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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

#611

Post by dimitrios1 »

kelnos wrote: post #593
shiroiushi wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is very different from the global market share, where Android has 45% more.' This case is about US antitrust law, so what happens outside US borders isn't really that important, except as far as it affects the companies' revenues and profits. Supposedly, the actions of any antitrust action are to protect consumers/the general public, but what that really means is consumers in the US . Consumers outside the US a…

If anti-trust action in the US results in the break-up of Google, it affects users worldwide, not just in the US. Regardless, 42% (in the US) is still a huge market share. Huge doesn't have to mean majority or even plurality.

Correct. "Huge" in the case of antitrust matters is big enough to act anti-competitively. It's much more broad than you think, and it sees a lion share of litigation done by the Feds.

For example, there's currently an ongoing anti trust case against "Al’s Asphalt Paving Company"

https://www.justice.gov/atr/case/us-v-als-asphalt-paving-com...

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

#612

Post by kelnos »

shiroiushi wrote: post #506
hluska wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you actually believe that the United States should permit a monopoly because it “enables the US to suffocate the tech efforts of other countries”? You would rather ruin everyone else than have a functional economy? That says a lot about you.

I think his idea is that if other competing countries (namely China) won't break up their big tech companies, so with US companies broken up, they won't be able to compete against the foreign behemoths. The US already can't compete at all with China in electronic hardware and manufacturing.

> The US already can't compete at all with China in electronic hardware and manufacturing.

This isn't because the US broke up their chip monopolies, though. This is because chip companies believed they could save money by shipping their expertise overseas and building things there instead. And they were right. They only had to put the US's economic future in jeopardy to do it.

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

#613

Post by 0dayz »

I'll admit I'm torn on Google, they got their own skeletons in the garden but at the same time Google have failed so many times with their attempts to gain a foothold in a lot of different markets.

And others they have either competed with other big tech such as Microsoft or Apple, or just is a player in the race.

Compared to say Amazon, Apple, meta or heaven forbid Microsoft that is.

I do think though if they get broken up then I'm fine with Google getting nuked and we all collectively wag the finger against the employees.

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

#614

Post by kelnos »

bloppe wrote: post #406
hightrix wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nicely provide us with everything digitally that we could need... Advertising Sorry for the snark, but no one anywhere needs advertising. Advertising in it's current form is a plague on humanity.

I started a small business selling candles during the pandemic. It's crazy how quickly you change your opinion about advertisements once you start needing to advertise your own business. All of the sudden, they're this amazing benefit for society. Advertisements can be good (when the business is good and genuinely wants you to know about good new product), and they can be bad (when the business if bad / misleading /…

> All of the sudden, they're this amazing benefit for society.

No, they're an amazing benefit to your business. I'm sure your candles are great, but society doesn't need them (your candles, specifically) to survive. People would continue to find candles without your advertisements. Maybe candles that aren't as nice as yours, but people will get by just fine, and wouldn't know (or care) what they were missing.

> Advertisements can be good (when the business is good and genuinely wants you to know about good new product)

Advertising is emotional manipulation. Why do I need to know about good products, even genuinely good ones? If I have an actual, articulated need for something, I can go out and look for it. But if I'm not actually looking for something, but someone advertises to me and convinces me to buy their thing, likely I would have gotten along just fine without it.

> An optimist would say there are more good than bad. I suppose you wouldn't consider yourself an optimist.

False dichotomy. Whether there are more good companies that honestly try to hawk their wares, or more bad companies that try to trick people into buying their garbage, is irrelevant. Advertising is a blight on society.

The thing that really makes my stomach churn, though, is that if I ran a company, I'd absolutely advertise. It's the prisoner's dilemma. Because advertising exists and others will use it, I can't opt out of using it myself. I feel super gross about this fact.

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

#615

Post by kelnos »

Aerroon wrote: post #431
hightrix wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suppose you wouldn't consider yourself an optimist. With regard to modern advertising, you are absolutely correct! That said, I fully understand and agree with the usefulness of advertising. What I'm against is the modern state of advertising. If all ads were simply contextual based on the content being shown and not the user, I don't think many of us would have problems with the ads industry.

And how is that going to work for all the non-English speaking countries? If that were the case then I could see more stringent regulations on which languages you can use for media creation depending on where the company is from.

It'll work same way browsers know what language to present their main content in: either via the Accept-Language HTTP header, or through a UI element on the website that lets the visitor choose the language.

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

#616

Post by kelnos »

hightrix wrote: post #411
trgn wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how did this happen before advertising? trade shows, trade magazines, word of mouth, window-dressing in the THING-quarter, ... why are personalized ads on a website indispensable?

> why are personalized ads on a website indispensable? They aren't. This is exactly what I mean by modern advertising. If ads were just contextual based on the content of the page, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

> If ads were just contextual based on the content of the page, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

I'd still be blocking them, though.

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

#617

Post by forgotoldacc »

filloutform wrote: post #610
stego-tech wrote: post #188

Loving the discourse in the comments here. Speaking as someone who grew up alongside Google in a sense, I fall on the side of the "break it up" camp. It was novel at the time to have a single company so nicely provide us with everything digitally that we could need - G Suite, YouTube, Search, Maps, Advertising, Books, Reader, etc - but in hindsight, we gave too much power to too unaccountable an entity, who in turn u…

Monopoly law is based on whether or not consumers are harmed. Consumers want free and cheap and quality, Google gives that thanks to economy of scale. Break up Google and consumers will pay more for the same services. until another company steps up and does the same thing Google does. this could be Baidu or Yandex. Yandex has their own version of drive, maps, Gmail, search etc etc.

But who's the customer?

Google is an ad business. It sells human eyes and ears to businesses. They own a massive chunk of the ad business and everything they make benefits ads. People who are buying ads (businesses) might benefit with more competition, because as it stands, we have dumb stuff like lawyers in Missouri buying ads and people in Bangladesh clicking them. Google gains money even though that ad was completely ineffective to the customer.

Plus google's goal is to funnel everything into ads. Search sucks ass. It's all astroturfed or straight up fake content these days. Users are getting scammed clicking on these links. Small businesses are getting strangled out because they can't pay protection fees that the megacorps that aren't flooded out by AI generated and SEO-optimized slop can. We all suffer because of that.

Google has a stranglehold on email. Try sending a non-gmail message to a gmail account as a normie and you're probably going straight to the spam bucket. How much has it costed people who had their messages lost because they won't hand all their data over to Google?

Technically, competition "exists", but it's strangled out to the point of basically not existing. Other companies can offer all these services if they grow big. The problem is there's no other company that can compete with google in the US. And whenever a new company comes along that can shake up the game, Google/Apple/Microsoft buy them out and shut them down, unless they're part of the club already (e.g. OpenAI)

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

#618

Post by shiroiushi »

kelnos wrote: post #612
shiroiushi wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think his idea is that if other competing countries (namely China) won't break up their big tech companies, so with US companies broken up, they won't be able to compete against the foreign behemoths. The US already can't compete at all with China in electronic hardware and manufacturing.

> The US already can't compete at all with China in electronic hardware and manufacturing. This isn't because the US broke up their chip monopolies, though. This is because chip companies believed they could save money by shipping their expertise overseas and building things there instead. And they were right. They only had to put the US's economic future in jeopardy to do it.

I'm not talking about chip companies, I mean all electronic hardware: other components, PCBs, etc., are mostly all made in Asia, except for ridiculously expensive stuff made primarily for the military. There's no way that iPhones could be economically made in America, for instance.

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

#619

Post by WalterBright »

shiroiushi wrote: post #511
WalterBright wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The reason people turned to ad-blockers is because the ads became too intrusive. They were fine (or at least bearable) when they were just simple text boxes next to your Google search results, or maybe when they were static banner ads. But then the advertisers came up with pop-ups, pop-unders, video ads, 2-hour long ads in the middle of YouTube videos, and all kind of other nasty shenanigans that hijacked your comput…

You can pay google and get ad free viewing.

I.e. if you don't want ads, you'll need to pay.

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

#620

Post by WalterBright »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #464
WalterBright wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cisco reputedly avoided an anti-trust action by wining and dining DoJ lawyers. Microsoft, in comparison, said rude things about the DoJ. Of course, I wish things did not work this way. But isn't it a bit naive to think it doesn't?

> Cisco reputedly avoided an anti-trust action by wining and dining DoJ lawyers Source? (They settled with Multiven.) > isn't it a bit naive to think it doesn't No, it's naïve to think that level of influence can be bought. Not an uncommon mistake. Bankman-Fried made it, and it's increasingly looking like Bytedance did too. But D.C. is a town obsessed with power over money. People regularly toss aside lobbyists and t…

> Source?

An article I read around 2000 about why the DoJ didn't go after Cisco, despite Cisco having a monopolistic position at the time.

Sorry I don't have a photographic memory.

> it's naïve to think that level of influence can be bought.

Not at all. Where do you think the money for the Clinton Foundation came from, for example?

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