“The DoJ identified four areas that its remedies framework needed to address: search distribution and revenue sharing; generation and display of search results; advertising scale and monetisation; and gathering and use of data.
…
In addition to potential spin-offs, prosecutors said remedies could include banning the exclusive contracts at the heart of the case — in particular the $20bn that Google pays Apple each year to be its default search engine — as well as imposing ‘non-discrimination’ measures on Google products such as its Android operating system and Play app store.
The DoJ is also considering requiring Google to share its vast trove of data gathered to improve search ranking models, indices and advertising algorithms, which prosecutors argue was accumulated unlawfully.”
Yeah that's what monopolies do. Make people use inferior products. The US used to break up monopolies all the time. This was followed with a wave of innovation.
Not only did Google not "force" anyone to use the LLM tech that they largely developed, most people think they're silly for inventing it and then sitting on their hands until another company (OpenAI) ate their lunch.
They biggest web advertising company definitely shouldn't control the world's most popular browser. Just like we all knew they would, they're blocking ad blockers, and this problem will only get worse.
It's fascinating how "preventing web extensions from having full access to everything on every site you visit when there is a repeated history of extensions being bought by companies that turn them into spyware data miners" gets turned into "blocking ad blockers".
Users don't read dialogs. They just click yes so they can get to their shiny talking purple gorilla. This also doesn't address the threat model: a good extensions that users trust and give these rights to which is bought out and changed to do malicious things.
Not all do, some do. And it only takes a few to spot something fishy and start reporting problems.
> This also doesn't address the threat model
It actually does, because few extensions need broad permissions. The threat is significantly reduced if a change in required permissions goes up a new dialog pops up which encourages the few users that read the thing to ask "Hey, why is this asking for so many more permissions?"
This model works. It works so well that the security model of pretty much every app store is exactly the same. The risks are also identical.
If the only options are "full access to everything" or "no access at all" then users are going to pick the former every time, because there's no alternative. And worse, they'll get used to extensions requiring "full access to everything" and become more likely to approve that permission even for malicious extensions. That's essentially the situation for lots of extensions prior to manifest v3 (and arguably post-v3 too, but it's a step in the right direction).
Fine-grained permissions are a good thing, even though they do unfortunately make things more challenging for developers.
I'm not so sure this is a problem. They're not completely blocking ad-blockers, just neutering them somewhat with MV3. You can still use uBOL (the "Lite" version of uBO) and get a lot of ads blocked on Chrome.
Remember, Chrome is not installed by default on Windows PCs; Edge is. People are using Chrome because they want to. They could just as easily download Firefox and uBO, like more-savvy users do. Unfortunately, too many can't be bothered. Should they be saved from excessive and intrusive ads? Again, they can easily install uBOL on their Chrome instance, or they can download and install FF+uBO. Or use something else like Brave.
>Tell your friends to use Firefox, people.
Absolutely, yes. Just don't be too surprised when you visit them later and they're still using Chrome (or Edge) with no ad-blocker at all. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
>Chrome is not installed by default on Windows PCs; Edge is
Whenever this is brought up, the silence is deafening.
Edge is a good browser, and users are notoriously lazy; most won't read a dialog box before clicking it away. And yet... ~everyone on Windows still downloads Chrome.
IME if I am using a non-Chrome browser I get three nags from Google to switch to Chrome before it gives up. It's happened on Google's home page, Gmail, and Maps.
> Whenever this is brought up, the silence is deafening.
Because it's a bad faith argument meant to dismiss all context surrounding the situation to be a reductive 'gotcha' point. Anti consumer practices are still harmful even if people willingly opt into them, and there's no cute soliloquy for you to publicly muse onto us here that would be able to suggest otherwise to dissipate the sentiment.
Your parent poster commented on the nature of learned helplessness to an obvious problem by framing it as leading a horse to water. They were talking about people like you.
I've tried uBlock Origin Lite on Chrome and it works... perfectly. I haven't noticed a single ad get through.
And isn't it supposed to be a lot more performant?
Before, I assumed Chrome really was trying to gradually stop ad-blocking. But now that I see it's had literally zero impact, at least on the sites I visit, I'm starting to wonder what all the fuss was about. Was manifest v3 really about performance and security all along, and not about eliminating ad blockers?
Meanwhile, you can't install adblocking on iOS Safari as an extension at all. But I never hear anybody bringing that up.
If the ads weren't invasive, covering the content, purposely distracting you and your data wasn't being collected and resold, we wouldn't need ad blockers.
There's side effect benefit of big kahuna companies mainly on the significant breakthrough and game changing research output because these excellent researchers are paid handsome money compared to conventional universities or research institutions.
We saw this with AT&T Bell research labs with their inventions of transistor and Unix, among others. The same thing happened with Google research with (arguably) deep learning and transformer.
Split them up at your own (US) perils, not unlike killing own Golden Goose.
This is a theoretical benefit which is directly at odds with the benefits of competition in a healthy market. For google, my observation is the "big kahuna" benefit of google basically does not exist and competition needs to be restored. Google is famous for not innovating on anything successfully, they produce graveyards of trash. Instead what they do is buy other companies then enshittify them in an anti competitive dance towards causing more damage than productivity.
You really have to think about exactly how our modern markets work and why buyouts are such dominant strategy. It's only sometimes about taking what you buy then using it, it's mostly about taking what you buy to stifle competition these days.
Look at twitter and Vine, twitter bought then shut down vine as part of a standard operating procedure just to stifle competition, and they had so little interest in capitalizing on what they bought that it left a market gap so wide TikTok filled it instead. But usually these practices do not leave such big market gaps, usually they simply shut down competition successfully and the buyer wins. Then in many cases if the company owners refuse to be bought out, extreme anti-competitive practices begin to destroy their business, which will not be punished until long after the victims get shut down. So owners need to choose between a huge pay out, or their company getting destroyed. Owners tend to choose the former.
Maps was technically an acquisition (Where2). But like YouTube, Doubleclick, Google Docs (Writely), Translate (Word Lens), Google Flights (ITA) and many others, Google successfully grew these products into giants.
Technically, but it's morphed so much that it doesn't even resemble its former self. I remember when Google Maps first came out and showed AJAX technology, so obviously superior to the competitors at the time like MapQuest. However, these days Google Maps is really more of a business directory with navigation, and it wasn't like that in the early days: you needed an address to navigate to.
The popular transformer paper, which went on to be used in things like ChatGPT, was authored by Google employees. But “come out of Google” is giving the organization too much credit and the individual too little. Also transformers were themselves a continuation of prior work like multi head attention. And it is possible that transformers were not needed - see this discussion from the other day:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41732853
Come on... that's so unfair. There is a reason such individuals chose to work at Google and not Apple or Amazon for example and were able to "individually" come up with such work without being pestered by their management to do other stuff.
Gmail was revolutionary at the start, but stopped innovating 10 years ago - why don’t we still have a good search engine within it?
MapReduce would be invented anyway (I implemented it from scratch before learning of it’s existence).
Chrome is just a slightly upgraded Firefox (and novadays Safari is just as good if not better with ai)
PageRank was what gave Google monopoly, it’s not a result of monopoly.
Go - I can give you that. ProtoBuf - not my field, but isn’t it just a format that someone else would develop to fill a niche? (unlike say mp3 that had new compression algorithms baked in)
Maps - I can give you that. Some people might argue that it was an acquisition, but without Google’s muscle, Street View would not be feasible.
Wat. It's like saying that an apple is a slightly upgraded orange. I would understand if you mentioned KHTML and Safari as relatives, but "slightly upgraded" does not fit anyway.
> PageRank was what gave Google monopoly
I don't think so. PageRank has been successfully implemented elsewhere, and outmatched. What helped Google build a monopoly was the first mover advantage, the network effects, and the incessant streams of money from AdWords (invented by Google), DoubleClick (acquired) and a bunch of other advertisement tools.
> Maps - I can give you that.
Don't :) Google Maps is an acquisition from 20 years ago. (As is Android, AdSense, and many other core flagship products of the Google brand.)
If you want a relatively recent, successful Google service for general public, it's Google Photos.
Picasa was rather different: it had a desktop client, had tags, did not have a dedicated view mode, etc. It ran as a separate product, and then was shut down, not integrated.
> Gmail was revolutionary at the start, but stopped innovating 10 years ago - why don't we still have a good search engine within it?
Not sure about your experience, but I used to subscribe to a lot of mailing lists just so that I can search for mailing list content using gmail, because the search function implemented by those mailing lists were generally worse.
Go you can hardly call an innovation. All of the ideas existed previously, and it's a poor execution on those ideas for reasons that have been discussed on HN at length before. They created it to serve their own needs in conditioning the labor market to make their hiring process easier.
Gosh this is pretty unfair to Rob Pike and Ken Thompson. A lot of infrastructure companies have benefitted from Go the same way Google has, for the same reasons.
Typical HN comment writing off significant thoughtfulness as "not an innovation" lol
> Google is famous for not innovating on anything successfully, they produce graveyards of trash.
- AlphaFold (just won a Nobel prize)
- Transformers (the "T" in GPT)
- Waymo (autonomous vehicles)
- Sycamore (quantum computing)
These are just a few off the top of my head.
If your idea of innovation is a better RSS reader, then sure, I agree with you. But in terms of things that push the forefront of technology, I have a hard time thinking of another company with greater impact in recent years.
The split of ATT killed Unix2, so we spent 30 years re-implementing Linux+k8s. These things that existed in Unix2 & Plan9 were re-implemented by Plan9 employees in Google Labs.
i can't even understand what you are saying? AT&T was good, or bad?
AT&T copyrights led to linux, and linux, independent of unix, has been a huge boon for good, and for unixness.
the threat to unix now is all the people who by nature prefer Dave Cutlerness, and can't see that their way is the wrong way, now they are using linux (because it won) and trying to ruin it.
UNIX exists because ATT was split. They could not profit from software (by law because of an agreement with the government) so early versions of UNIX where made free.
The AT&T split had nothing to do with monopoly regulation (as opposed to the Bell breakup in 1982), other than the fact that Wall Street wasn't rewarding regulated operating companies with dot-com valuations. AT&T wanted to sell hardware to other telcos and dot-coms, so spun off Lucent, which had no idea what it wanted to do with P9/Inferno (which was a fantastic piece of kit!) other than embed it into a couple of network products. Lucent bet heavily on unstable CLECs like Worldcom, generated a couple of headline-creating network crashes, and then failed to capitalize on their pole position in optical long-haul (to be fair, they also bet heavily on a very unstable Global Crossing for that). There's a lot of mismanagement and failures that can be ascribed to Lucent leadership without government or regulatory intervention being involved.
So wait, markets don't work, then? A free market, theoretically, promotes innovation by ensuring that businesses must advance their products in order to compete with one another. You're saying that a lack of competition promotes innovation by concentrating all of an industry's capital under one roof.
Regalian roles are to ensure fair competition by reducing any actor bigger than the state to something smaller, and ensuring the economy works with transparent information (no lying, rule of law, etc.)
Companies getting too big are natural; Letting them get too big is what happens when your state borrows a trillion per semester: Your state is obese, intervening in every little sector of the economy (thus the opposite of liberal), and not playing its regalian role.
You should indeed reduce the size of both the state and the largest companies, to let the economy self-regulate, but then, how would the US govern the rest of the world?
Both can be true in varying degrees at certain points in time. They're not mutually exclusive. There are benefits to centralization and concentration of capital. Competition is the same exact process that leads to monopolistic entities in the first place.
The thing that makes markets work is the struggle. A Darwinian survival of the fittest in a way. Once the struggle is over and only one contestant remains, the results are generally dystopian.
Also I believe that even when working optimally the Darwinian mechanism can't solve certain problems. Some things need to be dealt with by a group of motivated people working for other goals than profit.
Markets gave us compuserve and facebook while CERN gave us the open web, for example.
Yes I can see the dystopian consequences of google’s search monopoly profits, which they have used to do such horrible things as:
- Providing a free alternative to Microsoft’s monopolized office suite and desktop OS
- Provide a free alternative to Apple’s mobile OS, spurring a revolution in access to the internet for the world’s poor
- Provide free global maps with streetview sights
- Provide a free to access video platform with invaluable educational resources that allows millions of creators to make a living and that likely wouldn’t exist save for Google’s monumental investments and ability to sustain years of losses
- Research given away for free that ignited the current AI revolution
- Research given away for free that is revolutionizing medicine and drug development
So you’re telling me the evil monopolist that charges nothing has a competitor, and that competitor is free? Which is why we must break up the evil monopolist?
The case against Google surely is that they shouldn't be allowed to use their dominant position in ad sales to price dump unrelated businesses until all competitors are gone.
Like for example having youtube be free until they're the only game in town then start charging 14 dollars monthly to avoid 30% ads. Or targeting ads to gmail users so you can artificially provide a cheaper mail service than anyone else.
There's an actual law saying you can't do stuff like that.
I wish this were a viable option, but it is not. US national labs are horribly, horribly mismanaged. For some slower-moving fields like particle physics where institutional knowledge is key, they hold up alright, but for fast moving fields like quantum they are very behind. They are stagnant bureaucracies. I could tell stories, but better to just compare the output of national labs in many fields to those of the top universities in the States.
I think you need to better support the contention that the National Labs are “horribly, horribly mismanaged” [not even just horribly, but horribly, horribly]. I think many of us would like to hear your stories. But note that many in your audience here have decades of experience across both National Labs and leading industrial laboratories. Please, share your stories that span the contributions of tens of thousands of top-level STEM contributors across practically every area of scientific and engineering endeavor over the last, say, 15 years. Remember to stay unclassified…
Then separate out the basic science from the defense work which requires that bureaucratic oversight. Or direct that funding to universities. My main point is allowing monopolies because they direct their excess profits to research to hide their excess profits is just a complicated tax to fund basic research, which we would be better off spending directly on research without bloated executive salaries and distorted markets in e.g. search or browsers.
Clearly this model no longer works. Bell labs had 11 nobel prize winners. What did Google invent? Slightly better generative neural networks whose offsprings now pollute their search results?
You could interpret this the other way - Why has Jeff Dean been snubbed by the Nobel committee? Why hasn't Larry Page gotten a Nobel for inventing the search technology that half the planet now depends on? I don't know what category to put that one in, but there's some important results in lightspeed-limited communications in "The Datacenter as a Computer" that would be worth extending the Physics category for.
It was better search than other search options at the time, but was quickly an advertising company. It's also too bad that that it was so dominant early, because there used to be 4-5 search Enginess and their results were very different and you could find things in non-google results that you couldn't get from google (and vice versa).
You're not wrong, but it didn't last. Google jumped the shark in its first decade. I remember giving an internal presentation in 2010 or 2012 about how little of the screen real estate in a Google search result was actually search results.
Spanner is one thing I'd say they invented but they built a whole bunch of really neat stuff in order to be able to run search, back in 1998. that they're this behemoth conglomerate that it's cool to hate on doesn't erase the fact that they had to build all sorts of new things when they were just starting out.
Trying to turn a zoo into a farm, as AT&T attempted to do with Bell Labs post-divestiture, had limited success and incurred great emotional and spiritual cost on the institution. Bleah.
> side effect benefit of big kahuna companies mainly on the significant breakthrough and game changing research output
“Given that production could be carried on without any organization, Coase asks, 'Why and under what conditions should we expect firms to emerge?' Since modern firms can only emerge when an entrepreneur of some sort begins to hire people, Coase's analysis proceeds by considering the conditions under which it makes sense for an entrepreneur to seek hired help instead of contracting out for some particular task.
The traditional economic theory of the time suggested that, because the market is ‘efficient’ (that is, those who are best at providing each good or service most cheaply are already doing so), it should always be cheaper to contract out than to hire.
Coase noted, however, that there are a number of transaction costs to using the market; the cost of obtaining a good or service via the market is actually more than just the price of the good. Other costs, including search and information costs, bargaining costs, keeping trade secrets, and policing and enforcement costs, can all potentially add to the cost of procuring something via the market. This suggests that firms will arise when they can arrange to produce what they need internally, and somehow avoid these costs.
There is a natural limit to what can be produced internally, however. Coase notices ‘decreasing returns to the entrepreneur function’, including increasing overhead costs and increasing propensity for an overwhelmed manager to make mistakes in resource allocation. This is a countervailing cost to the use of the firm.
Coase argues that the size of a firm (as measured by how many contractual relations are ‘internal’ to the firm and how many ‘external’) is a result of finding an optimal balance between the competing tendencies of the costs outlined above. In general, making the firm larger will initially be advantageous, but the decreasing returns indicated above will eventually kick in, preventing the firm from growing indefinitely.”
Do you think it's impossible to have a nuanced discussion about monopolies? Their net effect may be wholly negative while having some interesting aspects
Not impossible, but mostly impossible. You can discuss the interesting aspects of large corporations, but you can't really discuss them in a vacuum. The top level post about "big kahuna" companies comes across as an unambiguous defense of monopolies, not an attempt at nuanced conversation.
Have these people even read the white papers that Google releases? They are mostly marketing pieces.
When systems and technologies are not publicly reproducible, why should scientists and (most) engineers care? I will not take Google at its word and would not recommend it to others.
Drawing from own experience working with Harvard, MIT and Google researchers, I could not disagree more.
When you talk to a researcher, do they strike you as someone who chases handsome amounts of money, or someone who chases ideas?
You bring up research labs. I listened to Alan Kay's numerous talks over the years (as an example of a prominent CS researcher), not once does he mention that he joined for the money at Xerox PARC. Yes, he was paid, but the main advantage was being given free reign to conduct research with the best experts in their fields, i.e. to invent and pursue ideas.
The important part from a financial perspective, is to be able to have finances to back a research division, where you can spend billions on building a new type of technology, if need be, that may not pan out. You don't need a monopoly to accomplish that.
You know who does chase handsome amounts of money? Day traders and everyone gambling on the stock market.
> is to be able to have finances to back a research division, where you can spend billions on building a new type of technology, if need be, that may not pan out. You don't need a monopoly to accomplish that
A company in an industry with very tight margins has much less money to invest in fundamental research. All the recent growth in generative AI has been driven by companies with very high margins; Google, Facebook, Amazon. If all those FANG were in tightly competitive markets and hence had low margins, they wouldn't have had billions of dollars to spend on the GPU compute necessary to develop modern language models. Which is evidenced by the fact that no companies in more competitive sectors have produced any large language models.
> company in an industry with very tight margins has much less money to invest in fundamental research
OpenAI has raised almost $18bn to date [1]. That puts it in the top 10 corporate R&D spenders globally, ahead of Intel and the entirety of big pharma [2]. (And OpenAI's gross margins for its API business are estimated around 40% [3]. Standard fare for tech. If anything, OpenAI subsidising its business with Apple and ChatGPT is behaving more like a tech giant than a start-up.)
The top of that list are the big 5 American tech companies, spending about $200bn annually on R&D. By coincidence, that's roughly the pace of U.S. VC spend [4]. The depth of American private capital markets make a solid case against favouring housing these long-shot bets inside tech giants. (Particularly absent non-compete and IP reform.)
Because you specifically mention Alan Kay, I just finished reading “Dealers of Lightning”, which is about PARC, and says that the researchers there were very handsomely paid. IIRC, they were paid 20% more than their counterparts in ‘regular’ Xerox R&D. Xerox was also a big company, making a lot of money when it started PARC; arguably a monopoly (depending on how you define the term).
That still doesn't prove that Kay worked there because of the financial incentives. I don't think that 20% is nearly enough for most top talent to bail to an otherwise less attractive company if they deeply care about what they're working on so long as they aren't wildly underpaid. There needs to be a combination of incentives to drive movement.
I don't know how you could prove or disprove why Kay worked somewhere fifty years ago, short of a written affidavit produced at the time. Additionally, most professionals don't admit that they took a job because of the pay, even if that's exactly why they did it; they usually say they 'went for a new challenge' or something like that.
I think you're getting it backwards. The research operations are a desperate attempt stave off regulation to keep the sweet, sweet monopoly profits coming in (and those profits are so big that the bean-counters allow it). I believe that was the explicit strategy at AT&T. We collectively pay way, way more.
It'd be way more efficient and cost effective to just set up a well-funded government labs to do that research.
It's an interesting argument for monopolies possibly being a net-good, but I don't think regulators really look at it. Companies do R&D because they like their monopoly status and don't want to be caught flat-footed by something new.
Yes. If a large company didn't employ those researchers, someone else would, and if they were for someone else maybe they'll come up with something which could damage the large company.
It's not about building and owning the next best thing, it's about preventing someone else building and owning the next best thing.
Well then the monopoly still isn't bad, because they can still be brought down solely by merit (just that no one have done it yet). Unlike government-enforced monopolies that'll stay no matter what they don't even have to do R&D.
It’s this kind of baseless negativity that is toxic to mental health. I’m done with this site for a while. It’s just too exhausting reading lies about how much everything sucks.
Rory Sutherland has a great take on this which is (paraphrasing and my own interpretation):
Innovation is a lot easier when you have a lot of money to spend on R&D. In order to get that money, you can't compete on price b/c that's a race to the bottom. Instead, you want to focus on quality and/or customer service so that you become a monopoly and then can use monopoly profits to innovate to higher quality products and services.
classical MBA says that a firm can compete on price OR branding, unfair advantages (moat) notwithstanding. Competition in commodities is difficult but not impossible given a rational economic environment. Some would say that the modern expectation of returns on investment are irrational, and warp the economics around them too.
Peter Thiel made a similar argument about monopolies years ago. As I pointed out then [1], the argument only shows that monopoly is good for the monopolist; it doesn't actually show that monopolies are good for society as a whole.
This! And where do people think open source funding, hackathons, bug bounties for software that's not even theirs, oss-fuzz, really incredible but not necessarily profitable research like Project Zero comes from? AdWords largesse.
Read a book on tech entrepreneurship. The “goal” of most startups is to get purchased by a big tech company. That’s utterly fucked, and tacitly demonstrates the problem.
Because a lot of those business are only possible through monumental amounts of work and/or investment and selling is way easier than being an owner-operator for years under very probable risk of failure?
Awkward: asking Google.com "What is Google and why would DoJ want to break it up?", it does not answer anything about what Google is. Half baked website
Genuine question: what societal value would be lost if Google was erased tomorrow (all technical reliance their services was magically replaced overnight with alternatives by pixies)?
Android makes up ~70% of the global phone marketshare [1]. Google maps makes up 70% of the mapping marketshare [2]. Chrome makes up ~65% of the browser marketshare [3]. Those are three of the nine products Google has with over a billion users [4].
What drop in equivalent exists for Android? I have no desire to move to iOS.
What drop in equivalent exists for Google maps? I have used OpenStreetMap for a personal project and have tried other proprietary options. If Google maps disappeared, life would go on but I would be worse off.
What equivalent exists for Chrome? Even on desktop I prefer Chrome over Firefox. On mobile, Firefox falls far behind Chrome.
Fortunately for you, Android and Chromium are FOSS and not going anywhere. For maps there is OSM with several available frontends, Bing maps, and Apple Maps has a web version.
Interoperability is great, walled-garden integration is a trap like any sort of bundling. If someone wants to create a suite of products that work well together that's fine so long as they employ means that allow other products to integrate as well. Google has gone the other route and created a suite of products and services that integrate in ways that exclude competitors.
Yup, and that's what people want. So what is the integrated service you are saying exists that can be a drop in replacement for the way so many organizations use Google's integrated services?
There we go. So if we go back up to your first comment where you say there are separate replacements for some services, you can see that isn't really relevant since what is being discussed was a drop in replacement for Google, and not an individual service they offer.
Aside from that though, Google's offerings are not a walled garden.
One of the pendulums in business strategy is whether companies should be smaller so they can be more nimble and pursue their own destines or larger so the can be more protected from market demands and can capitalize on "synergies" with other business units.
In practice, investors usually discount larger companies for efficiency reasons. You can see this with acquisition announcements where the acquirer usually goes down in price. The synergies often fail to pay off because there aren't actually many synergies between making microwaves and running a TV network, and the sprawling empire turns into mostly independent fiefdoms.
There has been many announcements of lawsuits based on antitrust in the last 3 weeks.
We can assume the message is “If you reelect the current party, we’ll finish these lawsuits.” There are two perverse effects:
- It positions the alternate party as the party that Google should sponsor,
- The good choice after reelection will then be to delay the next step of those popular antitrust cases to 3 weeks before the end of the next mandate, to tell the electors that they should reelect. Which ironically puts the current party in the position of the one doing nothing on the popular antitrust case (a corollary to “a party’s platform depends on ensuring the problems it’s supposed to solve keep existing”).
Harris has been thin on policy, so it's hard to say, but seeing that she's from the Bay Area, she might be more careful more careful to not break one of the country's key industries.
What if it kills Android, and everyone has to buy an iPhone? (Yeah, I know, Android is OSS and the phone makers could just maintain/improve it as a consortium without Google, but looking at how these companies operate I don't think they're capable of doing this.) (And no, I don't think the USG will break up Apple if this happens. They're already showing highly preferential treatment to Apple compared to Google.)
What if it kills YouTube, and the only viable alternative is TikTok? I recommend everyone start downloading all their favorite YouTube videos with yt-dlp right away, just in case.
What if it kills Google Maps? Again, there's no real viable alternative here unless you have an iPhone.
I can see a lot of ways things could go horribly wrong here if you're someone who doesn't want to be an Apple user.
> And no, I don't think the USG will break up Apple if this happens. They're already showing highly preferential treatment to Apple compared to Google.
The largest business by far is iPhones. It has 16% market share in the PC business, behind Lenovo, HP, and Dell. The only business that makes sense to peel off is the iPhone services (Apple Music, News, etc.) because that's the place it uses its dominant position to help its own products.
Samsung could easily maintain Android as they already have their own little Android software ecosystem that differs greatly from Google's. Full of spyware, but yeah.
There's tons of video hosting options but what makes YouTube special is access to a large audience and monetization. TikTok's monetization is garbage and not even a contender really. Large content creators are already negotiating their own brand deals to the point where YouTube's ad money is merely the cherry on top. I actually think breaking up YouTube would be good for audiences and in the long run creators themselves. Content creator networks would make a return in a big way.
There is already OpenStreetMaps. MapQuest existed before Google Maps and still does.
Yea, but OSM has variable quality by country, and isn’t really a “navigable” map in most places.
You can’t get turn-by-turn directions because they don’t (consistently) have things like lane permeability, turn restrictions, directionality, etc. You can’t get accurate ETAs because they don’t have speed limits or free flow speeds. And traffic data of course. Unless things have changed, routing class and surface type are also unreliable, so a shortest-path graph algo will take you down neighborhood streets or unmaintained roads.
There is a ton of under-the-hood map data, invisible to the end user, that you need to have to be able to deliver a modern phone navigation experience.
OpenStreetMaps is utterly useless for urban navigation. No connection to the local transit system, no business directory, it's only useful if you have a physical address you want to go to, and personally I never have that information.
MapQuest doesn't have any of this stuff either. Apple Maps is probably the closest, but it falls very far short of what Google Maps can do.
Mozilla killed Firefox itself with its poor leadership. They have had nearly 20 years of Google writing them half a billion checks annually. If they can't come up with a better business plan than literal corporate welfare, maybe they don't deserve to exist?
I don't understand where all the money goes for mozilla. Here is the revenue line from wikipedia for 2022:
total revenue | percent from google | total expenses |software dev expenses
$593 million | 81% ($480 million) | $425 million | $220 million
so basically 168 million in the bank in 2022. the math has been basically this the last 10 years. in 2018 they lost 1 million but in 2019 they gained 330 million. a lot of their software expenses probably comes from the busywork features they saddled upon themselves like pocket or whatever, since it was only $63 million in 2010 and has only gone up by a couple hundred million from there.
So just over the last 10 years from my back of the envelope map from that table on wikipedia, they should have a good 1.5 billion in the war chest by today assuming the mozilla foundation did not make investments with it, which they probably have this entire time so probably even more valuable. At a certain point, maybe already, the org should have enough cash socked away in investment to just pay for operating expenses out of dividends alone.
Hilariously shortsighted. Big Tech companies have been a GDP-doubling runaway success for the US economy.
It would be like if we here in Denmark started breaking up Novo Nordisk. Our economists would probably do a public lynching of any government official who suggested doing that.
However as a European I can't help but welcoming the US shooting themselves in the foot like this. Something tells me we will see more of this as more reddit-brained American millennials get political influence.
It is precisely the large impact on GDP that poses a threat to the host nation. When companies like Novo Nordisk are such a huge part of the economy, they can exert disproportionate influence on society itself.
Our economy is absolutely benefiting from Novo Nordisk's size right now, but if/when their demand weakens or they're out-competed, we're going to end up with a lot of unemployed biotechnicians and massive roads to Kalundborg which will need to be maintained.
Hilariously shortsighted. Breaking up Standard Oil created wildly competitive industries and launched Rockefeller's wealth into the stratosphere. Big Tech is a rent-seeking middleman that chokes the life out of innovation.
Hilariously confused. Tech is different from Big Tech, which is yet further different from Big Ad Tech.
For the avoidance of doubt, Wintel was Big Tech. The status quo now is Big Ad Tech.
The main economically positive thing for the US (and something Europeans absolutely screwed up in relative terms versus the US and increasingly China) is the early investment and adoption of Tech. Digitization as such is a great enabler.
But you don't need Big Tech oligopolies for a vibrant digital economy.
But even more importantly, you don't need bizarre Big Ad Tech commingled business models that build the economy's entire tech infrastructure - many parts of it having a critical utility like role - on the back of... ads.
But there is little scope for European schadenfreude. Arguably the US antitrust gears are moving precisely because people slowly wake up to the limits on economic opportunity placed by the Big Ad Tech status quo.
In Europe we are good at words and criticizing mistakes but deeds are scarce.
> Hilariously confused. Tech is different from Big Tech, which is yet further different from Big Ad Tech.
Big Ad Tech has been a money spigot for R&D in both hard and soft tech. This comes via M&A but also spawning a generation of VCs willing to fritter away adtech money on fun hard tech startups.
There is not a big source of VC funding for hardware startups that doesn't come directly or indirectly from Big Tech / Big Ad Tech revenue and valuations.
Developing and selling medicine to solve the number one health problem in the world (in addition to medicines for other health problems) is not real economy?
There is no point in chasing a high GDP when it results in a materially worse world. The point of a society isn't to make the numbers go up. If a monopoly is super efficient at generating some nebulous concept of value by creating and operating the world's largest surveillance system and actively using it to sell influence over people's attention and habits then the only sensible thing to do is to dismantle it.
If ads are the only way people are able to learn about products, then there is clearly a massive failure of imagination, as well as innovation. People know what they need, and have always known. The concept of exploiting human psychology in order to sell more of a product to people who likely don't need it is a relatively recent development in human history. Plus you can just search for stuff you need in a search engine...
> People know what they need, and have always known
No we don't. I need a better mouse trap, but I already have mouse traps that work, so if you make a better one you need me to find out about it otherwise I'll just buy the same old not so good ones out of habit thinking they work as good as any other one. There are also problems that I don't even know I have. There are a lot of houses with terrible insulation that the owners really need some advertisement to get them to upgrade - it will pay off in just a few years.
These ads do not need to interrupt people's lives to make their cases. If that mouse trap is so good then people who are in the market will discover it by active searching, then spread their discovery. If the new insulation will save people money then that's newsworthy information and will be reported on in information outlets that people subscribe to. The idea that businesses paying to push awareness is the only way people might discover previously unknown products and services is absurd.
If you think the mouse traps work you probably do not need other. Anyway, marketing is not good way to find about flaws of current ways. Because that is not it's focus.
At a time of their choosing they can subject themselves to marketing material (yellow pages) or simple word-of-mouth amplified by the Internet. Treating "knowledge of your product/service" as a market commodity is bizarre and has overall negative effects on competition (more money buys more awareness equals more sales).
I used to buy a magazine called "Computer Shopper", which I heard about via word of mouth.
Even now I will go out of my way to watch adverts for things like films I might be interested in.
Need to be careful with word of mouth though, many adverts are spread by word of mouth, especially on the internet where people are paid to say "hey this new $product is great". Those are worse that clearly marked ads.
What part of being a massive ad company whose raison d'etre is to collect as much personal information about you as possible (with limited or no consent) to enable other people to try to convince you to buy stuff even remotely a net positive for the world?
I would prefer to see ads for things that I want rather then see ads for stuff I couldn't care less about.
If I get convinced to buy useful things it's a win/win.
If you and enough others find such fine-tuned recommendations helpful then they would continue to exist without intrusive advertising. There are entire magazines full of ads that people pay for.
That could an opt in option, but the rest of us don’t want it. Google (or whatever ad company replaces it (Addled?) could give you the chance to opt in to ads and leave the rest of us alone. I’m fine with seeing ads about hunting when I’m on a gun sales website or local restaurants if I’m looking at recipes on Epicurious, just stop following me around, creeper (google)
Ever bought something you didn't actually want? Were you persuaded to want something? What was the exact mechanism? Were you lied to? "Made to" somehow?
> net positive for the world
How exactly do you find out what is "net positive for the world"? Who assigns the the values and who does the tallying?
We don't actually know, but we know it exists. Because otherwise people wouldn't bother paying for ads. Your average person can identify hundreds of brands instantly. What's the value of that? Billions? Trillions?
Certainly, when cigarettes and chewing tobacco were advertised most people did it. Granted, the addiction helps because you only need 1 successful conversion for a life-long customer.
Well, now very few people do that in the US. Without a shadow of a doubt in anyone's mind, the abolishment of those ads had something to do with it.
One of the most common fallacies I see is that choice is a binary. You either chose something, or you didn't. Meaning you were forced.
In actuality, choice is incredibly complex. There are thousands of individual events that will influence your choices. What you're doing right now could be influencing choices you make next decade, and you wouldn't know.
You can control people's choices without forcing their hand on anything. You can introduce information and events that sculpt their mind without so much as lifting a finger. It's a form of mind control, but not in the TV sense. Because people make the choices themselves.
Making someone do something is almost worthless. Convincing someone it's in their best interest to do something is where the value actually is. Look back at wars and our use of propaganda and try to break down what the end-goal is. It's not "making" people do something.
We are learning and teaching machines. We can't help influencing and being influenced. Any interaction we have with another human being will influence us. Reading a book, an article or a simple blog or forum post will influence my mind. A lesson or a chat will influence me. Even a smell or a color will generate thoughts and actions in me. We can't help it - they are using the same mechanism we use for learning and without that we can't survive.
But does that mean that they control me? Only if this information comes from only one side and is well integrated in my regular trusted information streams overwhelming my defenses. Like propaganda. Or a Guru. Or an academic institution.
Ads on the other hand are quite easily defeated because they are both clearly delimited and coming from numerous, competing directions. In a world without Ads I would be very vulnerable to them. In our world though they are reduced to a more utilitarian function: to inform me. They tell me what options are out there, what is available and how to get it if I so choose.
I don't think they can "make me" do anything against my own interest or even change my mind. They can merely inform me and I have no problem with that.
> I don't think they can "make me" do anything against my own interest or even change my mind
I think you lack humility and imagination.
Once again, I remind you of the Tobacco industry. After advertisement was abolished, Tabacco use went down significantly. They often targeted young boys with promises of masculinity and prestige.
Keep in mind Tabacco isn't your average product either. It kills you, rather painfully and slowly.
If people can be influenced via ads to do that, which we know they can because they were, odds are you are being influenced right now with products with much less personal risk.
Or perhaps look at the obesity epidemic. We have millions upon millions of people literally eating themselves to death. Their quality of life is severely impacted. That's pretty extreme, certainly nobody would harm themselves like that without influence from the outside. Now, granted, we run into the same problem of confounding factors. Food tastes good and food sense is taught to children. But I personally believe advertisement has something to do with it.
Your note about "competing ads" I don't think works. The reason being that while ads may compete with each other, they all have the same goal - to get you to buy something. Yes, McDonald's and Wendy's compete, but, for you, the effects are pretty much the same. You buy something unhealthy to eat.
I've never seen an ad for not eating. I've never seen an ad for not buying a pair of shoes. I have seen ads for not smoking - PSAs. Which, I think, is really just further proof that advertising must work.
All that to say, I think if ads did work you would have no way of knowing. I think I said this previously but it's pretty much worthless to force someone to do something. The trick is getting them to do it and letting them believe they made the choice. That's the golden goose.
Well, let's say ads work. I am not convinced, but you're persuading me. :)
Can't outlaw them - we still need them to quickly inform & educate the masses. The governments will definitely use them even if just for "good" purposes. Who will define "good" though? In a world without ads people will not build an immunity and any ad will have such an effect that the temptation to use it will become irresistible to anybody in power. And mark my words: they'll use them for worse stuff than smoking and eating.
Also, we'll loose all ad-supported free stuff. And there is a lot there, like pretty much all media. The poor will be the most affected, too, since stuff can be paid with money or attention and they have no money.
> Tobacco industry
I don't know any smoker that is not aware of the dangers. But what they get out of it makes it worth it to them. Believe it or not, most people do not live to maximize their life expectancy, they have other criteria as well - like pleasure or enjoyment of life. Otherwise everybody would start their day with 4 hours in the gym and walk everywhere.
> After advertisement was abolished, Tabacco use went down significantly.
I'm sure there were many other measures taken as well.
> the obesity epidemic [...] believe advertisement has something to do with it
How about the food pyramid pushed by governments that was full on processed carbs? How about the vilification of fat & meat made by the medical establishment I believe? How about people naturally choosing comfort and pleasure over hard work and restraint? How about partners working both with little time left to chop and cook at home?
I doubt you need ads to explain the obesity epidemic.
> I've never seen an ad for not eating. I've never seen an ad for not buying a pair of shoes.
Because we must eat and have shoes - we can't not buy food or shoes. None of those ads made me buy, they just influenced my purchase decision. And I see plenty of ads for health advisors and nutrition experts that tell me to eat more veggies and less sugar. Maybe they are not on main stream media, but alternative media is full of them.
> The trick is getting them to do it and letting them believe they made the choice.
If I wanted to protect my kids from that, I would expose them to more ads, not less. Because they would be even more vulnerable to ads if they saw fewer of them.
I believe that for the best ideas to win, we need to debate more, read more and learn more - not to burn the "bad" books.
Because of organic search, not because of the ads. It has had a massive effect on the economic opportunities of newcomers. You can open a restaurant outside of the main walking street of a place and get customers through Google Maps. You can have a small business selling almost anything online and people will find you using Google search. Before that you'd have to rely on traditional advertising for anybody to know you exist, which is neither cheap nor effective. Today you can start a business and pay 0 in advertising, and Google will still help customers find you through organic search.
Don't underestimate how much freedom that gives people to strike it out on their own.
The choices are not “Google as it currently exists” vs “a world without Google,” but rather “Google as it currently exists” and “Google as subject to stricter regulation.” There’s a fair case to be made that the world is worse than it would have been if the US had kept a tighter rein on Google.
Yeah, so little imagination in these pro-Google comments. They're imagining a world without Google instead of a world where ten Googles are all competing with one another.
What you say would have been true 10+ years ago, but not anymore. Big tech is really into rent seeking and competition stifling now, we'd see more innovation by opening up the space so new players can get a foothold.
The point is to not allow a company to be able to buy out the entire country. Maybe Novo Nordisk is a good steward but historically companies like Google and Amazon act only their own best interests. Breaking up these massive companies ends up doing the better thing anyway - a surge of competition emerges and offers better and often cheaper services. Look at the break up of Bell. The short term was marginally negative (higher long distance costs) but the market was better for it.
Google has a substantial amount of control over the flow of information in the United States. To the point it can literally redefine truth. This is a problem - and one that is easily solved by breaking up a de-facto monopoly. Moreover, the acquire-and-kill strategy stifles innovation. Imagine what we would have if Google didnt have the capital to buy and kill so many small companies.
I disagree fundamentally. The fallacy here is that breaking up a company results in it making less money. Usually it's the opposite, because corporate inefficiency stops being as much of a problem.
In my opinion, breaking up Google would only serve to make it even more profitable. Once companies grow to behemoths, they stop doing stuff. They slow down innovation to a crawl, and they essentially exist on life support and inertia until they're overthrown by a much, much smaller company.
We see this pattern of life for a company again and again. We see it RCA, with GE, with GM. The only reason AT&T (Ma Bell) is still around and didn't decay like others before it is BECAUSE it was broken up. It was given new life as a set of new, smaller companies.
A lot of Google's features when integrated and leading to ads and other Google properties they are justified, but if you were to forbid cooperation between the divisions, they may be shut down or diminished, as on their own they would need to be subsidized considerably and the 3rd party alternatives for ads would take most of the profits probably leading to negative cash flow without decreasing the level of service or charging fees.
What if they are valuable, but only when integrated with other parts of the company? At many of these companies, I can think of several products in big tech that are good for consumers and profitable but can't be done in a different, independent company.
It’s amazing to me that Google is still so rich given how lazy their culture is and how incompetent their product strategy has been. It just goes to show the power of their size and all it brings. Things like capital, monopolies (search), control over platforms (Chrome), network effects (YouTube and ad networks), and just plain old momentum.
This break up is long overdue but we also need a drastic rethink of antitrust law and corporate taxes to shift the economy towards innovative smaller instead of concentrating it in a few megacorps that are as powerful as some governments.
As I said in the past - Google and the likes (Meta) should have never been allowed to swallow other companies (DoubleClick, youtube and instagram/whatsapp respecively)...
I think decentralized technologies should be part of the discussion when you it comes to replacing technology monopolies. For example, there might be some protocols for cooperative web indexing or search or to provide a common layer that companies can build on.
I'd love to see how something like this could handle the bad actor problem. It is what (IMO) is currently killing the web today.
How would you, for example, stop a rouge indexer from spewing an unlimited number of bad indexes to spam their garbage into the distributed protocol? Or how would you address just bad/misleading/faulty indexes?
Web of trust, I guess? Don't accept just anyone doing scraping/indexing. Keep the trust network human-scale. I can imagine a world where the relevant protocols are open and organizations choose their own roots of trust. Common defaults would likely emerge, things like the Wikimedia foundation or Archive would serve as default roots for your average user, but you could add your own or remove those if you knew what you were doing.
I’ve never understood why Congress hasn’t mandated the Library of Congress to offer an Internet Archive/Google for content created in the US. Expand to all first-world country content if they wish. This is not a technology-limited problem at this point. Be nice to get fresh high-quality scans of analog content online…the early digital scans available commercially or otherwise are often unreadable.
Sure. If you ignore Microsoft Teams, One Drive, LinkedIn, Azure, Bing, Microsoft 365, OneDrive, Outlook, GitHub, Power BI, Skype, Visual Studio and Office...
This is all smoke and mirrors. DoJ does not have any intention of breaking up their friendly neighborhood Google.
What they're doing is seeing the writing on the wall of the upcoming election and seeing all of their jobs on the line and they're trying to shake down Google for golden parachutes.
I guarantee you in the next year, several high-level DoJ officials will secure senior positions at Google in order to defend against upcoming antitrust litigation. Those that don't will try to use their active litigation as an anchor to try and retain their jobs.
HN is a special place but among the average folk, I get why 90% of people use google. I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are. Especially with so many companies scraping the whole web for AI data, and so many GPUs chugging on that data. I suppose they are all focused on replacing the concept of search results with LLM prose. Ironically bing is down at the moment https://downdetector.com/status/bing/
Also: There is a MASSIVE incentive for foul play from everyone being searched. Every single business wants their results at the top. Everyone is grasping for every single advertiser's cents. The monetary encouragement to game the system is so incredibly strong. Google has to fight that uphill battle 24/7.
I have a lot of issues with Google as a company, but I do not envy their position when it comes to the web search. It is a cursed problem no matter how you look at it.
If they only divided it into information search ("library" knowledge) and business search (Yelp/YP) where you can tweak your preferences.
When you search for "vacuum cleaner", you either want online stores or you may want a local store. In either case it's a business query rather than looking for reviews or specs.
What's really polluting search, including Google, is the on-demand content generation based on your query. It's a sea of flotsam.
Unfortunately, if you did that, the businesses would still do their best to muscle in on the "information search" results. Marketers gotta Market, and placement on a SERP is a zero sum game. If one competitor managed to get themselves highly ranked in the "information search" then there would be incentive for all competitors to try.
I guess the idea is you disallow them from optimizing at all in the info search so much that you derank them on the biz for some not inconsequential amount of time if they misbehave.
No doubt, but there's a whole lot of problems shaped like that in tech today.
Look at any two sided market: Amazon/Etsy's third party sellers also want to be at the top, and there are bad actors trying to scam the intermediary and the customer. The same low friction onboarding that allows the company to succeed as an intermediary is also facilitating the fraud. Merchants can be fraudsters, advertisers can be fraudsters, users can be fraudsters producing fake clicks. There's economic incentives everywhere. See the relatively recent news of spotify getting generated songs, which are then played by fake listeners.
The companies are entering this situations with their eyes wide open. It's a necessary problem when you want to be an intermediary at a large enough scale. And if you don't have the scale, the per-interaction costs are really high, and your company gets beaten by someone with an easier onboarding funnel.
>It is a cursed problem no matter how you look at it.
But the funding model is also extremely blessed: you have a stream of people telling you every page load what they're interested in at that exact moment, and it's not hard to match them up with advertisers for those keywords.
And arguably the SEO parasitism problem is worsened by their monopoly -- to the extent that optimizing a site for one engine deoptimizes it on on others, the stronger the lead engine #1 has the more incentive there is to game it.
It's only getting harder and harder for newcomers to compete. Especially with the rise of abusive AI scrapers, webmasters are increasingly hostile to new web crawlers. Google and Bing get a pass because they're well-known, but any new service is fighting an uphill battle; a lot of sites will block them right off the bat. Nor does it help that some large sites (like Reddit) have inside deals with Google to feed them updates directly.
I am just shocked at how different our experiences are. I wonder what leads to the vast gulf? Could your results be better due to what you are searching or is the algorithm producing different results for each of us, based on other Google cues?
Because generalized Internet search encompasses any and all human interests. The vast gulf could easily be explained by bias in what 2 ppl are interested in and search for.
For example, if Alice is very interested in Sports News, coding, and movie reviews, they might get great results.
And then Bob runs searches on cooking recipes, interior design, and music, and gets terrible results.
Most likely you care about something that the other person doesn’t, biasing your search results greatly.
A general one: Whenever I search for something that was relevant in the past, but the keywords are now hijacked by some current events. Note that setting an upper date limit does not help: My problem is the content itself, not when the content was created. Somebody could still create content today about a historic event.
A concrete example that you guys can try for yourself is that I tried to find a certain Greek fable, because it became important to me because I deeply understood yet another layer of it only recently, decades after hearing the story and the usual interpretations:
Three philosophers discussing... stuff got tired and took a nap under a tree. Some mischievous boy put a black paint mark on their head while they slept. When they woke up, they all only saw the black mark on the other philosophers' heads and laughed at each other. It took a while for one of them to realize that he too must have such a mark.
I tried many questions and keywords and many search engines. The only one that found the fable was - ChatGPT!. All the search eng8ines only showed completely irrelevant stuff. I even tried avoiding the word "philosophers" because there are three well-known ancient Greek philosophers and plenty of results with that exact wording for those guys.
It's a valid USP and people are happy to pay them for it, but I don't think they are relevant in a discussion about the difficulty of building a search product.
For example, if you are discussing manufacturing issues in China, talking about how good drop-shippers on Amazon are is irrelevant.
Tomorrow Bing could say "yeah no more index for you" and DDG shuts down. It doesn't feel like a very stable business model to depend entirely on someone else's business.
I switched to DuckDuckGO about 1.5/2 years back, and it was awesome at the time. But it has gradually gotten worse to the point where I @google search pretty much 70% of the time. Now that could be me being in a bit in the honeymoon phase with DDG at the time and it wore off, or maybe it's actually been getting worse.
My pet, unproven, theory. Is that DDG has been "improving" but that's been making the search worse somehow. Perhaps the context and "fanciness" of a search is not something we all value and that's what we're experiencing.
My pet theory is that the reason why every search engine is worse than Google is because they all use Google's interface. They want a single textbox capable of searching everything. Google spent who knows how much money in R&D perfecting this search box. You can't make a search box more perfect than what Google has. I'd even say that most problems of "bad search results" are directly caused by this minimized interface design.
I think alternative search engines would have better chances if they provided alternative interfaces to refine search queries instead of trying to compete with Google/Bing.
I suspect it's because DuckDuckGO is Bing, and Bing is getting worse. Why is Bing getting worse? Because Bing has grown enough market share to be worth SEO people optimising for it.
That even if True is irrelevant to discussion. Antitrust isn't mostly against monopoly, but its abuse to gain benefit in another area or uncompetitive practices to stifle potential competition.
The alternatives are bad because the ones that were even remotely good were bought and killed by Google over the years. This includes ones we all have heard of as well as countless others.
This is a common tactic of tech giants, and the direct consequence of it is… what we have today.
Google has acquired a lot of ad competitors, but I can't remember any general-purpose search engines. It seemed more like they died out naturally over a long period. I welcome new information if that's not right.
Edit: Per Wiki, Google has also bought and killed the following search engines/services that nobody has heard of: Outride, Kaltix, Plink, Like.com, Orion, Metaweb, Awkan Technologies.
> it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are
Hard disagree. Google almost delights in not showing what you want. For political stuff it's very biased. If you search for something more obscure, Google really likes to "correct" your search and eliminate terms.
Although Google is better in my maternal language and for images (but AI is ruining image search for everyone).
I use DDG most of the time. Sometimes I try Google, and then I'm disgusted by all the non-result garbage they put at the top nowadays. Once in a while they do have something valuable that DDG misses.
HN isn't that special a place considering nerds think about Google as a "search engine" lol.
Google/Alphabet, first and foremost, is the largest online advertiser via its acquisitions of YouTube, DoubleClick, and others, in addition to selling ad placement on Google Search via AdWords, plus a growing number of consumer portals for price comparisons etc. integrated with Google Search (leaving out tracking your activity on Android devices, Google's cloud business, and Books/scholar). The immediate antitrust perspective starts by looking at Alphabet/Google subsidiaries both providing search results and ads on the pages listed in search results (and to a lesser degree even by pushing Google services via Google Search). This is what had ruined the web in more than one way.
Yes, I think the person you're replying to is noting that's just a really small piece of the puzzle. Google Search is really inconsequential in the grand scheme of Google, other than being a vessel for other business ventures.
After having been a paid subscriber for a number of months, I have to say that it still wasn't cutting it. I still ended up falling back to google all the time.
What bugs me most about Kagi at the moment is that their iOS plugin behaves weirdly. Frequently it will completely swallow my search and I'll have to retype it. Eventually I just disabled it :(
Arguably this is not their fault - I really wish iOS/MacOS Safari let you set a custom search engine instead of picking from a fixed list.
One part I can add, having tried Ecosia [1] is it at least made me consider question like:
"Are they actually planting these trees?" and "How would I possibly verify?"
"Does Microsoft actually pay them? All I'm doing is clicking? Is that worth enough?"
"How does anybody verify, and how is it not just an optimization for Ecosia to farm clicks for money? Chinese/Indian/Bangladeshi/Nigerian/MechTurk click farms don't cost that much. Seen the prices on MechTurk?"
The links points however are a bit ridiculous, they're entitled to their opinion but may be surprised to find people, at the businesses they use, have opinions that differ to theirs, and these businesses aren't always well-oiled machines.
Differences in opinions and values (in particular what money is used for) is one thing, failing (and refusing) legal obligations and getting surprised by something as basic as tax is something else entirely.
For a consumer facing business with no lock in, the tax thing makes absolutely no difference in your life using the product.
If it was really a concern you'd simply no longer have access and change search engine, until then it doesn't matter. You'd be surprised what tax issues even large billion dollar companies have.
Unless it's egregious, it's likely to be hypocritical. Are those same people buying mobile phones (cobalt is being used, guess where and who mines that) or using Amazon (poorer working conditions relatively speaking)? Or communicating via post, and buying from the local guy who imports their products (and has a big carbon footprint)? The real world is grey.
It doesn't really matter, because perfect shouldn't be the enemy of good. You're correct the world is gray, but if you're able to make a product switch without too much effort then go for it.
I mean, if I reduce my plastic use because I stop buying product X then that's still better (in my eyes) than if I did nothing. Or if Company Y has some egregious political ties, I cut them off, but Company Z is a huge conglomerate so I can't cut them off. Still a better deal than doing nothing.
You're missing my point. No one and no company is infallible. It's hypocritical, because if you dig deep enough you will find something that doesn't "align to your values".
It's impossible to 100% follow any value system. It doesn't mean you can forget about any values. Perfection is the enemy of the good. So I don't see your point. All compromises come with a cost (effort, money, lack of features). Everybody chooses which cost they can afford, as it should be.
No, not really. Some sides of the coin are just bad.
I get very frustrated at this "tribal thinking" notion that I hear a lot these days. It's not bad to have values and then at least try to stick to those values.
If someone doesn't like something they shouldn't be forced to endure it. I see this with so-called "cancel culture" too. It's not a cancel culture if you say something offensive and people stop listening. They're not trying to hurt you, that's not their intention. They just didn't like it so instead they go listen/watch something they DO like. That's predictable.
I mean, what's the end goal here? I use a product I don't even like just for the fun of it? Really? But I don't even like it...
After Chick-fil-a openly and vehemently opposed gay marriage in 2015 (and after!), I stopped eating there. And guess what? I don't miss it. I'm not worse off, at all. If anything, I'm better off, because the food is unhealthy anyway. Boom, it's that easy.
Your chick-fil-a example is egregious, that's fair enough.
I'm saying there's some other dirt on something you currently using instead that makes the whole endeavor pointless.
It's hypocritical if you say I disagree with you and I'm boycotting and then go ahead and use another company who has said something you disagree with in the past anyway.
It's the equivalent of the village mob roaming house to house for whatever reason. And then targeting one house specifically as it has better sun than the rest.
After reading the founders thoughts, if they were any sort of sizable company they would immediately have a GDPR violation. "emails and any info you give to use voluntarily (search prefs) is not PII and as such you can't have your data back." :0
The goal of almost all search engines is to direct people to adverts, not to give them the results.
Even when you do get the results your after, and get sent to the page you want, the goal of that page is to serve you adverts, not to give you the content you want.
Alternatives are bad because they do not have 24 years of data how users use the search. They will also never get this data if Google keeps dominating.
Idk how you could split it up other than right down the middle, creating 2 of each unit. 2 search engines, 2 browsers, 2 ad exchanges, 2 clouds and so on. Anything else is not going to be viable. Though maybe that’s the real goal.
Don't mistake the limited-purpose US Government for your state government. Colorado does quite a bit, from healthcare to environment to policing. And so does the US, for those subjects it has jurisdiction, and has been doing so for hundreds of years.
Not sure. The US Government has accrued a couple hundred years of unbroken political agitprop directed at it. From my observations, many people are comforted when anything tends to validate it, and otherwise ambivalent or oblivious to anything else. Underlying that is legal information that is inaccessible for most; the only books you can't check out of a library, a multitude of websites that never quite work. Newstainment that profits from attention does not help.
There was a study on it that made a big splash a while back. The interpreted version is that policy is made for the wealthy and special interest groups. If it happens to coincide with was the public wants, it's merely coincidence.
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In addition to potential spin-offs, prosecutors said remedies could include banning the exclusive contracts at the heart of the case — in particular the $20bn that Google pays Apple each year to be its default search engine — as well as imposing ‘non-discrimination’ measures on Google products such as its Android operating system and Play app store.
The DoJ is also considering requiring Google to share its vast trove of data gathered to improve search ranking models, indices and advertising algorithms, which prosecutors argue was accumulated unlawfully.”
Not only did Google not "force" anyone to use the LLM tech that they largely developed, most people think they're silly for inventing it and then sitting on their hands until another company (OpenAI) ate their lunch.
Tell your friends to use Firefox, people.
The hard protocol ban is heavy handed.
Not all do, some do. And it only takes a few to spot something fishy and start reporting problems.
> This also doesn't address the threat model
It actually does, because few extensions need broad permissions. The threat is significantly reduced if a change in required permissions goes up a new dialog pops up which encourages the few users that read the thing to ask "Hey, why is this asking for so many more permissions?"
This model works. It works so well that the security model of pretty much every app store is exactly the same. The risks are also identical.
Fine-grained permissions are a good thing, even though they do unfortunately make things more challenging for developers.
Remember, Chrome is not installed by default on Windows PCs; Edge is. People are using Chrome because they want to. They could just as easily download Firefox and uBO, like more-savvy users do. Unfortunately, too many can't be bothered. Should they be saved from excessive and intrusive ads? Again, they can easily install uBOL on their Chrome instance, or they can download and install FF+uBO. Or use something else like Brave.
>Tell your friends to use Firefox, people.
Absolutely, yes. Just don't be too surprised when you visit them later and they're still using Chrome (or Edge) with no ad-blocker at all. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
Whenever this is brought up, the silence is deafening.
Edge is a good browser, and users are notoriously lazy; most won't read a dialog box before clicking it away. And yet... ~everyone on Windows still downloads Chrome.
Because it's a bad faith argument meant to dismiss all context surrounding the situation to be a reductive 'gotcha' point. Anti consumer practices are still harmful even if people willingly opt into them, and there's no cute soliloquy for you to publicly muse onto us here that would be able to suggest otherwise to dissipate the sentiment.
Your parent poster commented on the nature of learned helplessness to an obvious problem by framing it as leading a horse to water. They were talking about people like you.
Interestingly, making such an accusation when it is unwarranted, as is the case here, is itself a bad-faith argument.
But I suppose this is just another cute soliloquy that I am "musing onto" you.
I've tried uBlock Origin Lite on Chrome and it works... perfectly. I haven't noticed a single ad get through.
And isn't it supposed to be a lot more performant?
Before, I assumed Chrome really was trying to gradually stop ad-blocking. But now that I see it's had literally zero impact, at least on the sites I visit, I'm starting to wonder what all the fuss was about. Was manifest v3 really about performance and security all along, and not about eliminating ad blockers?
Meanwhile, you can't install adblocking on iOS Safari as an extension at all. But I never hear anybody bringing that up.
There are a bunch of safari ad blockers in the app store that work the same way manifest v3 blockers work.
Mozilla is pretty much entirely funded by Google
We saw this with AT&T Bell research labs with their inventions of transistor and Unix, among others. The same thing happened with Google research with (arguably) deep learning and transformer.
Split them up at your own (US) perils, not unlike killing own Golden Goose.
You really have to think about exactly how our modern markets work and why buyouts are such dominant strategy. It's only sometimes about taking what you buy then using it, it's mostly about taking what you buy to stifle competition these days.
Look at twitter and Vine, twitter bought then shut down vine as part of a standard operating procedure just to stifle competition, and they had so little interest in capitalizing on what they bought that it left a market gap so wide TikTok filled it instead. But usually these practices do not leave such big market gaps, usually they simply shut down competition successfully and the buyer wins. Then in many cases if the company owners refuse to be bought out, extreme anti-competitive practices begin to destroy their business, which will not be punished until long after the victims get shut down. So owners need to choose between a huge pay out, or their company getting destroyed. Owners tend to choose the former.
I just given you the deep learning and transformer benefits.
There's a reason why the darling of AI Renaissance namely transformer was not invented at MIT, Stanford or Berkeley.
PageRank
Gmail
Maps
MapReduce
Chrome
Protocol Buffers
Go
Technically, but it's morphed so much that it doesn't even resemble its former self. I remember when Google Maps first came out and showed AJAX technology, so obviously superior to the competitors at the time like MapQuest. However, these days Google Maps is really more of a business directory with navigation, and it wasn't like that in the early days: you needed an address to navigate to.
MapReduce would be invented anyway (I implemented it from scratch before learning of it’s existence).
Chrome is just a slightly upgraded Firefox (and novadays Safari is just as good if not better with ai)
PageRank was what gave Google monopoly, it’s not a result of monopoly.
Go - I can give you that. ProtoBuf - not my field, but isn’t it just a format that someone else would develop to fill a niche? (unlike say mp3 that had new compression algorithms baked in)
Maps - I can give you that. Some people might argue that it was an acquisition, but without Google’s muscle, Street View would not be feasible.
Wat. It's like saying that an apple is a slightly upgraded orange. I would understand if you mentioned KHTML and Safari as relatives, but "slightly upgraded" does not fit anyway.
> PageRank was what gave Google monopoly
I don't think so. PageRank has been successfully implemented elsewhere, and outmatched. What helped Google build a monopoly was the first mover advantage, the network effects, and the incessant streams of money from AdWords (invented by Google), DoubleClick (acquired) and a bunch of other advertisement tools.
> Maps - I can give you that.
Don't :) Google Maps is an acquisition from 20 years ago. (As is Android, AdSense, and many other core flagship products of the Google brand.)
If you want a relatively recent, successful Google service for general public, it's Google Photos.
I seem to recall that followed the acquisition of Picasa.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa
This is comical. When Google acquired Android, it was nothing more than a 3000 line JavaScript demo. The Android OS was created entirely at Google.
Not sure about your experience, but I used to subscribe to a lot of mailing lists just so that I can search for mailing list content using gmail, because the search function implemented by those mailing lists were generally worse.
Typical HN comment writing off significant thoughtfulness as "not an innovation" lol
- AlphaFold (just won a Nobel prize)
- Transformers (the "T" in GPT)
- Waymo (autonomous vehicles)
- Sycamore (quantum computing)
These are just a few off the top of my head.
If your idea of innovation is a better RSS reader, then sure, I agree with you. But in terms of things that push the forefront of technology, I have a hard time thinking of another company with greater impact in recent years.
AT&T copyrights led to linux, and linux, independent of unix, has been a huge boon for good, and for unixness.
the threat to unix now is all the people who by nature prefer Dave Cutlerness, and can't see that their way is the wrong way, now they are using linux (because it won) and trying to ruin it.
This should be well known, simple google search:
https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/why...
Novell bought UNIX and has some grand plans for "SuperNOS", which also never shipped. It certainly wasn't anything like K8s.
Companies getting too big are natural; Letting them get too big is what happens when your state borrows a trillion per semester: Your state is obese, intervening in every little sector of the economy (thus the opposite of liberal), and not playing its regalian role.
You should indeed reduce the size of both the state and the largest companies, to let the economy self-regulate, but then, how would the US govern the rest of the world?
Also I believe that even when working optimally the Darwinian mechanism can't solve certain problems. Some things need to be dealt with by a group of motivated people working for other goals than profit.
Markets gave us compuserve and facebook while CERN gave us the open web, for example.
- Providing a free alternative to Microsoft’s monopolized office suite and desktop OS
- Provide a free alternative to Apple’s mobile OS, spurring a revolution in access to the internet for the world’s poor
- Provide free global maps with streetview sights
- Provide a free to access video platform with invaluable educational resources that allows millions of creators to make a living and that likely wouldn’t exist save for Google’s monumental investments and ability to sustain years of losses
- Research given away for free that ignited the current AI revolution
- Research given away for free that is revolutionizing medicine and drug development
In sum, truly a horrible thing they’ve done
Like for example having youtube be free until they're the only game in town then start charging 14 dollars monthly to avoid 30% ads. Or targeting ads to gmail users so you can artificially provide a cheaper mail service than anyone else.
There's an actual law saying you can't do stuff like that.
Google is an advertising company, search is a by-product and has been for a long time.
You're not wrong, but it didn't last. Google jumped the shark in its first decade. I remember giving an internal presentation in 2010 or 2012 about how little of the screen real estate in a Google search result was actually search results.
“Given that production could be carried on without any organization, Coase asks, 'Why and under what conditions should we expect firms to emerge?' Since modern firms can only emerge when an entrepreneur of some sort begins to hire people, Coase's analysis proceeds by considering the conditions under which it makes sense for an entrepreneur to seek hired help instead of contracting out for some particular task. The traditional economic theory of the time suggested that, because the market is ‘efficient’ (that is, those who are best at providing each good or service most cheaply are already doing so), it should always be cheaper to contract out than to hire.
Coase noted, however, that there are a number of transaction costs to using the market; the cost of obtaining a good or service via the market is actually more than just the price of the good. Other costs, including search and information costs, bargaining costs, keeping trade secrets, and policing and enforcement costs, can all potentially add to the cost of procuring something via the market. This suggests that firms will arise when they can arrange to produce what they need internally, and somehow avoid these costs.
There is a natural limit to what can be produced internally, however. Coase notices ‘decreasing returns to the entrepreneur function’, including increasing overhead costs and increasing propensity for an overwhelmed manager to make mistakes in resource allocation. This is a countervailing cost to the use of the firm.
Coase argues that the size of a firm (as measured by how many contractual relations are ‘internal’ to the firm and how many ‘external’) is a result of finding an optimal balance between the competing tendencies of the costs outlined above. In general, making the firm larger will initially be advantageous, but the decreasing returns indicated above will eventually kick in, preventing the firm from growing indefinitely.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm
>”Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.”
Have these people even read the white papers that Google releases? They are mostly marketing pieces.
When systems and technologies are not publicly reproducible, why should scientists and (most) engineers care? I will not take Google at its word and would not recommend it to others.
When you talk to a researcher, do they strike you as someone who chases handsome amounts of money, or someone who chases ideas?
You bring up research labs. I listened to Alan Kay's numerous talks over the years (as an example of a prominent CS researcher), not once does he mention that he joined for the money at Xerox PARC. Yes, he was paid, but the main advantage was being given free reign to conduct research with the best experts in their fields, i.e. to invent and pursue ideas.
The important part from a financial perspective, is to be able to have finances to back a research division, where you can spend billions on building a new type of technology, if need be, that may not pan out. You don't need a monopoly to accomplish that.
You know who does chase handsome amounts of money? Day traders and everyone gambling on the stock market.
A company in an industry with very tight margins has much less money to invest in fundamental research. All the recent growth in generative AI has been driven by companies with very high margins; Google, Facebook, Amazon. If all those FANG were in tightly competitive markets and hence had low margins, they wouldn't have had billions of dollars to spend on the GPU compute necessary to develop modern language models. Which is evidenced by the fact that no companies in more competitive sectors have produced any large language models.
OpenAI has raised almost $18bn to date [1]. That puts it in the top 10 corporate R&D spenders globally, ahead of Intel and the entirety of big pharma [2]. (And OpenAI's gross margins for its API business are estimated around 40% [3]. Standard fare for tech. If anything, OpenAI subsidising its business with Apple and ChatGPT is behaving more like a tech giant than a start-up.)
The top of that list are the big 5 American tech companies, spending about $200bn annually on R&D. By coincidence, that's roughly the pace of U.S. VC spend [4]. The depth of American private capital markets make a solid case against favouring housing these long-shot bets inside tech giants. (Particularly absent non-compete and IP reform.)
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/02/openai-raises-6-6b-and-is-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_by_research_...
[3] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/a-peek-behind-openai...
[4] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/ai-deals-lift-us-ve...
It'd be way more efficient and cost effective to just set up a well-funded government labs to do that research.
It's not about building and owning the next best thing, it's about preventing someone else building and owning the next best thing.
TCP/IP?
Innovation is a lot easier when you have a lot of money to spend on R&D. In order to get that money, you can't compete on price b/c that's a race to the bottom. Instead, you want to focus on quality and/or customer service so that you become a monopoly and then can use monopoly profits to innovate to higher quality products and services.
Clip: https://www.tiktok.com/@rorysutherlandclips/video/7314765561...
[1] http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/monopoly-money.html
[1] https://www.youtube.com/live/L_QaZk5iJOA?si=ZkxBe1CHgagmcBcW...
Competition is a prerequisite for healthy Capitalism. Lack of competition is the Achilles heel.
Is it the free maps? free mobile OS? free email? free cloud storage? free video service? free office suite? free desktop OS? free AI chat?
Genuine question: what societal value would be lost if Google was erased tomorrow (all technical reliance their services was magically replaced overnight with alternatives by pixies)?
You don't happen to know where one could find these magical perfectly compatible and functional drop in replacements, do you?
[1] https://backlinko.com/iphone-vs-android-statistics
[2] https://www.thestreet.com/technology/big-tech-working-to-cha...
[3] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
[4] https://01core.substack.com/p/google-has-9-products-with-ove...
What drop in equivalent exists for Google maps? I have used OpenStreetMap for a personal project and have tried other proprietary options. If Google maps disappeared, life would go on but I would be worse off.
What equivalent exists for Chrome? Even on desktop I prefer Chrome over Firefox. On mobile, Firefox falls far behind Chrome.
How about which single reasonable replacement offers the same services with the same level of integration?
Using Yahoo Mail and Amazon Cloud and Office Online and whatever other products isn't quite the same offering as what Google offers.
Yup, and that's what people want. So what is the integrated service you are saying exists that can be a drop in replacement for the way so many organizations use Google's integrated services?
There we go. So if we go back up to your first comment where you say there are separate replacements for some services, you can see that isn't really relevant since what is being discussed was a drop in replacement for Google, and not an individual service they offer.
Aside from that though, Google's offerings are not a walled garden.
In practice, investors usually discount larger companies for efficiency reasons. You can see this with acquisition announcements where the acquirer usually goes down in price. The synergies often fail to pay off because there aren't actually many synergies between making microwaves and running a TV network, and the sprawling empire turns into mostly independent fiefdoms.
We can assume the message is “If you reelect the current party, we’ll finish these lawsuits.” There are two perverse effects:
- It positions the alternate party as the party that Google should sponsor,
- The good choice after reelection will then be to delay the next step of those popular antitrust cases to 3 weeks before the end of the next mandate, to tell the electors that they should reelect. Which ironically puts the current party in the position of the one doing nothing on the popular antitrust case (a corollary to “a party’s platform depends on ensuring the problems it’s supposed to solve keep existing”).
What if it kills Android, and everyone has to buy an iPhone? (Yeah, I know, Android is OSS and the phone makers could just maintain/improve it as a consortium without Google, but looking at how these companies operate I don't think they're capable of doing this.) (And no, I don't think the USG will break up Apple if this happens. They're already showing highly preferential treatment to Apple compared to Google.)
What if it kills YouTube, and the only viable alternative is TikTok? I recommend everyone start downloading all their favorite YouTube videos with yt-dlp right away, just in case.
What if it kills Google Maps? Again, there's no real viable alternative here unless you have an iPhone.
I can see a lot of ways things could go horribly wrong here if you're someone who doesn't want to be an Apple user.
The largest business by far is iPhones. It has 16% market share in the PC business, behind Lenovo, HP, and Dell. The only business that makes sense to peel off is the iPhone services (Apple Music, News, etc.) because that's the place it uses its dominant position to help its own products.
There's tons of video hosting options but what makes YouTube special is access to a large audience and monetization. TikTok's monetization is garbage and not even a contender really. Large content creators are already negotiating their own brand deals to the point where YouTube's ad money is merely the cherry on top. I actually think breaking up YouTube would be good for audiences and in the long run creators themselves. Content creator networks would make a return in a big way.
There is already OpenStreetMaps. MapQuest existed before Google Maps and still does.
You can’t get turn-by-turn directions because they don’t (consistently) have things like lane permeability, turn restrictions, directionality, etc. You can’t get accurate ETAs because they don’t have speed limits or free flow speeds. And traffic data of course. Unless things have changed, routing class and surface type are also unreliable, so a shortest-path graph algo will take you down neighborhood streets or unmaintained roads.
There is a ton of under-the-hood map data, invisible to the end user, that you need to have to be able to deliver a modern phone navigation experience.
My phone tends to overheat when I stick it under the window to use for directions, so I tend to prefer the dedicated GPS units anyway.
MapQuest doesn't have any of this stuff either. Apple Maps is probably the closest, but it falls very far short of what Google Maps can do.
total revenue | percent from google | total expenses |software dev expenses
$593 million | 81% ($480 million) | $425 million | $220 million
so basically 168 million in the bank in 2022. the math has been basically this the last 10 years. in 2018 they lost 1 million but in 2019 they gained 330 million. a lot of their software expenses probably comes from the busywork features they saddled upon themselves like pocket or whatever, since it was only $63 million in 2010 and has only gone up by a couple hundred million from there.
So just over the last 10 years from my back of the envelope map from that table on wikipedia, they should have a good 1.5 billion in the war chest by today assuming the mozilla foundation did not make investments with it, which they probably have this entire time so probably even more valuable. At a certain point, maybe already, the org should have enough cash socked away in investment to just pay for operating expenses out of dividends alone.
It would be like if we here in Denmark started breaking up Novo Nordisk. Our economists would probably do a public lynching of any government official who suggested doing that.
However as a European I can't help but welcoming the US shooting themselves in the foot like this. Something tells me we will see more of this as more reddit-brained American millennials get political influence.
Our economy is absolutely benefiting from Novo Nordisk's size right now, but if/when their demand weakens or they're out-competed, we're going to end up with a lot of unemployed biotechnicians and massive roads to Kalundborg which will need to be maintained.
For the avoidance of doubt, Wintel was Big Tech. The status quo now is Big Ad Tech.
The main economically positive thing for the US (and something Europeans absolutely screwed up in relative terms versus the US and increasingly China) is the early investment and adoption of Tech. Digitization as such is a great enabler.
But you don't need Big Tech oligopolies for a vibrant digital economy.
But even more importantly, you don't need bizarre Big Ad Tech commingled business models that build the economy's entire tech infrastructure - many parts of it having a critical utility like role - on the back of... ads.
But there is little scope for European schadenfreude. Arguably the US antitrust gears are moving precisely because people slowly wake up to the limits on economic opportunity placed by the Big Ad Tech status quo.
In Europe we are good at words and criticizing mistakes but deeds are scarce.
Big Ad Tech has been a money spigot for R&D in both hard and soft tech. This comes via M&A but also spawning a generation of VCs willing to fritter away adtech money on fun hard tech startups.
There is not a big source of VC funding for hardware startups that doesn't come directly or indirectly from Big Tech / Big Ad Tech revenue and valuations.
Please explain how Google has created a materially worse world
No we don't. I need a better mouse trap, but I already have mouse traps that work, so if you make a better one you need me to find out about it otherwise I'll just buy the same old not so good ones out of habit thinking they work as good as any other one. There are also problems that I don't even know I have. There are a lot of houses with terrible insulation that the owners really need some advertisement to get them to upgrade - it will pay off in just a few years.
Even now I will go out of my way to watch adverts for things like films I might be interested in.
Need to be careful with word of mouth though, many adverts are spread by word of mouth, especially on the internet where people are paid to say "hey this new $product is great". Those are worse that clearly marked ads.
Ever bought something you didn't actually want? Were you persuaded to want something? What was the exact mechanism? Were you lied to? "Made to" somehow?
> net positive for the world
How exactly do you find out what is "net positive for the world"? Who assigns the the values and who does the tallying?
We don't actually know, but we know it exists. Because otherwise people wouldn't bother paying for ads. Your average person can identify hundreds of brands instantly. What's the value of that? Billions? Trillions?
Certainly, when cigarettes and chewing tobacco were advertised most people did it. Granted, the addiction helps because you only need 1 successful conversion for a life-long customer.
Well, now very few people do that in the US. Without a shadow of a doubt in anyone's mind, the abolishment of those ads had something to do with it.
One of the most common fallacies I see is that choice is a binary. You either chose something, or you didn't. Meaning you were forced.
In actuality, choice is incredibly complex. There are thousands of individual events that will influence your choices. What you're doing right now could be influencing choices you make next decade, and you wouldn't know.
You can control people's choices without forcing their hand on anything. You can introduce information and events that sculpt their mind without so much as lifting a finger. It's a form of mind control, but not in the TV sense. Because people make the choices themselves.
Making someone do something is almost worthless. Convincing someone it's in their best interest to do something is where the value actually is. Look back at wars and our use of propaganda and try to break down what the end-goal is. It's not "making" people do something.
But does that mean that they control me? Only if this information comes from only one side and is well integrated in my regular trusted information streams overwhelming my defenses. Like propaganda. Or a Guru. Or an academic institution.
Ads on the other hand are quite easily defeated because they are both clearly delimited and coming from numerous, competing directions. In a world without Ads I would be very vulnerable to them. In our world though they are reduced to a more utilitarian function: to inform me. They tell me what options are out there, what is available and how to get it if I so choose.
I don't think they can "make me" do anything against my own interest or even change my mind. They can merely inform me and I have no problem with that.
I think you lack humility and imagination.
Once again, I remind you of the Tobacco industry. After advertisement was abolished, Tabacco use went down significantly. They often targeted young boys with promises of masculinity and prestige.
Keep in mind Tabacco isn't your average product either. It kills you, rather painfully and slowly.
If people can be influenced via ads to do that, which we know they can because they were, odds are you are being influenced right now with products with much less personal risk.
Or perhaps look at the obesity epidemic. We have millions upon millions of people literally eating themselves to death. Their quality of life is severely impacted. That's pretty extreme, certainly nobody would harm themselves like that without influence from the outside. Now, granted, we run into the same problem of confounding factors. Food tastes good and food sense is taught to children. But I personally believe advertisement has something to do with it.
Your note about "competing ads" I don't think works. The reason being that while ads may compete with each other, they all have the same goal - to get you to buy something. Yes, McDonald's and Wendy's compete, but, for you, the effects are pretty much the same. You buy something unhealthy to eat.
I've never seen an ad for not eating. I've never seen an ad for not buying a pair of shoes. I have seen ads for not smoking - PSAs. Which, I think, is really just further proof that advertising must work.
All that to say, I think if ads did work you would have no way of knowing. I think I said this previously but it's pretty much worthless to force someone to do something. The trick is getting them to do it and letting them believe they made the choice. That's the golden goose.
Can't outlaw them - we still need them to quickly inform & educate the masses. The governments will definitely use them even if just for "good" purposes. Who will define "good" though? In a world without ads people will not build an immunity and any ad will have such an effect that the temptation to use it will become irresistible to anybody in power. And mark my words: they'll use them for worse stuff than smoking and eating.
Also, we'll loose all ad-supported free stuff. And there is a lot there, like pretty much all media. The poor will be the most affected, too, since stuff can be paid with money or attention and they have no money.
> Tobacco industry
I don't know any smoker that is not aware of the dangers. But what they get out of it makes it worth it to them. Believe it or not, most people do not live to maximize their life expectancy, they have other criteria as well - like pleasure or enjoyment of life. Otherwise everybody would start their day with 4 hours in the gym and walk everywhere.
> After advertisement was abolished, Tabacco use went down significantly.
I'm sure there were many other measures taken as well.
> the obesity epidemic [...] believe advertisement has something to do with it
How about the food pyramid pushed by governments that was full on processed carbs? How about the vilification of fat & meat made by the medical establishment I believe? How about people naturally choosing comfort and pleasure over hard work and restraint? How about partners working both with little time left to chop and cook at home?
I doubt you need ads to explain the obesity epidemic.
> I've never seen an ad for not eating. I've never seen an ad for not buying a pair of shoes.
Because we must eat and have shoes - we can't not buy food or shoes. None of those ads made me buy, they just influenced my purchase decision. And I see plenty of ads for health advisors and nutrition experts that tell me to eat more veggies and less sugar. Maybe they are not on main stream media, but alternative media is full of them.
> The trick is getting them to do it and letting them believe they made the choice.
If I wanted to protect my kids from that, I would expose them to more ads, not less. Because they would be even more vulnerable to ads if they saw fewer of them.
I believe that for the best ideas to win, we need to debate more, read more and learn more - not to burn the "bad" books.
Don't underestimate how much freedom that gives people to strike it out on their own.
Google has a substantial amount of control over the flow of information in the United States. To the point it can literally redefine truth. This is a problem - and one that is easily solved by breaking up a de-facto monopoly. Moreover, the acquire-and-kill strategy stifles innovation. Imagine what we would have if Google didnt have the capital to buy and kill so many small companies.
In my opinion, breaking up Google would only serve to make it even more profitable. Once companies grow to behemoths, they stop doing stuff. They slow down innovation to a crawl, and they essentially exist on life support and inertia until they're overthrown by a much, much smaller company.
We see this pattern of life for a company again and again. We see it RCA, with GE, with GM. The only reason AT&T (Ma Bell) is still around and didn't decay like others before it is BECAUSE it was broken up. It was given new life as a set of new, smaller companies.
This break up is long overdue but we also need a drastic rethink of antitrust law and corporate taxes to shift the economy towards innovative smaller instead of concentrating it in a few megacorps that are as powerful as some governments.
How would you, for example, stop a rouge indexer from spewing an unlimited number of bad indexes to spam their garbage into the distributed protocol? Or how would you address just bad/misleading/faulty indexes?
https://www.usvgoogleads.com
If a federal judge finds X/Twitter to have a monopoly on short-form nonsense, yes.
What they're doing is seeing the writing on the wall of the upcoming election and seeing all of their jobs on the line and they're trying to shake down Google for golden parachutes.
I guarantee you in the next year, several high-level DoJ officials will secure senior positions at Google in order to defend against upcoming antitrust litigation. Those that don't will try to use their active litigation as an anchor to try and retain their jobs.
I have a lot of issues with Google as a company, but I do not envy their position when it comes to the web search. It is a cursed problem no matter how you look at it.
When you search for "vacuum cleaner", you either want online stores or you may want a local store. In either case it's a business query rather than looking for reviews or specs.
What's really polluting search, including Google, is the on-demand content generation based on your query. It's a sea of flotsam.
Look at any two sided market: Amazon/Etsy's third party sellers also want to be at the top, and there are bad actors trying to scam the intermediary and the customer. The same low friction onboarding that allows the company to succeed as an intermediary is also facilitating the fraud. Merchants can be fraudsters, advertisers can be fraudsters, users can be fraudsters producing fake clicks. There's economic incentives everywhere. See the relatively recent news of spotify getting generated songs, which are then played by fake listeners.
The companies are entering this situations with their eyes wide open. It's a necessary problem when you want to be an intermediary at a large enough scale. And if you don't have the scale, the per-interaction costs are really high, and your company gets beaten by someone with an easier onboarding funnel.
But the funding model is also extremely blessed: you have a stream of people telling you every page load what they're interested in at that exact moment, and it's not hard to match them up with advertisers for those keywords.
And arguably the SEO parasitism problem is worsened by their monopoly -- to the extent that optimizing a site for one engine deoptimizes it on on others, the stronger the lead engine #1 has the more incentive there is to game it.
How many millions do you need to spend to decrease your own spending on AI for every query?
I have such a hard time understanding your position on this. Google search results are absolute trash now, compared to DuckDuckGo.
I start every search in DDG and have to take it to Google fully 90% of the time.
For example, if Alice is very interested in Sports News, coding, and movie reviews, they might get great results.
And then Bob runs searches on cooking recipes, interior design, and music, and gets terrible results.
Most likely you care about something that the other person doesn’t, biasing your search results greatly.
A general one: Whenever I search for something that was relevant in the past, but the keywords are now hijacked by some current events. Note that setting an upper date limit does not help: My problem is the content itself, not when the content was created. Somebody could still create content today about a historic event.
A concrete example that you guys can try for yourself is that I tried to find a certain Greek fable, because it became important to me because I deeply understood yet another layer of it only recently, decades after hearing the story and the usual interpretations:
Three philosophers discussing... stuff got tired and took a nap under a tree. Some mischievous boy put a black paint mark on their head while they slept. When they woke up, they all only saw the black mark on the other philosophers' heads and laughed at each other. It took a while for one of them to realize that he too must have such a mark.
I tried many questions and keywords and many search engines. The only one that found the fable was - ChatGPT!. All the search eng8ines only showed completely irrelevant stuff. I even tried avoiding the word "philosophers" because there are three well-known ancient Greek philosophers and plenty of results with that exact wording for those guys.
Putting a sticker on Bing and Yandex results doesn't make a Search company.
For example, if you are discussing manufacturing issues in China, talking about how good drop-shippers on Amazon are is irrelevant.
I switched to DuckDuckGO about 1.5/2 years back, and it was awesome at the time. But it has gradually gotten worse to the point where I @google search pretty much 70% of the time. Now that could be me being in a bit in the honeymoon phase with DDG at the time and it wore off, or maybe it's actually been getting worse.
My pet, unproven, theory. Is that DDG has been "improving" but that's been making the search worse somehow. Perhaps the context and "fanciness" of a search is not something we all value and that's what we're experiencing.
I think alternative search engines would have better chances if they provided alternative interfaces to refine search queries instead of trying to compete with Google/Bing.
This is a common tactic of tech giants, and the direct consequence of it is… what we have today.
Edit: Per Wiki, Google has also bought and killed the following search engines/services that nobody has heard of: Outride, Kaltix, Plink, Like.com, Orion, Metaweb, Awkan Technologies.
Hard disagree. Google almost delights in not showing what you want. For political stuff it's very biased. If you search for something more obscure, Google really likes to "correct" your search and eliminate terms.
Although Google is better in my maternal language and for images (but AI is ruining image search for everyone).
So yeah, I find DDG perfectly adequate.
Google/Alphabet, first and foremost, is the largest online advertiser via its acquisitions of YouTube, DoubleClick, and others, in addition to selling ad placement on Google Search via AdWords, plus a growing number of consumer portals for price comparisons etc. integrated with Google Search (leaving out tracking your activity on Android devices, Google's cloud business, and Books/scholar). The immediate antitrust perspective starts by looking at Alphabet/Google subsidiaries both providing search results and ads on the pages listed in search results (and to a lesser degree even by pushing Google services via Google Search). This is what had ruined the web in more than one way.
> I get why 90% of people use google. I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are.
Kagi
Plus, https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html
Arguably this is not their fault - I really wish iOS/MacOS Safari let you set a custom search engine instead of picking from a fixed list.
"Are they actually planting these trees?" and "How would I possibly verify?"
"Does Microsoft actually pay them? All I'm doing is clicking? Is that worth enough?"
"How does anybody verify, and how is it not just an optimization for Ecosia to farm clicks for money? Chinese/Indian/Bangladeshi/Nigerian/MechTurk click farms don't cost that much. Seen the prices on MechTurk?"
[1] https://www.ecosia.org/
The only earn money if people click ads, just like any other search engine. Microsoft isn't paying them to show them Bing results.
It uses google search behind the scenes. Among other search providers.
The links points however are a bit ridiculous, they're entitled to their opinion but may be surprised to find people, at the businesses they use, have opinions that differ to theirs, and these businesses aren't always well-oiled machines.
For a consumer facing business with no lock in, the tax thing makes absolutely no difference in your life using the product.
If it was really a concern you'd simply no longer have access and change search engine, until then it doesn't matter. You'd be surprised what tax issues even large billion dollar companies have.
I mean, if I reduce my plastic use because I stop buying product X then that's still better (in my eyes) than if I did nothing. Or if Company Y has some egregious political ties, I cut them off, but Company Z is a huge conglomerate so I can't cut them off. Still a better deal than doing nothing.
And compare Google and Kagi? Monopoly bad or Employee bad, which do you choose?
As I say unless its egregious. It's a nice idea but doesn't work in practice there's always trade offs.
It's purely tribal thinking i.e. this one is on my side so I can't go near that one.
No, not really. Some sides of the coin are just bad.
I get very frustrated at this "tribal thinking" notion that I hear a lot these days. It's not bad to have values and then at least try to stick to those values.
If someone doesn't like something they shouldn't be forced to endure it. I see this with so-called "cancel culture" too. It's not a cancel culture if you say something offensive and people stop listening. They're not trying to hurt you, that's not their intention. They just didn't like it so instead they go listen/watch something they DO like. That's predictable.
I mean, what's the end goal here? I use a product I don't even like just for the fun of it? Really? But I don't even like it...
After Chick-fil-a openly and vehemently opposed gay marriage in 2015 (and after!), I stopped eating there. And guess what? I don't miss it. I'm not worse off, at all. If anything, I'm better off, because the food is unhealthy anyway. Boom, it's that easy.
I'm saying there's some other dirt on something you currently using instead that makes the whole endeavor pointless.
It's hypocritical if you say I disagree with you and I'm boycotting and then go ahead and use another company who has said something you disagree with in the past anyway.
It's the equivalent of the village mob roaming house to house for whatever reason. And then targeting one house specifically as it has better sun than the rest.
After reading the founders thoughts, if they were any sort of sizable company they would immediately have a GDPR violation. "emails and any info you give to use voluntarily (search prefs) is not PII and as such you can't have your data back." :0
Even when you do get the results your after, and get sent to the page you want, the goal of that page is to serve you adverts, not to give you the content you want.
Can you give me an example of a search query which yields acceptable results on Google but does not on Bing?
Don't mistake the limited-purpose US Government for your state government. Colorado does quite a bit, from healthcare to environment to policing. And so does the US, for those subjects it has jurisdiction, and has been doing so for hundreds of years.
>That thought may be comforting, but no.
Why would that be comforting?
https://www.vox.com/2014/4/18/5624310/martin-gilens-testing-...
Sorry for the Vox link, that's what came up.