Comment by hardtke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hardtke | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The media reporting as well as Google's response is entirely focussed on the consumer monopoly on search, but the DOJ complaint focusses equally on potential anti-competitive practices in the search advertising market. The DOJ describes the situation well here:

110. There are barriers to entry in these advertising markets that protect Google’s advertising monopolies. Most critically, search advertising of any kind requires a search engine with sufficient scale to make advertising an efficient proposition for businesses. Specialized search engines require significant investment, including the cost of populating and indexing relevant data, distribution, developing and maintaining a search algorithm, and attracting users. Search advertising of any kind also requires (1) a user interface through which advertisers can buy ads, (2) software to facilitate the sales process, and (3) a sales and technical support staff. The same barriers to entry that apply to general search services also protect Google’s general search text advertising monopoly.

Declaring search advertising an illegal monopoly would not only open up the possibility for structural changes (requiring them to license the search advertising to other search engines, giving aggregators the ability to buy search advertising on google.com) but also exposes them potentially to large payments to advertisers who have been harmed in the past.

These arguments are so weak, if arguments like these hold we have similar analogies in other domains.

> search advertising of any kind requires a search engine with sufficient scale to make advertising an efficient proposition for businesses.

So does creating OSs. Let me make a similar statement on OSs: "selling OS of any kind requires certain scale with sufficient number of apps, for manufacturers to bundle your OS and app developers need the scale of OS to make it worthwhile for them to create apps".

Remember Windows Phone Catch 22. They created an OS which was reviewed well, seemed like a fresh take on UIs. But apps didn't come or came late, often buggy and not fixed in time. In the end it was never able to compete on apps.

> Specialized search engines require significant investment, including the cost of populating and indexing relevant data, distribution, developing and maintaining a search algorithm, and attracting users.

Didn't Siri and Alexa do exactly this to entrench their position in market. In fact voice search engines(assistants) often come as non changeable defaults.

In case of Siri it comes by default on more than a billion Apple devices.

The only way we exclude these from our discussion is if we go by a very narrow definition of search, these are here to stay and will possibly dominate search behaviour.

Keep in mind, the arguments are likely based on legal precedent, and not necessarily popular opinion or conventional wisdom.

I'm not disagreeing with you per se. Simply pointing out that legal stuff like this is a chess match. It's also unlikely the accused would go too far to tip their hand in terms of their defense.

Your analogies ignore the advertisement part of what you are quoting. Selling an OS doesn't require any particular scale at all, selling ads to display within an OS would.

> Selling an OS doesn't require any particular scale at all

It does require scale to build an OS, have appealing devices that ship with the OS and have apps that developers write because they can make money. How the OS is monetized makes no difference.

Look at Kindle as an example. Kindle has an ad subsidized model along with no ads one. Would Amazon even make the model work if they weren't big and didn't have other stuff to sell through it?

Look at game consoles, the cost of device and OS is subsidized by the cut Sony and MS receive from games. Would this model even work if they had no money or games to sell?

I will again circle back to Siri to make my point again. Apple is rumoured to be working on a search engine, this along with alrwsdy default Siri as a voice search engine. How do you think Apple is paying for all the cost of building and running this? Revenue they earn by selling devices. Can someone even compete to them using the same model if they don't have an OS or hardware to sell? Definitely no.

If we accept these analogies then a lot of tech companies are susceptible to analogous accusations.

Linux, the kernel, is free.

Haiku is written by volunteers (and before them BeOS challenged Microsoft due to exclusivity contracts required of OEMs).

TempleOS was written by a single person.

There are literally dozens of operating systems baked into all kinds of things that have small or volunteer dev teams. QNX, VxWorks, IOS (the Cisco one), the multitude of Unixes and BSDs, boutique/experimental ones like SkyOS or ReactOS.

Would anyone buy Playstation OS apart from a console? I don't know if there's a market for that (how is SteamOS going?). There might not be consumer demand, but a B2B offering could result in a sustained business.

Companies used to provide an OS to sell hardware. Linux mostly consolidated that market, but that doesn't mean there isn't room for more (macOS, remarkably, is still rocking 35 years later).

Linux required scale. It being free doesn't negate the requirement for a large group of contributors and corporate donors. Haiku OS doesn't have many serious users or use cases even after 18 years of development. I really appreciate the work they do but it shows how incredibly tough it is to make an operating system for the masses. TempleOS is definitely not something anyone uses except to try out the weird OS they heard about. It won't even run on my hardware without virtualization. QNX made by blackberry, IOS as you stated Cisco for its own hardware, VxWorks by TPG Capital and also an RTOS so not consumer hardware. SkyOS not in development for more than 10 years and never popular and ReactOS is intended to be binary compatible with an existing popular OS so even though it won't be popular it would be leveraging existing ecosystem of apps and resources.

I don't know what point you are trying to raise with playstation OS.

MacOS is developed by a 2 trillion dollar enterprise.

The point is not that OS can't be built without scale but rather that for a consumer OS ecosystem of applications and other resources and hardware choices are concerns that are really tough to solve without scale and thus the market consolidated to only a few popular players.

I think the argument could be made if it is talking about it's integration of search advertising with other types of ad sales. But yeah, if it's just talking about having the best search engine and selling ads on it, that's been the entire business of search engines since the beginning of the internet.

All that says is that running a business is hard. It doesn't say anything about uncompetitive practices.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com