151–160 of 524 posts
I don't think there would be much benefit to society by breaking up google. Whereas I do think there would be great benefit to breaking up Apple or MS.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While true and a fair point, iOS is Apple’s platform in a way that the web is most certainly not Google’s.
I hardly use Google, and I use the internet. DDG/Kagi/ChatGPT/Reddit/HN/etc for searching. Fastmail/myriad order email providers. Openstreetmap/Apple for maps. YouTube and Chrome Remote Desktop are what I use Google for, but those have alternatives too.
When I was at Amazon the majority of direct product traffic did not come internal search, it came from Google. In some areas they were competitors, Amazon was beholden to Google as the starting point for most customer’s browsing experience.
If what comes after is not better, then we waited too long to break this monopoly up. We either start ripping this band-aids off or we will just continually have a worse and worse internet.
Why does Google search use Google adwords? Is it because adwords has given them the better terms than their competition or because they have no choice by virtue of being the same company?
Imagine chopping Search and Ads out to be their own things.
GoogAds turns into just another advertising company. Perhaps viable but uninteresting. GoogSearch, well, almost nobody wants to pay for search, so they seek some kind of way to get money, and the start up with the integrated ads, soon to result in what we have now. I used to run various Google Search Appliances, but they bailed out of that market.
Peel off GMail? More than zero people want to pay for email, so you might see something like a clunky Fastmail with a free tier and a pay tier. The free tier means ads again and you're evolving to a Yahoo model. Ummm, nobody really wanted that.
How about hardware? I dunno, are Pixels a loss leader for Google? I'll bow to someone else's insight on this, and I'm not really hip to the phone scene: are there a lot of "smartphones, we only make smartphones" companies?
Google Docs and various officeware might stand on its own as a distant second to Microsoft. I know some people pay for that.
Google Books, maaaaaaaaaaybe. It might stand on its own but here we just see people having to pay for what was once free.
I just don't see anything interesting or stimulating coming out of carving up Google. Almost everything they did (it has been a while since I was "into" them) seemed focused on making things that were almost byproducts, wherein their real utility was feeding the search advertising cycle.
How is Google more of a Monopoly than Microsoft?
How is google a monopoly at all? There’s competition and alternative for each of their products. And people can keep using the alternatives if they want. I can choose iOS over Android. Bing over Google. Yahoo over Gmail. Dailymotion over YouTube. Why is it a problem that google makes a superior product and people choose it ? In all studies, when consumers get faced the decision to choose freely any search engine, mos…
If what comes after is not better, then we waited too long to break this monopoly up. We either start ripping this band-aids off or we will just continually have a worse and worse internet.
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…
I'm flumuxed that Google is the first tech company to be ruled a monopoly. I would put them fourth on the tech monopoly list, behind Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, in that order. I don't think there would be much benefit to society by breaking up google. Whereas I do think there would be great benefit to breaking up Apple or MS.
How is Google more of a Monopoly than Microsoft?
How is google a monopoly at all? There’s competition and alternative for each of their products. And people can keep using the alternatives if they want. I can choose iOS over Android. Bing over Google. Yahoo over Gmail. Dailymotion over YouTube. Why is it a problem that google makes a superior product and people choose it ? In all studies, when consumers get faced the decision to choose freely any search engine, mos…
https://www.economicshelp.org/microessays/markets/monopoly/
This article states that 25% of market share may be sufficient. That is not how I learned it in my economics classes: there we said it's 60% and values below that could be oligopoly (a small number of companies holding ~90% market share).
As for why it's bad: a single provider may choose to degrade their service, or increase charges, or create an unacceptable TOS. They would likely not be able to do that if there is an acceptable alternative.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While true and a fair point, iOS is Apple’s platform in a way that the web is most certainly not Google’s.
It’s odd how this is lost on people. Want to develop a game for PlayStation, Sony will need to approve. Want to develop a Facebook app, FB will gatekeep. If you wanted to make apps for the Danger Hiptop, you published through Danger. iOS is Apple’s consolized OS for their own hardware. It’s not a PC platform that anyone can put on whatever device they want. For better or worse.
"iPhone Families" is a very real thing that Apple has gone out of it's way to solidify. Or try being an (American) 15 year old kid and get included in group chats with an android phone.
It's pretty gross when a mega-corp is so powerful that it can leverage your friends and family against you, forcing you into their walled prison err.. garden.