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Comment by pcmoney | Hacker News Reader

You have multiple choices for water, dig a well, buy it from the local grocery store. Same for sewage because self composting toilets exist. Also electricity isn't a utility just use a stationary bike as a generator or buy solar panels...

Just because you have multiple choices doesn't mean something is/isn't a utility. Its pretty arbitrary. They also aren't talking about Google products (most of which are completely irrelevant aside from their ability to help Google sell ads) they are focused solely on search. Not saying they are "right" just that Google's search dominance is a thing and they use it support their own stuff. Eg: You can buy our electricity but it only "recommends" appliances we also sell

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I think you're making a category error in your analogy.

DuckDuckGo is much more like Google than "dig a well" is like municipal water.

Are those the right categories? Utilities are built (at least partially) and maintained using taxpayer money. Google acquired dominance by collecting user data. In both cases users, as a class, get access to essential services that what wouldn't have been possible without their contributions.

Utilities were also originally private competing companies and then they consolidated and the gov decided to make them regulated monopolies bec it made more sense then 10 different companies running their own electric lines. It’s possible to argue that one good search engine makes more sense vs 10 different small ok ones, the gov should step in and regulate.

I think he's not - when you look at it from the point of view of someone who wants to buy search advertisements.

Duck Duck Go doesn't come nearly close to the kind of reach Google has.

The difference between DDG and Google ads is quantitative - not qualitative.

There are at least a dozen companies you can buy water from and have it delivered to a giant storage tank made by at least 5 different companies. Or you could use a number of companies to dig a well for you.

Many people don't have access to municipal water and when I didn't, this is what I did.

Those companies aren't utility companies though.

The main, monopolistic solution of municipal water certainly is. The point is that options can still exist in a monopoly. Google still has a monopoly despite the existence competitors.

Most apartment buildings won't let you store large amounts of water on property.

I'm pretty sure those same apartment buildings wouldn't let you set up the large scale server farm required for you to set up your own search engine alternative to Google either.

That's not even remotely comparable.

Firstly it's not structurally practical to store giant tanks of water on private property. So the comparison makes no practical sense anyway.

But more, there is a significant market for private water in other properties. It's a non-trivial market which serves a significant proportion of the US population.

There is no significant market for private/non-Google search. Not only is DDG a footnote, but Google's dominance forces businesses to take steps to optimise their Google rank - or face penalties by losing access to potential customers.

Google can also remove businesses who aren't even customers from its rankings on a whim, with no redress.

It's clearly a monopoly.

When I lived in China, I didn't have the luxury of having access to Google, so I used Bing instead. It was actually quite reasonable for most of my needs, I'm not sure why more people don't give it a go. Of course, now that I live in the states again, I use Google, but most of my searching is on YouTube anyways (which was something else I didn't have access to in China).

I disagree, wells are equal to or better than municipal water, and can often be cheaper while being higher quality. the inverse can be true. the analogy holds imo.

I would like to learn more. Why is a well cleaner or higher quality than a big city municipal water supply? Is it because city water requires harsher treatment because it comes from a huge pool of waste while a well comes from a clean watershed?

It’s not. There are a ton of variables that determine the quality of your water. In many cases, well water will be significantly worse (my childhood home being a great example).

Untreated borehole water is often unsafe to for humans to drink, at least that's usually the case here in Australia.

As for cities, it depends entirely on the specific city.

The city I grew up in was supplied by a river that was unsafe to even swim in due to agricultural runoff and high levels of heavy metals from volcanic activity. Our drinking water was so heavily chlorinated that you practically needed a water filter to make it drinkable.

The city I went to university was supplied by an aquifer and modern, high quality piping. The water was such high quality, it required no treatment at all.

I'm sure there are different geographical and utility costs, but every well I've ever priced was between 25-100 years to break-even .

How long to break even after building your own search engine?

People talking like drilling a well in your backward is on par with typing in a different URL.

So how about this, the upfront cost and effort of typing in a different URL is at least a few orders of magnitude easier than drilling a well.

> So how about this, the upfront cost and effort of typing in a different URL is at least a few orders of magnitude easier than drilling a well.

That's missing the point.

Regardless of whether you personally type google.com or duckduckgo.com, most people use google and so they get directed to other Google products and don't see competing products, and that hurts competition in those spaces.

So why then isn't this an anti-trust case instead of trying to make google a public utility? It seems Ohio is throwing cases and seeing what sticks.

That's a good question, and I don't know.

Can a state bring an anti-trust case or does it have to be done by at the federal level?

> People talking like drilling a well in your backward is on par with typing in a different URL. So how about this, the upfront cost and effort of typing in a different URL is at least a few orders of magnitude easier than drilling a well.

You talking like BUILDING A POWER PLANT is on par with drilling a well in your backward.

So how about this, the upfront cost and effort of DRILLING A WELL is at least a few orders of magnitude easier than BUILDING A POWER PLANT.

---

Does that mean water shouldn't be a utility?

Or what was your point exactly?

It's relatively simple and easy to change your default search engine and/or type in a different url, in fact, it quite literally costs you $0 (as in - it doesn't cost you any more to use ddg over google), so digging a well, and the further cost of routing your pipes to pull from that underground water is infinitely more expensive to do. This is the principle behind utility companies being regulated: it's insanely expensive to do the alternative of using that utility company. Now, Apple and Google (in terms of Android) might need to be considered some sort of public utility (eg. providing an app store) since it would cost competitors tens of billions of dollars to match the existing ecosystem, but Google Search is far from being considered a utility.

The point is neither drilling a well or building your own power plant are realistic alternatives for 99% of the people. Whereas switching to ddg is a realistic alternative for 99% of the people.

Is that also a realistic alternative for a business?

To just place their ads on DDG? Where only about 2% of consumers are? And a huge part of DDG's users have ad block?

That would be a death sentence for a business, when the competitors have access to >80% of consumers on Google.

The lawsuit is about Google and their customers (the advertisers), NOT their users (who are actually part of the product Google sells).

Wells dug with modern equipment are a perfectly good alternative to municipal water - they can free one from over-regulated or poorly managed utilities. Even in the outskirts of California metros it's sometimes the only option without shelling out hundreds of thousands for extensions.

DuckDuckGo, on the other hand, is just Google with bangs, an insignificant spec compared to the latter.

Edit: DuckDuckGo US market share: 2.5% [1], US population getting their water from a well: 13% [2]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1220046/duckduckgo-searc...

[2] https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/scie...

> Wells dug with modern equipment are a perfectly good alternative to municipal water

... in certain geologic areas. And this doesn't work if you live in an apartment. I do feel like this is a big example of the "why don't you just" discussion from last week.

"Why don't you do something that works for over 40 million people all over the US" is a very far cry from "why don't you build your own power plant, datacenter, and networking infrastructure." It's a far better argument than DDG which - if my usage is anything to go by - is just a frontend for Google with convenient shortcuts to specialized searches like Github.

If you live in an apartment, you live in a multi-family building built by a developer with a lot more money than a single family can spend. They're exactly the ones who can afford alternatives, like paying the city to tear up roads and lay down a pipe to municipal water.

The point is that a well supports a tiny number of people compared to a municipal water system, but it's a real alternative. In the search engine space, DDG is just token opposition and there is no one analogous to a property developer that can afford a competitor to municipal water so it's Google or nothing.

> a frontend for Google

Bing*

Sure, but he poster is arguing that having alternatives is no reason to not declare a large company’s product a utility.

My municipality is great for wells, most houses use them, but the water company that was recently introduced is still classified a utility.

Water (or mineral) rights are often not included when you buy property within a city, too. "Just dig a well," is often literally illegal. Water rights are notoriously complicated and obscure.

"perfectly good alternative"

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

DuckDuckGo gives vastly different search results from Google. Last thing we need is the government involved in “improving” search results.

Often, cities will not allow you to use your own well, insisting you move on to city water.

Then you can also play a tragedy-of-the-commons aquifer game with all the commercial users of water in your area. Can you afford to keep making your well deeper than theirs? There are a few towns in California engaged in the resulting endgame.

Wells are regulated where I live.

Isn't DDG just a frontend for Bing? I can host my own searx instance, but that's not a real search engine and it shouldn't count IMO.

No, or at least not only. They mix a few sources.

I am on my own rainwater tanks. I don't see any reason it's not a viable alternative considering how many of us use it.

You can also go buy books and search for information without using electrons but the analogy is flawed. Your rainwater tanks do not have the economy of scale necessary to produce a natural monopoly until you build a tank and distribution system large enough to supply fresh water to an entire town, at which point it makes it difficult or impractical to compete.

To a certain extent, utilities differ in that they are regulated monopolies protected by the government. Any competing water company, for example, can’t just start running water mains without government approval. In exchange for that protection, the existing water utility incurs additional regulations, like needing approvals to raise rates and bring required to provide services to areas where it may not be profitable by itself.

Regarding your electrical example, that only works in isolation. You cannot just decide to tie your solar or generator to the grid, for example, because that utility is a regulated public good.

With tech (from search to ISPs) there are monopolies. Do they break them up or regulate them like utilities or something else? Our politicians are starting to tackle some real issues and we'll have to see how this shakes out.

Interesting perspective,thanks for sharing!

In general by government protection we just mean that they are receiving property protection from police and from local governmental offices for like water quality inspections, park maintenance, general public services like the post office, etc, right? not that the government decides anything of note for the utility/company of people who are doing their best to run things based on merit and performance and team cohesion and actual delivery of objectives? not any political shit? I ask because I'm truly afraid at what people are starting to think when they talk about government's role, at least from my age or younger and I'm probably on the younger side on this forum so I want to know what the more experienced people here think about this kind of thing.

It’s hard to answer completely because it varies by municipality and I’m not an expert. But the public utility commission does regulate quite a bit, potentially ranging from where a utility can build, how much renewable sources they must have, how much they can charge, etc.

In exchange, the utility can essentially be guaranteed that competitors will not be allowed to enter the market. In the past few decades, there has been more movement towards deregulated markets but not without issues. (See the documentary “The Smartest Guys in the Room” if you aren’t already familiar with the story of Enron).

That is a terrible argument. "Go sh*t in a chemical toiled" is not a reasonable alternative, the cost alone is ludicrous. Just have the decency and maturity to admit when you are wrong instead of arguing that you should "go dig a well" in the middle of the city. This is why we can't have reasonable conversations anymore.

You completely misunderstood the comment you're replying to. He's saying that the mere existence of alternatives does not preclude something from being a utility.

Thank you! I am also not even saying Google _should_ be a utility just that the standards for what makes something a utility candidate are not standard but rather arbitrary. Most utilities came about through lobbying one way or another not through some clinical application of rules.

I am concerned with Google's search dominance and its ability to use that to suppress and manipulate even if it is just to get me to buy something.

I pretty sure that you completely missed the point of the comment. - Woosh.

He wasn't arguing that building your own toilet is a good option - just that it exists as an option.

And the fact of options merely existing, doesn't automatically exclude something from being recognized as a utility.

>"Go sh*t in a chemical toiled" is not a reasonable alternative, the cost alone is ludicrous.

"Go buy an iPhone" is not a reasonable alternative, the cost alone is ludicrous.

Same situation, different words.

It’s actually illegal to drill a well in a municipality that provides water service. You’d have to move to a rural area.

Even if you do move to alternatives to public utilities, many areas will not allow you to disconnect from them and have a required minimum bill.

For example, If I got many solar panels and backup batteries to power my house, I would still be required to pay $5 a month to the local electric company and would not be allowed to disconnect from them.

> If I got many solar panels and backup batteries to power my house, I would still be required to pay $5 a month to the local electric company and would not be allowed to disconnect from them.

That may be true for water and gas, but is usually false for electricity.

This is nowhere near universally true

My neighbor gets city water and has a well for grey water. I live in Washington. Today you learned.

People need to stop acting like the law is the same everywhere. "X is illegal, period" is probably only true for murder and theft, and even then, with a lot of regional variations.

> You have multiple choices for water, dig a well, buy it from the local grocery store.

This is a false equivalence. Comparing Google to a municipal water system and other search engines to purchasing bottled water eliminates certain key features of the service, like water conditioning and infrastructure. I use DuckDuckGo and it is no where near the inconvenience implied by "dig a well".

Digging a well would be creating your own search engine. You can pay someone to come in an drill that well for you that doesn't exist a paid search engine.

Ddg would be like taking the water from a public fountain.

More like using the "free" fountain with a DDG logo on it with water being transferred from the nearby Microsoft fountain (but with a promise that they add their own magic sprinkly stuff to the water).

Not necessarily. I know cities where you HAVE to use their water if you want running water. No digging a well.

Move?

That costs more money

It might be out off topic, but this reminded me of one of the songs that gets recorded and released with every new version of OpenBSD[1], when we're talking about water. It's fun.

[1]https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#36

1) Google isn't carrying anything. It's your ISP that's actually carrying the bits to your house/work/phone/implants. 2) What google search is providing is literally content that they've created. I really don't see how this suit won't get dismissed on first amendment grounds.

I am not saying the suit has merit or will or won't get dismissed. I am saying Google's dominance in search and its willingness to use that to suppress/influence should make everyone want that to be a more competitive market.

It is not good that you need to pay "protection" money to Google so that your business shows up when your exact business name is searched (if your competitors buys your keywords). That is of course ok because its Google's business decision. What is less ok is that there are no new search companies making any headway in regards to market share. It is a stagnant sector of what should be a dynamic industry.

I want an endless corporate bar fight of companies trying to be better at search that works incredibly/game-changingly with any tool I have (not just Google apps).

Google has a near monopoly on search traffic.

Businesses HAVE to use Google for ads. Only placing ads on DuckDuckGo is not a viable strategy when more than 80% of all search traffic is via Google.

Google prioritizes their own products. Sometimes they even copy ideas and implement their own version of a product, and then they bump the competitors below themselves in the search results.

THAT is the problem, and why the lawsuit might hold water.

I am not aware of any city or town that has utilities and allows property owners to opt out and dig a well or put in a septic,

Maybe you could use composting toilet however you would still be required by law to hook up and maintain a connect to the public water and sewer system or the city would condemn your home

And if you are currently on a well and your municipality brings sewer or water service down your street, you are usually required to connect to them and decommission the septic system and well.

(I've heard that you can sometimes keep the well for irrigation purposes, but the house cannot be connected to it and the water cannot go down the drain.)

Or like many people put it after the Parler shutdown, build your own water station and power plant from scratch.

how do you dig a well if you live in the city? Buy water from the grocery store to take showers? cmon, this is ridiculous

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