181–190 of 502 posts
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?
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Why is it dominant? Is Google is preventing competition from entering the market or is it because Google offers the superior product? Good luck with that in court.
Just because they don't stop their competition from entering the market would not change whether or not something is a monopoly. They have 88% of the US search market share which is often consider to be in the monopoly territory. Of course it may not be prudent to go after a company that isn't doing any malicious against its competitors.
What would the punishment even be? Forcing adoption of other platforms to artificially inflate usage rates? Breaking Google Search into two competing Google Mini-Search products that aren't expected to cooperate and push search #3 and onward out of the market?
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> 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.
> You are right, the capital cost of millions of servers worldwide, with security guards, and buildings, and cooling is zero. Not even close to the capital costs and margins of an airline. Compare AWS margins and capital costs with Amazons retail margins and capital costs for example.
The best data point I can find is that Google spent 13B on datacenter and office construction in 2019, which is about the same as the purchase cost of all 130 of Delta Airlines' 737-900ER aircraft (which is about 1/6 of Delta's entire fleet).
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DuckDuckGo has better human-centered results, but they miss a lot of the more technical stuff.
Try using bang syntax for more specific results. Ie: append `!so` to search Stack Overflow, etc. It's similar to Google's `site:stackoverflow.com` but much nicer.
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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?
Do you think Costco has a factory making paper towels someplace, next door to their factory making alkaline batteries?
0.https://www.siliconrepublic.com/companies/google-diversity-i...
If I bring up federal contracting, which is an industry of comparable size, and which is dominated by companies founded well over 50 years ago [1], and which is way more politically opaque, and whose funding they cannot as tax-paying US citizens opt out of, the response is never anything more than "meh".
I understand that one is more relevant to daily in-their-face life. These aren't dumb people. They read, argue, write, vote. But the choice of what to agitate for is so odd to me.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_100_Contractors_of_the_U.S...
Traditional monopolies "control supply of a good or service, and where the entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted."
In this case, the supply of a good or service (social networking, webpage indexing and searching) are not controlled by Facebook and Google because they aren't finite resources. Anyone can index the web and anyone can build a social network and Google/Facebook aren't going to crush you with lawsuits or some other nefarious tactic to maintain their position (AFAIK).
Entry of new producers of these services is not prevented or highly restricted. New social networks and search engines pop up all the time.
What Facebook and Google have is massive, large scale user loyalty. Despite alternatives existing (Bing, Mastadon, DuckDuckGo, Myspace, etc.), users are voluntarily choosing to use Google and Facebook. This is not a monopoly.
I think we need a new term for this situation.
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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…
When I think of harmful monopolies, I think that the worst ones are where a company owns a patent to a drug and refuses to sell it for less than 100x cost. But people every day can choose to type in any website into their search bar... and they choose to type Google. I don't see any reason why Google should be punished for that--unless they've done something bad elsewhere. It seems like a lawsuit will objectively mak…
Want to use your own email server? Not going to be a piece of cake and good luck if gmail decides against you. Want to use firefox? Gmail and youtube really will move heaven and earth to make you use chrome. Want to preserve your privacy in any meaningful way? Good luck because rest of the society decided to hand over everything to Google and its free counterparts.
These companies gravity wells are so strong that they reduce meaningful choices to a consumer. In fact, give them enough time and they’ll coerce the market to behave in a particular way.
As of now, to operate as a business on the internet, you can ignore Apple, Amazon or even Facebook. You’ll have a tough time ignoring Google. Across the entire planet.
There’s no doubt that Google’s work has a lot of benefits to humanity. But that is not a license to ignore the dark side of the coin.
IMHO they're not a monopoly, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. Traditional monopolies "control supply of a good or service, and where the entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted." In this case, the supply of a good or service (social networking, webpage indexing and searching) are not controlled by Facebook and Google because they aren't finite resources. Anyone can index the web and…