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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

#361

Post by danielmarkbruce »

randomdata wrote: post #345
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?

0. The transition to bing from google costs 0.

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

#362

Post by warkdarrior »

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.

That is clearly not true. Marginalia has a different index than Kagi, which has a different index than Google. You are somewhat making the assumption that there is some perfect index that works for everyone, when the market shows there is a need for different indices for different users.

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

#363

Post by twoodfin »

pahkah wrote: post #182
fny wrote: post #31

I'm very curious to see what a breakup looks like. Past breakups involved "uniform" businesses: - American Tobacco: Commodity - Standard Oil: Commodity - AT&T: Utility - Northern Securities: Railroads - Swift & Co: Meatpacking - Kodak: Film - Paramount: Movie Theaters Google is more of a synergistic conglomerate. How would spinning off an individual business like Chrome, Android, or AdWords reduce their respective do…

At the very least, spinning off individual businesses prevents self-preferencing. Google can right now leverage its dominance in one area to increase market share in another. For example, if I load my GMail account in a browser other than Chrome, Google will "helpfully" suggest that I change my default browser to the "recommended" Chrome. This behavior makes it harder for upstarts to get a foot in the door across a w…

I’m frankly shocked that Google continues to think the juice on that annoying, constant Chrome-in-Gmail popup is worth even a marginal additional anti-trust attention squeeze.

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

#364

Post by tim333 »

t0mas88 wrote: post #341
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, becau…

Yeah but there's no great shortage of competing free browsers.

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

#365

Post by cogman10 »

kajecounterhack wrote: post #349
cogman10 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 resour…

> what incentive does the indexing company have to keep improving it?

A publicly owned asset doesn't need to be managed by a private entity. The incentive can be exactly the same incentive that the NHS and NASA operate on. It's a fun problem that you can make a career on making better that is ultimately a public good. Not everything needs to be operated with pure profits in mind.

> And what guarantees that the indexing company's strategy doesn't end up being unfair to those affected by their websites getting indexed?

Voting/lobbying/etc. Though I'd assume everyone that makes a website will want to be indexed.

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

#366

Post by danielmarkbruce »

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 idea that we'd want any type of government entity running search is absurd on several dimensions.

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

#367

Post by sushid »

t0mas88 wrote: post #341
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, becau…

But Opera and Firefox and others are all free browsers as well. I agree with the parent commenter that its not exactly a monopoly in the traditional sense. It's not even the default browser on Mac or Windows.

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

#368

Post by sushid »

cogman10 wrote: post #340
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…

> because people choose to use it. Incorrect. Google spent ungodly amounts of money to make sure that their search engine was the default in as many places as possible. People didn't "choose" to use it, they use the defaults. And in some cases, like my Android phone, google is the only option for integrated searches. I cannot use another search engine without opening a browser then opening up the search engine of cho…

You are literally agreeing with the parent commenter. It's anticompetitive but not a monopoly. The parent is also talking about Chrome, not Google Search.

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

#369

Post by asadotzler »

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.

You're imagining things. Google hasn't been prevented from that at all, yet, and may not be. We are discussing remedies here that have not happened yet. You cannot discount one possible remedy because of the existence of another possible remedy.

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

#370

Post by xp84 »

t0mas88 wrote: post #341
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, becau…

> last month decided to abandon the plan to deprecate cookies and tracking

Make no mistake, all that original plan was about was about applying pain to everybody else in the advertising world, while their replacement for cookies would have been satisfactory only at Google's scale. The whole thing was Google astroturfing, taking advantage of everyone's ignorance of how the Internet works to further entrench their advertising monopoly.

I don't know why they aborted the plan, but I suspect regulators had caught on that it wasn't altruism but Anti-competitiveness that motivated it.

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