Live data from Hacker News

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

storage.courtlistener.com

381–390 of 1001 posts

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

#381

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, i…

This is nonsense. Some people may have to sign up to Google One to pay them a fee starting at $20/year to access gmail/drive/docs/groups/forms. We, and they, will all live through.

etc.

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

#382

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 solution would also yield search engines that will actually be useful and powerful like old Google search was. They have crippled it drastically over the years. Used to be I could find exact quotes of forum posts from memory verbatim. I can't do that on Google or YouTube anymore. It's really dumbed down and watered down.

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

#383
post #5

A. The Remedy Should Open Access to Google’s Datasets and Search Index. B. The Remedy Should Prevent Google from Extending Its Monopolies into Query-Based AI Tools. Good luck with that YC...

And Netflix shouldn’t have been able to extend its monopoly in shipping DVDs to streaming

Personally, as copyright is a non-natural right, we should limit it for films/tv/shows such that whatever price it is sold for, then it is made available for any distributor to sell for after a very limited monopoly period (1 year from release, say, reflecting the current market in which films go from cinema to TV streaming platforms in a few weeks). This would apply to all distributors over X users and/or Y revenue (taking in at least the top 5 streaming platforms).

This way, the public can access copyright works, and producers of works can be paid, but distribution is opened up. Creators still get paid, distribution isn't monopolistic.

Netflix can argue "this show is worth £5 per viewer" and only sell rights at that price, but they pay tax on that price, and crucially the rest of the catalogue then needs to add up so if viewers are paying £8 per month then the rest of the catalogue is marked down accordingly. There will be manipulation, but if it doesn't reasonably add up then apply the sort of penalties in the EU of 20$ gross profit fines; strike off directors for copyright abuse (can't be directors of media companies again).

I can't see that this would harm income for creators, only for distributors (who aren't needed, they're just duplicating using monopolistic practices), and it seems it would have broad appeal.

So, yes, I agree.

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

#385

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, i…

Would YouTube not also be affected here? I don't have numbers but it seems to me a huge number of people depend on it as both consumers and producers, and I'm not sure it has any viable alternatives.

My even bigger worry is actually the effects on privacy, security, and people's data. I'm very curious what other companies people would trust more with their data.

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

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Google started to merge both (ChromeOS+Android) so maybe they would be sold together

Microsoft is the obvious buyer for Android and Chrome, lol. Let the circle complete.

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

#387

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…

This sounds a solution contrived to advantage companies that want access to this data rather than an actual economically valid business model. If building an index and selling access to it is a viable business, then why isn't someone doing it already? There's minimal barrier to entry. Blekko has an index. Are you selling access to it for profit?

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

#388

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…

Hosting costs are so minimal today that I don't think crawling is a natural monopoly. How much would it really cost a site to be crawled by 100 search engines?

A potentially shocking amount depending on the desired freshness if the bot isn’t custom tailored per site. I worked at a job posting site and Googlebot would nearly take down our search infrastructure because it crawled jobs via searching rather than the index.

Bots are typically tuned to work with generic sites over crawling efficiently.

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

#389

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, i…

Are we sure that the things listed here will not go away in a few years if Google continues to exist?

https://killedbygoogle.com/

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

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because everyone worships Thiel's "competition is for losers" and dreams of being a monopoly. Monopolies being the logical outcome of a deregulated environment, for which these companies lobby.
Post reply on HN