19 ms·

The Case Against Google

233 points by antipaul 9y ago

blakesterz 9y ago
Kind of an interesting thought from the article: " If you love Google, you should hope the government sues it for antitrust offenses — and you should hope it happens soon, because who knows what wondrous new creations are waiting patiently in the wings."
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  That's the crazy thing: Antitrust is the best path for everyone who isn't a billionaire corporation. Because not only will those of us who don't want to deal with them have options, but the former trust will be forced to compete again on merit, which means they'll have to step up their game. A lot of Google products coast by on their monopoly status alone, but if they get broken up or even just their behavior heavily restricted, they're going to have to get back to doing what originally made them great: Making the best web apps and services, like they used to.
  - wbl 9y ago
    The competition is a click away. If you can make a better webmail or calendar people will use it.
    - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      Better webmail and calendars exist (I use one of them), but because of Google's control of the entire market, two thirds of users are still on Gmail. That's the monopoly effect: Better products don't win out when one company controls the playing field. And now Google's out to introduce their own proprietary email format to hurt other parties even more.
      - ryandrake 9y ago
        Interesting. Their control of the market didn't seem to stop me from moving all of my Email out of Gmail recently. I just went and did it. I must have missed that screen where they say, "You can no longer continue exporting your E-mail. We control the playing field, so other services cannot win out!"
        justaguyhere 9y ago
        You are part of a tiny group of people that has the knowledge and motivation to do it, much of the population couldn't/wouldn't. Maybe 20 years from now, this would be different with majority of the people being tech savvy (like the majority of people who can drive today). Of course one can argue that it is the consumers' fault for not looking for better options...
        jyrkesh 9y ago
        Yeah, I think you addressed your own concern there. Why would a consumer who doesn't know how to export mail need something better than Gmail? I'm a power user, and I don't need anything but Gmail, so I can't fathom that there's some unserved email opportunity that consumers would love fulfilled if only they knew about Gmail competitors.
        dmitrygr 9y ago
        The stupidity of "the common user" you just referred to is not Google's fault or responsibility.
        justaguyhere 9y ago
        Maybe so, but the common user is what most users are and Google needs them to make their big money.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - blfr 9y ago
    - dictum 9y ago
      It's a lot harder to offer your service for free (80% of "better" here) when you don't run a highly vertically integrated and dominant advertising system.
      - blfr 9y ago
        What better paid options are there than G Suite?
        ocdtrekkie 9y ago
        Which options aren't better than G Suite? Many of Google's antiprivacy features are enabled even if you're paying for their product, and in addition to that, you get an outdated version of Google services that can take months or years before Google supports. Almost everything Google launches won't work with GApps accounts until some point in the future. I have regularly seen people moving from Google Apps to personal Gmail accounts just because the integration with other Google services is so bad. It's understandable Google wants it's business customers to have well-tested robust software, but more often then not, the support cycle can leave them excluded for years, with no way to opt in.
        blfr 9y ago
        Which options aren't better than G Suite? Everything else I've tried. Office 365 isn't better. What I could stitch together with OwnCloud wasn't better. All the important Google tools are in the G Suite. There's Gmail, Calendar, Keep, Photos, and the whole web office suite: Drive, Docs, Sheets. It also works and syncs with Android.
    - pzh 9y ago
      Was that meant to be sarcastic? (Serious question; because the article derides that exact statement.)
    - Sylos 9y ago
      No, they won't. There's people who don't even know that there's something else than GMail. They can't do one click and be at a competitor's site, if they don't know about it. And it doesn't help that their only way of finding out about competitors is through google.com.
- fancyfacebook 9y ago
  These bizarre roundabout ways the NYT finds to worship corporations are starting to get creepy. Calling their work wondrous and speaking directly to people who "love" Google is just absurd. Just stop, don't worship an organization.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Or maybe you're just giving undue importance to those words. One may "love" Google in the same way one "loves" quesadillas, or chrome rims.
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    Google has one of the strongest brands in the world. NYT's language is not that different from that used by ordinary people.
- qubex 9y ago
  That's the dilemma inherent in innovating a market you are an indisputed leader in: why rock the boat, and reset all your incumbent advantages to zero, when you can just sit pretty with what you've got? Kodak invented digital photography way back in the 1970s, patented it, and did nothing with it. It was only when the patents expired that digital cameras came to the fore (likely also because of intervening decades’ worth of technological improvement), and it killed them off. Until the beginning of the 20th Century the Royal Navy had an unassailable advantage in terms of ships and then Admiral Fisher designed the HMS Dreadnought which instantly obsoleted everything afloat and dialled back the UK's advantage to a single ship, and the Germans instantly took advantage of it and started building their own new dreadnoughts. This keeps happening.
fancyfacebook 9y ago
I love how difficult it's becoming to actually ever visit a website from a google result, especially on mobile. And even when you do you're usually still stuck with their tracking and spyware. Reminds me a lot of AOL's strategy back in the day.
- pmart123 9y ago
  I find this to be extremely annoying as well as it obscures the site link as well as it makes it very difficult to copy the source link if I want to share it. I think the comparison to AOL's strategy in 2000 is very warranted.
  - nasredin 9y ago
    LMFTFY: It is IMPOSSIBLE to copy search result link. Not just "difficult".
    - cat199 9y ago
      have been running browser mods for ~5y to do this. it's a pain. but it works. currently greasemonkey 'direct link out' and 'bypass google redirect'
      - newscracker 9y ago
        I've been using "Google Search Link Fix" with Firefox (for a long time) to get the direct links on search results. [1] [1]: https://github.com/palant/searchlinkfix https://github.com/palant/searchlinkfix
- dannyw 9y ago
  Exactly! I hope the EU looks into the whole AMP (both web and the recently announced and universally panned email) program for antitrust violations. I bet if they subpoena Google, they WILL find A/B tests and experiments on increasing engagement & time spent on google.com through AMP changes. How that fits into the antitrust framework is not my subject area, but Google needs to be reigned in.
justonepost 9y ago
This is so inane. I use bing all the time (accidentally) and I always go - wait, what's wrong with google? why are these search results so awful? oh riiiight. (switch to google). Google is being attacked hard by Apple (blocking ads), amazon&azure (cloud) and ads (facebook). What Government really needs to do isn't break up Google per se, but generally give more natural advantages to smaller startups versus larger corps. One example would be corporate tax. Increase corp taxes on large corps (say over 100 billion) and decrease on smaller ones. In fact, if I were the democratic party this would be my rallying cry. Time to really re-invigorate the american dream.
- adrianN 9y ago
  I doubt that it's that simple. What stops large corporations from splitting themselves into many small corporations that work closely together?
  - mcny 9y ago
    I think that's OK. Another thing we need to do is bring criminal liability for the board and the CEO for corporations. Probably not civil but definitely criminal.
  - fny 9y ago
    The idea is that antitrust regulation would kick in, but that's unfortunately not a priority of our government in the past few decades.
  - jacobr1 9y ago
    Presuming the company fully owned (or with some sort of pro-rata split) you could tax the parent company for the total of their holdings. If they truly were separate companies, well, that satisfies the OP's objective too, no? (Note I'm not a big fan of corporate taxes in general, I'd rather we not tax corporations and tax individuals more aggressively. Get rid of special rates for capital gains and have a much more progressive individual tax system.)
  - majormajor 9y ago
ebbv 9y ago
Foundem sounds like a spam site to me. By definition if I’m finding Foundem results in Google, then Foundem would not be the one who is solving my search, Google is. I actually think one of the issues with Google over the last decade has been a failure to clean up the results. Google used to be merciless in hammering spam sites into oblivion. I miss those days.
thisisit 9y ago
Is it just me or this kind of rant-like writeups make it difficult to go through the content? While I held on to the romanticized story about the dating site, I gave up when it segued into multi-para story about Rockfeller and SC. But I get the point and I think there is some value in Google making everyone dance every time they change their algorithm. Things might have been better if they have some kind of review board. Apparently having zero or negligible customer facing teams seems to be the norm.
- shahbaby 9y ago
  I pretty much just read articles backwards now.
  - Jeff_Brown 9y ago
    I was totally riveted. Without the storytelling I would not have learned, for instance, of this gem: "In public, Bill Gates was declaring victory [regarding the federal antitrust lawsuit], but inside Microsoft, executives were demanding that lawyers and other compliance officials — the kinds of people who, previously, were routinely ignored — be invited to every meeting. Software engineers began casually dropping by attorneys’ desks and describing new software features, and then asking, in desperate whispers, if anything they’d mentioned might trigger a subpoena. One Microsoft senior executive moved an extra chair into his office so a compliance official could sit alongside him during product reviews. Every time a programmer detailed a new idea, the executive turned to the official, who would point his thumb up or down like a capricious Roman emperor."
    - yesenadam 9y ago
      Incidentally, it seems 'thumbs up' had the opposite meaning to today in Roman times. Weird huh. http://time.com/4984728/thumbs-up-thumbs-down-history/ http://time.com/4984728/thumbs-up-thumbs-down-history/
- remir 9y ago
  Yeah, I'm getting tired of this "story telling" journalism. Just go straight to the point.
setgree 9y ago
I'm starting to despair that there's so much demand for reading/publishing 'the case against' X or Y company pieces, i.e. this and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16400950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16400950. Everybody who is for these companies is not like, passionate about them, we just use their products and pay (collectively) a lot of money to do so. With Google in particular, if their dominance was so unassailable, we wouldn't have slack or zoom, which exist essentially because gchat and google hangouts were so half-assed.
rnernento 9y ago
"Be evil." :(
bob_theslob646 9y ago
>"“Google’s built around horizontal search, which means if you type in ‘What’s the population of Myanmar,’ then Google finds websites that include the words ‘Myanmar’ and ‘population,’ and figures out which ones are most likely to answer your question,” says Neha Narula, who was a software engineer at Google before joining the M.I.T. Media Lab" I'm not sure if it's relevant but I get an exact result when I do this search. Not sure if that is horizontal search...
granitDev 9y ago
I think part of the problem when it comes to Google, is the massive name recognition. I'll wager that the average not-technical user who ventures to Google doesn't understand 1) what exactly a search engine is 2) alternatives exist. If you asked them, they probably think Google is the internet, and if you have to find anything, you have to go to Google to find it. I'll admit I have no proof of this, but I've found, generally that the non-technical individuals I know, have incredible poor working knowledge of the internet. I take as my primary evidence though the masses vulnerability to really stupid and easily caught scams, spoof websites, click bait, and spam emails. As a technical user, I'm constantly baffled that people fall for this crap. So if people really are that incomprehensibly ignorant, I'll bet they don't' even really know what a google is and why they use other than it's all they know and they'd be lost without it. If the general public can't figure out no one is going to hand them a million bucks from nigeria, how the hell can they figure out you don't have to use Google? I use DDG btw. I find their results fantastically good. So good that I can't even use google. The spam, the adds, the poor results. I cant' take it. I also can't handle that google returns different results on different computers. I get the same results on DDG every time i make the same search. I've gotten lazy and started performing searches for things instead of typing in the address because it's consistent and faster.
- jrcii 9y ago
  Yesterday I was trying to find organizations registered to the address 1011 1st Ave, which primarily belongs to the Archdiocese of New York. So I gave Google this query: "1011 1st ave" "new york" -archdiocese Many of the results do not include both of these quoted strings. So Google went from discarding your search terms and requiring quotes, to even discarding your quoted terms. I had to fire up duckduckgo to complete my search, which is something I never use but I had no choice.
- amelius 9y ago
  Well, similarly a lot of folks think Facebook is the internet, and they use Facebook's search bar instead of Google. Probably something similar holds for Amazon.
- jacksmith21006 9y ago
fareesh 9y ago
This talking point comes straight from the top https://twitter.com/georgesoros/status/964471195793068032?s=20 https://twitter.com/georgesoros/status/964471195793068032?s=... Expect a lot of press on this subject over the next few weeks.
- jacksmith21006 9y ago
  But you do have to wonder what Soros motives are. He is really not someone that looks for the greater good. There is going to be some financial aspect that makes him money. Not saying he is not accidentally aligned with the greater good but most certainty not the driver.
  - fareesh 9y ago
    https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2018/02/15/csco-aapl-nflx-fb-silicon-valley-stocks.html https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2018/02/15/csco-aap... Looks like a good time to short.
  - dtornabene 9y ago
    Yo man, maybe ease up on the George Soros shtick. You might as well put the echo around his name.
jacksmith21006 9y ago
The problem is Google will just be replaced with someone that dominates. Tech just ends up winner take all or most. We see it with each thing. From Search, to Ecommerce, to social media, etc. So we need to think through would someone else be better than Google? Because that is just what will happen.
- wu-ikkyu 9y ago
  This isn't natural, though. It's the designed goal of centuries-old patent law which has become counter productive.
jacksmith21006 9y ago
We do need to realize this is being driven by George Soros. "Soros' Proposal to 'Regulate' Google, Facebook Infuriates Internet Users" https://sputniknews.com/viral/201802181061784072-soros-internet-regulation-proposal-reaction/ https://sputniknews.com/viral/201802181061784072-soros-inter... I also purposely linked to Russian media. As also Russia been after Google. Not saying they are not accidentally aligned with what is best but rather realize there are other motives at play here. Soros is only going to care how he can make more money from this and suspect spends ZERO time working on the greater good for society.
falcolas 9y ago
Meta: It's unfortunate this, like most tech behemoth critiques, got flagged off the front page so quickly. There are, of course exceptions to this rule, so perhaps those are simply enough to saturate people's desire for such articles. More on point: what choices does a startup have when wanting to operate in a vertical that Google/Facebook et.al. also want to infiltrate? Find a smaller niche that doesn't hold enough interest (or money) to interest them? It's funny, I wouldn't have thought the RSS reader niche would have appealed to them originally, and yet here we are today where RSS reader startups still find themselves competing on price against a product that no longer exists. It really does seem like its not enough to just be better; the "worse is better" paradox in action.
- sctb 9y ago
  It wasn't flagged; it tripped the flamewar detector, which we've just turned off.
aiCeivi9 9y ago
Previous discussion about case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16374458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16374458
mudil 9y ago
Google is not the most evil corporation ever invented. The most evil corporation has not been invented yet.
dqpb 9y ago
The New York times is participating in a campaign against Americas top tech companies. I don't know what their goal is, but no good will come off it. Google is one of our strengths, not one of our weaknesses.
- Jeff_Brown 9y ago
  The article takes great pain to point out the importance and value of Google. Genghis Khan was one of Mongolia's strengths. Standard Oil was one of 19th century America's strengths. An empire can be great and still stifle good things. It's hard to know what we're missing.
  - moultano 9y ago
    >They basically shut down Foundem, creating more time for them to give advice to other companies and regulators fighting Google. This consulting work, some of which was funded by Google’s competitors, has helped to keep the Raffs afloat. They really buried the lead.
- jaydz 9y ago
  The media has been attacking tech for years. First they attacked startups and their valuations, later the "tech bros," and now Google/Amazon/Facebook. This Scott Galloway fellow seems to be leading the charge.
- neolefty 9y ago
  Two factors that seem to be on the mind of the NYTimes: * Tech companies' role in 2016 election interference (agents buying ads, trolls) * Tech companies' impact on journalism (Google News, decline in subscriptions, shift in advertising) The first one is explicit, and they have every right and responsibility to hold it up to the light, given its seriousness. The second one is a more of a speculation about their motivations. Newspapers are clearly frustrated -- how much does it factor into NYT's recent trend of aggressive coverage of tech & social media?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
Upvoter33 9y ago
I'm personally MUCH more worried about facebook and twitter than Google. Our current political discourse has gone off the rails in the U.S., and I think a large part of it is due to those two entities. Google I think is only a mild player in that space, which, in its extremes, is a threat to democratic society.
- dfabulich 9y ago
  YouTube is a major player in that space. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/02/how-youtubes-algorithm-distorts-truth https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/02/how-youtu... YouTube's algorithm recommended extremist/conspiracy content during the 2016 election. Here's YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12/05/youtube-taking-extremists-combining-human-judgment-powerful/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12/05/youtube-taking-ex... (behind a free registration wall) "Since June we have removed over 150,000 videos for violent extremism." "We will continue the significant growth of our teams into next year, with the goal of bringing the total number of people across Google working to address content that might violate our policies to over 10,000 in 2018."
  - jrcii 9y ago
    > YouTube's algorithm recommended extremist/conspiracy content Would you agree that the algorithm recommended this content because people believe in, or at least are interested in, conspiracies? Even if we feel that's a mistake, who are we (or Google) to be the arbiters of truth?
    - gareim 9y ago
      A friend asked me to watch a clip of Ben Shapiro so we could sincerely talk about what the other side believes. I forgot that I was on a fresh OS install, not yet logged in. Well, right after that one video, every single recommended video to me became a "Ben Shapiro SLAMS liberal...". I get that YouTube had no other metric to gauge me by, by there are 10 or 12 recommendations and there's no law that says YouTube can't ease into recommendations. Whether you're for or against Shapiro, this kind of behavior induces people into bubbles and radicalizing in the feedback loop.
lgleason 9y ago
Part of the reason that Google is in this situation is because, instead of staying neutral politically they took sides making themselves more of a target. There is also the issue of data privacy as it relates to sharing the data with the US Government. If they start to share more data with the US Government, the risk losing users and ad revenue. On the other hand many argue that their refusal to share data is bad for society as a whole. For example, some argue that more sharing of data would have helped catch the Florida school shooter before it happened. No matter what your personal feelings are about this, they are facing headwinds and scrutiny over this and Search advertising is still what brings in most of their profits.
- prepend 9y ago
  This is the sad reality. Google is out of sync with political currents so now there is this PR campaign against them. Hopefully, they continue to resist. It will be bad if they suck it up, get in line, and start paying lobbyists to both sides. Interestingly, before the Microsoft lawsuit there was no tech lobbying. The lesson learned by MS and others is that they have to spend a lot of money on DC. For example, in 98 MS spent $4M. By 03, this was up to almost $9M. https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000000115&year=2017id=D000000115&year=2017 https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00000011...
- AlwaysBCoding 9y ago
  I heard Peter Thiel make an interesting comment on this recently: that banks avoid political scrutiny because they fund both political parties, whereas Google is overtly biased towards one side (the blue side). This makes the red side hate them, and the blue side neglect them because they think of them as easy money. The only way to survive political scrutiny in a two-party system is to support both sides, or at least have a plausible threat that you could support the other side if over-regulated.
space_fountain 9y ago
I think something that's maybe being exposed here is that it isn't clear how to make digital products work together and that the incentives are to keep it that way. Walled gardens are being built inside basically every major tech company. Most aren't even illegal. Here's a simple example I ran into recently: I last weekend I created a hackathon project that can find the location in an audio book of a photo of a page from an physical book. The idea is it lets you switch back and forth between your physical reading experience and an audio book. It wasn't even all that hard and worked way better than I'd ever expected. I could probably get it polished and pretty usable within a couple of weeks of full time work, but without access to the audio and ebook files it's impossible. With DRM the default that access is basically impossible. I'm hoping to get Overdrive to implement it. I don't really care about any small potential profit it might generate and I know someone from there and they have the licensing and relationships to maybe make it work, but I feel like the world would be a better place if any company with an idea like that could just go out and do it. Yes google is trying to make search more of a wall around their garden, but everyone else is just building there's higher and we have laws to enforce their right to do so.
- mayneack 9y ago
  Speaking of walled gardens, that feature already exists for Amazon e-books and audiobooks read through kindle/audible.
  - space_fountain 9y ago
    Yep. Almost mentioned that here. My original plan was just to do that in a more open way, but I realized it had a bad combination of being hard and not that cool. Besides I and plenty of other people prefer real books.
sol_remmy 9y ago
I feel like media has become more monopolistic than tech and needs to be dealt with first. I'm personally worried about the dominance of big newspapers. It seems that the field of "trusted online newspapers" has narrowed down to only the New York Times and Washington Post. Most non-Tech Hackernews submissions come from either Nytimes or WaPo. I worry because these newspapers seem to increasingly be setting the political and social narrative for the entire country. That's a lot of power to give Jeff Bezos and Carlos Slim.
- otterley 9y ago
  First, Carlos Slim is a minority shareholder in the NY Times (and he actually sold off most of his stake last December), not an editorial board member. Second, the old-school newspapers still have a very strong culture of research and reporting interwoven deeply within their walls. Sure, they make mistakes, but they have a much greater stake in the accuracy and importance-weighting of their news reporting than a user-driven content company like Facebook or Twitter.
- hackme1234 9y ago
  New York Times is 160 years old. It is the 'paper of record' I am just pointing that out because your comment doesn't make sense as it reads like these newspapers are becoming 'increasingly' dominant or narrative setting. They have been that way for decades.
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  Most local newspapers in the US are slowly dying due to their advertising revenue being killed off in favor of digital ads. I contracted at the Mercury News about five years ago and the vast majority of their income came from a single advertiser and their classified/ads had declined from a section that was larger by itself than the entire newspaper is today. Not enough people want to pay for news to make it worthwhile for smaller players to thrive in the current environment. Also newspapers don't set the political and social narrative for the country - only three printed publications backed Donald Trump and he won the election. That shows the Rupert Murdoch/Fox News TV crowd was more effective, at least with the electoral count if not the popular vote.
- 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
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excalibur 9y ago
> People loved Standard Oil a century ago, and Microsoft in the 1990s, just as they love Google today. Which people are those? One of Microsoft's defining features has always been the juxtaposition of software iterations that consumers truly despise with those that they're sort of ok with.
mgeorgoulo 9y ago
Never expected that something could be blamed for being too useful. Or did I? To tell you the truth it always seemed like there's an awful lot of logic in the way internet works. Seems like the real world is catching on, trying to close this gap... I certainly hope it's too late :)
thedarkginger 9y ago
"Many of the most important antitrust lawsuits in American history — against IBM, Alcoa, Kodak and others — were rooted in claims that one company had made technological discoveries that allowed it to outpace competitors." Does that say more about the success of antitrust at spurring competitors to catch up or that "technological dominance" is only good as long as long as the paradigm doesn't shift (i.e. Kodak is now pretending to be a crypto company as a last resort)?
chewzerita 9y ago
And they have a Google reCAPTCHA on their page...
- Slansitartop 9y ago
  > And they have a Google reCAPTCHA on their page... Comments like yours are stupid and add nothing for these reasons: 1) A journalist or writer likely does not have technical control over their paper's website design. This is certainly true for someone writing for the NYT. They're not going to hold back their article because someone on the website team chose to use a product from the company they're critiquing. 2) Google, Facebook, etc. are so dominant that it's often not really possible to avoid them and their technology and still have a functioning business.
cmurf 9y ago
A trifecta of failures: failure of capitalism to innovate its own self moderation from being inherently anti-competitive; failure of democracy which engages after the fact based on emotion and is reactionary; failure of meritocracy where elites hand out favors to "friendlies", lower the ladder of regulatory avoidance to some and not others, ergo the opposite of merit. This is why we need more ethics, logic, rationality, and the promotion of epistemology as moderators. Capitalism, democracy, and meritocracy all in their own way are prone to people gaming the system, might making right.
sjg007 9y ago
It's pretty easy to measure how addictive YouTube is. Let a toddler use it. Now is it all bad? Maybe. I found my kids build into their genuine play things they saw on youtube. Is it worse than cartoons/tv? Maybe.. Should it be rationed, definitely.
pfedigan 9y ago
This was a fantastically written article. I've learned and been able to explore so much from it. I still love Google and wouldn't be where I am today without it but it makes a fair point when camparing this time to the early oil industry. It's not like there's no competition against Google, it's just been a fantastic tool and why use anything else.
kaeawc 9y ago
Whoa. Why is this post so buried?

233 points by antipaul 9y ago

Kind of an interesting thought from the article: " If you love Google, you should hope the government sues it for antitrust offenses — and you should hope it happens soon, because who knows what wondrous new creations are waiting patiently in the wings."

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
That's the crazy thing: Antitrust is the best path for everyone who isn't a billionaire corporation. Because not only will those of us who don't want to deal with them have options, but the former trust will be forced to compete again on merit, which means they'll have to step up their game. A lot of Google products coast by on their monopoly status alone, but if they get broken up or even just their behavior heavily restricted, they're going to have to get back to doing what originally made them great: Making the best web apps and services, like they used to.
- wbl 9y ago
  The competition is a click away. If you can make a better webmail or calendar people will use it.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    Better webmail and calendars exist (I use one of them), but because of Google's control of the entire market, two thirds of users are still on Gmail. That's the monopoly effect: Better products don't win out when one company controls the playing field. And now Google's out to introduce their own proprietary email format to hurt other parties even more.
    - ryandrake 9y ago
      Interesting. Their control of the market didn't seem to stop me from moving all of my Email out of Gmail recently. I just went and did it. I must have missed that screen where they say, "You can no longer continue exporting your E-mail. We control the playing field, so other services cannot win out!"
      - justaguyhere 9y ago
        You are part of a tiny group of people that has the knowledge and motivation to do it, much of the population couldn't/wouldn't. Maybe 20 years from now, this would be different with majority of the people being tech savvy (like the majority of people who can drive today). Of course one can argue that it is the consumers' fault for not looking for better options...
        jyrkesh 9y ago
        Yeah, I think you addressed your own concern there. Why would a consumer who doesn't know how to export mail need something better than Gmail? I'm a power user, and I don't need anything but Gmail, so I can't fathom that there's some unserved email opportunity that consumers would love fulfilled if only they knew about Gmail competitors.
        dmitrygr 9y ago
        The stupidity of "the common user" you just referred to is not Google's fault or responsibility.
        justaguyhere 9y ago
        Maybe so, but the common user is what most users are and Google needs them to make their big money.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - blfr 9y ago
  - dictum 9y ago
    It's a lot harder to offer your service for free (80% of "better" here) when you don't run a highly vertically integrated and dominant advertising system.
    - blfr 9y ago
      What better paid options are there than G Suite?
      - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
        Which options aren't better than G Suite? Many of Google's antiprivacy features are enabled even if you're paying for their product, and in addition to that, you get an outdated version of Google services that can take months or years before Google supports. Almost everything Google launches won't work with GApps accounts until some point in the future. I have regularly seen people moving from Google Apps to personal Gmail accounts just because the integration with other Google services is so bad. It's understandable Google wants it's business customers to have well-tested robust software, but more often then not, the support cycle can leave them excluded for years, with no way to opt in.
        blfr 9y ago
        Which options aren't better than G Suite? Everything else I've tried. Office 365 isn't better. What I could stitch together with OwnCloud wasn't better. All the important Google tools are in the G Suite. There's Gmail, Calendar, Keep, Photos, and the whole web office suite: Drive, Docs, Sheets. It also works and syncs with Android.
  - pzh 9y ago
    Was that meant to be sarcastic? (Serious question; because the article derides that exact statement.)
  - Sylos 9y ago
    No, they won't. There's people who don't even know that there's something else than GMail. They can't do one click and be at a competitor's site, if they don't know about it. And it doesn't help that their only way of finding out about competitors is through google.com.
fancyfacebook 9y ago
These bizarre roundabout ways the NYT finds to worship corporations are starting to get creepy. Calling their work wondrous and speaking directly to people who "love" Google is just absurd. Just stop, don't worship an organization.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Or maybe you're just giving undue importance to those words. One may "love" Google in the same way one "loves" quesadillas, or chrome rims.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  Google has one of the strongest brands in the world. NYT's language is not that different from that used by ordinary people.
qubex 9y ago
That's the dilemma inherent in innovating a market you are an indisputed leader in: why rock the boat, and reset all your incumbent advantages to zero, when you can just sit pretty with what you've got? Kodak invented digital photography way back in the 1970s, patented it, and did nothing with it. It was only when the patents expired that digital cameras came to the fore (likely also because of intervening decades’ worth of technological improvement), and it killed them off. Until the beginning of the 20th Century the Royal Navy had an unassailable advantage in terms of ships and then Admiral Fisher designed the HMS Dreadnought which instantly obsoleted everything afloat and dialled back the UK's advantage to a single ship, and the Germans instantly took advantage of it and started building their own new dreadnoughts. This keeps happening.

fancyfacebook 9y ago

I love how difficult it's becoming to actually ever visit a website from a google result, especially on mobile. And even when you do you're usually still stuck with their tracking and spyware. Reminds me a lot of AOL's strategy back in the day.

pmart123 9y ago
I find this to be extremely annoying as well as it obscures the site link as well as it makes it very difficult to copy the source link if I want to share it. I think the comparison to AOL's strategy in 2000 is very warranted.
- nasredin 9y ago
  LMFTFY: It is IMPOSSIBLE to copy search result link. Not just "difficult".
  - cat199 9y ago
    have been running browser mods for ~5y to do this. it's a pain. but it works. currently greasemonkey 'direct link out' and 'bypass google redirect'
    - newscracker 9y ago
      I've been using "Google Search Link Fix" with Firefox (for a long time) to get the direct links on search results. [1] [1]: https://github.com/palant/searchlinkfix https://github.com/palant/searchlinkfix
dannyw 9y ago
Exactly! I hope the EU looks into the whole AMP (both web and the recently announced and universally panned email) program for antitrust violations. I bet if they subpoena Google, they WILL find A/B tests and experiments on increasing engagement & time spent on google.com through AMP changes. How that fits into the antitrust framework is not my subject area, but Google needs to be reigned in.

justonepost 9y ago

This is so inane. I use bing all the time (accidentally) and I always go - wait, what's wrong with google? why are these search results so awful? oh riiiight. (switch to google). Google is being attacked hard by Apple (blocking ads), amazon&azure (cloud) and ads (facebook). What Government really needs to do isn't break up Google per se, but generally give more natural advantages to smaller startups versus larger corps. One example would be corporate tax. Increase corp taxes on large corps (say over 100 billion) and decrease on smaller ones. In fact, if I were the democratic party this would be my rallying cry. Time to really re-invigorate the american dream.

adrianN 9y ago
I doubt that it's that simple. What stops large corporations from splitting themselves into many small corporations that work closely together?
- mcny 9y ago
  I think that's OK. Another thing we need to do is bring criminal liability for the board and the CEO for corporations. Probably not civil but definitely criminal.
- fny 9y ago
  The idea is that antitrust regulation would kick in, but that's unfortunately not a priority of our government in the past few decades.
- jacobr1 9y ago
  Presuming the company fully owned (or with some sort of pro-rata split) you could tax the parent company for the total of their holdings. If they truly were separate companies, well, that satisfies the OP's objective too, no? (Note I'm not a big fan of corporate taxes in general, I'd rather we not tax corporations and tax individuals more aggressively. Get rid of special rates for capital gains and have a much more progressive individual tax system.)
- majormajor 9y ago

ebbv 9y ago

Foundem sounds like a spam site to me. By definition if I’m finding Foundem results in Google, then Foundem would not be the one who is solving my search, Google is. I actually think one of the issues with Google over the last decade has been a failure to clean up the results. Google used to be merciless in hammering spam sites into oblivion. I miss those days.

thisisit 9y ago

Is it just me or this kind of rant-like writeups make it difficult to go through the content? While I held on to the romanticized story about the dating site, I gave up when it segued into multi-para story about Rockfeller and SC. But I get the point and I think there is some value in Google making everyone dance every time they change their algorithm. Things might have been better if they have some kind of review board. Apparently having zero or negligible customer facing teams seems to be the norm.

shahbaby 9y ago
I pretty much just read articles backwards now.
- Jeff_Brown 9y ago
  I was totally riveted. Without the storytelling I would not have learned, for instance, of this gem: "In public, Bill Gates was declaring victory [regarding the federal antitrust lawsuit], but inside Microsoft, executives were demanding that lawyers and other compliance officials — the kinds of people who, previously, were routinely ignored — be invited to every meeting. Software engineers began casually dropping by attorneys’ desks and describing new software features, and then asking, in desperate whispers, if anything they’d mentioned might trigger a subpoena. One Microsoft senior executive moved an extra chair into his office so a compliance official could sit alongside him during product reviews. Every time a programmer detailed a new idea, the executive turned to the official, who would point his thumb up or down like a capricious Roman emperor."
  - yesenadam 9y ago
    Incidentally, it seems 'thumbs up' had the opposite meaning to today in Roman times. Weird huh. http://time.com/4984728/thumbs-up-thumbs-down-history/ http://time.com/4984728/thumbs-up-thumbs-down-history/
remir 9y ago
Yeah, I'm getting tired of this "story telling" journalism. Just go straight to the point.

setgree 9y ago

I'm starting to despair that there's so much demand for reading/publishing 'the case against' X or Y company pieces, i.e. this and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16400950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16400950. Everybody who is for these companies is not like, passionate about them, we just use their products and pay (collectively) a lot of money to do so. With Google in particular, if their dominance was so unassailable, we wouldn't have slack or zoom, which exist essentially because gchat and google hangouts were so half-assed.

rnernento 9y ago

"Be evil." :(

bob_theslob646 9y ago

>"“Google’s built around horizontal search, which means if you type in ‘What’s the population of Myanmar,’ then Google finds websites that include the words ‘Myanmar’ and ‘population,’ and figures out which ones are most likely to answer your question,” says Neha Narula, who was a software engineer at Google before joining the M.I.T. Media Lab" I'm not sure if it's relevant but I get an exact result when I do this search. Not sure if that is horizontal search...

granitDev 9y ago

I think part of the problem when it comes to Google, is the massive name recognition. I'll wager that the average not-technical user who ventures to Google doesn't understand 1) what exactly a search engine is 2) alternatives exist. If you asked them, they probably think Google is the internet, and if you have to find anything, you have to go to Google to find it. I'll admit I have no proof of this, but I've found, generally that the non-technical individuals I know, have incredible poor working knowledge of the internet. I take as my primary evidence though the masses vulnerability to really stupid and easily caught scams, spoof websites, click bait, and spam emails. As a technical user, I'm constantly baffled that people fall for this crap. So if people really are that incomprehensibly ignorant, I'll bet they don't' even really know what a google is and why they use other than it's all they know and they'd be lost without it. If the general public can't figure out no one is going to hand them a million bucks from nigeria, how the hell can they figure out you don't have to use Google? I use DDG btw. I find their results fantastically good. So good that I can't even use google. The spam, the adds, the poor results. I cant' take it. I also can't handle that google returns different results on different computers. I get the same results on DDG every time i make the same search. I've gotten lazy and started performing searches for things instead of typing in the address because it's consistent and faster.

jrcii 9y ago
Yesterday I was trying to find organizations registered to the address 1011 1st Ave, which primarily belongs to the Archdiocese of New York. So I gave Google this query: "1011 1st ave" "new york" -archdiocese Many of the results do not include both of these quoted strings. So Google went from discarding your search terms and requiring quotes, to even discarding your quoted terms. I had to fire up duckduckgo to complete my search, which is something I never use but I had no choice.
amelius 9y ago
Well, similarly a lot of folks think Facebook is the internet, and they use Facebook's search bar instead of Google. Probably something similar holds for Amazon.
jacksmith21006 9y ago

fareesh 9y ago

This talking point comes straight from the top https://twitter.com/georgesoros/status/964471195793068032?s=20 https://twitter.com/georgesoros/status/964471195793068032?s=... Expect a lot of press on this subject over the next few weeks.

jacksmith21006 9y ago
But you do have to wonder what Soros motives are. He is really not someone that looks for the greater good. There is going to be some financial aspect that makes him money. Not saying he is not accidentally aligned with the greater good but most certainty not the driver.
- fareesh 9y ago
  https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2018/02/15/csco-aapl-nflx-fb-silicon-valley-stocks.html https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2018/02/15/csco-aap... Looks like a good time to short.
- dtornabene 9y ago
  Yo man, maybe ease up on the George Soros shtick. You might as well put the echo around his name.

jacksmith21006 9y ago

The problem is Google will just be replaced with someone that dominates. Tech just ends up winner take all or most. We see it with each thing. From Search, to Ecommerce, to social media, etc. So we need to think through would someone else be better than Google? Because that is just what will happen.

wu-ikkyu 9y ago
This isn't natural, though. It's the designed goal of centuries-old patent law which has become counter productive.

jacksmith21006 9y ago

We do need to realize this is being driven by George Soros. "Soros' Proposal to 'Regulate' Google, Facebook Infuriates Internet Users" https://sputniknews.com/viral/201802181061784072-soros-internet-regulation-proposal-reaction/ https://sputniknews.com/viral/201802181061784072-soros-inter... I also purposely linked to Russian media. As also Russia been after Google. Not saying they are not accidentally aligned with what is best but rather realize there are other motives at play here. Soros is only going to care how he can make more money from this and suspect spends ZERO time working on the greater good for society.

falcolas 9y ago

Meta: It's unfortunate this, like most tech behemoth critiques, got flagged off the front page so quickly. There are, of course exceptions to this rule, so perhaps those are simply enough to saturate people's desire for such articles. More on point: what choices does a startup have when wanting to operate in a vertical that Google/Facebook et.al. also want to infiltrate? Find a smaller niche that doesn't hold enough interest (or money) to interest them? It's funny, I wouldn't have thought the RSS reader niche would have appealed to them originally, and yet here we are today where RSS reader startups still find themselves competing on price against a product that no longer exists. It really does seem like its not enough to just be better; the "worse is better" paradox in action.

sctb 9y ago
It wasn't flagged; it tripped the flamewar detector, which we've just turned off.

aiCeivi9 9y ago

Previous discussion about case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16374458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16374458

mudil 9y ago

Google is not the most evil corporation ever invented. The most evil corporation has not been invented yet.

dqpb 9y ago

The New York times is participating in a campaign against Americas top tech companies. I don't know what their goal is, but no good will come off it. Google is one of our strengths, not one of our weaknesses.

Jeff_Brown 9y ago
The article takes great pain to point out the importance and value of Google. Genghis Khan was one of Mongolia's strengths. Standard Oil was one of 19th century America's strengths. An empire can be great and still stifle good things. It's hard to know what we're missing.
- moultano 9y ago
  >They basically shut down Foundem, creating more time for them to give advice to other companies and regulators fighting Google. This consulting work, some of which was funded by Google’s competitors, has helped to keep the Raffs afloat. They really buried the lead.
jaydz 9y ago
The media has been attacking tech for years. First they attacked startups and their valuations, later the "tech bros," and now Google/Amazon/Facebook. This Scott Galloway fellow seems to be leading the charge.
neolefty 9y ago
Two factors that seem to be on the mind of the NYTimes: * Tech companies' role in 2016 election interference (agents buying ads, trolls) * Tech companies' impact on journalism (Google News, decline in subscriptions, shift in advertising) The first one is explicit, and they have every right and responsibility to hold it up to the light, given its seriousness. The second one is a more of a speculation about their motivations. Newspapers are clearly frustrated -- how much does it factor into NYT's recent trend of aggressive coverage of tech & social media?
deleted 9y ago
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Upvoter33 9y ago

I'm personally MUCH more worried about facebook and twitter than Google. Our current political discourse has gone off the rails in the U.S., and I think a large part of it is due to those two entities. Google I think is only a mild player in that space, which, in its extremes, is a threat to democratic society.

dfabulich 9y ago
YouTube is a major player in that space. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/02/how-youtubes-algorithm-distorts-truth https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/02/how-youtu... YouTube's algorithm recommended extremist/conspiracy content during the 2016 election. Here's YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12/05/youtube-taking-extremists-combining-human-judgment-powerful/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12/05/youtube-taking-ex... (behind a free registration wall) "Since June we have removed over 150,000 videos for violent extremism." "We will continue the significant growth of our teams into next year, with the goal of bringing the total number of people across Google working to address content that might violate our policies to over 10,000 in 2018."
- jrcii 9y ago
  > YouTube's algorithm recommended extremist/conspiracy content Would you agree that the algorithm recommended this content because people believe in, or at least are interested in, conspiracies? Even if we feel that's a mistake, who are we (or Google) to be the arbiters of truth?
  - gareim 9y ago
    A friend asked me to watch a clip of Ben Shapiro so we could sincerely talk about what the other side believes. I forgot that I was on a fresh OS install, not yet logged in. Well, right after that one video, every single recommended video to me became a "Ben Shapiro SLAMS liberal...". I get that YouTube had no other metric to gauge me by, by there are 10 or 12 recommendations and there's no law that says YouTube can't ease into recommendations. Whether you're for or against Shapiro, this kind of behavior induces people into bubbles and radicalizing in the feedback loop.

lgleason 9y ago

Part of the reason that Google is in this situation is because, instead of staying neutral politically they took sides making themselves more of a target. There is also the issue of data privacy as it relates to sharing the data with the US Government. If they start to share more data with the US Government, the risk losing users and ad revenue. On the other hand many argue that their refusal to share data is bad for society as a whole. For example, some argue that more sharing of data would have helped catch the Florida school shooter before it happened. No matter what your personal feelings are about this, they are facing headwinds and scrutiny over this and Search advertising is still what brings in most of their profits.

prepend 9y ago
This is the sad reality. Google is out of sync with political currents so now there is this PR campaign against them. Hopefully, they continue to resist. It will be bad if they suck it up, get in line, and start paying lobbyists to both sides. Interestingly, before the Microsoft lawsuit there was no tech lobbying. The lesson learned by MS and others is that they have to spend a lot of money on DC. For example, in 98 MS spent $4M. By 03, this was up to almost $9M. https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000000115&year=2017id=D000000115&year=2017 https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00000011...
AlwaysBCoding 9y ago
I heard Peter Thiel make an interesting comment on this recently: that banks avoid political scrutiny because they fund both political parties, whereas Google is overtly biased towards one side (the blue side). This makes the red side hate them, and the blue side neglect them because they think of them as easy money. The only way to survive political scrutiny in a two-party system is to support both sides, or at least have a plausible threat that you could support the other side if over-regulated.

space_fountain 9y ago

I think something that's maybe being exposed here is that it isn't clear how to make digital products work together and that the incentives are to keep it that way. Walled gardens are being built inside basically every major tech company. Most aren't even illegal. Here's a simple example I ran into recently: I last weekend I created a hackathon project that can find the location in an audio book of a photo of a page from an physical book. The idea is it lets you switch back and forth between your physical reading experience and an audio book. It wasn't even all that hard and worked way better than I'd ever expected. I could probably get it polished and pretty usable within a couple of weeks of full time work, but without access to the audio and ebook files it's impossible. With DRM the default that access is basically impossible. I'm hoping to get Overdrive to implement it. I don't really care about any small potential profit it might generate and I know someone from there and they have the licensing and relationships to maybe make it work, but I feel like the world would be a better place if any company with an idea like that could just go out and do it. Yes google is trying to make search more of a wall around their garden, but everyone else is just building there's higher and we have laws to enforce their right to do so.

mayneack 9y ago
Speaking of walled gardens, that feature already exists for Amazon e-books and audiobooks read through kindle/audible.
- space_fountain 9y ago
  Yep. Almost mentioned that here. My original plan was just to do that in a more open way, but I realized it had a bad combination of being hard and not that cool. Besides I and plenty of other people prefer real books.

sol_remmy 9y ago

I feel like media has become more monopolistic than tech and needs to be dealt with first. I'm personally worried about the dominance of big newspapers. It seems that the field of "trusted online newspapers" has narrowed down to only the New York Times and Washington Post. Most non-Tech Hackernews submissions come from either Nytimes or WaPo. I worry because these newspapers seem to increasingly be setting the political and social narrative for the entire country. That's a lot of power to give Jeff Bezos and Carlos Slim.

otterley 9y ago
First, Carlos Slim is a minority shareholder in the NY Times (and he actually sold off most of his stake last December), not an editorial board member. Second, the old-school newspapers still have a very strong culture of research and reporting interwoven deeply within their walls. Sure, they make mistakes, but they have a much greater stake in the accuracy and importance-weighting of their news reporting than a user-driven content company like Facebook or Twitter.
hackme1234 9y ago
New York Times is 160 years old. It is the 'paper of record' I am just pointing that out because your comment doesn't make sense as it reads like these newspapers are becoming 'increasingly' dominant or narrative setting. They have been that way for decades.
stevenwoo 9y ago
Most local newspapers in the US are slowly dying due to their advertising revenue being killed off in favor of digital ads. I contracted at the Mercury News about five years ago and the vast majority of their income came from a single advertiser and their classified/ads had declined from a section that was larger by itself than the entire newspaper is today. Not enough people want to pay for news to make it worthwhile for smaller players to thrive in the current environment. Also newspapers don't set the political and social narrative for the country - only three printed publications backed Donald Trump and he won the election. That shows the Rupert Murdoch/Fox News TV crowd was more effective, at least with the electoral count if not the popular vote.
9y ago

deleted 9y ago

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excalibur 9y ago

> People loved Standard Oil a century ago, and Microsoft in the 1990s, just as they love Google today. Which people are those? One of Microsoft's defining features has always been the juxtaposition of software iterations that consumers truly despise with those that they're sort of ok with.

mgeorgoulo 9y ago

Never expected that something could be blamed for being too useful. Or did I? To tell you the truth it always seemed like there's an awful lot of logic in the way internet works. Seems like the real world is catching on, trying to close this gap... I certainly hope it's too late :)

thedarkginger 9y ago

"Many of the most important antitrust lawsuits in American history — against IBM, Alcoa, Kodak and others — were rooted in claims that one company had made technological discoveries that allowed it to outpace competitors." Does that say more about the success of antitrust at spurring competitors to catch up or that "technological dominance" is only good as long as long as the paradigm doesn't shift (i.e. Kodak is now pretending to be a crypto company as a last resort)?

chewzerita 9y ago

And they have a Google reCAPTCHA on their page...

Slansitartop 9y ago
> And they have a Google reCAPTCHA on their page... Comments like yours are stupid and add nothing for these reasons: 1) A journalist or writer likely does not have technical control over their paper's website design. This is certainly true for someone writing for the NYT. They're not going to hold back their article because someone on the website team chose to use a product from the company they're critiquing. 2) Google, Facebook, etc. are so dominant that it's often not really possible to avoid them and their technology and still have a functioning business.

cmurf 9y ago

A trifecta of failures: failure of capitalism to innovate its own self moderation from being inherently anti-competitive; failure of democracy which engages after the fact based on emotion and is reactionary; failure of meritocracy where elites hand out favors to "friendlies", lower the ladder of regulatory avoidance to some and not others, ergo the opposite of merit. This is why we need more ethics, logic, rationality, and the promotion of epistemology as moderators. Capitalism, democracy, and meritocracy all in their own way are prone to people gaming the system, might making right.

sjg007 9y ago

It's pretty easy to measure how addictive YouTube is. Let a toddler use it. Now is it all bad? Maybe. I found my kids build into their genuine play things they saw on youtube. Is it worse than cartoons/tv? Maybe.. Should it be rationed, definitely.

pfedigan 9y ago

This was a fantastically written article. I've learned and been able to explore so much from it. I still love Google and wouldn't be where I am today without it but it makes a fair point when camparing this time to the early oil industry. It's not like there's no competition against Google, it's just been a fantastic tool and why use anything else.

kaeawc 9y ago

Whoa. Why is this post so buried?