Is Google's looming monopoly trial a watershed moment for Big Tech?
theweek.com
theweek.com
I hope the US government feeling ready to take on Google is merely a symptom of a broader sea-change.
The problem is not one player like Google getting too big as a business. Monopolies naturally arise and get cut down, as often by markets than regulation.
The change is that we must challenge the very idea that it's acceptable for one way of being , whether technology, platform, protocol, or practice to become a de-facto norm - and radically exclude all others.
Mono-culture is in the crosshairs now, not monopoly.
And that applies to the enforced "cashless society", effectively mandated smartphone use, single strong identity systems , cloud everything and app everything, and so on...
Mono-cultures, whether in digital tech or banana crops, never end well. Lack of plurality is antithetical to long-term resilience and a healthy democracy and society.
But on the monoculture point - doesn't the free market allow and reward diversity in areas people want it? You mention cashless society as an example.
That’s the fundamental advantage to many kinds of regulations, markets can’t convey unlimited information. We don’t want people constantly trying to decide where to eat based on the perceived risks of food born illness rather than price and how good the food tastes etc. By minimizing the risks of trying new restaurants you increase competition in other areas.
Want to have a back-door installed to spy on users? Want to silence a problematic dissident? - Much easier to get it done in one place than in many. Especially if you can leverage the threat of 'breaking up a monopoly' if they don't want to comply...
There is little evidence this is a motivator for Western leaders. It’s certainly not explanatory for Europe or American states.
Your single point of control point is valid. But these conglomerates’ value to policymakers is broader than spying. Want to pass a tech-leadership package? There’s a ready provider. Deliver on social messaging goals, like diversity or free speech? Scaled provider there, too.
If you expect a monopoly/monoculture to promote diversity and free speech you will be sorely disappointed.
I’m not sure how you get a mono-culture in the way you’re describing without a monopoly. Google has a monopoly on search, end of story. They have over 90% marketshare worldwide.
Monopoly law is about leveraging your position as a big provider against competition.
Microsoft had as much market share in consumer OS. They didn't get in trouble for that. They got in trouble for killing Netscape by bundling IE and forcing Windows on all devices by charging per device sold regardless of whether Windows was installed or not. (Might have missed other suits but these are examples)
Government intervention to ensure competition rarely happens so maybe a new term to describe that would be good.
Quite willing to discuss them though!
Not sure Google enforces one way of being: there is Bing search instead of Google and iPhone instead of Android.
Cashless society is a different concept, but also you have Google Pay, Apple Pay, others. so still not a monopoly.
Cloud everything, not sure want you want different. Companies to have their own serves in their offices?
And Google paid Apple to make them the default search engine on iPhones!
To rewind back to the 90s: there was always an alternative to Internet Explorer. But MS was still punished for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows.
Thanks, would sincerely love you to discuss these things, and you can find (mine and others') attempts to connect those dots here on our podcast: https://cybershow.uk
There is a plethora of thriving communities and unfathomable amount of diversity and options.
Phone hardware are in most cases locked down, and even if they are not the bespoke hardware with terrible support is pretty much unusable. There are software alternatives but they are severely lacking and often lock you out of core features that even the most modest smartphone user expect to function. And that society expects you to be able to do.
Comparatively a PC is nirvana, I know apple is trying their darn best to change that but it is in a pretty good state.
The mindshare and actual usage is also several orders of magnitudes better.
They might already be tracking their profitability that way to encourage search to include more ads "organically" (as in by tying search performance to ads in search revenue that team will be interested in improving ads in search revenue)
This doesn't even mean Google Search doesn't use Google Ads. It just means that Google Search has to buy usage of Google Ads thereby allowing competition between ad providers.
For example, would they attempt to exploit Android etc. even more?
On some level there is a case that their core vulnerability represents a major risk to them suddenly going full evil with everything in their strategic moat.
Google is still the number one search engine, by a pretty large margin, but they are looking increasingly vulnerable and even smaller search engines with their own crawlers are starting to appear.
August 2022: 3.34%
August 2023: 3.03%
Meanwhile Google has 92%: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share
> their AI search is significantly better
Whether the product is the best in class or not doesn't have any relevance when it comes to judging a monopoly. At least I really hope we don't end up in a situation where courts start ruling based on speculation on the future of AI because good lord would that be a mess.
I actually wish the media would stop calling these "monopoly" trials, even though I understand why they do it. They're antitrust trials. Google does not need to have an overarching monopoly in order to be tried for antitrust violations.
Google should know from Chrome's start that a lot of market share is user laziness, if you show up with a functionally equivalent product. Eventually someone clicks "Try X!"
MS' privileging of ChatGPT in Bing-on-Edge is a pretty genius shot.
Kneecapping Google without also going after Microsoft, Apple and Meta will only make things worse for consumers.
It’s noticing that as long as you stay somewhat low profile you can get away with almost anything, as apparently they can only notice/do something about one big player at a time.
Which is concerning.
That never actually helps them.
“Unless cops ticket every single speeder, they should not ticket anyone”
“Unless doctors can cure a patient’s cancer, they should not set a broken bone”
“Unless you’re going to track down everyone you’ve ever wronged, you should never apologize.”
I don’t think those work. The reality is that doing something is almost always better than doing nothing. And in a complex business and legal environment, insisting on simultaneous and equal action really is suggesting we do nothing.
Regulators should go after companies that break laws. Someone looking at company X should never, ever decide to forego enforcement because they people looking at company Y are not taking action.
Nobody is insisting on _simultaneous and equal_ action. Obviously that is not realistic.
But in an industry as volatile and dynamic as tech remedies do need to be applied in somewhat close order to have any claim to fairness.
Nearly any action in proportion to the harm would be sufficient.
It’s a common principle in law, actually.
For instance, with speeders - if literally no one including folks going 20 over the speed limit get a ticket for years in a town, and then the Sheriff’s political opponent gets a huge ticket and his car impounded for going 5 over, would that be ok?
What about if the Dr. treated everyone, except for his childhood bully which was dying of cancer?
Monopolistic and anti-trade behavior is going nuts everywhere, in almost every industry. From meat packing to shipping to tech.
If you force Google to reorg and then it takes 5 years to bring more antitrust action I'm not sure you've actually improved anything.
Why? What does this even mean?
I have no idea what it means to "focus all their resources" or why it's important.
The antitrust division of the DOJ alone has 380 attorneys (900 people total), and that is before you get into the fact that they also will contract with outside firms, etc.
This is 10x the size of the average large law firm's entire antitrust practice area. Probably 20x a lot of the time.
They can easily run multiple large tech cases at once.
FTC is 2x as large (it has 750 attorneys total)
"It could also very well be that the other big companies alter their behavior in response to the now real threat of anti-trust enforcement."
This didn't happen at all when MS was taken out. Or AT&T Or ...
So this seems like a pipe dream.
Your claim was that they need to "focus their resources" and can't possibly handle multiple large tech cases at once. You still haven't explained what that means, at all.
I pointed out they have tons of resources, even comparing it to the practices of large law firms that handle many large cases at once.
Now you are arguing they are doing something, but apparently not handling multiple large tech cases since you think they are incapable of doing that, but that there is some weird "day to day" that involves a significant mass of attorneys that they are all doing instead that is somehow "keeping the agencies running", and cite the size of the population of the US as if that has literally any relevance to anything.
This is all totally odd, since it's the 520 other people that keep the DOJ ATR running, not the lawyers. That's literally their job. The FTC also has a large support staff aside from the 780 attorneys.
What i take away from all of this is:
1. You have no idea what they do or how they operate.
2. You don't want to admit that they in fact, have plenty of resources to operate multiple tech cases at once, and are repeatedly deflecting because you have no basis to assert otherwise.
To wit - here's a fun fact that, uh, slightly damages your argument, FWIW - they've made multiple public comments and statements (to congress even!) that they believe they have what they need to handle multiple simultaneous large tech cases. It's in fact, why they staffed up over the past few years, adding hundreds of attorneys. So they don't even think you are right. Only you do.
You would know this, of course, if you actually bothered to try to look at or understand any of the data/statements/etc around the FTC or DOJ, rather than just randomly asserting things.
You would also know that the DOJ/FTC break down what percent of their support is focused on what (including sustaining operations), for example, and since it's not a very large percent, you wouldn't try to make a silly argument that they are understaffed to handle it because of that.
3. You aren't willing to engage in a discussion where you back up any point you make with any data.
Given #3, this is pointless. It's not worth trying to discuss this with someone who just asserts things based on their random opinions, and just changes their argument when they realize someone is pushing back on their silliness and giving real data.
If you want to have a meaningful discussion, bring facts. Otherwise, it's just people asserting their own personal gut feelings on the internet, which is not particularly interesting to discuss.
Have a good one.
(It's also not what they are doing, since FTC filed against Amazon)
If this action is successful and if Lina Kahn gets a second term. Two very big ifs.
Based on what data is this asserted?
As I pointed out elsewhere, the FTC has 780 attorneys, which is about 20x the largest antitrust lawfirms you will find.
The DOJ antitrust division has 380 attorneys, which is about 10x.
Both have hundreds of support folks as well (the DOJ ATR has 900 employees total).
It's not just them either, they have states with them as well that each carry their own resourcing.
They are also happy to hire outside resources.
There seems to be a weird view here of how any of this works, which amounts to what you said in your next sentence - "These companies have a huge amount of lobbying activity and the best legal teams out there."
Even if this is true, which it's often simply not (for example, the DOJ hired Boies to deal with Microsoft, at a time when Boies was unknown, and they overall had a much better legal team than MS, at a time when antitrust regulation of companies was neither new nor surprising), it doesn't change how many resources you need to deal with multiple companies at once.
I met plenty of DOJ antitrust attorneys in my time in DC. They are the best out there. What basis do you have for asserting they are not? I ask because I've yet to see a single person in this conversation who has a view based on things other than "gut feelings". Hopefully you do!
Because if it's just more of the same dataless trope spouted elsewhere, then it's not just a silly stereotype, it's also horribly denigrating to those folks, who really are, as i said, the best you will find.
It may change political wherewithal, but it has no bearing on the ability of regulatory offices to charge and prosecute multiple cases at once. Contrary to your claim, they are in fact, built to handle this.
Like anything else, trying a case like this has a relatively fixed, and well known cost.
The ATR and friends are well funded to be capable of trying multiple big tech cases at once, and in fact, are.
" I don't think taking down one monopoly would strengthen others, it'd set Google as an example and other monopolies that don't shrink themselves will get taken down next."
Given the exact opposite has happened in every single case historically (AT&T, MS, et al), this seems very wrong.
Overall, HN seems to focus on tropes about antitrust law, with very little data or knowledge of how any of it works for real.
People seem very happy to offer strong opinions despite that lack of data, however!
These are concerns you would have if it was in China, Russia or even the EU it happened. Rightly so. You should worry about it for the US too.
In reality, government actions in situations like this are more about tradeoffs. There will be winners and losers and, despite what some people want to believe, consumers will not unilaterally benefit from these actions. There will be downsides along with the upsides.
Applying heavy handed regulation to some companies while letting others do the same thing creates its own set of problems. Once the government becomes the arbiter of who wins and who loses, it gets ugly and the incentives get very weird.
The other fallacy is that spot enforcement is the only option. When you have multiple companies competing in the same space doing similar things, singling one out as a “monopoly” and targeting them is illogical. You create industry regulation and apply it to everyone. If nothing else, it’s a matter of efficiency.
However regulatory actions usually arrive too late, too much damage has happened, smaller competitors are already out of business, etc.
Googles problem is very much that they have an open policy of launching new products and axing it without regard for the existing userbase when it doesn't become the standard. They're so large that any individual user falls to the wayside in those metrics. Out of all of the ones on that list, Google is the most openly consumer hostile version of this stuff because they do everything the others do and are in a far more instrumental position for the average consumer. On B2B they're horrible because Google just... is the legitimate ad market these days. Like, if Google doesn't want you or if you don't like Googles rates, that's it. There's no real general purpose ad network that's comparable to Google that aren't niche startups or can offer comparable rates. The lawsuit is about the latter in specific though.
Apple just is your traditional walled garden setup. Only that which exists in the Apple garden is allowed on Apple and their market share is annoyingly large enough that it means Apple basically morally polices the mobile market. - not being on apple devices might as well mean that you don't exist as a mobile developer. That said this dominance isn't exactly by market share (worldwide anyway), but moreso by the fact that the Apple userbase is in the niche of "trendsetters" (or in other words: trendy younger people and your boss have iDevices, which are the demographics that disproportionately matter for popularity).
Microsoft is just getting a bit too comfortable after they lost that lawsuit in the 2000s and is just doing what they did back then. They need to be reminded why they lost that suit. Out of all big tech, they're probably the smallest fish to fry given they're also easily intimidated if the EU is any indication.
Meta is... well, it's mostly a privacy nightmare with some hints of a walled garden (fucking WhatsApp) and similar moral policing as Apple. They're only slightly less bad than Google because their brand is seen as so toxic that people not having a Facebook/Instagram account isn't seen as a social failing (which given they're a social media network, that matters).
Kneecap any one of them and it'll do a net good - they're all bad but they're bad in different markets. Google going down won't suddenly make Apple or Microsoft more powerful, they're in different fields. (And the Meta ad tracking machine is only on Meta products, afaik Meta doesn't sell general site ads.)
And just considering mobile alone, of course diminishing Android will empower Apple.
What a fantastic world we could have had.
The US political class is bought and paid for. They exist to do what the corps want. There is a good reason Tim Wu quit. Its a non contest.
For banks and accounting, the U.S. is marginally pro-consolidation. But oil is fractured (lol). Tobacco is, in America, tightly regulated and also fractured. Auto is full of upstarts. Telco and media are being transformed from several directions, including, also, by upstarts. And I’m not sure why soda is a priority.
I care much more about how they essentially own the browser space, and can just force through garbage "standards" that no one wants like Manifest V3 for no reason other than to make more people look at their own ads. That seems like an actual abuse of their monopoly status that's going to harm the internet.
Governments generally have objectives. Those objectives are inevitably counter to what a free market would do (otherwise they'd be already achieved). It is usually easier for those objectives to be achieved in a centralised market.
There is no call to look to governments to start prosecuting monopolies. A better place to start is to stop promoting them! Loosen up the financial regulation, start reversing the centralisation of banks, promote liberty. Put in some small tweaks around the edges of contract law to make it hard to constrain the future action of individuals.
Far to often governments build a monopoly, then pretend to fight it. The starting point really should be to stop building them up. The worst monopolies are those created by regulation because they are actually inescapable.
Does Google deserve its monopoly? Obviously Yes, there’s nothing Google does to prevent you from using Bing, DuckDuckGo etc. In fact you can start using them today, but Google will remain dominant because their product is superior
Is googles monopoly harmful to society? Their premier product is free to consumers. In fact a lot of their core products are simply free. They’ve done an incredible amount of r and d from transformers, tensorflow to deepmind which easily costs them billions a year. In fact it’s very hard to make an argument that they’re bad for consumers. The biggest complaints I see are from companies that run ads on Google, who are frustrated by the lack of other options and googles high prices. Fair enough, but I don’t see how this concern should lead to breaking up one of the largest companies in the world that is also a source of so much innovation.
If the MS litigation of days past is any indicator, this will do exactly nothing other than burn taxpayer money.
I think the government makes stupid decisions around spending sometimes.
Google is free. YouTube is free. You don’t need to use them. You can watch TV or use DDG or Firefox or whatever.
This lawsuit is moronic.
To be fair, the data is easy to cherry-pick and manipulate: it's probably pretty easy to plot Facebook against enforcement actions and say the enforcement actions led to a stock rebound (instead of cost discipline)