Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

storage.courtlistener.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 1001 posts

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

#401

Post by mondrian »

dantheman wrote: post #392
mondrian wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Throughout history there are very few monopolies and they don't normally last that long; that is unless they get are granted special privileges by the government.

Concentration is the default in an unregulated environment. Sure pure monopolies with 100% market control are rare but concentration is rampant. A handful of companies dominating tech, airlines, banks, media.

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

#402

Post by prepend »

hu3 wrote: post #268
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…

Meanwhile Apple, also sitting on infinite cash, is easily entertained by toying with regulators around the world and contributes back almost nothing in comparison to Google. Heck, they can't even be bothered to fund a single developer to help their hardware run Linux.

Why would Apple have developers working on their hardware running Linux? Apple doesn’t use Linux.

They aren’t the biggest oss dev, but they have a decent amount of contributions. [0][1]

It’s hard to compare how much Google vs Apple contributes to open source, but not sure why anyone would think Apple “contributes back almost nothing.”

[0] https://github.com/appleopen

[1] https://opensource.apple.com/projects/

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

#403

Post by joshvm »

danboarder wrote: post #332
ChuckMcM wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My take is that it's primarily a smart way to quickly gather lots of ELO/AB feedback about LLM responses for training, whilst also reducing people switching to ChatGPT. OpenAI has significant first mover advantage here and it's why they're so worried about distillation, becuase it threatens the moat.

Google, on the other hand, has a huge moat in access to probably the best search index available and existing infrastructure built around it. Not to mention the integration with Workspace emails, docs, photos - all sorts of things that can be used for training. But what they (presumably) lack is the feedback-derived data that OpenAI has had from the start.

ChatGPT does not use search grounding by default and the issues there are obvious. Both Gemini and ChatGPT make similar errors even with grounding but you would expect that to get better over time. It's an open research question as to what knowledge should be innate (in the weights) and what should be "queryable", but I do think the future will be an improved version of "intelligence" + "data lookup".

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

#404

Post by skybrian »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #372
skybrian wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Does that chart differentiate between before and after edge internals became chromium though?

Does it matter? It seems like distribution is more important than the internals.

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

#405

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

dmoy wrote: post #286
toomuchtodo wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://help.archive.org/help/archive-org-information/ and first hand conversations with their engineering team > We estimate that permanent storage costs us approximately $2.00US per gigabyte. https://webservices.archive.org/pages/vault/ > Vault offers a low-cost pricing model based on a one-time price per-gigabyte/terabyte for data deposited in the system, with no additional annual storage fees or data egress costs…

What's the read throughout to get the data back out, and does it scale to what you'd need to have N search indexes building on top of this shared crawl?

they could charge data processing costs for reads

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

#407

Post by prepend »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #206
nixonaddiction wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ok so google paid companies like apple to make google the default search engine. you cannot claim everything was just because their product was good. you can argue that striking the deal with apple was just a smart business move, but google isn't winning just because of their r&d.

It's just a default, you can change it. Did Google coerce Apple into taking that deal somehow? Or did they simply offer them the most compelling deal in a free market? Keep in mind that if paying to be the default search engine in a browser is illegal, then Firefox's primary revenue source is out the window.

Spoiler: Firefox’s primary revenue source is going to go out the window.

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

#408

Post by kccqzy »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #206
nixonaddiction wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ok so google paid companies like apple to make google the default search engine. you cannot claim everything was just because their product was good. you can argue that striking the deal with apple was just a smart business move, but google isn't winning just because of their r&d.

It's just a default, you can change it. Did Google coerce Apple into taking that deal somehow? Or did they simply offer them the most compelling deal in a free market? Keep in mind that if paying to be the default search engine in a browser is illegal, then Firefox's primary revenue source is out the window.

That's exactly what the government wants intentionally or unintentionally: make Firefox's primary revenue stream disappear.

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

#409

Post by fallingknife »

mondrian wrote: post #401
dantheman wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throughout history there are very few monopolies and they don't normally last that long; that is unless they get are granted special privileges by the government.

Concentration is the default in an unregulated environment. Sure pure monopolies with 100% market control are rare but concentration is rampant. A handful of companies dominating tech, airlines, banks, media.

Concentration seems much more prevalent in heavily regulated markets e.g. utilities / airlines. In many cases regulators have even encouraged this e.g.finance.

There is no default for unregulated markets. It's a question of whether the economies of scale outweigh the added costs from the complexity that scale requires. It costs close to 100x as much to build 100 houses, run 100 restaurants, or operate 100 trucks as it does to do 1. That's why these industries are not very concentrated. Whereas it costs nowhere close to 100x for a software or financial services company to serve 100x thee customers, so software and finance are very concentrated.

The effect of regulation is typically to increase concentration because the cost of compliance actually tends to scale very well. So businesses that grow face an decreasing regulatory compliance cost as a percent of revenue.

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

#410

Post by fsh »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #367

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 list is very telling. Instead of a healthy marketplace of companies competing to sell their software and services, we end up with one monopolist who gives away mediocre products and in return taxes everything you buy (in the form of ad spending), and then annoys you with the same ads. How is this a desirable outcome?
Post reply on HN