301–310 of 502 posts
This will not be an easy case for the states.
Unlike other monopolies (telecom, defense contracting) etc. where the monopoly is used to stagnate innovation (see Comcast being terrible), here the monopoly leads to more innovation. Smaller companies can't embark on Google-sized projects.
Sidenote: I'm pretty sure this lawsuit is just a political attack. It seems reasonable that other monopolies in healthcare/defense/etc. are much much worse, yet they aren't "liberal"/"blue" companies, so there are no lawsuits.
Disclosure: I'm interning at Google. I don't think this matters at all, but someone called me out on this in the comments.
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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…
Is it? Or is that what good regulation is for? What if YouTube and their competitors all nerfed and deplatformed popular creators because of advertiser pressures? Isn’t this a better argument for regulation?
Remember that the reason that Bork defined antitrust the way he did was because there wasn’t a methodical definition of where it should be applied in the 60’s, and the govt was arbitrarily interventionist.
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Break them up into what?
Well conceivably you could separate out the Facebook ad network and the Facebook social media, and possibly also maybe the IM systems (FB Chat/Whatsapp). I know virtually nothing about antitrust law, and I'm not a lawyer, so I'm speaking largely out of my behind, but those seem like logical-enough divisions.
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How though? It's trivially simple to change the default search engine. Just because a product is dominant doesn't mean it got that way nefariously. I'm sure if you added up all the R&D over the years in search, especially considering the lead time in market, Google's numbers dwarf others (I don't have a citation on that, but it stands to reason). Parallels could be drawn with Amazon and AWS's dominance.
Why is nefarious intent necessary? The rules for monopoly and abuse of market power don’t presuppose such negative motivations, just negative market outcomes.
Yes they do. The reason MS got put on the chopping block was because they began telling vendors that they would charge them more if they bundled Netscape or Java. Intel got slapped with a similar suite when they began telling vendors that they would charge more for their chips if they sold any configuration with AMD chips. Similarly Standard Oil did the same thing - once they began telling suppliers they would squeeze them out if they worked with any competitors they got broken up.
It's simply not enough to have a dominant position - you have to abuse it to get slapped with an anti trust suite.
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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.
This is no excuse to be the aggressor. "Republicans might do this" allows you to steamroll over anything set up to force compromise and bipartisanship. Once they're already doing something you don't have to feel bad about doing the same thing when it's your turn, but whoever is the first to tear down a barrier to naked partisanship is the party doing wrong.
My point was just that pragmatically, I don’t think it bit them in the ass.
I'm reminded of how I was so enamored by the internet during the age of the directory. Humans assembled information to share with each other, and there were different search engines you could use as well. It was just so much more interesting at the time.
There are still wonderful examples of information being assembled by humans like Wikipedia. But these types of sites struggle to have enough money to operate, while other companies just dominate everything, especially anything that involves money. That's how the market works.
But there are certain things the way having libraries, police, firefighters, maybe you can health insurance, where if profit is the only thing that's going to be considered, it just creates a society that is less worthwhile. Perhaps the search engine needs to be considered a public service.
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…
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…
And at the same time, they're taking steps to make it more difficult for Ad blocking software to be integrated into Chrome.
I'm glad they don't feel the need to bully other search engines out of existence, but that might have more to do with where their revenue comes from than any particular corporate morality.
> For example would YouTube be successful as it is today if it wasn't Google's resources and knowledge to skyrocket it?
You don't see the tight integration between Google's Advertising business and YouTube as a particularly unfair advantage? Are you sure they haven't operated at a loss on some or all of the product in order to bully smaller competitors out of the market?
Aside from the frontend code and the CDN, what is YouTube other than the advertising and other third-party integration anyways?
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…
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…
So? In the real world, antitrust isn't about how a company became dominant. The fact that a company is dominant is what matters. Legislatures know that having a market run by one entity is inevitably a bad thing. Google's success, its market dominance, is the very harm that antitrust is meant to address. How Google got there isn't relevant.
If the government deems an organization too big, there is always something on which to hang the prosecution hat. Price fixing, tying, vertical restraint, dumping... they will find something.
Do DOJ rules only apply to Google's operations in the US? Could DOJ also do this to overseas-based companies that operates in the U.S.? Say you break up Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc., and people begin to adopt the platforms like say, Baidu, TikTok, Alibaba, etc. which grow to 90%+ market dominance. Can DOJ bring antitrust lawsuits against Alibaba?