I don't know if or how this fits within actual antitrust law, but it makes sense that the issue was never price gouging, the issue was one entity gaining too much power.
In a theoretical dystopian future, a megacorp could own 99% of market share of all industries in the country, but intentionally offer very low prices on every product to avoid "monopoly" concerns. It becomes clear: monopolistic pricing is just a symptom, not the real issue. The real issue is power.
If this suit (and followup suits on other megacorps) fail, the future may call for new laws to define monopolistic power in novel ways, as soon as we the people recognize that getting search and email and social media for free doesn't mean that the megacorps are on our side.
In the US, there are two major areas of antitrust law and enforcement:
1) Sherman & Clayton Acts (1890, 1914) - outlaws cartels and anticompetitive activities (that is, activities that tend to lead to monopolies, but doesn't outlaw monopolies themselves). Price gouging is not an antitrust issue, but predatory pricing and price fixing are (you might have meant these terms). This area is primarily established via case law and enforced by the courts (and DOJ AD).
2) Merger guidelines/Federal Trade Commission (1968) - wherein key mergers must be reviewed and approved by the FTC. This area is more sensitive to political climate / executive branch as it's executive-appointed FTC regulators who set the guidelines and give approvals. We are now exiting an era of historic hands-off-ness.
Source: had a professor who is famous in antitrust world
If you can't do that, then you're basically just preventing a monopoly from happening in advance, right? Or trying to at least.
At any rate, I'm assuming US vs. Google will be required to reference precedent set in Sherman & Clayton + subsequent court rulings and _not_ be able to use their own mergers against them as they were approved by the FTC in the first place. Is that also correct?
As far as governments go, we could all become anarchists be done with them, but if you think for even a few seconds about it you would realize that this enormous vacuum of power would be filled by something. Corporations, rival nations with their government still intact, military warlords, or new political factions seeking to establish new governments. We have thousands of years of history that shows this pattern emerging again and again to the point that it is practically a natural law of power. The only check on power is greater or equal power. Ideally, you want this power to be answerable to the greatest number of people that this power is intended to serve. You may recall a lot of smart people during something called the Enlightenment spending a lot of time and energy on experimenting with different forms of government that met these criteria and still managing to not quite get it right. Many people in the West live in societies multiple iterations down the line from those established in the 18th and 19th century revolutions and there are still glaring issues. What do you suggest instead?
You have a say in your government's leadership. Don't like the President? Vote them out. Don't like Zuck? Nothing you can do about it.
Corporations are also accountable to governments, as this story illustrates. If US courts and/or legislators decide they want it, Google ceases to exist.
Economists think of this in terms of "Exit vs Voice".
With governments, you have a voice - one vote for deciding who's in charge - but no way to exit, even when your side loses.
With corporations you can exit - stop shopping at Target - but no voice in how Target is run.
Both models have pros and cons, and it's good to understand how they differ, and what situations they're suited for.
Basically - how do I exit a company if I'm not the one choosing to use their services?
I cannot use the internet and avoid Google's ads.
I cannot use the internet and avoid Amazon's hosting.
I cannot exit the internet because I literally make my living with it, the competitive disadvantage of doing so is SO great with the way we've structured services and life in general that it doesn't really work.
One wouldn't be allowed to use iphone or android? It would take a lot of manual data entry to migrate my accounts off gmail. Youtube obviously wouldn't be allowed but do I get to use adsense powered websites?
Philip Pettit has spent extensive time addressing really interesting questions like these, like what might distinguish "public" domination from "private."
I don't find that surprising because Google is a mess. They're a very poorly run organization, making decisions that make no sense at times. Their inefficiency and/or incompetence is probably the only reason why they haven't wreaked havoc on all of the markets they have their hand in. And the various monopolies they do have are, as monopolies usually are, immune to stupid decisions that would kill most other companies.
I think it might be because their corporate culture of being the good guy/"don't be evil" is incompatible with the reality of their situation. Like cognitive dissonance at a corporate level. I wonder how many of their employees in positions of power are still living in that fantasy, and making decisions based on it?
Executive level people seem too adept at defending the company and avoiding certain phrases or concepts, I believe they all know. Things like suggesting routine conversations include a lawyer and tagging them as such to try to include more conversations in attorney/client privilege shows a desire to hide guilty actions.
But many Googlers seem to perfectly fit that Upton Sinclair quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
That said, I don't think you can see how Alphabet's lawyers talk and think that they are somehow living in a bubble or are not having these sorts of high-level strategy discussions.
And whether or not such training is meant by executives to hide illegal behavior that they are aware of it's also catching many cases where people are just dumb and use wrong words to mean different things, words that have specific meaning in a legal context and that can hurt the person and the company although there was no illegal act being done.
How many messaging apps have they launched and killed?
It seems kind of obvious. Their goal is to organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible and useful. What better way to achieve this than to somehow create an AGI/ASI. They are certainly the best placed org to do it.
I'm not sure what people want these days: people are angry that they have successful products that people use more than competitor's prodcts, and also angry that they have unsuccessful products that are shut after failing to gain traction.
Mobile is all about power management. Apple got that right and really nailed the UX.
I don’t think Google knew that playbook at that point. Maybe Rubin did but even MSFT blew it.
None of that matters anymore, because Messenger/IG/WA are all mobile apps that most people probably dont chat as much through on a desktop/laptop. But at the time, it gave people a compelling reason to have the messenger product open on screen. Google Talk was similar, being overlayed over Gmail, but google squandered having a Talk bar over the bottom of every google property. Yahoo as well. Yahoo News should have had messenger across the bottom of the screen.
On the mobile front, FB Messenger sort of won out because people started to like iMessage, but there was still a need for a cross platform alternative. I believe Apple could have prevented FB Messenger from being a thing, had they released an Android client along with a browser extension. Apple's best move was releasing iTunes for Windows, something they are scared to repeat, and shouldnt be.
I wonder what the numbers are on WhatsApp vs FB Messenger, because people of all socioeconomic levels, languages, ages, country, and tech literacy use WhatsApp in my experience, whereas only Americans of a certain age group use FB Messenger.
That's why the suit is aimed at search and search advertising
Once the lawsuit drops I doubt this is the argument they are going to make.
This is going to be your run of the mill antitrust lawsuit. It's just making news because tech has avoided them for 30+ years.
With Google that argument is harder. A person could whip up G level search engine, mail, and maybe even youtube equivalent, but moving all those people ( but to make them consider your alternative would be impossibly painful to do ).
I will admit that NVidia and ARM scares me, but I am not sure what can be done here.
Hi Dunning, meet Kruger.
Not going to dismiss the inertia parameter, but neither DDG nor Bing ever returned what I was looking for and they never were as good as Google Search for my particular searches (yes, even in private navigation). I'm not saying they're not good, I'm saying they never returned good results for me.
That's because of drivers, and drivers are because of stable kernel API.
The simple fact that I can say "google it" and colloquially anyone in the US and probably Europe would understand what I mean kind of states how dominant they are in the market.
Today, we're talking about a few taps to change which search website you want to use.
If Nvidia actually gets to buy ARM, that's another matter. But again they can't sue based on a purchase that hasn't even gone through yet.
But that's really the same thing. If Google bans or interferes with Fediverse apps because they compete with YouTube, that's anti-competitive behavior. If they don't and those apps gain share with people whose content keeps getting censored on YouTube, they're not very effectively controlling the free flow of information.
Censorship by an incumbent is a market opportunity for a competitor, so a corporation can only really sustain it through anti-competitive actions against the challenger(s).
What's surprising to me is how un-monopolistic Google's share of the Cloud + AI market is under its control, considering how many of the techniques were invented there. I'd put it at under 25%.
The real behemoth is NVidia + ARM. GPU shortages are endemic. And the cost of a new entrant to the market just to construct a fab is probably $20B+. Ask Intel XE how much they are spending just to keep up ;)