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Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

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Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#381

Post by cstrahan »

Gatsky wrote: post #372
jhall1468 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing illegal about a monopoly. A monopoly that uses it's position to prevent competition is illegal. Giving DDG a very valuable domain name (given their name) absolutely does what you're saying it doesn't.

How is not giving the domain name to DDG using their monopoly to suppress competitors? This is not equivalent to say, removing DDG from their search results.

I don't think that's what they're saying. The point isn't that withholding the domain name is the end of the world, the point is that handing it over is a small token that Google can use to claim that they aren't anti-competitive. I don't know what my stance is on that interpretation, but that seems to be (to me) to be the intended interpretation.

Does that make sense?

Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#382

Post by ohthehugemanate »

izzydata wrote: post #141

Where does DuckDuckGo get the money to keep this service alive?

Advertising. They serve Bing ads based on your search terms. They don't store or share any kind of history or profile... Apparently just your search terms are enough to provide relevant ads with a solid click through rate.

Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#383

Post by mcintyre1994 »

CydeWeys wrote: post #130
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #109

I'm quite surprised there's no .go tld, I could see it being used quite a lot.

Two-letter TLDs are ccTLDs, and all the existing countries already have their ccTLDs. In order for this to happen, you'd need to have a new country spring into existence that can plausibly be abbreviated to .go, and then they would have to treat it like a faux-generic (like .io) instead of imposing registration/use restrictions as some countries do for their ccTLDs.

Ah that makes sense, thanks for pointing that out! :)

Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#385

Post by jedberg »

zenexer wrote: post #215

Meta: NamePros tech admin here. This hammered our servers so hard that we actually uncovered a fairly obscure bug in Nginx's FastCGI caching. It's gone unnoticed for years, including during rigorous load testing.

Nginx has had some strange bugs under heavy load. Way back in the day, reddit used Nginx as its frontend webserver/load balancer. All of a sudden one day I noticed that it was sending 99% of the traffic to the app server listed first in the config, then 99% of the remaining traffic to the next one, and so on down the line, such that the last app server in the list (only about 10 at the time) was essentially getting no traffic. If I changed the config, the traffic pattern was still based on the config order, so it wasn't a bug in the hashing or the numerical values of the IPs of the app servers or anything like that.

Never did figure out what caused that problem. We just switched out Nginx for Haproxy and never had a problem again. :)

Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#386

Post by ghostly_s »

mikekchar wrote: post #360
opo wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>...The story of Microsoft floating a significant loan to Apple in order to keep Apple solvent in the late '90's is well-known. That might be well known, but it never happened. To resolve a patent violation and alleged stolen source code, Microsoft bought 150 million dollars of Apple stock. (There were other aspects of the agreement, but there was no loan.) Your general point was likely right - Microsoft could have d…

Disclaimer: The following is based on my memories of working at Corel at the time. My memory is crap, so it is possible I've made mistakes. Please verify the authenticity of my claims if it is important to you and don't take my word for it. At almost the exact same time, MS bought Corel Stock that enabled Corel to stay afloat. It was non-voting stock, but it had a veto on acquisitions (to reasonably protect their inv…

I don't follow the scheme here. What are "penalties on the acquisition deals"? This all seems rather roundabout when it's dependent on the company being close to insolvency anyway, so they could have just bought them outright to begin with if that was really their master plan.

Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#387

Post by mikekchar »

ghostly_s wrote: post #386
mikekchar wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: The following is based on my memories of working at Corel at the time. My memory is crap, so it is possible I've made mistakes. Please verify the authenticity of my claims if it is important to you and don't take my word for it. At almost the exact same time, MS bought Corel Stock that enabled Corel to stay afloat. It was non-voting stock, but it had a veto on acquisitions (to reasonably protect their inv…

I don't follow the scheme here. What are "penalties on the acquisition deals"? This all seems rather roundabout when it's dependent on the company being close to insolvency anyway, so they could have just bought them outright to begin with if that was really their master plan.

In order to buy a publicly traded company outright, you need to get permission from the board. This is just the machinations to get that to happen -- at a price that they wanted.

Re: Google transferred ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo

#390

Post by PhasmaFelis »

Gatsky wrote: post #372
jhall1468 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing illegal about a monopoly. A monopoly that uses it's position to prevent competition is illegal. Giving DDG a very valuable domain name (given their name) absolutely does what you're saying it doesn't.

How is not giving the domain name to DDG using their monopoly to suppress competitors? This is not equivalent to say, removing DDG from their search results.

That's not what they're saying. If/when the feds come after Google for (most likely unrelated) monopolistic suppression, Google can say "we don't suppress our competitors--look how we helped out DDG!"
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