[thekingofh]

There's nothing objectively wrong with a large company unless they begin to squash competition with regulatory lock-in. This is what led to the breakup of AT&T/Bell. As far as I can tell, Google doesn't keep others out of the search market through any other means than just being better than the other guys. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I certainly haven't seen any shortage of search engines and alternative cloud services providers.

[lovich]

They routinely put their other products on top of the search pages, such as Google reviews over Yelp or Google maps over OpenMap results.

The issue isn't even so much as Google is dominating search, because they have been providing a better product in almost all cases until recently. The issue is that they are using their dominance in search to try and dominate other markets

[fixermark]

When a user searches for "Restaurants near me," how does Google answer that question reliably without using its own mapping service?

Trying to feed that query to a third-party service and then give users the results back adds significant risk that the third-party changes their API, changes their feature-set in an incompatible way, goes out of business, gets in a corporate fight with the search provider...

It's both cheaper and more convenient for the end-user if the search provider handles the mapping itself (in the absence of some kind of universal understood interface standard, complete with some kind of incentive to adhere to it).

[stuckinarut]

They pay to integrate with third party services via a bidding process.

> adds significant risk that the third-party changes their API, changes their feature-set in an incompatible way, goes out of business

All very unlikely to happen when dealing with a client the size of google.

> It's both cheaper and more convenient for the end-user if the search provider handles the mapping itself

added bonus, google gets to dominate mapping then jack up the cost 30x when they decide they want it to be a billion dollar business. LIke they did recently.

[fixermark]

> They pay to integrate with third party services via a bidding process.

It's an interesting idea; I don't think I've seen something like that floated before outside of the government space of fair bidding against contracts.

> added bonus, google gets to dominate mapping then jack up the cost 30x when they decide they want it to be a billion dollar business. LIke they did recently.

I hear OpenStreetMaps still exists, and has an API.

[stuckinarut]

An API not suitable for commercial use. So now you're relying on a third party who is suddenly trying to cope with some percentage of the insane traffic of google maps. If they can they make a lot of money.

if not you lose money by switching to them. if it's less than the new rate that you get from google, it's a hard sell to switch. You might point out that this third party should spend the money to scale, but unlike google they aren't equipped with an advertising firehose of cash that they can point at a losing business whenever they want. They have to operate a scale they can afford. Best case they have the staff to build out a service that they can scale quickly enough to take advantage. Realistically, that means using a cloud service provided by one of the oligarchs.

[RestlessMind]

If I am going to search for a business near me, I always prefer a Google maps based solution right there on the search results page, rather than having to navigate to yet another page (say, Yelp's) which is going to nag me to download their app and going to provide a shitty experience otherwise. Continuing along the same example, Yelp is not even going to provide me with all the useful service I might need (like driving directions to that business) and I will have to again navigate back to Google maps.

Google's practice of showing me data from other products (eg. Maps) right there on the search pages is definitely a win for me as a consumer.

[TomMarius]

It's their product after all; do you point people to your competition from your product? Everyone is free to use anything else. Anti-competitive would be if you couldn't use anything else.

[xg15]

"Your product" is something completely different if you're a mom-and-pop shop or startup or if you have 90% market share. This is why antitrust exists and what arguments like this always seem to ignore.

[TomMarius]

Can you be more specific, what exactly is and when exactly it becomes different?

[xg15]

In short, network effects. Longer: the amount of power their decisions have to affect society. If the mom-and-pop shop would refuse to serve readheads, that's (mostly) their decision. If Google decided to lock redheads out of their accounts, or block from using Chrome, Android or Search, those people would have serious disadvantages simply going around their daily life.

[TomMarius]

Are they getting hurt? I guess not. No one has any right to Google services[0]. Google has every right to refuse service to anyone[0]. What if they decided to close shop altogether?

Note that locking them e.g. out of a phone they bought before the ban is something different - that would be a breach of contract from Google side.

[0] unless there is an existing contract

[briandear]

Is the consumer being harmed? That’s the only question that matters in anti-trust. That mom and pop can’t compete isn’t a symptom of a monopoly, it’s a symptom of mom and pop not doing more to be the best choice. Mom and pop could compete if they had a better, cheaper product. If you want to compete — be better than the competition. Many startups are not — that isn’t the fault of Google.

[xg15]

Yes, e.g. by stiffling sale of alternative Android-based operating systems, as the EU just concluded. Google uses their market power and control over Android to give competing OSes a disadvantage, whether or not they would be better than Android/Google Play.

[TomMarius]

Using the EU as an argument is like bringing a friend that agrees with you to confirm your statement. Use actual arguments, please.

[xg15]

So, genuine question. If some company (with sufficiently deep pockets) decided to buy up all land, buildings, roads, infrastructure, etc that makes up a city and then decided that certain groups of persons are no longer allowed to tresspass its private property and must therefore leave the city, would you be ok with that?

[lovich]

When a company completely dominates a field they get different rules to prevent them from taking over every related field one at a time. "It's their product" doesn't cut it as a member of our society when that means they can control entire industries and jack up prices.

Having a single company own one industry after another is completely antithetical to the idea of capitalism, and if we're not going to do capitalism then we might as well start taxing Google even more to pay for public services, which I am sure they also don't want

[stuckinarut]

Except google dominates search and search is the only way.

This is like if one company owned the street signs, and just took them down arbitrarily.

[TomMarius]

You are free to use duckduckgo.com, bing.com or several more alternatives. Your metaphor is invalid.

[lovich]

All of those alternatives together don't even provide a fraction of the service that google provides.

The monopoly takes control and keeps prices higher than they would be with competition. New competition comes along every now and then but a monopoly just has to compete heavily for a short time to put the new comes out of business and then it's back to mining the market. This is how monopolies work and what anti trust legislature is supposed to stop.

Based on your comments here, I have to ask. Is there any situation you can think of where the government should step in to break up a company, short of violence or breaking a contract?

[stuckinarut]

right.

I'm gonna stretch my metaphor a lot.

Imagine street signs use polarized glasses (or something, I'm not an optics). I can see only those signs whose glasses I where.

I choose to wear google glasses. Everyone does, the competition is pretty good but google has been around for so long that I just don't really bother with anything else.

Now google takes down some signs. Am I really going to carry 3 pairs of glasses (N pairs, M are relevant) in order to figure out what street I'm on? or am I just going to walk a block to the next street and use the service google hasn't arbitrarily decided to destroy.

[xg15]

Google doesn't keep others out of the search market through any other means than just being better...

They have 98% market share in europe. They also provide the main revenue source (AdWords) and the most important implementation of the web stack (Chrome) - which fitted with mandatory automated updating. If you combine those factors, they are in a position where they can to a large part dictate what the de-facto standards for a successful website are. They can also rapidly change those standards or choose to promote or bury certain technologies.

If that is not an advantage over competitors, I don't know what is.

And this is just for the web. On Android - about half the worldwide market for mobile apps - they are not even a market participant at all. They are basically the government.

[fixermark]

Quick experiment you can try to check if Google is blocking competition:

1) navigate to bing.com

2) do a search

If it works, congratulations; Google isn't blocking competition. The 98% market share is probably because the market is winner-take-all, and people don't see a need to use a new competitor that's even equivalently-effective over one they are already comfortable with.

[xg15]

Imagine you run a website. Some day, for whatever reason, Google is blacklisting you. Are you going to say "eh, no big deal, I'll just have my customers use Bing instead"?

[fixermark]

Your customers already know how to get to your website: yourdomain.com.

Do you mean "Some day, for whatever reason, Google stops directing traffic to your website of people who don't know who you are, for free?"

Sounds like it's time to spend some money on advertising.

Their ability to kick a bunch of traffic towards you or refrain from doing so makes them a market-maker, but they share that with newspaper and television networks. It doesn't make them a monopoly. It's not their fault or responsibility if people don't "tune in" to the Bing channel.

[Merad]

You haven’t interacted with many average users, have you? When instructed to go to “yourdomain.com”, they’ll bring up google and search for yourdomain.com. If it doesn’t appear in google search results, it effectively doesn’t exist to an enormous segment of users.

[fixermark]

I'm the past, we solved problems like this by having industry groups pony up money to educate consumers about options.

Sounds like it's time for companies that can't get in Google search results to start doing ad spots about search engine choice.

[stuckinarut]

You deserved it because you served an ad that google didn't like the style of. Also their adblocker in chrome is fine too because that's not a conflict of interest.

- typical HN response.

[briandear]

Market share does not equal monopoly. Why aren’t Europeans building better search? It isn’t because of Google, it’s because of the risk-adverse tendencies of investors in Europe. If you pitched a search engine to a Euro-VC, you wouldn’t even get asked for a deck. Europe isn’t very innovation driven: they prefer the 2x rather than the 200x. The proof is simple: just look at the flow of European investment money: rarely do they invest in high-risk, high-reward ventures. While in the US, you can raise money for almost anything.

[xg15]

Ok, we built our awesome EuroSearch. How do we get it on the start pages of Firefox, Chrome and Android?

[YokoZar]

Firefox has had different default search engines in the past. At one point Yahoo was the default, and I believe it varied by continent.

Ubuntu once switched from Google to Yahoo in its Firefox as the default search engine, citing higher payments from Yahoo.

[sievebrain]

Pay higher referral fees. Or did you think Firefox used Google search for free?

[orteam]

By also building the awesome EuroBrowser? It worked for Google, just saying