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US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

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Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#221

Post by toomuchtodo »

mullingitover wrote: post #184
snielson wrote: post #168

The solution proposed by Kagi—separate the search index from the rest of Google—seems to make the most sense. Kagi explains it more here: https://blog.kagi.com/dawn-new-era-search

Crawling the internet is a natural monopoly. Nobody wants an endless stream of bots crawling their site, so googlebot wins because they’re the dominant search engine. It makes sense to break that out so everyone has access to the same dataset at FRAND pricing. My heart just wants Google to burn to the ground, but my brain says this is the more reasonable approach.

https://commoncrawl.org/

This is similar to the natural monopoly of root DNS servers (managed as a public good). There is no reason more money couldn't go into either Common Crawl, or something like it. The Internet Archive can persist the data for ~$2/GB in perpetuity (although storing it elsewhere is also fine imho) as the storage system of last resort. How you provide access to this data is, I argue, similar to how access to science datasets is provided by custodian institutions (examples would be NOAA, CERN, etc).

Build foundations on public goods, very broadly speaking (think OSI model, but for entire systems). This helps society avoid the grasp of Big Tech and their endless desire to build moats for value capture.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#222

Post by throwaway173738 »

Aerroon wrote: post #201
mjcl wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it was an antitrust action that unlocked a lot of that value. The consent decree required Bell Labs to license its patents (e.g. transistors) for reasonable royalties. The same consent decree also forbid AT&T from entering new industries like computing. So after they built UNIX, they sold the source code 'as-is' to universities for $200 ($20k for businesses).

You could also say, though, that this is what caused AT&T to be what it is today - disliked by their customers.

Ask anyone who was alive back then and they will tell you stories of how legendarily awful AT&T was to deal with. My father has told me several. The antitrust action made things better for regular people by allowing them to do things like buy their own handsets or haggle over price.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#223

Post by [deleted] »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #179
cyanydeez wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is now a basic utility. Unless you don't believe in basic public goods, allowing equitable access to the utility benefits everyone, especially businesses.

Public goods is an economics term with an actual meaning, and it has nothing to do with public utilities. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/public-good.asp

[deleted]

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#224

Post by rubitxxx2 »

snielson wrote: post #168

The solution proposed by Kagi—separate the search index from the rest of Google—seems to make the most sense. Kagi explains it more here: https://blog.kagi.com/dawn-new-era-search

Assuming the simplified diagram of Google’s architecture, sure, it looks like you’re just splitting off a well-isolated part, but it would be a significant hardship to do it in reality.

Why not also require Apple to split off only the phone and messaging part of its iPhone, Meta to split off only the user feed data, and for the U.S. federal government to run only out of Washington D.C.?

This isn’t the breakup of AT&T in the early 1980s where you could say all the equipment and wiring just now belongs to separate entities. (It wasn’t that simple, but it wasn’t like trying to extract an organ.)

I think people have to understand that and know that what they’re doing is killing Google, and it was already on its way into mind-numbed enterprise territory.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#225

Post by stackskipton »

oceanplexian wrote: post #210
mullingitover wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crawling the internet is a natural monopoly. Nobody wants an endless stream of bots crawling their site, so googlebot wins because they’re the dominant search engine. It makes sense to break that out so everyone has access to the same dataset at FRAND pricing. My heart just wants Google to burn to the ground, but my brain says this is the more reasonable approach.

> Crawling the internet is a natural monopoly. How so? A caching proxy costs you almost nothing and will serve thousands of requests per second on ancient hardware. Actually there's never been a better time in the history of the Internet to have competing search engines since there's never been so much abundance of performance, bandwidth, and software available at historic low prices or for free.

Not everyone wants to deal with caching proxy because they think the load on their site under normal operations is fine if it's rendered server side.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#226

Post by gopher_space »

dehrmann wrote: post #194
ViktorRay wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But when AT&T had a monopoly it funded Bell Labs which was responsible for much innovation. Then AT&T was shut down and Bell Labs went away. If we take your argument seriously then AT&T shouldn’t have been dismantled. But it was a good thing AT&T was dismantled. It helped lead to the modern internet. By your logic all Rockefeller had to do in the early 20th century was set up a lab to do basic research and then Stand…

> it was a good thing AT&T was dismantled Citation needed. I hear this repeated, but the consumer experience was it was split into regional monopolies, and consumers now had to deal with both local and long distance, and both were still monopolies. It only got better with competition from mobile providers.

The consumer experience was AT&T telling you to go fuck yourself. Everyone hated them with a burning passion.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#227

Post by throwaway173738 »

ajross wrote: post #203
ViktorRay wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But when AT&T had a monopoly it funded Bell Labs which was responsible for much innovation. Then AT&T was shut down and Bell Labs went away. If we take your argument seriously then AT&T shouldn’t have been dismantled. But it was a good thing AT&T was dismantled. It helped lead to the modern internet. By your logic all Rockefeller had to do in the early 20th century was set up a lab to do basic research and then Stand…

Bell Labs being defunded by a deregulated/competetive AT&T was precisely what led to the attempted commercialization of Unix and the near death of what would eventually be called "open source", though. In history as it stands, we had GNU and Linux and all that we lost was a few years. But it's easy to imagine a world where that didn't happen and BSD was just killed dead. So no OS X, no iOS, no Android, no ChromeOS, a…

You’re making the assumption that only corporations can fund or perform basic research. But the transistor was actually the culmination of decades of research by materials scientists and physicists in university and other labs into semiconductors before anyone realized there were applications.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#228

Post by riku_iki »

luckydata wrote: post #175
snielson wrote: post #168

The solution proposed by Kagi—separate the search index from the rest of Google—seems to make the most sense. Kagi explains it more here: https://blog.kagi.com/dawn-new-era-search

It's such a ridiculous proposal that would completely destroy Google's business. If that's the goal fine, but let's not pretend that any of those remedies are anything beyond a death sentence.

> It's such a ridiculous proposal that would completely destroy Google's business.

it won't. My bet is that bing and some other indexes are 95% Ok for average Joe. But relevance ranking is much tougher problem, and "google.com" is household brand with many other functions(maps, news, stocks, weather, knowledge graph, shopping, videos), and that's what is foundation of google monopoly.

I think this shared index thing will actually kill competition even more, since every players will use only index owned by google now.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#229

Post by riku_iki »

ketzo wrote: post #188
luckydata wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's such a ridiculous proposal that would completely destroy Google's business. If that's the goal fine, but let's not pretend that any of those remedies are anything beyond a death sentence.

Really? Google would still have an astonishingly large lead in the ad markets.

Not sure how they could hold lead in case they lose search traffic.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#230

Post by pixl97 »

Aerroon wrote: post #201
mjcl wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it was an antitrust action that unlocked a lot of that value. The consent decree required Bell Labs to license its patents (e.g. transistors) for reasonable royalties. The same consent decree also forbid AT&T from entering new industries like computing. So after they built UNIX, they sold the source code 'as-is' to universities for $200 ($20k for businesses).

You could also say, though, that this is what caused AT&T to be what it is today - disliked by their customers.

As the other person said, you must be young.

They are disliked now as much as they were disliked then. Except back then they charged you a hell of a lot for long distance.

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