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Comment by yanw | Hacker News Reader

They don't really get to have a say in this. Google doesn't dictate to Twitter how they should conduct their business and Twitter would do well to follow their lead.

If I recall correctly Twitter refused to renew Google's firehose access and forced them to shutter Realtime search: http://searchengineland.com/google-realtime-search-the-after...

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Twitter is not an effective monopoly though. With great power comes great antitrust regulation.

Are they? For sure they have the largest market share, but isn't lack of substitute goods a necessary condition for monopoly? IANAL, but I use Bing all the time on IE9 because it's the default search engine and most of the time I can't even tell the difference. I certainly haven't found a reason to change it.

It all depends on how you define Twitter's (and Google's) market, doesn't it? I'm pretty sure the gap in marketshare between Twitter and closely similar services like Identi.ca, Plurk or Yammer is actually larger than the gap between Google and Binghoo.

theres plenty of competition. So now we're supporting the government stepping in, when theres plenty of competition but just nothing thats good enough to compete. This is not an America I want to live in.

As I don't live in the US, i always found the US black-or-white politics unusual. People seem to argue for more or less government, but not about the right government.

Are you a lawyer? as I understand it a court would have to declare a monopoly and in this case none has.

Purely from a commonsense point of view however there is no such thing as a monopoly on information retrieval.

Me not being a lawyer doesn't make google less suspect for monopolistic practices. The US senate has been investigating it[1] and and new concerns are raised now[2]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/google-faces-...

http://betanews.com/2012/01/10/googles-new-personalized-sear...

In any case, the one who should be worried is facebook, not twitter. It's also interesting to note how google is going at greater lengths to promote G+ than it did with any of its products before.

There are always bought politicians parroting some special interest, that doesn't mean that they have a clue: http://searchengineland.com/dear-congress-its-not-ok-not-to-...

And what about innocent until proven guilty?

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