Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

storage.courtlistener.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

741–750 of 1001 posts

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

#741

Post by rstuart4133 »

erxam wrote: post #370
RainyDayTmrw wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm less worried about GMail. It's much easier to start a GMail competitor today (in relative, not absolute, terms) than a Chrome or Android competitor, because of network effects. For example, Fastmail is tiny (comparatively speaking), and will probably stay tiny forever, but their service works fine, and there's no major obstacles (comparatively speaking) to replacing GMail with Fastmail for any of us personally.

Is it really? I think any potential competitors face many of the same pitfalls as, say, Chrome competitors do. Maybe even worse. Google slams its weight around when web standards are being designed so as to unilaterally benefit Chrome, but (at least in theory) it's a fundamentally cooperative process where everyone at least gets some sort of input to direct where each standard goes. In GMail's case, they can just arb…

> Is it really?

Yes, of course it is. How many search competitors do you see out there? If you ignore resellers like ddg, these is bing, kangi, and country specific ones like Baidu. Email providers are a dime a dozen - Fastmail, Outlook, Protron, .. Google it, it's a long list. Hell. I run my own. I could not even contemplate building a web indexing engine.

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

#742

Post by ramijames »

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…

+ Waze.

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

#743

Post by dieortin »

jsheard wrote: post #161
ayewo wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are many other search engine options, why should Google be punished for hiring the best people over decades to make the best one? I’m guessing this whole court case wouldn’t have been a thing if Google wasn’t bribing Apple, to the tune of $20 billion a year [1], to remain the default search engine on iOS. 1: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/apple-may-add-ai-search-...

Or more recently beginning to throw money at websites to lock out their competitors, which is why Bing and co can't index Reddit anymore.

That’s not accurate, Bing can index Reddit just fine

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

#744

Post by standyro »

lolc wrote: post #523
FridayoLeary wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing mediocre about the search engine, gmail, maps, android, chrome etc.. etc. Do they all have room for for improvement? Probably. But they are simply incredibly, breathtakingly good products. Search, maybe has gotten worse in recent years, but it's still amazing. Maps and Satelleite view are astounding, especially when you consider that they are free. >How is this a desirable outcome? The list speaks fo…

> There is nothing mediocre about the search engine I agree. The search index is great, the presentation is shitty. As for maps: The most prominent features on it are ads. The rest is low contrast. For navigation the map is really bad. The satellite view is great. Yeah not mediocre: It's great tech enshittified.

The iPod has less space than a Nomad. Lame.

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

#745

Post by actinium226 »

yellow_postit wrote: post #616
actinium226 wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I'm so sick of maps. I type something in and there it is, can't they do any better than that? Sure they have directions to the place in multiple modalities, and photos of it, and reviews, but is that it? Is that really the best that's available? Google drive is likewise awful. I upload something to it and there it is. I come back 10 years later and it's still there. Why doesn't it do more? Why can't it make…

I know this is satire but Maps is increasingly worse. More ads. Less useful POIs. They actually stood still long enough for Apple Maps to catch up.

Yes, satire aside there's room for improvement in these services. Maps frequently has incorrect business hours.

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

#746

Post by Uptrenda »

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…

Yep, an over-sized, parasitic worm with control over most of the worlds communications, search, navigation, web browsing, and a size chunk of mobile software. That is definitely good for the Internet, security, privacy, and society at a whole. We can trust Google to always do what's right for the individual and to put profits second. Google makes money through donations and doesn't depend on the personal information of users it extracts to manipulate them into product purchases.

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

#747

Post by franga2000 »

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…

A lot of Google's products could be completely sustainable businesses on their own, but of course they couldn't offer them for free for personal use as they do now. Plenty of companies pay for Google Workspace, so that surely wouldn't die. Android could be spun out and returned to a more open development model, with phone manufacturers contributing money and developer time to the project instead of mostly freeloading from Gooogle. Google Cloud is supposedly profitable, (although I don't get why anyone would want to pay for that...).

Really the only things that I'd worry about are Google Search, Maps and Gmail, as they don't seem like they would work if they weren't free to use and I don't see a way to monetize them. It might be interesting to also put Google Maps under the same umbrella as Android, so it could be jointly owned by the phone manufacturers who ultimately benefit from its existence. Gmail could surely survive for quite a few years by optimizing their costs like crazy and burning Workspace profits.

The rest of the things you listed have existing competition, so it could probably survive and if not, alternatives exist.

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

#748

Post by bradley13 »

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…

So Google is "to big to fail" - that's what you are really saying.

The lesson that we should have learned from 2008 is that businesses should never be allowed to reach that kind of size. Google should have been prohibited from the M&A that created such a behemoth.

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

#750

Post by Create »

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…

  - OpenStreetMap, MapLibre
  - GMX, ProtonMail, Tutanota
  - Nextcloud, Seafile
  - Collabora, Etherpad, CryptPad
  - Discourse, Flarum
  - LimeSurvey Framaforms
  - Nextcloud, OpenStack, Hetzner, OVHcloud, Wix
  - Keycloak, Gluu, eduID, SAML2, OAUTH
  - Qwant, DuckDuckGo
  - Matomo, Plausible Analytics
  - Firefox, Brave
  - LineageOS, /e/ OS
  - OpenAuto, AGL (Automotive Grade Linux)
  - Open Health, Gadgetbridge
  - Fairphone, Various MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operators)
  - Community Fiber Networks, Local ISPs (various)
  - Skyscanner, Kiwi.com, Amadeus
  - LibreTranslate, Apertium, Mistral
  - CB, Swish, Klarna, SumUp, Revolut (UK)
  - EasyMile, Navya, Aurora, Apriv, BMW, Daimler, Renault, Volvo, VW, Oxbotica, Zenuity
Post reply on HN