How did Google get so big?
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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.
Also ops is engineering and has been since before Google existed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate-owned_life_insurance
I can't believe he left CG behind :(
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrows%E2%80%93Wheeler_transf...
Dozens have companies have benefited from the diaspora of DEC, and now Sun.
"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.
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.
Chrome allows you as well.
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.
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.
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.
The one area where Google search provides me with a notably better experience is in image search.
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.
For instance I just made a completely random search on Google just to see what it would look like: https://svkt.org/~simias/up/20180727-235325_tou.png
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.
Yes, Danger/HipTop, YouTube, and Keyhole are arguably the three smartest acquisitions that Google made.
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.)
Googles AI blows every other companies out of the water.
> Just because you can build a bigger bridge doesn't mean you're a good car designer.
What? How is that analogous?
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.
Also TPU2 is the only decent alternative to NVidia hardware in production, so that's a decent sign.
You might actually be thinking of Jeff's Stanford talk from a few years ago (2011). Slide 21 of:
https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
Ensure your design works if scale changes by 10X or 20X
but the right solution for X often not optimal for 100X
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."
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.
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.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1yzvh3/refutat...
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/61goq1/softwar...
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...
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.
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.
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.
No such thing is happening with bitcoin. You can't scale something to internet levels if its banned in half the worlds research labs.
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.
When you say "users", what do these users "use" Bitcoin for besides speculating on its price?
Do you know of any real usage?
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.
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.
"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."
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. :-(
>"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 say "in terms of revenue and profit...". Oh! Great point. I'd say you are right. What if you were to frame it in other terms?
I mean if the entirety of Google can be summed up in 3 sentences, what topics in the world do you consider to have depth?
Imo it's looking at a Shakespeare sonnet and saying 'yeah it's fucking poem'
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.
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.
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.
And now we're at the point where more than half of all digital ad revenue in some countries are pocketed by Facebook and Google.
Or attract more people to use their services to sell more ads
[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.
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.
AFAIK the terms didn't limit any other operating systems not based on Android.
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.
Is Firefox also dumping, since it's available for free, funded by donations and the default search provider?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson
Maybe you want to offer a rebuttal, or maybe you just want to insist he's jealous.
"Let them eat cake"
> 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.
Good job.
They tend to release great products, their problem is that they just don't always do it first.
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.
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.
The competition sucked and they have yet to make something better.
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.
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.
This said, I agree with you on everything else you've said.
I'd argue that having a single entity have such power over something so critical as being bad by nature. Concentrated power is the root of evil.
Google has too much power. They should be broken up for hte good of society.
Every major US tech company is being fined in the EU nowadays. Poor EU regulation shouldn't dictate US policy.
And what exactly would "US policy" be in this context?
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.
I don't use it because it isn't better. I'm not going to switch to something of equal value. Make something better and then I'll switch.
You're saying Google provided you with exactly the information you were looking for in the first place. And for free, btw.
That clearly can't be allowed to stand.
Awful indeed.
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.
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?
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?
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.
I don't understand why you're resorting to metaphor, I think what I said was pretty clear. Can you support the statement that all knowledge is good?
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.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jul/20/graveyard-ear...
If you are not for technological progress, is the corollary true, that you are for technological stagnation? Is not tech stagnation also tech attrition?
At least read the pagers linked. I strongly recommend the book in its entirety.
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.
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.
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:
- Xerox PARC: ~$450 million (http://articles.latimes.com/2001/dec/12/business/fi-parc12)
- Bell Labs: $6 billion (https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2015/08/comparing-research-bud...)
These sources might be imperfect.
I guess it's totally different because google only uses their duopoly position in ads to finance everything else.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
a skeptical journalist or consumer might immediately conclude that Google is unfairly influencing government to create an unlevel playing field.
but i'm genuinely curious to hear how Google would spin it.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
I am sorry, but Braess's paradox [0] is real. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox
ASML. The entire SV depends on it.
I wonder if Snap suffers from similair thinking.
I'm not sure if the same was also true for doubleclick (I don't know enough about ad tech).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
Here's a screenshot I took on July 18th: https://twitter.com/ocdtrekkie/status/1019593753227681793
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.
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.
Because I just did a few hours ago, and its since been taken down.
(I work at Google, but I submitted this report via a funnel that afaik can be accessed by the public)
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.)
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.
[1]:https://support.google.com/google-ads/troubleshooter/4578507...
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.
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.
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.
Chrome's success could be due to Google having an ad for Chrome at the top of the most visited site of the internet.
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
> 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.
It would be interesting to see how many of these acquisitions are still around. I think survivorship bias is strong here.
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.
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?
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
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/14/technology/14DoubleClick....
Talent (especially vetted talent) is both scarce and hard (expensive) to identify.
https://www.thenation.com/article/transcript-breakdown-are-a...
I'm genuinely not sure what the best way to go about this would be.
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.
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.
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.
And they all make money. so they can be split from the rest of the company.
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
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.
[0] unless there is an existing contract
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.
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.
What if Google closed shop? Would you force them to reopen again? What if Google never existed?
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.
This is like if one company owned the street signs, and just took them down arbitrarily.
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?
I'm gonna stretch my metaphor a lot.
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.
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
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- typical HN response.
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.
Sounds like it's time for companies that can't get in Google search results to start doing ad spots about search engine choice.
Ubuntu once switched from Google to Yahoo in its Firefox as the default search engine, citing higher payments from Yahoo.
> Keep fining them more and more money
> until they stop anti-competitive practices?
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.
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)
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.
I don't see why that type of sharing can't happen with open source services. Though it would require more customer consent.
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.
This is the basis of all antitrust laws.
Potentially, yes. Google abuses their search monopoly and ads duopoly to kill off competition in other areas.
They use their browser control to control internet standards.
They do things like effectively kill RSS via EEE style tactics.
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.
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.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/2
"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."
And the term "person" includes both companies/entities as well as people. "The term “person” means a natural person or an organization." https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?width=840...
Send these pricks to jail.
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.
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.
That's what I want.
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.
That's a joke, right?
- 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.
And that reminds me. I had forgotten MetaCrawler. As I recall, that was my favorite between AltaVista and Google.
> That's a joke, right?
I don't think they're joking. There are a lot of people, whole countries of them, for whom Facebook is literally the whole of the Internet.
But can one search the Internet via Facebook?
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 ;)
I can't remember if this was discontinued or not, but there's been varying levels of outcry about it.
(Disclosure: I work at Google)
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.
So does Google have a Facebook page? ;)
Did media and corporations have a presence on AOL?
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.
- Google: https://stratechery.com/company/google/
- Regulation: https://stratechery.com/topic/regulation/
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).
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?
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.
I think facebook would do a better job for the advertiser in this case.
why did CBS News bother to say this? pretty much no one has ever believed a company gets that big by accident.
Who has the other 8%?
Yahoo! is also Bing.
So DDG is essentially Bing.
Has some interesting numbers. Claims 3.9% bing, 2% yahoo/Verizon, 2% baidu, .6% yandex, .5% shenma
"Cat videos" and "good restaurants" is not all that people search for.
I keep mentioning "restaurants near me" in this thread because it's absolutely killer that's possible now.
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.
Does that mean all of China is <10%? That seems surprising.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And it's actually a big deal.
* I say these things as someone who has many problems with Google--and as someone who does in fact assist his competitors :O
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'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).
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.
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?
I would content that your personal opinion that search be a regulated utility does not reflect "the will of the people"
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.
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.
Generally looking forward to your opinions.