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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

• 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.
        • zepto 6y ago
          Indeed. “My” argument is a generalization of the argument people are making that Google should only be allowed to operate “one” service.
    • deelowe 6y ago
      So the ad business, which generates all the revenue is split off from everything else. All the various services including search die b/c they can't self sustain and all that's left is an ad platform akin to the former double click scenario. Now what?
      • zepto 6y ago
        Bing becomes the number one search engine.
  • TomasEkeli 6y ago
    one seems about right
    • deepsun 6y ago
      Then government shouldn't have allowed them to buy YouTube back then. So Google might ask -- why it was legal to acquire YouTube back then, but now it's illegal. We need to seriously reconsider SEC rules for approving acquisitions.
  • mcbutterbunz 6y ago
    It's not the number that OP is arguing, its this: > 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.
    • agrd00 6y ago
      Agreed, that’s an overly reductionist way of seeking a resolution. I say focus on worker capture. The only “market” Adam Smith mentioned is a free labor market, which is free by its ability to move between offers fluidly. We have that to an extent in tech but not really and it’s hardly pervasive. If the problem is the billions to influence culture, IMO its employee culture spend that’s the biggest downside to monoliths. Wealth-caring becomes the corporate mantra. Or Jesus in the old days. It’s clear there is a biological addiction to privatized monoliths boxing in agency to fetishizing the monolith, by tickling our limbic brain just right and repeating “New trend we’re selling!” all day. Let’s not let them do that, but let people work.
    • VikingCoder 6y ago
      Actually, they said, "I do have a problem with them being the best [six things], at the SAME time." It's reasonable to read that as the OP thinks the number should be less then 6. Yes, they also said other things, but I think I'm giving them a fair read of that sentence.
      • dsabanin 6y ago
        It's not in the number of the products, it's in the scale of each of those products and the influence that they give them.
        • VikingCoder 6y ago
          What should the law say is the new limit for the scale and influence they should be able to have?
  • 8ytecoder 6y ago
    They all feed off each other and that's a problem. When iOS was taking off, Google was legit worried about their search dominance being threatened. That's why they paid Apple top dollars to replace Bing as the default search engine on iOS. Same reason why they bought Android to make sure Apple doesn't get to dictate terms. Also the reason why they built Chrome. All of this made sure they have the most eyeballs and the data to train their search models better and better and better. If you look at history of Standard Oil, you'll see a similar pattern. Antitrust regulations were invented when people saw how this perfectly logical combination of actions could accumulate so much power.
    • d1zzy 6y ago
      I sure hope anti-trust law makes a distinction between good business decisions (that build moats around your business and allow you to not become obsolete and be outcompeted) and anti-competitive decisions. Or are we going to say now that pretty much any good business decision is anti-competitive if it's about trying to not lose market dominance?
  • pupdogg 6y ago
    Law’s official motto is also “In God We Trust”, can you define God?
    • VikingCoder 6y ago
      I happen to think it should not be the motto of the United States. In part because I don't think the Government should be trying to define what God is or is not.
  • artingent 6y ago
    One is plenty. Especially if "OS" is in the list. Microsoft in the 90s, and Apple and Google today have all used their OS supremacy to quash competition... quite often in extremely questionable ways.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • 737maxtw 6y ago
    Good question. These are questions we possibly should have asked in the 60s or 70s with the Automakers. Heck, let's think about THAT for a moment. When we look back at history we see that the big 3 took a number of anticompetitive actions over the years while managing to usually avoid government action through careful planning. (GM at times would hold back products in those decades, knowing if they went over a magic number of market share it was bad news.) But look at the RESULT. Look at 2008. Look at the future of self driving cars and the future of the trucking industry. By letting large monopolies run unchecked, they embed their ways of dependence into society such that impacts can be felt for generations. Maybe its not about the number but what the damage is. Edit: hit reply early, sorry. The big 3 managed to get taken down by the factors of the oil embargo and the growing Asian auto industry, but we still felt the effects I listed above. And, to that end, its worth restating that GM specifically tried to 'avoid' fitting the government definition.
    • xapata 6y ago
      So put a tax on bigness equal and opposite to its negative externality. Put the tax revenue in a rainy-day fund for whole-economy stimulus after market crashes.
  • Lammy 6y ago
    I read this with "best" implying a product they choose to use and "top" implying more like "inescapable".
  • mbesto 6y ago
    The same antitrust law that dictated breaking up AT&T and Standard Oil (among others): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Monopoly_and_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Mo...
    • dehrmann 6y ago
      I don't think breaking up AT&T was a success story. Instead of a national monopoly, you got regional ones and a long-distance provider. It was all still very over-pried and silly. The situation didn't improve for consumers until cell phone plans got close to the price of landlines.
  • TuringNYC 6y ago
    Are there any anti-competitive behaviors they have engaged in w/r/t #3, #4, #5, and #6 or would this just be punishment for punishment sake? I remember browsers before Chrome and Firefox. They were terrible. I'd love to see why Google should be punished for making a good product. I'm open to a good explanation. Same for Youtube. I cut my cable because we now get all our entertainment from Netflix and Youtube. We dont get locked into 2yr cable agreements, dont get magical regulatory recovery fees, $100 of charges, and stations that disappear (e.g., Disney on Fios). I'd hate to lose it just because the product is too good
    • deelowe 6y ago
      Also for youtube, how many people are now able to make a living producing content which they fully own and have control over the means of distribution?
      • closetohome 6y ago
        I do like to point out that whatever shenanigans YouTube is doing with their discoverability and promotion features, they still provide unlimited lifetime 8K video hosting for free. And that's a pretty good deal.
        • TuringNYC 6y ago
          Not only that, they allow anyone to become a publisher. You can be poor, you can live overseas, you can be a minority, you can have no connections -- and you still get to publish on YouTube -- and if you are good, they even send you traffic. Now show me another major media network that allows that.
        • cvwright 6y ago
          Yes, it’s called dumping, and it’s illegal to do this to expand a monopoly.
          • Siira 6y ago
            Dumping is only bad if it is temporary. Otherwise, it's called a natural monopoly.
  • golem14 6y ago
    Reminds me of "Life of Brian" REG: Yeah. All right, Stan. Don't labour the point. And what have they ever given us in return?! XERXES: The aqueduct? REG: What? XERXES: The aqueduct. REG: Oh. Yeah, yeah. They did give us that. Uh, that's true. Yeah. COMMANDO #3: And the sanitation. LORETTA: Oh, yeah, the sanitation, Reg. Remember what the city used to be like? REG: Yeah. All right. I'll grant you the aqueduct and the sanitation are two things that the Romans have done. MATTHIAS: And the roads. REG: Well, yeah. Obviously the roads. I mean, the roads go without saying, don't they? But apart from the sanitation, the aqueduct, and the roads-- COMMANDO: Irrigation. XERXES: Medicine. COMMANDOS: Huh? Heh? Huh... COMMANDO #2: Education. COMMANDOS: Ohh... REG: Yeah, yeah. All right. Fair enough. COMMANDO #1: And the wine. COMMANDOS: Oh, yes. Yeah... FRANCIS: Yeah. Yeah, that's something we'd really miss, Reg, if the Romans left. Huh. COMMANDO: Public baths. LORETTA: And it's safe to walk in the streets at night now, Reg. FRANCIS: Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let's face it. They're the only ones who could in a place like this. COMMANDOS: Hehh, heh. Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh. REG: All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us? XERXES: Brought peace. REG: Oh. Peace? Shut up!
  • dsabanin 6y ago
    It's not about the number, it's about how much influence other society one company should have. If we're not careful we may simply lose democracy to corporations. Some argue that it might already be too late.
  • MangoCoffee 6y ago
    isn't all six combined into one giant Monster? each one of these six also feed off each other. that's scary. isn't it?
  • bslyke 6y ago
    Assigning an arbitrary number in a law like this is ridiculous. So 1 under you're good, and 1 over that you're suddenly a law breaker? Furthermore, as other point out, how do you even objectively count these categorized "things" correctly? Even once you do have a number of "things" specified in a law, and this is somehow "objective", remember that objective reality cannot be perceived outside of the lens of the subjective. Therefore, your honor, your laws on blood alcohol level when driving are asinine and I rest my case.
  • bogwog 6y ago
    Think about it like this: what are the chances any other competitor will be able to challenge those products and succeed? If some other innovative company “started in a garage” or whatever does challenge one of those, Google has the power to kill it before it becomes a threat, cripple it while they copy the technology or poach the development team, acquire the company with a truckload of money, etc. So in the end, Google will always come out on top, and consumers will always be stuck with them. The only remedy to that situation is government intervention.
    • nassims 6y ago
      I think a competitor could rise by doing the same thing tech giants do. Start small in a unrelated niche than with the success in that niche enter other sectors until you can compete with Google.
    • gretch 6y ago
      This is often repeated, but historical evidence does not support it. Today, Google shares the majority of it's presence in online ads market with Facebook. Did Google try to "kill" facebook? Yes, they tried super hard in 2011 with the launch of Google+. And that completely flopped and now Facebook is a major rival for Google. If we look at Facebook - facebook probably tried to kill snapchat and tiktok, major rivals to Instagram, and look how well those services are doing. Microsoft couldn't stop iOS or Android. The list goes on...
  • winwhiz 6y ago
    It's not like they are content dominating just those verticals. Agriculture anyone? https://x.company/projects/mineral/ https://x.company/projects/mineral/
• wwwdonohue 6y ago
  I sort of agree, but part of me also thinks that if a company builds the world's best mobile OS and search engine and ad platform and video streaming service and internet browser and mapping service... well, good for them! They built the best products and it seems like it would ultimately be anti-consumer to do anything about it. It's different if a company like Google establishes its dominance via one great product (search) and then wields that power to artificially protect its other lines of business through e.g. contracts, the same way Microsoft did with OEMs. Sure, nothing "illegal" about it, but ultimately, it fits the de facto understanding of antitrust being about "consumer welfare." A company leveraging its dominance in one business to exert control over others =/= a company having success because it built the best products.
  • shliachtx 6y ago
    Except they purchased their way into many of these. Their advertising business was built on a number of acquisitions (DoubleClick, AdMob) - strategic acquisitions, surely, and they improved on them since - but it is not as if they bult the business from the ground up. The same goes for video streaming (YouTube - after attempting to create their own), and mobile OS (Android). With Android in particular it can be argued that it would not be what it is today without them, but they also heavily leveraged their other services to promote and maintain control over Android.
    • tsycho 6y ago
      I see this oft repeated comment about Google acquiring YouTube, DoubleClick and Android. Yes they did. But the companies they acquired were tiny upstarts, which might have even died on their own. Google built them into what they are today, and deserve 90% of the credit for their current significance. The same applies to FB and Instagram as well, fwiw. Though imo, not as much for WhatsApp, which already had 400MM users and would have organically reached 1B+ users on its own.
      • john-radio 6y ago
        YouTube was delivering an average of 100 million video views per day in July 2006, months before the Google acquisition for $1,650,000,000 that same year. It's inaccurate to characterize them as a "tiny startup."
• jabbanobodder 6y ago
  But you're not cornered in. You might think they have a large influence over what is happening online (and they do), but you as an individual have a choice if you want to use the services they provide. Also this large influence is additionally strengthened by the fact that no other company can offer services (above mentioned) that match the quality of the product Google is giving.
  • ColoradoDev 6y ago
    I don't buy this argument. You, as someone up-to-date on technology, have a choice. But if you think that the average middle-to-later aged individual has the knowledge to make this choice and avoid their influence, than I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
    • jabbanobodder 6y ago
      But why is that Google fault? Short answer, it's not.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • munk-a 6y ago
    I can't speak to all of the points but when it comes to video hosting - no you don't. Content creators can't move off of youtube since it's more of a discovery service than a hosting service and it has locked viewers into its platform - it doesn't offer any way for dailymotion, vimeo, nebula, acorn, amazon, netflix, twitch or dlive to promote videos on their home page and due to their enormous market share content creators can't survive on any of the other platforms. And, again with respect to video hosting there are plenty of very valid competitors technologically - with respect to search if you secretly rebranded google to bing I doubt anyone except the most techie would notice a difference - they win in search because everyone "googles it" - they used to win because alta vista, ask jeeves, lycos and yahoo were all trash, but now there is legitimate competition.
    • 6y ago
• pier25 6y ago
  So what's the solution? Impose laws that don't allow Google to share information between their services/products?
  • eloisant 6y ago
    Break out Google into independent companies. The antitrust law already exist.
• joshspankit 6y ago
  It is my firm belief that companies will be larger and have more influence than (all) countries (combined). It’s also possible that the groundwork has been laid already with Google, Facebook, and Apple (along with other non-tech companies). IMHO every dollar you spend is more of a vote than the political votes.
• 11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
  Scope and scale don't transition into being a problem until they begin to behave with a political (or religious, or...) bias and work to influence their customers in ways outside of providing value. Your phone company, auto manufacturer or favorite restaurant chain should want to provide value regardless of their customers' politics. It's definitely crossing a line for them to covertly influence the political leanings of their customers.
  • olladecarne 6y ago
    Any decision they make can be classified as "influencing political leanings". If they just serve you content that you agree with, that's influencing your political leaning by reinforcing your beliefs (IMO this is what Youtube already does). If they serve you any other content, unless it's random and therefore useless, then anyone can claim they are influencing political leanings. In fact, any company whose business model includes providing information can be claimed to "influence political leanings" since that's as well-defined as saying "adds information". So a library also falls under this, as does Netflix, and Spotify, etc.
    • 11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
      I agree, which is why I specifically said 'covertly'. Netflix and Spotify suggest movies and music they think you'll like, and they tell you they are doing so. Their recommendation engines add value. When I search Google, there is no disclaimer that they are slanting the results to match their political leanings in order to influence me away from mine.
• philjohn 6y ago
  I think all of those things are fine, in isolation, but it's pushing them all into the big draw, which is the search engine. Putting their own hotel/rental metasearch above the fold on mobile when searching for a hotel. Buying ITA and freezing out other users.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
  "I think Google is the best search engine." The OP is arguing that this case is about default settings, similar to the Microsoft case. In practice, someone else is deciding what is the "best" search engine for the vast majority of users, as these users never change default settings. It is arguable Google is paying millions of dollars to remove choice, and the question of what is the "best" search engine. If there were no "search from the address bar" or other "built-in search" with Google set as the default, what would happen. Would users choose Google. We cannot know because Google's distribution agreements have foreclosed the issue. Even if we all agree users would choose Google anyway, because it is unquestionably "the best", this does not explain why Google, with its monopoly on search, pays millions to become the default. Because the use of a search engine has been made a matter of "settings", e.g., address bar as search box, and not a conscious choice, e.g., typing the address of a search engine, Google's distribution agreements have removed user choice. The choice of search engine has already been made for them. It is like crapware that comes pre-installed on computers. One can argue users make a "choice" whether to use these programs or not, but the choice of whether to install them in the first instance has been removed, in exchange for payments. Sometimes the distributors make it difficult or near impossible to remove these programs, assuming a user even knows how to remove programs. Thanks to Google's negotiations with distributors, in order to "not use Google search", users have to change "settings". Generally, relatively few people ever modify settings. Hence there is a certain permanence to "settings". Companies pay millions to become the "default". There is nothing inherently "illegal" in making such agreements. However when the company paying millions to become the default already has a monopoly, then we have to question what is the true purpose of these distribution agreements.
• diegoholiveira 6y ago
  > This kind of power for a good reason has been historically reserved for elected governments, made accountable to the people. IMO, not even governments should have this kind of power. The same way we desperately needs to break big companies, we also need to stop big governments.
• nearbuy 6y ago
  > This kind of power for a good reason has been historically reserved for elected governments, made accountable to the people. I actually think that if the current government administration (or any administration really) had power over search, news and YouTube, it would be more abused than under Google.
• nswest23 6y ago
  If they had the kind of control over the human consciousness that you're suggesting they probably wouldn't be in the position of being sued by the federal government in the first place.