671–680 of 888 posts
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one may as well complain that outlawing bribery caused everyone to attempt regulatory capture instead
Except that ones made up.
The entire topic is dancing around the question of what corruption looks like in jurisdictions where you can’t just buy the government, and the answer is, mostly, regulatory capture.
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At least according to this, Google generated ~$47B/year. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/google-play-statistics/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/444476/google-play-annua...
That’s revenue not profits. Majority goes to app devs. Profits are all that matter
Most companies intentionally waste money on expenses to help drive future growth, or atleast avoid taxes. This is why you hear constantly Amazon pays almost no taxes compared to their revenue.
The free market's great IF there's competition. If the market's dead, it's time to reinject some life and keep the cogs turning. Scale's great, but it often comes with a societal cost. For every efficiency made, there's less agency and decent jobs to go round. Seems unfair to make such decisions ad-hoc though, and string it out through years of court cases and m/billions of lawyer fees. Why not establish rules of the…
Thiel himself said competition is for losers. He also said he thinks democracy and freedom are incompatible. His cohort doesn't want a free market, it wants godlike technofeudalism.
Interesting term. On a geopolitical scale, how is the US/NATO’s position any different? There are export controls around advanced semiconductors and encryption algorithms.
Is it okay to do this between countries but not within societies? (Genuine question. I really don’t know where I stand on this, for either side.)
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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...
With the extra clarification that just the size of the company or its market share aren't in and of themselves enough to constitute a crime. It's how the company acts once it has that power that constitutes the crime.
You could be a huge company, or dominate a market and still not run afoul of anti-competitive laws because you didn't abuse the position [0]. The abuse of position particularly (or only, depending on jurisdiction probably) if it brings harm to consumers is what lands a company in hot water.
[0] https://thehustle.co/originals/the-worlds-cutest-monopoly
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…
I think most people do not understand that Google funnels a lot of their profits to make Chrome and Android into OSS. Youtube may be the only viable company that can come out of Google. Rest will either have to charge a lot of money or die. And we will be left with an even more profitable ad giant, that sends back all profits to it's share holders.
Jolla/Sailfish make a mobile operating system with a handful of people, and even though that system pretty minimal, I'd say the added value on the Android side is the ecosystem of apps and porting to devices, which is done by other developers and manufacturers than Google. And I'm not sure how many people work on Firefox itself on any given day.
I guess it's just really hard to get a clear picture on what all those people in large companies are really doing day to day. The overhead must be enormous, and likely a lot of engineering effort is thrown at the wall to see what sticks.
Anywhere there are eyeballs, there will be ads. And wherever there are ads there are privacy concerns. Netflix waited until they had sufficiently killed off cable TV, then went back to creating the same problem it fixed. No ads in ChatGPT today, but soon as it (or a competitor) gains meaningful marketshare, there will be ads.
> And wherever there are ads there are privacy concerns. Not necessarily true. Physical billboards are ads but (mostly) without privacy concerns, until they start putting cameras on them watching who walks by and looks.
https://www.jcdecaux.com.au/news-around-world/jetstar-and-jc...
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That’s revenue not profits. Majority goes to app devs. Profits are all that matter
I disagree, the government should absolutely consider how much app devs would lose out on before they decide on how to carve up google.
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I think you underestimate the value of controlling the platform that you base all your revenue from. Chrome controls the internet and android has a huge market share on mobile. The latest changes to chrome that breaks plugins like ublock origin allows them to keep maximising their advertising revenue. I think these two being open source is a major reason why they have been so successfully adopted. It isn’t direct rev…
I think you are drastically overestimating the revenue gain from ad blockers But I agree that default search with being Google must have heavily blocked competition. Comparing how much they pay Mozilla and Apple to maintain search, it would be reasonable to estimate Chrome’s implementation to save them $1b a year But I highly doubt they make any back given > 1k people work on it
I think you are underestimating it. There must be a reason why google is trying to work around ad blockers on their platforms.
> But I highly doubt they make any back given > 1k people work on it
Where did you find that number? I highly doubt it. Maybe if you are counting contributors to chromium.
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> People know what they need, and have always known No we don't. I need a better mouse trap, but I already have mouse traps that work, so if you make a better one you need me to find out about it otherwise I'll just buy the same old not so good ones out of habit thinking they work as good as any other one. There are also problems that I don't even know I have. There are a lot of houses with terrible insulation that t…
If you think the mouse traps work you probably do not need other. Anyway, marketing is not good way to find about flaws of current ways. Because that is not it's focus.
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Exactly, it's "just" the market setting the price. The issue is that these are near monopolies, so the market isn't efficient. In other words, if those companies didn't have monopoly power, other businesses (or non-commercial entities) might be able to afford to hire some of these people as well, which might be beneficial overall for innovation. That's the economic argument and it's pretty clean imo. But as far as I'…
I think that's exactly the point I was getting it. Who decides what efficient is, and what do they measure. You might care about vision algorithms, and I might care about hamburgers. From the economics perspective, something being Monopoly doesn't mean it's inefficient. Depending on the situation, they can be far more efficient then diverse companies, or much less
From an economics perspective, if there is a monopoly, there is no free market, so you can't rely on the market for efficiency. A monopoly can be efficient, but it can also be arbitrarily inefficient and still keep its position.