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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]

#711

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

WesBrownSQL wrote: post #707
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I do get that, and I’m fine with it.

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

#713

Post by linkregister »

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…

Nearly all the services mentioned here were acquisitions or had strong competitors at the time of their launches. It is undeniable that Google has made these into quality products and led to their dominant position in their fields. However, Google's existence was necessary for none of these classes of products.

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

#714

Post by azinman2 »

raydiak wrote: post #705
gpt5 wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What I don’t see on there is ChatGPT, perplexity, etc. people’s behaviors and needs are changing.

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

#715

Post by raydiak »

scarface_74 wrote: post #675
lolinder wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the comment is saying that the situation is only going to get worse from here. There will never be a better time to solve Google's anticompetitive behavior. The consequences should be weighed and considered, but shrugging and letting Google keep on keeping on because it's too big to fail isn't a viable option.

Which one of those services are a “monopoly”?

The lawsuit focuses specifically on search and search advertising. So the answer to your question is Google Search.

Note that a legal monopoly is not the same as the extreme simplification of "zero other options". "In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with unfair price raises." [1]

"In United States v. Google LLC, the federal government alleges that Google has unfairly hindered competition in the search market through anti-competitive deals with Apple as well as mobile carriers. The government alleges that, as a result of these practices, Google has accumulated control of around 88% of the domestic search engine market.

In doing so, the government alleges, Google has additionally monopolized the search advertising market at the expense of competing services. Per the government's estimation, Google has been able to accumulate control of over 70% of the search advertising market. As a result of lack of competition, Google has been able to over-charge advertisers versus what they would pay in a competitive environment." [2]

Statcounter seems to align quite closely with the government's assertion. [3] Extra creepily, it appears to be even a hair worse globally, where Bing is less used (not that I like Bing or MS either). [4] But there is no international framework I'm aware of to handle global-scale monopolies, so that's outside the scope of the suit.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2... [3] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/un... [4] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share

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

#716

Post by animal_spirits »

lolinder wrote: post #695
animal_spirits wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 effec…

True, these services are not and never were free, we pay for them with our data. I would say this is all fairly common knowledge, my parents who are not tech savvy understand this, and I genuinely don't believe people care enough. I know this trade off, my tech savvy friends and acquaintances know this and yet we continue to make this trade off because frankly I don't think many value their personal data at all, and I think that's why we say these services are "free" because we're not trading anything we find particularly valuable.

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

#717

Post by sitkack »

josephg wrote: post #670
sitkack wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sycophant much? Incredible, Brilliant… Please.

You think my comment is sycophantic? If so, only on the surface. Another way to read what I wrote is that google has robbed the world of many smart people. Instead of contributing meaningfully, these people - trapped through money and inertia - spend their days doing useless work for an ad company. What a pity.

That is true of all of capitalism, that is true of 2 billion people on this wonderful planet that live on scraps. They didn't decide to be born in their condition any more than we ours.

One of the most detestable parts of Google are all the people with a smarmy self entitled sense of elitism. I had someone get off of a call, and they showed utter contempt for the customer, because in their words, "if they were smart enough they would work here, and every one wants to work here, therefor they are dumb and I shouldn't have to deal with stupid people" What a fucker.

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

#718

Post by ccppurcell »

janalsncm wrote: post #473
ccppurcell wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think comparing to banks is silly. Banks don't have competitive advantages like Google has. When banks fail it is not because they lost a competitive advantage (other than the competitive advantage of competent management). The catastrophe associated with a major bank collapse has to do with the specific function of banks in the financial system, not just: oh where are all their customers going to go?

Exactly. Even if Google search shut down tomorrow the economy would go on. It’s competitors are probably worse but it wouldn’t cause a run on the banks, which is a specific financial emergency.

I was going to write words to that effect also. I agree but feel I don't have a strong enough argument. I think if Google winked out of existence entirely tomorrow, the world would continue as normal except for the Googler job losses obviously.

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

#719

Post by robertlagrant »

jmatthews wrote: post #661
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…

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, they exert monopoly power and enjoy monopoly pricing.

What is monopoly pricing?

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

#720

Post by raydiak »

azinman2 wrote: post #714
raydiak wrote: post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What I don’t see on there is ChatGPT, perplexity, etc. people’s behaviors and needs are changing.

That's a fair point. If we saw a downward trend in google search usage in the last year or two, it might support your theory.

Whether AI and search are similar enough to call them competitors, at least right now, is highly debatable. I don't know about other people, but I for one have definitely not started asking chatbots questions instead of looking for informed, human-authored content.

EDIT: Note that I mean downward trend in total, not the percentages shown by statcounter. Statcounter does have a separate chatbot page though, if you're interested in that. Still doesn't answer your totally valid question of how many people are chatting instead of searching, though. Maybe Google or ChatGPT could tell us :)

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