> For those who are customers of AT&T - how do you like your service? Is it as good as Google?
Since you asked... AT&T is way better, here in Oakland and also in Austin (fiber). It's always up and there's actually decent customer support you can call. Their cellular service has been great too. Meanwhile, Google's search has turned into a content marketing delivery machine, and Google Drive web UI still cannot catch up to Windows 95 File Explorer features&performance.
But if you asked me which company can ruin my life or my company's future due to a glitch in an algorithm, the answer will be Google, not AT&T. I worry that Google is allowed to control both the search and the web browser everyone uses. I also worry that as Youtube is becoming increasingly more important for video, they'll control the "future of TV" as well. I am less worried about "dumb pipes" which is what AT&T is to me, especially with the latest migration to encryption for everything, even DNS.
Seconded.
I can also call AT&T and, eventually, reach someone. If I'm angry enough, I can ask to be routed to cancellation. (They fix things quicker.) If things go awry, I can threaten, and act on the threat, to escalate matters to my state regulator.
None of these are options with Google.
I pay for G-Suite for a side-project I inherited (I use Office 365 as my daily-driver) and while there is human support available, they don’t make it easy to get to. With Office 365 the phone support contact details are 2 clicks away from any screen.
Twitch, Patreon, Curiosity Stream, etc are all taking the parts of the pie that YouTube could have had if they invested in understanding the communities that built themselves on top of their platform. But instead, smaller, more agile (the verb not the noun) companies are responding to the demand while YouTube's advertising revenue streams are starting to dry up.
I am just not comfortable with seeing Google as a lesser threat.
But yes, this is why you use the DNS service of your choice instead of whatever dhcp returns.
If Google's algorithm can ruin your life or your business, then I would suggest you figure out how to decouple Google's influence on your life and business. I am sure it wont be easy, but I am also sure it can be done.
Yes, Google is the new TV. And when we are old, we will be telling our children that Youtube "rots your brain," just like our parents did.
Adapting your habits is easier to control than breaking up Google and Youtube.
It's now at the point where new entrants don't even attempt to start small. They explicitly dump massive sums in a bid to break in. It seems that this is happening even in areas where it's not warranted (local food delivery???).
It's as if the culture of every business has become captivated by the idea of becoming an oligopoly. My guess is because it's extremely attractive -- once you "make it" you don't have to compete any more.
It works, right up until it doesn't. I hope at some point, we make a big change in the level of corporate consolidation we allow.
I've seen the theory that this is the result of QE's massive inflation of asset prices; it is now harder and harder and harder to beat the market, but institutions have ever larger sums of money that they need to park and invest somewhere. Like, Softbank actively managing $100B in startups was never really going to work, at least not without these startups being required to get to ludicrous amounts of scale.
This is a really interesting theory that I’ve never heard before, but it makes sense. Does that imply deflation could instead encourage innovation?
The general proposal to alleviate this problem is to increase the supply of assets. This means investing in the common good. Basic research to create whole new types of things to build, infrastructure to enable businesses to reach new markets, and workforce development so businesses have more effective employees.
This is also often coupled with renewed enforcement of antitrust legislation, to give new players some oxygen and to discourage business models that rely on unprofitable scaling in order to reap monopolistic rewards. Then there is the side benefit that smaller companies have a harder time creating the conditions for regulatory capture.
The only real problem is that if you screw up the mix, massive deflation has some really horrible downsides.
You say this like it's new. US anti-trust law started in the late 1800s because of a slew of consolidation in the railroad industry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_competition_law...
The UK has had legislation to control monopolies for hundreds of years.
Of course railroads, oil, and steel were the first groups who naturally thought, "wouldn't it be great if we were the only people doing this, and we didn't have to deal with other people competing?" Since those businesses are big by their nature (capital intensive, worldwide market, often working directly with national governments).
But now this attitude is everywhere. Dog walking, taxicabs, office space. Not to mention the traditional areas like insurance, healthcare, telecom, etc. It seems like everyone, across every sector, is trying to merge and congeal into a single blob that extracts a reliable stream of money each month. Those who aren't already around are trying to skip the "make a good/valuable business" part and skip straight to the money extraction step. And I think in many places, businesses are way more focused on this than on actually doing or providing valuable services/things for people.
I'm speaking in really broad terms here. The cultural focus seems to have shifted from "how can we make the best product" to "how can we guarantee payment every month by consolidating/merging."
So our clients often are people googling desperately trying to make their suddenly stopped factory resume work, then they see our ads and buy from us.
It became obvious to us that Google is a threat, they changed rules multiple times in the past to encourage fraud (instead of stopping fraud), our revenue is directly proportional to the Google ads spend, and whenever we find a better ad provider, Google buys it.
Only possible competitor for Google is TV, but TV ads are way beyond our budget and we have no idea of they would work, considering our niche.
So... Google is not only a monopoly, it is an obvious one, and they abuse their power freely.
Lots of businesses use Google ads to great success, and I get that it's frustrating when your one source of new business changes terms on you, but this is the game. Google now has a lot of power over you, that's the market working.
But your relationship with Google is not necessarily adversarial. After all, they still bring you new business. As long as the cost for ads does not exceed the revenue from new business, the relationship you have with Google is mutually beneficial, though it might hurt when they change terms on you.
That's how business works. It frustrating, but that's the game.
On the surface social media looks completely benign, but they have these far reaching insidious impacts. Our elected representatives don't even have a basic understanding of how these sites operate... yet you have the majority of the population being fed content by these algorithms that determine what you see when, and they're completely opaque. They've got scores of analysts and psychologists shaping this stuff full-time... no single entity in human history has had this level of data and reach into human behavior, and it's all proprietary.
Small intentional changes over time to such wide-reaching algorithms can literally shape humanity in ways that may be entirely impossible for an outsider to detect.
You have adapted. With time, most of us will.
People are looking at these feeds, often daily, for a significant amount of time. We don't know if it's intentionally showing us more of our racist uncle's posts because we buy things when we're angry, for example... and that's just one small example in a vast sea.
We can't adapt because there are far too many unseen factors to be aware of. And I'll say it again... most people do not understand that every post on these networks is being fed through a biased algorithm. I've seen large numbers of developers on this site agree that Facebook should remain neutral when it comes to certain ads/posts, without acknowledging that neutrality has been gone from every post on Facebook for years and years at this point.
They know who you are, where you are, who you're with, and what you do. Data that spans billions of people. For people with Facebook on their phones they can essentially track your behavior 24/7 and have been doing so for years. This type of unseen influence could be dangerous even in benevolent hands.
I have not adapted because I don't know what to adapt to. I've just removed myself from the environment as completely as I can.
* delete FB and Insta accounts
* delete FB and Insta from your devices
* use Google search for stuff your ok with Google knowing; all else, use duckduckgo
* worry more about yourself, less about others
This is what I did.
Add some ad blockers to the mix too.
My gut tells me that there's no financial incentive for the government to target them. I.E. telco lobbies
As far as I understand the problem in the US is that many locations have just one wired service provider. Meaningful competitions would require that most buildings have multiple sets of fiber.
Splitting telecoms by geography seems pointless: California and Texas ISPs can't compete with each other without huge capital spending.
In the UK the last mile is either OpenReach, Virgin Media or KCOM. Because OpenReach has a virtual monopoly in last-mile infra across the country they are regulated and must provide access to other ISPs, in the old days through colocated DSLAMs in local exchanges (LLU) and now by having a set maximum price they can sell wholesale VDSL, FTTP and voice lines.
As a result, you have the gamut of ISPs from niche who focus on having amazing backhaul and customer service (AAISP) to "pile them high" ISPs like Vodafone, TalkTalk and then people like Sky who bundle talk, tv and broadband into relatively affordable packages.
As a result - there is a lot of competition almost everywhere in the country, and I can get a 384Mbps down 37Mbps up connection with unlimited usage and no traffic shaping for £50 a month.
After all of the rest of the comment, that's a pretty disappointing result. Fifty quid is currently $63. I can get symmetric gigabit FTTH for $65, or docsis 200 mbit for $40. This is not uncommon in urban areas in the states.
Where I am, in an urban apartment complex I had two provider choices: Frontier and Optimum. Frontier wired the building, but their plans were ridiculously underwhelming. My Optimum plan is ~$55/m including modem/router for 300/35. Their highest offering for upload seemed to be 45Mbps (or 35, plan descriptions between the site and sales were not consistent).
I’m not in telecom nor a networking expert, but what difficulties are there in offering symmetric plans?
It's also worth mentioning that there's no "equipment rental" fee on my DOCSIS connection for the cable modem.
I ran a speedtest on fast.com and got 985Mbps. The service uptime and quality has been utterly stellar. AT&T has been really good to me, but not everyone has access to 1G fiber.
The question is whether this type of comment "[Google/Facebook] is not the problem..." is a not-so-clever attempt to defend a FAANG company or whether it is legitimiate. I have seen this type of response many times on HN. It is like someone saying "Don't look there, look here." Of course, we can look both here and there, one step at a time.
What is a legitimate argument why breaking up Google/Facebook prevents the government from later breaking up telecoms, or solving any other problem.
Whereas if the telecoms were broken up, how does that improve the situation with the ad tech oligarchy. Even if you say "Don't look there, look here" eventually we may look "there". The harmful effects of Google/Facebook cannot be easily overhsadowed by other problems.
Great. Break up Google, in addition to those industries, as well.
You don't pay for Google with cash. You pay for Google by submitting your free will.
My email and search though is just a few options and realistically most of my family and friends just one option. Even if I move to the other side of the world that option is still the same.
That is a very misleading comparison. For almost all of the industries you've listed a) there are spatial limitations of monopolistic outreach (they have to exist in real world and can't exist all around the world at once) b) their products and services don't grow upon themselves exponentially c) the nature of their products and services is rather common knowledge. I'll go one by one;
a) Tech doesn't suffer from the spatial dynamics of competition and in that has virtually infinite economies of scale. A cable company has to fight for the right of physically laying cables, which creates a barrier of entry for the next competitor, but they have to do this work repeatedly in every other location. As long as bandwidth and compute is paid for, tech can be instantaneously omni-present around the world. This means the monopoly having a planet wide breadth, but also that margins required to sustain the monopoly can be much smaller.
b) Econ 101 has this classic output function: labor x capital x productivity = output. Tech is both an output and input in the form of increased productivity onto itself. This means exponential growth. When we talk about cable companies merging, it is a merger of homogeneous entities, and in that only a merger of capital and labor. The argument here is tech companies "merging" with their own, heterogeneous technologies to yield even greater exponential growth. They are talking about ads and search and chrome "merging". Therefore the monopolistic consequences of tech is very different than that of commodities and utilities.
c) Tech is constantly innovating on new products and new variations of their products, which we can't grasp the effects of. It is easier to guess what happens to competition or how the end user suffers when other industries have bad actors. Can we tell with confidence what the effect of Youtube's, Twitter's, Reddit's recommendation algorithms is on our collective sense-making capabilities and functioning of the democracy? Can we tell if the thousands of A/B experiments being run on us is revealing how the products can deliver more value or how to exploit the users better? Are users aware that they are participating in the largest scale applied-psychology lab ever existed? This information asymmetry is again a part of the unique dynamics of the monopolistic machinery of tech.
When these three come together, the resulting monopolistic dynamics is unprecedented and incomparable to that of commodities, utilities and other old-school services, and we would be fools to make light of it.
> Are users aware that they are participating in the largest scale applied-psychology lab ever existed?
You are. I am. Everyone on this thread is. Soon, most people will be aware.
> Econ 101 has this classic output function: labor x capital x productivity = output.
BS. This is not economic theory, and you are not an economist, friend. If so, please quantify with numbers so we can compare (don't wast your time).
> When these three come together, the resulting monopolistic dynamics is unprecedented and incomparable to that of commodities, utilities and other old-school services, and we would be fools to make light of it.
Lofty claims here. I'll raise you - people die because they can't afford medicine but nobody died because of big tech.
> BS. This is not economic theory, and you are not an economist, friend. If so, please quantify with numbers so we can compare (don't wast your time).
As it happens I actually am an economist, but that credential shouldn't have mattered either way. This function is called the Cobb–Douglas production function, it has statistical evidence as tested in the beginning of 20th century, and if someone has a qualified rebuttal they should go ahead because it could get them some academic award.
> Lofty claims here. I'll raise you - people die because they can't afford medicine but nobody died because of big tech.
Death is not the most useful standard by which we measure the health of a 21st century, developed nation economy. In fact, "this business doesn't kill people" is such a low standard to the degree of being virtually useless in this analysis. Sophistication of the tools we use for economic analysis should match the sophistication of the economic activity going on.
I didn’t hear any sense.
Why not worry about both groups?
There are more major automakers who sell products in the US alone than there ever were baby bells. And there are a ton of regional competitors outside of the US.
You are absolutely right that ATT, Comcast etc. are the real monopolies that have been established with the help of government and they need to be broken.
I guess in 10 years they will do the same to Tesla, SpaceX.
The tech companies, yes make a lot of money, but the wealth is much more concentrated and a lot lot less jobs are required to make it work.
These companies need to be broken up to foster competitiveness, which leads to more jobs, innovation in different sectors. The unified Google vs. China is such a tired argument from a company that trying to slowly spread their control and negatively leach internet users data. If they aren't broken up before they start causing even more material harm then who knows, maybe in 10 years when the only available GoogSurance denies your claim for medicine because they scraped your Ancenstry.com you'll see what I was talking about.
This is an unprecedented amount of power over society wielded by corporations and, in effect, the handful of private citizens who own them.
I tend to lean libertarian but I've questioned for a while if it's appropriate and/or possible to limit this power in an equitable manner...but unchecked Google alone can probably sway elections with algorithmic manipulation of search results and even selective autocompletion.
That's probably the entire reason that the administration is targeting these orgs, and while I don't agree with the administration I believe this particular endeavor may be for the greater good. When Twitter can delete videos retweeted by the president, or add "fact check warnings" which effectively (though maybe not truthfully) discredit his statements, Jack Dorsey and his board are wielding a more direct, more immediate, and possibly more effective power than any of other branches of government.
You can choose not to use FB and Google.
If Trump is attacking them cynically out of some tantrum relating to how they beat on him and his supporters. Then yeah, I disagree he's doing it for the right reasons. But I think he has the right directional thrust.
Much better. I can phone up AT&T and complain to them when something goes wrong; they usually fix it.
Google will either ignore me or close my account (and all other accounts with associated Google-owned things)
Another data point that people stuck overseas because of Covid-19: Airlines banded in their oligopoly and divided up the world.
AA cancelled all flights but Europe, United in americas, Delta in Asia, etc.
Now if you want to fly from one of those places, you must get a mile voucher for your return flight, and re-purchase the exorbitant one way ticket from the one company from the oligopoly that got your current location to explore.
You're right we shouldn't be worried about them...we should be afraid of what has transpired these past 10-15 years because of them.
A common divergence tactic by those companies is to switch focus on the financial services/telcom, etc.
A key difference between those industries and FB, Google, and Amazon, is that they are under extreme regulations and oversight.
Google, et. al. are free to do whatever they and has resulted in billions in damages.
First - airlines, pharma, and financial services are nowhere near 'oligarchy' and don't come close to meeting the definition, just the opposite, they are very competitive.
With Telcos - the issue is real, but the drawback is mostly competitive innovation and price. Stagnant deployments and high prices would be the result. FYI - the US has decent broadband pricing. See: Canada!
Oil is a special one, but the industry is global and very competitive, especially in certain layers of that industry. Prices are widely known and understood. There is zero concern that 'some big entity' will control all of the oil, certainly not in America.
FB, Amazon, Google represent far more existentially problematic kinds of 'monopolies' because it bleeds into other aspects of life (social, media, information) and into other, adjacent industries. These are the real problem.
Search and social also have 'natural monopoly' kind of conditions which exacerbates the problems.
The other industry you didn't mention, wherein there is an existential problem with competition is 'health insurance'.
Wholesale metro fiber is also considerably less than in the US, as public and utilities infrastructure is much more open. And there is already municipal fiber in Montreal, Calgary, and some suburban parts of Vancouver to name a few.
You also don't have to play games, like with Comcast that periodically raises your pricing arbitrarily and can really rack up if you're not paying attention. A few years back when I kept an apartment in Seattle, I went from $50/mo on promotional offer, to $80/mo regular, and ended up at almost $120/mo by the time I cancelled less than 2 years later. Such practices would never fly in Canada.
The US has just as much as this.
US rates are lower for the more common bandwidth options [1][2], and as soon as you consider Purchasing Parity - Canadian rates are very high. 'Equipment' / CAPEX is a tiny part of the cost of said networks, so it really should cost a lot less to manage networks in Canada if salaries are lower. Once that factor is taken into consideration Canadian prices are very materially higher.
That US companies are cheezy with their 'increasing rates' is kind of a different story.
[1] https://mobilesyrup.com/2019/12/18/canada-top-five-highest-c...
I'm not aware of the US mandating lines be resold at controlled costs dictated by the FCC, but I don't deal with consumer/eyeball networks so perhaps I'm missing something? From the frequent complaints I see about duopolies in most US networks, I'm quite skeptical of this.
In metro Vancouver, I'm able to purchase 1G VPLS fiber links for around $800/mo, and dark fiber in the $1000-$2000/mo range for the most part, with similar pricing in Calgary and Toronto. Quotes I've seen in Seattle and Los Angeles have been typically 3-6x that range.
I can purchase municipal dark fiber in Coquitlam or New Westminster (suburbs of Vancouver) for $400/mo, and I believe Montreal is $500/mo. I'm not aware of being able to buy metro dark fiber for anywhere near that anywhere in the US.
Comcast is showing a $65/mo promotional offer for 1 year, with no details showing on what speed that is. If it's anything like the $50/mo offer I used to have, it will most likely increase significantly at the end of the year, and will continue going up in price periodically unless you call and complain.
Which ISP with nationwide coverage in the US offers significantly better pricing than Teksavvy on comparable plans?
For example, Japan has 1G being common, SK has 1G being common, Taiwan has 500-1G common. They all bottleneck quite a bit exiting the country (except for TW, but to some destination countries only); and as a side effect, many "local" websites are extremely popular as opposed to being subject to other countries' laws and media.
SK has side effect of also having an extensive DNS and RST/hijacking-based national "great firewall" censorship system that is officially deployed for pornography and pro-NK articles, but has also been used for anti-LGBT rights websites and other purposes in the past, in addition to threats of forcing foreign companies to comply with heavy surveillance requirements like requiring national ID to comment on a blog post. Honestly, SK is not a great role model for internet or censorship. On top of that, while your "home" connectivity is fine, content providers trying to set up even CDN/caching nodes in SK are subject to serious annoyances, like the KRNIC/KINX crap where they really dislike it if your ASN isn't allocated by KRNIC - you're literally on the internet exchange already but all Korean ASs will not talk to you or give you time of day because you're not one of them, and are not present on the route server, and you're forced to route traffic that originates and terminates in Seoul through the US or Hurricane Electric or some other insane route.
Remember the baby bells? In 1982, AT&T (ma bell) lost an anti-trust lawsuit and was broken up into 8 companies (the baby bells).
Guess what happened since? If you guessed they merged back together, you would be correct. The baby bells merged back together and became 3 companies - AT&T, Verizon, and CenturyLink.
For those who are customers of AT&T - how do you like your service? Is it as good as Google?
Oligopoly is the new monopoly. Financial services, airlines, oil majors, media, pharma, auto, etc. Those are the industries that need breaking up. You pay for their services / products and they price fix (airline baggage fees, overdraft fees, etc), you don't even pay for Google. You can easily use duckduckgo and delete your FB / Insta with no consequence.
Edit - to address the comments saying that the tech companies should be broken up: sure, but how exactly? Google and Facebook in particular. You don't even pay for their services, so you (the citizens) can't claim consumer protection from their business. Only the companies / individuals that pay for Google and Facebook ads can.
Again, I get the frustration of the times and misinformation sucks, but Google and Facebook are not the cause. They are the means of distributing info (including ads that are sometimes just fake new), not the root source of all evil.