3 ms·
There's no reason to assume Democrats are more likely to support anti-trust suits vs Republicans. Tech companies and the wealthy individuals that created them t
by boh 7y ago
There's no reason to assume Democrats are more likely to support anti-trust suits vs Republicans. Tech companies and the wealthy individuals that created them tend to provide a great deal of donor support to the party. Whatever the rhetoric may be, Democrats have been fairly supportive of tech up to now.
> Google has its hands in too many pies...
That's one of the reasons anti-trust is such a difficult case to make. Besides search, Google doesn't really have a dominate market share within any of their other offerings (not even Android counts since it's open source and comes in many flavors from phone companies). Their search service is free, so the only party that is effected by their market dominance (in how we've typically defined trusts) are advertisers. Before they can have a strong anti-trust strong case, the government needs to define data as an asset and the disclosure of that data as a cost to the data owner (the Google user).
- t-writescode 7y agoIt might have one in online advertising? Are there any players aside from Amazon that aren’t Google in the online, automated advertising world?
- boh 7y agoAlso a difficult case to make. They're dominant because users have chosen to be a part of their network, and advertisers want to reach those users. It's difficult to argue they engaged in anti-competitive behavior by making a highly useful/effective product people choose to use. Up to this point, network effects can't be cited as anti-competitive. Looking at the times when Google did use their platform to bully other companies, it still wasn't in a business they dominate (Yelp comes to mind). It's difficult to argue an algorithm producing search results is inherently anti-competitive.
- richardw 7y agoI think it’s safe to say consumers would benefit from lower prices because companies wouldn’t have to bid so high on ads. We’d also possibly benefit from fewer ads on the main page, diluted ad tracking, more competition in other areas Google competes in (video, maps etc.) Ads subsidises the rest.
- boh 7y agoMore ad competition doesn't mean lower ad fees, since the success of another search platform would depend more on the number of users, not the price of the ad. Suggesting lower ad fees somehow benefits users is a huge stretch. The success of the other Google offerings is due more to the benefits of network effects, you'd need more than a decrease in Google ad subsidies to be competitive.