That's plain ridiculous. I'm not opposed to breaking up oligopolies, but calling for the government to fix this particular issue is like asking to be put under legal guardianship.
DDG, Startpage and such, on the current instantiation, they are proxies to someone else search-backend. Does it serve for you (or anyone) to avoid using Google (directly)? Yes, of course, and that's actually great. Do they fix the underlying problem? No. Not unless a) they are building an independent/autonomous backend, and b) they get so much money that they can challenge Google on the user acquisition.
Why is that a problem? Wouldn't decreased profitability be the sign of increased competition?
For instance, Google pays Apple 9 billion/year to be the default search engine (incredible but True). On the account of 20-30% to user acquisition that means that Apple users can be monetized by Google at around 30B/year (9B/0.30). Google is extremely good at monetizing people, right, a competitor might not be as efficient, let's say half. That gives you 15B addressable revenue.
Now the question. Would you pay Apple 10B to gain, at best, 15B? No one that crazy has this kind of money :-) On top of that, who prevents Google to pay 16B next year?
30% APY Seems like a good deal to me!
EDIT: more seriously, you don't start with iPhone. You start outbidding Google on the margins where your budget constraint less a factor.
> On top of that, who prevents Google to pay 16B next year?
Profit margins. Google's budget is not unlimited, after all.
Breaking up Google wouldn't fix that, and we cannot take all decisions away from users based on the argument that users are somehow manipulated. This is a blanket excuse for taking away any and all freedoms and responsibilities from everybody.
If we regulate Google, it has to be to guarantee a level playing field and to prevent the abuse of a dominant market position. We shouldn't regulate to force certain usability preferences upon users.
They use billions each year to acquire users, even though they are a dominant market share. Why would they do it? They have the users already, and a great product by the way. Reality, however, is that are no really acquiring the users... they are just increasing the price so that no-one else can acquire them and start a "real" competitor.
Wouldn't that (ironically) kill the largest revenue source for Mozilla ?
The market would become competitive again, so if Google 1 started showing less ads than Google 2, people would switch. Right now I'm not switching to Duck for reasons that originate from the fact that Google is a monopoly.
And what are those reasons?
- I'm used to Google's UI (yes, Duck's is similar but I'm sensitive even to subtle changes).
- I would have to change my default search provider on all browsers I use.
- I would have to take some time to verify that Duck is as good as Google.
2. Search quality and features.
- After a quick comparison, Google seems slightly better at search. Another factor is that even if both seemed similar, switching to Duck would give me anxiety that I'm using the worse product because the prior probability that Google is better is high.
- Google has various little features that Duck doesn't, for example search for "pomegranate nutrition" or "trump age".
Google can profitably invest much more into their product than Duck, because they have much more users.
Google's UI also changes from time to time. When that happens next time, use that opportunity to switch since you have to adjust to change anyway.
> I would have to take some time to verify that Duck is as good as Google.
If you start using Duck, and you come across a search where it doesn't give you what you're looking for, just append "!g" to the query to get redirected back to Google. That made switching rather pleasant for me, knowing that the "escape hatch" is only a few keypresses away.
> After a quick comparison, Google seems slightly better at search.
It seems to depend on the person. For technical searches, Duck is usually much better because they embed numerous sources as Instant Answers (Stack Overflow, MDN, GitHub, etc.)
> Google has various little features that Duck doesn't
As has Duck, see above.
Does this remain true for DuckDuckGo? I was under the impression that they used to be that way, but that they had switched over to using their own search backend some time ago.
ddg doesn't have date filtering search syntax like google has, for example "before:2018-12-31", they offer only a few date filtering options shown on a combo.
First, they do not hide that they aggregate. It's fanboys that tend to overextend DDG's capabilities, not them (at least for best of my knowledge).
And second, given the resources they have, they are doing more than enough, and they do provide a great service. It might not solve the underlying problem of privacy, but at least it helps protecting the privacy of those people using it.
To sum up, I do not think it's fair to bash DDG for aggregating.
I'm serious, they advertise for other people, but nobody advertises for you to use Google.
Who exactly is Google paying for preferential treatment regarding search? Microsoft's default browser uses Bing, Apple's uses Yahoo. Android? Android is made by Google, and most phone manufacturers still swap out the default browser for something using Yahoo.
Google spends virtually no money on user acquisition. Everybody uses them because they have a track record of being trust worthy with email and providing the best search results and tools like maps and even free tools for finding the best flights all for free.
Also, an anti-trust lawsuit would require that they charge their users. Having 90% of a market that doesn't charge its users doesn't make them an oligopoly, it makes them a non-profit.
As a site owner you have the problem that people searching for you are using Google and your site will only come up below adds for your competitor. Even when searching for your company name. Thus unless you pay a "Google Tax" (paying for ads) many people won't find you. In some cases even Google themselves will add features to compete with your service (flight booking is a relatively recent example)
If splitting up will solve that is questionable to me, though. The search has to be financed and unless we make it some base service paid by tax or similar they need a revenue service and ads is the only which seems to be working.
From a "civil rights" perspective to me it is also clear that Google has too much influence and power. But still fail to see a good way to regulate that.
So let's not call for a breakup to fix something a breakup can't fix and for reasons that are so obiously bad that they can be used to discredit more serious criticism of Google's dominance.
Really? Breaking up the search unit and the ads unit into separate companies would solve that problem, no?
An option might be that the search provider can license the search results to different companies putting their individual ads on topmofnthe results. Then different sites could compete for the the best dispaly and usability.
Similar to the way elictricity grids are split from providers or railway tracks are split from train operators in many European countries.
Issue of course is that with electrical grids and rail networks are a "solved" issue with little innovation. In the search market there is still lots of room for improvement and constant need to adapt to spamers.
I think the common suggestion is that they're not allowed to continue to own the content providers like maps or YouTube or shopping.
Other suggestions include stopping them competing with other aggregators like hotel ratings (TripAdvisor, etc.), shopping, flight finders, review services (yelp, etc.).
The 2nd one is a bit trickier because in some ways, it's valuable to users, but extremely easy for Google to essentially become the landlord of the internet and easily engage in extreme rent seeking behaviour.
Now, one issue here is that Google the search engine cannot be "just split". The least good, but easy way, is probably to nationalize it (since it's akin to basic infrastructure at this point.) A better, but harder way, is to figure out how it can be decentralized...
I’m sure there would be just as much consternation from Democrats if the situation was reversed.
It also encourages giving “both sides” equal weight whether they deserve it or not.
The whole point of Google is to be a centralized entry to the decentralized Web.
Where is the violence in Google's behavior ? They offer a private service, and their good spaces are of high values that companies are ready to pay for to maintain their own market dominance.
If we should break up Google, then we should also breakup Basecamp (company behind the original author's tweet)
Before: few people find you
After: more people find you
Google is providing a "low" quality service but they do help. The before and after makes it clear. But it's easy to forget how things were and just complain.
After: less people find your competition when searching for you
The issue is that coupling search and ads violates the expectation of "First result = Best result". Especially when A direct 100% fit can be replaced by a competitor (or even a parasite (in legal terms)) targeting your users.
If a company is ready to pay to be displayed first, then so be it
It is for you and I, but not for the average user. My grandpa clicks on sponsorized links because they are at the top, no matter the presence of the word "ads" or "sponsored".
It would be a lot clearer not to have ads at the top but elsewhere, so that the “best” result is always at the top.
Whereas duck duck go proves that a search engine can operate successfully as a startup.
A search index is not simply a function from search string to results. Treating it as such would oversimplify the potential value or future innovation of a search engine. A search index includes the data and metadata of all the pages indexed, plus derived data in various forms ranging from data structures to trained neural networks, plus sufficiently fast access to the data to make it possible to generate new such data structures or train new networks. And all that while continuing to index new pages as fast as possible.
A search index used internally by one company can change formats and technologies as long as the products using it have updated accordingly, and can provide many different facets of information. A search index used by multiple entities (likely competing entities) can't easily co-evolve with the search engines using it, can't easily change formats or technologies, can't easily discard older ones (and thus needs far more resources if it innovates), and has a much more difficult time providing previously unanticipated information.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see a good way to support innovation on the scale of a production search index without requiring billion-dollar infrastructure, but separating the search index from a search engine would substantially increase the complexity and expense of both, and seems quite likely to curtail innovation.
That's because it's being done in an extremely wasteful way that isn't really necessary. Proper regulation could enforce a better interface between websites and search engines than stupidly and repeatedly crawling bloated web pages and throwing away almost all their contents. Google has used its computing resources to stay ahead in this game and has no motivation to fix this waste of time and energy. All they've done lately is to suggest using sitemaps for dynamic web sites so their crawlers don't get stuck there forever.
Are you seriously saying a company worth north of $300 BILLION needs ads on their search engine to generate revenue?
It obviously won't; splitting search from ads as businesses wouldn't change that people aren't willing to pay for search and the way that free search, like most other free online services, is funded is ads. It just means that the vendor you pay for ads won't be the search engine provider directly but the ad network the search engine provider relies on, just as is the case for many other online services.
For instance, Josh Doody, the author of “Fearless Negotiation”, has been interviewed on six or seven podcasts that I follow.
How many companies have gotten popular by advertising on podcasts? If your entire business model is based on search results, you are bound to be disappointed. You are just one algorithm change from being made irrelevant.
Edited for qualification.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/27/534524024...
Nothing is stopping them. But they wouldn't have the monopoly on ads to cover them if their results are of bad quality.
I'm not seeing how anything would change. Google search and whatever other google branches will continue working together so it'll essentially be the same thing but with a different legal structure to appease everyone.
I mostly avoid it, but that's because I mostly avoid any Google service. All of them are bundled and I don't want some AI misstep to lock me out of the few of their services I care about. At this point some forced unbundling would bring a huge trust benefit to Google.
But anyway, it is very clear that the bundling of Google's monopolies on ads and search are a huge barrier to innovation and competition on both of those.
No one forces you to stay on Android.
1: because it replaced OSM…
And how would splitting off AdWords be good for the consumer? Do you like paying for your search engine, Gmail, maps, and more?
These services could still all be free because they could sell their ad space to AdWords. What it would mean though is that other email / maps / video services would be able to compete, as would other ad networks.
You would also be better off as a business to build your brand outside of YouTube even if you did use it for hosting.
There would be no need for that in principle, AdWords could buy personal information from google.
I’m guessing that’s the point at which we pivot back into ‘Oh noes, Google closes every unprofitable service’
Google providing these services is contingent on them being linked together, both for Google and for the user.
Honestly, the turn away from making money from the service itself vs using it as a front for some other, more abstract ploy is where tech has gone wrong in the past couple decades.
They charge phone companies billions of dollars for the use of Maps. That's why Apple made their own version. It's not exactly a cash cow, but they're not providing it for free either.
Can you elaborate on this? Are you talking about their javascript APIs[1], or for the right to preload the app on their subcribers' phones?
It has taken Apple billions of dollars and over five years to get anywhere close, Nokia built an actually pretty reasonable Mapping solution and had to more or less give up the ghost due to the expense.
Validating that the routes on the map actually exists and continue to exist more or less requires access to mobility data from every street, walkway, nook and cranny on the planet.
Any mapping solution able to achieve the requisite scale will run into exactly the same issues with data centralization. Who exactly do you see entering the market?
Google doesn't just have a perceived monopoly. Or perhaps monopoly isn't the right word, but I also can't think of a better one. It is about its pervasiveness and presence on too many markets at once, coupled with availability of too much data.
None of those five companies you vaguely hint at might themselves be a better basket on their own but they are at least five additional baskets. Removing a service from the most pervasive company is a win in itself, IMO.
It's precisely the pervasiveness and availability of the data that drives the quality of the mapping service. I'm curious as to how you think you can have one without the other.
Smartphone OS and location reporting feeds location data in which improves and validates the maps
Fact that other services are tied to the maps drives usage of the Maps themselves, increasing their quality further
Other companies, like Nokia, have tried to create a business from Maps without the install base
Apple has the install base and after five years billions of dollars is approaching a usable product
Wouldn't say Nokia's approach was a complete failure, but to pretend the quality is anywhere similar is delusional
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_(company)#/media/File:HER...
Certainly you aren't going to be able to create a decent Maps service without centralizing and processing an enormous amount of data
Do you think it would be impossible to have well-made maps without Google? Do you think Google's wide and heterogeneous basket of unrelated products and services is a necessary requirement to produce well-made maps, such that no company without it couldn't hope of achieving it?
For instance, would the quality of Google Maps be appreciably decreased if Gmail was moved to another company? My position is that no, it would not, so that would already be a win. I think a lot of services could be shaved off in this way without loss of map quality.
On the other hand, if Google's map product is superior to everything else by such a large margin, then certainly it is a viable product in itself because people still need a high-quality map. People would still install this app on their phones, providing opportunity for map validation. Importantly, people could then be asked whether they want to share this data to improve the service, which many would do, I'm sure.
> Certainly you aren't going to be able to create a decent Maps service without centralizing and processing an enormous amount of data
This also seems suspicious if we take it to mean user data, acquired incidentally, from users using other, unrelated services. We already know Google uses streetcars for mapping and in this case, it is a deliberate mapping effort and therefore the process by which it is converted to maps is easy to understand.
But how are we imagining incidentally collected user data (from usage of other services) to improve map quality? Yes, smartphone OS location validates it, in the sense that you may notice something is wrong if people start walking through buildings on your map.
It's hard for me to imagine that there is a hard requirement for the map company to be the smartphone OS company before this can happen. I mean, even if the map was produced by some other company, it would still get used by smartphone owners, providing the same opportunity. If this map was good, it would then get used by other services as well, achieving the same feedback loop you mention.
By the way, I use OpenStreetMaps on my phone and its error rate is about as high as Google Maps on the places I've tried it on. I can't help but how much better it would be if it actually had a lot of money behind it.
(Again, I'm not talking about other issues with Google's market dominance such as those related to AdWords from the perspective of ad buyers or Android licensing conditions)
But calling for government action just because people can't be bothered to use a different search engine that is just a click away discredits all valid criticism of Google's dominant market position.
On what? I genuinely don't see what people think google has a "monopoly" on. It's definitely the biggest player in search and ads, but it's nowhere near the only company. I wouldn't even call them "overly dominant"
As a litmus test I might say that "overly dominant" means that a slightly-above-average member of the audience couldn't name another option, and I don't really think any of these would hold up.
> Also Android, going by market share rather than worth.
Android vs iOS are actually surprisingly close, with iOS winning in the US <https://deviceatlas.com/blog/android-v-ios-market-share#us> (admittedly this is measured through UA sniffing and fingerprinting on websites, but I think the point stands)
If you go with that, OpenStreetMap/iOS Maps and Bing "still exist and are happily chugging along" too ?
In the US maybe, but worldwide Android has 87% market share !
As a reminder, "monopoly" is the ability of being able to dictate your terms to the market - when a company (or cartel) has such a power, the market isn't free anymore.
your alternative suggestion is flawed. ddg shows ads too. actually it shows the same number of ads and roughly in the same manner as google did when it was the same size as ddg today.
the real problem is ad-driven business model which makes all search engines (google, ddg, startpage) advertising companies first. you are what you sell.
Without saying whether or not I think they should be "broken up", there's much more to consider than their search engine.
Maybe they have other different concerns that they think will best be resolved by breaking them up?
For god’s sake, it’s literally their business. It’s not spamming anymore than NBC showing ads during The Voice is spamming. You get something for no out of pocket cost and in exchange you are going to be shown ads.
When I began using it DDG had bad results but results are much closer to google's results today.
Oligopolies like this exist because there is no free market. Government laws on things like intellectual property, profit taxes and most importantly, the limited liability of corporations are the necessary breading ground for organization into giants.
In a pre-corporate "Adam Smith" style free market Google could not exist. In a sense, these giants are the opposite of a free market as every movement of value within large corporations is governed by hierarchical decision making with an almost military scheme.
From this perspective, it isn't all that strange for governments to look into rules and regulations that can tame the beasts that they have created with their rules and regulations.
These type of situations are typically bad for consumers, and there is very much a role for the government to steer the status quo away from this and support Google’s competitors. Whether that’s done by breaking up Google, taxing them more heavily, or something else is up for discussion.
But simply telling people “just use DDG!” and considering that a viable solution to the problem is insufficient.
The only question is how. Maybe Google should be forced to limit the amount of ads they are showing.
Unfortunately it's only a temporary solution.
For one maintaining your own web crawler and index is expensive, DDG is outsourcing that to Bing. They use other sources too, but if Bing shuts down their API tomorrow, DDG will probably die.
DDG's revenue also comes from ads. They might claim that they want to do right by users, but when serving ads the incentive is to optimize those ads to make more money.
Also DDG's work isn't AFAIK open source. But it probably wouldn't help anyway, it's not like you could install a search engine on your own VPS.
I don't think breaking Google is the answer either.
What the US government should do is to introduce privacy laws that disallows user profiling for the purpose of serving ads. The GDPR in the EU is a step in the right direction. The US government should also demand for those ads to be more clearly marked as being ads via color clues.
If users choose Google today, it's either because of inertia or because they find that Google's organic search results are worth sifting through a page of ads.
This is unlike other aspects like privacy where users may not fully understand the consequences of their actions.
I find this a red herring. Ads have never been a problem, the ecosystem around them is the problem.
> What the US government should do is to introduce privacy laws that disallows user profiling for the purpose of serving ads. The GDPR in the EU is a step in the right direction.
This is overly specific; user profiling is also used in recommendations and to develop aggressive and optimized marketing strategies. One of the problem of "Big Tech surveillance" in not what they know about you, but that they know so much about everyone that they can model your behavior/response with little information. (which for example is what happened with Cambridge Analytica)
> The US government should also demand for those ads to be more clearly marked as being ads via color clues.
This feel a lot like micromanaging.
YouTube, Gmail, Drive, Android, G Suite ...
Facebook should be forced to sell Instagram.
Android - it came out in the Oracle case that Android has only made Google about $24 billion in profit from the time of its inception until the beginning of the trial. They have given Apple more money to be the default search engine on iOS than they have made on Android.
Gmail - mail hosts are a dime a dozen. It’s a feature not a product.
Google drive - again a feature not a product. DropBox has lost money since it’s inception and MS gives away 6TB of storage with Office365 ($100/year)
GSuite - not exactly a “monopoly” it’s a distant second to Microsoft.
Office software with the limited capabilities of GSuite is a commodity. Apple gives iWorks away.
Should Apple have been forced to keep selling iPods knowing that the phone would eventually kill their business? Should Microsoft and Google not been allowed to offer cloud services?
Remember Microsoft once had an antitrust brought against it for shipping IE with their OS. Imagine now, shipping a phone to millions, with your browser that defaults every text input to a search string directly into your ad network.
I think to get anywhere, we have to avoid rather than seek these. Digital monopolies are not telecoms or railroads. Policy by analogy is a bad idea.
DHH makes two kinda unrelated claims/observations. One is that Google is spamming, and that this is a sign of monopoly. Like you, I think this is a pretty weak case.
Second, is "pay-to-play." If Basecamp don't buy ads, basecamp's competition will outrank them in search results. Users search "dominos." Google suggests "pizza hut" unless dominos pay. A lot of "advertisers" running campaigns just for their brand name.
This seems rotten, by the very weak, very unestablished conventions of the internet.
There are monopol-ish issues with big techcos across lots of areas (1) EU Case: adwords controls most search ads. Google's search competitors are on unequal terms there. (2) Free speech on social media. FB & Twitter's adhoc policies are becoming the de facto free speech laws. (3) biggest-dataset-wins feedback loops.
All these have sheer size at their core.
I'll qualify that. The system has created vast inequalities of wealth, monopolisation by corporate structures that are too large to fail and helped to create and sustain a climate emergency that will change the face of life on the planet irreparably.