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Comment by throwaway_kufu | Hacker News Reader

They are not just taking away internet traffic, but in the flights example, they actually acquired an aggregate flight/travel company and so they are actually entering markets and competing with their own ad customers.

Then it comes fully circle to Google unfairly using their market position vis-a-vis data, search and advertising. It’s a win-win Google lets the data dictate which markets to enter and on one hand they can jack up advertising fees on customers/competitors and unfairly build their own service into search above both ads and organic results.

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Be careful when using Google Flight, last time I checked they use significantly less margins between flights so it’s shorter trips but much riskier.

Can you elaborate on this? Do you mean shorter layovers?

It sounds like it - and third-party companies will often show you flights that involve different companies on the different legs - which can leave you in a pickle because technically each airline's job is to get you to the end of THIER flight, not the entire journey.

And sometimes with a change of airport!

I remember when in Germany some budget airlines used to say they'd fly to "Frankfurt" (FRA) but actually flew to "Frankfurt-Hahn" (HHN) - 115km away. After arrival in HHN they put you on a bus to FRA that took about 2 hours.

You can screwed any time you book a connecting flight on two different airlines even if the times aren't tight. For instance if one is cancelled.

If you use the same airline they will make sure you get to the destination.

That's true, but it can save you a ton of money. You just have to be aware of the risks and plan accordingly.

I have typically used this strategy when flying back to the US from the EU. Take an EZJet or similar low cost airline from random small EU city to a larger EU city like Paris, London, Frankfurt, etc... and book the return trip to the US from the larger city. I've also been forced to do this from some EU cities since there was no connecting partner with a US airline.

Yeah this strategy is good, but you need to allow a long layover like 6 hours if you have to go through immigration and change airports for the connection which happens pretty often with ryanair and ezjet. It’s a big pain, but it does save money.

If you're booking each leg with different carrier, I find it best to pay the little extra with kiwi.com and they give you guarantee for the connection. I missed connection twice and they always got me on the next flight to the destination for free.

in my ideal world the software ITA wrote for airlines and is now owned by Google would be in the hands of consumers and the airlines could have adapted to shifts in demand probably without the need for abrupt cessation of services and human fatigue on industry employees caused when route optimisation analysis tempts executives with what I suspect are ultimately fictitious net present savings.

The difference is mind-boggling in some cases. On one trip in 2019 I had the following coach fair choices for SFO - Moscow return trip tickets booked 3 weeks prior to departure.

* UA or Lufthansa round trip (single carrier) $3K

* UA round trip SFO - Paris + Aeroflot round trip Paris - Moscow: $1K

No amount of search could reduce the gap. I went with the second option. The gap is even bigger if you have a route with multiple segments.

https://www.airtreks.com/ will do this for you with a person. phenomenal service.

To anyone from airtreks, I love you so much!

> even if the times aren't tight

Depending on the definition of "tight" each of us have. I remember having 40mins in Munich, and that is a BIG airport. Especially if you disembark on one side of the terminal and your flight is on the far/opposite end. That's 25-30mins brisk walking. With 5000 people in-between you could as well miss your flight. No discussion about stopping to get a coffee or a snack.. you'll miss your flight.

Another approach that's interesting is "buy long, fly short". Sometimes buying A->B->C and getting off at B is cheaper than just buying A->B. But, airlines can cancel the the A->B->C flight and replace it with an A->B and A->C, and place you on the A->C flight.

It doesn't really matter if it's on the same airline, it just has to be in the same reservation. Usually, that is the same thing; however on international and hyper-local (the kind that end with a Cessna) flights you'd often have several airlines with codeshares, and you could buy two separate tickets on the same airline if you wanted.

Oh don’t worry, you have 15 on-paper minutes to go from A1 to A70 in Detroit... in January... and the shuttle is down.

Even before it gets to that point, they routinely display snippets off regular websites and show ads next to it.

Keeping users from clicking through to organic results helps them generate more revenue.

Here’a a thought: most companies don’t actually want to serve a ton of extra pages. For example, airlines just want to fly passengers. They don’t care who puts those butts in seats and they would fully acknowledge that they aren’t able to deliver a better flight search than Google can. I mean, sure, some small team of web developers at every airline is pissed, but the CEO needs butts in seats to keep the pilot and service unions off her back. Her own web dev team is the least of her problems.

Sure, but if you aren’t controlling the experience of getting butts in seats, it’s harder to upsell and make even _more_ money from those butts.

"For example, airlines just want to fly passengers. They don’t care who puts those butts in seats"

Not sure who you talked to, but I've never heard that before. They all want to sell more direct and forego GDS fees and/or other types of fees and commissions. I'd love to see a quote from an airline VP or above that they don't care about their distribution model, boosting direct sales percentages, etc.

the OP wasn't talking about google competing with airlines, but with other flight aggregating and search/booking services, by abusing their monopoly on web search.

> Google lets the data dictate which markets to enter and on one hand they can jack up advertising fees on customers/competitors and unfairly build their own service into search above both ads and organic results.

Just like Amazon with Amazon Basics.

isn't the solution to disaffective aqui - hiring the restoration of the ability to IPO companies like ITA Software so there's another way to reach financial security for talented programmer - entrepreneurs? for that matter, do the conditions for recreating the frequency of lower level programmer millionaires (hardly a family home debt free today) like Microsoft created, require the recreation also of senior executive abuse of option schemes? It seems to me that making it a reasonable chance of becoming at least financially secure for not irrational amounts of dedication and 90 weeks, and underwriting that with the greater robustness of larger companies and hence livable salaries, instead of trying to sustain the apparent startup free for all figuring to a common heat death of the advertising budgetary universe?

Aren't there anti trust laws to prevent this kind of thing?

That depends, would Google let us know?

not if they could avoid it

Yes, but they lack enforcement.

Anti-trust in the US tend to not hit the big tech players as much they do other sectors. Also there is actually a debate in the judicial system about the extent of Anti trust laws themselves.

Chicago school basically published a bunch of position papers that made feudal corporations a legal entity that "aren't monopolies" because the give things away for free. Because the consumer isn't paying, it can't be bad.

Just tell people to stop using google. Go direct.

Upvoted - regardless how pointless some people might think this comment is, it really is the ONLY way that Google is going to drop out of its aggregate lead position.

Enough people realizing Google is trapping and cannibalizing traffic to the other sites it feeds off of, and choosing to do other things EXCEPT touching Google properties, is THE ONLY way they'll be unseated.

No clear legal path to stop a bully means it's an ethical / habit path.

Not saying there's any easy way, just that this is it.

I find those little snippets actually mostly worthless, maybe because I’ve seen enough of them taken out of context or basically using a snippet from someone who figured out SEO properly, meanwhile the correct information may be down a couple links or not there at all.

Antiturst laws are hard to enforce in the United States.

Monopolies themselves aren't illegal. To be convicted of an antitrust violation, a firm needs to both have a monopoly and needs to be using anticompetitive means to maintain that monopoly. The recent "textbook" example was of Microsoft, which in the 90s used its dominant position to charge computer manufacturers for a Windows license for each computer sold, regardless of whether it had Windows installed or was a "bare" PC.

Depending on how you define the market, Google may not even have a monopoly. It's probably dominant enough in web search to count, but if you look at its advertising network it competes with Facebook and other ad networks. In the realm of travel planning (to pick an example from these comments), it's barely a blip.

Furthermore, Google can potentially argue it's not being anticompetitive: all businesses use their existing data to optimize new products, so Google could claim that it not doing so would be an artificial straightjacket.

Is web search even a "market" independent of ads?

yes

Where's the money?

That's like arguing that newspapers are not a market, because it makes money from ads.

No, I was asking if web search was a market independent of ads.

BTW, newspapers also make money from subscriptions and sales of copies, so your analogy is doubly wrong.

In collecting and selling your data to 3rd parties.

It's not that hard, we're just out of practice due to the absurd Borkist economic theories we've been operating under for 40+ years. The laws are all there if the head of the DOJ antitrust division has the gumption to go reverse some bad precedents.

> In the realm of travel planning (to pick an example from these comments), it's barely a blip.

They used their monopoly in web search to gain non-negligible marketshare in entirely unrelated industry. That's text book anti-competitive behavior.

Google can argue whatever they want, but the argument that they're enabling other businesses is a bad one. It casts Google as a private regulator of the economy, which is exactly what antitrust laws are intended to deal with.

The current anti-trust doctrine in the US has a goal of protecting consumers - not competition. What Google is doing is arguably great for consumers but awful to their competitors/other organizations. Technically, companies can simply block Google using robots.txt - but in reality that will lose them more money than the current partial disintermediation by Google is costing them - and Google knows this.

It's a tall order to convince the courts that Google's actions consumers, or is illegal: after all, being innovative in ways that may end up hurting the competition is a key feature of a capitalist society - proving that a line has been crossed is really hard, by design.

consumers are in this case the advertisers.

google has a monopoly on search ads and does enforce it, being a drain on the economy since in many fields you only succeed if you spend on search ads

> consumers are in this case the advertisers.

If someone could convince the courts that this is correct, then I'm sure Google would lose. However, I bet dollars to donuts Google's counter-arguement would be that the people doing the searching and quickly finding information are also consumers, and they outnumber advertisers and may be harmed by any proposed remediation in favor of advertisers.

googles answer to this at yesterdays hearing..

Search isnt a single category. If you break it down, they arent a monopoly. For example. 1/2 of PRODUCT SEARCHES begin on Amazon. It's probably hard to argue Google as a monopoly if who they see as their main competitor has half the market share.

That's so disingenuous there should be a new term for it.

gSplain or gWash

Anecdotally, its true for books too. Amazon is a great way to figure out which books are the best reviewed before deciding to get one (whether paper, kindle or 'other means').

The US is so behind in identifying markets in technology which is what is leading to this dominance by a few companies and their resulting monopoly like power. We had already figured out that you can be dominant in only a subset of a market. For example Disney was forced to sell off fox sports channels when it purchased fox because it already owned espn and would have dominated sports TV. That’s the thing it wasn’t even just TV but a subset, sports TV. That identification is where we are behind. As of now no, one in the FTC knows what makes a market or why say YouTube and Facebook may both show large amounts of video content but are absolutely not competitors in video content space. It is because the functions are completely different. YouTube is barely a social network at all despite having users and comments and pages. Facebook is hardly a video platform at all because it isn’t profitable for users to focus on Facebook videos and make ad money.

Which is shortsighted. If competition did not benefit consumers, there would be no need for it anyway.

Anti-trust above all recognizes competition benefits consumers. And so “unfairly competing” is prohibited, because it is bad for the market, thus bad for consumers.

Laws are one thing and enforceability another.

In fact Google had to make certain concessions in order for the Google Flights acquisition to get regulatory approval.

IIRC a Chinese firewall between Google data and Google Flights...but like many regulations they were likely written by Google lobbyists aka the industry experts. Because at the end of the day Google flights: 1. Still has the built in widget above organic results and 2. They still bid on their own ad spots jacking up costs on competition which is ultimately passed on to consumers.

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