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Comment by abdullahkhalids | Hacker News Reader

Just to think about this more, are there any other business types, besides online news, where your success so radically depends on the decisions (read google news ranking and summarization algorithms) of some other business that you have zero relations with.

Google news+facebook+twitter can drastically change the revenue of any online news site with an internal decision. Where else do we see something like this in the economy?

EDIT: the criteria of zero business relationship between your entire product class and the Big Business is critical; otherwise lots of examples exist.

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Yes, hundreds upon hundreds.

There isn't a single physical product that's not beholden to the Walmarts of the world to stock, market and highlight those products. There isn't a single farmer in this world that isn't dependant on stores buying off their produce and putting it into shelves.

Heck, even in paper era, there wasn't a single paper not beholden to kiosks and other stores to put their papers into racks and into premium places where customers are most likely to pick them up. Do you hink NYTimes demanded that street vendors pay them for the privilege of putting their paper onto a rack?!

Having fully vertically integrated bussiness (like you're mentioning) is a very modern development of monopolies.

Newspapers obviously sold their paper to the paper kiosks, who then sold it to customers. Hence a business relationship between the two types of entities.

In the Google News case, no news sites sells their news to Google News. There is no business relation between Google News or any de jure contact whatsoever between the two. It's different. I am not saying its good or bad, or that this gives the right to the news sites for news sites to demand payments from Google.

But I think its a weird scenario that doesn't occur in other markets. And to understand the pathologies of the online news business, we need to think about this particular no-relations fact.

Virtually every product and service with a website and social media presence? If you get banned from Google, your visibility online pretty much falls off a cliff and your sales will likely never recover. So anyone making money from a website is dependent on Google and other search engines... well mostly Google indexing said site.

Also, any business whose livelihood depends on a large company's platform. Businesses and entrepreneurs selling their work on Amazon and eBay, YouTubers and Twitch streamers making content for those platforms, influencers in general given their reliance on social media services...

Except for Google search+product combo, in every other example you cited there is a contractual relation between the product and the SM.

If I have a product page on Facebook, I have a contract with Facebook. Facebook could choose to end that contract with me and close my account. But Google News blocking/downranking a news site does not involve any contract ending between Google News and the news site. If I don't have a product page on Facebook, Facebook could still choose to block/downrank posts where users on their own free will mention my product. But I don't think this really happens at any significant scale yet.

Same applies your Amazon/Ebay/Youtube/Twitch examples.

Going back a few decades, newspapers were dependent on the newsstands they were sold out of. They could put your paper higher or lower on the stand (ranking).

Going back not as far, CNN was dependent on your local cable company to deliver their signal to homes. Charter or Comcast could choose to stop carrying a channel altogether.

Consumer reports (both the company and the category). A bad review can destroy a company.

Yelp.

TripAdvisor.

Anything video.

No matter how hard you try to avoid it, some asshole will always post any video you make to YouTube immediately and probably try to monetize it.

Given how much money Google collects for YouTube, they should get fined through the roof when they allow somebody to upload something they don't have the rights to.

The porn companies showed that you solve this technically. However, Google will fight this to the very end.

App developers and Apple/Google

Manufacturers and Retailers

There are lots of examples of people who produce things being beholden to a few companies that controls the distribution channels.

A more interesting one is small businesses and payment processors which don't control the distribution but rather keep them operationally dependant on a product they control a monopoly over.

Any retail store. Like Costco and Walmart. They can break an entire company by just buying from a competitor.

There is a business relationship between Walmart/Costco and the product or a competitor of the product. In the Google News case, there is no business relation with any news site (Alphabet ads might have a relation with the news site, but that is not Google News).

Google News is a customer who walks into Walmart consumes the free samples and tells people about them.

Walmart is free to ban Google from the premises (robots.txt) or to negotiate an exchange (monetization agreement).

I think they key is that in your example, Cosco/Walmart was "buying" from the company and is now "buying" from a competitor. Google's typically not "buying" from anyone when they choose who to list on their pages (only "selling" exposure, in cases of paid advertising).

Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax usually have no business relation with their victims.

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