U.S. v. Google | Hacker News Reader

U.S. v. Google

wsj.com

59 pointsskilled82 comments

E: NYTimes has a live feed up now[0] but unfortunately it is paywalled. You can bypass it by disabling JS and then refreshing once in a while if you want to keep up. I don't see BBC or The Guardian running a live feed, but if there's a better (non-paywalled) link then comment below.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/09/12/business/google-anti...

> other companies such as Microsoft can’t perform enough searches to improve their product

Big belly laugh at this. Literally a boohoo moment. Apple, et. al. are going to throw MS a bone or something? Shitty products don't "deserve" anything IMO. What was OpenAI able to achieve without having 90% dominance in the ad space market?

Anti-competitiveness is still a problem so Google will have a hell of a battle ahead. I am curious what MSFT's stock did in the different phases of their antitrust suit.

The <blanks> behind the pre-trial briefs redactions will tell a lot. Some here, more detail in this thread [0].

1. Google’s <blank> with <blank> prevents <blank> from pre-setting a different, more private search engine (e.g., <blank>) as its default [blank].

2. Google's partners-including OEMS, carriers, and Apple-wanted more flexibility than what they ultimately received under their contracts with Google. In particular, <blank> bristled repeatedly at the <blank> restrictive nature ..... For example, in <blank>, <blank> sought to offer <blank>. Google refused.

3. Browsers also took issue with Google’s restrictive terms. For example, <blank> sought an alternative to Google and signed a contract with <blank> to encourage competition in search, welcoming the <blank> to <blank>. However, the trial testimony will show that to win the <blank> default from Google in 2014, <blank> needed to offer a <blank> million annual financial guarantee—roughly <blank> million more than Google was paying for the <blank> default. <blank>

[0] https://twitter.com/ColinHayhurst/status/1701274277830357164

> 3. Browsers also took issue with Google’s restrictive terms. For example, <blank> sought an alternative to Google and signed a contract with <blank> to encourage competition in search, welcoming the <blank> to <blank>. However, the trial testimony will show that to win the <blank> default from Google in 2014, <blank> needed to offer a <blank> million annual financial guarantee—roughly <blank> million more than Google was paying for the <blank> default. <blank>

That's an interesting thing to redact because... there's new articles from the time about some of these details. (This is almost certainly Mozilla switching the default search engine in Firefox, see https://techcrunch.com/2014/11/19/mozilla-partners-with-yaho...). The only thing that I'm not sure about is the precise monetary value was, or what the last <blank> (a full sentence, complete with a footnote attached).

I have so many mixed feelings about Google. They unlike the fruit company, advanced society sooo far with their FOSS. I have sooo many degoogled products, and I need to give them credit for that. They also refused to comply with the CCP, something the fruit company was happy to do during the hong kong protests. They even continue to let ad blockers on their platforms. They also made it easy for a poor college kid to make apps, unlike the fruit company.

But... They also suck. Canceling services, no customer service, removing the aux port to sell headphones, etc... They aren't the same company I was a fan of a decade or two ago.

Not sure what I want out of this. While it seems like I'm taking Ls from all the FAAMG companies, I admittedly think my life has never been better from a tech point of view. (most of that is from GPT and Moore's law though)

To put things into perspective, it sounds like most of your complaints are mostly from the point of view as a consumer, but what you like about them is that they enable you as a creator, being given access to modify FOSS, making it easy to create apps or as a responsible member of society, not complying with CCP, allowing ad blockers.

If you ask me, the latter are infinitely more important than the first thing.

Now, I will grant that Google also does a lot more to complain about.

Even if they were the greatest company on the planet that doesn’t change that they dominate the ad market and internet and that has to change

I wish more people understood how horrible advertising truly is.

Your life is essentially a compilation of what captures your attention. Embracing this perspective, any entity auctioning off your attention to the highest bidder is trading away a part of your life.

People don't understand what this means. They also don't understand how cynical this is in the context of a search engine. I don't have a solution to this, but man, its horrible.

This is a bit much. Attention is not that hard to control if you want to. It's sad if people allow their attention to be captured by doomscrolling/notification-clearing/etc but no more so than if they did so playing Solitaire or reading trashy magazines.

Attention really is hard to control, and most people can't do it. In fact, the only way I've learned to exert real control over attention is by practicing meditation. Regardless, the GP's point stands: we ARE the sum of our inputs.

> Regardless, the GP's point stands: we ARE the sum of our inputs

This seems too nonspecific. Influence is graded on a curve: early life experiences and childhood are formative, and the job of parents is to raise their children well. I don't think we should be equating the influence of internet ads with big experiences.

I agree, but we also shouldn't discount the thousands of little influences that affect us everyday, either. It's a bit like deflecting an asteroid: a big push early on will have the greatest effect, but thousands of little pushes later on will also deflect it. The key quality is the coherence of the impact - if they push in all directions, it may NOT have an impact. Arguably advertising is coherent in that it all seeks to increase your appetite for consumer behavior. And I would argue our parents do that to us, too, with gifts of toys and other trifles.

I agree, but I think being aware of that is how we self-determine a bit better. Facebook sucks you in with notifications, and if you notice that you can disable notifications, or (as I did) uninstall the app and just use the website.

Do you see ads to play solitaire on a regular basis but "control yourself" to not play it? I also don't see ads for magazines like I see ads for cars, food, gambling, etc. The magazines themselves contain ads, sure, but I have to have the desire to read a magazine first in order for my attention to be hijacked by an ad within.

That's naive. We all feel like we're the master of our story, but our history books show us that people are products of their time--their physical, social, and cultural environment. With determined effort, one person can fight the tide, but one person is a rounding error.

Trashy magazines are also a mechanism for auctioning off your attention to advertisers.

I don't personally feel like I notice many ads online. Maybe they are subtly influencing me but mostly I seem to avoid them. Yes I have an ad blocker but I still see ads or open things in an guest or incognito window or something which doesn't have an ad blocker. I don't think I can name an ad I've seen in the last year. Maybe a few years ago there was that Nintendo ad that took over all of youtube. Maybe I've seen a movie ad on IDMB once that caught my attention. Mostly though, it's just background noise that I tune out.

The only place I actually notice is Amazon, since it seems to often insert things I don't care about

Ads are not at all horrible. Ads help connect products with the niche markets of people that could benefit from them. Many cool products are too niche and would not be able to exist without targeted advertising. Yes, when done distastefully, ads can be quite horrible (ie ads for gambling and other vices), but when done well, both the user and advertiser benefit. This has to be true, otherwise, if users never found ads useful they would never click on them, and then advertisers would’ve never pay for advertisements since they wouldn’t benefit them.

I appreciate your perspective on the potential benefits of ads. However, I’m emphasizing a much deeper, existential concern here. Our lifes, essentially, are the sum of what we pay attention to. In this context, advertising doesn’t just sell products; it habitually redirects our attention, shaping our experiences and, consequently, our lifes in profound ways.

The pervasive nature of advertising can subtly dictate the rhythm of our lives, often reducing moments of potential introspection, creativity, or connection with others into opportunities for commercial engagement. It’s a constant auction of our attention at the cost of personal enrichment and depth of experience.

It alters our relationship with ourselves and with the world, as our attention is steadily guided away from personal priorities and towards commercial ones. This is a critical and largely unexamined impact of advertising. We are, effectively, paying the ultimate price, which is life itself. No amount of "taste" in individual ads can compensate for this.

Not to mention the way it shapes culture, inculcating children with the materialist creed of insatiable consumers before they even know what advertising is.

> Many cool products are too niche and would not be able to exist without targeted advertising.

This is not true. This is the excuse used to justify the spying.

Contextual ads work perfectly well for providing information about new or niche products. It the other, much creepier, use case for ads that want the detailed information to target tailored ads at individual users.

you're subscribing to the absolutely horrible notion that if someone is making money, its by definition a net good for society.

I wish more people understood that if you had to pay for everything on the internet, it for modern intents and purposes would be dead. Even this site itself is a marketing device.

(of course it is possible to show advertising without tracking. there's a lot of context to be had in many cases).

I find it hilarious when people complain about paywalls etc. If you want zero ads, then you have to pay. How will you pay otherwise, magic or thoughts n prayers??

then I love the "I dont want my computing resources to run ads", well then dont read the article !!

"But the internet in 1996 was absolutely amazing and totally free!!"

eyeroll

Oh, it gets worse. Tyranny amasses resources, and politics is power is marketing. Part of advertising absolutely is propagandizing humanity in the most traditionally appalling ways towards the most traditionally horrifying ends.

It's not even about 'propagandizing genocide and tyranny to make money'. For some people in power, genocide and tyranny are what you spend money ON, and the engine for making that money. Money isn't the goal, ideology is. Advertising connects naturally to that true goal, and nobody's asking where the money is coming from.

I adblock Google in part because some of the people able and willing to pay them Google-sized money to propagandize me are truly evil people that I don't want to hear from.

Influence is a part of life, and that's all advertising is. But at Google scale, and with good enough feedback (something Google and Facebook have really optimized for), influence is too effective- society-damaging levels of effective. And then it comes down to who's amassed the most money and power and also knows how to exploit those resources to work their wills.

A lot of those complaints, historically, are a direct result of Google's culture of being an engineering meritocracy: let everyone experiment, let employees easily transfer to new teams, and let the best product win. That does wonders for innovation if bureaucracy isn't an issue, but what you've seen in the past ten years is that bureaucracy has gotten in the way of innovation at the same time as Google has refused to adjust it's organization & culture to become more top-down and market driven. Since TK took over Cloud, you've started seeing this wholesale, and now this new "culture" (leadership focus & style) affects the Hardware & Platforms PAs, as well as the new Deepmind.

Google isn't an engineering meritocracy anymore, but it's still a great place for engineers overall: wealthy, excellent perks, and some of the best talent anywhere. But, adjusting the culture to be truly market driven and in alignment with a clear purpose has (and is still) taken years, and has created lots of interim pain & suffering [of all kinds, both internally and for customers & consumers]. Google is becoming more like Apple & Microsoft, and if the alternative is "pretend to be like the old Google", this cannot be anything but positive.

Do they contradict themselves? Very well then they contradict themselves. (They are large, they contain multitudes.)

you can create apps for free on apple platforms, just can’t publish without a sub.

google most def supports CCP since their re-entry into china

apple invented webkit and clang/llvm among others

maybe look at things with a more open perspective. google and apple both do good as well as bad; it’s not a competition in terms of who abuses capitalism, the answer is everyone.

Sorry, in what way is Google in China? No offices, no employees, products are not sold there, the only way to access their web products is VPN. Apple, on the other hand, sells their entire product lineup there. Some part of manufacturing is there, but most things are being built in Vietnam, Taiwan, etc, and FATP at most is in China.

This does give Apple more influence over China, as well as giving China influence over Apple. At these scales influence is never one-directional.

* Technically Apple forked WebKit from KHTML, but it's been 20 years and 10s of millions of lines of code since then. Chris Lattner and Vikram Adve created LLVM at UIUC. Chris was later hired by Apple who supported its development.

To me Google contributing to open source is like Pablo Escobar giving food and goods to the poor people of Colombia.

You are ignoring all the FOSS that never existed because Google killed it or prevented it from happening. Monopolies kill choices you will never even hear of, just by existing. You may believe some technologies are better off because a monopoly exists, but that's almost certainly always incorrect, monopolies impede progress.

Google successfully maintained the fiction for more than a decade that they were the only place where fundamental work could happen. that alone was immensely damaging to progress and the overall health of the community. they bought up not just all the talented students, but all their professors too.

This is bad in one aspect:

Google pays Mozilla a lot of money, mainly to keep Google search the default search engine in Firefox.

If that turns out to be illegal it could create a financial crisis for the Firefox browser and hence reduce diversity in web browsers.

this is true. but wouldn't it be nice everything didn't have to flow through google and could exist on its own merits?

infrastructure like browsers should really be neutral ground - its sad we can't figure out a way to fund things like that

It would be nice, but it's not realistic. If Google's revenue disappears, then unless Mozilla finds some other form of revenue (which they've been trying to do for years now), Firefox is done for.

At the same time though, when's the last time any of us donated to open source?

I can count myself within the last month... but many will admit that they have never run "npm fund" once.

FWIW, you can't donate to Firefox development.

Mozilla could easily live without Google's money if the vast majority of their income wasn't spent on being Big Nonprofit ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37180480 )

I would love it if they lost Google's money and trimmed the bile and focused on making great tech. But something tells me the first to be let go will be the techies, making Firefox effectively a maintenance-only browser. And the army of useless "evangelists" will be there until Mozilla collapses under its own weight.

Maybe we should have a reality check on the true cost of tech. Anything that can break the behavior of the tech industry due to cheap money is a good thing for the long term health of the industry.

Only problem is that there's no good alternative for them. You'd be committing Firefox to a slow death

And maybe that's OK and we should learn to live within our means

Is there a chance that Microsoft can make an offer to Mozilla about making bing the default search in this case. I don't know if this would make sense from Microsoft business point of view and probably an evil from internet freedom ans diversity point. But maybe it is better than the current status.

Another take might be that Google's financial clout killed the browser market. That whole $xx.xx CPM thing that only they attain, and others basically pick up the crumbs. Search terms as input to ads are very powerful.

Might be a bit contrarian, but so what?

Mozilla hasn't produced a decent browser for, what, 12 years? They instead take their hundreds of millions of dollars annually to instead spend time building junk like half-baked password managers.

I'd argue that Mozilla's mishandling of Firefox has been killing innovation in this space for years -- it is a giant red flag for anyone wanting to enter the space considering Mozilla's budget and still not being able to produce something of value. The reality is moreso that Mozilla itself doesn't care about building a better browser. It's only when people started to realise this in the last couple of years that we've started to see some new contenders.

Maybe when Mozilla dies, we might start to see open source efforts going to better browsers.

I actually think Firefox is better than chrome and use it as my main browser. Not sure why you say it’s not decent.

I also think they do a lot of great stuff around Firefox, the email spoofing is good, the sync function is good, their podcasts and studies are good. Not sure what people mean here.

This is a strong but valid take, Mozilla has a huge focus on getting revenue streams from somewhere, but flubbing it right and left along the way. The consumer might benefit from a better browser but Mozilla has basically decided that that’s not what will drive growth or revenues… not that I think they’re particularly correct about that

Idk, I think people underestimate what it takes to support a browser. It's a lot of money and Mozilla doesn't have an ad empire to leverage, operating system sales to subsidize from, or phone/computer sales.

All they have is the revenue they make from Google, a little bit from their attempts at revenue diversification, and a little bit from their partnerships (like Pocket). If the Google revenue disappears, they won't even be able to maintain the current level of quality.

This to me is entirely fantasy. We are instead overestimating what it takes to support a browser because of how much money Mozilla gets and still can't produce anything. We're talking amounts in the billions of dollars here, and more than a billion in current cash reserves.

This Google-controlled narrative is pushed out onto a lot of things (i.e search) which people are slowly starting to realise isn't that complex or expensive to build after all (see Brave Search for example). It's not surprising that Mozilla would echo similar sentiments considering the entire company is controlled opposition.

What other similarly sized or smaller company has successfully built a browser which is not Chromium-based fit for the average consumer? If you're just piggybacking on Google's work, then sure, it's probably not bad, but Mozilla has their own browser engine and is trying to keep feature parity with browsers which have effectively unlimited funding.

Well yes it’s clearly expensive to support a browser and that’s why they’re trying to make money, but they’re failing miserably to deliver on those other revenue streams and they aren’t keeping up in the browser space. That’s all, if they were developing some business model that worked that would be different. That’s why breaking off googles monopoly would kill them, they are dependent on it

If Firefox loses a lot of funding but Google loses the ability to pay companies to make Chrome the default on nearly all devices sold globally today, Firefox will be in much better shape than it is now. Google is killing it, and also giving it a few dollars.

how would the loss of funding put Firefox in better shape? Are you saying that exposure would mean dollars would flow in from donations from new users?

I think they are saying that Firefox would be in a better position to increase market share.

I am not sure that I agree. Specifically, I doubt that mozilla would be able to realize any revenue even if every OEM made Firefox the default browser.

ah thanks for that, Im was wondering how it makes their financial position better. Losing this case imo would knock them out completely

I'm saying if Google can't throw billions at other companies to push Chrome over Firefox, Firefox can get those users for pennies on the dollar, or even be considered the free better choice for product vendors to include.

I think you're misunderstanding....

If Android OEM's aren't locked into Chrome, they'll probably request payment from Edge, Brave and other startup browsers to be the default. Whoever pays most will get the spot. And that browser will end up being ad-ridden to help pay for that.

I could totally imagine browsers having ad-blockers that don't block ads, but merely replace "bad" website-provided ads with browser-provided "good" ads.

Even with tons of new users, how would Mozilla be able to fund continued development of Firefox?

Mozilla will need to find a way to raise funds.

I'm all in fabour of anti trust against google, but this really doesn't seem like the way. Any other company can easily pony up the cash to become the default search engine, if they'd like. Yahoo gave it a pass on firefox a few years back. All it costs is money. On android, they seemingly don't abuse their ownership of the platform there to maintain their search monopoly: the complaint is about a special search specific deal like everywhere else.

But why couldn't that be a monopolistic practice? For example, let’s say Apple is getting more than 100% of the ad revenue Google earns from iPhones, but it’s still worth it for Google only because it doesn’t have iPhone users start thinking about other search engines (thereby maintaining the monopoly). That seems pretty similar to standard oil pricing below market value to get its competitors out of business.

> That seems pretty similar to standard oil pricing below market value to get its competitors out of business.

Not quite. In economic terms, if:

> Apple is getting more than 100% of the ad revenue Google earns from iPhones

This would mean that Google is pricing it not just "below market value", but also "below marginal cost of production". You can price below market value and still make a small profit. But in your hypothetical it's literally bleeding money.

I don't think it invalidates your point that "it could qualify as a monopolistic practice". But it's an important distinction because generally selling your goods/services below the supplier's marginal cost is inherently unsustainable.

Playing for placement is common (not saying it's right, nor am I saying it's wrong)

https://thecounter.org/coca-cola-frito-lay-mars-real-estate-...

https://www.vox.com/2016/11/22/13707022/grocery-store-slotti...

Or we could give users the choice of default search engine instead of just rewarding the winners with the most money to spend..how do you ever expect a new upstart search engine to compete with google if google can just buy defaults? Or owns the most popular mobile OS and web browser?

Users are pretty much always able to choose their search engine. I don't understand what you mean by "give users the choice of default search engine". What would that look like? A global vote on the defaults for various platforms?

If we open that floodgate, I feel like we have to talk about the browser situation too. How are innovative browser engines expected to compete in a landscape where their defaults are not respected or possible?

on iOS the most innovative browsers are just shells over safari. Every browser is safari

At least the other OS's allow you to run your own rendering engine

The completion is a click away. On Android it's settings in the browser default search, similarly for Firefox and Chrome on desktop.

This will be a good one to watch. If the government wins, Apple and Mozilla might also be on the losing side here and for Mozilla itll pretty much be the end.

Might be the kick in the pants FF needs to figure out funding, otherwise a plus for web devs who now need to worry about just 2 rendering engines.

Matt Stoller has spun up a small initiative and is paying a reporter specifically to attend the trial in person if you want to follow along.

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/big-tech-on-trial-how-big...

https://www.bigtechontrial.com/

(financial supporter of both his BIG newsletter and big tech on trial, no other relation)

FWIW the "www.bigtechontrial.com" domain does not work for me.

Works OK for me. It goes to another Substack site.

Works good now - before it redirected to a register.com holding site!

> Might be the kick in the pants FF needs to figure out funding,

First they need to stop wasting money on silly side projects and funding activists and political activities

You are mixing up the Mozilla Corporation and the Mozilla Foundation.

Which one can I donate to that will spend the money on only FF and nothing else?

The foundation shouldn't be wasting money throwing activist festivals like this https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/announcing-activists-...

Neither

they will have to stop if $500 mn in payments stop....they might have to stop altogether lol

> This will be a good one to watch.

An equivalent of a trip to the theatre.

What about Microsoft? It seems like they're in a way worse position for from an antitrust perspective.

Do you think they have added more tracking in Google Chrome to use time as the last bullet/opportunity to gain more information about users?

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