8 ms·

Ask HN: Is Google a Monopoly or just really good at building useful products?

32 points by enosanto 8y ago

I know that Google is super powerful and has great products but what exactly are (if any) examples of Google showing anti-competitive behaviour?

deleted 8y ago
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waffleguy 8y ago
You could google it, but I doubt you’ll get good results
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
enjoyz 8y ago
In search, there have been instances where they've put their weight behind some products (Yelp vs Google reviews). It is also under scrutiny in the EU. Their antidote seems to be creating Alphabet and styling Google as an advertising company rather a search engine. That said, I for one, think they haven't put out and succeeded with subpar products by the sheer force of their control over search (Google Plus, Google Buzz, ...).
Dahoon 8y ago
>Is Google a monopoly? Yes in more than one area. The lowest hanging fruit (which will cause downvotes): Google Play. No one can release anything Google disagrees with on Google Play.... but google could. Google and Apple really should be separated from their stores. They know everything that happens on them and no one can compete against that. Bundling Chrome with Android (and Apple apps in iOS) is no different than Microsoft bundling IE or Windows media player.
- wpasc 8y ago
  Epic Games circumvented this pretty easily with Fortnite on Android
  - Dahoon 8y ago
    Yes, huge companies can make their own stores by levering a huge hit game, lots of cash and opening the gaping security hole that is sideloading apps. Firefox could also be downloaded from getfirefox.com. That doesn't mean Microsoft didn't abuse their monopoly with IE. Btw. also the same Epic that paid a developer to pull their game off Steam and make it exclusive to the Epic store after the game had had lots of advertisement on the Steam store. That is twice Epic has abused one store to promote their own. They are even worse than Google. At least Google pretends not to be scummy. But that is beside the point.
- mav3rick 8y ago
  Right Android is the only mobile OS where Epic and others can distribute APKs. You can't do that on iOS.
- pgeorgi 8y ago
  > No one can release anything Google disagrees with on Google Play Recent Android versions made it ever easier to install apps without using the Play Store: I have F-Droid installed and whitelisted (so no warnings every time an apk appears), which required toggling a permission switch the system pointed out to me. As for Chrome, apparently various vendors ship their own browser as default although it seems they still have to ship Chrome as alternative.
  - Dahoon 8y ago
    >Recent Android versions made it ever easier to install apps without using the Play Store Yes I'm using it myself but how is that making Google Play less of a monopoly? F-droid can't sell apps on the play store without using Google.
    - pgeorgi 8y ago
      > F-droid can't sell apps on the play store without using Google "I can't sell my organic bananas at Walmart without dealing with Walmart"? I can understand ideas that there shouldn't be a "default store" on devices. Or that Android's certification (whatever that is called) shouldn't require pre-installing the play store as only option. I may or may not agree with them. But "I should be able to sell my wares at a store without dealing with its owner/operator" sounds strange to me.
  - hedora 8y ago
    Side loading is nice, but unless you can uninstall the play store and blacklist the google APIs without breaking your phone, you’re still forced to send them your data (or to switch away from Android). So, they’re tying their market power in phone operating systems to their unrelated monopoly (duopoly?) in surveillance capitalism, and many peopfle unwillingly/unwittingly hand over their private information as a result. If you consider the full suite of their products, you’ll find that all people that are on the internet (and some that are not) hand over such information, unwilling or not.
- jasonvorhe 8y ago
  Except that the web is a completely different landscape than it was during the prime of IE6. If IE6 had been standards compliant like Chrome, no one would have bothered with Microsoft bundling it with Windows because you'd been able to switch browsers without every 2nd website telling you to use IE6. Firefox and later Chrome continued to rise because they were faster, extendable and more open, not because Microsoft has to offer a browser selection in some markets.
Marsymars 8y ago
Anti-competitive behaviour doesn't require a monopoly, e.g. dumping or tying.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  Google provides its key technology for no cost, subsidised by advertising. Search, Chrome, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, Android, Google+. And it frequently ties these to requirements.
kiernanmcgowan 8y ago
Monopolistic behavior and strong product development practices are not mutually exclusive. Google can put in the effort to make a great new product, but use its market dominance to make sure that it’s products have a better chance to succeed vs it’s competitors.
itsthedata123 8y ago
Data. Data. Data. The only reason Google has anything they have is their data and their user lock in. The software and culture are nice, as are the lunches. But seriously, their data is the only thing that keeps them from becoming one player among many.
giarc 8y ago
I'm no expert but I believe to move from "great product builder" to "monopoly" you have to actively block others from competing or doing things that would prevent their success.
1024core 8y ago
Google builds lots of failed products too (hint: Google+). They make up for it in sheer volume ;-)
- mav3rick 8y ago
  What is wrong in trying and failing ?
  - dreamcompiler 8y ago
    Nothing. But that's not what Google usually does. Much more often, Google tries and succeeds. People begin using the product because it's good, and then Google arbitrarily kills it [0]. I've been burned by this behavior enough that I now avoid Google products whenever possible, no matter how great they seem. [0] https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
prithvi24 8y ago
Google is pretty monopolistic. They have shown anti-competitive behavior with local, maps, etc. Would create a more competitive marketplace if Google has broken up into separate publicly traded entities (ie like Waymo)
- solarkraft 8y ago
  It would be great - and I think the move to Alphabet was a preparation for that.
krm01 8y ago
They have their share of failed products (see https://www.computerworlduk.com/galleries/it-vendors/google-graveyard-3508070/%3famp https://www.computerworlduk.com/galleries/it-vendors/google-...) Their position allows them to distribute their products to a larger audience, quicker than others for sure, but I don’t believe that’s a formula for success per se. Successful products like Gmail, grew like a scrappy startup working on a great product would grow. The first version Paul made was just a search engine for his own email. He then shared it with some friends/colleagues. Gradually more features were added to improve the product and now we all have Gmail. I’m sure the Google brand helped with distribution at some point later on, but users aren’t stupid. They pick the product they love using (unless they’re forced in an enterprise type of environment)
- wai1234 8y ago
  You write about Gmail as if no one had email before that. GMail doesn't have a single meaningful feature that other clients didn't have before. And those clients didn't completely redo the UI every 3 months whether you want it or not.
  - lfam 8y ago
    In the beginning, when Gmail was only accessible by invitation, the killer feature was the relatively huge amount of free storage it offered. 1 gigabyte vs 20 or 100 megabytes at other providers.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - pgeorgi 8y ago
    > GMail doesn't have a single meaningful feature that other clients didn't have before. I'd say that its search-first paradigm to mail handling (and related to that, labels) was rather unusual at the time, and for the most part it still is. Disclosure: I work at Google and get my regular exposure to GMail from there. I run and use my own mail server for everything that is not work.
3327 8y ago
Google is known in the valley to be notoriously bad at building products. Does that answer your question?
wai1234 8y ago
Why do you believe Google is "really good at building useful products"? Would you buy any of them if they didn't have the Google brand (or pay for any of the free ones for that matter)?
- TallGuyShort 8y ago
  I'm sure the Google brand has helped adoption, but I do actually pay for G Suite and it's pretty hard to beat if you're starting a business and want a pretty no-nonsense productivity suite everyone can work together on.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- cm2012 8y ago
  I would absolutely pay $150 a year easily for access to all google products. Gmail, docs, chrome, search are the key apps for me.
- killyp 8y ago
  10 years ago I certainly would have purchased Google Search, Google Maps, Chrome and Gmail. I currently pay for Android. Nowadays there are a lot more alternatives that have caught and surpassed some of these products. I have switched back to Firefox and am currently switching to ProtonMail but yes Google has made quite a few amazing products that for years had no competition.
ardy42 8y ago
> I know that Google is super powerful and has great products but what exactly are (if any) examples of Google showing anti-competitive behaviour? At least at one point, they nagged you incessantly to install Chrome when you used Google Search. I would attribute Chrome's current dominance [1] to that fact, and that fact alone. That's uncannily like the anti-competitive behavior Microsoft was judged to have used to push Internet Explorer into a dominant position and drive Netscape out of the market. [1] If Chrome had been allowed to grow its market share organically, I think would have still been popular, just not dominant. Firefox would have a bigger market share than it does now, for instance.
- joeshmoe23 8y ago
  Promoting stuff on one's own website isn't in any way shape or form illegal.
  - Youden 8y ago
    Not true. See the record $2.7b fine Google got for promoting Google Shopping results in its search results. Also see why: For leveraging a dominant position in one market (search) to intrude on another market (shopping). This looks suspiciously similar. Google is leveraging a dominant position in search engines to intrude on the browser market.
    - joeshmoe24 8y ago
      I'm talking about the US where google is also protected by the first amendment and not the bizarro world logic the EU uses to justify their protectionism (how are shopping ads different than any other search ads?!).
      - personjerry 8y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act_of_1890 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act_of_1890 "The Sherman Act broadly prohibits (1) anticompetitive agreements and (2) unilateral conduct that monopolizes or attempts to monopolize the relevant market." For example, squashing competition by deleting your competitors search results might be interpreted as an attempt to monopolize the market. In the context of providing a marketplace (i.e. the App Store), we aren't really looking at "private free speech" any more and so the first amendment does not apply here.
thayne 8y ago
Regardless of whether they abuse their monopoly power or not, it is undeniable that Google is either a monopoly or member of an oligopoly in several areas, including: search, advertisement (adwords), email (gmail), cloud infrastructure (GCP), navigation (google maps), SaaS productivity suite (google docs), mobile operating systems (android), web browsers (chrome), etc. Google certainly isn't as bad at abusing its monopoly power as it could be, but, well, it certainly isn't perfect either.
- 98codes 8y ago
  Out of everything in that list, I’d say GCP doesn’t belong. AWS is the beast in that space, with GCP running third at best.
gojomo 8y ago
The "or" in the question is a false dichotomy. Many historic examples of monopolistic abuse originated from market power that was initially acquired via excellence in innovation or execution. Also many anti-competitive behaviors, like certain pricing/tying/bundling/cross-subsidization strategies, are perfectly legal for a small operator, but become illegal when a firm gains immense market power. And there is rarely a "bright line" for when a firm crosses that threshold, and the things it used to do become illegal. The firm pretty much has to wait for pushback via prosecution – actual or threatened – and of course will keep denying there's anything wrong with their habitual practices indefinitely, as a matter of corporate culture.
- narag 8y ago
  Exactly. Also being a monopoly isn't illegal. That was talked about a lot at the time of Microsoft anti-trust case. What's illegal is using your monopoly position to get unfair advantage in other markets.
eitland 8y ago
> I know that Google is super powerful and has great products I'd say Google used to be a whole lot better. > but what exactly are (if any) examples of Google showing anti-competitive behaviour? Chrome: - how they push it (massive advertising, bundling etc) - how they use their massive web properties to make other browsers look bad
nknealk 8y ago
This may be downvoted to oblivion, but here goes: I think part of the problem with our current framing of what is "anti-competitive" or "monopolistic" focuses on consumers. A classical monopolist artificially limits supply and drives up prices to maximize profits (see, for example, the business practices of Standard Oil). That's completely orthogonal to Google's business model for two reasons: 1) For consumers, most products have no downward mobility in price from competition. The search is already free (ie. literally the lowest price possible). How can something be bad for consumers if it's free? Similar things can be said of gmail, maps, etc. 2) Google doesn't limit supply of its products within reasonable use (when's the last time you got a communication from Google demanding you do fewer searches?) I think the question you should perhaps ask is "when we consider regulating behavior of large firms, is regulation that's good for consumers actually good for society?"
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  Very much the case, and you can thank/blame Robert Bork for this. Earlier comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18436387#18436772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18436387#18436772 I'm liking Lina Kahn's take: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...
  - nknealk 8y ago
    Wow, your comment is far better cited than mine. Also, Bork wasn't necessarily wrong for the era he lived in. I think we don't yet have a good vocabulary to describe the kind of bad behavior we see in large tech firms. People use "monopoly" because it's the first word that comes to mind when a large firm is acting badly, but Google's/Facebook's/etc behavior does not fit our current definition.
    - dredmorbius 8y ago
      Bork was, I'm pretty convinced, far beyond wrong. His rationalisation was tremendously useful to those who benefited from that wrongness. That's a longer story.
NelsonMinar 8y ago
Google Ads is very much a self-supporting monopoly. Turns out online ads are a winner-take-all market, as Overture/Yahoo discovered in their demise.
- repolfx 8y ago
  Google Ads isn't a monopoly. Most obviously Facebook runs its own ad networks, but also, I see tons of ads when I browse around that come from other ad networks. There are hundreds of the things.
joeshmoe23 8y ago
There is no monopoly when your stuff is free, has virtually zero replacement cost and no lock-in. The "google is a monopoly" trope was introduced and cultivated by Steve Ballmer's Microsoft and it's being constantly adopted and revised by anyone with an axe to grind.
- quickthrower2 8y ago
  Google has a monopoly on search advertising which is not free.
  - joeshmoe23 8y ago
    "search advertising" is a curiously narrow distinction, the market is "advertising" and they own but a sliver of it.
    - quickthrower2 8y ago
      I’d be interested in what you class as a monopoly? You can always expand or shrink a market definition to suit whatever agenda. Using DeBeers as an example (from the Wikipedia article on monopoly), they could be argued to not have a monopoly, because diamonds are a sliver of the gifting market.
      - joeshmoe23 8y ago
        Isn't that what you're doing? Search ads isn't the only way to reach people and it's not an impediment for new entrants as shown by Amazon's ad business. As for the general matter, google has the right to publish and design their website however they see fit, it's a no brainer, the only reason this question keeps popping up is that google has very powerful enemies in basically all news and publishing companies (they blame it for their dwindling ad revenue), not to mention the oracles and yelps of the world and all of them are piggybacking on the infrastructure laid down by microsoft at the time.
        8y ago
chrisco255 8y ago
There was that time they colluded with Apple not to compete for talent and keep salaries artificially low. https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-fi-tn-apple-google-conspiracy-20140523-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-fi-tn-apple-google-co...
- MatthaeusHarris 8y ago
  That's an argument for them being a monopsony, not a monopoly. And since they were colluding with other companies, it fits the definition of a cartel better.
HALtheWise 8y ago
When I worked at Google as an intern, there were lots of people internally that were very aware that most of their core products don't have a locked in monopoly like Amazon, Facebook, or Apple do. For example, after the Cambridge Analytica stuff, lots of people wanted to leave Facebook, but mostly aren't able to due to network effects. In contrast, using Bing instead of Google Search is so easy that I do so occasionally when I'm having trouble finding something through Google. If their product was suddenly worse than the competition, they could lose their entire user base in days, because the network effects of personalized search are nowhere near the network effects of Facebook. The same is true for Maps, Gmail (data export is allowed), Drive, Photos, Chrome, Ads (for websites) and most of their other core products. I guess the question of whether they "are a monopoly" is largely dependent on what your definition of monopoly is, but the lack of lock-in means they aren't able to exploit their market dominance in most of the ways that traditionally make monopolies problematic. Google Play / Android is a good example where this is less true, although alternate Android app stores and OS's do exist (see Amazon's attempt to make Fire OS)
negutron 8y ago
Google is really good at crowdsourcing ideas by reading your email surreptitiously; at getting those tasty IP treats by scanning your cloud documents; and by watching trends by sifting through billions of keypresses and mousemovements sent secretly by your chrome browser. Also, since they were funded initially by the CIA and Darpa, they have access to unlimited black budget money (51T by some estimates now) so of course they can build the best stuff and give it all away for FREE!!! (because they are mining all your data for profitizing potentialities among their backchannel services networks)
huntleydavis 8y ago
They monopolize a resource : big data
tomohawk 8y ago
One definition of a monopoly is the Sherman Antitrust Act - 75% or more market share. Google has a monopoly in search (90% or more share) and they also control north of 60% of internet ad revenue, and they have a monopoly in browsers. Google repeatedly has leveraged monopolies in one area to gain monopolies in other areas. They also store tons of data on all of us, whether we want to use them or not. Since that data is not on devices we own, it is easy pickings for law enforcement to get ahold of as the traditional protections do not apply. If NSA or some government agency collected this data with so little oversight or protection, it would be outrageous. They wouldn't get away with saying "We promise not to be evil". If Google cuts off service to you, good luck. You have little recourse. Google enters markets, dominates them with a product, and then drops the product, destroying the market. Google is also highly partisan, overwhelmingly backing a single political party. This is unhealthy to say the least.

32 points by enosanto 8y ago

I know that Google is super powerful and has great products but what exactly are (if any) examples of Google showing anti-competitive behaviour?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

waffleguy 8y ago

You could google it, but I doubt you’ll get good results

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[deleted]

enjoyz 8y ago

In search, there have been instances where they've put their weight behind some products (Yelp vs Google reviews). It is also under scrutiny in the EU. Their antidote seems to be creating Alphabet and styling Google as an advertising company rather a search engine. That said, I for one, think they haven't put out and succeeded with subpar products by the sheer force of their control over search (Google Plus, Google Buzz, ...).

Dahoon 8y ago

>Is Google a monopoly? Yes in more than one area. The lowest hanging fruit (which will cause downvotes): Google Play. No one can release anything Google disagrees with on Google Play.... but google could. Google and Apple really should be separated from their stores. They know everything that happens on them and no one can compete against that. Bundling Chrome with Android (and Apple apps in iOS) is no different than Microsoft bundling IE or Windows media player.

wpasc 8y ago
Epic Games circumvented this pretty easily with Fortnite on Android
- Dahoon 8y ago
  Yes, huge companies can make their own stores by levering a huge hit game, lots of cash and opening the gaping security hole that is sideloading apps. Firefox could also be downloaded from getfirefox.com. That doesn't mean Microsoft didn't abuse their monopoly with IE. Btw. also the same Epic that paid a developer to pull their game off Steam and make it exclusive to the Epic store after the game had had lots of advertisement on the Steam store. That is twice Epic has abused one store to promote their own. They are even worse than Google. At least Google pretends not to be scummy. But that is beside the point.
mav3rick 8y ago
Right Android is the only mobile OS where Epic and others can distribute APKs. You can't do that on iOS.
pgeorgi 8y ago
> No one can release anything Google disagrees with on Google Play Recent Android versions made it ever easier to install apps without using the Play Store: I have F-Droid installed and whitelisted (so no warnings every time an apk appears), which required toggling a permission switch the system pointed out to me. As for Chrome, apparently various vendors ship their own browser as default although it seems they still have to ship Chrome as alternative.
- Dahoon 8y ago
  >Recent Android versions made it ever easier to install apps without using the Play Store Yes I'm using it myself but how is that making Google Play less of a monopoly? F-droid can't sell apps on the play store without using Google.
  - pgeorgi 8y ago
    > F-droid can't sell apps on the play store without using Google "I can't sell my organic bananas at Walmart without dealing with Walmart"? I can understand ideas that there shouldn't be a "default store" on devices. Or that Android's certification (whatever that is called) shouldn't require pre-installing the play store as only option. I may or may not agree with them. But "I should be able to sell my wares at a store without dealing with its owner/operator" sounds strange to me.
- hedora 8y ago
  Side loading is nice, but unless you can uninstall the play store and blacklist the google APIs without breaking your phone, you’re still forced to send them your data (or to switch away from Android). So, they’re tying their market power in phone operating systems to their unrelated monopoly (duopoly?) in surveillance capitalism, and many peopfle unwillingly/unwittingly hand over their private information as a result. If you consider the full suite of their products, you’ll find that all people that are on the internet (and some that are not) hand over such information, unwilling or not.
jasonvorhe 8y ago
Except that the web is a completely different landscape than it was during the prime of IE6. If IE6 had been standards compliant like Chrome, no one would have bothered with Microsoft bundling it with Windows because you'd been able to switch browsers without every 2nd website telling you to use IE6. Firefox and later Chrome continued to rise because they were faster, extendable and more open, not because Microsoft has to offer a browser selection in some markets.

Marsymars 8y ago

Anti-competitive behaviour doesn't require a monopoly, e.g. dumping or tying.

dredmorbius 8y ago
Google provides its key technology for no cost, subsidised by advertising. Search, Chrome, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, Android, Google+. And it frequently ties these to requirements.

kiernanmcgowan 8y ago

Monopolistic behavior and strong product development practices are not mutually exclusive. Google can put in the effort to make a great new product, but use its market dominance to make sure that it’s products have a better chance to succeed vs it’s competitors.

itsthedata123 8y ago

Data. Data. Data. The only reason Google has anything they have is their data and their user lock in. The software and culture are nice, as are the lunches. But seriously, their data is the only thing that keeps them from becoming one player among many.

giarc 8y ago

I'm no expert but I believe to move from "great product builder" to "monopoly" you have to actively block others from competing or doing things that would prevent their success.

1024core 8y ago

Google builds lots of failed products too (hint: Google+). They make up for it in sheer volume ;-)

mav3rick 8y ago
What is wrong in trying and failing ?
- dreamcompiler 8y ago
  Nothing. But that's not what Google usually does. Much more often, Google tries and succeeds. People begin using the product because it's good, and then Google arbitrarily kills it [0]. I've been burned by this behavior enough that I now avoid Google products whenever possible, no matter how great they seem. [0] https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/

prithvi24 8y ago

Google is pretty monopolistic. They have shown anti-competitive behavior with local, maps, etc. Would create a more competitive marketplace if Google has broken up into separate publicly traded entities (ie like Waymo)

solarkraft 8y ago
It would be great - and I think the move to Alphabet was a preparation for that.

krm01 8y ago

They have their share of failed products (see https://www.computerworlduk.com/galleries/it-vendors/google-graveyard-3508070/%3famp https://www.computerworlduk.com/galleries/it-vendors/google-...) Their position allows them to distribute their products to a larger audience, quicker than others for sure, but I don’t believe that’s a formula for success per se. Successful products like Gmail, grew like a scrappy startup working on a great product would grow. The first version Paul made was just a search engine for his own email. He then shared it with some friends/colleagues. Gradually more features were added to improve the product and now we all have Gmail. I’m sure the Google brand helped with distribution at some point later on, but users aren’t stupid. They pick the product they love using (unless they’re forced in an enterprise type of environment)

wai1234 8y ago
You write about Gmail as if no one had email before that. GMail doesn't have a single meaningful feature that other clients didn't have before. And those clients didn't completely redo the UI every 3 months whether you want it or not.
- lfam 8y ago
  In the beginning, when Gmail was only accessible by invitation, the killer feature was the relatively huge amount of free storage it offered. 1 gigabyte vs 20 or 100 megabytes at other providers.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- pgeorgi 8y ago
  > GMail doesn't have a single meaningful feature that other clients didn't have before. I'd say that its search-first paradigm to mail handling (and related to that, labels) was rather unusual at the time, and for the most part it still is. Disclosure: I work at Google and get my regular exposure to GMail from there. I run and use my own mail server for everything that is not work.

3327 8y ago

Google is known in the valley to be notoriously bad at building products. Does that answer your question?

wai1234 8y ago

Why do you believe Google is "really good at building useful products"? Would you buy any of them if they didn't have the Google brand (or pay for any of the free ones for that matter)?

TallGuyShort 8y ago
I'm sure the Google brand has helped adoption, but I do actually pay for G Suite and it's pretty hard to beat if you're starting a business and want a pretty no-nonsense productivity suite everyone can work together on.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
cm2012 8y ago
I would absolutely pay $150 a year easily for access to all google products. Gmail, docs, chrome, search are the key apps for me.
killyp 8y ago
10 years ago I certainly would have purchased Google Search, Google Maps, Chrome and Gmail. I currently pay for Android. Nowadays there are a lot more alternatives that have caught and surpassed some of these products. I have switched back to Firefox and am currently switching to ProtonMail but yes Google has made quite a few amazing products that for years had no competition.

ardy42 8y ago

> I know that Google is super powerful and has great products but what exactly are (if any) examples of Google showing anti-competitive behaviour? At least at one point, they nagged you incessantly to install Chrome when you used Google Search. I would attribute Chrome's current dominance [1] to that fact, and that fact alone. That's uncannily like the anti-competitive behavior Microsoft was judged to have used to push Internet Explorer into a dominant position and drive Netscape out of the market. [1] If Chrome had been allowed to grow its market share organically, I think would have still been popular, just not dominant. Firefox would have a bigger market share than it does now, for instance.

joeshmoe23 8y ago
Promoting stuff on one's own website isn't in any way shape or form illegal.
- Youden 8y ago
  Not true. See the record $2.7b fine Google got for promoting Google Shopping results in its search results. Also see why: For leveraging a dominant position in one market (search) to intrude on another market (shopping). This looks suspiciously similar. Google is leveraging a dominant position in search engines to intrude on the browser market.
  - joeshmoe24 8y ago
    I'm talking about the US where google is also protected by the first amendment and not the bizarro world logic the EU uses to justify their protectionism (how are shopping ads different than any other search ads?!).
    - personjerry 8y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act_of_1890 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act_of_1890 "The Sherman Act broadly prohibits (1) anticompetitive agreements and (2) unilateral conduct that monopolizes or attempts to monopolize the relevant market." For example, squashing competition by deleting your competitors search results might be interpreted as an attempt to monopolize the market. In the context of providing a marketplace (i.e. the App Store), we aren't really looking at "private free speech" any more and so the first amendment does not apply here.

thayne 8y ago

Regardless of whether they abuse their monopoly power or not, it is undeniable that Google is either a monopoly or member of an oligopoly in several areas, including: search, advertisement (adwords), email (gmail), cloud infrastructure (GCP), navigation (google maps), SaaS productivity suite (google docs), mobile operating systems (android), web browsers (chrome), etc. Google certainly isn't as bad at abusing its monopoly power as it could be, but, well, it certainly isn't perfect either.

98codes 8y ago
Out of everything in that list, I’d say GCP doesn’t belong. AWS is the beast in that space, with GCP running third at best.

gojomo 8y ago

The "or" in the question is a false dichotomy. Many historic examples of monopolistic abuse originated from market power that was initially acquired via excellence in innovation or execution. Also many anti-competitive behaviors, like certain pricing/tying/bundling/cross-subsidization strategies, are perfectly legal for a small operator, but become illegal when a firm gains immense market power. And there is rarely a "bright line" for when a firm crosses that threshold, and the things it used to do become illegal. The firm pretty much has to wait for pushback via prosecution – actual or threatened – and of course will keep denying there's anything wrong with their habitual practices indefinitely, as a matter of corporate culture.

narag 8y ago
Exactly. Also being a monopoly isn't illegal. That was talked about a lot at the time of Microsoft anti-trust case. What's illegal is using your monopoly position to get unfair advantage in other markets.

eitland 8y ago

> I know that Google is super powerful and has great products I'd say Google used to be a whole lot better. > but what exactly are (if any) examples of Google showing anti-competitive behaviour? Chrome: - how they push it (massive advertising, bundling etc) - how they use their massive web properties to make other browsers look bad

nknealk 8y ago

This may be downvoted to oblivion, but here goes: I think part of the problem with our current framing of what is "anti-competitive" or "monopolistic" focuses on consumers. A classical monopolist artificially limits supply and drives up prices to maximize profits (see, for example, the business practices of Standard Oil). That's completely orthogonal to Google's business model for two reasons: 1) For consumers, most products have no downward mobility in price from competition. The search is already free (ie. literally the lowest price possible). How can something be bad for consumers if it's free? Similar things can be said of gmail, maps, etc. 2) Google doesn't limit supply of its products within reasonable use (when's the last time you got a communication from Google demanding you do fewer searches?) I think the question you should perhaps ask is "when we consider regulating behavior of large firms, is regulation that's good for consumers actually good for society?"

dredmorbius 8y ago
Very much the case, and you can thank/blame Robert Bork for this. Earlier comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18436387#18436772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18436387#18436772 I'm liking Lina Kahn's take: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...
- nknealk 8y ago
  Wow, your comment is far better cited than mine. Also, Bork wasn't necessarily wrong for the era he lived in. I think we don't yet have a good vocabulary to describe the kind of bad behavior we see in large tech firms. People use "monopoly" because it's the first word that comes to mind when a large firm is acting badly, but Google's/Facebook's/etc behavior does not fit our current definition.
  - dredmorbius 8y ago
    Bork was, I'm pretty convinced, far beyond wrong. His rationalisation was tremendously useful to those who benefited from that wrongness. That's a longer story.

NelsonMinar 8y ago

Google Ads is very much a self-supporting monopoly. Turns out online ads are a winner-take-all market, as Overture/Yahoo discovered in their demise.

repolfx 8y ago
Google Ads isn't a monopoly. Most obviously Facebook runs its own ad networks, but also, I see tons of ads when I browse around that come from other ad networks. There are hundreds of the things.

joeshmoe23 8y ago

There is no monopoly when your stuff is free, has virtually zero replacement cost and no lock-in. The "google is a monopoly" trope was introduced and cultivated by Steve Ballmer's Microsoft and it's being constantly adopted and revised by anyone with an axe to grind.

quickthrower2 8y ago
Google has a monopoly on search advertising which is not free.
- joeshmoe23 8y ago
  "search advertising" is a curiously narrow distinction, the market is "advertising" and they own but a sliver of it.
  - quickthrower2 8y ago
    I’d be interested in what you class as a monopoly? You can always expand or shrink a market definition to suit whatever agenda. Using DeBeers as an example (from the Wikipedia article on monopoly), they could be argued to not have a monopoly, because diamonds are a sliver of the gifting market.
    - joeshmoe23 8y ago
      Isn't that what you're doing? Search ads isn't the only way to reach people and it's not an impediment for new entrants as shown by Amazon's ad business. As for the general matter, google has the right to publish and design their website however they see fit, it's a no brainer, the only reason this question keeps popping up is that google has very powerful enemies in basically all news and publishing companies (they blame it for their dwindling ad revenue), not to mention the oracles and yelps of the world and all of them are piggybacking on the infrastructure laid down by microsoft at the time.
      - 8y ago

chrisco255 8y ago

There was that time they colluded with Apple not to compete for talent and keep salaries artificially low. https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-fi-tn-apple-google-conspiracy-20140523-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-fi-tn-apple-google-co...

MatthaeusHarris 8y ago
That's an argument for them being a monopsony, not a monopoly. And since they were colluding with other companies, it fits the definition of a cartel better.

HALtheWise 8y ago

When I worked at Google as an intern, there were lots of people internally that were very aware that most of their core products don't have a locked in monopoly like Amazon, Facebook, or Apple do. For example, after the Cambridge Analytica stuff, lots of people wanted to leave Facebook, but mostly aren't able to due to network effects. In contrast, using Bing instead of Google Search is so easy that I do so occasionally when I'm having trouble finding something through Google. If their product was suddenly worse than the competition, they could lose their entire user base in days, because the network effects of personalized search are nowhere near the network effects of Facebook. The same is true for Maps, Gmail (data export is allowed), Drive, Photos, Chrome, Ads (for websites) and most of their other core products. I guess the question of whether they "are a monopoly" is largely dependent on what your definition of monopoly is, but the lack of lock-in means they aren't able to exploit their market dominance in most of the ways that traditionally make monopolies problematic. Google Play / Android is a good example where this is less true, although alternate Android app stores and OS's do exist (see Amazon's attempt to make Fire OS)

negutron 8y ago

Google is really good at crowdsourcing ideas by reading your email surreptitiously; at getting those tasty IP treats by scanning your cloud documents; and by watching trends by sifting through billions of keypresses and mousemovements sent secretly by your chrome browser. Also, since they were funded initially by the CIA and Darpa, they have access to unlimited black budget money (51T by some estimates now) so of course they can build the best stuff and give it all away for FREE!!! (because they are mining all your data for profitizing potentialities among their backchannel services networks)

huntleydavis 8y ago

They monopolize a resource : big data

tomohawk 8y ago

One definition of a monopoly is the Sherman Antitrust Act - 75% or more market share. Google has a monopoly in search (90% or more share) and they also control north of 60% of internet ad revenue, and they have a monopoly in browsers. Google repeatedly has leveraged monopolies in one area to gain monopolies in other areas. They also store tons of data on all of us, whether we want to use them or not. Since that data is not on devices we own, it is easy pickings for law enforcement to get ahold of as the traditional protections do not apply. If NSA or some government agency collected this data with so little oversight or protection, it would be outrageous. They wouldn't get away with saying "We promise not to be evil". If Google cuts off service to you, good luck. You have little recourse. Google enters markets, dominates them with a product, and then drops the product, destroying the market. Google is also highly partisan, overwhelmingly backing a single political party. This is unhealthy to say the least.