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It's pretty clear that this and other their other specifically anti-Google rulings are about protectionism and nothing more.
what are they protecting? Its not as if there are small european based search engines that are failing to compete with Google who would benefit fromt his action.
It's pretty clear that this and other their other specifically anti-Google rulings are about protectionism and nothing more.
There isn't yet an EU based competitor for this protectionism to make sense. But if there was, I see no reason why the EU shouldn't try to help it gain market share. It's in their interest for various reasons and more competition in search would really benefit everyone but Google.
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Natural monopolies are things like infrastructure where the entry cost of providing a fully separate parallel network (of railway lines, phone lines, broadband etc) is prohibitively high or where provision of such parallel network is undesirable for other reasons (e.g. environment). Could you explain how an operating system is a natural monopoly? Development of a new OS isn't cheap, but isn't prohibitively expensive…
> Could you explain how an operating system is a natural monopoly? The cost of providing and OS and an entire ecosystem of device drivers and an an entire ecosystem of apps is very high. But even if you manage to build that, the cost of training a significant percent of the population into using and developing for your platform is much higher. Getting a significant presence in the "brain space" of a population is ver…
Driving adoption is a matter for all products in the market, not specific to operating systems. You can make it easier with familiar UI, advertising and bundling your OS with hardware (although that may be anti-competitive practice it seems to be widely accepted where I live).
A monopoly should be defined by barriers to entry, not just market share. There's nothing preventing other large companies from entering the search space, and in fact many of them have (yahoo, microsoft, etc). There are true monopolistic firms like Comcast or Time Warner, where there are serious logistic/economic barriers preventing other firms from entering the market. This doesn't seem like one of them to me.
There are serious logistic/economic barriers to enter the search space. Building a competitive search engine is very expensive. Ask the Bing people. Yahoo Search is actually powered by Bing since 2009 according to Wikipedia. Their own search engine was not competitive enough. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search
> There are serious logistic/economic barriers to enter
> the search space.
Something particularly interesting about Google is that they just took the industry head-on. I'd guess that there'd be areas where you could build a kind of search engine that was better than the market leader, and focus on carving out a niche. Yandex have done just this with the Russian market. (and there's an example of a commercially-viable post-google search engine business).
But Google just went after being the leading power.
History in general, but in our space in particular, is written by small, well-coordinated teams who can repeatedly execute. If you can get that team together, you can do almost anything.
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Conflict of interest is very real and full disclosure should be a norm in the community powered media with so much influence on tech industry.
What? Everyone on HN works for someone. I am not my company. Google has plenty of views i don't agree with, and I have plenty of views they don't agree with. If you believe comments on HN (or almost anywhere else) should have conflict of interest disclosures, you may as well shut it all down. Everything here is opinions of people, presented as opinions of people.
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> Could you explain how an operating system is a natural monopoly? The cost of providing and OS and an entire ecosystem of device drivers and an an entire ecosystem of apps is very high. But even if you manage to build that, the cost of training a significant percent of the population into using and developing for your platform is much higher. Getting a significant presence in the "brain space" of a population is ver…
You're making implicit assumption that a new OS must come in with a new ecosystem built from scratch. There is a significant number of standards (e.g. POSIX, ELF, PDF etc) that can help you ensure different levels of interoperability with existing software and data. Implementing such standards lowers the cost of building an ecosystem significantly. Also, with the push to the cloud, fewer applications need to be provi…
It's a matter of degree. To simplify, the costs of switching are linear in the complexity of using the product. I apologize that I don't know how to precisely model human network effects (you need to learn the product from someone) on top of it, but intuitively the societal costs are super-linear.
Computer systems are by far the most complex products human kind has ever produced. Given the simplistic model sketch above, the costs of switching in the computer industry are the highest humanity has ever seen, likely by orders of magnitude. Fun times.
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You are completely wrong. Apple has a small market share, so it doesn't matter that they abuse it by disallowing e.g rival browsers and certain apps. It sucks, but one can use Android without too many headaches. But Google search is more like a public utility than a service. It has extreme market penetration which they abuse for various reasons like prime placing for their own products. And that not only hurts compet…
"It has extreme market penetration which they abuse for various reasons like prime placing for their own products. And that not only hurts competitors but in the end also consumers which will end up with only one option for maps, video sharing, etc." Assuming they did prime place their own products, this is not a recognized antitrust harm (it is not bundling or tying, despite random claims on HN).
Harmful indeed.
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Being a monopoly is not necessarily a bad thing. It can lead to consumers being negatively affected but that is not a foregone conclusion. YKK, the zip manufacturer, has effectively had a monopoly on zips for a long time but they produce high quality goods at a low price. The consumer gets a great deal and the monopoly knows to keep the customer happy to keep their market position. Google do search better than anyone…
I think YKK is a bad example here, considering they were fined for beign part of a cartel in Europe (2007). That doesn't seem like something that benefits customers or gets them a great deal.
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You are completely wrong. Apple has a small market share, so it doesn't matter that they abuse it by disallowing e.g rival browsers and certain apps. It sucks, but one can use Android without too many headaches. But Google search is more like a public utility than a service. It has extreme market penetration which they abuse for various reasons like prime placing for their own products. And that not only hurts compet…
"It has extreme market penetration which they abuse for various reasons like prime placing for their own products. And that not only hurts competitors but in the end also consumers which will end up with only one option for maps, video sharing, etc." Assuming they did prime place their own products, this is not a recognized antitrust harm (it is not bundling or tying, despite random claims on HN).
90% market share + hiding competitor sites to eg Google Places is punishable by EXISTING EU law.
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I do work for Google, but i explicitly don't speak for them on HN. I also don't work for Google Legal, and don't work on issues related to this stuff. I have opined on this stuff long before i worked for Google, and will long after. Google literally does not pay me for my views on this. Ben is literally paid for his anti-google views on this stuff. You are of course, welcome to discount whatever you like. You should…
You may feel that way, and you may really be acting that way, but what matters is not so much what you do but how it is perceived. Simply being employed by someone introduces bias, or at least the perception of bias. Just as you raise important notes about Ben that readers of his "work" ought to be aware of while drawing conclusions from it, readers of your comments ought to be aware of your association to Google whi…