Congressman warns FTC To Leave Google alone
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Google contributes to open source software in a very significant manner and completely voluntary - from early in it's history. Not sure I can name more than one or two others at their level who have done that.
Google's biggest problem is lack of human beings vs technical automation ratio. When things go horribly wrong with their services (ie. ban) and you need a human, it's pretty much impossible unless you can reach the top of a popular website with the story of your problem.
So what, that means they can't break the law?
At this point it's really inertia that is keeping the FTC on track towards a lawsuit.
Stop moving goalposts, grandparent was clearly peddling what amounts to an "upstanding member of the community" defense.
I'm not claiming Google broke any law, but they're not above the law, they can get investigated like anyone else.
There is no clear and shut case here, no evidence of cartel-like behaviour or raising prices on consumers. The FTC will hire an economist who will argue that exists "market failure", Google will in turn hire several economists, scholars, and law firms to prove them wrong.
Microsoft was anti-competitive because there was a significant roadblock to use competitor's services. With Google, all you have to do is type in bing.com/yahoo.com/duckduckgo.com instead of google.com.
Microsoft was doing the same thing by promoting Internet Explorer within their OS.
>all you have to do is type in bing.com/yahoo.com/duckduckgo.com instead of google.com.
The same way you could type getfirefox.com and chrome.google.com and get those browsers in Windows.
If you want to see the real anti-trust violations, look at the mobile market. All three Apple, Google and Microsoft can be held responsible for violations.
Just picture it, run Microsoft update Chrome and Firefox break now what?
Do you realize there wasn't a official specs set at that time? Different browsers came up with "patches"/features own there own. From the blink tag to Ajax, all were proprietary to each browser.
>offering discounts to prevent companies like Dell from selling competing operating systems.
Isn't that what Google is doing with android too?
>Just picture it, run Microsoft update Chrome and Firefox break now what?
I don't believe it ever happened or ever will. If Microsoft had to go that route, they would have done it before losing the biggest chunk of the browser share.
I don't believe it ever happened or ever will. If Microsoft had to go that route, they would have done it before losing the biggest chunk of the browser share.
Retric wasn't talking about patches to IE, but rather patches to the OS that would break third-party applications (they did this to Word Perfect during the transition from DOS to Windows, too). You can all about Microsoft's colorful past in the so-called Halloween Documents, the press coverage and public documentation of the main antitrust case, and in other cases such as those documented on Groklaw.
Isn't that what Google is doing with android too?
Can't say much about the rest of your comment, but I'm pretty sure Google wasn't trying to "prevent companies like [LG/Samsung/HTC] from selling competing operating systems." Apple doesn't sell iOS to other hardware manufacturers, and the other modern smartphone operating systems didn't exist when Google open-sourced Android.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has attempted to coerce vendors into selling Windows Phone smartphones by threatening them with patent suits.
Do you have any reference to this or is it another urban legend which is repeated till everyone assumes it is true?
Imagine a company with a 100% market share. Your startup wants to complete. It crawls the web, applies the latest in NLP and semantic search technology and produces an index. And, of course, buys a Super Bowl ad. The public is curious; they try your product once. And they discover that it sucks, so they never come back.
You simply can't compete on relevance without the user feedback. But without the volume of users, you'll never get the feedback you need. This is almost certainly why Microsoft made that crazy large offer for Yahoo all those years ago; it was their attempt to acquire volume to improve their relevance.
Consider the "Bing Challenge". I haven't tried it personally, but the feedback on HN has generally been "meh". And yet Bing claims that in blind tests, some better-than-expected percentage of users prefer the Bing results. How can this be? Well, one explanation is that the test has been cooked somehow to prefer Bing. But another explanation is that Bing's existing users are more likely to be "average users", while readers of HN are "techies" who overwhelmingly prefer Google. So Bing may simply be producing results that are preferred by the kind of customers who are already using Bing -- and against search terms which are more likely to be used by the kind of customers who are already using Bing. This is consistent with the hypothesis that user feedback is the primary driver of search quality.
Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but not at Bing. And it's a job, not a meaningful personal relationship.
I do agree that MS is facing difficulty with Bing because they don't have enough signals to generate decent info on what is relevant. But I'm also not convinced that they have the competence to succeed.
Disclaimer: I used to work at Microsoft and think their monopoly proceedings that forced browser choice were bunk. But that the integration between Office and Windows was largely correct, but Microsoft was too incompetent to do anything useful with it.
Of course they're not very likely to find that kind of stuff. More likely the hypothetical foobar.com fell down the rankings after a set of parameters were re-weighed using a ML algorithm and verified by having a bunch of human raters evaluate the search results before and after the change.
The worst part is that to maximize the chances of success of fishing expeditions like this, the FTC would of course try to extend the discovery to as many areas as possible. Including completely absurd ones, like supposed anti-competitive patent abuse. And that's why any article that lists all the things they're "investigating" Google for is going to dilute the already weak case even further.
But back when the case was being determined, the internet was incredibly slow and downloading large files like web browsers was pretty painful (both in time and the avg computer user's know how). So for a consumer to get a competing product to IE (which was free and bundled with Windows) you had to either know how and where to download a competitor or go buy a competing product at a store. These are leaps and bounds over the hurdles of Google competitors today.
They had an illegally acquired monopoly on the OS. Therefore they were not free to use this monopoly to reach into other areas.
Essentially, it's their illegal actions - bundling, forcing PC builders to pay for Windows whether it was bought or not, breaking competing apps, etc., that got them convicted.
Once they are a convicted monopolist, then one of the remedies is to ensure that they don't use this monopoly as leverage to get into other areas.
Now Google is in the first stage - the FTC can investigate whether they have a monopoly/market power, and if they do, are they using it in an anti-competitive way.
The FTC will have trouble in this case, esp on the search side, since users are not paying anything, nor are they compelled to use Google.
On the Advertising side, the FTC may have a stronger case to make, esp if they narrow it down to keyword advertising as a distinct market. But if you take advertising as a whole, Google is still a small part of the market, and the FTC won't have much to go on.
Are you saying Google's monopoly on the search engine is any different? I mean, technically it's not a monopoly, but Microsoft didn't technically have a monopoly either - there were a half-dozen other operating systems people were using. Apple, Beos, Next, etc.
And how did Microsoft "illegally acquire" a monopoly and Google didn't? Did Google just fall into theirs?
I'll also agree that no matter the basis of the monopoly every company must be watched carefully to ensure it doesn't start abusing its power, but I still think it is reasonable to consider how a company got to be a monopoly.
So what did Microsoft do to destroy its competition that Google didn't?
That doesn't really help, for example Map Quest from being steam rolled by Google Maps, because a Google map is shown when people search for a location on Google.
Are you suggesting Google should be forced to display competitor APIs in their search results?
It will be difficult for anybody to claw a lead from Google Maps, but I would have had a hard time believing anybody could steal the entire market away from Map Quest once upon a time, either.
Lobbying made the FTC start a costly investigation and now they struggle to let go.
I always wanted one myself.
For example, Google artificially inflates their AdWords ad rates using the quality score algorithm. It's an ingenious little black box that they can turn up the dial periodically as needed without looking like they are raising their rates, they're just "adjusting the algorithm".
Or, Google has many times changed their organic listings that hurt businesses traffic enough to push them to AdWords. For example, selling links as advertising can get you banned from Google, and Google aggressively pursues link networks because they can be a cost effective way of advertising on Google that is cheaper than AdWords.
Google does open source and a lot of amazing things for the tech community, but it's also a business out to protect its core business - online advertising and search. Sure, it has a right to do these things on its own network, but when you own 60, 70, 80% of the internet search volume, it's a fine line between reasonable business decision and anti-competitive behavior.