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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

#121

Post by ghastmaster »

eshamukhamedov wrote: post #24
ghastmaster wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever wonder why innovation takes place? Wonder why we are not still reliant on locomotives for transportation? Economic incentives for innovation and disruption are greater when a monopolistic entity is over charging for it's good or service. If they are not over charging then there is not as great an incentive to innovate or disrupt. If the latter is the case, why bust a monopoly that is providing a fair service?

> Economic incentives for innovation and disruption are greater when a monopolistic entity is over charging for it's good or service. Care to back that up, or are we supposed to take your, frankly, very unorthodox views at face value? Every industry I can think of with entrenched monopolies sees almost no innovation until things get so bad that they are finally disrupted: aerospace, energy, advertisement, telecommuni…

> Every industry I can think of with entrenched monopolies sees almost no innovation until things get so bad that they are finally disrupted: aerospace, energy, advertisement, telecommunications, and the list goes on and on.

Intel's virtual monopoly of microprocessors has led to AMD's recent advancements: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4247790-intel-vs-amd-battle... https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-vs-intel-cpu-market-sh...

Check out the historical market shares in the links. Markets have changed in time with respect to computing. People are opting for mobile devices which use arm processors(even breaking into server space). Unless the behemoths in the industry adapt, their industry may not exist in the future. That is innovation and disruption happening right now.

Intel had in 2018 90.4% of the desktop/notebook/server market with 96.8% of the server market share. Maybe this is only Intel vs. AMD stats. Are servers run with other processors?

Standard oil(Arguably the most notorious monopolistic company in the history of the United States) by comparison: "At one point, it was believe that they controlled somewhere between 88% to 91% of all the oil in the United States"

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

#122

Post by shadowgovt »

riazrizvi wrote: post #89
mrkramer wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's dominant market position was achieved through market competition not through impairing the ability of smaller companies to enter markets. Even in Google Chrome you can pick DuckDuckGo and Ecosia as your default search engine. Most of Chrome users probably never heard of those two search engines. For example would YouTube be successful as it is today if it wasn't Google's resources and knowledge to skyrocket…

Below is a link to a list of mergers and acquisitions by Google over the last twenty years, many of them were search engines and online portals. This is the type of thing that the Antitrust Laws were meant to prevent. However laws are only as good as the government's willingness to exercise them. Hopefully this signals the end of the second Gilded Age, and a return to the creative destruction that has made the USA's…

Not a fan of creative destruction in the software sphere, personally.

In a lot of sectors, sure. I'm all for someone building a better car.

What benefit does mass competition in the software service space give me? How many bespoke APIs am I expected to integrate against to build something useful?

Different for difference's sake is the curse of our industry.

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

#123

Post by dmitrygr »

iateanapple wrote: post #92
akersten wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

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

You are right, the capital cost of millions of servers worldwide, with security guards, and buildings, and cooling is zero.

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

#124

Post by Infinitesimus »

burkaman wrote: post #47
pb7 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Break them up into what?

AWS, Amazon Studios, Amazon the online marketplace, Amazon the producer of goods sold on that marketplace, Whole Foods, Ring, Twitch, whatever else they own

I don't think all of those will be viable businesses on their own without VC money will they?

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

#125

Post by iateanapple »

shadowgovt wrote: post #110
iateanapple wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 se…

> I’ve never had my searches for coronavirus related content restricted in any way by my ISP for example. Your ISP isn't a search engine. It's also regulated more like a utility, unlike Google. If your ISP started black-holing IP addresses for reason of the content they carried, there would be Congressional action (if the FCC didn't get there first).

That’s exactly right - we have plenty of options for redress against an ISP abusing its power at the local, state, and federal levels.

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

#126

Post by JoshTriplett »

aspenmayer wrote: post #2

'Both the Justice Department and a group of state attorneys general are likely to file antitrust lawsuits against Alphabet Inc.’s Google—and are well into planning for litigation, according to people familiar with the matter. 'The Justice Department is moving toward bringing a case as soon as this summer, some of the people said. At least some state attorneys general—led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republ…

The case against Google is "whatever we can throw together to pressure them to stop pushing end-to-end encryption we can't break". Google is by far the biggest proponent of this, and they have both the most popular browser and some of the most popular sites on the Internet, so they can very easily do so.

Whether you think Google is a monopoly or not, and whether you think they've done harm with that monopoly or not, I think this case is going to do net harm to Internet security.

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

#127

Post by MattGaiser »

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.

DuckDuckGo has better human-centered results, but they miss a lot of the more technical stuff.

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

#128

Post by rayiner »

akersten wrote: post #23

I will continue to believe that this is another tentacle of William Barr's political harassment of Google and tech in general until he leads the same crusade against other 'monopolies' of the same degree like Comcast, Apple, Boeing, Amazon, United Airlines, etc.

Market concentration for all of those companies is much less than for Google. Google has 91% of the search market. Boeing has 45% of the global airline market. Amazon has a similar percentage of the e-commerce market, and an even smaller percentage of the retail market. Apple had 39% of the domestic airline market. United has 15% of the domestic airline market. Comcast’s market penetration is under 50%. (That means they have less than half the market in the areas they serve.)

I don’t know if there is a political angle to this or not. But Google is objectively differently situated than the other companies you mention.

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

#129

Post by iateanapple »

subsubzero wrote: post #66
akersten wrote: post #23

I will continue to believe that this is another tentacle of William Barr's political harassment of Google and tech in general until he leads the same crusade against other 'monopolies' of the same degree like Comcast, Apple, Boeing, Amazon, United Airlines, etc.

Not saying google isn't a monopoly, it classically is, same with facebook. But I wonder if Goog wasn't a majority "blue" company would he aggressively go after them. The problem is there are so many oligarchy's controlling industries. Chips, well its a two or three company game(intel, amd, ARM). Lets look at airlines, well its united, delta, american etc. Communications(cell phones), ATT, Verizon, Sprint/Tmobile. Ame…

> But I wonder if Goog wasn't a majority "blue" company would he aggressively go after them.

If Google wasn’t a majority “blue” company they would have been trust busted under Obama.

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

#130

Post by jbeam »

bgorman wrote: post #106
subsubzero wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not saying google isn't a monopoly, it classically is, same with facebook. But I wonder if Goog wasn't a majority "blue" company would he aggressively go after them. The problem is there are so many oligarchy's controlling industries. Chips, well its a two or three company game(intel, amd, ARM). Lets look at airlines, well its united, delta, american etc. Communications(cell phones), ATT, Verizon, Sprint/Tmobile. Ame…

The government intentionally created the Airline oligopoly by banning foreign airlines from operating domestic flights in the US, and further by allowing United, American and Delta to form joint-ventures with foreign airlines to control prices/schedules between continents. Is Google really a monopoly? Many people use Outlook, iPhones, Apple Maps, AWS, Bing, HERE maps etc...

The antitrust investigation is focused on online advertising. So Outlook, iPhones, maps, AWS doesn't really apply there. "Many people" might use Bing, but Google dwarfs it in market share.

I'm not particularly familiar with the infrastructure of the ad business, but my layman's view is that alternatives are slim outside of Google for search engine and the more general web and Facebook for specifically social media.

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