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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

#411

Post by scarface74 »

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 wouldn’t go that far. The only reason that the justice department is going after big tech is because of the President’s personal dislike of the “left coast liberal elite”.

Don’t you find it strange that a Republican administration is going after a company for anti-trust?

I am not saying that Google hasn’t unfairly competed against small business or they shouldn’t be sued, but this is purely political, not the Justice Department all the sudden caring about the little guy.

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

#412

Post by post_below »

akersten wrote: post #365
riazrizvi wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

> and then de-listed the original thing from their store

While they don't delist items, their algo favors products they sell directly to the extent that Amazon will get the buy box over a third party seller even when that seller is reputable and cheaper. Add that the 3rd party seller has to pay a sales fee to Amazon, often making it impossible to compete with them without approaching zero margin.

It's not delisting but it's the next best thing. If Amazon starts selling something you sell, your sales are gone, you were just free market research for them.

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

#413

Post by qwhelan »

thayne wrote: post #409
malandrew wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Most booksellers could have just sold their bookstores years ago and bought shares of Amazon and done far better because they simply can't provide a faster, cheaper and better experience for their customers than Amazon can.

> because they simply can't provide a... better experience for their customers than Amazon can That's debatable. If I want a specific book, sure. But Amazon simply cannot replicate the experience of browsing a bookstore looking for an interesting book to read. I cannot physically hold the book in my hands, flip through it's pages, maybe read a few excerpts, etc. And if I'm buying a used book, I can't inspect the actu…

We've come full circle - Amazon has a bookstore chain these days (Amazon Books).

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

#414

Post by scarface74 »

dimator wrote: post #88
xoxoy wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The antitrust lawsuit is focused on Google’s dominance of search. The specific question is whether Google has a monopoly on search. I think the case is pretty strong that it does.

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.

AWS is not that dominant. Azure is half its size and GCP is a serious competitor. Not only that, there are plenty of companies you can go to if you don’t want managed services and just want VPSs.

Besides that, Amazon itself admits that only 5% of Enterprise workloads are on any cloud platform.

Any company - or heck most tech nerds - can build our infrastructure to suit their needs without going to managed services. Whether they should is based on their business model.

Before anyone tries to “educate me” about what AWS offers, I know the ins and outs of AWS.

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

#415

Post by paganel »

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…

> Google's dominant market position was achieved through market competition not through impairing the ability of smaller companies to enter markets.

Googlebot was allowed to its thing pretty freely back in the day on the assumption that Google will remain a search company only and will not step on the toes of the companies whose websites it was parsing. That proved out not to be true.

What's more, if today I want to parse Google's web properties (let's say its GoogleMaps data) the same way that Googlebot used to parse the websites of the companies I used to work for I'll get banned almost immediately.

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

#416

Post by scarface74 »

barrkel wrote: post #114
dantheman wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, because the government going after private organizations with vague mandates is a clear way to avoid corruption. /S This is a continuation of politics trying to skim money off of tech and funnel it to thier favored constituents - it's straight up corruption.

Democracy is about setting the rules for society, including how to reallocate some fraction of private resources according to a popular mandate. This doesn't mean its corruption. You need more qualification to call it that. (Not saying that the Trump admin isn't corrupt. I'm rather saying that your statement is too broad, and it fits almost all generally accepted democratic governance.)

I wonder if you would say that if the government took your property under eminent domain so that Walmart could build a store.

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

#417

Post by md_ »

gfodor wrote: post #225
md_ wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure that’s inherently disqualifying. When it comes to questions of law and justice, it seems entirely reasonable to ask about similar cases, simply to investigate the equal and fair application of law, no? “Whatsboutism”, as I understand it, is a technique where one brings up ill-proven allegations that are unrelated to the matter at hand merely to distract. Here, the claim seems much more on point: it’s tha…

Law especially at the federal DOJ level is as much about which cases to pursue as it is about what cases have merit. Either no monopolists should be prosecuted or a select subset worthy of the opportunity cost should be. How big the subset is a question, and the proper subset could be zero, but it's not a contradiction to see selective enforcement of anti-trust. The opposite, where many big, massive cases are opened…

Sure, but the claim here wasn't (as I read it) that this is unusual, but that it's unjust.

If prosecutors are selecting the highest ROI targets based on some calculation of which cases they can win and which cases have the biggest consumer or market impact (or are most egregious), that doesn't seem especially problematic. If they're selecting targets for prosecution based on who has political connections and who does not, however, that's very different.

Taken to the extreme, it's "whataboutism" to ask about racial disparities in criminal prosecutions; if a defendant is guilty, who cares if some other accused perpetrator of a different race wasn't prosecuted for a similar offense?

The impartial application of law--at least with respect to considerations like race or political connectedness--can certainly conflict with the pragmatic considerations of prosecutorial strategy, and I don't think it's simply "whataboutism" to question that tension.

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

#418

Post by neotek »

jaydz wrote: post #86
xoxoy wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The antitrust lawsuit is focused on Google’s dominance of search. The specific question is whether Google has a monopoly on search. I think the case is pretty strong that it does.

Why is it dominant? Is Google is preventing competition from entering the market or is it because Google offers the superior product? Good luck with that in court.

"Good luck with that in court" only means something if the courts haven't been stuffed full of incompetent and dangerously unqualified judges.

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

#419

Post by bhl »

scarface74 wrote: post #411
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 wouldn’t go that far. The only reason that the justice department is going after big tech is because of the President’s personal dislike of the “left coast liberal elite”. Don’t you find it strange that a Republican administration is going after a company for anti-trust? I am not saying that Google hasn’t unfairly competed against small business or they shouldn’t be sued, but this is purely political, not the Justi…

> Don’t you find it strange that a Republican administration is going after a company for anti-trust?

Nope. If anything, there is past precedence from the 2001 Antitrust case against Microsoft [1]. Note in that case, it wasn't about whether consumers were directly harmed, but whether Microsoft was abusing its market power to prevent other entrants into the browser space. Arguably this is very analogous to what Google and Facebook are currently being accused of.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

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

#420

Post by jondubois »

shadowgovt wrote: post #91
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…

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…

The biggest factor which is not considered in antitrust law is the fact that large corporations, by virtue of controlling a lot of capital, have access to a larger share of all the new money which is created out of thin air and injected into the economy as credit.

Economists are quick to point out that the new money which is created of of thin air is not given outright, but rather, it is loaned out - Therefore, by virtue of having to pay it back, corporations do not have an unfair advantage.

I disagree with this conclusion because an entity's access to loans is based almost entirely on how much collateral they possess - This necessarily implies that those entities which have more capital are able to take out bigger loans and thus derive more profits from these loans.

For example, if you have $100K in a particular asset (e.g. stocks), you can use that as collateral to borrow an additional $100K and you end up controlling $200K worth of assets in total. So if the yield on those assets is 10% per year, you will end up getting 20% per year relative to your own capital. 20% of $100K is $20K.

So according to this principle, a company which has $100 million in assets can borrow an additional $100 million - This means that an asset class which can generate 10% yield can be bought on leverage to generate 20% yield on the initial capital. 20% of $100 million is $20 million. This means that $10 million of that profit was derived entirely from credit which was printed out of thin air by banks. That $10 million is free money and was given solely on the basis of existing capital.

This is why the rich get richer; it has nothing to do with value creation. Whenever banks print money out of thin air and inject it into the economy, everyone in the country who receives a salary in that currency ends up paying for that equally because of dilution in the value of their salaries. In effect, this means that, salary earners and small capital owners are subsidizing big capital owners. This is what is fundamentally unfair about our financial system and why big corporations have to be limited; they're not successful because they're efficient, they're successful because they own more capital than everyone else and can thus access most of the newly 'printed' fiat money.

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