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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]

#451

Post by skybrian »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #411
skybrian wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

When people say that Google killed the Edge browser they generally mean that MS gave up on maintaining their own browser engine and the world moved that much closer to a web monoculture. To put this in historical perspective, a reskinned IE would not have been a meaningful or useful competitor to IE.

I don’t think it’s a meaningful comparison because Microsoft has the resources to fork Chromium if they need to. But since it works pretty well, there’s little incentive to do that. It would be like Electron forking V8 for no reason.

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

#452

Post by The_Blade »

satvikpendem wrote: post #446
suddenexample wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People bringing up this site in this specific way is a pet peeve of mine. What's the largest product that they sunset with no replacement? Stadia? Given the number of products Google has, I wouldn't consider their track record below average.

I agree. The vast majority of products "killed by Google" were ones no one were using and many were consolidated into other products.

i'm a rageaholic! i just can't live without rageahol!

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

#453

Post by nataliste »

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…

What happens to the assets of the dead Google? Will regulators actually let FAAN take over broad swaths of it? Not likely. It's much more likely that regional or smaller businesses will enter the vaccuum. Similarly but from the consumer side, I already know for many of these, there are already viable alternatives that would easily scale with demand.

Even further, if your business is coupled entirely to the continued existence of a single corporation, or if the totality of your economy is entirely coupled to the continued existence of a single corporation, we have a word for that: a monopoly. As far as I know, permitting the existence of monopolies is broadly agreed upon by experts to be a bad idea for many reasons, the least of which is the stifling of viable alternatives. The most severe is that it threatens the legitimacy of the entire government through regulatory capture and, at root, there is no organization that I think is actually "too big to fail" except the actual government.

Breaking up Google creates short-term disruptions and penalizes those that let the market even get to the point that the FTC and DOJ needed to intervene (I'm looking at you Mozilla). Everyone, including those now dependent on Google, is benefited in the longterm.

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

#454

Post by l72 »

The search part of Google doesn’t bother me. I have other options and I now reach for an llm first, then fall back to ddg. What I do think needs to be separated are: 1) Ads and analytics 2) Chrome 3) Google Play Services.

Googles ad platform and analytics are difficult to avoid. Even with browser extensions, dns blocking, and aggressive firewall rules, this is virtually impossible to avoid. I am shocked at how many websites and apps break when these are blocked. There needs to be a much healthier ecosystem without a single company gobbling all this up.

Chrome is also a big issue. Google has regularly used its web sites and android to heavily push chrome. They also use that influence for web “standards” that are not really standards. On top of it, even googles own sites are often terrible with non chrome based browsers. We need a variety of user agents and we need real standards that a truly independent body has a say in. The web has matured and we don’t need to be in a race for new apis and features right now.

Google play services are also a huge pain point. When developing for Android, you almost have to use them. Running Android without Google Play services or with an alternate is a futile effort if you want any sort of main stream app. My degoogled work phone is mostly useless for anything. We definitely need standards for these services with replaceable components that are transparent to the apps.

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

#455

Post by ccppurcell »

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…

I think comparing to banks is silly. Banks don't have competitive advantages like Google has. When banks fail it is not because they lost a competitive advantage (other than the competitive advantage of competent management). The catastrophe associated with a major bank collapse has to do with the specific function of banks in the financial system, not just: oh where are all their customers going to go?

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

#456

Post by snackernews »

eastbound wrote: post #416
sfpotter wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you used Kagi or Google recently? Kagi works way better.

On every Kagi comment, there is “Have you used Kagi recently? It’s improved a lot!” — to the level that I suspect they have bots to upgrade the brand image, at least to search which comments to respond do. I’m saying that because yes, I’ve used Kagi recently, and I switch back to Google every single time because Kagi can’t find anything. Kagi is to Google what Siri is to ChatGPT. Siri can’t even answer “What time is…

“Kagi is bad. As evidence I present Siri.”

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

#457

Post by ezfe »

dismalaf wrote: post #439

Not sure a VC firm with a vested interest in Google failing should be allowed to have an opinion here... I always thought the point of the government breaking up monopolies was to prevent anti-competitive behaviour, not simply to punish companies for being too successful. If we want to talk about what's best for the economy and startups, there's a bunch of large companies that could be broken up for the benefit of so…

There are two ways to remedy an anti competitive monopoly:

Behavioral remedies where the government gets involved with google’s business and maintains ongoing control to ensure they behave.

Structural remedies where the government separates the company into parts and then-crucially-leaves them alone for the most part.

The “ideal” solution is to magically stop Google from being anticompetitive but that is unrealistic.

The realistic solution is to split Google apart and kneecap its data flywheel to force it to compete.

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

#458

Post by hshshshshsh »

nickfromseattle wrote: post #102

How much blame do we assign Sundar for this outcome? Yes, he was just continuing where Larry / Sergey left off, but it did happen under his watch. Is there anything he could have done to avoid this outcome? In a way that Google shareholders would have found acceptable? Or was this outcome inevitable?

Did the laws of physics change or something before Sundar became CEO?

NO? Yeah. I thought so as well

Then the outcome was inevitable.

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

#459

Post by ezfe »

xyzzy9563 wrote: post #34
voytec wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. They are being punished for unfairly limiting competitiveness with repeated monopolistic practices affecting the browser/search markets relation.

But they only have high market share because people want to use Google instead of the competitors. Many consumers switch their search engine to Google when presented with other defaults. Because Google search works the best and people know that.

So then why do they pay Apple $25,000,000,000 a year to default search to Google?

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

#460

Post by The_Blade »

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?

if you put a Carlin word (at least my favorite McNulty / Bunk one) in front of your search, it bypasses Gemini AI results

for a pristine moment you get to be in a club and they AIn't in it

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