Hacker News Reader

Comment by animal_spirits | Hacker News Reader

I strongly disagree. If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened. They are all FREE too, mind you. Everyone would still be paying for email. The enormous amount of free education on YouTube would not have been accessible to the world. The economy that we know today would be vastly different and in my opinion far worse off. So much of the economic growth came off the back of the free and ad-subsidized services Google provided for us. The reason Google is the size it is today is because it provided better services at better prices than all the competitors. If Google was broken up 20 years ago, the consumer would have paid the price.

View on HN

The consumer did pay the price. Google built on empire on making consumers believe they were getting things for free while selling other businesses a direct line to its customers' wallets. It's been a very effective sleight of hand operation, to the point where even relatively savvy people on HN seem to forget that advertising pays the bills by getting its targets to spend money they would not have otherwise spent.

A world without Google would not be a world with less disposable income for regular people, but it might be a world with less disposable junk.

Even if you discount the effectiveness of ads (which seems foolish given how many people have so much staked on them working), the eye-watering prices Google charges for them get directly passed to the consumer in the form of higher prices.

Monopolies are rarely if ever good for consumers, but some monopolies are better than others at offloading the responsibility for their harm onto other businesses.

> A world without Google would not be a world with less disposable income for regular people, but it might be a world with less disposable junk.

If the argument is "more ads = more junk" then the argument is essentially "my values are more important than other peoples values". I'm also anti-consumerism, but if someone sees an ad and finds a product intriguing enough to purchase, they believe that thing might have value in their life. We might not agree, but we should not have the ability to control what other people find value in. I think this is equivalent to an argument of coercing people to conform to our values instead of convincing them to have our values.

I'm not sure where you got that I'm trying to impose anything on anyone—sounds like you latched onto a side note and decided to reply to what you thought the side note was implying instead of the substance of my comment?

The argument has nothing to do with values or imposing them on others, it's simply this: These things are not and never were free. Google wants you to think they're free, but either the ads are effective at driving revenue and consumers are paying for Google's products in the form of increased consumption or Google is a parasite that lies to businesses about the efficacy of their ads and consumers are paying for Google's products in the form of the parasitic Google tax. Most likely it's a bit of both.

Either way, Google offering these products for "free" did not have a positive effect on consumer wallets and paid solutions emerging to replace Google if it actually does dissolve will not have a negative effect.

True, these services are not and never were free, we pay for them with our data. I would say this is all fairly common knowledge, my parents who are not tech savvy understand this, and I genuinely don't believe people care enough. I know this trade off, my tech savvy friends and acquaintances know this and yet we continue to make this trade off because frankly I don't think many value their personal data at all, and I think that's why we say these services are "free" because we're not trading anything we find particularly valuable.

The problem is that you don't actually know how valuable it is without knowing how it's being used. If your ad-view statistics are used to charge you personally a higher price for a product than someone else who didn't click on the same ads, is that still okay? If they're used to raise your mortgage interest rate, is that still okay? If they're used to sell scam products to old ladies, is that still okay? If they're used to peddle political misinformation to support the election of a fascist, is that still okay? You don't know what tradeoff you're actually making. Maybe you'd think it was okay, maybe not.

Modern companies have become very, very good at making consumers believe they are getting a good deal by trading an obvious benefit for the possibility of a hidden harm. The type of data tracked by internet companies is only one form of this.

I fully agree with you - the practice of price discrimination is illegal under the Robinson-Patman Act and Google should be penalized for violating this law if they have been found to do this. I am only trying to push against the notion that Google (or any company) should be broken up just because they are big. This is the nuance that makes these discussions important IMO

My position is basically that enormous market power is like a ticking time bomb. It's not going to work to try to patch over it with specific prohibitions like the one you mention, because big companies will always find loopholes, use their market power to exploit them, and use their wealth and "too big to fail" status to drag out any attempt to enforce the rules. It is an endless game of whack-a-mole that can never work. It's better to just limit the total power of companies to do anything; doing so will also limit their ability to do harm of any kind.

It’s possible to reject the argument that consumers seeing ads is the same as monetary payment.

I'm fine seeing ads. I wouldn't pay commercial rates for the services I use.

I find ads maybe 20% useful and for me that's a good deal.

You have to explain why and how you are rejecting it.

The point of the poster above is that you're ultimately paying for your free email with a Google tax on every carton of milk and every smartphone you buy. That is, if advertising were banned and you had to pay for Gmail, most of your other purchases would be just a little bit cheaper, because they wouldn't be paying for Google ads to support your free email.

And this is just basic finance: the advertising budget has to be paid for somehow, so it is priced into the goods themselves (either through higher prices or lower quality, of course).

That's only true up to a point. If I say "more plastic in the ocean = more junk", you can say "oh, that's just you pushing your values, if someone else would rather have a disposable plastic water bottle than a clean ocean, that's their choice". But, as with (physical) pollution, the costs of this kind of ad pollution and covert data harvesting are not transparent to consumers, so it's not possible to say they have actually given informed consent to it.

More insidiously, the proliferation of this type of "junk" crowds out other business models, meaning that increasingly people can't even "test" whether they would prefer something else. It's basically the tyranny of small decisions. It's not just a matter of "I will trade you five minutes of my eyeball time for 6 months of email", because every such transaction increase the likelihood that in the future you will find yourself with no option other than to engage in such a transaction in order to, say, pay your electric bill.

It's my claim that my viewpoint is actually in accord with a majority of people's values, in the sense that if we considered an alternate universe with less ad junk, more people in that universe would look at ours and say "Wow, I'm glad I don't live there" than vice versa. It's just that there are lots of clever boiling-frog ways to get people to act against their own values without their being fully aware of it. The mere fact that something has happened doesn't mean most people actually wanted it to happen, or are happy it happened, or even realize they would in fact be happier if it hadn't happened.

>it's not possible to say they have actually given informed consent to it.

I assume you're a fan of GDPR banners?

>my viewpoint is actually in accord with a majority of people's values

It's not hard to install some privacy and adblocking extensions in your browser.

I think you're still doing that thing where you assume others share your values.

Yes?

Economics is the distribution of finite goods amongst infinite desires.

It’s the objective way to optimize an economy given some normative set up.

It can't be that objective if there are multiple schools of thought. Getting two economists to agree on why what happened yesterday happened is hard enough, let alone getting them to agree on what we should do today to have a specific outcome tomorrow.

Propaganda, which is what advertising is, is generally a way to trick people into doing things that they wouldn't otherwise have done, typically by making them believe things that are not true.

In the case of advertising, those untrue things are usually "X is a much bigger problem than I thought" and "Y will solve problem X and make my life a lot easier". That you can convince people of these things doesn't make them true in all cases. Washing machines are extremely useful; egg cookers, very much unnecessary. Yet commercials will often look the same for both kinds of products (not for washing machines today, obviously, as the case for why they are useful to have has long since become obvious, and commercials are mostly about which brand is better).

This is an often overlooked thing in discussions about advertising. A major part of the propaganda effort is not "which brand of X should I buy", it's "I need to own an X". That's where they lie to people the most, and convince them to waste money, not on an inferior product, but one that shouldn't have existed at all.

I think if I ate a lot of eggs, and egg cooker could be very handy.

If Google can use targeting advertising to identify customers who eat a lot of eggs, and tell them about the existence of egg cookers, that's a win for everyone except the chickens.

I don't know for sure, but I'd bet egg cookers aren't a useful tool for anyone, compared to the alternatives (boiling the egg without taking up extra room in your kitchen).

But even if you're right about this being useful to some people, advertising is not the right tool for discovering this: advertising will always exaggerate any positive of something and downplay any negative. The goal of advertising, and the incentive, is not to neutrally inform people about products they might use. It's to convince people to buy this product by any means necessary. If it weren't explicitly outlawed, advertisers would probably add "enlarges your penis and cures cancer" to every single product ad.

>I don't know for sure, but I'd bet egg cookers aren't a useful tool for anyone, compared to the alternatives (boiling the egg without taking up extra room in your kitchen).

Maybe they've got a big kitchen.

>advertising is not the right tool for discovering this

What is the right tool? How would new products find customers without advertising? I think any alternative would be much slower and less effective.

>advertising will always exaggerate any positive of something and downplay any negative.

Customers know this. You're underrating how smart customers are.

>If it weren't explicitly outlawed, advertisers would probably add "enlarges your penis and cures cancer" to every single product ad.

You really think people are stupid and they need someone like you to protect them from their stupidity, huh? Of course advertisers wouldn't do such a thing. It would be terrible for brand equity.

> What is the right tool? How would new products find customers without advertising? I think any alternative would be much slower and less effective.

I'm not sure, but I don't think that speed is a major concern here. Even if it becomes harder to introduce new product categories, that would be a small price to pay for stopping the huge waste of money (and CO2) that advertising tries to induce.

Most likely, professional product review sites are a better solution, with a good enough legal framework to prevent them from becoming direct advertising or attack sites. Ultimately, what you need is an impartial expert trying a product and reporting their experience.

> You really think people are stupid and they need someone like you to protect them from their stupidity, huh?

No, I just think systematically lying to people is a bad thing and should be legally discouraged. False advertising is a huge problem, even with laws that try to punish it.

And sure, maybe they wouldn't put those specific claims on every product, but you can bet that without false advertising laws, you'd see much wilder claims in every single ad than you do today.

> while selling other businesses a direct line to its customers' wallets

What does this mean?

> Even if you discount the effectiveness of ads (which seems foolish given how many people have so much staked on them working), the eye-watering prices Google charges for them get directly passed to the consumer in the form of higher prices.

But then...why is anyone buying them if they don't work? How do you run this experiment without Google in to show that hand-curated ads on TV etc would've been a better, cheaper way to do ads in the long run than automated ones?

There are mire dark patterns in this than you can think of. Have you ever wondered what does Amazon do on the top of the search results typing “something ebay” into google?

I can certainly think of some, but that doesn't mean that removing Google would result in lower prices. It could be that replacing automation with manual work could even raise prices.

You can read up on the advertising industry easily, right?

For consumers ads are a net negative. They inflate the cost of the product and favor incumbents and monopolists to retain that position.

Ads certainly work on average and Google has positioned itself in a way that they can extract much of the created value for businesses who buy them.

> The consumer did pay the price. Google built on empire on making consumers believe they were getting things for free

We are getting them for free. What a strange point to try to make.

>getting its targets to spend money they would not have otherwise spent

That's not necessarily a bad thing, if they're getting value from those purchases.

Plus, maybe they just would've learned about the product through some other channel, e.g. by watching TV. Which has more positive externalities: Google, or TV?

> If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened.

And that would be fine. To me this is like saying "if we had jailed those meth makers and dealers 20 years ago, all these meth labs today would never have existed". If these services cannot exist without a business model built around transparent, bounded transactions (e.g., no hidden data harvesting), then they should not exist. The problem is precisely that Google and others of its ilk have essentially gotten millions of people addicted to "free" services whose true costs are hidden.

> The reason Google is the size it is today is because it provided better services at better prices than all the competitors.

No, they've just been better at hiding the costs, exploiting legal loopholes, and exploiting their privileged position to raise barriers to entry for other participants.

> Everyone would still be paying for email.

Free email existed before Google - Hotmail and Yahoo come to mind immediately, but there were plenty of others. You also got a free email address from your ISP - even AOL users had email.

Fair point. Maybe I'm too young and have bought into the narrative that Google was the first widely available and free email. Still I think though, the plethora of their other services widely available for free (maps, drive, sites, youtube) were extraordinary for the price, at least for me.

> “their other services widely available for free”

None of their services are free. You just pay for them in other ways, even if you don’t realize it.

I think this is sort of missing the point: I’m happy to trade a bit of attention here and there for services because I’m just going to go without a lot of things if I have to pay real money for them. If we go to a model where every site charges for usage, I will start using fewer services regularly and will use each service for more things which seems a bit counterproductive in terms of monopolies.

If you “are going to go without then”, there’s apparently no value in it. So should also not matter if it goes away.

That's what you don't get. You aren't just watching ads. You are giving them data about you, a lot of data. That data is used to heavily manipulate you. This isn't like the old days of broadcast TV where ads air and you aren't directly tracked. If you ever find a product that is free, it isn't. You are the product that is being sold.

I do get that, and I’m fine with it.

Trouble is, many of us aren't.

The data is not just used to manipulate you, but everyone like you. Also you are giving away data from everyone that contacts you. You are non consensually making that decision for everyone in your inbox (and, I suspect, many others too).

if you think a bit harder, you shouldn't be. the data on you isn't just used to manipulate your choices on the market, it also ends up being used to manipulate your choices as a citizen -- politically, socially. You might think you're above such psychological tactics (and perhaps you are, but many many people are not, and whether you believe the democrats accusations of electoral fraud in 2016 or the many accusations on both sides since, there is absolutely no doubt that the corporatization of the internet has played a giant part in the most repugnant aspects of american and world politics since 2016)

Democrats didn't say there was election fraud in 2016. It was that the Russian government had workers on social media posing as Americans supporting Trump's campaign, and that they also got access to thousands of DNC emails due to a spearphishing campaign targeting DNC employees.

What they are probably referring to is that the Clinton Campaign in one of the Rust belt states asked for a recount as "claiming election fraud." The votes were close and within the margin for the campaign to ask. They asked, it got recounted and Trump ended up with slightly more votes after the recount. Then that was it. You know, what normally happens. The Clinton Campaign did not send someone to go do a press conference outside of the Four Seasons landscaping to repeat over and over claims that were repeatingly found false in courts.

You’re not actually paying with attention—attention isn’t money. Google’s customers are paying for your attention and you are paying for more expensive products. All of the money in Google’s pockets comes from their customers and we all end up eating that cost as participants in the global market sooner or later.

The whole “attention” thing is just a proxy.

This is a reductive view of the economy: one pays for something whenever one trades something of value to one’s counterparty to something that’s of value to oneself. In many cases, in fact, it’s preferable to do this sort of “bartering” to reduce the expenditure of money you might need for other things.

Finally, I have, in fact, benefitted personally from products that were advertised to me on the basis of user tracking data so a bit ambivalent about the anti-tracking argument.

Firefox was also extraordinary for the price. point being that Google has never been the only option, just the most popular because why not your gmail is already plugged in.

Firefox is 90% funded by Google ads.

No, Mozilla is 90% funded by Google ads. Mozilla does a ridiculous number of non-browser things. Konqueror and Navigator existed long before Google ad funding.

So only 10% of Mozilla’s revenue goes toward Firefox

Firefox existed before Mozilla's contracts with Google. Firefox was actually funded by AOL (to the tune of a couple million in sending off money when they shuttered Netscape) and Mitch Kapor (hundreds of thousands because he's a great guy who saw the potential) with some other donations from IBM, Oracle, and a few more big tech players.

And you think that would happen today? A couple of million wouldn’t go far.

firefox does not exist without google paying for it

mapquest was free maps going back to the early days of the internet

dropbox was free synced storage several years before google drive

youtoube was an independent free ad supported video site before google bought it

there are a million and one free website hosting services

I remember hotmail before gmail. Attachments had a 2 MB limit. I couldn't even share HQ photos using hotmail. And the whole inbox had a 25 MB capacity. I do believe there were paid alternatives with more storage.

Gmail came in with 1 GB storage and grouping emails as conversations. To me, both of these aspects were revolutionary, and other email providers shortly followed suit.

* "other email providers shortly followed suit" means that it was never out of their reach to begin with, they just needed more competition to convince them to try: which didn't have to be Google and didn't have to be ad- or surveillance-supported.

* 1GB storage in 2004 to 15GB storage 21 years later suggests that something vital has stalled. Every other storage metric (price of RAM per MB, price of hard drives per MB, price of cloud storage per MB) has improved 100 fold over the same time period[1,2].

1: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-comput... 2: https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm

It could also mean that you can't invest indefinite amount of storage to ever growing user base, if storage metrics would not improve indefinitely. There is a break down and 15GB cap is nothing comparing with Google Photos cut, which is a strong sign that storage is the problem even for behemoths.

> didn't have to be ad- or surveillance-supported

Which freemail service isn't ad- or surveillance-supported?

> suggests that something vital has stalled

Why does it have to be a technology-driven limit? I dare say Google thinks that anyone with more than 15GB of email is a serious enough user to pay for it.

> 1GB storage in 2004 to 15GB storage 21 years later

The original marketing was the the storage would grow forever, and you could believe it. Google was riding the an incredible high from smashing out what felt like constant Amazing New Things throughout the noughties. In fact, when they originally made the claim, back when Don't Be Evil was still the motto and they hadn't bought DoubleClick, I'm sure they believed it. By the time the final upgrade (or rather joining, of 5GB photos/Drive to 10GB mail) to 15GB came round in 2013, there was definitely a hint of the horns in the hairline.

Yes, and Gmail hasn't improved for decades. Why not? Because Google is a monopoly actor and does not need to compete.

Example: you can't create a new email label in the Android client. You have to log on to email in a browser and do it there. This was true when smartphones were a niche way of connecting to email, and it's still true today.

> I strongly disagree. If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened. They are all FREE too, mind you. Everyone would still be paying for email.

People weren't paying for email before gmail. It was predated by hotmail, Yahoo mail, and innumerable free online email offerings by small players. Being free wasn't even a selling point for gmail; the selling point was that they gave you a lot of storage.

Speaking of things that happened before Google, Yahoo Maps and Firefox are older than Google Maps and Chrome. And... Google Flights is a Google acquisition, not a product that they developed.

And then...

> Can you imagine how the world will be affected when these go away?

> Google Fi

> Google Fiber

> Google Pay

Yes, no one will notice.

> Google Groups

It already has gone away. Also, Usenet is something else older than Google.

> Google OAuth

Eliminating "sign in with [popular site]" would be a hugely positive change.

Nitpick - Maps and Chrome were also acquisition. Also Android, for that matter

Highly “regarded” take and you know it. Android was made in house by an acquired team. Same with the rest. Jesus this intentionally stupids

I didn't know that about Maps and Chrome. I did know Android was an acquisition, and that YouTube was, but in both cases I think Google's put in enough work not to dismiss them as Google projects.

>> Google Groups > It already has gone away. Also, Usenet is something else older than Google.

and google literally acquired and then killed deja news. If anything this is yet another argument for the antitrust.

almost no one ever paid for email, there were many free providers and people got accounts from their isp

google bought youtube 19 years ago because their own attempt was doing poorly and youtube was booming right after its founding, they didn't win in the space because they were good at it, they bought success in a way that probably shouldn't have been allowed

you're acting like google invented ad supported online services

the problem is now that google doesn't have to be the best any more, they can be third best at nearly everything but still own the market share because they can afford to give things away for free which ruins competition

> "If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened."

People didn't need them 20 years ago, so why do they need them now?

> "They are all FREE too, mind you."

No proprietary software is free. You either pay with your money (you do this with games, for example), or you pay with your data (and this is what you do with Google). Sometimes with both (you do this with Microsoft).

Gmail, YouTube and others are not free: you don't pay with money, but with your data and your attention.

So yeah, I think the world would be a better place if they had not been developed by Google.

Nearly all the services mentioned here were acquisitions or had strong competitors at the time of their launches. It is undeniable that Google has made these into quality products and led to their dominant position in their fields. However, Google's existence was necessary for none of these classes of products.

You can't state with such certainty that all these things wouldn't have happened without google. For all we know there would be 20 free or cheap alternatives to each service if google hadn't outcompeted them all with subsidies from ad revenue.

Those service are certainly not free. Google doesn't offer them just to be nice: they make money from them. The costs to the consumer are hidden and indirect, but they are costs nonetheless.

The services are not free. Argument invalid.

YouTube is profitable though. If their Google ties were severed they could still be ad supported, but they'd be able to pen deals with different ad networks and platforms.

Buddy, Google didn't create YouTube. They bought it and ruined it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com