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Comment by Over2Chars | Hacker News Reader

These rogue extensions are "surreptitiously monetizing web searches" - but doesn't Google conspicuously monetize web searches?

So it seems the Google TOS bans competition in search monetization using their "open source" browser. Isn't it odd that an "open source" browser is apparently designed to provide a monopoly on search monetization by the nice people who give it to you for free?

And being 80% or so of all searches: https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-...

It seems like Peter Thiel's claim that google is a search advertising monopoly masquerading as a (competitive, non-monopoly) technology company might be spot on.

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> Peter Thiel's claim that google is a search advertising monopoly masquerading as a (competitive, non-monopoly) technology company

That's not a very deep insight, it's been pretty obvious since they bought out DoubleClick in 2007.

I agree, I think it's not a deep insight, but Thiel notes (in his 'zero to one' speech he gave) that Google actively pretends not to be a search advertising monopoly, and instead pretends to be a competitive technology company, in a wide range of technology fields, to "hide" their monopoly.

Thiel is openly advocating monopolies, and says competition is for losers.

I think he's just calling GOOG out for their marketing, and noting their market strategy to deflect attention away from their monopoly.

I, for one, have never heard anyone publicly mention this besides Thiel. Have you?

I'm not sure I buy Thiel's argument becuase plenty of their non-search businesses such as Google Cloud, GSuite, Waymo, and Verily have become pretty successful in their own right, and vertical integration is another form of monopoly that tends to cracked down on.

Check out the big blue box. I think Thiel's point is spot on:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1093781/distribution-of-...

If I had a monopoly on sugar and traded in silver and healthcare, I would still have a monopoly on sugar.

Yea but diversification is a critical business strategy not just a marketing ploy

Yeah there are far cheaper ways to “distract” from a monopoly than building Waymo from scratch. Alleging that whole project exists only as a smokescreen is pretty conspiratorial thinking.

I have had drinks with Peter Thiel. If you force him to answer more than one question about his theories it totally falls apart. Mostly the logic actually goes like this: oh if it doesn’t work I have the money to survive it and you don’t so I still win and claim I was right.

I wish more people understood this.

+1 on this.

Ime he's a walking personification of "jack of all trades, master of none".

That's the perfect trait for a VC (broad knowledge is critical to identify market trends), but it has its flaws such as extreme simplification of complex topics.

That said, you can rightfully argue that this is why you are investing in egghead founders - so they can deal with solving those problems and logic gaps.

In the essay, _"The Silicon Valley Canon: On the Paideía of the American Tech Elite essays"_ the author writes

> If the Washington intellectual aims for authority and expertise, the Silicon Valley intellectual seeks novel or counter-intuitive insights. He claims to judge ideas on their utility; in practice I find he cares mostly for how interesting an idea first seems. He likes concepts that force him to puzzle and ponder. > This is fertile soil for the dabbler, the heretic, and the philosopher from first principles.

His lack of depth is obvious even from his speeches. He jumps from topic to topic and doesn't develop his ideas or show much internal organization. He has a pithy insight and then bounces to the next topic.

That said, if a 60 minute talk can provide even one useful insight that's useful, I'd say it's a win. And I think his "zero to one" talk had at least two or three.

Honestly, I concluded GOOG was an advertising company pretending to be a "tech" company some time ago, but if I say it I'm a "troll", if Thiel says it, well it might be true, right?

Advertising is the highest tech problem you can tackle. It literally is about using compute to bend the will of humans. How do you not get that?

If Advertising is the "highest tech problem" that can be tackled, I guess we're in for a rough ride.

I'd assume at least a dozen things are more important than advertising inexpensive Chinese made socks to Americans. But I could be wrong.

If by highest you mean, "most lucrative" then yes, I agree.

Vertical integration is very proconsumer as it reduces successive markups.

Until they drive competitors out of business, and then it's not. Much like the horizontal integration of, say, Walmart.

When the prices are low it's predatory, the same it's collusion and higher it's exploiting the monopoly.

I never had the illusion that Google makes their money from Pixel phones... It was always advertising.

You are keenly insightful in this age of the willingly blind.

Their technology products are free/low cost ways to get you to voluntarily opt in to their surveillance advertising model.

At this point in 2024/25, it's obvious to the point of multiple antitrust lawsuits against Google.

If you want a POV on the most recent one involving Doubleclick, listen to the first part of this podcast with Brian Kelley of App Nexus - a competitor to Google ad tech.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xm8gPuwqFHk

I mean… they’re as much search as Amazon is retail, no?

Doesn’t GCP bring in big bucks?

Not to mention gsuite. If your company don’t use Microsoft office they use gsuite.

The big blue block is search advertising revenue:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1093781/distribution-of-...

the much smaller black box is GCP. Much smaller. much much smaller.

Don't forget when Google bought Urchin in '05. It's all been a part of the same broad strategy.

Small info piece: Chrome isn't open source.

Otherwise I agree (even if it means agreeing with Peter Thiel in this case).

Well shiver me timbers, if that isn't a hoot.

Maybe my vernacular is off, "source available" ?

ah "licensed freeware"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome

chromium is open source, chrome is chromium + proprietary stuff added on top

99% of its source is open. I wonder what you think of open source applications that make API calls into closed source cloud systems?

Where does that 99% figure come from?

I think it's 100% open source chromium, minus some unknown percentage that's closed source surveillance blobs = ~99%. That's the maths I'm inferring.

The competition is a click away.

Can you quote the relevant section of the TOS?

I cannot. I am simply paraphrasing the leading sentence:

"The people overseeing the security of Google’s Chrome browser explicitly forbid third-party extension developers from trying to manipulate how the browser extensions they submit are presented in the Chrome Web Store. "

I assumed that this explicit prohibition would be a "TOS". I could be wrong. Maybe it's somewhere else or called something else.

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