[HN Gopher] US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in...
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US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of
plaintiffs [pdf]
Author : dave1629
Score : 298 points
Date : 2025-05-10 14:15 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (storage.courtlistener.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (storage.courtlistener.com)
| the_duke wrote:
| Key quotes:
|
| > "Our experience has been that entrenched monopoly power often
| deters new entry and chills investment in disruptive innovation."
|
| > "independent venture-capital firms like YC often hesitate to
| fund startups in the "kill zone" --the area of deadened
| innovation around a monopolist like Google."
|
| > "We agree with Plaintiffs' proposal that the remedy package
| should create pathways for startups and innovators to access
| Google's monopoly-derived datasets and search index."
|
| > "The remedy order should also prevent Google from entering into
| exclusive agreements to access AI training data..."
|
| > "An effective remedy package should help to leverage the
| current moment by ensuring that next-generation search and query-
| based AI tools can reach users free from exclusion, interference,
| or cooption."
|
| > "the remedy package should prevent Google from anticompetitive
| self-preferencing, and this prohibition should apply specifically
| to Google's use of its monopoly search product to boost its
| query-based AI tools or discriminate against rivals' tools."
|
| I think they have a good point with AI. After lagging behind
| initially, Google really went at it hard. Gemini is great now,
| and they are building a good set of tooling.
|
| It's easy for Google to suffocate the startups in that area. They
| already have a massive advantage with all the data they are
| sitting on.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| > I think they have a good point with AI. After lagging behind
| initially, Google really went at it hard. Gemini is great now,
| and they are building a good set of tooling.
|
| > It's easy for Google to suffocate the startups in that area.
| They already have a massive advantage with all the data they
| are sitting on.
|
| What is the solution, though? Should they not be allowed to
| compete in the LLM + search space? Should they handicap their
| models till perplexity &co. catch up? Will they be allowed to
| do something then? I honestly don't see what's asked of google
| here.
|
| Yes, they are massive. But they're massive because they've
| invested billions ($, manhours, etc) into their infra and have
| gathered a huge baggage of data, know-how, tech and expertise
| in this field. But what exactly are they to do from now on?
| MatthiasPortzel wrote:
| > The remedy order should also prevent Google from entering
| into exclusive agreements to access AI training data...
|
| Google, for example, bought _exclusive_ access to Reddit 's
| data. No one else can train on Reddit unless you have more
| money than Google (you don't). So one of the asks is that
| that sort of exclusive deal be prevented. If everyone is
| allowed to buy Reddit's data, and Google makes the best
| model, that wouldn't be a problem.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| > So one of the asks is that that sort of exclusive deal be
| prevented.
|
| Thank you, that actually sounds reasonable.
| sidibe wrote:
| A. The Remedy Should Open Access to Google's Datasets and Search
| Index.
|
| B. The Remedy Should Prevent Google from Extending Its Monopolies
| into Query-Based AI Tools.
|
| Good luck with that YC...
| scarface_74 wrote:
| And Netflix shouldn't have been able to extend its monopoly in
| shipping DVDs to streaming
| DrillShopper wrote:
| That's not comparable. Netflix did not have a monopoly on
| "shipping DVDs". Plenty of retailers, online or brick-and-
| mortar, did that at the same time Netflix did, and video
| rental places were still going. Some of which would deliver
| movies (the local Marcos near me had a deal with a local
| Family Video where if you bought a large pizza they would
| bring you both the pizza and a movie of your choice from
| Family Video, assuming it was in stock).
|
| Nor has Netflix had a monopoly on streaming.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| And there are other traditional search engines - including
| one run by another 1 trillion dollar+ market cap company.
|
| That's not to mention ChatGPT and other LLMs have built in
| search.
|
| Should Google not evolve with the times?
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Personally, as copyright is a non-natural right, we should
| limit it for films/tv/shows such that whatever price it is
| sold for, then it is made available for any distributor to
| sell for after a very limited monopoly period (1 year from
| release, say, reflecting the current market in which films go
| from cinema to TV streaming platforms in a few weeks). This
| would apply to all distributors over X users and/or Y revenue
| (taking in at least the top 5 streaming platforms).
|
| This way, the public can access copyright works, and
| producers of works can be paid, but distribution is opened
| up. Creators still get paid, distribution isn't monopolistic.
|
| Netflix can argue "this show is worth PS5 per viewer" and
| only sell rights at that price, but they pay tax on that
| price, and crucially the rest of the catalogue then needs to
| add up so if viewers are paying PS8 per month then the rest
| of the catalogue is marked down accordingly. There will be
| manipulation, but if it doesn't reasonably add up then apply
| the sort of penalties in the EU of 20$ gross profit fines;
| strike off directors for copyright abuse (can't be directors
| of media companies again).
|
| I can't see that this would harm income for creators, only
| for distributors (who aren't needed, they're just duplicating
| using monopolistic practices), and it seems it would have
| broad appeal.
|
| So, yes, I agree.
| itopaloglu83 wrote:
| The number of searches started to decline and everybody knows
| that Google is going to start pouring all their cash into AI
| tools now.
|
| It looks like this is a strategic case to prevent Google from
| getting into AI search space and even gain access to their
| search index data so that they can train their own models on
| it.
|
| Wright brothers invited the aircraft but almost all their
| patents were cancelled when the Great War started. If we
| believe the AI race is indeed an existential threat then let's
| cancel all patents that prevent anyone from innovating.
| hedora wrote:
| Much better idea:
|
| 1) Eliminate Google Play Services for android and the oem non-
| compete deals.
|
| 2) Right to privacy. All data collection and storage (even on
| customer owned hardware if used for targeting decisions) must
| be opt-in, by purpose and annually renewed. It must be easier
| to only opt in to data collection for use cases that provide
| application functionality / business transactions than it is to
| opt into blanket data collection.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| So they want Google's datasets and search index to be available
| for other companies and want to prevent Google from being a
| dominant player in AI based search.
|
| I wonder why a VC firm who is quite heavily invested in AI based
| startups file an amicus brief like that...
|
| Edit: before this gets downvoted into oblivion, the comment is
| not against antitrust enforcement. It's about VC firms having
| very specific ideas about what the antitrust enforcement would
| look like.
| echelon wrote:
| Monopolies prevent startups from reaching critical mass.
|
| Google and the rest of big tech are like the Jupiter of the
| tech world. It clears the orbit of anything else that could
| form.
|
| Big tech is so big that it can jump into new markets with ease,
| kill incumbents, snuff out new players, and perpetually tax
| non-innovation.
|
| We're twenty years behind on antitrust and breakups. It's time
| we had a forest fire to make way for new growth.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| More than 50 years behind. We shifted policy to _barely_
| enforcing anti-trust in the '70s, under growing Chicago
| school ( _spits_ ) influence among elected officials, "think
| tanks" (lobbying groups), and courts.
|
| That's why everything's so _insanely_ consolidated now.
| Practically every market has a handful of massive players
| _all of which_ would currently be under serious threat of
| break-up under the old approach to enforcement. It's all
| monopoly.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| I wholeheartedly support antitrust enforcement. My comment
| was mostly about VC firms having very specific opinions on
| what should happen.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Let's not pretend that YC and other VCs are noble. They get
| rich and pawn their money losing investments to the "bigger
| fool"
|
| https://medium.com/@kazeemibrahim18/the-post-ipo-
| performance...
|
| > _In aggregate, the average return across these YC companies
| is -49%, with a median return of -46%. To put this into
| perspective, over the same period, the S &P 500 yielded a
| positive return of 58%_
|
| And for the rest of the companies, they aren't trying to
| compete with BigTech, they are trying to get acquired by
| them. Out of the literally thousands of companies that YC has
| invested in, only about two dozen have gone public
| darth_avocado wrote:
| VC firms, not specifically YC, also tend to encourage
| monopolization when it comes to startups they are invested
| in. Have we not seen unicorns gobble up other smaller
| startups all the time?
| echelon wrote:
| You can compete with a unicorn. You can't compete with a
| trillion dollar company with a cash hoard larger than
| every unicorn.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Which is how AirBnB ruined tourist industries worldwide,
| caused rents to soar, people to get displaced from their
| cities of birth, and why they're touted as a "disruptor"
| in this very brief.
|
| The end game for these unicorns is to become the cash
| hoard that they intended to compete with.
| echelon wrote:
| > Let's not pretend that YC and other VCs are noble.
|
| I'm fine with that. Let them make money at the expense of
| big tech.
|
| Breaking up big tech benefits financial/venture capital,
| but it also benefits labor capital as well. More
| opportunity for more startups to succeed, more competition
| for engineering talent, less market distorting wage
| collusion.
|
| Big tech already won. It's benefactors already reap the
| benefits. Break them up and a new generation of engineers
| can grow wealthy on the field they contribute their labor
| to.
|
| Right now the proceeds of tech go to hedge funds and
| pension funds. It's venture capital and entrepreneurs that
| take risks. They're the ones that should see upside.
| Unfortunately, big tech monopolies put a ceiling on this.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| They do see upside - by being acquired by BigTech.
|
| So if Google wasn't a "monopoly" you think a startup
| could make a better search engine? Be more popular than
| Android - Microsoft tried both and failed because people
| prefer Google products. It wasn't for the lack of money.
|
| And engineers are getting wealthy - by working for
| BigTech. Even an entry level developer at BigTech makes
| more than 90% of workers.
| echelon wrote:
| That's a low ceiling.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Really? Making $250K a year for a mid level developer 3
| years out of school is a "low bar"?
|
| Google has created many more millionaires than YC. The
| only way that you could be a millionaire by investing in
| YC companies at IPO would be to be a multimillionaire and
| lose half your money.
| throwanem wrote:
| People act in furtherance of their interests, yes. Was there
| more you had meant to say?
| cryptonector wrote:
| "People act in furtherance of their interests, yes" [by
| invoking the power of the State].
|
| There, FTFY. It was implied, was it not?
|
| Perhaps that is what should happen here, but let's not
| quibble about it.
| throwanem wrote:
| "Invoking the power of the state?" Good heavens, they've
| only filed an amicus brief. "Begging the presently
| authorized tenant of a precisely defined and circumscribed
| aliquot of the delegated power of the state" would be a
| more accurate way to put it. I appreciate that's not as
| florid, nor as floridly serviceable to anyone else's
| interest in pursuing this conversation. As I said before,
| though...
| jeroenhd wrote:
| You're right, YC is far from a neutral party here. But then
| again, I don't think any for-profit organisation spending the
| money on lawyers to write amicus briefs is.
|
| They're looking for free data for their AI startups to make
| money off of, and with Google being in the middle of an
| antitrust catastrophe that may very well collapse web browser
| variety to two options in the next years, there's a lot of
| money to be made by stoking the flames.
| xyzzy9563 wrote:
| Google is effectively being punished for retaining their earnings
| and re-investing in tons of software R&D over the years. Their
| "monopoly" is because people choose to use them, not because they
| have to. Not to mention they are are being disrupted by ChatGPT
| and other LLMs anyways right now. There have always been lots of
| web browsers and search engines, but Google simply did a better
| job making and refining their software and hiring people to do
| that.
| nicce wrote:
| > Their "monopoly" is because people choose to use them, not
| because they have to.
|
| If I give you only one reasonable option and you choose that,
| is that selection? What if this one option distinguished
| others?
| xyzzy9563 wrote:
| It's the only reasonable option because they did the best job
| making a search engine. The competitors have search engines
| but their software is worse.
| voytec wrote:
| No. They are being punished for unfairly limiting
| competitiveness with repeated monopolistic practices affecting
| the browser/search markets relation.
| xyzzy9563 wrote:
| But they only have high market share because people _want_ to
| use Google instead of the competitors. Many consumers switch
| their search engine to Google when presented with other
| defaults. Because Google search works the best and people
| know that.
| voytec wrote:
| The aggressive marketing of Chrome on Google Search website
| to users using other browsers was a significant part of
| Chrome adoption success.
|
| And no - some people didn't willingly and consciously
| switched to their search engine. It was pushed down their
| throats by browser vendors being paid-off by Google for
| setting it as the default one. Mozilla has overwritten
| user-changed search engine setting in Firefox with several
| updates.
|
| Non tech-savvy users simply accept changes made in software
| they use.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| When _by far_ the most generous reading of a post is that
| it's a low-effort troll, I'd recommend ignoring the
| poster entirely.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I don't know if you remember but it was just a few years
| ago that using search engines like bing was a shameful
| meme.
| voytec wrote:
| Nowadays using Google Search is, since they pivoted from
| from being a "search company" to "adtech company" which
| resulted in the degradation of Google Search quality.
|
| "Engines like Bing" is an ambiguous term. There are
| better options than Bing.
| ezfe wrote:
| So then why do they pay Apple $25,000,000,000 a year to
| default search to Google?
| repelsteeltje wrote:
| > Google is effectively being punished for retaining their
| earnings and re-investing in tons of software R&D over the
| years
|
| They have indeed invested tons in r&d, but with excessively
| little results. Besides web search it's tough to see succeses
| that Google didn't _buy_ their way into. Gmail, maps, ...
| maybe?
| xnx wrote:
| Who knows when or if this current AI wave would've happened
| without Google.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| That argument cuts both ways: Who knows how much longer we
| had to wait for this AI boom because google was sponging up
| every genius to work on ad selling algorithms.
| kittikitti wrote:
| Google's research departments hyped up DeepMind's success in
| board games and enabled huge amounts of marketing which makes
| you believe this. However, DeepMind was a resounding failure
| after GPT's were released. If you look at the multiple
| documentaries, they now seem cringeworthy because of Google's
| arrogance about AI. Google did not simply do a better job, they
| acquired the companies that did and then convinced you that
| they were part of Google the entire time so they can take the
| credit.
|
| I'm really glad that YC brought this against Google but it
| should be clear that YC also enabled them. It's a lie that YC
| is independent from Google as it partners and promotes their
| engineers and Big Tech allies. They see the writing on the wall
| and their lawyers see this as a hedge against lawsuits against
| them. "We didn't cause this mess, see look! We're trying to
| help!" YC also doesn't serve American startups at all and their
| entrepreneurs strongly favors California or India.
| nixonaddiction wrote:
| ok so google paid companies like apple to make google the
| default search engine. you cannot claim everything was just
| because their product was good. you can argue that striking the
| deal with apple was just a smart business move, but google
| isn't winning just because of their r&d.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| It's just a default, you can change it. Did Google coerce
| Apple into taking that deal somehow? Or did they simply offer
| them the most compelling deal in a free market?
|
| Keep in mind that if paying to be the default search engine
| in a browser is illegal, then Firefox's primary revenue
| source is out the window.
| prepend wrote:
| Spoiler: Firefox's primary revenue source is going to go
| out the window.
| kccqzy wrote:
| That's exactly what the government wants intentionally or
| unintentionally: make Firefox's primary revenue stream
| disappear.
| legitster wrote:
| None of the proposed remedies benefit consumers.
| sidibe wrote:
| Garry Tan is a consumer too!
| DonHopkins wrote:
| He's been consuming his own exhaust too much.
| echelon wrote:
| We have two major phone operating systems and they charge a tax
| of 30%, which gets passed onto consumers. This should be zero
| if there was unlimited competition or web installation. There's
| also so much innovation happening in the mobile space right
| now. It's not like they're parked and reaping untold benefits.
|
| By having search monopolies, they've gamified paying for
| placement above your competitor's trademarks. Rather than spend
| on engineering or lowering costs, you have to pay to defend
| your brand.
|
| There are thousands of ways these monopolies are horrible for
| the consumer, for small business, and for innovation.
|
| These companies force their way into new markets, kill the
| sustainable incumbents by give away services sustained on
| unrelated business unit profit, then raise rates once the field
| has been salted and acquired. Amazon is a grocery store,
| primary care doctor, home electronics company, and James Bond.
|
| Why should Amazon get free advertising for their films on their
| web storefront, plastered on the side of their delivery vans,
| emblazoned on their packaging, when competing studios have to
| spend millions on marketing? To top it off, they're outsourcing
| the film crew labor to Eastern Europe where there are no crew
| safety laws and are putting American film workers out of
| business.
|
| And the current price pressure on your salary is directly a
| result of their market power. They don't have to fear you
| starting a company that can impact their profits anymore.
|
| These companies should all be dismantled. Large companies
| should be exposed to evolutionary pressures, but because of
| monopoly they become invasive species and dominate entire
| ecosystems. Regulation is the path to healthy competition and
| innovation.
| amazingamazing wrote:
| The solution is for people to make web apps which are
| agnostic to platform and device, no?
| echelon wrote:
| No, the solution is web installs without platform scare
| walls.
|
| We have sandboxing, permissions, app scanning heuristics,
| and databases of bad apps. If the web works from a
| technical standpoint and security posture, so can native.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| Yeah, the root of many monopolies today is an IP monopoly
| explicitly granted by government. Government policy is
| prohibiting monopolies via one relatively weak pathway, and
| literally establishing them via the IP pathway.
| Zak wrote:
| A finding that preventing or discouraging installation of
| apps from anywhere but the first-party store constitutes
| use of market power to exclude competitors and fix prices
| in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act sounds like a
| great solution to me.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| > By having search monopolies, they've gamified paying for
| placement above your competitor's trademarks. Rather than
| spend on engineering or lowering costs, you have to pay to
| defend your brand.
|
| I would _love_ to know how much money Google makes just from
| this extortion.
|
| ... which is enabled by their intentionally-misleading search
| ads, which also enable scams. I'd further love to know how
| much money they make promoting scams.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Ironically, Google has always allowed people to side-step the
| 30% tax.
| echelon wrote:
| With a burried setting and scare wall that they know fewer
| than 0.01% engage with.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| If developers bothered to put their apps on alternative
| stores with much lower rates, we wouldn't be in this mess.
| Amazon is shutting down their store because it turns out
| nobody is really all that interested in actual alternatives.
| Samsung has their own store but all I hear about it is people
| bitching that they already have Google Play and that it's
| "bloatware".
|
| Huawei even sells phones without Google Play in the west! Of
| course the first thing people try to do on them is get Google
| Play working, because the cheap hardware is all people care
| about.
|
| Sure, Apple has proven to be pretty shit about app cost, but
| Android does and always has offered alternative app stores,
| and it's the leading example of how much companies like Epic
| are lying through their teeth.
|
| Consumers pay the 30% app tax on Android because the
| companies claiming to want to get rid of it don't actually
| want to invest in alternatives, they just want Apple and
| Google to host their games for free so they can make more
| money.
|
| The same goes for a lot of these monopolies. People want
| options, but they don't want to pay for options. The result
| is a quick race to the bottom where only a few high-profit,
| low-margin companies dominate the market.
| belorn wrote:
| Andoid users install google play because the applications
| they want to use is only available on google play,
| regardless of personal choice. Andoid developers put their
| applications on google play because that is the only places
| where they can access enough number of users, which has
| nothing to do with developer choice.
|
| It is not about price. It is about platforms. A 0% app tax
| could not compete if there is 0 users on the platform, and
| google could increase the app tax to 100% if they wanted
| and people would still use it.
| surajrmal wrote:
| Amazon doesn't get free advertising. They lose out on revenue
| they could have gotten by placing another paying ad there
| instead. The opportunity cost is not 0.
| echelon wrote:
| Amazon chooses not to advertise third party products on
| those surfaces. They realize they have product synergy in
| giving away free films and movies to their customers, which
| is why they do it. It's a massively unfair platform
| advantage.
|
| UPS and FedEx don't emblazon ads on their delivery trucks.
| Nobody is buying up those ad spaces.
| Aerroon wrote:
| About the phone OS: unfortunately, other companies and
| _governments_ give this duopoly to Apple and Google.
|
| If I need my phone to access my bank and my bank's app only
| works on official Android or iOS then that's it. I don't have
| a choice in what phone OS I'm running.
|
| And the bank most likely does that because of government
| regulations.
| briandear wrote:
| Free apps don't cost any "tax."
|
| > This should be zero if there was unlimited competition or
| web installation
|
| Is credit card processing, billing, storage, distribution,
| "free?"
|
| And the 30% figure is inaccurate. Most developers don't pay
| that.
|
| How about stripe charging 2.9% +$0.30 per transaction? They
| are almost double the actual cost of the interchanges.
| echelon wrote:
| Businesses have hundreds of billing and payment options,
| and the fees are relatively small and straightforward.
|
| Google and Apple charge an order of magnitude more for a
| straightjacket distribution mechanism that is inferior to
| web search.
| jeffbee wrote:
| One wonders how these people imagine accessing a search index,
| from the practical, technical standpoint. If you believe that
| Google has only unfair business practices, then it makes perfect
| sense to believe that your organization will simply access their
| data.
| voytec wrote:
| > As a result, YC has an interest in ensuring that U.S.
| technology markets are free from anticompetitive barriers to
| entry and expansion.
|
| This part reads like a suggestion to loosen anti-
| competitive/antitrust law.
| grg0 wrote:
| Why? The point of antitrust is to promote market fairness.
|
| I don't trust YC very much, but I do trust they want a share of
| the pie. And they're not wrong that Google has monopolized and
| stagnated search. I think you're reading too much into that
| sentence?
| amazingamazing wrote:
| Why not make all companies open up their data sets, and stop pay
| to play?
| pvg wrote:
| Because all companies haven't been found to be illegal
| monopolies? Just like we don't fine everyone with a car for
| speeding.
| codegladiator wrote:
| more like same toll-tax/road-tax for vehicles of all sizes
| pvg wrote:
| How is it more like that? This is a proposed remedy for
| breaking the law. Driving on the road (tll or free) is not
| breaking the law. There is no 'like' about it at all.
| codegladiator wrote:
| I know what you mean but your statement
|
| > Just like we don't fine everyone with a car for
| speeding
|
| can me mistaken for "not everyone who is speeding is
| fined", and that's clearly not what you meant or wrote.
| You are right its not more like tolls because it still
| doesn't capture the /exponential/ difference of whats
| being compared (any other company vs google). Its like a
| car vs a jet fighter
| amazingamazing wrote:
| Pay to play is inherently anti competitive though. All cars
| that speed are fined, not just the "big" ones. It's also a
| fact that all companies opening up their data would make
| things more competitive. Moats are inherently anti
| competitive.
| pvg wrote:
| Pay to play is a really broad term (just skim the wikipedia
| page) and describing it as 'inherently anticompetitive'
| isn't saying much. There are also plenty of political,
| social and business arrangements that are deliberately
| anticompetitive by wide agreements of various sorts.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| They don't have an illegal monopoly on AI data sets, though?
| This is attacking a random, unrelated Google branch.
|
| The company that brought us AirBnB and Doordash arguing for
| fair and open markets should say enough about how honest
| their intentions are.
| pvg wrote:
| I'm not talking about the merits of YC's brief, just the
| merits of the comment I'm replying to. "Why shouldn't we
| apply the proposed remedy for illegal behaviour on
| everyone" seems like a no-brainer to me.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I don't think it's unreasonable to apply the same remedy
| to all AI companies. Sure, it would punish Google, but if
| companies would actually share their data set, the
| internet may not be so polluted with AI crawler bots I
| need to block on my servers.
|
| Just as an example: in my country, all public transit
| information is shared publicly between operators, so
| anyone can effectively build a public transit navigation
| app. That includes the for-profit companies that actually
| run the trains. Had they kept their data silo'd up, like
| they were not that long ago, companies would need to make
| expensive deals or write elaborate scrapers to provide
| basic route navigation services. Thanks to regulation
| opening up the data for this system, everyone benefits,
| including the transit companies themselves, as their
| route planners now seemlessly integrate with routes
| offered by unrelated third parties.
|
| By only hitting Google with regulations like those, I
| think we're building a situation where it's only a matter
| of time before a new Google appears and ruins the market
| again. Google has been financing Firefox and Safari for
| years now because they don't want to be the _only_
| browser, because being the _only_ browser comes with all
| kinds of nasty antitrust regulations. If we selectively
| apply mitigations like these for competitive purposes
| (which I very much doubt are the real reason they 're
| being suggested anyway), we'll just end up with some
| equivalent like "OpenAI sponsoring xAI and Claude so
| OpenAI doesn't control more than 80% of market share".
| pvg wrote:
| _I don 't think it's unreasonable to apply the same
| remedy to all AI companies._
|
| A court can't really formulate and enact such a remedy.
|
| _all public transit information_
|
| Not all entities are public and we have more readily
| available methods to influence the ones that are.
| bloppe wrote:
| Google is the reason for the current AI boom. Without the
| transformer architecture they invented by funding basic research,
| there would be no modern LLMs. YC is arguing that their incentive
| for funding that basic research should be taken away in order to
| spur innovation?
| chpatrick wrote:
| You can do basic research without being monopolistic.
| xyzzy9563 wrote:
| There are many other search engine options, why should Google
| be punished for hiring the best people over decades to make
| the best one? Many consumers also switch their search to
| Google when presented with other options or defaults.
| mcherm wrote:
| > why should Google be punished for hiring the best people
| over decades to make the best one?
|
| Google should not be punished for having gained a near-
| monopoly by hiring the best people.
|
| But perhaps their near-monopoly is due to other reasons
| like paying large amounts to ensure that they are the
| default option on various platforms. In this case, legal
| restrictions might be more appropriate.
|
| How do we determine which of these proposed reasons for the
| near-monopoly is correct? We use a legal process where each
| side presents their evidence and a neutral party decides
| which is most credible.
| skippyboxedhero wrote:
| Because the data they possess is the monopoly, they have
| better search results because it is too expensive for
| competitors to gather the data at this point as(I also
| think people who are unfamiliar with finance do not
| understand the quantum, Meta has a similar type of business
| but was under huge pressure with investing tens of billions
| into VR...it would cost hundreds of billions to get parity
| with Google, there is no way to finance this).
|
| It is nothing to do with "hiring the best people". Google's
| exec-level leadership is extremely poor, Mr Magoo-tier
| management. This is largely due to their share classes, the
| people at the very top are not very good at business so
| Google largely isn't run like a business. They have one
| business that is probably worth $4-5tn, and the rest is
| worth -$3-4tn. The number of "best people" out there is
| usually under 500 in a country the size of the US, a
| country that has hundreds of thousands of employees is not
| hiring the best.
|
| I would guess under 100 people at Google actually
| positively impact financial results in any way because the
| advertising business grows rapidly, uses no capital, and
| requires no staff. This is true of many of the tech
| companies do, you aren't getting the best if you pay an
| exec $50m because the best will always do their own thing
| and make more. Rather you get someone like Pichai or Cook
| who sounds good and will get shareholders to believe that
| setting fire to $200m/year to pay them is a good idea, they
| are indistinguishable from politicians.
|
| Google is under-earning massively. Staff aren't a monopoly,
| you just pay someone to leave and they are yours now (you
| see this in other areas like HFT where staff actually know
| useful stuff, you don't see this in tech because most staff
| don't know anything, they are looking for drones).
| surajrmal wrote:
| It's incredibly naive to think Google's continuous growth
| is automatic. It happened because of all the work the
| employees do, not in spite of it. Are there employees who
| don't contribute? Sure. But that's different from only
| 100 contributing to positive growth.
| skippyboxedhero wrote:
| Do you actually understand how and why they are growing?
|
| They start with a page with zero ads, they add one ad to
| that page one year, ad sales pushes that placements, then
| a few years they do it again, etc. Meta are the same.
|
| Google do sell at a higher price than offline ads because
| of targeting/intent but this is inherent to the product:
| search has inherently better intent and their targeting
| tech is no better than anyone else such that their prices
| are higher/grow faster.
|
| That is their growth model: higher ad density, the CEO
| deciding to add another ad to a page and earning
| $100m/year. There is no value-added otherwise because you
| don't need many people, you don't need capital and you
| are making $300bn/year.
|
| And, again, if you own the shares you understand that you
| are getting the ads business, and because of the dual
| class you are also getting this tech bureaucracy that
| sets fire to tens of billions every year employing people
| to do nothing. If these people are so productive...where
| is the revenue? It is all ads or ancillary business, they
| have GCP now but there is nothing else...because these
| people aren't doing anything.
|
| It is like owning a business that turns lead into gold,
| the process is automatic, requires no capital...and then
| employing a bunch of monks to pray for the lead and
| saying the business couldn't exist without them. Lol.
| nickfromseattle wrote:
| Note, Google also uses user interaction data from Chrome to
| influence the search results. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-user-
| interaction-...
| ayewo wrote:
| > There are many other search engine options, why should
| Google be punished for hiring the best people over decades
| to make the best one?
|
| I'm guessing this whole court case wouldn't have been a
| thing if Google wasn't bribing Apple, to the tune of $20
| billion a year [1], to remain the default search engine on
| iOS.
|
| 1: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/apple-may-add-ai-
| search-...
| jeffbee wrote:
| Amazing how you can see that as Google bribing Apple
| instead of Apple extorting Google.
| josefx wrote:
| It would be a rather ineffective extortion if "customers
| would just switch" as the comment further above claims.
| jsheard wrote:
| Or more recently beginning to throw money at websites to
| lock out their competitors, which is why Bing and co
| can't index Reddit anymore.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| That's true, but if it weren't for Google's monopolist
| position, I doubt they'd have the money to throw at the wall
| for random research. For every AI transformer they
| revolutionized, there's a self-driving car project that's
| dragging on for decades.
|
| Had Google operated like a normal company, the risk/reward of
| this kind of research would've looked completely differently.
|
| Google's monopoly helped research along in the same way
| totalitarian countries like China are developing
| infrastructure at break-neck speed: if you don't need to care
| about pesky rights and regulations, you can do things that
| would otherwise be impossible.
|
| I don't think Google's monopoly is worth having the current
| generation of lie generator bots around, but I don't think
| generative AI would be where it is right now had Google been
| forced to comply with antitrust regulations ten years ago.
| callc wrote:
| You certainly have a point. Places like google and bell
| labs have pushed innovation, apparently enabled by
| monopolies.
|
| I would rather we don't allow monopolies since they are so
| bad for society, regardless of some benefits.
|
| Government funded research and private investment are still
| a thing, that doesn't try to break the whole capitalism
| thing.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| > You certainly have a point. Places like google and bell
| labs have pushed innovation, apparently enabled by
| monopolies.
|
| I've heard this argument before (and recognize that you
| aren't defending it), but telecommunications, network and
| technology innovation has hardly suffered since Bell was
| dismantled in 1982.
| Mond_ wrote:
| You cannot possibly know which innovations and
| standardizations happened past 1982 in the world in which
| Bell was not dismantled.
| Macha wrote:
| Right, but there other, real, negative impacts of
| monopoly, whereas the positive impact of R&D funding
| seems to be at best a maybe as to if it's better than the
| alternative.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Telecommunications is still led by small groups of
| companies. Giant backbone providers stitch the internet
| together. Telecoms providers within a country, the ones
| that actually have hardware in the field, can often be
| counted on one hand, and often in one hand after a
| fireworks accident. 5G/6G/7G research is led by a small
| handful of companies that actually build the switches,
| transmitters, and modems. Cell tower frequencies are sold
| to a tiny group of carriers that sublet their network
| equipment to smaller companies they eventually buy up (if
| succesful) or disappear from the market (if not
| succesful).
|
| Fiber rollout in countries where a government funded
| phone line rollout has already succeeded is laughably
| slow, taking decades and many billions with little to
| show for it. Even in countries where no phone lines were
| rolled out back in the day, fiber is more and more being
| skipped as 5G allows for cheaper (though less reliable
| and less capable) deployment.
|
| I'm not saying monopolies are good or anything, and I
| think our problems would be even worse had we stuck to
| the monopolist systems that brought us telecoms as we
| know it, but I wouldn't consider the industry one where
| there's enough competition to drive innovation,
| especially since at least half of the entire sector is
| competing against Chinese government-controlled companies
| with seemingly endless coffers.
| globnomulous wrote:
| This is debatable, I think. What I've read is that,
| whereas Bell Labs did foundational, groundbreaking
| research that radically altered the course of human
| history, technological innovation since then has more
| often followed the lines Bell Labs, and their ilk, laid
| down. Giving the world a faster computer or faster
| network is fine and nice but pales in comparison to the
| consequences of giving the world modern computers, Unix,
| and C.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Counterpoint, C and Unix still don't have serious
| successors 50 years on.
| kaladin-jasnah wrote:
| My first thought was Bell Labs here. The lack of time
| pressure for research results sounds like a big reason
| why so much innovation happened--people could pursue
| projects that may not have immediately benefitted the
| company's bottom line, because Bell had money to throw. I
| think UNIX was an example of this, because MULTICS was a
| failure and Bell was wary of similar projects, but I
| might be wrong.
| mtillman wrote:
| According to Kernighan in UNIX: A History and a Memoir,
| the Unix team was constrained with regards to hardware
| capital at the time of Unix's creation. The Multics team
| got to use a fancy GE-645 (36-bits!) while the Unix team
| had to beg for "cheaper" systems like the PDP-7 and
| eventually an 11. Thompson has a great quote about how
| ultimately he was thankful they didn't have as much money
| to play with as the Multics team did but at the time he
| was annoyed he had to beg for a PDP-11. Fun book!
| ori_b wrote:
| Most of the Bell Labs fundamental breakthroughs had no
| path to commercialization at the time of their discovery.
| The transistor was discovered 12 years into Shockleys
| research on fundamental properties of semiconductors.
|
| If commercialization had been considered before funding,
| the project would have never been approved.
|
| Instead, Bell management took the view that they could
| find everything, and some of it might become a new
| market, maybe.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Google's position is a result of capitalism, not in spite
| of it.
| prepend wrote:
| Every corporation's position is a result of capitalism.
| I'd like to know more about your point.
| photonthug wrote:
| This is debatable and probably a US centric POV, I think
| you could argue that much of the world is better at
| public / private partnerships and so no, their _position_
| is not due to capitalism, even if their continued
| existence is.
|
| I'm not an expert on the economic history, but you could
| probably argue that the last big public / private
| partnerships in the US were in the railroad days. Defense
| spending I would not count in this category either.
| Although it builds whole ecosystems it is too insular and
| incestuous compared to something like transportation, or
| deliberately nurturing any other budding industry in a
| cooperative rather than competitive fashion
| callc wrote:
| I might not have explained my position adequately. I am
| not commenting on how Google became immensely successful,
| but just looking at it today in its current state.
|
| It seems like the end result of unchecked capitalism is
| monopolistic practices. Companies want to make as much
| $$$ as possible. The most effective way to do that is to
| become a monopoly and avoid/destroy/inhibit any amount of
| competition as possible.
|
| I really see it as an unstable system. Which is why we
| need society to put laws in place to keep the system in
| check, so it doesn't turn sour.
|
| Basically there's a "healthiness" scale of capitalism. I
| want healthy capitalism.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| "self-driving car project that's dragging on for decades."
|
| And yet, waymo seems to have got the correct risk reward
| trade-off compared to all of the move-fast-and-get-banned
| competitors...
| notimetorelax wrote:
| I think that you're supporting the argument that you're
| replying to.
| sanderjd wrote:
| It's funny that you use self driving cars as a negative
| example. We have a perfect natural experiment to look at to
| compare the slower research-driven approach (Waymo) to the
| "normal company" short term profit driven approach (Tesla).
|
| From where I'm sitting it's pretty clear which approach has
| been more successful.
| bloppe wrote:
| That's an interesting question. A lot of basic research is
| done in pursuit of creating entirely new markets. Being the
| first entrant to a new market makes you a monopolist in a way
| by default. It doesn't necessarily have to be anti-
| competitive.
|
| I'd argue the fact that Google publishes much more of their
| research than their competitors do is a strong indicator that
| they're actually not the anti-competitive ones.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| The greatest private sector basic research institute that has
| ever existed was the result of a government granted monopoly,
| so you have to admit, it helps.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Debatable. I visited the down at the heels post break up Bell
| Labs and it was sad.
| antonvs wrote:
| I worked for a while at the company that used to be named
| Bellcore (Bell Communications Research), which was
| originally a research consortium for the Baby Bells. By the
| time I joined, it was a zombie cash cow shell that did no
| research, and it met the common fate of such businesses:
| acquired by a private equity firm.
| concinds wrote:
| It's normal for mature industries to evolve into oligopolies.
| The filing goes far beyond fighting cartel-like behavior,
| into pretty ludicrous stuff (like "open access to Google's
| datasets and search Index").
| derektank wrote:
| Yet empirically, the biggest funders of basic research have
| historically been monopolies. The US government was, at least
| up until the last few months, the largest funder of basic
| research globally and it obviously maintains multiple
| different monopolies, a monopoly on legal use of force, a
| functional monopoly on financial transactions as the global
| reserve currency, and I'm sure others. Excluding national
| governments, Bell Labs and IBM were both probably the biggest
| funders of basic research in the last century during their
| respective heydays. Bell was obviously a monopoly and while
| IBM might never have faced anti-trust penalties, they did at
| one point control 70% of the mainframe market and the DoJ did
| bring a case against them (that was eventually dismissed by
| the Reagan administration.)
|
| I think there are many good reasons to pursue anti-trust
| action against companies that are in a dominant market
| position, but we should be honest about the tradeoffs.
| Businesses that have to aggressively compete to maintain
| market share don't have the slack to fund basic research.
| mjevans wrote:
| Which is why, like the 'monopoly on violence' the
| government should also be funding a _lot more research_.
|
| It should be at, or partnered with, higher learning
| institutions and since it's public funded all of the
| results should be free to use*. I'm willing to entertain
| the idea of: Free use for people and corporations within
| the country/countries that funded research, everyone else
| pays compulsory license fees.
| briandear wrote:
| But public funded research isn't "free to use." In many
| cases, you can't even read it without paying a scientific
| journal for a subscription. See the Bayh-Dole Act as
| well: universities can patent discoveries from federally
| funded research.
| layer8 wrote:
| There's no reason that couldn't be changed, e.g.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43858568.
| sanderjd wrote:
| These aren't contradictory ideas. Governments should fund
| more research and should also make it free.
| jpeloquin wrote:
| Publications with public funding have already escaped the
| paywall, partially as of 2013 and completely as of this
| year:
|
| https://par.nsf.gov/
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
|
| https://ospo.gwu.edu/overview-us-policy-open-access-and-
| open...
|
| https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-
| director/statem...
|
| https://www.coalition-s.org/plan_s_principles/
|
| The intent of the Bayh-Dole Act was to deal with a
| perceived problem of government-owned patents being
| investor-unfriendly. At the time the government would
| only grant non-exclusive licenses, and investors
| generally want exclusivity. That may have been the actual
| problem, moreso than who owned the patent. On the other
| hand, giving the actual inventors an incentive to
| commercialize their work should increase their
| productivity and the chance that the inventions actually
| get used.
| ctvo wrote:
| The biggest funders of basic research are those with the
| most resources. This is your insight? I don't think anyone
| disagrees. Then you conflate correlation with causation and
| move it to _monopolies_ fund basic research. Bravo.
| antonvs wrote:
| Major monopolies tend to have the most resources,
| particularly excess resources that are available to spend
| on things like research.
| layer8 wrote:
| That's not suprising at all, though. It doesn't imply
| that monopolies are a net benefit for society.
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| Is this not a bit "tail wagging the dog" thinking? There
| wasn't much innovation in telecommunications once Bell's
| monopoly was entrenched. Once it dissipated, innovation was
| everywhere in the space. Similarly, computers had less
| innovation while IBM was a monopoly than they've had since
| its monopoly dissipated.
|
| Though both companies created novel & useful inventions,
| the biggest shifts in those industries during those
| monopoly eras were from outside those organisations by
| competitive startups. As an example, IBM should have
| produced Microsoft, but they didn't. They missed out on a
| multi-trillion dollar value creation opportunity as a
| result.
| derektank wrote:
| There's a difference between conducting basic research
| and bringing new inventions to the market in the form of
| consumer goods or services. Monopolies are much, much
| worse at doing the latter than normal businesses because
| they have no competition pressuring them to improve their
| offerings.
| allturtles wrote:
| > There wasn't much innovation in telecommunications once
| Bell's monopoly was entrenched. Once it dissipated,
| innovation was everywhere in the space.
|
| I don't think that's accurate at all. If we take say 1920
| or so as the date when the monopoly was entrenched and
| 1984 as the break-up, there was tons of innovation in
| telecom in that time period. Novel telecom technologies
| introduced in that time period include television,
| microwave relays, satellite communications, submarine
| telephone cables, cellular telephones, fiber optics,
| electronic telephone switching, packet switching, the
| Internet.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| This line of argument to defend monopolies is the same line
| of argument against progressive taxation of high incomes.
| Just because those with trends excess use some small
| fraction of that excess to do good does not justify the
| means.
|
| I have been close enough to billionaires and how they spend
| their money to not be fully impressed by such arguments.
|
| And certainly the robber barons of the 2000s spend far less
| on the public good than when tax rates were higher and they
| used to fund universities, libraries, hospitals and the
| like.
| keybored wrote:
| > I think there are many good reasons to pursue anti-trust
| action against companies that are in a dominant market
| position, but we should be honest about the tradeoffs.
|
| Okay. I'll take the monopolostic government over the
| monopolistic corporation. Thanks.
| lacy_tinpot wrote:
| What monopoly?
|
| Google's entire business model is currently under threat
| right now.
| Larrikin wrote:
| There are lazy developers reading this very comment thread
| that broke basic website functionality this week because
| they only tested on Chrome
| ikiris wrote:
| Just because the competition is trash doesn't make chrome
| a monopoly.
| nmz wrote:
| How?
|
| The software world was basically created by Xerox and AT&T
| research.
| echelon wrote:
| > Google is the reason for the current AI boom.
|
| OpenAI is the reason for the current AI boom. Google wasn't
| productizing anything and didn't put any of this stuff out in
| the open. Where was their productization of the transformer?
|
| If anything, it should show that Google malinvests. Maybe none
| of it would have seen the light of day. Only now that they've
| been threatened are they building products.
| jeffbee wrote:
| That you are unaware of the applications of transformers is
| on you, not them. Search query understanding, search result
| ranking, translation, voice recognition, all other natural
| language applications, and generative applications like Gmail
| Smart Compose are all based on transformer architecture.
| currymj wrote:
| The BERT model, which uses the transformer architecture, was
| deployed by Google for every English language Google search
| by the end of 2019.
|
| This is about concurrent with OpenAI's release of GPT-2. But
| GPT-2 was not really a product.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| I usef BERT before chatgpt was a thing.
| jayd16 wrote:
| They had AI assistants and machine vision aplenty. The
| current hype cycle seems to stem from the discovery that
| going big on these models was worth it.
| luckydata wrote:
| OpenAi just decided they could jump the gun while Google
| CORRECTLY deemed the tech not ready yet. What you're breaking
| your neck to find fault with was Google being responsible.
| philipov wrote:
| You're saying this would hinder LLM research? Don't threaten me
| with a good time.
| ViktorRay wrote:
| But when AT&T had a monopoly it funded Bell Labs which was
| responsible for much innovation.
|
| Then AT&T was shut down and Bell Labs went away.
|
| If we take your argument seriously then AT&T shouldn't have
| been dismantled. But it was a good thing AT&T was dismantled.
| It helped lead to the modern internet.
|
| By your logic all Rockefeller had to do in the early 20th
| century was set up a lab to do basic research and then Standard
| Oil wouldn't have been broken up.
|
| Monopolies should be broken up. This is true regardless of any
| basic research that they fund.
| wslh wrote:
| Right, if you look back through the history of ideas, every
| breakthrough builds on prior research and inventions. In the
| realm of patents and copyrights, this is acknowledged
| formally: they expire after a certain time and enter the
| public domain. This also supports the view that the current
| state of the world, for better or worse, owes much to the
| past and those who came before (living or not living
| elements).
| mjcl wrote:
| And it was an antitrust action that unlocked a lot of that
| value. The consent decree required Bell Labs to license its
| patents (e.g. transistors) for reasonable royalties. The same
| consent decree also forbid AT&T from entering new industries
| like computing. So after they built UNIX, they sold the
| source code 'as-is' to universities for $200 ($20k for
| businesses).
| Aerroon wrote:
| You could also say, though, that this is what caused AT&T
| to be what it is today - disliked by their customers.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| Ask anyone who was alive back then and they will tell you
| stories of how legendarily awful AT&T was to deal with.
| My father has told me several. The antitrust action made
| things better for regular people by allowing them to do
| things like buy their own handsets or haggle over price.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| What telecom today will actually haggle
| nradov wrote:
| They won't haggle with consumers, but for large business
| customers the prices and other terms are absolutely
| negotiable.
| smcin wrote:
| All of them, in regions where they don't have a vertical
| monopoly. You can negotiate away installation fees and
| monthly package pricing on DSL, TV, internet phone...
| also sometimes get a no-contract deal instead of locking
| in for 24/28 mths with the dreaded ETF which is a large
| part of Comcast's profitability.
| pixl97 wrote:
| As the other person said, you must be young.
|
| They are disliked now as much as they were disliked then.
| Except back then they charged you a hell of a lot for
| long distance.
| efavdb wrote:
| "Monopolies should be broken up" doesn't imply we should
| disincentivize research though, does it?
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| I think the implication is that in a high competition area
| Noone has the spare funds for massive research projects
| that may go nowhere
| freejazz wrote:
| No. And?
| dehrmann wrote:
| > it was a good thing AT&T was dismantled
|
| Citation needed. I hear this repeated, but the consumer
| experience was it was split into regional monopolies, and
| consumers now had to deal with both local and long distance,
| and both were still monopolies. It only got better with
| competition from mobile providers.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Long distance rates when down.
|
| https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/09/att-breakup-
| spin...
| gopher_space wrote:
| The consumer experience was AT&T telling you to go fuck
| yourself. Everyone hated them with a burning passion.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Long distance was not a monopoly once competitors came
| along that provided better and cheaper service, all before
| the rise of mobile.
| com wrote:
| I was looking for a citation and instead found a number of
| vague or biased papers.
|
| Suprisingly there's an archived DoJ page that says that the
| same remedies may have been much cheaper to achieve through
| other means.
|
| https://www.justice.gov/archives/atr/att-divestiture-was-
| it-...
|
| YMMV. I don't agree with the narrowness of this analysis,
| and would like to see some links to academic studies in
| economics and the study of innovation tbh.
| ajross wrote:
| Bell Labs being defunded by a deregulated/competetive AT&T
| was precisely what led to the attempted commercialization of
| Unix and the near death of what would eventually be called
| "open source", though. In history as it stands, we had GNU
| and Linux and all that we lost was a few years.
|
| But it's easy to imagine a world where that didn't happen and
| BSD was just killed dead. So no OS X, no iOS, no Android, no
| ChromeOS, and the only vendor able to stand on its own is the
| one we all agree had the worst product.
|
| Ironically the world where the Bell monopoly was left in
| place seems to me to be one where we're all stuck running
| Microsoft Windows on everything, no?
|
| I mean, fine, there's nuance to everything but the idea that
| "well, open research isn't so important" seems frankly
| batshit to me. Monopolies fall on their own all the time
| (Microsoft's did too!). You can't get stuff into the public
| space that wasn't ever there to begin with.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| You're making the assumption that only corporations can
| fund or perform basic research. But the transistor was
| actually the culmination of decades of research by
| materials scientists and physicists in university and other
| labs into semiconductors before anyone realized there were
| applications.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >Monopolies fall on their own all the time (Microsoft's did
| too!)
|
| What in the heck are you talking about??? After Microsoft
| was convicted, even though they never received any actual
| punishment, the were very internally cautions about any
| behaviors that could be perceived as monopolistic. This is
| like a total misinterpretation of what actually occurred on
| your part.
|
| And yes, monopolies do fall, _after very long periods of
| time_. Some monopoly sitting around 25 years may not seem
| like much, but that 's half an average persons working
| life.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I'm pretty sympathetic to both sides of this. I don't really
| know the history well enough to say whether you're right that
| breaking up AT&T "helped lead to the modern internet". But
| even stipulating that it did, the loss of monopoly era Bell
| Labs was tragic.
|
| Both things can be true! It's entirely possible (probable
| even) that breaking up monopolies has both positive and
| negative impact.
|
| And I would be a _lot_ more sympathetic if we had a lot more
| public investment in technology. But we don 't. What I see is
| both public and private research investment under major
| attack. I think that's a recipe for disaster.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| There's actually a pretty solid argument to be made that the
| railways were never more effective than during the days of
| Rockefeller, when he could throw his money around to force
| otherwise-competing railways to optimize their work in an
| industry that has some fundamental strong incentives to be
| non-competitive (it rarely makes any sense to run two rail
| lines purely for competition reasons and leads to a race to
| the bottom on pricing).
|
| ... but that's more a story of the failure of the US
| government to go _far enough_ and nationalize the rail
| network and its operations. The most efficient era of US rail
| was during World War II, when the military took it over and
| prioritized schedules by optimal throughput over profit
| concerns.
| constantcrying wrote:
| Yes, large monopolistic corporations can spend large amounts of
| money on, presumably, completely unmonetizable research.
|
| Nevertheless anti-Trust law exists because of the belief that
| monopolies should not exist and that it is the governments
| function to dismantle monopolies. The consequence of that is
| that corporations who can freely spend hundreds of millions on
| basic research will be dismantled as well, as happened with
| AT&T, and the funding for the basic research will cease.
|
| >YC is arguing that their incentive for funding that basic
| research should be taken away in order to spur innovation?
|
| No. That is _the stance of the government_. YC is arguing that
| the remedies the government is seeking are appropriate.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| _Researchers at_ Google are the reason for the current AI boom.
|
| FTFY
| tucnak wrote:
| Potato potato
| oceanplexian wrote:
| > Without the transformer architecture they invented by funding
| basic research, there would be no modern LLMs.
|
| Without Google the researchers who invented the Transformers
| model might have launched their own startup instead of sitting
| on the technology for 5 years while it's mismanaged at a big
| company. We would have had LLMs in 2018 not 2022.
| riku_iki wrote:
| Actually, most researchers of transformer paper founded
| various startups.
| oofbaroomf wrote:
| A little bit unrelated, but the rise of Transformers in 2022
| was because of the compute available - in 2018, it would have
| been almost impossible to make something like GPT-4.
| riku_iki wrote:
| > Without the transformer architecture they invented by funding
| basic research, there would be no modern LLMs.
|
| one could argue that transformers are nothing without attention
| layer, which was not invented at google.
| pyrale wrote:
| > YC is arguing that their incentive for funding that basic
| research should be taken away in order to spur innovation?
|
| Ma Bell is arguing that Bell labs has been a fountain of
| knowledge everyone admires and has contributed tremendously to
| the advancement of telecommunication systems.
| croes wrote:
| Kings and nobles funded many scientists, do want to take their
| money and power away?
| lesuorac wrote:
| Isn't this actually an argument for breaking up Google?
|
| They came up with Transformers back in 2014 and sat on it for a
| decade until somebody else (OpenAI) forced their hand?
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| Yup. Arguably could not have invented the transformer without
| the resources of a behemoth like google
| beagle3 wrote:
| Juergen Schmidhuber and his students came up with much of the
| basic NN elements, such as RNN, LSTM and others without
| behemoth resources (and several years earlier). Ttbomk, the
| one thing they DIDN'T come up with was the transformer;
| however it is very likely someone would have within a 5-10
| year time frame.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| I well aware of Schmidhuber, still the scaling of the
| compute was critical. The reason Schmidhuber didnt go all
| the way is still scaling/capital, which accrues to
| monopolies who can afford wildly speculative research.
| Also, LSTM, RNN, etc, while effective for their time, were
| dead ends.
| beagle3 wrote:
| compute was critical, but compute was happening anyway. I
| fail to say why you are convinced that there would not be
| transformers.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I'm pretty sure we didn't need a global Monopoly on the
| Internet to come up with the paper "attention is all you need"
| written by eight people.
| hu3 wrote:
| These are the key points as I understand them:
|
| Amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief is being submitted by Y
| Combinator to pile on the US vs Google anti-trust case.
|
| YC asks court to basically cripple Google in their Search,
| Advertising and AI endeavours:
|
| - Open access to Google's datasets and search index.
|
| - Restrict Google's expansion into AI through monopolistic
| practices.
|
| - Limit Google exclusive agreements and pay-to-play distribution
| deals.
|
| - Enforce anti-circumvention and anti-retaliation mechanisms.
|
| IMO, from a VC standpoint, it's in YC's interest to give their
| privately funded startups the best chance possible to thrive. If
| that includes destroying solid giants of the industry, so be it.
| ksec wrote:
| Would YC have said the same if Google was YC funded? As much as
| I dislike Google I think some of the stuff they are asking are
| basically asking google to give up on ad or certain business.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| Of course they wouldn't. If it puts green in Paul Graham's
| pocket then YC is all for it.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| Are they considering the ramifications of encouraging courts to
| let businesses loot their rivals for profit?
|
| Seems like the court system may not be the best way to compete
| koolba wrote:
| They're probably advising a startup that does exactly that as
| a service. Lawfare-as-a-service would have incredible
| margins!
| bubblethrow wrote:
| Call me paranoid but I wonder if YC is acting as a proxy for
| OpenAI/Sam Altman here. To frame it differently would they
| behave similarly if OpenAI was a Google Subsidiary / or Google
| was run by Sam Altman.
| threeseed wrote:
| To quote tomhoward's post on here talking about YC's
| relationship with OpenAI:
|
| OK, it was independent but established with funding from YC
| Research and Jessica (among others including Sam himself and
| Elon) and initially operating from YC office space.
|
| So it was always something that was closely linked to YC and
| his involvement with it was generally accepted as being
| harmonious with his role running YC, until it became for-
| profit.
|
| Details here: https://www.wired.com/2015/12/how-elon-musk-
| and-y-combinator...
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| This is just a few rich venture capitalists, and the harvard
| trained founders they back, trying to line their own pockets. AI
| will democratize search regardless
| jrmg wrote:
| _AI will democratize search regardless_
|
| What do you mean by this and how will it happen?
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| companies like perplexity, as the models get better,
| competing on search will be trivial
| benoau wrote:
| Agreed. Because really what happens when we search is we
| run through a gauntlet of contrived websites stuffed with
| ads and trackers and referral links, selling someone else's
| stuff, splitting someone else's content across multiple
| page views, requiring your personal information if you want
| to view the content in its entirety, trying their best to
| be the #1 result for specific phrases that will get traffic
| even though shovelware sites should never be the
| authoritative source for someone else's product or company
| or content, while others pay to have their contrived
| websites be listed before them. None of this is necessary
| with AI.
| azemetre wrote:
| It usually means that they will somehow rat fuck the public
| commons for monetary gain.
|
| Democratic software means three things:
|
| 1. Can you understand it
|
| 2. Can you influence it both now and after your death
|
| 3. Can you destroy it
|
| I don't see how any of these things apply to AI, I'm sure it
| will make some people incredibly wealthy at the expense of
| others.
| almostgotcaught wrote:
| > AI will democratize search regardless
|
| Not a single person in this entire ecosystem knows the
| difference between democratize and liberalize. Hint: AI isn't
| gonna let us vote on aspects of search.
| xnx wrote:
| Google is a "monopoly" because their competitors with massive
| cash reserves (Microsoft, Apple, Meta) are too risk averse to
| compete in the marketplace and are hoping that the courtroom will
| deliver them a win.
| voytec wrote:
| No. The US vs. Google antitrust cases scope are Google's
| monopolistic practices in the search and adtech markets, not
| the browser market. The DOJ pushing for Google to sell Chrome
| is related to the search-related case.
| slater wrote:
| Am I misremembering, or doesn't Apple already have its own
| "stealth" search engine they could deploy at the drop of a hat,
| but instead use it as a bargaining chip w/ Google? Coulda sworn
| I read about it a decade ago in breathless "Is Apple working on
| its own search engine???" articles
| lolinder wrote:
| Which market are you talking about specifically? The
| outstanding cases against them are in search and in adtech.
| This amicus brief is for the Search case (this one [0]).
|
| In search (the relevant market here), Microsoft _does_ compete
| in the marketplace, and Microsoft 's evidence that Google's
| anticompetitive practices have prevented them from gaining any
| meaningful ground in search were a keystone of the government's
| case, including the fact that Microsoft has invested nearly
| $100 billion into Bing [1].
|
| In adtech much the same can be said about Meta.
|
| So, again, I'm curious: in which market does Google _not_ have
| competitors spending massive amounts of cash which Google still
| manages to hold back from being able to meaningfully compete?
|
| [0]
| https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223...
|
| [1]
| https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223...
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| Bing has a brand problem.
| KHRZ wrote:
| You have been a bad user. Bing has been a good Bing.
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| Bing sounds to my ears ridiculous. Is it a Chinese
| pancake? Or Mr. Bing?
|
| Also as a verb it's hard to pronounce.
| aoeusnth1 wrote:
| all that would make sense, but Bing is worse. Wasting money
| building a bad product does not entitle you to market share.
| lolinder wrote:
| That's (a) a different argument than the competition is
| "too risk averse", (b) subjective, and (c) arguably the
| result of a number of flywheel effects. That is, Bing's
| ability to compete is hampered by the fact that Google
| already has an overwhelming majority of search traffic from
| which to learn and improve.
|
| For example, from the second filing I linked to:
|
| > After search began appearing on phones, Google started
| logging information about user location, swipes, and other
| user-related movements. PFOF PP 1003-1004. This data is now
| vital to every aspect of search, including figuring out
| where and when to crawl specific websites, how to index the
| information retrieved from that crawl, what documents to
| retrieve from the index in response to a user query, and
| how to rank the retrieved items. Some elements of Google's
| search engine are trained on 13 months of data--a volume
| that would take Bing over 17 years to accumulate.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| Also, what is Bing's retention on windows? They try to cram
| it down your throat, but people still go straight for
| chrome/google.
| aoeusnth1 wrote:
| That argument might make sense if Bing was as good, but Bing
| is worse. Wasting money building a bad product does not
| entitle you to market share.
| lolinder wrote:
| You just left two comments that say the same thing. I
| replied to the one you left first.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43946577
| luckydata wrote:
| Do you not understand that a search engine is not a business
| by itself? I'm struggling to understand why so many
| supposedly smart people don't seem to grasp the obvious fact
| that Google can only exist in the current form or not at all
| and that any viable business of the same form has to look the
| same. Chrome is not a self standing viable business. YouTube
| is definitely not one either. Ads only works because the
| search engine exists. The search engine without ads would be
| a money pit. It's a synergistic business.
| lolinder wrote:
| This argument can be made about nearly any anticompetitive
| monopoly, and that should not stop the government from
| deciding that, if the business can only exist in its
| current form, then the business should not exist.
|
| You're not entitled to a business model if your business
| model is harmful.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| What evidence do you have that their business model is
| harmful? As a consumer search seems like an extremely
| healthy sector right now with plenty of competition.
| Google just happens to be by far the best.
|
| What exactly do you think is stopping you from using a
| competitor? Can you not find the setting to change your
| default search engine in Chrome? Is Google blocking you
| from making that choice somehow? All the arguments I've
| seen for Google being anti-competitive in this sector are
| extremely weak.
| bdangubic wrote:
| _Microsoft does compete in the marketplace_
|
| They compete much like I compete for People's Most Beautiful
| Man in the World :)
| georgeecollins wrote:
| A shareholder in those companies wouldn't support it. You could
| easily spend $10b trying to win back a fraction of the search
| market and Google could just spend $10b back to greater effect
| to bury you. Google is entrenched at every level: consumer
| awareness, browser, SEO, advertisers, ad-tech.
| timewizard wrote:
| A country as large and prosperous as the United States should
| have more than 4 providers. We should have more than 3 cellular
| companies. We should have more than 8 major ISPs.
|
| These are monopolies. You might not see it because the economy
| is so _over monopolized_ it's hard to have perspective.
|
| YCombinator loves to pretend it invented the idea of startups
| and entreprenourism but those have been vigorous and healthy
| throughout _most_ of America's existence. When they weren't we
| wrote some of the most comprehensive and consumer friendly
| anti-trust laws in the entire world. A feat which still stands
| today.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| We don't have 8 major ISPs. That's a joke.
|
| We have 8 monoplies that live together.
|
| I have never once lived in a house where I had a choice of
| ISP in the US (unless you count getting a mobile router).
| brap wrote:
| It's amazing how twisted the term "anti-competitive" has become.
| Where anti-competitive companies push for anti-competitive
| regulations under the false pretense of preventing anti-
| competitiveness.
|
| Google is being competitive.
|
| YC is being anti-competitive.
|
| Because they suck at competing against Google and they want to
| get unfair, unethical advantage _themselves_.
|
| Imagine spending years and billions building something and then I
| show up and say "hey man that's not fair, give me a slice of that
| thing for free. Oh and also I'm probably going to sell it back to
| you someday for a lot of money".
|
| And before someone tells me "that's the law", I don't care. If
| that's the law then it should be changed. Laws have been written
| (and lobbied) for all sorts of reasons and surprisingly not all
| of them are fair and ethical.
| caesil wrote:
| It's amazing how twisted the term "anti-competitive" has
| become. Where anti-competitive companies push for anti-
| competitive regulations under the false pretense of preventing
| anti-competitiveness.
|
| Standard Oil is being competitive.
|
| The U.S. oil refining and distribution industry is being anti-
| competitive.
|
| Because they suck at competing against Standard Oil and they
| want to get unfair, unethical advantage themselves.
|
| Imagine spending years and billions building something and then
| I show up and say "hey man that's not fair, give me a slice of
| that thing".
|
| And before someone tells me "that's the Sherman Act", I don't
| care. If that's the law then it should be changed. Laws have
| been written (and lobbied) for all sorts of reasons and
| surprisingly not all of them are fair and ethical.
|
| (I hope this illustrates how easy it is to make this exact
| argument about literally any monopoly.)
| visarga wrote:
| Google benefits at scale from infrastructure, systems and laws
| that create the opportunity to make such revenues. It is only
| natural they should not harm the host.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Meanwhile, YC has happily and excitedly fed it's start-ups to
| Google over the years.
|
| So pretty much "We don't want google to develop new things, we
| want them to have buy those from us"
| redczar wrote:
| Can YC prevent startups from selling to Google? Even if they
| could why should they? There is nothing wrong with believing
| Google abuses its monopoly and selling to Google.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| They could almost certainly prevent it in most cases, and
| they likely promote it in some.
| redczar wrote:
| I don't see how they could prevent a sale since they own
| such a small percent of the startup.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| What YC is complaining about is that they've been turned into
| Google's farm league.
|
| The thing is, Google doesn't develop anything new. Everything
| new they make fails horribly, so they can't and don't compete
| with YC in the way that you think.
|
| Examples of failed Google homegrown technologies include:
|
| - Social media: Google Buzz, Google+
|
| - Messaging: Google Chat, Hangouts, actually there's too many
| to list
|
| - Video: Google Video
|
| Almost all of Google's successful products are acquisitions:
|
| - Homegrown: Search, Gmail
|
| - Acquisitions: YouTube, Analytics, most of their adtech stack,
| Android, DeepBrain (the people who did all the AI work at
| Google)
|
| Furthermore, whenever Google or Facebook buys any startup, that
| startup gets an immediate moat and capital injection that can
| be used to crush any other startup that didn't sell out fast
| enough. So YC only has one option for an exit: sell the company
| to Google at a price Google decides.
| scarmig wrote:
| > DeepBrain (the people who did all the AI work at Google)
|
| "DeepBrain" isn't a thing. Google acquired DeepMind, which
| was the second biggest research lab in AI at the time. The
| first biggest was Google Brain. They existed in parallel
| until being merged in 2023.
|
| Brain was entirely homegrown, and it was responsible for
| AIAYN, BERT, PaLM. Which is to say, transformers.
| threeseed wrote:
| a) If YC was so tired of being a funnel to larger companies
| then they should be selecting companies based on their
| ability to be self sustaining companies. Not this hype-
| driven, boom or bust approach to startups they know VCs and
| acquirers want.
|
| b) Google Cloud, Gemini, TPUs, Pixel etc seem like pretty
| important products to me.
| dang wrote:
| > _Meanwhile, YC has happily and excitedly fed it 's start-ups
| to Google over the years._
|
| I'm curious what you've seen or heard that led you to that
| conclusion? It's the opposite of correct.
|
| YC supports what founders want, including if they want to sell
| to $BigCo, but such outcomes are hardly successes for YC. YC's
| success depends on outlier companies growing much larger than
| that.
| bionhoward wrote:
| Google is David and OpenAI is Goliath, excessively nerfing Google
| will put us all at the mercy of closed AI.
|
| Gemini (the app, not the API or AI studio) is one of the few
| places where we can use frontier generative AI without a
| "customer noncompete" (you know, the one where they compete with
| us and then say we're not allowed to compete back) ... if you use
| Claude or OpenAI or Grok, you're prohibited from training on your
| chat logs, or even using the thing to develop AI. Not so with
| Gemini app.
|
| Too bad you have to lose your chat history just to deactivate
| model training ("Gemini apps activity" conflates opt-out of
| training with opt-out of storing chat history)
|
| I don't know much about the ads space but I just hope going after
| Google doesn't create a vacuum that gets filled by an even worse
| monopoly (OpenAI)
| azemetre wrote:
| Really odd that the trillionaire dollar corporation that prints
| billions of dollars in pure profit every quarter due to
| monopolistic and anti-democratic policies is the David, the
| weak feeble underdog in this story, compared to OpenAI that is
| wildly unprofitable and has no real strategy outside of burning
| money.
|
| There has been no time in human history where destroying
| monopolies were a bad thing.
| bionhoward wrote:
| Isn't Microsoft also a trillion dollar corporation? If we add
| their 39% market share in foundation models (likely due to
| enterprise use of Azure OpenAI Service) to OpenAI's 9% market
| share, the result is around 48% market share, compared to
| Google's 15%, which is less than half of the MSFT/OAI
| pair...not to mention a cursory comparison of Gemini vs
| ChatGPT apps.
|
| Just because OpenAI isn't in "extraction mode" yet doesn't
| mean it's not a scary monopoly.
|
| Source, figure 2 in: [1] https://iot-analytics.com/leading-
| generative-ai-companies/
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yes, Microsoft is one of the world's biggest companies, and
| it underinvests in research and development, preferring to
| hoard cash. OpenAI is in effect a client state of Microsoft
| that Microsoft is using to make Google look flat-footed and
| force them to enter the chatbot market. Nothing that
| transpires between Microsoft and OpenAI is really at arms'
| length. Personally, I don't think this is a positive
| development for the industry or for humanity in generally.
| We were doing better before we had sycophantic robots
| confidently misleading us.
| keeda wrote:
| _> Yes, Microsoft is one of the world 's biggest
| companies, and it underinvests in research and
| development, preferring to hoard cash._
|
| I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but:
|
| 1. If you're talking about basic research, Microsoft
| Research has been a thing since the 90's, is highly
| prestigious, and has published far more papers than
| Google, based on their respective research websites. (To
| be fair, Google started much later.)
|
| 2. If you're talking about product development, MSFT is
| vastly more diversified in terms of revenues than any of
| the "Magnificent 7" because of their varied product
| lineup.
|
| 3. The basis of their relationship with OpenAI is
| literally them investing double digit billions to catch
| up on the AI race once they recognized the opportunity.
|
| _> OpenAI is in effect a client state of Microsoft that
| Microsoft is using to make Google look flat-footed and
| force them to enter the chatbot market._
|
| I'm not sure about Microsoft's influence in OpenAI's
| strategy, but it's pretty clear Google was caught
| flatfooted by their own strategy of locking away
| transformer technology behind products that didn't
| threaten their search monopoly. There's a reason the
| researchers who invented transformers had to leave and
| start a different company to bring its true potential to
| the market. Which, even if it was just a chatbot, is what
| has kicked off the AI boom.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Everyone I've encountered thinks of Microsoft Research as
| a bad pattern, that includes all the refugees from MSR
| Silicon Valley who joined Google after Microsoft
| dissolved it in 2014. Perhaps it is a bias of the people
| I've worked with in my career but the core early
| contributors at Google who came from DEC WRL also viewed
| separate research divisions as a bad idea.
|
| Anyway my statement was meant to be objective. Look at
| how much Microsoft spends on R&D for the last 25 years,
| compared to the amount Google spends, in absolute terms
| and as a fraction of revenues.
| keeda wrote:
| Having a separate research division being an anti-pattern
| is an interesting topic! I remember getting into a
| related discussion almost a decade ago with a professor
| who left academia to join Google, his point being
| product-driven R&D was strictly "better" than "bluesky"
| R&D because (IIRC) the work is more directly related to
| market needs.
|
| My contention was that this ignores the transformative
| potential of long-range theoretical research. For
| instance, somehow very few consider Xerox PARC to be an
| anti-pattern.
|
| From what I hear in the last few years even MSR has
| changed its ways to steer its research more in line with
| needs of product divisions, and I actually consider that
| a loss. Who knows what paradigm-shifting inventions like
| GenAI are being steered away from?
|
| > Look at how much Microsoft spends on R&D for the last
| 25 years, compared to the amount Google spends, in
| absolute terms and as a fraction of revenues.
|
| Hmm, at the risk of relying on sycophantic bots, AI
| overviews suggest most recently Microsoft spent 13.2% of
| revenues vs 14.8% for Google (and 30% for Meta!) Of
| course even a single % point is in the millions at their
| scale, but there are a ton of confounding factors
| including differing product margins and payscales (and
| CEO obsessions like Metaverse!) At least at a quick
| glance MSFT and GOOG seem comparable.
|
| The problem here is how "R&D" is defined. Unfortunately,
| even day-to-day product development is lumped in with
| R&D. I've done "R&D" in academia, private research firms,
| and big tech, and they are all poles apart. "Actual" R&D
| is very researchy, often based in discovering new aspects
| of reality, whereas "product" R&D is just regular product
| development. Which could be considered discovering new
| aspects of the market I suppose. They are both valuable
| but on very differnt timelines.
| azemetre wrote:
| Maybe MSFT is King Saul in your biblical metaphor.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| OpenAI is hardly a Goliath. It has no real moat, and is trying
| to build a business around a feature. But other businesses
| already have platforms with billions of users to deploy those
| features to.
| nicce wrote:
| As others have pointed out, we should see the forest from the
| trees. Microsoft is a huge OpenAI redistributor, also Apple.
| Everyone knows "ChatGPT". While the company size might not be
| monopoly, based on a larger userbase, it is.
| nickfromseattle wrote:
| How much blame do we assign Sundar for this outcome? Yes, he was
| just continuing where Larry / Sergey left off, but it did happen
| under his watch.
|
| Is there anything he could have done to avoid this outcome? In a
| way that Google shareholders would have found acceptable?
|
| Or was this outcome inevitable?
| kccqzy wrote:
| Yes. Sundar could have fought harder against the internal
| forces that thought cloud was just a fad and made Google a
| stronger player in Cloud. Then, Google would not have been as
| reliant on search/ads.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| Did the laws of physics change or something before Sundar
| became CEO?
|
| NO? Yeah. I thought so as well
|
| Then the outcome was inevitable.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| AI is the most competitive and healthy large industry I have
| seen. Having a search index helps just like having tweets for
| x.ai, but data isn't the deciding factor.
| fundaThree wrote:
| It's not the deciding factor _yet_. You can bet the IP hammer
| is going to swing in again once the big players have been
| decided just to keep the small players out.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Competitive maybe. Healthy almost certainly not. My definition
| for healthy industries is being able to fund operations and
| development either by revenues or debt. Not by continuously
| raising capital from investors and then burning it on hardware
| and operating costs.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| > but data isn't the deciding factor.
|
| That remains to be seen. The fear is that Google can leverage
| its large search index to produce better LLM experiences and
| win in that market too.
| beambot wrote:
| This feels a bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face...
|
| Unlike Microsoft's antitrust case of the 90s, Google seems much
| less anti-competitive by nature. Sure, they have unprecedented
| scale in search... but even that hegemony is being threatened by
| others in AI.
|
| If anything, going after Google with a DoJ kludgel will cause a
| servere freeze on startup M&A across all of FAANG. With IPO
| windows (mostly) closed, this removes the biggest exit dynamic
| the startup ecosystem has at its disposal. This is not a good
| thing from my perspective, and would seem counter to YC's
| interests.
|
| Someone steelman this for me...?
| lolinder wrote:
| > seems much less anti-competitive by nature
|
| It _seems_ much less, but I don 't believe it _is_ much less
| anticompetitive. We 're talking about the search market
| specifically in this case, and the government has presented
| strong evidence that Google is:
|
| * Using its position in other markets (browser, mobile) to
| ensure that others can't compete in search.
|
| * Paying the major _other_ vendors in those markets (browser,
| mobile) enormous sums of money to ensure that ~100% of the
| market share in both markets is used to prop up their lead in
| search.
|
| Both of these things are pretty blatantly anticompetitive:
| they're competing not primarily based on the quality of their
| product offering but instead based on their pre-existing
| revenue streams and their leads in other markets.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Google is now a basic utility. Unless you don't believe in
| basic public goods, allowing equitable access to the utility
| benefits everyone, especially businesses.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Public goods is an economics term with an actual meaning, and
| it has nothing to do with public utilities.
|
| https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/public-good.asp
| rexpop wrote:
| Interesting distinction!
|
| Utilities and infrastructure can be considered public goods
| insofar as they have the characteristics of non-rivalry and
| non-excludability, meaning that one person's use of them
| does not diminish another person's ability to use them and
| it is difficult to prevent others from using them even if
| they have not contributed to their provision.
|
| However, utilities _are_ typically excludable (service can
| be cut off for non-payment) and rivalrous to some extent
| (there are capacity limits and usage can impact others), so
| they are better classified as private or quasi-public
| goods.
|
| So why is this idea so prevalent: that public goods should
| be public utilities?
|
| A key driver behind the transformation of some public goods
| into regulated public utilities seems to be the theory of
| "natural monopoly," which posits that certain industries
| are most efficiently served by a single provider, making
| competition impractical or wasteful. Then in 1919 the
| economic theory of public goods, notably developed by Erik
| Lindahl, further contributed to the myth by arguing that
| public goods should be funded through taxation based on
| individual benefit. This reinforced the notion that the
| government should organize and finance such goods, often
| through public utility models.
|
| So I wouldn't say public goods have _nothing_ to do with
| public utilities.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Fair, definitionally they are entirely distinct. In the
| real world, the concepts interact. The number one in
| distinct from the number two, but they relate and
| interact in a vast number of ways.
|
| As it relates to Google search, I think it is very
| difficult to construct an argument that search is a
| natural monopoly. There's no limitations on parallel
| processes the way there are with roads or railroads or
| electric infrastructure. In fact, people have access to a
| long list of competitors at all times.
|
| You can make it much better case that they are engaging
| in monopolistic practices, which is a claim very
| different from a natural constraint
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > it has nothing to do with public utilities.
|
| This doesn't follow from the linked article. Taxes can be
| levied in various ways, oftentimes related to usage.
| Involving a private entity doesn't suddenly change the
| nature of the thing. There's a marked difference between a
| sack of flour and my electric meter.
|
| We as a society decide to make certain things into public
| goods. This is frequently the choice for natural
| monopolies.
|
| Critiquing the article you linked - when taken literally
| non-rivalrous applies to approximately nothing. Non-
| excludability is simply a matter of law, which is a matter
| of what the voting public wants.
| HaZeust wrote:
| Public goods are non-excludable (impossible to prevent anyone
| from using the good) and non-rivalrous (one person's use
| doesn't diminish the availability for others). Google doesn't
| match the criteria.
| photonthug wrote:
| Interesting definition. This applies to almost literally
| nothing except Jefferson's candle and IP. Actual literal
| fire is considered worthless and IP is bazillions of
| dollars of closely guarded secrets. Public transits,
| seemingly unlimited water sources, or neighborhood parks
| all suffer from overcrowding so this diminishing
| availability thing is tough to meet
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| You've cherrypicked the phrase "public good" and applied an
| out of context definition that doesn't fit. The thing being
| discussed was public utilities. Those are a sort of public
| good in the same sense that public parks, public libraries,
| and free education are all public goods.
|
| The local electric utility isn't "non-excludable" (unless
| you ignore criminal law) but it is certainly a public
| utility, a natural monopoly, and public good by most
| metrics. The vast majority of jurisdictions regulate it
| accordingly.
| felineflock wrote:
| YC should benefit most from an ecosystem where distribution
| channels (search, ads, etc) are not monopolized.
|
| Startups ideally should compete on merit, not on whether they
| are eventually allowed access to Google's platforms or get
| acquired. Startups can still exit via IPO, PE acquisition,
| cross-industry buyers or M&A.
|
| From this POV, Google's control over the adtech stack may be
| seen as gatekeeping digital advertising, which many YC
| companies rely on.
| croes wrote:
| Google killed the Edge browser with the same tricks MS used.
|
| The use money and Google Play services to hinder competition.
|
| Not really less anti-competitive.
| skybrian wrote:
| By one measure, Edge has 5% market share, twice that of
| Firefox.
|
| On Desktop it's 13%, which is second place.
|
| https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-
| share/desktop/worl...
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Does that chart differentiate between before and after edge
| internals became chromium though?
| skybrian wrote:
| Does it matter? It seems like distribution is more
| important than the internals.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| When people say that Google killed the Edge browser they
| generally mean that MS gave up on maintaining their own
| browser engine and the world moved that much closer to a
| web monoculture. To put this in historical perspective, a
| reskinned IE would not have been a meaningful or useful
| competitor to IE.
| skybrian wrote:
| I don't think it's a meaningful comparison because
| Microsoft has the resources to fork Chromium if they need
| to. But since it works pretty well, there's little
| incentive to do that. It would be like Electron forking
| V8 for no reason.
| const_cast wrote:
| Corporate is a huge, huge part of this.
|
| Lots of people working just use whatever browser is
| preloaded. In addition, you can't even download another
| browser in a lot of environments.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| Anecdotal, but I wanted to give Edge a chance. I found out
| that it is quite possibly the most feature-creep rich browser
| on the market. Its sole purpose seems to be "let Microsoft
| monitor your entire browsing experience".
|
| I also feel like Microsoft's heavy handed dark patterns trick
| less computer savvy people into using it, and those people
| probably aren't aware of how much info Microsoft is
| collecting about them. As a result, I seriously question that
| Edge's market share is organic because people actually like
| it.
| sofixa wrote:
| Google didn't kill the Edge browser, Microsoft gave up. If
| Mozilla can have an independent from scratch browser,
| Microsoft of all companies could have one too. It's just
| easier and cheaper for them to rebrand Chromium and call it a
| day.
|
| And I'm not buying the argument that progress on the Web
| (tech stack) should stop so that it's easier to make/maintain
| a browser.
| hollerith wrote:
| Some of us would have preferred for "progress" on the web
| stack to have stopped about 20 years ago.
| ewoodrich wrote:
| I grew up in the dial-up era but personally think it's
| _incredibly_ cool how I am able to use a full featured
| IDE, flash an ESP-32 or my phone via USB, make low
| latency Zoom /Teams calls with screen sharing, run
| language agnostic bytecode and low level GPU access, all
| in a highly secure sandbox on my Macbook, Linux/Windows
| Thinkpad, tablet and phone.
| r0m4n0 wrote:
| As others have pointed out, YC is definitely trying to get some
| of that Google money. Another important aspect that benefits YC
| is a turn of events that would improve the talent pool. Google
| retains tens of thousands of software engineers, I'd argue maybe
| the biggest reserve in existence. It's the largest population of
| experienced engineers that won't leave because the money and
| circumstances are too good. Startups would benefit if these
| circumstances changed
| gnaman wrote:
| that is not a google problem that is a big tech problem. people
| move where the money is and the money flows to google easily
| because ads is such a lucrative business. if you force the
| talent pool to move off google, meta or amazon will easily
| absorb them
| r0m4n0 wrote:
| More talent with less demand means lower wages and/or worse
| benefits. My situation at Google can't be matched at Amazon
| or Meta (remote work, pay, WLB, other benefits). I'd have to
| compromise if the climate changes but not much will make me
| leave... ever. I have a friend that has been trying to get me
| to join a startup for years and the risk just isn't worth the
| reward
| hermannj314 wrote:
| Is an Amicus brief just a way the legal profession sells ad space
| in high profile cases?
|
| You pay a lawyer a few thousand bucks to write some populist
| bromides you get to slap your name in the news. Seems like a good
| ROI.
| snielson wrote:
| The solution proposed by Kagi--separate the search index from the
| rest of Google--seems to make the most sense. Kagi explains it
| more here: https://blog.kagi.com/dawn-new-era-search
| luckydata wrote:
| It's such a ridiculous proposal that would completely destroy
| Google's business. If that's the goal fine, but let's not
| pretend that any of those remedies are anything beyond a death
| sentence.
| ketzo wrote:
| Really? Google would still have an astonishingly large lead
| in the ad markets.
| riku_iki wrote:
| Not sure how they could hold lead in case they lose search
| traffic.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| If they're dominating or one of only two or three important
| options in _multiple other areas_ and the index is the only
| reason... I mean, that 's a strong argument both that they're
| monopolists _and_ that they 're terrible at allocating the
| enormous amount of capital they have. That's really the only
| thing keeping them around? All their other lines of business
| _collectively_ aren 't enough to keep them alive? Yikes,
| _scathing_ indictment.
| riku_iki wrote:
| > It's such a ridiculous proposal that would completely
| destroy Google's business.
|
| it won't. My bet is that bing and some other indexes are 95%
| Ok for average Joe. But relevance ranking is much tougher
| problem, and "google.com" is household brand with many other
| functions(maps, news, stocks, weather, knowledge graph,
| shopping, videos), and that's what is foundation of google
| monopoly.
|
| I think this shared index thing will actually kill
| competition even more, since every players will use only
| index owned by google now.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| At this point, why are you so concerned about Google's
| business?
|
| This was 10 years ago. I could argue a moral Superior that
| Google possessed over Microsoft and Facebook, but man those
| days are looooooong gone.
| const_cast wrote:
| I don't know, I don't think it will.
|
| I mean, they're still going to be the number 1 name in adtech
| and analytics. And they're still gonna have pretty decent
| personalized ads because of analytics.
|
| Plus, that just one part of their business. There's also
| Android, which is a money printing machine with the Google
| Store (although that's under attack too).
| mullingitover wrote:
| Crawling the internet is a natural monopoly. Nobody wants an
| endless stream of bots crawling their site, so googlebot wins
| because they're the dominant search engine.
|
| It makes sense to break that out so everyone has access to the
| same dataset at FRAND pricing.
|
| My heart just wants Google to burn to the ground, but my brain
| says this is the more reasonable approach.
| hkpack wrote:
| Most of the tech is set for being a monopoly due to the
| negligible variable cost associated with serving a customer.
|
| Thus being even slightly in front of others is reinforced and
| the gap only widens.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| > Crawling the internet is a natural monopoly.
|
| How so?
|
| A caching proxy costs you almost nothing and will serve
| thousands of requests per second on ancient hardware.
| Actually there's never been a better time in the history of
| the Internet to have competing search engines since there's
| never been so much abundance of performance, bandwidth, and
| software available at historic low prices or for free.
| stackskipton wrote:
| Not everyone wants to deal with caching proxy because they
| think the load on their site under normal operations is
| fine if it's rendered server side.
| Onavo wrote:
| In the past month there were dozens of posts about using
| proof of work and other methods to defeat crawlers. I don't
| think most websites tolerate heavy crawling in the era of
| Vercel/AWS's serverless "per request" and bandwidth
| billing.
| immibis wrote:
| You don't get to tell site owners what to do. The actual
| facts on the ground are that they're trying to block your
| bot. It would be nice if they didn't block your bot, but
| the other, completely unnatural and advertising-driven,
| monopoly of hosting providers with insane per-request costs
| makes that impossible until they switch away.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| They try to block your bot _because_ Google is a monopoly
| and there 's little to no cost for blocking everything
| except Google.
|
| This isn't a "natural" monopoly, it's more like Internet
| Explorer 6.0 and everyone designing their sites to use
| ActiveX and IE-specific quirks.
| luckylion wrote:
| One possible answer: pay them for their trouble until you
| provide value to them, e.g. by paying some fraction of a
| cent for each (document) request.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Cool, you wanna solve micropayments now or wait until
| we've got cold fusion rolling first...?
| threeseed wrote:
| > The actual facts on the ground are that they're trying
| to block your bot
|
| Based on what evidence.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Costs almost nothing, but returns even less.*
|
| There are so many other bots/scrapers out there that
| literally return zero that I don't blame site owners for
| blocking all bots except googlebot.
|
| Would it be nice if they also allowed altruist-bot or
| common-crawler-bot? Maybe, but that's their call and a lot
| of them have made it on a rational basis.
|
| * - or is perceived to return
| Aurornis wrote:
| > that I don't blame site owners for blocking all bots
| except googlebot.
|
| I doubt this is happening outside of a few small hobbyist
| websites where crawler traffic looks significant relative
| to human traffic. Even among those, it's so common to
| move to static hosting with essentially zero cost and/or
| sign up for free tiers of CDNs that it's just not worth
| it outside of edge cases like trying to host public-
| facing Gitlab instances with large projects.
|
| Even then, the ROI on setting up proper caching and rate
| limiting far outweighs the ROI on trying to play whack-a-
| mole with non-Google bots.
|
| Even if someone did go to all the lengths to try to block
| the majority of bots, I have a really hard time believing
| they wouldn't take the extra 10 minutes to look up the
| other major crawlers and put those on the allow list,
| too.
|
| This whole argument about sites going to great lengths to
| block search indexers but then stopping just short of
| allowing a couple more of the well-known ones feels like
| mental gymnastics for a situation that doesn't occur.
| luckylion wrote:
| Regarding allowlisting the other major crawlers: I've
| never seen any significant amount of traffic coming from
| anything but Google or Bing. There's the occasional click
| from one of the resellers (ecosia, brave search,
| duckduckgo etc), but that's about it. Yahoo? haven't seen
| them in ages, except in Japan. Baidu or Yandex? might be
| relevant if you're in their primary markets, but I've
| never seen them. Huawei's Petal Search? Apple Search?
| Nothing. Ahrefs & friends? No need to crawl _my_ website,
| even if I wanted to use them for competitor analysis.
|
| So practically, there's very little value in allowing
| those. I usually don't bother blocking them, but if my
| content wasn't easy to cache, I probably would.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > sites going to great lengths to block search indexers
|
| That's not it. They're going to great lengths to block
| all bot traffic because of abusive and generally
| incompetent actors chewing through their resources. I'll
| cite that anubis has made the front page of HN several
| times within the past couple months. It is far from the
| first or only solution in that space, merely one of many
| alternatives to the solutions provided by centralized
| services such as cloudflare.
| threeseed wrote:
| > that I don't blame site owners for blocking all bots
| except googlebot
|
| I run a number of sites with decent traffic and the
| amount of spam/scam requests outnumbers crawling bots
| 1000 to 1.
|
| I would guess that the number of sites allowing just
| Googlebot is 0.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://commoncrawl.org/
|
| This is similar to the natural monopoly of root DNS servers
| (managed as a public good). There is no reason more money
| couldn't go into either Common Crawl, or something like it.
| The Internet Archive can persist the data for ~$2/GB in
| perpetuity (although storing it elsewhere is also fine imho)
| as the storage system of last resort. How you provide access
| to this data is, I argue, similar to how access to science
| datasets is provided by custodian institutions (examples
| would be NOAA, CERN, etc).
|
| Build foundations on public goods, very broadly speaking
| (think OSI model, but for entire systems). This helps society
| avoid the grasp of Big Tech and their endless desire to build
| moats for value capture.
| vasco wrote:
| > The Internet Archive can persist the data for ~$2/GB in
| perpetuity
|
| No they can't but do you have a source?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://help.archive.org/help/archive-org-information/
| and first hand conversations with their engineering team
|
| > We estimate that permanent storage costs us
| approximately $2.00US per gigabyte.
|
| https://webservices.archive.org/pages/vault/
|
| > Vault offers a low-cost pricing model based on a one-
| time price per-gigabyte/terabyte for data deposited in
| the system, with no additional annual storage fees or
| data egress costs.
|
| https://blog.dshr.org/2017/08/economic-model-of-long-
| term-st...
| dmoy wrote:
| What's the read throughout to get the data back out, and
| does it scale to what you'd need to have N search indexes
| building on top of this shared crawl?
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| they could charge data processing costs for reads
| bbarnett wrote:
| One problem, it leaves one place to censor.
|
| I agree that each front end should do it, but you can bet
| it will be a core service.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Wait, is the suggestion here just about crawling and
| storing the data? That's a very different thing than
| "Google's search index"... And yeah, I would agree that it
| is undifferentiated.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| If you have access to archived crawls, anyone can build
| and serve an index, or model weights (gpt).
| mullingitover wrote:
| The problem with this is in the vein of `Requires immediate
| total cooperation from everybody at once` if it's going to
| replace googlebot. Everyone who only allows googlebot would
| need to change and allow ccbot instead.
|
| It's already the case that googlebot is the common
| denominator bot that's allowed everywhere, ccbot not so
| much.
| CPLX wrote:
| I mean if it's created as part of setting the global
| rules for the internet you could just make it opt out.
| xp84 wrote:
| Wouldn't a decent solution, if some action happened where
| Google was divesting the crawler stuff, be to just do
| like browser user agents have always done (in that case
| multiple times to comical degrees)? Something like
| 'Googlebot/3.1 (successor, CommonCrawl 1.0)'
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Lots of good replies to your comment already. I'd also
| offer up Cloudflare offering the option to crawl customer
| origins, with them shipping the compressed archives off
| to Common Crawl for storage. This gives site admins and
| owners control over the crawling, and reduces unnecessary
| load as someone like Cloudflare can manage the crawler
| worker queue and network shipping internally.
|
| (Cloudflare customer, no other affiliation)
| kzrdude wrote:
| That says that if google switches over to ccbot then the
| rest will follow.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Hosting costs are so minimal today that I don't think
| crawling is a natural monopoly. How much would it really
| cost a site to be crawled by 100 search engines?
| everforward wrote:
| A potentially shocking amount depending on the desired
| freshness if the bot isn't custom tailored per site. I
| worked at a job posting site and Googlebot would nearly
| take down our search infrastructure because it crawled
| jobs via searching rather than the index.
|
| Bots are typically tuned to work with generic sites over
| crawling efficiently.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Where is the cost coming from? Wouldn't a crawler mostly
| just accessing cached static assets served by CDN?
|
| And what do you mean by your search infrastructure? Are
| you talking about elasticsearch or some equivalent?
| everforward wrote:
| No, in our case they were indexing job posts by sending
| search requests. Ie instead of pulling down the JSON
| files of jobs, they would search for them by sending
| stuff like "New York City, New York software engineer" to
| our search. Generally not cached because the searches
| weren't something humans would search for (they'd use the
| location drop down).
|
| I didn't work on search, but yeah, something like
| Elasticsearch. Googlebot was a majority of our search
| traffic at times.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Are sites really that averse to having a few more crawlers
| than they already do? It would seem that it's only a monopoly
| insofar as it's really expensive to do and almost nobody else
| thinks they can recoup the cost.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| A "few" more would be fine - but the sheer scale of the
| malicious AI training bot crawling that's happening now is
| enough to cause real availability problems (and expense)
| for numerous sites.
|
| One web forum I regularly read went through a patch a few
| months ago where it was unavailable for about 90% of the
| time due to being hammered by crawlers. It's only up again
| now because the owner managed to find a way to block them
| that hasn't yet been circumvented.
|
| So it's easy to see why people would allow googlebot and
| little else.
| natebc wrote:
| A few?
|
| We routinely are fighting off hundreds of bots at any
| moment. Thousands and Thousands per day, easily. US, China,
| Brazil from hundreds of different IPs, dozens of different
| (and falsified!) user agents all ignoring robots.txt and
| pushing over services that are needed by human beings
| trying to get work done.
|
| EDIT: Just checked our anubis stats for the last 24h
|
| CHALLENGE: 829,586
|
| DENY: 621,462
|
| ALLOW: 96,810
|
| This is with a pretty aggressive "DENY" rule for a lot of
| the AI related bots and on 2 pretty small sites at $JOB. We
| have hundreds, if not thousands of different sites that
| aren't protected by Anubis (yet).
|
| Anubis and efforts like it are a xesend for companies that
| don't want to pay off Cloudflare or some other "security"
| company peddling a WAF.
| zrm wrote:
| This seems like two different issues.
|
| One is, suppose there are a thousand search engine bots.
| Then what you want is some standard facility to say
| "please give me a list of every resources on this site
| that has changed since <timestamp>" so they can each get
| a diff from the last time they crawled your site.
| Uploading each resource on the site to each of a thousand
| bots _once_ is going to be irrelevant to a site serving
| millions of users (because it 's a trivial percentage)
| and to a site with a small amount of content (because
| it's a small absolute number), which together constitute
| the vast majority of all sites.
|
| The other is, there are aggressive bots that will try to
| scrape your entire site five times a day even if nothing
| has changed and ignore robots.txt. But then you set traps
| like disallowing something in robots.txt and then ban
| anything that tries to access it, which doesn't affect
| legitimate search engine crawlers because they respect
| robots.txt.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > then you set traps like disallowing something in
| robots.txt and then ban anything that tries to access it
|
| That doesn't work at all when the scraper rapidly rotates
| IPs from different ASNs because you can't differentiate
| the legitimate from the abusive traffic on a per-request
| basis. All you can be certain of is that a significant
| portion of your traffic is abusive.
|
| That results in aggressive filtering schemes which in
| turn means permitted bots must be whitelisted on a case
| by case basis.
| wslh wrote:
| > so googlebot wins because they're the dominant search
| engine.
|
| I think it's also important to highlight that sites
| explicitly choose which bots to allow in their robots.txt
| files, prioritizing Google which reinforces its position as
| the de-facto monopoly. Even when other bots are technically
| able to crawl them.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Of all the bad ideas I've heard of where to slice Google to
| break it up, this... Is actually the best idea.
|
| The indexer, without direct Google influence, is primarily
| incentivized to play nice with site administrators. This
| gives them reasons to improve consideration of both network
| integrity and privacy concerns (though Google has generally
| been good about these things, I think the damage is done
| regarding privacy that the brand name is toxic, regardless of
| the behaviors).
| tananaev wrote:
| Google search is a monopoly not because of crawling. It's
| because of the all the data it knows about website stats and
| user behavior. Original Google idea of ranking based on links
| doesn't work because it's too easily gamed. You have to know
| what websites are good based on user preferences and that's
| where you need to have data. It's impossible to build
| anything similar to Google without access to large amounts of
| user data.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Page ranking sounds like a perfect application of
| artificial intelligence.
|
| If China can apply it for total information awareness on
| their population, Google can apply it on page reliability
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| I'm fairly certain many people have already tried to
| apply magical AI pixie dust to this problem. Presumably
| it isn't so simple in practice.
| luckylion wrote:
| Sounds like you're implying that they are using Google
| Analytics to feed their ranking, but that's much easier to
| game than links are. User-signals on SERP clicks? There's a
| niche industry supplying those to SEOs (I've seen it a few
| times, I haven't seen it have any reliable impact).
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Crawling the internet is a natural monopoly. Nobody wants
| an endless stream of bots crawling their site,
|
| Companies want traffic from any source they can get. They
| welcome every search engine crawler that comes along because
| every little exposure translates to incremental chances at
| revenue or growing audience.
|
| I doubt many people are doing things to allow Googlebot but
| also ban other search crawlers.
|
| > My heart just wants Google to burn to the ground
|
| I think there's a lot of that in this thread and it's opening
| the door to some mental gymnastics like the above claim about
| Google being the only crawler allowed to index the internet.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| CommonCrawl is not a vlaid comparison. Most robots.txt target
| CCBot.
| rubitxxx2 wrote:
| Assuming the simplified diagram of Google's architecture, sure,
| it looks like you're just splitting off a well-isolated part,
| but it would be a significant hardship to do it in reality.
|
| Why not also require Apple to split off only the phone and
| messaging part of its iPhone, Meta to split off only the user
| feed data, and for the U.S. federal government to run only out
| of Washington D.C.?
|
| This isn't the breakup of AT&T in the early 1980s where you
| could say all the equipment and wiring just now belongs to
| separate entities. (It wasn't that simple, but it wasn't like
| trying to extract an organ.)
|
| I think people have to understand that and know that what
| they're doing is killing Google, and it was already on its way
| into mind-numbed enterprise territory.
| 486sx33 wrote:
| Google killed Google. They should not have decided to become
| evil. Search can easily be removed, G Suite should be
| separate too.
| freedomben wrote:
| > Search can easily be removed
|
| This strikes me like "two easy steps to draw an owl. First
| draw the head, then draw the body". I generally support
| some sort of breakup, but hand waving the complexities away
| is not going to do anybody any good
| lolinder wrote:
| > Apple to split off only the phone and messaging part of its
| iPhone
|
| Ooh, can we? My wife is super jealous of my ability to
| install custom apps for phone calls and messaging on Android,
| it'd be great if Apple would open theirs up to competition.
| Competition in the SMS app space would also likely help break
| up the usage of iMessage as a tool to pressure people into
| getting an iPhone so they get the blue bubble.
| rubitxxx2 wrote:
| > Ooh, can we?
|
| If the dream of a Star Trek future reputation-based
| government run by AI which secretly manipulates the vote
| comes true, yes we can!
|
| Either that or we could organize competitors to lobby the
| US or EU for more lawsuits in exchange for billions in
| kickbacks! (Not implying anything by this.)
| gamblor956 wrote:
| You jest, but splitting out just certain Internet Explorer
| features was part of the Microsoft antitrust resolution. It's
| what made Chrome's ascendancy possible.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I mean it's just data. You can just copy it and hand it over
| to a newly formed competing entity.
|
| You're not even really dealing with any of these shared
| infrastructure public property private property merged
| infrastructure issues.
|
| Yeah sure. There's mountains of racks of servers, but those
| aren't that hard to get tariffs TBD.
|
| I think it'll be interesting just to try and find some
| collection of ex Google execs who had actually like to go
| back to the do no evil days, and just hand them a copy of all
| the data.
|
| I simply don't think we have the properly and elected set of
| officials to implement antitrust of any scale. DOJ is now
| permanently politicized and corrupt, and citizens United
| means corps can outspend "the people" lavishly.
|
| Antitrust would mean a more diverse and resilient supply
| chain, creativity, more employment, more local manufacturing,
| a reversal of the "awful customer service" as a default,
| better prices, a less corrupt government, better products,
| more economic mobility, and, dare I say it, more freedom.
|
| Actually, let me expound upon the somewhat nebulous idea of
| more freedom. I think we all hear about Shadow banning or
| outright banning with utter silence and no appeals process
| for large internet companies that have a complete monopoly on
| some critical aspect of Internet usage.
|
| If these companies enabled by their cartel control, decide
| they don't like you or are told by a government not to like
| you, it is approaching a bigger burden as being denied the
| ability to drive.
|
| Not a single one of those is something oligarchs or a
| corporatocracy has the slightest interest in
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| At Blekko we advocated for this as well.
|
| Google has two interlocked monopolies, one is the search index
| and the other is their advertising service. We often joked that
| if Google reasonable and non-discriminatory priced access to
| their index, both to themselves and to others, AND they allowed
| someone to put what ever ads they wanted on those results. That
| change the landscape dramatically.
|
| Google would carve out their crawler/indexer/ranker business
| and sell access to themselves and others which would allow that
| business an income that did _NOT_ go back to the parent company
| (had to be disbursed inside as capex or opex for the business).
|
| Then front ends would have a good shot, DDG for example could
| front the index with the value proposition of privacy. Someone
| else could front the index with a value proposition of no-ads
| ever. A third party might front that index attuned to specific
| use cases like literature search.
|
| It would be a very different world.
| indolering wrote:
| Then why do we see all of these alt search engines and SEO
| services building out independent indexes? Why don't the
| competitors cooperate in this fashion already?
| mondrian wrote:
| Because everyone worships Thiel's "competition is for
| losers" and dreams of being a monopoly. Monopolies being
| the logical outcome of a deregulated environment, for which
| these companies lobby.
| dantheman wrote:
| Throughout history there are very few monopolies and they
| don't normally last that long; that is unless they get
| are granted special privileges by the government.
| mondrian wrote:
| Concentration is the default in an unregulated
| environment. Sure pure monopolies with 100% market
| control are rare but concentration is rampant. A handful
| of companies dominating tech, airlines, banks, media.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Concentration seems much more prevalent in heavily
| regulated markets e.g. utilities / airlines. In many
| cases regulators have even encouraged this e.g.finance.
|
| There is no default for unregulated markets. It's a
| question of whether the economies of scale outweigh the
| added costs from the complexity that scale requires. It
| costs close to 100x as much to build 100 houses, run 100
| restaurants, or operate 100 trucks as it does to do 1.
| That's why these industries are not very concentrated.
| Whereas it costs nowhere close to 100x for a software or
| financial services company to serve 100x thee customers,
| so software and finance are very concentrated.
|
| The effect of regulation is typically to increase
| concentration because the cost of compliance actually
| tends to scale very well. So businesses that grow face an
| decreasing regulatory compliance cost as a percent of
| revenue.
| guhcampos wrote:
| You are comparing Apples and Oranges. You just can't
| compare the barrier of entry for Software business and an
| Airline, even without any regulations. It's just orders
| of magnitude more expensive to buy an airplane than a
| laptop, and most utilities are natural monopolies so they
| behave fundamentally different.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Most planes are leased. The capex for an airline isn't
| anything especially high if they don't want it to be.
| mondrian wrote:
| Home building is interesting because I think a major
| blocker to monopoly-forming is the vastly heterogenous
| and complicated regulatory landscape, with building codes
| varying wildly from place to place. So you get a bunch of
| locally-specialized builders.
|
| Regulation can increase concentration in a high
| corruption/cronyism environment -- regulatory capture and
| regulatory moats. There is plenty of that happening.
|
| In building, I think we have local-concentration, due to
| both regulatory heterogeneity and then local cronyism -
| Bob has decades of connections to the city and gets
| permits easily, whereas Bob's competitor Steve is stuck
| in a loop of rejection due to a never ending list of
| pesky reasons.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| airlines? Worst example ever. There are lots of airlines
| coming and going. "Tech" isn't even an industry.
| hammock wrote:
| Concentration is not monopoly, and furthermore your
| comment does not begin to address the critical part of
| parent's comment : "does not last very long"
|
| Inequality at a point in time , and over time , is not
| nearly as bad if the winners keep rotating
| phatfish wrote:
| > unless they get are granted special privileges by the
| government
|
| That's what all the lobbyists are for.
|
| None of the people or organisations that advocate for
| "free markets" or competition actually want free markets
| and competition. It's a smoke screen so they can keep
| buying politicians to get their special privileges.
| cyberax wrote:
| > Throughout history there are very few monopolies and
| they don't normally last that long
|
| That's completely incorrect. Historically, monopolies
| were pretty long-lived. So much that they were often
| written into the legal codes.
|
| It's only fairly recently that the pace of innovation
| picked up so much, that monopolies not really die per se,
| but just become irrelevant.
| const_cast wrote:
| They always inevitably end up being given special
| privileges.
|
| Because, contrary to what we would all like to believe,
| once a company becomes large we _don 't_ want them to go
| under, even if they're not optimal.
|
| There's a huge amount of jobs, institutional knowledge,
| processes, capital, etc in these big monopolies. Like if
| Boeing just went under today, how long would it take for
| another company to re-figure out how to make airplanes? I
| mean, take a look at NASA. We went to the moon, but can
| we do it again? It would be very difficult. Because so
| many engineers retired and IP was allowed to just... rot.
|
| It's a balancing act. Obviously we want to keep the
| market as free as possible and yadda yadda invisible
| hand. But we also have national security to consider, and
| practicality.
| nashashmi wrote:
| You mean like a white label search engine? Customized with
| settings?
| fallingknife wrote:
| This sounds a solution contrived to advantage companies that
| want access to this data rather than an actual economically
| valid business model. If building an index and selling access
| to it is a viable business, then why isn't someone doing it
| already? There's minimal barrier to entry. Blekko has an
| index. Are you selling access to it for profit?
| mburns wrote:
| There are search engines that sell api access to their
| index. Pretty sure Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex all do.
|
| Blekko also did, 10 years ago. When they still existed.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| I think Brave Search does too?
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time, in case anyone is curious:
|
| _Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation,
| competition, and public good_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41393475 - Aug 2024 (79
| comments)
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| This just in: small search engine company thinks it's a great
| idea for small search engine companies to have the same search
| index as Google.
|
| Also, I love this bit: "[Google's] search results are of the
| best quality among its advertising-driven peers." I can just
| feel the breath of the guy who jumped in to say "wait, you
| can't just admit that Google's results are better than Kagi's!
| You need to add some sorta qualifier there that doesn't apply
| to us."
| sfpotter wrote:
| Have you used Kagi or Google recently? Kagi works way better.
| sdwr wrote:
| Then why do they want Google's search index?
| sfpotter wrote:
| So they can work even better...?
| hmottestad wrote:
| Crawling the web is costly. I assume it's cheaper to use
| the results from someone else's crawling. I don't know
| what Kagi is using to argue that they should have access
| to Google's indexes, but I'd guess it's some form of anti
| trust.
| guhcampos wrote:
| Let me add more: crawling the web is costly for EVERYONE.
|
| The more crawlers out there, the more useless traffic is
| being served by every single website on the internet.
|
| In an ideal world, there would be a single authoritative
| index, just as we have with web domains, and all players
| would cooperate into building, maintaining and improving
| it, so websites would not need to be constantly hammered
| by thousands of crawlers everyday.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Bandwidth is cheap. I also like seeing more traffic in
| the logs.
| const_cast wrote:
| Yeah not that cheap. There's a few articles on HN now
| about small, independent websites being essentially
| DDOS'd by crawlers. Although, to be fair, mostly AI
| crawlers.
| trollbridge wrote:
| I already get hit by literally hundreds of crawlers,
| presumably trying to find grist for there AI mills.
|
| One more crawler for a search index wouldn't hurt.
| eastbound wrote:
| On every Kagi comment, there is "Have you used Kagi
| recently? It's improved a lot!" -- to the level that I
| suspect they have bots to upgrade the brand image, at least
| to search which comments to respond do.
|
| I'm saying that because yes, I've used Kagi recently, and I
| switch back to Google every single time because Kagi can't
| find anything. Kagi is to Google what Siri is to ChatGPT.
| Siri can't even answer "What time is it?"
| tshaddox wrote:
| > to the level that I suspect they have bots to upgrade
| the brand image
|
| What "level" is that which couldn't possibly be
| accomplished by humans? Are you seeing thousands of
| messages every day?
| malfist wrote:
| Maybe you see different comments than I do, but I don't
| see many comments saying it's improved a lot lately.
|
| As a Kagi user, I would not say it's improved a lot
| lately. It's a consistent, specific product for what I
| need. I like the privacy aspects of it, and the control
| to block, raise or lower sites in my search results. If
| that's not something you care about then don't use it.
|
| Is it better than Google at finding things? I don't think
| so, but then, Google is trash these days too
| buzzerbetrayed wrote:
| I don't understand.
|
| The GP of your comment is literally saying that Kagi is
| better than Google as of late. You're not helping the
| "Kagi doesn't use bots" case by ignore the context 2
| comments up.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43948385
| Velorivox wrote:
| > I suspect they have bots to upgrade the brand image
|
| I disagree with the conclusion but I agree with the
| premise. Man is a rationalizing animal, and one way to
| validate one's choice in paying for a search engine
| (whether it is better or not) is to get others to use it
| as well. Kagi is also good at PR, they were able to spin
| a hostile metering plan as a lenient subscription plan.
|
| Word of mouth is often more prevalent than we think, and
| certainly more powerful than botting. I would not be
| shocked if the author of that "AirBnBs are blackhats"
| article was interacting with real users of Craigslist
| spurred on by some referral scheme.
| snackernews wrote:
| "Kagi is bad. As evidence I present Siri."
| MyPasswordSucks wrote:
| Do you not understand how analogies work, or did your
| compulsion to post a weaksauce burn just temporarily
| short-circuit that part of your brain?
|
| This isn't Twitter, you don't need to farm likes and
| retweets.
| buildfocus wrote:
| > On every Kagi comment, there is "Have you used Kagi
| recently? It's improved a lot!" -- to the level that I
| suspect they have bots to upgrade the brand image
|
| Odd to dismiss a point purely because it's consistently
| made, especially without much apparent disagreement.
| Perhaps more likely: there are just _many_ happy Kagi
| customers in the HN community.
|
| As one data point: I use Kagi, and agree with GP, and I
| am not a bot (activity of this HN account predates
| existence of Kagi by many years).
|
| That doesn't dismiss your experience of course, lots of
| people use search engines in different ways! Personally,
| I found the ads & other crap of Google drowned out
| results, and I frequently hit SEO spam etc where site
| reranking was helpful. I'm sure there's scenarios where
| that doesn't make sense though, it's not for everybody
| (not everybody can justify paying for search, just for
| starters).
| jmyeet wrote:
| That's like asking the foxes how the farmer should manage his
| chickens. Kagi is a (wannabe) competitor. Likewise, YC's
| interest here is in making money by having viable startups and
| having them acquired.
|
| I also don't think crawling the Web is the hard part. It's
| extraordinarily easy to do it badly [1] but what's the solution
| here? To have a bunch of wannabe search engines crawl Google's
| index instead?
|
| I've thought about this and I wonder if trying to replicate a
| general purpose search engine here is the right approach or
| not. Might it not be easier to target a particular vertical, at
| least to start with? I refuse to believe Google cannot be
| bested in every single vertical or that the scale of the job
| can't be segmented to some degree.
|
| [1]: https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/06/16/the-perfect-web-
| spider...
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| This solution would also yield search engines that will
| actually be useful and powerful like old Google search was.
| They have crippled it drastically over the years. Used to be I
| could find exact quotes of forum posts from memory verbatim. I
| can't do that on Google or YouTube anymore. It's really dumbed
| down and watered down.
| tiahura wrote:
| How Orwellian. Free market means buyers and sellers set terms of
| deal, not G.
| adrr wrote:
| How much things have changed when antitrust used mean unfair
| practices by real monopolies. Real monopolies. Standard Oil which
| you had no choice in what gas you used. The Bell System(ATT)
| controlled all of long distance, you had no choice to use them
| for making long distance calls. Microsoft owned 95% of the market
| when they got with antitrust, there was other OSes but your
| software wouldn't run on those OSes. Consumers had no choice. We
| got stuck with shitty products that were overpriced.
|
| Now antitrust means punishing companies that are too good. Their
| product is too superior. Even though Windows, the most used
| computer OS, literally defaults bing search but consumers change
| it to google. They are choosing to use google. We're going to
| punish the company that makes a product so good users don't want
| to use other products. They clearly have choice. There is no
| switching cost to what search engine you use. Its sad when
| companies who can't make a product people that people't don't
| want to use instead to use regulatory capture to prevent real
| competition in the search engine market. Just make a better
| product.
| jonhohle wrote:
| I haven't looked at the merits, and I don't like what the EU is
| doing to US companies with 20% market share, but I remember
| feeling the same way about Microsoft over 20 years ago.
| Fortunately, groklaw provided a constant stream of easily
| readable, high quality content. That, and I could see some of
| my favorite companies shutting down because their customers
| were restricted from doing business with them if they wanted to
| sell Windows.
|
| This isn't about search, it's about their ad monopoly. They are
| not being punished for search or related products. I'm actually
| not sure how breaking out the search index helps in this
| situation. I would think splitting out off-Google advertising
| is the more obvious break and one that would benefit humanity.
| (Ad networks can die in a fire.)
| adrr wrote:
| This is to separate search index from Google.
|
| Ad is even worse as Google doesn't even control the majority
| of digital marketing market. Only case i can think of is the
| Amex case but Supreme Court rightly found you can't be an
| abusive monopoly and have less than a majority of the market.
| light_triad wrote:
| It's good for YC to do this and will benefit every startup in the
| long run. Google has been one of the sources of the AI boom, and
| provides liquidity by acquiring startups. But as YC argues
| they've monopolised distribution channels to the point where you
| need to go through the Google toll booth every time you want to
| access the market. This tax on founders to reach their audience
| makes many types of businesses unsustainable and impossible,
| especially for products where usage != sharing.
| bogwog wrote:
| > and provides liquidity by acquiring startups
|
| You mean kills potentially successful tech companies of the
| future by acquiring startups to cement their dominance.
|
| I get why people on this site are in love with the idea of
| building an unsustainable, money-losing business where the only
| path to success is being acquired by a tech giant. It's like
| winning the lottery! But it helps nobody, it hurts your
| customers/users, and it hurts innovation. It's also stupid, as
| a successful tech company could potentially grow as big as the
| giants you're courting (ESPECIALLY now that the FTC has started
| finally doing its job). Why else do you think they're spending
| so much money to acquire you? It's easier on the ego to call it
| an "acquihire", but the truth is that they're just paying a
| maintenance tax on their monopoly.
|
| Every time people complain about how detrimental big tech is to
| society, it ultimately comes down to this sad strategy.
| threeseed wrote:
| Of course it is good for YC to do this. They have significant
| investments in OpenAI both directly and indirectly through the
| countless startups they've funded whose core is OpenAI.
|
| And it's ridiculous to act like (a) you are forced to go
| through Google to access the 'market' and (b) that this is
| somehow unusual or untoward. They are an advertising company
| and not the only one.
| creato wrote:
| It's disappointing to see the historical revisionism in these
| threads. Say what you will about google now, but the idea that
| they just bought their way into X industry doesn't seem right.
| Until maybe 10 years ago, tech people almost universally loved
| Google's offerings and adopted them eagerly because they were
| good. I remember the mad scramble on various forums for a gmail
| invite. I remember when google maps came about, it was a
| revelation compared to mapquest and so on. You could scroll the
| map instead of clicking buttons to jump half a screen at a time!
| For years 0-5 at least, chrome was almost universally loved by
| tech people. Process isolation, speed, lack of toolbar shitware,
| etc.
|
| At every company I've been at, half the dependencies came from
| big tech, and more than half of those were built _and maintained_
| by google. bazel, kubernetes, test frameworks, tensorflow, etc.
| these are just the big ones. There are a lot of smaller libraries
| from google that we 've used too, and more still that aren't
| owned by google but they invest a lot of engineering time into.
|
| I don't know what the right answer is to the google of today, but
| the cavalier assumption that google has simply leveraged a
| monopoly in search to build everything else it has doesn't add up
| to me.
| hu3 wrote:
| Meanwhile Apple, also sitting on infinite cash, is easily
| entertained by toying with regulators around the world and
| contributes back almost nothing in comparison to Google.
|
| Heck, they can't even be bothered to fund a single developer to
| help their hardware run Linux.
| prepend wrote:
| Why would Apple have developers working on their hardware
| running Linux? Apple doesn't use Linux.
|
| They aren't the biggest oss dev, but they have a decent
| amount of contributions. [0][1]
|
| It's hard to compare how much Google vs Apple contributes to
| open source, but not sure why anyone would think Apple
| "contributes back almost nothing."
|
| [0] https://github.com/appleopen
|
| [1] https://opensource.apple.com/projects/
| hu3 wrote:
| Please stare at your own links for a second.
|
| Let me help you:
|
| https://github.com/orgs/appleopen/repositories?q=sort%3Asta
| r...
|
| Their most popular repo in that entire account has 8 stars.
|
| I have multiple personal repos with more usage than that.
|
| As for the other link. More than half of those projects are
| Apple specific.
| stonogo wrote:
| You keep qualifying your comments with "by tech people" but the
| problem is that Google bought their way into non-tech people's
| computers. Every single Google product on every single pageload
| had an "install Chrome" link at the top. Every Chrome release
| blurred the line between 'signing into chrome' and 'signing
| into google' and, later, 'signing into your phone'. Most Google
| products broke on non-Chrome browsers on such a regular cadence
| that deliberate sabotage was a common assumption. So yes,
| Google has always been a darling to the "tech people", but the
| aggressive ways they worked to ensure that people adopted
| Chrome were very real.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| You're right. And that really shows you how destructive Google
| has been.
|
| 10-20 years ago Google was amazing. Their products were great.
| We all wanted them.
|
| And now, we have pretty much exactly those products. Almost
| nothing has improved in 10+ years. That's exactly the behavior
| of a monopoly.
|
| Their products are now aggressively hostile to users and their
| interests. Like Chrome trying to kill of ad blockers.
|
| Google now sits on what is now a low quality outdated product
| forever using their market power to keep everyone else out.
|
| That's why we have antitrust laws. To kill Googles.
| pingou wrote:
| As a google's shareholder that terrifies me.
|
| As an european, I am happy to see that the US administration may
| be ready to kill the one of the most powerful and unassailable
| company in the world and allow any other country to build a
| replacement.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The document metadata... ffs: "Microsoft Word - YC for filing
| FINAL DRAFT Y Combinator Amicus Brief"
|
| People, clean that shit up before publishing. That's an
| embarrassment. At least it's not "FINAL FINAL2 REWORKED" or
| something equally grotesque.
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| A bitly link is an insane choice
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Add + to the end of bitly urls to see where they redirect to
| without clicking on them.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The real killer is that Google perfected the ad-paid model, and
| launched an entire ecosystem on top of it
|
| Paid competitors cannot compete because people won't pay. People
| want the death of Google because people hate ads and tracking.
|
| Ultimately it is an everyone loses situation. No one is going to
| fly in a replace Google without either 1.) Charging a monthly sub
| or 2.) Invasive (yet most profitable) ad tracking.
|
| This is exactly why youtube stands alone too. What company looks
| at youtube's userbase and says "Yes, I want to cater to people
| who despise subscriptions and block ads". Exactly what vid.me did
| in 2017, which everyone celebrated until the went bankrupt.
| Hilift wrote:
| Google doesn't own all of ads though, only search ads. Facebook
| nets $70 billion per year with an ad system that prints golden
| bricks. No-one cares how it works due to it makes so much
| money. 80% of shares are held by institutions.
| Bender wrote:
| In terms of fairness, competition and monopolies is there a chart
| that shows how much tax payer funding each search engine has
| received _upon creation, annually and indirectly_? _e.g. donating
| NASA hangers for server hosting and experiments, heavily
| discounted real estate and land, tax breaks for power, etc..._
| Put another way, who has the biggest monopoly on direct and
| indirect tax-payer funding?
| grg0 wrote:
| > Put another way, who has the biggest monopoly on direct and
| indirect tax-payer funding?
|
| The Pentagon.
| danboarder wrote:
| This action comes a bit late, at the end of the "Search engine"
| era, at a time when AI responses from many sources are largely
| replacing the "Google Search".
|
| Similar action happened against Microsoft Windows around 2000,
| just as the rise of web-based apps (online email, google docs,
| etc) largely made the underlying operating system less relevant
| to how people use their computers and apps.
|
| So I read this as the dominant player can monopolize a market
| while it's relevant without an issue, and once the market starts
| to move on, the antitrust lawsuits come in to "make the market
| more competitive" at a time when that era is mostly over.
|
| And trying to regulate early (as with the last administration's
| AI legislation that is now being repealed) we can see that only
| hindsight is 20/20, and regulating too early can kill a market.
| My conclusion is to just let the best product win, and even
| dominate for a while as this is part of the market cycle, and
| when a better product/platform comes along the market will move
| to it.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I would be you $1 that in five to ten years there will be zero
| "AI" players replacing search. But that's a different topic
| than this one.
| MPSFounder wrote:
| I will take that bet Chuck. Maybe not completely replace, but
| AI will be the defacto search platform. I find myself using
| Google less and less these days
| bdangubic wrote:
| I only use Google when I am in the mood to search for
| something and find it below the fold after scrolling
| through mindless semi-related sponsored links
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| If for no other reason that I can perform combination
| searches.
|
| I don't need to search MQTT and AWS and v3/v5 and max
| packet sizes all separately anymore.
| danboarder wrote:
| Google themselves are trying to figure this out, with the
| first (top placement) of search results showing their Gemini
| AI Response, at least for me. I read this as an attempt to
| keep users on Google instead of asking Chat GPT or other some
| other AI. What's your take on that?
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Every AI chatbot to date suffers from the "Film expert"
| effect. That is when a script writer presents data from an
| "expert" in a movie or show to the audience in response to
| some information need on the part of the other characters.
| Writers are really good at making it sound credible. When
| an audience member experiences this interchange, generally
| they have one of two experiences. Either they know nothing
| about the subject (or the subject is made up like warp
| drive nacelle engineering) and they nod along at the
| response and factor it into their understanding of the
| story being told. Or, they do know a lot about the subject
| and the glaring inaccuracies jolt them out of the story
| temporarily as the suspension of disbelief is damaged.
|
| LLMs write in an authoritative way because that is how the
| material they have been trained on writes. Because there is
| no "there" there, an LLM has no way of evaluating the
| accuracy of the answer it just generated. People who
| "search" using an LLM in order to get information about a
| topic have a better than even chance of getting something
| that is completely false, and if they don't have the
| foundation to recognize its false may incorporate that
| false information into their world view. That becomes a
| major embarrassment later when they regurgitate that
| information, or act on that information in some way, that
| comes back to bite them.
|
| Gemini has many examples of things it has presented
| authoritatively that are stochastic noise. The current fun
| game is to ask "Why do people say ..." and create some
| stupid thing like "Too many cats spoil the soup." That
| generates an authoritative sounding answer from Gemini that
| is just stupid. Gemini can't say "I don't know, I've never
| seen anything that says people say that."
|
| As companies push these things out into more and places,
| more and more people will get the experience of believing
| something false because some LLM told them it was true. And
| like that friend of yours who always has an answer for
| every question you ask, but you keep finding out a bunch of
| them are just bullshit, you will rely on that information
| less and less. And eventually, like your buddy with all the
| answers, you stop asking them questions you actually want
| the answer too.
|
| I'm not down on "LLMs" per se, but I do not believe there
| is any evidence that they can be relied on for anything.
| The only thing I have seen, so far, that they can do well
| is help someone struggling with a blank page get started.
| That's because more people than not struggle with starting
| from a blank page but have no trouble _correcting_
| something that is wrong, or re-writing it into something.
|
| "Search" is multifaceted. Blekko found a great use case for
| reference librarians. They would have paid Blekko to
| provide them an index of primary sources that they could
| use. The other great use is shopping if you can pair it
| with your social network. (Something Blekko suggested to
| Facebook but Zuck was really blind to that one) Blekko had
| a demo where you could say, "Audi car dealer" and it would
| give you the results ranked by your friend's ratings on
| their service. I spent a lot of time at Blekko denying
| access to the index by criminals who were searching for
| vulnerable WordPress plugins or e-commerce shopping carts.
| Chat GPT is never going to give you a list of all sites on
| the Internet running a vulnerable version of Wordpress :-).
|
| So my take is the LLM isn't a replacement for search and
| efforts to make it so will stagnate and die leaving "Search
| Classic" to take up the slack.
|
| If you trained a model on a well vetted corpus and gave it
| the tools to say it didn't know, I could see it as being a
| better "textbook" then a physical textbook. But it still
| needs to know what it doesn't know.
| joshvm wrote:
| My take is that it's primarily a smart way to quickly
| gather lots of ELO/AB feedback about LLM responses for
| training, whilst also reducing people switching to ChatGPT.
| OpenAI has significant first mover advantage here and it's
| why they're so worried about distillation, becuase it
| threatens the moat.
|
| Google, on the other hand, has a huge moat in access to
| probably the best search index available and existing
| infrastructure built around it. Not to mention the
| integration with Workspace emails, docs, photos - all sorts
| of things that can be used for training. But what they
| (presumably) lack is the feedback-derived data that OpenAI
| has had from the start.
|
| ChatGPT does not use search grounding by default and the
| issues there are obvious. Both Gemini and ChatGPT make
| similar errors even with grounding but you would expect
| that to get better over time. It's an open research
| question as to what knowledge should be innate (in the
| weights) and what should be "queryable", but I do think the
| future will be an improved version of "intelligence" +
| "data lookup".
| The_Blade wrote:
| if you put a Carlin word (at least my favorite McNulty /
| Bunk one) in front of your search, it bypasses Gemini AI
| results
|
| for a pristine moment you get to be in a club and they
| AIn't in it
| wvenable wrote:
| Search will become AI. It might be that there be zero "AI"
| players involved though as Google is just as capable of doing
| AI.
| edanm wrote:
| I'd take that bet. AI players are _already_ replacing search
| for a lot of users in a lot of cases.
| sofixa wrote:
| Because we're still in the "get them hooked" stage where AI
| startups and Google/Meta are losing money on AI.
|
| Once they start properly monetising (aka making users pay
| for what it actually costs them to train and run), it will
| be a different story. The vast majority of people won't pay
| $20-30EUR/month for an LLM to replace their search engine.
| (And an analysis I saw of OpenAI's business model and
| financial indicated they're losing money even on their paid
| tier, per query).
| artursapek wrote:
| I've started using ChatGPT to look up most things I used to
| Google. It gives me immediate, concise results without having
| to parse bloated websites full of ads and other garbage.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| > This action comes a bit late, at the end of the "Search
| engine" era, at a time when AI responses from many sources are
| largely replacing the "Google Search".
|
| AIs are using search indices more and more. Google has the
| largest, and there is risk of Google using its monopoly in
| search (in particular their index) to give themselves an unfair
| advantage in the nascent AI market.
| sambeau wrote:
| The really uncompetitive behaviour started when Google removed
| the search string from search links. That killed 3rd party (and
| home-grown) analytics, which in turn facilitated large scale
| tracking of users from site with analytics to site with
| analytics.
|
| If you wanted to know how your keywords were performing you _had_
| to use Google Analytics.
| RainyDayTmrw wrote:
| Make no mistake. This is, first and foremost, a big, for-profit
| corporation fighting a bigger, for-profit corporation, for its
| own financial interests. Nevertheless, we may stand to benefit,
| if only incidentally.
|
| In particular, if the legal authorities start to unwind Google, I
| actually think Chrome and Android are more important to wall off
| or spin out than anything advertising or AI related.
| sroussey wrote:
| So should Gmail et al go with Chrome or with Android?
| RainyDayTmrw wrote:
| I'm less worried about GMail. It's much easier to start a
| GMail competitor today (in relative, not absolute, terms)
| than a Chrome or Android competitor, because of network
| effects. For example, Fastmail is tiny (comparatively
| speaking), and will probably stay tiny forever, but their
| service works fine, and there's no major obstacles
| (comparatively speaking) to replacing GMail with Fastmail for
| any of us personally.
| erxam wrote:
| Is it really?
|
| I think any potential competitors face many of the same
| pitfalls as, say, Chrome competitors do. Maybe even worse.
| Google slams its weight around when web standards are being
| designed so as to unilaterally benefit Chrome, but (at
| least in theory) it's a fundamentally cooperative process
| where everyone at least gets some sort of input to direct
| where each standard goes.
|
| In GMail's case, they can just arbitrarily shut off any
| competitor who might be gaining steam and kill them off
| before they can reach critical mass and sustain themselves.
| Just categorize them as 'spam' and make sure to redirect
| their emails 100% of the time and they've won.
|
| EDIT: just saw your edit. You're kinda right, but if
| Fastmail ever really starts growing then Google will take
| harsher actions to stymie it off. Maybe if a lot of small
| services start to collectively take a bigger slice of the
| market then they'd succeed at keeping Google at bay? I'm
| not so sure.
| owebmaster wrote:
| Google started to merge both (ChromeOS+Android) so maybe they
| would be sold together
| sroussey wrote:
| Microsoft is the obvious buyer for Android and Chrome, lol.
| Let the circle complete.
| iamkonstantin wrote:
| It would be cool if Apple/Google/gatekeepers considered similar
| measures for the App Store / Google Play related search where
| similar constraints apply.
| yashvg wrote:
| TL;DR: YC just filed an amicus brief in the Google-search
| antitrust case. They tell the judge that (1) Google's default-
| search/pay-to-play deals crushed the "kill-zone" around search,
| keeping VCs away; and (2) the coming wave of AI-search/agentic
| tools will suffer the same fate unless the court imposes forward-
| looking remedies--open Google's index, ban exclusive
| data+distribution deals, bar self-preferencing, add anti-
| circumvention teeth, and even spin off Android if Google
| backslides. YC frames this as the 2025 equivalent of the 1956
| Bell Labs decree and the 2001 Microsoft decision: rip open the
| gate so the next Google can be born.
| yashvg wrote:
| Summarized by o3:
|
| 1. Why YC cares
|
| - VC "kill-zone." YC says Google's decade of default-search
| contracts (Apple, carriers, OEMs) froze half of all U.S. search
| queries, scaring investors away from search/AI startups.
|
| - AI inflection point. Generative/query-based/agentic AI could
| disrupt search--but only if newcomers can reach users and train
| on data Google hoards. Without action, Google will "pull the
| ladder up" again.
|
| 2. What YC wants the court to order
|
| - Open index & dataset access. Force Google to license its
| search index + anonymized click/embedding data on fair,
| reasonable terms so rivals can build ranking stacks + AI
| models.
|
| - No self-preferencing in AI results. Google can't boost
| Gemini-style tools or demote rivals. No exclusive AI-training
| corpora access either.
|
| - Ban pay-to-play defaults. Outlaw "billions to be the default"
| (search, voice, browser, OS, car). No payments for choice-
| screen placement.
|
| - Anti-circumvention & retaliation guardrails. Independent
| monitoring, fast dispute resolution, steep fines, and--if
| Google cheats--possible Android spinoff.
|
| 3. Historical playbook YC cites
|
| - 1956 AT&T consent decree opened Bell Labs patents -
| semiconductor boom.
|
| - 2001 Microsoft browser decree - Firefox, Chrome, Google
| itself.
|
| - 2023-24 Nvidia-Arm block - both companies exploded in AI.
|
| - YC says same pattern can unlock "the next Stripe/Airbnb--but
| for search/AI."
|
| 4. Why HN should care
|
| - Open Index [?] ultimate dev API. Lets you build retrieval-
| augmented AI agents without a nation-state's crawl budget.
|
| - Distribution shake-up. Killing default deals revives
| mobile/browser competition; could birth real alt-search on
| phones.
|
| - VC signal. YC telling a judge "give us a level field and
| we'll bankroll challengers" means real capital is ready.
|
| - Policy trend. Regulators now want to pre-wire markets (index
| access, AI data parity, Android contingency) before the next
| moat forms.
|
| 5. Bottom line: This isn't about a fine. It's about cracking
| open the data + distribution bottlenecks that froze search
| since 2009. If Judge Mehta adopts YC/DOJ's plan, the door opens
| for real search/AI innovation--and VCs are ready to sprint
| through it.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I'm not sure people understand what the consequences of taking
| away Google's ad revenue is. If a large enough bank goes under,
| it takes out not just the bank, but huge sectors of the economy,
| affecting many more businesses and jobs. That's why the
| government bailed out the banks when they failed.
|
| The same will happen when Google loses its ad revenue. Google is
| an ad company. By opening up all its trade secret data, it loses
| its advantage. That will make it lose its core revenue. The end
| result will be Google collapsing entirely within a few years.
| Then those component parts people are talking about "opening up"
| will be gone too.
|
| Here's a small number of things that will die when Google dies.
| Can you imagine how the world will be affected when these go
| away? - Google Maps - Google Mail -
| Google Drive - Google Docs - Google Groups -
| Google Forms - Google Cloud - Google OAuth -
| Google Search - Google Analytics - Chrome -
| Android - Android Auto - Fitbit - Google Fi
| - Google Fiber - Google Flights - Google Translate
| - Google Pay - Waymo
|
| In the best case, killing these will force consumers to move to
| Apple. You wanna talk monopoly? You haven't seen anything yet.
|
| Apple has no alternative for much of the Business-focused
| products, so that will take considerable time for companies to
| adopt alternatives. But in the meantime, the world will become
| pretty broken for a lot of companies that depend on these tools.
| This will affect many more people than just Google's direct
| users. The whole web will shrink, and huge swaths of the
| worldwide economy will disappear. Businesses closing, lost jobs,
| shrinking economies, lack of services.
|
| There are plenty of parties who want to see Google lose or take
| part of its businesses. But if it's not done extremely carefully,
| there's a very large stack of dominoes that are poised to fall.
| wpm wrote:
| Too big to fail means too big to exist. Google et. al should
| never have been allowed to get this large, same as those banks.
|
| Better late than never.
| worik wrote:
| > Too big to fail means too big to exist. Google et. al
| should never have been allowed to get this large
|
| I agree
|
| But placing limits on private property accumulation is a
| controversial idea
|
| But it is an idea who's time must come, or we face a dreadful
| future of robber barrons and peons
| wavemode wrote:
| It's not clear to me why you believe that an antitrust ruling
| against Google would make them bankrupt. At worst they will lay
| off workers. But a post-antitrust google is still a viable
| company
| The_Blade wrote:
| somehow, after the ATT, Microsoft, Standard Oil, or American
| Tobacco antitrust suits, the constituent parts and country
| soldiered on
| const_cast wrote:
| Yeah, especially Tobacco. I mean, there hasn't been an
| industry gutted that hard ever. They were attacked from all
| sides. They can't even fucking advertise anymore, and when
| they can, they have to tell you "hey don't buy this it
| kills you". And then, cherry on top, when consumers do buy
| this product, they're allowed to use it in like < 1% of
| spaces.
|
| And yet, somehow, Tobacco is still profitable.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| This is very North America-centric. Smoking is still
| rampant in many countries, including parts of Europe. It
| was actually a bit of a culture shock for me.
| x0x0 wrote:
| This is nonsense. Some people may have to sign up to Google One
| to pay them a fee starting at $20/year to access
| gmail/drive/docs/groups/forms. We, and they, will all live
| through.
|
| etc.
| dataflow wrote:
| Would YouTube not also be affected here? I don't have numbers
| but it seems to me a huge number of people depend on it as both
| consumers and producers, and I'm not sure it has any viable
| alternatives.
|
| My even bigger worry is actually the effects on privacy,
| security, and people's data. I'm very curious what other
| companies people would trust more with their data.
| cyberax wrote:
| Why would it? Youtube sells ads (and premium subscriptions)
| on its own. It doesn't really need the rest of Google, and
| can just continue living as a separate company.
| worik wrote:
| > ta. I'm very curious what other companies people would
| trust more with their data.
|
| The problem is one company with all the data.
| dataflow wrote:
| > The problem is one company with all the data.
|
| I realize, but the idea that we won't have another giant
| company succeeding at achieving the same seems like wishful
| thinking.
| ardacinar wrote:
| Are we sure that the things listed here will not go away in a
| few years if Google continues to exist?
|
| https://killedbygoogle.com/
| suddenexample wrote:
| People bringing up this site in this specific way is a pet
| peeve of mine. What's the largest product that they sunset
| with no replacement? Stadia? Given the number of products
| Google has, I wouldn't consider their track record below
| average.
| sofixa wrote:
| And they reimbursed all purchases, including hardware you
| got to keep.
|
| As sad as killing Stadia was (it's still the best cloud
| gaming service, the UX was marvelous), it couldn't have
| been done better.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I agree. The vast majority of products "killed by Google"
| were ones no one were using and many were consolidated into
| other products.
| The_Blade wrote:
| i'm a rageaholic! i just can't live without rageahol!
| fsh wrote:
| This list is very telling. Instead of a healthy marketplace of
| companies competing to sell their software and services, we end
| up with one monopolist who gives away mediocre products and in
| return taxes everything you buy (in the form of ad spending),
| and then annoys you with the same ads. How is this a desirable
| outcome?
| sofixa wrote:
| Because the vast majority of people don't want to and have
| zero intention pf paying separately for email, maps,
| navigation, browser, etc.
|
| In fact, that's how things used to be before Google and their
| ilk used ads to make an ecosystem, and their ecosystem was
| _better_ and free at the point of use than what came before
| fsh wrote:
| The vast majority of people are paying separately for all
| kinds of stuff. I don't see a reason why software and
| digital services have to be different. In the early days,
| payment was difficult, but this has been long solved. I am
| convinced that the quality would improve dramatically if
| there was some actual competition.
|
| Also most people would probably prefer not to pay for the
| ad fees that google extorts from pretty much any company.
| ikiris wrote:
| With the exception of fi, If you think any of those
| services are something people want to pay yet another
| saas subscription for, you've been hitting your own
| supply too much.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| There is nothing mediocre about the search engine, gmail,
| maps, android, chrome etc.. etc. Do they all have room for
| for improvement? Probably. But they are simply incredibly,
| breathtakingly good products. Search, maybe has gotten worse
| in recent years, but it's still amazing.
|
| Maps and Satelleite view are astounding, especially when you
| consider that they are free.
|
| >How is this a desirable outcome?
|
| The list speaks for itself. There are many valid complaints
| against google, but this is not one of them.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Google collapsing would be an _incredible_ gift to the economy.
| Some companies are paying 30% in their advertising budget,
| before we even talk about the Play Store tax. We _all_ pay an
| incredible amount for Google 's existence, and a massive
| renaissance of technology development would occur if it stopped
| sucking all of the air out of the room.
|
| Apart from all of the illegal things, it's just bad that it
| exists.
| ardit33 wrote:
| This is juvenile thinking... none of them will go away. They
| can be independent services themselves, and be pretty
| profitable at it.
|
| The upshoot is if they are independent, they will be forced to
| compete fairly with other services. Which, does increase
| competition and choice.
| root_axis wrote:
| Most would go away and be replaced by another monopolist.
| Likely Microsoft or Apple.
| hamilyon2 wrote:
| Android in this list stands out.
|
| If Android goes away, I am not sure who is there to pick up The
| OS of the world, not IOS, certainly, but who?
|
| All else, good riddance. More competition will make better
| products.
| nativeit wrote:
| A non-profit collective of device manufacturers and software
| developers could probably create a very effective and potent
| steward for Android's long-term development. But I wouldn't
| hold my breath.
| worik wrote:
| Linux?
| const_cast wrote:
| Kinda, yeah. I mean Android is already Linux, just with
| suspicious, proprietary drivers that hold it back. Some
| Android phones are still running kernel 3!
|
| If manufacturers would just upstream their drivers and
| make them less shit, then android could take advantage of
| the entire body of work in GNU/Linux userland.
| rs186 wrote:
| I can imagine manufacturers that are fully in the Android
| ecosystem come together to maintain Android, including
| Xiaomi, Samsung, Oppo etc. There won't be as many feature
| updates, but it's not like Google puts a lot of resources in
| Android, or Android is delivering many features these days --
| Google moved/laid off many people on Android teams, and many
| of the recent updates are very minor features. Just look at
| what's new in Android 14 or 15 -- barely anything. I stopped
| getting excited about or even caring about major version
| updates for a while. The pace has already slowed down quite a
| bit compared to a decade ago, and the ecosystem is very
| mature and stable.
| nataliste wrote:
| What happens to the assets of the dead Google? Will regulators
| actually let FAAN take over broad swaths of it? Not likely.
| It's much more likely that regional or smaller businesses will
| enter the vaccuum. Similarly but from the consumer side, I
| already know for many of these, there are already viable
| alternatives that would easily scale with demand.
|
| Even further, if your business is coupled entirely to the
| continued existence of a single corporation, or if the totality
| of your economy is entirely coupled to the continued existence
| of a single corporation, we have a word for that: a monopoly.
| As far as I know, permitting the existence of monopolies is
| broadly agreed upon by experts to be a bad idea for many
| reasons, the least of which is the stifling of viable
| alternatives. The most severe is that it threatens the
| legitimacy of the entire government through regulatory capture
| and, at root, there is no organization that I think is actually
| "too big to fail" except the actual government.
|
| Breaking up Google creates short-term disruptions and penalizes
| those that let the market even get to the point that the FTC
| and DOJ needed to intervene (I'm looking at you Mozilla).
| Everyone, including those now dependent on Google, is benefited
| in the longterm.
| ccppurcell wrote:
| I think comparing to banks is silly. Banks don't have
| competitive advantages like Google has. When banks fail it is
| not because they lost a competitive advantage (other than the
| competitive advantage of competent management). The catastrophe
| associated with a major bank collapse has to do with the
| specific function of banks in the financial system, not just:
| oh where are all their customers going to go?
| janalsncm wrote:
| Exactly. Even if Google search shut down tomorrow the economy
| would go on. It's competitors are probably worse but it
| wouldn't cause a run on the banks, which is a specific
| financial emergency.
| worik wrote:
| Yes please
|
| The existence of none of those services depend on Google, and
| Google's cross subsidisation distorts the environment
| dreadfully
|
| Worse it puts Google at the centre of so many data flows, and
| now we realise we do not want a single index of all data, it is
| positively destructive
|
| Good riddance Google.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Because Google has monopoly power, they can charge whatever
| they want for ads, and every company in the economy has to pay
| it. So there's a pretty good argument the economy is being held
| back by a "Google tax".
|
| Most of the services you listed above are hardly best in class,
| and giving them away for free is basically scraps off of the
| table. The ones which are best in class like Waymo have a good
| shot at being commercially successful on their own.
| cyberax wrote:
| > Here's a small number of things that will die when Google
| dies.
|
| I dispute that. Google Docs/Drive/Mail are supported by
| enterprise subscriptions. Android Auto is also a commercial
| product that can live off license fees. Fi/Fiber/Pay/Waymo are
| also not free services, and can survive on their own.
|
| Free GMail/Forms/Groups/Translate can probably survive off ad
| revenue that they can get from third parties. They are pretty
| trivial expenses at this point.
|
| Android and Chrome are the main projects at risk.
| rs186 wrote:
| To be fair, nobody outside the company knows if Fi/Fiber/Pay
| are viable businesses, or they are on life support but still
| around because of the unlimited cash Google has. One can
| _guess_ they are profitable because they have been around for
| quite a while and still kicking. But nothing says they won 't
| be the next thing in Google graveyard -- plenty of services
| seemed to be doing ok before a major reorg sent them to
| death.
| karaterobot wrote:
| For the sake of argument, let's grant the implication that
| Google is in danger of going out of business. Even so, if our
| economy is at the point where one company going out of business
| would cripple it, it's almost certainly worth the pain of
| decoupling from that company. It would hurt, but we would get
| through it, and it would be better in the long run. On the
| other hand, if we just threw up our hands and said "do whatever
| you want, Google, you're too important for us to tell you what
| to do" then we're pretty much at their mercy. I can't imagine
| things getting better or fixing themselves in that situation.
| rs186 wrote:
| Let them die. The world will be a better place.
|
| Some of the services you mentioned are already very irrelevant:
|
| * Fitbit -- no explanation necessary
|
| * Google translate -- I don't know about if people use their
| APIs, but for me personally, I have not used translate for a
| few years. ChatGPT has been my go-to.
|
| * Google Pay -- it has a smaller market share than Samsung Pay.
|
| Then next tiers of services -- they are doing ok but there are
| plenty of competitors in the field:
|
| * Gmail, Drive, Docs, Groups, Forms, Cloud, Flights, Fi
|
| I even use some of them, but I really don't care if they go
| away.
|
| Life gets a bit more difficult if Maps, Chrome and Android are
| gone all of a sudden. Maybe we'll be back to using Garmin.
| Heck, I love the idea that everybody uses Nokia, Bing or Garmin
| for navigation, and we actually have a decent website -- like
| the Yelp or Zagar in the old days -- for restaurant reviews. I
| still see "#1 Rated Zagat" stickers from near two decades ago
| at many restaurants.
|
| Anyway, personally, for the vast majority of the things listed
| here, I don't see them going away being a bad thing that would
| even affect as many people as you think.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| Good. Every one of those products makes our lives significantly
| worse.
|
| Almost all of these products are subpar garbage that would
| never survive in a competitive world. Almost none of them have
| done anything different or interesting or new for over a
| decade.
|
| All these products do is use the search monopoly to take away
| the opportunity for us to have good versions of them.
| trevor-e wrote:
| When I worked in the travel tech industry several years ago, it
| was basically unfair to compete against Google Flights. We just
| accepted they didn't have to pay for marketing and had infinite
| compute to work with, and had to differentiate in other ways.
| They could operate the business at a loss and not really care
| because it was still good for Google as a whole to have user's
| travel data. They built a great product but didn't have to play
| by the rules everyone else had to follow.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It's also stopped being great.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Just to pick one of these: google Flights sucks. It had a
| better competitor - Hipmunk - which went under because Google
| ate their lunch by integrating flights search into the main
| search product. Don't know how many of these Google products
| have similar stories, but it's probably a non zero numbers.
|
| What we're getting, in many of these cases, is an _inferior_
| product that drove out better competitors through Google search
| integration.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| That's the very reason we need to break down Google.
|
| It's already too late, Google is already a monopolistic beast.
|
| Waiting even more will only make things much worst with the a.i
| revolution.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| Isn't there an obvious conflict of interest here? YC Wil benefit
| if Google is to share its index with startups. YC will fund
| hundreds of companies and then one of them will end up monopoly.
| What kind of bs is this. Cycle repeats.
| jmward01 wrote:
| Kind of the point of breaking up a monopoly is that it benefits
| a lot of the rest of the industry since the monopoly had been
| hindering it before. Also, it looks like you are saying any
| interest = a conflict of interest. Should only entities that
| have no interest in this matter be allowed to file in this way?
| PunchTornado wrote:
| These people have financial interests in destroying google. Why
| would a judge take their opinion into consideration?
| dismalaf wrote:
| Not sure a VC firm with a vested interest in Google failing
| should be allowed to have an opinion here...
|
| I always thought the point of the government breaking up
| monopolies was to prevent anti-competitive behaviour, not simply
| to punish companies for being too successful.
|
| If we want to talk about what's best for the economy and
| startups, there's a bunch of large companies that could be broken
| up for the benefit of society, but not sure that's entirely fair
| either.
| ezfe wrote:
| There are two ways to remedy an anti competitive monopoly:
|
| Behavioral remedies where the government gets involved with
| google's business and maintains ongoing control to ensure they
| behave.
|
| Structural remedies where the government separates the company
| into parts and then-crucially-leaves them alone for the most
| part.
|
| The "ideal" solution is to magically stop Google from being
| anticompetitive but that is unrealistic.
|
| The realistic solution is to split Google apart and kneecap its
| data flywheel to force it to compete.
| dismalaf wrote:
| Except no one is providing much evidence that Google is anti-
| competitive. It's more like they're simply too good at
| competing so competitors want to knee-cap them...
|
| Exhibit A: Bing's top search query is "google".
| l72 wrote:
| The search part of Google doesn't bother me. I have other options
| and I now reach for an llm first, then fall back to ddg. What I
| do think needs to be separated are: 1) Ads and analytics 2)
| Chrome 3) Google Play Services.
|
| Googles ad platform and analytics are difficult to avoid. Even
| with browser extensions, dns blocking, and aggressive firewall
| rules, this is virtually impossible to avoid. I am shocked at how
| many websites and apps break when these are blocked. There needs
| to be a much healthier ecosystem without a single company
| gobbling all this up.
|
| Chrome is also a big issue. Google has regularly used its web
| sites and android to heavily push chrome. They also use that
| influence for web "standards" that are not really standards. On
| top of it, even googles own sites are often terrible with non
| chrome based browsers. We need a variety of user agents and we
| need real standards that a truly independent body has a say in.
| The web has matured and we don't need to be in a race for new
| apis and features right now.
|
| Google play services are also a huge pain point. When developing
| for Android, you almost have to use them. Running Android without
| Google Play services or with an alternate is a futile effort if
| you want any sort of main stream app. My degoogled work phone is
| mostly useless for anything. We definitely need standards for
| these services with replaceable components that are transparent
| to the apps.
| sakoht wrote:
| Currently most websites have a snip of code that posts to Google
| when a visitor arrives. The cookie there is linked to an identity
| and later used to push ads, and metrics for the site user. It
| seems like this is the thing to make broadly available. Anyone
| with $ can index the web. But nobody can get every websites to
| update to post to 2+ destinations. Multiple companies should be
| able to listen to that feed, and then be responsible for tracking
| and indexing on their own.
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