What does everyone make of today's Google antitrust action? Only the stock market is happy with the status quo The US government finally unveiled its antitrust case against Google on Tuesday, accusing the tech giant of abusing its monopoly of the search and search ad market to keep out competition. But despite the historic nature of the case and the long delay in its arrival, it’s fair to say that pretty much nobody is happy with it. …
Well, the interesting thing there is that Trump isn't a Republican. He's a disaffected Democrat supporter/donor. It's one of the things that's been so strange about the Republican party embracing him and endorsing him. He bills himself as a businessman, not a politician, and the people clearly like that.
Even here in the UK, the opinion of the public towards politicians is that "they're all corrupt". How do you change that? Elect a reality tv star/businessman apparently.
The next 2 weeks will be interesting to watch as it all heats up.
The downvotes are because he's implying the Republicans would action it and the Democrats would cave.
If he read the article, he'd see it isn't a partisan issue.
Besides, whilst both parties are corporate whores, the Republicans claim to be "hands-off, no-regulation, frre-market wins" - it would therefore be more unusual for them to follow through.
Still, as *you* point out, the Republicans are likely to behave the same as the Democrats anyway.. It's all about the size of the bribe party donation at the end of the day.
Actually under the Republicans it would actually be better.
Biden's plans err really Kamala's plans since Joe will be gone within the first 6 months of office... will crush the economy.
You can actually read the WSJ articles on this. Joe claims no new taxes... but that's not going to happen. How do you think he'll fund anything? Even rolling back the tax cuts Trump gave... will crush the economy.
The Democratic party has been playing partisan politics and is willing to do things because they want to make Trump look bad. (Seriously and I'm a centrist and an independent. )
Even rolling back the tax cuts Trump gave... will crush the economy
Why? Based on what? The economy was growing at the same pace in Obama's second term as it did in Trump's first three years (i.e. excluding the pandemic) DESPITE his tax cut. So if the goal of his tax cut was to boost the economy, it failed. The real goal of course was as a giveaway to billionaires and corporations, with the hope that it would also boost the economy but even if he knew it wouldn't he still would have done it.
Republicans made the same claims about killing the economy when Clinton raised taxes, and whaddya know, the economy grew like gangbusters (FAR faster than it has under Trump) during both his terms, and without the crutch of 0% interest rates.
"You can actually read the WSJ articles on this. Joe claims no new taxes... but that's not going to happen. How do you think he'll fund anything? Even rolling back the tax cuts Trump gave... will crush the economy."
Because fools like you think that the economy ISN'T crushed under Republican rule??
We are now $27.1 TRILLION dollars in debt according to usdebtclock.org; according to Wikipedia it's 'only' a bit less than $21 trillion. That's "trillion", with a "T".
Your most hated people, Obama and the Democrats, left office at the end of 2015 with 'only' about $13 trillion in debt.
Yet all people like you did was rail against "tax-and-spend" Democrats...then you planted yourself a grand ol' tax cut which you have absolutely no intent to pay for, passing the bill down to future generations but WHINING every time it is even PROPOSED that you actually might have to pay (taxes) the money that you keep spending like water.
TL;dr
Your whining about taxes no longer holds any relevance AT ALL. Your type are still TRYING to play a high ground on spending, believing yourself somehow superior, but any one with a single brain cell already knows that debt has gone UP under every Republican president, all while you lie out of the side of your mouth on how supposedly great you are.
Republicans were quick to blame Obama for the massive deficits in his early years, when he inherited an economy in freefall.
COVID isn't Trump's fault, but his utter incompetence in dealing with it has made the economic pain in the US far worse than it would have been had he acknowledged it as a threat right away instead of downplaying for it a couple months when he could have been getting PPE stockpiled. Instead he sat on his hands and then blamed Obama for the "cupboards being bare" when he'd been in office for THREE YEARS, so the bare cupboards were his problem to fix.
He left the states to fend for themselves, so you had 50 states bidding against each other, everyone having to figure out testing on their own, and still hasn't done squat about contract tracing (not that there's much point at our current massive infection rate)
Then he turned mask wearing into a political divide, when had he simply said "wearing a mask is your patriotic duty to help you and those around you and keep our country running".
Instead he keeps claiming it is going away, or we're turning the corner. Currently we are turning the corner into a new peak, and red states in the upper midwest/plains (i.e. where it gets cold earlier) are leading the charge. He thinks if he keeps lying that people will believe him. That doesn't work too well for his supporters who live in red states and now seeing hospitals reaching capacity. That's 100% his fault.
If it goes anything like the "investigations" in Britain, there'll be a lot of clucking, allegedly contrite Management on the Select Parliamentary Committee Naughty Step Chair, and bugger all will happen. But, Due Process will have been followed and if they pay the 30 quid fine within a reasonable time it'll all go away.
Well, the US has some decent form in this, see Standard Oil and AT&T. If anyone can tame the likes of Google (I say Google deliberately as I don't think the rest of Alphabet has become a problem) then it's the US.
But like everything else these days it's instantly party political. So maybe nothing will happen.
More to the point, nothing will happen because there is no market abuse going on. Or none worth all this fuss, anyway. Google has massive market share because it's the only half decent search engine out there.
Yelp - formerly the Yellow Pages, the Google of phone books... - are complaining that their business is obsolete. Might as well let oil lamp manufacturers bring antitrust suits against led manufacturers; that business was made obsolete by the previous-generation technology.
...or are Googles shills less polite since they off-shored them? So hard to find good help that's willing to shill for peanuts since the content farms went free-range. Or are they making staff do it on their lunch breaks again?
The quality of Googles search results has gone DOWN over the years, not up, and now frequently fails to return matches on literal strings, on common sites, while burying partial results under pages of crap links, including ones pushing obvious scams.
No one else can really break into the market because Google has blocked any new entrants from getting off the launch pad. Has there been another minor player since Duck? Other than Google has anyone's share of search gone up instead of down? And they pay billions in incentives to ensure they are in a protected position even before you pull your device out of the box. Sure Yahoo dug it's own grave in many ways, and many of the minors were just wrappers for crapware and spyware. Yet no stream of startups is trying to innovate their way into that market, why do you think that is?
Because Google would shut you out at every turn. They have been caught blocking startups VC options, poaching staff and management(even if they pay them for busywork, like shill posting on social media!), as well punishing advertisers for using competing services, and straight up stealing other peoples content(lookin at you, Youtube...). And yeah, Yelp had a legit beef as Google was scraping it's content and including it in it's search results. I hate Yelp as a company (I don't appreciate small businesses being blackmailed to remove shill reviews) but two wrongs don't make a right.
Lots of noise, but I've not heard anyone propose a solution. This isn't like breaking Bell into regional companies, Alphabet are a global company operating in multiple near-monopolies.
How would you break up a search engine?
Same for a mobile OS? If you break up Android, why not Apple too?
If you just break up Alphabet into its individual bits, you just have lots of smaller problems. Solves it for Yelp and a few other minor players, but not the important areas of search, advertising and mobile.
It's going to be another fudge like stopping Microsoft embedding IE into Windows.
That was a bad solution that brought the actual situation in the telco market and broadband deploy. Creating regional monopolies was a bad idea - they would grow again as it happened.
The outcome of the MS investigation was not only getting a Windows without IE or a browser ballot. Actually MS was forced to document and make available many of its APIs and document formats for interoperability (more thanks to the EU investigation than the US one, too fixed on "customers" and not real competition in the market) and also stopped many of the worst behaviours of MS - which didn't want to be caught again in such investigations.
easy: separate into independent entities Search and affiliates (Maps, Ads), Android and affiliates (PlayStore), and Youtube.
For Facebook, separate WhatsApp and Instagram
For Apple, force them to allow to use alternatives to the AppStore, and remove the unique browser choice of WebKit (which would de-facto open the AppStore, as most apps are only frontends to web pages).
For Amazon, I didn't think of it, but I certainly would want them to pay their taxes.
For Microsoft, separate the OS from Office.
It is by nature a difficult case. Google is not a company which uses its dominant market position to increase prices for consumers like the other companies did who were subjected to similar procedures.
For consumers the whole google thing is a bit below the horizon, since it affects businesses, who need to pay google to be found at all, since over 95% of the people in the West use google when they want to know more about products and services. Microsoft sank billions into Bing, but didn't succeed, which shows how difficult it is to create a viable alternative to google. The approach to force the monopolist to open up, is a good way to start. If alternative search engines can interface with google, give their own flavor to the search results, it could create several specialized alternative search engines. This approach worked in the 70's when IBM was forced to publish specs of its dominant 370 architecture, creating many plug compatibles, so did it when MS was forced to allow alternative browsers and open up NetBIOS and Dos filesystem specs.
Google is the 'chocolate factory' which can print its own money.
Google takes the profits from ads which is based on the prices that they charge along with the fact that they have better analytics because they know who see's which sites because of their google analytics runs on each site.
Google is evil and you just don't understand how they are using their monopoly to make tons of money.
You can break up Alphabet and segment Search and declare it a monopoly.
One thing our fearless reporter in SFO has never looked at or questioned... why do all of the major web sites including El Reg, still run Google Analytics? To be fair and honest, a summer intern studying Data Science could write a better package.
So why does every major site still share their page hits and analytics w Google? Are they being compensated or does Google use this in part of their algorithms?
If Kieren and other journalists did their homework, they would have a better understanding of how Google has retained its monopoly....
It strikes me that instead of trying to break up something like Google, you just stop them being evil.
And you do that with proper privacy legislation that prevents ANY tracking of any kind and has humongous penalties attached, along with investigatory teams that have the right knowledge and unlimited access.
It would also help if all browsers stopped sending user agent strings and other fingerprintable info and always cleared cookies and local storage whenever a tab was closed.
"Offer something better than they do."
I knew googlebot would turn up at some point.
Google have been abusing their monopoly for over a decade and it is impossible not to give them data, data that makes it impossible for a new entrant to provide something better. The only company vaguely capable of giving it a run for it's money is Microsoft. But without access to the data from google analytics, as well as the analytics from google's SafeSearch, DNS, APIs, Fonts, Maps, YouTube and so on, that's pretty much impossible even for them.
If you don't believe me regarding choice... block google's ASN at your firewall, stop feeding them data, then try to go about your usual online activities. Trust me, we can wait while you do it, because you won't be long.
If you can't see how Google abuse their search product to push their other products you're very naive.
To be fair, they're not alone. Have you used Bing lately? They also inform me in bright big letters that Edge would be a far superior browser and where I could download it.
And yes, I use Bing. The Google captcha AI has too much trouble confirming that I am not an AI. Maybe I am.
It's not just about the supposed visible cost to consumers, it's also about how unfair business practices unfairly affect other companies, which ultimately also affect the consumer anyway.
As an aside, did you know that despite having offline data storage and offline use capability (local apps etc.) you HAVE to have a google account to use a chromebook you own. Want to set up another local user on your chromebook? They HAVE to create a google id too.
Why? As with other desktop systems, you expect to have an account to use cloud storage, or cloud bookmark sync, or gmail etc. but to do anything on your own computer, it isn't necessary, and shouldn't be mandated.
Not a good anti-trust argument to bring up the Chromebooks that Google dumped to undercut the laptop market on price and attempt to achieve global domination M$ style by killing the OS completely and replacing it with Chrome. They might have even succeeded if the whole idea of a browser based operating system on a closed platform replacing all other forms of desktop computing wasn't impossible, idiotic, and batshit crazy. Didn't stop them from trying though, and the landfills are still full of them to this day, along with piles of unwanted bikes, and the discarded innocence of most of the South and East bay.
And if you just want a web browser you could also get a tablet, but the Win 10 laptop usually has higher specs as well, and IT CAN DO MORE. Like having support for drivers and actual peripherals. And Google's terms mandate it's crapware be bundled on users devices or they will be blocked from core Google services, like maps.
Lastly, M$ stole the "You must sign in to do anything" play from Google's playbook, so that isn't really a point the Chocolate Factory is winning points on.
I only must install software on my device to use it! Much better security model then regular web search from a web page, has full access to your apps, so it easy to launch arbitrary code! It only makes sense to install an application to search for websites to view in a web browser, so much simpler than using the browser to search for things to view in the browser...
Only problem is a tendency to return "not found" for searches about Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet, Uyghur, or Xinjiang. Not everything our talking orangutan hates is good.
1998 didn't kill Microsoft and today they are bigger than ever. The same will happen to everyone else having an Antitrust case, well maybe Facebook can die. WhatsApp is a mobile App and people has no problem switching to a different one if it starts to get too bad. Facebook the website is losing users every year and Instagram doesn't really do anything no one else can do.
things become dangerous if there is no choice any more. At the moment the situation is not that
bad. I had been more worried 20 years ago, when we had almost an OS monopoly and browser
monopoly. Today, we have choice in choosing operating systems, phones, search engine, browser.
It is good that google provides an alternative to apple in the phone market, it is also good that it
offers a good search option (its not a monopoly, there are several alternatives). As for
advertisement, other companies like apple, microsoft, facebook or amazon compete more and more.
In the long term, the dangers will be elsewhere, companies like Baidu, Alibaba, Huawei, Xiaomi, Zoom
will gain more and more influence (also worldwide) They could dominate soon, as they
are not challenged by their govenments as long as they cooperate.
Remember US anti-trust isn't about protecting consumers - it's about protecting other companies.
Google's ability to see more analytics allow them to set prices to advertisers more efficiently than the old fashioned TV/cable ad-brokers did, and so puts those firms at a disadvantage.
The aim of this is to give the ad-agencies the same business model on the web that they had with print media.
As it appears the case is designed to narrow the scope and remedies to ensure Google will receive a slap on the wrist. One that they will able to drag out in court for years, while blocking any other serious US based cases from proceeding until it is resolved. That is to say, they are facing the M$ suit with the names scratched out and Alphabet written in crayon, and will run the same playbook and claim the M$ suit as precedent, _and Google wants it that way_
I can imagine Larry Page saying "Oh no, don't toss them in that briar patch"
Once again the world looks to Europe. Only thing we can do here is to point a bright light on the stuff their trying to pull and make sure the legacy of corruption sticks to whoever tries to push this farce through. Which is a worse look after all these years, having Enron on your CV, or having botched the prosecution? Still not good look for either right?
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