The thesis that Google was only good because they didn’t face competition gets it completely backwards. There were tons of search engines when Google started, their dominance came from having a lightweight killer product, not the other way around.
Originally they were indeed quite a good search engine amidst a sea of less good ones, in part because their tech was simply better, in part because they weren't as-yet merged with an advertisement company. Like Page and Brin put this up themselves as a reason why their contemporary competitors sucked[1].
Though their subsequent en-shittening has been in a relative competitive vacuum, really Bing sometimes with different front-ends.
I think today their main sticking power is how integrated they are. Not just with their browser, but the search engine with maps and what have you. Like if you build a search engine that just does internet search, users are confused why it can't tell them local restaurants' opening hours.
Also many of those search engines were are least partly focused on being a big curated directory of large/preferred sites.
In contrast, early-Google was amazing at bringing in the other stuff from small sites (and web-forums) that didn't have an advertising/marketing budget.
I really miss those trees of categorised sites however because they were great for discovery of similar sites as well whole topic areas. We lost something too when we stopped doing that and replaced it with the similar site search engines and roughly tracking popularity of sites.
Search engines/a publically traversable & reality reflecting of the physically accessible WWW is by design outlawed. DMCA saw to that. Now, if you want that, you have to spider. The moment you create that representation and make it available to anyone else for any level of financial gain, and it's all over.
...And given all the assholery of the typical scraper these days, yhe Web is increasingly having to do away with good faith serving to novel bots; because assholes gonna asshole.
> Search engines/a publically traversable & reality reflecting of the physically accessible WWW is by design outlawed. DMCA saw to that.
Do you mean in the sense that the DMCA forces everyone to censor their data on demand, and therefore data cannot be both accurate (containing certain items) and public?
> Now, if you want that, you have to spider.
Isn't "that" already the same thing as "spidering"?
Or do you mean that "you" (i.e. the data consumer) have to do your own in-house spidering, because nobody is allowed to centralize the work and then redistribute (complete) data?
Other search engines at the time (I'm thinking Altavista, Lycos, AskJeeves, Yahoo) were plagued with ads and also their search results were not as good. You might find what you're looking for on the eighth page of results, whereas with Google it was the first result practically all the time. It loaded, fast, it had no ads, it was magic. That's when the "I feel lucky" button meant something (before it was killed off years later in the name of serving up more ads)
That is exactly the thesis and the point of that whole section! I’m sorry you got downvoted for saying it, perhaps your tone was too blunt.
It’s not that Google was created as a monopoly with no competition — there’s a neat little graph about what happened to Yahoo in there! It’s that the experience of using Google and the Google suite was at its peak in their clear & unchallenged market leader phase.
You say that in a way that suggests that Google being a market leader is what caused or allowed them to develop a peak user experience. To me - and I suspect others too, given the downvotes - this causality is in the opposite direction to what common sense dictates. And simply pointing at the correlation doesn't help prove your case.
To me, it looks like Google achieved a market dominance because they had a great product, but quite quickly they began practising anti-competitive behaviours and before long the user experience began to degrade.
> not only are technology monopolies “not so bad”, and not only ought company founders seek to build them, but they are in fact actively good, create massive positive externalities for the public, and are a primary source of innovation for society. When they fail, things actually deteriorate.
The tech sector is fairly unique in that innovative useful products lead quite quickly to a monopoly. That doesn't make the monopoly a good thing. It leads to inefficiencies and degraded consumer experience while the company desperately tries to maintain and suck dry its market share. The author argues that monopolies set the scene for new disruptive technologies to appear, but you could equally well argue the opposite: monopolies slow down progress via a combination of regulatory capture, acquisitions, and anti-competitive practices.
Exactly. Monopolies are always a bad thing. Sometimes they result in a benefit that outweighs that bad, but that situation is temporary 100% of the time.
Consider another area: (personal) computer hardware.
The IBM PC was a big deal. But innovation really exploded when the PC compatibles came on the scene. IBM tried to stop that by switching to a proprietary architecture (MicroChannel). The market rejected that, because a better bus was less important than all the innovation that came through an open bus.
So, yeah. IBM tried to slow down progress so they could suck more profit out of the market, and the market ran them over with a non-proprietary alternative.
I think you're arguing that it doesn't matter when a monopoly tries to slow down progress, because a competitor will then overtake them. It sounds like IBM misjudged the market. This isn't how it always plays out - for example, Amazon forces you not to list your products cheaper elsewhere if you want it displayed as a "Featured" buy. But because the lack of viable alternatives means that most sellers bend over backwards rather than take their business elsewhere.
I don't know if I would entirely characterize it like that. Much of what is bad about the modern internet is the result of very intelligent people ("the brightest minds of my generation...") maximizing and hyper-focusing on a particular form of marketing, monopolization, financialization, and profit seeking, to the detriment of basically anything else.
It's not just "more stupid people are using the internet more", it's also "very smart people have changed the way that 95% of people can interact with the internet."
Stupid people click on adverts. So, businesses promote and foster stupidity.
Large businesses like Facebook, Reddit, and other social media is about collecting the largest pile of ad-clicking morons together in a package and selling access to advertisers.
It was a wonderful place and I’m happy to have lived and saw it for that brief flash before it went supernova. I don’t think people realize what a unique time in history they were alive for and witnessed.
I know it says that you need to strike a good balance between slacking of and competition, but author spends too much time saying that monopoly is good. It is not. It has never been.
I think enshittification live cycle draws a better picture. I think you can outgrow your initial idea. Company grows until the core idea can grow.
That does not end there. Grow is always expected. When you have perfect monopoly, how else can you grow more? You can diversify, you can buy competition. Creating a new idea beside your core idea often does not pan out. Take a look at google+. How much more can you squeeze out of users? You can enshittify. You squeeze, squeeze users, until your product deteriorates and CEOs leave a shall of a company.
Google does not squeeze users because of competition. It has a ton of money. It could innovate, but they decide to squeeze users. Easy money instead of hard work.
Respectfully, there’s a 1,000 word section in the middle about the fundamentally zero-sum nature of media and the competition for consumer eyeballs that I wrote to explain why the stunning success and growth of the mobile internet and walled garden apps is in fact a source of existential competition for Google and their open web.
Google’s share of consumer eyeballs, both direct on their own web properties & indirect via ads displayed on Web 2.0 sites, is smaller now than it was in 2012.
Of course, Google DID innovate. They spawned the modern AI industry. They just totally missed the boat on commercializing it, like many other ossifying monopolies before them.
It was inevitable. The internet was a new (un)natural resource, beautiful and useful for what it was, but all that capitalism inevitably saw it as was a space to make money.
And so, once more, the commons were pissed on and filled with information warfare against consumer minds.
Random quixotic idea: The Constitutional Right To Mental Filtering. (Cannot be signed away through contract.)
So you can't be sued for using blocking software for ads or disliked material, and working around technical roadblocks to that end would be protected. Not just in a browser, but also using a VR headset to hide ads as you walk around.
In the meantime, there's an interesting-but-unusual interpretation of Section 230 [0] that occupies similar legal territory.
Has anyone actually been suedfor personally using blocking software or similar? I could see a company having gone after a company behind blocking software, but suing the user seems suprising.
Very Big Company threatened it, anyway. [0] Even when an "impossible" lawsuit may not succeed, they can effectively harm victims when there is no quick/easy/cheap way to get it dismissed and have the attacker pay a cost for harassment. (Which is why anti-SLAPP laws are important. [1])
> You don’t need aggressive antitrust enforcement to kill them — just wait a while for the march of progress and the innovator’s dilemma to rear their heads.
This is not what happens.
Take Microsoft. It's now 25 years since the antitrust case against them, but since it never actually broke them up, they still have 70% desktop market share and the experience of Windows users continues to degrade over time.
You can say that they lost the mobile market, but that doesn't help anyone still using a PC for work, or stuck with Windows-only software. A new market may outgrow them, but the old market still exists, and why should we want those users to continue to be screwed?
Moreover, the thesis here is that the monopolies are beneficial until they enter the value extraction phase and turn on their customers. But in that case why wouldn't you want to break them up as soon as they do? No need to preserve them after that, their contribution has been made and it's time to smash them to bits so the corpse of what was once greatness can't be commandeered by sociopaths.
Microsoft has 70% desktop market share? They once had 95%. There are real alternatives now, alternatives that are generally supported and that interoperate with everything else. You don't have to be marginalized to use a non-Microsoft desktop.
But, more to the point, consider Sun's motto: "The network is the computer". The action isn't on desktop apps any more. "Computing" is primarily done online, not via locally-running apps. So which OS you run makes little real difference. And more and more of that network access is via phones rather than PCs. The PC OS makes even less difference when you're not using a PC.
The Microsoft antitrust case meant that Microsoft couldn't use its desktop dominance to control the browser (and thereby control the Web). When they lost that case, they lost their ability to control the future. It was a really big deal. The entire internet would not be a Microsoft-controlled walled garden.
> Microsoft has 70% desktop market share? They once had 95%.
And that's the point. It took 25 years from them to drop from 95% to 70%. It happens, but it's not fast. And that's a long time for things to be in a bad way.
> There are real alternatives now, alternatives that are generally supported and that interoperate with everything else. You don't have to be marginalized to use a non-Microsoft desktop.
Which is why it's 70% instead of 95%. But if you've actually used both modern Windows and modern Linux, you might notice that one has ads on the start menu, keeps pushing Microsoft apps and services on you even if you prefer alternatives and heavily pressures you to sign in with a Microsoft account, etc. It's a fairly hostile experience.
And, sure, some people are actually switching. I've heard more people saying they're going to dump Windows 11 for Linux this year than in the ten years prior combined.
But there still plenty of people stuck with it. They have legacy software that isn't supported well or at all on other platforms, or their company is all in on Active Directory and Microsoft Office and those things don't work as well on other platforms but take a big one-time effort to switch away from once they're entangled with your business.
Now suppose there were a dozen companies that had a license to modify and sell Windows, like there had been with Unix. They'd all support legacy Win32 apps but the first one that tried to put ads on the start menu would lose customers to the others. Then they'd start to diverge from each other, so there would be a call to create a compatibility layer so developers could target all of them, which would end up being something like Qt or GTK that can also target Linux and Mac, only all the developers would use it instead of a minority. One of the Micro Bells might go for an open source strategy, and then you get the Windows equivalent of BSD, forcing the others to innovate to gain an advantage. Back in the day people would use Solaris specifically for ZFS and things, even when BSD was free.
What would be the downside of this, compared to what we have now?
I don't recall the Microsoft antitrust case having been about breaking the company up though. The issue at hand was that one company shouldn't ship a web browser preinstalled in the OS, not that the same company shouldn't make both an OS and a web browser.
The initial judgment called for breaking up Microsoft. That was overturned on appeal. (Yes, the case was about Microsoft using OS dominance to dominate the browser market, but breaking up Microsoft was the initial remedy.)
This article is what happens when you start out with an assumption that things are getting ever better and then try to fit actual events into that frame.
Progress is a law of nature and we are building the communist workers' paradise so gulags are good, actually!
"the wheel of progress", "civilizational tech tree", give me break and please consider the idea that sometimes things actually do get worse.
Agreed. The weird thing is that the author explicitly concedes that things are worse now than they were 10 or 20 years ago. They concede that there's no easy way for them to access their own music that they bought. They concede that the internet is less fun; a walled, attention-stealing garden. They concede that corporations are intentionally trying to leasify their products. But they try to squeeze it into their worldview by framing it as a temporary downturn before some great new innovation comes along.
This piece kind of blew my mind. It is kind of like the flip side of the "enshittification" argument. Or another way of looking at the same phenomenon. It's not a perfect alegory or whatever, but it's one of the better ways of talking and thinking about "what went wrong" with the Internet that I've come across.
Those who benefit at the expense of others, get trapped into making up elaborate stories to justify their choices. Unfortunately making up stories, doesn't reduce the number of people who are paying some price or the other. Once that pool grows large enough, we see change. So Slavery got abolished, Colonies got abolished, and most Kings and Queens have been reduced to Tourist Attraction. Its up to the Tech Monopolists, for the sake of their own survival, to pay attention to the growing rumblings.
In some ways I think you can make the argument that we never really moved away from slavery as such. Not really. I’m typing this on an iPhone which is full of components that were mined/created/packaged/shipped by a lot of people who live under semi-terrible to horrible conditions. Some of the materials / components may have been build / gathered by actual slaves through third party contractors who lie to Apple. Apple which probably doesn’t look to closely into this.
I call out Apple here, but Apple is probably one of the better companies out of all the hardware that I own. I’ve even tried to buy my hardware sort of ethically but it’s basically impossible to do so. Which isn’t the only products which are hard to source. Now, I buy clothes which are actually made from the materials up to the final product within the EU, but that’s because I’m working in a well paid job which has a semi tight dress code. A lot of the clothes my children wear is recycled and was originally bought from H&M. A company which at the time some of this was bought were in a big scandal about some of their third party suppliers using child labour.
We have build this nice logistics setup where it’s easy to hide the bad conditions to actual slavery. Unless you care about it specifically you probably don’t even know which of your products were produced in a terrible way.
Slavery is not just forced labor, it's officially accepted arbitrary power of some people over lives of other people, treating people like cattle. It sadly does still exist, but in really small pockets, and is universally deemed unacceptable.
Terrible conditions are much more widespread. But, unlike slavery, this is not forced labor, and it's paid. If handled correctly, giving these people jobs lifts them from poverty. China is probably the biggest example.
But the problem of cultures living in abject poverty is usually not just in the lack of resources, but in predatory and embezzling power structures. Humankind produces more than enough food to feed everyone well; all occurrences of famine are either natural catastrophes or, often on top of theses, of supplies being appropriated and held by local overlords in order to maintain their privileged position, plebs be damned.
Not buying from oppressive regimes does not help the oppressed; buying from oppressive regimes does not help them either. But at least boycotting oppressors gives them less resources to use for strengthening their chokehold.
Slavery was undeniably "good for society", it made certain societies highly successful. See Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Old Dixie. The problem was that the success was very unevenly distributed, and, worse, large swathes of the society lived in a way we currently see as unacceptably bad.
This mostly shows that "society as a whole" is an extremely coarse scale, and should be used with a lot of caution, if at all.
Not only that, ancient Rome/Greece existed in a period where every agricultural society had some level of slavery, it was basically universal - although some places far more than others. For instance, Rome was ~10% slaves, Athens was ~20% slaves, and Sparta was ~95% slaves. Sparta was the worst.[1]
I think this is just the aftermath of the loss of steve jobs' leadership.
If he had been around, I think all kinds of course corrections would have happened and apple would have continued to rise. It would have been more about better and less about money.
