As for the rebuttal of "bUt ThE gDp", there's a counter-argument to be made that the GDP would have grown just as much with a higher diversity and stringent M&A regulations by spurring on new businesses and concepts, as opposed to mainstreaming fad after fad that seemingly solely benefits the established players. There's another argument to be made equating GDP values to desirable targets creates a Goodhart's Law problem, thereby making GDP as a measure of growth or success a bad metric; the rise of income and wealth inequality these past few decades, when there was increased focus on GDP as a target of growth or success, could be viewed as evidence supporting said argument.
It's worth noting that this case against Google is likely to be the bellwether for future divestments and breakups. Whatever comes next will be an invaluable learning experience for both sides, just like AT&T and Microsoft's own anti-trust woes were learning experiences for the current crop of companies.
Youtube may be the only viable company that can come out of Google. Rest will either have to charge a lot of money or die.
And we will be left with an even more profitable ad giant, that sends back all profits to it's share holders.
In fact, it almost seems like the only people able to produce great things in the 1970s were massive entrenched corporations like Ma Bell.
Funny, that.
Come to think of it, wasn't there a much more vibrant browser ecosystem in the late 90s and early 2000s, before Google used its dominant position in the ad market to undercut the competition? There used to be a lot more mobile operating systems out there, too.
I wonder what happened to all that competition? It's almost like some sort of massive anti-competitive influence came into force in the tech scene somewhere in the 2000s. . .
My subjective experiences tell me that, just like the early days of the microcomputer revolution, anything is possible with talented nerds who don't have to worry about grinding at their day jobs to survive. Early markets are often defined by those with the privilege to innovate absent the need to work to survive, and sharing the fruits of their labors with the masses because that's their entire intent - and that being able to live off of that income instead of a corporate gig was a nice bonus.
If you want more innovation, focus on eliminating societal precarity instead of slashing regulations or growing monopolies.
No? It used to be IE and Mozilla, and now it's Edge, Chrome, and Mozilla. Opera existed then and now, and probably more people use it now, but it's still small enough that no one cares. I suppose you could make a point about Edge using Chrome's engine, but that's because the IE one sucked and the new one Microsoft made for Edge sucked so they eventually switched to using Chrome's. But the idea that the browser market was somehow better back in the day is hilarious and wrong.
>There used to be a lot more mobile operating systems out there, too.
Not really. I suppose early on during the smartphone era, blackberry was still around, but they mostly lost out due to Apple finally getting decent MDM, and not bothering to improve their product after a while, than the fact that Android was growing in popularity. Microsoft entered kinda late and never really developed their phone OS enough and eventually gave up, but that's because their product wasn't good enough, not because of anything the others were doing to stop them.
Not sure if this is meant tongue-in-cheek.
Google very aggressively chased any 3rd-party Windows Phone apps out of town that were Google—services compatible, whilst refusing to release 1st party apps themselves.
Microsoft shares a fair part in the blame because they made developers switch frameworks like… 5 times (?) in the span of 3 OS versions. Not to mention the constant sunsetting of devices.
The UI was amazing though. All content and no dressing, performant on low-end hardware, had dark mode half a decade before Android / iOS.
We're seeing less engines which is far more important than the browser wrapper. Also Quantum's development is pretty much driven by a desire to maintain feature parity with Blink which means Google gets control over what the web is according to every major browser. The fact that there are a variety of companies whose browsers are under Google's control is irrelevant in terms of anti-competitive discussion.
Que?
If Google did some heinous stuff, tomorrow Microsoft would hard-fork Chromium and Brave et al would just switch their upstream to Edge.
Doubt.
I'll believe it when I see it. Maintaining a hard fork is almost as hard as a greenfield browser like old Edge or old Opera. There are no serious competitors doing hard Chromium forks besides Apple. (Afraid to admit Firefox isn't a serious competitor anymore.)
That's moving the goalposts, but honestly in the past it was IE and sometimes mozilla deciding how the web was going to work and anyone else playing catch up, which is essentially still what it is.
Most browsers have consolidated over time because we are constantly updating web standards and bar for security is so high. On top of that everything has to be insanely backward compatible
WebGPU is a good example. Implementing that securely in a nightmare
There are lots of distos out there, but we all use the same core and make it better & safer together.
Coming from Enterprise Architecture world, if you're not already treating browsers as full-fledged operating systems to manage and secure, then you're operating dangerously. In fact, that's actually why I'm resistant to further "webification" of software and applications, as it's the same drawbacks as nested virtualization: now we have the OS layer that makes the computer run and the web browser layer to interact with stuff to worry about, both of which have their own performance penalties and threat profiles.
As much as I love REST APIs (and boy, do I love them and their simplicity), I don't like the idea of everything running a web server when it doesn't have to be.
What I was trying to say is that we only have a single kernel in the linux world without complaint, so having a single browser "kernel" (chromium) can be seen as a good thing. We have multiple distros (chrome, edge, brave, etc) for the browser as well
Hell, even Firefox could relatively easily swap to running on Blink since most of their UI these days is CSS+JS.
The latest changes to chrome that breaks plugins like ublock origin allows them to keep maximising their advertising revenue.
I think these two being open source is a major reason why they have been so successfully adopted. It isn’t direct revenue, but the control and indirect revenue that comes from that which is the driver
Chrome synergizes with the rest of Google's portfolio.
But I agree that default search with being Google must have heavily blocked competition.
Comparing how much they pay Mozilla and Apple to maintain search, it would be reasonable to estimate Chrome’s implementation to save them $1b a year
But I highly doubt they make any back given > 1k people work on it
For example, if google didn't control the most popular browser, they probably would have had to say goodbye to third party cookies a long time ago, but since they do they've been able to delay it for quite a while, at least for a considerable portion of users.
It's everyone else who wants to keep them around.
And then look at Google's "privacy sandbox proposals, that aim to replace third party cookie functionality. They have largely been rejected by Mozilla and Apple, over privacy concerns.
I think you are underestimating it. There must be a reason why google is trying to work around ad blockers on their platforms.
> But I highly doubt they make any back given > 1k people work on it
Where did you find that number? I highly doubt it. Maybe if you are counting contributors to chromium.
Not in the US they don't; it's a minority share, split across many different manufacturers who all have their own flavor of Android, their own (crappy) app stores and pre-loaded crapware apps, etc. Apple has a clear majority of the US smartphone market (and it's a vertical monopoly, with Apple controlling the phone hardware and the app store and not allowing any alternatives), but no one's looking at breaking them up.
>I think these two being open source is a major reason why they have been so successfully adopted.
iOS isn't open-source, and it has a commanding majority of the US smartphone market.
This is very different from the global market share, where Android has 45% more.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/ios-vs-android-market-s...
This case is about US antitrust law, so what happens outside US borders isn't really that important, except as far as it affects the companies' revenues and profits. Supposedly, the actions of any antitrust action are to protect consumers/the general public, but what that really means is consumers in the US. Consumers outside the US are irrelevant. And the simple fact is that, by your own numbers, consumers in the US are mostly using iOS, not Android.
Regardless, 42% (in the US) is still a huge market share. Huge doesn't have to mean majority or even plurality.
For example, there's currently an ongoing anti trust case against "Al’s Asphalt Paving Company"
https://www.justice.gov/atr/case/us-v-als-asphalt-paving-com...
With the extra clarification that just the size of the company or its market share aren't in and of themselves enough to constitute a crime. It's how the company acts once it has that power that constitutes the crime.
You could be a huge company, or dominate a market and still not run afoul of anti-competitive laws because you didn't abuse the position [0]. The abuse of position particularly (or only, depending on jurisdiction probably) if it brings harm to consumers is what lands a company in hot water.
[0] https://thehustle.co/originals/the-worlds-cutest-monopoly
That's why Apple has higher profits than all other mobile operators combined!
I'm not sure in what world 42% isn't huge when it comes to market share. iOS having a majority isn't really relevant to this point.
And regardless, GP didn't say "in the US"; globally, they are far ahead of iOS. Sure, this anti-trust action is a US matter, but a break-up would absolutely affect Google globally.
The fact is that with the Spectre mitigations added to Chrome, the performance of networking with manifest v2 was bad. Having to keep sending every network request through 3 different processes just in case there is a plugin (uses by the minority of users) that wants to filter the requests before they are made.
Of course, blocking resource fetches like that could have easily been detected by any server that cares about it, and the interaction with service workers was...weird.
With manifest v3 you can still block ads. You can remove them from the DOM, you can make them invisible, you can replace them. You just can't programmatically decide which resources to filter - only a declarative model for resource filtering is supported.
No it doesn't, because I define all ads as bad, so Chrome's ad "blocker" is does not even remotely meet my needs.
> You just can't programmatically decide which resources to filter
That "just" is doing a ton of work there. Declarative ad blockers aren't terrible, but they're not great either. And I don't want my browser fetching ads (which could also be malware) at all. Downloading them and then hiding them is insufficient.
No, that is horseshit.
The goal of blocking ads isn't to only allow in "good ads".
It's to block ads. Not some ads. Not a few ads. Not just malware delivered via ads. Not just Google's competitors.
It's to block ads. All of them. To stop the relentless harassment of the advertising industry claiming other peoples' screens and time as their own.
Ads might suck a lot, but you are also not entitled to free content.
Actually no, it's worse. Ad companies take everything they can from you using any method they can including monitoring everything you browse or watch on TV or say near your phone or TV or in your car or what you look at in every shop or what you buy or who you chat to, compile massive secret databases and sell 'you' to anyone willing to pay, regardless of what the information is used for.
I don't see what is confusing here. Consumers love the ad-model because they can get things "free". If the real cost of ad-supported products is too much for you, then its too expensive for you to use.
Like someone found the backdoor to the movie theater, and people just go in that way rather than pay for a ticket, and then these same people go on rants about how movie tickets are a rip-off and they make you watch 30 mins of ads before the movie, and candy is 5x overpriced, and proudly declaring "I will never pay for a movie ticket again!", as if they are some righteous moral champion standing against the greed of people wanting to get paid for their work.
Straighten out your head, then come back and make an argument.
Also, if the industry actually did something, anything to address the grievances of ad block users (a lot of whom I'm willing to bet aren't inherently against advertising and fully understand it funds the content they consume and enjoy), it might be less of, if not a complete non-issue. But no, ads are still distracting, still heavily affect page load speed, still track every little thing visitors do, and still infect millions of peoples' systems with malware every year, and the industry just collectively shrugs and ploughs on towards maximum profit at any cost.
There was a user revolt, people flocked to U-block, and ad-block plus died.
Advertisers are greedy, but don't be a fool and think users are not equally (if not eve more) so.
You don't like it? Go out of business and have companies that are able to operate at the price consumers are willing to pay rise up in your place.
I'd be happy to pay for no ads, and I have before for streaming services. But as time goes on it gets harder and harder. Often the only choice is ads, at which point I block or move on to a different service.
Ads use up my time and attention. Which, to me, is much more valuable than a small amount of money.
which is really just absurd when you think about it. I don't care about another hour of battery life, but even if I did, I'd be perfectly happy if Chrome just told me "hey these extensions aren't very battery-efficient!" and I got to make my own decision about that.
If you're stuck having to run a ton of shitty JS code with ad malware in it, because your web browser doesn't allow you to effectively block it, that's probably going to cost you more in battery life than the overhead needed by MV2 to block that stuff.
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/google-play-statistics/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/444476/google-play-annua...
Profits are all that matter
Most companies intentionally waste money on expenses to help drive future growth, or atleast avoid taxes. This is why you hear constantly Amazon pays almost no taxes compared to their revenue.
Their internal books will track expenses in a different way so as to produce a non-tax profit, buy that's all internal non-tax accounting, and tends ro be private compared to SEC filings.
The money Google spends internally either on development or on cross subsidies is no profit and is what most of the issues in this discussion are addressing.
Profits is just money they couldn't find a place to spend on growth.
(Also a maximum of 30% goes to app devs which isn't a majority any way you measure it)
OSS would be fine without Google, it was great before Google ever existed. There are intrinsic motivations to contribute, which is why thousands of companies do.
Jolla/Sailfish make a mobile operating system with a handful of people, and even though that system pretty minimal, I'd say the added value on the Android side is the ecosystem of apps and porting to devices, which is done by other developers and manufacturers than Google. And I'm not sure how many people work on Firefox itself on any given day.
I guess it's just really hard to get a clear picture on what all those people in large companies are really doing day to day. The overhead must be enormous, and likely a lot of engineering effort is thrown at the wall to see what sticks.
My biggest question is how long they can stay at a handful if they become popular. The increased burden of security patches alone would likely turn that handful into a small army.
Security through obscurity is often mocked (for good reason), but it actually does work in cases like this as long as you don't reach Android's scale.
1. Google is fined/broken up due (in part) to paying for the default search engine position.
2. In the newly broken off chrome company, they auction the default search engine position.
3. Google cannot bid on it. So I guess Microsoft is going to win that position? Who else is going to pay for it?
I can't imagine this is what happens. This would just make the DoJ look absolutely foolish and would basically put the DoJ in the position of being Microsoft's personal attack dog. But on the other hand, what else could happen? It's still ridiculous even if it's anyone other than Microsoft that is the winning bidder.
It prompts the user to pick a search engine on install? And let's be honest, most people will probably pick google anyway.
But then the question is, how will companies like Mozilla and a spin-off company for chrome make money if they can't auction off the default search engine anymore?
Microsoft didn't stop developing EdgeHTML because it's too hard, they stopped because Google kept giving them the fuck around on sites like YouTube.
The whole point of web standards is that you can have multiple implementations for the same thing - there's zero reason that post-Google, Blink needs to be maintained by a single entity.
Microsoft can maintain their own fork of Blink, or bring back Edge, or adopt WebKit, or whatever works for them.
Opera and <insert laundry list of chrome-but-not-chrome browsers> have the same options, sans EdgeHTML.
The whole reason these companies are using Chromium/Blink is that Google has a stranglehold on web standards, and by being a me-too Chrome-alike they get support for Google's half baked ideas for free, to prevent the ever-fickle user base from switching browser because their browser doesn't support the latest half-written web standards draft.
This is not a good reason to break up anti-competitive monopolies: that it would harm the technology their monopoly depends on
To repeat the question from above, where is the downside?
Microsoft only abandoned EdgeHTML and adopted Blink because Google owned sites like YouTube were deliberately breaking in Edge.
At this stage I don't imagine they'd go back (to EdgeHTML as their engine) specifically, but it's not hard to imagine a world where MSFT maintains its own fork of Blink for use in Edge, Opera potentially the same.
As for Firefox: they get money for being the default search engine - if Google is broken up, the search engine company that emerges will have even more reason to want to be the default search engine on as many browsers as possible (and thus incentive to pay money to other browsers).
> So if Google dies then we'll have more diverse browser and mobile ecosystem
Initially, this won't be true. A lot of the browser ecosystem relies on Google right now. Eventually it would be replaced. I just don't think that it would be immediately true.
No they abandoned EdgeHTML because it was shit. Seriously there are plenty of posts right here on hacker news about the internals of that decision. The team and product failed to deliver so badly that it got the axe.
There sure are:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824
> This is already happening. I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't keep up.
> Now while I'm not sure I'm convinced that YouTube was changed intentionally to slow Edge, many of my co-workers are quite convinced - and they're the ones who looked into it personally.
Now it seems to me that 0.5 billion is the "cost of not technically being a monopoly" when they are indeed a monopoly, and it's a net win if they're pulling say 10 billion synergistic monopolistic profit from not being broken up into baby googles as a monopoly trust buster case.
I would say this is capitalism in a pure form, the kind the communists rail against, the kind where a monopoly crushes out all the benefits to the people, government corruption, etc. True "for the people" style capitalism would mean two browsers truly competing, ideally more than two (duopolies are monopolies by another name and poison our society broadly). One browser as part of an american zaibatsu, with the zaibatsu punting a little money to save face and claim competition exists - by propping up the competition financially - is absolutely a disgusting thing. To say "oh no, the thing they're propping up will no longer be propped up" is also disgusting and capitalistically twisted.
How do you know how much Google funnels of its profits (are you sure you mean this?) into Chrome and Android's open source projects? Do you work at Google and have access to this information? Are you sure you know what you're talking about here?
Innovation requires reliable funding, such as monopoly profits or government funding. Monopoly leads to undemocratic concentrations of power and various private taxes on the public (e.g. in the case of Google, your personal information). Bell Labs was funded by monopoly funding with a law directing a certain amount to research.
Competition improves the balance of power, but destroys the ability to innovate except on relatively easy to engineer variations of existing tech within a 1-5 year window projects. The recipients of monopolist largess (such as OSS) whither on the vine as competition drives profits to zero over time (which then causes consolidation and monopoly formations...).
The answer I prefer of course is to create the efficiencies and innovative capacity of large scale industry but control them democratically. Nationalize Google.
People eventually recognise a good idea, you don't need a well funded research group to have one. You need an environment where it's plausible for the new thing to work and be profitable.
Breaking up a giant like google seems that it would make it easier to promote an new idea, as it has less risk of being crushed by the interests of a tangentially related company.
Telecoms in Australia is probably the best modern example I can think of, the nbn was given a monopoly and now delivers an expensive inferior product, and there is no real way to compete or innovate around it.
It doesn't exactly take them out of the market, it just creates a enterprise with legal protections and non market motivations for what it actually does.
>Innovation requires reliable funding, such as monopoly profits or government funding.
we have more than enough angel vestors, normal investing, bank loans, etc. to get any innovation off the ground. And I think people forget that the original innovation hubs for big adacement came from Acedemia. Now retrofitted to be a recruiting wing for private businesses who pay to capture that knowledge.
The only downside here is that they then cannot proceed to offer that product for free for a decade to capture a market before squeezing said market they captured. Is that a downside for people who don't/can't pay? Yes. But that is historically how every business has operated. Figure out how to optimize costs so they can profit, and balance it against the market you are targeting. Big tech has forgotten about that and simply throws money around like it's monopoly money (and it kind of is).
We need a huge overhaul of how all this works. Ironically enough by going "backwards" in a few areas.
Nationalizing anything is an absolute disaster for innovation. What innovations did Aeroflot develop?
The free market and a thriving entrepreneur ecosystem creates innovation. The profit motive is a powerful one. Taking risks to invent the next big thing is what drives entrepreneurship in the first place. Governments are corrupt, inefficient, and don’t get punished by the markets when they fail.
This idea that governments are democratic is a myth. I didn’t vote for tethered bottle caps in the EU. I didn’t vote to send money to fund wars. In the U.S., one can vote, but the policies that actually happen are the result of what lobbyists spent the most money buying the relevant congressmen.
The answer to this is smaller government. The most democratic thing there is is the free market. Everyone can vote or not vote with their money. And the results are seen nearly immediately and companies have to respond.
If we could choose to pay taxes on a line-item basis, that would be the most democratic thing ever. Because a rep that you voted for on one issue and is wrong on another issue gets his “wrong” initiative defunded and his “right” initiative funded. We should bring free market principles to government not government principles to the free market.
The last thing we want is the common people, unaware of the intricacies of all the things a government pays for, voting on what and how government is funded. That's a great way to get some huge budgets for circuses while forgetting to allocate for bread. The most important aspects of life are not glamorous, but they need to be funded for.
There's some merit here (maybe people can choose where 5-10% of the federal budget goes), but before we can even think about that we'd need to get the national debt under control. There's negative money to allocate as is.
>In the U.S., one can vote, but the policies that actually happen are the result of what lobbyists spent the most money buying the relevant congressmen.
That's more of a lobbying issue than a democracy issue, no? Ideally a democracy would uncover a large gift and the PR would completely tank chances of re-election. But alas, the people aren't caring or well-tuned enough.
>The most democratic thing there is is the free market.
THe endgame of a free market is monopoly. So a small government would give the exact result we have here with lesser chances of an antitrust.
The way I see this argument is "Innovation requires an institution devoted to innovation, which requires reliable funding such as monopolistic or taxpayer"
As you say, on the 1-5 year horizon that's not true. Most successful startups are innovative, we need to look no further than Google itself with its pagerank innovation dominating search. Most universities have innovative researchers, and indeed explicitly set up innovative centers called "incubators" - but of course this is an example of government funding.
One of the first questions is what innovation requires 1-5 years. What about aha moment! innovation? Pagerank is an "aha moment" idea that takes a few months to demonstrate. There are more aha moment innovations than "grind for more than 5 years" I feel. Most of the "grind for 5+ years" innovations have yet to pay off e.g. fusion, super batteries, room temperature semiconductors.
A monopoly offers stable funding for some institution, but at what cost? No capitalistic incentive to improve product? Excess pricing because the consumer has no choice? Surely there are more fair ways to structure this.
Government control would destroy tech, government is not made for it. Look at Amtrak. A nationalized google would wither and get eaten alive by.. ... innovative search startups (themselves without research institutes funded by monopolies), or startups in one of the dozens of fields where Google has spread its tendrils.
Microsoft in its prime is a great example of monopolistic problems. They were a OS monopoly and kept leveraging that to smack down competition wherever they wanted to expand into. Google almost didn't make chrome - the CEO at the time was frightened that Microsoft would annihilate google if google should make a new browser. The monopoly engine allows for ease of dominating more and more industries through lateral growth. This all-encompassing destruction of captalistic price minimization, alone, is why we need to break down big tech monopolies such as google. An example of a "good citizen" non monopolistic company in this setting is Netflix - there's huge competition in entertainment field, they have innovated streaming tech, their profits are meritorious, and they haven't suffocated other fields like other big tech i.e. there's no Netflix phone, no Netflix video game console, no Netflix social media.
The other health of the Netflix / media ecosystem is it's not a duopoly. There's Netflix, there's Apple TV (hello, suffocating new industries!), there's Disney, there's paramount, there's hulu, and so on. This is what competition should look like. This is classic innovation in the capitalist sector, through brutal competition. We not only need to bust up monopolies but to consider duopolies or more generally - busting up groups of companies that collude to price or feature fix as holders of the majority of the market, which is what many duopolies are.
My initial search produces a lot of speculative numbers, but nothing verifiable. Admittedly, this is a realm I have little experience with, so perhaps I am looking for the wrong terms. It was also my understanding that the books of large companies like this are typically closed unless demanded by legal entities.
Chrome maybe but for Android, it's debatable at best to state it as OSS. AOSP doesn't run on a single phone on earth, not even the emulator and the freedom of users to modify it is very limited in practice.
I'd put it as "mostly source available" instead of open source.
Google ads would be fine on its own. They'd continue to dominate.
Google Analytics would probably have a problem. The big thing going for it is that it's free. Without being able to funnel their data hoovering into the rest of the ecosystem they'd probably lose that. If they _did_ have to charge, would they release a simpler tier that isn't so mind-bogglingly complex? That'd be nice.
Docs? Yeah, I don't see a way forward with that unless they charge a lot. There are some competitors, but they suck, and they struggle, and google docs seems one of the major nodes of interoperability between a lot of their products. It's be really hard to replicate that if you're broken up.
Calendar. Hah. Well. Everybody gets to suffer given that google calendar uses its own protocols. It's not like everybody could just switch to DAV and have close to the same functionality, at least out of the gate.
I agree with you re: Chrome and Android, but I will say that current FOSS forks of Android seem to do well. I think they have enough runway to continue making a good product. It would put phone makers into a bind, but I personally think their suffering is also a good thing. Fewer phone makers == less e-waste. Maybe people start holding onto their phones for a few years.
Honestly I couldn't care less about Chrome, except that I hope it does die. But Microsoft could take over the engine and use its hegemony to continue funneling money into developing it.
Firefox would be in a tough spot. They'd have to find another sponsor. I know they've been trying to diversify but I think we'd see a very different browser from them within 3 years of the breakup.
The good news is that there is no shortage of oligarchs to help pick up the pieces. Which is good because I bet Alphabet is going to start whinging about "massive layoffs" soon.
GTM and GA probably live with Display Ads
Chrome and Android probably live with Search
Who knows where ChromeOS, and all the hardware devices go
No, that is incidental. What is the first and principal thing it does, what needs does it serve by making open source browsers and operating systems?
Control. Google maintains appreciable control over mobile devices and the web by making their own mobile operating system and browser. In cases such as these, it is only a matter of time before they tightening the screws. They already have.
> we will be left with an even more profitable ad giant, that sends back all profits to it's share holders
But not one that can kill ad blockers or ram remote attestation down people's throats.
No one can predict the future. HN commenters love to try, every day. For example, speculating about a "breakup".
If neither side changes their position, Google will be fighting the US government for many years to come. That we can say with reasonable certainty. Regardless of the remedy sought.
As a shareholder I do not want the company to be fighting the US government for years to come. It's not good for business.
But Google fans no doubt read the news and spin it to be positive. No matter what, in their minds only Google can win. Self-delusion.
Meanwhile, the legal process will continue. More money for the lawyers.
Hard to find the sense in this action.
After Bill Gates rode on a golf cart with Bill Clinton, he realized the need to pay the expected tribute to the politicians.
Of course, I wish things did not work this way. But isn't it a bit naive to think it doesn't?
Source? (They settled with Multiven.)
> isn't it a bit naive to think it doesn't
No, it's naïve to think that level of influence can be bought. Not an uncommon mistake. Bankman-Fried made it, and it's increasingly looking like Bytedance did too. But D.C. is a town obsessed with power over money. People regularly toss aside lobbyists and their clients if it's politically expedient. In part because it's not like the lobbyists (or their clients) ditch them after being spurned.
Corruption on the highest levels is very similar. Not everyone is on the buyers club.
This is unfalsifiable. To the extent electeds can be bought or lobbied, it's on the fringes--they didn't know about crypto and now they do and have a mildly favourable view towards it instead of not giving a shit. Certainly not around something involving the DoJ.
The naïve view is electeds in America can be bought and sold like a Patek Philippe. You can just buy one of those, for the simple reason that there exists a secondary market. Power, on the other hand, is perishable. Go back to Bankman-Fried's downfall and note how many people thought he had banked favours with his cash. (I sometimes think he thought he bought favours with his cash.) That isn't how D.C. works. It isn't how power centre works. Power is personal and perishable, and that makes it unique in comparison with the things we usually trade money for.
Ferrari still curates their customers. If you buy a Ferrari and paint it pink, you get on their "nope" list. You also cannot buy a new Ferrari today unless you have a previous relationship with them, or are very very rich.
If you want the super special stuff like Monza SP1/2 or Daytona SP3 you need a longstanding relationship with Ferrari, but you can walk into a showroom and drive out with a 296 or Roma this afternoon if you have the cash, and let's not pretend a 296 isn't a very special car.
depends on the selection process, of course. At least in the US and I imagine most of the EU. You can paint a ferrari pink and get blacklisted. Not sure how it would go if they say they don't sell to women...
BTW, if you're not dressed properly, some high end stores have a security guard who won't let you in. This can get tricky these days, as many wealthy people dress like slobs.
I once wandered into Cartier's in NYC, dressed in my trademark slob clothes. The security guard tailed me about a foot behind me, obviously trying to intimidate me into leaving. I just kept me hands in me pocketses, took a look around, then left.
An article I read around 2000 about why the DoJ didn't go after Cisco, despite Cisco having a monopolistic position at the time.
Sorry I don't have a photographic memory.
> it's naïve to think that level of influence can be bought.
Not at all. Where do you think the money for the Clinton Foundation came from, for example?
Bill attended Georgetown and Yale (where he met Hilary), was governor of Arkansas for 12 years and had a short stint of running the country before the foundation was founded. Hilary was a director at a school of law and worked under Carter's administration, and had decades of other legal feats before entering the senate right after founding the foundation.
If those two can't network in those 30 years for funds, then America as a whole is a sham.
The only thing the government will be interested in is the spying which they aren't allowed to do, but unaccountable corporations are allowed to do. As people become more aware of this it means google becomes less and less useful.
When companies buy ads with Google they’re quite literally bidding for microtargeted user intent data.
No one can go to Google and buy information about a specific person.
No, you can’t buy user data on 1 specific person (then again, there’s many examples of people buying ads on a persons name to catch them googling themselves), but you can buy user data on small groups of people.
What does this mean? What is the value of "catching" someone googling themselves?
Demographics: Target users based on age, gender, parental status, household income, and more
Interests: Target people based on their interests, even if they're visiting pages about other topics
In-market audiences: Target users who are actively looking for products or services similar to yours
Custom intent audiences: Create and target audiences based on their search behavior and interests
Remarketing lists: Reconnect with users who have previously interacted with your website or app
Customer match: Use your first-party data to reach and re-engage with your customers
Similar segments: Expand the reach of your best-performing audiences by targeting new users with similar characteristics
Affinity audiences: Reach people based on a holistic picture of their lifestyles, passions, and habits
Life events segments: Target users
- I sell red bowling shoes
- I pay Google for access to anyone searching for ‘red bowling shoes’
- Once they land on my site I know who came via the Google ad (via the URL params)
- A certain percentage converts, and I get their personal info and payment info
I personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with that chain of events! It’s a win-win for both buyer and seller.
However, to argue that no data was sold is disingenuous at best. Google is the monopoly broker of the intent data on every buyer in the world.
Why should I let Google profit off of my thoughts/interests? Why shouldn’t I be making the money that the bowling shoe manufacturer paid to access my thoughts/interests?
When a TV station sells ad time to a company, and then someone sees the ad, comes into the store, and says "hey, I saw your TV ad while watching Law & Order", we don't say that the TV station has sold data to the merchant.
You pay to show your website to people searching for red bowling shoes.
> However, to argue that no data was sold is disingenuous at best.
No user data has been sold.
> I'm going by this document from the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and a lawsuit brought against Google, signed by member of Congress, that alleged data brokers are "siphoning" off bid-stream data and reselling it . It makes the claim that U.S Dept of Homeland Security uses real-time bidding data for warrant-less phone tracking.
> https://www.iccl.ie/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Mass-data-bre...
> https://www.tampabay.com/news/2021/05/07/google-selling-user...
The entire topic is dancing around the question of what corruption looks like in jurisdictions where you can’t just buy the government, and the answer is, mostly, regulatory capture.
More on topic: It was a neat idea, but given how consistently every single walled garden has ended up hindering progress and exploiting users in the long term, I'd rather go back to that 90's geocities era where users had to be mindful of their content instead of letting an algorithm scroll for them showing what maximizes engagement. The experiment has failed with aplomb.
Break up Google, break up Microsoft (again, kind of), open up Apple, shake down Steam. Make this new money show why old money was historically regulated into being a proper public service instead of a winner take all conglomerate.
And that's the entire point here: Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, etc. are hoarding the wealth. For the rest of us to actually benefit from the monetary value of the increased productivity of tech, that money has to be taken back.
In a country where 50 people own more wealth than 50%, the only beneficiaries to GDP growth are those 50 individuals. The rest of us are just getting fucked.
So I don't want Google to be broken up and lose business only for MS, Apple, Amazon and Facebook to gobble up its business
They are critical to national security because of their ability to perform. Nationalizing them would complete distort their incentives and destroy the company so thoroughly we might as well have just broken them up.
And for the people who think nationalizing businesses leads to socialist/communist hell, at the very least, if you've decided that a business is critical to national security, it should be funded at least in part by the government (with the government having a real, if not controlling, stake in it), and heavily, heavily regulated.
Even if we do want to nationalize anything for security reasons, defense contractors should be at the top on the list but they have already bought the US government so DOJ is after those who haven't paid their dues
GDP? Have people forgotten that a vibrant 'Free Market' requires breaking up monopolies?
When did supporting a 'Free Market' turn into, "don't touch our giant corps".
The Baby Bells started their re-merge back in the 90s. In 2000, when Verizon was formed, it was a combination of Bell Atlantic (New Jersey Bell + Bell Company of PA + Diamond State + C&P), NYNEX, and GTE. (I watched this all in real-time, as my father worked for Ma Bell -> New Jersey Bell -> Verizon for more or less his entire adult life.) I'm sure similar things happened in the rest of the country with other Baby Bells, though I don't know the history very well.
The break up occurred in the 80's. and since then through mergers/acquisitions, they have re-joined.
So we have monopolies again.
Somehow we have lost the will-power in government to impose the needed actions to ensure a free market. Like also denying mergers that would create monopolies.
Like how was Ticketmaster even allowed to happen. We let it buy its competitors and now it is a monopoly.
I always thought they missed out on a great opportunity to name the umbrella company AlephBet instead of AlphaBet ([1]), perhaps with a tag-line that reads: "stop thinking in constants" (to contrast Googol being equal to 10^100).
You would rather ruin everyone else than have a functional economy? That says a lot about you.
This isn't because the US broke up their chip monopolies, though. This is because chip companies believed they could save money by shipping their expertise overseas and building things there instead. And they were right. They only had to put the US's economic future in jeopardy to do it.
I think there's two big things wrong with this. For one China is actually breaking up its tech companies or even culling entire sectors, like education tech, as they do in AI, this kind of argument is basically just American oligopolists inventing a red scare to stave off regulation.
Secondly American companies have a lot of trouble abroad, in gigantic markets like the EU and increasingly India and Japan with stricter privacy regulation on the way because they're so large. So if anything, American anti trust would send a good signal to most markets that the US is in line with global trends.
If you use real life examples and history as a benchmark
I contend the even more disturbing mirror is the trust/monopoly/cartel structure of virtually all industries and markets in the United States.
The ultra rich are a symptom, not necessarily the cause: we need a massive breakup of practically every sector in the United States, and it's not just for what the parent of this comment says about wealth creation: increased employment, more job mobility, more innovation, overall competitive advantage in the world, more resilience to global supply chain disruption, and innumerable other national security and economic concerns.
Monopolies are really bad for freedom. As we see with the closed no-appeal ban systems of internet companies and utter lack of customer service, your very day to day freedom can sharply be curtailed at a whim by the centralized power of monopolies.
Sorry for the snark, but no one anywhere needs advertising. Advertising in it's current form is a plague on humanity.
But there have been businesses based on lead pipes for drinking water plumbing, asbestos for residential insulation, and so on. You could make an argument that these technologies enabled many businesses as well. That doesn’t mean we should allow lead pipes for drinking water or to use asbestos in residential homes.
An alternative effect could be that online ads are an avenue for better resourced established companies to out compete and stifle upstarts. Startups are always pressed for resources and running an effective online ad campaign can take significant resources.
You're surely right that some small businesses have benefited from the online ad market, but I suspect that on average larger companies have benefited to a greater degree.
[0]https://www.uschamber.com/small-business/small-business-data...
Ceteris paribus. Running a small business in most states involves more rules today than it did in 2000. (Common denominator: the cost of financial transactions due to post-9/11 anti-money laundering rules.)
And it still doesn't justify Google.
Plumbing is good and useful. Plumbing using lead pipes is harmful.
Advertising can be good and useful. Modern advertising that requires tracking everything a user does is harmful.
That X enables many businesses to exist doesn't mean that X is a good thing on balance, because X itself can have harmful effects that outweigh the benefits.
This is of course true, and I can look past the inelegant phrasing.
But to make this a credible argument you need to argue for why the costs of advertising outweigh the benefits.
They're looking for depth where there isn't any. You're attempting to prove advertising is bad by claiming it's like lead pipes, on the basis of them both being bad. It's tautology. One could similarly "prove" ad blockers or puppies by this analogy to be whatever because they, too, can be good or bad.
Modern advertising is what I'm against, not advertising as a whole.
Similarly, I'm against lead pipes for plumbing, not plumbing as a whole.
Put yourself in the mind of someone making a THING, how do you plan to reach your possible customers for THING?
THING is the best in class, better than the competition but how would you make the world aware of THING existing?
trade shows, trade magazines, word of mouth, window-dressing in the THING-quarter, ...
why are personalized ads on a website indispensable?
They aren't. This is exactly what I mean by modern advertising.
If ads were just contextual based on the content of the page, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
I'd still be blocking them, though.
There is no before advertising
Pretty sure we have ads from Mesopotamia
Advertising (4000 BCE)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_advertising
Fact-checking is literally just a Google search away. Irony intended.
Google ads was (and is) incredibly good for niche companies, since it makes it possible to advertise to people who are interested in your product instead of the general public.
So if you sell Warhammer paraphernalia, you can buy ads to be shown only to people who have searched for Warhammer related words, rather than "everyone in Wisconsin".
This lowers ad costs by many orders of magnitude, and makes a lot of businesses possible that simply couldn't exist before.
I'd want some damn good reasons to go back to the old ways!
Tracking people and shoving your wares in their faces is not the only way to reach interested parties. You could go to a Warhammer convention, join a Warhammer forum and offer to send members samples, or just post images of your stuff in a sharing thread, whatever. Engage with people while they're searching for the thing you're offering.
Of course, word of mouth requires you to actually make a good product whereas with advertisment it's enough if your product looks good.
I'm telling you what actually happened in the real world.
IME this is only true about drop shippers and similar business models. The vast majority of small businesses are, as a rule, awful at advertising. The few ads I see they are very poorly put together.
Even when they manage to get people to the business, small businesses are almost inevitably awful about maintaining their web presence, which makes it moot. Here's an example thread about such from the local reddit. Including some hostile responses from, charitably, overwhelmed small businesses about how you need to call to confirm a price https://old.reddit.com/r/Calgary/comments/1ewlsib/open_lette...)
I’m assuming most of the places that redditor contacted to buy UPS batteries from are B2B shops that aren’t geared to selling to people off the street.
I’m assuming this because sometimes I buy replacement UPS battery strings, and I pay with a purchase order after talking to or emailing an inside sales person, not with a credit card at a register.
Places like this don’t even need to advertise, the professionals they’re selling to know where to find what they need.
I think a lot of these businesses could succeed using alternative promotional strategies. Some of them might suffer because the owners have more money than time and advertising is a good tradeoff in that case, but overall good products are still going to do well.
Advertisements can be good (when the business is good and genuinely wants you to know about good new product), and they can be bad (when the business if bad / misleading / scammy). An optimist would say there are more good than bad. I suppose you wouldn't consider yourself an optimist.
No, they're an amazing benefit to your business. I'm sure your candles are great, but society doesn't need them (your candles, specifically) to survive. People would continue to find candles without your advertisements. Maybe candles that aren't as nice as yours, but people will get by just fine, and wouldn't know (or care) what they were missing.
> Advertisements can be good (when the business is good and genuinely wants you to know about good new product)
Advertising is emotional manipulation. Why do I need to know about good products, even genuinely good ones? If I have an actual, articulated need for something, I can go out and look for it. But if I'm not actually looking for something, but someone advertises to me and convinces me to buy their thing, likely I would have gotten along just fine without it.
> An optimist would say there are more good than bad. I suppose you wouldn't consider yourself an optimist.
False dichotomy. Whether there are more good companies that honestly try to hawk their wares, or more bad companies that try to trick people into buying their garbage, is irrelevant. Advertising is a blight on society.
The thing that really makes my stomach churn, though, is that if I ran a company, I'd absolutely advertise. It's the prisoner's dilemma. Because advertising exists and others will use it, I can't opt out of using it myself. I feel super gross about this fact.
With regard to modern advertising, you are absolutely correct!
That said, I fully understand and agree with the usefulness of advertising. What I'm against is the modern state of advertising. If all ads were simply contextual based on the content being shown and not the user, I don't think many of us would have problems with the ads industry.
If I were browsing a mountain biking forum, I'd see ads for mountain bikes and other related services. They would be MORE relevant, rather than the current ads I get for the product I bought 2 months ago.
>or through a UI element on the website that lets the visitor choose the language.
This is nonsensical too. People don't just speak only one language. If I'm going into an English website and you're giving me a language pop up I'm going to pick English. But ads that are in English are not relevant to me whatsoever.
Also, I would like to note that language redirects are, in my experience, absolute trash. It makes using sites like Adobe awful.
Even the language settings in windows lead to a bad user experience. I have to keep English as my first keyboard language and locale to make sure that websites don't default to other languages for me.
I have zero faith that they would get this right.
What people don't like is the current advertising business, which is intrusive, a blackhole of privacy concerns, rarely useful, and full of abusive companies (clickbait sites, for instance) that exist on the back of scummy behavior that hurts the advertiser (costing them money) and annoys/infuriates the consumer.
They don't like having an ad-free 7usd Netflix/Amazon/etc account that is now 12usd with ads, or 22usd without ads and the same privileges.
I utterly despise how so much of the Internet has been gentrified and sanitized to appeal to advertisers at the expense of communities and culture.
> *Advertising in it's current form* is a plague on humanity.
Magazine ads were not highly targeted towards every user that bought one. We liked magazine ads, they were high quality and usually contextually relevant.
Modern advertising is nothing like magazine ads. We don't take screenshots of ads on webpages, print them out, and hang them on our walls like we did with magazine ads.
> Why do you think Google provides you with free searches?
To deliver ads. The same reason Google does everything else.
Who pays for it? Not my problem. I'll use whatever free service exists, there will always be one.
Without a search engine? The internet would fail and targeted ads would cease to exist.
I.e. if you don't want ads, you'll need to pay.
No, Marketing. Advertising is only one form and the most antisocial one. There is a huge difference between making it possible for people interested in your product to find you versus going out of your way to shove your product in front of the eyes of people who are doing something at best tangentially related.
Google is an ad business. It sells human eyes and ears to businesses. They own a massive chunk of the ad business and everything they make benefits ads. People who are buying ads (businesses) might benefit with more competition, because as it stands, we have dumb stuff like lawyers in Missouri buying ads and people in Bangladesh clicking them. Google gains money even though that ad was completely ineffective to the customer.
Plus google's goal is to funnel everything into ads. Search sucks ass. It's all astroturfed or straight up fake content these days. Users are getting scammed clicking on these links. Small businesses are getting strangled out because they can't pay protection fees that the megacorps that aren't flooded out by AI generated and SEO-optimized slop can. We all suffer because of that.
Google has a stranglehold on email. Try sending a non-gmail message to a gmail account as a normie and you're probably going straight to the spam bucket. How much has it costed people who had their messages lost because they won't hand all their data over to Google?
Technically, competition "exists", but it's strangled out to the point of basically not existing. Other companies can offer all these services if they grow big. The problem is there's no other company that can compete with google in the US. And whenever a new company comes along that can shake up the game, Google/Apple/Microsoft buy them out and shut them down, unless they're part of the club already (e.g. OpenAI)
Sure Google is everywhere, but Meta holds much more data on our inner personal sides, which are the easiest things to actually abuse to no end. That and pornhub.
I don't use meta for much. Google on the otherhand takes some pretty dedicated behavior to avoid.
Absolutely not discounting all of that; there are some pretty strong parallels between the data you can infer on a person based on their gmail graph versus their fb messenger graph, for example.
Meta has a lot more "self-revealed-preference" data, though. Which of $thesePosts did you engage with? Does this pattern continue if we mix in $someOtherVariable? How long did you dwell on that one post before like/dis-like? Are you more likely to come back and spend time here if we tell you that $thisPerson has commented on your post instead of $thisOtherPerson? ... etc.
I think only YouTube serves as a plausible source of dwell time in the "at what part of $thisVideo did you click the like button" sense. If you don't use YouTube or use it signed out then it's (slightly) harder for google to attribute your actions to you. Facebook doesn't really have _anything_ that can be accessed without logging in.
Legally speaking, Google's not supposed to be correlating most of this data. But, as we know well, that doesn't mean they aren't doing it.
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/01/1242019127/google-incognito-m...
Scale's great, but it often comes with a societal cost. For every efficiency made, there's less agency and decent jobs to go round.
Seems unfair to make such decisions ad-hoc though, and string it out through years of court cases and m/billions of lawyer fees.
Why not establish rules of the market where once a company gets x% market share, the company 'wins', the CEO gets the ability to run for high office, the nation thanks shareholders and gives them a big payoff for supporting innovation, and those 1 run down the food chain get to spin off their own companies and go for gold.
Life and death is a part of everything sustainable in life. We should embrace these cycles and utilise them, not let old hat stagnation strangle and squeeze all what's good from life.
Think of Bell Labs.
Google has a number of Bell Labs style projects ongoing that massively benefit scientific research. Transformers, AlphaFold, etc.
It's hard to see how a smaller, more focused company would be able to justify that type of R&D.
That said, I do see an issue where some of the smartest people get sucked up by big tech. Instead of working on fundamental advances in image processing they end up working on beauty filters for Instagram. That can't be right.
Typically that's solved with R&D happening in academia or semi-public space.
How much this happens depends on the opportunities to do it in private companies, so entities like Google paying big salaries for R&D probably means we don't see what alternatives they would be if they stopped doing so.
It was, but not any more. The crazy capital investments often come from private companies as well. And that's not a problem. They're spending their money rather than your money.
Ok, and from whom did their money come? They didn’t magic it into existence.
Google spending money that came from advertisers who got it from people buying their products isn’t much different than a research team spending public money, just with fewer middle men and a (generally) lower negative impact on society.
That is ignoring the many moral arguments against targeted advertising, unnecessary consumerism, etc.
Can't you say the same thing if you go back 80 years and talk about the smartest minds in the world instead of working on energy for the masses they're working on the atomic bomb?
What is the possible societal-positive outcome of another social media filter? Or improved ad targeting algorithm? Or more attention-grabbing social media feed?
I could have asked the same thing about a weapon of mass destruction 80 years ago. I don't have an answer for how we can use those things in ways to better society. But I'm not convinced that there are _none_.
I don’t believe there is anyone in the general public or who is an expert in any of the aforementioned fields (which have been around for 1-3 decades) that truly believes they are net positives.
I see the sentiment a lot, but it strikes me as reality denialism. People are willing to pay for one thing but not the other.
The issue is that these are near monopolies, so the market isn't efficient.
In other words, if those companies didn't have monopoly power, other businesses (or non-commercial entities) might be able to afford to hire some of these people as well, which might be beneficial overall for innovation.
That's the economic argument and it's pretty clean imo.
But as far as I'm concerned personally, I would really prefer to live in a world in which smart people work on human flourishing... rather than whatever that is.
That's the reason why quantum computing and projects of this type would not exist if you didn't have behemoth companies with extra cash lying around.
From the economics perspective, something being Monopoly doesn't mean it's inefficient.
Depending on the situation, they can be far more efficient then diverse companies, or much less
From an economics perspective, if there is a monopoly, there is no free market, so you can't rely on the market for efficiency. A monopoly can be efficient, but it can also be arbitrarily inefficient and still keep its position.
I was trying to make the point that monopoly isnt defined by inefficiency, either by the technical definition or the colloquial one.
Rality is complex, and few monopolies can be arbitrarily inefficient. I think this is where a lot of the public confusion about monopiles comes from.
If you have the only grocery store or gas station in town, it might seem like there is a monopoly. There is probably a wide leeway to raise prices or be inefficient, but not without limit or else someone would compete.
If Amazon, Google, or whomever 10X'd their prices, competitors would arise.
A rational company would lower the price if that broadened the market and netted more profit by volume. Drugs aren't Veblen goods.
The impetus for jacking up drug prices is that the market is captive, and those who need the drug will obtain it. That and insurance/government is often the payor.
It's the same reason SAAS took off so much. If you sell the product and consumers are (relatively) happy, now what? They might come back and buy another version in 5-10 years, but how do you generate enough cash flow between now and then to stay afloat?
The time value of money means you want to sell every dose as soon as possible. with a 10% annual return, $1,000 today is better than $2,600 in 10 years.
Additionally, each day that passes, someone else can come in and outperform you or undercut your price.
You might think it is is inefficient to have a miracle cure for cancer tied up on patent for 20 years, but what are you comparing it to.
Is it? As consumers you may be noticing the impact now but as a developer I've felt the impact of Google's "scale" for years and it has not been pleasant.
It's bought by the gov ("payout to the shareholders"), regulations are enacted to delimit what it can and can't do, and the whole thing is setup to make sure it's for the benefit of the larger public, with additional consideration on how to reintroduce competition on part of its mandate.
We' ve seen it with postal services and telecom, and if the whole thing becomes outdated it can spun out as a private entity again.
Interesting term. On a geopolitical scale, how is the US/NATO’s position any different? There are export controls around advanced semiconductors and encryption algorithms.
Is it okay to do this between countries but not within societies? (Genuine question. I really don’t know where I stand on this, for either side.)
Your citizens/consumers/users are utterly dependent on your services and your goodwill, and you have an absolute, unquestionable, non-negotiable lifetime monopoly on the means necessary to exist in a modern, always-connected society. You can provide as little, terrible service as you want, because if anyone complains, you shadowban them from being able to exist in society, and they die, which is much easier than actually making good changes. And you don't even have to go to the effort of legal kabuki theater now, because you are the law.
If this sounds absurd, remember that power increases sociopathy and that bunker bros contemplate bomb-collars to ensure the compliance of their security forces after the apocalyptic "event" they're engineering, even if it truly is inadvertent, and in the meantime we have Epstein and child miners in the Congo and social media companies running world-scale psychological experiments and sometimes they pay a little fine for it to show how sorry they are for enabling one genocide or another.
The two most likely outcomes are a 1984-like state of the world, with a contrived stalemate because no one bloc can gain an edge, or, more worryingly, a 1984-like world state, because one of these blocs managed to either destroy or devour the others.
If you have a free market finding competition isn't an issue, but maintaining profitability is. If we had a free market when Google came onto the scene, everyone else would have copied PageRank the next day, and then you'd have hundreds of search engines all as good as each other, each sharping their pencils sharper and sharper in an attempt to win customers over on a price basis until there is nothing left. At which point there is nothing left to further innovation.
To combat that, we grant short-term monopolies over technology to allow their inventors time to build up a decent business before opening the flood gates, with the intent to balance what makes mixed-market economies great without ending up with no competition. The problem is that those monopoly procedures were established when time moved slowly. Back then, 20 years was barely enough time to get your product to and recognized in the market. These days, you can get there in a few years, or even less, which leaves nearly 20 more years to focus on killing all the competition.
Ultimately, we would have been better off if Google was pushed out into a free market after a few years. We benefitted from it having some head start, but it went on much too long.
Long distance was expensive for quite a while even after the break-up. If you called up an out-of-state friend or relative to catch up, you expected the call to cost you at least a few bucks. (And you hoped they would be the ones to call you next time.) Even into the 90's, long distance at $0.10/minute was considered cheap. And in most rural areas, everywhere past a mile or so out of town was long distance.
I remember buying long-distance calling cards to bring our phone costs down. For about 5 years, it was cheaper to just get a local-only phone line and then buy your long-distance as phone cards. Each card came with a certain number of minutes pre-loaded. You'd dial the 1-800 number on the back, scratch off your PIN, enter it, and then you'd dial your destination number. Other than the hassle of buying and using the card, the major downside was that your own number didn't (usually) show up on the caller ID.
They were also good if you stayed in hotels a lot, since hotels would charge upward of usurious amounts for both local and long-distance calls but they would typically allow toll-free calls to go through without charge.
- An office software suite
- Global maps and GPS, City Guides
- Video entertainment
- Mobile and Desktop OS
- Web Browsers
Also, pay no mind to their competitors in all of those markets AND in their core business of search, being feeble multi-trillion and multi-billion global corporations
“But my data” Have your ever sold your data? Would the value you could ever possibly receive for your data ever equate to the value you get from the free services?
Likely No and No.
Is the free ad supported city newspaper free? Yes it is in fact free, just like FM radio is free, and broadcast television is free, and sidewalks next to billboards are free
Someone creating something appealing and giving it away for free in order to make up for it through ads in front of eyeballs does not in any way mean that the free thing isn’t free
My data has been sold, yes. By me, no, because I don't have the means. But by others and especially by nefarious actors, absolutely.
So indeed, it's not free. Just because data isn't liquid at the individual level doesn't mean it has no value.
I would argue that the question of "Is it free?" should not be restricted to monetary payments. If I offer you dinner for an hour of yardwork - are you receiving the food for free? If I would offer you that same dinner in exchange for letting me watch you use your computer for a while, is it free?
I think ads do incur a cost on you: In usability of a service, in your attention span / desensitization and your ability to focus, in the money you would not have spent were it not for ads.
Googles services are free in the sense, that you don't spend cold hard cash on them, but I would still argue, that you pay for them. That 2 Trillion Dollar valuation has to come from somewhere... :(
#2. You can pay? Also is the argument somehow that the free thing isn’t free because the ad in it makes the UX worse?
Also curious to know how many ads exactly do you get while using google workspace? drive? android? maps?
Finally: You can literally use Chrome, Workspace, Drive, Android and Maps without seeing a single ad, without an ad blocker, without EVER using google search, for free.
Those semantics aside:
- Maps has ads in the form of sponsored results all over the map.
- Android is only a decently functional platform with Play services installed, which includes ads. I don't have an Android phone handy but I'm pretty sure there's up-sells included in quite a few places, I just can't name any right now.
- Chrome is a browser you cannot use for its primary purpose without seeing ads.
- Workspace is a directly paid-for product.
Google is an ad company. Essentially all of its products are supported by advertising, and it's slightly odd to suggest they are not.
I would like private businesses to offer transactional costs. I do not want businesses leveraging diffuse costs; I'd prefer that only my governments use diffuse costs and that private businesses have limited ability to use diffuse costs. At least with government I get a vote.
And here we see the ostrich. When faced with the horrors of reality, sticks its head in the sand. It’s simpler in there.
The advertisers paying to get their ads placed in front of those eyes disagree.
And ye, since another comment questions this, data or "eye-time are similar - they can be broken down to the individual.
The advertisers pay some price expecting a certain number of people to see the ad, and even if data about people is sold in bulk (too) there is a price per individual. It's a simple division to see the price they pay per person to view that cinema ad, or for one person's data, even if they always purchase those in bulk.
After all, they get to the bulk price by multiplying how much they are willing to pay for one individual with the expected (or in the case of data packages known) number of individuals.
Theres a reason that you have to log into a Google account to use those services, which means agreeing to their rather large TOS.
Buying something doesnt necessarily mean you have to pay money for it. Your time and information is worth something too.
Also Chrome exists primarily to ensure their ads business remains healthy i.e. they have massively watered down privacy restrictions.
You, the theater owner, are selling the time people are sitting in your theater in view of a large screen to advertisers. That time is literally worth something.
If there were no people in the theater, the advertisers wouldn’t pay for the time.
You just really don’t understand how advertising works.
You’re effectively saying something like “just because people would pay for something, doesn’t mean it has any value”
I have to believe that you’re an extremely skilled troll, because otherwise idk what’s going on in your head.
It literally means exactly that, because you're deriving some real value (money) from 5 minutes of your eyesight. So therefore it has value.
I don't want to sell my data. I want companies to stop collecting it.
In fact, I don't think I've seen anyone here wishing they could sell their data.
However the value is not nothing, and if you are a company with multiple billion users, that value of data can get pretty big pretty fast
That’s literally google’s business model.
You think Gmail is free bc Google is nice?
Come on…
Which is a bad thing and should stop. Right now!
Ps: it’s also not like you’re paying so little that you could say you’re getting it for…… free
Very weird.
It’s a good deal for the individual, that’s why Gmail is popular.
Trading something of low value for something of moderate value is not what “free” means…
Say the data from me or any of my peers was worth 1/100th of a cent and we give that away… that means I am trading something of minor value for something else…
Apple is mostly too dependent on vertical integration to truly take over a market. If they allowed their OS on other hardware or something, they could pull Google power but they are entirely built around being their own unique bubble.
If Google finally gets broken up, you'll probably see hardware manufacturers like Samsung and LG truly start doing interesting things again.
Google will even with a break up, continue to control search and probably the web as a whole. Microsoft would be starting from scratch trying to build a mobile ecosystem again to compete with whatever's left of Android. And largely outside of the Windows ecosystem, Microsoft has repeatedly failed to buy control over the developer ecosystem. (All they need is one dumb PM to tick off the average GitHub user, and they're sunk there too.)
Google's search advantage could be taken away with another website that's better. There's no installed base or corporate lockin to contend with. Same with email. Same with maps. While Google uses data from each of these services to better target ads at you, the services are not very tied into each other, and you could easily grab one of those services away from Google if you just provided a better standalone service.
To me, that's not a good case for breaking up Google.
Office/GCloud does feel like the two big players but I'm sure competition would creep up here if GSuite went away (and I doubt it would, even as a standalone company).
Working for big corps these days I see that supporting Apple devices is pretty standard.
I'd say Microsoft is way less entrenched than it was 10-15 years ago technically - but they do a great job of selling Azure to enterprises. And even there AWS is a huge competitor without Google.
Windows, on the other hand, is a very strong platform, but Valve has been chipping away at it recently by supporting efforts like Proton to play Windows games natively on Linux. Shipping a game on PC is synonymous with shipping on Windows, Mac is an afterthought, and Linux is a pipedream. Microsoft doesn't directly profit off gaming on Windows by charging a platform fee at the moment, but they have tried in the past and could in the future at the drop of a hat.
Windows's hold on gamers at this point is less about playing the games themselves and more about secondary applications, like Discord, having subpar Linux support.
On the publishing side of things, Microsoft just recently became the third largest gaming publisher in the world by buying the fourth largest gaming publisher in the world. Microsoft owns World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Call of Duty, and (for a while now) Minecraft. They own an absurdly large portion of the gaming market despite creating not a single successful franchise in-house.
Hyper relevant I'd say, although the Microsoft corporate touch seems to kill every studio they buy.
> Office/GCloud does feel like the two big players but I'm sure competition would creep up here if GSuite went away (and I doubt it would, even as a standalone company).
Office is orders of magnitude bigger than GSuite. It is gigantic. Governments release documents in Word format instead of OpenOffice. It's so big. GSuite is still a minnow in comparison.
I honestly would love it we would ditch surveillance capitalism and went back to a simpler option of paying for products and services. I think that essentially all of the complaints you here about Google (their lack of any responsiveness/customer support, their constant spying on users, the constant "Google graveyard" of discontinued products, their current corporate ossification, etc.) can be directly linked to the fact that users don't pay for their products.
Excellent criticism too that the evil monopolist that devilishly gives away extremely useful and value-add products and services in order to expand its evil monopoly is also famously criticized by the victims of those free data-mining products for sometimes discontinuing them without giving them proper notice! Surely Google can’t just stop mistreating them without adequate prior notice!
They started doing public long distance on their own (railroad) network in the 1970s. They were restrained (and frequently sued by) AT&T. The breakup opened the floodgates. They were sold like a half dozen times in the 80s.
But, MCI was AFAIK the largest early fiber pioneer.
I did a search for books about building the internet infrastructure and it turned up some other recommendations but I haven't read them so can't vouch for quality or content:
Network Geeks: How They Built the Internet by Brian E Carpenter
The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu
Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew Blum
How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone by Brian McCullough
Maybe someone else here has read them and can comment.
Now this gives me reason lamenting the break-up of AT&T.
You’re repeating someones posthoc thesis as obvious fact.
It’s probably a good point to share. Let’s just have a little more skepticism and openness to other analysis.
I have a lot of issues with Google as a company, but I do not envy their position when it comes to the web search. It is a cursed problem no matter how you look at it.
When you search for "vacuum cleaner", you either want online stores or you may want a local store. In either case it's a business query rather than looking for reviews or specs.
What's really polluting search, including Google, is the on-demand content generation based on your query. It's a sea of flotsam.
Look at any two sided market: Amazon/Etsy's third party sellers also want to be at the top, and there are bad actors trying to scam the intermediary and the customer. The same low friction onboarding that allows the company to succeed as an intermediary is also facilitating the fraud. Merchants can be fraudsters, advertisers can be fraudsters, users can be fraudsters producing fake clicks. There's economic incentives everywhere. See the relatively recent news of spotify getting generated songs, which are then played by fake listeners.
The companies are entering this situations with their eyes wide open. It's a necessary problem when you want to be an intermediary at a large enough scale. And if you don't have the scale, the per-interaction costs are really high, and your company gets beaten by someone with an easier onboarding funnel.
But the funding model is also extremely blessed: you have a stream of people telling you every page load what they're interested in at that exact moment, and it's not hard to match them up with advertisers for those keywords.
And arguably the SEO parasitism problem is worsened by their monopoly -- to the extent that optimizing a site for one engine deoptimizes it on on others, the stronger the lead engine #1 has the more incentive there is to game it.
How many millions do you need to spend to decrease your own spending on AI for every query?
Kagi
Arguably this is not their fault - I really wish iOS/MacOS Safari let you set a custom search engine instead of picking from a fixed list.
The links points however are a bit ridiculous, they're entitled to their opinion but may be surprised to find people, at the businesses they use, have opinions that differ to theirs, and these businesses aren't always well-oiled machines.
For a consumer facing business with no lock in, the tax thing makes absolutely no difference in your life using the product.
If it was really a concern you'd simply no longer have access and change search engine, until then it doesn't matter. You'd be surprised what tax issues even large billion dollar companies have.
I mean, if I reduce my plastic use because I stop buying product X then that's still better (in my eyes) than if I did nothing. Or if Company Y has some egregious political ties, I cut them off, but Company Z is a huge conglomerate so I can't cut them off. Still a better deal than doing nothing.
And compare Google and Kagi? Monopoly bad or Employee bad, which do you choose?
As I say unless its egregious. It's a nice idea but doesn't work in practice there's always trade offs.
"Are they actually planting these trees?" and "How would I possibly verify?"
"Does Microsoft actually pay them? All I'm doing is clicking? Is that worth enough?"
"How does anybody verify, and how is it not just an optimization for Ecosia to farm clicks for money? Chinese/Indian/Bangladeshi/Nigerian/MechTurk click farms don't cost that much. Seen the prices on MechTurk?"
The only earn money if people click ads, just like any other search engine. Microsoft isn't paying them to show them Bing results.
After reading the founders thoughts, if they were any sort of sizable company they would immediately have a GDPR violation. "emails and any info you give to use voluntarily (search prefs) is not PII and as such you can't have your data back." :0
It uses google search behind the scenes. Among other search providers.
So yeah, I find DDG perfectly adequate.
Can you give me an example of a search query which yields acceptable results on Google but does not on Bing?
I have such a hard time understanding your position on this. Google search results are absolute trash now, compared to DuckDuckGo.
Putting a sticker on Bing and Yandex results doesn't make a Search company.
For example, if you are discussing manufacturing issues in China, talking about how good drop-shippers on Amazon are is irrelevant.
I start every search in DDG and have to take it to Google fully 90% of the time.
A general one: Whenever I search for something that was relevant in the past, but the keywords are now hijacked by some current events. Note that setting an upper date limit does not help: My problem is the content itself, not when the content was created. Somebody could still create content today about a historic event.
A concrete example that you guys can try for yourself is that I tried to find a certain Greek fable, because it became important to me because I deeply understood yet another layer of it only recently, decades after hearing the story and the usual interpretations:
Three philosophers discussing... stuff got tired and took a nap under a tree. Some mischievous boy put a black paint mark on their head while they slept. When they woke up, they all only saw the black mark on the other philosophers' heads and laughed at each other. It took a while for one of them to realize that he too must have such a mark.
I tried many questions and keywords and many search engines. The only one that found the fable was - ChatGPT!. All the search eng8ines only showed completely irrelevant stuff. I even tried avoiding the word "philosophers" because there are three well-known ancient Greek philosophers and plenty of results with that exact wording for those guys.
For example, if Alice is very interested in Sports News, coding, and movie reviews, they might get great results.
And then Bob runs searches on cooking recipes, interior design, and music, and gets terrible results.
Most likely you care about something that the other person doesn’t, biasing your search results greatly.
I switched to DuckDuckGO about 1.5/2 years back, and it was awesome at the time. But it has gradually gotten worse to the point where I @google search pretty much 70% of the time. Now that could be me being in a bit in the honeymoon phase with DDG at the time and it wore off, or maybe it's actually been getting worse.
My pet, unproven, theory. Is that DDG has been "improving" but that's been making the search worse somehow. Perhaps the context and "fanciness" of a search is not something we all value and that's what we're experiencing.
I think alternative search engines would have better chances if they provided alternative interfaces to refine search queries instead of trying to compete with Google/Bing.
Even when you do get the results your after, and get sent to the page you want, the goal of that page is to serve you adverts, not to give you the content you want.
This is a common tactic of tech giants, and the direct consequence of it is… what we have today.
Edit: Per Wiki, Google has also bought and killed the following search engines/services that nobody has heard of: Outride, Kaltix, Plink, Like.com, Orion, Metaweb, Awkan Technologies.
Hard disagree. Google almost delights in not showing what you want. For political stuff it's very biased. If you search for something more obscure, Google really likes to "correct" your search and eliminate terms.
Although Google is better in my maternal language and for images (but AI is ruining image search for everyone).
Google/Alphabet, first and foremost, is the largest online advertiser via its acquisitions of YouTube, DoubleClick, and others, in addition to selling ad placement on Google Search via AdWords, plus a growing number of consumer portals for price comparisons etc. integrated with Google Search (leaving out tracking your activity on Android devices, Google's cloud business, and Books/scholar). The immediate antitrust perspective starts by looking at Alphabet/Google subsidiaries both providing search results and ads on the pages listed in search results (and to a lesser degree even by pushing Google services via Google Search). This is what had ruined the web in more than one way.
> I get why 90% of people use google. I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are.
> Finally, the filing said Google’s dominance over search text ads needed to be addressed by lowering barriers to would-be rivals or licensing its ad feed to others, independently from search results.
What Google has is a monopoly on search (which is bad), but I don't think having a monopoly for advertising on your own property is a bad thing. If anything, from a privacy perspective, I'd rather that only one party (the publisher, in this case Google) gets to see my searches, rather than the publisher and an ecosystem of low-scrupules ad platforms.
For sure I might be biased as I used to work on Google Ads, but I also know quite a bit about how the sausage is made and how the industry is. That being said, I really don't see how "licensing the ad feed" would do any good for end users.
Where one might run afoul is using your monopoly in one market -- search, in Google's case -- to gain an advantage in another market -- advertising. It's kinda interesting because they clearly don't treat "search" as a market given they don't sell it to anyone but it also clearly has value, otherwise people wouldn't use it.
Now I wonder if it is without precedent that the supposedly-monopolistic thing they're using as a carrot for their advantage in a different market doesn't actually generate revenue itself; not sure if that context has ever been tried in court.
There is another ongoing case regarding Google's Ad business (concerning Display Ads and more specifically the ad auctions) which seems pretty strong. But again, it's not about preventing Google from owning the ad platform for their own properties.
Preventing companies from owning the advertising platform for their own properties is a pretty terrible idea (got an idea for a new ad format that no network supports? Tough luck!). But, preventing a player with a monopoly in one sector from having an ad platform for other players, that's sensible.
They sell access to their search API, even to competitors.
In this case, the search provider is the low scruples ad platform. Bing as well.
I'm worried that what's actually going to happen is Google getting broken up and M$ just swooping in to feast on the carcass, leaving us in an even shittier position. Out of all the evils coming from the FAANG world, M$ and Meta are by far the worst IMO, so not breaking them up alongside google is just idiocy
Assume Google is split up, Android is not maintained because doing so is not profitable. Each handset manufacture still needs an OS, and will just make custom forks or whole OS. They're not going to wind down operations because Android stops being a thing
I don't think it meaningfully increases IOS market share?
It would be like if we here in Denmark started breaking up Novo Nordisk. Our economists would probably do a public lynching of any government official who suggested doing that.
However as a European I can't help but welcoming the US shooting themselves in the foot like this. Something tells me we will see more of this as more reddit-brained American millennials get political influence.
Please explain how Google has created a materially worse world
Don't underestimate how much freedom that gives people to strike it out on their own.
Ever bought something you didn't actually want? Were you persuaded to want something? What was the exact mechanism? Were you lied to? "Made to" somehow?
> net positive for the world
How exactly do you find out what is "net positive for the world"? Who assigns the the values and who does the tallying?
We don't actually know, but we know it exists. Because otherwise people wouldn't bother paying for ads. Your average person can identify hundreds of brands instantly. What's the value of that? Billions? Trillions?
Certainly, when cigarettes and chewing tobacco were advertised most people did it. Granted, the addiction helps because you only need 1 successful conversion for a life-long customer.
Well, now very few people do that in the US. Without a shadow of a doubt in anyone's mind, the abolishment of those ads had something to do with it.
One of the most common fallacies I see is that choice is a binary. You either chose something, or you didn't. Meaning you were forced.
In actuality, choice is incredibly complex. There are thousands of individual events that will influence your choices. What you're doing right now could be influencing choices you make next decade, and you wouldn't know.
You can control people's choices without forcing their hand on anything. You can introduce information and events that sculpt their mind without so much as lifting a finger. It's a form of mind control, but not in the TV sense. Because people make the choices themselves.
Making someone do something is almost worthless. Convincing someone it's in their best interest to do something is where the value actually is. Look back at wars and our use of propaganda and try to break down what the end-goal is. It's not "making" people do something.
But does that mean that they control me? Only if this information comes from only one side and is well integrated in my regular trusted information streams overwhelming my defenses. Like propaganda. Or a Guru. Or an academic institution.
Ads on the other hand are quite easily defeated because they are both clearly delimited and coming from numerous, competing directions. In a world without Ads I would be very vulnerable to them. In our world though they are reduced to a more utilitarian function: to inform me. They tell me what options are out there, what is available and how to get it if I so choose.
I don't think they can "make me" do anything against my own interest or even change my mind. They can merely inform me and I have no problem with that.
Even now I will go out of my way to watch adverts for things like films I might be interested in.
Need to be careful with word of mouth though, many adverts are spread by word of mouth, especially on the internet where people are paid to say "hey this new $product is great". Those are worse that clearly marked ads.
No we don't. I need a better mouse trap, but I already have mouse traps that work, so if you make a better one you need me to find out about it otherwise I'll just buy the same old not so good ones out of habit thinking they work as good as any other one. There are also problems that I don't even know I have. There are a lot of houses with terrible insulation that the owners really need some advertisement to get them to upgrade - it will pay off in just a few years.
For the avoidance of doubt, Wintel was Big Tech. The status quo now is Big Ad Tech.
The main economically positive thing for the US (and something Europeans absolutely screwed up in relative terms versus the US and increasingly China) is the early investment and adoption of Tech. Digitization as such is a great enabler.
But you don't need Big Tech oligopolies for a vibrant digital economy.
But even more importantly, you don't need bizarre Big Ad Tech commingled business models that build the economy's entire tech infrastructure - many parts of it having a critical utility like role - on the back of... ads.
But there is little scope for European schadenfreude. Arguably the US antitrust gears are moving precisely because people slowly wake up to the limits on economic opportunity placed by the Big Ad Tech status quo.
In Europe we are good at words and criticizing mistakes but deeds are scarce.
Big Ad Tech has been a money spigot for R&D in both hard and soft tech. This comes via M&A but also spawning a generation of VCs willing to fritter away adtech money on fun hard tech startups.
There is not a big source of VC funding for hardware startups that doesn't come directly or indirectly from Big Tech / Big Ad Tech revenue and valuations.
Our economy is absolutely benefiting from Novo Nordisk's size right now, but if/when their demand weakens or they're out-competed, we're going to end up with a lot of unemployed biotechnicians and massive roads to Kalundborg which will need to be maintained.
In my opinion, breaking up Google would only serve to make it even more profitable. Once companies grow to behemoths, they stop doing stuff. They slow down innovation to a crawl, and they essentially exist on life support and inertia until they're overthrown by a much, much smaller company.
We see this pattern of life for a company again and again. We see it RCA, with GE, with GM. The only reason AT&T (Ma Bell) is still around and didn't decay like others before it is BECAUSE it was broken up. It was given new life as a set of new, smaller companies.
Google has a substantial amount of control over the flow of information in the United States. To the point it can literally redefine truth. This is a problem - and one that is easily solved by breaking up a de-facto monopoly. Moreover, the acquire-and-kill strategy stifles innovation. Imagine what we would have if Google didnt have the capital to buy and kill so many small companies.
This is the short story of what happened in the local telecom deregulation, which I'm pretty sure will happen if you were to break up Google. Consider this took place over the course of 20+ years, but I see the same things happening.
After the Ma Bells breakup, there was a huge push to deregulate the regional carriers to increase local market competition. This was put in place in the late 90's here in Minnesota. Suddenly anybody could start a local telecom, lease lines from Qwest Communications (now CenturyLink), resell them and then compete with them in the local market.
This spawned hundreds of companies that were living on razor thin margins. Many were able to exist up to the 2000 initial dot com bust. Many went out of business during the recession. Those who survived? Many of those merged with each other, or were bought by larger regional carriers who wanted to get into the Minneapolis market.
This is what I see happening. You break Google up into smaller companies and within a decade, they will have all merged back together in some form, under different names, or they'll be bought by other companies seeking an advantage by using their technology. Its the same thing I saw happen in telecom. They tried to increase competition by deregulating the market and all it did was create a short-term gold rush and long-term crash.
The problem will be the same with Google. Qwest at the time owned the infrastructure and hardware. Nobody had the financial resources to build out an entirely new network to compete with them so they took the path of least resistance. Which lead to a myriad of other problems. Billing, installation, nefarious things Qwest would do to hamper competitors from switching their lines, etc.
You can break up Google, but over a few decades, we'll look back and understand it wasn't worth it.
Perhaps Ma Bell taught us lessons to avoid this time around.
I hope this is true. I'm not sure breaking up Ma Bell was a good thing long term. All they did was break them up and then all the regional bells and smaller companies just re-constituted themselves again in some other form. The deregulation created more competition, but it was short lived because of economic pressures.
For many business customers, their first dealings with local telecom companies that were competing with Qwest at the time were horrific. Business customers would lose their landline and internet service for days without any idea when it would be restored. Cutovers were problematic and a total crap shoot if they went smoothly. Qwest regularly tagged the wrong lines that needed to be cut over. The billing nightmares of moving off of Qwest to a local company were too numerous to remember. Many businesses would switch for the savings and within a few months, would switch back because it was just one thing after another these companies couldn't get right. Suddenly paying a little more for the peace of mind far outweighed any savings they were getting.
I suspect Google customers will have the same experience so I'm still on the fence whether it will be worth it long term. The one argument you can make is that Google isn't simply a company that needs competition, but that's its actually doing damage by how they manipulate their search rankings and what results they're delivering to people - so in that regard, they absolutely need to be broken up.
Here in Utah, if you are very lucky, you can get an intentionally-designed version of that: UTOPIA. UTOPIA works by leasing a municipal fiber network to anyone interested in running an ISP. Because the same network is sold by many separate ISPs, each ISP must actually offer a competitive price. It's very effective: while Comcast (XFinity) will charge anyone it can >$100/mo. for 1000/40mbit, while every UTOPIA provider has their price set to ~$60/mo. for 1000/1000mbit. Actually, I just checked, and UTOPIA prices have actually gone down to ~$45-50, and ~$75 for 2.5G!
The only problem left is that this only creates competitive pricing for areas where UTOPIA owns the network. Anywhere Comcast or CenturyLink owns still has predatory pricing. The worst part (in my experience) is that a handful of apartment developers have shady deals with specific ISPs, where they write the price, but not the speed, into each tenant's lease. For example, I must pay $100/mo. for what ends up being ~300/300mbit from SenaWave. That's better than my last apartment (owned by the same company) where the price and ISP were the same, but I was lucky to get any more than 100/100mbit.
Competition works, so long as it is actively maintained.
Netflix waited until they had sufficiently killed off cable TV, then went back to creating the same problem it fixed. No ads in ChatGPT today, but soon as it (or a competitor) gains meaningful marketshare, there will be ads.
Not necessarily true. Physical billboards are ads but (mostly) without privacy concerns, until they start putting cameras on them watching who walks by and looks.
After I make my decision and buy one (online, or in person), I no longer search for "vacuum cleaner reviews", but I search instead for "skiing in January" and I no longer get adverts for vacuum cleaners, I get it for ski resorts.
Odd take IMO that Google's ever encroaching ads make their product better. Heck, Larry and Sergei even wrote a treatise (it used to be available directly off google.com, can't remember the name) about how they would be different from search engines at the time, how they wouldn't sell search position, and how the ads model was fundamentally at odds with end user experience. That's hilarious now as Google has gone to great lengths to make ads as indistinguishable as possible from normal search results, and for some terms my entire front page is ads. Compare that to "early" Google where ads were clearly identified in top and right sections with a yellow banner.
Hey! You just bought a filter for your air purifier! Want to buy a new one! For a different purifier you don't own!
No, talk to me in six months.
https://www.jcdecaux.com.au/news-around-world/jetstar-and-jc...
Of course, consumers cannot possibly estimate the cost of ads. They can't tell how much of the stuff they buy is because they're influenced, or how many years of life they throw away by watching ads in the long run. Ads could be costing them 1 dollar a year, or maybe 1,000. But they don't know, and they sure as hell won't be paying 5 bucks for a product if there's a "free" ad version.
What does that even look like, practically speaking? Is sponsored segment an ad? Is wearing branded apparel an ad? Is doing a press junket for a new movie an ad?
Most newspapers require payment but have no ad free option either.
I’m not convinced.
Not running ads is what you do when you care about user experience. If you start running ads it’s because you care more about money than user experience.
As long as there is robust competition the consumer’s preferences will be favored, because success comes at their discretion.
So I think it’s more like “wherever the consumer isn’t the customer there will be ads”.
Company B has ads. Company B makes more money and can therefore provide more features / more content. Company B ends up providing more of what users want.
We saw this with AT&T Bell research labs with their inventions of transistor and Unix, among others. The same thing happened with Google research with (arguably) deep learning and transformer.
Split them up at your own (US) perils, not unlike killing own Golden Goose.
When you talk to a researcher, do they strike you as someone who chases handsome amounts of money, or someone who chases ideas?
You bring up research labs. I listened to Alan Kay's numerous talks over the years (as an example of a prominent CS researcher), not once does he mention that he joined for the money at Xerox PARC. Yes, he was paid, but the main advantage was being given free reign to conduct research with the best experts in their fields, i.e. to invent and pursue ideas.
The important part from a financial perspective, is to be able to have finances to back a research division, where you can spend billions on building a new type of technology, if need be, that may not pan out. You don't need a monopoly to accomplish that.
You know who does chase handsome amounts of money? Day traders and everyone gambling on the stock market.
A company in an industry with very tight margins has much less money to invest in fundamental research. All the recent growth in generative AI has been driven by companies with very high margins; Google, Facebook, Amazon. If all those FANG were in tightly competitive markets and hence had low margins, they wouldn't have had billions of dollars to spend on the GPU compute necessary to develop modern language models. Which is evidenced by the fact that no companies in more competitive sectors have produced any large language models.
OpenAI has raised almost $18bn to date [1]. That puts it in the top 10 corporate R&D spenders globally, ahead of Intel and the entirety of big pharma [2]. (And OpenAI's gross margins for its API business are estimated around 40% [3]. Standard fare for tech. If anything, OpenAI subsidising its business with Apple and ChatGPT is behaving more like a tech giant than a start-up.)
The top of that list are the big 5 American tech companies, spending about $200bn annually on R&D. By coincidence, that's roughly the pace of U.S. VC spend [4]. The depth of American private capital markets make a solid case against favouring housing these long-shot bets inside tech giants. (Particularly absent non-compete and IP reform.)
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/02/openai-raises-6-6b-and-is-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_by_research_...
[3] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/a-peek-behind-openai...
[4] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/ai-deals-lift-us-ve...
It'd be way more efficient and cost effective to just set up a well-funded government labs to do that research.
It's not about building and owning the next best thing, it's about preventing someone else building and owning the next best thing.
“Given that production could be carried on without any organization, Coase asks, 'Why and under what conditions should we expect firms to emerge?' Since modern firms can only emerge when an entrepreneur of some sort begins to hire people, Coase's analysis proceeds by considering the conditions under which it makes sense for an entrepreneur to seek hired help instead of contracting out for some particular task. The traditional economic theory of the time suggested that, because the market is ‘efficient’ (that is, those who are best at providing each good or service most cheaply are already doing so), it should always be cheaper to contract out than to hire.
Coase noted, however, that there are a number of transaction costs to using the market; the cost of obtaining a good or service via the market is actually more than just the price of the good. Other costs, including search and information costs, bargaining costs, keeping trade secrets, and policing and enforcement costs, can all potentially add to the cost of procuring something via the market. This suggests that firms will arise when they can arrange to produce what they need internally, and somehow avoid these costs.
There is a natural limit to what can be produced internally, however. Coase notices ‘decreasing returns to the entrepreneur function’, including increasing overhead costs and increasing propensity for an overwhelmed manager to make mistakes in resource allocation. This is a countervailing cost to the use of the firm.
Coase argues that the size of a firm (as measured by how many contractual relations are ‘internal’ to the firm and how many ‘external’) is a result of finding an optimal balance between the competing tendencies of the costs outlined above. In general, making the firm larger will initially be advantageous, but the decreasing returns indicated above will eventually kick in, preventing the firm from growing indefinitely.”
>”Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.”
Have these people even read the white papers that Google releases? They are mostly marketing pieces.
When systems and technologies are not publicly reproducible, why should scientists and (most) engineers care? I will not take Google at its word and would not recommend it to others.
This should be well known, simple google search:
https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/why...
AT&T copyrights led to linux, and linux, independent of unix, has been a huge boon for good, and for unixness.
the threat to unix now is all the people who by nature prefer Dave Cutlerness, and can't see that their way is the wrong way, now they are using linux (because it won) and trying to ruin it.
Novell bought UNIX and has some grand plans for "SuperNOS", which also never shipped. It certainly wasn't anything like K8s.
Also I believe that even when working optimally the Darwinian mechanism can't solve certain problems. Some things need to be dealt with by a group of motivated people working for other goals than profit.
Markets gave us compuserve and facebook while CERN gave us the open web, for example.
- Providing a free alternative to Microsoft’s monopolized office suite and desktop OS
- Provide a free alternative to Apple’s mobile OS, spurring a revolution in access to the internet for the world’s poor
- Provide free global maps with streetview sights
- Provide a free to access video platform with invaluable educational resources that allows millions of creators to make a living and that likely wouldn’t exist save for Google’s monumental investments and ability to sustain years of losses
- Research given away for free that ignited the current AI revolution
- Research given away for free that is revolutionizing medicine and drug development
In sum, truly a horrible thing they’ve done
Like for example having youtube be free until they're the only game in town then start charging 14 dollars monthly to avoid 30% ads. Or targeting ads to gmail users so you can artificially provide a cheaper mail service than anyone else.
There's an actual law saying you can't do stuff like that.
Companies getting too big are natural; Letting them get too big is what happens when your state borrows a trillion per semester: Your state is obese, intervening in every little sector of the economy (thus the opposite of liberal), and not playing its regalian role.
You should indeed reduce the size of both the state and the largest companies, to let the economy self-regulate, but then, how would the US govern the rest of the world?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/live/L_QaZk5iJOA?si=ZkxBe1CHgagmcBcW...
Innovation is a lot easier when you have a lot of money to spend on R&D. In order to get that money, you can't compete on price b/c that's a race to the bottom. Instead, you want to focus on quality and/or customer service so that you become a monopoly and then can use monopoly profits to innovate to higher quality products and services.
Clip: https://www.tiktok.com/@rorysutherlandclips/video/7314765561...
Google is an advertising company, search is a by-product and has been for a long time.
You're not wrong, but it didn't last. Google jumped the shark in its first decade. I remember giving an internal presentation in 2010 or 2012 about how little of the screen real estate in a Google search result was actually search results.
You really have to think about exactly how our modern markets work and why buyouts are such dominant strategy. It's only sometimes about taking what you buy then using it, it's mostly about taking what you buy to stifle competition these days.
Look at twitter and Vine, twitter bought then shut down vine as part of a standard operating procedure just to stifle competition, and they had so little interest in capitalizing on what they bought that it left a market gap so wide TikTok filled it instead. But usually these practices do not leave such big market gaps, usually they simply shut down competition successfully and the buyer wins. Then in many cases if the company owners refuse to be bought out, extreme anti-competitive practices begin to destroy their business, which will not be punished until long after the victims get shut down. So owners need to choose between a huge pay out, or their company getting destroyed. Owners tend to choose the former.
- AlphaFold (just won a Nobel prize)
- Transformers (the "T" in GPT)
- Waymo (autonomous vehicles)
- Sycamore (quantum computing)
These are just a few off the top of my head.
If your idea of innovation is a better RSS reader, then sure, I agree with you. But in terms of things that push the forefront of technology, I have a hard time thinking of another company with greater impact in recent years.
I just given you the deep learning and transformer benefits.
There's a reason why the darling of AI Renaissance namely transformer was not invented at MIT, Stanford or Berkeley.
PageRank
Gmail
Maps
MapReduce
Chrome
Protocol Buffers
Go
MapReduce would be invented anyway (I implemented it from scratch before learning of it’s existence).
Chrome is just a slightly upgraded Firefox (and novadays Safari is just as good if not better with ai)
PageRank was what gave Google monopoly, it’s not a result of monopoly.
Go - I can give you that. ProtoBuf - not my field, but isn’t it just a format that someone else would develop to fill a niche? (unlike say mp3 that had new compression algorithms baked in)
Maps - I can give you that. Some people might argue that it was an acquisition, but without Google’s muscle, Street View would not be feasible.
Wat. It's like saying that an apple is a slightly upgraded orange. I would understand if you mentioned KHTML and Safari as relatives, but "slightly upgraded" does not fit anyway.
> PageRank was what gave Google monopoly
I don't think so. PageRank has been successfully implemented elsewhere, and outmatched. What helped Google build a monopoly was the first mover advantage, the network effects, and the incessant streams of money from AdWords (invented by Google), DoubleClick (acquired) and a bunch of other advertisement tools.
> Maps - I can give you that.
Don't :) Google Maps is an acquisition from 20 years ago. (As is Android, AdSense, and many other core flagship products of the Google brand.)
If you want a relatively recent, successful Google service for general public, it's Google Photos.
This is comical. When Google acquired Android, it was nothing more than a 3000 line JavaScript demo. The Android OS was created entirely at Google.
I seem to recall that followed the acquisition of Picasa.
Not sure about your experience, but I used to subscribe to a lot of mailing lists just so that I can search for mailing list content using gmail, because the search function implemented by those mailing lists were generally worse.
Technically, but it's morphed so much that it doesn't even resemble its former self. I remember when Google Maps first came out and showed AJAX technology, so obviously superior to the competitors at the time like MapQuest. However, these days Google Maps is really more of a business directory with navigation, and it wasn't like that in the early days: you needed an address to navigate to.
Typical HN comment writing off significant thoughtfulness as "not an innovation" lol
Competition is a prerequisite for healthy Capitalism. Lack of competition is the Achilles heel.
Is it the free maps? free mobile OS? free email? free cloud storage? free video service? free office suite? free desktop OS? free AI chat?
Personally I am skeptical that they have enough technically capable and charismatic leaders to pull this off.
You can speculate that something better would emerge from the ashes. It's possible you're right. But you have to admit this would be a huge gamble.
This isn't like Bell where you can just split the company into geographically distinct regions and call it a day. Google's services are intricately linked together and tightly integrated, and you can argue that's a huge part of where their value lies.
I'm not entirely sure where I stand on this, but I think I'd be more in favor of laws to force interoperability and promote competition rather than a full fledged break up, at least in the short term. Or maybe a slow, carefully planned breakup where individual services get spun out one at a time over a few decades, with time to reverse course if that proves to be a bad idea.
If gmail disappears, people could move to another provider. Etc.
Letting dysfunctional companies fail is supposedly a core tenet of capitalism.
I.e, the first company to reach x% browser market share will receive $x million (billion?) in prize money
or, the first company to build an LLM-based search engine with x% market share will receive $n million
Or structure as a direct investment or heavy tax breaks.
Always better to incentivize competition versus punish success.
Or even better, if government wants to break up "ACME corp" then just tell the employees that, if you leave "ACME corp" and start your own company competing with ACME corp, we will waive taxes on all income for your first five profitable years.
An open source, public benefit search engine would be a really valuable thing to have, which no private company does or ever will find it viable to provide. And I don't even want it to be the only search engine. Commercial search engines will probably still have the edge in various ways, for various use cases. But why not have a public option as one point in the landscape?
If someone is going to "organise the world's information" I'd prefer it to be a democratically controlled government, not an unaccountable for-profit corporation. I know that's an ideological position that many here won't share.
Breaking up monopolies has a long, successful track record.
The entire antitrust concept is concerning honestly.
This seems like the opposite of what the government should be doing to incentivize competition and innovation.
Like all dominant companies, Google will eventually fall via strangulation by its internal bureaucracy. There's no reason to hand the market over to another country.
> Microsoft in the year ended June 2016 had $20.1 billion in foreign income and a domestic loss of $300 million. Microsoft’s income tax expense was $3.3 billion, for an effective rate of 16.5%. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, posted a $4.7 billion tax expense, or 19%. Such “avoision” will continue as long as foreign income is subject to lower rates than domestic.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2017/04/18/wh...
> There's no reason to hand the market over to another country.
Who's to say that the other country's Google-killer won't prove to be a greater boon to American consumers? Let the global market decide.
If you do it by hobbling American businesses, they aren't a greater boon.
And I care about every single business since I know that the more competition there is - the better and cheaper the products and services will be.
For the same reason Google is dominant today. Hobbling American business creates opportunities for other countries to take the top dog position.
Ever heard of second order effects and chilling effect of regulation?
Sorry guys, but because Google made itself into a monopoly you can no longer sell default positions on your platform (Which is essentially a company buying an ad placement).
I'm really curious what the Judge decides the remedy is for this issue. Anyone have any possible remedies in mind that doesn't completely tank some of these other guys revenues?
These trillion dollar companies were often able to invest into big money-losing moonshot projects that benefited consumers massively - in Google's case, GMail and Google Maps - which were truly unimaginable at the time even though they're taken for granted today, so there's clearly some benefit in the form of innovation. Who else can afford to build things like that?
The questions to ask are, can startups and venture capital take on the role of innovating that these big corps have done? I'm doubtful, since there's been no startup in the past ten years that put out anything nearly as genuinely innovative and helpful as Google Maps was for me, mainly because the risk/profit ratio is so bad without the network effects that these big companies have.
Do the benefits outweigh the costs? Ten years ago, when the big companies were innovating so much to the benefit of consumers, I'd answer unequivocally yes. Now it's much less clear.
And finally, is there any way to rein in the negative effects of these big companies while bringing out the positive effects to the benefit of consumers?
Maps was created because it allowed google to be more competitive, not because they were already on top of their game and could just pour billions into any product.
They did this when they were much smaller. I haven't seen anything impressive from the huge tech companies in the last years, be it MS, Google or Apple. All the the cool stuff was done years ago when they were much smaller. Their main achievements is to buy up or just crush potential competition before they become competitive.
This break up is long overdue but we also need a drastic rethink of antitrust law and corporate taxes to shift the economy towards innovative smaller instead of concentrating it in a few megacorps that are as powerful as some governments.
What if it kills Android, and everyone has to buy an iPhone? (Yeah, I know, Android is OSS and the phone makers could just maintain/improve it as a consortium without Google, but looking at how these companies operate I don't think they're capable of doing this.) (And no, I don't think the USG will break up Apple if this happens. They're already showing highly preferential treatment to Apple compared to Google.)
What if it kills YouTube, and the only viable alternative is TikTok? I recommend everyone start downloading all their favorite YouTube videos with yt-dlp right away, just in case.
What if it kills Google Maps? Again, there's no real viable alternative here unless you have an iPhone.
I can see a lot of ways things could go horribly wrong here if you're someone who doesn't want to be an Apple user.
There's tons of video hosting options but what makes YouTube special is access to a large audience and monetization. TikTok's monetization is garbage and not even a contender really. Large content creators are already negotiating their own brand deals to the point where YouTube's ad money is merely the cherry on top. I actually think breaking up YouTube would be good for audiences and in the long run creators themselves. Content creator networks would make a return in a big way.
There is already OpenStreetMaps. MapQuest existed before Google Maps and still does.
You can’t get turn-by-turn directions because they don’t (consistently) have things like lane permeability, turn restrictions, directionality, etc. You can’t get accurate ETAs because they don’t have speed limits or free flow speeds. And traffic data of course. Unless things have changed, routing class and surface type are also unreliable, so a shortest-path graph algo will take you down neighborhood streets or unmaintained roads.
There is a ton of under-the-hood map data, invisible to the end user, that you need to have to be able to deliver a modern phone navigation experience.
My phone tends to overheat when I stick it under the window to use for directions, so I tend to prefer the dedicated GPS units anyway.
MapQuest doesn't have any of this stuff either. Apple Maps is probably the closest, but it falls very far short of what Google Maps can do.
The largest business by far is iPhones. It has 16% market share in the PC business, behind Lenovo, HP, and Dell. The only business that makes sense to peel off is the iPhone services (Apple Music, News, etc.) because that's the place it uses its dominant position to help its own products.
total revenue | percent from google | total expenses |software dev expenses
$593 million | 81% ($480 million) | $425 million | $220 million
so basically 168 million in the bank in 2022. the math has been basically this the last 10 years. in 2018 they lost 1 million but in 2019 they gained 330 million. a lot of their software expenses probably comes from the busywork features they saddled upon themselves like pocket or whatever, since it was only $63 million in 2010 and has only gone up by a couple hundred million from there.
So just over the last 10 years from my back of the envelope map from that table on wikipedia, they should have a good 1.5 billion in the war chest by today assuming the mozilla foundation did not make investments with it, which they probably have this entire time so probably even more valuable. At a certain point, maybe already, the org should have enough cash socked away in investment to just pay for operating expenses out of dividends alone.
This is a bit scary. Hopefully this would not be retroactive, and only apply to searches made after the enforcement date?
How would you, for example, stop a rouge indexer from spewing an unlimited number of bad indexes to spam their garbage into the distributed protocol? Or how would you address just bad/misleading/faulty indexes?
"During that event, Cardiff Garcia did a fascinating interview with Paul Krugman, at the end of which Joe Wiesenthal asked a critical question. The United States, under Joe Biden, is embarking on an aggressive program of industrial policy even as it pursues increasingly vigorous antitrust enforcement. Aren't there tensions between these goals? Responding to an antitrust investigation of NVIDIA, Dylan Matthews similarly asked, "Here you have a tremendously successful national champion in a strategically critical industry. Is that exactly what you want[?]"
[1] https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/09/27/industrial-polic...
Facebook: Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus
Google: DoubleClick, YouTube, Android, Waze, Deep mind
Amazon: Whole Foods, Audible, Zappos, Ring, One Medical
Arguably, I think things would be better if a bunch of these acquisitions were never allowed in the first place. But most of Apple's acquisitions have been of the "acquihire" type where they got specific technologies to enhance their products - Beats is the only one I can think of off the top of my head that has basically remained separate.
I'm not saying acquisitions are the only benchmark for breaking up big tech, but to me it feels like the places where Apple is anti-competitive (e.g. App Store) can be remedied with much smaller changes than a full break up. With the other 3 it seems easier to identify places to "cleave".
If they had to separate their operating systems into another company, they would have to freely compete to put their app stores on their devices.
Or even better, spin off their hardware divisions if you want.
Either way Apple shouldn't be able to control their operating systems or their hardware unless they open up their devices and allow consumers easier ways to both repair their devices and install alternative operating systems on them.
I think it's a much harder argument to make that Apple should get to control all application software used on a device, and furthermore that they have a right to a cut of all revenue of app software sold for a particular device.
It's why I added they should be legally compelled by a consent decree to provide parts, schematics, and the ability to change operating systems seamlessly if they want to keep their monopoly.
Tell your friends to use Firefox, people.
The hard protocol ban is heavy handed.
Fine-grained permissions are a good thing, even though they do unfortunately make things more challenging for developers.
Not all do, some do. And it only takes a few to spot something fishy and start reporting problems.
> This also doesn't address the threat model
It actually does, because few extensions need broad permissions. The threat is significantly reduced if a change in required permissions goes up a new dialog pops up which encourages the few users that read the thing to ask "Hey, why is this asking for so many more permissions?"
This model works. It works so well that the security model of pretty much every app store is exactly the same. The risks are also identical.
I've tried uBlock Origin Lite on Chrome and it works... perfectly. I haven't noticed a single ad get through.
And isn't it supposed to be a lot more performant?
Before, I assumed Chrome really was trying to gradually stop ad-blocking. But now that I see it's had literally zero impact, at least on the sites I visit, I'm starting to wonder what all the fuss was about. Was manifest v3 really about performance and security all along, and not about eliminating ad blockers?
Meanwhile, you can't install adblocking on iOS Safari as an extension at all. But I never hear anybody bringing that up.
There are a bunch of safari ad blockers in the app store that work the same way manifest v3 blockers work.
Remember, Chrome is not installed by default on Windows PCs; Edge is. People are using Chrome because they want to. They could just as easily download Firefox and uBO, like more-savvy users do. Unfortunately, too many can't be bothered. Should they be saved from excessive and intrusive ads? Again, they can easily install uBOL on their Chrome instance, or they can download and install FF+uBO. Or use something else like Brave.
>Tell your friends to use Firefox, people.
Absolutely, yes. Just don't be too surprised when you visit them later and they're still using Chrome (or Edge) with no ad-blocker at all. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
Whenever this is brought up, the silence is deafening.
Edge is a good browser, and users are notoriously lazy; most won't read a dialog box before clicking it away. And yet... ~everyone on Windows still downloads Chrome.
Because it's a bad faith argument meant to dismiss all context surrounding the situation to be a reductive 'gotcha' point. Anti consumer practices are still harmful even if people willingly opt into them, and there's no cute soliloquy for you to publicly muse onto us here that would be able to suggest otherwise to dissipate the sentiment.
Your parent poster commented on the nature of learned helplessness to an obvious problem by framing it as leading a horse to water. They were talking about people like you.
Interestingly, making such an accusation when it is unwarranted, as is the case here, is itself a bad-faith argument.
But I suppose this is just another cute soliloquy that I am "musing onto" you.
Mozilla is pretty much entirely funded by Google
And others they have either competed with other big tech such as Microsoft or Apple, or just is a player in the race.
Compared to say Amazon, Apple, meta or heaven forbid Microsoft that is.
I do think though if they get broken up then I'm fine with Google getting nuked and we all collectively wag the finger against the employees.
Basically, a company would pay a very progressive tax on its revenue (not profit) which reaches 100% at some high threshold value. This tax would be flat zero for the vast majority of enterprises, but would approach 100% as the company's revenue approaches something that is big enough to be relevant on a countrywide GDP scale. Since it would be applied to individual companies only, splitting a company up wod reduce the tax or more even eliminate it entirely.
The exact point at which it makes sense for a company to split itself up the depends on the industry and other circumstances, but thst ppind exists and as society we can control in which type of scale it lies.
Just thought it was a neat proposal, although it would of course require careful legislation to avoid loopholes and edge cases. It surely ald be quite difficult to implement, given the opaque ownership structure of many companies and the companies they in turn own. But maybe the fact that this is so complicated should already give us pause...
If a federal judge finds X/Twitter to have a monopoly on short-form nonsense, yes.
Your drivers' license could have a chip in it capable of FIDO2 etc. and it could be linked with an OAuth provider. I know login.gov already exists but it's not built to be used everywhere.
I think governments often to do it badly, but I think it's a muscle we (broadly speaking) should try to strengthen, not just concede that we'll never be able to do it well.
I was really frustrated by Australia's COVID app rollout, which was just done in typical government style - by throwing money at a big consulting corporation which delivered trash. But the solution isn't "give up". It's "do better". The solution to corruption in the public sector is to fight the corruption, not abandon the public sector.
If a site has no login options other than designated OIDC providers then I’d say they de facto don’t allow anonymity.
Typically because they can easily get it for free. Perfect case study is WinRar. How many people actually bought a license for software they used daily?
…
In addition to potential spin-offs, prosecutors said remedies could include banning the exclusive contracts at the heart of the case — in particular the $20bn that Google pays Apple each year to be its default search engine — as well as imposing ‘non-discrimination’ measures on Google products such as its Android operating system and Play app store.
The DoJ is also considering requiring Google to share its vast trove of data gathered to improve search ranking models, indices and advertising algorithms, which prosecutors argue was accumulated unlawfully.”
I do wish they had some sort of GSoC style programs to do what Alpha Go Fold Zero did for the world.
Search engine marketing (search ads) are quickly declining, losing ground to Amazon.
YouTube Video ads have tons of competition from all other streaming providers.
Web search is a dying product, as time spent has moved to streaming video, social video and social media.
Once again FTC and Antitrust are 10+ years behind, just like they were with Microsoft. By the time any action was taken against Microsoft, antitrust concerns resolved themselves.
Meanwhile FTC is spending hundreds of millions on a case, and Google has to spend a similar amount. Consumers will lose out on both ends: higher subscription prices, higher ads prices , higher taxes.
What happened to the constitution?
In practice, investors usually discount larger companies for efficiency reasons. You can see this with acquisition announcements where the acquirer usually goes down in price. The synergies often fail to pay off because there aren't actually many synergies between making microwaves and running a TV network, and the sprawling empire turns into mostly independent fiefdoms.
Genuine question: what societal value would be lost if Google was erased tomorrow (all technical reliance their services was magically replaced overnight with alternatives by pixies)?
You don't happen to know where one could find these magical perfectly compatible and functional drop in replacements, do you?
[1] https://backlinko.com/iphone-vs-android-statistics
[2] https://www.thestreet.com/technology/big-tech-working-to-cha...
[3] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
[4] https://01core.substack.com/p/google-has-9-products-with-ove...
What drop in equivalent exists for Google maps? I have used OpenStreetMap for a personal project and have tried other proprietary options. If Google maps disappeared, life would go on but I would be worse off.
What equivalent exists for Chrome? Even on desktop I prefer Chrome over Firefox. On mobile, Firefox falls far behind Chrome.
How about which single reasonable replacement offers the same services with the same level of integration?
Using Yahoo Mail and Amazon Cloud and Office Online and whatever other products isn't quite the same offering as what Google offers.
Yup, and that's what people want. So what is the integrated service you are saying exists that can be a drop in replacement for the way so many organizations use Google's integrated services?
There we go. So if we go back up to your first comment where you say there are separate replacements for some services, you can see that isn't really relevant since what is being discussed was a drop in replacement for Google, and not an individual service they offer.
Aside from that though, Google's offerings are not a walled garden.
Today ad auctioning is the ultimate scamming game. The force everyone to pay more, and nobody wins except the ad venue.
But because it is a monopoly currently businesses pay way more than the value of the actual conversions Google ads achieve.
Nobody should be willing to pay above, yet they do because the competition is willing to speculate on the value of these and take extreme positions.
You can test it yourself. Try to promote your website with Google ads and you will see the insane prices they ask for. Btw you don't know if someone else is paying that number, google tells you that that is the price.
Not only did Google not "force" anyone to use the LLM tech that they largely developed, most people think they're silly for inventing it and then sitting on their hands until another company (OpenAI) ate their lunch.
What they're doing is seeing the writing on the wall of the upcoming election and seeing all of their jobs on the line and they're trying to shake down Google for golden parachutes.
I guarantee you in the next year, several high-level DoJ officials will secure senior positions at Google in order to defend against upcoming antitrust litigation. Those that don't will try to use their active litigation as an anchor to try and retain their jobs.
We can assume the message is “If you reelect the current party, we’ll finish these lawsuits.” There are two perverse effects:
- It positions the alternate party as the party that Google should sponsor,
- The good choice after reelection will then be to delay the next step of those popular antitrust cases to 3 weeks before the end of the next mandate, to tell the electors that they should reelect. Which ironically puts the current party in the position of the one doing nothing on the popular antitrust case (a corollary to “a party’s platform depends on ensuring the problems it’s supposed to solve keep existing”).
Don't mistake the limited-purpose US Government for your state government. Colorado does quite a bit, from healthcare to environment to policing. And so does the US, for those subjects it has jurisdiction, and has been doing so for hundreds of years.
>That thought may be comforting, but no.
Why would that be comforting?
https://www.vox.com/2014/4/18/5624310/martin-gilens-testing-...
Sorry for the Vox link, that's what came up.
It never eventuated though. Many of the interesting products and technologies that came out of it were either bought from or copying the actual innovators.
EDIT: AlphaFold was acquired by Google, in case anybody didn't realize that.
Products like Reader, News, etc. would still be around if they'd been split off from the Google mothership.
1. US gov trying to break up your search monopoly
2. ChatGPT disrupting your search monopoly
For me, the links are:
1. Arun Muthu's Programming in Scheme (https://medium.com/atomic-variables/programming-in-scheme-th...) Part 1 of a 4-year-old series of blog posts (on Medium) that has no other parts.
2. Yet Another Scheme Tutorial (http://www.shido.info/lisp/idx_scm_e.html) A decent looking Scheme tutorial, undated.
3. A Scheme Primer (https://spritely.institute/static/papers/scheme-primer.html) Another decent looking tutorial, 2022.
4. Scheme Tutorial (https://www.cs.rpi.edu/academics/courses/fall00/ai/scheme/re...) A copy of a 1997 tutorial for a 2000 class at RPI; has broken links pointing to http://cs.wwc.edu/~cs_dept/KU/PR/.
5. Kent Dybvig's The Scheme Programming Language 4th ed. (https://www.scheme.com/tspl4/)
6. Reddit "Best beginner friendly "write a scheme" tutorial?" (https://www.reddit.com/r/scheme/comments/klt0af/best_beginne...)
7. A link to the introduction of a copy of Paul Wilson's un-attributed An Introduction to Scheme and its Implementation (https://www.cs.rpi.edu/academics/courses/fall00/ai/scheme/re...) from RPI in 2000.
Google is an advertising company with a big IT department, not a technology company.
This is just political corruption feigning as doing the right thing for the country.
we are having the wrong debate and are being distracted by the sideshow.
in many ways this is a test balloon for public support to go after big tech as a narrative around censorship over misinformation that will explode over the next few years