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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]

#551

Post by jader201 »

dangrossman wrote: post #540
dvdhnt wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very ungrateful and childish perspective. It assumes that these things exist out of thin air rather than things google has created. Products don’t just appear, they’re built. Nothing is stopping someone from usurping google. Ever hear of oracle, intel, xerox, blackberry or Microsoft?

Almost all the things in this list were acquired from someone else that built them, rebranded, and then given away for free, taking much of the money out of the market that allowed that product to be built. Without Google giving away the one winner they chose to acquire, you'd have options again. I built my free web stats service in 2004 because I couldn't afford an Urchin license. Google bought Urchin Live and rebra…

> Almost all the things in this list were acquired from someone else that built them, rebranded, and then given away for free

Nearly everything that was acquired was a) already free, and b) built (and given away for free) in hopes that someone like Google would acquire them.

If you look at most startups, their exit strategy is acquisition. Some would live to IPO, but that is a much tougher road.

It could be argued that IPO is a less likely exit strategy because of Google’s and others’ position, but I think it’s disingenuous to imply that startups (that are already giving away their products for free) are getting acquired as a last resort.

Most CEOs plan and hope for it.

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

#552

Post by ankit219 »

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

Woudl the search index contain only raw data about the websites? Or would some sort of ranking be there?

If it's teh latter, its a neat way to ask a company to sell their users data to a third party because any kind of ranking comes via aggregation of users' actions. Without involving any user consent at all.

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

#553

Post by doctorpangloss »

TechDebtDevin wrote: post #546
fsh wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What are you talking about, there are competitors for all these products, they simply just aren't as good...

Not just bad. There isn't a single piece of Apple software that is (1) free and (2) people choose to use on iOS, only use because the user is forced to. Photos? Forced, sucks. iMessage? Forced, sucks. Apple Mail, Calendar, Contacts? Huge pieces of shit. The App Store, the very gateway into competition, is the shittiest of all, and not just because the 30% fee, but because its discovery is maybe the worst ever made by any catalog-style front end in the world.

At least they opened up the password completion APIs.

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

#554

Post by doctorpangloss »

rs186 wrote: post #483
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…

Let them die. The world will be a better place. Some of the services you mentioned are already very irrelevant: * Fitbit -- no explanation necessary * Google translate -- I don't know about if people use their APIs, but for me personally, I have not used translate for a few years. ChatGPT has been my go-to. * Google Pay -- it has a smaller market share than Samsung Pay. Then next tiers of services -- they are doing o…

YouTube, Gmail and Docs are pretty good. All the alternatives to them really suck...

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

#555

Post by Jach »

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…

It's important to try and de-googleify your life if only so you don't get caught up in making such an exaggerated sky-is-falling point. All of these could literally vanish tomorrow and the world would go on, they all have their alternatives, some of them arguably superior. For some, the near term pain would be greater than for others -- even just on my personal level I'd be caught with my pants down for email, because while I have over the years moved a lot of email addresses to something at my own domain name, I haven't done it for all of them, and I'd still need to update the forwarding to not-google. Not a huge deal though. A big one you didn't even list that's more important than several you did combined is Youtube, but again there are alternatives.

The world would change, but I think quite a bit less than you seem to think. To put it another way, the world was undeniably changed by Google, but the change has been done, and they're no longer necessary to keep the biggest changes from reverting. (I'd be more worried about SBCL development if google flights' backend couldn't find a new home -- the product itself has tons of competition + just going directly to airlines.)

In actual reality, of course, these things don't disappear overnight, making the pain of switching much, much less for businesses and individuals heavily dependent on some of these things. Even if "google collapsing within a few years" was likely (they have something like a third or more of annual operating expenses saved as cash on hand), a few years is more than enough time. If a business can migrate off of Salesforce or SAP (it can be expensive and time consuming but you can do it!), it can migrate off these.

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

#556

Post by callc »

echelon wrote: post #507
fsh wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We need a better word than "duopoly" to describe what Apple and Google are. They're just as bad as a monopoly - and they're impossible to compete with. Both Apple and Google need to be disrupted here. We should be able to see lots of healthy verticals for every single one of these product categories. They shouldn't accrue to two players and be impossible to dislodge. I propose the word "Googolith" to describe {Google…

Chaebol?

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

#557

Post by [deleted] »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #553
TechDebtDevin wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about, there are competitors for all these products, they simply just aren't as good...

Not just bad. There isn't a single piece of Apple software that is (1) free and (2) people choose to use on iOS, only use because the user is forced to. Photos? Forced, sucks. iMessage? Forced, sucks. Apple Mail, Calendar, Contacts? Huge pieces of shit. The App Store, the very gateway into competition, is the shittiest of all, and not just because the 30% fee, but because its discovery is maybe the worst ever made by…

[deleted]

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

#558

Post by madeofpalk »

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…

Waymo has zero business existing as some adtech-funded side project.

If Waymo cannot make the case that it should exist or be funded by itself, then it’s just not viable. Kill it.

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

#559

Post by Krssst »

BeetleB wrote: post #525
FridayoLeary wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing mediocre about the search engine, gmail, maps, android, chrome etc.. etc. Do they all have room for for improvement? Probably. But they are simply incredibly, breathtakingly good products. Search, maybe has gotten worse in recent years, but it's still amazing. Maps and Satelleite view are astounding, especially when you consider that they are free. >How is this a desirable outcome? The list speaks fo…

> There is nothing mediocre about the search engine, gmail, maps, android, chrome etc.. etc. Search Engine: Google is fantastic with its index. Very poor with the results it returns. Sampling of the problems: - There's a reason people add site:reddit.com - the default results are often very low quality. Sure, Google has the good quality stuff indexed, but over the last 5 years they've been declining like crazy in act…

> It's nice to have an alternative to Apple, but that's the only good thing about it. Using Android reminds me of the old Windows. Very unstable. Full of spyware/bloatware.

Being free to run whatever code we want as users (F-droid is a treasure). Plus actually having a "disable animations completely" button to remove unneeded slowness.

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

#560

Post by josephg »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #501
trevor-e wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked in the travel tech industry several years ago, it was basically unfair to compete against Google Flights. We just accepted they didn't have to pay for marketing and had infinite compute to work with, and had to differentiate in other ways. They could operate the business at a loss and not really care because it was still good for Google as a whole to have user's travel data. They built a great product b…

It's also stopped being great.

Are there better alternatives? I booked flights from Australia to Europe the other day through google flight search. I would never have found the flights I ended up booking via the airline websites directly.
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