How is google harming clients when their product is free and a click away to something else
US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case
321–330 of 888 posts
Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
The alternatives are bad because the ones that were even remotely good were bought and killed by Google over the years. This includes ones we all have heard of as well as countless others. This is a common tactic of tech giants, and the direct consequence of it is… what we have today.
Google has acquired a lot of ad competitors, but I can't remember any general-purpose search engines. It seemed more like they died out naturally over a long period. I welcome new information if that's not right.
They definitely bought and killed DejaNews.
Edit: Per Wiki, Google has also bought and killed the following search engines/services that nobody has heard of: Outride, Kaltix, Plink, Like.com, Orion, Metaweb, Awkan Technologies.
Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Google is famous for not innovating on anything successfully PageRank Gmail Maps MapReduce Chrome Protocol Buffers Go
Gmail was revolutionary at the start, but stopped innovating 10 years ago - why don’t we still have a good search engine within it? MapReduce would be invented anyway (I implemented it from scratch before learning of it’s existence). Chrome is just a slightly upgraded Firefox (and novadays Safari is just as good if not better with ai) PageRank was what gave Google monopoly, it’s not a result of monopoly. Go - I can g…
> Gmail was revolutionary at the start, but stopped innovating 10 years ago - why don't we still have a good search engine within it?
Not sure about your experience, but I used to subscribe to a lot of mailing lists just so that I can search for mailing list content using gmail, because the search function implemented by those mailing lists were generally worse.
Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
So it's OK to burden the whole country with a monopoly as long as they fund a handful of Nobel prizes? Competition is a prerequisite for healthy Capitalism. Lack of competition is the Achilles heel.
Please do tell us how Google is a burden to the whole country. Is it the free maps? free mobile OS? free email? free cloud storage? free video service? free office suite? free desktop OS? free AI chat?
Read a book on tech entrepreneurship. The “goal” of most startups is to get purchased by a big tech company. That’s utterly fucked, and tacitly demonstrates the problem.
Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case
#325The 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…
Sort of playing devil's advocate here, but well run companies with near monopolies have on many occasions provided massive benefits that would not have been possible at smaller scale. Think of Bell Labs. Google has a number of Bell Labs style projects ongoing that massively benefit scientific research. Transformers, AlphaFold, etc. It's hard to see how a smaller, more focused company would be able to justify that typ…
Why can't that be right?
I see the sentiment a lot, but it strikes me as reality denialism. People are willing to pay for one thing but not the other.
Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those things aren't free, they're supported by ad revenue and the sale of personal or aggregated user information. I'm not saying there isn't a place for that type of software, but imo it's wrong and somewhat dangerous to equate that with things that are actually free. And even so, to the extent that any of Google's software is actually free, it's mostly a loss leader for the sake of vendor lock-in, which is intrinsi…
A) Do you pay them? - No: then yes it is free “But my data” Have your ever sold your data? Would the value you could ever possibly receive for your data ever equate to the value you get from the free services? Likely No and No. Is the free ad supported city newspaper free? Yes it is in fact free, just like FM radio is free, and broadcast television is free, and sidewalks next to billboards are free Someone creating s…
All of these examples are probably in part or fully paid for with some sort of taxes. So it is less "no payments" and more "deferred payments".
I would argue that the question of "Is it free?" should not be restricted to monetary payments. If I offer you dinner for an hour of yardwork - are you receiving the food for free? If I would offer you that same dinner in exchange for letting me watch you use your computer for a while, is it free?
I think ads do incur a cost on you: In usability of a service, in your attention span / desensitization and your ability to focus, in the money you would not have spent were it not for ads.
Googles services are free in the sense, that you don't spend cold hard cash on them, but I would still argue, that you pay for them. That 2 Trillion Dollar valuation has to come from somewhere... :(
Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A) Do you pay them? - No: then yes it is free And here we see the ostrich. When faced with the horrors of reality, sticks its head in the sand. It’s simpler in there.
If I build a movie theater and give away the tickets knowing that I can make money on ads before a movie that does not mean that 5 minutes of your eyesight is now worth something
> that does not mean that 5 minutes of your eyesight is now worth something
The advertisers paying to get their ads placed in front of those eyes disagree.
And ye, since another comment questions this, data or "eye-time are similar - they can be broken down to the individual.
The advertisers pay some price expecting a certain number of people to see the ad, and even if data about people is sold in bulk (too) there is a price per individual. It's a simple division to see the price they pay per person to view that cinema ad, or for one person's data, even if they always purchase those in bulk.
After all, they get to the bulk price by multiplying how much they are willing to pay for one individual with the expected (or in the case of data packages known) number of individuals.
Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case
#328It's gonna be wild if they make paying to be default search illegal, and then Google gets to keep all the money it pays out while still being the default (because nothing else is worth using).
Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case
#329HN is a special place but among the average folk, I get why 90% of people use google. I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are. Especially with so many companies scraping the whole web for AI data, and so many GPUs chugging on that data. I suppose they are all focused on replacing the concept of search results with LLM prose. Ironically bing is down at the moment https://downdetec…
> I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are. I have such a hard time understanding your position on this. Google search results are absolute trash now, compared to DuckDuckGo.
Not my experience. I'd like to see you prove this.
Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case
#330Advertising venues that hold auctions need to be opened up to competition and provide full transpancy. These are markets that need regulations.
Today ad auctioning is the ultimate scamming game. The force everyone to pay more, and nobody wins except the ad venue.