Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

I have mixed feelings about this. Personally, working as a contractor at Google was one of the interesting jobs I have had and I generally like Google.

That said, after reading Dave Eggers' excellent book "The Circle" last year and having watched the movie yesterday, I was reminded of the dangers (even if fictional in the case of the book) of a monopoly controlling knowledge. The book/movie is obviously about Google and information monopolies even if the fictional company is named The Circle. Buying the education business with free/inexpensive services definitely increases Google's chance of being the information monopoly.

Personally I like to pay for services. I pay for FastMail and just use GMail as a backup email. I pay for Evernote instead of using free offerings like Keep. I pay for Office 365 to get lots of cloud storage and the Office apps for the rare times when I need them. I pay for using GCP and I buy movies and TV shows from Google Play and Apple. It is a cliche, but I like to be the customer and not the product.

I understand that School districts are on a tight budget, so it is understandable that they make use of free (or priced under-market) services.

For a historical perspective on the privacy issue, I found this book review interesting.

"So from the beginning, kings had an incentive to make the country 'legible' – that is, so organized and well-indexed that it was easy to know everything about everyone and collect/double-check taxes. Also from the beginning, nobles had an incentive to frustrate the kings so that they wouldn’t be out of a job. And commoners, who figured that anything which made it easier for the State to tax them and interfere in their affairs was bad news, usually resisted too."

So this resistance to being indexed has very deep roots! But I think we're way past that point now. Being "undocumented" makes it very hard to participate in society.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like...

Just a quick +1; Seeing Like a State is one of the best books I've ever read, and is a must read for anyone who uses data to make decisions. (Which, really, should be just about every software engineer...)

I also think it is kinda backwards that a for-profit corporation is subsidizing public education. This is a symptom of a broken system and instead of praising Google we should fix what is broken about the system. This also creates an interesting precedent if it sticks. Are parents going to beg Google to prop up their schools now?

Are Chromebooks subsidized? Maybe they're just cheaper.

Pretty sure they're subsidized. Plenty of products given to educators are subsidized. That in and of itself is not bad or wrong. It's when we put things in the proper context and ask how exactly does Google benefit from this that things take a wrong turn. I don't see how any positive spin for why Google is doing this actually holds up.

CB are not subsidized and schools pay for Google software recurring per kid.

Even if the Chromebooks aren't subsidized, Google Apps for Education is free to use which amounts to some kind of subsidy.

Google Classroom is not free and schools pay per recurring per kid.

This should be a tell that education has value and the government is underinvesting.

You're probably right, but it could just as easily be a tell that education has monetary value, and more invested would only get captured by organizations seeking to make a profit.

Yes. Educating children is the most profitable "startup" investment ever.

Practically guaranteed returns. Just teaching a child to read is probably more than break-even for every education dollar spent on the child.

It makes time traveling to get in on the ground floor of Facebook, Google, and Apple look like investing in treasury bonds.

a for-profit corporation is subsidizing public education

You think this is altruism? It's getting kids hooked early. Everything Google does is about getting more eyeballs on more ads, never forget that.

You misunderstood me. I agree it is not altruism and that is why I think for-profit corporate entities must be kept out of education. Their values and motives are misaligned.

> we should fix what is broken about the system

Who is we? The state? I don't trust the state to be able to fix this. Remember the launch of healthcare.gov? Google employees had to step in to fix it to make it usable.

Why do you automatically couple the collective noun to the state? I didn't say government bureaucrats should fix the problem for specific reasons. The world is more than just corporations and state sponsored entities. "We" means regular people, parents, teachers, community organizers, etc.

'We' could roll our own Linux distro, work out deals with manufacturers to provide some form factor useable by children to run our distro on, set up a massive cloud to orchestrate all these devices in such a way that they are useful to children and teachers without being a huge pain in the ass.

But I don't feel like it.

This isn't even remotely new. Apple and windows have been doing the same ever since computers were in schools. Heck, I even got free oem copies of Vista and 7, and Ms word through my school (University) which were provided to the school well below what the normal prices were.

The fact that Google is providing a subjectively better alternative isn't remotely new, but if it works better and see lower cost to schools, I'm more than happy to see it happen.

I didn't say anything about it being new.

Did the invention of printing press made them a monopoly? Google does not generate information; they facilitate it. The more the information is free, the more it will be converted to knowledge by these same schools and students. Your comparison of it to your values of buying things for yourself, is misleading.

If Guthenberg had invented the printing press in the current legislative framework, he would have enjoyed a monopoly for decades.

Thank you. That's exactly my point.

I'm glad you're questioning that assertion, but I don't think your counter-argument is very convincing. The economics of the printing press were different than the economics facing Google. For example: Google search benefits from network effects (clicks are used to improve future search results). Google mostly provides information goods (zero marginal cost of production), but books aren't really a perfect information good.

Google is darn near close to a monopoly on search (at least, Peter Thiel made that the premise of Zero to One), which isn't to say they're also a monopolist in every other field they're in.

They're a semi-monopoly (~80%) in the following markets: mail, search, online advertisements, browser, smartphones, mapping, layer data (it's $AMOUNT busy at place X right now)

I like Google since they're one of the few companies that has a 20+ year record of being careful with user data, but how much they control (or at least facilitate) is pretty scary from an objective viewpoint.

I don't know what your definition of "perfect information good" really is, but books have been converting information into knowledge for hundreds of years. Before the printing press, scribes used to hand-duplicate. The invention of printing press effectively changed the whole scene (just as the searching on the Internet changed Internet). Irrespective of the concerns of privacy etc, Google provides the best sauce of technology which facilitates searching the information (which converts to knowledge). As far as I can see, Google isn't in the business of creating knowledge.

The term "information good" is from economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_good

An information good is one for which it's very cheap to produce additional units. Unfortunately, I'm probably abusing the term, since books are listed as an example of information goods. The idea is that most of the cost of producing the book goes into the content (writing, editing, etc.) and actually printing one additional book is cheap. (When I said books are "imperfect" information goods I meant that they still require paper and shipping and retailing and such, but it's probably just a bad use of the term.)

There's a fantastic book about the economics of information goods called "Information Rules" ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/087584863X ). Software is an information good so this covers some topics relevant to the digital economy. My favorite part is the chapter on lock-in. In particular the discussion around the equation:

profits from a customer = quality advantage + switching costs

which puts "(marginal) goodness of your product" on equal footing with "pain you can inflict on your customer for leaving".

The original topic was not on the topic of economics, rather, the monopolies any invention creates. The economics of things have existed alongside everything else in human history. The point was whether Google is a monopoly in the context of information. My contention was to identify the fact that Google only facilitates the information (like what printing press did to the information people were keeping orally, or through scribes).

If Google is the monopoly in the sense that the OP describes, then a unified Internet itself is a bigger monopoly. Break apart the monolith of the Internet itself, and you have more player contending equally in facilitating search etc.

If you're not aware, one of the authors of Information Rules (great book, BTW, I second the recommendation), Hal Varian, now works for Google as their Chief Economist.

The comparison with press does not fully stand. After the invention of printing lots of different publishers were born, while we still have essentially just one Google. So they actually have quite a strong monopoly and quite some power with it. If they decide to not "facilitate" you, you become invisible.

Even though lots of different publishers were born, they were using the same technology, which is the printing press.

Google's core technology is search facility. If someone does this better than them, then there will be no monopoly. The core feature of printing press stood as is for longest period of time (even Xerox did not bring anything "new" to the table). That's, until the Internet in fact, was able to put a dent on the core invention of printing press. People are now reading on their screens, where as previously, they used to read only on the paper.

You are stuck with the short-term view of monopolies and privacy issues. We wouldn't be surprised if there was a big brouhaha over privacy during the time of the invention of printing press (ask any religious scholar what they have to say about the history of churches against the advancement of technology and knowledge).

If someone does this better than them, then there will be no monopoly

The problem is, this isn't necessarily true. Microsoft used to make the same argument in the '90s. The point is when you get entrenched in so many areas it becomes hard to switch. It's a network effect of information rather than people. There would have to be a significant improvement in order for people to switch (with some other motivation, like political).

^^ s/with some other motivation/without some other motivation/

If there were only 100 people on the planet, you'd only need one government. Would you call it monopoly? Internet as a whole is monolithic in nature. You are hitting the boundaries with the potential of one product delivering whatever it is supposed to deliver, in the best possible manner which satisfies everyone. If Internet could be broken down and become diverse, you'll naturally see more diversity of choices easily cohabiting.

If you don't pay for the product, you are the product. That's how these services are funded, by selling your personal information at scale, which you generate.

Now, your kids are the next product.

Tim Cook is that you? Really this line is rather ridiculous. Google charges per month per child for the software.

Google declined to provide a breakdown of the exact details the company collects from student use of its services. Bram Bout, director of Google’s education unit, pointed to a Google privacy notice listing the categories of information that the company’s education services collect, like location data and “details of how a user used our service.

Mr. Rochelle, the Google executive, said that it was important for the company to have large, diverse sets of educational users giving feedback — otherwise it might develop products that worked for only a few of them.

Why would they fail to provide that breakdown?

Because then they would have to admit they're building a profile of that child from the minute they start early school, and how strange that would be.

They no longer just facilitate it, they gather it with an ever-more-naked avarice and disregard for personal privacy. And I say that as a long time fan who has become increasingly creeped out by them over the past few years.

Google gatekeeps information by ranking algorithms, and information payments by advertising.

In bothe these areas, and others, they benefit by network effects, which I'm coming to see as foundational to natural monopoly and rent-seeking.

I simply don't understand what you're trying to say by mentioning the printing press in this context, though you might want to look up its particular disruptive history. Elizabeth Eisenstein is recommended reading.

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