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"The court rejected the notion that additional data increases the barriers to competitive entry, and indicated that this issue “requires closer examination and
by robkop 7y ago
"The court rejected the notion that additional data increases the barriers to competitive entry, and indicated that this issue “requires closer examination and a detailed explanation/review and conclusive presentation by the antitrust authorities.”"
Maybe someone who knows more about this topic could clarify but this suggests that the court believes network effects and scale don't affect the barrier to entry? (pending further reviews)
I would be very interested in learning more about how they came to this decision as from what I've seen a number of large tech products (e.g. youtube) only seem to become feasible at extreme scale.
- s3r3nity 7y agoSo I strongly disagreed with that finding, but two possible lines of reasoning: 1) Say you have a machine learning algorithm, where there could be two ways to improve the outcomes: get more data, or pick a better model. Google's massive dataset is a benefit/competitive moat of sorts to its search algorithm, but _in theory_ you could build a better algorithm or model. You can see some evidence of this in vertical specific searches (i.e. travel, shopping, etc.) and in DuckDuckGo's success. 2) The other refrain I hear a lot is that this additional data is not "zero-sum" - i.e. multiple apps can collect my location data or email or [insert data point here,] and I can onboard or offboard that data pretty easily. Therefore this data isn't a limited resource that can be hoarded like a true competitive moat.
- shadowgovt 7y ago(1) seems to strongly model how Google originally entered an already-packed search engine market and came to be the dominant ecosystem player.