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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

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.

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.