10 ms·

no one is forcing you to use google. you could always pick a different one if you want different results

by foolfoolz 5y ago

heisthefox 5y ago
For flights, you could just query the source directly: https://matrix.itasoftware.com/ https://matrix.itasoftware.com/
- astrange 5y ago
  Not sure if that's "the source" since the airlines are the source for their own data (and Southwest doesn't allow ITA to search their flights.) On the other hand, Google owns ITA and I think the airline websites are typically frontends for it anyway.
kdmccormick 5y ago
Yes, obviously, you as a user are free to find another search engine. However, you as a creator are not free to find another universe in which the leading search provider does not use their position of influence to squash any competing products by ranking their own products higher.
- mbreese 5y ago
  But that’s not an argument for making Google a public utility. That’s an argument that they are being anti-competitive. That’s a whole other discussion. And even then, the question isn’t are competitors being harmed, but are consumers being harmed. So long as their products are free, it’s hard to argue that consumers are suffering harm. (I haven’t heard privacy brought up as a legal measure of harm to consumers, which would be an interesting angle, but I’m not sure how that plays with current law…)
  - wyattpeak 5y ago
    > So long as their products are free, it’s hard to argue that consumers are suffering harm. Is it? There's an increasing antipathy towards the amount of data Google collect, many people on this forum, if not so much in the world at large, would consider that harm. If Google's hiding from me a better service that's also free, or even has an acceptable cost, I'd consider that harm. It's only hard to argue there's no harm if their product is identical to its competitors, which is basically never true.
  - _jal 5y ago
    > So long as their products are free, it’s hard to argue that consumers are suffering harm Well, that is the (Borkian) dominant understanding of antitrust right now, but it hasn't always been, and I think that view is under pressure again. It has never been clear to me why we must limit our view to consumers when looking at antitrust - there is always much more going on than how much things cost. It effects competitors (actual and would-be), the environment, related industries, available jobs, sometimes national security - monopolies can have huge impacts on lots of things. Why exactly is this super-reductive, artificially crabbed view the only measure of a monopoly's harm? Medium-term, I think the pendulum is swinging back.
    - ErrrNoMate 5y ago
      A sea of comments and this one is the only one mentioning Bork. Well played. Hopefully we can swim closer to looking at things in the round rather than this very narrow and very conservative view of the structures in which we live and operate.
  - josefx 5y ago
    > So long as their products are free, it’s hard to argue that consumers are suffering harm. It kills competition since most of them are financed by an unrelated service (Googles ad network) and without competition we get such nice things like randomized automated life time bans, non existent customer service, products that are randomly killed, overly anti competitive licensing agreements (Android apparently cannot survive on its own merits) etc. . Privacy is just one of many many issues.
- minsc__and__boo 5y ago
  There are entire businesses that run entirely on instagram or etsy, which don't even touch SEO.
antihero 5y ago
OP is not arguing the consumer is restricted in choice, more that Google can dominate the market of any information based business by coding a widget because they have a huge amount of data at their disposal. Much like if you make a good product and sell it on Amazon, Amazon can simply use their might to dupe your product and sell it as AmazonBasics. So innovation is stifled because the second it becomes profitable a giant can pluck it from your hands and use their power to squash you whilst making money from it. I am not sure what mechanisms within Capitalism are supposed to protect people from the simple power asymmetry of companies having far more resources money and lawyers doing what the fuck they like. There should be antitrust lawsuits against all of the giants abusing their power but, because of said power asymmetry, they of course have a huge amount of lobbying power in comparison to anyone else.
johnswas 5y ago
Ah yes, the "no one is forcing you" argument comes in almost every conversation where people complain about the truth of something. Almost as if they can do whatever they want and of course "no one is forcing you to use it". Also implying that you accepted the wrong doings but trying as best as you can to defend it.
anders_p 5y ago
You completely missed the point of the comment. Google is stealing ideas and products, that they know are viable through the metrics they gather from the search data. Then they implement those products and embed them ABOVE the search results. Effectively killing off the competitors, who invented and build the original products. HOW are developers free to avoid Google killing off their businesses like that?
- sumedh 5y ago
  > Google is stealing ideas and products, that they know are viable through the metrics they gather from the search data. Doesnt Walmart and Amazon do that as well, looking at the data and then making their own in house products?
  - brokencode 5y ago
    Yes, and maybe they should be regulated too. They enjoy dominant positions in the market and blatantly rip off successful products down to the color and bottle shape.
    - unishark 5y ago
      But any idiot can figure out which are the successful products on those search engines. They are literally there trying to be found and broadcast their popularity. The patent system is for protecting ideas which the law allows to be protected.
      - brokencode 5y ago
        But any idiot can’t get Walmart or Amazon to prominently place their copycat product on shelves or in search results. Only these retail behemoths can guarantee the competitive placement of their products in the market.
russian-hacker 5y ago
No one is forcing you to use an electrical company. You could always power your house with a bicycle generator. Therefore, electrical companies shouldn't be regulated as public utilities.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Creating your own power plant, lugging gallons of oil for power generation, or hiring someone to 24/7 power you home via bicycle all cost a few orders of magnitude more than paying the utility company for service, and creating a competing utility company wouldn't make sense competitively in any way, so naturally there's a monopoly. For search engines, it's both easy to switch to a different one as a consumer and it's easy for someone new to come in and create a profitable competitor (see bing, ddg).
  - inetknght 5y ago
    > so naturally there's a monopoly. And, just as naturally, the government actually owns a lot of the distribution network. The producers provide into the distribution network, the customers receive from the distribution network, and the government regulates fair (by some definition thereof) access.
  - ascar 5y ago
    > creating a competing utility company wouldn't make sense competitively in any way, so naturally there's a monopoly So how come there are countries without a natural monopoly and with competing utility providers? Also running your own generator with oil isn't a few orders of magnitude (i.e. at least 100x) more expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if it's not even one order of magnitude more expensive, but maybe just twice as expensive. I also don't think GP's simile is good, but some of your arguments against it are just blatantly false.
    - judge2020 5y ago
      > So how come there are countries without a natural monopoly and with competing utility providers? Local governments own most U.S. utility lines and pipes, so a competing for-profit utility would have to go against the not-for-profit public service, leaving low to no room for profit and no reason to even compete. Fiber/cable/dsl lines are one of the few U.S. utilities with competition because the performance/reliability/features of the service can vary greatly and because almost no local governments ran their own ISP before private companies came in and ran their lines. I can bet that any area with a municipal ISP has a very low chance of seeing xfinity/att run their own fiber if they're not already servicing the area.
craftinator 5y ago
You could always write a program that fuzzed urls at random then downloaded whatever's at that address with curl!
mxcrossr 5y ago
Imagine if thirty years ago we declared the yellow pages a public utility.

no one is forcing you to use google. you could always pick a different one if you want different results

heisthefox 5y ago

For flights, you could just query the source directly: https://matrix.itasoftware.com/ https://matrix.itasoftware.com/

astrange 5y ago
Not sure if that's "the source" since the airlines are the source for their own data (and Southwest doesn't allow ITA to search their flights.) On the other hand, Google owns ITA and I think the airline websites are typically frontends for it anyway.

kdmccormick 5y ago

Yes, obviously, you as a user are free to find another search engine. However, you as a creator are not free to find another universe in which the leading search provider does not use their position of influence to squash any competing products by ranking their own products higher.

mbreese 5y ago
But that’s not an argument for making Google a public utility. That’s an argument that they are being anti-competitive. That’s a whole other discussion. And even then, the question isn’t are competitors being harmed, but are consumers being harmed. So long as their products are free, it’s hard to argue that consumers are suffering harm. (I haven’t heard privacy brought up as a legal measure of harm to consumers, which would be an interesting angle, but I’m not sure how that plays with current law…)
- wyattpeak 5y ago
  > So long as their products are free, it’s hard to argue that consumers are suffering harm. Is it? There's an increasing antipathy towards the amount of data Google collect, many people on this forum, if not so much in the world at large, would consider that harm. If Google's hiding from me a better service that's also free, or even has an acceptable cost, I'd consider that harm. It's only hard to argue there's no harm if their product is identical to its competitors, which is basically never true.
- _jal 5y ago
  > So long as their products are free, it’s hard to argue that consumers are suffering harm Well, that is the (Borkian) dominant understanding of antitrust right now, but it hasn't always been, and I think that view is under pressure again. It has never been clear to me why we must limit our view to consumers when looking at antitrust - there is always much more going on than how much things cost. It effects competitors (actual and would-be), the environment, related industries, available jobs, sometimes national security - monopolies can have huge impacts on lots of things. Why exactly is this super-reductive, artificially crabbed view the only measure of a monopoly's harm? Medium-term, I think the pendulum is swinging back.
  - ErrrNoMate 5y ago
    A sea of comments and this one is the only one mentioning Bork. Well played. Hopefully we can swim closer to looking at things in the round rather than this very narrow and very conservative view of the structures in which we live and operate.
- josefx 5y ago
  > So long as their products are free, it’s hard to argue that consumers are suffering harm. It kills competition since most of them are financed by an unrelated service (Googles ad network) and without competition we get such nice things like randomized automated life time bans, non existent customer service, products that are randomly killed, overly anti competitive licensing agreements (Android apparently cannot survive on its own merits) etc. . Privacy is just one of many many issues.
minsc__and__boo 5y ago
There are entire businesses that run entirely on instagram or etsy, which don't even touch SEO.

antihero 5y ago

OP is not arguing the consumer is restricted in choice, more that Google can dominate the market of any information based business by coding a widget because they have a huge amount of data at their disposal. Much like if you make a good product and sell it on Amazon, Amazon can simply use their might to dupe your product and sell it as AmazonBasics. So innovation is stifled because the second it becomes profitable a giant can pluck it from your hands and use their power to squash you whilst making money from it. I am not sure what mechanisms within Capitalism are supposed to protect people from the simple power asymmetry of companies having far more resources money and lawyers doing what the fuck they like. There should be antitrust lawsuits against all of the giants abusing their power but, because of said power asymmetry, they of course have a huge amount of lobbying power in comparison to anyone else.

johnswas 5y ago

Ah yes, the "no one is forcing you" argument comes in almost every conversation where people complain about the truth of something. Almost as if they can do whatever they want and of course "no one is forcing you to use it". Also implying that you accepted the wrong doings but trying as best as you can to defend it.

anders_p 5y ago

You completely missed the point of the comment. Google is stealing ideas and products, that they know are viable through the metrics they gather from the search data. Then they implement those products and embed them ABOVE the search results. Effectively killing off the competitors, who invented and build the original products. HOW are developers free to avoid Google killing off their businesses like that?

sumedh 5y ago
> Google is stealing ideas and products, that they know are viable through the metrics they gather from the search data. Doesnt Walmart and Amazon do that as well, looking at the data and then making their own in house products?
- brokencode 5y ago
  Yes, and maybe they should be regulated too. They enjoy dominant positions in the market and blatantly rip off successful products down to the color and bottle shape.
  - unishark 5y ago
    But any idiot can figure out which are the successful products on those search engines. They are literally there trying to be found and broadcast their popularity. The patent system is for protecting ideas which the law allows to be protected.
    - brokencode 5y ago
      But any idiot can’t get Walmart or Amazon to prominently place their copycat product on shelves or in search results. Only these retail behemoths can guarantee the competitive placement of their products in the market.

russian-hacker 5y ago

No one is forcing you to use an electrical company. You could always power your house with a bicycle generator. Therefore, electrical companies shouldn't be regulated as public utilities.

judge2020 5y ago
Creating your own power plant, lugging gallons of oil for power generation, or hiring someone to 24/7 power you home via bicycle all cost a few orders of magnitude more than paying the utility company for service, and creating a competing utility company wouldn't make sense competitively in any way, so naturally there's a monopoly. For search engines, it's both easy to switch to a different one as a consumer and it's easy for someone new to come in and create a profitable competitor (see bing, ddg).
- inetknght 5y ago
  > so naturally there's a monopoly. And, just as naturally, the government actually owns a lot of the distribution network. The producers provide into the distribution network, the customers receive from the distribution network, and the government regulates fair (by some definition thereof) access.
- ascar 5y ago
  > creating a competing utility company wouldn't make sense competitively in any way, so naturally there's a monopoly So how come there are countries without a natural monopoly and with competing utility providers? Also running your own generator with oil isn't a few orders of magnitude (i.e. at least 100x) more expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if it's not even one order of magnitude more expensive, but maybe just twice as expensive. I also don't think GP's simile is good, but some of your arguments against it are just blatantly false.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    > So how come there are countries without a natural monopoly and with competing utility providers? Local governments own most U.S. utility lines and pipes, so a competing for-profit utility would have to go against the not-for-profit public service, leaving low to no room for profit and no reason to even compete. Fiber/cable/dsl lines are one of the few U.S. utilities with competition because the performance/reliability/features of the service can vary greatly and because almost no local governments ran their own ISP before private companies came in and ran their lines. I can bet that any area with a municipal ISP has a very low chance of seeing xfinity/att run their own fiber if they're not already servicing the area.

craftinator 5y ago

You could always write a program that fuzzed urls at random then downloaded whatever's at that address with curl!

mxcrossr 5y ago

Imagine if thirty years ago we declared the yellow pages a public utility.