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European Parliament votes in favour of breaking up Google

bbc.co.uk

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Re: European Parliament votes in favour of breaking up Google

#81

Post by avz »

bwilliams18 wrote: post #64
sfrank2147 wrote: post #58

A monopoly should be defined by barriers to entry, not just market share. There's nothing preventing other large companies from entering the search space, and in fact many of them have (yahoo, microsoft, etc). There are true monopolistic firms like Comcast or Time Warner, where there are serious logistic/economic barriers preventing other firms from entering the market. This doesn't seem like one of them to me.

In the US "natural" monopolies are allowed to exist, the best example of this being Microsoft with their Windows operating system. What isn't permissible, is using that monopoly to advantage your other products, and possibly more importantly disadvantage products of your competitors.

Natural monopolies are things like infrastructure where the entry cost of providing a fully separate parallel network (of railway lines, phone lines, broadband etc) is prohibitively high or where provision of such parallel network is undesirable for other reasons (e.g. environment).

Could you explain how an operating system is a natural monopoly?

Development of a new OS isn't cheap, but isn't prohibitively expensive either. It also isn't undesirable AFAICT.

Re: European Parliament votes in favour of breaking up Google

#82

Post by vdaniuk »

DannyBee wrote: post #67
vdaniuk wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conflict of interest is very real and full disclosure should be a norm in the community powered media with so much influence on tech industry.

What? Everyone on HN works for someone. I am not my company. Google has plenty of views i don't agree with, and I have plenty of views they don't agree with. If you believe comments on HN (or almost anywhere else) should have conflict of interest disclosures, you may as well shut it all down. Everything here is opinions of people, presented as opinions of people.

I would certainly be not against some external entity or random event shutting HN down. That would lead to genesis of new communities and contribute to spreading the influence to several or dozens of separate entities.

Ironically, voice of the hackers, the independents, the non-affiliated is weak here. The voice of the tech establishment, the VCs, the startups, the megacorps is heard loud and clear.

Do you not see how HN is crucial for YC continued success as the VC company? YC doesn't have to censor anything, the increased presence of YC alumni defines the narrative.

I do not believe that it is healthy for most important tech community on the open internet to be so strongly influenced by one VC company.

Disclosures would help a little bit.

edit I don't mind the downvotes :)

Re: European Parliament votes in favour of breaking up Google

#83

Post by pacala »

dmix wrote: post #69
pacala wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are serious logistic/economic barriers to enter the search space. Building a competitive search engine is very expensive. Ask the Bing people. Yahoo Search is actually powered by Bing since 2009 according to Wikipedia. Their own search engine was not competitive enough. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search

Just because it is expensive and technically hard doesn't mean Google is preventing them in any way. What would be worrisome is if they abuse their market position. Is there strong evidence they do this in search? It'd be more concerning if they did to promote their other products.

I am refuting the statement "A monopoly should be defined by barriers to entry, not just market share." made by sfrank2147, specifically interpreted as "barriers of entry for search market", which are surprisingly high. Based on his definition, Google is deep into monopoly territory.

What a monopoly really is and whether Google qualifies is a separate question, and I'm recusing myself from commenting on this point.

Re: European Parliament votes in favour of breaking up Google

#84

Post by pluma »

snird wrote: post #62
cbeach wrote: post #30

To copy from the previous discussion: I was blocked indefinitely from Adsense by Google's faulty algorithms (without explanation and with appeals rejected without explanation). I lost the revenue I'd earnt that month, and soon realised Google holds a monopoly in this space, and no one else offered a comparable service. I'm all for Google's stronghold to be broken. reply

Breaking up a company is a violent action. No one forced you to use their service, and they do not use violence or any kind of illegal actions to kill those who try to compete with them. Google simply are the biggest due to being the best. It's that simple. If you'll break up everyone who is too good, then what is the society we are walking toward in this situation?

Being best at their own economical interests and being best at their customers' interests are not the same thing.

Re: European Parliament votes in favour of breaking up Google

#85

Post by c3o »

I work for the Pirate Party MEP in the Parliament. My understanding is that this is mostly about German (and to a lesser degree Spanish) publishers putting pressure on Google for their various interests, including that they want to be paid when Google uses snippets of their content in Google News: https://juliareda.eu/2014/11/breaking-up-google-or-just-bank...

Re: European Parliament votes in favour of breaking up Google

#86

Post by tptacek »

Karunamon wrote: post #75
DannyBee wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Everyone on HN works for someone. I am not my company. Google has plenty of views i don't agree with, and I have plenty of views they don't agree with. If you believe comments on HN (or almost anywhere else) should have conflict of interest disclosures, you may as well shut it all down. Everything here is opinions of people, presented as opinions of people.

It's really not that hard to understand that someone making comments about a company they are paid by should call that out.

It is extremely hard to take this moralizing seriously when the only reason he's taking this flak is that he's actually signed his name to his comments and been forthcoming on the site about where he works. That's not something you can say about every opinionated HN commenter.

Re: European Parliament votes in favour of breaking up Google

#87

Post by cabalamat »

dmix wrote: post #69
pacala wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are serious logistic/economic barriers to enter the search space. Building a competitive search engine is very expensive. Ask the Bing people. Yahoo Search is actually powered by Bing since 2009 according to Wikipedia. Their own search engine was not competitive enough. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search

Just because it is expensive and technically hard doesn't mean Google is preventing them in any way. What would be worrisome is if they abuse their market position. Is there strong evidence they do this in search? It'd be more concerning if they did to promote their other products.

> Just because it is expensive and technically hard doesn't mean Google is preventing them in any way.

I agree. It means it's a natural monopoly. These should be regulated, because otherwise there is a tendency for them to abuse their power.

Re: European Parliament votes in favour of breaking up Google

#88

Post by DannyBee »

dmethvin wrote: post #66
DannyBee wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by "consulted", you mean that Ben has been paid to come up with papers exactly like this for various anti-google lobbies, many many times over the past 10 years, then yes, he has "consulted". Ben has literally no legal training in antitrust law that i'm aware of, so his opining on it is somewhat interesting. (I edited this comment because Ben does have a JD from Harvard law that I forgot about, so he does have leg…

> Ben does have a JD from Harvard law that I forgot about A major omission when attacking someone's legal qualifications. > When he's not writing antitrust papers, he's busy writing scare papers about click fraud, or online ad deals Yes, and they're scary because they are true. The insidious thing about click fraud is that consumers are the mules who do the work but generally are only indirectly harmed. Advertisers a…

FWIW: Ben is not fully disclosed by a longshot

See, e.g., http://mumbrella.com.au/google-adwords-benjamin-edelman-3700...

Re: European Parliament votes in favour of breaking up Google

#89

Post by tptacek »

vdaniuk wrote: post #82
DannyBee wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Everyone on HN works for someone. I am not my company. Google has plenty of views i don't agree with, and I have plenty of views they don't agree with. If you believe comments on HN (or almost anywhere else) should have conflict of interest disclosures, you may as well shut it all down. Everything here is opinions of people, presented as opinions of people.

I would certainly be not against some external entity or random event shutting HN down. That would lead to genesis of new communities and contribute to spreading the influence to several or dozens of separate entities. Ironically, voice of the hackers, the independents, the non-affiliated is weak here. The voice of the tech establishment, the VCs, the startups, the megacorps is heard loud and clear. Do you not see ho…

Charming. The "external entity or random event" part of that comment is what really sold it. You're all class.

Re: European Parliament votes in favour of breaking up Google

#90

Post by digi_owl »

pacala wrote: post #65
sfrank2147 wrote: post #58

A monopoly should be defined by barriers to entry, not just market share. There's nothing preventing other large companies from entering the search space, and in fact many of them have (yahoo, microsoft, etc). There are true monopolistic firms like Comcast or Time Warner, where there are serious logistic/economic barriers preventing other firms from entering the market. This doesn't seem like one of them to me.

There are serious logistic/economic barriers to enter the search space. Building a competitive search engine is very expensive. Ask the Bing people. Yahoo Search is actually powered by Bing since 2009 according to Wikipedia. Their own search engine was not competitive enough. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search

Duckduckgo may claim otherwise.
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