This is a poltical play. All of these should be targets but the WH is looking for a pre-election "win", more symbolic than anything.
Google is ~80% of search in the US. Large percentage of online advertising. Lots of anti-competitive stuff to point to.
Apple is 50% at best of the smartphone market and their major competitors are South Korean and Chinese. Targeting Apple, with no major US competitor, is NOT a win. Not a good thing to be bringing up in an election year.
Amazon would also be a complicated anti-trust target, you need to specifically focus on online retail effects while not allowing Amazon to switch the conversation to talking about general retail and Walmart/Target. So, too complicated for any kind of quick traction.
Every administration uses the announcement of proceedings (in various fields) as an achievement in and of itself. Similarly, passing laws and regulations is regarded as an achievement, regardless of whether the laws achieve their stated aims.
Yeah if the dust has settled in five years that would be surprisingly quick. I'm curious what the community of legal scholars considers most likely in this case.
If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd say YouTube's value to a certain political campaign might have played at part in bumping up Google's priority. Apple and Amazon do not have a similar propaganda^w free speech platform that has to be kept on a short leash with similar urgency.
Obviously that wouldn't never happen in the U.S.A. - the DoJ's dealings have been entirely professional, non-partisan and above-board.
This isn't a particularly strong argument. Kleenex isn't on the antitrust chopping block even though you never hear anyone say, "Hey, can you pass me an AngelSoft?"
Even if that is true, do you deny that they are search engines themselves.
Siri, Alexa etc are even more opaque as they don't give a list of results, rather have deep integration to their own services and can't even be replaced by an alternative.
I know antitrust covers more than just the classic case of monopolies driving up consumer prices. But looking at it just from the anti-consumer lens, the case against Amazon really is kind of funny, when they're at the same time blamed for pushing prices down so low that that the fed uses them as a possible explanation for low inflation [1].
There are reportedly investigations against Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook; with DOJ taking the first two and the FTC taking the latter. Google was likely the easiest because there was a prior FTC investigation and EU enforcement actions taken against Google. Additionally, more state AGs rallied to the Google case.
The Republican Party now views Google as a hostile, specifically anti-Republican entity. Google is regarded as a political enemy.
It's not just about the election. The Republicans will persistently pursue any comapny that attempts to attack them as Google openly has. Google declared war on that political party, that party is now striking back. It was an enormous mistake by Google, as the Republican Party is one of the few entities in the US that is drastically more powerful than Google is; they can make their operational existence absolute hell, and they can destroy the company over time very easily just by pursuing their executives using available power levers, the best execs will avoid Google rather than deal with all the shit. It's what prompted both Larry and Sergey to run for cover as fast as they could, so they could avoid the scrutiny and investigations; I pity Pichai, he's the well-paid volunteer patsy to stand in and take the fire for Larry and Sergey.
Seems like you'd be the one surprised: Even though they have cut their lobbying budget in the past two years, Alphabet has spent more on lobbying Congress over the past decade than any other tech firm, except maybe Amazon.
This seems topsy-turvy to me. _Of course_ Google is at the top of the list! Amazon and Apple don't own YouTube, as well as both the supply and demand sides of the vast majority of the advertising market.
There's plenty of reasons to go after all of the big tech companies, but Google seems like an obvious candidate for first.
Apple and amazon have antitrust issues in their own walled garden ecosystems, with the app store and amazon marketplace. I would think Amazon an initial candidate actually, since it's been displacing so many existing businesses.
Amazon has huge warehouses in lots of states which means they have political power to threaten pulling jobs from districts or states. Google is a much softer target.
Not sure how much of a net positive Amazon jobs are. New York already refused to deal with all the demands Amazon had when it planned its HQ there. Large companies know exactly how much perceived value they bring to the table and try to make sure that society pays for it at least twice over without giving any guarantees.
>Tech is always the soft target for governments worldwide.
lol. Take a look at credit card regulation in Europe and the amount of regulation passed on banks in the last 20 years alone (for good reasons).
The only thing that's soft about tech is the industry's constant whinging because they're finally recognizing that the good old days of getting away with everything might be over.
Credit cards are actually a good example. Let's slap the 0.2% interchange cap that is the legal limit in the EU on the Apple store and see what happens then.
> Let's slap the 0.2% interchange cap that is the legal limit in the EU on the Apple store and see what happens then.
That's exactly the wrong solution, because it implies within it that they get to continue holding a monopoly as long as they're a regulated one. And then the regulations address the most visible seven of the two hundred thousand problems that are caused by monopolies and leave all of the other ones.
What's needed is to reintroduce meaningful competition.
>That's exactly the wrong solution, because it implies within it that they get to continue holding a monopoly as long as they're a regulated one.
That's a pretty common solution when infrastructure is concerned, which platforms basically are. Having 20 stores on your phone to me makes about as much sense as having 50 postal services driving on the streets.
Not really sure what's wrong with basically making two regulations. Apple/Google get to charge ~1% or whatever for running the store, and they don't get to ban stuff other than content that's unlawful. To me it seems like that solves 99% of the issues we've been hearing about.
> That's a pretty common solution when infrastructure is concerned, which platforms basically are.
It's pretty common for physical infrastructure because it has high fixed costs. Building a water distribution network is billion dollar enterprise. App stores are the complete opposite of that -- if it weren't for the platforms purposely interfering with competing stores, an individual would be able to set one up in a weekend.
> Having 20 stores on your phone to me makes about as much sense as having 50 postal services driving on the streets.
But we do have 50 postal services driving on the streets. Or at least more than one anyway -- USPS, FedEx, UPS, Amazon, plus private couriers, trucking companies and so on.
You might as well ask why we have multiple retailers. "Wouldn't it be more efficient if everybody had to buy everything at Walmart and we just regulated them as a monopoly?" Some minor theoretical increase in efficiency is not worth the crushing oppression that would inevitably bring.
> Not really sure what's wrong with basically making two regulations. Apple/Google get to charge ~1% or whatever for running the store, and they don't get to ban stuff other than content that's unlawful. To me it seems like that solves 99% of the issues we've been hearing about.
Which means you're putting the role of vetting apps onto some other third parties -- good, now there will be competition and you won't be screwed if the monopoly store rejects something they shouldn't. But then what is the Google or Apple store even supposed to be doing? Hosting the app? Anybody can do that. Payment processing? There are a dozen companies that already do that.
The only reason they have a monopoly is that they use control over the platform to purposely put barriers in front of app store competitors. It's not a natural monopoly whatsoever.
And you're just proving the point about how the regulations only solve the most obvious problems and leave all the other ones. For example, if you let them exclude app store competitors, even if they can't charge high fees or exclude apps they don't like, they could still bury them in an unfindable hole by eliminating direct links and putting it on page 5000 of any search results, or cover anything they don't like in arbitrarily scary warning prompts, or find a hundred other ways to make your life hard unless you bend the knee. Whereas if their being unreasonable could be remedied by just going to another store, it actually puts a check on unreasonable behavior in general by way of competitive pressure, without you having to predict and explicitly prohibit it ahead of time.
I think competition is completely overrated, there's actual research that digital customers are even stickier than physical ones and less likely to shop for alternatives (just ask your aunt how often she goes shopping for web browsers).
Android actually allows different stores without too much hassle and everyone is still on Google Play.
The problem with competition is that competition requires choice and choice comes with cost, and people don't like having to make decisions every five minutes, that's the secret sauce behind TikTok's success, it abstracted all the nasty choice away you have to make in social networks, or why twitter beats Mastodon.
Point being you're ending up with Amazon/Walmart/Megacorp XY anyway because that's just how advanced economies roll, they tend towards more concentration, I absolutely won't be surprised if the retail sector is going to consolidate next and small retail just gets wiped out by tech, covid has given us a taste of that already.
It's either regulated behemoths or unregulated ones, the 90s internet isn't coming back.
Competition is the only thing standing in the way of serfdom. Choice is the only thing that allows you to say no to anything because you can get what you need somewhere else. Without it your only option is to say yes to anything no matter how little you want it.
> there's actual research that digital customers are even stickier than physical ones and less likely to shop for alternatives (just ask your aunt how often she goes shopping for web browsers).
Even when this is true, it doesn't mean that competition isn't working. When switching costs are low and people don't switch anyway, it means that it's working well -- in an efficient market all the producers are required to make their products equally good to avoid losing business to the others. Sticking with what you have because the ability to easily switch caused the producer to make it just as good as the alternatives is a very different thing than sticking with what you have even though it's terrible because switching costs are high.
You use browsers as an example, but remember that when Internet Explorer was stagnating, your aunt and half the world switched to Firefox.
Moreover, this is still also a reflection of their anti-competitive behavior rather than actual consumer choice. If when you bought a phone it came with a "web" icon and the first time you click on it, it listed all the popular browsers and had you choose one, that would be a whole different landscape than the one we have where your phone comes with one chosen for you and then suspiciously a disproportionate number of iOS users use Safari and a disproportionate number of Android users use Chrome. If switching costs were actually low, the browser share on each platform should be about the same.
> Android actually allows different stores without too much hassle and everyone is still on Google Play.
This is to some extent the same thing -- Google Play is less abusive than Apple because the competitive pressure keeps them in check more.
But even there, the amount of hassle of installing another store is too much -- if you try to install anything but the default, you not only get scary warnings, the other stores can't actually update the apps they install. And Google privileges themselves immensely by being installed as the default.
> The problem with competition is that competition requires choice and choice comes with cost, and people don't like having to make decisions every five minutes
That's not the problem with competition, it's the mechanism that incumbents use to destroy it.
"People don't want choices" is only true when there are many choices but all the choices are roughly equivalent, so that the gain from a better choice is smaller than the cost of taking the time to evaluate the alternatives. It's only true when the efficient market hypothesis is true. But the efficient market hypothesis requires people to be evaluating their alternatives, or it won't be true.
So if you give everyone a reasonable choice by default, at a time when competition exists, they take it. Because that option is about as good as the others and it saves them time. But when you give the same default to everyone, that destroys competition -- tomorrow none of the other alternatives will exist, because they can't survive just by being as good as the competition when something else is the default. And without them there is nothing left to prevent the default choice from becoming a stagnant and abusive monopoly.
> Point being you're ending up with Amazon/Walmart/Megacorp XY anyway because that's just how advanced economies roll, they tend towards more concentration
They tend towards more concentration because of the unconscionable lack of antitrust enforcement. This isn't a feature of "advanced economies" -- it's just Standard Oil and US Steel all over again.
> I absolutely won't be surprised if the retail sector is going to consolidate next and small retail just gets wiped out by tech, covid has given us a taste of that already.
"Small retail" has been getting wiped out by Walmart and Home Depot for decades. Economies of scale exist. But Walmart doesn't have an anti-competitive moat, it only has low prices. And it still has to compete with Amazon, Target, Costco, CVS, Best Buy, Dollar General, etc. None of which is "small retail" but that doesn't mean any of them is going without effective competition.
> It's either regulated behemoths or unregulated ones, the 90s internet isn't coming back.
Smash the behemoths into non-vertically-integrated pieces and watch the 90s internet come back.
Because tech has monopolies over specific markets (or duopolies) engaged in anti-competitive practices that harm business and consumers while being comically unregulated.
Banking, credit, and defense all have a pretty good balance of competition and regulation. That's not to say there aren't areas that should be targeted by governments, but tech is hardly a "soft target." It's never been hit!
Well, except for all the 90s/00s Microsoft + Internet Explorer antitrust drama -- though admittedly Microsoft came out of it mostly unscathed, if a bit humbled.
Not that antitrust has to be based on market share but - it is kinda hard to claim Facebook has a monopoly on much of anything. Facebook is a big player but there are dozens of big alternatives. That is not at all the case for Google. Search, YouTube, browsers, Android all have a dominant market position.
Google has complete control over all internet search traffic in most of the world. They get to decide which websites are popular and which are not. This affects every person who owns a website or blog; a LOT of people. This is too much power for one company.
Amazon is just an online retailer, their monopoly only affects people who have shops on Amazon; this is not as harmful because it does not affect as many people and businesses (currently).
Same with Apple, their monopoly only affects people and businesses who want to sell apps on the Apple App store; this is a small number of people and businesses compared to the number affected by Google's search monopoly.
If you own a website, your life is being affected by Google. At a society level, Google can control the narrative of any social issue by tweaking its ranking algorithms to serve its own interests.
From first hand experience as an open source author who runs an open source project website, it certainly seems that Google has been treating me progressively worse over time.
I think you know the truth and you're saying the opposite. Maybe you own Google shares, maybe you work there, maybe someone is paying you to post comments on HN...
How can anyone believe what you're saying? We can all look around and see for ourselves with our own eyes that Google's monopoly is harming us.
Why should anyone believe Google more than their own eyes?
Even if our eyes were deceiving us, doesn't it say something about Google that we have become so distrusting of it?
So if a company earns the trust of their users (and grows very big and successful as a result), they get to claim full credit for it, but if they lose that trust, they're not responsible?
I'd trust the gut feelings of the majority of people rather than the opinions of a handful of experts... What's worse about this case is that there are no experts coming out in defense of Google; they do have financial incentives; so I suspect that they simply have no material to work with!
They cannot show proof to defend the fairness of Google's ranking algorithm because they know that any insight into how it works would conclusively prove that it's not fair. That's why Google is keeping the algorithm a secret.
Experts and authority figures have deceived people enough times that they no longer deserve any trust. It's simple game theory.
For me, the point of no return was the 2008 bank bailouts and it was made worse with the 2020 COVID bailouts...
In spite of the fact that the government had promised that 2008 would be the last bailouts.
Reserve banks of the world are printing massive amounts of money and essentially giving it to corporations (via 'loans' which are used for stock buybacks) and in doing so they betrayed the trust of every honest worker who earns a salary in fiat.
It's not that we want to rely on gut feelings. Gut feelings are simply the lesser of two evils.
And BTW, there are plenty of intellectuals who promote the viewpoint that the system is fragile and corrupt such as Nassim Taleb, Noam Chomsky, Chamath Palihapitiya and others. If you want to make sense of the modern world, just read some of their books or watch some of their interviews and presentations on YouTube. The evidence that authorities cannot be trusted is absolutely clear.
I don't think people realize how much of an effect google has had on shaping the internet over the past decade. I get the impression that most people think Google is just following-along with the trends/changes occurring on the internet, rather than being the driving/molding force. And the fact that Google is politically biased internally should also be equally worrying.
