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Google's real monopoly is on the user data

propellernet.co.uk

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Re: Google's real monopoly is on the user data

#21

Post by bee_rider »

llm_trw wrote: post #14
miohtama wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also hurted Firefox a lot by promoting Chrome on every Google search query.

They hurt Firefox by giving them money. If not for the big fat google pay check Firefox would have had to be a good browser instead of the piggy bank for the personal projects of its former ceo.

There aren’t a ton of medium-sized successful browsers out there that didn’t take Google’s money, I think funding web browser development is just hard.

IMO the real anti-competitive behavior was iterating so fast on web standards. Chrome seems to be the vanguard on a lot of new web features, and has started up this whole silly JavaScript performance as a figure-of-merit competition.

The fact that Firefox has to pay dozens of full time engineering salaries or whatever just to tread water is the real problem IMO. Because not only can they not do it well, but most groups can’t do it at all.

As a result, the web as a standards-based platform for sharing documents is basically dying, being killed better than Microsoft ever could. And without the obvious appearance of being evil.

Re: Google's real monopoly is on the user data

#22

Post by troupo »

miohtama wrote: post #12
jt2190 wrote: post #5

> But the real question is, given that Google has around 90% of the search market share, and so has around 90% of the available user data, is the advantage it gives them so unfair that it should be illegal? In the U.S. it’s not illegal to be a monopoly but to use your monopoly position to prevent competitors from entering the market. (This is why it’s not illegal for a small town to have a single gas station, for exa…

They also hurted Firefox a lot by promoting Chrome on every Google search query.

They also hurt Firefox by literally sabotaging them: https://archive.is/tgIH9

And by promoting Chrome on every Google property from Youtube to Search to Google Docs

Re: Google's real monopoly is on the user data

#23

Post by tomrod »

Rick76 wrote: post #4
arbuge wrote: post #3

And they own Youtube... That will be a massive benefit when it comes to training AI-powered robots I think. Conceivably, an AI that's seen every plumbing-related video on Youtube would be superior to any human plumber you can imagine, assuming a good mapping between the human hand movements in the video and its own robotic arms. And so on for other domains.

It's a scary thought to me that 90% of online videos are hosted on YouTube. If Google were to ever fail, I know that won't happen, but I think the internet would be truly broken if for any reason YouTube is down.

For a little bit of time. Vimeo, etc. offer readily available alternatives, there are some open source initiatives to improve availability, and frankly VOD is a commoditized service these days. So YouTube going away would impact a mostly-not-connecting ad channel, and savvy creators that preserved their videos and farmed emails will survive without too much hiccup.

Re: Google's real monopoly is on the user data

#24

Post by AnimalMuppet »

jt2190 wrote: post #5

> But the real question is, given that Google has around 90% of the search market share, and so has around 90% of the available user data, is the advantage it gives them so unfair that it should be illegal? In the U.S. it’s not illegal to be a monopoly but to use your monopoly position to prevent competitors from entering the market. (This is why it’s not illegal for a small town to have a single gas station, for exa…

The other way a monopoly is illegal is if you use it to try to acquire a monopoly on some other market. (Microsoft using the OS monopoly to try to get a monopoly on browsers, for example.)

Re: Google's real monopoly is on the user data

#25

Post by notyourwork »

cletus wrote: post #19

Story time: many years ago, user testing of search ranking worked with a process called "side by sides". This where for a certain group of people they would compare search results in production with an experiment and they would see which were preferred. The goal of Google is to make the result the user wants #1 on that list. So you would have known searches and you could compare the old result and the new. This was a…

Makes complete sense, vending the data (i.e. search results) and having direct insights into the consumption of those results (i.e. chrome browser behavior) is a game changer. I imagine this is also part of the value of Google analytics.

Re: Google's real monopoly is on the user data

#28

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

I can't get behind the article's conclusions.

1) Google’s results are really good. Not quite. Google's results used to be really good but now are a mix of helpful to some, less helpful and fully counterproductive.

2) and they’re really good because they have a monopoly on the user data. User data may elevate some products but the worth of search results stems from the crawled index and search algorithms.

2a) every engineer could leave and a start a new search engine with the exact same source code and that search engine would be worse. Only until their crawlers built a sufficient index. If they can filter out results gamed for Google SEO, they'll be better.

3) In a landmark case, a US judge has ruled that Google’s monopoly on search is unlawful. Trim the first 3 letters of the last word and this conclusion will be sound.

Re: Google's real monopoly is on the user data

#29

Post by jjulius »

Rick76 wrote: post #4
arbuge wrote: post #3

And they own Youtube... That will be a massive benefit when it comes to training AI-powered robots I think. Conceivably, an AI that's seen every plumbing-related video on Youtube would be superior to any human plumber you can imagine, assuming a good mapping between the human hand movements in the video and its own robotic arms. And so on for other domains.

It's a scary thought to me that 90% of online videos are hosted on YouTube. If Google were to ever fail, I know that won't happen, but I think the internet would be truly broken if for any reason YouTube is down.

I mean, in a sense, the entire internet is likely ephemeral.
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