Want to use your own email server? Not going to be a piece of cake and good luck if gmail decides against you. Want to use firefox? Gmail and youtube really will move heaven and earth to make you use chrome. Want to preserve your privacy in any meaningful way? Good luck because rest of the society decided to hand over everything to Google and its free counterparts.
These companies gravity wells are so strong that they reduce meaningful choices to a consumer. In fact, give them enough time and they’ll coerce the market to behave in a particular way.
As of now, to operate as a business on the internet, you can ignore Apple, Amazon or even Facebook. You’ll have a tough time ignoring Google. Across the entire planet.
There’s no doubt that Google’s work has a lot of benefits to humanity. But that is not a license to ignore the dark side of the coin.
What's that meant to mean? I use firefox, and I don't even see any suggestion anywhere on any Google properties to use Chrome, though there used to be something on the front page. Certainly never seen anything in gmail.
I agree that gmail is a disaster for people running their own email servers, though.
Sure you can, you can set a negative price such that you pay a user for using your service which bing literally does [0].
[0]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/rewards/search-and-earn
Look at the current pricing of medicine in US! Instead of going after those they decide to go after Amazon and Google. US is a place that many living outside of it could never quite comprehend.
If the consumer market wanted an alternative, wouldn't there be competing companies by now that would ingest all that data and give you matching mail, docs, video, etc, services?
On the advertising front, Google is no longer the only game in town, so by definition not a monopoly.
Who are their competitors (I've not heard of one that isn't directly tied to a platform (a'la facebook))? How is the market segmented between Google and their competitors? If google had, as an example, 80% of the market share, it could still legitimately be considered to be a monopoly, even if it had 1000 competitors fighting for the last 20%.
Internet advertising may not be a majority of all ad spending, but Google is an internet ad company, not a general ad company. It would be like arguing the old phone company wasn't a monopoly because plenty of communication was still by mail or in person.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
In a lot of sectors, sure. I'm all for someone building a better car.
What benefit does mass competition in the software service space give me? How many bespoke APIs am I expected to integrate against to build something useful?
Different for difference's sake is the curse of our industry.
The issue is that a lot of people talk up "innovation" in the tech industry, that isn't. For every person who makes a better car, lots of people make the same or worse cars.
As a random example, which format would you rather have your api serialization format be in: ASN, XML or Json? I for one am glad that innovation made ASN and XML go away.
ha, obvs protobuffers. [hides from thrown tomatoes]
Microsoft would also [1] own the internet. Their browser IE would be the only significant consumer share, there would be no Mozilla, no open source browser. So no incentive to open the browser up to plugins. Microsoft would hold all the information on consumer browsing habits. Would they permit other search engines? Unlikely if there is no antitrust regulation compelling them to do so.
But that was then. I think your premise is, we more or less have all the software technology we need why do more, unless it comes from an incumbent, in the form of incremental improvements? Why shouldn't Apple, Google, Microsoft shut down their app stores a little more? Keep the development in-house. What's the point of allowing this creative destruction from 3rd parties? More and more, we only get these increasingly tired, corporate innovations. Fewer ports on computers in the name of locking down devices to make them less 'hackable', more restrictions on these OS that increasingly feel like sandboxes, because why bother giving users the unfettered ability to create stuff, it just allows more creative destruction. Why should corporations knock it out of the park when they can just suppress upstarts with unfair competition?
By the way, antitrust regulation also prevents [2] Apple, Google, Adobe etc suppressing developer salaries. Remember antitrust law also shares incentives and motivation, to encourage progress.
But the better question is what is the future without without creative destruction, without shared incentives and competition? We have the answer in thousands of years of monarchies. Monarchies are a stagnant form of human development, they have no incentivize to upset their current order so they constantly suppress change. We don't celebrate this ancient monarchy or that one, like we do federated political systems. Compare the cultural developments in ancient Greece's federated city states vs surrounding empires. Or the Roman Empire, when it was ruled by the Senate, before emperors ran it into the ground. Or the Gutenberg Press, that brought printing to the European states where publishers were incentivized by profit, compared to dynastic China that developed the technology hundreds of years before, which helped trigger the Renaissance. Or Britain after the Glorious Revolution broke the monarchy's monopolies and led to the Industrial Age. Or the Jamestown settlement after it began profit sharing to motivate the colonists, in the face of failure, which directly lead to the political institutions which created the United States of America. Without power sharing, all civilizations degrade into inheritance systems, where opportunity is few and far between, unless you go rogue.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/6/17827042/antitrust-1990s-m...
[2] https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/final-judgment-0
Always felt a little gross to me that people who make six figures would claim their wages were being held down. It's not like anyone who felt they were underpaid or underappreciated didn't know where the other companies were. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate it and cashed my check for being apparently a part of an oppressed class, but at the end of the day very little changed and the biggest beneficiaries of the entire exercise were the lawyers who got the lion's share of the suit money.
On the topic of monarchies, there was plenty of creative destruction during the monarchy era. Territories and kingdoms were constantly being built, defended, fought over, carved up, destroyed, and rebuilt. Not all churn is good churn.
I'm certainly not against new companies innovating and creating new things. But I'm not sure in the specific space of software engineering, we need the heavy hand of government cracking up a successful company to enable creation of good things. I don't think the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit was a good idea, and it looks like history has borne that out; Apple got themselves out of their own hole by finding another operating system route separate from Windows and rearchitecting themselves on top of it, and Mozilla would always have had a home on Linux that Windows couldn't touch one way or the other. In the long run, all the lawsuit really seems to have done is force Microsoft into a back seat in they have arbitrary restrictions on the way they are allowed to combine their browser and operating system resources, and who benefits from that? Chrome has written an OS and a browser combined, why isn't Microsoft allowed to?
Better software tends to speak for itself. Do we trust government to make these decisions for the people who understand the technology and the people who use it?
And making this argument is exactly why they added search engine selection. They wanted to be able to point to this tiny insignificant detail that might cost them a negligible fraction of Chrome searches and hold it up as market competition when the inevitable antitrust suit came along.
Have you ever heard of a for profit company gifting traffic to their direct competitor? It would be irrational behavior in a competitive market. If anything this is evidence of Google’s search engine monopoly and Google built the selection feature into Chrome it in furtherance of that monopoly power.
The #3 browser (Firefox) is (was?) massively funded by a half-billion-per-year agreement from the #1 browser's maker (Google) to add Chrome as the default search engine.
Sure, they could pull that deal. Unless you think it's a perfectly balanced deal, though, that feels like one for-profit company gifting traffic to their competitor (either Google giving money to Firefox, or Firefox giving traffic to Google).
It's more niche, but a lot of companies in my market donate to or fund their competitors for the sake of innovation and growing the pie.
Contrary to popular belief, for-profit companies (even those with scary board members in a competitive market) don't inherently have to be cutthroat.
Kind of like the cellophane paradox[1] I suppose. From Wikipedia:
> As Richard Posner wrote, "Reasonable interchangeability at the current price but not at a competitive price level, far from demonstrating the absence of monopoly power, might well be a symptom of that power; this elementary point was completely overlooked by the court"
But instead of a price denominated in dollars it's in consumer data I suppose.
That seems different from your argument, which I understand to be "only a monopolist would make it easy for consumers to choose a competitor". But again, the conclusion that Google is a monopolist seems to be baked into this logic -- would you really say Google is not a monopolist if they did not offer search engine choice?
No, not "only".
The argument is that while non-monopolists have a motivation to add those choices, monopolists have a motivation too.
Therefore seeing the end result isn't very strong evidence for whether something is a monopoly or not.
> If anything this is evidence of Google’s search engine monopoly and Google built the selection feature into Chrome it in furtherance of that monopoly power
So? In the real world, antitrust isn't about how a company became dominant. The fact that a company is dominant is what matters. Legislatures know that having a market run by one entity is inevitably a bad thing. Google's success, its market dominance, is the very harm that antitrust is meant to address. How Google got there isn't relevant.
If the government deems an organization too big, there is always something on which to hang the prosecution hat. Price fixing, tying, vertical restraint, dumping... they will find something.
Isn't that what government is? One entity running the market?
Governments don't like competition.
Whether it is one entity or many, what matters is the welfare of the consumer, which includes allowing competition to arise that can do better.
And at the same time, they're taking steps to make it more difficult for Ad blocking software to be integrated into Chrome.
I'm glad they don't feel the need to bully other search engines out of existence, but that might have more to do with where their revenue comes from than any particular corporate morality.
> For example would YouTube be successful as it is today if it wasn't Google's resources and knowledge to skyrocket it?
You don't see the tight integration between Google's Advertising business and YouTube as a particularly unfair advantage? Are you sure they haven't operated at a loss on some or all of the product in order to bully smaller competitors out of the market?
Aside from the frontend code and the CDN, what is YouTube other than the advertising and other third-party integration anyways?
Googlebot was allowed to its thing pretty freely back in the day on the assumption that Google will remain a search company only and will not step on the toes of the companies whose websites it was parsing. That proved out not to be true.
What's more, if today I want to parse Google's web properties (let's say its GoogleMaps data) the same way that Googlebot used to parse the websites of the companies I used to work for I'll get banned almost immediately.
Android isn't iOS where you're not allowed to replace the browser at all.
“Upgrade to a safe browser”.
They always use their monopolies (video, search, maps) to venture into different markets.
Not sure about that considering how many startups they buy each year
Coincidentally, this is also how legislation was implemented in this country until 1980s. Which is to say - this is what we did back when our economy was both prosperous and stable.
For a good example of just how much teeth anti-trust used to have before it got Borked, read this court opinion in one case from 1962: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/370/294/#tab-opi...
We will see though.
For example would YouTube be successful as it is today if it wasn't Google's resources and knowledge to skyrocket it? I think not.