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There's nothing objectively wrong with a large company unless they begin to squash competition with regulatory lock-in. This is what led to the breakup of AT&T/

There's nothing objectively wrong with a large company unless they begin to squash competition with regulatory lock-in. This is what led to the breakup of AT&T/Bell. As far as I can tell, Google doesn't keep others out of the search market through any other means than just being better than the other guys. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I certainly haven't seen any shortage of search engines and alternative cloud services providers.

lovich 8y ago
They routinely put their other products on top of the search pages, such as Google reviews over Yelp or Google maps over OpenMap results. The issue isn't even so much as Google is dominating search, because they have been providing a better product in almost all cases until recently. The issue is that they are using their dominance in search to try and dominate other markets
- TomMarius 8y ago
  It's their product after all; do you point people to your competition from your product? Everyone is free to use anything else. Anti-competitive would be if you couldn't use anything else.
  - xg15 8y ago
    "Your product" is something completely different if you're a mom-and-pop shop or startup or if you have 90% market share. This is why antitrust exists and what arguments like this always seem to ignore.
    - TomMarius 8y ago
      Can you be more specific, what exactly is and when exactly it becomes different?
      - xg15 8y ago
        In short, network effects. Longer: the amount of power their decisions have to affect society. If the mom-and-pop shop would refuse to serve readheads, that's (mostly) their decision. If Google decided to lock redheads out of their accounts, or block from using Chrome, Android or Search, those people would have serious disadvantages simply going around their daily life.
        TomMarius 8y ago
        Are they getting hurt? I guess not. No one has any right to Google services[0]. Google has every right to refuse service to anyone[0]. What if they decided to close shop altogether? Note that locking them e.g. out of a phone they bought before the ban is something different - that would be a breach of contract from Google side. [0] unless there is an existing contract
        xg15 8y ago
        > Are they getting hurt? I guess not. I absolutely disagree. In Google's case, their service have become an integral part to using the internet - and the internet has become an integral part of daily life. So such a block would absolutely have consequences. > Note that locking them e.g. out of a phone they bought before the ban is something different - that would be a breach of contract from Google side. Then it would as well be breach of contract to lock me out of the Play Store until I agreed to an updated ToS. Apparently this can still be done if the old ToS contains the right clauses. So I suspect the phone ban would work similarly.
        lovich 8y ago
        When a company has an almost complete monopoly and they decide to bar someone from service, how is that not hurting them? If you run a website that earns revenue based on incoming users and Google cuts you off, how is that not damaging you? You could use every single competitor and still not even get a quarter as much traffic as Google.
        8y ago
    - briandear 8y ago
      Is the consumer being harmed? That’s the only question that matters in anti-trust. That mom and pop can’t compete isn’t a symptom of a monopoly, it’s a symptom of mom and pop not doing more to be the best choice. Mom and pop could compete if they had a better, cheaper product. If you want to compete — be better than the competition. Many startups are not — that isn’t the fault of Google.
      - xg15 8y ago
        Yes, e.g. by stiffling sale of alternative Android-based operating systems, as the EU just concluded. Google uses their market power and control over Android to give competing OSes a disadvantage, whether or not they would be better than Android/Google Play.
        TomMarius 8y ago
        Using the EU as an argument is like bringing a friend that agrees with you to confirm your statement. Use actual arguments, please.
        xg15 8y ago
        It seems a bit ridiculous to call a multi-year investigation by the EU's anti-trust agency "calling in my friends", but ok. The most severe thing they did was give retailers a hard choice: Either they only sell phones with Google's Android distribution (AOSP+Google Play) or they only sell phones with no-name AOSP distributions. They cannot sell both. As missing out on the revenue from Google Play-based phones would be financially irresponsible, this choice had only one viable option: Not selling any other AOSP-based OS except Google's. Therefore Google effectively made competing AOSP-based projects extremely hard to sell, regardless of their quality.
        ionised 8y ago
        So you're not interested in hearing arguments you don't like?
  - stuckinarut 8y ago
    Except google dominates search and search is the only way. This is like if one company owned the street signs, and just took them down arbitrarily.
    - TomMarius 8y ago
      You are free to use duckduckgo.com, bing.com or several more alternatives. Your metaphor is invalid.
      - lovich 8y ago
        All of those alternatives together don't even provide a fraction of the service that google provides. The monopoly takes control and keeps prices higher than they would be with competition. New competition comes along every now and then but a monopoly just has to compete heavily for a short time to put the new comes out of business and then it's back to mining the market. This is how monopolies work and what anti trust legislature is supposed to stop. Based on your comments here, I have to ask. Is there any situation you can think of where the government should step in to break up a company, short of violence or breaking a contract?
      - stuckinarut 8y ago
        right. I'm gonna stretch my metaphor a lot. Imagine street signs use polarized glasses (or something, I'm not an optics). I can see only those signs whose glasses I where. I choose to wear google glasses. Everyone does, the competition is pretty good but google has been around for so long that I just don't really bother with anything else. Now google takes down some signs. Am I really going to carry 3 pairs of glasses (N pairs, M are relevant) in order to figure out what street I'm on? or am I just going to walk a block to the next street and use the service google hasn't arbitrarily decided to destroy.
  - lovich 8y ago
    When a company completely dominates a field they get different rules to prevent them from taking over every related field one at a time. "It's their product" doesn't cut it as a member of our society when that means they can control entire industries and jack up prices. Having a single company own one industry after another is completely antithetical to the idea of capitalism, and if we're not going to do capitalism then we might as well start taxing Google even more to pay for public services, which I am sure they also don't want
  - xg15 8y ago
    So, genuine question. If some company (with sufficiently deep pockets) decided to buy up all land, buildings, roads, infrastructure, etc that makes up a city and then decided that certain groups of persons are no longer allowed to tresspass its private property and must therefore leave the city, would you be ok with that?
- fixermark 8y ago
  When a user searches for "Restaurants near me," how does Google answer that question reliably without using its own mapping service? Trying to feed that query to a third-party service and then give users the results back adds significant risk that the third-party changes their API, changes their feature-set in an incompatible way, goes out of business, gets in a corporate fight with the search provider... It's both cheaper and more convenient for the end-user if the search provider handles the mapping itself (in the absence of some kind of universal understood interface standard, complete with some kind of incentive to adhere to it).
  - stuckinarut 8y ago
    They pay to integrate with third party services via a bidding process. > adds significant risk that the third-party changes their API, changes their feature-set in an incompatible way, goes out of business All very unlikely to happen when dealing with a client the size of google. > It's both cheaper and more convenient for the end-user if the search provider handles the mapping itself added bonus, google gets to dominate mapping then jack up the cost 30x when they decide they want it to be a billion dollar business. LIke they did recently.
    - fixermark 8y ago
      > They pay to integrate with third party services via a bidding process. It's an interesting idea; I don't think I've seen something like that floated before outside of the government space of fair bidding against contracts. > added bonus, google gets to dominate mapping then jack up the cost 30x when they decide they want it to be a billion dollar business. LIke they did recently. I hear OpenStreetMaps still exists, and has an API.
      - stuckinarut 8y ago
        An API not suitable for commercial use. So now you're relying on a third party who is suddenly trying to cope with some percentage of the insane traffic of google maps. If they can they make a lot of money. if not you lose money by switching to them. if it's less than the new rate that you get from google, it's a hard sell to switch. You might point out that this third party should spend the money to scale, but unlike google they aren't equipped with an advertising firehose of cash that they can point at a losing business whenever they want. They have to operate a scale they can afford. Best case they have the staff to build out a service that they can scale quickly enough to take advantage. Realistically, that means using a cloud service provided by one of the oligarchs.
- RestlessMind 8y ago
  If I am going to search for a business near me, I always prefer a Google maps based solution right there on the search results page, rather than having to navigate to yet another page (say, Yelp's) which is going to nag me to download their app and going to provide a shitty experience otherwise. Continuing along the same example, Yelp is not even going to provide me with all the useful service I might need (like driving directions to that business) and I will have to again navigate back to Google maps. Google's practice of showing me data from other products (eg. Maps) right there on the search pages is definitely a win for me as a consumer.
xg15 8y ago
Google doesn't keep others out of the search market through any other means than just being better... They have 98% market share in europe. They also provide the main revenue source (AdWords) and the most important implementation of the web stack (Chrome) - which fitted with mandatory automated updating. If you combine those factors, they are in a position where they can to a large part dictate what the de-facto standards for a successful website are. They can also rapidly change those standards or choose to promote or bury certain technologies. If that is not an advantage over competitors, I don't know what is. And this is just for the web. On Android - about half the worldwide market for mobile apps - they are not even a market participant at all. They are basically the government.
- fixermark 8y ago
  Quick experiment you can try to check if Google is blocking competition: 1) navigate to bing.com 2) do a search If it works, congratulations; Google isn't blocking competition. The 98% market share is probably because the market is winner-take-all, and people don't see a need to use a new competitor that's even equivalently-effective over one they are already comfortable with.
  - xg15 8y ago
    Imagine you run a website. Some day, for whatever reason, Google is blacklisting you. Are you going to say "eh, no big deal, I'll just have my customers use Bing instead"?
    - stuckinarut 8y ago
      You deserved it because you served an ad that google didn't like the style of. Also their adblocker in chrome is fine too because that's not a conflict of interest. - typical HN response.
    - fixermark 8y ago
      Your customers already know how to get to your website: yourdomain.com. Do you mean "Some day, for whatever reason, Google stops directing traffic to your website of people who don't know who you are, for free?" Sounds like it's time to spend some money on advertising. Their ability to kick a bunch of traffic towards you or refrain from doing so makes them a market-maker, but they share that with newspaper and television networks. It doesn't make them a monopoly. It's not their fault or responsibility if people don't "tune in" to the Bing channel.

lovich 8y ago

They routinely put their other products on top of the search pages, such as Google reviews over Yelp or Google maps over OpenMap results. The issue isn't even so much as Google is dominating search, because they have been providing a better product in almost all cases until recently. The issue is that they are using their dominance in search to try and dominate other markets

TomMarius 8y ago
It's their product after all; do you point people to your competition from your product? Everyone is free to use anything else. Anti-competitive would be if you couldn't use anything else.
- xg15 8y ago
  "Your product" is something completely different if you're a mom-and-pop shop or startup or if you have 90% market share. This is why antitrust exists and what arguments like this always seem to ignore.
  - TomMarius 8y ago
    Can you be more specific, what exactly is and when exactly it becomes different?
    - xg15 8y ago
      In short, network effects. Longer: the amount of power their decisions have to affect society. If the mom-and-pop shop would refuse to serve readheads, that's (mostly) their decision. If Google decided to lock redheads out of their accounts, or block from using Chrome, Android or Search, those people would have serious disadvantages simply going around their daily life.
      - TomMarius 8y ago
        Are they getting hurt? I guess not. No one has any right to Google services[0]. Google has every right to refuse service to anyone[0]. What if they decided to close shop altogether? Note that locking them e.g. out of a phone they bought before the ban is something different - that would be a breach of contract from Google side. [0] unless there is an existing contract
        xg15 8y ago
        > Are they getting hurt? I guess not. I absolutely disagree. In Google's case, their service have become an integral part to using the internet - and the internet has become an integral part of daily life. So such a block would absolutely have consequences. > Note that locking them e.g. out of a phone they bought before the ban is something different - that would be a breach of contract from Google side. Then it would as well be breach of contract to lock me out of the Play Store until I agreed to an updated ToS. Apparently this can still be done if the old ToS contains the right clauses. So I suspect the phone ban would work similarly.
        lovich 8y ago
        When a company has an almost complete monopoly and they decide to bar someone from service, how is that not hurting them? If you run a website that earns revenue based on incoming users and Google cuts you off, how is that not damaging you? You could use every single competitor and still not even get a quarter as much traffic as Google.
        8y ago
  - briandear 8y ago
    Is the consumer being harmed? That’s the only question that matters in anti-trust. That mom and pop can’t compete isn’t a symptom of a monopoly, it’s a symptom of mom and pop not doing more to be the best choice. Mom and pop could compete if they had a better, cheaper product. If you want to compete — be better than the competition. Many startups are not — that isn’t the fault of Google.
    - xg15 8y ago
      Yes, e.g. by stiffling sale of alternative Android-based operating systems, as the EU just concluded. Google uses their market power and control over Android to give competing OSes a disadvantage, whether or not they would be better than Android/Google Play.
      - TomMarius 8y ago
        Using the EU as an argument is like bringing a friend that agrees with you to confirm your statement. Use actual arguments, please.
        xg15 8y ago
        It seems a bit ridiculous to call a multi-year investigation by the EU's anti-trust agency "calling in my friends", but ok. The most severe thing they did was give retailers a hard choice: Either they only sell phones with Google's Android distribution (AOSP+Google Play) or they only sell phones with no-name AOSP distributions. They cannot sell both. As missing out on the revenue from Google Play-based phones would be financially irresponsible, this choice had only one viable option: Not selling any other AOSP-based OS except Google's. Therefore Google effectively made competing AOSP-based projects extremely hard to sell, regardless of their quality.
        ionised 8y ago
        So you're not interested in hearing arguments you don't like?
- stuckinarut 8y ago
  Except google dominates search and search is the only way. This is like if one company owned the street signs, and just took them down arbitrarily.
  - TomMarius 8y ago
    You are free to use duckduckgo.com, bing.com or several more alternatives. Your metaphor is invalid.
    - lovich 8y ago
      All of those alternatives together don't even provide a fraction of the service that google provides. The monopoly takes control and keeps prices higher than they would be with competition. New competition comes along every now and then but a monopoly just has to compete heavily for a short time to put the new comes out of business and then it's back to mining the market. This is how monopolies work and what anti trust legislature is supposed to stop. Based on your comments here, I have to ask. Is there any situation you can think of where the government should step in to break up a company, short of violence or breaking a contract?
    - stuckinarut 8y ago
      right. I'm gonna stretch my metaphor a lot. Imagine street signs use polarized glasses (or something, I'm not an optics). I can see only those signs whose glasses I where. I choose to wear google glasses. Everyone does, the competition is pretty good but google has been around for so long that I just don't really bother with anything else. Now google takes down some signs. Am I really going to carry 3 pairs of glasses (N pairs, M are relevant) in order to figure out what street I'm on? or am I just going to walk a block to the next street and use the service google hasn't arbitrarily decided to destroy.
- lovich 8y ago
  When a company completely dominates a field they get different rules to prevent them from taking over every related field one at a time. "It's their product" doesn't cut it as a member of our society when that means they can control entire industries and jack up prices. Having a single company own one industry after another is completely antithetical to the idea of capitalism, and if we're not going to do capitalism then we might as well start taxing Google even more to pay for public services, which I am sure they also don't want
- xg15 8y ago
  So, genuine question. If some company (with sufficiently deep pockets) decided to buy up all land, buildings, roads, infrastructure, etc that makes up a city and then decided that certain groups of persons are no longer allowed to tresspass its private property and must therefore leave the city, would you be ok with that?
fixermark 8y ago
When a user searches for "Restaurants near me," how does Google answer that question reliably without using its own mapping service? Trying to feed that query to a third-party service and then give users the results back adds significant risk that the third-party changes their API, changes their feature-set in an incompatible way, goes out of business, gets in a corporate fight with the search provider... It's both cheaper and more convenient for the end-user if the search provider handles the mapping itself (in the absence of some kind of universal understood interface standard, complete with some kind of incentive to adhere to it).
- stuckinarut 8y ago
  They pay to integrate with third party services via a bidding process. > adds significant risk that the third-party changes their API, changes their feature-set in an incompatible way, goes out of business All very unlikely to happen when dealing with a client the size of google. > It's both cheaper and more convenient for the end-user if the search provider handles the mapping itself added bonus, google gets to dominate mapping then jack up the cost 30x when they decide they want it to be a billion dollar business. LIke they did recently.
  - fixermark 8y ago
    > They pay to integrate with third party services via a bidding process. It's an interesting idea; I don't think I've seen something like that floated before outside of the government space of fair bidding against contracts. > added bonus, google gets to dominate mapping then jack up the cost 30x when they decide they want it to be a billion dollar business. LIke they did recently. I hear OpenStreetMaps still exists, and has an API.
    - stuckinarut 8y ago
      An API not suitable for commercial use. So now you're relying on a third party who is suddenly trying to cope with some percentage of the insane traffic of google maps. If they can they make a lot of money. if not you lose money by switching to them. if it's less than the new rate that you get from google, it's a hard sell to switch. You might point out that this third party should spend the money to scale, but unlike google they aren't equipped with an advertising firehose of cash that they can point at a losing business whenever they want. They have to operate a scale they can afford. Best case they have the staff to build out a service that they can scale quickly enough to take advantage. Realistically, that means using a cloud service provided by one of the oligarchs.
RestlessMind 8y ago
If I am going to search for a business near me, I always prefer a Google maps based solution right there on the search results page, rather than having to navigate to yet another page (say, Yelp's) which is going to nag me to download their app and going to provide a shitty experience otherwise. Continuing along the same example, Yelp is not even going to provide me with all the useful service I might need (like driving directions to that business) and I will have to again navigate back to Google maps. Google's practice of showing me data from other products (eg. Maps) right there on the search pages is definitely a win for me as a consumer.

xg15 8y ago

Google doesn't keep others out of the search market through any other means than just being better... They have 98% market share in europe. They also provide the main revenue source (AdWords) and the most important implementation of the web stack (Chrome) - which fitted with mandatory automated updating. If you combine those factors, they are in a position where they can to a large part dictate what the de-facto standards for a successful website are. They can also rapidly change those standards or choose to promote or bury certain technologies. If that is not an advantage over competitors, I don't know what is. And this is just for the web. On Android - about half the worldwide market for mobile apps - they are not even a market participant at all. They are basically the government.

fixermark 8y ago
Quick experiment you can try to check if Google is blocking competition: 1) navigate to bing.com 2) do a search If it works, congratulations; Google isn't blocking competition. The 98% market share is probably because the market is winner-take-all, and people don't see a need to use a new competitor that's even equivalently-effective over one they are already comfortable with.
- xg15 8y ago
  Imagine you run a website. Some day, for whatever reason, Google is blacklisting you. Are you going to say "eh, no big deal, I'll just have my customers use Bing instead"?
  - stuckinarut 8y ago
    You deserved it because you served an ad that google didn't like the style of. Also their adblocker in chrome is fine too because that's not a conflict of interest. - typical HN response.
  - fixermark 8y ago
    Your customers already know how to get to your website: yourdomain.com. Do you mean "Some day, for whatever reason, Google stops directing traffic to your website of people who don't know who you are, for free?" Sounds like it's time to spend some money on advertising. Their ability to kick a bunch of traffic towards you or refrain from doing so makes them a market-maker, but they share that with newspaper and television networks. It doesn't make them a monopoly. It's not their fault or responsibility if people don't "tune in" to the Bing channel.