I’m much more interested in the Ad-tech Monopoly. The Doubleclick merger should have never been approved.
“Other states are still considering their own cases related to Google’s search practices, and a large group of states is considering a case challenging Google’s power in the digital advertising market, The Wall Street Journal has reported. In the ad-technology market, Google owns industry-leading tools at every link in the complex chain between online publishers and advertisers.
The Justice Department also continues to investigate Google’s ad-tech practices.” [1]
Couldn't agree more, the adtech is where the monopoly lies. I worked for a doubleclick / ads 360 competitor and it was so plain that Google used its dominant position not only to squash competitors like us but also to further obscure the auction mechanisms. Today it's a challenge to specify exactly what you want to bid for a given keyword, in part for the better since it dramatically reduces complexity for advertisers but it does remove a lot of the control and hands it back to... Google. Ultimately the auction is completely irrelevant since Google decides which ads will show and by extension whose ad money they'll pocket. In addition to that, Google charges premium for ad space even in non-competitive markets; I'm talking about what you end up paying for a top spot although there are no other actors in the auction for a particular keyword (even in broader matches). While one could argue that it's up to them as a publisher to decide what a spot is worth, this mechanism is completely obscure and you will only ever find out in hindsight through what you pay for the traffic.
> Google charges premium for ad space even in non-competitive markets; I'm talking about what you end up paying for a top spot although there are no other actors in the auction for a particular keyword (even in broader matches).
Google uses a Vickery Auction, in other words the top bid pays what the second bidder bid so while I agree with your greater point, this is not based in reality as stated.
The post states that 90+% of google's auctions are still second priced:
> It’s important to note that our move to a single unified first price auction only impacts display and video inventory sold via Ad Manager. This change will have no impact on auctions for ads on Google Search, AdSense for Search, YouTube, and other Google properties, and advertisers using Google Ads or Display & Video 360 do not need to take any action.
2nd price auctions have been dead for 2+ years due to header bidding. For anything in which Google has to compete against other SSPs or DSPs, I'd imagine it is the same. If Google owns the content, such that they are the single party SSP/DSP, and header bidding is not possible, then I suppose 2nd price could come in.
I think it’s a way for publishers to simultaneously auction the same bit of space in multiple exchanges. I guess that this means they have to use first price auctions, though I don’t have a super great idea as to why.
I wrote an article on the subject: https://michelenasti.com/2019/10/21/how-internet-ads-work.ht... You may find the answer in the last paragraph. Basically, the browser will ask multiple bidders for an ad, and then an auction is performed in the browser. The result of this first auction may be then sent to google to see if there's a better offer from them.
It's called "header bidding" because... in origin.. this stuff was done in the <head> part of the page.
Thanks. That's a very well written article, I enjoyed learning from it.
The auction is performed in the browser? No wonder the web feels pokey these days.
I thought at first this must be due to the privacy requirements around cookies, only the browser can coordinate the different parties because none of them will be sent all the cookies needed to run a complete auction themselves. But it seems like it's really more some kind of hack around a limited (for business reasons) Google API.
Yes, I didn't express that correctly; I know about the second price auction and what I was referring to is that since Google does everything in their power to get you away from keyword level bidding and into their "smart bidding" solutions you have no _direct_ say in what the traffic costs (AFAIK it's still possible to use keyword level bidding but Google will email you very regularly to try to get you off). This fact is even more obvious in non-competitive markets as I was trying to point out.
I manage a decent size Google Adwords account. The Google adwords "strategist" they have call me is always pushing the Smart Bidding endlessly. So I try it on one campaign. Smart bidding increased the click cost from about $20 to $100. The one click converted but I get conversions on that campaign for about $60 so it was a disaster. Turned off that smart bidding and went back to my own eCpc bidding.
Honestly, how would anyone ever know if Google does what they say they're doing? Is there any trusted third party auditing Google's ad auctions? If Google says $X was the price at auction, how would I ever dispute that?
How would anyone ever know that Facebook hasn't designed it's algorithms for spreading misinformation and disinformation? How would anyone ever know that Apple doesn't use your photos to train an AI? How would anyone ever know that the Amazon doesn't peek into your RDS database?
>> Several current and former YouTube employees, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity because they had signed confidentiality agreements, said company leaders were obsessed with increasing engagement during those years.
>> One problem, according to several of the current and former YouTube employees, is that the A.I. tended to pigeonhole users into specific niches, recommending videos that were similar to ones they had already watched.
There are real human beings working on those systems. That's how everyone would know if Google does as it says
If something fishy indeed goes on in a large company, it must be on a need-to-know basis.
But the higher access you get, higher the penalties of sharing company secrets go.
Snowdens come into the picture every once in a while, but most average programmer Joes wouldn’t risk being internationally manhunted for whistleblowing questionable business practices.
While it’s possible for companies to keep secrets, most companies lack the secrecy and paranoia required to really keep big secrets for long periods of time. These companies tend to leak, both because people move around a lot, and because unlike governments they lack the ability to throw leakers in jail.
If google was actually futzing about with the auctions like that, we’d probably find out eventually.
Google is a client of the Pinkertons, a very old union busting company with a history of brutal tactics [0]. One of their employees was recently charged in a murder during riots in Denver [1].
My statement isn't irresponsible. Corporations are universally amoral. If it was in Google's interests to do it, they would. But I think that, right now, those interests don't exist.
That being said, someone that is in that situation, if the stakes are high enough, might be dissuaded just knowing that such things happen.
People make decisions. At some point, all corporate decisions go through people.
Would you (reader) want to bet your life against a conference room full of people with $1M+ worth of stock options you're about to negatively impact? Where a bad outcome for you only requires their silence?
There are many people in the world who value morals over money. There are a few who value morals over lots of money. But that's not a bet I'd take.
>> Facebook has designed its algorithms for spreading misinformation and disinformation, because emotion drives engagement.
If emotion drives engagement, then this should apply to positive emotions as well. All emotional posts, positive or negative, will be treated equally by the algorithm according to your logic. Hence it follows, that facebook hasn't explicitly designed it's algorithms to spread only misinformation and disinformation, acc to your logic.
I would like to see some proof that would back up your statement.
1. It doesn’t matter what the valence of the emotions are - positive or negative valence feedback loops will spread misinformation and disinformation. Positive emotion is not correlated with truth.
I assumed from your previous comment(below) that you are correlating negative emotion with misinformation and disinformation. If that's not what you meant, then I guess I misunderstood what you meant by your previous comment
>> Facebook has designed its algorithms for spreading misinformation and disinformation, because emotion drives engagement
The easiest negative emotion to cause with a post is outrage, which goes nicely with fake news.
The easiest positive emotion to cause are at the result of puppies and wholesome/faith-in-humanity-restored posts, neither are generally related to actual truthful news.
If emotion drives engagement and you optimize for engagement, then you will optimize for emotionally-charged posts over emotionally-neutral posts. If you then assume that emotionally-charged posts are more likely to be mis/dis-information, then you have a case.
I don't think this assumption is necessarily true for random misinformation (think common myths), but propaganda is usually designed to be emotionally charged, from PR to state propaganda.
The whole debate isn't even wrong in the first place as the questions are beyond "have you stopped beating your wife yet?" and into adding absurdities as qualifiers like "have you stopped beating your wife with a prized family heirloom yet?".
So bad it arguably qualifies as misinformation in itself. If an algorithim spreads any information and cannot classify it (if you have a general purpose algorithim which can know all truth apriori what are you doing here instead of creating a singularity!). Then /design/ which implies intent and effectiveness. Otherwise if I burn a Trump Voodoo doll I will have designed something with the "intent" to kill the President. Even if Fox News would be very offended by it nobody sane would take it as a serious assassination attempt.
That only makes sense if your voodoo doll didn’t actually kill the president. Facebook does spread misinformation.
As to intent - at some point in the distant past before it became clear what it’s effects were, you could argue that Facebook wasn’t designed to spread misinformation.
Once you know what a thing does and how it works, if you keep operating it, it is by design.
Heck, Thinking there are individuals who actually understand such a large system are complex.
Even at organizations orders of magnitude smaller than Facebook, it's pretty easy to have a few systems that are large enough you can only keep so many in your head at a time.
You'd probably need a few dozen of the right people together to begin to understand the complexity of their systems.
Yes, and you could do anything else that you want with your app. However, if your application is hosted on their servers you are just a traditional user from their perspective. And as the old adage goes, if you own the server, you own the user.
There is an implicit assumption, that the code that you push is actually the same one that is being run on the VM, in your statement. This brings me back to the point I was trying to make in the parent comment.
The encrypted traffic will be the traffic Amazon will be most interested in, since you took the trouble; they won't peek into the DB but they will be able to infer lots about what's going on if they want. It's the Tor Paradox.
I understand the line of reasoning above and would normally follow it - but Facebook, Apple and Google have all shown that they will do really shady things if they can get away with it. The reaction to Project Dragonfly was pretty nice to see, but you really have to wonder how many things like that make it through without any public outcry - I know real human beings and most of them are pretty awesome, some of them are sociopaths who'd do anything to make a buck though... we're gambling that some moral ones get into the decision making process and, tbh, if the sociopaths have their way the moral ones will remain blissfully ignorant of the shady stuff.
This is a pretty good point. I spoke to a developer from facebook once and they said essentially that there is nothing super secretive happening behind the curtains.
Yes they may be evil and doing all this bad stuff, but we pretty much know all the evil stuff they are doing publicly.
Or that Facebook developer just doesn't know about the super secretive happenings behind the curtains. If they did, they probably wouldn't talk about them. :)
I suppose it boils down to buying a service at a price, and the “bidding” process is just a price discovery tool for Google, not the customer. Is there anything wrong with Google charging me double via an “internal bid bot” so long as the big cost is in line with my boundaries?
If I’m trying to buy a car off a showroom floor, and the salesman says “you better take this price, I got 4 more people lined up to buy it,” does it matter if those 4 others are not genuinely interested or even real at all? It’s a bit slimey if a sales tactic, but if you say “I’ll pay nothing more than X,” you’ve lost the negotiating position. If you tell google “I’ll pay $3cpc for this phrase”, well now they should be shopping that phrase with all its might.
At the end of it, google has a primary interest in keeping its adtech optimized in a bang-for-buck sense for consumers vs it’s earnings. If they get carried away with charging too much, customers will start just walking away without a purchase. Just like the car salesman.
Is there any 3rd party auditing what your business or your company is doing? I don't think that's the way business works in the USA unless you have a contract with a company that they can audit your services/products/etc. That's between two companies and not a public service.
Depends on what industry you're in. In the banking world, it's extremely common to have auditors, escrow firms, and government regulators keeping an eye on what you're getting up to.
yes auditing is pretty standard. Thats a big part of the big 4 accounting firms work, since they are preparing tax docs and verifying numbers, they need to peek below the hood. Also, insurance companies will audit their clients to be sure premiums match coverage.
Wherefore? FB and other such platforms are much better at display ads technology, as they don't care about user privacy at all. User tracking is the only real discriminator when it comes to display ads, where as search queries are very discriminating.
DuckDuckGo claim to make significantly less money per search than Google does, which seems to disprove that search queries are enough of a discriminator on their own.
Despite DuckDuckGo being robustly profitable since 2014, we have been priced out of this auction because we choose to not maximize our profits by exploiting our users. In practical terms, this means our commitment to privacy and a cleaner search experience translates into less money per search. This means we must bid less relative to other, profit-maximizing companies.
Could be that DuckDuckGo users just aren't good ad targets. The big thing separating them is "hates big corporations", I could easily see advertisement for big corporations not being a big hit for this crowd.
I'm a DDG user. I do not "hate big corporations". I may dislike some big corporations. I've enthusiastically worked for others.
I hate poverty, injustice, and bigotry. I cannot stir up strong feelings about an advertising company.
On the other hand I am a terrible advertising target, not wholly impervious to advertising but actively resistant, in part having seen under the bonnet of the sector and found little but a morass of grubby lies and folks with broken moral compasses. I intentionally interpret advertising as noise, not signal.
(corollary: attempts to disguise advertising are an irritant and a cognitive burden, so I allocate advertorials, content marketing, and drip-email compaigns to the Brand Damage circle of hell)
Maybe, but one big difference I notice between the two is that a search for <brand> on Google often has the top result as an ad for that brand, whereas on DDG it will be the same result but not an ad. It seems that brands don't have to “defend their turf” on DDG by buying ads on their own name as they do for Google.
I wonder if DuckDuckGo would be more successful if it was easier to find out how to advertise with them. Like, a link on the page that says "Advertise on Duck Duck Go." I've tried to advertise with them in the past a few times and gave up. I posted here before also, as I think Gabriel used to read the pages.
I use them for search as my default, and I would have used them for ads. I still might if they put a link there.
I would like to see data on Google's revenue distribution per user, guessing it would be very lopsided. Some users are clicking ads for 50%+ of their searches. DuckDuckGo users are different because they most likely at minimum know the difference between a search result and an ad.
There's no way that "some users" (implying a significant proportion) are clicking ads 50% of the time after they do a search. that would be a very rare duck indeed.
Search queries are generally enough for ads, but DuckDuckGo only makes money on selling those ads, while Google also sells your person information connected to the search.
Yeah, I was trying to figure out how to say that Google further monetizes your search info without saying they sell your data, but gave up. It's still why Google makes more per search.
Probably true, but antitrust law is based on consumer welfare. Let’s say Google uses monopoly power in the ad market to squeeze advertisers. It’s hard to translate that into direct harm to consumers.
That argument would either hinge on the cost of advertising being passed along to consumers. Very hard to prove. Or the higher cost decreasing the total amount of advertising, somehow harming consumers. Dubious when ad-free products are generally considered premium and desirable
> Probably true, but antitrust law is based on consumer welfare.
I don’t believe this is true. The law doesn’t set that criteria, but rather it’s a standard of interpretation known as the Chicago School. This was established far after, but is not law.
There’s a lot of debate on whether or not we should continue to maintain the standard.
Antitrust legislation was originally established to prevent monopoly power from giving a company influence that could challenge that of government and harm democracy.
It is an interpretation, but one explicitly endorsed by 30 years of Supreme Court precedent. Given the current composition of the court, it's unlikely that we'll ever see the consumer welfare standard overruled in our lifetime.
> Let’s say Google uses monopoly power in the ad market to squeeze advertisers. It’s hard to translate that into direct harm to consumers.
Almost as if what harms the ad industry is good for consumers ...
Also, "direct harm to consumers" is about the lowest bar you can set. It would be way more responsible to take some preventative action, before the harm to consumers occurs.
I concur, I think this is when Google really jumped the shark. That said I believe it would be relatively easy to break up the company 1) office/mail/maps service as a pay to play 2) cloud service 3) search service. Obviously 1 would have to go to a rival ad platform or freemium to pay the bills, maybe also keep the "non search" ads platform. 2) and 3) should be able to pay for themselves 3) with related ads to the search.
the level of understanding in government of how the Internet was shaping up way back then was really really low; I was around then and felt it was crazy but unless the regulators can understand and measure an industry, they won't every stop an acquisition like Doubleclick.
Forgot about the monopoly -- how about outright fraud?
As someone who used to operate a domain parking service, I've seen evidence numerous times of google taking away publisher earnings because of alleged clickfraud, but then not refunding advertisers for those same clicks.
I know of three advertisers who were appearing in AdSense ads on a publisher page back in 2009 that Google refused to pay out because of "click fraud", and none of these advertisers received refunds or any indication that they were defrauded. Google took the money that was supposed to go to the publisher, kept it, and didn't refund the advertisers. They probably never do. I ended up paying $800 out of my pocket to compensate my users for the lost revenue.
I have also worked with hundreds of advertisers in the SEO space, and I have never, ever, seen someone say they had ad money refunded because of click fraud, yet I've seen plenty of publisher earnings held back because of supposed click fraud. Google's fight against click fraud is really just a fight against paying out to publishers, full stop.
Google also used to do this crazy shit (don't know if they still do as I'm not in that space anymore) where they would change the TOS at midnight and then retroactively block the past month's earnings on hundreds of accounts that are violating the seconds-old TOS. Pretty sure that is illegal as well.
If you think about it, Google has zero incentive to stop real click-fraud, especially if their chosen course of action is to just keep the money and not have to pay publishers or refund advertisers. This space needs regulation, and it's needed it for over a decade.
I will happily forward what I have if someone knows how to get in touch with investigators.
I would assume Google just shows more ads on other sites to compensate for the fraudent clicks.
Why should they give you money back when they can just fulfill their side of the contract by showing ads to non fraudent users.
It's funny that never actually occurred to me as a possibility. I would have to get in touch with the advertisers to see if that data is still in their account (which may be possible, I'll see what I can do).
It's also not sufficient even if they do that. Many advertisers will run a time-sensitive campaign -- free traffic 3 weeks later in those scenarios is worthless. I actually doubt google does this because if they did it would be most easily implemented as an account credit.
They just keep the money and hope no one ever holds them accountable for anything.
That isn't the way ad auctions work. They don't make it up 3 weeks later. They make it up in real time. The decision on where to show an ad is done in milliseconds. If it doesn't show up on your site it shows up on a different site instead right then.
Click-fraud decisions happen weeks later when it's time to send payouts to publishers. It will show $800 pending for deposit and then will say removed and you'll get an email about click fraud.
That's what happened in this scenario. $800 / a month worth of earnings on a publisher account got wiped out minutes before the new pay period started.
When the click fraud decision is made and when the decision is communicated are different things.
When combating fraud, communicating the result of fraud decisions gives fraudsters information they can use to evade fraud protections. The faster the feedback loop for fraudsters, the faster they can find the gaps. Give feedback too quickly, and you'll never keep up in the cat-and-mouse game.
I suspect G doesn’t do strict budget enforcement because that would be “fraud-intolerant.” They likely show in more places and, if no fraud, for the extra they charge $0 to the advertiser.
Having said that, I have also heard similar case where someone was banned for fraud when he wasn’t doing anything of the sort, and he had no way to dispute it. This was over a half-a-decade ago.
Google constantly takes 10-12% of adsense earning as "invalid traffic". Now we obviously dont use bots, we have real users, so i can only assume they consider those misclicks. Or something else, they have no transparency. The RPMs have been going down for a decade even as our traffic is stable, and slightly up during covid.
They also don't fill our inventory. I wish we had alternative ways to find advertisers.
I have yet to see studies confirming that the money that advertisers spend is made good on google marketplace or fb marketplace etc. Sure they may see 50% of it working, but what about the rest of it?
How about this? They have zero incentive to stop click fraud because they want to show one set of numbers to potential customers that their ROI will be significant. Meanwhile they bait you, hook you, then you don’t see the results they promised. Exactly as you said.
> As someone who used to operate a domain parking service, I've seen evidence numerous times of google taking away publisher earnings because of alleged clickfraud, but then not refunding advertisers for those same clicks.
Because they're not charged at all in the first place? No charge, so nothing to refund.
The media reporting as well as Google's response is entirely focussed on the consumer monopoly on search, but the DOJ complaint focusses equally on potential anti-competitive practices in the search advertising market. The DOJ describes the situation well here:
110. There are barriers to entry in these advertising markets that protect Google’s
advertising monopolies. Most critically, search advertising of any kind requires a search engine
with sufficient scale to make advertising an efficient proposition for businesses. Specialized
search engines require significant investment, including the cost of populating and indexing
relevant data, distribution, developing and maintaining a search algorithm, and attracting users.
Search advertising of any kind also requires (1) a user interface through which advertisers can
buy ads, (2) software to facilitate the sales process, and (3) a sales and technical support staff.
The same barriers to entry that apply to general search services also protect Google’s general
search text advertising monopoly.
Declaring search advertising an illegal monopoly would not only open up the possibility for structural changes (requiring them to license the search advertising to other search engines, giving aggregators the ability to buy search advertising on google.com) but also exposes them potentially to large payments to advertisers who have been harmed in the past.
These arguments are so weak, if arguments like these hold we have similar analogies in other domains.
> search advertising of any kind requires a search engine with sufficient scale to make advertising an efficient proposition for businesses.
So does creating OSs. Let me make a similar statement on OSs: "selling OS of any kind requires certain scale with sufficient number of apps, for manufacturers to bundle your OS and app developers need the scale of OS to make it worthwhile for them to create apps".
Remember Windows Phone Catch 22. They created an OS which was reviewed well, seemed like a fresh take on UIs. But apps didn't come or came late, often buggy and not fixed in time. In the end it was never able to compete on apps.
> Specialized search engines require significant investment, including the cost of populating and indexing relevant data, distribution, developing and maintaining a search algorithm, and attracting users.
Didn't Siri and Alexa do exactly this to entrench their position in market. In fact voice search engines(assistants) often come as non changeable defaults.
In case of Siri it comes by default on more than a billion Apple devices.
The only way we exclude these from our discussion is if we go by a very narrow definition of search, these are here to stay and will possibly dominate search behaviour.
Keep in mind, the arguments are likely based on legal precedent, and not necessarily popular opinion or conventional wisdom.
I'm not disagreeing with you per se. Simply pointing out that legal stuff like this is a chess match. It's also unlikely the accused would go too far to tip their hand in terms of their defense.
Your analogies ignore the advertisement part of what you are quoting. Selling an OS doesn't require any particular scale at all, selling ads to display within an OS would.
> Selling an OS doesn't require any particular scale at all
It does require scale to build an OS, have appealing devices that ship with the OS and have apps that developers write because they can make money. How the OS is monetized makes no difference.
Look at Kindle as an example. Kindle has an ad subsidized model along with no ads one. Would Amazon even make the model work if they weren't big and didn't have other stuff to sell through it?
Look at game consoles, the cost of device and OS is subsidized by the cut Sony and MS receive from games. Would this model even work if they had no money or games to sell?
I will again circle back to Siri to make my point again. Apple is rumoured to be working on a search engine, this along with alrwsdy default Siri as a voice search engine. How do you think Apple is paying for all the cost of building and running this? Revenue they earn by selling devices. Can someone even compete to them using the same model if they don't have an OS or hardware to sell? Definitely no.
If we accept these analogies then a lot of tech companies are susceptible to analogous accusations.
Haiku is written by volunteers (and before them BeOS challenged Microsoft due to exclusivity contracts required of OEMs).
TempleOS was written by a single person.
There are literally dozens of operating systems baked into all kinds of things that have small or volunteer dev teams. QNX, VxWorks, IOS (the Cisco one), the multitude of Unixes and BSDs, boutique/experimental ones like SkyOS or ReactOS.
Would anyone buy Playstation OS apart from a console? I don't know if there's a market for that (how is SteamOS going?). There might not be consumer demand, but a B2B offering could result in a sustained business.
Companies used to provide an OS to sell hardware. Linux mostly consolidated that market, but that doesn't mean there isn't room for more (macOS, remarkably, is still rocking 35 years later).
Linux required scale. It being free doesn't negate the requirement for a large group of contributors and corporate donors.
Haiku OS doesn't have many serious users or use cases even after 18 years of development. I really appreciate the work they do but it shows how incredibly tough it is to make an operating system for the masses.
TempleOS is definitely not something anyone uses except to try out the weird OS they heard about. It won't even run on my hardware without virtualization.
QNX made by blackberry, IOS as you stated Cisco for its own hardware, VxWorks by TPG Capital and also an RTOS so not consumer hardware.
SkyOS not in development for more than 10 years and never popular and ReactOS is intended to be binary compatible with an existing popular OS so even though it won't be popular it would be leveraging existing ecosystem of apps and resources.
I don't know what point you are trying to raise with playstation OS.
MacOS is developed by a 2 trillion dollar enterprise.
The point is not that OS can't be built without scale but rather that for a consumer OS ecosystem of applications and other resources and hardware choices are concerns that are really tough to solve without scale and thus the market consolidated to only a few popular players.
I think the argument could be made if it is talking about it's integration of search advertising with other types of ad sales. But yeah, if it's just talking about having the best search engine and selling ads on it, that's been the entire business of search engines since the beginning of the internet.
In reference to the default search engine partnership between Google and Apple:
"Though Google and Apple have been tight-lipped on how much their deal is worth, the lawsuit projects that it accounts for between 15% and 20% of Apple’s annual profits.
That means Google pays as much as $11 billion, or roughly one-third of Alphabet’s annual profits, to Apple for pole position on the iPhone. In return, Apple-originated search traffic adds up to half of Google search volume, the government says. Google declined to comment on that statistic, and representatives said they weren’t aware of the “Code Red” language included in the lawsuit." [1]
Thats a lot of revenue and if they clouded, this case may have legs.
> Apple-originated search traffic adds up to half of Google search volume, the government says.
That doesn't seem plausible. It seems like it ought to be more like 10-20% of search volume going by market share. Unless Apple users are for some reason doing more searches than Android and Windows users.
I could see how maybe ad revenue from Apple users is disproportional to their market share because they're generally wealthier.
It's also possible they're referring to revenue. It's expected that users who buy accessible-luxury phones are worth more to advertisers and marketers.
I'd expect iOS devices to also last longer than cheap Android phones. That means that iOS usage share should be substantially higher than its market share
Not sure how that follows. If iPhones last twice as long as Android phones, then for every iPhone sale to one user there are two Android sales to one user. Thus in any given year, there are twice as many iPhone users as the market share of phones sold in that year would indicate.
Google earn more per 1000 searches than Bing by quite a margin (I believe there is a stat for this in the UK CMA report).
Google can offer an amount greater that any other search engine would find profitable. If I remember correctly, Google earn around double per 1000 searches than Bing does. Other English based indexes tend to use Bing ads and earn even less per 1000 searches.
I suspect the amount Google offers is an amount that is deliberately at a level that Bing would not be able to match.
As comparison: "The new search deal will ensure Google remains the default search engine provider inside the Firefox browser until 2023 at an estimated price tag of around $400 million to $450 million per year." https://www.zdnet.com/article/sources-mozilla-extends-its-go...
It is a feedback cycle that has a negative effect on all consumers, not just the consumers that would use a different search engibne.
The feedback works like this:
1. Google is dominant and can outbid competitors.
2. Many (most?) users will not change default search provider so long as it is basically functional.
3. Google's competitors will only attract a minority of customers that realize they can change and decide to.
4. Google stays dominant and competition is stifled and with it any improvements.
As a user of alternate search engines, I am hurt because if 2 did not occur and people that did not care were distributed evenly then my search provider would have more revenue and would presumably hire more engineers to improve the service. Another competitor cannot capture that revenue from 2 simply because Google can always outbid them because of their dominance.
Of course, there are some number of people who would switch to Google if the default was Bing, but is it significantly different than the people switching now?
But Google is not the only dominant player, MS, Facebook, Amazon even Apple have the resources to make their own search engine and can pay others so that their search engine is the default one.
In this case MS can pay Apple to make Bing as the default.
I do think it's a lot better than the situation on Android phones. At least changing the default search engine is relatively easy on iOS (I've changed all my personal devices over to duckduckgo).
I want to have my own choice of search engine than Google/Yahoo/Bing/DuckDuckGo. I can't on iOS, I must choose from the 4 options and cannot supply my own.
Specifically: I want to use Yandex as an Australian.
Bit of a side question: how can deals be tight lipped in a publicly listed company? Can shareholders vote to make information public? Or is it just not common
The CEO is beholden to the board who are beholden to the shareholders. The CEO is generally not actually beholden to the shareholders (directly). Depending on the shares, the shareholders may or may not be able to actually influence the board.
Owning a share in coca cola doesn't give you a right to the secret formula.
This doesn't seem like it's going to work. Given a choice between search engines pretty much everyone is going to choose Google. I think there are definitely areas that Google acts anti-competitively. But search? The competitors are a URL away. And few use them because Google is just flat out better.
There are structural issues that make it very difficult for new competitors to gain traction in search. For example, many website owners are now hostile to new web crawlers, but they're happy to allow Google to hammer their servers because they want that sweet, sweet search traffic.
Mandating a commonly accessible crawl, with cached versions of the pages, would help new entrants a lot.
Also, there're large network effects with ad networks. It seems unlikely that many marketing managers are going to take the time to do targeted keyword queries on your search engine with 1/1,000,000 the traffic of Google.
I don't know a single website owner that is hostile to any search engine web crawler, unless that web crawler is slamming them with so many requests they're effectively getting DDoS'd.
Reddit, twitter, facebook are just three to start. There are plenty that disallow crawlers except google. We've crawled a significant amount now and just because you are unaware of them doesn't mean they don't exist. I can attest they're there.
I'll also add plenty of sites don't block any engine but confer special privileges to google bot which depending on the site and their size are almost the same thing.
Edit: And I'll add to limit confusion Reddit hides the sitemap and denies access there's is not an outright ban -- it just makes it a lot harder.
Content kingdoms have their own reasons to be hostile to Everyone searching, including Google. Even when their content is "searchable" by Google, they'll tease you with something and gate almost all content.
They are part of the story of why Google is degrading, not why they're doing well.
So unless you have a google domain your sol, it's also just generally frowned upon. We have our own UA WhizeBot with an email contact so you can let us know if our crawler is doing anything you'd rather it not.
There have been a few legal cases that protect scraping publicly available information on the web but we'd rather follow robots.txt to avoid the potential for shenanigans in any case.
That's "poor man's cloaking". Most people that genuinely care if it's Googlebot or not will verify it appropriately by doing a DNS lookup and a reverse DNS of that IP to ensure it's one of Google's IPs.
'Faking' the UA is much more likely to annoy site owners and end up with a permanent block.
I do, some third party search crawlers are just badly programmed, and after you get burned a bunch of times you just want to deny anyone who isn't one of the main players. I think they are basically startups with a lot of money to spend on crawl compute, but who haven't really figured out their crawl engine, and it can go wild on your site.
You also have bots that seem to be credential stuffing, bots that seem to be content scrapping (stuff with same typos shows up elsewhere after their visits, really obvious on new / fresh articles, bots that seem to be exploring for copyright claims, rando bots (maybe comment sentiment analysis for stock trading) etc.
Right, but that’s not really anti-search-engine, that’s anti-people-who-want-our-actual-data.
Like I said in another comment, if you’re someone that just wants to surface Amazon results they love you. It’s the people that want to take advantage of amazon data in some other way they’re trying to stop.
Oh, good to know, thanks. Are you running relatively complete crawls of larger sites at similar rates to Googlebot?
I've definitely seen my share of robots.txt that give special permission to Googlebot, but maybe my corner of the web was unusually aggressive toward crawlers.
No, not complete crawls of any sites, we've aimed to get a wider coverage in place of deeper crawls. This means we have most sites indexed and are now gradually going deeper. We do encounter robots.txt blocks, but we don't see it as a major issue right now.
It’s a bit like saying, in 1911, that given the choice between petroleum companies, everyone is going to choose Standard Oil, to which the answer is a resounding yes, of course they will.
Ask anybody in much of the Midwest where they will choose to buy groceries and they will answer Walmart.
This kind of reasoning is not an argument against the philosophy behind antitrust regulations. Rather, it is emblematic of the situation that monopolies create for themselves, by using their economies of scale to create pricing that cannot reasonably be expected to lose any competition over customers.
The same economies of scale benefit consumers and the economy as a whole as long as the business behaves in a manner consistent with the shared values of society. As soon as they decide to behave differently, though, society is at the mercy of a monopoly because they have consumed the entire market.
It's not illegal to be a monopoly - especially by providing a superior product or service.
The case hinges on the no-compete, tying, and default placement agreements. If Google didn't pay anyone to be the default search engine, didn't require Android Phone makers to pre-install Google apps and make Google the default search in order to get access to Google services and the store, etc then there's no problem.
The complaint also says that one of the reasons Google's results are better is the network and scale effects that come from owning 80-90% of search. A competitor has a very difficult time no matter how good their algorithm because you need insights you can only get when people use your service at scale. I don't personally know if that is true but that's part of the complaint.
The proposed antitrust violation is likely the combination: using their dominant position to outspend any other players when paying for default placement to ensure they're the only one with the scale to have the best search results. That forms a self-reinforcing cycle: users who do choose pick you because you have the best results and you use that fact to fund no-compete and default placement agreements to ensure you have unmatched scale which further reinforces your ability to deliver the best results.
Again: I don't know if this is true or a valid argument, but it seems to be what the complaint claims.
Agree (responded in an earlier comment). If DOJ are going to look anywhere, it should be the advertising side of things and placement in search results (as opposed to sidebar ads). Even then, I'm not sure there is any case.
The question I would posit is: Do the actions from Google that the Justice Department consider to be anti-competitive prevent competitors from becoming better?
For example, let's say I could be curious about DuckDuckGo if I had to choose a default search engine when I got an Apple device instead of Google being the default, then that could be revenue to DuckDuckGo for them to improve their search engine.
So what are you going to do, force Apple to sell their search default option for less money (whatever DuckDuckGo can afford to pay) in order to support more competition? It's really Apple's choice and interest what it does with the default search, Apple could decide tomorrow to point it to its own search engine and there's nothing Google, the DOJ or anyone else can do about it.
Not really sure what the DOJ expect Apple or Google to do in this situation, it seems to me that 2 companies entered a mutually benefiting contract. You can't argue that Google "colluded" with Apple, there's a lot of throwing punches between each other (all the privacy oriented moves Apple is doing are hurting Google's business) and again Apple could be making its own search engine anytime they wanted, they already replaced Google Maps with their own thing.
The monopolized market in this case would be the market for default search engines on mobile.
If the only two players (Google and Apple) both use Google Search by default, then Google has effectively captured 100% of the mobile ad market. (And since Google is paying Apple et al for that default state, it is indeed a market.)
The court could require device makers (including Google itself) to prompt users to select their search engine provider, or potentially ban Google from buying search engine defaults from other companies (Apple, Mozilla, etc.) as an anticompetitive practice.
That's an interesting scenario. Let's say Google is banned from buying search engine defaults. Then Mozilla would no longer be able to sell the Firefox default to Google.
Sure, they could sell it to someone else, but without the biggest player bidding up the price, it'd probably sell for a fraction of what it does today -- which could be devastating to Mozilla, given that almost all of their funding comes from the search deal. What would that do to competition in the browser space?
Competition in the browser space is over and Chromium won. If this had been regulated earlier by preventing Google from preinstalling Chrome on all Android devices, we wouldn't be in this situation where Firefox is on life support, but here we are.
Using Firefox as a reason not to break up some of Google's hold on search seems extremely short-sighted. Besides, Edge using Chrome changed the whole browser market dynamic as more and more people are using it. Once Microsoft reaches a somewhat decent percentage of install we will be back at a two (three?) player situation.
Apple could actually make more money. Say Google is split into two renamed search engines: elgooGA and elgooGB, with evenly divided assets. They would immediately be two search titans competing for the important Apple contract and would try to outbid one another. Perhaps elgooGA wins Apple, but then elgooGB wins Firefox. Every alternative platform to Apple would stand to get more money. And the users would then become more accustomed to having different default search providers and usage might be split. That is a win for DuckDuckGo and all other competitors.
Regarding DuckDuckGo, my understanding is that though they have their own web crawler, most of the information is coming from Bing and Yahoo, who are the only direct competitors to Google.
Before asking "should we" we need to answer "can we". If forcing Google to give users a choice results in them picking Google anyways then whether we should do that or not is irrelevant. Since it won't achieve it's stated purpose there's no point in forcing it.
The question is: does any of the competitors stand a chance against Google if they can't acquire more users and therefore improve their engine with the added revenue? Seems like a catch-22, and having Google as the default search engine everywhere, including in the web browser they make and that has the highest marketshare only exacerbate this.
>few use them because Google is just flat out better.
I completely disagree with this part, but you're totally right on people continuing to use it.
Search is highly dependent on the query. At first DDG's results seemed bad to me, but after a while I think I've changed how I write my searches. It's hard to explain, but I guess I'm putting more thought into understanding what it is that I hope to find.
Now, Google's results seem to just be a listing of whoever did the best SEO targeting on the subject, and ultimately that means worse results for me. It's less about what I'm looking for and more about what Google has to show me... and Google always has something relevant to show me. When DDG doesn't, I'm forced to re-consider my query and try again, ultimately reaching a better destination.
However, "change the way you search" is niche at best. Google is satisfying because it's so easy to use, that you almost don't even have to write a query. It's like an automatic "I'm feeling lucky" based on it's knowledge of you and your location and time of day, etc...
good god is this overdramatic. This whole thread is. Google is a good citizen, but people on hacker news just love a good story about tearing up big tech. How is society better off with google torn up? Arguments I expect and don't accept:
1. It allows alt search engine or alt browser to succeed. So what? The alt search engines and browsers are worse than the google ones. It doesn't benefit any actual people to have them rise up.
2. Google screwed my friend one time. Every single company (and person) on earth is guilty of this. One swallow does not a summer make.
3. Google is restricting this tech I like, or google is sometimes wrong about their bans. See (2)
And so on. I haven't seen anything compelling in this thread, just a whole lot of hyperventilating.
And to your point. No, search is not a wall of ads. But if you feel that way, literally change your search engine. It's easier than typing this comment you just posted.
Google does have a great service, but calling them a 'good citizen' is a stretch, IMO.
The events of celebritynetworth.com are a good example of why they've not been behaving as a good citizen (there is a thread about that on this forum).
A good number of people have took up your suggestion and changed their search engine, DDG's traffic count continues to rise. The reality is that many users will use whatever is put in front of them, i.e. how many people use the URL bar of their browser for searches, or use a search toolbar for a specific URL? Google knows this well, hence their paying to be the default search engine choice and paying an amount that no other engine can match.
Google's knows they are the best in class when it comes to general search, but to be sure they have been aggressive in ensuring that no one else gets a look in.
The UK's CMA report estimates that an entrant to the market would require around £20 billion of capital to be a credible alternative, as in, a proper crawling search engine, not a meta search engine like DuckDuckGo. That's before paying the likes of Apple billions of dollars simply so that people will use "what is there".
Having such a dominant position comes with responsibility, which is not solely Google's. The social networks along with Google are essentially the gateways to the web and how they present that information is important- and essentially only one point of view. Having room for more competition, choices, algorithms surely is a good thing.
I was just searching for "quill", a javascript editor. I clicked the first result without really looking (after all, i m searching name, right? ) - and it took me to some competing product called fro-something. I wasted my time, their money , yet google still made money.
I just tried search for "quill" in incognito, and I got quill.com as the first hit (both ads as well as organic result) - apparently there's a company called Quill Corporation (quill.com). It seems reasonable to return that as the first hit. quilljs.com is 5th hit on the first page. "quill javascript" has quilljs.com as the first hit.
This seems reasonable. What's your suggestion on how to make this better ?
just checked my history, my first result was "froalla", happened more than once
(the query must have been "quill js" or "quill editor" cant remember -- it's an example of the infamous 'google® tax' - an obviously keyword-targeted ad)
It is a search for "express-http-proxy" "logging" but at leat I got maybe one relevant result and a bunch of wildly unrelated ones, despite doublequotes.
There was one among the top 10 when I did the search.
As for most of the rest of the first 10, null would have been a valid, more correct and generally better result!
I actually wasted several minutes on one of them right away since I haven't still gotten into the habit of verifying every single Google result to se that it actually is what I asked for and not whatever filler Google decided to use this time. Not that it should be necessary, - they had this sorted back before 2010!
Seriously: why can't Google or DDG get this right anymore?
This sounds like exactly what the grandfather post (by wasdfff) was discussing. A competitor advertised their product based on the keywords you searched for.
You didn't buy their product, but Google helped them get your gaze briefly.
What is search but a list of adverts associated with your keywords?
Google can do without this "google tax", and imho they should. It's unethical , and it's not like a competitor putting a sign next to yours. The user is literally searching for a brand and is instead driven to click another. At best the competitor should be an ad on the side in this case. Considering how (especially in mobiles) google is often used as a kind of DNS-autocorrect in the omnibox, this behavior is unethical on the same level as websites with popups. A rich company like google would not normally allow it to itself, they can easily dispense with such sleaziness. The fact that they can do it unpunished is indicative of a monopoly position.
It will work most likely. We aren't in 2000 any more and both parties are mad Big Tech. There will definitely be some heads rolling in FAANG in the next few years.
Many DOJ attorneys resigned from this case in protest of it being brought to bear too quickly. Bill Barr, US Attorney General, overruled senior DOJ attorneys who felt that it was impossible to bring a strong case against Google by rushing it before the election.
As a result, this complaint being brought is considered legally weak, and it gives Google's legal team a huge advantage in fighting it. If the decision to accelerate the case, at the cost of its strength, causes the complaint to fail, it'll probably be the last antitrust case against Google we'll see for some time.
Last federal case probably. The Democratic states Attorneys Generals mostly have not signed onto the lawsuit because they don't want to be bound by unfavorable settlement terms (sorry I can't remember where I read that in the last couple days)
That's a good point. Right now it's unclear whether the Dem AGs really do reject the suit or whether they just don't want to add legitimacy pre-election.
Did sound an awful lot like they thought the suit was ill-timed and half-baked, though. I might have been misled by editorial content in the reporting.
This means Louisiana's Governor is John Edwards, a democrat, and normally one refers to a US State being led by a Governor... not an AG. Though a legal filing is led by an AG... so the comments when added together led to ambiguity I found funny, and decided to play with. I should have linked to the Governor first, and fully explained my joke. I understand comedy is not what we come here for, but sometimes, it's good to not take everything so seriously.
The questions is if a stronger case would see the light of day in the next four years with a change in administration. Maybe Barr thinks the answer is no.
If the administration changes, and they don't want to pursue the case, they can just drop it or flop it. Barr will not get a result before Inauguration so he's reliant on the next (or re-elected) adminstration regardless.
Not if the administration slow walks it, drags it out and then intentionally poorly presents its case as they realize its not in their interest to actually win it – which, if you spare me the speculation, is what a cynical person might say happened in the Oracle v. Google case, given that a positive result for Oracle there may mean Google now has huge swaths of newly-found copyrightable APIs of its own that its sitting on.
Note I say *the administration and not any particular candidate. I think both parties could (not to say they necessarily would) use this as mostly a political ploy to appeal to their bases without changing anything too drastic and walk away saying "we tried, blame the other side for the outcome" should they want to.
Yeah, I don't see how Google could pursue something like that without turning a large part of the market off using Google technologies. Doesn't mean they wont try though.
You have three months left to put the next admin "on the record". But you only have two weeks left to influence the election. I think it's clear from the timing what the priority is.
Yeah, puts them on record as bringing forth a weak case that's sure to lose.
Sounds to me like the current administration wants anti-trust to fail and going Leroy Jenkins on it right now is ensuring that a potential Biden administration has no hope of getting a strong case together. And if the current administration gets another term, they can push out a toothless settlement and claim "victory".
Exactly, it's a smart move. If a Biden administration wants to go easy on Google (and let's be honest: they do), now it'll be out in the open for everyone to see.
Democrats for a generation have been tough talkers about corporate power when speaking to the public, but doves when in private (or at fundraisers). Pinning them down is smart politics.
This makes no sense. Bringing a weak case now guarantees that DOJ won't pursue another case in the future after it gets its ass handed to it in court. There is plenty of support for going after big tech on both sides of the aisle --albeit for different reasons.
Here's a novel idea, how about we judge Bill Barr on his overriding multiple DOJ personnel in the weeks before an election instead of what intent you want to ascribe to a Biden admin. If the intent was to actually put pressure on the Biden admin, he had another 3 months to continue to build the case and then announce between the election and inauguration.
Bringing a weak case now guarantees that DOJ won't pursue another case in the future after it gets its ass handed to it in court
Simply because a complaint was filed does not mean that investigation doesn't continue. It's not as if the complaint cannot be amended or new complaints cannot be made.
But your question begging aside regarding this being a "weak case", if Barr felt (justly or unjustly) that the case wouldn't have been brought by a Biden administration then this may have been the best opportunity to make the complaint. It's not unreasonable to think that a Biden administration might be more sympathetic to Google. After all, Google was a prominent advising figure during the Obama administration and Harris is a San Francisco politician with Google relationships. Maybe that's a cynical view of the Biden administration or maybe it's not sufficiently cynical in evaluating Barr's motives. Such is politics and I don't really trust any of them.
> Simply because a complaint was filed does not mean that investigation doesn't continue.
While true, it does mean that you think you can make the case, which not many people think that they can, including a bunch of career prosecutors. I haven't seen a single outside analyst that has said this is a good case. Let's check in on what the market thinks of this case: GOOG: up 1.39% today as of time of this comment.
> that the case wouldn't have been brought by a Biden administration then this may have been the best opportunity to make the complaint.
Why? Why not November 4, or December 3, or January 14? Why now, 2 weeks before an election. It reeks of political motivation. Even if that wasn't the intent, it has the appearance of that intent which could have easily been avoided by simply waiting until after the election day.
Why? Why not November 4, or December 3, or January 14? Why now, 2 weeks before an election. It reeks of political motivation.
There are more types of political motivation than just vote seeking, and the timing is certainly political. If there's any time to get Biden and/or Harris on the record regarding whether they will continue to pursue the complaint is now. There will be no motivation for them to do so after the election no matter who wins.
> If there's any time to get Biden and/or Harris on the record regarding whether they will continue to pursue the complaint is now
Huh? How does doing this now, when the Trump campaign sucks up all the oxygen in the room going to lead to someone asking the Biden campaign about this.
99% of the people will literally not care what Biden has to say about this case, or what an independent DOJ under a Biden admin chooses to do with this in 3 months from now. It's only value is the current news cycle and hence vote seeking.
The problem there is that then we'll hear complaints that the incoming administration is either incompetent or corrupt for the Google probe failing or being dropped.
This seems like a pretty decent hedge on the outcome of the election to me. If it a strong case and they win, Barr can take credit if Trump stays in office or if Biden wins and cleans house.
If they lose the case and Trump is re-elected, Barr can lick his wounds and try again in a year or so with a stronger case.
If they lose the case and Biden cleans house, he can blame the Biden administration for dropping the ball.
Their goal isn't to actually enforce antitrust though, it's to appear strong for the election. So anything after November is completely useless to them. Your comment implies that once Democrats take over, there will be no more appetite for an antitrust case, which is not true.
That would make sense if the goal was to actually win the case. The actual goal is optics and to feed the victim complex of one side of the "culture war" ahead of the election.
The comment about “just before an election” is kind of interesting to me. If the law doesn’t dictate that the powers of the government aren’t valid at this time, then shouldn’t they still be doing their job?
Would waiting a few months cause large problems in their ability to do that job? Would it significantly decrease the risk of this being seen as some kind of politicized decision?
If anything, an anti-trust prosecution is more likely to go ahead in the unlikely event Biden takes office. The Democratic party has a much greater willingness to engage in regulatory actions against large businesses than does the GOP.
The GOP pushing a rushed (and therefore, weak) case now smells of a designed-to-fail effort that will only strengthen Google's position by poisoning the well against effective anti-trust efforts in the future.
It may also be partisan. Facebook has received considerably less attention from Washington as it has become more cooperative with Republican demands that conservative-oriented fabricated news remain on the platform[0]. Google has made no such commitments and might be in the GOP's sights as a result. While the DOJ is playing to lose, defending the case will cost Google money and this could be a lever to encourage them to follow Facebook's lead and give preferential treatment to conservative fake news.
There is no evidence that Biden would go after big tech at all. It's not part of his platform. They are benefitting bigly from donations and favorable coverage from FAANG. Biden himself is prone to sell out to foreign companies as evidenced by his son's dealings in China, Ukraine, and Russia. You can't expect someone that corrupt to go after monopoly corruption.
You’re making two common mistakes, hopefully unwittingly: don’t confuse the modest leanings of FAANG workers with their bosses’ - the major tech companies PACs and executives heavily donate to whoever they think will be able to lighten regulation or give them favorable tax breaks. Peter Thiel and Palmer Luckey are not freak unicorns but represent a sizable fraction of people and money.
Secondly, try to find evidence supporting the wild claims going around about either Biden. You’ll note that these claims tend to be very long on supposition but short on evidence and the people promoting them hace significant conflicts of interest. Just as when most of the same people said Clinton was more corrupt than Trump, they’re banking on you reading the headline but not critically examining the story.
In a world that is increasing polarized it is important to remember:
Just because evidence that contradicts your world view doesn't exist within you filter bubble of preferred information sources doesn't necessarily mean that evidence doesn't exist period.
Yes, I'm quite aware of that — note that I was suggesting that OP look for the actual evidence rather than relying on other people's claims. Their echoing of attacks which have been unsupported by evidence but common in conservative circles suggested that they were inside such a filter bubble
I think it’s very different because the original person made a very bold claim, and the other said “I don’t know if I’ll believe that without evidence”. The burden of proof lies on the one who makes the original claim, not the one who doesn’t believe it without evidence.
Without making a judgement on the veracity of the claims.
There is at least circumstantial evidence in this case. I have noticed that the tactic used to defend biden has become to place insurmountable burden of proof on anyone who claims wrong doing while giving the bidens every benefit of the doubt. Which is gaslighting.
That is akin to saying "there is no evidence OJ killed his wife. The bloody glove found at his home has all the hallmarks of being planted by russian intelligence".
I can't speak for OP but while this is a common cognitive pitfall it's also one which you can intentionally correct for by attempting to anchor your beliefs on original sources and making an effort to find things outside of your immediate community. People are going to be successful at this to varying degrees but as we can see currently there are large segments of the population who never try.
Sure, here's Politico's Quint Forgey quoting the Director of National Intelligence that the laptop (source of the emails) is in the FBI's possession and that it is authentically Hunter's: https://twitter.com/QuintForgey/status/1318166732419235841
And here's the NYPost article itself, excerpts included:
`Biden wrote that Ye had sweetened the terms of an earlier, three-year consulting contract with CEFC that was to pay him $10 million annually “for introductions alone.”`
`"Consulting fees is one piece of our income stream but the reason this proposal by the chairman was so much more interesting to me and my family is that we would also be partners inn [sic] the equity and profits of the JV’s [joint venture’s] investments."`
`The documents obtained by The Post also include an “Attorney Engagement Letter” executed in September 2017 in which one of Ye’s top lieutenants, former Hong Kong government official Chi Ping Patrick Ho, agreed to pay Biden a $1 million retainer for “Counsel to matters related to US law and advice pertaining to the hiring and legal analysis of any US Law Firm or Lawyer.`
This is the problem with getting your information from Twitter. You're taking a public statement from a political appointee whose boss very badly needs an attack angle and generalizing it without cause. We know that the non-partisan staff have been telling Congress and the public that there are Russian attempts to influence the election[1,2] involving some of the people in this story[3].
This matters because you're taking a single very specific claim as proof an entire story. The DNI made a very specific denial that Hunter Biden's laptop is not part of a Russian disinformation campaign — we don't know what level of certainty the analysts have that this was actually Biden's laptop, that the data on it wasn't modified after it left Biden's control, that he wasn't fine parsing this being a disinformation campaign run by anyone other than the Russian government, or that the emails presented in the NY Post story are authentic and complete.
Continuing the trend, there's a conservative media figure citing unnamed officials with uncorroborated claims. We don't know how well informed they are, what conflicts of interest they have, etc. but we do know that their chain of command has a number of people who have significant personal investment in a particular election result. This is why anything involving politically sensitive claims really needs to be done as openly as possible since history is full of examples of various ways officials have mislead the public.
Similarly, you are presenting as proof a JPEG on a conservative blog showing two signatures which aren't close matches and have none of the provenance you'd need to demonstrate that similarities aren't due to one of them being a forgery based on the public record. Even if the receipt was authentic, that tells you he dropped a Mac off, which could be part of but is not on its own sufficient to say that the data came from that Mac.
I mention all of this because it's how the process works: you're convinced that Biden is corrupt because the sources you read presented some nice juicy headlines and just enough plausible details to underpin all of those conclusions. If you remember Guccifer 2.0, one of the best ways to make a forgery seem more realistic is to put it in with legitimate but innocuous documents. The decision to sit on this story until close before an election but not release the data or an independent forensic report is exactly what you'd do in this case.
My suggestion that you look for the evidence is to put an upper bound on how confidently you should present that narrative as fact — for example, doesn't it seem interesting that this conversation about laptops is still missing any evidence that a meeting or conversation happened or that it involved anything more than a businessman wangling a handshake with a prominent global figure? It's certainly possible that Hunter Biden did something dodgy but I personally would wait to call his father corrupt without strong or, really, any evidence of that. Similarly, the NY Post story repeated the long-debunked claim about VP Biden having tried to get a prosecutor fired for investigating Burisma — that certainly doesn't mean that the rest of the story is completely wrong but it does call into question how much a wise reader should trust the story without further corroboration.
Your #1 and #2 links simply indicate a general assessment of several foreign entities including China, Russia, Iran and their general attitudes towards the candidates (it also indicates China, our number one threat strategically, militarily, technologically, democratically, medically, prefers Biden). No doubt they are all trying to influence the U.S. election. None of that has anything to do with the damning evidence of Hunter Biden selling access to his father for millions of dollars.
I linked to professional staffers on Twitter from Politico and Fox. They're not random contributors, they're journalists and they're quoting specific government officials.
At any rate, I know, neither journalists nor government officials have a very good reputation these days, but you asked for evidence, and I provided that, along with photo evidence of Hunter's signature on the laptop repair ticket, which matches the Paternity suit signature filed by Hunter's baby mama in Arkansas last year. It's the same RHB (Robert Hunter Biden) signature. I don't know what to tell you. Look again.
The laptop had incriminating photos of Hunter smoking crack. Those photos were published. Where else would they have come from? Also, the dates on the emails match up with Secret Service travel logs from 2014: https://www.theepochtimes.com/secret-service-travel-logs-mat...
I'm convinced Biden is corrupt, because power corrupts. That's an almost universal law of human nature. And Biden had power for 47 years. You cannot be a part of that scene for that long without corruption rubbing off on you. After a while, you start to think you're invincible. Especially if the media covers for you. Conservatives don't have that benefit. They're always under far more scrutiny than liberals, because over 90% of journalists are liberal and they don't cover Democrats the same way. They spent 3 years on a fake Russian scandal against Trump. Spent $50 million+ and wasted the nation's time based on some DNC paid for propaganda hit piece by a washed up ex-MI6 agent. And the media spent 3 years breathlessly covering every "bombshell" report only to come up with nothing.
Again, there is signatures, emails, photos, and witnesses on the Biden story and you had a made up tabloid story that dominated news coverage on Trump for THREE YEARS.
> Conservatives don't have that benefit. They're always under far more scrutiny than liberals, because over 90% of journalists are liberal and they don't cover Democrats the same way. They spent 3 years on a fake Russian scandal against Trump. Spent $50 million+ and wasted the nation's time based on some DNC paid for propaganda hit piece by a washed up ex-MI6 agent.
This is a great example of what happens when you uncritically seek out information which satisfies your political biases without thinking about it critically. I’m sure you do believe what you wrote above because people you trust have told you to do so, but wishing doesn’t mean that it’s true.
For example, do you really expect anyone to believe there’s a global “the media” with uniform beliefs spanning everyone from the BBC and NPR to Fox News and The Guardian? Want to try using evidence to show that, say, journalists were covering for Hillary Clinton during the previous election? (Or for the amusing belief that they’re covering for Biden now by totally not covering this other than all of the hundreds of stories running about it?)
Your mischaracterization of the Russia investigation similarly shows that you’re only reading sources friendly to the subjects. There were multiple sources, none of them the Steele dossier, and it certainly found a lot more than nothing – all facts you’ve had easily available to learn for years but have either chosen not to or are at least hoping your readers have not:
I’m not going to waste time further responding to someone acting in bad faith but don’t think I wasn’t amused by you going from claiming that a major multi-government intelligence investigation was a “made up tabloid story” while at the same time complaining that people are calling for verification of a tabloid story.
In contemporary American politics, "filter bubbles" that suppress facts--as opposed to providing a slanted interpretation of the meaning of facts--are exclusively a product of conservative politics.
If there was concrete evidence of malfeasance involving either Biden, actual media outlets (NYT, WaPo, CNN, ABC, CBS, etc) would report on it. They might downplay it, but they would report it.
In contrast, conservative media gleefully provides politically motivated "alternative facts[0]" -- more properly known as 'lies'[1] -- and fails to report on stories that are politically harmful to conservatives. Conservative media is not intended to inform; it is intended to keep people ignorant of actual, objective, facts.[2]
Has your filter bubble told you that Trump was impeached specifically for attempting to blackmail the Ukrainian government into framing Biden?
Has your filter bubble told you that this kind of conduct is not normal in a democracy?
Just because conservative media lies to people to further a political objective does not mean that the entire media ecosystem is equally bad.
The issue I see there is the Democratic establishment is pro-corporate before anything else. So yeah, if Biden is elected, this will never have seen the light of day.
The Democratic establishment is more pro-corporate than the Republican establishment? In what reality is this. Like I don't get where this idea comes from that you have to be pro-business or anti-business. I can be both pro-worker and pro-business, it's not black and white, it's shades of gray.
> The Democratic establishment is more pro-corporate than the Republican establishment?
It depends on the company in question.
And, yes, Republicans right now are much more likely to be skeptical of Silicon Valley giants than are Democrats, who have been very cozy with Democrats since 2008.
The biggest and most powerful corporations in the world right now are tech companies, of which Republicans are increasingly skeptical and with which Democrats are increasingly cozy. So of course it's relevant to a question about how Democrats could be seen as pro-corporate.
> The biggest and most powerful corporations in the world right now are tech companies,
Not even close to true. JP Morgan, ExxonMobil, Citi, Chevron, ATT, Comcast,, Walmart, GE, GM, Berkshire Hatahway, Pfizer, Johnson & Jhonson... I could go on. Yes, Apple, MS, FB, Google are huge tech companies, but they are not the most common and not by any means "the most powerful".
The most clear and objective way to compare corporations is market capitalization, and the seven corporations with the biggest market cap in the world are all tech companies.[1]
How powerful a company is a bit harder to judge, but if anything tech companies punch above their weight when it comes to political power. Johnson & Johnson has ten times the market cap of twitter, but much less political power.
The difference is none of the companies you listed have the same amount of control over the internet. SV giants are the new gatekeepers of information.
Exactly. Those companies are more of a "you buy things from them" than the "your knowledge and view of the world is filtered through it" of Google. Google yields tremendous power over people just by what results it shows them when they search for things.
You're a libertarian, aren't you? Frankly, business's interests and worker interests are fundamentally at odds solely because labor is so expensive and having to accommodate workers' needs is expensive.
In what reality are you living in that Obama didn't give corporate America billions of dollars in hand-outs in the aftermath of 2008? Republicans aren't any better, but Democrats like to pretend they care about workers, when all they really care about is enriching the wealthy.
Not wanting to destroy your countries industries and creating a balance between workers and businesses is not the same as believing that today's large businesses are over regulated and workers have too much power.
If you are anti-capitalist, fine, but your complaint isn't the Dems are pro-business, the argument is that they are still capitalists.
Honestly, America is pro-corporate before anything else - neither party is actually a good advocate for labour or consumer protection, you only see these things on the fringes of the parties.
I doubt it. The democrats want this too. However, Biden would have much more likely listened to his advisors rather than this case where no doubt Trump is throwing stuff at the wall hoping it sticks and helps him with the election. Most people are probably in favor of holding Google's feet to the fire.
Many DOJ attorneys resigned from this case in protest
Wouldn't this give Barr the opportunity to bring in people who always agree with him and make the situation worse? Not just this case against Google, but in general.
Yes, but that doesn't mean the case will gain the approval of judges. Of course, this is why the current administration has worked very hard to place as many judges as possible on the federal courts, but since federal judges hold lifetime appointments they sometimes develop an unexpected degree of independent thought once they land on a suitably comfortable bench and fail to please their erstwhile patrons, instead pursuing the respect of their judicial peers or their legacy.
There's an interview where Barr is asked about his legacy that's worth looking up, it's a great example of the conflict between short-term expediency and long-term sustainability.
> Since federal judges hold lifetime appointments they sometimes develop an unexpected degree of independent thought once they land on a suitably comfortable bench and fail to please their erstwhile patrons, instead pursuing the respect of their judicial peers or their legacy.
Isn't there a contradiction between independent thought and pursing the respect of their judicial peers?
> There's an interview where Barr is asked about his legacy that's worth looking up, it's a great example of the conflict between short-term expediency and long-term sustainability.
I think you're referring to him saying "everybody dies", and you take this as short-term expediency? I don't agree. I think it's a statement of independence: I will not be manipulated by the people who write "the first draft of history", I'll do what I think is right.
Resigned from the case, but not resigned from the dept?
When you argue a case in court, you have to be a "zealous advocate" meaning you have to believe what you're arguing. I don't think a lawyer even employed by Justice Dept. can be compelled to argue a specific case.
Of course he can probably cook up whatever reason to fire them.
edit: in case it wasn't obvious, IANAL - thanks for clarifications
Attorneys argue positions they do not agree with or believe in all the time. Their job is to represent their client and bring about the best case possible, in the interests of a system designed to be adversarial.
The concept of “zealous advocacy” is such a minor part of the ABA’s Rules of Professional Conduct to begin with. Attorneys just like to use that one term as an excuse to be assholes, while forgetting the myriad of other ethical requirements in the Rules.
While I commend them for taking a stand, they should absolutely be fired for failing to refusing to represent their client, aka the Federal government. They have effectively terminated their relationship with the client and should no longer be representing them.
In fact, the first footnote in Rule 1.3 (where the text for “zeal with advocacy” occurs outside the preamble), it reads:
“[1] A lawyer should pursue a matter on behalf of a client despite opposition, obstruction or personal inconvenience to the lawyer, and take whatever lawful and ethical measures are required to vindicate a client's cause or endeavor.”
For private attorneys, you refuse to represent your client on ethical grounds, you do not get to continue billing them. Not sure why it should be any different here.
They're not private attorneys who have the US as their client. They work for an organization (DoJ) that has the US as its client. That organization can have whatever policies it wants about how cases are allocated among its staff.
Yes, I am fully aware that they are not private attorneys. I am also aware that Federal employment laws are unlikely to support firing them on account of recusing themselves from a case.
However, that does not mean the ABA's Rules of Professional Conduct do not apply to them, nor does it mean they should not be fired for choosing to terminate representation of their client.
It sets a terrible precedent in a system that is designed to have someone willing to fight on each side for their client. If the government wants to bring about a weak case, let them. The opposing party has their own representation point out those weaknesses, if that is truly the case.
So whether they can be fired or not, doesn't change the fact that they should be, or that they should resign from the Department.
> Their job is to represent their client and bring about the best case possible
To be clear, the current issue is not that they do or don't believe the case on its merits, but that they don't believe they have enough time to push the best case possible.
Fair enough, but I think that reasoning is akin to a public defender saying they won’t defend their client because they are overworked and didn’t have enough time to prepare. Someone else is still going to have to do it, only now they will have even less time to prepare.
There are legal processes that can be used to continue trials and other hearings, which they’re fully aware of. Their client said to go, it is not their job to decide when, only to offer advice against such a decision (in theory).
It's more like the public defender's boss is deciding when to schedule the trial, and deliberately schedules it before their performance review instead of scheduling it to improve the chance that the case is successful.
I’m not sure how that example negates what I said. Regardless of the circumstances as to why a case is tried sooner than you would like, it’s still happening. Sometimes it is a judge, sometimes it is a boss, sometimes it is a strategic maneuver by opposing counsel, etc. That doesn’t make it an acceptable excuse to not represent their client’s interests given the time they do have, nor does it make the decision any less impactful to the client they represent.
I guess it is a difficult position to be in, especially in the current administration. If you leave, you know your replacement is likely going to be unqualified, yes men. If you stay, you conscience will bother you and you won't be able to do much good anyway.
That is the modus operandi of this entire Administration. Trump has fired advisors and cabinet over and over until almost all the current positions are filled with yes men and women or not filled at all and just have people holding the position and maintaining status quo.
We've been waiting for them to build a strong case for several years. It will likely take several more for it to work its way through the courts. At some point the interests of the public in having a timely curb to Google's actions outweighs the value of preparing a perfect case.
Also, as I understand it (not a lawyer, just listening to law students), this filing’s purpose is to establish a prima-facia case. There aren’t really many ‘arguments’ as to why Section 2 of the USC 15 has been violated, this is just trying to convince a judge to hear the case.
I’d wait until the judge agrees to hear the case and cases are cited to really make any predictions. The cited case law will set the first odds. It feels too early to cast lots.
The ones who resigned didn't happen to have their own political motivations as well? These cases always have plenty of time and areas for arguments refined.
I can't read anything with politicized names and highly question the perfectly placed PRified counter points.
The truth, aka middle ground (if such a thing even exists anymore), is the hardest thing to come by these days. Lawyers working for a gov agency are the least reputable in this area in my books.
> at the cost of its strength, causes the complaint to fail, it'll probably be the last antitrust case against Google we'll see for some time.
The conspiracy theorist in me says this was on purpose. Barr isn't rushing this case before the election to make it look like they're doing something, they're rushing it to sabotage any future attempts to rein in Google.
Thanks for the input. I had assumed they'd been working on this behind the scenes for awhile. I should have realized with the current administration one should never believe that best practices were being practiced.
You're reading a whole lot into this single sentence in the article:
> Some lawyers in the department worry that Mr. Barr’s determination to bring a complaint this month could weaken their case and ultimately strengthen Google’s hand, according to interviews with 15 lawyers who worked on the case or were briefed on the department’s strategy.
It says "some" lawyers expressed concern, according to interviews with 15 of them. Nothing about that sentence alleges that all 15 they spoke with expressed concern. Some could be 2 or 3 and all 15 were aware of the concern.
I'm dumbfounded. Of all the things in the tech world they chose Google paying Apple, Samsung, et.al. to be the default search engine to sue over. That's not really evidence of Google blocking competition. That's evidence of phone manufacturers using their power in one market (phone sales) to extract cash out of another (search/ads).
Arguably, Google paying such sums is evidence that there IS competition in the search engine space. Otherwise, Google could just say "You know where to find Lycos or AltaVista if you prefer them".
Google pay such sums since otherwise the other search engines would pay billions to be the default search engine. And if we make such transactions illegal Apple will make their own search engine and make that the default since there is too much money left on the table otherwise.
google having so little competition means that phone companies are making a lot less than they would in a healthy market. There's nothing to compare to
Regardless, it feels like a very shrewd approach: very narrow and also the keystone holding up Google's monopolies in other areas. Not all other areas, but a lot of them.
Prohibiting pay-for-placement can be enforced by accountants and lawyers without help from engineers. Would be theoretically much easier to enforce than any other area of scrutiny I've heard discussed.
This would also kill Firefox if it's applied beyond mobile.
Possibly? I didn't see anything in the complaint about the use of their search landing page to push Chrome on people. That could be a problem because Chrome always defaults to Google search.
Honestly... what would Chrome's market share be if Google weren't heavily pushing it on everyone who visits google.com?
> that's evidence of phone manufacturers using their power in one market (phone sales) to extract cash out of another (search/ads).
That's an example of how competition is supposed to work. Phone makers sell their audience to the highest bidder. There's no shortage of phone makers. The issue is that google bought them all.
The issue is the near zero marginal cost of software makes it easy to dominate entire lines business. Technology itself allows businesses to become huge because once they have a solution, they can implement it at near zero cost everywhere and so competitors can’t really compete. Like Walmart/target/Costco versus little Main Street stores, or Home Depot/Lowe’s versus independent hardware stores, etc.
Smaller operators will have high marginal costs and higher prices, and will never be able to compete with bigger operations that can utilize software and other technology to offer the absolute lowest prices.
Although, in other businesses like retail, this results in single digit profit margins at best, whereas in software, due to the minimal labor needed and protections of copyright and obfuscation and network effects, the tech companies can maintain much bigger profit margins.
Yeah indeed the margins are high. In the case of google/FB, they are so high, that paying back users with "free services" doesn't cut it anymore. Even the cost of running those free services has gone way down. At this point users shouldbe getting paid for having their data used. That way, a potential competitor could outright buy the users directly (instead of paying FB/Google for advertising to acquire users). Unfortunately there's no legal framework for that yet.
No other industry except perhaps finance has the potential to cheaply scale as IT. I wonder what antimonopoly actions have been in finance in the past (finance seems to have been a lot more regulated since forever)
Maybe I am all special or something. For me, it is 300 points or more per day.
Yes, a few years back they changed the points ratio on that end. It used to take about 500 points to get a $5 gift card and now it is 5250 points.
But they also fiddled with things on the other end.
At least for me. Maybe Bill Gates likes me or something and told his people "Make sure that pathetic homeless woman can earn $10 per month as my generous gift to her."
I earn a $5 gift card about once every two weeks-ish. I'm poor enough that matters to me, so it is something I am very aware of. That $5 gift card is sometimes still all the money I have for the day, though I'm less desperately poor than when I was homeless.
I don't know what else to tell you. Your info sounds out of date to me, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Maybe you are using Bing on desktop, mobile (iOS), with their extension, making Edge your default browser, and doing all daily bonus activities? So altogether it's selling your info and some of your attention.
I was just doing it passively on one computer without extensions.
The 'anti trust' in this situation would be Google using it's own dominance over Chrome and Android to 'unfairly' promote it's own products.
The most unhealthy thing in these systems is the 'value chain creep' that allows monopoly in one area, to be leveraged into other areas.
Imagine if you owned all the real estate in the state and you had a cracker factory. Hey, just charge your cracker-making competitors 2x the rent. Nobody can make crackers but you.
Or you own all the railways and charge your Oil pumping competitors more to transport Oil - you have an Oil monopoly.
Chrome is not a 'money losing product' - it's absolutely one of the most important products in Google's portfolio - the surpluses are yielded elsewhere, in Search. Arguably same for Android.
If there were an 'anti trust' case it would be to separate Search/Chrome/Android/Cloud in the similar vein that Microsoft would ostensibly be separated from any app software.
Amazon uses AWS surpluses to 'dump' on commercial distribution which is another weird one.
If there is a case to concern over monopoly, it's those.
You could split Google in Search/Chrome/Android/Cloud, and that would help in reducing they monopoly, but if there is one thing I could change it would be to decouple ranking, filtering and targeting from the rest, and open them up.
There should be multiple rankers on top of the index, users should be able to choose and create new rankers. Same for filtering - what gets hidden/censured, put the power back to the users, let them select their filter lists. Instead of one true ranking and filtering, let users customise it as they like.
That's a neat idea, and it might help - but it's not the kind of problem governments would chose to solve.
Or put another way, governments would chose to intervene by helping to create more 'competition' - which creates product variations approximating true market needs - as opposed to trying to 'legislate features'. 'Feature lists today' but something else tommorow. If the market is healthy, it will move in the direction of value, is the idea.
Governments can also help by promoting and supporting standards.
Spidering and building an index is relatively easy. It's not the barrier to creating a search engine, and I don't think you'd find that Microsoft's index is materially smaller than Google's. The hard part is figuring out how to turn that content into relevant results.
Only 2 companies in the US have an independent English based index with the contents of the entire web. Granted, the sheer volume of data is a barrier to making the index but removing that, only 4 US companies have crawled the entire internet. I'm going to have to disagree with you on that one. To write a crawler capable of the scale and timeliness to crawl the entire web in a week or two requires some pretty solid engineering. I don't however disagree that building a good search is also difficult.
Google and Microsoft were not the first web spiders.
A famous example, Yahoo!, didn't walk away from search and partner with Microsoft because of the difficulty of building an index. They did it because it was going to cost billions per year to try to keep up with Google in producing results.
I'm not arguing there's no work to do in building an index, but the problems of crawling and indexing can be solved by cash. They're a moat against small challengers, but not against well capitalized ones. Ranking and filtering require lots of research and tuning. This is the moat against even the well capitalized.
Put another way: do you really disagree that Google would still easily dominate search based on result quality even if small startups got access to their index data?
That's actually the opposite of how it's supposed to work. You're not supposed to be able to use your dominance in one market (cell phone manufacturing) to unfairly compete in another (search).
>>> that's evidence of phone manufacturers using their power in one market (phone sales) to extract cash out of another (search/ads).
>> That's an example of how competition is supposed to work. Phone makers sell their audience to the highest bidder.
> That's actually the opposite of how it's supposed to work. You're not supposed to be able to use your dominance in one market (cell phone manufacturing) to unfairly compete in another (search).
If you read the comment in question, there is no suggestion that the cell phone manufacturers are competing in the search market. They're taxing it, or selling to it.
> Apple 25%, Samsung 34%, Huawei 17%, Xiaomi 10% in Europe
Apple gets 11 billions/year to use Google as the default search engine
The remaining 61% (Samsung+Huawei+Xiaomi) is Android that means Google
Xiaomi defaults to Baidu in China, for example, but everywhere else, where the CPC has no direct control over the wires, they use Google because Google money is good even in China
Given this AG's track record can we really hold on good-faith that this isn't politically motivated? Many conservatives are absolutely desperate to believe there is a conspiracy against them, but why go to lengths of proving it if you can just exact revenge through AT legislation.
> That's not really evidence of Google blocking competition. That's evidence of phone manufacturers using their power in one market (phone sales) to extract cash out of another (search/ads).
No, I think it is a pretty clear example of rent-seeking on Google's behalf.
> phone manufacturers using their power in one market
Who has more market power - the disparate group of phone vendors who are legally barred from coordinating on things like this or the single actor that controls the only operating system package tenable for those phone vendors to use?
> No, I think it is a pretty clear example of rent-seeking on Google's behalf.
If anything, rent-seeking would be the other way, but that's still a big stretch.
The phone manufacturers know that searches are valuable to search engines, so they charge for it even though they're not doing anything but being a broker for their users. But while that is getting a cut (literally seeking rent), calling it "rent seeking" is a stretch, because clearly that brokering and OS space is naturally valuable and the phone companies aren't just injecting themselves into someone else's money-making process.
Google pays off phone manufacturers to sign onerous contract preventing them from installing other app stores or displaying other options on the home screen or during the setup process -> They then collect rent from the companies that have to offer their apps on the Play Store.
From wikipedia, "An example of rent-seeking in a modern economy is spending money on lobbying for government subsidies in order to be given wealth that has already been created." In this instance, the phone vendors are the politicians.
>> Of all the things in the tech world they chose Google paying Apple, Samsung, et.al. to be the default search engine to sue over. That's not really evidence of Google blocking competition. That's evidence of phone manufacturers using their power in one market (phone sales) to extract cash out of another (search/ads).
> No, I think it is a pretty clear example of rent-seeking on Google's behalf.
Not sure what conversation you're having in the above comment, but this is the one that I was responding to :)
Google engages in anti-competitive behavior (ie. using their capital to increase the entry barriers for other app store markets on Android), so that they can then collect rent on their app store (among other things, like search/advertising).
The anti-competitive actions (paying off phone vendors) that Google takes are part of that rent-seeking behavior, just as companies that lobby politicians to increase barriers to entry so they can raise prices are engaging in rent-seeking.
If you want to nit-pick and say the play store pricing is the rent-seeking and the paying off of the phone vendors is the anti-competitive behavior, I wouldn't have a huge quibble with that.
It's not nit picking to say you're giving non sequiturs to the comments you were responding to.
> Google engages in anti-competitive behavior (ie. using their capital to increase the entry barriers for other app store markets on Android), so that they can then collect rent on their app store (among other things, like search/advertising).
There is an argument that could be made that companies taking a 30% cut of app store revenue is rent seeking, but it makes no sense to say that Google is paying Apple per-user search acquisition fees in iOS Safari so that Google can then turn around and collect fees in the iOS App Store (because obviously that's not a thing).
You're absolutely correct, I misread the original comment and doubled-down rather than double-checking, which is my fault. I was thrown off by the reference to the "OS space" in your comment.
I still think what I'm saying is true, but agree that it is not quite the same issue.
It seems like you're both right and we're just looking for the right words... there are anti-competitive as well as rent-seeking behaviors, would the combination of those be racketeering?
>Google pays off phone manufacturers to sign onerous contract preventing them from installing other app stores or displaying other options on the home screen or during the setup process
GOOD
Here's the problem. You want to make it illegal for google to stop phone manufacturers from installing even more crapware than they do already? How would that be a win for anyone besides Samsung/LG/Sony/etc? Encouraging even more fracturing of the Android ecosystem and the lack of updates? Google is protecting consumer welfare. This should be encouraged, not looked at skeptically.
This is not the MS in the 90s situation where manufacturers couldn't install Linux instead of Windows. This would be MS saying you can't install BonziBuddy and sell it with our logo and services on it.
If it was a win for Samsung/LG/Sony to install crap-ware, then they would be doing it already rather than signing lucrative contracts that help Google maintain its monopoly position.
This is definitely not a good example of 'rent seeking'.
'Rent seeking' is real-estate.
You buy a property, you seek 'rent' for the rights to access it.
It's that simple.
It's considered different than other economic activity because it's not productive in nature.
Edit:
1) From Investoopedia: "Economic rent is the income earned from utilization of resource ownership. Entities that own resources can lend them to earn interest rents, lease them to earn rental income, or they may utilize their resources in other income-producing ways."
2) Here is Carl Marx agreeing with literally Adam Smith "Adam Smith correctly defines rent as “the price paid for the use of land” ([O.U.P., Vol. I, p. 162; Garnier,] t, I, p. 299) - in 'Theories of Surplus Value'.
Renting out a plot of land is the easiest, simplest, most obvious example of rent-seeking.
> The ones getting paid tens billions of dollars annually seems like the obvious answer to me.
So what, the seller on any side of a transaction is the one who has the market power?
To make it simpler: if there was one employer in the entirety of Earth and 7 billion people who wanted a job - since the employer is paying the employee, the employee would have the market power?
Microsoft argued it wasn't using monopoly power, because Windows was priced lower than the profit-maximizing price a monopoly would use. The Justice Department argued that was evidence of anti-competitive behavior: Microsoft chose to deter competition with an unnaturally low price.
Perhaps the argument is that Google is overpaying, and that's anti-competitive.
To make you analogy more accurate, this single employer would be paying the employees not to work for anyone else. And in that case, yes, the employees would be the ones that have the power since they are getting money for nothing.
It's not for nothing though - the employer is buying their productive capacity. The fact that the employer chooses to do nothing with it is entirely irrelevant.
Same issue with Google - by using their market power to monopolize search power across devices and OSes, they are effectively locking out any other potential entrants. That this is being done to enhance a completely different line of business (ads) is classic anti-competitive behavior.
What you are describing is a monopsony, they are illegal, and the employer is considered to have the most power in that relation because the employees are atomized.
You're right - I spoke loosely. I still believe my comments apply if you consider the larger bundle that Google is offering and the terms that come with it, plus the fact that they are leveraging their capital to block competitor app stores from even appearing on the home screen or being installed.
> ...they are leveraging their capital to block competitor app stores from even appearing on the home screen or being installed.
If Google weren't paying manufacturers to not install other app stores, other app stores would be paying manufacturers to install them, which could result in a user experience that Google doesn't control but which users would blame Google for ("Android is slow/buggy!" when in fact it's third party software that is causing the performance issues). Their deals are arguably defensible since they don't block third party app stores entirely, just pre-installed ones.
I certainly see the issues with Google parlaying their dominance in the ad market to also dominate the mobile market, but I have a feeling this will be settled with some consent decrees to put up some guardrails in the ad market. The actual harm to consumers from Google's business model is pretty vague and is passed on through marketing expenses that trickle down into product/service prices. If Google disappeared, ads would still cost money and advertising expenses likely wouldn't be drastically lower.
There is no way to uninstall Chrome from Android, the best one can do is disable it. Smells like MSFT and IE back in the day. Which lead to what will probably be very similar hearings and results.
There's an extremely easy way to uninstall Chrome from Android, which is to never install it in the first place. You do that by using the Android open source project.
There are a bunch of Android forks in the wild[1].
>There are a bunch of Android forks in the wild[1].
That's absolutely correct. And some of those forks are significantly better than the Android OEM offerings by the phone manufacturers.
However, that's orthogonal to GP's point. Only a very small percentage[0] of Android users would even consider flashing custom roms, and even fewer would have the knowledge or confidence to do so.
As such, the impact of custom roms/no chrome is most likely rounding error for Google.
I'd point out that I've used custom roms quite a bit, initially because (as usual) my phone vendor stopped providing updates after a year and after that because custom roms are often better than stock roms.
But I'm not your typical user, as I'm technical and it really pisses me off that vendors use the lack of support to pressure folks to buy new phones.
Any time someone buys a document from PACER and has the RECAP extension https://free.law/recap/ installed in their browser it is uploaded so everyone can view it for free on the Court Listener website.
If, on a whim, google blocks your name or business, what do you do? I found out by accident, and I think they have too much control.
Earlier this year, Google suspended my ad words account. I don't know why but think it was their mistake. The sites and ads were ethical and well within their terms. Still, I’ve sent emails and letters without progress.
It's frustrating not having an avenue to resolve the issue. Even more so because I'm in tech and though I understood these things. More so because I worked at google for a long time.
In the suspension dialog they warn all accounts under my name or the domain names linked to the ad words account will be blocked.
I don't depend on ad words. If I did, I would be completely out of luck. I'm not aware of an alternative ads network or search engine.
>Google’s a monster. If they don’t want you on the net, there’s nothing you can do.
That's hyperbole. I'm on the net and Google can't stop me by any white-hat means. I have a website hosted on non-Google infrastructure on a domain name registered with a non-Google registrar, and I don't rely on advertising to pay the bills.
Have you considered a more ethical revenue stream that doesn't involve advertising and surveillance? There is life after AdWords.
I own a shop that sells industrial parts, many clients of ours praised us for giving critical help, being able to find parts they needed urgently to keep their also critical factory working.
thing is, people find out we exist solely because Google search, when something goes wrong on the factory, they google for the solution, and finds us... whenever Google changes SEO in a bad direction, or ban our ads by mistake (happened more than once) our revenue tanks hard.
To be honest it feels terrible, I have no idea how to fix this situation.
Note: just so you understand how ethical and important the business are, some of the products our clients make and needed our emergency help: cheap bread, medicine, medical equipment, beverages, work vehicles, etc...
One of our most lucrative sales that came from a google search: a truck factory was having countless accidents because a clamping tool kept failing and injuring the workers, they were desperate for another supplier that knew how to fix that issue, instead of just selling replacements we actually sent someone to the factory and figured out a way to do a certain step during production differently, in a safer way.
Google is a double edged sword. Their search engine is good enough most people, in enterprise or otherwise, will rely on it when they need answers. This results in a centralized system where it is super high value for you to work with and ensure you are taking full advantage of.
That does leave you at the whims of said centralized system. There is no centralized system that can avoid this. If such a centralized system did not exist and people searched on a wide landscape of competing smaller search networks, it would be dramatically more difficult for you to ensure you were well positioned to be found on all those smaller networks.
Put that address big front and center on all your literature, equipment, parts, boxes, etc.
Write, "for help, please visit: or call:"
Also, put your searchable text articles on the big social networks. Paste the entire text into your subreddit, facebook, instagram. Put your site URL in the profile.
It's a sad state of things, and will probably get better soon with meta-search or some other kind of new search paradigm.
There are 100s of millions of domain. How do I know which domain to open if I can't find it with some search engine or with advertisement. I don't think this is limited to Google. Every search engine/social network have automated process for blacklisting sites, and there is no human to contact if they blocks your domain. I am yet to see large search engine/scale social network which provides reason for low views to the owners/posters.
Nothing will happen just like with Microsoft. DOJ is only doing this to scare them to ease and liberal their services.
Google achieved dominant market position through legal and fair market competition. If you want to regulate them introduce Internet Search Engine laws do it the same for Internet Social Networks and Internet Social media. They are not breaking Google up that's for sure.
Listen what Larry Page said "data in data out" with Facebook and with Google. If internet service allows you to export your data and move it to the competing service there are no problems.
"You don't want to be holding your users hostage. We want there to be a competitive market, we want other companies to be able to do things so we think it's important that you as users of Google can take your data and take it out if you need to or take it somewhere else." [1]
This isn't about search, it's about how Google abuses the profits they get from search. You're not supposed to leverage a monopoly in one area into others. It's near impossible to compete with such companies.
I can't imagine any sane person would say that Google's search itself is a problem.
It was the same problem with MSFT when they tried to leverage their monopoly in OS into browsers, apps.
It is about search and btw companies take their profits and expand their portfolios if it wasn't like that Apple would still be doing PCs and Iphone wouldn't exist.
There are still other search engines and were many more prior to "google" becoming a verb. They won over those because their search results were faster/better. Yet there is no barrier to entry in websearch. As seen with DDG, some people value privacy higher so they have a niche.
I think the real reason why nobody really tries to compete is not upfront money or techinical issues, but that nobody can think of a way to monetize successfully while attractively differentiating themselves from google search.
The only reason Firefox was able to gain traction over IE in the early 00's was the antitrust case. Without it Chrome and Safari probably wouldn't exist either.
I'm pretty sure you are disregarding the technical improvements that Firefox and Chrome made over IE, and the marketing prowess of Google putting the Chrome installer on their search page. Other browsers were perfectly legitimate to build and install before the antitrust case... Safari is a weird thing to bring up as its primary use case is outside the domain of IE.
The experience is night and day compared to what it was.
Old Microsoft still rears its ugly head, I guess much to the annoyance of everyone in the company who tries - and succeeds - in making money in honest ways, but the difference is still enormous.
Yeah, it got better in some areas (participation in Alliance for Open Media for example is great), but not much better in others where MS still has sickening lock-in (MS still did support Vulkan effort).
Microsoft lost their case and was ordered broken up. They were saved in the DC Circuit who rejected the remedy, and then by the incoming Bush administration who had the DoJ back off the case and settle.
It's very easy to imagine that (as with many things from that era) had a few hundred votes in Florida gone differently Microsoft's windows empire would now be just a memory. It was very close.
It was certainly not the wrist slap you're imagining.
> You don't want to be holding your users hostage.
Except that's exactly want you're doing in case of social media. Even with the ability to move your data, you can't simply move platforms because network effects lock you in. I'm really looking forward to ACCESS Act.
Maybe they did initially but the Google of the last 5+ years has been resting on their laurels in terms of search, showing subpar results to drive you towards their ad results. Then they abuse their special status on chrome and relationships with mobile providers to keep their position. Read the house report page 77 it sheds light on that.
Edit: Ah yes the random downvotes without replies -- except it doesn't really change the above.
Edit2: "By owning Android, the world’s most popular mobile
operating system, Google ensured that Google Search remained dominant even as mobile replaced
desktop as the critical entry point to the Internet. Documents submitted to the Subcommittee show that
at certain key moments, Google conditioned access to the Google Play Store on making Google Search
the default search engine, a requirement that gave Google a significant advantage over competing
search engines.417 Through revenue-sharing agreements amounting to billions of dollars in annual
payments, Google also established default positions on Apple’s Safari browser (on both desktop and
mobile) and Mozilla’s Firefox.418"
It seems clear to me that MS didn’t just accidentally forget to develop IE for 5+ years in the early 2000s. They did so because they needed to avoid the antitrust inspectors. Given that Chrome exists in its current form today because of a lack of competition, I don’t know how you can claim that the antitrust stuff did “nothing”.
My logic makes perfect sense from my economic point of view.
I'm a neoliberal economist and I think that hardcore competition benefits customers and consumers since it drives quality of products and services up and it drives prices of products and services down. State intervention is only required if a company is ravaging the economy.
> My logic makes perfect sense from my economic point of view. I'm a neoliberal economist
Naming your particular ideological bent does not make your logic any more convincing.
My understanding was that self-identifying "neoliberals" believed in data-driven policy. As a data engineer, I'm telling you that the causal assumptions you are making are fundamentally faulty. Perhaps they align better with your ideological view, but that doesn't mean it makes "perfect sense."
I think the point was that they were able to adapt and evolve because Microsoft's ability to force IE on users was constrained by the antitrust action. It's possible that without antitrust Mozilla might have died on the vine.
the argument is that they were able to catch up to / surpass IE because Microsoft stopped working on it for 5 years. (I'm not endorsing or rejecting it myself.)
Antitrust was a disaster for Bell Labs, which gave us inventions like the transistor and Unix. Nothing as noteworthy after the breakup and string of acquisitions. In the same way I’m worried for all the moon shoot projects at these big companies if they are broken up. I suggest reading the Idea Factory and then see how you feel about breaking up big tech.
Bell also forced you to rent their telephones if you wanted phone service. The old Bell was a disaster for consumers and Bell Labs does not excuse their monopolistic practices. As a counterpoint consider Xerox PARC, which brought us the GUI and Ethernet without Xerox fucking over their customers (too much).
Edit: I find it funny that someone posting on "Hacker" News is defending a monopoly that extracts an ad tax from every startup and kills many innovative new companies by acquihire.
You really find it funny that someone on HN is defending the company whose resources and internal innovation culture lead to advances that are foundational to all the technology we work on today? So maybe they charged too much for their phone service, big deal. I’d argue that their contributions to science and engineering outweigh that.
Somehow, it's much rarer to see someone on HN defending the government, whose resources and internal innovation culture lead to advances that are foundational to all the technology that we work on today. So maybe they charged too much taxes, bid deal. I’d argue that their contributions to science and engineering outweigh that.
None of those things are new or interesting. Maps were used in the 70s and you can find a chapter about them being parrapalized in Kthuths original Art of Computer Programming.
What I wonder is why would you sue Google before Amazon? Yes Google is a monopoly, but IMO Amazon is much worse.
I'm not thinking about the cloud business which has plenty competition, but the retail stuff. They undercut the competition until it dies then they're the sole business around.
Case in point: a couple weeks ago I bought a 16 TB hard drive for my personal server. It was something like 420€ on Amazon and about 600€ on my local Newegg equivalent. While I would have bought it locally for a couple dozen euros more, there was no way I would spend almost 200€ more for the same thing.
I know that long term it's bad for me and I hate myself for it but I still went with Amazon.
But Amazon doesn't have anywhere close to a monopoly on retail? There are many more options for retail, in particular buying a HDD, than there are for search. And while it's clear that Amazon does engage in some anti-competitive behavior, the pricing you complain about doesn't really have to do with Amazon; the seller set that price, not Amazon.
Still trying to grasp what is legally considered a monopoly in this country. I've come to consider it as "market leader of a sufficiently large market with a history of anti-competitive practices." Is that essentially accurate?
No. Again, you can have a monopoly and not be breaking any laws. Being a monopoly is not illegal. Being an uncompetitive monopoly is. [1] But it is also illegal to engage in anti competitive behavior even if you don’t have a literal monopoly. [2]
“Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.” [1]
Because Amazon isn't a monopoly, you just don't have any retailers competing with them on price for this rather niche product. That is not necessarily all that surprising.
If anything, I would think you would enjoy that Amazon is forcing other online retailers that service your area to bring their prices down. In the US, there are a variety of retailers who are competitive with Amazon on pricing. On convenience, perhaps not, especially for Prime members, but certainly Amazon is not in a completely different price bracket most of the time.
The stupidity of this argument could be boiled down to the government trying to file an antitrust lawsuit on the Rolling Stones having an ongoing monopoly on rock music because movie directors are still deciding to use their superiorly popular (and in my opinion superiorly written) music over all the modern hacks.
I dont think this is an issue of antitrust, rather an issue of regulation.
You regulate the internal affairs of the oil industry not because you still care about the monopoly Standard Oil once hand on the market, but rather because you care about how they can directly operate in such a way that has been proven to cause more harm than good. (e.g. this is why california is so up tight about getting your car "smogged")
There is a debate that needs to be had regarding how the power of big tech flies in the face of the 1st amendment when it comes to how internal bias can harm the public in the same sense that somebody yelling "fire" in a crowded theater can cause trouble.
But this doesn't fall under antitrust and I think distracting the real issue with this kind of lawsuit is just another way for Washington to feint like they are "actively" trying to do something about the problem while in reality allowing for the problem to persist into the long term future.
But to build a competitive search engine you need massive engineering, network and hardware resources; or put simply you need a lot of money. To fund that very expensive to operate but necessarily free search product you need lots of ad revenue, for which you need advertisers, which only pay for ads on the dominant search engine.
Maybe it is a lot easier for google to stay on top than for others to get to that level? And is the market really open when competitors face a sky-high barrier to entry?
I mean, there have been some very well funded attempts to compete with Google. Bing is the main one I am referring to. Bing has the technical chops to theoretically compete with Google but their product offering as a whole is not as good, and people prefer the Google option.
It is possible to try and compete with Google, and more will try, but it will be very difficult to create a more complete overall package.
This one was obviously coming. The question is what the specific issues outlined in the lawsuit will be, and what possible remedies are.
Prominently allowing search engine choice in Chrome, Android, etc. may be one part of it. Splitting search off from the rest of Google might be another. Regulating search overall might be one but that carries a lot of risks.
Has this reduced search market share for Google in Europe? I suspect not since Google has a high brand loyalty. In fact this complaint may make Google even more profitable by not allowing phone manufacturers to charge the for default placement. I believe it will likely kill the main revenue stream for Mozilla as well.
search engines who squeeze money out of every last drop of people's personal information (including ISPs and arbitrage players that will participate in next year's auctions) are easily able to outbid search engines like us that respect people's privacy
Watershed moment in how we "price" monopolistic power. It's not "market share" or "barriers to entry" or even engaging in "anti-competitive behavior" anymore. But more about how corporations can control the free flow of information. Much harder to make that case for the government I should imagine.
What's surprising to me is how un-monopolistic Google's share of the Cloud + AI market is under its control, considering how many of the techniques were invented there. I'd put it at under 25%.
The real behemoth is NVidia + ARM. GPU shortages are endemic. And the cost of a new entrant to the market just to construct a fab is probably $20B+. Ask Intel XE how much they are spending just to keep up ;)
> Watershed moment in how we "price" monopolistic power. It's not "market share" or "barriers to entry" or even engaging in "anti-competitive behavior" anymore. But more about how corporations can control the free flow of information. Much harder to make that case for the government I should imagine.
I don't know if or how this fits within actual antitrust law, but it makes sense that the issue was never price gouging, the issue was one entity gaining too much power.
In a theoretical dystopian future, a megacorp could own 99% of market share of all industries in the country, but intentionally offer very low prices on every product to avoid "monopoly" concerns. It becomes clear: monopolistic pricing is just a symptom, not the real issue. The real issue is power.
If this suit (and followup suits on other megacorps) fail, the future may call for new laws to define monopolistic power in novel ways, as soon as we the people recognize that getting search and email and social media for free doesn't mean that the megacorps are on our side.
>I don't know if or how this fits within actual antitrust law, but it makes sense that the issue was never price gouging, the issue was one entity gaining too much power.
In the US, there are two major areas of antitrust law and enforcement:
1) Sherman & Clayton Acts (1890, 1914) - outlaws cartels and anticompetitive activities (that is, activities that tend to lead to monopolies, but doesn't outlaw monopolies themselves). Price gouging is not an antitrust issue, but predatory pricing and price fixing are (you might have meant these terms). This area is primarily established via case law and enforced by the courts (and DOJ AD).
2) Merger guidelines/Federal Trade Commission (1968) - wherein key mergers must be reviewed and approved by the FTC. This area is more sensitive to political climate / executive branch as it's executive-appointed FTC regulators who set the guidelines and give approvals. We are now exiting an era of historic hands-off-ness.
Source: had a professor who is famous in antitrust world
Have we ever "busted up a monopoly" using 2? Is the FTC able to retroactively split up a company that was originally formed via large mergers and acquisitions? Split out e.g. Youtube from Google as it was originally an acquisition? That seems unlikely to me but I don't know much about it at all.
If you can't do that, then you're basically just preventing a monopoly from happening in advance, right? Or trying to at least.
At any rate, I'm assuming US vs. Google will be required to reference precedent set in Sherman & Clayton + subsequent court rulings and _not_ be able to use their own mergers against them as they were approved by the FTC in the first place. Is that also correct?
Governments are still (largely) accountable to the people, in contrast to corporations, which are not accountable whatsoever (except through gov regulation). Your comment is just detraction
And yet even deleting these services or choosing not to use them yourself does not keep them from tracking you. We have long known about "shadow profiles" that for example Facebook uses to collect data on individuals that don't (yet, they hope) have Facebook accounts.
As far as governments go, we could all become anarchists be done with them, but if you think for even a few seconds about it you would realize that this enormous vacuum of power would be filled by something. Corporations, rival nations with their government still intact, military warlords, or new political factions seeking to establish new governments. We have thousands of years of history that shows this pattern emerging again and again to the point that it is practically a natural law of power. The only check on power is greater or equal power. Ideally, you want this power to be answerable to the greatest number of people that this power is intended to serve. You may recall a lot of smart people during something called the Enlightenment spending a lot of time and energy on experimenting with different forms of government that met these criteria and still managing to not quite get it right. Many people in the West live in societies multiple iterations down the line from those established in the 18th and 19th century revolutions and there are still glaring issues. What do you suggest instead?
How do I delete my FB shadow profile? Do I need to create an FB account first or what? How do I get onto sites that use ReCaptha (that's potentially anything behind CloudFlare BTW) without letting Google hoover up a bunch of identifying information? How do I delete the data that Google collects with ReCaptha?
That's missing the point. Deleting your FB account doesn't affect FB's power or practices. Does it make you slightly less directly affected by their nonsense? Sure, but it's often a false sense of security. If disinformation on FB results in a different outcome to your election, or prevents parents from thinking a COVID vaccine is safe, or whatever else, that affects your life even if you're not on the platform.
You have a say in your government's leadership. Don't like the President? Vote them out. Don't like Zuck? Nothing you can do about it.
Corporations are accountable to their customers. If people stop paying for their products, they cease to exist.
Corporations are also accountable to governments, as this story illustrates. If US courts and/or legislators decide they want it, Google ceases to exist.
Economists think of this in terms of "Exit vs Voice".
With governments, you have a voice - one vote for deciding who's in charge - but no way to exit, even when your side loses.
With corporations you can exit - stop shopping at Target - but no voice in how Target is run.
Both models have pros and cons, and it's good to understand how they differ, and what situations they're suited for.
Try exiting Google or Amazon. It's borderline impossible.
Basically - how do I exit a company if I'm not the one choosing to use their services?
I cannot use the internet and avoid Google's ads.
I cannot use the internet and avoid Amazon's hosting.
I cannot exit the internet because I literally make my living with it, the competitive disadvantage of doing so is SO great with the way we've structured services and life in general that it doesn't really work.
I was just wondering which is easier, quitting a country or google. Initially emigration would be harder but in the long run I would be just fine.
One wouldn't be allowed to use iphone or android? It would take a lot of manual data entry to migrate my accounts off gmail. Youtube obviously wouldn't be allowed but do I get to use adsense powered websites?
It'd be cool if people spent more time reading basic political philosophy, rather than reading one book on libertarianism and deciding that that is now their philosophy.
Philip Pettit has spent extensive time addressing really interesting questions like these, like what might distinguish "public" domination from "private."
> What's surprising to me is how un-monopolistic Google's share of the Cloud + AI market is under its control, considering how many of the techniques were invented there. I'd put it at under 25%.
I don't find that surprising because Google is a mess. They're a very poorly run organization, making decisions that make no sense at times. Their inefficiency and/or incompetence is probably the only reason why they haven't wreaked havoc on all of the markets they have their hand in. And the various monopolies they do have are, as monopolies usually are, immune to stupid decisions that would kill most other companies.
I think it might be because their corporate culture of being the good guy/"don't be evil" is incompatible with the reality of their situation. Like cognitive dissonance at a corporate level. I wonder how many of their employees in positions of power are still living in that fantasy, and making decisions based on it?
From my conversations, Googlers indeed appear to earnestly argue for their company in ways that directly ignore or fail to recognize the monopoly power they wield. It absolutely feels like line employees are unable to grasp what market power is and how the company wields it.
Executive level people seem too adept at defending the company and avoiding certain phrases or concepts, I believe they all know. Things like suggesting routine conversations include a lawyer and tagging them as such to try to include more conversations in attorney/client privilege shows a desire to hide guilty actions.
I've noticed this in many companies, but at Google it does seem particularly worse. In private conversations with friends, I will at least be cognizant of the bad things that the company I work for is doing - it's just a job.
But many Googlers seem to perfectly fit that Upton Sinclair quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
That said, I don't think you can see how Alphabet's lawyers talk and think that they are somehow living in a bubble or are not having these sorts of high-level strategy discussions.
I have zero experience at the levels of Google when it comes to market dominance. But I do have some for certain niche products in the chemical sector, where I worked for one of two suppliers in exostence. And there I, a simple low level team lead, received dedicated anti-trust training. Including what wording to use in e-mails and what words to avoid. So I would guess, Google is much more prudent and higher management levels, especially since this discussion is nothing new.
Googlers are definitely trained what language to use and not to use. Though I think there is still a cognitive dissonance where they believe they're just avoiding problematic statements as opposed to avoiding admitting blatantly illegal behavior.
Why would a company believe it's doing illegal stuff? That wouldn't make much sense unless it's made out of people that are OK with doing illegal stuff (Mafia?). So of course most employees don't believe that.
And whether or not such training is meant by executives to hide illegal behavior that they are aware of it's also catching many cases where people are just dumb and use wrong words to mean different things, words that have specific meaning in a legal context and that can hurt the person and the company although there was no illegal act being done.
I said this before, but I still believe Larry and Sergei removed themselves completely from the company because they couldn’t care less about the ad or cloud business per se. More so they might even view it as dirty. It’s a means to an end. Amass as much money (ad/cloud) as possible, get the best possible experts in CS/AI (so many phd’s) and gather every last bit of relevant information/data they can get.
It seems kind of obvious. Their goal is to organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible and useful. What better way to achieve this than to somehow create an AGI/ASI. They are certainly the best placed org to do it.
Personal opinion? And this applies almost equally to Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL. But that they all lost the messenger wars. Of the four, Google was the best positioned to take mobile, really the best positioned of any company in the world. And that blunder is probably a bigger blunder than Microsoft and Facebook arriving late to the mobile world. Because Google WAS the mobile operating system, they were the cross platform browser vendor, and they completely, absolutely, 100% failed to deliver a worldwide mobile first + desktop messaging solution that was better than the competition.
Does this not in fact support the claim that they are not quite the monopoly that people make them out to be? That it is in fact not that easy to abuse their power in owning the platform to gain market share in messaging?
I'm not sure what people want these days: people are angry that they have successful products that people use more than competitor's prodcts, and also angry that they have unsuccessful products that are shut after failing to gain traction.
I dont know how the accusation that they are a monopoly in search and advertising related to them being poor at spending that money to become a monopoly elsewhere.
Interesting.. I’ve seen the messaging wars start up again every 5 years. The current iteration is business oriented with slack etc.. but that doesn’t mean it won’t be personal again.
Mobile is all about power management. Apple got that right and really nailed the UX.
I don’t think Google knew that playbook at that point. Maybe Rubin did but even MSFT blew it.
Quite honestly, I think Facebooks play to overlay chat ontop of something more addictive was its big win. Then having a mobile app to talk to the same people.
None of that matters anymore, because Messenger/IG/WA are all mobile apps that most people probably dont chat as much through on a desktop/laptop. But at the time, it gave people a compelling reason to have the messenger product open on screen. Google Talk was similar, being overlayed over Gmail, but google squandered having a Talk bar over the bottom of every google property. Yahoo as well. Yahoo News should have had messenger across the bottom of the screen.
On the mobile front, FB Messenger sort of won out because people started to like iMessage, but there was still a need for a cross platform alternative. I believe Apple could have prevented FB Messenger from being a thing, had they released an Android client along with a browser extension. Apple's best move was releasing iTunes for Windows, something they are scared to repeat, and shouldnt be.
>On the mobile front, FB Messenger sort of won out because people started to like iMessage, but there was still a need for a cross platform alternative. I believe Apple could have prevented FB Messenger from being a thing, had they released an Android client along with a browser extension. Apple's best move was releasing iTunes for Windows, something they are scared to repeat, and shouldnt be.
I wonder what the numbers are on WhatsApp vs FB Messenger, because people of all socioeconomic levels, languages, ages, country, and tech literacy use WhatsApp in my experience, whereas only Americans of a certain age group use FB Messenger.
WhatsApp is the clear winner since it has always been optimized for very old devices. But it's now a FB product anyway. At some point FB will develop a unified messaging product... maybe in response to antitrust.
I mean the gold standard here is WeChat. QQ is probably the next one. Messaging apps are probably more important than FB for example. The problem right now in the US is friction with using messaging apps for payment. Venmo, apple pay and other apps are making inroads here but we are still mostly confined to credit card interfaces.
> What's surprising to me is how un-monopolistic Google's share of the Cloud + AI market is under its control, considering how many of the techniques were invented there. I'd put it at under 25%.
That's why the suit is aimed at search and search advertising
If they ever break up search and advertising GCP would immediately become the biggest cloud because of the cost of migrating the other parts of Google.
>Watershed moment in how we "price" monopolistic power. It's not "market share" or "barriers to entry" or even engaging in "anti-competitive behavior" anymore. But more about how corporations can control the free flow of information
Once the lawsuit drops I doubt this is the argument they are going to make.
This is going to be your run of the mill antitrust lawsuit. It's just making news because tech has avoided them for 30+ years.
Chip is probably one of the few spaces, where oligopoly or duopoly makes sense ( though it is still scary ). The entry barriers are not artificial. It is genuinely hard to start from the ground up just based on the level of progress made thus far.
With Google that argument is harder. A person could whip up G level search engine, mail, and maybe even youtube equivalent, but moving all those people ( but to make them consider your alternative would be impossibly painful to do ).
I will admit that NVidia and ARM scares me, but I am not sure what can be done here.
Listen. I know people have a tendency to get defensive, when they believe someone insults their craft. I am not doing that. I am arguing that what google has really going for it is inertia. It is similar to the world of OS, where Windows still rules supreme. Note that DDG was built fast, but it struggles against G search engine based on familiarity. But ok, DDG has issues other than familiarity. What about Bing? MS had to actually pay people to encourage adoption. That is how strong the force of inertia really is. So yeah. I do dismiss your counter argument, because it does not address the core of mine.
I'm not being defensive and it was not my intention. I did not communicate that clearly.
Not going to dismiss the inertia parameter, but neither DDG nor Bing ever returned what I was looking for and they never were as good as Google Search for my particular searches (yes, even in private navigation). I'm not saying they're not good, I'm saying they never returned good results for me.
I can offer some anecdata. For some reason or another, Bing is better than Google for finding otherwise copyrighted work ( I was able to find Morty streams after new season came out ). My personal pet theory is that since Google was first to the game with majority market share, copyright holders and the like concentrated their effort on it. Needless to say, it is just one person's experience. I will admit that DDG still lacks in that area, but it has improved.
Yeah but Nvidia and ARM are luxury goods. There is no point breaking up a monopoly of that calibre. They specialize in a niche market that affects an even more niche market.
The simple fact that I can say "google it" and colloquially anyone in the US and probably Europe would understand what I mean kind of states how dominant they are in the market.
It's trivial to use duckduckgo or bing. It's people's choice to use google. Also, you can say "kleenex" and "band-aid" and "q tip" and "vaseline" or "coke" and everyone would understand, but they have no dominance, other than some people prefer to use them. I can easily find alternatives to all of them right next to them in almost any store I go to.
It was trivial for users to use non-IE browsers on Windows in the 90s. Ease of using an alternative is not the singular or most important definition of a monopoly.
It wasn't as trivial as today. People may have had to install non IE browsers from from a disc or download from slow and flaky internet connections. Also, I think a central part of that case was also Microsoft wielding its power to force other companies to stay away from non IE browsers.
Today, we're talking about a few taps to change which search website you want to use.
I work at a company where IE is colloquial with internet. If even mention chrome it's like I just told a homeschooled christian kid that atheists exist.
I think the shortage and performance war is happening only at the top and the market is more volatile at the mid-bottom. Besides AMD and Nvidia have been trading places if we look beyond the last few years. Not enough to base a monopoly lawsuit on.
If Nvidia actually gets to buy ARM, that's another matter. But again they can't sue based on a purchase that hasn't even gone through yet.
I think parent comment's concern about Nvidia is with respect to AI. Nobody wants a GTX 1660 for that kind of work, the high end GPU supply is the only part that matters.
> It's not "market share" or "barriers to entry" or even engaging in "anti-competitive behavior" anymore. But more about how corporations can control the free flow of information.
But that's really the same thing. If Google bans or interferes with Fediverse apps because they compete with YouTube, that's anti-competitive behavior. If they don't and those apps gain share with people whose content keeps getting censored on YouTube, they're not very effectively controlling the free flow of information.
Censorship by an incumbent is a market opportunity for a competitor, so a corporation can only really sustain it through anti-competitive actions against the challenger(s).
I'm obviously biased here given I manage an alternative search engine, but I really think this will mean good things for competition in the search space. Every other search engine besides Google currently has < 10% of market combined and having literally founded a search engine because of how bad I found Google's results I can't believe that continued domination is from a quality standpoint. I wholeheartedly believe they do not rank the top results appropriately and that means it actively harms consumers in favor of ads and sponsored results.
When they started adding those "This site works better in Chrome" popups on their web properties I was fairly shocked; didn't MS get in trouble for essentially this & Windows/IE?
Microsoft released an Operating System where the main portal of entry to the internet was also their own product. Microsoft engaged in anti-competitive behavior to dissuade users from having alternative browsers installed -- which is similar to a shopping mall starting its own jewelry store to compete with outside jewelry stores renting space in the mall. There are certain behaviors that are kosher, and there are certain behaviors that destroy competition in unsavory ways. Ultimately, the illegality was not able to be shown, and Microsoft started a [not-so-good] trend of acquiring competition rather than dissuading its existence and adoption. This is in some ways a lot worse than finding them guilty.
This seems to be getting a lot of downvotes, but I think it's correct, strictly speaking. There are a lot of business practices that are legal up until the point where you've acquired sufficient market power. After that, antitrust law applies. Similarly, regulators don't care if two companies with negligible market share want to merge, but they may care a lot if the two dominant players in a market want to merge.
Frankly I’m surprised to see that they’re going after Google first. Amazon and/or Facebook are much more vulnerable to an anti-trust lawsuit, and just based on some of the public information that we already have they have likely engaged in anticompetitive behavior. I fully expect that antitrust action against FB/Amazon will continue regardless of who wins the election.
Because Anti-Trust wise Luxottica is less of an issue as long as they don't abuse their market power when it comes to sunglasses. they could, if they did stuff like forcing retailer into certain deals and conditions. But unles sthey do things seem to be fne.
They absolutely do. They're the debeers of the glasses industry. They make your glasses, they make your lenses, they run your vision plan/program. Every optician ever has to sign with them to get the standard selection, as does any name brand that wants their brand licenced.
But even beyond that, regional monopolies for carriers are somehow okay?
I think it's just rent seeking/retributions for favours not rendered.
How did they acquire Oakley? I don't remember any major controversy at the time, and reading a few news articles and Wikipedia, it just reads like any other corporate merger.
> Luxottica purchased Sunglass Hut in early 2001. It promptly told Oakley it wanted to pay significantly lower wholesale prices or it would reduce its orders and push its own brands instead.
> Within months, Oakley acknowledged to shareholders that the talks hadn't gone well and that Luxottica was slashing its orders.
> The company's stock immediately lost more than a third of its value.
> The fact that this isn't mentioned on Wikipedia might mean that Luxxotica has been very good at scrubbing their online persona.
It's on Wikipedia:
"Luxottica acquired Oakley in November 2007 for US$2.1 billion. Oakley had tried to dispute their prices because of Luxottica's large marketshare, and Luxottica responded by dropping Oakley from their stores, causing their stock price to drop, followed by Luxottica's hostile take over of the company."
Oops, I based that on the Oakley wikipedia article (which only mentions vague antitrust concerns[1]) and the parent's ignorance about Luxxotica's purchase of Oakley (I assumed he looked at the Wikipedia article).
I did read that section, but it's not immediately clear to me that those two things are causally related. Yes, Luxxotica cut Oakley out of their stores and Oakley stock lost a lot of value. But, Luxxotica bought Oakley 6 years later. Where's the link exactly? Did Oakley's stock continue to decline? Was there shareholder demand to sell?
I was in the US Army in the time surrounding the purchase. The amount of Oakley product that was purchased by both the government and individual soldiers should have been enough to keep Oakley afloat all on its own.
the short story is Oakley wasn't interested in being acquired, but since Luxottica owns most of the sunglasses stores you've heard of, was able to turn the screws on Oakley by refusing to stock their product, causing it's share price to tank and enabled Luxottica to buy Oakley cheap.
These are all problems, I'm just happy that there's an appetite for anti-trust action at all at the federal level. Let's also not forget that phone service providers already had a round of anti-trust back in 1982[1], though it seems like legislators have forgotten why that occurred and let many of the baby Bells re-merge in recent years.
Facebook has been so friendly to the republican party that they immediately blocked sharing of accusations against Joe Biden for impropriety while serving as the Vice President of the United States. Oh I forgot though... simply allowing republicans to speak online is nowadays akin to full on support for the GOP platform.
"This Note argues that the current framework in antitrust—specifically its pegging competition to 'consumer welfare,' defined as short-term price effects—is unequipped to capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy"
It's an opinion piece stating that law ought to be changed, not that Amazon is doing anything illegal.
I never really quite understand how people think antitrust law applies to Amazon. I don't have expert-level knowledge of Amazon's various markets, but I don't think they have a monopoly in any of them.
What Amazon is typically accused of, having store brands, is what every retailer does. That's hard to win. Maybe there are other things, but I haven't heard of them.
What Amazon is typically accused of, having store brands, is what every retailer does.
This is simply not true and displays a fundamental misunderstanding of how retail works. A retailer pays the supplier for the stock of inventory that goes on its shelves, Amazon does not. (It is only in very rare cases the supplier only gets paid for actual sales of retail inventory; generally this happens for new products offered on a consignment basis to demonstrate market demand.) Frequently, retailers will share sales data with their suppliers so that the suppliers can make more attractive products, because then they can sell more units to end customers or charge higher markups.
But importantly, with retail, the retailer is the supplier's customer, not you.
In contrast, Amazon does not buy the inventory from the suppliers, instead it charges them money to store their inventory in Amazon's warehouses. On top of that, Amazon uses its access to sales data of external suppliers' products to design competing products which it then offers for sale, utilizing its ownership of the platform to promote its own products above competing products. While both of these latter two activities are problematic, it is the last one that definitely runs afoul of antitrust law (and was what got Microsoft into trouble with the EU).
The problem with Amazon: it is using its position as the controller of the dominant online marketplace to establish a position in the market for individual categories of goods in a manner that interferes with the normal dynamics of the market.
> In contrast, Amazon does not buy the inventory from the suppliers, instead it charges them money to store their inventory in Amazon's warehouses.
That part seems entirely reasonable. Would you rather Amazon pay sellers for unsold stock? That seems like a sure way to get Amazon to reduce the number of 3rd party sellers they stock.
Amazon's model is entirely reasonable until they become a 1st-party seller that competes with 3rd parties. Then it is all too natural for there to be some market abuse. For instance, configuring search ranking to always put the Amazon branded option in the top results is Amazon abusing their market position as a marketplace/distributor to now directly sell goods.
I'd say some markteplace behaviour is potentially problematic. Amazon knows all sales data on every product on every seller, if Amazon is then selling the same items, Private brand or OEM, it can benefit from a lot of data the individual sellers dont have. Plus the possibilitis Amazon has by owning the marketplace.
From personal experience so, once Amazon loses the buy box, the measures to gain it back are more or less what other seller could do as well. No idea how much seller data they use in selecting private brand products so.
Playing the devil's advocate here, Amazon is definitely not the only retailer that can use data.
All the retailers have data on what sells in their store, they also have the data on how sales are influenced by shelf placement.
Amazon to me is a logistics company, along with their storefront and AWS. Their focus on margins and their competence to use data to drive their logistics chains is what's truly scary. They can optimize a lot of inefficiencies that exist in logistics right now just because of the involvement of different disjoint players.
I totally agree with that. And having seen Amazon and various other companies from the inside, I jave to say that Amazon was definitely the most extreme, but all the most compliant one. They are looking for the legal limits, but the they stay within them. If these limits aren't clearly defined, they test them. So I would suspect that from a legal perspective, Amazon might be fine.
Hoe all that translates into anti-trust law, I have no idea.
Branded and store/white-label products have coexisted for a while now. It seems to work for everyone involved. The only players that it doesn't seem to work for are those with a brand but not anything underlying to differentiate themselves. But they're ultimately not driving any economic value so it's not that bad when we lose them.
Amazon has clear and healthy competitors; Walmart, Cosco, Alibaba, Ebay and so on. It would be a struggle to prove that they're a monopoly, let alone that they're using their monopoly illegally.
Whereas Google has something like 95% of mobile search, and actively consumes competitors or, allegedly, wields its monopoly to drive traffic away from them.
I agree with your assessment. My point is just that search volume or user volume is an indicator of the size of the ad market, which is what any antitrust litigation will mostly be about.
They're not concerned with the user experience under these companies, they're concerned about economic impact, which is mostly felt by people doing marketing on their platforms.
Facebook is a social media company the way the Yellow Pages was a book publisher - it may be the most visible product they make, but it's not how they actually make money.
I'm not really sure on what basis you conclude that Amazon and/or Facebook are more vulnerable than Google. Google controls +80% of search; it dominates desktop browsers with 70% market share; it effectively owns the most popular mobile operating system and +65% of mobile users use Google's mobile browser; it also owns YouTube and Gmail, which tie neatly into the rest of its products and lead to even more market domination (they read your emails and sell that information to advertisers, etc.).
Google has done more to atrophy progress on the Internet than any other big tech company. It has used its monopoly position on search and ads to crush competition. Google has been "evil" for a very long time.
Not sure about Facebook, I mean there's reddit, twitter, etc. Each w/ it's own niche...but Amazon, and Apple, imho are the biggest offenders. Amazon would be first on my list.
Apple is dominant as a monopoly in what exactly? Their own store, their own hardware, their own OS, their own services? Every business Apple is in has large alternatives. They make money selling you things, not from ads. Everything Google and Facebook do is designed to ensure they make ad revenue or sell your data in some way for money; they need to control every thing in their supposed business (search, android, social media, etc) to ensure they dominate in collecting ad/data revenue which is the only business they make money on. Apple only wants to sell you more devices or device related services which is their business. You can live quite well without any Apple product at all, many people do. Try living without Google.
Amazon on the other hand is worse, as they want to control all business segments they get into, even totally unrelated to their business of being a store that sells things. Using your dominance in one type of business to force everyone to also support unrelated businesses with no alternatives is one common definition of monopoly; think dominating railroads to force everyone to use your oil (Standard Oil).
Amazon and is not t the same time. eCommerce dominant? Sure, but then you have Alibaba, Shopify and eBay in addition to other marketplaces. Cloud? Surely dominant, but you also have Google and Microsoft. Retail? There Amazon is still small if you include stationary retail. Logistics? As much as everybody is complaining, Amazon Logistics is still more of an in-house alternative to UPS, Fedex, DHL,... So again, no real dominance of the parcel delivery market.
It kind of gets tricky when you combine all that, but I assume that this would be a fun thing to argue infornt of a court I guess.
Google seems to me to be much more straight forward, they clearly dominate search and web ads. The latter with the exception of social, which would be facebooks domain. And with Android, Google is the second largest player in Mobile if you ignore hthe hardware aspect.
Not saying either company should be broken up, that's for couts to decide.
I don't see Alibaba or eBay as competitors to Amazon--the former because it doesn't really operate in the US (almost nobody in the US would know what Alibaba is) and the latter because it just serves a completely different market with different mechanisms and so on. Shopify might be, but it's so tiny in comparison it's hardly unreasonable to suggest it isn't a legitimate competitor.
Wal-Mart, on the other hand, might be nearing that status as far as eCommerce is concerned.
What percent of "digital goods" purchases is that? Because it's definitely not 60%. Defining a category like "app purchases" seems extremely narrow and arbitrary - a way to construct a product category that you can then say Apple is dominant in. What's the difference between the "app" Fornite and Fortnite on the Xbox One and why should they be treated as different product categories for the purposes of measuring market share?
Facebook controls Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
If you add those together, Facebook controls an overwhelming majority of the social media market share -- way more than the relatively tiny niche held by Reddit and Twitter.
Edit: Facebook has 2603 million active users, Instagram has 1083M, Reddit has just 430 million. Twitter is estimated at 326 million. TikTok is the closest thing to a true Facebook competitor with 800M users, and a large share of them are probably concentrated in China -- and the Trump administration already tried to get them banned. (I'm excluding messaging services and YouTube here since they're a different niche).
Reddit has gone significantly more mainstream over the past few years. I remember when a reddit post got 2000 upvotes that was a big deal. Then suddenly it became 4k, 8k, and then I stopped caring it got so large.
Reddit is becoming into a weird beast because I've found theres a mentality of people who assume you actively subscribe to the stuff set by default hence why people get upset when you don't tout the same opinion. I've even had people ask me what I was doing in their subreddit, said I came from /r/all, and they basically said "yeah right." Reddit is probably going to dominate the online forum market since it's so much easier to create a subreddit than it is make your own website with forums.
My only beef with this is reddit silences things they don't like, and not just things that sound reasonable. My rationale is let these people be. They're dumb enough to discuss this garbage on your platform, so why not collect that data and just monitor it? Better than they go elsewhere and now you have no idea.
Also reddit trying to take their anonymous platform and make it so you act as a community member has always been weird to me. That makes sense for public people, not for general users. Especially when bot accounts just harvest upvotes. Twitter is basically what facebook used to be now.
You need to use actual numbers. The total size of the active worldwide userbase on all of Facebook's platforms is at least one order of magnitude larger than reddit. And the revenue they extract from it is larger still. Reddit is merely the world's largest Internet forum. They don't have a moat.
Reddit is a top 20 site, according to Alexa. So they're not doing poorly. And any social website has a moat: the network effects from social connections.
It's at #18, below Wikipedia, live.com, Zoom, Yahoo, the usual suspects (Google/YouTube/Facebook/Amazon) and a bunch of Chinese websites.
All this proves is that the Alexa top N isn't a good metric of determining who is or isn't a monopoly. It's completely ignoring mobile apps (so Instagram/Whatsapp don't make an appearance), and it has no visibility into revenue. Reddit's current total valuation is in the small single digit billions. It doesn't deserve consideration in a conversation about the true gorillas in the field, i.e. the ones that are worth three orders of magnitude more.
I edited my comment to add some proper numbers. Reddit has grown but it's still almost an order of magnitude smaller than Facebook+Instagram. The competition isn't even close.
Pretty poor evidence generally, mostly on the say so of snake oil salesmen trying to convince political campaigns to pay them handsomely to do so with extremely uncertain results.
I note the conspiracy theory that Cambridge Analytica threw the Brexit referendum via Facebook has essentially completely collapsed over the last month or so. CA certainly wanted their clients to think that such a thing was possible. They were fantasists, for money.
Short term, yes, but what guarantee does any political group have that the tech companies won't turn on them at some point? Facebook in particular has an ever graying userbase, which means they're naturally going to continue to lean more and more conservative.
>Facebook in particular has an ever graying userbase
I don't buy it. Facebook has always been an adult network. It started as something that kept kids out. They opened up, but they dont need them. Eventually, when people get older they sign up for it. It't not sexy, its utilitarian. Their biggest risk to their business is more addictive products, not their customer age. People can get addicted at any age.
TiKTok, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube are still more commoner<>celebrity networks, while Facebook is a WhitePages and now a YellowPages too.
From what I see, it's less important with young adults now than it was a few years ago, and it started as something only for young adults that spread upwards through the age groups. It could be reaching a stable point though, true.
The whole "facebook isnt cool anymore" thing has been going on for a decade now. Linkedin isnt cool. The WhitePages arent cool. Plenty of other properties, like twitch, discord, twitter, carve out their niche. Snapchat was going to be the facebook killer, people got bored with snapchat. But facebook keeps growing. Now TikTok is looking like a threat. But no matter what everybodys favorite place to hangout is, they also have a facebook. And companies keep throwing money into facebook ads.
They went after Google, because Google has a monopoly.
Amazon does well from AWS, but hardly has domineering marketshare in the way Google does.
The idea that FB has a monopoly is laughable. Until Trump put the kibosh on them there was a real threat from TikTok. Zuck was getting desperate. Social media is very fickle.
Aapl as well only has a monopoly amongst high paying customers. Not sure you can call that a monopoly.
Why is it that this is only attacking google search? I'm not that well versed in antitrust legal matters but why isn't there attempts to break up the broader Alpbabet into sensible smaller companies that each do their own thing? In my head that seems like it should be simpler.
To me, it would be disappointing if they broke up the firm to the point where R&D has to survive w/o subsidies. US science research funding has not kept up. I'm glad the likes of Google have kept pace with corporate R&D.
Consider for a moment where self-driving-car technology would be w/o Google subsidizing it. Or mapping technology. Or like a dozen other technologies. Were these supposed to pop up w/ VC struggling from round to round? Many of the VC backed companies themselves have a put option of being acquired by Google/FAANG -- so if that exit is gone, it would be even worse.
This implies that the product wouldn't be shuttered if it weren't acquired. Startups aren't extactly know for their longevity. Some were intended to be sold to a FAANG on day one. As for Instagram, products are cool until their investors start expecting them to turn a profit.
Worse for those in the real world where you have payroll obligations, rent, AWS bills, health insurance, and mortgages.
As a customer I feel the same way. However, having been a co-founder and CTO of a startup, let me tell you the real story:
- Most startups are not like snapchat, they are not once-in-a-generation unicorns.
- Most startups have huge burn, especially consumer-entertainment type startups (imagine how much network bandwidth YouTube was burning before Google purchased them.)
- Startups are at the mercy of funding rounds and sometimes the market itsself can get away from you, through no fault of your own startup
- FAANG provide a put option -- "whats the worse that can happen? we get acquired by X" which allows people to take on more risk while trying to swing for the fences.
- It is arguable how long darling consumer apps could survive as independent when consumers often dont want to pay money. It is a catch 22 -- the startup is told the product has to be free but they are also not allowed to seek bigger coffers to actually subsidize it
So in the end -- sure, I agree with you, but who pays? Esp if this is something massive with network effects. Perhaps I can pay for WhatsApp, but can my grandma pay for it with her meager overseas salary? And if she cannot, how is the network sustainable?
I'm not saying I disagree with you, but I dont know what the solution is other than the current one.
Google has monopolies in advertising, mobile, streaming video, mapping, and web browsing. The latter gatekeeps all other Internet based businesses and allows them to pick winners and losers.
YouTube is a monopoly. Arguably it's one of the largest social networks too. But for most video creators, YouTube is the only option to reach an audience. Bear in mind, even big movie and TV studios who operate their own video streaming platforms... where do the trailers all get posted? YouTube, where people can find them.
As someone who's not used Google services since 2016... it's still the one Google property I can't really escape, because nobody is posting their content anywhere else.
Maybe in the most narrow of definitions. IG/FB and Tiktok are huge competitors in the video space, Tiktok being the dominant platform if you focus on short form video.
Google used to be more in tune with small businesses. Now they are so focused on that ad money (mostly from big corporations), that so many small businesses are getting squeezed out. Rather than helping small businesses grow, that keep taking parts of the market small businesses previously made some or all of there revenue from. And of course Google gets tax breaks that are not available to small businesses because they can do accounting tricks. It's just not a level playing field anymore.
If search weren't part of the equation I could see how that might benefit some small businesses but definitely there is a clear Monopoly on search. Don't you agree?
Google definitely needs anti-trust scrutiny. The timing is suspicious though. Could political motivation be at play here?
And why didn't Facebook get sued too? They're just as anti-competitive. Was there an implicit protection agreement reached at one of those private dinners Zuckerberg had at the White House?
And what about Amazon? There's a whole laundry list of anti-competitive practices happening with their online sales and marketplace.
>And why didn't Facebook get sued too?
>And what about Amazon?
I completely agree, and this has been my main headscratcher since we first heard about a possible anti-trust case.
For starters, I still think things like banks, telecom, and probably oil, and defense industry companies probably need to be broken up, and that they should be much higher priorities. To say nothing of the obscure industries we wouldn't normally think of (Luxxotica with glasses) that are monopolized. There's probably others for obscure things I'm not even thinking of.
And even within tech, I wouldn't even rank Google ahead of Amazon, and I'm not 100% that I would rank them ahead of Facebook either.
And, if that's not all, I think Google at least serves as a check on the other Frightful Five, and subtracting Google will serve to further consolidate tech. And if that's not enough, I feel that the tech industry has served as a useful check against other entrenched industries. Their clash with cable, and occasional work to protect an open internet are a healthy counterbalance to voices of other monopolized industries.
Leveraging your monopoly in one market to constrain business in another market is.
Microsoft wasn't prosecuted because Windows was a monopoly, Microsoft was prosecuted because it leveraged that monopoly to block out other competitors (you could not buy a PC without a Windows license, even if you wanted to put another O/S on it).
IBM wasn't investigated because it dominated mainframes, but because it leveraged that domination to control other markets.
AT&T wasn't prosecuted for antitrust because of its monopoly on phone service in the US…the US government had effectively granted AT&T that monopoly in the first place. It was prosecuted and broken up because it leveraged that monopoly to box out competitors across multiple markets that intersected with the telephone system.
Google’s weak spots are not their monopolies in search nor ads. It’s having leveraged those monopolies in the browser and mobile phone markets. If I had to guess, they will offer to separate ad spots on search results into a separate market place, offer to spin off Chrome and Android to foundations funded initially by Google but expected to stand on their own (ala Mozilla/Firefox) after some time period, offer to separate ad placement from ad serving, and generally rearrange the chairs and org chart with a series of consent decrees requiring regular reporting to Congress or the DOJ.
Late reply, but I understand that monopolies aren't per se illegal. I said that the companies listed need to be broken up, not that they fall into the category of "monopoly that's technically not illegal and not leveraging its monopoly to constrain business in another market." There's an awful lot of projection there and I'm not sure how that ended up being the takeaway from what I said.
> Microsoft wasn't prosecuted because Windows was a monopoly, Microsoft was prosecuted because it leveraged that monopoly to block out other competitors (you could not buy a PC without a Windows license, even if you wanted to put another O/S on it).
That's what the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit should have been primarily about. The central issue in the lawsuit was including IE with Windows. Now 20 years later, the idea that they shouldn't include a web browser with their OS just seems silly.
Settlements and consent decrees are not the worst thing in the world. IBM was never prosecuted but the fear induced by the 1970s antitrust investigation likely caused the series of missteps IBM made in the 1980s that allowed the personal computer industry to bloom (if there was no antitrust investigation, IBM would likely have written an operating system for PCs in–house, not call on Gary Kildall or Bill Gates).
Big question mark in my mind is if there’s hard evidence that Google employees required customers of one service (say, Cloud) to utilize another Google service (ads, G Suite/Workplace, etc.) in order to get a discount or some other preference. That's a slam dunk. My suspicion is that there'll be a lot of activities that hew extremely closely to that line without crossing it.
> banks, telecom, and probably oil, and defense industry companies
None of these, with the possible exception of telecom, are monopolies or engaging in specific anti-competitive behavior. I agree that the pattern of consolidation there is bad, but I fail to see
a. how this announcement precludes any other lawsuits against the companies you're mentioning
b. why the fact that other industries also ought to be broken up has any bearing on whether Google has engaged in anti-competitive behavior?
>a. how this announcement precludes any other lawsuits against the companies you're mentioning
I feel like the answer to this is pretty obvious, but to state the obvious, Google exists in the same timeline as the companies in other industries that I listed, and in most cases have arrived later on the timelines and engaged in less egregious offenses than a number of other companies, yet Google were prioritized for anti-trust action ahead of those other companies.
>why the fact that other industries also ought to be broken up has any bearing on whether Google has engaged in anti-competitive behavior?
I think if you read my comment and heard "Google is not engaging in anti-competitive behavior", you heard something I did not write. I think a wide range of companies ought to be challenged for anti-competitive behavior, including Google, and many of them have engaged in much more egregious offenses than Google, yet Google is targeted while others haven't been. Whatever impetus would have lead to prosecuting Google out to have lead to targeting a number of other companies before getting to Google.
The hypothetical possibility that worse companies that ought to have been higher priorities might possibly be prosecuted in the future is not something that I feel is responsive the to point here.
The NBA, MLB, NFL, and MLS have limited exemptions from antitrust law. The MLB has a complete statutory exemption from antitrust law. (See https://sportslaw.uslegal.com/antitrust-and-labor-law-issues...) However, their monopoly status doesn't prevent competing leagues from forming; indeed the modern NBA and NFL are the results of the merger of smaller leagues. The MLS itself is the third iteration of professional soccer in the US, the first two having failed quite miserably, and multiple professional football leagues have launched and failed in just the past decade despite healthy ticket sales due to mismanaged spending.
UFC is not a monopoly but does engage in anticompetitive behavior, including for example restricting its fighters from competing for other promotions, controlling the sponsorships they can receive, and even the sponsors they may promote in the ring. Their practices affect their fighters, but have no discernable effect on their audience. You can easily choose to watch one of the other promotions, like Bellator.
WWE is the oldest and most successful wrestling promotion, but it has a dozen or so major competitors, and there are hundreds of wrestling promotions at the local and regional levels.
Gymnastics and the other Olympic sports don't have monopolies, why do you think they do? Track athletes compete in multiple professional events over the course of the year (most of which aren't televised in the US due to lack of audience but many of which are broadcast globally), and most olympic sports, gymnastics included, are not commercial draws outside of national championships and olympic qualifiers.
> Gymnastics and the other Olympic sports don't have monopolies, why do you think they do? Track athletes compete in multiple professional events over the course of the year (most of which aren't televised in the US due to lack of audience but many of which are broadcast globally), and most olympic sports, gymnastics included, are not commercial draws outside of national championships and olympic qualifiers.
It looks like cheerleading is a monopoly in the US based on related articles due to the governing bodies being controlled by the same commercial entity and that entity blocking the formation of competing events.
However, USA Gymnastics is not a monopoly, and there are other entities that organize gymnastics competitions (and most gymnastics competitions are not USA Gymnastics competitions). USA Gymnastics is simply the organization that is tasked with overseeing the national championship and Olympic qualifiers.
There is absolutely no monopoly in running. There are literally thousands of different races around the world, and nearly as many race organizers. Each of the big major marathons is organized by a different company. Each of the major track events is put on by a different company. There are dozens of running shoe and apparel brands. There are hundreds of running clubs like Nike's Oregon Project, many of which were just as, or even more successful, as NOP (see, e.g. North Arizona Elite).
An announcement on one does not mean announcements and cases aren't coming against the others.
In the book, The Age Surveillance Capitalism, the case is made the Google is actually worse than FB but lesser known for many of the things people complain about.
Google may be the easier monopoly case to go after given the Doubleclick merger, the way Chrome is used, etc.
Announcing Google today does not preclude others from being announced later. Cases take time.
Also, based on the story I saw the Google one is pretty straight forward. The deals they have made to force their search onto things like the iPhone (with Apple) and Android (with the carriers/manufacturers) is the issue.
Considering we haven’t had effective anti-trust for some time... I agree I think focusing on one and seeing where the modern limits are is a better move than a shotgun to anyone you feel may have skirted a fair system.
"The rumor is that a suit against Facebook will soon follow" [1] said Matt Stoller in his latest BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly and finance. It takes a lot of resources to file those suits, so don't expect them to be announced at exactly the same time.
PS: Since it contains quite a bit of interesting and relevant information about the cases against GAFA, I submitted this particular newsletter at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24837931
Could there be political motivations in politics? I'd expect so.
The issue with doing anything during an election is that people on the other side accuse the administration of suspicious timing. The issue with doing nothing during an election is that everyone accuses you of being a lame duck. This is, more or less, business as usual for the administration; they've been on Big Tech's ass for at least a year now, and finally something is coming of it.
Every big tech company needs looked at, and potentially split up. And, maybe, they'll all get their turn. But resources are limited; when the US went to war with Germany, we didn't airdrop troops in Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Munich, and Frankfurt on the same day. Actually, we didn't even start with Germany. Starting with Google allows some legal precedent to be set on some of the very weird, novel antitrust issues the case is going to face, which will make future cases easier. I tend to think Amazon should have been the first, but Google is certainly up there, and probably (IMO) a more potentially harmful monopoly than Apple, Microsoft, or Facebook.
I'll agree that Amazon is Scarier. But I also think that Google's behavior is a lot easier to scrutinize/prove in court thanks to their actions in/around Android and Search
FTC/DOJ/FCC have different, and sometimes complementary, powers. DOJ is taking lead on Google right now, but don't forget FTC just fined Facebook $5B. DOJ may be at the forefront of this particular action because of Trump's grievances, but there's no reason to think Biden wouldn't go even harder, especially if we get Pai out of the FTC (praise be the day). GDPR has been a total wash, it will be funny to see the Americans actually do a better job with a far more constricted legal toolkit.
I would be incredibly surprised, Harris was advised by Jonathan Mayer on privacy issues, the Democratic House just released a scathing report on tech monopolies, and Biden knows he still needs support from the Sanders/Warren crowd who are salivating at the prospect of breaking up Big Tech. Facebook's shameless support of the Trump admin may likewise be viewed as one of many of Zuck's poorly thought out moves. Unlike Obama, who credited Facebook/Google with his 2008 victory, and opened a revolving door between Google/White House, the appearance of that would be absolutely toxic in the present climate.
My largest issue with the Obama administration was their incredibly corrupt and cozy relationship with Google. It's one of the reasons I was really hoping nearly anyone else would win the primary.
So yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if Biden drops it, but only because he was likely part of the problem to begin with. Google wouldn't be the problem it is today if the Obama/Biden administration was doing their job.
(Still voting for him, mind you. It's not like we have better options.)
But basically, a massive number of Google employees were installed in high-level positions of the Obama administration, and a lot of Obama administration folks got great jobs at Google. Obama installed a professor who wrote studies about how Google shouldn't face antitrust scrutiny (who was paid by Google to do so) as the FTC Commissioner (Joshua Wright, who is now a lawyer at Google's preferred law firm... he went from Google shill to government official and now back to Google work), and an FTC case against Google where staffers recommended litigation inexplicably got shoved under the rug.
Then you'd see things like a former Googler in Obama's administration announce an initiative to budget billions of taxpayer dollars to buy computers for schoolchildren... unshockingly, these were intended to be Chromebooks, which get kids started early as Google account holders. (I believe Congress ended up rejecting this particular budgetary line item, or reducing it significantly.)
This sort of topic gets a lot of people going on both sides of the matter, and people get very loyal to their camps. Accuracy often has nothing to do with how people vote on these things. We've got an intersection of partisan US politics and Google here, it's voting catnip.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24836520&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24836520&p=3
For those wanting the real thing, the Justice Dept complaint is here (thanks to r721 below):
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/7273457/10-20-20-...