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Comment by sharikous | Hacker News Reader

Good for you I guess.

I replaced Google search with Brave and DDG, Google Docs is not so useful for me (bad support for math formulas) and Gmail is just a default service I use from a client

I don't happen to see much value in the product you mention. The main reason I use them is because of inertia and the need to jump through hoops with my Android phone to use alternatives.

And interestingly I see Facebook and Whatsapp as very valuable for keeping in contact with people I am physically far from.

So I guess my experience is sort of the opposite

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I wanted to build a science paper research platform, and math support was big on the list, the outlineapp team had an open issue to support LaTeX. You might be interested in that as a docs replacement maybe

I agree, WhatsApp is (or was historically) a great product I got value from.

Unfortunately I think Facebook's incentives will compromise the product's quality. It's why many move to signal and telegram.

Doesn't Brave just take its results from google? They are pretty hard to avoid, being an effective monopoly.

> They are pretty hard to avoid, being an effective monopoly.

Im confused by this claim. Is it really that difficult to avoid Google search? It seems to me that it just requires going to bing.com, or changing the default search in your browser.

Also, Brave Search uses its own index, not google results.

Agreed, they are not a monopoly in any sense of the word. They're just considerably better than their competition, and it's absurdly easy to choose whichever search service you like, so almost everyone chooses Google.

It's the same with facebook, nearly everyone else is already there, so if you want to connect to people that's where you go. They just hit critical mass first.

The word monopoly gets thrown around as though it just means 'big and bad'. It's wooly thinking that's polluting the debate by obscuring what's actually going on. Missing the mark like that just detracts focus from actual pertinent criticisms of the harm these companies actually do, or what needs to happen to resolve those issues.

https://www.competitionpolicyinternational.com/why-is-it-cal...

Y'all needy to either be way more pedantic, or back off a bit, but staying at the level you're at is completely missing the point most people have taken to referring to with the word ’monopoly'.

There’s certainly some cartel-like behaviour going on, such as the recently uncovered collusion between Facebook and Google in the ad markets. That has to be stamped on.

I’m a little uneasy about Facebook owning WhatsApp, but I can’t see any concrete way they are able to use that to significantly exclude competition.

I just don’t see how Google is leveraging its other properties in significant ways to exclude say Bing or DDG. I use Google docs and gmail, but what has that got to do with whether I use Google search or Bing?

What anti-trust action do you think is needed, and what is it’s desired outcome? I don’t know what ‘breaking up Facebook ’ really means, except maybe making them sell WhatsApp. What would that achieve?

The essence of anti-trust is killing vertical integration, or at least keeping that integration from getting so deep it's harmful to the ability to maintain a healthy marketplace.

When you start to see all eggs start to get destined for one basket (Facebook, Amazon, Google, or Microsoft), and especially in Google's or Apple's case of buyout and extinguish, you have a problem.

Amazon is also right on top of that precarious position as well; sitting on top of and utilizing third-party sales data to front-run. It's not just about harm to the consumer, it's harm to the market as a whole.

The case of Tech in particular is fascinating, because what their service offerings enable is apparently highly destabilizing to the very authorities that would regulate them.

And no, Tech isn't the only sector on my sh*tlist. Media consolidation has gotten rather out of hand as well in my opinion. Walmart has also started to devastate the dairy industry for everyone but the industrial ops as well after buying out one of the big packaging outfits.

OK, I'll ask again. What action do you think needs to be taken, and how would it improve the market for users? How should be prevent these companies from being monopolies, accepting for a moment that they are.

I still don't know what "break up Google" or "Break up Facebook" actually means and how that would help. There are bits of them you could forcefully spin off, but so what?

Simple. You (a company) do one thing. You do not absorb other companies and extinguish them. Somebody else does the same thing you do, but a bit different? Want to merge? Bend over, cuz here comes the part where you have to painstakingly prove why you merging with them is good, and won't subject the market to crippling hyperoptimization forces.

Walmart took control of pricing in the dairy sector causing small operations to no longer be able to compete, propped up by income from other revenue streams. Google has basically set up a value desert around itself as far as advertising goes. As a knock on, it's extinguished potential competitor/disruptor after disruptor. Facebook has absorbed and integrated personal info on a gargantuan scale with the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions.

Action items off the top of my head: Alphabet gets dissolved. Facebook calves off Instagram/WhatsApp. Bare minimum.

Start an investigation into how vertical integration of brick and mortar grocers and packaging Industries effects actors in that space.

Murdoch I'd have to do more research on, as he's a relatively recent arrival on my list.

Amazon gets to decide if it's going to be a logistics company, or a platform for the sellers, or it's own "brick and mortar"-like. If marketplace, no using third-party seller for order flow analysis and front running. AWS gets calved, period.

The bigger you get, the more regulators take a stake in shaping your growth, to the breaking point. Thems the breaks. Stay small if you want to do it your way. Risk becoming national infrastructure/utility as the numbers of M&A's increase.

It's not all stick though. A company can do a strategic "merge-and-release" whereby for a short period of time, a company can acquire another, help it scale, then calve off after a period. After a certain size point, this is the only arrangement by which consolidation can happen. Calving off of industrial verticals is required for further permanent merger activity to continue.

The end goal of this doctrine is to keep network effects at bay. Once you start getting snowball effect, your shareholder's needs take second place to stakeholder's needs. Period. It is insane how effective a one way wealth funnel our system can become once we stop trustbusting.

Oh, every telecom merger in the past 10 years gets audited, and gets subjected to a public review. Any found to have not significantly increased in the benefit delivered to the end user gets an asset auction, loses eligibility for bidding on municipal projects, all last mile municipal ISP bans are nulled.

I'd throw in a day in the stocks as a target of rotten vegetation in the town square for lobbyists that have been intentionally obtuse, but I really don't think that's within the realm of possibility.

All of this is liable to change if someone would be interested in hiring me for a reasonable sum to map it all out full-time complete with authority to engage in legal discovery to get what info I don't have access to that'd actually make anything in this post more than frustrated pontificating.

I get you on Amazon, they are abusing their function as a market platform for others and that needs cracking down on. That's not really anything to do with being a monopoly, it's just abuse, I suppose being dominant makes it easier to do it. That's not going to stop them dominating the market though, just stop them abusing that dominance.

How does spinning off google's non-search businesses address the dominance of Google search? I don't see how gmail or docs makes any difference to that. I don't see how making Youtube a separate company benefits youtube users.

How does spinning off Instagram and whatsApp from the facebook social network make any difference to anything? The facebook social network would still be dominant. It would make no difference to their ability to collude with google on ads, those are completely orthogonal issues.

I'm not saying these companies aren't dominant in their market segment. They should not be allowed to abuse that dominance through e.g. coluding on ad placement. Regulation and enforcement is needed. However nothing you have suggested would make any difference to the dominance of google search or of the facebook social network. I also don't see how it would benefit users.

Can anyone who buys the idea that google search is a monopoly, or that facebook social network is a monopoly, tell me how they would end those monopolies, why they would do it, and what the benefits would be?

With Google Search, your Ad dominance is tightly coupled to the effectiveness of the search engine. The actual effectiveness nowadays of Google Search as a finder of information is secondary to the brand recognition and that everyone reaches for it. Separating those two interests keeps the incentives aligned. Google search has been made strictly worse through the tight integration of the advertising functionality. The other issue with Google is the tendency to acquire and kill potential competitors. This inhibits a truly competitive marketplace. Yes, denormalization of market task introduces inefficiency in resource consumption, but increases systemic resilience and overall opportunity for gainful employment. It also creates career mobility, and prevents issues created by non-competes which have been well known to cripple or otherwise hobble skilled employees in rather small or highly consolidated industrial verticals.

YouTube? Society gains by not having a company ultimately accountable to the same exact people. The virtue of the Free Market is that regression to the mean makes sure the system remains healthy since you've got a larger sampling of capital allocators. When you start seeing the same faces over and over again leading most of the big names in Tech when you track the actual corporate hierarchy, you have a problem. We're also coming out of a period of huge pushing into n young people to get a college education to prepare them for dealing with non-trivial issues of balancing the nuances of a healthy business through whatever specialized vertical they have. You don't need more consolidation. That's the opposite of what you want unless you are literally trying to get entrepreneurial talent to pursue other directions; a task made more difficult by hyperoptimization contagion created by having to compete with overly consolidated market actors.

Spinning off WhatsApp and Instagram rips out large chunks of social graph from Facebook, or would if you enforced the split up to include a cleansing of their dataset of any data acquired through those acquisitions. To be clear, I am not a nice understanding trust buster. If you've attracted my attention to the point these companies have, this will hurt. I don't care how impractical or unfair it seems.

I've thought about this for quite a long time actually. Impractically so. It's not exactly something anyone ever comes and asks you about though.

I kinda wish more people would. Older I get the more fascinating these types of dynamic systems are to think through.

I like your point about reducing consolidation to increase variety in control and management. It’s an interesting point, but I’m not sure there’s any actual law they are breaking by just owning and running multiple businesses. I would have thought legally speaking they would need to perform some form of market abuse to justify enforcement. Yes there have been abuses and they should be held to account, but we have laws fur that already and breaking up companies doesn’t do anything to stop such abuses. Google and Facebook are separate businesses and the still colluded. It’s the abuse that’s illegal in such cases, not the ownership structure.

I dint see how you can split off Google search from advertising things. Would you split up a newspaper and the business function that sells ad space on it? How? I suppose ads do make it less useful, but honestly it’s still the best by far, even if some others are now mostly good enough.

I’m with you on preventing the buying and elimination of competitors, but there are already mechanisms to do that. All acquisitions have to go through regulatory review.

They’re a monopoly in the ad business, Google and Facebook are reminiscent of Microsoft and Apple circa the 90’s.

They can’t both be a monopoly in the same business. That would be a duopoly or a cartel.

However between the two of them they collectively control about 51% of the online advertising market. They’re the heavy hitters for sure, and do dominate some market segments, but is two companies each having about 25% of a market a monopoly? Google’s market share has been declining for 5 years. Amazon’s share is rising fast. Is a triopoly a thing? Even if it was, we don’t have one anyway.

Sure there is cartel like behaviour going on. That needs to stamped on hard. I’m not against action where it’s needed, I just see a lot of vague uninformed and inaccurate comment on this issue. Uninformed outrage is a dangerous combination.

>they are not a monopoly in any sense of the word.

you sound like an employee with a vested interest in the company, or someone living in a bubble

> "google has a secret deal with facebook called "Jedi Blue" that they knew was so illegal that it has a whole section describing how they'll cover for each other if anyone finds out > - google appears to have a team called gTrade that is wholly dedicated to ad market manipulation"

from the antitrust lawsuit underway;

https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/145205394002405785...

>you sound like an employee with a vested interest in the company,...

Oooh, insulting my motivations. Nice move!

There's cartel like behaviour going on, no question, I said as much elsewhere on the thread, and that needs to be stamped on hard. It's part of the harm they are doing I referred to. That's not the same as any one of these companies being a monopoly.

Brave announced only 2 weeks ago that they would no longer default to Google search in their browser.

"Privacy-preserving Brave Search Replaces Google as the Default Search Engine in the Brave Browser"

https://brave.com/search-and-web-discovery/

I don't think this is relevant to my comment at all.

The first part of my comment ignores the existence of Brave Search, saying that it's not "hard to avoid" Google Search when all it takes to do so is changing your browser to point to Bing.

The second part of my comment that references Brave search was a response to the question of whether brave search uses Google under the hood.

> I replaced Google search with Brave and DDG,

I've been using Brave's new search engine for the last three weeks and it is extremely good. This is the first time a non-Google search engine has made it a week in my daily workflow (software development + own multiple businesses).

curious, I'm not a fan of organizing my own docs collection or being unable to collaborate on docs/share them via urls - I also dislike bespoke native apps for most tasks that are comfortable in the browser.

Have you found equivalent services to gmail and docs without the privacy risks? it wouldn't be too bad to spend a dollar or two a month for something with less privacy tradeoffs.

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