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Comment by andromeduck | Hacker News Reader

What's even the point of adding a bunch of rules to break up a player with less than a third of the market and already in decline? It seems pretty clear that competitors have stepped it up. Meanwhile in Mobile ma bell has reassembled itself and in cable we're stuck with regional monopolies; in healthcare we're happy with the same or greater dominance by total monopolies like for insulin or glasses amongst other goods; likewise in payments with Visa and Mastercard.

Smells like political rent seeking to me.

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I have a big problem when people talk about Google only having "a third of the market", and counting total digital ad spend as that market. For example, I bet that if you looked at certain industries of people selling things online (for example, plumbers, attorneys, hotels, etc.) you'd find that nearly 100% of businesses spend money on Google. Sure, they may spread ad spend around (e.g. lots of businesses uses Facebook for brand awareness and Google for targeted search marketing), but these businesses don't see not spending on Google as an option. If there were real competition, these businesses would have a choice to spend these dollars somewhere else, but the fact is that Google is so dominant in search that for most companies the options are "pay the Google tax" and "go out of business". That doesn't feel like a market with healthy competition.

If you cut any industry finely enough, you will find a monopoly. The pizza restaurant next door is a monopolist in the pizza category on my street.

So if you don’t want policy to be completely arbitrary, you’ll need some principles to follow when drawing industry boundaries.

> The pizza restaurant next door is a monopolist in the pizza category on my street.

That's ridiculous. Sure, it may be easiest to order from the guy next door, but if you don't like the pizza next door, you can easily call the guy 3 blocks down the street.

My point is you have options when it comes to pizza. There are many types of businesses that simply do not have any options besides Google. Don't believe me? Ask literally anyone who works in digital advertising. If you were planning any kind of digital ad campaign that relied on search, and you said you weren't going to spend on Google, they'd think you were insane. "Oh yeah, I've decided to put all my search ad spend on Bing." It sounds ridiculously laughable just writing it out.

I work for Bing. Awwww, man. ;-)

By this logic Apple is a monopoly in the mobile space since nobody can afford to ignore them when building apps.

People absolutely can afford to ignore Apple in the mobile space, except if your app is 100% reliant on the US market. iOS is only about 20-25% of the global market.

We're talking about US antitrust law and its enforcement in this thread. And in the US market iOS is the priority for app developers.

Very few US companies operate only in the US as far as app development, and none of the statistics I've seen so far concern solely the US.

In any case, if you're making a social media app or other international app, an Android version is likely more important.

You're kind of completely missing the point you're responding to.

There is no such thing as international anti-trust. In this conversation the US market is the only thing that matters since we are talking about US law. Hence, android does not really matter much for revenue.

That is not entirely true, because the internet is inherently international. It is a different kind of anti-trust, though I recognize that laws haven't caught up to it.

Even in the US, Apple does not have even close to a monopoly over Android, anyways. At best they have 50% of the marketshare.

iOS has 58.54% market share in the US according to https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-sta...

And yet iOS generates 80% more revenue than Android does[0]. If you want to make money, you can't ignore Apple.

[0] https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/07/03/apples-app-store-...

If you monetize mainly by charging people for your app, sure. If you sell mandatory subscriptions or make your money from ads, Android is more important.

This makes sense on paper but iOS users also tend to have higher disposable income[0] which would make them spend more on subscriptions and be more valuable ad targets.

[0] https://www.mobilemarketer.com/news/survey-iphone-owners-spe...

That study is US-only, too. If you're making a solely US-based ad-servicing service (which makes very little sense, and if you are you should spend time on internationalization before spending time on your iOS app), otherwise if you are making a subscription service only in the US that does make sense.

And even if the trends did hold up internationally, and I really suspect they don't, Android would still be better for ads and subscriptions internationally due to nearly three times the market share, despite a bit more than half the disposable income.

I don’t see why the trends wouldn’t hold up internationally. Android is more popular than iOS internationally because the vast majority of the world has a lower PPP than the US. Android is popular in places like India which pale in comparison to US revenues per customer simply based on PPP alone.

I really don't believe that is true. Even in countries with high GDP iPhones can be much less popular than Android, for example Germany, or Italy, or Japan, or Finland, by pretty massive margins.

People don't really buy iPhones as soon as they have money unless it is a status symbol in their culture, which it really is the more the country is Americanized/anglophone. I think that correlation holds up much better than GDP PPP. There is no real reason for money to predict iOS market share except for that.

That's not universal - anecdotally I've seen Android versions that end up generating 80-120% more than the iOS version (per user). It depends a lot on the market and your product. Also, in other situations I can't help but wonder if it could be put down to Android's 2nd class citizen status in many companies. If you're going to give your iOS users a native experience (with no expense spared) while doing the bare minimum for Android (or not at all) then yes - you will earn substantially more per user on iOS.

I really didn't think about that one. Yes, it's entirely true, a ton of Android apps are so broken that I would have no reason to buy the app or service.

This doesn’t really make any sense. If there were overwhelming riches to be had in the Android market, companies would allocate greater resources to making Android apps good. But there aren’t — at least not compared to iOS — so the resource allocation is commensurate. Companies want money first and foremost; they don’t care which platform allows for a prettier UI if it gets in the way of $$$.

I don't think that is true. Even when app development is a very small share of total cost, and certainly insignificant compared to benefits especially re: other makets, such as Snapchat, the Android app might be horribly lacking.

There aren't overwhelming riches to be had on either platform (unless you're Apple or Google of course).

The point I'm trying to make here is that people will use that figure (often without much thought) to justify giving Android users a sub-par experience - which only serves to reinforce it. I've worked for several companies that have given parity to iOS and Android, and one that did not. For the former we did not observe a disparity that large. YMMV by region and industry of course.

Yes.

That would be closer to a monopsony (single buyer), though the details get a bit fuzzy when talking about platforms rather than straight customer-seller relationships.

Yes, it is. Not in defanged US antitrust law, but in reality.

I think there are lots of monopolies, yeah

That's because Apple is a monopoly, or at least Google and apple form a duoopoly. And if you make mobile apps you have to pay the google tax, apple tax, or more likely both.And play by their rules.

This raises and interesting point:

Would consumers be better served if app developers had to pay the Google tax, the Apple tax aaaaaand the Microsoft tax, the Samsung tax, the HTC tax, etc etc etc?

Yes, because if there was competition, that "tax" would likely be lower. For instance, Microsoft's fees for one-off purchases are just half of what Apple/Google are charging.

On android, you can publish yourself which Fortnite did [0]. iOS you cannot though and in fact they are getting sued for their "abusive monopoly in iOS app/in-app distribution services" [1].

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45063002#:~:text=The%20d....

[1]: https://www.hbsslaw.com/uploads/case_downloads/apple-dev/201...

Yes, it is technically possible. But good luck getting your users to do that if you aren't as big as fortnite.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...

NO AMP: https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/4/18652460/apple-class-actio...

Doesn't that mean spending on Google is profitable? You can simply set a bid limit at less than your customer lifetime value (multiplied by conversion rate) on all channels. If someone outbids you systematically, then your spend in that channel drops to zero. Who cares whether it's Google or anyone else. The right move is to spend on all profitable channels, and if you run out of money, borrow more. Why pass up profit when capital is so cheap?

>If you cut any industry finely enough, you will find a monopoly

And inversely, if you cut any industry coarsely enough, you will never find any monopolies.

"Don't break us up! Sure, we may own the entire telephone service, but we do not have a monopoly. See, you should be looking at total human communications. People talk in person, send letters, etc. We own a teeny tiny slice of total human communications."

"Don't break us up! Sure, we may own the entire rail network, but we do not have a monopoly. See, you should be looking at entire human travel. People walk, ride horses, travel by ships, etc. We own a teeny tiny slice of total travel industry."

The only monopoly is the government granted monopoly, ma bell was one.

So if Verizon manages to, through mergers and acquisitions and like, get a 100% market share in the US, it would still not be a monopoly, because it is not government granted?

Of course not. If you don't like paying the monopoly prices, you can just, uh... you can just start your own backyard wireless telecommunications service provider.

MCI was created to compete with Ma Bell and did so.

In Verizon's specific case it would be a government granted monopoly either way. Between infrastructure easements to wireless spectrum to state laws banning municipal competition, that industry is government granted through and through.

Peter Thiel said you can tell if a company is a monopoly by the way they talk about themselves:

“Anyone that has a monopoly will pretend that they're in incredible competition. If you're a non-monopolist, you will rhetorically describe your market as super small, you're the only person in that market.If you have a monopoly, you will describe it as super big, and there is lots of competition in it"

This has been a point of contention all the time. Regulators want to shrink the market size as much as possible, and companies want to expand it as much as possible. This is not a way to determine monopoly.

The quote was referring to the way the company describes themselves in e.g. 10Q briefings.

We already have a framework to define markets, called hypothetical monopolist test. It's conceptually simple; given a market definition, can a hypothetical monopolist impose significant increases in price without customers turning away? If not, it means there's competitors so it's not monopoly.

In this definition, Google's not going to be a monopolist as advertisers can easily reallocate their budget to alternative options (FB, Amazon, etc) to improve their ROI if Google decides to increase their fee significantly. Publishers don't have much options other than AdSense to sell their ad slots so it's monopsony(=single buyer controls the market). Not sure if the US antitrust law can handle this situation. If so, then this is going to be a landmark case.

> In this definition, Google's not going to be a monopolist as advertisers can easily reallocate their budget to alternative options (FB, Amazon, etc) to improve their ROI if Google decides to increase their fee significantly.

That is the point I 100% absolutely disagree with. Ask any digital marketer, most of them see FB and Amazon as serving different purposes than what targeted search ads do. If you put 'Bing' or 'DuckDuckGo' I would agree with you, but in that case you'll find that the way Adwords bidding work that Google pretty much already takes a huge portion of potential margin - in many areas with deep-pocketed investors who think they'll eventually turn profitable Google actually takes more than 100% of potential margin.

> Ask any digital marketer, most of them see FB and Amazon as serving different purposes than what targeted search ads do.

I'm very well aware of this, but this doesn't necessarily mean that budget planning will be done completely independent across multiple different channels. We already have observed a significant fraction of search advertisements budget has been moved from Google to Amazon as Amazon becomes a more effective ads platform. In fact, nowaway this becomes a much more attractive option since Amazon now owns literally everything from advertisements, auction, optimization and measurements in a single platform.

> in many areas with deep-pocketed investors who think they'll eventually turn profitable Google actually takes more than 100% of potential margin.

Most of the Google's largest advertisers are big, conventional companies with a strong cash flow, not those burning the money from investors. They really care about incrementality, efficacy, measurement and performance. Sure, you can probably burn a few million dollars without a good reason but you cannot spend x100 like that.

You can make similar arguments for many other industry titans too. If you don't cater to Apple you will lose out on major chunk of high paying people, if you don't cater to Amazon you will miss out on a lot of e-commerce sales, if you don't cater to Instagram you will miss out younger audience.

It has been mentioned before on topics like this one, but lots of people commenting in here are directly financially involved in this type of discussion (i.e. breaking up Google or FB), as in they're probably employees of those companies and as such their relatively big compensations depend on these companies' operations remaining pretty much the same.

This is the worst of all possible market definitions. That the market is the thing which only this company does. Most of the companies are choosing google (or forced to choose google) because of the reach and the traffic it gets you. They are free not to spend on Google, use Facebook, Amazon, or any other network (many exist but people arent so aware), the returns are very very low. Its a moat for Google given that their targeted marketing is very very accurate compared to other networks. Same goes with Facebook.

If you limit them, you are not improving your ROAS or even efficiency. For most of the companies, they would end up spending higher per qualified lead compared to what they get from Google. This is very hard to break and side by side ensure that the advertisers (and publishers) are not harmed in the process.

Facebook has its own audience Network, but that is really bad in terms of returns. There are others like Taboola, Smarty Ad and so on, but all of them end up not delivering enough returns, and as a publisher, you end up going to google.

I think it's pretty clear what the motivation is if you look at who's pushing for this.

  - Large publishers and news agencies who have seen declining revenues due to increased competition for ads.
  - Left-leaning people who believe large companies are inherently bad for society.
  - Right-leaning people who believe "big tech" is biased against them.

Its also worth noting who's not pushing for this.

  - Advertisers.
  - General consumers.

>General consumers

But are they pushing against it? Would they, if asked?

If the verdict involved something like "your Google account will no longer work with X service" there would definitely be a lot of consumer pushback

Or if you now have to pay for X what you used to get for free

Google already does this, bolstered by their monopoly. You used to be able to listen to Youtube videos with the screen off without paying them.

YouTube vanced ftw

That's an assumption. Severing the financial tie might not necessarily fully sever the operational relationship. Obviously Google would be pushing that narrative hard, but it would be relatively easy to push back and say, "Separate companies with a non-exclusive relationship would still be lucrative and so the two companies that result from this action aren't going to give that up just to spite consumers/regulators."

Why should anyone care about general consumers? They're just fine being sheep as long as they're comfortable.

Protecting consumers is the entire basis of anti-trust law.

this is sort of an admission that the motivation is purely notional, and most people would not see any actual tangible benefit to it

The second and third groups contain many general consumers, so I who you intend include in that. Is your point that only ideologues believe that Google deserves anti-trust scrutiny?

The point is that the groups pushing anti-trust action seem to be motivated by things that have nothing to do with helping Google's customers.

Advertisers just apply a markup and pass it along to their customers.

This is the weakest part of your argument.

I have noticed a decline in quality of google products in recent years. I attribute this primarily to their increasing monopoly power. Not to mention all the products google has killed: https://killedbygoogle.com/, many of which were quite popular.

It's not like Google has some noble duty to launch or maintain their products if they don't want to.

> Left-leaning people who believe large companies are inherently bad for society.

Curious to read more about this. It could just be me, but I have not seen much criticism of Google coming from this perspective. The closest I can think of is criticism of their skill at avoiding taxes.

> in healthcare we're happy

Are we, though? It sounds like you're saying why go after google when there are so many other companies with similar levels of control over their own markets who we also don't go after. That's not a reasonable objection, unless you can find somebody who thinks that we should go after google, but not go after these other companies.

> That's not a reasonable objection, unless you can find somebody who thinks that we should go after google, but not go after these other companies.

But you can -- the US Department of Justice, who are apparently preparing a case against Google and not companies in those other markets.

So in order to go after one monopolist they must go after all monopolists are once? Can’t they prioritize?

Which brings us back to the original question -- why are they starting with Google and not the others?

Especially when Time Warner and the other conglomerates have been doing this shit for decades before anyone knew wtf Google was

"What's even the point of adding a bunch of rules to break up a player with less than a third of the market and already in decline?"

The market they are defining does not include Facebook, Amazon or other "walled gardens". Details in the PDF.

The "why not look at other industries/companies" argument is old, tired and makes little sense. Looking at one company/industry does not prevent AGs or DOJ from looking at another.

So if you slice “the market” granularly enough and squint, then there is a monopoly.

If I had a general consumer business, I would much rather use FB advertising because they know more about their users than Google.

If you had a general consumer business and used both, you'd probably drop Facebook after finding that they don't translate into revenue growth at nearly the same rate. If you didn't, you'd still likely find that your return on investment is far better with Google ad buys. At least, that was my experience with a lifestyle/hobby product. So many leads from Facebook were simply garbage, and the numbers seemed, well, let's just say questionable.

Again, your mileage may differ, but FB knowing more about people didn't seem to matter for me. When it came down to it, a dollar spent with Google was far better than a dollar spent with FB.

That's only you, though. Plus you don't have a consumer business. Not very persuasive.

The "choice" described in the paper is not between Facebook and Google, it is between Google and nothing. According the the authors, Facebook does not particpate in the business of ads for the "open web".

Who cares if FB participates in the “open web” when the majority of adults in the US have a FB Account and probably spend more time on FB than anywhere else?

Is this a rhetorical question or does it seek an answer?

Assuming the later, academics and people working on these investigations, if the "open web" is the market they are using for their antitrust analysis. If Facebook participated in this market then one could argue that there is some competition.

From a footnote in the PDF:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3391913

Again that goes back to slicing a market to fit a narrative and not reality.

All antitrust lawsuits contain a narrative. There will be at least two narratives, one of which will be Google's.

As for "reality" you would need to be more specific what you mean.

What if someone said, "Who cares if they are slicing a market to fit a narrative?"

Are you saying the authors who are "slicing the market to fit a narrative" are not allowed to do that? Or are you just saying you do not like that they are doing that? Or both?

They are wrong if they think Google is a monopoly on "open web" advertising anyway.

Facebook's Audience Network allows you to buy ads on 3rd party (open) websites[1] as does VerizonMedia/Oath

[1] https://www.facebook.com/business/marketing/audience-network

What about AdGear, Adition, Polar and YoSpace?

Yes and many others. However the reach of the ones I listed is huge.

Why didn't Google mention the ones you cited and the "many others" in its response to the CMA report? Do none of them have customers in the UK?

That's a different report. I'm not particularly familiar with it, but I believe they were looking at Google dominance in search and search advertising, whereas this attempts to make an antitrust argument in "open web adverting".

The argument that Google is dominant in search is much stronger than the argument made here.

If you are not familiar with the CMA report then how do you know it does not address display ads on third party websites, i.e., "open web adverting"?

In the CMA report "open web advertising" is referred to as the "open display market".

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5dfa0580ed915...

"We have organised our work into three thigh-level themes:

Theme 1 considers to what extent Google and Facebook have market power in search and social media respectively and the sources of this market power;

Theme 2 assesses whether consumers have adequate control over the use of their data by online platforms, by exploring the choices they are given, how easy it is to exercise those choices and whether there is adequate protection for those who do not engage; and

Theme 3 focusses on the business to business digital advertising markets, exploring a range of concerns including a lack of transparency, conflicts of interest and the leveraging of market power to undermine competition."

Not disagreeing with your premise, however the Google response to the CMA report devotes a significant amount of verbiage to explaining and defending their position in the "open display market". On page 4 of the 25-page response to the CMA report you will find the heading "Competition in Digital Advertising". Under this you will see the subheadings "Search Advertising", "Display Advertising on Third Party Websites" and "Our Relationship with Publishers". The "Search Advertising" section is just over 3 pages. The "Display Advertising on Third Party Websites" is 4.5 pages. The "Our relationship with Publishers" section is just over 2 pages.

It is true the CMA did not make precisely the same arguments as the authors of the "roadmap" paper. They are two different jusrisdictions. However the CMA report forms the factual basis for all the arguments in the roadmap paper.

Why do you think Google didn't list these companies?

I found the Google response[1] and I'd note that they don't name any other companies at all (at least in a very quick glance through). I suspect this is a policy choice by Google - they don't want to be seen as pointing regulators at competitors.

I would also note that on page 23 footnote 69 they point references showing "the top 100 U.S. advertisers use an average 4 to 7 DSPs according to a 2016-2018 study" and "500 largest U.S. publishers use an average of 6 SSPs"

[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5d78ba3540f0b...

In parapgraph 29 of the response, with respect to "publisher ad serving", Google mentioned several competitors by name. In the roadmap paper the authors note the publisher ad server market is "particularly concentrated" with Google having a "90% or higher share".

Not sure I understand what you are thinking regarding the "policy choice" idea. Would need some more elaboration.

> In parapgraph 29 of the response

Could you refer to page number or something? I'm not going through counting paragraphs. I searched for "publisher ad serving" and didn't find it, and searched for "Facebook" and didn't find anything that seemed to sound like what you are talking about.

I don't understand the gist of your comments here either. You asked me why Google didn't refer to competitors in their response, but now you say that they do?

> Not sure I understand what you are thinking regarding the "policy choice" idea.

"they don't want to be seen as pointing regulators at competitors."

The paragraphs are numbered for you. The legal field often prefers to reference numbered paragraphs instead of page numbers. It can be easier. Paragraph 29 is on page 8.

You claimed the authors of the roadmap paper are "wrong". You cited a couple of purported Google competitors, Facebook and Verizon. I noted that in their response to CMA report Google did not mention those two competitors. They mentioned several other ones, none of them as prominent as Facebook or Verizon. Then you said there are "many other" competitors, too, besides Facebook and Verizon. I am wondering why Google did mention any of these competitors you are referring to in their response to the CMA report. Seems like it would be relevant to mention them.

Page 8 has footnote 29. Paragraphs aren't numbered. It doesn't name competitors there so I'm pretty confused.

However page 7 does say:

The Market Study will need to take account of the ways in which other players are entering, expanding, or consolidating in the supply of digital ads Examples include Amazon’s growing ads business, Verizon (which purchased AOL and Yahoo!), the integrated AT&T/Time Warner/AppNexus businesses, AdForm, and Alibaba – one of China’s largest digital ad providers that recently...

The reference in that quote include footnote 29. Perhaps you are confusing footnotes/references with the substantive response?

1) Google, thanks to its acquisitions / strategies is actually all over the web, and has a hand in every single part of the ad tech stack (outside of walled gardens). It's problematic

2) As a consequence of #1 (all those Google Analytics install collecting data) and their properties (YT, Search, etc...) they have excellent data on pretty much every one.

As a matter of fact, someone in the industry made a test on Grindr to see what kind of audience quality each player had in the adtech world. Google was the best provider and by a large margin.

Why are monopolies a problem? Because they stifle competition? Why is this? Because they control a market or ecosystem to the point where they can very very effectively prevent new players from entering it. If we have an ecosystem that a large number of our citizens are affected by and it is very hard for a new company to compete with a few established players, then there's a risk of many of those citizens getting "the short end" because the companies controlling the ecosystem have no incentive to competitively price anything. I think that's as good a reason as any to consider busting a monopoly.

None of the big tech companies “control” an ecosystem. Users voluntarily choose that ecosystem because of network effects.

Every major tech company’s product has a viable alternative.

And I guess 90s Microsoft didn’t have a monopoly if you counted all embedded OSes and all software and all hardware devices with software.

There are other monopolies and Google isn’t alone, but I think if this were political then Twitter and Facebook would be bigger targets.

Maybe it’s petty because Google completely bungled the Congressional shaming.

I hope the anti-trust investigation focuses on search. They have an obscene monopoly on search, built largely on the massive amounts of our personal data they have access to (through Chrome, Gmail, YouTube and so on), even though their product has been stagnating and returning worse and worse results for the better part of the past decade.

We need real competition there and it doesn't seem like Bing and its clones (Duckduckgo and so on) are going to get us there. They are at too big a disadvantage out the gate.

I've never heard Visa or Mastercard characterized as monopolies before. Is that true? I guess I always just thought they were so regulated that nobody wants to try and enter the market (except Discover who I happen to bank with)

Not to be too tangential here but does anyone know if Visa/Mastercard monopoly has a negative affect on the consumer right now? I havent noticed one, so it must be a lot more subtle than, say, internet / cable monopolies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discover_Card#Business_develop...

The payment one is just ridiculous and completely wrong.

Credit cards are already competitive i.e. Visa, MasterCard, American Express. And the payment space is one of the most dynamic and competitive around. Endless amounts of new startups and bigger players in digital payments e.g. PayPal.

> Visa, MasterCard, American Express

Add Discover and you essentially have a complete list of credit networks in the US. The other offerings you see are mostly white label products built on top of the usual credit networks.

I wouldn't consider PayPal a competitor since they don't operate a credit network (although they sometimes facilitate money transfers that don't involve the credit networks). Whenever a physical credit card is used in the US, it's almost always the case that one of those four credit networks collects an interchange fee.

I think it would be important to disclose your affiliation to Google, especially when you're defending your employer, and arguing against breaking up Google.

Google's ad business has doubled in size in 3 1/2 years. They're not in decline and neither is their ad business. They'll be at $200 billion in sales soon; they're one of the largest, most powerful corporations in world history.

Amazon's ad business is a small fraction the size of Google. Facebook's ad sales are less than 1/2 that of Google.

Market share isn't the only factor to consider in pursuing anti-trust.

However if it's market share you're interested in: Google has three other monopoly positions and their ad business is the cornerstone that makes it all function, providing an excellent reason to target the ad business to inflict a reduction in total system power in one shot. This is the proper way to view the giant tech companies: with a holistic view of how they maintain and integrate their overall monopoly positions and extend them, rather than focusing on very narrow abuses.

Are you disputing that google has monopolies in search, browser, or hosting user-generated videos? Because, as I understand it the argument is google is abusing it's monopoly power in those areas to increase prices for ads.

This! I would love to see google broken up and admittedly dislike the company. But I think that they are declining on their own.

Are Google's lobbying efforts considered to be rent-seeking?

> Smells like political rent seeking to me.

Pleonasm.

But fully agree with your point.

Why do you consider google in decline??

I think it's because Sundar lacks strategic vision and/or lacks the courage to disturb the power structure/struggle below him. He's a Ballmer.

Ah makes sense.

Why do people always say this? Multiple agendas can be pursued simultaneously

The person you're replying to is a current Google employee.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/10/amazon-...

https://twitter.com/william_fitz/status/1270740531081932801?...

Googlers downvoted and flagged a comment that raised the possibility of astroturfing. Looks like we hit a nerve. Their employer is spending millions trying to sway public opinion.

I downvoted and flagged your comment and am no googler. It's against HN's rules to accuse other users of astroturfing without evidence: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Even if another user works for Google and is commenting about Google, a lot of people comment based on what they know or how they feel from work. Nothing could be more natural than to do that, so it's not evidence of an organized campaign. Moreover, it's not something we'd want to suppress on Hacker News, because we don't want to disincentivize [1] people from showing up here to talk about what they know, and for most of us, what we work on is our area of greatest knowledge.

Should an employee of $CO disclose that they work for $CO whenever they comment on a topic that's related to $CO? Arguably that would be courteous to other users. But not doing it is certainly less discourteous than accusing someone else of being an astroturfer or shill, and the implication that someone was paid to post an HN comment rather than expressing a sincerely held view is a slur.

There is plenty of past explanation about HN's no-astroturfing-accusations rule at [2].

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Thank you for letting me know. I was not aware of that rule. I do see commenters that routinely like to share the fact of who they work for, It may be that they only do that when they think it stengthens their comment. In any event, I will not make the same mistake again.

Remember that to argue that the comment contained an "accusation" requires that one draw some inference from the inclusion of the Wikipedia URL. Inlcuding the URL was a mistake. The statement I made however contained no accusation. It merely drew attention to the fact that Googlers often disclose their employer when talking about Google stuff on HN but in this case the person made not mention of it. I found that noteworthy. The inference to be made there would simply be potential bias. I think that's fair.

Is it within the rules to state that a commenter is an employee of "${CO}"? I note the commenter who did that did not get flagged.

Thanks for the balanced reply! Fair enough re "accusation". If I had read your comment more closely I would have said "insinuation", which is the word that the guidelines use anyway.

> Is it within the rules to state that a commenter is an employee of "${CO}"? I note the commenter who did that did not get flagged.

That's a tough one to answer unequivocally. Bringing in someone's personal details as ammunition in an argument is generally not allowed: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so..., so if I had to pick yes or no I'd say no. But one can imagine lots of borderline cases.

Because those things are not pursued. Good faith can only go so far when their comment was just as valid a decade ago as it is today.

"Why cut my fingernails? They'll grow back."

- Ephraim, "Munich" (2005)

We've got 5G on the way with the 3-way mobile mobile in the U.S. plus Space X's Starlink on the way: https://www.starlink.com/. All this will provide competition for cable companies big time.

As for payments, the Visa/MC/Amex hegemony will get challenged by crypto. Ethereum's scalability is rapidly approaching Visa scale and with stablecoins and DeFi skyrocketing in popularity, it's going to be an interesting thing to watch.

Starlink is not competition for cable companies, unfortunately. Any area dense enough for cable is too dense for Starlink. There may be more competition in wireless carriers than wired ISPs, but that's not saying much. It's still not nearly the competitive market it should be especially with even more consolidation happening recently.

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