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throwaway_kufu
doukdouk
Words get abused a lot, and for some of them, they do not have a clear-cut, universally agreed upon meaning. "Monopoly" is one of such words (others candidate include: freedom, democracy, justice).
When random person X complains about, say, Google having a monopoly, there are two possibilities:
- Person X means something along "Google has a dominant market position and abuses its power", slightly abusing the meaning of "monopoly".
- Person X means Google is literally a monopoly, that it is not possible to get online ads otherwise and does not know that firms such as Facebook exist.
Somehow a lot of people choose to believe interpretation #2 is true, and spend a lot of time debating whether this or that company is a "monopoly" as if it is somehow more important than the substantive issues.
ardy42
> Somehow a lot of people choose to believe interpretation #2 is true, and spend a lot of time debating whether this or that company is a "monopoly" as if it is somehow more important than the substantive issues
Not to accuse anyone here of this, but intentionally doing what you describe is an disingenuous but effective way of shaping the conversation to discourage scrutiny of more general kinds of anti-competitive behavior. I'm sure it's part of any monopolist's PR strategy (or large business engaged in anti-competitive behavior, to be more precise).
undefined
animationwill
Are you saying OP is a Google PR insider accusing Google of abusing market privilege while ensuring the perfect definition of “monopoly“ isn’t marred by inaccuracy?
theptip
The problem with this analysis is that “monopoly” is only one part of antitrust law, and there are plenty of other abuses of dominant market positions that don’t require a monopoly to be present.
Furthermore, in the legal context the meaning is more clear-cut than you make out, though there is significant room for debate. I would not put it anywhere near “freedom” in terms of loose definitions. There are rigorous tests for determining whether a company should be deemed to be a monopoly within a specific market (which requires both a method for defining the boundary of a market, and what “dominant” means.)
This is also different by country, see
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act_of_189... Vs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_competition_l...
I think your general point is to stop focusing on monopoly and get more familiar with all of the different antitrust provisions, to which I would wholeheartedly agree.
kaczordon
This doesn't clear anything up though. Who gets to define the boundary/scope of the market being measured? It's pretty easy to manipulate this to make it seem like a company has a "dominant" share even if that's not the case from the consumers point of view.
Take the anti-trust case against Microsoft, for example, the market was defined as that for computer operating systems for stand-alone personal computers using microchips of the kind manufactured by Intel. This left out not only operating systems running on Apple computers but also other operating systems such as those produced by Sun Microsystems for multiple computers or the Linux system for stand-alone computers. In its narrowly defined market, Microsoft clearly had a “dominant” share.
Also lots of people use Amazon to search for products so it's not clear to me how there is a market failure here.
doukdouk
If your point is that "monopoly" has a different meaning in a colloquial/political context and in a legal context, that it relies on non-obvious definitions of what the relevant market, what dominant is, and that it varies by country, I do not think it strongly supports the assertion that it does not have a loose definition.
speeder
I am the CMO for a company.
Google is the ONLY ad provider that give results, all others don't even get any clicks.
How that is not a monopoly on the classic definition? Every time Google has a bug and screw with my ads, the revenue of the company I work for tanks hard, and I am yet to find any solution for it.
treis
That depends heavily on your industry and obviously isnt true as a rule. Google gets 37% of ad spend, Facebook ~20% and then everyone else combines for the last 40%.
It's true that if your looking at targeting users searching for something that it's basically just Google. But people are increasingly using apps and specific sites over general surfing. Reddit, tiktok, snap, etc. all have their own ads and collectively represent major competition.
nova22033
Google is the ONLY ad provider that give results, all others don't even get any clicks.
Being effective doesn't make you a monopoly.
giancarlostoro
You may want to contact the antitrust regulators, testimonies such as your are highly relevant to this case.
fakedang
I'm surprised. I thought Facebook would have been somewhat effective. Can anyone point out any use cases of when Facebook and Google work and don't work?
FWIW my dad ran a few FB ads for his SME and it was alright, although nothing stellar either. He didn't run on Google though so I can't really draw a comparison.
Nasrudith
[flagged]
paulryanrogers
Meaning isn't dictated by a language academy and may change over time. Debating about the precise differences between monopoly and monopsony serves more to distract from the core issue: abuse of their market position.
If the allegations are true then I can't see a solution that does not involve breaking Google up. The incentives to cheat are likely just undeniable over a time scale of years.
hn_throwaway_99
I think the argument that Facebook and Google compete in the ad space is tenuous at best. Just ask a digital marketer: almost all of them consider FB and Google to have separate purposes and markets.
So fine, Google doesn't have a monopoly on online ads, but they do have a monopoly on search ads.
heavyset_go
From the government itself[1]:
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
nodamage
I've seen this quoted a lot lately but saying that a literal monopoly (as in, a single company with 100% market share) is not required doesn't really say much about what is required, which depends on the specific violation being alleged.
Some violations (price fixing, bid rigging) are considered so egregious that they are illegal regardless of market share.
Other violations (tying) require some degree of market power.
Violations related to monopolization or attempted monopolization do require monopoly power (or the dangerous probability of obtaining it it).
tel
Monopolies are a well-defined theoretical concept, but in practice it's about market power. When one entity has overwhelming market power it's afforded with options that harm consumer welfare.
Anti-trust isn't about defeating theoretical monopolies. It's about protecting consumers, new businesses, the market from abuses through overwhelming market power.
So your first possibility seems right on the money and appropriate.
xibalba
You may be over-indexing on a prescriptive lexicon:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/descriptive-vs...
treis
>n either case google is a dominant market incumbent that uses its position (in this case web traffic, data and online ad platform) to unfairly compete and stifle competition.
It's not that clear how much that helps. The places where Google won (Maps, Gmail, Chrome) they had a pretty clearly better product. Other places where they didn't (Duo/Hangouts, Plus, Gsuite, Chromebook, GCloud) they don't dominate the market.
Supermancho
> It's not that clear how much that helps.
It's clear that it helps enough to subsidize the entire rest of the Google operation (enough to run a more computationally and sophisticated business like search). AdTech is all about targeting by extracting context and minimally about tracking events.
Leveraging search to power ad targeting is the most efficient means. I'm not sure how this is a topic of debate other than to split hairs on what measuring stick to use.
boogies
Translate at least seems to have some people ignorant of the alternatives convinced that they have a clearly better product — “no competitors that even come close in terms of quality” when they objectively don’t. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23975001
wodenokoto
The claimed “objectively” better translator is DeepL.
You need to read like 8 paragraphs deep to get to that and there is no real explanation as to why it is objectively better - just a link to an article where some journalists apparently thought it was better.
switch11
Excellent Comment
Let's consider a few more examples of abuse of market dominance
1) Retail Me Not
Google through Google Venture secretly invested in them and didn't disclose that
Then for next 3 years, Retail Me Not was #1 for EVERY SINGLE deal and coupon search term on Google
Is that an abuse of market dominance? Pretty Sure
Is it illegal? According to US Anti Trust Law - not sure. A lawyer can step in
2) A market we are in
The largest 2 players (us and another company) are #40 and #41 when people search for the biggest key word
Not #2, Not #10
At #40 and #41
Who is in the Top 10?
companies that advertise A LOT on Google, even though they are distant 4th and 6th in the market
Not only that, they do it in blatant ways
Last year, they pumped up organic traffic to one of our competitors THIRTY TIMES over night
So, the top two companies (another company and us) saw ZERO CHANGE
However, a company that is a distant 4th in the market suddenly got its organic search engine traffic increased 30 times
Pretty sure in 3 or 4 years it will be revealed that Google invested in them or did some tie up
*
Google is basically using Search as a weapon
apahwa
this comment acts like there is some person on Google's side manually curating the search results. why is it Google's fault that your competitors have better SEO teams?
squeaky-clean
I totally agree with the idea of your post. Just wanted to share a sort of funny tidbit about the specific example you chose: I work in fare marketing for airlines, and google flights is actually a bit of a boon for us because it drops you directly into the airline booking engine with pre-filled info.
Before Google Flights we were mostly competing against Expedia/Kayak/etc. Now Google Flights indirectly gives the airlines the top rank again, and we're competing against the OTA's for the secondary spots with ads and SEO. I can also anecdotally attest that Instagram ads work very well for airlines. (Well... worked very well, pre march 2020 and all).
I do agree with your main sentiment though, and the case could totally be made that google flights is doubly screwing over the OTA's now. Just wanted to share some interesting anecdata.
1vuio0pswjnm7
As detailed on the site css-tricks.com, a popular HN item, there was a time before "#1 google Organic search result" meant anything. That is, the best search engine at the time did not try to order the results. The search was accurate and comprehensive but there was no preferential ordering according to "popularity" or a "secret" algorithm. That search engine was Alta Vista. Raw results.
I can remember combing through page after page looking for the results I wanted. Try that today and Google is likely to temporarily block you, accusing you of having "strange activity" coming from your computer, or looking like a "bot".
The more Google has tried to "solve" the problem of finding the appropriate results for the particular searcher within the raw results returned from the query, the more they have manipulated the raw results to suit their own perspective. There is no option to get those raw results and search within them the way you want. There is only Google's way -- reorder them according to Google's "secret" processes. Do not dig into subsequent pages, stay on page one. This necessarily carries a Google bias. It also creates a "winner-take-all" contest to reach page one that Google's exploits for selling online ad services.
In other words, not only does Google manipulate searches through deciding the "1st search result", it actually created this concept of "1st search result" with respect to web search. The idea that Google could guess the "correct" search result, reorder the raw results and place the "best" one at the top of the first page of results was in fact Google's idea.
Thanks to Google, reordering the raw results has become commonplace so no one really thinks about this anymore, but it is this (biased) reordering that allows Google to profit.
undefined
Aunche
> google subsidiary gets a custom tool at the top of google results (such as Flights) above both organic and ads.
Searching for flights is still a search. You wouldn't expect the first result of "cat pictures" to be Bing's search results for cat pictures, so it's also natural that the first result of "flight nyc la" would return actual flights as its first result would return actual flights rather than a link to Expedia.
IncRnd
That is illegal under antitrust laws.
Google was fined billions of euros for doing that.
Ericson2314
Let me make it really simple: The problem with the tech industry is vertical monopoly, but many people want to just think about horizontal monopoly.
Supermancho
Especially where tech has the best margins, we end up with horizontal monopolies over time. eg In idiocracy, "Welcome to Google-Costco, we love you."
ricardo81
The UK recently evaluated the online ad market and found that Google and Facebook commanded 70% of all online ad spend in the country [0].
Their large pool of advertisers also helps them command a higher return per search compared to other platforms, allowing them to outbid its peers to become the default search choice on devices, e.g. Apple products. Their lack of privacy sensitive policy also helps their ad targeting.
Generally to me it seems hard for new entrants to make any inroads for market share when there's a self-perpetuating cycle like that.
[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/cma-lifts-the-lid-on-digi...
tehlike
Fb could disrupt google because it had the impressions first, so that is the dimension to think about. Adspend and advertiser pool is a by product. Disclaimer: current fb, ex google employee.
yellowstuff
I'd think that if someone has the intention to buy but doesn't have a site in mind, they'll usually use Google: like "best mortgage rates" or "american girl doll clothes". I can see FB ads being better for raising interest in a product to a targeted demographic, but I'd assume that the Google ads that are very close to the point of sale are much more valuable. What am I missing?
dylan604
It's 2 different things to me. Buying an ad on Facebook is an attempt to get a specific ad campaign in front of specific users without the user specifically requesting it. Buying an ad on Google means getting your advertised item in front of a user as a result from a user's search. Either way, the user is now just one click away from getting to your advertised product, so I'm not seeing how Google is any closer than Facebook is. Facebook is passively placing your ad in front of a user, where Google's is active from the point of view of the user's actions. That's just for ad placement within the Google Search. I'm sure Google is doing the same passive ad placement in its other ad distribution arms.
philipov
Fb is also a problem, so relying on them isn't going to solve anything. A cartel or oligopoly is not a better situation than a monopoly. For there to be a healthy market, it needs to be possible for small business to compete. If that's not possible in a market, then it needs to be regulated like a public utility.
indigochill
> If that's not possible in a market, then it needs to be regulated like a public utility.
What I don't understand here is does this not just hand Google the monopoly but now with government protection? Because they're already in place, so who's gonna offer this public utility?
We see similar situations with, e.g. cellular carriers in the states, where wherever you live, you only get not-even-a-handful of choices.
And how does a country regulate an international "utility"? For Google to maintain its global position, it needs to consider not just local regulations, but also those in international markets. Public utilities so far have always had a limited area of operation.
yholio
Facebook has the impressions because in many countries they have a de-facto monopoly in social networking, which has become a large part of all web trafic. Google will cover the rest of the net almost unchallenged. So it's not even a duopoly, it's a segmented monopoly.
KorematsuFred
Every company is a monopoly based on how you define the market. Why should we focus only on online ads ? Why not look at the entire ad spend and then see what % is controlled by Google ?
By some logic the coffee shop in my block has a monopoly on coffee if their market is the block. They are irrelevant if you look at the entire city.
AnthonyMouse
Which is why market definition requires you to look at substitution. If there is another coffee shop two blocks away and your coffee shop raised prices significantly, people would start going to the other one, because they're strong substitutes for one another. Whereas if the nearest coffee shop was twenty blocks away, likely they wouldn't, because that's too far to walk and it doesn't make sense to pay $2.75 to ride the subway to save $1.50 on a cup of coffee. So the block is too small but the whole city is too big.
> Why not look at the entire ad spend and then see what % is controlled by Google ?
Because they would be reaching different customers, such that if the advertiser moved a dollar from e.g. online to print, they would lose customers, because the print viewers have already seen their ad from the existing print advertising they do, and the online viewers (who are different people) haven't. Which means they aren't adequate substitutes for one another.
tannhaeuser
That's too relativistic. If only AMZN, GOOG, and FB gain during coronavirus, this clearly means there's need for action considering the perspective of online-only advertising going forward. Especially if the success of TikTok as the only competitor in the space has resulted in government influence.
Nasrudith
That sounds like an attempt to maintain "never my fault" consistency akin to stating we need to beat all people at traffic stops instead of admitting that beating people at traffic stops to look good on crime in the first place was criminally wrong.
AmericanChopper
Being a monopoly is actually irrelevant. The anti-trust law in the US focuses on regulating anti-competitive business practices. You can implement anti-competitive business practices with any portion of the market, and you can have an outright monopoly without implementing any anti-competitive practices (and therefor without breaking the law).
But to successfully implement anti-competitive practices, you do usually need a significant portion of market share. Which is pretty much what’s being discussed here, even though it’s not a very accurate use of the word. You can also do it by acting as a cartel, which is another situation commonly (though not very accurately) described as a monopoly.
Ensorceled
Bizarre that you are equivocating a local coffee shop to online advertising; the emergence of which gutted the magazine industry, severely damaged and forever changed print news, and was single-handedly responsible for pushing Alphabet and Facebook into the Fortune 50.
elliekelly
Even in that extreme hypothetical I’m not sure it would be considered a monopoly - is there a convenience store on the block? A grocery store? A bakery? The market for “coffee on a given block” isn’t limited to coffee shops.
V6HBGNQHU
Blame the people spending that spend.
return1
The only way to have competition is if FB started a search engine or if google bought instagram
chris_f
FB may already be backing their way into search:
https://www.engadget.com/facebook-test-adds-wikipedia-search...
bagacrap
backing into? They've had a search box for ages and they've consistently tried to make sure all content is on their platform (rather than hosted elsewhere).
undefined
curiousgal
Same senators who thought Google made iPhones? Not defending Google but I am saying that most of those senators are not the holders of truth when it comes to technology.
manigandham
That's not what happened. The question was asking why a child saw a family member in an ad while playing a game. The Congressman just held up an iPhone while asking but it had nothing to do with the hardware.
Of course there are numerous factors that may have contributed to the ad (and maybe Google wasn't involved) but they went with the smartass answer and the media ran with that narrative instead. It's not the greatest question but it's much more valid than what people are assuming it was.
Video of the question (and notice the title): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmuROTmazco&t=60
squeaky-clean
He does specifically say "how does that show up on a 7 year old's iPhone" at 1:30, and those words will be entered into the record, which is probably why Sundar responded with that.
iPhone claims aside, that's just a terrible question. Doesn't know what type of phone it was, doesn't know what type of game they were playing, doesn't give any details on the sort of photo shown or the ad copy shown. By all likelihood it sounds like this was a Facebook ad because of FB's "Social Ads" policy does use profile pictures of people on your friends list in their ads. On top of that, kids are not the smartest or most honest. It could have been a picture of any old man that looks similar and she assumes it's her grandpa. It could be a made-up story entirely.
blhack
No, it's not a terrible question. It is a general question about the business of online advertising, something that Sundar Pichai is unquestionably an expert about since he is the CEO of the largest company in the world that sells online advertising, and for all you know it could have been a web game that the grand daughter was playing in a chrome browser.
A reasonable, non-combative answer to this question may have been something along the lines of:
Senator, ad providers have little control over what the content of the ads that are going into these applications is. While I'm not sure what the specific ad that your granddaughter saw was, I can tell you that at google, there is a system where a user can report an ad as inappropriate. Again I'm not sure what the specific ad that you saw was, or if it was part of google's advertising platform, but if it was, you could have reported that to google for review, and I can understand why that would have been an uncomfortable experience for you.
manigandham
Yes it's lacking too much context. Google's CEO probably didn't intend to be so dismissive but stalled since there wasn't a clear answer, and the statement ended up being snarky enough to move focus from the question to the "old people are bad at tech" bias, which was then reinforced by the media.
It's unfortunate but it shows just how bad the understanding is on all sides, and why these corporations can get away with so much. The most recent hearings this year revealed how much training these CEOs get and how adept they are at maneuvering around any real investigation.
lawrenceyan
Watched the video, and there was just a random guy dressed up with a mustache and top hat sitting behind the camera during the entire hearing?
manigandham
Yes. He shows up in many hearings.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/monopoly-m...
rtx
How does this happen two different comments about one incident captured on video.
nerdponx
Because people don't watch the original video, they read spin articles about the incident.
manigandham
Read the comments on the video. People don't really comprehend much of the content they consume and are easily steered by headlines.
undefined
JakeKalstad
The kid dressed up like the monopoly man in the background was a welcomed surprise.
sn41
No... If I recall right, that was Steve King. Steve King was a congressman, not a senator. Maligning a single congressman does not invalidate the basic point that a lot of senators are making.
scarface74
Or the entire Senate calling the wrong CEO in to testify?
https://money.cnn.com/2016/10/27/media/att-time-warner-senat...
Can you name one positive law with regards to tech that the government has passed in the last 20 years?
During the last hearing, many of the representatives were more concerned about Google and Facebook being “unfair” to conservatives. Well that and grilling Zuckerburg about Twitter’s practices.
qppo
That's not what the article you linked says. To the question though there really haven't been many federal laws regarding tech at all. It's kind of hard to find an example of anything that directly focuses on tech and has been around long enough to make a judgement whether it was good or bad.
JumpCrisscross
> most of those senators are not the holders of truth when it comes to technology
They don’t have to be. Their staffers do.
I’ve worked with a number of staffers on these questions for about three years now. They’re some of the smartest people I’ve worked with in my career, which has centred around Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
mondoshawan
So why aren't they the senators instead of the morons they back?
Broken_Hippo
Because a senator should know how to listen to others. They cannot be an expert on everything. Heck, these folks are making rules about medicine, pollution, car safety, tech issues, teaching, school lunches, interstate highways, commerce, military, child toy standards, what sorts of meat to allow in, and lots of other things I can't think up off of the top of my head. No one can be an expert on all of them - why we would suddenly expect them all to be an expert on this is beyond me. IIRC, an education in law is pretty common, which would be expected.
(I know the system isn't perfect and not everyone listens to educated voices and in a perfect world, there would be a range of knowledge in the elected body itself).
Edited for a missed comma.
mhh__
You need to be a certain type of animal to be a successful politician. Especially in the US where the power per person in the senate especially is enormous.
The house of commons has 600 more MPs for 5x less population.
HatchedLake721
Because being smart is not a golden ticket or the only quality required to become a senator/politician.
wasdfff
The staffer is a specialist. Intimate knowledge of highway infrastructure, or technology issues alone do not make a senator. A senator is someone who manages a small cabal of specialist experts who collectively hold more knowledge than any one head could ever fit. The job can’t be done by one person, its a coordinated team effort.
qaq
would people actually vote for them?
branchesncheckz
Ironically enough, I think that's the problem that lobbyists were intended to mitigate. You can't expect legislators to be experts on every technical topic, but in an ideal world you could retain subject matter experts to give good information to any congressperson who needed it.
It's not a bad idea in theory, but you run into the classic problem of deciding how to define "good information".
takeda
I don't think lobbying is bad, the problem isn't lobbying, it is the money required to make senators listen to them. That is the element that is corrupting everything.
Also senators can, and often do is have experts and have them provide sworn statements about given subject.
wasdfff
Congresspeople do have access to experts. Their staffers are brilliant. The issue is that ultimately what motivates any politician is moneyed interests, and not collective good.
cheph
So the reasoning here is if there are dumb legislators we should just defer to Google on how they should be regulated?
rodonn
No, we should defer to the career antitrust experts at the DOJ and FTC as well the academics who study anti-trust and competition (a mix of mostly legal and economic professors).
scarface74
You mean the “career” experts that are just as beholden to the whims of the President?
Or in the case of the FTC that gave the cable companies more power and upheld states blocking municipal broadband and got rid of net neutrality?
whereistimbo
Not defer to Google, but a smarter legislator.
actuator
I don't understand the issue completely, so the case may have merit but it's not like the current admin doesn't have an axe to grind with them. Might be just electioneering antics but look at this tweet: https://twitter.com/EricTrump/status/1303288007357796353
9HZZRfNlpR
I'm pretty sure all of your politicians have axes to grind, for different reasons.
Proziam
Google does make a smartphone, and if my parents are any example, every smartphone is an iPhone just like every gaming system is an xbox.
Razengan
I don’t know, some people here seem pretty confident in the knowledge of senators etc. when it comes to calls for investigations into Apple.
dalbasal
EU courts have arrived at similar conclusions re: Adwords. Specifically, they found that adwords does this sort of thing to its "search partners," competitors to google monetising via Adwords.
Google fought it, lost it, and then took its puny (in google terms) $1.5bn fine as a (affordable) cost of doing business. They certainly would have be happy to pay more than this for the gains they made by operating this way.
The issue with Antitrust as it is, is that the "crime" requires active proof and specificity. Essentially, the (practically) inevitable side effects of market dominance. You might need to prove specific violations like price fixing or (like with Adwords, Amazon and other current cases) using market data to gain an edge as a participant. You might need to prove market dominance by "proving" price effects and other microeconomic effects.
The problem is, these are hard to prove. You certainly can't prove all of them. But, they are a problem to the extent that monopolies exist. An occasional, multi year case ending in a fine <5% of annual revenue... this is a farce. Antitrust law is having almost no effects.
It doesn't help that software economics are very different, and that a lot of both theory and legislation practically assumes that the "market" is commodity-like. It just so happens that dominating literal "marketplaces" like adwords, amazon marketplace, etc. is an area with precedents.
Meanwhile, it's not like we particularly care if the adwords marketplace is efficient. There is simultaneously a massive public interest in 2020 monopolies, ooh. Otoh, the cases that prosecutors are making are very disconnected from the actual public interest. The public isn't all that interested in ad marketplaces being "better," cheaper or whatnot.
jeffbee
You can't count on senators to know what they are talking about. This article from yesterday I found quite helpful in explaining the details of the situation.
https://truthonthemarket.com/2020/09/14/the-antitrust-case-a...
Guereric
Thanks, I learned much about the workings of ad space from reading it.
cletus
I like the definition of anticompetitive behaviour that revolves around using power in one market to squash competitors in another.
Example: back in the 90s when Microsoft found itself at the pointy end of an antitrust effort, they did things like:
- Restricting OEMs from installing non-Windows OSs
- When they didn't restrict it, they effectively did by having more favourable pricing per license if Windows was the only OS you shipped
- They did similar things with Office but it was less egregious
- Restrictions on preinstalling Netscape
- Restrictions on default browser
- Using Windows to hinder competitors by breaking existing applications, giving a head start to MS software or moving core functionality into the OS (as they tried with IE)
Here are some theoretical examples of what anticompetitive behaviour might look like:
- Making AdWords usage exclusive (ie you couldn't also use Bing's version)
- Making Doubleclick exclusive
- Making either effectively exclusive by providing preferential pricing for exclusive use
- Making use of one ad platform require use of another
Antitrust doesn't exist to protect competitors from competition. People forget that. There are (many) competing display ad platforms. There's less competition in search (and thus search ads). But you can create your own search engine as Bing and DDG are witness to (plus all the dead ones).
It's just that all the other search engines suck. Or, perhaps more accurately, Google is seriously good at search in a way that's hard to replicate.
I personally don't think we should go down this road of dismantling companies just because their competitors suck. That's the Yelp business model. Yelp hasn't changed in 10 years. They have so many missed opportunities. But no, "Google is stealing our content".
Microsoft has the financial muscle to fund a search engine. They do of course. But Google is much better. Just because Microsoft sucks it doesn't (necessarily) mean that Google is a problem.
jeffbee
> Antitrust doesn't exist to protect competitors from competition
That's in America. In Europe, it actually does.
nl
The headline doesn't quite convey what the argument seems to be: Google is involved in nearly every step in the chain between advertisers seeking to place their ads and the publishers selling space on their websites. Hawley pointed to findings from the United Kingdom's antitrust regulator showing that Google has dominant positions in various parts of the ad technology market, ranging from 40% to more than 90%.
There could be some merit in that argument.
But the way it is usually made ("Google (or Google+FB) monopolizes the digital ad market") seems easy to refute: just look at the demand for TikTok, and Snapchat is pulling in over $500M (revenue) a quarter and back to robust growth after some missteps a year or two ago.
And Twitch ads & sponsorships are huge.
Even the UK investigation found Google+FB only controlled 70% of the market (which I believe is less than the major newspaper publishers controlled in the newspaper heyday)
rch
My impressession is that politicians prefer Facebook over Google.
mhh__
Google don't seem to be as interested in playing the game as facebook.
bjo590
They are all playing the same game, but the niches they found success force them to play differently. Google tried to take over fb.com with g+. FB tried to attack android with fb phones. They both are fighting over direct direct messaging with Hangouts/messenger/whatsapp. There is just as much politics in Youtube as there is in Facebook.
LatteLazy
No one seems to agree on what the problem is or what the solution is. Any "solutions" are complex and it's hard to predict the outcomes of implementation. The motives of politicians implimenting these solutions have never been less reliable or more corrupt or short-term-ist as far as I know. And in the background we have problems 100 times larger than whatever Google is meant to be: the collapse of democracy, climate change, Chinas rise in power and fall in decency etc.
mensetmanusman
If Congress cuts Google into pieces, they should be consistent and set some sort of maximum market value (as a percentage of US GDP).
That way, once companies reach a certain size, they can expect a split.
I actually think this would be good for society, because it would shuffle things up consistently to force new ideas. Also, smaller companies can grow more effectively, so the stock market should enjoy that as well.
wuunderbar
And then how do US companies then compete with overseas companies that don’t have this setback?
throwaways885
Other than the US regulating the shit out of overseas companies like China does, they can't.
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eqtn
make targeted advertising opt in. Make the opt in scary like how android enables the installation of apk's from unknown sources.
amelius
Just ban targeted advertising, but allow websites that ask the user to tell about themselves in order to get tailored product recommendations.
thinkharderdev
I recently listened to a podcast with Jason Furman and he made an interesting distinction. He distinguished between companies that grow to be very large through organic growth vs companies that grow very large through acquisitions. He used Walmart as an example of the former. They grew by being really good at logistics and having a really efficient supply chain, so they could offer lower prices and ultimately open a lot of stores. He used Google as an example of the latter. Obviously the search tech was their own but basically all of the ad tech (what they actually generate revenue with) was cobbled together through acquisitions.
justaguyhere
Or educate users to pay for quality and make quality websites/products so we don't have to depend on advertising. This would be insanely difficult to pull off, but it is at least worth a try.
The incumbents have trained users to expect everything on the internet for free. People think they pay $75 (or whatever their internet connection costs) and that should cover everything - news, search, email...
How many people even pay for super important stuff like email? No wonder ads are everywhere, like bad smell.
Nasrudith
That sounds like you are asking the customer to serve the market instead of the market to serve the customer.
throwaways885
$75 should cover the basics, including a sub to Facebook/Google if you want it. It's far too much to pay for only the internet pipes.
ntsplnkv2
Advertising is a huge reason why the US economy keeps on churning. I think there could be several knock on effects to something like this, even though in principle I agree.
kirillzubovsky
Despite what Government thinks of Google, I think holding antitrust hearings is just a political theatre. At the end of the day they might slap Google with a penalty which by all accounts will be just a margin of error tax write off. If the government really wants to encourage competition, they need to enable creation of new businesses, plain and simple.
Google isn't a Monopoly as much as they just have the most eyeballs because they built a great company. But Facebook, Pinterest, Snapchat, Reddit, and a few dozen smaller players, are all the answer to Google's monopoly.
I've just spent a few days testing different ad segments, and for the one I was doing, it turns out Reddit was 5x cheaper than the next cheapest source. Cool right?
What we need is more companies that are able to capture eyeballs, and an efficient mechanism to distribute ads among them.
johnward
> Reddit was 5x cheaper than the next cheapest source
I applaud anyone that can monetize the reddit audience. I've dabbled in their ad platform and had no luck at all.
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What so many people fail to realize about these issues vis-a-vis Google, it’s not so much the issues of Google having a monopoly or not on the ad market...in either case google is a dominant market incumbent that uses its position (in this case web traffic, data and online ad platform) to unfairly compete and stifle competition.
Google has often used data acquired through their market position to start subsidiaries to unfairly compete with their ad customers.
The reason it’s unfair is because Google has not just the ad data but the web search data, this often results in a Google ad customer going from #1 google Organic search result for key terms, to #2 to Google’s competing subsidiary.
Worse from going from #1 to #2 to a google product, the natural instinct to save the business is to increase ad spend to be sure you are still the #1 ad to our place the google at the top of organic search, of course ad spend goes right into the pocket of your new competitors core business anyway, and in many instances googles subsidiary will start bidding for your same keywords so they literally can’t lose competing with your business rather the have basically acquired an off form of rent seeking equity or they kill your business and become the market incumbent.
Of course the kicker are those instances a google subsidiary gets a custom tool at the top of google results (such as Flights) above both organic and ads.