Live data from Hacker News

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

storage.courtlistener.com

811–820 of 1001 posts

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

#811

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…

Let's take Android. Who has a revenue stream and needs Android? All the major phone vendors except Apple.

They could join up and finance Android development, and presumably Android Auto too.

Yes, there would be a disruption, a consortium likely isn't going to work as efficiently as google did, but it won't be Android's death.

Google Drive has competitors (Dropbox, OneDrive), so it to be possible to operate without sponsorship from other business units.

And so son...

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

#812

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…

The point is that splitting Google Ads business from eg. Google Maps business will make GAds company and GMaps company set up a mutually beneficial business arrangement — not much needs to change there! The problem with monopolies is that a company like Google, by dominating one space (be it Maps tech or Advertising marketshare), it can use that as a moat to start dominating other areas, even at a loss (which is what…

Yes, the point is that the ad company should become the middle man, like things used to be before everything consolidated into Google.

People have valuable data? Sell it to a middle man.

People want to display targeted ads? Sell it to a middle man.

People want to buy targeted ads? Buy it from a middle man.

Not everything consolidated into a single company.

The whole infrastructure and market already exists, the problem is that Google has a monopoly on certain data and it’s abusing its position.

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

#813

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…

Firstly you forgot YouTube. The vast majorities of these have alternatives that have existed before and currently, and of course none of these will "die". If they can’t be profitable without a monopoly, then consumers and businesses shouldn’t be overcharged for the services they depend on just to keep "Fitbit" afloat.

>In the best case, killing these will force consumers to move to Apple

Then Apple will be broken up.

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

#814

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.

If Chrome would need to be sold off, or Android, or Maps, those can only become even more pressured to be monetized for user data, I’m afraid

More pressure than the max? Do you think they are going to start using your password hashes to mine bitcoin?

Whatever Google stopped tracking they did because of regulation not out of user backlash or goodwill.

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

#815

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point here is that it should be done carefully and thoughtfully.

Nobody thinks otherwise so what’s the point of such a comment?

Have you been paying attention to the current US administration? Whatever your opinion of them I don’t think anyone could reasonably say they’re doing things carefully and thoughtfully.

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

#816

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.

i like an ad monopoly. it makes ads cost more

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

#817

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would also add that search has already moved elsewhere. Less and less people are using search engines to shop, ex:Amazon makes >$57B a year from search ads, but also look at Temu and Shein which are mostly glorified product search platforms. No one is searching for "funny videos" when you can just open Instagram and Tiktok. The only real unique thing that search engines can do is queries that are not directly comme…

Honestly, I haven't used either of ChatGPT or Perplexity seriously. They haven't performed particularly well when I tested them and dun-dun-dun in my uses Gemini has been growing on me. And another odd thing at the moment is that Google's search has somehow become better at giving me the results I'm looking for and DDG is giving a lot of annoying crap.

Any particular results/examples we can look into? Feel free to email me if preferred (see profile).

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

#818

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google services are not a gift. They are not actually free. Google is not a charity nor is it a non-profit. I want people in this discussion to stop arguing as if Google isn't making money on all these services. If the parents were slowly siphoning off enough of the teen's money through a convoluted set of channels such that the teenager indirectly paid for the truck anyway and the parents ended up effectively taking…

The point is that people are spoiled and still complaining. A replacement for Google is 15 services that are $9.99/mo or ad-supported with zero tolerance for ad blocking. People are blind to this, they think Google is a charity that got greedy. Meanwhile they haven't let a Google ad through their ad blocker for 15 years.

> A replacement for Google is 15 services that are $9.99/mo or ad-supported with zero tolerance for ad blocking.

Youtube Premium is $13.99/mo or you get ads with also zero tolerance for ad blocking. We've already been there for a while wherever Google is serious about it.

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

#819

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google themselves are trying to figure this out, with the first (top placement) of search results showing their Gemini AI Response, at least for me. I read this as an attempt to keep users on Google instead of asking Chat GPT or other some other AI. What's your take on that?

Every AI chatbot to date suffers from the "Film expert" effect. That is when a script writer presents data from an "expert" in a movie or show to the audience in response to some information need on the part of the other characters. Writers are really good at making it sound credible. When an audience member experiences this interchange, generally they have one of two experiences. Either they know nothing about the s…

What happens when search engines start displaying AI generated/human seasoned content? Everything written online is being seasoned by ChatGPT et al. and human behavior is being conditioned to think by its highly convincing outputs.

Why should I trust an ad supported search engine with the bastardized search experience displaying top rank results by highest paying advertiser and now mixing in AI slop pretending to be human written for the foreseeable future. The future looks bleak..

I rather create an AI agent to do my Google search for me and cut out the ad links results bias and further synthesize the results for me in human readable and interrogabal format.

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

#820
post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But they are simply incredibly, breathtakingly good products. I literally laughed out loud at this. There is nothing further from the truth when you look at what else is out there. I feel like a lot of these comments are shilling for Google they're so biased. Search is not amazing. Search is littered with garbage. Try out Kagi or even DDG for a day, but let's not pretend search hasn't been a dumpster fire for years…

DDG is definitely not better IME, and also relies heavily on Bing. I still use it as my default, it's good enough, but I mostly default to it to avoid the Google captcha hell. Here's a prior comment of mine explaining one poor search scenario: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43348712

Thank you for providing an example we can look into. If you have other thoughts, please also feel free to share them with me, and I'll take them back to the team. My email is in my profile if that method is preferred. Despite what some people think, we do a lot of the search results ourselves and we're constantly working to improve our search experience. We post quarterly updates to https://duckduckgo.com/updates
Post reply on HN