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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]

#361

Post by RainyDayTmrw »

sroussey wrote: post #333
RainyDayTmrw wrote: post #329

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?

I'm less worried about GMail. It's much easier to start a GMail competitor today (in relative, not absolute, terms) than a Chrome or Android competitor, because of network effects. For example, Fastmail is tiny (comparatively speaking), and will probably stay tiny forever, but their service works fine, and there's no major obstacles (comparatively speaking) to replacing GMail with Fastmail for any of us personally.

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

#362

Post by stonogo »

creato wrote: post #204

It's disappointing to see the historical revisionism in these threads. Say what you will about google now, but the idea that they just bought their way into X industry doesn't seem right. Until maybe 10 years ago, tech people almost universally loved Google's offerings and adopted them eagerly because they were good. I remember the mad scramble on various forums for a gmail invite. I remember when google maps came ab…

You keep qualifying your comments with "by tech people" but the problem is that Google bought their way into non-tech people's computers. Every single Google product on every single pageload had an "install Chrome" link at the top. Every Chrome release blurred the line between 'signing into chrome' and 'signing into google' and, later, 'signing into your phone'. Most Google products broke on non-Chrome browsers on such a regular cadence that deliberate sabotage was a common assumption. So yes, Google has always been a darling to the "tech people", but the aggressive ways they worked to ensure that people adopted Chrome were very real.

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

#363

Post by scarface_74 »

echelon wrote: post #291
scarface_74 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Really? Making $250K a year for a mid level developer 3 years out of school is a “low bar”?

Google has created many more millionaires than YC. The only way that you could be a millionaire by investing in YC companies at IPO would be to be a multimillionaire and lose half your money.

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

#364

Post by wvenable »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #302
danboarder wrote: post #298

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.

Search will become AI. It might be that there be zero "AI" players involved though as Google is just as capable of doing AI.

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

#365

Post by allturtles »

OtherShrezzing wrote: post #157
derektank wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is this not a bit "tail wagging the dog" thinking? There wasn't much innovation in telecommunications once Bell's monopoly was entrenched. Once it dissipated, innovation was everywhere in the space. Similarly, computers had less innovation while IBM was a monopoly than they've had since its monopoly dissipated. Though both companies created novel & useful inventions, the biggest shifts in those industries during thos…

> There wasn't much innovation in telecommunications once Bell's monopoly was entrenched. Once it dissipated, innovation was everywhere in the space.

I don't think that's accurate at all. If we take say 1920 or so as the date when the monopoly was entrenched and 1984 as the break-up, there was tons of innovation in telecom in that time period. Novel telecom technologies introduced in that time period include television, microwave relays, satellite communications, submarine telephone cables, cellular telephones, fiber optics, electronic telephone switching, packet switching, the Internet.

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

#366

Post by fc417fc802 »

zrm wrote: post #330
natebc wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few? We routinely are fighting off hundreds of bots at any moment. Thousands and Thousands per day, easily. US, China, Brazil from hundreds of different IPs, dozens of different (and falsified!) user agents all ignoring robots.txt and pushing over services that are needed by human beings trying to get work done. EDIT: Just checked our anubis stats for the last 24h CHALLENGE: 829,586 DENY: 621,462 ALLOW: 96,810 This…

This seems like two different issues. One is, suppose there are a thousand search engine bots. Then what you want is some standard facility to say "please give me a list of every resources on this site that has changed since " so they can each get a diff from the last time they crawled your site. Uploading each resource on the site to each of a thousand bots once is going to be irrelevant to a site serving millions o…

> then you set traps like disallowing something in robots.txt and then ban anything that tries to access it

That doesn't work at all when the scraper rapidly rotates IPs from different ASNs because you can't differentiate the legitimate from the abusive traffic on a per-request basis. All you can be certain of is that a significant portion of your traffic is abusive.

That results in aggressive filtering schemes which in turn means permitted bots must be whitelisted on a case by case basis.

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

#367

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

I'm not sure people understand what the consequences of taking away Google's ad revenue is. If a large enough bank goes under, it takes out not just the bank, but huge sectors of the economy, affecting many more businesses and jobs. That's why the government bailed out the banks when they failed.

The same will happen when Google loses its ad revenue. Google is an ad company. By opening up all its trade secret data, it loses its advantage. That will make it lose its core revenue. The end result will be Google collapsing entirely within a few years. Then those component parts people are talking about "opening up" will be gone too.

Here's a small number of things that will die when Google dies. Can you imagine how the world will be affected when these go away?

  - Google Maps
  - Google Mail
  - Google Drive
  - Google Docs
  - Google Groups
  - Google Forms
  - Google Cloud
  - Google OAuth
  - Google Search
  - Google Analytics
  - Chrome
  - Android
  - Android Auto
  - Fitbit
  - Google Fi
  - Google Fiber
  - Google Flights
  - Google Translate
  - Google Pay
  - Waymo
In the best case, killing these will force consumers to move to Apple. You wanna talk monopoly? You haven't seen anything yet.

Apple has no alternative for much of the Business-focused products, so that will take considerable time for companies to adopt alternatives. But in the meantime, the world will become pretty broken for a lot of companies that depend on these tools. This will affect many more people than just Google's direct users. The whole web will shrink, and huge swaths of the worldwide economy will disappear. Businesses closing, lost jobs, shrinking economies, lack of services.

There are plenty of parties who want to see Google lose or take part of its businesses. But if it's not done extremely carefully, there's a very large stack of dominoes that are poised to fall.

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

#368

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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.

CommonCrawl is not a vlaid comparison. Most robots.txt target CCBot.

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

#369

Post by hshshshshsh »

Isn't there an obvious conflict of interest here? YC Wil benefit if Google is to share its index with startups. YC will fund hundreds of companies and then one of them will end up monopoly. What kind of bs is this. Cycle repeats.

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

#370

Post by erxam »

RainyDayTmrw wrote: post #361
sroussey wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm less worried about GMail. It's much easier to start a GMail competitor today (in relative, not absolute, terms) than a Chrome or Android competitor, because of network effects. For example, Fastmail is tiny (comparatively speaking), and will probably stay tiny forever, but their service works fine, and there's no major obstacles (comparatively speaking) to replacing GMail with Fastmail for any of us personally.

Is it really?

I think any potential competitors face many of the same pitfalls as, say, Chrome competitors do. Maybe even worse. Google slams its weight around when web standards are being designed so as to unilaterally benefit Chrome, but (at least in theory) it's a fundamentally cooperative process where everyone at least gets some sort of input to direct where each standard goes.

In GMail's case, they can just arbitrarily shut off any competitor who might be gaining steam and kill them off before they can reach critical mass and sustain themselves. Just categorize them as 'spam' and make sure to redirect their emails 100% of the time and they've won.

EDIT: just saw your edit. You're kinda right, but if Fastmail ever really starts growing then Google will take harsher actions to stymie it off. Maybe if a lot of small services start to collectively take a bigger slice of the market then they'd succeed at keeping Google at bay? I'm not so sure.

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