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US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

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Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#201

Post by Aerroon »

mjcl wrote: post #174
ViktorRay wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But when AT&T had a monopoly it funded Bell Labs which was responsible for much innovation. Then AT&T was shut down and Bell Labs went away. If we take your argument seriously then AT&T shouldn’t have been dismantled. But it was a good thing AT&T was dismantled. It helped lead to the modern internet. By your logic all Rockefeller had to do in the early 20th century was set up a lab to do basic research and then Stand…

And it was an antitrust action that unlocked a lot of that value. The consent decree required Bell Labs to license its patents (e.g. transistors) for reasonable royalties. The same consent decree also forbid AT&T from entering new industries like computing. So after they built UNIX, they sold the source code 'as-is' to universities for $200 ($20k for businesses).

You could also say, though, that this is what caused AT&T to be what it is today - disliked by their customers.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#202

Post by antonvs »

ctvo wrote: post #148
derektank wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet empirically, the biggest funders of basic research have historically been monopolies. The US government was, at least up until the last few months, the largest funder of basic research globally and it obviously maintains multiple different monopolies, a monopoly on legal use of force, a functional monopoly on financial transactions as the global reserve currency, and I'm sure others. Excluding national government…

The biggest funders of basic research are those with the most resources. This is your insight? I don't think anyone disagrees. Then you conflate correlation with causation and move it to _monopolies_ fund basic research. Bravo.

Major monopolies tend to have the most resources, particularly excess resources that are available to spend on things like research.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#203

Post by ajross »

ViktorRay wrote: post #153
bloppe wrote: post #31

Google is the reason for the current AI boom. Without the transformer architecture they invented by funding basic research, there would be no modern LLMs. YC is arguing that their incentive for funding that basic research should be taken away in order to spur innovation?

But when AT&T had a monopoly it funded Bell Labs which was responsible for much innovation. Then AT&T was shut down and Bell Labs went away. If we take your argument seriously then AT&T shouldn’t have been dismantled. But it was a good thing AT&T was dismantled. It helped lead to the modern internet. By your logic all Rockefeller had to do in the early 20th century was set up a lab to do basic research and then Stand…

Bell Labs being defunded by a deregulated/competetive AT&T was precisely what led to the attempted commercialization of Unix and the near death of what would eventually be called "open source", though. In history as it stands, we had GNU and Linux and all that we lost was a few years.

But it's easy to imagine a world where that didn't happen and BSD was just killed dead. So no OS X, no iOS, no Android, no ChromeOS, and the only vendor able to stand on its own is the one we all agree had the worst product.

Ironically the world where the Bell monopoly was left in place seems to me to be one where we're all stuck running Microsoft Windows on everything, no?

I mean, fine, there's nuance to everything but the idea that "well, open research isn't so important" seems frankly batshit to me. Monopolies fall on their own all the time (Microsoft's did too!). You can't get stuff into the public space that wasn't ever there to begin with.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#204

Post by creato »

It's disappointing to see the historical revisionism in these threads. Say what you will about google now, but the idea that they just bought their way into X industry doesn't seem right. Until maybe 10 years ago, tech people almost universally loved Google's offerings and adopted them eagerly because they were good. I remember the mad scramble on various forums for a gmail invite. I remember when google maps came about, it was a revelation compared to mapquest and so on. You could scroll the map instead of clicking buttons to jump half a screen at a time! For years 0-5 at least, chrome was almost universally loved by tech people. Process isolation, speed, lack of toolbar shitware, etc.

At every company I've been at, half the dependencies came from big tech, and more than half of those were built and maintained by google. bazel, kubernetes, test frameworks, tensorflow, etc. these are just the big ones. There are a lot of smaller libraries from google that we've used too, and more still that aren't owned by google but they invest a lot of engineering time into.

I don't know what the right answer is to the google of today, but the cavalier assumption that google has simply leveraged a monopoly in search to build everything else it has doesn't add up to me.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#205

Post by alabastervlog »

luckydata wrote: post #175
snielson wrote: post #168

The solution proposed by Kagi—separate the search index from the rest of Google—seems to make the most sense. Kagi explains it more here: https://blog.kagi.com/dawn-new-era-search

It's such a ridiculous proposal that would completely destroy Google's business. If that's the goal fine, but let's not pretend that any of those remedies are anything beyond a death sentence.

If they're dominating or one of only two or three important options in multiple other areas and the index is the only reason... I mean, that's a strong argument both that they're monopolists and that they're terrible at allocating the enormous amount of capital they have. That's really the only thing keeping them around? All their other lines of business collectively aren't enough to keep them alive? Yikes, scathing indictment.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#206

Post by Ajedi32 »

nixonaddiction wrote: post #178
xyzzy9563 wrote: post #9

Google is effectively being punished for retaining their earnings and re-investing in tons of software R&D over the years. Their "monopoly" is because people choose to use them, not because they have to. Not to mention they are are being disrupted by ChatGPT and other LLMs anyways right now. There have always been lots of web browsers and search engines, but Google simply did a better job making and refining their so…

ok so google paid companies like apple to make google the default search engine. you cannot claim everything was just because their product was good. you can argue that striking the deal with apple was just a smart business move, but google isn't winning just because of their r&d.

It's just a default, you can change it. Did Google coerce Apple into taking that deal somehow? Or did they simply offer them the most compelling deal in a free market?

Keep in mind that if paying to be the default search engine in a browser is illegal, then Firefox's primary revenue source is out the window.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#207

Post by ikiris »

Larrikin wrote: post #196
lacy_tinpot wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What monopoly? Google's entire business model is currently under threat right now.

There are lazy developers reading this very comment thread that broke basic website functionality this week because they only tested on Chrome

Just because the competition is trash doesn't make chrome a monopoly.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#208

Post by tucnak »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #195
bloppe wrote: post #31

Google is the reason for the current AI boom. Without the transformer architecture they invented by funding basic research, there would be no modern LLMs. YC is arguing that their incentive for funding that basic research should be taken away in order to spur innovation?

Researchers at Google are the reason for the current AI boom. FTFY

Potato potato

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#209

Post by ipaddr »

dehrmann wrote: post #194
ViktorRay wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But when AT&T had a monopoly it funded Bell Labs which was responsible for much innovation. Then AT&T was shut down and Bell Labs went away. If we take your argument seriously then AT&T shouldn’t have been dismantled. But it was a good thing AT&T was dismantled. It helped lead to the modern internet. By your logic all Rockefeller had to do in the early 20th century was set up a lab to do basic research and then Stand…

> it was a good thing AT&T was dismantled Citation needed. I hear this repeated, but the consumer experience was it was split into regional monopolies, and consumers now had to deal with both local and long distance, and both were still monopolies. It only got better with competition from mobile providers.

Long distance rates when down.

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/09/att-breakup-spin...

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#210

Post by oceanplexian »

mullingitover wrote: post #184
snielson wrote: post #168

The solution proposed by Kagi—separate the search index from the rest of Google—seems to make the most sense. Kagi explains it more here: https://blog.kagi.com/dawn-new-era-search

Crawling the internet is a natural monopoly. Nobody wants an endless stream of bots crawling their site, so googlebot wins because they’re the dominant search engine. It makes sense to break that out so everyone has access to the same dataset at FRAND pricing. My heart just wants Google to burn to the ground, but my brain says this is the more reasonable approach.

> Crawling the internet is a natural monopoly.

How so?

A caching proxy costs you almost nothing and will serve thousands of requests per second on ancient hardware. Actually there's never been a better time in the history of the Internet to have competing search engines since there's never been so much abundance of performance, bandwidth, and software available at historic low prices or for free.

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