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Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

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Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#91

Post by shadowgovt »

pge wrote: post #20

This is interesting because it seems like the DOJ's definition of monopoly is changing, which I think is a good thing. Since the late 80s (roughly), antitrust litigation has only been brought on the basis of a monopoly's negative impact on consumer prices (i.e. does the existence of a monopoly cause the consumer to have to pay higher prices?). That ignores monopolies that impair the ability of smaller companies to en…

This has been a major gap between the American understanding of monopoly protection and the European one.

In the European space, protection of smaller business' ability to compete is factored in. But the US space, in general, has not cared if smaller businesses can compete and tends to take a laissez-faire attitude towards business-on-business market pressures. It's the effect of the market on consumers that's paramount.

To be honest, I'm not sold on the European-style philosophy. Guilds traditionally empowered tradespeople, but they also had a reputation for holding back innovation and punishing new ideas that didn't fit the existing paradigms. Amazon, for example, has made book-buying so cheap nationally that individual bookstores have trouble competing. Amazon's other failings aside (which should be addressed by sweeping employee / labor protections, not by breaking up Amazon): should Grandma's books be more expensive in general so the local bookstore owner gets to enjoy the lifestyle of self-business-ownership to which he is accustom? Why / why not?

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#92

Post by iateanapple »

akersten wrote: post #45
iateanapple wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are any of those companies (except Amazon) even in the same league in terms of negative impact as big tech?

I mean, your choices for flying somewhere are what - Delta or United? Some small regional carriers? What about for internet service - just a single ISP in most areas. Sometimes a monopoly by law, where no one else can lay fiber and they're free to charge as much as they want. Your choices for searching something on the internet, hosting a video, doing email, etc. are innumerable. So you'll have to qualify what you me…

> I mean, your choices for flying somewhere are what - Delta or United?

Both delta and united are operating very high capital cost businesses on thin margins.

What can we gain by trust busting them?

> What about for internet service - just a single ISP in most areas.

ISPs can be dealt with effectively at the local level - and they are not as invasive or as politically powerful as the tech giants.

I’ve never had my searches for coronavirus related content restricted in any way by my ISP for example.

> Your choices for searching something on the internet, hosting a video, doing email, etc. are innumerable.

You are ignoring network effects and the advertising monopoly.

But maybe that’s a good way to trust bust them?

Perhaps YouTube should be made to start showing my dlive streams in the search results?

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#93

Post by exclusiv »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #70
tyre wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Precedent is tricky. Democrats removing the filibuster for judges came back to haunt them. There was a recent (last few weeks) SCOTUS decision that came out with numerous opinions by different coalitions. You could tell that they were all maneuvering around this idea of precedent. Liberal justices who ended up on either side (majority or minority) were couching their votes as upholding a prior precedent, even w…

Precedent is tricky. Democrats removing the filibuster for SCOTUS judges came back to haunt them. Did it though? Legal precedent is different (for now) from political precedent, and I think the Republicans have proven they’re happy to steamroll through almost anything they can to seat a Justice. They would have instantly dropped the filibuster if it hadn’t already been done.

Come on now. Both sides will do what it takes to get their ideologically bent Justice in place. The leadership on both sides is complete trash anyway.

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#94

Post by Armic »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #31
ghastmaster wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be a boom for the economy Why? Are they inefficient? Have their resources been mis-allocated? > jobs For the sake of jobs? That pay more or less? > create much needed competition Are they charging too much?

It's dangerous for us all to be so dependent on a few companies. I doubt that's what motivates the DoJ in this case, but right now, if you have a problem with Google, you have to post a cri de coeur on Twitter or Hacker News and hope it embarrasses somebody at Google enough to take action on your behalf. More competitors in the advertising and search space would certainly help, or at least keep the situation from get…

Re: Amazon, many companies do the same thing (e.g. CVS, Target, Costco). With Costco in particular, Kirkland products are higher quality and cheaper than the competition in almost all categories they are in, which is a benefit to me as a consumer. Should Kirkland be broken off just because other companies can't compete with it? If not, what's the justification for Amazon?

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#95

Post by kamarg »

MattGaiser wrote: post #25

The big problem with this is the extreme mediocrity of every other industry. Amazon and Google are winning everything because none of their competitors have even attempted to do better than they did 10 years ago. Amazon should have won in very few of the markets it entered. Instead, its competitors just decided to lie down and die, with a couple of yelps on their way to their death.

> Amazon should have won in very few of the markets it entered. Instead, its competitors just decided to lie down and die, with a couple of yelps on their way to their death.

Once AWS started really making money, there's not many companies that could realistically beat Amazon. How do you beat them when they can use tactics like what happened with diapers.com? How many companies can afford to run what is likely their main revenue source at a $100,000,000+ loss every three months just to keep Amazon out of a market that wouldn't even be a top 5 revenue stream for Amazon?

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#96

Post by coredog64 »

TylerE wrote: post #76
nostrademons wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boeing's 737 Max debacle killed two plane-fuls of people . It's pretty hard to argue that either Amazon or Google has had negative effects on that magnitude.

So do you believe Ford deserves to exist? Because they’ve killed a lot more people through faulty engineeeing than Boeing. The Pinto fuel system alone killed over 900 people

Gonna need a citation on that. NHTSA says 27, with ~100 lawsuits filed against Ford.

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#97

Post by tomohawk »

glenstein wrote: post #16

I don't have a problem with this. But I wonder why there isn't similar willpower to pursue, say, telecoms, banks, Monsanto, Luxxotica, Disney, and the like. Why is it just big tech?

The big tech co's have become politically active by infringing on people's freedom of speech, etc. You can argue they're private, but that doesn't really matter. The telcos are private, but they can't drop your connection if they don't like what you are talking about. They can't drop the account of an organization that agitates for things they disagree with.

The big tech co's have made their bed, now they get to sleep in it.

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#98

Post by blululu »

chrischattin wrote: post #58
MattGaiser wrote: post #25

The big problem with this is the extreme mediocrity of every other industry. Amazon and Google are winning everything because none of their competitors have even attempted to do better than they did 10 years ago. Amazon should have won in very few of the markets it entered. Instead, its competitors just decided to lie down and die, with a couple of yelps on their way to their death.

DuckDuckGo has a better search engine than Google right now, imo.

I'm curious why you say this. I spent the past two weeks using Bing (which is the source of DDG results, but a little faster and more accurate). For most queries it was fine (finding things on Wikipedia), but last weekend I got into a project that required a lot of css and html (not my day job). There were a lot of cases where the search results were not even close to the thing I wanted. The experience led me to switch my default browser back to Google.

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#99

Post by AnimalMuppet »

megiddo wrote: post #68
glenstein wrote: post #16

I don't have a problem with this. But I wonder why there isn't similar willpower to pursue, say, telecoms, banks, Monsanto, Luxxotica, Disney, and the like. Why is it just big tech?

Telecoms usually pay for their monopoly privileges. This is just a shakedown. The same way Microsoft was deemed a "monopoly" and what? Unbundled explorer? Is anyone seriously worried about their monopoly now? There's always a new kid on the block. The DOJ is too slow to be effective at targeting tech monopolies. They should just quit before they look like a bunch of johnny-come-lately blowhards.

Microsoft was specifically deemed a monopoly in desktop operating systems. That was OK. The problem was that they were trying to use that to "leverage" their way into dominance on the internet, by pushing (really quite aggressively) users to use Internet Explorer, and by pushing (even bribing) websites to include "IE-only" elements. "Try to make using Netscape a jarring experience" was the way they put it.

It's that "leveraging" bit that was the problem - trying to use a monopoly in one area to destroy competition in another area.

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#100

Post by AnimalMuppet »

glenstein wrote: post #75
blululu wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider that Facebook has 3 different messaging apps, and Google has an unknown number of messaging apps. Both companies have strong internal incentives to consolidate their own messaging apps and yet these efforts have never succeeded. I'm not sure if having a single universal protocol is the best idea.

I was with you until the last sentence which I didn't understand.

I believe the idea is that, if those companies can't do it, even though they want to, then it may be hard to do (or at least to do well/cleanly). Requiring it to be done may therefore be a bad idea.
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