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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]

#611

Post by like_any_other »

BrenBarn wrote: post #574
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…

> 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. That is why the banks should have been broken up into smaller banks long before we reached that point, and it is why Google should have been broken up long ago. The only way to prevent the situation you describe…

> That is why the banks should have been broken up into smaller banks long before we reached that point

They still can be broken up. As for not being competitive on the global market - neither is regular labor compared to slave labor. And just like companies employing slave labor are (or should be) barred from the US market, so can companies that are too large. Solving such prisoner dilemmas is exactly what government is for.

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

#612

Post by int_19h »

TechDebtDevin wrote: post #545
Hydrocarb0n wrote: post #531

Google is much bigger than a Monopoly, it is a multi-monopoly, Search, web ads, email, video, maps / nav, User data / metrics. If you had told me in early 2000s that google would absolutely dominate all of these fields And it would be allowed to continue for decades, I wouldn't believe you. I'm a free market guy, I believe some small gov is nessasary to regulate monopolies, protect constitutional rights etc, but mult…

Do you think the world benefits from this monopoly though? I think the world would be a worse place without Google, a much worse place. While it would be nice to live in some timeline were lots of choices for search (there actually are, people are just lazy and don't like change), but we built a world with Google and let it get to where its at. We will just be shooting ourselves in our own foot, at least in the short…

This argument is very similar to that for "enlightened monarch" kind of despotism.

The fundamental problem is that, even if you buy the notion that this particular ruler is really so enlightened that they are a net benefit, there's no guarantee that this will still be the case in the future.

So, even if you believe that Google provides net benefit today, letting them acquire more and more power is a bad idea because they aren't necessarily going to give you free things tomorrow. Indeed, the logic of capitalism dictates that they stop doing so as soon as there's no more competition, however small, that continues to contest that particular niche.

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

#613

Post by yellow_postit »

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…

This list makes the case this is long overdue.

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

#614

Post by jahsome »

BrenBarn wrote: post #574
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…

> 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. That is why the banks should have been broken up into smaller banks long before we reached that point, and it is why Google should have been broken up long ago. The only way to prevent the situation you describe…

I'm reading your comment as "someone should have done something a long time ago so it's not worth considering the consequences of doing it now."

That fantasy doesn't seem to take into account the specific realities of current day.

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

#615

Post by cocoafleck »

lelandbatey wrote: post #597
londons_explore wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think a click stream isn't necessary, but Kagi is not a good basis for the argument in my opinion.

Kagi is a primarily meta search engine. The click stream exists on their sources (Bing, Google, Yandex, Marginalia, not sure if they use Brave). They do have Teclis which is their own index that they use, and their systems for reordering the page of results such as downranking heavy ad pages, and based upon user preferences (which I love).

https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-... is a source I would recommend checking out if you are curious.

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

#616

Post by yellow_postit »

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…

I know this is satire but Maps is increasingly worse. More ads. Less useful POIs. They actually stood still long enough for Apple Maps to catch up.

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

#617

Post by int_19h »

creato wrote: post #204

It's disappointing to see the historical revisionism in these threads. Say what you will about google now, but the idea that they just bought their way into X industry doesn't seem right. Until maybe 10 years ago, tech people almost universally loved Google's offerings and adopted them eagerly because they were good. I remember the mad scramble on various forums for a gmail invite. I remember when google maps came ab…

Gmail and GMaps were 20 years ago. Chrome, almost 15 years ago.

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

#618

Post by ChuckMcM »

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.

Click stream is useful, without a doubt. It isn't essential. We had already started the process at Blekko of moving to alternate ways for ranking the index.

That said, if you run the frontend as proposed, you get to collect the clicks. That gives you the click stream you want. If the index returns you a serp with unwrapped links (which it should if it was unbundled from a given search front end) then you could develop analytics around what your particular customers "like" in their links and have a different ranking than perhaps some other front end. One thing that Blekko made really clear for me that the Google idea that there was always the "best" result for that query (aka the I'm Feeling Lucky link) there was often different shades of intent behind the query that aren't part of the query itself. Google felt they could get it in the first 10 links (back before the first 10 links were sponsored content :-)) and often on the page you could see the two or three inferred "intents" (shopping, information, entertainment were common).

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

#619

Post by int_19h »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #212
efavdb wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Monopolies should be broken up” doesn’t imply we should disincentivize research though, does it?

I think the implication is that in a high competition area Noone has the spare funds for massive research projects that may go nowhere

That's what governments are (supposed to be) for.

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

#620

Post by fnfjfk »

hu3 wrote: post #438
prepend wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would Apple have developers working on their hardware running Linux? Apple doesn’t use Linux. They aren’t the biggest oss dev, but they have a decent amount of contributions. [0][1] It’s hard to compare how much Google vs Apple contributes to open source, but not sure why anyone would think Apple “contributes back almost nothing.” [0] https://github.com/appleopen [1] https://opensource.apple.com/projects/

Please stare at your own links for a second. Let me help you: https://github.com/orgs/appleopen/repositories?q=sort%3Astar... Their most popular repo in that entire account has 8 stars. I have multiple personal repos with more usage than that. As for the other link. More than half of those projects are Apple specific.

https://github.com/swiftlang/swift
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