Between Android, App Store, Chrome and Search Google has a very big stronghold over how people access and consume the internet.
Google has an insane competitive advantage over most of the internet into knowing exactly what are people looking for and being the first to provide it.
This isn't any different to what Amazon does on their shop. They know what sells and for how better than any of their sellers, and they will know what basic product to launch and kill the competition.
But honestly, I think that if I was Google or Amazon...I would do the same? They aren't in the business of charity or powering internet users but making money for shareholders.
As a user I despise that, but as an entrepreneur monetizing information and channeling it to your own services is such a no brainer.
This is a very difficult topic to discuss, one that's born from people defaulting to Google Search and the lack of any realistic competition.
It doesn't matter how worse google search gets, it's still going to be the default search for ages due to it being default already on pretty much every device bar Windows computers when using Edge.
At some point this is an issue for legislators I fear, because I just don't see how anyone can fight this.
Dismember into what? Except for a lot of ranting and stamping of feet on HN, I don't see a lot of HNers jumping in and providing free alternative services for Google services?
There is a lot of DEMAND for free services for sure, but doesn't seem a lot of people are putting their money where their mouth is? Kagi hasn't grown all that much, neither have services like Nebula?
The market for these loss-leading services is skewed because Google subsidizes their free offerings so that they improve their ads branch. Because it is hard to compete with a free (actually money-losing) service, it is very hard for competitors to spring up. And thus the whole thing is anti-competitive.
If they were separate companies and had to compete on their own merit, not subsidized by the ads division, they'd have to ask for money too. Then, competitors actually have a chance to offer something better.
And through that, the reach of the ads business is limited unless they start to work with the competing services. This opens up the market for other ad markets, too.
And then we are a step closer to the free market that is efficient and good for consumers.
The argument "but if you spin off this major part of the company, it wouldn't be profitable enough to survive on its own" is the whole damn point. Using your monopoly in one area to prop up an otherwise-unprofitable arm controlling another area is exactly the kind of behavior antitrust law is designed to combat.
Too many people (especially around here) seem to forget that.
> And then we are a step closer to the free market that is efficient and good for consumers.
With Apple, Amazon and Microsoft doing the same in same markets... are we? Because it doesn't seem like "whap the random company that didn't pay enough for marketing" strategy isn't really working into establishing proper competition that benefits society.
Maybe... a different approach needs to be taken? How about starting to talk about legislation which would force large companies to allow competition into their vertical integrations - ALL of them, not just the single pet megacorp we hate this week. Level playing field and all that.
How would the market change in the wake of such a move? I can imagine that other companies will try to rebuild what Google was in other form. And these companies might not be US entities.
> Android -- a cost center. No viable business model. Maybe Samsung would fork AOSP for their phones.
The Android company could simply get paid licensing fees for its OS and extras like Microsoft? Or maybe AOSP would instead continue as a intercompany project somewhat similar to Linux (the kernel).
> Cloud -- has to run at a loss in the immediate future to capture marketshare
That's dumping and I don't think it should be allowed so routinely anyway.
> Email -- nobody pays for email. Get ready for a much smaller mailbox and ads targeted by email contents. Get "sponsored" emails in your feed.
So, if people care they can pay for the paid service.
> YouTube -- was a separate company before
Was it profitable through? I see Alphabet published revenue numbers but I didn't find profit numbers. So maybe it would be hit by costcutting like limiting video length in some cases.
> Maps -- will become a free tourist map, may have to pay to unlock any zone except your home.
OpenStreetMaps exists, so an independent Google Maps company would have to compete with that.
> Search -- if it can sell ads independently, could be a viable business.
It's the starting and most profitable part that paid for all the rest, no? How it could not be viable.
> Advertising -- all the other units need advertising to survive. This could be a clearinghouse
But is the profit in the clearinghouse part or the selling ad space part? I'm guessing both.
I don't have the answers here any more than anyone; but I notice that most approaches tend to cut along the existing verticals (e.g. the product areas).
The break-up of AT&T provides another perhaps more viable arena for thought...
There the breakup resulted in multiple, independent competing companies cleaved from AT&T. Three organically produced combinations now remain of the original 7:
1. Verizon is what was the north eastern region (Bell Atlantic + NYNEX).
2. The now reunited trademark AT&T started as the western ones (Pacific Telesis and Ameritech) then added the southwest (Southwestern Bell/SBC) in 2005 and the southern states' one (BellSouth) in 2006.
3. The midwestern region was Qwest which is still around in some form as CenturyLink/Lumen.
From one massive company which did everything you got a bunch of companies that actually competed with each other in the main and market dominant sector. The market continued to evolve and real market forces forced combinations among them; IMO this is a good and natural thing.
Remember MCI and Sprint? Did you know they were already around pre-breakup as starving competitors of the monopoly? Suddenly they became national brands and introduced their own leaderships' priorities into the consumer marketplace (MCI in particular was early in seeing the importance of several early Internet packet-based technologies and in consumer email).
Prior to the breakup did you know that the domestic television networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, there wasn't Fox yet) had long-term contracts to send their signals over AT&T's terrestrial network? Almost immediately after the breakup (this is not a causal thing, but there is a lot of correlation) they all switched almost immediately thereafter to sattelite distribution (which had been available for nearly a decade).
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The point I'm making is that you don't have to just draw inside the preexisting lines. The goal isn't the punish Alphabet, but to maximize competition in the market to the benefit of the nation (externalities positive and negative) and its consumers (first-order real good). Promoting competition may result in 2 search companies that can't reunite or something equally unthinkable...
Thoughtcrime on HN would be assuming Google actually does good and provides value. Wanting FAANG companies to be broken up, by violence if necessary, is such a common opinion here it's banal.
But only the FAANG that have failed to properly market this month - Meta is currently in favor (or at least out of weekly rant cycle), Apple and Microsoft have managed to spend enough on marketing lately to be spared the bile floodgates of HN with Google being its usual incompetent self.
But the pendulum will shift again.
(The core of my annoyance here isn't ranting over FAANGs, but the fact that any kind of suggestion of systemic fixes immediately brings out libertarians accusing us of trying to undermine poor economy.)
Google provides value but its monopoly provides less value than what would have been created by a multiple of companies freely competing in an open market.
I do think that Google is indeed too big to the point it's a threat for the future of the internet and fair competition indeed.
But I also don't like the idea of legislators having to sort it out, they may do more damage than good for all the parties, from companies to users to Google.
Google is a US company but the "welfare loss" its monopoly create is on the whole (western) world and not just the US economy. That is why it won't be regulated out of existance.
It is better for (US) national security that Google keeps its (global) monopoly. (Non-US) competitors to Google would hamper the US's ability to surveil and gather data globally.
As you said, it's only natural for a company to abuse a monopoly in one area to boost them in other areas, that's why these companies have to broken up to keep competition healthy in the other areas.
There should probably be some legislative pressure to separate service providers and advertisers. Most of the problems of the modern web can be traced back to how well-integrated the advertising is into big corporations' widely used services.
Is the idea for commercial search engine a bad idea? Where only e-commerce websites are tracked instead of the whole web? I don't understand this idea of intent tracking, guessing and suggestions. I explicitly want good results for my query, I have already made my mind to buy something. For this reason, I despise that Facebook guesses my intent when I visit an e-commerce website through Google search and starts suggesting related websites on its apps in async manner. All I want is, give me an interface to search for relevant query. I don't care if I search on Google or Facebook.
Your comment is based on the premises that Meta/Google... are there to help you shop/find the best result once you've made your mind. For that purpose, an optimised search engine is indeed very useful.
But I don't think that's why intent profiling exists. What if, instead of helping you find quickly what you are looking for, they forced you through a less perfect system that, while leading you to your result, suggests you other, somewhat similar articles... Maybe you'll buy more? That incentivises ads and thus increases profits for the AdTech.
I was talking about Facebook's not so subtle nudge when they have already guessed your intent. It's already known that they do that. Then they show ads on their online properties few minutes later, people have already sensed this deception and their are reels made on this behaviour. How about facebook lets me search through the catalogue of websites who have opted to advertise with them. Maybe once it is well known that facebook also allows for normal search within their apps, other e-commerce website would be willing to pay a nominal fee to be included in search results.
> I think that if I was Google or Amazon...I would do the same?
Of course. There isn't anything particularly evil in Google or Amazon. They are a result of the capitalistic environment. If not them, some other mega corp would have emerged to do essentially the same. Bigger companies get bigger. They are just optimization machines.
That's why we need governments to intervene, break up monopolies, stop mergers, etc. I don't care if it's "fair" for companies. Most people are worse off because of huge multinationals and monopolies.
They are the result of a capitalistic environment that systematically dismantled all rules and regulations to prevent monopoly and oligopolies from happening in the first place
>But honestly, I think that if I was Google or Amazon...I would do the same?
Youre always a person, and every single decision is always signed by a person. Yes, markets should be regulated and this should not be up to Google, and yes there are incentives within companies to make people behave in certain ways, but it's always been a strange line of argument to me that this absolves individuals.
If I worked at Youtube right now and someone told me to implement that stupid ad blocker I'd tell them to shove it. People who are fortunate enough to be in demand at Google or Amazon have a non-negligible amount of agency, and alternatives.
Search engines are already doing it to themselves by screwing with the ordering of results, paid placement in results, "did you mean" anti-patterns, obscuring or ignoring their prior powerful tools to filter results, etc. I don't really trust what a search engine returns to me. I have to sanity check every result.
With generative text and image technology, the reliability of finding legitimately human and organic information is basically nil.
Intellectuals will begin forming smaller, more exclusive, and better-curated groups and content stores. We're already seeing a slow resurgence of micro communities, for example pubnixes/tildes, directories like ye olden DMOZ, blogrolls and protocol rings, e.g. Bongusta on Gopherspace.
None of them solve the search problem per se, but it's an answer to the eroding quality of web search results.
In my impression, a lot of people here hold a surprisingly contradictory set of beliefs. They're huge fans of the current economic system, where the main actors are publicly owned companies, and where we rely on profits growing YOY to generate wealth for everyone (who owns the stocks).
And, on the other hand, they're critical of Google which is operating precisely as such a company, and doing exactly what it needs for its profits to grow YOY.
Google is being lead by an MBA, has a very extensive management class, and employs a lot of people. The only way to be a lead and earn good money is to have people under you. The structure of Google is very analogous to other companies in the same sector.
Frequently there's no other behavior that would make sense for Google to exhibit. The job of all the execs in the company is revenue growth.
Could you enlighten me here? Maybe I can update my model with your feedback? Do you believe that you can somehow have your cake (infinite growth) and eat it too (ethical companies which care about the community when the profit margins get slim)?
Also the elephant in the headline - facilitating mass air travel is of course facilitating the climate catastrophe. Watching megaorps debate about the market rules of how to optimize this harmful activity is its own special kind of grotesque.
I personally do not own Google shares directly, it’s mostly ETFs. I do not care much about Google and would rather prefer the portfolio to be diverse enough, meaning that there’s enough competition on the market and enough other companies worth investing. We do not need monopolies to prosper, because they reduce the size of the pie. Any fan of free market would agree with me, because when competition does not exist, free market does not exist.
Maybe those companies should have been smaller and focus on returning money to shareholders rather than on investment in expansion to other markets/products. It all depends on their size and influence.
You're right that the company and execs are behaving exactly as they should given the regulatory environment that existed since the 1980s. Namely, do not stand in the way of consolidation and only consider consumer prices for anti-Trust evaluations.
Unfortunately that's a fundamentally anti-capitalist way to go about things because the end result is what Google, and frankly all other dominant, publicly traded corporations are doing right now: profit by increasing rent-seeking and strangling competition rather than out-innovate (e.g 1, for perspective Google's cost of remaining the default search engine is about on par for their average R&D spend; in a healthy, thriving, innovative environment that wouldn't be the case).
The problem isn't Google per se, they're acting as expected. It's the regulatory capture of the judiciary and FTC from ignoring and/or dismantling the laws that would have prevented this environment from occurring in the first place. So we don't have a vibrant, diverse ecosystem anywhere, whether search, washing machines, publishing, defense contractors, etc.
Luckily the tide is turning with the Google trial on right now, and Amazon kicking off soon.
What does that have to do with enforcing already-existing anti-trust regulation? Anti-trust regulation, mind you, that helped the US mobilize for WW2 and led directly to a golden age for American innovation, standard of living and defeated the Soviets?
Do you think the concentration of power should be avoided in general, and let’s say a single person shouldn’t be able to decide on a whim that thousands of people have to do something pointless or harmful, like building a mega yacht?
I know it's not something that's going to happen any time in the foreseeable future, but I think it would be fantastic for our society and economy if the top marginal tax rate was 100%, with that tax bracket starting at (just as an off-the cuff estimate) something like $50 million/year, with regular and capital gains income counted together and taxed at the same rate.
Many people witter about how that means there's "no incentive to do better", but a) if you as a person making $50,000, $500,000, or even $5,000,000 per year think that this applies to you or is ever likely to, you are probably wrong, because even the person making $5M/yr is closer to the one making $50K/yr than they are to the one making $50M/yr, and b) if the only incentive you personally respond to is monetary, you are in the minority, because it's plain from empirical evidence and plenty of solid scientific research that the norm for human beings is to care about doing a good job for its own sake—so long as they're not being burned out, beaten down, and kept poor, and especially if they're allowed to do work that they like doing and are given some degree of ownership in it (not legally/financially, but conceptually—autonomy, a say in the process, etc).
More realistically, I'd love to return to something like the tax structure in what many look back on as a golden age: the post-WWII years, when the top marginal tax rate was above 90%, and yet somehow our industry chugged along at a fantastic pace, and people didn't just stop caring because there was "nothing to work for".
As a consumer, I don't care about where or who I get my results from.
If I search for "NYC to LAX Monday", I don't care if I have to click through to a shady website with lots of SEO experts who will probably miss the "Monday" part of my query anyway, I'd rather get a nice list of flights right in my search results. I don't care if those are provided by Google, a third-party website that Google scrapes, somebody Google signs a deal with or somebody who implements a Google-provided API for this and is good at SEO, as a consumer, I care about flying, not clicking links. Forcing Google to hide the flights UI and link me to Expedia is a worse experience for me. Same applies to News, Shopping, facts, answers etc.
If the Google results ever get really bad or way too expensive, most people will switch search engines (or switch search engines for a single use-case), like searching for products on Amazon instead of Google or searching for flights directly on Expedia. So far, Google results are getting worse but results from other (free) search engines aren't that much better, so other people stay with Google and there is that.
Bit rich considering Expedia's subsidiary Trivago was fined by the ACCC in Australia for pushing hotel listings by the highest paying advertisers to the top of their search results.
That is different though, they weren’t pushing their own hotels. Google actually built a competing product and integrated it with all its services including search and maps.
This is Expedia we’re talking about, the face of an industry that has marketed/SEOed/strongarmed their way into taking a cut on the majority of reservations. They’re literally the Google to the industry they feed on. I bet a lot of business owners hate them more than they hate Google, even though Expedia considers themself “vibrant innovative enterprises that deliver value for consumers”.
One of the reasons ARM could never have started in the US (and a reason to argue against the nVidia takeover) is american b2b culture leads to inevitably competing with your own customers, and I can almost sense the replies in advance defending such activity as better for the consumer even though in the long run it clearly is not.
Mr Diller here I am sure is far from angelic but he is doing heroic if futile work. Google simply cannot stop their antics unless forced to do so.
Apple as well. If you are trying to provide for example a piece of configuration software that runs on a mobile device in a heavily Apple dominant market you are at the whim of Apple App store reviewers.
> I don't think it's good for Google, I don't think it's good for the consumer, I don't think it's good for the country, and it's most certainly not good for us.
"it's good for the country"? How much do you need to have taken off until you say (and believe) such things?
It is kind of crazy. Websites allow themselves to be indexed, to become content to display ads above. What if Google just showed ads? Then it would be like the traditional yellow pages. Of course, it is not in Google's interest, but I think it is in the interest of websites everywhere. There should be some licensing schemes which state under what terms your website can be indexed. Think creative commons, but with categories such as "can be indexed for ad-driven search pages", "can be indexed for for-pay search pages" and so on. I think something like this is needed to wrestle control from Google.
The main problem is bad people, people who put shareholder value above all else.
However, another big problem is good people leaving when bad things happen.
At some point only bad people remain at a company and this will be the fait of Google at some point.
Google has an insane competitive advantage over most of the internet into knowing exactly what are people looking for and being the first to provide it.
This isn't any different to what Amazon does on their shop. They know what sells and for how better than any of their sellers, and they will know what basic product to launch and kill the competition.
But honestly, I think that if I was Google or Amazon...I would do the same? They aren't in the business of charity or powering internet users but making money for shareholders.
As a user I despise that, but as an entrepreneur monetizing information and channeling it to your own services is such a no brainer.
This is a very difficult topic to discuss, one that's born from people defaulting to Google Search and the lack of any realistic competition.
It doesn't matter how worse google search gets, it's still going to be the default search for ages due to it being default already on pretty much every device bar Windows computers when using Edge.
At some point this is an issue for legislators I fear, because I just don't see how anyone can fight this.