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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

#191

Post by nerfhammer »

kamarg wrote: post #95
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…

Microsoft Azure is supposedly almost half the size of AWS already

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

#192

Post by jb775 »

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…

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

Certainly can't help them. However, I think that's a moot point if everyone can agree they are the most troublesome company in the "land of large companies". It seems like every few months I see outrage on HN over "Google increased pricing for $X service, but there aren't really any other options" situations.

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

#193

Post by xoxoy »

drusepth wrote: post #182
_-david-_ wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How would a government even go after a monopoly that isn't doing anything 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?

I don’t think this is about search dominance.

It’s probably about Google stifling competitors on their own search results page.

Yelp has complained forever that Google ranks their own reviews above Yelp.

Things like that.

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

#194

Post by lhorie »

onewhonknocks wrote: post #188

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…

"If you're not paying for the product, then you are the product" is how the old adage goes. If users are the product, then couldn't one argue that it's a monopoly over the supply of users?

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

#195

Post by dontreact »

onewhonknocks wrote: post #188

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…

No one can build a search engine as good as Google without the data flowing through it every day. That have so many click logs to train their models and see what works, there is just no way to compete.

If all Google engineers left at the same time, Google would still probably end up dominant by hiring new folks to get things back up and running.

No amount of human labor will be able to close that data gap.

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

#196

Post by artificial »

rayiner wrote: post #160
adventured wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> America is increasingly becoming a land of large companies controlling industries where the consumer almost always loses Increasingly? When wasn't that true? You have to go back to pre Civil War, where the economy was heavily geographically split due to movement/transport limitations, which mostly voids the discussion (it was very much a local and regional, agriculture-heavy economy, with limited manufacturing and…

This is an excellent point. Markets consolidate because mega-corps enjoy massive economies of scale. Do people remember what e-commerce was like before Amazon? You waited a week to get products in the mail. It was Amazon’s massive scale that made next day free shipping possible.

*Free with purchase: There's a membership fee and inflated prices for Prime. I'm glad for the competition since multiple retailers drastically improved their offerings.

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

#197

Post by sub7 »

About fucking time. Search is the big one but please don't neglect Android and Chrome.

And take Apple to task as well - their app store policies and new app signing requirements for OSX are absurd.

Amazon has just started abusing it's monopoly so they'll be in the next antitrust wave I imagine and get away here.

Don't even get me started on Whatsapp.

Consistently anti-user and competition crushing behaviour in tech should be dealt with forcefully. Not some 5 billion $ chickenshit fine please.

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

#198

Post by tomrod »

onewhonknocks wrote: post #188

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…

Dominant platforms.

Platforms are defined as connecting two (or more) sides of a market.

There is a lot of economic literature in this space over the past several decades. Glen Weyl is pretty active in the area, as well as many known economists over the years.

It's not user loyalty that drives this, typically, but rather ease of ingress / difficulty of egress (adoption/switching costs) into the various platforms. Integration among common services helps too.

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

#199

Post by dredmorbius »

onewhonknocks wrote: post #188

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…

"Monopolization Defined"

The antitrust laws prohibit conduct by a single firm that unreasonably restrains competition by creating or maintaining monopoly power. Most Section 2 claims involve the conduct of a firm with a leading market position, although Section 2 of the Sherman Act also bans attempts to monopolize and conspiracies to monopolize. As a first step, courts ask if the firm has "monopoly power" in any market. This requires in-depth study of the products sold by the leading firm, and any alternative products consumers may turn to if the firm attempted to raise prices. Then courts ask if that leading position was gained or maintained through improper conduct—that is, something other than merely having a better product, superior management or historic accident. Here courts evaluate the anticompetitive effects of the conduct and its procompetitive justifications.

"Market Power"

Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.

https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

Your humble opinion has little relation to governing regulatory law.

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

#200

Post by artificial »

abduhl wrote: post #109
setpatchaddress wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy that. The Republicans would have killed the filibuster when they were next in power. This was simple acknowledgement by Democrats of the changing nature of the Republican party.

"We struck first because the other side was going to strike first if we didn't!" Who knew that first-mover advantage existed in politics? Or perhaps this is better seen as a example of mutually assured destruction playing out in real life?

Two arms of the same beast :(
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