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Comment by kens | Hacker News Reader

> 15 years ago, IBM was far from being a monopoly

I think some historical background is necessary here. Nowadays IBM isn't a monopoly but during the 20th century, IBM was more or less a monopoly. IBM's antitrust problems go back to their 1936 consent decree and 1956 consent decree. IBM was subject to a huge antitrust case that went on from 1969 to 1982 as well as many other antitrust lawsuits.

The first point is that of course IBM and other at-risk companies will have training to keep people from writing things that will cause antitrust problems. (Their antitrust case had 30 million pages of discovery.)

Second, antitrust cases hinge on the "market" (as a legal term), so it's not surprising that Google wants employees to avoid using that word. In an antitrust case, each side will argue over what is "the market", and you don't want to lose the case because of a random email discussing the "market". Google's recommendation to say "Area" instead of "Market" hardly limits thought, but it makes a big different in antitrust.

Third, I don't want to go all CLS, but antitrust law is pretty much incoherent and illogical. Even after the antitrust case against IBM ended (by fizzling out after 13 years), nobody agrees on whether IBM was violating antitrust laws or not.

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No question that anti-trust is currently pretty much incoherent.

One frustration is that it has morphed from things around consumer harm to a new focus on harm to other ... businesses.

Google downranks some crappy content farm / shopping aggregator - bam - antitrust complaint. Yes, it hurt that business and so helps google shopping - but no one asks - do users like these crap content farms? Same with google finance - I liked it. Now google can't prioritize that - even through I want it and so I get sent to a giant ad laden garbage fest of another finance / stock quote site.

The other issue consumers no longer have any leverage with respect to very large businesses and govt is no where. So Apple can build a very valuable offering by playing "cop" in their closed garden. That is a consumer benefit.

In other words, you individually would never be able to negotiate a deal where someone would let you sign up for their service anonymously, but apple can force that.

They can force trials signups to have full details of renewals (same font).

They can force folks to allow you to cancel subscriptions without huge advance warnings and will remind you of subscriptions in advance. Yes, this sucks for developers, but the consumer is helped by these steps.

Until govt steps in, I'd love for them to back off on folks creating these places where the tons of crap the govt allows on the broader internet is not permitted.

> Now google can't prioritize that - even through I want it

Of course they can: they could let you opt-in to this specific facet of customised search results. The general issue is about the default search results.

> morphed from things around consumer harm to a new focus on harm to other ... businesses.

As far as I know, it is actually the focus on "consumer harm" that is, well was, the new thing, introduced in the 1980s under Reagan, and it largely gutted antitrust law. And that was exactly the purpose.

For much of that history, including the seminal breakup of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in 1911, the ruling antitrust theory was “harmful dominance.” That’s the idea that companies that dominate an industry are potentially dangerous merely because they are dominant. With dominance comes the ability to impose corporate will on workers, suppliers, other industries, people who live near factories, even politicians and regulators.

The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 saw the rise of a new antitrust theory, based on “consumer welfare.” Consumer welfare advocates argue that monopolies can be efficient, able to deliver better products at lower prices to consumers, and therefore the government does us all a disservice when it indiscriminately takes on monopolies.

https://wolfstreet.com/2021/08/14/antitrust-bombshells-in-th...

Monopolies in the long term tend to lead to higher prices because without good competition what’s the incentive to sell with low profit margins? So, sell cheap for years, kill any competition, then the market is yours and you can do whatever you want to the inevitable detriment of the consumer. The consumer also looses in monopolies.

But the complaints against apple have focused on things they do that at least too me seem helpful and a positive part of my experience with apple. I feel MUCH more comfortable spending money via apple then I do almost anywhere else.

Software on the web - endless issues buying / refunding / renewing.

And if I don't like apple (which only has like 15% market share) I can switch to any number of android phones.

It's just weird seeing the FTC going after a player that is generally doing things consumers like. Meanwhile, android phones ship with rom loaded rootkits / trackers / overlays and app stores and what do we hear from FTC? Crickets - literally.

But there's a lot that would help consumers that Apple conspicuously don't do.

It took them ages to deal with kids making unauthorised in app purchases and AFAIK they still haven't dealt with scam apps and scam subscriptions ($150/year QR code scanning app).

Consumers would appreciate PWAs but it doesn't suit Apple's corporate strategy so they are poorly supported.

You can't pay through the Netflix or Kindle app due to their ridiculous rules.

They look for ways to keep market dominance and move into more markets and then they think about consumer benefits they can add on the side.

I might add, Apple could kill the market for stolen iPhones (by preventing a phone from working when they get a bona ride police report) but they don’t.

If apple allowed other stores on their phones you could still buy exclusively from apple. All your applications to could have a "verified by apple" sticker.

Nothing prevents apple from providing the exact same experience and still have a setting in the phone that allow third party markets from installing their applications. It would be just like the app store in windows.

> Nothing prevents...

Nothing prevents you working 10 minutes a day on something I want you to do - and yet I suspect you will not.

Apple has proven to be the most competent organisation on the planet, in the 50 odd year history of mobile phones, at getting consumers what they want. Suggesting that they should run things some other way needs some much stronger arguments and is going to be highly debatable.

To get to this point they've taken on all the major tech giants, the mobile phone industry, the telecoms and various foundational web technologies (including Flash, happily) and out-competed anyone in the business of making profits. At every step of the way they proved to be much better at anticipating what was a good idea than everyone. Much more serious voices were made to look foolish than the backseat drivers.

If you don't want what Apple is selling, buy something else.

Buy what? There's only Apple and Google and they collude to dominate the market.

I think you make a good point (sorry to see it looks like you are getting downvoted).

Apple has CONSISTENTLY chosen to go outside norm. For example, carriers wouldn't let you have more than 10 songs on their devices? Carriers putting crapware on devices? Carriers making you do contracts to get a specific device?

Apple took all that on - and I was happy for it. You can buy an unlocked iphone for most iphones outside of carrier channels, and you don't need to worry too much about who you buy from because apple doesn't let carriers screw with device.

One interesting pattern is the criticize and then copy pattern. Folks are 1) outraged at a change apple is making and then 2) rush to copy it.

I hate the lack of a headphone jack personally (was amazing for low latency audio work). But I can't deny that literally almost every company that criticized them then COPIED them on this.

I expect the same thing with their move away from more chargers in the box. Lots of outrage and criticism, then folks will probably copy them.

I do wish lighting cables had become a standard. The USB-C port is just less solid when plugged in - I have lots more problems with it for some reason (stuff getting inside cable, loose fitting etc etc.

Monopolies also breed more monopolies.

If there is only one buyer/seller then in order to fight their price making power, you can’t form a cartel (illegal price collusion!) but you can consolidate into another monopoly and push the monopoly price making power elsewhere in your benefit.

> One frustration is that it has morphed from things around consumer harm to a new focus on harm to other ... businesses.

This is the root of most hullabaloo around Apple, isn’t it? Many of the things they do, like limiting exploitation by third-party payment systems (e.g. which rarely offer refunds for regretful purchases, unlike the App Store which always complies) or hiding your email from personal data farmers, ultimately benefit consumers, but of course Apple’s competitors would love to break those walls down and invade the garden.

It's interesting because the coalition for "app fairness" is a whose who almost of folks who have repeatedly paid fines / penalties (which barely covers the cost) for their billing and other practices.

We already know how the other guys do it, they screw you. must cancel 30 days in advance or you get a 1 year renewal. Meanwhile, when I delete an app that has a subscription apple reminds me and suggests cancelling subscription!

The problem is individuals have NO / ZERO leverage in these deals these days. This is not your corner grocer. Match Group etc are major companies - and yes, they will do everything they can to extract every $, long term brand strength be darned.

How would a consumer know that they are "harmed" by Google's shenanigans when those shenanigans involve deleting the competition before it gets the chance to compete? This sounds like a catch 22 type of definition of monopoly. Businesses need competition for the free market to work properly.

No rational person is going to see “Area” in this context as anything but a synonym for “Market.”

Especially when Google is distributing documentation saying to use the word "Area" explicitly instead of "Market."

IANAL but it seems that it would succeed in requiring an additional layer of argumentation that “area” is code for “market”. My rough sense is that nothing is trivial in cases like this, but how difficult would it be to argue this?

Las I checked judges don't love it when you try to be clever or cute.

Establishing the use of the word "market" in an email is not the end goal. The end goal is establishing the violation of US antitrust laws by, e.g. buying out the competition and taking actions that unreasonably restrict trade (generally in your competitors' goods/services).

But there are two ways to hold a company to account. One is a civil mechanism, producing civil penalties and consent decrees (or damages, maybe?). The other is by the prosecution of a criminal offence. Enforcement via the latter is harder to do. It requires showing the actions were done intentionally, just like every criminal prosecution. It also has a very high standard of proof. Using the word "crushing the competition" in the context of buying competitors or engineering them out of the first page of search results is evidence of that. Google doesn't want exposure to criminal liability. It is undoubtedly harder to prove they did this stuff intentionally if they deliberately refrain from talking about it and do it in winks and nods.

I don't know what you're referring to by "try to be clever or cute" but using these language guidelines to decode discovered materials and show a criminal intent to do things that constitute criminal violations of antitrust law is not cute, and neither is relying on the absence of directly incriminating language to absolve yourself.

"Your honor, my case is kawaii. The defense rests."

In all seriousness, a clever argument can be very good, as long as it's also solid. Not mutually exclusive.

q: why do you ask people to use the word area instead of market?

a: Because imprecise language clouds thinking and makes things less intelligible, and Google is a company that makes its money from intelligence. People have been incorrectly referring to areas as markets, in order to better communicate we laid down guidelines. We often lay down guidelines about corporate communications to heighten their efficiency, as do other companies

on edit: I'm not saying that this is true, but one can easily make an argument as to why you use area instead of market in communication and ask your workers to do likewise. I would think the courts would require more evidence than that.

You're suggesting that an answer which explicitly makes "area" a synonym for "market" is a defense against the suggestion that using "area" is an attempt to obfuscate that they're really referring to "market". That, uh, doesn't add up.

Using area still murk the waters. Some people may be legitimately meaning something other than market when they say area. So it's not really possible to say that every market occurrence can be replaced with market in the internal emails. This is not the definitions section of a contract, it's a guideline. So, it's probably still worth doing. If they don't, then people using market have 100% chance of meaning market, whereas after the guideline, usage of area has less than 100% chance of meaning market and being accepted like so.

It’s not that complex. Judges aren’t computers, and the words of a law are not an imperative program that judges “execute” against the evidence and arguments. The attempted ruse isn’t that clever, and it’s more likely to piss a judge off than wow him or her.

That's true, but if this didn't make news then what would've happened in the future? Thousands, millions maybe, of documents talking about areas and no mention of markets make discover more difficult for a future anti-trust case.

Okay, but we can agree that IBM powered the holocaust, and that those tattoos on survivor’s arms represented the punch cards for IBM systems, right?

Because really, when there’s a profit to be made, American companies are there to fill a “need”, right?

What point are you trying to make?

Every corporation has secrets they’d like to hide. No one is beyond reproach.

I don’t think anyone is disputing that — but every thing Google is doing is the result of fallible humans acting in pursuit of profit.

It doesn’t matter who or when. What matters is that people put aside their ethics in pursuit of profits. I think that needs to end.

</soapbox>

That's horrifying. I was not aware. The horror is hundreds of IBM employees were directly involved in extermination activities; literally maintaining tabulation machines on prem, as it were, in the camps.

I hope every HN reader has the awareness and moral strength to resist, where the corporations are unable, the next time such à job comes.

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/52879

I wouldn't get my hopes up. The number of times I've seen people, even here, equate legality and morality is frightening.

> I wouldn't get my hopes up. The number of times I've seen people, even here, equate legality and morality is frightening.

I have literally never seen anyone here argue that "murder and genocide isn't morally wrong if it is legally right".

Are you sure you aren't equivocating "I don't support $FOO political position" with "I support murder and genocide"?

Because I have seen a number of people argue that some aspect of their personal moral code, which isn't currently written into law, should be written into law and enforced on the rest of the people who don't have that moral code.

No, I wasn't even thinking of political positions. I'm not trying to dog-whistle around red-tribe/blue-tribe signaling, I actually mean what I said. I was in a comment thread some time ago about the ethics of self-driving cars. Another user believed that they should base the decisions of who to save on the cultural mores, history, and laws of the region where they are sold. On the one hand, it's hard to see a business doing otherwise. On the other, that's exactly how we get Zyklon B and legal slavery in the third world.

I was discussing the trolley problem with a lawyer a few years ago, and her conclusion to the dilemma, no joke, was literally "It depends if I would be legally culpable in the country I'm in." Which is a very legalistic, and utterly amoral answer.

My apologies, I read your comment more uncharitably than you intended.

> Another user believed that they should base the decisions of who to save on the cultural mores, history, and laws of the region where they are sold.

This brings up a different issue: the product will then be considered amoral in the particular region that it is deployed in. That's the problem with using "morals" as a yardstick - it's too subjective because every culture has their own set of morals, and these morals change over time anyway.

For a product sold in multiple regions, it makes sense to follow the cultural mores of that region. If you don't like their morals, don't do business with them.

I wonder how much has been spent over the years suppressing this?

Wait till you read about Academi or McKinsey.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/world/asia/mckinsey-china... https://www.propublica.org/article/new-york-city-paid-mckins... https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/07/01/blackwaters-descendants...

Holy shit, that's an incredible story. I live right in front of Auschwitz and I had no idea.

Also that quote from the article, from IMB's spokesman:

"We are a technology company, we are not historians."

That's fucking rich. Imagine Bayer saying the same when questioned if their company used to make Zyklon B.

It sounds like German employees in Germany and it’s territories working for the german subsidiary did work for the German government yes, and after the war was declared they did some very shady stuff. Similarly American citizens working for German companies in America did work for the US government during the war.

I don’t really see what’s surprising about any of this. The implication seems to be that the US directors of IBM were supposed to do something about it, but I’m not sure what.

Of course if some of these contracts for the concentration camps and such were tendered during peacetime, and this was known and it was possible for the US operation to exercise oversight, that would be incredibly damning.

Are you just guessing though? There certainly was coordination between IBM in the US and IBM in Nazi Germany even during the war. Look at IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black for example.

We can argue about the scale of involvement and its meaning, but if you're not just speculating you should mention a source.

My apologies, I thought it was clear I was speculating. Hence "sounds like" and "that would be incredibly damning". Thanks for the reference.

Americans will fuell all sides of the conflict to reap the financial and political profits, disregarding human lives including unaware civilians. With their official army, intelligence agencies, corporations, and many other entities we have no clue about.

The fascinating part of the deal of IBM with Nazi Germany is that it boils down to _tracking_of_individuals_. Their personal profile, location, capabilities, health status.

Please don't take HN threads into flamewar like this. It's generic and predictable, and therefore off topic.

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

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> antitrust law is pretty much incoherent and illogical

Most things antitrust are incoherent and illogical. The unofficial plan seems to be literally to find market leaders who are offering substantially better products than the competition and then attack them for unspecified and likely immeasurable gains. Whether or not we've seen benefits from past antitrust actions, I don't believe measurements and observations of the actual outcomes are part of the debate. There is just an assumption that because they happened and big companies are bad ergo the outcome must have been good.

The article alludes to Google's 92% search engine market share as some sort of concealed monopoly. As a problem, this doesn't make sense! There is absolutely nothing stopping anyone switching to another search engine except the other search engines aren't generally very good. Google is better at providing search results than they are. Or presumably it is, I don't know since I stopped using Google Search a long while ago. This is a monopoly only in the sense that everyone agrees Google is a better option.

The problem with Google is that it is likely integrated with the US intelligence services. No antitrust suit is ever going to attack that; because it is the part that the government supports.

Once upon a time US regulators recognized that limited competition and market dominance can be a problem all by themselves, for their chilling effect on innovation. Unfortunately under Reagan the DOJ changed their policy and started arguing that concrete consumer harm has to be demonstrated for a business to be subject to antitrust. That’s a much higher bar. Imagine trying to build the modern internet under a telco monopoly, and trying to argue that consumers were being harmed because internet access was limited. Who would even want internet access under those circumstances?

The same is true of Google. It’s hard to show concrete harm (though wrecking flight search counts for me) when we have no counterfactual to consider. For example, in a truly competitive display ad market (instead of a duopoly), maybe our civilization would have figured out that display ads are a waste of money and consumer product manufacturers and retailers would stop buying them. But it’s hard to know. This is why we should go after any company that is dominant in any market.

Helpfully this is exactly the sort of argument I'm complaining about. The basic form is "the regulators did this", its "hard to show concrete harm" but therefore "we should go after any company that is dominant in any market".

If we skip to the handwave, what is and how solid is the evidence that the regulator's actions were sensible? Targeting the most competent company for harassment is, on the face of it, a bad strategy.

> Imagine trying to build the modern internet under a telco monopoly

"Before the 1996 Act was passed, the largest four ILECs owned less than half of all the lines in the country while, five years later, the largest four local telephone companies owned about 85% of all the lines in the country." [0]

Yeah, that'd be really hard. But the major problem is poor regulation creating monopolies/incentives for them. The correct approach is to go for the root cause - competition stifling regulation - rather than setting up monopolies and then ineffectually trying to fight them in courts.

"Antitrust" is a distraction from the actual problem - bad regulation and incentives. And if the coversation revolved around actual attempts at showing evidence the antitrust stuff is hard to sustain. The examples are trivial. People on HN were whinging about Google removing an alert box in Chrome the other week.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996

The problem with this is that I can't really point to a competition-stifling regulation that actually benefits Google.

Copyright and patent law would be the closest thing, but Google's core business isn't selling licensing agreements. They owned the search market way before Android was even a public project, much less the open-core monstrosity it is today. Google got to where it is because it legitimately hunted the rest of it's competitors into extinction, not because it got better at throwing red tape at them.

Can you point to actual harm done by Google that people can't walk away from?

I've been working to untangle myself from them for a while. It isn't particularly hard, there are just a lot of really good services that need to be replaced.

The only thing I can't evade is the constant snooping all over the web. And that isn't something antitrust regulators are going to be dealing with.

> Can you point to actual harm done by Google that people can't walk away from?

The idea that things such as access to information, mailbox, applications, storage, … should not cost you any money and that it’s acceptable (for the few people who even know) to pay with a log of every move you do.

Just go read any paid app reviews on any of the App Store to read tons of comments like « 1/5 It’s not free ».

In what way did they wreck search? If I’m going to a new city, I usually start on Google flights and find it okay to good.

If I need more, I’ll go to a specific carrier’s site or to Matrix, but I’m usually using Google to get the overview picture (and it seems to work well).

Google recently removed use of its sync API (and others) from Chromium. What you call a "search engine" is really a vast network of integrated services that Google can pull the plug on at any moment for any reason.

If you want to make money from your site/channel, you pony up to Google's ad services to get ads from Google's ad networks to show up higher in Google's search engines so your customers with Google accounts can easily sign into your site running Google's authentication and feed metrics back into Google's web browser that's optimized for Google content. That's some kind of vertical integration, baby.

I'm deliriously sleepy, but I'm sure I got like, 70% of that right. I don't want to just de-Google, I want to be able to extricate and cordon off it and everything related to it on the web like I do with Facebook. But how?

Monopolies aren't necesarily bad in-and-of-themselves. The trouble starts when a monopoly in one market is used to gain an advantage in another.

So, having a monopoly in the search engine market isn't necessarily a problem (especially given the low switching costs you noted), but leveraging that monopoly to compete with non-search-engine companies by essentially choking off their search engine traffic is a BIG problem.

The exact means used that results in said choking-off may or may not matter (this is where the incoherence pops up), but the fact is that the conduct of any company with a monopoly (including entirely legitimate and legal ones) MUST face additional scrutiny for how it affects other markets.

When it was just starting out, Google was proud of how quickly users left Google search results by clicking a link. AFAICT, that didn't change until sometime well after AdWords was introduced (in fact, how quickly users left was an AdWords selling point and increased competition for the top ad slots), but at some point, Google started cannibalizing their SERP traffic in various ways. It was going to bite them in the ass sooner or later.

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