Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 502 posts

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

#341

Post by papeda »

elliekelly wrote: post #295
papeda wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're saying that both "adding search engine choice" and "removing search engine choice" are monopolistic tools for Google?

I'm saying Google added search engine choice to Chrome in order to create the illusion of competition in a monopolized market. If Google didn't have monopoly power in the search engine market they never would have added search engine choice to Chrome in the first place for the same reason Starbucks stores don't sell bags of Dunkin' Donuts coffee beans. A rational enterprise in a competitive market doesn't benevolentl…

Hm. If I understand the cellophane paradox, it says that the "substitutes exist" does not imply "there is no monopoly".

That seems different from your argument, which I understand to be "only a monopolist would make it easy for consumers to choose a competitor". But again, the conclusion that Google is a monopolist seems to be baked into this logic -- would you really say Google is not a monopolist if they did not offer search engine choice?

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

#342

Post by FpUser »

mrkramer wrote: post #54
pge wrote: post #20

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…

Well, everybody starts small and nice. Remember "do no evil". Then as the thing grows suddenly everything is changing and one day it can become a monster.

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

#343

Post by xjsuueueje »

pge wrote: post #20

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…

I don't really see the problem with the current definition of a monopoly if consumers are saving money. The Europeans focus more on the sorts of effects you're talking about and they're far from famous for their efficient businesses practices or low consumer prices. Or is the idea that uncompetitive small businesses are valuable in a totally real but difficult to measure way?

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

#344

Post by sciurus »

shadowgovt wrote: post #131
c1b wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny how making books cheap is considered a failing.

Right? That's the thing; it's not. Not by consumers, anyway. Now, French book-sellers, on the other hand, appreciate the law that keeps them in business for aesthetic reasons, whether or not it makes economic sense or they can stay financially competitive when the price of data transmission has crashed past too-small-to-meter-per-word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lang_Law

This is something interesting I was completely unaware of. It's not just France, lots of countries have legally fixed book prices.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_book_price

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

#345

Post by yeetman21 »

inapis wrote: post #189
davidajackson wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You really can’t compete against free. A large number of people use Google properties because they are free. Existence of a free product will pretty much decimate a large number of business models. Give it enough time and these companies will create gravity wells that start distorting society. Google’s network effects are so strong that as a consumer or a producer you cannot run away from them. Want to use your own e…

>you can ignore Apple, Amazon or even Facebook Wat is AWS? You can ignore google if you want to. I'm on firefox and I use gmail. Many companies I know use Outlook for their mail

Hard is not the same as impossible

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

#346

Post by papeda »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #319
marmada wrote: post #302

A take: monopoly in tech is good. Because Google/Amazon/FB have so much money they can do things that push tech forward as a whole. Think about the revolutionary improvements Google has made towards data centers, AWS, and all the research/open source contributions these companies have done. Unlike other monopolies (telecom, defense contracting) etc. where the monopoly is used to stagnate innovation (see Comcast being…

Google/Amazon/Facebook have each served to stagnate tech, not push it forward. If you read their headlines, sure, you'll believe they're doing groundbreaking things. But in reality, these behemoths have killed thousands of innovative startups to protect their cash cows. The uncommitted experiments they run, meanwhile, never amount to anything useful for the world. There were better social networks than Facebook, but…

> Healthcare has to do business with Google. Defense has to do business with Google.

Can you elaborate on this? Neither industry seems to rely on ads or SEO or app stores.

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

#347

Post by dragonwriter »

dodobirdlord wrote: post #338
v7p1Qbt1im wrote: post #335

I think it‘s kind of funny that there was an article today about Google‘s Pixel division being disjointed and not integrated enough with the Android division. Maybe part of the reason for the publics perception of Google‘s teams and divisions seemingly operating in an independent and chaotic manner is a way of minimizing the attack surface for antitrust accusations.

Integration is hard. The amount of work to keep good integration between all services in a business grows as the square of the number of services. Missing “obvious” integrations is just a natural consequence of being large.

> The amount of work to keep good integration between all services in a business grows as the square of the number of services

That's true if each of the services directly integrates with each of the other services—or, more generally, if the number of integrations per service grows proportionally to the total number of services.

But the number of service interactions per service seems, IME, to increase sublinearly with number of services, and a decreasing marginal rate.

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

#348

Post by yeetman21 »

falcolas wrote: post #272
dimator wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some truth to this. For many years, Google allows users the ability to wholesale export all of their data (perhaps as a defense for this moment in time). If the consumer market wanted an alternative, wouldn't there be competing companies by now that would ingest all that data and give you matching mail, docs, video, etc, services? On the advertising front, Google is no longer the only game in town, so by defi…

> On the advertising front, Google is no longer the only game in town, so by definition not a monopoly. Who are their competitors (I've not heard of one that isn't directly tied to a platform (a'la facebook))? How is the market segmented between Google and their competitors? If google had, as an example, 80% of the market share, it could still legitimately be considered to be a monopoly, even if it had 1000 competito…

>Who are their competitors (I've not heard of one that isn't directly tied to a platform (a'la facebook))?

What is 2+2 and don't tell me 4.

Google had 102 billion dollars worth of adds to Facebook's 67 and Alibaba's 30~

It has nowhere close to a monopoly on ads

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

#349

Post by dodobirdlord »

olliej wrote: post #174
bgorman wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

For advertising it is, especially since they were allowed to purchase their only real competitor years ago.

I think the snarky response here would be “When did Google buy Facebook?” If you’re willing to restrict the scope of the “internet advertising market” to just specifically the things that Google dominates, then duh, Google has total control of “internet advertising”. And yet, there’s another multi-hundred billion dollar company that makes most of its money by advertising on the internet. Scoping markets in this way is nonsense. It a marketer wants to market products on the internet, are they going to put all of their money into Google because it’s the only way to advertise on the internet? Obviously not. And further, therefore there is obviously not a monopoly.

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

#350

Post by 0xEFF »

elliekelly wrote: post #87
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…

> Even in Google Chrome you can pick DuckDuckGo and Ecosia as your default search engine. And making this argument is exactly why they added search engine selection. They wanted to be able to point to this tiny insignificant detail that might cost them a negligible fraction of Chrome searches and hold it up as market competition when the inevitable antitrust suit came along. Have you ever heard of a for profit compan…

IE being the mandatory browser played a big role in the antitrust suite against Microsoft. Afterwards they had to build controls to allow other browsers to be the default for the OS. Perhaps that played a larger role in the decision to allow the user to change the default search engine.
Post reply on HN