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U.S. states file updated antitrust complaint against Google

reuters.com

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Re: U.S. states file updated antitrust complaint against Google

#71

Post by epistasis »

mabbo wrote: post #53

As more data comes out about Google, Apple, Amazon, one simple underlying thing becomes clear: a single company cannot be trusted to operate a marketplace while also being a participant . Apple's App Store insider knowledge lets them discover popular apps, then boot them off the platform when they decide to compete. Amazon sees what products are successful and profitable, then makes knock-offs which they promote over…

> Amazon sees what products are successful and profitable, then makes knock-offs which they promote over the originals. And now, reading into this, Google is manipulating their ad markets using inside knowledge.

This is nothing new, as brick and mortar retailers have store brands for popular products as well.

While I'm glad that the move to the internet lets us reevaluate some of the social relations, I have a reeeeaaaaal hard time finding any way that this sort of thing harms consumers.

Re: U.S. states file updated antitrust complaint against Google

#72

Post by AnthonyMouse »

MereInterest wrote: post #58
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it is a safe bet that there will always be new monopolies developing. There are always new markets, and benefits often don't scale linearly with growth. Find a monopoly and you'll probably find a regulation propping it up. For many of these tech companies it's DMCA 1201 and other things that prohibit adversarial interoperability. If you have a law that lets you boot competitors out of adjacent markets once…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

This tech stuff isn't a natural monopoly.

The defining characteristic of a natural monopoly is that customer is paying a large amount per unit to cover costs that stay the same no matter the amount of usage. The per-unit cost for most of this tech stuff is approximately zero, and the ones that aren't zero (e.g. semiconductor manufacturing) have significant unit production costs and are not a natural monopoly either.

It's also questionable whether even "natural monopolies" would be monopolies absent regulation. It's more efficient to have a single power grid, but if there was no law granting a statutory monopoly to a single provider and the existing provider became abusive, somebody would build a parallel power grid. Because having two would cost twice as much as having one, but that's still less than paying five times as much to an unrestrained monopolist. So the result of unregulated "natural monopoly" still isn't a monopoly, it's just competition which is unusually inefficient.

Re: U.S. states file updated antitrust complaint against Google

#73

Post by brutal_chaos_ »

epistasis wrote: post #71
mabbo wrote: post #53

As more data comes out about Google, Apple, Amazon, one simple underlying thing becomes clear: a single company cannot be trusted to operate a marketplace while also being a participant . Apple's App Store insider knowledge lets them discover popular apps, then boot them off the platform when they decide to compete. Amazon sees what products are successful and profitable, then makes knock-offs which they promote over…

> Amazon sees what products are successful and profitable, then makes knock-offs which they promote over the originals. And now, reading into this, Google is manipulating their ad markets using inside knowledge. This is nothing new, as brick and mortar retailers have store brands for popular products as well. While I'm glad that the move to the internet lets us reevaluate some of the social relations, I have a reeeea…

It's a difficult argument, but perhaps one on quality could be made (IANAL and maybe talking out my ASS). By having Amazon promote their lesser-quality-but-supposed-same-product the consumer is being hurt. I argue this as I have spent too much on Amazon Basics. One specific case, USB cables, I had to go buy am alternate brand of the same product soon thereafter.

Re: U.S. states file updated antitrust complaint against Google

#74

Post by epistasis »

brutal_chaos_ wrote: post #73
epistasis wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon sees what products are successful and profitable, then makes knock-offs which they promote over the originals. And now, reading into this, Google is manipulating their ad markets using inside knowledge. This is nothing new, as brick and mortar retailers have store brands for popular products as well. While I'm glad that the move to the internet lets us reevaluate some of the social relations, I have a reeeea…

It's a difficult argument, but perhaps one on quality could be made (IANAL and maybe talking out my ASS). By having Amazon promote their lesser-quality-but-supposed-same-product the consumer is being hurt. I argue this as I have spent too much on Amazon Basics. One specific case, USB cables, I had to go buy am alternate brand of the same product soon thereafter.

Agreed that this will happen, but I also think this is exactly the same thing that's expected of store brands: cheaper, but could be of lower quality.

Re: U.S. states file updated antitrust complaint against Google

#75

Post by riazrizvi »

ngngngng wrote: post #67
mabbo wrote: post #53

As more data comes out about Google, Apple, Amazon, one simple underlying thing becomes clear: a single company cannot be trusted to operate a marketplace while also being a participant . Apple's App Store insider knowledge lets them discover popular apps, then boot them off the platform when they decide to compete. Amazon sees what products are successful and profitable, then makes knock-offs which they promote over…

Does this only go for internet companies? Or do you think it applies to Walmart selling its own Equate brand of everything or Costco selling its own Kirkland brand of everything?

If 92.47% of all stores in the USA were only Walmart then yes, there would be a national interest in determining how grocery store competition had been destroyed/denied and we would want to fix it.

In such a situation you would see a degradation of store product quality vs price. It might not be so clear with internet search because Google’s ascendence was coincident with innovation that it has hoovered up. But once you see competition restored, with things like the return of a Search API, or of more transparent ranking metrics, or of customizable ranking algorithms then you will begin to see what you are missing.

Re: U.S. states file updated antitrust complaint against Google

#76

Post by klipt »

hnxs wrote: post #70
ngngngng wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this only go for internet companies? Or do you think it applies to Walmart selling its own Equate brand of everything or Costco selling its own Kirkland brand of everything?

Can you explain how Costco is relevant here when they make most of their money off membership fees and not sales?

Would you say the same about Amazon promoting its own brand, if Amazon made more money off Prime than sales?

Re: U.S. states file updated antitrust complaint against Google

#77

Post by mjevans »

brutal_chaos_ wrote: post #73
epistasis wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon sees what products are successful and profitable, then makes knock-offs which they promote over the originals. And now, reading into this, Google is manipulating their ad markets using inside knowledge. This is nothing new, as brick and mortar retailers have store brands for popular products as well. While I'm glad that the move to the internet lets us reevaluate some of the social relations, I have a reeeea…

It's a difficult argument, but perhaps one on quality could be made (IANAL and maybe talking out my ASS). By having Amazon promote their lesser-quality-but-supposed-same-product the consumer is being hurt. I argue this as I have spent too much on Amazon Basics. One specific case, USB cables, I had to go buy am alternate brand of the same product soon thereafter.

The Amazon brands I see as the ONE product they should (in theory) never allow co-mingling on and thus the safe one to buy for a known quality.

Re: U.S. states file updated antitrust complaint against Google

#78

Post by the_pwner224 »

ngngngng wrote: post #67
mabbo wrote: post #53

As more data comes out about Google, Apple, Amazon, one simple underlying thing becomes clear: a single company cannot be trusted to operate a marketplace while also being a participant . Apple's App Store insider knowledge lets them discover popular apps, then boot them off the platform when they decide to compete. Amazon sees what products are successful and profitable, then makes knock-offs which they promote over…

Does this only go for internet companies? Or do you think it applies to Walmart selling its own Equate brand of everything or Costco selling its own Kirkland brand of everything?

There are a few differences.

The big tech companies have a much higher market share. For phone app makers, the App Store is the only point of access to the majority of affluent Americans; Google controls access to the rest of the 1st world population (sideloading is possible on Android but 99.9% of normies won't use your app if it's not on the store). Amazon does have competitors and you can also run your own e-shop, but they are the gatekeepers for a large portion of the online sales market - getting kicked off of Amazon is going to hurt bad for any online retailer. Of course getting kicked out of Walmart is also bad, but there are lots of competitors that lots of people use (grocery stores which have regional chains as well as smaller local chains, Target, Costco, Amazon, etc.).

Which leads into the second point - Apple has a long history of integrating cool features/apps into their OS and then kicking out the original creator from the app store. This destroys the creator / original company and basically transfers the idea's profits to Apple. Retail stores and Amazon do make knockoffs, but generally the original product is still sold alongside it. In many cases the branded product is superior to the generic product and many people will pay extra for it; in many other cases the brand also supplies the generic label product so that's beneficial for both parties.

Re: U.S. states file updated antitrust complaint against Google

#79

Post by kymaz »

ngngngng wrote: post #67
mabbo wrote: post #53

As more data comes out about Google, Apple, Amazon, one simple underlying thing becomes clear: a single company cannot be trusted to operate a marketplace while also being a participant . Apple's App Store insider knowledge lets them discover popular apps, then boot them off the platform when they decide to compete. Amazon sees what products are successful and profitable, then makes knock-offs which they promote over…

Does this only go for internet companies? Or do you think it applies to Walmart selling its own Equate brand of everything or Costco selling its own Kirkland brand of everything?

The effects of costco and walmart's behavior is largely contained within their own retail space. Amazon.com has no such constraint.

I think my answer is yesno. It isn't about the action of making and selling the competing products, but about how the internet and FAANG scale changes the customer-business dynamics. Consider that when you browse wares in a physical store like Costco or Walmart, the selection is constrained to what can fit within a building, thus the absolute worthless garbage junk and knockoffs will be culled to make space for less return-prone items ( At Costco, I don't see 5 pages or aisles of identical products listed under different brands that are mechanically indistinguishable from 'kirkland signature' products). Costco also seems to care about counterfeits and whether or not something they sold was found to be bad (this has happened to me, a food item at costco was found to be the source of a few food poisoning cases and was traced back to a single item at costco, and costo went around calling everyone who had that batch on their purchase history to let them know). I've wound up with counterfeit pieces of junk off Amazon that I'm not going to go through the effort of refunding/returning/complaining about, so it's all slippage that AMZN gets away with. Returns and replacements are so fast at brick and mortar stores 5 miles away from home!

Re: U.S. states file updated antitrust complaint against Google

#80

Post by cgriswald »

klipt wrote: post #76
hnxs wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain how Costco is relevant here when they make most of their money off membership fees and not sales?

Would you say the same about Amazon promoting its own brand, if Amazon made more money off Prime than sales?

I'd say in the case of Amazon, store brands are missing the point. They can let sellers take all the risk of determining what the market will support, while profiting whether the seller is successful or not. If successful, Amazon can reach its own deal with the manufacturer and compete with the very same branded product, possibly at a lower price, without having to pay into the marketplace, and with the capability of manipulating the search results.
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