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Comment by ffpip | Hacker News Reader

The reason Google is because of their AI. And the reason their AI is good is because of the massive amount of data they collect by violating privacy. No other company can start right now. Their search engine is years of efforts of collecting every user's data in Chrome for determining 'freshness', page rank and other related stuff.

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You are making the same flawed argument that the DOJ complaint is making: that Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon, some of the largest companies Earth has ever seen, somehow can't afford to compete in search, which is plainly ridiculous.

They could compete, but it would be a money hole. You’d have to spend billions and years to reach some level of parity with Google to persuade enough people to switch, and even then the marketing spend necessary to reach any significant level of switching would be another massive investment.

"wah, this is hard" is not an antitrust case. Anyway it's clearly not all that hard since Bing exists. The fact that Apple sells iOS users' attention for six billion dollars a year is strong evidence of Bing's strength. Market prices are set by the 2nd bidder, not the highest bidder. The price Google pays to Apple is what those eyeballs would have been worth to Microsoft, not how much they are worth to Google.

See Bing

The DOJ complaint isn't "You can't have a monopoly". In fact there is nothing illegal about having a monopoly in a product or service under US law.

The problem arises when a company leverages a monopoly to suppress competition, implement predatory pricing, or manipulate competition in another market. Using a monopoly in search to compel tying agreements prohibiting browsers or manufacturers from including other search engines or apps would qualify. If it turns out that agents of the company (Directors, VPs, etc) internally communicated an intent to suppress competition that would be more than enough to bury them.

I don't disagree with your comments but I also don't see the connection between them and the specific case the DOJ has actually filed against Google.

This is not what the DOJ is complaining about. The case is that companies that aren't huge can't compete, because they can't scale.

I don't understand that argument.

By that same argument, companies that aren't huge can't compete with Walmart, UPS, McDonald's, etc.

That argument basically breaks down to "Small companies can't compete against huge companies without finding a way to become huge themselves."

Isn't that just capitalism?

The quality of google search is good for consumers, it also isn't anti-competitve to improve the quality of your product, even if you're using resources and knowledge from unrelated businesses to do so.

The ideal outcome of this lawsuit is Google being forced to open up their vast amounts of data obtained by being the 90+% market monopoly. Only then can other search engines even begin to compete.

How is this different than Coke and their brand?

Because Coke doesn't collect massive amounts of data from their customers to feed AIs?

I think you may have replied to the wrong post, because your post doesn't make a lot of sense as a reply to the parent.

How is Coke leveraging their strength in the beverage market to dominate another market?

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