Y Combinator says Google is a monopolist, no comment about its OpenAI ties | Hacker News Reader

Y Combinator says Google is a monopolist, no comment about its OpenAI ties

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126 pointsmastazi42 comments

Recent and related:

US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43945820 - May 2025 (936 comments)

OpenAI is hardly a monopolist, and the way it's shaping up so far LLM-based search is being provided by 3rd-parties like DuckDuckGo offering multiple models to choose from.

It is because OpenAI is a competitor for Google search, not because OAI is also a monopoly. YC has a conflict of interest because of their relation to OpenAI(YC research) and Sam Altman directly.

YC doesn’t after all often amicus briefs in court, the relationship was a definitely a factor in doing so. Stating that relationship clearly and disclosing financial upside they may get in the soon to be for profit conversion is relevant to this case.

The google decision could have implications for OpenAI’s business and therefore their enterprise value .

I'd be surprised if DuckDuckGo had more LLM users than ChatGPT has search users. Even Perplexity probably doesn't come close.

Apple Intelligence is another example integrating (intending to anyway) a variety of services you can choose between. Cursor as well. It actually feels like the ability to easily switch between rival models is a pretty standard feature of 3rd party services. And right now it feels like nobody is trying to stop this!

We will see what happens with the windsurf acquisition. This is one of the best things with the community though. Both the OSS solutions and wrappers.

You can safely say now the pendulum is swinging back towards Google if YC is complaining, and there's probably moat in AI after all [1].

Google has Google Search, Gmail, Scholar, Patents, Books, Maps, Workspace, Drive, Gemini and Youtube just to name several killer applications that are being widely used by billions of people every single day [2].

I think NotebookLM is easily one of best products come up from Google since the initial search engine with PageRank. It's a combination of virtual personal and research assistant that's very helpful that keep you in the driving seat with much less hallucinations compared to your typical LLMs including Google own Gemini.

Never paid Google for all its services all my life but now I'd probably would pay for NotebookLM, and get 2 TB storage on top of that, that's telling something from the user of the early Google years, of more than 20 years.

[1] Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI” (1039 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35813322

[2] List of Google products:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products

I've watched a video about NotebookLM podcast generation functionality, and I thought it was impressive. While I realize that it definitely doesn't replace actual podcasts, I immediately thought of many novel and interesting uses for it. Narration is a powerful tool and IME ingesting sources in a narrative form helps my brain to better internalize information.

Yep the podcast looks very intuitive, surreal and nifty at the same time. It's interactive thus you can interrupt the session to get the response dynamically and immediately from the virtual panel and host.

> It also wants Google to do things it argues would help startups, like opening up Google’s search index so others can train LLMs on it.

There’s a comment about OpenAI ties… kinda

Google is a massive monopoly, I’m glad we are starting to fight this stuff again. Google, Amazon, and Apple all have insane monopolies that are not healthy

Google is certainly a monopoly in several sectors, search and YouTube come to mind. Amazon is a duopoly with Walmart and both need to be dismantled, but the damage to main street was done a long time ago. I'm not sure where Apple is a monopoly. People argue the App Store but only for the iPhone and iPad, but I feel that takes some mental gymnastics since it's somewhat niche and other stores for other phones exist.

I agree, but the way the law is applied in the United States, anything that increases prices is more likely to be seen as a monopoly from a legal perspective.

Thats a reason why Apple is so against the opening up of the App market, and wanted to die on the hill of stopping apps for letting people know about offline purchase options.

They had issues long ago with the iBooks Store, of all things. Particularly absurd given the nature of Amazon’s business.

YC being a monopolist doesn’t make Google not a monopolist.

Bringing in some random hypocrisy is a great way to unmake your own point, TechCrunch.

The article doesn't appear to say that OpenAI is a monopolist - it's more a conflict of interest:

   However, YC is also closely tied to OpenAI, which is now directly competing against Google on search. OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman used to run YC, while OpenAI was the first group affiliated with YC Research.

Which is a strange statement because OpenAI is not directly competing against Google on search. They don’t have a public search engine and rely on Bing for search results — they do something greater and more broad than search. Conflating product categories to make this point is not effective for whatever argument they are making here.

ChatGPT is absolutely taking people away from Google. People are turning to that instead of a search engine for more and more things now.

Here's one article about it: https://www.techradar.com/tech/people-are-increasingly-swapp...

It’s like saying Netflix is competing in cable television because people switched from Comcast. Netflix changed the experience so significantly we came up with a new category of streaming entertainment. OpenAI and Google aren’t competing on search per se (Bing, DDG, etc), they are competing in something more abstract which is organizing information which could include full text search of a crawled index or generative AI techniques like LLM. The space they are actually “competing” in is so broad it’s hard to say they are direct competitors. Further to my point, ChatGPT is so not a search engine that it relies on Bing for accessing indexed website content.

I feel like Netflix did pretty successfully compete with cable tv? they're not the same product but you could reasonably say it's the same market

I agree, let’s say they competed in home entertainment. A category so broad that Netflix themselves considered any potential option a household member had at the couch as competition. That includes video game consoles, cable boxes, other streaming apps, etc. Hypothetically: Would you say Netflix is such a competitor with Nintendo that we shouldn’t accept their investing partners criticism of Nintendo if they had a monopoly?

Netflix does have games now, so they're not a bad comparison.

That's the parent's point

FWIW, I think a lot of that is an echo chamber distortion here at HN. In the real world, frankly the best AI-enhanced search provider[1] is... Google. And honestly it isn't really very close. Have you tried asking questions at the Google search prompt recently? My sense is that most HN commenters don't, on principle.

[1] And yes, I work there, but on boring firmware and wouldn't know a transformer if you hit me with one. I'm just a consumer who's recently learned that typing detailed questions into the search prompt gives shockingly great summary answers with references.

> Have you tried asking questions at the Google search prompt recently?

I do sometimes. It's not too bad when it comes to answers to simple programming questions lately, but I've found I mostly can't trust it with answers to other things, like medical or news or history. It sounds right but I dig into the actual articles and find it misinterpreted things often enough I can't trust it. But I also don't use ChatGPT for that purpose either (but Google insists on giving me those answers anyway when I'm just trying to search for articles).

I actually wish it didn't do A.I. responses by default. Like I'd rather it didn't spend the processing power for that when I actually really want to use it for a search engine and not for A.I. (I heard that A.I. uses approximately 10x more compute power than a standard search, on average... I'm not certain that's true, but I don't doubt it's at least significantly more than a search).

I'd rather only use processing power for A.I. when I specifically want to do so. I'm actually contemplating switching my standard search engine away from Google so I don't keep getting A.I. responses.

It competes because people like me use it for search. I would say I primarily use it for search.

> OpenAI is not directly competing against Google on search. They don’t have a public search engine

This is like the railroad arguing they don’t compete with trucks before promptly going bankrupt in the late 60s / early 70s.

Except a truck is actually better than a train (except in the case of moving huge quantities of cargo). ChatGPT is far worse at "searching" than Google is, it blows my mind that people are willing to subject themselves to it.

> a truck is actually better than a train (except in the case of moving huge quantities of cargo). ChatGPT is far worse at "searching"

A truck and train are both transport. Google and ChatGPT are both fuzzy information retrieval functions. As a Kagi user, I’m not really seeing a massive difference in quality between first-page Google results and whatever nonsense LLMs serve up for the average searcher, who is not typically searching out of hardened utility as much as rough convenience.

YC is more of a cartel than a monopolist.

I may have missed something:

YC is a monopolist?

You would think starting thousands and thousands of companies with the goal of being disruptive to incumbents in often monopolistic industries would have earned them something but I guess not lol.

Reminds me of when Saudi Arabia was criticizing Canada for its human rights record at the UN, subsequently other groups highlighted the lack of accountability against indigenous populations and mass graves at the boarding schools.

I found pretty much nobody willing to accept that logic that Saudi Arabia having a poor human rights record doesn't make Canada exempt from being called out.

We are in the process of abandoning ChatGPT Enterprise because Google is now bundling Gemini access for free with Google Workspace.

If OpenAI is not safe from anticompetitive practices then no YC startup is.

Kudos to Garry Tan for not only recognizing Google’s long-running manipulation of the search landscape, but for taking principled action in this pivotal case. It’s rare to see a tech leader willing to both speak truth to power and back it up with decisive legal support—thank you.

Both YC and Google are legalized illusions that obfuscate who benefits from YC and Google

Top of the org chart at these businesses should be the actual target, not the paper trail they set up to protect them.

The fact that Google sells the ads on the websites it serves as search results is a major problem.

It's become normalized that the Internet is a barely usable ad ridden hellscape (ever try to read any recipe on your phone?).

Imagine if Google punished sites for overly intrusive ads in its result rankings? We'd have a whole better internet.

That is definitely a search engine I would like to use. If it existed.

Isn't YC well positioned to disrupt Google's monopoly? They just need to pause funding AI slop and focus on quality again, even if it means doubling the standard deal to get the necessary talent interested.

OpenAI allows you to plug its llm engine into most anything. Google does not. that alone should debunk this.

What can you plug OpenAI into that you can’t with Gemini or vertex? Heck, you can run Claude and llama on vertex!

I was more referring to their search engine and proprietary office products, they cannot be altered or api-d without permission of google, it was OpenAI that introduced the API norm, which Google would likely have not adopted if they had done this on their own terms

That and this was a hearing for the _Google_ antitrust case you can't just randomly wander off topic and self incriminate yourself in this context. Unclear what Techcrunch expected

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