[HN Gopher] Google Reneged on the Monopolistic Bargain
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Google Reneged on the Monopolistic Bargain
Author : EventH-
Score : 102 points
Date : 2024-02-21 17:07 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pluralistic.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (pluralistic.net)
| tdoggette wrote:
| > A company that can't figure out the difference between a scam
| like Better Homes and Gardens and a rigorous review site like
| Housefresh should be pouring every spare dime it brings in into
| fixing this problem. Not buying default search status on every
| platform so that we never try another search engine: they should
| be fixing their shit.
| raid2000 wrote:
| Well summarized. Anti-competition has become the new standard
| operating model.
| _heimdall wrote:
| At least in the US, I believe we've proven that anti-
| competition regulations don't work and that the government
| realized its easier to regulate the consumer than to deal
| with regulating massive corporations.
|
| If you want to win reelection you're much better off taking
| massive piles of cash from big businesses and regulate
| consumers to help create the monopolies. Trying to protect
| consumers by breaking up monopolies and promoting healthy
| market competition will see you leaving office in a hurry.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > I believe we've proven that anti-competition regulations
| don't work
|
| You have? How? You barely have any. And the ones you do
| have you rarely enforce.
|
| > Trying to protect consumers by breaking up monopolies and
| promoting healthy market competition will see you leaving
| office in a hurry.
|
| That sounds like a flaw in your political/electoral system
| not in anti-competition regulations.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment here but..
|
| > You barely have any .. anti-competition regulations
|
| this is not true. However, the secrecy implemented around
| enforcement (bad publicity) causes the casual observer to
| think so..
|
| There are very large enforcement actions that take place
| regularly.. they are far from perfect, and the failures
| tend to be the ones that are amplified in media..
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > this is not true. However, the secrecy implemented
| around enforcement (bad publicity) causes the casual
| observer to think so..
|
| That isn't the reason it isn't true. The US nominally has
| quite strong antitrust laws. The statutes are _extremely_
| broad in what they prohibit. But the enforcement is
| lacking and the courts over time have read the laws more
| narrowly than they were intended to be.
|
| > the failures tend to be the ones that are amplified in
| media..
|
| The failures are prolific. In a functioning regulatory
| environment, whether because you don't have regulations
| that prop up incumbents and don't create regulatory
| barriers to entry or because you break them up and stop
| them from buying each other, you wouldn't have industries
| where any one company has more than 15% of the market.
| But that is common, not rare, and that is the measure of
| it working.
| _heimdall wrote:
| > You have? How? You barely have any. And the ones you do
| have you rarely enforce.
|
| Lack of enforcement was actually part of my point. More
| broadly, though, we don't need more regulation so much as
| we need less legal protections that allow companies to
| get away with it.
|
| > That sounds like a flaw in your political/electoral
| system not in anti-competition regulations.
|
| No disagreements at all that our political and electoral
| system is flawed. I'm not so sure if that's the direct
| cause here though or if its the other way around.
| Meaning, we could be here because runaway anticompetitive
| behavior led to political and regulatory capture rather
| than the flawed political system being the proximal
| cause.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| In the US we've proven that it's easiest to just talk about
| anti-competition regulation to buy votes and then never
| actually get around to improving or enforcing it. After
| all, if you solve problems, you lose platforms to run the
| next election on.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I don't think that last sentence follows. There are
| _always_ more problems to solve. They're just stupid and
| lazy and loyal to their owners.
| _heimdall wrote:
| I'd argue there are always more _problems_ , we don't
| have to solve them all nor should we assume that we can.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| There are always more problems, but for example, it's a
| lot easier to get voters heated over abortion rights than
| it is over whether or not a national ID should carry
| biometric data.
| bratbag wrote:
| I think you are missing the third leg of this, which is how
| those monopolies extend outside of the US and act as part
| of the states global soft power strategy in those other
| countries where they are also monopolies.
|
| The US is no more likely to break them up as it is to cut
| its military budget in half.
| voisin wrote:
| Comrade, if you think the US is bad you should come check
| out Canada.
| AJ007 wrote:
| Google has sucked for years, and the level of sucking has been
| covered extensively on hn.
|
| The one thing that was a real shock was how much more gas was
| left in the ad model engine. They've managed to grow
| substantially over the past couple of years largely by pushing
| advertisers in to a ROAS model that is clearly optimized to
| make Google more money: gross almost 2x from 2019 to 2023 --
| from $161b to $307b. Net income more than doubled -- from $34b
| to $73.8b.
|
| Google, Google's employees, and Google's shareholders don't
| need nearly $1b in revenue a day. What they do just isn't that
| important anymore. That money is very much a tax, and
| ultimately the money consumers are paying for products and
| services is going to Google instead of making the product or
| service better.
|
| The good news is there are now many alternatives that work as
| well or better than Google. Combine that with LLM options
| (Perplexity, ChatGPT), and the future looks Google-lite or
| Google-free. It would be even better if we had more
| decentralized & localized search options like YaCy. If we want
| to have any control over our search future we need it.
|
| I'll just keep repeating this: Google today is a yellow pages.
| For search they offer little of value that isn't provided by
| others. Old people keep using Google because that's what they
| have been using for years or because it just shows up (like the
| yellow pages did, but now as a default.)
| 15457345234 wrote:
| Was it actually revenue growth from adverts or was it from a
| sudden splurge in pandemic-era spending caused by governments
| all over the world panic-signing up for Google Classroom and
| buying Chromebooks?
|
| Because I can see pretty much all of the 'growth' that
| occurred during 2020-2021 being unwound gradually as people
| realise that a lot of what happened was an absolute disaster
| for society.
|
| When it comes to making any predictions for the future you
| really have to write off the 2019-2021 pandemic era figures
| as a glitch.
| Topgamer7 wrote:
| A few weeks ago I bit the bullet and paid for kagi, as a dev
| it's night and day for finding documentation and relevant,
| non-spammy results.
| mikece wrote:
| So... the problem isn't that Google search isn't good but that
| (1) the ads sold are many and to some people who are scammers,
| and (2) enough of how the search engine algorithm works has
| become common knowledge and exploited by SEO experts seeking to
| inflate the relevance of sites by using what they know of how
| Google ranks search results.
|
| But for this to become a problem Google first had to come up with
| a system better than everyone else's.
|
| Sounds like a classic dilemma to me.
| blihp wrote:
| No, the schemes being used are decidedly low tech for the most
| part and trivially detectable. Google's result quality isn't
| dying a death of a thousand cuts due to hordes of disreputable
| actors, it's dying a death of Google being dependent on a small
| basket of sleazy companies that they're economically in bed
| with.
| bbor wrote:
| Amazingly written, hilarious, but I figured out what's
| frustrating me: the focus on being a consumer. If you're using
| words like "enshittocene" I feel you should think a little more
| about writing a post focusing on why Google isn't helpful for
| product reviews. Google n co are destroying _democracy_ and _the
| planet itself_ , and to spend our final days complaining that
| sometimes people buy bad products seems out of touch.
| Google literally has one job: to detect this kind of thing and
| crush it. The deal we made with Google was, "You monopolize
| search and use your monopoly rents to ensure that we never, ever
| try another search engine. In return, you will somehow
| distinguish between low-effort, useless nonsense and good
| information.
|
| I don't think it's fair to say Google has "one job", and I think
| this is the core example of the status-quo bias mentioned above.
| We didn't agree to a deal with Google! We never had a chance.
| Maybe this author did, but 99% of people think of Google like
| Walmart IMO: a fact of life.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| > We didn't agree to a deal with Google!
|
| We refuse to bring down governments who don't write the laws
| necessary to break up Google. So there is complicity there.
| 20after4 wrote:
| Google (and Walmart) established their dominant position
| through clever marketing based on lies. We bought it and only
| now are starting to realize what we fell for.
|
| Google's big lie was "don't be evil." They provided
| overwhelmingly valuable services for free. They did everything
| with minimal advertising and generally fantastic performance.
| Then they merged with an advertising company and pretty soon
| "don't be evil" was abandoned, along with almost every other
| principle that they had used to earn their dominant position in
| search and email.
|
| Walmart in the 1980s and 1990s was all about "Made in the
| USA.1" They sold themselves as a small-town company that cared
| about American jobs and American values. They did this while
| simultaneously dealing with American manufacturers using
| ruthless tactics. Walmart had a direct and significant (I would
| say critical) role in the widespread decline of manufacturing
| in the US.
|
| 1. This is not so prominent anymore but it was a lie from the
| start. Walmart has a long history with claiming to support
| American manufacturing while aggressively doing the opposite.
| https://www.thestand.org/2014/11/how-walmart-destroyed-u-s-m...
| bbor wrote:
| This a great, well researched response, and I don't disagree
| with the sentiment, but I think we should be careful not go
| give these companies too much credit. America has,
| understandably, been investing less in manufacturing over
| time at a roughly steady rate of decline:
| https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2017/april/us-
| manu... manufacturing's share of nominal
| gross domestic product (GDP) has dropped from 28.1 percent in
| 1953 to just 12 percent in 2015
|
| So I don't think it started in the 90s with walmart. Although
| the Fed makes an interesting argument in that article: we
| don't manufacture less, we manufacture the same but it's just
| worth way less as inflation ticks along. They describe
| American manufacturing as "fairly constant", which I think
| would be considered a very hot take by most Americans
| hypocrticalCons wrote:
| Well if it doesn't have that one singular job, you're admitting
| it shouldn't exist. Monopolies are illegal, Google shouldn't
| exist. Neither should Amazon, Microsoft, etc. Having massive
| marketing apparatuses that are larger than your company
| shouldn't be legal. Leave it to Americans to fully profiteer
| lies, marketing, and propaganda.
| bbor wrote:
| I agree ;) tho I think it's unfair to blame the Americans,
| the Brits brewed up capitalism as revenge for their weather
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| The abstract thesis here is that if you have a near-monopoly in
| some domain, where the product's quality is dependent on someone
| else, for example,
|
| * links and content on pages that Google search engine ranks
|
| * reviews on the Amazon market
|
| then everyone is going to use every trick in the book to come out
| on top, and that will just constantly degrade your product.
|
| If there was competition in the domain, then the tricks used for
| one search engine might not work for other search engines. So the
| situation might be better in the long run.
| 20after4 wrote:
| It's the very definition of selling out. This seems to be a very
| common trend with the vast majority of all previously respected
| institutions (at least in the USA). They have all sold out
| (literally sold the company, in many cases) and have now
| abandoned all principles (or pretenses) of decency and provision
| of value to customers. Now they are just trading on past
| integrity that is no longer reality. They will coast on their
| dwindling reputations for as long as they can get away with it.
|
| The attitude is "Fuck you, pay me." but wrapped in massive
| amounts of PR spin in an attempt to obfuscate the realty and
| deflect the blame.
| hypocrticalCons wrote:
| > just trading
|
| When Americans understand stockbuybacks should be illegal, that
| the entire stock market is a game played by monsters, then
| maybe, maybe you'll fix your shit
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I think it's that Google thinks it's claws are so deeply embedded
| in our habits that it no longer matters whether their products
| are any good.
| johnea wrote:
| Mr. Doctoro is right about goggle being shit.
|
| But in the casse of this article, the repeated reference to a
| "deal" goggle made with us, is just not correct. There was no
| deal.
|
| Goggle never promised anyone that they wouldn't flood their
| search results with shit.
|
| Goggle will do whatever makes it the most money, like laying off
| 1000s of workers while buying back 10s of billions of $ in stock.
| I bet those workers thought they had a "deal" too, they didn't.
|
| The only correction is for us citizens to elect legislators, and
| demand regulation anad breakup of massive monopolies.
|
| Instead some of the poorest trailer park trash in the us south
| are sending their spare nickels to the cheeto's gofundme campain.
| In spite of the fact that he's billionaire brat child from a NYC
| family slum lord empire.
|
| So, don't expect any of this to change in the us, except to get
| worse, because at this point american's are just too stupid...
| windexh8er wrote:
| Maybe it's legitimate, but this story got ramped off the front
| page of HN faster than I could send it to a few folks.
| taion wrote:
| The framing of this as a Google issue would suggest that other
| search engines wouldn't have this issue, but I'm not sure that's
| true? The "air purifier" search on DDG seems to give the same set
| of blogspam results:
| https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=best+air+purifier+for+pet+hai...
|
| Can someone with Kagi check to see if Kagi does better here?
| piva00 wrote:
| Searched on Kagi, my first result was a reddit post on /r/dyson
| [1], second result was a Medium post without much substance,
| then there's a collection of blogspam neatly arranged in a box
| with just the title of the pages (not polluting much, I can
| just skip that box), third to ninth result are varying degrees
| of blogs and the tenth result is WebMD [2].
|
| [1]
| https://old.reddit.com/r/dyson/comments/1730x73/best_air_pur...
|
| [2] https://www.webmd.com/pets/how-to-choose-an-air-purifier-
| for...
| itronitron wrote:
| Yeah, it's all mostly junk.
| happymellon wrote:
| Isn't DDG just a proxy for Bing?
|
| I can't imagine who would go to Microsoft for quality.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| I believe I've seen DDG's CEO or founder on here claiming
| that they do not proxy requests through Bing and that they do
| their own indexing. I think they had been using Bing at some
| point but I'm pretty sure current DDG results is all DDG
| indexing. Probably still falling for most of the same tricks
| which blogspammers use for Google SEO, though.
| n4r9 wrote:
| I'm guessing what's happening is that Google doesn't really care
| and is not really incentivised (in the short term) to provide
| high quality search results. It wouldn't make enough profit to
| work on that. And if any competitors become threatening enough
| they have ways of bringing them down that are cheaper than
| maintaining product or technical supremacy.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Bummer optimizing hiring devs on leetcode skills doesn't lead to
| better search result engineering.
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