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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]

#341

Post by threeseed »

bubblethrow wrote: post #122
hu3 wrote: post #49

These are the key points as I understand them: Amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief is being submitted by Y Combinator to pile on the US vs Google anti-trust case. YC asks court to basically cripple Google in their Search, Advertising and AI endeavours: - Open access to Google's datasets and search index. - Restrict Google's expansion into AI through monopolistic practices. - Limit Google exclusive agreements an…

Call me paranoid but I wonder if YC is acting as a proxy for OpenAI/Sam Altman here. To frame it differently would they behave similarly if OpenAI was a Google Subsidiary / or Google was run by Sam Altman.

To quote tomhoward's post on here talking about YC's relationship with OpenAI:

OK, it was independent but established with funding from YC Research and Jessica (among others including Sam himself and Elon) and initially operating from YC office space.

So it was always something that was closely linked to YC and his involvement with it was generally accepted as being harmonious with his role running YC, until it became for-profit.

Details here: https://www.wired.com/2015/12/how-elon-musk-and-y-combinator...

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

#342

Post by [deleted] »

grg0 wrote: post #321
Bender wrote: post #280

In 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?

> Put another way, who has the biggest monopoly on direct and indirect tax-payer funding? The Pentagon.

[deleted]

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

#343

Post by dang »

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

Discussed at the time, in case anyone is curious:

Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41393475 - Aug 2024 (79 comments)

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

#344

Post by callc »

soulofmischief wrote: post #189
callc wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I might not have explained my position adequately. I am not commenting on how Google became immensely successful, but just looking at it today in its current state.

It seems like the end result of unchecked capitalism is monopolistic practices. Companies want to make as much $$$ as possible. The most effective way to do that is to become a monopoly and avoid/destroy/inhibit any amount of competition as possible.

I really see it as an unstable system. Which is why we need society to put laws in place to keep the system in check, so it doesn’t turn sour.

Basically there’s a “healthiness” scale of capitalism. I want healthy capitalism.

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

#345

Post by luckylion »

Aurornis wrote: post #326
sokoloff wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Costs almost nothing, but returns even less.* There are so many other bots/scrapers out there that literally return zero that I don’t blame site owners for blocking all bots except googlebot. Would it be nice if they also allowed altruist-bot or common-crawler-bot? Maybe, but that’s their call and a lot of them have made it on a rational basis. * - or is perceived to return

> that I don’t blame site owners for blocking all bots except googlebot. I doubt this is happening outside of a few small hobbyist websites where crawler traffic looks significant relative to human traffic. Even among those, it’s so common to move to static hosting with essentially zero cost and/or sign up for free tiers of CDNs that it’s just not worth it outside of edge cases like trying to host public-facing Gitla…

Regarding allowlisting the other major crawlers: I've never seen any significant amount of traffic coming from anything but Google or Bing. There's the occasional click from one of the resellers (ecosia, brave search, duckduckgo etc), but that's about it. Yahoo? haven't seen them in ages, except in Japan. Baidu or Yandex? might be relevant if you're in their primary markets, but I've never seen them. Huawei's Petal Search? Apple Search? Nothing. Ahrefs & friends? No need to crawl _my_ website, even if I wanted to use them for competitor analysis.

So practically, there's very little value in allowing those. I usually don't bother blocking them, but if my content wasn't easy to cache, I probably would.

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

#346

Post by yashvg »

TL;DR: YC just filed an amicus brief in the Google-search antitrust case. They tell the judge that (1) Google’s default-search/pay-to-play deals crushed the “kill-zone” around search, keeping VCs away; and (2) the coming wave of AI-search/agentic tools will suffer the same fate unless the court imposes forward-looking remedies—open Google’s index, ban exclusive data+distribution deals, bar self-preferencing, add anti-circumvention teeth, and even spin off Android if Google backslides. YC frames this as the 2025 equivalent of the 1956 Bell Labs decree and the 2001 Microsoft decision: rip open the gate so the next Google can be born.

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

#347

Post by luckylion »

tananaev wrote: post #314
mullingitover wrote: post #184

Earlier 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.

Google search is a monopoly not because of crawling. It's because of the all the data it knows about website stats and user behavior. Original Google idea of ranking based on links doesn't work because it's too easily gamed. You have to know what websites are good based on user preferences and that's where you need to have data. It's impossible to build anything similar to Google without access to large amounts of us…

Sounds like you're implying that they are using Google Analytics to feed their ranking, but that's much easier to game than links are. User-signals on SERP clicks? There's a niche industry supplying those to SEOs (I've seen it a few times, I haven't seen it have any reliable impact).

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

#348

Post by kzrdude »

mullingitover wrote: post #283
toomuchtodo wrote: post #221

Earlier 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…

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.

That says that if google switches over to ccbot then the rest will follow.

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

#349

Post by CobrastanJorji »

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

This just in: small search engine company thinks it's a great idea for small search engine companies to have the same search index as Google.

Also, I love this bit: "[Google's] search results are of the best quality among its advertising-driven peers." I can just feel the breath of the guy who jumped in to say "wait, you can't just admit that Google's results are better than Kagi's! You need to add some sorta qualifier there that doesn't apply to us."

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

#350

Post by indolering »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #300
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…

Then why do we see all of these alt search engines and SEO services building out independent indexes? Why don't the competitors cooperate in this fashion already?
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