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Watershed moment in how we "price" monopolistic power. It's not "market share" or "barriers to entry" or even engaging in "anti-competitive behavior" anymore. B

Watershed moment in how we "price" monopolistic power. It's not "market share" or "barriers to entry" or even engaging in "anti-competitive behavior" anymore. But more about how corporations can control the free flow of information. Much harder to make that case for the government I should imagine. What's surprising to me is how un-monopolistic Google's share of the Cloud + AI market is under its control, considering how many of the techniques were invented there. I'd put it at under 25%. The real behemoth is NVidia + ARM. GPU shortages are endemic. And the cost of a new entrant to the market just to construct a fab is probably $20B+. Ask Intel XE how much they are spending just to keep up ;)

A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
Chip is probably one of the few spaces, where oligopoly or duopoly makes sense ( though it is still scary ). The entry barriers are not artificial. It is genuinely hard to start from the ground up just based on the level of progress made thus far. With Google that argument is harder. A person could whip up G level search engine, mail, and maybe even youtube equivalent, but moving all those people ( but to make them consider your alternative would be impossibly painful to do ). I will admit that NVidia and ARM scares me, but I am not sure what can be done here.
- opnitro 6y ago
  Regulation and/or state ownership?
- gipp 6y ago
  > A person could whip up G level search engine, mail, and maybe even youtube equivalent Hi Dunning, meet Kruger.
  - Jugurtha 6y ago
    The "This could be built in a week-end" and "Why don't you just [something that only 1/1000 can do and takes so much time]". See also: https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
      Listen. I know people have a tendency to get defensive, when they believe someone insults their craft. I am not doing that. I am arguing that what google has really going for it is inertia. It is similar to the world of OS, where Windows still rules supreme. Note that DDG was built fast, but it struggles against G search engine based on familiarity. But ok, DDG has issues other than familiarity. What about Bing? MS had to actually pay people to encourage adoption. That is how strong the force of inertia really is. So yeah. I do dismiss your counter argument, because it does not address the core of mine.
      - Jugurtha 6y ago
        I'm not being defensive and it was not my intention. I did not communicate that clearly. Not going to dismiss the inertia parameter, but neither DDG nor Bing ever returned what I was looking for and they never were as good as Google Search for my particular searches (yes, even in private navigation). I'm not saying they're not good, I'm saying they never returned good results for me.
        A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
        I can offer some anecdata. For some reason or another, Bing is better than Google for finding otherwise copyrighted work ( I was able to find Morty streams after new season came out ). My personal pet theory is that since Google was first to the game with majority market share, copyright holders and the like concentrated their effort on it. Needless to say, it is just one person's experience. I will admit that DDG still lacks in that area, but it has improved.
      - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
        >It is similar to the world of OS, where Windows still rules supreme. That's because of drivers, and drivers are because of stable kernel API.
nottorp 6y ago
I think the shortage and performance war is happening only at the top and the market is more volatile at the mid-bottom. Besides AMD and Nvidia have been trading places if we look beyond the last few years. Not enough to base a monopoly lawsuit on. If Nvidia actually gets to buy ARM, that's another matter. But again they can't sue based on a purchase that hasn't even gone through yet.
- wlesieutre 6y ago
  I think parent comment's concern about Nvidia is with respect to AI. Nobody wants a GTX 1660 for that kind of work, the high end GPU supply is the only part that matters.
  - nottorp 6y ago
    Don't know if AI is a market that's big enough to catch the attention of regulators, no matter how important it is to the HN crowd.
sylens 6y ago
> What's surprising to me is how un-monopolistic Google's share of the Cloud + AI market is under its control, considering how many of the techniques were invented there. I'd put it at under 25%. That's why the suit is aimed at search and search advertising
- sidibe 6y ago
  If they ever break up search and advertising GCP would immediately become the biggest cloud because of the cost of migrating the other parts of Google.
bogwog 6y ago
> What's surprising to me is how un-monopolistic Google's share of the Cloud + AI market is under its control, considering how many of the techniques were invented there. I'd put it at under 25%. I don't find that surprising because Google is a mess. They're a very poorly run organization, making decisions that make no sense at times. Their inefficiency and/or incompetence is probably the only reason why they haven't wreaked havoc on all of the markets they have their hand in. And the various monopolies they do have are, as monopolies usually are, immune to stupid decisions that would kill most other companies. I think it might be because their corporate culture of being the good guy/"don't be evil" is incompatible with the reality of their situation. Like cognitive dissonance at a corporate level. I wonder how many of their employees in positions of power are still living in that fantasy, and making decisions based on it?
- curt15 6y ago
  >They're a very poorly run organization, making decisions that make no sense at times. How many messaging apps have they launched and killed?
  - plushpuffin 6y ago
    Do you mean as of right now, or at the time you posted?
    - ilovetux 6y ago
      ha
- sjg007 6y ago
  What are some specific examples of being poorly run?
  - basch 6y ago
    Personal opinion? And this applies almost equally to Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL. But that they all lost the messenger wars. Of the four, Google was the best positioned to take mobile, really the best positioned of any company in the world. And that blunder is probably a bigger blunder than Microsoft and Facebook arriving late to the mobile world. Because Google WAS the mobile operating system, they were the cross platform browser vendor, and they completely, absolutely, 100% failed to deliver a worldwide mobile first + desktop messaging solution that was better than the competition.
nojito 6y ago
>Watershed moment in how we "price" monopolistic power. It's not "market share" or "barriers to entry" or even engaging in "anti-competitive behavior" anymore. But more about how corporations can control the free flow of information Once the lawsuit drops I doubt this is the argument they are going to make. This is going to be your run of the mill antitrust lawsuit. It's just making news because tech has avoided them for 30+ years.
helen___keller 6y ago
> Watershed moment in how we "price" monopolistic power. It's not "market share" or "barriers to entry" or even engaging in "anti-competitive behavior" anymore. But more about how corporations can control the free flow of information. Much harder to make that case for the government I should imagine. I don't know if or how this fits within actual antitrust law, but it makes sense that the issue was never price gouging, the issue was one entity gaining too much power. In a theoretical dystopian future, a megacorp could own 99% of market share of all industries in the country, but intentionally offer very low prices on every product to avoid "monopoly" concerns. It becomes clear: monopolistic pricing is just a symptom, not the real issue. The real issue is power. If this suit (and followup suits on other megacorps) fail, the future may call for new laws to define monopolistic power in novel ways, as soon as we the people recognize that getting search and email and social media for free doesn't mean that the megacorps are on our side.
- hammock 6y ago
  >I don't know if or how this fits within actual antitrust law, but it makes sense that the issue was never price gouging, the issue was one entity gaining too much power. In the US, there are two major areas of antitrust law and enforcement: 1) Sherman & Clayton Acts (1890, 1914) - outlaws cartels and anticompetitive activities (that is, activities that tend to lead to monopolies, but doesn't outlaw monopolies themselves). Price gouging is not an antitrust issue, but predatory pricing and price fixing are (you might have meant these terms). This area is primarily established via case law and enforced by the courts (and DOJ AD). 2) Merger guidelines/Federal Trade Commission (1968) - wherein key mergers must be reviewed and approved by the FTC. This area is more sensitive to political climate / executive branch as it's executive-appointed FTC regulators who set the guidelines and give approvals. We are now exiting an era of historic hands-off-ness. Source: had a professor who is famous in antitrust world
  - ShamelessC 6y ago
    Have we ever "busted up a monopoly" using 2? Is the FTC able to retroactively split up a company that was originally formed via large mergers and acquisitions? Split out e.g. Youtube from Google as it was originally an acquisition? That seems unlikely to me but I don't know much about it at all. If you can't do that, then you're basically just preventing a monopoly from happening in advance, right? Or trying to at least. At any rate, I'm assuming US vs. Google will be required to reference precedent set in Sherman & Clayton + subsequent court rulings and _not_ be able to use their own mergers against them as they were approved by the FTC in the first place. Is that also correct?
MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
Yeah but Nvidia and ARM are luxury goods. There is no point breaking up a monopoly of that calibre. They specialize in a niche market that affects an even more niche market. The simple fact that I can say "google it" and colloquially anyone in the US and probably Europe would understand what I mean kind of states how dominant they are in the market.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  It's trivial to use duckduckgo or bing. It's people's choice to use google. Also, you can say "kleenex" and "band-aid" and "q tip" and "vaseline" or "coke" and everyone would understand, but they have no dominance, other than some people prefer to use them. I can easily find alternatives to all of them right next to them in almost any store I go to.
  - Karunamon 6y ago
    It was trivial for users to use non-IE browsers on Windows in the 90s. Ease of using an alternative is not the singular or most important definition of a monopoly.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      It wasn't as trivial as today. People may have had to install non IE browsers from from a disc or download from slow and flaky internet connections. Also, I think a central part of that case was also Microsoft wielding its power to force other companies to stay away from non IE browsers. Today, we're talking about a few taps to change which search website you want to use.
    - MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
      I work at a company where IE is colloquial with internet. If even mention chrome it's like I just told a homeschooled christian kid that atheists exist.
      - rendang 6y ago
cma 6y ago
Neither Nvidia nor ARM make fabs.
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> It's not "market share" or "barriers to entry" or even engaging in "anti-competitive behavior" anymore. But more about how corporations can control the free flow of information. But that's really the same thing. If Google bans or interferes with Fediverse apps because they compete with YouTube, that's anti-competitive behavior. If they don't and those apps gain share with people whose content keeps getting censored on YouTube, they're not very effectively controlling the free flow of information. Censorship by an incumbent is a market opportunity for a competitor, so a corporation can only really sustain it through anti-competitive actions against the challenger(s).

A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago

Chip is probably one of the few spaces, where oligopoly or duopoly makes sense ( though it is still scary ). The entry barriers are not artificial. It is genuinely hard to start from the ground up just based on the level of progress made thus far. With Google that argument is harder. A person could whip up G level search engine, mail, and maybe even youtube equivalent, but moving all those people ( but to make them consider your alternative would be impossibly painful to do ). I will admit that NVidia and ARM scares me, but I am not sure what can be done here.

opnitro 6y ago
Regulation and/or state ownership?
gipp 6y ago
> A person could whip up G level search engine, mail, and maybe even youtube equivalent Hi Dunning, meet Kruger.
- Jugurtha 6y ago
  The "This could be built in a week-end" and "Why don't you just [something that only 1/1000 can do and takes so much time]". See also: https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
    Listen. I know people have a tendency to get defensive, when they believe someone insults their craft. I am not doing that. I am arguing that what google has really going for it is inertia. It is similar to the world of OS, where Windows still rules supreme. Note that DDG was built fast, but it struggles against G search engine based on familiarity. But ok, DDG has issues other than familiarity. What about Bing? MS had to actually pay people to encourage adoption. That is how strong the force of inertia really is. So yeah. I do dismiss your counter argument, because it does not address the core of mine.
    - Jugurtha 6y ago
      I'm not being defensive and it was not my intention. I did not communicate that clearly. Not going to dismiss the inertia parameter, but neither DDG nor Bing ever returned what I was looking for and they never were as good as Google Search for my particular searches (yes, even in private navigation). I'm not saying they're not good, I'm saying they never returned good results for me.
      - A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
        I can offer some anecdata. For some reason or another, Bing is better than Google for finding otherwise copyrighted work ( I was able to find Morty streams after new season came out ). My personal pet theory is that since Google was first to the game with majority market share, copyright holders and the like concentrated their effort on it. Needless to say, it is just one person's experience. I will admit that DDG still lacks in that area, but it has improved.
    - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
      >It is similar to the world of OS, where Windows still rules supreme. That's because of drivers, and drivers are because of stable kernel API.

nottorp 6y ago

I think the shortage and performance war is happening only at the top and the market is more volatile at the mid-bottom. Besides AMD and Nvidia have been trading places if we look beyond the last few years. Not enough to base a monopoly lawsuit on. If Nvidia actually gets to buy ARM, that's another matter. But again they can't sue based on a purchase that hasn't even gone through yet.

wlesieutre 6y ago
I think parent comment's concern about Nvidia is with respect to AI. Nobody wants a GTX 1660 for that kind of work, the high end GPU supply is the only part that matters.
- nottorp 6y ago
  Don't know if AI is a market that's big enough to catch the attention of regulators, no matter how important it is to the HN crowd.

sylens 6y ago

sidibe 6y ago
If they ever break up search and advertising GCP would immediately become the biggest cloud because of the cost of migrating the other parts of Google.

bogwog 6y ago

> What's surprising to me is how un-monopolistic Google's share of the Cloud + AI market is under its control, considering how many of the techniques were invented there. I'd put it at under 25%. I don't find that surprising because Google is a mess. They're a very poorly run organization, making decisions that make no sense at times. Their inefficiency and/or incompetence is probably the only reason why they haven't wreaked havoc on all of the markets they have their hand in. And the various monopolies they do have are, as monopolies usually are, immune to stupid decisions that would kill most other companies. I think it might be because their corporate culture of being the good guy/"don't be evil" is incompatible with the reality of their situation. Like cognitive dissonance at a corporate level. I wonder how many of their employees in positions of power are still living in that fantasy, and making decisions based on it?

curt15 6y ago
>They're a very poorly run organization, making decisions that make no sense at times. How many messaging apps have they launched and killed?
- plushpuffin 6y ago
  Do you mean as of right now, or at the time you posted?
  - ilovetux 6y ago
    ha
sjg007 6y ago
What are some specific examples of being poorly run?
- basch 6y ago
  Personal opinion? And this applies almost equally to Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL. But that they all lost the messenger wars. Of the four, Google was the best positioned to take mobile, really the best positioned of any company in the world. And that blunder is probably a bigger blunder than Microsoft and Facebook arriving late to the mobile world. Because Google WAS the mobile operating system, they were the cross platform browser vendor, and they completely, absolutely, 100% failed to deliver a worldwide mobile first + desktop messaging solution that was better than the competition.

nojito 6y ago

>Watershed moment in how we "price" monopolistic power. It's not "market share" or "barriers to entry" or even engaging in "anti-competitive behavior" anymore. But more about how corporations can control the free flow of information Once the lawsuit drops I doubt this is the argument they are going to make. This is going to be your run of the mill antitrust lawsuit. It's just making news because tech has avoided them for 30+ years.

helen___keller 6y ago

> Watershed moment in how we "price" monopolistic power. It's not "market share" or "barriers to entry" or even engaging in "anti-competitive behavior" anymore. But more about how corporations can control the free flow of information. Much harder to make that case for the government I should imagine. I don't know if or how this fits within actual antitrust law, but it makes sense that the issue was never price gouging, the issue was one entity gaining too much power. In a theoretical dystopian future, a megacorp could own 99% of market share of all industries in the country, but intentionally offer very low prices on every product to avoid "monopoly" concerns. It becomes clear: monopolistic pricing is just a symptom, not the real issue. The real issue is power. If this suit (and followup suits on other megacorps) fail, the future may call for new laws to define monopolistic power in novel ways, as soon as we the people recognize that getting search and email and social media for free doesn't mean that the megacorps are on our side.

hammock 6y ago
>I don't know if or how this fits within actual antitrust law, but it makes sense that the issue was never price gouging, the issue was one entity gaining too much power. In the US, there are two major areas of antitrust law and enforcement: 1) Sherman & Clayton Acts (1890, 1914) - outlaws cartels and anticompetitive activities (that is, activities that tend to lead to monopolies, but doesn't outlaw monopolies themselves). Price gouging is not an antitrust issue, but predatory pricing and price fixing are (you might have meant these terms). This area is primarily established via case law and enforced by the courts (and DOJ AD). 2) Merger guidelines/Federal Trade Commission (1968) - wherein key mergers must be reviewed and approved by the FTC. This area is more sensitive to political climate / executive branch as it's executive-appointed FTC regulators who set the guidelines and give approvals. We are now exiting an era of historic hands-off-ness. Source: had a professor who is famous in antitrust world
- ShamelessC 6y ago
  Have we ever "busted up a monopoly" using 2? Is the FTC able to retroactively split up a company that was originally formed via large mergers and acquisitions? Split out e.g. Youtube from Google as it was originally an acquisition? That seems unlikely to me but I don't know much about it at all. If you can't do that, then you're basically just preventing a monopoly from happening in advance, right? Or trying to at least. At any rate, I'm assuming US vs. Google will be required to reference precedent set in Sherman & Clayton + subsequent court rulings and _not_ be able to use their own mergers against them as they were approved by the FTC in the first place. Is that also correct?

MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago

Yeah but Nvidia and ARM are luxury goods. There is no point breaking up a monopoly of that calibre. They specialize in a niche market that affects an even more niche market. The simple fact that I can say "google it" and colloquially anyone in the US and probably Europe would understand what I mean kind of states how dominant they are in the market.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
It's trivial to use duckduckgo or bing. It's people's choice to use google. Also, you can say "kleenex" and "band-aid" and "q tip" and "vaseline" or "coke" and everyone would understand, but they have no dominance, other than some people prefer to use them. I can easily find alternatives to all of them right next to them in almost any store I go to.
- Karunamon 6y ago
  It was trivial for users to use non-IE browsers on Windows in the 90s. Ease of using an alternative is not the singular or most important definition of a monopoly.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    It wasn't as trivial as today. People may have had to install non IE browsers from from a disc or download from slow and flaky internet connections. Also, I think a central part of that case was also Microsoft wielding its power to force other companies to stay away from non IE browsers. Today, we're talking about a few taps to change which search website you want to use.
  - MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
    I work at a company where IE is colloquial with internet. If even mention chrome it's like I just told a homeschooled christian kid that atheists exist.
    - rendang 6y ago

cma 6y ago

Neither Nvidia nor ARM make fabs.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago

> It's not "market share" or "barriers to entry" or even engaging in "anti-competitive behavior" anymore. But more about how corporations can control the free flow of information. But that's really the same thing. If Google bans or interferes with Fediverse apps because they compete with YouTube, that's anti-competitive behavior. If they don't and those apps gain share with people whose content keeps getting censored on YouTube, they're not very effectively controlling the free flow of information. Censorship by an incumbent is a market opportunity for a competitor, so a corporation can only really sustain it through anti-competitive actions against the challenger(s).