They're free to do what Google did: spend billions on eb crawlers, offer extensive free services like Gmail and chrome and build their own datasets.

Plus, it doesn't really matter: it's not a problem for someone to offer a good service. It's a problem for them to offer a bad one and then force it on people because they're big.

Yeah, that's pretty much how monopolies (anti-competitive companies) work: you could replicate the entire Google ecosystem, but without doing all of that you can't compete with any segment of Google. It is not reasonable to require of any competitor in the search engine field to offer their own ad network, mail service, cloud service, cloud computing service, enterprise offering. This is illegal, as hopefully the anti-trust lawsuit will show. It's a smart business practice, but once you cross a certain threshold it is regulated by the government because it is no longer good for society.

I agree about barriers to entry helping Google maintain their monopoly. We disagree about whether monopolies themselves are illegal as you say.

From the wiki page laying out the US law in this (feel free to correct me if Aussie law differs?):

>The courts have interpreted this to mean that monopoly is not unlawful per se, but only if acquired through prohibited conduct.

>When enterprises are not under public ownership, and where regulation does not foreclose the application of antitrust law, two requirements must be shown for the offense of monopolization. First, the alleged monopolist must possess sufficient power in an accurately defined market for its products or services. Second, the monopolist must have used its power in a prohibited way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law

I don't think Google meets the second requirement. I believe we agree it meets the first?

Reading right after the end of your quote: "... Second, the monopolist must have used its power in a prohibited way. The categories of prohibited conduct are not closed, and are contested in theory. Historically they have been held to include exclusive dealing, price discrimination, refusing to supply an essential facility, product tying and predatory pricing."

Unfortunately for the prosecutors, the big tech companies have abused their power in ways that couldn't have existed in the past, so they will have to set precedents in these anti-trust cases - but the law does allow for prosecutors to claim that Google's behavior is abusive by the _spirit_ of the law. I hope they do a good job, because we'll need these precedents for the next few decades.

That's a fair response. Would you mind speculating on what Google are doing that breaks the spirit of the law and what new categories of prohibited conduct we might look forwards to?

I think there is something of a reckoning coming for FB, Google, Twitter etc around fake news. But I'd imagine that's a separate issue to antitrust.

I'm not quite sure that we need new categories of prohibited conduct, when existing categories fit.

We could debate the particulars, gray areas abound here, but areas of concern include:

Tying: which is offering unrelated goods or services only as a bundle. Things like Android licensing (effectively) requiring Google search defaults to use the Google Play store (no longer the case in EU); possibly the Google(+) login requirement for YouTube account fits. By tying the otherwise unrelated small product with the big product, the small product gets more market share, and this can be abusive.

Dumping (or predatory pricing): selling (or giving away) a product below cost to drive out competiton. Android or Chrome could fit here; but the case is murky because the US (at least) is looking for harm to consumers, and sees free browsers and free OS for phone reducing the price of the phone as a consumer good. But there's some feedback loops here that aren't great for the consumer.

Something that comes up that's hard for me to put into a category is cross promotion. When Google highlights other Google services on search results, that sometimes feels abusive (or is reported as abusive). Especially when it's not really apropriate for the search query. This is the category news complaints seem to be in.

All answers to this will have to be anecdotes, unless someone has access to internal memos that instruct managers to systematically engage in such manners. My personal belief, based only on friendly conversations with people who work and worked in big tech, is that the culture in those companies (especially Google) convinces employees that these "growth hacks" are valid, and that a winning variation in an A/B test immediately means "this is good for our users".

One example that I like referring back to is from a product manager I interviewed a few years ago. He was very proud that he was part of a team that realized that since Android has a lot of users and Gmail is the default browser, they can show content to people on Gmail on Android to promote other Google mobile products. No competitor of those mobile products could reach that kind of wide advertisements, and why did Google get to advertise there? It isn't like they paid the most for the ad spot, or had the best product (most mid- and low-tier Google products are _awful_) - it's because one group could go to another and tell them "please put this promotion over there".

And one that is more of a conspiracy, but there is evidence that comes up every now and then: Google AdWords has better targeting and data collection capabilities than any other network, because Chrome allows AdWords to collect data that other systems are blocked from collecting "due to privacy concerns". But somehow, AdWords getting that data isn't a privacy concern.

My belief is that this is because Google employees honestly in their hearts are convinced they are the good guys and it's OK for them to have this. I'm sure in some cases there's an exec that weighs in, but in so many cases it's Google's elitist and entitled culture that makes employees think that they are superior and infallible to employees of other companies, so it's OK for them to do this. And yes - there is corporate responsibility and liability for the creation and maintenance of such a culture, when it is so pervasive.