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Comment by trocadero | Hacker News Reader

I think the analogy of Google's castle being search and everything else a scorched earth tactic to protect that is perfect. It's the heart of my strongly ambivalent feelings about Google. If you take their major successes like Maps, Android, Chrome, GMail, Analytics they are all really good products. They aren't examples of a monopoly giving bad service or forcing an inferior product on consumers.

The problem is that it sucks the oxygen out of the room for so many fundamental technologies that we use today. How do you compete with the combination of massive resources and a willingness to give away things for free?

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Honest question, not tongue in cheek, if there's an instance where consumer utility and ability to compete are opposing forces, which do we side with? And if, as I suspect, it is nuanced and not a binary answer, do we ever consider one of the forces while trying to increase the other? Should the one doling out anti-competitive punishments be required to recognize consumer utility/happiness? Should the one implementing consumer utility/happiness be required to recognize its competitors' abilities? To me it seems the requirement to recognize the other opposing force is only on the implementer.

I think the law is there to protect competitors, and that's it.

Why the law is there is of course another matter.

It's like if you go out and kill someone. That person may have been a really, really horrible person that our society is measuredly better off without. But unless there's some kind of self-defense involved, you're facing a sentence to prison.

I'm not trying to equate killing with monopoly abuse, but I find it odd that the principle that if you break the law, you face the consequences results in so much questioning.

These cases are meticulously prepared and come from complaints filed with the authorities. If you read all the paperwork, you'd most likely come to the same conclusion: Google abused their dominant market position.

> I think the law is there to protect competitors, and that's it.

I disagree. I think it's there (or should be there) to protect society/consumers, and that's it. I am saying that by excluding all other consumer effects and pretending that it's there to protect competitors potentially at the harm of society is invalid. Sometimes they align, sometimes they don't.

> I'm not trying to equate killing with monopoly abuse, but I find it odd that the principle that if you break the law, you face the consequences results in so much questioning.

Because the law is vague and subjective. It's not like we have algorithms or robots determining guilt. The thing that is odd is confusing questioning of the law with questioning of the idea of breaking laws. And I agree they probably did abuse their position, but that doesn't relate specifically to the comment you're responding to which is more about whether abuse is all that should be taken into consideration.

Here's the problem, though: If you say, "Consumers don't seem to be harmed by this action," you don't know what the alternative could have been. Consumers could have been much better off with additional competition.

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