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Comment by genericuser314 | Hacker News Reader

I think you're making a category error in your analogy.

DuckDuckGo is much more like Google than "dig a well" is like municipal water.

Wells dug with modern equipment are a perfectly good alternative to municipal water - they can free one from over-regulated or poorly managed utilities. Even in the outskirts of California metros it's sometimes the only option without shelling out hundreds of thousands for extensions.

DuckDuckGo, on the other hand, is just Google with bangs, an insignificant spec compared to the latter.

Edit: DuckDuckGo US market share: 2.5% [1], US population getting their water from a well: 13% [2]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1220046/duckduckgo-searc...

[2] https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/scie...

> Wells dug with modern equipment are a perfectly good alternative to municipal water

... in certain geologic areas. And this doesn't work if you live in an apartment. I do feel like this is a big example of the "why don't you just" discussion from last week.

"Why don't you do something that works for over 40 million people all over the US" is a very far cry from "why don't you build your own power plant, datacenter, and networking infrastructure." It's a far better argument than DDG which - if my usage is anything to go by - is just a frontend for Google with convenient shortcuts to specialized searches like Github.

If you live in an apartment, you live in a multi-family building built by a developer with a lot more money than a single family can spend. They're exactly the ones who can afford alternatives, like paying the city to tear up roads and lay down a pipe to municipal water.

The point is that a well supports a tiny number of people compared to a municipal water system, but it's a real alternative. In the search engine space, DDG is just token opposition and there is no one analogous to a property developer that can afford a competitor to municipal water so it's Google or nothing.

> a frontend for Google

Bing*

Sure, but he poster is arguing that having alternatives is no reason to not declare a large company’s product a utility.

My municipality is great for wells, most houses use them, but the water company that was recently introduced is still classified a utility.

Water (or mineral) rights are often not included when you buy property within a city, too. "Just dig a well," is often literally illegal. Water rights are notoriously complicated and obscure.

"perfectly good alternative"

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

DuckDuckGo gives vastly different search results from Google. Last thing we need is the government involved in “improving” search results.

Often, cities will not allow you to use your own well, insisting you move on to city water.

Then you can also play a tragedy-of-the-commons aquifer game with all the commercial users of water in your area. Can you afford to keep making your well deeper than theirs? There are a few towns in California engaged in the resulting endgame.

Wells are regulated where I live.

People talking like drilling a well in your backward is on par with typing in a different URL.

So how about this, the upfront cost and effort of typing in a different URL is at least a few orders of magnitude easier than drilling a well.

> So how about this, the upfront cost and effort of typing in a different URL is at least a few orders of magnitude easier than drilling a well.

That's missing the point.

Regardless of whether you personally type google.com or duckduckgo.com, most people use google and so they get directed to other Google products and don't see competing products, and that hurts competition in those spaces.

So why then isn't this an anti-trust case instead of trying to make google a public utility? It seems Ohio is throwing cases and seeing what sticks.

That's a good question, and I don't know.

Can a state bring an anti-trust case or does it have to be done by at the federal level?

> People talking like drilling a well in your backward is on par with typing in a different URL. So how about this, the upfront cost and effort of typing in a different URL is at least a few orders of magnitude easier than drilling a well.

You talking like BUILDING A POWER PLANT is on par with drilling a well in your backward.

So how about this, the upfront cost and effort of DRILLING A WELL is at least a few orders of magnitude easier than BUILDING A POWER PLANT.

---

Does that mean water shouldn't be a utility?

Or what was your point exactly?

It's relatively simple and easy to change your default search engine and/or type in a different url, in fact, it quite literally costs you $0 (as in - it doesn't cost you any more to use ddg over google), so digging a well, and the further cost of routing your pipes to pull from that underground water is infinitely more expensive to do. This is the principle behind utility companies being regulated: it's insanely expensive to do the alternative of using that utility company. Now, Apple and Google (in terms of Android) might need to be considered some sort of public utility (eg. providing an app store) since it would cost competitors tens of billions of dollars to match the existing ecosystem, but Google Search is far from being considered a utility.

The point is neither drilling a well or building your own power plant are realistic alternatives for 99% of the people. Whereas switching to ddg is a realistic alternative for 99% of the people.

Is that also a realistic alternative for a business?

To just place their ads on DDG? Where only about 2% of consumers are? And a huge part of DDG's users have ad block?

That would be a death sentence for a business, when the competitors have access to >80% of consumers on Google.

The lawsuit is about Google and their customers (the advertisers), NOT their users (who are actually part of the product Google sells).

There are at least a dozen companies you can buy water from and have it delivered to a giant storage tank made by at least 5 different companies. Or you could use a number of companies to dig a well for you.

Many people don't have access to municipal water and when I didn't, this is what I did.

Those companies aren't utility companies though.

The main, monopolistic solution of municipal water certainly is. The point is that options can still exist in a monopoly. Google still has a monopoly despite the existence competitors.

Most apartment buildings won't let you store large amounts of water on property.

I'm pretty sure those same apartment buildings wouldn't let you set up the large scale server farm required for you to set up your own search engine alternative to Google either.

That's not even remotely comparable.

Firstly it's not structurally practical to store giant tanks of water on private property. So the comparison makes no practical sense anyway.

But more, there is a significant market for private water in other properties. It's a non-trivial market which serves a significant proportion of the US population.

There is no significant market for private/non-Google search. Not only is DDG a footnote, but Google's dominance forces businesses to take steps to optimise their Google rank - or face penalties by losing access to potential customers.

Google can also remove businesses who aren't even customers from its rankings on a whim, with no redress.

It's clearly a monopoly.

When I lived in China, I didn't have the luxury of having access to Google, so I used Bing instead. It was actually quite reasonable for most of my needs, I'm not sure why more people don't give it a go. Of course, now that I live in the states again, I use Google, but most of my searching is on YouTube anyways (which was something else I didn't have access to in China).

Isn't DDG just a frontend for Bing? I can host my own searx instance, but that's not a real search engine and it shouldn't count IMO.

No, or at least not only. They mix a few sources.

I disagree, wells are equal to or better than municipal water, and can often be cheaper while being higher quality. the inverse can be true. the analogy holds imo.

I would like to learn more. Why is a well cleaner or higher quality than a big city municipal water supply? Is it because city water requires harsher treatment because it comes from a huge pool of waste while a well comes from a clean watershed?

It’s not. There are a ton of variables that determine the quality of your water. In many cases, well water will be significantly worse (my childhood home being a great example).

Untreated borehole water is often unsafe to for humans to drink, at least that's usually the case here in Australia.

As for cities, it depends entirely on the specific city.

The city I grew up in was supplied by a river that was unsafe to even swim in due to agricultural runoff and high levels of heavy metals from volcanic activity. Our drinking water was so heavily chlorinated that you practically needed a water filter to make it drinkable.

The city I went to university was supplied by an aquifer and modern, high quality piping. The water was such high quality, it required no treatment at all.

I'm sure there are different geographical and utility costs, but every well I've ever priced was between 25-100 years to break-even .

How long to break even after building your own search engine?

Are those the right categories? Utilities are built (at least partially) and maintained using taxpayer money. Google acquired dominance by collecting user data. In both cases users, as a class, get access to essential services that what wouldn't have been possible without their contributions.

Utilities were also originally private competing companies and then they consolidated and the gov decided to make them regulated monopolies bec it made more sense then 10 different companies running their own electric lines. It’s possible to argue that one good search engine makes more sense vs 10 different small ok ones, the gov should step in and regulate.

I think he's not - when you look at it from the point of view of someone who wants to buy search advertisements.

Duck Duck Go doesn't come nearly close to the kind of reach Google has.

The difference between DDG and Google ads is quantitative - not qualitative.

I am on my own rainwater tanks. I don't see any reason it's not a viable alternative considering how many of us use it.

You can also go buy books and search for information without using electrons but the analogy is flawed. Your rainwater tanks do not have the economy of scale necessary to produce a natural monopoly until you build a tank and distribution system large enough to supply fresh water to an entire town, at which point it makes it difficult or impractical to compete.

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