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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

#201

Post by jonas21 »

LightHugger wrote: post #11
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 is a theoretical benefit which is directly at odds with the benefits of competition in a healthy market. For google, my observation is the "big kahuna" benefit of google basically does not exist and competition needs to be restored. Google is famous for not innovating on anything successfully, they produce graveyards of trash. Instead what they do is buy other companies then enshittify them in an anti competitiv…

> Google is famous for not innovating on anything successfully, they produce graveyards of trash.

- AlphaFold (just won a Nobel prize)

- Transformers (the "T" in GPT)

- Waymo (autonomous vehicles)

- Sycamore (quantum computing)

These are just a few off the top of my head.

If your idea of innovation is a better RSS reader, then sure, I agree with you. But in terms of things that push the forefront of technology, I have a hard time thinking of another company with greater impact in recent years.

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

#202

Post by Arainach »

cogman10 wrote: post #84
Arainach wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fascinating how "preventing web extensions from having full access to everything on every site you visit when there is a repeated history of extensions being bought by companies that turn them into spyware data miners" gets turned into "blocking ad blockers".

Because there were other ways to handle the ad blocker situation. For example, allowing the users to grant access to an extension. The hard protocol ban is heavy handed.

Users don't read dialogs. They just click yes so they can get to their shiny talking purple gorilla. This also doesn't address the threat model: a good extensions that users trust and give these rights to which is bought out and changed to do malicious things.

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

#203

Post by ta_1138 »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #120
whiplash451 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe because search is an extremely hard problem and requires hundreds of millions (if not billions) of investment to remain competitive?

Also: There is a MASSIVE incentive for foul play from everyone being searched. Every single business wants their results at the top. Everyone is grasping for every single advertiser's cents. The monetary encouragement to game the system is so incredibly strong. Google has to fight that uphill battle 24/7. I have a lot of issues with Google as a company, but I do not envy their position when it comes to the web search…

No doubt, but there's a whole lot of problems shaped like that in tech today.

Look at any two sided market: Amazon/Etsy's third party sellers also want to be at the top, and there are bad actors trying to scam the intermediary and the customer. The same low friction onboarding that allows the company to succeed as an intermediary is also facilitating the fraud. Merchants can be fraudsters, advertisers can be fraudsters, users can be fraudsters producing fake clicks. There's economic incentives everywhere. See the relatively recent news of spotify getting generated songs, which are then played by fake listeners.

The companies are entering this situations with their eyes wide open. It's a necessary problem when you want to be an intermediary at a large enough scale. And if you don't have the scale, the per-interaction costs are really high, and your company gets beaten by someone with an easier onboarding funnel.

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

#204

Post by exabrial »

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…

[flagged]

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

#206

Post by anon291 »

I wish that instead of wasting time on antitrust cases, that the government would just directly fund competition by incentivizing it.

I.e, the first company to reach x% browser market share will receive $x million (billion?) in prize money

or, the first company to build an LLM-based search engine with x% market share will receive $n million

Or structure as a direct investment or heavy tax breaks.

Always better to incentivize competition versus punish success.

Or even better, if government wants to break up "ACME corp" then just tell the employees that, if you leave "ACME corp" and start your own company competing with ACME corp, we will waive taxes on all income for your first five profitable years.

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

#207

Post by DinoDad13 »

nickff wrote: post #117
brendoelfrendo wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not a participant in your back-and-forth, but the top level comment seems to be much more nuanced than your posts. Perhaps you could: > ”Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.”

> "Split them up at your own (US) perils, not unlike killing own Golden Goose."

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

#208

Post by gmueckl »

4star3star wrote: post #182
gaiagraphia wrote: post #181

The free market's great IF there's competition. If the market's dead, it's time to reinject some life and keep the cogs turning. Scale's great, but it often comes with a societal cost. For every efficiency made, there's less agency and decent jobs to go round. Seems unfair to make such decisions ad-hoc though, and string it out through years of court cases and m/billions of lawyer fees. Why not establish rules of the…

It would become a game to NOT capture x% market share to the degree that it suited interested parties to avoid it.

That would have interesting implications. Companies would have to grow by aggressive diversification into other markets. Instead of a Google or Appple that controls your digital life, you'd have an endgame with a few ACMEs that attempt to lock you in in every aspect of your life: Your pots would work best with a stove from the same company. Your washing machine and detergent only do a good on a specific brand of clothes etc. A completely different kind of market regulation would be required.

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

#209

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

strongpigeon wrote: post #136

Something I really don't get is the part about Google's monopoly in search text ads. FTA: > Finally, the filing said Google’s dominance over search text ads needed to be addressed by lowering barriers to would-be rivals or licensing its ad feed to others, independently from search results. What Google has is a monopoly on search (which is bad), but I don't think having a monopoly for advertising on your own property…

> What Google has is a monopoly on search (which is bad), but I don't think having a monopoly for advertising on your own property is a bad thing.

Where one might run afoul is using your monopoly in one market -- search, in Google's case -- to gain an advantage in another market -- advertising. It's kinda interesting because they clearly don't treat "search" as a market given they don't sell it to anyone but it also clearly has value, otherwise people wouldn't use it.

Now I wonder if it is without precedent that the supposedly-monopolistic thing they're using as a carrot for their advantage in a different market doesn't actually generate revenue itself; not sure if that context has ever been tried in court.

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

#210

Post by randomdata »

gaiagraphia wrote: post #181

The free market's great IF there's competition. If the market's dead, it's time to reinject some life and keep the cogs turning. Scale's great, but it often comes with a societal cost. For every efficiency made, there's less agency and decent jobs to go round. Seems unfair to make such decisions ad-hoc though, and string it out through years of court cases and m/billions of lawyer fees. Why not establish rules of the…

> The free market's great IF there's competition.

If you have a free market finding competition isn't an issue, but maintaining profitability is. If we had a free market when Google came onto the scene, everyone else would have copied PageRank the next day, and then you'd have hundreds of search engines all as good as each other, each sharping their pencils sharper and sharper in an attempt to win customers over on a price basis until there is nothing left. At which point there is nothing left to further innovation.

To combat that, we grant short-term monopolies over technology to allow their inventors time to build up a decent business before opening the flood gates, with the intent to balance what makes mixed-market economies great without ending up with no competition. The problem is that those monopoly procedures were established when time moved slowly. Back then, 20 years was barely enough time to get your product to and recognized in the market. These days, you can get there in a few years, or even less, which leaves nearly 20 more years to focus on killing all the competition.

Ultimately, we would have been better off if Google was pushed out into a free market after a few years. We benefitted from it having some head start, but it went on much too long.

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