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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

#441

Post by jemmyw »

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…

I read through some of the documents of the original complaint. This is mainly not about Google being the dominant search engine for consumers. It's more to do with their anti competitive behavior in the ad tech market. As a consumer, switching is easy. As a company that wants to advertise, switching is not easy if Google holds all the users. But also they've bought up all sides of the market, so what used to be competitive is now entirely controlled by one company. And, once they had that control, they started squeezing both sides, advertisers and sites that run advertising.

From a consumer perspective it's not about being able to switch search engine. Google is potentially putting a drag on entire economies, both money wise, and innovation wise. If every service you use has to spend extra because Google has an advertising monopoly then every service is passing a cost to you. If every service needs to do it the one way then there's no advancement, no new models, just "give Google money" forever.

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

#442

Post by 3000browsers »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #437
mcpar-land wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Breaking up their individual businesses can cause each business to have incentives that line up better with their customers / users. Example: if Chrome was separated from Google, they won't have as much of an incentive to push back against adblockers with things like Manifest V3. Or include APIs that are only available to google websites (Which it has! https://x.com/lcasdev/status/1810696257137959018 )

> Example: if Chrome was separated from Google, they won't have as much of an incentive to push back against adblockers I think your example is completely wrong. Chrome has no source of funding. If separated from Google, they will have a massively magnified incentive to cater to the whims of advertisers because they would be completely subservient to them for funding. My understanding is that Chrome provides value to…

Also, websearch would equally not be able to survive on its own. We know it from the fact that the competitors in the search field that put quality over ads, are doing it as a paid service.

That would be a paid service that the majority of people would not be okay with, and even if google search did an enshittification pass trying to create a crowd that would. Users would still jump ship to the next search that is still provided for free.

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

#443

Post by 3000browsers »

dwattttt wrote: post #416
sahila wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does your rationale explain Internet Explore/Edge and Safari which both have abundance of money and still can’t outcompete Chrome? This goes back to the original point about Google search being superior to Bing, and not just because it’s free.

> How does your rationale explain Internet Explore/Edge and Safari which both have abundance of money and still can’t outcompete Chrome? How do I explain groups that attempt to compete and don't overthrow an incumbent? How much explanation does that need? That's literally the default, most attempts to overthrow the king fail.

And when a king does fall, it's never a guarantee who gets to stay in that throne. Even in actual political overthrows, there is no profession more dangerous than being the guy who led the revolution, and we can count in less than half a hand how many humans in history actually got the spot, got struck down and then made a legitimate democratic comeback afterwards.

More often than not, when a product is replaced, the growth of the replacer is a steady way upwards from 0. Not a meandering stable placement that suddenly shuffles around. I dunno what's the reasoning for that phenomena, I just chalk it up to people refuse change without perceived innovation. But point is, experience states that none of the browsers should be doing too much more than what they already do - the only likely path to victory is waiting for others to fuck, and not even Twitter, a shithole, could do that to themselves.

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

#444

Post by __loam »

sahila wrote: post #412
__loam wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is so critically important to the infrastructure of the internet itself that I really struggle to understand why a for profit entity with incentives that are not aligned to the public should be in charge of the most important search engine.

Because they created the search engine, and truthfully profit motives produce better products at lower costs than non-profits generally across the board. The alternative is having government creating software and it’s hard to point to any public US website/app where I’m amazed.

Riding this taxi cab directly to privatization of fire fighters.

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

#445

Post by pjmlp »

voxic11 wrote: post #434
t0mas88 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Making a good OS costs money also but linux is given away for free. Is linux unfairly competing with Microsoft and Apple?

Taking IBM as an example, they were one of the first in 2000 to make Linux business a reality, because in doing so, it makes their own Aix development costs lower, and eventually played so well that they own Red-Hat, without which, many key projects like GCC and GNOME would lose their main source of income.

The other UNIX vendors that went out of business thanks to Linux's free beer, or Microsoft and Apple's issues trying to sell licenses for their OSes on the server room, both now supporting Linux VMs as "The Year of Desktop Linux", are good examples that when it is free, everyone takes it no matter how it goes.

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

#446

Post by pjmlp »

georgeecollins wrote: post #347
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 proba…

Thanks to Electron and Chrome, the modern Web is literally ChromeOS in disguise.

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

#447

Post by az226 »

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…

Remedies don’t always necessitate a breakup.

For instances if Android phones were allowed to not make Google the default search engine, for Apple to ask each user which engine they want instead of there being a default, for query and click through data needing to be shared at cost with other search engine companies, Chrome not being allowed to default to Google but require user input, and so on. Lots of options and more than one remedy can be applied simultaneously.

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

#448

Post by lccerina »

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…

An interesting read on the matter comes from Cory Doctorow (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shat...). The uniform business here is ads. Google controls the supply, the demand and the marketplace, effectively setting whatever price they want and whatever quality of service they want. Smaller business cannot enter the market as competitors, while customers (here the people wanting to put ads on the internet) are chocked out.

Then if you add that Chrome enforces how browser experiences are designed and how tracking is done, you see the problem emerging.

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

#449

Post by cm277 »

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 can be more easily understood as a bunch of businesses that funnel traffic into an ad marketplace. Search, Android, GMail, Maps, Chrome, everything is just about having enough traffic and enough behavioral data to make them the biggest ad seller ever. But they are also the broker and price-setter. That's how they make money, not on the quality of their services --which OK, they have to maintain to a competitive standard: easy to do when you are printing money.

So, the solution is relatively simple: break off their ad marketplace business. Break off their ad display business. Let the funnels fend for themselves.

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