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.
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US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]
271–280 of 1001 posts
Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]
#272Earlier 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.
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…
Wait, is the suggestion here just about crawling and storing the data? That's a very different thing than "Google's search index"... And yeah, I would agree that it is undifferentiated.
Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]
#273The 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…
> Apple to split off only the phone and messaging part of its iPhone
Ooh, can we? My wife is super jealous of my ability to install custom apps for phone calls and messaging on Android, it'd be great if Apple would open theirs up to competition. Competition in the SMS app space would also likely help break up the usage of iMessage as a tool to pressure people into getting an iPhone so they get the blue bubble.
Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]
#274Meanwhile, YC has happily and excitedly fed it's start-ups to Google over the years. So pretty much "We don't want google to develop new things, we want them to have buy those from us"
What YC is complaining about is that they've been turned into Google's farm league.
The thing is, Google doesn't develop anything new. Everything new they make fails horribly, so they can't and don't compete with YC in the way that you think.
Examples of failed Google homegrown technologies include:
- Social media: Google Buzz, Google+
- Messaging: Google Chat, Hangouts, actually there's too many to list
- Video: Google Video
Almost all of Google's successful products are acquisitions:
- Homegrown: Search, Gmail
- Acquisitions: YouTube, Analytics, most of their adtech stack, Android, DeepBrain (the people who did all the AI work at Google)
Furthermore, whenever Google or Facebook buys any startup, that startup gets an immediate moat and capital injection that can be used to crush any other startup that didn't sell out fast enough. So YC only has one option for an exit: sell the company to Google at a price Google decides.
Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Wait, is the suggestion here just about crawling and storing the data? That's a very different thing than "Google's search index"... And yeah, I would agree that it is undifferentiated.
If you have access to archived crawls, anyone can build and serve an index, or model weights (gpt).
Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Apple to split off only the phone and messaging part of its iPhone Ooh, can we? My wife is super jealous of my ability to install custom apps for phone calls and messaging on Android, it'd be great if Apple would open theirs up to competition. Competition in the SMS app space would also likely help break up the usage of iMessage as a tool to pressure people into getting an iPhone so they get the blue bubble.
> Ooh, can we?
If the dream of a Star Trek future reputation-based government run by AI which secretly manipulates the vote comes true, yes we can!
Either that or we could organize competitors to lobby the US or EU for more lawsuits in exchange for billions in kickbacks! (Not implying anything by this.)
Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]
#277Google 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?
Isn't this actually an argument for breaking up Google?
They came up with Transformers back in 2014 and sat on it for a decade until somebody else (OpenAI) forced their hand?
Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]
#278Google 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…
I'm pretty sympathetic to both sides of this. I don't really know the history well enough to say whether you're right that breaking up AT&T "helped lead to the modern internet". But even stipulating that it did, the loss of monopoly era Bell Labs was tragic.
Both things can be true! It's entirely possible (probable even) that breaking up monopolies has both positive and negative impact.
And I would be a lot more sympathetic if we had a lot more public investment in technology. But we don't. What I see is both public and private research investment under major attack. I think that's a recipe for disaster.
Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is why, like the 'monopoly on violence' the government should also be funding a _lot more research_. It should be at, or partnered with, higher learning institutions and since it's public funded all of the results should be free to use*. I'm willing to entertain the idea of: Free use for people and corporations within the country/countries that funded research, everyone else pays compulsory license fees.
But public funded research isn’t “free to use.” In many cases, you can’t even read it without paying a scientific journal for a subscription. See the Bayh-Dole Act as well: universities can patent discoveries from federally funded research.
These aren't contradictory ideas. Governments should fund more research and should also make it free.
Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]
#280In terms of fairness, competition and monopolies is there a chart that shows how much tax payer funding each search engine has received upon creation, annually and indirectly? e.g. donating NASA hangers for server hosting and experiments, heavily discounted real estate and land, tax breaks for power, etc... Put another way, who has the biggest monopoly on direct and indirect tax-payer funding?