You seem to be trying to build an analogy between a person's right to a material necessity and a corporation's right to a convenient market. I don't think the analogy holds. (The flip side would be "Are you saying Google should be a nationalized, government-regulated search engine?")
Municipal sewer/water isn't a material necessity, they're a convenience. There are million dollar houses in the D.C. suburbs that have well water/septic.
That's true. "Any water" is a material necessity (I think I'd argue "any sewer" too, if you plan to not pick up and nomad yourself around every few weeks). If you can self-supply it, that's fine.
It's hard to see any comparison. At the peak of AT&T's power, they were able to block sales of a third-party device that attached to your phone that helped keep people from overhearing your conversations. The device was just a cup, it didn't do anything electrical, but AT&T still decided they didn't like it and shut it down. That was eventually overturned in court, but it was a decade-long fight. It took another deca…
I made a similar comment recently as well [1]. Google doesn't have many natural moats to their original cash cow, search, just habit and laziness among its users. Lose them and they lose their advertisers too.
It seems Google's primary competitive advantage is a well-architected technology platform (though Steve Yegge may disagree) and the world's top talent. But there's nothing like the kind of total control over critical infrastructure that the Bell System had which is the definition of natural monopoly.
> ... and they make Microsoft look like an innocent kitten in comparison. It sounds like you don't remember Microsoft back in the day. Google "Halloween Memos". (Edit: Note particularly the bit about "de-commodifying protocols", that is, finding ways to break standards and create lock-in.) Microsoft literally paid web sites to put HTML in their pages so that Netscape wouldn't handle properly. Microsoft literally gene…
I would argue that if you think any of that compares to Google, you don't have any clue what Google's been up to lately. ;) But at least you can acknowledge that there's almost no comparable evidence of anticompetitive behavior from Microsoft in the last decade. But I acknowledge as well that if Microsoft were in a monopoly position again, as Google is now, they would be up to the same hijinks.
Microsoft arguably still is, in the OS area. What mellowed Microsoft out, in my view, was the US antitrust court case and resulting consent decree.
I think a big part of it is that Google controls one of the single most effective advertising channels to drive the growth of a competitor, and can therefore strangle them in the cradle.
Wait Google does not allow its competitors to use Adsense?
Fair response there.
They have unilateral power to bury someone in search results though. Which can effectively require them to use adsense.
I don't think this is reasonable. Buy our other product or get poor search results. There's a few really good examples on other threads here. The best example I saw involved a hypothetical YouTube competitor facing a large number of DMCA takedowns, they may be complying with the law, but the takedowns will give google an excuse to bury them in search results forever more, while they can "excuse" YouTube.
Who exactly regulates the sewer/water monopoly held by a local government? I cannot even begin to explain the insidious local politics surrounding the local water utility in the city where my folks used to live and the way they forced homeowners to hook up to the ever-expanding sewer at cost to the homeowners, regardless of whether their existing septic systems were adequate or not, to pad the pockets of the contract…
Local politics might be bad, but it'd be far worse to have it run by Google. They'd never pick up your customer support calls; they'd be more concerned with using ML to figure out when you sh*t and when you shower (valuable data for advertisers, you see). Also they'd randomly remove you from the network all the time for no apparent reason.
I see where you're coming from (and your comment is very funny) however my experience with Google Fiber as an ISP and Google's Project Fi as an MVNO is pretty much the opposite. They've been great, including customer service. And those are utilities, essentially, no? That's the whole argument behind Net Neutrality, that ISPs are providing a utility.
Hmm forking Android and turning the ecosystem into a complete mess around stuff like security updates. To the point were a lot of people, including myself, are considering buying a Google device purely to ensure some sort of longevity.
I just finished having a heated argument with friends living in India (that work at investment banks, so not exactly old people with some calling device in hand). A bunch of them were complaining that Uber is being bad, requiring camera permissions, etc. The newer androids have nicer permissions systems, requested at runtime. But they are running Android 5* because the shiny turd of a phone they got supports only tha…
I think you all are missing the point. As Google gave away Android for free with the support of their brand, services and user base it essentially killed all the alternatives (MeeGo, WebOS, BlackBerry 10) and companies that were focused on software (Palm, Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola, BlackBerry). It's not at all unexpected that these Asian companies can't compete in terms of systems design, both in terms of experience and ownership, but also just cost. Almost no one is making any money (other than Samsung, which is extremely very vertically integrated, at least in theory). Throwing in cheaper chips and making the software flashier is really the only business model that is available, even if some manufacturers like Mi do offer long term support.
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…
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…
Replace the words "benevolent dictator" with "winner." People go to Google by choice, they win based on consumer preference. Unlike say, Windows, there is nothing locking you into Google you don't have to use Chrome or GMAIl, or their search. Yes a lot of people are okay with one company controlling 80% percent of a market if - they get there by relatively fair practices, there are clear and viable alternatives, and…
> 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…
Making their anti-spam operations transparent may be self-defeating, spammers may then be able to game the system.
> pre-existing market with network effects. (a phenomenon whereby a product or service gains additional value as more people use it.) Google has network effects as well as they own Android dialer, hangouts, google messenger, and email. I don't buy this argument. They just failed. Also you'd be the first person I'd see that defends Yelp's business model, but yeah I'm not familiar with the Google vs Yelp court case.
> Also you'd be the first person I'd see that defends Yelp's business model, but yeah I'm not familiar with the Google vs Yelp court case. Google copied Yelp!’s ratings, showed them without any backlink in Maps and Places. Once Yelp! complained, Google told them to either suck it up, or to use robots.txt to opt-out of Google search entirely. "If you want to be in the index, you have to allow us to scrape your data an…
thanks for the information. Yeah without attribution, it does seem like they are wrong on this.