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US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

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Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#511

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

theptip wrote: post #508
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #367

I'm not sure people understand what the consequences of taking away Google's ad revenue is. If a large enough bank goes under, it takes out not just the bank, but huge sectors of the economy, affecting many more businesses and jobs. That's why the government bailed out the banks when they failed. The same will happen when Google loses its ad revenue. Google is an ad company. By opening up all its trade secret data, i…

> In the best case, killing these will force consumers to move to Apple. I think there are better options than you suggest. The whole doc suite can be had from Microsoft. Maybe folks need to ten bucks a month for something that used to be free, but it’s not like we fundamentally lose capabilities. This is a completely different order of magnitude than banks going under, where people were impacted to the tune of thous…

You're only thinking of consumers. That's still not small potatoes - Google Workspace has 3 billion active users every month (37% of the planet). Office365 has 270 million.

But on the business side, there are 6 million businesses that use Google Workspace to manage their company - their drives, documents, email, distribution lists, SSO, etc. They can't just flip a switch and migrate their entire company to another provider. It would take months to years for most companies to fully migrate. And that's for the products/services that there's an analogue for. Not every Google feature and product has a 1:1 replacement.

Back to the consumer side - it will be insane the number of things affected that nobody is thinking of. Off the top of my head, imagine the billions of people who have used Google SSO to sign up for random websites, and imagine that just stops working. And on top of that, they were all using Gmail. So now they can't login to all the websites they're signed up for, and they can't send a password reset, because their email no longer works. This is just a few of the thousands of issues there will be, for a large chunk of the planet.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#512

Post by const_cast »

AlexandrB wrote: post #503
const_cast wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, especially Tobacco. I mean, there hasn't been an industry gutted that hard ever. They were attacked from all sides. They can't even fucking advertise anymore, and when they can, they have to tell you "hey don't buy this it kills you". And then, cherry on top, when consumers do buy this product, they're allowed to use it in like And yet, somehow, Tobacco is still profitable.

This is very North America-centric. Smoking is still rampant in many countries, including parts of Europe. It was actually a bit of a culture shock for me.

Oh yes I'm aware, I have family in Eastern Europe and yeah... it's different. When I went in the 2010s you could still smoke in most restaurants. I actually have a strange place for that kind of environment. It's charming, it's endearing, in a way. But it probably sucks for public health.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#513

Post by notepad0x90 »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #367

I'm not sure people understand what the consequences of taking away Google's ad revenue is. If a large enough bank goes under, it takes out not just the bank, but huge sectors of the economy, affecting many more businesses and jobs. That's why the government bailed out the banks when they failed. The same will happen when Google loses its ad revenue. Google is an ad company. By opening up all its trade secret data, i…

Google/Alphabet made a critical mistake. When the Alphabet parent company was founded, Google search and AD should have been divested. All those product lines you mentioned should have been part of separate corporations where at most Google is a minority owner in a joint venture. Google will still rip benefits including profits and some exclusivity but it won't stifle competition by directing those product to align with what benefits its AD revenue stream.

DOJ is in the wrong when trying to open up search and ad, it should simply split Google up in the way I mentioned earlier. Search and advertising should be their own completely independent company. Mostly everyone wins that way: Competitors, the public , shareholders (one product line won't sink the rest, no "all your eggs in one basket" situation) and even majority shareholders.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#514

Post by cwmoore »

echelon wrote: post #507
fsh wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This list is very telling. Instead of a healthy marketplace of companies competing to sell their software and services, we end up with one monopolist who gives away mediocre products and in return taxes everything you buy (in the form of ad spending), and then annoys you with the same ads. How is this a desirable outcome?

We need a better word than "duopoly" to describe what Apple and Google are. They're just as bad as a monopoly - and they're impossible to compete with. Both Apple and Google need to be disrupted here. We should be able to see lots of healthy verticals for every single one of these product categories. They shouldn't accrue to two players and be impossible to dislodge. I propose the word "Googolith" to describe {Google…

Paretarchy?

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#516

Post by nulld3v »

Aurornis wrote: post #319
mullingitover wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crawling the internet is a natural monopoly. Nobody wants an endless stream of bots crawling their site, so googlebot wins because they’re the dominant search engine. It makes sense to break that out so everyone has access to the same dataset at FRAND pricing. My heart just wants Google to burn to the ground, but my brain says this is the more reasonable approach.

> Crawling the internet is a natural monopoly. Nobody wants an endless stream of bots crawling their site, Companies want traffic from any source they can get. They welcome every search engine crawler that comes along because every little exposure translates to incremental chances at revenue or growing audience. I doubt many people are doing things to allow Googlebot but also ban other search crawlers. > My heart jus…

> I doubt many people are doing things to allow Googlebot but also ban other search crawlers.

Sadly this is just not the case.[1][2] Google knows this too so they explicitly crawl from a specific IP range that they publish.[3]

I also know this, because I had a website that blocked any bots outside of that IP range. We had honeypot links (hidden to humans via CSS) that insta-banned any user or bot that clicked/fetched them. User-Agent from curl, wget, or any HTTP lib = insta-ban. Crawling links sequentially across multiple IPs = all banned. Any signal we found that indicated you were not a human using a web browser = ban.

We were listed on Google and never had traffic issues.

[1] https://onescales.com/blogs/main/the-bot-blocklist

[2] Chart in the middle of this page: https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-blo... (note: Google-Extended != Googlebot)

[3] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#517

Post by throwaway314155 »

suddenexample wrote: post #415
ardacinar wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we sure that the things listed here will not go away in a few years if Google continues to exist? https://killedbygoogle.com/

People bringing up this site in this specific way is a pet peeve of mine. What's the largest product that they sunset with no replacement? Stadia? Given the number of products Google has, I wouldn't consider their track record below average.

Well their press releases indicate long term support and then they cancel the projects. This _has_ to have more serious consequences (on businesses mostly, but consumers too) than you are implying. This sort of thing naturally effects consumer/brand loyalty. With such a clear lack of focus on any one solution, why would anyone trust Google going forward with their new products/services?

This is the end result of trying to run your massive corporation like some kind of start-up incubator. No wisdom or strategy, just throw shit at the wall and see what sticks.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#518

Post by fallingknife »

guhcampos wrote: post #426
fallingknife wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Concentration seems much more prevalent in heavily regulated markets e.g. utilities / airlines. In many cases regulators have even encouraged this e.g.finance. There is no default for unregulated markets. It's a question of whether the economies of scale outweigh the added costs from the complexity that scale requires. It costs close to 100x as much to build 100 houses, run 100 restaurants, or operate 100 trucks as i…

You are comparing Apples and Oranges. You just can't compare the barrier of entry for Software business and an Airline, even without any regulations. It's just orders of magnitude more expensive to buy an airplane than a laptop, and most utilities are natural monopolies so they behave fundamentally different.

I can't and I didn't. I never said anything about barriers to entry. I'm talking about concentration here and why the market is dominated by airlines with hundreds of planes instead of airlines with 10 planes. Barriers to entry are inevitable in capital intensive industries.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#519

Post by danielheath »

FridayoLeary wrote: post #491
fsh wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This list is very telling. Instead of a healthy marketplace of companies competing to sell their software and services, we end up with one monopolist who gives away mediocre products and in return taxes everything you buy (in the form of ad spending), and then annoys you with the same ads. How is this a desirable outcome?

There is nothing mediocre about the search engine, gmail, maps, android, chrome etc.. etc. Do they all have room for for improvement? Probably. But they are simply incredibly, breathtakingly good products. Search, maybe has gotten worse in recent years, but it's still amazing. Maps and Satelleite view are astounding, especially when you consider that they are free. >How is this a desirable outcome? The list speaks fo…

Having used alternatives to a few of their products… I’ll accept part of that list.

Gmail is well below mediocre, it’s so sluggish and unresponsive even on fast hardware. Compare with fastmail; it’s hard to go back.

The search engine consistently gives me pages of blog spam before a useful result. Eg Kagi is dramatically more useful despite having a tiny fraction of the resources to work with.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#520

Post by michaelt »

gazpacho wrote: post #510
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #367

I'm not sure people understand what the consequences of taking away Google's ad revenue is. If a large enough bank goes under, it takes out not just the bank, but huge sectors of the economy, affecting many more businesses and jobs. That's why the government bailed out the banks when they failed. The same will happen when Google loses its ad revenue. Google is an ad company. By opening up all its trade secret data, i…

I agree. At risk of being totally off base because I have not been keeping up with the details of the legal matter it seems to me that the solution isn't to kill Google's core business but rather to force it to sell off some of these branches, with thought and strategy. E.g. one of the comments below pointed out that Google Flights competes with other sites / businesses. Seems like a good candidate to spin off: it co…

> Android? [...] who / how are they going to be funded?

Given that Android gets to take a 30% cut of every app sale and in-app purchase, I think they'll survive.

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