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Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

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Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#241

Post by theprotocol »

yeukhon wrote: post #47
GuardianCaveman wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ant-competitive practices? Facebook buying up any and all rivals like WhatsApp and Instagram? They are a juggernaut and shouldn’t be able to own all social media.

What’s wrong with buying competitions?

There are market concentration regulations. The SEC typically applies a formula to determine if an acquisition results in a single entity owning too much of the market, in which case it would not be approved.

I don't know if this has been considered for these companies, but I suspect it may have been bypassed. At the very least, that's what an investigation would determine.

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#242

Post by soup10 »

dmix wrote: post #205
losingthefight wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I mean, pick one of a hundred. They are deprecating APIs that would block the interception and are ignoring community pushback. But since you asked... https://bgr.com/2019/05/31/google-chrome-update-ad-blockers-... https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evy53j/google-struggles-t... https://9to5google.com/2019/05/29/chrome-ad-blocking-enterpr... But I mean, that was a 2 second search. Citations are indeed hard to…

Good reason for about 5-10% of the internet users with adblockers to switch to Firefox. Which kind of hurts the monopoly argument. Not that I support google being more and more monopolistic these days. I still don’t think the browser market is a good example right now. There’s far better examples than this.

i'm sure a lot of people that would otherwise have been making browsers decided chrome is "good enough" and assumed google wasn't likely to do anything to scummy like this. monopoly is maybe not the best word choice but its overwhelming popularity and use has given it a lot of inertia and influence over the direction of the web

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#243

Post by bduerst »

tantalor wrote: post #132
fyoving wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what's being investigated here, if the government would actually want to compel Google to alter their search results then it's a first amendment case.

> Take a look at google AMP The argument here is its unfair to bias ranking towards a preferred format. In this case, something about excluding competitors, except AMP is completely open-source[1] so...? The counterargument is yes you can, because it's your pamphlet/newspaper/website and you're the editor, not the government. [1] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml

Yeah, if AMP is antitrust then so is Facebook's Open Graph. Despite the hate for both on HN, neither format is targeting competitors or hurting consumers in this case.

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#244

Post by ilaksh »

I will go ahead and bring up a related issue. Most people seem to not see it as being related but in my mind it is very closely related. So maybe consider not burying my comment completely.

Part of the reason we have these technology monopolies is that they provide ubiquitous platforms and that is very powerful for consumers and businesses (as long as your goals don't conflict with their goals).

The issue is that these platforms are being provided by private interests, but have so much scope that they act like public platforms.

My suggestion is to try to create public platforms that business or consumers could tap into/build off of. This would allow for us to audit the mechanisms and also provide a base layer that competition could be built on.

In my mind the obvious technical direction is decentralization technologies. That's the only way such public networks could be feasible.

I actually see this as covering technology in an extremely broad sense. It applies to everything from Google search and ads, to Amazon and online retail, to Uber and taxi apps, maybe even the US dollar and currency, or perhaps even government itself.

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#245

Post by bduerst »

reallydude wrote: post #175
fyoving wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a price fixing/cartel case not a first amendment one.

Isn't that the point? What you prosecute is not related the first amendment, despite the actions being protected by it.

This case is clearly price fixing, not first amendment.

The radio stations weren't broadcasting their prices to consumers, but secretly communicating with competitors to form a cartel, which is forbidden. Doesn't matter if they were radio stations or grocery stores.

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#246

Post by baddox »

thanatos_dem wrote: post #204
yeukhon wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buying a competition is not anticompetitive. So why congratulate any acquisition on HN?

Buying competition = removing competition Removing competition is literally the most anticompetitive thing you can do. Like definitionally. That’s why all major (edit: US) acquisitions take months to years to get approval from the SEC.

Buying a competitor is no more anticompetitive than causing a competitor to shut down because they weren’t competitive enough.

What is supposed to happen to competitors that are actually less efficient and/or produce less appealing products? Do people really expect “competition” to mean a perpetual exact tie between two or more competitors?

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#247

Post by luckylion »

googthrwy_ wrote: post #198
nsomaru wrote: post #174

I was the biggest Google fan ever. I recommended all their products to everyone I know. Gone are those days. I now trust Microsoft (heh! M!cr0$0ft, anyone?) more than Google which is strange given I grew up rebelling against MS’s technical desktop hegemony. I wonder when Google decided “doing evil” was okay. I wonder how the SWE’s and other senior people in this thread feel about working for a company that many now c…

I wonder how the SWE’s and other senior people in this thread feel about working for a company that many now consider scum. All their excuses and retorts can honestly take a hike: It is my honest opinion that if you still work for Google you’re selling us all out. Googler here, I understand why you may think Google is evil now and I'm not going to say they are a perfect company. But I think you should consider that i…

> Many of us work on things that people like and improve our lives.

Like what? Services that support the ads monetization, lock in users and strengthen control over the ecosystem?

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#248

Post by bduerst »

o10449366 wrote: post #180
KirinDave wrote: post #71

Distressingly absent from this list is the company that cheerfully collects and sells even more data that Google about the average American's life and collects MUCH more of their money: Amazon.

Amazon does not collect more data than Google does, even by your own definition. In fact, Google uses Amazon to collect even more information than they do innately by mining Gmail for purchase receipts.

Amazon purchases your credit card purchase history from major CC providers, likely as part of reciprocity agreement. They know more about you thank you think.

Source: I was retargeted on Amazon for an impulse buy of an obscure item from Macy's. My CC was the only way to join my data.

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#249

Post by dodobirdlord »

o10449366 wrote: post #180
KirinDave wrote: post #71

Distressingly absent from this list is the company that cheerfully collects and sells even more data that Google about the average American's life and collects MUCH more of their money: Amazon.

Amazon does not collect more data than Google does, even by your own definition. In fact, Google uses Amazon to collect even more information than they do innately by mining Gmail for purchase receipts.

To be fair, Amazon probably does "sell even more data than Google about the average American's life" given that Google doesn't sell data.

Re: Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google

#250

Post by bduerst »

KirinDave wrote: post #84
untog wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collects money, yes. But collects more data? I'm dubious.

Everyone who uses AWS essentially gives data signals to Amazon. As they're by far the biggest cloud provider, that's a lot of data. Add that to their physical goods store, their shipping, their payments, their music store, their player apps, their subscription data, their identity and payment data. Amazon's looking at getting into the consumer communications business too. If I were a bad person asking, "Who's more va…

I may be mistaken but every major cloud provider, from AWS to Azure to Google, has dictated in their SLA that they don't mine your data (as a cloud customer).
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