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Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility

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Re: Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility

#661

Post by Frost1x »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #656
irrational wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I type " weather" google will show me the weather, but which weather company has shutdown because of that? I have noticed recently that the Weather.com app has added huge advertisements at the top and has roughly doubled the number of ads within the page. It honestly feels like desperation to me and I’ve been wondering if something bad is happening to the company.

It has no reason to exist in the first place. All the data for weather comes from government agencies anyway, and weather.gov does the same job. They’re a relic from when we did not have internet and there might have been some utility in a middleman producing a TV channel to get people that information.

To be fair, NWS does a poor job at presenting their own data. Some services do add their own models to NWS but the vast majority just re-wrap NWS forecasts. NWS data visualizations and the websites aren't the snazziest things but they do work.

Re: Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility

#662

Post by jonathankoren »

greyman wrote: post #642
unishark wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, google could take over almost any business like this. I have never worked with a technology company that would in danger of being taken over in this way. The examples you list are all free information you can find on the internet, which is precisely google's business. To run afoul of monopoly laws they need to do things like build their own restaurants and route searches to them rather than the o…

>grabbing free info anyone can get Yes, that's true, the info is free in a sense that someone published it on the internet. But taking the weather companies as an example, someone has to measure the weather, and then compute the predictions. That'a real cost someone needs to pay. And that I think is the reason some people don't like what Google is doing - they are displaying the temperature, while someone else paid f…

TBF though, weather is like the worst example of rent seeking. The people that provide the most value to weather reporting and prediction is the federal government through the a National Weather Service. Private companies usually just repackage the free government provided reports, or they do some analysis on top of the government provided data.

That’s what has always made AccuWeather’s attempt to “privatize” (in reality stop having the government publicly publish forecasts, but continue the hard work of data collection) the weather service transparent rent seeking.

Re: Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility

#663

Post by MinorTom »

wrycoder wrote: post #479
amadeuspagel wrote: post #451

If we ignore all this culture war bullshit for a minute there's a really fascinating issue here. The concrete issue is flight search. When you google "flight from a to b", rather then seeing search results linking to websites for flight search, the first thing you see is the results of Google's own flight search. Is that wrong? What about image search? When you search for "skyline berlin", you'll see images of berlin…

That's known as "tying" - an illegal use of a overwhelming market position to leverage the market position of other products of the same company. That's the key thing that determines illegal monopolistic practice.

That's true if you define Google as a link search engine, but what if you were to define it as a "solution finder"? This way it just fits into the definition.

Re: Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility

#664

Post by swiley »

fraserharris wrote: post #609
fraserharris wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Research in Motion thought the Blackberry keyboard was their killer feature for business professionals. They were wrong. The iPhone killed Blackberry, not Android.

The 3rd hand story I heard ~2011 from a former RIM executive who was there at the time of Steve Job's demo of the iPhone was that Mike Lazaridis' (co-founder of RIM) reaction to seeing the demo: "It's impossible! The whole thing would have to be a battery!"

He's right, it is impossible for the iPhone and clones to match the blackberry's batter life. It turns out any (certainly not all but few enough to keep blackberry in the market) prefer 60FPS scrolling to having the battery last a week.

Re: Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility

#665

Post by swiley »

Frost1x wrote: post #661
lotsofpulp wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has no reason to exist in the first place. All the data for weather comes from government agencies anyway, and weather.gov does the same job. They’re a relic from when we did not have internet and there might have been some utility in a middleman producing a TV channel to get people that information.

To be fair, NWS does a poor job at presenting their own data. Some services do add their own models to NWS but the vast majority just re-wrap NWS forecasts. NWS data visualizations and the websites aren't the snazziest things but they do work.

I guess I'm weird but I prefer the NWS.

Re: Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility

#666

Post by swiley »

johbjo wrote: post #616

Let's say the electric company wants to start a restaurant. So they shut the power to the competing restaurants in the neighbourhood. Everyone agrees it would be outrageous. Now, what about Apple dictating payment policy on apps in the app store? Google premiering their own services in the results? Forcing their own apps onto all Android devices, impossible to remove? These platforms turn themselves into natural mono…

Making the App Store a public utility instead of preventing Apple from forcing their users to do things is absolutely the wrong response because it ensures Apple will be in power forever.

Re: Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility

#667

Post by Dah00n »

roenxi wrote: post #660
Dah00n wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not GP but a monopoly doesn't mean "we own the market everywhere" or "we have close to 100% of the market-share". We have this same discussion every time someone says monopoly.. Apple for example is a 100% monopoly in the app store. Likewise Google can be a monopoly on their search result page. It would have sounded insane some years back but today, when google search is a gatekeeper (like Facebook), they absolut…

> Apple for example is a 100% monopoly in the app store. Every physical store is a monopoly in their own space. It is hard to see that specific point being important. The fact that Apple gate-keeps their store is also a major selling point of the iPhone. I don't want random people to be able to load random apps onto the phones of my family members. Having a programmable combined GPS/microphone/wallet/photo repository…

>Every physical store is a monopoly in their own space.

This comparison is disingenuous. There aren't only two big physical stores (and maybe a handful small stores hardly no one knows about) in the entire world. If 99% of all physical stores were a Walmart or Costco you could compare but luckily this isn't so.

>The fact that Apple gate-keeps their store is also a major selling point of the iPhone.

That is beside the point. Just because something is a feature you (or most) like doesn't mean it is legal or not, monopoly or not. I'm not going to discuss if it is a good or bad feature because it would be off-topic.

>Monopolistic is when Google won't allow your Travel Planner to enter their search index, or deranks it in favour of their alternative.

Consider this: You have 100.000 result on Travel planners today with your site being number 3 and tomorrow you also have 100.000 results with your site being number 3 but now there's a big box above all the results that tells you what you were looking for (and the data might even come from your site). This is way worse than being de-ranked. That's not fair competition.

Another example: You have one of many Fitness Apps for iOS. For years Apple can see data on just what people search for, install, etc. and then one day they use all this data to create their own fitness app. Quickly your app would be irrelevant. Add to that that we have proof that Apple abuse their position by offering to buy a successful app and if refused they harass the publisher in different ways and create their own.

Re: Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility

#668

Post by cbolton »

johbjo wrote: post #616

Let's say the electric company wants to start a restaurant. So they shut the power to the competing restaurants in the neighbourhood. Everyone agrees it would be outrageous. Now, what about Apple dictating payment policy on apps in the app store? Google premiering their own services in the results? Forcing their own apps onto all Android devices, impossible to remove? These platforms turn themselves into natural mono…

This analogy seems way off to me. It completely misses the fact that Google is doing what it's supposed to do which is giving the user the information they're looking for.

I don't think cutting power is giving the customer (restaurants) or users (not clear in the analogy) what they want.

It's true that with flight search, competitor results are de-emphasized, but as far as I'm concerned Google could even drop them entirely, showing only their internal results if they want to. It's answering the user query, and if the user is unsatisfied they can trivially switch to another source of information.

To make a better analogy, consider that flight search is a specialized version of what Google does more generally. So:

Electric company "EC" wants to start providing DC current to interested customers, so they show the option prominently in their communications with their customers.

This is a tragedy for the existing DC industry because "EC" has the best reputation (highest reliability) in the general electricity industry so most people will first consider them for a DC contract even if they're not necessarily the best for DC power. Still, unhappy customers can easily switch to another DC provider.

Re: Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility

#669

Post by IX-103 »

chipsambos wrote: post #619
rgbrenner wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

google could take over almost any business like this. That didn't happen to travel companies. Google added flights, but Booking Holdings (aka Priceline) continued to grow each year to 15B in revenue for 2019. (Huge drop for 2020 obviously.) If I type " weather" google will show me the weather, but which weather company has shutdown because of that? Google news is in the search results, but there are a lot of news com…

Some within the industry have been making noise that Google is quietly and slowly taking control of the whole trip funnel. Interesting read: https://www.cartrawler.com/ct/digital-disruption/googles-ste... I'd agree that providers are ceding too much control to Google for short-term wins, maybe without even realising the power they're handing over to Google. Google is quietly inserting themselves between the customer…

Interesting that no one mentions that Google also runs the backend flight/hotel search used by most trip planning sites. They bought it (ITA) over a decade ago.

So all these providers already lost this power years ago and are just providing a fancy UX over Google's backend travel search service. Now Google is merging the two search engines and cutting out the middleman.

Re: Ohio sues Google, seeks to declare the internet company a public utility

#670

Post by Maursault »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #451

If we ignore all this culture war bullshit for a minute there's a really fascinating issue here. The concrete issue is flight search. When you google "flight from a to b", rather then seeing search results linking to websites for flight search, the first thing you see is the results of Google's own flight search. Is that wrong? What about image search? When you search for "skyline berlin", you'll see images of berlin…

> When you search for "skyline berlin", you'll see images of berlin's skyline, before you see links to other image search sites.

Not to defend Google, but to be fair, 1) when searching for images, you're searching for images, not "image search sites." To search for image search sites, you'd search "all" (not photos) for "image search," which mostly returns Google image search and Google image search help pages as top results, burying other image search engines on subsequent pages. Google's search algorithm does seem biased against competitor image search sites, but maybe Google search is really finding only articles. Searching "all" for "image search sites" returns links to articles listing image search sites. Searching for Yahoo images returns Yahoo Image Search as the top result. 2) the images search results are actually thumbnails, and also links, so you see the thumbs precisely at the same time that you see links to the sites that host each image search result.

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