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yes, I think you're probably right. And there are small business owners who'd love to eliminate Yelp or heavily regulate Yelp to make it behave quite differentl

yes, I think you're probably right. And there are small business owners who'd love to eliminate Yelp or heavily regulate Yelp to make it behave quite differently. Oracle has a pretty mediocre product and a really old school, back-room style of doing sales, but at least there are some reasonable competitive alternatives (some are even free). but, the call, from some corners of the national political scene, to focus on breaking up Google strongly suggests that Google is a much, much bigger problem than Yelp or Oracle. even a little bit of problematic, biased, anticompetitive or evil behavior by Google has a giant impact.

magduf 7y ago
Google is a juggernaut to be sure, but I just don't see that it's behaving all that badly towards consumers, compared to their competition (which they do have). Oracle, to me, is a much more evil company, and very clearly screws over their own customers, plus there was that whole evil thing they did with trying to copyright the Java API. I just don't see Google trying to shut down competitors like that, or treating customers horribly. They could do a better job with customer service (lots of horror stories about people not being able to get errors fixed in Google Maps for a long time). But as I showed in that article, Yelp was outright extorting restaurant owners, and nothing is done about it. Google Maps has their own reviews, and I've never heard of such blatantly evil behavior there. Also, it's hard to see how breaking them up would even work. Many of their products are free, and only available because of their money-making ad business. I guess you could make them divest YouTube; that's self-supporting with its own ads, and doesn't really need to be integrated with the rest of their offerings. But things like Google Photos wouldn't survive on their own.

magduf 7y ago

Google is a juggernaut to be sure, but I just don't see that it's behaving all that badly towards consumers, compared to their competition (which they do have). Oracle, to me, is a much more evil company, and very clearly screws over their own customers, plus there was that whole evil thing they did with trying to copyright the Java API. I just don't see Google trying to shut down competitors like that, or treating customers horribly. They could do a better job with customer service (lots of horror stories about people not being able to get errors fixed in Google Maps for a long time). But as I showed in that article, Yelp was outright extorting restaurant owners, and nothing is done about it. Google Maps has their own reviews, and I've never heard of such blatantly evil behavior there. Also, it's hard to see how breaking them up would even work. Many of their products are free, and only available because of their money-making ad business. I guess you could make them divest YouTube; that's self-supporting with its own ads, and doesn't really need to be integrated with the rest of their offerings. But things like Google Photos wouldn't survive on their own.