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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]

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting definition. This applies to almost literally nothing except Jefferson’s candle and IP. Actual literal fire is considered worthless and IP is bazillions of dollars of closely guarded secrets. Public transits, seemingly unlimited water sources, or neighborhood parks all suffer from overcrowding so this diminishing availability thing is tough to meet

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

#332

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 domina…

I would be you $1 that in five to ten years there will be zero "AI" players replacing search. But that's a different topic than this one.

Google themselves are trying to figure this out, with the first (top placement) of search results showing their Gemini AI Response, at least for me. I read this as an attempt to keep users on Google instead of asking Chat GPT or other some other AI. What's your take on that?

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

#333

Make no mistake. This is, first and foremost, a big, for-profit corporation fighting a bigger, for-profit corporation, for its own financial interests. Nevertheless, we may stand to benefit, if only incidentally. In particular, if the legal authorities start to unwind Google, I actually think Chrome and Android are more important to wall off or spin out than anything advertising or AI related.

So should Gmail et al go with Chrome or with Android?

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

#334

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.

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

#336

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

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…

I mean it's just data. You can just copy it and hand it over to a newly formed competing entity.

You're not even really dealing with any of these shared infrastructure public property private property merged infrastructure issues.

Yeah sure. There's mountains of racks of servers, but those aren't that hard to get tariffs TBD.

I think it'll be interesting just to try and find some collection of ex Google execs who had actually like to go back to the do no evil days, and just hand them a copy of all the data.

I simply don't think we have the properly and elected set of officials to implement antitrust of any scale. DOJ is now permanently politicized and corrupt, and citizens United means corps can outspend "the people" lavishly.

Antitrust would mean a more diverse and resilient supply chain, creativity, more employment, more local manufacturing, a reversal of the "awful customer service" as a default, better prices, a less corrupt government, better products, more economic mobility, and, dare I say it, more freedom.

Actually, let me expound upon the somewhat nebulous idea of more freedom. I think we all hear about Shadow banning or outright banning with utter silence and no appeals process for large internet companies that have a complete monopoly on some critical aspect of Internet usage.

If these companies enabled by their cartel control, decide they don't like you or are told by a government not to like you, it is approaching a bigger burden as being denied the ability to drive.

Not a single one of those is something oligarchs or a corporatocracy has the slightest interest in

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

#337
post #257

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 killed the Edge browser with the same tricks MS used. The use money and Google Play services to hinder competition. Not really less anti-competitive.

By one measure, Edge has 5% market share, twice that of Firefox.

On Desktop it’s 13%, which is second place.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...

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

#338
post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Microsoft is one of the world's biggest companies, and it underinvests in research and development, preferring to hoard cash. OpenAI is in effect a client state of Microsoft that Microsoft is using to make Google look flat-footed and force them to enter the chatbot market. Nothing that transpires between Microsoft and OpenAI is really at arms' length. Personally, I don't think this is a positive development for…

> Yes, Microsoft is one of the world's biggest companies, and it underinvests in research and development, preferring to hoard cash. I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but: 1. If you're talking about basic research, Microsoft Research has been a thing since the 90's, is highly prestigious, and has published far more papers than Google, based on their respective research websites. (To be fair, Google started much…

Everyone I've encountered thinks of Microsoft Research as a bad pattern, that includes all the refugees from MSR Silicon Valley who joined Google after Microsoft dissolved it in 2014. Perhaps it is a bias of the people I've worked with in my career but the core early contributors at Google who came from DEC WRL also viewed separate research divisions as a bad idea.

Anyway my statement was meant to be objective. Look at how much Microsoft spends on R&D for the last 25 years, compared to the amount Google spends, in absolute terms and as a fraction of revenues.

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

#339

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…

a) If YC was so tired of being a funnel to larger companies then they should be selecting companies based on their ability to be self sustaining companies. Not this hype-driven, boom or bust approach to startups they know VCs and acquirers want.

b) Google Cloud, Gemini, TPUs, Pixel etc seem like pretty important products to me.

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

#340

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.

> It's such a ridiculous proposal that would completely destroy Google's business. it won't. My bet is that bing and some other indexes are 95% Ok for average Joe. But relevance ranking is much tougher problem, and "google.com" is household brand with many other functions(maps, news, stocks, weather, knowledge graph, shopping, videos), and that's what is foundation of google monopoly. I think this shared index thing…

At this point, why are you so concerned about Google's business?

This was 10 years ago. I could argue a moral Superior that Google possessed over Microsoft and Facebook, but man those days are looooooong gone.

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