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Comment by the_arun | Hacker News Reader

If google is serving 90% traffic & others are unable to enter - Doesn't that mean google is doing something right for the customer and others are unable to outcompete it? Isn't this how life works?

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Google is allowed to be big, be better and win users. But happy customers is not the full test of monopolization. The real question is, "Could a meaningfully better search engine realistically displace Google today?” If the answer is no, then competition is broken

> "Could a meaningfully better search engine realistically displace Google today?”

ChatGPT clearly demonstrated that displacing Google is possible. All previous monopoly arguments seemed even more flimsy after that.

I think you’re proving the monopoly argument yourself: if they only way to compete with Google is an innovation that generations of scientists have been working towards, it does paint a grim picture of competition in this space. Besides, are we ignoring Gemini?

Google already used AI and language models before ChatGPT came out. If you wanted a state of the art search / recommendation engine you needed that innovations from scientists already.

That's what I am saying: if you had a better search/rec engine than Google, good luck making it useful without Google's search index, acquired to a large extent thanks to their dominant market position. This doesn't sound like healthy competition. ChatGPT had to change the whole game to be able to compete.

ChatGPT did not build a search engine though. They built something else (equally impressive) and then were able to use their weight to enter the web search business where most sites now have to allow them in.

While it's good that building other products is possible, it doesn't detract from the point that search engines are a de-facto monopoly.

(Not quite the same as a search engine, but to create a base model in an LLM, they pretty much did "download the whole internet" for it)

This is a woefully naive view on the nature of monopolies. You could have made the same argument for Standard Oil.

Is the user's choice to use google a meaningful one when they're effectively the only game in town?

Google must be right for the customer because Google pays billions of dollars to be the default search engine for all the major browsers. And end users are notorious for changing application defaults.

Competition only works when we have an even field.

Like shooting your opponents in the leg before a Marathon will surely improve your chances, but it doesn't mean you are the best out of them. This is like the very tenet of markets, reaching as far back as Adam Smith.

"Funnily" enough this requires some external system that upholds the rules of the competition, e.g. governments. That's why busting monopolies make sense.

...No. Not at all. Not in the case of Google and generally that's not "how life works". If it was true, why would Google spend so much money to be the default search engine in so many devices/browsers?

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