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by cidibe 3345 days ago
The threat of anti-trust to Google is good enough, I hope it's not acted on. It makes them try to play fairer than they would otherwise eg making customers can export their data. I feel like they've made more of an effort on things like GCP to make customers not locked in than their competition because they are the most in danger of getting busted up.

It'd be too bad though to break up yet another company that does interesting long term projects with a comfortable cash faucet because it is too successful.
3 comments
canadian_voter 3345 days ago
The threat of anti-trust to Google is good enough, I hope it's not acted on.

I can guarantee you that someone at Google had studied game theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-credible_threat

Edit: To clarify, a threat must be credible for it to be effective. So a threat is only "good enough" if there is a reasonable chance it will be carried out. For example, you actually have to have nukes and be willing to use them if you threaten to nuke somebody, otherwise they'll just ignore you.

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shouldbworking 3345 days ago
The only true monopoly Google holds is search. They have a lot of successful products in other venues but nothing that reaches 90%+ market penetration. The only other thing that's close is chrome browser.

Chrome is already starting to get some "google only" features...Like hangouts and Chromecast support. If any of these become a necessity to browse regular sites it will be a defacto monopoly on the web browser market.

Random thought, but one reason I don't like Angular is because it "shapes" your site exactly how google wants it. Much like AMP, this just makes it easy for Google to "borrow" your content for other purposes.

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ghaff 3345 days ago
Chrome actually has higher desktop marketshare than I would have thought, about 60%. [1] But that's still pretty far from a monopoly.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/business/2016/05/firefox-overtakes-m...

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shouldbworking 3345 days ago
Consider the mobile market as well, it outnumbers desktop these days
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ghaff 3345 days ago
Chrome seems to be in about the same range on mobile though, about 50%.
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xigency 3345 days ago
The threat of anti-trust measures hasn't been great enough for the SEC to block the mergers that put them in control of the majority of Internet ads. It's astonishing to see how awful the ads that Google (Alphabet) serves are.
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