261–270 of 1001 posts
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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
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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.
We routinely are fighting off hundreds of bots at any moment. Thousands and Thousands per day, easily. US, China, Brazil from hundreds of different IPs, dozens of different (and falsified!) user agents all ignoring robots.txt and pushing over services that are needed by human beings trying to get work done.
EDIT: Just checked our anubis stats for the last 24h
CHALLENGE: 829,586
DENY: 621,462
ALLOW: 96,810
This is with a pretty aggressive "DENY" rule for a lot of the AI related bots and on 2 pretty small sites at $JOB. We have hundreds, if not thousands of different sites that aren't protected by Anubis (yet).
Anubis and efforts like it are a xesend for companies that don't want to pay off Cloudflare or some other "security" company peddling a WAF.
A. The Remedy Should Open Access to Google’s Datasets and Search Index. B. The Remedy Should Prevent Google from Extending Its Monopolies into Query-Based AI Tools. Good luck with that YC...
1) Eliminate Google Play Services for android and the oem non-compete deals.
2) Right to privacy. All data collection and storage (even on customer owned hardware if used for targeting decisions) must be opt-in, by purpose and annually renewed. It must be easier to only opt in to data collection for use cases that provide application functionality / business transactions than it is to opt into blanket data collection.
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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…
Amazon doesn't get free advertising. They lose out on revenue they could have gotten by placing another paying ad there instead. The opportunity cost is not 0.
UPS and FedEx don't emblazon ads on their delivery trucks. Nobody is buying up those ad spaces.
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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.
Suprisingly there’s an archived DoJ page that says that the same remedies may have been much cheaper to achieve through other means.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/atr/att-divestiture-was-it-...
YMMV. I don’t agree with the narrowness of this analysis, and would like to see some links to academic studies in economics and the study of innovation tbh.
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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.
https://commoncrawl.org/ This is similar to the natural monopoly of root DNS servers (managed as a public good). There is no reason more money couldn't go into either Common Crawl, or something like it. The Internet Archive can persist the data for ~$2/GB in perpetuity (although storing it elsewhere is also fine imho) as the storage system of last resort. How you provide access to this data is, I argue, similar to ho…
No they can't but do you have a source?
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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.
https://commoncrawl.org/ This is similar to the natural monopoly of root DNS servers (managed as a public good). There is no reason more money couldn't go into either Common Crawl, or something like it. The Internet Archive can persist the data for ~$2/GB in perpetuity (although storing it elsewhere is also fine imho) as the storage system of last resort. How you provide access to this data is, I argue, similar to ho…
I agree that each front end should do it, but you can bet it will be a core service.
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 ab…
Heck, they can't even be bothered to fund a single developer to help their hardware run Linux.
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https://commoncrawl.org/ This is similar to the natural monopoly of root DNS servers (managed as a public good). There is no reason more money couldn't go into either Common Crawl, or something like it. The Internet Archive can persist the data for ~$2/GB in perpetuity (although storing it elsewhere is also fine imho) as the storage system of last resort. How you provide access to this data is, I argue, similar to ho…
> The Internet Archive can persist the data for ~$2/GB in perpetuity No they can't but do you have a source?
> We estimate that permanent storage costs us approximately $2.00US per gigabyte.
https://webservices.archive.org/pages/vault/
> Vault offers a low-cost pricing model based on a one-time price per-gigabyte/terabyte for data deposited in the system, with no additional annual storage fees or data egress costs.
https://blog.dshr.org/2017/08/economic-model-of-long-term-st...
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Because the data they possess is the monopoly, they have better search results because it is too expensive for competitors to gather the data at this point as(I also think people who are unfamiliar with finance do not understand the quantum, Meta has a similar type of business but was under huge pressure with investing tens of billions into VR...it would cost hundreds of billions to get parity with Google, there is n…
It's incredibly naive to think Google's continuous growth is automatic. It happened because of all the work the employees do, not in spite of it. Are there employees who don't contribute? Sure. But that's different from only 100 contributing to positive growth.
They start with a page with zero ads, they add one ad to that page one year, ad sales pushes that placements, then a few years they do it again, etc. Meta are the same.
Google do sell at a higher price than offline ads because of targeting/intent but this is inherent to the product: search has inherently better intent and their targeting tech is no better than anyone else such that their prices are higher/grow faster.
That is their growth model: higher ad density, the CEO deciding to add another ad to a page and earning $100m/year. There is no value-added otherwise because you don't need many people, you don't need capital and you are making $300bn/year.
And, again, if you own the shares you understand that you are getting the ads business, and because of the dual class you are also getting this tech bureaucracy that sets fire to tens of billions every year employing people to do nothing. If these people are so productive...where is the revenue? It is all ads or ancillary business, they have GCP now but there is nothing else...because these people aren't doing anything.
It is like owning a business that turns lead into gold, the process is automatic, requires no capital...and then employing a bunch of monks to pray for the lead and saying the business couldn't exist without them. Lol.