20 ms·

Google Antitrust Notes

308 points by headalgorithm 6y ago

matheist 6y ago
> You’d require that the monopoly offer a straightforward full-text-based document retrieval API that implements several different ranking algorithms and bills per search. You’d forbid it from engaging in any advertising businesses. Then you’d free up people to build consumer-facing search interfaces and compete to sell advertising on them. What does selling ads look like if search is not a monopoly? As an advertiser in the new world, I'd have to go around and buy ads on all the new search front-ends. I probably want to pay them proportionally to how much traffic they get (well, conversions, but let's say traffic). If there's a small number of large front-ends then maybe I go to each of them directly, but if there's a long tail of front-ends then probably there'd be a search middleman who the various front-ends contract with... I guess there's still Google Search, and Google AdSense, but now AdSense also sells ads on other front-ends, and Google Search works with other brokers besides AdSense?
- andyjohnson0 6y ago
  > As an advertiser in the new world, I'd have to go around and buy ads on all the new search front-ends. And site operators presumably have to deal with many more ad platforms, which is likely to be a complication for them. Theres a certain logic to the way it works now, even if it is (arguably) anti-competitive and undesirable.
- rightbyte 6y ago
  There would probably be more actually good adnetworks without Google Ads. No need to sign up with each search frontend or site. Today other adnetworks mostly serve sites that are shady, controversial or too small for Adsense since they can't compete.
- ackbar03 6y ago
  Is this actually the most likely scenario though? I agree it's hard to compete and have a search service completely indexing the entire internet. Is breaking up the front end the most likely?
- viraptor 6y ago
  Third parties providing a nicely packaged solution to schedule ads on multiple networks would be created a short moment after the split starts. On the more technical side, common APIs would be created. It's basically the case of skyscanner, kayak, etc. and the air travel companies.
- prepend 6y ago
  If Google had competition they would have to lower their prices and provide better quality ads and ad tracking. Click fraud is pretty real and I’ve had contacts say it’s 30-50% of actual ad revenue. Currently, this is just “factored in” but how neat would it be if this could be prevented. Google has no incentive to fix this as click fraud is profitable for them. For ad auditing, Google frequently shows ads to people outside my geolocation and doesn’t audit how they do this. Would be nice to fix this as it’s a decent number of botched customer interactions. Finally, pricing could be so much lower. I’ve advertised for low frequency terms where the minimum bid is $1 even though there’s only 1 or zero current advertisers. So the “auction” is against a floor set by google, not the market. If no one else is buying a keyword, the minimum should be very low and climb as multiple ad buyers drive the price up. This is probably the most annoying as it would save businesses so much money.
  - AJ007 6y ago
    One of Google's greatest strength was in the pre 2010 period was they were the only advertising sources that sold high quality traffic in massive volume and fraud was almost a non-issue. Go back to 2007 and try to run an ad campaign anywhere else online and it was a nightmare. Things have changed. Google repeatedly has modified the delivery settings of their ads for active campaigns, just as you complain about the geolocation issue. My guess is that if someone did a proper investigation Google would have to back pay advertisers many billions of dollars. This is fraud anyway you cut it. They have done the same thing with mobile ads. You disable the mobile app inventory and they modify the UI and re-enable it.
  - jefftk 6y ago
    > I’ve advertised for low frequency terms where the minimum bid is $1 even though there’s only 1 or zero current advertisers. So the “auction” is against a floor set by google, not the market. Showing excessive ads wastes users' attention and teaches them not to pay attention to other higher value ads. A price floor seems like a very reasonable way to handle this? (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
    - prepend 6y ago
- treis 6y ago
  They did this with the gas company where I live. Instead of buying gas from the gas company you contract with any number of 3rd parties and they turn around and pay the gas company to deliver it. It's not clear how this is better. The gas company still exists and takes the bulk of my payment. The 3rd parties tack on their service fee. And they basically all run a bait and switch where you sign a contract for a fix term and then the price gets jacked up if you forget to sign a new one. It's the worst of both worlds. The gas company still has a delivery monopoly. And now we've got a bunch of scummy 3rd parties running what are basically scams.
threeseed 6y ago
> The Complaint says that mobile traffic in the US is 60% iOS vs 40% Android, which I hadn’t known. Apple routes all the search traffic to Google, which in return routes billions of dollars to Apple. The arrangement works great for both of them. Actually it doesn't. That's why Apple has been building out their search engine for the last few years. Just like with Maps at some point it will be good enough and they will push an update to Safari to use it as the default.
- Google234 6y ago
  Apple cares more about control than money. This is why they will throw away that income for their own search engine.
  - username90 6y ago
    Getting a big share of search volume would be worth more than their contract with Google.
- Angostura 6y ago
  Even apart from that Google may be the default search engine on mobile Safari but you can change it (I'm set to use DDG) so Apple may send the vast majority of searches to Google - but not all.
- jasonvorhe 6y ago
  Apple has a search engine? So they basically scrape the web themselves and serve the results via Spotlight & Siri, it just lacks a web frontend? Is there any additional information on that? I haven't heard of a Apple crawler user agent yet, but I could've just missed that. I always thought they'd be using Bing or DDG for that data. If Apple wanted to go into the search engine business, I'd have expected them to just aquire DDG, tbh.
  - BRedSox 6y ago
    This sums up essentially all I can dig up. https://www.coywolf.news/seo/apple-search-engine/ https://www.coywolf.news/seo/apple-search-engine/
tannhaeuser 6y ago
The world can't wait for this process to take several years. Nor can it gamble on US partisanship in antitrust matters. By the time any antitrust process can have results, the internet economy is destroyed and just serves FAANG, even more than it does already. Maybe the EU is waiting until after US elections, but they absolutely shouldn't put any hope in another administration (who are, after all, partly responsible for this monopolistic situation, and taking money from Google). Just as the digital tax initiative is going nowhere, so will this antitrust process.
- unionpivo 6y ago
  It would be worse to do it quick, fuck up and make Google even stronger via regulatory capture or something similar. And going in second time around would be even more difficult
  - Mindwipe 6y ago
    Yes, but a big part of the problem is a lack of agreement about what regulators are actually trying to achieve, and there being a lose coalition of political forces on tech regulation who actually have mutually contradictory goals and just agree on the mechanism. That is likely to cause significant issues in this process. For example, there is absolutely a political element that seeks to attack the market power of large technology companies because they want to force more control on public speech, and some who want to attack the power in order to explicitly prevent that.
    - tannhaeuser 6y ago
      In EU, telcos (and energy, etc.) are regulated. I don't see a reason why IT services shouldn't, given that the market is in a dead-end situation. Regulation can cover professional IT services (VMs/pods) as well as social (portability of social accounts, similar to mobile number portability), in addition to DNS, mail-, and web-spaces which are already de-facto regulated. Goal, among other things, is to break verticals, platforms, network effects, similar to net neutrality principles.
blueterminal 6y ago
Abolish antitrust laws. It does nothing but create monopolies. Milton Friedman on Anti-Trust and Tech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlwxdyLnMXM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlwxdyLnMXM
maurys 6y ago
It surprises me not to hear more concerns about strangling U.S. based tech giants at a time that China and the rest of the world is catching up. I'm not sure I buy that line of argument myself, but I did expect it to come up more prominently.
- chpatrick 6y ago
  Maybe as a country the US is more powerful with healthy competition among strong tech companies than with monopolies. Look at Intel and AMD.
- paganel 6y ago
  From half a world away the US tech industry has looked more "strangled" in the last 6-8 years compared to the 2005-2012 period (to give just an example), one could say that happened because of the concentration at the top (of talent and money, mostly, or of money keeping that talent in golden hand-cuffs). During that 2005-2012 timeframe you had a US search engine becoming really global, a US online retailer almost single-handedly inventing a new industry (cloud computing) and a US social-web company crushing almost all foreign competition on its own home-turf (and which could only be stopped by explicit Government intervention, as was the case with China explicitly blocking FB and with Russia directly taking control of VKontakte as a better way to counter FB).
  - antb123 6y ago
    cloud computing was invented by shared mainframes in the 70s and 80s and charges per MIPS. Amazon applied open source software to the hosting and specifically the network stack and security stack. The model was already there.
    - oblio 6y ago
      The model wasn't already there. Everyone means the public cloud. Mainframes were at best, private clouds.
    - xxpor 6y ago
      The key was VT-x/AMD-v becoming available.
fauigerzigerk 6y ago
>Speaking as a person who spent some years if his career working on full-text search, I doubt that there’s much left in the way of low-hanging fruit. Maybe so, but judging by my search results most of the fruit is still on the tree. Natural language understanding is an active field of research. Turning Google into a search utility is a bad idea. Splitting off the crawling part and turning that into a utility would be a lot more interesting. It would allow search engines to compete on search quality while sharing the capex required for crawling.
- throwaway3699 6y ago
  Crawling the web is the easy part compared to human labour needed for search quality algorithms.
  - cblconfederate 6y ago
    thanks partially to google, NLP is now more of a problem of (moderate) scale
    - andrepd 6y ago
      What? This is not remotely true.
      - cblconfederate 6y ago
        Applications built on pretrained bert don't necessarily need huge scale
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  I think we are at a point where a distributed index becomes an attractive idea. Compute nodes are cheap and every website could devote resources to support it. Considering how exclusionary google has become, web companies might have an incentive there to support a distributed solution. I don't know how developed those solutiosn are, though. Apparently there is some effort in Distributed SE coordinated by blockhains. I think this comes close to the idea of "Google as an utility". https://hackernoon.com/is-the-concept-of-a-distributed-search-engine-potent-enough-to-challenge-googles-dominance-l1s44t2 https://hackernoon.com/is-the-concept-of-a-distributed-searc...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nl 6y ago
You can make a case that Web search is a natural monopoly. Running the crawlers and indexers and servers is freaking expensive, requiring monster capex and operational expenditure. It’s not obvious to me that the world needs more than one. I wonder how true this is these days? I understand that the "long tail" of web queries is very important, but if you were to skip that for version 1, and concentrate on crawling the top 1M English language sites how much would it really cost?
- xiphias2 6y ago
  English is the language that needs the most resources, and where Google put the most effort. Actually any other language would be a smaller crawling/indexing investment, if really that was the hardest part. I don't know the current situation, but Yandex was better in Russia than Google a few years ago.
- vharuck 6y ago
  I'm not familiar with the mechanics of web crawlers, so hopefully somebody can shed some light. Would there be value in a search engines for specific topics? For example, movie reviews and blogs. Assuming you had a way to determine if a page is a review or blog, would it make indexing easier to ignore the rest? Could a tailored search engine be tweaked to give better results? I kind of think it would be useful, because some websites I use have really great search tools (e.g. ones with tags). But those are only for the website itself, so there's no crawling.
michaelt 6y ago
> To my surprise, a few members of my tribe were pushing back against this lawsuit. Personally I think there's plenty Google is doing that's wrong † but I'm just disappointed the antitrust complaint seems to be all about the advertising industry. As far as I'm concerned, the online advertising industry is already doomed. The first time there was a drive-by malware installation from an advert on a reputable website, the industry's fate was sealed. When I heard there would be antitrust action, I was hoping there would be more attention to all the other problems, so hearing it's all about competition in a dead industry is a disappointment. † Nonexistent support, low-privacy defaults in Chrome, perpetual "oopsies" breaking firefox support, over-enthusiastic anti-spam features forcing e-mail centralisation, iOS gmail constantly "forgetting" that I didn't want to install Chrome, reCapcha and DoH and AMP and GA all having the potential to act as centralised tracking, reCapcha being deliberately slow and difficult for people who disable browser fingerprinting, opaque and capricious treatment of youtube creators and android app developers, pushing sketchy browser "features" like "signed exchange" that badly solve problems of Google's own creation...
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > I'm just disappointed the antitrust complaint seems to be all about the advertising industry The DoJ focussed on search. Specifically, Google paying for the default slot. The DoubleClick/ad business is not directly addressed. The harms in the complaint are more widely discussed than in this article.
- creddit 6y ago
  > in a dead industry That “dead industry” is worth many $100s of Billions. What are you on about?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- zepto 6y ago
  † None of those would matter if Google had competition.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
ColinHayhurst 6y ago
> You can make a case that Web search is a natural monopoly. Thoughtful article, great writing but help me here: How can a natural monopoly (what ever that means) ever be a good thing? Imagine if we'd let one company extract, refine and distribute all oil. Or even a monopoly for any one of those three.
- jxf 6y ago
  That's not really what a natural monopoly is. In a natural monopoly, the high barrier to entry means it's essentially wasteful to encourage competition. For example, imagine operating the first power plant in a desert region. If it's expensive to set up power plants, then there won't be much point in encouraging competition; no one else will want to set up one. The operators of the power plant have a natural monopoly. It would be better to spend the resources required for a second power plant on servicing customers elsewhere instead of fighting over the same territory — so the monopoly is "good" in the sense that it disincentivizes a bad allocation of capital. Generally, natural monopolies get regulated (e.g. a power authority blessed by the local government operates the power plant instead of a private firm).
- ericmay 6y ago
  Colin - a natural monopoly is a pretty well-known economic concept. Essentially, you’re able to form a monopolistic business just by the nature of the business itself - you don’t have to conduct anti-competitive practices or buy out your competitors. For Search it’s straightforward. The more people who search on your platform, the better the results get. Eventually competitors can’t really emerge because the product is too good. This also happens with low costs as well at certain economies of scale. My argument against breaking up Google would be they face search competition via Amazon, Facebook, and even Apple. But I can see both sides here. That’s what makes it an interesting case!
- zaphar 6y ago
  How can a natural monopoly (what ever that means) ever be a good thing? The whole point of something being a natural monopoly is that it doesn't matter if it's good or bad. No matter what you do one company will tend to win it all over time. So in order to control such things the government (another natural monopoly) has to step in and put fences around the monopoly.
bluelu 6y ago
If someone would really want to break the Google search monopoly, they would seperate: - Crawling and document parsing. Imagine something like archive.org where all search engines would get the content from. This could also be used to enforce copyright legislation (e.g. deletions of documents, etc...). Today, it's nearly impossible to collect the data as google does, because most website owners won't even allow that you crawl them (e.g. distill networks anti bot protection, etc...) - Metrics (e.g. data from google analytics, dns resolvers, browser toolbards, browser statistics, etc...). Again this data should be available to everyone from a central authority. Then there could be more independent search engines building on top of that data. If that doesn't happen, then there will never be any competition. Todays copyright and data privacy laws even further strengthen a monopoly position, as smaller players will not even get access to some data (or at different pricing then google does)
- ricardo81 6y ago
  Having one crawler would not be desirable as it'd involve choosing which pages get crawled and how often for freshness. Point taken about sites being less available to crawl due to the bot whitelist approach but it is not a huge issue, though some large sites like Facebook go for a whitelist only approach. Regarding those other data sources, the more privacy conscious engines would perhaps object to particular kinds of data but agreed that the kind of scale and various sources that Google has at its disposal, does give it an advantage when it comes to search. There are alternatives beyond Google and Bing who do index the web albeit at the moment are smaller in scale, and likely outnumbered by all the Bing clones. There is a high barrier to entry wrt cost but the technical/capital hurdles of crawling are not so high as compared to ranking and indexing.
wombatmobile 6y ago
An alternative approach to regulating google's search monopoly would be to require google to either compensate users for harvesting their metadata, or prohibit google from harvesting metadata. This approach would have different consequences to the DOJ's approach. It would leave intact google's ability to provide useful services that Tim Bray and others like, whilst redressing the economic tidal wave that flows google's way, for the better. How would this work? There are many possibilities. Here are just 2, one of them individualistic and consumer oriented, the other social and community oriented: 1. Google gives coupons to users as compensation for harvesting their metadata. So if a user performs say 5000 google searches per year, google gives them coupons for say $500 which they can redeem on purchases made with vendors who advertise through google. 2. Google funds journalism by paying the metadata harvesting fee into a trust administered by an independent org that facilitates journalism. Like PBS or the BBC but not owned by the British Government, owned independently by a worldwide org that is affiliated with journalists associations. The logic behind #2 is that pre-google, advertising revenue funded the news business. Post-google, the news business has shrunk by more than 50% of journalists and so the quality of the 4th estate has suffered.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  > require google to either compensate users for harvesting their metadata This. Youtubers get compensated, why not ordinary users. Search, shopping and social media is work... It's the current year and billions are stuck home , many without even jobs. > How would this work? First you need a legal framework that allows users to sell their metadata. GDPR makes it illegal, but that's wrong. If this data has value (apparently it has a lot of value) , it should be tradeable for services. Incidentally, i think one of the benefits of the DoJ action is that it gets people talking about solutions that people called 'crazy' until yesterday.
  - alphager 6y ago
    > GDPR makes it illegal, but that's wrong. Where does the GDPR make that illegal?
jondubois 6y ago
The complaints resonate strongly with an article I wrote in 2018 when I tried to make a case for the value of cryptocurrencies: https://medium.com/hackernoon/in-the-context-of-everything-else-cryptocurrency-is-not-a-bubble-4112cd50542 https://medium.com/hackernoon/in-the-context-of-everything-e...
miki123211 6y ago
One angle of this case which is often missed is the impact on browsers. If Google is forbidden from paying browser vendors for being the default search engine, bye bye, Firefox. A significant part of Mozilla's revenue comes from their deal with Google. I don't think a project as big as a browser could survive without that revenue. If Google wins, Google has a search monopoly. If Google loses, they will have a slightly smaller search monopoly and a browser monopoly.
- abdullahkhalids 6y ago
  I am not too concerned. I think Mozilla will simply have to switch to a donation based system (like Wikimedia Foundation), with relevant restructuring to a non-profit. And I think they will be able to raise 10s of millions of dollars.
  - doublerabbit 6y ago
    And if they didn't excessively pay their high execs stupid amount of money.
  - Ygg2 6y ago
    We'll see if Mozilla will be able to achieve that. I hope so. I want it to succeed, but according to Mozilla that donation based structure would be impossible. While you could be cynical, I think people using Wikipedia are way more numerous than people using Firefox. I think it's inevitable that the future will be dominated by a Blink based browser. It's omnipresent on mobile and the desktop will probably just be Edge (a Blink derivative).
    - account42 6y ago
      > impossible > inevitable Well now that that's settled...
      - Ygg2 6y ago
        What are you counter arguments?
v77 6y ago
The Stratachery article posted yesterday was way more interesting and less filled with perjorative attacks.
carfacts 6y ago
Asking for relief in a vague generalized form is the general practice in larger complex cases where the relief the claimant would be entitled to depends on the outcome of and findings associated with various claims made. As these become known, parties will be given an opportunity to be more specific about the relief they think is appropriate.
m463 6y ago
The best part: "I recommend reading it; It’s not that long and I certainly learned a few things about the shape of the search and advertising business, and you probably would too."
magwa101 6y ago
American anti trust was based on apparent harm to users. This is a different beast altogether. That is worth noting.
shadowgovt 6y ago
"Disappointment · Section VIII, at the end of the Complaint, is entitled “Request for Relief”. It doesn’t even fill one of the 64 pages... Maybe this is a symptom of me not being an antitrust lawyer, but I’d have hoped for some specific, creative ideas on how to accomplish these good things." Also not a lawyer, but I listen to enough law podcasts to make a wild guess: if the lawyers ask for specific structural relief, they constrain what the judge is allowed to do. For example, let's assume they ask for Google to be broken up... If they can't build a case strong enough for that to happen, they get no relief and they wasted the case. Or if they don't ask for Google to be broken up, but they make a strong enough case that a judge could decide that's appropriate, it doesn't matter; plaintiff asked for something else, therefore plaintiff believes that something else makes them whole, therefore that's all the judge can and should do to resolve the case. Remember, the whole point of courts is to keep society humming along by exploring how people have been wronged and righting that wrong, and the plaintiff telling you something rights their wrong is a good primary source. Asking for "Structural relief as needed to cure any anticompetitive harm" leaves it in the judge's court and grants the saddle-point of maximum potential for disruption to Google and maximum potential for some positive outcome.
- camhart 6y ago
  Off topic- but what podcasts would you recommend?
  - willyg123 6y ago
    Also interested
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    I've been a fan of "Opening Arguments" for awhile (https://openargs.com/ https://openargs.com/). The co-hosts are the first to clarify that Mr. Torrez is in mostly corporate patent law, so he doesn't know the entire field... But he passed the Bar, so he has a lawyer's viewpoint on topics. The most educational aspect has been their dives into the point of the law itself, i.e. the underlying theory of why we approach guilt, innocence, findings of fact, etc. the way we do.
novaleaf 6y ago
> The problem is (to steal a phrase from the Complaint) “monopoly rents from advertisers”. Search advertising is a context where you know exactly what the user is looking for, and it’s amazingly effective, and Google enjoys a monopoly, which means they can charge what the market will bear, and they do. Seems that way. I pay around $0.30/click on keywords with no competitive bids. When I switched to paying per conversion value, I might get days with good value followed by days with terrible value, so that monthly it balances out to maximize my cost/conversion.
einpoklum 6y ago
> The second pushback is along the lines of “... Google is a damn good search engine ... ” ... I agree: Well, I disagree. 1. It is quite difficult to determine whether a search engine is good or not - without massive resources for surveying. Also, remember that even if one likes the results - they typically don't know which potential results they are _not_ seeing, to compare against. 2. Google is known to suppress search results on political grounds. Specifically, Socialist and anti-Imperialist news and commentary is partially suppressed. This was covered here on HN a few times already, e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14975338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14975338 ; Google officials mostly keep quiet about this of course, so the breadth and scope are not entirely clear. There's also an NYT story about this and other issues, but it's paywalled: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/technology/google-search-bias-claims.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/technology/google-search-... . I would not at all be surprised if other non-mainstream political views are being suppressed as well. 3. Inherent, over-arcing Biases in Google's ranking: This is a different issue than direct suppression or blocking. Here's I myself am being very anecdotal and speculative, but I have the distinct sense that larger websites get ranked higher by Google, so that for most of a typical person's searches they are likely to stay within a the sphere of, oh, I don't know, a few thousands or tens of thousands of larger sites. Again, anecdotally, when I search duckduckgo I seem to get into the "tail" in terms of site size faster. I may be totally wrong about this but as I said in (1.) we can't really know.
einpoklum 6y ago
> I’m disappointed. Maybe this is a symptom of me not being an antitrust lawyer, but I’d have hoped for some specific, creative ideas on how to accomplish these good things. Maybe it is too early in the procedure to ask for specific measures? I know that in criminal law, the state doesn't suggest specific punishment until after the verdict; and in civil law in many countries, you may ask for some specific relief to begin with, but it is very customary for the scope, nature and extent of that relief to change and be fleshed out as the procedure approaches its conclusion.
jupp0r 6y ago
The part that I don't get is: why would end users switch their search engine to an inferior one just because advertisers are harmed by Googles monopoly? As a user, I like ads being super expensive because that means there will be fewer of them.
- markeg 6y ago
  Maybe because most end users are also consumers of other products (e.g., foods, housing, electronics) who eventually pay for ads via purchases?
- ineedasername 6y ago
  There don't actually seem to be fewer adds though. In face, more and more real estate seems devoted to then. And their auction system would result in the same number of adds not matter the price because there will always be a highest bidder, and unless there are fewer bidders that ad placements, all placements will be filled. That will pretty much always be the case for and keywords of even moderate popularity/demand.
  - jupp0r 6y ago
    Google is alleged in the lawsuit to artificially inflate prices.
    - ineedasername 6y ago
      Yes, I'm saying that I don't think that reduces the number of adds actually displayed though. Not unless there are fewer buyer for spaces than there are spaces, and any moderately popular keyword will have ample demand. That doesn't mean Google is not a a monopoly, but I was just responding to the part of the comment that indicated more expensive adds would mean fewer adds. It hasn't so far, as I now sometimes have to scroll down below the first screen to actually get to real results instead of ads.
- jdeibele 6y ago
  I switched to DuckDuckGo and FireFox because I disapprove of Google's footprint and the way that they're trying to watch everything I do. When I switched, about 2 years ago, DuckDuckGo was clearly worse. Now I feel like DuckDuckGo has gotten a little bit better but Google Search has definitely gotten worse. I'm now using Pocket and Pinboard a lot more because I can't count on search being able to bring up something I saw a couple of months ago.

308 points by headalgorithm 6y ago

> You’d require that the monopoly offer a straightforward full-text-based document retrieval API that implements several different ranking algorithms and bills per search. You’d forbid it from engaging in any advertising businesses. Then you’d free up people to build consumer-facing search interfaces and compete to sell advertising on them. What does selling ads look like if search is not a monopoly? As an advertiser in the new world, I'd have to go around and buy ads on all the new search front-ends. I probably want to pay them proportionally to how much traffic they get (well, conversions, but let's say traffic). If there's a small number of large front-ends then maybe I go to each of them directly, but if there's a long tail of front-ends then probably there'd be a search middleman who the various front-ends contract with... I guess there's still Google Search, and Google AdSense, but now AdSense also sells ads on other front-ends, and Google Search works with other brokers besides AdSense?

andyjohnson0 6y ago
> As an advertiser in the new world, I'd have to go around and buy ads on all the new search front-ends. And site operators presumably have to deal with many more ad platforms, which is likely to be a complication for them. Theres a certain logic to the way it works now, even if it is (arguably) anti-competitive and undesirable.
rightbyte 6y ago
There would probably be more actually good adnetworks without Google Ads. No need to sign up with each search frontend or site. Today other adnetworks mostly serve sites that are shady, controversial or too small for Adsense since they can't compete.
ackbar03 6y ago
Is this actually the most likely scenario though? I agree it's hard to compete and have a search service completely indexing the entire internet. Is breaking up the front end the most likely?
viraptor 6y ago
Third parties providing a nicely packaged solution to schedule ads on multiple networks would be created a short moment after the split starts. On the more technical side, common APIs would be created. It's basically the case of skyscanner, kayak, etc. and the air travel companies.
prepend 6y ago
If Google had competition they would have to lower their prices and provide better quality ads and ad tracking. Click fraud is pretty real and I’ve had contacts say it’s 30-50% of actual ad revenue. Currently, this is just “factored in” but how neat would it be if this could be prevented. Google has no incentive to fix this as click fraud is profitable for them. For ad auditing, Google frequently shows ads to people outside my geolocation and doesn’t audit how they do this. Would be nice to fix this as it’s a decent number of botched customer interactions. Finally, pricing could be so much lower. I’ve advertised for low frequency terms where the minimum bid is $1 even though there’s only 1 or zero current advertisers. So the “auction” is against a floor set by google, not the market. If no one else is buying a keyword, the minimum should be very low and climb as multiple ad buyers drive the price up. This is probably the most annoying as it would save businesses so much money.
- AJ007 6y ago
  One of Google's greatest strength was in the pre 2010 period was they were the only advertising sources that sold high quality traffic in massive volume and fraud was almost a non-issue. Go back to 2007 and try to run an ad campaign anywhere else online and it was a nightmare. Things have changed. Google repeatedly has modified the delivery settings of their ads for active campaigns, just as you complain about the geolocation issue. My guess is that if someone did a proper investigation Google would have to back pay advertisers many billions of dollars. This is fraud anyway you cut it. They have done the same thing with mobile ads. You disable the mobile app inventory and they modify the UI and re-enable it.
- jefftk 6y ago
  > I’ve advertised for low frequency terms where the minimum bid is $1 even though there’s only 1 or zero current advertisers. So the “auction” is against a floor set by google, not the market. Showing excessive ads wastes users' attention and teaches them not to pay attention to other higher value ads. A price floor seems like a very reasonable way to handle this? (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
  - prepend 6y ago
treis 6y ago
They did this with the gas company where I live. Instead of buying gas from the gas company you contract with any number of 3rd parties and they turn around and pay the gas company to deliver it. It's not clear how this is better. The gas company still exists and takes the bulk of my payment. The 3rd parties tack on their service fee. And they basically all run a bait and switch where you sign a contract for a fix term and then the price gets jacked up if you forget to sign a new one. It's the worst of both worlds. The gas company still has a delivery monopoly. And now we've got a bunch of scummy 3rd parties running what are basically scams.

threeseed 6y ago

> The Complaint says that mobile traffic in the US is 60% iOS vs 40% Android, which I hadn’t known. Apple routes all the search traffic to Google, which in return routes billions of dollars to Apple. The arrangement works great for both of them. Actually it doesn't. That's why Apple has been building out their search engine for the last few years. Just like with Maps at some point it will be good enough and they will push an update to Safari to use it as the default.

Google234 6y ago
Apple cares more about control than money. This is why they will throw away that income for their own search engine.
- username90 6y ago
  Getting a big share of search volume would be worth more than their contract with Google.
Angostura 6y ago
Even apart from that Google may be the default search engine on mobile Safari but you can change it (I'm set to use DDG) so Apple may send the vast majority of searches to Google - but not all.
jasonvorhe 6y ago
Apple has a search engine? So they basically scrape the web themselves and serve the results via Spotlight & Siri, it just lacks a web frontend? Is there any additional information on that? I haven't heard of a Apple crawler user agent yet, but I could've just missed that. I always thought they'd be using Bing or DDG for that data. If Apple wanted to go into the search engine business, I'd have expected them to just aquire DDG, tbh.
- BRedSox 6y ago
  This sums up essentially all I can dig up. https://www.coywolf.news/seo/apple-search-engine/ https://www.coywolf.news/seo/apple-search-engine/

tannhaeuser 6y ago

The world can't wait for this process to take several years. Nor can it gamble on US partisanship in antitrust matters. By the time any antitrust process can have results, the internet economy is destroyed and just serves FAANG, even more than it does already. Maybe the EU is waiting until after US elections, but they absolutely shouldn't put any hope in another administration (who are, after all, partly responsible for this monopolistic situation, and taking money from Google). Just as the digital tax initiative is going nowhere, so will this antitrust process.

unionpivo 6y ago
It would be worse to do it quick, fuck up and make Google even stronger via regulatory capture or something similar. And going in second time around would be even more difficult
- Mindwipe 6y ago
  Yes, but a big part of the problem is a lack of agreement about what regulators are actually trying to achieve, and there being a lose coalition of political forces on tech regulation who actually have mutually contradictory goals and just agree on the mechanism. That is likely to cause significant issues in this process. For example, there is absolutely a political element that seeks to attack the market power of large technology companies because they want to force more control on public speech, and some who want to attack the power in order to explicitly prevent that.
  - tannhaeuser 6y ago
    In EU, telcos (and energy, etc.) are regulated. I don't see a reason why IT services shouldn't, given that the market is in a dead-end situation. Regulation can cover professional IT services (VMs/pods) as well as social (portability of social accounts, similar to mobile number portability), in addition to DNS, mail-, and web-spaces which are already de-facto regulated. Goal, among other things, is to break verticals, platforms, network effects, similar to net neutrality principles.

blueterminal 6y ago

Abolish antitrust laws. It does nothing but create monopolies. Milton Friedman on Anti-Trust and Tech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlwxdyLnMXM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlwxdyLnMXM

maurys 6y ago

It surprises me not to hear more concerns about strangling U.S. based tech giants at a time that China and the rest of the world is catching up. I'm not sure I buy that line of argument myself, but I did expect it to come up more prominently.

chpatrick 6y ago
Maybe as a country the US is more powerful with healthy competition among strong tech companies than with monopolies. Look at Intel and AMD.
paganel 6y ago
From half a world away the US tech industry has looked more "strangled" in the last 6-8 years compared to the 2005-2012 period (to give just an example), one could say that happened because of the concentration at the top (of talent and money, mostly, or of money keeping that talent in golden hand-cuffs). During that 2005-2012 timeframe you had a US search engine becoming really global, a US online retailer almost single-handedly inventing a new industry (cloud computing) and a US social-web company crushing almost all foreign competition on its own home-turf (and which could only be stopped by explicit Government intervention, as was the case with China explicitly blocking FB and with Russia directly taking control of VKontakte as a better way to counter FB).
- antb123 6y ago
  cloud computing was invented by shared mainframes in the 70s and 80s and charges per MIPS. Amazon applied open source software to the hosting and specifically the network stack and security stack. The model was already there.
  - oblio 6y ago
    The model wasn't already there. Everyone means the public cloud. Mainframes were at best, private clouds.
  - xxpor 6y ago
    The key was VT-x/AMD-v becoming available.

fauigerzigerk 6y ago

>Speaking as a person who spent some years if his career working on full-text search, I doubt that there’s much left in the way of low-hanging fruit. Maybe so, but judging by my search results most of the fruit is still on the tree. Natural language understanding is an active field of research. Turning Google into a search utility is a bad idea. Splitting off the crawling part and turning that into a utility would be a lot more interesting. It would allow search engines to compete on search quality while sharing the capex required for crawling.

throwaway3699 6y ago
Crawling the web is the easy part compared to human labour needed for search quality algorithms.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  thanks partially to google, NLP is now more of a problem of (moderate) scale
  - andrepd 6y ago
    What? This is not remotely true.
    - cblconfederate 6y ago
      Applications built on pretrained bert don't necessarily need huge scale
cblconfederate 6y ago
I think we are at a point where a distributed index becomes an attractive idea. Compute nodes are cheap and every website could devote resources to support it. Considering how exclusionary google has become, web companies might have an incentive there to support a distributed solution. I don't know how developed those solutiosn are, though. Apparently there is some effort in Distributed SE coordinated by blockhains. I think this comes close to the idea of "Google as an utility". https://hackernoon.com/is-the-concept-of-a-distributed-search-engine-potent-enough-to-challenge-googles-dominance-l1s44t2 https://hackernoon.com/is-the-concept-of-a-distributed-searc...

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nl 6y ago

You can make a case that Web search is a natural monopoly. Running the crawlers and indexers and servers is freaking expensive, requiring monster capex and operational expenditure. It’s not obvious to me that the world needs more than one. I wonder how true this is these days? I understand that the "long tail" of web queries is very important, but if you were to skip that for version 1, and concentrate on crawling the top 1M English language sites how much would it really cost?

xiphias2 6y ago
English is the language that needs the most resources, and where Google put the most effort. Actually any other language would be a smaller crawling/indexing investment, if really that was the hardest part. I don't know the current situation, but Yandex was better in Russia than Google a few years ago.
vharuck 6y ago
I'm not familiar with the mechanics of web crawlers, so hopefully somebody can shed some light. Would there be value in a search engines for specific topics? For example, movie reviews and blogs. Assuming you had a way to determine if a page is a review or blog, would it make indexing easier to ignore the rest? Could a tailored search engine be tweaked to give better results? I kind of think it would be useful, because some websites I use have really great search tools (e.g. ones with tags). But those are only for the website itself, so there's no crawling.

michaelt 6y ago

> To my surprise, a few members of my tribe were pushing back against this lawsuit. Personally I think there's plenty Google is doing that's wrong † but I'm just disappointed the antitrust complaint seems to be all about the advertising industry. As far as I'm concerned, the online advertising industry is already doomed. The first time there was a drive-by malware installation from an advert on a reputable website, the industry's fate was sealed. When I heard there would be antitrust action, I was hoping there would be more attention to all the other problems, so hearing it's all about competition in a dead industry is a disappointment. † Nonexistent support, low-privacy defaults in Chrome, perpetual "oopsies" breaking firefox support, over-enthusiastic anti-spam features forcing e-mail centralisation, iOS gmail constantly "forgetting" that I didn't want to install Chrome, reCapcha and DoH and AMP and GA all having the potential to act as centralised tracking, reCapcha being deliberately slow and difficult for people who disable browser fingerprinting, opaque and capricious treatment of youtube creators and android app developers, pushing sketchy browser "features" like "signed exchange" that badly solve problems of Google's own creation...

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> I'm just disappointed the antitrust complaint seems to be all about the advertising industry The DoJ focussed on search. Specifically, Google paying for the default slot. The DoubleClick/ad business is not directly addressed. The harms in the complaint are more widely discussed than in this article.
creddit 6y ago
> in a dead industry That “dead industry” is worth many $100s of Billions. What are you on about?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
zepto 6y ago
† None of those would matter if Google had competition.
ocdtrekkie 6y ago

ColinHayhurst 6y ago

> You can make a case that Web search is a natural monopoly. Thoughtful article, great writing but help me here: How can a natural monopoly (what ever that means) ever be a good thing? Imagine if we'd let one company extract, refine and distribute all oil. Or even a monopoly for any one of those three.

jxf 6y ago
That's not really what a natural monopoly is. In a natural monopoly, the high barrier to entry means it's essentially wasteful to encourage competition. For example, imagine operating the first power plant in a desert region. If it's expensive to set up power plants, then there won't be much point in encouraging competition; no one else will want to set up one. The operators of the power plant have a natural monopoly. It would be better to spend the resources required for a second power plant on servicing customers elsewhere instead of fighting over the same territory — so the monopoly is "good" in the sense that it disincentivizes a bad allocation of capital. Generally, natural monopolies get regulated (e.g. a power authority blessed by the local government operates the power plant instead of a private firm).
ericmay 6y ago
Colin - a natural monopoly is a pretty well-known economic concept. Essentially, you’re able to form a monopolistic business just by the nature of the business itself - you don’t have to conduct anti-competitive practices or buy out your competitors. For Search it’s straightforward. The more people who search on your platform, the better the results get. Eventually competitors can’t really emerge because the product is too good. This also happens with low costs as well at certain economies of scale. My argument against breaking up Google would be they face search competition via Amazon, Facebook, and even Apple. But I can see both sides here. That’s what makes it an interesting case!
zaphar 6y ago
How can a natural monopoly (what ever that means) ever be a good thing? The whole point of something being a natural monopoly is that it doesn't matter if it's good or bad. No matter what you do one company will tend to win it all over time. So in order to control such things the government (another natural monopoly) has to step in and put fences around the monopoly.

bluelu 6y ago

If someone would really want to break the Google search monopoly, they would seperate: - Crawling and document parsing. Imagine something like archive.org where all search engines would get the content from. This could also be used to enforce copyright legislation (e.g. deletions of documents, etc...). Today, it's nearly impossible to collect the data as google does, because most website owners won't even allow that you crawl them (e.g. distill networks anti bot protection, etc...) - Metrics (e.g. data from google analytics, dns resolvers, browser toolbards, browser statistics, etc...). Again this data should be available to everyone from a central authority. Then there could be more independent search engines building on top of that data. If that doesn't happen, then there will never be any competition. Todays copyright and data privacy laws even further strengthen a monopoly position, as smaller players will not even get access to some data (or at different pricing then google does)

ricardo81 6y ago
Having one crawler would not be desirable as it'd involve choosing which pages get crawled and how often for freshness. Point taken about sites being less available to crawl due to the bot whitelist approach but it is not a huge issue, though some large sites like Facebook go for a whitelist only approach. Regarding those other data sources, the more privacy conscious engines would perhaps object to particular kinds of data but agreed that the kind of scale and various sources that Google has at its disposal, does give it an advantage when it comes to search. There are alternatives beyond Google and Bing who do index the web albeit at the moment are smaller in scale, and likely outnumbered by all the Bing clones. There is a high barrier to entry wrt cost but the technical/capital hurdles of crawling are not so high as compared to ranking and indexing.

wombatmobile 6y ago

An alternative approach to regulating google's search monopoly would be to require google to either compensate users for harvesting their metadata, or prohibit google from harvesting metadata. This approach would have different consequences to the DOJ's approach. It would leave intact google's ability to provide useful services that Tim Bray and others like, whilst redressing the economic tidal wave that flows google's way, for the better. How would this work? There are many possibilities. Here are just 2, one of them individualistic and consumer oriented, the other social and community oriented: 1. Google gives coupons to users as compensation for harvesting their metadata. So if a user performs say 5000 google searches per year, google gives them coupons for say $500 which they can redeem on purchases made with vendors who advertise through google. 2. Google funds journalism by paying the metadata harvesting fee into a trust administered by an independent org that facilitates journalism. Like PBS or the BBC but not owned by the British Government, owned independently by a worldwide org that is affiliated with journalists associations. The logic behind #2 is that pre-google, advertising revenue funded the news business. Post-google, the news business has shrunk by more than 50% of journalists and so the quality of the 4th estate has suffered.

cblconfederate 6y ago
> require google to either compensate users for harvesting their metadata This. Youtubers get compensated, why not ordinary users. Search, shopping and social media is work... It's the current year and billions are stuck home , many without even jobs. > How would this work? First you need a legal framework that allows users to sell their metadata. GDPR makes it illegal, but that's wrong. If this data has value (apparently it has a lot of value) , it should be tradeable for services. Incidentally, i think one of the benefits of the DoJ action is that it gets people talking about solutions that people called 'crazy' until yesterday.
- alphager 6y ago
  > GDPR makes it illegal, but that's wrong. Where does the GDPR make that illegal?

jondubois 6y ago

The complaints resonate strongly with an article I wrote in 2018 when I tried to make a case for the value of cryptocurrencies: https://medium.com/hackernoon/in-the-context-of-everything-else-cryptocurrency-is-not-a-bubble-4112cd50542 https://medium.com/hackernoon/in-the-context-of-everything-e...

miki123211 6y ago

One angle of this case which is often missed is the impact on browsers. If Google is forbidden from paying browser vendors for being the default search engine, bye bye, Firefox. A significant part of Mozilla's revenue comes from their deal with Google. I don't think a project as big as a browser could survive without that revenue. If Google wins, Google has a search monopoly. If Google loses, they will have a slightly smaller search monopoly and a browser monopoly.

abdullahkhalids 6y ago
I am not too concerned. I think Mozilla will simply have to switch to a donation based system (like Wikimedia Foundation), with relevant restructuring to a non-profit. And I think they will be able to raise 10s of millions of dollars.
- doublerabbit 6y ago
  And if they didn't excessively pay their high execs stupid amount of money.
- Ygg2 6y ago
  We'll see if Mozilla will be able to achieve that. I hope so. I want it to succeed, but according to Mozilla that donation based structure would be impossible. While you could be cynical, I think people using Wikipedia are way more numerous than people using Firefox. I think it's inevitable that the future will be dominated by a Blink based browser. It's omnipresent on mobile and the desktop will probably just be Edge (a Blink derivative).
  - account42 6y ago
    > impossible > inevitable Well now that that's settled...
    - Ygg2 6y ago
      What are you counter arguments?

v77 6y ago

The Stratachery article posted yesterday was way more interesting and less filled with perjorative attacks.

carfacts 6y ago

Asking for relief in a vague generalized form is the general practice in larger complex cases where the relief the claimant would be entitled to depends on the outcome of and findings associated with various claims made. As these become known, parties will be given an opportunity to be more specific about the relief they think is appropriate.

m463 6y ago

The best part: "I recommend reading it; It’s not that long and I certainly learned a few things about the shape of the search and advertising business, and you probably would too."

magwa101 6y ago

American anti trust was based on apparent harm to users. This is a different beast altogether. That is worth noting.

shadowgovt 6y ago

"Disappointment · Section VIII, at the end of the Complaint, is entitled “Request for Relief”. It doesn’t even fill one of the 64 pages... Maybe this is a symptom of me not being an antitrust lawyer, but I’d have hoped for some specific, creative ideas on how to accomplish these good things." Also not a lawyer, but I listen to enough law podcasts to make a wild guess: if the lawyers ask for specific structural relief, they constrain what the judge is allowed to do. For example, let's assume they ask for Google to be broken up... If they can't build a case strong enough for that to happen, they get no relief and they wasted the case. Or if they don't ask for Google to be broken up, but they make a strong enough case that a judge could decide that's appropriate, it doesn't matter; plaintiff asked for something else, therefore plaintiff believes that something else makes them whole, therefore that's all the judge can and should do to resolve the case. Remember, the whole point of courts is to keep society humming along by exploring how people have been wronged and righting that wrong, and the plaintiff telling you something rights their wrong is a good primary source. Asking for "Structural relief as needed to cure any anticompetitive harm" leaves it in the judge's court and grants the saddle-point of maximum potential for disruption to Google and maximum potential for some positive outcome.

camhart 6y ago
Off topic- but what podcasts would you recommend?
- willyg123 6y ago
  Also interested
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  I've been a fan of "Opening Arguments" for awhile (https://openargs.com/ https://openargs.com/). The co-hosts are the first to clarify that Mr. Torrez is in mostly corporate patent law, so he doesn't know the entire field... But he passed the Bar, so he has a lawyer's viewpoint on topics. The most educational aspect has been their dives into the point of the law itself, i.e. the underlying theory of why we approach guilt, innocence, findings of fact, etc. the way we do.

novaleaf 6y ago

> The problem is (to steal a phrase from the Complaint) “monopoly rents from advertisers”. Search advertising is a context where you know exactly what the user is looking for, and it’s amazingly effective, and Google enjoys a monopoly, which means they can charge what the market will bear, and they do. Seems that way. I pay around $0.30/click on keywords with no competitive bids. When I switched to paying per conversion value, I might get days with good value followed by days with terrible value, so that monthly it balances out to maximize my cost/conversion.

einpoklum 6y ago

> The second pushback is along the lines of “... Google is a damn good search engine ... ” ... I agree: Well, I disagree. 1. It is quite difficult to determine whether a search engine is good or not - without massive resources for surveying. Also, remember that even if one likes the results - they typically don't know which potential results they are _not_ seeing, to compare against. 2. Google is known to suppress search results on political grounds. Specifically, Socialist and anti-Imperialist news and commentary is partially suppressed. This was covered here on HN a few times already, e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14975338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14975338 ; Google officials mostly keep quiet about this of course, so the breadth and scope are not entirely clear. There's also an NYT story about this and other issues, but it's paywalled: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/technology/google-search-bias-claims.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/technology/google-search-... . I would not at all be surprised if other non-mainstream political views are being suppressed as well. 3. Inherent, over-arcing Biases in Google's ranking: This is a different issue than direct suppression or blocking. Here's I myself am being very anecdotal and speculative, but I have the distinct sense that larger websites get ranked higher by Google, so that for most of a typical person's searches they are likely to stay within a the sphere of, oh, I don't know, a few thousands or tens of thousands of larger sites. Again, anecdotally, when I search duckduckgo I seem to get into the "tail" in terms of site size faster. I may be totally wrong about this but as I said in (1.) we can't really know.

einpoklum 6y ago

> I’m disappointed. Maybe this is a symptom of me not being an antitrust lawyer, but I’d have hoped for some specific, creative ideas on how to accomplish these good things. Maybe it is too early in the procedure to ask for specific measures? I know that in criminal law, the state doesn't suggest specific punishment until after the verdict; and in civil law in many countries, you may ask for some specific relief to begin with, but it is very customary for the scope, nature and extent of that relief to change and be fleshed out as the procedure approaches its conclusion.

jupp0r 6y ago

The part that I don't get is: why would end users switch their search engine to an inferior one just because advertisers are harmed by Googles monopoly? As a user, I like ads being super expensive because that means there will be fewer of them.

markeg 6y ago
Maybe because most end users are also consumers of other products (e.g., foods, housing, electronics) who eventually pay for ads via purchases?
ineedasername 6y ago
There don't actually seem to be fewer adds though. In face, more and more real estate seems devoted to then. And their auction system would result in the same number of adds not matter the price because there will always be a highest bidder, and unless there are fewer bidders that ad placements, all placements will be filled. That will pretty much always be the case for and keywords of even moderate popularity/demand.
- jupp0r 6y ago
  Google is alleged in the lawsuit to artificially inflate prices.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    Yes, I'm saying that I don't think that reduces the number of adds actually displayed though. Not unless there are fewer buyer for spaces than there are spaces, and any moderately popular keyword will have ample demand. That doesn't mean Google is not a a monopoly, but I was just responding to the part of the comment that indicated more expensive adds would mean fewer adds. It hasn't so far, as I now sometimes have to scroll down below the first screen to actually get to real results instead of ads.
jdeibele 6y ago
I switched to DuckDuckGo and FireFox because I disapprove of Google's footprint and the way that they're trying to watch everything I do. When I switched, about 2 years ago, DuckDuckGo was clearly worse. Now I feel like DuckDuckGo has gotten a little bit better but Google Search has definitely gotten worse. I'm now using Pocket and Pinboard a lot more because I can't count on search being able to bring up something I saw a couple of months ago.