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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]

#921

Post by BobaFloutist »

luckylion wrote: post #765
BobaFloutist wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool, you wanna solve micropayments now or wait until we've got cold fusion rolling first...?

You wouldn't have to make them micropayments, you can pay out once some threshold is reached. Of course, it would incentivize the sites to make you want to crawl them more, but that might be a good thing. There would be pressure on you to focus on quality over quantity, which would probably be a good thing for your product.

>You wouldn't have to make them micropayments, you can pay out once some threshold is reached.

Believe it or not, this is a potential solution for micropayments that has been explored.

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

#922

Post by braza »

If there’s one place in the internet that people can be sincere, probably it will be here in a YC Combinator forum.

Said that… There’s a lot of interesting perspectives:

From YC: it’s a logical and quite unique business decision. YC can capitalize on a very weak moment of a gigantic moment from government support and general public sentiment.

At the end we’re in an all knives out and YC is taking the opportunistic route because it has economic interest in the Google break down.

From Google: I think we can think that the era of “cool monopoly” is officially over and Microsoft was right all the time. Be boring, be ruthless, be the only one. No amount of public good press for more than 1 decade will save your nice monopoly to fall from grace.

From the USA: will be interesting to see if the administration will celebrate it, since Google whether we like it or not, is one instrument I of soft power and influence of the American interest around the work. How the tradeoff of limit its reach due new foreign players or how pulverised market will help their policies its something to wait and see.

Form a personal perspective: as a consumer, and future candidate for a YC founding company I think have Google broke down to have 50 new SaaS selling their services for 9,99 per month, won’t be a net benefit.

Being completely honest: I prefer that the Google shareholders thar contains big billionaires and pension funds tied with retirements plus public regulatory and scrutiny it’s a way better alternative than 60 new SaaS tied with all private interests of Paul Graham VC family office or David Sachs/Chammath offices.

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

#923

Post by m101 »

Can someone please describe what the exact monopoly position is that Google have and how they defend it?

I take it it's some sort of ads marketplace where they charge a fee to connect buyers with sellers?

But why are things like chrome and payments to companies for default search engine placement considered monopolistic?

It is increasingly sounding like a witch-hunt given the list of accusations I've heard.

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

#924

Post by tcmart14 »

rs186 wrote: post #487
cyberax wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here's a small number of things that will die when Google dies. I dispute that. Google Docs/Drive/Mail are supported by enterprise subscriptions. Android Auto is also a commercial product that can live off license fees. Fi/Fiber/Pay/Waymo are also not free services, and can survive on their own. Free GMail/Forms/Groups/Translate can probably survive off ad revenue that they can get from third parties. They are pret…

To be fair, nobody outside the company knows if Fi/Fiber/Pay are viable businesses, or they are on life support but still around because of the unlimited cash Google has. One can guess they are profitable because they have been around for quite a while and still kicking. But nothing says they won't be the next thing in Google graveyard -- plenty of services seemed to be doing ok before a major reorg sent them to deat…

My guess is that even if Google Pay isn't profitable, its probably a 'have to have' feature to ensure an Android equivalent to Apple Pay.

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

#925

Post by tcmart14 »

bathtub365 wrote: post #885
selfhoster wrote: post #880

Here is anticompetitive, I use Firefox on Ubuntu Linux and went to Apple maps site, here is what it says: https://maps.apple.com/unsupported "Your current browser isn't supported" I thought OK, how many people use Firefox on Linux. So I went to their site in this browser, Chrome (most popular browser in the world on the most popular Linux Desktop OS, Ubuntu)...same error. Every site I visit in Chrome (and Edge when I…

Does Apple have a monopoly on web maps?

I'll be honest, until this, I didn't even know you could go to maps in your web browser and use it there. I figured it was really for iPhones and iPads.

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

#926

Post by hluska »

selfhoster wrote: post #867
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.

> You essentially outline why it should be broken up. I disagree: 1) My wife and I have a FREE Gmail account we use for home and other combined interests. 2) We watch all our streaming (movies, docs, etc.) and TV (Tablo TV DVR for free OTA) using FREE Chrome on Linux laptops in our LR, MBR and one for ambiance that runs all day between the kitchen and LR visible across both rooms showing relaxing aquarium and bird vi…

And again, under an economic definition of monopoly, you have explained why Google should be broken up.

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

#927

Post by jodrellblank »

dannycastonguay wrote: post #550
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…

Why do antitrust proposals always suggest breaking up Google by function—Search, Ads, Gmail, etc.? What if, instead, we cloned the whole company? Start by splitting Google into two identical, full-stack companies, each with all the core products. A year later, split them again. Over time, you get 4 or 8 Googles competing across the board. Employees could be assigned algorithmically to avoid chaos. This feels more lik…

Because that's conceptually simple. With your idea, you cannot clone the domain 'gmail.com' so one of these must happen:

- one company gets control of gmail.com and the other has to register a new domain nobody has ever heard of.

- the companies share control of gmail.com and users see no changes.

Anyone who must upend their digital life (email, contacts, Android login, YouTube login, analytics, 'login with Google' around the web, payment data, etc. etc.) has a problem, the company which gets the domain has a massive advantage. If they share it how are they competing with each other, which one can change the Gmail experience or pricing scheme?

Similar with GCP, which split gets to run a big customer's services? The customer isn't going to pay twice for them to be cloned. Does the customer have to update all their logins and API keys and contracts and payment details?

Who owns all the Exabytes of pre-existing YouTube data and what happens to all the ISP peering and CDN server hosting contracts which run it?

What happens to the legal contracts, tax deals to have offices in certain countries, employee visas, paying the datacenter maintenance bills or office cleaning bills? If the employees sit next to each other and now one works for Google_A and keeps everything the same, the other works for Google_1 and has to move to a new office which hasn't been built yet... same problem as Gmail but internally, one company gets a big advantage the other gets a big disruption.

What happens when you algorithmically split employees 'to avoid chaos' but one company ends up with no senior people who have access to a certain system?

Since we didn't ask for our accounts to be copied to Google1, do hundreds of millions of us have send Google1 a 'delete my account' request to get rid of them? If I delete my account from GoogleA do they have access and legal right to delete the copy from Google1 as well? If they don't, does my deleted login to GoogleA still work backed by the copy of my account on Google1, because there is only one GMail.com domain and it has to keep working?

It's conceptually easier to say maps.google.com is under control of a new company, not subsidised by Google Advertising income, and it needs to compete with other map providers, even if technically it's hard to extract the accounts and data from Google's server infrastructure.

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

#928

Post by immibis »

luckylion wrote: post #765
BobaFloutist wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool, you wanna solve micropayments now or wait until we've got cold fusion rolling first...?

You wouldn't have to make them micropayments, you can pay out once some threshold is reached. Of course, it would incentivize the sites to make you want to crawl them more, but that might be a good thing. There would be pressure on you to focus on quality over quantity, which would probably be a good thing for your product.

I could even pay a fixed amount to my ISP every month for a fixed amount of data transfer.

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

#929

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

lolinder wrote: post #659
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…

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…

>getting its targets to spend money they would not have otherwise spent

That's not necessarily a bad thing, if they're getting value from those purchases.

Plus, maybe they just would've learned about the product through some other channel, e.g. by watching TV. Which has more positive externalities: Google, or TV?

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

#930

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

BrenBarn wrote: post #701
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…

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 a…

>it's not possible to say they have actually given informed consent to it.

I assume you're a fan of GDPR banners?

>my viewpoint is actually in accord with a majority of people's values

It's not hard to install some privacy and adblocking extensions in your browser.

I think you're still doing that thing where you assume others share your values.

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