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Telecoms have a huge amount of infrastructure that serves as a massive barrier to entry for new participants. Silicon valley companies in general don't have th
by eridius 10y ago
Telecoms have a huge amount of infrastructure that serves as a massive barrier to entry for new participants.
Silicon valley companies in general don't have this. If you don't like Google, someone else can come along and make a new search engine. And in fact that's exactly what DuckDuckGo did, and I strongly recommend using them if you care even the slightest bit about the privacy of your online searches.
But if you don't like what Comcast is doing with your data, who can you switch to? In most markets there's no viable competitor, and even if you include things like satellite (which in general isn't actual a good competitor to wired internet), I'd have to imagine the satellite internet companies (I don't actually know who they are) aren't likely to be much better than Comcast when it comes to protecting your privacy.
- tptacek 10y agoYou have in fact virtually no chance of building a new search engine to compete with Google, and were you to try I think you'd discover that the effort would be both incredibly capital-intensive and also involve pretty staggering up-front operational expenditures as well, since the number and caliber of developers you'd need to accomplish that feat would be extremely high. I think it'd be an interesting exercise to tease apart how much it would cost to build out a new nationwide optical network versus building a competitive search engine.
- mikecb 10y agoI think most interestingly, in order to create a competitive search engine, you would need not only a nationwide, but indeed a globe-spanning optical network.
- kasey_junk 10y agoWhat about if you used Googles cloud infrastructure? I agree that it's probably crazy but I think it is possible that large organizations can miss on their core value propositions once a certain time/size has passed.
- sbierwagen 10y agoRunning a search engine is capital-intensive in the sense that to have a search engine, you have to maintain an index: a copy of all the text of the publically viewable internet, updated regularly. This requires a lot of network bandwidth and a whole lot of disk space. Generally, cloud stuff is more expensive than running on bare metal: https://blog.pinboard.in/2012/01/the_five_stages_of_hosting/ https://blog.pinboard.in/2012/01/the_five_stages_of_hosting/ If you tried to run an index on GCE it would cost you 5x or 10x what it would to do on servers you own. If you managed to create a viable product with this incredibly onerous constraint, to the point of posing an actual business threat to Google, then they would just shut you down, since all your stuff is on their servers.