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> They are pretty hard to avoid, being an effective monopoly. Im confused by this claim. Is it really that difficult to avoid Google search? It seems to me tha

> They are pretty hard to avoid, being an effective monopoly. Im confused by this claim. Is it really that difficult to avoid Google search? It seems to me that it just requires going to bing.com, or changing the default search in your browser. Also, Brave Search uses its own index, not google results.

simonh 5y ago
Agreed, they are not a monopoly in any sense of the word. They're just considerably better than their competition, and it's absurdly easy to choose whichever search service you like, so almost everyone chooses Google. It's the same with facebook, nearly everyone else is already there, so if you want to connect to people that's where you go. They just hit critical mass first. The word monopoly gets thrown around as though it just means 'big and bad'. It's wooly thinking that's polluting the debate by obscuring what's actually going on. Missing the mark like that just detracts focus from actual pertinent criticisms of the harm these companies actually do, or what needs to happen to resolve those issues.
- salawat 5y ago
  https://www.competitionpolicyinternational.com/why-is-it-called-antitrust/ https://www.competitionpolicyinternational.com/why-is-it-cal... Y'all needy to either be way more pedantic, or back off a bit, but staying at the level you're at is completely missing the point most people have taken to referring to with the word ’monopoly'.
  - simonh 5y ago
    There’s certainly some cartel-like behaviour going on, such as the recently uncovered collusion between Facebook and Google in the ad markets. That has to be stamped on. I’m a little uneasy about Facebook owning WhatsApp, but I can’t see any concrete way they are able to use that to significantly exclude competition. I just don’t see how Google is leveraging its other properties in significant ways to exclude say Bing or DDG. I use Google docs and gmail, but what has that got to do with whether I use Google search or Bing? What anti-trust action do you think is needed, and what is it’s desired outcome? I don’t know what ‘breaking up Facebook ’ really means, except maybe making them sell WhatsApp. What would that achieve?
    - salawat 5y ago
      The essence of anti-trust is killing vertical integration, or at least keeping that integration from getting so deep it's harmful to the ability to maintain a healthy marketplace. When you start to see all eggs start to get destined for one basket (Facebook, Amazon, Google, or Microsoft), and especially in Google's or Apple's case of buyout and extinguish, you have a problem. Amazon is also right on top of that precarious position as well; sitting on top of and utilizing third-party sales data to front-run. It's not just about harm to the consumer, it's harm to the market as a whole. The case of Tech in particular is fascinating, because what their service offerings enable is apparently highly destabilizing to the very authorities that would regulate them. And no, Tech isn't the only sector on my sh*tlist. Media consolidation has gotten rather out of hand as well in my opinion. Walmart has also started to devastate the dairy industry for everyone but the industrial ops as well after buying out one of the big packaging outfits.
      - simonh 5y ago
        OK, I'll ask again. What action do you think needs to be taken, and how would it improve the market for users? How should be prevent these companies from being monopolies, accepting for a moment that they are. I still don't know what "break up Google" or "Break up Facebook" actually means and how that would help. There are bits of them you could forcefully spin off, but so what?
        salawat 5y ago
        Simple. You (a company) do one thing. You do not absorb other companies and extinguish them. Somebody else does the same thing you do, but a bit different? Want to merge? Bend over, cuz here comes the part where you have to painstakingly prove why you merging with them is good, and won't subject the market to crippling hyperoptimization forces. Walmart took control of pricing in the dairy sector causing small operations to no longer be able to compete, propped up by income from other revenue streams. Google has basically set up a value desert around itself as far as advertising goes. As a knock on, it's extinguished potential competitor/disruptor after disruptor. Facebook has absorbed and integrated personal info on a gargantuan scale with the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions. Action items off the top of my head: Alphabet gets dissolved. Facebook calves off Instagram/WhatsApp. Bare minimum. Start an investigation into how vertical integration of brick and mortar grocers and packaging Industries effects actors in that space. Murdoch I'd have to do more research on, as he's a relatively recent arrival on my list. Amazon gets to decide if it's going to be a logistics company, or a platform for the sellers, or it's own "brick and mortar"-like. If marketplace, no using third-party seller for order flow analysis and front running. AWS gets calved, period. The bigger you get, the more regulators take a stake in shaping your growth, to the breaking point. Thems the breaks. Stay small if you want to do it your way. Risk becoming national infrastructure/utility as the numbers of M&A's increase. It's not all stick though. A company can do a strategic "merge-and-release" whereby for a short period of time, a company can acquire another, help it scale, then calve off after a period. After a certain size point, this is the only arrangement by which consolidation can happen. Calving off of industrial verticals is required for further permanent merger activity to continue. The end goal of this doctrine is to keep network effects at bay. Once you start getting snowball effect, your shareholder's needs take second place to stakeholder's needs. Period. It is insane how effective a one way wealth funnel our system can become once we stop trustbusting. Oh, every telecom merger in the past 10 years gets audited, and gets subjected to a public review. Any found to have not significantly increased in the benefit delivered to the end user gets an asset auction, loses eligibility for bidding on municipal projects, all last mile municipal ISP bans are nulled. I'd throw in a day in the stocks as a target of rotten vegetation in the town square for lobbyists that have been intentionally obtuse, but I really don't think that's within the realm of possibility. All of this is liable to change if someone would be interested in hiring me for a reasonable sum to map it all out full-time complete with authority to engage in legal discovery to get what info I don't have access to that'd actually make anything in this post more than frustrated pontificating.
- faeriechangling 5y ago
  They’re a monopoly in the ad business, Google and Facebook are reminiscent of Microsoft and Apple circa the 90’s.
  - simonh 5y ago
    They can’t both be a monopoly in the same business. That would be a duopoly or a cartel. However between the two of them they collectively control about 51% of the online advertising market. They’re the heavy hitters for sure, and do dominate some market segments, but is two companies each having about 25% of a market a monopoly? Google’s market share has been declining for 5 years. Amazon’s share is rising fast. Is a triopoly a thing? Even if it was, we don’t have one anyway. Sure there is cartel like behaviour going on. That needs to stamped on hard. I’m not against action where it’s needed, I just see a lot of vague uninformed and inaccurate comment on this issue. Uninformed outrage is a dangerous combination.
- propogandist 5y ago
  >they are not a monopoly in any sense of the word. you sound like an employee with a vested interest in the company, or someone living in a bubble > "google has a secret deal with facebook called "Jedi Blue" that they knew was so illegal that it has a whole section describing how they'll cover for each other if anyone finds out > - google appears to have a team called gTrade that is wholly dedicated to ad market manipulation" from the antitrust lawsuit underway; https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/1452053940024057857 https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/145205394002405785...
  - simonh 5y ago
    >you sound like an employee with a vested interest in the company,... Oooh, insulting my motivations. Nice move! There's cartel like behaviour going on, no question, I said as much elsewhere on the thread, and that needs to be stamped on hard. It's part of the harm they are doing I referred to. That's not the same as any one of these companies being a monopoly.
donarb 5y ago
Brave announced only 2 weeks ago that they would no longer default to Google search in their browser. "Privacy-preserving Brave Search Replaces Google as the Default Search Engine in the Brave Browser" https://brave.com/search-and-web-discovery/ https://brave.com/search-and-web-discovery/
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  I don't think this is relevant to my comment at all. The first part of my comment ignores the existence of Brave Search, saying that it's not "hard to avoid" Google Search when all it takes to do so is changing your browser to point to Bing. The second part of my comment that references Brave search was a response to the question of whether brave search uses Google under the hood.

simonh 5y ago

Agreed, they are not a monopoly in any sense of the word. They're just considerably better than their competition, and it's absurdly easy to choose whichever search service you like, so almost everyone chooses Google. It's the same with facebook, nearly everyone else is already there, so if you want to connect to people that's where you go. They just hit critical mass first. The word monopoly gets thrown around as though it just means 'big and bad'. It's wooly thinking that's polluting the debate by obscuring what's actually going on. Missing the mark like that just detracts focus from actual pertinent criticisms of the harm these companies actually do, or what needs to happen to resolve those issues.

salawat 5y ago
https://www.competitionpolicyinternational.com/why-is-it-called-antitrust/ https://www.competitionpolicyinternational.com/why-is-it-cal... Y'all needy to either be way more pedantic, or back off a bit, but staying at the level you're at is completely missing the point most people have taken to referring to with the word ’monopoly'.
- simonh 5y ago
  There’s certainly some cartel-like behaviour going on, such as the recently uncovered collusion between Facebook and Google in the ad markets. That has to be stamped on. I’m a little uneasy about Facebook owning WhatsApp, but I can’t see any concrete way they are able to use that to significantly exclude competition. I just don’t see how Google is leveraging its other properties in significant ways to exclude say Bing or DDG. I use Google docs and gmail, but what has that got to do with whether I use Google search or Bing? What anti-trust action do you think is needed, and what is it’s desired outcome? I don’t know what ‘breaking up Facebook ’ really means, except maybe making them sell WhatsApp. What would that achieve?
  - salawat 5y ago
    The essence of anti-trust is killing vertical integration, or at least keeping that integration from getting so deep it's harmful to the ability to maintain a healthy marketplace. When you start to see all eggs start to get destined for one basket (Facebook, Amazon, Google, or Microsoft), and especially in Google's or Apple's case of buyout and extinguish, you have a problem. Amazon is also right on top of that precarious position as well; sitting on top of and utilizing third-party sales data to front-run. It's not just about harm to the consumer, it's harm to the market as a whole. The case of Tech in particular is fascinating, because what their service offerings enable is apparently highly destabilizing to the very authorities that would regulate them. And no, Tech isn't the only sector on my sh*tlist. Media consolidation has gotten rather out of hand as well in my opinion. Walmart has also started to devastate the dairy industry for everyone but the industrial ops as well after buying out one of the big packaging outfits.
    - simonh 5y ago
      OK, I'll ask again. What action do you think needs to be taken, and how would it improve the market for users? How should be prevent these companies from being monopolies, accepting for a moment that they are. I still don't know what "break up Google" or "Break up Facebook" actually means and how that would help. There are bits of them you could forcefully spin off, but so what?
      - salawat 5y ago
        Simple. You (a company) do one thing. You do not absorb other companies and extinguish them. Somebody else does the same thing you do, but a bit different? Want to merge? Bend over, cuz here comes the part where you have to painstakingly prove why you merging with them is good, and won't subject the market to crippling hyperoptimization forces. Walmart took control of pricing in the dairy sector causing small operations to no longer be able to compete, propped up by income from other revenue streams. Google has basically set up a value desert around itself as far as advertising goes. As a knock on, it's extinguished potential competitor/disruptor after disruptor. Facebook has absorbed and integrated personal info on a gargantuan scale with the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions. Action items off the top of my head: Alphabet gets dissolved. Facebook calves off Instagram/WhatsApp. Bare minimum. Start an investigation into how vertical integration of brick and mortar grocers and packaging Industries effects actors in that space. Murdoch I'd have to do more research on, as he's a relatively recent arrival on my list. Amazon gets to decide if it's going to be a logistics company, or a platform for the sellers, or it's own "brick and mortar"-like. If marketplace, no using third-party seller for order flow analysis and front running. AWS gets calved, period. The bigger you get, the more regulators take a stake in shaping your growth, to the breaking point. Thems the breaks. Stay small if you want to do it your way. Risk becoming national infrastructure/utility as the numbers of M&A's increase. It's not all stick though. A company can do a strategic "merge-and-release" whereby for a short period of time, a company can acquire another, help it scale, then calve off after a period. After a certain size point, this is the only arrangement by which consolidation can happen. Calving off of industrial verticals is required for further permanent merger activity to continue. The end goal of this doctrine is to keep network effects at bay. Once you start getting snowball effect, your shareholder's needs take second place to stakeholder's needs. Period. It is insane how effective a one way wealth funnel our system can become once we stop trustbusting. Oh, every telecom merger in the past 10 years gets audited, and gets subjected to a public review. Any found to have not significantly increased in the benefit delivered to the end user gets an asset auction, loses eligibility for bidding on municipal projects, all last mile municipal ISP bans are nulled. I'd throw in a day in the stocks as a target of rotten vegetation in the town square for lobbyists that have been intentionally obtuse, but I really don't think that's within the realm of possibility. All of this is liable to change if someone would be interested in hiring me for a reasonable sum to map it all out full-time complete with authority to engage in legal discovery to get what info I don't have access to that'd actually make anything in this post more than frustrated pontificating.
faeriechangling 5y ago
They’re a monopoly in the ad business, Google and Facebook are reminiscent of Microsoft and Apple circa the 90’s.
- simonh 5y ago
  They can’t both be a monopoly in the same business. That would be a duopoly or a cartel. However between the two of them they collectively control about 51% of the online advertising market. They’re the heavy hitters for sure, and do dominate some market segments, but is two companies each having about 25% of a market a monopoly? Google’s market share has been declining for 5 years. Amazon’s share is rising fast. Is a triopoly a thing? Even if it was, we don’t have one anyway. Sure there is cartel like behaviour going on. That needs to stamped on hard. I’m not against action where it’s needed, I just see a lot of vague uninformed and inaccurate comment on this issue. Uninformed outrage is a dangerous combination.
propogandist 5y ago
>they are not a monopoly in any sense of the word. you sound like an employee with a vested interest in the company, or someone living in a bubble > "google has a secret deal with facebook called "Jedi Blue" that they knew was so illegal that it has a whole section describing how they'll cover for each other if anyone finds out > - google appears to have a team called gTrade that is wholly dedicated to ad market manipulation" from the antitrust lawsuit underway; https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/1452053940024057857 https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/145205394002405785...
- simonh 5y ago
  >you sound like an employee with a vested interest in the company,... Oooh, insulting my motivations. Nice move! There's cartel like behaviour going on, no question, I said as much elsewhere on the thread, and that needs to be stamped on hard. It's part of the harm they are doing I referred to. That's not the same as any one of these companies being a monopoly.

donarb 5y ago

Brave announced only 2 weeks ago that they would no longer default to Google search in their browser. "Privacy-preserving Brave Search Replaces Google as the Default Search Engine in the Brave Browser" https://brave.com/search-and-web-discovery/ https://brave.com/search-and-web-discovery/

wutbrodo 5y ago
I don't think this is relevant to my comment at all. The first part of my comment ignores the existence of Brave Search, saying that it's not "hard to avoid" Google Search when all it takes to do so is changing your browser to point to Bing. The second part of my comment that references Brave search was a response to the question of whether brave search uses Google under the hood.