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Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

theregister.com

461–470 of 524 posts

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

#461
post #308

> The Chocolate Factory has appealed the Epic verdict and also plans to challenge the DoJ's victory. Is "Chocolate Factory" a typo?

Maybe try a Google search? ;) http://wikibin.org/articles/mountain-view-chocolate-factory.... https://www.theregister.com/2008/11/24/dziuba_on_yang/

I don't use Google for most searches anymore. Unfortunately, with relatively newer search engines it's taking time for them to be at parity with Google.

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

#462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, you missed the point. Google isn't paying apple for advertisers, they are paying for distribution of eyeballs. You get the eyes, you get the ads.

You’re right that there is a cost to producing a product, but the question was about the switching cost to the customer. At very least there is a direct labour cost to move the ads from Google to something else, so it is obviously not 0 like the out-to-lunch comment claimed earlier. Although I think we all know the switching cost is going to be way higher than that as the aforementioned spend on building the product…

The person was referring to the user of search. You might think it's clever to point out that the person paying the bills is the ads user, but that's not what they meant, it's clear that's not what they meant, and the concerns about payments to apple to be the default search engine are related to search users.

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

#463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re right that there is a cost to producing a product, but the question was about the switching cost to the customer. At very least there is a direct labour cost to move the ads from Google to something else, so it is obviously not 0 like the out-to-lunch comment claimed earlier. Although I think we all know the switching cost is going to be way higher than that as the aforementioned spend on building the product…

The person was referring to the user of search. You might think it's clever to point out that the person paying the bills is the ads user, but that's not what they meant, it's clear that's not what they meant, and the concerns about payments to apple to be the default search engine are related to search users.

And you might think it is clever to have no idea what is going on around you, but we are clearly talking about the customer, which was specifically asked about earlier in the thread.

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

#464
post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or how about the fact that basically no one uses Windows by choice, they use it because they need to for some app, and because of that Microsoft makes the entire OS constantly harass everyone to try and trick them into signing up for Microsoft services. Regularly I get an OS update that walks me through "setting up" my "new" PC I've had for 3 years, and it involves dodging dark pattern UIs to not sign up for Office o…

"Basically no one uses Windows by choice" Uhh not really, I use it by choice, because it provides functionality that other brands don't. That operating system provides functionality, compatibility and services that other manufacturers don't.

No idea what functions or services Windows has that doesn't exist on other platforms in an equal or superior way. PowerShell maybe?

"Compatibility" is exactly what I'm referring to as being the issue. I use Windows because it has compatibility with my Steam library. But if I could play those games hassle-free on another platform then I'd love to never boot up that dark-pattern-riddled adware dumpster fire excuse for an OS again.

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

#465

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…

This is insane you're getting downvoted. Someone needs to pay for the development of Chrome. That's just the reality.

How is Chrome going to make money as a standalone company? I have no idea, but it probably aligns with your guess

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

#466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I will never pay for a browser" ...in the current market, which was created by companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google, who subsidized their browsers through other income.

If Google is broken up, Apple will still have Safari and Microsoft will still have Edge. There is no reason to believe the market for non-$0 browsers will suddenly manifest absent a Google-integrated Chrome. The people have already spoken with their wallets on this topic.

Microsoft gave up on maintaining their own browser engine (Trident) almost a decade ago, and therefore are now dependent on Chrome's engine (Blink). Since then there have only been three independent browser engines: WebKit (Safari), Gecko (Firefox), and Blink (Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Brave, Edge, ...). Maintaining a performant + featureful + safe browser engine is a massive task, requiring many expensive engineers -- and Blink/V8 in particular has a lot of complexity (sea-of-nodes repr, their weird DSL, ...) that other engines don't. So if Google dropped Chrome, Microsoft would have a hard time picking it up, but would need to if they wanted to keep providing Edge.

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

#467
post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The precedent is that every browser out there currently has one of: - integration to ad infrastructure - integration to the vendor's other service infrastructure - a cost of more than $0 Given that the market is full of people who will only bear $0, the likely conclusion is that a Chrome separated from the ability to integrate to vendor infrastructure will turn to integrating to someone's ad infrastructure (more poor…

No one pays $0. All that slurping of user data is used by other corps to maximize their profits. They're paying for that data, and then believe they're making more from consumers as a result. But no matter what, the cost of collecting that data, the infra, and then corp x or y buying it, comes out of the bottom line. It's like points credit cards. Where does that cash back come from, magical fairies? It comes from re…

But there's an obvious difference between shelling out $60 up-front or $5 a month or whatever and shelling out $0 (and then being tracked, or having your data harvested).

Especially in the modern ecosystem where costs have become divorced from income, people would (behavior observation strongly suggests) much rather pay with their information footprint (a resource they can't capitalize alone) than the dollars in their wallets. Otherwise... Where's the successful paid-for browser right now? Which one? Can we point to it?

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

#468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Google is broken up, Apple will still have Safari and Microsoft will still have Edge. There is no reason to believe the market for non-$0 browsers will suddenly manifest absent a Google-integrated Chrome. The people have already spoken with their wallets on this topic.

Microsoft gave up on maintaining their own browser engine (Trident) almost a decade ago, and therefore are now dependent on Chrome's engine (Blink). Since then there have only been three independent browser engines: WebKit (Safari), Gecko (Firefox), and Blink (Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Brave, Edge, ...). Maintaining a performant + featureful + safe browser engine is a massive task, requiring many expensive engineers -…

Good point. That suggests a significant nonzero possibility that unless MS decides it's strategically meaningful enough to them to maintain a foot in the door on the browser space (much like Google chose to do), they might abandon the project, which would severely crimp the money-faucet for maintenance of the core engine.

This could, hypothetically, lead to a collapse of that ecosystem into an also-ran, in which case all Apple has to do is invest more in supporting their browser on OSs they don't own and we could end up with full browser hegemony... "If it doesn't work on Safari, it doesn't work on the Internet."

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

#469
post #441

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 comp…

Google doesn't have an advertising monopoly. Facebook all by itself does about half of Google's revenue in ads. Then you have twitter, amazon, snap, all kinds of stuff. Google would be lucky to have 40% of online ads, and then once you include all advertising they are way down, maybe 15-20% or something.

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

#470
post #338
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The market price for a browser from a consumer perspective is $0. The market price for search is $0. And yet we have Kagi because Google is now so ad infested. Ads are now bad enough that there is money in killing them. The market price for email is $0. And yet we have Fastmail. The problem with Google is dumping . The cross-subsidization means that YouTube, Gmail, Chrome, etc. can run at a loss indefinitely and so…

But do we have any reason to believe that in the absence of Google, the next dumper won't just come along and take their place? The government isn't exactly signaling a willingness to change the fundamentals of the market here.

> YouTube, on the other hand, should be sued into oblivion for not implementing identity checks for upload

YouTube is probably actually too big to fail at this point. Breaking YouTube video links would have a massive impact on video on the Internet as a whole. Hosting video (efficiently and performantly) is still actually expensive, and YouTube is eating the cost of subsidizing most of the Internet's archive of videos.

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