well positioned to be found on all those smaller networks.
Put that address big front and center on all your literature, equipment, parts, boxes, etc.
Write, "for help, please visit: or call:"
Also, put your searchable text articles on the big social networks. Paste the entire text into your subreddit, facebook, instagram. Put your site URL in the profile.
It's a sad state of things, and will probably get better soon with meta-search or some other kind of new search paradigm.
There are 100s of millions of domain. How do I know which domain to open if I can't find it with some search engine or with advertisement. I don't think this is limited to Google. Every search engine/social network have automated process for blacklisting sites, and there is no human to contact if they blocks your domain. I am yet to see large search engine/scale social network which provides reason for low views to the owners/posters.
When they started adding those "This site works better in Chrome" popups on their web properties I was fairly shocked; didn't MS get in trouble for essentially this & Windows/IE?
This seems to be getting a lot of downvotes, but I think it's correct, strictly speaking. There are a lot of business practices that are legal up until the point where you've acquired sufficient market power. After that, antitrust law applies. Similarly, regulators don't care if two companies with negligible market share want to merge, but they may care a lot if the two dominant players in a market want to merge.
Microsoft released an Operating System where the main portal of entry to the internet was also their own product. Microsoft engaged in anti-competitive behavior to dissuade users from having alternative browsers installed -- which is similar to a shopping mall starting its own jewelry store to compete with outside jewelry stores renting space in the mall. There are certain behaviors that are kosher, and there are certain behaviors that destroy competition in unsavory ways. Ultimately, the illegality was not able to be shown, and Microsoft started a [not-so-good] trend of acquiring competition rather than dissuading its existence and adoption. This is in some ways a lot worse than finding them guilty.
Antitrust was a disaster for Bell Labs, which gave us inventions like the transistor and Unix. Nothing as noteworthy after the breakup and string of acquisitions. In the same way I’m worried for all the moon shoot projects at these big companies if they are broken up. I suggest reading the Idea Factory and then see how you feel about breaking up big tech.
Bell also forced you to rent their telephones if you wanted phone service. The old Bell was a disaster for consumers and Bell Labs does not excuse their monopolistic practices. As a counterpoint consider Xerox PARC, which brought us the GUI and Ethernet without Xerox fucking over their customers (too much).
Edit: I find it funny that someone posting on "Hacker" News is defending a monopoly that extracts an ad tax from every startup and kills many innovative new companies by acquihire.
You really find it funny that someone on HN is defending the company whose resources and internal innovation culture lead to advances that are foundational to all the technology we work on today? So maybe they charged too much for their phone service, big deal. I’d argue that their contributions to science and engineering outweigh that.
Somehow, it's much rarer to see someone on HN defending the government, whose resources and internal innovation culture lead to advances that are foundational to all the technology that we work on today. So maybe they charged too much taxes, bid deal. I’d argue that their contributions to science and engineering outweigh that.
None of those things are new or interesting. Maps were used in the 70s and you can find a chapter about them being parrapalized in Kthuths original Art of Computer Programming.
I’m much more interested in the Ad-tech Monopoly. The Doubleclick merger should have never been approved.
“Other states are still considering their own cases related to Google’s search practices, and a large group of states is considering a case challenging Google’s power in the digital advertising market, The Wall Street Journal has reported. In the ad-technology market, Google owns industry-leading tools at every link in the complex chain between online publishers and advertisers.
The Justice Department also continues to investigate Google’s ad-tech practices.” [1]
Wherefore? FB and other such platforms are much better at display ads technology, as they don't care about user privacy at all. User tracking is the only real discriminator when it comes to display ads, where as search queries are very discriminating.
I agree, considering how much money they still make with Display Ads, and its potential to make so much more, it's amazing to me how Display Ads are still like 1/10 the quality of Facebook ads as a product for advertisers, and Facebook Ads is also a mess with all the bugs and random algorithm changes they make on a weekly basis, so that's saying something.
It's not just about targeting. But the algorithm is also 10x worse and the UX is 10x worse, and often it's on purpose to get as much "dumb money" as they can, while of course shooting themselves in the foot, because the better long strategy would be to actually make it a quality product that gives people results.
DuckDuckGo claim to make significantly less money per search than Google does, which seems to disprove that search queries are enough of a discriminator on their own.
Despite DuckDuckGo being robustly profitable since 2014, we have been priced out of this auction because we choose to not maximize our profits by exploiting our users. In practical terms, this means our commitment to privacy and a cleaner search experience translates into less money per search. This means we must bid less relative to other, profit-maximizing companies.
Search queries are generally enough for ads, but DuckDuckGo only makes money on selling those ads, while Google also sells your person information connected to the search.
Yeah, I was trying to figure out how to say that Google further monetizes your search info without saying they sell your data, but gave up. It's still why Google makes more per search.
Could be that DuckDuckGo users just aren't good ad targets. The big thing separating them is "hates big corporations", I could easily see advertisement for big corporations not being a big hit for this crowd.
Maybe, but one big difference I notice between the two is that a search for <brand> on Google often has the top result as an ad for that brand, whereas on DDG it will be the same result but not an ad. It seems that brands don't have to “defend their turf” on DDG by buying ads on their own name as they do for Google.
I'm a DDG user. I do not "hate big corporations". I may dislike some big corporations. I've enthusiastically worked for others.
I hate poverty, injustice, and bigotry. I cannot stir up strong feelings about an advertising company.
On the other hand I am a terrible advertising target, not wholly impervious to advertising but actively resistant, in part having seen under the bonnet of the sector and found little but a morass of grubby lies and folks with broken moral compasses. I intentionally interpret advertising as noise, not signal.
(corollary: attempts to disguise advertising are an irritant and a cognitive burden, so I allocate advertorials, content marketing, and drip-email compaigns to the Brand Damage circle of hell)
I wonder if DuckDuckGo would be more successful if it was easier to find out how to advertise with them. Like, a link on the page that says "Advertise on Duck Duck Go." I've tried to advertise with them in the past a few times and gave up. I posted here before also, as I think Gabriel used to read the pages.
I use them for search as my default, and I would have used them for ads. I still might if they put a link there.
I would like to see data on Google's revenue distribution per user, guessing it would be very lopsided. Some users are clicking ads for 50%+ of their searches. DuckDuckGo users are different because they most likely at minimum know the difference between a search result and an ad.
There's no way that "some users" (implying a significant proportion) are clicking ads 50% of the time after they do a search. that would be a very rare duck indeed.
Couldn't agree more, the adtech is where the monopoly lies. I worked for a doubleclick / ads 360 competitor and it was so plain that Google used its dominant position not only to squash competitors like us but also to further obscure the auction mechanisms. Today it's a challenge to specify exactly what you want to bid for a given keyword, in part for the better since it dramatically reduces complexity for advertisers but it does remove a lot of the control and hands it back to... Google. Ultimately the auction is completely irrelevant since Google decides which ads will show and by extension whose ad money they'll pocket. In addition to that, Google charges premium for ad space even in non-competitive markets; I'm talking about what you end up paying for a top spot although there are no other actors in the auction for a particular keyword (even in broader matches). While one could argue that it's up to them as a publisher to decide what a spot is worth, this mechanism is completely obscure and you will only ever find out in hindsight through what you pay for the traffic.
> Google charges premium for ad space even in non-competitive markets; I'm talking about what you end up paying for a top spot although there are no other actors in the auction for a particular keyword (even in broader matches).
Google uses a Vickery Auction, in other words the top bid pays what the second bidder bid so while I agree with your greater point, this is not based in reality as stated.
Yes, I didn't express that correctly; I know about the second price auction and what I was referring to is that since Google does everything in their power to get you away from keyword level bidding and into their "smart bidding" solutions you have no _direct_ say in what the traffic costs (AFAIK it's still possible to use keyword level bidding but Google will email you very regularly to try to get you off). This fact is even more obvious in non-competitive markets as I was trying to point out.
I manage a decent size Google Adwords account. The Google adwords "strategist" they have call me is always pushing the Smart Bidding endlessly. So I try it on one campaign. Smart bidding increased the click cost from about $20 to $100. The one click converted but I get conversions on that campaign for about $60 so it was a disaster. Turned off that smart bidding and went back to my own eCpc bidding.
2nd price auctions have been dead for 2+ years due to header bidding. For anything in which Google has to compete against other SSPs or DSPs, I'd imagine it is the same. If Google owns the content, such that they are the single party SSP/DSP, and header bidding is not possible, then I suppose 2nd price could come in.
I think it’s a way for publishers to simultaneously auction the same bit of space in multiple exchanges. I guess that this means they have to use first price auctions, though I don’t have a super great idea as to why.
I wrote an article on the subject: https://michelenasti.com/2019/10/21/how-internet-ads-work.ht... You may find the answer in the last paragraph. Basically, the browser will ask multiple bidders for an ad, and then an auction is performed in the browser. The result of this first auction may be then sent to google to see if there's a better offer from them.
It's called "header bidding" because... in origin.. this stuff was done in the <head> part of the page.
Thanks. That's a very well written article, I enjoyed learning from it.
The auction is performed in the browser? No wonder the web feels pokey these days.
I thought at first this must be due to the privacy requirements around cookies, only the browser can coordinate the different parties because none of them will be sent all the cookies needed to run a complete auction themselves. But it seems like it's really more some kind of hack around a limited (for business reasons) Google API.
The post states that 90+% of google's auctions are still second priced:
> It’s important to note that our move to a single unified first price auction only impacts display and video inventory sold via Ad Manager. This change will have no impact on auctions for ads on Google Search, AdSense for Search, YouTube, and other Google properties, and advertisers using Google Ads or Display & Video 360 do not need to take any action.
Honestly, how would anyone ever know if Google does what they say they're doing? Is there any trusted third party auditing Google's ad auctions? If Google says $X was the price at auction, how would I ever dispute that?
How would anyone ever know that Facebook hasn't designed it's algorithms for spreading misinformation and disinformation? How would anyone ever know that Apple doesn't use your photos to train an AI? How would anyone ever know that the Amazon doesn't peek into your RDS database?
>> Several current and former YouTube employees, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity because they had signed confidentiality agreements, said company leaders were obsessed with increasing engagement during those years.
>> One problem, according to several of the current and former YouTube employees, is that the A.I. tended to pigeonhole users into specific niches, recommending videos that were similar to ones they had already watched.
There are real human beings working on those systems. That's how everyone would know if Google does as it says
The encrypted traffic will be the traffic Amazon will be most interested in, since you took the trouble; they won't peek into the DB but they will be able to infer lots about what's going on if they want. It's the Tor Paradox.
Yup, it's a classic paradox in information theory and telecommunication theory about entropy and power/energy flows. Do you want to save energy or privacy? Which is stronger hypothesis P=NP? The continuum hypothesis? The fact that physics can't fundamentally integrate relativity or quantum field theory? The ergodic hypothesis? In the spirit of both physics, CS, and math, we are valued by the trust networks who we trust and inform. The failure to integrate means in physical terms we can still create new huge blobs of semantic meaningful value and save energy at the same time by using free distributed cloud v-compute spacetime. You can theorize from any cloud provider Amazon MS Google if they shared info they legally shouldn't have inferred for data privacy reasons. Reason over complexity classes.
Personally I live near Washington DC, so with a government change, I will have to reassess what side of the issue ethically I should be reasoning in. Save energy? Encourage monopoly? Join government? Join big tech? Seek rents from big tech? I'm just meditating and creating deferred decision trees for myself postmarked for myself using the "well known" schwartz–zippel lemma and noether's theorem so i have self-determination.
Yes, and you could do anything else that you want with your app. However, if your application is hosted on their servers you are just a traditional user from their perspective. And as the old adage goes, if you own the server, you own the user.
There is an implicit assumption, that the code that you push is actually the same one that is being run on the VM, in your statement. This brings me back to the point I was trying to make in the parent comment.
This is a pretty good point. I spoke to a developer from facebook once and they said essentially that there is nothing super secretive happening behind the curtains.
Yes they may be evil and doing all this bad stuff, but we pretty much know all the evil stuff they are doing publicly.
Or that Facebook developer just doesn't know about the super secretive happenings behind the curtains. If they did, they probably wouldn't talk about them. :)
I understand the line of reasoning above and would normally follow it - but Facebook, Apple and Google have all shown that they will do really shady things if they can get away with it. The reaction to Project Dragonfly was pretty nice to see, but you really have to wonder how many things like that make it through without any public outcry - I know real human beings and most of them are pretty awesome, some of them are sociopaths who'd do anything to make a buck though... we're gambling that some moral ones get into the decision making process and, tbh, if the sociopaths have their way the moral ones will remain blissfully ignorant of the shady stuff.
Heck, Thinking there are individuals who actually understand such a large system are complex.
Even at organizations orders of magnitude smaller than Facebook, it's pretty easy to have a few systems that are large enough you can only keep so many in your head at a time.
You'd probably need a few dozen of the right people together to begin to understand the complexity of their systems.
If something fishy indeed goes on in a large company, it must be on a need-to-know basis.
But the higher access you get, higher the penalties of sharing company secrets go.
Snowdens come into the picture every once in a while, but most average programmer Joes wouldn’t risk being internationally manhunted for whistleblowing questionable business practices.
My statement isn't irresponsible. Corporations are universally amoral. If it was in Google's interests to do it, they would. But I think that, right now, those interests don't exist.
That being said, someone that is in that situation, if the stakes are high enough, might be dissuaded just knowing that such things happen.
People make decisions. At some point, all corporate decisions go through people.
Would you (reader) want to bet your life against a conference room full of people with $1M+ worth of stock options you're about to negatively impact? Where a bad outcome for you only requires their silence?
There are many people in the world who value morals over money. There are a few who value morals over lots of money. But that's not a bet I'd take.
Google is a client of the Pinkertons, a very old union busting company with a history of brutal tactics [0]. One of their employees was recently charged in a murder during riots in Denver [1].
While it’s possible for companies to keep secrets, most companies lack the secrecy and paranoia required to really keep big secrets for long periods of time. These companies tend to leak, both because people move around a lot, and because unlike governments they lack the ability to throw leakers in jail.
If google was actually futzing about with the auctions like that, we’d probably find out eventually.
Then I guess the Edward Snowden leaks aren't real because real human beings would of otherwise told us?
What is a conspiracy theory one day can suddenly turn into reality with just a little bit of transparency, just because large companies hire alot of people who they would never bring into said conspiracies doesn't discount the point.
>> Facebook has designed its algorithms for spreading misinformation and disinformation, because emotion drives engagement.
If emotion drives engagement, then this should apply to positive emotions as well. All emotional posts, positive or negative, will be treated equally by the algorithm according to your logic. Hence it follows, that facebook hasn't explicitly designed it's algorithms to spread only misinformation and disinformation, acc to your logic.
I would like to see some proof that would back up your statement.
1. It doesn’t matter what the valence of the emotions are - positive or negative valence feedback loops will spread misinformation and disinformation. Positive emotion is not correlated with truth.
I assumed from your previous comment(below) that you are correlating negative emotion with misinformation and disinformation. If that's not what you meant, then I guess I misunderstood what you meant by your previous comment
>> Facebook has designed its algorithms for spreading misinformation and disinformation, because emotion drives engagement
The easiest negative emotion to cause with a post is outrage, which goes nicely with fake news.
The easiest positive emotion to cause are at the result of puppies and wholesome/faith-in-humanity-restored posts, neither are generally related to actual truthful news.
If emotion drives engagement and you optimize for engagement, then you will optimize for emotionally-charged posts over emotionally-neutral posts. If you then assume that emotionally-charged posts are more likely to be mis/dis-information, then you have a case.
I don't think this assumption is necessarily true for random misinformation (think common myths), but propaganda is usually designed to be emotionally charged, from PR to state propaganda.
The whole debate isn't even wrong in the first place as the questions are beyond "have you stopped beating your wife yet?" and into adding absurdities as qualifiers like "have you stopped beating your wife with a prized family heirloom yet?".
So bad it arguably qualifies as misinformation in itself. If an algorithim spreads any information and cannot classify it (if you have a general purpose algorithim which can know all truth apriori what are you doing here instead of creating a singularity!). Then /design/ which implies intent and effectiveness. Otherwise if I burn a Trump Voodoo doll I will have designed something with the "intent" to kill the President. Even if Fox News would be very offended by it nobody sane would take it as a serious assassination attempt.
That only makes sense if your voodoo doll didn’t actually kill the president. Facebook does spread misinformation.
As to intent - at some point in the distant past before it became clear what it’s effects were, you could argue that Facebook wasn’t designed to spread misinformation.
Once you know what a thing does and how it works, if you keep operating it, it is by design.
if you know enough about remote sensing, you can in effect, exact rents from the google landlord by passively observing observation bias by sensing crawling getting infos they cannot know about by some strong statistical independence test, probablity mass that they cannot know about. understand the gdpr and related privacy laws well. the probably with google is that it is too big and has too much influence, so many people's business model is being the non-google. same thing with facebook, etc.
Is there any 3rd party auditing what your business or your company is doing? I don't think that's the way business works in the USA unless you have a contract with a company that they can audit your services/products/etc. That's between two companies and not a public service.
Depends on what industry you're in. In the banking world, it's extremely common to have auditors, escrow firms, and government regulators keeping an eye on what you're getting up to.
yes auditing is pretty standard. Thats a big part of the big 4 accounting firms work, since they are preparing tax docs and verifying numbers, they need to peek below the hood. Also, insurance companies will audit their clients to be sure premiums match coverage.
I suppose it boils down to buying a service at a price, and the “bidding” process is just a price discovery tool for Google, not the customer. Is there anything wrong with Google charging me double via an “internal bid bot” so long as the big cost is in line with my boundaries?
If I’m trying to buy a car off a showroom floor, and the salesman says “you better take this price, I got 4 more people lined up to buy it,” does it matter if those 4 others are not genuinely interested or even real at all? It’s a bit slimey if a sales tactic, but if you say “I’ll pay nothing more than X,” you’ve lost the negotiating position. If you tell google “I’ll pay $3cpc for this phrase”, well now they should be shopping that phrase with all its might.
At the end of it, google has a primary interest in keeping its adtech optimized in a bang-for-buck sense for consumers vs it’s earnings. If they get carried away with charging too much, customers will start just walking away without a purchase. Just like the car salesman.
the level of understanding in government of how the Internet was shaping up way back then was really really low; I was around then and felt it was crazy but unless the regulators can understand and measure an industry, they won't every stop an acquisition like Doubleclick.
I concur, I think this is when Google really jumped the shark. That said I believe it would be relatively easy to break up the company 1) office/mail/maps service as a pay to play 2) cloud service 3) search service. Obviously 1 would have to go to a rival ad platform or freemium to pay the bills, maybe also keep the "non search" ads platform. 2) and 3) should be able to pay for themselves 3) with related ads to the search.
Probably true, but antitrust law is based on consumer welfare. Let’s say Google uses monopoly power in the ad market to squeeze advertisers. It’s hard to translate that into direct harm to consumers.
That argument would either hinge on the cost of advertising being passed along to consumers. Very hard to prove. Or the higher cost decreasing the total amount of advertising, somehow harming consumers. Dubious when ad-free products are generally considered premium and desirable
> Probably true, but antitrust law is based on consumer welfare.
I don’t believe this is true. The law doesn’t set that criteria, but rather it’s a standard of interpretation known as the Chicago School. This was established far after, but is not law.
There’s a lot of debate on whether or not we should continue to maintain the standard.
Antitrust legislation was originally established to prevent monopoly power from giving a company influence that could challenge that of government and harm democracy.
It is an interpretation, but one explicitly endorsed by 30 years of Supreme Court precedent. Given the current composition of the court, it's unlikely that we'll ever see the consumer welfare standard overruled in our lifetime.
> Let’s say Google uses monopoly power in the ad market to squeeze advertisers. It’s hard to translate that into direct harm to consumers.
Almost as if what harms the ad industry is good for consumers ...
Also, "direct harm to consumers" is about the lowest bar you can set. It would be way more responsible to take some preventative action, before the harm to consumers occurs.
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[ 0.12 ms ] story [ 558 ms ] threadCall me when a thing happens.
[0]. https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/15/21260494/google-antitrust...
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department and 11 states filed an antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet Inc’s Google on Tuesday for allegedly breaking the law in using its market power to fend off rivals.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tech-antitrust-google/u-s...
I’m not opposed to some anti trust action across the entire industry but making this a partisan election issue is just going to discredit the whole thing and obscure the real issues.
Obviously this should have been done sooner, but it’s Trump we’re talking about, it’s half a miracle if it gets done at all.
https://www.projectveritas.com/news/insider-blows-whistle-ex...
Imagine casually dismissing a megacorp exec literally confessing to wanting to interfere in your country's election.
> They have littering been caught red-handed doctoring videos
1. At the very least source your claims.
2. Point out which parts of the linked post are doctored or in any way false.
Source?
so the concern is real that Google could escape with a slap on the wrist pending an administration change. Too many like to pretend otherwise but big tech knows whose its real friends are and their party likes the money. So expect a song and dance with enough exceptions and escape routes to be business as usual
[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/policy-2020...
What makes you think Democrats are more like to scrap an investigation?
Because of the cozy relationship between the Obama administration and Google.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-makes-most-of-close-ties...
https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close...
Prominently allowing search engine choice in Chrome, Android, etc. may be one part of it. Splitting search off from the rest of Google might be another. Regulating search overall might be one but that carries a lot of risks.
That's already happening in Europe:
https://www.blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/updat...
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/02/google-to-let-eu-users-choos...
https://spreadprivacy.com/search-preference-menu-duckduckgo-...
search engines who squeeze money out of every last drop of people's personal information (including ISPs and arbitrage players that will participate in next year's auctions) are easily able to outbid search engines like us that respect people's privacy
https://spreadprivacy.com/search-preference-menu-auctions/
What's surprising to me is how un-monopolistic Google's share of the Cloud + AI market is under its control, considering how many of the techniques were invented there. I'd put it at under 25%.
The real behemoth is NVidia + ARM. GPU shortages are endemic. And the cost of a new entrant to the market just to construct a fab is probably $20B+. Ask Intel XE how much they are spending just to keep up ;)
With Google that argument is harder. A person could whip up G level search engine, mail, and maybe even youtube equivalent, but moving all those people ( but to make them consider your alternative would be impossibly painful to do ).
I will admit that NVidia and ARM scares me, but I am not sure what can be done here.
Hi Dunning, meet Kruger.
See also: https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial
Not going to dismiss the inertia parameter, but neither DDG nor Bing ever returned what I was looking for and they never were as good as Google Search for my particular searches (yes, even in private navigation). I'm not saying they're not good, I'm saying they never returned good results for me.
That's because of drivers, and drivers are because of stable kernel API.
If Nvidia actually gets to buy ARM, that's another matter. But again they can't sue based on a purchase that hasn't even gone through yet.
That's why the suit is aimed at search and search advertising
I don't find that surprising because Google is a mess. They're a very poorly run organization, making decisions that make no sense at times. Their inefficiency and/or incompetence is probably the only reason why they haven't wreaked havoc on all of the markets they have their hand in. And the various monopolies they do have are, as monopolies usually are, immune to stupid decisions that would kill most other companies.
I think it might be because their corporate culture of being the good guy/"don't be evil" is incompatible with the reality of their situation. Like cognitive dissonance at a corporate level. I wonder how many of their employees in positions of power are still living in that fantasy, and making decisions based on it?
How many messaging apps have they launched and killed?
Mobile is all about power management. Apple got that right and really nailed the UX.
I don’t think Google knew that playbook at that point. Maybe Rubin did but even MSFT blew it.
None of that matters anymore, because Messenger/IG/WA are all mobile apps that most people probably dont chat as much through on a desktop/laptop. But at the time, it gave people a compelling reason to have the messenger product open on screen. Google Talk was similar, being overlayed over Gmail, but google squandered having a Talk bar over the bottom of every google property. Yahoo as well. Yahoo News should have had messenger across the bottom of the screen.
On the mobile front, FB Messenger sort of won out because people started to like iMessage, but there was still a need for a cross platform alternative. I believe Apple could have prevented FB Messenger from being a thing, had they released an Android client along with a browser extension. Apple's best move was releasing iTunes for Windows, something they are scared to repeat, and shouldnt be.
I wonder what the numbers are on WhatsApp vs FB Messenger, because people of all socioeconomic levels, languages, ages, country, and tech literacy use WhatsApp in my experience, whereas only Americans of a certain age group use FB Messenger.
I'm not sure what people want these days: people are angry that they have successful products that people use more than competitor's prodcts, and also angry that they have unsuccessful products that are shut after failing to gain traction.
Executive level people seem too adept at defending the company and avoiding certain phrases or concepts, I believe they all know. Things like suggesting routine conversations include a lawyer and tagging them as such to try to include more conversations in attorney/client privilege shows a desire to hide guilty actions.
And whether or not such training is meant by executives to hide illegal behavior that they are aware of it's also catching many cases where people are just dumb and use wrong words to mean different things, words that have specific meaning in a legal context and that can hurt the person and the company although there was no illegal act being done.
But many Googlers seem to perfectly fit that Upton Sinclair quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
That said, I don't think you can see how Alphabet's lawyers talk and think that they are somehow living in a bubble or are not having these sorts of high-level strategy discussions.
It seems kind of obvious. Their goal is to organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible and useful. What better way to achieve this than to somehow create an AGI/ASI. They are certainly the best placed org to do it.
Once the lawsuit drops I doubt this is the argument they are going to make.
This is going to be your run of the mill antitrust lawsuit. It's just making news because tech has avoided them for 30+ years.
I don't know if or how this fits within actual antitrust law, but it makes sense that the issue was never price gouging, the issue was one entity gaining too much power.
In a theoretical dystopian future, a megacorp could own 99% of market share of all industries in the country, but intentionally offer very low prices on every product to avoid "monopoly" concerns. It becomes clear: monopolistic pricing is just a symptom, not the real issue. The real issue is power.
If this suit (and followup suits on other megacorps) fail, the future may call for new laws to define monopolistic power in novel ways, as soon as we the people recognize that getting search and email and social media for free doesn't mean that the megacorps are on our side.
In the US, there are two major areas of antitrust law and enforcement:
1) Sherman & Clayton Acts (1890, 1914) - outlaws cartels and anticompetitive activities (that is, activities that tend to lead to monopolies, but doesn't outlaw monopolies themselves). Price gouging is not an antitrust issue, but predatory pricing and price fixing are (you might have meant these terms). This area is primarily established via case law and enforced by the courts (and DOJ AD).
2) Merger guidelines/Federal Trade Commission (1968) - wherein key mergers must be reviewed and approved by the FTC. This area is more sensitive to political climate / executive branch as it's executive-appointed FTC regulators who set the guidelines and give approvals. We are now exiting an era of historic hands-off-ness.
Source: had a professor who is famous in antitrust world
If you can't do that, then you're basically just preventing a monopoly from happening in advance, right? Or trying to at least.
At any rate, I'm assuming US vs. Google will be required to reference precedent set in Sherman & Clayton + subsequent court rulings and _not_ be able to use their own mergers against them as they were approved by the FTC in the first place. Is that also correct?
You have a say in your government's leadership. Don't like the President? Vote them out. Don't like Zuck? Nothing you can do about it.
As far as governments go, we could all become anarchists be done with them, but if you think for even a few seconds about it you would realize that this enormous vacuum of power would be filled by something. Corporations, rival nations with their government still intact, military warlords, or new political factions seeking to establish new governments. We have thousands of years of history that shows this pattern emerging again and again to the point that it is practically a natural law of power. The only check on power is greater or equal power. Ideally, you want this power to be answerable to the greatest number of people that this power is intended to serve. You may recall a lot of smart people during something called the Enlightenment spending a lot of time and energy on experimenting with different forms of government that met these criteria and still managing to not quite get it right. Many people in the West live in societies multiple iterations down the line from those established in the 18th and 19th century revolutions and there are still glaring issues. What do you suggest instead?
Corporations are also accountable to governments, as this story illustrates. If US courts and/or legislators decide they want it, Google ceases to exist.
Economists think of this in terms of "Exit vs Voice".
With governments, you have a voice - one vote for deciding who's in charge - but no way to exit, even when your side loses.
With corporations you can exit - stop shopping at Target - but no voice in how Target is run.
Both models have pros and cons, and it's good to understand how they differ, and what situations they're suited for.
Basically - how do I exit a company if I'm not the one choosing to use their services?
I cannot use the internet and avoid Google's ads.
I cannot use the internet and avoid Amazon's hosting.
I cannot exit the internet because I literally make my living with it, the competitive disadvantage of doing so is SO great with the way we've structured services and life in general that it doesn't really work.
Philip Pettit has spent extensive time addressing really interesting questions like these, like what might distinguish "public" domination from "private."
One wouldn't be allowed to use iphone or android? It would take a lot of manual data entry to migrate my accounts off gmail. Youtube obviously wouldn't be allowed but do I get to use adsense powered websites?
The simple fact that I can say "google it" and colloquially anyone in the US and probably Europe would understand what I mean kind of states how dominant they are in the market.
Today, we're talking about a few taps to change which search website you want to use.
But that's really the same thing. If Google bans or interferes with Fediverse apps because they compete with YouTube, that's anti-competitive behavior. If they don't and those apps gain share with people whose content keeps getting censored on YouTube, they're not very effectively controlling the free flow of information.
Censorship by an incumbent is a market opportunity for a competitor, so a corporation can only really sustain it through anti-competitive actions against the challenger(s).
Consider for a moment where self-driving-car technology would be w/o Google subsidizing it. Or mapping technology. Or like a dozen other technologies. Were these supposed to pop up w/ VC struggling from round to round? Many of the VC backed companies themselves have a put option of being acquired by Google/FAANG -- so if that exit is gone, it would be even worse.
Worse for whom? As a customer, I groan every time a product I use gets acquired by FAANG because I know it's going to get shuttered in a few months.
Edit: Or in the case of large acquisitions like Instagram slowly integrated with the parent company's shitty products.
Worse for those in the real world where you have payroll obligations, rent, AWS bills, health insurance, and mortgages.
As a customer I feel the same way. However, having been a co-founder and CTO of a startup, let me tell you the real story:
- Most startups are not like snapchat, they are not once-in-a-generation unicorns.
- Most startups have huge burn, especially consumer-entertainment type startups (imagine how much network bandwidth YouTube was burning before Google purchased them.)
- Startups are at the mercy of funding rounds and sometimes the market itsself can get away from you, through no fault of your own startup
- FAANG provide a put option -- "whats the worse that can happen? we get acquired by X" which allows people to take on more risk while trying to swing for the fences.
- It is arguable how long darling consumer apps could survive as independent when consumers often dont want to pay money. It is a catch 22 -- the startup is told the product has to be free but they are also not allowed to seek bigger coffers to actually subsidize it
So in the end -- sure, I agree with you, but who pays? Esp if this is something massive with network effects. Perhaps I can pay for WhatsApp, but can my grandma pay for it with her meager overseas salary? And if she cannot, how is the network sustainable?
I'm not saying I disagree with you, but I dont know what the solution is other than the current one.
As someone who's not used Google services since 2016... it's still the one Google property I can't really escape, because nobody is posting their content anywhere else.
Maybe in the most narrow of definitions. IG/FB and Tiktok are huge competitors in the video space, Tiktok being the dominant platform if you focus on short form video.
I don't buy it. Facebook has always been an adult network. It started as something that kept kids out. They opened up, but they dont need them. Eventually, when people get older they sign up for it. It't not sexy, its utilitarian. Their biggest risk to their business is more addictive products, not their customer age. People can get addicted at any age.
TiKTok, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube are still more commoner<>celebrity networks, while Facebook is a WhitePages and now a YellowPages too.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
I note the conspiracy theory that Cambridge Analytica threw the Brexit referendum via Facebook has essentially completely collapsed over the last month or so. CA certainly wanted their clients to think that such a thing was possible. They were fantasists, for money.
You have to have a pretty warped view on proceedings for this to be the case.
https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/social-media/2020/...
https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/2847/documents...
The ICO spent three years investigating CA, and the report is very clear that the findings were that they had no effect.
If you add those together, Facebook controls an overwhelming majority of the social media market share -- way more than the relatively tiny niche held by Reddit and Twitter.
Edit: Facebook has 2603 million active users, Instagram has 1083M, Reddit has just 430 million. Twitter is estimated at 326 million. TikTok is the closest thing to a true Facebook competitor with 800M users, and a large share of them are probably concentrated in China -- and the Trump administration already tried to get them banned. (I'm excluding messaging services and YouTube here since they're a different niche).
Source is Statista: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...
Reddit is becoming into a weird beast because I've found theres a mentality of people who assume you actively subscribe to the stuff set by default hence why people get upset when you don't tout the same opinion. I've even had people ask me what I was doing in their subreddit, said I came from /r/all, and they basically said "yeah right." Reddit is probably going to dominate the online forum market since it's so much easier to create a subreddit than it is make your own website with forums.
My only beef with this is reddit silences things they don't like, and not just things that sound reasonable. My rationale is let these people be. They're dumb enough to discuss this garbage on your platform, so why not collect that data and just monitor it? Better than they go elsewhere and now you have no idea.
Also reddit trying to take their anonymous platform and make it so you act as a community member has always been weird to me. That makes sense for public people, not for general users. Especially when bot accounts just harvest upvotes. Twitter is basically what facebook used to be now.
All this proves is that the Alexa top N isn't a good metric of determining who is or isn't a monopoly. It's completely ignoring mobile apps (so Instagram/Whatsapp don't make an appearance), and it has no visibility into revenue. Reddit's current total valuation is in the small single digit billions. It doesn't deserve consideration in a conversation about the true gorillas in the field, i.e. the ones that are worth three orders of magnitude more.
Amazon on the other hand is worse, as they want to control all business segments they get into, even totally unrelated to their business of being a store that sells things. Using your dominance in one type of business to force everyone to also support unrelated businesses with no alternatives is one common definition of monopoly; think dominating railroads to force everyone to use your oil (Standard Oil).
It kind of gets tricky when you combine all that, but I assume that this would be a fun thing to argue infornt of a court I guess.
Google seems to me to be much more straight forward, they clearly dominate search and web ads. The latter with the exception of social, which would be facebooks domain. And with Android, Google is the second largest player in Mobile if you ignore hthe hardware aspect.
Not saying either company should be broken up, that's for couts to decide.
Wal-Mart, on the other hand, might be nearing that status as far as eCommerce is concerned.
Apple has 50% of the US smart phone market, in a 2 entity duopoly.
That is significant market power.
> to force everyone to also support unrelated businesses with no alternatives
Anti-competitive behavior does not require a singular firm, in order for it to be illegal. Instead, only significant market power is required.
"This Note argues that the current framework in antitrust—specifically its pegging competition to 'consumer welfare,' defined as short-term price effects—is unequipped to capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy"
It's an opinion piece stating that law ought to be changed, not that Amazon is doing anything illegal.
I never really quite understand how people think antitrust law applies to Amazon. I don't have expert-level knowledge of Amazon's various markets, but I don't think they have a monopoly in any of them.
As friendly as Facebook has been to the republican party, it doesn't surprise me that they aren't first in line to be prosecuted, if ever.
A good start would be defining a set of standard lens sizes so people could at least easily find and print replacement frames.
"Meanwhile <any phone/mobile/internet/health-insurance provider> nothing"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T#Breakup_and_reformation...
But even beyond that, regional monopolies for carriers are somehow okay?
I think it's just rent seeking/retributions for favours not rendered.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/agoodman/2014/07/16/theres-more...
> Within months, Oakley acknowledged to shareholders that the talks hadn't gone well and that Luxottica was slashing its orders.
> The company's stock immediately lost more than a third of its value.
https://boingboing.net/2019/03/12/luxottica.html
The fact that this isn't mentioned on Wikipedia might mean that Luxxotica has been very good at scrubbing their online persona.
It's on Wikipedia:
"Luxottica acquired Oakley in November 2007 for US$2.1 billion. Oakley had tried to dispute their prices because of Luxottica's large marketshare, and Luxottica responded by dropping Oakley from their stores, causing their stock price to drop, followed by Luxottica's hostile take over of the company."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxottica
There's even a sub-section on "Monopolistic pricing practices".
[1] > Luxottica's acquisition of Oakley has been criticized as potential violation of Antitrust laws. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakley,_Inc.)
I was in the US Army in the time surrounding the purchase. The amount of Oakley product that was purchased by both the government and individual soldiers should have been enough to keep Oakley afloat all on its own.
Google has done more to atrophy progress on the Internet than any other big tech company. It has used its monopoly position on search and ads to crush competition. Google has been "evil" for a very long time.
Should we define a line between marketplace operators and marketplace competitors? Or at least define rules to better ensure fair competition?
From personal experience so, once Amazon loses the buy box, the measures to gain it back are more or less what other seller could do as well. No idea how much seller data they use in selecting private brand products so.
All the retailers have data on what sells in their store, they also have the data on how sales are influenced by shelf placement.
Amazon to me is a logistics company, along with their storefront and AWS. Their focus on margins and their competence to use data to drive their logistics chains is what's truly scary. They can optimize a lot of inefficiencies that exist in logistics right now just because of the involvement of different disjoint players.
Hoe all that translates into anti-trust law, I have no idea.
This is simply not true and displays a fundamental misunderstanding of how retail works. A retailer pays the supplier for the stock of inventory that goes on its shelves, Amazon does not. (It is only in very rare cases the supplier only gets paid for actual sales of retail inventory; generally this happens for new products offered on a consignment basis to demonstrate market demand.) Frequently, retailers will share sales data with their suppliers so that the suppliers can make more attractive products, because then they can sell more units to end customers or charge higher markups.
But importantly, with retail, the retailer is the supplier's customer, not you.
In contrast, Amazon does not buy the inventory from the suppliers, instead it charges them money to store their inventory in Amazon's warehouses. On top of that, Amazon uses its access to sales data of external suppliers' products to design competing products which it then offers for sale, utilizing its ownership of the platform to promote its own products above competing products. While both of these latter two activities are problematic, it is the last one that definitely runs afoul of antitrust law (and was what got Microsoft into trouble with the EU).
The problem with Amazon: it is using its position as the controller of the dominant online marketplace to establish a position in the market for individual categories of goods in a manner that interferes with the normal dynamics of the market.
That part seems entirely reasonable. Would you rather Amazon pay sellers for unsold stock? That seems like a sure way to get Amazon to reduce the number of 3rd party sellers they stock.
Amazon does well from AWS, but hardly has domineering marketshare in the way Google does.
The idea that FB has a monopoly is laughable. Until Trump put the kibosh on them there was a real threat from TikTok. Zuck was getting desperate. Social media is very fickle.
Aapl as well only has a monopoly amongst high paying customers. Not sure you can call that a monopoly.
Google is a well defined monopoly.
Whereas Google has something like 95% of mobile search, and actively consumes competitors or, allegedly, wields its monopoly to drive traffic away from them.
They're not concerned with the user experience under these companies, they're concerned about economic impact, which is mostly felt by people doing marketing on their platforms. Facebook is a social media company the way the Yellow Pages was a book publisher - it may be the most visible product they make, but it's not how they actually make money.
For example, let's say I could be curious about DuckDuckGo if I had to choose a default search engine when I got an Apple device instead of Google being the default, then that could be revenue to DuckDuckGo for them to improve their search engine.
Yahoo has been Bing for years, and DuckDuckGo pulls from Bing and Yandex - the latter being mostly for searches in Russian.
Not really sure what the DOJ expect Apple or Google to do in this situation, it seems to me that 2 companies entered a mutually benefiting contract. You can't argue that Google "colluded" with Apple, there's a lot of throwing punches between each other (all the privacy oriented moves Apple is doing are hurting Google's business) and again Apple could be making its own search engine anytime they wanted, they already replaced Google Maps with their own thing.
If the only two players (Google and Apple) both use Google Search by default, then Google has effectively captured 100% of the mobile ad market. (And since Google is paying Apple et al for that default state, it is indeed a market.)
The court could require device makers (including Google itself) to prompt users to select their search engine provider, or potentially ban Google from buying search engine defaults from other companies (Apple, Mozilla, etc.) as an anticompetitive practice.
Sure, they could sell it to someone else, but without the biggest player bidding up the price, it'd probably sell for a fraction of what it does today -- which could be devastating to Mozilla, given that almost all of their funding comes from the search deal. What would that do to competition in the browser space?
Using Firefox as a reason not to break up some of Google's hold on search seems extremely short-sighted. Besides, Edge using Chrome changed the whole browser market dynamic as more and more people are using it. Once Microsoft reaches a somewhat decent percentage of install we will be back at a two (three?) player situation.
I was just searching for "quill", a javascript editor. I clicked the first result without really looking (after all, i m searching name, right? ) - and it took me to some competing product called fro-something. I wasted my time, their money , yet google still made money.
This seems reasonable. What's your suggestion on how to make this better ?
(the query must have been "quill js" or "quill editor" cant remember -- it's an example of the infamous 'google® tax' - an obviously keyword-targeted ad)
https://www.google.com/search?safe=active&client=firefox-b-m...
It is a search for "express-http-proxy" "logging" but at leat I got maybe one relevant result and a bunch of wildly unrelated ones, despite doublequotes.
As for most of the rest of the first 10, null would have been a valid, more correct and generally better result!
I actually wasted several minutes on one of them right away since I haven't still gotten into the habit of verifying every single Google result to se that it actually is what I asked for and not whatever filler Google decided to use this time. Not that it should be necessary, - they had this sorted back before 2010!
Seriously: why can't Google or DDG get this right anymore?
You didn't buy their product, but Google helped them get your gaze briefly.
What is search but a list of adverts associated with your keywords?
1. It allows alt search engine or alt browser to succeed. So what? The alt search engines and browsers are worse than the google ones. It doesn't benefit any actual people to have them rise up.
2. Google screwed my friend one time. Every single company (and person) on earth is guilty of this. One swallow does not a summer make.
3. Google is restricting this tech I like, or google is sometimes wrong about their bans. See (2)
And so on. I haven't seen anything compelling in this thread, just a whole lot of hyperventilating.
And to your point. No, search is not a wall of ads. But if you feel that way, literally change your search engine. It's easier than typing this comment you just posted.
The events of celebritynetworth.com are a good example of why they've not been behaving as a good citizen (there is a thread about that on this forum).
A good number of people have took up your suggestion and changed their search engine, DDG's traffic count continues to rise. The reality is that many users will use whatever is put in front of them, i.e. how many people use the URL bar of their browser for searches, or use a search toolbar for a specific URL? Google knows this well, hence their paying to be the default search engine choice and paying an amount that no other engine can match.
Google's knows they are the best in class when it comes to general search, but to be sure they have been aggressive in ensuring that no one else gets a look in.
The UK's CMA report estimates that an entrant to the market would require around £20 billion of capital to be a credible alternative, as in, a proper crawling search engine, not a meta search engine like DuckDuckGo. That's before paying the likes of Apple billions of dollars simply so that people will use "what is there".
Having such a dominant position comes with responsibility, which is not solely Google's. The social networks along with Google are essentially the gateways to the web and how they present that information is important- and essentially only one point of view. Having room for more competition, choices, algorithms surely is a good thing.
I completely disagree with this part, but you're totally right on people continuing to use it.
Search is highly dependent on the query. At first DDG's results seemed bad to me, but after a while I think I've changed how I write my searches. It's hard to explain, but I guess I'm putting more thought into understanding what it is that I hope to find.
Now, Google's results seem to just be a listing of whoever did the best SEO targeting on the subject, and ultimately that means worse results for me. It's less about what I'm looking for and more about what Google has to show me... and Google always has something relevant to show me. When DDG doesn't, I'm forced to re-consider my query and try again, ultimately reaching a better destination.
However, "change the way you search" is niche at best. Google is satisfying because it's so easy to use, that you almost don't even have to write a query. It's like an automatic "I'm feeling lucky" based on it's knowledge of you and your location and time of day, etc...
Mandating a commonly accessible crawl, with cached versions of the pages, would help new entrants a lot.
Also, there're large network effects with ad networks. It seems unlikely that many marketing managers are going to take the time to do targeted keyword queries on your search engine with 1/1,000,000 the traffic of Google.
I'll also add plenty of sites don't block any engine but confer special privileges to google bot which depending on the site and their size are almost the same thing.
Edit: And I'll add to limit confusion Reddit hides the sitemap and denies access there's is not an outright ban -- it just makes it a lot harder.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80553?hl=en
So unless you have a google domain your sol, it's also just generally frowned upon. We have our own UA WhizeBot with an email contact so you can let us know if our crawler is doing anything you'd rather it not.
There have been a few legal cases that protect scraping publicly available information on the web but we'd rather follow robots.txt to avoid the potential for shenanigans in any case.
'Faking' the UA is much more likely to annoy site owners and end up with a permanent block.
They are part of the story of why Google is degrading, not why they're doing well.
You also have bots that seem to be credential stuffing, bots that seem to be content scrapping (stuff with same typos shows up elsewhere after their visits, really obvious on new / fresh articles, bots that seem to be exploring for copyright claims, rando bots (maybe comment sentiment analysis for stock trading) etc.
Google is much more welcome by comparison.
Generally I wouldn't qualify a lot of those as search engine web crawlers but more web scrapers looking to re-use data, not just surface it.
Like I said in another comment, if you’re someone that just wants to surface Amazon results they love you. It’s the people that want to take advantage of amazon data in some other way they’re trying to stop.
While I don't know if I'd say "hostility" I would say passive aggressive to other crawlers.
I've definitely seen my share of robots.txt that give special permission to Googlebot, but maybe my corner of the web was unusually aggressive toward crawlers.
We have an API, in case of interest.
Ask anybody in much of the Midwest where they will choose to buy groceries and they will answer Walmart.
This kind of reasoning is not an argument against the philosophy behind antitrust regulations. Rather, it is emblematic of the situation that monopolies create for themselves, by using their economies of scale to create pricing that cannot reasonably be expected to lose any competition over customers.
The same economies of scale benefit consumers and the economy as a whole as long as the business behaves in a manner consistent with the shared values of society. As soon as they decide to behave differently, though, society is at the mercy of a monopoly because they have consumed the entire market.
The case hinges on the no-compete, tying, and default placement agreements. If Google didn't pay anyone to be the default search engine, didn't require Android Phone makers to pre-install Google apps and make Google the default search in order to get access to Google services and the store, etc then there's no problem.
The complaint also says that one of the reasons Google's results are better is the network and scale effects that come from owning 80-90% of search. A competitor has a very difficult time no matter how good their algorithm because you need insights you can only get when people use your service at scale. I don't personally know if that is true but that's part of the complaint.
The proposed antitrust violation is likely the combination: using their dominant position to outspend any other players when paying for default placement to ensure they're the only one with the scale to have the best search results. That forms a self-reinforcing cycle: users who do choose pick you because you have the best results and you use that fact to fund no-compete and default placement agreements to ensure you have unmatched scale which further reinforces your ability to deliver the best results.
Again: I don't know if this is true or a valid argument, but it seems to be what the complaint claims.
And why didn't Facebook get sued too? They're just as anti-competitive. Was there an implicit protection agreement reached at one of those private dinners Zuckerberg had at the White House?
And what about Amazon? There's a whole laundry list of anti-competitive practices happening with their online sales and marketplace.
Maybe the next administration will give equal scrutiny to all of the big tech companies rather than seemingly targeting just one of them.
If one company actually had a monopoly on windshield wipers for cars and another had a monopoly on windshield wipers for trucks, that doesn't change just because there is somebody who has both a car and a truck. When you need windshield wipers for your car, there is still only one place you could get them.
Saying something is or is not a monopoly is distracting from what actually matters. It's deflecting.
Anti-competitive behavior can be illegal all by itself. Price fixing is one obvious example but there are plenty of others.
If you got the monopoly without doing anti-competitive behavior, such as by simple having a better product or by getting lucky and having competitors that all made stupid mistakes that sunk them, your monopoly may be legal.
If you don't like Comcast, you could move to an area with a different ISP, and there's a certain point where you probably would move, if Comcast's service became egregious enough. But I don't usually see this argument when people refer to Comcast as a monopoly, because it's understood that the switching cost is unreasonably high.
I've switched between iOS and Android before. What's the big deal?
Monopoly's are whether or not a product or service dominates a specific sector, industry or market. A company can't have a monopoly over its own products which by definition would cover most product/service companies.
Given iOS market share is about ~25% of the Mobile OS Market, it currently doesn't qualify as a Monopoly although it's currently under EU investigation & Epic lawsuit which may rule differently.
Separately, it's worth noting that iOS has ~60% market share in the United States[1]. It's lower globally, as you pointed out, but I'd argue domestic market-share should be what matters in US-based suits.
1: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-sta...
No it's just a software platform that's open to 3rd parties to develop for, just like Android, Windows, macOS, Linux, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, Smart TV's, Speakers, Watches, embedded platforms, etc. you could go as far and say that Cloud Providers or even Game Engines are software platforms.
But a single platform doesn't define a market, the prominent market iOS is in would be smart mobile OS's of which Android is apart of. Its 60% US Market share could be a determining factor in the US although they do have a clear unobstructed competitor in Android - time will tell as rulings from current investigations & trials get handed down. Of course it's not illegal to have a monopoly, only if its dominant Monopoly power position is abused for anti-competitive purposes, typically for creating a monopoly in a different market, but there are a few other abuses.
Cable companies and cell companies should be hoisted up next.
Apple is not in a situation where they need to be broken up to ensure a free market like Facebook, Amazon, and perhaps Google are.
FB is being used by foreign powers to shape US elections, and you think Apple is the biggest problem here?
https://9to5mac.com/2019/03/06/microsoft-store-revenue-share...
But still 30% for XBOX/games where they once again have market power in that market.
Antitrust action has never required the lack of an alternative.
> FB is being used by foreign powers to shape US elections, and you think Apple is the biggest problem here?
Apple is being used to attack democracy campaigners in Hong Kong, mainland China and Belarus, and has a long history of attacking sexual minorities and sex education efforts.
Yes, Apple is 100% the biggest problem here.
I would love to see some sort of regulated 10% rake cap on digital marketplaces (both mobile and gaming) and ticket sales. Note that this would apply only to games being distributed through the platform owner's marketplace, and that consumers would be allowed to install by right software from other sources as well.
- Sent from my android
That's usually how this stuff works.
> And why didn't Facebook get sued too
You can't make one case against multiple companies, and resources are finite. It will take many years for each of these cases to play out.
I wouldn't be surprised if a Biden administration drops this too.
So yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if Biden drops it, but only because he was likely part of the problem to begin with. Google wouldn't be the problem it is today if the Obama/Biden administration was doing their job.
(Still voting for him, mind you. It's not like we have better options.)
But basically, a massive number of Google employees were installed in high-level positions of the Obama administration, and a lot of Obama administration folks got great jobs at Google. Obama installed a professor who wrote studies about how Google shouldn't face antitrust scrutiny (who was paid by Google to do so) as the FTC Commissioner (Joshua Wright, who is now a lawyer at Google's preferred law firm... he went from Google shill to government official and now back to Google work), and an FTC case against Google where staffers recommended litigation inexplicably got shoved under the rug.
Then you'd see things like a former Googler in Obama's administration announce an initiative to budget billions of taxpayer dollars to buy computers for schoolchildren... unshockingly, these were intended to be Chromebooks, which get kids started early as Google account holders. (I believe Congress ended up rejecting this particular budgetary line item, or reducing it significantly.)
(Bear in mind, my post both speaks ill of Obama, who might as well be Jesus to the Democratic Party, and also made it clear I'm voting against Trump. So I ingratiate myself with very few politically in the parent comment.)
A reasonable thought on the surface, but this has been pushed by many people on both sides of the aisle, including Elizabeth Warren.
"He [Barr] pushed career Justice Department attorneys to bring the case by the end of September, prompting pushback from lawyers who wanted more time and complained of political influence."[1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/technology/google-antitru...
Ie lots of people pushing a change, not pushing a theory.
Also, based on the story I saw the Google one is pretty straight forward. The deals they have made to force their search onto things like the iPhone (with Apple) and Android (with the carriers/manufacturers) is the issue.
For Apple, Amazon, and Facebook, I think similar accusations can be made, but it's not as "shooting fish in a barrel" easy as Google.
I completely agree, and this has been my main headscratcher since we first heard about a possible anti-trust case.
For starters, I still think things like banks, telecom, and probably oil, and defense industry companies probably need to be broken up, and that they should be much higher priorities. To say nothing of the obscure industries we wouldn't normally think of (Luxxotica with glasses) that are monopolized. There's probably others for obscure things I'm not even thinking of.
And even within tech, I wouldn't even rank Google ahead of Amazon, and I'm not 100% that I would rank them ahead of Facebook either.
And, if that's not all, I think Google at least serves as a check on the other Frightful Five, and subtracting Google will serve to further consolidate tech. And if that's not enough, I feel that the tech industry has served as a useful check against other entrenched industries. Their clash with cable, and occasional work to protect an open internet are a healthy counterbalance to voices of other monopolized industries.
In the book, The Age Surveillance Capitalism, the case is made the Google is actually worse than FB but lesser known for many of the things people complain about.
Google may be the easier monopoly case to go after given the Doubleclick merger, the way Chrome is used, etc.
From MMA/WWE to Varsity/Gimnastics
UFC is not a monopoly but does engage in anticompetitive behavior, including for example restricting its fighters from competing for other promotions, controlling the sponsorships they can receive, and even the sponsors they may promote in the ring. Their practices affect their fighters, but have no discernable effect on their audience. You can easily choose to watch one of the other promotions, like Bellator.
WWE is the oldest and most successful wrestling promotion, but it has a dozen or so major competitors, and there are hundreds of wrestling promotions at the local and regional levels.
Gymnastics and the other Olympic sports don't have monopolies, why do you think they do? Track athletes compete in multiple professional events over the course of the year (most of which aren't televised in the US due to lack of audience but many of which are broadcast globally), and most olympic sports, gymnastics included, are not commercial draws outside of national championships and olympic qualifiers.
Gymnastics https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24769576
As for I was thinking cheerleading but didn't got the words right. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24638896
Also cant find it on hn algolia but the young runner and Nike Oregon Project came to mind.
However, USA Gymnastics is not a monopoly, and there are other entities that organize gymnastics competitions (and most gymnastics competitions are not USA Gymnastics competitions). USA Gymnastics is simply the organization that is tasked with overseeing the national championship and Olympic qualifiers.
There is absolutely no monopoly in running. There are literally thousands of different races around the world, and nearly as many race organizers. Each of the big major marathons is organized by a different company. Each of the major track events is put on by a different company. There are dozens of running shoe and apparel brands. There are hundreds of running clubs like Nike's Oregon Project, many of which were just as, or even more successful, as NOP (see, e.g. North Arizona Elite).
None of these, with the possible exception of telecom, are monopolies or engaging in specific anti-competitive behavior. I agree that the pattern of consolidation there is bad, but I fail to see
a. how this announcement precludes any other lawsuits against the companies you're mentioning b. why the fact that other industries also ought to be broken up has any bearing on whether Google has engaged in anti-competitive behavior?
Trying to bag multiple tech companies seems like a recipe for failure.
> the government will only be able to put its best lawyers on some cases.
Also, I think you really underestimate how many competent prosecutors the government has - they can handle more than one anti-trust case at a time.
I feel like the answer to this is pretty obvious, but to state the obvious, Google exists in the same timeline as the companies in other industries that I listed, and in most cases have arrived later on the timelines and engaged in less egregious offenses than a number of other companies, yet Google were prioritized for anti-trust action ahead of those other companies.
>why the fact that other industries also ought to be broken up has any bearing on whether Google has engaged in anti-competitive behavior?
I think if you read my comment and heard "Google is not engaging in anti-competitive behavior", you heard something I did not write. I think a wide range of companies ought to be challenged for anti-competitive behavior, including Google, and many of them have engaged in much more egregious offenses than Google, yet Google is targeted while others haven't been. Whatever impetus would have lead to prosecuting Google out to have lead to targeting a number of other companies before getting to Google.
The hypothetical possibility that worse companies that ought to have been higher priorities might possibly be prosecuted in the future is not something that I feel is responsive the to point here.
Leveraging your monopoly in one market to constrain business in another market is.
Microsoft wasn't prosecuted because Windows was a monopoly, Microsoft was prosecuted because it leveraged that monopoly to block out other competitors (you could not buy a PC without a Windows license, even if you wanted to put another O/S on it).
IBM wasn't investigated because it dominated mainframes, but because it leveraged that domination to control other markets.
AT&T wasn't prosecuted for antitrust because of its monopoly on phone service in the US…the US government had effectively granted AT&T that monopoly in the first place. It was prosecuted and broken up because it leveraged that monopoly to box out competitors across multiple markets that intersected with the telephone system.
Google’s weak spots are not their monopolies in search nor ads. It’s having leveraged those monopolies in the browser and mobile phone markets. If I had to guess, they will offer to separate ad spots on search results into a separate market place, offer to spin off Chrome and Android to foundations funded initially by Google but expected to stand on their own (ala Mozilla/Firefox) after some time period, offer to separate ad placement from ad serving, and generally rearrange the chairs and org chart with a series of consent decrees requiring regular reporting to Congress or the DOJ.
Big question mark in my mind is if there’s hard evidence that Google employees required customers of one service (say, Cloud) to utilize another Google service (ads, G Suite/Workplace, etc.) in order to get a discount or some other preference. That's a slam dunk. My suspicion is that there'll be a lot of activities that hew extremely closely to that line without crossing it.
That's what the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit should have been primarily about. The central issue in the lawsuit was including IE with Windows. Now 20 years later, the idea that they shouldn't include a web browser with their OS just seems silly.
There is no right "non-suspicious" timing for this type of scrutiny.
"Attorney General William P. Barr, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, has played an unusually active role in the investigation. He pushed career Justice Department attorneys to bring the case by the end of September, prompting pushback from lawyers who wanted more time and complained of political influence. Mr. Barr has spoken publicly about the inquiry for months and set tight deadlines for the prosecutors leading the effort."
The issue with doing anything during an election is that people on the other side accuse the administration of suspicious timing. The issue with doing nothing during an election is that everyone accuses you of being a lame duck. This is, more or less, business as usual for the administration; they've been on Big Tech's ass for at least a year now, and finally something is coming of it.
Every big tech company needs looked at, and potentially split up. And, maybe, they'll all get their turn. But resources are limited; when the US went to war with Germany, we didn't airdrop troops in Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Munich, and Frankfurt on the same day. Actually, we didn't even start with Germany. Starting with Google allows some legal precedent to be set on some of the very weird, novel antitrust issues the case is going to face, which will make future cases easier. I tend to think Amazon should have been the first, but Google is certainly up there, and probably (IMO) a more potentially harmful monopoly than Apple, Microsoft, or Facebook.
I'll agree that Amazon is Scarier. But I also think that Google's behavior is a lot easier to scrutinize/prove in court thanks to their actions in/around Android and Search
"The rumor is that a suit against Facebook will soon follow" [1] said Matt Stoller in his latest BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly and finance. It takes a lot of resources to file those suits, so don't expect them to be announced at exactly the same time.
[1] https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/how-would-president-biden...
PS: Since it contains quite a bit of interesting and relevant information about the cases against GAFA, I submitted this particular newsletter at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24837931
I mean, Amazon definitely has issues, but apart from some incredibly good acquisitions and sharp business practices, I don't see the anti-trust case against Facebook.
Full disclosure: I own one share of FB.
The rent-seeking by Google + Apple seems pretty clear to me.
It's incredibly successful because of the FB acquisition, so I'm not sure what the anti-trust concern is.
Now, Whatsapp is a completely different matter, and that should probably never have been allowed to happen (and if Whatsapp had been popular in the US, I'm not sure that it would have been).
It's wild to me that this is even a question. A lawsuit like this a couple weeks before the election from a DOJ which might not exist in 4 months is nakedly political. Why is anyone taking this seriously?
Earlier this year, Google suspended my ad words account. I don't know why but think it was their mistake. The sites and ads were ethical and well within their terms. Still, I’ve sent emails and letters without progress.
It's frustrating not having an avenue to resolve the issue. Even more so because I'm in tech and though I understood these things. More so because I worked at google for a long time.
In the suspension dialog they warn all accounts under my name or the domain names linked to the ad words account will be blocked.
I don't depend on ad words. If I did, I would be completely out of luck. I'm not aware of an alternative ads network or search engine.
What, as an individual?
That's hyperbole. I'm on the net and Google can't stop me by any white-hat means. I have a website hosted on non-Google infrastructure on a domain name registered with a non-Google registrar, and I don't rely on advertising to pay the bills.
Have you considered a more ethical revenue stream that doesn't involve advertising and surveillance? There is life after AdWords.
thing is, people find out we exist solely because Google search, when something goes wrong on the factory, they google for the solution, and finds us... whenever Google changes SEO in a bad direction, or ban our ads by mistake (happened more than once) our revenue tanks hard.
To be honest it feels terrible, I have no idea how to fix this situation.
Note: just so you understand how ethical and important the business are, some of the products our clients make and needed our emergency help: cheap bread, medicine, medical equipment, beverages, work vehicles, etc...
One of our most lucrative sales that came from a google search: a truck factory was having countless accidents because a clamping tool kept failing and injuring the workers, they were desperate for another supplier that knew how to fix that issue, instead of just selling replacements we actually sent someone to the factory and figured out a way to do a certain step during production differently, in a safer way.
That does leave you at the whims of said centralized system. There is no centralized system that can avoid this. If such a centralized system did not exist and people searched on a wide landscape of competing smaller search networks, it would be dramatically more difficult for you to ensure you were well positioned to be found on all those smaller networks.
Get a domain name you can hold on to.
Put a big search box on it which works well.
Put that address big front and center on all your literature, equipment, parts, boxes, etc.
Write, "for help, please visit: or call:"
Also, put your searchable text articles on the big social networks. Paste the entire text into your subreddit, facebook, instagram. Put your site URL in the profile.
It's a sad state of things, and will probably get better soon with meta-search or some other kind of new search paradigm.
They still do a lot of shady things actually: https://www.theverge.com/21310611/microsoft-edge-browser-for...
Every once in a while I see Edge pinning itself to my taskbar after an update, or opening automatically and telling me to migrate.
Edit: I find it funny that someone posting on "Hacker" News is defending a monopoly that extracts an ad tax from every startup and kills many innovative new companies by acquihire.
Throwing 100x more resources at AI ideas from the 70s isn't an foundational advance.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Art_of_Computer_Pro...
Nor the second one:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Art_of_Computer_Program...
Nor the third one:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Art_of_Computer_Pro...
I also searched for "parallel" and couldn't find any relevant passages to map parallelization.
They are definitely not foundational in anywhere near the sense that bell labs was.
“Other states are still considering their own cases related to Google’s search practices, and a large group of states is considering a case challenging Google’s power in the digital advertising market, The Wall Street Journal has reported. In the ad-technology market, Google owns industry-leading tools at every link in the complex chain between online publishers and advertisers.
The Justice Department also continues to investigate Google’s ad-tech practices.” [1]
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-department-to-file-long...
It's not just about targeting. But the algorithm is also 10x worse and the UX is 10x worse, and often it's on purpose to get as much "dumb money" as they can, while of course shooting themselves in the foot, because the better long strategy would be to actually make it a quality product that gives people results.
Source: https://spreadprivacy.com/search-preference-menu-duckduckgo-...
Despite DuckDuckGo being robustly profitable since 2014, we have been priced out of this auction because we choose to not maximize our profits by exploiting our users. In practical terms, this means our commitment to privacy and a cleaner search experience translates into less money per search. This means we must bid less relative to other, profit-maximizing companies.
That would literally be selling the crown jewels for some extra pocket money, what makes you think this is the case?
I don't know what this means.
But Google doesn't sell data. They let you buy ads against people that match your data or requirements, and that's a pretty fundamental difference.
But not sure what OP meant by that
I hate poverty, injustice, and bigotry. I cannot stir up strong feelings about an advertising company.
On the other hand I am a terrible advertising target, not wholly impervious to advertising but actively resistant, in part having seen under the bonnet of the sector and found little but a morass of grubby lies and folks with broken moral compasses. I intentionally interpret advertising as noise, not signal.
(corollary: attempts to disguise advertising are an irritant and a cognitive burden, so I allocate advertorials, content marketing, and drip-email compaigns to the Brand Damage circle of hell)
I use them for search as my default, and I would have used them for ads. I still might if they put a link there.
Apparently you have to sign up for some Microsoft ad platform, and then select DDG as one of the places to show your ads.
Hopefully someday DDG will have its own index.
1. Search Facebook login
2. Click first link
This user probably clicks a lot of ads.
Google uses a Vickery Auction, in other words the top bid pays what the second bidder bid so while I agree with your greater point, this is not based in reality as stated.
The auction is performed in the browser? No wonder the web feels pokey these days.
I thought at first this must be due to the privacy requirements around cookies, only the browser can coordinate the different parties because none of them will be sent all the cookies needed to run a complete auction themselves. But it seems like it's really more some kind of hack around a limited (for business reasons) Google API.
https://www.blog.google/products/admanager/simplifying-progr...
> It’s important to note that our move to a single unified first price auction only impacts display and video inventory sold via Ad Manager. This change will have no impact on auctions for ads on Google Search, AdSense for Search, YouTube, and other Google properties, and advertisers using Google Ads or Display & Video 360 do not need to take any action.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/yo...
>> Several current and former YouTube employees, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity because they had signed confidentiality agreements, said company leaders were obsessed with increasing engagement during those years.
>> One problem, according to several of the current and former YouTube employees, is that the A.I. tended to pigeonhole users into specific niches, recommending videos that were similar to ones they had already watched.
There are real human beings working on those systems. That's how everyone would know if Google does as it says
But yes, the rest they expect us to take on faith. Or trust some boilerplate in their ToS (written by their lawyers, to absolve them of liability).
Personally I live near Washington DC, so with a government change, I will have to reassess what side of the issue ethically I should be reasoning in. Save energy? Encourage monopoly? Join government? Join big tech? Seek rents from big tech? I'm just meditating and creating deferred decision trees for myself postmarked for myself using the "well known" schwartz–zippel lemma and noether's theorem so i have self-determination.
There is an implicit assumption, that the code that you push is actually the same one that is being run on the VM, in your statement. This brings me back to the point I was trying to make in the parent comment.
Yes they may be evil and doing all this bad stuff, but we pretty much know all the evil stuff they are doing publicly.
Does "a developer" know Facebook's long-term goals, its interim strategies, or details of its relationships with operations like Cambridge Analytica?
Even at organizations orders of magnitude smaller than Facebook, it's pretty easy to have a few systems that are large enough you can only keep so many in your head at a time.
You'd probably need a few dozen of the right people together to begin to understand the complexity of their systems.
But the higher access you get, higher the penalties of sharing company secrets go.
Snowdens come into the picture every once in a while, but most average programmer Joes wouldn’t risk being internationally manhunted for whistleblowing questionable business practices.
So I do not think your argument is valid.
Conversely, a corporate whistleblower at the level we're discussing is in for a payday from media/book deals, etc.
That being said, someone that is in that situation, if the stakes are high enough, might be dissuaded just knowing that such things happen.
Would you (reader) want to bet your life against a conference room full of people with $1M+ worth of stock options you're about to negatively impact? Where a bad outcome for you only requires their silence?
There are many people in the world who value morals over money. There are a few who value morals over lots of money. But that's not a bet I'd take.
[0] https://newrepublic.com/article/147619/pinkertons-still-neve... [1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/juliareinstein/security...
Pinkerton sub-contracted this person.
If google was actually futzing about with the auctions like that, we’d probably find out eventually.
What is a conspiracy theory one day can suddenly turn into reality with just a little bit of transparency, just because large companies hire alot of people who they would never bring into said conspiracies doesn't discount the point.
If emotion drives engagement, then this should apply to positive emotions as well. All emotional posts, positive or negative, will be treated equally by the algorithm according to your logic. Hence it follows, that facebook hasn't explicitly designed it's algorithms to spread only misinformation and disinformation, acc to your logic.
I would like to see some proof that would back up your statement.
1. It doesn’t matter what the valence of the emotions are - positive or negative valence feedback loops will spread misinformation and disinformation. Positive emotion is not correlated with truth.
2. If you haven’t heard about this idea before, here is a starting point: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/opinion/digital-technolog...
I assumed from your previous comment(below) that you are correlating negative emotion with misinformation and disinformation. If that's not what you meant, then I guess I misunderstood what you meant by your previous comment
>> Facebook has designed its algorithms for spreading misinformation and disinformation, because emotion drives engagement
The easiest positive emotion to cause are at the result of puppies and wholesome/faith-in-humanity-restored posts, neither are generally related to actual truthful news.
I don't think this assumption is necessarily true for random misinformation (think common myths), but propaganda is usually designed to be emotionally charged, from PR to state propaganda.
So bad it arguably qualifies as misinformation in itself. If an algorithim spreads any information and cannot classify it (if you have a general purpose algorithim which can know all truth apriori what are you doing here instead of creating a singularity!). Then /design/ which implies intent and effectiveness. Otherwise if I burn a Trump Voodoo doll I will have designed something with the "intent" to kill the President. Even if Fox News would be very offended by it nobody sane would take it as a serious assassination attempt.
As to intent - at some point in the distant past before it became clear what it’s effects were, you could argue that Facebook wasn’t designed to spread misinformation.
Once you know what a thing does and how it works, if you keep operating it, it is by design.
If I’m trying to buy a car off a showroom floor, and the salesman says “you better take this price, I got 4 more people lined up to buy it,” does it matter if those 4 others are not genuinely interested or even real at all? It’s a bit slimey if a sales tactic, but if you say “I’ll pay nothing more than X,” you’ve lost the negotiating position. If you tell google “I’ll pay $3cpc for this phrase”, well now they should be shopping that phrase with all its might.
At the end of it, google has a primary interest in keeping its adtech optimized in a bang-for-buck sense for consumers vs it’s earnings. If they get carried away with charging too much, customers will start just walking away without a purchase. Just like the car salesman.
And which Publishers will receive their share of the scraps.
That argument would either hinge on the cost of advertising being passed along to consumers. Very hard to prove. Or the higher cost decreasing the total amount of advertising, somehow harming consumers. Dubious when ad-free products are generally considered premium and desirable
I don’t believe this is true. The law doesn’t set that criteria, but rather it’s a standard of interpretation known as the Chicago School. This was established far after, but is not law.
There’s a lot of debate on whether or not we should continue to maintain the standard.
https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/reassessing-chicago-school...
Antitrust legislation was originally established to prevent monopoly power from giving a company influence that could challenge that of government and harm democracy.
Almost as if what harms the ad industry is good for consumers ...
Also, "direct harm to consumers" is about the lowest bar you can set. It would be way more responsible to take some preventative action, before the harm to consumers occurs.
EDIT: Ars Technica is hosting it at https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/gov.u...