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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
by 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 agoVery 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 agoWow, 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 agoBork 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.
- kodz4 8y agoHow can something Google offers for free be bad for consumers has already been answered by the EU - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google The rest of the world is more easily bought and paid for by Google lobbying because every Politician needs to use Google Ads+YouTube Ads+Android Apps to get elected. EDIT: Here's one more useful link - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google
- candiodari 8y agoPersonally I find the cases the EU has against Google to be, well pathetic. Absolutely without merit. The sites that felt disadvantaged, whom the EU worked on behalf of, were scummy comparison shopping sites. The other complaints, the "right to forget" legislation had similar scummy people behind it. Politicians that had committed fraud on multiple counts and wanted to hide this. That pretty much leaves the android case ... I don't know too much about that, I must say. I might add that android is not entirely free for device manufacturers. Probably cheaper than any other option, yes, but not free.