Is Google really a monopoly? Many people use Outlook, iPhones, Apple Maps, AWS, Bing, HERE maps etc...
I'm not particularly familiar with the infrastructure of the ad business, but my layman's view is that alternatives are slim outside of Google for search engine and the more general web and Facebook for specifically social media.
Antitrust prosecutions are heavily dependent upon shaping the "market" which supposedly is being monopolized.
There is no good argument for antitrust against the Apple App Store if the market is "all transactional marketplaces where software can be purchased", but there is a good argument if the market is narrowly defined as "all transactional marketplaces where software can be installed onto iOS mobile devices".
Look for similar shaping of the market by both sides (the prosecutor will attempt to narrow the market and the defendants will attempt to broaden the market).
Also worth noting that Amazon already chipping away at Google's market share dominance in online advertising[1]. By the time the DOJ's prosecution goes thru the courts, the market is likely to be significantly changed from where it was when AG Sessions (who started these investigations) started crafting an anti-tech-giants strategy.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/15/amazon-is-eating-into-google...
This is clearly the case though? The App Store doesn't sell, say, Windows software, and iOS devices refuse to run software from (for example) the Google Play store.
These numbers are really scary, if you care about fair competition and a just, balanced society.
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/544400/market-share-of-i... [3] https://beta.trimread.com/articles/16433 [4] https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-gaining-google-search-a...
Exactly. The Federal government speaks out of both sides of it's mouth. If monopolies fail to spur innovation as is suggested by many, then regulatory burdens such as the Jones Act do even more explicitly.
Increasingly? When wasn't that true? You have to go back to pre Civil War, where the economy was heavily geographically split due to movement/transport limitations, which mostly voids the discussion (it was very much a local and regional, agriculture-heavy economy, with limited manufacturing and a very limited consumer goods market as we know it today; not very comparable to anything that exists now). Once you get near to or beyond the Civil War and firmly into the industrial era, the combinations begin essentially immediately and they dominate their segments rapidly. Vanderbilt got so rich by aggressively creating monopolies in his day, in transport. It was far more brutal than anything you can imagine today, in all respects including the options/alternatives that consumers had. From US Steel in 1901 to the few giant railroads to Standard Oil to American Tobacco to the couple remaining giant auto companies (eg GM, Ford, Chrysler) that survived that industry's shakeout in the following decades. Further, you had a small group of industrialists and financiers that cross-controlled everything regardless (and they had few laws limiting their behavior), as with eg Rockefeller heavily dictating terms with the railroads to crush his competition.
Leap forward in time: Sears, PAN-AM, IBM, General Electric, General Motors, Ford, AT&T, US Steel, US Rubber, Bethlehem Steel, Armour & Co., Kodak, Polaroid, a very small number of giant media companies like CBS, and so on.
Yesterday was dominated entirely by massive corporations. It doesn't matter what decade you select. Whether it's 1910, 1950, 1980, or 2020. It wasn't better in the past.
Markets always do this consolidating naturally. Your only option to prevent that is to use the government to prevent or interrupt it.
Most people I've seen equate monopoly with "95% of people use", which really isn't a monopoly. As far as I'm aware, dominating a market is not the sole criteria of a monopoly (although I am aware it is a sign of successful one, correlation/causation).
For someone who doesn't follow this kind of thing, can anyone point to concrete examples of "no other company does this" monopoly or "actively stifling competition" anti-trust practices taken by google without just scoffing and saying its obvious?
For example, Google doesn't have a monopoly on search; I can use DuckDuckGo just fine (although patent trolling complicates this a bit). Google does, however, have a monopoly on search traffic; if Google delists your site, it has effectively disappeared from 90+% of peoples' (mis-)conception of the internet[1]. A government the purports to support a free market must[0] regulate the latter case.
0: in the sense that not doing so directly communicates that they do not in fact support a free market
1: and this could be true to a lesser degree even if it had only, say, 45% market share
Edit: there might also be regulations that should apply to de-facto infrastructure like search engines regardless of monopoly status, but those are, by specification, not based on monopoly status.
As much people talk about Google's monopoly, I've not seen anyone bring up this point, which is what I was talking about in my previous comment. And I would absolutely agree with you that this could represent an issue of abuse of your position in the market. Would the next step be to prove this abuse occurs? For instance, if I google "maps" I'll get google's maps first, for sure. But I'll also get apple's maps, bing's maps, open map, and mapquest on the first page.
"Majority blue" is in a majority of their employees vote Democrat? That's just what happens when you're headquartered in California, in a metro area, with a workforce that skews younger.
I don't think that Google is somehow pushing liberal objectives in a meaningful way.
if they were, i'm sure a careful examination of topics highlighted in google doodles i'm sure would illustrate this one way or another
But true or not, it is perceived that way by those who are aggrieved (social conservatives in the USA)... which is what your comment's parent was discussing.
I'm not disagreeing with your comment, but you aren't disagreeing with your parent comment either.
It doesn't matter if they're biasing search results or not, that's complicated anyways, highly visible culture war stuff is what his audience is primed for.
A study showed that Google News returned links to CNN vastly more often than links to Fox News, even though Fox News has triple the market share of CNN.
See also censoring of YouTube videos: https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-let-google-get-away-with-c...
> How else to explain why Google has restricted more than half of our 15 videos that are pro-Israel—even one by former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper?
Google may or may not be doing this intentionally; it may be some byproduct of the algorithm plus unconscious bias from left-leaning Googlers. But the result definitely pushes liberal objectives. Your typical Googler reviewing YouTube videos living somewhere like San Francisco simply isn’t equipped to figure out what is and isn’t within the mainstream of acceptability.
And, come on man. Seriously, every news network except Fox News for the past almost 3 years pushed the Russian collusion narrative and it's turning out to be almost the exact opposite. So, you really need to rethink what you view as quality news. I'm not saying that I think Fox News is the best quality, prefer Bloomberg to be honest.
Just because you don't agree with political ideology of a news network doesn't mean it's low quality.
[1] https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/category/news-and-me...
I mean, one possibility is that Google’s algorithms are causing the politics of web site visitors people in France to affect the search results of people in Kansas. That seems like an unintentional form of pressing liberal agendas.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/cord-cutting-accelerates-raisin...
> Barr is a longtime proponent of the unitary executive theory of nearly unfettered presidential authority over the executive branch of the U.S. government.
> Barr as attorney general in 1992 authored the report The Case for More Incarceration, where he argued for an increase in the United States incarceration rate
> Having criticized the Mueller investigation before taking office, Barr did not recuse himself from overseeing the investigation as attorney general. After receiving Mueller's report he issued a four-page letter to Congress, describing what he said were its principal conclusions, and adding his opinion that the evidence presented did not establish obstruction of justice by Trump. Special counsel Mueller privately responded that Barr's letter had misrepresented the report.
> Barr intervened in the criminal case against convicted Trump associate Roger Stone, recommending a lighter sentence for Stone than the career prosecutors who had worked on the case. In May 2020, the Justice Department under Barr announced the dropping of charges against ex-Trump adviser Michael Flynn despite an earlier guilty plea by Flynn, which he later filed to withdraw.
So yeah, he's a hatchet man for the president, through and through. This is just revenge for tech's left leaning donations and stance, at the bidding of Trump of course. Big tech has long been in the sights of conservatives and this is just another shot in what's been a growing conflict.
Likewise for your point that Barr endorses a theory a unitary executive. So do many people. What does that prove? It’s not a controversial idea. The very first sentence of Article II of the United States Constitution says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” It doesn’t even say something like “there shall be an executive branch and the President shall be in charge of it.” It vests the executive Power (capitalization in original) in a single person. Article I and Article III, by contrast, “vest” the legislative and judicial powers in institutions (Congress, and the Supreme Court). The choice of phrasing appears pretty deliberate. And notably absent from Article II is any mention of career bureaucrats who can exercise the executive Power" of the United States independently of the person in whom that Power is vested.
Yes. Barr was well known as a controversial politician even in those times. You can find numerous news reports affirming this. His entire political career is one giant walking controversy. While I agree that his words and opinions were more mainstream at the time, he was at the storm of more than a few scandals. Iran contra pardons are another obvious one.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/03/05/b...
> "{Are his actions} politically motivated? {Or} self-serving? I'm asking myself those same questions," said one key Justice Department official
> Much of what Barr has done since his confirmation seems to benefit the administration politically. He pleased conservatives by reversing policy and offering Justice Department help to states that want to get out from under court-ordered prison population caps.
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/19/opinion/essay-the-patsy-p...
Lots of stuff out there.
[1]https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-william-...
If Google wasn’t a majority “blue” company they would have been trust busted under Obama.
Certainly can't help them. However, I think that's a moot point if everyone can agree they are the most troublesome company in the "land of large companies". It seems like every few months I see outrage on HN over "Google increased pricing for $X service, but there aren't really any other options" situations.
Cable companies have taken billion in federal subsidies, lied about universal deployment and speeds, and unless there is local competition have taken customers to the cleaners, forced the purchase of bundled channel packages, charged rentals for modems they were not renting (I should know - I called in every month to have charge removed) etc.
I can think of a long list of other large / monopoly type companies that regular abuse consumers at far higher levels than google does.
Consumer spend on google is actually pretty small.
Google controls 91.89% of the search market [1]
G controls 68% of the browser market [2]
G's android is on 84% of phones operating systems [3]
G has 73% of the search advertising market [4]
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/544400/market-share-of-i.... [3] https://beta.trimread.com/articles/16433 [4] https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-gaining-google-search-a....
Breaking up a regional monopoly into smaller regional monopolies doesn't work (see baby Bells).
What would be better is requiring the owners of any last mile infrastructure to lease said infrastructure to any other interested operator at cost. This worked with DSL, but the mandate ended when we moved on to other technologies like cable and fiber that had no such requirements.
Instead, we now do the opposite. We give ISPs tax breaks and incentives and piles of cash to "build out the infrastructure" (read: we pay them to invest in their own business), because they threaten to not build it otherwise (read: they're threatening to deliberately decline to grow their business), and for the privilege of paying them to increase their customer and revenue base, we (get this) give them the exclusive right to be the only operator of any similar last mile infrastructure in that area.
How fucking stupid can we get?
We should not allow these agreements to happen, and we should retroactively void any that are currently in place.
Boeing has a serious lack of competition. Their only meaningful competitor is Airbus and that's a foreign company. They have no domestic competition at all, which is inherently problematic, especially for a critical industry like that.
I don't understand why United Airlines is on that list either. Airlines are a weird market because it's extremely capital intensive but also aggressively competitive, so they sort of alternate between all going bankrupt from relentless price competition and all colluding to raise prices enough that they don't all go bankrupt and then getting in trouble over it.
This isn't due to monopolistic behavior; the McDonnell Douglas company, the last big American competitor to Boeing, would probably have ceased to be a going concern had the merger not happened. Modern aircraft cost billions and billions of dollars to develop; Bombardier just threw in the towel and sold to Airbus, and Embraer almost did the same with Boeing were it not for COVID. There are only so many aircraft manufacturers with the resources to invest in development of brand new commerical aircraft.
That might mean they haven't violated antitrust laws but that doesn't make them any less a monopoly. We might also want to start looking at how that somehow happened without them doing something untoward, because it implies that something else has gone wrong -- why is it now prohibitively expensive to design a commercial aircraft when it didn't used to be?
Monopolies also aren't allowed to do certain things no matter how they got that way. (Many of the things Apple does come to mind.)
2. Aircraft development has always been really expensive. Lots of iconic companies have shuttered, merged, or otherwise ceased to exist because aircraft development is fucking hard. Historically:
* McDonnell Douglas merged into Boeing (or the other way around, depending on your view) after they failed to build the MD-11 up to the performance advertised to customers and suffered billions in costs and delays, and that was formed from an earlier merger of McDonnell and Douglas after Douglas struggled with the costs of developing the DC-8 and 9, both airliners that are considered to have sold fairly well.
* Airbus was formed from scavenging various European national aircraft manufacturers because they would all lose money if they tried competing individually vs MCD and Boeing.
* Lockheed Martin exited the commercial aircraft market decades ago after spending billions of dollars on a delayed aircraft that airlines said they were interested in, but then got cold feet about buying.
More recently:
* Bombardier sold its aircraft lines to Airbus because it spent billions of dollars trying to fix mistakes and delays.
* Embraer tried to sell stakes in its aircraft lines to Boeing because despite having airplanes that sell well they could not cope with the cost of developing updated versions of their aircraft.
* China, Japan, and Russia have each had state-backed programs to try and take some of the lucrative airline market. All of the programs have cost billions of dollars, were delayed, and on top of that non-domestic customers are not really interested in these planes since they have worse efficiency and performance characteristics than competing aircraft products.
Even the big two have had problems; every single recent aircraft line has seen delays and cost overruns. Boeing and Airbus are just big enough that they can eat the cost of it without needing lots of government subsidy, but the MAX8 crisis has shown that might not even be true anymore.
If it were possible to reduce costs, someone would have done it by now, because aircraft manufacturing can be a very lucrative industry resulting in millions of direct and indirect jobs. As it turns out, aircraft are expensive because the ever-increasing requirements for fuel efficiency and safety from airlines and regulators have resulted in aircraft that get harder and harder to develop and build each generation. Rolling any of this back is not a good idea, because
* for various reasons, using more fuel than you have to for air travel is not good
* every single safety regulation for aircraft is written in blood, and in general people do not want to fly in planes created via "move fast, break things"; see the MAX8 crisis.
> Monopolies also aren't allowed to do certain things no matter how they got that way. (Many of the things Apple does come to mind.)
What is something Boeing has done that they should not be allowed to do as a result of their position in a duopoly?
Apple already lost a preliminary suit that will allow them to be sued for their monopolistic practices - https://www.zdnet.com/article/goodbye-walled-garden-apple-ge...
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-sta...
And 66% of the tablet market share in the USA
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/tablet/united-sta...
So yes, Apple can easily be considered a monopoly in the USA. Monopolies are regulated by countries.
In reality, I agree that Apple doesn't really qualify as a monopoly. Same with United.
I don't know if the good necessarily outweighs the bad, but maybe it does.
This is a continuation of politics trying to skim money off of tech and funnel it to thier favored constituents - it's straight up corruption.
This doesn't mean its corruption. You need more qualification to call it that.
(Not saying that the Trump admin isn't corrupt. I'm rather saying that your statement is too broad, and it fits almost all generally accepted democratic governance.)
Precedent is tricky. Democrats removing the filibuster for judges came back to haunt them.
There was a recent (last few weeks) SCOTUS decision that came out with numerous opinions by different coalitions. You could tell that they were all maneuvering around this idea of precedent.
Liberal justices who ended up on either side (majority or minority) were couching their votes as upholding a prior precedent, even when they definitely weren't.
Conservative justices ended up on either side of the case while subtly arguing that overturning precedent, or at least modifying it, was okay and normal.
Both are presumed to be setting up for the next challenge to Roe vs. Wade.
EDIT: mistakenly put that the democrats removed filibuster for SCOTUS judges, that was for other nominations
Who knew that first-mover advantage existed in politics? Or perhaps this is better seen as a example of mutually assured destruction playing out in real life?
Did it though? Legal precedent is different (for now) from political precedent, and I think the Republicans have proven they’re happy to steamroll through almost anything they can to seat a Justice. They would have instantly dropped the filibuster if it hadn’t already been done.
My point was just that pragmatically, I don’t think it bit them in the ass.
Just why? What’s the history here?
The courts, and in particular the supreme court, have increasingly been weaponized as ways to both advance agendas and preserve inviolable causes of both parties. Since the justices are appointed by political processes, that appointment has also become increasingly political, to the point that people justify voting for a presidential candidate they dislike because of the supreme court vacancies the candidate will presumably be able to fill.
The libertarian answer would be to reduce the power and discretion of government officials so it won't be such a high-stakes, partisan process.
I don’t know if there is a political angle to this or not. But Google is objectively differently situated than the other companies you mention.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/09/25/inside-...
Your choices for searching something on the internet, hosting a video, doing email, etc. are innumerable.
So you'll have to qualify what you mean by "negative impact" before I can answer that.
The definition of a monopoly isn't "really big". It's not even "the biggest of four major companies".
How many ways are there to publish a mobile app, for example?
I generally describe myself as libertarian but I'm struggling to have a laissez-faire attitude about some aspects of big tech. I think the most frustrating thing is the lack of "due process" in the way that big tech deals with customers. Look at the recent story about the ridiculous review process for Chrome extensions. I could tell similar stories about the app stores.
Both delta and united are operating very high capital cost businesses on thin margins.
What can we gain by trust busting them?
> What about for internet service - just a single ISP in most areas.
ISPs can be dealt with effectively at the local level - and they are not as invasive or as politically powerful as the tech giants.
I’ve never had my searches for coronavirus related content restricted in any way by my ISP for example.
> Your choices for searching something on the internet, hosting a video, doing email, etc. are innumerable.
You are ignoring network effects and the advertising monopoly.
But maybe that’s a good way to trust bust them?
Perhaps YouTube should be made to start showing my dlive streams in the search results?
Your ISP isn't a search engine. It's also regulated more like a utility, unlike Google. If your ISP started black-holing IP addresses for reason of the content they carried, there would be Congressional action (if the FCC didn't get there first).
Edit: Perhaps network effect is the wrong term - but it’s a bit like saying if you don’t like guns don’t buy a gun - that doesn’t really limit the negative impacts from guns...
You are right, the capital cost of millions of servers worldwide, with security guards, and buildings, and cooling is zero.
Not even close to the capital costs and margins of an airline.
Compare AWS margins and capital costs with Amazons retail margins and capital costs for example.
The best data point I can find is that Google spent 13B on datacenter and office construction in 2019, which is about the same as the purchase cost of all 130 of Delta Airlines' 737-900ER aircraft (which is about 1/6 of Delta's entire fleet).
It’s hard to do a fair comparison like this between high growth companies and normal companies - for example what fraction of that cost for Google is growth based vs to maintain exisiting services?
> > Boeing's 737 Max debacle killed two plane-fuls of people. It's pretty hard to argue that either Amazon or Google has had negative effects on that magnitude.
> I don't think it's particularly useful to compare across industries like this, especially when invoking an "appeal to worse problems" to justify ignoring a problem under discussion.
Interesting sequence of comments. Perhaps you placed yours at the wrong level but it certainly doesn't look like good faith at the moment.
The Pinto fuel system alone killed over 900 people
No, it's not; it's just tedious and requires math and statistical/actuarial concepts like quality-adjusted-life-years. (The TL;DR would be that google inflicts significantly less harm per person to vastly larger numbers of persons.)
Unpleasant and time consuming is not the same as difficult.
In August 2018, a study[86] estimated that more than 24,000+ Rohingya people were killed by the Myanmar military and the local Buddhists since the "clearance operations" started on 25 August 2017. The study[86] also estimated that more than 18,000 Rohingya Muslim women and girls were raped, 116,000 Rohingya were beaten, 36,000 Rohingya were thrown into fire,[86][87][88][89][90][91] burned down and destroyed 354 Rohingya villages in Rakhine state,[92] looted many Rohingya houses,[93] committed widespread gang rapes and other forms of sexual violence against the Rohingya Muslim women and girls.[94][95][96] The military drive also displaced a large number of Rohingya people and made them refugees. According to the United Nations reports, as of January 2018, nearly 690,000 Rohingya people had fled or had been driven out of Rakhine state who then took shelter in the neighboring Bangladesh as refugees.[97] In December, two Reuters journalists who had been covering the Inn Din massacre event were arrested and imprisoned.[97]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Muslims_in_Myan...
The company involved, Facebook:
is Facebook really doing all it can to try to halt the spread of violence? Not according to the United Nations’ Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, which released its own report on Tuesday looking into the causes of the genocide that has taken place against the Rohingya in that country. Among other recommendations, the UN report says any commercial entity doing business in Myanmar should not “enter into an economic or financial relationship with the security forces,” including the military police, known as the Tatmadaw.
https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/facebook-un-myanmar-geno...
With no absolution at all to Beoing for its impressive death count, 24,000 souls, and tens of thousands of rapes and beatings,, in which Facebook's negligence played sufficient role for the UN to specifically call it out, is more than a couple of planes-full, and is why what happens online is in fact as serious and consequential as can be.