251–260 of 351 posts
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Isn’t the whole point that they’re tightly intertwined? You pay to advertise in the relevant search results of your customers.
That’s not the law, so it’s irrelevant to the legal issues.
So, what are the demands in this trial? Do they want to divide google? How?
So-called "break-up" may not be effective as expected and it's easy to workaround that for tech companies as they're less tied to physical infrastructures unlike conventional monopolies. It's likely that they'll got billions of fine as well as be forced to implement corrective measures on their anti-competitive behaviors, of course if they lose.
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Yeah and other countries won't follow suit. Congrats, you yield all the economics of scale to China. What now? "Export" the US's domestic laws to other countries like it always does?
We would be more efficient if we made the work week 80 hours minimum, at the small cost of people's happiness! China would stand no chance. In case I'm unclear, I feel that not keeping our economy diverse and fair because China might make more stuff than us if we do is very misguided.
No, we wouldn't.
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But is it free if it costs them billions? That is, saying that customers /could/ switch is not necessarily relevant. There is evidence that they believe paying for the "default" billing is worth a ton of money. Not just to Apple, but to Mozilla, too. That they could lose access to revenue streams by losing default billing is very relevant when that is also a large portion of how they are able to make that payment. Co…
>> That is, saying that customers /could/ switch is not necessarily relevant On the contrary, it’s the whole ballgame in a case like this. Google’s claim will be: “we have high market share because our product is good. Look - customers could switch for free if they didn’t like it.” The government cannot make a monopolization claim solely on the basis of high market share in this case. It’s not remotely persuasive. (I…
The discovery is what could kill Google, here. They will argue customers could switch, but any negotiations with apple to stay default are discoverable. If any of them note they fear losing share, that is pretty damning.
Note I fully agree with you on difficulty of position. But you don't pay billions for status that you think you earn on your merits.
Especially if you then charge other players to be top search spot for their own name.
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…
Programmers are often overconfident and think they can implement anything... except when they have to follow common sense regulation in which case it's always impossible or they come up with ridiculous straw men like you just have.
There are a million ways to curtail anti-competitive behavior. One, on the spot, example would be: not to stop people from making searches, but instead to tax at 100% everything over the 30% of searches.
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I ask this every time it comes up, but what exactly does Apple have a monopoly in? They don’t control majority of anything in any category that they participate in. They are a major purchaser of high end fab processes, but that doesn’t allow them to control PC, phone, steaming, messaging, audio, home integration, or any other market. They are one of the most vertically integrated large companies, but they are allowed…
These types of discussions on this site are pointless. I can tell that no matter what I say, you’re going to end up moving the goal posts. Why do I know this? Because you non sarcastically are trying to say that Apple doesn’t have a monopoly. The amount of mental gymnastics is takes to frame it that way is only possible if someone cares more about defending the honor of their favorite megacorp than finding any kind o…
As you say, many people disagree with you. It is very possible they have more of an argument than then just being idiots or shills or whatever disparaging label you want to give them. The question you are responding to is a legit one. People will continue to ask for justification whenever you proclaim Apple a monopolist. The fact they haven’t been convinced by the thousands of comments means your position isn’t as self evident as you think.
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> You are correct - market share is not an anti-trust violation in it’s own. I think that entire line of jurisprudence is a tragic mistake. The wording of the law is crystal clear: "shall not monopolize", not "shall not monopolize unless it's just a really good product". A 95% market share should not be allowed under any circumstances.
There are a whole bunch of edge cases you aren’t thinking about. Markets can be highly local (hospital markets, eg.), firms go out of business, new products enter new markets (smart phones, tablets), even defining “the market” is hard (does Sirius XM have a meaningful “monopoly” on satellite radio?). So your “make 95% market share illegal” idea is quite challenging (actually impossible) to work out
Advertising is not intrinsically evil but mix an incompetent and captured political class with the surveillance and personal targeting possibilities opened by fast moving information technology (the advent of the web and mobile) and you get the closest approximation to dystopia that has ever existed: Surveillance Capitalism [1], as first defined and analyzed by Zuboff. People have normalized that an advertiser is the…
I will happily take this "dystopia" over many places in the world. Of course, it would be nice if we could change some things, but opening the argument with this level of hyperbole makes the rest difficult to follow.