71–80 of 128 posts
- #5: Facebook reportedly discredited critics by linking them to George Soros (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18460406)
- #10: Facebook’s weapon amid chaos and controversy: misdirection (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18460962)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Microsoft spent more than a decade, investing tens of billions of dollars and absorbing an astonishing $12.4 billion in cumulative losses, to establish Bing as a credible competitor. It is cheaper and easier to build a manned space program than it is to build a modern search engine." - Matthew Hindman, "The Internet Trap", 2018 (p. 174)
Right, the issue was to make it credible . It was never difficult for someone to say "screw this, I'll use a different search engine instead" and be using it in minutes. Google would even find it for them! The last sentence of the quote is false; only a small fraction of that money was spent on "building the search engine". Again, the relevant point is whether you can offer an alternative, which MS (and several other…
2. How can we know that the only reason Google can keep being the best out of incumbents is because of past network value. e.g. if a competitor had access to the same amount of historical sea h data as Google, could they use it in a better way?
If they are, they are not a traditional monopolies. Traditional monopolies "control supply of a good or service, and where the entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted." In this case, the supply of a good or service (social networking, webpage indexing and searching) are not controlled by Facebook and Google because they aren't finite resources. Anyone can index the web and anyone can build a social n…
Also, in google and facebooks case the "consumers" are the product and the advertisers are the buyers.
Time for a bunch of people with no competition law or economics background to get upset over the term 'monopoly'.
At this point, Google in many cases offers the best service: DuckDuckGo is good, but Google is better. It is so good that it indexes the CIA's stuff: https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/416215-cia-operations... This is without even considering google dorks, possibly one of the most powerful tools infosec researchers (or even average people) have to refine queries. In the case of Facebook, it offers the best produc…
Google and Facebook both want to be publishers when it suits them, and common carriers when it suits them, and both have shown, I think we can all agree, a propensity to be evil. I think it's telling that Google retired, "Don't be evil."
I think Google is worse in that regard since they are so much more pervasive. It's easy enough to permanently opt out of Facebook, but to avoid using Google is difficult, if not impossible.
The other question is that do these companies allow for competition, not that they are necessarily explicitly preventing competition (although they may be), but whether or not they are so successful and have so much of a market share that it is literally impossible to compete with them, and again, I think the answer is yes. We see new competitors for Facebook on almost a weekly basis, and none of them ever get anywhere, not because of whether or not they are any good, but the fact that they can't compete because pretty much everyone who isn't actively boycotting Facebook is on Facebook (including me).
As far as Google goes, the best we can hope for the is someone to be able to compete with them in one particular area, and even that would be tough because Google, like Microsoft or Apple, can throw so much money at a project that it can succeed as a loss leader by simply outlasting any would-be competitor.
Oh boy - it's that time again. Time for a bunch of people with no competition law or economics background to get upset over the term 'monopoly'.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What matters is whether it's hard for others to offer alternatives It is monstrously hard to offer alternatives. The barrier to entry is the massive engineering effort to compete. Google is not just a search engine. It is an email server and client, a calendar, an online office suite, a cloud provider, a mobile platform, and I can go on listing things to fill up several pages of what Google is. Even if DuckDuckGo i…
> It is an email server and client, a calendar, an online office suite, a cloud provider, a mobile platform, and I can go on listing things to fill up several pages of what Google is. In my mind search, email, calendar, cloud, drive are all separate services. Just because I use Google Search doesn't mean I use google drive and gmail. In fact, I use Microsoft's OneDrive most of the time instead of Google Drive, and I…
Example: now that Google says that they don't mine email / calendar / docs data for ads, that means they don't make direct revenue from those services - unless a user pays for them directly a la G Suite or Google Drive pricing. Therefore Google leverages strong market share and revenue from Search to invest in these services to bundle them and offer them for free.
In theory any other company can build individual blocks, but most likely could not (1) offer them for free, nor (2) address the switching cost that a user of Google's services does not have (i.e. having multiple tabs or different applications opened to use email + calendar + files + etc.) If this wasn't a technology company, but like a p&g company, hypothetically, this would be clear cut monopolistic behavior.
That said, it's a thorny issue and I could see both sides, and the technology market landscape necessitates an analysis of our definitions of monopoly / market share / competition, etc.
If they are, they are not a traditional monopolies. Traditional monopolies "control supply of a good or service, and where the entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted." In this case, the supply of a good or service (social networking, webpage indexing and searching) are not controlled by Facebook and Google because they aren't finite resources. Anyone can index the web and anyone can build a social n…
If they are, they are not a traditional monopolies. Traditional monopolies "control supply of a good or service, and where the entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted." In this case, the supply of a good or service (social networking, webpage indexing and searching) are not controlled by Facebook and Google because they aren't finite resources. Anyone can index the web and anyone can build a social n…
The service google and facebook provide is access to their captured audience. In the case of google that is the advertisement market with search and the platform of youtube. It is rather commonly known that many video producers are extremely unhappy using youtube but feel locked in since thats where the audience is, and the audience is equally locked in since youtube is where the producers are. New video platforms po…
Sure it's not YouTube (yet), but it's nothing to sneeze at either.
> many video producers are extremely unhappy using youtube
YouTube basically created an entire new market around video production. If it weren't for YouTube (or a similarly popular service), I'd hazard a guess that many of those video production jobs simply wouldn't exist.
It's hard to complain about a market with a too-big-player when the player basically created the entire market.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iac-interactive-vimeo/iac...