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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]

#231

Post by Aerroon »

echelon wrote: post #19
legitster wrote: post #11

None of the proposed remedies benefit consumers.

We have two major phone operating systems and they charge a tax of 30%, which gets passed onto consumers. This should be zero if there was unlimited competition or web installation. There's also so much innovation happening in the mobile space right now. It's not like they're parked and reaping untold benefits. By having search monopolies, they've gamified paying for placement above your competitor's trademarks. Rath…

About the phone OS: unfortunately, other companies and governments give this duopoly to Apple and Google.

If I need my phone to access my bank and my bank's app only works on official Android or iOS then that's it. I don't have a choice in what phone OS I'm running.

And the bank most likely does that because of government regulations.

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

#232

Post by riku_iki »

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.

one could argue that transformers are nothing without attention layer, which was not invented at google.

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

#233

Post by kjkjadksj »

throwaway173738 wrote: post #222
Aerroon wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ask anyone who was alive back then and they will tell you stories of how legendarily awful AT&T was to deal with. My father has told me several. The antitrust action made things better for regular people by allowing them to do things like buy their own handsets or haggle over price.

What telecom today will actually haggle

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

#234

Post by azemetre »

bionhoward wrote: post #154
azemetre wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really odd that the trillionaire dollar corporation that prints billions of dollars in pure profit every quarter due to monopolistic and anti-democratic policies is the David, the weak feeble underdog in this story, compared to OpenAI that is wildly unprofitable and has no real strategy outside of burning money. There has been no time in human history where destroying monopolies were a bad thing.

Isn’t Microsoft also a trillion dollar corporation? If we add their 39% market share in foundation models (likely due to enterprise use of Azure OpenAI Service) to OpenAI’s 9% market share, the result is around 48% market share, compared to Google’s 15%, which is less than half of the MSFT/OAI pair…not to mention a cursory comparison of Gemini vs ChatGPT apps. Just because OpenAI isn’t in “extraction mode” yet doesn’…

Maybe MSFT is King Saul in your biblical metaphor.

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

#235

Post by riku_iki »

oceanplexian wrote: post #218
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.

Actually, most researchers of transformer paper founded various startups.

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

#236

Post by Onavo »

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.

In the past month there were dozens of posts about using proof of work and other methods to defeat crawlers. I don't think most websites tolerate heavy crawling in the era of Vercel/AWS's serverless "per request" and bandwidth billing.

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

#237

Post by mattmaroon »

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.

Are sites really that averse to having a few more crawlers than they already do? It would seem that it’s only a monopoly insofar as it’s really expensive to do and almost nobody else thinks they can recoup the cost.

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

#238

Post by immibis »

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.

You don't get to tell site owners what to do. The actual facts on the ground are that they're trying to block your bot. It would be nice if they didn't block your bot, but the other, completely unnatural and advertising-driven, monopoly of hosting providers with insane per-request costs makes that impossible until they switch away.

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

#239

Post by 486sx33 »

rubitxxx2 wrote: post #224
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

Assuming the simplified diagram of Google’s architecture, sure, it looks like you’re just splitting off a well-isolated part, but it would be a significant hardship to do it in reality. Why not also require Apple to split off only the phone and messaging part of its iPhone, Meta to split off only the user feed data, and for the U.S. federal government to run only out of Washington D.C.? This isn’t the breakup of AT&T…

Google killed Google. They should not have decided to become evil. Search can easily be removed, G Suite should be separate too.

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

#240

Post by pixl97 »

ajross wrote: post #203
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…

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, a…

>Monopolies fall on their own all the time (Microsoft's did too!)

What in the heck are you talking about??? After Microsoft was convicted, even though they never received any actual punishment, the were very internally cautions about any behaviors that could be perceived as monopolistic. This is like a total misinterpretation of what actually occurred on your part.

And yes, monopolies do fall, after very long periods of time. Some monopoly sitting around 25 years may not seem like much, but that's half an average persons working life.

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