Google’s deal with Apple is def problematic but apart from that I really don’t think it’s a monopoly. Google leadership (according to public info) was in a panic about ChatGPT and rightly so. It was eerily similar to what Google once was at its inception: a no bs way to get better answers to your questions. Luckily for Google, hallucination is a significant issue. Just “GPT it” is already in the modern vernacular. Go…
Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious
141–150 of 524 posts
Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There has been nothing in my life so disillusioning as working on a Web app for a company that is more or less required to play Google's game. Have you built any iOS apps?
While true and a fair point, iOS is Apple’s platform in a way that the web is most certainly not Google’s.
Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious
#143The breakup that needs to happen is ads and search/youtube/etc, everything else would work itself out after that.
Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious
#144Yes, everybody is still super upset that Microsoft got hit by antitrust in 2001 and shifted heavily to B2B. We've really missed out on having more fantastic Microsoft software forcibly intertwined in our daily lives. I wish Microsoft owned all of desktop AND mobile computing AND the internet so I was forced to do everything via the fantastic Microsoft Windows! Darn these regulators for trying to allow competitors to…
Azure, VS code, Github, CoPilot... the emergence of teams...
> I wish Microsoft owned
A large chunk of the engineering stack?
Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're not. Textbook definition: "A market structure characterized by a single seller, selling a unique product in the market." Google Search has competitors and is not even selling its search product.
> Google Search has competitors and is not even selling its search product. The product is not search, it’s ad placements.
Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious
#146Google's "search results" are the textbook definition of a monopolized good/service. The whole thing is almost a casino, rigged to the point of absurdity. There has been nothing in my life so disillusioning as working on a Web app for a company that is more or less required to play Google's game.
They're not. Textbook definition: "A market structure characterized by a single seller, selling a unique product in the market." Google Search has competitors and is not even selling its search product.
And I would say that Google can fairly be called a unique product in the market. They are the default search engine on almost all browsers and operating systems, their mobile phone operating system owns 70% of the global market share, and most of these devices give Google's search engine preferential treatment, their name is synonymous with searching on the web, their market share is over 90%, they have more data on their users than probably any other company and can provide more personalized search results than anyone else, their web index is clearly more complete than e.g. Bing's (if you do a domain-restricted search, Google often finds twice as many results as Bing).
It's true that alternatives to Google exist, but Google's overwhelming market dominance makes it imo difficult to argue that they aren't a monopoly in practice.
Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about Microsoft?
The funny thing is this is going to be benefit Microsoft significantly. Much of what Google did Chrome, Android, etc. was to prevent Microsoft from destroying it like Netscape, Novell, Lotus, Wordperfect, ... It's probably no coincidence that Google's first external CEO Eric Schmidt was the CEO of Novell.
It's not exactly a hot take nowadays that all the Big Tech companies are probably overdue for serious antitrust action.
Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surely the crawling is the easiest part? The AI goldrush has seen dozens of new players gobbling up the entire internet. The hard part is turning that staggering amount of unstructured data into a useful search engine, and in particular fighting off black-hat SEO.
Websites these days are often pretty hostile to crawling aside from the Googlebot. Other crawlers are asked not to by the robots.txt, fully blocked, or put through captchas. https://knuckleheads.club/ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/technology/how-google-dom...
Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Breaking up Google gets worse the longer we wait.
That seems to be in support of the parent's point. So breaking up Google would have resulted in worse outcomes for consumers 10 years ago, but it would be even worse today? Then it wouldn't have made sense to break them up 10 years ago and it would make even less sense today. I'm not claiming there aren't any good reasons to break up Google (I don't know), but this line of argumentation doesn't work as far as I can s…
Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
It appears to me that your two paragraphs contradict each other. If we break up Google and what comes afterwards is worse, then break it up or we'll get worse? Is it worse if we do and worse if we don't? Which "worse" is worse? Or do I misunderstand your point? The whole point of breaking up monopolies is not moral principle. It's so that things get better for customers. If they don't, then what's the justification f…
Going to the dentist hurts more than a cavity. Sometimes a period of acute pain is better than a lifetime of moderate pain.