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Comment by wstrange | Hacker News Reader

The article specifically calls out competitors such as Yelp, TripAdvisor and Oracle. I don't think these are Google's customers or users.

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The problem here is that Google is actually a much better actor than their competitors.

Yelp is an outright extortionist: https://nypost.com/2014/10/13/restaurant-fights-yelps-allege...

And I don't think I need to go into detail here about just how awful a company Oracle is.

yes, I think you're probably right. And there are small business owners who'd love to eliminate Yelp or heavily regulate Yelp to make it behave quite differently. Oracle has a pretty mediocre product and a really old school, back-room style of doing sales, but at least there are some reasonable competitive alternatives (some are even free).

but, the call, from some corners of the national political scene, to focus on breaking up Google strongly suggests that Google is a much, much bigger problem than Yelp or Oracle. even a little bit of problematic, biased, anticompetitive or evil behavior by Google has a giant impact.

Google is a juggernaut to be sure, but I just don't see that it's behaving all that badly towards consumers, compared to their competition (which they do have). Oracle, to me, is a much more evil company, and very clearly screws over their own customers, plus there was that whole evil thing they did with trying to copyright the Java API. I just don't see Google trying to shut down competitors like that, or treating customers horribly. They could do a better job with customer service (lots of horror stories about people not being able to get errors fixed in Google Maps for a long time). But as I showed in that article, Yelp was outright extorting restaurant owners, and nothing is done about it. Google Maps has their own reviews, and I've never heard of such blatantly evil behavior there.

Also, it's hard to see how breaking them up would even work. Many of their products are free, and only available because of their money-making ad business. I guess you could make them divest YouTube; that's self-supporting with its own ads, and doesn't really need to be integrated with the rest of their offerings. But things like Google Photos wouldn't survive on their own.

>I don't think these are Google's customers or users.

Think about how both yelp and TripAdvisor both built out their websites to comply with Google SEO rules (for organic search) and used Google AdWords (to pay for keyword ads to drive traffic and convert sales).

Google used their market dominance to learn everything about these markets and created competitors to both yelp and TripAdvisor. Google’s spin off companies then bid up the same adword keywords (so where yelp and TripAdvisor May have paid $1/click now google is bidding them up to $2 and these businesses can either pay or lose out to these new google businesses).

Google shouldn’t be able to use their market position to enter new markets in order to drive up costs to their existing ad customers and ultimately the end users.

Yelp got really butthurt when google started de-ranking first page result spammers (yelp, about.com and other trash) because this effectively zombified their whole business. And now their ceo is on a wild goose chase to stick it to them.

when Yelp, Oracle and News Corp. are asking for something, you can bet that "something" is either "very bad" or leads to "very bad" things.

In which of Google's markets does Oracle compete?

Cloud

Java.

Oracle and Google are currently what may be the biggest tech-related legal battle of the decade. It is up to the supreme court now. To put it simply, Oracle claims that Google hijacked Java for its Android ecosystem.

There may be some other areas where they compete, particularly when it comes to cloud services, but I think Java is the big one.

But Google switched to OpenJDK a while ago, and since that has become the reference Java implementation, how could Java be monetized nowadays for mobile devices?

Weren't they in fact forked Java the platform? AFAIK you were not allowed to create your incompatible Java version, Microsoft tried it withe their Embrace Extend Extinguish tactics and lost in the courts.

What is weird in the Oracle vs Google is that they are debating copyright over the APIs and that for me seems unrelated.

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