Comment by Nevermark | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nevermark | Hacker News Reader

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Whether its friends, family, or every online community I experience, there seems to be a politically impactful grassroots flip in favor of anti-big tech action for many reasons:

1. Normal daily life increasingly happens through gates controlled by a handful of firms.

2. We all noticed when several of these firms crossed from "free" and "wonderful" to enshitiffied services. E.g. Google, Amazon, etc.

3. A general disgust with big tech's handling of social media in terms of user manipulation, and privacy abuses. And disgust with a perception of unhelpful behavior and lack of transparency or responsibility by social media's famous leaders.

4. General feeling that big tech is shafting little people, whether it's social media, physical world gig work, heavily taxing or not paying creators on their sites or in apps, etc.

5. People dealing with big tech mismanagement of their accounts, with great frustration and even fear.

(I almost lost my home when more than one financial firm suddenly decided that having a non-driver's ID after a move somehow made me more risky? Or a good target to demonstrate they are weeding out risky people?I will never know the reasons, and their unexplained decisions are unappealable. A month of hell. Banned for life, without recourse, apparently.)

6. The amount of frivolous and disturbing news that is generated by the tech billionaire class, emphasizing vast inequalities in resources and quality of public behavior between regular people and the super rich.

I don't imagine its just me that has experienced a surge of complaints like these in their techie and non-techie circles.

I think the relative unity behind these negative perspectives comes from them being based in everyone's practical lives, as apposed to having indirect, abstract, tribal or ideological bases.

I'll add another thing someone pointed out. The difference between General Motors circa 1955 and Google circa 2020.

General Motors indirect economic effects were huge and larger than the company itself. Lots and lots of businesses and people were employed indirectly.

Google, nothing, bupkis, they're totally extractive on the rest of the economy. Most of the towns and cities in the US google doesn't employ anyone directly or indirectly. And the places they do they distort the economy in bad ways.

Very good point!

Along those lines, it is interesting that as much as “evil” Microsoft dominated computing and leveraged their power in the 90’s, they still provided a very open (in terms of building on) platform for an enormous number of third parties.

Now Apple manages an enormous platform re iOS apps, but it is not open technologically or economically.

Apple and Microsoft have a very different market share. Windows has something around 85-90% desktop/laptop market share. So you can make a very good argument that they have a functional monopoly over the desktop OS market.

Contrast this with Apple, they have around 10% desktop/laptop market share and around 50% of the smartphone market share. Here you could only argue that they have a duopoly with google on the smartphone OS market.

Microsoft had to open up the platform or they would have gotten destroyed by antitrust laws there and then. They had to let other developers deploy on their OS and support them because if they failed the government would have gotten involved and forced them. So smartly they decided let us no destroy the nice thing we have and play as nice as we have to to keep our profits and our market share. And they mostly succeeded in that regard.

The duopoly difference is real. But either side of a duopoly in a critical global market has tremendous power.

Very hard, often impossible, to be competitive in mobile software if you don’t support iOS.

Microsoft didn’t optimize Windows for third party developers because of legal action.

Supporting third party developer innovation was the foundational Microsoft strategy, long before and after they got into operating systems.

The legal issue was using their platform’s defaults and product bundling to kill the opportunities and economics for potentially competitive platforms (Netscape, the web as an OS platform replacement).

I disagree. Google offers a cheap and effective way of advertising, making it possible for smb’s in rural areas to have a global reach. That’s not nothing.

In some cases yes. In a lot of cases no. Take barbers for instance. Acquiring new customers used to be somewhat "automatic" and organic through Google. You'd set up a website. You'd set up a Google my business listing. And if you did an average job people could start finding you through search and Google Maps.

Now the digital competition is way fiercer. There are way more advertisers. They've improved their craft, websites and copy. Any random barber can't go into the Google marketplace and expect results without either being really good at CPC advertising and CRO (which 99% aren't) or pay top dollar to an agency.

All the while Google is increasing their profits by skimming off what originally was organic search results and moving it into paid results. Through new Ad placements on Google Maps. Shitty placements provided through the "Performance max" placements. Or just even more ads at the top of the SERP.

On top of this the ad bidding system is inherently set up to be extractive. In a perfectly measurable market the price you pay for an acquisition through CPC ads will increase until it has extracted all the profit an advertiser can reasonably give.

This distorts the economy greatly. It concentrates power to those who are the best at digital - at the cost of the average business owner who has no resources, interest or skills in learning it.

This goes for barbers, bakeries, restaurants and all kinds of brick and mortar stores. In a lot of these cases it's a zero sum game where Google has inserted itself in the perfect position to be extractive.

Not to mention the advertising dollars that used to go to the local newspaper is now going to a California behemoth.

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