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Comment by ArtWomb | Hacker News Reader

Watershed moment in how we "price" monopolistic power. It's not "market share" or "barriers to entry" or even engaging in "anti-competitive behavior" anymore. But more about how corporations can control the free flow of information. Much harder to make that case for the government I should imagine.

What's surprising to me is how un-monopolistic Google's share of the Cloud + AI market is under its control, considering how many of the techniques were invented there. I'd put it at under 25%.

The real behemoth is NVidia + ARM. GPU shortages are endemic. And the cost of a new entrant to the market just to construct a fab is probably $20B+. Ask Intel XE how much they are spending just to keep up ;)

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> Watershed moment in how we "price" monopolistic power. It's not "market share" or "barriers to entry" or even engaging in "anti-competitive behavior" anymore. But more about how corporations can control the free flow of information. Much harder to make that case for the government I should imagine.

I don't know if or how this fits within actual antitrust law, but it makes sense that the issue was never price gouging, the issue was one entity gaining too much power.

In a theoretical dystopian future, a megacorp could own 99% of market share of all industries in the country, but intentionally offer very low prices on every product to avoid "monopoly" concerns. It becomes clear: monopolistic pricing is just a symptom, not the real issue. The real issue is power.

If this suit (and followup suits on other megacorps) fail, the future may call for new laws to define monopolistic power in novel ways, as soon as we the people recognize that getting search and email and social media for free doesn't mean that the megacorps are on our side.

>I don't know if or how this fits within actual antitrust law, but it makes sense that the issue was never price gouging, the issue was one entity gaining too much power.

In the US, there are two major areas of antitrust law and enforcement:

1) Sherman & Clayton Acts (1890, 1914) - outlaws cartels and anticompetitive activities (that is, activities that tend to lead to monopolies, but doesn't outlaw monopolies themselves). Price gouging is not an antitrust issue, but predatory pricing and price fixing are (you might have meant these terms). This area is primarily established via case law and enforced by the courts (and DOJ AD).

2) Merger guidelines/Federal Trade Commission (1968) - wherein key mergers must be reviewed and approved by the FTC. This area is more sensitive to political climate / executive branch as it's executive-appointed FTC regulators who set the guidelines and give approvals. We are now exiting an era of historic hands-off-ness.

Source: had a professor who is famous in antitrust world

Have we ever "busted up a monopoly" using 2? Is the FTC able to retroactively split up a company that was originally formed via large mergers and acquisitions? Split out e.g. Youtube from Google as it was originally an acquisition? That seems unlikely to me but I don't know much about it at all.

If you can't do that, then you're basically just preventing a monopoly from happening in advance, right? Or trying to at least.

At any rate, I'm assuming US vs. Google will be required to reference precedent set in Sherman & Clayton + subsequent court rulings and _not_ be able to use their own mergers against them as they were approved by the FTC in the first place. Is that also correct?

If you're worried about power, the by far biggest monopolist there is the US Federal Government.

Governments are still (largely) accountable to the people, in contrast to corporations, which are not accountable whatsoever (except through gov regulation). Your comment is just detraction

that's interesting. I can delete my FB account or Amazon account. how can I do this with my government?

Move to a different country. Apply for citizenship. Renounce your original citizenship. Rules may apply...

Vote. By voting you can ditch the old government and install a new one.

Note: The cancellation fees for US Citizenship can be quite high!

That's missing the point. Deleting your FB account doesn't affect FB's power or practices. Does it make you slightly less directly affected by their nonsense? Sure, but it's often a false sense of security. If disinformation on FB results in a different outcome to your election, or prevents parents from thinking a COVID vaccine is safe, or whatever else, that affects your life even if you're not on the platform.

You have a say in your government's leadership. Don't like the President? Vote them out. Don't like Zuck? Nothing you can do about it.

How do I delete my FB shadow profile? Do I need to create an FB account first or what? How do I get onto sites that use ReCaptha (that's potentially anything behind CloudFlare BTW) without letting Google hoover up a bunch of identifying information? How do I delete the data that Google collects with ReCaptha?

And yet even deleting these services or choosing not to use them yourself does not keep them from tracking you. We have long known about "shadow profiles" that for example Facebook uses to collect data on individuals that don't (yet, they hope) have Facebook accounts.

As far as governments go, we could all become anarchists be done with them, but if you think for even a few seconds about it you would realize that this enormous vacuum of power would be filled by something. Corporations, rival nations with their government still intact, military warlords, or new political factions seeking to establish new governments. We have thousands of years of history that shows this pattern emerging again and again to the point that it is practically a natural law of power. The only check on power is greater or equal power. Ideally, you want this power to be answerable to the greatest number of people that this power is intended to serve. You may recall a lot of smart people during something called the Enlightenment spending a lot of time and energy on experimenting with different forms of government that met these criteria and still managing to not quite get it right. Many people in the West live in societies multiple iterations down the line from those established in the 18th and 19th century revolutions and there are still glaring issues. What do you suggest instead?

Corporations are accountable to their customers. If people stop paying for their products, they cease to exist.

Corporations are also accountable to governments, as this story illustrates. If US courts and/or legislators decide they want it, Google ceases to exist.

Economists think of this in terms of "Exit vs Voice".

With governments, you have a voice - one vote for deciding who's in charge - but no way to exit, even when your side loses.

With corporations you can exit - stop shopping at Target - but no voice in how Target is run.

Both models have pros and cons, and it's good to understand how they differ, and what situations they're suited for.

Try exiting Google or Amazon. It's borderline impossible.

Basically - how do I exit a company if I'm not the one choosing to use their services?

I cannot use the internet and avoid Google's ads.

I cannot use the internet and avoid Amazon's hosting.

I cannot exit the internet because I literally make my living with it, the competitive disadvantage of doing so is SO great with the way we've structured services and life in general that it doesn't really work.

We probably disagree about how bad that is, but I think it's a valid argument within the voice/exit framework.

It'd be cool if people spent more time reading basic political philosophy, rather than reading one book on libertarianism and deciding that that is now their philosophy.

Philip Pettit has spent extensive time addressing really interesting questions like these, like what might distinguish "public" domination from "private."

I was just wondering which is easier, quitting a country or google. Initially emigration would be harder but in the long run I would be just fine.

One wouldn't be allowed to use iphone or android? It would take a lot of manual data entry to migrate my accounts off gmail. Youtube obviously wouldn't be allowed but do I get to use adsense powered websites?

> What's surprising to me is how un-monopolistic Google's share of the Cloud + AI market is under its control, considering how many of the techniques were invented there. I'd put it at under 25%.

I don't find that surprising because Google is a mess. They're a very poorly run organization, making decisions that make no sense at times. Their inefficiency and/or incompetence is probably the only reason why they haven't wreaked havoc on all of the markets they have their hand in. And the various monopolies they do have are, as monopolies usually are, immune to stupid decisions that would kill most other companies.

I think it might be because their corporate culture of being the good guy/"don't be evil" is incompatible with the reality of their situation. Like cognitive dissonance at a corporate level. I wonder how many of their employees in positions of power are still living in that fantasy, and making decisions based on it?

>They're a very poorly run organization, making decisions that make no sense at times.

How many messaging apps have they launched and killed?

Do you mean as of right now, or at the time you posted?

What are some specific examples of being poorly run?

Personal opinion? And this applies almost equally to Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL. But that they all lost the messenger wars. Of the four, Google was the best positioned to take mobile, really the best positioned of any company in the world. And that blunder is probably a bigger blunder than Microsoft and Facebook arriving late to the mobile world. Because Google WAS the mobile operating system, they were the cross platform browser vendor, and they completely, absolutely, 100% failed to deliver a worldwide mobile first + desktop messaging solution that was better than the competition.

Interesting.. I’ve seen the messaging wars start up again every 5 years. The current iteration is business oriented with slack etc.. but that doesn’t mean it won’t be personal again.

Mobile is all about power management. Apple got that right and really nailed the UX.

I don’t think Google knew that playbook at that point. Maybe Rubin did but even MSFT blew it.

Quite honestly, I think Facebooks play to overlay chat ontop of something more addictive was its big win. Then having a mobile app to talk to the same people.

None of that matters anymore, because Messenger/IG/WA are all mobile apps that most people probably dont chat as much through on a desktop/laptop. But at the time, it gave people a compelling reason to have the messenger product open on screen. Google Talk was similar, being overlayed over Gmail, but google squandered having a Talk bar over the bottom of every google property. Yahoo as well. Yahoo News should have had messenger across the bottom of the screen.

On the mobile front, FB Messenger sort of won out because people started to like iMessage, but there was still a need for a cross platform alternative. I believe Apple could have prevented FB Messenger from being a thing, had they released an Android client along with a browser extension. Apple's best move was releasing iTunes for Windows, something they are scared to repeat, and shouldnt be.

>On the mobile front, FB Messenger sort of won out because people started to like iMessage, but there was still a need for a cross platform alternative. I believe Apple could have prevented FB Messenger from being a thing, had they released an Android client along with a browser extension. Apple's best move was releasing iTunes for Windows, something they are scared to repeat, and shouldnt be.

I wonder what the numbers are on WhatsApp vs FB Messenger, because people of all socioeconomic levels, languages, ages, country, and tech literacy use WhatsApp in my experience, whereas only Americans of a certain age group use FB Messenger.

WhatsApp is the clear winner since it has always been optimized for very old devices. But it's now a FB product anyway. At some point FB will develop a unified messaging product... maybe in response to antitrust.

Does this not in fact support the claim that they are not quite the monopoly that people make them out to be? That it is in fact not that easy to abuse their power in owning the platform to gain market share in messaging?

I'm not sure what people want these days: people are angry that they have successful products that people use more than competitor's prodcts, and also angry that they have unsuccessful products that are shut after failing to gain traction.

I dont know how the accusation that they are a monopoly in search and advertising related to them being poor at spending that money to become a monopoly elsewhere.

how much revenue is in the mobile messaging business?

I mean the gold standard here is WeChat. QQ is probably the next one. Messaging apps are probably more important than FB for example. The problem right now in the US is friction with using messaging apps for payment. Venmo, apple pay and other apps are making inroads here but we are still mostly confined to credit card interfaces.

From my conversations, Googlers indeed appear to earnestly argue for their company in ways that directly ignore or fail to recognize the monopoly power they wield. It absolutely feels like line employees are unable to grasp what market power is and how the company wields it.

Executive level people seem too adept at defending the company and avoiding certain phrases or concepts, I believe they all know. Things like suggesting routine conversations include a lawyer and tagging them as such to try to include more conversations in attorney/client privilege shows a desire to hide guilty actions.

I have zero experience at the levels of Google when it comes to market dominance. But I do have some for certain niche products in the chemical sector, where I worked for one of two suppliers in exostence. And there I, a simple low level team lead, received dedicated anti-trust training. Including what wording to use in e-mails and what words to avoid. So I would guess, Google is much more prudent and higher management levels, especially since this discussion is nothing new.

Googlers are definitely trained what language to use and not to use. Though I think there is still a cognitive dissonance where they believe they're just avoiding problematic statements as opposed to avoiding admitting blatantly illegal behavior.

Why would a company believe it's doing illegal stuff? That wouldn't make much sense unless it's made out of people that are OK with doing illegal stuff (Mafia?). So of course most employees don't believe that.

And whether or not such training is meant by executives to hide illegal behavior that they are aware of it's also catching many cases where people are just dumb and use wrong words to mean different things, words that have specific meaning in a legal context and that can hurt the person and the company although there was no illegal act being done.

I've noticed this in many companies, but at Google it does seem particularly worse. In private conversations with friends, I will at least be cognizant of the bad things that the company I work for is doing - it's just a job.

But many Googlers seem to perfectly fit that Upton Sinclair quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

That said, I don't think you can see how Alphabet's lawyers talk and think that they are somehow living in a bubble or are not having these sorts of high-level strategy discussions.

I said this before, but I still believe Larry and Sergei removed themselves completely from the company because they couldn’t care less about the ad or cloud business per se. More so they might even view it as dirty. It’s a means to an end. Amass as much money (ad/cloud) as possible, get the best possible experts in CS/AI (so many phd’s) and gather every last bit of relevant information/data they can get.

It seems kind of obvious. Their goal is to organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible and useful. What better way to achieve this than to somehow create an AGI/ASI. They are certainly the best placed org to do it.

> What's surprising to me is how un-monopolistic Google's share of the Cloud + AI market is under its control, considering how many of the techniques were invented there. I'd put it at under 25%.

That's why the suit is aimed at search and search advertising

If they ever break up search and advertising GCP would immediately become the biggest cloud because of the cost of migrating the other parts of Google.

>Watershed moment in how we "price" monopolistic power. It's not "market share" or "barriers to entry" or even engaging in "anti-competitive behavior" anymore. But more about how corporations can control the free flow of information

Once the lawsuit drops I doubt this is the argument they are going to make.

This is going to be your run of the mill antitrust lawsuit. It's just making news because tech has avoided them for 30+ years.

Chip is probably one of the few spaces, where oligopoly or duopoly makes sense ( though it is still scary ). The entry barriers are not artificial. It is genuinely hard to start from the ground up just based on the level of progress made thus far.

With Google that argument is harder. A person could whip up G level search engine, mail, and maybe even youtube equivalent, but moving all those people ( but to make them consider your alternative would be impossibly painful to do ).

I will admit that NVidia and ARM scares me, but I am not sure what can be done here.

Regulation and/or state ownership?

> A person could whip up G level search engine, mail, and maybe even youtube equivalent

Hi Dunning, meet Kruger.

The "This could be built in a week-end" and "Why don't you just [something that only 1/1000 can do and takes so much time]".

Listen. I know people have a tendency to get defensive, when they believe someone insults their craft. I am not doing that. I am arguing that what google has really going for it is inertia. It is similar to the world of OS, where Windows still rules supreme. Note that DDG was built fast, but it struggles against G search engine based on familiarity. But ok, DDG has issues other than familiarity. What about Bing? MS had to actually pay people to encourage adoption. That is how strong the force of inertia really is. So yeah. I do dismiss your counter argument, because it does not address the core of mine.

I'm not being defensive and it was not my intention. I did not communicate that clearly.

Not going to dismiss the inertia parameter, but neither DDG nor Bing ever returned what I was looking for and they never were as good as Google Search for my particular searches (yes, even in private navigation). I'm not saying they're not good, I'm saying they never returned good results for me.

I can offer some anecdata. For some reason or another, Bing is better than Google for finding otherwise copyrighted work ( I was able to find Morty streams after new season came out ). My personal pet theory is that since Google was first to the game with majority market share, copyright holders and the like concentrated their effort on it. Needless to say, it is just one person's experience. I will admit that DDG still lacks in that area, but it has improved.

>It is similar to the world of OS, where Windows still rules supreme.

That's because of drivers, and drivers are because of stable kernel API.

Yeah but Nvidia and ARM are luxury goods. There is no point breaking up a monopoly of that calibre. They specialize in a niche market that affects an even more niche market.

The simple fact that I can say "google it" and colloquially anyone in the US and probably Europe would understand what I mean kind of states how dominant they are in the market.

It's trivial to use duckduckgo or bing. It's people's choice to use google. Also, you can say "kleenex" and "band-aid" and "q tip" and "vaseline" or "coke" and everyone would understand, but they have no dominance, other than some people prefer to use them. I can easily find alternatives to all of them right next to them in almost any store I go to.

It was trivial for users to use non-IE browsers on Windows in the 90s. Ease of using an alternative is not the singular or most important definition of a monopoly.

It wasn't as trivial as today. People may have had to install non IE browsers from from a disc or download from slow and flaky internet connections. Also, I think a central part of that case was also Microsoft wielding its power to force other companies to stay away from non IE browsers.

Today, we're talking about a few taps to change which search website you want to use.

I work at a company where IE is colloquial with internet. If even mention chrome it's like I just told a homeschooled christian kid that atheists exist.

What kind of company/employees? Just curious

It's basically government but the private sector version of it.

I think the shortage and performance war is happening only at the top and the market is more volatile at the mid-bottom. Besides AMD and Nvidia have been trading places if we look beyond the last few years. Not enough to base a monopoly lawsuit on.

If Nvidia actually gets to buy ARM, that's another matter. But again they can't sue based on a purchase that hasn't even gone through yet.

I think parent comment's concern about Nvidia is with respect to AI. Nobody wants a GTX 1660 for that kind of work, the high end GPU supply is the only part that matters.

Don't know if AI is a market that's big enough to catch the attention of regulators, no matter how important it is to the HN crowd.

Neither Nvidia nor ARM make fabs.

> It's not "market share" or "barriers to entry" or even engaging in "anti-competitive behavior" anymore. But more about how corporations can control the free flow of information.

But that's really the same thing. If Google bans or interferes with Fediverse apps because they compete with YouTube, that's anti-competitive behavior. If they don't and those apps gain share with people whose content keeps getting censored on YouTube, they're not very effectively controlling the free flow of information.

Censorship by an incumbent is a market opportunity for a competitor, so a corporation can only really sustain it through anti-competitive actions against the challenger(s).

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