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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

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
  That sounds good. Then, as long as control becomes more diffuse through the public markets, the incentives are in place for them to start working with everyone else in the market, not just their corporate parent. Not trivial in practice, but sounds like it would be much better if we could figure out a way to make it happen. The first step towards more federated standards and interoperability is to have a larger number of players in the market.
vog 9y ago
That's strange. I've had the same feeling with Google for a long time: Why are the results so strange, and no improvement in sight for years? Then I discovered DuckDuckGo and never looked back. For example, why do Google searches for HTML/JS stuff result in third-party crap sites instead of pointing me directly to the relevant MDN or W3C sites? Why do searches for company names result in tons of marketing crap (where their main web site would have been sufficient), instead of at least showing the Wikipedia article as well? If you really want to embrace diversity, look beyond the two largest players. For search engines, it's not Bing versus Google, there are DuckDuckGo, YaCy and so on. For laptops, it's not Windows versus MacOS, there's MINT, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, etc. For servers, it's not Windows Server versus RHEL, there's also Debian, FreeBSD, etc. For smart phones, it's not iOS versus Google-Android, there's also LineageOS, Replicant, etc. (For nitpickers: Yes, LineageOS is heavily based on Android, which is again heavily based on Linux. Still, a slick LineageOS doesn't even need GApps, which is a huge difference to the e.g. stock Samsung/Asus/... crapware Android.)
- nasredin 9y ago
  So it's not just me that thinks Google lost the war to spammers? I limit my searches to com,org,net,io domains and the first pages are still full of spam. The UI is race-to-the-bottom terrible. Choosing "verbatim" takes 3 mouse clicks FFS! Google is becoming only useful with esoteric knowledge. E.g. you need to append site:stackexchange for the search to be useful.
  - whatshisface 9y ago
    It really depends what you're searching for - product reviews are an endless landscape of garbage, science-related stuff is pretty good.
  - bobdole1234 9y ago
    Google might have just lumped you into the idiot bin, there are people who WANT their searches to look like spam. Google will happily show people what it thinks they want based on how they've interacted with the service (or sometimes, how the people on that IP address/machine have interacted with the service). I always have to start an incognito tab to find anything that isn't pure drivel on my mothers machine. Otherwise I get search results that look remarkably like the spam she forwards me. Try a search from an incognito tab and compare.
ChrisSD 9y ago
The way large multinational corporations pay tax in the UK seems to be that the government names a figure, the company says "ha, no" then they negotiate down until the company is happy. I don't think raising that starting figure is going achieve much but maybe it works differently in other countries.
- aje403 9y ago
  Came to post this, blindly raising the corporate tax rate will not work as intended and is an extremely naive suggestion to make Corporations, like many other organisms, will do what is best for them at any given moment, including deciding whether or not behaving ethically is in their best interests
  - IntronExon 9y ago
    That sounds like a cancerous organism, in which case the solution is excision and destruction.
    - cobookman 9y ago
      Corporations today might be the cold. But If you kill them off you might be left with something like Ebola. Just because something isn't perfect doesn't mean it's not the best outcome. If you've got a better idea let's hear it.
      - IntronExon 9y ago
        Kill the bad actors, not the whole system. That has been historically what is done, and it works. Edit: The Chickenshit Club is a good read which relates this in more detail.
    - aje403 9y ago
      Great thinking, the world is full of immoral people, should we burn that down too?
Jeff_Brown 9y ago
The argument, "Google is better than its competitors, so there's no problem," misses the point of antitrust regulation. We don't know what better technologies might exist if a monopolist had not been crushing them.
- Aunche 9y ago
  How is Google "crushing" them? They just aren't getting as much exposure from Google as they'd like to. There's always going to be people unhappy with where their product shows up in search. Without a search engine, they'd have no chance at all in the first place. I agree that it's unfair for Google to prioritize their own products in Google search, but they aren't doing anything malicious.
  - Jeff_Brown 9y ago
    Perhaps I should have said "stifling". Questions of malice, or of intent more generally, are irrelevant. Antitrust law is intended to promote consumer welfare. If consumers would be better off knowing about a service than not, and because it threatens Google, Google is relegating it to page 70 of their search results, that's bad for consumers. Even if Google is trying to make everyone happy, regulators can help society by stepping in.
- cromwellian 9y ago
  What about academia? You mean new algorithms can’t be invented unless they can be immediately commercialized and profitable? Also the Foundem guys tell a good story, but where’s the Hustle? If they had such good technology, why didn’t they pivot? Why didn’t they try to sell to Amazon or NextTag? In 1998 I met people that created a price comparison website scraping engine at a conference, they failed to get significant traction and sold for a ton of money to Amazon. The technology they created VDB or treating the internet as a virtual sql database, turned out to be backed by none other than Anand Rajaraman and someone most people will be familiar with Peter Norvig. I mean, honestly, if these guys had something truly innovative, I’m pretty sure they could have arranged an acquisition. Is there any scientific evidence at all that innovation is being crushed? This seems like an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence beyond a few anecdotes from losing startups. 95% of businesses fail to be viable for a host of reasons. If you’re doing product search your main competitor these days is Amazon anyway.
dbatten 9y ago
> Increase corp taxes on large corps (say over 100 billion) and decrease on smaller ones. Heck, I'd settle for tax reforms that didn't give large corporations that can afford an army of tax accountants/lawyers and a host of offshore shell corporations an advantage over small corporations that can't afford those things. You don't even need to get into giving advantages to startups to begin with, just stop hamstringing them by making them compete against folks that can sidestep the tax code.
lmm 9y ago
> Increase corp taxes on large corps (say over 100 billion) and decrease on smaller ones. Rather than this (which would be complex and unenforceable), just remove the loopholes (double Irish etc.) that allow those large corps to avoid taxes while smaller competitors can't.
UserJS 9y ago
> Increase corp taxes on large corps (say over 100 billion) and decrease on smaller ones. Financially, I believe startups would actually want to see higher taxes instead of lower ones due to their ability to take advantage of net operating losses, which is a carry-forward that allows them to write off taxes for the future.
cwkoss 9y ago
Progressive tax on corporate earnings Make businesses under $1M/year exempt, increase taxes proportionally to earnings above that.

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
That sounds good. Then, as long as control becomes more diffuse through the public markets, the incentives are in place for them to start working with everyone else in the market, not just their corporate parent. Not trivial in practice, but sounds like it would be much better if we could figure out a way to make it happen. The first step towards more federated standards and interoperability is to have a larger number of players in the market.

vog 9y ago

That's strange. I've had the same feeling with Google for a long time: Why are the results so strange, and no improvement in sight for years? Then I discovered DuckDuckGo and never looked back. For example, why do Google searches for HTML/JS stuff result in third-party crap sites instead of pointing me directly to the relevant MDN or W3C sites? Why do searches for company names result in tons of marketing crap (where their main web site would have been sufficient), instead of at least showing the Wikipedia article as well? If you really want to embrace diversity, look beyond the two largest players. For search engines, it's not Bing versus Google, there are DuckDuckGo, YaCy and so on. For laptops, it's not Windows versus MacOS, there's MINT, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, etc. For servers, it's not Windows Server versus RHEL, there's also Debian, FreeBSD, etc. For smart phones, it's not iOS versus Google-Android, there's also LineageOS, Replicant, etc. (For nitpickers: Yes, LineageOS is heavily based on Android, which is again heavily based on Linux. Still, a slick LineageOS doesn't even need GApps, which is a huge difference to the e.g. stock Samsung/Asus/... crapware Android.)

nasredin 9y ago
So it's not just me that thinks Google lost the war to spammers? I limit my searches to com,org,net,io domains and the first pages are still full of spam. The UI is race-to-the-bottom terrible. Choosing "verbatim" takes 3 mouse clicks FFS! Google is becoming only useful with esoteric knowledge. E.g. you need to append site:stackexchange for the search to be useful.
- whatshisface 9y ago
  It really depends what you're searching for - product reviews are an endless landscape of garbage, science-related stuff is pretty good.
- bobdole1234 9y ago
  Google might have just lumped you into the idiot bin, there are people who WANT their searches to look like spam. Google will happily show people what it thinks they want based on how they've interacted with the service (or sometimes, how the people on that IP address/machine have interacted with the service). I always have to start an incognito tab to find anything that isn't pure drivel on my mothers machine. Otherwise I get search results that look remarkably like the spam she forwards me. Try a search from an incognito tab and compare.

ChrisSD 9y ago

The way large multinational corporations pay tax in the UK seems to be that the government names a figure, the company says "ha, no" then they negotiate down until the company is happy. I don't think raising that starting figure is going achieve much but maybe it works differently in other countries.

aje403 9y ago
Came to post this, blindly raising the corporate tax rate will not work as intended and is an extremely naive suggestion to make Corporations, like many other organisms, will do what is best for them at any given moment, including deciding whether or not behaving ethically is in their best interests
- IntronExon 9y ago
  That sounds like a cancerous organism, in which case the solution is excision and destruction.
  - cobookman 9y ago
    Corporations today might be the cold. But If you kill them off you might be left with something like Ebola. Just because something isn't perfect doesn't mean it's not the best outcome. If you've got a better idea let's hear it.
    - IntronExon 9y ago
      Kill the bad actors, not the whole system. That has been historically what is done, and it works. Edit: The Chickenshit Club is a good read which relates this in more detail.
  - aje403 9y ago
    Great thinking, the world is full of immoral people, should we burn that down too?

Jeff_Brown 9y ago

The argument, "Google is better than its competitors, so there's no problem," misses the point of antitrust regulation. We don't know what better technologies might exist if a monopolist had not been crushing them.

Aunche 9y ago
How is Google "crushing" them? They just aren't getting as much exposure from Google as they'd like to. There's always going to be people unhappy with where their product shows up in search. Without a search engine, they'd have no chance at all in the first place. I agree that it's unfair for Google to prioritize their own products in Google search, but they aren't doing anything malicious.
- Jeff_Brown 9y ago
  Perhaps I should have said "stifling". Questions of malice, or of intent more generally, are irrelevant. Antitrust law is intended to promote consumer welfare. If consumers would be better off knowing about a service than not, and because it threatens Google, Google is relegating it to page 70 of their search results, that's bad for consumers. Even if Google is trying to make everyone happy, regulators can help society by stepping in.
cromwellian 9y ago
What about academia? You mean new algorithms can’t be invented unless they can be immediately commercialized and profitable? Also the Foundem guys tell a good story, but where’s the Hustle? If they had such good technology, why didn’t they pivot? Why didn’t they try to sell to Amazon or NextTag? In 1998 I met people that created a price comparison website scraping engine at a conference, they failed to get significant traction and sold for a ton of money to Amazon. The technology they created VDB or treating the internet as a virtual sql database, turned out to be backed by none other than Anand Rajaraman and someone most people will be familiar with Peter Norvig. I mean, honestly, if these guys had something truly innovative, I’m pretty sure they could have arranged an acquisition. Is there any scientific evidence at all that innovation is being crushed? This seems like an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence beyond a few anecdotes from losing startups. 95% of businesses fail to be viable for a host of reasons. If you’re doing product search your main competitor these days is Amazon anyway.

dbatten 9y ago

> Increase corp taxes on large corps (say over 100 billion) and decrease on smaller ones. Heck, I'd settle for tax reforms that didn't give large corporations that can afford an army of tax accountants/lawyers and a host of offshore shell corporations an advantage over small corporations that can't afford those things. You don't even need to get into giving advantages to startups to begin with, just stop hamstringing them by making them compete against folks that can sidestep the tax code.

lmm 9y ago

> Increase corp taxes on large corps (say over 100 billion) and decrease on smaller ones. Rather than this (which would be complex and unenforceable), just remove the loopholes (double Irish etc.) that allow those large corps to avoid taxes while smaller competitors can't.

UserJS 9y ago

> Increase corp taxes on large corps (say over 100 billion) and decrease on smaller ones. Financially, I believe startups would actually want to see higher taxes instead of lower ones due to their ability to take advantage of net operating losses, which is a carry-forward that allows them to write off taxes for the future.

cwkoss 9y ago

Progressive tax on corporate earnings Make businesses under $1M/year exempt, increase taxes proportionally to earnings above that.