Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

> But placing limits on private property accumulation is a controversial idea

The US wouldn't need a legal limit on wealth to prevent Google from becoming this large.

Every major Google product since gmail in ~2004 was acquired. Google Maps? Acquired from Where 2 Technologies. Google Docs? Acquired from Writely. Android? Acquired as a startup. Google Analytics? You guessed it, acquisition. DoubleClick? Once again, acquisition. Deepmind? Acquisition. reCAPTCHA? Acquisition. Youtube? Believe it or not, acquisition.

This isn't a story of a business getting big because of their innovation and the vast demand for their much-loved products.

This is a story of US competition regulators sleeping on the job for 20 years.

View on HN

One of the acquisitions you are talking about was 4 people that started a company and was "acquired" by google less than a year later. The idea that something like this should be blocked by competition regulators is frankly, totally insane.

Aside from that, in 2004, Google was a ~30B company, 1/3rd the size of e.g. UPS. For comparison, Microsoft was ~10x bigger.

The rewriting of history in this thread is just crazy. I don't disagree that google today is huge and some regulation is necessary, but what you are proposing should have been done in 2004 is off the charts ridiculous. Not even totalitarian dictatorships exert that much control over their populations.

> 4 people that started a company and was "acquired" by google less than a year later. The idea that something like this should be blocked by competition regulators is frankly, totally insane.

Why?

FOMO? Or another reason?

I can't understand how this is even a question.

At the time, google was a $30B company, 10x smaller than Microsoft. Where 2 Technologies was a 1 year old company with 4 people, with 0 documented sales or market share that I can find. The only evidence I can find of the company actually doing anything is a picture of a whiteboard. I'm not dinging the company, just saying that it was very, very early in its life.

Suggesting that competition regulators should have blocked this is basically suggesting that the government has veto power over almost any hiring decision by any of the top ~1000 companies by market cap.

> Suggesting that competition regulators should have blocked this is basically suggesting that the government has veto power over almost any hiring decision by any of the top ~1000 companies by market cap.

Ok. I am not suggesting that. I do assert it is not "totally insane".

And it is not the "hiring decisions". It is the merger decisions.

So if you enter the top ~1000 company territory, you loose a few freedoms. Is that so bad?

You're not denying freedom to just those ~1000 companies, you're also denying freedoms from everyone they might "acquire". And if your definition of "acquisition" is 4 dudes with a source control repo and no market/sales, then you've denied a lot of freedom to a lot of people, not just some big corporates we all love to hate.

I personally know of probably a dozen cases of a small team of <10 people getting hired into various companies that all would be scrutinized under this reasoning, and yeah, I think that's totally insane.

I believe they had an analytics offering before they purchased Urchin. Same for DoubleClick.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com