Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uh, I did. That's what the whole "surveillance system" part of the post was. Also I think advertisements in general are harmful.
how do people learn of products?
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US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case
221–230 of 888 posts
Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case
#222Loving the discourse in the comments here. Speaking as someone who grew up alongside Google in a sense, I fall on the side of the "break it up" camp. It was novel at the time to have a single company so nicely provide us with everything digitally that we could need - G Suite, YouTube, Search, Maps, Advertising, Books, Reader, etc - but in hindsight, we gave too much power to too unaccountable an entity, who in turn u…
If I am worried about anybody holding my private data (apart from US' 3-letter agencies and thats a hill I am not going to die upon since I don't have same basic human rights as US citizens), its Meta. Sure Google is everywhere, but Meta holds much more data on our inner personal sides, which are the easiest things to actually abuse to no end. That and pornhub.
Google actually tracks associates everywhere you visit in incognito mode in chrome and associates it with your main user id. So whatever pornhub knows, so does google.
Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Google is famous for not innovating on anything successfully PageRank Gmail Maps MapReduce Chrome Protocol Buffers Go
Go you can hardly call an innovation. All of the ideas existed previously, and it's a poor execution on those ideas for reasons that have been discussed on HN at length before. They created it to serve their own needs in conditioning the labor market to make their hiring process easier.
Gosh this is pretty unfair to Rob Pike and Ken Thompson. A lot of infrastructure companies have benefitted from Go the same way Google has, for the same reasons.
Typical HN comment writing off significant thoughtfulness as "not an innovation" lol
Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Why wouldn't people pay for something highly useful?
Typically because they can easily get it for free. Perfect case study is WinRar. How many people actually bought a license for software they used daily?
Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case
#225The 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 game already exists. Intel and Amd had an odd relationship for years when Intel needed Amd so they could claim that competition existed. Cross licensing instruction sets and the like.
Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Excellent job demonstrating Google's broad market dominance, and that alternatives exist to replace them should antitrust action be taken.
What drop in equivalent exists for Android? I have no desire to move to iOS. What drop in equivalent exists for Google maps? I have used OpenStreetMap for a personal project and have tried other proprietary options. If Google maps disappeared, life would go on but I would be worse off. What equivalent exists for Chrome? Even on desktop I prefer Chrome over Firefox. On mobile, Firefox falls far behind Chrome.
Fortunately for you, Android and Chromium are FOSS and not going anywhere. For maps there is OSM with several available frontends, Bing maps, and Apple Maps has a web version.
Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they only divided it into information search ("library" knowledge) and business search (Yelp/YP) where you can tweak your preferences. When you search for "vacuum cleaner", you either want online stores or you may want a local store. In either case it's a business query rather than looking for reviews or specs. What's really polluting search, including Google, is the on-demand content generation based on your quer…
Unfortunately, if you did that, the businesses would still do their best to muscle in on the "information search" results. Marketers gotta Market, and placement on a SERP is a zero sum game. If one competitor managed to get themselves highly ranked in the "information search" then there would be incentive for all competitors to try.
I guess the idea is you disallow them from optimizing at all in the info search so much that you derank them on the biz for some not inconsequential amount of time if they misbehave.
Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case
#228Loving the discourse in the comments here. Speaking as someone who grew up alongside Google in a sense, I fall on the side of the "break it up" camp. It was novel at the time to have a single company so nicely provide us with everything digitally that we could need - G Suite, YouTube, Search, Maps, Advertising, Books, Reader, etc - but in hindsight, we gave too much power to too unaccountable an entity, who in turn u…
> nicely provide us with everything digitally that we could need... Advertising Sorry for the snark, but no one anywhere needs advertising. Advertising in it's current form is a plague on humanity.
Tons of small businesses rely on advertising. Tons of legit businesses only exist because online advertising became easy and widespread.
Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case
#229[flagged]
Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
The closest thing to a unique offering that they have is YouTube. What other services don't have perfectly reasonable replacements ready and waiting?
> What other services don't have perfectly reasonable replacements ready and waiting? How about which single reasonable replacement offers the same services with the same level of integration? Using Yahoo Mail and Amazon Cloud and Office Online and whatever other products isn't quite the same offering as what Google offers.
Interoperability is great, walled-garden integration is a trap like any sort of bundling. If someone wants to create a suite of products that work well together that's fine so long as they employ means that allow other products to integrate as well. Google has gone the other route and created a suite of products and services that integrate in ways that exclude competitors.