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Vivaldi CEO – “Google: it is time to return to not being evil” Me: that train has left the station. When you have monopoly power (70%-98% of market share) the

Vivaldi CEO – “Google: it is time to return to not being evil” Me: that train has left the station. When you have monopoly power (70%-98% of market share) the governments should return Google and Whatever Corp to not being evil.

akerl_ 9y ago
It seems like companies are stuck in a losing game. We constantly push small companies to capture more market share. Any companies that fold during that effort, we bring out the pitchforks because the services they ran get shut off. Any companies that succeed, we bring out the pitchforks because they own too much market power. It seems a bit much that we ask for companies to constantly grow and simultaneously ensure they never pass 70% market share.
- chki 9y ago
  Do "we" really push companies to capture market share? I mean sure, stockholders do, but "we" as the general public don't really care about a companies size until they become too big.
  - MugaSofer 9y ago
    It would be more accurate to say the laws of physics push certain services to capture enormous market share. How can a new search engine - or email service, for that matter - compete with Google's servers? How can a new social network compete with Facebook having all your friends already on it? How can a new encyclopedia compete with Wikipedia's vast store of volunteer-checked knowledge? How can a new operating system compete with the fact that everyone already knows hw to use Windows? It's not impossible, but an incremental improvement won't do it; you need to be massively better than the default to overcome the sheer advantage that comes from being the default.
  - akerl_ 9y ago
    I'd say there's a portion of non-shareholders who believe companies they like should be fighting to maximize market share, but I agree with you in-so-far as I think we can ignore that group for purposes of this discussion. To your point: if you're the CEO of a company, and the shareholders are pushing you to capture market share, you're quite inclined to do it. Especially since capturing market share makes it more likely your company will stay profitable or become profitable, even absent shareholder wishes. Which works until/unless you reach the point where you've gotten the combination of skill and luck and circumstance that means you end up with a monopoly market share, at which point "we" (where we == the non-shareholder general public) start posting about how your company has taken over the market and the government should declare you some combination of "common carrier" or "utility" or "out of business".
  - freedomben 9y ago
    I respectfully disagree that "we the general public" don't really care about a company's size. I know a lot of people who will not adopt an app or product until the company has proven and/or established itself in the market. I think this describes a lot of Apple users who won't adopt new products until Apple gets in the game (the Apple watch being a recent example). A lot of people want a seamless and connected experience, and you have to be a massive player in order to provide that in a lot of cases.
    - deadowl 9y ago
      And the XMPP Federation couldn't provide that ideal?
      - themacguffinman 9y ago
        Of course it couldn't. Messaging was moving very rapidly with new features like stickers, reactions, expiring messages, phone number IDs, SMS fallback, stories, bots...and all of this had to be presented a very integrated and user-friendly package. You simply can't move that fast (or move much at all) with a huge standard like XMPP with 20 different clients that barely change. Not to mention that in this capitalist society, messaging services are incentivized to grow at all cost because user-base is the best fuel for monetization. Holding onto XMPP federation like Google did in XMPP's final years of relevancy would be suicide; you would be helping your competitors while gaining nothing.
        Zhyl 9y ago
        But by that same token, could it be possible for a new standard which incorporates all those features to become viable when the messaging space has stabalised?
  - AndrewKemendo 9y ago
    Yes "we" do, because "we" use the services and abandon smaller less integrated self service software. Of course everyone (on HN) says "Oh, well not me." Everyone who complains about users think that everyone needs to be Richard Stallman and only connect with the internet by faxing HTTPS requests and then reading forum threads printed off of a dot-matrix printer. In reality anyone who is using a smartphone or modern software is pushing AGFAM to be bigger and more consolidated and anyone who doesn't totally blow open one of those segments is a wannabe, trash or should just join one of those.
- clumsysmurf 9y ago
  > It seems a bit much that we ask for companies to constantly grow Its often brought up, that corporations and the economy have to keep growing ... but is it really necessary? Why can't both achieve some steady state equilibrium within a system of finite resources?
  - akerl_ 9y ago
    Short of equilibrium by government/societal-mandate, being a business and ending up in market equilibrium is really quite difficult/dangerous. You have to be in equilibrium with at least one but far more likely multiple other entities, you can't collude with them because that would itself be anti-competitive towards new entries into the market, and so you need to make new advances / optimizations at the same rate as your competition, or else one of you is going to destabilize the equilibrium.
- coding123 9y ago
  Well when you combine all views on anything and try to abide by everyone's demands, the end result is immediate end of all motion. There is a divided view on everything.
- devwastaken 9y ago
  > Any companies that succeed, we bring out the pitchforks because they own too much market power. Who does that? Why do you have to have 'too much market power' to succeed? If google was 1/10 its size, it'd still be successful.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- alexryan 9y ago
  It's certainly true that companies seem to get corrupted as they get larger, but does it HAVE to be that way? Many of us are totally cool with very large companies so long as we believe them to be led by people of good character. My hypotheses is that growing companies are magnets to people of low character and if you don’t have a strategy for dealing with that, they will infiltrate and destroy the company.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- freehunter 9y ago
  It's completely possible for someone to have immense market power and not use it for evil. I mean Apple is the richest company in the world but they choose to compete in very niche markets, and hasn't actually completely dominated a market since the iPod even though they easily could with their massive stockpiles of money. Instead of trying to bend the Internet to the point of breaking, Google could just... not do that. They could focus on putting the industry best ads in the industry best search results, running the largest video streaming service, sell a wildly successful mobile OS, and have the best online office suite without all of the other terrible things they do as a corporation. They're already the best at basically everything, so they got bored and now need to burn their reputation like it's kindling. It's pointless.
  - akerl_ 9y ago
    There are posts on this site at least once a week about something Apple is doing that folks feel to be "evil", just like Google.
    - freehunter 9y ago
      I don't think that removing the headphone jack from a phone is really "evil", no matter how you feel about headphone jacks.
      - akerl_ 9y ago
        It seems weird to pick an example I didn't give, and then refute that example, with the implication that you've offered evidence against my claim.
        freehunter 9y ago
        Well considering you didn't give an example...
  - jiggunjer 9y ago
    Apple is in a niche market? You mean Starbucks clients?
- namlem 9y ago
  The market is only efficient when it's competitive. It is necessary to break up monopolies in order to maintain that competitiveness.
- dblohm7 9y ago
  It's usually not the market share itself that is the problem; it is when the company uses that market share to take anticompetitive actions in other markets that we have a problem.
- colordrops 9y ago
  That all seems orthogonal to the topic of ethics of companies.
- lmm 9y ago
  Companies make sense for competitive markets. They're a poor model for winner-takes-all natural monopolies, which is why we prefer nationalisation for e.g. public utilities. A lot of the internet behaves that way too, as we're slowly realising.
sandov 9y ago
Me: When a company treats its users badly, users can stop using Google and Whatever Corp treats them badly. If users voluntarily subject themselves to mistreating, then I don't see why governments should intervene.
- cm2187 9y ago
  There is some truth. A cigarette company would definitely agree.
- _tulpa 9y ago
  This is just the stupid 'vote with your wallet' argument again. Which is stupid because 1) the average user/consumer wallet is 3/10ths of nothing in terms of economic voting power. 2) the average user/consumer can only vote for stuff which exists, and google has done a great job of making sure that there are no competitive alternatives In this case you're "paying" with your data, which has even less voting power because you can't even opt out of that payment just by not using their services. You'd pretty much have to stop using the internet entirely. Unfortunately many people have bought the stupid 'regulation=bad 100% free market is best' rhetoric which is totally crap for everyone except the really big fish. There's just no incentive for big corporations to 'not be evil' without the artifical incetive of being regulated and punished for treating their users shittily.
  - studentrob 9y ago
    > In this case you're "paying" with your data, which has even less voting power because you can't even opt out of that payment just by not using their services. You'd pretty much have to stop using the internet entirely. Huh? You can use Firefox, Bing and another email provider.
    - _tulpa 9y ago
      Okay, so you want to opt out of all google services and data harvesting. In addition to replacing chrome, search, and gmail, drive, maps, calendar, youtube, allo, duo, keep, hangouts, etc, etc you must also: - Never send/receive email to/from anyone else with a gmail address. You're still providing your data even if this one won't affect you directly. - Block third-party tracking on websites and advertisements which are basically everywhere now, or somehow avoid the websites with tracking. That's assuming this is even possible, and remains possible. Yes there's uMatrix/uBlock et al, but there's also Admiral and Instart Logic et al, and no way to confirm that the measures you're taking are working. - Settle for alternative services with different and/or inferior experiences. This is hard even if the alternatives are perfectly usable and of comparable quality. Google wins because it has stuff that is more convenient than the alternatives, and usually better quality. - Don't use Android, the mobile OS with something like 80-90% market share which also happens to be the lowest cost option for a decent smartphone. Oh, you use a ROM without play services? Captive portal detection still contacts a google server to check for internet access and I don't know if there's other stuff like that baked in. - Know enough to question your trust in google in the first place. So through a buttload of effort and some domain specific knowledge you can exercise some percentage (probably less than 100%) of your wallet vote which was worth 3/10ths of nothing to begin with. You have to be a tech-savvy idealist to go through with it, and that demographic is never going to be big enough to force a massive corporation to self regulate against their own best interests.
ucaetano 9y ago
Google has >70% market share of ads? In which universe? You don't seem to understand the definition of monopoly...

akerl_ 9y ago

It seems like companies are stuck in a losing game. We constantly push small companies to capture more market share. Any companies that fold during that effort, we bring out the pitchforks because the services they ran get shut off. Any companies that succeed, we bring out the pitchforks because they own too much market power. It seems a bit much that we ask for companies to constantly grow and simultaneously ensure they never pass 70% market share.

chki 9y ago
Do "we" really push companies to capture market share? I mean sure, stockholders do, but "we" as the general public don't really care about a companies size until they become too big.
- MugaSofer 9y ago
  It would be more accurate to say the laws of physics push certain services to capture enormous market share. How can a new search engine - or email service, for that matter - compete with Google's servers? How can a new social network compete with Facebook having all your friends already on it? How can a new encyclopedia compete with Wikipedia's vast store of volunteer-checked knowledge? How can a new operating system compete with the fact that everyone already knows hw to use Windows? It's not impossible, but an incremental improvement won't do it; you need to be massively better than the default to overcome the sheer advantage that comes from being the default.
- akerl_ 9y ago
  I'd say there's a portion of non-shareholders who believe companies they like should be fighting to maximize market share, but I agree with you in-so-far as I think we can ignore that group for purposes of this discussion. To your point: if you're the CEO of a company, and the shareholders are pushing you to capture market share, you're quite inclined to do it. Especially since capturing market share makes it more likely your company will stay profitable or become profitable, even absent shareholder wishes. Which works until/unless you reach the point where you've gotten the combination of skill and luck and circumstance that means you end up with a monopoly market share, at which point "we" (where we == the non-shareholder general public) start posting about how your company has taken over the market and the government should declare you some combination of "common carrier" or "utility" or "out of business".
- freedomben 9y ago
  I respectfully disagree that "we the general public" don't really care about a company's size. I know a lot of people who will not adopt an app or product until the company has proven and/or established itself in the market. I think this describes a lot of Apple users who won't adopt new products until Apple gets in the game (the Apple watch being a recent example). A lot of people want a seamless and connected experience, and you have to be a massive player in order to provide that in a lot of cases.
  - deadowl 9y ago
    And the XMPP Federation couldn't provide that ideal?
    - themacguffinman 9y ago
      Of course it couldn't. Messaging was moving very rapidly with new features like stickers, reactions, expiring messages, phone number IDs, SMS fallback, stories, bots...and all of this had to be presented a very integrated and user-friendly package. You simply can't move that fast (or move much at all) with a huge standard like XMPP with 20 different clients that barely change. Not to mention that in this capitalist society, messaging services are incentivized to grow at all cost because user-base is the best fuel for monetization. Holding onto XMPP federation like Google did in XMPP's final years of relevancy would be suicide; you would be helping your competitors while gaining nothing.
      - Zhyl 9y ago
        But by that same token, could it be possible for a new standard which incorporates all those features to become viable when the messaging space has stabalised?
- AndrewKemendo 9y ago
  Yes "we" do, because "we" use the services and abandon smaller less integrated self service software. Of course everyone (on HN) says "Oh, well not me." Everyone who complains about users think that everyone needs to be Richard Stallman and only connect with the internet by faxing HTTPS requests and then reading forum threads printed off of a dot-matrix printer. In reality anyone who is using a smartphone or modern software is pushing AGFAM to be bigger and more consolidated and anyone who doesn't totally blow open one of those segments is a wannabe, trash or should just join one of those.
clumsysmurf 9y ago
> It seems a bit much that we ask for companies to constantly grow Its often brought up, that corporations and the economy have to keep growing ... but is it really necessary? Why can't both achieve some steady state equilibrium within a system of finite resources?
- akerl_ 9y ago
  Short of equilibrium by government/societal-mandate, being a business and ending up in market equilibrium is really quite difficult/dangerous. You have to be in equilibrium with at least one but far more likely multiple other entities, you can't collude with them because that would itself be anti-competitive towards new entries into the market, and so you need to make new advances / optimizations at the same rate as your competition, or else one of you is going to destabilize the equilibrium.
coding123 9y ago
Well when you combine all views on anything and try to abide by everyone's demands, the end result is immediate end of all motion. There is a divided view on everything.
devwastaken 9y ago
> Any companies that succeed, we bring out the pitchforks because they own too much market power. Who does that? Why do you have to have 'too much market power' to succeed? If google was 1/10 its size, it'd still be successful.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
alexryan 9y ago
It's certainly true that companies seem to get corrupted as they get larger, but does it HAVE to be that way? Many of us are totally cool with very large companies so long as we believe them to be led by people of good character. My hypotheses is that growing companies are magnets to people of low character and if you don’t have a strategy for dealing with that, they will infiltrate and destroy the company.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
freehunter 9y ago
It's completely possible for someone to have immense market power and not use it for evil. I mean Apple is the richest company in the world but they choose to compete in very niche markets, and hasn't actually completely dominated a market since the iPod even though they easily could with their massive stockpiles of money. Instead of trying to bend the Internet to the point of breaking, Google could just... not do that. They could focus on putting the industry best ads in the industry best search results, running the largest video streaming service, sell a wildly successful mobile OS, and have the best online office suite without all of the other terrible things they do as a corporation. They're already the best at basically everything, so they got bored and now need to burn their reputation like it's kindling. It's pointless.
- akerl_ 9y ago
  There are posts on this site at least once a week about something Apple is doing that folks feel to be "evil", just like Google.
  - freehunter 9y ago
    I don't think that removing the headphone jack from a phone is really "evil", no matter how you feel about headphone jacks.
    - akerl_ 9y ago
      It seems weird to pick an example I didn't give, and then refute that example, with the implication that you've offered evidence against my claim.
      - freehunter 9y ago
        Well considering you didn't give an example...
- jiggunjer 9y ago
  Apple is in a niche market? You mean Starbucks clients?
namlem 9y ago
The market is only efficient when it's competitive. It is necessary to break up monopolies in order to maintain that competitiveness.
dblohm7 9y ago
It's usually not the market share itself that is the problem; it is when the company uses that market share to take anticompetitive actions in other markets that we have a problem.
colordrops 9y ago
That all seems orthogonal to the topic of ethics of companies.
lmm 9y ago
Companies make sense for competitive markets. They're a poor model for winner-takes-all natural monopolies, which is why we prefer nationalisation for e.g. public utilities. A lot of the internet behaves that way too, as we're slowly realising.

sandov 9y ago

Me: When a company treats its users badly, users can stop using Google and Whatever Corp treats them badly. If users voluntarily subject themselves to mistreating, then I don't see why governments should intervene.

cm2187 9y ago
There is some truth. A cigarette company would definitely agree.
_tulpa 9y ago
This is just the stupid 'vote with your wallet' argument again. Which is stupid because 1) the average user/consumer wallet is 3/10ths of nothing in terms of economic voting power. 2) the average user/consumer can only vote for stuff which exists, and google has done a great job of making sure that there are no competitive alternatives In this case you're "paying" with your data, which has even less voting power because you can't even opt out of that payment just by not using their services. You'd pretty much have to stop using the internet entirely. Unfortunately many people have bought the stupid 'regulation=bad 100% free market is best' rhetoric which is totally crap for everyone except the really big fish. There's just no incentive for big corporations to 'not be evil' without the artifical incetive of being regulated and punished for treating their users shittily.
- studentrob 9y ago
  > In this case you're "paying" with your data, which has even less voting power because you can't even opt out of that payment just by not using their services. You'd pretty much have to stop using the internet entirely. Huh? You can use Firefox, Bing and another email provider.
  - _tulpa 9y ago
    Okay, so you want to opt out of all google services and data harvesting. In addition to replacing chrome, search, and gmail, drive, maps, calendar, youtube, allo, duo, keep, hangouts, etc, etc you must also: - Never send/receive email to/from anyone else with a gmail address. You're still providing your data even if this one won't affect you directly. - Block third-party tracking on websites and advertisements which are basically everywhere now, or somehow avoid the websites with tracking. That's assuming this is even possible, and remains possible. Yes there's uMatrix/uBlock et al, but there's also Admiral and Instart Logic et al, and no way to confirm that the measures you're taking are working. - Settle for alternative services with different and/or inferior experiences. This is hard even if the alternatives are perfectly usable and of comparable quality. Google wins because it has stuff that is more convenient than the alternatives, and usually better quality. - Don't use Android, the mobile OS with something like 80-90% market share which also happens to be the lowest cost option for a decent smartphone. Oh, you use a ROM without play services? Captive portal detection still contacts a google server to check for internet access and I don't know if there's other stuff like that baked in. - Know enough to question your trust in google in the first place. So through a buttload of effort and some domain specific knowledge you can exercise some percentage (probably less than 100%) of your wallet vote which was worth 3/10ths of nothing to begin with. You have to be a tech-savvy idealist to go through with it, and that demographic is never going to be big enough to force a massive corporation to self regulate against their own best interests.

ucaetano 9y ago

Google has >70% market share of ads? In which universe? You don't seem to understand the definition of monopoly...