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While this is a far shorter list than Luther's 95 theses, I will post this here while I run to get popcorn to see just how Google gets out of this. Sample argu

by smush 7y ago

While this is a far shorter list than Luther's 95 theses, I will post this here while I run to get popcorn to see just how Google gets out of this. Sample arguably anti-competitive actions Google has taken: 1. Turning off XMPP federation in Google Talk, moving from an open standard to an archipelago of walled gardens (Hangouts, Allo, GChat, Hangouts again, Messages/RCS that the carriers are gonna give up to Google to host(!?)) 2. Killing Windows Phone by not allowing any Google-based apps on the platform (https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/14/15970082/google-killed-windows-phone-not-iphone https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/14/15970082/google-killed-wi...) 3. Posting map/weather/review content straight to SERPs starving MapQuest/WU/Yelp et al from getting clicks 4. Anyone not browsing on Chrome gets an upsell to install Chrome (MS got roasted for this with Windows Media & best used on IE) 5. Degrading services on competing browsers/platforms via things like U2F in Firefox, slow/wontfix polyfills (https://www.computerworld.com/article/3389882/former-mozilla-exec-alleges-google-torpedoed-firefox-with-oops-excuses.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3389882/former-mozilla...) There are probably more entries to list, and these are complex issues being reduced to a sentence or two, but I've tried to not post things that are not immediately anti-competitive even if I don't like 'em (Google+ forced integration which resulted in me still not commenting on YouTube all these years later, RIP Google Reader)

enitihas 7y ago
I am not sure your list demonstrates anti-competitve behaviour: 1. Did Apple ever offer a XMPP federated iMessage? Facebook offered XMPP messenger? Shall Google bear the eternal burden of keeping their products constant, and not make changes they think are better(even if they are worse overall). 2. When did we have iTunes on windows Phone either? Even Office came for Android and iOS only when the fate of Windows phone was sealed. Lots of developers didn't develop for Windows phone. Shall those be investigated too? (Yes yes, MSFT did make a youtube app, but google has full liberty to decide which platforms they want to make apps for). 4. Now MSFT even specifically tells you that Edge is a better browser in Windows during all sorts of things(while changing default browser, I think while downloading other browsers too). Also iOS will always remind you Safari is there, as it is the default browser and that can't be changed.
- magashna 7y ago
  In 1903 I haven't gotten the Edge prompts when changing.
  - neogodless 7y ago
    Whoa - you might be right. I got a laptop and it was on 1809. Got the prompt. But then updated to 1903... fiddled with some stuff. Reinstalled Windows (but it stays on 1903) and I changed the browser to Firefox, and I don't recall that prompt this time around. (Where it asked you to confirm and you have to carefully read the buttons and then click "Switch anyway.")
- fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
  Those sound anti-competitive as well
- yummypaint 7y ago
  Are you claiming that google has never engaged in anti-competitive behavior? If not, I would be interested to see your list.
  - enitihas 7y ago
    No, I am claiming the above examples are not evidence of anti competitive behaviour.
- neogodless 7y ago
  It has not been my experience that Apple services are dominant outside of the Apple ecosystem inhabitants. Google, on the other hand, is everywhere. As a former Windows Phone user, there were apps that talked to Google Accounts (mail, calendar, contacts) as well as an app written to work with YouTube. I don't remember any others right now. But Google actively blocked those apps while refusing to release their own interface to their services. That made it more painful than it needed to be to continue using Windows Phone. The fact that they were able to say "too bad, we will not work with you, the users will suffer" is exemplary of their dominant position. Maybe there are iTunes users out there that wanted to access their iTunes accounts on Windows phone, but could not?
tyingq 7y ago
This 2012 FTC report has some ideas: http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/ http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/
stcredzero 7y ago
There are probably more entries to list, and these are complex issues being reduced to a sentence or two A recurring pattern with Google and YouTube: Someone achieves virality through controversy. They are promptly de-monetized, deleted, or frozen with no reason given. When the period of viral opportunity has passed, typically in about a day or two, the account/monetization is reinstated with no reason given. This pattern is so insidiously subtle, so frequent, and so potentially powerful in manipulating the media of 2019, it probably deserves its own Wiki and its own investigation. Those who can control virality can modulate most of the loudest voices on the Internet. That's basically the power to relegate the ideas you don't like to relative near silence. (Also, those who can control virality can pick the winners among startup companies.) (EDIT: Basically, these sorts of shenanigans are like Michael Swaine's story from decades back about deleting his own parking tickets in South Carolina. He was supposed to have parking so he could work on the city's mainframe, but the bureaucracy dropped the ball. Way back then, this sort of thing amounts to a funny anecdote. In the world of 2019, it would be a firing offense and possibly get someone prosecuted for fraud. There are analogous things from the world of aviation, and stories of the wild west. With great power comes great responsibility. Make no mistake, as a technologist, you wield power.)
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  > Those who can control virality can modulate most of the loudest voices on the Internet. That's basically the power to relegate the ideas you don't like to relative near silence. If you wonder why HN exists, this is it.
  - smush 7y ago
    If HN went down tomorrow, I could hop to slashdot to find the old-timers, lobste.rs for the hip, reddit.com/r/sysadmin | r/selfhosted | many, many more tech subreddits, and more tech watering holes. If Google went down tomorrow, we have what, Bing? Yahoo, DDG, and others are all powered by Bing. Otherwise we are trapped with the likes of Yandex/Baidu.
    - adventured 7y ago
fjabre 7y ago
You forgot AMP and AMP for Gmail
- smush 7y ago
  Indeed, I did. Glad you remembered it for me, that is a big one and another example of embrace, extend, extinguish leveraging the power of Google Search. I suppose that's me in the super-privacy-nerd bubble. Having moved to Fastmail for email and using Firefox for Mobile + Startpage search, I almost never encounter Amp in my own SERPs (not that there's much AMP content out there for Clonk Endeavor ;P).
  - d1zzy 7y ago
    I don't think it qualifies since anyone can go and implement AMP. If AMP extensions are being made which aren't documented and they are implemented only by closed source code in Google clients and servers then you can argue that they are leveraging their power to keep competition out. Otherwise the competition can simply implement AMP. Or let's look at it differently, if you are Google and find that a new, HTTP-incompatible protocol would make things better for a significant number of clients, how would you develop and push for that new standard in a way that people won't complain about anti-competitive behavior like you are complaining above? And are you sure that following those steps won't result in other people on HN complaining that it's anti-competitive?
    - shkkmo 7y ago
      > how would you develop and push for that new standard in a way that people won't complain about anti-competitive behavior like you are complaining above? IMHO, google would have been fine if they had done everything the same but instead of basing mobile search results on AMP usage, they had based it on page load time metrics. EDIT: The issue with AMP is less that Google created a new standard and more the way that Google has tried to utilize its other properties to force adoption of that standard in ways that seem more focused on benefiting Google than the internet as a whole.
alienreborn 7y ago
> 3. Posting map/weather/review content straight to SERPs starving MapQuest/WU/Yelp et al from getting clicks I get why this is included in Anti Trust but I love this feature. Recently read a report that now <50% results lead to click which means it is loved by lot of users too.
- Multicomp 7y ago
  I agree that's a useful feature, but that seems orthogonal as to whether or not it is anticompetitive.
- aviraldg 7y ago
  Solution: allow these companies to bid for the spot. Like they're doing in the EU for the choice of default search engine in Chrome. Allow power users to pick a default, so we don't have to suffer through terrible third party content and ads. Disabling this functionality will be a net negative for the end user.
- FreakyT 7y ago
  Agreed -- my favorite example of this is lyrics. Most lyrics sites are horrible, ad-filled messes, and I for one can't wait for Google to finally eliminate them from existence.
  - freehunter 7y ago
    Genius.com is such a good lyrics site (good... not great) and it kills me when I search for lyrics and it's not on the first page of results. I don't know why, but I always have to add +genius to my searches to get it to show up over all the trash sites.
    - amaccuish 7y ago
      I second that. So good and clean that I've atually contributed myself. I personally hate Google including say Wikipedia snippets. Quite often I want to read more of the article, and the link is small and at the bottom of the box, often requiring you to click and arrow to reveal the full box. If they value Wikipedia and Genius/MusicMatch so much, they should make it much clearer where they got their content from.
mtgx 7y ago
And that's just a (small) list of anti-competitive actions Google has taken outside of its main monopoly - search. In search, Google has been far more aggressive. Currently, "organic searches" are less than 50% on the page, and on mobile you hardly even get an organic search above the fold (not so different from desktop now, I guess). And of the organic searches, Google is starting to take up more and more positions with its own properties or simply showing a snippet of other people's content so that they stick on the Google home page longer. If we take this to the extreme, and Google's current CEO blindly continues to follow quarterly results, I imagine in less than 10 years 90%+ of the results will be either Google's own properties or ads.
Multicomp 7y ago
Just to pile on, how about taking features out of Android open source project and putting them into Google Play services?
dmitrygr 7y ago
As a user: 1. xmpp sucks for battery life. extensions to improve it exist but are optional. xmpp-free hangout was free to improve battery use 2. if i made money selling ads and someone used my content for free & ripped out the ads, i would deny them access too. If they had 0.01% of marketshare, i also would not prioritize making a custom app just for them either 3. GOOD! i do not want to make extra clicks when i do not need to. 4. ok, this is a dick move, i admit 5. having worked at google and seen how things work in there, i am 100% sure this is not a top-down "break firefox whenever possible" directive but just normal shortage of engineering effort and too many things prioritized higher than "make shit work in firefox"
- icebraining 7y ago
  I find the antitrust angle weak, but XMPP federation doesn't require the client itself to use XMPP, only the servers among themselves.
hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
Honestly, so many of Google's arguments sound exactly like Microsoft's arguments from the late 90s when they were adamant that the browser was an integral part of the OS and not a separate application. They were essentially saying that "the OS is everything", and so they could roll all sorts of functionality into the OS, leveraging their OS monopoly to get advantages in other areas (i.e. apps). It was always my understanding that it was that leveraging of their monopoly into other areas that was the illegal part. Google is now basically saying "everything is search", i.e. rolling pretty much everything into SERP pages so you never need to click off Google.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Microsoft's biggest legally official sin was killing the paid browser market. Reflect on that with the benefit of hindsight and the larger modern VC backed freemium economy. The other evil stuff they did, like blackmailing PC makers to ban competing OSes, didn't even get them in much trouble. There's a bit of a difference between controlling the OS, which was (largely still is) almost impossible for the average user to safely change even if they wanted to, and controlling a web page that anyone who can type 20 characters can switch away from.
  - hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
    At this point, the "anyone can switch away to another search engine" argument is getting pretty stale, preciously because Google owns all the major assets that would make writing a truly competing service viable: 1. They own Android, so as the default search engine on the majority of the world's phones they are privy to insane amounts of data. They also know tons of other things that only being in control of the largest OS provides, like location history and app history. 2. Similarly, with their purchase of DoubleClick 15ish years ago they own the largest ad network. 3. With Gmail they probably know as much about social connections as Facebook. 4. They de facto control AMP, and can thus dictate site implementation to millions of publishers. All of this info is used by Google to constantly improve their search engine, and it has all the hallmarks of using information from disparate areas (mainly of businesses they acquired, mind you) to build a deeper moat.
body12 7y ago
6. Pretty much everything about AMP: forcing sites to conform to a standard they created in order to show up in search, a standard that doesn't let sites control their UX or interactivity (then, just showing Google hosted caches by default instead of being a search engine.) 7. Overzealous GMail spam filters making it hard for anyone new to run email services 8. Google Groups: buying the biggest Usenet archive, breaking features, and embrace-extend-extinguishing it with groups that are on the same interface but don't syndicate to Usenet 9. Buying Meebo to shut it down, buying Softcard to shut it down. 10. Breaking reCAPTCHA for Firefox users, then maybe fixing it a year or two later after causing untold numbers of people to switch to Chrome (possible duplicate of degrading services) 11. Running YouTube at a massive loss for a decade to prevent anyone else from competing in online video 12. Not letting YouTube be run on Amazon devices 13. Bundling / requiring / defaulting Google services on Android phones, the world's dominant phone platform 14. Slowly allowing more ads in search (which has 90+% market share) and reducing their visibility so that people have to pay to have their own website show up when they are searched for All this being said, my gut is that something with their opaque ad markets is what's really going to stand out in the investigation.
- jcampbell1 7y ago
  The one that will actually get them in trouble is running ads on top of navigational queries to a trademarked brand. Here is Jason Fried of Basecamp openly accusing Google of a shakedown racket: https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016 https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016 Of the 100,000 or so people that actually give $2,700 to political candidates, I'd think this is their biggest gripe with Google, and likely the issue that is going to cause Google the most problems. The more interesting thing to me is how quickly goodwill just expires. Google search is among mankind's greatest achievements in the past century, along with the free gifts of quality email, youtube, android, etc. It is an interesting thought experiment of how to keep a brand burnished in the eyes of the public given goodwill decays so rapidly.
  - body12 7y ago
    Google Search has gotten worse in the past few years in my opinion. It seems biased towards newly published content and content from the top 100 sites or so. Before it felt like you were grepping the internet, but now it feels like you're at an airport newsstand. It will frequently re-write your queries for you if you are searching for uncommon things, and putting it in quotes doesn't always fix it.
8ytecoder 7y ago
In my very humble opinion, services that are offered for free should also be investigated for anti-trust practices. Google comes up with Gmail - phenomenally better than other services of its time - kills all viable competition and the let it languish or even degrades the experience. No one can compete with free. Result is that email as a platform is slowly languishing with no real improvements.
- d1zzy 7y ago
  So as a company better to just not provide a great free service or a service that is largely better than the competition because if it's too successful then you get blamed for not keeping it updated.
- aviraldg 7y ago
  If you kill off free and ad supported services[0], you take away the ability of a large fraction of the world's population to use the internet. People using 3-4 USD/month prepaid internet packs to communicate using Facebook and Whatsapp, and these days, even finding jobs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20556346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20556346) HN's default position of "burn the ads with fire", therefore, has always struck me as a very privileged position that fails to take into account users from all around the world. And guess what? If the kind of people who usually post here succeed in forcing through that opinion, that is what most of the world will have to deal with too, since Silicon Valley drives so much of tech. [0] Although, it is unlikely that advertisers are really targeting the kind of users I'm talking about, so in effect these users are being subsidized by others.
  - 8ytecoder 7y ago
    WhatsApp’s original model was $1 a year. That would have been a reasonable fee even for most developing countries. Job posting sites make money from the poster and don’t have to be ad supported.
    - ballark 7y ago
      What would a $1 a year model do in terms of opening the market up to competition? That seems like the worst of both worlds, no additional competition, and we make these difficult for those without much money.
cromwellian 7y ago
XMPP is a bad example. Google Talk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Talk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Talk) supported XMPP from 2005-2014, but by the time they dropped federation, it had already massively declined. You can argue over the reasons for that, I personally blame a combination of smartphones (iphone launch in 2007), which drove phone number based messaging apps/iMessage/WhatsApp/etc and the rise of path-dependent social networks like Facebook (FB messenger) However, even if you look at the pre-2007 pre-FB era, instant messaging was dominated by Yahoo Messenger, AOL Messenger, MSN Messenger, etc. None of them supported federation, there were several attempts at interop, but none of them wanted it. Moreover, IIRC, Google's stated reason in 2014 for dropping federation was a non-reciprocal leaching that some of these platforms were using to exploit XMPP federation to ingest users into their walled gardens. In messaging, every single product Google has offered has failed to gain market, and it's really Facebook and Apple which collectively have a oligarchal stranglehold on the market (or WeChat in China) Google's latest attempt is a restoration of federation on mobile through RCS, but what's the likelihood that the dominance of iMessage and FB Messenger/WhatsApp are going to be weakened by this?
- lonelappde 7y ago
  People hate Google for "Don't Be Evil" because it was the "chosen one", while giving a pass to their unabashedly evil competitors.
  - forgottenpass 7y ago
    Google wasn't _chosen_, they said that they would be better and then promptly gave up as soon as they had gained a bunch of good will and it wasn't convenient for them anymore. And I still fail to understand how Google surveilling and exfiltrating is somehow better than anyone else doing it.
buboard 7y ago
I think #1 is its primary job, search: They rip off everyone's and their mother's content yet don't allow scraping google result pages. and their moneymaker, ads: preventing advertisers from reaching any kind of adult content publishers by imposing arbitrary filters for what is "acceptable", and using advertising revenue as a weapon to deplatform opinions they dont like Their acquisition of AI competitors is a huge one imho. They are the only companies which seriously threaten their search engine. In another time, the UK would have blocked the purchase of Deepmind for national security reasons alone.
badrabbit 7y ago
Just about all google sites use user-agent detection which can sometimes mean different quality. I know because I have had to analyze lots if sites with linux vs windows user-agent to see if they behave differently.
otakucode 7y ago
Running YouTube at a loss of hundreds of millions a year for over a decade on a billion-dollar+ infrastructure purely and solely to guarantee that no competition could ever rise against it would, I think, be an easy sell as anti-competitive. I personally would also like to see Google be the first of many "sellers" of digital goods prosecuted for fraud and false advertising for constantly advertising that they are "selling" you digital content when they are, in fact, only giving you a license which itself amounts to a contract lacking consideration - placing no obligation upon the licensor and extending no legally enforceable benefit to the licensee.
at-fates-hands 7y ago
>> 2. Killing Windows Phone by not allowing any Google-based apps on the platform (https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/14/15970082/google-killed-wi... https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/14/15970082/google-killed-wi...) I honestly had no idea about this one. The Windows phone and Microsoft clearly had other issues with their mobile platform, but this clearly did not help. Most people I know said they wouldn't switch because most of the Android apps weren't available on the Windows app store.
malchow 7y ago
This is a good list, although in economic damage terms it's really just the start. Our efforts on this are just becoming public now, but there's a lot more that will come out -- especially in ads, ad serving, and content.
SkyMarshal 7y ago
Another anti-trust violation that was part of Microsoft’s suit was for product tying. Basically, it’s legal to obtain a monopoly in one product via competitive means, but it’s illegal for the company to then obtain monopolies with other products by tying them to the legal monopoly. Microsoft was guilty of this vis-a-vis Windows, Office, and Internet Explorer (and maybe some server side stuff). Google may be guilty of it as well with Google Search, Chrome, YouTube, Gmail.
KKKKkkkk1 7y ago
US antitrust law requires demonstrating harm to consumers not competitors. All of your examples are about harm to competitors.
- Spearchucker 7y ago
  Harming a competitor harms the consumer because competitors create the products that offer the consumer choice.
dehrmann 7y ago
My favorite, though it's closer to racketeering, is that they run ads for for branded keywords and charge the same brands for placement. Basically, Google is telling companies "you wouldn't want someone to get you competitor listed in the top position when they search for you, would you?"
distant_hat 7y ago
Personally, the one service I really liked that Google killed off for good was Deja News. Ever since they bought it, they brought more and more user hostile patterns until they turned it into Google Groups where you can't search old stuff anymore at all.
dwighttk 7y ago
This investigation is only about their ad network
davvolun 7y ago
> 4. Anyone not browsing on Chrome gets an upsell to install Chrome (MS got roasted for this with Windows Media & best used on IE) Every time you install a new copy of Windows and switch the browser to Firefox/Chrome/whatever, you get prompted "are you sure you really want to switch from Edge? It's amazing!!!1!" Then there's the fact occasionally it will still open things up in Edge -- search for 'Amazon' in Windows Start (is that what we're calling it still?) and do "Search the web" or "Web results" and it will open Edge (in Bing). Apparently my default apps are Mail for Email, Maps for Maps, Groove Music for Music Player, nothing for Photo viewer, nothing for Video player, and Google Chrome for Web browser. I've never opened Mail, Maps or Groove Music, I've never had a problem with photos and videos opening in my preferred viewers, and Windows doesn't seem to entirely respect the Web browser setting anyway... Antitrust against Google? Sure, but MS is still doing it's antitrust thing 20 or so years on; I'm not aware of Apple being significantly different either. Outside of the OS vendors, all of the tech companies are trying to "maximize profits" by spying on users, forcing lock-in, degrading others' services, whatever. Point being? I don't know -- "Big Tech" sucks and there's either no taste or no competence in government for shutting down these little tricks and loopholes. Something needs to change, but I don't know how or what. Join EFF, donate money? Maybe...
condercet 7y ago
There are several more instances of Google promoting their own services above the SERP (and competitors). 1. Shopping. Google got in big trouble with the EU about this recently. 2. Job listings. Google launched a jobs product and promoted it above the SERP, damaging Glassdoor / Indeed etc. Providing the largest source of traffic (via google search) and competing in industries that depend on that traffic is an inherent conflict of interest.

by smush 7y ago

enitihas 7y ago

I am not sure your list demonstrates anti-competitve behaviour: 1. Did Apple ever offer a XMPP federated iMessage? Facebook offered XMPP messenger? Shall Google bear the eternal burden of keeping their products constant, and not make changes they think are better(even if they are worse overall). 2. When did we have iTunes on windows Phone either? Even Office came for Android and iOS only when the fate of Windows phone was sealed. Lots of developers didn't develop for Windows phone. Shall those be investigated too? (Yes yes, MSFT did make a youtube app, but google has full liberty to decide which platforms they want to make apps for). 4. Now MSFT even specifically tells you that Edge is a better browser in Windows during all sorts of things(while changing default browser, I think while downloading other browsers too). Also iOS will always remind you Safari is there, as it is the default browser and that can't be changed.

magashna 7y ago
In 1903 I haven't gotten the Edge prompts when changing.
- neogodless 7y ago
  Whoa - you might be right. I got a laptop and it was on 1809. Got the prompt. But then updated to 1903... fiddled with some stuff. Reinstalled Windows (but it stays on 1903) and I changed the browser to Firefox, and I don't recall that prompt this time around. (Where it asked you to confirm and you have to carefully read the buttons and then click "Switch anyway.")
fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
Those sound anti-competitive as well
yummypaint 7y ago
Are you claiming that google has never engaged in anti-competitive behavior? If not, I would be interested to see your list.
- enitihas 7y ago
  No, I am claiming the above examples are not evidence of anti competitive behaviour.
neogodless 7y ago
It has not been my experience that Apple services are dominant outside of the Apple ecosystem inhabitants. Google, on the other hand, is everywhere. As a former Windows Phone user, there were apps that talked to Google Accounts (mail, calendar, contacts) as well as an app written to work with YouTube. I don't remember any others right now. But Google actively blocked those apps while refusing to release their own interface to their services. That made it more painful than it needed to be to continue using Windows Phone. The fact that they were able to say "too bad, we will not work with you, the users will suffer" is exemplary of their dominant position. Maybe there are iTunes users out there that wanted to access their iTunes accounts on Windows phone, but could not?

tyingq 7y ago

This 2012 FTC report has some ideas: http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/ http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/

stcredzero 7y ago

There are probably more entries to list, and these are complex issues being reduced to a sentence or two A recurring pattern with Google and YouTube: Someone achieves virality through controversy. They are promptly de-monetized, deleted, or frozen with no reason given. When the period of viral opportunity has passed, typically in about a day or two, the account/monetization is reinstated with no reason given. This pattern is so insidiously subtle, so frequent, and so potentially powerful in manipulating the media of 2019, it probably deserves its own Wiki and its own investigation. Those who can control virality can modulate most of the loudest voices on the Internet. That's basically the power to relegate the ideas you don't like to relative near silence. (Also, those who can control virality can pick the winners among startup companies.) (EDIT: Basically, these sorts of shenanigans are like Michael Swaine's story from decades back about deleting his own parking tickets in South Carolina. He was supposed to have parking so he could work on the city's mainframe, but the bureaucracy dropped the ball. Way back then, this sort of thing amounts to a funny anecdote. In the world of 2019, it would be a firing offense and possibly get someone prosecuted for fraud. There are analogous things from the world of aviation, and stories of the wild west. With great power comes great responsibility. Make no mistake, as a technologist, you wield power.)

Gibbon1 7y ago
> Those who can control virality can modulate most of the loudest voices on the Internet. That's basically the power to relegate the ideas you don't like to relative near silence. If you wonder why HN exists, this is it.
- smush 7y ago
  If HN went down tomorrow, I could hop to slashdot to find the old-timers, lobste.rs for the hip, reddit.com/r/sysadmin | r/selfhosted | many, many more tech subreddits, and more tech watering holes. If Google went down tomorrow, we have what, Bing? Yahoo, DDG, and others are all powered by Bing. Otherwise we are trapped with the likes of Yandex/Baidu.
  - adventured 7y ago

fjabre 7y ago

You forgot AMP and AMP for Gmail

smush 7y ago
Indeed, I did. Glad you remembered it for me, that is a big one and another example of embrace, extend, extinguish leveraging the power of Google Search. I suppose that's me in the super-privacy-nerd bubble. Having moved to Fastmail for email and using Firefox for Mobile + Startpage search, I almost never encounter Amp in my own SERPs (not that there's much AMP content out there for Clonk Endeavor ;P).
- d1zzy 7y ago
  I don't think it qualifies since anyone can go and implement AMP. If AMP extensions are being made which aren't documented and they are implemented only by closed source code in Google clients and servers then you can argue that they are leveraging their power to keep competition out. Otherwise the competition can simply implement AMP. Or let's look at it differently, if you are Google and find that a new, HTTP-incompatible protocol would make things better for a significant number of clients, how would you develop and push for that new standard in a way that people won't complain about anti-competitive behavior like you are complaining above? And are you sure that following those steps won't result in other people on HN complaining that it's anti-competitive?
  - shkkmo 7y ago
    > how would you develop and push for that new standard in a way that people won't complain about anti-competitive behavior like you are complaining above? IMHO, google would have been fine if they had done everything the same but instead of basing mobile search results on AMP usage, they had based it on page load time metrics. EDIT: The issue with AMP is less that Google created a new standard and more the way that Google has tried to utilize its other properties to force adoption of that standard in ways that seem more focused on benefiting Google than the internet as a whole.

alienreborn 7y ago

> 3. Posting map/weather/review content straight to SERPs starving MapQuest/WU/Yelp et al from getting clicks I get why this is included in Anti Trust but I love this feature. Recently read a report that now <50% results lead to click which means it is loved by lot of users too.

Multicomp 7y ago
I agree that's a useful feature, but that seems orthogonal as to whether or not it is anticompetitive.
aviraldg 7y ago
Solution: allow these companies to bid for the spot. Like they're doing in the EU for the choice of default search engine in Chrome. Allow power users to pick a default, so we don't have to suffer through terrible third party content and ads. Disabling this functionality will be a net negative for the end user.
FreakyT 7y ago
Agreed -- my favorite example of this is lyrics. Most lyrics sites are horrible, ad-filled messes, and I for one can't wait for Google to finally eliminate them from existence.
- freehunter 7y ago
  Genius.com is such a good lyrics site (good... not great) and it kills me when I search for lyrics and it's not on the first page of results. I don't know why, but I always have to add +genius to my searches to get it to show up over all the trash sites.
  - amaccuish 7y ago
    I second that. So good and clean that I've atually contributed myself. I personally hate Google including say Wikipedia snippets. Quite often I want to read more of the article, and the link is small and at the bottom of the box, often requiring you to click and arrow to reveal the full box. If they value Wikipedia and Genius/MusicMatch so much, they should make it much clearer where they got their content from.

mtgx 7y ago

And that's just a (small) list of anti-competitive actions Google has taken outside of its main monopoly - search. In search, Google has been far more aggressive. Currently, "organic searches" are less than 50% on the page, and on mobile you hardly even get an organic search above the fold (not so different from desktop now, I guess). And of the organic searches, Google is starting to take up more and more positions with its own properties or simply showing a snippet of other people's content so that they stick on the Google home page longer. If we take this to the extreme, and Google's current CEO blindly continues to follow quarterly results, I imagine in less than 10 years 90%+ of the results will be either Google's own properties or ads.

Multicomp 7y ago

Just to pile on, how about taking features out of Android open source project and putting them into Google Play services?

dmitrygr 7y ago

As a user: 1. xmpp sucks for battery life. extensions to improve it exist but are optional. xmpp-free hangout was free to improve battery use 2. if i made money selling ads and someone used my content for free & ripped out the ads, i would deny them access too. If they had 0.01% of marketshare, i also would not prioritize making a custom app just for them either 3. GOOD! i do not want to make extra clicks when i do not need to. 4. ok, this is a dick move, i admit 5. having worked at google and seen how things work in there, i am 100% sure this is not a top-down "break firefox whenever possible" directive but just normal shortage of engineering effort and too many things prioritized higher than "make shit work in firefox"

icebraining 7y ago
I find the antitrust angle weak, but XMPP federation doesn't require the client itself to use XMPP, only the servers among themselves.

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago

Honestly, so many of Google's arguments sound exactly like Microsoft's arguments from the late 90s when they were adamant that the browser was an integral part of the OS and not a separate application. They were essentially saying that "the OS is everything", and so they could roll all sorts of functionality into the OS, leveraging their OS monopoly to get advantages in other areas (i.e. apps). It was always my understanding that it was that leveraging of their monopoly into other areas that was the illegal part. Google is now basically saying "everything is search", i.e. rolling pretty much everything into SERP pages so you never need to click off Google.

lonelappde 7y ago
Microsoft's biggest legally official sin was killing the paid browser market. Reflect on that with the benefit of hindsight and the larger modern VC backed freemium economy. The other evil stuff they did, like blackmailing PC makers to ban competing OSes, didn't even get them in much trouble. There's a bit of a difference between controlling the OS, which was (largely still is) almost impossible for the average user to safely change even if they wanted to, and controlling a web page that anyone who can type 20 characters can switch away from.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  At this point, the "anyone can switch away to another search engine" argument is getting pretty stale, preciously because Google owns all the major assets that would make writing a truly competing service viable: 1. They own Android, so as the default search engine on the majority of the world's phones they are privy to insane amounts of data. They also know tons of other things that only being in control of the largest OS provides, like location history and app history. 2. Similarly, with their purchase of DoubleClick 15ish years ago they own the largest ad network. 3. With Gmail they probably know as much about social connections as Facebook. 4. They de facto control AMP, and can thus dictate site implementation to millions of publishers. All of this info is used by Google to constantly improve their search engine, and it has all the hallmarks of using information from disparate areas (mainly of businesses they acquired, mind you) to build a deeper moat.

body12 7y ago

6. Pretty much everything about AMP: forcing sites to conform to a standard they created in order to show up in search, a standard that doesn't let sites control their UX or interactivity (then, just showing Google hosted caches by default instead of being a search engine.) 7. Overzealous GMail spam filters making it hard for anyone new to run email services 8. Google Groups: buying the biggest Usenet archive, breaking features, and embrace-extend-extinguishing it with groups that are on the same interface but don't syndicate to Usenet 9. Buying Meebo to shut it down, buying Softcard to shut it down. 10. Breaking reCAPTCHA for Firefox users, then maybe fixing it a year or two later after causing untold numbers of people to switch to Chrome (possible duplicate of degrading services) 11. Running YouTube at a massive loss for a decade to prevent anyone else from competing in online video 12. Not letting YouTube be run on Amazon devices 13. Bundling / requiring / defaulting Google services on Android phones, the world's dominant phone platform 14. Slowly allowing more ads in search (which has 90+% market share) and reducing their visibility so that people have to pay to have their own website show up when they are searched for All this being said, my gut is that something with their opaque ad markets is what's really going to stand out in the investigation.

jcampbell1 7y ago
The one that will actually get them in trouble is running ads on top of navigational queries to a trademarked brand. Here is Jason Fried of Basecamp openly accusing Google of a shakedown racket: https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016 https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016 Of the 100,000 or so people that actually give $2,700 to political candidates, I'd think this is their biggest gripe with Google, and likely the issue that is going to cause Google the most problems. The more interesting thing to me is how quickly goodwill just expires. Google search is among mankind's greatest achievements in the past century, along with the free gifts of quality email, youtube, android, etc. It is an interesting thought experiment of how to keep a brand burnished in the eyes of the public given goodwill decays so rapidly.
- body12 7y ago
  Google Search has gotten worse in the past few years in my opinion. It seems biased towards newly published content and content from the top 100 sites or so. Before it felt like you were grepping the internet, but now it feels like you're at an airport newsstand. It will frequently re-write your queries for you if you are searching for uncommon things, and putting it in quotes doesn't always fix it.

8ytecoder 7y ago

In my very humble opinion, services that are offered for free should also be investigated for anti-trust practices. Google comes up with Gmail - phenomenally better than other services of its time - kills all viable competition and the let it languish or even degrades the experience. No one can compete with free. Result is that email as a platform is slowly languishing with no real improvements.

d1zzy 7y ago
So as a company better to just not provide a great free service or a service that is largely better than the competition because if it's too successful then you get blamed for not keeping it updated.
aviraldg 7y ago
If you kill off free and ad supported services[0], you take away the ability of a large fraction of the world's population to use the internet. People using 3-4 USD/month prepaid internet packs to communicate using Facebook and Whatsapp, and these days, even finding jobs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20556346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20556346) HN's default position of "burn the ads with fire", therefore, has always struck me as a very privileged position that fails to take into account users from all around the world. And guess what? If the kind of people who usually post here succeed in forcing through that opinion, that is what most of the world will have to deal with too, since Silicon Valley drives so much of tech. [0] Although, it is unlikely that advertisers are really targeting the kind of users I'm talking about, so in effect these users are being subsidized by others.
- 8ytecoder 7y ago
  WhatsApp’s original model was $1 a year. That would have been a reasonable fee even for most developing countries. Job posting sites make money from the poster and don’t have to be ad supported.
  - ballark 7y ago
    What would a $1 a year model do in terms of opening the market up to competition? That seems like the worst of both worlds, no additional competition, and we make these difficult for those without much money.

cromwellian 7y ago

XMPP is a bad example. Google Talk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Talk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Talk) supported XMPP from 2005-2014, but by the time they dropped federation, it had already massively declined. You can argue over the reasons for that, I personally blame a combination of smartphones (iphone launch in 2007), which drove phone number based messaging apps/iMessage/WhatsApp/etc and the rise of path-dependent social networks like Facebook (FB messenger) However, even if you look at the pre-2007 pre-FB era, instant messaging was dominated by Yahoo Messenger, AOL Messenger, MSN Messenger, etc. None of them supported federation, there were several attempts at interop, but none of them wanted it. Moreover, IIRC, Google's stated reason in 2014 for dropping federation was a non-reciprocal leaching that some of these platforms were using to exploit XMPP federation to ingest users into their walled gardens. In messaging, every single product Google has offered has failed to gain market, and it's really Facebook and Apple which collectively have a oligarchal stranglehold on the market (or WeChat in China) Google's latest attempt is a restoration of federation on mobile through RCS, but what's the likelihood that the dominance of iMessage and FB Messenger/WhatsApp are going to be weakened by this?

lonelappde 7y ago
People hate Google for "Don't Be Evil" because it was the "chosen one", while giving a pass to their unabashedly evil competitors.
- forgottenpass 7y ago
  Google wasn't _chosen_, they said that they would be better and then promptly gave up as soon as they had gained a bunch of good will and it wasn't convenient for them anymore. And I still fail to understand how Google surveilling and exfiltrating is somehow better than anyone else doing it.

buboard 7y ago

I think #1 is its primary job, search: They rip off everyone's and their mother's content yet don't allow scraping google result pages. and their moneymaker, ads: preventing advertisers from reaching any kind of adult content publishers by imposing arbitrary filters for what is "acceptable", and using advertising revenue as a weapon to deplatform opinions they dont like Their acquisition of AI competitors is a huge one imho. They are the only companies which seriously threaten their search engine. In another time, the UK would have blocked the purchase of Deepmind for national security reasons alone.

badrabbit 7y ago

Just about all google sites use user-agent detection which can sometimes mean different quality. I know because I have had to analyze lots if sites with linux vs windows user-agent to see if they behave differently.

otakucode 7y ago

Running YouTube at a loss of hundreds of millions a year for over a decade on a billion-dollar+ infrastructure purely and solely to guarantee that no competition could ever rise against it would, I think, be an easy sell as anti-competitive. I personally would also like to see Google be the first of many "sellers" of digital goods prosecuted for fraud and false advertising for constantly advertising that they are "selling" you digital content when they are, in fact, only giving you a license which itself amounts to a contract lacking consideration - placing no obligation upon the licensor and extending no legally enforceable benefit to the licensee.

at-fates-hands 7y ago

>> 2. Killing Windows Phone by not allowing any Google-based apps on the platform (https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/14/15970082/google-killed-wi... https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/14/15970082/google-killed-wi...) I honestly had no idea about this one. The Windows phone and Microsoft clearly had other issues with their mobile platform, but this clearly did not help. Most people I know said they wouldn't switch because most of the Android apps weren't available on the Windows app store.

malchow 7y ago

This is a good list, although in economic damage terms it's really just the start. Our efforts on this are just becoming public now, but there's a lot more that will come out -- especially in ads, ad serving, and content.

SkyMarshal 7y ago

Another anti-trust violation that was part of Microsoft’s suit was for product tying. Basically, it’s legal to obtain a monopoly in one product via competitive means, but it’s illegal for the company to then obtain monopolies with other products by tying them to the legal monopoly. Microsoft was guilty of this vis-a-vis Windows, Office, and Internet Explorer (and maybe some server side stuff). Google may be guilty of it as well with Google Search, Chrome, YouTube, Gmail.

KKKKkkkk1 7y ago

US antitrust law requires demonstrating harm to consumers not competitors. All of your examples are about harm to competitors.

Spearchucker 7y ago
Harming a competitor harms the consumer because competitors create the products that offer the consumer choice.

dehrmann 7y ago

My favorite, though it's closer to racketeering, is that they run ads for for branded keywords and charge the same brands for placement. Basically, Google is telling companies "you wouldn't want someone to get you competitor listed in the top position when they search for you, would you?"

distant_hat 7y ago

Personally, the one service I really liked that Google killed off for good was Deja News. Ever since they bought it, they brought more and more user hostile patterns until they turned it into Google Groups where you can't search old stuff anymore at all.

dwighttk 7y ago

This investigation is only about their ad network

davvolun 7y ago

> 4. Anyone not browsing on Chrome gets an upsell to install Chrome (MS got roasted for this with Windows Media & best used on IE) Every time you install a new copy of Windows and switch the browser to Firefox/Chrome/whatever, you get prompted "are you sure you really want to switch from Edge? It's amazing!!!1!" Then there's the fact occasionally it will still open things up in Edge -- search for 'Amazon' in Windows Start (is that what we're calling it still?) and do "Search the web" or "Web results" and it will open Edge (in Bing). Apparently my default apps are Mail for Email, Maps for Maps, Groove Music for Music Player, nothing for Photo viewer, nothing for Video player, and Google Chrome for Web browser. I've never opened Mail, Maps or Groove Music, I've never had a problem with photos and videos opening in my preferred viewers, and Windows doesn't seem to entirely respect the Web browser setting anyway... Antitrust against Google? Sure, but MS is still doing it's antitrust thing 20 or so years on; I'm not aware of Apple being significantly different either. Outside of the OS vendors, all of the tech companies are trying to "maximize profits" by spying on users, forcing lock-in, degrading others' services, whatever. Point being? I don't know -- "Big Tech" sucks and there's either no taste or no competence in government for shutting down these little tricks and loopholes. Something needs to change, but I don't know how or what. Join EFF, donate money? Maybe...

condercet 7y ago

There are several more instances of Google promoting their own services above the SERP (and competitors). 1. Shopping. Google got in big trouble with the EU about this recently. 2. Job listings. Google launched a jobs product and promoted it above the SERP, damaging Glassdoor / Indeed etc. Providing the largest source of traffic (via google search) and competing in industries that depend on that traffic is an inherent conflict of interest.