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“Google Is as Close to a Natural Monopoly as the Bell System Was in 1956″

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Re: “Google Is as Close to a Natural Monopoly as the Bell System Was in 1956″

#201

Post by scarface74 »

easilyBored wrote: post #92
scarface74 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats the viable alternative to Google Search? Sure you can use Bing as a customer, but if you're a website operator you HAVE to stay on Google's good side. (not always easy to do) Or you can not base your business on the fickleness of Google's search algorithms. Ben Thompson (stratechery.com) posts one article per week publically and charged $100 a year for his newsletter. The only time he gave numbers, he has over…

"Or you can not base your business on the fickleness of Google's search algorithms." Or you can not base your business on the fickleness of your phone company's /ISP algorithms. Google is a much as 90% of referrals for many websites. Answer this: Are you sure that Google updates their search algorithm independent of revenue impact? I remember reading from FTC's investigation that Google kept changing their "independe…

Or you can not base your business on the fickleness of your phone company's /ISP algorithms. Google is a much as 90% of referrals for many websites

Business 101 is that you're always in trouble if you depend on one supplier for the majority of your business. The second example I have is John Gruber (daringfireball.com). He never sold ads based on the number of active visitors.

He sells one RSS sponsorship at the beginning of the week and a thank you post at the end of the week. His revenue wasn't affected when he lost half his readership.

Re: “Google Is as Close to a Natural Monopoly as the Bell System Was in 1956″

#202

Post by notatoad »

kuschku wrote: post #194
notatoad wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has enough failed projects in their portfolio to prove this argument wrong. If they could make a product successful just by abusing their network effect, they'd be able to get Google+ or Hangouts off the ground. Also, Google Spaces, Android TV, Android Auto, Duo, Allo... Google Photos has crushed all the other startups in the space because it's so good , not because it's been forced on everybody by a monopoly.…

Hangouts, Duo, Allo, Auto are all things I already had accounted for. Because they have the issue of existing competitors with network effect. > Google Photos has crushed all the other startups in the space because it's so good And why is it so good? Because Google uses an advantage they gained from (partially illegally) datamining user data. Google Duo is better than Skype, Google Allo is better than Telegram. They…

>Google Duo is better than Skype, Google Allo is better than Telegram.

Sure, if you want to pick the weakest competitor, they're better. Duo competes with facetime, not skype. Allo competes with WhatsApp, not Telegram.

Yes, part of what makes Google Photos good is the integration with their other products. "network effect" is a thing. But leveraging your other products is not the same thing as being an illegal monopoly. iCloud Photos has a network effect. Facebook's photo sharing product has a much larger network effect than Google's.

Re: “Google Is as Close to a Natural Monopoly as the Bell System Was in 1956″

#203

Post by Retric »

ng12 wrote: post #195
Retric wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are actually a massive outlier. http://www.siliconbeat.com/2016/05/20/apple-microsoft-google... While Apple has a larger total cash horde ~(216 billion) only 7% of that is in the US or 15B, Google has a larger US cash horde @$73B * 31% = 22.6B making it the largest accessible cash horde in the US. PS: The ~$1.68 trillion in cash held by U.S. companies at the end of 2015 is kind of misleading as financial compani…

I'm not saying that Google doesn't compete on their cash reserves, I'm saying "so what"? Does having a lot of capital make you a monopoly? Should we penalize business for having cash to spend?

Look at it from the other direction. I am saying one of the downsides of monopolies is they end up with a lot of capital, but they don't use it efficiently. At the core investing capital efficiently is a different skill.

Another way to look at it is after breaking up AT&T it created a lot of horribly dysfunctional companies. Verizon is a long way from greatness, but many of these guys where far worse and then went out of business because they where inefficient. Remember, it was the same people, tech, and business models before and after the breakup, but busting up AT&T exposed problems to market forces which then went away.

I am fine saying the rot has yet to set in at Google. But, give it 20 years and expect the same kind of problems because of human nature.

PS: Granted, this does not really answer your so what, but efficiency in the long term really is a boon to society.

Re: “Google Is as Close to a Natural Monopoly as the Bell System Was in 1956″

#204

Post by majewsky »

jorvi wrote: post #193
aaomidi wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two years of OS updates and three years of security updates. The devices that google had and weren't using Qualcomm CPU got updates for a lot longer (e.g Nexus Player). It gets very, very annoying for Google to try to support phones that use CPUs that don't update or release anything anymore.

I never understood how 'SoC manufacture X doesn't release updates for that SoC' translates into 'we can't update/support this device anymore'. My OnePlus One is whizzing along happily on Nougat (7.1.2) via LineageOS. There's also a well working ported version of OxygenOS 3.1 for it, despite OnePlus having abandoned it on 2.1; Hell, even the Samsung Galaxy S2 can still run Nougat via, again, LineageOS. What's preventi…

Because the LineageOS installer does not give any warranty that it won't brick the phone beyond repair. If Google updates Android and it uses an unsupported Qualcomm driver and that thing breaks anything, Google may be held liable in court and forced to pay damages.

Re: “Google Is as Close to a Natural Monopoly as the Bell System Was in 1956″

#205

Post by hobarrera »

ipa711 wrote: post #127

I use duckduckgo more than Google for search. I almost always get hits with duckduckgo, that I want, that are on page 2 of Google.

DuckDuckGo is great. It's gotten so much better in recent years, that I can't stand the poor results that Google yields recently.

TBH, if I can't find something on DDG, google won't have anything useful either.

Re: “Google Is as Close to a Natural Monopoly as the Bell System Was in 1956″

#206

Post by SXX »

lallysingh wrote: post #169
SXX wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unlike say, Windows, there is nothing locking you into Google you don't have to use Chrome or GMAIl, or their search. I agree about their search, but problem with Chrome isn't just lack of alternatives. Problem is that Google have too much power over web standards and all of competitors have to follow. Even Mozilla had to implement DRM. Gmail is similar: Google never directly used their power against competitors, b…

Are the relevant standards bodies just puppets?

None of them are independent. Members of W3C / WHATWG / etc work for Google or competitors. They all have to agree on something because with Chrome market share anything can be enforced anyway.

If there feature video on YouTube / Netflix won't play without everyone going to implement it anyway.

Re: “Google Is as Close to a Natural Monopoly as the Bell System Was in 1956″

#207

Post by AnthonyMouse »

The Bell System wasn't a natural monopoly.

AT&T had a monopoly on long distance service. The natural monopoly is the last mile. Even after Ma Bell was broken up, all the local natural monopolies were still there. Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) didn't serve the same territory as Southwestern Bell (now "AT&T").

The way that Ma Bell became a national monopoly is that nobody originally prevented them from leveraging their last mile monopolies. If your network is the only way to reach millions of telephone customers in your service area, a smaller provider has no choice but to deal with you, and so absent regulation the bigger telco can charge whatever they want for interconnection. They can also show up with an offer to buy your network for cost in one hand and a bankruptcy-inducing interconnection bill in the other. If this sounds to you anything like the current debate over network neutrality, well spotted.

Google isn't AT&T, they're IBM.

Re: “Google Is as Close to a Natural Monopoly as the Bell System Was in 1956″

#208

Post by ellyagg »

scarface74 wrote: post #201
easilyBored wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Or you can not base your business on the fickleness of Google's search algorithms." Or you can not base your business on the fickleness of your phone company's /ISP algorithms. Google is a much as 90% of referrals for many websites. Answer this: Are you sure that Google updates their search algorithm independent of revenue impact? I remember reading from FTC's investigation that Google kept changing their "independe…

Or you can not base your business on the fickleness of your phone company's /ISP algorithms. Google is a much as 90% of referrals for many websites Business 101 is that you're always in trouble if you depend on one supplier for the majority of your business. The second example I have is John Gruber (daringfireball.com). He never sold ads based on the number of active visitors. He sells one RSS sponsorship at the begi…

> Business 101 is that you're always in trouble if you depend on one supplier for the majority of your business.

You're making the point. It's hard to build an online business without appeasing Google and that they need to is bad for small and fledgling businesses.

It's possible to build an online business without Google, of course. There are usually alternatives to monopolies, just ones that cost a lot more or are much riskier or much lower quality, etc. I don't agree that it's just as easy to build an online business without Google.

Re: “Google Is as Close to a Natural Monopoly as the Bell System Was in 1956″

#209

Post by fixermark »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #117
ouid wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Bing seems pretty close in search quality, but yet few switch over. a) Why would anyone switch if they are both equal and both free? b) Most people use chrome. Most people don't change their default search engine. c) As much as people pretend to hate Google, they actually hate Microsoft a lot more, and for good reason. Microsoft operates on bad faith far more frequently than Google does, most of their business decis…

In fact, you are self-defeating your arguments. Chrome was entirely built to be leveraged to force people to use Google Search, since people don't change their default search engine. Bear in mind, they paid Apple and Mozilla each over a billion dollars to be everyone's default search. Sundar Pichai, the current CEO of Google, got started by pushing the Google Toolbar as one of those bloatware add-ons when you install…

"Chrome was entirely built to be leveraged to force people to use Google Search"

That grossly simplifies the origin and existence of Chrome. While it's true that Google is the default omnibox search (I'd argue that "people don't change their default search engine" is a really weak way to "force" people to use a browser---too weak to justify building a whole browser by itself), you have to remember the ecosystem of browsers that were on the market when Chrome hit the scene. Flash was all over the place, and memory protection between open windows / tabs was nonexistent; a misbehaving browser plugin (and there were a lot of them at the time, including Flash) or a bug in JavaScript could cripple your entire session in IE, Safari, and Firefox. Google's business model is very much centered on the web (not just search, but ads and office productivity applications); strategically, it was risky of Google to be in the position of being, essentially, application developers for platforms they didn't have any controlling stake in. They needed to be in a position where they could---for example---improve process isolation, rendering engines, and JavaScript engines instead of delaying projects until the three dominant browsers got around to making the technological features Google saw as important a priority.

I assume "And it defaults to the Google search engine" is in there too, but that's a bit like saying General Motors makes cars so they can get their stereos into people's hands.

Re: “Google Is as Close to a Natural Monopoly as the Bell System Was in 1956″

#210

Post by AlexandrB »

sfifs wrote: post #88
redm wrote: post #53

I think the key point here is not whether Google is abusing its effective monopoly willingly, its that it exists at all. There may be alternatives, but not viable ones. Try not supporting Chrome or ignoring Chrome requirements such as security mandates, you will go out of business. You can say these are 'good' for the consumer but the fact that Google has the ability to unilaterally change the web itself is partially…

This appears to be a common misconception that monopolies are bad from a public policy standpoint. For public policy, the existence of a monopoly is neither here nor there. Monopolies are problem ONLY IF their operations causes negative economic effects to consumers - typically by raising prices. Indeed in many cases (eg. Transport, Infrastructure) a monopoly is actively granted in return for guaranteed availability…

> Monopolies are problem ONLY IF their operations causes negative economic effects to consumers - typically by raising prices.

The more I think about it, the more it seems as thought we need to put a price tag on the data companies collect about users. Google may be raising prices all the time by tracking more and more data about you, but this is completely opaque because even though information is "the new oil" no one puts a real price tag on it.

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