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The main problem I have with the predominant discussions around antitrust in contemporary internet software is that they largely ignore one quality that truly m

The main problem I have with the predominant discussions around antitrust in contemporary internet software is that they largely ignore one quality that truly makes something a monopoply. That is, truly onerous monopolies don't just own a vast majority of some market share. They hamper the ability to switch to another product. Facebook, Google Search and Chrome, the most discussed products in current antitrust discussions all have viable quality alternatives. Don't like Chrome? Pick up Firefox, it's quick and easy to change. And it's the best product it's probably ever been. Don't like Google search? There's Bing, there's DuckDuckGo and more. Don't like Facebook? Try any of the bajillion other social networks. Hell, quite social networks and call your grandma instead. It's better for ya. Antitrust isn't supposed to be a bludgeon to knock whoever is on top off the top. It's supposed to be a tool to break open markets where companies have successfully closed off competition and made it impossible for opponents to succeed. I just don't see that in the web right now. There is no conceivable reason Facebook couldn't be replaced and there's ample research showing that young people are already making that transition to other platforms. Meanwhile, industries like internet service, cellular and in some places water provision, leave consumers with essentially no alternative and no choice. I see this wave of anti-web 2.0 furvor as people championing a good cause, antitrust, in utterly the wrong place for our time.

dralley 7y ago
>Facebook, Google Search and Chrome, the most discussed products in current antitrust discussions all have viable quality alternatives. People need to stop thinking of Google and Facebook as if they offer consumer services. They don't. Their product is their ads, and their consumers are corporate marketing departments, and through this lens they are both thoroughly monopolists. Or at least "duopolists". https://www.emarketer.com/content/global-ad-spending-update https://www.emarketer.com/content/global-ad-spending-update See also: AMP, internet.org
- m463 7y ago
  Don't think ads, they are identification services.
- DubiousPusher 7y ago
  That's a take I hadn't considered. Google's danger as a monopoly comes more from the situation in which you have to pay them to sell anything on the web. That's a much more interesting argument.
  - judge2020 7y ago
    And one that the GOP will actually care about. Truth be told the GOP doesn't care about the average American locked into 1/2 ISPs available to them, but when businesses are the ones being price gouged you can bet the GOP will be the one to save the day by regulating big tech.
clairity 7y ago
> "...one quality that truly makes something a monopoply... hamper the ability to switch to another product." substitutability isn't often discussed because it's a minor symptom of monopolies and wholly insufficient by itself to prove monopoly power, as every monopolist will have some competition and substitutes. it's unrealistic to expect a monopolist to own 100% of a market (have no competition). it's even more unrealistic to expect no substitutes on top of no competition (a substitute is using an adjacent-market product).
- DubiousPusher 7y ago
  That's exactly my point though. Marketshare isn't necessarily a good indicator of a problematic monopoly. Imagine three companies dominate a given market. In most geographies, say 75%, the two larger companies company with each other and a few other stragglers. But in 25% geography a single company dominates. Who is the problem? The larger companies, competing in their broader market or the smaller company? As an example, Amazon is dominant in the online retail sphere. The have an incredible market share. But I've never once had this create a significant problem as a consumer. Why? Because the cost to me as a consumer to use something else is tremendously low. I can use Walmart.com which has gotten quite good. Or I can go to a physical store. Meanwhile, people must tolerate anything Comcast pulls, though they certainly have a smaller share of the personal internet service provision market than Amazon does of the eretail marlet. To me monopoly is not dangerous because of marketshare. It's dangerous when the bulk of its customers cannot switch to another service. Particularly so if the market is difficult for new competition to enter. I get all the open internet gripes about Google and what they've done with Chrome. And that thing could become a monster. But the reality is that you can switch today with minimal impact to an excellent alternative browser. People buying a drug like HUMIRA are not so lucky.
  - treis 7y ago
    >Meanwhile, people must tolerate anything Comcast pulls, though they certainly have a smaller share of the personal internet service provision market than Amazon does of the eretail marlet. People have Satellite, Cell providers, and usually a DSL option to choose from if they don't like Comcast. Those aren't particularly good options, but realistically neither are the other browsers besides Chrome. Plus, the only other browser that people choose to use is Firefox and that's primarily funded through a deal with Google. The problem is that Google has laid waste to many potential markets by giving products away for free to protect their ad monopoly. How can you start a competing company in Maps or Browser or mobile OS when your competitor is willing to spend billions to make their product and then give it away for free? The conundrum is is it harmful to consumers? Google gives away a bunch of high quality products for free but ultimately they all serve the Ad master.
joshAg 7y ago
> That is, truly onerous monopolies don't just own a vast majority of some market share. They hamper the ability to switch to another product. The article explains how Google through Chrome's dominance is doing and did exactly this via webstandards for DRM despite most of chrome being completely open-source via chromium. Because Chrome has such a large footprint, it become much easier for google to make a non-standard feature become part of the standard. As long as there is a thoroughly unencumbered but still practically reasonable way to implement that standard everything is great. But that falls apart for the DRM that enables browsers to play video files. Sure, google is willing to license that code to you, but that means you have to pay or play by their rules in order to keep being able to make a competing browser. And no, you can't just make your own version of the DRM: https://boingboing.net/2019/05/29/hoarding-software-freedom.html https://boingboing.net/2019/05/29/hoarding-software-freedom.... That's bad enough for hampering the ability for people to switch products, because it means that people can't make a practical chrome competitor without becoming a google vassal, which defeats many of their reasons to making a competing browser. But it gets worse. If google makes a change to chrome that people dislike, say hampering ad-blocking via some as-yet-unstandardized change or pushing through a standard that most people dislike, they can then tie the licensing of the unrelated feature to implementing this other thing that people dislike. For example, Google could refuse to license the DRM code to any browser that interferes with or modifies the playback of the DRMed video stream. Then, they could define modification and interference to include removing ads from the stream. Or google could just decline to license at all for no reason: https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked-my-browser/ https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked...
- ajross 7y ago
  > The article explains how Google through Chrome's dominance is doing and did exactly this via webstandards for DRM despite most of chrome being completely open-source via chromium. Yes, but it also fails to make much of an antitrust case about this. I mean, is Widevine licensing anticompetitive? Discriminatory? Surely it would be hard to make a competitor for it. But at the same time Apple and HBO seem to be streaming a ton of content without it. The harm to open source media playback is real, but that's not an argument about market health. Frankly I'm pretty doubtful much antitrust hay can be made about this. We watch Microsoft choke Netscape to death in the 90's, and at the end of the day nothing happened. Maybe Google will be forced to spin off the Widevine IP to a separate company, I guess. No one is going to kill Chrome for you.
vkou 7y ago
> Facebook, Google Search and Chrome, the most discussed products in current antitrust discussions all have viable quality alternatives. What is a quality alternative to Facebook? Diaspora was DOA, Mastodon is a cesspit, Twitter is nothing like Facebook, and G+ is long-dead.
- euyyn 7y ago
  My understanding is all kids moved to Instagram / Snapchat as soon as parents started using Facebook too, and now parents are on Instagram too so I expect kids are already using something else.
- antidesitter 7y ago
  > Mastodon is a cesspit Explain what you mean.
  - vkou 7y ago
    It's full of instances with definitely illegal, and possibly borderline-illegal content, and even worse - spam. You have to extensively, and aggressively blacklist, to avoid getting flooded in this crap. (And unless you want to wade knee-deep through that dreck, what you do, is to just copy & paste a blacklist some other poor bastard curated. I'm sure there's no vector for abuse, or censorship there...) Mastodon also fails to solve the harassment problem. Facebook and Twitter do a piss-poor job of it, but Mastodon takes it to another level. > The attack vector looks like this: a group of motivated harassers chooses a target somewhere in the fediverse. Every time that person posts, they immediately respond, maybe with something clever like “fuck you” or “log off.” So from the target’s point of view, every time they post something, even something innocuous like a painting or a photo of their dog, they immediately get a dozen comments saying “fuck you” or “go away” or “you’re not welcome here” or whatever. This makes it essentially impossible for them to use the social media platform. > The second part of the attack is that, when the target posts something, harassers from across the fediverse click the “report” button and send a report to their local moderators as well as the moderator of the target’s instance. This overwhelms both the local moderators and (especially) the remote moderator. In mastodon.cloud’s case, it appears the moderator got 60 reports overnight, which was so much trouble that they decided to evict Wil Wheaton from the instance rather than deal with the deluge. [1] The problem is that Mastodon conflates identity, and community. You will get moderated by third parties for belonging in a particular community, if that community is poorly moderated. Because the definition of poorly moderated is universal, you get a balkanized, political nightmare, where half the toots half the world sends are unreadable to the other half, even if the sender is not personally violating any rules of either community. For a social network in 2019, this is unacceptable. Oh, and if you're one of those people who cares about privacy, the only reason Cambridge Analytica, and its ilk aren't harvesting data from Mastodon, is because it's irrelevant. Yes, you can have private conversations with a particular group of users on it, without leaking data. Guess what? You can do that through e-mail, too. As soon as your toots are public, they can be scraped, your social graph can be re-constructed, packaged, and sold to the highest bidders. [1] https://nolanlawson.com/2018/08/31/mastodon-and-the-challenges-of-abuse-in-a-federated-system/ https://nolanlawson.com/2018/08/31/mastodon-and-the-challeng... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/31/17801404/mastodon-harassment-wil-wheaton-mobs-twitter https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/31/17801404/mastodon-harassm...
snek 7y ago
If you want to make a browser and show any content encrypted with Widevine (which is the majority of DRM content), you need a Widevine license, and they straight up refuse to issue those. How are you supposed to compete with Chrome when Google prevents you from playing Netflix and Spotify?
- Mikeb85 7y ago
  Spotify has native apps on all platforms (even Linux). Netflix works on Firefox (even on Linux). Not sure how Google is preventing anything...
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    Isn't Netflix stuck at 480p without properly working widevine?
    - Mikeb85 7y ago
      Not sure because it downloads Widevine by default.
      - Dylan16807 7y ago
        Now I'm not sure what your argument is. When the problem is "they refuse to issue Widevine licenses", it doesn't really matter that a browser as huge as Firefox managed to get one. It wasn't "if you want to use Linux", it was "if you want to make a browser". Also the Widevine authorized for Linux is only 720p on Netflix.
        Mikeb85 7y ago
        The point is you don't need to worry about a browser playing DRM because most platforms have native apps for the only uses a browser needs DRM for...
        Dylan16807 7y ago
cwyers 7y ago
I tried switching to Edge because it has better touchscreen support, better battery life and some other niceties. But the number of websites that only test in Chrome is... not small.
msiyer 7y ago
I think it is prudent if we are constantly vigilant and detect monopolistic behaviors ASAP. Why wait till the entity truly becomes a monopoly and has enough power to topple governments?
- DubiousPusher 7y ago
  Agreed. I wish there was better antitrust controls across the economy. Unfortunately the way the U.S. government enforces antitrust measures is incredibly pick and choosey. Therefore there's an opportunity cost to focusing on certain companies.
prepend 7y ago
I’ve been trying to switch off of chrome/search/gmail/AdWords for a few years now and it’s not easy. And I stand up servers and write scripts. Gmail doesn’t conform to email standards and eats random emails. Chrome ignores DNT and other things. Search pushes chrome, etc. It’s a soft lock in compared to Microsoft’s 90s “bundle IE or we break you” deals with PC manufacturers, but it’s definitely not easy to move away from them. And this makes all the other anti-competitive things compoundedly bad.
mattigames 7y ago
Interesting how you left out the biggest issue at hand and didn't mention it once: Android > Without Google Services and the Google Play Store, it’s a brick. They’ve mastered separation of the strategic openness of Android with the accompanying strategic closed-ness of everything that runs on it and makes it actually worth something.
- DubiousPusher 7y ago
  Agreed. Android and iOS for that matter are definitely deep into problematic duopoly territory.
bryanrasmussen 7y ago
one of the markers of monopoly is that you can use your dominance in one industry to move into other industries and achieve dominance there. Sound like anyone you know?
- DubiousPusher 7y ago
  That has ceased to be a serious consideration for American antitrust enforcement for decades. That almost literally describes every company in the S&P 500.

dralley 7y ago

>Facebook, Google Search and Chrome, the most discussed products in current antitrust discussions all have viable quality alternatives. People need to stop thinking of Google and Facebook as if they offer consumer services. They don't. Their product is their ads, and their consumers are corporate marketing departments, and through this lens they are both thoroughly monopolists. Or at least "duopolists". https://www.emarketer.com/content/global-ad-spending-update https://www.emarketer.com/content/global-ad-spending-update See also: AMP, internet.org

m463 7y ago
Don't think ads, they are identification services.
DubiousPusher 7y ago
That's a take I hadn't considered. Google's danger as a monopoly comes more from the situation in which you have to pay them to sell anything on the web. That's a much more interesting argument.
- judge2020 7y ago
  And one that the GOP will actually care about. Truth be told the GOP doesn't care about the average American locked into 1/2 ISPs available to them, but when businesses are the ones being price gouged you can bet the GOP will be the one to save the day by regulating big tech.

clairity 7y ago

> "...one quality that truly makes something a monopoply... hamper the ability to switch to another product." substitutability isn't often discussed because it's a minor symptom of monopolies and wholly insufficient by itself to prove monopoly power, as every monopolist will have some competition and substitutes. it's unrealistic to expect a monopolist to own 100% of a market (have no competition). it's even more unrealistic to expect no substitutes on top of no competition (a substitute is using an adjacent-market product).

DubiousPusher 7y ago
That's exactly my point though. Marketshare isn't necessarily a good indicator of a problematic monopoly. Imagine three companies dominate a given market. In most geographies, say 75%, the two larger companies company with each other and a few other stragglers. But in 25% geography a single company dominates. Who is the problem? The larger companies, competing in their broader market or the smaller company? As an example, Amazon is dominant in the online retail sphere. The have an incredible market share. But I've never once had this create a significant problem as a consumer. Why? Because the cost to me as a consumer to use something else is tremendously low. I can use Walmart.com which has gotten quite good. Or I can go to a physical store. Meanwhile, people must tolerate anything Comcast pulls, though they certainly have a smaller share of the personal internet service provision market than Amazon does of the eretail marlet. To me monopoly is not dangerous because of marketshare. It's dangerous when the bulk of its customers cannot switch to another service. Particularly so if the market is difficult for new competition to enter. I get all the open internet gripes about Google and what they've done with Chrome. And that thing could become a monster. But the reality is that you can switch today with minimal impact to an excellent alternative browser. People buying a drug like HUMIRA are not so lucky.
- treis 7y ago
  >Meanwhile, people must tolerate anything Comcast pulls, though they certainly have a smaller share of the personal internet service provision market than Amazon does of the eretail marlet. People have Satellite, Cell providers, and usually a DSL option to choose from if they don't like Comcast. Those aren't particularly good options, but realistically neither are the other browsers besides Chrome. Plus, the only other browser that people choose to use is Firefox and that's primarily funded through a deal with Google. The problem is that Google has laid waste to many potential markets by giving products away for free to protect their ad monopoly. How can you start a competing company in Maps or Browser or mobile OS when your competitor is willing to spend billions to make their product and then give it away for free? The conundrum is is it harmful to consumers? Google gives away a bunch of high quality products for free but ultimately they all serve the Ad master.

joshAg 7y ago

> That is, truly onerous monopolies don't just own a vast majority of some market share. They hamper the ability to switch to another product. The article explains how Google through Chrome's dominance is doing and did exactly this via webstandards for DRM despite most of chrome being completely open-source via chromium. Because Chrome has such a large footprint, it become much easier for google to make a non-standard feature become part of the standard. As long as there is a thoroughly unencumbered but still practically reasonable way to implement that standard everything is great. But that falls apart for the DRM that enables browsers to play video files. Sure, google is willing to license that code to you, but that means you have to pay or play by their rules in order to keep being able to make a competing browser. And no, you can't just make your own version of the DRM: https://boingboing.net/2019/05/29/hoarding-software-freedom.html https://boingboing.net/2019/05/29/hoarding-software-freedom.... That's bad enough for hampering the ability for people to switch products, because it means that people can't make a practical chrome competitor without becoming a google vassal, which defeats many of their reasons to making a competing browser. But it gets worse. If google makes a change to chrome that people dislike, say hampering ad-blocking via some as-yet-unstandardized change or pushing through a standard that most people dislike, they can then tie the licensing of the unrelated feature to implementing this other thing that people dislike. For example, Google could refuse to license the DRM code to any browser that interferes with or modifies the playback of the DRMed video stream. Then, they could define modification and interference to include removing ads from the stream. Or google could just decline to license at all for no reason: https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked-my-browser/ https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked...

ajross 7y ago
> The article explains how Google through Chrome's dominance is doing and did exactly this via webstandards for DRM despite most of chrome being completely open-source via chromium. Yes, but it also fails to make much of an antitrust case about this. I mean, is Widevine licensing anticompetitive? Discriminatory? Surely it would be hard to make a competitor for it. But at the same time Apple and HBO seem to be streaming a ton of content without it. The harm to open source media playback is real, but that's not an argument about market health. Frankly I'm pretty doubtful much antitrust hay can be made about this. We watch Microsoft choke Netscape to death in the 90's, and at the end of the day nothing happened. Maybe Google will be forced to spin off the Widevine IP to a separate company, I guess. No one is going to kill Chrome for you.

vkou 7y ago

> Facebook, Google Search and Chrome, the most discussed products in current antitrust discussions all have viable quality alternatives. What is a quality alternative to Facebook? Diaspora was DOA, Mastodon is a cesspit, Twitter is nothing like Facebook, and G+ is long-dead.

euyyn 7y ago
My understanding is all kids moved to Instagram / Snapchat as soon as parents started using Facebook too, and now parents are on Instagram too so I expect kids are already using something else.
antidesitter 7y ago
> Mastodon is a cesspit Explain what you mean.
- vkou 7y ago
  It's full of instances with definitely illegal, and possibly borderline-illegal content, and even worse - spam. You have to extensively, and aggressively blacklist, to avoid getting flooded in this crap. (And unless you want to wade knee-deep through that dreck, what you do, is to just copy & paste a blacklist some other poor bastard curated. I'm sure there's no vector for abuse, or censorship there...) Mastodon also fails to solve the harassment problem. Facebook and Twitter do a piss-poor job of it, but Mastodon takes it to another level. > The attack vector looks like this: a group of motivated harassers chooses a target somewhere in the fediverse. Every time that person posts, they immediately respond, maybe with something clever like “fuck you” or “log off.” So from the target’s point of view, every time they post something, even something innocuous like a painting or a photo of their dog, they immediately get a dozen comments saying “fuck you” or “go away” or “you’re not welcome here” or whatever. This makes it essentially impossible for them to use the social media platform. > The second part of the attack is that, when the target posts something, harassers from across the fediverse click the “report” button and send a report to their local moderators as well as the moderator of the target’s instance. This overwhelms both the local moderators and (especially) the remote moderator. In mastodon.cloud’s case, it appears the moderator got 60 reports overnight, which was so much trouble that they decided to evict Wil Wheaton from the instance rather than deal with the deluge. [1] The problem is that Mastodon conflates identity, and community. You will get moderated by third parties for belonging in a particular community, if that community is poorly moderated. Because the definition of poorly moderated is universal, you get a balkanized, political nightmare, where half the toots half the world sends are unreadable to the other half, even if the sender is not personally violating any rules of either community. For a social network in 2019, this is unacceptable. Oh, and if you're one of those people who cares about privacy, the only reason Cambridge Analytica, and its ilk aren't harvesting data from Mastodon, is because it's irrelevant. Yes, you can have private conversations with a particular group of users on it, without leaking data. Guess what? You can do that through e-mail, too. As soon as your toots are public, they can be scraped, your social graph can be re-constructed, packaged, and sold to the highest bidders. [1] https://nolanlawson.com/2018/08/31/mastodon-and-the-challenges-of-abuse-in-a-federated-system/ https://nolanlawson.com/2018/08/31/mastodon-and-the-challeng... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/31/17801404/mastodon-harassment-wil-wheaton-mobs-twitter https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/31/17801404/mastodon-harassm...

snek 7y ago

If you want to make a browser and show any content encrypted with Widevine (which is the majority of DRM content), you need a Widevine license, and they straight up refuse to issue those. How are you supposed to compete with Chrome when Google prevents you from playing Netflix and Spotify?

Mikeb85 7y ago
Spotify has native apps on all platforms (even Linux). Netflix works on Firefox (even on Linux). Not sure how Google is preventing anything...
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  Isn't Netflix stuck at 480p without properly working widevine?
  - Mikeb85 7y ago
    Not sure because it downloads Widevine by default.
    - Dylan16807 7y ago
      Now I'm not sure what your argument is. When the problem is "they refuse to issue Widevine licenses", it doesn't really matter that a browser as huge as Firefox managed to get one. It wasn't "if you want to use Linux", it was "if you want to make a browser". Also the Widevine authorized for Linux is only 720p on Netflix.
      - Mikeb85 7y ago
        The point is you don't need to worry about a browser playing DRM because most platforms have native apps for the only uses a browser needs DRM for...
        Dylan16807 7y ago

cwyers 7y ago

I tried switching to Edge because it has better touchscreen support, better battery life and some other niceties. But the number of websites that only test in Chrome is... not small.

msiyer 7y ago

I think it is prudent if we are constantly vigilant and detect monopolistic behaviors ASAP. Why wait till the entity truly becomes a monopoly and has enough power to topple governments?

DubiousPusher 7y ago
Agreed. I wish there was better antitrust controls across the economy. Unfortunately the way the U.S. government enforces antitrust measures is incredibly pick and choosey. Therefore there's an opportunity cost to focusing on certain companies.

prepend 7y ago

I’ve been trying to switch off of chrome/search/gmail/AdWords for a few years now and it’s not easy. And I stand up servers and write scripts. Gmail doesn’t conform to email standards and eats random emails. Chrome ignores DNT and other things. Search pushes chrome, etc. It’s a soft lock in compared to Microsoft’s 90s “bundle IE or we break you” deals with PC manufacturers, but it’s definitely not easy to move away from them. And this makes all the other anti-competitive things compoundedly bad.

mattigames 7y ago

Interesting how you left out the biggest issue at hand and didn't mention it once: Android > Without Google Services and the Google Play Store, it’s a brick. They’ve mastered separation of the strategic openness of Android with the accompanying strategic closed-ness of everything that runs on it and makes it actually worth something.

DubiousPusher 7y ago
Agreed. Android and iOS for that matter are definitely deep into problematic duopoly territory.

bryanrasmussen 7y ago

one of the markers of monopoly is that you can use your dominance in one industry to move into other industries and achieve dominance there. Sound like anyone you know?

DubiousPusher 7y ago
That has ceased to be a serious consideration for American antitrust enforcement for decades. That almost literally describes every company in the S&P 500.