> "Our experience has been that entrenched monopoly power often deters new entry and chills investment in disruptive innovation."
> "independent venture-capital firms like YC often hesitate to fund startups in the “kill zone” —the area of deadened innovation around a monopolist like Google."
> "We agree with Plaintiffs' proposal that the remedy package should create pathways for startups and innovators to access Google's monopoly-derived datasets and search index."
> "The remedy order should also prevent Google from entering into exclusive agreements to access AI training data..."
> "An effective remedy package should help to leverage the current moment by ensuring that next-generation search and query-based AI tools can reach users free from exclusion, interference, or cooption."
> "the remedy package should prevent Google from anticompetitive self-preferencing, and this prohibition should apply specifically to Google's use of its monopoly search product to boost its query-based AI tools or discriminate against rivals' tools."
I think they have a good point with AI. After lagging behind initially, Google really went at it hard. Gemini is great now, and they are building a good set of tooling.
It's easy for Google to suffocate the startups in that area. They already have a massive advantage with all the data they are sitting on.
> I think they have a good point with AI. After lagging behind initially, Google really went at it hard. Gemini is great now, and they are building a good set of tooling.
> It's easy for Google to suffocate the startups in that area. They already have a massive advantage with all the data they are sitting on.
What is the solution, though? Should they not be allowed to compete in the LLM + search space? Should they handicap their models till perplexity &co. catch up? Will they be allowed to do something then? I honestly don't see what's asked of google here.
Yes, they are massive. But they're massive because they've invested billions ($, manhours, etc) into their infra and have gathered a huge baggage of data, know-how, tech and expertise in this field. But what exactly are they to do from now on?
> The remedy order should also prevent Google from entering into exclusive agreements to access AI training data…
Google, for example, bought exclusive access to Reddit's data. No one else can train on Reddit unless you have more money than Google (you don't). So one of the asks is that that sort of exclusive deal be prevented. If everyone is allowed to buy Reddit's data, and Google makes the best model, that wouldn't be a problem.
That's not comparable. Netflix did not have a monopoly on "shipping DVDs". Plenty of retailers, online or brick-and-mortar, did that at the same time Netflix did, and video rental places were still going. Some of which would deliver movies (the local Marcos near me had a deal with a local Family Video where if you bought a large pizza they would bring you both the pizza and a movie of your choice from Family Video, assuming it was in stock).
It's not that they have a search engine. It's what they're doing to advertisers, websight owners, and consumers with it that is the problem. It's them abusing their market position to the detriment of customers and competitors.
Personally, as copyright is a non-natural right, we should limit it for films/tv/shows such that whatever price it is sold for, then it is made available for any distributor to sell for after a very limited monopoly period (1 year from release, say, reflecting the current market in which films go from cinema to TV streaming platforms in a few weeks). This would apply to all distributors over X users and/or Y revenue (taking in at least the top 5 streaming platforms).
This way, the public can access copyright works, and producers of works can be paid, but distribution is opened up. Creators still get paid, distribution isn't monopolistic.
Netflix can argue "this show is worth £5 per viewer" and only sell rights at that price, but they pay tax on that price, and crucially the rest of the catalogue then needs to add up so if viewers are paying £8 per month then the rest of the catalogue is marked down accordingly. There will be manipulation, but if it doesn't reasonably add up then apply the sort of penalties in the EU of 20$ gross profit fines; strike off directors for copyright abuse (can't be directors of media companies again).
I can't see that this would harm income for creators, only for distributors (who aren't needed, they're just duplicating using monopolistic practices), and it seems it would have broad appeal.
No one has a natural right to have their work protected by copyright. Copyright is supposed to be a deal to encourage creativity _and_ benefit the public domain.
Capitalists have distorted it to be a means to pay the producers (ie capital holders) over-and-over whilst eroding the public domain.
The default position is if you (a creator) make a work available anyone can copy it, alter it, resell it for free. I don't think that is right, but what we currently have is IMO not a sufficient benefit to the public.
Why would I spend time producing something if I don’t get paid for it? If you want the public to benefit from something you create, you have the right to go out there and spend your own money to doing so
The open source movement didn’t ask to get other people to write stuff and give it away.
I’m assuming you don’t work for free, why should creators?
The number of searches started to decline and everybody knows that Google is going to start pouring all their cash into AI tools now.
It looks like this is a strategic case to prevent Google from getting into AI search space and even gain access to their search index data so that they can train their own models on it.
Wright brothers invited the aircraft but almost all their patents were cancelled when the Great War started. If we believe the AI race is indeed an existential threat then let's cancel all patents that prevent anyone from innovating.
1) Eliminate Google Play Services for android and the oem non-compete deals.
2) Right to privacy. All data collection and storage (even on customer owned hardware if used for targeting decisions) must be opt-in, by purpose and annually renewed. It must be easier to only opt in to data collection for use cases that provide application functionality / business transactions than it is to opt into blanket data collection.
So they want Google’s datasets and search index to be available for other companies and want to prevent Google from being a dominant player in AI based search.
I wonder why a VC firm who is quite heavily invested in AI based startups file an amicus brief like that…
Edit: before this gets downvoted into oblivion, the comment is not against antitrust enforcement. It’s about VC firms having very specific ideas about what the antitrust enforcement would look like.
More than 50 years behind. We shifted policy to barely enforcing anti-trust in the ‘70s, under growing Chicago school (spits) influence among elected officials, “think tanks” (lobbying groups), and courts.
That’s why everything’s so insanely consolidated now. Practically every market has a handful of massive players all of which would currently be under serious threat of break-up under the old approach to enforcement. It’s all monopoly.
> In aggregate, the average return across these YC companies is -49%, with a median return of -46%. To put this into perspective, over the same period, the S&P 500 yielded a positive return of 58%
And for the rest of the companies, they aren’t trying to compete with BigTech, they are trying to get acquired by them. Out of the literally thousands of companies that YC has invested in, only about two dozen have gone public
VC firms, not specifically YC, also tend to encourage monopolization when it comes to startups they are invested in. Have we not seen unicorns gobble up other smaller startups all the time?
Which is how AirBnB ruined tourist industries worldwide, caused rents to soar, people to get displaced from their cities of birth, and why they're touted as a "disruptor" in this very brief.
The end game for these unicorns is to become the cash hoard that they intended to compete with.
> Let’s not pretend that YC and other VCs are noble.
I'm fine with that. Let them make money at the expense of big tech.
Breaking up big tech benefits financial/venture capital, but it also benefits labor capital as well. More opportunity for more startups to succeed, more competition for engineering talent, less market distorting wage collusion.
Big tech already won. It's benefactors already reap the benefits. Break them up and a new generation of engineers can grow wealthy on the field they contribute their labor to.
Right now the proceeds of tech go to hedge funds and pension funds. It's venture capital and entrepreneurs that take risks. They're the ones that should see upside. Unfortunately, big tech monopolies put a ceiling on this.
They do see upside - by being acquired by BigTech.
So if Google wasn’t a “monopoly” you think a startup could make a better search engine? Be more popular than Android - Microsoft tried both and failed because people prefer Google products. It wasn’t for the lack of money.
And engineers are getting wealthy - by working for BigTech. Even an entry level developer at BigTech makes more than 90% of workers.
Really? Making $250K a year for a mid level developer 3 years out of school is a “low bar”?
Google has created many more millionaires than YC. The only way that you could be a millionaire by investing in YC companies at IPO would be to be a multimillionaire and lose half your money.
"Invoking the power of the state?" Good heavens, they've only filed an amicus brief. "Begging the presently authorized tenant of a precisely defined and circumscribed aliquot of the delegated power of the state" would be a more accurate way to put it. I appreciate that's not as florid, nor as floridly serviceable to anyone else's interest in pursuing this conversation. As I said before, though...
You're right, YC is far from a neutral party here. But then again, I don't think any for-profit organisation spending the money on lawyers to write amicus briefs is.
They're looking for free data for their AI startups to make money off of, and with Google being in the middle of an antitrust catastrophe that may very well collapse web browser variety to two options in the next years, there's a lot of money to be made by stoking the flames.
Google is effectively being punished for retaining their earnings and re-investing in tons of software R&D over the years. Their "monopoly" is because people choose to use them, not because they have to. Not to mention they are are being disrupted by ChatGPT and other LLMs anyways right now. There have always been lots of web browsers and search engines, but Google simply did a better job making and refining their software and hiring people to do that.
But they only have high market share because people want to use Google instead of the competitors. Many consumers switch their search engine to Google when presented with other defaults. Because Google search works the best and people know that.
The aggressive marketing of Chrome on Google Search website to users using other browsers was a significant part of Chrome adoption success.
And no - some people didn't willingly and consciously switched to their search engine. It was pushed down their throats by browser vendors being paid-off by Google for setting it as the default one. Mozilla has overwritten user-changed search engine setting in Firefox with several updates.
Non tech-savvy users simply accept changes made in software they use.
Nowadays using Google Search is, since they pivoted from from being a "search company" to "adtech company" which resulted in the degradation of Google Search quality.
"Engines like Bing" is an ambiguous term. There are better options than Bing.
> Google is effectively being punished for retaining their earnings and re-investing in tons of software R&D over the years
They have indeed invested tons in r&d, but with excessively little results. Besides web search it's tough to see succeses that Google didn't buy their way into. Gmail, maps, ... maybe?
That argument cuts both ways: Who knows how much longer we had to wait for this AI boom because google was sponging up every genius to work on ad selling algorithms.
Google's research departments hyped up DeepMind's success in board games and enabled huge amounts of marketing which makes you believe this. However, DeepMind was a resounding failure after GPT's were released. If you look at the multiple documentaries, they now seem cringeworthy because of Google's arrogance about AI. Google did not simply do a better job, they acquired the companies that did and then convinced you that they were part of Google the entire time so they can take the credit.
I'm really glad that YC brought this against Google but it should be clear that YC also enabled them. It's a lie that YC is independent from Google as it partners and promotes their engineers and Big Tech allies. They see the writing on the wall and their lawyers see this as a hedge against lawsuits against them. "We didn't cause this mess, see look! We're trying to help!" YC also doesn't serve American startups at all and their entrepreneurs strongly favors California or India.
ok so google paid companies like apple to make google the default search engine. you cannot claim everything was just because their product was good. you can argue that striking the deal with apple was just a smart business move, but google isn't winning just because of their r&d.
It's just a default, you can change it. Did Google coerce Apple into taking that deal somehow? Or did they simply offer them the most compelling deal in a free market?
Keep in mind that if paying to be the default search engine in a browser is illegal, then Firefox's primary revenue source is out the window.
We have two major phone operating systems and they charge a tax of 30%, which gets passed onto consumers. This should be zero if there was unlimited competition or web installation. There's also so much innovation happening in the mobile space right now. It's not like they're parked and reaping untold benefits.
By having search monopolies, they've gamified paying for placement above your competitor's trademarks. Rather than spend on engineering or lowering costs, you have to pay to defend your brand.
There are thousands of ways these monopolies are horrible for the consumer, for small business, and for innovation.
These companies force their way into new markets, kill the sustainable incumbents by give away services sustained on unrelated business unit profit, then raise rates once the field has been salted and acquired. Amazon is a grocery store, primary care doctor, home electronics company, and James Bond.
Why should Amazon get free advertising for their films on their web storefront, plastered on the side of their delivery vans, emblazoned on their packaging, when competing studios have to spend millions on marketing? To top it off, they're outsourcing the film crew labor to Eastern Europe where there are no crew safety laws and are putting American film workers out of business.
And the current price pressure on your salary is directly a result of their market power. They don't have to fear you starting a company that can impact their profits anymore.
These companies should all be dismantled. Large companies should be exposed to evolutionary pressures, but because of monopoly they become invasive species and dominate entire ecosystems. Regulation is the path to healthy competition and innovation.
No, the solution is web installs without platform scare walls.
We have sandboxing, permissions, app scanning heuristics, and databases of bad apps. If the web works from a technical standpoint and security posture, so can native.
Yeah, the root of many monopolies today is an IP monopoly explicitly granted by government. Government policy is prohibiting monopolies via one relatively weak pathway, and literally establishing them via the IP pathway.
A finding that preventing or discouraging installation of apps from anywhere but the first-party store constitutes use of market power to exclude competitors and fix prices in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act sounds like a great solution to me.
It's my understanding that availability of alternatives is a major factor in determining whether a company has market power. Someone looking for interactive entertainment has a multitude of options beyond gaming consoles, so the manufacturer using technical means to extract a payment from anyone selling games is less likely to be considered anticompetitive. Furthermore, people with gaming consoles often have more than one brand, PC games, and games on mobile devices.
There is no viable alternative to an Android or iOS powered smartphone for most people, and even switching between the two is enough of a challenge that few people do it once they've picked one. That gives their respective vendors substantially more power to fix prices and exclude competitors.
> By having search monopolies, they've gamified paying for placement above your competitor's trademarks. Rather than spend on engineering or lowering costs, you have to pay to defend your brand.
I would love to know how much money Google makes just from this extortion.
… which is enabled by their intentionally-misleading search ads, which also enable scams. I’d further love to know how much money they make promoting scams.
If developers bothered to put their apps on alternative stores with much lower rates, we wouldn't be in this mess. Amazon is shutting down their store because it turns out nobody is really all that interested in actual alternatives. Samsung has their own store but all I hear about it is people bitching that they already have Google Play and that it's "bloatware".
Huawei even sells phones without Google Play in the west! Of course the first thing people try to do on them is get Google Play working, because the cheap hardware is all people care about.
Sure, Apple has proven to be pretty shit about app cost, but Android does and always has offered alternative app stores, and it's the leading example of how much companies like Epic are lying through their teeth.
Consumers pay the 30% app tax on Android because the companies claiming to want to get rid of it don't actually want to invest in alternatives, they just want Apple and Google to host their games for free so they can make more money.
The same goes for a lot of these monopolies. People want options, but they don't want to pay for options. The result is a quick race to the bottom where only a few high-profit, low-margin companies dominate the market.
Andoid users install google play because the applications they want to use is only available on google play, regardless of personal choice. Andoid developers put their applications on google play because that is the only places where they can access enough number of users, which has nothing to do with developer choice.
It is not about price. It is about platforms. A 0% app tax could not compete if there is 0 users on the platform, and google could increase the app tax to 100% if they wanted and people would still use it.
>Huawei even sells phones without Google Play in the west! Of course the first thing people try to do on them is get Google Play working, because the cheap hardware is all people care about.
For the devs' part, some of them did port their apps to Huawei's store (at least from my observation in Indonesia). Samsung also has their own app store on their own phones that's mostly for their built-in stuff.
Amazon doesn't get free advertising. They lose out on revenue they could have gotten by placing another paying ad there instead. The opportunity cost is not 0.
Amazon chooses not to advertise third party products on those surfaces. They realize they have product synergy in giving away free films and movies to their customers, which is why they do it. It's a massively unfair platform advantage.
UPS and FedEx don't emblazon ads on their delivery trucks. Nobody is buying up those ad spaces.
About the phone OS: unfortunately, other companies and governments give this duopoly to Apple and Google.
If I need my phone to access my bank and my bank's app only works on official Android or iOS then that's it. I don't have a choice in what phone OS I'm running.
And the bank most likely does that because of government regulations.
One wonders how these people imagine accessing a search index, from the practical, technical standpoint. If you believe that Google has only unfair business practices, then it makes perfect sense to believe that your organization will simply access their data.
Why? The point of antitrust is to promote market fairness.
I don't trust YC very much, but I do trust they want a share of the pie. And they're not wrong that Google has monopolized and stagnated search. I think you're reading too much into that sentence?
How is it more like that? This is a proposed remedy for breaking the law. Driving on the road (tll or free) is not breaking the law. There is no 'like' about it at all.
> Just like we don't fine everyone with a car for speeding
can me mistaken for "not everyone who is speeding is fined", and that's clearly not what you meant or wrote. You are right its not more like tolls because it still doesn't capture the /exponential/ difference of whats being compared (any other company vs google). Its like a car vs a jet fighter
Pay to play is inherently anti competitive though. All cars that speed are fined, not just the “big” ones. It’s also a fact that all companies opening up their data would make things more competitive. Moats are inherently anti competitive.
Pay to play is a really broad term (just skim the wikipedia page) and describing it as 'inherently anticompetitive' isn't saying much. There are also plenty of political, social and business arrangements that are deliberately anticompetitive by wide agreements of various sorts.
I'm not talking about the merits of YC's brief, just the merits of the comment I'm replying to. "Why shouldn't we apply the proposed remedy for illegal behaviour on everyone" seems like a no-brainer to me.
I don't think it's unreasonable to apply the same remedy to all AI companies. Sure, it would punish Google, but if companies would actually share their data set, the internet may not be so polluted with AI crawler bots I need to block on my servers.
Just as an example: in my country, all public transit information is shared publicly between operators, so anyone can effectively build a public transit navigation app. That includes the for-profit companies that actually run the trains. Had they kept their data silo'd up, like they were not that long ago, companies would need to make expensive deals or write elaborate scrapers to provide basic route navigation services. Thanks to regulation opening up the data for this system, everyone benefits, including the transit companies themselves, as their route planners now seemlessly integrate with routes offered by unrelated third parties.
By only hitting Google with regulations like those, I think we're building a situation where it's only a matter of time before a new Google appears and ruins the market again. Google has been financing Firefox and Safari for years now because they don't want to be the only browser, because being the only browser comes with all kinds of nasty antitrust regulations. If we selectively apply mitigations like these for competitive purposes (which I very much doubt are the real reason they're being suggested anyway), we'll just end up with some equivalent like "OpenAI sponsoring xAI and Claude so OpenAI doesn't control more than 80% of market share".
Google is the reason for the current AI boom. Without the transformer architecture they invented by funding basic research, there would be no modern LLMs. YC is arguing that their incentive for funding that basic research should be taken away in order to spur innovation?
There are many other search engine options, why should Google be punished for hiring the best people over decades to make the best one? Many consumers also switch their search to Google when presented with other options or defaults.
> why should Google be punished for hiring the best people over decades to make the best one?
Google should not be punished for having gained a near-monopoly by hiring the best people.
But perhaps their near-monopoly is due to other reasons like paying large amounts to ensure that they are the default option on various platforms. In this case, legal restrictions might be more appropriate.
How do we determine which of these proposed reasons for the near-monopoly is correct? We use a legal process where each side presents their evidence and a neutral party decides which is most credible.
Because the data they possess is the monopoly, they have better search results because it is too expensive for competitors to gather the data at this point as(I also think people who are unfamiliar with finance do not understand the quantum, Meta has a similar type of business but was under huge pressure with investing tens of billions into VR...it would cost hundreds of billions to get parity with Google, there is no way to finance this).
It is nothing to do with "hiring the best people". Google's exec-level leadership is extremely poor, Mr Magoo-tier management. This is largely due to their share classes, the people at the very top are not very good at business so Google largely isn't run like a business. They have one business that is probably worth $4-5tn, and the rest is worth -$3-4tn. The number of "best people" out there is usually under 500 in a country the size of the US, a country that has hundreds of thousands of employees is not hiring the best.
I would guess under 100 people at Google actually positively impact financial results in any way because the advertising business grows rapidly, uses no capital, and requires no staff. This is true of many of the tech companies do, you aren't getting the best if you pay an exec $50m because the best will always do their own thing and make more. Rather you get someone like Pichai or Cook who sounds good and will get shareholders to believe that setting fire to $200m/year to pay them is a good idea, they are indistinguishable from politicians.
Google is under-earning massively. Staff aren't a monopoly, you just pay someone to leave and they are yours now (you see this in other areas like HFT where staff actually know useful stuff, you don't see this in tech because most staff don't know anything, they are looking for drones).
It's incredibly naive to think Google's continuous growth is automatic. It happened because of all the work the employees do, not in spite of it. Are there employees who don't contribute? Sure. But that's different from only 100 contributing to positive growth.
Do you actually understand how and why they are growing?
They start with a page with zero ads, they add one ad to that page one year, ad sales pushes that placements, then a few years they do it again, etc. Meta are the same.
Google do sell at a higher price than offline ads because of targeting/intent but this is inherent to the product: search has inherently better intent and their targeting tech is no better than anyone else such that their prices are higher/grow faster.
That is their growth model: higher ad density, the CEO deciding to add another ad to a page and earning $100m/year. There is no value-added otherwise because you don't need many people, you don't need capital and you are making $300bn/year.
And, again, if you own the shares you understand that you are getting the ads business, and because of the dual class you are also getting this tech bureaucracy that sets fire to tens of billions every year employing people to do nothing. If these people are so productive...where is the revenue? It is all ads or ancillary business, they have GCP now but there is nothing else...because these people aren't doing anything.
It is like owning a business that turns lead into gold, the process is automatic, requires no capital...and then employing a bunch of monks to pray for the lead and saying the business couldn't exist without them. Lol.
> The number of "best people" out there is usually under 500 in a country the size of the US, a country that has hundreds of thousands of employees is not hiring the best.
> I would guess under 100 people at Google actually positively impact financial results in any way
It's really funny to me that people write comments like this and yet are incapable of basic arithmetic, like this being 0.0001% of the US population, or thinking that the entire ad business runs on just 100 people who are magically making the company $4 trillion dollars while everyone else drags it down.
> There are many other search engine options, why should Google be punished for hiring the best people over decades to make the best one?
I’m guessing this whole court case wouldn’t have been a thing if Google wasn’t bribing Apple, to the tune of $20 billion a year [1], to remain the default search engine on iOS.
That's true, but if it weren't for Google's monopolist position, I doubt they'd have the money to throw at the wall for random research. For every AI transformer they revolutionized, there's a self-driving car project that's dragging on for decades.
Had Google operated like a normal company, the risk/reward of this kind of research would've looked completely differently.
Google's monopoly helped research along in the same way totalitarian countries like China are developing infrastructure at break-neck speed: if you don't need to care about pesky rights and regulations, you can do things that would otherwise be impossible.
I don't think Google's monopoly is worth having the current generation of lie generator bots around, but I don't think generative AI would be where it is right now had Google been forced to comply with antitrust regulations ten years ago.
> You certainly have a point. Places like google and bell labs have pushed innovation, apparently enabled by monopolies.
I've heard this argument before (and recognize that you aren't defending it), but telecommunications, network and technology innovation has hardly suffered since Bell was dismantled in 1982.
Right, but there other, real, negative impacts of monopoly, whereas the positive impact of R&D funding seems to be at best a maybe as to if it's better than the alternative.
Telecommunications is still led by small groups of companies. Giant backbone providers stitch the internet together. Telecoms providers within a country, the ones that actually have hardware in the field, can often be counted on one hand, and often in one hand after a fireworks accident. 5G/6G/7G research is led by a small handful of companies that actually build the switches, transmitters, and modems. Cell tower frequencies are sold to a tiny group of carriers that sublet their network equipment to smaller companies they eventually buy up (if succesful) or disappear from the market (if not succesful).
Fiber rollout in countries where a government funded phone line rollout has already succeeded is laughably slow, taking decades and many billions with little to show for it. Even in countries where no phone lines were rolled out back in the day, fiber is more and more being skipped as 5G allows for cheaper (though less reliable and less capable) deployment.
I'm not saying monopolies are good or anything, and I think our problems would be even worse had we stuck to the monopolist systems that brought us telecoms as we know it, but I wouldn't consider the industry one where there's enough competition to drive innovation, especially since at least half of the entire sector is competing against Chinese government-controlled companies with seemingly endless coffers.
This is debatable, I think. What I've read is that, whereas Bell Labs did foundational, groundbreaking research that radically altered the course of human history, technological innovation since then has more often followed the lines Bell Labs, and their ilk, laid down. Giving the world a faster computer or faster network is fine and nice but pales in comparison to the consequences of giving the world modern computers, Unix, and C.
My first thought was Bell Labs here. The lack of time pressure for research results sounds like a big reason why so much innovation happened—people could pursue projects that may not have immediately benefitted the company's bottom line, because Bell had money to throw. I think UNIX was an example of this, because MULTICS was a failure and Bell was wary of similar projects, but I might be wrong.
According to Kernighan in UNIX: A History and a Memoir, the Unix team was constrained with regards to hardware capital at the time of Unix's creation. The Multics team got to use a fancy GE-645 (36-bits!) while the Unix team had to beg for "cheaper" systems like the PDP-7 and eventually an 11. Thompson has a great quote about how ultimately he was thankful they didn't have as much money to play with as the Multics team did but at the time he was annoyed he had to beg for a PDP-11. Fun book!
Most of the Bell Labs fundamental breakthroughs had no path to commercialization at the time of their discovery. The transistor was discovered 12 years into Shockleys research on fundamental properties of semiconductors.
If commercialization had been considered before funding, the project would have never been approved.
Instead, Bell management took the view that they could find everything, and some of it might become a new market, maybe.
This is debatable and probably a US centric POV, I think you could argue that much of the world is better at public / private partnerships and so no, their position is not due to capitalism, even if their continued existence is.
I’m not an expert on the economic history, but you could probably argue that the last big public / private partnerships in the US were in the railroad days. Defense spending I would not count in this category either. Although it builds whole ecosystems it is too insular and incestuous compared to something like transportation, or deliberately nurturing any other budding industry in a cooperative rather than competitive fashion
I might not have explained my position adequately. I am not commenting on how Google became immensely successful, but just looking at it today in its current state.
It seems like the end result of unchecked capitalism is monopolistic practices. Companies want to make as much $$$ as possible. The most effective way to do that is to become a monopoly and avoid/destroy/inhibit any amount of competition as possible.
I really see it as an unstable system. Which is why we need society to put laws in place to keep the system in check, so it doesn’t turn sour.
Basically there’s a “healthiness” scale of capitalism. I want healthy capitalism.
It's funny that you use self driving cars as a negative example. We have a perfect natural experiment to look at to compare the slower research-driven approach (Waymo) to the "normal company" short term profit driven approach (Tesla).
From where I'm sitting it's pretty clear which approach has been more successful.
That's an interesting question. A lot of basic research is done in pursuit of creating entirely new markets. Being the first entrant to a new market makes you a monopolist in a way by default. It doesn't necessarily have to be anti-competitive.
I'd argue the fact that Google publishes much more of their research than their competitors do is a strong indicator that they're actually not the anti-competitive ones.
The greatest private sector basic research institute that has ever existed was the result of a government granted monopoly, so you have to admit, it helps.
I worked for a while at the company that used to be named Bellcore (Bell Communications Research), which was originally a research consortium for the Baby Bells. By the time I joined, it was a zombie cash cow shell that did no research, and it met the common fate of such businesses: acquired by a private equity firm.
It's normal for mature industries to evolve into oligopolies. The filing goes far beyond fighting cartel-like behavior, into pretty ludicrous stuff (like "open access to Google’s datasets and search Index").
Yet empirically, the biggest funders of basic research have historically been monopolies. The US government was, at least up until the last few months, the largest funder of basic research globally and it obviously maintains multiple different monopolies, a monopoly on legal use of force, a functional monopoly on financial transactions as the global reserve currency, and I'm sure others. Excluding national governments, Bell Labs and IBM were both probably the biggest funders of basic research in the last century during their respective heydays. Bell was obviously a monopoly and while IBM might never have faced anti-trust penalties, they did at one point control 70% of the mainframe market and the DoJ did bring a case against them (that was eventually dismissed by the Reagan administration.)
I think there are many good reasons to pursue anti-trust action against companies that are in a dominant market position, but we should be honest about the tradeoffs. Businesses that have to aggressively compete to maintain market share don't have the slack to fund basic research.
Which is why, like the 'monopoly on violence' the government should also be funding a _lot more research_.
It should be at, or partnered with, higher learning institutions and since it's public funded all of the results should be free to use*. I'm willing to entertain the idea of: Free use for people and corporations within the country/countries that funded research, everyone else pays compulsory license fees.
But public funded research isn’t “free to use.” In many cases, you can’t even read it without paying a scientific journal for a subscription. See the Bayh-Dole Act as well: universities can patent discoveries from federally funded research.
The intent of the Bayh-Dole Act was to deal with a perceived problem of government-owned patents being investor-unfriendly. At the time the government would only grant non-exclusive licenses, and investors generally want exclusivity. That may have been the actual problem, moreso than who owned the patent. On the other hand, giving the actual inventors an incentive to commercialize their work should increase their productivity and the chance that the inventions actually get used.
The biggest funders of basic research are those with the most resources. This is your insight? I don't think anyone disagrees. Then you conflate correlation with causation and move it to _monopolies_ fund basic research. Bravo.
Is this not a bit "tail wagging the dog" thinking? There wasn't much innovation in telecommunications once Bell's monopoly was entrenched. Once it dissipated, innovation was everywhere in the space. Similarly, computers had less innovation while IBM was a monopoly than they've had since its monopoly dissipated.
Though both companies created novel & useful inventions, the biggest shifts in those industries during those monopoly eras were from outside those organisations by competitive startups. As an example, IBM should have produced Microsoft, but they didn't. They missed out on a multi-trillion dollar value creation opportunity as a result.
There's a difference between conducting basic research and bringing new inventions to the market in the form of consumer goods or services. Monopolies are much, much worse at doing the latter than normal businesses because they have no competition pressuring them to improve their offerings.
> There wasn't much innovation in telecommunications once Bell's monopoly was entrenched. Once it dissipated, innovation was everywhere in the space.
I don't think that's accurate at all. If we take say 1920 or so as the date when the monopoly was entrenched and 1984 as the break-up, there was tons of innovation in telecom in that time period. Novel telecom technologies introduced in that time period include television, microwave relays, satellite communications, submarine telephone cables, cellular telephones, fiber optics, electronic telephone switching, packet switching, the Internet.
This line of argument to defend monopolies is the same line of argument against progressive taxation of high incomes. Just because those with trends excess use some small fraction of that excess to do good does not justify the means.
I have been close enough to billionaires and how they spend their money to not be fully impressed by such arguments.
And certainly the robber barons of the 2000s spend far less on the public good than when tax rates were higher and they used to fund universities, libraries, hospitals and the like.
> I think there are many good reasons to pursue anti-trust action against companies that are in a dominant market position, but we should be honest about the tradeoffs.
Okay. I’ll take the monopolostic government over the monopolistic corporation. Thanks.
the argument seems to be basically that if Google hadn't had a dominant position they would not have had the money to make a new technology that was important for the current AI wave, and they should have the right to exploit this technology that they helped create - disregarding that in the American system this is what patents exist to enable.
OpenAI is the reason for the current AI boom. Google wasn't productizing anything and didn't put any of this stuff out in the open. Where was their productization of the transformer?
If anything, it should show that Google malinvests. Maybe none of it would have seen the light of day. Only now that they've been threatened are they building products.
That you are unaware of the applications of transformers is on you, not them. Search query understanding, search result ranking, translation, voice recognition, all other natural language applications, and generative applications like Gmail Smart Compose are all based on transformer architecture.
They had AI assistants and machine vision aplenty. The current hype cycle seems to stem from the discovery that going big on these models was worth it.
OpenAi just decided they could jump the gun while Google CORRECTLY deemed the tech not ready yet. What you're breaking your neck to find fault with was Google being responsible.
But when AT&T had a monopoly it funded Bell Labs which was responsible for much innovation.
Then AT&T was shut down and Bell Labs went away.
If we take your argument seriously then AT&T shouldn’t have been dismantled. But it was a good thing AT&T was dismantled. It helped lead to the modern internet.
By your logic all Rockefeller had to do in the early 20th century was set up a lab to do basic research and then Standard Oil wouldn’t have been broken up.
Monopolies should be broken up. This is true regardless of any basic research that they fund.
Right, if you look back through the history of ideas, every breakthrough builds on prior research and inventions. In the realm of patents and copyrights, this is acknowledged formally: they expire after a certain time and enter the public domain. This also supports the view that the current state of the world, for better or worse, owes much to the past and those who came before (living or not living elements).
And it was an antitrust action that unlocked a lot of that value. The consent decree required Bell Labs to license its patents (e.g. transistors) for reasonable royalties. The same consent decree also forbid AT&T from entering new industries like computing. So after they built UNIX, they sold the source code 'as-is' to universities for $200 ($20k for businesses).
Ask anyone who was alive back then and they will tell you stories of how legendarily awful AT&T was to deal with. My father has told me several. The antitrust action made things better for regular people by allowing them to do things like buy their own handsets or haggle over price.
All of them, in regions where they don't have a vertical monopoly. You can negotiate away installation fees and monthly package pricing on DSL, TV, internet phone... also sometimes get a no-contract deal instead of locking in for 24/28 mths with the dreaded ETF which is a large part of Comcast's profitability.
Citation needed. I hear this repeated, but the consumer experience was it was split into regional monopolies, and consumers now had to deal with both local and long distance, and both were still monopolies. It only got better with competition from mobile providers.
YMMV. I don’t agree with the narrowness of this analysis, and would like to see some links to academic studies in economics and the study of innovation tbh.
Bell Labs being defunded by a deregulated/competetive AT&T was precisely what led to the attempted commercialization of Unix and the near death of what would eventually be called "open source", though. In history as it stands, we had GNU and Linux and all that we lost was a few years.
But it's easy to imagine a world where that didn't happen and BSD was just killed dead. So no OS X, no iOS, no Android, no ChromeOS, and the only vendor able to stand on its own is the one we all agree had the worst product.
Ironically the world where the Bell monopoly was left in place seems to me to be one where we're all stuck running Microsoft Windows on everything, no?
I mean, fine, there's nuance to everything but the idea that "well, open research isn't so important" seems frankly batshit to me. Monopolies fall on their own all the time (Microsoft's did too!). You can't get stuff into the public space that wasn't ever there to begin with.
You’re making the assumption that only corporations can fund or perform basic research. But the transistor was actually the culmination of decades of research by materials scientists and physicists in university and other labs into semiconductors before anyone realized there were applications.
No, I'm making the observation that corporations do fund or perform basic research; and the straightforward inference that removing the incentive for them to do so is bad.
Is that wrong? Possibly. But if you're hanging your argument on the idea that the transistor would have been invented without Bell Labs (or BSD without AT&T's open research, which was my example), I think it's on you to provide the evidence.
>Monopolies fall on their own all the time (Microsoft's did too!)
What in the heck are you talking about??? After Microsoft was convicted, even though they never received any actual punishment, the were very internally cautions about any behaviors that could be perceived as monopolistic. This is like a total misinterpretation of what actually occurred on your part.
And yes, monopolies do fall, after very long periods of time. Some monopoly sitting around 25 years may not seem like much, but that's half an average persons working life.
You responded to a parenthetical. The point was about AT&T, not Microsoft. And yes, they effectively killed BSD, relenting only in the late 90's once it became clear that (post-Linux) there was little value left in Unix. In a different universe, they go to the mattresses with SysV against Windows NT and lose, and we have nothing.
I'm pretty sympathetic to both sides of this. I don't really know the history well enough to say whether you're right that breaking up AT&T "helped lead to the modern internet". But even stipulating that it did, the loss of monopoly era Bell Labs was tragic.
Both things can be true! It's entirely possible (probable even) that breaking up monopolies has both positive and negative impact.
And I would be a lot more sympathetic if we had a lot more public investment in technology. But we don't. What I see is both public and private research investment under major attack. I think that's a recipe for disaster.
There's actually a pretty solid argument to be made that the railways were never more effective than during the days of Rockefeller, when he could throw his money around to force otherwise-competing railways to optimize their work in an industry that has some fundamental strong incentives to be non-competitive (it rarely makes any sense to run two rail lines purely for competition reasons and leads to a race to the bottom on pricing).
... but that's more a story of the failure of the US government to go far enough and nationalize the rail network and its operations. The most efficient era of US rail was during World War II, when the military took it over and prioritized schedules by optimal throughput over profit concerns.
Yes, large monopolistic corporations can spend large amounts of money on, presumably, completely unmonetizable research.
Nevertheless anti-Trust law exists because of the belief that monopolies should not exist and that it is the governments function to dismantle monopolies. The consequence of that is that corporations who can freely spend hundreds of millions on basic research will be dismantled as well, as happened with AT&T, and the funding for the basic research will cease.
>YC is arguing that their incentive for funding that basic research should be taken away in order to spur innovation?
No. That is the stance of the government. YC is arguing that the remedies the government is seeking are appropriate.
> Without the transformer architecture they invented by funding basic research, there would be no modern LLMs.
Without Google the researchers who invented the Transformers model might have launched their own startup instead of sitting on the technology for 5 years while it's mismanaged at a big company. We would have had LLMs in 2018 not 2022.
A little bit unrelated, but the rise of Transformers in 2022 was because of the compute available - in 2018, it would have been almost impossible to make something like GPT-4.
> YC is arguing that their incentive for funding that basic research should be taken away in order to spur innovation?
Ma Bell is arguing that Bell labs has been a fountain of knowledge everyone admires and has contributed tremendously to the advancement of telecommunication systems.
Juergen Schmidhuber and his students came up with much of the basic NN elements, such as RNN, LSTM and others without behemoth resources (and several years earlier). Ttbomk, the one thing they DIDN’T come up with was the transformer; however it is very likely someone would have within a 5-10 year time frame.
I well aware of Schmidhuber, still the scaling of the compute was critical. The reason Schmidhuber didnt go all the way is still scaling/capital, which accrues to monopolies who can afford wildly speculative research. Also, LSTM, RNN, etc, while effective for their time, were dead ends.
I'm not saying that, I'm saying you need a company with huge amounts of cash on hand to spend on R&D. The monopoly provides a safe space for it, like it or not, this system has worked.
> Google is the reason for the current AI boom. Without the transformer architecture they invented by funding basic research, there would be no modern LLMs.
Sounds great to me! Wish they had been broken up before that happened.
Amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief is being submitted by Y Combinator to pile on the US vs Google anti-trust case.
YC asks court to basically cripple Google in their Search, Advertising and AI endeavours:
- Open access to Google's datasets and search index.
- Restrict Google's expansion into AI through monopolistic practices.
- Limit Google exclusive agreements and pay-to-play distribution deals.
- Enforce anti-circumvention and anti-retaliation mechanisms.
IMO, from a VC standpoint, it's in YC's interest to give their privately funded startups the best chance possible to thrive. If that includes destroying solid giants of the industry, so be it.
Would YC have said the same if Google was YC funded? As much as I dislike Google I think some of the stuff they are asking are basically asking google to give up on ad or certain business.
Call me paranoid but I wonder if YC is acting as a proxy for OpenAI/Sam Altman here. To frame it differently would they behave similarly if OpenAI was a Google Subsidiary / or Google was run by Sam Altman.
To quote tomhoward's post on here talking about YC's relationship with OpenAI:
OK, it was independent but established with funding from YC Research and Jessica (among others including Sam himself and Elon) and initially operating from YC office space.
So it was always something that was closely linked to YC and his involvement with it was generally accepted as being harmonious with his role running YC, until it became for-profit.
This is just a few rich venture capitalists, and the harvard trained founders they back, trying to line their own pockets. AI will democratize search regardless
Agreed. Because really what happens when we search is we run through a gauntlet of contrived websites stuffed with ads and trackers and referral links, selling someone else's stuff, splitting someone else's content across multiple page views, requiring your personal information if you want to view the content in its entirety, trying their best to be the #1 result for specific phrases that will get traffic even though shovelware sites should never be the authoritative source for someone else's product or company or content, while others pay to have their contrived websites be listed before them. None of this is necessary with AI.
Not a single person in this entire ecosystem knows the difference between democratize and liberalize. Hint: AI isn't gonna let us vote on aspects of search.
Google is a "monopoly" because their competitors with massive cash reserves (Microsoft, Apple, Meta) are too risk averse to compete in the marketplace and are hoping that the courtroom will deliver them a win.
No. The US vs. Google antitrust cases scope are Google's monopolistic practices in the search and adtech markets, not the browser market. The DOJ pushing for Google to sell Chrome is related to the search-related case.
Am I misremembering, or doesn’t Apple already have its own “stealth” search engine they could deploy at the drop of a hat, but instead use it as a bargaining chip w/ Google? Coulda sworn I read about it a decade ago in breathless “Is Apple working on its own search engine???” articles
Which market are you talking about specifically? The outstanding cases against them are in search and in adtech. This amicus brief is for the Search case (this one [0]).
In search (the relevant market here), Microsoft does compete in the marketplace, and Microsoft's evidence that Google's anticompetitive practices have prevented them from gaining any meaningful ground in search were a keystone of the government's case, including the fact that Microsoft has invested nearly $100 billion into Bing [1].
In adtech much the same can be said about Meta.
So, again, I'm curious: in which market does Google not have competitors spending massive amounts of cash which Google still manages to hold back from being able to meaningfully compete?
We are not just a "reskinned rebranded Bing." I know we're talking about search here, but to be clear DuckDuckGo is way more than search at this point and that is a large part of why we are popular. For example, we have a browser, duck.ai, VPN, email protection, app tracking protection, etc. We were first known for search (and maybe mostly on this forum since that's where I started), but we're now popular for all this other stuff as well that works to keep you more generally protected (see https://duckduckgo.com/compare-privacy).
In search in particular, search results have been more than web links since the early 2000s when instant answers started to appear on Yahoo. Since then, more and more of the page is instant answers of one kind or another (aka search modules, oneboxes, etc.) and less and less of it is traditional web links.
AI-assisted answers has accelerated this even more in the past two years, and we get 0 of that from Bing. Same with knowledge graph answers before that (e.g., info from Wikipedia and other quick facts, which became the most prevalent search module on desktop), again, 0 from Bing. And same for the most prevalent search module on mobile too — local results — 0 from Bing.
That is to say, a lot of our search results content is not coming from Bing. We have hundreds of team members and millions of lines of search code at this point. We’re constantly working on search, and looking to improve it. We post updates quarterly to https://duckduckgo.com/updates (along with updates on our other products and services).
In terms of traditional web links, yes, we primarily use Bing as an input in the same way Kagi primarily uses Google as an input. As Vlad has said publicly (most recently heard him on The Talk Show) and has been made clear from this US v Google case from Google/Bing/Apple/OpenAI/etc. testimony, it costs upwards of a billion dollars a year to maintain a competitive index of web links. Only the biggest companies can afford that. Nevertheless, we still work on actively crawling and indexing, but the reality is small companies cannot do it all themselves. In fact, that's true for most products in most industries -- they rely on a supply chain for various components, some of them critical.
Finally, even if you have the same traditional links, but you put instant answers above or beside or in between them, change the design significantly, or otherwise add to them (all of which we do), then the actual user experience of the search results ends up being significantly different in terms of how it is perceived and what people click on. For the latter, people engage with a section above another section about twice as much, so for example, if you just put a different box/answer on top you've drastically changed the experience of the search engine.
That's (a) a different argument than the competition is "too risk averse", (b) subjective, and (c) arguably the result of a number of flywheel effects. That is, Bing's ability to compete is hampered by the fact that Google already has an overwhelming majority of search traffic from which to learn and improve.
For example, from the second filing I linked to:
> After search began appearing on phones, Google started logging information about user location, swipes, and other user-related movements. PFOF ¶¶ 1003–1004. This data is now vital to every aspect of search, including figuring out where and when to crawl specific websites, how to index the information retrieved from that crawl, what documents to retrieve from the index in response to a user query, and how to rank the retrieved items. Some elements of Google’s search engine are trained on 13 months of data—a volume that would take Bing over 17 years to accumulate.
Do you not understand that a search engine is not a business by itself? I'm struggling to understand why so many supposedly smart people don't seem to grasp the obvious fact that Google can only exist in the current form or not at all and that any viable business of the same form has to look the same. Chrome is not a self standing viable business. YouTube is definitely not one either. Ads only works because the search engine exists. The search engine without ads would be a money pit. It's a synergistic business.
This argument can be made about nearly any anticompetitive monopoly, and that should not stop the government from deciding that, if the business can only exist in its current form, then the business should not exist.
You're not entitled to a business model if your business model is harmful.
What evidence do you have that their business model is harmful? As a consumer search seems like an extremely healthy sector right now with plenty of competition. Google just happens to be by far the best.
What exactly do you think is stopping you from using a competitor? Can you not find the setting to change your default search engine in Chrome? Is Google blocking you from making that choice somehow? All the arguments I've seen for Google being anti-competitive in this sector are extremely weak.
A shareholder in those companies wouldn’t support it. You could easily spend $10b trying to win back a fraction of the search market and Google could just spend $10b back to greater effect to bury you. Google is entrenched at every level: consumer awareness, browser, SEO, advertisers, ad-tech.
A country as large and prosperous as the United States should have more than 4 providers. We should have more than 3 cellular companies. We should have more than 8 major ISPs.
These are monopolies. You might not see it because the economy is so _over monopolized_ it's hard to have perspective.
YCombinator loves to pretend it invented the idea of startups and entreprenourism but those have been vigorous and healthy throughout _most_ of America's existence. When they weren't we wrote some of the most comprehensive and consumer friendly anti-trust laws in the entire world. A feat which still stands today.
It’s amazing how twisted the term “anti-competitive” has become. Where anti-competitive companies push for anti-competitive regulations under the false pretense of preventing anti-competitiveness.
Google is being competitive.
YC is being anti-competitive.
Because they suck at competing against Google and they want to get unfair, unethical advantage themselves.
Imagine spending years and billions building something and then I show up and say “hey man that’s not fair, give me a slice of that thing for free. Oh and also I’m probably going to sell it back to you someday for a lot of money”.
And before someone tells me “that’s the law”, I don’t care. If that’s the law then it should be changed. Laws have been written (and lobbied) for all sorts of reasons and surprisingly not all of them are fair and ethical.
It’s amazing how twisted the term “anti-competitive” has become. Where anti-competitive companies push for anti-competitive regulations under the false pretense of preventing anti-competitiveness.
Standard Oil is being competitive.
The U.S. oil refining and distribution industry is being anti-competitive.
Because they suck at competing against Standard Oil and they want to get unfair, unethical advantage themselves.
Imagine spending years and billions building something and then I show up and say “hey man that’s not fair, give me a slice of that thing”.
And before someone tells me “that’s the Sherman Act”, I don’t care. If that’s the law then it should be changed. Laws have been written (and lobbied) for all sorts of reasons and surprisingly not all of them are fair and ethical.
(I hope this illustrates how easy it is to make this exact argument about literally any monopoly.)
Google benefits at scale from infrastructure, systems and laws that create the opportunity to make such revenues. It is only natural they should not harm the host.
It doesn't matter whether the monopoly position was achieved "fairly" or not. Either way it is detrimental to the overall health of the economy and to consumer choice, and that alone is good enough reason to bust them. Those laws were passed for a reason - people saw what the end result looked like, and they didn't like it.
If you don't want someone to come and bust a monopoly you've spent years and billions building, then don't use your time and money to build a monopoly.
Can YC prevent startups from selling to Google? Even if they could why should they? There is nothing wrong with believing Google abuses its monopoly and selling to Google.
What YC is complaining about is that they've been turned into Google's farm league.
The thing is, Google doesn't develop anything new. Everything new they make fails horribly, so they can't and don't compete with YC in the way that you think.
Examples of failed Google homegrown technologies include:
- Social media: Google Buzz, Google+
- Messaging: Google Chat, Hangouts, actually there's too many to list
- Video: Google Video
Almost all of Google's successful products are acquisitions:
- Homegrown: Search, Gmail
- Acquisitions: YouTube, Analytics, most of their adtech stack, Android, DeepBrain (the people who did all the AI work at Google)
Furthermore, whenever Google or Facebook buys any startup, that startup gets an immediate moat and capital injection that can be used to crush any other startup that didn't sell out fast enough. So YC only has one option for an exit: sell the company to Google at a price Google decides.
> DeepBrain (the people who did all the AI work at Google)
"DeepBrain" isn't a thing. Google acquired DeepMind, which was the second biggest research lab in AI at the time. The first biggest was Google Brain. They existed in parallel until being merged in 2023.
Brain was entirely homegrown, and it was responsible for AIAYN, BERT, PaLM. Which is to say, transformers.
a) If YC was so tired of being a funnel to larger companies then they should be selecting companies based on their ability to be self sustaining companies. Not this hype-driven, boom or bust approach to startups they know VCs and acquirers want.
b) Google Cloud, Gemini, TPUs, Pixel etc seem like pretty important products to me.
> Meanwhile, YC has happily and excitedly fed it's start-ups to Google over the years.
I'm curious what you've seen or heard that led you to that conclusion? It's the opposite of correct.
YC supports what founders want, including if they want to sell to $BigCo, but such outcomes are hardly successes for YC. YC's success depends on outlier companies growing much larger than that.
Google is David and OpenAI is Goliath, excessively nerfing Google will put us all at the mercy of closed AI.
Gemini (the app, not the API or AI studio) is one of the few places where we can use frontier generative AI without a “customer noncompete” (you know, the one where they compete with us and then say we’re not allowed to compete back) … if you use Claude or OpenAI or Grok, you’re prohibited from training on your chat logs, or even using the thing to develop AI. Not so with Gemini app.
Too bad you have to lose your chat history just to deactivate model training (“Gemini apps activity” conflates opt-out of training with opt-out of storing chat history)
I don’t know much about the ads space but I just hope going after Google doesn’t create a vacuum that gets filled by an even worse monopoly (OpenAI)
Really odd that the trillionaire dollar corporation that prints billions of dollars in pure profit every quarter due to monopolistic and anti-democratic policies is the David, the weak feeble underdog in this story, compared to OpenAI that is wildly unprofitable and has no real strategy outside of burning money.
There has been no time in human history where destroying monopolies were a bad thing.
Isn’t Microsoft also a trillion dollar corporation? If we add their 39% market share in foundation models (likely due to enterprise use of Azure OpenAI Service) to OpenAI’s 9% market share, the result is around 48% market share, compared to Google’s 15%, which is less than half of the MSFT/OAI pair…not to mention a cursory comparison of Gemini vs ChatGPT apps.
Just because OpenAI isn’t in “extraction mode” yet doesn’t mean it’s not a scary monopoly.
Yes, Microsoft is one of the world's biggest companies, and it underinvests in research and development, preferring to hoard cash. OpenAI is in effect a client state of Microsoft that Microsoft is using to make Google look flat-footed and force them to enter the chatbot market. Nothing that transpires between Microsoft and OpenAI is really at arms' length. Personally, I don't think this is a positive development for the industry or for humanity in generally. We were doing better before we had sycophantic robots confidently misleading us.
> Yes, Microsoft is one of the world's biggest companies, and it underinvests in research and development, preferring to hoard cash.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but:
1. If you're talking about basic research, Microsoft Research has been a thing since the 90's, is highly prestigious, and has published far more papers than Google, based on their respective research websites. (To be fair, Google started much later.)
2. If you're talking about product development, MSFT is vastly more diversified in terms of revenues than any of the "Magnificent 7" because of their varied product lineup.
3. The basis of their relationship with OpenAI is literally them investing double digit billions to catch up on the AI race once they recognized the opportunity.
> OpenAI is in effect a client state of Microsoft that Microsoft is using to make Google look flat-footed and force them to enter the chatbot market.
I'm not sure about Microsoft's influence in OpenAI's strategy, but it's pretty clear Google was caught flatfooted by their own strategy of locking away transformer technology behind products that didn't threaten their search monopoly. There's a reason the researchers who invented transformers had to leave and start a different company to bring its true potential to the market. Which, even if it was just a chatbot, is what has kicked off the AI boom.
Everyone I've encountered thinks of Microsoft Research as a bad pattern, that includes all the refugees from MSR Silicon Valley who joined Google after Microsoft dissolved it in 2014. Perhaps it is a bias of the people I've worked with in my career but the core early contributors at Google who came from DEC WRL also viewed separate research divisions as a bad idea.
Anyway my statement was meant to be objective. Look at how much Microsoft spends on R&D for the last 25 years, compared to the amount Google spends, in absolute terms and as a fraction of revenues.
Having a separate research division being an anti-pattern is an interesting topic! I remember getting into a related discussion almost a decade ago with a professor who left academia to join Google, his point being product-driven R&D was strictly "better" than "bluesky" R&D because (IIRC) the work is more directly related to market needs.
My contention was that this ignores the transformative potential of long-range theoretical research. For instance, somehow very few consider Xerox PARC to be an anti-pattern.
From what I hear in the last few years even MSR has changed its ways to steer its research more in line with needs of product divisions, and I actually consider that a loss. Who knows what paradigm-shifting inventions like GenAI are being steered away from?
> Look at how much Microsoft spends on R&D for the last 25 years, compared to the amount Google spends, in absolute terms and as a fraction of revenues.
Hmm, at the risk of relying on sycophantic bots, AI overviews suggest most recently Microsoft spent 13.2% of revenues vs 14.8% for Google (and 30% for Meta!) Of course even a single % point is in the millions at their scale, but there are a ton of confounding factors including differing product margins and payscales (and CEO obsessions like Metaverse!) At least at a quick glance MSFT and GOOG seem comparable.
The problem here is how "R&D" is defined. Unfortunately, even day-to-day product development is lumped in with R&D. I've done "R&D" in academia, private research firms, and big tech, and they are all poles apart. "Actual" R&D is very researchy, often based in discovering new aspects of reality, whereas "product" R&D is just regular product development. Which could be considered discovering new aspects of the market I suppose. They are both valuable but on very differnt timelines.
OpenAI is hardly a Goliath. It has no real moat, and is trying to build a business around a feature. But other businesses already have platforms with billions of users to deploy those features to.
As others have pointed out, we should see the forest from the trees. Microsoft is a huge OpenAI redistributor, also Apple. Everyone knows ”ChatGPT”. While the company size might not be monopoly, based on a larger userbase, it is.
Yes. Sundar could have fought harder against the internal forces that thought cloud was just a fad and made Google a stronger player in Cloud. Then, Google would not have been as reliant on search/ads.
AI is the most competitive and healthy large industry I have seen. Having a search index helps just like having tweets for x.ai, but data isn’t the deciding factor.
It's not the deciding factor yet. You can bet the IP hammer is going to swing in again once the big players have been decided just to keep the small players out.
Competitive maybe. Healthy almost certainly not. My definition for healthy industries is being able to fund operations and development either by revenues or debt. Not by continuously raising capital from investors and then burning it on hardware and operating costs.
This feels a bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face...
Unlike Microsoft's antitrust case of the 90s, Google seems much less anti-competitive by nature. Sure, they have unprecedented scale in search... but even that hegemony is being threatened by others in AI.
If anything, going after Google with a DoJ kludgel will cause a servere freeze on startup M&A across all of FAANG. With IPO windows (mostly) closed, this removes the biggest exit dynamic the startup ecosystem has at its disposal. This is not a good thing from my perspective, and would seem counter to YC's interests.
It seems much less, but I don't believe it is much less anticompetitive. We're talking about the search market specifically in this case, and the government has presented strong evidence that Google is:
* Using its position in other markets (browser, mobile) to ensure that others can't compete in search.
* Paying the major other vendors in those markets (browser, mobile) enormous sums of money to ensure that ~100% of the market share in both markets is used to prop up their lead in search.
Both of these things are pretty blatantly anticompetitive: they're competing not primarily based on the quality of their product offering but instead based on their pre-existing revenue streams and their leads in other markets.
Google is now a basic utility. Unless you don't believe in basic public goods, allowing equitable access to the utility benefits everyone, especially businesses.
Utilities and infrastructure can be considered public goods insofar as they have the characteristics of non-rivalry and non-excludability, meaning that one person's use of them does not diminish another person's ability to use them and it is difficult to prevent others from using them even if they have not contributed to their provision.
However, utilities are typically excludable (service can be cut off for non-payment) and rivalrous to some extent (there are capacity limits and usage can impact others), so they are better classified as private or quasi-public goods.
So why is this idea so prevalent: that public goods should be public utilities?
A key driver behind the transformation of some public goods into regulated public utilities seems to be the theory of "natural monopoly," which posits that certain industries are most efficiently served by a single provider, making competition impractical or wasteful. Then in 1919 the economic theory of public goods, notably developed by Erik Lindahl, further contributed to the myth by arguing that public goods should be funded through taxation based on individual benefit. This reinforced the notion that the government should organize and finance such goods, often through public utility models.
So I wouldn't say public goods have nothing to do with public utilities.
Fair, definitionally they are entirely distinct. In the real world, the concepts interact. The number one in distinct from the number two, but they relate and interact in a vast number of ways.
As it relates to Google search, I think it is very difficult to construct an argument that search is a natural monopoly. There's no limitations on parallel processes the way there are with roads or railroads or electric infrastructure. In fact, people have access to a long list of competitors at all times.
You can make it much better case that they are engaging in monopolistic practices, which is a claim very different from a natural constraint
This doesn't follow from the linked article. Taxes can be levied in various ways, oftentimes related to usage. Involving a private entity doesn't suddenly change the nature of the thing. There's a marked difference between a sack of flour and my electric meter.
We as a society decide to make certain things into public goods. This is frequently the choice for natural monopolies.
Critiquing the article you linked - when taken literally non-rivalrous applies to approximately nothing. Non-excludability is simply a matter of law, which is a matter of what the voting public wants.
Public goods are non-excludable (impossible to prevent anyone from using the good) and non-rivalrous (one person's use doesn't diminish the availability for others). Google doesn't match the criteria.
Interesting definition. This applies to almost literally nothing except Jefferson’s candle and IP. Actual literal fire is considered worthless and IP is bazillions of dollars of closely guarded secrets. Public transits, seemingly unlimited water sources, or neighborhood parks all suffer from overcrowding so this diminishing availability thing is tough to meet
It is the actual definition since economist Paul Samuelson coined it in 1954.
Things like public parks and public pools would be classic examples of a "Common resource." Rival and non-excludable.
Classic examples of true public goods would be public radio broadcasting or national defense.
At some point in the past couple decades, people have come to misunderstand the term. Having heard the argument that public goods justify taxation to fund them, they come to believe that anything they like must be a public good.
You've cherrypicked the phrase "public good" and applied an out of context definition that doesn't fit. The thing being discussed was public utilities. Those are a sort of public good in the same sense that public parks, public libraries, and free education are all public goods.
The local electric utility isn't "non-excludable" (unless you ignore criminal law) but it is certainly a public utility, a natural monopoly, and public good by most metrics. The vast majority of jurisdictions regulate it accordingly.
As a consumer, I agree with the parent comment and disagree with your comment. Google is closer to a public utility than any other tech company and most of their valuable services, we get to use for free and it benefits our whole family and probably the families of every home from here to the west, north, south and east of us, mostly all for FREE.
YC should benefit most from an ecosystem where distribution channels (search, ads, etc) are not monopolized.
Startups ideally should compete on merit, not on whether they are eventually allowed access to Google’s platforms or get acquired. Startups can still exit via IPO, PE acquisition, cross-industry buyers or M&A.
From this POV, Google’s control over the adtech stack may be seen as gatekeeping digital advertising, which many YC companies rely on.
When people say that Google killed the Edge browser they generally mean that MS gave up on maintaining their own browser engine and the world moved that much closer to a web monoculture. To put this in historical perspective, a reskinned IE would not have been a meaningful or useful competitor to IE.
I don’t think it’s a meaningful comparison because Microsoft has the resources to fork Chromium if they need to. But since it works pretty well, there’s little incentive to do that. It would be like Electron forking V8 for no reason.
Anecdotal, but I wanted to give Edge a chance. I found out that it is quite possibly the most feature-creep rich browser on the market. Its sole purpose seems to be “let Microsoft monitor your entire browsing experience”.
I also feel like Microsoft’s heavy handed dark patterns trick less computer savvy people into using it, and those people probably aren’t aware of how much info Microsoft is collecting about them. As a result, I seriously question that Edge’s market share is organic because people actually like it.
Google didn't kill the Edge browser, Microsoft gave up. If Mozilla can have an independent from scratch browser, Microsoft of all companies could have one too. It's just easier and cheaper for them to rebrand Chromium and call it a day.
And I'm not buying the argument that progress on the Web (tech stack) should stop so that it's easier to make/maintain a browser.
I grew up in the dial-up era but personally think it's incredibly cool how I am able to use a full featured IDE, flash an ESP-32 or my phone via USB, make low latency Zoom/Teams calls with screen sharing, run language agnostic bytecode and utilize low level GPU access, all in a highly secure sandbox on my Macbook, Linux/Windows Thinkpad, $100 Chromebook, tablet and phone.
As others have pointed out, YC is definitely trying to get some of that Google money. Another important aspect that benefits YC is a turn of events that would improve the talent pool. Google retains tens of thousands of software engineers, I’d argue maybe the biggest reserve in existence. It’s the largest population of experienced engineers that won’t leave because the money and circumstances are too good. Startups would benefit if these circumstances changed
that is not a google problem that is a big tech problem. people move where the money is and the money flows to google easily because ads is such a lucrative business. if you force the talent pool to move off google, meta or amazon will easily absorb them
More talent with less demand means lower wages and/or worse benefits. My situation at Google can’t be matched at Amazon or Meta (remote work, pay, WLB, other benefits). I’d have to compromise if the climate changes but not much will make me leave… ever. I have a friend that has been trying to get me to join a startup for years and the risk just isn’t worth the reward
The solution proposed by Kagi—separate the search index from the rest of Google—seems to make the most sense. Kagi explains it more here: https://blog.kagi.com/dawn-new-era-search
It's such a ridiculous proposal that would completely destroy Google's business. If that's the goal fine, but let's not pretend that any of those remedies are anything beyond a death sentence.
Sorry, but corporations are not people despite what some people will tell you.
They would definitely NOT survive in any recognizable form with "only a few billion dollars", because the stock price is a function of profits. Take away most of the profits, and most of the company's value gets wiped out, most of the employees would leave or get laid off, and anything of value that remains would quickly become worthless. Users would all move to the government-sanctioned replacement monopoly, likely X. To say nothing about the thousands of ordinary people who have large Alphabet holdings in their retirement portfolios and would be wiped out.
Google is practically the definition of a "too big to fail" company. They need to be reigned in to allow more competition, but straight up destroying the company would be a move so colossally stupid I could just see the Trump regime doing it.
If they're dominating or one of only two or three important options in multiple other areas and the index is the only reason... I mean, that's a strong argument both that they're monopolists and that they're terrible at allocating the enormous amount of capital they have. That's really the only thing keeping them around? All their other lines of business collectively aren't enough to keep them alive? Yikes, scathing indictment.
> It's such a ridiculous proposal that would completely destroy Google's business.
it won't. My bet is that bing and some other indexes are 95% Ok for average Joe. But relevance ranking is much tougher problem, and "google.com" is household brand with many other functions(maps, news, stocks, weather, knowledge graph, shopping, videos), and that's what is foundation of google monopoly.
I think this shared index thing will actually kill competition even more, since every players will use only index owned by google now.
I mean, they're still going to be the number 1 name in adtech and analytics. And they're still gonna have pretty decent personalized ads because of analytics.
Plus, that just one part of their business. There's also Android, which is a money printing machine with the Google Store (although that's under attack too).
Crawling the internet is a natural monopoly. Nobody wants an endless stream of bots crawling their site, so googlebot wins because they’re the dominant search engine.
It makes sense to break that out so everyone has access to the same dataset at FRAND pricing.
My heart just wants Google to burn to the ground, but my brain says this is the more reasonable approach.
A caching proxy costs you almost nothing and will serve thousands of requests per second on ancient hardware. Actually there's never been a better time in the history of the Internet to have competing search engines since there's never been so much abundance of performance, bandwidth, and software available at historic low prices or for free.
In the past month there were dozens of posts about using proof of work and other methods to defeat crawlers. I don't think most websites tolerate heavy crawling in the era of Vercel/AWS's serverless "per request" and bandwidth billing.
You don't get to tell site owners what to do. The actual facts on the ground are that they're trying to block your bot. It would be nice if they didn't block your bot, but the other, completely unnatural and advertising-driven, monopoly of hosting providers with insane per-request costs makes that impossible until they switch away.
You wouldn't have to make them micropayments, you can pay out once some threshold is reached.
Of course, it would incentivize the sites to make you want to crawl them more, but that might be a good thing. There would be pressure on you to focus on quality over quantity, which would probably be a good thing for your product.
There are so many other bots/scrapers out there that literally return zero that I don’t blame site owners for blocking all bots except googlebot.
Would it be nice if they also allowed altruist-bot or common-crawler-bot? Maybe, but that’s their call and a lot of them have made it on a rational basis.
> that I don’t blame site owners for blocking all bots except googlebot.
I doubt this is happening outside of a few small hobbyist websites where crawler traffic looks significant relative to human traffic. Even among those, it’s so common to move to static hosting with essentially zero cost and/or sign up for free tiers of CDNs that it’s just not worth it outside of edge cases like trying to host public-facing Gitlab instances with large projects.
Even then, the ROI on setting up proper caching and rate limiting far outweighs the ROI on trying to play whack-a-mole with non-Google bots.
Even if someone did go to all the lengths to try to block the majority of bots, I have a really hard time believing they wouldn’t take the extra 10 minutes to look up the other major crawlers and put those on the allow list, too.
This whole argument about sites going to great lengths to block search indexers but then stopping just short of allowing a couple more of the well-known ones feels like mental gymnastics for a situation that doesn’t occur.
Regarding allowlisting the other major crawlers: I've never seen any significant amount of traffic coming from anything but Google or Bing. There's the occasional click from one of the resellers (ecosia, brave search, duckduckgo etc), but that's about it. Yahoo? haven't seen them in ages, except in Japan. Baidu or Yandex? might be relevant if you're in their primary markets, but I've never seen them. Huawei's Petal Search? Apple Search? Nothing. Ahrefs & friends? No need to crawl _my_ website, even if I wanted to use them for competitor analysis.
So practically, there's very little value in allowing those. I usually don't bother blocking them, but if my content wasn't easy to cache, I probably would.
> sites going to great lengths to block search indexers
That's not it. They're going to great lengths to block all bot traffic because of abusive and generally incompetent actors chewing through their resources. I'll cite that anubis has made the front page of HN several times within the past couple months. It is far from the first or only solution in that space, merely one of many alternatives to the solutions provided by centralized services such as cloudflare.
This is similar to the natural monopoly of root DNS servers (managed as a public good). There is no reason more money couldn't go into either Common Crawl, or something like it. The Internet Archive can persist the data for ~$2/GB in perpetuity (although storing it elsewhere is also fine imho) as the storage system of last resort. How you provide access to this data is, I argue, similar to how access to science datasets is provided by custodian institutions (examples would be NOAA, CERN, etc).
Build foundations on public goods, very broadly speaking (think OSI model, but for entire systems). This helps society avoid the grasp of Big Tech and their endless desire to build moats for value capture.
> Vault offers a low-cost pricing model based on a one-time price per-gigabyte/terabyte for data deposited in the system, with no additional annual storage fees or data egress costs.
What's the read throughout to get the data back out, and does it scale to what you'd need to have N search indexes building on top of this shared crawl?
Wait, is the suggestion here just about crawling and storing the data? That's a very different thing than "Google's search index"... And yeah, I would agree that it is undifferentiated.
The problem with this is in the vein of `Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once` if it's going to replace googlebot. Everyone who only allows googlebot would need to change and allow ccbot instead.
It's already the case that googlebot is the common denominator bot that's allowed everywhere, ccbot not so much.
Wouldn’t a decent solution, if some action happened where Google was divesting the crawler stuff, be to just do like browser user agents have always done (in that case multiple times to comical degrees)? Something like ‘Googlebot/3.1 (successor, CommonCrawl 1.0)’
Lots of good replies to your comment already. I'd also offer up Cloudflare offering the option to crawl customer origins, with them shipping the compressed archives off to Common Crawl for storage. This gives site admins and owners control over the crawling, and reduces unnecessary load as someone like Cloudflare can manage the crawler worker queue and network shipping internally.
Hosting costs are so minimal today that I don't think crawling is a natural monopoly. How much would it really cost a site to be crawled by 100 search engines?
A potentially shocking amount depending on the desired freshness if the bot isn’t custom tailored per site. I worked at a job posting site and Googlebot would nearly take down our search infrastructure because it crawled jobs via searching rather than the index.
Bots are typically tuned to work with generic sites over crawling efficiently.
No, in our case they were indexing job posts by sending search requests. Ie instead of pulling down the JSON files of jobs, they would search for them by sending stuff like “New York City, New York software engineer” to our search. Generally not cached because the searches weren’t something humans would search for (they’d use the location drop down).
I didn’t work on search, but yeah, something like Elasticsearch. Googlebot was a majority of our search traffic at times.
Are sites really that averse to having a few more crawlers than they already do? It would seem that it’s only a monopoly insofar as it’s really expensive to do and almost nobody else thinks they can recoup the cost.
A "few" more would be fine - but the sheer scale of the malicious AI training bot crawling that's happening now is enough to cause real availability problems (and expense) for numerous sites.
One web forum I regularly read went through a patch a few months ago where it was unavailable for about 90% of the time due to being hammered by crawlers. It's only up again now because the owner managed to find a way to block them that hasn't yet been circumvented.
So it's easy to see why people would allow googlebot and little else.
We routinely are fighting off hundreds of bots at any moment. Thousands and Thousands per day, easily. US, China, Brazil from hundreds of different IPs, dozens of different (and falsified!) user agents all ignoring robots.txt and pushing over services that are needed by human beings trying to get work done.
EDIT: Just checked our anubis stats for the last 24h
CHALLENGE: 829,586
DENY: 621,462
ALLOW: 96,810
This is with a pretty aggressive "DENY" rule for a lot of the AI related bots and on 2 pretty small sites at $JOB. We have hundreds, if not thousands of different sites that aren't protected by Anubis (yet).
Anubis and efforts like it are a xesend for companies that don't want to pay off Cloudflare or some other "security" company peddling a WAF.
One is, suppose there are a thousand search engine bots. Then what you want is some standard facility to say "please give me a list of every resources on this site that has changed since <timestamp>" so they can each get a diff from the last time they crawled your site. Uploading each resource on the site to each of a thousand bots once is going to be irrelevant to a site serving millions of users (because it's a trivial percentage) and to a site with a small amount of content (because it's a small absolute number), which together constitute the vast majority of all sites.
The other is, there are aggressive bots that will try to scrape your entire site five times a day even if nothing has changed and ignore robots.txt. But then you set traps like disallowing something in robots.txt and then ban anything that tries to access it, which doesn't affect legitimate search engine crawlers because they respect robots.txt.
> then you set traps like disallowing something in robots.txt and then ban anything that tries to access it
That doesn't work at all when the scraper rapidly rotates IPs from different ASNs because you can't differentiate the legitimate from the abusive traffic on a per-request basis. All you can be certain of is that a significant portion of your traffic is abusive.
That results in aggressive filtering schemes which in turn means permitted bots must be whitelisted on a case by case basis.
> That doesn't work at all when the scraper rapidly rotates IPs from different ASNs because you can't differentiate the legitimate from the abusive traffic on a per-request basis.
Well sure you can. If it's requesting something which is allowed in robots.txt, it's a legitimate request. It's only if it's requesting something that isn't that you have to start trying to decide whether to filter it or not.
What does it matter if they use multiple IP addresses to request only things you would have allowed them to request from a single one?
> If it's requesting something which is allowed in robots.txt, it's a legitimate request.
An abusive scraper is pushing over your boxes. It is intentionally circumventing rate limits and (more generally) accurate attribution of the traffic source. In this example you have deemed such behavior to be abusive and would like to put a stop to it.
Any given request looks pretty much normal. The vast majority are coming from residential IPs (in this example your site serves mostly residential customers to begin with).
So what if 0.001% of requests hit a disallowed resource and you ban those IPs? That's approximately 0.001% of the traffic that you're currently experiencing. It does not solve your problem at all - the excessive traffic that is disrespecting ratelimits and gumming up your service for other well behaved users.
Why would it be only 0.001% of requests? You can fill your actual pages with links to pages disallowed in robots.txt which are hidden from a human user but visible to a bot scraping the site. Adversarial bots ignoring robots.txt would be following those links everywhere. It could just as easily be 50% of requests and each time it happens, they lose that IP address.
I mean sure but if there were 3 search engines instead of one would you disallow two of them? The spam problem is one thing but I dont think having a ten search engines rather than two is going to destroy websites.
The claim that search is a natural monopoly because of the impact on websites of having a few more search competitors scanning them seems silly. I don’t think it’s a natural monopoly at all.
> so googlebot wins because they’re the dominant search engine.
I think it's also important to highlight that sites explicitly choose which bots to allow in their robots.txt files, prioritizing Google which reinforces its position as the de-facto monopoly. Even when other bots are technically able to crawl them.
Of all the bad ideas I've heard of where to slice Google to break it up, this... Is actually the best idea.
The indexer, without direct Google influence, is primarily incentivized to play nice with site administrators. This gives them reasons to improve consideration of both network integrity and privacy concerns (though Google has generally been good about these things, I think the damage is done regarding privacy that the brand name is toxic, regardless of the behaviors).
Google search is a monopoly not because of crawling. It's because of the all the data it knows about website stats and user behavior. Original Google idea of ranking based on links doesn't work because it's too easily gamed. You have to know what websites are good based on user preferences and that's where you need to have data. It's impossible to build anything similar to Google without access to large amounts of user data.
Sounds like you're implying that they are using Google Analytics to feed their ranking, but that's much easier to game than links are. User-signals on SERP clicks? There's a niche industry supplying those to SEOs (I've seen it a few times, I haven't seen it have any reliable impact).
> Crawling the internet is a natural monopoly. Nobody wants an endless stream of bots crawling their site,
Companies want traffic from any source they can get. They welcome every search engine crawler that comes along because every little exposure translates to incremental chances at revenue or growing audience.
I doubt many people are doing things to allow Googlebot but also ban other search crawlers.
> My heart just wants Google to burn to the ground
I think there’s a lot of that in this thread and it’s opening the door to some mental gymnastics like the above claim about Google being the only crawler allowed to index the internet.
> I doubt many people are doing things to allow Googlebot but also ban other search crawlers.
Sadly this is just not the case.[1][2] Google knows this too so they explicitly crawl from a specific IP range that they publish.[3]
I also know this, because I had a website that blocked any bots outside of that IP range. We had honeypot links (hidden to humans via CSS) that insta-banned any user or bot that clicked/fetched them. User-Agent from curl, wget, or any HTTP lib = insta-ban. Crawling links sequentially across multiple IPs = all banned. Any signal we found that indicated you were not a human using a web browser = ban.
We were listed on Google and never had traffic issues.
Assuming the simplified diagram of Google’s architecture, sure, it looks like you’re just splitting off a well-isolated part, but it would be a significant hardship to do it in reality.
Why not also require Apple to split off only the phone and messaging part of its iPhone, Meta to split off only the user feed data, and for the U.S. federal government to run only out of Washington D.C.?
This isn’t the breakup of AT&T in the early 1980s where you could say all the equipment and wiring just now belongs to separate entities. (It wasn’t that simple, but it wasn’t like trying to extract an organ.)
I think people have to understand that and know that what they’re doing is killing Google, and it was already on its way into mind-numbed enterprise territory.
This strikes me like "two easy steps to draw an owl. First draw the head, then draw the body". I generally support some sort of breakup, but hand waving the complexities away is not going to do anybody any good
> Apple to split off only the phone and messaging part of its iPhone
Ooh, can we? My wife is super jealous of my ability to install custom apps for phone calls and messaging on Android, it'd be great if Apple would open theirs up to competition. Competition in the SMS app space would also likely help break up the usage of iMessage as a tool to pressure people into getting an iPhone so they get the blue bubble.
If the dream of a Star Trek future reputation-based government run by AI which secretly manipulates the vote comes true, yes we can!
Either that or we could organize competitors to lobby the US or EU for more lawsuits in exchange for billions in kickbacks! (Not implying anything by this.)
You jest, but splitting out just certain Internet Explorer features was part of the Microsoft antitrust resolution. It's what made Chrome's ascendancy possible.
I mean it's just data. You can just copy it and hand it over to a newly formed competing entity.
You're not even really dealing with any of these shared infrastructure public property private property merged infrastructure issues.
Yeah sure. There's mountains of racks of servers, but those aren't that hard to get tariffs TBD.
I think it'll be interesting just to try and find some collection of ex Google execs who had actually like to go back to the do no evil days, and just hand them a copy of all the data.
I simply don't think we have the properly and elected set of officials to implement antitrust of any scale. DOJ is now permanently politicized and corrupt, and citizens United means corps can outspend "the people" lavishly.
Antitrust would mean a more diverse and resilient supply chain, creativity, more employment, more local manufacturing, a reversal of the "awful customer service" as a default, better prices, a less corrupt government, better products, more economic mobility, and, dare I say it, more freedom.
Actually, let me expound upon the somewhat nebulous idea of more freedom. I think we all hear about Shadow banning or outright banning with utter silence and no appeals process for large internet companies that have a complete monopoly on some critical aspect of Internet usage.
If these companies enabled by their cartel control, decide they don't like you or are told by a government not to like you, it is approaching a bigger burden as being denied the ability to drive.
Not a single one of those is something oligarchs or a corporatocracy has the slightest interest in
Google has two interlocked monopolies, one is the search index and the other is their advertising service. We often joked that if Google reasonable and non-discriminatory priced access to their index, both to themselves and to others, AND they allowed someone to put what ever ads they wanted on those results. That change the landscape dramatically.
Google would carve out their crawler/indexer/ranker business and sell access to themselves and others which would allow that business an income that did NOT go back to the parent company (had to be disbursed inside as capex or opex for the business).
Then front ends would have a good shot, DDG for example could front the index with the value proposition of privacy. Someone else could front the index with a value proposition of no-ads ever. A third party might front that index attuned to specific use cases like literature search.
Then why do we see all of these alt search engines and SEO services building out independent indexes? Why don't the competitors cooperate in this fashion already?
Because everyone worships Thiel's "competition is for losers" and dreams of being a monopoly. Monopolies being the logical outcome of a deregulated environment, for which these companies lobby.
Throughout history there are very few monopolies and they don't normally last that long; that is unless they get are granted special privileges by the government.
Concentration is the default in an unregulated environment. Sure pure monopolies with 100% market control are rare but concentration is rampant. A handful of companies dominating tech, airlines, banks, media.
Concentration seems much more prevalent in heavily regulated markets e.g. utilities / airlines. In many cases regulators have even encouraged this e.g.finance.
There is no default for unregulated markets. It's a question of whether the economies of scale outweigh the added costs from the complexity that scale requires. It costs close to 100x as much to build 100 houses, run 100 restaurants, or operate 100 trucks as it does to do 1. That's why these industries are not very concentrated. Whereas it costs nowhere close to 100x for a software or financial services company to serve 100x thee customers, so software and finance are very concentrated.
The effect of regulation is typically to increase concentration because the cost of compliance actually tends to scale very well. So businesses that grow face an decreasing regulatory compliance cost as a percent of revenue.
You are comparing Apples and Oranges. You just can't compare the barrier of entry for Software business and an Airline, even without any regulations. It's just orders of magnitude more expensive to buy an airplane than a laptop, and most utilities are natural monopolies so they behave fundamentally different.
I can't and I didn't. I never said anything about barriers to entry. I'm talking about concentration here and why the market is dominated by airlines with hundreds of planes instead of airlines with 10 planes. Barriers to entry are inevitable in capital intensive industries.
Home building is interesting because I think a major blocker to monopoly-forming is the vastly heterogenous and complicated regulatory landscape, with building codes varying wildly from place to place. So you get a bunch of locally-specialized builders.
Regulation can increase concentration in a high corruption/cronyism environment
— regulatory capture and regulatory moats. There is plenty of that happening.
In building, I think we have local-concentration, due to both regulatory heterogeneity and then local cronyism - Bob has decades of connections to the city and gets permits easily, whereas Bob’s competitor Steve is stuck in a loop of rejection due to a never ending list of pesky reasons.
Concentration is not monopoly, and furthermore your comment does not begin to address the critical part of parent’s comment : “does not last very long”
Inequality at a point in time , and over time , is not nearly as bad if the winners keep rotating
> unless they get are granted special privileges by the government
That's what all the lobbyists are for.
None of the people or organisations that advocate for "free markets" or competition actually want free markets and competition. It's a smoke screen so they can keep buying politicians to get their special privileges.
They always inevitably end up being given special privileges.
Because, contrary to what we would all like to believe, once a company becomes large we don't want them to go under, even if they're not optimal.
There's a huge amount of jobs, institutional knowledge, processes, capital, etc in these big monopolies. Like if Boeing just went under today, how long would it take for another company to re-figure out how to make airplanes? I mean, take a look at NASA. We went to the moon, but can we do it again? It would be very difficult. Because so many engineers retired and IP was allowed to just... rot.
It's a balancing act. Obviously we want to keep the market as free as possible and yadda yadda invisible hand. But we also have national security to consider, and practicality.
This sounds a solution contrived to advantage companies that want access to this data rather than an actual economically valid business model. If building an index and selling access to it is a viable business, then why isn't someone doing it already? There's minimal barrier to entry. Blekko has an index. Are you selling access to it for profit?
Ie. Knowing which users clicked which search results.
Without the click stream, one cannot build or even maintain a good ranker. With a larger click stream from more users, one can make a better ranker, which in turn makes the service better so more users use it.
End result: monopoly.
The only solution is to force all players to share click stream data with all others.
I don't think that's quite true, as competitors like Kagi have been able to compete well with effectively zero clickstream (by comparison). It'll help, but it's not the make-or-break that the index is.
Kagi sends searches to other providers (Bing?) and then simply re-ranks the results, so they're effectively inheriting the click stream data of those other providers.
I think a click stream isn't necessary, but Kagi is not a good basis for the argument in my opinion.
Kagi is a primarily meta search engine. The click stream exists on their sources (Bing, Google, Yandex, Marginalia, not sure if they use Brave). They do have Teclis which is their own index that they use, and their systems for reordering the page of results such as downranking heavy ad pages, and based upon user preferences (which I love).
Click stream is useful, without a doubt. It isn't essential. We had already started the process at Blekko of moving to alternate ways for ranking the index.
That said, if you run the frontend as proposed, you get to collect the clicks. That gives you the click stream you want. If the index returns you a serp with unwrapped links (which it should if it was unbundled from a given search front end) then you could develop analytics around what your particular customers "like" in their links and have a different ranking than perhaps some other front end. One thing that Blekko made really clear for me that the Google idea that there was always the "best" result for that query (aka the I'm Feeling Lucky link) there was often different shades of intent behind the query that aren't part of the query itself. Google felt they could get it in the first 10 links (back before the first 10 links were sponsored content :-)) and often on the page you could see the two or three inferred "intents" (shopping, information, entertainment were common).
> Google has two interlocked monopolies, one is the search index
The index is the farthest thing from a monopoly Google has - anyone can recreate it. Heck, you can even just download Commoncrawl to get a massive head start.
I see it a bit differently, many (most?) web sites explicitly deny scraping execept for Google. Further Google has the infrastructure to crawl several trillion web pages and create a relevant index out of the most authoritative 1.5 trillion. To re-create that on your own, you would need both the web to allow it, and the infrastructure to do it. I would agree that this isn't an insurmountable moat but it is a good one.
Most websites only explicitly deny scraping by bad bots (robots.txt). Things like Cloudflare are a completely different matter, and I have a whole batch of opinions about how they are destroying the web.
I'd love to compete directly with OpenAI, but the cost of a half million GPUs is a me problem - not a them problem. Google can't be faulted for figuring out how to crawl the web in an economically viable way.
This just in: small search engine company thinks it's a great idea for small search engine companies to have the same search index as Google.
Also, I love this bit: "[Google's] search results are of the best quality among its advertising-driven peers." I can just feel the breath of the guy who jumped in to say "wait, you can't just admit that Google's results are better than Kagi's! You need to add some sorta qualifier there that doesn't apply to us."
Crawling the web is costly. I assume it's cheaper to use the results from someone else's crawling. I don't know what Kagi is using to argue that they should have access to Google's indexes, but I'd guess it's some form of anti trust.
Let me add more: crawling the web is costly for EVERYONE.
The more crawlers out there, the more useless traffic is being served by every single website on the internet.
In an ideal world, there would be a single authoritative index, just as we have with web domains, and all players would cooperate into building, maintaining and improving it, so websites would not need to be constantly hammered by thousands of crawlers everyday.
Yeah not that cheap. There's a few articles on HN now about small, independent websites being essentially DDOS'd by crawlers. Although, to be fair, mostly AI crawlers.
On every Kagi comment, there is “Have you used Kagi recently? It’s improved a lot!” — to the level that I suspect they have bots to upgrade the brand image, at least to search which comments to respond do.
I’m saying that because yes, I’ve used Kagi recently, and I switch back to Google every single time because Kagi can’t find anything. Kagi is to Google what Siri is to ChatGPT. Siri can’t even answer “What time is it?”
Maybe you see different comments than I do, but I don't see many comments saying it's improved a lot lately.
As a Kagi user, I would not say it's improved a lot lately. It's a consistent, specific product for what I need. I like the privacy aspects of it, and the control to block, raise or lower sites in my search results. If that's not something you care about then don't use it.
Is it better than Google at finding things? I don't think so, but then, Google is trash these days too
The GP of your comment is literally saying that Kagi is better than Google as of late. You’re not helping the “Kagi doesn’t use bots” case by ignore the context 2 comments up.
They said Kagi works "way better" than google, not that Kagi is better as of late (although they do ask if they've tried kagi lately). Which is consistent with my statement that Kagi is a consistent product and not really improving. They keep adding AI features, but I disable those and don't care about them.
You're welcome to check my post history, I'm certainly not a bot. Or if I am, I'm a very convincing one that runs an astrophotography blog.
> I suspect they have bots to upgrade the brand image
I disagree with the conclusion but I agree with the premise. Man is a rationalizing animal, and one way to validate one’s choice in paying for a search engine (whether it is better or not) is to get others to use it as well. Kagi is also good at PR, they were able to spin a hostile metering plan as a lenient subscription plan.
Word of mouth is often more prevalent than we think, and certainly more powerful than botting. I would not be shocked if the author of that “AirBnBs are blackhats” article was interacting with real users of Craigslist spurred on by some referral scheme.
> one way to validate one’s choice in paying for a search engine (whether it is better or not) is to get others to use it as well.
It's not so much validating, but I'm hoping they grow so I can keep using their service. It would suck for them to close shop because they never got popular enough to be sustainable.
It's taken as a given that Siri is inferior to ChatGPT. Both are natural language call-and-response models, but one of them is constantly in the news for diagnosing patients more accurately than actual medical doctors [1] and identifying a picture's location by the species of grass shown in a fifty-pixel-wide clump in the corner, and the other one can turn off your lights and order you a pizza when you ask it what tomorrow's weather forecast is.
Ergo, a person of average scholastic aptitude who is neither trying to ape late night talk show hosts by taking half of each single-colon-pair of an analogy, severing the other pair ends and any remaining context, and repeating the result with a well-rehearsed look of confusion; nor defensive about being called out for doing just that, can readily infer that the message being transmitted is that Kagi is fundamentally a tool very similar to Google, but which delivers inferior results.
> On every Kagi comment, there is “Have you used Kagi recently? It’s improved a lot!” — to the level that I suspect they have bots to upgrade the brand image
Odd to dismiss a point purely because it's consistently made, especially without much apparent disagreement. Perhaps more likely: there are just _many_ happy Kagi customers in the HN community.
As one data point: I use Kagi, and agree with GP, and I am not a bot (activity of this HN account predates existence of Kagi by many years).
That doesn't dismiss your experience of course, lots of people use search engines in different ways! Personally, I found the ads & other crap of Google drowned out results, and I frequently hit SEO spam etc where site reranking was helpful. I'm sure there's scenarios where that doesn't make sense though, it's not for everybody (not everybody can justify paying for search, just for starters).
Kagi is just a meta search engine. They are already using Googles search index. They just find it too expensive. Guess they need to show ads to pay for the searches.
That's like asking the foxes how the farmer should manage his chickens. Kagi is a (wannabe) competitor. Likewise, YC's interest here is in making money by having viable startups and having them acquired.
I also don't think crawling the Web is the hard part. It's extraordinarily easy to do it badly [1] but what's the solution here? To have a bunch of wannabe search engines crawl Google's index instead?
I've thought about this and I wonder if trying to replicate a general purpose search engine here is the right approach or not. Might it not be easier to target a particular vertical, at least to start with? I refuse to believe Google cannot be bested in every single vertical or that the scale of the job can't be segmented to some degree.
This solution would also yield search engines that will actually be useful and powerful like old Google search was. They have crippled it drastically over the years. Used to be I could find exact quotes of forum posts from memory verbatim. I can't do that on Google or YouTube anymore. It's really dumbed down and watered down.
Googles c suite is clearly not thinking ahead here. They could have helped to slow down the anti-trust lawsuits by opening up their search index to whichever AI company wants to pay for it. Web crawling is expensive, and lots of companies are spending wild amounts of money on it. There is a very clear market arbitrage opportunity between the cost of crawling the web and Google's cost of serving up their existing data.
Woudl the search index contain only raw data about the websites? Or would some sort of ranking be there?
If it's teh latter, its a neat way to ask a company to sell their users data to a third party because any kind of ranking comes via aggregation of users' actions. Without involving any user consent at all.
Separating the index creates a commodity data layer that preserves Google's crawling investment while enabling innovation at the ranking/interface layer, similar to how telecom unbundling worked for ISPs.
I feel like there's some conceptual drift going on in Kagi's blog post wrt their proposed remedy.
They argue that the search index is an essential facility, and per their link "The essential facilities doctrine attacks a form of exclusionary conduct by which an undertaking controls the conditions of access to an asset forming a ‘bottleneck’ for rivals to compete".
But unlike physical locations where bridges/ports can be built, the ability to crawl the internet is not excludable by Google.
They do argue that the web is not friendly to new crawlers, but what Kagi wants is not just the raw index itself, but also all the serving/ranking built on top of it so that they do not have to re-engineer it themselves.
It's also worth noting that Bing exists, and presumably has it's own index of the web and no evidence has been presented that the raw index content itself is the reason that Bing is not competitive.
Then you'd just end up with all the ads being scams, and people not wanting to search on Google, because all the top results are scams instead of things they might actually be interested in that are not scams.
1,006 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 612 ms ] thread> "Our experience has been that entrenched monopoly power often deters new entry and chills investment in disruptive innovation."
> "independent venture-capital firms like YC often hesitate to fund startups in the “kill zone” —the area of deadened innovation around a monopolist like Google."
> "We agree with Plaintiffs' proposal that the remedy package should create pathways for startups and innovators to access Google's monopoly-derived datasets and search index."
> "The remedy order should also prevent Google from entering into exclusive agreements to access AI training data..."
> "An effective remedy package should help to leverage the current moment by ensuring that next-generation search and query-based AI tools can reach users free from exclusion, interference, or cooption."
> "the remedy package should prevent Google from anticompetitive self-preferencing, and this prohibition should apply specifically to Google's use of its monopoly search product to boost its query-based AI tools or discriminate against rivals' tools."
I think they have a good point with AI. After lagging behind initially, Google really went at it hard. Gemini is great now, and they are building a good set of tooling.
It's easy for Google to suffocate the startups in that area. They already have a massive advantage with all the data they are sitting on.
> It's easy for Google to suffocate the startups in that area. They already have a massive advantage with all the data they are sitting on.
What is the solution, though? Should they not be allowed to compete in the LLM + search space? Should they handicap their models till perplexity &co. catch up? Will they be allowed to do something then? I honestly don't see what's asked of google here.
Yes, they are massive. But they're massive because they've invested billions ($, manhours, etc) into their infra and have gathered a huge baggage of data, know-how, tech and expertise in this field. But what exactly are they to do from now on?
Google, for example, bought exclusive access to Reddit's data. No one else can train on Reddit unless you have more money than Google (you don't). So one of the asks is that that sort of exclusive deal be prevented. If everyone is allowed to buy Reddit's data, and Google makes the best model, that wouldn't be a problem.
Thank you, that actually sounds reasonable.
Yes? I'm not sure why you find this strange. It's exactly how antitrust works.
B. The Remedy Should Prevent Google from Extending Its Monopolies into Query-Based AI Tools.
Good luck with that YC...
Nor has Netflix had a monopoly on streaming.
That’s not to mention ChatGPT and other LLMs have built in search.
Should Google not evolve with the times?
This way, the public can access copyright works, and producers of works can be paid, but distribution is opened up. Creators still get paid, distribution isn't monopolistic.
Netflix can argue "this show is worth £5 per viewer" and only sell rights at that price, but they pay tax on that price, and crucially the rest of the catalogue then needs to add up so if viewers are paying £8 per month then the rest of the catalogue is marked down accordingly. There will be manipulation, but if it doesn't reasonably add up then apply the sort of penalties in the EU of 20$ gross profit fines; strike off directors for copyright abuse (can't be directors of media companies again).
I can't see that this would harm income for creators, only for distributors (who aren't needed, they're just duplicating using monopolistic practices), and it seems it would have broad appeal.
So, yes, I agree.
Capitalists have distorted it to be a means to pay the producers (ie capital holders) over-and-over whilst eroding the public domain.
The default position is if you (a creator) make a work available anyone can copy it, alter it, resell it for free. I don't think that is right, but what we currently have is IMO not a sufficient benefit to the public.
The open source movement didn’t ask to get other people to write stuff and give it away.
I’m assuming you don’t work for free, why should creators?
It looks like this is a strategic case to prevent Google from getting into AI search space and even gain access to their search index data so that they can train their own models on it.
Wright brothers invited the aircraft but almost all their patents were cancelled when the Great War started. If we believe the AI race is indeed an existential threat then let's cancel all patents that prevent anyone from innovating.
1) Eliminate Google Play Services for android and the oem non-compete deals.
2) Right to privacy. All data collection and storage (even on customer owned hardware if used for targeting decisions) must be opt-in, by purpose and annually renewed. It must be easier to only opt in to data collection for use cases that provide application functionality / business transactions than it is to opt into blanket data collection.
I wonder why a VC firm who is quite heavily invested in AI based startups file an amicus brief like that…
Edit: before this gets downvoted into oblivion, the comment is not against antitrust enforcement. It’s about VC firms having very specific ideas about what the antitrust enforcement would look like.
Google and the rest of big tech are like the Jupiter of the tech world. It clears the orbit of anything else that could form.
Big tech is so big that it can jump into new markets with ease, kill incumbents, snuff out new players, and perpetually tax non-innovation.
We're twenty years behind on antitrust and breakups. It's time we had a forest fire to make way for new growth.
That’s why everything’s so insanely consolidated now. Practically every market has a handful of massive players all of which would currently be under serious threat of break-up under the old approach to enforcement. It’s all monopoly.
https://medium.com/@kazeemibrahim18/the-post-ipo-performance...
> In aggregate, the average return across these YC companies is -49%, with a median return of -46%. To put this into perspective, over the same period, the S&P 500 yielded a positive return of 58%
And for the rest of the companies, they aren’t trying to compete with BigTech, they are trying to get acquired by them. Out of the literally thousands of companies that YC has invested in, only about two dozen have gone public
The end game for these unicorns is to become the cash hoard that they intended to compete with.
I'm fine with that. Let them make money at the expense of big tech.
Breaking up big tech benefits financial/venture capital, but it also benefits labor capital as well. More opportunity for more startups to succeed, more competition for engineering talent, less market distorting wage collusion.
Big tech already won. It's benefactors already reap the benefits. Break them up and a new generation of engineers can grow wealthy on the field they contribute their labor to.
Right now the proceeds of tech go to hedge funds and pension funds. It's venture capital and entrepreneurs that take risks. They're the ones that should see upside. Unfortunately, big tech monopolies put a ceiling on this.
So if Google wasn’t a “monopoly” you think a startup could make a better search engine? Be more popular than Android - Microsoft tried both and failed because people prefer Google products. It wasn’t for the lack of money.
And engineers are getting wealthy - by working for BigTech. Even an entry level developer at BigTech makes more than 90% of workers.
Google has created many more millionaires than YC. The only way that you could be a millionaire by investing in YC companies at IPO would be to be a multimillionaire and lose half your money.
There, FTFY. It was implied, was it not?
Perhaps that is what should happen here, but let's not quibble about it.
They're looking for free data for their AI startups to make money off of, and with Google being in the middle of an antitrust catastrophe that may very well collapse web browser variety to two options in the next years, there's a lot of money to be made by stoking the flames.
If I give you only one reasonable option and you choose that, is that selection? What if this one option distinguished others?
And no - some people didn't willingly and consciously switched to their search engine. It was pushed down their throats by browser vendors being paid-off by Google for setting it as the default one. Mozilla has overwritten user-changed search engine setting in Firefox with several updates.
Non tech-savvy users simply accept changes made in software they use.
"Engines like Bing" is an ambiguous term. There are better options than Bing.
They have indeed invested tons in r&d, but with excessively little results. Besides web search it's tough to see succeses that Google didn't buy their way into. Gmail, maps, ... maybe?
I'm really glad that YC brought this against Google but it should be clear that YC also enabled them. It's a lie that YC is independent from Google as it partners and promotes their engineers and Big Tech allies. They see the writing on the wall and their lawyers see this as a hedge against lawsuits against them. "We didn't cause this mess, see look! We're trying to help!" YC also doesn't serve American startups at all and their entrepreneurs strongly favors California or India.
Keep in mind that if paying to be the default search engine in a browser is illegal, then Firefox's primary revenue source is out the window.
By having search monopolies, they've gamified paying for placement above your competitor's trademarks. Rather than spend on engineering or lowering costs, you have to pay to defend your brand.
There are thousands of ways these monopolies are horrible for the consumer, for small business, and for innovation.
These companies force their way into new markets, kill the sustainable incumbents by give away services sustained on unrelated business unit profit, then raise rates once the field has been salted and acquired. Amazon is a grocery store, primary care doctor, home electronics company, and James Bond.
Why should Amazon get free advertising for their films on their web storefront, plastered on the side of their delivery vans, emblazoned on their packaging, when competing studios have to spend millions on marketing? To top it off, they're outsourcing the film crew labor to Eastern Europe where there are no crew safety laws and are putting American film workers out of business.
And the current price pressure on your salary is directly a result of their market power. They don't have to fear you starting a company that can impact their profits anymore.
These companies should all be dismantled. Large companies should be exposed to evolutionary pressures, but because of monopoly they become invasive species and dominate entire ecosystems. Regulation is the path to healthy competition and innovation.
We have sandboxing, permissions, app scanning heuristics, and databases of bad apps. If the web works from a technical standpoint and security posture, so can native.
There is no viable alternative to an Android or iOS powered smartphone for most people, and even switching between the two is enough of a challenge that few people do it once they've picked one. That gives their respective vendors substantially more power to fix prices and exclude competitors.
I would love to know how much money Google makes just from this extortion.
… which is enabled by their intentionally-misleading search ads, which also enable scams. I’d further love to know how much money they make promoting scams.
Huawei even sells phones without Google Play in the west! Of course the first thing people try to do on them is get Google Play working, because the cheap hardware is all people care about.
Sure, Apple has proven to be pretty shit about app cost, but Android does and always has offered alternative app stores, and it's the leading example of how much companies like Epic are lying through their teeth.
Consumers pay the 30% app tax on Android because the companies claiming to want to get rid of it don't actually want to invest in alternatives, they just want Apple and Google to host their games for free so they can make more money.
The same goes for a lot of these monopolies. People want options, but they don't want to pay for options. The result is a quick race to the bottom where only a few high-profit, low-margin companies dominate the market.
It is not about price. It is about platforms. A 0% app tax could not compete if there is 0 users on the platform, and google could increase the app tax to 100% if they wanted and people would still use it.
For the devs' part, some of them did port their apps to Huawei's store (at least from my observation in Indonesia). Samsung also has their own app store on their own phones that's mostly for their built-in stuff.
UPS and FedEx don't emblazon ads on their delivery trucks. Nobody is buying up those ad spaces.
If I need my phone to access my bank and my bank's app only works on official Android or iOS then that's it. I don't have a choice in what phone OS I'm running.
And the bank most likely does that because of government regulations.
> This should be zero if there was unlimited competition or web installation
Is credit card processing, billing, storage, distribution, “free?”
And the 30% figure is inaccurate. Most developers don’t pay that.
How about stripe charging 2.9% +$0.30 per transaction? They are almost double the actual cost of the interchanges.
Google and Apple charge an order of magnitude more for a straightjacket distribution mechanism that is inferior to web search.
This part reads like a suggestion to loosen anti-competitive/antitrust law.
I don't trust YC very much, but I do trust they want a share of the pie. And they're not wrong that Google has monopolized and stagnated search. I think you're reading too much into that sentence?
> Just like we don't fine everyone with a car for speeding
can me mistaken for "not everyone who is speeding is fined", and that's clearly not what you meant or wrote. You are right its not more like tolls because it still doesn't capture the /exponential/ difference of whats being compared (any other company vs google). Its like a car vs a jet fighter
The company that brought us AirBnB and Doordash arguing for fair and open markets should say enough about how honest their intentions are.
Just as an example: in my country, all public transit information is shared publicly between operators, so anyone can effectively build a public transit navigation app. That includes the for-profit companies that actually run the trains. Had they kept their data silo'd up, like they were not that long ago, companies would need to make expensive deals or write elaborate scrapers to provide basic route navigation services. Thanks to regulation opening up the data for this system, everyone benefits, including the transit companies themselves, as their route planners now seemlessly integrate with routes offered by unrelated third parties.
By only hitting Google with regulations like those, I think we're building a situation where it's only a matter of time before a new Google appears and ruins the market again. Google has been financing Firefox and Safari for years now because they don't want to be the only browser, because being the only browser comes with all kinds of nasty antitrust regulations. If we selectively apply mitigations like these for competitive purposes (which I very much doubt are the real reason they're being suggested anyway), we'll just end up with some equivalent like "OpenAI sponsoring xAI and Claude so OpenAI doesn't control more than 80% of market share".
A court can't really formulate and enact such a remedy.
all public transit information
Not all entities are public and we have more readily available methods to influence the ones that are.
Google should not be punished for having gained a near-monopoly by hiring the best people.
But perhaps their near-monopoly is due to other reasons like paying large amounts to ensure that they are the default option on various platforms. In this case, legal restrictions might be more appropriate.
How do we determine which of these proposed reasons for the near-monopoly is correct? We use a legal process where each side presents their evidence and a neutral party decides which is most credible.
It is nothing to do with "hiring the best people". Google's exec-level leadership is extremely poor, Mr Magoo-tier management. This is largely due to their share classes, the people at the very top are not very good at business so Google largely isn't run like a business. They have one business that is probably worth $4-5tn, and the rest is worth -$3-4tn. The number of "best people" out there is usually under 500 in a country the size of the US, a country that has hundreds of thousands of employees is not hiring the best.
I would guess under 100 people at Google actually positively impact financial results in any way because the advertising business grows rapidly, uses no capital, and requires no staff. This is true of many of the tech companies do, you aren't getting the best if you pay an exec $50m because the best will always do their own thing and make more. Rather you get someone like Pichai or Cook who sounds good and will get shareholders to believe that setting fire to $200m/year to pay them is a good idea, they are indistinguishable from politicians.
Google is under-earning massively. Staff aren't a monopoly, you just pay someone to leave and they are yours now (you see this in other areas like HFT where staff actually know useful stuff, you don't see this in tech because most staff don't know anything, they are looking for drones).
They start with a page with zero ads, they add one ad to that page one year, ad sales pushes that placements, then a few years they do it again, etc. Meta are the same.
Google do sell at a higher price than offline ads because of targeting/intent but this is inherent to the product: search has inherently better intent and their targeting tech is no better than anyone else such that their prices are higher/grow faster.
That is their growth model: higher ad density, the CEO deciding to add another ad to a page and earning $100m/year. There is no value-added otherwise because you don't need many people, you don't need capital and you are making $300bn/year.
And, again, if you own the shares you understand that you are getting the ads business, and because of the dual class you are also getting this tech bureaucracy that sets fire to tens of billions every year employing people to do nothing. If these people are so productive...where is the revenue? It is all ads or ancillary business, they have GCP now but there is nothing else...because these people aren't doing anything.
It is like owning a business that turns lead into gold, the process is automatic, requires no capital...and then employing a bunch of monks to pray for the lead and saying the business couldn't exist without them. Lol.
> I would guess under 100 people at Google actually positively impact financial results in any way
It's really funny to me that people write comments like this and yet are incapable of basic arithmetic, like this being 0.0001% of the US population, or thinking that the entire ad business runs on just 100 people who are magically making the company $4 trillion dollars while everyone else drags it down.
[0] https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-user-interaction-...
I’m guessing this whole court case wouldn’t have been a thing if Google wasn’t bribing Apple, to the tune of $20 billion a year [1], to remain the default search engine on iOS.
1: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/apple-may-add-ai-search-...
https://www.bing.com/search?q=pope%20francis%20died%20site%3...
The results are all from before July 2024, when the Google deal was established.
Had Google operated like a normal company, the risk/reward of this kind of research would've looked completely differently.
Google's monopoly helped research along in the same way totalitarian countries like China are developing infrastructure at break-neck speed: if you don't need to care about pesky rights and regulations, you can do things that would otherwise be impossible.
I don't think Google's monopoly is worth having the current generation of lie generator bots around, but I don't think generative AI would be where it is right now had Google been forced to comply with antitrust regulations ten years ago.
I would rather we don’t allow monopolies since they are so bad for society, regardless of some benefits.
Government funded research and private investment are still a thing, that doesn’t try to break the whole capitalism thing.
I've heard this argument before (and recognize that you aren't defending it), but telecommunications, network and technology innovation has hardly suffered since Bell was dismantled in 1982.
Fiber rollout in countries where a government funded phone line rollout has already succeeded is laughably slow, taking decades and many billions with little to show for it. Even in countries where no phone lines were rolled out back in the day, fiber is more and more being skipped as 5G allows for cheaper (though less reliable and less capable) deployment.
I'm not saying monopolies are good or anything, and I think our problems would be even worse had we stuck to the monopolist systems that brought us telecoms as we know it, but I wouldn't consider the industry one where there's enough competition to drive innovation, especially since at least half of the entire sector is competing against Chinese government-controlled companies with seemingly endless coffers.
If commercialization had been considered before funding, the project would have never been approved.
Instead, Bell management took the view that they could find everything, and some of it might become a new market, maybe.
I’m not an expert on the economic history, but you could probably argue that the last big public / private partnerships in the US were in the railroad days. Defense spending I would not count in this category either. Although it builds whole ecosystems it is too insular and incestuous compared to something like transportation, or deliberately nurturing any other budding industry in a cooperative rather than competitive fashion
It seems like the end result of unchecked capitalism is monopolistic practices. Companies want to make as much $$$ as possible. The most effective way to do that is to become a monopoly and avoid/destroy/inhibit any amount of competition as possible.
I really see it as an unstable system. Which is why we need society to put laws in place to keep the system in check, so it doesn’t turn sour.
Basically there’s a “healthiness” scale of capitalism. I want healthy capitalism.
And yet, waymo seems to have got the correct risk reward trade-off compared to all of the move-fast-and-get-banned competitors...
From where I'm sitting it's pretty clear which approach has been more successful.
I'd argue the fact that Google publishes much more of their research than their competitors do is a strong indicator that they're actually not the anti-competitive ones.
I think there are many good reasons to pursue anti-trust action against companies that are in a dominant market position, but we should be honest about the tradeoffs. Businesses that have to aggressively compete to maintain market share don't have the slack to fund basic research.
It should be at, or partnered with, higher learning institutions and since it's public funded all of the results should be free to use*. I'm willing to entertain the idea of: Free use for people and corporations within the country/countries that funded research, everyone else pays compulsory license fees.
https://par.nsf.gov/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
https://ospo.gwu.edu/overview-us-policy-open-access-and-open...
https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statem...
https://www.coalition-s.org/plan_s_principles/
The intent of the Bayh-Dole Act was to deal with a perceived problem of government-owned patents being investor-unfriendly. At the time the government would only grant non-exclusive licenses, and investors generally want exclusivity. That may have been the actual problem, moreso than who owned the patent. On the other hand, giving the actual inventors an incentive to commercialize their work should increase their productivity and the chance that the inventions actually get used.
Though both companies created novel & useful inventions, the biggest shifts in those industries during those monopoly eras were from outside those organisations by competitive startups. As an example, IBM should have produced Microsoft, but they didn't. They missed out on a multi-trillion dollar value creation opportunity as a result.
I don't think that's accurate at all. If we take say 1920 or so as the date when the monopoly was entrenched and 1984 as the break-up, there was tons of innovation in telecom in that time period. Novel telecom technologies introduced in that time period include television, microwave relays, satellite communications, submarine telephone cables, cellular telephones, fiber optics, electronic telephone switching, packet switching, the Internet.
I have been close enough to billionaires and how they spend their money to not be fully impressed by such arguments.
And certainly the robber barons of the 2000s spend far less on the public good than when tax rates were higher and they used to fund universities, libraries, hospitals and the like.
Okay. I’ll take the monopolostic government over the monopolistic corporation. Thanks.
Google's entire business model is currently under threat right now.
The software world was basically created by Xerox and AT&T research.
OpenAI is the reason for the current AI boom. Google wasn't productizing anything and didn't put any of this stuff out in the open. Where was their productization of the transformer?
If anything, it should show that Google malinvests. Maybe none of it would have seen the light of day. Only now that they've been threatened are they building products.
This is about concurrent with OpenAI's release of GPT-2. But GPT-2 was not really a product.
Then AT&T was shut down and Bell Labs went away.
If we take your argument seriously then AT&T shouldn’t have been dismantled. But it was a good thing AT&T was dismantled. It helped lead to the modern internet.
By your logic all Rockefeller had to do in the early 20th century was set up a lab to do basic research and then Standard Oil wouldn’t have been broken up.
Monopolies should be broken up. This is true regardless of any basic research that they fund.
They are disliked now as much as they were disliked then. Except back then they charged you a hell of a lot for long distance.
Citation needed. I hear this repeated, but the consumer experience was it was split into regional monopolies, and consumers now had to deal with both local and long distance, and both were still monopolies. It only got better with competition from mobile providers.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/09/att-breakup-spin...
Suprisingly there’s an archived DoJ page that says that the same remedies may have been much cheaper to achieve through other means.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/atr/att-divestiture-was-it-...
YMMV. I don’t agree with the narrowness of this analysis, and would like to see some links to academic studies in economics and the study of innovation tbh.
But it's easy to imagine a world where that didn't happen and BSD was just killed dead. So no OS X, no iOS, no Android, no ChromeOS, and the only vendor able to stand on its own is the one we all agree had the worst product.
Ironically the world where the Bell monopoly was left in place seems to me to be one where we're all stuck running Microsoft Windows on everything, no?
I mean, fine, there's nuance to everything but the idea that "well, open research isn't so important" seems frankly batshit to me. Monopolies fall on their own all the time (Microsoft's did too!). You can't get stuff into the public space that wasn't ever there to begin with.
Is that wrong? Possibly. But if you're hanging your argument on the idea that the transistor would have been invented without Bell Labs (or BSD without AT&T's open research, which was my example), I think it's on you to provide the evidence.
What in the heck are you talking about??? After Microsoft was convicted, even though they never received any actual punishment, the were very internally cautions about any behaviors that could be perceived as monopolistic. This is like a total misinterpretation of what actually occurred on your part.
And yes, monopolies do fall, after very long periods of time. Some monopoly sitting around 25 years may not seem like much, but that's half an average persons working life.
Both things can be true! It's entirely possible (probable even) that breaking up monopolies has both positive and negative impact.
And I would be a lot more sympathetic if we had a lot more public investment in technology. But we don't. What I see is both public and private research investment under major attack. I think that's a recipe for disaster.
... but that's more a story of the failure of the US government to go far enough and nationalize the rail network and its operations. The most efficient era of US rail was during World War II, when the military took it over and prioritized schedules by optimal throughput over profit concerns.
Nevertheless anti-Trust law exists because of the belief that monopolies should not exist and that it is the governments function to dismantle monopolies. The consequence of that is that corporations who can freely spend hundreds of millions on basic research will be dismantled as well, as happened with AT&T, and the funding for the basic research will cease.
>YC is arguing that their incentive for funding that basic research should be taken away in order to spur innovation?
No. That is the stance of the government. YC is arguing that the remedies the government is seeking are appropriate.
FTFY
Without Google the researchers who invented the Transformers model might have launched their own startup instead of sitting on the technology for 5 years while it's mismanaged at a big company. We would have had LLMs in 2018 not 2022.
one could argue that transformers are nothing without attention layer, which was not invented at google.
Ma Bell is arguing that Bell labs has been a fountain of knowledge everyone admires and has contributed tremendously to the advancement of telecommunication systems.
They came up with Transformers back in 2014 and sat on it for a decade until somebody else (OpenAI) forced their hand?
Sounds great to me! Wish they had been broken up before that happened.
Amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief is being submitted by Y Combinator to pile on the US vs Google anti-trust case.
YC asks court to basically cripple Google in their Search, Advertising and AI endeavours:
- Open access to Google's datasets and search index.
- Restrict Google's expansion into AI through monopolistic practices.
- Limit Google exclusive agreements and pay-to-play distribution deals.
- Enforce anti-circumvention and anti-retaliation mechanisms.
IMO, from a VC standpoint, it's in YC's interest to give their privately funded startups the best chance possible to thrive. If that includes destroying solid giants of the industry, so be it.
Seems like the court system may not be the best way to compete
OK, it was independent but established with funding from YC Research and Jessica (among others including Sam himself and Elon) and initially operating from YC office space.
So it was always something that was closely linked to YC and his involvement with it was generally accepted as being harmonious with his role running YC, until it became for-profit.
Details here: https://www.wired.com/2015/12/how-elon-musk-and-y-combinator...
What do you mean by this and how will it happen?
Democratic software means three things:
1. Can you understand it
2. Can you influence it both now and after your death
3. Can you destroy it
I don’t see how any of these things apply to AI, I’m sure it will make some people incredibly wealthy at the expense of others.
Not a single person in this entire ecosystem knows the difference between democratize and liberalize. Hint: AI isn't gonna let us vote on aspects of search.
In search (the relevant market here), Microsoft does compete in the marketplace, and Microsoft's evidence that Google's anticompetitive practices have prevented them from gaining any meaningful ground in search were a keystone of the government's case, including the fact that Microsoft has invested nearly $100 billion into Bing [1].
In adtech much the same can be said about Meta.
So, again, I'm curious: in which market does Google not have competitors spending massive amounts of cash which Google still manages to hold back from being able to meaningfully compete?
[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223...
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223...
Also as a verb it’s hard to pronounce.
In search in particular, search results have been more than web links since the early 2000s when instant answers started to appear on Yahoo. Since then, more and more of the page is instant answers of one kind or another (aka search modules, oneboxes, etc.) and less and less of it is traditional web links.
AI-assisted answers has accelerated this even more in the past two years, and we get 0 of that from Bing. Same with knowledge graph answers before that (e.g., info from Wikipedia and other quick facts, which became the most prevalent search module on desktop), again, 0 from Bing. And same for the most prevalent search module on mobile too — local results — 0 from Bing.
That is to say, a lot of our search results content is not coming from Bing. We have hundreds of team members and millions of lines of search code at this point. We’re constantly working on search, and looking to improve it. We post updates quarterly to https://duckduckgo.com/updates (along with updates on our other products and services).
In terms of traditional web links, yes, we primarily use Bing as an input in the same way Kagi primarily uses Google as an input. As Vlad has said publicly (most recently heard him on The Talk Show) and has been made clear from this US v Google case from Google/Bing/Apple/OpenAI/etc. testimony, it costs upwards of a billion dollars a year to maintain a competitive index of web links. Only the biggest companies can afford that. Nevertheless, we still work on actively crawling and indexing, but the reality is small companies cannot do it all themselves. In fact, that's true for most products in most industries -- they rely on a supply chain for various components, some of them critical.
Finally, even if you have the same traditional links, but you put instant answers above or beside or in between them, change the design significantly, or otherwise add to them (all of which we do), then the actual user experience of the search results ends up being significantly different in terms of how it is perceived and what people click on. For the latter, people engage with a section above another section about twice as much, so for example, if you just put a different box/answer on top you've drastically changed the experience of the search engine.
For example, from the second filing I linked to:
> After search began appearing on phones, Google started logging information about user location, swipes, and other user-related movements. PFOF ¶¶ 1003–1004. This data is now vital to every aspect of search, including figuring out where and when to crawl specific websites, how to index the information retrieved from that crawl, what documents to retrieve from the index in response to a user query, and how to rank the retrieved items. Some elements of Google’s search engine are trained on 13 months of data—a volume that would take Bing over 17 years to accumulate.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43946577
You're not entitled to a business model if your business model is harmful.
What exactly do you think is stopping you from using a competitor? Can you not find the setting to change your default search engine in Chrome? Is Google blocking you from making that choice somehow? All the arguments I've seen for Google being anti-competitive in this sector are extremely weak.
They compete much like I compete for People’s Most Beautiful Man in the World :)
These are monopolies. You might not see it because the economy is so _over monopolized_ it's hard to have perspective.
YCombinator loves to pretend it invented the idea of startups and entreprenourism but those have been vigorous and healthy throughout _most_ of America's existence. When they weren't we wrote some of the most comprehensive and consumer friendly anti-trust laws in the entire world. A feat which still stands today.
We have 8 monoplies that live together.
I have never once lived in a house where I had a choice of ISP in the US (unless you count getting a mobile router).
Google is being competitive.
YC is being anti-competitive.
Because they suck at competing against Google and they want to get unfair, unethical advantage themselves.
Imagine spending years and billions building something and then I show up and say “hey man that’s not fair, give me a slice of that thing for free. Oh and also I’m probably going to sell it back to you someday for a lot of money”.
And before someone tells me “that’s the law”, I don’t care. If that’s the law then it should be changed. Laws have been written (and lobbied) for all sorts of reasons and surprisingly not all of them are fair and ethical.
Standard Oil is being competitive.
The U.S. oil refining and distribution industry is being anti-competitive.
Because they suck at competing against Standard Oil and they want to get unfair, unethical advantage themselves.
Imagine spending years and billions building something and then I show up and say “hey man that’s not fair, give me a slice of that thing”.
And before someone tells me “that’s the Sherman Act”, I don’t care. If that’s the law then it should be changed. Laws have been written (and lobbied) for all sorts of reasons and surprisingly not all of them are fair and ethical.
(I hope this illustrates how easy it is to make this exact argument about literally any monopoly.)
If you don't want someone to come and bust a monopoly you've spent years and billions building, then don't use your time and money to build a monopoly.
So pretty much "We don't want google to develop new things, we want them to have buy those from us"
The thing is, Google doesn't develop anything new. Everything new they make fails horribly, so they can't and don't compete with YC in the way that you think.
Examples of failed Google homegrown technologies include:
- Social media: Google Buzz, Google+
- Messaging: Google Chat, Hangouts, actually there's too many to list
- Video: Google Video
Almost all of Google's successful products are acquisitions:
- Homegrown: Search, Gmail
- Acquisitions: YouTube, Analytics, most of their adtech stack, Android, DeepBrain (the people who did all the AI work at Google)
Furthermore, whenever Google or Facebook buys any startup, that startup gets an immediate moat and capital injection that can be used to crush any other startup that didn't sell out fast enough. So YC only has one option for an exit: sell the company to Google at a price Google decides.
"DeepBrain" isn't a thing. Google acquired DeepMind, which was the second biggest research lab in AI at the time. The first biggest was Google Brain. They existed in parallel until being merged in 2023.
Brain was entirely homegrown, and it was responsible for AIAYN, BERT, PaLM. Which is to say, transformers.
b) Google Cloud, Gemini, TPUs, Pixel etc seem like pretty important products to me.
I'm curious what you've seen or heard that led you to that conclusion? It's the opposite of correct.
YC supports what founders want, including if they want to sell to $BigCo, but such outcomes are hardly successes for YC. YC's success depends on outlier companies growing much larger than that.
Gemini (the app, not the API or AI studio) is one of the few places where we can use frontier generative AI without a “customer noncompete” (you know, the one where they compete with us and then say we’re not allowed to compete back) … if you use Claude or OpenAI or Grok, you’re prohibited from training on your chat logs, or even using the thing to develop AI. Not so with Gemini app.
Too bad you have to lose your chat history just to deactivate model training (“Gemini apps activity” conflates opt-out of training with opt-out of storing chat history)
I don’t know much about the ads space but I just hope going after Google doesn’t create a vacuum that gets filled by an even worse monopoly (OpenAI)
There has been no time in human history where destroying monopolies were a bad thing.
Just because OpenAI isn’t in “extraction mode” yet doesn’t mean it’s not a scary monopoly.
Source, figure 2 in: [1] https://iot-analytics.com/leading-generative-ai-companies/
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but:
1. If you're talking about basic research, Microsoft Research has been a thing since the 90's, is highly prestigious, and has published far more papers than Google, based on their respective research websites. (To be fair, Google started much later.)
2. If you're talking about product development, MSFT is vastly more diversified in terms of revenues than any of the "Magnificent 7" because of their varied product lineup.
3. The basis of their relationship with OpenAI is literally them investing double digit billions to catch up on the AI race once they recognized the opportunity.
> OpenAI is in effect a client state of Microsoft that Microsoft is using to make Google look flat-footed and force them to enter the chatbot market.
I'm not sure about Microsoft's influence in OpenAI's strategy, but it's pretty clear Google was caught flatfooted by their own strategy of locking away transformer technology behind products that didn't threaten their search monopoly. There's a reason the researchers who invented transformers had to leave and start a different company to bring its true potential to the market. Which, even if it was just a chatbot, is what has kicked off the AI boom.
Anyway my statement was meant to be objective. Look at how much Microsoft spends on R&D for the last 25 years, compared to the amount Google spends, in absolute terms and as a fraction of revenues.
My contention was that this ignores the transformative potential of long-range theoretical research. For instance, somehow very few consider Xerox PARC to be an anti-pattern.
From what I hear in the last few years even MSR has changed its ways to steer its research more in line with needs of product divisions, and I actually consider that a loss. Who knows what paradigm-shifting inventions like GenAI are being steered away from?
> Look at how much Microsoft spends on R&D for the last 25 years, compared to the amount Google spends, in absolute terms and as a fraction of revenues.
Hmm, at the risk of relying on sycophantic bots, AI overviews suggest most recently Microsoft spent 13.2% of revenues vs 14.8% for Google (and 30% for Meta!) Of course even a single % point is in the millions at their scale, but there are a ton of confounding factors including differing product margins and payscales (and CEO obsessions like Metaverse!) At least at a quick glance MSFT and GOOG seem comparable.
The problem here is how "R&D" is defined. Unfortunately, even day-to-day product development is lumped in with R&D. I've done "R&D" in academia, private research firms, and big tech, and they are all poles apart. "Actual" R&D is very researchy, often based in discovering new aspects of reality, whereas "product" R&D is just regular product development. Which could be considered discovering new aspects of the market I suppose. They are both valuable but on very differnt timelines.
Is there anything he could have done to avoid this outcome? In a way that Google shareholders would have found acceptable?
Or was this outcome inevitable?
NO? Yeah. I thought so as well
Then the outcome was inevitable.
That remains to be seen. The fear is that Google can leverage its large search index to produce better LLM experiences and win in that market too.
Unlike Microsoft's antitrust case of the 90s, Google seems much less anti-competitive by nature. Sure, they have unprecedented scale in search... but even that hegemony is being threatened by others in AI.
If anything, going after Google with a DoJ kludgel will cause a servere freeze on startup M&A across all of FAANG. With IPO windows (mostly) closed, this removes the biggest exit dynamic the startup ecosystem has at its disposal. This is not a good thing from my perspective, and would seem counter to YC's interests.
Someone steelman this for me...?
It seems much less, but I don't believe it is much less anticompetitive. We're talking about the search market specifically in this case, and the government has presented strong evidence that Google is:
* Using its position in other markets (browser, mobile) to ensure that others can't compete in search.
* Paying the major other vendors in those markets (browser, mobile) enormous sums of money to ensure that ~100% of the market share in both markets is used to prop up their lead in search.
Both of these things are pretty blatantly anticompetitive: they're competing not primarily based on the quality of their product offering but instead based on their pre-existing revenue streams and their leads in other markets.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/public-good.asp
Utilities and infrastructure can be considered public goods insofar as they have the characteristics of non-rivalry and non-excludability, meaning that one person's use of them does not diminish another person's ability to use them and it is difficult to prevent others from using them even if they have not contributed to their provision.
However, utilities are typically excludable (service can be cut off for non-payment) and rivalrous to some extent (there are capacity limits and usage can impact others), so they are better classified as private or quasi-public goods.
So why is this idea so prevalent: that public goods should be public utilities?
A key driver behind the transformation of some public goods into regulated public utilities seems to be the theory of "natural monopoly," which posits that certain industries are most efficiently served by a single provider, making competition impractical or wasteful. Then in 1919 the economic theory of public goods, notably developed by Erik Lindahl, further contributed to the myth by arguing that public goods should be funded through taxation based on individual benefit. This reinforced the notion that the government should organize and finance such goods, often through public utility models.
So I wouldn't say public goods have nothing to do with public utilities.
As it relates to Google search, I think it is very difficult to construct an argument that search is a natural monopoly. There's no limitations on parallel processes the way there are with roads or railroads or electric infrastructure. In fact, people have access to a long list of competitors at all times.
You can make it much better case that they are engaging in monopolistic practices, which is a claim very different from a natural constraint
This doesn't follow from the linked article. Taxes can be levied in various ways, oftentimes related to usage. Involving a private entity doesn't suddenly change the nature of the thing. There's a marked difference between a sack of flour and my electric meter.
We as a society decide to make certain things into public goods. This is frequently the choice for natural monopolies.
Critiquing the article you linked - when taken literally non-rivalrous applies to approximately nothing. Non-excludability is simply a matter of law, which is a matter of what the voting public wants.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43950097
Things like public parks and public pools would be classic examples of a "Common resource." Rival and non-excludable.
Classic examples of true public goods would be public radio broadcasting or national defense.
At some point in the past couple decades, people have come to misunderstand the term. Having heard the argument that public goods justify taxation to fund them, they come to believe that anything they like must be a public good.
The local electric utility isn't "non-excludable" (unless you ignore criminal law) but it is certainly a public utility, a natural monopoly, and public good by most metrics. The vast majority of jurisdictions regulate it accordingly.
Startups ideally should compete on merit, not on whether they are eventually allowed access to Google’s platforms or get acquired. Startups can still exit via IPO, PE acquisition, cross-industry buyers or M&A.
From this POV, Google’s control over the adtech stack may be seen as gatekeeping digital advertising, which many YC companies rely on.
The use money and Google Play services to hinder competition.
Not really less anti-competitive.
On Desktop it’s 13%, which is second place.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
Lots of people working just use whatever browser is preloaded. In addition, you can't even download another browser in a lot of environments.
I also feel like Microsoft’s heavy handed dark patterns trick less computer savvy people into using it, and those people probably aren’t aware of how much info Microsoft is collecting about them. As a result, I seriously question that Edge’s market share is organic because people actually like it.
And I'm not buying the argument that progress on the Web (tech stack) should stop so that it's easier to make/maintain a browser.
You pay a lawyer a few thousand bucks to write some populist bromides you get to slap your name in the news. Seems like a good ROI.
They would definitely NOT survive in any recognizable form with "only a few billion dollars", because the stock price is a function of profits. Take away most of the profits, and most of the company's value gets wiped out, most of the employees would leave or get laid off, and anything of value that remains would quickly become worthless. Users would all move to the government-sanctioned replacement monopoly, likely X. To say nothing about the thousands of ordinary people who have large Alphabet holdings in their retirement portfolios and would be wiped out.
Google is practically the definition of a "too big to fail" company. They need to be reigned in to allow more competition, but straight up destroying the company would be a move so colossally stupid I could just see the Trump regime doing it.
it won't. My bet is that bing and some other indexes are 95% Ok for average Joe. But relevance ranking is much tougher problem, and "google.com" is household brand with many other functions(maps, news, stocks, weather, knowledge graph, shopping, videos), and that's what is foundation of google monopoly.
I think this shared index thing will actually kill competition even more, since every players will use only index owned by google now.
This was 10 years ago. I could argue a moral Superior that Google possessed over Microsoft and Facebook, but man those days are looooooong gone.
I mean, they're still going to be the number 1 name in adtech and analytics. And they're still gonna have pretty decent personalized ads because of analytics.
Plus, that just one part of their business. There's also Android, which is a money printing machine with the Google Store (although that's under attack too).
It makes sense to break that out so everyone has access to the same dataset at FRAND pricing.
My heart just wants Google to burn to the ground, but my brain says this is the more reasonable approach.
Thus being even slightly in front of others is reinforced and the gap only widens.
How so?
A caching proxy costs you almost nothing and will serve thousands of requests per second on ancient hardware. Actually there's never been a better time in the history of the Internet to have competing search engines since there's never been so much abundance of performance, bandwidth, and software available at historic low prices or for free.
This isn't a "natural" monopoly, it's more like Internet Explorer 6.0 and everyone designing their sites to use ActiveX and IE-specific quirks.
Of course, it would incentivize the sites to make you want to crawl them more, but that might be a good thing. There would be pressure on you to focus on quality over quantity, which would probably be a good thing for your product.
Believe it or not, this is a potential solution for micropayments that has been explored.
Based on what evidence.
There are so many other bots/scrapers out there that literally return zero that I don’t blame site owners for blocking all bots except googlebot.
Would it be nice if they also allowed altruist-bot or common-crawler-bot? Maybe, but that’s their call and a lot of them have made it on a rational basis.
* - or is perceived to return
I doubt this is happening outside of a few small hobbyist websites where crawler traffic looks significant relative to human traffic. Even among those, it’s so common to move to static hosting with essentially zero cost and/or sign up for free tiers of CDNs that it’s just not worth it outside of edge cases like trying to host public-facing Gitlab instances with large projects.
Even then, the ROI on setting up proper caching and rate limiting far outweighs the ROI on trying to play whack-a-mole with non-Google bots.
Even if someone did go to all the lengths to try to block the majority of bots, I have a really hard time believing they wouldn’t take the extra 10 minutes to look up the other major crawlers and put those on the allow list, too.
This whole argument about sites going to great lengths to block search indexers but then stopping just short of allowing a couple more of the well-known ones feels like mental gymnastics for a situation that doesn’t occur.
So practically, there's very little value in allowing those. I usually don't bother blocking them, but if my content wasn't easy to cache, I probably would.
That's not it. They're going to great lengths to block all bot traffic because of abusive and generally incompetent actors chewing through their resources. I'll cite that anubis has made the front page of HN several times within the past couple months. It is far from the first or only solution in that space, merely one of many alternatives to the solutions provided by centralized services such as cloudflare.
I run a number of sites with decent traffic and the amount of spam/scam requests outnumbers crawling bots 1000 to 1.
I would guess that the number of sites allowing just Googlebot is 0.
This is similar to the natural monopoly of root DNS servers (managed as a public good). There is no reason more money couldn't go into either Common Crawl, or something like it. The Internet Archive can persist the data for ~$2/GB in perpetuity (although storing it elsewhere is also fine imho) as the storage system of last resort. How you provide access to this data is, I argue, similar to how access to science datasets is provided by custodian institutions (examples would be NOAA, CERN, etc).
Build foundations on public goods, very broadly speaking (think OSI model, but for entire systems). This helps society avoid the grasp of Big Tech and their endless desire to build moats for value capture.
No they can't but do you have a source?
> We estimate that permanent storage costs us approximately $2.00US per gigabyte.
https://webservices.archive.org/pages/vault/
> Vault offers a low-cost pricing model based on a one-time price per-gigabyte/terabyte for data deposited in the system, with no additional annual storage fees or data egress costs.
https://blog.dshr.org/2017/08/economic-model-of-long-term-st...
I agree that each front end should do it, but you can bet it will be a core service.
It's already the case that googlebot is the common denominator bot that's allowed everywhere, ccbot not so much.
(Cloudflare customer, no other affiliation)
Bots are typically tuned to work with generic sites over crawling efficiently.
And what do you mean by your search infrastructure? Are you talking about elasticsearch or some equivalent?
I didn’t work on search, but yeah, something like Elasticsearch. Googlebot was a majority of our search traffic at times.
One web forum I regularly read went through a patch a few months ago where it was unavailable for about 90% of the time due to being hammered by crawlers. It's only up again now because the owner managed to find a way to block them that hasn't yet been circumvented.
So it's easy to see why people would allow googlebot and little else.
We routinely are fighting off hundreds of bots at any moment. Thousands and Thousands per day, easily. US, China, Brazil from hundreds of different IPs, dozens of different (and falsified!) user agents all ignoring robots.txt and pushing over services that are needed by human beings trying to get work done.
EDIT: Just checked our anubis stats for the last 24h
CHALLENGE: 829,586
DENY: 621,462
ALLOW: 96,810
This is with a pretty aggressive "DENY" rule for a lot of the AI related bots and on 2 pretty small sites at $JOB. We have hundreds, if not thousands of different sites that aren't protected by Anubis (yet).
Anubis and efforts like it are a xesend for companies that don't want to pay off Cloudflare or some other "security" company peddling a WAF.
One is, suppose there are a thousand search engine bots. Then what you want is some standard facility to say "please give me a list of every resources on this site that has changed since <timestamp>" so they can each get a diff from the last time they crawled your site. Uploading each resource on the site to each of a thousand bots once is going to be irrelevant to a site serving millions of users (because it's a trivial percentage) and to a site with a small amount of content (because it's a small absolute number), which together constitute the vast majority of all sites.
The other is, there are aggressive bots that will try to scrape your entire site five times a day even if nothing has changed and ignore robots.txt. But then you set traps like disallowing something in robots.txt and then ban anything that tries to access it, which doesn't affect legitimate search engine crawlers because they respect robots.txt.
That doesn't work at all when the scraper rapidly rotates IPs from different ASNs because you can't differentiate the legitimate from the abusive traffic on a per-request basis. All you can be certain of is that a significant portion of your traffic is abusive.
That results in aggressive filtering schemes which in turn means permitted bots must be whitelisted on a case by case basis.
Well sure you can. If it's requesting something which is allowed in robots.txt, it's a legitimate request. It's only if it's requesting something that isn't that you have to start trying to decide whether to filter it or not.
What does it matter if they use multiple IP addresses to request only things you would have allowed them to request from a single one?
An abusive scraper is pushing over your boxes. It is intentionally circumventing rate limits and (more generally) accurate attribution of the traffic source. In this example you have deemed such behavior to be abusive and would like to put a stop to it.
Any given request looks pretty much normal. The vast majority are coming from residential IPs (in this example your site serves mostly residential customers to begin with).
So what if 0.001% of requests hit a disallowed resource and you ban those IPs? That's approximately 0.001% of the traffic that you're currently experiencing. It does not solve your problem at all - the excessive traffic that is disrespecting ratelimits and gumming up your service for other well behaved users.
The claim that search is a natural monopoly because of the impact on websites of having a few more search competitors scanning them seems silly. I don’t think it’s a natural monopoly at all.
I think it's also important to highlight that sites explicitly choose which bots to allow in their robots.txt files, prioritizing Google which reinforces its position as the de-facto monopoly. Even when other bots are technically able to crawl them.
The indexer, without direct Google influence, is primarily incentivized to play nice with site administrators. This gives them reasons to improve consideration of both network integrity and privacy concerns (though Google has generally been good about these things, I think the damage is done regarding privacy that the brand name is toxic, regardless of the behaviors).
If China can apply it for total information awareness on their population, Google can apply it on page reliability
Companies want traffic from any source they can get. They welcome every search engine crawler that comes along because every little exposure translates to incremental chances at revenue or growing audience.
I doubt many people are doing things to allow Googlebot but also ban other search crawlers.
> My heart just wants Google to burn to the ground
I think there’s a lot of that in this thread and it’s opening the door to some mental gymnastics like the above claim about Google being the only crawler allowed to index the internet.
Sadly this is just not the case.[1][2] Google knows this too so they explicitly crawl from a specific IP range that they publish.[3]
I also know this, because I had a website that blocked any bots outside of that IP range. We had honeypot links (hidden to humans via CSS) that insta-banned any user or bot that clicked/fetched them. User-Agent from curl, wget, or any HTTP lib = insta-ban. Crawling links sequentially across multiple IPs = all banned. Any signal we found that indicated you were not a human using a web browser = ban.
We were listed on Google and never had traffic issues.
[1] https://onescales.com/blogs/main/the-bot-blocklist
[2] Chart in the middle of this page: https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-blo... (note: Google-Extended != Googlebot)
[3] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
Why not also require Apple to split off only the phone and messaging part of its iPhone, Meta to split off only the user feed data, and for the U.S. federal government to run only out of Washington D.C.?
This isn’t the breakup of AT&T in the early 1980s where you could say all the equipment and wiring just now belongs to separate entities. (It wasn’t that simple, but it wasn’t like trying to extract an organ.)
I think people have to understand that and know that what they’re doing is killing Google, and it was already on its way into mind-numbed enterprise territory.
This strikes me like "two easy steps to draw an owl. First draw the head, then draw the body". I generally support some sort of breakup, but hand waving the complexities away is not going to do anybody any good
Ooh, can we? My wife is super jealous of my ability to install custom apps for phone calls and messaging on Android, it'd be great if Apple would open theirs up to competition. Competition in the SMS app space would also likely help break up the usage of iMessage as a tool to pressure people into getting an iPhone so they get the blue bubble.
If the dream of a Star Trek future reputation-based government run by AI which secretly manipulates the vote comes true, yes we can!
Either that or we could organize competitors to lobby the US or EU for more lawsuits in exchange for billions in kickbacks! (Not implying anything by this.)
You're not even really dealing with any of these shared infrastructure public property private property merged infrastructure issues.
Yeah sure. There's mountains of racks of servers, but those aren't that hard to get tariffs TBD.
I think it'll be interesting just to try and find some collection of ex Google execs who had actually like to go back to the do no evil days, and just hand them a copy of all the data.
I simply don't think we have the properly and elected set of officials to implement antitrust of any scale. DOJ is now permanently politicized and corrupt, and citizens United means corps can outspend "the people" lavishly.
Antitrust would mean a more diverse and resilient supply chain, creativity, more employment, more local manufacturing, a reversal of the "awful customer service" as a default, better prices, a less corrupt government, better products, more economic mobility, and, dare I say it, more freedom.
Actually, let me expound upon the somewhat nebulous idea of more freedom. I think we all hear about Shadow banning or outright banning with utter silence and no appeals process for large internet companies that have a complete monopoly on some critical aspect of Internet usage.
If these companies enabled by their cartel control, decide they don't like you or are told by a government not to like you, it is approaching a bigger burden as being denied the ability to drive.
Not a single one of those is something oligarchs or a corporatocracy has the slightest interest in
Google has two interlocked monopolies, one is the search index and the other is their advertising service. We often joked that if Google reasonable and non-discriminatory priced access to their index, both to themselves and to others, AND they allowed someone to put what ever ads they wanted on those results. That change the landscape dramatically.
Google would carve out their crawler/indexer/ranker business and sell access to themselves and others which would allow that business an income that did NOT go back to the parent company (had to be disbursed inside as capex or opex for the business).
Then front ends would have a good shot, DDG for example could front the index with the value proposition of privacy. Someone else could front the index with a value proposition of no-ads ever. A third party might front that index attuned to specific use cases like literature search.
It would be a very different world.
There is no default for unregulated markets. It's a question of whether the economies of scale outweigh the added costs from the complexity that scale requires. It costs close to 100x as much to build 100 houses, run 100 restaurants, or operate 100 trucks as it does to do 1. That's why these industries are not very concentrated. Whereas it costs nowhere close to 100x for a software or financial services company to serve 100x thee customers, so software and finance are very concentrated.
The effect of regulation is typically to increase concentration because the cost of compliance actually tends to scale very well. So businesses that grow face an decreasing regulatory compliance cost as a percent of revenue.
Regulation can increase concentration in a high corruption/cronyism environment — regulatory capture and regulatory moats. There is plenty of that happening.
In building, I think we have local-concentration, due to both regulatory heterogeneity and then local cronyism - Bob has decades of connections to the city and gets permits easily, whereas Bob’s competitor Steve is stuck in a loop of rejection due to a never ending list of pesky reasons.
Inequality at a point in time , and over time , is not nearly as bad if the winners keep rotating
That's what all the lobbyists are for.
None of the people or organisations that advocate for "free markets" or competition actually want free markets and competition. It's a smoke screen so they can keep buying politicians to get their special privileges.
That's completely incorrect. Historically, monopolies were pretty long-lived. So much that they were often written into the legal codes.
It's only fairly recently that the pace of innovation picked up so much, that monopolies not really die per se, but just become irrelevant.
Because, contrary to what we would all like to believe, once a company becomes large we don't want them to go under, even if they're not optimal.
There's a huge amount of jobs, institutional knowledge, processes, capital, etc in these big monopolies. Like if Boeing just went under today, how long would it take for another company to re-figure out how to make airplanes? I mean, take a look at NASA. We went to the moon, but can we do it again? It would be very difficult. Because so many engineers retired and IP was allowed to just... rot.
It's a balancing act. Obviously we want to keep the market as free as possible and yadda yadda invisible hand. But we also have national security to consider, and practicality.
Blekko also did, 10 years ago. When they still existed.
Ie. Knowing which users clicked which search results.
Without the click stream, one cannot build or even maintain a good ranker. With a larger click stream from more users, one can make a better ranker, which in turn makes the service better so more users use it.
End result: monopoly.
The only solution is to force all players to share click stream data with all others.
Kagi is a primarily meta search engine. The click stream exists on their sources (Bing, Google, Yandex, Marginalia, not sure if they use Brave). They do have Teclis which is their own index that they use, and their systems for reordering the page of results such as downranking heavy ad pages, and based upon user preferences (which I love).
https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-... is a source I would recommend checking out if you are curious.
That said, if you run the frontend as proposed, you get to collect the clicks. That gives you the click stream you want. If the index returns you a serp with unwrapped links (which it should if it was unbundled from a given search front end) then you could develop analytics around what your particular customers "like" in their links and have a different ranking than perhaps some other front end. One thing that Blekko made really clear for me that the Google idea that there was always the "best" result for that query (aka the I'm Feeling Lucky link) there was often different shades of intent behind the query that aren't part of the query itself. Google felt they could get it in the first 10 links (back before the first 10 links were sponsored content :-)) and often on the page you could see the two or three inferred "intents" (shopping, information, entertainment were common).
The index is the farthest thing from a monopoly Google has - anyone can recreate it. Heck, you can even just download Commoncrawl to get a massive head start.
I'd love to compete directly with OpenAI, but the cost of a half million GPUs is a me problem - not a them problem. Google can't be faulted for figuring out how to crawl the web in an economically viable way.
Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41393475 - Aug 2024 (79 comments)
Also, I love this bit: "[Google's] search results are of the best quality among its advertising-driven peers." I can just feel the breath of the guy who jumped in to say "wait, you can't just admit that Google's results are better than Kagi's! You need to add some sorta qualifier there that doesn't apply to us."
The more crawlers out there, the more useless traffic is being served by every single website on the internet.
In an ideal world, there would be a single authoritative index, just as we have with web domains, and all players would cooperate into building, maintaining and improving it, so websites would not need to be constantly hammered by thousands of crawlers everyday.
One more crawler for a search index wouldn’t hurt.
I’m saying that because yes, I’ve used Kagi recently, and I switch back to Google every single time because Kagi can’t find anything. Kagi is to Google what Siri is to ChatGPT. Siri can’t even answer “What time is it?”
What “level” is that which couldn’t possibly be accomplished by humans? Are you seeing thousands of messages every day?
As a Kagi user, I would not say it's improved a lot lately. It's a consistent, specific product for what I need. I like the privacy aspects of it, and the control to block, raise or lower sites in my search results. If that's not something you care about then don't use it.
Is it better than Google at finding things? I don't think so, but then, Google is trash these days too
The GP of your comment is literally saying that Kagi is better than Google as of late. You’re not helping the “Kagi doesn’t use bots” case by ignore the context 2 comments up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43948385
You're welcome to check my post history, I'm certainly not a bot. Or if I am, I'm a very convincing one that runs an astrophotography blog.
I disagree with the conclusion but I agree with the premise. Man is a rationalizing animal, and one way to validate one’s choice in paying for a search engine (whether it is better or not) is to get others to use it as well. Kagi is also good at PR, they were able to spin a hostile metering plan as a lenient subscription plan.
Word of mouth is often more prevalent than we think, and certainly more powerful than botting. I would not be shocked if the author of that “AirBnBs are blackhats” article was interacting with real users of Craigslist spurred on by some referral scheme.
It's not so much validating, but I'm hoping they grow so I can keep using their service. It would suck for them to close shop because they never got popular enough to be sustainable.
I was commenting on the weakness of the analogy. There’s nothing in any of the 4 entities mentioned other than the author’s opinion about them.
Sorry my comment missed the mark for you.
Ergo, a person of average scholastic aptitude who is neither trying to ape late night talk show hosts by taking half of each single-colon-pair of an analogy, severing the other pair ends and any remaining context, and repeating the result with a well-rehearsed look of confusion; nor defensive about being called out for doing just that, can readily infer that the message being transmitted is that Kagi is fundamentally a tool very similar to Google, but which delivers inferior results.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/17/health/chatgpt-ai-doctors...
Odd to dismiss a point purely because it's consistently made, especially without much apparent disagreement. Perhaps more likely: there are just _many_ happy Kagi customers in the HN community.
As one data point: I use Kagi, and agree with GP, and I am not a bot (activity of this HN account predates existence of Kagi by many years).
That doesn't dismiss your experience of course, lots of people use search engines in different ways! Personally, I found the ads & other crap of Google drowned out results, and I frequently hit SEO spam etc where site reranking was helpful. I'm sure there's scenarios where that doesn't make sense though, it's not for everybody (not everybody can justify paying for search, just for starters).
I also don't think crawling the Web is the hard part. It's extraordinarily easy to do it badly [1] but what's the solution here? To have a bunch of wannabe search engines crawl Google's index instead?
I've thought about this and I wonder if trying to replicate a general purpose search engine here is the right approach or not. Might it not be easier to target a particular vertical, at least to start with? I refuse to believe Google cannot be bested in every single vertical or that the scale of the job can't be segmented to some degree.
[1]: https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/06/16/the-perfect-web-spider...
If it's teh latter, its a neat way to ask a company to sell their users data to a third party because any kind of ranking comes via aggregation of users' actions. Without involving any user consent at all.
They argue that the search index is an essential facility, and per their link "The essential facilities doctrine attacks a form of exclusionary conduct by which an undertaking controls the conditions of access to an asset forming a ‘bottleneck’ for rivals to compete".
But unlike physical locations where bridges/ports can be built, the ability to crawl the internet is not excludable by Google.
They do argue that the web is not friendly to new crawlers, but what Kagi wants is not just the raw index itself, but also all the serving/ranking built on top of it so that they do not have to re-engineer it themselves.
It's also worth noting that Bing exists, and presumably has it's own index of the web and no evidence has been presented that the raw index content itself is the reason that Bing is not competitive.