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Comment by fuzztester | Hacker News Reader

>They effectively give themselves billions of dollars in free advertising

how the heck is google's " 'giving' themselves something for free", considered wrong? even if it is billions of dollars?

in which alt world is it wrong of you to 'give' yourself a 100 dollars? or even billions? of your own money? or even billions worth of advertising space? both the giver and the receiver are you, right? you are not stealing anything from anyone.

then what the heck is the problem? maybe I am dumb, but I fail to see it.

in your own words, they are giving it to themselves, right?

they are not taking that money away from anyone else.

and note: I am not a Google shill. I criticized them, with some justifications that I gave, roughly about a day ago. check my comments. I try to be objective, though of course I may sometimes fail at that.

interested to hear what you have to say about all this.

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They're giving themselves money by abusing their monopoly status. Sure, in a totally free market, it looks innocent. There are laws against this because monopolies are damaging to any market it's in and ends up hurting the end user.

pardon me.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

>A monopoly (from Greek μόνος, mónos, 'single, alone' and πωλεῖν, pōleîn, 'to sell'), as described by Irving Fisher, is a market with the "absence of competition", creating a situation where a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular thing.

how is Google a monopoly according to the above definition in Wikipedia?

they have competitors like bing, duckduckgo, kagi, and some others that i have read about here on hn recently.

and I do not know about the others, but at least bing and duckduckgo have existed for many years.

so again, how are they a monopoly?

Depending on the metric, Google has 90% of the search engine market. Yes they have competition in a literal sense, but not in a meaningful sense.

10% is quite a meaningful share, in an absolute sense. also, 10% of a huge market is, well, huge.

Are you really trying to argue that 90% of the internet text search share held by one company isn't a monopoly?

j-maffe, it looks to me like you are being disingenuous, because in reply to your earlier comment above, I had quoted the Wikipedia definition of monopoly. my entire subsequent argument was based on that, as you well know. if you want to try to redefine terms, or move goalposts, feel free to do so, but I will not participate in an argument based on such behaviour.

to repeat, quoting from the Wikipedia definition of monopoly:

>A monopoly (from Greek μόνος, mónos, 'single, alone' and πωλεῖν, pōleîn, 'to sell'), as described by Irving Fisher, is a market with the "absence of competition", creating a situation where a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular thing.

(italics mine)

can you really not see the difference between 90% search share held by Google, which means 10% share held by others, vs. absence of competition? it is blindingly obvious.

I am leaving this thread. I don't argue with people who either don't get it, or seem to be operating under false pretences.

Just to be clear, you're saying that the judge [1], the Justice Department [2], and journalists[3] are all wrong? If you want to be pedantic about it, they have what is called an effective monopoly[4].

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-05/google-lo...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/20/google-...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/yes-google-has-a-mon...

[4] http://www2.harpercollege.edu/mhealy/eco211f/lectures/monopo...

I am making a rare exception to my statement about not engaging with you further (because of the crap that you wrote earlier), because of the other crap that you wrote above (only in order to point that crap out to other readers):

half the links (i.e. 1 and 2) you quoted above don't work for me. paywalls or signup required? clever you, eh? not!

and link 4 is too long and verbose. I searched for the word effective, but did not find it in the initial part on the screen.

aaannnddd ... you are quoting journalists (!) as though they are automatically competent authorities? and even judges' decisions sometimes get reversed by higher courts. so effectively you have no point. hee ... hee ... hee ...

looks like, in your arguments, you thrive on appeals to faux authority, and nothing else, particularly not on reasoning.

so, tata, bye bye, dude.

this sort of argument is below me.

bless you. you need it.

your ignoring that, or not understanding that, is like a person saying that 10% is equal to 0%. I cannot argue with such people. it's a dead end, and a waste of my time.

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