

Congressman warns FTC To Leave Google alone - DaNmarner
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/congressman-warns-ftc-leave-google-alone/

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ck2
Google may do some questionable things but it certainly is no Microsoft or
Facebook or ebay/PayPal.

Google contributes to open source software in a very significant manner and
completely voluntary - from early in it's history. Not sure I can name more
than one or two others at their level who have done that.

Google's biggest problem is lack of human beings vs technical automation
ratio. When things go horribly wrong with their services (ie. ban) and you
need a human, it's pretty much impossible unless you can reach the top of a
popular website with the story of your problem.

~~~
Steko
"Google contributes to open source software in a very significant manner and
completely voluntary"

So what, that means they can't break the law?

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capo
Who said they broke the law? I'm no expert on antitrust law but as I
understand the FTC will basically try to argue a theory in front of a judge,
and if it's indeed concerning which results rank where it's not a particularly
strong theory.

At this point it's really inertia that is keeping the FTC on track towards a
lawsuit.

~~~
Steko
"Who said they broke the law?"

Stop moving goalposts, grandparent was clearly peddling what amounts to an
"upstanding member of the community" defense.

I'm not claiming Google broke any law, but they're not above the law, they can
get investigated like anyone else.

~~~
capo
Not sure if you've noticed but they _are_ being investigated. Investigations
however do not imply guilt, and this is not a criminal investigation so it's
not analogous to your example.

There is no clear and shut case here, no evidence of cartel-like behaviour or
raising prices on consumers. The FTC will hire an economist who will argue
that exists "market failure", Google will in turn hire several economists,
scholars, and law firms to prove them wrong.

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hiddenstage
I never understood the FTC's position on this anti-competitive case. Google is
promoting their own services on their own website.. how is that anti-
competitive? They should be able to make their products the number one result
of every search if they wanted to but they obviously wouldn't do that.

Microsoft was anti-competitive because there was a significant roadblock to
use competitor's services. With Google, all you have to do is type in
bing.com/yahoo.com/duckduckgo.com instead of google.com.

~~~
CurtHagenlocher
But at least today, searching isn't just a matter of a better web crawl, or a
better algorithm against web data. A key component -- perhaps _the_ key
component -- of providing good search results is being able to incorporate
user feedback from previous searches.

Imagine a company with a 100% market share. Your startup wants to complete. It
crawls the web, applies the latest in NLP and semantic search technology and
produces an index. And, of course, buys a Super Bowl ad. The public is
curious; they try your product once. And they discover that it sucks, so they
never come back.

You simply can't compete on relevance without the user feedback. But without
the volume of users, you'll never get the feedback you need. This is almost
certainly why Microsoft made that crazy large offer for Yahoo all those years
ago; it was their attempt to acquire volume to improve their relevance.

Consider the "Bing Challenge". I haven't tried it personally, but the feedback
on HN has generally been "meh". And yet Bing claims that in blind tests, some
better-than-expected percentage of users prefer the Bing results. How can this
be? Well, one explanation is that the test has been cooked somehow to prefer
Bing. But another explanation is that Bing's existing users are more likely to
be "average users", while readers of HN are "techies" who overwhelmingly
prefer Google. So Bing may simply be producing results that are preferred by
the kind of customers who are already using Bing -- and against search terms
which are more likely to be used by the kind of customers who are already
using Bing. This is consistent with the hypothesis that user feedback is the
primary driver of search quality.

Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but not at Bing. And it's a job, not a
meaningful personal relationship.

~~~
randomfool
This sounds like a variant of economies of scale. i.e, it's cheaper when
you're dealing in bulk. I haven't heard of this being a problem for large
manufacturers in the past, I'm not sure why it applies to Google.

I do agree that MS is facing difficulty with Bing because they don't have
enough signals to generate decent info on what is relevant. But I'm also not
convinced that they have the competence to succeed.

Disclaimer: I used to work at Microsoft and think their monopoly proceedings
that forced browser choice were bunk. But that the integration between Office
and Windows was largely correct, but Microsoft was too incompetent to do
anything useful with it.

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DaNmarner
My take on this: lobbying works.

~~~
beedogs
My take is that the US is basically a corpocracy at this point. They should
just drop all pretenses of being a government of, for, and by the people.

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duxup
Maybe google bought them self a congressman?

I always wanted one myself.

~~~
saalweachter
I hear they're pretty cheap in the empty states, especially if you're willing
to share them with their current owners.

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programminggeek
I realize that we are pro-tech around here, but Google really has close to a
real monopoly power in many forms of online advertising: search, display,
mobile, affiliate, they are pretty much bigger than most of the competition.
That doesn't mean they are a monopoly, but they certain can and do set their
own rules about how business should be done on the internet.

For example, Google artificially inflates their AdWords ad rates using the
quality score algorithm. It's an ingenious little black box that they can turn
up the dial periodically as needed without looking like they are raising their
rates, they're just "adjusting the algorithm".

Or, Google has many times changed their organic listings that hurt businesses
traffic enough to push them to AdWords. For example, selling links as
advertising can get you banned from Google, and Google aggressively pursues
link networks because they can be a cost effective way of advertising on
Google that is cheaper than AdWords.

Google does open source and a lot of amazing things for the tech community,
but it's also a business out to protect its core business - online advertising
and search. Sure, it has a right to do these things on its own network, but
when you own 60, 70, 80% of the internet search volume, it's a fine line
between reasonable business decision and anti-competitive behavior.

~~~
voodoomagicman
The reason that google punishes paid links and link networks is that incoming
links are a huge component of pagerank - if these weren't punished, it would
lower the quality of their search results.

