21 ms·

United States vs. Google

404 points by headalgorithm 6y ago

coder1001 6y ago
Correct me if I am wrong, but is there anything stopping anyone from starting a new (better) search engine, and promoting it like crazy? Maybe even pay users a portion of the ads revenue for using the new search engine? I understand there are economies of scale here, but if a few investors got together what's to stop them from achieving this?
- blitz_skull 6y ago
  Theoretically there’s nothing stopping them. But I personally think realistically it’s too far gone for this current generation. Computer literacy is too low. The same way an entire class of people (looking at you, Grandma) think that Microsoft Windows IS the computer, many people think Google IS the internet. And to some degree they aren’t wrong. Overcoming that perception is going to be insanely expensive and time-consuming. Not to say it shouldn’t be done. Not to say it couldn’t be done, but man, talk about an uphill battle. Especially as Google will naturally mobilize their own machine to crush this new competition.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    I guess the question is, to what degree is this like worrying that people identify Xerox with photocopiers? People are still gonna be saying "googling" in a decade, certainly, but there are lots of ways that could go that don't help Google as a company.
    - blitz_skull 6y ago
      I think the biggest difference is the degree of interaction. I'm 25 and have used a photocopier a whopping 5-10 times in my life. It's a non-impact. The internet, however, is different in both the frequency of interaction and the import of being transparent. Also, as far as I can tell, it would be an order of magnitude cheaper to start a new photocopying machine because the tricks and tactics that Xerox could ostensibly use to slow down your new startup are relatively benign. Google controls (more or less) the way anyone, anywhere (who isn't tech-savvy) will find you as an online business. Kinda scary.
- ffpip 6y ago
  The reason Google is because of their AI. And the reason their AI is good is because of the massive amount of data they collect by violating privacy. No other company can start right now. Their search engine is years of efforts of collecting every user's data in Chrome for determining 'freshness', page rank and other related stuff.
  - throwaway6734 6y ago
    How is this different than Coke and their brand?
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      Because Coke doesn't collect massive amounts of data from their customers to feed AIs? I think you may have replied to the wrong post, because your post doesn't make a lot of sense as a reply to the parent.
    - arrosenberg 6y ago
      How is Coke leveraging their strength in the beverage market to dominate another market?
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    You are making the same flawed argument that the DOJ complaint is making: that Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon, some of the largest companies Earth has ever seen, somehow can't afford to compete in search, which is plainly ridiculous.
    - macintux 6y ago
      They could compete, but it would be a money hole. You’d have to spend billions and years to reach some level of parity with Google to persuade enough people to switch, and even then the marketing spend necessary to reach any significant level of switching would be another massive investment.
      - 6y ago
- gilrain 6y ago
  The argument is that Google would use its monopoly in other areas to defend its monopoly in search. For instance, what if the most popular browser (Chrome, conveniently for Google) just... didn't work very well with this new search engine? Entirely innocent technical details, of course... a wonky library here, a faster protocol there which they can adopt first. Pretty soon, the new search engine is "the slow one" through no fault of its own.
- solipsism 6y ago
  The part you chose to put in parentheses is the hardest part. No matter what you did to improve the search experience, Google could match it at lightning speed because of their scale.
  - fnord123 6y ago
    aiui they still return results for pinterest and quora so it can't be that good.
- jrockway 6y ago
  Nobody is stopping anyone from doing this, and people are doing this. Whenever I lock my screen on Windows, I get an unremovable ad from Microsoft that says I can earn money for every search if I just switch to Bing. When you click "help" in Windows, it doesn't give you help -- it opens your a browser for a Bing search for something vaguely related to the problem, and the search returns no useful results. (It doesn't link to as much malware as it used to. Maybe that's because of my ad blocker though.) The reality is that Bing sucks. Hard. It can't even return Microsoft's knowledge base for a search term that Microsoft explicitly set up. Every time, I cut-n-paste the term into Google and that is how I resolve my question. (Of course being linked to Microsoft's own website! They wrote the software. They wrote the documentation. But their own search can't find it!) The problem is not Google being anti-competitive here. It's Microsoft that can't compete. They don't have two employees that said "hey, we should set up a monthly sync to make sure all the help in Windows gets linked to our knowledge base in Bing" between someone on the Windows team and someone on the Bing team. And that's the kind of thing that makes your company go out of business. The government can do very little to help you with that.
  - nyanpasu64 6y ago
    You can hide the Windows 10 lock screen ads: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-remove-advertising-windows-10#remove_ads_lock https://www.windowscentral.com/how-remove-advertising-window... Not sure if it works on all Windows 10 editions though.
    - jrockway 6y ago
      Ah, I see that now. It came back after my reinstall. (I'm good at turning off Cortana and sending my web browsing history to Microsoft. This one I missed, however.)
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  > is there anything stopping anyone from starting a new (better) search engine Nothing, but that's always been the case, with every monopoly. There was nothing stopping anybody from running telephone lines and competing with AT&T in the 80's except for AT&T's massive incumbency head-start.
  - aikinai 6y ago
    You chose the perfect example to disprove your own point. Other companies could not run phone lines. There are plenty of hard monopolies, and they’re very different from soft, virtuous cycle monopolies.
    - commandlinefan 6y ago
      Hm, ok, you're right - there was regulatory capture in place at that time, but when the phone companies started running lines in the first place in the 1800's, they had to work around the local regulations at the time as well. Worth noting that the AT&T breakup didn't involve restricting the artificial monopoly, but limiting the power of a single entity to control the market as they had.
- jcfrei 6y ago
  As described in the article: It's a chicken and egg problem. More people using a search engine, leads to more data for analytics, more analytics lead to better results and again more people using it.
- indigochill 6y ago
  People use Google because it's what they know and the alternatives for whatever reason do not sufficiently differentiate themselves in ways that the user cares about enough to switch. In order to be disrupt Google, you don't make a better Google. You identify something Google doesn't deliver and which people care about enough to use your search engine. I don't think anyone knows right know what that hypothetical killer feature is, and most probably assume it doesn't exist. On another level, though, incumbents have a habit of buying potential threats (which can be a pretty good deal when you're in venture capital land and need to show your shareholders high returns). Google's bought a number of companies with a different take on search over the years, such as Like.com and Clever Sense.
crazygringo 6y ago
Most interesting part IMO is at the end (emphasis mine): > That, though, is why it is a mistake to read the report as some sort of technocratic document... it is exceptionally difficult to make the case that any of these companies are causing consumer harm, which is the de facto standard for antitrust in the United States. Indeed, what makes Google’s contention that “The competition is only a click away” so infuriating is the fact it is true. > What matters more is the context laid out by Letwin: there is a strain of political thought in America, independent of political party (although traditionally associated with Democrats), that is inherently allergic to concentrated power — monopoly in the populist sense, if not the legal one. > Hatred of monopoly is one of the oldest American political habits and like most profound traditions, it consisted of an essentially permanent idea expressed differently at different times. “Monopoly”, as the word was used in America, meant at first a special legal privilege granted by the state; later it came more often to mean exclusive control that a few persons achieved by their own efforts; but it always meant some sort of unjustified power, especially one that raised obstacles to equality of opportunity. > In other words, this subcommittee report is simply a new expression of an old idea; the details matter less than the fact it exists. I think this reflects a lot of discourse I've seen on HN -- one commenter condemning Google/Apple/etc. for being a monopoly, and a second commenter observing the company doesn't meet the legal standard of a monopoly, but it's like both sides are talking past each other. It's because most people don't actually care about the meaningful technical definition of a monopoly -- they just don't like it when companies get too big, period. At the end of the day, it's like there's something inherently satisfying when the big guy gets knocked down, the idea that being big is bad in and of itself. I think that's a really valuable observation that Stratechery makes.
- lucasyvas 6y ago
  I'm one of the types that doesn't care much if a company has/hasn't reached the legal definition of a monopoly. This is because by the time anything reaches that point, the damage has already been done to the market. It doesn't take a time traveller to tell you what is going to happen once it reaches a particular point. I appreciate both perspectives, but openly take my position.
  - 6y ago
jeffbee 6y ago
The blogs and tweets I follow have coalesced around a particular view of this case, which is that it's pretty weak for the reasons mentioned in the OP: it seems to be trying to protect extremely large and well-resourced competitors (like Microsoft) and relies on facts which demonstrate the anti-competitive practices of Apple, rather than those of Google.
waterside81 6y ago
So if every phone/browser etc. asked you to pick your default browser at setup time - would that placate the DOJ? Wouldn't most people stick pick Google?
- Osiris 6y ago
  I believe your comment is a bit tongue in cheek about Microsoft's settlement over IE. The concern here is that government, especially lawyers, are not good at coming up with remedies. If the court rules Google is a monopoly, then what? What changes will be demanded, and will they "fix" the issue that the government is trying to solve?
  - TheCoelacanth 6y ago
    Anything short of breaking it up won't accomplish anything.
  - bun_at_work 6y ago
    Did you read the article? Or any of the lawsuit? The fix the gov't is pushing for seems obvious - in this case it would prevent companies in Google's position from making exclusive deals that promote their product over competitors. A specific example - Google pays Apple billions of dollars each year to make Google the default search engine. That wouldn't be allowed. What Apple does in response isn't outlined.
    - Osiris 6y ago
      The complaint is purposefully scant on remedy requests. I was trying to say that lawyers aren't good at solving business problems, not that they don't try to do it. The question I was posing is: Will the remedies that government asks for, actually solve the problem? The parent comment mentioned that one of the remedies for Microsoft was just to ask people which browser to use as their default, which seemed to be too little too late, so to speak.
- gniv 6y ago
  If the iPhone asked to pick a browser at setup time Chrome installs would skyrocket.
siliconmountain 6y ago
I'm surprised Ben Thompson is able to write such detail and publish in 24 hours without a team. As a one-person newsletter, it is impressive. Makes me feel sad that I don't publish even a single blog post in a year
amadeuspagel 6y ago
> what is SEO but a collective effort by basically the entire Internet to ensure that Google’s search engine is as good as possible? On the contrary, it seems like an advantage for other search engines that people aren't trying to game their system.
ankit219 6y ago
One key insight I found from the article is the distinction between European Commission and US approach when it comes to innovation and investment in tech. > Third, Google will argue that its deals for Android distribution and the tying of search defaults to Google Play Services (including the Play Store) (...) but is also Google’s just reward for having invested in the creation of Android. This last argument didn’t work in front of the European Commission, but it may be more effective before a U.S. judge. The Justice Department, meanwhile, probably has the strongest case on this point: sure, Google created Android, but it also made the choice to open source it, and if its attempts to re-seize control through blatant tying aren’t illegal then it’s hard to imagine what could be. This argument did not work with EU presumably because they look at it from the current stage perspective and hurting of choices vs just rewards for innovation. Android is open source, but very few manufacturers fork it because they are incentivized not to. There are customizations, and something better could come up if more people work on it. (slightly cheeky, but then maybe Google would not look to Apple to decide what features to add). I remember one time when Samsung was trying to create an OS for its smart TV based on android but decided against it and signed an exclusive MADA with Google years ago (and renewed in 2019 as well). The question I have here is: what if Google decides to take android private and claim ownership? It wont be well received in the dev community, but are they even allowed to do it? What would be the repercussions of the same?
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  They would only be able to do it if they get rid of any code at all that they didn't develop themselves, and then accordingly followed the rest of the licenses. I'd imagine this would be a huge clusterfuck.
  - vermilingua 6y ago
    Is that not the whole premise of Fuscia/Zircon?
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      That might very well be it, but that is very, very different from Android. If push comes to shove, I would expect most manufacturers to continue using Android instead of using Fuchsia or Zircon.
kerng 6y ago
I wonder if a different approach would work well. Every 12 years, take the largest 10 companies and break them up in chunks.
- thekyle 6y ago
  Why 12 years?
jcfrei 6y ago
The article mentions that the real focus of anticompetitive behaviour in Google's case should be the acquisition or integration of additional aggregators. In this case the Android app store. I think one of the most blatant anticompetitive behaviours is how Google has integrated the play store framework into lots of applications which means disabling it breaks them (or causes apps to show warning notifications). At the same time privacy features for apps themselves keep increasing limiting the possibility for new entrants to collect data on consumer behaviour. This gives Google itself an unfair advantage - which is entirely unrelated to the quality of their service (in this case the play store). This I believe should be the main focus of this DOJ lawsuit.
- mjevans 6y ago
  Google's search results are probably (I speculate for lack of data) as good as they are because of all of the privacy problems. Surely Google either knows who I am, or has cross referenced my interests over the years to similar individuals. Google also knows my emails. On mobile Google probably knows my GPS position, and anything with a maps context benefits from that. == The search has a lot of implicit input that, apart from just the keywords alone which would still be problematic enough from a privacy standpoint, would be insanely consumer harming to share at all.
  - mjevans 6y ago
    I as a consumer find value in the quality of Google's results and consider that the bigger harm is probably worsening this index on the repository of all knowledge we know. Therefore as competition in this space is naturally limited I would rather see a third option than status quo or break-up; recognition as a natural monopoly and regulations to benefit consumers.
dvduval 6y ago
I have to pay Google to compete against Google. I'm in education. And Google has a product for educators and students. So do I. Now Google's going to be able to smartly know who to advertise to and get their product in front of Google's customers better than I will be able to. They're just naturally a big bully.
- roryokane 6y ago
  What do you mean you have to pay Google to compete? Which of their products or services are you forced to buy? Google Search ads for your product?
acoard 6y ago
>But even if a company achieves monopoly position through legitimate means, it cannot take actions that do not advance plausible business goals but rather are designed to make it harder for competitors to catch up. This reads like a text-book definition of a "moat." It's no surprise to people that have been paying attention that moats are anti-competitive in nature, yet it'll be interested too see what, if any, impact anti-trust will have on the common wisdom of building moats.
- titanomachy 6y ago
  By the time you're big enough to have to worry about antitrust, you've already made it. I doubt this will affect the advice given to startup founders.
- zepto 6y ago
  Without moats of some kind, you end up with a commodity. In this instance, marginal value asymptotically approaches marginal cost, which in the case of software is zero. Ironically destroying the incentive to participate. The only alternative to moats is intellectual property, which is arguably far worse.
yaacov 6y ago
Side point, but > This, in turn, leads Google’s suppliers to work to make Google better — what is SEO but a collective effort by basically the entire Internet to ensure that Google’s search engine is as good as possible? Feels pretty confused to me. IMO, crappy sites with good SEO make Google worse for lots of queries.
- enumjorge 6y ago
  Yeah like the way Pinterest’s takeover of Google image results was an effort to make the search engine as good as possible /s
  - perardi 6y ago
    I am fully in support of Google using their monopoly power to bury Pinterest results. Really. Go ahead and stifle a company, because in this particular case, they make Google’s search results worse.
dsabanin 6y ago
I think Google is the best search engine. I don't have a problem with that. I do have a problem with them being the best search engine, top online ad platform and a developer of the top mobile OS, top video streaming service, top internet browser, top mapping/navigation service, among other things, at the SAME time. Their assets give them undue and unsupervised influence over a very big chunk of what's happening online. This gives them ability to control big part of collective human consciousness, across languages and borders. This kind of power for a good reason has been historically reserved for elected governments, made accountable to the people. At least in theory (a man can dream).
- VikingCoder 6y ago
  1) best search engine 2) top online ad platform 3) top mobile OS 4) top video streaming service 5) top internet browser 6) top mapping/navigation service Okay, you listed 6. What should the law say is the new limit for how many they should be able to have?
  - aloisdg 6y ago
    Lets say 1.
    - zepto 6y ago
      The divisions are arbitrary. A search engine is a number of components - e.g. a crawler, an index, and a user interface. Why should one company be able to own all three of these? Why not just one? Perhaps crawling should only be able to be sold as a wholesale commodity.
      - genidoi 6y ago
        What is the exact point that a crawler needs to be decoupled (at the corporate level) from it's front end? Is it measured by MAUs? Pages scraped? Or is it going by "it can be decoupled, so it should". The extreme version of your argument would have companies own the IP to a particular for loop's iterator variable name.
shadowgovt 6y ago
FTA: "although it has been frustrating to see the degree to which antitrust seems to have been politicized" I think that was always a bit inevitable. Antitrust is, at its heart, a tool to subvert the rules because the rules aren't fair; left to its own devices, unfettered capitalism is full of positive feedback loops that encourage winner-take-all situations in any case where resources are finite and one set of resources can be spent to acquire another (such as money and attention). Recognizing that doesn't make for a good world to live in, we have laws structured so that when you get so big you're hurting consumers, the government can step in and break up a company. But the questions of how big is too big, what constitutes "consumer harm," and how one breaks up a company aren't encoded in the law (because the law can't predict the evolution of the market itself). Those questions are always going to be obviously "judgement calls" and therefore very political.
residentfoam 6y ago
If I were the US authorities, I'd start asking/demanding Google to stop SSO across Search/GMail/Browser. Just because I am a GMail user does not automatically mean that you can trace all my web search. In addition, I'd demand removing Captcha-alike when using VPN services, to avoid them from tracking my IP. I mean, even if you are not logged-in, they can still correlate IPs across products.
- pbalau 6y ago
  > In addition, I'd demand removing Captcha-alike when using VPN services, to avoid them from tracking my IP. You'll demand that from whom? Is not Google that plops the captcha in your face, is the particular webiste/app that is doing it. Is the same thing as with the Facebook trackers/buttons.
  - residentfoam 6y ago
    It is also Google.
- richardwhiuk 6y ago
  > In addition, I'd demand removing Captcha-alike when using VPN services, to avoid them from tracking my IP. This feels like a random, irrelevant complaint.
austincheney 6y ago
If the feds really believed these ad tech companies are monopolies they can solve the problem more directly, and permanently, by rolling back the various legal protections these businesses can’t live without.
bumblebritches5 6y ago
Wouldn't it technically br United States vs Alphabet?
wonder_er 6y ago
At least Google's monopoly isn't based on coercion and threats of violence. I with the US Government didn't have a monopoly on coercion and threats of violence. It's hard for me to give a sh*t about the Department of Justice's take on _anything_ when they still prosecute drug possession. Repeat after me: - Google cannot legally kill people or put them in boxes. - The DoJ and it's subsidiaries kills people and puts them in boxes, "legally". Google has a 'natural monopoly' on search and tech-related things, by virtue of better services and spending money. Google doesn't have a _legal_ monopoly on anything. Department of Justice has a _legal_ monopoly on everything it cares to monopolize, but is actually pretty bad at its job. It's likely this entire issue is politically motivated to distract/contribute to political goals for the upcoming US election. As far as models for governence and large-group coordination, I'd trust Google way more than I'd trust the US Government. So why does everyone think the government will save us from Google? The best thing the DoJ could do would be disband itself and go permanently out of business. For example, another top HN thread right now talks about how "behavioral nudges" caused the NYPD to arrest 30,000 LESS people than they otherwise would: > Each year, millions of Americans fail to appear in court for low-level offenses, and warrants are then issued for their arrest. In two field studies in New York City, we make critical information salient by redesigning the summons form and providing text message reminders. These interventions reduce failures to appear by 13-21% and lead to 30,000 fewer arrest warrants over a 3-year period. Holy shit! Sending TEXTS causes the police to issue 30,000 less arrests? From the article: > Over 10 million people are arrested each year in the United States, and millions more are issued summonses that draw them into the criminal justice system and require court appearances. Let's move that from passive to active tense: Law enforcement agencies arrest 10 million people every year in the United States. Has Google arrested even 1% of that number? Why or why not?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Judgmentality 6y ago
  This is a red herring fallacy. The government can be more evil than Google and Google can still be evil. Does that mean we should not care that Google is evil? The government is the only tool we have to fight Google. And while there are lots of problems with our government, we still have the ability to enact change by voting. You can't really do that with Google, even as a shareholder. The founders have supervoting rights, so even if every investor voted against them they don't have to listen.
rland 6y ago
> there is a strain of political thought in America, independent of political party (although traditionally associated with Democrats), that is inherently allergic to concentrated power — monopoly in the populist sense, if not the legal one. > Hatred of monopoly is one of the oldest American political habits and like most profound traditions In what country does the author live? Americans are so used to concentrated power that they don't bat an eye when they need to pay $100/mo for DSL, $2500 for an ambulance ride, or 1000%+ retail cost on lifesaving medication. Or when their boss (usually acting in the capacity of a multi billion dollar conglomerate) insists they pee into a cup or be constantly tracked and spied on in their workplace. Or when a single company siphons 100+ basis points off their tax payment (Lockheed, military budget). Or when we allow a handful of private companies to put human beings into prison. Or when five companies own nearly all television output. Or when three companies decide arbitrarily whether we can participate in the financial system (credit ratings). Or when 2% of every single transaction goes to one of two companies (Visa or MasterCard). Or when billions of dollars are spent each election cycle by only a handful of players. Or when a handful of individual bankers destroy the entire country's pensions and retirement funds, and are rewarded millions of dollars for it. To Americans, ceding power to a entity controlled by a half dozen stupendously wealthy shareholders is as natural as breathing. Or, yes, when two companies (for most, just one company) control the flow of every single bit of information we see and hear online (Facebook or Google). Our allergy to concentrated power is the same one that a patient dying of AIDS would have against influenza. Though, let's be fair: HIV is a pre-existing condition. This lawsuit probably sputter, though, because it doesn't adhere to the working legal definition of monopoly. Which itself suffers from the same blindness to power shared by the super-majority of Americans. New laws for a new era? Look at who is on the judiciary. Look who is writing laws. Look at -- oh who am I kidding. We have made our choice the past few decades, and we are making our choice now.
- thayne 6y ago
  I think most Americans are unhappy with this situation. But we feel powerless to change it. We may have the right to vote, but we don't have options to vote for anyone that is incentivized to change the status quo.
abvdasker 6y ago
One thing I wish the piece touched on is the way that these platforms have evolved into anti-competitive environments due to a kind of vertical integration. Google doesn't just control the operating system or the OEMs. Their agreements with OEMs benefit their own applications over the competition's, effectively allowing Google to leverage its power as a platform to benefit its apps developed for its platform. We've seen the exact same dynamic play out with Amazon and its products. It's only this year that Apple has allowed third party apps to serve as replacements for its default web browser and other apps on iOS. This particular kind of anticompetitive behavior definitely meets the standard of negatively affecting consumers because of the extent to which it intentionally limits the end-user's ability to choose the competition.
kelnos 6y ago
> At the same time, whatever an Aggregator chooses to do on its own site or app is less important, because users and third parties can always go elsewhere, and if they don’t, that is because they are satisfied. This always strikes me as a weak argument. Facebook users can't go elsewhere because their friends aren't on other platforms. It doesn't matter if there's a more privacy-focused social network out there that people want to switch to. Network effects generally trump consumer choice.
- sixstringtheory 6y ago
  Friends' choices to use Facebook are also consumers' choices. What is the alternative? Either persuade your friends to move, or remove their choice via legislative action. Are there other options?
  - olau 6y ago
    Mandate interop?
  - will_pseudonym 6y ago
    How much choice did customers of the Bell System have? There was nothing stopping another company from stringing wires across the country and building their own telephone network separate from the Bell System. But they don't just have to build all that infrastructure, they have to have the customers that are already under the Bell System. So they would have to pay gigantic amounts of money to people to switch, because if they didn't, there wouldn't be a value to switching for that consumer. There are a lot of analogues to these two companies. And the argument against breaking up Facebook would be similar. It's wrong that they're being punished for building something that so many people have found useful. They spent billions building the network, and now they're shattered into multiple companies because of it? It's hard to know what the right thing to do is, in terms of benefitting the public, maintaining the incentive for future new technology & infrastructure to be built, and being fair to Facebook & its employees, shareholders, and customers. There's a lot to balance out, and it doesn't seem like there will ever be a right answer. But, I find the similarity to the Bell System very striking, and I do think that it being broken up was on whole the right thing to do for the country and its citizens, which is what a government is ultimately tasked with doing.
deleted 6y ago
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lanevorockz 6y ago
It's quite a shallow argument. Google's clients are not their users, the users is their product. Main case is the conveniently tax paradise located Ads team. They are the ones making the money and they are a virtual monopoly. If you want to advertise on the internet what options do you have for Ad platforms? Not many. That's why Tech Giants are now bigger then countries. We might be moving to the Ultra Capitalist future of Demolition Man.
Siira 6y ago
Telegram was (and is) a much better messenger, yet people in most Western countries continued to use WhatsApp because of the network effects. This is strong evidence that requiring interop is a promising legal intervention. Heck, there is no format you can use on external disks that works on both macOS and Windows. (ExFAT is prone to data loss.)
m0zg 6y ago
Apple would be wise to delay the release of their own search engine now, by a year or two, just to weaken Google. Basically, they'll get paid billions to twiddle their thumbs, while Google is fucked by the DOJ for their getting paid billions.
alex_young 6y ago
Consumer harm is easy to demonstrate IMHO. Google monopolized search with the great product they developed, and then tied it to an ever increasingly aggressive ad product which in turn makes all of the web practically unusable without filtering. There’s noting inherently expensive about serving http, and it should be getting ever cheaper as Moore’s Law progress along its merry way, but for this middle man we’ve all gotten addicted to.
- olladecarne 6y ago
  I think you've got the causality wrong here. There’s noting inherently expensive about serving http -> makes all of the web practically unusable without filtering -> Google monopolized search with the great product they developed Serving http is getting cheaper, therefore the filtering problem is getting harder, therefore it's harder for new competitors to emerge. Either way, I agree that ads are the root of the problem because it makes serving garbage http so cheap or profitable. Force people to make informed decisions about where to spend their time and money. Right now people just click away on anything so garbage clickbait is one of the most profitable models.
throwaway-sf 6y ago
FWIW, Google was the only big tech co to see a revenue decline YoY in Q2. They have a valuation of around 1T, which is now less than half Apple, and a third less Amazon. Search has naturally become less essential to accessing the internet when people are spending more and more time on closed platform native apps, streaming services, gaming, etc. They seem to have put all their eggs in the search basket, which looks risky in a world where the most popular platforms keep people off the open internet.
- anamexis 6y ago
  They may have put all their eggs in the search basket, but it wasn't for lack of trying other baskets.
PrinceKropotkin 6y ago
> "Competition is only a click away" I must be crazy! The competition (bing, duckduckgo) is exactly the same service down to the same shitty interface minus the autoscraped crap on the side. If there's competition it's not on the internet I have access to. Where's the search engine I actually transact to use? That's what real competition would look like.
ajarmst 6y ago
I'm old enough to remember the 'Look and Feel' and Microsoft vs. Netscape suits. By the time the antitrust actions against Microsoft and the whole SCO/Linux fiasco worked their ways through the system, the judgements were largely irrelevant or moot (in the colloquial sense). I think an additional value of actions like this are to enter some of the issues that the modern information economy---which operate on scales at least an order of magnitude faster---into the legal record and provide basic arguments and interpretations that can afford the development of new law and precedent. Even bad or silly decisions (hello, 'right to be forgotten' and cookie warnings) provide a foundation for legal challenge and new laws (viz. Section 230, although that last has also been serving as an illustration of how ignorant (hi, Donald) or cynical (hi, Joe) legislators can be about the law.) Minor dig at the generally very good article: complaining that something has become politicized in 2020 is almost quaint. Ya think?

404 points by headalgorithm 6y ago

Correct me if I am wrong, but is there anything stopping anyone from starting a new (better) search engine, and promoting it like crazy? Maybe even pay users a portion of the ads revenue for using the new search engine? I understand there are economies of scale here, but if a few investors got together what's to stop them from achieving this?

blitz_skull 6y ago
Theoretically there’s nothing stopping them. But I personally think realistically it’s too far gone for this current generation. Computer literacy is too low. The same way an entire class of people (looking at you, Grandma) think that Microsoft Windows IS the computer, many people think Google IS the internet. And to some degree they aren’t wrong. Overcoming that perception is going to be insanely expensive and time-consuming. Not to say it shouldn’t be done. Not to say it couldn’t be done, but man, talk about an uphill battle. Especially as Google will naturally mobilize their own machine to crush this new competition.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  I guess the question is, to what degree is this like worrying that people identify Xerox with photocopiers? People are still gonna be saying "googling" in a decade, certainly, but there are lots of ways that could go that don't help Google as a company.
  - blitz_skull 6y ago
    I think the biggest difference is the degree of interaction. I'm 25 and have used a photocopier a whopping 5-10 times in my life. It's a non-impact. The internet, however, is different in both the frequency of interaction and the import of being transparent. Also, as far as I can tell, it would be an order of magnitude cheaper to start a new photocopying machine because the tricks and tactics that Xerox could ostensibly use to slow down your new startup are relatively benign. Google controls (more or less) the way anyone, anywhere (who isn't tech-savvy) will find you as an online business. Kinda scary.
ffpip 6y ago
The reason Google is because of their AI. And the reason their AI is good is because of the massive amount of data they collect by violating privacy. No other company can start right now. Their search engine is years of efforts of collecting every user's data in Chrome for determining 'freshness', page rank and other related stuff.
- throwaway6734 6y ago
  How is this different than Coke and their brand?
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    Because Coke doesn't collect massive amounts of data from their customers to feed AIs? I think you may have replied to the wrong post, because your post doesn't make a lot of sense as a reply to the parent.
  - arrosenberg 6y ago
    How is Coke leveraging their strength in the beverage market to dominate another market?
- jeffbee 6y ago
  You are making the same flawed argument that the DOJ complaint is making: that Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon, some of the largest companies Earth has ever seen, somehow can't afford to compete in search, which is plainly ridiculous.
  - macintux 6y ago
    They could compete, but it would be a money hole. You’d have to spend billions and years to reach some level of parity with Google to persuade enough people to switch, and even then the marketing spend necessary to reach any significant level of switching would be another massive investment.
    - 6y ago
gilrain 6y ago
The argument is that Google would use its monopoly in other areas to defend its monopoly in search. For instance, what if the most popular browser (Chrome, conveniently for Google) just... didn't work very well with this new search engine? Entirely innocent technical details, of course... a wonky library here, a faster protocol there which they can adopt first. Pretty soon, the new search engine is "the slow one" through no fault of its own.
solipsism 6y ago
The part you chose to put in parentheses is the hardest part. No matter what you did to improve the search experience, Google could match it at lightning speed because of their scale.
- fnord123 6y ago
  aiui they still return results for pinterest and quora so it can't be that good.
jrockway 6y ago
Nobody is stopping anyone from doing this, and people are doing this. Whenever I lock my screen on Windows, I get an unremovable ad from Microsoft that says I can earn money for every search if I just switch to Bing. When you click "help" in Windows, it doesn't give you help -- it opens your a browser for a Bing search for something vaguely related to the problem, and the search returns no useful results. (It doesn't link to as much malware as it used to. Maybe that's because of my ad blocker though.) The reality is that Bing sucks. Hard. It can't even return Microsoft's knowledge base for a search term that Microsoft explicitly set up. Every time, I cut-n-paste the term into Google and that is how I resolve my question. (Of course being linked to Microsoft's own website! They wrote the software. They wrote the documentation. But their own search can't find it!) The problem is not Google being anti-competitive here. It's Microsoft that can't compete. They don't have two employees that said "hey, we should set up a monthly sync to make sure all the help in Windows gets linked to our knowledge base in Bing" between someone on the Windows team and someone on the Bing team. And that's the kind of thing that makes your company go out of business. The government can do very little to help you with that.
- nyanpasu64 6y ago
  You can hide the Windows 10 lock screen ads: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-remove-advertising-windows-10#remove_ads_lock https://www.windowscentral.com/how-remove-advertising-window... Not sure if it works on all Windows 10 editions though.
  - jrockway 6y ago
    Ah, I see that now. It came back after my reinstall. (I'm good at turning off Cortana and sending my web browsing history to Microsoft. This one I missed, however.)
commandlinefan 6y ago
> is there anything stopping anyone from starting a new (better) search engine Nothing, but that's always been the case, with every monopoly. There was nothing stopping anybody from running telephone lines and competing with AT&T in the 80's except for AT&T's massive incumbency head-start.
- aikinai 6y ago
  You chose the perfect example to disprove your own point. Other companies could not run phone lines. There are plenty of hard monopolies, and they’re very different from soft, virtuous cycle monopolies.
  - commandlinefan 6y ago
    Hm, ok, you're right - there was regulatory capture in place at that time, but when the phone companies started running lines in the first place in the 1800's, they had to work around the local regulations at the time as well. Worth noting that the AT&T breakup didn't involve restricting the artificial monopoly, but limiting the power of a single entity to control the market as they had.
jcfrei 6y ago
As described in the article: It's a chicken and egg problem. More people using a search engine, leads to more data for analytics, more analytics lead to better results and again more people using it.
indigochill 6y ago
People use Google because it's what they know and the alternatives for whatever reason do not sufficiently differentiate themselves in ways that the user cares about enough to switch. In order to be disrupt Google, you don't make a better Google. You identify something Google doesn't deliver and which people care about enough to use your search engine. I don't think anyone knows right know what that hypothetical killer feature is, and most probably assume it doesn't exist. On another level, though, incumbents have a habit of buying potential threats (which can be a pretty good deal when you're in venture capital land and need to show your shareholders high returns). Google's bought a number of companies with a different take on search over the years, such as Like.com and Clever Sense.

crazygringo 6y ago

Most interesting part IMO is at the end (emphasis mine): > That, though, is why it is a mistake to read the report as some sort of technocratic document... it is exceptionally difficult to make the case that any of these companies are causing consumer harm, which is the de facto standard for antitrust in the United States. Indeed, what makes Google’s contention that “The competition is only a click away” so infuriating is the fact it is true. > What matters more is the context laid out by Letwin: there is a strain of political thought in America, independent of political party (although traditionally associated with Democrats), that is inherently allergic to concentrated power — monopoly in the populist sense, if not the legal one. > Hatred of monopoly is one of the oldest American political habits and like most profound traditions, it consisted of an essentially permanent idea expressed differently at different times. “Monopoly”, as the word was used in America, meant at first a special legal privilege granted by the state; later it came more often to mean exclusive control that a few persons achieved by their own efforts; but it always meant some sort of unjustified power, especially one that raised obstacles to equality of opportunity. > In other words, this subcommittee report is simply a new expression of an old idea; the details matter less than the fact it exists. I think this reflects a lot of discourse I've seen on HN -- one commenter condemning Google/Apple/etc. for being a monopoly, and a second commenter observing the company doesn't meet the legal standard of a monopoly, but it's like both sides are talking past each other. It's because most people don't actually care about the meaningful technical definition of a monopoly -- they just don't like it when companies get too big, period. At the end of the day, it's like there's something inherently satisfying when the big guy gets knocked down, the idea that being big is bad in and of itself. I think that's a really valuable observation that Stratechery makes.

lucasyvas 6y ago
I'm one of the types that doesn't care much if a company has/hasn't reached the legal definition of a monopoly. This is because by the time anything reaches that point, the damage has already been done to the market. It doesn't take a time traveller to tell you what is going to happen once it reaches a particular point. I appreciate both perspectives, but openly take my position.
- 6y ago

jeffbee 6y ago

The blogs and tweets I follow have coalesced around a particular view of this case, which is that it's pretty weak for the reasons mentioned in the OP: it seems to be trying to protect extremely large and well-resourced competitors (like Microsoft) and relies on facts which demonstrate the anti-competitive practices of Apple, rather than those of Google.

waterside81 6y ago

So if every phone/browser etc. asked you to pick your default browser at setup time - would that placate the DOJ? Wouldn't most people stick pick Google?

Osiris 6y ago
I believe your comment is a bit tongue in cheek about Microsoft's settlement over IE. The concern here is that government, especially lawyers, are not good at coming up with remedies. If the court rules Google is a monopoly, then what? What changes will be demanded, and will they "fix" the issue that the government is trying to solve?
- TheCoelacanth 6y ago
  Anything short of breaking it up won't accomplish anything.
- bun_at_work 6y ago
  Did you read the article? Or any of the lawsuit? The fix the gov't is pushing for seems obvious - in this case it would prevent companies in Google's position from making exclusive deals that promote their product over competitors. A specific example - Google pays Apple billions of dollars each year to make Google the default search engine. That wouldn't be allowed. What Apple does in response isn't outlined.
  - Osiris 6y ago
    The complaint is purposefully scant on remedy requests. I was trying to say that lawyers aren't good at solving business problems, not that they don't try to do it. The question I was posing is: Will the remedies that government asks for, actually solve the problem? The parent comment mentioned that one of the remedies for Microsoft was just to ask people which browser to use as their default, which seemed to be too little too late, so to speak.
gniv 6y ago
If the iPhone asked to pick a browser at setup time Chrome installs would skyrocket.

siliconmountain 6y ago

I'm surprised Ben Thompson is able to write such detail and publish in 24 hours without a team. As a one-person newsletter, it is impressive. Makes me feel sad that I don't publish even a single blog post in a year

amadeuspagel 6y ago

> what is SEO but a collective effort by basically the entire Internet to ensure that Google’s search engine is as good as possible? On the contrary, it seems like an advantage for other search engines that people aren't trying to game their system.

ankit219 6y ago

One key insight I found from the article is the distinction between European Commission and US approach when it comes to innovation and investment in tech. > Third, Google will argue that its deals for Android distribution and the tying of search defaults to Google Play Services (including the Play Store) (...) but is also Google’s just reward for having invested in the creation of Android. This last argument didn’t work in front of the European Commission, but it may be more effective before a U.S. judge. The Justice Department, meanwhile, probably has the strongest case on this point: sure, Google created Android, but it also made the choice to open source it, and if its attempts to re-seize control through blatant tying aren’t illegal then it’s hard to imagine what could be. This argument did not work with EU presumably because they look at it from the current stage perspective and hurting of choices vs just rewards for innovation. Android is open source, but very few manufacturers fork it because they are incentivized not to. There are customizations, and something better could come up if more people work on it. (slightly cheeky, but then maybe Google would not look to Apple to decide what features to add). I remember one time when Samsung was trying to create an OS for its smart TV based on android but decided against it and signed an exclusive MADA with Google years ago (and renewed in 2019 as well). The question I have here is: what if Google decides to take android private and claim ownership? It wont be well received in the dev community, but are they even allowed to do it? What would be the repercussions of the same?

sudosysgen 6y ago
They would only be able to do it if they get rid of any code at all that they didn't develop themselves, and then accordingly followed the rest of the licenses. I'd imagine this would be a huge clusterfuck.
- vermilingua 6y ago
  Is that not the whole premise of Fuscia/Zircon?
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    That might very well be it, but that is very, very different from Android. If push comes to shove, I would expect most manufacturers to continue using Android instead of using Fuchsia or Zircon.

kerng 6y ago

I wonder if a different approach would work well. Every 12 years, take the largest 10 companies and break them up in chunks.

thekyle 6y ago
Why 12 years?

jcfrei 6y ago

The article mentions that the real focus of anticompetitive behaviour in Google's case should be the acquisition or integration of additional aggregators. In this case the Android app store. I think one of the most blatant anticompetitive behaviours is how Google has integrated the play store framework into lots of applications which means disabling it breaks them (or causes apps to show warning notifications). At the same time privacy features for apps themselves keep increasing limiting the possibility for new entrants to collect data on consumer behaviour. This gives Google itself an unfair advantage - which is entirely unrelated to the quality of their service (in this case the play store). This I believe should be the main focus of this DOJ lawsuit.

mjevans 6y ago
Google's search results are probably (I speculate for lack of data) as good as they are because of all of the privacy problems. Surely Google either knows who I am, or has cross referenced my interests over the years to similar individuals. Google also knows my emails. On mobile Google probably knows my GPS position, and anything with a maps context benefits from that. == The search has a lot of implicit input that, apart from just the keywords alone which would still be problematic enough from a privacy standpoint, would be insanely consumer harming to share at all.
- mjevans 6y ago
  I as a consumer find value in the quality of Google's results and consider that the bigger harm is probably worsening this index on the repository of all knowledge we know. Therefore as competition in this space is naturally limited I would rather see a third option than status quo or break-up; recognition as a natural monopoly and regulations to benefit consumers.

dvduval 6y ago

I have to pay Google to compete against Google. I'm in education. And Google has a product for educators and students. So do I. Now Google's going to be able to smartly know who to advertise to and get their product in front of Google's customers better than I will be able to. They're just naturally a big bully.

roryokane 6y ago
What do you mean you have to pay Google to compete? Which of their products or services are you forced to buy? Google Search ads for your product?

acoard 6y ago

>But even if a company achieves monopoly position through legitimate means, it cannot take actions that do not advance plausible business goals but rather are designed to make it harder for competitors to catch up. This reads like a text-book definition of a "moat." It's no surprise to people that have been paying attention that moats are anti-competitive in nature, yet it'll be interested too see what, if any, impact anti-trust will have on the common wisdom of building moats.

titanomachy 6y ago
By the time you're big enough to have to worry about antitrust, you've already made it. I doubt this will affect the advice given to startup founders.
zepto 6y ago
Without moats of some kind, you end up with a commodity. In this instance, marginal value asymptotically approaches marginal cost, which in the case of software is zero. Ironically destroying the incentive to participate. The only alternative to moats is intellectual property, which is arguably far worse.

yaacov 6y ago

Side point, but > This, in turn, leads Google’s suppliers to work to make Google better — what is SEO but a collective effort by basically the entire Internet to ensure that Google’s search engine is as good as possible? Feels pretty confused to me. IMO, crappy sites with good SEO make Google worse for lots of queries.

enumjorge 6y ago
Yeah like the way Pinterest’s takeover of Google image results was an effort to make the search engine as good as possible /s
- perardi 6y ago
  I am fully in support of Google using their monopoly power to bury Pinterest results. Really. Go ahead and stifle a company, because in this particular case, they make Google’s search results worse.

dsabanin 6y ago

I think Google is the best search engine. I don't have a problem with that. I do have a problem with them being the best search engine, top online ad platform and a developer of the top mobile OS, top video streaming service, top internet browser, top mapping/navigation service, among other things, at the SAME time. Their assets give them undue and unsupervised influence over a very big chunk of what's happening online. This gives them ability to control big part of collective human consciousness, across languages and borders. This kind of power for a good reason has been historically reserved for elected governments, made accountable to the people. At least in theory (a man can dream).

VikingCoder 6y ago
1) best search engine 2) top online ad platform 3) top mobile OS 4) top video streaming service 5) top internet browser 6) top mapping/navigation service Okay, you listed 6. What should the law say is the new limit for how many they should be able to have?
- aloisdg 6y ago
  Lets say 1.
  - zepto 6y ago
    The divisions are arbitrary. A search engine is a number of components - e.g. a crawler, an index, and a user interface. Why should one company be able to own all three of these? Why not just one? Perhaps crawling should only be able to be sold as a wholesale commodity.
    - genidoi 6y ago
      What is the exact point that a crawler needs to be decoupled (at the corporate level) from it's front end? Is it measured by MAUs? Pages scraped? Or is it going by "it can be decoupled, so it should". The extreme version of your argument would have companies own the IP to a particular for loop's iterator variable name.

shadowgovt 6y ago

FTA: "although it has been frustrating to see the degree to which antitrust seems to have been politicized" I think that was always a bit inevitable. Antitrust is, at its heart, a tool to subvert the rules because the rules aren't fair; left to its own devices, unfettered capitalism is full of positive feedback loops that encourage winner-take-all situations in any case where resources are finite and one set of resources can be spent to acquire another (such as money and attention). Recognizing that doesn't make for a good world to live in, we have laws structured so that when you get so big you're hurting consumers, the government can step in and break up a company. But the questions of how big is too big, what constitutes "consumer harm," and how one breaks up a company aren't encoded in the law (because the law can't predict the evolution of the market itself). Those questions are always going to be obviously "judgement calls" and therefore very political.

residentfoam 6y ago

If I were the US authorities, I'd start asking/demanding Google to stop SSO across Search/GMail/Browser. Just because I am a GMail user does not automatically mean that you can trace all my web search. In addition, I'd demand removing Captcha-alike when using VPN services, to avoid them from tracking my IP. I mean, even if you are not logged-in, they can still correlate IPs across products.

pbalau 6y ago
> In addition, I'd demand removing Captcha-alike when using VPN services, to avoid them from tracking my IP. You'll demand that from whom? Is not Google that plops the captcha in your face, is the particular webiste/app that is doing it. Is the same thing as with the Facebook trackers/buttons.
- residentfoam 6y ago
  It is also Google.
richardwhiuk 6y ago
> In addition, I'd demand removing Captcha-alike when using VPN services, to avoid them from tracking my IP. This feels like a random, irrelevant complaint.

austincheney 6y ago

If the feds really believed these ad tech companies are monopolies they can solve the problem more directly, and permanently, by rolling back the various legal protections these businesses can’t live without.

bumblebritches5 6y ago

Wouldn't it technically br United States vs Alphabet?

wonder_er 6y ago

At least Google's monopoly isn't based on coercion and threats of violence. I with the US Government didn't have a monopoly on coercion and threats of violence. It's hard for me to give a sh*t about the Department of Justice's take on _anything_ when they still prosecute drug possession. Repeat after me: - Google cannot legally kill people or put them in boxes. - The DoJ and it's subsidiaries kills people and puts them in boxes, "legally". Google has a 'natural monopoly' on search and tech-related things, by virtue of better services and spending money. Google doesn't have a _legal_ monopoly on anything. Department of Justice has a _legal_ monopoly on everything it cares to monopolize, but is actually pretty bad at its job. It's likely this entire issue is politically motivated to distract/contribute to political goals for the upcoming US election. As far as models for governence and large-group coordination, I'd trust Google way more than I'd trust the US Government. So why does everyone think the government will save us from Google? The best thing the DoJ could do would be disband itself and go permanently out of business. For example, another top HN thread right now talks about how "behavioral nudges" caused the NYPD to arrest 30,000 LESS people than they otherwise would: > Each year, millions of Americans fail to appear in court for low-level offenses, and warrants are then issued for their arrest. In two field studies in New York City, we make critical information salient by redesigning the summons form and providing text message reminders. These interventions reduce failures to appear by 13-21% and lead to 30,000 fewer arrest warrants over a 3-year period. Holy shit! Sending TEXTS causes the police to issue 30,000 less arrests? From the article: > Over 10 million people are arrested each year in the United States, and millions more are issued summonses that draw them into the criminal justice system and require court appearances. Let's move that from passive to active tense: Law enforcement agencies arrest 10 million people every year in the United States. Has Google arrested even 1% of that number? Why or why not?

deleted 6y ago
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Judgmentality 6y ago
This is a red herring fallacy. The government can be more evil than Google and Google can still be evil. Does that mean we should not care that Google is evil? The government is the only tool we have to fight Google. And while there are lots of problems with our government, we still have the ability to enact change by voting. You can't really do that with Google, even as a shareholder. The founders have supervoting rights, so even if every investor voted against them they don't have to listen.

rland 6y ago

> there is a strain of political thought in America, independent of political party (although traditionally associated with Democrats), that is inherently allergic to concentrated power — monopoly in the populist sense, if not the legal one. > Hatred of monopoly is one of the oldest American political habits and like most profound traditions In what country does the author live? Americans are so used to concentrated power that they don't bat an eye when they need to pay $100/mo for DSL, $2500 for an ambulance ride, or 1000%+ retail cost on lifesaving medication. Or when their boss (usually acting in the capacity of a multi billion dollar conglomerate) insists they pee into a cup or be constantly tracked and spied on in their workplace. Or when a single company siphons 100+ basis points off their tax payment (Lockheed, military budget). Or when we allow a handful of private companies to put human beings into prison. Or when five companies own nearly all television output. Or when three companies decide arbitrarily whether we can participate in the financial system (credit ratings). Or when 2% of every single transaction goes to one of two companies (Visa or MasterCard). Or when billions of dollars are spent each election cycle by only a handful of players. Or when a handful of individual bankers destroy the entire country's pensions and retirement funds, and are rewarded millions of dollars for it. To Americans, ceding power to a entity controlled by a half dozen stupendously wealthy shareholders is as natural as breathing. Or, yes, when two companies (for most, just one company) control the flow of every single bit of information we see and hear online (Facebook or Google). Our allergy to concentrated power is the same one that a patient dying of AIDS would have against influenza. Though, let's be fair: HIV is a pre-existing condition. This lawsuit probably sputter, though, because it doesn't adhere to the working legal definition of monopoly. Which itself suffers from the same blindness to power shared by the super-majority of Americans. New laws for a new era? Look at who is on the judiciary. Look who is writing laws. Look at -- oh who am I kidding. We have made our choice the past few decades, and we are making our choice now.

thayne 6y ago
I think most Americans are unhappy with this situation. But we feel powerless to change it. We may have the right to vote, but we don't have options to vote for anyone that is incentivized to change the status quo.

abvdasker 6y ago

One thing I wish the piece touched on is the way that these platforms have evolved into anti-competitive environments due to a kind of vertical integration. Google doesn't just control the operating system or the OEMs. Their agreements with OEMs benefit their own applications over the competition's, effectively allowing Google to leverage its power as a platform to benefit its apps developed for its platform. We've seen the exact same dynamic play out with Amazon and its products. It's only this year that Apple has allowed third party apps to serve as replacements for its default web browser and other apps on iOS. This particular kind of anticompetitive behavior definitely meets the standard of negatively affecting consumers because of the extent to which it intentionally limits the end-user's ability to choose the competition.

kelnos 6y ago

> At the same time, whatever an Aggregator chooses to do on its own site or app is less important, because users and third parties can always go elsewhere, and if they don’t, that is because they are satisfied. This always strikes me as a weak argument. Facebook users can't go elsewhere because their friends aren't on other platforms. It doesn't matter if there's a more privacy-focused social network out there that people want to switch to. Network effects generally trump consumer choice.

sixstringtheory 6y ago
Friends' choices to use Facebook are also consumers' choices. What is the alternative? Either persuade your friends to move, or remove their choice via legislative action. Are there other options?
- olau 6y ago
  Mandate interop?
- will_pseudonym 6y ago
  How much choice did customers of the Bell System have? There was nothing stopping another company from stringing wires across the country and building their own telephone network separate from the Bell System. But they don't just have to build all that infrastructure, they have to have the customers that are already under the Bell System. So they would have to pay gigantic amounts of money to people to switch, because if they didn't, there wouldn't be a value to switching for that consumer. There are a lot of analogues to these two companies. And the argument against breaking up Facebook would be similar. It's wrong that they're being punished for building something that so many people have found useful. They spent billions building the network, and now they're shattered into multiple companies because of it? It's hard to know what the right thing to do is, in terms of benefitting the public, maintaining the incentive for future new technology & infrastructure to be built, and being fair to Facebook & its employees, shareholders, and customers. There's a lot to balance out, and it doesn't seem like there will ever be a right answer. But, I find the similarity to the Bell System very striking, and I do think that it being broken up was on whole the right thing to do for the country and its citizens, which is what a government is ultimately tasked with doing.

deleted 6y ago

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lanevorockz 6y ago

It's quite a shallow argument. Google's clients are not their users, the users is their product. Main case is the conveniently tax paradise located Ads team. They are the ones making the money and they are a virtual monopoly. If you want to advertise on the internet what options do you have for Ad platforms? Not many. That's why Tech Giants are now bigger then countries. We might be moving to the Ultra Capitalist future of Demolition Man.

Siira 6y ago

Telegram was (and is) a much better messenger, yet people in most Western countries continued to use WhatsApp because of the network effects. This is strong evidence that requiring interop is a promising legal intervention. Heck, there is no format you can use on external disks that works on both macOS and Windows. (ExFAT is prone to data loss.)

m0zg 6y ago

Apple would be wise to delay the release of their own search engine now, by a year or two, just to weaken Google. Basically, they'll get paid billions to twiddle their thumbs, while Google is fucked by the DOJ for their getting paid billions.

alex_young 6y ago

Consumer harm is easy to demonstrate IMHO. Google monopolized search with the great product they developed, and then tied it to an ever increasingly aggressive ad product which in turn makes all of the web practically unusable without filtering. There’s noting inherently expensive about serving http, and it should be getting ever cheaper as Moore’s Law progress along its merry way, but for this middle man we’ve all gotten addicted to.

olladecarne 6y ago
I think you've got the causality wrong here. There’s noting inherently expensive about serving http -> makes all of the web practically unusable without filtering -> Google monopolized search with the great product they developed Serving http is getting cheaper, therefore the filtering problem is getting harder, therefore it's harder for new competitors to emerge. Either way, I agree that ads are the root of the problem because it makes serving garbage http so cheap or profitable. Force people to make informed decisions about where to spend their time and money. Right now people just click away on anything so garbage clickbait is one of the most profitable models.

throwaway-sf 6y ago

FWIW, Google was the only big tech co to see a revenue decline YoY in Q2. They have a valuation of around 1T, which is now less than half Apple, and a third less Amazon. Search has naturally become less essential to accessing the internet when people are spending more and more time on closed platform native apps, streaming services, gaming, etc. They seem to have put all their eggs in the search basket, which looks risky in a world where the most popular platforms keep people off the open internet.

anamexis 6y ago
They may have put all their eggs in the search basket, but it wasn't for lack of trying other baskets.

PrinceKropotkin 6y ago

> "Competition is only a click away" I must be crazy! The competition (bing, duckduckgo) is exactly the same service down to the same shitty interface minus the autoscraped crap on the side. If there's competition it's not on the internet I have access to. Where's the search engine I actually transact to use? That's what real competition would look like.

ajarmst 6y ago

I'm old enough to remember the 'Look and Feel' and Microsoft vs. Netscape suits. By the time the antitrust actions against Microsoft and the whole SCO/Linux fiasco worked their ways through the system, the judgements were largely irrelevant or moot (in the colloquial sense). I think an additional value of actions like this are to enter some of the issues that the modern information economy---which operate on scales at least an order of magnitude faster---into the legal record and provide basic arguments and interpretations that can afford the development of new law and precedent. Even bad or silly decisions (hello, 'right to be forgotten' and cookie warnings) provide a foundation for legal challenge and new laws (viz. Section 230, although that last has also been serving as an illustration of how ignorant (hi, Donald) or cynical (hi, Joe) legislators can be about the law.) Minor dig at the generally very good article: complaining that something has become politicized in 2020 is almost quaint. Ya think?