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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

#381

Post by dodobirdlord »

dragonwriter wrote: post #347
dodobirdlord wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

Even the effort of being on the lookout for whether two services should naturally integrate with each other scales superlinearly. Eventually you reach a point where most teams don't even know of the existence of most teams.

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

#384

Post by monadic2 »

papeda wrote: post #352
pdonis wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> here the monopoly leads to more innovation More innovation in what? And as compared to what? The innovations you mention are all addressing issues that only huge tech giants like Google have anyway. And they are all funded by the ad-supported business model, which IMO is a negative that outweighs those positive contributions. Plus, the ad supported business model means users only get the benefit of any innovations…

> If this hypothesis were correct, we would have expected to see lawsuits against those other monopolies during, say, the Obama administration. But we didn't. This presupposes that the DoJ has always been a political weapon.

> This presupposes that the DoJ has always been a political weapon.

Of course it has. Look at the war on drugs and lack of prosecution when democrats enter power. Both parties use the DoJ to push their own agenda and perception. Frankly the expectation that the DoJ be non-partisan (much like the supreme court!) is naive and the democrats cripple themselves by even articulating this expectation.

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

#385

Post by ridewinter »

b3kart wrote: post #266
judge2020 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Google search engine didn't have anything to build off of when it was introduced since it was using an algorithm and not ML. You could create a search engine today without utilizing any click data outside of "what link did this user click on the result page and did they search for a similar query or try another link as their next action". In fact, this is already happening. DDG is building its own crawler (I ofte…

Sure, but when Google have been starting out they didn’t have to compete with...Google (as it is today). While companies that would like to enter the market now have to. And Google has a massive competitive advantage: their data and their scale. Not saying that regulation will necessarily help, and it’s not Google’s fault that they’re so good, but it’s silly not to admit that it’s hard to enter the search market toda…

They said the same thing about Microsoft. Along came Google destroying them in an ancillary arena. Expect that trend to continue in the future.

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

#386

Post by rahimnathwani »

thayne wrote: post #379
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…

I think there is an argument about wealth inequality there. Wealth that previously was distributed among local bookstores is now concentrated in a single company and it's shareholders. That's a pretty naive analysis, but I suspect Amazon's monopoly power has contributed to America's increasing wealth inequality.

Amazon probably has more shareholders today than the total number of people who have ever owned a share of a local bookstore.

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

#387

Post by m463 »

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…

if you had perfect information on everyone, you could have personalized pricing, and people would pay more, some much more.

And google has arguably the best information in the world since identifying specific people is their core business.

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

#388

Post by [deleted] »

riazrizvi wrote: post #337
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…

No, no, no. Amazon disrupted the grip that publishing houses had on publishing, they have democratized writing. Publishers and bookstores had restricted markets that were dictated by a few big publishing houses. Amazon disrupted that, which has lead to far more books being written. Books that have been self-published. How on earth is that considered a failing? Bookstores are no longer viable, because Amazon has obvia…

[deleted]

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

#389

Post by malandrew »

jonas21 wrote: post #376
akersten wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon's problem is in the use of data metrics on its giant store to create products that compete with its partners. The Amazon Essentials line is anticompetitive IMO, because as the operator of such a large platform, Amazon has a responsibility to the US economy. Curious on your thoughts about Kroger/Great Value/Archer Farms (Target) brand items? At least Amazon marks them clearly as house-brand, Archer Farms is p…

I agree that all major retailers have store brands that are not easily distinguishable -- but Amazon kind of takes it to a whole new level: https://www.vox.com/2018/4/7/17208804/amazon-private-label-b...

All they are doing is learning what is worth white-labeling. They still need to manufacture a product that is equal to or better than what it is competing with. The overwhelming majority of these products are absolutely generic things for which there are already many alternatives and Amazon is adding one more.

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

#390

Post by ciarannolan »

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.

You're surprised that upstarts aren't able to compete with a monopolistic power? This take completely misses the point.
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