29 ms·
US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]
- amazingamazing 1y agoWhy not make all companies open up their data sets, and stop pay to play?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- pvg 1y agoBecause all companies haven't been found to be illegal monopolies? Just like we don't fine everyone with a car for speeding.
- codegladiator 1y agomore like same toll-tax/road-tax for vehicles of all sizes
- pvg 1y agoHow is it more like that? This is a proposed remedy for breaking the law. Driving on the road (tll or free) is not breaking the law. There is no 'like' about it at all.
- codegladiator 1y agoI know what you mean but your statement > Just like we don't fine everyone with a car for speeding can me mistaken for "not everyone who is speeding is fined", and that's clearly not what you meant or wrote. You are right its not more like tolls because it still doesn't capture the /exponential/ difference of whats being compared (any other company vs google). Its like a car vs a jet fighter
- amazingamazing 1y agoPay to play is inherently anti competitive though. All cars that speed are fined, not just the “big” ones. It’s also a fact that all companies opening up their data would make things more competitive. Moats are inherently anti competitive.
- pvg 1y agoPay to play is a really broad term (just skim the wikipedia page) and describing it as 'inherently anticompetitive' isn't saying much. There are also plenty of political, social and business arrangements that are deliberately anticompetitive by wide agreements of various sorts.
- jeroenhd 1y agoThey don't have an illegal monopoly on AI data sets, though? This is attacking a random, unrelated Google branch. The company that brought us AirBnB and Doordash arguing for fair and open markets should say enough about how honest their intentions are.
- pvg 1y agoI'm not talking about the merits of YC's brief, just the merits of the comment I'm replying to. "Why shouldn't we apply the proposed remedy for illegal behaviour on everyone" seems like a no-brainer to me.
- jeroenhd 1y agoI don't think it's unreasonable to apply the same remedy to all AI companies. Sure, it would punish Google, but if companies would actually share their data set, the internet may not be so polluted with AI crawler bots I need to block on my servers. Just as an example: in my country, all public transit information is shared publicly between operators, so anyone can effectively build a public transit navigation app. That includes the for-profit companies that actually run the trains. Had they kept their data silo'd up, like they were not that long ago, companies would need to make expensive deals or write elaborate scrapers to provide basic route navigation services. Thanks to regulation opening up the data for this system, everyone benefits, including the transit companies themselves, as their route planners now seemlessly integrate with routes offered by unrelated third parties. By only hitting Google with regulations like those, I think we're building a situation where it's only a matter of time before a new Google appears and ruins the market again. Google has been financing Firefox and Safari for years now because they don't want to be the only browser, because being the only browser comes with all kinds of nasty antitrust regulations. If we selectively apply mitigations like these for competitive purposes (which I very much doubt are the real reason they're being suggested anyway), we'll just end up with some equivalent like "OpenAI sponsoring xAI and Claude so OpenAI doesn't control more than 80% of market share".
- pvg 1y ago
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- the_duke 1y agoKey quotes: > "Our experience has been that entrenched monopoly power often deters new entry and chills investment in disruptive innovation." > "independent venture-capital firms like YC often hesitate to fund startups in the “kill zone” —the area of deadened innovation around a monopolist like Google." > "We agree with Plaintiffs' proposal that the remedy package should create pathways for startups and innovators to access Google's monopoly-derived datasets and search index." > "The remedy order should also prevent Google from entering into exclusive agreements to access AI training data..." > "An effective remedy package should help to leverage the current moment by ensuring that next-generation search and query-based AI tools can reach users free from exclusion, interference, or cooption." > "the remedy package should prevent Google from anticompetitive self-preferencing, and this prohibition should apply specifically to Google's use of its monopoly search product to boost its query-based AI tools or discriminate against rivals' tools." I think they have a good point with AI. After lagging behind initially, Google really went at it hard. Gemini is great now, and they are building a good set of tooling. It's easy for Google to suffocate the startups in that area. They already have a massive advantage with all the data they are sitting on.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- NitpickLawyer 1y ago> I think they have a good point with AI. After lagging behind initially, Google really went at it hard. Gemini is great now, and they are building a good set of tooling. > It's easy for Google to suffocate the startups in that area. They already have a massive advantage with all the data they are sitting on. What is the solution, though? Should they not be allowed to compete in the LLM + search space? Should they handicap their models till perplexity &co. catch up? Will they be allowed to do something then? I honestly don't see what's asked of google here. Yes, they are massive. But they're massive because they've invested billions ($, manhours, etc) into their infra and have gathered a huge baggage of data, know-how, tech and expertise in this field. But what exactly are they to do from now on?
- MatthiasPortzel 1y ago
- sidibe 1y agoA. The Remedy Should Open Access to Google’s Datasets and Search Index. B. The Remedy Should Prevent Google from Extending Its Monopolies into Query-Based AI Tools. Good luck with that YC...
- scarface_74 1y agoAnd Netflix shouldn’t have been able to extend its monopoly in shipping DVDs to streaming
- DrillShopper 1y agoThat's not comparable. Netflix did not have a monopoly on "shipping DVDs". Plenty of retailers, online or brick-and-mortar, did that at the same time Netflix did, and video rental places were still going. Some of which would deliver movies (the local Marcos near me had a deal with a local Family Video where if you bought a large pizza they would bring you both the pizza and a movie of your choice from Family Video, assuming it was in stock). Nor has Netflix had a monopoly on streaming.
- scarface_74 1y agoAnd there are other traditional search engines - including one run by another 1 trillion dollar+ market cap company. That’s not to mention ChatGPT and other LLMs have built in search. Should Google not evolve with the times?
- DrillShopper 1y agoIt's not that they have a search engine. It's what they're doing to advertisers, websight owners, and consumers with it that is the problem. It's them abusing their market position to the detriment of customers and competitors.
- scarface_74 1y agoWhat are they doing to consumers? And why should we feel sorry for the purveyors of adtech that just made the web worse in every possible way?
- darth_avocado 1y agoSo they want Google’s datasets and search index to be available for other companies and want to prevent Google from being a dominant player in AI based search. I wonder why a VC firm who is quite heavily invested in AI based startups file an amicus brief like that… Edit: before this gets downvoted into oblivion, the comment is not against antitrust enforcement. It’s about VC firms having very specific ideas about what the antitrust enforcement would look like.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- echelon 1y agoMonopolies prevent startups from reaching critical mass. Google and the rest of big tech are like the Jupiter of the tech world. It clears the orbit of anything else that could form. Big tech is so big that it can jump into new markets with ease, kill incumbents, snuff out new players, and perpetually tax non-innovation. We're twenty years behind on antitrust and breakups. It's time we had a forest fire to make way for new growth.
- alabastervlog 1y agoMore than 50 years behind. We shifted policy to barely enforcing anti-trust in the ‘70s, under growing Chicago school (spits) influence among elected officials, “think tanks” (lobbying groups), and courts. That’s why everything’s so insanely consolidated now. Practically every market has a handful of massive players all of which would currently be under serious threat of break-up under the old approach to enforcement. It’s all monopoly.
- darth_avocado 1y agoI wholeheartedly support antitrust enforcement. My comment was mostly about VC firms having very specific opinions on what should happen.
- scarface_74 1y agoLet’s not pretend that YC and other VCs are noble. They get rich and pawn their money losing investments to the “bigger fool” https://medium.com/@kazeemibrahim18/the-post-ipo-performance-of-y-combinator-companies-a-mixed-bag-of-success-and-struggle-58e9a4006f01 https://medium.com/@kazeemibrahim18/the-post-ipo-performance... > In aggregate, the average return across these YC companies is -49%, with a median return of -46%. To put this into perspective, over the same period, the S&P 500 yielded a positive return of 58% And for the rest of the companies, they aren’t trying to compete with BigTech, they are trying to get acquired by them. Out of the literally thousands of companies that YC has invested in, only about two dozen have gone public
- xyzzy9563 1y agoGoogle is effectively being punished for retaining their earnings and re-investing in tons of software R&D over the years. Their "monopoly" is because people choose to use them, not because they have to. Not to mention they are are being disrupted by ChatGPT and other LLMs anyways right now. There have always been lots of web browsers and search engines, but Google simply did a better job making and refining their software and hiring people to do that.
- nicce 1y ago> Their "monopoly" is because people choose to use them, not because they have to. If I give you only one reasonable option and you choose that, is that selection? What if this one option distinguished others?
- xyzzy9563 1y agoIt's the only reasonable option because they did the best job making a search engine. The competitors have search engines but their software is worse.
- voytec 1y agoNo. They are being punished for unfairly limiting competitiveness with repeated monopolistic practices affecting the browser/search markets relation.
- xyzzy9563 1y agoBut they only have high market share because people want to use Google instead of the competitors. Many consumers switch their search engine to Google when presented with other defaults. Because Google search works the best and people know that.
- voytec 1y agoThe aggressive marketing of Chrome on Google Search website to users using other browsers was a significant part of Chrome adoption success. And no - some people didn't willingly and consciously switched to their search engine. It was pushed down their throats by browser vendors being paid-off by Google for setting it as the default one. Mozilla has overwritten user-changed search engine setting in Firefox with several updates. Non tech-savvy users simply accept changes made in software they use.
- legitster 1y agoNone of the proposed remedies benefit consumers.
- sidibe 1y agoGarry Tan is a consumer too!
- DonHopkins 1y agoHe's been consuming his own exhaust too much.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- echelon 1y agoWe have two major phone operating systems and they charge a tax of 30%, which gets passed onto consumers. This should be zero if there was unlimited competition or web installation. There's also so much innovation happening in the mobile space right now. It's not like they're parked and reaping untold benefits. By having search monopolies, they've gamified paying for placement above your competitor's trademarks. Rather than spend on engineering or lowering costs, you have to pay to defend your brand. There are thousands of ways these monopolies are horrible for the consumer, for small business, and for innovation. These companies force their way into new markets, kill the sustainable incumbents by give away services sustained on unrelated business unit profit, then raise rates once the field has been salted and acquired. Amazon is a grocery store, primary care doctor, home electronics company, and James Bond. Why should Amazon get free advertising for their films on their web storefront, plastered on the side of their delivery vans, emblazoned on their packaging, when competing studios have to spend millions on marketing? To top it off, they're outsourcing the film crew labor to Eastern Europe where there are no crew safety laws and are putting American film workers out of business. And the current price pressure on your salary is directly a result of their market power. They don't have to fear you starting a company that can impact their profits anymore. These companies should all be dismantled. Large companies should be exposed to evolutionary pressures, but because of monopoly they become invasive species and dominate entire ecosystems. Regulation is the path to healthy competition and innovation.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jeffbee 1y agoOne wonders how these people imagine accessing a search index, from the practical, technical standpoint. If you believe that Google has only unfair business practices, then it makes perfect sense to believe that your organization will simply access their data.
- voytec 1y ago> As a result, YC has an interest in ensuring that U.S. technology markets are free from anticompetitive barriers to entry and expansion. This part reads like a suggestion to loosen anti-competitive/antitrust law.
- grg0 1y agoWhy? The point of antitrust is to promote market fairness. I don't trust YC very much, but I do trust they want a share of the pie. And they're not wrong that Google has monopolized and stagnated search. I think you're reading too much into that sentence?
- bloppe 1y agoGoogle is the reason for the current AI boom. Without the transformer architecture they invented by funding basic research, there would be no modern LLMs. YC is arguing that their incentive for funding that basic research should be taken away in order to spur innovation?
- lesuorac 1y agoIsn't this actually an argument for breaking up Google? They came up with Transformers back in 2014 and sat on it for a decade until somebody else (OpenAI) forced their hand?
- chpatrick 1y agoYou can do basic research without being monopolistic.
- nmz 1y agoHow? The software world was basically created by Xerox and AT&T research.
- xyzzy9563 1y agoThere are many other search engine options, why should Google be punished for hiring the best people over decades to make the best one? Many consumers also switch their search to Google when presented with other options or defaults.
- mcherm 1y ago> why should Google be punished for hiring the best people over decades to make the best one? Google should not be punished for having gained a near-monopoly by hiring the best people. But perhaps their near-monopoly is due to other reasons like paying large amounts to ensure that they are the default option on various platforms. In this case, legal restrictions might be more appropriate. How do we determine which of these proposed reasons for the near-monopoly is correct? We use a legal process where each side presents their evidence and a neutral party decides which is most credible.
- dangoodmanUT 1y agoA bitly link is an insane choice
- aspenmayer 1y agoAdd + to the end of bitly urls to see where they redirect to without clicking on them.
- hu3 1y agoThese are the key points as I understand them: Amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief is being submitted by Y Combinator to pile on the US vs Google anti-trust case. YC asks court to basically cripple Google in their Search, Advertising and AI endeavours: - Open access to Google's datasets and search index. - Restrict Google's expansion into AI through monopolistic practices. - Limit Google exclusive agreements and pay-to-play distribution deals. - Enforce anti-circumvention and anti-retaliation mechanisms. IMO, from a VC standpoint, it's in YC's interest to give their privately funded startups the best chance possible to thrive. If that includes destroying solid giants of the industry, so be it.
- ksec 1y agoWould YC have said the same if Google was YC funded? As much as I dislike Google I think some of the stuff they are asking are basically asking google to give up on ad or certain business.
- DrillShopper 1y agoOf course they wouldn't. If it puts green in Paul Graham's pocket then YC is all for it.
- ants_everywhere 1y agoAre they considering the ramifications of encouraging courts to let businesses loot their rivals for profit? Seems like the court system may not be the best way to compete
- koolba 1y agoThey’re probably advising a startup that does exactly that as a service. Lawfare-as-a-service would have incredible margins!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ldjkfkdsjnv 1y agoThis is just a few rich venture capitalists, and the harvard trained founders they back, trying to line their own pockets. AI will democratize search regardless
- jrmg 1y agoAI will democratize search regardless What do you mean by this and how will it happen?
- ldjkfkdsjnv 1y agocompanies like perplexity, as the models get better, competing on search will be trivial
- benoau 1y agoAgreed. Because really what happens when we search is we run through a gauntlet of contrived websites stuffed with ads and trackers and referral links, selling someone else's stuff, splitting someone else's content across multiple page views, requiring your personal information if you want to view the content in its entirety, trying their best to be the #1 result for specific phrases that will get traffic even though shovelware sites should never be the authoritative source for someone else's product or company or content, while others pay to have their contrived websites be listed before them. None of this is necessary with AI.
- azemetre 1y agoIt usually means that they will somehow rat fuck the public commons for monetary gain. Democratic software means three things: 1. Can you understand it 2. Can you influence it both now and after your death 3. Can you destroy it I don’t see how any of these things apply to AI, I’m sure it will make some people incredibly wealthy at the expense of others.
- almostgotcaught 1y ago> AI will democratize search regardless Not a single person in this entire ecosystem knows the difference between democratize and liberalize. Hint: AI isn't gonna let us vote on aspects of search.
- xnx 1y agoGoogle is a "monopoly" because their competitors with massive cash reserves (Microsoft, Apple, Meta) are too risk averse to compete in the marketplace and are hoping that the courtroom will deliver them a win.
- voytec 1y agoNo. The US vs. Google antitrust cases scope are Google's monopolistic practices in the search and adtech markets, not the browser market. The DOJ pushing for Google to sell Chrome is related to the search-related case.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- slater 1y agoAm I misremembering, or doesn’t Apple already have its own “stealth” search engine they could deploy at the drop of a hat, but instead use it as a bargaining chip w/ Google? Coulda sworn I read about it a decade ago in breathless “Is Apple working on its own search engine???” articles
- lolinder 1y agoWhich market are you talking about specifically? The outstanding cases against them are in search and in adtech. This amicus brief is for the Search case (this one [0]). In search (the relevant market here), Microsoft does compete in the marketplace, and Microsoft's evidence that Google's anticompetitive practices have prevented them from gaining any meaningful ground in search were a keystone of the government's case, including the fact that Microsoft has invested nearly $100 billion into Bing [1]. In adtech much the same can be said about Meta. So, again, I'm curious: in which market does Google not have competitors spending massive amounts of cash which Google still manages to hold back from being able to meaningfully compete? [0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205.1.0_6.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223... [1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205.837.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223...
- brap 1y agoIt’s amazing how twisted the term “anti-competitive” has become. Where anti-competitive companies push for anti-competitive regulations under the false pretense of preventing anti-competitiveness. Google is being competitive. YC is being anti-competitive. Because they suck at competing against Google and they want to get unfair, unethical advantage themselves. Imagine spending years and billions building something and then I show up and say “hey man that’s not fair, give me a slice of that thing for free. Oh and also I’m probably going to sell it back to you someday for a lot of money”. And before someone tells me “that’s the law”, I don’t care. If that’s the law then it should be changed. Laws have been written (and lobbied) for all sorts of reasons and surprisingly not all of them are fair and ethical.
- caesil 1y agoIt’s amazing how twisted the term “anti-competitive” has become. Where anti-competitive companies push for anti-competitive regulations under the false pretense of preventing anti-competitiveness. Standard Oil is being competitive. The U.S. oil refining and distribution industry is being anti-competitive. Because they suck at competing against Standard Oil and they want to get unfair, unethical advantage themselves. Imagine spending years and billions building something and then I show up and say “hey man that’s not fair, give me a slice of that thing”. And before someone tells me “that’s the Sherman Act”, I don’t care. If that’s the law then it should be changed. Laws have been written (and lobbied) for all sorts of reasons and surprisingly not all of them are fair and ethical. (I hope this illustrates how easy it is to make this exact argument about literally any monopoly.)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- visarga 1y agoGoogle benefits at scale from infrastructure, systems and laws that create the opportunity to make such revenues. It is only natural they should not harm the host.
- Workaccount2 1y agoMeanwhile, YC has happily and excitedly fed it's start-ups to Google over the years. So pretty much "We don't want google to develop new things, we want them to have buy those from us"
- redczar 1y agoCan YC prevent startups from selling to Google? Even if they could why should they? There is nothing wrong with believing Google abuses its monopoly and selling to Google.
- kmeisthax 1y agoWhat YC is complaining about is that they've been turned into Google's farm league. The thing is, Google doesn't develop anything new. Everything new they make fails horribly, so they can't and don't compete with YC in the way that you think. Examples of failed Google homegrown technologies include: - Social media: Google Buzz, Google+ - Messaging: Google Chat, Hangouts, actually there's too many to list - Video: Google Video Almost all of Google's successful products are acquisitions: - Homegrown: Search, Gmail - Acquisitions: YouTube, Analytics, most of their adtech stack, Android, DeepBrain (the people who did all the AI work at Google) Furthermore, whenever Google or Facebook buys any startup, that startup gets an immediate moat and capital injection that can be used to crush any other startup that didn't sell out fast enough. So YC only has one option for an exit: sell the company to Google at a price Google decides.
- 1y ago
- bionhoward 1y agoGoogle is David and OpenAI is Goliath, excessively nerfing Google will put us all at the mercy of closed AI. Gemini (the app, not the API or AI studio) is one of the few places where we can use frontier generative AI without a “customer noncompete” (you know, the one where they compete with us and then say we’re not allowed to compete back) … if you use Claude or OpenAI or Grok, you’re prohibited from training on your chat logs, or even using the thing to develop AI. Not so with Gemini app. Too bad you have to lose your chat history just to deactivate model training (“Gemini apps activity” conflates opt-out of training with opt-out of storing chat history) I don’t know much about the ads space but I just hope going after Google doesn’t create a vacuum that gets filled by an even worse monopoly (OpenAI)
- azemetre 1y agoReally odd that the trillionaire dollar corporation that prints billions of dollars in pure profit every quarter due to monopolistic and anti-democratic policies is the David, the weak feeble underdog in this story, compared to OpenAI that is wildly unprofitable and has no real strategy outside of burning money. There has been no time in human history where destroying monopolies were a bad thing.
- bionhoward 1y agoIsn’t Microsoft also a trillion dollar corporation? If we add their 39% market share in foundation models (likely due to enterprise use of Azure OpenAI Service) to OpenAI’s 9% market share, the result is around 48% market share, compared to Google’s 15%, which is less than half of the MSFT/OAI pair…not to mention a cursory comparison of Gemini vs ChatGPT apps. Just because OpenAI isn’t in “extraction mode” yet doesn’t mean it’s not a scary monopoly. Source, figure 2 in: [1] https://iot-analytics.com/leading-generative-ai-companies/ https://iot-analytics.com/leading-generative-ai-companies/
- jeffbee 1y agoYes, Microsoft is one of the world's biggest companies, and it underinvests in research and development, preferring to hoard cash. OpenAI is in effect a client state of Microsoft that Microsoft is using to make Google look flat-footed and force them to enter the chatbot market. Nothing that transpires between Microsoft and OpenAI is really at arms' length. Personally, I don't think this is a positive development for the industry or for humanity in generally. We were doing better before we had sycophantic robots confidently misleading us.
- nickfromseattle 1y agoHow much blame do we assign Sundar for this outcome? Yes, he was just continuing where Larry / Sergey left off, but it did happen under his watch. Is there anything he could have done to avoid this outcome? In a way that Google shareholders would have found acceptable? Or was this outcome inevitable?
- kccqzy 1y agoYes. Sundar could have fought harder against the internal forces that thought cloud was just a fad and made Google a stronger player in Cloud. Then, Google would not have been as reliant on search/ads.
- hshshshshsh 1y agoDid the laws of physics change or something before Sundar became CEO? NO? Yeah. I thought so as well Then the outcome was inevitable.
- xiphias2 1y agoAI is the most competitive and healthy large industry I have seen. Having a search index helps just like having tweets for x.ai, but data isn’t the deciding factor.
- fundaThree 1y agoIt's not the deciding factor yet. You can bet the IP hammer is going to swing in again once the big players have been decided just to keep the small players out.
- jaco6 1y ago[dead]
- Ekaros 1y agoCompetitive maybe. Healthy almost certainly not. My definition for healthy industries is being able to fund operations and development either by revenues or debt. Not by continuously raising capital from investors and then burning it on hardware and operating costs.
- JustExAWS 1y agoSo no YC companies are healthy…
- Seattle3503 1y ago> but data isn’t the deciding factor. That remains to be seen. The fear is that Google can leverage its large search index to produce better LLM experiences and win in that market too.
- beambot 1y agoThis feels a bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face... Unlike Microsoft's antitrust case of the 90s, Google seems much less anti-competitive by nature. Sure, they have unprecedented scale in search... but even that hegemony is being threatened by others in AI. If anything, going after Google with a DoJ kludgel will cause a servere freeze on startup M&A across all of FAANG. With IPO windows (mostly) closed, this removes the biggest exit dynamic the startup ecosystem has at its disposal. This is not a good thing from my perspective, and would seem counter to YC's interests. Someone steelman this for me...?
- lolinder 1y ago> seems much less anti-competitive by nature It seems much less, but I don't believe it is much less anticompetitive. We're talking about the search market specifically in this case, and the government has presented strong evidence that Google is: * Using its position in other markets (browser, mobile) to ensure that others can't compete in search. * Paying the major other vendors in those markets (browser, mobile) enormous sums of money to ensure that ~100% of the market share in both markets is used to prop up their lead in search. Both of these things are pretty blatantly anticompetitive: they're competing not primarily based on the quality of their product offering but instead based on their pre-existing revenue streams and their leads in other markets.
- cyanydeez 1y agoGoogle is now a basic utility. Unless you don't believe in basic public goods, allowing equitable access to the utility benefits everyone, especially businesses.
- s1artibartfast 1y agoPublic goods is an economics term with an actual meaning, and it has nothing to do with public utilities. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/public-good.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/public-good.asp
- deleted 1y ago
- r0m4n0 1y agoAs others have pointed out, YC is definitely trying to get some of that Google money. Another important aspect that benefits YC is a turn of events that would improve the talent pool. Google retains tens of thousands of software engineers, I’d argue maybe the biggest reserve in existence. It’s the largest population of experienced engineers that won’t leave because the money and circumstances are too good. Startups would benefit if these circumstances changed
- gnaman 1y agothat is not a google problem that is a big tech problem. people move where the money is and the money flows to google easily because ads is such a lucrative business. if you force the talent pool to move off google, meta or amazon will easily absorb them
- r0m4n0 1y agoMore talent with less demand means lower wages and/or worse benefits. My situation at Google can’t be matched at Amazon or Meta (remote work, pay, WLB, other benefits). I’d have to compromise if the climate changes but not much will make me leave… ever. I have a friend that has been trying to get me to join a startup for years and the risk just isn’t worth the reward
- hermannj314 1y agoIs an Amicus brief just a way the legal profession sells ad space in high profile cases? You pay a lawyer a few thousand bucks to write some populist bromides you get to slap your name in the news. Seems like a good ROI.
- snielson 1y agoThe solution proposed by Kagi—separate the search index from the rest of Google—seems to make the most sense. Kagi explains it more here: https://blog.kagi.com/dawn-new-era-search https://blog.kagi.com/dawn-new-era-search
- luckydata 1y agoIt's such a ridiculous proposal that would completely destroy Google's business. If that's the goal fine, but let's not pretend that any of those remedies are anything beyond a death sentence.
- Disposal8433 1y ago[flagged]
- minwcnt5 1y agoSorry, but corporations are not people despite what some people will tell you. They would definitely NOT survive in any recognizable form with "only a few billion dollars", because the stock price is a function of profits. Take away most of the profits, and most of the company's value gets wiped out, most of the employees would leave or get laid off, and anything of value that remains would quickly become worthless. Users would all move to the government-sanctioned replacement monopoly, likely X. To say nothing about the thousands of ordinary people who have large Alphabet holdings in their retirement portfolios and would be wiped out. Google is practically the definition of a "too big to fail" company. They need to be reigned in to allow more competition, but straight up destroying the company would be a move so colossally stupid I could just see the Trump regime doing it.
- ketzo 1y agoReally? Google would still have an astonishingly large lead in the ad markets.
- riku_iki 1y ago
- tiahura 1y agoHow Orwellian. Free market means buyers and sellers set terms of deal, not G.
- adrr 1y agoHow much things have changed when antitrust used mean unfair practices by real monopolies. Real monopolies. Standard Oil which you had no choice in what gas you used. The Bell System(ATT) controlled all of long distance, you had no choice to use them for making long distance calls. Microsoft owned 95% of the market when they got with antitrust, there was other OSes but your software wouldn't run on those OSes. Consumers had no choice. We got stuck with shitty products that were overpriced. Now antitrust means punishing companies that are too good. Their product is too superior. Even though Windows, the most used computer OS, literally defaults bing search but consumers change it to google. They are choosing to use google. We're going to punish the company that makes a product so good users don't want to use other products. They clearly have choice. There is no switching cost to what search engine you use. Its sad when companies who can't make a product people that people't don't want to use instead to use regulatory capture to prevent real competition in the search engine market. Just make a better product.
- jonhohle 1y agoI haven’t looked at the merits, and I don’t like what the EU is doing to US companies with 20% market share, but I remember feeling the same way about Microsoft over 20 years ago. Fortunately, groklaw provided a constant stream of easily readable, high quality content. That, and I could see some of my favorite companies shutting down because their customers were restricted from doing business with them if they wanted to sell Windows. This isn’t about search, it’s about their ad monopoly. They are not being punished for search or related products. I’m actually not sure how breaking out the search index helps in this situation. I would think splitting out off-Google advertising is the more obvious break and one that would benefit humanity. (Ad networks can die in a fire.)
- adrr 1y agoThis is to separate search index from Google. Ad is even worse as Google doesn’t even control the majority of digital marketing market. Only case i can think of is the Amex case but Supreme Court rightly found you can’t be an abusive monopoly and have less than a majority of the market.
- 1y ago
- light_triad 1y agoIt's good for YC to do this and will benefit every startup in the long run. Google has been one of the sources of the AI boom, and provides liquidity by acquiring startups. But as YC argues they've monopolised distribution channels to the point where you need to go through the Google toll booth every time you want to access the market. This tax on founders to reach their audience makes many types of businesses unsustainable and impossible, especially for products where usage != sharing.
- bogwog 1y ago> and provides liquidity by acquiring startups You mean kills potentially successful tech companies of the future by acquiring startups to cement their dominance. I get why people on this site are in love with the idea of building an unsustainable, money-losing business where the only path to success is being acquired by a tech giant. It's like winning the lottery! But it helps nobody, it hurts your customers/users, and it hurts innovation. It's also stupid, as a successful tech company could potentially grow as big as the giants you're courting (ESPECIALLY now that the FTC has started finally doing its job). Why else do you think they're spending so much money to acquire you? It's easier on the ego to call it an "acquihire", but the truth is that they're just paying a maintenance tax on their monopoly. Every time people complain about how detrimental big tech is to society, it ultimately comes down to this sad strategy.
- threeseed 1y agoOf course it is good for YC to do this. They have significant investments in OpenAI both directly and indirectly through the countless startups they've funded whose core is OpenAI. And it's ridiculous to act like (a) you are forced to go through Google to access the 'market' and (b) that this is somehow unusual or untoward. They are an advertising company and not the only one.
- creato 1y agoIt's disappointing to see the historical revisionism in these threads. Say what you will about google now, but the idea that they just bought their way into X industry doesn't seem right. Until maybe 10 years ago, tech people almost universally loved Google's offerings and adopted them eagerly because they were good. I remember the mad scramble on various forums for a gmail invite. I remember when google maps came about, it was a revelation compared to mapquest and so on. You could scroll the map instead of clicking buttons to jump half a screen at a time! For years 0-5 at least, chrome was almost universally loved by tech people. Process isolation, speed, lack of toolbar shitware, etc. At every company I've been at, half the dependencies came from big tech, and more than half of those were built and maintained by google. bazel, kubernetes, test frameworks, tensorflow, etc. these are just the big ones. There are a lot of smaller libraries from google that we've used too, and more still that aren't owned by google but they invest a lot of engineering time into. I don't know what the right answer is to the google of today, but the cavalier assumption that google has simply leveraged a monopoly in search to build everything else it has doesn't add up to me.
- hu3 1y agoMeanwhile Apple, also sitting on infinite cash, is easily entertained by toying with regulators around the world and contributes back almost nothing in comparison to Google. Heck, they can't even be bothered to fund a single developer to help their hardware run Linux.
- prepend 1y agoWhy would Apple have developers working on their hardware running Linux? Apple doesn’t use Linux. They aren’t the biggest oss dev, but they have a decent amount of contributions. [0][1] It’s hard to compare how much Google vs Apple contributes to open source, but not sure why anyone would think Apple “contributes back almost nothing.” [0] https://github.com/appleopen https://github.com/appleopen [1] https://opensource.apple.com/projects/ https://opensource.apple.com/projects/
- hu3 1y ago
- pingou 1y agoAs a google's shareholder that terrifies me. As an european, I am happy to see that the US administration may be ready to kill the one of the most powerful and unassailable company in the world and allow any other country to build a replacement.
- mschuster91 1y agoThe document metadata... ffs: "Microsoft Word - YC for filing FINAL DRAFT Y Combinator Amicus Brief" People, clean that shit up before publishing. That's an embarrassment. At least it's not "FINAL FINAL2 REWORKED" or something equally grotesque.
- Workaccount2 1y agoThe real killer is that Google perfected the ad-paid model, and launched an entire ecosystem on top of it Paid competitors cannot compete because people won't pay. People want the death of Google because people hate ads and tracking. Ultimately it is an everyone loses situation. No one is going to fly in a replace Google without either 1.) Charging a monthly sub or 2.) Invasive (yet most profitable) ad tracking. This is exactly why youtube stands alone too. What company looks at youtube's userbase and says "Yes, I want to cater to people who despise subscriptions and block ads". Exactly what vid.me did in 2017, which everyone celebrated until the went bankrupt.
- Hilift 1y agoGoogle doesn't own all of ads though, only search ads. Facebook nets $70 billion per year with an ad system that prints golden bricks. No-one cares how it works due to it makes so much money. 80% of shares are held by institutions.
- ppsreejith 1y ago> People want the death of Google because people hate ads and tracking. > Paid competitors cannot compete because people won't pay. Seems to me they're different groups of people. Otherwise, if people hate ads, why don't they pay? I don't agree it's an everyone loses situation. Enough people don't mind or prefer the ads based ecosystem for it to continue. IMO, more sophisticated ad blockers (I.e real control over one's devices) used by more people, would make the ad tech ecosystem a lot less profitable. After all, ads only work when you can control what the other person sees.
- grumple 1y agoWith Google controlling most devices and browsers, you aren’t getting that control.
- tossandthrow 1y agoPeople only want to not pay, when that is an alternative. We are already seeing a transition. This is lead by the fact that paying online is much easier than 10 years ago. And the fact that we are slowly being conaiditoned to paying for online services.
- Bender 1y agoIn terms of fairness, competition and monopolies is there a chart that shows how much tax payer funding each search engine has received upon creation, annually and indirectly? e.g. donating NASA hangers for server hosting and experiments, heavily discounted real estate and land, tax breaks for power, etc... Put another way, who has the biggest monopoly on direct and indirect tax-payer funding?
- grg0 1y ago> Put another way, who has the biggest monopoly on direct and indirect tax-payer funding? The Pentagon.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- danboarder 1y agoThis action comes a bit late, at the end of the "Search engine" era, at a time when AI responses from many sources are largely replacing the "Google Search". Similar action happened against Microsoft Windows around 2000, just as the rise of web-based apps (online email, google docs, etc) largely made the underlying operating system less relevant to how people use their computers and apps. So I read this as the dominant player can monopolize a market while it's relevant without an issue, and once the market starts to move on, the antitrust lawsuits come in to "make the market more competitive" at a time when that era is mostly over. And trying to regulate early (as with the last administration's AI legislation that is now being repealed) we can see that only hindsight is 20/20, and regulating too early can kill a market. My conclusion is to just let the best product win, and even dominate for a while as this is part of the market cycle, and when a better product/platform comes along the market will move to it.
- ChuckMcM 1y agoI would be you $1 that in five to ten years there will be zero "AI" players replacing search. But that's a different topic than this one.
- MPSFounder 1y agoI will take that bet Chuck. Maybe not completely replace, but AI will be the defacto search platform. I find myself using Google less and less these days
- bdangubic 1y agoI only use Google when I am in the mood to search for something and find it below the fold after scrolling through mindless semi-related sponsored links
- SV_BubbleTime 1y agoIf for no other reason that I can perform combination searches. I don’t need to search MQTT and AWS and v3/v5 and max packet sizes all separately anymore.
- sambeau 1y agoThe really uncompetitive behaviour started when Google removed the search string from search links. That killed 3rd party (and home-grown) analytics, which in turn facilitated large scale tracking of users from site with analytics to site with analytics. If you wanted to know how your keywords were performing you had to use Google Analytics.
- RainyDayTmrw 1y agoMake no mistake. This is, first and foremost, a big, for-profit corporation fighting a bigger, for-profit corporation, for its own financial interests. Nevertheless, we may stand to benefit, if only incidentally. In particular, if the legal authorities start to unwind Google, I actually think Chrome and Android are more important to wall off or spin out than anything advertising or AI related.
- sroussey 1y agoSo should Gmail et al go with Chrome or with Android?
- RainyDayTmrw 1y agoI'm less worried about GMail. It's much easier to start a GMail competitor today (in relative, not absolute, terms) than a Chrome or Android competitor, because of network effects. For example, Fastmail is tiny (comparatively speaking), and will probably stay tiny forever, but their service works fine, and there's no major obstacles (comparatively speaking) to replacing GMail with Fastmail for any of us personally.
- erxam 1y agoIs it really? I think any potential competitors face many of the same pitfalls as, say, Chrome competitors do. Maybe even worse. Google slams its weight around when web standards are being designed so as to unilaterally benefit Chrome, but (at least in theory) it's a fundamentally cooperative process where everyone at least gets some sort of input to direct where each standard goes. In GMail's case, they can just arbitrarily shut off any competitor who might be gaining steam and kill them off before they can reach critical mass and sustain themselves. Just categorize them as 'spam' and make sure to redirect their emails 100% of the time and they've won. EDIT: just saw your edit. You're kinda right, but if Fastmail ever really starts growing then Google will take harsher actions to stymie it off. Maybe if a lot of small services start to collectively take a bigger slice of the market then they'd succeed at keeping Google at bay? I'm not so sure.
- iamkonstantin 1y agoIt would be cool if Apple/Google/gatekeepers considered similar measures for the App Store / Google Play related search where similar constraints apply.
- yashvg 1y agoTL;DR: YC just filed an amicus brief in the Google-search antitrust case. They tell the judge that (1) Google’s default-search/pay-to-play deals crushed the “kill-zone” around search, keeping VCs away; and (2) the coming wave of AI-search/agentic tools will suffer the same fate unless the court imposes forward-looking remedies—open Google’s index, ban exclusive data+distribution deals, bar self-preferencing, add anti-circumvention teeth, and even spin off Android if Google backslides. YC frames this as the 2025 equivalent of the 1956 Bell Labs decree and the 2001 Microsoft decision: rip open the gate so the next Google can be born.
- yashvg 1y agoSummarized by o3: 1. Why YC cares - VC “kill-zone.” YC says Google’s decade of default-search contracts (Apple, carriers, OEMs) froze half of all U.S. search queries, scaring investors away from search/AI startups. - AI inflection point. Generative/query-based/agentic AI could disrupt search—but only if newcomers can reach users and train on data Google hoards. Without action, Google will “pull the ladder up” again. 2. What YC wants the court to order - Open index & dataset access. Force Google to license its search index + anonymized click/embedding data on fair, reasonable terms so rivals can build ranking stacks + AI models. - No self-preferencing in AI results. Google can’t boost Gemini-style tools or demote rivals. No exclusive AI-training corpora access either. - Ban pay-to-play defaults. Outlaw “billions to be the default” (search, voice, browser, OS, car). No payments for choice-screen placement. - Anti-circumvention & retaliation guardrails. Independent monitoring, fast dispute resolution, steep fines, and—if Google cheats—possible Android spinoff. 3. Historical playbook YC cites - 1956 AT&T consent decree opened Bell Labs patents → semiconductor boom. - 2001 Microsoft browser decree → Firefox, Chrome, Google itself. - 2023–24 Nvidia-Arm block → both companies exploded in AI. - YC says same pattern can unlock “the next Stripe/Airbnb—but for search/AI.” 4. Why HN should care - Open Index ≈ ultimate dev API. Lets you build retrieval-augmented AI agents without a nation-state’s crawl budget. - Distribution shake-up. Killing default deals revives mobile/browser competition; could birth real alt-search on phones. - VC signal. YC telling a judge “give us a level field and we’ll bankroll challengers” means real capital is ready. - Policy trend. Regulators now want to pre-wire markets (index access, AI data parity, Android contingency) before the next moat forms. 5. Bottom line: This isn’t about a fine. It’s about cracking open the data + distribution bottlenecks that froze search since 2009. If Judge Mehta adopts YC/DOJ’s plan, the door opens for real search/AI innovation—and VCs are ready to sprint through it.
- throwaway984393 1y ago[dead]
- 0xbadcafebee 1y agoI'm not sure people understand what the consequences of taking away Google's ad revenue is. If a large enough bank goes under, it takes out not just the bank, but huge sectors of the economy, affecting many more businesses and jobs. That's why the government bailed out the banks when they failed. The same will happen when Google loses its ad revenue. Google is an ad company. By opening up all its trade secret data, it loses its advantage. That will make it lose its core revenue. The end result will be Google collapsing entirely within a few years. Then those component parts people are talking about "opening up" will be gone too. Here's a small number of things that will die when Google dies. Can you imagine how the world will be affected when these go away? - Google Maps - Google Mail - Google Drive - Google Docs - Google Groups - Google Forms - Google Cloud - Google OAuth - Google Search - Google Analytics - Chrome - Android - Android Auto - Fitbit - Google Fi - Google Fiber - Google Flights - Google Translate - Google Pay - Waymo In the best case, killing these will force consumers to move to Apple. You wanna talk monopoly? You haven't seen anything yet. Apple has no alternative for much of the Business-focused products, so that will take considerable time for companies to adopt alternatives. But in the meantime, the world will become pretty broken for a lot of companies that depend on these tools. This will affect many more people than just Google's direct users. The whole web will shrink, and huge swaths of the worldwide economy will disappear. Businesses closing, lost jobs, shrinking economies, lack of services. There are plenty of parties who want to see Google lose or take part of its businesses. But if it's not done extremely carefully, there's a very large stack of dominoes that are poised to fall.
- stevage 1y agoHow do you get from "google loses ad revenue" to "android dies"? Even if for some reason Google went bankrupt all these divisions would just be sold off.
- wpm 1y agoToo big to fail means too big to exist. Google et. al should never have been allowed to get this large, same as those banks. Better late than never.
- 1y ago
- hshshshshsh 1y agoIsn't there an obvious conflict of interest here? YC Wil benefit if Google is to share its index with startups. YC will fund hundreds of companies and then one of them will end up monopoly. What kind of bs is this. Cycle repeats.
- jmward01 1y agoKind of the point of breaking up a monopoly is that it benefits a lot of the rest of the industry since the monopoly had been hindering it before. Also, it looks like you are saying any interest = a conflict of interest. Should only entities that have no interest in this matter be allowed to file in this way?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- PunchTornado 1y agoThese people have financial interests in destroying google. Why would a judge take their opinion into consideration?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- linotype 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dismalaf 1y agoNot sure a VC firm with a vested interest in Google failing should be allowed to have an opinion here... I always thought the point of the government breaking up monopolies was to prevent anti-competitive behaviour, not simply to punish companies for being too successful. If we want to talk about what's best for the economy and startups, there's a bunch of large companies that could be broken up for the benefit of society, but not sure that's entirely fair either.
- ezfe 1y agoThere are two ways to remedy an anti competitive monopoly: Behavioral remedies where the government gets involved with google’s business and maintains ongoing control to ensure they behave. Structural remedies where the government separates the company into parts and then-crucially-leaves them alone for the most part. The “ideal” solution is to magically stop Google from being anticompetitive but that is unrealistic. The realistic solution is to split Google apart and kneecap its data flywheel to force it to compete.
- l72 1y agoThe search part of Google doesn’t bother me. I have other options and I now reach for an llm first, then fall back to ddg. What I do think needs to be separated are: 1) Ads and analytics 2) Chrome 3) Google Play Services. Googles ad platform and analytics are difficult to avoid. Even with browser extensions, dns blocking, and aggressive firewall rules, this is virtually impossible to avoid. I am shocked at how many websites and apps break when these are blocked. There needs to be a much healthier ecosystem without a single company gobbling all this up. Chrome is also a big issue. Google has regularly used its web sites and android to heavily push chrome. They also use that influence for web “standards” that are not really standards. On top of it, even googles own sites are often terrible with non chrome based browsers. We need a variety of user agents and we need real standards that a truly independent body has a say in. The web has matured and we don’t need to be in a race for new apis and features right now. Google play services are also a huge pain point. When developing for Android, you almost have to use them. Running Android without Google Play services or with an alternate is a futile effort if you want any sort of main stream app. My degoogled work phone is mostly useless for anything. We definitely need standards for these services with replaceable components that are transparent to the apps.
- sakoht 1y agoCurrently most websites have a snip of code that posts to Google when a visitor arrives. The cookie there is linked to an identity and later used to push ads, and metrics for the site user. It seems like this is the thing to make broadly available. Anyone with $ can index the web. But nobody can get every websites to update to post to 2+ destinations. Multiple companies should be able to listen to that feed, and then be responsible for tracking and indexing on their own.
- stevenhuang 1y ago> Multiple companies should be able to listen to that feed, and then be responsible for tracking and indexing on their own. How about no. If I must I'd really rather just Google than some fly by night companies having that access. Not to mention it'd be easier to block too.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- wewewedxfgdf 1y agoIt really concerns me that Chrome will no longer be funded by Google.
- Hydrocarb0n 1y agoGoogle is much bigger than a Monopoly, it is a multi-monopoly, Search, web ads, email, video, maps / nav, User data / metrics. If you had told me in early 2000s that google would absolutely dominate all of these fields And it would be allowed to continue for decades, I wouldn't believe you. I'm a free market guy, I believe some small gov is nessasary to regulate monopolies, protect constitutional rights etc, but multi-monopolies- I can't believe are allowed to exist under such a large beaurocratic superstate with left or right in power.
- TechDebtDevin 1y agoDo you think the world benefits from this monopoly though? I think the world would be a worse place without Google, a much worse place. While it would be nice to live in some timeline were lots of choices for search (there actually are, people are just lazy and don't like change), but we built a world with Google and let it get to where its at. We will just be shooting ourselves in our own foot, at least in the short term.
- Draiken 1y agoWe simply can't know if there would be better alternatives because of it. Any competition is acquired or dies and it has been like this for years. But then again monopolies are the final form of capitalism so there's no real way to avoid them. Maybe on an utopia where we have strong regulations and can shield them from being influenced by money. Not gonna happen.
- int_19h 1y agoThis argument is very similar to that for "enlightened monarch" kind of despotism. The fundamental problem is that, even if you buy the notion that this particular ruler is really so enlightened that they are a net benefit, there's no guarantee that this will still be the case in the future. So, even if you believe that Google provides net benefit today, letting them acquire more and more power is a bad idea because they aren't necessarily going to give you free things tomorrow. Indeed, the logic of capitalism dictates that they stop doing so as soon as there's no more competition, however small, that continues to contest that particular niche.
- iataiatax10 1y agoHaving a monopoly is not against the law. Harming consumers is. The remedies should address the former not the later. Google's monopoly was earned by engineering excellence.
- ankit219 1y agoIt's 100% Google saves my data. And gives me an option to delete that data. It uses that data, and while I have some degree of control over it, i don't have full control over it. As a user it's preposterous that any kind of data generated by me is anonymized (or not) and effectively sold to a third party. First party usage is kind of understandable. What YC and the govt is asking is that Google should be forced to do exactly that? Sell some data points about me generated by my interactions without my consent. That too it seems for no fee. Without even asking for the permission from the users. What kind of clown world are we living in? I dont care if its anonymized. Presumably, if that data is so useful, why dont all of these companies lining up to pay the users?Take permission from the users, pay them, and then use whatever they want. Data is only useful in the aggregate, pay ln the aggregate too for whatever revenue and market cap they reach. Doing it without the user consent in 2025 is weird.
- stormbeard 1y ago> Presumably, if that data is so useful, why dont all of these companies lining up to pay the users? Because users are lining up to give away their data.
- ankit219 1y agoNot to these companies who want it. To Google yes. Not exactly because they have to, but also because they built things people want.
- tzury 1y agoWhat happened to “win by building a better product”?
- CommenterPerson 1y agoGarmin user here. Maybe the last one on the planet? (my kid thinks I'm nuts). Many of the comments are about how great Google's products are (or aren't). But the case is about anti-competitive behavior. Personally, I hate how a bulk of the internet now consists of surveillance. All this amazing tech brilliance.. resting on a foundation that's about getting us to buy more junk. I will be happy if this lawsuit reduces that (even a little bit).
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y agoThe USA has big tech Dutch disease.
- davkan 1y agoAs in a standalone car gps unit? A ton of people use Garmin fitness and backcountry gear.
- byyoung3 1y agoYC mainly trying to make a buck, I'm weary of these sorts of lawsuits
- oxonia 1y agoNot a good document. Needs a faded picture of a dragon on every page.
- selfhoster 1y agoThe villain is not Google. The villain is Y Combinator and the US Government.
- selfhoster 1y agoHere is anticompetitive, I use Firefox on Ubuntu Linux and went to Apple maps site, here is what it says: https://maps.apple.com/unsupported https://maps.apple.com/unsupported "Your current browser isn't supported" I thought OK, how many people use Firefox on Linux. So I went to their site in this browser, Chrome (most popular browser in the world on the most popular Linux Desktop OS, Ubuntu)...same error. Every site I visit in Chrome (and Edge when I use it for the few sites I use it for) works on Linux. Apple should be the target of breaking up. Why isn't Y Combinator and the U.S. going after them?
- bathtub365 1y agoDoes Apple have a monopoly on web maps?
- tcmart14 1y agoI'll be honest, until this, I didn't even know you could go to maps in your web browser and use it there. I figured it was really for iPhones and iPads.
- owl_vision 1y agoSame here with firefox, FreeBSD.
- ringer 1y agoAnd of course it works when I change only the user-agent to windows.
- braza 1y agoIf there’s one place in the internet that people can be sincere, probably it will be here in a YC Combinator forum. Said that… There’s a lot of interesting perspectives: From YC: it’s a logical and quite unique business decision. YC can capitalize on a very weak moment of a gigantic moment from government support and general public sentiment. At the end we’re in an all knives out and YC is taking the opportunistic route because it has economic interest in the Google break down. From Google: I think we can think that the era of “cool monopoly” is officially over and Microsoft was right all the time. Be boring, be ruthless, be the only one. No amount of public good press for more than 1 decade will save your nice monopoly to fall from grace. From the USA: will be interesting to see if the administration will celebrate it, since Google whether we like it or not, is one instrument I of soft power and influence of the American interest around the work. How the tradeoff of limit its reach due new foreign players or how pulverised market will help their policies its something to wait and see. Form a personal perspective: as a consumer, and future candidate for a YC founding company I think have Google broke down to have 50 new SaaS selling their services for 9,99 per month, won’t be a net benefit. Being completely honest: I prefer that the Google shareholders thar contains big billionaires and pension funds tied with retirements plus public regulatory and scrutiny it’s a way better alternative than 60 new SaaS tied with all private interests of Paul Graham VC family office or David Sachs/Chammath offices.
- m101 1y agoCan someone please describe what the exact monopoly position is that Google have and how they defend it? I take it it's some sort of ads marketplace where they charge a fee to connect buyers with sellers? But why are things like chrome and payments to companies for default search engine placement considered monopolistic? It is increasingly sounding like a witch-hunt given the list of accusations I've heard.