If I could give a six word response for the technical side: "Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat and team".
To paraphrase some Cal/UC Berkeley professor that I cannot remember, he said that the problem with scaling is that when you go up a magnitude or more, you may need a qualitatively different solution for the same problem. Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and their team have time and time again managed to design and build state-of-the-art, qualitatively different solutions (MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner). And now their team's attention is on AI...
> the problem with scaling is that when you go up a magnitude or more, you may need a qualitatively different solution for the same problem.
Never been to Berkeley but I've heard something similar enough times that I've adopted it as one of my own aphorisms.
When the order of magnitude changes, so do the good solutions.
(This is also my thesis for why we keep repeating software history. We stop using a solution because it doesn't work with the current ratio of speed or costs for network, memory, storage and processing. Then someone introduces 10GB networking or SSD disks and the old solution works for 5 more years until someone introduces a new CPU that scales better horizontally or vertically and we start over.)
I think it's important to mention Sanjay Ghemawat is very likely just as important to google as Jeff Dean, just Jeff has been made the public figure for a variety of reasons.
I disagree with passion. The vision of Larry Page and Sergey Brin is responsible for Google's success. Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat executed Page and Brin's ideas, but they were not the key decision makers. Did Dean and Ghemawat decide to buy and then build Android? Did they decide to build Google Maps? Did they decide to buy YouTube?. The answer is no. Page and Brin would have hired other smart people if Dean and Ghemawat weren't available or had they left Google.
I agree, as I was not talking about the overall success of Google, just the success of Google's secret sauce (their backend infrastructure) that enabled it to sell ads and deliver search results with a high level of quality. If you read some of the books about early Google, they (Jeff, Sanjay et al) were really, really struggling to do stuff like index the web without the crawler collapsing mid-way. That's how MapReduce became to be developed.
Yes, Danger/HipTop, YouTube, and Keyhole are arguably the three smartest acquisitions that Google made.
Also, the Google SRE book makes the point that they couldn't have achieved their scale w/out approaching ops from an engineering perspective. Linearly hiring ops people as services scale would have been too expensive.
That doesn't provide a perfect answer. Sanjay and Jeff (and a lot of other senior Googlers) were all at DEC. Why didn't DEC succeed to the degree that Google has?
And Softdisk had John Carmack and basically the entire original Id software team on their payroll. And Fairchild Semiconductors had the entire executive founding team of Intel, and Xeroc PARC had not only several key people but essentially the entire IP portfolio of modern computers, including some working prototypes...
"Success" is the result of a very large equation with many variables, and having (some of) the right people is only a few of them.
Because they didn’t have Craig Silverstein and many many others. Lets not pretend Jeff and Sanjay, as much talented and prolific as they are, are singlehandedly responsible for Googles success.
I don't know if Sanjay and Jeff worked directly on DEC's AltaVista search engine but that project was treated as a low-priority "demo showcase" for DEC Alpha servers instead of being seen by DEC management as a new multibillion dollar internet business to pursue. DEC could have had a "Bezos-hey-we-can-sell-computing-as-AWS" moment with AltaVista but they missed it and let Google surpass it.
They didn't - AltaVista was done by Louis Monier and Mike Burrows, both of whom also worked at Google and both of whom also made significant contributions to the codebase.
I do agree that management was the critical ingredient - my former VP at Google (employee #48) credited Urs Hoelzle (employee #9, and Google's first VP) as a key ingredient to Google's success. Ironically, though, Google hired Western Digital's management as well - SVP Alan Eustace came from there - and yet the team under Eustace at Google was much more effective than the team under Eustace at Western Digital.
I suspect that management has sort of a "gatekeeping" effect - if all of your management is good, the whole department does great things, but if a single link in the org chart is a dufus, the whole organization will fail. When I joined Google in 2009, my whole management chain (6 levels, up to Eric Schmidt) were all engineers, and it showed.
> I suspect that management has sort of a "gatekeeping" effect - if all of your management is good, the whole department does great things, but if a single link in the org chart is a dufus, the whole organization will fail. When I joined Google in 2009, my whole management chain (6 levels, up to Eric Schmidt) were all engineers, and it showed.
So true. As an engineer, the most direct impact on my productivity has been the team and manager. But the manager is a SPOF: if he/she is bad, then my productivity suffers.
I have yet to work in an organization where there was a good chain as you mention though. Maybe that's what sets Google apart. Smaller companies tend to have shorter management chains and I prefer them for that reason.
Mike Burrows was a coauthor on the algorithm behind bz2 [1]. It's the most mindblowing algorithm I ever encountered and so I have utmost respect for that couple of guys :)
> To paraphrase some Cal/UC Berkeley professor that I cannot remember, he said that the problem with scaling is that when you go up a magnitude or more, you may need a qualitatively different solution for the same problem.
You might actually be thinking of Jeff's Stanford talk from a few years ago (2011). Slide 21 of:
Ensure your design works if scale changes by 10X or 20X
but the right solution for X often not optimal for 100X
There's no attribution, but that is good advice I've kept with me throughout my career. Props to the original author (perhaps apocryphal at this point?).
"And now their team's attention is on AI..." is quite the hype thing to say. Just because you can build a bigger bridge doesn't mean you're a good car designer.
> Googles AI blows every other companies out of the water.
That is certainly true, but that could also mean that Google will be the first company to hit certain unsurpassable road-blocks. Just look at Google Translate, which IMO hasn’t qualitatively improved for the better for at least 2 years now, even though most probably the data on which it is based is at least an order of magnitude “bigger”. The same might also happen to autonomous driving.
I think that Google's dominance has almost nothing to do with technology and almost everything to do with customer lock-in.
For me, duckduckgo.com is as good as Google but I still use Google because it's the default search engine for Chrome's address bar - And that's where I do all my searches from these days. If Duckduckgo made their own browser which was of the same quality as Chrome then I would definitely consider using it and switching to Duckduckgo for search as well.
For me it's because with Google I don't need to go to page 5 to find interesting results.
I've tried to use DuckDuckGo several times, each time I've quickly found myself trawling page after page of results, reverted to Google and found the stuff I was after on page one.
That used to be true for me but I've used ddg as my main search engine for a couple of years and I find myself using "!g" less and less. Actually you made me realize that I haven't used it in a while, probably weeks (and I've had a very busy couple of weeks with tons of opportunities to look for stuff online).
It's not because duckduckgo finds everything I want, it's because I've noticed that when ddg doesn't find something usually google doesn't either. Also whenever I end up on google now (generally because I forgot to change the search engine after a fresh install) I find the website cluttered which is a shame because it used to be in Google's DNA to keep the search page simple.
What the hell is all of that stuff? If I wanted to browse the stock exchange or google maps I would. "People also search for" well good for them I guess.
Could also just use Tor Browser - it's Firefox modified for privacy, all running through Tor, with search defaulted to DDG. Actually works pretty well as a drop-in system, and you can't beat the privacy.
Ironically, my biggest complaint is the search - a number of queries that I'd expect to "just work" on Google, DDG really struggles with. There actually is a noticeable difference in quality between them.
There is a huge benefit to being the default, if that wasn't the case google wouldn't pay all the companies they do billions of dollars a year to be the default.
I used to wonder why search engine companies care about which engine is the default in a browser because it only takes a few seconds to change it but now I know why. People are lazy :/
It gets worse. I remember I had a friend that had a piece of spyware that set his default search engine to something else. At first glance I didn't realize it was a piece of spyware because all his searches looked like normal searches, albeit on a generic looking page.
I wondered why he didn't switch to Google or something else at the time and it used to annoy me whenever I was using his desktop for anything. Then I took a look into it and found out that he actually couldn't set his default search engine through his browser anymore, in Firefox or Chrome actually.
It was a browser extension. For that entire time there was a piece of spyware on his computer probably watching all of his browsing that he probably could have figured out about himself, if he wasn't too lazy to just switch his search engine. Once I looked into it, it took all of five minutes (if that) to figure out what was happening and remove the problem, and he's not exactly tech illiterate. He literally just didn't care or want to take the time to switch his search engine.
That's a data point. Just one, anecdotal data point, but take it how you will.
If that happened Google would probably ban Android phones that use Google apps from using third party browsers (like they already did for third party search providers). Then your tabs wouldn't be able to sync with mobile.
On the market end - Google got huge because they inserted themselves as a critical part of peoples' usage of a resource that got even huger.
As late as 2013, my coworkers and I would mock the Wall Street analysts who covered Google because (you could tell from their questions on the earnings call) they assumed that the Internet was no longer growing. So all the focus was on CPCs and Google's ability to monetize, when the number of queries had quadrupled over the previous 4 years. You can hold monetization absolutely constant and if usage is growing 400%, your revenue will grow 400%.
Just two days ago Google's earnings came out and people were wondering how they still managed 20% YoY growth. Some of that undoubtedly came from Cloud & other emerging businesses, but I'd bet that the Internet is still growing.
CoinBase is trying to pull off the same thing with crypto - they're a critical onramp for people wanting to get started with a new, fast-growing technology. Regulators & the press always fight the last war, though - they're focused on Google and Facebook rather than on the next wave of giant monopolies.
People always underestimate the potential size of consumer markets, because their perspective is human-centric. Before they & their friends adopt a new technology, it's a toy or a fad and will never catch on. Afterwards, everybody they know already uses it, so of course it's old news. Few people realize that "everybody they know" is less than one millionth of all of humanity, or that if you're in a developed country you will get innovations 10-20 years before the rest of the world does, or that if you're in a tech metropolis in a developed country you will get them ~5 years before the rest of the country. "The future is here, it's just unevenly distributed."
Coinbase is not the next Google. They provide no actual value, beyond making it easy to join a bubble. Google's value proposition in the early days was enormous, very obvious, and continues to this day.
If you have already accepted cryptocurrencies as the wave of the future, Coinbase provides enormous value. You can't do much in the crypto world without owning some cryptocurrencies, and they are the largest, easiest to use, and generally most trusted way to exchange $USD for Bitcoin or Ethereum.
Most Americans have not accepted that premise (and I don't exclude myself...I'm on the fence as for whether crypto is a bubble or the future of world commerce). However, I'll point out that in 1996 when Larry/Sergey/Scott Hassan were first working on Google, it was far from obvious that the web would be a big thing. Streaming audio (via RealAudio/WMP/etc.) was a year in the future; most Americans had 14.4K connections that made it impossible (my first MP3 took 2 hours to download a 5 minute song). E-commerce was clunky and sluggish, and the big "order everything online!" push was 2 years in the future.
There were only 36M users online, roughly the same order as the number of Bitcoin users in the U.S. (Bitcoin has more international adoption though). Interactive websites were almost unknown, because the technology really didn't support it. Most people used the web for porn, or to lookup song lyrics and share their favorite bands, or to share scientific information.
It wasn't until the early 2000s, after the dot-com bubble burst and yet people continued using the Internet (and found a lot of new uses for it, like dating/socializing/paying for things/watching videos/sharing photos/finding lodging), that it became apparent that it was really here to stay. Not coincidentally, those were Google's biggest growth years.
In 1996 the internet was in every imp University campus worldwide and every CS dept had multiple labs working on a lot of the what most people take for granted today that allowed the internet to scale.
No such thing is happening with bitcoin. You can't scale something to internet levels if its banned in half the worlds research labs.
"Every imp[ortant] University campus" is a tiny subset of "all people". The total population of 4-year college students in the U.S. is 13.4M, roughly the same as the number of Coinbase users. In 2005 Facebook was in every important university campus worldwide, and yet people (including myself) continued to call it a fad until they started making billions in 2012.
1996 was exactly when it was obvious the web was taking off. That was right when the transition was happening from online services like AOL that gave you some Internet access as an aside, to ISPs that just connected you directly via PPP. I was hired to answer tech support calls for some guys that had started an ISP in their apartment and within a month or two they'd grown exponentially and expanded to real offices.
Bitcoin is presently used for illegal activity, remittances, currency in countries undergoing hyperinflation (Zimbabwe, Venezuela), as a way to make oneself feel wealthy, and of course price speculation.
Ethereum is currently used for startup fundraising via ICO, for tokens in collectible games (Cryptokitties), to distribute ad revenue from browsing the web (Brave), to incentivize participation on curated social news sites (Steemit), for decentralized prediction markets (Augur), to get paid for donating computing power (Golem), and of course for speculation. Possibly others I'm not aware of too.
> If you have already accepted cryptocurrencies as the wave of the future, Coinbase provides enormous value. You can't do much in the crypto world without owning some cryptocurrencies, and they are the largest, easiest to use, and generally most trusted way to exchange $USD for Bitcoin or Ethereum.
If you accept it sure. However, the utility between the internet and cryptocurrencies are vastly different.
The internet provides light speed communication and seeing as we are a species built upon communication, communicating from days to fraction of a second which is also orders of magnitude cheaper (granted, not at the start but it got there and cryptocurrencies have not solved the scaling problem (cost) yet) is hugely beneficial. The benefits are completely obvious.
Cryptocurrencies provide you the ability to incentivize people you cannot trust to spend money to secure a network in the hopes that the cost of securing the network is greater than the cost of someone oversupplying your network and stealing your money.
Also, the benefits of control not being enforceable by a central authority is a bad thing in most cases and the few that are useful are outweighed by in pretty much every use case the billions of dollars it costs to run those computers to secure it.
It has been almost 10 years since the bitcoin network started, where is its killer use case?
Lastly, the billions of dollars spent to pay for the decentralized network to secure it are mostly payed for by creating new coins. At the end of the mining timeline, they will have to rely purely on transaction fees to pay for the costs to secure the network and the billions of dollars used to do so currently at a fraction of the scale Visa does will likely never outweigh the benefits of decentralization.
TLDR: Running decentralized nodes to recompute the same transactions to protect against untrusted nodes will always be more expensive than running each transaction on a single node on a trusted server.
The point though is that Coinbase is the same kind of play. And really, you don't need to be "as big as Google" to succeed in life - you just need to make your millions and get out with them.
Coinbase is a bet on the idea that there's enough crypto-enthusiasm that they can capture a small part of a lot money while it lasts.
Our personal perception of the size of a network is directly proportional to the value that we get from it. Extrapolating from that we estimate a square law. However we are neither aware of nor directly value the long tail of people distant from us in the network. From multiple ways of estimating, the value of that tail works out to be O(log(N)), leading to a O(N log(N)) valuation for a network.
Your and Odlyzko's refutation still fails to consider frictional or hygenic costs. These are roughly constant for n, and set an upper size bound where marginal (actually: constant) cost exceeds marginal value.
Since a novel network might be able to selectively recruit high-value nodes, this sets up the serial monopoly / collapse / new monopoly dynamic.
A few other dynamics added (Gresham's law, tyranny of minimum viable user) accentuate this.
This is sort of what I was inquiring about in my other post on this topic. Very nice work on the content in those links, thank you.
Are we forever resigned to serial monopolies when it comes to certain aspects of the internet ? Or, would it be wiser for us to construct multiple, smaller networks wherein the connections are more valid/constructive for the individual participants ? Very intriguing questions...
That's an excellent question, and one I'm considering.
The dynamic I describe seems to produce those. And monopolies and networks are tightly related.
In particular, it seems to me that very nearly all monopolies have a network element, expressed physically or logically. You may have to squint at times to see it.
But is the converse true? Do all networks create monopolies? Here I think the answer is no, in which case the question becomes "why not".
That might hold some clues.
Open protocols, counterveiling networks, various forms of friction, and holding specific control points open, all seem to help.
Previously to buy ads you had to call someone, get dinner with some weird guy, make tons of calls, get crappy click rates, trust the other companies 'reporting', pay for impression ads (wtf). It was a mess. You also had to do this with 23 DIFFERENT companies, which were all different. Google wasn't the first, but they did follow through and make a great way to advertise with self serve.
Selling ads is awesome. No overhead, no rotting inventory, no operations mess. It scales infinitely naturally. It is clean easy cash. Everything else they do is a huge side show to distract people.
Google didn't invent online ads, not even the auctioned ones. Also, their innovations in the online ad space were generally limited to their search-based ad business.
Its technically true just like its true that they didn't invent online search. Their innovations (either in house or through acquisitions) have fundamentally changed the ad space as the GP mentions. And this is an ongoing process as well as more and more people move off the more mainstream media platforms.
And Apple didn’t invent the smartphone, but they reimagined it in a way that basically made things 10X better in UX, just like buying ads on google is 10X better than the process described earlier.
I recall one of the questions in my interview at google years ago:
"Do you know what kind of company Google is?"
"Sure, everyone thinks you're a tech company or a search company or whatever - but Google is an advertising company, and thats it. All the other stuff distracts from the fact that youre just the most profitable ad company."
> "Sure, everyone thinks you're a tech company or a search company or whatever - but Google is an advertising company, and thats it. All the other stuff distracts from the fact that youre just the most profitable ad company."
That is pretty much the most anti-google culture perspective statement you could have said. If there was ever an argument for culture fit, this is it.
I went through a three month-long interview process with them... then they said I did very well and they would be extending me an offer.
THen next day, they called and said I would not receive an offer and would not give a reason.
THey invited me to interview for that position multiple times over the next couple of years and I finally had to ask them to stop recruiting me for that position... they stopped. :-(
Maybe there were additional reasons, but tbh the answer you gave was very bad and probably would have been grounds enough to not hire you.
>"Sure, everyone thinks you're a tech company or a search company or whatever - but Google is an advertising company, and thats it. All the other stuff distracts from the fact that youre just the most profitable ad company."
When given the opportunity to demonstrate nuanced thinking, you've boiled down a really complex and large thing into a simple platitude. "Google is an advertising company, and thats it". Really, is that the full story? You truly think that?
I mean if that were the case and you wanted to be genuine you could at least dive to another level and explain why or how.
And for reference it probably would have been okay to say 'No, I'm not sure what kind of company Google is. I know that you guys do X and Y, but I know there's some other stuff too, but I don't have any insight because I don't work here'
You don't think the kind of reply he gave is pretty combative for the interviewing for a job at said company?
You recommend that as a path forward for people who interview at your company or at Google in the future?
Look I understand sometimes people don't want to work at a certain company. But typically it's better to decline the interview than to show up and be smug or righteous about it.
So his options are 1) be delusional about a company's product, or 2) work for another company?
No one at Google has qualms about working at an ad company? No one at Facebook does?
For some people, a job is a job. It doesn't have to be a calling or a mission. I personally wouldn't work in ad-tech for personal reasons, but clearly most of our industry would. Are 100% of those people fine with what their company does? Clearly at Facebook they aren't.
Honesty isn't combative, and if the interviewers say that honest answer in that way, then it would reflect their own misgivings about Google's business model, wouldn't it?
But read his reply again: >"Sure, everyone thinks you're a tech company or a search company or whatever - but Google is an advertising company, and thats it. All the other stuff distracts from the fact that youre just the most profitable ad company."
"an advertising company, _and thats it_" (emphasis mine)
"your _just_ the most profitable ad company" (emphasis mine)
Really? It's that far in 1 direction
If you really think that, fine it's your opinion and you are entitled to that, but I encourage you to seek multiple perspectives in the future.
I've already conceded that google is an ad company from a rev perspective since it's 87% ads. But you can't concede to me (the interviewer) that maybe there's something else going on and your legit view of the other people at the company is that they are just "distractions"?
Like seriously, you don't have to put up these tough walls. I'm just an internet stranger. Just be real for a moment. Is that what you really think? It's the last time I'll ask.
Why is Google being big a problem? Who are they hurting by being big at this time?
[edit]: to elaborate, I was under the impression that the whole point of anti-monopoly regulations was to protect consumers from monopolistic predatory practices, not to prevent monopolies from actually existing per se.
Hence my question: is there anyone actually being hurt by the currently limited choice of search engines or phone operating systems?
Also, what prevents someone from trying to build a much better one?
If Google starts to misbehave as a monopoly, fine, let the USG (themselves a monopoly, btw) do their thing go after them.
But as long as they provide a superior service for free (yeah, I know, you're the product, blah, blah), I'm not sure I'm seeing the problem.
One example: By preventing phone manufacturers who use Android and Google services from also selling phones with other operating systems they are killing the opportunity for another phone OS from gaining traction.
We could have missed out on the opportunity for something better than Android being developed and we'll never know. It's called dumping; flooding the market with something free to kill competition and make sure Google is in the majority of hands in Europe.
If I'm not mistaken, they contractually limited manufacturers from selling devices with Android forks, according to Google to avoid experience fragmentation.
AFAIK the terms didn't limit any other operating systems not based on Android.
Yep actually I retact part of my original comment. Thanks for the correction.
The dumping part is still valid because any OS that isn't free and relies on licencing can't complete with an OS that makes it money from a secondary business like search and advertising.
Google gave away Android to make sure it dominated mobile advertising. Any OS reliying on profits directly from licencing the OS cannot complete.
Your comment is still false. Google allows Android forks with their services installed. You just can't break the API, which makes sense, otherwise apps from the store wouldn't reliably work.
Wouldn't this line of thinking mean all open source code just dumping? The linux kernel, with lots of its development done by either volunteers or employees of companies who use it, is also given away for free. How can a paid licensed OS compete with what is essentially a co-op of developers across organizations giving the code away for free?
Is Firefox also dumping, since it's available for free, funded by donations and the default search provider?
This only becomes an issue when you are a monopoly as this is when it hurts the consumers ability to choose alternatives. If Android truely is the best option let the customer decide without trying to stifel competition.
Firefox and Linux don't work to stop competition in the same way. Neither care if manufactures provide other options or flavors and Linux especially has commercial forks like OSX and Android.
This is false. Samsung and others made Microsoft phones as long as it was a viable alternative. Google restricted others to prevent a split of their own platform - Android.
It's not so much they are hurting anyone, since they have made it virtually impossible to compete with them.
Say you do a search for a particular location, the first thing that pops up to the the top of the page is a box with some information pulled from wikipedia and a link/image of it on google maps. Search for a band, and you see the same with links to youtube and google music. Search for online storage and you see the same thing.
While google has been audited time and time again to prove that their search engine totally allows competitors to make an impact against some of these sorts of things. Even without the box, the builder of the worlds most used search engine is certainly very good at search engine optimization for their own products.
if they're _purposefully_ ranking their own services above competing services, then yes, I agree they should be fined until they stop. _however_, more often than not, their own service is _exactly_ what I'm looking for - be it GPM/YouTube/Maps/etc.
It's not really their fault they're head and shoulders above the competition/the de-facto provider for most of the content people search for every day (well, maybe it is their fault, but it's not a bad thing).
Exactly. I really don't understand why people try and muddy the waters around Google products. I'm not forced to use Google; Google products are just damn good.
Having a monopoly in a market due to the fact that your product is just that good isn't a bad thing, and punishing companies for being successful sets an awful precedent (which is why breaking up Google isn't going to happen). From search, maps, email, YouTube, and to photos, Google products are widely used because they're completely free (aside from the data collection portion) and they're best in class.
Please don't lie to us and act like Google's monopoly position is hurting the market. I'm sure Google is doing some shady stuff on the edges, but nothing so egregious to warrant antitrust action.
Why are their products that good? What is it that makes content creators publish on youtube rather than on other platforms. I'd argue that a huge part of this is the fact that youtube gives creators more visibility than other places, and since google is able to leverage search in addition to their advertising business to bring more eyes to youtube is the reason for the platforms success.
I think your confusing googles monopoly not hurting the market with not hurting their consumers. But to suggest that they don't make it near impossible for anyone to compete against them is absolutely them hurting the market. Namely, the equity value of google would be more balanced with other smaller firms, and in turn we'd see more very rich people rather than fewer people with net worths well over 10 billion.
I still see plenty of other video listings from other sites in my Google search results, and even if they're ranked above equivalent YouTube results I always pick the YouTube listing.
I have no doubts why I do this; YouTube provides a far better experience. It's incredibly bandwidth efficient even when my connection is slow, it's very responsive when seeking, and their time-to-first-video-frame is really good. And perhaps most importantly, it's consistently good. I don't get UI or playback issues every 10th video.
I cannot say the same for any other video host I've come across in my life. It's ridiculous how far ahead YouTube is on technology alone, and I still haven't found any site that can match it.
There are Google products which are inferior compared to their competitors, and usage rates show that as well: YouTube Gaming/YT livestreaming are basically platforms that only host people banned from Twitch.
>Namely, the equity value of google would be more balanced with other smaller firms, and in turn we'd see more very rich people rather than fewer people with net worths well over 10 billion.
Why would that be a good thing? Or rather, a better thing than the current situation? Why would that even be desirable?
Again, antitrust laws exist for one reason: to protect consumers. Not to implement someone's idea of an ideal society or market.
If you believe e.g. that company equity should be more uniformly distributed, go talk to your congressman, have him draft a law to that effect and get congress to vote on it.
> Why would that be a good thing? Or rather, a better thing than the current situation? Why would that even be desirable?
Because wealth inequality is massively harmful for society. It's the sort of thing that leads to revolution.
>
If you believe e.g. that company equity should be more uniformly distributed, go talk to your congressman, have him draft a law to that effect and get congress to vote on it.
and then Google writes him a check and the whole thing goes away. Biggest lobbyist around.
> Because wealth inequality is massively harmful for society.
Nope.
Hunger, poverty, lack of education, lack of access to medical care, etc.. is harmful to society and leads to revolutions and whatever root cause leads to those is to be fought against.
Except that wealth inequality isn't such a root cause.
Wealth inequality isn't and has never been a problem except in the minds of utopian ideologues, collectivists or people with a basic jealousy problem.
You're pretty dismissive of a theory I find interesting, I wonder if you've ever really entertained the idea that a wealthy country will cater its services to those who can pay, leaving those who can't pay behind.
So USA has a high median income, so we have high education outcomes, high healthcare outcomes, right? We certainly have the best schools and the best hospitals. But only the top few percentile can afford the best schools and best hospitals, everyone else gets left behind.
But we have higher infant mortality than many countries with lower incomes, and we don't compete so well when it comes to average assessment scores.
Naturally I was exposed to this thinking via a TED talk years ago, from this guy:
> Wealth inequality isn't and has never been a problem except in the minds of utopian ideologues, collectivists or people with a basic jealousy problem
> Hunger, poverty, lack of education, lack of access to medical care, etc...
All of these woes were in play at that time.
Unlike the poster above who showed a source that tries (and fails imo) to show causation between wealth inequality and said woes, you provided exactly zero value to the conversation.
Google Photos was horrendous for years, and they aquihired several best-in-class companies (Picasa, and then a few mobile photo editing apps) and killed their products.
> I'm sure Google is doing some shady stuff on the edges, but nothing so egregious to warrant antitrust action.
And when they do do stuff that is so egregious but they are too big ($$$) how are you going to stop them from abuse? Isn't this why, for example, people absolutely loathe telecom/ISPs? Sure they were great when the internet first came out ("it was just that good"), but now look how abusive they are since only a few co's own the copper that runs into your house.
Is it because their products are that good, or because they have one monopoly that also functions as a money hose that they can aim as needed to decimate competition in other areas.
Yes, because all Google has to do is use their search money to destroy the competition; it's not like Google has any failed products or anything. /s
Also, being a multibillion dollar company and using your billions in one product line to either prop up or build another product isn't illegal. It's just business.
Did you ever use Excite/Alta Vista/Yahoo, MapQuest, Hotmail, etc? Because if you had, you wouldn't have to ask that question. Every product Google has had success with was better than the competition by a large margin. When it failed (Google+) it gained zero traction.
The competition sucked and they have yet to make something better.
We have to think deeper as to why their service is the one that's preferred though.
Part of it is the fact that they had historically been able to subsidize the monetization potential of their other services in order to out compete those who needed their services to make money.
The other half is more speculation, but certainly very possible, that they've been able to play this game for a long enough time that they have been able to use search to build these brands in such a way that makes us think of them first for all of these services. Brand power is a very powerful thing, and considering the fact that they have a subsidized ability to advertise to us (both through promoting things in search, and by not needing to pay themselves for adsense/adwords) is what has made these the more high quality services over time since we have given our data to them.
Travel search engines used to be big business. They still are, but they're hurting, and not a small part of it is due to Google having a onebox of flight info. I personally love that onebox - I book all my flights through it - but I'd have a hard time explaining how it's not anticompetitive. Vertical integration can have some great efficiencies, but it can also destroy once healthy markets, and I only see that getting worse with modern supply chain management and similar technologies.
So if your business doesn't stand a chance and goes under due to unfair competition, you'd be fine with it, since "businesses are born and die every day"?
And what exactly would "US policy" be in this context?
>Say you do a search for a particular location, the first thing that pops up to the the top of the page is a box with some information pulled from wikipedia and a link/image of it on google maps.
You're saying Google provided you with exactly the information you were looking for in the first place. And for free, btw.
Whats good for consumers isn't whats good for the broader market, we wouldn't see mega billionares with net worths close to that of previous captains of industry if we forced them to allow others to compete (where the only viable way to do so from my perspective is to not let them compete at all). In every other industry you see far less vertical integration due to the history of how companies have been regulated against (i.e. Car and airplane manufacturers are using very few of their own parts).
Bing works just fine, but people don't use it because it's not what they're used to. Rarely does Google have an actual monopoly where new competitors can't enter the field - in fact, for every Google product I can give you a viable alternative. The only difference is that Google is winning.
Outside of search, you should ask why are they winning? Better products don't necessarily have better user numbers due to how much network effects play into a lot of googles products. There's no doubt in my mind that google has been able to leverage their search and advertising businesses, not only as products themselves, but also their knowledge in the space, to push users to, and keep their eyes on said products.
If apple and google traded maps products, it's very likely that web and android users would still largely use the google one more often than apple maps is being used now since they have more power to guide you into using the product. The same applies to them advertising chrome when you open up another browser to google.com.
The problem isn't google search as much as it is the fact that google search and their ad products allows them to promote their own products at a cost far less than their competitors.
Google advertises their products using their own ad network. And yes, they does cost them in opportunity cost because instead of making money selling that ad spot, they are claiming that space themselves depriving themselves of the revenue.
What you are saying isn't normally a problem, the problem is the fact that google is by far the largest digital advertiser, where their core product is information retrieval. If you are able to manipulate information retrieval in your favor that's an unfair advantage.
I agree, it’s like Domino’s advertising their cinnamon sticks (or whatever) on their pizza boxes. They don’t have to advertise Papa John’s cinnamon sticks. Why should they?
and was allowed to grow into a behemoth capable of perverting democracy and engaging in essentially any behaviour it desires, from a business standpoint.
"Some were investigated, but only superficially, the government just really isn't enforcing our antitrust laws. And that's what's happened. None of these acquisitions have been challenged."
Behemoths like Google emerge every time new inventions lead to the creation of new markets followed by mass adoption during a relatively short timeframe, when regulations don't exist yet. It has happened in history time and time again (Standard Oil, Detroit Big 3, etc.) It's not entirely preventable, but it requires awareness foremost and then the (political/societal) will to deal with it.
I think it is also worth calling out that at least 2 of those acquisitions, android and google, were made before they became as dominant as they are today. Android was purchased by google 2 years before it even launched, and while youtube was explosively popular at the time of purchase, many at the time thought the 1B purchase price for a revenue-less company was a stupid decision, and nobody was concerned about a monopoly. In other words, the businesses, and their dominance in those business, were made well after the acquisition such that I don't think if they had been investigated rigorously by the FTC they would have been stopped.
I'm not sure if the same was also true for doubleclick (I don't know enough about ad tech).
Google was solely responsible for YouTube's ultimate success and they deserve the credit accordingly. It was a dead company if they didn't buy it, they were rapidly bleeding to death financially and the legal picture was disastrous. It was viewed as a stupid mistake of a purchase in part because the argument was they would be a giant red ink pit forever. The sole reason YouTube survived the legal attack was due to Google's enormous resources and market position. Without that, the music cartel and Hollywood would have made sure to kill it or buy it (same difference).
The mobile picture is a lot less clear. Perhaps a dominant open source solution would have emerged. Samsung has shown itself to be mediocre at producing competitive origination platforms, so I'm highly skeptical they'd have produced the big leading platform. Apple's iOS would have never held the dominate market share, because they're universally the high profit small share player. China only came on in the last few years in terms of their ability to originate such a platform, and the rest of the planet is simply not going to adopt a Chinese platform as the 85% global market solution. The Europeans have been entirely absent post Nokia's implosion. So who else was going to fund the expensive creation of and shepherding of something like Android? Nobody. Google deserves vast credit for that accordingly as well.
> Google was solely responsible for YouTube's ultimate success and they deserve the credit accordingly.
If they were capable of making a success of video without buying YouTube why did they buy it in the first place. Video.google.com was developer internally, YouTube thrashed it, Google gave up and bought YouTube.
They needed each other. YouTube couldn't survive without Google's money and engineering ability, and Google didn't understand how to quickly iterate in social products.
I'm curious though, was this always supposed to be the case? I think Apple has adapted amazingly well to the market (look at their profits) but I don't think there's any evidence that this has been a holistic, from the start business strategy for them.
I know my Elementary and High schools had Macs because of Apple's aggressive Educational discounts, and at the time it was generally accepted that Apple was trying to get a generation of kids used to Macs so that they would be the mainstream computer when they reached adulthood. Ultimately we were all forced to use Wintel boxes when we got jobs so this play didn't work. Apple didn't get in bed with businesses the same way they did with schools.
Then when we swing over to iOS, the first iPhones were premium devices because they _had_ to be. The hardware required to realize their vision was bleeding edge and they knew it would take a few years to commoditize it. Ultimately Android popped up and stole the budget market (with crappy devices, some of them having keyboards and resistive touchscreens) before Apple felt comfortable putting out something budget like the 5c much too late.
I doubt that was their original intention. However I do think it's an inherent consequence to what they do (building and controlling their own ecosystem top to bottom, not licensing the OS, staying in the higher price tiers, etc).
Steve Jobs basically admitted the Apple approach only works in that model. In the 2007 Jobs / Gates discussion at D5 [1]. He pointed out that the whole thing only works because
of PC guy (they were joking about the PC guy vs Mac guy ads). What he meant was, the Apple approach requires that context. Where they can be the high quality, high profit, smaller market share position and always have the PC guy competitor as the contrast to amplify their own appeal.
If everyone has a Gucci bag, it's not a Gucci bag any longer.
The best thing that ever happened to Apple, was Google buying and building up Android as the 85% market player. Jobs should have been thanking them every day for that perceived betrayal. The ideal was always to have another PC guy scenario to play off of. You want tons of shitty Android phones out there in the market to compete against. Let them have the worthless bottom ~50% of the market financially, where there's zero profit to be had and lots of mediocre consumer experiences. That makes what Apple does a lot easier, in terms of pitching their value proposition to customers.
> The best thing that ever happened to Apple, was Google buying and building up Android as the 85% market player. Jobs should have been thanking them every day for that perceived betrayal. The ideal was always to have another PC guy scenario to play off of. You want tons of shitty Android phones out there in the market to compete against. Let them have the worthless bottom ~50% of the market financially, where there's zero profit to be had and lots of mediocre consumer experiences.
With the EU fining Google 5 Billion dollars for essentially bundling search to google play in order to make some money off of all the money Google spent on android, the EU has shown that the Apple model is the only real way to go.
IOS is way more restrictive than android and they can get away with it because they only make expensive devices that only a subset of people can pay for thus isolating themselves from antitrust arguments.
The point of antitrust regulations is to stop the anti-innovation practices in the first place, so while they may appear to be a 'benevolent dictator,' they will quickly turn for the worse.
> The point of antitrust regulations is to stop the anti-innovation practices
Is that true? That doesn't match the definition of any antitrust regulation I'm aware of. AFAIK antitrust regulation is intended to enforce _fairness_, not _innovation_. Often the two go hand in hand, of course, but I think it's worth not conflating the two.
The idea of anti-trust regulation is to break up companies that cornered a market, that is, (mostly) prevented competition on it. Breaking them up serves to make more, smaller companies (out of the split giant) that would start to compete again.
Anti-trust laws can be seen as pro-market laws that try to prevent long periods of monopolized markets without waiting for a naturally occurring disruption, instead providing a mandated disruption.
Whether it's _efficient_, and whether it works as intended, can be discussed.
I used "fairness" because it appears in most definitions of the anti trust regulation. A "level playing field" is 100% not the point of antitrust laws. Sidenote: I don't believe any "playing field" in business is "level".
I think something for folks to keep in mind is that much of the US antitrust laws were made back in the early 1900s to combat _literal_ monopolies, objective collusion between companies to harm consumers, and so on. We're talking price fixing here.
> Anti-trust laws can be seen as pro-market laws that try to prevent long periods of monopolized markets without waiting for a naturally occurring disruption, instead providing a mandated disruption.
This sentence is dangerous: it is very close to saying that any long-term, successful company should be "disrupted". Interpreted differently it could be read that startups should have some inherent right to evenly compete with large companies (by fining or splitting up large companies to be "beatable" by startups).
Again, that is not all the point of anti trust laws. I won't argue whether there should be laws like that (as you can tell, I think not), but the anti trust regulation in the USA is definitely squarely aimed at _actual_ monopolies and collusion.
> This sentence is dangerous: it is very close to saying that any long-term, successful company should be "disrupted". Interpreted differently it could be read that startups should have some inherent right to evenly compete with large companies (by fining or splitting up large companies to be "beatable" by startups).
No it isn't. "Successful company" and "company that has cornered/monopolized their market" are not even close to the same thing.
Anti-trust laws don't aim to make competition fair, they aim to make it possible.
Bell Labs was a monopoly (at least for a time period) and yielded countless high-impact, transformative innovations that a company with fewer resources (probably) would not have been able to develop. I think (although I could be wrong) most would agree they were a net benefit to society.
Bell Labs was not a monopoly: it did not prevent operation of other research labs. E.g. the highly successful Xeroc PARC co-existed with them for a decade or two.
Bell the telecom company was a monopoly that financed Bell Labs. Bell Labs did not go down in flames when Bell was partitioned in 1982, and continued providing the world with great achievements.
Totally true; I glossed over the distinction between Bell and Bell Labs -- I suppose this might be analogous (with the full understanding that the analogy is incomplete) to separating Google[x] and Google. However, is it not the case that Bell Labs was able to undertake such ambitious research projects because it was backed by a monopoly?
Also, while Xerox PARC was also a legendary research institution in its day, I don't put it at the scale of Bell Labs, which touched a much broader array of fields. To quantify this distinction, compare the research budgets in 2018 dollars:
In our local post-monopoly phone provider, 30 years ago dispatchers would call the local strip club bartender to reach their technicians. They were all on a first name basis.
It was much better to work for these companies back then. Now, everything is super efficient and all that extra value the technicians generate go straight to executives and shareholders.
I don't think it can be considered an open question if we're all just waiting for the inevitable disaster.
The problem is we're just being slowly boiled so nothing has been done to stop the complete perversion of democracy and slide into a corporate oligarchy.
Innovative companies on their own are not really innovative really. A monopoly enforces their opinion and product in the world. If you don't like their price or approach too bad for you. You are kept out of the game (it is a monopoly right).
As has been mentioned a bunch of times here, Google and Facebook have all too naturally embraced Microsoft's (and prior monopolies' ) approach of embrace, extend, and extinguish. There were at least 2-3 articles this week about the games Google plays (e.g. youtube loading faster on Chrome due to Google going ahead with their own suggested implementation without consensus).
I don't think there is any economic model out there that even argues monopolies are a good idea in some fashion.
> Youtube loading faster on Chrome due to Google going ahead with their own suggested implementation without consensus
Are they blocking other browsers from utilizing said efficient tool because claiming that they are purposefully slowing other browsers is disingenuous as they are almost certainly just optimizing efficiency between their various products (chrome and youtube).
Blaming google for optimizing their systems without supporting every other possible system under the sun is beyond ridicules. Nobody has the engineering capacity to perfectly optimize their services for every use case.
> If you don't like their price or approach too bad for you. You are kept out of the game
yes, basically true, i think. the article says Google spent more money on lobbying last year than any other corporation...
why does Google think that spending money in this way is useful? what does Google get in return? how does Google explain to shareholders that this is not a waste?
> why does Google think that spending money in this way is useful?
It's not useful, it's required. You have two choices. You can do the equivalent of what Microsoft did for a long time, and hide in the Pacific Northwest and pray that the Monster in DC just leaves you alone, while all of your competitors lobby to have you destroyed. You will not be left alone no matter what, if you achieve that kind of success, no matter how you achieve it. The only rational choice, is to get in the game and try to influence the outcome, which is what all of your competitors are going to be doing. Microsoft learned that very painful lesson after waiving at the US Government for years and thinking they could ignore what was going on with their competitors lobbying. Google learned from Microsoft's mistake, and got in almost immediately once their position became dominant.
With the politics in DC, you're either in it defending your position, or you're dinner being served up by your competitors who are very aggressively in it and trying to use the political machine against you as a weapon. The US has a $7 trillion government system top to bottom, one third the size of the economy. There's no avoiding that.
Unfortunately, I agree that lobbying has become another "tax" to be paid, consequently a "tax" to the consumers. Tangent: I still don't understand how people find lobbying natural and a good idea.
Is preemptive regulation ever a good thing? How could any government have pre-regulated, say, the internet?
If you are not for technological progress, is the corollary true, that you are for technological stagnation? Is not tech stagnation also tech attrition?
Edit: am I really being downvoted for asking for evidence that technological progress (the driving force that made all people on Earth extraordinaly more rich) is bad? What is wrong with you, people?
Well, I disagree. Partial knowledge and technology can be bad and extremely dangerous.
In the 19th- early 20th century they were treating radioactive substances like they were chew toys (making toys etc). The worst nuclear accident happened near lake Karachay, because they had the technology to create nuclear weapons, but did not understand, or knew the danger and how to manage the waste. (Russians were trying to catch up and create their own arsenal, had acquired fragmented knowledge that were piecing together.)
No. My argument is kind of the opposite. I am here countering the point that gaining knowledge is a monotonous function with respect to "goodness"/value. We need to be cautious and acknowledge our lack of knowledge, when we move ahead.
I fully agree with you, of course. That doesn't mean the technology is bad, though - it's just that people are too cocky and think they know everything. Knowledge can't be bad nor good, people and their use of knowledge are.
You can't separate a technology from it's use. Technology is created to be used.
Besides I could just as easily say some knowledge is good and some knowledge is bad. If you want to say that "knowledge is definitely not bad" then I'm going to ask you your own question - can you support that statement?
> You can't separate a technology from it's use. Technology is created to be used.
False. Every day, dozens of thousands of people in academia engage in basic research (actual term), something that does not lead to "usable technology" most of the time.
> some knowledge is good and some knowledge is bad
Are you saying that guns kill people? I thought that people kill people, using guns.
So our knowledge about guns is bad because guns kill? I can't explain it more, sorry. I think the explanation I've given is very obvious - technology can be used badly, but it's always the people who do it, not the technology itself. Technology is neutral, you can simply not use it - knowing it still might prove important for development of other technologies, e.g. for prevention, reparation, ... after the original technology is used, in case of nuclear weapons for example (how would we know how to prevent and treat radiation illness without knowing anything about nuclear physics), and at the very extreme, the technology itself will do nothing - until people start using it. People are bad, not technology.
That's kind of a poor reply. "Sometimes things have unintended consequences". And a link to a book that says that technology alone won't save the environment, more things will be needed.
Which successful companies came out of EU in the last 20 years? How well do they stack up against US (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Uber etc) or China (Tencent, Alibaba etc)? If not many, does that mean EU entrepreneurs are hindered by the regulations?
One might also argue that European model is better because it might prevent one company from dominating the market. But if that is the case, why does EU face technology dominance from American companies (smartphones, search, e-commerce, operating systems etc), rather than having that marketshare captured by European companies?
I think the deviating factor there is actually mindset. E.g. Germany and Japan have dominance over U.S. car manufacturers. Most companies in the E.U. don't set out to break the world and change it; they aim for a quality product built after a series of increments. In the U.S. every company in technology is out there to change the world, even if they are selling something totally common. Namely, the iphone was a combination of existing technology combined so as to change the world. In the meantime other companies were innovating in the RF area, which well makes sense, but doesn't make for a "ground-breaking" product.
That argument has been made and argued by a number of economists -- will try to find some citations if I get the time -- feel free to google scholar in the meantime.
I understand the fear of regulation that exists, however we need to take a step back from time to time and evaluate the options. Right now, U.S. has really shitty internet (I am serious, price/value is really bad...), because the 3-4 companies, crash smaller ones or bully them into suicidal terms; and have shared the U.S. pie among them. (I bet in your area only 1 carrier has acceptable speeds -- given you have more than one.) The companies were paid though to improve the infrastructure and people chose to effectively let them roam free. They pocketed the cash.
The US has approximately 100 tech companies worth $10 billion or more. Europe, with over 2x the population of the US, has about two dozen.
Seimens is a very old - 170 years old - industrial conglomerate. That's like using GE, Berkshire Hathaway or 3M as an example.
Nokia is barely a good example. They're a $30b market cap company, Google can sneeze and lose or gain that in a day. Texas Instruments and Broadcom are worth 3x what Nokia is; Cisco is worth 7x Nokia. In a land of giants, Nokia is pretty small.
SAP is a very serious tech company, and by far the only good big tech example Europe has today. They're slow growth, have a $140b market cap, with $4b in profit (equal to about a month of Apple's profit). They're less than half the size of Oracle and will be eclipsed in size by Salesforce in the near future.
ARM was one of the more exciting European opportunities, until Softbank ate them. NXP might be able to make some good growth moves now that they're apparently not ending up in the belly of a US giant. I could see them forging a good path as an independent.
Spotify might have a bright future. They have to make a decision soon about whether they're going to be culturally an acquiring and aggressive growth company, or whether they're going to watch that extreme valuation (which they can probably never justify given the margin situation) disappear and get acquired in the next market downturn. If they play their cards right, they could be a legitimate long-term $30b-$50b market cap media/tech company (legitimate as in actually backing that up with earnings).
I think Europe's big opportunity, broadly speaking, is in artificial intelligence over the next decade plus. That's a solid inflection point where some new big companies will emerge. Europe has tons of AI talent to make something happen there (if they don't all sell out to big US or Chinese tech).
> I think Europe's big opportunity, broadly speaking, is in artificial intelligence over the next decade plus. That's a solid inflection point where some new big companies will emerge. Europe has tons of AI talent to make something happen there (if they don't all sell out to big US or Chinese tech).
I can only see this happening if the the US doesn't continue sucking up the best talent in the field, which is unfortunately very often the case over the last 20 years. Europe is pretty un-competitive in terms of remuneration, especially for those at the leading edge of AI work. Many European markets need to wake up and start treating their software engineering grads better, today it too often feels like they get lumped with 'the IT guys' rather than seen as a creative instrument for new business ideas. How you fix this culture I have no idea though.
I actually think a more difficult immigration environment in the USA could be a potential factor in improving Europe's fortunes, if it stems the leak of smart people leaving. The recent change in posture over things like the H1-B visa, the likely rescinding of the right to work on an H4 dependent visa especially (this would prevent a huge number of immigrant spouses from being able to work if their partner moves to the US - this makes a job in the USA a much harder sell for married couples), could have a pretty big chilling effect.
I'm not sure this works all that great as a rebuttal, given Facebook alone just lost more value in a single day this week than the combined 2017 revenues of those three...
Also, Nokia and Siemens were founded in the 1800s, they did not emerge in "the last 20 years". SAP dates to the 1970s as well.
It pains me to admit as a European, but the lack of any real large modern internet success stories to emerge from our continent is a real shame.
Nokia is an independent Finnish company. Mobile phones under the label "Nokia" are made by HMD Global, also a Finnish company, which bought some of the remnants of Microsofts smartphone branch, which had previously bought Nokia's smartphone branch.
Google succeeded because Yahoo used it as its default search engine for years alongside their directory. Google got enormous exposure from that at a point when they needed it. Imagine if your little startup had a "How about you try us out ?" on google.com, permanently. Plus, eventually, Google got better at Search.
At the same time google was stocking every level of their org chart with legendary engineers, Yahoo appointed a demented Scientologist from Hollywood as their CEO. Yahoo for some reason thought they were in the show business. They could not have succeeded on that premise and it’s a miracle the company even survive the reign of Terry Semel.
Stoppelman's Yelp is a bad example. I don't want to visit a page that pesters me to install their app instead of showing me the reviews I came to read. If Yelp's ranking has been lowered, good riddance.
I don't really want to defend behaviors similar to Yelp's. Because it's indeed annoying. But let's play devil's advocate here.
Part of the reason why Google can have a clear and good user experience, is because they can afford it. On the other hand, for smaller company, not meeting user count goals could mean not getting funding and die. This will force them to nag the users to get them to install the app, even if doing that could annoy some of the users.
And this is pretty much a classic example of why monopoly is bad.
Monopolies are bad because more capital means that you can create a better product?
If beating Google was as simple as needing more money to build a better product, then why couldn't startups just pitch that to investors and raise more funding? Probably because beating Google is harder than throwing money at a random startup's app.
At that rate you might as well outlaw venture capital funds because they disadvantage people trying to bootstrap their own startup.
There are certainly many reasons why monopolies are bad, but having capital is not one of them.
> I don't really want to defend behaviors similar to Yelp's. Because it's indeed annoying. But let's play devil's advocate here.
> Part of the reason why Google can have a clear and good user experience, is because they can afford it. On the other hand, for smaller company, not meeting user count goals could mean not getting funding and die. This will force them to nag the users to get them to install the app, even if doing that could annoy some of the users.
They don't have to do that. They can use the same tracking resources that other online companies use to show increased usage.
I'm not saying that I have a better solution. But their current solution is sub-optimal. Their website is crap, looks outdated. What are they even working on?
The problem isn't that they can afford it, but the fact that they have essentially implemented a vendor lock in for the majority of their products, and have implemented vertical integration in a way that they can very easily expand through acquisitions and their own product listings.
They have a monopoly on what people see when they want to find something, and can use that to point you to google properties, or should they expand into further ventures such as selling their own goods, move you away from other retailers.
i'm not a fan of Yelp's business practices or strategic web decisions, yet, i think Stoppelman may have a point even if Yelp is guilty of the same type of shady practices itself.
IOW, just like i wonder if i'm missing an excellent restaurant when i search for restaurants in Yelp, i also wonder if i'm missing an excellent review website when i search for "restaurant reviews" on Google.
It's funny you mention this: I've discovered that Google is injecting an ad above searches for "mapquest" that leads users who make the mistake of clicking on a Google ad to install a browser hijacker plugin before they can get the directions they're looking for.
This hurts MapQuest's brand, gives people malware, and of course, conveniently, makes Google a lot of money. They've been doing it for at least a number of years. There is no way to report the malicious ad to Google, and I've seen the exact same site over and over again confusing computer illiterate users into believing MapQuest requires they download a plugin.
A significant portion of Google's ad business is malware content, and they put it above legitimate rankings. Which is to say, Google is not downranking bad sites for being bad, Google is downranking sites who don't pay them for the privilege of being on top.
You honestly think Google cares about MapQuest at all? The ad you're mentioning is using MapQuest as a keyword. It needs to be reported. Job done.
Google doesn't care about MapQuest and it remains the top non-advertised listing for searching MapQuest. MapQuest is a has-been and it has nothing to do with Google's ranking them, and everything to do with a terrible UI that was entirely inferior to Maps on release.
You've missed a lot of the point here. MapQuest isn't something Google cares about, but it is an extremely popular search term, particularly among the computer illiterate, who learned what it was back in the 90s, and have ever since considered it "where to get directions". Like many other search terms, it's a high value term for malicious content, and Google's happy to rake in the cash. While "Google does not sell your data", they're more than willing to redirect you to a malicious browser extension that does.
Those of us in the tech industry don't use MapQuest. We don't click on ads. A lot of us have ad blockers. So we don't really think about the fact that the cushy online presence adtech has built for us is built on taking advantage of less technologically savvy. You may not pay for Google, but indirectly, the old lady down the block does, every time she has to take her computer into Best Buy to have the garbage scrubbed off of it.
And where the antitrust drops back in: Google doesn't let people bid on ads for their own products, so "google maps" never returns a malicious map site.
And, as I noted above, this site's been heavily promoted in Google Ads for years, at least five, and there's no way to report it in Google Search. Several Google employees are likely reading this thread who have the ability to do something about it or know who to escalate it to, but I'm reasonably confident it'll still be there next week.
I'm happy to be proven wrong that a Googler has accomplished such a task. As I stated in two of these comments: There appears to be no place to report an ad on Google Search. Can you explain where this feature is, because I've explicitly looked for it many times.
I see a dropdown that offers me a single option: "Why this ad?", which of course, just tells me it's based on my current search terms since I have personalization off. Clicking Ad Settings didn't bring me a report option either. I was kinda expecting a button like the "Report Ad" button you can see if you look at an ad on DuckDuckGo.
EDIT: I've bookmarked the below link and will use it liberally against malware.
...And I'll use the generic "submit feedback" button to point out I should really just be able to report a bad ad on the ad itself.
(Note: "Send feedback" has gotten pretty obscure on Google Search, nobody scrolls that far! On Google+, it's always on the left, on Gmail it's on the settings gear (I checked Settings on Google Search first and didn't find it there.)
>I'm happy to be proven wrong that a Googler has accomplished such a task. As I stated in two of these comments: There appears to be no place to report an ad on Google Search. Can you explain where this feature is, because I've explicitly looked for it many times.
As far as I know, there should be a "send feedback" button on the bottom of pretty much any page. It could be used for something like this, although I have no idea how long resolution would take in that case.
There's also this form[1], which I found by Googling "report bad Google ad" (its accessible via the first result). This is essentially what I did.
Hey Joshua, just a note: Five hours ago, I confirmed you were right, the ad was gone. But it looks like the same site is back in business: https://www.google.com/search?q=mapquest
Specifically, in every test I've ever run, Google puts http://www.mapsanddrivingdirection.com/Maps as the ad run above the official MapQuest link. It's a company out of Cyprus that repackages OpenStreetMap data with a big giant "Download to Continue" button when you try to get directions.
I can tell you the download requests admin privileges on your machine to install (aka, is not just an extension alone), and overrides your New Tab page and changes your search provider. I will admit I didn't have the courage to actually install it anywhere to confirm the extent of it's behavior, but placing the registry key that disables Chrome auto-updates is pretty par for the course on these type of infections.
Let's ask a question : How did Google defeat another giant - Microsoft - in 2 major markets where Microsoft had a head start and deep pockets? How did Chrome beat IE, and how did Android beat the several generations of Windows Mobile and Windows Phone?
Clearly Microsoft had no dearth of talent or money. So how come it could not keep Google at bay? In my view the answer lies in the fact that Google's engineering led culture meant they could follow a release cadence that is unheard of for such large systems. Chrome was releasing every 6 weeks, and Android every 3-6 months or so in the early days. Meanwhile we had 1.5 - 2 years between each Windows Phone release.
When Chrome started, IE had nearly 70% market share and the benefit of being deployed on nearly every computer on earth. Microsoft was in the mobile phone market from 2000. In 2011, IDC predicted Windows Phone would overtake the iPhone. Both Google and Microsoft were taken aback by the iPhone, but Google was able to turn on a dime, Microsoft was not. Google achievement has been to stay agile even as it grew big - in my view this remains the secret to their success.
I think this is somewhat related to how Google lost to Facebook in the social space. Google already had Orkut with them. Similarly the idea of Google drive was floated around in Google as early as 2008. But it took the Advent of Dropbox for Google to realise what they had missed.
Same goes for the public cloud. Although Google had the app engine, they did not aggressively invest in it. Azure clearly over took Google in cloud space.
I am sure there would be many such examples from all the Tech Giants.
Google did a great job of putting the user first. You never felt like you were being sold something, a refreshing change from the MSN 'homepage' at the time.
You also did not feel that you were being given something for free that had a catch to it - see HN story today about prisons getting 'free' tablets.
Make no mistake, Microsoft can do free very nicely too - Internet Explorer in the Netscape days was partly ascendant for doing 'free' very well at a time when Netscape was emerging from 'shareware'. But with Microsoft 'free' you always felt that you were a pawn in their plans for global domination, to blot out the rivals.
I think that Google came along with a great series of products and services that put the user first with an ethos that Microsoft, Apple and others just did not 'get'. Although Chrome was marketed with billboards and a link in the search results, the real work on adoption was done by the users recommending the superior, user centric product to their workmates, friends and family.
And i think Microsoft could have done this too. But perhaps the conflict between improving the open web vs pushing their own operating system was a conflict they never resolved internally, giving Google the time and space it needed to outflank them. And Google moved fast enough, and as you have said, created a great enough user experience, that it could quickly establish a strong foothold.
I think if Microsoft had truly been focused on keeping IE as the best browser in the world, it would have been difficult to displace given its dominance.
No doubt Chrome had an advantage over Firefox in this case. But that does not explain how they beat IE. Microsoft had the advantage of shipping IE with the OS itself.
I don't believe the licensing cost of Windows Phone was what led to its downfall. The Nokia deal probably cost Microsoft more than any licensing fee it would have collected. Microsoft had the money and the presence in the market to out compete Google. It just did not have the right product at the right time.
These items have nothing to do with engineering ability and everything to do with inept leadership at Microsoft.
Google had better leadership and easier choices. They had no prexisting customers or partners to annoy.
Companies get wacky like this on top. Think about a certain computer company shippping defective laptops for years to avoid disruption of the product schedule. :)
It is also good to ask why Google could not succeed at social media. Perhaps network effects and an equally agile competitor were a big enough moat for Facebook to fight off Google successfully.
To say that abuse of monopoly is what has enabled Google to grow big is too simplistic. They have succeeded brilliantly in areas where they had equally big competitors, and failed spectacularly as well in others - social media being the most prominent. But more tech focused readers will recall Wave, or NaCl. Then are cases where we have a stalemate for example G Suite, where Microsoft still holds it own with Office.
Google Cloud is a strange case where one can argue that Google has failed to leverage many of its own innovations in containers and other data center infrastructure to achieve a dominant position. I would argue this is a case where Google should have been a market leader and much like Microsoft in the 2000's has frittered away a natural advantage.
> Steve Kroft: Were any of those acquisitions questioned by the antitrust division of the Justice Department?
> Gary Reback: Some were investigated, but only superficially, the government just really isn't enforcing our antitrust laws. And that's what's happened. None of these acquisitions have been challenged
Granted, most of Google's 200+ acquisitions would not trigger any scrutiny, but this line is mind boggling.
There's the massive problem that none of Google's acquisitions were big when they were acquired. Google can at the very least be said to have very significantly contributed to the success of their acquisitions.
I think only 2 acquisitions have had a impact. the one for adwords/adsense patent and one other. The rest have been to poach talent and other stuff or were duds.
> There's Android, YouTube, 510 Systems, and the constellation of acquisitions made to create Google Apps, at a minimum.
Buying Android hardly would have triggered anti-trust investigations given Apple's significant market share at the time, and the many other significant competitors (BlackBerry and Nokia just to name two).
Same goes with YouTube - Google bought it before it was a smash success, and before people thought that sort of thing would be a major viewership center.
510 Systems and their self driving car really still isn't a money-making center for Google (nor is self-driving technology for anyone at the moment).
Google Apps is a hard sale against Office 365, etc...
I just don't see how any one of these acquisitions, on their own, would have caused government Anti-Trust inquiries... unless your point is Google operates in too many different markets?
nit: Android was purchased long before Apple entered the market. Doesn't change your argument, no one was expecting vendors to rush to a new OS because of the iPhone revolution.
As others have pointed out, Google bought Android long before Apple released the iPhone.
Even after Apple did release the iPhone, the strategy behind Android was entirely focused on competing with Microsoft, not Apple. Google was terrified that Microsoft would get into the smartphone OS market and achieve a dominant position, and then muscle Google out of mobile search and advertising. That's why Android is open source (well, mostly). Google made the Android OS free for manufacturers to use with their phones as a way to get them to use Android instead of a Microsoft OS.
The strategy worked brilliantly. Android has done exactly what Google wanted it to accomplish. Microsoft has never gained any meaningful market share in the smartphone market. And between Android and various deals with Apple, Google has a tremendous presence with smartphone users.
No - they bought Android 2 years before the iPhone was announced, and 6-12 months before rumors about it appeared.
You're thinking of the apocryphal story that Google completely pivoted Android when Eric Schmidt heard about the iPhone at the last Apple board meeting before the iPhone announcement
When YouTube and Android was first launched, Google was not nearly as big as it is today. There were even questions about Google's viability back then given that most of their revenue came from online advertising.
It would be interesting to see how many of these acquisitions are still around. I think survivorship bias is strong here.
There's just no way Android's acquisition would or could have been stopped.
Google bought it in July 05, one year after IPO. The smartest phones available were the Blackberry 7750, Motorola Q, and Palm Treo. Google had $3B in revenue in 04 and was on its way to $6B in revenue in 05 when it spent $50MM on Android.
There was no way this acquisition would have been blocked without clairvoyance. Even then "stop this $3B company from buying a startup because it's going to destroy a $35B company in 9 years" is not exactly a compelling argument.
The argument is even more nonsensical than that against Facebook's Instagram acquisition, which is saying something. People argue that DOJ or FTC should have stopped a company that hadn't yet IPOd from buying a company that had raised $7MM (and would raise $50MM a few days before the facebook acquisition).
Sure they're obviously huge in retrospect but they really weren't at the time. Interesting and hot companies die all the time: YikYak and Secret looked like they were going to take over the world at one point.
So if Google is a monopoly, what should be done about it? Split it up into separate, competing mini-Googles? Keep fining them more and more money until they stop anti-competitive practices? Split off Maps/Android/Drive/etc into separate companies so that Google can't use their search monopoly to dominate those fields?
I'm genuinely not sure what the best way to go about this would be.
There's nothing objectively wrong with a large company unless they begin to squash competition with regulatory lock-in. This is what led to the breakup of AT&T/Bell. As far as I can tell, Google doesn't keep others out of the search market through any other means than just being better than the other guys. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I certainly haven't seen any shortage of search engines and alternative cloud services providers.
They routinely put their other products on top of the search pages, such as Google reviews over Yelp or Google maps over OpenMap results.
The issue isn't even so much as Google is dominating search, because they have been providing a better product in almost all cases until recently. The issue is that they are using their dominance in search to try and dominate other markets
When a user searches for "Restaurants near me," how does Google answer that question reliably without using its own mapping service?
Trying to feed that query to a third-party service and then give users the results back adds significant risk that the third-party changes their API, changes their feature-set in an incompatible way, goes out of business, gets in a corporate fight with the search provider...
It's both cheaper and more convenient for the end-user if the search provider handles the mapping itself (in the absence of some kind of universal understood interface standard, complete with some kind of incentive to adhere to it).
They pay to integrate with third party services via a bidding process.
> adds significant risk that the third-party changes their API, changes their feature-set in an incompatible way, goes out of business
All very unlikely to happen when dealing with a client the size of google.
> It's both cheaper and more convenient for the end-user if the search provider handles the mapping itself
added bonus, google gets to dominate mapping then jack up the cost 30x when they decide they want it to be a billion dollar business. LIke they did recently.
> They pay to integrate with third party services via a bidding process.
It's an interesting idea; I don't think I've seen something like that floated before outside of the government space of fair bidding against contracts.
> added bonus, google gets to dominate mapping then jack up the cost 30x when they decide they want it to be a billion dollar business. LIke they did recently.
I hear OpenStreetMaps still exists, and has an API.
An API not suitable for commercial use. So now you're relying on a third party who is suddenly trying to cope with some percentage of the insane traffic of google maps. If they can they make a lot of money.
if not you lose money by switching to them. if it's less than the new rate that you get from google, it's a hard sell to switch. You might point out that this third party should spend the money to scale, but unlike google they aren't equipped with an advertising firehose of cash that they can point at a losing business whenever they want. They have to operate a scale they can afford. Best case they have the staff to build out a service that they can scale quickly enough to take advantage. Realistically, that means using a cloud service provided by one of the oligarchs.
If I am going to search for a business near me, I always prefer a Google maps based solution right there on the search results page, rather than having to navigate to yet another page (say, Yelp's) which is going to nag me to download their app and going to provide a shitty experience otherwise. Continuing along the same example, Yelp is not even going to provide me with all the useful service I might need (like driving directions to that business) and I will have to again navigate back to Google maps.
Google's practice of showing me data from other products (eg. Maps) right there on the search pages is definitely a win for me as a consumer.
It's their product after all; do you point people to your competition from your product? Everyone is free to use anything else. Anti-competitive would be if you couldn't use anything else.
"Your product" is something completely different if you're a mom-and-pop shop or startup or if you have 90% market share. This is why antitrust exists and what arguments like this always seem to ignore.
In short, network effects. Longer: the amount of power their decisions have to affect society. If the mom-and-pop shop would refuse to serve readheads, that's (mostly) their decision. If Google decided to lock redheads out of their accounts, or block from using Chrome, Android or Search, those people would have serious disadvantages simply going around their daily life.
Are they getting hurt? I guess not. No one has any right to Google services[0]. Google has every right to refuse service to anyone[0]. What if they decided to close shop altogether?
Note that locking them e.g. out of a phone they bought before the ban is something different - that would be a breach of contract from Google side.
When a company has an almost complete monopoly and they decide to bar someone from service, how is that not hurting them?
If you run a website that earns revenue based on incoming users and Google cuts you off, how is that not damaging you? You could use every single competitor and still not even get a quarter as much traffic as Google.
If this is supposed to lead to the NAP, physical violence is not the only way a person's agency can be restricted or living quality can be reduced. (What I would define as "hurt" here)
I absolutely disagree. In Google's case, their service have become an integral part to using the internet - and the internet has become an integral part of daily life. So such a block would absolutely have consequences.
> Note that locking them e.g. out of a phone they bought before the ban is something different - that would be a breach of contract from Google side.
Then it would as well be breach of contract to lock me out of the Play Store until I agreed to an updated ToS. Apparently this can still be done if the old ToS contains the right clauses. So I suspect the phone ban would work similarly.
Is the consumer being harmed? That’s the only question that matters in anti-trust. That mom and pop can’t compete isn’t a symptom of a monopoly, it’s a symptom of mom and pop not doing more to be the best choice. Mom and pop could compete if they had a better, cheaper product. If you want to compete — be better than the competition. Many startups are not — that isn’t the fault of Google.
Yes, e.g. by stiffling sale of alternative Android-based operating systems, as the EU just concluded. Google uses their market power and control over Android to give competing OSes a disadvantage, whether or not they would be better than Android/Google Play.
It seems a bit ridiculous to call a multi-year investigation by the EU's anti-trust agency "calling in my friends", but ok.
The most severe thing they did was give retailers a hard choice: Either they only sell phones with Google's Android distribution (AOSP+Google Play) or they only sell phones with no-name AOSP distributions. They cannot sell both.
As missing out on the revenue from Google Play-based phones would be financially irresponsible, this choice had only one viable option: Not selling any other AOSP-based OS except Google's.
Therefore Google effectively made competing AOSP-based projects extremely hard to sell, regardless of their quality.
So, genuine question. If some company (with sufficiently deep pockets) decided to buy up all land, buildings, roads, infrastructure, etc that makes up a city and then decided that certain groups of persons are no longer allowed to tresspass its private property and must therefore leave the city, would you be ok with that?
When a company completely dominates a field they get different rules to prevent them from taking over every related field one at a time. "It's their product" doesn't cut it as a member of our society when that means they can control entire industries and jack up prices.
Having a single company own one industry after another is completely antithetical to the idea of capitalism, and if we're not going to do capitalism then we might as well start taxing Google even more to pay for public services, which I am sure they also don't want
All of those alternatives together don't even provide a fraction of the service that google provides.
The monopoly takes control and keeps prices higher than they would be with competition. New competition comes along every now and then but a monopoly just has to compete heavily for a short time to put the new comes out of business and then it's back to mining the market. This is how monopolies work and what anti trust legislature is supposed to stop.
Based on your comments here, I have to ask. Is there any situation you can think of where the government should step in to break up a company, short of violence or breaking a contract?
Imagine street signs use polarized glasses (or something, I'm not an optics). I can see only those signs whose glasses I where.
I choose to wear google glasses. Everyone does, the competition is pretty good but google has been around for so long that I just don't really bother with anything else.
Now google takes down some signs. Am I really going to carry 3 pairs of glasses (N pairs, M are relevant) in order to figure out what street I'm on? or am I just going to walk a block to the next street and use the service google hasn't arbitrarily decided to destroy.
Google doesn't keep others out of the search market through any other means than just being better...
They have 98% market share in europe. They also provide the main revenue source (AdWords) and the most important implementation of the web stack (Chrome) - which fitted with mandatory automated updating. If you combine those factors, they are in a position where they can to a large part dictate what the de-facto standards for a successful website are. They can also rapidly change those standards or choose to promote or bury certain technologies.
If that is not an advantage over competitors, I don't know what is.
And this is just for the web. On Android - about half the worldwide market for mobile apps - they are not even a market participant at all. They are basically the government.
Quick experiment you can try to check if Google is blocking competition:
1) navigate to bing.com
2) do a search
If it works, congratulations; Google isn't blocking competition. The 98% market share is probably because the market is winner-take-all, and people don't see a need to use a new competitor that's even equivalently-effective over one they are already comfortable with.
Imagine you run a website. Some day, for whatever reason, Google is blacklisting you. Are you going to say "eh, no big deal, I'll just have my customers use Bing instead"?
Your customers already know how to get to your website: yourdomain.com.
Do you mean "Some day, for whatever reason, Google stops directing traffic to your website of people who don't know who you are, for free?"
Sounds like it's time to spend some money on advertising.
Their ability to kick a bunch of traffic towards you or refrain from doing so makes them a market-maker, but they share that with newspaper and television networks. It doesn't make them a monopoly. It's not their fault or responsibility if people don't "tune in" to the Bing channel.
You haven’t interacted with many average users, have you? When instructed to go to “yourdomain.com”, they’ll bring up google and search for yourdomain.com. If it doesn’t appear in google search results, it effectively doesn’t exist to an enormous segment of users.
You deserved it because you served an ad that google didn't like the style of. Also their adblocker in chrome is fine too because that's not a conflict of interest.
Market share does not equal monopoly. Why aren’t Europeans building better search? It isn’t because of Google, it’s because of the risk-adverse tendencies of investors in Europe. If you pitched a search engine to a Euro-VC, you wouldn’t even get asked for a deck. Europe isn’t very innovation driven: they prefer the 2x rather than the 200x. The proof is simple: just look at the flow of European investment money: rarely do they invest in high-risk, high-reward ventures. While in the US, you can raise money for almost anything.
This is how they would do it. When Microsoft ware being ruled against for anti trust, they would have forced them to split the operating systems business from the rest of their product businesses.
My guess would be that google would get broken up in a way that separated things that were strategically vertically integrated, say, search+android (their big platforms for directing you at their services) and things like youtube, maps, ect. which are services to be consumed.
Technically, it would almost be easier to rewrite Google from scratch than to split it up. Google is a giant monorepo, so anything can depend on anything else. Also, all their services run on the same data centers.
How does splitting Google benefit the consumer? Is the consumer being harmed right now? Are they being price gouged or forced to use inferior products?
The need to break up monopolies isn't about the consumers as much as it is about having a competitive marketplace, where other businesses didn't have to struggle against googles ability to self promote itself. Markets work best when companies can compete on as close to equal terms as possible (which these days we only really see during the emergence of a new industry).
I agree with almost everything you said, except that RSS was never as popular as Twitter is now. Copying and pasting a URL is too technical, and Live Bookmarks were the wrong UX all around. Mailing lists are still more popular than RSS ever was.
In retrospect, if Firefox had used a New Tab Page with an RSS driven feed like what they do with Pocket now, we'd probably still be using it today. Too bad 2005 Mozilla didn't have UX designers calling the shots.
Do you have any examples of these things taking place in reality or is it just "possible" stuff. And Google did not kill RSS lol, it was always super niche.
> Keep fining them more and more money
> until they stop anti-competitive practices?
I believe you're referring to the EU's fines against Google here. In that case that's pretty much the only weapon the EU has. They can ultimately deny Google market access to the EU, and argue that case at the WTO, or seize Google's assets in the EU, but they can't decide to split up a US-based legal entity.
The EU also cannot prevent Google from buying US startups, furthering they monopoly position. And US startups get more funding because they might be bought by Google.
Technology often leads to a natural monopoly as it has high fixed costs and low variable costs.
One way I can see changing this dynamic is using open source services. That way anyone is able to clone, improve or change them. Provide consumer choice.
However businesses are aiming for monopolies. Crowd funding and open source might change the dynamic.
It's probably too late for search as the lead is too far. I also doubt most people care to solve a problem before it happens.
Maps is okay, search is okay. Maps that can take signal from search to figure out what people care about, and search that can utilize geographic signal to guess what a person might want as an answer for "restaurants near me" is huge.
Personal opinion: the fact that type of sharing hasn't happened with open source services speaks volumes about the priorities of the open-source communities and is the single-biggest argument in favor of allowing large corporations leeway to create big cool things with big data. I don't see anyone else stepping up to solve the hard problems like this.
Even if everything about search was open source, how would an upstart competitor possibly compete on the hardware front? A single Google-style data center would imo be an insurmountable capital cost.
if there were an anti-trust court case, maybe a court would decide that Google is required to allow, say, a restaurant review site, to use Google Cloud on an equal footing with Google's own restaurant review service.
it reminds me of the decision where ATT was ultimately required to allow user-owned telephones to connect to its wired network. (in earlier times, ATT only let phones leased from and owned by ATT to connect to its network)
You could say the same about shipping companies, airlines or car companies. Yet, competition is everywhere despite high capital costs. Even space exploration has competition. High capital costs aren’t anti-competitive.
True, though I'm coming to conclude that's only explaining a portion of the dynamic. Technlogy also produces points of control -- either of exclusion or coercion.
Ignoring the cynic in me that tells me that nothing will change, makes me think that the right answer is probably less to do with breaking apart or changing google but more likely the establishment of personal data privacy rights in the US. Once it’s more expensive to collect everything about us, companies like google will have a hard time.
I don’t think we’d realistically introduce laws like this until the citizens united decision is overturned. Until then the US political system is owned by the rich.
I don't see what the problem with google collecting my information is. You are more likely to have your data leaked by a careless or vengeful webmaster after visiting a small personal website than a massive corporate website like google.com. If you visit any website , your IP can be logged.
If I visit a "small personal website" such as a blog, they're not going to know much more about me than my IP address, which pages I viewed, and possibly an inbound link ID.
One of the big things I find scary about Google is the sheer centralization of data. For a typical user of Google services, Google will have their complete browsing and search history, including "incognito", 24/7/365 location history, hundreds of voice recordings (perhaps some taken without user intent), advertisement tracking data, the complete email inbox and outbox, IM history, Android application history, documents and other files stored on Drive, contacts, possibly call and text history, and thousands of photographs (including ones intended to be private). There's a lot of harm one could do against a person with that kind of information.
If you required Google to license either their algorithmic search index or their search ad marketplace to other companies, it would have a dramatic effect on the competitive dynamics of the search market worldwide.
Forcing the search business to open up and be overseen and governed by a transparent boardroom is probably the best way to go about it.
Since search has 90% market share and creates 90% of revenue, it needs to be both made into a standards organization and separated from google sufficiently enough that Google begins to pay better attention to the profitability and development of the other products and other bets.
I think they did it for investors, not for the sake of regulators. Investors were, I think, beginning to get a little tired of Google's string of goofy product flops — investors wanted Google to focus on what makes it money: ads.
I doubt regulators have ever suggested breaking up a company into a bunch of dependent subsidiaries. There's probably not an office at the DoJ where lawyers are turning over tables and screaming 'you have foiled us again with your restructuring shenanigans, Google'.
I've always been curious about that. Is a parent company + subsidiaries immune from anti-trust laws in the US? I mean, I'm sure Alphabet still shares Google search data across its subsidiaries--which is the real monopoly power concern.
It's probably a lot less about anti-trust and a lot more about bankruptcy protection.
With the companies logically divided, Alphabet can choose devote $XYZ money to some specific initiative and have a guarantee that they're liable for AT MOST that much money. If the sub-company completely mis-manages its assets and goes belly-up, its failure doesn't impact e.g. Google or Waymo (in any deeper way than opportunity cost of the money going to the other sub-company instead of those). Bankruptcy responsibility stops at the owning company and doesn't trickle up to the assets of the company that owns that company, in general.
It's a common pattern for movie studios---Hollywood studios build out a short-lived company to own every film production to insulate themselves from liability and financial disaster.
It's not complicated. But for some reason everyone misses the obvious. You go after the people responsible for taking these actions, not the "company" itself as an ethereal creation. If someone (or multiple people, as here) are in violation of Title 15, they are committing felonies according to the law. These felonies happen to be punishable by up to 10 years in prison, in addition to steep fines. However, the fines for the people who would be found guilty wont' make a dent so it won't deter them. Which is why you send them to jail. And, BTW, that's 10 years per count. If, for example these people are found guilty of multiple violations, send them to jail for a decade for each violation. Problem solved. No executives would be engaging in this activity anymore. And Title 15 definitely, absolutely supports the prosecution of both companies as entities and the individuals behind it. It also makes the mere attempt to monopolize any aspect of trade or business a felony. You don't even have to succeed - you just need to try to fuck people over. Also, it should be noted that harm does not need to be proved under this law. This was by design because the original architects of these antitrust laws recognized that prices could actually be lower because 1) they can afford to seek lower profit margins due to size/scale or that 2) these large companies can subsidize a business unit with a more profitable one to destroy competitors in the other. This is the tactic Amazon is using. Amazon has small profits margins when you look at the company as a whole. If you look at the retail business, which is what they are most famous for, they have staggering losses every quarter, usually to the tune of 15-20% for that massive business unit. If they didn't have their other business units they would be force to raise product prices and fees substantially just to break even, let alone profit. What Amazon is doing in this regard is supposedly illegal. Like blatantly, black-letter-law illegal - and has been for around 100 years. Yet no one is prosecuting them. That doesn't even touch upon the crap they do with sales taxes and determining nexus. And let's not forget that for anything Amazon sells on its own marketplace they won't face their marketplace fees, which usually are around 15%.
"Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $100,000,000 if a corporation, or, if any other person, $1,000,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding 10 years, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court."
You've got it backwards, and I find that way of thinking quite dangerous.
You have to go to the root of the problem to solve it, and the root is that corps are fundamentally driven towards monopolistic practices by competition. If it's legal, and it improves the bottom line corps __have__ to do it. Not should or will, __have__ to. Because if they don't someone else will and they'll die.
Need to treat corps like the organisms that they are. More than the sum of their parts, and with their own agency.
Agree with you on your main point, but the conclusion you draw is strange. Yes, they are driven towards monopolistic practices and if something is legal, it will be done. Totally agree. But that's precisely why Title 15 exists. The government/society sets the rules of what is deemed acceptable and allowed to be done in pursuit of profit. If you violate those rules - rules which everyone else follows and is expected to follow, you have committed a serious offense according to the law. Why would/should that not result in prosecution? Because it's an "organism" that acts as a separate entity from a regular person? Fine, Title 15 allows for the prosecution of the entity itself so you can charge the entity but it also includes the ability to charge the individuals within the entity that acted in violation of the law". Make no mistake, in basically every one of these examples I have ever seen, there is most definitely a person or group of people that discussed the company's action/policy and decided to break the law. You think the decision at Google to promote their own products and put competitors on page 4 just magically happened? No. A person (i.e. product manager) or a group of people sat in a room and discussed how to increase profits and actively made that decision. They deserve to be individually charged for their actions and the company should be charged because they were all acting on behalf of the firm. The lawyers for these companies aren't stupid. But they know these laws are not being enforced...from the article:
"Some were investigated, but only superficially, the government just really isn't enforcing our antitrust laws." That quote from the article was in reference to challenging the mergers, but the same larger body of law includes Title 15. And if they aren't even challenging these mergers properly, you know for damn sure they aren't enforcing the rest of Title 15 properly because that takes much more work on their part. These laws exist for a very, very good reason. As soon as you start strongly enforcing these laws, this problem will go away. These aren't obscure laws we're talking about. These are part of the bedrock of our laws regarding competition and fair practices.
EDIT: It is precisely because the rule of law barely exists regarding Title 15 for certain companies that we have this problem. The issue isn't that we are approaching the problem incorrectly - it's that this is a consequence of lawlessness and a lack of enforcement. All the tools to properly address this exist already and don't really require adjustment, just enforcement.
Back in the day, I loved AltaVista. And then I dicovered Google. And found that it consistently gave me better results. At least at first, Google grew because its stuff worked better than the competition's.
Still, it is pretty clear that Google now excludes competitors through discrimination in search results. But it's hard to prove, because search algorithms are so bloody complicated. And because SEO warfare is so intense. Google can just claim that any discrimination is just collateral damage.
> Google is the gatekeeper for-- for the World Wide Web, for the internet as we know it.'
Sad but true. So other than DDG, are there any good privacy-friendly search services? Startpage seems to just repackage Google. Also, are there any search services that are less censored than Google?
> [Google] denied it was a monopoly in search or search advertising, citing many competitors including Amazon and Facebook.
This goes to Peter Thiel's point (like him or not for other reasons): all businesses claim to not be monopolies when talking to regulators or critics while they claim to be monopolies when talking to investors.
It's easy. Want to be a monopoly for investors? Just describe whatever is arbitrarily unique and claim that your market is specific to to that. Want to be a non-monopoly? Just claim that your scope is broad enough to encompass many other businesses.
Or wait, are you saying that they don't realize that there's anything except Facebook? And yes, I can vaguely remember when all I knew was CompuServe and Econet. And AOL, which only idiots used ;)
> Or wait, are you saying that they don't realize that there's anything except Facebook?
Something like that. Maybe they realise but they don't care. Want to read the news? You check out CNN's Facebook page for latest posts. Want to sell something? Use the marketplace.
For whatever website most of them would like to visit for information there is a Facebook page available.
- many search engines are used at once
- searches are proxied through a third-party provider
For example, if you type "ipv6" into searx.me you'll get results from Google, Bing, Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, and dozens of other sites. It's not perfect privacy, but I generally get better results than using only one search engine and there's a small boost to privacy.
The only thing you have to look out for is the "images" tab. It's usually fine, but unless you turn on the adult content filter there's almost always and least one pornographic image somewhere in the results. I'm not sure which search engine is responsible for those results, but I should probably just disable that search engine for my queries.
See https://finder.cool/ . I am the creator (trying to do my part?). It is more a "site finder" than search engine, but it's a good start. Growing every day. Unique: no site prioritization over another. So there is no "SEO". I hope that shakes things up a bit some day. And top level domains are first level citizens. Today it is at around 400000 sites indexed (note these are unique sites, not pages within) and is built to scale and take in all N-billion sites in the world ... which will happen if it gets traction. At the current 400K sites or so, seems to have actually entered the realm of starting to become useful.
Not a joke. Google don't define search as web search but rather "search of any kind of data source you can imagine". Thus Amazon is a search competitor because people often go straight to Amazon and type in what they want rather than go to Google first and maybe see shopping results.
His vastly oversimplified point is that most anti-trust regulation focuses on supply. Owning all of the printing equipment and distribution networks in newspapers gave you leverage. Google is instead a demand-side aggregator (they don't own the content on their product, but own the choke point, which is the consumer facing user experience of having a single, simple, easy to use search engine).
Does anybody else here remember the late 90's when you had to try multiple search engines to get something close to what you were looking for? Google has largely solved that problem and are (IMO rightfully) rewarded for it.
I really like Google and their products. They simply make my life easier. I will admit it would be interesting to see what would happen if search was split up: would that tech improve at a faster pace than it does now? Or would we end up back in the late 90's?
>> Jeremy Stoppelman: They will make you disappear. They will bury you.
I love hearing rich people whine about the monopolies held by even richer people. So much hypocrisy. Without the Silicon Valley tech oligopoly, Jeremy Stoppelman would probably never have been able to raise so much money for Yelp in the first place.
You can tell how mature a company is by how much they talk about their competitors. Startups and players who are really struggling never talk about competitors and try to steer the subject away from them, lest the customer finds another deal. Monopolies often talk about their competitors, because it hides that they're monopolies. Google likes to say that they compete with Microsoft with their Docs suite, with Apple in mobile OS and with Tom Tom on the navigation market. If they were anything like your local startup the only thing they would say is "we're a digital advertising company focusing on search ads, we have 90% of the market and are among the oldest still in the industry".
On HN people are always complaining that google services are unreliable because google shuts down a lot of stuff.
Well I think that's because they try a lot of things too. It's really amazing how they have managed to excel in lots of places. Maps, Office/GSuite, Email, Cloud, Chrome, Android, Waymo, Search...all of these are companies on their own.
Google manages to innovate by trying a lot of things and shutting down what doesn't work. It's like a startup incubator, and perhaps it motivates employees with the potential for big bonuses upon success just like a startup does.
Let's not underestimate timing and luck. Google was there at the right time during the history of the Internet with the right technical solution and the right people. There are lots of very smart people who can do great things but if they're not at the right intersection of time, technology and business, and if they don't get lucky, nothing happens. The company has been steered reasonably well but without that initial trajectory they wouldn't be where they are today.
I believe they are selling the metadata which is a very hard to define information about all machine processed information of every human that use their systems. Now-a-days it is a mine for several large scale social objectives, and so very precious. The way and form they sell it may differ depending of the end-front application. Nevertheless, interesting how they did figure out that people information is a mine of money. So we are their product :)
Cuil. On a serious note, it seems to me that barrier to entry for search is now exponentially higher than it was when they started. I'm not sure if it's even doable with small resources (in proverbial garage) anymore.
Probably not in the sense of the standard Google plays in now being very close to natural-language awareness. You can probably garage up a Webcrawler or a Lycos relatively cheaply, but it's going to feel clunky and complicated relative to the queries Google and Bing can support.
I keep mentioning "restaurants near me" in this thread because it's absolutely killer that's possible now.
I dont know how much money MS do with Bing, but if i were they, i would open source everything to see a lot of Google competitors pop here and there based on their tech, and later buy the most proeminent contenders.
They are locked in to the 2% position, and thats the only alternative i can see to shake things up and have a change to grab more.
They could also provide the pure search index for other companies by using their cloud infra, and charge for the cloud use instead where Bing would be only one of the clients of this open search index.
It was basically the strategy the open source world with the lead of Linux did to them, and were able to take down their dominant monopolistic position over software.
Because of having 90% of the search engine market they have a uniquely comprehensive view into the human mind. I would not be suprised if these huge data aggregation companies lead the race into sentient AI.
I feel like by now Google has enough dirt on anyone to personally ruin them. "Well, why did you look up 'Can you die from eating too much hair?' in 2012?"
If you've got your history enabled (which it is by default -- https://myactivity.google.com), you'll discover how much insight it actually has into your mind.
"Cat videos" and "good restaurants" is not all that people search for.
I've been trying to reconcile the libertarian perspective on this topic with my more-liberal leanings, and I've got to say that I'm perplexed.
Can any libertarians here share their thoughts on the role of government in producing tech monopolies ? Is there any role at all ?
IOW, would we see the same problem if there were still private AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy networks instead of just the one Internet ? And yes, I'm putting aside the question of whether the absence of the public internet would be good or bad for society.
I can't see how you wouldn't just end up with one company buying out the others and becoming a monopoly, anyway, but I'm open to ideas as to how that would be mitigated by competition. There's also the issue of companies with deep pockets, or investors with deep pockets, just doing "free" until everyone else is gone, which, for some reason, seems to be in vogue now. But, I suspect that private networks would be very careful about letting any one participant acquire too much network power in one area.
Do you believe in free speech? Do you believe in free choice? Do you think that individuals in a city/state/country should be able to talk to others in a different city/state/country?
Is the Great Firewall of China a good thing or deeply evil?
Anyone is free (outside China and a few other places) can install their favorite version of Linux, use Opera/Firefox/whatever, use protonmail, search on duckduckgo.
Why should the government FORCE people to use a different source of information than the one that they prefer?
Advertisers are leaving local monopolists/oligopolists (local TV stations, newspapers, cable, yellow pages) and choosing a different, cheaper, more effective, and more flexible option to reach customers. Producers and consumers were very badly served by these old incumbents, why should the government step in to protect those old and malevolent businesses?
It's the same thing as Uber vs Taxis. Taxis are racist, expensive, government enforced oligopolies that exploit the drivers, have bad service, don't want to take credit cards (don't even mention Apple/Google/Samsung/AliPay), and aren't available when you really need one. Do you prefer app enabled car service or the old style Taxi, like the ones using terrorism in Barcelona to protect their monopoly?
We have an information commons with infinite choice and network effects. Same as with language. If you're comfortable using criminal law to require individuals to speak a certain language in private, then sure government should control what companies and products people can choose to engage with. The New York Times, Cox, Bertelsmann, and Reed-Elsevier would love that, along with Xi Jinping. Just realize that you are consciously strengthening old corrupt oligopolies and annihilating free speech and freedom of choice.
There's an implicit assumption in most of these discussions that beating Google Search is a matter of money and scale, and while there are some evidence for that (e.g. unreasonable effectiveness of having lots of data), it is not a certain conclusion, it is only a conclusion if your goal is to beat Google by making an incrementally better classical search engine. It is indeed hard to beat something by offering something "about the same", when the cost for the consumer is already effectively zero from a monetary perspective.
But this doesn't rule out someone coming up with a disruptive, radically better search. Take this as a thought experiment, somewhere out there, is another Albert Einstein, working on his magnum opus, an AGI based search engine. He has a mind blowing advancement in AGI, like GR was in Physics, that will completely eclipse classical search AND deep learning approaches AND he knows it.
Demos shown to investors are mind blowing, and he quickly raises enough funds to launch a competitor. There is whisper and talk all around the valley. Google tries to make an acquisition, but he and his investors turn it down, because they can see how valuable the tech is. By the time Google realizes their offer should have been much bigger, it's getting traction and taking off like a rocket ship. Now Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, Amazon, Microsoft, are all looking to acquire it.
Yes, there are arguments that being the "default" is hard to dislodge. But Chrome dislodged IE. Google Search dislodged AltaVista and Yahoo. iOS and Android dislodged Windows. But better technology if it is better enough and marketed correctly can convince consumers to switch. Remember, Chrome was fighting a common refrain that "browsers are done, and who needs another browser?" Efforts like the Chrome Comic Book (https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html) and eye-catching early Chrome ads (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCgQDjiotG0) was able to overcome consumer inertia of having IE pre-installed.
When the iPod, and a rumored Apple Phone was proposed (but before it was first demoed), we had the same naysayers claiming that a new upstart in a space they had never been in before couldn't possibly defeat the established players like Blackberry or Nokia.
But if you create a sufficiently, radically better product, you in effect, create an entirely new platform or market, NOT simply a competitor within the existing market. This is what any hypothetical competitor to Google Search has to do. They need to change what Search means. It can't mean SERP and PageRank, there are marginal gains to be had. It has to be a radically different kind of search experience.
Disclaimer, I work for Yelp (a backend infra team)
TFA includes, although not clearly enough, at least one example of exactly this behavior (Google being big hurting consumer's) in their scheme to squash Yelp by inserting their own local results (with big ui) on the front page. There have been multiple studies showing the content on Yelp is far more evolved than Google's content (in # of ratings, # of reviews, average quality of reviews, # and quality of photos).
This is even with Google leveraging it's dominant market share in the mobile space to proactively push users to rate business simply by an AI connecting the dots on location. These nag alerts are not even something that can be disabled without also disabling all of Android location-tracking! Which is very irritating for me as I find many such features (for example, location history has saved my rear several times when I lost items.)
This isn't a fanboy battle like Sega vs Nintendo.
I'm not anti-google, hell I'm totally bought into their ecosystem (have had an Android since the g1, use a Google home, Google WiFi, Android TV, use all Google's office suit, Gmail, etc).
But even if you personally dislike Yelp (that's fine), it is simply a fact that Yelp has superior content in the local niche. Google is intentionally burying a competitor which has a verifiably huge quality advantage in the local review niche rather than improving their product/content enough for it to compete naturally. This IS anti-competitive behavior which IS hurting consumer's.
It even has downstream impacts on consumer's experiences within Yelp itself! Another comment complains about Yelp bugging you to install the mobile client rather than just show the result - this is absolutely a response to the existential threat of Google continuing to use their search monopoly to prevent fair competition. For better or worse it's the best shelter from the Google: at least until they start doing the same thing with Play Store...
This isn't even only a Yelp problem. Why does Expedia, for example, push users so hard to get the mobile app? Because Google has inserted their own travel booking widgets at the top of the results as well! Why is venmo killing off the website version in favor of mobile only? Maybe it has something to do with what you see at the top of a Google search for 'send money'.
The thing that is SO important to stress is that even if you are a Google fan (as I am), or perhaps ESPECIALLY if you are, anti-competitive behavior like this only results in hurting consumers by killing off competition. Turns out competition results in improvements for consumers.
It's their own business. That's like saying your sales team is colluding with your engineering team. Also, no one forces anyone to use Google. And am I to assume that you do everything you can to help your competitors?*
* I say these things as someone who has many problems with Google--and as someone who does in fact assist his competitors :O
IMHO Google should be regulated as a utility. Search is obviously as key to modern life as is electricity, water, highways, etc. Why do we leave this critical infrastructure completely under the control of one corporation, which is itself under the control of just a tiny handful of billionaires?
Now, I mostly agree with Sergey and Larry’s investments, and I love the long term approach and big picture view they take. But Google is still too powerful. The democratic will of the people is being disregarded here, and that is simply wrong.
I agree that Google has a large control over the search market (and others), but it does not need to be regulated as a utility. Largely because you can just... switch. Really easily in fact.
I've been using DuckDuckGo.com as my primary search engine for the past 3 years and have never looked back. The results are most of the time better (sometimes worse, but so it goes).
Google is a Delaware Corporation with substantial operations in California. Who runs it in your ideal world? The people of Delaware? US federal government?
If you want a different Google for each jurisdiction, how small down do you give the control? A Google for France? A Google for each department? A Google for each Commune?
How does this approach fit with WTO and EU rules, not to mention the US Constitution?
What do you do if Google reacts against your move? Moves its employees/servers/incorporation? Do you run a Great Firewall of X to stop people in your area from using Google?
Hard to argue for this when ISPs themselves are not regulated as a utility, even though you must have an ISP to use Google, in many municipalities they are just as much of a monopoly as Google, and they have engaged in even more anticompetitive tactics than Google.
If you want to regulate the whole Internet infrastructure - from device to ISP to web browser to search engine - as a utility you might have more of a case, but that gets a lot more complicated.
While I agree with your concern about Google's enormous market share, Google isn't the sole owner of web search, and you're free to use another search engine instead. I've been using DDG exclusively for about two years already.
It would make much more sense to regulate ISPs, as people are "stuck" with them and don't really have the option not to use internet.
Hijacking this thread to share a very unpopular opinion: It requires an entity with the amount of resources, tech, talent and data they have to develop an AGI and eventually ASI.
I personally would prefer them to develop it, than say Amazon. Or worse Tencent or Baidu i.e an authoritarian government. This has been Larry and Sergey's motivation from the get go. This is obviously naive but I believe the ad machine and the power and money that came of it is only a means to an end. A real AI has always been the target.
Yes an open source consortium like OpenAI would be better but that is honestly not realistic. Who knows, it might go the way of Kubernetes and TensorFlow. Open source the framework and offer the best service to run it on.
Unless there is a massive war on the horizon this development is inevitable. There are downsides, as with all powerful tech. But in 300 years humanity might live in post-scarcity society and finally be done with the fear and hate for each other that comes with inequality. Sorry for the emotional rant.
This is blind optimism. I prefer to life like this. But we might of course also end up in a Blade Runner/Resident Evil/1984 type situation.
To paraphrase some Cal/UC Berkeley professor that I cannot remember, he said that the problem with scaling is that when you go up a magnitude or more, you may need a qualitatively different solution for the same problem. Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and their team have time and time again managed to design and build state-of-the-art, qualitatively different solutions (MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner). And now their team's attention is on AI...
2016 (might be more recent ones) update on AI at Google http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/3/16/jeff-dean-on-large...
Video of full lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSaZGT4-6EY
EDIT: Sanjay Ghemawat and Jeff are like the dynamic duo of large scale systems engineering.