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Comment by ehsankia | Hacker News Reader

It's easy to critique them for being too big, but what solution do you have? Would you propose that they just... stop scaling? Stop making new products?

I realize that they are really big, and with more products, they get more data, but imagine for one second that your goal truly was to help customers and provide them with as many useful tools as possible, what options would you have?

You either make more products that helps people (and end up getting more data), or you don't, stay stale, and end up going down like Yahoo or many other company who don't evolve do.

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I fall under this line of thinking too.

I am a gmail/drive/cal user primarily. I find their services fast, reliable, secure and integrated to a lot of other services.

Sure, they collect and sell my browsing data. But so what? It costs me nothing, doesn't impact my experience (outside of the occasionally annoying ad), and provides them revenue to keep innovating.

I don't really understand the anti-google sentiment that's been brewing lately. Why not the same aversion to apple, microsoft, and amazon? Or is it just flavor of the month?

Personally I'd much rather use Hire over LinkedIn. But I guess it's just one devil for another.

It's not about being big. It's about the fact that every product they release is deliberately designed to siphon more data off their users. Everything's stored server-side, everything's identifiable, everything's quid-pro-quo where the service is crippled without your data.

A prime example is the way they now channel so much of Android's data through Google Play Services. The updated permissions model is great if you want to stop third parties creeping on you, but with everything going through Google Play Services, your phone can only give you data if that data first goes to Google. If you don't permit Google Play Services to access your location, not only does Maps pettily default you to the wrong continent but even the Gmail app scolds you for having location data turned off.

Don't conflate 'deliberately invasive' with 'big'.

It's in corporations' nature to grow, just like Microsoft did in its antitrust days, and Google (and Amazon and others) are now. It can be dangerous.

I don't expect corporations to stop growing by themselves. But consumers can use alternative products, and tech workers can prefer to work at other companies. We can limit the danger that way.

> but what solution do you have?

It isn't easy, but as long as nation states are plausibly more powerful than Google, we—humanity—can hope.

Use antitrust to inhibit moves like the one under discussion.

Use privacy legislation to plug the Google data vacuum nozzle.

Suspend net neutrality in ways calculated to allow ISPs to suck Google dry, while not hurting anybody else too much.

> Would you propose that they just... stop scaling? Stop making new products?

Yes.

I want an economy where we have millions of tiny companies, each doing one thing, and doing that well. Like the German Mittelstand.

Having Amazon split up into dozens of smaller companies for different categories just sounds really annoying to me.

You don’t have to split up by category. But you should split up by business model.

One entity would run the marketplace, another entity would do the Amazon Basics products, and AWS would be a third entity.

A single entity controlling the market place, products, distribution platform, and infrastructure just screams of antitrust.

Generally, no company should be allowed to both run a marketplace, and offer products on it.

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