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Search is an essential utility used by basically everyone on the planet with an internet connection. Google has a lock on 96% of that traffic and has increasing
by __loam 2y ago
Search is an essential utility used by basically everyone on the planet with an internet connection. Google has a lock on 96% of that traffic and has increasingly made business decisions with respect to search that hurt the quality of the results and hurt both consumers and the people who get indexed by search. Google can unilaterally destroy your business with small opaque algorithm tweaks. They also increasingly have a monopoly on the browser, making decisions like deprecating support for ad blocking because it hurts the business.
Google makes about 16-22 billion dollars a quarter in profit but they still do layoffs and they still make decisions that harm consumers but help their own short term growth. Search is a basic utility that is essential to the function of the internet. It's like water and electricity. There are huge structural barriers to being able to compete in that market, so if we care at all about basic economic theory, Google probably ought to at least be operated as a non-profit, and realistically be subject to massive anti-trust enforcement considering they are the modern robber barons on top of our communication networks.
- dismalaf 2y agoThere's search engines other than Google and there's very, very minimal barriers to using a different search engine; literally just type in Bing.com instead of Google.com. Hell, if you're on MS Windows which has a similar monopoly on desktop devices, Bing will be shoved in your face over, over and over again and using Google actually requires more effort...
- __loam 2y agoMost of them use Bing's indexes on the backend and some competition does not mean that Google doesn't have monopoly power over the market. Firefox exists but Chrome still has a much larger share of the market.
- YetAnotherNick 2y agoJust because something has monopoly because of being better shouldn't result in antitrust. Even in the browser case, Google is very active in standardisation, and also pays Firefox. Though I think we should definitely ban things like Google search engine advertising Google Chrome for free.
- _aavaa_ 2y agoBut it's active in standardization in a way that helps Google's business specifically, not the market as a whole.
- sdwr 2y agoOn the other hand, search is not a commodity that can be dispensed in interchangable units. Those opaque tweaks that tank your business are the same ones that keep spam and SEO garbage down.
- __loam 2y agoI agree that Google has an obligation to keep search results high quality but they're failing at that while also screwing over legitimate businesses.
- nickff 2y agoIt seems like high-quality search is a very difficult task, largely due to their adversarial relationship with ‘spammers’. If someone else can do a better job, I’m sure their service will quickly capture the market.
- __loam 2y agoThe problem with monopolistic markets is that the new service won't quickly capture the market lol. That's why the DoJ is going after them, there are meaningful barriers to competition that creates incentives for Google to choose value for their business over maintaining a high quality service.
- nickff 2y agoI am not sure that web search is a monopolistic market, though it seems that Google is the dominant player. Google itself wasn't the first player, and managed to capture a large market share from established incumbents. Why do you think that competitors couldn't quickly capture the market? You seem to think this is an obvious fact, but I don't see why, as switching costs are very low. It seems to me that the important market is online ads (which is where other companies focus), and that Google is the only company willing to invest in web search.
- 2y ago
- bdangubic 2y agoholy sh*t what a comment!!! why stop here though, lets make ecommerce an essential utility and turn over amazon to the government too! and of course we all need to go somewhere so we should turn over tesla and all the other car companies to the government too! heck now that I re-read your comment I think we should forbid profit altogether and make sure all businesses in America are non-profit, utility-for-all!
- __loam 2y agoAmazon does have an oligopoly over utility computing along with ms and Google. They run like 60% of the internet on AWS. Tesla obviously does not have a monopoly on cars or even electric vehicles. You can believe whatever you like but it's simple economics that big tech companies have monopoly power over their markets. Denying that is pretty baffling but this is Hackernews so I'm not sure what I expected.
- bdangubic 2y agoyou may want to move to another country though mate… free market, we all have alternatives (kagi, bing, chapgpt for search, temu, target, walmart… for ecomm, azure/google/oracle/ali for cloud…) … if every successful business was eventually treated by the likes of you as “utility” it’d be a hoot of a society
- __loam 2y agoThe US has been enforcing anti-trust law for over a century including against tech companies like Microsoft.
- whatever1 2y agoI don’t think that you can make the case that the existence of aws has made access to cloud services more expensive. There is a ton of vendors who are competing on price. Although to be fair once you pick a vendor you are locked in their ecosystem. There is definitely friction in the market.
- EasyMark 2y agoAlso you can be heavily invested in Google apps and then one day suddenly google cuts you off and all you are ever going to get to talk is some email/chat bot who does not care to elevate a situation for you. Imagine having all your business docs, customer docs, and processes in google app suite and then just suddenly be cut off. It won’t happen with me since I avoid that situation, but what happens when google glitches and your small business folds because you can’t get to its data?