US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case • Hacker News Board

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

#681

Post by simiones » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 12:00 PM UTC

jackcosgrove wrote: post #526

rurp wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capital markets don't perfectly account for all positive and negative externalities in the world, not even close. For example think of a company that invents a miracle drug that only costs $1 to produce. The net benefit to humanity would be to open up production and sell it to everyone who needs it for a few bucks, but of course the company will do everything it can to maintain a monopoly and sell the drug for $X0000…

> sell the drug for $X0000/dose, even if relatively few people can obtain it A rational company would lower the price if that broadened the market and netted more profit by volume. Drugs aren't Veblen goods. The impetus for jacking up drug prices is that the market is captive, and those who need the drug will obtain it. That and insurance/government is often the payor.

If the drug is needed by 1 million people, selling it for $1 will net you $1 million (let's assume all the 1 million can afford $1). If they instead sell it for $1000 and only 2000 people who need it can afford it, they'll make $2 million, so it's much more economically efficient.

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

#682

Post by yreg » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 12:03 PM UTC

bobviolier wrote: post #663

nl wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Profits are not all that matters. The money Google spends internally either on development or on cross subsidies is no profit and is what most of the issues in this discussion are addressing. Profits is just money they couldn't find a place to spend on growth. (Also a maximum of 30% goes to app devs which isn't a majority any way you measure it)

70% goed to app devs (right?)

of course

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

#683

Post by snarf21 » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 12:09 PM UTC

svara wrote: post #243

gaiagraphia wrote: post #181

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…

Sort of playing devil's advocate here, but well run companies with near monopolies have on many occasions provided massive benefits that would not have been possible at smaller scale. Think of Bell Labs. Google has a number of Bell Labs style projects ongoing that massively benefit scientific research. Transformers, AlphaFold, etc. It's hard to see how a smaller, more focused company would be able to justify that typ…

I don't think it would be the company that focused on those Moonshots. The founder types with $Billions get bored and start new things that try these instead.

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

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Post by alt227 » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 12:10 PM UTC

someluccc wrote: post #390

nosianu wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that does not mean that 5 minutes of your eyesight is now worth something The advertisers paying to get their ads placed in front of those eyes disagree. And ye, since another comment questions this, data or "eye-time are similar - they can be broken down to the individual. The advertisers pay some price expecting a certain number of people to see the ad, and even if data about people is sold in bulk (too) there is…

You can literally use Chrome, Workspace, Drive, Android and Maps without seeing a single ad, without an ad blocker, without EVER using google search, for free.

Do you realise that as soon as you go to any of those websites, your details are scraped and sold? The second you put any data in drive or worksdpace, that is scraped into LLMs and sold?

Theres a reason that you have to log into a Google account to use those services, which means agreeing to their rather large TOS.

Buying something doesnt necessarily mean you have to pay money for it. Your time and information is worth something too.

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

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Post by FrustratedMonky » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 12:13 PM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #609

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Breaking up AT&T lead to innovation. GDP? Have people forgotten that a vibrant 'Free Market' requires breaking up monopolies? When did supporting a 'Free Market' turn into, "don't touch our giant corps".

I won't argue that AT&T's breakup wasn't a good thing and the right move, but unfortunately a lot of that breakup has been undone: today telephony is controlled by a small oligopoly in the US. Better than a single monopoly, I suppose, but still not great. The Baby Bells started their re-merge back in the 90s. In 2000, when Verizon was formed, it was a combination of Bell Atlantic (New Jersey Bell + Bell Company of PA…

totally.

The break up occurred in the 80's. and since then through mergers/acquisitions, they have re-joined.

So we have monopolies again.

Somehow we have lost the will-power in government to impose the needed actions to ensure a free market. Like also denying mergers that would create monopolies.

Like how was Ticketmaster even allowed to happen. We let it buy its competitors and now it is a monopoly.

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

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Post by alt227 » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 12:14 PM UTC

someluccc wrote: post #293

dartos wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A) Do you pay them? - No: then yes it is free And here we see the ostrich. When faced with the horrors of reality, sticks its head in the sand. It’s simpler in there.

Your data is worthless. Please do tell me how much you could sell your “data” for right now.

The data of an individual may be worth something like $0.001 which is not that much to an individual.

However the value is not nothing, and if you are a company with multiple billion users, that value of data can get pretty big pretty fast

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

#687

Post by snarf21 » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 12:14 PM UTC

gaiagraphia wrote: post #181

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…

I think you are close, but we need to stop these mega-mergers where the acquisition would give any company X% of the market. We also need to go after the anti-monopoly practices of the mega giants; like what Amazon did to Diapers.com. As we've seen through the pandemic and elsewhere, extreme consolidation is only good for shareholders and more rent-seeking. It is never good for workers or the market or competition. It has affected everything from food to energy to "news" to healthcare.

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

#688

Post by carlosjobim » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 12:21 PM UTC

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #209

strongpigeon wrote: post #136

Something I really don't get is the part about Google's monopoly in search text ads. FTA: > Finally, the filing said Google’s dominance over search text ads needed to be addressed by lowering barriers to would-be rivals or licensing its ad feed to others, independently from search results. What Google has is a monopoly on search (which is bad), but I don't think having a monopoly for advertising on your own property…

> What Google has is a monopoly on search (which is bad), but I don't think having a monopoly for advertising on your own property is a bad thing. Where one might run afoul is using your monopoly in one market -- search, in Google's case -- to gain an advantage in another market -- advertising. It's kinda interesting because they clearly don't treat "search" as a market given they don't sell it to anyone but it also…

> It's kinda interesting because they clearly don't treat "search" as a market given they don't sell it to anyone but it also clearly has value, otherwise people wouldn't use it.

They sell access to their search API, even to competitors.

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

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Post by rightbyte » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 12:30 PM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #175

My primary interest is how Alphabet will attempt to implement this. In particular, if they break up Search and Ads, or really any major product in google3/borg, Alphabet will have a massive pile of work splitting those up in a way that allows the resulting groups to achieve the same level of horizontal and vertical integration that they currently enjoy. Personally I am skeptical that they have enough technically capa…

It might be schadenfreude but I see failure as an option.

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

#690

Post by Aerroon » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 12:39 PM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #615

Aerroon wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But then they are not based on the context of the website. This is just the same tracking with another name.

>or through a UI element on the website that lets the visitor choose the language.

This is nonsensical too. People don't just speak only one language. If I'm going into an English website and you're giving me a language pop up I'm going to pick English. But ads that are in English are not relevant to me whatsoever.

Also, I would like to note that language redirects are, in my experience, absolute trash. It makes using sites like Adobe awful.

Even the language settings in windows lead to a bad user experience. I have to keep English as my first keyboard language and locale to make sure that websites don't default to other languages for me.

I have zero faith that they would get this right.