US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by asdff » Wed, Oct 09, 2024, 5:52 PM UTC

aiauthoritydev wrote: post #151

asdff wrote: post #146

If they did this 15 year ago, I bet google reader would still be actively maintained today. More innovation is possible when there are smaller companies working on fewer things. Yes there are economies of scale with large entities, but you then run up against the economy of shareholder attention if your little effort within the larger organization is not the current golden child of the day. When you work at a smaller…

Google engineer's time was not worth Google reader. If you think it was a useful product you could have created it yourself for profit.

Highly useful software is not always profitable. Limiting our species to developing technologies that are profitable rather than merely useful is a severe blow to our path of innovation.

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

#172

Post by zaphar » Wed, Oct 09, 2024, 5:52 PM UTC

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.

I am not at all confident that a government lab will be either well-funded or efficient in any sense of the words.

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

#173

Post by kachapopopow » Wed, Oct 09, 2024, 5:53 PM UTC

arghwhat wrote: post #159

mm263 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are Kagi

After having been a paid subscriber for a number of months, I have to say that it still wasn't cutting it. I still ended up falling back to google all the time. Plus, https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

Interesting read.

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

#174

Post by AlexandrB » Wed, Oct 09, 2024, 5:55 PM UTC

arghwhat wrote: post #159

mm263 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are Kagi

After having been a paid subscriber for a number of months, I have to say that it still wasn't cutting it. I still ended up falling back to google all the time. Plus, https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

What bugs me most about Kagi at the moment is that their iOS plugin behaves weirdly. Frequently it will completely swallow my search and I'll have to retype it. Eventually I just disabled it :(

Arguably this is not their fault - I really wish iOS/MacOS Safari let you set a custom search engine instead of picking from a fixed list.

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

#175

Post by dekhn » Wed, Oct 09, 2024, 5:56 PM UTC

My primary interest is how Alphabet will attempt to implement this. In particular, if they break up Search and Ads, or really any major product in google3/borg, Alphabet will have a massive pile of work splitting those up in a way that allows the resulting groups to achieve the same level of horizontal and vertical integration that they currently enjoy.

Personally I am skeptical that they have enough technically capable and charismatic leaders to pull this off.

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

#176

Post by labcomputer » Wed, Oct 09, 2024, 5:57 PM UTC

busterarm wrote: post #99

shiroiushi wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one of several scary scenarios. What if it kills Android, and everyone has to buy an iPhone? (Yeah, I know, Android is OSS and the phone makers could just maintain/improve it as a consortium without Google, but looking at how these companies operate I don't think they're capable of doing this.) (And no, I don't think the USG will break up Apple if this happens. They're already showing highly preferential treat…

Samsung could easily maintain Android as they already have their own little Android software ecosystem that differs greatly from Google's. Full of spyware, but yeah. There's tons of video hosting options but what makes YouTube special is access to a large audience and monetization. TikTok's monetization is garbage and not even a contender really. Large content creators are already negotiating their own brand deals to…

Yea, but OSM has variable quality by country, and isn’t really a “navigable” map in most places.

You can’t get turn-by-turn directions because they don’t (consistently) have things like lane permeability, turn restrictions, directionality, etc. You can’t get accurate ETAs because they don’t have speed limits or free flow speeds. And traffic data of course. Unless things have changed, routing class and surface type are also unreliable, so a shortest-path graph algo will take you down neighborhood streets or unmaintained roads.

There is a ton of under-the-hood map data, invisible to the end user, that you need to have to be able to deliver a modern phone navigation experience.

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

#177

Post by mandibles » Wed, Oct 09, 2024, 5:58 PM UTC

kibwen wrote: post #47

dtquad wrote: post #39

Hilariously shortsighted. Big Tech companies have been a GDP-doubling runaway success for the US economy. It would be like if we here in Denmark started breaking up Novo Nordisk. Our economists would probably do a public lynching of any government official who suggested doing that. However as a European I can't help but welcoming the US shooting themselves in the foot like this. Something tells me we will see more of…

Hilariously shortsighted. Breaking up Standard Oil created wildly competitive industries and launched Rockefeller's wealth into the stratosphere. Big Tech is a rent-seeking middleman that chokes the life out of innovation.

Standard Oil had already lost a huge portion of its market share when the forced breakup finally happened.

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

#178

Post by eagerpace » Wed, Oct 09, 2024, 6:02 PM UTC

Anywhere there are eyeballs, there will be ads. And wherever there are ads there are privacy concerns.

Netflix waited until they had sufficiently killed off cable TV, then went back to creating the same problem it fixed. No ads in ChatGPT today, but soon as it (or a competitor) gains meaningful marketshare, there will be ads.

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

#179

Post by whitehexagon » Wed, Oct 09, 2024, 6:02 PM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #63

kolinko wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail was revolutionary at the start, but stopped innovating 10 years ago - why don’t we still have a good search engine within it? MapReduce would be invented anyway (I implemented it from scratch before learning of it’s existence). Chrome is just a slightly upgraded Firefox (and novadays Safari is just as good if not better with ai) PageRank was what gave Google monopoly, it’s not a result of monopoly. Go - I can g…

> Chrome is just a slightly upgraded Firefox Wat. It's like saying that an apple is a slightly upgraded orange. I would understand if you mentioned KHTML and Safari as relatives, but "slightly upgraded" does not fit anyway. > PageRank was what gave Google monopoly I don't think so. PageRank has been successfully implemented elsewhere, and outmatched. What helped Google build a monopoly was the first mover advantage,…

>If you want a relatively recent, successful Google service for general public, it's Google Photos.

I seem to recall that followed the acquisition of Picasa.

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

#180

Post by KerryJones » Wed, Oct 09, 2024, 6:06 PM UTC

asdff wrote: post #171

aiauthoritydev wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google engineer's time was not worth Google reader. If you think it was a useful product you could have created it yourself for profit.

Highly useful software is not always profitable. Limiting our species to developing technologies that are profitable rather than merely useful is a severe blow to our path of innovation.

Why wouldn't people pay for something highly useful? It seems the opposite, that people would pay for things that are highly useful. People don't pay for things that are marginally useful.