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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]

#691

Post by alextingle »

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…

Killing Gmail would be a massive win for email deliverability. It's got so big now that they simply don't give a shit about delivering emails from smaller players.

That gives users the impression that other providers are unreliable, and further bolsters their monopoly.

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

#692

Post by mike_d »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #300
snielson wrote: post #168

The solution proposed by Kagi—separate the search index from the rest of Google—seems to make the most sense. Kagi explains it more here: https://blog.kagi.com/dawn-new-era-search

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…

> Google has two interlocked monopolies, one is the search index

The index is the farthest thing from a monopoly Google has - anyone can recreate it. Heck, you can even just download Commoncrawl to get a massive head start.

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

#693

Post by BrenBarn »

animal_spirits wrote: post #651
BrenBarn wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 strongly disagree. If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened. They are all FREE too, mind you. Everyone would still be paying for email. The enormous amount of free education on YouTube would not have been accessible to the world. The economy that we know today would be vastly different and in my opinion far worse off. So much of the economic growth came off…

> If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened.

And that would be fine. To me this is like saying "if we had jailed those meth makers and dealers 20 years ago, all these meth labs today would never have existed". If these services cannot exist without a business model built around transparent, bounded transactions (e.g., no hidden data harvesting), then they should not exist. The problem is precisely that Google and others of its ilk have essentially gotten millions of people addicted to "free" services whose true costs are hidden.

> The reason Google is the size it is today is because it provided better services at better prices than all the competitors.

No, they've just been better at hiding the costs, exploiting legal loopholes, and exploiting their privileged position to raise barriers to entry for other participants.

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

#694

Post by timschmidt »

scarface_74 wrote: post #674
dcow wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox was also extraordinary for the price. point being that Google has never been the only option, just the most popular because why not your gmail is already plugged in.

Firefox is 90% funded by Google ads.

No, Mozilla is 90% funded by Google ads. Mozilla does a ridiculous number of non-browser things. Konqueror and Navigator existed long before Google ad funding.

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

#695

Post by lolinder »

animal_spirits wrote: post #686
lolinder wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The consumer did pay the price. Google built on empire on making consumers believe they were getting things for free while selling other businesses a direct line to its customers' wallets. It's been a very effective sleight of hand operation, to the point where even relatively savvy people on HN seem to forget that advertising pays the bills by getting its targets to spend money they would not have otherwise spent. A…

> A world without Google would not be a world with less disposable income for regular people, but it might be a world with less disposable junk. If the argument is "more ads = more junk" then the argument is essentially "my values are more important than other peoples values". I'm also anti-consumerism, but if someone sees an ad and finds a product intriguing enough to purchase, they believe that thing might have val…

I'm not sure where you got that I'm trying to impose anything on anyone—sounds like you latched onto a side note and decided to reply to what you thought the side note was implying instead of the substance of my comment?

The argument has nothing to do with values or imposing them on others, it's simply this: These things are not and never were free. Google wants you to think they're free, but either the ads are effective at driving revenue and consumers are paying for Google's products in the form of increased consumption or Google is a parasite that lies to businesses about the efficacy of their ads and consumers are paying for Google's products in the form of the parasitic Google tax. Most likely it's a bit of both.

Either way, Google offering these products for "free" did not have a positive effect on consumer wallets and paid solutions emerging to replace Google if it actually does dissolve will not have a negative effect.

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

#696

Post by FilosofumRex »

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…

They're too big to fail argument of Obama, is now they're too big to break up.

No, they are not, by historical standard. When the Standard Oil Trust was broken up in 1911, it controlled nearly 80% of gasoline market in the US and kept prices too low, so no one could enter the market.

Exxon, Mobile, Chevron, Texaco, Amoco, Gulf oil, and 30 other oil companies emerged. Today only 4 are still around, because anti-trust enforcement has been guted by both parties since WWII. Google babies will merge and raise, yet again.

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

#697

Post by lolinder »

JustExAWS wrote: post #690
lolinder wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maps/mail/drive/docs/flights/translate: provided for free using their dominance in ad tech to bankroll it and feeding the data back in to the ad platform. No one else can compete, and using dominance in one market to ensure dominance in others has historically been a clear trigger for antitrust. Android: they lost a court case over this one that has lots of details if you care to look. The rest are a weird mix of pai…

Docs and GSuite gets plenty of money from businesses abs school districts.

So those portions of the business will stand up fine on their own. The consumer-facing side is anticompetitive, though.

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

#698

Post by [deleted] »

lolinder wrote: post #659
animal_spirits wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree. If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened. They are all FREE too, mind you. Everyone would still be paying for email. The enormous amount of free education on YouTube would not have been accessible to the world. The economy that we know today would be vastly different and in my opinion far worse off. So much of the economic growth came off…

The consumer did pay the price. Google built on empire on making consumers believe they were getting things for free while selling other businesses a direct line to its customers' wallets. It's been a very effective sleight of hand operation, to the point where even relatively savvy people on HN seem to forget that advertising pays the bills by getting its targets to spend money they would not have otherwise spent. A…

[deleted]

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

#699

Post by riffraff »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #666
animal_spirits wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree. If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened. They are all FREE too, mind you. Everyone would still be paying for email. The enormous amount of free education on YouTube would not have been accessible to the world. The economy that we know today would be vastly different and in my opinion far worse off. So much of the economic growth came off…

> I strongly disagree. If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened. They are all FREE too, mind you. Everyone would still be paying for email. People weren't paying for email before gmail. It was predated by hotmail, Yahoo mail, and innumerable free online email offerings by small players. Being free wasn't even a selling point for gmail; the selling point was th…

>> Google Groups > It already has gone away. Also, Usenet is something else older than Google.

and google literally acquired and then killed deja news. If anything this is yet another argument for the antitrust.

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

#700

Post by tinodb »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #678
fergbrain wrote: post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “their other services widely available for free” None of their services are free. You just pay for them in other ways, even if you don’t realize it.

I think this is sort of missing the point: I’m happy to trade a bit of attention here and there for services because I’m just going to go without a lot of things if I have to pay real money for them. If we go to a model where every site charges for usage, I will start using fewer services regularly and will use each service for more things which seems a bit counterproductive in terms of monopolies.

If you “are going to go without then”, there’s apparently no value in it. So should also not matter if it goes away.
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