The problem is that Google is without question a monopoly, and so I think that there is a valid argument that it needs to be regulated and be forced to be impartial in the results shown. The fact that they show people's content without giving them page views (in a world where page views are how you get significant amounts of money, not to mention subscription opportunities) is a conscious decision to implement a feature that arguably impacts revenue. I think there is also a valid argument for this as well.
But I do think that the EU copyright law is significantly flawed because it's purpose is to further extend the already ridiculously over-extended draconian copyright laws that exist in the EU. I don't think the issues they (ostensibly) set out to solve are something that should be ignored though -- Google acting as a biased monopoly which implements features that impact people's ability to make money is a real problem that needs to be solved somehow.
> The problem is that Google is without question a monopoly
This is just false. bing.com exists. news.ycombinator.com exists. reddit.com exists....
> The fact that they show people's content without giving them page views..
This is just false. Google shows at most an excerpt (that is defined by the publisher) or a headline (on news.google.com). Unless you're talking about AMP, but that's a decision made by the publisher too.
> [Google being a monopoly] is just false. bing.com exists. news.ycombinator.com exists. reddit.com exists....
I don't think the existence of other websites on the internet is not really an argument against Google being a monopoly. Without question, the vast majority of the population (outside China) uses Google. This means that the majority of people who use the internet are using Google as their method of accessing websites, and thus Google has an effective monopoly on what links people see (and thus by proxy what articles they read and what they think about topics).
I'm arguing all of this from a point of view where you don't really care how Google or anything behind the scenes works -- most people view Google as a utility that just tells you what "the internet" has to say on a topic. Given it's prevalence and significant impact on people's decision making, it should have far more accountability.
> Google shows at most an excerpt (that is defined by the publisher) or a headline (on news.google.com).
Google also has their Q&A thing where they parse the contents of web pages to answer questions you ask Google -- so you don't end up on the person who wrote the answer's website. I think that is pretty clearly an example of Google showing people's content without giving them page views (whether or not you agree that it is an issue).
If there are viable competitors then can’t consumers simply move to different platforms? I primarily use DuckDuckGo, so how is Google search a monopoly?
If you’re going to base it solely off number of users then you’re effectively punishing businesses for being successful and NOT from harming consumers.
Google can (and has) changed large things about their platform that may negatively impact their users (~90% of the internet population which is ~3 billion people -- larger than the population of any single country) and their users don't really have much of a choice.
For instance, changes to PageRank have negatively impacted websites and business consistently in the past (so much that there's an industry around making pages cater to the whims of an unauditable algorithm -- SEO). I think the fact that websites obviously cannot just switch to a competitor (unless they want to stop catering to a potential market of 3 billion people) rules that as being monopolistic behaviour.
That's what I mean when I refer to a monopoly. If you have exclusive control over an algorithm that affects more people than any government body on earth, then you are a monopoly. Same argument goes for quite a few of their other products (if your personal mail server isn't effectively "blessed" by GMail you cannot communicate with the majority of internet users), but Search is the most obvious one.
Monopoly doesn't mean that there's only one company in the market. It means that one company has an overwhelming amount of market share. Google unquestionably fits this description when it comes to internet search, outside of China at least.
Generally it's measured by the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index - HHI.
Does 92% usage make something a monopoly? 95%? 99%? 100%?
I think that the percentage argument is not the only important thing to consider, there are other anti-competitive practices which (when practiced at a large enough scale) become a monopoly even if "only" 50% of people use the product (friendly reminder that 50% of internet users is more than a billion people -- much larger than the population of most countries).
My point is not that Google is doing something illegal (and thus arguing over the legal definition of a monopoly is not helpful -- just like arguing over the legal meaning of the US 1st Amendment is not helpful in discussions over the concept of free speech). I'm arguing that it is a monopoly in the ordinary meaning of the word, in that effectively everyone uses Google and Google exerts a massive amount of power over their users.
But for a pseudo-legal argument: Google participates in a form of product tying[1] by requiring you to create a Google account in order to access Google Groups (which are publicly-run mailing lists and an unrelated product to their account service). Now since you don't pay for Google accounts this isn't a strict violation of anti-trust laws, but it is very close in concept to the sort of thing anti-trust laws protect against.
> Does 92% usage make something a monopoly? 95%? 99%? 100%?
100% certainly would.
> I'm arguing that it is a monopoly in the ordinary meaning of the word, in that effectively everyone uses Google and Google exerts a massive amount of power over their users.
What do you mean by "the ordinary meaning of the word" here? It's also not clear to me that "effectively everyone uses Google".
91% of internet users is about 3 billion people. They control a platform that affects more people than any single nation state (2-3x larger than the largest nation state and larger than the top 3 countries combined). For instance, changes in PageRank (which is an unaccountable and unauditable algorithm) affect every user of their site in terms of what links they see, what articles they read, and by extension what they think.
You might argue it's the fault of users for not being informed, but I think that if a company has a significant impact on the lives of 3 billion people (which again, is a larger influence than any single government on this planet -- and nation states have constitutions and laws specifically to ensure that they serve the people and are accountable) then it has reached the point where it either needs to be broken up or be regulated. I don't care which, I just think that this cowboy mentality (that software is somehow special and lives in a world where regulation is always an unreasonable viewpoint to have) has to stop at some point.
Regarding the term monopoly, there are different views on what precisely the term means. Google does have anti-competitive practices which you might argue make them act as a monopoly. You can argue they have a monopoly on internet searches because whenever they change PageRank in a way that negatively impacts some users (or when they make changes to GMail's spam filter so that it starts blocking valid emails) there isn't a rush to a different service because there is no way to co-ordinate such a rush. Instead you have other secondary industries like SEO which exist purely to try to keep websites reachable from Google. The fact they have the power to manipulate how the majority of sites operate clearly means they have significant (and in my view monopolistic) control over the market.
They also have a market share that is actually incomprehensible. Microsoft was indicted under anti-trust laws because of Internet Explorer being bundled with Windows. I think Google acts as much more of a monopoly than Microsoft did in the 90s, and "good guy Google" really is an outdated mental model for a company with that much influence over people's lives.
> But for a pseudo-legal argument: Google participates in a form of product tying[1] by requiring you to create a Google account in order to access Google Groups (which are publicly-run mailing lists and an unrelated product to their account service).
That seems to be false; I can read mailing lists hosted at Google Groups without logging in (for instance https://groups.google.com/a/groups.riscv.org/forum/#!forum/i... opens for me without asking for a login). I'm subscribed to that mailing list from an email address which is not a Google account, and I didn't have to log in to any Google account when I subscribed. I can post to that mailing list directly from a normal email client, through a non-Google email provider.
The link you just posted requires me to log in, and I've had this problem with go-nuts and the OCI mailing list in the past. It's strange this doesn't happen to you -- maybe it's a geographically specific thing (I'm connecting from Australia)?
Of course you don't need to login in order to post on the mailing list, but I think that's only one of the three main features of a mailing list (broadcast, subscription, and archival) that I can do without logging in.
Though the word implies otherwise a monopoly is not defined by the lack of competitors. At least not in a legal sense anymore.
It is defined by it's marketshare. And google search is by and large a monopoly in this regard having ~90% market share in virtually all segments of the market.
> Though the word implies otherwise a monopoly is not defined by the lack of competitors. At least not in a legal sense anymore.
Yes, it is, though in practice that's based on complex factual analysis of whether there is real competition not whether there are other players in the same descriptive market.
> It is defined by it's marketshare.
No, marketshare is a “same descriptive market” test that people casually talking about competition use; legally, the more relevant tests are things like pricing power—can the alleged monopolist raise prices in some range without losing sales to a competitor. You can have a very large marketshare in a descriptive market but lack pricing power, or have small marketshare in a descriptive market and have pricing power because the market described is really multiple segregated markets in practice.
>[..] a monopoly is not defined by the lack of competitors.[..]It is defined by it's marketshare.
No, I can't agree. I don't even consider Microsoft a monopoly, even though their product comes pre-installed on every PC you can buy in shops. If you can't get any alternative ISP (to e.g. AT&T) where you live, by any means, now that is a monopoly.
Move house? To where? In areas with only a single ISP, and that ISP 'owns' the poles/whatever, you can move as much as you want. Nothing changes.
Or did you mean moving to another city? Another part of the country? Really?
It should be obvious that it's perfectly possible to define something as a monopoly in a certain area. If a monopoly could only be defined as a monopoly if it were global, there wouldn't be many.
For the record, I do agree that ISPs are monopolies (or oligopolies) in many parts of the US and other countries as well. However they are not the only form of monopoly, and I don't understand why you seem to be saying that the statement "Google is a monopoly" is implicitly saying "ISPs are not a monopoly". They're both monopolies, just different kinds -- the geographic argument doesn't make sense for websites for instance (outside of countries that massively censor the internet).
> The problem is that Google is without question a monopoly
Is it? I mean, sure, far more people use Google than, say, Bing or DuckDuckGo. But there's nothing actually stopping them from using those alternatives, other than the fact that they're not as good.
That's obviously correct, but it seems weird to use a different metric for market share and lock-in. If you define Google's customers as ad buyers, then they're very much not a monopoly, have way less than 91% market share, and their competitiors don't have a lack of users.
If they have a monopoly on search because of their share of searches, then surely the relevant lock-in would be how easily users of search can move to competitors?
Think about it this way: there are plenty of products and services that you can't advertise anywhere else but on google search, so Google has a monopoly on that. This monopoly exists because of Google's abusive practices to prevent competition from entering the market it wants to own.
> I think that there is a valid argument that it needs to be regulated and be forced to be impartial in the results shown
I agree that regulation might be useful here, and impartial search results are a good goal. But linking fees go against that. If newspaper A wants a fee from google for showing its links but newspaper B doesn't, it would be unfair to the entire market to force google to include both A and B equally. If A and B agree to charge google the same fee, that sounds a lot like a cartel doing price fixing, which is already illegal. The government could set a fixed price google has to pay, but at that point we have given up on finding a free market solution, so that's a last resort that isn't nessesary yet.
It's fine that people can demand money for links, but I don't see any scenario where this would happen in reality.
>The fact that they show people's content without giving them page views (in a world where page views are how you get significant amounts of money, not to mention subscription opportunities) is a conscious decision to implement a feature that arguably impacts revenue
Think about how grossly afflicted with clickbait the news ecosystem is today, and then imagine how much worse it could get if Google were legally prevented from even attaching a blurb to the links that it shows users.
How do you judge impartial objectively? You can't even handle fake news without it being a cudgel for censors denying reality. Pure stats won't work and as seen with the moderation problem with Facebook not advocating their partisan view sets off their persecution complex.
Also by previewing they prevent load as well and boost relevance. That favors real data instead of SEO page caching garbage that tries to get matched to every common keyword. You do not have a right to a business model, much less it being unchanged by time.
ooh the widget content. wow that’s huge, most google results have some kind of widget content be it q&a results or images or even key excerpts. never really thought that it’s reducing a lot of page views but with enough of those little widgets it probably adds up. If you’re getting what you’re looking for right on the results page then why click on a link?
But I do think that the EU copyright law is significantly flawed because it's purpose is to further extend the already ridiculously over-extended draconian copyright laws that exist in the EU. I don't think the issues they (ostensibly) set out to solve are something that should be ignored though -- Google acting as a biased monopoly which implements features that impact people's ability to make money is a real problem that needs to be solved somehow.