I agree that some of google’s conduct is very questionable. It’s not obvious to me that paying to be the default search product is pro-competitive.

On the other hand, the case that Google is going to make (and which I think is going to be really hard for the government to overcome) is this: we (google) give our product away for free and so do our competitors. What’s more, the cost of switching search engines is literally zero: just type Bing instead of Google.

If customers are choosing our search product among two free options, then our product is better. It’s going to be very difficult to establish that there’s an abuse of dominant position in that case. (There is other behavior by google which is more questionable, but in search they are on firm ground.)

Having a large market share is not an antitrust violation, nor should it be.

Stoller wrote a book on the subject which I never properly got through in its entirety, but it included a deep dive on what a monopoly is. You are correct - market share is not an anti-trust violation in it’s own. My assumption is that they will be arguing over whether Google is exercising its total control over the system to prevent competition from emerging, and using that control to extract all the value for itself. All while crippling functionality for the customers, not us search engine users in this case - but the advertisers.

Google as a default to other browsers doesn’t bother me. It’s the being the ad broker, the exchange, the browser, the os and the search engine that are problematic. They have demonstrated over two decades that they cannot protect the interests of either their users or the ad buyers. Disabling cookies is essentially meaningless when you’re forced to sign into your browser or os. Absolutely no ad exchange can act in the interest of their users’ privacy when they have a browser or os that mandates you to sign in. And yes, even ad buyers get screwed by Google’s exchange (Google’s real customers). There are many fraudulent publishers that stack ads but get paid out for false impressions, Google still collects on fake impressions and has little interest in decreasing the fraud since they have a 30% take on the impressions.

The ideal outcome is that chrome is spun off, android is spun off, and the ad exchange is spun off. Google can keep its suite of productivity tools and search engine and run ad words. That’s a completely reasonable and still extremely valuable business that is highly defensible. I think their interests can align with their users and customers in that scenario. As it is right now, I don’t think you can have the business model they have and not have serious conflicts of interest with users and advertisers.

(There are really important antitrust issues in the ad exchange but that isn’t the case the government brought!)

To me that looks like an actual antitrust violation but the DoJ and FTC aren’t investigating bc they are obsessing about “big tech” uselessly and bringing bad cases they are going to lose!

If you want your regulators to actually do something about a lack of competition in the US economy (which they really should be doing!) there are a ton of markets worth investigating before they waste their time on this loser of a case.

But, hey, maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s a bad case being done for show. Slap on the wrist, back to business as usual sort of deal.

It's also a lot better than the ads market is, with literally one dominant player that monopolizes all stages of the supply chain. This is literally what Standard Oil did, controlling the wells, the refineries, and the distribution railroads to shut out competitors.

If you look at financial exchanges, there's a very good reason for the brokers and exchange to all be different companies.

But to your earlier point: > On the other hand, the case that Google is going to make (and which I think is going to be really hard for the government to overcome) is this: we (google) give our product away for free and so do our competitors. What’s more, the cost of switching search engines is literally zero: just type Bing instead of Google.

Don't you think the counter argument to this, is, "No it's not that easy to just go to bing when you buy out the default search on rivals' browsers and operating systems and have the browser and mobile os with the world's largest market shares"? I get that the attack here is directly on search but it would be surprising to me if this wasn't part of the case. It seems insane to bring this case if there isn't a component focused on the browser and OS conflict of interest in search.

I’m looking for an analogy for you. The claim is that Google has monopolized the search market. It’s difficult to find actual monopolies in real life bc generally antitrust regulation works well (pace Lina Khan).

Think about a small city with two independent hospitals which then merge. That’s closer to a monopoly. There is a potential harm to consumers here bc traveling to go out of your local market for hospital services brings real costs: travel time, inconvenience, etc. That gives the newly merged hospitals power in the market. (Maybe not to the level of a monopoly, but likely substantial market power nonetheless.)

Applying something like this analogy to your counter argument: literally all the consumer has to do to avoid Google’s so-called monopolization of the search market is type the letters “b-i-n-g-.-c-o-m”. That’s entirely different from the hospital case.

It’s going to be very very very hard for the government to establish that google has anything like monopoly power here. Remember: making a better product and as a result having a large market share is not a crime. Google is going to say that since consumers can costlessly switch to a competitor who is also free, the reason they have 95% market share is bc their product is better.

I find it very hard to imagine that they will lose this case. It’s possible! But it seems really unlikely to me.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl...

I think that entire line of jurisprudence is a tragic mistake.

The wording of the law is crystal clear: "shall not monopolize", not "shall not monopolize unless it's just a really good product".

A 95% market share should not be allowed under any circumstances.

We aren’t failing to offer definitions here bc we’re in the tank for big tech. To immediately suggest we have malign motivations isn’t charitable. It’s genuinely a hard problem.

And I agree that it shouldn’t have been “allowed” but here we are.

Search is not Google’s product, it’s a way to get their product. Their product is eyeballs which they sell to advertisers.

>the cost of switching search engines is literally zero: just type Bing instead of Google.

If this is true, why does Google pay Apple billions/year and Mozilla millions/year to make Google the default search? You could be saving that money!

Monopolization of the ad market is not the issue here, because the specific claim is that google has monopolized the search market. You can read that right in the linked article.

Google’s payments to be the default are (as I already said) not obviously pro-competitive to me. I don’t know if you and I disagree there.

But again… in Google’s defense they are going to say (accurately!) “everyone gives search away for free so consumers are free to switch.”

It’s going to be impossible (IMO) to argue that consumers are harmed in the search market. It just won’t be credible.

The department of justice is likely wasting its time, which is similar to the recent behavior of the FTC under Lina Khan which is (if you are American) wasting taxpayers’ time taking on losing cases, while letting mergers which really deserve critical scrutiny through. Microsoft Activision is a prominent recent example.

And if the Justice Department actually does show up in court with a filing that says: “No, your search engine was awesome, but it’s increasingly ad-filled crap. You’re too powerful, you’re too lazy, and America needs some real competition” (this is a direct quote from Stoller’s article) they are going to be laughed out of town and they will richly deserve it.

So again… I like the attention Stoller pays to antitrust issues but his analysis of the economics (especially in the case of some tech firms) is just bad.

Incorrect. The Stoller article says “government argues that Google has a monopoly of general search and *search advertising*”.

The case in question (1:20-cv-03010) alleges anticompetitive behaviors in multiple interrelated markets: general search services, *search advertising, general search advertising, and general search text advertising*. The other major case (1:23-cv-00108) is about their monopolization of the digital ad market via Doubleclick/Ad Exchange/Google Ads.

That was always ludicrous. The only way for the FTC to win that case was to define the relevant market as "games produced by Activision". That would have made the merger anticompetitive by definition... but no more anticompetitive than Activision already was.

"So if the government wins, we’ll see immense innovation and new entrants. If Google wins, however, then machine learning/AI will be deployed consistent with how Google, and perhaps Microsoft, chooses to deploy them, which is to say, slowly, un-creatively, and in service to monopoly power."

Specifically, the "slowly, un-creatively" part, which is what I really care about.

That's not a defense, though.

So the government is unlikely to prove anti-competitive outcomes by arguing an increased cost to consumer, but that's not what they seem to be arguing. Going from Ohio v. Amex, The other relevant ways to prove anti-competitive outcomes are through a decrease in product quality in the relevant market or market power and evidence of harms to competition.

The government appears to be arguing that product quality is lower and that Google has market power and has engaged in conduct that harms competition. If those are results from anti-competitive behavior then that is an antitrust violation, and should be.

The government lost Ohio vs. Amex, which was in any event about a two sided market. Google is definitely active in two sided markets but this case does not make those claims.

Good luck to DoJ if they are arguing that the quality of the product is lower! They are going to fall on their faces.

I’m not saying google doesn’t engage in anticompetitive behavior. There is a good case to be made on various things they do. But to go at google for “monopolizing the search market” is just pointless. The DoJ should bring a stronger case! Such cases can be made.

It doesn't matter if the government lost Ohio v. Amex, and it doesn't matter that it's about a two-sided market - I was using the Court's reasoning and outline of other ways to demonstrate anti-competitive outcomes. When the Court phrases something in their decisions a certain way or creates a test, it doesn't matter if the government fails the test in that case - the test can still be applied in later cases and in lower courts. Here, it wasn't even a new test, it was just a recent illustration of an earlier one.

In Ohio v. Amex, the Court found that Amex improved product quality and increased transaction volume generally. Regardless of the fact that the government would have failed because of the 'both sides of the markets have to have anti-competitive outcomes' elements, the way to see if it meets the bar is cost, quality and volume.

It's difficult in this market to make the case that decreased cost counters decreased quality or competition because the competitors also operate at zero cost to consumers. I'm not so sure they will fall on their faces arguing that the quality of the product is lower, frankly - we'll see. Either way, cost as a balance for anti-competitive behavior should not be a panacea here.

That said, Google will probably win anyway.

Having some kind of default search selection come up on fresh installs of Android, iOS, Macs and Firefox wouldn't really hurt consumers, and barely hurt Google (it became dominant through quality and people remember that). Ironically (and sadly) preventing Google using it's influence over default seach options would probably harm Mozilla the most... but it should still happen.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl...

The press release doesn't mention it, but the actual court document asks the court to:

"Order the divestiture of, at minimum, the Google Ad Manager suite, including both Google’s publisher ad server, DFP, and Google’s ad exchange, AdX, along with any additional structural relief as needed to cure any anticompetitive harm"

However, asking for a structural remedy like divestiture after so much time is going to be a tall order, to say the least. Generally courts don’t like to meddle directly in the way firms are run (correctly, in my view).

This is hogwash though. They take an 80% cut of the advertising profits (could be more now, this is just my dated figure that I know from a decade ago). Are the courts really incapable of dealing with an ad-supported monopoly in 2023?

> On the other hand, the case that Microsoft is going to make (and which I think is going to be really hard for the government to overcome) is this: we (Microsoft) give our product away for free and so do our competitors. What’s more, the cost of switching browsers is literally zero: just download Netscape instead of Internet Explorer.

> If customers are choosing our browser among two free options, then our product is better. It’s going to be very difficult to establish that there’s an abuse of dominant position in that case. (There is other behavior by Microsoft which is more questionable, but in browsers they are on firm ground.)

Notably the claim is being made that the search market is being monopolized, not that there is a bundle at issue. If the government thinks there’s a bundle here they can make that claim.

The government is claiming that the search market is being monopolized, not by having the best results, but by paying $45 billion dollars/year to various browser suppliers to make Google the default browser. That's the illegal act.

> "Essentially, Google has bought up all of the shelf space where search is placed in front of consumers, which is to say browsers and phones. This behavior is very similar to what Microsoft did in the 1990s, when it bundled its browser with its operating system, and signed deals with ISPs to block its browser rival Netscape from getting access to customers. The analogy isn’t a coincidence, as the Microsoft case is controlling precedent. "

And google is going to say correctly that consumers are free to switch search engines. They are free to enter “bing.com” in google chrome and it will take them right where they want to go: to another search engine!

I note above that I am not sure google’s payments are pro-competitive. They probably aren’t. It’s fair to be uncomfortable with them. But to make an antitrust case on monopolization of search you are going to need more evidence than those payments.

And people were free to download Netscape.

But the thing is that people don't type "bing.com" nor "google.com" because they just use the browser search bar and don't bother with what search engine is being used.

That is, saying that customers /could/ switch is not necessarily relevant. There is evidence that they believe paying for the "default" billing is worth a ton of money. Not just to Apple, but to Mozilla, too.

That they could lose access to revenue streams by losing default billing is very relevant when that is also a large portion of how they are able to make that payment.

Could see it more as collusion with competition, I suppose? It isn't competing on the merits of their search, but more on their ability to afford default status. Which keeps Apple from entering search, and ostensibly keeps it more expensive for Microsoft to keep Bing.

Consider, if Apple could get more from MS to make Bing default, why wouldn't they?

On the contrary, it’s the whole ballgame in a case like this. Google’s claim will be: “we have high market share because our product is good. Look - customers could switch for free if they didn’t like it.” The government cannot make a monopolization claim solely on the basis of high market share in this case. It’s not remotely persuasive. (Indeed: who do you do your searches with??)

>> “there is evidence…”

Totally agree with this sentence. But it’s not going to be decisive for the government. It will not be remotely sufficient. Again - it’s not clear to me personally that this behavior is pro-competitive. But I’ve already told you what google is going to say. If you’re going to argue monopolization you have to define the market (here search) and then show it’s monopolized. Market share isn’t enough.

>> could see it more as collusion…

Not legally. Sorry. Not without some specific evidence of a conspiracy.

The discovery is what could kill Google, here. They will argue customers could switch, but any negotiations with apple to stay default are discoverable. If any of them note they fear losing share, that is pretty damning.

Note I fully agree with you on difficulty of position. But you don't pay billions for status that you think you earn on your merits.

Especially if you then charge other players to be top search spot for their own name.

Sure, like a farmer gives his cows pasture.

If one farmer bought up all the land, and then tried to claim he was giving away grass for free I doubt any jury would be fooled.

Not the only example, but an example most of us had dealt with....

If you are locking a product down so that I cannot choose why are you afraid of fair competition in a free marketplace Google?

So I tried to read Matt on antitrust (though it turns out we share some of the same views), but once you get beyond the "forcefulness", everything only gets worse in my experience.

It's a lot of bloviation, and when you get into the details, he often will, charitably, take interesting interpretations of the actual opinions and views of courts and others, especially when they disagree with his view. Once I read enough to have a sense of continuity (IE how did claims/views/predictions turn out), I ended up giving up my subscription because i just couldn't read it anymore. There are those who are much better at representing what's going on as a whole in a thing, even when they have a point of view and share it. Even when it's a point of view i think is totally wrongheaded. It's not as passionate, for sure, but I find it more useful and enjoyable in the end, whether i agree or not.

In Matt's case, let's take this one: "Judge Mehta tossed these claims, saying that services like Yelp and Expedia aren’t general search engines and are therefore not in the same market as Google. It was a highly technical and annoying way to read certain legal questions, but bringing an antitrust case has become virtually impossible unless it’s done perfectly."

You'll note that Matt does what he often does here - when he can't explain why he's right, things become more abstract - there aren't any examples of how it was "highly technical" or "annoying" or what "certain legal questions" are. Not a single example anywhere to be found. No example or data that backs up that it is "virtually impossible" to bring antitrust cases unless they are "done perfectly".

Nope, just some abstract complaint and throwaway language about how, you know, whatever he said in the last newsletter about how this part was gonna be a slam dunk or whatever is really right, it's just, you know, "highly technical" things got in the way.

Which ones?

Oh, well, you wouldn't know them, they live in Canada, and only visit in the summer.

Let's look at what actually happened here: No, the judge did not throw the claims out because they aren't general search engines. He threw it out because he felt the plaintiffs were way short on the evidence, because they rely entirely on an expert who cites no evidence himself, only makes up theories. This sounds like an exaggerated opinion of what happened, but it's not :)

See page 46 of the opinion.

"The court agrees with Google’s second argument. Plaintiffs’ theory of anticompetitive harm rests on a multi-linked causal sequence that relies not on evidence but almost entirely on the opinion and speculation of its expert, Professor Jonathan Baker. Plaintiffs cite Professor Baker’s report for the following propositions:

< a page of propositions elided >

Remarkably, not one of Professor Baker’s opinions, on which these fact assertions are based, cites to any record evidence.

Indeed, a closer inspection of Professor Baker's reports shows he has largely theorized the anticompetitive effects in the relevant market of Google's conduct toward the SVP's

...

Plaintiffs are required to show with proof "that the monopolist's conduct indeed has the requisite anticompetitive effect", and they have fallen well short of that burden".

This isn't even the end.

It goes on, where the Judge points out this state at oral argument and the states confirm they have no evidence, etc.

It then explains why unsupported expert opinions aren't enough to get past summary judgement, etc. It is a clear step by step refutation of the claims, unrelated to the market question.

It does then end with "Professor Baker's opinions do not rest on facts; only his ruminations about the market effects of Google's conduct" as one final jab.

To read all that, and believe that this is about, you know, some highly technical legal questions being read in an annoying way and that it's the judge requiring them to "do it perfectly" is, uh, an interesting take for sure.

It's one thing if Matt went into this and said "I think that random theorization should be enough, because facts are a lagging indicator" or "I think the court is wrong on the following legal standard", or whatever, but nope, this just gets painted as the nonsense we started with.

This is very common in his writing, and at least for me, made it not worth reading.

Would drive, docs and gmail be free if you divorced them from the ad revenue products?

If they are all free then it’s not a bundle in the antitrust relevant sense. Microsoft Teams is a great example of an anticompetitive bundle if you want one.

> Microsoft Teams is a great example of an anticompetitive bundle if you want one.

Also true.

This is exactly where the anticompetitive effects of bundling arise.

>> With Google, the products are paid for by the ad revenues instead of Windows and Office licenses.

That’s why it’s going to be impossible to argue that this is bundling in the anticompetitive sense.

Yes, probably. They all count against your 15 GB quota of free storage, after which you have to pay Google for more. It's basically the same model as Dropbox.

All of this “… then you are the product” stuff is totally meaningless legally and economically.

I mean… maybe? (How much is your data worth to google in dollars? Probably not that much.) But I think consumers understand how google makes their money. If your argument in court is “consumers are misunderstanding in dollar terms how much this is harming them,” then you are going to lose.

The obvious hesitation I have is just that some companies really do benefit from a lot of vertical integration. Could Apple be Apple if they were forced to spin off the phone business, or the chip design house, or the OS?

What would it mean for the startup ecosystem if getting bought by a conglomerate was a less plausible exit?

How would regulators enforce that the split off entities were truly independent vs faking it and then having exclusivity deals that meant they were basically still the same singular entity?

If it weren't, the things that are integrated become available for others - meaning better products for all, no?

What's the societal benefit of integrating all these advances in single companies?

TLDR: it’s complex, but successful vertical businesses have fairly different products, efficiencies, and outcomes.

Yes, no other company but Apple could have pulled that off, but that’s only because Apple themselves are a monopolist with the market power to fight another monopolist.

That’s not a good thing. The solution to monopolies isn’t more monopolies. A much smaller company than Apple could have theoretically created a better processor than Qualcomm, but it just couldn’t happen due to multiple anti-competitive factors. Like how Qualcomm has a patent portfolio that gives them a monopoly on 4G modems, and can use that to force companies to purchase other components from them if they want a modem.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/qualcomm-us-ftc-apple-chips...

They are one of the most vertically integrated large companies, but they are allowed to monopolize their own products. There is no iPhone market - that’s a product within a huge market of other mobile devices that anyone can join.

And if I’m completely wrong about you, then I apologize. My patience for these internet arguments isn’t what it used to be. To answer your question, there are no doubt thousands of comments on this website about that topic. Ignore the ones that seem to come from Apple fanboys, and you’ll find the right answers.

The way I see it, Apple has targeted a very specific kind of customer. And these people have a few things in common:

Value privacy

Value great hardware

Willing to recognize and pay for all the ways Apple adds value: packaging, UX, etc...

And there are some more, but I feel listing more won't add value here.

I do like the Apple M1 computer I own. And I like the older 8 and 16 bit ones too. The reasons are very different with the older machines being open and hackable and the M1 being fast with crazy good battery life given the overall performance.

However, I flat out won't own an Apple phone. Too closed down, and the UX is not well aligned with how I prefer to do things.

I disagree strongly with many things Apple does and feel their products often are too restrictive.

But, I do not have to use anything they make either.

Some have argued that Apple has serious lock in on their products. Yep. Except for the computers, I agree! That is why I won't use any of their stuff.

Yet lots of people want it that way and Apple delivers it to them and asks those people to pay right up, and those people do pay up and a whole lot of those people are happy having seen good value for their dollar.

In my view, Apple gets to do that.

And nobody has to like them doing that, right?

How is any of it a monopoly?

Serious question.

So when people say Apple has a monopoly, I want to know what market they control so entirely that they are able to eliminate any competitors should they choose to behave anti-competitively. People often say they have a monopoly on iPhones, but that’s not a market, it’s a product that they make and sell. If 90% of mobile devices were iPhones, I’d agree, but they’re not, so Apple cannot have a monopoly in that market.

Sometime people suggest they have control over mobile development. Targeting iPhones is profitable because iPhone users spend money. It’s no different from console development (PS5, Switch, Xbox) where all software goes through a gatekeeper who takes a cut. How does that control mobile development when they’re in the minority in the market?

They have a huge market cap and pile of cash, that still doesn’t make them a monopoly. They don’t have price control in any market segment. Sticking with phones, you can get Samsung and Pixel phones for higher and lower cost.

AFAICT they don’t meet any common or legal definition of a monopoly so I am interested in what industry people think they control.

You’ve not said why you think they’re a monopoly, so I can really only assume the common things I see people complain about. A company having business practices that might be considered hostile does not make them a monopoly though. That word has a specific meaning.

Is profit in a market a measure that’s ever been used to identify a monopoly? Apple has no method of controlling prices in the mobile market, so what difference does it make if they are one of the few profitable companies? That’s why I mentioned buying out fab processes, but that might be anti-competitive, but still not monopolistic.

By definition monopolies dominate a market so thoroughly that they can prevent equivalent products from being offered at lower prices. Apple does not have the power to keep mobile device prices high, despite their fab dominance (and there are other fabs that offer substitute processes).

There are dozens of cheap mobile devices that, despite low profitability, still dominate the market. Despite Jobs’ claim that the iPhone was guarded by patents, competitors with essentially the same features were available within a year of the iPhone’s release.

Does Apple have some anti-competitive practices? They’ve been found to in the past (employee recruiting between companies), and may or may not now, but that is separate from being a monopoly.

Saying Apple doesn't have a phone monopoly because of cheap Android devices is like saying Microsoft didn't have one because doing work on a piece of paper was still a thing.

As you say, many people disagree with you. It is very possible they have more of an argument than then just being idiots or shills or whatever disparaging label you want to give them. The question you are responding to is a legit one. People will continue to ask for justification whenever you proclaim Apple a monopolist. The fact they haven’t been convinced by the thousands of comments means your position isn’t as self evident as you think.

(I own zero Apple products, not really a fan of any mega corp)

My first thought is that the "apple Qualcomm" that would come out would have incentives to make better chips without needing to also sell phones (competing with other chip manufacturers) but I can understand that the chip industry is very costly and risky, I can see how without integration they can't compete with any current player - too expensive and risky.

I think Apple’s long term privacy and e2ee pushes and googles recent attempts at the same would not exist across a pile of medium sized companies. iCloud Photos leaking would continue to be a thing.

I guess going public would be the move realistically. I would prefer to see a shift toward startups aiming for solvency though, which I believe would make better companies. Companies that fit a role in society better. Free market capitalism isn't really happening if consumers aren't paying for anything and the money rains in from the VC heavens instead.

This (among other things) contributes to the trend of increasing consolidation in virtually every industry in America.

What they are missing out is alternative investment categories only available to those with more money, or estate planning solutions that are expensive to setup.

Which is what the Sherman Act says:

"Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other per- son or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $100,000,000 if a corporation, or, if any other person, $1,000,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding 10 years, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court."

It hasn't been rigorously enforced since the 1960s, but the Department of Justice does have the option of enforcing it as written.

And companies like Google have more than just "big money political influence". YouTube banned discussions on legitimate discussion of Covid and politics in the past few years, for instance.

That is the goal and why "Break up Google" is being aggressively pushed by pro-Chinese bots on reddit, twitter etc.

"Break up Google" should be translated to "Give all the data to China".

Before the rise of TikTok I would as a European have supported the US shooting itself in the foot by breaking up Google, Microsoft etc. I assumed those would be trivially replaced by European alternatives. However today, post-TikTok, I know the majority of people will just eagerly jump on the first Chinese spyware alternative that pops up.

In case I'm unclear, I feel that not keeping our economy diverse and fair because China might make more stuff than us if we do is very misguided.

No, we wouldn't.

The free market wasn't solving that problem. A new baby formula factory can't just be built to cover a gap that'd probably disappear in a year. But that leaves people in a shitty position for a year.

By the definition I learned in school, that's not a free market, precisely because it can't scale on both supply and demand sides. If it can't be (if factory startup costs will always be too high) then that's an argument for regulation to offset the problem, but it's not a free market problem.

Even assuming that this is a good idea, this have an unnecessary risk of being unconstitutional and getting scrapped by the justices. If you want to limit property rights in this fundamental way, that has to be based on a very strong judicial basis. That's why almost all reasonable antitrust regulation happens in a reactive way, because it has to prove that those regulated entities are actually doing something harmful.

Antitrust is reactive because consolidation is a slow burn and it takes a while for a critical mass of voters to feel the problem. Thats why Obama and Biden have taken completely different approaches, despite being ideologically similar.

This can be done for search as well which makes sure at least 4 players stay in the market at all times. Why isn't US govt doing this?

1. https://www.indiatimes.com/worth/news/upi-apps-may-soon-have...

Because it would be incredibly unpopular, for one.

Can you imagine being in the middle of some work, Googling a term, only to be hit with "Sorry, we're over the government limit and can't fulfill your search"

Hacker News and Stack Overflow would be full of people trading tips about using VPNs to evade the limits.

People don't actually like having the government restrict them from using things they want to use.

Please ask about VPNs on Quora until the end of the month.

You're right, I hate it and always switch to a different search engine instead. So, that's the goal here right?

You using a VPN is just as outrageous to them as you attempting to use a working ad blocker.

Programmers are often overconfident and think they can implement anything... except when they have to follow common sense regulation in which case it's always impossible or they come up with ridiculous straw men like you just have.

There are a million ways to curtail anti-competitive behavior. One, on the spot, example would be: not to stop people from making searches, but instead to tax at 100% everything over the 30% of searches.

Why isn't the UK, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, ... doing this? Because it's a pretty strong form of controlled economy that distorts the market.

How would this work for search engines? Would you force people to use a different search engine than the one they want? (e.g. they type Google.com and end up redirected to Bing.com) ; or somehow just funnel revenue to other companies... then who gets to decide which companies this gets funneled to?

Anti-trust is about preventing anti-competitive tactics, but the scheme you is ironically anti-competitive: it artificially inflates usage of other services even if they don't provide an equal/superior service, with consumers paying the price.

[disclaimer: I work at Google, so likely biased]

There is a way. If we start treating Internet search as commodity/public utility, we can use shared municipal fiber analogy. One public website can route requests to multiple participating search providers, ensuring that the searches are evenly distributed.

Of course, it's not a good idea for a lot of reasons. Starting as extending government surveillance, through leaving consumers with limited choices (if different providers' result quality is significantly different, which it probably is), and all the way down to having to decide what qualifies as a search engine.

It's best to look at the root of the issue. I don't think most people are upset that Google is the most popular search engine out there. It's the other practices that make people wary or outright unhappy. Google is very multi-faceted, so government forcing company split (e.g. make Google Search, Gmail, Chrome, Android etc. entirely separate entities), or disallowing of some business practices (such as making Chrome cater to Google Analytics needs) might be beneficial.

Again, I am probably biased here, but I don't see much anti-competitive behaviour in the search engine space. If people have a clear superior alternative to Google, then by all means please share it here.

Even during the brief period where I used duckduckgo, I was constantly finding myself typing "!g" to get results from Google as they were just consistently more relevant.

... Oh wait, that's actually a great idea and I want to see that happen.

Baidu "六四事件"[0] to find out more!

[0] "June Fourth incident", the Chinese name for the Tiananmen square massacre. Other banned search terms include "candle", "never forget", and the numbers 25 and 64.

Ad-free tax-funded search would be kind of neat.

Why do you need to penalize private institutions if users prefer to use them over a government service?

It’s painfully simple and we’ve done it a million times. Breaking up AT&T is probably the most obvious example.

They could split up the search and ads business and maps and Google local search and so on.

It would be fine. We’d be fine.

Also if you work at Google can you tell us if anyone has noticed that the supposedly “equal/superior service” has degraded so badly that it’s barely fucking usable a lot of the time?

Which is, of course, relevant.

To change this takes real political will and a recognition of who the beneficiaries of the current systems are. It's not simple in any remotely democratic system with rule of law.

We do have the FTC which can enforce antitrust (when the executive branch doesn't interfere) and force various requirements (like the auctioning of ad terms be separated from the business of marketing ads, and the collection of search data) on different parts of the company.

(edit: Oops, I must remember to only discuss US politics with any realism. Reference to any other country's corruption/politics must only be with the highest reverence, deference, and awe.)

Right, because a judge would look at a company holding the same market through subsidiaries and not throw the book at them. IANAL, but AFAICT the wording in the law doesn't even distinguish one company vs a group acting together; why would that make a difference?

I'd answer those two questions differently, but I think you're referring to something I wasn't.

You shouldn’t ensure that three potentially inferior products stay on the market. That makes no sense.

It also reduces the incentives those firms have to invest in quality - at some point there is a hard limit on how much competition they face. That would be a terrible, terrible law.

It's absolutely worse today, how much worse depends on how far back you go.

Before 2005 Google didn't put ads in search results, AdWords results were separated off to the right side of the page to make them clearly distinct from organic search results.

Google has a conflict of interest here: on the one hand their users need information, but on the other Google is the primary vendor of advertisements on these garbage clickbait sites. It would not surprise me if Google intentionally upweighted results that have their ads in them, and they certainly are not downweighting them the way Kagi does.

For instance, Google product search results would likely be greatly improved by always showing relevant reddit posts first. But this would last a very short amount of time until reddit would be completely drowned in junk. (I've seen people argue that this is already the case, but searching reddit still tends to work well for the products I search for)

We can be happy that Google search hasn't gone this way, and as a Kagi user you should be glad that it's not a more popular engine, as the quality of results likely highly depend on that just fact.

In a way the ads-filled product search results are better, because at least they're honestly trying to sell you the product you are searching for rather than making fake comparison sites pretending to be genuine content.

This is already a thing under Google's system: if a result isn't an ad-ridden mess, it's content marketing trying to sell an adjacent product.

You haven't addressed the conflict of interest that Google has as the largest vendor of ads on the internet. Right now, Kagi's sole job is to help me find what I'm looking for. If SEO started to game their current algorithm, the incentive would be for Kagi to improve their algorithm and win the meta game. If they fail to do so, their payments will dry up as people look for an engine that will.

Google has no such incentive. If their algorithms consistently drive traffic to pages that have their ads on them, Google is incentivized to keep that traffic flowing, regardless of how SEO'd the content is. The user isn't Google's customer, the advertiser is.

If they start popping up in Kagis result they will bother me at most two or three times before I hit the downrank or block button and they are gone.

Why Google hasn't managed to create something similar during the last two decades I leave as an exercise for the reader.

In what universe can for-profit behavior be trusted or accepted at face value as genuine? Also, maybe I'm using it Wrong™, but I don't use general search engines to look for products. I'm not shopping all the time, so why should we be advertised to all the time? I use a blocker and aggressively eradicate ads from my experiences, precisely because they are useless to me, take up valuable screen real estate and bandwidth, and are security and privacy vulnerabilities.

It wasn't so bad back when it was just a JPG and a link, but the telemetry that gets baked into it is creepy as well. For-profit Internet behavior needs to rein in its snooping if it wants to gain trust.

You know, things like the fusionauth OAuth guides (not trying to call them out).

I ask because it's a weird area where it can be shit and predatory, or a general good thing.

These things aren't all true in real life, and on the internet it's even easier to fake all of that.

In the beginning Google went by 'amount of text' (which is why you read everybody's life story on how they had sex next to a magma flow in Hawaii which created the idea of doing burnt ends on a pizza stone), references (remember all those backlinks which would boost your page). Credentials are a lot harder to track. There is no API at my school where you can put in my name and see my credentials (and all you'd see is 'we got governments subsidies for this person, which is why we let him pass').

And all of this worked at the start. Knowledgeable people naturally had references on the web, as only knowledgeable people were on the web.

Now we literally have people writing text purely to make it look like their website has more content on them, even if it is remotely related to what they serve.

Great example, even posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36740400

Or any coding problem where you end up on logrocket / some partitioning app / some generated website with which has an 'answer' for KB0000000 -> KB9999999...

Now instead of 5 sites with identical recipes, what about 500? 5,000? 5,000,000? How can you even rank them in a meaningful way and does it matter to the end user?

There will be too much of a supply of information, especially when ai ramps up, that no one website will have unique value outside of local significance or if it was made by your mom or someone you like. I think it will be crazy to see what the web looks like 10 years from now. It could be vastly different.

The problem never was or will be Search. The problem is advertisers hijacking the verb of "Search" to weight it for those willing to pay.

Librarians and archivists have had search solved for the last century. The only people who have a problem with that implementation are the ones who want to convince you the answer you're looking for is them.

Why are top 10 results for 'apply for visa to Moldova' a scam? Is it really impossible to give government officials an ability to provide input for official business, like applying for a passport?

Could you not hire like 2 people in each makor country to keep track of websites for important government services?

Could you not take community input like reddit does, or wikipedia?

seriously sometimes i think the people making the smartest algorythms are tge ones with biggest tonnel vision, and are incapable of examining alternative solutions.

Lets take your problem. Applying for a visa for Moldova. Let's say that there's a site hosted at visa.moldova.gov with a form to apply.

Eventually, someone is going to integrate a bunch of data broker services to auto-fill that form, then data broker to other tourism related businesses trying to compete to plan your stay.

It is very much in their interest to ensure that no one sees visa.moldova.gov, but instead sees one of their onboarding funnels.

Thus the well around a well known onboarding point to a critical government service is poisoned.

the ability to make accurate predictions of outcome by way of knowledge, observation, and logical deliberation.

Now any imaginable niche subject is drowned by a deluge of blogspam articles.

Interesting people moved behind walled gardens because who is going to bother building a webpage when you can just post a pic or 140 characters on a whim and move on with life.

I was about to give up but these to have given me hope that search isn't unsolvable.

If it's too complicated to say one technology is where all the value lie, it's going to be extremely complicated to say Google's existence is meaningful.

We can lean on the fundamental social truism; it's a front to act as a bloom filter for the US dollar, and busy work for people that might otherwise topple the government.

Amazon: Walmart (goods), Netflix (media)

Microsoft: Apple (OS), Google, Amazon (enterprise compute)

Apple: Microsoft (O, services), Samsung (mobile), Google (mobile, services), Netflix (media)

So, it will take care of itself, and I think there are many other competition issues that need government intervention.

1) They have free data about what most users want (i.e. click on)

2) Websites fight for being indexed by Google, but crawlers other than Google basically have to fight to access websites

IMO Chrome needs to be split out too as does Android.

Is Microsoft abusing their market position to keep competitors out of the market?

If there was a company that controlled 100% of a market, but was committing no "abuse", that's still a problem.

We want competition. If there is no competition, then evidently conditions that prevent competition exist.

Also, as the 90s Microsoft case showed, just having a monopoly isn’t bad. It’s the harm caused by having the monopoly. Back in the 90s, Microsoft was found to harm other browsers.

[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

But I think if Standard had 64% in the beginning and there was a competitive market, they would not have been broken up.

[0] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chart-evolution-standard-oi...

As to when the case started, it’s impossible to know what the minimum threshold was. It could just as easily been well below 64% as people where in monopoly busting push at the time.

Can you elaborate your thoughts here because the point of breaking up companies with monopolistic power is they cannot be divorced from monopolistic abuse of that power. It is written into US law that the company has a legal duty to it's shareholders. It seems your point is a distinction without a difference.

The legal duty to shareholders doesn't mean that companies need to violate the law. In reality, saying " we don't abuse our market position to avoid regulatory scrutiny" is acting in the interests of shareholders, and a lawsuit wouldn't go further. Otherwise you'd be saying that companies had a duty to break all laws in pursuit of shareholder value, which is obviously silly.

And yeah under us law you have to prove consumer harm or anticompetitive practice, not just having a significant market majority.

What do you think this looks like in practice? Because it makes logical sense to me that monopolistic companies would use their monopolistic power to come as close as they can with anti competitive behavior without attracting scrutiny which is why you break them up in the first place. And it's not theoretical, there are many examples not least of which is Microsoft.

It's not though!

The legal duty is to act in the best interests of shareholders. Avoiding the risk of regulatory scrutiny is in the interests of shareholders. The way a lawsuit like this would work is that you'd go to discovery and short of the CEO explicitly stating that they were tanking share prices (and not disclosing that at the time), the lawsuit would get thrown out.

> monopolistic power

What is monopolistic power that isn't anticompetitive? Either what you're saying here is "Companies would engage in anticompetitive behavior and avoid scrutiny" in which case that's a regulatory failing, or you're saying "companies would engage in legal practices I personally dislike, and not attract scrutiny as a result", which is totally fine.

> And it's not theoretical, there are many examples not least of which is Microsoft

I'm not sure what you're saying, Microsoft wasn't broken up.

I am saying this isn't theory. That this happens basically any time a company has monopolistic power. We cannot expect companies to behave altruistically (nor should we, the purpose of a corporation is to make a profit).

> "Companies would engage in anticompetitive behavior and avoid scrutiny" in which case that's a regulatory failing

Yes, that is exactly what I'm saying. And the regulatory response is to break the company apart or provide a public service that meets the need of the public if the monopoly is natural.

The legal duty is to maximize shareholder value. Because that is the only interest of a shareholder. I am aware I'm repeating myself here but that necessarily means the company must behave in a way that they maximize their profit under the law as it currently stands regardless of morality/ethics. Given the US government has not done any monopoly control since I can remember, avoiding regulatory scrutiny is a farcical risk.

The original point we were discussing is that private monopolies by themselves can be okay but monopolistic manipulation should be punished. And I disagree with that point because monopolies (and any company) must maximize their profit. Nevermind the legal duty to their shareholders, companies must maximize profit.

And duty to shareholders would actually mean that management would not abuse their monopoly power because of the risk of breakup.

EDIT: OP eventually clarified in the thread that they're talking about piracy. So apparently the argument is that because Microsoft products can be pirated, Microsoft isn't a monopoly. Make of that what you will.

And also as a small fish the higher OEM price is being subsidised by the Fortune 500 companies which buy millions of dollars worth of products from Dell etc.

Edit: The idea that OEMs only tack on the extra cost to big companies is demonstrably false. For one thing, margins per-item are always lower on bulk purchases, not higher—Fortune 500 do not pay list price on anything. For another, you can see the difference in cost on the Dell XPS 13 by switching between Linux and Windows:

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/xps-13-plus-dev...

Computers that don't offer a Linux option just all come with that $149 surcharge baked in.

And there is no inherent reason it has to be that way. Microsoft doesn't have any kind of a monopoly on app distribution for Windows, for example. POSIX applications aren't tied to any specific vendor's proprietary Unix. You don't have to run Windows on most PCs even if that's what it comes with, and the same has been true of many Macs, but not iPhones.

Taking a monopoly you have legitimately and leveraging it into control over some other market is called tying.

Walmart and Amazon are both huge but it seems just wrong to say a brick-and-mortar store as equivalent to an online market place. The direct competitors to Amazon are Ebay, Baidu, Etsy, Temu and others, all of which are much smaller in the US (but some are huge elsewhere). You say that Facebook is a Google competitor because it offers eyeballs and because people sometimes go there to get stuff and it uses it's info for ads providing.

The actual situation imo is that online enterprises compete via monopolistic competition [1]. No large high tech company wants to offer exactly the same thing as it's because at best neither will make a lot of money - instead, any company entering a crowded marketplace will come up with something guaranteeing them more engagement, higher profits and so-forth (thus something even worse from the consumer's view). See Meta's Threads.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopolistic_competition

Walmart is also an online market place. Walmart.com includes third party reseller products with many significant similarities to Amazon. They've got fulfilled by Walmart, free shipping, and if you join Walmart+ it includes Paramount+ video streaming (also free grocery delivery).

There's no need for companies supplying a product en masse to be anywhere near that large.

iMessage has always worked with any device that supports SMS.

Google, on the other hand, actively blocked Windows Phone from having access to Youtube. Even when Microsoft paid to write a Youtube app themselves, Google blocked it.

Google did the same thing and blocked Youtube on Amazon's Echo Show.

youtube has always worked in a web browser.

Meanwhile I'm laughing about how fast Apple would come down on Google if they made their own Android chat that tapped into iMessage and internet commentators tried to justify it by "even when Google paid to write an iMessage app themselves, Apple blocked it"

Apple doesn't have a monopoly position to abuse in when it comes to texting.

Google, on the other hand, does nave a monopoly position on internet video, and a history of using that monopoly as a weapon against competing platforms.

> app.)...In the absence of a strategy to become the primary messaging service for [the] bulk of cell phone users, I am concerned [that] iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove an obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406303/imessage-android...

That may be causing your confusing here. You weren't aware of the functionality difference that Apple prevents other platforms from using with their design choices.

I'd recommend that you research which functionality is prevented on other platforms, since you didn't seem to know about it.

That's not blocking.

A good example of blocking is not allowing any developers on a competing smart phone platform to write an app that allows users to access your monopoly internet video platform.

Apple is pretty clearly blocking Google (or any other Android app developer) from implementing this functionality and greatly benefits from it. Particularly relevant for the age demographic this thread originally referenced.

What functionality? Give some concrete examples.

Try again.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406303/imessage-android...

Sorry, but Google's proprietary closed source fork of RCS is not any kind of "standard".

> Google's version of RCS—the one promoted on the website with Google-exclusive features like optional encryption—is definitely proprietary, by the way. If this is supposed to be a standard, there's no way for a third-party to use Google's RCS APIs right now. Some messaging apps, like Beeper, have asked Google about integrating RCS and were told there's no public RCS API and no plans to build one.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/new-google-site-begs...

This is very amusing given that Google wants to charge people to have RCS that can interoperate with their proprietary closed source implementation of RCS.

> If you want to implement RCS, you'll need to run the messages through some kind of service, and who provides that server? It will probably be Google. Google bought Jibe, the leading RCS server provider, in 2015. Today it has a whole sales pitch about how Google Jibe can "help carriers quickly scale RCS services, iterate in short cycles, and benefit from improvements immediately." So the pitch for Apple to adopt RCS isn't just this public-good nonsense about making texts with Android users better; it's also about running Apple's messages through Google servers. Google profits in both server fees and data acquisition.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/new-google-site-begs...