I'm not sure people understand what the consequences of taking away Google's ad revenue is. If a large enough bank goes under, it takes out not just the bank, but huge sectors of the economy, affecting many more businesses and jobs. That's why the government bailed out the banks when they failed.
The same will happen when Google loses its ad revenue. Google is an ad company. By opening up all its trade secret data, it loses its advantage. That will make it lose its core revenue. The end result will be Google collapsing entirely within a few years. Then those component parts people are talking about "opening up" will be gone too.
Here's a small number of things that will die when Google dies. Can you imagine how the world will be affected when these go away?
- Google Maps
- Google Mail
- Google Drive
- Google Docs
- Google Groups
- Google Forms
- Google Cloud
- Google OAuth
- Google Search
- Google Analytics
- Chrome
- Android
- Android Auto
- Fitbit
- Google Fi
- Google Fiber
- Google Flights
- Google Translate
- Google Pay
- Waymo
In the best case, killing these will force consumers to move to Apple. You wanna talk monopoly? You haven't seen anything yet.
Apple has no alternative for much of the Business-focused products, so that will take considerable time for companies to adopt alternatives. But in the meantime, the world will become pretty broken for a lot of companies that depend on these tools. This will affect many more people than just Google's direct users. The whole web will shrink, and huge swaths of the worldwide economy will disappear. Businesses closing, lost jobs, shrinking economies, lack of services.
There are plenty of parties who want to see Google lose or take part of its businesses. But if it's not done extremely carefully, there's a very large stack of dominoes that are poised to fall.
You essentially outline why it should be broken up.
I'm not convinced making the ad tech sector more competitive would prompt that outcome but, "It would disrupt mature products" isn't a compelling argument to allow the existence of a monopoly.
Google is a monopoly, they exert monopoly power and enjoy monopoly pricing.
I think the more likely outcome would be more dynamic products under smaller bannerheads.
That's a fair point. If we saw a downward trend in google search usage in the last year or two, it might support your theory.
Whether AI and search are similar enough to call them competitors, at least right now, is highly debatable. I don't know about other people, but I for one have definitely not started asking chatbots questions instead of looking for informed, human-authored content.
EDIT: Note that I mean downward trend in total, not the percentages shown by statcounter. Statcounter does have a separate chatbot page though, if you're interested in that. Still doesn't answer your totally valid question of how many people are chatting instead of searching, though. Maybe Google or ChatGPT could tell us :)
> If a large enough bank goes under, it takes out not just the bank, but huge sectors of the economy, affecting many more businesses and jobs. That's why the government bailed out the banks when they failed.
That is why the banks should have been broken up into smaller banks long before we reached that point, and it is why Google should have been broken up long ago. The only way to prevent the situation you describe is to never allow any single entity to become so important to so many people.
It's like planting a tree. The best time to break up a big company is twenty years ago (before it became so big). The second-best time is now.
I strongly disagree. If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened. They are all FREE too, mind you. Everyone would still be paying for email. The enormous amount of free education on YouTube would not have been accessible to the world. The economy that we know today would be vastly different and in my opinion far worse off. So much of the economic growth came off the back of the free and ad-subsidized services Google provided for us. The reason Google is the size it is today is because it provided better services at better prices than all the competitors. If Google was broken up 20 years ago, the consumer would have paid the price.
The consumer did pay the price. Google built on empire on making consumers believe they were getting things for free while selling other businesses a direct line to its customers' wallets. It's been a very effective sleight of hand operation, to the point where even relatively savvy people on HN seem to forget that advertising pays the bills by getting its targets to spend money they would not have otherwise spent.
A world without Google would not be a world with less disposable income for regular people, but it might be a world with less disposable junk.
Even if you discount the effectiveness of ads (which seems foolish given how many people have so much staked on them working), the eye-watering prices Google charges for them get directly passed to the consumer in the form of higher prices.
Monopolies are rarely if ever good for consumers, but some monopolies are better than others at offloading the responsibility for their harm onto other businesses.
> A world without Google would not be a world with less disposable income for regular people, but it might be a world with less disposable junk.
If the argument is "more ads = more junk" then the argument is essentially "my values are more important than other peoples values". I'm also anti-consumerism, but if someone sees an ad and finds a product intriguing enough to purchase, they believe that thing might have value in their life. We might not agree, but we should not have the ability to control what other people find value in. I think this is equivalent to an argument of coercing people to conform to our values instead of convincing them to have our values.
That's only true up to a point. If I say "more plastic in the ocean = more junk", you can say "oh, that's just you pushing your values, if someone else would rather have a disposable plastic water bottle than a clean ocean, that's their choice". But, as with (physical) pollution, the costs of this kind of ad pollution and covert data harvesting are not transparent to consumers, so it's not possible to say they have actually given informed consent to it.
More insidiously, the proliferation of this type of "junk" crowds out other business models, meaning that increasingly people can't even "test" whether they would prefer something else. It's basically the tyranny of small decisions. It's not just a matter of "I will trade you five minutes of my eyeball time for 6 months of email", because every such transaction increase the likelihood that in the future you will find yourself with no option other than to engage in such a transaction in order to, say, pay your electric bill.
It's my claim that my viewpoint is actually in accord with a majority of people's values, in the sense that if we considered an alternate universe with less ad junk, more people in that universe would look at ours and say "Wow, I'm glad I don't live there" than vice versa. It's just that there are lots of clever boiling-frog ways to get people to act against their own values without their being fully aware of it. The mere fact that something has happened doesn't mean most people actually wanted it to happen, or are happy it happened, or even realize they would in fact be happier if it hadn't happened.
I'm not sure where you got that I'm trying to impose anything on anyone—sounds like you latched onto a side note and decided to reply to what you thought the side note was implying instead of the substance of my comment?
The argument has nothing to do with values or imposing them on others, it's simply this: These things are not and never were free. Google wants you to think they're free, but either the ads are effective at driving revenue and consumers are paying for Google's products in the form of increased consumption or Google is a parasite that lies to businesses about the efficacy of their ads and consumers are paying for Google's products in the form of the parasitic Google tax. Most likely it's a bit of both.
Either way, Google offering these products for "free" did not have a positive effect on consumer wallets and paid solutions emerging to replace Google if it actually does dissolve will not have a negative effect.
True, these services are not and never were free, we pay for them with our data. I would say this is all fairly common knowledge, my parents who are not tech savvy understand this, and I genuinely don't believe people care enough. I know this trade off, my tech savvy friends and acquaintances know this and yet we continue to make this trade off because frankly I don't think many value their personal data at all, and I think that's why we say these services are "free" because we're not trading anything we find particularly valuable.
The problem is that you don't actually know how valuable it is without knowing how it's being used. If your ad-view statistics are used to charge you personally a higher price for a product than someone else who didn't click on the same ads, is that still okay? If they're used to raise your mortgage interest rate, is that still okay? If they're used to sell scam products to old ladies, is that still okay? If they're used to peddle political misinformation to support the election of a fascist, is that still okay? You don't know what tradeoff you're actually making. Maybe you'd think it was okay, maybe not.
Modern companies have become very, very good at making consumers believe they are getting a good deal by trading an obvious benefit for the possibility of a hidden harm. The type of data tracked by internet companies is only one form of this.
> while selling other businesses a direct line to its customers' wallets
What does this mean?
> Even if you discount the effectiveness of ads (which seems foolish given how many people have so much staked on them working), the eye-watering prices Google charges for them get directly passed to the consumer in the form of higher prices.
But then...why is anyone buying them if they don't work? How do you run this experiment without Google in to show that hand-curated ads on TV etc would've been a better, cheaper way to do ads in the long run than automated ones?
There are mire dark patterns in this than you can think of. Have you ever wondered what does Amazon do on the top of the search results typing “something ebay” into google?
> If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened.
And that would be fine. To me this is like saying "if we had jailed those meth makers and dealers 20 years ago, all these meth labs today would never have existed". If these services cannot exist without a business model built around transparent, bounded transactions (e.g., no hidden data harvesting), then they should not exist. The problem is precisely that Google and others of its ilk have essentially gotten millions of people addicted to "free" services whose true costs are hidden.
> The reason Google is the size it is today is because it provided better services at better prices than all the competitors.
No, they've just been better at hiding the costs, exploiting legal loopholes, and exploiting their privileged position to raise barriers to entry for other participants.
> "If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened."
People didn't need them 20 years ago, so why do they need them now?
> "They are all FREE too, mind you."
No proprietary software is free. You either pay with your money (you do this with games, for example), or you pay with your data (and this is what you do with Google). Sometimes with both (you do this with Microsoft).
Free email existed before Google - Hotmail and Yahoo come to mind immediately, but there were plenty of others. You also got a free email address from your ISP - even AOL users had email.
I remember hotmail before gmail. Attachments had a 2 MB limit. I couldn't even share HQ photos using hotmail. And the whole inbox had a 25 MB capacity. I do believe there were paid alternatives with more storage.
Gmail came in with 1 GB storage and grouping emails as conversations. To me, both of these aspects were revolutionary, and other email providers shortly followed suit.
* "other email providers shortly followed suit" means that it was never out of their reach to begin with, they just needed more competition to convince them to try: which didn't have to be Google and didn't have to be ad- or surveillance-supported.
* 1GB storage in 2004 to 15GB storage 21 years later suggests that something vital has stalled. Every other storage metric (price of RAM per MB, price of hard drives per MB, price of cloud storage per MB) has improved 100 fold over the same time period[1,2].
Yes, and Gmail hasn't improved for decades. Why not? Because Google is a monopoly actor and does not need to compete.
Example: you can't create a new email label in the Android client. You have to log on to email in a browser and do it there. This was true when smartphones were a niche way of connecting to email, and it's still true today.
Fair point. Maybe I'm too young and have bought into the narrative that Google was the first widely available and free email. Still I think though, the plethora of their other services widely available for free (maps, drive, sites, youtube) were extraordinary for the price, at least for me.
I think this is sort of missing the point: I’m happy to trade a bit of attention here and there for services because I’m just going to go without a lot of things if I have to pay real money for them. If we go to a model where every site charges for usage, I will start using fewer services regularly and will use each service for more things which seems a bit counterproductive in terms of monopolies.
That's what you don't get. You aren't just watching ads. You are giving them data about you, a lot of data. That data is used to heavily manipulate you. This isn't like the old days of broadcast TV where ads air and you aren't directly tracked. If you ever find a product that is free, it isn't. You are the product that is being sold.
Firefox was also extraordinary for the price. point being that Google has never been the only option, just the most popular because why not your gmail is already plugged in.
No, Mozilla is 90% funded by Google ads. Mozilla does a ridiculous number of non-browser things. Konqueror and Navigator existed long before Google ad funding.
Those service are certainly not free. Google doesn't offer them just to be nice: they make money from them. The costs to the consumer are hidden and indirect, but they are costs nonetheless.
Nearly all the services mentioned here were acquisitions or had strong competitors at the time of their launches. It is undeniable that Google has made these into quality products and led to their dominant position in their fields. However, Google's existence was necessary for none of these classes of products.
> I strongly disagree. If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened. They are all FREE too, mind you. Everyone would still be paying for email.
People weren't paying for email before gmail. It was predated by hotmail, Yahoo mail, and innumerable free online email offerings by small players. Being free wasn't even a selling point for gmail; the selling point was that they gave you a lot of storage.
Speaking of things that happened before Google, Yahoo Maps and Firefox are older than Google Maps and Chrome. And... Google Flights is a Google acquisition, not a product that they developed.
And then...
> Can you imagine how the world will be affected when these go away?
> Google Fi
> Google Fiber
> Google Pay
Yes, no one will notice.
> Google Groups
It already has gone away. Also, Usenet is something else older than Google.
> Google OAuth
Eliminating "sign in with [popular site]" would be a hugely positive change.
almost no one ever paid for email, there were many free providers and people got accounts from their isp
google bought youtube 19 years ago because their own attempt was doing poorly and youtube was booming right after its founding, they didn't win in the space because they were good at it, they bought success in a way that probably shouldn't have been allowed
you're acting like google invented ad supported online services
the problem is now that google doesn't have to be the best any more, they can be third best at nearly everything but still own the market share because they can afford to give things away for free which ruins competition
> That is why the banks should have been broken up into smaller banks long before we reached that point
They still can be broken up. As for not being competitive on the global market - neither is regular labor compared to slave labor. And just like companies employing slave labor are (or should be) barred from the US market, so can companies that are too large. Solving such prisoner dilemmas is exactly what government is for.
No, the comment is saying that the situation is only going to get worse from here. There will never be a better time to solve Google's anticompetitive behavior.
The consequences should be weighed and considered, but shrugging and letting Google keep on keeping on because it's too big to fail isn't a viable option.
I set the bar even lower than the other commenter. I don't care if it's a monopoly, nor even really if it's engaged in anticompetitive practices. I just care if it's big, like big enough to have outsized market power. I think that markets with large disparities in size and market power among participants are inherently anticompetitive. I think that in most market sectors --- banks, automakers, airlines, media, you name it --- there are a small number of large companies with outsize market power, and those should all be broken up.
Absolutely right. Customers benefit most if there is a working market and monopolies and other kinds of capture are restricted.
When I compare the cost cutting happening in my supermarket over pennies and then compare it to the exuberant prices at airports, festival venues and sport stadiums it is clear how much many industries are ripping customers off.
The lawsuit focuses specifically on search and search advertising. So the answer to your question is Google Search.
Note that a legal monopoly is not the same as the extreme simplification of "zero other options". "In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with unfair price raises." [1]
"In United States v. Google LLC, the federal government alleges that Google has unfairly hindered competition in the search market through anti-competitive deals with Apple as well as mobile carriers. The government alleges that, as a result of these practices, Google has accumulated control of around 88% of the domestic search engine market.
In doing so, the government alleges, Google has additionally monopolized the search advertising market at the expense of competing services. Per the government's estimation, Google has been able to accumulate control of over 70% of the search advertising market. As a result of lack of competition, Google has been able to over-charge advertisers versus what they would pay in a competitive environment." [2]
Statcounter seems to align quite closely with the government's assertion. [3] Extra creepily, it appears to be even a hair worse globally, where Bing is less used (not that I like Bing or MS either). [4] But there is no international framework I'm aware of to handle global-scale monopolies, so that's outside the scope of the suit.
I didn't use that word and no one in the chain above me did either. I specifically chose "anticompetitive behavior" to emphasize that a monopoly is not required to do damage to the free market or to trigger antitrust action.
So out of the list, how has Google behaved “anti competitively” in any of these?
- Google Maps
- Google Mail
- Google Drive
- Google Docs
- Google Groups
- Google Forms
- Google Cloud
- Google OAuth
- Google Analytics
- Android
- Android Auto
- Fitbit
- Google Fi
- Google Fiber
- Google Flights
- Google Translate
- Google Pay
- Waymo
Maps/mail/drive/docs/flights/translate: provided for free using their dominance in ad tech to bankroll it and feeding the data back in to the ad platform. No one else can compete, and using dominance in one market to ensure dominance in others has historically been a clear trigger for antitrust.
Android: they lost a court case over this one that has lots of details if you care to look.
The rest are a weird mix of paid services that should be fine to stand up on their own or not even products at all (OAuth).
You can't have the Play app store on your Android phone unless you accept to install Youtube, Google Maps, Google Drive and Google Photos. This is clearly anti-competitive.
Horizontal integration is a tried and true strategy of monopolies.
Standard Oil bought or bankrupt competitive refineries, pipeline companies, regional railroads, even mom&pop gas stations & groceries often at considerable costs to ensure no part of the oil supply chain was profitable for its competitors.
This is a straw man, nobody asserted that the consequences should not be considered. Clearly, whichever way we proceed there will be considerable consequences; I doubt there is any dispute about that. Your argument seems to fail to acknowledge the dystopian consequences of NOT doing something.
Also, let's dispense with inappropriate jabs such as referring to other perspectives as "fantasy".
You still haven't addressed the consequences of NOT doing something.
Perhaps you've never heard the expression about "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now." It's an aphorism, absolutely not literal. [1] Additionally, even if it were intended literally, which it clearly was not, saying it should have been done 20 years ago is not the same as fantasizing. It also obviously concludes that it should be done now, which is not fantasy.
I didn't say you were dismissive. If you have valid points, you should be able to make them without rewording everything into something else that you can tear down. That's called a straw man argument. "... the informal fallacy of refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction" [2]
"That's why we need anti-trust in the first place."
Moreover, it seems to me these laws ought to strengthened to make executives/decision makers even more accountable.
The people who made Google a monopoly aren't stupid and knew full well what they were doing. They should not be able to hide behind Google's corporate structure and also should be penalized for their bad behavior.
Yes, this is one of the big changes that need to be made to really reform things. Companies act based on decisions made by individuals. Those individuals should be held accountable if the company's actions are found to be harmful. There should be lots of CEOs and board members of companies in oil, healthcare, housing, retail (as well as tech) who should be facing fines in the hundreds of millions (if not the billions) on their personal assets.
Customers frequently prefer cheap bundles. The right time for an antitrust decision is often when the company is large and stops behaving competitively.
This list is very telling. Instead of a healthy marketplace of companies competing to sell their software and services, we end up with one monopolist who gives away mediocre products and in return taxes everything you buy (in the form of ad spending), and then annoys you with the same ads. How is this a desirable outcome?
There is nothing mediocre about the search engine, gmail, maps, android, chrome etc.. etc. Do they all have room for for improvement? Probably. But they are simply incredibly, breathtakingly good products. Search, maybe has gotten worse in recent years, but it's still amazing.
Maps and Satelleite view are astounding, especially when you consider that they are free.
>How is this a desirable outcome?
The list speaks for itself. There are many valid complaints against google, but this is not one of them.
> There is nothing mediocre about the search engine, gmail, maps, android, chrome etc.. etc.
Search Engine: Google is fantastic with its index. Very poor with the results it returns. Sampling of the problems:
- There's a reason people add site:reddit.com - the default results are often very low quality. Sure, Google has the good quality stuff indexed, but over the last 5 years they've been declining like crazy in actually showing you what you need.
- When I search for something on mobile, I get fairly unstructured results. First, an AI blurb. Then the first batch of results are videos. Then some web sites. Then a break with "People also ask...". Then more web sites. Then image results.
99% of the time I just want the web sites. Before, if there were video/image results, they'd be on the top and I'd conveniently scroll past them to get to the meat. I can't do that any more. Google keeps breaking the flow by adding more and more sections. When I hit "More search results", the problem continues.
Thank God for Kagi.
> gmail
Lots of people don't use it (including me). Other than people losing their mail, I'm not sure what is lost if this goes away. Email providers are aplenty. What am I missing by not using Gmail?
> maps
I'll grant you this one.
> android
It's nice to have an alternative to Apple, but that's the only good thing about it. Using Android reminds me of the old Windows. Very unstable. Full of spyware/bloatware.
> chrome
The only thing Chrome was better at than Firefox was stability - for a brief period in its history. Firefox is just better. If a site works on Chrome and not Firefox, that's not because Firefox is inferior.
Calling Chrome an "incredibly, breathtakingly good product" is just insane. It's merely an OK browser.
> It's nice to have an alternative to Apple, but that's the only good thing about it. Using Android reminds me of the old Windows. Very unstable. Full of spyware/bloatware.
Being free to run whatever code we want as users (F-droid is a treasure). Plus actually having a "disable animations completely" button to remove unneeded slowness.
It's also amazing how awesome Android can be. When you compare GrapheneOS / CalyxOS you go from a slow, bloated phone that lasts maybe a day - to a phone you have complete control of that is performant and lasts days on a charge. The contrast is stark and most people have no clue those options exist.
"If a site works on Chrome and not Firefox, that's not because Firefox is inferior."
Right, we've been through all that stuff with Internet Explorer—sites often preferred it over others even though its HTML extensions weren't standard W3C. Chrome is better but it's still favored for the same reasons.
Having used alternatives to a few of their products… I’ll accept part of that list.
Gmail is well below mediocre, it’s so sluggish and unresponsive even on fast hardware. Compare with fastmail; it’s hard to go back.
The search engine consistently gives me pages of blog spam before a useful result. Eg Kagi is dramatically more useful despite having a tiny fraction of the resources to work with.
I suggest you explore alternatives and their usability compared to whatever Google offers. For example Google Docs word processing part is astonishingly bad. Gmail really sucks for when you have a lot of e-mail and also has a high chance of locking you out at some point, which can be really bad,if you relied on it too much. YouTube? Ahaaahhaaha! Rarely used anything that is so annoying to use and so extremely bloated and buggy. They are the prime example btw. for the back button no longer working.
People at Google work on many things, but they also build lots of shit.
Products like engine, gmail, maps, and youtube were game-changers when first released. But that was a long time ago and right now plenty of competitors would step in and do a decent copycat job.
> But they are simply incredibly, breathtakingly good products.
I literally laughed out loud at this. There is nothing further from the truth when you look at what else is out there. I feel like a lot of these comments are shilling for Google they're so biased.
Search is not amazing. Search is littered with garbage. Try out Kagi or even DDG for a day, but let's not pretend search hasn't been a dumpster fire for years now.
DDG is definitely not better IME, and also relies heavily on Bing. I still use it as my default, it's good enough, but I mostly default to it to avoid the Google captcha hell.
Because the vast majority of people don't want to and have zero intention pf paying separately for email, maps, navigation, browser, etc.
In fact, that's how things used to be before Google and their ilk used ads to make an ecosystem, and their ecosystem was better and free at the point of use than what came before
The vast majority of people are paying separately for all kinds of stuff. I don't see a reason why software and digital services have to be different. In the early days, payment was difficult, but this has been long solved. I am convinced that the quality would improve dramatically if there was some actual competition.
Also most people would probably prefer not to pay for the ad fees that google extorts from pretty much any company.
> I am convinced that the quality would improve dramatically if there was some actual competition.
You can pay for Google One right now, roughly exchanging cash for storage capacity on the otherwise free services. I see no viable competition for that model. Protonmail is comparatively expensive.
I really don't want the Internet to turn into the mess that is video streaming where every independent licensing agency tries to capture an audience for $15/month.
Another great example is Let's Encrypt. It's a public good to provide quality TLS certificates and the marginal cost is $0 with some sponsorship. I'd far rather other core Internet services like e-mail and basic file sharing are sponsored.
Honestly, I feel like people are subconsciously aware that Google is trying to bludgeon them into getting YouTube premium, and they're simply sticking it to Google rather than giving in. Google's gone through:
- one skippable 5s ad
- two skippable 5s ads
- one unskippable 5s and one skippable 15s ads
- aforementioned or two 15s ads, one skippable
- two 15s unskippable ads
- removed the prerenderer 'skip' button to make it more difficult to immediately skip
- removed the ad amount indicator and precise length indicator (now just a bar) to psychologically drive people into sunk cost feelings
God knows what they're cooking up next.
And for large swathes of content, there is no alternative to YouTube.
Those changes seem more like boiling the frog because the content they're looking for is only available on YT.
I'm a firm believer in the issue being one of pricing, not that the consumer is willing to pay nothing at all.
I have this view because we've already seen how users flocked to iTunes, then Spotify/Apple Music and Netflix/other streaming services when the pricing was right. We are also now watching as people depart streaming services and return to direct sales and P2P file-sharing due to incrementally higher prices.
To me that's a sure indicator of price being the problem, not an insatiable appetite for zero cost.
The math largely makes sense too. Particularly in music if you're the type that has a taste for a genre of music, rather than just wanting to listen to the top 40.
I agree price is the issue. I'm a YouTube premium subscriber myself since I use it so much, but every friend I've talked to about it bar one has been put off by the price. Lowering the price and possibly splitting YouTube Music into its own subscription would make a big difference - I have no interest in YouTube music as I already have another music streaming subscription I'm not interested in giving up.
Everytime someone blocks an ad, someone else has to watch it.
It's crazy to me how entitled people are and how completely blind they are to how the ad supported model works.
Then these same people complain that youtube has no competitors. Yeah, no shit, who in their right mind would invest in a customer base like youtubes? Oh, that's right, Vid.me, and they went bankrupt in a year. Wonder why...
With the exception of fi, If you think any of those services are something people want to pay yet another saas subscription for, you’ve been hitting your own supply too much.
But if Google weren't a monopoly, phone manufacturers could choose to bundle different collections of apps made by different people on to their hardware, rather than having to get it all from Google. This would also mean that phone users could be given a genuine choice about their privacy, rather than have dark patterns to force them to give up most of it, because it's the Android business model.
We need a better word than "duopoly" to describe what Apple and Google are. They're just as bad as a monopoly - and they're impossible to compete with.
Both Apple and Google need to be disrupted here. We should be able to see lots of healthy verticals for every single one of these product categories. They shouldn't accrue to two players and be impossible to dislodge.
I propose the word "Googolith" to describe {Google, Apple, Amazon}, though it's not a great attempt. We do need some kind of word or language to describe these anti-competitive titans that are impossible to innovate against. The word "monopoly" gets shut down, but the control they wield may as well be monopolistic. There's no choice and there's no competing. They're practically nation states.
Google works because of it's ad network and tracking. Everything Google does is a money furnace without a centralized ad network.
People may celebrate the break-up of google, but it will be short lived when they find that now everything they do on the internet that they used to do through google costs a monthly sub. Or is ad supported with zero tolerance for ad-blocking.
The reason competing with google is impossible is because people are deathly allergic to paying for things that they think are free. Vid.me sucked all the air out of the room for a few months in 2017 and was pulling tons of yotubers over. Then it went bankrupt because "People don't like subscriptions, people don't like ads."
This is a point that will be recurring and merits more thought IMHO.
Google services are mostly better because they crushed competition. Cutting their advantage will also mean better alternatives (money will flow to competitors instead of being sucked by Google).
As an analogy, it's like athlete doping: they sure were faster than the other athletes, but that's part of the issue.
Exactly. People keep saying "the alternatives aren't as good" as though markets aren't filled with feedback loops and the other products being worse somehow proves that Google is winning on fair terms. Google's products being better doesn't prove the system is fair, all it proves is that Google is better at navigating the current system, which is hardly surprising given that they have largely been able to shape it for themselves.
Google services are not a gift. They are not actually free. Google is not a charity nor is it a non-profit. I want people in this discussion to stop arguing as if Google isn't making money on all these services.
If the parents were slowly siphoning off enough of the teen's money through a convoluted set of channels such that the teenager indirectly paid for the truck anyway and the parents ended up effectively taking a share of the money, that would be definitely worth hating.
If his parents dipped into the funds their grand-parent left to release at his 18th birthday, just to buy him the F150, he sure should be pissed about not getting what he actually wanted.
What Google "gives" isn't popping from nowhere, the billions they use to fund it still came from us, just in indirect ways.
I pay for cloud storage, not from Google. I'm happy to pay for this, and I use enough storage there I would be paying Google if I used their storage. Almost every time I go into the Photos all on my phone, there's a dark pattern which tries to get me to turn on backups. If I do this, all my personal photos will be uploaded to Google's servers. Then the UI will change so that I'm never presented with an explicit choice of turning this off, ever again, and will have to search for how to do it. I don't love the internet Google created.
Not just bad. There isn't a single piece of Apple software that is (1) free and (2) people choose to use on iOS, only use because the user is forced to. Photos? Forced, sucks. iMessage? Forced, sucks. Apple Mail, Calendar, Contacts? Huge pieces of shit. The App Store, the very gateway into competition, is the shittiest of all, and not just because the 30% fee, but because its discovery is maybe the worst ever made by any catalog-style front end in the world.
At least they opened up the password completion APIs.
People literally buy phones from Apple so they can have a blue bubble in iMessage. Movies carry out social campaigns about how they were “filmed” on iPhone. And there’s no shortage of alternatives on those devices, from WhatsApp to Signal.
Apple user software is legitimately awful in a systematic way. Although I like the Chess app. :)
Google, interestingly, is much better.
I don't know what to say. It's clear that the Internet Ecosystem has a megafauna of Google and taking it out would be an ecosystem collapse, but the other Megafauna are... worse.
It’s pretty myopic to say that people don’t choose to use Apple software. Not only do many people choose to use the Apple software that comes with their devices, they buy those devices for it.
I agree. I'm so sick of maps. I type something in and there it is, can't they do any better than that? Sure they have directions to the place in multiple modalities, and photos of it, and reviews, but is that it? Is that really the best that's available?
Google drive is likewise awful. I upload something to it and there it is. I come back 10 years later and it's still there. Why doesn't it do more? Why can't it make my file better over time? Why can't they take ideas from dropbox, or box, or onedrive. Stupid monopoly forcing us all into one choice.
And as for Google Fiber, well there are so many ISPs offering gigabit plans now, what is Fiber going to offer to do better? It's like you said we need a healthy marketplace with competing companies, not just the one monopolist with shitty gigabit ethernet service.
This is a very ungrateful and childish perspective. It assumes that these things exist out of thin air rather than things google has created. Products don’t just appear, they’re built. Nothing is stopping someone from usurping google. Ever hear of oracle, intel, xerox, blackberry or Microsoft?
Almost all the things in this list were acquired from someone else that built them, rebranded, and then given away for free, taking much of the money out of the market that allowed that product to be built. Without Google giving away the one winner they chose to acquire, you'd have options again.
I built my free web stats service in 2004 because I couldn't afford an Urchin license. Google bought Urchin Live and rebranded it as Google Analytics, and gave it away for free. My service barely pays for itself 20+ years later, but I'm still here and would have an offering for that market on day one that Google Analytics shut down. So would dozens of others.
Gmail is the only product you listed that Google started itself.
Google Maps was built on the acquisitions of Where 2 Technologies, Keyhole and ZipDash.
Chrome is based on WebKit, built at Apple.
Waymo's hardware came from the acquisition of 510 Systems, and the software came from the acquihiring of the team that developed Stanford's self-driving cars for the 2005 and 2007 DARPA challenges, who brought their code with them.
> Almost all the things in this list were acquired from someone else that built them, rebranded, and then given away for free
Nearly everything that was acquired was a) already free, and b) built (and given away for free) in hopes that someone like Google would acquire them.
If you look at most startups, their exit strategy is acquisition. Some would live to IPO, but that is a much tougher road.
It could be argued that IPO is a less likely exit strategy because of Google’s and others’ position, but I think it’s disingenuous to imply that startups (that are already giving away their products for free) are getting acquired as a last resort.
I don’t think so, at least, it’s not their main motivation.
For most, I imagine the VC fueled free period is to lock up customers and increase you have their sensitive data, you start making moves so you can start to charge them, usually a fairly hefty sum. It’s a classic lock in strategy.
It's a more sophisticated perspective than you're giving it credit for.
They're not disputing that google has provided all these services, they're arguing that google's ability to subsidize them prevents market solutions for these same problems being produced.
The internet is, in this view, somewhat of a planned economy with Google as the central planning committee. You get google's maps and google's docs and google's search, rather than a maps marketplace, a docs marketplace, and a search marketplace.
Google is able to enforce this on the market because it holds a unique position where it can extract a significant amount of the value generated in the internet economy in 'ad taxes'.
It's important to try and de-googleify your life if only so you don't get caught up in making such an exaggerated sky-is-falling point. All of these could literally vanish tomorrow and the world would go on, they all have their alternatives, some of them arguably superior. For some, the near term pain would be greater than for others -- even just on my personal level I'd be caught with my pants down for email, because while I have over the years moved a lot of email addresses to something at my own domain name, I haven't done it for all of them, and I'd still need to update the forwarding to not-google. Not a huge deal though. A big one you didn't even list that's more important than several you did combined is Youtube, but again there are alternatives.
The world would change, but I think quite a bit less than you seem to think. To put it another way, the world was undeniably changed by Google, but the change has been done, and they're no longer necessary to keep the biggest changes from reverting. (I'd be more worried about SBCL development if google flights' backend couldn't find a new home -- the product itself has tons of competition + just going directly to airlines.)
In actual reality, of course, these things don't disappear overnight, making the pain of switching much, much less for businesses and individuals heavily dependent on some of these things. Even if "google collapsing within a few years" was likely (they have something like a third or more of annual operating expenses saved as cash on hand), a few years is more than enough time. If a business can migrate off of Salesforce or SAP (it can be expensive and time consuming but you can do it!), it can migrate off these.
Yeah. It’s also hard to overstate how many incredible engineers work at Google. Many - perhaps most of them are doing very low value work of adding marginal features nobody cares about to mature products. And in many cases doing so at a glacial pace. Every year thousands of brilliant engineers add ~1m lines of code to Google chrome. And almost nobody notices or cares. As browsers get faster, companies respond by adding more bloat to their websites.
If Google suddenly went out of business and 5% of xooglers started companies, we would see a gigantic burst of innovation in computing.
I am sure there are many capable people working at Google, but the exaggerating of their skill level needs to stop. Some leet coder doesn't necessarily deliver better designed systems than any another engineer. And with that, the cult of believing in whiteboard coding interviews also needs to go away.
I’ve worked there. They certainly aren’t all geniuses. But there are a huge number of brilliant engineers there - many of whom spend their lives schleping protobufs around for a fat paycheck.
It’s not the whiteboard interviews that makes that possible. It’s the prestige (especially from a few years ago), job security and salary. And the opportunity to work with other smart people. Google has an excellent talent pool.
I've had the lucky position to be able to think positively about a lot of the tech and gaming layoffs in the last couple years for pretty much this reason -- that we'll eventually look back on them as unleashing a lot of previously locked up potential. On the other hand there are people at google and elsewhere who get paid to do important maintenance work, not requiring much innovative thinking, but if they leave/are laid off that work just stops happening, and something valuable is lost. On the other other hand, if AI keeps getting better at a similar pace as the last 5 years, none of this will matter on global economy-doubling timelines of ~15 years.
You think my comment is sycophantic? If so, only on the surface. Another way to read what I wrote is that google has robbed the world of many smart people. Instead of contributing meaningfully, these people - trapped through money and inertia - spend their days doing useless work for an ad company. What a pity.
That is true of all of capitalism, that is true of 2 billion people on this wonderful planet that live on scraps. They didn't decide to be born in their condition any more than we ours.
One of the most detestable parts of Google are all the people with a smarmy self entitled sense of elitism. I had someone get off of a call, and they showed utter contempt for the customer, because in their words, "if they were smart enough they would work here, and every one wants to work here, therefor they are dumb and I shouldn't have to deal with stupid people" What a fucker.
Some of the services you mentioned are already very irrelevant:
* Fitbit -- no explanation necessary
* Google translate -- I don't know about if people use their APIs, but for me personally, I have not used translate for a few years. ChatGPT has been my go-to.
* Google Pay -- it has a smaller market share than Samsung Pay.
Then next tiers of services -- they are doing ok but there are plenty of competitors in the field:
* Gmail, Drive, Docs, Groups, Forms, Cloud, Flights, Fi
I even use some of them, but I really don't care if they go away.
Life gets a bit more difficult if Maps, Chrome and Android are gone all of a sudden. Maybe we'll be back to using Garmin. Heck, I love the idea that everybody uses Nokia, Bing or Garmin for navigation, and we actually have a decent website -- like the Yelp or Zagar in the old days -- for restaurant reviews. I still see "#1 Rated Zagat" stickers from near two decades ago at many restaurants.
Anyway, personally, for the vast majority of the things listed here, I don't see them going away being a bad thing that would even affect as many people as you think.
> Google translate -- I don't know about if people use their APIs, but for me personally, I have not used translate for a few years. ChatGPT has been my go-to.
Hard to agree on this one.
Most of the time when I’m the country side of Hungary and some Nordic countries Google Translator it’s essential for communication of foreigners that lives I those places. I can tell several anecdotes of international people being able to communicate with their local in-laws via Google Translator conversational feature; or even cases of people being able to read after a mechanical translation.
YouTube spent years showing children damaging content through an algo until the parental boycott became so bad that they had to do something, worried that a generation was going to grow up not addicted to their content.
YouTube sucks in terms of usability. It only survives, because it is at no cost except for ads viewing and not even that, when using uBlock Origin properly and because of most of the content being there. Other than that is has become so enshittified, it is one of the worst sites I visit.
Gmail and Docs are children's toys for people, who don't know much about e-mail and proper documents. Those are the majority of people on the Internet these days though, so Gmail and Docs are going nowhere any time soon.
No, youtube survives because it’s the only platform with a reasonable split between youtube itself and it’s creators. It was obvious long ago that people will go where the content is, usability issues be damned.
If by that you are talking about anything that doesn't have built-in version control and simultaneous editing, good riddance to it and the v4-edited-copy-FINAL-edited it rode in on. But there are a few actual competitors to Google Docs that have built-in versioning and simultaneous editing.
When I worked in the travel tech industry several years ago, it was basically unfair to compete against Google Flights. We just accepted they didn't have to pay for marketing and had infinite compute to work with, and had to differentiate in other ways. They could operate the business at a loss and not really care because it was still good for Google as a whole to have user's travel data. They built a great product but didn't have to play by the rules everyone else had to follow.
Are there better alternatives? I booked flights from Australia to Europe the other day through google flight search. I would never have found the flights I ended up booking via the airline websites directly.
> 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.
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.
This isn't something that has anything to do with size or property. Just 1) eliminate advertising, and 2) actually enforce the most basic of antitrust, namely using one product to subsidize another operating at a loss that prevents competition.
If this is the price we'll pay to break up a monopoly, then be it. Maybe we don't need these services, and maybe people will finally learn to not be dependent on a single provider for everything they have on the Internet.
It's not clear to me why you believe that an antitrust ruling against Google would make them bankrupt. At worst they will lay off workers. But a post-antitrust google is still a viable company
Yeah, especially Tobacco. I mean, there hasn't been an industry gutted that hard ever. They were attacked from all sides. They can't even fucking advertise anymore, and when they can, they have to tell you "hey don't buy this it kills you". And then, cherry on top, when consumers do buy this product, they're allowed to use it in like < 1% of spaces.
This is very North America-centric. Smoking is still rampant in many countries, including parts of Europe. It was actually a bit of a culture shock for me.
Oh yes I'm aware, I have family in Eastern Europe and yeah... it's different. When I went in the 2010s you could still smoke in most restaurants. I actually have a strange place for that kind of environment. It's charming, it's endearing, in a way. But it probably sucks for public health.
For the sake of argument, let's grant the implication that Google is in danger of going out of business. Even so, if our economy is at the point where one company going out of business would cripple it, it's almost certainly worth the pain of decoupling from that company. It would hurt, but we would get through it, and it would be better in the long run. On the other hand, if we just threw up our hands and said "do whatever you want, Google, you're too important for us to tell you what to do" then we're pretty much at their mercy. I can't imagine things getting better or fixing themselves in that situation.
A lot of Google's products could be completely sustainable businesses on their own, but of course they couldn't offer them for free for personal use as they do now. Plenty of companies pay for Google Workspace, so that surely wouldn't die. Android could be spun out and returned to a more open development model, with phone manufacturers contributing money and developer time to the project instead of mostly freeloading from Gooogle. Google Cloud is supposedly profitable, (although I don't get why anyone would want to pay for that...).
Really the only things that I'd worry about are Google Search, Maps and Gmail, as they don't seem like they would work if they weren't free to use and I don't see a way to monetize them. It might be interesting to also put Google Maps under the same umbrella as Android, so it could be jointly owned by the phone manufacturers who ultimately benefit from its existence. Gmail could surely survive for quite a few years by optimizing their costs like crazy and burning Workspace profits.
The rest of the things you listed have existing competition, so it could probably survive and if not, alternatives exist.
Isn't it depressing that a single private company wield such influence in society that Stockholm syndrome develops? I don't know about you, but accepting this is true is way worse than loosing gapps
Because Google has monopoly power, they can charge whatever they want for ads, and every company in the economy has to pay it. So there’s a pretty good argument the economy is being held back by a “Google tax”.
Most of the services you listed above are hardly best in class, and giving them away for free is basically scraps off of the table. The ones which are best in class like Waymo have a good shot at being commercially successful on their own.
The problem is that it is ingrained in people that these services are free, and the only way they are free is by having them feed a centralized ad network.
It's about time that people get used to the idea that you have to pay for some of these things.
In aggregate it won't even hurt to transition to that: consumers are, in aggregate, already paying for these things in the form of increased spending on unrelated products they were sold by the ads and increased prices on goods (because their suppliers pay Google monopolistic prices for ads).
"The whole web will shrink, and huge swaths of the worldwide economy will disappear."
Even if that were to be true and comes to pass then who is to blame? Clearly both Google and Government and its regulators who let Google get out of hand and allowed it to violate monopoly laws for so long when it's been obvious for years.
OK, what's to be done? You can't allow the law to continue to be violated especially now that everybody knows that it has been—if you do then you are giving all and sundry carte blanche to ignore laws as they see fit. That's a recipe for the break down of law and order.
If the Government legislates to give Google exemptions or some form of special privilege then it's not only further entrenching Google's monopoly but also further weakening democracy by favoring the rich and powerful (they'd be further privileged).
Now let's assume some compromise or whitewashing where Google is restructured or bits sold off without strong financial sanctions/fines etc.—ones that actually hurt shareholders' stocks significantly then no one will be happy. Google won't be happy because its already optimized its business structure for maximum income and a restructure would reduce revenues, and those who've been hurt would claim it was too little too late and they'd cry foul.
Yes, government has to take much of the blame but so do shareholders and Google executives. If little is done and there are no penalties that actually hurt the pocket of the perpetrators to a significant extent then it'll be back business as usual in short order. We need strong penalties to set an example to the world that violating the law won't be tolerated.
I'm not a Google shareholder but if I were I'd be selling my shares just in case.
"The whole web will shrink, and huge swaths of the worldwide economy will disappear."
Even if that were to be true and comes to pass then who is to blame? Clearly both Google and Government and its regulators who let Google get out of hand and allowed it to violate monopoly laws for so long when it's been obvious for years.
OK, what's to be done? You can't allow the law to continue to be violated especially now that everybody knows that it has been—if you do then you are giving all and sundry carte blanche to ignore laws as they see fit. That's a recipe for the break down of law and order.
If the Government legislates to give Google exemptions or some form of special privilege then it's not only further entrenching Google's monopoly but also further weakening democracy by favoring the rich and powerful (they'd be further privileged).
Now let's assume some compromise or whitewashing where Google is restructured or bits sold off without strong financial sanctions/fines etc.—ones that actually hurt shareholders' stocks significantly then no one will be happy. Google won't be happy because its already optimized its business for maximum income and a restructure of any significant size would reduce revenues, and those who've been hurt by Google's monopoly would claim it was too little too late and they'd cry foul.
Yes, Government has to take much of the blame but so do shareholders and Google executives. If little is done and there are no penalties
that actually hurt the pockets of the perpetrators to a significant extent then it'll be back business as usual in short order. We need strong penalties to set an example to the world that violating the law won't be tolerated. Perhaps the dominoes have to fall to right things.
I'm not a Google shareholder but if I were I'd be selling my shares just in case.
So Google is "to big to fail" - that's what you are really saying.
The lesson that we should have learned from 2008 is that businesses should never be allowed to reach that kind of size. Google should have been prohibited from the M&A that created such a behemoth.
I think comparing to banks is silly. Banks don't have competitive advantages like Google has. When banks fail it is not because they lost a competitive advantage (other than the competitive advantage of competent management). The catastrophe associated with a major bank collapse has to do with the specific function of banks in the financial system, not just: oh where are all their customers going to go?
Exactly. Even if Google search shut down tomorrow the economy would go on. It’s competitors are probably worse but it wouldn’t cause a run on the banks, which is a specific financial emergency.
I was going to write words to that effect also. I agree but feel I don't have a strong enough argument. I think if Google winked out of existence entirely tomorrow, the world would continue as normal except for the Googler job losses obviously.
They're too big to fail argument of Obama, is now they're too big to break up.
No, they are not, by historical standard. When the Standard Oil Trust was broken up in 1911, it controlled nearly 80% of gasoline market in the US and kept prices too low, so no one could enter the market.
Exxon, Mobile, Chevron, Texaco, Amoco, Gulf oil, and 30 other oil companies emerged. Today only 4 are still around, because anti-trust enforcement has been guted by both parties since WWII. Google babies will merge and raise, yet again.
Just to pick one of these: google Flights sucks. It had a better competitor - Hipmunk - which went under because Google ate their lunch by integrating flights search into the main search product. Don't know how many of these Google products have similar stories, but it's probably a non zero numbers.
What we're getting, in many of these cases, is an inferior product that drove out better competitors through Google search integration.
I remember Hipmunk, it was horrible! Google flights is by far the best flight search platform, competition aren't even close. 10x faster search of flights and the calendar view for prices is incredible!
I consider Google Maps to be the best application ever created. Products like Google Mail, Calendar, Search, Chrome, Android are absolutely best in class. To call them inferior is laughable.
I don’t buy it. I suspect that a reason Google Cloud remains a laggard in market share is that Google’s core business, as an advertiser that feeds off user data, gives parts of the available market the heebie jeebies.
The monopoly is possibly self-defeating at this point. Maybe the reason for the Google graveyard is that too big to fail has somehow turned into too big to succeed.
You mean the internet would return back to how it was in the 00's? I don't see how that's bad...
I 100% admit everything above has value and has decreased friction for interconecting people and internet services but the idea is that should one corporation control everything listed there?
And IMO no. Microsoft had the same for them in the 90's and while I can see a rush into Microsoft and Apple Ecosystems, it will also give a window for new companies, new people to create products to fill in the gaps created by google being forced to spin off it's ecosystem.
They'd have to adapt their business models, the likelihood of the services disappearing are minimal because they each have multiple revenue streams beyond just collecting user data. Indeed we know it's possible because much of the list are me-too products from those which have different business models.
Also we don't need a hypothetic situation: Google already kill off a fair chunk of their tools and services, and alternatives rapidly come to fill their place.
Google's position largely exists because loss leaders tied against leveraging network effects – and as others have noted, many of their services are piss poor.
Google's loss won't be Apple's benefit in any meaningful way, the masses are with Google because it's free, and that's precisely what Apple isn't, and there isn't a great overlap in their services.
As a counterpoint I don't think the government's case is the right approach, they should be establishing the rules of the game at the legislative level, everyone needs to be affected by the potential changes, Google didn't form in a vacuum.
i’ve been using google products for over twenty years and they touch almost all aspects of my life and communications. in the past couple of years I’ve been working to de-couple by going to apple and local vs cloud data. it’s an extremely lengthy and error prone process. apple is workable but not great.
Some of us still remembers pre-Google internet. Imagine how we were able to send emails and navigate on the streets. The image you are painting here is a classic false dichotomy. If Google goes under people won’t be moving to Apple, they are going to move to Fastmail, Yandex Maps, and so on. We might even see a new mobile platform that does not collect every single bit of your life.
Google/Alphabet made a critical mistake. When the Alphabet parent company was founded, Google search and AD should have been divested. All those product lines you mentioned should have been part of separate corporations where at most Google is a minority owner in a joint venture. Google will still rip benefits including profits and some exclusivity but it won't stifle competition by directing those product to align with what benefits its AD revenue stream.
DOJ is in the wrong when trying to open up search and ad, it should simply split Google up in the way I mentioned earlier. Search and advertising should be their own completely independent company. Mostly everyone wins that way: Competitors, the public , shareholders (one product line won't sink the rest, no "all your eggs in one basket" situation) and even majority shareholders.
I genuinely do not use a single service on your list and my life is absolutely indistinguishable from that of one who does. I’m digitally literate and normally functional. Do people really believe these services are irreplaceable let alone the best of the best? That’s the trap…
I have actively moved away from all of these services you listed years ago. The only one that is truly impactful is Gmail, again because of the monopoly they have in mail. But I don't understand your argument. There are options and you're worried about Apple, yet admit they don't have competing products in many of those segments.
Google is exactly the monopoly we need less of. These arguments for it are uninformed. You don't need any of these products. In fact, when Google is out of the way it opens the door for new and better options. Google's products aren't great. They're good enough. And they're only good enough to keep users in the platform to continue to siphon off user data and serve as a conduit for their true business: ads.
> In the best case, killing these will force consumers to move to Apple.
I think there are better options than you suggest.
The whole doc suite can be had from Microsoft. Maybe folks need to ten bucks a month for something that used to be free, but it’s not like we fundamentally lose capabilities.
This is a completely different order of magnitude than banks going under, where people were impacted to the tune of thousands or millions of dollars when they lost their homes.
You're only thinking of consumers. That's still not small potatoes - Google Workspace has 3 billion active users every month (37% of the planet). Office365 has 270 million.
But on the business side, there are 6 million businesses that use Google Workspace to manage their company - their drives, documents, email, distribution lists, SSO, etc. They can't just flip a switch and migrate their entire company to another provider. It would take months to years for most companies to fully migrate. And that's for the products/services that there's an analogue for. Not every Google feature and product has a 1:1 replacement.
Back to the consumer side - it will be insane the number of things affected that nobody is thinking of. Off the top of my head, imagine the billions of people who have used Google SSO to sign up for random websites, and imagine that just stops working. And on top of that, they were all using Gmail. So now they can't login to all the websites they're signed up for, and they can't send a password reset, because their email no longer works. This is just a few of the thousands of issues there will be, for a large chunk of the planet.
> But on the business side, there are 6 million businesses that use Google Workspace to manage their company - their drives, documents, email, distribution lists, SSO, etc. They can't just flip a switch and migrate their entire company to another provider.
Sounds like it'll be plenty profitable as a business in its own right, then.
> Off the top of my head, imagine the billions of people who have used Google SSO to sign up for random websites, and imagine that just stops working.
Why would it suddenly stop working? Lots of third party websites use Google (or Microsoft) SSO.
I agree. At risk of being totally off base because I have not been keeping up with the details of the legal matter it seems to me that the solution isn't to kill Google's core business but rather to force it to sell off some of these branches, with thought and strategy. E.g. one of the comments below pointed out that Google Flights competes with other sites / businesses. Seems like a good candidate to spin off: it could probably be a profitable business in it's own right. Android? Chrome? Idk about those: who / how are they going to be funded? Each piece needs to be analyzed and a deal needs to be struck that's not based on principles as much as it is on what is pragmatically the right balance that benefits people (the American people in particular) the most in the medium to long term.
My understanding is that the legal remedies/repercussions being considered involve divesting Android, Chrome. Splitting these off is not in any way killing Googles core business.
Why do antitrust proposals always suggest breaking up Google by function—Search, Ads, Gmail, etc.? What if, instead, we cloned the whole company?
Start by splitting Google into two identical, full-stack companies, each with all the core products. A year later, split them again. Over time, you get 4 or 8 Googles competing across the board.
Employees could be assigned algorithmically to avoid chaos. This feels more like cell division than amputation—preserving the synergies while creating competition.
I would rather have us all weaned off the Google services. That would be a great outcome actually. I am guessing your idea is, that those 2 or 4 Googles would then compete and make better products. But I am not sure how likely it is, that they can fix the mess and pile of bloat, that their software is.
People bringing up this site in this specific way is a pet peeve of mine. What's the largest product that they sunset with no replacement? Stadia? Given the number of products Google has, I wouldn't consider their track record below average.
Well their press releases indicate long term support and then they cancel the projects. This _has_ to have more serious consequences (on businesses mostly, but consumers too) than you are implying. This sort of thing naturally effects consumer/brand loyalty. With such a clear lack of focus on any one solution, why would anyone trust Google going forward with their new products/services?
This is the end result of trying to run your massive corporation like some kind of start-up incubator. No wisdom or strategy, just throw shit at the wall and see what sticks.
Of this list, the only things I'd miss are Search (because Kagi relies on it) and Maps. I do use Android, but I'll be frank: It sucks. And I'm sure Translate is easily replaceable by a 3rd party.
How do you get from "google loses ad revenue" to "android dies"? Even if for some reason Google went bankrupt all these divisions would just be sold off.
Google has built all these free products for one reason: your comment. They want people to genuinely believe that they can't be treated like a monopoly in ads.
Not because they're not a monopoly in ads. No no no. They want us to believe they're a good monopolist that can't be broken up because they're giving us so many good things. Don't let it sway you for a second that Google is proven to hinder competition and raise ad prices.
Exactly. Each one of the products in that large list is a separate market that's being distorted by a monopoly. This is all the more evidence that Google needs to be broken up into very tiny pieces.
If Google is an ad business, then each of those non-ad products they're giving away for free, supported by the money from the ad machine, is another market they're gaining dominance in by leveraging their position in another market. That's textbook monopolist behavior.
Yep, an over-sized, parasitic worm with control over most of the worlds communications, search, navigation, web browsing, and a size chunk of mobile software. That is definitely good for the Internet, security, privacy, and society at a whole. We can trust Google to always do what's right for the individual and to put profits second. Google makes money through donations and doesn't depend on the personal information of users it extracts to manipulate them into product purchases.
Google, as a search provider, has billions of eyeballs a day. They will still have ad revenue from that. Their basic business model of surveillance capitalism is intact.
It just says they can’t control both sides of the ad market. If history is any lesson (the AT&T breakup specifically), divesting ad would create a more competitive ad market and Google the search engine would make more money by playing multiple suppliers against each other, fostering competition.
From a principles perspective, if feels like too severe of a remedy and I don’t support it. But “if AT&T is broken up nobody will ever be able to make a phone call again” is too extreme to take seriously. Money follows value. Google has plenty of value outside of its monopoly position.
- Google Maps - this would be a big loss but at least this will open the field for Apple Maps and OSM (and I wonder if a competitor will be able to properly leave OSM as is an perhaps integrate traffic data like with Waze or another product like it)
- Google Mail - I dumped gmail after Google google'd GDomains and sold it to squarespace so I moved to proton
- Google Drive - lol, this is a literal multibillion industry with dropbox, box.com, etc
- Google Docs - lol, maybe high schoolers will finally use paper and pencil now? either way proton docs looks promising and perheps a new competitor will take the space
- Google Groups - email listservs are still a thing, use that
- Google Forms - this seems like a serious loss but surely there will be another competitor
- Google Cloud - there are better ways to do on prem now, either way you can use AWS or Azure
- Google OAuth - ok this one will be a big loss but also people need to get it together that google isnt mail.
- Google Search - this product has been going through a collapse since pre covid give me a break
- Google Analytics - lol
- Chrome - web standards have been cannibalized by google already so like who cares at this point. just switch to Firefox
- Android - another major loss but it still suffers from fragmentation, hopefully Chinese competitors fill the void?
- Android Auto - lol
- Fitbit - lol didn't they just release an update where you cant export your data anymore
- Google Fi - another MVNO that may die out? I mean cricket is still good right?
- Google Fiber - a genuine loss and hope they will be treated with care but probably not given the large legacy telcos that will acquire it
- Google Flights - another major loss? but even as someone who loves flying it is becoming an untenable situation given the current regime in the White House and ATCs getting knocked out
- Google Translate - another major loss but this can be solved with LLMs
- Google Pay - lol
- Waymo - lol
I like your style, "lol" is the appropriate response to the notion of losing Google's entire list of products.
Android? It's not a big loss. It's no longer the open platform it used to be. Hardware remote attestation will get us locked out of every app if we "tamper" with our devices. It's just a shitty version of iOS now so who cares?
Would YouTube not also be affected here? I don't have numbers but it seems to me a huge number of people depend on it as both consumers and producers, and I'm not sure it has any viable alternatives.
My even bigger worry is actually the effects on privacy, security, and people's data. I'm very curious what other companies people would trust more with their data.
Why would it? Youtube sells ads (and premium subscriptions) on its own. It doesn't really need the rest of Google, and can just continue living as a separate company.
A non-profit collective of device manufacturers and software developers could probably create a very effective and potent steward for Android's long-term development. But I wouldn't hold my breath.
Kinda, yeah. I mean Android is already Linux, just with suspicious, proprietary drivers that hold it back. Some Android phones are still running kernel 3!
If manufacturers would just upstream their drivers and make them less shit, then android could take advantage of the entire body of work in GNU/Linux userland.
I can imagine manufacturers that are fully in the Android ecosystem come together to maintain Android, including Xiaomi, Samsung, Oppo etc. There won't be as many feature updates, but it's not like Google puts a lot of resources in Android, or Android is delivering many features these days -- Google moved/laid off many people on Android teams, and many of the recent updates are very minor features. Just look at what's new in Android 14 or 15 -- barely anything. I stopped getting excited about or even caring about major version updates for a while. The pace has already slowed down quite a bit compared to a decade ago, and the ecosystem is very mature and stable.
We understand the consequences. The only projects listed that matter are the open source ones. They’ll survive. The rest don’t matter and will die as they frankly would’ve already if not for Google unfair position in the market.
Why is this bad? All those services are areas where there could be interesting competition if google didn't strangle them at birth by subsidizing their own version with infinite ad monies. Take google docs as an example, everyone is talking about on shoring essential services now that the USA has become a security threat to other countries. Before now, imagine any European company trying to justify investment for building a docs competitor when google just gives it away? Yeah sure, your data stays on the continent but that wasn't put into perspective until recently.
What happens to the assets of the dead Google? Will regulators actually let FAAN take over broad swaths of it? Not likely. It's much more likely that regional or smaller businesses will enter the vaccuum. Similarly but from the consumer side, I already know for many of these, there are already viable alternatives that would easily scale with demand.
Even further, if your business is coupled entirely to the continued existence of a single corporation, or if the totality of your economy is entirely coupled to the continued existence of a single corporation, we have a word for that: a monopoly. As far as I know, permitting the existence of monopolies is broadly agreed upon by experts to be a bad idea for many reasons, the least of which is the stifling of viable alternatives. The most severe is that it threatens the legitimacy of the entire government through regulatory capture and, at root, there is no organization that I think is actually "too big to fail" except the actual government.
Breaking up Google creates short-term disruptions and penalizes those that let the market even get to the point that the FTC and DOJ needed to intervene (I'm looking at you Mozilla). Everyone, including those now dependent on Google, is benefited in the longterm.
Killing Gmail would be a massive win for email deliverability. It's got so big now that they simply don't give a shit about delivering emails from smaller players.
That gives users the impression that other providers are unreliable, and further bolsters their monopoly.
Yeah, the unfortunate thing is reigning in one monopolist today seems like more an invitation to the other monopolists.
How many potentially world dominating mega-corps are there? Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Musk-corps, OpenAI, Nvidia...
It seems like any reasonable rejigging of things would require attacks on multiple sources of monopoly. And any other attack on a given player is just going to strengthening other players.
To you the only implied solution is to just let Google eating all the money in the market?
Most of the products on your list are products that are or can be profitable on their own and have profitable competitors. Google could be broken up and Apple wouldn’t just take over the world as you assert.
Google wouldn’t just magically go out of business just because of the scenario you describe. They’d still command a huge part of ad spend because they’re a huge brand name. Even if competitors get a much-deserved leg up, it would take a whole lot of sustained momentum to unseat them.
Good. Every one of those products makes our lives significantly worse.
Almost all of these products are subpar garbage that would never survive in a competitive world. Almost none of them have done anything different or interesting or new for over a decade.
All these products do is use the search monopoly to take away the opportunity for us to have good versions of them.
> Here's a small number of things that will die when Google dies.
I dispute that. Google Docs/Drive/Mail are supported by enterprise subscriptions. Android Auto is also a commercial product that can live off license fees. Fi/Fiber/Pay/Waymo are also not free services, and can survive on their own.
Free GMail/Forms/Groups/Translate can probably survive off ad revenue that they can get from third parties. They are pretty trivial expenses at this point.
To be fair, nobody outside the company knows if Fi/Fiber/Pay are viable businesses, or they are on life support but still around because of the unlimited cash Google has. One can guess they are profitable because they have been around for quite a while and still kicking. But nothing says they won't be the next thing in Google graveyard -- plenty of services seemed to be doing ok before a major reorg sent them to death.
Google Fi is just an MVNO, and there are quite a few competitors in this area (e.g. I'm using US-Mobile). They have comparable prices, so I'd guess that Fi is at least not operating at a loss.
Existing Fiber customers are basically a free money printing press. That's not going to change. But the new area buildouts can slow down.
Honestly, Google has been so un-innovative for so long, that it's hard to make a case for them. They just don't have a lot of products that are really benefiting from being under the umbrella of a large company.
I can definitely see an argument that back in 2006, Google Docs would have been impossible without access to the internal Google infrastructure and the unique expertise of Google engineers. These days? It's just a run-of-the-mill cloud application that can be trivially hosted on commercially available AWS or Google Compute.
Perhaps treating Google as a huge VC company would be more fair.
Google collapsing would be an incredible gift to the economy. Some companies are paying 30% in their advertising budget, before we even talk about the Play Store tax. We all pay an incredible amount for Google's existence, and a massive renaissance of technology development would occur if it stopped sucking all of the air out of the room.
Apart from all of the illegal things, it's just bad that it exists.
Most of those products don't really matter much. I'm sure humanity will survive without them.
Maps? Switch to the many alternatives. Android? Now that they've got hardware remote attestation all of the "openness" has been lost so it's become nothing but a worse version of iOS. Only the loss of gmail would be painful and the suffering would not last long.
Let it happen.
> In the best case, killing these will force consumers to move to Apple.
Break Apple up too. Don't forget about Meta and Amazon and all the others.
> Apple has no alternative for much of the Business-focused products, so that will take considerable time for companies to adopt alternatives.
Not a big deal. Adapt or go out of business. Better yet, price it in by adapting ahead of time: ditch Google now.
Moving to Proton Mail with my own domain was much easier than I'd anticipated. It's great.
> The whole web will shrink
Welp. Sounds like the web is gonna go back to its roots. Sign me up.
> huge swaths of the worldwide economy will disappear
This distorted economy that rewards total nonsense just because it attracts attention?
Let it disappear.
Things are just too screwed up and I don't think they're ever gonna be fixed unless something biblical happens. This might just be it.
This is nonsense. Some people may have to sign up to Google One to pay them a fee starting at $20/year to access gmail/drive/docs/groups/forms. We, and they, will all live through.
The solution proposed by Kagi—separate the search index from the rest of Google—seems to make the most sense. Kagi explains it more here: https://blog.kagi.com/dawn-new-era-search
Google has two interlocked monopolies, one is the search index and the other is their advertising service. We often joked that if Google reasonable and non-discriminatory priced access to their index, both to themselves and to others, AND they allowed someone to put what ever ads they wanted on those results. That change the landscape dramatically.
Google would carve out their crawler/indexer/ranker business and sell access to themselves and others which would allow that business an income that did NOT go back to the parent company (had to be disbursed inside as capex or opex for the business).
Then front ends would have a good shot, DDG for example could front the index with the value proposition of privacy. Someone else could front the index with a value proposition of no-ads ever. A third party might front that index attuned to specific use cases like literature search.
Ie. Knowing which users clicked which search results.
Without the click stream, one cannot build or even maintain a good ranker. With a larger click stream from more users, one can make a better ranker, which in turn makes the service better so more users use it.
End result: monopoly.
The only solution is to force all players to share click stream data with all others.
Click stream is useful, without a doubt. It isn't essential. We had already started the process at Blekko of moving to alternate ways for ranking the index.
That said, if you run the frontend as proposed, you get to collect the clicks. That gives you the click stream you want. If the index returns you a serp with unwrapped links (which it should if it was unbundled from a given search front end) then you could develop analytics around what your particular customers "like" in their links and have a different ranking than perhaps some other front end. One thing that Blekko made really clear for me that the Google idea that there was always the "best" result for that query (aka the I'm Feeling Lucky link) there was often different shades of intent behind the query that aren't part of the query itself. Google felt they could get it in the first 10 links (back before the first 10 links were sponsored content :-)) and often on the page you could see the two or three inferred "intents" (shopping, information, entertainment were common).
I don't think that's quite true, as competitors like Kagi have been able to compete well with effectively zero clickstream (by comparison). It'll help, but it's not the make-or-break that the index is.
I think a click stream isn't necessary, but Kagi is not a good basis for the argument in my opinion.
Kagi is a primarily meta search engine. The click stream exists on their sources (Bing, Google, Yandex, Marginalia, not sure if they use Brave). They do have Teclis which is their own index that they use, and their systems for reordering the page of results such as downranking heavy ad pages, and based upon user preferences (which I love).
Kagi sends searches to other providers (Bing?) and then simply re-ranks the results, so they're effectively inheriting the click stream data of those other providers.
> Google has two interlocked monopolies, one is the search index
The index is the farthest thing from a monopoly Google has - anyone can recreate it. Heck, you can even just download Commoncrawl to get a massive head start.
I see it a bit differently, many (most?) web sites explicitly deny scraping execept for Google. Further Google has the infrastructure to crawl several trillion web pages and create a relevant index out of the most authoritative 1.5 trillion. To re-create that on your own, you would need both the web to allow it, and the infrastructure to do it. I would agree that this isn't an insurmountable moat but it is a good one.
Then why do we see all of these alt search engines and SEO services building out independent indexes? Why don't the competitors cooperate in this fashion already?
Because everyone worships Thiel's "competition is for losers" and dreams of being a monopoly. Monopolies being the logical outcome of a deregulated environment, for which these companies lobby.
Throughout history there are very few monopolies and they don't normally last that long; that is unless they get are granted special privileges by the government.
Concentration is the default in an unregulated environment. Sure pure monopolies with 100% market control are rare but concentration is rampant. A handful of companies dominating tech, airlines, banks, media.
Concentration is not monopoly, and furthermore your comment does not begin to address the critical part of parent’s comment : “does not last very long”
Inequality at a point in time , and over time , is not nearly as bad if the winners keep rotating
Concentration seems much more prevalent in heavily regulated markets e.g. utilities / airlines. In many cases regulators have even encouraged this e.g.finance.
There is no default for unregulated markets. It's a question of whether the economies of scale outweigh the added costs from the complexity that scale requires. It costs close to 100x as much to build 100 houses, run 100 restaurants, or operate 100 trucks as it does to do 1. That's why these industries are not very concentrated. Whereas it costs nowhere close to 100x for a software or financial services company to serve 100x thee customers, so software and finance are very concentrated.
The effect of regulation is typically to increase concentration because the cost of compliance actually tends to scale very well. So businesses that grow face an decreasing regulatory compliance cost as a percent of revenue.
You are comparing Apples and Oranges. You just can't compare the barrier of entry for Software business and an Airline, even without any regulations. It's just orders of magnitude more expensive to buy an airplane than a laptop, and most utilities are natural monopolies so they behave fundamentally different.
I can't and I didn't. I never said anything about barriers to entry. I'm talking about concentration here and why the market is dominated by airlines with hundreds of planes instead of airlines with 10 planes. Barriers to entry are inevitable in capital intensive industries.
Home building is interesting because I think a major blocker to monopoly-forming is the vastly heterogenous and complicated regulatory landscape, with building codes varying wildly from place to place. So you get a bunch of locally-specialized builders.
Regulation can increase concentration in a high corruption/cronyism environment
— regulatory capture and regulatory moats. There is plenty of that happening.
In building, I think we have local-concentration, due to both regulatory heterogeneity and then local cronyism - Bob has decades of connections to the city and gets permits easily, whereas Bob’s competitor Steve is stuck in a loop of rejection due to a never ending list of pesky reasons.
> unless they get are granted special privileges by the government
That's what all the lobbyists are for.
None of the people or organisations that advocate for "free markets" or competition actually want free markets and competition. It's a smoke screen so they can keep buying politicians to get their special privileges.
They always inevitably end up being given special privileges.
Because, contrary to what we would all like to believe, once a company becomes large we don't want them to go under, even if they're not optimal.
There's a huge amount of jobs, institutional knowledge, processes, capital, etc in these big monopolies. Like if Boeing just went under today, how long would it take for another company to re-figure out how to make airplanes? I mean, take a look at NASA. We went to the moon, but can we do it again? It would be very difficult. Because so many engineers retired and IP was allowed to just... rot.
It's a balancing act. Obviously we want to keep the market as free as possible and yadda yadda invisible hand. But we also have national security to consider, and practicality.
This sounds a solution contrived to advantage companies that want access to this data rather than an actual economically valid business model. If building an index and selling access to it is a viable business, then why isn't someone doing it already? There's minimal barrier to entry. Blekko has an index. Are you selling access to it for profit?
This just in: small search engine company thinks it's a great idea for small search engine companies to have the same search index as Google.
Also, I love this bit: "[Google's] search results are of the best quality among its advertising-driven peers." I can just feel the breath of the guy who jumped in to say "wait, you can't just admit that Google's results are better than Kagi's! You need to add some sorta qualifier there that doesn't apply to us."
Crawling the web is costly. I assume it's cheaper to use the results from someone else's crawling. I don't know what Kagi is using to argue that they should have access to Google's indexes, but I'd guess it's some form of anti trust.
Let me add more: crawling the web is costly for EVERYONE.
The more crawlers out there, the more useless traffic is being served by every single website on the internet.
In an ideal world, there would be a single authoritative index, just as we have with web domains, and all players would cooperate into building, maintaining and improving it, so websites would not need to be constantly hammered by thousands of crawlers everyday.
Yeah not that cheap. There's a few articles on HN now about small, independent websites being essentially DDOS'd by crawlers. Although, to be fair, mostly AI crawlers.
On every Kagi comment, there is “Have you used Kagi recently? It’s improved a lot!” — to the level that I suspect they have bots to upgrade the brand image, at least to search which comments to respond do.
I’m saying that because yes, I’ve used Kagi recently, and I switch back to Google every single time because Kagi can’t find anything. Kagi is to Google what Siri is to ChatGPT. Siri can’t even answer “What time is it?”
Maybe you see different comments than I do, but I don't see many comments saying it's improved a lot lately.
As a Kagi user, I would not say it's improved a lot lately. It's a consistent, specific product for what I need. I like the privacy aspects of it, and the control to block, raise or lower sites in my search results. If that's not something you care about then don't use it.
Is it better than Google at finding things? I don't think so, but then, Google is trash these days too
The GP of your comment is literally saying that Kagi is better than Google as of late. You’re not helping the “Kagi doesn’t use bots” case by ignore the context 2 comments up.
They said Kagi works "way better" than google, not that Kagi is better as of late (although they do ask if they've tried kagi lately). Which is consistent with my statement that Kagi is a consistent product and not really improving. They keep adding AI features, but I disable those and don't care about them.
You're welcome to check my post history, I'm certainly not a bot. Or if I am, I'm a very convincing one that runs an astrophotography blog.
> I suspect they have bots to upgrade the brand image
I disagree with the conclusion but I agree with the premise. Man is a rationalizing animal, and one way to validate one’s choice in paying for a search engine (whether it is better or not) is to get others to use it as well. Kagi is also good at PR, they were able to spin a hostile metering plan as a lenient subscription plan.
Word of mouth is often more prevalent than we think, and certainly more powerful than botting. I would not be shocked if the author of that “AirBnBs are blackhats” article was interacting with real users of Craigslist spurred on by some referral scheme.
> On every Kagi comment, there is “Have you used Kagi recently? It’s improved a lot!” — to the level that I suspect they have bots to upgrade the brand image
Odd to dismiss a point purely because it's consistently made, especially without much apparent disagreement. Perhaps more likely: there are just _many_ happy Kagi customers in the HN community.
As one data point: I use Kagi, and agree with GP, and I am not a bot (activity of this HN account predates existence of Kagi by many years).
That doesn't dismiss your experience of course, lots of people use search engines in different ways! Personally, I found the ads & other crap of Google drowned out results, and I frequently hit SEO spam etc where site reranking was helpful. I'm sure there's scenarios where that doesn't make sense though, it's not for everybody (not everybody can justify paying for search, just for starters).
Crawling the internet is a natural monopoly. Nobody wants an endless stream of bots crawling their site, so googlebot wins because they’re the dominant search engine.
It makes sense to break that out so everyone has access to the same dataset at FRAND pricing.
My heart just wants Google to burn to the ground, but my brain says this is the more reasonable approach.
This is similar to the natural monopoly of root DNS servers (managed as a public good). There is no reason more money couldn't go into either Common Crawl, or something like it. The Internet Archive can persist the data for ~$2/GB in perpetuity (although storing it elsewhere is also fine imho) as the storage system of last resort. How you provide access to this data is, I argue, similar to how access to science datasets is provided by custodian institutions (examples would be NOAA, CERN, etc).
Build foundations on public goods, very broadly speaking (think OSI model, but for entire systems). This helps society avoid the grasp of Big Tech and their endless desire to build moats for value capture.
The problem with this is in the vein of `Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once` if it's going to replace googlebot. Everyone who only allows googlebot would need to change and allow ccbot instead.
It's already the case that googlebot is the common denominator bot that's allowed everywhere, ccbot not so much.
Wouldn’t a decent solution, if some action happened where Google was divesting the crawler stuff, be to just do like browser user agents have always done (in that case multiple times to comical degrees)? Something like ‘Googlebot/3.1 (successor, CommonCrawl 1.0)’
Lots of good replies to your comment already. I'd also offer up Cloudflare offering the option to crawl customer origins, with them shipping the compressed archives off to Common Crawl for storage. This gives site admins and owners control over the crawling, and reduces unnecessary load as someone like Cloudflare can manage the crawler worker queue and network shipping internally.
Wait, is the suggestion here just about crawling and storing the data? That's a very different thing than "Google's search index"... And yeah, I would agree that it is undifferentiated.
Hosting costs are so minimal today that I don't think crawling is a natural monopoly. How much would it really cost a site to be crawled by 100 search engines?
A potentially shocking amount depending on the desired freshness if the bot isn’t custom tailored per site. I worked at a job posting site and Googlebot would nearly take down our search infrastructure because it crawled jobs via searching rather than the index.
Bots are typically tuned to work with generic sites over crawling efficiently.
No, in our case they were indexing job posts by sending search requests. Ie instead of pulling down the JSON files of jobs, they would search for them by sending stuff like “New York City, New York software engineer” to our search. Generally not cached because the searches weren’t something humans would search for (they’d use the location drop down).
I didn’t work on search, but yeah, something like Elasticsearch. Googlebot was a majority of our search traffic at times.
> Vault offers a low-cost pricing model based on a one-time price per-gigabyte/terabyte for data deposited in the system, with no additional annual storage fees or data egress costs.
What's the read throughout to get the data back out, and does it scale to what you'd need to have N search indexes building on top of this shared crawl?
A caching proxy costs you almost nothing and will serve thousands of requests per second on ancient hardware. Actually there's never been a better time in the history of the Internet to have competing search engines since there's never been so much abundance of performance, bandwidth, and software available at historic low prices or for free.
There are so many other bots/scrapers out there that literally return zero that I don’t blame site owners for blocking all bots except googlebot.
Would it be nice if they also allowed altruist-bot or common-crawler-bot? Maybe, but that’s their call and a lot of them have made it on a rational basis.
> that I don’t blame site owners for blocking all bots except googlebot.
I doubt this is happening outside of a few small hobbyist websites where crawler traffic looks significant relative to human traffic. Even among those, it’s so common to move to static hosting with essentially zero cost and/or sign up for free tiers of CDNs that it’s just not worth it outside of edge cases like trying to host public-facing Gitlab instances with large projects.
Even then, the ROI on setting up proper caching and rate limiting far outweighs the ROI on trying to play whack-a-mole with non-Google bots.
Even if someone did go to all the lengths to try to block the majority of bots, I have a really hard time believing they wouldn’t take the extra 10 minutes to look up the other major crawlers and put those on the allow list, too.
This whole argument about sites going to great lengths to block search indexers but then stopping just short of allowing a couple more of the well-known ones feels like mental gymnastics for a situation that doesn’t occur.
> sites going to great lengths to block search indexers
That's not it. They're going to great lengths to block all bot traffic because of abusive and generally incompetent actors chewing through their resources. I'll cite that anubis has made the front page of HN several times within the past couple months. It is far from the first or only solution in that space, merely one of many alternatives to the solutions provided by centralized services such as cloudflare.
Regarding allowlisting the other major crawlers: I've never seen any significant amount of traffic coming from anything but Google or Bing. There's the occasional click from one of the resellers (ecosia, brave search, duckduckgo etc), but that's about it. Yahoo? haven't seen them in ages, except in Japan. Baidu or Yandex? might be relevant if you're in their primary markets, but I've never seen them. Huawei's Petal Search? Apple Search? Nothing. Ahrefs & friends? No need to crawl _my_ website, even if I wanted to use them for competitor analysis.
So practically, there's very little value in allowing those. I usually don't bother blocking them, but if my content wasn't easy to cache, I probably would.
In the past month there were dozens of posts about using proof of work and other methods to defeat crawlers. I don't think most websites tolerate heavy crawling in the era of Vercel/AWS's serverless "per request" and bandwidth billing.
You don't get to tell site owners what to do. The actual facts on the ground are that they're trying to block your bot. It would be nice if they didn't block your bot, but the other, completely unnatural and advertising-driven, monopoly of hosting providers with insane per-request costs makes that impossible until they switch away.
You wouldn't have to make them micropayments, you can pay out once some threshold is reached.
Of course, it would incentivize the sites to make you want to crawl them more, but that might be a good thing. There would be pressure on you to focus on quality over quantity, which would probably be a good thing for your product.
Google search is a monopoly not because of crawling. It's because of the all the data it knows about website stats and user behavior. Original Google idea of ranking based on links doesn't work because it's too easily gamed. You have to know what websites are good based on user preferences and that's where you need to have data. It's impossible to build anything similar to Google without access to large amounts of user data.
Sounds like you're implying that they are using Google Analytics to feed their ranking, but that's much easier to game than links are. User-signals on SERP clicks? There's a niche industry supplying those to SEOs (I've seen it a few times, I haven't seen it have any reliable impact).
Of all the bad ideas I've heard of where to slice Google to break it up, this... Is actually the best idea.
The indexer, without direct Google influence, is primarily incentivized to play nice with site administrators. This gives them reasons to improve consideration of both network integrity and privacy concerns (though Google has generally been good about these things, I think the damage is done regarding privacy that the brand name is toxic, regardless of the behaviors).
> Crawling the internet is a natural monopoly. Nobody wants an endless stream of bots crawling their site,
Companies want traffic from any source they can get. They welcome every search engine crawler that comes along because every little exposure translates to incremental chances at revenue or growing audience.
I doubt many people are doing things to allow Googlebot but also ban other search crawlers.
> My heart just wants Google to burn to the ground
I think there’s a lot of that in this thread and it’s opening the door to some mental gymnastics like the above claim about Google being the only crawler allowed to index the internet.
> I doubt many people are doing things to allow Googlebot but also ban other search crawlers.
Sadly this is just not the case.[1][2] Google knows this too so they explicitly crawl from a specific IP range that they publish.[3]
I also know this, because I had a website that blocked any bots outside of that IP range. We had honeypot links (hidden to humans via CSS) that insta-banned any user or bot that clicked/fetched them. User-Agent from curl, wget, or any HTTP lib = insta-ban. Crawling links sequentially across multiple IPs = all banned. Any signal we found that indicated you were not a human using a web browser = ban.
We were listed on Google and never had traffic issues.
> so googlebot wins because they’re the dominant search engine.
I think it's also important to highlight that sites explicitly choose which bots to allow in their robots.txt files, prioritizing Google which reinforces its position as the de-facto monopoly. Even when other bots are technically able to crawl them.
Are sites really that averse to having a few more crawlers than they already do? It would seem that it’s only a monopoly insofar as it’s really expensive to do and almost nobody else thinks they can recoup the cost.
We routinely are fighting off hundreds of bots at any moment. Thousands and Thousands per day, easily. US, China, Brazil from hundreds of different IPs, dozens of different (and falsified!) user agents all ignoring robots.txt and pushing over services that are needed by human beings trying to get work done.
EDIT: Just checked our anubis stats for the last 24h
CHALLENGE: 829,586
DENY: 621,462
ALLOW: 96,810
This is with a pretty aggressive "DENY" rule for a lot of the AI related bots and on 2 pretty small sites at $JOB. We have hundreds, if not thousands of different sites that aren't protected by Anubis (yet).
Anubis and efforts like it are a xesend for companies that don't want to pay off Cloudflare or some other "security" company peddling a WAF.
One is, suppose there are a thousand search engine bots. Then what you want is some standard facility to say "please give me a list of every resources on this site that has changed since <timestamp>" so they can each get a diff from the last time they crawled your site. Uploading each resource on the site to each of a thousand bots once is going to be irrelevant to a site serving millions of users (because it's a trivial percentage) and to a site with a small amount of content (because it's a small absolute number), which together constitute the vast majority of all sites.
The other is, there are aggressive bots that will try to scrape your entire site five times a day even if nothing has changed and ignore robots.txt. But then you set traps like disallowing something in robots.txt and then ban anything that tries to access it, which doesn't affect legitimate search engine crawlers because they respect robots.txt.
> then you set traps like disallowing something in robots.txt and then ban anything that tries to access it
That doesn't work at all when the scraper rapidly rotates IPs from different ASNs because you can't differentiate the legitimate from the abusive traffic on a per-request basis. All you can be certain of is that a significant portion of your traffic is abusive.
That results in aggressive filtering schemes which in turn means permitted bots must be whitelisted on a case by case basis.
A "few" more would be fine - but the sheer scale of the malicious AI training bot crawling that's happening now is enough to cause real availability problems (and expense) for numerous sites.
One web forum I regularly read went through a patch a few months ago where it was unavailable for about 90% of the time due to being hammered by crawlers. It's only up again now because the owner managed to find a way to block them that hasn't yet been circumvented.
So it's easy to see why people would allow googlebot and little else.
Assuming the simplified diagram of Google’s architecture, sure, it looks like you’re just splitting off a well-isolated part, but it would be a significant hardship to do it in reality.
Why not also require Apple to split off only the phone and messaging part of its iPhone, Meta to split off only the user feed data, and for the U.S. federal government to run only out of Washington D.C.?
This isn’t the breakup of AT&T in the early 1980s where you could say all the equipment and wiring just now belongs to separate entities. (It wasn’t that simple, but it wasn’t like trying to extract an organ.)
I think people have to understand that and know that what they’re doing is killing Google, and it was already on its way into mind-numbed enterprise territory.
> Apple to split off only the phone and messaging part of its iPhone
Ooh, can we? My wife is super jealous of my ability to install custom apps for phone calls and messaging on Android, it'd be great if Apple would open theirs up to competition. Competition in the SMS app space would also likely help break up the usage of iMessage as a tool to pressure people into getting an iPhone so they get the blue bubble.
If the dream of a Star Trek future reputation-based government run by AI which secretly manipulates the vote comes true, yes we can!
Either that or we could organize competitors to lobby the US or EU for more lawsuits in exchange for billions in kickbacks! (Not implying anything by this.)
You jest, but splitting out just certain Internet Explorer features was part of the Microsoft antitrust resolution. It's what made Chrome's ascendancy possible.
I mean it's just data. You can just copy it and hand it over to a newly formed competing entity.
You're not even really dealing with any of these shared infrastructure public property private property merged infrastructure issues.
Yeah sure. There's mountains of racks of servers, but those aren't that hard to get tariffs TBD.
I think it'll be interesting just to try and find some collection of ex Google execs who had actually like to go back to the do no evil days, and just hand them a copy of all the data.
I simply don't think we have the properly and elected set of officials to implement antitrust of any scale. DOJ is now permanently politicized and corrupt, and citizens United means corps can outspend "the people" lavishly.
Antitrust would mean a more diverse and resilient supply chain, creativity, more employment, more local manufacturing, a reversal of the "awful customer service" as a default, better prices, a less corrupt government, better products, more economic mobility, and, dare I say it, more freedom.
Actually, let me expound upon the somewhat nebulous idea of more freedom. I think we all hear about Shadow banning or outright banning with utter silence and no appeals process for large internet companies that have a complete monopoly on some critical aspect of Internet usage.
If these companies enabled by their cartel control, decide they don't like you or are told by a government not to like you, it is approaching a bigger burden as being denied the ability to drive.
Not a single one of those is something oligarchs or a corporatocracy has the slightest interest in
This strikes me like "two easy steps to draw an owl. First draw the head, then draw the body". I generally support some sort of breakup, but hand waving the complexities away is not going to do anybody any good
This solution would also yield search engines that will actually be useful and powerful like old Google search was. They have crippled it drastically over the years. Used to be I could find exact quotes of forum posts from memory verbatim. I can't do that on Google or YouTube anymore. It's really dumbed down and watered down.
Googles c suite is clearly not thinking ahead here. They could have helped to slow down the anti-trust lawsuits by opening up their search index to whichever AI company wants to pay for it. Web crawling is expensive, and lots of companies are spending wild amounts of money on it. There is a very clear market arbitrage opportunity between the cost of crawling the web and Google's cost of serving up their existing data.
Woudl the search index contain only raw data about the websites? Or would some sort of ranking be there?
If it's teh latter, its a neat way to ask a company to sell their users data to a third party because any kind of ranking comes via aggregation of users' actions. Without involving any user consent at all.
That's like asking the foxes how the farmer should manage his chickens. Kagi is a (wannabe) competitor. Likewise, YC's interest here is in making money by having viable startups and having them acquired.
I also don't think crawling the Web is the hard part. It's extraordinarily easy to do it badly [1] but what's the solution here? To have a bunch of wannabe search engines crawl Google's index instead?
I've thought about this and I wonder if trying to replicate a general purpose search engine here is the right approach or not. Might it not be easier to target a particular vertical, at least to start with? I refuse to believe Google cannot be bested in every single vertical or that the scale of the job can't be segmented to some degree.
It's such a ridiculous proposal that would completely destroy Google's business. If that's the goal fine, but let's not pretend that any of those remedies are anything beyond a death sentence.
If they're dominating or one of only two or three important options in multiple other areas and the index is the only reason... I mean, that's a strong argument both that they're monopolists and that they're terrible at allocating the enormous amount of capital they have. That's really the only thing keeping them around? All their other lines of business collectively aren't enough to keep them alive? Yikes, scathing indictment.
I mean, they're still going to be the number 1 name in adtech and analytics. And they're still gonna have pretty decent personalized ads because of analytics.
Plus, that just one part of their business. There's also Android, which is a money printing machine with the Google Store (although that's under attack too).
> It's such a ridiculous proposal that would completely destroy Google's business.
it won't. My bet is that bing and some other indexes are 95% Ok for average Joe. But relevance ranking is much tougher problem, and "google.com" is household brand with many other functions(maps, news, stocks, weather, knowledge graph, shopping, videos), and that's what is foundation of google monopoly.
I think this shared index thing will actually kill competition even more, since every players will use only index owned by google now.
Sorry, but corporations are not people despite what some people will tell you.
They would definitely NOT survive in any recognizable form with "only a few billion dollars", because the stock price is a function of profits. Take away most of the profits, and most of the company's value gets wiped out, most of the employees would leave or get laid off, and anything of value that remains would quickly become worthless. Users would all move to the government-sanctioned replacement monopoly, likely X. To say nothing about the thousands of ordinary people who have large Alphabet holdings in their retirement portfolios and would be wiped out.
Google is practically the definition of a "too big to fail" company. They need to be reigned in to allow more competition, but straight up destroying the company would be a move so colossally stupid I could just see the Trump regime doing it.
This action comes a bit late, at the end of the "Search engine" era, at a time when AI responses from many sources are largely replacing the "Google Search".
Similar action happened against Microsoft Windows around 2000, just as the rise of web-based apps (online email, google docs, etc) largely made the underlying operating system less relevant to how people use their computers and apps.
So I read this as the dominant player can monopolize a market while it's relevant without an issue, and once the market starts to move on, the antitrust lawsuits come in to "make the market more competitive" at a time when that era is mostly over.
And trying to regulate early (as with the last administration's AI legislation that is now being repealed) we can see that only hindsight is 20/20, and regulating too early can kill a market. My conclusion is to just let the best product win, and even dominate for a while as this is part of the market cycle, and when a better product/platform comes along the market will move to it.
Because we're still in the "get them hooked" stage where AI startups and Google/Meta are losing money on AI.
Once they start properly monetising (aka making users pay for what it actually costs them to train and run), it will be a different story. The vast majority of people won't pay $20-30€/month for an LLM to replace their search engine. (And an analysis I saw of OpenAI's business model and financial indicated they're losing money even on their paid tier, per query).
They’ll instead accept being manipulated and fed content influenced by money, be it ads or individualized content that somehow serves whoever is paying for it.
Google themselves are trying to figure this out, with the first (top placement) of search results showing their Gemini AI Response, at least for me. I read this as an attempt to keep users on Google instead of asking Chat GPT or other some other AI. What's your take on that?
My take is that it's primarily a smart way to quickly gather lots of ELO/AB feedback about LLM responses for training, whilst also reducing people switching to ChatGPT. OpenAI has significant first mover advantage here and it's why they're so worried about distillation, becuase it threatens the moat.
Google, on the other hand, has a huge moat in access to probably the best search index available and existing infrastructure built around it. Not to mention the integration with Workspace emails, docs, photos - all sorts of things that can be used for training. But what they (presumably) lack is the feedback-derived data that OpenAI has had from the start.
ChatGPT does not use search grounding by default and the issues there are obvious. Both Gemini and ChatGPT make similar errors even with grounding but you would expect that to get better over time. It's an open research question as to what knowledge should be innate (in the weights) and what should be "queryable", but I do think the future will be an improved version of "intelligence" + "data lookup".
Every AI chatbot to date suffers from the "Film expert" effect. That is when a script writer presents data from an "expert" in a movie or show to the audience in response to some information need on the part of the other characters. Writers are really good at making it sound credible. When an audience member experiences this interchange, generally they have one of two experiences. Either they know nothing about the subject (or the subject is made up like warp drive nacelle engineering) and they nod along at the response and factor it into their understanding of the story being told. Or, they do know a lot about the subject and the glaring inaccuracies jolt them out of the story temporarily as the suspension of disbelief is damaged.
LLMs write in an authoritative way because that is how the material they have been trained on writes. Because there is no "there" there, an LLM has no way of evaluating the accuracy of the answer it just generated. People who "search" using an LLM in order to get information about a topic have a better than even chance of getting something that is completely false, and if they don't have the foundation to recognize its false may incorporate that false information into their world view. That becomes a major embarrassment later when they regurgitate that information, or act on that information in some way, that comes back to bite them.
Gemini has many examples of things it has presented authoritatively that are stochastic noise. The current fun game is to ask "Why do people say ..." and create some stupid thing like "Too many cats spoil the soup." That generates an authoritative sounding answer from Gemini that is just stupid. Gemini can't say "I don't know, I've never seen anything that says people say that."
As companies push these things out into more and places, more and more people will get the experience of believing something false because some LLM told them it was true. And like that friend of yours who always has an answer for every question you ask, but you keep finding out a bunch of them are just bullshit, you will rely on that information less and less. And eventually, like your buddy with all the answers, you stop asking them questions you actually want the answer too.
I'm not down on "LLMs" per se, but I do not believe there is any evidence that they can be relied on for anything. The only thing I have seen, so far, that they can do well is help someone struggling with a blank page get started. That's because more people than not struggle with starting from a blank page but have no trouble correcting something that is wrong, or re-writing it into something.
"Search" is multifaceted. Blekko found a great use case for reference librarians. They would have paid Blekko to provide them an index of primary sources that they could use. The other great use is shopping if you can pair it with your social network. (Something Blekko suggested to Facebook but Zuck was really blind to that one) Blekko had a demo where you could say, "Audi car dealer" and it would give you the results ranked by your friend's ratings on their service. I spent a lot of time at Blekko denying access to the index by criminals who were searching for vulnerable WordPress plugins or e-commerce shopping carts. Chat GPT is never going to give you a list of all sites on the Internet running a vulnerable version of Wordpress :-).
So my take is the LLM isn't a replacement for search and efforts to make it so will stagnate and die leaving "Search Classic" to take up the slack.
If you trained a model on a well vetted corpus and gave it the tools to say it didn't know, I could see it as being a better "textbook" then a physical textbook. But it still needs to know what it doesn't know.
I’ve started using ChatGPT to look up most things I used to Google. It gives me immediate, concise results without having to parse bloated websites full of ads and other garbage.
I will take that bet Chuck. Maybe not completely replace, but AI will be the defacto search platform. I find myself using Google less and less these days
I only use Google when I am in the mood to search for something and find it below the fold after scrolling through mindless semi-related sponsored links
> This action comes a bit late, at the end of the "Search engine" era, at a time when AI responses from many sources are largely replacing the "Google Search".
AIs are using search indices more and more. Google has the largest, and there is risk of Google using its monopoly in search (in particular their index) to give themselves an unfair advantage in the nascent AI market.
This feels a bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face...
Unlike Microsoft's antitrust case of the 90s, Google seems much less anti-competitive by nature. Sure, they have unprecedented scale in search... but even that hegemony is being threatened by others in AI.
If anything, going after Google with a DoJ kludgel will cause a servere freeze on startup M&A across all of FAANG. With IPO windows (mostly) closed, this removes the biggest exit dynamic the startup ecosystem has at its disposal. This is not a good thing from my perspective, and would seem counter to YC's interests.
YC should benefit most from an ecosystem where distribution channels (search, ads, etc) are not monopolized.
Startups ideally should compete on merit, not on whether they are eventually allowed access to Google’s platforms or get acquired. Startups can still exit via IPO, PE acquisition, cross-industry buyers or M&A.
From this POV, Google’s control over the adtech stack may be seen as gatekeeping digital advertising, which many YC companies rely on.
It seems much less, but I don't believe it is much less anticompetitive. We're talking about the search market specifically in this case, and the government has presented strong evidence that Google is:
* Using its position in other markets (browser, mobile) to ensure that others can't compete in search.
* Paying the major other vendors in those markets (browser, mobile) enormous sums of money to ensure that ~100% of the market share in both markets is used to prop up their lead in search.
Both of these things are pretty blatantly anticompetitive: they're competing not primarily based on the quality of their product offering but instead based on their pre-existing revenue streams and their leads in other markets.
Anecdotal, but I wanted to give Edge a chance. I found out that it is quite possibly the most feature-creep rich browser on the market. Its sole purpose seems to be “let Microsoft monitor your entire browsing experience”.
I also feel like Microsoft’s heavy handed dark patterns trick less computer savvy people into using it, and those people probably aren’t aware of how much info Microsoft is collecting about them. As a result, I seriously question that Edge’s market share is organic because people actually like it.
Google didn't kill the Edge browser, Microsoft gave up. If Mozilla can have an independent from scratch browser, Microsoft of all companies could have one too. It's just easier and cheaper for them to rebrand Chromium and call it a day.
And I'm not buying the argument that progress on the Web (tech stack) should stop so that it's easier to make/maintain a browser.
I grew up in the dial-up era but personally think it's incredibly cool how I am able to use a full featured IDE, flash an ESP-32 or my phone via USB, make low latency Zoom/Teams calls with screen sharing, run language agnostic bytecode and utilize low level GPU access, all in a highly secure sandbox on my Macbook, Linux/Windows Thinkpad, $100 Chromebook, tablet and phone.
When people say that Google killed the Edge browser they generally mean that MS gave up on maintaining their own browser engine and the world moved that much closer to a web monoculture. To put this in historical perspective, a reskinned IE would not have been a meaningful or useful competitor to IE.
I don’t think it’s a meaningful comparison because Microsoft has the resources to fork Chromium if they need to. But since it works pretty well, there’s little incentive to do that. It would be like Electron forking V8 for no reason.
Google is now a basic utility. Unless you don't believe in basic public goods, allowing equitable access to the utility benefits everyone, especially businesses.
Public goods are non-excludable (impossible to prevent anyone from using the good) and non-rivalrous (one person's use doesn't diminish the availability for others). Google doesn't match the criteria.
You've cherrypicked the phrase "public good" and applied an out of context definition that doesn't fit. The thing being discussed was public utilities. Those are a sort of public good in the same sense that public parks, public libraries, and free education are all public goods.
The local electric utility isn't "non-excludable" (unless you ignore criminal law) but it is certainly a public utility, a natural monopoly, and public good by most metrics. The vast majority of jurisdictions regulate it accordingly.
Interesting definition. This applies to almost literally nothing except Jefferson’s candle and IP. Actual literal fire is considered worthless and IP is bazillions of dollars of closely guarded secrets. Public transits, seemingly unlimited water sources, or neighborhood parks all suffer from overcrowding so this diminishing availability thing is tough to meet
It is the actual definition since economist Paul Samuelson coined it in 1954.
Things like public parks and public pools would be classic examples of a "Common resource." Rival and non-excludable.
Classic examples of true public goods would be public radio broadcasting or national defense.
At some point in the past couple decades, people have come to misunderstand the term. Having heard the argument that public goods justify taxation to fund them, they come to believe that anything they like must be a public good.
Utilities and infrastructure can be considered public goods insofar as they have the characteristics of non-rivalry and non-excludability, meaning that one person's use of them does not diminish another person's ability to use them and it is difficult to prevent others from using them even if they have not contributed to their provision.
However, utilities are typically excludable (service can be cut off for non-payment) and rivalrous to some extent (there are capacity limits and usage can impact others), so they are better classified as private or quasi-public goods.
So why is this idea so prevalent: that public goods should be public utilities?
A key driver behind the transformation of some public goods into regulated public utilities seems to be the theory of "natural monopoly," which posits that certain industries are most efficiently served by a single provider, making competition impractical or wasteful. Then in 1919 the economic theory of public goods, notably developed by Erik Lindahl, further contributed to the myth by arguing that public goods should be funded through taxation based on individual benefit. This reinforced the notion that the government should organize and finance such goods, often through public utility models.
So I wouldn't say public goods have nothing to do with public utilities.
Fair, definitionally they are entirely distinct. In the real world, the concepts interact. The number one in distinct from the number two, but they relate and interact in a vast number of ways.
As it relates to Google search, I think it is very difficult to construct an argument that search is a natural monopoly. There's no limitations on parallel processes the way there are with roads or railroads or electric infrastructure. In fact, people have access to a long list of competitors at all times.
You can make it much better case that they are engaging in monopolistic practices, which is a claim very different from a natural constraint
This doesn't follow from the linked article. Taxes can be levied in various ways, oftentimes related to usage. Involving a private entity doesn't suddenly change the nature of the thing. There's a marked difference between a sack of flour and my electric meter.
We as a society decide to make certain things into public goods. This is frequently the choice for natural monopolies.
Critiquing the article you linked - when taken literally non-rivalrous applies to approximately nothing. Non-excludability is simply a matter of law, which is a matter of what the voting public wants.
The real killer is that Google perfected the ad-paid model, and launched an entire ecosystem on top of it
Paid competitors cannot compete because people won't pay. People want the death of Google because people hate ads and tracking.
Ultimately it is an everyone loses situation. No one is going to fly in a replace Google without either 1.) Charging a monthly sub or 2.) Invasive (yet most profitable) ad tracking.
This is exactly why youtube stands alone too. What company looks at youtube's userbase and says "Yes, I want to cater to people who despise subscriptions and block ads". Exactly what vid.me did in 2017, which everyone celebrated until the went bankrupt.
Google doesn't own all of ads though, only search ads. Facebook nets $70 billion per year with an ad system that prints golden bricks. No-one cares how it works due to it makes so much money. 80% of shares are held by institutions.
> People want the death of Google because people hate ads and tracking.
> Paid competitors cannot compete because people won't pay.
Seems to me they're different groups of people. Otherwise, if people hate ads, why don't they pay?
I don't agree it's an everyone loses situation. Enough people don't mind or prefer the ads based ecosystem for it to continue.
IMO, more sophisticated ad blockers (I.e real control over one's devices) used by more people, would make the ad tech ecosystem a lot less profitable. After all, ads only work when you can control what the other person sees.
Garmin user here. Maybe the last one on the planet? (my kid thinks I'm nuts).
Many of the comments are about how great Google's products are (or aren't). But the case is about anti-competitive behavior. Personally, I hate how a bulk of the internet now consists of surveillance. All this amazing tech brilliance.. resting on a foundation that's about getting us to buy more junk. I will be happy if this lawsuit reduces that (even a little bit).
The really uncompetitive behaviour started when Google removed the search string from search links. That killed 3rd party (and home-grown) analytics, which in turn facilitated large scale tracking of users from site with analytics to site with analytics.
If you wanted to know how your keywords were performing you had to use Google Analytics.
Make no mistake. This is, first and foremost, a big, for-profit corporation fighting a bigger, for-profit corporation, for its own financial interests. Nevertheless, we may stand to benefit, if only incidentally.
In particular, if the legal authorities start to unwind Google, I actually think Chrome and Android are more important to wall off or spin out than anything advertising or AI related.
I'm less worried about GMail. It's much easier to start a GMail competitor today (in relative, not absolute, terms) than a Chrome or Android competitor, because of network effects. For example, Fastmail is tiny (comparatively speaking), and will probably stay tiny forever, but their service works fine, and there's no major obstacles (comparatively speaking) to replacing GMail with Fastmail for any of us personally.
I think any potential competitors face many of the same pitfalls as, say, Chrome competitors do. Maybe even worse. Google slams its weight around when web standards are being designed so as to unilaterally benefit Chrome, but (at least in theory) it's a fundamentally cooperative process where everyone at least gets some sort of input to direct where each standard goes.
In GMail's case, they can just arbitrarily shut off any competitor who might be gaining steam and kill them off before they can reach critical mass and sustain themselves. Just categorize them as 'spam' and make sure to redirect their emails 100% of the time and they've won.
EDIT: just saw your edit. You're kinda right, but if Fastmail ever really starts growing then Google will take harsher actions to stymie it off. Maybe if a lot of small services start to collectively take a bigger slice of the market then they'd succeed at keeping Google at bay? I'm not so sure.
Yes, of course it is. How many search competitors do you see out there? If you ignore resellers like ddg, these is bing, kangi, and country specific ones like Baidu. Email providers are a dime a dozen - Fastmail, Outlook, Protron, .. Google it, it's a long list. Hell. I run my own. I could not even contemplate building a web indexing engine.
It's good for YC to do this and will benefit every startup in the long run. Google has been one of the sources of the AI boom, and provides liquidity by acquiring startups. But as YC argues they've monopolised distribution channels to the point where you need to go through the Google toll booth every time you want to access the market. This tax on founders to reach their audience makes many types of businesses unsustainable and impossible, especially for products where usage != sharing.
You mean kills potentially successful tech companies of the future by acquiring startups to cement their dominance.
I get why people on this site are in love with the idea of building an unsustainable, money-losing business where the only path to success is being acquired by a tech giant. It's like winning the lottery! But it helps nobody, it hurts your customers/users, and it hurts innovation. It's also stupid, as a successful tech company could potentially grow as big as the giants you're courting (ESPECIALLY now that the FTC has started finally doing its job). Why else do you think they're spending so much money to acquire you? It's easier on the ego to call it an "acquihire", but the truth is that they're just paying a maintenance tax on their monopoly.
Every time people complain about how detrimental big tech is to society, it ultimately comes down to this sad strategy.
Of course it is good for YC to do this. They have significant investments in OpenAI both directly and indirectly through the countless startups they've funded whose core is OpenAI.
And it's ridiculous to act like (a) you are forced to go through Google to access the 'market' and (b) that this is somehow unusual or untoward. They are an advertising company and not the only one.
Isn't there an obvious conflict of interest here? YC Wil benefit if Google is to share its index with startups. YC will fund hundreds of companies and then one of them will end up monopoly. What kind of bs is this. Cycle repeats.
Kind of the point of breaking up a monopoly is that it benefits a lot of the rest of the industry since the monopoly had been hindering it before. Also, it looks like you are saying any interest = a conflict of interest. Should only entities that have no interest in this matter be allowed to file in this way?
It's disappointing to see the historical revisionism in these threads. Say what you will about google now, but the idea that they just bought their way into X industry doesn't seem right. Until maybe 10 years ago, tech people almost universally loved Google's offerings and adopted them eagerly because they were good. I remember the mad scramble on various forums for a gmail invite. I remember when google maps came about, it was a revelation compared to mapquest and so on. You could scroll the map instead of clicking buttons to jump half a screen at a time! For years 0-5 at least, chrome was almost universally loved by tech people. Process isolation, speed, lack of toolbar shitware, etc.
At every company I've been at, half the dependencies came from big tech, and more than half of those were built and maintained by google. bazel, kubernetes, test frameworks, tensorflow, etc. these are just the big ones. There are a lot of smaller libraries from google that we've used too, and more still that aren't owned by google but they invest a lot of engineering time into.
I don't know what the right answer is to the google of today, but the cavalier assumption that google has simply leveraged a monopoly in search to build everything else it has doesn't add up to me.
Meanwhile Apple, also sitting on infinite cash, is easily entertained by toying with regulators around the world and contributes back almost nothing in comparison to Google.
Heck, they can't even be bothered to fund a single developer to help their hardware run Linux.
You keep qualifying your comments with "by tech people" but the problem is that Google bought their way into non-tech people's computers. Every single Google product on every single pageload had an "install Chrome" link at the top. Every Chrome release blurred the line between 'signing into chrome' and 'signing into google' and, later, 'signing into your phone'. Most Google products broke on non-Chrome browsers on such a regular cadence that deliberate sabotage was a common assumption. So yes, Google has always been a darling to the "tech people", but the aggressive ways they worked to ensure that people adopted Chrome were very real.
The search part of Google doesn’t bother me. I have other options and I now reach for an llm first, then fall back to ddg. What I do think needs to be separated are: 1) Ads and analytics 2) Chrome 3) Google Play Services.
Googles ad platform and analytics are difficult to avoid. Even with browser extensions, dns blocking, and aggressive firewall rules, this is virtually impossible to avoid. I am shocked at how many websites and apps break when these are blocked. There needs to be a much healthier ecosystem without a single company gobbling all this up.
Chrome is also a big issue. Google has regularly used its web sites and android to heavily push chrome. They also use that influence for web “standards” that are not really standards. On top of it, even googles own sites are often terrible with non chrome based browsers. We need a variety of user agents and we need real standards that a truly independent body has a say in. The web has matured and we don’t need to be in a race for new apis and features right now.
Google play services are also a huge pain point. When developing for Android, you almost have to use them. Running Android without Google Play services or with an alternate is a futile effort if you want any sort of main stream app. My degoogled work phone is mostly useless for anything. We definitely need standards for these services with replaceable components that are transparent to the apps.
AI is the most competitive and healthy large industry I have seen. Having a search index helps just like having tweets for x.ai, but data isn’t the deciding factor.
Competitive maybe. Healthy almost certainly not. My definition for healthy industries is being able to fund operations and development either by revenues or debt. Not by continuously raising capital from investors and then burning it on hardware and operating costs.
It's not the deciding factor yet. You can bet the IP hammer is going to swing in again once the big players have been decided just to keep the small players out.
Having a monopoly is not against the law. Harming consumers is. The remedies should address the former not the later. Google's monopoly was earned by engineering excellence.
As others have pointed out, YC is definitely trying to get some of that Google money. Another important aspect that benefits YC is a turn of events that would improve the talent pool. Google retains tens of thousands of software engineers, I’d argue maybe the biggest reserve in existence. It’s the largest population of experienced engineers that won’t leave because the money and circumstances are too good. Startups would benefit if these circumstances changed
that is not a google problem that is a big tech problem. people move where the money is and the money flows to google easily because ads is such a lucrative business. if you force the talent pool to move off google, meta or amazon will easily absorb them
More talent with less demand means lower wages and/or worse benefits. My situation at Google can’t be matched at Amazon or Meta (remote work, pay, WLB, other benefits). I’d have to compromise if the climate changes but not much will make me leave… ever. I have a friend that has been trying to get me to join a startup for years and the risk just isn’t worth the reward
Currently most websites have a snip of code that posts to Google when a visitor arrives. The cookie there is linked to an identity and later used to push ads, and metrics for the site user. It seems like this is the thing to make broadly available. Anyone with $ can index the web. But nobody can get every websites to update to post to 2+ destinations. Multiple companies should be able to listen to that feed, and then be responsible for tracking and indexing on their own.
Google is much bigger than a Monopoly, it is a multi-monopoly,
Search,
web ads,
email,
video,
maps / nav,
User data / metrics.
If you had told me in early 2000s that google would absolutely dominate all of these fields And it would be allowed to continue for decades, I wouldn't believe you.
I'm a free market guy, I believe some small gov is nessasary to regulate monopolies, protect constitutional rights etc, but multi-monopolies- I can't believe are allowed to exist under such a large beaurocratic superstate with left or right in power.
Do you think the world benefits from this monopoly though? I think the world would be a worse place without Google, a much worse place. While it would be nice to live in some timeline were lots of choices for search (there actually are, people are just lazy and don't like change), but we built a world with Google and let it get to where its at. We will just be shooting ourselves in our own foot, at least in the short term.
This argument is very similar to that for "enlightened monarch" kind of despotism.
The fundamental problem is that, even if you buy the notion that this particular ruler is really so enlightened that they are a net benefit, there's no guarantee that this will still be the case in the future.
So, even if you believe that Google provides net benefit today, letting them acquire more and more power is a bad idea because they aren't necessarily going to give you free things tomorrow. Indeed, the logic of capitalism dictates that they stop doing so as soon as there's no more competition, however small, that continues to contest that particular niche.
We simply can't know if there would be better alternatives because of it. Any competition is acquired or dies and it has been like this for years.
But then again monopolies are the final form of capitalism so there's no real way to avoid them. Maybe on an utopia where we have strong regulations and can shield them from being influenced by money. Not gonna happen.
It's 100% Google saves my data. And gives me an option to delete that data. It uses that data, and while I have some degree of control over it, i don't have full control over it.
As a user it's preposterous that any kind of data generated by me is anonymized (or not) and effectively sold to a third party. First party usage is kind of understandable. What YC and the govt is asking is that Google should be forced to do exactly that? Sell some data points about me generated by my interactions without my consent. That too it seems for no fee. Without even asking for the permission from the users. What kind of clown world are we living in? I dont care if its anonymized.
Presumably, if that data is so useful, why dont all of these companies lining up to pay the users?Take permission from the users, pay them, and then use whatever they want. Data is only useful in the aggregate, pay ln the aggregate too for whatever revenue and market cap they reach. Doing it without the user consent in 2025 is weird.
TL;DR: YC just filed an amicus brief in the Google-search antitrust case. They tell the judge that (1) Google’s default-search/pay-to-play deals crushed the “kill-zone” around search, keeping VCs away; and (2) the coming wave of AI-search/agentic tools will suffer the same fate unless the court imposes forward-looking remedies—open Google’s index, ban exclusive data+distribution deals, bar self-preferencing, add anti-circumvention teeth, and even spin off Android if Google backslides. YC frames this as the 2025 equivalent of the 1956 Bell Labs decree and the 2001 Microsoft decision: rip open the gate so the next Google can be born.
- VC “kill-zone.” YC says Google’s decade of default-search contracts (Apple, carriers, OEMs) froze half of all U.S. search queries, scaring investors away from search/AI startups.
- AI inflection point. Generative/query-based/agentic AI could disrupt search—but only if newcomers can reach users and train on data Google hoards. Without action, Google will “pull the ladder up” again.
2. What YC wants the court to order
- Open index & dataset access. Force Google to license its search index + anonymized click/embedding data on fair, reasonable terms so rivals can build ranking stacks + AI models.
- No self-preferencing in AI results. Google can’t boost Gemini-style tools or demote rivals. No exclusive AI-training corpora access either.
- Ban pay-to-play defaults. Outlaw “billions to be the default” (search, voice, browser, OS, car). No payments for choice-screen placement.
- Anti-circumvention & retaliation guardrails. Independent monitoring, fast dispute resolution, steep fines, and—if Google cheats—possible Android spinoff.
3. Historical playbook YC cites
- 1956 AT&T consent decree opened Bell Labs patents → semiconductor boom.
- 2001 Microsoft browser decree → Firefox, Chrome, Google itself.
- 2023–24 Nvidia-Arm block → both companies exploded in AI.
- YC says same pattern can unlock “the next Stripe/Airbnb—but for search/AI.”
4. Why HN should care
- Open Index ≈ ultimate dev API. Lets you build retrieval-augmented AI agents without a nation-state’s crawl budget.
- Distribution shake-up. Killing default deals revives mobile/browser competition; could birth real alt-search on phones.
- VC signal. YC telling a judge “give us a level field and we’ll bankroll challengers” means real capital is ready.
- Policy trend. Regulators now want to pre-wire markets (index access, AI data parity, Android contingency) before the next moat forms.
5. Bottom line: This isn’t about a fine. It’s about cracking open the data + distribution bottlenecks that froze search since 2009. If Judge Mehta adopts YC/DOJ’s plan, the door opens for real search/AI innovation—and VCs are ready to sprint through it.
It would be cool if Apple/Google/gatekeepers considered similar measures for the App Store / Google Play related search where similar constraints apply.
Why? The point of antitrust is to promote market fairness.
I don't trust YC very much, but I do trust they want a share of the pie. And they're not wrong that Google has monopolized and stagnated search. I think you're reading too much into that sentence?
In terms of fairness, competition and monopolies is there a chart that shows how much tax payer funding each search engine has received upon creation, annually and indirectly? e.g. donating NASA hangers for server hosting and experiments, heavily discounted real estate and land, tax breaks for power, etc... Put another way, who has the biggest monopoly on direct and indirect tax-payer funding?
How much things have changed when antitrust used mean unfair practices by real monopolies. Real monopolies. Standard Oil which you had no choice in what gas you used. The Bell System(ATT) controlled all of long distance, you had no choice to use them for making long distance calls. Microsoft owned 95% of the market when they got with antitrust, there was other OSes but your software wouldn't run on those OSes. Consumers had no choice. We got stuck with shitty products that were overpriced.
Now antitrust means punishing companies that are too good. Their product is too superior. Even though Windows, the most used computer OS, literally defaults bing search but consumers change it to google. They are choosing to use google. We're going to punish the company that makes a product so good users don't want to use other products. They clearly have choice. There is no switching cost to what search engine you use. Its sad when companies who can't make a product people that people't don't want to use instead to use regulatory capture to prevent real competition in the search engine market. Just make a better product.
I haven’t looked at the merits, and I don’t like what the EU is doing to US companies with 20% market share, but I remember feeling the same way about Microsoft over 20 years ago. Fortunately, groklaw provided a constant stream of easily readable, high quality content. That, and I could see some of my favorite companies shutting down because their customers were restricted from doing business with them if they wanted to sell Windows.
This isn’t about search, it’s about their ad monopoly. They are not being punished for search or related products. I’m actually not sure how breaking out the search index helps in this situation. I would think splitting out off-Google advertising is the more obvious break and one that would benefit humanity. (Ad networks can die in a fire.)
Ad is even worse as Google doesn’t even control the majority of digital marketing market. Only case i can think of is the Amex case but Supreme Court rightly found you can’t be an abusive monopoly and have less than a majority of the market.
Google is the reason for the current AI boom. Without the transformer architecture they invented by funding basic research, there would be no modern LLMs. YC is arguing that their incentive for funding that basic research should be taken away in order to spur innovation?
But when AT&T had a monopoly it funded Bell Labs which was responsible for much innovation.
Then AT&T was shut down and Bell Labs went away.
If we take your argument seriously then AT&T shouldn’t have been dismantled. But it was a good thing AT&T was dismantled. It helped lead to the modern internet.
By your logic all Rockefeller had to do in the early 20th century was set up a lab to do basic research and then Standard Oil wouldn’t have been broken up.
Monopolies should be broken up. This is true regardless of any basic research that they fund.
And it was an antitrust action that unlocked a lot of that value. The consent decree required Bell Labs to license its patents (e.g. transistors) for reasonable royalties. The same consent decree also forbid AT&T from entering new industries like computing. So after they built UNIX, they sold the source code 'as-is' to universities for $200 ($20k for businesses).
Ask anyone who was alive back then and they will tell you stories of how legendarily awful AT&T was to deal with. My father has told me several. The antitrust action made things better for regular people by allowing them to do things like buy their own handsets or haggle over price.
All of them, in regions where they don't have a vertical monopoly. You can negotiate away installation fees and monthly package pricing on DSL, TV, internet phone... also sometimes get a no-contract deal instead of locking in for 24/28 mths with the dreaded ETF which is a large part of Comcast's profitability.
Citation needed. I hear this repeated, but the consumer experience was it was split into regional monopolies, and consumers now had to deal with both local and long distance, and both were still monopolies. It only got better with competition from mobile providers.
YMMV. I don’t agree with the narrowness of this analysis, and would like to see some links to academic studies in economics and the study of innovation tbh.
I'm pretty sympathetic to both sides of this. I don't really know the history well enough to say whether you're right that breaking up AT&T "helped lead to the modern internet". But even stipulating that it did, the loss of monopoly era Bell Labs was tragic.
Both things can be true! It's entirely possible (probable even) that breaking up monopolies has both positive and negative impact.
And I would be a lot more sympathetic if we had a lot more public investment in technology. But we don't. What I see is both public and private research investment under major attack. I think that's a recipe for disaster.
Right, if you look back through the history of ideas, every breakthrough builds on prior research and inventions. In the realm of patents and copyrights, this is acknowledged formally: they expire after a certain time and enter the public domain. This also supports the view that the current state of the world, for better or worse, owes much to the past and those who came before (living or not living elements).
There's actually a pretty solid argument to be made that the railways were never more effective than during the days of Rockefeller, when he could throw his money around to force otherwise-competing railways to optimize their work in an industry that has some fundamental strong incentives to be non-competitive (it rarely makes any sense to run two rail lines purely for competition reasons and leads to a race to the bottom on pricing).
... but that's more a story of the failure of the US government to go far enough and nationalize the rail network and its operations. The most efficient era of US rail was during World War II, when the military took it over and prioritized schedules by optimal throughput over profit concerns.
Bell Labs being defunded by a deregulated/competetive AT&T was precisely what led to the attempted commercialization of Unix and the near death of what would eventually be called "open source", though. In history as it stands, we had GNU and Linux and all that we lost was a few years.
But it's easy to imagine a world where that didn't happen and BSD was just killed dead. So no OS X, no iOS, no Android, no ChromeOS, and the only vendor able to stand on its own is the one we all agree had the worst product.
Ironically the world where the Bell monopoly was left in place seems to me to be one where we're all stuck running Microsoft Windows on everything, no?
I mean, fine, there's nuance to everything but the idea that "well, open research isn't so important" seems frankly batshit to me. Monopolies fall on their own all the time (Microsoft's did too!). You can't get stuff into the public space that wasn't ever there to begin with.
You’re making the assumption that only corporations can fund or perform basic research. But the transistor was actually the culmination of decades of research by materials scientists and physicists in university and other labs into semiconductors before anyone realized there were applications.
>Monopolies fall on their own all the time (Microsoft's did too!)
What in the heck are you talking about??? After Microsoft was convicted, even though they never received any actual punishment, the were very internally cautions about any behaviors that could be perceived as monopolistic. This is like a total misinterpretation of what actually occurred on your part.
And yes, monopolies do fall, after very long periods of time. Some monopoly sitting around 25 years may not seem like much, but that's half an average persons working life.
You responded to a parenthetical. The point was about AT&T, not Microsoft. And yes, they effectively killed BSD, relenting only in the late 90's once it became clear that (post-Linux) there was little value left in Unix. In a different universe, they go to the mattresses with SysV against Windows NT and lose, and we have nothing.
Yet empirically, the biggest funders of basic research have historically been monopolies. The US government was, at least up until the last few months, the largest funder of basic research globally and it obviously maintains multiple different monopolies, a monopoly on legal use of force, a functional monopoly on financial transactions as the global reserve currency, and I'm sure others. Excluding national governments, Bell Labs and IBM were both probably the biggest funders of basic research in the last century during their respective heydays. Bell was obviously a monopoly and while IBM might never have faced anti-trust penalties, they did at one point control 70% of the mainframe market and the DoJ did bring a case against them (that was eventually dismissed by the Reagan administration.)
I think there are many good reasons to pursue anti-trust action against companies that are in a dominant market position, but we should be honest about the tradeoffs. Businesses that have to aggressively compete to maintain market share don't have the slack to fund basic research.
Is this not a bit "tail wagging the dog" thinking? There wasn't much innovation in telecommunications once Bell's monopoly was entrenched. Once it dissipated, innovation was everywhere in the space. Similarly, computers had less innovation while IBM was a monopoly than they've had since its monopoly dissipated.
Though both companies created novel & useful inventions, the biggest shifts in those industries during those monopoly eras were from outside those organisations by competitive startups. As an example, IBM should have produced Microsoft, but they didn't. They missed out on a multi-trillion dollar value creation opportunity as a result.
There's a difference between conducting basic research and bringing new inventions to the market in the form of consumer goods or services. Monopolies are much, much worse at doing the latter than normal businesses because they have no competition pressuring them to improve their offerings.
> There wasn't much innovation in telecommunications once Bell's monopoly was entrenched. Once it dissipated, innovation was everywhere in the space.
I don't think that's accurate at all. If we take say 1920 or so as the date when the monopoly was entrenched and 1984 as the break-up, there was tons of innovation in telecom in that time period. Novel telecom technologies introduced in that time period include television, microwave relays, satellite communications, submarine telephone cables, cellular telephones, fiber optics, electronic telephone switching, packet switching, the Internet.
Which is why, like the 'monopoly on violence' the government should also be funding a _lot more research_.
It should be at, or partnered with, higher learning institutions and since it's public funded all of the results should be free to use*. I'm willing to entertain the idea of: Free use for people and corporations within the country/countries that funded research, everyone else pays compulsory license fees.
But public funded research isn’t “free to use.” In many cases, you can’t even read it without paying a scientific journal for a subscription. See the Bayh-Dole Act as well: universities can patent discoveries from federally funded research.
The intent of the Bayh-Dole Act was to deal with a perceived problem of government-owned patents being investor-unfriendly. At the time the government would only grant non-exclusive licenses, and investors generally want exclusivity. That may have been the actual problem, moreso than who owned the patent. On the other hand, giving the actual inventors an incentive to commercialize their work should increase their productivity and the chance that the inventions actually get used.
> I think there are many good reasons to pursue anti-trust action against companies that are in a dominant market position, but we should be honest about the tradeoffs.
Okay. I’ll take the monopolostic government over the monopolistic corporation. Thanks.
This line of argument to defend monopolies is the same line of argument against progressive taxation of high incomes. Just because those with trends excess use some small fraction of that excess to do good does not justify the means.
I have been close enough to billionaires and how they spend their money to not be fully impressed by such arguments.
And certainly the robber barons of the 2000s spend far less on the public good than when tax rates were higher and they used to fund universities, libraries, hospitals and the like.
The biggest funders of basic research are those with the most resources. This is your insight? I don't think anyone disagrees. Then you conflate correlation with causation and move it to _monopolies_ fund basic research. Bravo.
That's true, but if it weren't for Google's monopolist position, I doubt they'd have the money to throw at the wall for random research. For every AI transformer they revolutionized, there's a self-driving car project that's dragging on for decades.
Had Google operated like a normal company, the risk/reward of this kind of research would've looked completely differently.
Google's monopoly helped research along in the same way totalitarian countries like China are developing infrastructure at break-neck speed: if you don't need to care about pesky rights and regulations, you can do things that would otherwise be impossible.
I don't think Google's monopoly is worth having the current generation of lie generator bots around, but I don't think generative AI would be where it is right now had Google been forced to comply with antitrust regulations ten years ago.
It's funny that you use self driving cars as a negative example. We have a perfect natural experiment to look at to compare the slower research-driven approach (Waymo) to the "normal company" short term profit driven approach (Tesla).
From where I'm sitting it's pretty clear which approach has been more successful.
My first thought was Bell Labs here. The lack of time pressure for research results sounds like a big reason why so much innovation happened—people could pursue projects that may not have immediately benefitted the company's bottom line, because Bell had money to throw. I think UNIX was an example of this, because MULTICS was a failure and Bell was wary of similar projects, but I might be wrong.
Most of the Bell Labs fundamental breakthroughs had no path to commercialization at the time of their discovery. The transistor was discovered 12 years into Shockleys research on fundamental properties of semiconductors.
If commercialization had been considered before funding, the project would have never been approved.
Instead, Bell management took the view that they could find everything, and some of it might become a new market, maybe.
According to Kernighan in UNIX: A History and a Memoir, the Unix team was constrained with regards to hardware capital at the time of Unix's creation. The Multics team got to use a fancy GE-645 (36-bits!) while the Unix team had to beg for "cheaper" systems like the PDP-7 and eventually an 11. Thompson has a great quote about how ultimately he was thankful they didn't have as much money to play with as the Multics team did but at the time he was annoyed he had to beg for a PDP-11. Fun book!
> You certainly have a point. Places like google and bell labs have pushed innovation, apparently enabled by monopolies.
I've heard this argument before (and recognize that you aren't defending it), but telecommunications, network and technology innovation has hardly suffered since Bell was dismantled in 1982.
Telecommunications is still led by small groups of companies. Giant backbone providers stitch the internet together. Telecoms providers within a country, the ones that actually have hardware in the field, can often be counted on one hand, and often in one hand after a fireworks accident. 5G/6G/7G research is led by a small handful of companies that actually build the switches, transmitters, and modems. Cell tower frequencies are sold to a tiny group of carriers that sublet their network equipment to smaller companies they eventually buy up (if succesful) or disappear from the market (if not succesful).
Fiber rollout in countries where a government funded phone line rollout has already succeeded is laughably slow, taking decades and many billions with little to show for it. Even in countries where no phone lines were rolled out back in the day, fiber is more and more being skipped as 5G allows for cheaper (though less reliable and less capable) deployment.
I'm not saying monopolies are good or anything, and I think our problems would be even worse had we stuck to the monopolist systems that brought us telecoms as we know it, but I wouldn't consider the industry one where there's enough competition to drive innovation, especially since at least half of the entire sector is competing against Chinese government-controlled companies with seemingly endless coffers.
Right, but there other, real, negative impacts of monopoly, whereas the positive impact of R&D funding seems to be at best a maybe as to if it's better than the alternative.
This is debatable, I think. What I've read is that, whereas Bell Labs did foundational, groundbreaking research that radically altered the course of human history, technological innovation since then has more often followed the lines Bell Labs, and their ilk, laid down. Giving the world a faster computer or faster network is fine and nice but pales in comparison to the consequences of giving the world modern computers, Unix, and C.
I might not have explained my position adequately. I am not commenting on how Google became immensely successful, but just looking at it today in its current state.
It seems like the end result of unchecked capitalism is monopolistic practices. Companies want to make as much $$$ as possible. The most effective way to do that is to become a monopoly and avoid/destroy/inhibit any amount of competition as possible.
I really see it as an unstable system. Which is why we need society to put laws in place to keep the system in check, so it doesn’t turn sour.
Basically there’s a “healthiness” scale of capitalism. I want healthy capitalism.
This is debatable and probably a US centric POV, I think you could argue that much of the world is better at public / private partnerships and so no, their position is not due to capitalism, even if their continued existence is.
I’m not an expert on the economic history, but you could probably argue that the last big public / private partnerships in the US were in the railroad days. Defense spending I would not count in this category either. Although it builds whole ecosystems it is too insular and incestuous compared to something like transportation, or deliberately nurturing any other budding industry in a cooperative rather than competitive fashion
That's an interesting question. A lot of basic research is done in pursuit of creating entirely new markets. Being the first entrant to a new market makes you a monopolist in a way by default. It doesn't necessarily have to be anti-competitive.
I'd argue the fact that Google publishes much more of their research than their competitors do is a strong indicator that they're actually not the anti-competitive ones.
It's normal for mature industries to evolve into oligopolies. The filing goes far beyond fighting cartel-like behavior, into pretty ludicrous stuff (like "open access to Google’s datasets and search Index").
I worked for a while at the company that used to be named Bellcore (Bell Communications Research), which was originally a research consortium for the Baby Bells. By the time I joined, it was a zombie cash cow shell that did no research, and it met the common fate of such businesses: acquired by a private equity firm.
The greatest private sector basic research institute that has ever existed was the result of a government granted monopoly, so you have to admit, it helps.
There are many other search engine options, why should Google be punished for hiring the best people over decades to make the best one? Many consumers also switch their search to Google when presented with other options or defaults.
> why should Google be punished for hiring the best people over decades to make the best one?
Google should not be punished for having gained a near-monopoly by hiring the best people.
But perhaps their near-monopoly is due to other reasons like paying large amounts to ensure that they are the default option on various platforms. In this case, legal restrictions might be more appropriate.
How do we determine which of these proposed reasons for the near-monopoly is correct? We use a legal process where each side presents their evidence and a neutral party decides which is most credible.
> There are many other search engine options, why should Google be punished for hiring the best people over decades to make the best one?
I’m guessing this whole court case wouldn’t have been a thing if Google wasn’t bribing Apple, to the tune of $20 billion a year [1], to remain the default search engine on iOS.
Because the data they possess is the monopoly, they have better search results because it is too expensive for competitors to gather the data at this point as(I also think people who are unfamiliar with finance do not understand the quantum, Meta has a similar type of business but was under huge pressure with investing tens of billions into VR...it would cost hundreds of billions to get parity with Google, there is no way to finance this).
It is nothing to do with "hiring the best people". Google's exec-level leadership is extremely poor, Mr Magoo-tier management. This is largely due to their share classes, the people at the very top are not very good at business so Google largely isn't run like a business. They have one business that is probably worth $4-5tn, and the rest is worth -$3-4tn. The number of "best people" out there is usually under 500 in a country the size of the US, a country that has hundreds of thousands of employees is not hiring the best.
I would guess under 100 people at Google actually positively impact financial results in any way because the advertising business grows rapidly, uses no capital, and requires no staff. This is true of many of the tech companies do, you aren't getting the best if you pay an exec $50m because the best will always do their own thing and make more. Rather you get someone like Pichai or Cook who sounds good and will get shareholders to believe that setting fire to $200m/year to pay them is a good idea, they are indistinguishable from politicians.
Google is under-earning massively. Staff aren't a monopoly, you just pay someone to leave and they are yours now (you see this in other areas like HFT where staff actually know useful stuff, you don't see this in tech because most staff don't know anything, they are looking for drones).
It's incredibly naive to think Google's continuous growth is automatic. It happened because of all the work the employees do, not in spite of it. Are there employees who don't contribute? Sure. But that's different from only 100 contributing to positive growth.
Do you actually understand how and why they are growing?
They start with a page with zero ads, they add one ad to that page one year, ad sales pushes that placements, then a few years they do it again, etc. Meta are the same.
Google do sell at a higher price than offline ads because of targeting/intent but this is inherent to the product: search has inherently better intent and their targeting tech is no better than anyone else such that their prices are higher/grow faster.
That is their growth model: higher ad density, the CEO deciding to add another ad to a page and earning $100m/year. There is no value-added otherwise because you don't need many people, you don't need capital and you are making $300bn/year.
And, again, if you own the shares you understand that you are getting the ads business, and because of the dual class you are also getting this tech bureaucracy that sets fire to tens of billions every year employing people to do nothing. If these people are so productive...where is the revenue? It is all ads or ancillary business, they have GCP now but there is nothing else...because these people aren't doing anything.
It is like owning a business that turns lead into gold, the process is automatic, requires no capital...and then employing a bunch of monks to pray for the lead and saying the business couldn't exist without them. Lol.
> Without the transformer architecture they invented by funding basic research, there would be no modern LLMs.
Without Google the researchers who invented the Transformers model might have launched their own startup instead of sitting on the technology for 5 years while it's mismanaged at a big company. We would have had LLMs in 2018 not 2022.
A little bit unrelated, but the rise of Transformers in 2022 was because of the compute available - in 2018, it would have been almost impossible to make something like GPT-4.
> Google is the reason for the current AI boom. Without the transformer architecture they invented by funding basic research, there would be no modern LLMs.
Sounds great to me! Wish they had been broken up before that happened.
> YC is arguing that their incentive for funding that basic research should be taken away in order to spur innovation?
Ma Bell is arguing that Bell labs has been a fountain of knowledge everyone admires and has contributed tremendously to the advancement of telecommunication systems.
Yes, large monopolistic corporations can spend large amounts of money on, presumably, completely unmonetizable research.
Nevertheless anti-Trust law exists because of the belief that monopolies should not exist and that it is the governments function to dismantle monopolies. The consequence of that is that corporations who can freely spend hundreds of millions on basic research will be dismantled as well, as happened with AT&T, and the funding for the basic research will cease.
>YC is arguing that their incentive for funding that basic research should be taken away in order to spur innovation?
No. That is the stance of the government. YC is arguing that the remedies the government is seeking are appropriate.
Juergen Schmidhuber and his students came up with much of the basic NN elements, such as RNN, LSTM and others without behemoth resources (and several years earlier). Ttbomk, the one thing they DIDN’T come up with was the transformer; however it is very likely someone would have within a 5-10 year time frame.
I well aware of Schmidhuber, still the scaling of the compute was critical. The reason Schmidhuber didnt go all the way is still scaling/capital, which accrues to monopolies who can afford wildly speculative research. Also, LSTM, RNN, etc, while effective for their time, were dead ends.
I'm not saying that, I'm saying you need a company with huge amounts of cash on hand to spend on R&D. The monopoly provides a safe space for it, like it or not, this system has worked.
the argument seems to be basically that if Google hadn't had a dominant position they would not have had the money to make a new technology that was important for the current AI wave, and they should have the right to exploit this technology that they helped create - disregarding that in the American system this is what patents exist to enable.
OpenAI is the reason for the current AI boom. Google wasn't productizing anything and didn't put any of this stuff out in the open. Where was their productization of the transformer?
If anything, it should show that Google malinvests. Maybe none of it would have seen the light of day. Only now that they've been threatened are they building products.
They had AI assistants and machine vision aplenty. The current hype cycle seems to stem from the discovery that going big on these models was worth it.
OpenAi just decided they could jump the gun while Google CORRECTLY deemed the tech not ready yet. What you're breaking your neck to find fault with was Google being responsible.
That you are unaware of the applications of transformers is on you, not them. Search query understanding, search result ranking, translation, voice recognition, all other natural language applications, and generative applications like Gmail Smart Compose are all based on transformer architecture.
Yes. Sundar could have fought harder against the internal forces that thought cloud was just a fad and made Google a stronger player in Cloud. Then, Google would not have been as reliant on search/ads.
We have two major phone operating systems and they charge a tax of 30%, which gets passed onto consumers. This should be zero if there was unlimited competition or web installation. There's also so much innovation happening in the mobile space right now. It's not like they're parked and reaping untold benefits.
By having search monopolies, they've gamified paying for placement above your competitor's trademarks. Rather than spend on engineering or lowering costs, you have to pay to defend your brand.
There are thousands of ways these monopolies are horrible for the consumer, for small business, and for innovation.
These companies force their way into new markets, kill the sustainable incumbents by give away services sustained on unrelated business unit profit, then raise rates once the field has been salted and acquired. Amazon is a grocery store, primary care doctor, home electronics company, and James Bond.
Why should Amazon get free advertising for their films on their web storefront, plastered on the side of their delivery vans, emblazoned on their packaging, when competing studios have to spend millions on marketing? To top it off, they're outsourcing the film crew labor to Eastern Europe where there are no crew safety laws and are putting American film workers out of business.
And the current price pressure on your salary is directly a result of their market power. They don't have to fear you starting a company that can impact their profits anymore.
These companies should all be dismantled. Large companies should be exposed to evolutionary pressures, but because of monopoly they become invasive species and dominate entire ecosystems. Regulation is the path to healthy competition and innovation.
If developers bothered to put their apps on alternative stores with much lower rates, we wouldn't be in this mess. Amazon is shutting down their store because it turns out nobody is really all that interested in actual alternatives. Samsung has their own store but all I hear about it is people bitching that they already have Google Play and that it's "bloatware".
Huawei even sells phones without Google Play in the west! Of course the first thing people try to do on them is get Google Play working, because the cheap hardware is all people care about.
Sure, Apple has proven to be pretty shit about app cost, but Android does and always has offered alternative app stores, and it's the leading example of how much companies like Epic are lying through their teeth.
Consumers pay the 30% app tax on Android because the companies claiming to want to get rid of it don't actually want to invest in alternatives, they just want Apple and Google to host their games for free so they can make more money.
The same goes for a lot of these monopolies. People want options, but they don't want to pay for options. The result is a quick race to the bottom where only a few high-profit, low-margin companies dominate the market.
Andoid users install google play because the applications they want to use is only available on google play, regardless of personal choice. Andoid developers put their applications on google play because that is the only places where they can access enough number of users, which has nothing to do with developer choice.
It is not about price. It is about platforms. A 0% app tax could not compete if there is 0 users on the platform, and google could increase the app tax to 100% if they wanted and people would still use it.
> By having search monopolies, they've gamified paying for placement above your competitor's trademarks. Rather than spend on engineering or lowering costs, you have to pay to defend your brand.
I would love to know how much money Google makes just from this extortion.
… which is enabled by their intentionally-misleading search ads, which also enable scams. I’d further love to know how much money they make promoting scams.
About the phone OS: unfortunately, other companies and governments give this duopoly to Apple and Google.
If I need my phone to access my bank and my bank's app only works on official Android or iOS then that's it. I don't have a choice in what phone OS I'm running.
And the bank most likely does that because of government regulations.
Amazon doesn't get free advertising. They lose out on revenue they could have gotten by placing another paying ad there instead. The opportunity cost is not 0.
Amazon chooses not to advertise third party products on those surfaces. They realize they have product synergy in giving away free films and movies to their customers, which is why they do it. It's a massively unfair platform advantage.
UPS and FedEx don't emblazon ads on their delivery trucks. Nobody is buying up those ad spaces.
Yeah, the root of many monopolies today is an IP monopoly explicitly granted by government. Government policy is prohibiting monopolies via one relatively weak pathway, and literally establishing them via the IP pathway.
A finding that preventing or discouraging installation of apps from anywhere but the first-party store constitutes use of market power to exclude competitors and fix prices in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act sounds like a great solution to me.
No, the solution is web installs without platform scare walls.
We have sandboxing, permissions, app scanning heuristics, and databases of bad apps. If the web works from a technical standpoint and security posture, so can native.
Google is David and OpenAI is Goliath, excessively nerfing Google will put us all at the mercy of closed AI.
Gemini (the app, not the API or AI studio) is one of the few places where we can use frontier generative AI without a “customer noncompete” (you know, the one where they compete with us and then say we’re not allowed to compete back) … if you use Claude or OpenAI or Grok, you’re prohibited from training on your chat logs, or even using the thing to develop AI. Not so with Gemini app.
Too bad you have to lose your chat history just to deactivate model training (“Gemini apps activity” conflates opt-out of training with opt-out of storing chat history)
I don’t know much about the ads space but I just hope going after Google doesn’t create a vacuum that gets filled by an even worse monopoly (OpenAI)
OpenAI is hardly a Goliath. It has no real moat, and is trying to build a business around a feature. But other businesses already have platforms with billions of users to deploy those features to.
As others have pointed out, we should see the forest from the trees. Microsoft is a huge OpenAI redistributor, also Apple. Everyone knows ”ChatGPT”. While the company size might not be monopoly, based on a larger userbase, it is.
Really odd that the trillionaire dollar corporation that prints billions of dollars in pure profit every quarter due to monopolistic and anti-democratic policies is the David, the weak feeble underdog in this story, compared to OpenAI that is wildly unprofitable and has no real strategy outside of burning money.
There has been no time in human history where destroying monopolies were a bad thing.
Isn’t Microsoft also a trillion dollar corporation? If we add their 39% market share in foundation models (likely due to enterprise use of Azure OpenAI Service) to OpenAI’s 9% market share, the result is around 48% market share, compared to Google’s 15%, which is less than half of the MSFT/OAI pair…not to mention a cursory comparison of Gemini vs ChatGPT apps.
Just because OpenAI isn’t in “extraction mode” yet doesn’t mean it’s not a scary monopoly.
Yes, Microsoft is one of the world's biggest companies, and it underinvests in research and development, preferring to hoard cash. OpenAI is in effect a client state of Microsoft that Microsoft is using to make Google look flat-footed and force them to enter the chatbot market. Nothing that transpires between Microsoft and OpenAI is really at arms' length. Personally, I don't think this is a positive development for the industry or for humanity in generally. We were doing better before we had sycophantic robots confidently misleading us.
> Yes, Microsoft is one of the world's biggest companies, and it underinvests in research and development, preferring to hoard cash.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but:
1. If you're talking about basic research, Microsoft Research has been a thing since the 90's, is highly prestigious, and has published far more papers than Google, based on their respective research websites. (To be fair, Google started much later.)
2. If you're talking about product development, MSFT is vastly more diversified in terms of revenues than any of the "Magnificent 7" because of their varied product lineup.
3. The basis of their relationship with OpenAI is literally them investing double digit billions to catch up on the AI race once they recognized the opportunity.
> OpenAI is in effect a client state of Microsoft that Microsoft is using to make Google look flat-footed and force them to enter the chatbot market.
I'm not sure about Microsoft's influence in OpenAI's strategy, but it's pretty clear Google was caught flatfooted by their own strategy of locking away transformer technology behind products that didn't threaten their search monopoly. There's a reason the researchers who invented transformers had to leave and start a different company to bring its true potential to the market. Which, even if it was just a chatbot, is what has kicked off the AI boom.
Everyone I've encountered thinks of Microsoft Research as a bad pattern, that includes all the refugees from MSR Silicon Valley who joined Google after Microsoft dissolved it in 2014. Perhaps it is a bias of the people I've worked with in my career but the core early contributors at Google who came from DEC WRL also viewed separate research divisions as a bad idea.
Anyway my statement was meant to be objective. Look at how much Microsoft spends on R&D for the last 25 years, compared to the amount Google spends, in absolute terms and as a fraction of revenues.
Having a separate research division being an anti-pattern is an interesting topic! I remember getting into a related discussion almost a decade ago with a professor who left academia to join Google, his point being product-driven R&D was strictly "better" than "bluesky" R&D because (IIRC) the work is more directly related to market needs.
My contention was that this ignores the transformative potential of long-range theoretical research. For instance, somehow very few consider Xerox PARC to be an anti-pattern.
From what I hear in the last few years even MSR has changed its ways to steer its research more in line with needs of product divisions, and I actually consider that a loss. Who knows what paradigm-shifting inventions like GenAI are being steered away from?
> Look at how much Microsoft spends on R&D for the last 25 years, compared to the amount Google spends, in absolute terms and as a fraction of revenues.
Hmm, at the risk of relying on sycophantic bots, AI overviews suggest most recently Microsoft spent 13.2% of revenues vs 14.8% for Google (and 30% for Meta!) Of course even a single % point is in the millions at their scale, but there are a ton of confounding factors including differing product margins and payscales (and CEO obsessions like Metaverse!) At least at a quick glance MSFT and GOOG seem comparable.
The problem here is how "R&D" is defined. Unfortunately, even day-to-day product development is lumped in with R&D. I've done "R&D" in academia, private research firms, and big tech, and they are all poles apart. "Actual" R&D is very researchy, often based in discovering new aspects of reality, whereas "product" R&D is just regular product development. Which could be considered discovering new aspects of the market I suppose. They are both valuable but on very differnt timelines.
Not sure a VC firm with a vested interest in Google failing should be allowed to have an opinion here...
I always thought the point of the government breaking up monopolies was to prevent anti-competitive behaviour, not simply to punish companies for being too successful.
If we want to talk about what's best for the economy and startups, there's a bunch of large companies that could be broken up for the benefit of society, but not sure that's entirely fair either.
Except no one is providing much evidence that Google is anti-competitive. It's more like they're simply too good at competing so competitors want to knee-cap them...
Google is effectively being punished for retaining their earnings and re-investing in tons of software R&D over the years. Their "monopoly" is because people choose to use them, not because they have to. Not to mention they are are being disrupted by ChatGPT and other LLMs anyways right now. There have always been lots of web browsers and search engines, but Google simply did a better job making and refining their software and hiring people to do that.
But they only have high market share because people want to use Google instead of the competitors. Many consumers switch their search engine to Google when presented with other defaults. Because Google search works the best and people know that.
The aggressive marketing of Chrome on Google Search website to users using other browsers was a significant part of Chrome adoption success.
And no - some people didn't willingly and consciously switched to their search engine. It was pushed down their throats by browser vendors being paid-off by Google for setting it as the default one. Mozilla has overwritten user-changed search engine setting in Firefox with several updates.
Non tech-savvy users simply accept changes made in software they use.
Nowadays using Google Search is, since they pivoted from from being a "search company" to "adtech company" which resulted in the degradation of Google Search quality.
"Engines like Bing" is an ambiguous term. There are better options than Bing.
ok so google paid companies like apple to make google the default search engine. you cannot claim everything was just because their product was good. you can argue that striking the deal with apple was just a smart business move, but google isn't winning just because of their r&d.
It's just a default, you can change it. Did Google coerce Apple into taking that deal somehow? Or did they simply offer them the most compelling deal in a free market?
Keep in mind that if paying to be the default search engine in a browser is illegal, then Firefox's primary revenue source is out the window.
Google's research departments hyped up DeepMind's success in board games and enabled huge amounts of marketing which makes you believe this. However, DeepMind was a resounding failure after GPT's were released. If you look at the multiple documentaries, they now seem cringeworthy because of Google's arrogance about AI. Google did not simply do a better job, they acquired the companies that did and then convinced you that they were part of Google the entire time so they can take the credit.
I'm really glad that YC brought this against Google but it should be clear that YC also enabled them. It's a lie that YC is independent from Google as it partners and promotes their engineers and Big Tech allies. They see the writing on the wall and their lawyers see this as a hedge against lawsuits against them. "We didn't cause this mess, see look! We're trying to help!" YC also doesn't serve American startups at all and their entrepreneurs strongly favors California or India.
> Google is effectively being punished for retaining their earnings and re-investing in tons of software R&D over the years
They have indeed invested tons in r&d, but with excessively little results. Besides web search it's tough to see succeses that Google didn't buy their way into. Gmail, maps, ... maybe?
That argument cuts both ways: Who knows how much longer we had to wait for this AI boom because google was sponging up every genius to work on ad selling algorithms.
The number of searches started to decline and everybody knows that Google is going to start pouring all their cash into AI tools now.
It looks like this is a strategic case to prevent Google from getting into AI search space and even gain access to their search index data so that they can train their own models on it.
Wright brothers invited the aircraft but almost all their patents were cancelled when the Great War started. If we believe the AI race is indeed an existential threat then let's cancel all patents that prevent anyone from innovating.
1) Eliminate Google Play Services for android and the oem non-compete deals.
2) Right to privacy. All data collection and storage (even on customer owned hardware if used for targeting decisions) must be opt-in, by purpose and annually renewed. It must be easier to only opt in to data collection for use cases that provide application functionality / business transactions than it is to opt into blanket data collection.
Personally, as copyright is a non-natural right, we should limit it for films/tv/shows such that whatever price it is sold for, then it is made available for any distributor to sell for after a very limited monopoly period (1 year from release, say, reflecting the current market in which films go from cinema to TV streaming platforms in a few weeks). This would apply to all distributors over X users and/or Y revenue (taking in at least the top 5 streaming platforms).
This way, the public can access copyright works, and producers of works can be paid, but distribution is opened up. Creators still get paid, distribution isn't monopolistic.
Netflix can argue "this show is worth £5 per viewer" and only sell rights at that price, but they pay tax on that price, and crucially the rest of the catalogue then needs to add up so if viewers are paying £8 per month then the rest of the catalogue is marked down accordingly. There will be manipulation, but if it doesn't reasonably add up then apply the sort of penalties in the EU of 20$ gross profit fines; strike off directors for copyright abuse (can't be directors of media companies again).
I can't see that this would harm income for creators, only for distributors (who aren't needed, they're just duplicating using monopolistic practices), and it seems it would have broad appeal.
That's not comparable. Netflix did not have a monopoly on "shipping DVDs". Plenty of retailers, online or brick-and-mortar, did that at the same time Netflix did, and video rental places were still going. Some of which would deliver movies (the local Marcos near me had a deal with a local Family Video where if you bought a large pizza they would bring you both the pizza and a movie of your choice from Family Video, assuming it was in stock).
Can YC prevent startups from selling to Google? Even if they could why should they? There is nothing wrong with believing Google abuses its monopoly and selling to Google.
> Meanwhile, YC has happily and excitedly fed it's start-ups to Google over the years.
I'm curious what you've seen or heard that led you to that conclusion? It's the opposite of correct.
YC supports what founders want, including if they want to sell to $BigCo, but such outcomes are hardly successes for YC. YC's success depends on outlier companies growing much larger than that.
What YC is complaining about is that they've been turned into Google's farm league.
The thing is, Google doesn't develop anything new. Everything new they make fails horribly, so they can't and don't compete with YC in the way that you think.
Examples of failed Google homegrown technologies include:
- Social media: Google Buzz, Google+
- Messaging: Google Chat, Hangouts, actually there's too many to list
- Video: Google Video
Almost all of Google's successful products are acquisitions:
- Homegrown: Search, Gmail
- Acquisitions: YouTube, Analytics, most of their adtech stack, Android, DeepBrain (the people who did all the AI work at Google)
Furthermore, whenever Google or Facebook buys any startup, that startup gets an immediate moat and capital injection that can be used to crush any other startup that didn't sell out fast enough. So YC only has one option for an exit: sell the company to Google at a price Google decides.
> DeepBrain (the people who did all the AI work at Google)
"DeepBrain" isn't a thing. Google acquired DeepMind, which was the second biggest research lab in AI at the time. The first biggest was Google Brain. They existed in parallel until being merged in 2023.
Brain was entirely homegrown, and it was responsible for AIAYN, BERT, PaLM. Which is to say, transformers.
a) If YC was so tired of being a funnel to larger companies then they should be selecting companies based on their ability to be self sustaining companies. Not this hype-driven, boom or bust approach to startups they know VCs and acquirers want.
b) Google Cloud, Gemini, TPUs, Pixel etc seem like pretty important products to me.
One wonders how these people imagine accessing a search index, from the practical, technical standpoint. If you believe that Google has only unfair business practices, then it makes perfect sense to believe that your organization will simply access their data.
Google is a "monopoly" because their competitors with massive cash reserves (Microsoft, Apple, Meta) are too risk averse to compete in the marketplace and are hoping that the courtroom will deliver them a win.
Which market are you talking about specifically? The outstanding cases against them are in search and in adtech. This amicus brief is for the Search case (this one [0]).
In search (the relevant market here), Microsoft does compete in the marketplace, and Microsoft's evidence that Google's anticompetitive practices have prevented them from gaining any meaningful ground in search were a keystone of the government's case, including the fact that Microsoft has invested nearly $100 billion into Bing [1].
In adtech much the same can be said about Meta.
So, again, I'm curious: in which market does Google not have competitors spending massive amounts of cash which Google still manages to hold back from being able to meaningfully compete?
That's (a) a different argument than the competition is "too risk averse", (b) subjective, and (c) arguably the result of a number of flywheel effects. That is, Bing's ability to compete is hampered by the fact that Google already has an overwhelming majority of search traffic from which to learn and improve.
For example, from the second filing I linked to:
> After search began appearing on phones, Google started logging information about user location, swipes, and other user-related movements. PFOF ¶¶ 1003–1004. This data is now vital to every aspect of search, including figuring out where and when to crawl specific websites, how to index the information retrieved from that crawl, what documents to retrieve from the index in response to a user query, and how to rank the retrieved items. Some elements of Google’s search engine are trained on 13 months of data—a volume that would take Bing over 17 years to accumulate.
Do you not understand that a search engine is not a business by itself? I'm struggling to understand why so many supposedly smart people don't seem to grasp the obvious fact that Google can only exist in the current form or not at all and that any viable business of the same form has to look the same. Chrome is not a self standing viable business. YouTube is definitely not one either. Ads only works because the search engine exists. The search engine without ads would be a money pit. It's a synergistic business.
This argument can be made about nearly any anticompetitive monopoly, and that should not stop the government from deciding that, if the business can only exist in its current form, then the business should not exist.
You're not entitled to a business model if your business model is harmful.
What evidence do you have that their business model is harmful? As a consumer search seems like an extremely healthy sector right now with plenty of competition. Google just happens to be by far the best.
What exactly do you think is stopping you from using a competitor? Can you not find the setting to change your default search engine in Chrome? Is Google blocking you from making that choice somehow? All the arguments I've seen for Google being anti-competitive in this sector are extremely weak.
No. The US vs. Google antitrust cases scope are Google's monopolistic practices in the search and adtech markets, not the browser market. The DOJ pushing for Google to sell Chrome is related to the search-related case.
A shareholder in those companies wouldn’t support it. You could easily spend $10b trying to win back a fraction of the search market and Google could just spend $10b back to greater effect to bury you. Google is entrenched at every level: consumer awareness, browser, SEO, advertisers, ad-tech.
A country as large and prosperous as the United States should have more than 4 providers. We should have more than 3 cellular companies. We should have more than 8 major ISPs.
These are monopolies. You might not see it because the economy is so _over monopolized_ it's hard to have perspective.
YCombinator loves to pretend it invented the idea of startups and entreprenourism but those have been vigorous and healthy throughout _most_ of America's existence. When they weren't we wrote some of the most comprehensive and consumer friendly anti-trust laws in the entire world. A feat which still stands today.
Am I misremembering, or doesn’t Apple already have its own “stealth” search engine they could deploy at the drop of a hat, but instead use it as a bargaining chip w/ Google? Coulda sworn I read about it a decade ago in breathless “Is Apple working on its own search engine???” articles
It’s amazing how twisted the term “anti-competitive” has become. Where anti-competitive companies push for anti-competitive regulations under the false pretense of preventing anti-competitiveness.
Google is being competitive.
YC is being anti-competitive.
Because they suck at competing against Google and they want to get unfair, unethical advantage themselves.
Imagine spending years and billions building something and then I show up and say “hey man that’s not fair, give me a slice of that thing for free. Oh and also I’m probably going to sell it back to you someday for a lot of money”.
And before someone tells me “that’s the law”, I don’t care. If that’s the law then it should be changed. Laws have been written (and lobbied) for all sorts of reasons and surprisingly not all of them are fair and ethical.
It doesn't matter whether the monopoly position was achieved "fairly" or not. Either way it is detrimental to the overall health of the economy and to consumer choice, and that alone is good enough reason to bust them. Those laws were passed for a reason - people saw what the end result looked like, and they didn't like it.
If you don't want someone to come and bust a monopoly you've spent years and billions building, then don't use your time and money to build a monopoly.
Google benefits at scale from infrastructure, systems and laws that create the opportunity to make such revenues. It is only natural they should not harm the host.
It’s amazing how twisted the term “anti-competitive” has become. Where anti-competitive companies push for anti-competitive regulations under the false pretense of preventing anti-competitiveness.
Standard Oil is being competitive.
The U.S. oil refining and distribution industry is being anti-competitive.
Because they suck at competing against Standard Oil and they want to get unfair, unethical advantage themselves.
Imagine spending years and billions building something and then I show up and say “hey man that’s not fair, give me a slice of that thing”.
And before someone tells me “that’s the Sherman Act”, I don’t care. If that’s the law then it should be changed. Laws have been written (and lobbied) for all sorts of reasons and surprisingly not all of them are fair and ethical.
(I hope this illustrates how easy it is to make this exact argument about literally any monopoly.)
> "Our experience has been that entrenched monopoly power often deters new entry and chills investment in disruptive innovation."
> "independent venture-capital firms like YC often hesitate to fund startups in the “kill zone” —the area of deadened innovation around a monopolist like Google."
> "We agree with Plaintiffs' proposal that the remedy package should create pathways for startups and innovators to access Google's monopoly-derived datasets and search index."
> "The remedy order should also prevent Google from entering into exclusive agreements to access AI training data..."
> "An effective remedy package should help to leverage the current moment by ensuring that next-generation search and query-based AI tools can reach users free from exclusion, interference, or cooption."
> "the remedy package should prevent Google from anticompetitive self-preferencing, and this prohibition should apply specifically to Google's use of its monopoly search product to boost its query-based AI tools or discriminate against rivals' tools."
I think they have a good point with AI. After lagging behind initially, Google really went at it hard. Gemini is great now, and they are building a good set of tooling.
It's easy for Google to suffocate the startups in that area. They already have a massive advantage with all the data they are sitting on.
> I think they have a good point with AI. After lagging behind initially, Google really went at it hard. Gemini is great now, and they are building a good set of tooling.
> It's easy for Google to suffocate the startups in that area. They already have a massive advantage with all the data they are sitting on.
What is the solution, though? Should they not be allowed to compete in the LLM + search space? Should they handicap their models till perplexity &co. catch up? Will they be allowed to do something then? I honestly don't see what's asked of google here.
Yes, they are massive. But they're massive because they've invested billions ($, manhours, etc) into their infra and have gathered a huge baggage of data, know-how, tech and expertise in this field. But what exactly are they to do from now on?
> The remedy order should also prevent Google from entering into exclusive agreements to access AI training data…
Google, for example, bought exclusive access to Reddit's data. No one else can train on Reddit unless you have more money than Google (you don't). So one of the asks is that that sort of exclusive deal be prevented. If everyone is allowed to buy Reddit's data, and Google makes the best model, that wouldn't be a problem.
This is just a few rich venture capitalists, and the harvard trained founders they back, trying to line their own pockets. AI will democratize search regardless
Agreed. Because really what happens when we search is we run through a gauntlet of contrived websites stuffed with ads and trackers and referral links, selling someone else's stuff, splitting someone else's content across multiple page views, requiring your personal information if you want to view the content in its entirety, trying their best to be the #1 result for specific phrases that will get traffic even though shovelware sites should never be the authoritative source for someone else's product or company or content, while others pay to have their contrived websites be listed before them. None of this is necessary with AI.
Not a single person in this entire ecosystem knows the difference between democratize and liberalize. Hint: AI isn't gonna let us vote on aspects of search.
Amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief is being submitted by Y Combinator to pile on the US vs Google anti-trust case.
YC asks court to basically cripple Google in their Search, Advertising and AI endeavours:
- Open access to Google's datasets and search index.
- Restrict Google's expansion into AI through monopolistic practices.
- Limit Google exclusive agreements and pay-to-play distribution deals.
- Enforce anti-circumvention and anti-retaliation mechanisms.
IMO, from a VC standpoint, it's in YC's interest to give their privately funded startups the best chance possible to thrive. If that includes destroying solid giants of the industry, so be it.
Call me paranoid but I wonder if YC is acting as a proxy for OpenAI/Sam Altman here. To frame it differently would they behave similarly if OpenAI was a Google Subsidiary / or Google was run by Sam Altman.
To quote tomhoward's post on here talking about YC's relationship with OpenAI:
OK, it was independent but established with funding from YC Research and Jessica (among others including Sam himself and Elon) and initially operating from YC office space.
So it was always something that was closely linked to YC and his involvement with it was generally accepted as being harmonious with his role running YC, until it became for-profit.
Would YC have said the same if Google was YC funded? As much as I dislike Google I think some of the stuff they are asking are basically asking google to give up on ad or certain business.
I'm not talking about the merits of YC's brief, just the merits of the comment I'm replying to. "Why shouldn't we apply the proposed remedy for illegal behaviour on everyone" seems like a no-brainer to me.
I don't think it's unreasonable to apply the same remedy to all AI companies. Sure, it would punish Google, but if companies would actually share their data set, the internet may not be so polluted with AI crawler bots I need to block on my servers.
Just as an example: in my country, all public transit information is shared publicly between operators, so anyone can effectively build a public transit navigation app. That includes the for-profit companies that actually run the trains. Had they kept their data silo'd up, like they were not that long ago, companies would need to make expensive deals or write elaborate scrapers to provide basic route navigation services. Thanks to regulation opening up the data for this system, everyone benefits, including the transit companies themselves, as their route planners now seemlessly integrate with routes offered by unrelated third parties.
By only hitting Google with regulations like those, I think we're building a situation where it's only a matter of time before a new Google appears and ruins the market again. Google has been financing Firefox and Safari for years now because they don't want to be the only browser, because being the only browser comes with all kinds of nasty antitrust regulations. If we selectively apply mitigations like these for competitive purposes (which I very much doubt are the real reason they're being suggested anyway), we'll just end up with some equivalent like "OpenAI sponsoring xAI and Claude so OpenAI doesn't control more than 80% of market share".
Pay to play is inherently anti competitive though. All cars that speed are fined, not just the “big” ones. It’s also a fact that all companies opening up their data would make things more competitive. Moats are inherently anti competitive.
Pay to play is a really broad term (just skim the wikipedia page) and describing it as 'inherently anticompetitive' isn't saying much. There are also plenty of political, social and business arrangements that are deliberately anticompetitive by wide agreements of various sorts.
How is it more like that? This is a proposed remedy for breaking the law. Driving on the road (tll or free) is not breaking the law. There is no 'like' about it at all.
> Just like we don't fine everyone with a car for speeding
can me mistaken for "not everyone who is speeding is fined", and that's clearly not what you meant or wrote. You are right its not more like tolls because it still doesn't capture the /exponential/ difference of whats being compared (any other company vs google). Its like a car vs a jet fighter
So they want Google’s datasets and search index to be available for other companies and want to prevent Google from being a dominant player in AI based search.
I wonder why a VC firm who is quite heavily invested in AI based startups file an amicus brief like that…
Edit: before this gets downvoted into oblivion, the comment is not against antitrust enforcement. It’s about VC firms having very specific ideas about what the antitrust enforcement would look like.
You're right, YC is far from a neutral party here. But then again, I don't think any for-profit organisation spending the money on lawyers to write amicus briefs is.
They're looking for free data for their AI startups to make money off of, and with Google being in the middle of an antitrust catastrophe that may very well collapse web browser variety to two options in the next years, there's a lot of money to be made by stoking the flames.
More than 50 years behind. We shifted policy to barely enforcing anti-trust in the ‘70s, under growing Chicago school (spits) influence among elected officials, “think tanks” (lobbying groups), and courts.
That’s why everything’s so insanely consolidated now. Practically every market has a handful of massive players all of which would currently be under serious threat of break-up under the old approach to enforcement. It’s all monopoly.
> In aggregate, the average return across these YC companies is -49%, with a median return of -46%. To put this into perspective, over the same period, the S&P 500 yielded a positive return of 58%
And for the rest of the companies, they aren’t trying to compete with BigTech, they are trying to get acquired by them. Out of the literally thousands of companies that YC has invested in, only about two dozen have gone public
VC firms, not specifically YC, also tend to encourage monopolization when it comes to startups they are invested in. Have we not seen unicorns gobble up other smaller startups all the time?
Which is how AirBnB ruined tourist industries worldwide, caused rents to soar, people to get displaced from their cities of birth, and why they're touted as a "disruptor" in this very brief.
The end game for these unicorns is to become the cash hoard that they intended to compete with.
> Let’s not pretend that YC and other VCs are noble.
I'm fine with that. Let them make money at the expense of big tech.
Breaking up big tech benefits financial/venture capital, but it also benefits labor capital as well. More opportunity for more startups to succeed, more competition for engineering talent, less market distorting wage collusion.
Big tech already won. It's benefactors already reap the benefits. Break them up and a new generation of engineers can grow wealthy on the field they contribute their labor to.
Right now the proceeds of tech go to hedge funds and pension funds. It's venture capital and entrepreneurs that take risks. They're the ones that should see upside. Unfortunately, big tech monopolies put a ceiling on this.
They do see upside - by being acquired by BigTech.
So if Google wasn’t a “monopoly” you think a startup could make a better search engine? Be more popular than Android - Microsoft tried both and failed because people prefer Google products. It wasn’t for the lack of money.
And engineers are getting wealthy - by working for BigTech. Even an entry level developer at BigTech makes more than 90% of workers.
Really? Making $250K a year for a mid level developer 3 years out of school is a “low bar”?
Google has created many more millionaires than YC. The only way that you could be a millionaire by investing in YC companies at IPO would be to be a multimillionaire and lose half your money.
"Invoking the power of the state?" Good heavens, they've only filed an amicus brief. "Begging the presently authorized tenant of a precisely defined and circumscribed aliquot of the delegated power of the state" would be a more accurate way to put it. I appreciate that's not as florid, nor as floridly serviceable to anyone else's interest in pursuing this conversation. As I said before, though...
As an european, I am happy to see that the US administration may be ready to kill the one of the most powerful and unassailable company in the world and allow any other country to build a replacement.
I'm not sure people understand what the consequences of taking away Google's ad revenue is. If a large enough bank goes under, it takes out not just the bank, but huge sectors of the economy, affecting many more businesses and jobs. That's why the government bailed out the banks when they failed.
The same will happen when Google loses its ad revenue. Google is an ad company. By opening up all its trade secret data, it loses its advantage. That will make it lose its core revenue. The end result will be Google collapsing entirely within a few years. Then those component parts people are talking about "opening up" will be gone too.
Here's a small number of things that will die when Google dies. Can you imagine how the world will be affected when these go away?
In the best case, killing these will force consumers to move to Apple. You wanna talk monopoly? You haven't seen anything yet.Apple has no alternative for much of the Business-focused products, so that will take considerable time for companies to adopt alternatives. But in the meantime, the world will become pretty broken for a lot of companies that depend on these tools. This will affect many more people than just Google's direct users. The whole web will shrink, and huge swaths of the worldwide economy will disappear. Businesses closing, lost jobs, shrinking economies, lack of services.
There are plenty of parties who want to see Google lose or take part of its businesses. But if it's not done extremely carefully, there's a very large stack of dominoes that are poised to fall.
You essentially outline why it should be broken up.
I'm not convinced making the ad tech sector more competitive would prompt that outcome but, "It would disrupt mature products" isn't a compelling argument to allow the existence of a monopoly.
Google is a monopoly, they exert monopoly power and enjoy monopoly pricing.
I think the more likely outcome would be more dynamic products under smaller bannerheads.
I think the point here is that it should be done carefully and thoughtfully.
> Google is a monopoly, they exert monopoly power and enjoy monopoly pricing.
What is monopoly pricing?
Pricing you can only achieve because you are the only seller.
Google is an ad monopoly and ad business should be broken up somehow(I don't know how). Here we are breaking up every business other than ad business.
> Google is a monopoly
This argument was stronger a couple of years ago. But search is being commoditized at such a rapid pace that it's not clear that this is true anymore.
When analyst measure companies moats, they measure their strength in years/decades. How many years would you give Google Search at this point?
https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share looks pretty clear to me. If this suit turns into another nothingburger, that moat probably extends from here to the AI apocalypse.
What I don’t see on there is ChatGPT, perplexity, etc. people’s behaviors and needs are changing.
That's a fair point. If we saw a downward trend in google search usage in the last year or two, it might support your theory.
Whether AI and search are similar enough to call them competitors, at least right now, is highly debatable. I don't know about other people, but I for one have definitely not started asking chatbots questions instead of looking for informed, human-authored content.
EDIT: Note that I mean downward trend in total, not the percentages shown by statcounter. Statcounter does have a separate chatbot page though, if you're interested in that. Still doesn't answer your totally valid question of how many people are chatting instead of searching, though. Maybe Google or ChatGPT could tell us :)
> If a large enough bank goes under, it takes out not just the bank, but huge sectors of the economy, affecting many more businesses and jobs. That's why the government bailed out the banks when they failed.
That is why the banks should have been broken up into smaller banks long before we reached that point, and it is why Google should have been broken up long ago. The only way to prevent the situation you describe is to never allow any single entity to become so important to so many people.
It's like planting a tree. The best time to break up a big company is twenty years ago (before it became so big). The second-best time is now.
I strongly disagree. If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened. They are all FREE too, mind you. Everyone would still be paying for email. The enormous amount of free education on YouTube would not have been accessible to the world. The economy that we know today would be vastly different and in my opinion far worse off. So much of the economic growth came off the back of the free and ad-subsidized services Google provided for us. The reason Google is the size it is today is because it provided better services at better prices than all the competitors. If Google was broken up 20 years ago, the consumer would have paid the price.
The consumer did pay the price. Google built on empire on making consumers believe they were getting things for free while selling other businesses a direct line to its customers' wallets. It's been a very effective sleight of hand operation, to the point where even relatively savvy people on HN seem to forget that advertising pays the bills by getting its targets to spend money they would not have otherwise spent.
A world without Google would not be a world with less disposable income for regular people, but it might be a world with less disposable junk.
Even if you discount the effectiveness of ads (which seems foolish given how many people have so much staked on them working), the eye-watering prices Google charges for them get directly passed to the consumer in the form of higher prices.
Monopolies are rarely if ever good for consumers, but some monopolies are better than others at offloading the responsibility for their harm onto other businesses.
> A world without Google would not be a world with less disposable income for regular people, but it might be a world with less disposable junk.
If the argument is "more ads = more junk" then the argument is essentially "my values are more important than other peoples values". I'm also anti-consumerism, but if someone sees an ad and finds a product intriguing enough to purchase, they believe that thing might have value in their life. We might not agree, but we should not have the ability to control what other people find value in. I think this is equivalent to an argument of coercing people to conform to our values instead of convincing them to have our values.
Yes?
Economics is the distribution of finite goods amongst infinite desires.
It’s the objective way to optimize an economy given some normative set up.
That's only true up to a point. If I say "more plastic in the ocean = more junk", you can say "oh, that's just you pushing your values, if someone else would rather have a disposable plastic water bottle than a clean ocean, that's their choice". But, as with (physical) pollution, the costs of this kind of ad pollution and covert data harvesting are not transparent to consumers, so it's not possible to say they have actually given informed consent to it.
More insidiously, the proliferation of this type of "junk" crowds out other business models, meaning that increasingly people can't even "test" whether they would prefer something else. It's basically the tyranny of small decisions. It's not just a matter of "I will trade you five minutes of my eyeball time for 6 months of email", because every such transaction increase the likelihood that in the future you will find yourself with no option other than to engage in such a transaction in order to, say, pay your electric bill.
It's my claim that my viewpoint is actually in accord with a majority of people's values, in the sense that if we considered an alternate universe with less ad junk, more people in that universe would look at ours and say "Wow, I'm glad I don't live there" than vice versa. It's just that there are lots of clever boiling-frog ways to get people to act against their own values without their being fully aware of it. The mere fact that something has happened doesn't mean most people actually wanted it to happen, or are happy it happened, or even realize they would in fact be happier if it hadn't happened.
I'm not sure where you got that I'm trying to impose anything on anyone—sounds like you latched onto a side note and decided to reply to what you thought the side note was implying instead of the substance of my comment?
The argument has nothing to do with values or imposing them on others, it's simply this: These things are not and never were free. Google wants you to think they're free, but either the ads are effective at driving revenue and consumers are paying for Google's products in the form of increased consumption or Google is a parasite that lies to businesses about the efficacy of their ads and consumers are paying for Google's products in the form of the parasitic Google tax. Most likely it's a bit of both.
Either way, Google offering these products for "free" did not have a positive effect on consumer wallets and paid solutions emerging to replace Google if it actually does dissolve will not have a negative effect.
It’s possible to reject the argument that consumers seeing ads is the same as monetary payment.
I'm fine seeing ads. I wouldn't pay commercial rates for the services I use.
I find ads maybe 20% useful and for me that's a good deal.
True, these services are not and never were free, we pay for them with our data. I would say this is all fairly common knowledge, my parents who are not tech savvy understand this, and I genuinely don't believe people care enough. I know this trade off, my tech savvy friends and acquaintances know this and yet we continue to make this trade off because frankly I don't think many value their personal data at all, and I think that's why we say these services are "free" because we're not trading anything we find particularly valuable.
The problem is that you don't actually know how valuable it is without knowing how it's being used. If your ad-view statistics are used to charge you personally a higher price for a product than someone else who didn't click on the same ads, is that still okay? If they're used to raise your mortgage interest rate, is that still okay? If they're used to sell scam products to old ladies, is that still okay? If they're used to peddle political misinformation to support the election of a fascist, is that still okay? You don't know what tradeoff you're actually making. Maybe you'd think it was okay, maybe not.
Modern companies have become very, very good at making consumers believe they are getting a good deal by trading an obvious benefit for the possibility of a hidden harm. The type of data tracked by internet companies is only one form of this.
> while selling other businesses a direct line to its customers' wallets
What does this mean?
> Even if you discount the effectiveness of ads (which seems foolish given how many people have so much staked on them working), the eye-watering prices Google charges for them get directly passed to the consumer in the form of higher prices.
But then...why is anyone buying them if they don't work? How do you run this experiment without Google in to show that hand-curated ads on TV etc would've been a better, cheaper way to do ads in the long run than automated ones?
You can read up on the advertising industry easily, right?
For consumers ads are a net negative. They inflate the cost of the product and favor incumbents and monopolists to retain that position.
Ads certainly work on average and Google has positioned itself in a way that they can extract much of the created value for businesses who buy them.
There are mire dark patterns in this than you can think of. Have you ever wondered what does Amazon do on the top of the search results typing “something ebay” into google?
> If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened.
And that would be fine. To me this is like saying "if we had jailed those meth makers and dealers 20 years ago, all these meth labs today would never have existed". If these services cannot exist without a business model built around transparent, bounded transactions (e.g., no hidden data harvesting), then they should not exist. The problem is precisely that Google and others of its ilk have essentially gotten millions of people addicted to "free" services whose true costs are hidden.
> The reason Google is the size it is today is because it provided better services at better prices than all the competitors.
No, they've just been better at hiding the costs, exploiting legal loopholes, and exploiting their privileged position to raise barriers to entry for other participants.
> "If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened."
People didn't need them 20 years ago, so why do they need them now?
> "They are all FREE too, mind you."
No proprietary software is free. You either pay with your money (you do this with games, for example), or you pay with your data (and this is what you do with Google). Sometimes with both (you do this with Microsoft).
> Everyone would still be paying for email.
Free email existed before Google - Hotmail and Yahoo come to mind immediately, but there were plenty of others. You also got a free email address from your ISP - even AOL users had email.
I remember hotmail before gmail. Attachments had a 2 MB limit. I couldn't even share HQ photos using hotmail. And the whole inbox had a 25 MB capacity. I do believe there were paid alternatives with more storage.
Gmail came in with 1 GB storage and grouping emails as conversations. To me, both of these aspects were revolutionary, and other email providers shortly followed suit.
* "other email providers shortly followed suit" means that it was never out of their reach to begin with, they just needed more competition to convince them to try: which didn't have to be Google and didn't have to be ad- or surveillance-supported.
* 1GB storage in 2004 to 15GB storage 21 years later suggests that something vital has stalled. Every other storage metric (price of RAM per MB, price of hard drives per MB, price of cloud storage per MB) has improved 100 fold over the same time period[1,2].
1: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-comput... 2: https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm
Yes, and Gmail hasn't improved for decades. Why not? Because Google is a monopoly actor and does not need to compete.
Example: you can't create a new email label in the Android client. You have to log on to email in a browser and do it there. This was true when smartphones were a niche way of connecting to email, and it's still true today.
Fair point. Maybe I'm too young and have bought into the narrative that Google was the first widely available and free email. Still I think though, the plethora of their other services widely available for free (maps, drive, sites, youtube) were extraordinary for the price, at least for me.
> “their other services widely available for free”
None of their services are free. You just pay for them in other ways, even if you don’t realize it.
I think this is sort of missing the point: I’m happy to trade a bit of attention here and there for services because I’m just going to go without a lot of things if I have to pay real money for them. If we go to a model where every site charges for usage, I will start using fewer services regularly and will use each service for more things which seems a bit counterproductive in terms of monopolies.
That's what you don't get. You aren't just watching ads. You are giving them data about you, a lot of data. That data is used to heavily manipulate you. This isn't like the old days of broadcast TV where ads air and you aren't directly tracked. If you ever find a product that is free, it isn't. You are the product that is being sold.
I do get that, and I’m fine with it.
Trouble is, many of us aren't.
If you “are going to go without then”, there’s apparently no value in it. So should also not matter if it goes away.
Firefox was also extraordinary for the price. point being that Google has never been the only option, just the most popular because why not your gmail is already plugged in.
Firefox is 90% funded by Google ads.
No, Mozilla is 90% funded by Google ads. Mozilla does a ridiculous number of non-browser things. Konqueror and Navigator existed long before Google ad funding.
mapquest was free maps going back to the early days of the internet
dropbox was free synced storage several years before google drive
youtoube was an independent free ad supported video site before google bought it
there are a million and one free website hosting services
Gmail, YouTube and others are not free: you don't pay with money, but with your data and your attention.
So yeah, I think the world would be a better place if they had not been developed by Google.
Those service are certainly not free. Google doesn't offer them just to be nice: they make money from them. The costs to the consumer are hidden and indirect, but they are costs nonetheless.
Nearly all the services mentioned here were acquisitions or had strong competitors at the time of their launches. It is undeniable that Google has made these into quality products and led to their dominant position in their fields. However, Google's existence was necessary for none of these classes of products.
The services are not free. Argument invalid.
> I strongly disagree. If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened. They are all FREE too, mind you. Everyone would still be paying for email.
People weren't paying for email before gmail. It was predated by hotmail, Yahoo mail, and innumerable free online email offerings by small players. Being free wasn't even a selling point for gmail; the selling point was that they gave you a lot of storage.
Speaking of things that happened before Google, Yahoo Maps and Firefox are older than Google Maps and Chrome. And... Google Flights is a Google acquisition, not a product that they developed.
And then...
> Can you imagine how the world will be affected when these go away?
> Google Fi
> Google Fiber
> Google Pay
Yes, no one will notice.
> Google Groups
It already has gone away. Also, Usenet is something else older than Google.
> Google OAuth
Eliminating "sign in with [popular site]" would be a hugely positive change.
Nitpick - Maps and Chrome were also acquisition. Also Android, for that matter
Highly “regarded” take and you know it. Android was made in house by an acquired team. Same with the rest. Jesus this intentionally stupids
>> Google Groups > It already has gone away. Also, Usenet is something else older than Google.
and google literally acquired and then killed deja news. If anything this is yet another argument for the antitrust.
almost no one ever paid for email, there were many free providers and people got accounts from their isp
google bought youtube 19 years ago because their own attempt was doing poorly and youtube was booming right after its founding, they didn't win in the space because they were good at it, they bought success in a way that probably shouldn't have been allowed
you're acting like google invented ad supported online services
the problem is now that google doesn't have to be the best any more, they can be third best at nearly everything but still own the market share because they can afford to give things away for free which ruins competition
Buddy, Google didn't create YouTube. They bought it and ruined it.
> That is why the banks should have been broken up into smaller banks long before we reached that point
They still can be broken up. As for not being competitive on the global market - neither is regular labor compared to slave labor. And just like companies employing slave labor are (or should be) barred from the US market, so can companies that are too large. Solving such prisoner dilemmas is exactly what government is for.
I'm reading your comment as "someone should have done something a long time ago so it's not worth considering the consequences of doing it now."
That fantasy doesn't seem to take into account the specific realities of current day.
No, the comment is saying that the situation is only going to get worse from here. There will never be a better time to solve Google's anticompetitive behavior.
The consequences should be weighed and considered, but shrugging and letting Google keep on keeping on because it's too big to fail isn't a viable option.
Which one of those services are a “monopoly”?
I set the bar even lower than the other commenter. I don't care if it's a monopoly, nor even really if it's engaged in anticompetitive practices. I just care if it's big, like big enough to have outsized market power. I think that markets with large disparities in size and market power among participants are inherently anticompetitive. I think that in most market sectors --- banks, automakers, airlines, media, you name it --- there are a small number of large companies with outsize market power, and those should all be broken up.
Absolutely right. Customers benefit most if there is a working market and monopolies and other kinds of capture are restricted.
When I compare the cost cutting happening in my supermarket over pennies and then compare it to the exuberant prices at airports, festival venues and sport stadiums it is clear how much many industries are ripping customers off.
The lawsuit focuses specifically on search and search advertising. So the answer to your question is Google Search.
Note that a legal monopoly is not the same as the extreme simplification of "zero other options". "In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with unfair price raises." [1]
"In United States v. Google LLC, the federal government alleges that Google has unfairly hindered competition in the search market through anti-competitive deals with Apple as well as mobile carriers. The government alleges that, as a result of these practices, Google has accumulated control of around 88% of the domestic search engine market.
In doing so, the government alleges, Google has additionally monopolized the search advertising market at the expense of competing services. Per the government's estimation, Google has been able to accumulate control of over 70% of the search advertising market. As a result of lack of competition, Google has been able to over-charge advertisers versus what they would pay in a competitive environment." [2]
Statcounter seems to align quite closely with the government's assertion. [3] Extra creepily, it appears to be even a hair worse globally, where Bing is less used (not that I like Bing or MS either). [4] But there is no international framework I'm aware of to handle global-scale monopolies, so that's outside the scope of the suit.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2... [3] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/un... [4] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share
I didn't use that word and no one in the chain above me did either. I specifically chose "anticompetitive behavior" to emphasize that a monopoly is not required to do damage to the free market or to trigger antitrust action.
So out of the list, how has Google behaved “anti competitively” in any of these?
Maps/mail/drive/docs/flights/translate: provided for free using their dominance in ad tech to bankroll it and feeding the data back in to the ad platform. No one else can compete, and using dominance in one market to ensure dominance in others has historically been a clear trigger for antitrust.
Android: they lost a court case over this one that has lots of details if you care to look.
The rest are a weird mix of paid services that should be fine to stand up on their own or not even products at all (OAuth).
Docs and GSuite gets plenty of money from businesses abs school districts.
So those portions of the business will stand up fine on their own. The consumer-facing side is anticompetitive, though.
You can't have the Play app store on your Android phone unless you accept to install Youtube, Google Maps, Google Drive and Google Photos. This is clearly anti-competitive.
Horizontal integration is a tried and true strategy of monopolies.
Standard Oil bought or bankrupt competitive refineries, pipeline companies, regional railroads, even mom&pop gas stations & groceries often at considerable costs to ensure no part of the oil supply chain was profitable for its competitors.
No, my point is that things are bad now because we didn't do it a long time ago, and things will be worse later if we don't do it now.
This is a straw man, nobody asserted that the consequences should not be considered. Clearly, whichever way we proceed there will be considerable consequences; I doubt there is any dispute about that. Your argument seems to fail to acknowledge the dystopian consequences of NOT doing something.
Also, let's dispense with inappropriate jabs such as referring to other perspectives as "fantasy".
I disagree with every single thing you said.
I think GP was arguing for exactly what I asserted, and it's a literal fantasy to imagine doing something 20 years ago.
I'd like to point out I wasn't being dismissive, at all. Sorry you read into it that way.
You still haven't addressed the consequences of NOT doing something.
Perhaps you've never heard the expression about "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now." It's an aphorism, absolutely not literal. [1] Additionally, even if it were intended literally, which it clearly was not, saying it should have been done 20 years ago is not the same as fantasizing. It also obviously concludes that it should be done now, which is not fantasy.
I didn't say you were dismissive. If you have valid points, you should be able to make them without rewording everything into something else that you can tear down. That's called a straw man argument. "... the informal fallacy of refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction" [2]
[1] https://english.stackexchange.com/a/603725 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
> I think GP was arguing for exactly what I asserted
I was not, as I explained in another comment.
Smaller banks aren't competitive with larger (global) banks.
Smaller anything isn't competitive with larger anything, because the larger guys can always price-dump and bundle their way to full market dominance.
That's why we need anti-trust in the first place.
"That's why we need anti-trust in the first place."
Moreover, it seems to me these laws ought to strengthened to make executives/decision makers even more accountable.
The people who made Google a monopoly aren't stupid and knew full well what they were doing. They should not be able to hide behind Google's corporate structure and also should be penalized for their bad behavior.
Yes, this is one of the big changes that need to be made to really reform things. Companies act based on decisions made by individuals. Those individuals should be held accountable if the company's actions are found to be harmful. There should be lots of CEOs and board members of companies in oil, healthcare, housing, retail (as well as tech) who should be facing fines in the hundreds of millions (if not the billions) on their personal assets.
Customers frequently prefer cheap bundles. The right time for an antitrust decision is often when the company is large and stops behaving competitively.
This list is very telling. Instead of a healthy marketplace of companies competing to sell their software and services, we end up with one monopolist who gives away mediocre products and in return taxes everything you buy (in the form of ad spending), and then annoys you with the same ads. How is this a desirable outcome?
There is nothing mediocre about the search engine, gmail, maps, android, chrome etc.. etc. Do they all have room for for improvement? Probably. But they are simply incredibly, breathtakingly good products. Search, maybe has gotten worse in recent years, but it's still amazing.
Maps and Satelleite view are astounding, especially when you consider that they are free.
>How is this a desirable outcome?
The list speaks for itself. There are many valid complaints against google, but this is not one of them.
> There is nothing mediocre about the search engine, gmail, maps, android, chrome etc.. etc.
Search Engine: Google is fantastic with its index. Very poor with the results it returns. Sampling of the problems:
- There's a reason people add site:reddit.com - the default results are often very low quality. Sure, Google has the good quality stuff indexed, but over the last 5 years they've been declining like crazy in actually showing you what you need.
- When I search for something on mobile, I get fairly unstructured results. First, an AI blurb. Then the first batch of results are videos. Then some web sites. Then a break with "People also ask...". Then more web sites. Then image results.
99% of the time I just want the web sites. Before, if there were video/image results, they'd be on the top and I'd conveniently scroll past them to get to the meat. I can't do that any more. Google keeps breaking the flow by adding more and more sections. When I hit "More search results", the problem continues.
Thank God for Kagi.
> gmail
Lots of people don't use it (including me). Other than people losing their mail, I'm not sure what is lost if this goes away. Email providers are aplenty. What am I missing by not using Gmail?
> maps
I'll grant you this one.
> android
It's nice to have an alternative to Apple, but that's the only good thing about it. Using Android reminds me of the old Windows. Very unstable. Full of spyware/bloatware.
> chrome
The only thing Chrome was better at than Firefox was stability - for a brief period in its history. Firefox is just better. If a site works on Chrome and not Firefox, that's not because Firefox is inferior.
Calling Chrome an "incredibly, breathtakingly good product" is just insane. It's merely an OK browser.
> It's nice to have an alternative to Apple, but that's the only good thing about it. Using Android reminds me of the old Windows. Very unstable. Full of spyware/bloatware.
Being free to run whatever code we want as users (F-droid is a treasure). Plus actually having a "disable animations completely" button to remove unneeded slowness.
It's also amazing how awesome Android can be. When you compare GrapheneOS / CalyxOS you go from a slow, bloated phone that lasts maybe a day - to a phone you have complete control of that is performant and lasts days on a charge. The contrast is stark and most people have no clue those options exist.
"If a site works on Chrome and not Firefox, that's not because Firefox is inferior."
Right, we've been through all that stuff with Internet Explorer—sites often preferred it over others even though its HTML extensions weren't standard W3C. Chrome is better but it's still favored for the same reasons.
Having used alternatives to a few of their products… I’ll accept part of that list.
Gmail is well below mediocre, it’s so sluggish and unresponsive even on fast hardware. Compare with fastmail; it’s hard to go back.
The search engine consistently gives me pages of blog spam before a useful result. Eg Kagi is dramatically more useful despite having a tiny fraction of the resources to work with.
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I suggest you explore alternatives and their usability compared to whatever Google offers. For example Google Docs word processing part is astonishingly bad. Gmail really sucks for when you have a lot of e-mail and also has a high chance of locking you out at some point, which can be really bad,if you relied on it too much. YouTube? Ahaaahhaaha! Rarely used anything that is so annoying to use and so extremely bloated and buggy. They are the prime example btw. for the back button no longer working.
People at Google work on many things, but they also build lots of shit.
Products like engine, gmail, maps, and youtube were game-changers when first released. But that was a long time ago and right now plenty of competitors would step in and do a decent copycat job.
> But they are simply incredibly, breathtakingly good products.
I literally laughed out loud at this. There is nothing further from the truth when you look at what else is out there. I feel like a lot of these comments are shilling for Google they're so biased.
Search is not amazing. Search is littered with garbage. Try out Kagi or even DDG for a day, but let's not pretend search hasn't been a dumpster fire for years now.
DDG is definitely not better IME, and also relies heavily on Bing. I still use it as my default, it's good enough, but I mostly default to it to avoid the Google captcha hell.
Here's a prior comment of mine explaining one poor search scenario: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43348712
> There is nothing mediocre about the search engine
I agree. The search index is great, the presentation is shitty.
As for maps: The most prominent features on it are ads. The rest is low contrast. For navigation the map is really bad. The satellite view is great.
Yeah not mediocre: It's great tech enshittified.
The iPod has less space than a Nomad. Lame.
Because the vast majority of people don't want to and have zero intention pf paying separately for email, maps, navigation, browser, etc.
In fact, that's how things used to be before Google and their ilk used ads to make an ecosystem, and their ecosystem was better and free at the point of use than what came before
The vast majority of people are paying separately for all kinds of stuff. I don't see a reason why software and digital services have to be different. In the early days, payment was difficult, but this has been long solved. I am convinced that the quality would improve dramatically if there was some actual competition.
Also most people would probably prefer not to pay for the ad fees that google extorts from pretty much any company.
> I am convinced that the quality would improve dramatically if there was some actual competition.
You can pay for Google One right now, roughly exchanging cash for storage capacity on the otherwise free services. I see no viable competition for that model. Protonmail is comparatively expensive.
I really don't want the Internet to turn into the mess that is video streaming where every independent licensing agency tries to capture an audience for $15/month.
Another great example is Let's Encrypt. It's a public good to provide quality TLS certificates and the marginal cost is $0 with some sponsorship. I'd far rather other core Internet services like e-mail and basic file sharing are sponsored.
Everyone would be subscribed to YT premium, if people were ok with paying for ad-free experience.
Honestly, I feel like people are subconsciously aware that Google is trying to bludgeon them into getting YouTube premium, and they're simply sticking it to Google rather than giving in. Google's gone through:
- one skippable 5s ad
- two skippable 5s ads
- one unskippable 5s and one skippable 15s ads
- aforementioned or two 15s ads, one skippable
- two 15s unskippable ads
- removed the prerenderer 'skip' button to make it more difficult to immediately skip
- removed the ad amount indicator and precise length indicator (now just a bar) to psychologically drive people into sunk cost feelings
God knows what they're cooking up next.
And for large swathes of content, there is no alternative to YouTube.
Those changes seem more like boiling the frog because the content they're looking for is only available on YT.
I'm a firm believer in the issue being one of pricing, not that the consumer is willing to pay nothing at all.
I have this view because we've already seen how users flocked to iTunes, then Spotify/Apple Music and Netflix/other streaming services when the pricing was right. We are also now watching as people depart streaming services and return to direct sales and P2P file-sharing due to incrementally higher prices.
To me that's a sure indicator of price being the problem, not an insatiable appetite for zero cost.
The math largely makes sense too. Particularly in music if you're the type that has a taste for a genre of music, rather than just wanting to listen to the top 40.
I agree price is the issue. I'm a YouTube premium subscriber myself since I use it so much, but every friend I've talked to about it bar one has been put off by the price. Lowering the price and possibly splitting YouTube Music into its own subscription would make a big difference - I have no interest in YouTube music as I already have another music streaming subscription I'm not interested in giving up.
Everytime someone blocks an ad, someone else has to watch it.
It's crazy to me how entitled people are and how completely blind they are to how the ad supported model works.
Then these same people complain that youtube has no competitors. Yeah, no shit, who in their right mind would invest in a customer base like youtubes? Oh, that's right, Vid.me, and they went bankrupt in a year. Wonder why...
Ads spread malware that threatens my financial security.
Remove active content from online advertising and I'll disable my ad blocker.
> The vast majority of people are paying separately for all kinds of stuff.
And a lot of them already suffer from subscription fatigue.
With the exception of fi, If you think any of those services are something people want to pay yet another saas subscription for, you’ve been hitting your own supply too much.
But if Google weren't a monopoly, phone manufacturers could choose to bundle different collections of apps made by different people on to their hardware, rather than having to get it all from Google. This would also mean that phone users could be given a genuine choice about their privacy, rather than have dark patterns to force them to give up most of it, because it's the Android business model.
We need a better word than "duopoly" to describe what Apple and Google are. They're just as bad as a monopoly - and they're impossible to compete with.
Both Apple and Google need to be disrupted here. We should be able to see lots of healthy verticals for every single one of these product categories. They shouldn't accrue to two players and be impossible to dislodge.
I propose the word "Googolith" to describe {Google, Apple, Amazon}, though it's not a great attempt. We do need some kind of word or language to describe these anti-competitive titans that are impossible to innovate against. The word "monopoly" gets shut down, but the control they wield may as well be monopolistic. There's no choice and there's no competing. They're practically nation states.
Google works because of it's ad network and tracking. Everything Google does is a money furnace without a centralized ad network.
People may celebrate the break-up of google, but it will be short lived when they find that now everything they do on the internet that they used to do through google costs a monthly sub. Or is ad supported with zero tolerance for ad-blocking.
The reason competing with google is impossible is because people are deathly allergic to paying for things that they think are free. Vid.me sucked all the air out of the room for a few months in 2017 and was pulling tons of yotubers over. Then it went bankrupt because "People don't like subscriptions, people don't like ads."
I've been using "quasi-monopoly".
Chaebol?
Paretarchy?
What are you talking about, there are competitors for all these products, they simply just aren't as good...
> as good
This is a point that will be recurring and merits more thought IMHO.
Google services are mostly better because they crushed competition. Cutting their advantage will also mean better alternatives (money will flow to competitors instead of being sucked by Google).
As an analogy, it's like athlete doping: they sure were faster than the other athletes, but that's part of the issue.
Exactly. People keep saying "the alternatives aren't as good" as though markets aren't filled with feedback loops and the other products being worse somehow proves that Google is winning on fair terms. Google's products being better doesn't prove the system is fair, all it proves is that Google is better at navigating the current system, which is hardly surprising given that they have largely been able to shape it for themselves.
The fundamental issue is that people don't want to pay money for things.
Google tapped into that by creating an ad economy, which since it's inception also comes with a payment optional feature (ad-blocking).
People may hate google, but by god do they ever love the internet google created.
Yes, that's why anti-dumping laws were put into place, except it's complicated to expand to online markets.
I actually wonder how much people actually like the current web. People bitching about popups and ads is enough of a staple of our culture.
People hate the current web the way a teenager hates the Blue 2023 F-150 his parents got him because a Black 2025 Dodge Ram is what he wanted.
Google services are not a gift. They are not actually free. Google is not a charity nor is it a non-profit. I want people in this discussion to stop arguing as if Google isn't making money on all these services.
If the parents were slowly siphoning off enough of the teen's money through a convoluted set of channels such that the teenager indirectly paid for the truck anyway and the parents ended up effectively taking a share of the money, that would be definitely worth hating.
If his parents dipped into the funds their grand-parent left to release at his 18th birthday, just to buy him the F150, he sure should be pissed about not getting what he actually wanted.
What Google "gives" isn't popping from nowhere, the billions they use to fund it still came from us, just in indirect ways.
I pay for cloud storage, not from Google. I'm happy to pay for this, and I use enough storage there I would be paying Google if I used their storage. Almost every time I go into the Photos all on my phone, there's a dark pattern which tries to get me to turn on backups. If I do this, all my personal photos will be uploaded to Google's servers. Then the UI will change so that I'm never presented with an explicit choice of turning this off, ever again, and will have to search for how to do it. I don't love the internet Google created.
Not just bad. There isn't a single piece of Apple software that is (1) free and (2) people choose to use on iOS, only use because the user is forced to. Photos? Forced, sucks. iMessage? Forced, sucks. Apple Mail, Calendar, Contacts? Huge pieces of shit. The App Store, the very gateway into competition, is the shittiest of all, and not just because the 30% fee, but because its discovery is maybe the worst ever made by any catalog-style front end in the world.
At least they opened up the password completion APIs.
Yeah, I really don't understand how MS, Google and AT&T get this treatment but not Apple..
Mostly because they don't have 90+% market share in anything.
People literally buy phones from Apple so they can have a blue bubble in iMessage. Movies carry out social campaigns about how they were “filmed” on iPhone. And there’s no shortage of alternatives on those devices, from WhatsApp to Signal.
Apple user software is legitimately awful in a systematic way. Although I like the Chess app. :)
Google, interestingly, is much better.
I don't know what to say. It's clear that the Internet Ecosystem has a megafauna of Google and taking it out would be an ecosystem collapse, but the other Megafauna are... worse.
It’s pretty myopic to say that people don’t choose to use Apple software. Not only do many people choose to use the Apple software that comes with their devices, they buy those devices for it.
The list is mostly BS. Android doesn’t even have a majority market share in any of those services except for Search related services.
And even if Gmail does have a majority of the market, there are plenty of other email providers.
I agree. I'm so sick of maps. I type something in and there it is, can't they do any better than that? Sure they have directions to the place in multiple modalities, and photos of it, and reviews, but is that it? Is that really the best that's available?
Google drive is likewise awful. I upload something to it and there it is. I come back 10 years later and it's still there. Why doesn't it do more? Why can't it make my file better over time? Why can't they take ideas from dropbox, or box, or onedrive. Stupid monopoly forcing us all into one choice.
And as for Google Fiber, well there are so many ISPs offering gigabit plans now, what is Fiber going to offer to do better? It's like you said we need a healthy marketplace with competing companies, not just the one monopolist with shitty gigabit ethernet service.
And don't even get me started on gmail!
My apologies but I can't work out if your Google Drive example is some deep satire that's going over my head.
What functionality are you expecting?
I think it's sarcasm, rather than the frustration of a utopianist, but it's unreasonably hard to tell.
I know this is satire but Maps is increasingly worse. More ads. Less useful POIs. They actually stood still long enough for Apple Maps to catch up.
Yes, satire aside there's room for improvement in these services. Maps frequently has incorrect business hours.
This is a very ungrateful and childish perspective. It assumes that these things exist out of thin air rather than things google has created. Products don’t just appear, they’re built. Nothing is stopping someone from usurping google. Ever hear of oracle, intel, xerox, blackberry or Microsoft?
Almost all the things in this list were acquired from someone else that built them, rebranded, and then given away for free, taking much of the money out of the market that allowed that product to be built. Without Google giving away the one winner they chose to acquire, you'd have options again.
I built my free web stats service in 2004 because I couldn't afford an Urchin license. Google bought Urchin Live and rebranded it as Google Analytics, and gave it away for free. My service barely pays for itself 20+ years later, but I'm still here and would have an offering for that market on day one that Google Analytics shut down. So would dozens of others.
Google maps Gmail Chrome Waymo
Were all built within google. For most people (who do not sell software on the internet) we get a great trade from the current state of things!
Gmail is the only product you listed that Google started itself.
Google Maps was built on the acquisitions of Where 2 Technologies, Keyhole and ZipDash.
Chrome is based on WebKit, built at Apple.
Waymo's hardware came from the acquisition of 510 Systems, and the software came from the acquihiring of the team that developed Stanford's self-driving cars for the 2005 and 2007 DARPA challenges, who brought their code with them.
> Almost all the things in this list were acquired from someone else that built them, rebranded, and then given away for free
Nearly everything that was acquired was a) already free, and b) built (and given away for free) in hopes that someone like Google would acquire them.
If you look at most startups, their exit strategy is acquisition. Some would live to IPO, but that is a much tougher road.
It could be argued that IPO is a less likely exit strategy because of Google’s and others’ position, but I think it’s disingenuous to imply that startups (that are already giving away their products for free) are getting acquired as a last resort.
Most CEOs plan and hope for it.
> If you look at most startups, their exit strategy is acquisition
And that is a part of the problem.
> Most CEOs plan and hope for it
I don’t think so, at least, it’s not their main motivation.
For most, I imagine the VC fueled free period is to lock up customers and increase you have their sensitive data, you start making moves so you can start to charge them, usually a fairly hefty sum. It’s a classic lock in strategy.
It's a more sophisticated perspective than you're giving it credit for.
They're not disputing that google has provided all these services, they're arguing that google's ability to subsidize them prevents market solutions for these same problems being produced.
The internet is, in this view, somewhat of a planned economy with Google as the central planning committee. You get google's maps and google's docs and google's search, rather than a maps marketplace, a docs marketplace, and a search marketplace.
Google is able to enforce this on the market because it holds a unique position where it can extract a significant amount of the value generated in the internet economy in 'ad taxes'.
Ungrateful it seems lol. Most of these products are acquisitions.
It's important to try and de-googleify your life if only so you don't get caught up in making such an exaggerated sky-is-falling point. All of these could literally vanish tomorrow and the world would go on, they all have their alternatives, some of them arguably superior. For some, the near term pain would be greater than for others -- even just on my personal level I'd be caught with my pants down for email, because while I have over the years moved a lot of email addresses to something at my own domain name, I haven't done it for all of them, and I'd still need to update the forwarding to not-google. Not a huge deal though. A big one you didn't even list that's more important than several you did combined is Youtube, but again there are alternatives.
The world would change, but I think quite a bit less than you seem to think. To put it another way, the world was undeniably changed by Google, but the change has been done, and they're no longer necessary to keep the biggest changes from reverting. (I'd be more worried about SBCL development if google flights' backend couldn't find a new home -- the product itself has tons of competition + just going directly to airlines.)
In actual reality, of course, these things don't disappear overnight, making the pain of switching much, much less for businesses and individuals heavily dependent on some of these things. Even if "google collapsing within a few years" was likely (they have something like a third or more of annual operating expenses saved as cash on hand), a few years is more than enough time. If a business can migrate off of Salesforce or SAP (it can be expensive and time consuming but you can do it!), it can migrate off these.
Yeah. It’s also hard to overstate how many incredible engineers work at Google. Many - perhaps most of them are doing very low value work of adding marginal features nobody cares about to mature products. And in many cases doing so at a glacial pace. Every year thousands of brilliant engineers add ~1m lines of code to Google chrome. And almost nobody notices or cares. As browsers get faster, companies respond by adding more bloat to their websites.
If Google suddenly went out of business and 5% of xooglers started companies, we would see a gigantic burst of innovation in computing.
I am sure there are many capable people working at Google, but the exaggerating of their skill level needs to stop. Some leet coder doesn't necessarily deliver better designed systems than any another engineer. And with that, the cult of believing in whiteboard coding interviews also needs to go away.
I’ve worked there. They certainly aren’t all geniuses. But there are a huge number of brilliant engineers there - many of whom spend their lives schleping protobufs around for a fat paycheck.
It’s not the whiteboard interviews that makes that possible. It’s the prestige (especially from a few years ago), job security and salary. And the opportunity to work with other smart people. Google has an excellent talent pool.
Breaking up Google would likely result in many great new businesses being built if that talent pool was shoved out of their comfort zones.
I've had the lucky position to be able to think positively about a lot of the tech and gaming layoffs in the last couple years for pretty much this reason -- that we'll eventually look back on them as unleashing a lot of previously locked up potential. On the other hand there are people at google and elsewhere who get paid to do important maintenance work, not requiring much innovative thinking, but if they leave/are laid off that work just stops happening, and something valuable is lost. On the other other hand, if AI keeps getting better at a similar pace as the last 5 years, none of this will matter on global economy-doubling timelines of ~15 years.
Sycophant much? Incredible, Brilliant… Please.
You think my comment is sycophantic? If so, only on the surface. Another way to read what I wrote is that google has robbed the world of many smart people. Instead of contributing meaningfully, these people - trapped through money and inertia - spend their days doing useless work for an ad company. What a pity.
That is true of all of capitalism, that is true of 2 billion people on this wonderful planet that live on scraps. They didn't decide to be born in their condition any more than we ours.
One of the most detestable parts of Google are all the people with a smarmy self entitled sense of elitism. I had someone get off of a call, and they showed utter contempt for the customer, because in their words, "if they were smart enough they would work here, and every one wants to work here, therefor they are dumb and I shouldn't have to deal with stupid people" What a fucker.
Let them die. The world will be a better place.
Some of the services you mentioned are already very irrelevant:
* Fitbit -- no explanation necessary
* Google translate -- I don't know about if people use their APIs, but for me personally, I have not used translate for a few years. ChatGPT has been my go-to.
* Google Pay -- it has a smaller market share than Samsung Pay.
Then next tiers of services -- they are doing ok but there are plenty of competitors in the field:
* Gmail, Drive, Docs, Groups, Forms, Cloud, Flights, Fi
I even use some of them, but I really don't care if they go away.
Life gets a bit more difficult if Maps, Chrome and Android are gone all of a sudden. Maybe we'll be back to using Garmin. Heck, I love the idea that everybody uses Nokia, Bing or Garmin for navigation, and we actually have a decent website -- like the Yelp or Zagar in the old days -- for restaurant reviews. I still see "#1 Rated Zagat" stickers from near two decades ago at many restaurants.
Anyway, personally, for the vast majority of the things listed here, I don't see them going away being a bad thing that would even affect as many people as you think.
> Google translate -- I don't know about if people use their APIs, but for me personally, I have not used translate for a few years. ChatGPT has been my go-to.
Hard to agree on this one.
Most of the time when I’m the country side of Hungary and some Nordic countries Google Translator it’s essential for communication of foreigners that lives I those places. I can tell several anecdotes of international people being able to communicate with their local in-laws via Google Translator conversational feature; or even cases of people being able to read after a mechanical translation.
YouTube, Gmail and Docs are pretty good. All the alternatives to them really suck...
YouTube spent years showing children damaging content through an algo until the parental boycott became so bad that they had to do something, worried that a generation was going to grow up not addicted to their content.
YouTube sucks in terms of usability. It only survives, because it is at no cost except for ads viewing and not even that, when using uBlock Origin properly and because of most of the content being there. Other than that is has become so enshittified, it is one of the worst sites I visit.
Gmail and Docs are children's toys for people, who don't know much about e-mail and proper documents. Those are the majority of people on the Internet these days though, so Gmail and Docs are going nowhere any time soon.
No, youtube survives because it’s the only platform with a reasonable split between youtube itself and it’s creators. It was obvious long ago that people will go where the content is, usability issues be damned.
> proper documents
If by that you are talking about anything that doesn't have built-in version control and simultaneous editing, good riddance to it and the v4-edited-copy-FINAL-edited it rode in on. But there are a few actual competitors to Google Docs that have built-in versioning and simultaneous editing.
When I worked in the travel tech industry several years ago, it was basically unfair to compete against Google Flights. We just accepted they didn't have to pay for marketing and had infinite compute to work with, and had to differentiate in other ways. They could operate the business at a loss and not really care because it was still good for Google as a whole to have user's travel data. They built a great product but didn't have to play by the rules everyone else had to follow.
It's also stopped being great.
Are there better alternatives? I booked flights from Australia to Europe the other day through google flight search. I would never have found the flights I ended up booking via the airline websites directly.
Too big to fail means too big to exist. Google et. al should never have been allowed to get this large, same as those banks.
Better late than never.
> Too big to fail means too big to exist. Google et. al should never have been allowed to get this large
I agree
But placing limits on private property accumulation is a controversial idea
But it is an idea who's time must come, or we face a dreadful future of robber barrons and peons
> 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.
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.
I believe they had an analytics offering before they purchased Urchin. Same for DoubleClick.
This isn't something that has anything to do with size or property. Just 1) eliminate advertising, and 2) actually enforce the most basic of antitrust, namely using one product to subsidize another operating at a loss that prevents competition.
You don't even need a hard limit for that. Just have a progressive property tax in place, and start applying it to intellectual property as well.
If this is the price we'll pay to break up a monopoly, then be it. Maybe we don't need these services, and maybe people will finally learn to not be dependent on a single provider for everything they have on the Internet.
It's not clear to me why you believe that an antitrust ruling against Google would make them bankrupt. At worst they will lay off workers. But a post-antitrust google is still a viable company
somehow, after the ATT, Microsoft, Standard Oil, or American Tobacco antitrust suits, the constituent parts and country soldiered on
Yeah, especially Tobacco. I mean, there hasn't been an industry gutted that hard ever. They were attacked from all sides. They can't even fucking advertise anymore, and when they can, they have to tell you "hey don't buy this it kills you". And then, cherry on top, when consumers do buy this product, they're allowed to use it in like < 1% of spaces.
And yet, somehow, Tobacco is still profitable.
This is very North America-centric. Smoking is still rampant in many countries, including parts of Europe. It was actually a bit of a culture shock for me.
Oh yes I'm aware, I have family in Eastern Europe and yeah... it's different. When I went in the 2010s you could still smoke in most restaurants. I actually have a strange place for that kind of environment. It's charming, it's endearing, in a way. But it probably sucks for public health.
For the sake of argument, let's grant the implication that Google is in danger of going out of business. Even so, if our economy is at the point where one company going out of business would cripple it, it's almost certainly worth the pain of decoupling from that company. It would hurt, but we would get through it, and it would be better in the long run. On the other hand, if we just threw up our hands and said "do whatever you want, Google, you're too important for us to tell you what to do" then we're pretty much at their mercy. I can't imagine things getting better or fixing themselves in that situation.
A lot of Google's products could be completely sustainable businesses on their own, but of course they couldn't offer them for free for personal use as they do now. Plenty of companies pay for Google Workspace, so that surely wouldn't die. Android could be spun out and returned to a more open development model, with phone manufacturers contributing money and developer time to the project instead of mostly freeloading from Gooogle. Google Cloud is supposedly profitable, (although I don't get why anyone would want to pay for that...).
Really the only things that I'd worry about are Google Search, Maps and Gmail, as they don't seem like they would work if they weren't free to use and I don't see a way to monetize them. It might be interesting to also put Google Maps under the same umbrella as Android, so it could be jointly owned by the phone manufacturers who ultimately benefit from its existence. Gmail could surely survive for quite a few years by optimizing their costs like crazy and burning Workspace profits.
The rest of the things you listed have existing competition, so it could probably survive and if not, alternatives exist.
Isn't it depressing that a single private company wield such influence in society that Stockholm syndrome develops? I don't know about you, but accepting this is true is way worse than loosing gapps
Because Google has monopoly power, they can charge whatever they want for ads, and every company in the economy has to pay it. So there’s a pretty good argument the economy is being held back by a “Google tax”.
Most of the services you listed above are hardly best in class, and giving them away for free is basically scraps off of the table. The ones which are best in class like Waymo have a good shot at being commercially successful on their own.
They won't be killed, they'll be forced to stand up as their own businesses, like the Baby Bells after Ma Bell broke up, or the split of Standard Oil.
I can see most of these being reasonable standalone businesses. And if they can't be they'll die and get replaced by one that is better.
The problem is that it is ingrained in people that these services are free, and the only way they are free is by having them feed a centralized ad network.
It's about time that people get used to the idea that you have to pay for some of these things.
In aggregate it won't even hurt to transition to that: consumers are, in aggregate, already paying for these things in the form of increased spending on unrelated products they were sold by the ads and increased prices on goods (because their suppliers pay Google monopolistic prices for ads).
There is no reason that the ad network needs to be centralized. Thats more convenient, but not required.
"The whole web will shrink, and huge swaths of the worldwide economy will disappear."
Even if that were to be true and comes to pass then who is to blame? Clearly both Google and Government and its regulators who let Google get out of hand and allowed it to violate monopoly laws for so long when it's been obvious for years.
OK, what's to be done? You can't allow the law to continue to be violated especially now that everybody knows that it has been—if you do then you are giving all and sundry carte blanche to ignore laws as they see fit. That's a recipe for the break down of law and order.
If the Government legislates to give Google exemptions or some form of special privilege then it's not only further entrenching Google's monopoly but also further weakening democracy by favoring the rich and powerful (they'd be further privileged).
Now let's assume some compromise or whitewashing where Google is restructured or bits sold off without strong financial sanctions/fines etc.—ones that actually hurt shareholders' stocks significantly then no one will be happy. Google won't be happy because its already optimized its business structure for maximum income and a restructure would reduce revenues, and those who've been hurt would claim it was too little too late and they'd cry foul.
Yes, government has to take much of the blame but so do shareholders and Google executives. If little is done and there are no penalties that actually hurt the pocket of the perpetrators to a significant extent then it'll be back business as usual in short order. We need strong penalties to set an example to the world that violating the law won't be tolerated.
I'm not a Google shareholder but if I were I'd be selling my shares just in case.
Now with that in mind give me your solutions.
"The whole web will shrink, and huge swaths of the worldwide economy will disappear."
Even if that were to be true and comes to pass then who is to blame? Clearly both Google and Government and its regulators who let Google get out of hand and allowed it to violate monopoly laws for so long when it's been obvious for years.
OK, what's to be done? You can't allow the law to continue to be violated especially now that everybody knows that it has been—if you do then you are giving all and sundry carte blanche to ignore laws as they see fit. That's a recipe for the break down of law and order.
If the Government legislates to give Google exemptions or some form of special privilege then it's not only further entrenching Google's monopoly but also further weakening democracy by favoring the rich and powerful (they'd be further privileged).
Now let's assume some compromise or whitewashing where Google is restructured or bits sold off without strong financial sanctions/fines etc.—ones that actually hurt shareholders' stocks significantly then no one will be happy. Google won't be happy because its already optimized its business for maximum income and a restructure of any significant size would reduce revenues, and those who've been hurt by Google's monopoly would claim it was too little too late and they'd cry foul.
Yes, Government has to take much of the blame but so do shareholders and Google executives. If little is done and there are no penalties that actually hurt the pockets of the perpetrators to a significant extent then it'll be back business as usual in short order. We need strong penalties to set an example to the world that violating the law won't be tolerated. Perhaps the dominoes have to fall to right things.
I'm not a Google shareholder but if I were I'd be selling my shares just in case.
Now with that in mind give me your solutions.
So Google is "to big to fail" - that's what you are really saying.
The lesson that we should have learned from 2008 is that businesses should never be allowed to reach that kind of size. Google should have been prohibited from the M&A that created such a behemoth.
I think comparing to banks is silly. Banks don't have competitive advantages like Google has. When banks fail it is not because they lost a competitive advantage (other than the competitive advantage of competent management). The catastrophe associated with a major bank collapse has to do with the specific function of banks in the financial system, not just: oh where are all their customers going to go?
Exactly. Even if Google search shut down tomorrow the economy would go on. It’s competitors are probably worse but it wouldn’t cause a run on the banks, which is a specific financial emergency.
I was going to write words to that effect also. I agree but feel I don't have a strong enough argument. I think if Google winked out of existence entirely tomorrow, the world would continue as normal except for the Googler job losses obviously.
They're too big to fail argument of Obama, is now they're too big to break up.
No, they are not, by historical standard. When the Standard Oil Trust was broken up in 1911, it controlled nearly 80% of gasoline market in the US and kept prices too low, so no one could enter the market.
Exxon, Mobile, Chevron, Texaco, Amoco, Gulf oil, and 30 other oil companies emerged. Today only 4 are still around, because anti-trust enforcement has been guted by both parties since WWII. Google babies will merge and raise, yet again.
Just to pick one of these: google Flights sucks. It had a better competitor - Hipmunk - which went under because Google ate their lunch by integrating flights search into the main search product. Don't know how many of these Google products have similar stories, but it's probably a non zero numbers.
What we're getting, in many of these cases, is an inferior product that drove out better competitors through Google search integration.
I remember Hipmunk, it was horrible! Google flights is by far the best flight search platform, competition aren't even close. 10x faster search of flights and the calendar view for prices is incredible!
I consider Google Maps to be the best application ever created. Products like Google Mail, Calendar, Search, Chrome, Android are absolutely best in class. To call them inferior is laughable.
I don’t buy it. I suspect that a reason Google Cloud remains a laggard in market share is that Google’s core business, as an advertiser that feeds off user data, gives parts of the available market the heebie jeebies.
The monopoly is possibly self-defeating at this point. Maybe the reason for the Google graveyard is that too big to fail has somehow turned into too big to succeed.
You mean the internet would return back to how it was in the 00's? I don't see how that's bad...
I 100% admit everything above has value and has decreased friction for interconecting people and internet services but the idea is that should one corporation control everything listed there?
And IMO no. Microsoft had the same for them in the 90's and while I can see a rush into Microsoft and Apple Ecosystems, it will also give a window for new companies, new people to create products to fill in the gaps created by google being forced to spin off it's ecosystem.
They'd have to adapt their business models, the likelihood of the services disappearing are minimal because they each have multiple revenue streams beyond just collecting user data. Indeed we know it's possible because much of the list are me-too products from those which have different business models.
Also we don't need a hypothetic situation: Google already kill off a fair chunk of their tools and services, and alternatives rapidly come to fill their place.
Google's position largely exists because loss leaders tied against leveraging network effects – and as others have noted, many of their services are piss poor.
Google's loss won't be Apple's benefit in any meaningful way, the masses are with Google because it's free, and that's precisely what Apple isn't, and there isn't a great overlap in their services.
As a counterpoint I don't think the government's case is the right approach, they should be establishing the rules of the game at the legislative level, everyone needs to be affected by the potential changes, Google didn't form in a vacuum.
i’ve been using google products for over twenty years and they touch almost all aspects of my life and communications. in the past couple of years I’ve been working to de-couple by going to apple and local vs cloud data. it’s an extremely lengthy and error prone process. apple is workable but not great.
I don't have the right answer for this as in how to handle this - but this is needed.
Today I hear often people asking me "What's your Gmail" and that is fucking dangerous!
Some of us still remembers pre-Google internet. Imagine how we were able to send emails and navigate on the streets. The image you are painting here is a classic false dichotomy. If Google goes under people won’t be moving to Apple, they are going to move to Fastmail, Yandex Maps, and so on. We might even see a new mobile platform that does not collect every single bit of your life.
Google/Alphabet made a critical mistake. When the Alphabet parent company was founded, Google search and AD should have been divested. All those product lines you mentioned should have been part of separate corporations where at most Google is a minority owner in a joint venture. Google will still rip benefits including profits and some exclusivity but it won't stifle competition by directing those product to align with what benefits its AD revenue stream.
DOJ is in the wrong when trying to open up search and ad, it should simply split Google up in the way I mentioned earlier. Search and advertising should be their own completely independent company. Mostly everyone wins that way: Competitors, the public , shareholders (one product line won't sink the rest, no "all your eggs in one basket" situation) and even majority shareholders.
I genuinely do not use a single service on your list and my life is absolutely indistinguishable from that of one who does. I’m digitally literate and normally functional. Do people really believe these services are irreplaceable let alone the best of the best? That’s the trap…
I have actively moved away from all of these services you listed years ago. The only one that is truly impactful is Gmail, again because of the monopoly they have in mail. But I don't understand your argument. There are options and you're worried about Apple, yet admit they don't have competing products in many of those segments.
Google is exactly the monopoly we need less of. These arguments for it are uninformed. You don't need any of these products. In fact, when Google is out of the way it opens the door for new and better options. Google's products aren't great. They're good enough. And they're only good enough to keep users in the platform to continue to siphon off user data and serve as a conduit for their true business: ads.
> In the best case, killing these will force consumers to move to Apple.
I think there are better options than you suggest.
The whole doc suite can be had from Microsoft. Maybe folks need to ten bucks a month for something that used to be free, but it’s not like we fundamentally lose capabilities.
This is a completely different order of magnitude than banks going under, where people were impacted to the tune of thousands or millions of dollars when they lost their homes.
You're only thinking of consumers. That's still not small potatoes - Google Workspace has 3 billion active users every month (37% of the planet). Office365 has 270 million.
But on the business side, there are 6 million businesses that use Google Workspace to manage their company - their drives, documents, email, distribution lists, SSO, etc. They can't just flip a switch and migrate their entire company to another provider. It would take months to years for most companies to fully migrate. And that's for the products/services that there's an analogue for. Not every Google feature and product has a 1:1 replacement.
Back to the consumer side - it will be insane the number of things affected that nobody is thinking of. Off the top of my head, imagine the billions of people who have used Google SSO to sign up for random websites, and imagine that just stops working. And on top of that, they were all using Gmail. So now they can't login to all the websites they're signed up for, and they can't send a password reset, because their email no longer works. This is just a few of the thousands of issues there will be, for a large chunk of the planet.
> But on the business side, there are 6 million businesses that use Google Workspace to manage their company - their drives, documents, email, distribution lists, SSO, etc. They can't just flip a switch and migrate their entire company to another provider.
Sounds like it'll be plenty profitable as a business in its own right, then.
> Off the top of my head, imagine the billions of people who have used Google SSO to sign up for random websites, and imagine that just stops working.
Why would it suddenly stop working? Lots of third party websites use Google (or Microsoft) SSO.
I agree. At risk of being totally off base because I have not been keeping up with the details of the legal matter it seems to me that the solution isn't to kill Google's core business but rather to force it to sell off some of these branches, with thought and strategy. E.g. one of the comments below pointed out that Google Flights competes with other sites / businesses. Seems like a good candidate to spin off: it could probably be a profitable business in it's own right. Android? Chrome? Idk about those: who / how are they going to be funded? Each piece needs to be analyzed and a deal needs to be struck that's not based on principles as much as it is on what is pragmatically the right balance that benefits people (the American people in particular) the most in the medium to long term.
My understanding is that the legal remedies/repercussions being considered involve divesting Android, Chrome. Splitting these off is not in any way killing Googles core business.
> Android? [...] who / how are they going to be funded?
Given that Android gets to take a 30% cut of every app sale and in-app purchase, I think they'll survive.
If what you are saying is that significant parts of the tech landscape will change, then that's exactly the point.
Why do antitrust proposals always suggest breaking up Google by function—Search, Ads, Gmail, etc.? What if, instead, we cloned the whole company?
Start by splitting Google into two identical, full-stack companies, each with all the core products. A year later, split them again. Over time, you get 4 or 8 Googles competing across the board.
Employees could be assigned algorithmically to avoid chaos. This feels more like cell division than amputation—preserving the synergies while creating competition.
I would rather have us all weaned off the Google services. That would be a great outcome actually. I am guessing your idea is, that those 2 or 4 Googles would then compete and make better products. But I am not sure how likely it is, that they can fix the mess and pile of bloat, that their software is.
Waymo has zero business existing as some adtech-funded side project.
If Waymo cannot make the case that it should exist or be funded by itself, then it’s just not viable. Kill it.
You just listed a bunch of things I'd like to see go.
That's the very reason we need to break down Google.
It's already too late, Google is already a monopolistic beast.
Waiting even more will only make things much worst with the a.i revolution.
Are we sure that the things listed here will not go away in a few years if Google continues to exist?
https://killedbygoogle.com/
People bringing up this site in this specific way is a pet peeve of mine. What's the largest product that they sunset with no replacement? Stadia? Given the number of products Google has, I wouldn't consider their track record below average.
I agree. The vast majority of products "killed by Google" were ones no one were using and many were consolidated into other products.
Google Reader was fairly popular.
> vast majority
i'm a rageaholic! i just can't live without rageahol!
And they reimbursed all purchases, including hardware you got to keep.
As sad as killing Stadia was (it's still the best cloud gaming service, the UX was marvelous), it couldn't have been done better.
Well their press releases indicate long term support and then they cancel the projects. This _has_ to have more serious consequences (on businesses mostly, but consumers too) than you are implying. This sort of thing naturally effects consumer/brand loyalty. With such a clear lack of focus on any one solution, why would anyone trust Google going forward with their new products/services?
This is the end result of trying to run your massive corporation like some kind of start-up incubator. No wisdom or strategy, just throw shit at the wall and see what sticks.
We're gonna be fine without all those items from that list. There are plenty of alternatives and plenty more would arise once the monopolist sinks.
Of this list, the only things I'd miss are Search (because Kagi relies on it) and Maps. I do use Android, but I'll be frank: It sucks. And I'm sure Translate is easily replaceable by a 3rd party.
Google Translate has been inferior to DeepL for a very long time now.
More recently, LLMs will offer far better translation than anything else.
How do you get from "google loses ad revenue" to "android dies"? Even if for some reason Google went bankrupt all these divisions would just be sold off.
My favourite one that you somehow missed, which should probably be at the top, YouTube.
And nothing of value was lost.
Google Cloud is a decent business though, as is YouTube.
digital advertisement is a mass-surveillance technology in the hands of corporations. I cheer its collapse
Google has built all these free products for one reason: your comment. They want people to genuinely believe that they can't be treated like a monopoly in ads.
Not because they're not a monopoly in ads. No no no. They want us to believe they're a good monopolist that can't be broken up because they're giving us so many good things. Don't let it sway you for a second that Google is proven to hinder competition and raise ad prices.
I don't buy it.
Exactly. Each one of the products in that large list is a separate market that's being distorted by a monopoly. This is all the more evidence that Google needs to be broken up into very tiny pieces.
If Google is an ad business, then each of those non-ad products they're giving away for free, supported by the money from the ad machine, is another market they're gaining dominance in by leveraging their position in another market. That's textbook monopolist behavior.
Yep, an over-sized, parasitic worm with control over most of the worlds communications, search, navigation, web browsing, and a size chunk of mobile software. That is definitely good for the Internet, security, privacy, and society at a whole. We can trust Google to always do what's right for the individual and to put profits second. Google makes money through donations and doesn't depend on the personal information of users it extracts to manipulate them into product purchases.
Or it will force Google to charge for services - a much more honest transaction.
And you’re just naming random services most of which are already paid products like Google Cloud.
+ Waze.
This is an incredibly hyperbolic take.
Google, as a search provider, has billions of eyeballs a day. They will still have ad revenue from that. Their basic business model of surveillance capitalism is intact.
It just says they can’t control both sides of the ad market. If history is any lesson (the AT&T breakup specifically), divesting ad would create a more competitive ad market and Google the search engine would make more money by playing multiple suppliers against each other, fostering competition.
From a principles perspective, if feels like too severe of a remedy and I don’t support it. But “if AT&T is broken up nobody will ever be able to make a phone call again” is too extreme to take seriously. Money follows value. Google has plenty of value outside of its monopoly position.
This list makes the case this is long overdue.
- Google Maps - this would be a big loss but at least this will open the field for Apple Maps and OSM (and I wonder if a competitor will be able to properly leave OSM as is an perhaps integrate traffic data like with Waze or another product like it)
I like your style, "lol" is the appropriate response to the notion of losing Google's entire list of products.
Android? It's not a big loss. It's no longer the open platform it used to be. Hardware remote attestation will get us locked out of every app if we "tamper" with our devices. It's just a shitty version of iOS now so who cares?
Would YouTube not also be affected here? I don't have numbers but it seems to me a huge number of people depend on it as both consumers and producers, and I'm not sure it has any viable alternatives.
My even bigger worry is actually the effects on privacy, security, and people's data. I'm very curious what other companies people would trust more with their data.
> ta. I'm very curious what other companies people would trust more with their data.
The problem is one company with all the data.
> The problem is one company with all the data.
I realize, but the idea that we won't have another giant company succeeding at achieving the same seems like wishful thinking.
Making sure another company doesn't get into the same position is precisely what antitrust laws and enforcement agencies are for.
The only reason why we have the mess we do is because we have made our antitrust toothless starting in 1980s, and it's only gradually coming back now.
Why would it? Youtube sells ads (and premium subscriptions) on its own. It doesn't really need the rest of Google, and can just continue living as a separate company.
Android in this list stands out.
If Android goes away, I am not sure who is there to pick up The OS of the world, not IOS, certainly, but who?
All else, good riddance. More competition will make better products.
A non-profit collective of device manufacturers and software developers could probably create a very effective and potent steward for Android's long-term development. But I wouldn't hold my breath.
Linux?
Kinda, yeah. I mean Android is already Linux, just with suspicious, proprietary drivers that hold it back. Some Android phones are still running kernel 3!
If manufacturers would just upstream their drivers and make them less shit, then android could take advantage of the entire body of work in GNU/Linux userland.
I can imagine manufacturers that are fully in the Android ecosystem come together to maintain Android, including Xiaomi, Samsung, Oppo etc. There won't be as many feature updates, but it's not like Google puts a lot of resources in Android, or Android is delivering many features these days -- Google moved/laid off many people on Android teams, and many of the recent updates are very minor features. Just look at what's new in Android 14 or 15 -- barely anything. I stopped getting excited about or even caring about major version updates for a while. The pace has already slowed down quite a bit compared to a decade ago, and the ecosystem is very mature and stable.
The bulk of Android is open source, the only proprietary bits are the google services.
We understand the consequences. The only projects listed that matter are the open source ones. They’ll survive. The rest don’t matter and will die as they frankly would’ve already if not for Google unfair position in the market.
Why is this bad? All those services are areas where there could be interesting competition if google didn't strangle them at birth by subsidizing their own version with infinite ad monies. Take google docs as an example, everyone is talking about on shoring essential services now that the USA has become a security threat to other countries. Before now, imagine any European company trying to justify investment for building a docs competitor when google just gives it away? Yeah sure, your data stays on the continent but that wasn't put into perspective until recently.
What happens to the assets of the dead Google? Will regulators actually let FAAN take over broad swaths of it? Not likely. It's much more likely that regional or smaller businesses will enter the vaccuum. Similarly but from the consumer side, I already know for many of these, there are already viable alternatives that would easily scale with demand.
Even further, if your business is coupled entirely to the continued existence of a single corporation, or if the totality of your economy is entirely coupled to the continued existence of a single corporation, we have a word for that: a monopoly. As far as I know, permitting the existence of monopolies is broadly agreed upon by experts to be a bad idea for many reasons, the least of which is the stifling of viable alternatives. The most severe is that it threatens the legitimacy of the entire government through regulatory capture and, at root, there is no organization that I think is actually "too big to fail" except the actual government.
Breaking up Google creates short-term disruptions and penalizes those that let the market even get to the point that the FTC and DOJ needed to intervene (I'm looking at you Mozilla). Everyone, including those now dependent on Google, is benefited in the longterm.
This is juvenile thinking... none of them will go away. They can be independent services themselves, and be pretty profitable at it.
The upshoot is if they are independent, they will be forced to compete fairly with other services. Which, does increase competition and choice.
Most would go away and be replaced by another monopolist. Likely Microsoft or Apple.
So do the same thing to them.
Killing Gmail would be a massive win for email deliverability. It's got so big now that they simply don't give a shit about delivering emails from smaller players.
That gives users the impression that other providers are unreliable, and further bolsters their monopoly.
Yup, ok with all of those.
Yeah, the unfortunate thing is reigning in one monopolist today seems like more an invitation to the other monopolists.
How many potentially world dominating mega-corps are there? Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Musk-corps, OpenAI, Nvidia...
It seems like any reasonable rejigging of things would require attacks on multiple sources of monopoly. And any other attack on a given player is just going to strengthening other players.
> Fitbit
google is killing that themselves.
- Google Fi - Google Fiber - Google Flights - Google Translate - Google Pay
won't miss these
What a lame take on this.
To you the only implied solution is to just let Google eating all the money in the market?
Most of the products on your list are products that are or can be profitable on their own and have profitable competitors. Google could be broken up and Apple wouldn’t just take over the world as you assert.
Google wouldn’t just magically go out of business just because of the scenario you describe. They’d still command a huge part of ad spend because they’re a huge brand name. Even if competitors get a much-deserved leg up, it would take a whole lot of sustained momentum to unseat them.
And?
If monopoly is attained over such segment failure of those products and services is less bad outcome.
You've made literally an argument to nationalise Google and make it into a government department - not to leave it to fester.
Good. Every one of those products makes our lives significantly worse.
Almost all of these products are subpar garbage that would never survive in a competitive world. Almost none of them have done anything different or interesting or new for over a decade.
All these products do is use the search monopoly to take away the opportunity for us to have good versions of them.
> Here's a small number of things that will die when Google dies.
I dispute that. Google Docs/Drive/Mail are supported by enterprise subscriptions. Android Auto is also a commercial product that can live off license fees. Fi/Fiber/Pay/Waymo are also not free services, and can survive on their own.
Free GMail/Forms/Groups/Translate can probably survive off ad revenue that they can get from third parties. They are pretty trivial expenses at this point.
Android and Chrome are the main projects at risk.
To be fair, nobody outside the company knows if Fi/Fiber/Pay are viable businesses, or they are on life support but still around because of the unlimited cash Google has. One can guess they are profitable because they have been around for quite a while and still kicking. But nothing says they won't be the next thing in Google graveyard -- plenty of services seemed to be doing ok before a major reorg sent them to death.
Google Fi is just an MVNO, and there are quite a few competitors in this area (e.g. I'm using US-Mobile). They have comparable prices, so I'd guess that Fi is at least not operating at a loss.
Existing Fiber customers are basically a free money printing press. That's not going to change. But the new area buildouts can slow down.
Honestly, Google has been so un-innovative for so long, that it's hard to make a case for them. They just don't have a lot of products that are really benefiting from being under the umbrella of a large company.
I can definitely see an argument that back in 2006, Google Docs would have been impossible without access to the internal Google infrastructure and the unique expertise of Google engineers. These days? It's just a run-of-the-mill cloud application that can be trivially hosted on commercially available AWS or Google Compute.
Perhaps treating Google as a huge VC company would be more fair.
Yes please
The existence of none of those services depend on Google, and Google's cross subsidisation distorts the environment dreadfully
Worse it puts Google at the centre of so many data flows, and now we realise we do not want a single index of all data, it is positively destructive
Good riddance Google.
Google collapsing would be an incredible gift to the economy. Some companies are paying 30% in their advertising budget, before we even talk about the Play Store tax. We all pay an incredible amount for Google's existence, and a massive renaissance of technology development would occur if it stopped sucking all of the air out of the room.
Apart from all of the illegal things, it's just bad that it exists.
Oh no.
What a shame.
Opens popcorn, unfolds garden chair
Most of those products don't really matter much. I'm sure humanity will survive without them.
Maps? Switch to the many alternatives. Android? Now that they've got hardware remote attestation all of the "openness" has been lost so it's become nothing but a worse version of iOS. Only the loss of gmail would be painful and the suffering would not last long.
Let it happen.
> In the best case, killing these will force consumers to move to Apple.
Break Apple up too. Don't forget about Meta and Amazon and all the others.
> Apple has no alternative for much of the Business-focused products, so that will take considerable time for companies to adopt alternatives.
Not a big deal. Adapt or go out of business. Better yet, price it in by adapting ahead of time: ditch Google now.
Moving to Proton Mail with my own domain was much easier than I'd anticipated. It's great.
> The whole web will shrink
Welp. Sounds like the web is gonna go back to its roots. Sign me up.
> huge swaths of the worldwide economy will disappear
This distorted economy that rewards total nonsense just because it attracts attention?
Let it disappear.
Things are just too screwed up and I don't think they're ever gonna be fixed unless something biblical happens. This might just be it.
This is nonsense. Some people may have to sign up to Google One to pay them a fee starting at $20/year to access gmail/drive/docs/groups/forms. We, and they, will all live through.
etc.
The solution proposed by Kagi—separate the search index from the rest of Google—seems to make the most sense. Kagi explains it more here: https://blog.kagi.com/dawn-new-era-search
At Blekko we advocated for this as well.
Google has two interlocked monopolies, one is the search index and the other is their advertising service. We often joked that if Google reasonable and non-discriminatory priced access to their index, both to themselves and to others, AND they allowed someone to put what ever ads they wanted on those results. That change the landscape dramatically.
Google would carve out their crawler/indexer/ranker business and sell access to themselves and others which would allow that business an income that did NOT go back to the parent company (had to be disbursed inside as capex or opex for the business).
Then front ends would have a good shot, DDG for example could front the index with the value proposition of privacy. Someone else could front the index with a value proposition of no-ads ever. A third party might front that index attuned to specific use cases like literature search.
It would be a very different world.
Access to the click stream is the big bit.
Ie. Knowing which users clicked which search results.
Without the click stream, one cannot build or even maintain a good ranker. With a larger click stream from more users, one can make a better ranker, which in turn makes the service better so more users use it.
End result: monopoly.
The only solution is to force all players to share click stream data with all others.
Click stream is useful, without a doubt. It isn't essential. We had already started the process at Blekko of moving to alternate ways for ranking the index.
That said, if you run the frontend as proposed, you get to collect the clicks. That gives you the click stream you want. If the index returns you a serp with unwrapped links (which it should if it was unbundled from a given search front end) then you could develop analytics around what your particular customers "like" in their links and have a different ranking than perhaps some other front end. One thing that Blekko made really clear for me that the Google idea that there was always the "best" result for that query (aka the I'm Feeling Lucky link) there was often different shades of intent behind the query that aren't part of the query itself. Google felt they could get it in the first 10 links (back before the first 10 links were sponsored content :-)) and often on the page you could see the two or three inferred "intents" (shopping, information, entertainment were common).
I don't think that's quite true, as competitors like Kagi have been able to compete well with effectively zero clickstream (by comparison). It'll help, but it's not the make-or-break that the index is.
I think a click stream isn't necessary, but Kagi is not a good basis for the argument in my opinion.
Kagi is a primarily meta search engine. The click stream exists on their sources (Bing, Google, Yandex, Marginalia, not sure if they use Brave). They do have Teclis which is their own index that they use, and their systems for reordering the page of results such as downranking heavy ad pages, and based upon user preferences (which I love).
https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-... is a source I would recommend checking out if you are curious.
Kagi sends searches to other providers (Bing?) and then simply re-ranks the results, so they're effectively inheriting the click stream data of those other providers.
> Google has two interlocked monopolies, one is the search index
The index is the farthest thing from a monopoly Google has - anyone can recreate it. Heck, you can even just download Commoncrawl to get a massive head start.
I see it a bit differently, many (most?) web sites explicitly deny scraping execept for Google. Further Google has the infrastructure to crawl several trillion web pages and create a relevant index out of the most authoritative 1.5 trillion. To re-create that on your own, you would need both the web to allow it, and the infrastructure to do it. I would agree that this isn't an insurmountable moat but it is a good one.
Then why do we see all of these alt search engines and SEO services building out independent indexes? Why don't the competitors cooperate in this fashion already?
Because everyone worships Thiel's "competition is for losers" and dreams of being a monopoly. Monopolies being the logical outcome of a deregulated environment, for which these companies lobby.
Throughout history there are very few monopolies and they don't normally last that long; that is unless they get are granted special privileges by the government.
Concentration is the default in an unregulated environment. Sure pure monopolies with 100% market control are rare but concentration is rampant. A handful of companies dominating tech, airlines, banks, media.
Concentration is not monopoly, and furthermore your comment does not begin to address the critical part of parent’s comment : “does not last very long”
Inequality at a point in time , and over time , is not nearly as bad if the winners keep rotating
airlines? Worst example ever. There are lots of airlines coming and going. "Tech" isn't even an industry.
Concentration seems much more prevalent in heavily regulated markets e.g. utilities / airlines. In many cases regulators have even encouraged this e.g.finance.
There is no default for unregulated markets. It's a question of whether the economies of scale outweigh the added costs from the complexity that scale requires. It costs close to 100x as much to build 100 houses, run 100 restaurants, or operate 100 trucks as it does to do 1. That's why these industries are not very concentrated. Whereas it costs nowhere close to 100x for a software or financial services company to serve 100x thee customers, so software and finance are very concentrated.
The effect of regulation is typically to increase concentration because the cost of compliance actually tends to scale very well. So businesses that grow face an decreasing regulatory compliance cost as a percent of revenue.
You are comparing Apples and Oranges. You just can't compare the barrier of entry for Software business and an Airline, even without any regulations. It's just orders of magnitude more expensive to buy an airplane than a laptop, and most utilities are natural monopolies so they behave fundamentally different.
Most planes are leased. The capex for an airline isn't anything especially high if they don't want it to be.
I can't and I didn't. I never said anything about barriers to entry. I'm talking about concentration here and why the market is dominated by airlines with hundreds of planes instead of airlines with 10 planes. Barriers to entry are inevitable in capital intensive industries.
Home building is interesting because I think a major blocker to monopoly-forming is the vastly heterogenous and complicated regulatory landscape, with building codes varying wildly from place to place. So you get a bunch of locally-specialized builders.
Regulation can increase concentration in a high corruption/cronyism environment — regulatory capture and regulatory moats. There is plenty of that happening.
In building, I think we have local-concentration, due to both regulatory heterogeneity and then local cronyism - Bob has decades of connections to the city and gets permits easily, whereas Bob’s competitor Steve is stuck in a loop of rejection due to a never ending list of pesky reasons.
> unless they get are granted special privileges by the government
That's what all the lobbyists are for.
None of the people or organisations that advocate for "free markets" or competition actually want free markets and competition. It's a smoke screen so they can keep buying politicians to get their special privileges.
They always inevitably end up being given special privileges.
Because, contrary to what we would all like to believe, once a company becomes large we don't want them to go under, even if they're not optimal.
There's a huge amount of jobs, institutional knowledge, processes, capital, etc in these big monopolies. Like if Boeing just went under today, how long would it take for another company to re-figure out how to make airplanes? I mean, take a look at NASA. We went to the moon, but can we do it again? It would be very difficult. Because so many engineers retired and IP was allowed to just... rot.
It's a balancing act. Obviously we want to keep the market as free as possible and yadda yadda invisible hand. But we also have national security to consider, and practicality.
> Throughout history there are very few monopolies and they don't normally last that long
That's completely incorrect. Historically, monopolies were pretty long-lived. So much that they were often written into the legal codes.
It's only fairly recently that the pace of innovation picked up so much, that monopolies not really die per se, but just become irrelevant.
You mean like a white label search engine? Customized with settings?
This sounds a solution contrived to advantage companies that want access to this data rather than an actual economically valid business model. If building an index and selling access to it is a viable business, then why isn't someone doing it already? There's minimal barrier to entry. Blekko has an index. Are you selling access to it for profit?
There are search engines that sell api access to their index. Pretty sure Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex all do.
Blekko also did, 10 years ago. When they still existed.
I think Brave Search does too?
This just in: small search engine company thinks it's a great idea for small search engine companies to have the same search index as Google.
Also, I love this bit: "[Google's] search results are of the best quality among its advertising-driven peers." I can just feel the breath of the guy who jumped in to say "wait, you can't just admit that Google's results are better than Kagi's! You need to add some sorta qualifier there that doesn't apply to us."
Have you used Kagi or Google recently? Kagi works way better.
Then why do they want Google's search index?
Crawling the web is costly. I assume it's cheaper to use the results from someone else's crawling. I don't know what Kagi is using to argue that they should have access to Google's indexes, but I'd guess it's some form of anti trust.
Let me add more: crawling the web is costly for EVERYONE.
The more crawlers out there, the more useless traffic is being served by every single website on the internet.
In an ideal world, there would be a single authoritative index, just as we have with web domains, and all players would cooperate into building, maintaining and improving it, so websites would not need to be constantly hammered by thousands of crawlers everyday.
I already get hit by literally hundreds of crawlers, presumably trying to find grist for there AI mills.
One more crawler for a search index wouldn’t hurt.
Bandwidth is cheap. I also like seeing more traffic in the logs.
Yeah not that cheap. There's a few articles on HN now about small, independent websites being essentially DDOS'd by crawlers. Although, to be fair, mostly AI crawlers.
So they can work even better...?
On every Kagi comment, there is “Have you used Kagi recently? It’s improved a lot!” — to the level that I suspect they have bots to upgrade the brand image, at least to search which comments to respond do.
I’m saying that because yes, I’ve used Kagi recently, and I switch back to Google every single time because Kagi can’t find anything. Kagi is to Google what Siri is to ChatGPT. Siri can’t even answer “What time is it?”
Maybe you see different comments than I do, but I don't see many comments saying it's improved a lot lately.
As a Kagi user, I would not say it's improved a lot lately. It's a consistent, specific product for what I need. I like the privacy aspects of it, and the control to block, raise or lower sites in my search results. If that's not something you care about then don't use it.
Is it better than Google at finding things? I don't think so, but then, Google is trash these days too
I don’t understand.
The GP of your comment is literally saying that Kagi is better than Google as of late. You’re not helping the “Kagi doesn’t use bots” case by ignore the context 2 comments up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43948385
They said Kagi works "way better" than google, not that Kagi is better as of late (although they do ask if they've tried kagi lately). Which is consistent with my statement that Kagi is a consistent product and not really improving. They keep adding AI features, but I disable those and don't care about them.
You're welcome to check my post history, I'm certainly not a bot. Or if I am, I'm a very convincing one that runs an astrophotography blog.
> I suspect they have bots to upgrade the brand image
I disagree with the conclusion but I agree with the premise. Man is a rationalizing animal, and one way to validate one’s choice in paying for a search engine (whether it is better or not) is to get others to use it as well. Kagi is also good at PR, they were able to spin a hostile metering plan as a lenient subscription plan.
Word of mouth is often more prevalent than we think, and certainly more powerful than botting. I would not be shocked if the author of that “AirBnBs are blackhats” article was interacting with real users of Craigslist spurred on by some referral scheme.
> to the level that I suspect they have bots to upgrade the brand image
What “level” is that which couldn’t possibly be accomplished by humans? Are you seeing thousands of messages every day?
> On every Kagi comment, there is “Have you used Kagi recently? It’s improved a lot!” — to the level that I suspect they have bots to upgrade the brand image
Odd to dismiss a point purely because it's consistently made, especially without much apparent disagreement. Perhaps more likely: there are just _many_ happy Kagi customers in the HN community.
As one data point: I use Kagi, and agree with GP, and I am not a bot (activity of this HN account predates existence of Kagi by many years).
That doesn't dismiss your experience of course, lots of people use search engines in different ways! Personally, I found the ads & other crap of Google drowned out results, and I frequently hit SEO spam etc where site reranking was helpful. I'm sure there's scenarios where that doesn't make sense though, it's not for everybody (not everybody can justify paying for search, just for starters).
“Kagi is bad. As evidence I present Siri.”
Do you not understand how analogies work, or did your compulsion to post a weaksauce burn just temporarily short-circuit that part of your brain?
This isn't Twitter, you don't need to farm likes and retweets.
For someone guarding the platform from weaksauce nonsense comments you picked a strange one to defend.
I was commenting on the weakness of the analogy. There’s nothing in any of the 4 entities mentioned other than the author’s opinion about them.
Sorry my comment missed the mark for you.
Crawling the internet is a natural monopoly. Nobody wants an endless stream of bots crawling their site, so googlebot wins because they’re the dominant search engine.
It makes sense to break that out so everyone has access to the same dataset at FRAND pricing.
My heart just wants Google to burn to the ground, but my brain says this is the more reasonable approach.
https://commoncrawl.org/
This is similar to the natural monopoly of root DNS servers (managed as a public good). There is no reason more money couldn't go into either Common Crawl, or something like it. The Internet Archive can persist the data for ~$2/GB in perpetuity (although storing it elsewhere is also fine imho) as the storage system of last resort. How you provide access to this data is, I argue, similar to how access to science datasets is provided by custodian institutions (examples would be NOAA, CERN, etc).
Build foundations on public goods, very broadly speaking (think OSI model, but for entire systems). This helps society avoid the grasp of Big Tech and their endless desire to build moats for value capture.
The problem with this is in the vein of `Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once` if it's going to replace googlebot. Everyone who only allows googlebot would need to change and allow ccbot instead.
It's already the case that googlebot is the common denominator bot that's allowed everywhere, ccbot not so much.
Wouldn’t a decent solution, if some action happened where Google was divesting the crawler stuff, be to just do like browser user agents have always done (in that case multiple times to comical degrees)? Something like ‘Googlebot/3.1 (successor, CommonCrawl 1.0)’
Lots of good replies to your comment already. I'd also offer up Cloudflare offering the option to crawl customer origins, with them shipping the compressed archives off to Common Crawl for storage. This gives site admins and owners control over the crawling, and reduces unnecessary load as someone like Cloudflare can manage the crawler worker queue and network shipping internally.
(Cloudflare customer, no other affiliation)
That says that if google switches over to ccbot then the rest will follow.
I mean if it’s created as part of setting the global rules for the internet you could just make it opt out.
Wait, is the suggestion here just about crawling and storing the data? That's a very different thing than "Google's search index"... And yeah, I would agree that it is undifferentiated.
If you have access to archived crawls, anyone can build and serve an index, or model weights (gpt).
Hosting costs are so minimal today that I don't think crawling is a natural monopoly. How much would it really cost a site to be crawled by 100 search engines?
A potentially shocking amount depending on the desired freshness if the bot isn’t custom tailored per site. I worked at a job posting site and Googlebot would nearly take down our search infrastructure because it crawled jobs via searching rather than the index.
Bots are typically tuned to work with generic sites over crawling efficiently.
Where is the cost coming from? Wouldn't a crawler mostly just accessing cached static assets served by CDN?
And what do you mean by your search infrastructure? Are you talking about elasticsearch or some equivalent?
No, in our case they were indexing job posts by sending search requests. Ie instead of pulling down the JSON files of jobs, they would search for them by sending stuff like “New York City, New York software engineer” to our search. Generally not cached because the searches weren’t something humans would search for (they’d use the location drop down).
I didn’t work on search, but yeah, something like Elasticsearch. Googlebot was a majority of our search traffic at times.
One problem, it leaves one place to censor.
I agree that each front end should do it, but you can bet it will be a core service.
> The Internet Archive can persist the data for ~$2/GB in perpetuity
No they can't but do you have a source?
https://help.archive.org/help/archive-org-information/ and first hand conversations with their engineering team
> We estimate that permanent storage costs us approximately $2.00US per gigabyte.
https://webservices.archive.org/pages/vault/
> Vault offers a low-cost pricing model based on a one-time price per-gigabyte/terabyte for data deposited in the system, with no additional annual storage fees or data egress costs.
https://blog.dshr.org/2017/08/economic-model-of-long-term-st...
What's the read throughout to get the data back out, and does it scale to what you'd need to have N search indexes building on top of this shared crawl?
they could charge data processing costs for reads
> Crawling the internet is a natural monopoly.
How so?
A caching proxy costs you almost nothing and will serve thousands of requests per second on ancient hardware. Actually there's never been a better time in the history of the Internet to have competing search engines since there's never been so much abundance of performance, bandwidth, and software available at historic low prices or for free.
Costs almost nothing, but returns even less.*
There are so many other bots/scrapers out there that literally return zero that I don’t blame site owners for blocking all bots except googlebot.
Would it be nice if they also allowed altruist-bot or common-crawler-bot? Maybe, but that’s their call and a lot of them have made it on a rational basis.
* - or is perceived to return
> that I don’t blame site owners for blocking all bots except googlebot
I run a number of sites with decent traffic and the amount of spam/scam requests outnumbers crawling bots 1000 to 1.
I would guess that the number of sites allowing just Googlebot is 0.
> that I don’t blame site owners for blocking all bots except googlebot.
I doubt this is happening outside of a few small hobbyist websites where crawler traffic looks significant relative to human traffic. Even among those, it’s so common to move to static hosting with essentially zero cost and/or sign up for free tiers of CDNs that it’s just not worth it outside of edge cases like trying to host public-facing Gitlab instances with large projects.
Even then, the ROI on setting up proper caching and rate limiting far outweighs the ROI on trying to play whack-a-mole with non-Google bots.
Even if someone did go to all the lengths to try to block the majority of bots, I have a really hard time believing they wouldn’t take the extra 10 minutes to look up the other major crawlers and put those on the allow list, too.
This whole argument about sites going to great lengths to block search indexers but then stopping just short of allowing a couple more of the well-known ones feels like mental gymnastics for a situation that doesn’t occur.
> sites going to great lengths to block search indexers
That's not it. They're going to great lengths to block all bot traffic because of abusive and generally incompetent actors chewing through their resources. I'll cite that anubis has made the front page of HN several times within the past couple months. It is far from the first or only solution in that space, merely one of many alternatives to the solutions provided by centralized services such as cloudflare.
Regarding allowlisting the other major crawlers: I've never seen any significant amount of traffic coming from anything but Google or Bing. There's the occasional click from one of the resellers (ecosia, brave search, duckduckgo etc), but that's about it. Yahoo? haven't seen them in ages, except in Japan. Baidu or Yandex? might be relevant if you're in their primary markets, but I've never seen them. Huawei's Petal Search? Apple Search? Nothing. Ahrefs & friends? No need to crawl _my_ website, even if I wanted to use them for competitor analysis.
So practically, there's very little value in allowing those. I usually don't bother blocking them, but if my content wasn't easy to cache, I probably would.
Not everyone wants to deal with caching proxy because they think the load on their site under normal operations is fine if it's rendered server side.
In the past month there were dozens of posts about using proof of work and other methods to defeat crawlers. I don't think most websites tolerate heavy crawling in the era of Vercel/AWS's serverless "per request" and bandwidth billing.
You don't get to tell site owners what to do. The actual facts on the ground are that they're trying to block your bot. It would be nice if they didn't block your bot, but the other, completely unnatural and advertising-driven, monopoly of hosting providers with insane per-request costs makes that impossible until they switch away.
They try to block your bot because Google is a monopoly and there's little to no cost for blocking everything except Google.
This isn't a "natural" monopoly, it's more like Internet Explorer 6.0 and everyone designing their sites to use ActiveX and IE-specific quirks.
One possible answer: pay them for their trouble until you provide value to them, e.g. by paying some fraction of a cent for each (document) request.
Cool, you wanna solve micropayments now or wait until we've got cold fusion rolling first...?
You wouldn't have to make them micropayments, you can pay out once some threshold is reached.
Of course, it would incentivize the sites to make you want to crawl them more, but that might be a good thing. There would be pressure on you to focus on quality over quantity, which would probably be a good thing for your product.
> The actual facts on the ground are that they're trying to block your bot
Based on what evidence.
Google search is a monopoly not because of crawling. It's because of the all the data it knows about website stats and user behavior. Original Google idea of ranking based on links doesn't work because it's too easily gamed. You have to know what websites are good based on user preferences and that's where you need to have data. It's impossible to build anything similar to Google without access to large amounts of user data.
Sounds like you're implying that they are using Google Analytics to feed their ranking, but that's much easier to game than links are. User-signals on SERP clicks? There's a niche industry supplying those to SEOs (I've seen it a few times, I haven't seen it have any reliable impact).
Page ranking sounds like a perfect application of artificial intelligence.
If China can apply it for total information awareness on their population, Google can apply it on page reliability
I'm fairly certain many people have already tried to apply magical AI pixie dust to this problem. Presumably it isn't so simple in practice.
Most of the tech is set for being a monopoly due to the negligible variable cost associated with serving a customer.
Thus being even slightly in front of others is reinforced and the gap only widens.
CommonCrawl is not a vlaid comparison. Most robots.txt target CCBot.
Of all the bad ideas I've heard of where to slice Google to break it up, this... Is actually the best idea.
The indexer, without direct Google influence, is primarily incentivized to play nice with site administrators. This gives them reasons to improve consideration of both network integrity and privacy concerns (though Google has generally been good about these things, I think the damage is done regarding privacy that the brand name is toxic, regardless of the behaviors).
> Crawling the internet is a natural monopoly. Nobody wants an endless stream of bots crawling their site,
Companies want traffic from any source they can get. They welcome every search engine crawler that comes along because every little exposure translates to incremental chances at revenue or growing audience.
I doubt many people are doing things to allow Googlebot but also ban other search crawlers.
> My heart just wants Google to burn to the ground
I think there’s a lot of that in this thread and it’s opening the door to some mental gymnastics like the above claim about Google being the only crawler allowed to index the internet.
> I doubt many people are doing things to allow Googlebot but also ban other search crawlers.
Sadly this is just not the case.[1][2] Google knows this too so they explicitly crawl from a specific IP range that they publish.[3]
I also know this, because I had a website that blocked any bots outside of that IP range. We had honeypot links (hidden to humans via CSS) that insta-banned any user or bot that clicked/fetched them. User-Agent from curl, wget, or any HTTP lib = insta-ban. Crawling links sequentially across multiple IPs = all banned. Any signal we found that indicated you were not a human using a web browser = ban.
We were listed on Google and never had traffic issues.
[1] https://onescales.com/blogs/main/the-bot-blocklist
[2] Chart in the middle of this page: https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-blo... (note: Google-Extended != Googlebot)
[3] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
> so googlebot wins because they’re the dominant search engine.
I think it's also important to highlight that sites explicitly choose which bots to allow in their robots.txt files, prioritizing Google which reinforces its position as the de-facto monopoly. Even when other bots are technically able to crawl them.
Are sites really that averse to having a few more crawlers than they already do? It would seem that it’s only a monopoly insofar as it’s really expensive to do and almost nobody else thinks they can recoup the cost.
A few?
We routinely are fighting off hundreds of bots at any moment. Thousands and Thousands per day, easily. US, China, Brazil from hundreds of different IPs, dozens of different (and falsified!) user agents all ignoring robots.txt and pushing over services that are needed by human beings trying to get work done.
EDIT: Just checked our anubis stats for the last 24h
CHALLENGE: 829,586
DENY: 621,462
ALLOW: 96,810
This is with a pretty aggressive "DENY" rule for a lot of the AI related bots and on 2 pretty small sites at $JOB. We have hundreds, if not thousands of different sites that aren't protected by Anubis (yet).
Anubis and efforts like it are a xesend for companies that don't want to pay off Cloudflare or some other "security" company peddling a WAF.
This seems like two different issues.
One is, suppose there are a thousand search engine bots. Then what you want is some standard facility to say "please give me a list of every resources on this site that has changed since <timestamp>" so they can each get a diff from the last time they crawled your site. Uploading each resource on the site to each of a thousand bots once is going to be irrelevant to a site serving millions of users (because it's a trivial percentage) and to a site with a small amount of content (because it's a small absolute number), which together constitute the vast majority of all sites.
The other is, there are aggressive bots that will try to scrape your entire site five times a day even if nothing has changed and ignore robots.txt. But then you set traps like disallowing something in robots.txt and then ban anything that tries to access it, which doesn't affect legitimate search engine crawlers because they respect robots.txt.
> then you set traps like disallowing something in robots.txt and then ban anything that tries to access it
That doesn't work at all when the scraper rapidly rotates IPs from different ASNs because you can't differentiate the legitimate from the abusive traffic on a per-request basis. All you can be certain of is that a significant portion of your traffic is abusive.
That results in aggressive filtering schemes which in turn means permitted bots must be whitelisted on a case by case basis.
A "few" more would be fine - but the sheer scale of the malicious AI training bot crawling that's happening now is enough to cause real availability problems (and expense) for numerous sites.
One web forum I regularly read went through a patch a few months ago where it was unavailable for about 90% of the time due to being hammered by crawlers. It's only up again now because the owner managed to find a way to block them that hasn't yet been circumvented.
So it's easy to see why people would allow googlebot and little else.
Assuming the simplified diagram of Google’s architecture, sure, it looks like you’re just splitting off a well-isolated part, but it would be a significant hardship to do it in reality.
Why not also require Apple to split off only the phone and messaging part of its iPhone, Meta to split off only the user feed data, and for the U.S. federal government to run only out of Washington D.C.?
This isn’t the breakup of AT&T in the early 1980s where you could say all the equipment and wiring just now belongs to separate entities. (It wasn’t that simple, but it wasn’t like trying to extract an organ.)
I think people have to understand that and know that what they’re doing is killing Google, and it was already on its way into mind-numbed enterprise territory.
> Apple to split off only the phone and messaging part of its iPhone
Ooh, can we? My wife is super jealous of my ability to install custom apps for phone calls and messaging on Android, it'd be great if Apple would open theirs up to competition. Competition in the SMS app space would also likely help break up the usage of iMessage as a tool to pressure people into getting an iPhone so they get the blue bubble.
> Ooh, can we?
If the dream of a Star Trek future reputation-based government run by AI which secretly manipulates the vote comes true, yes we can!
Either that or we could organize competitors to lobby the US or EU for more lawsuits in exchange for billions in kickbacks! (Not implying anything by this.)
You jest, but splitting out just certain Internet Explorer features was part of the Microsoft antitrust resolution. It's what made Chrome's ascendancy possible.
I mean it's just data. You can just copy it and hand it over to a newly formed competing entity.
You're not even really dealing with any of these shared infrastructure public property private property merged infrastructure issues.
Yeah sure. There's mountains of racks of servers, but those aren't that hard to get tariffs TBD.
I think it'll be interesting just to try and find some collection of ex Google execs who had actually like to go back to the do no evil days, and just hand them a copy of all the data.
I simply don't think we have the properly and elected set of officials to implement antitrust of any scale. DOJ is now permanently politicized and corrupt, and citizens United means corps can outspend "the people" lavishly.
Antitrust would mean a more diverse and resilient supply chain, creativity, more employment, more local manufacturing, a reversal of the "awful customer service" as a default, better prices, a less corrupt government, better products, more economic mobility, and, dare I say it, more freedom.
Actually, let me expound upon the somewhat nebulous idea of more freedom. I think we all hear about Shadow banning or outright banning with utter silence and no appeals process for large internet companies that have a complete monopoly on some critical aspect of Internet usage.
If these companies enabled by their cartel control, decide they don't like you or are told by a government not to like you, it is approaching a bigger burden as being denied the ability to drive.
Not a single one of those is something oligarchs or a corporatocracy has the slightest interest in
Google killed Google. They should not have decided to become evil. Search can easily be removed, G Suite should be separate too.
> Search can easily be removed
This strikes me like "two easy steps to draw an owl. First draw the head, then draw the body". I generally support some sort of breakup, but hand waving the complexities away is not going to do anybody any good
This solution would also yield search engines that will actually be useful and powerful like old Google search was. They have crippled it drastically over the years. Used to be I could find exact quotes of forum posts from memory verbatim. I can't do that on Google or YouTube anymore. It's really dumbed down and watered down.
Discussed at the time, in case anyone is curious:
Dawn of a new era in Search: Balancing innovation, competition, and public good - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41393475 - Aug 2024 (79 comments)
Googles c suite is clearly not thinking ahead here. They could have helped to slow down the anti-trust lawsuits by opening up their search index to whichever AI company wants to pay for it. Web crawling is expensive, and lots of companies are spending wild amounts of money on it. There is a very clear market arbitrage opportunity between the cost of crawling the web and Google's cost of serving up their existing data.
Woudl the search index contain only raw data about the websites? Or would some sort of ranking be there?
If it's teh latter, its a neat way to ask a company to sell their users data to a third party because any kind of ranking comes via aggregation of users' actions. Without involving any user consent at all.
That's like asking the foxes how the farmer should manage his chickens. Kagi is a (wannabe) competitor. Likewise, YC's interest here is in making money by having viable startups and having them acquired.
I also don't think crawling the Web is the hard part. It's extraordinarily easy to do it badly [1] but what's the solution here? To have a bunch of wannabe search engines crawl Google's index instead?
I've thought about this and I wonder if trying to replicate a general purpose search engine here is the right approach or not. Might it not be easier to target a particular vertical, at least to start with? I refuse to believe Google cannot be bested in every single vertical or that the scale of the job can't be segmented to some degree.
[1]: https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/06/16/the-perfect-web-spider...
It's such a ridiculous proposal that would completely destroy Google's business. If that's the goal fine, but let's not pretend that any of those remedies are anything beyond a death sentence.
If they're dominating or one of only two or three important options in multiple other areas and the index is the only reason... I mean, that's a strong argument both that they're monopolists and that they're terrible at allocating the enormous amount of capital they have. That's really the only thing keeping them around? All their other lines of business collectively aren't enough to keep them alive? Yikes, scathing indictment.
I don't know, I don't think it will.
I mean, they're still going to be the number 1 name in adtech and analytics. And they're still gonna have pretty decent personalized ads because of analytics.
Plus, that just one part of their business. There's also Android, which is a money printing machine with the Google Store (although that's under attack too).
Really? Google would still have an astonishingly large lead in the ad markets.
Not sure how they could hold lead in case they lose search traffic.
> It's such a ridiculous proposal that would completely destroy Google's business.
it won't. My bet is that bing and some other indexes are 95% Ok for average Joe. But relevance ranking is much tougher problem, and "google.com" is household brand with many other functions(maps, news, stocks, weather, knowledge graph, shopping, videos), and that's what is foundation of google monopoly.
I think this shared index thing will actually kill competition even more, since every players will use only index owned by google now.
At this point, why are you so concerned about Google's business?
This was 10 years ago. I could argue a moral Superior that Google possessed over Microsoft and Facebook, but man those days are looooooong gone.
[flagged]
Sorry, but corporations are not people despite what some people will tell you.
They would definitely NOT survive in any recognizable form with "only a few billion dollars", because the stock price is a function of profits. Take away most of the profits, and most of the company's value gets wiped out, most of the employees would leave or get laid off, and anything of value that remains would quickly become worthless. Users would all move to the government-sanctioned replacement monopoly, likely X. To say nothing about the thousands of ordinary people who have large Alphabet holdings in their retirement portfolios and would be wiped out.
Google is practically the definition of a "too big to fail" company. They need to be reigned in to allow more competition, but straight up destroying the company would be a move so colossally stupid I could just see the Trump regime doing it.
This action comes a bit late, at the end of the "Search engine" era, at a time when AI responses from many sources are largely replacing the "Google Search".
Similar action happened against Microsoft Windows around 2000, just as the rise of web-based apps (online email, google docs, etc) largely made the underlying operating system less relevant to how people use their computers and apps.
So I read this as the dominant player can monopolize a market while it's relevant without an issue, and once the market starts to move on, the antitrust lawsuits come in to "make the market more competitive" at a time when that era is mostly over.
And trying to regulate early (as with the last administration's AI legislation that is now being repealed) we can see that only hindsight is 20/20, and regulating too early can kill a market. My conclusion is to just let the best product win, and even dominate for a while as this is part of the market cycle, and when a better product/platform comes along the market will move to it.
I would be you $1 that in five to ten years there will be zero "AI" players replacing search. But that's a different topic than this one.
I'd take that bet. AI players are already replacing search for a lot of users in a lot of cases.
Because we're still in the "get them hooked" stage where AI startups and Google/Meta are losing money on AI.
Once they start properly monetising (aka making users pay for what it actually costs them to train and run), it will be a different story. The vast majority of people won't pay $20-30€/month for an LLM to replace their search engine. (And an analysis I saw of OpenAI's business model and financial indicated they're losing money even on their paid tier, per query).
They’ll instead accept being manipulated and fed content influenced by money, be it ads or individualized content that somehow serves whoever is paying for it.
Read that again, but slowly.
Of course the AI answers will be subtly manipulated as it will be directly content influenced by money
Google themselves are trying to figure this out, with the first (top placement) of search results showing their Gemini AI Response, at least for me. I read this as an attempt to keep users on Google instead of asking Chat GPT or other some other AI. What's your take on that?
My take is that it's primarily a smart way to quickly gather lots of ELO/AB feedback about LLM responses for training, whilst also reducing people switching to ChatGPT. OpenAI has significant first mover advantage here and it's why they're so worried about distillation, becuase it threatens the moat.
Google, on the other hand, has a huge moat in access to probably the best search index available and existing infrastructure built around it. Not to mention the integration with Workspace emails, docs, photos - all sorts of things that can be used for training. But what they (presumably) lack is the feedback-derived data that OpenAI has had from the start.
ChatGPT does not use search grounding by default and the issues there are obvious. Both Gemini and ChatGPT make similar errors even with grounding but you would expect that to get better over time. It's an open research question as to what knowledge should be innate (in the weights) and what should be "queryable", but I do think the future will be an improved version of "intelligence" + "data lookup".
if you put a Carlin word (at least my favorite McNulty / Bunk one) in front of your search, it bypasses Gemini AI results
for a pristine moment you get to be in a club and they AIn't in it
Every AI chatbot to date suffers from the "Film expert" effect. That is when a script writer presents data from an "expert" in a movie or show to the audience in response to some information need on the part of the other characters. Writers are really good at making it sound credible. When an audience member experiences this interchange, generally they have one of two experiences. Either they know nothing about the subject (or the subject is made up like warp drive nacelle engineering) and they nod along at the response and factor it into their understanding of the story being told. Or, they do know a lot about the subject and the glaring inaccuracies jolt them out of the story temporarily as the suspension of disbelief is damaged.
LLMs write in an authoritative way because that is how the material they have been trained on writes. Because there is no "there" there, an LLM has no way of evaluating the accuracy of the answer it just generated. People who "search" using an LLM in order to get information about a topic have a better than even chance of getting something that is completely false, and if they don't have the foundation to recognize its false may incorporate that false information into their world view. That becomes a major embarrassment later when they regurgitate that information, or act on that information in some way, that comes back to bite them.
Gemini has many examples of things it has presented authoritatively that are stochastic noise. The current fun game is to ask "Why do people say ..." and create some stupid thing like "Too many cats spoil the soup." That generates an authoritative sounding answer from Gemini that is just stupid. Gemini can't say "I don't know, I've never seen anything that says people say that."
As companies push these things out into more and places, more and more people will get the experience of believing something false because some LLM told them it was true. And like that friend of yours who always has an answer for every question you ask, but you keep finding out a bunch of them are just bullshit, you will rely on that information less and less. And eventually, like your buddy with all the answers, you stop asking them questions you actually want the answer too.
I'm not down on "LLMs" per se, but I do not believe there is any evidence that they can be relied on for anything. The only thing I have seen, so far, that they can do well is help someone struggling with a blank page get started. That's because more people than not struggle with starting from a blank page but have no trouble correcting something that is wrong, or re-writing it into something.
"Search" is multifaceted. Blekko found a great use case for reference librarians. They would have paid Blekko to provide them an index of primary sources that they could use. The other great use is shopping if you can pair it with your social network. (Something Blekko suggested to Facebook but Zuck was really blind to that one) Blekko had a demo where you could say, "Audi car dealer" and it would give you the results ranked by your friend's ratings on their service. I spent a lot of time at Blekko denying access to the index by criminals who were searching for vulnerable WordPress plugins or e-commerce shopping carts. Chat GPT is never going to give you a list of all sites on the Internet running a vulnerable version of Wordpress :-).
So my take is the LLM isn't a replacement for search and efforts to make it so will stagnate and die leaving "Search Classic" to take up the slack.
If you trained a model on a well vetted corpus and gave it the tools to say it didn't know, I could see it as being a better "textbook" then a physical textbook. But it still needs to know what it doesn't know.
Search will become AI. It might be that there be zero "AI" players involved though as Google is just as capable of doing AI.
I’ve started using ChatGPT to look up most things I used to Google. It gives me immediate, concise results without having to parse bloated websites full of ads and other garbage.
I will take that bet Chuck. Maybe not completely replace, but AI will be the defacto search platform. I find myself using Google less and less these days
I only use Google when I am in the mood to search for something and find it below the fold after scrolling through mindless semi-related sponsored links
If for no other reason that I can perform combination searches.
I don’t need to search MQTT and AWS and v3/v5 and max packet sizes all separately anymore.
> This action comes a bit late, at the end of the "Search engine" era, at a time when AI responses from many sources are largely replacing the "Google Search".
AIs are using search indices more and more. Google has the largest, and there is risk of Google using its monopoly in search (in particular their index) to give themselves an unfair advantage in the nascent AI market.
This feels a bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face...
Unlike Microsoft's antitrust case of the 90s, Google seems much less anti-competitive by nature. Sure, they have unprecedented scale in search... but even that hegemony is being threatened by others in AI.
If anything, going after Google with a DoJ kludgel will cause a servere freeze on startup M&A across all of FAANG. With IPO windows (mostly) closed, this removes the biggest exit dynamic the startup ecosystem has at its disposal. This is not a good thing from my perspective, and would seem counter to YC's interests.
Someone steelman this for me...?
YC should benefit most from an ecosystem where distribution channels (search, ads, etc) are not monopolized.
Startups ideally should compete on merit, not on whether they are eventually allowed access to Google’s platforms or get acquired. Startups can still exit via IPO, PE acquisition, cross-industry buyers or M&A.
From this POV, Google’s control over the adtech stack may be seen as gatekeeping digital advertising, which many YC companies rely on.
> seems much less anti-competitive by nature
It seems much less, but I don't believe it is much less anticompetitive. We're talking about the search market specifically in this case, and the government has presented strong evidence that Google is:
* Using its position in other markets (browser, mobile) to ensure that others can't compete in search.
* Paying the major other vendors in those markets (browser, mobile) enormous sums of money to ensure that ~100% of the market share in both markets is used to prop up their lead in search.
Both of these things are pretty blatantly anticompetitive: they're competing not primarily based on the quality of their product offering but instead based on their pre-existing revenue streams and their leads in other markets.
Google killed the Edge browser with the same tricks MS used.
The use money and Google Play services to hinder competition.
Not really less anti-competitive.
Anecdotal, but I wanted to give Edge a chance. I found out that it is quite possibly the most feature-creep rich browser on the market. Its sole purpose seems to be “let Microsoft monitor your entire browsing experience”.
I also feel like Microsoft’s heavy handed dark patterns trick less computer savvy people into using it, and those people probably aren’t aware of how much info Microsoft is collecting about them. As a result, I seriously question that Edge’s market share is organic because people actually like it.
Chrome has become that for google.
Google didn't kill the Edge browser, Microsoft gave up. If Mozilla can have an independent from scratch browser, Microsoft of all companies could have one too. It's just easier and cheaper for them to rebrand Chromium and call it a day.
And I'm not buying the argument that progress on the Web (tech stack) should stop so that it's easier to make/maintain a browser.
Some of us would have preferred for "progress" on the web stack to have stopped about 20 years ago.
I grew up in the dial-up era but personally think it's incredibly cool how I am able to use a full featured IDE, flash an ESP-32 or my phone via USB, make low latency Zoom/Teams calls with screen sharing, run language agnostic bytecode and utilize low level GPU access, all in a highly secure sandbox on my Macbook, Linux/Windows Thinkpad, $100 Chromebook, tablet and phone.
By one measure, Edge has 5% market share, twice that of Firefox.
On Desktop it’s 13%, which is second place.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
Corporate is a huge, huge part of this.
Lots of people working just use whatever browser is preloaded. In addition, you can't even download another browser in a lot of environments.
Does that chart differentiate between before and after edge internals became chromium though?
Does it matter? It seems like distribution is more important than the internals.
When people say that Google killed the Edge browser they generally mean that MS gave up on maintaining their own browser engine and the world moved that much closer to a web monoculture. To put this in historical perspective, a reskinned IE would not have been a meaningful or useful competitor to IE.
I don’t think it’s a meaningful comparison because Microsoft has the resources to fork Chromium if they need to. But since it works pretty well, there’s little incentive to do that. It would be like Electron forking V8 for no reason.
Google is now a basic utility. Unless you don't believe in basic public goods, allowing equitable access to the utility benefits everyone, especially businesses.
Public goods are non-excludable (impossible to prevent anyone from using the good) and non-rivalrous (one person's use doesn't diminish the availability for others). Google doesn't match the criteria.
You've cherrypicked the phrase "public good" and applied an out of context definition that doesn't fit. The thing being discussed was public utilities. Those are a sort of public good in the same sense that public parks, public libraries, and free education are all public goods.
The local electric utility isn't "non-excludable" (unless you ignore criminal law) but it is certainly a public utility, a natural monopoly, and public good by most metrics. The vast majority of jurisdictions regulate it accordingly.
Interesting definition. This applies to almost literally nothing except Jefferson’s candle and IP. Actual literal fire is considered worthless and IP is bazillions of dollars of closely guarded secrets. Public transits, seemingly unlimited water sources, or neighborhood parks all suffer from overcrowding so this diminishing availability thing is tough to meet
It is the actual definition since economist Paul Samuelson coined it in 1954.
Things like public parks and public pools would be classic examples of a "Common resource." Rival and non-excludable.
Classic examples of true public goods would be public radio broadcasting or national defense.
At some point in the past couple decades, people have come to misunderstand the term. Having heard the argument that public goods justify taxation to fund them, they come to believe that anything they like must be a public good.
Public goods is an economics term with an actual meaning, and it has nothing to do with public utilities.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/public-good.asp
Interesting distinction!
Utilities and infrastructure can be considered public goods insofar as they have the characteristics of non-rivalry and non-excludability, meaning that one person's use of them does not diminish another person's ability to use them and it is difficult to prevent others from using them even if they have not contributed to their provision.
However, utilities are typically excludable (service can be cut off for non-payment) and rivalrous to some extent (there are capacity limits and usage can impact others), so they are better classified as private or quasi-public goods.
So why is this idea so prevalent: that public goods should be public utilities?
A key driver behind the transformation of some public goods into regulated public utilities seems to be the theory of "natural monopoly," which posits that certain industries are most efficiently served by a single provider, making competition impractical or wasteful. Then in 1919 the economic theory of public goods, notably developed by Erik Lindahl, further contributed to the myth by arguing that public goods should be funded through taxation based on individual benefit. This reinforced the notion that the government should organize and finance such goods, often through public utility models.
So I wouldn't say public goods have nothing to do with public utilities.
Fair, definitionally they are entirely distinct. In the real world, the concepts interact. The number one in distinct from the number two, but they relate and interact in a vast number of ways.
As it relates to Google search, I think it is very difficult to construct an argument that search is a natural monopoly. There's no limitations on parallel processes the way there are with roads or railroads or electric infrastructure. In fact, people have access to a long list of competitors at all times.
You can make it much better case that they are engaging in monopolistic practices, which is a claim very different from a natural constraint
> it has nothing to do with public utilities.
This doesn't follow from the linked article. Taxes can be levied in various ways, oftentimes related to usage. Involving a private entity doesn't suddenly change the nature of the thing. There's a marked difference between a sack of flour and my electric meter.
We as a society decide to make certain things into public goods. This is frequently the choice for natural monopolies.
Critiquing the article you linked - when taken literally non-rivalrous applies to approximately nothing. Non-excludability is simply a matter of law, which is a matter of what the voting public wants.
See my response here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43950097
The real killer is that Google perfected the ad-paid model, and launched an entire ecosystem on top of it
Paid competitors cannot compete because people won't pay. People want the death of Google because people hate ads and tracking.
Ultimately it is an everyone loses situation. No one is going to fly in a replace Google without either 1.) Charging a monthly sub or 2.) Invasive (yet most profitable) ad tracking.
This is exactly why youtube stands alone too. What company looks at youtube's userbase and says "Yes, I want to cater to people who despise subscriptions and block ads". Exactly what vid.me did in 2017, which everyone celebrated until the went bankrupt.
Google doesn't own all of ads though, only search ads. Facebook nets $70 billion per year with an ad system that prints golden bricks. No-one cares how it works due to it makes so much money. 80% of shares are held by institutions.
> People want the death of Google because people hate ads and tracking.
> Paid competitors cannot compete because people won't pay.
Seems to me they're different groups of people. Otherwise, if people hate ads, why don't they pay?
I don't agree it's an everyone loses situation. Enough people don't mind or prefer the ads based ecosystem for it to continue.
IMO, more sophisticated ad blockers (I.e real control over one's devices) used by more people, would make the ad tech ecosystem a lot less profitable. After all, ads only work when you can control what the other person sees.
Garmin user here. Maybe the last one on the planet? (my kid thinks I'm nuts).
Many of the comments are about how great Google's products are (or aren't). But the case is about anti-competitive behavior. Personally, I hate how a bulk of the internet now consists of surveillance. All this amazing tech brilliance.. resting on a foundation that's about getting us to buy more junk. I will be happy if this lawsuit reduces that (even a little bit).
The really uncompetitive behaviour started when Google removed the search string from search links. That killed 3rd party (and home-grown) analytics, which in turn facilitated large scale tracking of users from site with analytics to site with analytics.
If you wanted to know how your keywords were performing you had to use Google Analytics.
Make no mistake. This is, first and foremost, a big, for-profit corporation fighting a bigger, for-profit corporation, for its own financial interests. Nevertheless, we may stand to benefit, if only incidentally.
In particular, if the legal authorities start to unwind Google, I actually think Chrome and Android are more important to wall off or spin out than anything advertising or AI related.
So should Gmail et al go with Chrome or with Android?
I'm less worried about GMail. It's much easier to start a GMail competitor today (in relative, not absolute, terms) than a Chrome or Android competitor, because of network effects. For example, Fastmail is tiny (comparatively speaking), and will probably stay tiny forever, but their service works fine, and there's no major obstacles (comparatively speaking) to replacing GMail with Fastmail for any of us personally.
Is it really?
I think any potential competitors face many of the same pitfalls as, say, Chrome competitors do. Maybe even worse. Google slams its weight around when web standards are being designed so as to unilaterally benefit Chrome, but (at least in theory) it's a fundamentally cooperative process where everyone at least gets some sort of input to direct where each standard goes.
In GMail's case, they can just arbitrarily shut off any competitor who might be gaining steam and kill them off before they can reach critical mass and sustain themselves. Just categorize them as 'spam' and make sure to redirect their emails 100% of the time and they've won.
EDIT: just saw your edit. You're kinda right, but if Fastmail ever really starts growing then Google will take harsher actions to stymie it off. Maybe if a lot of small services start to collectively take a bigger slice of the market then they'd succeed at keeping Google at bay? I'm not so sure.
> Is it really?
Yes, of course it is. How many search competitors do you see out there? If you ignore resellers like ddg, these is bing, kangi, and country specific ones like Baidu. Email providers are a dime a dozen - Fastmail, Outlook, Protron, .. Google it, it's a long list. Hell. I run my own. I could not even contemplate building a web indexing engine.
Google started to merge both (ChromeOS+Android) so maybe they would be sold together
Microsoft is the obvious buyer for Android and Chrome, lol. Let the circle complete.
It's good for YC to do this and will benefit every startup in the long run. Google has been one of the sources of the AI boom, and provides liquidity by acquiring startups. But as YC argues they've monopolised distribution channels to the point where you need to go through the Google toll booth every time you want to access the market. This tax on founders to reach their audience makes many types of businesses unsustainable and impossible, especially for products where usage != sharing.
> and provides liquidity by acquiring startups
You mean kills potentially successful tech companies of the future by acquiring startups to cement their dominance.
I get why people on this site are in love with the idea of building an unsustainable, money-losing business where the only path to success is being acquired by a tech giant. It's like winning the lottery! But it helps nobody, it hurts your customers/users, and it hurts innovation. It's also stupid, as a successful tech company could potentially grow as big as the giants you're courting (ESPECIALLY now that the FTC has started finally doing its job). Why else do you think they're spending so much money to acquire you? It's easier on the ego to call it an "acquihire", but the truth is that they're just paying a maintenance tax on their monopoly.
Every time people complain about how detrimental big tech is to society, it ultimately comes down to this sad strategy.
Of course it is good for YC to do this. They have significant investments in OpenAI both directly and indirectly through the countless startups they've funded whose core is OpenAI.
And it's ridiculous to act like (a) you are forced to go through Google to access the 'market' and (b) that this is somehow unusual or untoward. They are an advertising company and not the only one.
Isn't there an obvious conflict of interest here? YC Wil benefit if Google is to share its index with startups. YC will fund hundreds of companies and then one of them will end up monopoly. What kind of bs is this. Cycle repeats.
Kind of the point of breaking up a monopoly is that it benefits a lot of the rest of the industry since the monopoly had been hindering it before. Also, it looks like you are saying any interest = a conflict of interest. Should only entities that have no interest in this matter be allowed to file in this way?
It's disappointing to see the historical revisionism in these threads. Say what you will about google now, but the idea that they just bought their way into X industry doesn't seem right. Until maybe 10 years ago, tech people almost universally loved Google's offerings and adopted them eagerly because they were good. I remember the mad scramble on various forums for a gmail invite. I remember when google maps came about, it was a revelation compared to mapquest and so on. You could scroll the map instead of clicking buttons to jump half a screen at a time! For years 0-5 at least, chrome was almost universally loved by tech people. Process isolation, speed, lack of toolbar shitware, etc.
At every company I've been at, half the dependencies came from big tech, and more than half of those were built and maintained by google. bazel, kubernetes, test frameworks, tensorflow, etc. these are just the big ones. There are a lot of smaller libraries from google that we've used too, and more still that aren't owned by google but they invest a lot of engineering time into.
I don't know what the right answer is to the google of today, but the cavalier assumption that google has simply leveraged a monopoly in search to build everything else it has doesn't add up to me.
Meanwhile Apple, also sitting on infinite cash, is easily entertained by toying with regulators around the world and contributes back almost nothing in comparison to Google.
Heck, they can't even be bothered to fund a single developer to help their hardware run Linux.
Why would Apple have developers working on their hardware running Linux? Apple doesn’t use Linux.
They aren’t the biggest oss dev, but they have a decent amount of contributions. [0][1]
It’s hard to compare how much Google vs Apple contributes to open source, but not sure why anyone would think Apple “contributes back almost nothing.”
[0] https://github.com/appleopen
[1] https://opensource.apple.com/projects/
Please stare at your own links for a second.
Let me help you:
https://github.com/orgs/appleopen/repositories?q=sort%3Astar...
Their most popular repo in that entire account has 8 stars.
I have multiple personal repos with more usage than that.
As for the other link. More than half of those projects are Apple specific.
https://github.com/swiftlang/swift
Gmail and GMaps were 20 years ago. Chrome, almost 15 years ago.
You keep qualifying your comments with "by tech people" but the problem is that Google bought their way into non-tech people's computers. Every single Google product on every single pageload had an "install Chrome" link at the top. Every Chrome release blurred the line between 'signing into chrome' and 'signing into google' and, later, 'signing into your phone'. Most Google products broke on non-Chrome browsers on such a regular cadence that deliberate sabotage was a common assumption. So yes, Google has always been a darling to the "tech people", but the aggressive ways they worked to ensure that people adopted Chrome were very real.
You're right. And that really shows you how destructive Google has been.
10-20 years ago Google was amazing. Their products were great. We all wanted them.
And now, we have pretty much exactly those products. Almost nothing has improved in 10+ years. That's exactly the behavior of a monopoly.
Their products are now aggressively hostile to users and their interests. Like Chrome trying to kill of ad blockers.
Google now sits on what is now a low quality outdated product forever using their market power to keep everyone else out.
That's why we have antitrust laws. To kill Googles.
The search part of Google doesn’t bother me. I have other options and I now reach for an llm first, then fall back to ddg. What I do think needs to be separated are: 1) Ads and analytics 2) Chrome 3) Google Play Services.
Googles ad platform and analytics are difficult to avoid. Even with browser extensions, dns blocking, and aggressive firewall rules, this is virtually impossible to avoid. I am shocked at how many websites and apps break when these are blocked. There needs to be a much healthier ecosystem without a single company gobbling all this up.
Chrome is also a big issue. Google has regularly used its web sites and android to heavily push chrome. They also use that influence for web “standards” that are not really standards. On top of it, even googles own sites are often terrible with non chrome based browsers. We need a variety of user agents and we need real standards that a truly independent body has a say in. The web has matured and we don’t need to be in a race for new apis and features right now.
Google play services are also a huge pain point. When developing for Android, you almost have to use them. Running Android without Google Play services or with an alternate is a futile effort if you want any sort of main stream app. My degoogled work phone is mostly useless for anything. We definitely need standards for these services with replaceable components that are transparent to the apps.
AI is the most competitive and healthy large industry I have seen. Having a search index helps just like having tweets for x.ai, but data isn’t the deciding factor.
Competitive maybe. Healthy almost certainly not. My definition for healthy industries is being able to fund operations and development either by revenues or debt. Not by continuously raising capital from investors and then burning it on hardware and operating costs.
So no YC companies are healthy…
> but data isn’t the deciding factor.
That remains to be seen. The fear is that Google can leverage its large search index to produce better LLM experiences and win in that market too.
It's not the deciding factor yet. You can bet the IP hammer is going to swing in again once the big players have been decided just to keep the small players out.
[dead]
Having a monopoly is not against the law. Harming consumers is. The remedies should address the former not the later. Google's monopoly was earned by engineering excellence.
As others have pointed out, YC is definitely trying to get some of that Google money. Another important aspect that benefits YC is a turn of events that would improve the talent pool. Google retains tens of thousands of software engineers, I’d argue maybe the biggest reserve in existence. It’s the largest population of experienced engineers that won’t leave because the money and circumstances are too good. Startups would benefit if these circumstances changed
that is not a google problem that is a big tech problem. people move where the money is and the money flows to google easily because ads is such a lucrative business. if you force the talent pool to move off google, meta or amazon will easily absorb them
More talent with less demand means lower wages and/or worse benefits. My situation at Google can’t be matched at Amazon or Meta (remote work, pay, WLB, other benefits). I’d have to compromise if the climate changes but not much will make me leave… ever. I have a friend that has been trying to get me to join a startup for years and the risk just isn’t worth the reward
Is an Amicus brief just a way the legal profession sells ad space in high profile cases?
You pay a lawyer a few thousand bucks to write some populist bromides you get to slap your name in the news. Seems like a good ROI.
Currently most websites have a snip of code that posts to Google when a visitor arrives. The cookie there is linked to an identity and later used to push ads, and metrics for the site user. It seems like this is the thing to make broadly available. Anyone with $ can index the web. But nobody can get every websites to update to post to 2+ destinations. Multiple companies should be able to listen to that feed, and then be responsible for tracking and indexing on their own.
Not a good document. Needs a faded picture of a dragon on every page.
Google is much bigger than a Monopoly, it is a multi-monopoly, Search, web ads, email, video, maps / nav, User data / metrics.
If you had told me in early 2000s that google would absolutely dominate all of these fields And it would be allowed to continue for decades, I wouldn't believe you.
I'm a free market guy, I believe some small gov is nessasary to regulate monopolies, protect constitutional rights etc, but multi-monopolies- I can't believe are allowed to exist under such a large beaurocratic superstate with left or right in power.
Do you think the world benefits from this monopoly though? I think the world would be a worse place without Google, a much worse place. While it would be nice to live in some timeline were lots of choices for search (there actually are, people are just lazy and don't like change), but we built a world with Google and let it get to where its at. We will just be shooting ourselves in our own foot, at least in the short term.
This argument is very similar to that for "enlightened monarch" kind of despotism.
The fundamental problem is that, even if you buy the notion that this particular ruler is really so enlightened that they are a net benefit, there's no guarantee that this will still be the case in the future.
So, even if you believe that Google provides net benefit today, letting them acquire more and more power is a bad idea because they aren't necessarily going to give you free things tomorrow. Indeed, the logic of capitalism dictates that they stop doing so as soon as there's no more competition, however small, that continues to contest that particular niche.
We simply can't know if there would be better alternatives because of it. Any competition is acquired or dies and it has been like this for years.
But then again monopolies are the final form of capitalism so there's no real way to avoid them. Maybe on an utopia where we have strong regulations and can shield them from being influenced by money. Not gonna happen.
It's 100% Google saves my data. And gives me an option to delete that data. It uses that data, and while I have some degree of control over it, i don't have full control over it.
As a user it's preposterous that any kind of data generated by me is anonymized (or not) and effectively sold to a third party. First party usage is kind of understandable. What YC and the govt is asking is that Google should be forced to do exactly that? Sell some data points about me generated by my interactions without my consent. That too it seems for no fee. Without even asking for the permission from the users. What kind of clown world are we living in? I dont care if its anonymized.
Presumably, if that data is so useful, why dont all of these companies lining up to pay the users?Take permission from the users, pay them, and then use whatever they want. Data is only useful in the aggregate, pay ln the aggregate too for whatever revenue and market cap they reach. Doing it without the user consent in 2025 is weird.
> Presumably, if that data is so useful, why dont all of these companies lining up to pay the users?
Because users are lining up to give away their data.
TL;DR: YC just filed an amicus brief in the Google-search antitrust case. They tell the judge that (1) Google’s default-search/pay-to-play deals crushed the “kill-zone” around search, keeping VCs away; and (2) the coming wave of AI-search/agentic tools will suffer the same fate unless the court imposes forward-looking remedies—open Google’s index, ban exclusive data+distribution deals, bar self-preferencing, add anti-circumvention teeth, and even spin off Android if Google backslides. YC frames this as the 2025 equivalent of the 1956 Bell Labs decree and the 2001 Microsoft decision: rip open the gate so the next Google can be born.
Summarized by o3:
1. Why YC cares
- VC “kill-zone.” YC says Google’s decade of default-search contracts (Apple, carriers, OEMs) froze half of all U.S. search queries, scaring investors away from search/AI startups.
- AI inflection point. Generative/query-based/agentic AI could disrupt search—but only if newcomers can reach users and train on data Google hoards. Without action, Google will “pull the ladder up” again.
2. What YC wants the court to order
- Open index & dataset access. Force Google to license its search index + anonymized click/embedding data on fair, reasonable terms so rivals can build ranking stacks + AI models.
- No self-preferencing in AI results. Google can’t boost Gemini-style tools or demote rivals. No exclusive AI-training corpora access either.
- Ban pay-to-play defaults. Outlaw “billions to be the default” (search, voice, browser, OS, car). No payments for choice-screen placement.
- Anti-circumvention & retaliation guardrails. Independent monitoring, fast dispute resolution, steep fines, and—if Google cheats—possible Android spinoff.
3. Historical playbook YC cites
- 1956 AT&T consent decree opened Bell Labs patents → semiconductor boom.
- 2001 Microsoft browser decree → Firefox, Chrome, Google itself.
- 2023–24 Nvidia-Arm block → both companies exploded in AI.
- YC says same pattern can unlock “the next Stripe/Airbnb—but for search/AI.”
4. Why HN should care
- Open Index ≈ ultimate dev API. Lets you build retrieval-augmented AI agents without a nation-state’s crawl budget.
- Distribution shake-up. Killing default deals revives mobile/browser competition; could birth real alt-search on phones.
- VC signal. YC telling a judge “give us a level field and we’ll bankroll challengers” means real capital is ready.
- Policy trend. Regulators now want to pre-wire markets (index access, AI data parity, Android contingency) before the next moat forms.
5. Bottom line: This isn’t about a fine. It’s about cracking open the data + distribution bottlenecks that froze search since 2009. If Judge Mehta adopts YC/DOJ’s plan, the door opens for real search/AI innovation—and VCs are ready to sprint through it.
It would be cool if Apple/Google/gatekeepers considered similar measures for the App Store / Google Play related search where similar constraints apply.
> As a result, YC has an interest in ensuring that U.S. technology markets are free from anticompetitive barriers to entry and expansion.
This part reads like a suggestion to loosen anti-competitive/antitrust law.
Why? The point of antitrust is to promote market fairness.
I don't trust YC very much, but I do trust they want a share of the pie. And they're not wrong that Google has monopolized and stagnated search. I think you're reading too much into that sentence?
In terms of fairness, competition and monopolies is there a chart that shows how much tax payer funding each search engine has received upon creation, annually and indirectly? e.g. donating NASA hangers for server hosting and experiments, heavily discounted real estate and land, tax breaks for power, etc... Put another way, who has the biggest monopoly on direct and indirect tax-payer funding?
> Put another way, who has the biggest monopoly on direct and indirect tax-payer funding?
The Pentagon.
It really concerns me that Chrome will no longer be funded by Google.
How much things have changed when antitrust used mean unfair practices by real monopolies. Real monopolies. Standard Oil which you had no choice in what gas you used. The Bell System(ATT) controlled all of long distance, you had no choice to use them for making long distance calls. Microsoft owned 95% of the market when they got with antitrust, there was other OSes but your software wouldn't run on those OSes. Consumers had no choice. We got stuck with shitty products that were overpriced.
Now antitrust means punishing companies that are too good. Their product is too superior. Even though Windows, the most used computer OS, literally defaults bing search but consumers change it to google. They are choosing to use google. We're going to punish the company that makes a product so good users don't want to use other products. They clearly have choice. There is no switching cost to what search engine you use. Its sad when companies who can't make a product people that people't don't want to use instead to use regulatory capture to prevent real competition in the search engine market. Just make a better product.
I haven’t looked at the merits, and I don’t like what the EU is doing to US companies with 20% market share, but I remember feeling the same way about Microsoft over 20 years ago. Fortunately, groklaw provided a constant stream of easily readable, high quality content. That, and I could see some of my favorite companies shutting down because their customers were restricted from doing business with them if they wanted to sell Windows.
This isn’t about search, it’s about their ad monopoly. They are not being punished for search or related products. I’m actually not sure how breaking out the search index helps in this situation. I would think splitting out off-Google advertising is the more obvious break and one that would benefit humanity. (Ad networks can die in a fire.)
This is to separate search index from Google.
Ad is even worse as Google doesn’t even control the majority of digital marketing market. Only case i can think of is the Amex case but Supreme Court rightly found you can’t be an abusive monopoly and have less than a majority of the market.
Google is the reason for the current AI boom. Without the transformer architecture they invented by funding basic research, there would be no modern LLMs. YC is arguing that their incentive for funding that basic research should be taken away in order to spur innovation?
But when AT&T had a monopoly it funded Bell Labs which was responsible for much innovation.
Then AT&T was shut down and Bell Labs went away.
If we take your argument seriously then AT&T shouldn’t have been dismantled. But it was a good thing AT&T was dismantled. It helped lead to the modern internet.
By your logic all Rockefeller had to do in the early 20th century was set up a lab to do basic research and then Standard Oil wouldn’t have been broken up.
Monopolies should be broken up. This is true regardless of any basic research that they fund.
And it was an antitrust action that unlocked a lot of that value. The consent decree required Bell Labs to license its patents (e.g. transistors) for reasonable royalties. The same consent decree also forbid AT&T from entering new industries like computing. So after they built UNIX, they sold the source code 'as-is' to universities for $200 ($20k for businesses).
You could also say, though, that this is what caused AT&T to be what it is today - disliked by their customers.
Ask anyone who was alive back then and they will tell you stories of how legendarily awful AT&T was to deal with. My father has told me several. The antitrust action made things better for regular people by allowing them to do things like buy their own handsets or haggle over price.
What telecom today will actually haggle
All of them, in regions where they don't have a vertical monopoly. You can negotiate away installation fees and monthly package pricing on DSL, TV, internet phone... also sometimes get a no-contract deal instead of locking in for 24/28 mths with the dreaded ETF which is a large part of Comcast's profitability.
They won't haggle with consumers, but for large business customers the prices and other terms are absolutely negotiable.
As the other person said, you must be young.
They are disliked now as much as they were disliked then. Except back then they charged you a hell of a lot for long distance.
> it was a good thing AT&T was dismantled
Citation needed. I hear this repeated, but the consumer experience was it was split into regional monopolies, and consumers now had to deal with both local and long distance, and both were still monopolies. It only got better with competition from mobile providers.
Long distance rates when down.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/09/att-breakup-spin...
Long distance was not a monopoly once competitors came along that provided better and cheaper service, all before the rise of mobile.
I was looking for a citation and instead found a number of vague or biased papers.
Suprisingly there’s an archived DoJ page that says that the same remedies may have been much cheaper to achieve through other means.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/atr/att-divestiture-was-it-...
YMMV. I don’t agree with the narrowness of this analysis, and would like to see some links to academic studies in economics and the study of innovation tbh.
The consumer experience was AT&T telling you to go fuck yourself. Everyone hated them with a burning passion.
I'm pretty sympathetic to both sides of this. I don't really know the history well enough to say whether you're right that breaking up AT&T "helped lead to the modern internet". But even stipulating that it did, the loss of monopoly era Bell Labs was tragic.
Both things can be true! It's entirely possible (probable even) that breaking up monopolies has both positive and negative impact.
And I would be a lot more sympathetic if we had a lot more public investment in technology. But we don't. What I see is both public and private research investment under major attack. I think that's a recipe for disaster.
“Monopolies should be broken up” doesn’t imply we should disincentivize research though, does it?
I think the implication is that in a high competition area Noone has the spare funds for massive research projects that may go nowhere
That's what governments are (supposed to be) for.
No. And?
Right, if you look back through the history of ideas, every breakthrough builds on prior research and inventions. In the realm of patents and copyrights, this is acknowledged formally: they expire after a certain time and enter the public domain. This also supports the view that the current state of the world, for better or worse, owes much to the past and those who came before (living or not living elements).
There's actually a pretty solid argument to be made that the railways were never more effective than during the days of Rockefeller, when he could throw his money around to force otherwise-competing railways to optimize their work in an industry that has some fundamental strong incentives to be non-competitive (it rarely makes any sense to run two rail lines purely for competition reasons and leads to a race to the bottom on pricing).
... but that's more a story of the failure of the US government to go far enough and nationalize the rail network and its operations. The most efficient era of US rail was during World War II, when the military took it over and prioritized schedules by optimal throughput over profit concerns.
Bell Labs being defunded by a deregulated/competetive AT&T was precisely what led to the attempted commercialization of Unix and the near death of what would eventually be called "open source", though. In history as it stands, we had GNU and Linux and all that we lost was a few years.
But it's easy to imagine a world where that didn't happen and BSD was just killed dead. So no OS X, no iOS, no Android, no ChromeOS, and the only vendor able to stand on its own is the one we all agree had the worst product.
Ironically the world where the Bell monopoly was left in place seems to me to be one where we're all stuck running Microsoft Windows on everything, no?
I mean, fine, there's nuance to everything but the idea that "well, open research isn't so important" seems frankly batshit to me. Monopolies fall on their own all the time (Microsoft's did too!). You can't get stuff into the public space that wasn't ever there to begin with.
You’re making the assumption that only corporations can fund or perform basic research. But the transistor was actually the culmination of decades of research by materials scientists and physicists in university and other labs into semiconductors before anyone realized there were applications.
>Monopolies fall on their own all the time (Microsoft's did too!)
What in the heck are you talking about??? After Microsoft was convicted, even though they never received any actual punishment, the were very internally cautions about any behaviors that could be perceived as monopolistic. This is like a total misinterpretation of what actually occurred on your part.
And yes, monopolies do fall, after very long periods of time. Some monopoly sitting around 25 years may not seem like much, but that's half an average persons working life.
You responded to a parenthetical. The point was about AT&T, not Microsoft. And yes, they effectively killed BSD, relenting only in the late 90's once it became clear that (post-Linux) there was little value left in Unix. In a different universe, they go to the mattresses with SysV against Windows NT and lose, and we have nothing.
You can do basic research without being monopolistic.
Yet empirically, the biggest funders of basic research have historically been monopolies. The US government was, at least up until the last few months, the largest funder of basic research globally and it obviously maintains multiple different monopolies, a monopoly on legal use of force, a functional monopoly on financial transactions as the global reserve currency, and I'm sure others. Excluding national governments, Bell Labs and IBM were both probably the biggest funders of basic research in the last century during their respective heydays. Bell was obviously a monopoly and while IBM might never have faced anti-trust penalties, they did at one point control 70% of the mainframe market and the DoJ did bring a case against them (that was eventually dismissed by the Reagan administration.)
I think there are many good reasons to pursue anti-trust action against companies that are in a dominant market position, but we should be honest about the tradeoffs. Businesses that have to aggressively compete to maintain market share don't have the slack to fund basic research.
Is this not a bit "tail wagging the dog" thinking? There wasn't much innovation in telecommunications once Bell's monopoly was entrenched. Once it dissipated, innovation was everywhere in the space. Similarly, computers had less innovation while IBM was a monopoly than they've had since its monopoly dissipated.
Though both companies created novel & useful inventions, the biggest shifts in those industries during those monopoly eras were from outside those organisations by competitive startups. As an example, IBM should have produced Microsoft, but they didn't. They missed out on a multi-trillion dollar value creation opportunity as a result.
There's a difference between conducting basic research and bringing new inventions to the market in the form of consumer goods or services. Monopolies are much, much worse at doing the latter than normal businesses because they have no competition pressuring them to improve their offerings.
> There wasn't much innovation in telecommunications once Bell's monopoly was entrenched. Once it dissipated, innovation was everywhere in the space.
I don't think that's accurate at all. If we take say 1920 or so as the date when the monopoly was entrenched and 1984 as the break-up, there was tons of innovation in telecom in that time period. Novel telecom technologies introduced in that time period include television, microwave relays, satellite communications, submarine telephone cables, cellular telephones, fiber optics, electronic telephone switching, packet switching, the Internet.
Which is why, like the 'monopoly on violence' the government should also be funding a _lot more research_.
It should be at, or partnered with, higher learning institutions and since it's public funded all of the results should be free to use*. I'm willing to entertain the idea of: Free use for people and corporations within the country/countries that funded research, everyone else pays compulsory license fees.
But public funded research isn’t “free to use.” In many cases, you can’t even read it without paying a scientific journal for a subscription. See the Bayh-Dole Act as well: universities can patent discoveries from federally funded research.
These aren't contradictory ideas. Governments should fund more research and should also make it free.
There’s no reason that couldn’t be changed, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43858568.
Publications with public funding have already escaped the paywall, partially as of 2013 and completely as of this year:
https://par.nsf.gov/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
https://ospo.gwu.edu/overview-us-policy-open-access-and-open...
https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statem...
https://www.coalition-s.org/plan_s_principles/
The intent of the Bayh-Dole Act was to deal with a perceived problem of government-owned patents being investor-unfriendly. At the time the government would only grant non-exclusive licenses, and investors generally want exclusivity. That may have been the actual problem, moreso than who owned the patent. On the other hand, giving the actual inventors an incentive to commercialize their work should increase their productivity and the chance that the inventions actually get used.
> I think there are many good reasons to pursue anti-trust action against companies that are in a dominant market position, but we should be honest about the tradeoffs.
Okay. I’ll take the monopolostic government over the monopolistic corporation. Thanks.
This line of argument to defend monopolies is the same line of argument against progressive taxation of high incomes. Just because those with trends excess use some small fraction of that excess to do good does not justify the means.
I have been close enough to billionaires and how they spend their money to not be fully impressed by such arguments.
And certainly the robber barons of the 2000s spend far less on the public good than when tax rates were higher and they used to fund universities, libraries, hospitals and the like.
The biggest funders of basic research are those with the most resources. This is your insight? I don't think anyone disagrees. Then you conflate correlation with causation and move it to _monopolies_ fund basic research. Bravo.
Major monopolies tend to have the most resources, particularly excess resources that are available to spend on things like research.
That’s not suprising at all, though. It doesn’t imply that monopolies are a net benefit for society.
That's true, but if it weren't for Google's monopolist position, I doubt they'd have the money to throw at the wall for random research. For every AI transformer they revolutionized, there's a self-driving car project that's dragging on for decades.
Had Google operated like a normal company, the risk/reward of this kind of research would've looked completely differently.
Google's monopoly helped research along in the same way totalitarian countries like China are developing infrastructure at break-neck speed: if you don't need to care about pesky rights and regulations, you can do things that would otherwise be impossible.
I don't think Google's monopoly is worth having the current generation of lie generator bots around, but I don't think generative AI would be where it is right now had Google been forced to comply with antitrust regulations ten years ago.
It's funny that you use self driving cars as a negative example. We have a perfect natural experiment to look at to compare the slower research-driven approach (Waymo) to the "normal company" short term profit driven approach (Tesla).
From where I'm sitting it's pretty clear which approach has been more successful.
"self-driving car project that's dragging on for decades."
And yet, waymo seems to have got the correct risk reward trade-off compared to all of the move-fast-and-get-banned competitors...
I think that you’re supporting the argument that you’re replying to.
You certainly have a point. Places like google and bell labs have pushed innovation, apparently enabled by monopolies.
I would rather we don’t allow monopolies since they are so bad for society, regardless of some benefits.
Government funded research and private investment are still a thing, that doesn’t try to break the whole capitalism thing.
My first thought was Bell Labs here. The lack of time pressure for research results sounds like a big reason why so much innovation happened—people could pursue projects that may not have immediately benefitted the company's bottom line, because Bell had money to throw. I think UNIX was an example of this, because MULTICS was a failure and Bell was wary of similar projects, but I might be wrong.
Most of the Bell Labs fundamental breakthroughs had no path to commercialization at the time of their discovery. The transistor was discovered 12 years into Shockleys research on fundamental properties of semiconductors.
If commercialization had been considered before funding, the project would have never been approved.
Instead, Bell management took the view that they could find everything, and some of it might become a new market, maybe.
According to Kernighan in UNIX: A History and a Memoir, the Unix team was constrained with regards to hardware capital at the time of Unix's creation. The Multics team got to use a fancy GE-645 (36-bits!) while the Unix team had to beg for "cheaper" systems like the PDP-7 and eventually an 11. Thompson has a great quote about how ultimately he was thankful they didn't have as much money to play with as the Multics team did but at the time he was annoyed he had to beg for a PDP-11. Fun book!
> You certainly have a point. Places like google and bell labs have pushed innovation, apparently enabled by monopolies.
I've heard this argument before (and recognize that you aren't defending it), but telecommunications, network and technology innovation has hardly suffered since Bell was dismantled in 1982.
Telecommunications is still led by small groups of companies. Giant backbone providers stitch the internet together. Telecoms providers within a country, the ones that actually have hardware in the field, can often be counted on one hand, and often in one hand after a fireworks accident. 5G/6G/7G research is led by a small handful of companies that actually build the switches, transmitters, and modems. Cell tower frequencies are sold to a tiny group of carriers that sublet their network equipment to smaller companies they eventually buy up (if succesful) or disappear from the market (if not succesful).
Fiber rollout in countries where a government funded phone line rollout has already succeeded is laughably slow, taking decades and many billions with little to show for it. Even in countries where no phone lines were rolled out back in the day, fiber is more and more being skipped as 5G allows for cheaper (though less reliable and less capable) deployment.
I'm not saying monopolies are good or anything, and I think our problems would be even worse had we stuck to the monopolist systems that brought us telecoms as we know it, but I wouldn't consider the industry one where there's enough competition to drive innovation, especially since at least half of the entire sector is competing against Chinese government-controlled companies with seemingly endless coffers.
You cannot possibly know which innovations and standardizations happened past 1982 in the world in which Bell was not dismantled.
Right, but there other, real, negative impacts of monopoly, whereas the positive impact of R&D funding seems to be at best a maybe as to if it's better than the alternative.
This is debatable, I think. What I've read is that, whereas Bell Labs did foundational, groundbreaking research that radically altered the course of human history, technological innovation since then has more often followed the lines Bell Labs, and their ilk, laid down. Giving the world a faster computer or faster network is fine and nice but pales in comparison to the consequences of giving the world modern computers, Unix, and C.
Counterpoint, C and Unix still don't have serious successors 50 years on.
Google's position is a result of capitalism, not in spite of it.
I might not have explained my position adequately. I am not commenting on how Google became immensely successful, but just looking at it today in its current state.
It seems like the end result of unchecked capitalism is monopolistic practices. Companies want to make as much $$$ as possible. The most effective way to do that is to become a monopoly and avoid/destroy/inhibit any amount of competition as possible.
I really see it as an unstable system. Which is why we need society to put laws in place to keep the system in check, so it doesn’t turn sour.
Basically there’s a “healthiness” scale of capitalism. I want healthy capitalism.
Every corporation’s position is a result of capitalism. I’d like to know more about your point.
This is debatable and probably a US centric POV, I think you could argue that much of the world is better at public / private partnerships and so no, their position is not due to capitalism, even if their continued existence is.
I’m not an expert on the economic history, but you could probably argue that the last big public / private partnerships in the US were in the railroad days. Defense spending I would not count in this category either. Although it builds whole ecosystems it is too insular and incestuous compared to something like transportation, or deliberately nurturing any other budding industry in a cooperative rather than competitive fashion
That's an interesting question. A lot of basic research is done in pursuit of creating entirely new markets. Being the first entrant to a new market makes you a monopolist in a way by default. It doesn't necessarily have to be anti-competitive.
I'd argue the fact that Google publishes much more of their research than their competitors do is a strong indicator that they're actually not the anti-competitive ones.
It's normal for mature industries to evolve into oligopolies. The filing goes far beyond fighting cartel-like behavior, into pretty ludicrous stuff (like "open access to Google’s datasets and search Index").
Debatable. I visited the down at the heels post break up Bell Labs and it was sad.
I worked for a while at the company that used to be named Bellcore (Bell Communications Research), which was originally a research consortium for the Baby Bells. By the time I joined, it was a zombie cash cow shell that did no research, and it met the common fate of such businesses: acquired by a private equity firm.
The greatest private sector basic research institute that has ever existed was the result of a government granted monopoly, so you have to admit, it helps.
What monopoly?
Google's entire business model is currently under threat right now.
There are lazy developers reading this very comment thread that broke basic website functionality this week because they only tested on Chrome
Just because the competition is trash doesn't make chrome a monopoly.
There are many other search engine options, why should Google be punished for hiring the best people over decades to make the best one? Many consumers also switch their search to Google when presented with other options or defaults.
> why should Google be punished for hiring the best people over decades to make the best one?
Google should not be punished for having gained a near-monopoly by hiring the best people.
But perhaps their near-monopoly is due to other reasons like paying large amounts to ensure that they are the default option on various platforms. In this case, legal restrictions might be more appropriate.
How do we determine which of these proposed reasons for the near-monopoly is correct? We use a legal process where each side presents their evidence and a neutral party decides which is most credible.
> There are many other search engine options, why should Google be punished for hiring the best people over decades to make the best one?
I’m guessing this whole court case wouldn’t have been a thing if Google wasn’t bribing Apple, to the tune of $20 billion a year [1], to remain the default search engine on iOS.
1: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/apple-may-add-ai-search-...
Or more recently beginning to throw money at websites to lock out their competitors, which is why Bing and co can't index Reddit anymore.
That’s not accurate, Bing can index Reddit just fine
Amazing how you can see that as Google bribing Apple instead of Apple extorting Google.
It would be a rather ineffective extortion if "customers would just switch" as the comment further above claims.
Note, Google also uses user interaction data from Chrome to influence the search results. [0]
[0] https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-user-interaction-...
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Because the data they possess is the monopoly, they have better search results because it is too expensive for competitors to gather the data at this point as(I also think people who are unfamiliar with finance do not understand the quantum, Meta has a similar type of business but was under huge pressure with investing tens of billions into VR...it would cost hundreds of billions to get parity with Google, there is no way to finance this).
It is nothing to do with "hiring the best people". Google's exec-level leadership is extremely poor, Mr Magoo-tier management. This is largely due to their share classes, the people at the very top are not very good at business so Google largely isn't run like a business. They have one business that is probably worth $4-5tn, and the rest is worth -$3-4tn. The number of "best people" out there is usually under 500 in a country the size of the US, a country that has hundreds of thousands of employees is not hiring the best.
I would guess under 100 people at Google actually positively impact financial results in any way because the advertising business grows rapidly, uses no capital, and requires no staff. This is true of many of the tech companies do, you aren't getting the best if you pay an exec $50m because the best will always do their own thing and make more. Rather you get someone like Pichai or Cook who sounds good and will get shareholders to believe that setting fire to $200m/year to pay them is a good idea, they are indistinguishable from politicians.
Google is under-earning massively. Staff aren't a monopoly, you just pay someone to leave and they are yours now (you see this in other areas like HFT where staff actually know useful stuff, you don't see this in tech because most staff don't know anything, they are looking for drones).
It's incredibly naive to think Google's continuous growth is automatic. It happened because of all the work the employees do, not in spite of it. Are there employees who don't contribute? Sure. But that's different from only 100 contributing to positive growth.
Do you actually understand how and why they are growing?
They start with a page with zero ads, they add one ad to that page one year, ad sales pushes that placements, then a few years they do it again, etc. Meta are the same.
Google do sell at a higher price than offline ads because of targeting/intent but this is inherent to the product: search has inherently better intent and their targeting tech is no better than anyone else such that their prices are higher/grow faster.
That is their growth model: higher ad density, the CEO deciding to add another ad to a page and earning $100m/year. There is no value-added otherwise because you don't need many people, you don't need capital and you are making $300bn/year.
And, again, if you own the shares you understand that you are getting the ads business, and because of the dual class you are also getting this tech bureaucracy that sets fire to tens of billions every year employing people to do nothing. If these people are so productive...where is the revenue? It is all ads or ancillary business, they have GCP now but there is nothing else...because these people aren't doing anything.
It is like owning a business that turns lead into gold, the process is automatic, requires no capital...and then employing a bunch of monks to pray for the lead and saying the business couldn't exist without them. Lol.
How?
The software world was basically created by Xerox and AT&T research.
> Without the transformer architecture they invented by funding basic research, there would be no modern LLMs.
Without Google the researchers who invented the Transformers model might have launched their own startup instead of sitting on the technology for 5 years while it's mismanaged at a big company. We would have had LLMs in 2018 not 2022.
A little bit unrelated, but the rise of Transformers in 2022 was because of the compute available - in 2018, it would have been almost impossible to make something like GPT-4.
Actually, most researchers of transformer paper founded various startups.
Isn't this actually an argument for breaking up Google?
They came up with Transformers back in 2014 and sat on it for a decade until somebody else (OpenAI) forced their hand?
> Google is the reason for the current AI boom. Without the transformer architecture they invented by funding basic research, there would be no modern LLMs.
Sounds great to me! Wish they had been broken up before that happened.
> YC is arguing that their incentive for funding that basic research should be taken away in order to spur innovation?
Ma Bell is arguing that Bell labs has been a fountain of knowledge everyone admires and has contributed tremendously to the advancement of telecommunication systems.
Yes, large monopolistic corporations can spend large amounts of money on, presumably, completely unmonetizable research.
Nevertheless anti-Trust law exists because of the belief that monopolies should not exist and that it is the governments function to dismantle monopolies. The consequence of that is that corporations who can freely spend hundreds of millions on basic research will be dismantled as well, as happened with AT&T, and the funding for the basic research will cease.
>YC is arguing that their incentive for funding that basic research should be taken away in order to spur innovation?
No. That is the stance of the government. YC is arguing that the remedies the government is seeking are appropriate.
Yup. Arguably could not have invented the transformer without the resources of a behemoth like google
Juergen Schmidhuber and his students came up with much of the basic NN elements, such as RNN, LSTM and others without behemoth resources (and several years earlier). Ttbomk, the one thing they DIDN’T come up with was the transformer; however it is very likely someone would have within a 5-10 year time frame.
I well aware of Schmidhuber, still the scaling of the compute was critical. The reason Schmidhuber didnt go all the way is still scaling/capital, which accrues to monopolies who can afford wildly speculative research. Also, LSTM, RNN, etc, while effective for their time, were dead ends.
compute was critical, but compute was happening anyway. I fail to say why you are convinced that there would not be transformers.
I'm not saying that, I'm saying you need a company with huge amounts of cash on hand to spend on R&D. The monopoly provides a safe space for it, like it or not, this system has worked.
Kings and nobles funded many scientists, do want to take their money and power away?
> Without the transformer architecture they invented by funding basic research, there would be no modern LLMs.
one could argue that transformers are nothing without attention layer, which was not invented at google.
You're saying this would hinder LLM research? Don't threaten me with a good time.
Researchers at Google are the reason for the current AI boom.
FTFY
Potato potato
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the argument seems to be basically that if Google hadn't had a dominant position they would not have had the money to make a new technology that was important for the current AI wave, and they should have the right to exploit this technology that they helped create - disregarding that in the American system this is what patents exist to enable.
I’m pretty sure we didn’t need a global Monopoly on the Internet to come up with the paper “attention is all you need” written by eight people.
> Google is the reason for the current AI boom.
OpenAI is the reason for the current AI boom. Google wasn't productizing anything and didn't put any of this stuff out in the open. Where was their productization of the transformer?
If anything, it should show that Google malinvests. Maybe none of it would have seen the light of day. Only now that they've been threatened are they building products.
The BERT model, which uses the transformer architecture, was deployed by Google for every English language Google search by the end of 2019.
This is about concurrent with OpenAI's release of GPT-2. But GPT-2 was not really a product.
They had AI assistants and machine vision aplenty. The current hype cycle seems to stem from the discovery that going big on these models was worth it.
I usef BERT before chatgpt was a thing.
OpenAi just decided they could jump the gun while Google CORRECTLY deemed the tech not ready yet. What you're breaking your neck to find fault with was Google being responsible.
That you are unaware of the applications of transformers is on you, not them. Search query understanding, search result ranking, translation, voice recognition, all other natural language applications, and generative applications like Gmail Smart Compose are all based on transformer architecture.
How much blame do we assign Sundar for this outcome? Yes, he was just continuing where Larry / Sergey left off, but it did happen under his watch.
Is there anything he could have done to avoid this outcome? In a way that Google shareholders would have found acceptable?
Or was this outcome inevitable?
Yes. Sundar could have fought harder against the internal forces that thought cloud was just a fad and made Google a stronger player in Cloud. Then, Google would not have been as reliant on search/ads.
Did the laws of physics change or something before Sundar became CEO?
NO? Yeah. I thought so as well
Then the outcome was inevitable.
None of the proposed remedies benefit consumers.
We have two major phone operating systems and they charge a tax of 30%, which gets passed onto consumers. This should be zero if there was unlimited competition or web installation. There's also so much innovation happening in the mobile space right now. It's not like they're parked and reaping untold benefits.
By having search monopolies, they've gamified paying for placement above your competitor's trademarks. Rather than spend on engineering or lowering costs, you have to pay to defend your brand.
There are thousands of ways these monopolies are horrible for the consumer, for small business, and for innovation.
These companies force their way into new markets, kill the sustainable incumbents by give away services sustained on unrelated business unit profit, then raise rates once the field has been salted and acquired. Amazon is a grocery store, primary care doctor, home electronics company, and James Bond.
Why should Amazon get free advertising for their films on their web storefront, plastered on the side of their delivery vans, emblazoned on their packaging, when competing studios have to spend millions on marketing? To top it off, they're outsourcing the film crew labor to Eastern Europe where there are no crew safety laws and are putting American film workers out of business.
And the current price pressure on your salary is directly a result of their market power. They don't have to fear you starting a company that can impact their profits anymore.
These companies should all be dismantled. Large companies should be exposed to evolutionary pressures, but because of monopoly they become invasive species and dominate entire ecosystems. Regulation is the path to healthy competition and innovation.
If developers bothered to put their apps on alternative stores with much lower rates, we wouldn't be in this mess. Amazon is shutting down their store because it turns out nobody is really all that interested in actual alternatives. Samsung has their own store but all I hear about it is people bitching that they already have Google Play and that it's "bloatware".
Huawei even sells phones without Google Play in the west! Of course the first thing people try to do on them is get Google Play working, because the cheap hardware is all people care about.
Sure, Apple has proven to be pretty shit about app cost, but Android does and always has offered alternative app stores, and it's the leading example of how much companies like Epic are lying through their teeth.
Consumers pay the 30% app tax on Android because the companies claiming to want to get rid of it don't actually want to invest in alternatives, they just want Apple and Google to host their games for free so they can make more money.
The same goes for a lot of these monopolies. People want options, but they don't want to pay for options. The result is a quick race to the bottom where only a few high-profit, low-margin companies dominate the market.
Andoid users install google play because the applications they want to use is only available on google play, regardless of personal choice. Andoid developers put their applications on google play because that is the only places where they can access enough number of users, which has nothing to do with developer choice.
It is not about price. It is about platforms. A 0% app tax could not compete if there is 0 users on the platform, and google could increase the app tax to 100% if they wanted and people would still use it.
Ironically, Google has always allowed people to side-step the 30% tax.
With a burried setting and scare wall that they know fewer than 0.01% engage with.
> By having search monopolies, they've gamified paying for placement above your competitor's trademarks. Rather than spend on engineering or lowering costs, you have to pay to defend your brand.
I would love to know how much money Google makes just from this extortion.
… which is enabled by their intentionally-misleading search ads, which also enable scams. I’d further love to know how much money they make promoting scams.
About the phone OS: unfortunately, other companies and governments give this duopoly to Apple and Google.
If I need my phone to access my bank and my bank's app only works on official Android or iOS then that's it. I don't have a choice in what phone OS I'm running.
And the bank most likely does that because of government regulations.
Amazon doesn't get free advertising. They lose out on revenue they could have gotten by placing another paying ad there instead. The opportunity cost is not 0.
Amazon chooses not to advertise third party products on those surfaces. They realize they have product synergy in giving away free films and movies to their customers, which is why they do it. It's a massively unfair platform advantage.
UPS and FedEx don't emblazon ads on their delivery trucks. Nobody is buying up those ad spaces.
The solution is for people to make web apps which are agnostic to platform and device, no?
Yeah, the root of many monopolies today is an IP monopoly explicitly granted by government. Government policy is prohibiting monopolies via one relatively weak pathway, and literally establishing them via the IP pathway.
A finding that preventing or discouraging installation of apps from anywhere but the first-party store constitutes use of market power to exclude competitors and fix prices in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act sounds like a great solution to me.
No, the solution is web installs without platform scare walls.
We have sandboxing, permissions, app scanning heuristics, and databases of bad apps. If the web works from a technical standpoint and security posture, so can native.
Free apps don’t cost any “tax.”
> This should be zero if there was unlimited competition or web installation
Is credit card processing, billing, storage, distribution, “free?”
And the 30% figure is inaccurate. Most developers don’t pay that.
How about stripe charging 2.9% +$0.30 per transaction? They are almost double the actual cost of the interchanges.
Businesses have hundreds of billing and payment options, and the fees are relatively small and straightforward.
Google and Apple charge an order of magnitude more for a straightjacket distribution mechanism that is inferior to web search.
Garry Tan is a consumer too!
He's been consuming his own exhaust too much.
YC mainly trying to make a buck, I'm weary of these sorts of lawsuits
What happened to “win by building a better product”?
Google is David and OpenAI is Goliath, excessively nerfing Google will put us all at the mercy of closed AI.
Gemini (the app, not the API or AI studio) is one of the few places where we can use frontier generative AI without a “customer noncompete” (you know, the one where they compete with us and then say we’re not allowed to compete back) … if you use Claude or OpenAI or Grok, you’re prohibited from training on your chat logs, or even using the thing to develop AI. Not so with Gemini app.
Too bad you have to lose your chat history just to deactivate model training (“Gemini apps activity” conflates opt-out of training with opt-out of storing chat history)
I don’t know much about the ads space but I just hope going after Google doesn’t create a vacuum that gets filled by an even worse monopoly (OpenAI)
OpenAI is hardly a Goliath. It has no real moat, and is trying to build a business around a feature. But other businesses already have platforms with billions of users to deploy those features to.
As others have pointed out, we should see the forest from the trees. Microsoft is a huge OpenAI redistributor, also Apple. Everyone knows ”ChatGPT”. While the company size might not be monopoly, based on a larger userbase, it is.
Really odd that the trillionaire dollar corporation that prints billions of dollars in pure profit every quarter due to monopolistic and anti-democratic policies is the David, the weak feeble underdog in this story, compared to OpenAI that is wildly unprofitable and has no real strategy outside of burning money.
There has been no time in human history where destroying monopolies were a bad thing.
Isn’t Microsoft also a trillion dollar corporation? If we add their 39% market share in foundation models (likely due to enterprise use of Azure OpenAI Service) to OpenAI’s 9% market share, the result is around 48% market share, compared to Google’s 15%, which is less than half of the MSFT/OAI pair…not to mention a cursory comparison of Gemini vs ChatGPT apps.
Just because OpenAI isn’t in “extraction mode” yet doesn’t mean it’s not a scary monopoly.
Source, figure 2 in: [1] https://iot-analytics.com/leading-generative-ai-companies/
Yes, Microsoft is one of the world's biggest companies, and it underinvests in research and development, preferring to hoard cash. OpenAI is in effect a client state of Microsoft that Microsoft is using to make Google look flat-footed and force them to enter the chatbot market. Nothing that transpires between Microsoft and OpenAI is really at arms' length. Personally, I don't think this is a positive development for the industry or for humanity in generally. We were doing better before we had sycophantic robots confidently misleading us.
> Yes, Microsoft is one of the world's biggest companies, and it underinvests in research and development, preferring to hoard cash.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but:
1. If you're talking about basic research, Microsoft Research has been a thing since the 90's, is highly prestigious, and has published far more papers than Google, based on their respective research websites. (To be fair, Google started much later.)
2. If you're talking about product development, MSFT is vastly more diversified in terms of revenues than any of the "Magnificent 7" because of their varied product lineup.
3. The basis of their relationship with OpenAI is literally them investing double digit billions to catch up on the AI race once they recognized the opportunity.
> OpenAI is in effect a client state of Microsoft that Microsoft is using to make Google look flat-footed and force them to enter the chatbot market.
I'm not sure about Microsoft's influence in OpenAI's strategy, but it's pretty clear Google was caught flatfooted by their own strategy of locking away transformer technology behind products that didn't threaten their search monopoly. There's a reason the researchers who invented transformers had to leave and start a different company to bring its true potential to the market. Which, even if it was just a chatbot, is what has kicked off the AI boom.
Everyone I've encountered thinks of Microsoft Research as a bad pattern, that includes all the refugees from MSR Silicon Valley who joined Google after Microsoft dissolved it in 2014. Perhaps it is a bias of the people I've worked with in my career but the core early contributors at Google who came from DEC WRL also viewed separate research divisions as a bad idea.
Anyway my statement was meant to be objective. Look at how much Microsoft spends on R&D for the last 25 years, compared to the amount Google spends, in absolute terms and as a fraction of revenues.
Having a separate research division being an anti-pattern is an interesting topic! I remember getting into a related discussion almost a decade ago with a professor who left academia to join Google, his point being product-driven R&D was strictly "better" than "bluesky" R&D because (IIRC) the work is more directly related to market needs.
My contention was that this ignores the transformative potential of long-range theoretical research. For instance, somehow very few consider Xerox PARC to be an anti-pattern.
From what I hear in the last few years even MSR has changed its ways to steer its research more in line with needs of product divisions, and I actually consider that a loss. Who knows what paradigm-shifting inventions like GenAI are being steered away from?
> Look at how much Microsoft spends on R&D for the last 25 years, compared to the amount Google spends, in absolute terms and as a fraction of revenues.
Hmm, at the risk of relying on sycophantic bots, AI overviews suggest most recently Microsoft spent 13.2% of revenues vs 14.8% for Google (and 30% for Meta!) Of course even a single % point is in the millions at their scale, but there are a ton of confounding factors including differing product margins and payscales (and CEO obsessions like Metaverse!) At least at a quick glance MSFT and GOOG seem comparable.
The problem here is how "R&D" is defined. Unfortunately, even day-to-day product development is lumped in with R&D. I've done "R&D" in academia, private research firms, and big tech, and they are all poles apart. "Actual" R&D is very researchy, often based in discovering new aspects of reality, whereas "product" R&D is just regular product development. Which could be considered discovering new aspects of the market I suppose. They are both valuable but on very differnt timelines.
Maybe MSFT is King Saul in your biblical metaphor.
Not sure a VC firm with a vested interest in Google failing should be allowed to have an opinion here...
I always thought the point of the government breaking up monopolies was to prevent anti-competitive behaviour, not simply to punish companies for being too successful.
If we want to talk about what's best for the economy and startups, there's a bunch of large companies that could be broken up for the benefit of society, but not sure that's entirely fair either.
There are two ways to remedy an anti competitive monopoly:
Behavioral remedies where the government gets involved with google’s business and maintains ongoing control to ensure they behave.
Structural remedies where the government separates the company into parts and then-crucially-leaves them alone for the most part.
The “ideal” solution is to magically stop Google from being anticompetitive but that is unrealistic.
The realistic solution is to split Google apart and kneecap its data flywheel to force it to compete.
Except no one is providing much evidence that Google is anti-competitive. It's more like they're simply too good at competing so competitors want to knee-cap them...
Exhibit A: Bing's top search query is "google".
They literally determined they were in a court of law. Lol.
Google is effectively being punished for retaining their earnings and re-investing in tons of software R&D over the years. Their "monopoly" is because people choose to use them, not because they have to. Not to mention they are are being disrupted by ChatGPT and other LLMs anyways right now. There have always been lots of web browsers and search engines, but Google simply did a better job making and refining their software and hiring people to do that.
No. They are being punished for unfairly limiting competitiveness with repeated monopolistic practices affecting the browser/search markets relation.
But they only have high market share because people want to use Google instead of the competitors. Many consumers switch their search engine to Google when presented with other defaults. Because Google search works the best and people know that.
The aggressive marketing of Chrome on Google Search website to users using other browsers was a significant part of Chrome adoption success.
And no - some people didn't willingly and consciously switched to their search engine. It was pushed down their throats by browser vendors being paid-off by Google for setting it as the default one. Mozilla has overwritten user-changed search engine setting in Firefox with several updates.
Non tech-savvy users simply accept changes made in software they use.
I don't know if you remember but it was just a few years ago that using search engines like bing was a shameful meme.
Nowadays using Google Search is, since they pivoted from from being a "search company" to "adtech company" which resulted in the degradation of Google Search quality.
"Engines like Bing" is an ambiguous term. There are better options than Bing.
When by far the most generous reading of a post is that it’s a low-effort troll, I’d recommend ignoring the poster entirely.
So then why do they pay Apple $25,000,000,000 a year to default search to Google?
Because they have the money and Apple wants them to pay. Why should Google let a competitor pay a lesser amount to be the default?
Because $25 billion is a large amount of money and you just made the claim that people would use Google regardless
ok so google paid companies like apple to make google the default search engine. you cannot claim everything was just because their product was good. you can argue that striking the deal with apple was just a smart business move, but google isn't winning just because of their r&d.
It's just a default, you can change it. Did Google coerce Apple into taking that deal somehow? Or did they simply offer them the most compelling deal in a free market?
Keep in mind that if paying to be the default search engine in a browser is illegal, then Firefox's primary revenue source is out the window.
That's exactly what the government wants intentionally or unintentionally: make Firefox's primary revenue stream disappear.
Spoiler: Firefox’s primary revenue source is going to go out the window.
Google's research departments hyped up DeepMind's success in board games and enabled huge amounts of marketing which makes you believe this. However, DeepMind was a resounding failure after GPT's were released. If you look at the multiple documentaries, they now seem cringeworthy because of Google's arrogance about AI. Google did not simply do a better job, they acquired the companies that did and then convinced you that they were part of Google the entire time so they can take the credit.
I'm really glad that YC brought this against Google but it should be clear that YC also enabled them. It's a lie that YC is independent from Google as it partners and promotes their engineers and Big Tech allies. They see the writing on the wall and their lawyers see this as a hedge against lawsuits against them. "We didn't cause this mess, see look! We're trying to help!" YC also doesn't serve American startups at all and their entrepreneurs strongly favors California or India.
> Their "monopoly" is because people choose to use them, not because they have to.
If I give you only one reasonable option and you choose that, is that selection? What if this one option distinguished others?
It's the only reasonable option because they did the best job making a search engine. The competitors have search engines but their software is worse.
> Google is effectively being punished for retaining their earnings and re-investing in tons of software R&D over the years
They have indeed invested tons in r&d, but with excessively little results. Besides web search it's tough to see succeses that Google didn't buy their way into. Gmail, maps, ... maybe?
Who knows when or if this current AI wave would've happened without Google.
That argument cuts both ways: Who knows how much longer we had to wait for this AI boom because google was sponging up every genius to work on ad selling algorithms.
A bitly link is an insane choice
Add + to the end of bitly urls to see where they redirect to without clicking on them.
These people have financial interests in destroying google. Why would a judge take their opinion into consideration?
A. The Remedy Should Open Access to Google’s Datasets and Search Index.
B. The Remedy Should Prevent Google from Extending Its Monopolies into Query-Based AI Tools.
Good luck with that YC...
The number of searches started to decline and everybody knows that Google is going to start pouring all their cash into AI tools now.
It looks like this is a strategic case to prevent Google from getting into AI search space and even gain access to their search index data so that they can train their own models on it.
Wright brothers invited the aircraft but almost all their patents were cancelled when the Great War started. If we believe the AI race is indeed an existential threat then let's cancel all patents that prevent anyone from innovating.
Much better idea:
1) Eliminate Google Play Services for android and the oem non-compete deals.
2) Right to privacy. All data collection and storage (even on customer owned hardware if used for targeting decisions) must be opt-in, by purpose and annually renewed. It must be easier to only opt in to data collection for use cases that provide application functionality / business transactions than it is to opt into blanket data collection.
And Netflix shouldn’t have been able to extend its monopoly in shipping DVDs to streaming
Personally, as copyright is a non-natural right, we should limit it for films/tv/shows such that whatever price it is sold for, then it is made available for any distributor to sell for after a very limited monopoly period (1 year from release, say, reflecting the current market in which films go from cinema to TV streaming platforms in a few weeks). This would apply to all distributors over X users and/or Y revenue (taking in at least the top 5 streaming platforms).
This way, the public can access copyright works, and producers of works can be paid, but distribution is opened up. Creators still get paid, distribution isn't monopolistic.
Netflix can argue "this show is worth £5 per viewer" and only sell rights at that price, but they pay tax on that price, and crucially the rest of the catalogue then needs to add up so if viewers are paying £8 per month then the rest of the catalogue is marked down accordingly. There will be manipulation, but if it doesn't reasonably add up then apply the sort of penalties in the EU of 20$ gross profit fines; strike off directors for copyright abuse (can't be directors of media companies again).
I can't see that this would harm income for creators, only for distributors (who aren't needed, they're just duplicating using monopolistic practices), and it seems it would have broad appeal.
So, yes, I agree.
You have no right to other people’s work and content writers get residuals.
That's not comparable. Netflix did not have a monopoly on "shipping DVDs". Plenty of retailers, online or brick-and-mortar, did that at the same time Netflix did, and video rental places were still going. Some of which would deliver movies (the local Marcos near me had a deal with a local Family Video where if you bought a large pizza they would bring you both the pizza and a movie of your choice from Family Video, assuming it was in stock).
Nor has Netflix had a monopoly on streaming.
And there are other traditional search engines - including one run by another 1 trillion dollar+ market cap company.
That’s not to mention ChatGPT and other LLMs have built in search.
Should Google not evolve with the times?
Meanwhile, YC has happily and excitedly fed it's start-ups to Google over the years.
So pretty much "We don't want google to develop new things, we want them to have buy those from us"
Can YC prevent startups from selling to Google? Even if they could why should they? There is nothing wrong with believing Google abuses its monopoly and selling to Google.
They could almost certainly prevent it in most cases, and they likely promote it in some.
I don’t see how they could prevent a sale since they own such a small percent of the startup.
> Meanwhile, YC has happily and excitedly fed it's start-ups to Google over the years.
I'm curious what you've seen or heard that led you to that conclusion? It's the opposite of correct.
YC supports what founders want, including if they want to sell to $BigCo, but such outcomes are hardly successes for YC. YC's success depends on outlier companies growing much larger than that.
What YC is complaining about is that they've been turned into Google's farm league.
The thing is, Google doesn't develop anything new. Everything new they make fails horribly, so they can't and don't compete with YC in the way that you think.
Examples of failed Google homegrown technologies include:
- Social media: Google Buzz, Google+
- Messaging: Google Chat, Hangouts, actually there's too many to list
- Video: Google Video
Almost all of Google's successful products are acquisitions:
- Homegrown: Search, Gmail
- Acquisitions: YouTube, Analytics, most of their adtech stack, Android, DeepBrain (the people who did all the AI work at Google)
Furthermore, whenever Google or Facebook buys any startup, that startup gets an immediate moat and capital injection that can be used to crush any other startup that didn't sell out fast enough. So YC only has one option for an exit: sell the company to Google at a price Google decides.
> DeepBrain (the people who did all the AI work at Google)
"DeepBrain" isn't a thing. Google acquired DeepMind, which was the second biggest research lab in AI at the time. The first biggest was Google Brain. They existed in parallel until being merged in 2023.
Brain was entirely homegrown, and it was responsible for AIAYN, BERT, PaLM. Which is to say, transformers.
a) If YC was so tired of being a funnel to larger companies then they should be selecting companies based on their ability to be self sustaining companies. Not this hype-driven, boom or bust approach to startups they know VCs and acquirers want.
b) Google Cloud, Gemini, TPUs, Pixel etc seem like pretty important products to me.
One wonders how these people imagine accessing a search index, from the practical, technical standpoint. If you believe that Google has only unfair business practices, then it makes perfect sense to believe that your organization will simply access their data.
The document metadata... ffs: "Microsoft Word - YC for filing FINAL DRAFT Y Combinator Amicus Brief"
People, clean that shit up before publishing. That's an embarrassment. At least it's not "FINAL FINAL2 REWORKED" or something equally grotesque.
Google is a "monopoly" because their competitors with massive cash reserves (Microsoft, Apple, Meta) are too risk averse to compete in the marketplace and are hoping that the courtroom will deliver them a win.
Which market are you talking about specifically? The outstanding cases against them are in search and in adtech. This amicus brief is for the Search case (this one [0]).
In search (the relevant market here), Microsoft does compete in the marketplace, and Microsoft's evidence that Google's anticompetitive practices have prevented them from gaining any meaningful ground in search were a keystone of the government's case, including the fact that Microsoft has invested nearly $100 billion into Bing [1].
In adtech much the same can be said about Meta.
So, again, I'm curious: in which market does Google not have competitors spending massive amounts of cash which Google still manages to hold back from being able to meaningfully compete?
[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223...
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223...
That argument might make sense if Bing was as good, but Bing is worse. Wasting money building a bad product does not entitle you to market share.
You just left two comments that say the same thing. I replied to the one you left first.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43946577
all that would make sense, but Bing is worse. Wasting money building a bad product does not entitle you to market share.
That's (a) a different argument than the competition is "too risk averse", (b) subjective, and (c) arguably the result of a number of flywheel effects. That is, Bing's ability to compete is hampered by the fact that Google already has an overwhelming majority of search traffic from which to learn and improve.
For example, from the second filing I linked to:
> After search began appearing on phones, Google started logging information about user location, swipes, and other user-related movements. PFOF ¶¶ 1003–1004. This data is now vital to every aspect of search, including figuring out where and when to crawl specific websites, how to index the information retrieved from that crawl, what documents to retrieve from the index in response to a user query, and how to rank the retrieved items. Some elements of Google’s search engine are trained on 13 months of data—a volume that would take Bing over 17 years to accumulate.
Also, what is Bing's retention on windows? They try to cram it down your throat, but people still go straight for chrome/google.
Do you not understand that a search engine is not a business by itself? I'm struggling to understand why so many supposedly smart people don't seem to grasp the obvious fact that Google can only exist in the current form or not at all and that any viable business of the same form has to look the same. Chrome is not a self standing viable business. YouTube is definitely not one either. Ads only works because the search engine exists. The search engine without ads would be a money pit. It's a synergistic business.
This argument can be made about nearly any anticompetitive monopoly, and that should not stop the government from deciding that, if the business can only exist in its current form, then the business should not exist.
You're not entitled to a business model if your business model is harmful.
What evidence do you have that their business model is harmful? As a consumer search seems like an extremely healthy sector right now with plenty of competition. Google just happens to be by far the best.
What exactly do you think is stopping you from using a competitor? Can you not find the setting to change your default search engine in Chrome? Is Google blocking you from making that choice somehow? All the arguments I've seen for Google being anti-competitive in this sector are extremely weak.
Microsoft does compete in the marketplace
They compete much like I compete for People’s Most Beautiful Man in the World :)
Bing has a brand problem.
You have been a bad user. Bing has been a good Bing.
Bing sounds to my ears ridiculous. Is it a Chinese pancake? Or Mr. Bing?
Also as a verb it’s hard to pronounce.
It shouldn't be any harder to pronounce than "sing", surely?
No. The US vs. Google antitrust cases scope are Google's monopolistic practices in the search and adtech markets, not the browser market. The DOJ pushing for Google to sell Chrome is related to the search-related case.
A shareholder in those companies wouldn’t support it. You could easily spend $10b trying to win back a fraction of the search market and Google could just spend $10b back to greater effect to bury you. Google is entrenched at every level: consumer awareness, browser, SEO, advertisers, ad-tech.
A country as large and prosperous as the United States should have more than 4 providers. We should have more than 3 cellular companies. We should have more than 8 major ISPs.
These are monopolies. You might not see it because the economy is so _over monopolized_ it's hard to have perspective.
YCombinator loves to pretend it invented the idea of startups and entreprenourism but those have been vigorous and healthy throughout _most_ of America's existence. When they weren't we wrote some of the most comprehensive and consumer friendly anti-trust laws in the entire world. A feat which still stands today.
We don't have 8 major ISPs. That's a joke.
We have 8 monoplies that live together.
I have never once lived in a house where I had a choice of ISP in the US (unless you count getting a mobile router).
Am I misremembering, or doesn’t Apple already have its own “stealth” search engine they could deploy at the drop of a hat, but instead use it as a bargaining chip w/ Google? Coulda sworn I read about it a decade ago in breathless “Is Apple working on its own search engine???” articles
How Orwellian. Free market means buyers and sellers set terms of deal, not G.
It’s amazing how twisted the term “anti-competitive” has become. Where anti-competitive companies push for anti-competitive regulations under the false pretense of preventing anti-competitiveness.
Google is being competitive.
YC is being anti-competitive.
Because they suck at competing against Google and they want to get unfair, unethical advantage themselves.
Imagine spending years and billions building something and then I show up and say “hey man that’s not fair, give me a slice of that thing for free. Oh and also I’m probably going to sell it back to you someday for a lot of money”.
And before someone tells me “that’s the law”, I don’t care. If that’s the law then it should be changed. Laws have been written (and lobbied) for all sorts of reasons and surprisingly not all of them are fair and ethical.
It doesn't matter whether the monopoly position was achieved "fairly" or not. Either way it is detrimental to the overall health of the economy and to consumer choice, and that alone is good enough reason to bust them. Those laws were passed for a reason - people saw what the end result looked like, and they didn't like it.
If you don't want someone to come and bust a monopoly you've spent years and billions building, then don't use your time and money to build a monopoly.
Google benefits at scale from infrastructure, systems and laws that create the opportunity to make such revenues. It is only natural they should not harm the host.
It’s amazing how twisted the term “anti-competitive” has become. Where anti-competitive companies push for anti-competitive regulations under the false pretense of preventing anti-competitiveness.
Standard Oil is being competitive.
The U.S. oil refining and distribution industry is being anti-competitive.
Because they suck at competing against Standard Oil and they want to get unfair, unethical advantage themselves.
Imagine spending years and billions building something and then I show up and say “hey man that’s not fair, give me a slice of that thing”.
And before someone tells me “that’s the Sherman Act”, I don’t care. If that’s the law then it should be changed. Laws have been written (and lobbied) for all sorts of reasons and surprisingly not all of them are fair and ethical.
(I hope this illustrates how easy it is to make this exact argument about literally any monopoly.)
Key quotes:
> "Our experience has been that entrenched monopoly power often deters new entry and chills investment in disruptive innovation."
> "independent venture-capital firms like YC often hesitate to fund startups in the “kill zone” —the area of deadened innovation around a monopolist like Google."
> "We agree with Plaintiffs' proposal that the remedy package should create pathways for startups and innovators to access Google's monopoly-derived datasets and search index."
> "The remedy order should also prevent Google from entering into exclusive agreements to access AI training data..."
> "An effective remedy package should help to leverage the current moment by ensuring that next-generation search and query-based AI tools can reach users free from exclusion, interference, or cooption."
> "the remedy package should prevent Google from anticompetitive self-preferencing, and this prohibition should apply specifically to Google's use of its monopoly search product to boost its query-based AI tools or discriminate against rivals' tools."
I think they have a good point with AI. After lagging behind initially, Google really went at it hard. Gemini is great now, and they are building a good set of tooling.
It's easy for Google to suffocate the startups in that area. They already have a massive advantage with all the data they are sitting on.
> I think they have a good point with AI. After lagging behind initially, Google really went at it hard. Gemini is great now, and they are building a good set of tooling.
> It's easy for Google to suffocate the startups in that area. They already have a massive advantage with all the data they are sitting on.
What is the solution, though? Should they not be allowed to compete in the LLM + search space? Should they handicap their models till perplexity &co. catch up? Will they be allowed to do something then? I honestly don't see what's asked of google here.
Yes, they are massive. But they're massive because they've invested billions ($, manhours, etc) into their infra and have gathered a huge baggage of data, know-how, tech and expertise in this field. But what exactly are they to do from now on?
> The remedy order should also prevent Google from entering into exclusive agreements to access AI training data…
Google, for example, bought exclusive access to Reddit's data. No one else can train on Reddit unless you have more money than Google (you don't). So one of the asks is that that sort of exclusive deal be prevented. If everyone is allowed to buy Reddit's data, and Google makes the best model, that wouldn't be a problem.
> So one of the asks is that that sort of exclusive deal be prevented.
Thank you, that actually sounds reasonable.
> What is the solution, though? Should they not be allowed to compete in the LLM + search space?
Yes? I'm not sure why you find this strange. It's exactly how antitrust works.
This is just a few rich venture capitalists, and the harvard trained founders they back, trying to line their own pockets. AI will democratize search regardless
AI will democratize search regardless
What do you mean by this and how will it happen?
It usually means that they will somehow rat fuck the public commons for monetary gain.
Democratic software means three things:
1. Can you understand it
2. Can you influence it both now and after your death
3. Can you destroy it
I don’t see how any of these things apply to AI, I’m sure it will make some people incredibly wealthy at the expense of others.
companies like perplexity, as the models get better, competing on search will be trivial
Agreed. Because really what happens when we search is we run through a gauntlet of contrived websites stuffed with ads and trackers and referral links, selling someone else's stuff, splitting someone else's content across multiple page views, requiring your personal information if you want to view the content in its entirety, trying their best to be the #1 result for specific phrases that will get traffic even though shovelware sites should never be the authoritative source for someone else's product or company or content, while others pay to have their contrived websites be listed before them. None of this is necessary with AI.
> AI will democratize search regardless
Not a single person in this entire ecosystem knows the difference between democratize and liberalize. Hint: AI isn't gonna let us vote on aspects of search.
These are the key points as I understand them:
Amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief is being submitted by Y Combinator to pile on the US vs Google anti-trust case.
YC asks court to basically cripple Google in their Search, Advertising and AI endeavours:
- Open access to Google's datasets and search index.
- Restrict Google's expansion into AI through monopolistic practices.
- Limit Google exclusive agreements and pay-to-play distribution deals.
- Enforce anti-circumvention and anti-retaliation mechanisms.
IMO, from a VC standpoint, it's in YC's interest to give their privately funded startups the best chance possible to thrive. If that includes destroying solid giants of the industry, so be it.
Call me paranoid but I wonder if YC is acting as a proxy for OpenAI/Sam Altman here. To frame it differently would they behave similarly if OpenAI was a Google Subsidiary / or Google was run by Sam Altman.
To quote tomhoward's post on here talking about YC's relationship with OpenAI:
OK, it was independent but established with funding from YC Research and Jessica (among others including Sam himself and Elon) and initially operating from YC office space.
So it was always something that was closely linked to YC and his involvement with it was generally accepted as being harmonious with his role running YC, until it became for-profit.
Details here: https://www.wired.com/2015/12/how-elon-musk-and-y-combinator...
Would YC have said the same if Google was YC funded? As much as I dislike Google I think some of the stuff they are asking are basically asking google to give up on ad or certain business.
Of course they wouldn't. If it puts green in Paul Graham's pocket then YC is all for it.
Are they considering the ramifications of encouraging courts to let businesses loot their rivals for profit?
Seems like the court system may not be the best way to compete
They’re probably advising a startup that does exactly that as a service. Lawfare-as-a-service would have incredible margins!
Why not make all companies open up their data sets, and stop pay to play?
Because all companies haven't been found to be illegal monopolies? Just like we don't fine everyone with a car for speeding.
They don't have an illegal monopoly on AI data sets, though? This is attacking a random, unrelated Google branch.
The company that brought us AirBnB and Doordash arguing for fair and open markets should say enough about how honest their intentions are.
I'm not talking about the merits of YC's brief, just the merits of the comment I'm replying to. "Why shouldn't we apply the proposed remedy for illegal behaviour on everyone" seems like a no-brainer to me.
I don't think it's unreasonable to apply the same remedy to all AI companies. Sure, it would punish Google, but if companies would actually share their data set, the internet may not be so polluted with AI crawler bots I need to block on my servers.
Just as an example: in my country, all public transit information is shared publicly between operators, so anyone can effectively build a public transit navigation app. That includes the for-profit companies that actually run the trains. Had they kept their data silo'd up, like they were not that long ago, companies would need to make expensive deals or write elaborate scrapers to provide basic route navigation services. Thanks to regulation opening up the data for this system, everyone benefits, including the transit companies themselves, as their route planners now seemlessly integrate with routes offered by unrelated third parties.
By only hitting Google with regulations like those, I think we're building a situation where it's only a matter of time before a new Google appears and ruins the market again. Google has been financing Firefox and Safari for years now because they don't want to be the only browser, because being the only browser comes with all kinds of nasty antitrust regulations. If we selectively apply mitigations like these for competitive purposes (which I very much doubt are the real reason they're being suggested anyway), we'll just end up with some equivalent like "OpenAI sponsoring xAI and Claude so OpenAI doesn't control more than 80% of market share".
I don't think it's unreasonable to apply the same remedy to all AI companies.
A court can't really formulate and enact such a remedy.
all public transit information
Not all entities are public and we have more readily available methods to influence the ones that are.
Pay to play is inherently anti competitive though. All cars that speed are fined, not just the “big” ones. It’s also a fact that all companies opening up their data would make things more competitive. Moats are inherently anti competitive.
Pay to play is a really broad term (just skim the wikipedia page) and describing it as 'inherently anticompetitive' isn't saying much. There are also plenty of political, social and business arrangements that are deliberately anticompetitive by wide agreements of various sorts.
more like same toll-tax/road-tax for vehicles of all sizes
How is it more like that? This is a proposed remedy for breaking the law. Driving on the road (tll or free) is not breaking the law. There is no 'like' about it at all.
I know what you mean but your statement
> Just like we don't fine everyone with a car for speeding
can me mistaken for "not everyone who is speeding is fined", and that's clearly not what you meant or wrote. You are right its not more like tolls because it still doesn't capture the /exponential/ difference of whats being compared (any other company vs google). Its like a car vs a jet fighter
So they want Google’s datasets and search index to be available for other companies and want to prevent Google from being a dominant player in AI based search.
I wonder why a VC firm who is quite heavily invested in AI based startups file an amicus brief like that…
Edit: before this gets downvoted into oblivion, the comment is not against antitrust enforcement. It’s about VC firms having very specific ideas about what the antitrust enforcement would look like.
You're right, YC is far from a neutral party here. But then again, I don't think any for-profit organisation spending the money on lawyers to write amicus briefs is.
They're looking for free data for their AI startups to make money off of, and with Google being in the middle of an antitrust catastrophe that may very well collapse web browser variety to two options in the next years, there's a lot of money to be made by stoking the flames.
Monopolies prevent startups from reaching critical mass.
Google and the rest of big tech are like the Jupiter of the tech world. It clears the orbit of anything else that could form.
Big tech is so big that it can jump into new markets with ease, kill incumbents, snuff out new players, and perpetually tax non-innovation.
We're twenty years behind on antitrust and breakups. It's time we had a forest fire to make way for new growth.
More than 50 years behind. We shifted policy to barely enforcing anti-trust in the ‘70s, under growing Chicago school (spits) influence among elected officials, “think tanks” (lobbying groups), and courts.
That’s why everything’s so insanely consolidated now. Practically every market has a handful of massive players all of which would currently be under serious threat of break-up under the old approach to enforcement. It’s all monopoly.
I wholeheartedly support antitrust enforcement. My comment was mostly about VC firms having very specific opinions on what should happen.
Let’s not pretend that YC and other VCs are noble. They get rich and pawn their money losing investments to the “bigger fool”
https://medium.com/@kazeemibrahim18/the-post-ipo-performance...
> In aggregate, the average return across these YC companies is -49%, with a median return of -46%. To put this into perspective, over the same period, the S&P 500 yielded a positive return of 58%
And for the rest of the companies, they aren’t trying to compete with BigTech, they are trying to get acquired by them. Out of the literally thousands of companies that YC has invested in, only about two dozen have gone public
VC firms, not specifically YC, also tend to encourage monopolization when it comes to startups they are invested in. Have we not seen unicorns gobble up other smaller startups all the time?
You can compete with a unicorn. You can't compete with a trillion dollar company with a cash hoard larger than every unicorn.
Which is how AirBnB ruined tourist industries worldwide, caused rents to soar, people to get displaced from their cities of birth, and why they're touted as a "disruptor" in this very brief.
The end game for these unicorns is to become the cash hoard that they intended to compete with.
> Let’s not pretend that YC and other VCs are noble.
I'm fine with that. Let them make money at the expense of big tech.
Breaking up big tech benefits financial/venture capital, but it also benefits labor capital as well. More opportunity for more startups to succeed, more competition for engineering talent, less market distorting wage collusion.
Big tech already won. It's benefactors already reap the benefits. Break them up and a new generation of engineers can grow wealthy on the field they contribute their labor to.
Right now the proceeds of tech go to hedge funds and pension funds. It's venture capital and entrepreneurs that take risks. They're the ones that should see upside. Unfortunately, big tech monopolies put a ceiling on this.
They do see upside - by being acquired by BigTech.
So if Google wasn’t a “monopoly” you think a startup could make a better search engine? Be more popular than Android - Microsoft tried both and failed because people prefer Google products. It wasn’t for the lack of money.
And engineers are getting wealthy - by working for BigTech. Even an entry level developer at BigTech makes more than 90% of workers.
That's a low ceiling.
Really? Making $250K a year for a mid level developer 3 years out of school is a “low bar”?
Google has created many more millionaires than YC. The only way that you could be a millionaire by investing in YC companies at IPO would be to be a multimillionaire and lose half your money.
People act in furtherance of their interests, yes. Was there more you had meant to say?
"People act in furtherance of their interests, yes" [by invoking the power of the State].
There, FTFY. It was implied, was it not?
Perhaps that is what should happen here, but let's not quibble about it.
"Invoking the power of the state?" Good heavens, they've only filed an amicus brief. "Begging the presently authorized tenant of a precisely defined and circumscribed aliquot of the delegated power of the state" would be a more accurate way to put it. I appreciate that's not as florid, nor as floridly serviceable to anyone else's interest in pursuing this conversation. As I said before, though...
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As a google's shareholder that terrifies me.
As an european, I am happy to see that the US administration may be ready to kill the one of the most powerful and unassailable company in the world and allow any other country to build a replacement.