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United States vs. Google

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Re: United States vs. Google

#311

Post by munk-a »

mqnfred wrote: post #302
username90 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure Youtube will overtake Twitch as a streaming platform within a year now. They have implemented the features they lacked a couple of years ago like premium subscriptions for channels. And since they advertise streams in your watch next recommendations in youtube you will get a lot of spontaneous people watching them easily, while you only go to Twitch if you specifically want to watch a stream. Some vid…

I think you make a very good point. I would add that in the short to mid-term, Twitch could also grow thanks to the pie getting bigger. Video streaming, I believe, is far from having peaked.

I agree - I think twitch is really failing to support the pre-baked video content though and that's a good way to hook new viewers.

If you're interested in some tips on a game and search for it (maybe "In game X I'm having trouble on this level") chances are you'll get some hits from youtube of people running the level as a walk-through - twitch highlights don't tend to be as indexed or as accessible since the metadata about what's actually in the video is a lot weaker by default.

Those hits on folks looking for a walk-through will end up with some conversions to stream subscribers and I think that's why Twitch is really destined to struggle.

Re: United States vs. Google

#312

Post by rstuart4133 »

shliachtx wrote: post #92
wwwdonohue wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sort of agree, but part of me also thinks that if a company builds the world's best mobile OS and search engine and ad platform and video streaming service and internet browser and mapping service... well, good for them! They built the best products and it seems like it would ultimately be anti-consumer to do anything about it. It's different if a company like Google establishes its dominance via one great product…

Except they purchased their way into many of these. Their advertising business was built on a number of acquisitions (DoubleClick, AdMob) - strategic acquisitions, surely, and they improved on them since - but it is not as if they bult the business from the ground up. The same goes for video streaming (YouTube - after attempting to create their own), and mobile OS (Android). With Android in particular it can be argue…

> Except they purchased their way into many of these.

They did. But youtube.com wasn't that big when they bought it. In fact by definition most of the things they bought (like maps.google.com) weren't big. The obvious corollary is Google is very good buy scaling something up while keeping it rock solid.

And, they are. Examples of original things that did come out of Google are Kubernetes, the Site Reliability Engineering Handbook, and pulling off something I thought was impossible: Spanner, a global distributed ACID database. From what I can tell they have constructed the fastest, most reliable distributed computing platform on the planet.

They are the Toyota's of the computing landscape: nothing particularly outstanding in any particular model of car, the secret sauce is the infrastructure and processes they've developed to manufacture those cars that ensures they are both cheap and reliable. And so it is with Google. They aren't particularly good at coming up with new products. In fact they often buy them. But then those products get moved onto best computing infrastructure on the planet. If the products are any good, they seemingly grow without effort to become a dominant player.

Re: United States vs. Google

#313

Post by akiselev »

tsycho wrote: post #222
shliachtx wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they purchased their way into many of these. Their advertising business was built on a number of acquisitions (DoubleClick, AdMob) - strategic acquisitions, surely, and they improved on them since - but it is not as if they bult the business from the ground up. The same goes for video streaming (YouTube - after attempting to create their own), and mobile OS (Android). With Android in particular it can be argue…

I see this oft repeated comment about Google acquiring YouTube, DoubleClick and Android. Yes they did. But the companies they acquired were tiny upstarts, which might have even died on their own. Google built them into what they are today, and deserve 90% of the credit for their current significance. The same applies to FB and Instagram as well, fwiw. Though imo, not as much for WhatsApp, which already had 400MM user…

YouTube saw the writing on the wall early - Google's capital allowed them to scale without paywalling or drowning viewers in advertisements like they are now.

The Android acquisition is a redherring - manufacturers started adopting Android en mass because it was royalty free(ish) and they had to compete against Apple's new app store mostly with feature phone OSes entirely unfit for the job.

Neither Youtube nor Google's selfless "donation" to the consumer electronics industry would have been possible without the ad business. IANAL but that looks like textbook predatory pricing (and in Android's case, can't be defended by pointing at Apple, since they don't participate in the smartphone OS market).

Re: United States vs. Google

#314

Post by gundmc »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #273
Siira wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> charging absolutely nothing for their competing product. Most people prefer this. What you're suggesting is to subsidize the rich by removing free products thus making everyone share the costs for the premium services. I.e., this is not a local maximum preventing the global utopia of premium services for the rich. The current design serves the world better than that exclusionary, elitist dream. (Though the market i…

In no way am I suggesting that we "subsidize the rich". I'm suggesting that we do the opposite, that we restrict and regulate the richest monopolies (Google) to preserve freedoms for the poor. We're very much at risk of being a world in which people either have to be rich or not participate in society to avoid privacy invasion by companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. If you're poor, you can have a fr…

> If you're poor, you can have a free email address, but that comes at a cost of allowing Google to read your email (and pass it to their ad customers) so they can serve you ads.

Google doesn't show ads based on email contents.

"When you open Gmail, you'll see ads that were selected to show you the most useful and relevant ads. The process of selecting and showing personalized ads in Gmail is fully automated. These ads are shown to you based on your online activity while you're signed into Google. We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads."

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en

Re: United States vs. Google

#315

Post by throwaway-sf »

FWIW, Google was the only big tech co to see a revenue decline YoY in Q2.

They have a valuation of around 1T, which is now less than half Apple, and a third less Amazon.

Search has naturally become less essential to accessing the internet when people are spending more and more time on closed platform native apps, streaming services, gaming, etc. They seem to have put all their eggs in the search basket, which looks risky in a world where the most popular platforms keep people off the open internet.

Re: United States vs. Google

#316

Post by autoexec »

cj wrote: post #258
garyfirestorm wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you want to punish them for being successful. I still haven't seen the harm to the consumers. They build search and ad networks and email and android. I use them all the time. I now have access to youtube and infinite amount of information on it on my fingertips.

> I still haven't seen the harm to the consumers. IMO the main problem is the existence of an institution that is (arguably) more powerful than any government in the world. That's not necessarily a problem on its own. It becomes a problem when those same institutions have a very small number of people with specially concocted classes of shares that give people like Zuckerberg majority control of the company despite o…

> IMO the main problem is the existence of an institution that is (arguably) more powerful than any government in the world.

Which is why the US government has been collecting all the data they can from google. It's a perfect means to perform mass surveillance on everyone and google has no power to refuse to hand that data over or even to tell anyone about it.

Re: United States vs. Google

#317

Post by anamexis »

throwaway-sf wrote: post #315

FWIW, Google was the only big tech co to see a revenue decline YoY in Q2. They have a valuation of around 1T, which is now less than half Apple, and a third less Amazon. Search has naturally become less essential to accessing the internet when people are spending more and more time on closed platform native apps, streaming services, gaming, etc. They seem to have put all their eggs in the search basket, which looks r…

They may have put all their eggs in the search basket, but it wasn't for lack of trying other baskets.

Re: United States vs. Google

#318

Post by afjl »

remram wrote: post #274
rayiner wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost nobody who went through the educational system in the last decade is even voting. People who are voting today were educated during a period of massively growing education funding: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/mar/02/dave-brat/...

In most states, your vote literally does not count. (mine doesn't for a different reason since I'm a foreign citizen)

Only for the presidential race. Everything else (local offices, local ballot props, state office/props) counts quite a bit!

Re: United States vs. Google

#319

Post by AnthonyMouse »

aikinai wrote: post #146
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's not really what it's about. The problem isn't that they came to dominate search, it's about what they do now that they have. They leverage it into control over browsers, video hosting, mobile operating systems. Which makes the monopoly stickier, and creates more of them which reinforce each other, because Google is the default search engine on Android and Chrome is the default browser on Android and Google…

I wasn’t arguing for or against everything Google has done, but pointing out that these dynamics are neither trivial nor inevitable as many people (like lucasyvas above) want to believe, and it absolutely does take a time-traveler to know which of today’s rocket ships will still be cruising in five or ten years. But one specific point, you mentioned leveraging Search to win in mobile operating systems, which stood ou…

> they provided the iPhone with all of their best features from day one

iPhone is the competing platform that wasn't flattened. Do they also provide all their best features on Tizen, Ubuntu Touch, PostmarketOS, PureOS etc.? Were they on Windows Phone before it was abandoned?

Re: United States vs. Google

#320

Post by fn_bb_sqr_pnts »

autoexec wrote: post #316
cj wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still haven't seen the harm to the consumers. IMO the main problem is the existence of an institution that is (arguably) more powerful than any government in the world. That's not necessarily a problem on its own. It becomes a problem when those same institutions have a very small number of people with specially concocted classes of shares that give people like Zuckerberg majority control of the company despite o…

> IMO the main problem is the existence of an institution that is (arguably) more powerful than any government in the world. Which is why the US government has been collecting all the data they can from google. It's a perfect means to perform mass surveillance on everyone and google has no power to refuse to hand that data over or even to tell anyone about it.

if we allow that this combination of market power (search + ads + channels of distribution like youtube, android) wld lead to mass surveillance, what prevents other companies from arising and abusing this power? Other countries would hv to go along. I don't think trading Google dominance outside the US for Baidu solves anything.
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