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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Wow, thanks very much for this explanation - I really appreciated it giving me full context before reading the email exchange.

It's hard for me to imagine better evidence that Google needs to be broken up than this. Honestly, I think it should basically be forbidden for Ads folks to even talk to the Chrome team. This looks like textbook abuse of monopoly power when you use your dominant position in one area (web browsing) to juice your position in another area (ads).

Also, I think it shows the foolishness of any company thinking that "Don't be evil" is a position that can last over time as you grow. I know it's easy to look at Jerry as "the bad guy" in this situation, but he is simply reacting to his incentives ("if we don't make these changes, we miss our sales number, and if we miss our sales numbers, we don't get our bonus"). All big companies eventually revert to their incentive structure once they become big enough. This line of thinking also goes to show why Google has traveled down the enshittification path so strongly over the past 5-10 years. Easy for to me imagine how each little search result change resulted in more revenue and not a significant number of people leaving, until you are left with the situation we have now where the entire first page of any remotely commercial search is just ads, going directly against Google's entire original thesis for their existence in the first place. My guess is the relatively recent change of text from "Ad" to "Sponsored" is because fewer people realize that sponsored means ad.

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> I know it's easy to look at Jerry as "the bad guy" in this situation, but he is simply reacting to his incentives

The way you react to incentives determines your moral character. If an action is harmful on its own, it doesn't become any less harmful if you also stand to gain from it.

Companies are amoral and lack human agency, and hence they cannot be held morally responsible for their actions. The responsibility lies with the people making the decisions within the company. And not just the people on the top, but also the people making the day-to-day choices that transform the strategic decisions into reality.

(See also: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil)

People continue to parrot the phrase that corporations are typically beholden to their shareholders to maximize profit.

We also know from the prison experiments that people have a really hard time not falling into evil behavior when it's expected.

But I agree: neither of those facts absolve every individual in any organization anywhere from doing the wrong thing. Even if someone else would step in to your spot and do the wrong thing, it's still your responsibility.

The prison experiments are long debunked. It required lying to and manipulating the guards and has never been successfully replicated. They had to be pushed and coerced into evil behavior when they were explicitly being told it was not just expected but required.

Plus, no control group. Not an experiment.

Doesn't matter, we have real world proof of the same thanks to Nazi Germany (they were good for something I guess).

The book Ordinary Men, based on which there's a Netflix documentary too, follows the story of a bunch of police reservists (basically regular men, in their 50s, from Hamburg, who were too old to be conscripted in the army, so were conscripted in the police for "police duties"). They were regular people, with families and stuff, mostly dockworkers so probably leaned left before the rise of Nazis, but were sent to commit massacres in Poland and they did it. Some struggled, especially after the first ones, but later on it just became normal. Those were regular people, not some crazy Nazi fanatics convinced Jews and Poles were subhuman. One of them convinced himself to target children for murder, because it was merciful - you see, they would die on their own without their parents (which were murdered by his colleagues), so giving them a quick death was mercy. He had kids himself too.

Harrowing stuff, but quite decent proof that humans are capable of anything. Nobody is born a monster, but can become one in the wrong circumstances and through bad personal choices.

What in the actual fuck? Are we serious with these implications that Jerry is suffering from the same thought processes that Nazi war criminals used to justify crimes against humanity? It took all of 7 posts and "Jerry from the Ads team" to become "Jerry from the Gestapo."

He's not at the bottom of some slippery slope, a husk of a human leftover from plunging into darkness. He's on the Ads team doing what he's supposed to: making money from Ads. There's a difference between doing something because it's "what you're told" and doing it because it's the right thing for you to be doing. The right thing for Jerry just happens to be a major inconvenience for Anil.

This is an oversimplified apples-to-chickens kind of comparison, but I worked a cybersecurity job where the right thing for me was keeping the firewall up, but Network/IT administration made it clear they found it inconvenient. After leaving, I learned a Network admin DID take down the firewall and that was a bigger inconvenience. Everyone ultimately wants the same end result and pushing your team's priorities is how you contribute; it doesn't make you "bad."

It'd be a bit different if Jerry was out finding children so he could kill them, dismember them and sew their skin into his clothing. But at least he seems considerate enough that he'd do it in that order.

Isn’t pushing and coercing what’s going on here too though?

With the company setting expectations and requirements while people’s job/career hinges on it.

I would consider Jerry as being corporately coerced here and thus more inclined to act immoraly.

> it's still your responsibility.

it's not, in the sense of social darwinian competition.

If i stand to lose money, or have to sacrifice something in order to be "moral" when my "competitor" doesn't and thus gain an advantage towards me, i cannot be moral.

That's why my rule is: if it's not illegal, it's moral.

Mortality optimizes across longer time horizons than this individual moment.

If you can steal something and with very high probability not get caught then there’s seemingly a net benefit. However, if you start to steal regularly the odds you get caught are much higher than the most common probability * the number of times you steal. This is true across a wide range of unethical behavior.

Try to remember you lack perfect information and so can’t accurately judge the odds every time. Thus regularly taking low probability risks to your reputation and chances are you’re going to miss judge some of those risks.

Heuristics like this aren’t perfect, but it’s easy to underestimate how valuable a positive reputation is.

That sounds like a dystopian hellscape.

It's the dystopian hellscape that we live in.

K, omw to bang your wife

We've banned this account. If the comment were just a one-off, I'd post a warning instead, but you've not been using the site as intended in other places either.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

First, that isnt a system of morality.

But moving past that I think you've missed some nuance on morals (or more generally social norms) - they help prevent the degenerate race to the bottom you're referencing. Its upsetting but pragmatic to nullify relative advantage by engaging in shitty behavior, but if you're frequently justifying behavior by citing hypothetical competitors then you're just shitting the place up for everyone by starting that race.

Please don't post flamebait to HN.

I really enjoyed this talk on the history of big-retail lobbying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj0dBCooWGo

It has a lot to say about the notion that corporations are beholden to shareholders to maximize profits. Who they're really beholden to are 80s-era corporate raiders who changed corporate culture by enforcing the Shareholder Capitalism model at financial gunpoint.

The whole “companies must maximize profits at all costs” thing is false, fake, untrue.

It’s easy to prove: if true, it would be illegal for companies to do any philanthropy at all. They do, out of some mix of brand building and PR and whatever, but obviously those same principles can be applied to any other policy that seeks to increase NPV of future profits at the expense of this quarter.

Companies can and do pass up revenue opportunities and that is fine and legal.

even if it’s only 90% true it can still a useful characterization of corporations

also, I think a lot of corporations do philanthropy as advertising, hoping it will be in a positive effect on revenue. So, still doing everything for the bottom line

It has to be debunked and people need to stop using it because whenever its brought up, its never as a thought exercice or as a 90% thing. It's always brought up as the exact truth.

Swedish Aktienbolaget are actually required to maximise their profits, but not necessarily in the immediate term.

Philanthropy helps revenue by converting those actions into lower taxes for the companies that do philanthropy.

It is still about profits at the end of the day.

> Philanthropy helps revenue by converting those actions into lower taxes for the companies that do philanthropy.

This makes zero sense.

This is how a capitalist society works, regardless if it makes sense or not.

Revenue is income generated through business operations. Profit is what remains after deducting expenses from revenue. Taxes are paid on profit. Philanthropy reduces profit and thereby reduces taxes. Reducing taxes does not help revenue in any way.

Words play, what matters is that amount of money left in the bank to distribute among company owners.

Which is lower after philanthropic giving.

Depending on the jurisdiction.

Which jurisdictions give you $X back on your taxes if you donate $X to charitable organizations?

> Words play

And when you use words incorrectly, you don't make any sense.

If the tax rate is 30% and I have 100 dollars in profit, I will have 70 dollars left in the bank. Instead, if I donate 10 dollars and write it off, I will still have to pay 27 dollars in taxes, leaving me with only 63 dollars.

So, it's not just about words. Your comment is fundamentally wrong.

Depending on the jurisdiction.

There are no jurisdiction with a >100% tax rate.

Sure, if you're talking about Narnia.

> what matters is that amount of money left in the bank to distribute among company owners.

It would still be lower with the philanthropy and tax deductions, rather than not doing the philanthropy and paying more taxes. You can never get a bigger tax reduction than the amount you're putting in. The only way that would be possible is if tax rates exceeded 100%.

Philanthropy is a concept from a capitalist(-like) situation. If your government is taking everyone's stuff and redistributing it, you aren't being philanthropic.

That's the trick regarding public image, and actual intent.

Corporations must operate in the interests of their shareholders but business judgment that directors may exercise is expansive, at least in the state of Delaware.

Meaning they can sponsor a little league team but most certainly can't raise wages, lower prices, and cut dividends (Ford v. Dodge). In turn, they can't go so far as to knowingly compromise safety in pursuit of saving a few bucks per unit (Grimshaw v. Ford).

> but most certainly can't raise wages, lower prices, and cut dividends (Ford v. Dodge)

Can you summarize this case? I don’t understand why corporations would be prevented from doing this. Couldn’t you always make the case that lowering prices or increasing wages are in the long term interest of shareholders, with the goal of increasing market share?

I'm not a law talkin' guy or member of any bar cartel.

That said, it sounds like Henry Ford expressed that he wanted to hire more people, make up for lower prices with more volume, and invest in more plants, but seemed also motivated by cutting off dividend payments to the Dodge bros. Their payments had reached a megadollar a year, after initially putting in 10 kilobucks for 10%, and Ford correctly suspected they were using the payments to fund a rival car company. Courts ruled he couldn't cut off dividends so he bought everybody out.

> In turn, they can't go so far as to knowingly compromise safety in pursuit of saving a few bucks per unit (Grimshaw v. Ford).

Boeing execs that got away with negligence that killed people are laughing all the way to their golden toilets.

As GGC points out, Ford v. Dodge was about anticompetitive practices, not arbitrary increases to wages.

Companies are 100% free to double wages at random. It is possible shareholders will sue (“everything is securities fraud”), but that’s a dispute about whether the action was in the best interests of shareholders in the long term.

It remains 100% false that companies must maximize corporate profits, especially short term.

The argument that companies must focus on profit and expansion to remain competitive is rooted in the principles of free markets and competition. In a capitalist system, businesses operate in an environment where they are constantly vying for customers and market share. If a company fails to prioritize profit and growth, it risks being out-competed by more aggressive and efficient competitors.

> it would be illegal for companies to do any philanthropy at all.

Most of philanthropy is free marketing with tax deductible spendings sadly. I.e. smart marketing and creative accounting, so they spend a little to gain much more in return.

Tax deductions are not tax credits. The company is still out of pocket money. Which, if this canard were true, would be illegal.

More like "not just become evil, but also be actively punished for not to comply". Same with nazis below - if you go against, you risk to go to jail/die. Same with corpo CEOs - if they fail to maximise the profit, they would get fired and replaced. Or if they take risk to not copycat other companies.

this is true but it's also worth noting that people who are going to take a moral stance about this kind of thing are not going to last in those positions. this fact does not absolve jerry at all, of course.

Kind of disagree. Employees, whatever their rank (except maybe at the very top) cannot be help responsible for doing their job because of the very simple fact that the purpose of a company is to maximize shareholders values.

It's up to the government (meaning us) to make sure that there are guardrails so this search for profit do not negatively impact society.

And this is exactly what the government is doing with this lawsuit.

A long time ago, when I was doing my mandatory military service, we were told about situations where we were not allowed to follow the orders of our superiors. Even in the military, we were expected to think for ourselves, make our own decisions, and take responsibility for our actions.

Employees are human beings and not property of their employers. As long as you are responsible for your actions outside work, you are also responsible while at work.

I understand your point and yes, personal responsibility is important and in the military, where people are not easily replaceable in the heat of action, especially in times of war, your point is absolutely valid. But what would have happen in that case if Jerry or Anil had quit in protest? Some other dude would have taken their place.

People will act based on ethical standards that are derived from their cultural environment. Since the 70s/80s, the American society (and more generally the entire developed world) has been reorganized around ultra-liberal Chicago style view of the economy and especially the Friedman doctrine [0]. It is impossible (or comes with incredible personal cost) for an individual to go against the cultural grain. In this context, personal responsibility can never be a proper substitution to our collective responsibility as citizens.

The silly notion of the heroic individual fighting against corruption, evil doing or whatnot is dangerous. Everyone of us is responsible for the world we live in, not Jerry in marketing. The law that we indirectly vote for and the one who enforce them on our behalf are the only true and meaningful weapons against our societies decadence.

And these actions against Google and Amazon will show were we stand in that fight.

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

Have you ever voted in an election? That's basically the same situation. Voting is almost certainly waste of time, because a single vote is very unlikely to matter.

You don't make the right choice with the expectation that it will change anything, but because it's the right thing to do. If you are not willing to make the right choice if may cost you something, you have no right to expect that anyone will do it in any situation. If you are not willing to do that, you choose to believe in a society where everyone is a selfish asshole. In a society like that, there is no such thing as our collective responsibility as citizens.

> Have you ever voted in an election?

I have voted in every election I had the opportunity to vote, including union election. And yes I think it matters. But democracy is not just about the procedural token of the election. I am also engaged in my union and in my local town council (and should probably do more).

And there is a wide range of possible actions between being a hero (which is for me the definition of great personal sacrifice for the common good) and a "selfish asshole". I am a realist and don't expect everyone to be a hero. In fact, I expect no one to be hero. I don't want anyone to have to suffer for doing the right thing, that is why I believe in collective action because I don't think personal solution are useful against systematic problems.

But by the tone of your comment, I don't think we are communicating on the same level. So let's agree to disagree and have a very good day.

> But what would have happen in that case if Jerry or Anil had quit in protest? Some other dude would have taken their place.

And those other people would be just as responsible if they fail to refuse.

> It is not true that science marches on in defiance of human will, independent of human will, that just is not the case. But it is comfortable, as I said: it leads to the position that "if I don't do it, someone else will."

> Of course if one takes that as an ethical principle then obviously it can serve as a license to do anything at all. "People will be murdered; if I don't do it, someone else will." "Women will be raped; if I don't do it, someone else will."

-- Joseph Weizenbaum

> There was a widespread conviction that it is impossible to withstand temptation of any kind, that none of us could be trusted or even be expected to be trustworthy when the chips are down, that to be tempted and to be forced are almost the same, whereas in the words of Mary McCarthy, who first spotted this fallacy: "If somebody points a gun at you and says,'Kill your friend or I will kill you,' he is tempting you, that is all." And while a temptation where one's life is at stake may be a legal excuse for a crime, it certainly is not a moral justification.

-- Hannah Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship"

> It's hard for me to imagine better evidence that Google needs to be broken up than this.

But it never happened -- the omnibox stayed -- so it doesn't seem like very good evidence to me. It actually shows the opposite -- that the product team built what was best for users in spite of opposition from sales.

> But it never happened

Oh something happened.

Here's a news article from 10 days after that e-mail: https://www.ghacks.net/2019/05/14/fix-chrome-prioritizing-se...

tl;dr: Chrome started prioritizing previous searches over visited sites for suggestions in the omnibar.

> prioritizing previous searches over visited sites

To put a finer (more-explicit) point on that: That sounds like an attempt to keep people making google searches over and over merely to return to whatever search-result they already found in the past and wanted to see again.

It's true that not everything in the browser-history is what people want, but still... Imagine I searched for "monkey island ferry schedule" and picked the obviously-correct first result at "dot.monkey.gov/ferries". Boom, done, got it. Then if I want that information again tomorrow, why would I ever want to re-search, as opposed to just returning to the same result?

In contrast to all this Chrome stuff, let's imagine a browser that is utterly focused on the user's best-interests. With sufficient features/intelligence, it would actually do the exact opposite: "I notice every time you search any monkey/ferry stuff, you always stop once you get to that same result... So you probably always want exactly that page, therefore I should offer it prominently to help you avoid wasting time on unnecessary searches."

I feel like that would kill Google.

What if you searched "best canon camera 2023" and clicked the top (shitty probably ai generated) result https://www.bestcanoncamera2023.com? Do you think you would want to go back to that great site when you continued your research the next day?

I could see there being a lot of queries where the search is the preferred thing to repeat.

chrome://flags/#omnibox-drive-suggestions

The author seems to wonder what it has to do with Google drive to product, not realizing it’s Jerry from Google marketing driving you to go look at ads.

Makes you wonder what schemes the markers are dreaming up for LLM chat dialogue agents to start ‘driving’ us to profitable things.

Yep! It was actually something that made me decrease my use in chrome and eventually switch to safari.

My mental model and my job requires me to use a lot previous sites. I keep my history for a full year for that reason. I might need to go back to something I read 6 months ago. I know I read it. I know it’s out there. And I don’t use bookmarks because I never know if what I read right now might be useful in 3 months. Sure I can google it again, but then have to go through multiple results on google to try to remember the right one. And with the google algo, you never know which new garbage will show up on top

I did notice at some point that chrome would always try to send me back to google even if I knew it was in my history. Safari just shows me the previously visited site above everything.

Those emails confirm my suspicions. This was all about ads.

I switched to Edge because there was no way to disable omnibox suggestions/ad money printer, especially if it autocompleted what I was typing.

As others have pointed out something did happen, but even if it hadn't this exchange still highlights an serious issue. The fundamentals matter more than any single outcome and these tensions haven't gone anywhere. There must be countless other conflicts along these lines and it's unreasonable to expect a for-profit like Google to consistently act against its own short term financial interests.

Ah yes, let's act completely oblivious to the core problem just because this specific case was able to have a solution, yet if we take a look at youtube since 2010 or at how Bard was originally released and kept back till ChatGPT caught on purely due to user pressure (and to this day Bard is terrible, most likely on purpose).

Google has so many cases where millions or even billions for all we know have had their productivity lowered purely because Google decided to do changes and or held back features for the sole reason that it would affect their ads revenue.

I think in this case, the outcome is less important than the process itself.

A simple reason why: if the Ad team reacted early in the approval process, the feature could have been canned at the design level and there would never have been this email exchange. Yet, the user would still be losing potential improvements due to the Ads team talking to the Chrome team.

Except it's way harder to argue on hypotheticals. And honestly, if we have this exchnage happening once, I'd assume the same level of intervention is happening a lot more, but without making waves, without explicit pleas and less drama.

Even at the day to day level, after this exchange happens I'd expect the Chrome team to either be wary of the ad impacts in their future features, or the Ad team to keep an eye on the Chrome roadmap to critically intervene whenever they see something that could even remotely affect them.

The omnibox stayed but got nerfed in a rather idiotic way, if https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/6240767/behaviour-o... is to be trusted. So I wouldn't say it "never happened", assuming that this is what they were talking about. But apparently it's back to the correct behavior now (and has been for a while).

Honestly I don't see this conversation going much differently if Chrome was it's own company. Like Apple and Mozilla, Chrome would get paid based on how many queries it sent to Google, then they do a launch that reduces queries and their revenue arm would say "whoa whoa whoa are you sure this benefit is worth this level of revenue hit?"

Mozilla doesn’t JUST make money from searches. So why would chrome?

In fact, Mozilla has been trying to reduce its dependence on Google for awhile now. I think it’s down to around ~80% of their revenue, IIRC. If Google were to stop, Bing would jump on that in a heartbeat.

80% is still ridiculously dependent and the GP point stands

Apple is definitely not paid by search sent to google, it’s a bulk amount for the whole year. And we can tell that safari just doesn’t prioritize past google searches in the omnibar the same way that chrome does.

It's still bizarre to me that Google was ever allowed to purchase DoubleClick (even though DoubleClick was far more evil).

They managed to do it at the right time; back then most people still thought they actually followed "Don't be Evil". Also, unless I am misremembering, the acquisition was completed before the first commercial Android phone was even announced, they were a much smaller company.

The joke within Google at the time was, "We had to spend $3 billion to convince Sergey that image ads weren't evil."

How can chrome be broken off from the rest of google? It's not a standalone product that has its own revenue sources.

Chrome would find revenue instantly the same way Firefox and Safari do (bid out the default search engine).

So now you have the Chrome team with an even more direct incentive to maximize search volumes at the expense of a good product since that's their revenue source too.

That would be a good thing if it drove people away...

After the WEI incident chrome is pretty dang tainted to me.

I'm mostly salty that chromium made Opera go from the wonderful Presto engine to being yet another chromium clone...

> I'm mostly salty that chromium made Opera go from the wonderful Presto engine to being yet another chromium clone...

I do not know this story. How did the Chromium team force Opera to change rendering engines?

The same way Microsoft was forced to change to Chromium for Edge - Google forcing Chromium-specific features through the standardization process at a rate exhausting for Microsoft (or any other browser engine implementor) to follow in time without popular sites breaking.

This doesn't seem to be an issue for Firefox which is in the same boat.

> Chrome would find revenue instantly the same way Firefox and Safari do

As in, Chrome decoupled from Google should have 90% of revenue coming from Google/Alphabet, as Mozilla does?

90% < 100%. It is, at the very least, a start.

The world you are suggesting, where intermediary platforms take all of the revenue out of the information systems, would not be a good one.

This is pretty ironic given that you are talking about browsers taking revenue away google, which is an intermediary platform taking all the ad revenue from various publishers ...

Bing could bid for it

Google search revenue seems to do ok for Mozilla although that's not the best solution.

That would be their problem, not whoever orders it to be broken up. And frankly, that should have happened years ago.

> It's not a standalone product that has its own revenue sources.

Chrome makes a ton of money.

Google pays Apple and others billions of dollars to be the default search engine in their browser. Google gets that free now from Chrome but they get the revenue from all of those searches. Google would need to pay Chrome for that. Or I'm sure Microsoft would be willing to pay a lot if Google is not.

Google paying all of its employees to work on Chrome, or it pays Chrome to be the default search engine to a new company called Chrome so Chrome can pay its employees. What's the difference?

I think the difference is if Chrome had to stand on its own, it would be even more incentivized to drive traffic to Google for revenue at the expense of user experience.

what if, *gasp*, people paid for chrome directly?

What if google paid it's users directly for their searches.

Sounds like a joke but Bing is actually trying this.

if people paid for Chrome, Google would have to stop collecting data on its users. Google would much rather have that data than some <$20 fee. If Chrome was its own company, Google's money to be the default search engine would be more than they could earn from selling the browser. Free. Always has. Always will be. wait, that's the other data hoover.

Ask the regulators, that's one tool they use against monopolies. Like when they shattered AT&T into over a dozen pieces.

Which created the baby bell monopolies. :s

It's created AT&T all over again. Many got gobbled up by one baby bell who bought the name. Quite interesting.

Having had to deal with the ILEC/CLEC dance decades ago, the splits also did nothing to change their ‘die competitor’ attitude in any way.

>It's not a standalone product that has its own revenue sources.

The question reveals the problem.

But isn't the alternative just that chrome does? Is that better? Would you have never wanted the giant leaps forward in browsers that Google continually provides?

I don't agree it is continually, I see Chrome as already in the 'extinguish' phase. Chrome was able to make the improvements faster than competitors because - without an bottomless money engine in the form of a search monopoly - they weren't competitors at all. The price we pay for a few years of higher performance may be many more years of reduced innovation from competition.

What giant leaps? WebP images? AMP pages?

Chrome won the browser wars a decade ago, it hasn't done anything since except try to track and monetize that audience.

JavaScript and HTML rendering performance

Safari is faster and uses less memory

Chrome/Blink shouldn’t be broken off into a business, but into a nonprofit org. Lots of companies rely on both which should make funding a non-issue.

What would stop Google from simply forking Chrome again?

Maybe Chromium development could be broken off into a non-profit, but Chrome is just some Google branding on top of the open source Chromium.

If it came to breaking up Alphabet, The courts would include in their orders terms that would prohibit them just picking the pieces back up.....

Yes, exactly. Chrome dominates the browser market via money made monopolizing search ads.

Amazon dominates the webhosting market via money made from monopolizing online commerce?

I dont think this is a form of monopoly, if the only thing the dominant position gives you is money to burn.

however, if google refused to advertise another browser in their search, and instead show chrome's ads in place of say, a firefox ad, then there's huge grounds for monopoly abuse.

actually burning said money to force out competitors is absolutely problematic monopoly seeking. Burning it for other reasons isn’t.

Senator, we run ads.

Sorry but Jerry is definitely the bad guy. The bad guy often does evil shit just for the money. In this case Jerry is trying to hold back human progress. Screw Jerry and everything he stands for and screw his management and the investors for putting him in this position with bullshit incentive structures

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0

A man's gotta try!

How is this any evidence that Google needs to be broken up? Google, like all companies, wants to maximize revenue. What about this is anti-competitive? Foolishness is not illegal.

Fortunately we have the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which does make this behavior illegal.

Leveraging your monopoly in one area to advance your position in another area is illegal in the US, even if the company got to their monopoly position in the first area by just having the best product.

This is basically exactly what Microsoft was found guilty of in the late 90s: abusing their monopoly power in operating systems to advance their position in the Internet by making IE the default browser and insisting, despite all evidence to the contrary, that "The browser must be an integral part of the OS!"

How is the described behavior leveraging Google's monopoly status? Making a product shittier to raise revenue is not specific to monopolies and not illegal.

That isn’t what the Sherman antitrust act says.

It says doing it ‘unreasonably’ (or to an ‘unreasonable’ extent) is illegal (regarding trade).

Attempting to monopolize (or actually doing so) is illegal, but leaning on a subsidiary to stop hurting revenue for the overall entity isn’t necessarily that (or illegal!). Monopolies based on actual quality are also generally considered okay (not illegal).

If it was, any company with multiple divisions would be in violation.

We’ll see what the court determines here.

Happy to provide a reference to the law if you want. It’s pretty short.

Edit: actually, FTC has a great write up - which also shows how difficult this case is when you look at other market participants and what Google was actually doing - https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

It serves to show a pattern of behavior to protect a monopoly in ads. This examples show how they leveraged their monopoly of Chrome to protect their ads.

Except that change didn’t get made?

They changed how omnibar worked. It switched from history first to doing a google search first.

To clarify, when I said "Fortunately we have the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which does make this behavior illegal" I was referring to the act and the century plus of case law around the act that solidified what it meant. With laws in the US it's pretty easy to point at any individual law and say "it doesn't actually say that" if you ignore all the jurisprudence that goes along with that law. E.g. The 1st amendment literally only applies to laws the US Congress can make, but centuries of following case law means that it now applies to essentially all governmental bodies in the US.

I think the link you added is great in that it would seem trivial to rewrite that "Example: The Microsoft Case" and apply many of those exact same rationales to what Google has done. I am not saying the case is a total slam dunk, and I think it's fine to argue some of the finer points (e.g. I'm sure there will be a lot of debate along what is described in that "Market Power" section to determine if Google has sufficient market power in search, ads or browsers), but I do strongly push back against the statement I was replying to, "Google, like all companies, wants to maximize revenue. What about this is anti-competitive?" If you can't see how what Google was doing was anti-competitive (whether or not it meets the threshold of deserving of a severe governmental solution), I feel like that's just being willfully obtuse.

Almost every argument on that page for what is actually OK is what Google is doing.

The case law really doesn’t support the current case well, and the linked example doesn’t either.

There are literally hundreds of well known companies that are doing meaningfully worse, with extremely large market monopolies, and are being ignored.

As I’ve said in other threads, the standard hinges on ‘reasonable’ though, with no meaningful case laws or statute that define it in a useful way. So it’s going to hinge on essentially ‘I know it when I see it’.

> Leveraging your monopoly in one area to advance your position in another area

Layman here but your phrasing feels way more broad and vague than how I've usually seen this phrased. The FTC's phrasing [1] is "use a monopoly in one market to attempt to monopolize another market." Namely, a market has to exist for both things, and that's what you have to be advancing (for a violation).

What I find fascinating in this case (which might be just my ignorance on the topic; I'd love for someone to explain if so) is the notion of a "market" for a browser. Doesn't a market involve some kind of payment? What would that mean exactly, when browsers are free for everyone to download and use?

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

> This is basically exactly what Microsoft was found guilty of in the late 90s: abusing their monopoly power in operating systems to advance their position in the Internet by making IE the default browser and insisting, despite all evidence to the contrary, that "The browser must be an integral part of the OS!"

Except that ruling was overturned on appeal so this was never actually found to be illegal.

The ruling that ordering the breakup of Microsoft was an appropriate remedy was overturned. The finding that they were violating antitrust law was not.

It's complicated as there were many different claims made against Microsoft in the lawsuit, some were upheld on appeal and some were overturned. But the specific claim I was replying to (that bundling Internet Explorer with Windows violated antitrust law) was one of the ones overturned by the appeals court.

I think the spirit of the antitrust laws was to prevent the stifling of competition using monopoly power.

Microsoft was definitely doing that when they threaten to charge OEMs more if they bundled Netscape Navigator - OEMs couldn’t say “no” to Microsoft due to their desktop OS monopoly; it would be the end of their business.

In Google’s case, I find it hard to see how they are stifling the competition.

Blowing your vast capital to improve your product is not anticompetitive - it’s unfair but it’s not anticompetitive.

Designing your products to advantage your other products, again, it’s unfair but it isn’t anticompetitive IMHO - competition isn’t being stifled; must every company make sure their products benefit their competitors’s as much as their own before they are allowed to release it?

The courts will have to be very careful. Their ruling in this case will set a precedent and in the future other companies can get hit by the same logic they use against Google if they convict.

I don’t like Google’s de facto control of the web and their attempt to kill JPEGXL in favor of their own formats, AVIF and WebP. JPEGXL is the superior format and they should support it but they aren’t obligated to. It makes them a prick but being a prick isn’t illegal. We can still hate their guts though.

Remove the word monopoly from this and there is nothing wrong with it. It's standard and smart business practice to create synergies among your business units in this way. It's one of the key reasons companies acquire other companies.

While I would agree that Google doing it may be detrimental to consumers, it's not suddenly nefarious when they do it. They're just doing what any company would do. It's not their job to look out for the health of the market or what's best for consumers. That's the governments job. It's Google's job to look out for Google and their shareholders.

>it can be detrimental to consumers, it's not suddenly nefarious when they do it.

That is more of a US than an EU point of view.

US is more "If you're not a monopoly, feel free to fuck the customer"

EU is more "Consumers have rights, quite being a dick".

I'm not familiar with EU law but as a US consumer, I don't think that's fair. They're far from perfect but they try. We have entire agencies that exist to protect consumers in specific areas. The SEC being a famous one. Their entire mission is to protect investors from getting scammed. That's why congress created and funds the SEC. That's why those thousands of people go to work every day. To protect us from getting scammed. Awesome. I'm thankful for it.

The context here is one particular type of fucking over the customer. The ways in which monopolies can abuse their power. Within that one specific type, what you said is probably accurate.

Google's customer service is famously awful.

Only if you don't pay for it. if you pay for it, its average to normal.

(I pay for 1 and I get what I pay for. People respond when I ask for help)

I'd gladly pay ~$100 or so not to be treated like a criminal by Google Ads support, but when I'm already (or was) paying ~$2000/month I'd expect someone to at least hear me out when I suggest their algo might be fucked up. Alas, they won't let me pay for support in the first place.

Indeed, the GP's description of the situation is backwards. In the US, harming consumers is the surest way to lose an antitrust case. In the EU, they use regulatory powers to protect competitors, even when it harms consumers.

The SEC protects investors, not end customers/users. It's different. The EU has a bunch of consumer rights that apply to everyday people regardless of wealth.

The US has very little of that, aside from the occasional recall. Instead, we have a predatory legal system that thrives on lawsuits instead of regulations.

Yes I forgot, you can't make analogies or even provide examples on the interest, because no two things are ever exactly alike. My apologies.

My point stands, however.

It's not really an analogy though. The US is really behind in consumer rights compared to the EU.

The SEC's existence doesn't change that. It's like saying we have a EPA and a ATF. But those aren't consumer protection agencies either.

So apologizing wasn't enough. What would you like for me to show my genuine remorse for providing an example you don't approve of?

So either you're being sarcastic about "genuine" and your entire post here is just to be obnoxious...

Or you're the worst apologizer in the world, jesus christ, go read a tutorial or something.

And no your point doesn't stand. The defensiveness about it being exactly alike would matter if it was an analogy, but you did not make an analogy. Non-analogies do have to match, and that is not an unreasonable standard.

I shouldn't need to apologize for making an example.

How about you quit being such a pedant. An example is not supposed to be exactly the same in every way. It doesn't even need to be mostly the same. It can be only kinda sorta maybe related and that's ok. It's just an example.

Somehow analogies an examples came to mean perfect clones. That's not what they are.

> I shouldn't need to apologize for making an example.

You don't need to apologize, but a fake apology serves no purpose except to annoy people.

A fake apology that claims "genuine remorse" is extra annoying.

> How about you quit being such a pedant. An example is not supposed to be exactly the same in every way. It doesn't even need to be mostly the same. It can be only kinda sorta maybe related and that's ok. It's just an example.

Examples do need to be the same. That's the point of examples, they show what something is.

You can have "an example of something related", but that's not evidence of whatever it's related to. It's ancillary information.

This isn't pedantry, this is how you explain things and argue points. I can't fix an incorrect example by steelmanning your argument, the way I could ignore an actual issue of pedantry.

On the other side, an analogy doesn't have to be related at all, but it takes significantly more to set up. A connects to B the same way that X connects to Y. It looks very different from an example.

I don't think this is a worthwhile discussion to continue. Good day/evening to you.

Except for the last 20 years where we've had basically zero anti-trust enforcement. Lina Kahn biden's FTC chair is actually taking a crack at it again and has filed several major anti-trust suits against several big tech companies this month.

> it may be detrimental to consumers, it's not suddenly nefarious when they do it

It absolutely is. The whole point of these corporations is to serve us with good products and services. That's why society allows them to exist at all. That they get to turn a profit is merely a side effect meant to incentivize them. If whatever it is they're doing is not good for us, it absolutely should be prohibited. We couldn't care less how much money they're making or losing, it's literally not our problem.

"they're not doing anything nefarious" and "what they are doing should be prohibited" are not mutually exclusive.

You aren't disagreeing with me.

They're in anti-trust proceedings. That is the proper way to handle any harm they're doing.

And...as I said...that doesn't mean they are doing anything nefarious. They're conducting business as any other business would, they just happen to be really good at it. If the regulators want to step in, they can. It's the system working as intended.

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