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Google, Amazon, FB are not the monopolies that you should be worried about. They are fun to talk about and tech is sexy, but there are bigger problems - ISPs /

• speeder 6y ago
  My business, despite being quite critical (we sell parts for maintenance of machinery, today one of my clients for example was a medical equipment factory) relies heavily on ads, people come, buy what they want, and if I solves the problem, it is over, they don't recommend or talk about us, and often aren't return costumers either unless another machine break... So our clients often are people googling desperately trying to make their suddenly stopped factory resume work, then they see our ads and buy from us. It became obvious to us that Google is a threat, they changed rules multiple times in the past to encourage fraud (instead of stopping fraud), our revenue is directly proportional to the Google ads spend, and whenever we find a better ad provider, Google buys it. Only possible competitor for Google is TV, but TV ads are way beyond our budget and we have no idea of they would work, considering our niche. So... Google is not only a monopoly, it is an obvious one, and they abuse their power freely.
  • game_the0ry 6y ago
    Yours is a real grievance, though most of the people on this thread are complaining from the perspective of a search consumer, not from a commercial advertiser. Lots of businesses use Google ads to great success, and I get that it's frustrating when your one source of new business changes terms on you, but this is the game. Google now has a lot of power over you, that's the market working. But your relationship with Google is not necessarily adversarial. After all, they still bring you new business. As long as the cost for ads does not exceed the revenue from new business, the relationship you have with Google is mutually beneficial, though it might hurt when they change terms on you. That's how business works. It frustrating, but that's the game.
  • bryan_w 6y ago
    You should try Facebook ads
• ForHackernews 6y ago
  > For those who are customers of AT&T - how do you like your service? Is it as good as Google? Much better. I can phone up AT&T and complain to them when something goes wrong; they usually fix it. Google will either ignore me or close my account (and all other accounts with associated Google-owned things)
• acituan 6y ago
  > Google, Amazon, FB are not the monopolies that you should be worried about. They are fun to talk about and tech is sexy, but there are bigger problems - ISPs / telecoms, for example. That is a very misleading comparison. For almost all of the industries you've listed a) there are spatial limitations of monopolistic outreach (they have to exist in real world and can't exist all around the world at once) b) their products and services don't grow upon themselves exponentially c) the nature of their products and services is rather common knowledge. I'll go one by one; a) Tech doesn't suffer from the spatial dynamics of competition and in that has virtually infinite economies of scale. A cable company has to fight for the right of physically laying cables, which creates a barrier of entry for the next competitor, but they have to do this work repeatedly in every other location. As long as bandwidth and compute is paid for, tech can be instantaneously omni-present around the world. This means the monopoly having a planet wide breadth, but also that margins required to sustain the monopoly can be much smaller. b) Econ 101 has this classic output function: labor x capital x productivity = output. Tech is both an output and input in the form of increased productivity onto itself. This means exponential growth. When we talk about cable companies merging, it is a merger of homogeneous entities, and in that only a merger of capital and labor. The argument here is tech companies "merging" with their own, heterogeneous technologies to yield even greater exponential growth. They are talking about ads and search and chrome "merging". Therefore the monopolistic consequences of tech is very different than that of commodities and utilities. c) Tech is constantly innovating on new products and new variations of their products, which we can't grasp the effects of. It is easier to guess what happens to competition or how the end user suffers when other industries have bad actors. Can we tell with confidence what the effect of Youtube's, Twitter's, Reddit's recommendation algorithms is on our collective sense-making capabilities and functioning of the democracy? Can we tell if the thousands of A/B experiments being run on us is revealing how the products can deliver more value or how to exploit the users better? Are users aware that they are participating in the largest scale applied-psychology lab ever existed? This information asymmetry is again a part of the unique dynamics of the monopolistic machinery of tech. When these three come together, the resulting monopolistic dynamics is unprecedented and incomparable to that of commodities, utilities and other old-school services, and we would be fools to make light of it.
  • 6y ago
• SEJeff 6y ago
  I switched from 3 years of bad Comcast cable to AT&T 1G fiber recently. They were professional and ran the fiber from the pole to my house in a few hours. I ran a speedtest on fast.com and got 985Mbps. The service uptime and quality has been utterly stellar. AT&T has been really good to me, but not everyone has access to 1G fiber.
  • gruez 6y ago
    Sounds like you had a choice of service providers where you live. That might explain why the service was so good. Unfortunately, most americans don't have a choice of service providers, or only have one fast provider (eg. cable that goes to 100mbit, but DSL that only goes to 10mbit).
• tengbretson 6y ago
  I don't actually think the lack of choices is the real problem though. The issue I see is that things like AdSense or AWS are able to financially prop up Google and Amazon's ventures into a myriad of other markets that make them immune to the actual market forces in those domains. It ends up having a really bad distorting effect on any of the other players trying to run a normal business.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• SaltyBackendGuy 6y ago
  I literally almost wrote this. I am glad I didn't because because you framed it better. My gut tells me that there's no financial incentive for the government to target them. I.E. telco lobbies
  • game_the0ry 6y ago
    Yes, lobbying is the root defect in the operating system of governance. This is what happens when business can buy legislative outcomes - Americans can't afford medicine when the rest of the world gets it cheaply.
• kanox 6y ago
  Many places have decent telecoms competition with a similar number of carriers. As far as I understand the problem in the US is that many locations have just one wired service provider. Meaningful competitions would require that most buildings have multiple sets of fiber. Splitting telecoms by geography seems pointless: California and Texas ISPs can't compete with each other without huge capital spending.
  • pottertheotter 6y ago
    I think the solution is to have municipally owned fiber that is open to many ISPs.
    • 1over137 6y ago
      More generally: government owned. i.e. could be provincial, federal, etc. Like how water pipes and electricity already are (in many places).
    • CameronNemo 6y ago
      One challenge is that in many places (especially the most profitable areas), the last mile is already built out. So by saying "municipally owned fiber" you mean laying new pipes to replace existing pipes (significant material cost) or trying to wrestle control of the existing pipes away from large ISPs (significant political cost). A small to medium sized city cannot just tell AT&T "give me your fiber", and it often lacks the capital to put down new fiber. Even if a small project could be completed, the dominant ISP in the area would simply lower their prices enough to make the project uneconomical, thus preventing the project from recouping its costs and staining the idea of publicly owned internet infrastructure.
      • Avicebron 6y ago
        Then maybe more thought should be given to how the dominant ISP's as well as other anti-competitive business practices have put the local municipalities into a position where they 1) don't have the cash to lay down their own pipes 2)are put in a position where blatant anti-competitive behavior like strangling newly laid pipes would not be adjudicated fairly. A two prong approach of subsidizing local pipes and pressuring existing fiber to behavior fairly.
• odiroot 6y ago
  Didn't literally the same happen with Standard Oil?
• nojito 6y ago
  >Google, Amazon, FB are not the monopolies that you should be worried about. You're right we shouldn't be worried about them...we should be afraid of what has transpired these past 10-15 years because of them. A common divergence tactic by those companies is to switch focus on the financial services/telcom, etc. A key difference between those industries and FB, Google, and Amazon, is that they are under extreme regulations and oversight. Google, et. al. are free to do whatever they and has resulted in billions in damages.
• jariel 6y ago
  No, this is totally wrong. First - airlines, pharma, and financial services are nowhere near 'oligarchy' and don't come close to meeting the definition, just the opposite, they are very competitive. With Telcos - the issue is real, but the drawback is mostly competitive innovation and price. Stagnant deployments and high prices would be the result. FYI - the US has decent broadband pricing. See: Canada! Oil is a special one, but the industry is global and very competitive, especially in certain layers of that industry. Prices are widely known and understood. There is zero concern that 'some big entity' will control all of the oil, certainly not in America. FB, Amazon, Google represent far more existentially problematic kinds of 'monopolies' because it bleeds into other aspects of life (social, media, information) and into other, adjacent industries. These are the real problem. Search and social also have 'natural monopoly' kind of conditions which exacerbates the problems. The other industry you didn't mention, wherein there is an existential problem with competition is 'health insurance'.
  • softwarejosh 6y ago
    canada is ultra dependent look at south korea
    • jariel 6y ago
      South Korea has a dense population and just came out of a centrally planned economy wherein they had to create a modern network and just rolled out fiber almost everywhere. That's a very special case. At the 'start' of such central/social reforms, leaps of progress can often be made no doubt, the issue is what happens in the long run.
      • dylz 6y ago
        I've managed some local networks (remotely) in this region for some high traffic sites: quite a handful of Asian countries have high bandwidth dense fiber inside the country, but it tends to go to crap as soon you exit the country/bottleneck heavily. For example, Japan has 1G being common, SK has 1G being common, Taiwan has 500-1G common. They all bottleneck quite a bit exiting the country (except for TW, but to some destination countries only); and as a side effect, many "local" websites are extremely popular as opposed to being subject to other countries' laws and media. SK has side effect of also having an extensive DNS and RST/hijacking-based national "great firewall" censorship system that is officially deployed for pornography and pro-NK articles, but has also been used for anti-LGBT rights websites and other purposes in the past, in addition to threats of forcing foreign companies to comply with heavy surveillance requirements like requiring national ID to comment on a blog post. Honestly, SK is not a great role model for internet or censorship. On top of that, while your "home" connectivity is fine, content providers trying to set up even CDN/caching nodes in SK are subject to serious annoyances, like the KRNIC/KINX crap where they really dislike it if your ASN isn't allocated by KRNIC - you're literally on the internet exchange already but all Korean ASs will not talk to you or give you time of day because you're not one of them, and are not present on the route server, and you're forced to route traffic that originates and terminates in Seoul through the US or Hurricane Electric or some other insane route.
• ur-whale 6y ago
  The fact that you identified worse offenders doesn't remove the initial problem.
• playingchanges 6y ago
  Pretty simple really. Too big to fail? Break it up.
• rland 6y ago
  I mean, what industry is not consolidating at this point? It feels like just about every conceivable area is served by a handful of gigantic players, with the rest competing for scraps. It's now at the point where new entrants don't even attempt to start small. They explicitly dump massive sums in a bid to break in. It seems that this is happening even in areas where it's not warranted (local food delivery???). It's as if the culture of every business has become captivated by the idea of becoming an oligopoly. My guess is because it's extremely attractive -- once you "make it" you don't have to compete any more. It works, right up until it doesn't. I hope at some point, we make a big change in the level of corporate consolidation we allow.
  • bobthepanda 6y ago
    > It's as if the culture of every business has become captivated by the idea of becoming an oligopoly. My guess is because it's extremely attractive -- once you "make it" you don't have to compete any more. I've seen the theory that this is the result of QE's massive inflation of asset prices; it is now harder and harder and harder to beat the market, but institutions have ever larger sums of money that they need to park and invest somewhere. Like, Softbank actively managing $100B in startups was never really going to work, at least not without these startups being required to get to ludicrous amounts of scale.
    • Xcelerate 6y ago
      > QE's massive inflation of asset prices; it is now harder and harder and harder to beat the market This is a really interesting theory that I’ve never heard before, but it makes sense. Does that imply deflation could instead encourage innovation?
      • jrumbut 6y ago
        Maybe, maybe not, but it would be a very painful way to do it (particularly since the average person has debt, owns some assets, but doesn't park huge sums in savings accounts or cash under the mattress like prior generations did). The general proposal to alleviate this problem is to increase the supply of assets. This means investing in the common good. Basic research to create whole new types of things to build, infrastructure to enable businesses to reach new markets, and workforce development so businesses have more effective employees. This is also often coupled with renewed enforcement of antitrust legislation, to give new players some oxygen and to discourage business models that rely on unprofitable scaling in order to reap monopolistic rewards. Then there is the side benefit that smaller companies have a harder time creating the conditions for regulatory capture.
• old-gregg 6y ago
  You are making a good point, and yet... > For those who are customers of AT&T - how do you like your service? Is it as good as Google? Since you asked... AT&T is way better, here in Oakland and also in Austin (fiber). It's always up and there's actually decent customer support you can call. Their cellular service has been great too. Meanwhile, Google's search has turned into a content marketing delivery machine, and Google Drive web UI still cannot catch up to Windows 95 File Explorer features&performance. But if you asked me which company can ruin my life or my company's future due to a glitch in an algorithm, the answer will be Google, not AT&T. I worry that Google is allowed to control both the search and the web browser everyone uses. I also worry that as Youtube is becoming increasingly more important for video, they'll control the "future of TV" as well. I am less worried about "dumb pipes" which is what AT&T is to me, especially with the latest migration to encryption for everything, even DNS.
  • JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > AT&T is way better Seconded. I can also call AT&T and, eventually, reach someone. If I'm angry enough, I can ask to be routed to cancellation. (They fix things quicker.) If things go awry, I can threaten, and act on the threat, to escalate matters to my state regulator. None of these are options with Google.
    • techntoke 6y ago
      That is actually false. You have to pay for AT&T. If you pay for G Suite then you have access to live support.
      • DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
        Paying for G-Suite is no guarantee your files won’t suddenly go missing with no backups: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17115643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17115643 I pay for G-Suite for a side-project I inherited (I use Office 365 as my daily-driver) and while there is human support available, they don’t make it easy to get to. With Office 365 the phone support contact details are 2 clicks away from any screen.
• spideymans 6y ago
  >Financial services, airlines, oil majors, media, pharma, auto, etc. Those are the industries that need breaking up. Great. Break up Google, in addition to those industries, as well.
• anonuser123456 6y ago
  You and I may not worry about Google/FB etc, but many businesses do.
• sdjkfgsdjkfghjh 6y ago
  True. That does not make google/amazon/fb immune though. Another data point that people stuck overseas because of Covid-19: Airlines banded in their oligopoly and divided up the world. AA cancelled all flights but Europe, United in americas, Delta in Asia, etc. Now if you want to fly from one of those places, you must get a mile voucher for your return flight, and re-purchase the exorbitant one way ticket from the one company from the oligopoly that got your current location to explore.
• KorematsuFred 6y ago
  I have never understood American politician's obsession with killing their Golden goose. They did the same with many manufacturing jobs in past and most of those jobs ended up moving to other countries over time. Hurting Google or Facebook is not going to make anything better but will lead to job less, loss of economic opportunity and competitive advantage to other nations. You are absolutely right that ATT, Comcast etc. are the real monopolies that have been established with the help of government and they need to be broken. I guess in 10 years they will do the same to Tesla, SpaceX.
  • Avicebron 6y ago
    It's not as much America's Golden goose as the auto industry. That isn't a complete comparison, the destruction of the auto industry broke large swathes of the physical economy (by that I mean the many many industries that go into an automobile, factories for cables, factories for putting the plastic on cables, doors, glass, etc. These are physical locations that require many people involved, not to mention the job creature surrounding these manufacturing plants. The tech companies, yes make a lot of money, but the wealth is much more concentrated and a lot lot less jobs are required to make it work. These companies need to be broken up to foster competitiveness, which leads to more jobs, innovation in different sectors. The unified Google vs. China is such a tired argument from a company that trying to slowly spread their control and negatively leach internet users data. If they aren't broken up before they start causing even more material harm then who knows, maybe in 10 years when the only available GoogSurance denies your claim for medicine because they scraped your Ancenstry.com you'll see what I was talking about.
• kube-system 6y ago
  > auto There are more major automakers who sell products in the US alone than there ever were baby bells. And there are a ton of regional competitors outside of the US.
• Yoofie 6y ago
  This is a straight up failure of governments of preventing mergers. If you let all these companies merge or acquire each other without restriction, this is in the inevitable result which ultimately harms the consumer and new entrants to the market.
• foobiekr 6y ago
  My few attempts to get customer service from AT&T and Comcast went far, far better than the attempts to get help from Google.
• rb808 6y ago
  Right now in my house I have the choice of 3 different cell networks, 2 broadband providers and coming some extra things like satellites. All of them can be swapped in or out without much trouble. I can move houses or even countries to get different options My email and search though is just a few options and realistically most of my family and friends just one option. Even if I move to the other side of the world that option is still the same.
• jotto 6y ago
  >you don't even pay for Google You don't pay for Google with cash. You pay for Google by submitting your free will.
• tw000001 6y ago
  FAANG are different a kind of monopoly - an unprecedented one for which no legislation exists. They have a monopoly on data, as brokers they control not only what companies may purchase for commercial services, but through curation of search results and news/social media feeds they control what information reaches the eyes of millions of people. This is an unprecedented amount of power over society wielded by corporations and, in effect, the handful of private citizens who own them. I tend to lean libertarian but I've questioned for a while if it's appropriate and/or possible to limit this power in an equitable manner...but unchecked Google alone can probably sway elections with algorithmic manipulation of search results and even selective autocompletion. That's probably the entire reason that the administration is targeting these orgs, and while I don't agree with the administration I believe this particular endeavor may be for the greater good. When Twitter can delete videos retweeted by the president, or add "fact check warnings" which effectively (though maybe not truthfully) discredit his statements, Jack Dorsey and his board are wielding a more direct, more immediate, and possibly more effective power than any of other branches of government.
  • Avicebron 6y ago
    You're being hit hard wherever you go, but I think you've got a fair mindset. Small amounts of people have a disproportionate amount of final say in how millions of people get to group and share information. That has to have negative externalizations, it doesn't track that it would have absolutely no ill effects. If you have a legitimate argument that defends there will be no problems, please share, I'm open minded. If Trump is attacking them cynically out of some tantrum relating to how they beat on him and his supporters. Then yeah, I disagree he's doing it for the right reasons. But I think he has the right directional thrust.
  • game_the0ry 6y ago
    They have a monopoly on data bc you gave it to them. You can choose not to use FB and Google.
    • tw000001 6y ago
      I haven't had a FB account in about 10 years. I can't stop them from harvesting anyone else's data. Or controlling what they see.
• ummonk 6y ago
  I'm actually an AT&T fiber user through Sonic and have a perfect experience with my service. Installation took some time originally because they had to route a line into my house but it has been great since.
• pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
  What if the government breaks up both. The ad tech businesses and the telecoms. The question is whether this type of comment "[Google/Facebook] is not the problem..." is a not-so-clever attempt to defend a FAANG company or whether it is legitimiate. I have seen this type of response many times on HN. It is like someone saying "Don't look there, look here." Of course, we can look both here and there, one step at a time. What is a legitimate argument why breaking up Google/Facebook prevents the government from later breaking up telecoms, or solving any other problem. Whereas if the telecoms were broken up, how does that improve the situation with the ad tech oligarchy. Even if you say "Don't look there, look here" eventually we may look "there". The harmful effects of Google/Facebook cannot be easily overhsadowed by other problems.
• jorvi 6y ago
  All the big techs are stifling competition in many markets by offering their product in those markets at or below cost and supporting those losses with money that comes from elsewhere in the company. Look at music streaming: Spotify is the only big service that is only in that market. Look at consumer storage: Dropbox is the only big service that is only in that market. If tech behemoths didn’t exist, there would be much more active competition and thus technological advancement in those markets. They also buy start-ups in emerging markets at a breakneck pace.
• designdesign 6y ago
  ISPs and telecoms are dangerous due to their level of control, but are significantly worse at using their data to influence the way you think. I strongly believe that the current political climate would be significantly more tepid if not for Facebook and YouTube alone... the scale is so hard to comprehend. On the surface social media looks completely benign, but they have these far reaching insidious impacts. Our elected representatives don't even have a basic understanding of how these sites operate... yet you have the majority of the population being fed content by these algorithms that determine what you see when, and they're completely opaque. They've got scores of analysts and psychologists shaping this stuff full-time... no single entity in human history has had this level of data and reach into human behavior, and it's all proprietary. Small intentional changes over time to such wide-reaching algorithms can literally shape humanity in ways that may be entirely impossible for an outsider to detect.
  • game_the0ry 6y ago
    But you're aware of this, so the algorithm is obsolete for influencing you. You have adapted. With time, most of us will.
    • designdesign 6y ago
      That's not true at all! We have little idea how or why it influences us outside of the basics (sell ads, make money). People are looking at these feeds, often daily, for a significant amount of time. We don't know if it's intentionally showing us more of our racist uncle's posts because we buy things when we're angry, for example... and that's just one small example in a vast sea. We can't adapt because there are far too many unseen factors to be aware of. And I'll say it again... most people do not understand that every post on these networks is being fed through a biased algorithm. I've seen large numbers of developers on this site agree that Facebook should remain neutral when it comes to certain ads/posts, without acknowledging that neutrality has been gone from every post on Facebook for years and years at this point. They know who you are, where you are, who you're with, and what you do. Data that spans billions of people. For people with Facebook on their phones they can essentially track your behavior 24/7 and have been doing so for years. This type of unseen influence could be dangerous even in benevolent hands. I have not adapted because I don't know what to adapt to. I've just removed myself from the environment as completely as I can.
• CogitoCogito 6y ago
  > Google, Amazon, FB are not the monopolies that you should be worried about. They are fun to talk about and tech is sexy, but there are bigger problems - ISPs / telecoms, for example Why not worry about both groups?
• Sevaris 6y ago
  On the other hand, AT&T doesn't affect anybody in Europe, but Facebook and Google have clear global effects.