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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]

#291

Post by echelon »

scarface_74 wrote: post #103
echelon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let’s not pretend that YC and other VCs are noble. I'm fine with that. Let them make money at the expense of big tech. Breaking up big tech benefits financial/venture capital, but it also benefits labor capital as well. More opportunity for more startups to succeed, more competition for engineering talent, less market distorting wage collusion. Big tech already won. It's benefactors already reap the benefits. Break…

They do see upside - by being acquired by BigTech. So if Google wasn’t a “monopoly” you think a startup could make a better search engine? Be more popular than Android - Microsoft tried both and failed because people prefer Google products. It wasn’t for the lack of money. And engineers are getting wealthy - by working for BigTech. Even an entry level developer at BigTech makes more than 90% of workers.

That's a low ceiling.

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

#292

Post by oofbaroomf »

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.

A little bit unrelated, but the rise of Transformers in 2022 was because of the compute available - in 2018, it would have been almost impossible to make something like GPT-4.

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

#293

Post by shadowgovt »

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.

Of all the bad ideas I've heard of where to slice Google to break it up, this... Is actually the best idea.

The indexer, without direct Google influence, is primarily incentivized to play nice with site administrators. This gives them reasons to improve consideration of both network integrity and privacy concerns (though Google has generally been good about these things, I think the damage is done regarding privacy that the brand name is toxic, regardless of the behaviors).

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

#294

Post by HaZeust »

cyanydeez wrote: post #160
beambot wrote: post #141

This feels a bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face... Unlike Microsoft's antitrust case of the 90s, Google seems much less anti-competitive by nature. Sure, they have unprecedented scale in search... but even that hegemony is being threatened by others in AI. If anything, going after Google with a DoJ kludgel will cause a servere freeze on startup M&A across all of FAANG. With IPO windows (mostly) closed,…

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 are non-excludable (impossible to prevent anyone from using the good) and non-rivalrous (one person's use doesn't diminish the availability for others). Google doesn't match the criteria.

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

#295

Post by scarmig »

kmeisthax wrote: post #274
Workaccount2 wrote: post #76

Meanwhile, 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: Goo…

> DeepBrain (the people who did all the AI work at Google)

"DeepBrain" isn't a thing. Google acquired DeepMind, which was the second biggest research lab in AI at the time. The first biggest was Google Brain. They existed in parallel until being merged in 2023.

Brain was entirely homegrown, and it was responsible for AIAYN, BERT, PaLM. Which is to say, transformers.

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

#296

Post by shadowgovt »

ViktorRay wrote: post #153
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?

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…

There's actually a pretty solid argument to be made that the railways were never more effective than during the days of Rockefeller, when he could throw his money around to force otherwise-competing railways to optimize their work in an industry that has some fundamental strong incentives to be non-competitive (it rarely makes any sense to run two rail lines purely for competition reasons and leads to a race to the bottom on pricing).

... but that's more a story of the failure of the US government to go far enough and nationalize the rail network and its operations. The most efficient era of US rail was during World War II, when the military took it over and prioritized schedules by optimal throughput over profit concerns.

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

#297

Post by drivebyhooting »

KHRZ wrote: post #164
drivebyhooting wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bing has a brand problem.

You have been a bad user. Bing has been a good Bing.

Bing sounds to my ears ridiculous. Is it a Chinese pancake? Or Mr. Bing?

Also as a verb it’s hard to pronounce.

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

#298

Post by danboarder »

This action comes a bit late, at the end of the "Search engine" era, at a time when AI responses from many sources are largely replacing the "Google Search".

Similar action happened against Microsoft Windows around 2000, just as the rise of web-based apps (online email, google docs, etc) largely made the underlying operating system less relevant to how people use their computers and apps.

So I read this as the dominant player can monopolize a market while it's relevant without an issue, and once the market starts to move on, the antitrust lawsuits come in to "make the market more competitive" at a time when that era is mostly over.

And trying to regulate early (as with the last administration's AI legislation that is now being repealed) we can see that only hindsight is 20/20, and regulating too early can kill a market. My conclusion is to just let the best product win, and even dominate for a while as this is part of the market cycle, and when a better product/platform comes along the market will move to it.

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

#299

Post by bogwog »

light_triad wrote: post #193

It's good for YC to do this and will benefit every startup in the long run. Google has been one of the sources of the AI boom, and provides liquidity by acquiring startups. But as YC argues they've monopolised distribution channels to the point where you need to go through the Google toll booth every time you want to access the market. This tax on founders to reach their audience makes many types of businesses unsust…

> and provides liquidity by acquiring startups

You mean kills potentially successful tech companies of the future by acquiring startups to cement their dominance.

I get why people on this site are in love with the idea of building an unsustainable, money-losing business where the only path to success is being acquired by a tech giant. It's like winning the lottery! But it helps nobody, it hurts your customers/users, and it hurts innovation. It's also stupid, as a successful tech company could potentially grow as big as the giants you're courting (ESPECIALLY now that the FTC has started finally doing its job). Why else do you think they're spending so much money to acquire you? It's easier on the ego to call it an "acquihire", but the truth is that they're just paying a maintenance tax on their monopoly.

Every time people complain about how detrimental big tech is to society, it ultimately comes down to this sad strategy.

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

#300

Post by ChuckMcM »

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

At Blekko we advocated for this as well.

Google has two interlocked monopolies, one is the search index and the other is their advertising service. We often joked that if Google reasonable and non-discriminatory priced access to their index, both to themselves and to others, AND they allowed someone to put what ever ads they wanted on those results. That change the landscape dramatically.

Google would carve out their crawler/indexer/ranker business and sell access to themselves and others which would allow that business an income that did NOT go back to the parent company (had to be disbursed inside as capex or opex for the business).

Then front ends would have a good shot, DDG for example could front the index with the value proposition of privacy. Someone else could front the index with a value proposition of no-ads ever. A third party might front that index attuned to specific use cases like literature search.

It would be a very different world.

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