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Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

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Re: Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

#231

Post by ocdtrekkie »

closeparen wrote: post #135
rdlecler1 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Google doesn't have an effective monopoly then I don't think I understand the word. The only search engine relavant to my search results is Google and I don't here to many people talking about optimizing their SEO for bing.

It's not necessarily illegal to be a monopoly, it's illegal to behave in certain anti-competitive ways. For example: - Rockefeller made deals with the railroads that shipped Standard Oil to charge higher prices to other prospective oil shippers. - Rockefeller bought any competitor that was undercutting him and raised its prices so it stopped being a threat. - "Competing" firms met and drew up an agreement that neithe…

- Google bought out it's only competitor to Google Wallet at the time (Softcard) and shut it down.

- Google just announced that it'll block competitors' ads on it's web browser by default. And charge people who use other ad blockers money.

- Google has a secret agreement with every mobile device manufacturer not named Apple to use their product on their terms, and seek their permission for all device releases. And set Google's already dominant software as default on every device.

(EDIT @closeparen, yes, market forces are part of the monopoly Google has constructed. It's impossible to succeed in building a non-Google OS phone. That's the point. Google doesn't have to prohibit them from doing anything they know the licensees can't succeed at doing.

As Androids are woefully insecure, all consumers are hurt by Google's monopoly. Android is an example of an inferior product succeeding through monopoly control.)

Re: Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

#232

Post by pmoriarty »

weirdstuff wrote: post #114
TulliusCicero wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I work at Google > The world is a better place with lots of smaller companies. [citation needed] A lot of things Google does -- a lot of the things people actually like about Google -- are possible only because it's a huge monolith. Divorce the ad-making money machine, and say goodbye to all the services consumers like that are nowhere near as profitable: gmail, maps, photos, chrome, android, translate, y…

> Divorce the ad-making money machine, and say goodbye to all the services consumers like that are nowhere near as profitable: gmail, maps, photos, chrome, android, translate, youtube, drive, waze, where do you think the money for this stuff all comes from? This needs a citation, as well. This is assuming Google hasn't starved out potential competitors who would have provided the same service, or better service, had…

"This is assuming Google hasn't starved out potential competitors who would have provided the same service, or better service, had the playing field been more level."

There are alternatives to many of these already.

Firefox (and other browsers) for Chrome, Openstreetmap for maps. Vimeo for youtube. Flickr for photos. Dropbox for drive. Never heard of waze, so don't know what's an alternative for that, but I would be surprised if there wasn't one.

I'm also of a rare breed who thinks Android is total an utter garbage compared to Palm OS, and much prefer the latter. I wish Google and Apple had never gotten in to the phone business. It's been an utter nightmare of spyware and bloatware ever since.

I personally would not miss any of these products execept for youtube, and that only because of the content which is provided by users, not by Google. That content could be moved to another platform, and I'm sure if Google disappeared entirely and permanently tomorrow, just as good or better a storehouse of video content would be rebuilt to replace it.

Re: Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

#233

Post by cobbzilla »

dvt wrote: post #221
oneshot908 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO breaking up Google or Amazon makes as much sense as breaking up a tumor in the body without removing any of its cells and declaring victory. Go ahead, make some arbitrary cuts between Amazon, Lab 126 and AWS. Or go split Google into Android, Search and Cloud. That's a huge buying opportunity in both cases IMO. But if you really want to talk about a current monopoly in the valley, look no further than NVIDIA's 100…

> You wanna join the evil 1% in the valley? That's relatively easy. Learn how to code and ship working systems, especially big data and machine learning systems. That ability alone is worth high six-figures income to Google and Facebook (cue people insisting that's not the case because they don't make that kind of money). Lol what the fuck are you smoking? Making 7 figures is de facto NOT relatively easy and NOT stan…

you don't need 7 figures to join the 1%. last i heard it was around $450k/year; there are a lot of people at Apple/FB/Google/etc that make that much or more, but still far less than $1M

Re: Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

#234

Post by slice_of_life »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #170
slice_of_life wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well at least we can get that out of the way; it is an affront then. These 4 companies (and more) have done more good than all the goodness of your heart will ever do. We have to be pragmatic and not just be bleeding hearts because it is endearing and it will make us popular. >to have all of us go forward as a species instead of concentrating the power in the hands of few. This is the problem you and others that thin…

I don't understand your logic. If companies are allowed to get as big as they want, then it naturally constrains other smaller companies from competing. It's not a free market anymore, it's a few big fish in a small lake. Good luck not being a predator. This has happened before. We had massive conglomerates in the late 1800s. Thankfully some leaders with vision (Roosevelt) broke them up. Egalitarianism does not == th…

>If companies are allowed to get as big as they want, then it naturally constrains other smaller companies from competing.

These big 4 weren't always there. There were other players before them. In fact they're relatively VERY young.

How do companies get big? By solving customers' needs in a free market and doing so at scale. No one forces you to use Instagram over a Kodak; you have a need, Kodak, once big, could no longer meet your needs. They went way.

My point is, customers make companies big. The bigger they get, the more they can solve customers' needs. Trying to solve these needs any other way leads to disasters.

I mean, what are we doing here then if the goal isn't to be as big or bigger than google? To do more than they have. This takes resources and many resources at that. How else do you propose getting satellites to orbit and mapping out the earth and it's terrain?

Let's not sit here and pretend we don't like using GPS or chrome or google maps or android or iOS and soon self-driving cars... When companies are at a certain scale they can solve different types of problems than smaller companies.

Smaller companies can solve different sets of problems and with time may be they too can become large companies.

Trying to say they should be split or spoken against shows a lack of growth mentality and being stuck in the past as opposed to trying to conquer new territory. There are still so many problems to solve not just what these 4 have done. It's insane, the number of things that need to be solved.

Re: Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

#235

Post by ocdtrekkie »

scarface74 wrote: post #74
izacus wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with that is that those companies can use the ad revenue to dump prices in other field and essentially drive any possible competition out of the market. This can cause a dangerous snowball where a few huge corporations control several markets and competing is impossible because they don't need to earn profit (or earn anything at all) on those secondary markets. Add vendor lockin and you just created a cor…

And what will happen to these companies as more people start blocking ads? Apple introduced an ad blocking framework into iOS a year or two ago and this year they are going even further with blocking tracking cookies and letting users default to reading view. So sure the "unwashed masses" will see ads but ad buyers are going to start losing their most affluent audience - the people who are willing to pay not to see a…

Well, you start making your own ad blocker to block their ad blockers. And then you charge people money to see content if they're using third party ad blockers.

Re: Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

#236

Post by joshuamorton »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #223
joshuamorton wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So then under this definition, apple is also a monopoly, as is pretty much any walled garden app store company (ie. Valve, arguably Amazon, Microsoft, and any other company with a platform that allows third parties to use that platform for a cut)? To be clear, in the US, there is at least one major competitor to Google in that space (Apple), so a price increase would lead developers to leave the platform. And in much…

Apple isn't actually much of a competitor where it matters: OEMs only have one choice which OS to license, which is why without major government trustbusting action, dozens of manufacturers have no choice but to build Android phones. Google has no competition in this space, and any company that tried to break from them would go under.

That's a different conversation (hardware licensing vs. app store). Also I'm curious, I see you posting pretty often, and about 80% of your comments are anti-Google specifically, is there a reason for that?

Re: Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

#237

Post by paulsutter »

acdha wrote: post #210
paulsutter wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was responding to this particular question: > Are you thinking google would be willing to risk their ad revenue for a cool new tech? University and government research is also super important. Google publishes papers not code, whereas universities often publish their code and that's doing more to move AI forward than Google. But Google is willing to make large research bets too.

Yeah, I'm definitely not saying Google isn't doing important work. I just think this highlights the key role government funding plays in ensuring that businesses don't have to pay for all of that basic research and training. That's basically the answer to that question: Google isn't risking their core business on this because so much of the foundation has been set. If, say, in 2003 they'd gone to investors and asked…

Yeah so awesome that the whole world can coast to success now that DARPA derisked the future.

Re: Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

#238

Post by joshuamorton »

ForHackernews wrote: post #225
joshuamorton wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just curious, what data do you believe google gives to advertisers? I work at google, and I see this trope on HN a lot, and I always like to see what data people think is given away, since a lot of the time they seem to be under the impression that either Google's privacy policy is different than it actually is, or that Google's privacy policy isn't actually something that Google follows, or that it doesn't prote…

Given that Google can revise their privacy policy unilaterally at any time (and, as far as I know, they are under no legal obligation to delete or restrict access to data collected under previous iterations of the policy) I don't see why any of us should feel comforted by the existence of some mutable words on a webpage somewhere.

>as far as I know, they are under no legal obligation to delete or restrict access to data collected under previous iterations of the policy

(obviously IANAL) I'm fairly sure that they cannot without your permission, although they can assume your permission if you continue using the service after they change the policy (and you're informed of the change), and at least with the changes I can find online, Google at least generally seems to give users the chance to opt out of changes.

Edit: a quick search for examples backs up my claim, I can't find any situation where a company could modify its privacy policy in a way that would affect existing user data, and apply that new policy to users who were no longer using the platform. Either its not legal, or companies voluntarily don't do that.

Re: Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

#239

Post by kyrra »

oneshot908 wrote: post #173
jondubois wrote: post #14

I agree they should be regulated. The world is a better place with lots of smaller companies. These big companies turn regular people into corporate livestock to serve the wealthy. If you were to analyze Facebook as if it were a country, the wealth gap among employees would be atrocious - The top 1% would own maybe 99% of the wealth of the country and everyone else would earn a minuscule fraction of the total value t…

IMO breaking up Google or Amazon makes as much sense as breaking up a tumor in the body without removing any of its cells and declaring victory. Go ahead, make some arbitrary cuts between Amazon, Lab 126 and AWS. Or go split Google into Android, Search and Cloud. That's a huge buying opportunity in both cases IMO. But if you really want to talk about a current monopoly in the valley, look no further than NVIDIA's 100…

> look no further than NVIDIA's 100% ownership of the DL/ML processor space.

[Disclaimer: I work for Google, opinions are my own]

Google has their TPU that they are letting others use via Cloud services[0]. It may not be the same as buying hardware, but they are giving Nvidia a run for their money.

https://cloud.google.com/tpu/

Re: Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

#240

Post by pmoriarty »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #189
oneshot908 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO breaking up Google or Amazon makes as much sense as breaking up a tumor in the body without removing any of its cells and declaring victory. Go ahead, make some arbitrary cuts between Amazon, Lab 126 and AWS. Or go split Google into Android, Search and Cloud. That's a huge buying opportunity in both cases IMO. But if you really want to talk about a current monopoly in the valley, look no further than NVIDIA's 100…

The thing is, there's a lot of us who don't want to join the 1% in the valley. We don't want to join these parasitic companies which are turning the industry into a boring clone-the-other-big-co greedfest. So for a lot of us, just work hard and join the crowd isn't really a solution. Not to mention, if you find Trump a true threat, please realize he is a threat made possible through the echo chambers of SV tech, whic…

"We don't want to join these parasitic companies which are turning the industry into a boring clone-the-other-big-co greedfest."

When has it not been a greedfest? People have been trying to clone big, successful companies forever. Google was hardly the first, and won't be the last. This has been going on for many decades. Welcome to capitalism.

Something that is new, though, and much more troubling is their massive spying on their users. That could have a very significant negative effect on society in the long run, and is one of the main reasons that I personally would never want to work for these companies either.

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