141–150 of 351 posts
The Indian govt imposed restrictions that a payment provider in India can fulfill max 30% of the total volume of transactions in an year [1]. After that, they have to restrict themselves. This completely avoids monopoly and concentration risks. This can be done for search as well which makes sure at least 4 players stay in the market at all times. Why isn't US govt doing this? 1. https://www.indiatimes.com/worth/news…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Should Apple exist in it's current form? If it weren't, the things that are integrated become available for others - meaning better products for all, no? What's the societal benefit of integrating all these advances in single companies?
Not so much because then, for example, you become Qualcomm and have 50 different customers all asking for different things from your chips and you reach a local optimum where you solve everyone’s issue a little bit but don’t actually do a good job. There’s a reason that Apple’s chips are so much better in terms of performance and energy efficiency. Similarly, it’s why Apple did the W1 first and it took a very long ti…
Yes, no other company but Apple could have pulled that off, but that’s only because Apple themselves are a monopolist with the market power to fight another monopolist.
That’s not a good thing. The solution to monopolies isn’t more monopolies. A much smaller company than Apple could have theoretically created a better processor than Qualcomm, but it just couldn’t happen due to multiple anti-competitive factors. Like how Qualcomm has a patent portfolio that gives them a monopoly on 4G modems, and can use that to force companies to purchase other components from them if they want a modem.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/qualcomm-us-ftc-apple-chips...
It's hard to tell if it's Google's dominance causing search to suck or just the web ecosystem naturally optimizing for clicks. I will say most queries with even vaguely commercial intent do seem to get the max or nearly a full page of sponsored links. I don't recall what it was like years ago but I'm pretty sure it is worse. I also think it's pretty clear the platform take-rate needs to be generally lowered across th…
Now any imaginable niche subject is drowned by a deluge of blogspam articles.
Interesting people moved behind walled gardens because who is going to bother building a webpage when you can just post a pic or 140 characters on a whim and move on with life.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But how is this the result of Apple engaging in anti-competitive practices? 75% of people choosing your product can not be grounds to breakup a company and the fact that it looks different for other age groups is just further evidence that Apple is engaging in fair competition.
Blocking iMessage on non Apple devices and generally making Apple stuff only work with other Apple stuff, not to mention their 30% fees on their app store while also not allowing other app stores, are all anticompetitive practices, which the EU is well regulating soon.
iMessage has always worked with any device that supports SMS.
Google, on the other hand, actively blocked Windows Phone from having access to Youtube. Even when Microsoft paid to write a Youtube app themselves, Google blocked it.
Google did the same thing and blocked Youtube on Amazon's Echo Show.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Read up on past monopoly busts, you don’t need an overwhelming market share to be broken up. Standard oil was down to 64% and that didn’t save it.
When antitrust proceedings starts against Standard Oil in 1904, they had 91% market share [0]. By 1911 when they were broken up they were down to 64%, but that’s because the case progressed. And after the breakup they had 0%. But I think if Standard had 64% in the beginning and there was a competitive market, they would not have been broken up. [0] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chart-evolution-standard-oi...
As to when the case started, it’s impossible to know what the minimum threshold was. It could just as easily been well below 64% as people where in monopoly busting push at the time.
The Indian govt imposed restrictions that a payment provider in India can fulfill max 30% of the total volume of transactions in an year [1]. After that, they have to restrict themselves. This completely avoids monopoly and concentration risks. This can be done for search as well which makes sure at least 4 players stay in the market at all times. Why isn't US govt doing this? 1. https://www.indiatimes.com/worth/news…
Because it would be incredibly unpopular, for one.
Can you imagine being in the middle of some work, Googling a term, only to be hit with "Sorry, we're over the government limit and can't fulfill your search"
Hacker News and Stack Overflow would be full of people trading tips about using VPNs to evade the limits.
People don't actually like having the government restrict them from using things they want to use.
The Indian govt imposed restrictions that a payment provider in India can fulfill max 30% of the total volume of transactions in an year [1]. After that, they have to restrict themselves. This completely avoids monopoly and concentration risks. This can be done for search as well which makes sure at least 4 players stay in the market at all times. Why isn't US govt doing this? 1. https://www.indiatimes.com/worth/news…
> Why isn't US govt doing this? Why isn't the UK, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, ... doing this? Because it's a pretty strong form of controlled economy that distorts the market. How would this work for search engines? Would you force people to use a different search engine than the one they want? (e.g. they type Google.com and end up redirected to Bing.com) ; or somehow just funnel revenue to other companies... then wh…
The Indian govt imposed restrictions that a payment provider in India can fulfill max 30% of the total volume of transactions in an year [1]. After that, they have to restrict themselves. This completely avoids monopoly and concentration risks. This can be done for search as well which makes sure at least 4 players stay in the market at all times. Why isn't US govt doing this? 1. https://www.indiatimes.com/worth/news…
> Why isn't US govt doing this? Because it would be incredibly unpopular, for one. Can you imagine being in the middle of some work, Googling a term, only to be hit with "Sorry, we're over the government limit and can't fulfill your search" Hacker News and Stack Overflow would be full of people trading tips about using VPNs to evade the limits. People don't actually like having the government restrict them from using…
Please ask about VPNs on Quora until the end of the month.
It's hard to tell if it's Google's dominance causing search to suck or just the web ecosystem naturally optimizing for clicks. I will say most queries with even vaguely commercial intent do seem to get the max or nearly a full page of sponsored links. I don't recall what it was like years ago but I'm pretty sure it is worse. I also think it's pretty clear the platform take-rate needs to be generally lowered across th…
Kagi stands to me as proof that search can be better if it isn't run by an ad company. Kagi deliberately downranks sites that are loaded with ads and trackers, and the quality of their results is much higher, with much less SEO blogspam. Unsurprisingly, having a high concentration of ads and trackers is highly correlated with having content that is intended to maximize views rather than provide utility. Google has a…
For instance, Google product search results would likely be greatly improved by always showing relevant reddit posts first. But this would last a very short amount of time until reddit would be completely drowned in junk. (I've seen people argue that this is already the case, but searching reddit still tends to work well for the products I search for)
We can be happy that Google search hasn't gone this way, and as a Kagi user you should be glad that it's not a more popular engine, as the quality of results likely highly depend on that just fact.
In a way the ads-filled product search results are better, because at least they're honestly trying to sell you the product you are searching for rather than making fake comparison sites pretending to be genuine content.
Antitrust laws are too reactive. We need proactive laws that break up companies if they grow beyond a certain size criteria. Ideally, the criteria would be aggressive enough to kill large corporations leaving behind only small to medium-sized businesses. The result would be markets with increased competition, more innovation, lower prices, more options for employment and self-employment, and the elimination of Big Co…