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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]

#591

Post by makeitdouble »

TechDebtDevin wrote: post #546
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?

What are you talking about, there are competitors for all these products, they simply just aren't as good...

> as good

This is a point that will be recurring and merits more thought IMHO.

Google services are mostly better because they crushed competition. Cutting their advantage will also mean better alternatives (money will flow to competitors instead of being sucked by Google).

As an analogy, it's like athlete doping: they sure were faster than the other athletes, but that's part of the issue.

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

#592

Post by bcraven »

actinium226 wrote: post #581
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?

I agree. I'm so sick of maps. I type something in and there it is, can't they do any better than that? Sure they have directions to the place in multiple modalities, and photos of it, and reviews, but is that it? Is that really the best that's available? Google drive is likewise awful. I upload something to it and there it is. I come back 10 years later and it's still there. Why doesn't it do more? Why can't it make…

My apologies but I can't work out if your Google Drive example is some deep satire that's going over my head.

What functionality are you expecting?

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

#593

Post by zelphirkalt »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #554
rs186 wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let them die. The world will be a better place. Some of the services you mentioned are already very irrelevant: * Fitbit -- no explanation necessary * Google translate -- I don't know about if people use their APIs, but for me personally, I have not used translate for a few years. ChatGPT has been my go-to. * Google Pay -- it has a smaller market share than Samsung Pay. Then next tiers of services -- they are doing o…

YouTube, Gmail and Docs are pretty good. All the alternatives to them really suck...

YouTube sucks in terms of usability. It only survives, because it is at no cost except for ads viewing and not even that, when using uBlock Origin properly and because of most of the content being there. Other than that is has become so enshittified, it is one of the worst sites I visit.

Gmail and Docs are children's toys for people, who don't know much about e-mail and proper documents. Those are the majority of people on the Internet these days though, so Gmail and Docs are going nowhere any time soon.

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

#594

Post by pests »

michaelt wrote: post #535
worik wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Too big to fail means too big to exist. Google et. al should never have been allowed to get this large I agree But placing limits on private property accumulation is a controversial idea But it is an idea who's time must come, or we face a dreadful future of robber barrons and peons

> But placing limits on private property accumulation is a controversial idea The US wouldn't need a legal limit on wealth to prevent Google from becoming this large. Every major Google product since gmail in ~2004 was acquired. Google Maps? Acquired from Where 2 Technologies. Google Docs? Acquired from Writely. Android? Acquired as a startup. Google Analytics? You guessed it, acquisition. DoubleClick? Once again, ac…

I believe they had an analytics offering before they purchased Urchin. Same for DoubleClick.

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

#595

Post by Jach »

josephg wrote: post #568
Jach wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important to try and de-googleify your life if only so you don't get caught up in making such an exaggerated sky-is-falling point. All of these could literally vanish tomorrow and the world would go on, they all have their alternatives, some of them arguably superior. For some, the near term pain would be greater than for others -- even just on my personal level I'd be caught with my pants down for email, becaus…

Yeah. It’s also hard to overstate how many incredible engineers work at Google. Many - perhaps most of them are doing very low value work of adding marginal features nobody cares about to mature products. And in many cases doing so at a glacial pace. Every year thousands of brilliant engineers add ~1m lines of code to Google chrome. And almost nobody notices or cares. As browsers get faster, companies respond by addi…

I've had the lucky position to be able to think positively about a lot of the tech and gaming layoffs in the last couple years for pretty much this reason -- that we'll eventually look back on them as unleashing a lot of previously locked up potential. On the other hand there are people at google and elsewhere who get paid to do important maintenance work, not requiring much innovative thinking, but if they leave/are laid off that work just stops happening, and something valuable is lost. On the other other hand, if AI keeps getting better at a similar pace as the last 5 years, none of this will matter on global economy-doubling timelines of ~15 years.

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

#596

Post by int_19h »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #511
theptip wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pr…

> 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.

Sounds like it'll be plenty profitable as a business in its own right, then.

> 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.

Why would it suddenly stop working? Lots of third party websites use Google (or Microsoft) SSO.

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

#597

Post by lelandbatey »

londons_explore wrote: post #504
ChuckMcM wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At Blekko we advocated for this as well. Google has two interlocked monopolies, one is the search index and the other is their advertising service. We often joked that if Google reasonable and non-discriminatory priced access to their index, both to themselves and to others, AND they allowed someone to put what ever ads they wanted on those results. That change the landscape dramatically. Google would carve out their…

Access to the click stream is the big bit. Ie. Knowing which users clicked which search results. Without the click stream, one cannot build or even maintain a good ranker. With a larger click stream from more users, one can make a better ranker, which in turn makes the service better so more users use it. End result: monopoly. The only solution is to force all players to share click stream data with all others.

I don't think that's quite true, as competitors like Kagi have been able to compete well with effectively zero clickstream (by comparison). It'll help, but it's not the make-or-break that the index is.

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

#598

Post by apwell23 »

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…

> Fitbit

google is killing that themselves.

- Google Fi - Google Fiber - Google Flights - Google Translate - Google Pay

won't miss these

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

#599

Post by Terr_ »

bcraven wrote: post #592
actinium226 wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I'm so sick of maps. I type something in and there it is, can't they do any better than that? Sure they have directions to the place in multiple modalities, and photos of it, and reviews, but is that it? Is that really the best that's available? Google drive is likewise awful. I upload something to it and there it is. I come back 10 years later and it's still there. Why doesn't it do more? Why can't it make…

My apologies but I can't work out if your Google Drive example is some deep satire that's going over my head. What functionality are you expecting?

I think it's sarcasm, rather than the frustration of a utopianist, but it's unreasonably hard to tell.

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

#600

Post by int_19h »

BeetleB wrote: post #528
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…

Of this list, the only things I'd miss are Search (because Kagi relies on it) and Maps. I do use Android, but I'll be frank: It sucks. And I'm sure Translate is easily replaceable by a 3rd party.

Google Translate has been inferior to DeepL for a very long time now.

More recently, LLMs will offer far better translation than anything else.

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