The antitrust trial against Google is starting in September • Hacker News Board

Re: The antitrust trial against Google is starting in September

#281

Post by arrosenberg » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 12:53 AM UTC

jonas21 wrote: post #245

arrosenberg wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? Yes, probably. They all count against your 15 GB quota of free storage, after which you have to pay Google for more. It's basically the same model as Dropbox.

Dropbox doesn’t do email or office tools as far as I know; they have Paper, but thats not the same. I also believe the free tier is storage only, which is the cheapest element of the offering to deliver.

Re: The antitrust trial against Google is starting in September

#282

Post by Loocid » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 1:06 AM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #133

concordDance wrote: post #47

Won't this kill Firefox if Google gets told it cant pay browsers to put it as default? That would suck.

If Firefox in its current form can't exist without Google's support, then Firefox in its current form is a useless vassal of Google anyway. We can't have our one hope for an independent web be entirely dependent on the organization bent on owning the web completely! If their lifeline to Google is cut, maybe Mozilla will finally take us up on our offer and make it possible to pay for Firefox directly, rather than thro…

>then Firefox in its current form is a useless vassal of Google anyway.

Other than Google being the default search engine how are they a vassal of Google?

Re: The antitrust trial against Google is starting in September

#283

Post by huitzitziltzin » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 1:14 AM UTC

arrosenberg wrote: post #280

huitzitziltzin wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

Gonna need a cite on that logic. The MS case was about including IE with Windows for free. With Google, the products are paid for by the ad revenues instead of Windows and Office licenses. > Microsoft Teams is a great example of an anticompetitive bundle if you want one. Also true.

>> The MS case was about including IE with Windows for free.

This is exactly where the anticompetitive effects of bundling arise.

>> With Google, the products are paid for by the ad revenues instead of Windows and Office licenses.

That’s why it’s going to be impossible to argue that this is bundling in the anticompetitive sense.

Re: The antitrust trial against Google is starting in September

#284

Post by jitl » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 1:17 AM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #221

jitl wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has 95% of search market, but none of the other examples have 95% of anything. What are Amazon, Apple, Microsoft’s monopolies? They all have substantial competitors across their various verticals. Amazon: Walmart (goods), Netflix (media) Microsoft: Apple (OS), Google, Amazon (enterprise compute) Apple: Microsoft (O, services), Samsung (mobile), Google (mobile, services), Netflix (media)

Amazon: Walmart (goods), Netflix (media) Walmart and Amazon are both huge but it seems just wrong to say a brick-and-mortar store as equivalent to an online market place. The direct competitors to Amazon are Ebay, Baidu, Etsy, Temu and others, all of which are much smaller in the US (but some are huge elsewhere). You say that Facebook is a Google competitor because it offers eyeballs and because people sometimes go t…

I go to Walmart a bit less frequently than I go to Amazon in person (Fresh or Whole Foods), but I order from Walmart quite frequently. Their online delivery services are very competitive and comparable to Amazon's. If Amazon is out of stock on an item or showing long delivery time, I'll order from Walmart instead. Most recently I ordered a Synology RT6600AX Wifi router/media server because Amazon had 2 week delivery time, and Walmart had 2 day.

Re: The antitrust trial against Google is starting in September

#285

Post by summerlight » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 1:19 AM UTC

riku_iki wrote: post #252

summerlight wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think they very tied together because all google services run on the same internal infra and use shared collected data, and for example moving ads out of google and force them to pay market cloud prices, deal with all bugs and complexity other market players are facing and more importantly cut from data collected internally at google will produce significant damage on them.

There is no good way to prevent a proposed "G Infra" and other broken up entities such as "G Ads", "G Search", etc etc to make a preferential deal to share the infrastructure since "G Infra" has never been a monopoly in the market. If you want to do that, you gotta go through another multi-year legal fights which is destined to fail. You might be able to prevent "G Search" from doing some anti-competitive stuff, but at the point it's not that different from just forcing corrective measures except breaking up is a much harder, risky and time consuming goal.

Breaking up based on geographic location worked well for conventional monopoly because those companies were usually organized in a geographically cohesive way and they don't have good incentives to form another cartel across the continent. For Google, it's already structured in a way to reinforce network effects in every way, so this is a completely different story. The right approach to tackle this problem is a more pin-pointed regulation, such as DMA. EU is doing the right thing for those big techs while the US is wasting its precious time and energy.

Re: The antitrust trial against Google is starting in September

#286

Post by charrondev » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 1:22 AM UTC

bbor wrote: post #207

lolinder wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that antitrust is too reactive, especially in tech, but when it hits the real world your proposed solution would just lead to a new Byzantine maze like our current tax code. We'd get a whole new industry built up around helping corporations to technically stay under the thresholds by exploiting loopholes (and another industry for lobbying for those loopholes to be expanded).

This could be used as a criticism of literally any law of any kind.

Precisely. Laws and regulations are overly complex, and as a result open many opportunities for corporations pay for carve outs for themselves, enriching themselves at the expense of the public.

Re: The antitrust trial against Google is starting in September

#287

Post by HWR_14 » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 1:23 AM UTC

huitzitziltzin wrote: post #187

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…

I tried rewriting your comment as it could have been written a few decades ago:

> On the other hand, the case that Microsoft is going to make (and which I think is going to be really hard for the government to overcome) is this: we (Microsoft) give our product away for free and so do our competitors. What’s more, the cost of switching browsers is literally zero: just download Netscape instead of Internet Explorer.

> If customers are choosing our browser among two free options, then our product is better. It’s going to be very difficult to establish that there’s an abuse of dominant position in that case. (There is other behavior by Microsoft which is more questionable, but in browsers they are on firm ground.)

Re: The antitrust trial against Google is starting in September

#288

Post by HWR_14 » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 1:25 AM UTC

huitzitziltzin wrote: post #219

scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On the contrary, antitrust law has a lot of rules about using dominance in one industry to prop up another.

Re: The antitrust trial against Google is starting in September

#289

Post by joshuamorton » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 1:25 AM UTC

wak90 wrote: post #277

joshuamorton wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am aware of the legal duty. The legal duty is to maximize shareholder value but not explicitly break the law. 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 theoreti…

> The legal duty is to maximize shareholder value but not explicitly break the law.

It's not though!

The legal duty is to act in the best interests of shareholders. Avoiding the risk of regulatory scrutiny is in the interests of shareholders. The way a lawsuit like this would work is that you'd go to discovery and short of the CEO explicitly stating that they were tanking share prices (and not disclosing that at the time), the lawsuit would get thrown out.

> monopolistic power

What is monopolistic power that isn't anticompetitive? Either what you're saying here is "Companies would engage in anticompetitive behavior and avoid scrutiny" in which case that's a regulatory failing, or you're saying "companies would engage in legal practices I personally dislike, and not attract scrutiny as a result", which is totally fine.

> And it's not theoretical, there are many examples not least of which is Microsoft

I'm not sure what you're saying, Microsoft wasn't broken up.

Re: The antitrust trial against Google is starting in September

#290

Post by ewoodrich » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 1:26 AM UTC

GeekyBear wrote: post #185

stale2002 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since it seems like you are not aware, you should know that the functionality available for iMessage is different on other platforms. That may be causing your confusing here. You weren't aware of the functionality difference that Apple prevents other platforms from using with their design choices. I'd recommend that you research which functionality is prevented on other platforms, since you didn't seem to know about…

Are we both talking about a text messaging app that can send text messages to any device that supports the universal SMS standard? That's not blocking. A good example of blocking is not allowing any developers on a competing smart phone platform to write an app that allows users to access your monopoly internet video platform.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...

Apple is pretty clearly blocking Google (or any other Android app developer) from implementing this functionality and greatly benefits from it. Particularly relevant for the age demographic this thread originally referenced.