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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

#61

Post by openrisk »

dtquad wrote: post #39

Hilariously shortsighted. Big Tech companies have been a GDP-doubling runaway success for the US economy. It would be like if we here in Denmark started breaking up Novo Nordisk. Our economists would probably do a public lynching of any government official who suggested doing that. However as a European I can't help but welcoming the US shooting themselves in the foot like this. Something tells me we will see more of…

Hilariously confused. Tech is different from Big Tech, which is yet further different from Big Ad Tech.

For the avoidance of doubt, Wintel was Big Tech. The status quo now is Big Ad Tech.

The main economically positive thing for the US (and something Europeans absolutely screwed up in relative terms versus the US and increasingly China) is the early investment and adoption of Tech. Digitization as such is a great enabler.

But you don't need Big Tech oligopolies for a vibrant digital economy.

But even more importantly, you don't need bizarre Big Ad Tech commingled business models that build the economy's entire tech infrastructure - many parts of it having a critical utility like role - on the back of... ads.

But there is little scope for European schadenfreude. Arguably the US antitrust gears are moving precisely because people slowly wake up to the limits on economic opportunity placed by the Big Ad Tech status quo.

In Europe we are good at words and criticizing mistakes but deeds are scarce.

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

#62

Post by laborcontract »

fsh wrote: post #35
teleforce wrote: post #8

There's side effect benefit of big kahuna companies mainly on the significant breakthrough and game changing research output because these excellent researchers are paid handsome money compared to conventional universities or research institutions. We saw this with AT&T Bell research labs with their inventions of transistor and Unix, among others. The same thing happened with Google research with (arguably) deep lear…

Clearly this model no longer works. Bell labs had 11 nobel prize winners. What did Google invent? Slightly better generative neural networks whose offsprings now pollute their search results?

indexing against Nobel prizes is like trying to use patents as a proxy for innovation

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

#63

Post by nine_k »

kolinko wrote: post #55
akoboldfrying wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Google is famous for not innovating on anything successfully PageRank Gmail Maps MapReduce Chrome Protocol Buffers Go

Gmail was revolutionary at the start, but stopped innovating 10 years ago - why don’t we still have a good search engine within it? MapReduce would be invented anyway (I implemented it from scratch before learning of it’s existence). Chrome is just a slightly upgraded Firefox (and novadays Safari is just as good if not better with ai) PageRank was what gave Google monopoly, it’s not a result of monopoly. Go - I can g…

> Chrome is just a slightly upgraded Firefox

Wat. It's like saying that an apple is a slightly upgraded orange. I would understand if you mentioned KHTML and Safari as relatives, but "slightly upgraded" does not fit anyway.

> PageRank was what gave Google monopoly

I don't think so. PageRank has been successfully implemented elsewhere, and outmatched. What helped Google build a monopoly was the first mover advantage, the network effects, and the incessant streams of money from AdWords (invented by Google), DoubleClick (acquired) and a bunch of other advertisement tools.

> Maps - I can give you that.

Don't :) Google Maps is an acquisition from 20 years ago. (As is Android, AdSense, and many other core flagship products of the Google brand.)

If you want a relatively recent, successful Google service for general public, it's Google Photos.

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

#65

Post by throwaway48476 »

ilaksh wrote: post #64

I think decentralized technologies should be part of the discussion when you it comes to replacing technology monopolies. For example, there might be some protocols for cooperative web indexing or search or to provide a common layer that companies can build on.

Common crawl?

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

#66

Post by throwaway48476 »

dtquad wrote: post #39

Hilariously shortsighted. Big Tech companies have been a GDP-doubling runaway success for the US economy. It would be like if we here in Denmark started breaking up Novo Nordisk. Our economists would probably do a public lynching of any government official who suggested doing that. However as a European I can't help but welcoming the US shooting themselves in the foot like this. Something tells me we will see more of…

Denmark has separate gdp numbers that don't include novo nordisk because they care about the real economy, not just number go up.

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

#67

Post by onecommentman »

qnleigh wrote: post #33
waveBidder wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just skip the middle man skimming off the top and 10x the national labs funding.

I wish this were a viable option, but it is not. US national labs are horribly, horribly mismanaged. For some slower-moving fields like particle physics where institutional knowledge is key, they hold up alright, but for fast moving fields like quantum they are very behind. They are stagnant bureaucracies. I could tell stories, but better to just compare the output of national labs in many fields to those of the top…

I think you need to better support the contention that the National Labs are “horribly, horribly mismanaged” [not even just horribly, but horribly, horribly]. I think many of us would like to hear your stories. But note that many in your audience here have decades of experience across both National Labs and leading industrial laboratories. Please, share your stories that span the contributions of tens of thousands of top-level STEM contributors across practically every area of scientific and engineering endeavor over the last, say, 15 years. Remember to stay unclassified…

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

#68

Post by onecommentman »

I’ve never understood why Congress hasn’t mandated the Library of Congress to offer an Internet Archive/Google for content created in the US. Expand to all first-world country content if they wish. This is not a technology-limited problem at this point. Be nice to get fresh high-quality scans of analog content online…the early digital scans available commercially or otherwise are often unreadable.

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

#69

Post by onecommentman »

teleforce wrote: post #8

There's side effect benefit of big kahuna companies mainly on the significant breakthrough and game changing research output because these excellent researchers are paid handsome money compared to conventional universities or research institutions. We saw this with AT&T Bell research labs with their inventions of transistor and Unix, among others. The same thing happened with Google research with (arguably) deep lear…

Trying to turn a zoo into a farm, as AT&T attempted to do with Bell Labs post-divestiture, had limited success and incurred great emotional and spiritual cost on the institution. Bleah.

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

#70

Post by akoboldfrying »

teractiveodular wrote: post #28
akoboldfrying wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Google is famous for not innovating on anything successfully PageRank Gmail Maps MapReduce Chrome Protocol Buffers Go

Maps was technically an acquisition (Where2). But like YouTube, Doubleclick, Google Docs (Writely), Translate (Word Lens), Google Flights (ITA) and many others, Google successfully grew these products into giants.

I didn't know Maps (or Google Docs, or Translate) were acquisitions, thanks.
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