7 ms·

I think we need a better term than monopoly, that separates it from what people usually mean which is 'the best product'. I literally cannot think of any sort o

I think we need a better term than monopoly, that separates it from what people usually mean which is 'the best product'. I literally cannot think of any sort of product or service with lower switching costs than internet search. Typing bing.com takes 0.8 seconds and costs $0. Hundreds of orders of magnitude easier than switching to a different railroad if only one goes through your town. Google is a big ass company and enjoys outsized market share because people choose to use it. Everyone who buys a MacBook or Surface computer or smartphone does one thing immediately and that's to download Chrome. It's literally the first thing people voluntarily choose to do after powering on the device for the first time. I'm not sure why we need government interference here which in all likelihood would change no customer behaviour but probably just add a few extra clicks in front of the Chrome downloading process. When Alphabet begins doing something like banning Google Fiber customers from accessing bing.com, that will be interesting. But there honestly very minimal anti-competitive behaviour like that happening at the moment.

ossyrial 2y ago
> Google is a big ass company and enjoys outsized market share because people choose to use it. If this were true, Google could make the immediate and easy decision to increase their annual profits by $26 billion, by simply stopping to pay browser vendors to make Google the default search engine. https://untested.sonnet.io/Defaults+Matter%2C+Don't+Assume+Consent https://untested.sonnet.io/Defaults+Matter%2C+Don't+Assume+C...
- danielmarkbruce 2y ago
  The person didn't say "all people choose it no matter what". The statement is true as written.
- throwaway48540 2y ago
  Their need to buy advertising proves it is not a monopoly. If they were, they'd make that easy and profitable decision immediately.
  - avidiax 2y ago
    Google's payment to Apple isn't advertisement. It's to prevent Apple from rolling their own search engine, or selling the default to the next highest bidder.
    - throwaway48540 2y ago
      Putting their search in front of people instead of others is advertisement. It doesn't prevent apple from doing anything.
      - dwaite 2y ago
        Apple has a business agreement to use Google search, and it seems it is a similar agreement to what they made to OpenAI - we as Apple will use your service by default, we pay you nothing, and we take a percentage of your monetization.
cogman10 2y ago
> because people choose to use it. Incorrect. Google spent ungodly amounts of money to make sure that their search engine was the default in as many places as possible. People didn't "choose" to use it, they use the defaults. And in some cases, like my Android phone, google is the only option for integrated searches. I cannot use another search engine without opening a browser then opening up the search engine of choice. Monopoly may not be the right term, but anticompetitive is. They outspent every other search provider to make sure their product was used. They paid off apple to not develop a search engine and instead use theirs as a default. These are things in the court documents which caused the ruling to go against them.
- sushid 2y ago
  You are literally agreeing with the parent commenter. It's anticompetitive but not a monopoly. The parent is also talking about Chrome, not Google Search.
  - cogman10 2y ago
    I never said I disagreed with their entire comment, I was responding to the statements saying "switching search engines is easy and google is obviously the superior product that's why it's used instead of bing.com". That should have been clear from my comment and if you look at other comments in this thread you'll see others interpreted the parent comment similarly. I suggest you read others comments more charitably.
- bamboozled 2y ago
  I used DDG for a long time, it's crap, I switched back to Google, I suspect a lot of people would do the same. There isn't a lot of competition. I tired Kagi, it's good too, but I didn't feel like the cost was justified when Google is free. I will probably try Kagi again someday though, I did like it and I think their mission is pretty cool.
  - rcMgD2BwE72F 2y ago
    I'm 10x happier with Kagi than Google, and I was very skeptical (having followed Google's devs very closely as acquisition specialist for ~10+y). If you can afford Kagi, I'm curious to know why you don't stick with it. Or I'll assume that because the Google brand is just too strong, in which case we have a particular case of a monopoly.
t0mas88 2y ago
Google is offering a free browser, while making a good browser costs money. They are subsidising that by their huge ad-business. And by no surprise, their browser is the only major one that has no privacy protection features and last month decided to abandon the plan to deprecate cookies and tracking. That browser is competing with someone like Opera (used to be a paid for product) and Mozilla in an unfair way, because Google is killing others by making it free and taking the loss.
- tim333 2y ago
  Yeah but there's no great shortage of competing free browsers.
- sushid 2y ago
  But Opera and Firefox and others are all free browsers as well. I agree with the parent commenter that its not exactly a monopoly in the traditional sense. It's not even the default browser on Mac or Windows.
  - dwattttt 2y ago
    > Opera and Firefox and others are all free browsers as well And yet browser development costs money. If browsers cost money, you could make a better product and compete by selling it, but when an incumbent is giving theirs away for free?
    - xp84 2y ago
      Yes! The situation that has been our world since MSIE went free over 25 years ago.
    - sahila 2y ago
      How does your rationale explain Internet Explore/Edge and Safari which both have abundance of money and still can’t outcompete Chrome? This goes back to the original point about Google search being superior to Bing, and not just because it’s free.
randomdata 2y ago
> and costs $0. But then you're not the customer, you're the product, as they say. What is the cost to the actual customer to transition to an alternative?
- danielmarkbruce 2y ago
  0. The transition to bing from google costs 0.
  - ukblewis 2y ago
    Or all of their investment? Considering that very few end-users use Bing, ditching Google is like ditching the internet for much of their target audience, at least, most likely
  - fooker 2y ago
    You missed the point. The actual customer is the one buying ads. It's comically difficult to avoid Google if you're the one who wants to show ads.
    - danielmarkbruce 2y ago
      Nope, you missed the point. Google isn't paying apple for advertisers, they are paying for distribution of eyeballs. You get the eyes, you get the ads.
      - randomdata 2y ago
        You’re right that there is a cost to producing a product, but the question was about the switching cost to the customer. At very least there is a direct labour cost to move the ads from Google to something else, so it is obviously not 0 like the out-to-lunch comment claimed earlier. Although I think we all know the switching cost is going to be way higher than that as the aforementioned spend on building the product isn't fruitless.
        2y ago
georgeecollins 2y ago
Just have to say this again even if everyone already knows it: If the US Government / EU hadn't threatened Microsoft they would have embedded their browser in Windows and tied it to the OS to the extent where normal people would only use their browser. I don't know if Google could exist in that alternate world, but I suspect Microsoft would have "deprived them of Oxygen" and they would be bought or crushed. You probably can't stop Google from being the most popular search (or don't want to) but you should be able to stop Google from using the popularity of their product to crush alternative ad tech. Or crush some new tech we don't realize will be important.
- __loam 2y ago
  Google is so critically important to the infrastructure of the internet itself that I really struggle to understand why a for profit entity with incentives that are not aligned to the public should be in charge of the most important search engine.
  - sahila 2y ago
    Because they created the search engine, and truthfully profit motives produce better products at lower costs than non-profits generally across the board. The alternative is having government creating software and it’s hard to point to any public US website/app where I’m amazed.
    - Teever 2y ago
      That's not the only alternative. Another alternative could be that the government breaks up entities like Google and regulates the market in a way that segments it so that it is more beneficial to society by providing more safety and stability over the vital infrastructure that is the Internet as well as by creating healthier markets that provide consumers with access to cheaper, better goods from a variety of vendors aren't squeezed by the likes Google, Apple, and Amazon.
    - __loam 2y ago
      Riding this taxi cab directly to privatization of fire fighters.
m463 2y ago
> Google is a big ass company and enjoys outsized market share because people choose to use it. but not really. the situation is similar to auto-voting the incumbent in every goverment election each november. that is not ok.
bedhead 2y ago
There needs to be some remedy for these handful of companies that manage to break the game like they reached the kill screen in Pac Man.
linotype 2y ago
They just paid Reddit to shut off access to other companies/search engines. How is that not anti-competitive?
bitfilped 2y ago
Google the search engine isn't the problem, it's the app ecosystem where they behave as a monopoly.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
thfuran 2y ago
>I think we need a better term than monopoly, that separates it from what people usually mean which is 'the best product'. I wouldn't go so far as to say that literally nobody means that when they say 'monopoly' but I doubt it is common enough for that claim to be made in good faith.
amy-petrik-214 2y ago
It's a fine thesis, google the humble search engine, easy to compete against. Sure. That argument stands. But.. ... google is not a search engine. There's the google duopoly with facebook (ads, user data). There's the google duopoly with apple (phone operating system), there's the gmail system not exactly the same as search. There's google the web browser, duopoly(ish) with firefox. There's the youtube (duopoly with netflix? monopoly?). Probably a bunch of other various duopolies. Then there's all these other giga-sized "side projects" which seem small proportional to those mega-businesses - google home type stuff, google nest, waze, consumer electronics etc. Arguably the google nest and assistant is duopolistic with amazon alexa. Which is the state of tech, there's like 5 big companies that share some portion of pies of 20 major duopolies and 100 minor duopolies. And they're all like "SEE! SEE! We're NOT a monopoly". And there's two of them saying that, pointing each at the other one as evidence of their non-monopoly status. To me that's monopoly by another name, and that other name is duopoly, and as such it has many of the same problems as the monopoly. And duopolies all every damn place, not just tech - NYSE and NASDAQ stock markets. Sony and xbox (sorry nintendo). Boeing and Airbus. Visa and Mastercard. Pepsi and Coke. Intel and AMD, AMD and NVIDIA. Windows and Mac. How many "gentleman's agreements" must exist in those duopolies, too many methinks And so if you ask me it would be quite natural to shatter all these companies according to their duopolistic silos, with the hope being that the duopolies exist in part from the synergy and deep pockets of the whole organization, and so by breaking apart the duopolistic strings to the rest of the org, perhaps there can be a third and fourth phone operating system, home consumer electronic, web browser, youtube, and so on. Because the point of capitalism is an efficient market to serve the public, not to serve the megacorp coffers
nhumrich 2y ago
Monopoly is not "large, even 100% market share". Monopoly is when they use that market share to compete in _an entire different market_ without actually earning the "best" spot. Or using their dominance to prevent competition entirely from succeeding. For example: Blocking all ad-tracking on its own browser, except ads purchased through its own ad network. Remember, _you_ are not the customer of Google. You are the product. The ad companies are the customer. The market is not search: the market is ad sales.
- jnwatson 2y ago
  No, that's abuse of monopoly power. It isn't illegal to be a monopoly. It is illegal to a abuse that position.
jemmyw 2y ago
I read through some of the documents of the original complaint. This is mainly not about Google being the dominant search engine for consumers. It's more to do with their anti competitive behavior in the ad tech market. As a consumer, switching is easy. As a company that wants to advertise, switching is not easy if Google holds all the users. But also they've bought up all sides of the market, so what used to be competitive is now entirely controlled by one company. And, once they had that control, they started squeezing both sides, advertisers and sites that run advertising. From a consumer perspective it's not about being able to switch search engine. Google is potentially putting a drag on entire economies, both money wise, and innovation wise. If every service you use has to spend extra because Google has an advertising monopoly then every service is passing a cost to you. If every service needs to do it the one way then there's no advancement, no new models, just "give Google money" forever.
- danielmarkbruce 2y ago
  Google doesn't have an advertising monopoly. Facebook all by itself does about half of Google's revenue in ads. Then you have twitter, amazon, snap, all kinds of stuff. Google would be lucky to have 40% of online ads, and then once you include all advertising they are way down, maybe 15-20% or something.
  - chairmansteve 2y ago
    They have a search monopoly, therefore are the gateway to internet
    - danielmarkbruce 2y ago
      That's at least close to the truth. It's not strictly a monopoly though. And there is a very real chance it's all about to blow up given LLMs.
      - alsetmusic 2y ago
        The judge found them to be a monopoly. They are strictly a monopoly. Unless the case gets overturned, they are exactly a monopoly. LLMs are not going to meaningfully upset the balance any time soon. They are a service / product in search of a problem for most people. And if they do something useful for you, that’s great but HN users are not most people so the statement stands.
cm277 2y ago
Google can be more easily understood as a bunch of businesses that funnel traffic into an ad marketplace. Search, Android, GMail, Maps, Chrome, everything is just about having enough traffic and enough behavioral data to make them the biggest ad seller ever. But they are also the broker and price-setter. That's how they make money, not on the quality of their services --which OK, they have to maintain to a competitive standard: easy to do when you are printing money. So, the solution is relatively simple: break off their ad marketplace business. Break off their ad display business. Let the funnels fend for themselves.
throwaway743 2y ago
In terms of the control they have over people's livelihoods when it comes to the play store and admob, and their incredible lack of care/customer service, yeah they're getting away with murder and totally a monopoly and acting like one.
nonrandomstring 2y ago
> I think we need a better term than monopoly, I think you're right. It hides a lot. We do need a better understanding of the problems. But be careful what you wish for. Google being a monopoly is not a cause, but a symptom. Do a little 5Y analysis. Even rolling it back one step; Q. Why is Google/Microsoft etc a monopoly? A. Because they bought up all the competitors. So, a deeper problem is the very ability to buy and sell companies. Is it "the market"? Yet it is possible to create articles of a company as non LLC/Ltd so that it it can never be bought or sold. People don't do this because they don't intend to "build a great product/company", they intend to cash-out and sell a great company. These subtle incentive structures really matter. Dig deeper and ask things like "why do people only build companies to sell?" There's more upsetting answers behind that one too. In the end, if you want to say BigTech is not to blame and could not do anything else but agglomerate into problematically large blocs then we have to concede the environment and incentives of modern business are harmful to the public/national good. The place to intervene is then at the level of those values.
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  Sorry that was clumsy and insensitive of me to suggest values should go ahead of money.
_heimdall 2y ago
> I think we need a better term than monopoly, that separates it from what people usually mean which is 'the best product'. I think the problem is that people don't know what the word means. We don't need to redefine it, people will either respect the importance of definitions of we'll just lose the next term for a monopoly as well. For anyone following along, Google is a monopoly because they are the market leader in multiple overlapping industries and product lines. They choose to leverage those products together to fain a competitive advantage that no one competing with a single product can reasonably compete with.
flessner 2y ago
The issue isn't having a monopoly, it's exploiting vertical integration in digital platforms. - Hardware (Google Pixel, Chromecast, Chromebook) - OS (Android, ChromeOS) - Distribution (Google Play Store) - Browser (Chrome) - Search (Google) - Products (YouTube, Drive, Gmail, ...) - Business (GCP, Workspace) The only other companies that are similar are Microsoft and Apple... both arguably less extensive. The issue with this also isn't entirely clear until it's "exploited": Google (and the others) can force certain products on their customers due to controlling the "underlying" product. Ad targeting also becomes incredibly precise and valuable... everyone else has to go through the scraps while Google can "just" read your emails (Gmail), get your location (Hardware/OS), go through your files and photos (Drive) and use your search history (Google).

ossyrial 2y ago

> Google is a big ass company and enjoys outsized market share because people choose to use it. If this were true, Google could make the immediate and easy decision to increase their annual profits by $26 billion, by simply stopping to pay browser vendors to make Google the default search engine. https://untested.sonnet.io/Defaults+Matter%2C+Don't+Assume+Consent https://untested.sonnet.io/Defaults+Matter%2C+Don't+Assume+C...

danielmarkbruce 2y ago
The person didn't say "all people choose it no matter what". The statement is true as written.
throwaway48540 2y ago
Their need to buy advertising proves it is not a monopoly. If they were, they'd make that easy and profitable decision immediately.
- avidiax 2y ago
  Google's payment to Apple isn't advertisement. It's to prevent Apple from rolling their own search engine, or selling the default to the next highest bidder.
  - throwaway48540 2y ago
    Putting their search in front of people instead of others is advertisement. It doesn't prevent apple from doing anything.
    - dwaite 2y ago
      Apple has a business agreement to use Google search, and it seems it is a similar agreement to what they made to OpenAI - we as Apple will use your service by default, we pay you nothing, and we take a percentage of your monetization.

cogman10 2y ago

> because people choose to use it. Incorrect. Google spent ungodly amounts of money to make sure that their search engine was the default in as many places as possible. People didn't "choose" to use it, they use the defaults. And in some cases, like my Android phone, google is the only option for integrated searches. I cannot use another search engine without opening a browser then opening up the search engine of choice. Monopoly may not be the right term, but anticompetitive is. They outspent every other search provider to make sure their product was used. They paid off apple to not develop a search engine and instead use theirs as a default. These are things in the court documents which caused the ruling to go against them.

sushid 2y ago
You are literally agreeing with the parent commenter. It's anticompetitive but not a monopoly. The parent is also talking about Chrome, not Google Search.
- cogman10 2y ago
  I never said I disagreed with their entire comment, I was responding to the statements saying "switching search engines is easy and google is obviously the superior product that's why it's used instead of bing.com". That should have been clear from my comment and if you look at other comments in this thread you'll see others interpreted the parent comment similarly. I suggest you read others comments more charitably.
bamboozled 2y ago
I used DDG for a long time, it's crap, I switched back to Google, I suspect a lot of people would do the same. There isn't a lot of competition. I tired Kagi, it's good too, but I didn't feel like the cost was justified when Google is free. I will probably try Kagi again someday though, I did like it and I think their mission is pretty cool.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 2y ago
  I'm 10x happier with Kagi than Google, and I was very skeptical (having followed Google's devs very closely as acquisition specialist for ~10+y). If you can afford Kagi, I'm curious to know why you don't stick with it. Or I'll assume that because the Google brand is just too strong, in which case we have a particular case of a monopoly.

t0mas88 2y ago

Google is offering a free browser, while making a good browser costs money. They are subsidising that by their huge ad-business. And by no surprise, their browser is the only major one that has no privacy protection features and last month decided to abandon the plan to deprecate cookies and tracking. That browser is competing with someone like Opera (used to be a paid for product) and Mozilla in an unfair way, because Google is killing others by making it free and taking the loss.

tim333 2y ago
Yeah but there's no great shortage of competing free browsers.
sushid 2y ago
But Opera and Firefox and others are all free browsers as well. I agree with the parent commenter that its not exactly a monopoly in the traditional sense. It's not even the default browser on Mac or Windows.
- dwattttt 2y ago
  > Opera and Firefox and others are all free browsers as well And yet browser development costs money. If browsers cost money, you could make a better product and compete by selling it, but when an incumbent is giving theirs away for free?
  - xp84 2y ago
    Yes! The situation that has been our world since MSIE went free over 25 years ago.
  - sahila 2y ago
    How does your rationale explain Internet Explore/Edge and Safari which both have abundance of money and still can’t outcompete Chrome? This goes back to the original point about Google search being superior to Bing, and not just because it’s free.

randomdata 2y ago

> and costs $0. But then you're not the customer, you're the product, as they say. What is the cost to the actual customer to transition to an alternative?

danielmarkbruce 2y ago
0. The transition to bing from google costs 0.
- ukblewis 2y ago
  Or all of their investment? Considering that very few end-users use Bing, ditching Google is like ditching the internet for much of their target audience, at least, most likely
- fooker 2y ago
  You missed the point. The actual customer is the one buying ads. It's comically difficult to avoid Google if you're the one who wants to show ads.
  - danielmarkbruce 2y ago
    Nope, you missed the point. Google isn't paying apple for advertisers, they are paying for distribution of eyeballs. You get the eyes, you get the ads.
    - randomdata 2y ago
      You’re right that there is a cost to producing a product, but the question was about the switching cost to the customer. At very least there is a direct labour cost to move the ads from Google to something else, so it is obviously not 0 like the out-to-lunch comment claimed earlier. Although I think we all know the switching cost is going to be way higher than that as the aforementioned spend on building the product isn't fruitless.
      - 2y ago

georgeecollins 2y ago

Just have to say this again even if everyone already knows it: If the US Government / EU hadn't threatened Microsoft they would have embedded their browser in Windows and tied it to the OS to the extent where normal people would only use their browser. I don't know if Google could exist in that alternate world, but I suspect Microsoft would have "deprived them of Oxygen" and they would be bought or crushed. You probably can't stop Google from being the most popular search (or don't want to) but you should be able to stop Google from using the popularity of their product to crush alternative ad tech. Or crush some new tech we don't realize will be important.

__loam 2y ago
Google is so critically important to the infrastructure of the internet itself that I really struggle to understand why a for profit entity with incentives that are not aligned to the public should be in charge of the most important search engine.
- sahila 2y ago
  Because they created the search engine, and truthfully profit motives produce better products at lower costs than non-profits generally across the board. The alternative is having government creating software and it’s hard to point to any public US website/app where I’m amazed.
  - Teever 2y ago
    That's not the only alternative. Another alternative could be that the government breaks up entities like Google and regulates the market in a way that segments it so that it is more beneficial to society by providing more safety and stability over the vital infrastructure that is the Internet as well as by creating healthier markets that provide consumers with access to cheaper, better goods from a variety of vendors aren't squeezed by the likes Google, Apple, and Amazon.
  - __loam 2y ago
    Riding this taxi cab directly to privatization of fire fighters.

m463 2y ago

> Google is a big ass company and enjoys outsized market share because people choose to use it. but not really. the situation is similar to auto-voting the incumbent in every goverment election each november. that is not ok.

bedhead 2y ago

There needs to be some remedy for these handful of companies that manage to break the game like they reached the kill screen in Pac Man.

linotype 2y ago

They just paid Reddit to shut off access to other companies/search engines. How is that not anti-competitive?

bitfilped 2y ago

Google the search engine isn't the problem, it's the app ecosystem where they behave as a monopoly.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

thfuran 2y ago

>I think we need a better term than monopoly, that separates it from what people usually mean which is 'the best product'. I wouldn't go so far as to say that literally nobody means that when they say 'monopoly' but I doubt it is common enough for that claim to be made in good faith.

amy-petrik-214 2y ago

It's a fine thesis, google the humble search engine, easy to compete against. Sure. That argument stands. But.. ... google is not a search engine. There's the google duopoly with facebook (ads, user data). There's the google duopoly with apple (phone operating system), there's the gmail system not exactly the same as search. There's google the web browser, duopoly(ish) with firefox. There's the youtube (duopoly with netflix? monopoly?). Probably a bunch of other various duopolies. Then there's all these other giga-sized "side projects" which seem small proportional to those mega-businesses - google home type stuff, google nest, waze, consumer electronics etc. Arguably the google nest and assistant is duopolistic with amazon alexa. Which is the state of tech, there's like 5 big companies that share some portion of pies of 20 major duopolies and 100 minor duopolies. And they're all like "SEE! SEE! We're NOT a monopoly". And there's two of them saying that, pointing each at the other one as evidence of their non-monopoly status. To me that's monopoly by another name, and that other name is duopoly, and as such it has many of the same problems as the monopoly. And duopolies all every damn place, not just tech - NYSE and NASDAQ stock markets. Sony and xbox (sorry nintendo). Boeing and Airbus. Visa and Mastercard. Pepsi and Coke. Intel and AMD, AMD and NVIDIA. Windows and Mac. How many "gentleman's agreements" must exist in those duopolies, too many methinks And so if you ask me it would be quite natural to shatter all these companies according to their duopolistic silos, with the hope being that the duopolies exist in part from the synergy and deep pockets of the whole organization, and so by breaking apart the duopolistic strings to the rest of the org, perhaps there can be a third and fourth phone operating system, home consumer electronic, web browser, youtube, and so on. Because the point of capitalism is an efficient market to serve the public, not to serve the megacorp coffers

nhumrich 2y ago

Monopoly is not "large, even 100% market share". Monopoly is when they use that market share to compete in _an entire different market_ without actually earning the "best" spot. Or using their dominance to prevent competition entirely from succeeding. For example: Blocking all ad-tracking on its own browser, except ads purchased through its own ad network. Remember, _you_ are not the customer of Google. You are the product. The ad companies are the customer. The market is not search: the market is ad sales.

jnwatson 2y ago
No, that's abuse of monopoly power. It isn't illegal to be a monopoly. It is illegal to a abuse that position.

jemmyw 2y ago

I read through some of the documents of the original complaint. This is mainly not about Google being the dominant search engine for consumers. It's more to do with their anti competitive behavior in the ad tech market. As a consumer, switching is easy. As a company that wants to advertise, switching is not easy if Google holds all the users. But also they've bought up all sides of the market, so what used to be competitive is now entirely controlled by one company. And, once they had that control, they started squeezing both sides, advertisers and sites that run advertising. From a consumer perspective it's not about being able to switch search engine. Google is potentially putting a drag on entire economies, both money wise, and innovation wise. If every service you use has to spend extra because Google has an advertising monopoly then every service is passing a cost to you. If every service needs to do it the one way then there's no advancement, no new models, just "give Google money" forever.

danielmarkbruce 2y ago
Google doesn't have an advertising monopoly. Facebook all by itself does about half of Google's revenue in ads. Then you have twitter, amazon, snap, all kinds of stuff. Google would be lucky to have 40% of online ads, and then once you include all advertising they are way down, maybe 15-20% or something.
- chairmansteve 2y ago
  They have a search monopoly, therefore are the gateway to internet
  - danielmarkbruce 2y ago
    That's at least close to the truth. It's not strictly a monopoly though. And there is a very real chance it's all about to blow up given LLMs.
    - alsetmusic 2y ago
      The judge found them to be a monopoly. They are strictly a monopoly. Unless the case gets overturned, they are exactly a monopoly. LLMs are not going to meaningfully upset the balance any time soon. They are a service / product in search of a problem for most people. And if they do something useful for you, that’s great but HN users are not most people so the statement stands.

cm277 2y ago

Google can be more easily understood as a bunch of businesses that funnel traffic into an ad marketplace. Search, Android, GMail, Maps, Chrome, everything is just about having enough traffic and enough behavioral data to make them the biggest ad seller ever. But they are also the broker and price-setter. That's how they make money, not on the quality of their services --which OK, they have to maintain to a competitive standard: easy to do when you are printing money. So, the solution is relatively simple: break off their ad marketplace business. Break off their ad display business. Let the funnels fend for themselves.

throwaway743 2y ago

In terms of the control they have over people's livelihoods when it comes to the play store and admob, and their incredible lack of care/customer service, yeah they're getting away with murder and totally a monopoly and acting like one.

nonrandomstring 2y ago

> I think we need a better term than monopoly, I think you're right. It hides a lot. We do need a better understanding of the problems. But be careful what you wish for. Google being a monopoly is not a cause, but a symptom. Do a little 5Y analysis. Even rolling it back one step; Q. Why is Google/Microsoft etc a monopoly? A. Because they bought up all the competitors. So, a deeper problem is the very ability to buy and sell companies. Is it "the market"? Yet it is possible to create articles of a company as non LLC/Ltd so that it it can never be bought or sold. People don't do this because they don't intend to "build a great product/company", they intend to cash-out and sell a great company. These subtle incentive structures really matter. Dig deeper and ask things like "why do people only build companies to sell?" There's more upsetting answers behind that one too. In the end, if you want to say BigTech is not to blame and could not do anything else but agglomerate into problematically large blocs then we have to concede the environment and incentives of modern business are harmful to the public/national good. The place to intervene is then at the level of those values.

nonrandomstring 2y ago
Sorry that was clumsy and insensitive of me to suggest values should go ahead of money.

_heimdall 2y ago

> I think we need a better term than monopoly, that separates it from what people usually mean which is 'the best product'. I think the problem is that people don't know what the word means. We don't need to redefine it, people will either respect the importance of definitions of we'll just lose the next term for a monopoly as well. For anyone following along, Google is a monopoly because they are the market leader in multiple overlapping industries and product lines. They choose to leverage those products together to fain a competitive advantage that no one competing with a single product can reasonably compete with.

flessner 2y ago

The issue isn't having a monopoly, it's exploiting vertical integration in digital platforms. - Hardware (Google Pixel, Chromecast, Chromebook) - OS (Android, ChromeOS) - Distribution (Google Play Store) - Browser (Chrome) - Search (Google) - Products (YouTube, Drive, Gmail, ...) - Business (GCP, Workspace) The only other companies that are similar are Microsoft and Apple... both arguably less extensive. The issue with this also isn't entirely clear until it's "exploited": Google (and the others) can force certain products on their customers due to controlling the "underlying" product. Ad targeting also becomes incredibly precise and valuable... everyone else has to go through the scraps while Google can "just" read your emails (Gmail), get your location (Hardware/OS), go through your files and photos (Drive) and use your search history (Google).