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Comment by big_curses | Hacker News Reader

Hilarious that Yelp is criticizing Google in any way given their history of manipulating reviews and ratings, something that I find much more egregious than promoting internal products and services.

Aside from that, can someone explain to me the reason this should require any sort of legal action taken against Google? I understand people not liking this behavior, but that's a reason to stop using Google, not to form this antitrust response. Additionally, it always seems to me that actions like Google's are fine until a company becomes to big, at which point it is suddenly decided that it is unfair. Why do we even care about fairness now? Nothing about the resources one has at one's disposal ever seems fair in business. It all seems very arbitrary.

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It is because of anti-competitive behavior. Say I create a browser but Google will place big popups (and other sneaky deals) to convince or trick people to install a Google product because they dominate the search and because they can buy their way into getting sneakily installed on users devices.

If I create a Search engine I can't compete on quality with Google because they will buy the default spot on all devices, then with this money from search+ads they buy their way into other markets(video,music,file sharing).

Implementing new kinds of search results is as anti competitive as AWS implementing new kinds of dedicated services. There is no way third party solutions can compete with that, but it is unclear if it is a problem or not for AWS or Google to improve their offerings.

The issue I have with Google Search part is that it can be abused to promote Google products or Google approved information, and sometimes they scrape some information and present it as fact and out of context.

Many times I am wondering is Google pushing this youtube results on top when I search something because this results are more relevant or is because they make money from youtube views.

Could a video platform compete with youtube if Google searches will put youtube results first ?

I think even if Google does not do anything particular to gain, truth is it will earn money when people will click a Google Play game or YouTube video than a link to some random website like Wikipedia.

We should not expect business to not do what makes money. The problem is that sometimes it goes against some other values like freedom, safety, innovation.

Than it is the time to take action. This is the time when action should be taken

I think at some point AWS may be declared anti-competitive. Vertical integration can be in certain cases anti-competitive, and huge AWS bandwidth fees strongly enforce keeping everything at AWS.

> Additionally, it always seems to me that actions like Google's are fine until a company becomes to big, at which point it is suddenly decided that it is unfair. Why do we even care about fairness now? Nothing about the resources one has at one's disposal ever seems fair in business. It all seems very arbitrary.

We should probably approach it differently. Instead of targeting specific companies, implement policies to hinder all companies from growing massive.

The larger the company, the greater the power. The greater the power, the larger the impact of any possible abuses. So to prevent abuses that people can't work around easily, prevent the companies from getting too big in the first place.

Is there anything morally superior about small companies? Not really. But large companies have power inherent to their size, so we can try to level the playing field at least to balance out that power. Take away the power, reintroduce alternatives to the market, and everyone is incentivized to behave better.

I love your idea. It is an attempt of doing what politicians should try to do more often: not look at individual issues in an isolated manner, bit rather think about how to prevent them structurally by improving the system itself!!

But a large company also have drawbacks - like the lack of agility and bureaucracy and inefficiency.

If the small company really were truly better (and by a large magnitude), they would have a chance. After all, how did google beat the original behemoth of yahoo?

>>"Additionally, it always seems to me that actions like Google's are fine until a company becomes to big, at which point it is suddenly decided that it is unfair."

It's the fact that it's big what makes it unfair and scary(1). It's literally called "antitrust" (2)

(1) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_(business)#/media/File:S...

(2) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_(business)

It does make it unfair, but I don't see that as an issue in itself.

For the image in your first link, I don't see the issue as Standard Oil being powerful in itself, but rather the government having the power to create regulation and subsidies for businesses that would cause it to be a target of a trust in the first place. I believe the only way to get corporate money out of politics is to take the government out of economics completely. (of course they could still prosecute businesses for illegal action, but they could not solidify a business' power through subsidies or regulation)

You can't remove regulation, it's what keeps negative externalities in check.

>>"(of course they could still prosecute businesses for illegal action, but they could not solidify a business' power through subsidies or regulation)"

What it's an illegal or legal action comes from the power of government to create regulation. Any business at that level will have incentive to try to write the laws. They could even try to create subsidies that increase profits.

At the end of the day, you need rules, the question is who define the rules, some democratic process or money?

In a maximally capitalist system, corporations are only incentivised to make changes when those changes improve their profit generation. If environmental improvements would decrease net income, they generally won't do it on their own as it would be inefficient.

Similarly, companies won't generally elect to weaken their bargaining position with employees, such as paying higher wages, reducing working hours, providing PTO or fair hiring/firing practices.

One of the main purposes of government is to represent the will and interests of the general person, whether that's internationally or in collaboration with the companies that provide jobs.

"Similarly, companies won't generally elect to weaken their bargaining position with employees"

Agreed, but I think the force to combat this should be unions purely through collective bargaining rather than either side using regulation backed by the monopoly on force that is the government.

"One of the main purposes of government is to represent the will and interests of the general person"

I hold a stripped back view of the government. That it's proper function should only be to protect the rights of individuals via it's monopoly on force. Of course, 'what are an individual's rights?' is a whole other conversation. The government does provide many legitimate services, but they are things that I think can, and should, be done privately. The fact that the government has the monopoly on force is one of the reasons why it's purview should be so restrained.

Being Big isn't the criteria - monopolies in that sense are allowed. Exploiting a monopoly position to advantage oneself is what brings the specter of antitrust.

Being big is what makes economically interesting to do lobbying, regulatory capture, and tax optimization.

Again, those come under using your size advantage to become big, which is currently not treated harmfully.

> that actions like Google's are fine until a company becomes to big

Thats literally how anti-trust laws works. Once a company gets too big, certain anti-competitive actions become illegal.

> Why do we even care about fairness now?

It is not really about fairness. Instead, it is that if a company is large enough, certain actions negatively effect the market much more.

If a company is large, then people have few other others, and anti-competitive actions have a worse effect on the market.

If a company is small, it doesn't matter very much if a company is behaving anti-competitively, because people can just use a competitor.

Thats the justification.

> It all seems very arbitrary

Far from it. We know that markets perform best when there is lots of choice. Monopolies are bad for various reasons, but one of them is that it can be leveraged to gain a monopoly in other markets, as described by a sibling comment.

This is market economy 101, you could read up on the context of anticompetitive legislation.

This (never officially released) FTC report from 2012 does a pretty job explaining why it's illegal. http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/

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