71–80 of 417 posts
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The point of antitrust regulations is to stop the anti-innovation practices in the first place, so while they may appear to be a 'benevolent dictator,' they will quickly turn for the worse.
It seems to be an open question whether letting a corp play benevolent dictator for some timeframe, at least, is a useful thing.
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Some technological progress is good and some of it bad.
No technological progress is bad. Sometimes this progress is used badly, but knowledge is definitely not bad.
Besides I could just as easily say some knowledge is good and some knowledge is bad. If you want to say that "knowledge is definitely not bad" then I'm going to ask you your own question - can you support that statement?
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Technology often leads to a natural monopoly as it has high fixed costs and low variable costs. One way I can see changing this dynamic is using open source services. That way anyone is able to clone, improve or change them. Provide consumer choice. However businesses are aiming for monopolies. Crowd funding and open source might change the dynamic. It's probably too late for search as the lead is too far. I also dou…
... and benefits from horizontal scaling. Maps is okay, search is okay. Maps that can take signal from search to figure out what people care about, and search that can utilize geographic signal to guess what a person might want as an answer for "restaurants near me" is huge.
I don't see why that type of sharing can't happen with open source services. Though it would require more customer consent.
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There's nothing objectively wrong with a large company unless they begin to squash competition with regulatory lock-in. This is what led to the breakup of AT&T/Bell. As far as I can tell, Google doesn't keep others out of the search market through any other means than just being better than the other guys. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I certainly haven't seen any shortage of search engines and alternative cloud servi…
Google doesn't keep others out of the search market through any other means than just being better... They have 98% market share in europe. They also provide the main revenue source (AdWords) and the most important implementation of the web stack (Chrome) - which fitted with mandatory automated updating. If you combine those factors, they are in a position where they can to a large part dictate what the de-facto stan…
1) navigate to bing.com
2) do a search
If it works, congratulations; Google isn't blocking competition. The 98% market share is probably because the market is winner-take-all, and people don't see a need to use a new competitor that's even equivalently-effective over one they are already comfortable with.
Why is Google being big a problem? Who are they hurting by being big at this time? [edit]: to elaborate, I was under the impression that the whole point of anti-monopoly regulations was to protect consumers from monopolistic predatory practices, not to prevent monopolies from actually existing per se. Hence my question: is there anyone actually being hurt by the currently limited choice of search engines or phone ope…
We could have missed out on the opportunity for something better than Android being developed and we'll never know. It's called dumping; flooding the market with something free to kill competition and make sure Google is in the majority of hands in Europe.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point of antitrust regulations is to stop the anti-innovation practices in the first place, so while they may appear to be a 'benevolent dictator,' they will quickly turn for the worse.
It seems to be an open question whether letting a corp play benevolent dictator for some timeframe, at least, is a useful thing.
Google got so big by causing its server-side adtech businesses to collude in such a way as to restrain trade and forestall competitors.
Why is Google being big a problem? Who are they hurting by being big at this time? [edit]: to elaborate, I was under the impression that the whole point of anti-monopoly regulations was to protect consumers from monopolistic predatory practices, not to prevent monopolies from actually existing per se. Hence my question: is there anyone actually being hurt by the currently limited choice of search engines or phone ope…
Say you do a search for a particular location, the first thing that pops up to the the top of the page is a box with some information pulled from wikipedia and a link/image of it on google maps. Search for a band, and you see the same with links to youtube and google music. Search for online storage and you see the same thing.
While google has been audited time and time again to prove that their search engine totally allows competitors to make an impact against some of these sorts of things. Even without the box, the builder of the worlds most used search engine is certainly very good at search engine optimization for their own products.
"Bing, their competition, has 2% of the market. They have 90%." Who has the other 8%?
Cuil. On a serious note, it seems to me that barrier to entry for search is now exponentially higher than it was when they started. I'm not sure if it's even doable with small resources (in proverbial garage) anymore.
I keep mentioning "restaurants near me" in this thread because it's absolutely killer that's possible now.
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If you required Google to license either their algorithmic search index or their search ad marketplace to other companies, it would have a dramatic effect on the competitive dynamics of the search market worldwide.
Would it? Is the algorithm the source of value or the massive store of data harvested over a decade and stored globally in myriad datacenters?