
Google is Crushing the Internet - dforrestwilson
http://theweek.com/articles/693488/google-monopoly--crushing-internet
======
empath75
I don't have a strong opinion about whether or not google should be regulated
or not. However, this guy doesn't seem appreciate the scale of the
difficulties that google solved and how much better google was than the
competition. They almost single-handedly transformed the internet into a
useful tool. Altavista and yahoo were like looking up information in a card
catalog in comparison. It wasn't just a first mover advantage. And they
followed it up by releasing, an ads platform that made everyone else look like
amateur hour, a mail product that was far better than hotmail, a mapping tool
much better than MapQuest, and a web browser that was far better than ie or
Firefox.

They are in the position they're in because they solved a lot of difficult
problems and made it look easy. If we ever get to the point that we need as a
society to rein them in, we should do it with a full understanding of what
they've accomplished.

It's bizarre to accuse the company that made the internet into what it is
today of somehow crushing it.

~~~
wazoox
Basically you're explaining that they earned a monopoly for a reason. That's
true. And there are always true advantages to monopoly (standardization,
economy of scale, prices stability ...). However monopolies harm the economy
and the public good in the long run.

See, that works for any past monopoly:

I don't have a strong opinion about whether or not Microsoft should be
regulated or not. [...] It's bizarre to accuse the company that made the PC
into what it is today of somehow crushing it.

I don't have a strong opinion about whether or not AT&T should be regulated or
not. [...] It's bizarre to accuse the company that made the telephone into
what it is today of somehow crushing it.

I don't have a strong opinion about whether or not Standard Oil should be
regulated or not. [...] It's bizarre to accuse the company that made the oil
industry into what it is today of somehow crushing it.

~~~
bgw
It has always been strange for me to understand Google search as a monopoly.
First, there are competitors. Second, it's free (yes, I know you pay with
data). Third, you can use the internet without using any of Google's services
(except adsense, I suppose). How is Google's search a monopoly when it's the
user who is deciding they prefer it to Bing or Duck Duck Go or Yahoo? Perhaps
my understanding of monopoly is incomplete because this makes no sense to me.

~~~
pixl97
If I produce content that I want other people to view, I have to cater it to
googles requirements or almost nobody sees it. Simply put Google is the
biggest driver of traffic and ad dollars.

If you play by (or if you game) Googles rules you can make piles of cash,
driven by the traffic they send your way. Then the next day it can dry up with
no reason given.

Saying that the user prefers it is a slightly backward way of thinking about
it. Does the user prefer it because it is better, or is it because abuse of
their monopoly doesn't allow other providers to achieve the same quality of
service?

~~~
scarface74
_If I produce content that I want other people to view, I have to cater it to
googles requirements or almost nobody sees it. Simply put Google is the
biggest driver of traffic and ad dollars._

I know of a few bloggers who don't seem to be dependent on Google or Facebook
to maintain their business.

1\. John Gruber (daringireball.com). He made a name for himself over 15 years
and is famous enough to be on the shortlist of people that Apple always
reaches out to when they want to do a four or five person press event. He
routinely gets VPs from Apple on his podcast.

He sells RSS sponsorships - one at the beginning of the week and one at the
end of the week. He also makes money from his podcast.

He did lose half his readership after Google killed off Google Reader, but he
said since he never sold his ads based on the number of readers, it hasn't
hurt his business too badly.

2\. Ben Thompson (stratechery.com). He posts once a week to his blog, became
popular and has over 2000 subscribers to his newsletter that he charges $100/a
year for. He has one advertiser for his podcast - mailchimp - they sponsored
him for an entire year.

3\. Marco Arment - first architect of Tumblr, creator of Instapaper, and now
Overcast. He is also a decently well known blogger in the Apple ecosystem. He
basically created his own podcast app ad sales platform, and has a popular
podcast.

4\. Horace Deidu. He started out as a blogger/analyst and now he gives
speeches and does workshops worldwide.

It's hard getting noticed over the noise, but it can be done. It is possible
to create a viable content business without an over reliance on Google.

------
5_minutes
While I understand the sympathy here for Google's accomplishments, and don't
agree with many of the OP's points - just objectively, it's scary for us all
to be dependent on one commercial company. Wether they earned to be in that
position or not.

It's also hard to compare things: the scale of the current internet usage, the
type of information that is available. (And what can be influenced by showing
what).

This scale is much, much wider then what happened to AT&T back in the days.
That said, since Apple and MS are also getting away with very similar things,
I don't see a point in punishing Google. Especially, as them all being US
companies.

The solution of breaking up Google and then putting weaker foreign company in
the front-seat, by doing so -- also would not make any sense.

------
fear91
I'm wondering when, if ever, the general public will start recognizing Google
as one of the "big brothers". Somehow it's still perceived as this "cool"
startup but they squash small businesses, avoid taxes, are in bed with
intelligence agencies, etc.

~~~
quickben
I'm old enough to remember the techies backlash over targeted advertising in
Gmail.

It seemed the google's PR started throwing cash at it for years to "educate"
the public.

The general public appeared to be a complacent herd of sheep like creatures
that would embrace convenience over everything.

Maybe in your circles Google is "cool". In my circles it's necessary evil. The
platform/network effect is so strong there is no escaping it. The US is
invested my money wise too deep and won't do what they had the backbone to do
with SO and the rest.

So, "when, if ever", won't be anytime soon.

Meanwhile, innovation suffers. They killed chat protocols interfaces (pure
monopoly abuse since they have most users), the buried end-to-end encryption,
they killed bunch of competing businesses by promoting their side businesses
on the search page higher, etc.

Http2 could have had things for the users in it (if one goes through the
troubles of upgrading a network layer). Instead it had "cut off download at
instant if requested" and other features that made web crawling (though not
necessarily browsing and developing) easy.

Going forward, they will be cleaning the advertising agency landsccape to get
rid out of competition with : Amp ( since they​ de facto own mobile browsing
and Android). Desktop displayed ads (they announced as blocker in chrome, and
guess twice whose ads will be allowed through).

I can enumerate all day.

TLDR: they are out of the 'cool' startup area, and firmly into the deep
monopolistic abuse waters.

~~~
PaulHoule
In the 1990s VCs openly stated they would not fund Microsoft competitors.
There is a huge hole of companies that never started to compete with Google
today, just the VCs don't talk about it today.

~~~
tyingq
Pretty big moat though, right? What would the minimum investment be to build
something, for just search, that was technically just on par with Google?

~~~
quickben
Off the top of my head, few millions in hardware?

Going over people's "Google=internet search"... Infinite? Microsoft is still
attempting it.

~~~
tyingq
I meant more about achieving comparable relevancy and feature parity (kg,
snippets, widgets). I assume it's a big number since existing players are
unable to match those.

~~~
quickben
Probably, but then, what's the added business value from them really? Few
percent at best? Zero at worst?

On a similar note: Yahoo had their "verticals", and when they had to cut
something, these search addons were the first to go.

I tried to start a search engine twice so far in fact. The first attempt was a
decade ago, for a small country. I had objectively much better and cleaner
index then Google. Perfect native language support. All spam removed. Other
features that Google didn't.

People have me honest feedback actually (it was a different time for them
then). Basically, I got 30 daily users, and a lot of "yes but why bother when
Google already exist" type of answers.

What I got out of it, was that technical superiority didn't enter into it. One
simply can't break on marketing and business with Google around.

In any case, it was an amazing experience, and a great interview taking point
afterwards. Landed me all the jobs I wanted ever since.

So that being said, I don't think the search features matter that much. The
mountain to climb over is their integration on Android, inside other services,
and more along these lines.

------
aorth
> _Before rolling it out, Google asked Warner [CelebrityNetWorth.com] if they
> could scrape his data and credit him. Warner declined, but Google did it
> anyway._

Money quote. Google's rich snippets are friendly to users, but hostile to
sites where the data originates.

~~~
mattm
One could argue that if a "business" is only providing one sentence answers to
questions then it's not really a business in the first place.

The owner seemed to have found a very small gap and it was closed shortly
after.

~~~
tchaffee
Google is profiting off those one sentence answers. If it's enough of a
business for Google, I suppose it's enough of a business for the people doing
the actual work to find the answers.

~~~
mcintyre1994
Are they actually though - in the immediate term? Sure they show ads on the
search result, but there's a box with the answer to your query, why would you
click an ad?

It seems like the reason it's good for Google is because it's the perfect
response to the query and it cements Google as the search engine that can
answer my questions.

Are they directly profiting from those queries or are they just making
themselves a better search engine, and indirectly profiting from that? If the
latter I find it hard to argue against them.

~~~
tchaffee
If they are stealing the data in order to make themselves a better search
engine, I find that pretty easy to argue against. Someone did work that
provides value and Google is taking that data and making it look like their
own.

~~~
AznHisoka
Nobody needs to argue anything. just block google in your robots.txt if you
are unhappy. case closed.

~~~
tchaffee
What sites need is a happy medium. For Google to index the site, but to not
use that same data to eliminate the need for a visit to the site. Content has
value. If Google is grabbing that content and using it on their own site,
that's a problem.

------
Analemma_
There's nothing more frustrating than someone arguing for a position you
yourself favor with terrible, easily-knocked-down arguments. I actually do
think Google should be regulated, but the author is putting forward the worst
possible case. His theories about first mover advantage and network effects
are both ridiculous: Google wasn't even the third search engine in existence,
and there are little to no network effects in search. They got where they are
from quality of product and economy of scale.

Ryan Cooper, try rewriting this article from the angle of the _effects_ of
Google's monopoly, not the causes. The causes angle is more tempting, because
we understand that regulation should be avoided, and so if it must be done we
want to feel like the company did something "bad" to "deserve it", but that's
a fallacy.

------
ma2rten
I don't understand why this article got so many upvotes.

First, I think the entire premise of the article that Google is not really
better than other search engines is wrong. And even if that were true that
would not be a case of network effect but just brand advantage.

Next, he goes on the say that Google should be regulated, but doesn't say how.
I can't really think of a reasonable way that would solve this problem.

EDIT: After thinking about this, I came up with an interesting (hypothetical)
proposal: Google gets split into two companies. Both companies get access to
the Google source code and neither of them is allowed to use the Google brand
name for search.

This would create competition and solve some of the problems. For instance a
website could get delisted by Google A, but still get traffic from Google B. I
am not sure if it would be a net positive tough.

------
Ono-Sendai
What a bunch of bullshit. Google's search engine was far better than it's
competitors when it came out, and continues to be. It doesn't (generally)
maintain its position through network effects (such as e.g. Facebook does).

~~~
snowpanda
> and continues to be

This hasn't been my personal experience, I've been getting better results (the
past year or so) with DuckDuckGo.

------
pbw
What is the solution here? Is google supposed to judge for every snippet
whether or not it's beneficial for the wider internet? Seems like they cannot
objectively make that call. Should rich snippets be illegal? The article
presents a problem, but what is the solution?

~~~
tyingq
Aside from the issue mentioned in the article, there's also the issue of how a
rich snippet can appear to be a deliberate endorsement by Google. Because the
process is automated, with no checks and balances, some odd stuff gets out
there.

------
tyingq
Some fun rich snippets that highlight the sort of clumsy approach Google is
taking right now: [http://imgur.com/a/6EDEP](http://imgur.com/a/6EDEP)

------
twsted
Yesterday I have read another submission [0] on HN, linking to an interesting
NYT article "Is It Time to Break Up Google?" [1].

Why has it been flagged?

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14174460](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14174460)

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/22/opinion/sunday/is-it-
time...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/22/opinion/sunday/is-it-time-to-
break-up-google.html)

~~~
Oletros
Perhaps it was flagged because one of the solutions was to get ride of DMCA
Safe Harbour. The author has interest in doing that because he is a film
producer

------
ctime
Was this person even around back when Google was first started? I recall
routinely using 2-3 search engines just find something trivially easy to find
in any modern search engine. The others completely sucked (Excite + Altavista
+ webcrawler + yahoo was my typical cocktail of search engines, for those
wondering).

The service is and was simply the BEST and it always WORKED. People don't seem
to remember days when the internet was far less reliable (and less useful).

------
raarts
The railroads were nationalized in the 19th century because of their
importance to the economy and their unwillingness to standardize. Is that
comparable?

------
maverick_iceman
_> What gives it roughly 80 percent of the online search traffic is first
mover advantage. Back in the mid-'90s[...] Google was just a little bit better
than the others_

This is bullshit. Yahoo! and Altavista were there before Google. And by
calling Google's page rank based search algorithm "just a little better than
others" the author reveals his own ignorance.

~~~
gozur88
This jumped out at me too. He's using some terms incorrectly in this article.
In the very next paragraph he says

>Back in the mid-'90s when Sergey Brin and Larry Page started the company,
there were many other search tools jostling for position.

... which puts a lie to the sentence you quoted.

And then the next point:

>Second, what makes Google's search dominance profitable is network effects.
Without a large internet to index, and a huge number of people looking for
things online, even the best imaginable search would be worthless.

That's not what people mean when they talk about network effects. The fact
that huge numbers of people use Google doesn't make searching with Google more
useful, and Microsoft can also index that "large internet" for Bing.

------
pg_bot
This is the second or third article regarding breaking up the google/facebook
ad monopoly that I've read in the past few days.

I'm guessing someone has hired a PR firm to push this idea as it feels like
I'm being submarined.
[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

~~~
angry-hacker
Or just people on the media are pissed off. They have that leverage anyway
over Google to spread their thoughts through media.

I personally think Google should be separated or made a dumb pipe, this would
be the most American thing ever!

~~~
bgw
The telecoms need to be made "dumb pipe[s]" in the US before we start worrying
about Google.

~~~
angry-hacker
But Google is bigger than U.S.

Globally speaking, they have more influence and power.

------
nthcolumn
And yet we can still read his drivel under the suffocating weight that is
google! He complains and says that there really ought to be competition but
then gives examples of people simply rehashing results from Google - much like
er.. Bing did! I too wish someone would provide some actual competition. I'm
sure google would too.

I refer the honorable gentleman to my previous answer
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14180331](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14180331)

------
Upvoter33
alas, dare we say it: more regulation of these essential services is probably
going to be needed at some point. Google is generally a good citizen of the
world, but if they weren't, they could shape and control the world in many
ways. Shouldn't govmt oversight be involved?

------
rrggrr
Fake news. First the NYT, now The Week, and tomorrow perhaps the Wash Post.
Correspondent's dinner is around the corner and much pain is being felt by
traditional media.

This is Google's competitors crying, whining and hoping to influence public
opinion. If you don't like Google's search dominance then build a better
engine. Users are happy to migrate for more privacy (DDG), a rich UI (Bing),
computational power (Wolphram) ... if the search results great. Google's been
hammered by FB in social, by AWS in cloud computing, by Office360 in apps,
etc., etc. They're not a monolith.

