Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

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There are secondary effects you have to pay attention to... the R&D budget on products like this is paid for by service costs... when you see a system become price constrained down to "virtually no margin" you lose a lot of that; meanwhile, the winner (assuming this is important enough to even bother with, which it seems it is; although, whether this space is actually useful for Google or nothing more than a way to screw with Amazon is not clear) is predictable: Google makes a lot more money than Amazon (>10x normally, and in recent quarters "infinitely more", as Amazon has dipped into the red) and has almost no serious competition in its actual space (advertising)... almost everything else they do is just ad-subsidized (and frankly should be examined for anti-trust... giving away everything from phones to email hosting at cost or even for free in the hope of retaining more advertising revenue is a lot more damaging to the overall ecosystem than giving away one product--a web browser--in the hope of retaining more operating system sales... I'd even go so far as to say it is less justifiable from a technical standpoint: these divisions of Google are almost entirely unrelated).

Unfortunately for you, anti-trust doesn't work like that. You have to prove concrete harm to customers.

And that's how it should be, before Google, your only option for a smartphone was to pay one company way too much money. Customers directly benefit, and are more productive, so it's basically impossible in the US to prove antitrust against google.

I don't believe that's accurate (at least, as I would interpret "concrete harm to customers"). It may be enough in the US for the predator to intend to reduce competition and to have a reasonable chance of success (and of maintaining higher prices one competition is reduced)[1][2].

[1] - http://www-student.unl.edu/cis/econ321b03/online_course/unit...

[2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing

You'll notice in that second link:

> However, because the antitrust laws are ultimately intended to benefit consumers, and discounting results in at least short-term net benefit to consumers, the U.S. Supreme Court has set high hurdles to antitrust claims based on a predatory pricing theory.

So yeah, good luck MS et al. You'll have better luck in the socialist paradise known as the EU.

Before Google and after Google there were other competitors to Apple, such as Windows Mobile and WebOS. Also, to be very clear: you seem to be talking about Android, when I was talking about actual physical phones and tablets; right now there are a bunch of people angry that Google is pretty much giving away Nexus devices in an entirely unsustainable fashion. This is a fairly recent development (and would probably be getting more complaints if they didn't immediately run out ;P).

http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/03/editorial-amazon-and-goog...

Regardless, your same argument could easily be said about web browsers, and somehow that case happened, so obviously anti-trust actually does work like that, at least in the eyes of the US prosecutors: just like with Internet Explorer, Google has managed to squelch numerous markets where there could have been competitors by being the only player willing to do it good enough for free; for some less obvious examples, think of cases like Google Code, or Google Charts, or even Google Groups (which is still around, but whose only competitor was another free offering from Yahoo! which is largely a laughing stock at this point).

Here's what a bunch of smart people think:

http://www.c-span.org/Events/Law-and-Economics-Experts-Discu...

synposis: the antitrust case is at this point ridiculous.

As a formerly poor person who could only afford a G1 and not an iphone, allowing me to rise out of poverty, I'm not angry. The only angry people I know are Apple execs. Consumers are pretty happy about this. Which means the antitrust case is going nowhere.

The Microsoft case was different, Microsoft was found guilty for EOM shenanigans, and Bork, who authored modern antitrust law and thought microsoft was guilty, now thinks there is no antitrust case against Google.

When the FTC is done, they'll be a laughing stock.

If you want to really find a problem, you'll have to look at amazon who is not only selling at cost, they make no profit and have a high P/E since investors think they'll eliminate competition then raise prices.

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