
How to tame the tech titans - kawera
https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21735021-dominance-google-facebook-and-amazon-bad-consumers-and-competition-how-tame
======
titzer
FTA:

> The tricky task for policymakers is to restrain them without unduly stifling
> innovation.

This suggests a profound lack of understanding of the power imbalance between
the Tech Giants(TM) and the rest of the world. The fact that these big
companies operate what amounts to mini-surveillance states and face little to
no scrutiny about it, and this is not even mentioned in the article, is proof
this person has not thought deeply about this problem. The additional fact
that these huge Titans dominate vast monocultures puts us all at risk of
catastrophic failure or the vulnerability of cyber attack and should scare the
bejesus out of policymakers, militaries, and agencies tasked with securing
national infrastructure.

People need to think harder about how bad it would be if, e.g. Apple or Google
actually _were_ evil, or were co-opted into evil overnight. Or what if they
were just evil _to you_.

Some of these companies essentially possess "kill switches" over vast parts of
the computing landscape. Laptops are a bad software update from being bricks;
the cloud is divided up into huge chunks that could go dark; one provider
holds more than a third of the world's email; 90% of the world's search
traffic.

These entities don't need to be somehow (gently) "restrained", but as a
civilization we need to rethink the power we've ceded to them at a very
fundamental level, or we risk growing ever weaker and more dependent on them.

~~~
indigochill
Am I mistaken in my impression that the bulk of innovation actually happens
outside of titans, which the titans then buy? So even hamstringing them
wouldn't actually stifle innovation?

~~~
jonathanyc
It would seem like it. In terms of innovative research, it doesn’t seem like,
say, Google Research is so much more productive than your average prestigious
research university (albeit possessing perhaps a different set of focus
areas). Similarly, when it comes to improvements on technical infrastructure,
it seems Google plays a large role, but not an exceptionally large one, which
makes sense by virtue of their massive deployments and having the capital to
hire good engineers. Still, this doesn’t seem so outsized—Meltdown/Spectre
weren’t discovered solely by Google, for example.

On the other hand, when it comes to product innovation, it definitely seems
like the bulk of it happens, as you said, outside titans. Again picking on
Google (sorry), V8, Google Docs, Google Maps, YouTube, and Android were all
acquisitions! And though Google acquiring them might certainly have given them
large amounts of resources to expand (e.g. subsidizing YouTube), there is
definitely the question of stifling innovation and competition. Consider
TinEye, who first published reverse image search; later Google just poured
engineers onto their own reverse image search platform and copied it.

I think you can see the same dynamic with Facebook copying Snapchat features.
It doesn’t seem like a healthy market.

EDIT: V8 might be better characterized as the product of an acquihire,
actually. It might not fit with the rest of the list, which were all literally
acquisitions of products developed outside Google.

~~~
TheHegemon
> Consider TinEye, who first published reverse image search; later Google just
> poured engineers onto their own reverse image search platform and copied it

If Google's product was better, wouldn't that mean it increased competition
and innovation?

~~~
jonathanyc
I think it’s a comparable situation to dumping[1]. Google can attract users
from TinEye by virtue of their brand alone and subsidize their own product
even if it is unprofitable. The result is that in the long term TinEye is
unable to compete and disappears, after which point Google has no incentive to
improve their service. The only entities left that can compete are other
titans.

It also is a distortion in that it discourages investment into technical
innovation if you are trying to make money as a non-titan—-why even bother if
Google will just come along and copy your product then give it away for free
(to drive traffic to Google search)?

There is still the potential of innovation in this case from academic
researchers, who might not care about commercialization. But such a situation
where individuals cannot hope to compete and where research just feeds into
titans would be pretty awful.

1:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_\(pricing_policy\))

------
smg
I am surprised there has not been an antitrust case against Google and
Facebook. Google is definitely abusing the monopoly position it has in search.
The claim that any user can switch to Bing by just typing in a different URL
is ridiculous.

The remedy that the original article suggest is right on point. The way search
systems work these days is by learning from how users interact with them.
Google's market share ensures that it will always have access to more tail
queries and user's intent while asking them. Building a better search engines
than Google is no longer about hiring engineers or investing in data centers,
it is about having access to the data that Google has on searches. Just like
the DOJ forced Microsoft to document and provide API's that were being used by
IE and Office to all software companies, a case today that forces Google to
share all the data that it collects on searches would help break its monopoly.

~~~
gaius
_a case today that forces Google to share all the data that it collects on
searches would help break its monopoly._

The only thing worse than Google having everyone’s search history is forcing
them to reveal everyone’s search history. The data should be destroyed and new
data not gathered.

“You googled X on date D therefore we have concluded Y is a preexisting
condition and your claim is denied”

~~~
ErikVandeWater
Two responses.

1\. Although I see your point that search queries could be dangerous, Google
would never allow such use of search queries. Using search queries from a
given person to market them products is one thing, but using it against them
is a different beast that would horribly hurt the Google brand. And although
one could imagine a court order being used to get a user's history,
establishing a pre-existing condition is not enough of a benefit to go through
the trouble of getting a court order for search history (and would likely not
be granted, given the circumstantial nature of the evidence).

2\. There are a hundred reasons to search any given query. If an insurer is
using such an insubstantial basis to establish a pre-existing condition, the
actual problem is that the insurer has too much market power and can be (for
lack of a better word) an asshole without losing customers.

~~~
RhodesianHunter
You appear to be replying to a comment without having read or understood any
of the context?

The thread is discussing a case in which Google would be forced to release all
of this data via court order, so your first bullet doesn't make sense as
Google would have no choice in this theoretical scenario.

------
ekidd
> _Regulators could oblige platform firms to make anonymised bulk data
> available to competitors, in return for a fee, a bit like the compulsory
> licensing of a patent. Such data-sharing requirements could be calibrated to
> firms’ size: the bigger platforms are, the more they have to share. These
> mechanisms would turn data from something titans hoard, to suppress
> competition, into something users share, to foster innovation._

This is a _terrible_ idea, and would be massively destructive of user privacy.
"Anonymized" data can very often be de-anonymized.

Maybe I'm dumb, but I actually trust a fair amount Google with my less
sensitive data. Google is secretive, and a bit paranoid, and they don't like
to share. Data goes in, but historically, not much has come out.

I do not, however, trust Facebook with my data. And that's the point: Just
because I've looked at the tradeoffs and decided to share certain data with
Google, I don't want the government ordering Google to share it with _other_
companies. Ditto for LinkedIn: I'm happy to give them a resume, but I don't
necessary want to share that with scrapers who are repurposing the data.

------
billysielu
I'm not convinced there's a problem here that needs to be solved.

"The dominance of Google, Facebook and Amazon is bad for consumers and
competition" ... really??

\- Amazon provides good products and services at good prices and that's why
they're successful. Some things are cheaper locally, some things aren't. I buy
loads of stuff from Amazon and don't want that to change.

\- Google, privacy is a concern, but their search engine is extremely useful,
and gmail, and chrome, etc. I rely on Chrome, and the search engine, as long
as they're the best at what they do I'm happy to continue using them.

\- Facebook, is still the most widely used (and that makes it the best) social
network. I think Facebook is going to die a natural death - especially when
people realize how difficult it is to actually delete their content. It's
still the easiest way to run a group, as most people are already on Facebook.
I run a local residents group on Facebook and am happy to continue using
Facebook for that. I don't use it for personal stuff anymore because
everyone's too political, the risk isn't worth the reward. My actual friends
use a WhatsApp group to chat with each other, that's a good service I want to
keep using. Facebook doesn't belong in the same list as Amazon and Google -
because tbh Facebook could disappear tomorrow and it wouldn't affect very much
at all.

~~~
matthewmacleod
_" The dominance of Google, Facebook and Amazon is bad for consumers and
competition" ... really??_

Yes, really.

The existence of monopoly or significantly market-dominating providers is
_definitionally_ a failure of competition.

I suppose you could argue about whether or not a competitive market is good,
but I'm pretty sure it is.

~~~
billysielu
I reacted more to the word 'consumers' than 'competition' as the competition
argument comes back around to what's best for consumers anyway.

So I put my consumer hat on and pondered what would I rather have: \- The
current situation \- Intervention

And I concluded I quite like the current situation, these companies provide
meaningful benefits to me.

If I put my tin foil hat on, it seems quite obvious that 'bad for consumers'
is what someone wants you to think, but it isn't entirely true.

~~~
CodeCube
Unfortunately, you may be happy with Amazon, but there's loads of examples of
where this is going wrong for consumers. From issues with counterfit products
(see the post recently about the guy who unknowingly was "charged" with import
fraud and denied privileged flight status due to an Amazon order), to them
taking advantage of the fact that people assume they're the cheapest price
(they aren't always), to "prime shipping" becoming more and more of a thing
you can't depend on (late shipments ... all the time).

Maybe you live in an area that Amazon gives higher priority to, maybe you live
closer to a shipping center than I do, maybe the things you tend to order tend
to be highly stocked in their warehouses ... I don't know, but the more time
passes, the more Amazon frustrates me personally as a consumer, and others as
well based on articles being written and social media chatter; which is
frustrating, because the average national retail store is terrible (and they
already killed all the mom n pop stores), and having to maintain accounts on
lots of smaller online retailers is a pain (not to mention lax security can
lead to stolen credit cards, etc). So obviously, in some ways, I agree with
you because Amazon does provide benefits ... they just need to not be the only
viable player in the online space.

------
vinceguidry
I think Google Search is going to eventually become a regulated public
utility, and we can look to the telecom industry for an example of how that
will go down.

The thing that comes to mind is the fact that Google refuses to allow API
access to searching. They used to, with results limited to just five bad
results, but quietly removed even that when they released a new tool and
discontinued the old one.

It struck me at the time that I learned this, as I figured that Google was so
large, that search would become like a free public utility that they ran. I
suppose I shouldn't have been surprised that they don't, but other similar
adventures got me to conclude that the API revolution is still in it's barest
infancy.

But Google instead goes to _enormous_ lengths to protect Search. I might make
it a weekend project some day to figure out just what the current state of
Google scraping is, that cat and mouse game probably has a fascinating
history.

This will probably become a point of debate 20 years down the road when
antitrust cases on tech giants finally become politically feasible.

~~~
bagacrap
Do you actually want it to be a free public utility? In terms of reliability,
Google search currently has a lot more 9s than any utility I know of (roads,
power, water, internet service). Utility companies are not really known for
innovation as much as stagnation, unless you count innovative new ways to
extract rent.

To me the reason Google dominates search is not that it's loads better than
the competition but because it's a little bit better, and there's minimal cost
of switching (from Bing to Google, say).

------
daviddumenil
A gentle contradiction in the article: "a full-scale break-up would cripple
the platforms’ economies of scale"

but later:

"Trustbusters should scrutinise mergers to gauge whether a deal is likely to
neutralise a potential long-term threat"

There also seems to be plenty of middle ground there. Like forcing a sell-off
of Waze and Instagram without breaking up the whole parent company.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
We CAN break them up. Facebook can be broken up into a federated network.
Split Google into YouTube, Hangouts, Cloud, and The Rest. Force any
integrations between these to be done with open protocols anyone can
implement.

~~~
neolefty
Search and ads are the big ones. And you can't really split any part of the
company off from ads because that's revenue.

So if you're going to split Google, the only way I can see it working is a
bilateral (or multilateral) split, like the AT&T breakup into the Baby Bells.
Each part would get search and ads and maybe the existing YouTube corpus, ???

Discussion question: How did the AT&T breakup work out in the long run?
(Genuinely curious, not trying to be snarky.)

~~~
theandrewbailey
In the long run, tech changed the landscape so much that the breakup was
ultimately a success. I'm skeptical that cell phones would be as ubiquitous
and cheap as they are if it didn't. Long distance calling (a big deal back
then) was killed by tech and competition at the same time.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Other things like answering machines probably would not have happened, too. I
wasn't around back then but as I understand it you were only allowed to
connect Ma Bell's telephones to your telephone line and Bell's goons would
break in and rip out unapproved telephone equipment.

~~~
theandrewbailey
Third party devices were "legalized" by the Carterfone decision in the 1950s,
long before the breakup.

[https://arstechnica.com/tech-
policy/2017/12/carterfone-40-ye...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-
policy/2017/12/carterfone-40-years/)

------
dalbasal
Apple is a bit of a herring here.

Apple had a very unusual strategy of (a) not pursuing market share and (b) not
building moats. This was part of their quirkiness as a tech giant. The truth
is that they are far more exposed to competitive pressures, and their own
future performance than others.

IE, the ipod had little or no moat. OSX never had 10% market share. iOS has
tsomewhat of a platform moat, but they left the high volume segment of the
market to Google. They have some network-effect-moats like facetime built in,
but it doesn't add up to a persistent dominance. Facetime still needs to be
better than whatsapp and skype on _iphones_ to maintain popularity.

In all their major product lines, the current competition could really hurt
them if Apple underperform for one or two generations. iOS, OSX, itunes...

Few other companies think like this. IE maintained dominance (despite
antitrust) for a long time.It wasn't untill Firefox & Chrome broke their
monopoly that browsers/www started advancing again.

They survived bad operating systems, that no one wanted (Vista), extending XP
by 5+ years past its use by date.

Amazon dominate online selling. They had a _patent_ on remembering your CC
number, a mf _patent!_ ...just to turn past market share into future market
share. The infrastructure services are platforms, with lock in.

Google is all about 100% market share, all about lock in. All about
accumulating data so that they have

FB has all the people and all the sites (FB tracking pixel). They have the
best ad-targetting platorm for this reason. All the people regsitered.
Detailed data on their FB dataset. Vast off-platform collected from advertiser
sites (all the advertisers).

I agree that part of the FB problem is that they aren't treated like news
media, and are exempt from journalistic norms. But, this is also a red
herring. Their monopoly is a problem regardless.

Many of their acquisitions are defensive, buying potential competition.

Antitrust needs a total re-build from the ground up. It's not about price
fixing anymore. It's about taking up all the space so that no one else can
play.

I don't think that the standards of antitrust are any good right now. You have
to prve price fixing, unfair competition or some other hard to prove and
potentially irelevant activities. I think antitrust has to be preventive.

It needs to make sure there is ample room in a market for innovation, and/or
regulate _all_ the giants by default. Got a dataset that includes all the
people in a country? Maybe that should be a public dataset.

~~~
mercutio2
Apple would only be a red herring if the article in question was talking in
any way about Apple! It’s not, it’s subtitle specifies it’s referring to
Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

In fact, Apple is mentioned only once in the article, in a sentence saying
“Apple is to be admired for making things people want to buy”.

Pedantry about RTFA aside, I generally agree with your points, Apple has
chosen a business model that makes it relatively unlikely to receive serious
anti-trust scrutiny!

------
pqh
I mostly agree with the points leading up to the suggestion of mandatory data
sharing. I'm still mulling that over.

But I do agree that just breaking up Google, for example, wouldn't necessarily
be a good thing. Of all the tech giants, I think Google is still doing the
most good in terms of investing in innovation. Their research teams are varied
and doing the fantastic.

Disclaimer: I don't work there and forewent an offer to network my way in.

------
pg_bot
I'm still surprised that no one has proposed a protocol to replace Facebook /
Twitter. If a real time RSS system existed then both of those companies don't
really need to exist. In fact, I think you could mock up a service just using
SMTP that would work exactly as both those companies do today.

~~~
davidcbc
The problem is you're trying to solve a problem that most Facebook users don't
care about. The hurdles to replacing Facebook or Twitter aren't technical,
they are social. The killer feature of any social network is people using it.

------
ntonozzi
Ben Thompson has some awesome writing on tech titans, and their role in the
economy. Here's some definitions: [https://stratechery.com/2017/defining-
aggregators/](https://stratechery.com/2017/defining-aggregators/) and here's
an some writing on why they are not necessarily bad monopolies:
[https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-
theory/](https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/).

------
joejerryronnie
We're all gonna look back at this in 15 years with a good laugh at our
naivety. New paradigms will emerge, and with them new competitors we can't
even imagine today. Google and Facebook are one technical/cultural shift away
from irrelevancy. Amazon is much closer to a traditional monopolist and will
perhaps require regulatory intervention.

I literally had this same conversation about Microsoft and Yahoo in 2000.
Remember when we all thought that George W Bush was the worst possible
president imaginable? Yeah, those were good times . . .

------
chx
I am surprised my esteemed colleagues haven't jumped on

> Immunity to content liability must go, too.

This would be quite a hurdle to quite a few sites if it applied across the
board. To begin with, this site. Reddit. Etc.

~~~
WovenTales
On the one hand, definitely worrisome when taking into account the alternative
sites. On the other, it's in a paragraph about legal exceptions, so I'm
wondering if the article's saying that Facebook and such get more people
looking the other way, and that any smaller competitors would get jumped on
disproportionally; just looking at music, YouTube doesn't seem to be suffering
too greatly from everyone uploading recordings, while I can easily see a small
upstart getting sued into oblivion for a fraction of the infringement. Maybe
some of that is that they can point to their algorithms as mitigation, but, A,
that gets into proprietary secrets that would be key to even existing clashing
with anti-trust laws, and B, there's still plenty of eight-year-old music
videos that they somehow haven't gotten around to checking.

------
pjungwir
If people are interested in tech monopolies, innovation, and government, here
are some great books:

\- _The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation_ , by
John Gertner: A running theme is how AT&T was motivated to "give back" to the
country to avoid anti-monopoly action by the government. I take today's talk
about Google/Facebook/Apple/Amazon to be a negotiating tactic to motivate them
to act similarly, although I wouldn't be surprised to see real government
involvement either.

\- _The Chip_ by T. R. Reid: the invention of the integrated circuit near-
simultaneously by two different people/companies.

\- _Where Wizards Stay up Late_ by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon: the origins
of ARPANET at BBN.

Two other closely-related themes in these books are:

\- Patents (a limited monopoly), and how the patents for both transistors and
integrated circuits were licensed very freely, allowing much faster
innovation.

\- Government spending, e.g. how the space race and arms buildup paid for the
early years of IC development before they were commercially competitive with
just wiring up lots of components.

. . .

OT, I found all these books more interesting than _The Soul of a New Machine_
by Tracy Kidder. Although it won a Pulitzer, it never felt like any of it
"mattered" in the same way. (I had never heard of the Data General Eclipse.)
It just seemed like another story of engineers killing themselves with
overwork.

------
kashyapc
"Apple is to be admired as the world’s most valuable listed company for the
simple reason that it makes things people want to buy, even while facing
fierce competition."

Really? Apple gets a clean chit for everything?

I live in the Linux world, can the BSD (including all the variants)
contributors / maintainers enlighten if Apple is contributing anything back?

(NB: I am aware of what the BSD license _allows_. I'm mostly interested about
Apple's behaviour from the "being a good citizen" POV.)

------
CurtMonash
I posted a few minutes ago about how chaotic privacy-related public policy is
around the world. [http://www.dbms2.com/2013/07/08/privacy-data-use-gap-
theory/](http://www.dbms2.com/2013/07/08/privacy-data-use-gap-theory/) This
article is another wrinkle yet.

------
kome
I like Amazon because it proves that coordinated economy can work pretty well
nowadays. We need to nationalize it. :)

~~~
debt
Give Bezos a second. He'll become a lunatic in due time, they all do.

~~~
kome
To be fair, he is already a lunatic.

------
panabee
monopoly analysis feels outdated.

most government policies are rightly evaluated on how they impact society
overall, not a single issue group (SIG). for instance, it benefits society
overall to tax cigarettes even though it harms employees and companies related
to the tobacco industry.

why not view monopolies with the same societal lens?

for argument's sake, assume google does have a monopoly position in search and
abuses it. the resulting cash flows enabled self-driving cars, free worldwide
communication, and cheaper smartphones.

so google hurt search but helped other industries, increasing competition in
automobiles, communication, and smartphones -- all of which are larger
industries. is this better or worse for society?

understanding how tech should help society is a complex and critical issue,
but the pursuit of truth requires a balanced, dispassionate analysis from the
perspective of society, not one SIG.

------
shaqbert
If they are smart, they will do some self regulation to preempt the government
from coming in. Giving more transparency and empowerment to the users, and
explaining a little more what they are doing, and why they are doing it, would
go a long way.

------
oldgun
> Apple is to be admired as the world’s most valuable listed company for the
> simple reason that it makes things people want to buy, even while facing
> fierce competition.

Not sure if I completely agree that Apple's an angel in this case.

------
kumarski
Part of their motivation to maximize costs is to minimize tax exposure.

Since 2008 Walmart has paid $64B in corporate income tax, while Amazon has
paid $1.4B.

(Source: [http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-
sec](http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-sec))

Amazon is taking NYC's lunch money - New York City has the power to stop
Amazon and to restore middle-class equilibrium.

(Source: [http://www.adamtownsend.me/amazon-
nyc/](http://www.adamtownsend.me/amazon-nyc/))

Jean-Claude Juncker and Luxembourg's exclusive relationship granted Amazon
illegal tax evasion.

(source: [http://europa.eu/rapid/press-
release_IP-17-3701_en.htm](http://europa.eu/rapid/press-
release_IP-17-3701_en.htm))

Only 13 percent of Amazon’s profits went to federal, state, local and foreign
taxes from 2007 through 2015, according to an analysis by S&P Global Market
Intelligence.

For the sake of comparison, that’s about half the average amount S&P 500
companies paid over same period.

Amazon paid just a 9.3 percent effective federal income tax between 2008 and
2012.

Source: [http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-
meter/statements/2017/jul/...](http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-
meter/statements/2017/jul/26/donald-trump/amazon-no-tax-monopoly-donald-trump-
said/)

Amazon will unemploy millions of people.

Source: [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazon-is-going-to-kill-
mo...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazon-is-going-to-kill-more-
american-jobs-than-china-did-2017-01-19)

"Since 2008 Walmart has paid $64B in corporate income tax, while Amazon has
paid $1.4B. This is despite the fact that, in the last 24 months, Amazon has
added the value of Walmart to its market cap. The most uncomfortable question
in business, in my view, is how do we pay our soldiers, firefighters, and
teachers if a firm can ascend to $460B in value (#5 in the world) without
paying any meaningful corporate taxes." \- Professor Scott Galloway

Source: [https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-19/why-
wal-m...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-19/why-wal-mart-
pays-a-lot-more-in-taxes-than-amazon)

~~~
zBard
Comparing tax paid to market cap is disingenuous at best - I was surprised
Bloomberg would print that, but they then go on to explain it in the article.

------
Feniks
You can't, the US is too dysfunctional and corrupt. Current administration has
realised this and instead of aiming high opts to go low.

The EU struggles in vain to get their tech sector off the ground and China is
doing their own thing.

------
zerostar07
Easy: cut their government - bodyguard

------
cletus
Ugh, The Economist.

> However, the barriers to entry are rising.

Largely irrelevant. Antritrust doesn't exist to protect you from competition.
It exists to protect you from unfair practices resulting in market dominance
(typically monopolies). There's a difference.

> If this trend runs its course, consumers will suffer as the tech industry
> becomes less vibrant

Not every surface is a slipper slope.

More to the point, we're now talking about what _might_ happen rather than
what _is_ happening?

> Less money will go into startups

Absolutely no evidence of that yet. In fact I'd argue there's still too much
sloshing around the tech industry. But that's fine. If "sophisticatd"
investors want to lose their collective shirts on pets.com or whatever, go for
it.

> The European Commission has accused Google of using control of Android, its
> mobile operating system, to give its own apps a leg up.

I've never understood the complaints about Android for two reasons:

1\. Consumers have other options (mainly iOS); and

2\. Apple isn't held to the same standard. The only reason Google seems to be
is that they let third-party manufacturers use their stuff at all. Apple
doesn't. So Google gets raked over the anti-competitive coals? WTF?

It's also worth nothing that Android consists of two principal parts:

1\. The open source part, which anyone can do anything with (license
permitting); and

2\. The Google apps and Android trademark, which come with constraints.

Amazon has gone the route of using (1) for their Fire line. Samsung is in camp
(2). The point here is you don't have to use (2). People are capable of
writing their own apps. Well, let me clarify. They _should_ be but they
aren't. Samsung apps in particular are terrible.

That's not Google's fault. That's Samsung's.

> Facebook keeps buying firms which could one day lure users away

Isn't this a sign that their alleged market dominance is fragile?

Honestly, this whole piece seems like a giant FUD exercise in "What if..."

~~~
brandmeyer
"Consumers have other options (mainly iOS)"

Two or three competitors in a space does not a robust market make. For one
thing, it is very easy to create side-channels of collusion between the
competitors. Just as one example closer to everyday life, think about how easy
it is for two people to share information in bridge or spades (the card games)
without overt communication. I guarantee that side-channel collusion is
happening between executives any time the number of players has gotten small
enough.

How many times have regulatory agencies used the existence of only two
networking/telecom providers in an area as a basis for deciding that a market
has sufficient competition to allow another merger to go through? We can see
the adverse effects of the lack of competition in the terrible customer
service and product quality in that industry.

Why can't we see it in our own?

~~~
dude01
There used to be a blog titled "Oligopoly Watch" (looks like it's dead now)
where they talked about two or more groups of companies dominating various
market segments. So yeah, you can have way more than two companies indirectly
colluding to fix prices and competition.

I don't know if this is the greatest link, but here's a list of some current
oligopolies: [https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/121514/what-are-
som...](https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/121514/what-are-some-current-
examples-oligopolies.asp)

------
crdoconnor
For Google you could separate the search index from the rest of the company,
start regulating it as a public utility and force them to open up its APIs to
startups.

At this point it's a little hard to argue that a plucky young startup can come
along and build a competing index at the same scale. The amount of power alone
needed to maintain it is staggering.

~~~
godelmachine
Regulating would only diminish its QoS, methinks. Algorithms improve at such
fast scale that no one person has complete knowledge about it. Regulating it
may drive the regulators mad.

~~~
crdoconnor
Are you arguing that setting up QoS metrics for a search engine index is
intrinsically hard in the way that monitoring the safe running of a nuclear
power plant or an air traffic control system is not?

I think maintaining a search index is intrinsically hard - much like
maintaining a nuclear power plant. I don't think monitoring a search index is
though.

I'm also skeptical of the notion that the engineering of the search index has
changed fundamentally in the last 5 years. Realistically Google is not under
much competitive pressure any more.

------
jstewartmobile
So, we get a prescription article from the industry that tech has struck the
hardest: print journalism. And their prescription? _Regulation_!

Not much better than placebo if you ask me. US government is so venal. Only
reason Europe is on the war path is that the offenders aren't European
companies. With the amount of cash the big 4/5/6 have on hand, they'll
eventually neuter and/or bypass the European regulators as well.

I don't know about Amazon, but with the amount of compute power lying around
today, a lot of what Google and Facebook do could probably done just as well--
if not better--through a distributed model. Sometimes I wonder if NAT and all
of the extraneous junk in IPv6 were just the incumbents' way of salting the
ground?

