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Comment by marmada | Hacker News Reader

A take: monopoly in tech is good. Because Google/Amazon/FB have so much money they can do things that push tech forward as a whole. Think about the revolutionary improvements Google has made towards data centers, AWS, and all the research/open source contributions these companies have done.

Unlike other monopolies (telecom, defense contracting) etc. where the monopoly is used to stagnate innovation (see Comcast being terrible), here the monopoly leads to more innovation. Smaller companies can't embark on Google-sized projects.

Sidenote: I'm pretty sure this lawsuit is just a political attack. It seems reasonable that other monopolies in healthcare/defense/etc. are much much worse, yet they aren't "liberal"/"blue" companies, so there are no lawsuits.

Disclosure: I'm interning at Google. I don't think this matters at all, but someone called me out on this in the comments.

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Google/Amazon/Facebook have each served to stagnate tech, not push it forward. If you read their headlines, sure, you'll believe they're doing groundbreaking things. But in reality, these behemoths have killed thousands of innovative startups to protect their cash cows. The uncommitted experiments they run, meanwhile, never amount to anything useful for the world.

There were better social networks than Facebook, but they didn't make money the way Facebook does, so Facebook bought them and killed them. There were better online stores than Amazon, but they didn't abuse humans and play the same games Amazon does to succeed, so they died and it won. Tech monopolies are monopolies, and they're particularly aggressive ones.

I also don't think you grasp the scope of tech monopolies. You cannot operate a business today without doing business with Google. You can hate Google, but you still have to do business with Google. Because if you aren't putting out Google Ads or at least optimizing your SEO for Google's bots, if you aren't launching your app in the Play Store, you're cutting off the majority of your customer base, and you're dying.

Healthcare has to do business with Google. Defense has to do business with Google. Effing Comcast has to do business with Google. There has never been a monopoly on this planet that had more power and that was so unavoidable. And it doesn't take a lot of research to find places people are being hurt or having their livelihoods taken by the unholy beast that it's become.

> Healthcare has to do business with Google. Defense has to do business with Google.

Can you elaborate on this? Neither industry seems to rely on ads or SEO or app stores.

You'd be surprised what you can find on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lmaeronaut...

Obviously healthcare providers market to consumers, medicines are marketed to consumers even when they're supposed to be prescribed by doctors, and of course, marketing healthcare wares to doctors is a pretty big deal.

But ask yourself how healthcare companies and defense contractors market themselves, find new talent, even lobby. (Targeting advertising can literally shove ads just in the face of people in federal government buildings.)

Google has the eyes of well over 80% of the global population. Which means if you want to talk to... pretty much any group of people, you likely have to do it through Google.

This is very well put. I've worked in tech for both startups and corporations. I've moved around a lot and I've come to the same conclusion.

The effects of tech monopolies are particularly obvious to those who work in open source.

For example, it's extremely common to find that some very expensive third-party services have free open source alternatives available - These open source communities are often struggling to stay alive. Big tech corporations hire thousands of engineers in-house and so it would cost them nothing extra to use the open source solution (they already have the engineering capacity to implement and manage it). But they won't! They will happily pay millions of dollars of fees annually to get something that they could have gotten for free and maybe paid an optional $20K per year 'tech support' fee to the open source community. Not only that, but their system would be way more flexible because the corporation would have full control over the open source code and their own data. For example, the $400 million that Facebook spent on acquiring Giphy could have been saved if they had used an open source solution instead. Heck, they could have built Giphy themselves from the ground up in a couple of months using open source solutions for very little additional engineering cost.

Corporations have no incentives to be efficient; instead they will use some expensive provider because the CEOs of both companies are friends. They have a monopoly so they can afford to be very wasteful.

> here the monopoly leads to more innovation

More innovation in what? And as compared to what?

The innovations you mention are all addressing issues that only huge tech giants like Google have anyway. And they are all funded by the ad-supported business model, which IMO is a negative that outweighs those positive contributions.

Plus, the ad supported business model means users only get the benefit of any innovations Google makes when it increases Google's ad income. That incentive is not well aligned with the needs of users. How many times has Google discontinued a popular application because it wasn't making them enough money? A company in Google's position is exactly the company that could figure out how to get a billion users to pay them directly for services those users want, instead of using their eyeballs as commodities, but Google has put zero effort towards that highly desirable innovation.

We also don't see all the innovations that are not happening because the people that would have made them are being paid by Google and other tech giants to look for new ways to capture more eyeballs instead.

> I'm pretty sure this lawsuit is just a political attack. It seems reasonable that other monopolies in healthcare/defense/etc. are much much worse, yet they aren't "liberal"/"blue" companies, so there are no lawsuits.

If this hypothesis were correct, we would have expected to see lawsuits against those other monopolies during, say, the Obama administration. But we didn't.

The lawsuit is specifically stated in the article to be targeted at the ad-supported business model, so the obvious inference is that all the issues with that business model that have come up over the years have finally built up enough political pressure that the government feels it has to do something about it.

> If this hypothesis were correct, we would have expected to see lawsuits against those other monopolies during, say, the Obama administration. But we didn't.

This presupposes that the DoJ has always been a political weapon.

> This presupposes that the DoJ has always been a political weapon.

Of course it has. Look at the war on drugs and lack of prosecution when democrats enter power. Both parties use the DoJ to push their own agenda and perception. Frankly the expectation that the DoJ be non-partisan (much like the supreme court!) is naive and the democrats cripple themselves by even articulating this expectation.

> This presupposes that the DoJ has always been a political weapon.

No, it only presupposes that if the DoJ is going to be used as a political weapon, any administration, of either party, is about equally as likely to use it as any other. Given the general track record of the Federal government, this seems like a much more plausible assumption than your implicit assumption that it only started being a political weapon just now.

> A company in Google's position is exactly the company that could figure out how to get a billion users to pay them directly for services those users want, instead of using their eyeballs as commodities, but Google has put zero effort towards that highly desirable innovation.

Fwiw Google has tried this more than once. It's just that the value that advertisers get is way higher than the value that consumers get.

There are specific search terms that can go for more than $50 ad bids. Individuals can't really pay for that much. Like how much would you be willing to pay for Google search each year?

> If this hypothesis were correct, we would have expected to see lawsuits against those other monopolies during, say, the Obama administration. But we didn't.

This only follows if you believe the Obama and Trump admins are equally corrupt.

> Smaller companies can't embark on Google-sized projects.

What do you mean by "Google-sized projects"? Google is made up of many differently sized services. And a lot of the services that Google provides have smaller companies that provide competing services. One of Google's advantages is that it can subsidize the cost of smaller services with it's cash cow.

Monopolies are always harmful for the functioning of society. Google has crushed thousands of small companies. Also they have quite some power, for example they can simply delist your companies website from their index and your customer base is gone. I doesn't matter if other things are much worse in other branches. They should also get punished.

Google forces you to work solely with google, E.g (from the antitrust investigation of the EC:

Google required direct partners to exclusively use Google's AdSense and could not engage with Google's competitors;

It is actively disadvantaging the competition:

>Google does not apply its system of penalties, a predefined set of parameters to lower the placement of shopping results, to its own Google Shopping results as it did to other competitors.

>yet they aren't "liberal"/"blue" companies, so there are no lawsuits

And this is off the track in my opinion. In Europe Google also has problems with the European Union, do you think they are liberal or conservative on your scale? Google deserves some punishment for how it behaves. It is doing actively damage to society. Do not evil has long be gone.

This is going to give bad points again, but may I say that I find the amount of polarization in your country distasteful? And that is an understatement. I think you shouldn't divide your country into two compartments, you are all in the ride together.

It will weaken you in the long term and your country is actively exporting these ideas. So in Europe polarization is also growing. It is a dangerous matter thinking into sides like this.

It sounds like red is evil to you and blue is good. Watch out for that. Watch out for that.

I don’t think comparing monopolies across industries is justification for a monopoly in tech. A more telling comparison would be monopoly in tech vs no monopoly in tech.

Why aren’t you disclosing that you’re working for Google?

Alright it's disclosed. I'm not opposed to disclosing (I'm assuming you know b/c it's been mentioned previously in my profile). But also, I had this viewpoint well before I decided to work at Google this summer for an internship.

> Because Google/Amazon/FB have so much money they can do things that push tech forward as a whole.

You mean they have enough money to buy other companies to stifle competition and innovation.

> yet they aren't "liberal"/"blue" companies, so there are no lawsuits.

The distrust of google is bipartisan. Both the democrats and republicans have called for this. Actually, the democrats have been far more vocal.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/8/18256032/elizabeth-warren-...

> Disclosure: I'm interning at Google. I don't think this matters at all, but someone called me out on this in the comments.

It matters because it shows you have financial interests which may bias your opinion. Not to mention if you are interning at google, you have very little experience in and knowledge of the tech industry.

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