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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]

#571

Post by redwall_hp »

philistine wrote: post #570
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…

Google has built all these free products for one reason: your comment. They want people to genuinely believe that they can't be treated like a monopoly in ads. Not because they're not a monopoly in ads. No no no. They want us to believe they're a good monopolist that can't be broken up because they're giving us so many good things. Don't let it sway you for a second that Google is proven to hinder competition and rai…

Exactly. Each one of the products in that large list is a separate market that's being distorted by a monopoly. This is all the more evidence that Google needs to be broken up into very tiny pieces.

If Google is an ad business, then each of those non-ad products they're giving away for free, supported by the money from the ad machine, is another market they're gaining dominance in by leveraging their position in another market. That's textbook monopolist behavior.

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

#572

Post by matheusmoreira »

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…

Most of those products don't really matter much. I'm sure humanity will survive without them.

Maps? Switch to the many alternatives. Android? Now that they've got hardware remote attestation all of the "openness" has been lost so it's become nothing but a worse version of iOS. Only the loss of gmail would be painful and the suffering would not last long.

Let it happen.

> In the best case, killing these will force consumers to move to Apple.

Break Apple up too. Don't forget about Meta and Amazon and all the others.

> Apple has no alternative for much of the Business-focused products, so that will take considerable time for companies to adopt alternatives.

Not a big deal. Adapt or go out of business. Better yet, price it in by adapting ahead of time: ditch Google now.

Moving to Proton Mail with my own domain was much easier than I'd anticipated. It's great.

> The whole web will shrink

Welp. Sounds like the web is gonna go back to its roots. Sign me up.

> huge swaths of the worldwide economy will disappear

This distorted economy that rewards total nonsense just because it attracts attention?

Let it disappear.

Things are just too screwed up and I don't think they're ever gonna be fixed unless something biblical happens. This might just be it.

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

#573

Post by davidgerard »

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…

You've made literally an argument to nationalise Google and make it into a government department - not to leave it to fester.

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

#574

Post by BrenBarn »

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…

> 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.

That is why the banks should have been broken up into smaller banks long before we reached that point, and it is why Google should have been broken up long ago. The only way to prevent the situation you describe is to never allow any single entity to become so important to so many people.

It's like planting a tree. The best time to break up a big company is twenty years ago (before it became so big). The second-best time is now.

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

#575

Post by BrenBarn »

bloppe wrote: post #31

Google is the reason for the current AI boom. Without the transformer architecture they invented by funding basic research, there would be no modern LLMs. YC is arguing that their incentive for funding that basic research should be taken away in order to spur innovation?

> Google is the reason for the current AI boom. Without the transformer architecture they invented by funding basic research, there would be no modern LLMs.

Sounds great to me! Wish they had been broken up before that happened.

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

#576

Post by zelphirkalt »

josephg wrote: post #568
Jach wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, becaus…

Yeah. It’s also hard to overstate how many incredible engineers work at Google. Many - perhaps most of them are doing very low value work of adding marginal features nobody cares about to mature products. And in many cases doing so at a glacial pace. Every year thousands of brilliant engineers add ~1m lines of code to Google chrome. And almost nobody notices or cares. As browsers get faster, companies respond by addi…

I am sure there are many capable people working at Google, but the exaggerating of their skill level needs to stop. Some leet coder doesn't necessarily deliver better designed systems than any another engineer. And with that, the cult of believing in whiteboard coding interviews also needs to go away.

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

#577

Post by brookst »

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 is an incredibly hyperbolic take.

Google, as a search provider, has billions of eyeballs a day. They will still have ad revenue from that. Their basic business model of surveillance capitalism is intact.

It just says they can’t control both sides of the ad market. If history is any lesson (the AT&T breakup specifically), divesting ad would create a more competitive ad market and Google the search engine would make more money by playing multiple suppliers against each other, fostering competition.

From a principles perspective, if feels like too severe of a remedy and I don’t support it. But “if AT&T is broken up nobody will ever be able to make a phone call again” is too extreme to take seriously. Money follows value. Google has plenty of value outside of its monopoly position.

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

#578

Post by FridgeSeal »

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…

Oh no.

What a shame.

Opens popcorn, unfolds garden chair

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

#579

Post by itsoktocry »

BrenBarn wrote: post #574
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…

> 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. That is why the banks should have been broken up into smaller banks long before we reached that point, and it is why Google should have been broken up long ago. The only way to prevent the situation you describe…

Smaller banks aren't competitive with larger (global) banks.

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

#580

Post by zelphirkalt »

FridayoLeary wrote: post #491
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?

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…

I suggest you explore alternatives and their usability compared to whatever Google offers. For example Google Docs word processing part is astonishingly bad. Gmail really sucks for when you have a lot of e-mail and also has a high chance of locking you out at some point, which can be really bad,if you relied on it too much. YouTube? Ahaaahhaaha! Rarely used anything that is so annoying to use and so extremely bloated and buggy. They are the prime example btw. for the back button no longer working.

People at Google work on many things, but they also build lots of shit.

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