
Standard Oil Company Must Dissolve in 6 Months (1911) - davidbarker
http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1911/05/16/104825255.html
======
rckclmbr
Standard Oil consisted of 5% of the US GDP at the time, and controlled the
entire refining process. Google is still pretty far away from that.

One thing I find interesting though is that Rockefeller feared Teddy Roosevelt
being elected, just like Google fears Bernie Sanders. Bernie and Roosevelt
hate big business for the same reasons. Interestingly, the top tech companies
think monopoly is good for the same reasons that Rockefeller did -- that they
can hyperoptimize the entire process, and the winners are the consumers
because of cheaper prices and higher quality.

That assumes the business operates in the consumers best interests, however...

~~~
sharkjacobs
fun trivia: when google was refactored into alphabet they changed their
corporate motto from "don't be evil" to "do the right thing"

------
DavidSJ
Interestingly, they included the full text of the Supreme Court decision in
the article. I guess they could just link to the PDF these days, but would the
New York Times have included the full text in the early 90's?

Edit: Also of note is the notice of the first "aero-taxi" beginning service in
Paris.

Edit 2: And reading the article, we see that concern over "activist judges
legislating from the bench" is nothing new.

~~~
SilasX
As recently as 1998, newspapers included the full Starr Report (investigation
of the Clinton/Lewsinsky scandal) in their paper edition.

~~~
april1stislame
If anything ever needed the full details that would be the president's
blowjobs...

------
abcampbell
This will happen to Google. Sooner than people realize.

(From another story on the front page)
[http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/general-news/20160513/uc-
st...](http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/general-news/20160513/uc-students-
suit-claims-google-scanned-accounts-without-permission/1)

~~~
eloff
Monopolies are not illegal. Abusing a monopoly position to unfairly crush the
competition is. I don't see Google doing that.

The market is open to competition, and Google is very disruptable, if somehow
you think you can do a better job than they do. If another Larry and Sergey
came along with a search engine that was significantly better, they'd disrupt
Google just as easily as the original Larry and Sergey did to whatever was
popular before them (I don't even remember.) Do they have the vast majority of
the market share? Yes. But they also have plenty of competitors and there's no
lock in for people searching, nor a high pain threshold for people to switch
search engines. The reason Google holds such a dominant position is simply
that their search results are best. If that weren't the case, I'd switch
today, and so would you.

~~~
vertex-four
The issue is that what was before them didn't depend on training ML algorithms
against ridiculous amounts of current and historic data, including per-user
data which is not accessible to anyone except Google.

Google's search engine at this point is nearly impossible to beat. The only
way to outcompete it would be to come up with a better system for finding
information than full-text search.

~~~
eloff
Maybe, maybe not. I'm sure nobody saw Larry and Sergey coming either. Just
because you don't see how it can be done, doesn't mean it can't be.

But either way, that's not causing Google to break any anti-trust laws. They
don't have to make it easy for competitors, just not unfairly use their power
to stomp on them.

One could even make the argument that the reason Google has done such a good
job at search over the years is because Larry and Sergey are very afraid of
being disrupted by another Larry and Sergey. They have to stay on their toes
and they know it.

~~~
JackFr
If you consider that the product is not search, but rather eyeballs for
advertisers (for which they give away the search for free), Facebook has
already disrupted the heck out of them.

~~~
TulliusCicero
From a consumer perspective, the product is search. If tomorrow, Safeway
stopped charging money for groceries and instead had extremely intrusive ads
all throughout its stores, their product would still be groceries.

~~~
steego
> If tomorrow, Safeway stopped charging money for groceries and instead had
> extremely intrusive ads all throughout its stores, their product would still
> be groceries.

From an accounting perspective, their products would be ads. The groceries
would be a cost of good to sell their actual product, ads. This is how 99% of
the business world works.

> From a consumer perspective, the product is search.

I'm sure cows think the product is grass/hay/corn from a "consumer
perspective", but cows are beautiful dumb inventory with kind eyes.

------
noobermin
I'm a pretty lib guy, but let's be honest, could we have the iphone/macbook
without apple? ibm? intel? Not everything can be done "fast", although I grant
many things can't be done slow, and as recent years have shown, more and more
can be done by those "fast moving" companies also.

I think the question of whether big business should exist is at this point no
longer really an open question. Instead, it is important for us to regulate
them. Dissolving the concept of a big business is throwing out the baby with
the bath water. I feel like even big businesses as institutions can provide
some good in society that smaller organizations not always can.

~~~
caoilte
The usual argument is that Apple/IBM/Intel have innovated simply because they
do not hold monopolies. If they were to achieve monopoly domination they would
have a duty of care to their shareholders to spend the money that they
currently spend on innovating on preventing competitors from entering the
marketplace.

Don't confuse monopolies with big business.

Your electricity utility company, your cable internet/(?television?)/(?phone?)
company are monopolies.

Arguably, Google is a search monoopoly.

Apple does not have a monopoly on smart phones.

~~~
noobermin
The article does not deal with monopolies but the existence of big business.
Either that or I misread it.

~~~
caoilte
You appear to have misread the article. Not difficult. They use language very
differently to the way we do today.

A key line,

'They [representatives of big business] regarded with especial favor the
establishment of the proposition that a combination must be in "unreasonable"
restraint of commerce to be unlawful'

They're basically saying, " _phew_ just because the government went after
Standard Oil, doesn't mean it will come after us next because we are also
big."

In those days they talked a lot about "trust busting". This is a monopoly when
one company creates an artificial market or a cartel when several do.

------
arthurcolle
I didn't know about 'timesmachine' \- is this new?

~~~
caminante
I think it dates back to 2008-ish[0]. NYT's also been adding archives and
features[1]. The latter gives an overview of their approach to the technical
challenges of serving up MB's of data from scans. Tl;dr, NYT tiled the scans
into "digital maps."

[0] [http://scobleizer.com/new-york-times-announces-times-
machine...](http://scobleizer.com/new-york-times-announces-times-machine/)

[1] [http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/how-to-build-a-
time...](http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/how-to-build-a-
timesmachine/)

------
bbanyc
When Exxon (formerly Standard Oil of New Jersey) and Mobil (formerly Standard
Oil of New York) merged, some wags commented that the old trust was coming
back together, and Rockefeller would be proud. It wasn't the whole thing,
though - the trust also included Chevron (Standard of California) and a few
companies (Sohio, Amoco, Arco) since bought up by BP. And I'm sure I'm missing
a few.

------
silentrob
This reminds me of a TV mini series a saw on History a few months back -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Men_Who_Built_America](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Men_Who_Built_America)

As a Canadian I found the history piece fascinating, and something I missed in
school.

------
digi_owl
I think the term monopoly is a distraction. Shifts the focus too much towards
raw sales numbers, where the real issue is how much of a mental presence the
company has within the marketplace. Any time a company, or group of companies,
are large enough that they can dictate the direction and speed of change, be
worried. As they are as likely to not move it at all.

------
Conky
Why not do to google what the government did to the big bell to create all the
little bells. All the R&D money would not have been spent if there was only
one! Google's Ad platforms are limiting how we are able to see and experience
different forms of exchange without without advertising imbedded.

------
msane
[http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/](http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/) is such a
well done site. NYT always knocks it out of the park on web products.

------
ginko
How can the NYT claim copyright on a 1911 news article?

~~~
Someone
Everybody can claim that copyright; what a court thinks of such a claim is
something else.

In this case, the copyright claim likely is not on the original paper or its
text, but on the site.

------
ck2
I'm stunned by the 1 cent price.

That means in 100 years the newstand price went up 250x

Can't just be inflation. Must have been competition and abundant advertisers.

~~~
chillacy
Or trying to squeeze more money out of a smaller readerbase?
[http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/03/newsonomics-the-collapse-
of...](http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/03/newsonomics-the-collapse-of-single-
copy-sales/)

1 cent in 1913 => 24 cents today
[http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/](http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/)

I'm not sure how much a single issue costs today, but the cheapest you can get
NYT for is 75 cents a day: [http://daggle.com/new-york-times-
subscription-3480](http://daggle.com/new-york-times-subscription-3480)

~~~
ck2
Newstand price is $2.50 inside and outside NYC for daily and $5 Sunday

[http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/New-York-Times-Price-
Hi...](http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/New-York-Times-Price-
Hike-50-Cents-3-Dollars-136619908.html)

~~~
chillacy
Damn, that's... terrible. News is cheap these days with the internet and all,
but I guess that just means I have no brand loyalty.

------
coin
Horrible usability on an iPad, just serve me the content without trying to be
clever

------
voodootrucker
Given that corporations have now gotten more powerful than the governments
that regulate them, I doubt we'll see this happen nowadays (but it desperately
needs to happen, to Comcast, Google, etc)

Source:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11544016](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11544016)
(and pretty much the whole cable lobby, VW scandal, etc)

~~~
shrewduser
Comcast I get but why Google? and who's etc exactly?

