This needs a citation, as well.

This is assuming Google hasn't starved out potential competitors who would have provided the same service, or better service, had the playing field been more level.

My unsubstantiated opinion is that many talented folks are/have been dissuaded from trying their hand at anything that may go up against Google, et. al., unless their looking for an aquihire. (And we know how Google treats those after a few years.)

And there's another argument to be made: that Google's habit of purchasing competition stifles the innovation since it's nipping it in the bud.

(I majored in Econ in uni.)

There are alternatives to many of these already.

Firefox (and other browsers) for Chrome, Openstreetmap for maps. Vimeo for youtube. Flickr for photos. Dropbox for drive. Never heard of waze, so don't know what's an alternative for that, but I would be surprised if there wasn't one.

I'm also of a rare breed who thinks Android is total an utter garbage compared to Palm OS, and much prefer the latter. I wish Google and Apple had never gotten in to the phone business. It's been an utter nightmare of spyware and bloatware ever since.

I personally would not miss any of these products execept for youtube, and that only because of the content which is provided by users, not by Google. That content could be moved to another platform, and I'm sure if Google disappeared entirely and permanently tomorrow, just as good or better a storehouse of video content would be rebuilt to replace it.

Since Google bought them, they canibalized the crowdsourced data for Maps anyway, and have never updated the Waze UI so it looks like a Fisher Price toy today. There is really no reason to use it over Google Maps.

We already know that with the existence of Google we get free products like search, mail, video, etc. Do you have evidence that when we destroy google that we will still retain all of these benefits?

Countries can already barely withstand pressure from big companies, by allowing them grow even further everything would just turn in a way that would allow such companies to make even more money, whilst increasing the gap between the rich and the poor.

And with regards to better services, I think the open source community has shown us that it's possible to make great services without having to work for a company. In many cases even better services because the prime objective is to make a program that would help the user, not make money for the company.

How is google even a monopoly? Bing exists, yahoo still exists. In Asia Google isn't even the most popular search engine.

Want me to show you how google is not a monopoly? A company with monopoly power would be able to raise the price of its service to the price the market can bear. If google put search behind a pay wall, Bing would destroy it in market share.

> that's a small price to pay for not having to be subjugated by a conglomerate.

So now you are not using economic arguments but appealing to emotion.

I just need to point this out

First you felt the need to off hand mention your (clearly undergraduate) degree in economics which had absolutely zero relevance to the discussion.

Secondly, you are using appeals to emotion without any basis in fact. "Google is an extremely successful company and we use them in so many things! They must be evil!"

Try using evidence. I'm not going to argue against your fear mongering only point out that like almost all fear mongering, it is not based on fact.

> Countries can already barely withstand pressure from big companies

There is absolutely zero evidence of this. None of your arguments are based on evidence. The US just fined Volkswagen billions of dollars. The EU is ready to fine Google billions of dollars. Apple paid japan hundreds millions of dollars in fines. All the banks responsible for the financial crisis in America and the EU paid hundreds of billions

> In many cases even better services because the prime objective is to make a program that would help the user, not make money for the company.

Again you have no evidence of this. If smaller businesses were able to provide better services people would be using dedicated email providers, not gmail. They would be using flickr instead of google and apple photos.

That was a different person.

>There is absolutely zero evidence of this. None of your arguments are based on evidence. The US just fined Volkswagen billions of dollars. The EU is ready to fine Google billions of dollars. Apple paid japan hundreds millions of dollars in fines. All the banks responsible for the financial crisis in America and the EU paid hundreds of billions

Precisely, EU, USA and China(ones that I know, there might be more) are the ones who can actually fight back from the pressure. Once they're able to pay enough politicians even more to coax them into bringing laws that help them further, we won't even have that(like that hasn't happened before).

Additionally, you need to consider if the fines are actually painful enough. Sure, sometimes it's enough to make them stop doing offences, but sometimes the companies are left with a net profit from illegal actions.

> Again you have no evidence of this. If smaller businesses were able to provide better services people would be using dedicated email providers, not gmail. They would be using flickr instead of google and apple photos.

Look up Linux. Whilst big companies did have a hand in making it, it's still driven a lot by the community. Compare how Linux performs against Windows(fast, no intentional backdoors, free, almost limitless customisability) and MacOS(no upgrades that make your completely fine hardware useless in 3-4 years after purchase).

I neither use flickr not google/apple photos so can't judge the discrepancy in quality. But I do a lot of messengers, text editors, email clients and so on, and they're completely fine. You need to consider that perhaps people are using them because they didn't bother to look up alternatives and just went with what the company offered them because "hey! it's 'free'! and it's right here."

You seem to be giving off some belligerent vibes, so I'm not going to argue much further, all I'm asking is that you consider that companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft and so on are not in the business of making people happy, but in the business of making money. And if that means the best path to that is to manipulate governments and try to control every aspect of people's lives for their own profit - they'll do it. If you break them apart you give them much less power to do that.

Now, I don't provide a lot of hard evidence on HN, if only because this probably isn't the right type of forum for a courtroom. I like to keep it a bit more casual.

The 30% share Google takes from sales of Android applications is completely arbitrary and they could probably even increase it further without suffering any consequences beyond negative PR.

To be clear, in the US, there is at least one major competitor to Google in that space (Apple), so a price increase would lead developers to leave the platform. And in much of the rest of the world, sideloading APKs is a very, very common way of installing, so google taking 50% or 99% would lead to more third party app stores (note some of these already exist) and users sideloading APKs without Google taking any cut whatsoever.

Google has no competition in this space, and any company that tried to break from them would go under.

Second, I wanted to address the accusatory notion of the back half of your comment, and point out the hypocrisy of Googler coming in here and suggesting others have ulterior motives for their comments.

- I do not work for nor am paid for any company with skin in this game. My opinions are very literally my own. I speak a lot about Google because a lot of people disproportionately speak positively about Google even though they should not.

- You are paid by a company being directly suggested to be destroyed/broken up, in this article. As Upton Sinclair once said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

You mean like the Kindle Fire, which runs a custom version of AOSP and doesn't include the play store? You have it backwards. If manufacturers want to access to the play store on device, they need to meet minimum standards, not the other way.

But again, that's beside the point. No matter what, there's less vertical integration on the android side of things than on the Apple side of things, which has no alternate play stores, and which requires you to pay apple to be able to sideload apps.

And even that's mostly beside the point, because what we're talking about is a cut being taken from purchases of paid apps on the play store. That has nothing to do with devices at all. And what I said is true, if the price that Google took from app manufacturers increased, app developers would raise prices or leave the platform, and as a result users would too, and move to iOS or Windows Phone if it came to that. Or, they'd do what many people already do and sideload APKs via other app stores, like the Amazon App store or F-Droid.

So again, there's one ecosystem with multiple hardware provides, multiple appstores, and the ability to sideload apps entirely, and another ecosystem with one hardware manufacturer, one app store, and no ability to sideload apps without paying additional money, and the manufacturer and app store are the same entity, but your argument is that the first example is more vertically integrated?

>Second, I wanted to address the accusatory notion of the back half of your comment, and point out the hypocrisy of Googler coming in here and suggesting others have ulterior motives for their comments.

What hypocrisy? I don't hide that I worked for google, and generally make an effort to reveal that when I'm posting on google-related topics (and I do so in this thread) Ulterior implies hidden motives. I'm not hiding anything.

>I speak a lot about Google because a lot of people disproportionately speak positively about Google even though they should not.

This cleverly avoids actually explaining why you rail against Google so much. You're begging the question.

>You are paid by a company being directly suggested to be destroyed/broken up

Indeed I am. Given that I'm very forthcoming with that, I don't see why that should matter though. Its not like this thread will have any effect on my livelyhood.

If you'd like a detailed opinion of mine about Google at large, feel free to message me, my contact info is in my profile. I don't think the mods would appreciate an in-depth on my issues with your employer here.

This is wrong. The anti-forking clause applies to Open Handset Alliance members only: a group which Amazon does not belong to.

"Company shall not... take any actions that may cause or result in the fragmentation of Android, including but not limited to the distribution by Company of a software development kit (SDK) derived from Android or derived from Android Compatible Devices..."

Please don't claim people are wrong without any evidence, especially when the evidence that exists disagrees with you. ;)

Also, while the Open Handset Alliance page is no longer updated, OHA members are the companies who have signed the MADA. The OHA is a thinly veiled cartel for Google to exert control over the industry. If Amazon releases a Play Store-supported phone, they'll have to kill the Kindle Fire line... or make them Google Play-included Android devices... which would mean being forced to include a competing eBook store, Play Books, on Kindle devices.

This is the very definition of illegal tying, and hopefully the US government will finally take note.

By using Google services you are Google's product, not Google's customer.

Google's services are free attractions, provided in exchange for highly-profitable surveillance capabilities.

In other words, the value an individual may derive from a interaction with Google is decoupled from the profit Google can derive from that interaction. This breaks the key assumption behind classic "free market" models. For Google, the two are related only in aggregate and in abstract, via network effects, largely as proxies for monopoly status and capital accumulation.

18th C. arguments about "free markets" and competition naturally springing up from animal spirits don't work very well for the modern technology industry.

> There is absolutely zero evidence of [technology monopolies exerting pressure on governments]

Examples of companies paying fines in exchange for breaking the law (a pretty generous punishment considering what happens to non-corporation people) is evidence that companies have not yet taken over from governments, but I don't think that was the parent's point.

The largest gripe from governments is flagrant tax avoidance/evasion. If you need "evidence", I'd recommend keeping tabs on technology news in the 'mainstream media' (e.g. various EU governments re: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple tax evasion; Tim Cook pretty openly asking the US to change tax law for him because he's got a lot of money, and is happy to deprive his countrymen of it).

Not a monopoly is not a high enough bar. They are dominant in search, browser, and mobile.

> Try using evidence

Evidence like using their position in search to shove Chrome in our faces, then using that position to help shove DRM on us.

Evidence like their ridiculous plans with the ad blocker?

> Congrats on your degree in econ.

Thanks.

Hey. I'd be happy to pay for a gmail, photos, maps if that removes the creepy ad-business.

Usually (when not traveling) I try to avoid Google's free services like search, the excellent Google Assistant, Maps, etc. That said, I use Google constantly for stuff I pay for: Google Cloud Platform, buying movies and TV shows on Google Play, pay for a YouTube Red + Play Music family plan, and use their One a Day charity site.

I would be delighted to pay $10/month for the current 'free' Google services if they strongly protected privacy.

That's not true. Google is using their ad money to subsidize those services and kill off competition. If Google weren't offering ad-supported, "good enough" services then even more people would pay for the alternatives.

Even with Google's anti-competitive behavior, people still pay for Dropbox, Fastmail, SmugMug, etc.

You're also assuming people understand and accept the level of privacy invasion that goes on when they use Google services. If people knew just how much information Google collects about them, and how they use it, I don't think they would be okay with it. Of course only Google can disclose that information, and you won't.

> Of course, if you're one of the uber technerds that thinks that Google is unabashedly evil and Linux is going to take over the desktop any day now, that probably sounds great to you. I just think the average consumer would have a different take on it.

That's great. Keep "average consumers" totally in the dark about the creepy ways your company is tracking their every move online, and then portray people who don't drink the koolaid as wacky conspiracy theorists and "uber technerds".

Let's say as a result of Creation's sharing of this data with local governments, crime is nonexistent.

Based on only what we've said is that a good or bad deal? Also, all of your examples were either purchased or have alternatives, so, yeah.

I think most of the people here would say that's a bad deal - but I don't think there's any way to say definitively that such is the case.

It's possible a more open society with less secrets is a better society - but I don't know that, and I don't know that the opposite is true.

Your scenario is way too terse to yield some actual insights and honestly seems aimed for a particular outcome. Questions that remail open, e.g.: What kind of crime? How can the governments get rid of crime using data alone? What side-effects does the data-sharing have? Are those side-effects less or more severe than the crime used to be? Can you know all potential side-effects for the future? there other approaches to solve the crime problem?

Not all bad means are equally bad. E.g. Taxes are a necessary evil that we accept, but we don't, as a general rule, let agents of the government just take whatever they want (hence the recent controversy over civil forfeiture).

I am not arguing for protectionism per-se, but more out of a shared concern that wealth (including opportunity, work and power) in the broadest sense should distributed. A few companies dominating prohibit this – Apple has over $260 billions in the bank. Or Amazon having more than half of all online sales.

I think there are alternatives for all of those, many open source.

I'm with that guy: the ease of life is amazing with Google. I'll buy movie tickets online then get an alert about driving conditions and when I need to leave to arrive on time. That's something your open source maps program can't do because it doesn't have access to my email.

And if it did I wouldn't use it because it'd be sitting there combing my email constantly which isn't efficient to do on my phone.

Google's ability to personalize data is without compare honestly. It comes from being huge... And I'm OK with it.

A closed system just makes it easier for someone to do - because they don't have to care about any standard protocols and can hack together whatever they want and everyone will just deal with it.

I'm not really arguing against you - but I think it's important to note that what we have is possible, just not _right now_.

Of course, _right now_ is when we all want it.

There have been a lot of attempts at dbus-based services to advertise or invoke other processes for various tasks but it never became as pervasive as share buttons and never had the UX.

[1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/web-intents/ [2]: https://github.com/WICG/web-share

Is this really such a great price to pay for your privacy? For it to be easier to look up your friend's phone number from your email list?

But since you said that what applies to Facebook could also apply to Google here are some examples - http://www.salimvirani.com/facebook/.

Finally, I'll admit that I have no concrete evidence that Google mishandles users' privacy. I will research that in the near future and perhaps my opinion will change accordingly. However, just the fact that they have access to all that data is insane. Potentially, Google and other advertising companies can know more about you than your closest friends and family. If that would be true wouldn't that bother you? Even if they don't abuse the data now who says they can't do it in the future if that would make them more profit and they could get away with it?

I think its a misleading way to present the information, but its not sharing any information (your likes) with anyone who didn't already have access to that information (your friends).

If a company decided to put cameras in people's homes to improve "customer service" that business would be out of business the next day. And yet companies are able to get much more information about us by having access to what we do on the internet and everyone is fine about it.

I understand that this is a result of people not wanting to pay for access to websites and online-services but, in my opinion, that's because they don't understand the ramifications. I don't have a solution for this problem, but I hope we'll fine another way, one that doesn't involve companies knowing so much about you.

I don't necessarily disagree, but "Xcorp is presenting personal data that you've released publically in a misleading way" very different than "Xcorp is giving personal data that you assumed was private away to third parties". I think the second is a lot more serious than the first.

>If a company decided to put cameras in people's homes to improve "customer service" that business would be out of business the next day.

I'm not sure I agree, given the popularity of smart TVs and the recently announced Amazon Echo Look. I make no judgement of whether this is good or bad (I personally don't have any always-on recording devices), but I don't think its true.

>I understand that this is a result of people not wanting to pay for access to websites and online-services but, in my opinion, that's because they don't understand the ramifications.

See, and I disagree here. There are certain kinds of services that money cannot provide. Google Now recommends news articles to me, it can give me reminders about upcoming events from my emails and Google gives me some personalized search features (ie. if I type "frequent flyer number" into the default google search bar, my number appears, scraped from an email years ago). Those features have a utility that I couldn't get from an application that didn't track information about me. Potentially I could self host something with that level of utility, but it would take a research lab and millions of dollars to create.

On the other hand, reddit, which tracks comparatively little information about me, reliably recommends trending posts that are of zero interest to me.

And I think that's the main difference between our viewpoints. Personally, I'm not ok with a company having so much information about me just for the sake of convenience. I'd rather have to write my own scripts to scrape through news feeds or just continually check blogs that I like rather than a company having all that data about me.

We are living at a time, imo, when data is the most important asset. And companies like Google are one of the biggest purveyors of it. It's dangerous when a company could have enough information about you and have the tools to know exactly what makes you "tick". They could provide services to make "specially crafted" advertisements that would manipulate you at a scale even more than they do now. "You like tall blondes? Here's a computer generated tall blonde that talks about the new eau d'toilette and how it seduces her! Buy it!"

It's bad enough that companies are using methods to addict their users to make their apps more profitable now, imagine what a world it'll be when they'll have the technology and ability to do it to the point that no one could possibly refuse their advertising.

Now I realise that this is taking it to the extreme, but my point here is precisely that we need to consider these possibilities in case they don't catch us unaware and when it's already too late to do anything.

This is a fair view to hold (I think the rest of your post goes off into slippery slope land, but its based on a realistic fear), but at the same time, I think you need to be aware that you (or I) won't be able to recreate some of the things that these companies can do, no matter how much time or effort we invest.

Its also worth realizing that you're essentially stating that these experiences should be inaccessible to those who are nonexperts. That is, if in your perfect world, MiGooBookZon doesn't exist, and you make due with a set of scripts that you wrote that scrape some RSS feeds you care about and order articles based on some ratings you hardcoded for personal use, where does that leave all of the people who don't have the technical chops to write a set of personal scripts to scrape the news sources that interest them?

The problem in "my perfect world" would be not that people with less technical ability won't have access to the tools, but that the tools would be less efficient(but as I've stated in another comment, a program being (F)OSS doesn't necessarily mean it's worse, sometimes quite the opposite), due to not having all that integration.

And I consider it to be a good deal. If some people don't then I'd like for it be an option for both parties to make their decisions based on pros and cons, however, the issue with monopolies/oligopolies is that too often they don't leave you a choice. They'd buy up all the small companies that have good ideas, integrate them into themselves and so on, until there's realistically no other option but to actually start using them.

Google obviously gives no data to advertisers... they sell targeted ads. The difference is vast. As an advertiser I would purchase an ad targeted at 20-something male video game players, for example. I would not get to read their emails to get better insight into their minds or anything insane like that.

And if that started happening at Google they'd die, and they know it.

They can cross reference one's data across all their services.

So, let's say your Android phone let's Google know where you live, work and hang around by checking maps history and gps records, and they accumulate all the search words and they know who you are, really and check every email for finding who is related and they can really come up with a model of what kind of person you are at any specific moment.

Group together, see what the citizens are like in a certain area, I think that alone is already valuable for targeting.

And they surely randomly get hidden gems where it can't possibly go public but use for their own merit.

>I'm just curious, what data do you believe google gives to advertisers?

It sounds like you're saying that Google has a lot of information on you, which is probably true, but how much of that gets given to third parties? (and if you're claiming that the information you described is given to third parties, I'm confident that you're mistaken).

Sorry, last year we've seen how several large car makers have had systematically undermined environmental regulations for years. That does not exactly inspire a lot of faith regarding self-policed, "we'll promise really really hard" privacy policies to me.

That scandal has shown that self-policing doesn't work if all the incentives point into the opposite direction. I don't see what significant differences at Google would make them immune to the forces that were at work at VW.

That is, unlike with VW vehicles, individual employees are directly negatively affected.

(obviously IANAL) I'm fairly sure that they cannot without your permission, although they can assume your permission if you continue using the service after they change the policy (and you're informed of the change), and at least with the changes I can find online, Google at least generally seems to give users the chance to opt out of changes.

Edit: a quick search for examples backs up my claim, I can't find any situation where a company could modify its privacy policy in a way that would affect existing user data, and apply that new policy to users who were no longer using the platform. Either its not legal, or companies voluntarily don't do that.

Thinks like your coworkers not knowing every last detail of your family, nobody you know IRL knowing about your weird online kinks, etc.

Your privacy is largely reliant on your different social circles being separated, your various identities being apart, and Google has made it so they can link all of your data together.

(EDIT @joshuamorton: Security and privacy are actually distinctly different concepts with very different implications. A former Googler told me this is not well understood inside the company.)

>Security and privacy are actually distinctly different concepts with very different implications.

True, but you cannot have privacy without security. That is to say, if I pieces my personal information to 5 different groups, but all of them are vulnerable, your data, all of it, is vulnerable, and an untrusted Nth party can attain all of it. On the other hand, if you give all of your personal information to a single secure party, you know who has the data.

Obviously, its a bit more complex than this because often times larger groups are single sources of failures, but still.

For a nondigital metaphor, your list of kinks is less likely to get out if you put it in a safe deposit box than if you rip it into 4 pieces and tell your closest friends to put their piece under their mattress, even if no friend as the whole list and you trust each friend more than your bank, because an adversary can probably figure out that you gave it to your friends, and can break into their houses, but won't be able to crack the vault.

The problem you miss is that people have different identities. And people want to interact with others, to communicate with people, through those identities. Locking up your kinks in a vault isn't really an option if you want to share them with a community of like-minded individuals. But just because you do, you don't necessarily want your family to be able to look them up on Google.

People have different even potentially public personas, that they still want to keep separate. Under a variety of names, I'm involved in a variety of different communities, some of which I don't really want people I know IRL to know about, some which I don't mind. But all of them are out there on the Internet, because that's how I interact with them.

Actually, apart from the Google-centric notion of it and the lack of multiple identities (exacerbated by Google's "real name policy", Google+ was probably the closest Google got to getting this right: I could put specify which Circles people belonged in, and share information with each independently.

They may not sell all of those to third parties but what does it matter if they know all of it.

What is a privacy anyway after you've already revealed who you are constantly on multiple Google products.

It's the financial industry that you have to worry about. The finance industry has atrocious security and access to very personal information on you. Finance companies (your bank, credit card, etc.) sell your information to the highest bargainer with much higher privileges (physical mail and junk emails) and don't allow you to opt out.

Edit: And also the health care industry. Super personal information with archaic tech and paper thin security. Data might not be sold but the risk of bad parties gaining access to your information is high.

This is why AmaGooFace is so dangerous, because the way things are going they will have unprecedented insight and control into global populations. Multinational corporations are a much more dangerous threat to humanity's future freedom than governments.

please. Name the open source alternatives that don't require my grandma to set up her own VPS.

In my Japanese urban region, the building where I live which has been there for 8 years is a flat land in openstreetmap including other neighboring buildings.

Apple's map is better but it's still far behind Google's.

I used to work on photos. Nothing right now is as good overall -- free autobackup, search, auto creations/assistant, general usability -- and it's not really close.

Open source is particularly weak here, you think the average person wants to manage their own photo/video server? In fact just in general OSS seems to usually be weak at services because contributions aren't just fire and forget.

What I'm worried about is corporations becoming so powerful that they can just change the whole economic landscape in their favour.

For example, I'm a HUGE fan of Steam, but if Valve grew large enough that you can only buy games from Valve, the only programming jobs available were at Valve for 20k$ pa whilst "Lord Gaben" was close to becoming a trillionaire along with his shareholders I'd definitely stop using their platform, even if that meant I can't play games as conveniently or not have access to them at all.

Bottom line, companies can do good, but governments need to keep them in check if they become too powerful.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bigger-corporations-are-m...

Yes indeed. So eloquently said. You can't have one without the other. With scale comes unprecedented ability that cannot be attained any other way.

I'm a huge supporter of google and what you've accomplished in such a short time. Do not feel discouraged with some of the negative feedback. Kudos to you and keep up the good work. What you're doing is truly impactful. I as well as a billion other users enjoy your products immensely.

If you're not paying, you're selling yourself.

> if you're one of the uber technerds that thinks that Google is unabashedly evil

as opposed to the people who worship at their altar?