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US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

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Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#101

Post by alexpotato »

teleforce wrote: post #8

There's side effect benefit of big kahuna companies mainly on the significant breakthrough and game changing research output because these excellent researchers are paid handsome money compared to conventional universities or research institutions. We saw this with AT&T Bell research labs with their inventions of transistor and Unix, among others. The same thing happened with Google research with (arguably) deep lear…

Rory Sutherland has a great take on this which is (paraphrasing and my own interpretation):

Innovation is a lot easier when you have a lot of money to spend on R&D. In order to get that money, you can't compete on price b/c that's a race to the bottom. Instead, you want to focus on quality and/or customer service so that you become a monopoly and then can use monopoly profits to innovate to higher quality products and services.

Clip: https://www.tiktok.com/@rorysutherlandclips/video/7314765561...

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#103

Post by brendoelfrendo »

cosmic_quanta wrote: post #79
DinoDad13 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love it when the top comments on a hacker news thread is justifying monopolies. Fuck economics right?

Do you think it's impossible to have a nuanced discussion about monopolies? Their net effect may be wholly negative while having some interesting aspects

Not impossible, but mostly impossible. You can discuss the interesting aspects of large corporations, but you can't really discuss them in a vacuum. The top level post about "big kahuna" companies comes across as an unambiguous defense of monopolies, not an attempt at nuanced conversation.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#104

Post by idle_zealot »

cogman10 wrote: post #82
ilaksh wrote: post #64

I think decentralized technologies should be part of the discussion when you it comes to replacing technology monopolies. For example, there might be some protocols for cooperative web indexing or search or to provide a common layer that companies can build on.

I'd love to see how something like this could handle the bad actor problem. It is what (IMO) is currently killing the web today. How would you, for example, stop a rouge indexer from spewing an unlimited number of bad indexes to spam their garbage into the distributed protocol? Or how would you address just bad/misleading/faulty indexes?

Web of trust, I guess? Don't accept just anyone doing scraping/indexing. Keep the trust network human-scale. I can imagine a world where the relevant protocols are open and organizations choose their own roots of trust. Common defaults would likely emerge, things like the Wikimedia foundation or Archive would serve as default roots for your average user, but you could add your own or remove those if you knew what you were doing.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#105

Post by idle_zealot »

ruthmarx wrote: post #40
pixxel wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>societal value Genuine question: what societal value would be lost if Google was erased tomorrow (all technical reliance their services was magically replaced overnight with alternatives by pixies)?

What would happen if you replaced Google with a perfect functional equivalent? Well, nothing. You don't happen to know where one could find these magical perfectly compatible and functional drop in replacements, do you?

The closest thing to a unique offering that they have is YouTube. What other services don't have perfectly reasonable replacements ready and waiting?

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#106

Post by dehrmann »

tivert wrote: post #97
teleforce wrote: post #8

There's side effect benefit of big kahuna companies mainly on the significant breakthrough and game changing research output because these excellent researchers are paid handsome money compared to conventional universities or research institutions. We saw this with AT&T Bell research labs with their inventions of transistor and Unix, among others. The same thing happened with Google research with (arguably) deep lear…

I think you're getting it backwards. The research operations are a desperate attempt stave off regulation to keep the sweet, sweet monopoly profits coming in (and those profits are so big that the bean-counters allow it). I believe that was the explicit strategy at AT&T. We collectively pay way, way more. It'd be way more efficient and cost effective to just set up a well-funded government labs to do that research.

It's an interesting argument for monopolies possibly being a net-good, but I don't think regulators really look at it. Companies do R&D because they like their monopoly status and don't want to be caught flat-footed by something new.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#107

Post by nick__m »

fecal_henge wrote: post #42
fsh wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly this model no longer works. Bell labs had 11 nobel prize winners. What did Google invent? Slightly better generative neural networks whose offsprings now pollute their search results?

Google invented the ability to put an animated Gif inside a spreadsheet cell.

with COM and OLE, this was possible in excel on win3.11 !

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#108

Post by waveBidder »

qnleigh wrote: post #33
waveBidder wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just skip the middle man skimming off the top and 10x the national labs funding.

I wish this were a viable option, but it is not. US national labs are horribly, horribly mismanaged. For some slower-moving fields like particle physics where institutional knowledge is key, they hold up alright, but for fast moving fields like quantum they are very behind. They are stagnant bureaucracies. I could tell stories, but better to just compare the output of national labs in many fields to those of the top…

Then separate out the basic science from the defense work which requires that bureaucratic oversight. Or direct that funding to universities. My main point is allowing monopolies because they direct their excess profits to research to hide their excess profits is just a complicated tax to fund basic research, which we would be better off spending directly on research without bloated executive salaries and distorted markets in e.g. search or browsers.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#109

Post by which »

teleforce wrote: post #8

There's side effect benefit of big kahuna companies mainly on the significant breakthrough and game changing research output because these excellent researchers are paid handsome money compared to conventional universities or research institutions. We saw this with AT&T Bell research labs with their inventions of transistor and Unix, among others. The same thing happened with Google research with (arguably) deep lear…

This! And where do people think open source funding, hackathons, bug bounties for software that's not even theirs, oss-fuzz, really incredible but not necessarily profitable research like Project Zero comes from? AdWords largesse.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#110

Post by logicchains »

optymizer wrote: post #85
teleforce wrote: post #8

There's side effect benefit of big kahuna companies mainly on the significant breakthrough and game changing research output because these excellent researchers are paid handsome money compared to conventional universities or research institutions. We saw this with AT&T Bell research labs with their inventions of transistor and Unix, among others. The same thing happened with Google research with (arguably) deep lear…

Drawing from own experience working with Harvard, MIT and Google researchers, I could not disagree more. When you talk to a researcher, do they strike you as someone who chases handsome amounts of money, or someone who chases ideas? You bring up research labs. I listened to Alan Kay's numerous talks over the years (as an example of a prominent CS researcher), not once does he mention that he joined for the money at X…

> is to be able to have finances to back a research division, where you can spend billions on building a new type of technology, if need be, that may not pan out. You don't need a monopoly to accomplish that

A company in an industry with very tight margins has much less money to invest in fundamental research. All the recent growth in generative AI has been driven by companies with very high margins; Google, Facebook, Amazon. If all those FANG were in tightly competitive markets and hence had low margins, they wouldn't have had billions of dollars to spend on the GPU compute necessary to develop modern language models. Which is evidenced by the fact that no companies in more competitive sectors have produced any large language models.

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