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US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

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Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#431

Post by Aerroon »

hightrix wrote: post #421
bloppe wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started a small business selling candles during the pandemic. It's crazy how quickly you change your opinion about advertisements once you start needing to advertise your own business. All of the sudden, they're this amazing benefit for society. Advertisements can be good (when the business is good and genuinely wants you to know about good new product), and they can be bad (when the business if bad / misleading /…

> I suppose you wouldn't consider yourself an optimist. With regard to modern advertising, you are absolutely correct! That said, I fully understand and agree with the usefulness of advertising. What I'm against is the modern state of advertising. If all ads were simply contextual based on the content being shown and not the user, I don't think many of us would have problems with the ads industry.

And how is that going to work for all the non-English speaking countries? If that were the case then I could see more stringent regulations on which languages you can use for media creation depending on where the company is from.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#432

Post by hightrix »

WalterBright wrote: post #423
hightrix wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Searching the internet and not rendering any promoted links or ads in my browser.

[flagged]

Short and simple response.

> *Advertising in it's current form* is a plague on humanity.

Magazine ads were not highly targeted towards every user that bought one. We liked magazine ads, they were high quality and usually contextually relevant.

Modern advertising is nothing like magazine ads. We don't take screenshots of ads on webpages, print them out, and hang them on our walls like we did with magazine ads.

> Why do you think Google provides you with free searches?

To deliver ads. The same reason Google does everything else.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#433

Post by thfuran »

nox101 wrote: post #409
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just a lesson that capitalism is insatiable. Early on, Google didn't have personalized ads and they were still making money hand over fist just because search queries are an excellent signal into stuff you may want to buy. But in "line must always go up" fashion, there is even more money to be squeezed out if they surveille everything you do to personalize ads. Same thing happened with Facebook. They had a ton…

That's not how it works. Rather, Google realizes someone else would take over their business if they didn't make their product better. If Google stuck to no data and XYZSearch used data, then XYZSearch would provide a better product and Google would go out of business. It doesn't take greed, the "could make even more money" part, to have an incentive to do better. All it takes is a desire not to go out of business.

That might make sense if everyone were picking which search engine to use based on the relevance of its ads, but they aren't. In fact, early Google was popular in part because it wasn't all covered in ads.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#434

Post by zo1 »

AlienRobot wrote: post #329
voisin wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not OP.

I switched to DuckDuckGO about 1.5/2 years back, and it was awesome at the time. But it has gradually gotten worse to the point where I @google search pretty much 70% of the time. Now that could be me being in a bit in the honeymoon phase with DDG at the time and it wore off, or maybe it's actually been getting worse.

My pet, unproven, theory. Is that DDG has been "improving" but that's been making the search worse somehow. Perhaps the context and "fanciness" of a search is not something we all value and that's what we're experiencing.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#435

Post by stackskipton »

duped wrote: post #335
ta1243 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google doesn't really sell products though, not to businesses. It sells individual data to businesses, it sells advertising to businesses. The only thing the government will be interested in is the spying which they aren't allowed to do, but unaccountable corporations are allowed to do. As people become more aware of this it means google becomes less and less useful.

GCP isn't a B2B product?

Yes but it's tiny compared to Google Revenue and when I messed with it, it wasn't 100% certified for Government use. Meaning if you used it for Government, you could only use select products vs Microsoft and Amazon which certified almost all their products.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#436

Post by robertlagrant »

makeitdouble wrote: post #420
svara wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's hard to see how a smaller, more focused company would be able to justify that type of R&D. Typically that's solved with R&D happening in academia or semi-public space. How much this happens depends on the opportunities to do it in private companies, so entities like Google paying big salaries for R&D probably means we don't see what alternatives they would be if they stopped doing so.

> Typically that's solved with R&D happening in academia or semi-public space.

It was, but not any more. The crazy capital investments often come from private companies as well. And that's not a problem. They're spending their money rather than your money.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#437

Post by robertlagrant »

makeitdouble wrote: post #430
0xB31B1B wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so who are the academics raising 1b+ dollars to build and operate GPU farms to work on the frontiers of transformer models?

I'd raise you the same question on which private company is spawning its own LHC to research fundamental physics.

Firing particles at each other to disprove the next 500 variants of string theory is nowhere near as useful.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#438

Post by mcmoor »

dehrmann wrote: post #106
tivert wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're getting it backwards. The research operations are a desperate attempt stave off regulation to keep the sweet, sweet monopoly profits coming in (and those profits are so big that the bean-counters allow it). I believe that was the explicit strategy at AT&T. We collectively pay way, way more. It'd be way more efficient and cost effective to just set up a well-funded government labs to do that research.

It's an interesting argument for monopolies possibly being a net-good, but I don't think regulators really look at it. Companies do R&D because they like their monopoly status and don't want to be caught flat-footed by something new.

Well then the monopoly still isn't bad, because they can still be brought down solely by merit (just that no one have done it yet). Unlike government-enforced monopolies that'll stay no matter what they don't even have to do R&D.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#439

Post by [deleted] »

stego-tech wrote: post #188

Loving the discourse in the comments here. Speaking as someone who grew up alongside Google in a sense, I fall on the side of the "break it up" camp. It was novel at the time to have a single company so nicely provide us with everything digitally that we could need - G Suite, YouTube, Search, Maps, Advertising, Books, Reader, etc - but in hindsight, we gave too much power to too unaccountable an entity, who in turn u…

[deleted]

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#440

Post by throw4847285 »

ryandrake wrote: post #218
eagerpace wrote: post #178

Anywhere there are eyeballs, there will be ads. And wherever there are ads there are privacy concerns. Netflix waited until they had sufficiently killed off cable TV, then went back to creating the same problem it fixed. No ads in ChatGPT today, but soon as it (or a competitor) gains meaningful marketshare, there will be ads.

> And wherever there are ads there are privacy concerns. Not necessarily true. Physical billboards are ads but (mostly) without privacy concerns, until they start putting cameras on them watching who walks by and looks.

That's one of my favorite scenes in Minority Report. It's even better that they used a real company (Gap) which likely paid to have their store depicted as a dystopian hellscape. People think of Stephen Spielberg as a director of fluff, but I can't think of a more subversive moment in a mainstream blockbuster.
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