Google labeled "an illegal monopolist" by US federal judge | Hacker News Reader

Google labeled "an illegal monopolist" by US federal judge

notebookcheck.net

48 pointsbelter19 comments

I'm still trying to reconcile Apple's victory over Epic with Google's loss to them. To an outside observer it seems obvious that Apple is a far worse offender in monopolizing app distribution on their platform, yet somehow they're the ones who managed to pull a victory in court.

It appears that part of it is a bit of a technicality—Apple never allowed a market for app distribution on their platform at all, while Google did. So, technically, Google is abusing their competition while Apple simply doesn't have any. There's a certain kind of logic to that argument, but it feels like it establishes perverse incentives for a platform to retain 100% control. It's legal precedence for "give them an inch; they'll take a mile"—not only will they try to take the mile, they're legally entitled to.

I also suspect that the other side of it has to be that Google is simply far less competent at managing its legal position than Apple is. Google is constantly getting into trouble in these cases for deleting data they shouldn't have and similar offenses. Apple, meanwhile, doesn't seem to retain any more incriminating data than Google does, but they somehow simultaneously manage to avoid getting in trouble for their data retention policies.

You can see Microsoft trying to slowly inch their way towards Apple’s stance. They want to be able to claim that being 100% in control is their core product value and therefore it’s not a matter of competition or abuse. Neither Apple nor anyone else should be allowed these flimsy arguments.

It seems like admitting your core business is monopolistic should be damning not liberating.

A lot of these "monopoly" talks could be resolved by simply making adversarial interoperability legal and codified into law.

Tech monopolies are primarily so because the legal system is being abused to prevent adversarial interoperability.

If it was possible to build alternative clients to interoperate with monopolist's services then their monopolies would crumble as third-parties would be able to repackage and resell whole or parts of the monopolist's services without the attached downsides and reduce lock-in/network effects.

Any law that could fix this would never become one because it would fix it. Best we can hope for is old laws holding back the tide of absolute corporate power, at for a little while longer.

We need all new definitions of what a monopoly is, instead of the ones we have in law. The current definitions let everything drag out for years in courts by setting too high a bar. Instead, we need to recognize that all companies above a certain size or even “medium” market share damage competition simply due to their size. There shouldn’t be tests like proof of consumer harm, which is often hard or impossible to prove. Companies should also not be allowed to define the type of service they are, since they use overly broad market segments to make themselves look small. Their market capitalization or revenue or profit should be enough evidence of a problem. We know that big incumbents can copy smaller players, fight expensive legal battles, loss lead, bundle products, and behave in other anti competitive ways. Their size is a problem on its own.

A healthy society needs to have fair competition and reasonably distributed power. What we have right now with trillion Dollar megacorps (by market cap) is not healthy.

The problem was created by globalization.

Previously, companies could only grow so big. Now with a worldwide addressable market, that's increased substantially.

I'd love to see US antitrust law recast as a series of increasing restrictions. No need to make it binary.

If you exceed this threshold, these are the requirements you're held to...

If you exceed this next threshold, these are the additional requirements...

The root issue is that extremely large companies are held to the same rules as much smaller companies, while having access to resources that alone create monopoly concerns.

And, IMHO, Godzilla-style "find a big monster to fight the big monster" regulation isn't a healthy approach to creating competition. Much better to increase competition restrictions with company size.

> The root issue is that extremely large companies are held to the same rules as much smaller companies, while having access to resources that alone create monopoly concerns.

Totally agree. Another “simple” solution is different taxes based on size (maybe based on global revenues or profits).

Definitely in favor of simple rules, as they're harder to game, but not sure tax rate alone would be sufficient to redress (as it's also subject to accounting creativity).

Throwing ideas out there:

- Past a certain size, companies are prohibited from acquiring/merging with another company

- Past a certain size, companies are subject to data interoperability requirements (i.e. 'must have takeout'), with an independent team funded and dedicated to implementing requests, and penalties if they aren't released within a certain timeframe

The goal should be that e.g. "being Alphabet-sized" is not in Alphabet's own best interest, and it would be more beneficial to itself / its shareholders to break into multiple smaller companies that would be subject to less restriction but are independent.

And critically, the same requirements would apply to international companies doing business in the US.

So, increasing competition, but keeping the playing field level for all.

The conundrum is that the entrenched powers could likely continue to wield power based on the amount of regulations and standards in tech nowadays. There basically would need to be a way to subsidize startups for whom such compliance is a significant expense.

Tax the big companies to subsidize smaller ones perhaps?

What kind of size are we talking about here? There’s lots of programs to subsidize truly small businesses, which I think are a good idea. It’s less obvious to me that we should tax the Googles making tens of billions in profit to subsidize companies making millions.

I don't reflexively gag at the thought of some redistribution but I think that redistribution of money is a medium-term bandaid solution for this scenario.

I've been meaning to read Chokepoint Capitalism for a while but from the name alone it sounds like government or public intervention ought to be focused on preventing the creation of such chokepoints. Not just near-monopoly like Microsoft has over lots of PC bootloader signatures, but also avoiding duopolies like Android-Apple. In very vague terms the most sensible option would be that it should be possible for any size party to create a minimum viable product so that market forces could actually work - such as open-sourcing a "minimum viable" amount of IP that a competitor can ship a product and let customer experience and market forces come to the fore, instead of lock-in, walled gardens, regulatory capture, standards burden etc.

Personally I also would like to see standard education include something akin to "How To Get Away With Murder" except it's "How FAANG Gets Away With Fucking Everybody". Bring the technical and economic literacy of the general populace closer to the average HN level, basically. More tinkers, more hackers.

And, in a broader sweep, a comment I made recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40461326

“That company’s really big, that’s per se bad for markets” used to be (more or less) the standard. Now it’s not and every major category of good and service is dominated by a handful of businesses that would never have been allowed to grow that large before.

This comment shouldn't be downvoted. Point to a 750 billion dollar company that doesn't have undue market power.

Allowing Epic into Google Play seems like such a poor fix to me. It doesn't seem to end the abuse just allow Epic in on the game.

There’s no way this administration manages to do anything in the remaining 7 months. If they actually wanted to antitrust Google they would have started this in 2021. 2024 is too late, and this looks like a purely political play, perhaps to remind our corporate overlords to cut fatter checks to the relevant politicians. Nice business you got there, it’d be a shame if something happened to it.

This particular case won't be affected by an administration change at all, and regardless, reining in Big Tech is a bipartisan issue and has been for some time. The DOJ's suit against Google that just concluded (US v. Google 2020) was filed in October 2020 by the Trump DOJ. A second Trump DOJ isn't going to pull the plug on a suit that they started.

They may arrive at it from very different directions, but neither party in Washington right now is well disposed towards the modern gatekeepers of public discourse.

A good start. Now do apple, amazon, facebook, intel, amd, and most of the rest of the s&p 500 and make the remedy an actual remedy like breaking the companies up.

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