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Comment by fzeroracer | Hacker News Reader

While I think the article is pretty low quality I agree with the premise all the same. The internet as a whole is probably one of the least regulated markets you can find yourself in (ignoring the oncoming ISP problems for a second), and yet we see it dominated by a few large companies

What stops smaller search engines from competing? Or smaller social media alternatives to Facebook? To me I think the answer is simple: Once you reach a certain size you can continue to squash competition through sheer momentum. For the people who are more tech savvy we might switch to using DuckDuckGo or Vivaldi but even my parents who are nigh-illiterate when it comes to computers knows about Facebook, Google and Chrome. Heck, every time we tell someone to 'just Google it', we see how successful Google is with capturing mind share.

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As a counterpoint: in the 1990s the US government was convinced that Microsoft was an unassailable monopoly dominating all areas of technology. Competition could not defeat it; only government action could defeat it. All of the arguments you made in your post, about size and market domination, were made about Microsoft in the late 1990s.

The government did not break up Microsoft, but then Google came along, and nobody saw it coming. And Apple became a major player after nearly going out of business in the 90s, and Facebook dominated a market category called "social media" that nobody was thinking about in the late 1990s.

It turned out that government action was not necessary, because competition actually did work, and it worked by creating new technologies that nobody expected.

I doubt the people who are concerned about market dominance in 2018 know more than the people who were concerned about it in the late 1990s, and they are probably just as wrong.

Winners in the tech industry turn into giants via vertical integration and predatory pricing. They keep adding stuff related to the segment they first won in. They keep making stuff cheap or free to undercut competitors.

There are many examples of this and we have two big examples in the US of anti-trust regulators stepping in and hobbling the giant: IBM in the 60s/70s and Microsoft in the 90s/00s. In both cases the government forced the giant to change its behavior and the industry eventually experienced a new wave of small firms that filled the void, competed, and innovated.

Notably in both cases the giant also got off relatively easy in the end (no breakup). And both are successful companies to this day. But they were tied up in court long enough to lose their ability to squelch competitors and dominate new markets.

Now you could argue this was not fair to IBM or to Microsoft (in the future, to Google?). In both cases you'd be right. I'd argue you don't have to be fair to the winner especially once he starts playing dirty tricks to keep others down. You be fair to the little guys and you get tough on the big guys, that's the foundation for both a healthy market and a healthy society.

You could also argue that making things free is good for consumers. You'd be right again, except in the case where the freebies are designed to kill off competition and stagnate the product category (Internet Explorer being a classic case where Microsoft bundled it, gave it away for free, then stopped improving it for years).

We have 50 years of precedents and the people at the DOJ know their history. I suspect it's just a matter of political winds and timing before Alphabet has to follow in IBM and Microsoft's footsteps.

> Winners in the tech industry turn into giants via vertical integration and predatory pricing. They keep adding stuff related to the segment they first won in. They keep making stuff cheap or free to undercut competitors.

> There are many examples of this and we have two big examples in the US of anti-trust regulators stepping in and hobbling the giant: IBM in the 60s/70s and Microsoft in the 90s/00s.

If IBM was really a vertically-integrated, predatory giant, how could Microsoft have been successful?

If Microsoft was a vertically integrated, predatory giant, how could Google have been successful?

The only sensible answer is that the incumbents were not as powerful as they seemed to be.

> You could also argue that making things free is good for consumers. You'd be right again, except in the case where the freebies are designed to kill off competition and stagnate the product category (Internet Explorer being a classic case where Microsoft bundled it, gave it away for free, then stopped improving it for years

And yet Internet Explorer was beaten by Firefox and Chrome. So clearly the market works just fine, otherwise we'd still be stuck with IE.

> We have 50 years of precedents and the people at the DOJ know their history. I suspect it's just a matter of political winds and timing before Alphabet has to follow in IBM and Microsoft's footsteps.

Yeah, they will. They will be beaten by new companies that they, and the government, did not see coming. That is my point.

> If IBM was really a vertically-integrated, predatory giant, how could Microsoft have been successful?

> If Microsoft was a vertically integrated, predatory giant, how could Google have been successful?

> The only sensible answer is that the incumbents were not as powerful as they seemed to be.

Like the parent said IBM was under legal scrutiny for over a decade and Microsoft was for around 8 years.

They deliberately became less predatory to avoid the wrath of the US government.

How did you miss his point about legal scrutiny? Or did you just willfully ignore it because it doesn't fit into your world view?

Counter-counter point: Apple would probably not exist without an investment by Microsoft essentially forced by the US government. And would Google have ever emerged as a dominant player if Microsoft were free to compete with them by restricting access to their website at the operating system level?

> would Google have ever emerged as a dominant player if Microsoft were free to compete with them by restricting access to their website at the operating system level?

Yes, the scenario you seem to be imagining is logically impossible.

Microsoft can't just block traffic to random URLs before they emerge as a dominant player somewhere. The course of action only makes any sense if Google has already achieved dominance.

Could Microsoft shake a website's existing dominance by blocking web traffic to it at the OS level? Of course not.

Why couldn't Microsoft block URLs before they emerge as a dominant player?

All Microsoft would need to do is keep an eye out for potential competition and start blocking them. More than that, if Microsoft was going to that sort of extreme, they could start tracking URLs that their users go to. Anything that starts to get popular would be investigated and blocked if it was a threat.

Windows used to have a little search box in the taskbar. All they needed back then was a better bing.

Windows still has a little search box in the task bar. Clicking "hide" is one of the many steps I take on every PC I install 10 on.

An alternate view of the Microsoft antitrust case, suggesting that government action was necessary, and did have a positive effect:

"Some limitations were placed on Microsoft’s behavior, such as a requirement that it share certain programming information with third-party companies. The appropriateness of that remedy is still debated. But what we do know is that the remedy pushed Microsoft to act with more caution, creating an essential opening for a new generation of firms.

It might seem like a cruel irony that the immediate beneficiaries of the Microsoft antitrust case — namely, Google, Facebook and Amazon — have now become behemoths themselves." [1]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/opinion/microsoft-antitru...

You like the price/performance improvements we've seen from Intel in the last couple of years thanks to competition from Ryzen? Thank the govt for that. If there weren't action taken, AMD would have died long ago due to a bunch of things like anti-competitive supplier agreements with PC makers, benchmark cooking, compiler 'enhancements' etc. (see the five years prior to Ryzen to get a small taste of what that future looked like)

You like Google search and other Internet sites and services? Had the government not intervened, Microsoft would likely have continued down it's preferred path of using Windows and Internet Explorer as a choke point. This would have prevented companies like Google from ever getting traction to the point where they had the revenue to do anything remotely like what we've seen in the last 10 years. Microsoft would likely have found a way to box Amazon in and extract a fee from them on Windows (i.e. think what Apple does re: getting a cut of sales in its app store, only for all retail sales on Windows machines) and maybe they never would have gotten to a size/scale where they could have gone on to do things like AWS etc. There would have likely been 'problems' with the iPod that people wouldn't have experienced with the Zune, and forget about Microsoft ever letting something like BootCamp happen... Apple's fate would have likely been very different. (and without the success of the iPod it's unlikely that the iPhone/iPad ever would have happened or if they did Microsoft would have likewise found a way to contain it assuming they hadn't already killed/acquired Apple to get them out of the way.)

There's a very good reason why you didn't see companies even remotely like FAANG succeeding in the 90's: Intel and Microsoft didn't allow the companies around then to thrive if they became a threat. You can say 'well, all these new companies are on the Web and that's how they succeeded.' The problem is, the Web requires a computer of some sort to connect to it. In the late 90's, Wintel controlled 95% of them or so. I suspect 10 years from now, the next generation will either be saying 'see, there was no need for government action... look at all the competitors those old FAANG companies we have today' or 'no one is able to compete with these FAANG companies... why won't the government do something?'

Well, I think government action against Microsoft was necessary as the next 10-15 years was more dominance. I also think anti-trust investigations are long overdue against Google and perhaps Facebook.

It took Google rising to the point of being worthy of an anti-trust investigation for competition to "work" against Microsoft. Of course Microsoft made some big mistakes along the way too, but they remain monopolistic and abusive in their choices for Windows.

Hardly indicative that a belief that they are over-dominant was wrong in the 90s, or is wrong now.

Yet ms dominance was beaten only by linux and firefox...open source efforts, not competing companies, and those cracks allowed for google and others to come in.

Prior to that you had crap like "ie6 will be the last ie, and we dont see a need for tabs in the browser".

Microsoft dominance in browsers was beaten by other large corporations throwing resources at open source.

Mozilla was set up by Netscape. It provided Mozilla a drastic headstart over having to do everything from scratch. Firefox only exists due to the Netscape Corporation. It directly came out of the Mozilla Suite, which was originated by Netscape.

Webkit was started within and supported by Apple, and then Google. Derived from KHTML of course, it non-the-less had a vast corporate push.

Chrome became so successful on the desktop because Google promoted it endlessly on the Google search page among other places (and they still do). It wasn't just open source that beat Microsoft there, it was Google's massive reach. Almost nobody is using Konqueror.

The drastic improvement in JavaScript over the last decade was sparked by Google's efforts on V8, which forced everybody else to play catch-up. JavaScript itself of course also came from Netscape.

> Microsoft dominance in browsers was beaten by other large corporations throwing resources at open source.

I don't agree with your timing. My memories of the time were

* Browser wars I - Netscape loses, MS rests on its laurels while Netscape releases source code * Years pass * Mozilla has been able to build up the Netscape base into a viable product and starts to really make in-roads against MS * Big corps see success and fund it to avoid MS lock-in * Years pass * Chrome comes along

Sure, there was some initial investment in Mozilla, but I sincerely doubt success occurred without relying on a vast number of unfunded volunteer hours. Chrome is cool, but likewise it built on that open source base that you dismiss so lightly.

If market success relies on people doing free work, and the dominance is in place for years because no competitor can compete in that market until the unpaid labor can catch up, then the market isn't what's responsible for the success.

Nobody thinks linux has beaten windows

At the time in question, NT Server was a real threat. Commercial unixes were expensive to get and worse to maintain. NT Server was (by most accounts) TERRIBLE, yet as servers became more mainstream, NT Server (and IIS) became more common because alternatives weren't considered viable. Heck, even Linux success was often contrary to the expectations from above. Plenty of articles in the 90s covered how techies would install Linux in secret because had it been known they'd have been told to use NT.

Meanwhile, on the desktop Microsoft literally invested in Apple to prop up the idea that they had competition. Had Microsoft not done so, and they likely would not have had they not been afraid of antiitrust concerns, would Apple have survived to become the behemoth it is today? Does anyone think that NeXtStep, however nice their work, would have been even a speed bump to MS?

By sheer install base, it certainly has. Compare Linux servers + android and windows definately loses. Android at 2.7B vs windows at 1.4b (1)

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_sys...

It's funny how Android is considered to be Linux when comparing marketshare, but talk about malware stats, and suddenly Android is not Linux.

It's a poor implementation of Linux that's for sure, but Linux nonetheless.

Some like to call it Android/Linux to distinguish it from GNU/Linux.

that doesnt mean it has 'beaten windows', i.e. people did not uninstall windows to replace it with desktop linux. Windows was never in android phones, and not too deeply into servers.

I have my doubts we will ever see a monopoly broken up again. Mainly I attribute that to the lobbying power of all monopolies. If Company A is getting investigated, it is in the interest of Companies B through Z to not have Company A broken up lest it gives the gov't the idea to come after them next.

Also, what's the point of the break up? Look at how AT&T was broken into the Baby Bells. After a number of years, ATT formed from merging all of the Baby Bells back into the same company again (minus the ampersand).

> and it worked by creating new technologies that nobody expected.

Where "new technologies nobody expected" means "built new user-friendly products on top of a technology that had been in development for 30 years, funded by the government." First past the post onto the results of a commercialized ARPA research program, and making $10+ million every hour as result.

It's not clear what the next government-incubated platform for innovation will be.

Practically, nobody in tech cares that the government did the early heavy lifting for - pretty much - every technology we're using today.

True but then aquihire and aquisition were not that prevalent in the 90s.

The problem is not really even the lack of competitors so to say but mainly the fact that little startups that look like they might be good fits for the business model of big cooperations are acquired right off the bat.

> The problem is not really even the lack of competitors so to say but mainly the fact that little startups that look like they might be good fits for the business model of big cooperations are acquired right off the bat.

What negative effects does that have?

The FAANGs buy a competing company and then just kill it off.

Good for the founders and investors, not so good for end users.

This reduces innovation and competition in markets. We should be thinking about preventing massive companies like Google or Facebook from buying anything and everything that looks interesting.

I worked for a direct report of Steve Jobs and later a direct report of Bill Gates. They routinely met in secret to divide up the market and agreed kill each others competitors - as well as divide up the market so they could all get rich. (Ever wonder why Apple had schools or why Apple & Windows networking was always broken or why only the UNIX vendors had working networking? Those were all by agreement, so that each of them could get insanely rich.) So monopoly is real, though it is really what is sometimes called "effective monopoly", which is created by product differentiation and much harder to detect. So forgive me if I consider people who believe in "free market" to be fools. They just haven't seen the things I've seen.

Are you working on a tell-all, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man style? Because extraordinary claims require extraordinary dirt that should at least make for a good read

Is alleging collusion actually an extraordinary claim? It is a very inexpensive and hard to punish play that produces a ton of value. We literally already CAUGHT these people doing the same in respect of developer salaries and yet you're still incredulous.

The people who are caught and litigated against with respect to anti-competitive agreements almost exclusively look like fraud 101 rank amateurs. Do you think only stupid people try to take the free money off the table?

You know, extraordinary claims don't require proof or elaboration. This isn't a court of law. I'm sharing my experiences on a public board. The insistence on legal-style proof seems to be a personality-trait of some people. I worked there. I saw things. If some people can accept an unconfirmed datapoint, and add that to their store of knowledge, then they will be able to make better judgments than if they insist on legal-style proof.

No, I'm not trying to be legalistic. I'm saying that being in such an interesting position not once but twice must carry some juicy stories, and the world yearns for more gossip about the tech robber barons who created our modern world. Please, for the sake of posterity, write a future NYT bestseller dishing the digital dirt.

To be fair, there are many people nowadays that would argue that Microsoft is at or reaching monopoly-levels of dominance. Linux might as well not exist outside of software fields and developers. We see them exert that control every now and then too (such as their rampant ads and attempts to control browsers).

Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple all tend to control different but large spheres of the internet. In those spheres they exert almost ironclad control over everything and we see them slowly creep more and more into our personal lives or gathering our personal data.

I'm not sure how to say competition really worked in this case because we've seen new fields pop up followed by complete dominance by one company over that field.

> To be fair, there are many people nowadays that would argue that Microsoft is at or reaching monopoly-levels of dominance.

I can't think of anyone who would say that who does not work at Microsoft and/or is drunk.

> Once you reach a certain size you can continue to squash competition through sheer momentum.

While this may be true, the main reason people use Google more than DDG is that it's a better search engine. It's not just about mindshare.

... And it's a better search because it has two decades worth of mindshare, and the revenue and data that came with it.

VCs would throw money at a new search engine if they thought it could be 10x better than Google, but so far no one is trying to run with an idea like that. Google doesn't have to be the best after it owned the market, just not lag so far behind that it's significantly worse. They keep improving to keep the barriers to entry high in search.

Actually, the problem with many of these markets is the winner takes all nature of them. Google is significantly better at obscure searches as compared to Bing or others. A large part of the reason is that Google gets a lot more rare search terms being the default, and it improves by learning on which links do users click on and what following searches do users do to fine-tune their search. A less frequently used search engine misses out on this data and consequently doesn't improve.

What does 10x better than Google even look like? The only thing I can think of is really good NLP and semantic searches, but Google has data and AI talent that's impossible for a startup to compete with there so it's a dead end.

Not really. The real problem with a search engine is surfacing to much "content farm" at the top.

Once you are able to weed out all these content farms it is relatively easy to bring the right answer within the first 10/20 links, that is, on the first results page.

It is effectively hard if you want to do all that with instant results about current events, but for 99% of my searches, a 1 month old answer is perfectly fine. For the weather, I go anyway on a dedicated weather website.

> What does 10x better than Google even look like?

Well that's easy - just relevant results, no ads being stuffed down my throat, no sponsored links, fake pages mimicking official ones, just relevant info. Easily 10x better for me.

You know, how google used to look like in the beginning.

So, DuckDuckGo with Pagerank?

DDG before they started ignoring what you searched for.

edit: I'm getting downvoted, but it doesn't make it less true.

Without quoting, some terms (not stop words) get silently dropped (even Google tells you when they drop terms).

example: workbox wizard doesn't work

None of the results contain workbox anywhere.

And recently they started "optimizing" and correcting terms in quotes.

example: google "amp" modal

I quoted "amp" because otherwise it only searches for map. Yet most results are still for "map".

I really liked DDG, but they seem as intent as google in making their services worse for me, so I dropped them.

> None of the results contain workbox anywhere.

Actually, by now some do. Further down the list. Doesn't really make it better.

Not really. It was better than everything else when it first launched.

Was it better when it first launched than DuckDuckGo is now?

That's reductive and backwards.

I've been using DGG and find myself switching to Google for maps, images, news, and sports scores and schedules—Google has really built out over the years.

> maps, images, news, and sports scores and schedules

DDG provides all or most of those things, and they work well in IMHO.

I've lately seen myself using the !g flag for a lot of my searches because it seems inevitable when DDG results don't match up.

> I've lately seen myself using the !g flag for a lot of my searches because it seems inevitable when DDG results don't match up.

DDG and Verbatim-mode Google searches are pretty equivalent, in my experience. Google seems better because it makes the assumption that what you "really" want is what everyone else wanted, which is annoying when it's actually getting it wrong.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12045959

Huh, surprisingly for me it was the opposite. I tried to switch to DDG 4,3,2 years ago, eventually coming back to Google due to the need to use !g very often. But in the last year or so it became a non-issue, so I finally switched.

Same with me - I use DDG for my main search engine for the last year or so, and do a g! search about a dozen times per month since.

> Once you reach a certain size you can continue to squash competition through sheer momentum.

Not momentum. FB and Google lost their momentum a long time ago. What they have is power and market share. What google, facebook, etc are doing is no more different than what standard oil did in the late 1800s. Get big enough so that any other competitors has to either sell out or die out from underselling or external pressure ( manipulated railroad shipping prices, etc ).

Even if you have a good idea to compete with google or facebook, you aren't going to be able to get funding. Banks and VC aren't going to help you since many banks and VC are invested in facebook. Why invest in you when there are better opportunities out there.

Say you had a great search engine, but in order to get anywhere, you need to get "defaulted" on chrome or firefox. Good luck with that. Google is never going to let you be the "out-of-the-box" default on chrome. And you aren't going to outbid google for default status on firefox.

Once someone reaches monopoly status in a particular sector, it's hard to challenge them since they control almost every aspect of the environment. You either have to wait for the environment to change or move into another field. Or you need government intervention vis-a-vis window/internet explorer antitrust case.

> The internet as a whole is probably one of the least regulated markets

> What stops smaller search engines from competing?

At the risk of sounding condescending - the IP protection legislation [1]. Please bear with me as I'm not about to make a value judgement here, merely point out the mechanics.

Right now Google holds a vast trove of data - indexed web content, users' search history and behavior, and algorithms to generate search results based on the aforementioned. No competitor may use that trove to improve their products or services unless Google gives them explicit permission by licensing. This is enforced by the government based on Copyright Clause and Berne Convention and other; the enforcement is pretty quick and can involve swift disconnection from the network, forfeiture of internet domains, etc.

I'm generally against blanket removal of IP protections.[2]

Having said that, consider a thought experiment: data being free as in free beer, and whomever manages to grab it, could use it. Both static data, and use of APIs. Be it copy of Google's indexes and algorithms, or perusing results of direct queries from Google to further their own search results. Employees free to exfiltrate data and code and start up competitors to Google. This would give many a competitor a leg up in the battle to catch up and perhaps overtake.

What one can do currently is either go DDG way, by improving incrementally on Bing and other contracted sources while remaining at the mercy of their whim, or do what Bing did - try to sneak a bit of the crown jewels here and there [3]. The later didn't do Microsoft much good.

Re-emphasizing, I'm not advocating abolition of IP regulation here, nor making value judgement; merely pointing out that there's regulation in place - and it gets acted upon swiftly and to pretty strong effects.

[1] just as well as the network effects, brand loyalty, access to VC, and other aspects discussed upthread

[2] I want the protections to run for meaningfully shorter periods of time

[3] https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/

In business-speak it's called "switching cost". Google aggressively pursued the entire tech stack: search -> browser -> OS (and in many different verticals) so that switching to another platform would be costly (in terms of time and convenience).

That's why they branch out into so many free areas like Email, maps, etc. to create an ecosystem that works efficiently with itself and not as efficiently with external services.

If only everybody was as enlightened as us, Vivaldi users. Too bad those illiterate masses don't know what's good for them.

> Once you reach a certain size you can continue to squash competition through sheer momentum.

How about someone building a better search engine? Google’s massive spending isn’t all about a better search engine; it’s about scaling that better search engine. Certainly the money used to fund Juicero or similar crap would be enough to create a really great search engine. Microsoft has that Bing thing and it just isn’t as good — despite having plenty of capital to really go after the problem if they wanted.

How many search startups have YC funded? How many people reading this are trying to build a better search engine? It feels like nobody is even trying. DDG allowing google searches makes no sense if they really want to win. It’s a cop out. Google, even in the early days didn’t allow people to search Yahoo through Google. It seems like a large part of DDG is simply a wrapper on Google. When Tesla started nobody thought they could beat the entrenched players. They aren’t exactly winning, but, at least in California, I see a ton of them on the road. Where is the “Tesla” of search?

A whole lot of handwringing, but it doesn’t seem like anyone is really trying. Apple’s new HQ is built pretty much on the ashes of HP. Building a better search is possible if there was anyone audacious enough to try.

Start small. Make it good and focused, then grow. Perhaps be the best search engine for people interested in flower arranging or whatever niche is interesting, get good at that. Start marketing to people interested in flowers. Build an audience, then add trees or tropical fish or whatever. Start selling contextual ads targeting that demographic but while respecting privacy (no tracking.) Rinse and repeat. Even borrow from the olden times and hand-curate results until you can figure out how to automate and improve quality. It’s completely possible but instead everyone simply laments how powerful Google is without doing a damned thing to innovate.

Their competition is not going to be ‘another search engine’, but ‘the thing that replaces search’. DeepMind had the potential to grow to something revolutionary, and they bought that

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