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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

#341

Post by t0mas88 »

missedthecue wrote: post #334

I think we need a better term than monopoly, that separates it from what people usually mean which is 'the best product'. I literally cannot think of any sort of product or service with lower switching costs than internet search. Typing bing.com takes 0.8 seconds and costs $0. Hundreds of orders of magnitude easier than switching to a different railroad if only one goes through your town. Google is a big ass company…

Google is offering a free browser, while making a good browser costs money. They are subsidising that by their huge ad-business.

And by no surprise, their browser is the only major one that has no privacy protection features and last month decided to abandon the plan to deprecate cookies and tracking.

That browser is competing with someone like Opera (used to be a paid for product) and Mozilla in an unfair way, because Google is killing others by making it free and taking the loss.

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

#342

Post by warkdarrior »

layer8 wrote: post #300
JKCalhoun wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm scratching my head trying to think of something Google does that should be a public institution. Can you give an example? YouTube is the closest thing I can think of, but it is tightly bound to advertising. Wikipedia, archive.org are two examples of non-Google projects that come to mind when I think of internet "public-good". They seem to be doing fine without advertising dollars (although perhaps they are only h…

Web search is certainly something that should be a public institution.

Make sure to search only for government-approved topics.

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

#343

Post by paxys »

tyree731 wrote: post #319
Someone wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know how Microsoft is not up for discussion when it's a behemoth Because we think interfering with the free market is necessary when a company misuses market power, not solely when it is a behemoth.

But Microsoft has misused their market power plenty of times, such as when they bundled Microsoft Teams with their enterprise contract at zero cost, destroying Slack's market value overnight.

Not just bundled, but force-installed Teams on every Windows computer.

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

#344

Post by hbn »

graeme wrote: post #307
Chabsff wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original value-proposal for Chrome was: The more people browse the web in general, the more Google profits. So the mere existence of a good free, fast, and safe browser would inherently benefit Google at large in general. And that rationale is why we get to have Chromium at all. Obviously things have evolved quite a bit since then, but I think the general pitch that Chrome is primarily a value-multiplier for the…

That's likely not the real rationale. If people browse with Chrome, then google is the default . That is immensely valuable to google, as google's payments to apple, mozilla and android manufacturer's show. In theory Chrome could exist as an independent business if it were allowed to take bids for search default from google. But if the US govt broke up google they would likely also ban the sort of deal that would let…

By the time Chrome came out Google already was in the position where everyone knew to set their default homepage to Google in IE in the same way they automatically go to install Chrome now.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the pseudo-control Chrome gives them over web standards. They can implement experimental APIs in Chrome and immediately use them in their webapps.

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

#345

Post by randomdata »

missedthecue wrote: post #334

I think we need a better term than monopoly, that separates it from what people usually mean which is 'the best product'. I literally cannot think of any sort of product or service with lower switching costs than internet search. Typing bing.com takes 0.8 seconds and costs $0. Hundreds of orders of magnitude easier than switching to a different railroad if only one goes through your town. Google is a big ass company…

> and costs $0.

But then you're not the customer, you're the product, as they say. What is the cost to the actual customer to transition to an alternative?

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

#346

Post by cogman10 »

bdw5204 wrote: post #336

With search, there are actually 2 different products. The index itself is a textbook natural monopoly. There's no upside in having more than 1 web crawler as long as it can be trusted to just crawl the web but there's plenty of downside in the form of increased bandwidth costs for web sites. The actual search rankings are where competition makes sense. So spin the Google search index off as a non-profit that makes it…

> The index itself is a textbook natural monopoly.

I would argue that because of this, the index itself should be something operated by the public rather than privately. This is especially true because it's within the best interests of the public to have an archive of the internet. The wayback machine currently supports that and it's on its last legs.

Index the internet with a public search API, then let future search engines hit that an optimize based on internal algorithms to get better results.

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

#347

Post by georgeecollins »

missedthecue wrote: post #334

I think we need a better term than monopoly, that separates it from what people usually mean which is 'the best product'. I literally cannot think of any sort of product or service with lower switching costs than internet search. Typing bing.com takes 0.8 seconds and costs $0. Hundreds of orders of magnitude easier than switching to a different railroad if only one goes through your town. Google is a big ass company…

Just have to say this again even if everyone already knows it: If the US Government / EU hadn't threatened Microsoft they would have embedded their browser in Windows and tied it to the OS to the extent where normal people would only use their browser. I don't know if Google could exist in that alternate world, but I suspect Microsoft would have "deprived them of Oxygen" and they would be bought or crushed.

You probably can't stop Google from being the most popular search (or don't want to) but you should be able to stop Google from using the popularity of their product to crush alternative ad tech. Or crush some new tech we don't realize will be important.

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

#348

Post by t0mas88 »

nolist_policy wrote: post #239
IX-103 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your premise, but you're example is unfortunate. The manifest v3 thing was due to an API change to improve performance by pulling the renderer out of the critical path for network requests. Adblockers can still block ads (as in not show them), but they can't throttle or block requests. It would be better to point out that Chrome is the only browser not getting rid of third party cookies. Chrome promised…

I think the third party cookie thing is due to their other antitrust lawsuite in advertising.

They've used the UK regulators as a very convenient excuse. But realistically the problem is that Google's DoubleClick has a monopoly on both sides of the ad marketplace. If that wasn't the case, the regulators would not have a problem with Chrome deprecating cookies.

So Google has maneuvered into this position skillfully and then blamed the regulars for not continuing on a pro-privacy path, while conveniently that also makes them the most ad money...

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

#349

Post by kajecounterhack »

cogman10 wrote: post #346
bdw5204 wrote: post #336

With search, there are actually 2 different products. The index itself is a textbook natural monopoly. There's no upside in having more than 1 web crawler as long as it can be trusted to just crawl the web but there's plenty of downside in the form of increased bandwidth costs for web sites. The actual search rankings are where competition makes sense. So spin the Google search index off as a non-profit that makes it…

> The index itself is a textbook natural monopoly. I would argue that because of this, the index itself should be something operated by the public rather than privately. This is especially true because it's within the best interests of the public to have an archive of the internet. The wayback machine currently supports that and it's on its last legs. Index the internet with a public search API, then let future searc…

> the index itself should be something operated by the public rather than privately

I love this but the act of indexing the web is both complex and ever-evolving (not to mention expensive), so the market needs to have natural incentives for the public crawler to continue being good at its job. Google is incentivized to have a great index because it feeds into its competitive advantage. If the index is a shared resource, what incentive does the indexing company have to keep improving it? And what guarantees that the indexing company's strategy doesn't end up being unfair to those affected by their websites getting indexed?

All search companies would have to maintain secondary indices to augment the public one. There's probably some artificial structure needed to make open indexing viable.

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

#350

Post by cardanome »

abduhl wrote: post #214
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you pointing out the exact problem with Google? If Chrome wasn't a viable business without Google's ads subsidizing it, isn't its existence in its current form exactly the kind of anti-competitive outcome we would be better off without? Without Google subsidizing Chrome, a real competitive market for browsers might emerge, with more vendors investing more effort into competing for users, without having to comp…

What possible browser competition can exist? The market price for a browser from a consumer perspective is $0. I will never pay for a browser. All that will happen is new ad placements from smaller companies, directly in the browser.

I absolutely would have donated large sums of money to Firefox development if they had allowed me to do so. Sadly you can only donate to the Mozilla Foundation which does a lot of other stuff. Wikipedia shows that projects can get very stable funding through donations.

Browsers offer incredible value. If there is need people will pony up the money. Many corporations have an business interest in keeping the web free and easily accessible so could serve as potential sponsors. Just like some newer programming language get baking from different companies and manage to stay independent. You just don't want to have one company having total influence.

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