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Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

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Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

#271

Post by chipdart »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #268
brookst wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not a subscriber to the “if I choose to buy a product, I get to dictate product design decisions for the company” school of thought. Buy it or don’t. If you want X there is no right do demand Y turn into X.

"buy it or don't" does not work with oligopolies. If you had a free market, I would agree, but you very much don't in this case.

> "buy it or don't" does not work with oligopolies. If you had a free market, I would agree, but you very much don't in this case.

Why do you believe there is no free market on mobile phones? I mean, what exactly forces you to pick an iPhone over anything?

Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

#272

Post by labcomputer »

aembleton wrote: post #247
jerf wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft for a good long while made money on two things: Office and Windows. You could break them up into "Office", "Windows", and any combination of "everything else", and for the most part what would happen is that the Office and Windows parts would make more money proportionally, and most if not all of the "everything else" would die. Even products that could nominally have survived on their own if they had grown…

> how is search getting funded? With ads, by making deals with ad brokers. Its just that they will be able to shop around rather than using their own in house one

Sure, but why should we think that those deals will be better than what “Search Google” has with “Ads Google” today?

Whatever revenue is attributed to Search today is just the result of internal horse-trading, perhaps augmented with some accountant’s estimation of “fair market value” for ad space in search results. After the breakup anything is fair game. Maybe the ad broker keeps 95% of ad revenue.

And, if you believe that Google has been using its monopoly to raise ad prices, why shouldn’t prices fall?

Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

#273

Post by labcomputer »

brookst wrote: post #228
nordsieck wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ads and search are the two businesses that most directly collude and which could both survive and thrive independently. I'm skeptical that search is viable as an independent business at scale. I know DDG is making a go of it, but the business only has to pay a single salary.

Why wouldn’t Google search be viable if it could negotiate rates with multiple ad networks? IMO there would be more net revenue generated from competition in the ad space.

1. Doesn’t that bring us back to a monopoly? One dominant seller of ad space with many buyers? Do we just recursively split out the ad sales and then ask search to sell ads?

2. Why is everyone here so convinced that ad rates will go up with this structure? Isn’t part of the reason for Google’s conviction that they are charging too much for ads?

Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

#274

Post by vel0city »

newsclues wrote: post #263
vel0city wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ma Bell had the power to make it so you couldn't talk on a wire, at all . They owned all the wires. They owned all the phones. But sure, being de-monetized on a website, that's way worse. And yes, Ma Bell had the ability to listen in to every conversation had on a wire. Not just some, all . Meanwhile most conversations I have on the internet don't involve Google in the slightest.

More control over a narrower aspect of life, vs control over many parts of your life. Google can be your email, your phone, your ISP, own your health data, control what you watch, listen, search for, it can control your ability to make money or even control access to your data and documents.

> Google can be

Can be.

Google doesn't control what I watch. Google doesn't control what I listen to. Google doesn't control my email. Google doesn't own my health data. Google isn't my ISP. Google doesn't control my data and documents. Google doesn't control my ability to make money. Google doesn't control what I search for.

Meanwhile with Ma Bell, it was Ma Bell or just don't have telecommunications.

Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

#275

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

newsclues wrote: post #34
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The public would have been against breaking up Standard Oil because they kept oil cheap.

Standard oil lacks the ability to shape the narrative that google has. If standard oil had control of the information space history would be very different. Not even Ma Bell had the power that google has

That's a good point but my point was more that if we listened to public opinion we may not have broken up Standard Oil!

Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

#276

Post by nostrademons »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #217
IX-103 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or because AdWords was designed and specifically optimized for search and then only later released (in a modified form) as a separate product.

AdWords was primarily built by purchasing the biggest competitor, DoubleClick. Google intentionally built the best ad serving engine, in large part by buying the competition out.

AdWords came out in 2000. Google acquired DoubleClick in 2007. AdWords was much better before the DoubleClick acquisition. It turned into crap as DoubleClick management forced the engineering-focused AdWords management out.

I don't know if you have any personal experience from that time period, but AdWords was magical for an online business in the mid-00s. You could get conversion rates orders of magnitude higher than display ads like DoubleClick. Whole businesses were built off of providing a solution to a problem that people were searching for. It was also a hell of a lot less intrusive than the banner ads that occupied the web in the late 1990s - AdWords was text only, and worked because you had a need, somebody had a solution, and Google matched them up. You didn't have to see all these products that you didn't need.

We're unfortunately going back to the brand advertising days of a corporate monoculture, largely because Google Search (and the web in general) sucks now.

Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

#277

Post by Workaccount2 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #235
Workaccount2 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You generally cannot have friends as an American under 25 without owning an iPhone. Outside of HN tech heads, regular young Americans use phones that "can send pictures that don't look like garbage!". I consider Apple by far the most insidious, since they leverage your friends and family against you to put heavy social penalties on not submitting. They then use this dominance to bend devs to their will, and take an e…

WhatsApp offers very simple high quality image/video sharing. If you are being excluded by your friends, it’s not because the image quality is bad. It’s because they want to exclude you.

Why would I get a whatsapp when I already have a perfectly working messaging app? Everyone needs to download this random app because one kid is too broke to get an iphone?

Some people are painfully unaware of what it looks like on the ground here...

Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

#278

Post by bradley13 »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #122

It is so easy to switch away from Google I just can't take any break up attempt seriously. ATT WAS phone service in the U.S. 90% of the U.S used ATT when it was broken up, and much of that 90% had no alternative. With Google if another better search engine did appear you could switch in minutes. And if you consider Android a monopoly then you'd have to consider iOS one too, and that's one much more obvious in it's us…

Easy to switch away from Google? We're techies, so we don't see a lot of what is going on. Turn off your blockers for ads and trackers. Look at the number of websites that have Google trackers. Look at where the ads come from. That doesn't even count search, and Google search has also become a platform for Google-driven ads. Add in YouTube and other Google properties, and "monopoly" is an understatement.

A breakup would separate the major services: Google search, YouTube, the ad business (DoubleClick et al), etc.. However, even then, the ad business probably needs to be broken up further.

This should all have been done much earlier, at least 5 and maybe even 10 years ago. Now Google is so entrenched that it will be difficult. One assumes that the government is more powerful than a corporation, but once you look into just how members of Congress so quicly become millionaires, well...

Re: Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

#280

Post by ttoinou »

labcomputer wrote: post #265
maeil wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's an interesting hypothesis, but it's entirely possible that separated from Google, Chrome is either not a viable business model (browsers don't make money on their own) No, that's not possible. Google pays $20 billion to Safari to be the default search engine. Imagine how much they would pay an independent Chrome, which has many multiples of Safari's market share. That alone guarantees it would be an incredibly…

But Google isn’t allowed to pay to be the default search engine anymore. So that revenue stream is gone.

It still shows the market value of browsers, even if unrealized or illegal this value could be exploited differently
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