[HN Gopher] US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case
___________________________________________________________________
US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case
Author : JumpCrisscross
Score : 271 points
Date : 2024-10-09 03:39 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ft.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ft.com)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| "The DoJ identified four areas that its remedies framework needed
| to address: search distribution and revenue sharing; generation
| and display of search results; advertising scale and
| monetisation; and gathering and use of data.
|
| ...
|
| In addition to potential spin-offs, prosecutors said remedies
| could include banning the exclusive contracts at the heart of the
| case -- in particular the $20bn that Google pays Apple each year
| to be its default search engine -- as well as imposing 'non-
| discrimination' measures on Google products such as its Android
| operating system and Play app store.
|
| The DoJ is also considering requiring Google to share its vast
| trove of data gathered to improve search ranking models, indices
| and advertising algorithms, which prosecutors argue was
| accumulated unlawfully."
| gnabgib wrote:
| Related _DOJ may want to break up Google_ (84 points, 2 months
| ago, 98 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41240716
| arthurcolle wrote:
| break up google for fumbling transformers alone
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| Yeah that's what monopolies do. Make people use inferior
| products. The US used to break up monopolies all the time. This
| was followed with a wave of innovation.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| I can't tell if you're serious.
|
| Not only did Google not "force" anyone to use the LLM tech
| that they largely developed, most people think they're silly
| for inventing it and then sitting on their hands until
| another company (OpenAI) ate their lunch.
| DinoDad13 wrote:
| The anti-trust case isn't about Google's LLM business.
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| They biggest web advertising company definitely shouldn't control
| the world's most popular browser. Just like we all knew they
| would, they're blocking ad blockers, and this problem will only
| get worse.
|
| Tell your friends to use Firefox, people.
| Arainach wrote:
| It's fascinating how "preventing web extensions from having
| full access to everything on every site you visit when there is
| a repeated history of extensions being bought by companies that
| turn them into spyware data miners" gets turned into "blocking
| ad blockers".
| cogman10 wrote:
| Because there were other ways to handle the ad blocker
| situation. For example, allowing the users to grant access to
| an extension.
|
| The hard protocol ban is heavy handed.
| Arainach wrote:
| Users don't read dialogs. They just click yes so they can
| get to their shiny talking purple gorilla. This also
| doesn't address the threat model: a good extensions that
| users trust and give these rights to which is bought out
| and changed to do malicious things.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > Users don't read dialogs.
|
| Not all do, some do. And it only takes a few to spot
| something fishy and start reporting problems.
|
| > This also doesn't address the threat model
|
| It actually does, because few extensions need broad
| permissions. The threat is significantly reduced if a
| change in required permissions goes up a new dialog pops
| up which encourages the few users that read the thing to
| ask "Hey, why is this asking for so many more
| permissions?"
|
| This model works. It works so well that the security
| model of pretty much every app store is exactly the same.
| The risks are also identical.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| I'm not so sure this is a problem. They're not _completely_
| blocking ad-blockers, just neutering them somewhat with MV3.
| You can still use uBOL (the "Lite" version of uBO) and get a
| lot of ads blocked on Chrome.
|
| Remember, Chrome is not installed by default on Windows PCs;
| Edge is. People are using Chrome because they want to. They
| could just as easily download Firefox and uBO, like more-savvy
| users do. Unfortunately, too many can't be bothered. Should
| they be saved from excessive and intrusive ads? Again, they can
| easily install uBOL on their Chrome instance, or they can
| download and install FF+uBO. Or use something else like Brave.
|
| >Tell your friends to use Firefox, people.
|
| Absolutely, yes. Just don't be too surprised when you visit
| them later and they're still using Chrome (or Edge) with no ad-
| blocker at all. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't
| make it drink.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| >Chrome is not installed by default on Windows PCs; Edge is
|
| Whenever this is brought up, the silence is deafening.
|
| Edge is a good browser, and users are notoriously lazy; most
| won't read a dialog box before clicking it away. And yet...
| ~everyone on Windows still downloads Chrome.
| spongebobstoes wrote:
| does google.com still push Chrome? I think it does, and
| it's most people's first website
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| IME if I am using a non-Chrome browser I get three nags
| from Google to switch to Chrome before it gives up. It's
| happened on Google's home page, Gmail, and Maps.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _they 're blocking ad blockers_
|
| I've tried uBlock Origin Lite on Chrome and it works...
| perfectly. I haven't noticed a single ad get through.
|
| And isn't it supposed to be a lot more performant?
|
| Before, I assumed Chrome really was trying to gradually stop
| ad-blocking. But now that I see it's had literally zero impact,
| at least on the sites I visit, I'm starting to wonder what all
| the fuss was about. Was manifest v3 really about performance
| and security all along, and not about eliminating ad blockers?
|
| Meanwhile, you can't install adblocking on iOS Safari as an
| extension _at all_. But I never hear anybody bringing that up.
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| > Meanwhile, you can't install adblocking on iOS Safari as an
| extension at all. But I never hear anybody bringing that up.
|
| There are a bunch of safari ad blockers in the app store that
| work the same way manifest v3 blockers work.
| musictubes wrote:
| It isn't brought up because it isn't true. Plenty of ad
| blockers for iOS/ipados Safari.
| apercu wrote:
| If the ads weren't invasive, covering the content, purposely
| distracting you and your data wasn't being collected and
| resold, we wouldn't need ad blockers.
| richwater wrote:
| > Tell your friends to use Firefox, people.
|
| Mozilla is pretty much entirely funded by Google
| teleforce wrote:
| There's side effect benefit of big kahuna companies mainly on the
| significant breakthrough and game changing research output
| because these excellent researchers are paid handsome money
| compared to conventional universities or research institutions.
|
| We saw this with AT&T Bell research labs with their inventions of
| transistor and Unix, among others. The same thing happened with
| Google research with (arguably) deep learning and transformer.
|
| Split them up at your own (US) perils, not unlike killing own
| Golden Goose.
| LightHugger wrote:
| This is a theoretical benefit which is directly at odds with
| the benefits of competition in a healthy market. For google, my
| observation is the "big kahuna" benefit of google basically
| does not exist and competition needs to be restored. Google is
| famous for not innovating on anything successfully, they
| produce graveyards of trash. Instead what they do is buy other
| companies then enshittify them in an anti competitive dance
| towards causing more damage than productivity.
|
| You really have to think about exactly how our modern markets
| work and why buyouts are such dominant strategy. It's only
| sometimes about taking what you buy then using it, it's mostly
| about taking what you buy to stifle competition these days.
|
| Look at twitter and Vine, twitter bought then shut down vine as
| part of a standard operating procedure just to stifle
| competition, and they had so little interest in capitalizing on
| what they bought that it left a market gap so wide TikTok
| filled it instead. But usually these practices do not leave
| such big market gaps, usually they simply shut down competition
| successfully and the buyer wins. Then in many cases if the
| company owners refuse to be bought out, extreme anti-
| competitive practices begin to destroy their business, which
| will not be punished until long after the victims get shut
| down. So owners need to choose between a huge pay out, or their
| company getting destroyed. Owners tend to choose the former.
| teleforce wrote:
| > "big kahuna" benefit of google basically does not exist
|
| I just given you the deep learning and transformer benefits.
|
| There's a reason why the darling of AI Renaissance namely
| transformer was not invented at MIT, Stanford or Berkeley.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| >Google is famous for not innovating on anything successfully
|
| PageRank
|
| Gmail
|
| Maps
|
| MapReduce
|
| Chrome
|
| Protocol Buffers
|
| Go
| teractiveodular wrote:
| Maps was technically an acquisition (Where2). But like
| YouTube, Doubleclick, Google Docs (Writely), Translate
| (Word Lens), Google Flights (ITA) and many others, Google
| successfully grew these products into giants.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| I didn't know Maps (or Google Docs, or Translate) were
| acquisitions, thanks.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Didn't some of the early GPT work come out of Google?
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| The popular transformer paper, which went on to be used
| in things like ChatGPT, was authored by Google employees.
| But "come out of Google" is giving the organization too
| much credit and the individual too little. Also
| transformers were themselves a continuation of prior work
| like multi head attention. And it is possible that
| transformers were not needed - see this discussion from
| the other day:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41732853
| tgma wrote:
| Come on... that's so unfair. There is a reason such
| individuals chose to work at Google and not Apple or
| Amazon for example and were able to "individually" come
| up with such work without being pestered by their
| management to do other stuff.
| kolinko wrote:
| Gmail was revolutionary at the start, but stopped
| innovating 10 years ago - why don't we still have a good
| search engine within it?
|
| MapReduce would be invented anyway (I implemented it from
| scratch before learning of it's existence).
|
| Chrome is just a slightly upgraded Firefox (and novadays
| Safari is just as good if not better with ai)
|
| PageRank was what gave Google monopoly, it's not a result
| of monopoly.
|
| Go - I can give you that. ProtoBuf - not my field, but
| isn't it just a format that someone else would develop to
| fill a niche? (unlike say mp3 that had new compression
| algorithms baked in)
|
| Maps - I can give you that. Some people might argue that it
| was an acquisition, but without Google's muscle, Street
| View would not be feasible.
| nine_k wrote:
| > _Chrome is just a slightly upgraded Firefox_
|
| Wat. It's like saying that an apple is a slightly
| upgraded orange. I would understand if you mentioned
| KHTML and Safari as relatives, but "slightly upgraded"
| does not fit anyway.
|
| > _PageRank was what gave Google monopoly_
|
| I don't think so. PageRank has been successfully
| implemented elsewhere, and outmatched. What helped Google
| build a monopoly was the first mover advantage, the
| network effects, and the incessant streams of money from
| AdWords (invented by Google), DoubleClick (acquired) and
| a bunch of other advertisement tools.
|
| > _Maps - I can give you that._
|
| Don't :) Google Maps is an acquisition from 20 years ago.
| (As is Android, AdSense, and many other core flagship
| products of the Google brand.)
|
| If you want a relatively recent, successful Google
| service for general public, it's Google Photos.
| whitehexagon wrote:
| >If you want a relatively recent, successful Google
| service for general public, it's Google Photos.
|
| I seem to recall that followed the acquisition of Picasa.
| nine_k wrote:
| Picasa was rather different: it had a desktop client, had
| tags, did not have a dedicated view mode, etc. It ran as
| a separate product, and then was shut down, not
| integrated.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa
| kernal wrote:
| >Google Maps is an acquisition from 20 years ago. (As is
| Android)
|
| This is comical. When Google acquired Android, it was
| nothing more than a 3000 line JavaScript demo. The
| Android OS was created entirely at Google.
| omoikane wrote:
| > Gmail was revolutionary at the start, but stopped
| innovating 10 years ago - why don't we still have a good
| search engine within it?
|
| Not sure about your experience, but I used to subscribe
| to a lot of mailing lists just so that I can search for
| mailing list content using gmail, because the search
| function implemented by those mailing lists were
| generally worse.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| Comparing the innovations of Bell Labs with..... _Protobuf_
| of all things makes me gag.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| Gag if you want to gag, but I'm not comparing anything
| with Bell Labs. I'm giving evidence that the claim I
| quoted is false.
| treyd wrote:
| Go you can hardly call an innovation. All of the ideas
| existed previously, and it's a poor execution on those
| ideas for reasons that have been discussed on HN at length
| before. They created it to serve their own needs in
| conditioning the labor market to make their hiring process
| easier.
| kajecounterhack wrote:
| Gosh this is pretty unfair to Rob Pike and Ken Thompson.
| A lot of infrastructure companies have benefitted from Go
| the same way Google has, for the same reasons.
|
| Typical HN comment writing off significant thoughtfulness
| as "not an innovation" lol
| jonas21 wrote:
| > _Google is famous for not innovating on anything
| successfully, they produce graveyards of trash._
|
| - AlphaFold (just won a Nobel prize)
|
| - Transformers (the "T" in GPT)
|
| - Waymo (autonomous vehicles)
|
| - Sycamore (quantum computing)
|
| These are just a few off the top of my head.
|
| If your idea of innovation is a better RSS reader, then sure,
| I agree with you. But in terms of things that push the
| forefront of technology, I have a hard time thinking of
| another company with greater impact in recent years.
| iml7 wrote:
| The split of ATT killed Unix2, so we spent 30 years re-
| implementing Linux+k8s. These things that existed in Unix2 &
| Plan9 were re-implemented by Plan9 employees in Google Labs.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Never even heard of Unix2 - was it a complete replacement ?
| fsckboy wrote:
| i can't even understand what you are saying? AT&T was good,
| or bad?
|
| AT&T copyrights led to linux, and linux, independent of unix,
| has been a huge boon for good, and for unixness.
|
| the threat to unix now is all the people who by nature prefer
| Dave Cutlerness, and can't see that their way is the wrong
| way, now they are using linux (because it won) and trying to
| ruin it.
| lfmunoz4 wrote:
| UNIX exists because ATT was split. They could not profit from
| software (by law because of an agreement with the government)
| so early versions of UNIX where made free.
|
| This should be well known, simple google search:
|
| https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-
| general-1/why...
| flomo wrote:
| Seconding info about "unix2". I used to pour over the trade
| tabloids, and I've never heard of this.
|
| Novell bought UNIX and has some grand plans for "SuperNOS",
| which also never shipped. It certainly wasn't anything like
| K8s.
| pjmlp wrote:
| UNIX only became a success, because ATT initially wasn't
| allowed to charge real money for research work.
| HillRat wrote:
| The AT&T split had nothing to do with monopoly regulation (as
| opposed to the Bell breakup in 1982), other than the fact
| that Wall Street wasn't rewarding regulated operating
| companies with dot-com valuations. AT&T wanted to sell
| hardware to other telcos and dot-coms, so spun off Lucent,
| which had no idea what it wanted to do with P9/Inferno (which
| was a fantastic piece of kit!) other than embed it into a
| couple of network products. Lucent bet heavily on unstable
| CLECs like Worldcom, generated a couple of headline-creating
| network crashes, and then failed to capitalize on their pole
| position in optical long-haul (to be fair, they also bet
| heavily on a very unstable Global Crossing for that). There's
| a lot of mismanagement and failures that can be ascribed to
| Lucent leadership without government or regulatory
| intervention being involved.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| So wait, markets don't work, then? A free market,
| theoretically, promotes innovation by ensuring that businesses
| must advance their products in order to compete with one
| another. You're saying that a lack of competition promotes
| innovation by concentrating all of an industry's capital under
| one roof.
| eastbound wrote:
| Regalian roles are to ensure fair competition by reducing any
| actor bigger than the state to something smaller, and
| ensuring the economy works with transparent information (no
| lying, rule of law, etc.)
|
| Companies getting too big are natural; Letting them get too
| big is what happens when your state borrows a trillion per
| semester: Your state is obese, intervening in every little
| sector of the economy (thus the opposite of liberal), and not
| playing its regalian role.
|
| You should indeed reduce the size of both the state and the
| largest companies, to let the economy self-regulate, but
| then, how would the US govern the rest of the world?
| farts_mckensy wrote:
| Both can be true in varying degrees at certain points in
| time. They're not mutually exclusive. There are benefits to
| centralization and concentration of capital. Competition is
| the same exact process that leads to monopolistic entities in
| the first place.
| Kon5ole wrote:
| The thing that makes markets work is the struggle. A
| Darwinian survival of the fittest in a way. Once the struggle
| is over and only one contestant remains, the results are
| generally dystopian.
|
| Also I believe that even when working optimally the Darwinian
| mechanism can't solve certain problems. Some things need to
| be dealt with by a group of motivated people working for
| other goals than profit.
|
| Markets gave us compuserve and facebook while CERN gave us
| the open web, for example.
| someluccc wrote:
| Yes I can see the dystopian consequences of google's search
| monopoly profits, which they have used to do such horrible
| things as:
|
| - Providing a free alternative to Microsoft's monopolized
| office suite and desktop OS
|
| - Provide a free alternative to Apple's mobile OS, spurring
| a revolution in access to the internet for the world's poor
|
| - Provide free global maps with streetview sights
|
| - Provide a free to access video platform with invaluable
| educational resources that allows millions of creators to
| make a living and that likely wouldn't exist save for
| Google's monumental investments and ability to sustain
| years of losses
|
| - Research given away for free that ignited the current AI
| revolution
|
| - Research given away for free that is revolutionizing
| medicine and drug development
|
| In sum, truly a horrible thing they've done
| ta1243 wrote:
| Very few of that is free. openstreetmap - that's free.
| Google maps is an advertising and data mining platform.
| someluccc wrote:
| So you're telling me the evil monopolist that charges
| nothing has a competitor, and that competitor is free?
| Which is why we must break up the evil monopolist?
| Kon5ole wrote:
| The case against Google surely is that they shouldn't be
| allowed to use their dominant position in ad sales to
| price dump unrelated businesses until all competitors are
| gone.
|
| Like for example having youtube be free until they're the
| only game in town then start charging 14 dollars monthly
| to avoid 30% ads. Or targeting ads to gmail users so you
| can artificially provide a cheaper mail service than
| anyone else.
|
| There's an actual law saying you can't do stuff like
| that.
| waveBidder wrote:
| just skip the middle man skimming off the top and 10x the
| national labs funding.
| qnleigh wrote:
| I wish this were a viable option, but it is not. US national
| labs are horribly, horribly mismanaged. For some slower-
| moving fields like particle physics where institutional
| knowledge is key, they hold up alright, but for fast moving
| fields like quantum they are very behind. They are stagnant
| bureaucracies. I could tell stories, but better to just
| compare the output of national labs in many fields to those
| of the top universities in the States.
| onecommentman wrote:
| I think you need to better support the contention that the
| National Labs are "horribly, horribly mismanaged" [not even
| just horribly, but horribly, horribly]. I think many of us
| would like to hear your stories. But note that many in your
| audience here have decades of experience across both
| National Labs and leading industrial laboratories. Please,
| share your stories that span the contributions of tens of
| thousands of top-level STEM contributors across practically
| every area of scientific and engineering endeavor over the
| last, say, 15 years. Remember to stay unclassified...
| busterarm wrote:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=national+laboratory+misma
| nag.... it has been widely reported on. Search results
| are eye-opening.
| waveBidder wrote:
| Then separate out the basic science from the defense work
| which requires that bureaucratic oversight. Or direct that
| funding to universities. My main point is allowing
| monopolies because they direct their excess profits to
| research to hide their excess profits is just a complicated
| tax to fund basic research, which we would be better off
| spending directly on research without bloated executive
| salaries and distorted markets in e.g. search or browsers.
| fsh wrote:
| Clearly this model no longer works. Bell labs had 11 nobel
| prize winners. What did Google invent? Slightly better
| generative neural networks whose offsprings now pollute their
| search results?
| fecal_henge wrote:
| Google invented the ability to put an animated Gif inside a
| spreadsheet cell.
| nick__m wrote:
| with COM and OLE, this was possible in excel on win3.11 !
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| You could interpret this the other way - Why has Jeff Dean
| been snubbed by the Nobel committee? Why hasn't Larry Page
| gotten a Nobel for inventing the search technology that half
| the planet now depends on? I don't know what category to put
| that one in, but there's some important results in
| lightspeed-limited communications in "The Datacenter as a
| Computer" that would be worth extending the Physics category
| for.
| apercu wrote:
| "search technology"
|
| Google is an advertising company, search is a by-product
| and has been for a long time.
| ta1243 wrote:
| About 20 years ago it wasn't, and Google's pagerank stuff
| was revolutionary and potentially nobel prize worthy (no
| idea, I'm not a scientist)
| apercu wrote:
| It was better search than other search options at the
| time, but was quickly an advertising company. It's also
| too bad that that it was so dominant early, because there
| used to be 4-5 search Enginess and their results were
| very different and you could find things in non-google
| results that you couldn't get from google (and vice
| versa).
|
| You're not wrong, but it didn't last. Google jumped the
| shark in its first decade. I remember giving an internal
| presentation in 2010 or 2012 about how little of the
| screen real estate in a Google search result was actually
| search results.
| laborcontract wrote:
| indexing against Nobel prizes is like trying to use patents
| as a proxy for innovation
| fragmede wrote:
| Spanner is one thing I'd say they invented but they built a
| whole bunch of really neat stuff in order to be able to run
| search, back in 1998. that they're this behemoth conglomerate
| that it's cool to hate on doesn't erase the fact that they
| had to build all sorts of new things when they were just
| starting out.
| novia wrote:
| Two of Google's researchers are getting the Nobel prize for
| AlphaFold2 this year.
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| DeepMind, not Google organically.
| novia wrote:
| Many parts of Google today are acquisitions: YouTube,
| Android, Doubleclick, and many more.
| kibwen wrote:
| What on Earth... you do realize that antitrust regulation was
| the only reason we got Unix in the first place, right?
| onecommentman wrote:
| Trying to turn a zoo into a farm, as AT&T attempted to do with
| Bell Labs post-divestiture, had limited success and incurred
| great emotional and spiritual cost on the institution. Bleah.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _side effect benefit of big kahuna companies mainly on the
| significant breakthrough and game changing research output_
|
| "Given that production could be carried on without any
| organization, Coase asks, 'Why and under what conditions should
| we expect firms to emerge?' Since modern firms can only emerge
| when an entrepreneur of some sort begins to hire people,
| Coase's analysis proceeds by considering the conditions under
| which it makes sense for an entrepreneur to seek hired help
| instead of contracting out for some particular task. The
| traditional economic theory of the time suggested that, because
| the market is 'efficient' (that is, those who are best at
| providing each good or service most cheaply are already doing
| so), it should always be cheaper to contract out than to hire.
|
| Coase noted, however, that there are a number of transaction
| costs to using the market; the cost of obtaining a good or
| service via the market is actually more than just the price of
| the good. Other costs, including search and information costs,
| bargaining costs, keeping trade secrets, and policing and
| enforcement costs, can all potentially add to the cost of
| procuring something via the market. This suggests that firms
| will arise when they can arrange to produce what they need
| internally, and somehow avoid these costs.
|
| There is a natural limit to what can be produced internally,
| however. Coase notices 'decreasing returns to the entrepreneur
| function', including increasing overhead costs and increasing
| propensity for an overwhelmed manager to make mistakes in
| resource allocation. This is a countervailing cost to the use
| of the firm.
|
| Coase argues that the size of a firm (as measured by how many
| contractual relations are 'internal' to the firm and how many
| 'external') is a result of finding an optimal balance between
| the competing tendencies of the costs outlined above. In
| general, making the firm larger will initially be advantageous,
| but the decreasing returns indicated above will eventually kick
| in, preventing the firm from growing indefinitely."
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm
| DinoDad13 wrote:
| I love it when the top comments on a hacker news thread is
| justifying monopolies. Fuck economics right?
| cosmic_quanta wrote:
| Do you think it's impossible to have a nuanced discussion
| about monopolies? Their net effect may be wholly negative
| while having some interesting aspects
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| Not impossible, but _mostly_ impossible. You can discuss
| the interesting aspects of large corporations, but you can
| 't really discuss them in a vacuum. The top level post
| about "big kahuna" companies comes across as an unambiguous
| defense of monopolies, not an attempt at nuanced
| conversation.
| nickff wrote:
| Not a participant in your back-and-forth, but the top
| level comment seems to be much more nuanced than your
| posts. Perhaps you could:
|
| > _"Please respond to the strongest plausible
| interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one
| that 's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."_
| DinoDad13 wrote:
| > "Split them up at your own (US) perils, not unlike
| killing own Golden Goose."
| benopal64 wrote:
| Honestly, it's disgusting.
|
| Have these people even read the white papers that Google
| releases? They are mostly marketing pieces.
|
| When systems and technologies are not publicly reproducible,
| why should scientists and (most) engineers care? I will not
| take Google at its word and would not recommend it to others.
| belter wrote:
| You should know 80% of Hacker News works for either Google or
| Facebook.
| optymizer wrote:
| Drawing from own experience working with Harvard, MIT and
| Google researchers, I could not disagree more.
|
| When you talk to a researcher, do they strike you as someone
| who chases handsome amounts of money, or someone who chases
| ideas?
|
| You bring up research labs. I listened to Alan Kay's numerous
| talks over the years (as an example of a prominent CS
| researcher), not once does he mention that he joined for the
| money at Xerox PARC. Yes, he was paid, but the main advantage
| was being given free reign to conduct research with the best
| experts in their fields, i.e. to invent and pursue ideas.
|
| The important part from a financial perspective, is to be able
| to have finances to back a research division, where you can
| spend billions on building a new type of technology, if need
| be, that may not pan out. You don't need a monopoly to
| accomplish that.
|
| You know who does chase handsome amounts of money? Day traders
| and everyone gambling on the stock market.
| logicchains wrote:
| > is to be able to have finances to back a research division,
| where you can spend billions on building a new type of
| technology, if need be, that may not pan out. You don't need
| a monopoly to accomplish that
|
| A company in an industry with very tight margins has much
| less money to invest in fundamental research. All the recent
| growth in generative AI has been driven by companies with
| very high margins; Google, Facebook, Amazon. If all those
| FANG were in tightly competitive markets and hence had low
| margins, they wouldn't have had billions of dollars to spend
| on the GPU compute necessary to develop modern language
| models. Which is evidenced by the fact that no companies in
| more competitive sectors have produced any large language
| models.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _company in an industry with very tight margins has much
| less money to invest in fundamental research_
|
| OpenAI has raised almost $18bn to date [1]. That puts it in
| the top 10 corporate R&D spenders globally, ahead of Intel
| and the entirety of big pharma [2]. (And OpenAI's gross
| margins for its API business are estimated around 40% [3].
| Standard fare for tech. If anything, OpenAI subsidising its
| business with Apple and ChatGPT is behaving more like a
| tech giant than a start-up.)
|
| The top of that list are the big 5 American tech companies,
| spending about $200bn annually on R&D. By coincidence,
| that's roughly the pace of U.S. VC spend [4]. The depth of
| American private capital markets make a solid case against
| favouring housing these long-shot bets inside tech giants.
| (Particularly absent non-compete and IP reform.)
|
| [1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/02/openai-
| raises-6-6b-and-is-...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_by_rese
| arch_...
|
| [3] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/a-peek-behind-
| openai...
|
| [4] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/ai-deals-lift-
| us-ve...
| nickff wrote:
| Because you specifically mention Alan Kay, I just finished
| reading "Dealers of Lightning", which is about PARC, and says
| that the researchers there were very handsomely paid. IIRC,
| they were paid 20% more than their counterparts in 'regular'
| Xerox R&D. Xerox was also a big company, making a lot of
| money when it started PARC; arguably a monopoly (depending on
| how you define the term).
| thefaux wrote:
| That still doesn't prove that Kay worked there because of
| the financial incentives. I don't think that 20% is nearly
| enough for most top talent to bail to an otherwise less
| attractive company if they deeply care about what they're
| working on so long as they aren't wildly underpaid. There
| needs to be a combination of incentives to drive movement.
| nickff wrote:
| I don't know how you could prove or disprove why Kay
| worked somewhere fifty years ago, short of a written
| affidavit produced at the time. Additionally, most
| professionals don't admit that they took a job because of
| the pay, even if that's exactly why they did it; they
| usually say they 'went for a new challenge' or something
| like that.
| tivert wrote:
| I think you're getting it backwards. The research operations
| are a desperate attempt stave off regulation to keep the sweet,
| sweet monopoly profits coming in (and those profits are _so
| big_ that the bean-counters allow it). I believe that was the
| explicit strategy at AT &T. We collectively pay way, _way_
| more.
|
| It'd be way more efficient and cost effective to just set up a
| well-funded government labs to do that research.
| dehrmann wrote:
| It's an interesting argument for monopolies possibly being a
| net-good, but I don't think regulators really look at it.
| Companies do R&D because they like their monopoly status and
| don't want to be caught flat-footed by something new.
| ta1243 wrote:
| Yes. If a large company didn't employ those researchers,
| someone else would, and if they were for someone else maybe
| they'll come up with something which could damage the large
| company.
|
| It's not about building and owning the next best thing,
| it's about preventing someone else building and owning the
| next best thing.
| zaphar wrote:
| I am not at all confident that a government lab will be
| either well-funded or efficient in any sense of the words.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
|
| TCP/IP?
| alexpotato wrote:
| Rory Sutherland has a great take on this which is (paraphrasing
| and my own interpretation):
|
| Innovation is a lot easier when you have a lot of money to
| spend on R&D. In order to get that money, you can't compete on
| price b/c that's a race to the bottom. Instead, you want to
| focus on quality and/or customer service so that you become a
| monopoly and then can use monopoly profits to innovate to
| higher quality products and services.
|
| Clip:
| https://www.tiktok.com/@rorysutherlandclips/video/7314765561...
| mistrial9 wrote:
| classical MBA says that a firm can compete on price OR
| branding, unfair advantages (moat) notwithstanding.
| Competition in commodities is difficult but not impossible
| given a rational economic environment. Some would say that
| the modern expectation of returns on investment are
| irrational, and warp the economics around them too.
| pdonis wrote:
| Peter Thiel made a similar argument about monopolies years
| ago. As I pointed out then [1], the argument only shows that
| monopoly is good for the monopolist; it doesn't actually show
| that monopolies are good for society as a whole.
|
| [1] http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/monopoly-money.html
| which wrote:
| This! And where do people think open source funding,
| hackathons, bug bounties for software that's not even theirs,
| oss-fuzz, really incredible but not necessarily profitable
| research like Project Zero comes from? AdWords largesse.
| blackoil wrote:
| That is like wishing a benevolent dictator, who'll be in most
| cases more efficient then democracy but is a huge risk to take.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| Lina Khan's response to this argument. [1]
|
| [1]
| https://www.youtube.com/live/L_QaZk5iJOA?si=ZkxBe1CHgagmcBcW...
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| So it's OK to burden the whole country with a monopoly as long
| as they fund a handful of Nobel prizes?
|
| Competition is a prerequisite for healthy Capitalism. Lack of
| competition is the Achilles heel.
| someluccc wrote:
| Please do tell us how Google is a burden to the whole
| country.
|
| Is it the free maps? free mobile OS? free email? free cloud
| storage? free video service? free office suite? free desktop
| OS? free AI chat?
| christhecaribou wrote:
| Read a book on tech entrepreneurship. The "goal" of most
| startups is to get purchased by a big tech company. That's
| utterly fucked, and tacitly demonstrates the problem.
| someluccc wrote:
| It's fucked that people start companies because they have
| the safety net of possibly being acquired even if the
| business doesn't work out?
| christhecaribou wrote:
| It's suspicious that long term growth into an independent
| business isn't realistically discussed as an option.
| someluccc wrote:
| Because a lot of those business are only possible through
| monumental amounts of work and/or investment and selling
| is way easier than being an owner-operator for years
| under very probable risk of failure?
| Maledictus wrote:
| https://archive.ph/DPtgt
| kibwen wrote:
| Google is such a rudderless mess that breaking it up may be the
| only way to salvage anything of societal value from this company.
| pixxel wrote:
| >societal value
|
| Genuine question: what societal value would be lost if Google
| was erased tomorrow (all technical reliance their services was
| magically replaced overnight with alternatives by pixies)?
| ruthmarx wrote:
| What would happen if you replaced Google with a perfect
| functional equivalent? Well, nothing.
|
| You don't happen to know where one could find these magical
| perfectly compatible and functional drop in replacements, do
| you?
| idle_zealot wrote:
| The closest thing to a unique offering that they have is
| YouTube. What other services don't have perfectly
| reasonable replacements ready and waiting?
| bhelkey wrote:
| Android makes up ~70% of the global phone marketshare
| [1]. Google maps makes up 70% of the mapping marketshare
| [2]. Chrome makes up ~65% of the browser marketshare [3].
| Those are three of the nine products Google has with over
| a billion users [4].
|
| [1] https://backlinko.com/iphone-vs-android-statistics
|
| [2] https://www.thestreet.com/technology/big-tech-
| working-to-cha...
|
| [3] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
|
| [4] https://01core.substack.com/p/google-has-9-products-
| with-ove...
| idle_zealot wrote:
| Excellent job demonstrating Google's broad market
| dominance, and that alternatives exist to replace them
| should antitrust action be taken.
| bhelkey wrote:
| What drop in equivalent exists for Android? I have no
| desire to move to iOS.
|
| What drop in equivalent exists for Google maps? I have
| used OpenStreetMap for a personal project and have tried
| other proprietary options. If Google maps disappeared,
| life would go on but I would be worse off.
|
| What equivalent exists for Chrome? Even on desktop I
| prefer Chrome over Firefox. On mobile, Firefox falls far
| behind Chrome.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| Fortunately for you, Android and Chromium are FOSS and
| not going anywhere. For maps there is OSM with several
| available frontends, Bing maps, and Apple Maps has a web
| version.
| ruthmarx wrote:
| No one is denying alternatives exist, people are denying
| alternatives exist that are anywhere near as good.
| ruthmarx wrote:
| > What other services don't have perfectly reasonable
| replacements ready and waiting?
|
| How about which single reasonable replacement offers the
| same services with the same level of integration?
|
| Using Yahoo Mail and Amazon Cloud and Office Online and
| whatever other products isn't quite the same offering as
| what Google offers.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| Interoperability is great, walled-garden integration is a
| trap like any sort of bundling. If someone wants to
| create a suite of products that work well together that's
| fine so long as they employ means that allow other
| products to integrate as well. Google has gone the other
| route and created a suite of products and services that
| integrate in ways that exclude competitors.
| ruthmarx wrote:
| > Interoperability is great,
|
| Yup, and that's what people want. So what is the
| integrated service you are saying exists that can be a
| drop in replacement for the way so many organizations use
| Google's integrated services?
| idle_zealot wrote:
| There isn't one, and there's no incentive to build it so
| long as creating a walled garden is more profitable.
| ruthmarx wrote:
| > There isn't one,
|
| There we go. So if we go back up to your first comment
| where you say there are separate replacements for some
| services, you can see that isn't really relevant since
| what is being discussed was a drop in replacement for
| Google, and not an individual service they offer.
|
| Aside from that though, Google's offerings are not a
| walled garden.
| dehrmann wrote:
| You could make that argument for anything, though.
| dehrmann wrote:
| One of the pendulums in business strategy is whether companies
| should be smaller so they can be more nimble and pursue their
| own destines or larger so the can be more protected from market
| demands and can capitalize on "synergies" with other business
| units.
|
| In practice, investors usually discount larger companies for
| efficiency reasons. You can see this with acquisition
| announcements where the acquirer usually goes down in price.
| The synergies often fail to pay off because there aren't
| actually many synergies between making microwaves and running a
| TV network, and the sprawling empire turns into mostly
| independent fiefdoms.
| eastbound wrote:
| There has been many announcements of lawsuits based on antitrust
| in the last 3 weeks.
|
| We can assume the message is "If you reelect the current party,
| we'll finish these lawsuits." There are two perverse effects:
|
| - It positions the alternate party as the party that Google
| should sponsor,
|
| - The good choice after reelection will then be to delay the next
| step of those popular antitrust cases to 3 weeks before the end
| of the next mandate, to tell the electors that they should
| reelect. Which ironically puts the current party in the position
| of the one doing nothing on the popular antitrust case (a
| corollary to "a party's platform depends on ensuring the problems
| it's supposed to solve keep existing").
| chipgap98 wrote:
| Weren't some of these cases begun under the previous
| administration? Neither party is a fan of big tech
| dehrmann wrote:
| Harris has been thin on policy, so it's hard to say, but
| seeing that she's from the Bay Area, she might be more
| careful more careful to not break one of the country's key
| industries.
| ripped_britches wrote:
| It will be really ironic if this kills Mozilla / Firefox
| shiroiushi wrote:
| That's one of several scary scenarios.
|
| What if it kills Android, and everyone has to buy an iPhone?
| (Yeah, I know, Android is OSS and the phone makers could just
| maintain/improve it as a consortium without Google, but looking
| at how these companies operate I don't think they're capable of
| doing this.) (And no, I don't think the USG will break up Apple
| if this happens. They're already showing highly preferential
| treatment to Apple compared to Google.)
|
| What if it kills YouTube, and the only viable alternative is
| TikTok? I recommend everyone start downloading all their
| favorite YouTube videos with yt-dlp right away, just in case.
|
| What if it kills Google Maps? Again, there's no real viable
| alternative here unless you have an iPhone.
|
| I can see a lot of ways things could go horribly wrong here if
| you're someone who doesn't want to be an Apple user.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > And no, I don't think the USG will break up Apple if this
| happens. They're already showing highly preferential
| treatment to Apple compared to Google.
|
| The largest business by far is iPhones. It has 16% market
| share in the PC business, behind Lenovo, HP, and Dell. The
| only business that makes sense to peel off is the iPhone
| services (Apple Music, News, etc.) because that's the place
| it uses its dominant position to help its own products.
| busterarm wrote:
| Samsung could easily maintain Android as they already have
| their own little Android software ecosystem that differs
| greatly from Google's. Full of spyware, but yeah.
|
| There's tons of video hosting options but what makes YouTube
| special is access to a large audience and monetization.
| TikTok's monetization is garbage and not even a contender
| really. Large content creators are already negotiating their
| own brand deals to the point where YouTube's ad money is
| merely the cherry on top. I actually think breaking up
| YouTube would be good for audiences and in the long run
| creators themselves. Content creator networks would make a
| return in a big way.
|
| There is already OpenStreetMaps. MapQuest existed before
| Google Maps and still does.
| labcomputer wrote:
| Yea, but OSM has variable quality by country, and isn't
| really a "navigable" map in most places.
|
| You can't get turn-by-turn directions because they don't
| (consistently) have things like lane permeability, turn
| restrictions, directionality, etc. You can't get accurate
| ETAs because they don't have speed limits or free flow
| speeds. And traffic data of course. Unless things have
| changed, routing class and surface type are also
| unreliable, so a shortest-path graph algo will take you
| down neighborhood streets or unmaintained roads.
|
| There is a ton of under-the-hood map data, invisible to the
| end user, that you need to have to be able to deliver a
| modern phone navigation experience.
| busterarm wrote:
| Garmin (and other) GPS devices still exist. They're quite
| nice these days even.
|
| My phone tends to overheat when I stick it under the
| window to use for directions, so I tend to prefer the
| dedicated GPS units anyway.
| labcomputer wrote:
| Google Maps isn't going anywhere. They are a profit center
| from all the search ads within the map.
| azemetre wrote:
| Mozilla killed Firefox itself with its poor leadership. They
| have had nearly 20 years of Google writing them half a billion
| checks annually. If they can't come up with a better business
| plan than literal corporate welfare, maybe they don't deserve
| to exist?
| asdff wrote:
| I don't understand where all the money goes for mozilla. Here
| is the revenue line from wikipedia for 2022:
|
| total revenue | percent from google | total expenses |software
| dev expenses
|
| $593 million | 81% ($480 million) | $425 million | $220 million
|
| so basically 168 million in the bank in 2022. the math has been
| basically this the last 10 years. in 2018 they lost 1 million
| but in 2019 they gained 330 million. a lot of their software
| expenses probably comes from the busywork features they saddled
| upon themselves like pocket or whatever, since it was only $63
| million in 2010 and has only gone up by a couple hundred
| million from there.
|
| So just over the last 10 years from my back of the envelope map
| from that table on wikipedia, they should have a good 1.5
| billion in the war chest by today assuming the mozilla
| foundation did not make investments with it, which they
| probably have this entire time so probably even more valuable.
| At a certain point, maybe already, the org should have enough
| cash socked away in investment to just pay for operating
| expenses out of dividends alone.
| dtquad wrote:
| Hilariously shortsighted. Big Tech companies have been a GDP-
| doubling runaway success for the US economy.
|
| It would be like if we here in Denmark started breaking up Novo
| Nordisk. Our economists would probably do a public lynching of
| any government official who suggested doing that.
|
| However as a European I can't help but welcoming the US shooting
| themselves in the foot like this. Something tells me we will see
| more of this as more reddit-brained American millennials get
| political influence.
| MathiasPius wrote:
| It is precisely the large impact on GDP that poses a threat to
| the host nation. When companies like Novo Nordisk are such a
| huge part of the economy, they can exert disproportionate
| influence on society itself.
|
| Our economy is absolutely benefiting from Novo Nordisk's size
| right now, but if/when their demand weakens or they're out-
| competed, we're going to end up with a lot of unemployed
| biotechnicians and massive roads to Kalundborg which will need
| to be maintained.
| kibwen wrote:
| Hilariously shortsighted. Breaking up Standard Oil created
| wildly competitive industries and launched Rockefeller's wealth
| into the stratosphere. Big Tech is a rent-seeking middleman
| that chokes the life out of innovation.
| mandibles wrote:
| Standard Oil had already lost a huge portion of its market
| share when the forced breakup finally happened.
| openrisk wrote:
| Hilariously confused. Tech is different from Big Tech, which is
| yet further different from Big Ad Tech.
|
| For the avoidance of doubt, Wintel was Big Tech. The status quo
| now is Big Ad Tech.
|
| The main economically positive thing for the US (and something
| Europeans absolutely screwed up in relative terms versus the US
| and increasingly China) is the early investment and adoption of
| Tech. Digitization as such _is_ a great enabler.
|
| But you don't need Big Tech oligopolies for a vibrant digital
| economy.
|
| But even more importantly, you don't need bizarre Big Ad Tech
| commingled business models that build the economy's entire tech
| infrastructure - many parts of it having a critical utility
| like role - on the back of... ads.
|
| But there is little scope for European schadenfreude. Arguably
| the US antitrust gears are moving precisely because people
| slowly wake up to the limits on economic opportunity placed by
| the Big Ad Tech status quo.
|
| In Europe we are good at words and criticizing mistakes but
| deeds are scarce.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| > Hilariously confused. Tech is different from Big Tech,
| which is yet further different from Big Ad Tech.
|
| Big Ad Tech has been a money spigot for R&D in both hard and
| soft tech. This comes via M&A but also spawning a generation
| of VCs willing to fritter away adtech money on fun hard tech
| startups.
|
| There is not a big source of VC funding for hardware startups
| that doesn't come directly or indirectly from Big Tech / Big
| Ad Tech revenue and valuations.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Denmark has separate gdp numbers that don't include novo
| nordisk because they care about the real economy, not just
| number go up.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Developing and selling medicine to solve the number one
| health problem in the world (in addition to medicines for
| other health problems) is not real economy?
| idle_zealot wrote:
| There is no point in chasing a high GDP when it results in a
| materially worse world. The point of a society isn't to make
| the numbers go up. If a monopoly is super efficient at
| generating some nebulous concept of value by creating and
| operating the world's largest surveillance system and actively
| using it to sell influence over people's attention and habits
| then the only sensible thing to do is to dismantle it.
| richwater wrote:
| > results in a materially worse world.
|
| Please explain how Google has created a materially worse
| world
| idle_zealot wrote:
| Uh, I did. That's what the whole "surveillance system" part
| of the post was. Also I think advertisements in general are
| harmful.
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| how do people learn of products?
| ssklash wrote:
| If ads are the only way people are able to learn about
| products, then there is clearly a massive failure of
| imagination, as well as innovation. People know what they
| need, and have always known. The concept of exploiting
| human psychology in order to sell more of a product to
| people who likely don't need it is a relatively recent
| development in human history. Plus you can just search
| for stuff you need in a search engine...
| bluGill wrote:
| > People know what they need, and have always known
|
| No we don't. I need a better mouse trap, but I already
| have mouse traps that work, so if you make a better one
| you need me to find out about it otherwise I'll just buy
| the same old not so good ones out of habit thinking they
| work as good as any other one. There are also problems
| that I don't even know I have. There are a lot of houses
| with terrible insulation that the owners really need some
| advertisement to get them to upgrade - it will pay off in
| just a few years.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| These ads do not need to interrupt people's lives to make
| their cases. If that mouse trap is so good then people
| who are in the market will discover it by active
| searching, then spread their discovery. If the new
| insulation will save people money then that's newsworthy
| information and will be reported on in information
| outlets that people subscribe to. The idea that
| businesses paying to push awareness is the only way
| people might discover previously unknown products and
| services is absurd.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| At a time of their choosing they can subject themselves
| to marketing material (yellow pages) or simple word-of-
| mouth amplified by the Internet. Treating "knowledge of
| your product/service" as a market commodity is bizarre
| and has overall negative effects on competition (more
| money buys more awareness equals more sales).
| ta1243 wrote:
| I used to buy a magazine called "Computer Shopper", which
| I heard about via word of mouth.
|
| Even now I will go out of my way to watch adverts for
| things like films I might be interested in.
|
| Need to be careful with word of mouth though, many
| adverts are spread by word of mouth, especially on the
| internet where people are paid to say "hey this new
| $product is great". Those are worse that clearly marked
| ads.
| lovethevoid wrote:
| The same way you learned about hacker news.
| ta1243 wrote:
| If ads were to benefit the customer, then they would be
| opt-in
| alexashka wrote:
| It's a paperclip maximizer. Paperclip maximizers are bad.
| ssklash wrote:
| What part of being a massive ad company whose raison d'etre
| is to collect as much personal information about you as
| possible (with limited or no consent) to enable other
| people to try to convince you to buy stuff even remotely a
| net positive for the world?
| pawelmurias wrote:
| I would prefer to see ads for things that I want rather
| then see ads for stuff I couldn't care less about. If I
| get convinced to buy useful things it's a win/win.
| ksenzee wrote:
| The choices are not "Google as it currently exists" vs "a
| world without Google," but rather "Google as it currently
| exists" and "Google as subject to stricter regulation."
| There's a fair case to be made that the world is worse than
| it would have been if the US had kept a tighter rein on
| Google.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| What you say would have been true 10+ years ago, but not
| anymore. Big tech is really into rent seeking and competition
| stifling now, we'd see more innovation by opening up the space
| so new players can get a foothold.
| zer8k wrote:
| The point is to not allow a company to be able to buy out the
| entire country. Maybe Novo Nordisk is a good steward but
| historically companies like Google and Amazon act only their
| own best interests. Breaking up these massive companies ends up
| doing the better thing anyway - a surge of competition emerges
| and offers better and often cheaper services. Look at the break
| up of Bell. The short term was marginally negative (higher long
| distance costs) but the market was better for it.
|
| Google has a substantial amount of control over the flow of
| information in the United States. To the point it can literally
| redefine truth. This is a problem - and one that is easily
| solved by breaking up a de-facto monopoly. Moreover, the
| acquire-and-kill strategy stifles innovation. Imagine what we
| would have if Google didnt have the capital to buy and kill so
| many small companies.
| exabrial wrote:
| Just curious, who is your employer?
| molticrystal wrote:
| A lot of Google's features when integrated and leading to ads and
| other Google properties they are justified, but if you were to
| forbid cooperation between the divisions, they may be shut down
| or diminished, as on their own they would need to be subsidized
| considerably and the 3rd party alternatives for ads would take
| most of the profits probably leading to negative cash flow
| without decreasing the level of service or charging fees.
| apercu wrote:
| If they are shut down but valuable, some other company will
| produce similar products. That's how the market should work.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| It's amazing to me that Google is still so rich given how lazy
| their culture is and how incompetent their product strategy has
| been. It just goes to show the power of their size and all it
| brings. Things like capital, monopolies (search), control over
| platforms (Chrome), network effects (YouTube and ad networks),
| and just plain old momentum.
|
| This break up is long overdue but we also need a drastic rethink
| of antitrust law and corporate taxes to shift the economy towards
| innovative smaller instead of concentrating it in a few megacorps
| that are as powerful as some governments.
| ktosobcy wrote:
| As I said in the past - Google and the likes (Meta) should have
| never been allowed to swallow other companies (DoubleClick,
| youtube and instagram/whatsapp respecively)...
| ilaksh wrote:
| I think decentralized technologies should be part of the
| discussion when you it comes to replacing technology monopolies.
| For example, there might be some protocols for cooperative web
| indexing or search or to provide a common layer that companies
| can build on.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Common crawl?
| cogman10 wrote:
| I'd love to see how something like this could handle the bad
| actor problem. It is what (IMO) is currently killing the web
| today.
|
| How would you, for example, stop a rouge indexer from spewing
| an unlimited number of bad indexes to spam their garbage into
| the distributed protocol? Or how would you address just
| bad/misleading/faulty indexes?
| idle_zealot wrote:
| Web of trust, I guess? Don't accept just anyone doing
| scraping/indexing. Keep the trust network human-scale. I can
| imagine a world where the relevant protocols are open and
| organizations choose their own roots of trust. Common
| defaults would likely emerge, things like the Wikimedia
| foundation or Archive would serve as default roots for your
| average user, but you could add your own or remove those if
| you knew what you were doing.
| onecommentman wrote:
| I've never understood why Congress hasn't mandated the Library of
| Congress to offer an Internet Archive/Google for content created
| in the US. Expand to all first-world country content if they
| wish. This is not a technology-limited problem at this point. Be
| nice to get fresh high-quality scans of analog content
| online...the early digital scans available commercially or
| otherwise are often unreadable.
| pseufaux wrote:
| Unabashedly one sided, but still a pretty good resource about
| this case.
|
| https://www.usvgoogleads.com
| matthewfelgate wrote:
| I don't understand how Microsoft gets away with being a bigger
| monopoly for longer.
| fyrn_ wrote:
| Arguably a duopoly with Apple, while ads and web browsing are
| just google? Not sure just a guess.
| busterarm wrote:
| A 40 year relationship with every arm of every Government.
| EcommerceFlow wrote:
| If Google isn't allowed to use search data to train LLMs, would
| the same apply to X and the tweets found there?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If Google isn 't allowed to use search data to train LLMs,
| would the same apply to X and the tweets found there?_
|
| If a federal judge finds X/Twitter to have a monopoly on short-
| form nonsense, yes.
| busterarm wrote:
| This is all smoke and mirrors. DoJ does not have any intention of
| breaking up their friendly neighborhood Google.
|
| What they're doing is seeing the writing on the wall of the
| upcoming election and seeing all of their jobs on the line and
| they're trying to shake down Google for golden parachutes.
|
| I guarantee you in the next year, several high-level DoJ
| officials will secure senior positions at Google in order to
| defend against upcoming antitrust litigation. Those that don't
| will try to use their active litigation as an anchor to try and
| retain their jobs.
| heinrich5991 wrote:
| https://archive.is/DPtgt
| geor9e wrote:
| HN is a special place but among the average folk, I get why 90%
| of people use google. I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me
| how bad the alternatives still are. Especially with so many
| companies scraping the whole web for AI data, and so many GPUs
| chugging on that data. I suppose they are all focused on
| replacing the concept of search results with LLM prose.
| Ironically bing is down at the moment
| https://downdetector.com/status/bing/
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Maybe because search is an extremely hard problem and requires
| hundreds of millions (if not billions) of investment to remain
| competitive?
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| Also: There is a MASSIVE incentive for foul play from
| everyone being searched. Every single business wants their
| results at the top. Everyone is grasping for every single
| advertiser's cents. The monetary encouragement to game the
| system is so incredibly strong. Google has to fight that
| uphill battle 24/7.
|
| I have a lot of issues with Google as a company, but I do
| _not_ envy their position when it comes to the web search. It
| is a cursed problem no matter how you look at it.
| mc32 wrote:
| If they only divided it into information search ("library"
| knowledge) and business search (Yelp/YP) where you can
| tweak your preferences.
|
| When you search for "vacuum cleaner", you either want
| online stores or you may want a local store. In either case
| it's a business query rather than looking for reviews or
| specs.
|
| What's really polluting search, including Google, is the
| on-demand content generation based on your query. It's a
| sea of flotsam.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Unfortunately, if you did that, the businesses would
| still do their best to muscle in on the "information
| search" results. Marketers gotta Market, and placement on
| a SERP is a zero sum game. If one competitor managed to
| get themselves highly ranked in the "information search"
| then there would be incentive for all competitors to try.
| mc32 wrote:
| I guess the idea is you disallow them from optimizing at
| all in the info search so much that you derank them on
| the biz for some not inconsequential amount of time if
| they misbehave.
| ta_1138 wrote:
| No doubt, but there's a whole lot of problems shaped like
| that in tech today.
|
| Look at any two sided market: Amazon/Etsy's third party
| sellers also want to be at the top, and there are bad
| actors trying to scam the intermediary and the customer.
| The same low friction onboarding that allows the company to
| succeed as an intermediary is also facilitating the fraud.
| Merchants can be fraudsters, advertisers can be fraudsters,
| users can be fraudsters producing fake clicks. There's
| economic incentives everywhere. See the relatively recent
| news of spotify getting generated songs, which are then
| played by fake listeners.
|
| The companies are entering this situations with their eyes
| wide open. It's a necessary problem when you want to be an
| intermediary at a large enough scale. And if you don't have
| the scale, the per-interaction costs are really high, and
| your company gets beaten by someone with an easier
| onboarding funnel.
| jldugger wrote:
| >It is a cursed problem no matter how you look at it.
|
| But the funding model is also extremely blessed: you have a
| stream of people telling you every page load what they're
| interested in at that exact moment, and it's not hard to
| match them up with advertisers for those keywords.
|
| And arguably the SEO parasitism problem is worsened by
| their monopoly -- to the extent that optimizing a site for
| one engine deoptimizes it on on others, the stronger the
| lead engine #1 has the more incentive there is to game it.
| duskwuff wrote:
| It's only getting harder and harder for newcomers to compete.
| Especially with the rise of abusive AI scrapers, webmasters
| are increasingly hostile to new web crawlers. Google and Bing
| get a pass because they're well-known, but any new service is
| fighting an uphill battle; a lot of sites will block them
| right off the bat. Nor does it help that some large sites
| (like Reddit) have inside deals with Google to feed them
| updates directly.
| voisin wrote:
| > I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the
| alternatives still are.
|
| I have such a hard time understanding your position on this.
| Google search results are absolute trash now, compared to
| DuckDuckGo.
| ergonaught wrote:
| Google search results are garbage and are still superior to
| DDG.
|
| I start every search in DDG and have to take it to Google
| fully 90% of the time.
| voisin wrote:
| I am just shocked at how different our experiences are. I
| wonder what leads to the vast gulf? Could your results be
| better due to what you are searching or is the algorithm
| producing different results for each of us, based on other
| Google cues?
| gretch wrote:
| Because generalized Internet search encompasses any and
| all human interests. The vast gulf could easily be
| explained by bias in what 2 ppl are interested in and
| search for.
|
| For example, if Alice is very interested in Sports News,
| coding, and movie reviews, they might get great results.
|
| And then Bob runs searches on cooking recipes, interior
| design, and music, and gets terrible results.
|
| Most likely you care about something that the other
| person doesn't, biasing your search results greatly.
| nosianu wrote:
| I have two examples where Google is really bad.
|
| A general one: Whenever I search for something that was
| relevant in the past, but the keywords are now hijacked
| by some current events. Note that setting an upper date
| limit does not help: My problem is the content itself,
| not when the content was created. Somebody could still
| create content today about a historic event.
|
| A concrete example that you guys can try for yourself is
| that I tried to find a certain Greek fable, because it
| became important to me because I deeply understood yet
| another layer of it only recently, decades after hearing
| the story and the usual interpretations:
|
| Three philosophers discussing... stuff got tired and took
| a nap under a tree. Some mischievous boy put a black
| paint mark on their head while they slept. When they woke
| up, they all only saw the black mark on the other
| philosophers' heads and laughed at each other. It took a
| while for one of them to realize that he too must have
| such a mark.
|
| I tried many questions and keywords and many search
| engines. The only one that found the fable was -
| ChatGPT!. All the search eng8ines only showed completely
| irrelevant stuff. I even tried avoiding the word
| "philosophers" because there are three well-known ancient
| Greek philosophers and plenty of results with that exact
| wording for those guys.
| elevatedastalt wrote:
| DuckDuckGo can have a seat at the table when they implement
| their own search index.
|
| Putting a sticker on Bing and Yandex results doesn't make a
| Search company.
| Abekkus wrote:
| If they are actually nominally offering privacy over bing
| and yandex, while selling anonymous ads on that sticker,
| that is a valid USP.
| elevatedastalt wrote:
| It's a valid USP and people are happy to pay them for it,
| but I don't think they are relevant in a discussion about
| the difficulty of building a search product.
|
| For example, if you are discussing manufacturing issues
| in China, talking about how good drop-shippers on Amazon
| are is irrelevant.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| Tomorrow Bing could say "yeah no more index for you" and
| DDG shuts down. It doesn't feel like a very stable
| business model to depend entirely on someone else's
| business.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Here are some examples of DDG utterly failing as a search
| engine compared to google: https://www.tumblr.com/ddgvsggl
| AlienRobot wrote:
| Not my experience. I'd like to see you prove this.
| blackoil wrote:
| That even if True is irrelevant to discussion. Antitrust isn't
| mostly against monopoly, but its abuse to gain benefit in
| another area or uncompetitive practices to stifle potential
| competition.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| The alternatives are bad because the ones that were even
| remotely good were bought and killed by Google over the years.
| This includes ones we all have heard of as well as countless
| others.
|
| This is a common tactic of tech giants, and the direct
| consequence of it is... what we have today.
| aednichols wrote:
| Google has acquired a lot of ad competitors, but I can't
| remember any general-purpose search engines. It seemed more
| like they died out naturally over a long period. I welcome
| new information if that's not right.
| buildsjets wrote:
| They definitely bought and killed DejaNews.
|
| Edit: Per Wiki, Google has also bought and killed the
| following search engines/services that nobody has heard of:
| Outride, Kaltix, Plink, Like.com, Orion, Metaweb, Awkan
| Technologies.
| xdennis wrote:
| > it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are
|
| Hard disagree. Google almost delights in not showing what you
| want. For political stuff it's very biased. If you search for
| something more obscure, Google really likes to "correct" your
| search and eliminate terms.
|
| Although Google is better in my maternal language and for
| images (but AI is ruining image search for everyone).
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I use DDG most of the time. Sometimes I try Google, and then
| I'm disgusted by all the non-result garbage they put at the top
| nowadays. Once in a while they do have something valuable that
| DDG misses.
|
| So yeah, I find DDG perfectly adequate.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| HN isn't that special a place considering nerds think about
| Google as a "search engine" lol.
|
| Google/Alphabet, first and foremost, is the largest online
| advertiser via its acquisitions of YouTube, DoubleClick, and
| others, in addition to selling ad placement on Google Search
| via AdWords, plus a growing number of consumer portals for
| price comparisons etc. integrated with Google Search (leaving
| out tracking your activity on Android devices, Google's cloud
| business, and Books/scholar). The immediate antitrust
| perspective starts by looking at Alphabet/Google subsidiaries
| both providing search results and ads on the pages listed in
| search results (and to a lesser degree even by pushing Google
| services via Google Search). This is what had ruined the web in
| more than one way.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| google.com is a search engine, regardless of what drives
| Google's revenue. Weird to say it's not.
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| It's an advertising billboard that if you scroll past might
| have some relevant links at the bottom of the page.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Well no, it's a search engine.
| ta1243 wrote:
| But Google the company is an advertising company,
| regardless of what they use to spread those adverts. Weird
| to say it's not.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| It's very clear GP was talking about Google the search
| engine (as in, google.com) in their post.
|
| > I get why 90% of people use google. I'm no google fan,
| but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still
| are.
| mm263 wrote:
| > it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are
|
| Kagi
| arghwhat wrote:
| After having been a paid subscriber for a number of months, I
| have to say that it still wasn't cutting it. I still ended up
| falling back to google all the time.
|
| Plus, https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html
| kachapopopow wrote:
| Interesting read.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| What bugs me most about Kagi at the moment is that their
| iOS plugin behaves weirdly. Frequently it will completely
| swallow my search and I'll have to retype it. Eventually I
| just disabled it :(
|
| Arguably this is not their fault - I really wish iOS/MacOS
| Safari let you set a custom search engine instead of
| picking from a fixed list.
| mulmen wrote:
| On iOS I just set my default browser to Orion with Kagi
| as a default search engine. There's some minor UI bugs
| but they're not showstoppers.
| chiaroscuro1312 wrote:
| thanks for this link
| hiatus wrote:
| Wow, those comments from the founder on GDPR are not unlike
| "we just chatgpted the license lol". I'm reconsidering my
| sub.
| atrus wrote:
| Yeah the sentence "We do not collect/extract this
| information, but the user volunteers it" is just...200%
| yikes.
| araes wrote:
| One part I can add, having tried Ecosia [1] is it at least
| made me consider question like:
|
| "Are they actually planting these trees?" and "How would I
| possibly verify?"
|
| "Does Microsoft actually pay them? All I'm doing is
| clicking? Is that worth enough?"
|
| "How does anybody verify, and how is it not just an
| optimization for Ecosia to farm clicks for money?
| Chinese/Indian/Bangladeshi/Nigerian/MechTurk click farms
| don't cost that much. Seen the prices on MechTurk?"
|
| [1] https://www.ecosia.org/
| AlienRobot wrote:
| They have all that information in their website.
|
| The only earn money if people click ads, just like any
| other search engine. Microsoft isn't paying them to show
| them Bing results.
| Kuinox wrote:
| > I still ended up falling back to google all the time.
|
| It uses google search behind the scenes. Among other search
| providers.
| KoolKat23 wrote:
| I can understand your point.
|
| The links points however are a bit ridiculous, they're
| entitled to their opinion but may be surprised to find
| people, at the businesses they use, have opinions that
| differ to theirs, and these businesses aren't always well-
| oiled machines.
| ta1243 wrote:
| The goal of almost all search engines is to direct people to
| adverts, not to give them the results.
|
| Even when you do get the results your after, and get sent to
| the page you want, the goal of that page is to serve you
| adverts, not to give you the content you want.
| miohtama wrote:
| Alternatives are bad because they do not have 24 years of data
| how users use the search. They will also never get this data if
| Google keeps dominating.
| JasserInicide wrote:
| Unironically Yandex, especially if you're searching for
| politically sensitive stuff. It is _wild_ how much Google
| censors.
| ein0p wrote:
| Idk how you could split it up other than right down the middle,
| creating 2 of each unit. 2 search engines, 2 browsers, 2 ad
| exchanges, 2 clouds and so on. Anything else is not going to be
| viable. Though maybe that's the real goal.
| bfrog wrote:
| Imagine an ad company locking up talent for decades. Zzzzzzzz
| gerash wrote:
| What an incompetent government where the goal is to pad some DoJ
| lawyer's resume instead of benefiting consumers or the economy
| Clubber wrote:
| The US government has been working solely for their donors for
| the last 40+ years. Any benefit the voters get from lawmaking
| is coincidental.
| esbranson wrote:
| That thought may be comforting, but no.
|
| Don't mistake the limited-purpose US Government for your
| state government. Colorado does quite a bit, from healthcare
| to environment to policing. And so does the US, for those
| subjects it has jurisdiction, and has been doing so for
| hundreds of years.
| Clubber wrote:
| >>The US government has been working solely for their
| donors for the last 40+ years. Any benefit the voters get
| from lawmaking is coincidental.
|
| >That thought may be comforting, but no.
|
| Why would that be comforting?
| strongpigeon wrote:
| Something I really don't get is the part about Google's monopoly
| in search text ads. FTA:
|
| > Finally, the filing said Google's dominance over search text
| ads needed to be addressed by lowering barriers to would-be
| rivals or licensing its ad feed to others, independently from
| search results.
|
| What Google has is a monopoly on _search_ (which is bad), but I
| don 't think having a monopoly for advertising on your own
| property is a bad thing. If anything, from a privacy perspective,
| I'd rather that only one party (the publisher, in this case
| Google) gets to see my searches, rather than the publisher and an
| ecosystem of low-scrupules ad platforms.
|
| For sure I might be biased as I used to work on Google Ads, but I
| also know quite a bit about how the sausage is made and how the
| industry is. That being said, I really don't see how "licensing
| the ad feed" would do any good for end users.
| soperj wrote:
| >low scrupules ad platforms
|
| In this case, the search provider is the low scruples ad
| platform. Bing as well.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > What Google has is a monopoly on search (which is bad), but I
| don't think having a monopoly for advertising on your own
| property is a bad thing.
|
| Where one might run afoul is using your monopoly in one market
| -- search, in Google's case -- to gain an advantage in another
| market -- advertising. It's kinda interesting because they
| clearly don't treat "search" as a market given they don't sell
| it to anyone but it also clearly has value, otherwise people
| wouldn't use it.
|
| Now I wonder if it is without precedent that the supposedly-
| monopolistic thing they're using as a carrot for their
| advantage in a different market doesn't actually generate
| revenue itself; not sure if that context has ever been tried in
| court.
| strongpigeon wrote:
| The argument that I see that could be made (which is
| different from what the judge said here) is that Google used
| their monopoly in search to gain an unfair advantage in
| _Network Ads_. I could totally see forcing Google to spin-off
| their external ad network, but at the same time, these ads
| sucks and are getting worse CPM wise.
|
| There is another ongoing case regarding Google's Ad business
| (concerning Display Ads and more specifically the ad
| auctions) which seems pretty strong. But again, it's not
| about preventing Google from owning the ad platform for their
| own properties.
|
| Preventing companies from owning the advertising platform for
| their own properties is a pretty terrible idea (got an idea
| for a new ad format that no network supports? Tough luck!).
| But, preventing a player with a monopoly in one sector from
| having an ad platform for other players, that's sensible.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| DeepMind wouldn't have happened to the level it did had google
| been broken up prior.
| asdff wrote:
| What might deep mind have looked like today if it were given
| the same resources in an academic or national lab setting and
| no ultimate profit motive?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Sans access to the worlds top supercomputer infra.
| asdff wrote:
| Used to be the worlds top supercomputer infra was in
| national labs or such places and not private companies.
| Some of the largest are still there. In my hypothetical
| that would be the case "assuming same resources."
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Governments can not compete on infra with trillion dollar
| computer companies.
| giobox wrote:
| There was no shortage of other deep-pocketed suitors trying to
| buy DeepMind too during the Google acquisition back in 2014 - I
| think DeepMind would have likely found a reasonable home
| regardless.
| creato wrote:
| Are those other deep-pocketed suitors not under antitrust
| scrutiny themselves at the moment? Maybe they would be first
| in the firing line of the DoJ if they had bought DeepMind
| instead?
| Jyaif wrote:
| Among the big tech companies, only Google cared about AI at
| the time.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I just bring this up as a reminder that the government did
| kill Bell Labs by breaking up a trust. There are pros and
| cons to every corporation system.
| asdff wrote:
| If they did this 15 year ago, I bet google reader would still be
| actively maintained today. More innovation is possible when there
| are smaller companies working on fewer things. Yes there are
| economies of scale with large entities, but you then run up
| against the economy of shareholder attention if your little
| effort within the larger organization is not the current golden
| child of the day. When you work at a smaller company, that little
| effort is the entire company's product. It has to work and get
| better to succeed. It can't be forgotten about and left to
| languish like so many potentially great products and technologies
| that are chained to some large org today.
| aiauthoritydev wrote:
| Google engineer's time was not worth Google reader. If you
| think it was a useful product you could have created it
| yourself for profit.
| asdff wrote:
| Highly useful software is not always profitable. Limiting our
| species to developing technologies that are profitable rather
| than merely useful is a severe blow to our path of
| innovation.
| KerryJones wrote:
| Why wouldn't people pay for something highly useful? It
| seems the opposite, that people would pay for things that
| are highly useful. People don't pay for things that are
| marginally useful.
| hightrix wrote:
| > Why wouldn't people pay for something highly useful?
|
| Typically because they can easily get it for free.
| Perfect case study is WinRar. How many people actually
| bought a license for software they used daily?
| ghodith wrote:
| So then don't make it free?
| KerryJones wrote:
| I think you're missing a case here -- if they remove it,
| and they can get along without it without much trouble,
| I'd argue it isn't highly useful. Just because it has
| frequent use doesn't mean it's highly useful.
| musictubes wrote:
| There are a variety of people that did just that. It's
| frustrating to keep seeing the sentiment, on HN of all
| places, that Google Reader is what is needed for RSS
| services. RSS readers are a niche business and clearly not
| worth Google's opportunity cost of maintaining. I have used
| NewsBlur as my RSS aggregator since Reader shut down. Pretty
| sure it is a one man operation.
| Madiyan wrote:
| 85907 54751
| 1penny42cents wrote:
| crazy double whammy:
|
| 1. US gov trying to break up your search monopoly
|
| 2. ChatGPT disrupting your search monopoly
| relistan wrote:
| Hilarious to see all the people lamenting the break-up of AT&T.
| That break-up sparked the long distance phone race, which became
| the driving force for the massive laying of fiber optics... which
| enabled the Internet boom of the 1990s.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| My understanding was that most of the internet infrastructure
| was laid by Bell before their break-up because they projected
| video calling being a huge use case in the future.
| floxy wrote:
| 1982 seem a bit early for the massive fiber rollout. My
| recollection was that Sprint was the driving factor for
| laying fiber, since they had the railroad right-of-ways. But
| that was quite a while back. Maybe there was also another
| dark-horse company laying fiber along railroads, but not
| operating as a phone company? Something not quite at the tip
| of my tongue. Seems like someone could have written a good
| history book about internet infrastructure, especially the
| mid-to-late 90s. Anyone have suggestions?
| inheritedwisdom wrote:
| I'd read that...I'd love to hear an Acquired podcast on the
| path of Long Distance Discount Services -> WorldCom -> MCI
| -> Verizon. They laid down a lot of fiber.
| relistan wrote:
| Sprint is the de-acronymized name for SPRINT: Southern
| Pacific Railroad Internal Networking Telephony
|
| They started doing public long distance on their own
| (railroad) network in the 1970s. They were restrained (and
| frequently sued by) AT&T. The breakup opened the
| floodgates. They were sold like a half dozen times in the
| 80s.
|
| But, MCI was AFAIK the largest early fiber pioneer.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| The place that I heard about Bell Labs was: The Idea
| Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
| by Jon Gertner
|
| I did a search for books about building the internet
| infrastructure and it turned up some other recommendations
| but I haven't read them so can't vouch for quality or
| content:
|
| Network Geeks: How They Built the Internet by Brian E
| Carpenter
|
| The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
| by Tim Wu
|
| Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew
| Blum
|
| How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone by
| Brian McCullough
|
| Maybe someone else here has read them and can comment.
| nickff wrote:
| AT&T had also been granted a long-term monopoly on long-
| distance telephony by the federal government; Google has never
| had such protection.
| relistan wrote:
| A monopoly is a monopoly no matter how it got that way.
| bityard wrote:
| Breaking up AT&T was unquestionably the right call. (So to
| say.)
|
| Long distance was expensive for quite a while even after the
| break-up. If you called up an out-of-state friend or relative
| to catch up, you expected the call to cost you at least a few
| bucks. (And you hoped they would be the ones to call you next
| time.) Even into the 90's, long distance at $0.10/minute was
| considered cheap. And in most rural areas, everywhere past a
| mile or so out of town was long distance.
|
| I remember buying long-distance calling cards to bring our
| phone costs down. For about 5 years, it was cheaper to just get
| a local-only phone line and then buy your long-distance as
| phone cards. Each card came with a certain number of minutes
| pre-loaded. You'd dial the 1-800 number on the back, scratch
| off your PIN, enter it, and then you'd dial your destination
| number. Other than the hassle of buying and using the card, the
| major downside was that your own number didn't (usually) show
| up on the caller ID.
|
| They were also good if you stayed in hotels a lot, since hotels
| would charge upward of usurious amounts for both local and
| long-distance calls but they would typically allow toll-free
| calls to go through without charge.
| someluccc wrote:
| This illustrates why breaking up google is a good idea given
| their egregious charges (free) for things people used
| to/still spend money on, such as:
|
| - An office software suite
|
| - Global maps and GPS, City Guides
|
| - Video entertainment
|
| - Mobile and Desktop OS
|
| - Web Browsers
|
| Also, pay no mind to their competitors in all of those
| markets AND in their core business of search, being feeble
| multi-trillion and multi-billion global corporations
| zuminator wrote:
| Those things aren't free, they're supported by ad revenue
| and the sale of personal or aggregated user information.
| I'm not saying there isn't a place for that type of
| software, but imo it's wrong and somewhat dangerous to
| equate that with things that are actually free. And even
| so, to the extent that any of Google's software is actually
| free, it's mostly a loss leader for the sake of vendor
| lock-in, which is intrinsically anticompetitive.
| someluccc wrote:
| A) Do you pay them? - No: then yes it is free
|
| "But my data" Have your ever sold your data? Would the
| value you could ever possibly receive for your data ever
| equate to the value you get from the free services?
|
| Likely No and No.
|
| Is the free ad supported city newspaper free? Yes it is
| in fact free, just like FM radio is free, and broadcast
| television is free, and sidewalks next to billboards are
| free
|
| Someone creating something appealing and giving it away
| for free in order to make up for it through ads in front
| of eyeballs does not in any way mean that the free thing
| isn't free
| nomat wrote:
| if you aren't considering the fact that your data is what
| enabled these companies to become such massive giants in
| the first place, you may be living outside of the EU.
| dartos wrote:
| > A) Do you pay them? - No: then yes it is free
|
| And here we see the ostrich. When faced with the horrors
| of reality, sticks its head in the sand. It's simpler in
| there.
| someluccc wrote:
| Your data is worthless. Please do tell me how much you
| could sell your "data" for right now.
| dartos wrote:
| My data, sure, but the data of my entire
| age/racial/economic group is worth a lot to marketing
| firms. There's a ton of that information in emails.
|
| That's literally google's business model.
|
| You think Gmail is free bc Google is nice?
|
| Come on...
| someluccc wrote:
| So in this transaction you're exchanging something that
| is individually worthless for something that is
| individually valuable.
|
| Which is a bad thing and should stop. Right now!
|
| Ps: it's also not like you're paying so little that you
| could say you're getting it for...... free
| diggernet wrote:
| It's not worthless to companies who want to use it
| against me.
|
| I don't want to sell my data. I want companies to stop
| collecting it.
|
| In fact, I don't think I've seen anyone here wishing they
| could sell their data.
| someluccc wrote:
| If I build a movie theater and give away the tickets
| knowing that I can make money on ads before a movie that
| does not mean that 5 minutes of your eyesight is now
| worth something
| nosianu wrote:
| > _that does not mean that 5 minutes of your eyesight is
| now worth something_
|
| The advertisers paying to get their ads placed in front
| of those eyes disagree.
|
| And ye, since another comment questions this, data or
| "eye-time are similar - they can be broken down to the
| individual.
|
| The advertisers pay some price expecting a certain number
| of people to see the ad, and even if data about people is
| sold in bulk (too) there is a price per individual. It's
| a simple division to see the price they pay per person to
| view that cinema ad, or for one person's data, even if
| they always purchase those in bulk.
|
| After all, they get to the bulk price by multiplying how
| much they are willing to pay for one individual with the
| expected (or in the case of data packages known) number
| of individuals.
| someluccc wrote:
| You can literally use Chrome, Workspace, Drive, Android
| and Maps without seeing a single ad, without an ad
| blocker, without EVER using google search, for free.
| hyggetrold wrote:
| Movie theater is an interesting analogy because they make
| zero money on ticket sales. Usually ticket revenue pays
| for the cost of the movie (theaters pay the studio for
| the movie). The way the theaters make money is on
| concessions, hence why they're crazy expensive.
| braabe wrote:
| All of these examples are probably in part or fully paid
| for with some sort of taxes. So it is less "no payments"
| and more "deferred payments".
|
| I would argue that the question of "Is it free?" should
| not be restricted to monetary payments. If I offer you
| dinner for an hour of yardwork - are you receiving the
| food for free? If I would offer you that same dinner in
| exchange for letting me watch you use your computer for a
| while, is it free?
|
| I think ads do incur a cost on you: In usability of a
| service, in your attention span / desensitization and
| your ability to focus, in the money you would not have
| spent were it not for ads.
|
| Googles services are free in the sense, that you don't
| spend cold hard cash on them, but I would still argue,
| that you pay for them. That 2 Trillion Dollar valuation
| has to come from somewhere... :(
| someluccc wrote:
| #1. Would I have used the computer at the same
| time/place/duration? Then yes it is free. It literally
| cost me nothing.
|
| #2. You can pay? Also is the argument somehow that the
| free thing isn't free because the ad in it makes the UX
| worse?
|
| Also curious to know how many ads exactly do you get
| while using google workspace? drive? android? maps?
|
| Finally: You can literally use Chrome, Workspace, Drive,
| Android and Maps without seeing a single ad, without an
| ad blocker, without EVER using google search, for free.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Sorry to repeat the "if you're not paying, you're the
| product, not the consumer" adage, but I think that's
| critically important when evaluating Google. These things
| aren't free, they're paid for by billions in advertising,
| and it's not like Google was the first to figure out this
| business model - radio and TV was "free" in the same manner
| for decades prior.
|
| I honestly would _love_ it we would ditch surveillance
| capitalism and went back to a simpler option of paying for
| products and services. I think that essentially all of the
| complaints you here about Google (their lack of any
| responsiveness /customer support, their constant spying on
| users, the constant "Google graveyard" of discontinued
| products, their current corporate ossification, etc.) can
| be directly linked to the fact that users don't pay for
| their products.
| someluccc wrote:
| Like I said in my comment. All of those things are things
| you can PAY FOR, today! To multi-trillion dollar
| corporations! The time you can go back to giving away
| your money for things google gives away for free is...
| now!
|
| Excellent criticism too that the evil monopolist that
| devilishly gives away extremely useful and value-add
| products and services in order to expand its evil
| monopoly is also famously criticized by the victims of
| those free data-mining products for sometimes
| discontinuing them without giving them proper notice!
| Surely Google can't just stop mistreating them without
| adequate prior notice!
| dmonitor wrote:
| My concern is that breaking up Google without breaking up
| Microsoft will basically just be giving MS a huge advantage
| in the multitude of categories in which they compete with
| each other, so we'll be left in an even worse situation
| than before.
| tightbookkeeper wrote:
| That's a complicated chain of cause and effect to claim so
| casually.
| dekhn wrote:
| My primary interest is how Alphabet will attempt to implement
| this. In particular, if they break up Search and Ads, or really
| any major product in google3/borg, Alphabet will have a massive
| pile of work splitting those up in a way that allows the
| resulting groups to achieve the same level of horizontal and
| vertical integration that they currently enjoy.
|
| Personally I am skeptical that they have enough technically
| capable and charismatic leaders to pull this off.
| adamc wrote:
| Not sure that would be a bad thing.
| eagerpace wrote:
| Anywhere there are eyeballs, there will be ads. And wherever
| there are ads there are privacy concerns.
|
| Netflix waited until they had sufficiently killed off cable TV,
| then went back to creating the same problem it fixed. No ads in
| ChatGPT today, but soon as it (or a competitor) gains meaningful
| marketshare, there will be ads.
| tensor wrote:
| What I'd love to see is regulation forcing companies to provide
| reasonably priced ad-free options. There should be a right to
| opt out of ads.
| yeevs wrote:
| I'd argue almost every platform with ads do have this option.
| You just may disagree about what's reasonably priced.
| waveBidder wrote:
| Facebook immediately comes to mind. Does google even have
| an ad-free version? Youtube nominally does (though that
| doesn't stop channels from running their own).
| tensor wrote:
| YouTube and Gmail do. I have both ad free. Google search
| does not. Facebook only did in Europe afaik, but I'd
| argue it's not priced fairly. I don't use most of meta,
| but would love an ad free instagram. But even if I were
| in Europe, the price is 20 a month. If I used other meta
| products that might be fine as a bundle, but is absurdly
| high for just instagram.
|
| Most newspapers require payment but have no ad free
| option either.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| I mean Youtube does people just don't pay for it....
| ta1243 wrote:
| Youtube videos still come with adverts, just not the google
| ones.
| mulmen wrote:
| Competition should solve this. The government's role is to
| cultivate competitive markets, not to get bogged down in
| implementation details.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > And wherever there are ads there are privacy concerns.
|
| Not necessarily true. Physical billboards are ads but (mostly)
| without privacy concerns, until they start putting cameras on
| them watching who walks by and looks.
| feelandcoffee wrote:
| I miss old contextual advertising. Like you read a sports
| website, you see ads for matches, sports gear, etc, all based
| on the content not the user preferences.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| That's just a lesson that capitalism is insatiable. Early
| on, Google didn't have personalized ads and they were
| _still_ making money hand over fist just because search
| queries are an excellent signal into stuff you may want to
| buy. But in "line must always go up" fashion, there is
| even more money to be squeezed out if they surveille
| everything you do to personalize ads. Same thing happened
| with Facebook. They had a ton of data about what ads to
| show you solely based on your interactions on Facebook's
| (now also Instagram's) site and apps, but they could make
| even more money if they tracked you everywhere online in
| order to increase their ad click-through rates.
| ta1243 wrote:
| The adverts were better too. When I'm seaching for
| "vacuum cleaner reviews", there are adverts for vacuum
| cleaners.
|
| After I make my decision and buy one (online, or in
| person), I no longer search for "vacuum cleaner reviews",
| but I search instead for "skiing in January" and I no
| longer get adverts for vacuum cleaners, I get it for ski
| resorts.
| nox101 wrote:
| That's not how it works. Rather, Google realizes someone
| else would take over their business if they didn't make
| their product better. If Google stuck to no data and
| XYZSearch used data, then XYZSearch would provide a
| better product and Google would go out of business. It
| doesn't take greed, the "could make even more money"
| part, to have an incentive to do better. All it takes is
| a desire not to go out of business.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| I remember buying cable tv because it had 'no ads'.
| mulmen wrote:
| > Anywhere there are eyeballs, there will be ads.
|
| I'm not convinced.
|
| Not running ads is what you do when you care about user
| experience. If you start running ads it's because you care more
| about money than user experience.
|
| As long as there is robust competition the consumer's
| preferences will be favored, because success comes at their
| discretion.
|
| So I think it's more like "wherever the consumer isn't the
| customer there will be ads".
| nox101 wrote:
| Company A has no ads because they care about user experience
|
| Company B has ads. Company B makes more money and can
| therefore provide more features / more content. Company B
| ends up providing more of what users want.
| gaiagraphia wrote:
| The free market's great IF there's competition. If the market's
| dead, it's time to reinject some life and keep the cogs turning.
|
| Scale's great, but it often comes with a societal cost. For every
| efficiency made, there's less agency and decent jobs to go round.
|
| Seems unfair to make such decisions ad-hoc though, and string it
| out through years of court cases and m/billions of lawyer fees.
|
| Why not establish rules of the market where once a company gets
| x% market share, the company 'wins', the CEO gets the ability to
| run for high office, the nation thanks shareholders and gives
| them a big payoff for supporting innovation, and those 1 run down
| the food chain get to spin off their own companies and go for
| gold.
|
| Life and death is a part of everything sustainable in life. We
| should embrace these cycles and utilise them, not let old hat
| stagnation strangle and squeeze all what's good from life.
| 4star3star wrote:
| It would become a game to NOT capture x% market share to the
| degree that it suited interested parties to avoid it.
| gmueckl wrote:
| That would have interesting implications. Companies would
| have to grow by aggressive diversification into other
| markets. Instead of a Google or Appple that controls your
| digital life, you'd have an endgame with a few ACMEs that
| attempt to lock you in in every aspect of your life: Your
| pots would work best with a stove from the same company. Your
| washing machine and detergent only do a good on a specific
| brand of clothes etc. A completely different kind of market
| regulation would be required.
| grumpy_coder wrote:
| That game already exists. Intel and Amd had an odd
| relationship for years when Intel needed Amd so they could
| claim that competition existed. Cross licensing instruction
| sets and the like.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| What happens to the company when it wins in your scenario. Did
| you leave that out or did I miss something?
| randomdata wrote:
| _> The free market 's great IF there's competition._
|
| If you have a free market finding competition isn't an issue,
| but maintaining profitability is. If we had a free market when
| Google came onto the scene, everyone else would have copied
| PageRank the next day, and then you'd have hundreds of search
| engines all as good as each other, each sharping their pencils
| sharper and sharper in an attempt to win customers over on a
| price basis until there is nothing left. At which point there
| is nothing left to further innovation.
|
| To combat that, we grant short-term monopolies over technology
| to allow their inventors time to build up a decent business
| before opening the flood gates, with the intent to balance what
| makes mixed-market economies great without ending up with no
| competition. The problem is that those monopoly procedures were
| established when time moved slowly. Back then, 20 years was
| barely enough time to get your product to and recognized in the
| market. These days, you can get there in a few years, or even
| less, which leaves nearly 20 more years to focus on killing all
| the competition.
|
| Ultimately, we would have been better off if Google was pushed
| out into a free market after a few years. We benefitted from it
| having some head start, but it went on much too long.
| svara wrote:
| Sort of playing devil's advocate here, but well run companies
| with near monopolies have on many occasions provided massive
| benefits that would not have been possible at smaller scale.
|
| Think of Bell Labs.
|
| Google has a number of Bell Labs style projects ongoing that
| massively benefit scientific research. Transformers, AlphaFold,
| etc.
|
| It's hard to see how a smaller, more focused company would be
| able to justify that type of R&D.
|
| That said, I do see an issue where some of the smartest people
| get sucked up by big tech. Instead of working on fundamental
| advances in image processing they end up working on beauty
| filters for Instagram. That can't be right.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Why can't that be right?
|
| I see the sentiment a lot, but it strikes me as reality
| denialism. People are willing to pay for one thing but not
| the other.
| svara wrote:
| Exactly, it's "just" the market setting the price.
|
| The issue is that these are near monopolies, so the market
| isn't efficient.
|
| In other words, if those companies didn't have monopoly
| power, other businesses (or non-commercial entities) might
| be able to afford to hire some of these people as well,
| which might be beneficial overall for innovation.
|
| That's the economic argument and it's pretty clean imo.
|
| But as far as I'm concerned personally, I would really
| prefer to live in a world in which smart people work on
| human flourishing... rather than whatever that is.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think that's exactly the point I was getting it. Who
| decides what efficient is, and what do they measure. You
| might care about vision algorithms, and I might care
| about hamburgers.
|
| From the economics perspective, something being Monopoly
| doesn't mean it's inefficient.
|
| Depending on the situation, they can be far more
| efficient then diverse companies, or much less
| LunaSea wrote:
| The market is shit at making long term risky bets that
| require a lot of R&D.
|
| That's the reason why quantum computing and projects of
| this type would not exist if you didn't have behemoth
| companies with extra cash lying around.
| rurp wrote:
| Capital markets don't perfectly account for all positive
| and negative externalities in the world, not even close.
| For example think of a company that invents a miracle drug
| that only costs $1 to produce. The net benefit to humanity
| would be to open up production and sell it to everyone who
| needs it for a few bucks, but of course the company will do
| everything it can to maintain a monopoly and sell the drug
| for $X0000/dose, even if relatively few people can obtain
| it. Lawyers and lobbyists will get paid a lot of money to
| get the second outcome, even though they're producing
| negative value overall.
| maccard wrote:
| > That said, I do see an issue where some of the smartest
| people get sucked up by big tech. Instead of working on
| fundamental advances in image processing they end up working
| on beauty filters for Instagram. That can't be right.
|
| Can't you say the same thing if you go back 80 years and talk
| about the smartest minds in the world instead of working on
| energy for the masses they're working on the atomic bomb?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > It's hard to see how a smaller, more focused company would
| be able to justify that type of R&D.
|
| Typically that's solved with R&D happening in academia or
| semi-public space.
|
| How much this happens depends on the opportunities to do it
| in private companies, so entities like Google paying big
| salaries for R&D probably means we don't see what
| alternatives they would be if they stopped doing so.
| 0xB31B1B wrote:
| so who are the academics raising 1b+ dollars to build and
| operate GPU farms to work on the frontiers of transformer
| models?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I'd raise you the same question on which private company
| is spawning its own LHC to research fundamental physics.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > Scale's great
|
| Is it? As consumers you may be noticing the impact now but as a
| developer I've felt the impact of Google's "scale" for years
| and it has not been pleasant.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I think you're partly describing nationalisation of a business
| when it becomes so big it can't be left alone and needs to be
| readjusted to help the market.
|
| It's bought by the gov ("payout to the shareholders"),
| regulations are enacted to delimit what it can and can't do,
| and the whole thing is setup to make sure it's for the benefit
| of the larger public, with additional consideration on how to
| reintroduce competition on part of its mandate.
|
| We' ve seen it with postal services and telecom, and if the
| whole thing becomes outdated it can spun out as a private
| entity again.
| mmastrac wrote:
| Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon -- the US could easily break all
| of these up. There's a huge risk to stagnation and over-
| optimization once these companies get as big as they do.
| christhecaribou wrote:
| They should. It's good for the public trust, competition, and
| innovation. I'd even go so far as to argue it's good for the
| shareholders.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I'm curious as to why you included Apple. All of the other
| companies bought up a bunch of potential competitors so they
| wouldn't get outcompeted, e.g:
|
| Facebook: Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus
|
| Google: DoubleClick, YouTube, Android, Waze, Deep mind
|
| Amazon: Whole Foods, Audible, Zappos, Ring, One Medical
|
| Arguably, I think things would be better if a bunch of these
| acquisitions were never allowed in the first place. But most of
| Apple's acquisitions have been of the "acquihire" type where
| they got specific technologies to enhance their products -
| Beats is the only one I can think of off the top of my head
| that has basically remained separate.
|
| I'm not saying acquisitions are the only benchmark for breaking
| up big tech, but to me it feels like the places where Apple is
| anti-competitive (e.g. App Store) can be remedied with much
| smaller changes than a full break up. With the other 3 it seems
| easier to identify places to "cleave".
| stego-tech wrote:
| Loving the discourse in the comments here. Speaking as someone
| who grew up alongside Google in a sense, I fall on the side of
| the "break it up" camp. It was novel at the time to have a single
| company so nicely provide us with everything digitally that we
| could need - G Suite, YouTube, Search, Maps, Advertising, Books,
| Reader, etc - but in hindsight, we gave too much power to too
| unaccountable an entity, who in turn used it to choke off any
| avenues to challenge its dominance.
|
| As for the rebuttal of "bUt ThE gDp", there's a counter-argument
| to be made that the GDP would have grown just as much with a
| higher diversity and stringent M&A regulations by spurring on new
| businesses and concepts, as opposed to mainstreaming fad after
| fad that seemingly solely benefits the established players.
| There's another argument to be made equating GDP values to
| desirable targets creates a Goodhart's Law problem, thereby
| making GDP as a measure of growth or success a bad metric; the
| rise of income and wealth inequality these past few decades, when
| there was increased focus on GDP as a target of growth or
| success, could be viewed as evidence supporting said argument.
|
| It's worth noting that this case against Google is likely to be
| the bellwether for future divestments and breakups. Whatever
| comes next will be an invaluable learning experience for both
| sides, just like AT&T and Microsoft's own anti-trust woes were
| learning experiences for the current crop of companies.
| jajko wrote:
| If I am worried about anybody holding my private data (apart
| from US' 3-letter agencies and thats a hill I am not going to
| die upon since I don't have same basic human rights as US
| citizens), its Meta.
|
| Sure Google is everywhere, but Meta holds much more data on our
| inner personal sides, which are the easiest things to actually
| abuse to no end. That and pornhub.
| sitkack wrote:
| Are you sure? Google has a search and location data, Google
| email is on one side if not both of most email chains,
| receipts, etc.
|
| I don't use meta for much. Google on the otherhand takes some
| pretty dedicated behavior to avoid.
| baby_souffle wrote:
| > Are you sure? Google has a search and location data,
| Google email is on one side if not both of most email
| chains, receipts, etc.
|
| Absolutely not discounting all of that; there are some
| pretty strong parallels between the data you can infer on a
| person based on their gmail graph versus their fb messenger
| graph, for example.
|
| Meta has a lot more "self-revealed-preference" data,
| though. Which of $thesePosts did you engage with? Does this
| pattern continue if we mix in $someOtherVariable? How long
| did you dwell on that one post before like/dis-like? Are
| you more likely to come back and spend time here if we tell
| you that $thisPerson has commented on your post instead of
| $thisOtherPerson? ... etc.
|
| I think only YouTube serves as a plausible source of dwell
| time in the "at what part of $thisVideo did you click the
| like button" sense. If you don't use YouTube or use it
| signed out then it's (slightly) harder for google to
| attribute your actions to you. Facebook doesn't really have
| _anything_ that can be accessed without logging in.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Between Google Search, AdSense, Google Analytics, Google
| Tag Manager, and various other APIs, Google has all the
| pieces in place to get a pretty good overview of what
| users are doing online. (And that's not even considering
| that the user's likely to be logged into a Google browser
| that's uploading their browsing history wholesale.)
|
| Legally speaking, Google's not _supposed_ to be
| correlating most of this data. But, as we know well, that
| doesn 't mean they aren't doing it.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Google actually tracks associates everywhere you visit in
| incognito mode in chrome and associates it with your main
| user id. So whatever pornhub knows, so does google.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| I believe they stopped doing that
|
| https://www.npr.org/2024/04/01/1242019127/google-
| incognito-m...
| Manuel_D wrote:
| I do not believe that was ever the case. They track
| searches, sure, but it is not associated with your user id.
| The way they treat incognito browsers is just like a
| freshly installed firefox browser that's never been logged
| into a google account. They're logged as anonymous
| searches.
| hightrix wrote:
| > nicely provide us with everything digitally that we could
| need... Advertising
|
| Sorry for the snark, but no one anywhere _needs_ advertising.
| Advertising in it 's current form is a plague on humanity.
| loumaciel wrote:
| Tons of small businesses rely on advertising. Tons of legit
| businesses only exist because online advertising became easy
| and widespread.
| hightrix wrote:
| I fully understand that advertising enables many
| businesses.
|
| But there have been businesses based on lead pipes for
| drinking water plumbing, asbestos for residential
| insulation, and so on. You could make an argument that
| these technologies enabled many businesses as well. That
| doesn't mean we should allow lead pipes for drinking water
| or to use asbestos in residential homes.
| loumaciel wrote:
| Online advertising has leveled the playing field,
| allowing smaller brands to compete with big names.
| Platforms like Google make it easy to capture attention,
| which is why even giants like Nike are losing market
| share to newer players. This shift spans all non-
| regulated industries. Without online ads, launching a
| nationwide brand would require enormous budgets, leaving
| us stuck with the same old monopolies.
| nomat wrote:
| > allowing smaller brands to compete
|
| to name a few: LISEN, Qifutan, Loncaster, YKYI, Holikme
| and SXhyf. And who could forget VWMYQ?
| candiddevmike wrote:
| How has it leveled the playing field? It's now become an
| arms race of bidding for the top ad spot, even for your
| own brand name. The big players can out spend the little
| guy and even be top ranking on searches for them.
| tgv wrote:
| Large companies spend quite a bit of money on online
| advertising, and also on research on that. They test
| their materials, they have data teams for comparing
| campaign results. And they can hijack other brand names
| if they pay enough. I wouldn't place my washing machine
| on your playing field.
|
| And it still doesn't justify Google.
| rurp wrote:
| If you're right about that being the dominant effect we
| should see small businesses increase as a portion of GDP
| as online ads become more prevalent, but as best I can
| tell we aren't seeing that at all. For example this[0]
| chart from the US Chamber of Commerce shows their share
| of the economy actually shrinking significantly.
|
| An alternative effect could be that online ads are an
| avenue for better resourced established companies to out
| compete and stifle upstarts. Startups are always pressed
| for resources and running an effective online ad campaign
| can take significant resources.
|
| You're surely right that _some_ small businesses have
| benefited from the online ad market, but I suspect that
| on average larger companies have benefited to a greater
| degree.
|
| [0]https://www.uschamber.com/small-business/small-
| business-data...
| Iulioh wrote:
| Bad things happened because tool, tool bad , very good
| argument.
|
| Put yourself in the mind of someone making a THING, how
| do you plan to reach your possible customers for THING?
|
| THING is the best in class, better than the competition
| but how would you make the world aware of THING existing?
| trgn wrote:
| how did this happen before advertising?
|
| trade shows, trade magazines, word of mouth, window-
| dressing in the THING-quarter, ...
|
| why are personalized ads on a website indispensable?
| Iulioh wrote:
| What do you mean before advertising?
|
| There is no before advertising
|
| Pretty sure we have ads from Mesopotamia
| jollofricepeas wrote:
| Give or take a few hundred years.
|
| Advertising (4000 BCE)
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_advertising
|
| Fact-checking is literally just a Google search away.
| Irony intended.
| trgn wrote:
| i know what you're saying, but really now, you know what
| i mean. some scribbles on a pancard or some fish monger
| shouting above the crowd, it's not the same as the mass
| media ads that find you everywhere willingly and
| unwillingy, 24/7. so before 1900, why not, to make it
| easy. let's go back there.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Even Pompeii had advertisements.
| hightrix wrote:
| > why are personalized ads on a website indispensable?
|
| They aren't. This is exactly what I mean by modern
| advertising.
|
| If ads were just contextual based on the content of the
| page, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| This is the worst attempt at logical reasoning I've seen
| in a while...
| hightrix wrote:
| What's hard for you to understand?
|
| Plumbing is good and useful. Plumbing using lead pipes is
| harmful.
|
| Advertising can be good and useful. Modern advertising
| that requires tracking everything a user does is harmful.
| bormaj wrote:
| Emphasis on _advertising in its current form_, I think it's
| a valuable means to be able to a). monetize something and
| b). to spread awareness. But I agree with GP that as a
| society we're allowing companies to grossly over-engineer
| our lives around ads.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| In general advertising is low ROI, the tradeoff being that
| it's "easy."
|
| I think a lot of these businesses could succeed using
| alternative promotional strategies. Some of them might
| suffer because the owners have more money than time and
| advertising is a good tradeoff in that case, but overall
| good products are still going to do well.
| loumaciel wrote:
| What alternative promotional strategies?
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Social media/content marketing/cold outreach/trade
| shows/events/etc
| bluGill wrote:
| If you rely on advertising you should not be outsourcing it
| to google anyway. You should have more control over that
| part of your business which means it needs to be at least
| partially in house. Even if you do take some google ads,
| make sure you have other partners and make sure that ads
| meet your standards (not a scam, not for your competitors).
| loumaciel wrote:
| You don't rely on Google to handle everything, it's self-
| service. Whether you use Google or another platform
| depends entirely on where your audience is. For example,
| my father runs a small construction company, and 90% of
| his leads come from Google search. That's where people
| are looking for services like his.
| jbm wrote:
| "Many" feels like it is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
|
| IME this is only true about drop shippers and similar
| business models. The vast majority of small businesses are,
| as a rule, awful at advertising. The few ads I see they are
| very poorly put together.
|
| Even when they manage to get people to the business, small
| businesses are almost inevitably awful about maintaining
| their web presence, which makes it moot. Here's an example
| thread about such from the local reddit. Including some
| hostile responses from, charitably, overwhelmed small
| businesses about how you need to call to confirm a price ht
| tps://old.reddit.com/r/Calgary/comments/1ewlsib/open_lette.
| ..)
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > Even when they manage to get people to the business,
| small businesses are almost inevitably awful about
| maintaining their web presence, which makes it moot.
| Here's an example thread about such from the local
| reddit. Including some hostile responses from,
| charitably, overwhelmed small businesses about how you
| need to call to confirm a price
|
| I'm assuming most of the places that redditor contacted
| to buy UPS batteries from are B2B shops that aren't
| geared to selling to people off the street.
|
| I'm assuming this because sometimes I buy replacement UPS
| battery strings, and I pay with a purchase order after
| talking to or emailing an inside sales person, not with a
| credit card at a register.
|
| Places like this don't even need to advertise, the
| professionals they're selling to know where to find what
| they need.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I am in the market for a new scanner. I looked at
| advertisements for them.
| hightrix wrote:
| Me too. I went to a store online that sells them and
| determined which one I wanted by features and reveiws.
| WalterBright wrote:
| How did you know about a store that sells them?
| hightrix wrote:
| Searching the internet and not rendering any promoted
| links or ads in my browser.
| WalterBright wrote:
| And why do you think that vendors create search-friendly
| pages? Advertising!
|
| BTW, back in the olden days, magazines were sold, but the
| bulk of the magazine revenue came from advertising.
|
| Without advertising, the magazines would have cost the
| consumer quite a bit more.
|
| And, as someone who paid for ad placement in computer
| magazines, the sales directly corresponded to the
| advertising.
|
| Why do you think Google provides you with free searches?
| It isn't because they are altruistic. It's because
| companies pay to advertise on it. If everybody installed
| an ad blocker like you, you'd find yourself having to pay
| for search.
| bloppe wrote:
| I started a small business selling candles during the
| pandemic. It's crazy how quickly you change your opinion
| about advertisements once you start needing to advertise your
| own business. All of the sudden, they're this amazing benefit
| for society.
|
| Advertisements can be good (when the business is good and
| genuinely wants you to know about good new product), and they
| can be bad (when the business if bad / misleading / scammy).
| An optimist would say there are more good than bad. I suppose
| you wouldn't consider yourself an optimist.
| hightrix wrote:
| > I suppose you wouldn't consider yourself an optimist.
|
| With regard to modern advertising, you are absolutely
| correct!
|
| That said, I fully understand and agree with the usefulness
| of advertising. What I'm against is the modern state of
| advertising. If all ads were simply contextual based on the
| content being shown and not the user, I don't think many of
| us would have problems with the ads industry.
| pawelmurias wrote:
| How are ads for less relevant products better? If the
| user tracking data is used only for showing ads and
| doesn't leak I would guess 99% of people would care about
| getting tracked.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| The GDP argument is weird. If Google being huge is good for GDP
| why don't we just let them own the whole country? One US
| company for everything, maximum GDP afterall!
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| "President Walt Disney Pepsi Comcast has done wonders for the
| economy! Being that it now _is_...the economy. "
| adventured wrote:
| Big tech is very good for the US. They're far more difficult
| to compete with in terms of scale and the resources they can
| deploy, than small companies. It more easily enables the US
| to suffocate the tech efforts of other competing nations.
| Giving this advantage up is extraordinarily moronic by the
| US. There is no benefit to the US by making it easier for the
| rest of the world to compete with the US golden geese. The
| DOJ isn't thinking that far ahead, they're playing a game of
| agenda.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| Big Tech is stagnant and mostly good at milking the US
| consumer for cash. The tech industry would be better serve
| the average American if the market was more dynamic, and
| that requires breaking up the big players who are (often
| illegally) stifling competition.
| sirspacey wrote:
| What MSFT learned from that was to open offices in Washington
| DC, lobby and sell to the federal gov.
|
| Hard to find the sense in this action.
| duped wrote:
| Maybe if google sold more products to the feds they wouldn't
| be so brazen as to kill them off
| ta1243 wrote:
| Google doesn't really sell products though, not to
| businesses. It sells individual data to businesses, it
| sells advertising to businesses.
|
| The only thing the government will be interested in is the
| spying which they aren't allowed to do, but unaccountable
| corporations are allowed to do. As people become more aware
| of this it means google becomes less and less useful.
| spankalee wrote:
| Google does not sell individual's data to businesses.
| Where do you even get that notion?
| pembrook wrote:
| Defacto, yes they do, that's the entire value proposition
| of their advertising model -- that they can target
| customers better than any other platform due to buying
| intent signals from search queries.
|
| When companies buy ads with Google they're quite
| literally bidding for microtargeted user intent data.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| That is not "de facto" selling data about an individual
| to other businesses.
|
| No one can go to Google and buy information about a
| specific person.
| pembrook wrote:
| I think we're just arguing semantics.
|
| No, you can't buy user data on 1 specific person (then
| again, there's many examples of people buying ads on a
| persons name to catch them googling themselves), but you
| can buy user data on small groups of people.
| nox101 wrote:
| No you can't. It's not semantics. It's reality. You can't
| buy data on people or groups of people from google any
| more than you can buy data on people from NBC, ABC, CBS.
| From TV stations you can buy ads during specific
| programs. That's it. From Google you can buy ads. You can
| not buy data. Data is something you can do something with
| on your own, analyse it, etc. Google does not give you
| data.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > there's many examples of people buying ads on a persons
| name to catch them googling themselves
|
| What does this mean? What is the value of "catching"
| someone googling themselves?
| duped wrote:
| GCP isn't a B2B product?
| 0xB31B1B wrote:
| GCP doesn't make money
| WalterBright wrote:
| Before the anti-trust action against Microsoft, Microsoft did
| not lobby nor donate to politicians.
|
| After Bill Gates rode on a golf cart with Bill Clinton, he
| realized the need to pay the expected tribute to the
| politicians.
| inopinatus wrote:
| one may as well complain that outlawing bribery caused
| everyone to attempt regulatory capture instead
| tightbookkeeper wrote:
| Except that ones made up.
| adam_arthur wrote:
| Competition usually leads to higher wealth creation and GDP,
| not less.
|
| If you use real life examples and history as a benchmark
| internet101010 wrote:
| I have always thought the reason they became alphabet was
| because of the expectation that they would eventually get
| broken up and wanted a company for each letter.
| mucle6 wrote:
| I think they already had a company for each letter when they
| became alphabet
| BurningFrog wrote:
| They were also betting on Alpha!
| inopinatus wrote:
| come back 2003, all is forgiven
| whiplash451 wrote:
| With you up to the last sentence. What were the learnings for
| the current crop of companies?
| mathgeek wrote:
| Both suits, since they went before several courts,
| established specific actions that companies should avoid (and
| ones that they could get away with).
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Breaking up AT&T lead to innovation.
|
| GDP? Have people forgotten that a vibrant 'Free Market'
| requires breaking up monopolies?
|
| When did supporting a 'Free Market' turn into, "don't touch our
| giant corps".
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Besides the fact that optimizing for GDP growth only vs other
| metrics is not necessarily economically healthy for a country
| and its citizens.
| gavin_gee wrote:
| clearly, google hasn't paid enough campaign donations vis-a-vis
| Microsoft.
|
| This is just political corruption feigning as doing the right
| thing for the country.
|
| we are having the wrong debate and are being distracted by the
| sideshow.
|
| in many ways this is a test balloon for public support to go
| after big tech as a narrative around censorship over
| misinformation that will explode over the next few years
| exabrial wrote:
| Good. Then Apple, Then Amazon, Then Facebook. All of them are
| squeezing innovation in this country.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Is there any chance this could occur in the remaining term of
| Biden? If not, is Harris going to continue on this path? I assume
| so, since they are both part of the same machine.
| anon291 wrote:
| I wish that instead of wasting time on antitrust cases, that the
| government would just directly fund competition by incentivizing
| it.
|
| I.e, the first company to reach x% browser market share will
| receive $x million (billion?) in prize money
|
| or, the first company to build an LLM-based search engine with x%
| market share will receive $n million
|
| Or structure as a direct investment or heavy tax breaks.
|
| Always better to incentivize competition versus punish success.
|
| Or even better, if government wants to break up "ACME corp" then
| just tell the employees that, if you leave "ACME corp" and start
| your own company competing with ACME corp, we will waive taxes on
| all income for your first five profitable years.
| crabmusket wrote:
| Instead of spending millions or billions on giveaways to
| private companies, why not fund a public alternative? Sure,
| search isn't cheap. But governments should consider information
| access to be of key importance to democratic participation.
|
| An open source, public benefit search engine would be a really
| valuable thing to have, which no private company does or ever
| will find it viable to provide. And I don't even want it to be
| the only search engine. Commercial search engines will probably
| still have the edge in various ways, for various use cases. But
| why not have a public option as one point in the landscape?
|
| If someone is going to "organise the world's information" I'd
| prefer it to be a democratically controlled government, not an
| unaccountable for-profit corporation. I know that's an
| ideological position that many here won't share.
| mulmen wrote:
| How does cementing early leaders benefit consumers?
|
| This seems like the opposite of what the government should be
| doing to incentivize competition and innovation.
| j2kun wrote:
| They're not punishing success, they're punishing illegal
| behavior.
|
| Breaking up monopolies has a long, successful track record.
| mcguire wrote:
| A fun thing to do with google's search engine: look for "Scheme
| tutorial".
|
| For me, the links are:
|
| 1. Arun Muthu's Programming in Scheme (https://medium.com/atomic-
| variables/programming-in-scheme-th...) Part 1 of a 4-year-old
| series of blog posts (on Medium) that has no other parts.
|
| 2. Yet Another Scheme Tutorial
| (http://www.shido.info/lisp/idx_scm_e.html) A decent looking
| Scheme tutorial, undated.
|
| 3. A Scheme Primer
| (https://spritely.institute/static/papers/scheme-primer.html)
| Another decent looking tutorial, 2022.
|
| 4. Scheme Tutorial
| (https://www.cs.rpi.edu/academics/courses/fall00/ai/scheme/re...)
| A copy of a 1997 tutorial for a 2000 class at RPI; has broken
| links pointing to http://cs.wwc.edu/~cs_dept/KU/PR/.
|
| 5. Kent Dybvig's The Scheme Programming Language 4th ed.
| (https://www.scheme.com/tspl4/)
|
| 6. Reddit "Best beginner friendly "write a scheme" tutorial?"
| (https://www.reddit.com/r/scheme/comments/klt0af/best_beginne...)
|
| 7. A link to the introduction of a copy of Paul Wilson's un-
| attributed An Introduction to Scheme and its Implementation
| (https://www.cs.rpi.edu/academics/courses/fall00/ai/scheme/re...)
| from RPI in 2000.
|
| Google is an advertising company with a big IT department, not a
| technology company.
| Narhem wrote:
| As someone who has had my computers hacked by what I assumed was
| a google employee then harassed by numerous other companies, the
| US should have a panic button.
|
| Bother me or any kids again and whatever organization you work
| for should be punished. It's not okay for people to sabotage
| relationships with autocorrect.
| burningChrome wrote:
| As someone who spent time researching the Ma Bells breakup and
| being knee deep in the local telecom deregulation, I see a lot of
| the same proposals when discussing the breaking up of Google and
| Facebook.
|
| This is the short story of what happened in the local telecom
| deregulation, which I'm pretty sure will happen if you were to
| break up Google. Consider this took place over the course of 20+
| years, but I see the same things happening.
|
| After the Ma Bells breakup, there was a huge push to deregulate
| the regional carriers to increase local market competition. This
| was put in place in the late 90's here in Minnesota. Suddenly
| anybody could start a local telecom, lease lines from Qwest
| Communications (now CenturyLink), resell them and then compete
| with them in the local market.
|
| This spawned hundreds of companies that were living on razor thin
| margins. Many were able to exist up to the 2000 initial dot com
| bust. Many went out of business during the recession. Those who
| survived? Many of those merged with each other, or were bought by
| larger regional carriers who wanted to get into the Minneapolis
| market.
|
| This is what I see happening. You break Google up into smaller
| companies and within a decade, they will have all merged back
| together in some form, under different names, or they'll be
| bought by other companies seeking an advantage by using their
| technology. Its the same thing I saw happen in telecom. They
| tried to increase competition by deregulating the market and all
| it did was create a short-term gold rush and long-term crash.
|
| The problem will be the same with Google. Qwest at the time owned
| the infrastructure and hardware. Nobody had the financial
| resources to build out an entirely new network to compete with
| them so they took the path of least resistance. Which lead to a
| myriad of other problems. Billing, installation, nefarious things
| Qwest would do to hamper competitors from switching their lines,
| etc.
|
| You can break up Google, but over a few decades, we'll look back
| and understand it wasn't worth it.
| christhecaribou wrote:
| So are you implying we shouldn't've broken up Ma Bell? Or
| shouldn't breakup Google?
|
| Perhaps Ma Bell taught us lessons to avoid this time around.
| burningChrome wrote:
| >> Perhaps Ma Bell taught us lessons to avoid this time
| around.
|
| I hope this is true. I'm not sure breaking up Ma Bell was a
| good thing long term. All they did was break them up and then
| all the regional bells and smaller companies just re-
| constituted themselves again in some other form. The
| deregulation created more competition, but it was short lived
| because of economic pressures.
|
| For many business customers, their first dealings with local
| telecom companies that were competing with Qwest at the time
| were horrific. Business customers would lose their landline
| and internet service for days without any idea when it would
| be restored. Cutovers were problematic and a total crap shoot
| if they went smoothly. Qwest regularly tagged the wrong lines
| that needed to be cut over. The billing nightmares of moving
| off of Qwest to a local company were too numerous to
| remember. Many businesses would switch for the savings and
| within a few months, would switch back because it was just
| one thing after another these companies couldn't get right.
| Suddenly paying a little more for the peace of mind far
| outweighed any savings they were getting.
|
| I suspect Google customers will have the same experience so
| I'm still on the fence whether it will be worth it long term.
| The one argument you can make is that Google isn't simply a
| company that needs competition, but that's its actually doing
| damage by how they manipulate their search rankings and what
| results they're delivering to people - so in that regard,
| they absolutely need to be broken up.
| wrongotron wrote:
| I think you ignore how much the telecom market reshaped itself
| in the meantime. Pre-breakup AT&T had complete market power
| over what technologies would or would not get deployed. The use
| of landlines has plummeted, to be replaced by cell phones.
| Today the average consumer has significantly greater choice
| when it comes to carriers, even if many of the usual suspects
| are still in the game. I question whether the breathing room
| would have existed in the market without the breakup. If you
| have an innovative startup idea in a space, and you have
| exactly one customer to sell to, you have a major uphill
| battle.
| textlapse wrote:
| This will also end up breaking up the Ads to Nobel Prize
| pipeline.
|
| I do wish they had some sort of GSoC style programs to do what
| Alpha Go Fold Zero did for the world.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Considering how many great/successful products that Google killed
| because they weren't successful "enough" compared to the ad
| business, this would be a good thing.
|
| Products like Reader, News, etc. would still be around if they'd
| been split off from the Google mothership.
| api wrote:
| The most important thing -- and I doubt this would ever happen --
| would be to break off the identity (OAuth) provider and make it
| some kind of public non-profit. One company should not own the
| identity layer for such a huge chunk of the Internet, and _so_
| many people use Google for this.
| crabmusket wrote:
| Man that would be really cool. I do wish governments would move
| a bit faster on providing such generic public benefit services.
| api wrote:
| I'm not a huge fan of governments doing Internet services,
| but the identity layer is something that actually fits within
| their sphere. Governments already provide the canonical
| identity layer for society and have since, like, ancient
| Egypt.
|
| Your drivers' license could have a chip in it capable of
| FIDO2 etc. and it could be linked with an OAuth provider. I
| know login.gov already exists but it's not built to be used
| everywhere.
| weeksie wrote:
| By the time they break them up search will be less relevant than
| ever. Barn door/horse, etc.
| blufish wrote:
| How is google harming clients when their product is free and a
| click away to something else
| crabmusket wrote:
| Google does everything they can to make sure there is no
| "something else". That's what antitrust enforcement is meant to
| address.
| bsimpson wrote:
| It's gonna be wild if they make paying to be default search
| illegal, and then Google gets to keep all the money it pays out
| while still being the default (because nothing else is worth
| using).
| whatever1 wrote:
| Advertising venues that hold auctions need to be opened up to
| competition and provide full transpancy. These are markets that
| need regulations.
|
| Today ad auctioning is the ultimate scamming game. The force
| everyone to pay more, and nobody wins except the ad venue.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| If the advertisers weren't winning, they would stop using those
| platforms.
| crabmusket wrote:
| What is the so-called "ad feed" mentioned in this article? What
| would it mean to license this to somebody else?
| yalogin wrote:
| I think the government is late to the game in this instance. I
| would have been in the "break it up" camp until this year. I see
| google's search monopoly going away in the next few years with
| GenAI.
| WalterBright wrote:
| What country wouldn't love to have a Google? And the US wants to
| break its good fortune up.
|
| Like all dominant companies, Google will eventually fall via
| strangulation by its internal bureaucracy. There's no reason to
| hand the market over to another country.
| theultdev wrote:
| Good. I bet Mozilla is nervous.
| alex_young wrote:
| https://archive.ph/DPtgt
| elisbce wrote:
| So they have no problems with Microsoft, Meta, Blackrock,
| Berkshire, Exxon/Chevron, but Google.
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