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> that's evidence of phone manufacturers using their power in one market (phone sales) to extract cash out of another (search/ads). That's an example of how co

> that's evidence of phone manufacturers using their power in one market (phone sales) to extract cash out of another (search/ads). That's an example of how competition is supposed to work. Phone makers sell their audience to the highest bidder. There's no shortage of phone makers. The issue is that google bought them all.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
The issue is the near zero marginal cost of software makes it easy to dominate entire lines business. Technology itself allows businesses to become huge because once they have a solution, they can implement it at near zero cost everywhere and so competitors can’t really compete. Like Walmart/target/Costco versus little Main Street stores, or Home Depot/Lowe’s versus independent hardware stores, etc. Smaller operators will have high marginal costs and higher prices, and will never be able to compete with bigger operations that can utilize software and other technology to offer the absolute lowest prices. Although, in other businesses like retail, this results in single digit profit margins at best, whereas in software, due to the minimal labor needed and protections of copyright and obfuscation and network effects, the tech companies can maintain much bigger profit margins.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  Yeah indeed the margins are high. In the case of google/FB, they are so high, that paying back users with "free services" doesn't cut it anymore. Even the cost of running those free services has gone way down. At this point users shouldbe getting paid for having their data used. That way, a potential competitor could outright buy the users directly (instead of paying FB/Google for advertising to acquire users). Unfortunately there's no legal framework for that yet. No other industry except perhaps finance has the potential to cheaply scale as IT. I wonder what antimonopoly actions have been in finance in the past (finance seems to have been a lot more regulated since forever)
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    Bing does pay users to use its search. Though the pay out is quite modest at about $1.50 a month, in gift cards.
    - cblconfederate 6y ago
      Thats actually great. pity it s not so effective.
      - DoreenMichele 6y ago
        You can actually make closer to $10/month in gift cards via Bing. No clue where the buck fifty figure came from in the GP.
        paulryanrogers 6y ago
        Maybe my math was off but it's about 50 points a day and they slashed the point per penny ratio from 1:1 to 10:1.
        DoreenMichele 6y ago
        Maybe I am all special or something. For me, it is 300 points or more per day. Yes, a few years back they changed the points ratio on that end. It used to take about 500 points to get a $5 gift card and now it is 5250 points. But they also fiddled with things on the other end. At least for me. Maybe Bill Gates likes me or something and told his people "Make sure that pathetic homeless woman can earn $10 per month as my generous gift to her." I earn a $5 gift card about once every two weeks-ish. I'm poor enough that matters to me, so it is something I am very aware of. That $5 gift card is sometimes still all the money I have for the day, though I'm less desperately poor than when I was homeless. I don't know what else to tell you. Your info sounds out of date to me, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
        paulryanrogers 6y ago
treis 6y ago
That's actually the opposite of how it's supposed to work. You're not supposed to be able to use your dominance in one market (cell phone manufacturing) to unfairly compete in another (search).
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  what dominance?
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    Exclusive control on the one phone each user has.
    - cblconfederate 6y ago
      that's kind of ridiculous, there is no dominant phone maker. Also a lot of ppl have multiple phones/tablets
  - treis 6y ago
    Samsung and Apple control 75% of the market in the US.
    - cblconfederate 6y ago
      Apple 40%, samsung 25% , LG 10% in the US Apple 25%, Samsung 34%, Huawei 17%, Xiaomi 10% in Europe Sounds pretty fine for a market with healthy competition. Really hard to call any of them a monopoly. Google® has 94+% of mobile search in both US and EU!
      - romanoderoma 6y ago
        > Apple 25%, Samsung 34%, Huawei 17%, Xiaomi 10% in Europe Apple gets 11 billions/year to use Google as the default search engine The remaining 61% (Samsung+Huawei+Xiaomi) is Android that means Google Xiaomi defaults to Baidu in China, for example, but everywhere else, where the CPC has no direct control over the wires, they use Google because Google money is good even in China
jariel 6y ago
Yes, exactly. The 'anti trust' in this situation would be Google using it's own dominance over Chrome and Android to 'unfairly' promote it's own products. The most unhealthy thing in these systems is the 'value chain creep' that allows monopoly in one area, to be leveraged into other areas. Imagine if you owned all the real estate in the state and you had a cracker factory. Hey, just charge your cracker-making competitors 2x the rent. Nobody can make crackers but you. Or you own all the railways and charge your Oil pumping competitors more to transport Oil - you have an Oil monopoly. Chrome is not a 'money losing product' - it's absolutely one of the most important products in Google's portfolio - the surpluses are yielded elsewhere, in Search. Arguably same for Android. If there were an 'anti trust' case it would be to separate Search/Chrome/Android/Cloud in the similar vein that Microsoft would ostensibly be separated from any app software. Amazon uses AWS surpluses to 'dump' on commercial distribution which is another weird one. If there is a case to concern over monopoly, it's those.
- visarga 6y ago
  You could split Google in Search/Chrome/Android/Cloud, and that would help in reducing they monopoly, but if there is one thing I could change it would be to decouple ranking, filtering and targeting from the rest, and open them up. There should be multiple rankers on top of the index, users should be able to choose and create new rankers. Same for filtering - what gets hidden/censured, put the power back to the users, let them select their filter lists. Instead of one true ranking and filtering, let users customise it as they like.
  - sarah180 6y ago
    Spidering and building an index is relatively easy. It's not the barrier to creating a search engine, and I don't think you'd find that Microsoft's index is materially smaller than Google's. The hard part is figuring out how to turn that content into relevant results.
    - Grimm1 6y ago
      Only 2 companies in the US have an independent English based index with the contents of the entire web. Granted, the sheer volume of data is a barrier to making the index but removing that, only 4 US companies have crawled the entire internet. I'm going to have to disagree with you on that one. To write a crawler capable of the scale and timeliness to crawl the entire web in a week or two requires some pretty solid engineering. I don't however disagree that building a good search is also difficult.

lotsofpulp 6y ago

The issue is the near zero marginal cost of software makes it easy to dominate entire lines business. Technology itself allows businesses to become huge because once they have a solution, they can implement it at near zero cost everywhere and so competitors can’t really compete. Like Walmart/target/Costco versus little Main Street stores, or Home Depot/Lowe’s versus independent hardware stores, etc. Smaller operators will have high marginal costs and higher prices, and will never be able to compete with bigger operations that can utilize software and other technology to offer the absolute lowest prices. Although, in other businesses like retail, this results in single digit profit margins at best, whereas in software, due to the minimal labor needed and protections of copyright and obfuscation and network effects, the tech companies can maintain much bigger profit margins.

cblconfederate 6y ago
Yeah indeed the margins are high. In the case of google/FB, they are so high, that paying back users with "free services" doesn't cut it anymore. Even the cost of running those free services has gone way down. At this point users shouldbe getting paid for having their data used. That way, a potential competitor could outright buy the users directly (instead of paying FB/Google for advertising to acquire users). Unfortunately there's no legal framework for that yet. No other industry except perhaps finance has the potential to cheaply scale as IT. I wonder what antimonopoly actions have been in finance in the past (finance seems to have been a lot more regulated since forever)
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  Bing does pay users to use its search. Though the pay out is quite modest at about $1.50 a month, in gift cards.
  - cblconfederate 6y ago
    Thats actually great. pity it s not so effective.
    - DoreenMichele 6y ago
      You can actually make closer to $10/month in gift cards via Bing. No clue where the buck fifty figure came from in the GP.
      - paulryanrogers 6y ago
        Maybe my math was off but it's about 50 points a day and they slashed the point per penny ratio from 1:1 to 10:1.
        DoreenMichele 6y ago
        Maybe I am all special or something. For me, it is 300 points or more per day. Yes, a few years back they changed the points ratio on that end. It used to take about 500 points to get a $5 gift card and now it is 5250 points. But they also fiddled with things on the other end. At least for me. Maybe Bill Gates likes me or something and told his people "Make sure that pathetic homeless woman can earn $10 per month as my generous gift to her." I earn a $5 gift card about once every two weeks-ish. I'm poor enough that matters to me, so it is something I am very aware of. That $5 gift card is sometimes still all the money I have for the day, though I'm less desperately poor than when I was homeless. I don't know what else to tell you. Your info sounds out of date to me, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
        paulryanrogers 6y ago

treis 6y ago

That's actually the opposite of how it's supposed to work. You're not supposed to be able to use your dominance in one market (cell phone manufacturing) to unfairly compete in another (search).

cblconfederate 6y ago
what dominance?
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Exclusive control on the one phone each user has.
  - cblconfederate 6y ago
    that's kind of ridiculous, there is no dominant phone maker. Also a lot of ppl have multiple phones/tablets
- treis 6y ago
  Samsung and Apple control 75% of the market in the US.
  - cblconfederate 6y ago
    Apple 40%, samsung 25% , LG 10% in the US Apple 25%, Samsung 34%, Huawei 17%, Xiaomi 10% in Europe Sounds pretty fine for a market with healthy competition. Really hard to call any of them a monopoly. Google® has 94+% of mobile search in both US and EU!
    - romanoderoma 6y ago
      > Apple 25%, Samsung 34%, Huawei 17%, Xiaomi 10% in Europe Apple gets 11 billions/year to use Google as the default search engine The remaining 61% (Samsung+Huawei+Xiaomi) is Android that means Google Xiaomi defaults to Baidu in China, for example, but everywhere else, where the CPC has no direct control over the wires, they use Google because Google money is good even in China

jariel 6y ago

Yes, exactly. The 'anti trust' in this situation would be Google using it's own dominance over Chrome and Android to 'unfairly' promote it's own products. The most unhealthy thing in these systems is the 'value chain creep' that allows monopoly in one area, to be leveraged into other areas. Imagine if you owned all the real estate in the state and you had a cracker factory. Hey, just charge your cracker-making competitors 2x the rent. Nobody can make crackers but you. Or you own all the railways and charge your Oil pumping competitors more to transport Oil - you have an Oil monopoly. Chrome is not a 'money losing product' - it's absolutely one of the most important products in Google's portfolio - the surpluses are yielded elsewhere, in Search. Arguably same for Android. If there were an 'anti trust' case it would be to separate Search/Chrome/Android/Cloud in the similar vein that Microsoft would ostensibly be separated from any app software. Amazon uses AWS surpluses to 'dump' on commercial distribution which is another weird one. If there is a case to concern over monopoly, it's those.

visarga 6y ago
You could split Google in Search/Chrome/Android/Cloud, and that would help in reducing they monopoly, but if there is one thing I could change it would be to decouple ranking, filtering and targeting from the rest, and open them up. There should be multiple rankers on top of the index, users should be able to choose and create new rankers. Same for filtering - what gets hidden/censured, put the power back to the users, let them select their filter lists. Instead of one true ranking and filtering, let users customise it as they like.
- sarah180 6y ago
  Spidering and building an index is relatively easy. It's not the barrier to creating a search engine, and I don't think you'd find that Microsoft's index is materially smaller than Google's. The hard part is figuring out how to turn that content into relevant results.
  - Grimm1 6y ago
    Only 2 companies in the US have an independent English based index with the contents of the entire web. Granted, the sheer volume of data is a barrier to making the index but removing that, only 4 US companies have crawled the entire internet. I'm going to have to disagree with you on that one. To write a crawler capable of the scale and timeliness to crawl the entire web in a week or two requires some pretty solid engineering. I don't however disagree that building a good search is also difficult.