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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

#281

Post by bcrosby95 »

chrischattin wrote: post #48
quattrofan wrote: post #14

The big one is Amazon. The revenue from AWS funds the ability for them to crush the high street on the shopping side. They should be forced to sell off AWS as a separate company.

This is all beneficial for the consumer, no? Having a competitive advantage is not illegal. Someone correct me, but isn't the law's intent to protect people from abuse of monopolistic power? Which wouldn't be the case here.

The laws intent is debated. Some think it is there to protect consumers. Others to protect free enterprise and eliminate the ability to manipulate a marketplace - pro consumer or not.

Lately, the outlook of protecting consumers has won out in the US, as that is what the Supremes laid out as a determining factor in the later half of the 20th century.

But it wasn't always that way. And the laws aren't written that way.

In my opinion, focusing on consumer benefit is a red herring. We are all both consumers and producers. An economy full of companies shutting out competition through market manipulation may be good when I'm trying to buy something, but it's bad when I'm trying to find work, because they can dictate whatever terms they desire in that half of my participation in the economy.

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

#282

Post by nuclearnice1 »

c1b wrote: post #111
shadowgovt wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 paramo…

Funny how making books cheap is considered a failing.

I think you misunderstood shadowgovt’s comment.

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

#283

Post by reading-at-work »

rayiner wrote: post #155
WorldMaker wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telecom is a horse of a slightly different color though because they are intentionally granted regional monopolies over utilities. There should be better regulatory enforcement of these utility deals, but between regulatory capture and nearly trust-like brokered deals to swap regions among each other to best minimize any particular region's regulatory control and collusion opportunities between neighboring regions, a…

Telecoms aren’t intentionally granted regional monopolies. It’s illegal under the Cable Act of 1992.

WorldMaker's answer to this comment is great. I would TL;DR it by saying that while there are always multiple phone companies to choose from, there is usually only one cable or fiber internet company, which is what matters.

In every state I've ever lived, for example, Comcast is the only company that provides acceptable internet speeds. DSL and satellite providers don't even come close enough to count as competition. So Comcast has the localized monopoly on the infrastructure necessary to actually provide a good product.

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

#284

Post by a1369209993 »

thephyber wrote: post #156
jbeam wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The antitrust investigation is focused on X so Y doesn't really apply there. Antitrust prosecutions are heavily dependent upon shaping the "market" which supposedly is being monopolized. There is no good argument for antitrust against the Apple App Store if the market is "all transactional marketplaces where software can be purchased", but there is a good argument if the market is narrowly defined as "all transacti…

> "all transactional marketplaces where software can be installed onto iOS mobile devices"

This is clearly the case though? The App Store doesn't sell, say, Windows software, and iOS devices refuse to run software from (for example) the Google Play store.

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

#285

Post by baddox »

mushufasa wrote: post #227
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…

Not sure where you got your definition. The economic definition of a natural monopoly is where firms have increasing returns to scale. That means where firms can produce more product per unit cost as the volume sold of that product gets large. https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/1997-... A good example is electricity -- it's super duper hard to put up electrical wires all around a country. But once…

That’s a very simplified definition. I don’t think economists consider any market with significant barriers to entry and economies of scale to be a natural monopoly. From what I’ve seen, the term is usually used whenever the market actually has become a monopoly, or if it appears that the barriers to entry and economies of scale are so significant that the optimum number of firms is one.

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

#286

Post by foxtr0t »

nojito wrote: post #46
foxtr0t wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't settlement far more likely than losing all the way through appeals? And in what way is it straightforward? Does it not require a new interpretation of antitrust law? Google isn't using monopoly power to increase prices for consumers.

>Google isn't using monopoly power to increase prices for consumers. This is whole reason for the criminal trial. If they can prove Google stifled competition in the advertising business, it is going to be a cut and dry case.

Last I checked almost all antitrust laws are enforced through civil cases.

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

#287

Post by aspenmayer »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #126
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,…

What are you referring to when you say: ‘Google is by far the biggest proponent of this [end-to-end encryption]’? In what way do you mean?

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

#288

Post by mullingitover »

panopticon wrote: post #273
rayiner wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fox News is by a large margin the #1 cable news network. If search results were weighted based on user preferences you’d expect it to show up more, not less.

Note that "cable news network" is an important qualifier in that statement. The network newscasts (ABC, CBS, NBC) each see 3x Fox's news programming viewership.

Plus the entire cable market shrank 8% in the last year alone[1].

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/cord-cutting-accelerates-raisin...

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

#289

Post by dantheman »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #247
c1b wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny how making books cheap is considered a failing.

You could have made the same argument about Standard Oil - until the competition were crushed and prices went up. Which is why lower consumer prices aren't a valid defence against anti=trust. Nor is the argument that markets "naturally" lead to monopolies or (at best) oligopolies and cartels - even though empirically they do. So much so that setting out to create a monopoly is a bullet point on many unicorn-wannabe b…

During standard oils run, the price of kerosene, dropped from 35 cents to 8 cents, and their percentage of the oil market actually decreased significantly long before it was broken up.

https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-standard-oil-was-a-pr...

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

#290

Post by dantheman »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #247
c1b wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny how making books cheap is considered a failing.

You could have made the same argument about Standard Oil - until the competition were crushed and prices went up. Which is why lower consumer prices aren't a valid defence against anti=trust. Nor is the argument that markets "naturally" lead to monopolies or (at best) oligopolies and cartels - even though empirically they do. So much so that setting out to create a monopoly is a bullet point on many unicorn-wannabe b…

Antitrust protection has historical been used by lesser players to hurt their competitors and the public because they have political pull.
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