3 ms·

You can do basic research without being monopolistic.

nmz 1y ago
How? The software world was basically created by Xerox and AT&T research.
xyzzy9563 1y ago
There 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.
- skippyboxedhero 1y ago
  Because the data they possess is the monopoly, they have better search results because it is too expensive for competitors to gather the data at this point as(I also think people who are unfamiliar with finance do not understand the quantum, Meta has a similar type of business but was under huge pressure with investing tens of billions into VR...it would cost hundreds of billions to get parity with Google, there is no way to finance this). It is nothing to do with "hiring the best people". Google's exec-level leadership is extremely poor, Mr Magoo-tier management. This is largely due to their share classes, the people at the very top are not very good at business so Google largely isn't run like a business. They have one business that is probably worth $4-5tn, and the rest is worth -$3-4tn. The number of "best people" out there is usually under 500 in a country the size of the US, a country that has hundreds of thousands of employees is not hiring the best. I would guess under 100 people at Google actually positively impact financial results in any way because the advertising business grows rapidly, uses no capital, and requires no staff. This is true of many of the tech companies do, you aren't getting the best if you pay an exec $50m because the best will always do their own thing and make more. Rather you get someone like Pichai or Cook who sounds good and will get shareholders to believe that setting fire to $200m/year to pay them is a good idea, they are indistinguishable from politicians. Google is under-earning massively. Staff aren't a monopoly, you just pay someone to leave and they are yours now (you see this in other areas like HFT where staff actually know useful stuff, you don't see this in tech because most staff don't know anything, they are looking for drones).
  - surajrmal 1y ago
    It's incredibly naive to think Google's continuous growth is automatic. It happened because of all the work the employees do, not in spite of it. Are there employees who don't contribute? Sure. But that's different from only 100 contributing to positive growth.
    - skippyboxedhero 1y ago
      Do you actually understand how and why they are growing? They start with a page with zero ads, they add one ad to that page one year, ad sales pushes that placements, then a few years they do it again, etc. Meta are the same. Google do sell at a higher price than offline ads because of targeting/intent but this is inherent to the product: search has inherently better intent and their targeting tech is no better than anyone else such that their prices are higher/grow faster. That is their growth model: higher ad density, the CEO deciding to add another ad to a page and earning $100m/year. There is no value-added otherwise because you don't need many people, you don't need capital and you are making $300bn/year. And, again, if you own the shares you understand that you are getting the ads business, and because of the dual class you are also getting this tech bureaucracy that sets fire to tens of billions every year employing people to do nothing. If these people are so productive...where is the revenue? It is all ads or ancillary business, they have GCP now but there is nothing else...because these people aren't doing anything. It is like owning a business that turns lead into gold, the process is automatic, requires no capital...and then employing a bunch of monks to pray for the lead and saying the business couldn't exist without them. Lol.
  - saagarjha 1y ago
    > The number of "best people" out there is usually under 500 in a country the size of the US, a country that has hundreds of thousands of employees is not hiring the best. > I would guess under 100 people at Google actually positively impact financial results in any way It's really funny to me that people write comments like this and yet are incapable of basic arithmetic, like this being 0.0001% of the US population, or thinking that the entire ad business runs on just 100 people who are magically making the company $4 trillion dollars while everyone else drags it down.
- nickfromseattle 1y ago
  Note, Google also uses user interaction data from Chrome to influence the search results. [0] [0] https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-user-interaction-signals-36377.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-user-interaction-...
- varelse 1y ago
  [dead]
- ayewo 1y ago
  > There are many other search engine options, why should Google be punished for hiring the best people over decades to make the best one? I’m guessing this whole court case wouldn’t have been a thing if Google wasn’t bribing Apple, to the tune of $20 billion a year [1], to remain the default search engine on iOS. 1: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/apple-may-add-ai-search-engines-to-safari-as-google-use-drops/546220/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/apple-may-add-ai-search-...
  - jeffbee 1y ago
    Amazing how you can see that as Google bribing Apple instead of Apple extorting Google.
    - josefx 1y ago
      It would be a rather ineffective extortion if "customers would just switch" as the comment further above claims.
  - jsheard 1y ago
    Or more recently beginning to throw money at websites to lock out their competitors, which is why Bing and co can't index Reddit anymore.
    - dieortin 1y ago
      That’s not accurate, Bing can index Reddit just fine
      - jsheard 1y ago
        This doesn't look very fine to me... https://www.bing.com/search?q=pope%20francis%20died%20site%3Areddit.com https://www.bing.com/search?q=pope%20francis%20died%20site%3... The results are all from before July 2024, when the Google deal was established.
jeroenhd 1y ago
That's true, but if it weren't for Google's monopolist position, I doubt they'd have the money to throw at the wall for random research. For every AI transformer they revolutionized, there's a self-driving car project that's dragging on for decades. Had Google operated like a normal company, the risk/reward of this kind of research would've looked completely differently. Google's monopoly helped research along in the same way totalitarian countries like China are developing infrastructure at break-neck speed: if you don't need to care about pesky rights and regulations, you can do things that would otherwise be impossible. I don't think Google's monopoly is worth having the current generation of lie generator bots around, but I don't think generative AI would be where it is right now had Google been forced to comply with antitrust regulations ten years ago.
- callc 1y ago
  You certainly have a point. Places like google and bell labs have pushed innovation, apparently enabled by monopolies. I would rather we don’t allow monopolies since they are so bad for society, regardless of some benefits. Government funded research and private investment are still a thing, that doesn’t try to break the whole capitalism thing.
  - dghlsakjg 1y ago
    > You certainly have a point. Places like google and bell labs have pushed innovation, apparently enabled by monopolies. I've heard this argument before (and recognize that you aren't defending it), but telecommunications, network and technology innovation has hardly suffered since Bell was dismantled in 1982.
    - Mond_ 1y ago
      You cannot possibly know which innovations and standardizations happened past 1982 in the world in which Bell was not dismantled.
      - Macha 1y ago
bloppe 1y ago
That's an interesting question. A lot of basic research is done in pursuit of creating entirely new markets. Being the first entrant to a new market makes you a monopolist in a way by default. It doesn't necessarily have to be anti-competitive. I'd argue the fact that Google publishes much more of their research than their competitors do is a strong indicator that they're actually not the anti-competitive ones.
DrillShopper 1y ago
The greatest private sector basic research institute that has ever existed was the result of a government granted monopoly, so you have to admit, it helps.
Zigurd 1y ago
Debatable. I visited the down at the heels post break up Bell Labs and it was sad.
- antonvs 1y ago
  I worked for a while at the company that used to be named Bellcore (Bell Communications Research), which was originally a research consortium for the Baby Bells. By the time I joined, it was a zombie cash cow shell that did no research, and it met the common fate of such businesses: acquired by a private equity firm.
concinds 1y ago
It's normal for mature industries to evolve into oligopolies. The filing goes far beyond fighting cartel-like behavior, into pretty ludicrous stuff (like "open access to Google’s datasets and search Index").
derektank 1y ago
Yet empirically, the biggest funders of basic research have historically been monopolies. The US government was, at least up until the last few months, the largest funder of basic research globally and it obviously maintains multiple different monopolies, a monopoly on legal use of force, a functional monopoly on financial transactions as the global reserve currency, and I'm sure others. Excluding national governments, Bell Labs and IBM were both probably the biggest funders of basic research in the last century during their respective heydays. Bell was obviously a monopoly and while IBM might never have faced anti-trust penalties, they did at one point control 70% of the mainframe market and the DoJ did bring a case against them (that was eventually dismissed by the Reagan administration.) I think there are many good reasons to pursue anti-trust action against companies that are in a dominant market position, but we should be honest about the tradeoffs. Businesses that have to aggressively compete to maintain market share don't have the slack to fund basic research.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- mjevans 1y ago
  Which is why, like the 'monopoly on violence' the government should also be funding a _lot more research_. It should be at, or partnered with, higher learning institutions and since it's public funded all of the results should be free to use*. I'm willing to entertain the idea of: Free use for people and corporations within the country/countries that funded research, everyone else pays compulsory license fees.
  - briandear 1y ago
    But public funded research isn’t “free to use.” In many cases, you can’t even read it without paying a scientific journal for a subscription. See the Bayh-Dole Act as well: universities can patent discoveries from federally funded research.
    - layer8 1y ago
      There’s no reason that couldn’t be changed, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43858568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43858568.
lacy_tinpot 1y ago
What monopoly? Google's entire business model is currently under threat right now.
- Larrikin 1y ago
  There are lazy developers reading this very comment thread that broke basic website functionality this week because they only tested on Chrome
  - ikiris 1y ago
    Just because the competition is trash doesn't make chrome a monopoly.

nmz 1y ago

How? The software world was basically created by Xerox and AT&T research.

There 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.
skippyboxedhero 1y ago
Because the data they possess is the monopoly, they have better search results because it is too expensive for competitors to gather the data at this point as(I also think people who are unfamiliar with finance do not understand the quantum, Meta has a similar type of business but was under huge pressure with investing tens of billions into VR...it would cost hundreds of billions to get parity with Google, there is no way to finance this). It is nothing to do with "hiring the best people". Google's exec-level leadership is extremely poor, Mr Magoo-tier management. This is largely due to their share classes, the people at the very top are not very good at business so Google largely isn't run like a business. They have one business that is probably worth $4-5tn, and the rest is worth -$3-4tn. The number of "best people" out there is usually under 500 in a country the size of the US, a country that has hundreds of thousands of employees is not hiring the best. I would guess under 100 people at Google actually positively impact financial results in any way because the advertising business grows rapidly, uses no capital, and requires no staff. This is true of many of the tech companies do, you aren't getting the best if you pay an exec $50m because the best will always do their own thing and make more. Rather you get someone like Pichai or Cook who sounds good and will get shareholders to believe that setting fire to $200m/year to pay them is a good idea, they are indistinguishable from politicians. Google is under-earning massively. Staff aren't a monopoly, you just pay someone to leave and they are yours now (you see this in other areas like HFT where staff actually know useful stuff, you don't see this in tech because most staff don't know anything, they are looking for drones).
- surajrmal 1y ago
  It's incredibly naive to think Google's continuous growth is automatic. It happened because of all the work the employees do, not in spite of it. Are there employees who don't contribute? Sure. But that's different from only 100 contributing to positive growth.
  - skippyboxedhero 1y ago
    Do you actually understand how and why they are growing? They start with a page with zero ads, they add one ad to that page one year, ad sales pushes that placements, then a few years they do it again, etc. Meta are the same. Google do sell at a higher price than offline ads because of targeting/intent but this is inherent to the product: search has inherently better intent and their targeting tech is no better than anyone else such that their prices are higher/grow faster. That is their growth model: higher ad density, the CEO deciding to add another ad to a page and earning $100m/year. There is no value-added otherwise because you don't need many people, you don't need capital and you are making $300bn/year. And, again, if you own the shares you understand that you are getting the ads business, and because of the dual class you are also getting this tech bureaucracy that sets fire to tens of billions every year employing people to do nothing. If these people are so productive...where is the revenue? It is all ads or ancillary business, they have GCP now but there is nothing else...because these people aren't doing anything. It is like owning a business that turns lead into gold, the process is automatic, requires no capital...and then employing a bunch of monks to pray for the lead and saying the business couldn't exist without them. Lol.
- saagarjha 1y ago
  > The number of "best people" out there is usually under 500 in a country the size of the US, a country that has hundreds of thousands of employees is not hiring the best. > I would guess under 100 people at Google actually positively impact financial results in any way It's really funny to me that people write comments like this and yet are incapable of basic arithmetic, like this being 0.0001% of the US population, or thinking that the entire ad business runs on just 100 people who are magically making the company $4 trillion dollars while everyone else drags it down.
nickfromseattle 1y ago
Note, Google also uses user interaction data from Chrome to influence the search results. [0] [0] https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-user-interaction-signals-36377.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-user-interaction-...
varelse 1y ago
[dead]
ayewo 1y ago
> There are many other search engine options, why should Google be punished for hiring the best people over decades to make the best one? I’m guessing this whole court case wouldn’t have been a thing if Google wasn’t bribing Apple, to the tune of $20 billion a year [1], to remain the default search engine on iOS. 1: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/apple-may-add-ai-search-engines-to-safari-as-google-use-drops/546220/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/apple-may-add-ai-search-...
- jeffbee 1y ago
  Amazing how you can see that as Google bribing Apple instead of Apple extorting Google.
  - josefx 1y ago
    It would be a rather ineffective extortion if "customers would just switch" as the comment further above claims.
- jsheard 1y ago
  Or more recently beginning to throw money at websites to lock out their competitors, which is why Bing and co can't index Reddit anymore.
  - dieortin 1y ago
    That’s not accurate, Bing can index Reddit just fine
    - jsheard 1y ago
      This doesn't look very fine to me... https://www.bing.com/search?q=pope%20francis%20died%20site%3Areddit.com https://www.bing.com/search?q=pope%20francis%20died%20site%3... The results are all from before July 2024, when the Google deal was established.

jeroenhd 1y ago

That's true, but if it weren't for Google's monopolist position, I doubt they'd have the money to throw at the wall for random research. For every AI transformer they revolutionized, there's a self-driving car project that's dragging on for decades. Had Google operated like a normal company, the risk/reward of this kind of research would've looked completely differently. Google's monopoly helped research along in the same way totalitarian countries like China are developing infrastructure at break-neck speed: if you don't need to care about pesky rights and regulations, you can do things that would otherwise be impossible. I don't think Google's monopoly is worth having the current generation of lie generator bots around, but I don't think generative AI would be where it is right now had Google been forced to comply with antitrust regulations ten years ago.

callc 1y ago
You certainly have a point. Places like google and bell labs have pushed innovation, apparently enabled by monopolies. I would rather we don’t allow monopolies since they are so bad for society, regardless of some benefits. Government funded research and private investment are still a thing, that doesn’t try to break the whole capitalism thing.
- dghlsakjg 1y ago
  > You certainly have a point. Places like google and bell labs have pushed innovation, apparently enabled by monopolies. I've heard this argument before (and recognize that you aren't defending it), but telecommunications, network and technology innovation has hardly suffered since Bell was dismantled in 1982.
  - Mond_ 1y ago
    You cannot possibly know which innovations and standardizations happened past 1982 in the world in which Bell was not dismantled.
    - Macha 1y ago

bloppe 1y ago

That's an interesting question. A lot of basic research is done in pursuit of creating entirely new markets. Being the first entrant to a new market makes you a monopolist in a way by default. It doesn't necessarily have to be anti-competitive. I'd argue the fact that Google publishes much more of their research than their competitors do is a strong indicator that they're actually not the anti-competitive ones.

DrillShopper 1y ago

The greatest private sector basic research institute that has ever existed was the result of a government granted monopoly, so you have to admit, it helps.

Zigurd 1y ago

Debatable. I visited the down at the heels post break up Bell Labs and it was sad.

antonvs 1y ago
I worked for a while at the company that used to be named Bellcore (Bell Communications Research), which was originally a research consortium for the Baby Bells. By the time I joined, it was a zombie cash cow shell that did no research, and it met the common fate of such businesses: acquired by a private equity firm.

concinds 1y ago

It's normal for mature industries to evolve into oligopolies. The filing goes far beyond fighting cartel-like behavior, into pretty ludicrous stuff (like "open access to Google’s datasets and search Index").

derektank 1y ago

Yet empirically, the biggest funders of basic research have historically been monopolies. The US government was, at least up until the last few months, the largest funder of basic research globally and it obviously maintains multiple different monopolies, a monopoly on legal use of force, a functional monopoly on financial transactions as the global reserve currency, and I'm sure others. Excluding national governments, Bell Labs and IBM were both probably the biggest funders of basic research in the last century during their respective heydays. Bell was obviously a monopoly and while IBM might never have faced anti-trust penalties, they did at one point control 70% of the mainframe market and the DoJ did bring a case against them (that was eventually dismissed by the Reagan administration.) I think there are many good reasons to pursue anti-trust action against companies that are in a dominant market position, but we should be honest about the tradeoffs. Businesses that have to aggressively compete to maintain market share don't have the slack to fund basic research.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
mjevans 1y ago
Which is why, like the 'monopoly on violence' the government should also be funding a _lot more research_. It should be at, or partnered with, higher learning institutions and since it's public funded all of the results should be free to use*. I'm willing to entertain the idea of: Free use for people and corporations within the country/countries that funded research, everyone else pays compulsory license fees.
- briandear 1y ago
  But public funded research isn’t “free to use.” In many cases, you can’t even read it without paying a scientific journal for a subscription. See the Bayh-Dole Act as well: universities can patent discoveries from federally funded research.
  - layer8 1y ago
    There’s no reason that couldn’t be changed, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43858568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43858568.

lacy_tinpot 1y ago

What monopoly? Google's entire business model is currently under threat right now.

Larrikin 1y ago
There are lazy developers reading this very comment thread that broke basic website functionality this week because they only tested on Chrome
- ikiris 1y ago
  Just because the competition is trash doesn't make chrome a monopoly.