281–290 of 1001 posts
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?
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Google is now a basic utility. Unless you don't believe in basic public goods, allowing equitable access to the utility benefits everyone, especially businesses.
Public goods is an economics term with an actual meaning, and it has nothing to do with public utilities. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/public-good.asp
Utilities and infrastructure can be considered public goods insofar as they have the characteristics of non-rivalry and non-excludability, meaning that one person's use of them does not diminish another person's ability to use them and it is difficult to prevent others from using them even if they have not contributed to their provision.
However, utilities are typically excludable (service can be cut off for non-payment) and rivalrous to some extent (there are capacity limits and usage can impact others), so they are better classified as private or quasi-public goods.
So why is this idea so prevalent: that public goods should be public utilities?
A key driver behind the transformation of some public goods into regulated public utilities seems to be the theory of "natural monopoly," which posits that certain industries are most efficiently served by a single provider, making competition impractical or wasteful. Then in 1919 the economic theory of public goods, notably developed by Erik Lindahl, further contributed to the myth by arguing that public goods should be funded through taxation based on individual benefit. This reinforced the notion that the government should organize and finance such goods, often through public utility models.
So I wouldn't say public goods have nothing to do with public utilities.
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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…
It's already the case that googlebot is the common denominator bot that's allowed everywhere, ccbot not so much.
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You can do basic research without being monopolistic.
That's true, but if it weren't for Google's monopolist position, I doubt they'd have the money to throw at the wall for random research. For every AI transformer they revolutionized, there's a self-driving car project that's dragging on for decades. Had Google operated like a normal company, the risk/reward of this kind of research would've looked completely differently. Google's monopoly helped research along in the…
From where I'm sitting it's pretty clear which approach has been more successful.
As others have pointed out, YC is definitely trying to get some of that Google money. Another important aspect that benefits YC is a turn of events that would improve the talent pool. Google retains tens of thousands of software engineers, I’d argue maybe the biggest reserve in existence. It’s the largest population of experienced engineers that won’t leave because the money and circumstances are too good. Startups w…
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> The Internet Archive can persist the data for ~$2/GB in perpetuity No they can't but do you have a source?
https://help.archive.org/help/archive-org-information/ and first hand conversations with their engineering team > 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…
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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 problem with this is in the vein of `Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once` if it's going to replace googlebot. Everyone who only allows googlebot would need to change and allow ccbot instead. It's already the case that googlebot is the common denominator bot that's allowed everywhere, ccbot not so much.
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You can do basic research without being monopolistic.
Yet empirically, the biggest funders of basic research have historically been monopolies. The US government was, at least up until the last few months, the largest funder of basic research globally and it obviously maintains multiple different monopolies, a monopoly on legal use of force, a functional monopoly on financial transactions as the global reserve currency, and I'm sure others. Excluding national government…
Okay. I’ll take the monopolostic government over the monopolistic corporation. Thanks.
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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 problem with this is in the vein of `Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once` if it's going to replace googlebot. Everyone who only allows googlebot would need to change and allow ccbot instead. It's already the case that googlebot is the common denominator bot that's allowed everywhere, ccbot not so much.
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You certainly have a point. Places like google and bell labs have pushed innovation, apparently enabled by monopolies. I would rather we don’t allow monopolies since they are so bad for society, regardless of some benefits. Government funded research and private investment are still a thing, that doesn’t try to break the whole capitalism thing.
Google's position is a result of capitalism, not in spite of it.