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How did Google get so big?

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Re: How did Google get so big?

#81

Post by fixermark »

acover wrote: post #73
fixermark wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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.

You make a good point. I don't see why that type of sharing can't happen with open source services. Though it would require more customer consent.

Personal opinion: the fact that type of sharing hasn't happened with open source services speaks volumes about the priorities of the open-source communities and is the single-biggest argument in favor of allowing large corporations leeway to create big cool things with big data. I don't see anyone else stepping up to solve the hard problems like this.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#82

Post by booleandilemma »

zjaffee wrote: post #78
ur-whale wrote: post #25

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…

It's not so much they are hurting anyone, since they have made it virtually impossible to compete with them. 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 se…

Couldn’t people just stop using Google search though? There’s Bing, Duckduckgo, Ask.com (are they still around?)

Re: How did Google get so big?

#83

Post by euyyn »

sincerely wrote: post #40
izzydata wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to be implying it is inherently a bad thing. Is trying to stop innovative companies also a hindrance to technological progress?

I mean, you're implying that "technological progress" is inherently a good thing.

Why wouldn't it be?

Re: How did Google get so big?

#85

Post by nashashmi »

wilsonnb2 wrote: post #6

So if Google is a monopoly, what should be done about it? Split it up into separate, competing mini-Googles? Keep fining them more and more money until they stop anti-competitive practices? Split off Maps/Android/Drive/etc into separate companies so that Google can't use their search monopoly to dominate those fields? I'm genuinely not sure what the best way to go about this would be.

Forcing the search business to open up and be overseen and governed by a transparent boardroom is probably the best way to go about it.

Since search has 90% market share and creates 90% of revenue, it needs to be both made into a standards organization and separated from google sufficiently enough that Google begins to pay better attention to the profitability and development of the other products and other bets.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#86

Post by ebikelaw »

wallflower wrote: post #8

If I could give a six word response for the technical side: "Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat and team". To paraphrase some Cal/UC Berkeley professor that I cannot remember, he said that the problem with scaling is that when you go up a magnitude or more, you may need a qualitatively different solution for the same problem. Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and their team have time and time again managed to design and build st…

That doesn't provide a perfect answer. Sanjay and Jeff (and a lot of other senior Googlers) were all at DEC. Why didn't DEC succeed to the degree that Google has?

Re: How did Google get so big?

#87

Post by TimJYoung »

I've been trying to reconcile the libertarian perspective on this topic with my more-liberal leanings, and I've got to say that I'm perplexed.

Can any libertarians here share their thoughts on the role of government in producing tech monopolies ? Is there any role at all ?

IOW, would we see the same problem if there were still private AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy networks instead of just the one Internet ? And yes, I'm putting aside the question of whether the absence of the public internet would be good or bad for society.

I can't see how you wouldn't just end up with one company buying out the others and becoming a monopoly, anyway, but I'm open to ideas as to how that would be mitigated by competition. There's also the issue of companies with deep pockets, or investors with deep pockets, just doing "free" until everyone else is gone, which, for some reason, seems to be in vogue now. But, I suspect that private networks would be very careful about letting any one participant acquire too much network power in one area.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#88

Post by ebikelaw »

adrianN wrote: post #33
ur-whale wrote: post #25

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…

Their competitors?

This is irrelevant to American anti-trust law. Europe will move to protect competitors, but America will only act to protect the consumer.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#89

Post by nashashmi »

devmunchies wrote: post #16
ProAm wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im pretty sure this is why Alphabet was formed, they sort of split themselves up as a preventative measure.

Well android, maps, gmail, cloud, youtube are all still under Google so not really.

Structurally, youtube and cloud co have their own CEOs.

And they all make money. so they can be split from the rest of the company.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#90

Post by TomMarius »

xg15 wrote: post #63
TomMarius wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's their product after all; do you point people to your competition from your product? Everyone is free to use anything else. Anti-competitive would be if you couldn't use anything else.

"Your product" is something completely different if you're a mom-and-pop shop or startup or if you have 90% market share. This is why antitrust exists and what arguments like this always seem to ignore.

Can you be more specific, what exactly is and when exactly it becomes different?
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