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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]

#701

Post by BrenBarn »

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…

That's only true up to a point. If I say "more plastic in the ocean = more junk", you can say "oh, that's just you pushing your values, if someone else would rather have a disposable plastic water bottle than a clean ocean, that's their choice". But, as with (physical) pollution, the costs of this kind of ad pollution and covert data harvesting are not transparent to consumers, so it's not possible to say they have actually given informed consent to it.

More insidiously, the proliferation of this type of "junk" crowds out other business models, meaning that increasingly people can't even "test" whether they would prefer something else. It's basically the tyranny of small decisions. It's not just a matter of "I will trade you five minutes of my eyeball time for 6 months of email", because every such transaction increase the likelihood that in the future you will find yourself with no option other than to engage in such a transaction in order to, say, pay your electric bill.

It's my claim that my viewpoint is actually in accord with a majority of people's values, in the sense that if we considered an alternate universe with less ad junk, more people in that universe would look at ours and say "Wow, I'm glad I don't live there" than vice versa. It's just that there are lots of clever boiling-frog ways to get people to act against their own values without their being fully aware of it. The mere fact that something has happened doesn't mean most people actually wanted it to happen, or are happy it happened, or even realize they would in fact be happier if it hadn't happened.

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

#702

Post by ChuckMcM »

mike_d wrote: post #692
ChuckMcM wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see it a bit differently, many (most?) web sites explicitly deny scraping execept for Google. Further Google has the infrastructure to crawl several trillion web pages and create a relevant index out of the most authoritative 1.5 trillion. To re-create that on your own, you would need both the web to allow it, and the infrastructure to do it. I would agree that this isn't an insurmountable moat but it is a good one.

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

#703

Post by seangrogg »

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…

And nothing of value was lost.

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

#704

Post by HWR_14 »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #637
bernardom wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They won't be killed, they'll be forced to stand up as their own businesses, like the Baby Bells after Ma Bell broke up, or the split of Standard Oil. I can see most of these being reasonable standalone businesses. And if they can't be they'll die and get replaced by one that is better.

The problem is that it is ingrained in people that these services are free, and the only way they are free is by having them feed a centralized ad network.

There is no reason that the ad network needs to be centralized. Thats more convenient, but not required.

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

#705

Post by raydiak »

gpt5 wrote: post #672
jmatthews wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You essentially outline why it should be broken up. I'm not convinced making the ad tech sector more competitive would prompt that outcome but, "It would disrupt mature products" isn't a compelling argument to allow the existence of a monopoly. Google is a monopoly, they exert monopoly power and enjoy monopoly pricing. I think the more likely outcome would be more dynamic products under smaller bannerheads.

> Google is a monopoly This argument was stronger a couple of years ago. But search is being commoditized at such a rapid pace that it's not clear that this is true anymore. When analyst measure companies moats, they measure their strength in years/decades. How many years would you give Google Search at this point?

https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share looks pretty clear to me. If this suit turns into another nothingburger, that moat probably extends from here to the AI apocalypse.

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

#706

Post by odyssey7 »

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…

I don’t buy it. I suspect that a reason Google Cloud remains a laggard in market share is that Google’s core business, as an advertiser that feeds off user data, gives parts of the available market the heebie jeebies.

The monopoly is possibly self-defeating at this point. Maybe the reason for the Google graveyard is that too big to fail has somehow turned into too big to succeed.

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

#707

Post by WesBrownSQL »

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.

That's what you don't get. You aren't just watching ads. You are giving them data about you, a lot of data. That data is used to heavily manipulate you. This isn't like the old days of broadcast TV where ads air and you aren't directly tracked. If you ever find a product that is free, it isn't. You are the product that is being sold.

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

#708

Post by RajBhai »

handoflixue wrote: post #653
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…

> Everyone would still be paying for email. Free email existed before Google - Hotmail and Yahoo come to mind immediately, but there were plenty of others. You also got a free email address from your ISP - even AOL users had email.

I remember hotmail before gmail. Attachments had a 2 MB limit. I couldn't even share HQ photos using hotmail. And the whole inbox had a 25 MB capacity. I do believe there were paid alternatives with more storage.

Gmail came in with 1 GB storage and grouping emails as conversations. To me, both of these aspects were revolutionary, and other email providers shortly followed suit.

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

#709

Post by rolisz »

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…

Gmail, YouTube and others are not free: you don't pay with money, but with your data and your attention.

So yeah, I think the world would be a better place if they had not been developed by Google.

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

#710

Post by FilosofumRex »

JustExAWS wrote: post #682
lolinder wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't use that word and no one in the chain above me did either. I specifically chose "anticompetitive behavior" to emphasize that a monopoly is not required to do damage to the free market or to trigger antitrust action.

So out of the list, how has Google behaved “anti competitively” in any of these? - Google Maps - Google Mail - Google Drive - Google Docs - Google Groups - Google Forms - Google Cloud - Google OAuth - Google Analytics - Android - Android Auto - Fitbit - Google Fi - Google Fiber - Google Flights - Google Translate - Google Pay - Waymo

Horizontal integration is a tried and true strategy of monopolies.

Standard Oil bought or bankrupt competitive refineries, pipeline companies, regional railroads, even mom&pop gas stations & groceries often at considerable costs to ensure no part of the oil supply chain was profitable for its competitors.

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