The mysterious case of missing URLs and Google's AMP

"Monopoly" now seems to mean "preferred by most people."

From the standpoint of the consumer they may not have a monopoly, but from the standpoint of the website they do.

From the perspective of a website developer, Google has a monopoly.

It’s interesting how all these points would be super simple to validate a decade ago.

> They have no exclusive rights to "search". Bing, DDG, Yahoo, and more all compete in the same space.

They sponsor firefox and safari, so have exclusive rights on the default settings though.

Bing can’t be the default search engine on anything with more than 10% user share.

> They are not prevent me from using another search engine

Android system search is locked at the maker level if they include Google Play, and isn’t bootloader locking becoming the norm, worsening the locking ?

Nobody made anyone use the telephone network either. There were alternative, less preferred methods of long distance communication. But once an incumbent builds in self-reinforcing network effects--be they telephone lines or a rich network of data--they are able to leverage it to immense strength, left unchecked.

a monopoly is not defined by the things you list. it is instead defined by the ability to exert disproportionate power on a market, enough to create favorable conditions for itself (i.e., it's anti-free market).

it's usually characterized by a large, but not necessarily majority, market share in a given industry or segment (monopolies can have as little as 30% market share), and pricing power, both of which google has in search.

AFAIK all these - Bing, DDG, Yahoo, and more all compete in the same space. - are simply a single search engine (Bing) with some additions over the top. I suspect that there are about 4 true search engines remaining in the world, two of which are strictly regional (Baidu and Yandex) and Bing is only remaining afloat due to sheer willpower of MS which may end abruptly, as with some other products. I consider this state (with all other factors) as effectively a monopoly.

None of those things necessarily constitute a monopoly - but when barriers to entry are too high to facilitate other entrants, when they have first dibs on all of the talent, deep lobbying power etc. then it can become monopolistic.

A good example is their commoditization of adjacent economies: they give Android away for free to make sure that there are few competitors who can make a dime there. Apple, the biggest company on the planet, being the only one who can hold a toe in that market.

Similarly as the default search engine on Chrome - Google definitely wants to make sure browsers are 'free' 'open source' etc so they can fuel the dominant entity and make sure the surpluses are captured in search, not elsewhere.

Microsoft would use their monopoly power in one area (OS) and leverage that into monopoly in other areas, i.e. office software.

If GM, Ford and Daimler Chrysler were to merge, they would be a monopoly even though the merged entity wouldn't meet any of the criteria you've highlighted.

Google can't necessarily be described in network effects either, but generally the very fact of their market penetration almost proves that there are systematic barriers.

They make gazillions of dollars - so why aren't there gazillions of competitors and tons of choice? Because of those barriers.

And they will keep extending themselves as they see fit to use billions of dollars to either dominate - or remove all surpluses form adjacent industries, thereby leaving the surpluses in their core offer, like search.

If you take a minute to consider why in 'free trade' deals, nations that participate are forbidden from government intervention in local companies. It's not really 'free trade' if for example the government can use tax base from the broader economy to support a strategic players and enable them to 'dump' their product on the market at what would otherwise be below market value. In that context, Google could be described as 'dumping' Android and Chrome on the market in some sense.

It's definitely grey but I think it's reasonable to consider Google as a monopoly.

I don’t think anti-monopoly laws were intended to prevent the physical enslavement of customers who are begging to stop using a certain project but are forced to continue.

It’s common sense. Sometimes profit-seeking companies amass an amount of power within the market that allows them to do things that are bad for their customers, bad for the market, or bad for society. Because we don’t have modern regulations in this country (sadly, Elizabeth Warren’s efforts in this direction will be thwarted by the corrupt legislators her laws would target), the cult of “delivering value to shareholders” often distorts the behavior of companies in this direction.

I’m not sure about Google, but it’s a totally reasonable to be asking these questions. Whatever term you want to use, Google could have a big enough influence on the market to create outcomes (like AMP!) that are conspicuously shitty for people who use the Internet overall. That’s really important and we should stop them if that’s happening.

This needs to be repeated because it helps to understand the issue.

There are only four (4) search indexes of sufficient size in English, these are Bing, Google, Baidu (Chinese), and Yandex (Russian).

Everything on the internet that calls itself a "search engine" gets its search result data from one of those four indexes. Different front ends provide different features around the results, whether it is privacy enhancement, ad enhancement, Etc.

Google's English language index is generally considered the 'best' based on the depth of the index with respect to its crawl size and that index's ability to provide both good precision and recall.

You can use any search site you want but you will likely be using Google search results. If you feel like you're results aren't quite as good as Google's, and you are in the US, you are probably using Bing. Neither Baidu nor Yandex have US data centers so latency to their indexes is pretty bad for most front end web sites.

It's a de facto monopoly.

Each of those points could have been made about Windows at the time (considering Mac), yet the European antitrust commission decided it was a monopoly and fined them. Quite seriously, if memory serves.

Where do those rules come from? Are they part of the official definition for monopoly? Why did the EC not deem them relevant (enough) when ruling against Microsoft? Why would they not do the same with Google (if ever relevant)?

Is there official reading on this?

Ahahahahah!

A monopoly, or cartel, is a business that keeps competitors from entering the fray.

Please go on the street corner with your WLAN and portable server to offer search/CDN and whatever, and you'll quickly attract government thugs who will shut you down for lack of permission from the monopoly bureau (Govt regulation). So Yes it is a big, fat, and really fucking juicy monopoly. That's what govts and big corps all are, a big bunch of fascists handing each other 'licences' stipulating their exclusive self-granted right to do x or z.

Google to me seems like a case of natural monopoly[1]. Competition in this market is stifled by the amount of investment and infrastructure needed to make a good search engine.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

Hiding email addresses is really annoying, and a security hole because email users can lie about their name.

Look at the problem with the telephone system where scammers can spoof caller ID.

Enabling Web Packaging and then hiding URLs will produce a lot less blowback than doing it in the reverse order.

You don’t need a different approach. It’s absolutely possible to build fast websites today without AMP - it’s just a collection of good practices and strict limits.

In fact, you can even use AMP itself without any of the Google garden parts.

Sure, please point to some that pay equally well and offer equally interesting coworkers and tasks.

Small, fast, user-friendly web pages sound like a better place to me.

Why, exactly?

The worst case is that Google is transforming itself from a web search engine to an app store, with AMP "sites" being the apps, and google.com search results being a directory of apps you can "buy" (i.e. read and pay with your attention, instead of cash).

This is certainly not a good direction for "the web", but it's not an illogical path to go down. People seem fine with publishing apps and being beholden to someone's walled garden. Apple does this quite well; people seem to prefer apps to opening a browser and visiting some URL. (As an example of how crazy things have gotten... I wanted to post to Instagram from my computer once, but there is actually no way to do it. You have to transfer your photo to your phone, obtain their app through a walled-garden app store, and THEN upload the photo via the app. What?)

I'll also point out that Google is not really the arbiter of what is and is not the web. Yeah, it's a pretty good search engine. It's the one I open by default. But they have less and less leverage over you every day. In Windows 10, I have a search bar in my taskbar. It does not use Google. I cannot change it to Google. If my interface to the web is a Windows machine, I have to go out of my way to use Google. (I just disabled Cortana completely because I don't use it... but I will still hit the Windows key, type something like "cmd" with the intent to run cmd.exe, typo it, and end up on a Bing page with random search results. Man Google is so evil for doing that to me... wait...)

Whether or not making news articles with ads proprietary (AMP) is good for the world really depends on who you are. If you are writing articles that are funded with ad views, and your readers decide "this loads too slowly, so I've lost interest" or "I know how I can make it faster, install an ad-blocker!", then AMP is great for you. If you are the average HN reader and think "my websites are never slow and ads are evil", then you will think the opposite. Depending on how you look at it, you can easily see working on AMP as changing the world by making independent journalism profitable and easy to read. Or you can see it as throwing away the open web, which is the paragon of all that is right in the world.

Anyway, what I'm saying is that it's not black & white. It's a change, for sure. Some changes are good. Some changes are bad. What you think should dictate whether or not you choose to work on it, because there is no path towards the world being great that everyone agrees on. If there was, we'd all be working on that. Instead, there is disagreement and people have chosen sides. You are on one side, but not everyone agrees with you; hence, there is another side.

Do you believe that URLs are the optimal way of identifying web content? The web is wildly different from the early days where it was a series of documents arrange in a hierarchical manner. If we were designing the web today from scratch, URLs would likely not be the solution.

What is wrong with considering that there may be something better?

That typically applies to all monopolies in free countries

> No one is 'forcing' you to do anything with your website, wanting to be top of Google SERP is optional.

Not if you want people to be able to find you…

I work for a large publisher. Google isn't putting a literal knife to anyones throat, but they are not so subtly suggesting that search traffic is tied to your usage of AMP. That qualifies as `force` in my book.

Are you kidding? If someone controlled most of the world's food supply, and said that each night you had to do the moonwalk to have access to their food supply, would you say they are forcing you to do the moonwalk? I would, and I'm pretty sure any sane person would. Because the other option is starvation, which leads to you ceasing to exist. How anyone can actually believe the "logic" you're proposing here is really beyond me.

So the pro-Google argument I'm hearing is something like: "Google is making a better experience for users and no one is forcing you to use Google."

If you think Google is in the right here you have to say Microsoft was totally right to push IE and make it the default on Windows machines and make certain pages only load in IE and all the rest. After all, you could simply go install Firefox or not view pages on Microsoft.com.

The problem is that Google is using it's market advantage to do things that takes control from websites and affects their economics directly. Google using it's influence to dictate best practices is nothing new (and has always been worrisome), but AMP directly affects websites owner's control of their content and they are continuing down a path that weaken the economics of site owners, especially smaller sites.

You can say it's great to strip out bloated stuff from pages, but if Google strips more value from websites and gives them nothing in return, it just leads to sites closing down or producing less content because Google is absorbing their value.

And also don't forget good content that doesn't care about AMP or isn't part of an economic machine that jumps when Google says jump. That content just gets further pushed down the SERPs for big entities that follow Google's rules, regardless of it the content is better or if it has any "bloat" to strip in the first place. How exactly is that good for users?