7 ms·

Is Google's looming monopoly trial a watershed moment for Big Tech?

• usrnm 3y ago
  Let's hope it is
• cageface 3y ago
  I'll applaud antitrust action if it's applied fairly across the industry. Kneecapping Google without also going after Microsoft, Apple and Meta will only make things worse for consumers.
  • 1over137 3y ago
    I dunno. Stopping one criminal is better than stopping none.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
    This is one of the thought fallacies that lock in the status quo - "if you can't fix all problems everywhere all at once, then you shouldn't do anything at all"
    • lazide 3y ago
      Noticing the market effects of taking out one major player while ignoring the others doing similar things isn’t a fallacy. It’s noticing that as long as you stay somewhat low profile you can get away with almost anything, as apparently they can only notice/do something about one big player at a time. Which is concerning.
      • johnnyworker 3y ago
        They're not "taken out" as a player, they, in the best case, get improved as participant.
        • lazide 3y ago
          If there is an antitrust finding and a real, and impactful outcome, they’ll at a minimum be distracted with 5+ years of reorganization BS and lose their ability to leverage what they have now. That never actually helps them.
      • Brian_K_White 3y ago
        Doing one thing today and portraying that as never doing anything else is a fallacy. Acting like it would do no good and have no effect on everyone else even if they never do the exact same thing to everyone else is a fallacy. It's fallacies all around.
      • brookst 3y ago
        It’s a fallacy because it’s based on some kind of idealism and not reality. Let’s see how it works for other aspects of life: “Unless cops ticket every single speeder, they should not ticket anyone” “Unless doctors can cure a patient’s cancer, they should not set a broken bone” “Unless you’re going to track down everyone you’ve ever wronged, you should never apologize.” I don’t think those work. The reality is that doing something is almost always better than doing nothing. And in a complex business and legal environment, insisting on simultaneous and equal action really is suggesting we do nothing. Regulators should go after companies that break laws. Someone looking at company X should never, ever decide to forego enforcement because they people looking at company Y are not taking action.
        • cageface 3y ago
          insisting on simultaneous and equal action really is suggesting we do nothing. Nobody is insisting on _simultaneous and equal_ action. Obviously that is not realistic. But in an industry as volatile and dynamic as tech remedies do need to be applied in somewhat close order to have any claim to fairness.
          • vintermann 3y ago
            Yes. An antitrust suit against Google is itself welcome. But if it stops here, or Alphabet mysteriously gets away very lightly after appointing a few more "ex"-intelligence people to its board, we should see through it.
        • lazide 3y ago
          As other replies noted, no one is looking for or setting the bar at simultaneous and equal action. Nearly any action in proportion to the harm would be sufficient. It’s a common principle in law, actually. For instance, with speeders - if literally no one including folks going 20 over the speed limit get a ticket for years in a town, and then the Sheriff’s political opponent gets a huge ticket and his car impounded for going 5 over, would that be ok? What about if the Dr. treated everyone, except for his childhood bully which was dying of cancer? Monopolistic and anti-trade behavior is going nuts everywhere, in almost every industry. From meat packing to shipping to tech.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • cageface 3y ago
      I'm not saying they all need to be addressed at once. But they should be addressed close together otherwise it's just the government picking market winners. Technology moves fast. If you force Google to reorg and then it takes 5 years to bring more antitrust action I'm not sure you've actually improved anything.
      • Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
        I agree, but it could be that they need to focus all their resources to take on google with any chance of success. It could also very well be that the other big companies alter their behavior in response to the now real threat of anti-trust enforcement.
        • DannyBee 3y ago
          "I agree, but it could be that they need to focus all their resources to take on google with any chance of success." Why? What does this even mean? I have no idea what it means to "focus all their resources" or why it's important. The antitrust division of the DOJ alone has 380 attorneys (900 people total), and that is before you get into the fact that they also will contract with outside firms, etc. This is 10x the size of the average large law firm's entire antitrust practice area. Probably 20x a lot of the time. They can easily run multiple large tech cases at once. FTC is 2x as large (it has 750 attorneys total) "It could also very well be that the other big companies alter their behavior in response to the now real threat of anti-trust enforcement." This didn't happen at all when MS was taken out. Or AT&T Or ... So this seems like a pipe dream.
          • Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
            Are you suggesting all these staff are just sitting idly and doing nothing? Or could it be they have these large staffs because there is a whole lot of lawyering to do on a day to day basis keeping these agencies running for a country with 300+ million people.
            • 3y ago
    • bryanlarsen 3y ago
      Google is probably the primary counterweight against Microsoft, Apple, Meta and Amazon. Taking out or diminishing Google will strengthen the monopolies of the other 4.
      • sharemywin 3y ago
        First you have to win the case against google then you can look at other companies.
        • DannyBee 3y ago
          Why, exactly? (It's also not what they are doing, since FTC filed against Amazon)
          • j_maffe 3y ago
            Maybe because the regulatory offices aren't built well enough to handle all monopolies at once? These companies have a huge amount of lobbying activity and the best legal teams out there. I don't think taking down one monopoly would strengthen others, it'd set Google as an example and other monopolies that don't shrink themselves will get taken down next.
            • DannyBee 3y ago
              "Maybe because the regulatory offices aren't built well enough to handle all monopolies at once? " Based on what data is this asserted? As I pointed out elsewhere, the FTC has 780 attorneys, which is about 20x the largest antitrust lawfirms you will find. The DOJ antitrust division has 380 attorneys, which is about 10x. Both have hundreds of support folks as well (the DOJ ATR has 900 employees total). It's not just them either, they have states with them as well that each carry their own resourcing. They are also happy to hire outside resources. There seems to be a weird view here of how any of this works, which amounts to what you said in your next sentence - "These companies have a huge amount of lobbying activity and the best legal teams out there." Even if this is true, which it's often simply not (for example, the DOJ hired Boies to deal with Microsoft, at a time when Boies was unknown, and they overall had a much better legal team than MS, at a time when antitrust regulation of companies was neither new nor surprising), it doesn't change how many resources you need to deal with multiple companies at once. I met plenty of DOJ antitrust attorneys in my time in DC. They are the best out there. What basis do you have for asserting they are not? I ask because I've yet to see a single person in this conversation who has a view based on things other than "gut feelings". Hopefully you do! Because if it's just more of the same dataless trope spouted elsewhere, then it's not just a silly stereotype, it's also horribly denigrating to those folks, who really are, as i said, the best you will find. It may change political wherewithal, but it has no bearing on the ability of regulatory offices to charge and prosecute multiple cases at once. Contrary to your claim, they are in fact, built to handle this. Like anything else, trying a case like this has a relatively fixed, and well known cost. The ATR and friends are well funded to be capable of trying multiple big tech cases at once, and in fact, are. " I don't think taking down one monopoly would strengthen others, it'd set Google as an example and other monopolies that don't shrink themselves will get taken down next." Given the exact opposite has happened in every single case historically (AT&T, MS, et al), this seems very wrong. Overall, HN seems to focus on tropes about antitrust law, with very little data or knowledge of how any of it works for real. People seem very happy to offer strong opinions despite that lack of data, however!
    • vintermann 3y ago
      It's still right to worry that other obscene monopolists are merely using the government as a cat's paw against a rival - or maybe the government itself is using the lawsuit as a threat to whip Google into compliance with some national security demand that won't be made public. These are concerns you would have if it was in China, Russia or even the EU it happened. Rightly so. You should worry about it for the US too.
      • 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
        We can solve that problem when it arises.
        • vintermann 3y ago
          Can we? I hope so. But first step is watching out for it. We can't solve it if we don't notice it, and there's historically been a lot of blatant things we didn't notice.
    • oh_sigh 3y ago
      Sometimes that isn't a fallacy. If you have a cancerous tumors, you generally want to get rid of every bit of it at the same time - removing 50% isn't going to slow it down.
    • Aurornis 3y ago
      There’s a fallacy in your reasoning, too: The assumption that any government action is a pure “fix” with no downsides at all. In reality, government actions in situations like this are more about tradeoffs. There will be winners and losers and, despite what some people want to believe, consumers will not unilaterally benefit from these actions. There will be downsides along with the upsides. Applying heavy handed regulation to some companies while letting others do the same thing creates its own set of problems. Once the government becomes the arbiter of who wins and who loses, it gets ugly and the incentives get very weird. The other fallacy is that spot enforcement is the only option. When you have multiple companies competing in the same space doing similar things, singling one out as a “monopoly” and targeting them is illogical. You create industry regulation and apply it to everyone. If nothing else, it’s a matter of efficiency.
  • bryanlarsen 3y ago
    I think given the scrutiny and investigations those 3 and Amazon it's very likely that those 3 and Amazon will face antitrust if the case against Google is successful and if Lina Khan gets a second term. Both are pretty big if's.
  • miohtama 3y ago
    US, EU, went after Microsoft in the past, especially about web browsers. However regulatory actions usually arrive too late, too much damage has happened, smaller competitors are already out of business, etc.
  • dblohm7 3y ago
    IANAL but AIUI US antitrust law only applies when a monopoly is acquired/maintained via prohibited means. Having a monopoly position in itself is necessary but not sufficient to be considered illegal by US courts.
  • noirscape 3y ago
    To be frank, all of those four are all exhibiting monopolist behavior in different ways. Google just is the worst of the lot from an antitrust perspective. Googles problem is very much that they have an open policy of launching new products and axing it without regard for the existing userbase when it doesn't become the standard. They're so large that any individual user falls to the wayside in those metrics. Out of all of the ones on that list, Google is the most openly consumer hostile version of this stuff because they do everything the others do and are in a far more instrumental position for the average consumer. On B2B they're horrible because Google just... is the legitimate ad market these days. Like, if Google doesn't want you or if you don't like Googles rates, that's it. There's no real general purpose ad network that's comparable to Google that aren't niche startups or can offer comparable rates. The lawsuit is about the latter in specific though. Apple just is your traditional walled garden setup. Only that which exists in the Apple garden is allowed on Apple and their market share is annoyingly large enough that it means Apple basically morally polices the mobile market. - not being on apple devices might as well mean that you don't exist as a mobile developer. That said this dominance isn't exactly by market share (worldwide anyway), but moreso by the fact that the Apple userbase is in the niche of "trendsetters" (or in other words: trendy younger people and your boss have iDevices, which are the demographics that disproportionately matter for popularity). Microsoft is just getting a bit too comfortable after they lost that lawsuit in the 2000s and is just doing what they did back then. They need to be reminded why they lost that suit. Out of all big tech, they're probably the smallest fish to fry given they're also easily intimidated if the EU is any indication. Meta is... well, it's mostly a privacy nightmare with some hints of a walled garden (fucking WhatsApp) and similar moral policing as Apple. They're only slightly less bad than Google because their brand is seen as so toxic that people not having a Facebook/Instagram account isn't seen as a social failing (which given they're a social media network, that matters). Kneecap any one of them and it'll do a net good - they're all bad but they're bad in different markets. Google going down won't suddenly make Apple or Microsoft more powerful, they're in different fields. (And the Meta ad tracking machine is only on Meta products, afaik Meta doesn't sell general site ads.)
    • cageface 3y ago
      I think it's also worth keeping in mind that a lot of important open source tech has originated at Google. Without Google we wouldn't have NodeJS, Electron, Kubernetes, Go, Flutter etc. None of the other big tech companies have made comparable contributions. And just considering mobile alone, of course diminishing Android will empower Apple.
• gnarbarian 3y ago
  Google performs too much ideological editorializing on their search results and on YouTube.
  • cycrutchfield 3y ago
    If you truly feel that way, then don’t use Google or YouTube?
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • gnarbarian 3y ago
      I don't. but their dominant position enables an abnormal influence on modern discourse and politics.
      • cycrutchfield 3y ago
        Refusing to amplify conspiracy theories seems like a net benefit to modern discourse and politics.
        • gnarbarian 3y ago
          these days the difference between a right wing conspiracy theory and the news is 6 months.
          • cycrutchfield 3y ago
            I actually laughed out loud at this. Lay off the copium
            • gnarbarian 3y ago
              how am I trying to cope here?
• etempleton 3y ago
  I just don’t see what the plan is here. I actually don’t think Google has such an iron grip monopoly that it unbreakable. In fact, I see Google as the most vulnerable of the big tech companies. They have one highly profitable product, search. Bing is making serious strides and their AI search is significantly better. Everything else Google does is small potatoes.
  • josephd79 3y ago
    Is Google Ads and Youtube not profitable?
    • gorbypark 3y ago
      Technically, Google Ads is making all the money. Google search and YouTube are more or less just funnels for Google Ads. I'm not sure how Alphabet has everything setup and if Google Ads revenue that originates from search is booked to the search division, but in reality, everything is just ways for you to look at Google Ads.
      • bryanlarsen 3y ago
        I don't buy this argument. Google Search and YouTube are highly separable. There is some synergy between the two, but really no more than between any two ad-driven sites on the Internet.
        • gorbypark 3y ago
          Yeah, of course. At the scale of Google's main products, they could build unique ads platforms and keep everything completely seperate if they wanted to, needed to or were forced to.
          • Guvante 3y ago
            Alphabet would like get separated into independent companies. They might already be tracking their profitability that way to encourage search to include more ads "organically" (as in by tying search performance to ads in search revenue that team will be interested in improving ads in search revenue) This doesn't even mean Google Search doesn't use Google Ads. It just means that Google Search has to buy usage of Google Ads thereby allowing competition between ad providers.
• nonrandomstring 3y ago
  Perhaps we're seeing a watershed moment for western culture. I hope the US government feeling ready to take on Google is merely a symptom of a broader sea-change. The problem is not one player like Google getting too big as a business. Monopolies naturally arise and get cut down, as often by markets than regulation. The change is that we must challenge the very idea that it's acceptable for one way of being , whether technology, platform, protocol, or practice to become a de-facto norm - and radically exclude all others. Mono-culture is in the crosshairs now, not monopoly. And that applies to the enforced "cashless society", effectively mandated smartphone use, single strong identity systems , cloud everything and app everything, and so on... Mono-cultures, whether in digital tech or banana crops, never end well. Lack of plurality is antithetical to long-term resilience and a healthy democracy and society.
  • dizzydes 3y ago
    Monopolies are one thing as the products are similar so massive network effects and economies of scale might need to be offset by govt regulation. But on the monoculture point - doesn't the free market allow and reward diversity in areas people want it? You mention cashless society as an example.
    • ethbr1 3y ago
      People as a whole balance diversity against the benefits of picking most-popular / best-in-breed (e.g. better support, reliability, and features; because it's funded at scale).
    • Retric 3y ago
      People want more than one thing so diversity may easily fail to overcome the desire for cheaper prices etc. That’s the fundamental advantage to many kinds of regulations, markets can’t convey unlimited information. We don’t want people constantly trying to decide where to eat based on the perceived risks of food born illness rather than price and how good the food tastes etc. By minimizing the risks of trying new restaurants you increase competition in other areas.
  • bluescrn 3y ago
• flappyeagle 3y ago
  I hope googles stock takes a hit on this so I can buy it on discount. If the MS litigation of days past is any indicator, this will do exactly nothing other than burn taxpayer money.
  • j_maffe 3y ago
    I'm always perplexed by these vague but very consistent comments about burning taxpayer money. If you think government actions are a waste of tax money just go live in a forest or something.
    • flappyeagle 3y ago
      I would love my government to build commuter rail at scale. Or provide healthcare. Or child support. Or subsidized housing. I think the government makes stupid decisions around spending sometimes. Google is free. YouTube is free. You don’t need to use them. You can watch TV or use DDG or Firefox or whatever. This lawsuit is moronic.
      • j_maffe 3y ago
        Even if it is free it's still an essential service that we all use. The consumer needs to be protected from monopolies that harm the market. Monopolies have been proven over and over again to be harmful to the end product. Imagine if Google actually had competitors. They'd actually work on improving search results which everyone has been complaining about later. They wouldn't put 5 ads at the top of the page. They wouldn't rank lengthy, vague sources at the top to maximize your time looking on their ads. How can this be a waste of time?
  • oh_sigh 3y ago
    I don't have data for this, but I feel like whenever government action is announced against these big companies, their stock goes up, not down
    • refulgentis 3y ago
• philipov 3y ago
  Monopoly is a red herring. We should be going after trusts of all sorts, even if they don't rise to the level of monopoly power. A cartel is no less damaging just because the individual players don't hold monopoly power. What matters is that you leverage your large capital position into political power used to enact anti-consumer policy. Competition is only important in-so-far as it is capable of protecting consumers, so even if there's a fig leaf of competition, that's not the point if it isn't effective at protecting consumers. Large concentrations of capital are used to undermine consumer protections without needing to be allocated into a strict monopoly, and therefore should be subject to antitrust regulation.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• roenxi 3y ago
  People really aren't thinking clearly about where monopolies come from. The monopolies that are scary are those formed by the government - centralised powers love monopolies! Google and Apple provide a single point of contact for the censorship regime and surveillance state. The risk here isn't Google as a monopoly, it is the government banning competition with Google under some sort of think-of-the-children or national security justification. Google wouldn't even have a monopoly on anything worth having if IP laws were more sane. Governments generally have objectives. Those objectives are inevitably counter to what a free market would do (otherwise they'd be already achieved). It is usually easier for those objectives to be achieved in a centralised market. There is no call to look to governments to start prosecuting monopolies. A better place to start is to stop promoting them! Loosen up the financial regulation, start reversing the centralisation of banks, promote liberty. Put in some small tweaks around the edges of contract law to make it hard to constrain the future action of individuals. Far to often governments build a monopoly, then pretend to fight it. The starting point really should be to stop building them up. The worst monopolies are those created by regulation because they are actually inescapable.
• hbn 3y ago
  I don't even care about their search monopoly. I've never found a search engine that works great these days because the internet is so filled with SEO blogspam, AI garbage, engagement farming, and information siloed behind specific non-searchable platforms like Discord, it doesn't matter what search engine you use. I care much more about how they essentially own the browser space, and can just force through garbage "standards" that no one wants like Manifest V3 for no reason other than to make more people look at their own ads. That seems like an actual abuse of their monopoly status that's going to harm the internet.
• sashank_1509 3y ago
  A lot of bickering behind whether Google fits the definition of a monopoly or not, this legalese is make-work for lawyers. As a citizen my only concern is: Does Google deserve its monopoly? Obviously Yes, there’s nothing Google does to prevent you from using Bing, DuckDuckGo etc. In fact you can start using them today, but Google will remain dominant because their product is superior Is googles monopoly harmful to society? Their premier product is free to consumers. In fact a lot of their core products are simply free. They’ve done an incredible amount of r and d from transformers, tensorflow to deepmind which easily costs them billions a year. In fact it’s very hard to make an argument that they’re bad for consumers. The biggest complaints I see are from companies that run ads on Google, who are frustrated by the lack of other options and googles high prices. Fair enough, but I don’t see how this concern should lead to breaking up one of the largest companies in the world that is also a source of so much innovation.
  • parineum 3y ago
    There's a lot of misunderstanding about antitrust and monopolies. Monopolies aren't illegal, anti-competitive behavior is. Antitrust breaks up monopolies that are anti-competitive. If you're a monopoly because you have the best product, that's good for consumers.
• smfugit 3y ago
  Since they have done a great job dealing with big oil, big tobacco, big ag, big pharma, big banks, big auto, big telco, big media, big soda, big accounting, the mil complex etc I shall not be holding my breath. The US political class is bought and paid for. They exist to do what the corps want. There is a good reason Tim Wu quit. Its a non contest.
  • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > big oil, big tobacco, big ag, big pharma, big banks, big auto, big telco, big media, big soda, big accounting For banks and accounting, the U.S. is marginally pro-consolidation. But oil is fractured (lol). Tobacco is, in America, tightly regulated and also fractured. Auto is full of upstarts. Telco and media are being transformed from several directions, including, also, by upstarts. And I’m not sure why soda is a priority.