16 ms·
A new round of antitrust questions can’t go well for Google
- dredmorbius 7y agoSource: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-01/trump-antitrust-case-against-google-should-scare-tech-industry https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-01/trump-... (Post currently points to Yahoo.)
- bediger4000 7y agoHonest question, I'm not trying to incite political discussions, but... Can Google get out of this by sucking up to Trump? It appears that Trump is susceptible to flattery, and he also appears to play favorites. The other viewpoint might be: can Google get a fair trial in the US court system? Trump has let the Federalist Society pick all the Federal judges he's nominated, as near as I can tell. Some of them haven't been very knowledgeable about the law. Or maybe, should the DoJ worry that its case won't get a very fair hearing at trial? My point is that we're living in interesting times. Assumptions commonly made in the past just might not hold today, even in the US Court system.
- dundercoder 7y agoLately it feels like there isn’t any authority left that can’t be bought off.
- krustyburger 7y agoUnfortunately, that’s not a recent development.
- dang 7y agoMaybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
- tzakrajs 7y agoPolitical discussions on a venture capitalist news aggregator probably isn’t popular with the moderators, it may even disturb their sense of intellectual curiosity. Step lightly.
- britch 7y agoI think the tactic would work, but I don't think Google would want to use it. IMO they'd burn through a lot of recruiting/culture credit pretty quickly if they became too friendly with the Trump administration. Say what you will about Google, they still have a reputation for hiring some of the best engineers. I think a lot of that is off the back that many do not view them as an "evil" company. Becoming very close with the Trump administration would be good way of doing that. I don't think Google really wants to give up their reputation, even if the cost is a monopoly investigation. Being too buddy-buddy with conservatives has resulted in pushback for Facebook[0] and Uber[1] (Apple[2] too, but a little less so). Personally I believe that Google, Amazon, and Facebook( a little bit less so) should all be broken up. When you look at Google and Amazon they have their fingers in every pie, it's mind boggling. I am more left than right, and I am very skeptical of what the Trump administration would do about this. It feels like, with Facebook especially, conservatives are not exactly mad that the companies are big. They are mad that the companies are big and not entirely right-wing mouth pieces. There's a lot of anger about "biased" Google results[3] and "censorship" from Facebook[4]. If you look at the business landscape in US, most very large businesses are culturally conservative. Most tech companies prefer to project a younger, liberal image partially for recruiting reasons. I don't think the Trump administration would be interested in pursuing this if Google looked and acted a bit more like Procter and Gamble. This seems like a winning position for Trump and a losing position for Google no matter how it shakes out. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/technology/facebook-kavanaugh-nomination-kaplan.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/technology/facebook-kavan... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/technology/uber-ceo-travis-kalanick-trump-advisory-council.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/technology/uber-ceo-travi... [2] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/8/18256467/tim-apple-cook-donald-trump-ivanka https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/8/18256467/ti... [3] https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-search-for-anti-conservative-bias-on-google https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-sear... [4] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/09/facebook-newsfeed-censor-conservative-news https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/09/facebook-...
- gesman 7y agoNormal, regular process of government[s] extracting extra tax dollars from large enterprises in forms of penalties/fines for whatever violations. This will ends when Google will pay up and promise to do some [cosmetic] changes.
- devoply 7y agoYeah it did nothing to Microsoft. Business as usual.
- saagarjha 7y agoFor antitrust? I’d say it did quite a bit, given that it lead to other companies being able to enter the market and take over market share from Microsoft.
- furgooswft13 7y agoDid it really? MS lost browser dominance because they purposefully let IE stagnate at 6, and Firefox then Chrome ate their lunch. They lost OS dominance because of the unforeseen dramatic rise of post-iPhone smartphones. The combination of WebKit on iPhones and Android plus Google using it's own market clout to push Chrome on desktop is what really put the nail in IE's coffin. The anti-trust actions from the US and the EU had little to do with this (the EU's decision to force MS to prompt the user to choose a browser happened in late 2009 when these developments were already well under way, and was limited to EU region installs IIRC). MS still dominates OS's on desktops and laptops, but no one seems to care about that anymore. We have to remember that from IE4-6 before Firefox came around Internet Explorer really was the best browser in town. When MS dropped the ball on that, it was market forces that caused them to lose market share, not any government action. Same with Windows Mobile/PocketPC. And if the EU's goal was to foster browser diversity in their suit against MS, they missed the boat on that entirely.
- fourthark 7y agoIt exposed all their shady business (and technical!) practices and they weren't able to behave that way anymore. But I agree, macroeconomic forces were more powerful.
- RickJWagner 7y agoThis is interesting to me because Google has the power to greatly influence public opinion. For me, it's not the business monopoly, it's the influence monopoly. And that's very much worth regulating.
- studentrob 7y agoI don't think they have any more influence than media conglomerates like Comcast, who owns NBC, and who effectively turned the attention from net neutrality to hatred of Facebook, Amazon, and Google. It is rather ridiculous to argue that Google, who provides free services, is any more of a monopoly than broadband ISPs.
- dewey 7y agoIf you look at adtech there’s really only Google and Facebook so it’d call this very close to a monopoly. This is also not a free service so you are only comparing a small subset of Google services which are mostly built to fuel the ad part (Search and YouTube being the biggest one probably)
- akarki15 7y ago> If you look at adtech there’s really only Google and Facebook so it’d call this very close to a monopoly. Please look up the definition of monopoly before throwing the word. Earlier part of your own sentence refutes the claim that google has a monopoly in ad. Further numbers: https://adage.com/article/digital/duopoly-loses-share-ad-spend/316692 https://adage.com/article/digital/duopoly-loses-share-ad-spe...
- dewey 7y agoI‘m well aware of the textbook definition of a monopoly. Thanks for your concern. I said „close to a monopoly“ to refer to the big market share of either of them, which is clearly the case as also written in your linked article.
- 7y ago
- gravypod 7y agoHow do investigations like these work (logistically)? Google is a massive, multinational, multi-industry, R&D/Software/Hardware/Logistics/Cloud/SaaS/Ads/everything platform. Google is also one of the very few who can actually say they are hiring only "the best" engineers (*by Google standards for Google's use case). How would an entity run an investigation or audit against Google? If I, or I'm assuming anyone who doesn't work in Google, was asked to come in and develop a fundamental understanding of how everything works within Google's software/infrastructure it would likely take me a long time to do that and I'd likely need a lot of help from real Googlers. They are, of course, the best of the best and I'm just some random SWE. I'm assuming their business side is as complicated as their software must be and I'm assuming their legal/business/executive team is as smart as their engineers. How practical is it for an outside party to claim that they actually understand what is happening within Google? How many people does that take? How long does that take? Does Google need to provide support staff for these people to aid them in understanding Google's internal business structure? Also, for audits like this is "understanding what is happening within $company" a factor? If a company is so big that it can't see what it's stepping on (crushing in an noncompetitive way) does it get a pass?
- tzakrajs 7y agoI am curious why you think Google, given its spurious record with privacy, security and labor, that it would have the best engineers? Not to mention engineers in the valley often lambast Google for sun setting every decent platform that engineers care about.
- gravypod 7y agoEveryone makes mistakes, few people make multi-billion dollar companies that shape the industry they occupy.
- salawat 7y agoFew companies shape their industry as drastically as Google does. Hence the Anti-Trust probe. Nobody is that good, sadly. Every time someone has looked to be that good historically, it was because they were engaging in anti-competitive practices, and needed to be broken up.
- studentrob 7y agoWouldn't it make more sense to break up broadband ISP monopolies first? Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. cannot do business without ISPs. Plus, you can always choose to just not use Google. And no, I don't think the justice department can or will "do both". It's clear this admin is anti-net neutrality, catering to Comcast's whims.
- duxup 7y agoFor whatever reason local telco monopolies seem as much tied to state and local setups that protect them and their access. I don't know how that would play out with a federal anti trust setup.
- notatoad 7y ago>For whatever reason It's pretty simple: as you say, they're local. Google and Amazon are the big evil corporations on the other side of the country, but Comcast has an office in your town, and your neighbour's son works for them. They're a significant provider of relatively well-paid low-skill jobs in every community in the country. It's incredibly difficult to come down on that.
- duxup 7y agoMaybe, but I don't know if I buy that reason. It seems more like the actual interest in actually doing any anti trust stuff for any consumer type product just faded away mostly ...
- bobthepanda 7y agoI don‘t think states have ever been compelled by antitrust suits to change regulations; there is no state-level version of the WTO where one can sue about this. Remaking federal regulation to preempt states is laborious and fraught with difficulty; see Obamacare.
- sk5t 7y agoAnd yet we have the interstate commerce clause, giving the fed a direct line to meddle freely in any matter whatsoever.
- chairmanwow 7y agoThis blows my mind. Sure Google is has what essentially amounts to a monopoly on search. But hasn’t this been true since, what? 2005? I feel like this is an action by the DOJ to throw heat off of the recently ignored ruling by Mueller. “A sitting president cannot be charged with a felony”. Oh. We should distract the masses with a big (fucking obvious) course of action. Honestly I’m just a little disappointed in the machinations.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago>recently ignored ruling by Mueller ...? The conclusion of the official report said no evidence of collusion, but couldn’t clear on obstruction (of a crime that it just previously said didn’t happen but that’s outside my legal knowledge). What are you referring to? I must not have been following it closely enough.
- bowmessage 7y agoCould this be retaliation for not fully complying with federally desired Huawei boycotts? </tinfoil-hat>
- chvid 7y agoWhy would the US ever breakup Google? This company is key to the American surveillance of the rest of the world.
- nabla9 7y agoThe theory given in the article seems plausible to me.
- myko 7y agoThe NSA could just as easily (probably more easily) hack smaller companies. It isn't as if Google is giving the US government access to user data (except when legally obligated through warrants) - the Prism program was essentially spying on these companies without their knowledge.
- chvid 7y agoNSA does not hack Google; it gets direct access through a series of secret laws and courts. American citizens may have some protection against surveillance but the rest of the world does not.
- myko 7y ago<citation needed>
- chvid 7y agogoogle prism
- myko 7y agoYeah, I have. That's what I was referring to. They didn't give the NSA a firehose. Check out Yonatan Zunger's comments from the time this came out: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/12/heres-everything-we-know-about-prism-to-date/?utm_term=.0444e63cf675 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/12/heres... You're acting like Google was complicit with the NSA capturing data without a specific target - they weren't.
- sfifs 7y agoIt will be interesting to see how prosecutors argue any anti trust case against Google. In American case law, the doctrine of consumer welfare being the objective of anti trust is pretty deeply enshrined in recent case law [1]. The philosophy essentially says that monopoly is not bad as long as consumers benefit and increasing competition through anti trust actions can increase consumer cost. This is very different from how anti trust works in most other places in the world - so they will have the difficult task to prove consumer harm [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox
- headsoup 7y agoI assume it depends on what harm could be described as: Is harm of lost opportunity to a wider market, user data harvesting, incompatibility of websites due to monopolistic standards definition, Etc? Does the harm have to be obvious and categorised as emotional/physical or similar? The linked article there does not clarify the matter, to the point of the certainty of the position being vague at best.
- sfifs 7y agoThe change in legal thinking has been that fewer and fewer situations are held "per se" anticompetitive in US law and cases have to be analyzed by the "test of reason". Even vertical pricing actions (fixing ceiling and in some situations floors) have been held to be not anticompetitive. The article has links to cases where these arguments (known as Chicago School) have been cited and have been precedent setting in American case law The net result is Google can't be prosecuted just because it's a monopoly. It will require provable consumer harm (not necessarily just industry harm) on a case by case basis (not just hypothetical) to win the case.
- anoncake 7y agoI don't understand this philosophy. If monopolies don't harm the customer, why bother having a market at all? You could argue that freedom requires private property and only a market economy is compatible with private property. But "A planned economy is more efficient but I don't support it because I support private property rights" is a pretty uncommon stance.
- sanguy 7y agoNeeds to be split up but the problem is the advertising side needs all the free services to harvest data to drive the ad business. A split up google may not be a viable business.
- perlgeek 7y agoMaybe you can't split ads from search, but you could totally split Google Cloud | Search + Ads | Youtube | Maps -- and who knows what else google makes profit with.
- chiefofgxbxl 7y agoThe effect on YouTube may be interesting and actually end up more beneficial. They could still run ads based on the videos you are viewing, but maybe they'd have to make up lost revenue by getting more people to pay for subscriptions (e.g. YouTube Red). Those subscriptions would signal to YouTube which users have expendable money (especially if it's a tiered pricing system), and what channels and videos you as a paying customer actually value spending money on. Some of that money could be used to increase payouts for content developers, hopefully increasing quality and user retention, ultimately spurring a positive cycle.
- patient_zero 7y agoFinancial opinion pieces are always a difficult read for me, as they always seem slanted in favor of the company and against any hint of regulations n such. This one seems to have a tone of "can google survive the big bad regulators?" to it that makes me... tired. Consider this excerpt: "In the U.S. and elsewhere, politicians from all party stripes have sought to attack Google or other tech giants for various perceived sins,including being too big for the good of industry and consumers. Being Google has meant dealing with perennial regulatory and political nightmares." "sought to attack"... "perceived sins"... "Being google... has lead to nightmares" Is this language not considered to be pushing the reader's opinion in a certain direction? On a related note, I would like to postulate that monopolies are inherently anti-consumer because they are anti competitive by design. A monopoly as a rule breaks capitalism, which only works because of competition. the fact that harm must be proven somehow is a ridiculous notion and too high a bar. The fact that this is even up for debate is wild on its face and I just don't understand why we're here except for maybe we as a country have a collective case of stockholm syndrome towards the market that the government has shown it is unable to control. Consider the other Google-related link on this very site. Google decided to break adblocking, and because they are a monopoly they can do that. This and other anti-trust laws we've slacked off on enforcing is how we've gotten to the point where there are very few choices for the consumer in many aspects of life here in the states.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dragonwriter 7y ago> On a related note, I would like to postulate that monopolies are inherently anti-consumer because they are anti competitive by design. Monopolies are the fact of absence of competition by definition, but not necessarily anti-competitive by design. But the absence of competition in a market isn't always bad for consumers. First, a market may not be a consumer market, and more importantly monopolies may be bad for customers because they may improve the product that can be offered. (Netflix acquiring competition had made each streaming services worse, with smaller and less stable libraries and rising prices; it's been a bonanza for content owners, but not consumers.) One factor in why monopolies can be better for consumers is that they tend also to be monopsonies.
- OnlyRepliesToBS 7y agoOk, we'll ask you again later.