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Yay! I am happy about this. I feel as if there are a ton of monopolies and trusts today that stifle competition. Does anyone else feel similar?
by thebiglebrewski 9y ago
Yay! I am happy about this. I feel as if there are a ton of monopolies and trusts today that stifle competition. Does anyone else feel similar?
- fishcolorbrick 9y agoI don't. I use a mix of Google services and non-Google services, and I've never had a hard time finding a good competitor for a Google tool.
- CottageCarry 9y agoI'd love an actually decent competitor to Youtube.
- rumblestrut 9y agoVimeo?
- kevinnk 9y agoFacebook and vid.me as well. And twitch for streaming.
- Dirlewanger 9y agoVimeo isn't, and doesn't want to be, a YouTube competitor.
- savanaly 9y agoI mean, I want the improvement in quality that usually comes with competition, but I don't actually want there to be competition. Does anyone really relish the idea of having to search multiple sites for a given video because you don't know or can't remember which one it's on, and having to have an account and different set of uploader subscriptions for Youtube A, B and C? And remember where the subscribe button is on A vs. B and does C support changing video speed or not? etc. Just one platform is a massive, MASSIVE perk of the current system.
- ISL 9y agoRemember RSS feeds? :).
- mark_l_watson 9y agoGood point. I split the eBooks I buy between Kindle, Google Books, and Apple iBooks. I do this to not put all my digital purchases in one basket, support competition, and sometimes take advantage of sales. It is a nuisance. But, even though you make a good point, I disagree in the sense that I would like to see other services like Vimeo gain market share to balance things out. Trouble is, it is difficult for other services to compete with ‘free.’
- ajdlinux 9y agoIndeed. Really I want a decentralised system where I have my cake and eat it too, with a single mechanism for accessing my content while also not giving a single company control over and profit from the entire industry. Oh, and this hypothetical decentralised system has to, well, not completely suck. Which means it's never going to happen.
- lkrubner 9y agoMaybe there could be a search engine that finds videos on all video sites, and shows them according to some well-tested algorithm, without any bias? Oh, but the owners of such a search engine would need to be entirely neutral and unbiased. For instance, they should not also be owners of a video site that they would like to promote. It's been a long time since the USA Justice Department went after a company for having a vertical monopoly, but this is a reminder of why vertical monopolies can inhibit innovation, just as much as horizontal ones.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y agoYeah, just like you don't really want to have more than one company hosting text on the web. Imagine the mess it would be if there were more than one company hosting text on the web! It's a massive perk of the current system that all text that is published on the web is hosted at the web hosting company! But, quite seriously, I think we have a massive problem on our hands if even people who frequent hacker news just aren't aware of the concepts of standards and interoperability anymore, that a monopoly seems to be perceived as the only way to achieve integration at the user experience level. Want to have more than one TV channel with a common user interface? Obviously, all TV channels need to be owned by one company! Want to have more than one appliance with a common electricity supply infrastructure? Obviously, all appliances need to be provided by the one electricity supplier! Want to have more than one newspaper in the same language and alphabet? Obviously, all newspapers and their common language and alphabet need to be owned by one company! Want people all around the planet to be able to talk to each other remotely? Obviously, all telephones and telephone networks need to be owned and operated by one company! I'd really like to understand how this thinking managed to take hold, given that it seems to be so obviously fallacious to me.
- ikiris 9y agoIt's as if twitch, amazon, and 5 million porn sites didn't exist.
- wavefunction 9y agoThose aren't really Youtube though. I can go on youtube to listen to music or watch a video on rebuilding a carburetor self-published by some random guy, or catch a movie trailer, or even publish my own videos.
- indigo0086 9y agoYou can get money directly from the viewers with twitch, therefore making it far superior than YouTube. The idea that YouTube is monopoly because people are to afraid of moving to other options is silly
- ajdlinux 9y agoTwitch is a video gaming streaming service. YouTube is a general video service. Twitch isn't superior.
- Buge 9y agoYou can get money directly from viewers on youtube too. https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2017/09/a-new-way-to-earn-money-with-youtube.html https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2017/09/a-new-way-to... https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7277005 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7277005
- warent 9y agoNobody is going to mention DailyMotion?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- blarrrble 9y agoYoutube isn't doing anything incredible or unique on the UX side. The myriad high quality pornography video sites readily prove this, by competitively offering pretty top notch experiences on a diversity of platforms. It's just that Youtube has an immense gravitational pull, that everyone likes and comes back for. At scale, no less, which is pretty tough when streaming video is such a demanding high bandwidth product.
- DataWorker 9y agoIt’s not about your google app use. The ad industry in the US is about 150 billion. Google is pulling about 90 billion in ad revenue.
- bobajeff 9y agoYou've found a good competitor to Google search?
- AnimalMuppet 9y agoBing at least claims to be. Is Bing enough worse that it isn't a usable alternative?
- hyperpallium 9y agoI tried DDG for a while. Search results were pretty good for me (and w! so! etc are nice), but google is so much faster. That takes capital investment, for local centers around the world. I'll try bing for a while.
- jdmichal 9y agoI've been daily-driving Bing for a few years now, and the only time I switch to Google is for searches on obscure programming errors. I've otherwise had no issues finding anything.
- duckwheat 9y agoThis is what killed Bing for me. I work at a .NET heavy company and it seemed like Bing was pushing (possibly not intentionally) MSDN and MS forums pretty hard. That generally was not where the answers to my questions were, and after a while I just gave up on it.
- bwb 9y agoI used it for 3 weeks in china, it is really bad compared to google imo. I could not wait to switch back.
- tomrod 9y agoDuckDuckGo
- bobajeff 9y ago
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- fourstar 9y agoThe fact they they actively prevent some Adsense publishers while making an exception for others (in the field of Marijuana, for example), is enough for me to be on board with this. They're big enough to play favorites.
- maxxxxx 9y agoI think we should make life difficult for companies from a certain size on. These large companies kill competition and innovation.
- thephyber 9y agoI would prefer we "make life difficult" for companies based on their behavior, not their size. At the risk of sounding like a libertarian, I'm of the mind that monopolies aren't inherently bad until they start buying politicians and bills that reinforce their hold on the market. Tesla is huge for electric-only car companies, but I don't hear the average person screaming that they should be shut down in states where they are trying to bypass dealership-protectionist state laws. In fact, there are anecdotes of people buying Teslas used from other states because they (aren't|weren't) available new in some states.
- vorotato 9y agoThe game would change, they would just do as much behavior as they can get away with until they got large enough to change the law.
- thephyber 9y agoThat's a hypothetical in a world that doesn't (yet) exist. Let's leave the lawsuits for when actual harm has happened, not potential harm.
- chiaro 9y agoMonopolies are inherently bad because not being subject to competitive forces means they can charge what the market can bear, rather than the rate set by competition. This is bad for the consumer, bad for competition, and bad for the economy (fewer people are making transactions than at the market clearing price, slowing down economic growth). If that makes you sound like a libertarian it speaks poorly to their general economic literacy. On the flip side, Tesla is also treated a lot better than smaller competitors, because its size enables it to play states off against each other: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigafactory_1#State_competition_and_incentives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigafactory_1#State_competitio...
- IBM 9y agoIt's an exciting time for antitrust. The movement is getting stronger on both sides of the aisle [1]. [1] https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novemberdecember-2017/the-democrats-confront-monopoly/ https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novemberdecember-2017...
- todd8 9y agoI don't. Why do we want or even trust government to decide for us that a company is too big and needs to be smaller or that a company should conducts it business in the way that the government wants it to. As long as a company isn't somehow forcing me to use it services, I'm free to go elsewhere. If you don't like Google don't use it. The fact that you desire something from Google that it isn't giving you (searching with more privacy, better free email service, whatever) doesn't give you some sort of moral claim against the company. The public can vote for other companies by buying from or using them. As a last resort, start a new company and run it the way you want.
- 5ilv3r 9y agoThat'd be a fine option if it was a real option.
- na85 9y agoComcast is a good counterexample that basically destroys this entirely naive line of thinking. In industries where huge capital costs are the barrier to entry, the market is not open or free, and requires regulation.
- wu-ikkyu 9y ago>Why do we want or even trust government to decide for us that a company is too big and needs to be smaller or that a company should conducts it business in the way that the government wants it to. As long as a company isn't somehow forcing me to use it services, I'm free to go elsewhere. Should we get rid of IP laws then? Isn't copyright a government granted monopoly?
- chiefofgxbxl 9y ago> If you don't like Google don't use it. What happens when people don't know they're using Google? I have an Android phone and one thing that is bugging me is how the default browser on the bottom "toolbar" is in fact named "Internet". This may be fine for techies like you and me, but I'm concerned for the older folk who may have difficulty with technology or non-techies. In this case, if one just went with the defaults, one wouldn't even know you were using a Google-built browser. Remember that old story back when Internet Explorer was dominating the market, and most people surveyed couldn't tell the difference between the web and a web browser? They pointed to the "e" browser logo and said, "That's the internet!" This is a nasty pattern in tech these days. On my laptop which carries Windows 10, the programs aren't named in such a way to identify that they are Microsoft programs [0]. You see an email client named "Mail" and a map service named "Maps". No indication that they are Microsoft Mail or Microsoft (Bing) Maps. Also, on Windows 10 when you log in you are presented with a "photo of the day". If you click on any of the links on that image, the URLs will be opened in Microsoft Edge, and any searches are performed using Bing, regardless if you set your default browser to something else! [0] https://s18.postimg.org/ipxt1962h/default.png https://s18.postimg.org/ipxt1962h/default.png
- diogenescynic 9y agoComcast and Monsanto being the worst.