They were well behaved when they had competition to worry about. Once they effectively achieved a monopoly, ethics slowly got relegated to the back seat. They started leveraging the search monopoly to take over other industries, to undermine the open web, to engage in political censorship (hello Project Dragonfly) and much more.
Everything you say here is an excellent argument why search should not be a monopoly. We need competition to keep the search engines honest. Regulation won’t help, since orgs like the FCC are vulnerable to regulatory capture, and there’s no other way to "hold them to a higher standard" than taking your business elsewhere. As long as you continue using their products and thus earning them money, they don’t have any reason to care what you think about their business practises.
That's why they want Google and Facebook broken. And of course, they're unwilling to spend any money, change any law anywhere, accommodate anyone, or put in any kind of effort whatsoever.
Fundamentally they want the internet to disappear. They want the control of information out of the hands of these idiotic American nerds that refuse to control information !
Google was trying to gain the Chinese market by implementing political censorship. And once they knelt and swore allegiance to the Chinese regime, every other totalitarian regime around the world would be lining up with demands that they do the same in their countries.
Expecting Google to stand up to EU on anything is naïve. They already got massive fines, they don’t have the spine to risk more. They will do as the commisars dictates, whether they’re split up or not.
I'm super glad that google didn't go through with dragonfly and it's really sad that they even went as far as they did. However, going through with it would have just made them the same as basically every other company.
Apple, microsoft, and basically every other company all operate in china, following chinese "law". Ironically, it's two of the worst/most hated companies (google, facebook) in the US, and most frequently demanded to be broken up here on HN, are two of the very, very few companies that haven't bent over for china.
In other words, their refraining from Dragonfly wasn’t because of moral courage or a principled stance. It was just to avoid a PR disaster.
And it was only because Dragonfly was leaked that that we ever heard of it. Imagine what other interesting programs they’ve got going on that we haven’t heard of yet.
Right now the only country that could actually do anything about Google is the US, but they won't because we benefit from having the number one internet search company be American.
Also, the rank and file employees in Google are largely liberal and tend to make a big fuss over things like censorship. If Google is broken up a company that is more friendly to state interference could emerge and take it's place.
Were. When though? The founders said in their original university paper that selling advertising was wrong and would inherently corrupt a search engine. Of course once they realised how much money was being made in search, that fundamental tenet of don't be evil lapsed before the phrase was even coined.
History and Google's progress of updates seems to have borne their claim out. Google is worse than it was, in good measure as they have twisted results to push more sales. It's a shopping search first and foremost, and frankly not a very good search any more. With an obscene overreach of data gathering that is almost impossible to evade. Every opportunity to gather data they gather more. Remember the Google war driving guy who "accidentally" gathered all that extra wifi info from streetview cars? Entirely by accident. How many believe in that "accident" who isn't on Google payroll?
So no, I don't see it as anti-success, more that they became far too large, far too greedy, and far too abusive - e.g. demanding everyone train the self-driving fleet to pass a captcha. Scanning the world's books was a far more appealing proposition.
Given they have the data, and the holy trinity of search, advertising and monitoring, regulation is not enough. Split off advertising or analytics and monitoring, or break it up some other way. That's to serve the public interest, not as some anti-success crusade.
That proposition failed precisely because it was regarded - rightly or wrongly, it's not clear that it matters - as a "far too large, far too greedy, and far too abusive" endeavor.
For many people in the world, the US already is a country that matches this exact description - what with toothless antitrust laws, anti-union actions being tolerated, and what the ICE camps look like is something we don't even have to talk about.
Sure, China would be worse, but you should strive for more than just "the second worst developed country(tm)"
In fact, yours is the perfect argument why we in Europe should try to end the dominance of Google and break it up.
In the case of search engine balkanisation (I'd be in favour of it), I'd think that eurosearch would, on average, be more censorious than amerifind.
Every European engineer I talk to seems either amazed or resentful about American software engineers’ salaries and benefits. How have the unions helped you in this regard? How have they helped your tech companies be more competitive in the global economy?
E.g. we get health insurance even if we quit or switch jobs.
The thing about European software companies tho is that they are hardly unionized at all.
>Every European engineer I talk to seems either amazed or resentful about American software engineers’ salaries and benefits.
I am not, to be honest. Sure, at a first glance it might seem the US devs make tons of money. But once you account for cost of living (like the astronomical rents in every major tech hub city) things do not look that rosy anymore. I know US people who make twice or trice what I make, and yet they live in dumps that you can hardly call apartment and they say they cannot afford any better. That, combined with the at-will nature of US employment, really doesn't strike me as desirable.
I like living in a country where I have a pretty awesome standard of living, a nice apartment that I don't have to share (unless I want to) and a safety net that is (at least for now) able to catch me should I ever struggle or become sick, so I won't go homeless.
Those things are largely thanks to work the unions did in the past and keep doing.
If breaking up the American tech companies helped disperse jobs outside of Silicon Valley, that would be a good thing.
The title may be, but the article was not. Was a reasoned statement for why those folks bothered to build another search engine.
I disagree here. Billionaires are often pretty awesome. Once someone gets way more money than the could ever need, they tend to pursue other activities that they enjoy more than making money, which is frequently giving it away (Bill Gates, Warren Buffet) or starting moonshot space companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, or Virgin Galactic. Even Zuckerberg donates to projects like these.
Rich people take on projects that may not be viable yet, but are important nonetheless, essentially filling the role that government used to play in R&D.
Oh, come on!
Google is not doing its job well, other could do parts of it much better, but Google is too big to allow others to enter its same space, so we need alternatives that can put pressure on Google more than we need Google.
The "people hate success" rhetoric is so sad it can't even be measured.
search isn't a naturally monopolistic market, because although there are some initial high fixed costs, much of those costs can be roughly scaled with size. there aren't really any other significant barriers to entry.
marginally but noticeably better search results (e.g., pagerank) did provide an early advantage for google, which is how it established its monopoly over time in the first place (combined with the ad auction model from overture, which gave it economic & political might), but that advantage has eroded with its lack of focus on search. google also has a giant suite of data gathering products but it's not clear that those provide a true competitive advantage in search (again, search results aren't much better than the competition).
the other interesting characteristic of search is that its competition isn't necessarily zero-sum. a user might do the same search on multiple search engines, providing each competitor with a full marginal revenue opportunity, rather than only one competitor winning the business (as in classic competition).
because of all this, i'm neutral on the breakup argument but am bullish on the "increasing competition" argument for search.
It is not. Apparently some people are still fooled by the doodles and dinosaur jump game.
It’s easy to say MORE REGULATIONS... just as after any tragedy people claim “we just need one more law”! The truth is government has proven toothless in tax collection and regulation of these giants.
It was an inspirational company and story that many rooted for due to its culture and mission.
generalizations are false a lot of the times
We're here for curious conversation. The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
Please don’t lower the quality of discussion like this. It’d be nice if you could discuss the content of the comment itself, politely, and refrain from attacking the poster by claiming they have a hidden agenda.
But then you turned this into a personal attack and questioning his motivation, which you already “suspect”.
Regulation is missing, in my opinion, and breaking them up doesn’t address the problem and is a dicey proposition all together. But attacking people is breaking rules and only makes you lose credibility.
Even as a Google Employee I agree that the concentration of marketshare and infrastructure that Google has distorts the market. But without radical intervention either by normal humans collectively or by governments using legislative and military power to shape corporations into their vision (again, probably collectively to be effective) the problem can't go away.
At the very least, we need to stop pretending that pointing our the problems of rent economies and monopoly tendencies in capitalism is not "an anti-success rhetoric" but rather a candid and informed discussion. Markets do not function well (defined as delivering utility to the largest number of people, we could of course define this in other ways) when you need to render the player's assets on a log scale.
Now that they have that success, lacking threats, the value is evaporating.
Lots of people do not care how much others make. If the value is there, world better, game on!
But, getting very large amounts of money and those things aren't really happening and lots of people will definitely express negatives about it.
As they should.
I see links are back in my search results now. But my trust is not back with those links. I have found all the other search tools I need and am using them, encouraging greater success.
These companies with almost impossible to think about type large amounts of money can be doing better by people. Expecting that makes great sense.
And where that is not effective, seeking various remedies does too.
Competition, use of the State, protest, all on the table.
Anyone concerned about the potential impact of those things is completely free to avoid them. Just make sure the value to people is there and they won't really care about the money.
Knee jerk, break them up helped create this net we are seeing consolidated and increasingly devoid of value.
People calling for that again is understandable.
Finally, breakups are super expensive. A real, material threat of that happening makes for a real, material cost and risk assessment, which can justify hedging all of that with better value to the people too.
I was around during the “search wars”, and what’s usually forgotten is that well, they were by far the best behaved as a corporate entity.
This “romantization” of this ideal state, devoid of historical context or acknowledgement of the world we live in is extremwly counter productive.
Should google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple do better? Absofuckinglutely!!!
Regulate them, hold them to a higher standard!
But Will breaking them up do anything except destroy them and just empower the next competitor ( who will have to learn the same lessons?
Even worse, likely in a country that won’t match your same values of “freedom”
Are imbalances in power great? Nope
Are monopolies awesome? Most never
Are billionaires awesome? Nope
But this is the stage we are at due to an interconnect global economy. We built this.
Knee jerk solutions don’t and have never fixed anything