Every acquisition over $100m should automatically trigger a review, especially if said company is a "leader" in ANY market, and looked at from the perspective of:
"Is the company removing this competitor from the market hurting competition in their own market in the long term?"
It's way better for the market to let the cash-rich large corporations attempt to develop their own competitor to a new threat they might see in the market than to allow them to buy that competitor.
It would've been better for us if Instagram was never bought by Facebook, Admob never bought by Google, and so on.
Sure, maybe they wouldn't have gotten quite as successful on their own, but for one perhaps Facebook wouldn't have become as strong as it became in the social media space (a good thing) or they would've been forced to create a NEW competitor, and we all benefit from more competitors in the market. Instead they removed one and made themselves even more powerful.
Because the essential feature of very large companies is their attempting to create a market where they can invest as little as possible and continue to extract revenue.
"Humans overestimate progress in the short term and over estimate it in the long term."
You're discounting the law of accelerated returns. It might take another 50 years to make a "big discovery/milestone in curing aging" but from that point forward it might become a lot easier to cure aging.
Windows 10 is a privacy disaster compared to previous versions of Windows. They track every single app and website you open, what files you have on your PC, and much more.
Sundar Pichai has been destroying the company from inside out since he took over as CEO.
But all of that has been masked by the fact that he's been aggressively pushing the ad team to keep increasing the revenue each quarter - and he's been "successful" in that.
But all of that is killing the company both directly (too many damn ads in Google products these days), as well as indirectly (not having a good vision for all of the other products, destroying the "don't be evil culture" that make Google great and beloved, and so on).
Of course by the time this is obvious to Google's board, Pichai will already be a billionaire himself if he isn't already, so who cares what happens afterward, right?
People will just incorporate in Delaware, or other, similarly limp wristed jurisdictions instead of doing something somewhere where they face that type of risk. See current behavior for evidence of that.
To replace Pichai the two largest Google shareholders would have to give a shit about the direction of the company. But they've been absent for longer than Pichai has been CEO.
Yes. Normally people are too quick to attribute power and fault to individuals, or so everyone says, but here's a case where two individuals really seem to have something close to full power and ability to fix at least the more obvious and readily fixable problems—they simply choose not to—and yet people usually diffuse the blame among "Google" or "the incentives".
> They've gone backward and the "spirit" of the old Google was literally killed when Sundar Pichai took over.
What? That happened with Eric Schmidt. Coming from old-school Oracle, old corporate. He said "Brands is how you sort out this mess" and killed the variety in google search by prioritizing big brands. That's why you get search results from only the biggest corporate outlets in every other category. He succeeded in bumping shoe shopping searches and sales for Amazon etc, but killed the independent web.
What has he milked, though? I thought Google's money just comes from preexisting businesses like search, ads, YT, etc. None of the new stuff introduced under Sundar went anywhere, but all boats rose over the years for tech, especially in 2020.
Why are they scary? Are people's private conversations in their homes scary, too? Are private meetups scary?
I feel like people have by default fallen for the government propaganda and they don't even realize it.
What's next? Putting a chip that can monitor everyone's thoughts in real-time to prevent school shootings? Would the cops even be able to filter through thousands of such thoughts on a daily basis and take action against the most "real" thought? Or would they be flooded by data and not know what to do with it and how to act, and only act after the fact anyway?
Remember for virtually all of the terrorist attacks in the past 15 years, the authorities were already well aware of the attackers' history. Some had even been arrested before and released.
None of these surveillance laws is the right solution to those types of problems. Those problems have other fundamental causes that create them (economic policy, education policy, healthcare policy, etc).
And the governments know that, too. But such laws have other much bigger benefits for them, such as the ability to spy on any single person that they feel has slighted them in some way at will, so they can destroy that person's life. They care about passing surveillance laws for this reason way more than what they say the reason is in public. Another benefit is spying on individuals for economic benefits, too, such as stealing other countries' or foreign company's trade secrets, etc. But of course you're never going to hear them preach new surveillance laws for those reasons.
> What's next? Putting a chip that can monitor everyone's thoughts in real-time to prevent school shootings?
Funny, that: school shootings seems to share two traits with CSAM: they are salient (horrible, traumatic, publicised…), but they are also fairly rare. I admit that for CSAM I only suspect it, but school shooting represents a very small fraction of all gun deaths in the US. Which represent only a fraction of violent deaths. Which represent only a (small?) fraction of all deaths. Making a priority of reducing school shootings at the expense of other death reduction policies sounds… somewhere between irrational and dishonest.
It seems to me that trying to ban guns in the name of reducing school shootings is like trying to ban encryption to reduce CSAM: it's fundamental rights (self defence, privacy) vs greater good (school shootings, CSAM). And while many "greater good" people clearly mean well (heck, some even have a point), for others it really is about power and control.
Yes, campaigns use the emotions and biases of people to push whatever political agenda they set out to push. That's the way it is, even though I don't like it.
Yes, banning guns would reduce gun deaths. However, the problem is not gun death here, it's violent death: suicides & murders mostly. It's not clear to me that banning guns would reduce those deaths. People can use ropes, clubs, and knives instead. And while mass shootings would no longer happen, we need to remember that they only represent about 0.1% of all gun deaths. They almost don't matter in the grand scheme of things.
Finally there are two little snags: first, can we even ban guns for real? Black markets are a thing. Second, taking guns away from people could be a risky business if not handled with extreme care, especially in the US where second amendment advocacy resonates with so many people.
In all seriousness, every now and then I open YouTube by mistake in another browser that doesn't have ublock, and the experience is infuriating - having to waatch 5+ second ads on every video I search for or look at. How do people stand it?
"Is the company removing this competitor from the market hurting competition in their own market in the long term?"
It's way better for the market to let the cash-rich large corporations attempt to develop their own competitor to a new threat they might see in the market than to allow them to buy that competitor.
It would've been better for us if Instagram was never bought by Facebook, Admob never bought by Google, and so on.
Sure, maybe they wouldn't have gotten quite as successful on their own, but for one perhaps Facebook wouldn't have become as strong as it became in the social media space (a good thing) or they would've been forced to create a NEW competitor, and we all benefit from more competitors in the market. Instead they removed one and made themselves even more powerful.