Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

storage.courtlistener.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 1001 posts

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

#211

Post by bdangubic »

lolinder wrote: post #110
xnx wrote: post #58

Google is a "monopoly" because their competitors with massive cash reserves (Microsoft, Apple, Meta) are too risk averse to compete in the marketplace and are hoping that the courtroom will deliver them a win.

Which market are you talking about specifically? The outstanding cases against them are in search and in adtech. This amicus brief is for the Search case (this one [0]). In search (the relevant market here), Microsoft does compete in the marketplace, and Microsoft's evidence that Google's anticompetitive practices have prevented them from gaining any meaningful ground in search were a keystone of the government's cas…

Microsoft does compete in the marketplace

They compete much like I compete for People’s Most Beautiful Man in the World :)

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

#212

Post by thatguy0900 »

efavdb wrote: post #185
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…

“Monopolies should be broken up” doesn’t imply we should disincentivize research though, does it?

I think the implication is that in a high competition area Noone has the spare funds for massive research projects that may go nowhere

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

#213

Post by jonhohle »

adrr wrote: post #190

How much things have changed when antitrust used mean unfair practices by real monopolies. Real monopolies. Standard Oil which you had no choice in what gas you used. The Bell System(ATT) controlled all of long distance, you had no choice to use them for making long distance calls. Microsoft owned 95% of the market when they got with antitrust, there was other OSes but your software wouldn't run on those OSes. Consum…

I haven’t looked at the merits, and I don’t like what the EU is doing to US companies with 20% market share, but I remember feeling the same way about Microsoft over 20 years ago. Fortunately, groklaw provided a constant stream of easily readable, high quality content. That, and I could see some of my favorite companies shutting down because their customers were restricted from doing business with them if they wanted to sell Windows.

This isn’t about search, it’s about their ad monopoly. They are not being punished for search or related products. I’m actually not sure how breaking out the search index helps in this situation. I would think splitting out off-Google advertising is the more obvious break and one that would benefit humanity. (Ad networks can die in a fire.)

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

#214

Post by pingou »

As a google's shareholder that terrifies me.

As an european, I am happy to see that the US administration may be ready to kill the one of the most powerful and unassailable company in the world and allow any other country to build a replacement.

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

#215

Post by [deleted] »

oceanplexian wrote: post #210
mullingitover wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#216

Post by mschuster91 »

The document metadata... ffs: "Microsoft Word - YC for filing FINAL DRAFT Y Combinator Amicus Brief"

People, clean that shit up before publishing. That's an embarrassment. At least it's not "FINAL FINAL2 REWORKED" or something equally grotesque.

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

#217

Post by nmz »

chpatrick wrote: post #39
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?

You can do basic research without being monopolistic.

How?

The software world was basically created by Xerox and AT&T research.

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

#218

Post by oceanplexian »

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?

> Without the transformer architecture they invented by funding basic research, there would be no modern LLMs.

Without Google the researchers who invented the Transformers model might have launched their own startup instead of sitting on the technology for 5 years while it's mismanaged at a big company. We would have had LLMs in 2018 not 2022.

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

#220

Post by [deleted] »

efavdb wrote: post #185
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…

“Monopolies should be broken up” doesn’t imply we should disincentivize research though, does it?

[deleted]
Post reply on HN