9 ms·
Wow, thanks very much for this explanation - I really appreciated it giving me full context before reading the email exchange. It's hard for me to imagine bett
by hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Wow, thanks very much for this explanation - I really appreciated it giving me full context before reading the email exchange.
It's hard for me to imagine better evidence that Google needs to be broken up than this. Honestly, I think it should basically be forbidden for Ads folks to even talk to the Chrome team. This looks like textbook abuse of monopoly power when you use your dominant position in one area (web browsing) to juice your position in another area (ads).
Also, I think it shows the foolishness of any company thinking that "Don't be evil" is a position that can last over time as you grow. I know it's easy to look at Jerry as "the bad guy" in this situation, but he is simply reacting to his incentives ("if we don't make these changes, we miss our sales number, and if we miss our sales numbers, we don't get our bonus"). All big companies eventually revert to their incentive structure once they become big enough. This line of thinking also goes to show why Google has traveled down the enshittification path so strongly over the past 5-10 years. Easy for to me imagine how each little search result change resulted in more revenue and not a significant number of people leaving, until you are left with the situation we have now where the entire first page of any remotely commercial search is just ads, going directly against Google's entire original thesis for their existence in the first place. My guess is the relatively recent change of text from "Ad" to "Sponsored" is because fewer people realize that sponsored means ad.
- changoplatanero 3y agoHow can chrome be broken off from the rest of google? It's not a standalone product that has its own revenue sources.
- hamandcheese 3y agoChrome would find revenue instantly the same way Firefox and Safari do (bid out the default search engine).
- fallingknife 3y agoSo now you have the Chrome team with an even more direct incentive to maximize search volumes at the expense of a good product since that's their revenue source too.
- to11mtm 3y agoThat would be a good thing if it drove people away... After the WEI incident chrome is pretty dang tainted to me. I'm mostly salty that chromium made Opera go from the wonderful Presto engine to being yet another chromium clone...
- warkdarrior 3y ago> I'm mostly salty that chromium made Opera go from the wonderful Presto engine to being yet another chromium clone... I do not know this story. How did the Chromium team force Opera to change rendering engines?
- lightspot21 3y agoThe same way Microsoft was forced to change to Chromium for Edge - Google forcing Chromium-specific features through the standardization process at a rate exhausting for Microsoft (or any other browser engine implementor) to follow in time without popular sites breaking.
- hamandcheese 3y agoThis doesn't seem to be an issue for Firefox which is in the same boat.
- voytec 3y ago> Chrome would find revenue instantly the same way Firefox and Safari do As in, Chrome decoupled from Google should have 90% of revenue coming from Google/Alphabet, as Mozilla does?
- wizzwizz4 3y ago90% < 100%. It is, at the very least, a start.
- jeffbee 3y agoThe world you are suggesting, where intermediary platforms take all of the revenue out of the information systems, would not be a good one.
- Ensorceled 3y agoThis is pretty ironic given that you are talking about browsers taking revenue away google, which is an intermediary platform taking all the ad revenue from various publishers ...
- peoplearepeople 3y agoBing could bid for it
- NegativeLatency 3y agoGoogle search revenue seems to do ok for Mozilla although that's not the best solution.
- jacquesm 3y agoThat would be their problem, not whoever orders it to be broken up. And frankly, that should have happened years ago.
- 22289d 3y ago> It's not a standalone product that has its own revenue sources. Chrome makes a ton of money. Google pays Apple and others billions of dollars to be the default search engine in their browser. Google gets that free now from Chrome but they get the revenue from all of those searches. Google would need to pay Chrome for that. Or I'm sure Microsoft would be willing to pay a lot if Google is not.
- dylan604 3y agoGoogle paying all of its employees to work on Chrome, or it pays Chrome to be the default search engine to a new company called Chrome so Chrome can pay its employees. What's the difference?
- Gh0stRAT 3y agoI think the difference is if Chrome had to stand on its own, it would be even more incentivized to drive traffic to Google for revenue at the expense of user experience.
- chii 3y agowhat if, *gasp*, people paid for chrome directly?
- 20after4 3y agoWhat if google paid it's users directly for their searches.
- Gh0stRAT 3y agoSounds like a joke but Bing is actually trying this.
- dylan604 3y agoif people paid for Chrome, Google would have to stop collecting data on its users. Google would much rather have that data than some <$20 fee. If Chrome was its own company, Google's money to be the default search engine would be more than they could earn from selling the browser. Free. Always has. Always will be. wait, that's the other data hoover.
- devnullbrain 3y ago>It's not a standalone product that has its own revenue sources. The question reveals the problem.
- hyperhopper 3y agoBut isn't the alternative just that chrome does? Is that better? Would you have never wanted the giant leaps forward in browsers that Google continually provides?
- devnullbrain 3y agoI don't agree it is continually, I see Chrome as already in the 'extinguish' phase. Chrome was able to make the improvements faster than competitors because - without an bottomless money engine in the form of a search monopoly - they weren't competitors at all. The price we pay for a few years of higher performance may be many more years of reduced innovation from competition.
- rchaud 3y agoWhat giant leaps? WebP images? AMP pages? Chrome won the browser wars a decade ago, it hasn't done anything since except try to track and monetize that audience.
- hyperhopper 3y agoJavaScript and HTML rendering performance
- graftak 3y agoSafari is faster and uses less memory
- jwells89 3y agoChrome/Blink shouldn’t be broken off into a business, but into a nonprofit org. Lots of companies rely on both which should make funding a non-issue.
- jannes 3y agoWhat would stop Google from simply forking Chrome again? Maybe Chromium development could be broken off into a non-profit, but Chrome is just some Google branding on top of the open source Chromium.
- UnlockedSecrets 3y agoIf it came to breaking up Alphabet, The courts would include in their orders terms that would prohibit them just picking the pieces back up.....
- rurp 3y agoYes, exactly. Chrome dominates the browser market via money made monopolizing search ads.
- chii 3y agoAmazon dominates the webhosting market via money made from monopolizing online commerce? I dont think this is a form of monopoly, if the only thing the dominant position gives you is money to burn. however, if google refused to advertise another browser in their search, and instead show chrome's ads in place of say, a firefox ad, then there's huge grounds for monopoly abuse.
- lazide 3y agoactually burning said money to force out competitors is absolutely problematic monopoly seeking. Burning it for other reasons isn’t.
- bagels 3y agoSenator, we run ads.
- fallingknife 3y agoHow is this any evidence that Google needs to be broken up? Google, like all companies, wants to maximize revenue. What about this is anti-competitive? Foolishness is not illegal.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoFortunately we have the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which does make this behavior illegal. Leveraging your monopoly in one area to advance your position in another area is illegal in the US, even if the company got to their monopoly position in the first area by just having the best product. This is basically exactly what Microsoft was found guilty of in the late 90s: abusing their monopoly power in operating systems to advance their position in the Internet by making IE the default browser and insisting, despite all evidence to the contrary, that "The browser must be an integral part of the OS!"
- fallingknife 3y agoHow is the described behavior leveraging Google's monopoly status? Making a product shittier to raise revenue is not specific to monopolies and not illegal.
- lazide 3y agoThat isn’t what the Sherman antitrust act says. It says doing it ‘unreasonably’ (or to an ‘unreasonable’ extent) is illegal (regarding trade). Attempting to monopolize (or actually doing so) is illegal, but leaning on a subsidiary to stop hurting revenue for the overall entity isn’t necessarily that (or illegal!). Monopolies based on actual quality are also generally considered okay (not illegal). If it was, any company with multiple divisions would be in violation. We’ll see what the court determines here. Happy to provide a reference to the law if you want. It’s pretty short. Edit: actually, FTC has a great write up - which also shows how difficult this case is when you look at other market participants and what Google was actually doing - https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/single-firm-conduct/monopolization-defined https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
- Brybry 3y agoIt's still bizarre to me that Google was ever allowed to purchase DoubleClick (even though DoubleClick was far more evil).
- to11mtm 3y agoThey managed to do it at the right time; back then most people still thought they actually followed "Don't be Evil". Also, unless I am misremembering, the acquisition was completed before the first commercial Android phone was even announced, they were a much smaller company.
- btilly 3y agoThe joke within Google at the time was, "We had to spend $3 billion to convince Sergey that image ads weren't evil."
- crazygringo 3y ago> It's hard for me to imagine better evidence that Google needs to be broken up than this. But it never happened -- the omnibox stayed -- so it doesn't seem like very good evidence to me. It actually shows the opposite -- that the product team built what was best for users in spite of opposition from sales.
- chmod775 3y ago> But it never happened Oh something happened. Here's a news article from 10 days after that e-mail: https://www.ghacks.net/2019/05/14/fix-chrome-prioritizing-search-words-over-visited-sites-in-address-bar/ https://www.ghacks.net/2019/05/14/fix-chrome-prioritizing-se... tl;dr: Chrome started prioritizing previous searches over visited sites for suggestions in the omnibar.
- Terr_ 3y ago> prioritizing previous searches over visited sites To put a finer (more-explicit) point on that: That sounds like an attempt to keep people making google searches over and over merely to return to whatever search-result they already found in the past and wanted to see again. It's true that not everything in the browser-history is what people want, but still... Imagine I searched for "monkey island ferry schedule" and picked the obviously-correct first result at "dot.monkey.gov/ferries". Boom, done, got it. Then if I want that information again tomorrow, why would I ever want to re-search, as opposed to just returning to the same result? In contrast to all this Chrome stuff, let's imagine a browser that is utterly focused on the user's best-interests. With sufficient features/intelligence, it would actually do the exact opposite: "I notice every time you search any monkey/ferry stuff, you always stop once you get to that same result... So you probably always want exactly that page, therefore I should offer it prominently to help you avoid wasting time on unnecessary searches."
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lostmsu 3y ago
- 22289d 3y agoRemove the word monopoly from this and there is nothing wrong with it. It's standard and smart business practice to create synergies among your business units in this way. It's one of the key reasons companies acquire other companies. While I would agree that Google doing it may be detrimental to consumers, it's not suddenly nefarious when they do it. They're just doing what any company would do. It's not their job to look out for the health of the market or what's best for consumers. That's the governments job. It's Google's job to look out for Google and their shareholders.
- pixl97 3y ago>it can be detrimental to consumers, it's not suddenly nefarious when they do it. That is more of a US than an EU point of view. US is more "If you're not a monopoly, feel free to fuck the customer" EU is more "Consumers have rights, quite being a dick".
- 22289d 3y agoI'm not familiar with EU law but as a US consumer, I don't think that's fair. They're far from perfect but they try. We have entire agencies that exist to protect consumers in specific areas. The SEC being a famous one. Their entire mission is to protect investors from getting scammed. That's why congress created and funds the SEC. That's why those thousands of people go to work every day. To protect us from getting scammed. Awesome. I'm thankful for it. The context here is one particular type of fucking over the customer. The ways in which monopolies can abuse their power. Within that one specific type, what you said is probably accurate.
- behringer 3y agoSorry but Jerry is definitely the bad guy. The bad guy often does evil shit just for the money. In this case Jerry is trying to hold back human progress. Screw Jerry and everything he stands for and screw his management and the investors for putting him in this position with bullshit incentive structures
- jltsiren 3y ago> I know it's easy to look at Jerry as "the bad guy" in this situation, but he is simply reacting to his incentives The way you react to incentives determines your moral character. If an action is harmful on its own, it doesn't become any less harmful if you also stand to gain from it. Companies are amoral and lack human agency, and hence they cannot be held morally responsible for their actions. The responsibility lies with the people making the decisions within the company. And not just the people on the top, but also the people making the day-to-day choices that transform the strategic decisions into reality. (See also: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil)
- NegativeK 3y agoPeople continue to parrot the phrase that corporations are typically beholden to their shareholders to maximize profit. We also know from the prison experiments that people have a really hard time not falling into evil behavior when it's expected. But I agree: neither of those facts absolve every individual in any organization anywhere from doing the wrong thing. Even if someone else would step in to your spot and do the wrong thing, it's still your responsibility.
- jdiff 3y agoThe prison experiments are long debunked. It required lying to and manipulating the guards and has never been successfully replicated. They had to be pushed and coerced into evil behavior when they were explicitly being told it was not just expected but required.
- a123b456c 3y agoPlus, no control group. Not an experiment.
- sofixa 3y agoDoesn't matter, we have real world proof of the same thanks to Nazi Germany (they were good for something I guess). The book Ordinary Men, based on which there's a Netflix documentary too, follows the story of a bunch of police reservists (basically regular men, in their 50s, from Hamburg, who were too old to be conscripted in the army, so were conscripted in the police for "police duties"). They were regular people, with families and stuff, mostly dockworkers so probably leaned left before the rise of Nazis, but were sent to commit massacres in Poland and they did it. Some struggled, especially after the first ones, but later on it just became normal. Those were regular people, not some crazy Nazi fanatics convinced Jews and Poles were subhuman. One of them convinced himself to target children for murder, because it was merciful - you see, they would die on their own without their parents (which were murdered by his colleagues), so giving them a quick death was mercy. He had kids himself too. Harrowing stuff, but quite decent proof that humans are capable of anything. Nobody is born a monster, but can become one in the wrong circumstances and through bad personal choices.
- esrauch 3y agoHonestly I don't see this conversation going much differently if Chrome was it's own company. Like Apple and Mozilla, Chrome would get paid based on how many queries it sent to Google, then they do a launch that reduces queries and their revenue arm would say "whoa whoa whoa are you sure this benefit is worth this level of revenue hit?"
- withinboredom 3y agoMozilla doesn’t JUST make money from searches. So why would chrome? In fact, Mozilla has been trying to reduce its dependence on Google for awhile now. I think it’s down to around ~80% of their revenue, IIRC. If Google were to stop, Bing would jump on that in a heartbeat.
- whimsicalism 3y ago80% is still ridiculously dependent and the GP point stands
- jeromegv 3y agoApple is definitely not paid by search sent to google, it’s a bulk amount for the whole year. And we can tell that safari just doesn’t prioritize past google searches in the omnibar the same way that chrome does.