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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]

#241

Post by Macha »

Mond_ wrote: post #117
dghlsakjg wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You certainly have a point. Places like google and bell labs have pushed innovation, apparently enabled by monopolies. I've heard this argument before (and recognize that you aren't defending it), but telecommunications, network and technology innovation has hardly suffered since Bell was dismantled in 1982.

You cannot possibly know which innovations and standardizations happened past 1982 in the world in which Bell was not dismantled.

Right, but there other, real, negative impacts of monopoly, whereas the positive impact of R&D funding seems to be at best a maybe as to if it's better than the alternative.

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

#242

Post by sokoloff »

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.

Costs almost nothing, but returns even less.*

There are so many other bots/scrapers out there that literally return zero that I don’t blame site owners for blocking all bots except googlebot.

Would it be nice if they also allowed altruist-bot or common-crawler-bot? Maybe, but that’s their call and a lot of them have made it on a rational basis.

* - or is perceived to return

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

#243

Post by briandear »

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…

Free apps don’t cost any “tax.”

> This should be zero if there was unlimited competition or web installation

Is credit card processing, billing, storage, distribution, “free?”

And the 30% figure is inaccurate. Most developers don’t pay that.

How about stripe charging 2.9% +$0.30 per transaction? They are almost double the actual cost of the interchanges.

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

#244

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

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 was not a monopoly once competitors came along that provided better and cheaper service, all before the rise of mobile.

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

#245

Post by AlexandrB »

immibis wrote: post #238
oceanplexian wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They try to block your bot because Google is a monopoly and there's little to no cost for blocking everything except Google.

This isn't a "natural" monopoly, it's more like Internet Explorer 6.0 and everyone designing their sites to use ActiveX and IE-specific quirks.

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

#246

Post by redczar »

BobbyJo wrote: post #169
redczar wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can YC prevent startups from selling to Google? Even if they could why should they? There is nothing wrong with believing Google abuses its monopoly and selling to Google.

They could almost certainly prevent it in most cases, and they likely promote it in some.

I don’t see how they could prevent a sale since they own such a small percent of the startup.

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

#247

Post by minwcnt5 »

Disposal8433 wrote: post #187
luckydata wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

Sorry, but corporations are not people despite what some people will tell you.

They would definitely NOT survive in any recognizable form with "only a few billion dollars", because the stock price is a function of profits. Take away most of the profits, and most of the company's value gets wiped out, most of the employees would leave or get laid off, and anything of value that remains would quickly become worthless. Users would all move to the government-sanctioned replacement monopoly, likely X. To say nothing about the thousands of ordinary people who have large Alphabet holdings in their retirement portfolios and would be wiped out.

Google is practically the definition of a "too big to fail" company. They need to be reigned in to allow more competition, but straight up destroying the company would be a move so colossally stupid I could just see the Trump regime doing it.

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

#248

Post by robinsonb5 »

mattmaroon wrote: post #237
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.

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.

A "few" more would be fine - but the sheer scale of the malicious AI training bot crawling that's happening now is enough to cause real availability problems (and expense) for numerous sites.

One web forum I regularly read went through a patch a few months ago where it was unavailable for about 90% of the time due to being hammered by crawlers. It's only up again now because the owner managed to find a way to block them that hasn't yet been circumvented.

So it's easy to see why people would allow googlebot and little else.

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

#249

Post by belorn »

jeroenhd wrote: post #78
echelon wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If developers bothered to put their apps on alternative stores with much lower rates, we wouldn't be in this mess. Amazon is shutting down their store because it turns out nobody is really all that interested in actual alternatives. Samsung has their own store but all I hear about it is people bitching that they already have Google Play and that it's "bloatware". Huawei even sells phones without Google Play in the we…

Andoid users install google play because the applications they want to use is only available on google play, regardless of personal choice. Andoid developers put their applications on google play because that is the only places where they can access enough number of users, which has nothing to do with developer choice.

It is not about price. It is about platforms. A 0% app tax could not compete if there is 0 users on the platform, and google could increase the app tax to 100% if they wanted and people would still use it.

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

#250

Post by Workaccount2 »

The real killer is that Google perfected the ad-paid model, and launched an entire ecosystem on top of it

Paid competitors cannot compete because people won't pay. People want the death of Google because people hate ads and tracking.

Ultimately it is an everyone loses situation. No one is going to fly in a replace Google without either 1.) Charging a monthly sub or 2.) Invasive (yet most profitable) ad tracking.

This is exactly why youtube stands alone too. What company looks at youtube's userbase and says "Yes, I want to cater to people who despise subscriptions and block ads". Exactly what vid.me did in 2017, which everyone celebrated until the went bankrupt.

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