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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]

#931

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

tsimionescu wrote: post #783
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…

Propaganda, which is what advertising is, is generally a way to trick people into doing things that they wouldn't otherwise have done, typically by making them believe things that are not true. In the case of advertising, those untrue things are usually "X is a much bigger problem than I thought" and "Y will solve problem X and make my life a lot easier". That you can convince people of these things doesn't make them…

I think if I ate a lot of eggs, and egg cooker could be very handy.

If Google can use targeting advertising to identify customers who eat a lot of eggs, and tell them about the existence of egg cookers, that's a win for everyone except the chickens.

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

#932

Post by creato »

worik wrote: post #918
creato wrote: post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the acquisitions you are talking about was 4 people that started a company and was "acquired" by google less than a year later. The idea that something like this should be blocked by competition regulators is frankly, totally insane . Aside from that, in 2004, Google was a ~30B company, 1/3rd the size of e.g. UPS. For comparison, Microsoft was ~10x bigger. The rewriting of history in this thread is just crazy.…

> 4 people that started a company and was "acquired" by google less than a year later. The idea that something like this should be blocked by competition regulators is frankly, totally insane. Why? FOMO? Or another reason?

I can't understand how this is even a question.

At the time, google was a $30B company, 10x smaller than Microsoft. Where 2 Technologies was a 1 year old company with 4 people, with 0 documented sales or market share that I can find. The only evidence I can find of the company actually doing anything is a picture of a whiteboard. I'm not dinging the company, just saying that it was very, very early in its life.

Suggesting that competition regulators should have blocked this is basically suggesting that the government has veto power over almost any hiring decision by any of the top ~1000 companies by market cap.

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

#933

Post by heylook »

rafaelmn wrote: post #901
belorn wrote: post #855

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't need to embed ads into the browser if the websitet that the user will load are already loaded with google ads. They also don't need to replace competitor ads with google ads if there is no meaningful market share by any competitor. Why should they siphon data to a third parties when they themselves want the data, and its a competitive advantage to keep that data for themselves. What we are seeing is chrome…

This is my point - Chrome isn't there to play dirty, it's there so competitors can't. But if it had to make money without Google all that BS would get bundled in the browser.

> Chrome isn't there to play dirty, it's there so competitors can't.

Like Manifest V3, which explicitly makes it harder to strip out Google's own ad products on websites you visit?

> without Google all that BS would get bundled in the browser.

Or maybe it wouldn't. There are already lots of other browsers that don't.

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

#934

Post by harrison_clarke »

coev wrote: post #835
harrison_clarke wrote: post #816

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i like an ad monopoly. it makes ads cost more

which makes everything you buy cost more, are you sure you still like it then?

there's externalities with ads. one is that the more ads i see, the harder i ignore them. i would expect consumer attention to work like roads, where charging more to use it is balanced out by the appeal of less traffic

it's not clear to me that an ad monopoly makes products cost more, even without getting into ads distracting the whole workforce

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

#935

Post by hirvi74 »

actinium226 wrote: post #745
yellow_postit wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was always under the impression that businesses are responsible for updating their own hours for Maps. Is that not the case?

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

#936

Post by thaumasiotes »

diffuse_l wrote: post #673
thaumasiotes wrote: post #666

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. People weren't paying for email before gmail. It was predated by hotmail, Yahoo mail, and innumerable free online email offerings by small players. Being free wasn't even a selling point for gmail; the selling point was th…

Nitpick - Maps and Chrome were also acquisition. Also Android, for that matter

I didn't know that about Maps and Chrome. I did know Android was an acquisition, and that YouTube was, but in both cases I think Google's put in enough work not to dismiss them as Google projects.

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

#937

Post by worik »

creato wrote: post #932
worik wrote: post #918

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 4 people that started a company and was "acquired" by google less than a year later. The idea that something like this should be blocked by competition regulators is frankly, totally insane. Why? FOMO? Or another reason?

I can't understand how this is even a question. At the time, google was a $30B company, 10x smaller than Microsoft. Where 2 Technologies was a 1 year old company with 4 people, with 0 documented sales or market share that I can find. The only evidence I can find of the company actually doing anything is a picture of a whiteboard. I'm not dinging the company, just saying that it was very, very early in its life. Sugge…

> Suggesting that competition regulators should have blocked this is basically suggesting that the government has veto power over almost any hiring decision by any of the top ~1000 companies by market cap.

Ok. I am not suggesting that. I do assert it is not "totally insane".

And it is not the "hiring decisions". It is the merger decisions.

So if you enter the top ~1000 company territory, you loose a few freedoms. Is that so bad?

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

#938

Post by scarface_74 »

asadotzler wrote: post #899
scarface_74 wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is 90% funded by Google ads.

Firefox existed before Mozilla's contracts with Google. Firefox was actually funded by AOL (to the tune of a couple million in sending off money when they shuttered Netscape) and Mitch Kapor (hundreds of thousands because he's a great guy who saw the potential) with some other donations from IBM, Oracle, and a few more big tech players.

And you think that would happen today? A couple of million wouldn’t go far.

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

#939

Post by mortos »

yegg wrote: post #820
mortos wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I appreciate you having an open ear and reaching out. As I said, it's hard to drum up examples but I do throw in the !g bang a fair bit. With the privacy requirements maybe you can't, but it could be interesting to see if you can find searches where people try a couple times then throw in the !g to try and find examples. I can't be the only one with this workflow.

I've just found another, "G Jones collab album" hardly has any results about his collaborations. In the first page of results there's only one relevant link and it's for Acid Disk 2 with EPROM. Spelling out "collaboration" doesn't make much difference. The results in Google are much more relevant to the key word here being "collab".

As an aside, I love duck.ai and use it frequently especially with work as I trust the privacy.

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

#940

Post by creato »

worik wrote: post #937
creato wrote: post #932

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't understand how this is even a question. At the time, google was a $30B company, 10x smaller than Microsoft. Where 2 Technologies was a 1 year old company with 4 people, with 0 documented sales or market share that I can find. The only evidence I can find of the company actually doing anything is a picture of a whiteboard. I'm not dinging the company, just saying that it was very, very early in its life. Sugge…

> Suggesting that competition regulators should have blocked this is basically suggesting that the government has veto power over almost any hiring decision by any of the top ~1000 companies by market cap. Ok. I am not suggesting that. I do assert it is not "totally insane". And it is not the "hiring decisions". It is the merger decisions. So if you enter the top ~1000 company territory, you loose a few freedoms. Is…

You're not denying freedom to just those ~1000 companies, you're also denying freedoms from everyone they might "acquire". And if your definition of "acquisition" is 4 dudes with a source control repo and no market/sales, then you've denied a lot of freedom to a lot of people, not just some big corporates we all love to hate.

I personally know of probably a dozen cases of a small team of <10 people getting hired into various companies that all would be scrutinized under this reasoning, and yeah, I think that's totally insane.

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