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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]

#961

Post by immibis »

threeseed wrote: post #356
immibis wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't get to tell site owners what to do. The actual facts on the ground are that they're trying to block your bot. It would be nice if they didn't block your bot, but the other, completely unnatural and advertising-driven, monopoly of hosting providers with insane per-request costs makes that impossible until they switch away.

> The actual facts on the ground are that they're trying to block your bot Based on what evidence.

based on them matching the user-agent and sending you a block page? I don't know what else to tell you. It's in plain sight.

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

#962

Post by thomastjeffery »

surajrmal wrote: post #951
thomastjeffery wrote: post #913

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried Firefox recently? It's been my favorite for a decade or so. Now that chrome has crippled its extension API, it's objectively better. I'm not convinced that any of these would change for the worse. Maybe we will start using more content and services that aren't made by Google. That sounds good to me. Of course, the overall situation will be improved the most by breaking up Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon,…

Firefox won't be around much longer if Google isn't able to pay to be its default search engine.

Neither will chrome or edge?

Maybe an uncertain future isn't certainly bleak.

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

#963

Post by DrillShopper »

scarface_74 wrote: post #358
DrillShopper wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not comparable. Netflix did not have a monopoly on "shipping DVDs". Plenty of retailers, online or brick-and-mortar, did that at the same time Netflix did, and video rental places were still going. Some of which would deliver movies (the local Marcos near me had a deal with a local Family Video where if you bought a large pizza they would bring you both the pizza and a movie of your choice from Family Video, a…

And there are other traditional search engines - including one run by another 1 trillion dollar+ market cap company. That’s not to mention ChatGPT and other LLMs have built in search. Should Google not evolve with the times?

It's not that they have a search engine. It's what they're doing to advertisers, websight owners, and consumers with it that is the problem. It's them abusing their market position to the detriment of customers and competitors.

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

#964

Post by actinium226 »

hirvi74 wrote: post #935
actinium226 wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There was a business near me that closed. I reported it on Maps, and they still listed it as open for a month. Another time I arrived at a business just shortly before their closing time and found that it was closed-closed, as in out of business.

In the first case they could have paid someone $20 on fiverrr or whatever to go and physically look to see if it's closed and update it more quickly. Not sure about the second case, but either way if a maps service put in the effort to have more accurate hours they could do so, and that would be a reasonable thing for users to pay for.

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

#965

Post by int_19h »

1123581321 wrote: post #655
int_19h wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smaller anything isn't competitive with larger anything, because the larger guys can always price-dump and bundle their way to full market dominance. That's why we need anti-trust in the first place.

Customers frequently prefer cheap bundles. The right time for an antitrust decision is often when the company is large and stops behaving competitively.

Customers acting individually have a short-term perspective which leads them to prefer low prices in general, which is why strategies like price dumping work - yet they are illegal for a reason.

The problem is that once the monopolist is entrenched and all competition killed off, those cheap bundles stop being cheap. Hence why you need someone to take the long term view and nip these kinds of things in the bud. A democratically elected government is the best avenue for that.

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

#966

Post by Workaccount2 »

kergonath wrote: post #829
Workaccount2 wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everytime someone blocks an ad, someone else has to watch it. It's crazy to me how entitled people are and how completely blind they are to how the ad supported model works. Then these same people complain that youtube has no competitors. Yeah, no shit, who in their right mind would invest in a customer base like youtubes? Oh, that's right, Vid.me, and they went bankrupt in a year. Wonder why...

> Everytime someone blocks an ad, someone else has to watch it. No, that’s not how it works, at all. I give money to some people on Patreon, I pay for Nebula, but I am never going to give Google a single euro willingly. I’ll leave YouTube in a heartbeat the moment the people I follow (whom I am already giving money otherwise) make their content available elsewhere.

Just so you are aware, less than 1% of viewers actually give money directly to creators.

It's good you do it, thank you, and people run at the opportunity to show everyone they are doing the right thing (creating an illusion of popularity), but I can tell you from having seen the stats - essentially nobody does it.

Nebula, which you mention, has about 700k subscribers. Yet they host YouTube videos for creators who collectively have over 120M subscribers...that is a 0.6% conversion rate.

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

#967

Post by derivagral »

surajrmal wrote: post #950
hluska wrote: post #926

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For offering best in class services people want to use? It feels like the people who want a Google breakup simply have something to gain from it. It's not obvious the average consumer will benefit.

The average consumer now sees mostly ads above the fold. Also, lots of internal stuff like this coming out. Not sure how this is meant to benefit the consumer aside from "they have to love what we deign to give them."

https://searchengineland.com/google-ads-search-and-chrome-bo...

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

#968

Post by MyOutfitIsVague »

surajrmal wrote: post #953
MyOutfitIsVague wrote: post #943

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making moves so that competitors can't play at all is so far beyond playing dirty. It's anti-competitive and illegal.

They can play, but they are competing with a raised bar which benefits consumers. It's not illegal to make things better.

They aren't competing with a raised bar, they are competing with a bar that can only be passed if you already have a massive presence in an unrelated area. You can not compete with an entrenched existing player when they are giving their things away for "free", subsidized by a massive ad tax. This entrenchment is tailor-made to make competition infeasible.

This is illegal for a reason. It does NOT benefit consumers to make it impossible for anybody to compete with you. This is anti-competitive, not competition.

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

#969

Post by throw10920 »

surajrmal wrote: post #952
ReptileMan wrote: post #854

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or for someone finally to solve the micropayment problem. I don't mind paying the 53 cents it costs google to provide me their services per month with 30 or 40% margin. But I refuse to subscribe for close to zero value services for 10 or 20 dollar a month.

Do you want the web to work like clash of titans?

What? This is nonsensical. Why did you post this?

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

#970

Post by ajross »

throwaway173738 wrote: post #227
ajross wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bell Labs being defunded by a deregulated/competetive AT&T was precisely what led to the attempted commercialization of Unix and the near death of what would eventually be called "open source", though. In history as it stands, we had GNU and Linux and all that we lost was a few years. But it's easy to imagine a world where that didn't happen and BSD was just killed dead. So no OS X, no iOS, no Android, no ChromeOS, a…

You’re making the assumption that only corporations can fund or perform basic research. But the transistor was actually the culmination of decades of research by materials scientists and physicists in university and other labs into semiconductors before anyone realized there were applications.

No, I'm making the observation that corporations do fund or perform basic research; and the straightforward inference that removing the incentive for them to do so is bad.

Is that wrong? Possibly. But if you're hanging your argument on the idea that the transistor would have been invented without Bell Labs (or BSD without AT&T's open research, which was my example), I think it's on you to provide the evidence.

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