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by legitster 3162 days ago
US antitrust law is written to protect availability of consumer choice, not necessarily businesses from each other.

As someone who enjoys Google Cards and Amazon Basic (Facebook I will give you), I would not be happy if the government deemed the product I enjoy to be illegal under the basis of protecting my available choices.
1 comments
jparse 3162 days ago
Err, you are proving my point. You protect the availability of consumer choice by protecting business from actors who are leveraging their marketshare and engaging in uncompetitive practices. In this case, other businesses (i.e. Google, Facebook, et all)

I am with you. You should have choice. That is exactly what antitrust law is written for.

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legitster 3162 days ago
But... Wait... Are Google Cards (just the example we chose) an uncompetitive practice (as you outlined above) and be broken up, or a consumer choice that I have a right to? You are saying that they are both.
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jparse 3162 days ago
Google cards are an example of anti-competitive behavior. They lift content from sites, often without their permission, and display that data on the site. With their 90 percent marketshare, this behavior kills websites. There have been numerous lawsuits on this. The end result, is you have a web with less choice and innovation.[1] The most outrageous thing is they take this content and display ads right next to it and profit off it. All without giving a dime to the website owners.

Cards are one example, the best example is Google's plan to kill comparison shopping sites because it was eating into their marketshare. Washington Post put it best:

> Quoting internal Google documents and emails, the report shows that the company created a list of rival comparison shopping sites that it would artificially lower in the general search results, even though tests showed that Google users “liked the quality of the [rival] sites” and gave negative feedback on the proposed changes.

Google reworked its search algorithm at least four times, the documents show, and altered its established rating criteria before the proposed changes received “slightly positive” user feedback. Internal Google documents predicted that the proposed changes would reduce rivals’ user traffic up to 20 percent and subsequently reported producing the desired results once the changes were implemented.[2]

[1] https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/you-should-be-outrag...

The list goes on and on...

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humanrebar 3162 days ago
> They lift content from sites, often without their permission...

To be fair on this point, if the salient content is facts (for example, the expected weight of a healthy cocker spaniel), then the originating site didn't "own" the content anyway.

They certainly have copyright on the presentation of the facts, but that just obligates Google to run the original content through some sort of algorithm (or something) to make sure they're not violating copyright.

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platz 3162 days ago
The issue is in how the laws are defined, not in any moral concepts of fairness. In court they can always claim that the consumer doesn't have to use their service, they have choice to use a competitor. The problem is that in the internet age, it is not in controlling supply but in effectively unlimited demand created by combination of zero marginal cost to add customers and network effects of the internet.
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