Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

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I think people underestimate how deeply intertwined Google's services and apps are.

I don't think a split off "Google Services" could survive. Google's fabric is designed to run Google's apps and vice versa. You can't just cram some other company's software into Google's core fabric and you can't just run AdSense on someone else's cloud. ETA: this is partially because of historical accretion and path dependence, but also because offering services at Google scale and reliability is a legitimately hard, abstraction-breaking problem; most fabrics aren't architected for the fault-tolerance and scaling that Google's fabric is (did you really isolate concerns? Are you sure your backing-store is eventually-consistent lock-free?), and most software isn't designed to run on a fault-tolerant, high-reliability fabric (what does your UI do if half the database is missing for ten minutes? Did you break your storage down into a NoSQL database with massive data denormalization because space is almost free, or are you using a relational database with heavy cross-lookup constraints that require high availability? Are your RPCs doctored with enough data to make for useful full-service traces, or do your microservices just spit JSON at each other?).

(Source: was there; I saw enough acquisitions go sideways to know how actually hard it is to reshape software from the outside world to fit Google's way of doing computing).

I'm sorry, but Google has already dealt with this issue, and they can deal with it again. Quota is a thing there, and they already have process for billing and managing access to Google resources by entities which are quasi-internal because during the "Alphabet" transition many things that were formerly internal -- such as the e.g. "Access & Energy PA", which became "Access", mostly Fiber ... which I happened to work at the time -- became quasi-external, and they started having to pay Google-proper for Borg usage, etc.

It's not impossible at all for Google to set up process, billing, and data access boundaries. They just naturally have an interest in avoiding this completely. Which is exactly the point -- right now their ads products in particular have way too much insight into both the buy and sell side of the equation, and Google has gone out of its way to dominate the entire ad supply chain using this knowledge.

Forcing an infrastructure separation and an organizational separation for the ads businesses there would do a lot of good for the market as a whole.

And not sure we should care too much about how Google does out of it. They're swimming in ad revenues.

Good point. I was thinking about this through the lens of how Google looks when doing an acquisition and under-valuing the fact that these spin-offs would be already-constructed Google-shaped offerings.

Still, it sets up a monoculture of service fabrics those products can run on where the division between orgs is, at best, paper-thin; at worst, search or ads dies and takes services with it (or vice-versa) because without several eng-decades neither of those sub-companies are kitted to act as an independent company.

That sounds like a problem for Google to solve, not the public. "We setup our business so that it's too difficult to comply with the law" isn't an excuse in any context.

In theory, yes. In practice, didn't MS use basically this as one of their arguments when the FTC tried to break them up back in the day?

"The US failed to break up a monopoly that to this day stifles competition and prevents effective capitalism by making itself to complicated to regulate, so lets keep making the same mistakes"

Does modern MS stifle competition and prevent effective capitalism? I don't think I've heard anyone beat that drum and get a band marching behind it in years.

This is the same Microsoft that's seen its desktop market share slowly erode since 2013, right? The one holding 1.9% of smartphone marketshare? The one so impossible to regulate that the FTC is regulating it right now (https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/...)?

> Does modern MS stifle competition and prevent effective capitalism?

Of course they do, and anyone who is confused by their marketing into thinking otherwise is just plain blind. The last someone "beat that drum" was none other than the british competition regulator aka CMA not _two months ago_, which among maaany other things literally complained Microsoft was still using their monopoly power to prevent gaming on desktop Linux. Stay classy, MS.

> We found that the Microsoft Cloud Remedy had several shortcomings: [..] Microsoft would not have to supply Activision’s full range of games to providers that may decide to operate using a non-Windows PC operating system (eg Linux)

The European Commission respectfully disagrees.

https://gamerant.com/cma-overstated-microsoft-cloud-gaming-s...

Ironically, I already predicted that the EC would likely bend over and accept MS's ridiculous proposal, but we would never know since the CMA rejecting it first would leave the EC in a untenable position. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35772912

I guess it is not as untenable as I thought, and the EC believes it can just throw shit towards the CMA until they get away with it. I also have my confirmation on whether the EC would be stupid enough to accept the deal.

Anyway, you cannot disagree with the fact that MS still _tried_ to stifle Linux, which is the point (and the part that I'm quoting). And arguably both as server and as a desktop OS.

Sure, back in the day. And they don't go out of their way to support it in the modern era.

...but this goes back to the US interpretation of "monopoly practice" vs. the European interpretation. Where was the consumer harm? How does MS "stifle" an OS that you can just pick up from a CD, floppy disk, or the Internet and drop on a machine you own?

History seems to have shown "You can't." In general, the biggest hindrance to Linux desktop adoption is the Linux UX (and for games, the experience of building one with the libraries available on Linux [https://utopixel.games/en/blog/building-outer-wonders-for-li...]), not anything Microsoft (or Apple, for that matter) have done to it.

"Back in the day" is stretching it since MS did this 2 months ago. With the same strategy they used to kill Be decades ago, which obviously works.

It's irrelevant what you think about Linux UX. It is just fact that MS is worried enough that _to this day_ they are using their monopoly position to stifle non-Windows OSes ( desktop AND server) every frigging time they can. Same way they have doing continuously for decades.

And also despite the fact their marketing dept says that "MS loves Linux" and the armchair analysts say that MS makes money from Linux servers.

Are you talking about Be as in Be Incorporated? With the BeBox and BeOS?

They settled a lawsuit with Microsoft, but Be didn't fail because of anything Microsoft did any more than it failed because of anything Apple did. Nobody wanted yet another operating system to write code against. Be failed for the same reason that Plan 9 hasn't caught fire and served as a meaningful alternative to the Linux ecosystem; when your architecture is too far divorced from the existing ecosystems after the ecosystems grow sufficiently large, it doesn't matter if your solution is slightly better... Developers don't want to invest the time starting over.

Monopoly protection is a lot of things, but it isn't a mechanism for somebody to try and compete with DC power for long distance transmission when the world has already wired up AC.

Again, it's irrelevant what your opinion of the competition is. I'm just pointing that _they are_ abusing their dominant position to stiffle the competition, as recently as 2 months ago, and using the same tactiques they have been using since forever.

"The competition sucks" has never been an argument _at all_ in any antitrust case and never will, by definition.

"Competition is a ruthless process. A firm that reduces cost and expands sales injures rivals--sometimes fatally." ~ Ball Mem'l Hosp., Inc. v. Mut. Hosp. Ins., Inc., 784 F.2d 1325, 1338 (7th Cir. 1986) (Easterbrook, J.)., sourced from the DOJ website. (https://www.justice.gov/archives/atr/competition-and-monopol...). Also worth noting on that page: "At its core, section 2 makes it illegal to acquire or maintain monopoly power through improper means." Monopoly itself is not illegal in the US system; consumer harm is. This differs from the European interpretation.

... but yes, "Your honor, the competition is just too bad at this to compete" is an antitrust defense as a result. At least in the US system.

Your conclusion does not really follow from what you are quoting. Can you quote a case where "the competition sucks" was actually and succesfully used as a defense in the US?

I don't disagree with anything you quoted -- it is abuse of a dominant position that is illegal (even in my country at the very least, which last time I checked was in the EU). Just note that it doesn't really matter if you got your monopoly because "the competition sucked" or not, just the fact that you have a dominant position, and you abused it. So I disagree with the conclusion.

And let it be clear that all of this is an off-topic, since again the point was that MS is still using the same anti-competitive strategies they were using decades ago, to this day.

> Your conclusion does not really follow from what you are quoting.

Sorry, I should have been more clear. Emphasis mine: "At its core, section 2 makes it illegal to acquire or maintain monopoly power through improper means." The American system recognizes the notion of proper monopoly; if one company is doing something very well and every other company lacks the tools or skill to do as well, that is not actionable. Using market dominance is also not, by itself, actionable ("Competition is a ruthless process" &c). What the US does consider actionable is consumer harm... undercutting your opponents' prices because you can isn't actionable by itself ("Hey, look at all that competition lowering prices! Consumers love low prices!"), but undercutting them unsustainably and then jacking the price later when you grind them out of business is.

But you're right that we're having a two-ships-passing-in-the-night discussion on the topic now, because Europe takes a very different view upon this (protection of the marketplace, in the European history of antitrust, is protecting the right to make a living competing, not the consumers' right not to be screwed). Much of what I'm saying is in the American mindset, and reasonable people can disagree because reasonable people can come from different philsophical backgrounds on what constitutes protection-worthy antitrust behavior.

(Linux, as example, in the American system it's hard to make the argument that MS being unwilling to spend the money to port software they own to another OS is consumer harm. It can be made though; I believe that's one of the reasons the FCC was blocking the MS / Activision merger. But it's right on the edge of a defendable argument, because the counter-argument is "Who cares if Word doesn't run on Ubuntu distros if OpenOffice is right there?").

Of course. It controls 90% + of the global PC desktop OS market. Every single business runs on Windows, and a tiny fraction on Apple. It's a classic monopoly, kin of like when US Steel had some refineries and technically competed with Standard Oil in the oil industry, but only on paper, and mostly served to create the illusion of competition.

Keeping in mind that the law wasn't that when the tech stack was built.

It would certainly be a problem for Google to solve, but one should note that legally requiring this of the company would be tantamount to legally requiring Google to shut down (which in the long run would harm user privacy because the company would almost certainly be replaced by an ecosystem of companies that care far less about privacy than Google does, and a gaggle of unrelated firms running hither and thither with user data is harder to regulate than one megacorp). There are better ways to serve the public interest here.

> legally requiring this of the company would be tantamount to legally requiring Google to shut down

What a leap in logic. Care to elaborate? That assertion is insane and the rest of the comment hinges on that.

Most of the value of Google is the services it provides (search and ads, and indeed cloud, which is a separate product and not just "Google's internal fabric exposed") on its internal fabric.

Splitting out "Google Services" from ads or search creates a company with one customer (or two, if we've split out ads and search) that is basically in no market position to get more customers because Google's internal fabric is not a "cloud offering" (source: I was listening in when the company decided to offer Google Cloud and not make that "just the bare metal we run everything on;" Google's internal bare metal is too developer-hostile to the common way things are done outside Google to be a viable product).

Meanwhile, search and ads would be in a place where there was only one "cloud" company in the world they could run their product on.

For all its money, I don't believe Google could afford to re-tool their products to work on someone else's cloud, so once the "Services" company foundered for being unable to compete / having a monoculture of customers, the ads and search companies would die for lack of vendor offering the one bespoke cloud model they can run on.

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