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Ask HN: Is Google a Monopoly or just really good at building useful products?

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Re: Ask HN: Is Google a Monopoly or just really good at building useful products?

#41

Post by dredmorbius »

nknealk wrote: post #38

This may be downvoted to oblivion, but here goes: I think part of the problem with our current framing of what is "anti-competitive" or "monopolistic" focuses on consumers. A classical monopolist artificially limits supply and drives up prices to maximize profits (see, for example, the business practices of Standard Oil). That's completely orthogonal to Google's business model for two reasons: 1) For consumers, most…

Very much the case, and you can thank/blame Robert Bork for this.

Earlier comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18436387#18436772

I'm liking Lina Kahn's take:

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...

Re: Ask HN: Is Google a Monopoly or just really good at building useful products?

#42

Post by shereadsthenews »

thayne wrote: post #40
wai1234 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You write about Gmail as if no one had email before that. GMail doesn't have a single meaningful feature that other clients didn't have before. And those clients didn't completely redo the UI every 3 months whether you want it or not.

When it first came out, gmail was significantly better than the competition, for the following reasons: 1. _much_ better spam filtering 2. _much_ better searching 3. a _lot_ of storage (no need to delete old emails)

When Gmail came out it was also a gigantic money incinerator into which Google shoveled search ads revenue. It is easy to show that Google used one product line to break into another line of business. It would be harder to convince me that this harmed consumers.

Re: Ask HN: Is Google a Monopoly or just really good at building useful products?

#44

Post by nknealk »

dredmorbius wrote: post #41
nknealk wrote: post #38

This may be downvoted to oblivion, but here goes: I think part of the problem with our current framing of what is "anti-competitive" or "monopolistic" focuses on consumers. A classical monopolist artificially limits supply and drives up prices to maximize profits (see, for example, the business practices of Standard Oil). That's completely orthogonal to Google's business model for two reasons: 1) For consumers, most…

Very much the case, and you can thank/blame Robert Bork for this. Earlier comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18436387#18436772 I'm liking Lina Kahn's take: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...

Wow, your comment is far better cited than mine. Also, Bork wasn't necessarily wrong for the era he lived in.

I think we don't yet have a good vocabulary to describe the kind of bad behavior we see in large tech firms. People use "monopoly" because it's the first word that comes to mind when a large firm is acting badly, but Google's/Facebook's/etc behavior does not fit our current definition.

Re: Ask HN: Is Google a Monopoly or just really good at building useful products?

#45

Post by kodz4 »

nknealk wrote: post #38

This may be downvoted to oblivion, but here goes: I think part of the problem with our current framing of what is "anti-competitive" or "monopolistic" focuses on consumers. A classical monopolist artificially limits supply and drives up prices to maximize profits (see, for example, the business practices of Standard Oil). That's completely orthogonal to Google's business model for two reasons: 1) For consumers, most…

How can something Google offers for free be bad for consumers has already been answered by the EU - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google

The rest of the world is more easily bought and paid for by Google lobbying because every Politician needs to use Google Ads+YouTube Ads+Android Apps to get elected.

EDIT: Here's one more useful link - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google

Re: Ask HN: Is Google a Monopoly or just really good at building useful products?

#46

Post by repolfx »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #43

Google Ads is very much a self-supporting monopoly. Turns out online ads are a winner-take-all market, as Overture/Yahoo discovered in their demise.

Google Ads isn't a monopoly. Most obviously Facebook runs its own ad networks, but also, I see tons of ads when I browse around that come from other ad networks. There are hundreds of the things.

Re: Ask HN: Is Google a Monopoly or just really good at building useful products?

#47

Post by hedora »

dazc wrote: post #39
wai1234 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You write about Gmail as if no one had email before that. GMail doesn't have a single meaningful feature that other clients didn't have before. And those clients didn't completely redo the UI every 3 months whether you want it or not.

Yet Gmail gained momentum really fast. I wonder why that was, the 'others' complete failure to filter spam perhaps?

I think it was the extremely high storage quotas (for the time) and the fact that the UI was ajax’y and didn’t reload the whole page/frame when you clicked.

Spam filtering on gmail has always been OK, but it was fine (for me) on other products for many years before gmail came out. I doubt it was much of a differentiator, but who knows? Maybe the #1 provider before gmail really sucked at it or something.

Re: Ask HN: Is Google a Monopoly or just really good at building useful products?

#48

Post by joeshmoe23 »

There is no monopoly when your stuff is free, has virtually zero replacement cost and no lock-in.

The "google is a monopoly" trope was introduced and cultivated by Steve Ballmer's Microsoft and it's being constantly adopted and revised by anyone with an axe to grind.

Re: Ask HN: Is Google a Monopoly or just really good at building useful products?

#50

Post by joeshmoe23 »

ardy42 wrote: post #24

> I know that Google is super powerful and has great products but what exactly are (if any) examples of Google showing anti-competitive behaviour? At least at one point, they nagged you incessantly to install Chrome when you used Google Search. I would attribute Chrome's current dominance [1] to that fact, and that fact alone. That's uncannily like the anti-competitive behavior Microsoft was judged to have used to pu…

Promoting stuff on one's own website isn't in any way shape or form illegal.
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