Google Reneged on the Monopolistic Bargain
pluralistic.net
pluralistic.net
The one thing that was a real shock was how much more gas was left in the ad model engine. They've managed to grow substantially over the past couple of years largely by pushing advertisers in to a ROAS model that is clearly optimized to make Google more money: gross almost 2x from 2019 to 2023 -- from $161b to $307b. Net income more than doubled -- from $34b to $73.8b.
Google, Google's employees, and Google's shareholders don't need nearly $1b in revenue a day. What they do just isn't that important anymore. That money is very much a tax, and ultimately the money consumers are paying for products and services is going to Google instead of making the product or service better.
The good news is there are now many alternatives that work as well or better than Google. Combine that with LLM options (Perplexity, ChatGPT), and the future looks Google-lite or Google-free. It would be even better if we had more decentralized & localized search options like YaCy. If we want to have any control over our search future we need it.
I'll just keep repeating this: Google today is a yellow pages. For search they offer little of value that isn't provided by others. Old people keep using Google because that's what they have been using for years or because it just shows up (like the yellow pages did, but now as a default.)
Because I can see pretty much all of the 'growth' that occurred during 2020-2021 being unwound gradually as people realise that a lot of what happened was an absolute disaster for society.
When it comes to making any predictions for the future you really have to write off the 2019-2021 pandemic era figures as a glitch.
If you want to win reelection you're much better off taking massive piles of cash from big businesses and regulate consumers to help create the monopolies. Trying to protect consumers by breaking up monopolies and promoting healthy market competition will see you leaving office in a hurry.
You have? How? You barely have any. And the ones you do have you rarely enforce.
> Trying to protect consumers by breaking up monopolies and promoting healthy market competition will see you leaving office in a hurry.
That sounds like a flaw in your political/electoral system not in anti-competition regulations.
> You barely have any .. anti-competition regulations
this is not true. However, the secrecy implemented around enforcement (bad publicity) causes the casual observer to think so..
There are very large enforcement actions that take place regularly.. they are far from perfect, and the failures tend to be the ones that are amplified in media..
That isn't the reason it isn't true. The US nominally has quite strong antitrust laws. The statutes are extremely broad in what they prohibit. But the enforcement is lacking and the courts over time have read the laws more narrowly than they were intended to be.
> the failures tend to be the ones that are amplified in media..
The failures are prolific. In a functioning regulatory environment, whether because you don't have regulations that prop up incumbents and don't create regulatory barriers to entry or because you break them up and stop them from buying each other, you wouldn't have industries where any one company has more than 15% of the market. But that is common, not rare, and that is the measure of it working.
Is that realistic? Intuition is telling me that's very idealistic but I'm prepared to be surprised
There are many markets where this is the case. Which trucking company has significantly more than 15% market share? Which law firm? Which car insurance company? Which university? Which construction company?
Nearly all of the consolidated industries got there through some combination of mergers, vertical integration and regulatory barriers to entry. Even some of the "natural monopolies" like last mile telecommunications are only so because of regulatory choices -- the natural monopoly is actually the roads, which the government owns, and if they provided easy and affordable access to roadside cable trenches there would be much more competition for data service.
Lack of enforcement was actually part of my point. More broadly, though, we don't need more regulation so much as we need less legal protections that allow companies to get away with it.
> That sounds like a flaw in your political/electoral system not in anti-competition regulations.
No disagreements at all that our political and electoral system is flawed. I'm not so sure if that's the direct cause here though or if its the other way around. Meaning, we could be here because runaway anticompetitive behavior led to political and regulatory capture rather than the flawed political system being the proximal cause.
The US is no more likely to break them up as it is to cut its military budget in half.
They came out with Gemini really late and they look like they don't know what they're doing. They are going to be late to the next disruptor too
The attitude is "Fuck you, pay me." but wrapped in massive amounts of PR spin in an attempt to obfuscate the realty and deflect the blame.
Everything that has a good reputation gets financialized and run into the ground, then the shareholders move on.
Buying anything has become a game of "has that already turned to crap".
When Americans understand stockbuybacks should be illegal, that the entire stock market is a game played by monsters, then maybe, maybe you'll fix your shit
Can someone with Kagi check to see if Kagi does better here?
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/dyson/comments/1730x73/best_air_pur...
[2] https://www.webmd.com/pets/how-to-choose-an-air-purifier-for...
I can't imagine who would go to Microsoft for quality.
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources...
> To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia.
> We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results.
> we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing.
* links and content on pages that Google search engine ranks
* reviews on the Amazon market
then everyone is going to use every trick in the book to come out on top, and that will just constantly degrade your product.
If there was competition in the domain, then the tricks used for one search engine might not work for other search engines. So the situation might be better in the long run.
I’m not trying to defend Google, BUT I do this all the BHG style “fraud” should be punished. Posting junk content for click through ads and affiliate links is a sad way to make a living, and we should have no problem with booting them from the visible internet.
Sometimes I wish owners of popular brands let them die with dignity instead of selling their brand to be worn as skin for soulless PE fraud.
If it isn't outright illegal it's certainly disappointing.
Is the current Meredith company a different organization from the one started by the magazine's founder, Edwin Meredith?
Google literally has one job: to detect this kind of thing and crush it. The deal we made with Google was, "You monopolize search and use your monopoly rents to ensure that we never, ever try another search engine. In return, you will somehow distinguish between low-effort, useless nonsense and good information.
Google's big lie was "don't be evil." They provided overwhelmingly valuable services for free. They did everything with minimal advertising and generally fantastic performance. Then they merged with an advertising company and pretty soon "don't be evil" was abandoned, along with almost every other principle that they had used to earn their dominant position in search and email.
Walmart in the 1980s and 1990s was all about "Made in the USA.¹" They sold themselves as a small-town company that cared about American jobs and American values. They did this while simultaneously dealing with American manufacturers using ruthless tactics. Walmart had a direct and significant (I would say critical) role in the widespread decline of manufacturing in the US.
1. This is not so prominent anymore but it was a lie from the start. Walmart has a long history with claiming to support American manufacturing while aggressively doing the opposite. https://www.thestand.org/2014/11/how-walmart-destroyed-u-s-m...
manufacturing's share of nominal gross domestic product (GDP) has dropped from 28.1 percent in 1953 to just 12 percent in 2015
One example: Place a massive order beyond the capability of the supplier to meet the demand but at a premium price to incentivize them to try anyway. Then cancel at the last minute when production is almost finished but doesn't quite meet the original quantity ordered. Finally come back a few weeks / months later and offer to buy the resulting overstock at a deeply discounted price.
Obviously the blame doesn't all belong to Walmart but when a company is struggling and desperate it only takes a couple of deals like that to put them on a fast track to liquidation of their assets until all that remains is a company dedicated to marketing imported products under a previously prestigious brand.
The company I have specific knowledge about, Rawlings Sporting Goods, shut down most of their US manufacturing at the end of the 1990s and moved everything to China. Walmart had a big hand in driving the nails in the coffin of that ~80 year old company.
We refuse to bring down governments who don't write the laws necessary to break up Google. So there is complicity there.
But for this to become a problem Google first had to come up with a system better than everyone else's.
Sounds like a classic dilemma to me.
It’s one of the reasons why I started AskPandi as a side project. It’s an answer engine that gives answers without fluff. No link sifting, no ads, no popups, no cookie consents.
It’s making browsing the web fun again.
Presumably 12,000 google employees working for 27 years could deliver more benefit to google (and to the world, and probably to google's shareholders as well) than a stock buyback?
But what I’ve still yet to hear anyone share are good solutions?
The situation with Google’s search results is basically identical to the one with Amazon and cheap crappy products. In both cases people seem to have just given up.
But in the casse of this article, the repeated reference to a "deal" goggle made with us, is just not correct. There was no deal.
Goggle never promised anyone that they wouldn't flood their search results with shit.
Goggle will do whatever makes it the most money, like laying off 1000s of workers while buying back 10s of billions of $ in stock. I bet those workers thought they had a "deal" too, they didn't.
The only correction is for us citizens to elect legislators, and demand regulation anad breakup of massive monopolies.
Instead some of the poorest trailer park trash in the us south are sending their spare nickels to the cheeto's gofundme campain. In spite of the fact that he's billionaire brat child from a NYC family slum lord empire.
So, don't expect any of this to change in the us, except to get worse, because at this point american's are just too stupid...
ChatGPT is this blogspam?