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Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

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Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#211

Post by xienze »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #99
megiddo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telecoms usually pay for their monopoly privileges. This is just a shakedown. The same way Microsoft was deemed a "monopoly" and what? Unbundled explorer? Is anyone seriously worried about their monopoly now? There's always a new kid on the block. The DOJ is too slow to be effective at targeting tech monopolies. They should just quit before they look like a bunch of johnny-come-lately blowhards.

Microsoft was specifically deemed a monopoly in desktop operating systems . That was OK. The problem was that they were trying to use that to "leverage" their way into dominance on the internet, by pushing (really quite aggressively) users to use Internet Explorer, and by pushing (even bribing) websites to include "IE-only" elements. "Try to make using Netscape a jarring experience" was the way they put it. It's that…

> The problem was that they were trying to use that to "leverage" their way into dominance on the internet, by pushing (really quite aggressively) users to use Internet Explorer

Absolutely correct. By the way, have you visited Google with a non-Chrome browser? They’ll encourage you to use Chrome for “the best experience.” Seems very much like leveraging, never understood why people don’t make a bigger deal about this.

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#212

Post by tyre »

akiselev wrote: post #135
tyre wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Precedent is tricky. Democrats removing the filibuster for judges came back to haunt them. There was a recent (last few weeks) SCOTUS decision that came out with numerous opinions by different coalitions. You could tell that they were all maneuvering around this idea of precedent. Liberal justices who ended up on either side (majority or minority) were couching their votes as upholding a prior precedent, even w…

Democrats didn't remove the SCOTUS filibuster, the Republicans did that to get Gorsuch on the bench. The Democrats removed the filibuster for regular judicial appointments during Obama's tenure because Republicans blocked all of his nominations, using the judicial filibuster more in two years than all previous Congresses combined.

you're correct, I wrote this in too much haste

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#213

Post by ohazi »

vondur wrote: post #120
akersten wrote: post #23

I will continue to believe that this is another tentacle of William Barr's political harassment of Google and tech in general until he leads the same crusade against other 'monopolies' of the same degree like Comcast, Apple, Boeing, Amazon, United Airlines, etc.

I agree with Comcast, they need to be broken up, and Amazon could do with some scrutiny. But Apple, Boeing and United Airlines? The aren't monopolies by any definition.

> Comcast, they need to be broken up

Breaking up a regional monopoly into smaller regional monopolies doesn't work (see baby Bells).

What would be better is requiring the owners of any last mile infrastructure to lease said infrastructure to any other interested operator at cost. This worked with DSL, but the mandate ended when we moved on to other technologies like cable and fiber that had no such requirements.

Instead, we now do the opposite. We give ISPs tax breaks and incentives and piles of cash to "build out the infrastructure" (read: we pay them to invest in their own business), because they threaten to not build it otherwise (read: they're threatening to deliberately decline to grow their business), and for the privilege of paying them to increase their customer and revenue base, we (get this) give them the exclusive right to be the only operator of any similar last mile infrastructure in that area.

How fucking stupid can we get?

We should not allow these agreements to happen, and we should retroactively void any that are currently in place.

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#214

Post by jorblumesea »

While it's probably true that most of the tech companies have some form of platform monopolies, William Barr, out of all people, is not to be trusted. Hatchet man through and through.

The motives here are entirely political. Notice that the ISPs, telecom industry in general, defense industries are left out of this discussion.

Tech companies lean left, largely donate to the Democrats, and have been the focus of conservative groups for years as they are considered "biased" towards those on the Left. Like many things about Trump's administration, it's about revenge against those who oppose him, be they companies, state or individuals.

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#215

Post by missedthecue »

laluser wrote: post #105
adventured wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were going to bother, you'd split Amazon and AWS. Amazon becomes mostly a retail company again. Without the AWS subsidy margins, they'll be down to retail margins and the ad business (with ads, it's plenty). They can perhaps keep the gadgets, splitting every major aspect apart might be going too far. AWS is a $400 to $600 billion market cap company right now if it were trading on its own, based on its operatin…

I think the sum of the parts would end up being worth more than the single entity. Which would make Uncle Jeff worth even more. Not that I care.

Happened with Rockefeller so probably

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#216

Post by pb7 »

xoxoy wrote: post #193
drusepth wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would a government even go after a monopoly that isn't doing anything malicious against its competitors? What would the punishment even be? Forcing adoption of other platforms to artificially inflate usage rates? Breaking Google Search into two competing Google Mini-Search products that aren't expected to cooperate and push search #3 and onward out of the market?

I don’t think this is about search dominance. It’s probably about Google stifling competitors on their own search results page. Yelp has complained forever that Google ranks their own reviews above Yelp. Things like that.

Yelp is a parasite that participates in extortion of small businesses. They need to be investigated themselves long before their word has any weight in this matter.

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#217

Post by judge2020 »

dontreact wrote: post #195
onewhonknocks wrote: post #188

IMHO they're not a monopoly, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. Traditional monopolies "control supply of a good or service, and where the entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted." In this case, the supply of a good or service (social networking, webpage indexing and searching) are not controlled by Facebook and Google because they aren't finite resources. Anyone can index the web and…

No one can build a search engine as good as Google without the data flowing through it every day. That have so many click logs to train their models and see what works, there is just no way to compete. If all Google engineers left at the same time, Google would still probably end up dominant by hiring new folks to get things back up and running. No amount of human labor will be able to close that data gap.

The Google search engine didn't have anything to build off of when it was introduced since it was using an algorithm and not ML. You could create a search engine today without utilizing any click data outside of "what link did this user click on the result page and did they search for a similar query or try another link as their next action".

In fact, this is already happening. DDG is building its own crawler (I often see the ddg user agent on my web properties) and they don't have any open "machine learning expert" positions.

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#218

Post by iateanapple »

joshuamorton wrote: post #183
iateanapple wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are right, the capital cost of millions of servers worldwide, with security guards, and buildings, and cooling is zero. Not even close to the capital costs and margins of an airline. Compare AWS margins and capital costs with Amazons retail margins and capital costs for example.

The capital costs might actually be similar (or higher for AWS). The margins, of course, are much lower for an airline. The best data point I can find is that Google spent 13B on datacenter and office construction in 2019, which is about the same as the purchase cost of all 130 of Delta Airlines' 737-900ER aircraft (which is about 1/6 of Delta's entire fleet).

> The best data point I can find is that Google spent 13B on datacenter and office construction in 2019

It’s hard to do a fair comparison like this between high growth companies and normal companies - for example what fraction of that cost for Google is growth based vs to maintain exisiting services?

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#219

Post by JulianMorrison »

onewhonknocks wrote: post #188

IMHO they're not a monopoly, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. Traditional monopolies "control supply of a good or service, and where the entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted." In this case, the supply of a good or service (social networking, webpage indexing and searching) are not controlled by Facebook and Google because they aren't finite resources. Anyone can index the web and…

The Scylla is scale, if you aren't big you can't do search at all, and only a behemoth like Google can do free-form AI assisted questions.

The Charybdis is trust. You can't monetize search directly, or it becomes a bunch of transparent lies that nobody wants. You can't be a rapacious predator that has already tried to eat the internet several times (sorry, Microsoft). It mattered that early Google said "don't be evil". You have to monetize something else, but weave it into your search so that you aren't bleeding money.

Only Google has threaded the needle. It may never happen a second time.

Re: Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google

#220

Post by gfodor »

akersten wrote: post #23

I will continue to believe that this is another tentacle of William Barr's political harassment of Google and tech in general until he leads the same crusade against other 'monopolies' of the same degree like Comcast, Apple, Boeing, Amazon, United Airlines, etc.

Google ought to scare you a lot more than the other companies you listed. One not need bring politics into the picture to understand why surveillance capitalism-based companies may require distinct scrutiny.
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