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US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

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Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#411

Post by hightrix »

trgn wrote: post #315
Iulioh wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad things happened because tool, tool bad , very good argument. Put yourself in the mind of someone making a THING, how do you plan to reach your possible customers for THING? THING is the best in class, better than the competition but how would you make the world aware of THING existing?

how did this happen before advertising? trade shows, trade magazines, word of mouth, window-dressing in the THING-quarter, ... why are personalized ads on a website indispensable?

> why are personalized ads on a website indispensable?

They aren't. This is exactly what I mean by modern advertising.

If ads were just contextual based on the content of the page, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#412

Post by nox101 »

mulmen wrote: post #343
eagerpace wrote: post #178

Anywhere there are eyeballs, there will be ads. And wherever there are ads there are privacy concerns. Netflix waited until they had sufficiently killed off cable TV, then went back to creating the same problem it fixed. No ads in ChatGPT today, but soon as it (or a competitor) gains meaningful marketshare, there will be ads.

> Anywhere there are eyeballs, there will be ads. I’m not convinced. Not running ads is what you do when you care about user experience. If you start running ads it’s because you care more about money than user experience. As long as there is robust competition the consumer’s preferences will be favored, because success comes at their discretion. So I think it’s more like “wherever the consumer isn’t the customer the…

Company A has no ads because they care about user experience

Company B has ads. Company B makes more money and can therefore provide more features / more content. Company B ends up providing more of what users want.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#413

Post by WalterBright »

hightrix wrote: post #407
WalterBright wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in the market for a new scanner. I looked at advertisements for them.

Me too. I went to a store online that sells them and determined which one I wanted by features and reveiws.

How did you know about a store that sells them?

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#414

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

mmastrac wrote: post #185

Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon -- the US could easily break all of these up. There's a huge risk to stagnation and over-optimization once these companies get as big as they do.

I'm curious as to why you included Apple. All of the other companies bought up a bunch of potential competitors so they wouldn't get outcompeted, e.g:

Facebook: Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus

Google: DoubleClick, YouTube, Android, Waze, Deep mind

Amazon: Whole Foods, Audible, Zappos, Ring, One Medical

Arguably, I think things would be better if a bunch of these acquisitions were never allowed in the first place. But most of Apple's acquisitions have been of the "acquihire" type where they got specific technologies to enhance their products - Beats is the only one I can think of off the top of my head that has basically remained separate.

I'm not saying acquisitions are the only benchmark for breaking up big tech, but to me it feels like the places where Apple is anti-competitive (e.g. App Store) can be remedied with much smaller changes than a full break up. With the other 3 it seems easier to identify places to "cleave".

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#415

Post by pawelmurias »

ssklash wrote: post #140
richwater wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> results in a materially worse world. Please explain how Google has created a materially worse world

What part of being a massive ad company whose raison d'etre is to collect as much personal information about you as possible (with limited or no consent) to enable other people to try to convince you to buy stuff even remotely a net positive for the world?

I would prefer to see ads for things that I want rather then see ads for stuff I couldn't care less about. If I get convinced to buy useful things it's a win/win.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#416

Post by dmonitor »

someluccc wrote: post #250
bityard wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Breaking up AT&T was unquestionably the right call. (So to say.) Long distance was expensive for quite a while even after the break-up. If you called up an out-of-state friend or relative to catch up, you expected the call to cost you at least a few bucks. (And you hoped they would be the ones to call you next time.) Even into the 90's, long distance at $0.10/minute was considered cheap. And in most rural areas, ever…

This illustrates why breaking up google is a good idea given their egregious charges (free) for things people used to/still spend money on, such as: - An office software suite - Global maps and GPS, City Guides - Video entertainment - Mobile and Desktop OS - Web Browsers Also, pay no mind to their competitors in all of those markets AND in their core business of search, being feeble multi-trillion and multi-billion g…

My concern is that breaking up Google without breaking up Microsoft will basically just be giving MS a huge advantage in the multitude of categories in which they compete with each other, so we'll be left in an even worse situation than before.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#417

Post by JasserInicide »

geor9e wrote: post #113

HN is a special place but among the average folk, I get why 90% of people use google. I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are. Especially with so many companies scraping the whole web for AI data, and so many GPUs chugging on that data. I suppose they are all focused on replacing the concept of search results with LLM prose. Ironically bing is down at the moment https://downdetec…

Unironically Yandex, especially if you're searching for politically sensitive stuff. It is wild how much Google censors.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#419

Post by hightrix »

WalterBright wrote: post #413
hightrix wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too. I went to a store online that sells them and determined which one I wanted by features and reveiws.

How did you know about a store that sells them?

Searching the internet and not rendering any promoted links or ads in my browser.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#420

Post by makeitdouble »

svara wrote: post #243
gaiagraphia wrote: post #181

The free market's great IF there's competition. If the market's dead, it's time to reinject some life and keep the cogs turning. Scale's great, but it often comes with a societal cost. For every efficiency made, there's less agency and decent jobs to go round. Seems unfair to make such decisions ad-hoc though, and string it out through years of court cases and m/billions of lawyer fees. Why not establish rules of the…

Sort of playing devil's advocate here, but well run companies with near monopolies have on many occasions provided massive benefits that would not have been possible at smaller scale. Think of Bell Labs. Google has a number of Bell Labs style projects ongoing that massively benefit scientific research. Transformers, AlphaFold, etc. It's hard to see how a smaller, more focused company would be able to justify that typ…

> It's hard to see how a smaller, more focused company would be able to justify that type of R&D.

Typically that's solved with R&D happening in academia or semi-public space.

How much this happens depends on the opportunities to do it in private companies, so entities like Google paying big salaries for R&D probably means we don't see what alternatives they would be if they stopped doing so.

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