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Comment by ballenf | Hacker News Reader

The gut-level issue people have is a company gaining trust through creating a level playing field with algorithmic ranking, etc. and then slowly trading in that trust in order to create an ever larger moat around their monopoly.

The nefarious part is that Google pretends to still be an uninterested referee on a fair playing field. All the revelations regarding back door deals and anti-consumer activity makes it clear that they abandoned those principles in order to cement their monopoly and raise their rents.

And as for recruiting your happy customers into your cause -- there are many things we're fine letting non-monopolies do that make us very uneasy when monopolies do the same. Whether this should be one of those things is worth discussing and shouldn't be dismissed with an oversimplified straw man argument.

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When was the playing field level, I wonder?

The entire point of algorithmic ranking is to bias some data over other data to maximize user satisfaction. Search engines have been creating winners and losers since day 1.

Search engines have not always existed, though. Somebody else could have built a better search engine than Google before Google.

Several companies built search engines before Google.

Google managed to find a montetization strategy that kept theirs going when the others ran out.

Yes, but the "playing field" was level when Google did that. They didn't play any unfair tricks to get ahead in the game. The question was "when was the playing field ever level".

I don't think the playing field was level back in the day when there were several incumbents preceding Google with far larger databases of crawled content and everyone was gaming the algorithms to figure out what SEO looked like.

I think Google changed the nature of the unlevel playing field, but it was unlevel when they got there.

Lets say it was more level than it was today.

"Google pretends to still be an uninterested referee on a fair playing field."

It sounds to me as if they clearly lay out the disadvantages (in their view) to their users. That's pretty much all there is to it. I don't think they pretend to be "uninterested referees" in a call to action against certain legislation? Who would ever think that? Clearly they are "interested" in shooting down that legislation.

As I said elsewhere, there is plenty to dislike about Google and their power. That article was not about that, though.

The "monopolies" argument is just commie propaganda in my opinion. In general the "people with power" theory, which commies want to use to gain power over other people. If you don't like Google, again, don't use them. It is only the people giving it its power. Likewise, if your employer exerts "power" over you, look for another job. The people could stop using Google at any moment, taking away its power. Government regulations, on the other hand, are REAL tyranny as there is no way to opt out.

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