Comment by tibbetts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tibbetts | Hacker News Reader

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Once upon a time US regulators recognized that limited competition and market dominance can be a problem all by themselves, for their chilling effect on innovation. Unfortunately under Reagan the DOJ changed their policy and started arguing that concrete consumer harm has to be demonstrated for a business to be subject to antitrust. That’s a much higher bar. Imagine trying to build the modern internet under a telco monopoly, and trying to argue that consumers were being harmed because internet access was limited. Who would even want internet access under those circumstances?

The same is true of Google. It’s hard to show concrete harm (though wrecking flight search counts for me) when we have no counterfactual to consider. For example, in a truly competitive display ad market (instead of a duopoly), maybe our civilization would have figured out that display ads are a waste of money and consumer product manufacturers and retailers would stop buying them. But it’s hard to know. This is why we should go after any company that is dominant in any market.

Helpfully this is exactly the sort of argument I'm complaining about. The basic form is "the regulators did this", its "hard to show concrete harm" but therefore "we should go after any company that is dominant in any market".

If we skip to the handwave, what is and how solid is the evidence that the regulator's actions were sensible? Targeting the most competent company for harassment is, on the face of it, a bad strategy.

> Imagine trying to build the modern internet under a telco monopoly

"Before the 1996 Act was passed, the largest four ILECs owned less than half of all the lines in the country while, five years later, the largest four local telephone companies owned about 85% of all the lines in the country." [0]

Yeah, that'd be really hard. But the major problem is poor regulation creating monopolies/incentives for them. The correct approach is to go for the root cause - competition stifling regulation - rather than setting up monopolies and then ineffectually trying to fight them in courts.

"Antitrust" is a distraction from the actual problem - bad regulation and incentives. And if the coversation revolved around actual attempts at showing evidence the antitrust stuff is hard to sustain. The examples are trivial. People on HN were whinging about Google removing an alert box in Chrome the other week.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996

The problem with this is that I can't really point to a competition-stifling regulation that actually benefits Google.

Copyright and patent law would be the closest thing, but Google's core business isn't selling licensing agreements. They owned the search market way before Android was even a public project, much less the open-core monstrosity it is today. Google got to where it is because it legitimately hunted the rest of it's competitors into extinction, not because it got better at throwing red tape at them.

Can you point to actual harm done by Google that people can't walk away from?

I've been working to untangle myself from them for a while. It isn't particularly hard, there are just a lot of really good services that need to be replaced.

The only thing I can't evade is the constant snooping all over the web. And that isn't something antitrust regulators are going to be dealing with.

> Can you point to actual harm done by Google that people can't walk away from?

The idea that things such as access to information, mailbox, applications, storage, … should not cost you any money and that it’s acceptable (for the few people who even know) to pay with a log of every move you do.

Just go read any paid app reviews on any of the App Store to read tons of comments like « 1/5 It’s not free ».

In what way did they wreck search? If I’m going to a new city, I usually start on Google flights and find it okay to good.

If I need more, I’ll go to a specific carrier’s site or to Matrix, but I’m usually using Google to get the overview picture (and it seems to work well).

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