271–280 of 351 posts
There are very solid reasons the average human / American does NOT want more competitive as markets. Until anyone is willing to address those, this is us communally shooting ourselves in the foot because Google fell from popularity. Not much else to see here sadly.
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>we (google) give our product away for free and so do our competitors. Search is not Google’s product, it’s a way to get their product. Their product is eyeballs which they sell to advertisers. >the cost of switching search engines is literally zero: just type Bing instead of Google. If this is true, why does Google pay Apple billions/year and Mozilla millions/year to make Google the default search? You could be savi…
The government could make antitrust claims regarding google’s behavior vis a vis advertisers. (I’m sympathetic to some claims that could be made there!) Monopolization of the ad market is not the issue here, because the specific claim is that google has monopolized the search market. You can read that right in the linked article. Google’s payments to be the default are (as I already said) not obviously pro-competitiv…
That was always ludicrous. The only way for the FTC to win that case was to define the relevant market as "games produced by Activision". That would have made the merger anticompetitive by definition... but no more anticompetitive than Activision already was.
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…
The free market wasn't solving that problem. A new baby formula factory can't just be built to cover a gap that'd probably disappear in a year. But that leaves people in a shitty position for a year.
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Microsoft has over 90% of the desktop OS and Office software markets. It’s impossible to come up with a reasonable definition of monopoly that doesn’t include them in those markets.
It isn't about market share, but about anti-competitive practices. Is Microsoft abusing their market position to keep competitors out of the market?
If there was a company that controlled 100% of a market, but was committing no "abuse", that's still a problem.
We want competition. If there is no competition, then evidently conditions that prevent competition exist.
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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.
You are entitled to a sanguine view of the status quo. You are in good numerical company. A lot of perceptive and incisive thinkers are actually horrified.
Alternatively, people who live in a bubble and don't give a damn about real horror, like what is happening to the uyghurs, or child trafficking in the US, or the US government selling guns to drug cartels via operation fast and furious under president Obama, or any number of self-induced things that are genuinely bad.
The fact that Google has built a browser, indexes websites for searching, has an advertising business, and also a mobile phone operating system is NOT horror.
It is, at worst, a plot in an incredibly boring legal drama.
I appreciate the passion Matt Stoller brings to antitrust issues but his analyses are not good on the economics, to say the very least. I agree that some of google’s conduct is very questionable. It’s not obvious to me that paying to be the default search product is pro-competitive. On the other hand, the case that Google is going to make (and which I think is going to be really hard for the government to overcome) i…
"So if the government wins, we’ll see immense innovation and new entrants. If Google wins, however, then machine learning/AI will be deployed consistent with how Google, and perhaps Microsoft, chooses to deploy them, which is to say, slowly, un-creatively, and in service to monopoly power."
Specifically, the "slowly, un-creatively" part, which is what I really care about.
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>Also, as the 90s Microsoft case showed, just having a monopoly isn’t bad. It’s the harm caused by having the monopoly. Can you elaborate your thoughts here because the point of breaking up companies with monopolistic power is they cannot be divorced from monopolistic abuse of that power. It is written into US law that the company has a legal duty to it's shareholders. It seems your point is a distinction without a d…
Basically all of this is false. The legal duty to shareholders doesn't mean that companies need to violate the law. In reality, saying " we don't abuse our market position to avoid regulatory scrutiny" is acting in the interests of shareholders, and a lawsuit wouldn't go further. Otherwise you'd be saying that companies had a duty to break all laws in pursuit of shareholder value, which is obviously silly. And yeah u…
What do you think this looks like in practice? Because it makes logical sense to me that monopolistic companies would use their monopolistic power to come as close as they can with anti competitive behavior without attracting scrutiny which is why you break them up in the first place. And it's not theoretical, there are many examples not least of which is Microsoft.
I appreciate the passion Matt Stoller brings to antitrust issues but his analyses are not good on the economics, to say the very least. I agree that some of google’s conduct is very questionable. It’s not obvious to me that paying to be the default search product is pro-competitive. On the other hand, the case that Google is going to make (and which I think is going to be really hard for the government to overcome) i…
Not the only example, but an example most of us had dealt with....
If you are locking a product down so that I cannot choose why are you afraid of fair competition in a free marketplace Google?
I appreciate the passion Matt Stoller brings to antitrust issues but his analyses are not good on the economics, to say the very least. I agree that some of google’s conduct is very questionable. It’s not obvious to me that paying to be the default search product is pro-competitive. On the other hand, the case that Google is going to make (and which I think is going to be really hard for the government to overcome) i…
That's not a defense, though.
So the government is unlikely to prove anti-competitive outcomes by arguing an increased cost to consumer, but that's not what they seem to be arguing. Going from Ohio v. Amex, The other relevant ways to prove anti-competitive outcomes are through a decrease in product quality in the relevant market or market power and evidence of harms to competition.
The government appears to be arguing that product quality is lower and that Google has market power and has engaged in conduct that harms competition. If those are results from anti-competitive behavior then that is an antitrust violation, and should be.
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I wasn’t referring to the case specifically, but Google is absolutely bundling products in the formal, illegal sense as well. Would drive, docs and gmail be free if you divorced them from the ad revenue products?
>> Would drive, docs and gmail be free if you divorced them from the ad revenue products? If they are all free then it’s not a bundle in the antitrust relevant sense. Microsoft Teams is a great example of an anticompetitive bundle if you want one.
> Microsoft Teams is a great example of an anticompetitive bundle if you want one.
Also true.