[sonnyblarney]

a) They are monopolies by the classic definition.

b) "a monopoly is perfectly fine, AS LONG AS the economic power isn't abused to prevent competition which harms consumers."

This is kind of a non sequitur ... Of course they will prevent competition, that's the essential name of the game. Every company does this - this is not 'abuse' it's just how it works. Ergo, by your definition monopolies are all bad.

I actually think some monopolies are good - when you have well run actor that has some external controls on prices etc. it provides stability among other things.

c) To the extent that colas can be defined as a market, then they have a monopoly. 'Search' does exist aside an adjacent market in which content can be replaced, so it's not helpful.

Google needs to be broken up.

Search is so fundamentally essential ... it's like 'information neutrality'.

The FANGS are total hyprocrits pushing for 'Net Neutrality'.

Just as Comcast should not be able to offer anything but QoS and not read the content of my bites ... Google should not be able to offer anything but quality search. All their other products depend on their search monopoly. Much like Comcast would leverage looking at your packets. Much like Microsoft leverages their OS power to control office software etc..

Search, OS, maybe even Browsers - should be independent, just as Carriers can't use their power to get into other lines of business.

The AT&T merger is bad news, they shouldn't be in the content business.

[wpasc]

I frequently see people say "Google should be broken up" and I want to hear more on that argument. Meaning Google and Youtube should be separated? but then we're no longer talking about just their search dominance right? How could search alone be broken up if a large part of the complaint is about the dominance of their search?

Moreover, it is pretty easy to not use google search? Why couldn't someone use DDG, Yahoo, Bing, etc.? despite it being defaulted to in browsers (you can change this), most people elect to use Google. If a company dominates a single sector through consumer choice, should they be broken up (esoecially when consumer could walk away)?

I'm not try to be facetious, I would just like counter arguments

[toast0]

The argument goes roughly as follows:

Google is able to use its lead in search to exert undue influence on other markets. Google can (and has) ocassionaly placed banners suggesting a switch to chrome, influencing the browser market. Google showcases YouTube videos above other video results, regardless of the relative merits of the videos. Similar things in other verticals.

Additionally, search dominance leads to dominance in the related search ads and text ads generally space. In part, because of market size, Yahoo was unable to attract the same kind of advertising market as Google, and famously chose to contract that out to Microsoft, which also was unable to make it work well. I was at Yahoo during parts of that time, and my feeling is that market size wasn't a big part of that failure, but it could be argued that it was a part.

Is any of this compelling enough to be worth an anti-trust case? I don't think so, but maybe?

How could you break up Google if this was considered egrigious enough? Split into several actually separate companies: software, containing chrome, android, and chrome os; search, providing web search apis, but not a front end; advertising, providing advertising apis, but not hosting any sites that use then; consumer services, including a web search front end, Gmail, YouTube, etc; business services, including the Google cloud stuff and maybe g suite; I dunno about the alphabet soup bits. Make the search and ads services contracts be on FRAND and public terms.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Google can (and has) ocassionaly placed banners suggesting a switch to chrome, influencing the browser market.

But so can anybody else. Google sells ads on their search engine to anyone. If you asked nicely enough with a large enough pile of money they would presumably even sell you a banner placement.

What is the objection supposed to be? That Google didn't pay itself for the ad space? How would it have changed anything if they did?

[rifung]

> What is the objection supposed to be?

I work at Google; opinions are my own.

I believe the objection is that it's an unfair competitive advantage and hurts competition. The reasoning is similar to that given when Google was fined for Google Shopping in the EU.

> But so can anybody else. Google sells ads on their search engine to anyone. If you asked nicely enough with a large enough pile of money they would presumably even sell you a banner placement.

You could make the same argument about Microsoft with Internet Explorer then no? I'm sure if someone offered to pay many billions of dollars, Microsoft would have gladly included their browser with Windows too.

Being able to do the same thing with a sufficiently large sum of money doesn't imply that something is not an anticompetitive practice. If anything, it may show that it is indeed anticompetitive..

[AnthonyMouse]

> I believe the objection is that it's an unfair competitive advantage and hurts competition.

But the advantage is just having more resources. Mozilla could likewise pay Facebook/Reddit/Yahoo to push Firefox... if they could afford it. You could call it "unfair" that they don't have the money, but that has nothing to do with Google search in particular.

> You could make the same argument about Microsoft with Internet Explorer then no? I'm sure if someone offered to pay many billions of dollars, Microsoft would have gladly included their browser with Windows too.

But that's the opposite of how tying works. The classic tying case is you have a monopoly on cars and you require all your customers to buy your brand of gasoline, so you also monopolize the market for gasoline.

The Internet Explorer case was really bizarre, because they kept talking about the browser market, but what they were really tying to Windows was (web) apps. It was the same thing with Java. Microsoft wanted to tie the app ecosystem to Windows, so you had to use their platform-specific APIs and the app developer and all their customers get tied to Windows. Microsoft never made a dime from the browser market, nor ever intended to.

But Google pushing Chrome is the other side of the coin. They also have no intention to make any money selling web browsers, but their goal isn't to tie Google search to Chrome -- it works fine in Firefox and IE -- their goal was to prevent Microsoft from using dominance in the browser market to tie Google search (the web app) to Windows through the browser. It's an anti-tying move.

To get where Microsoft was they would have to be preventing other browsers from using Google search while preventing Chrome from using non-Google search (as Microsoft interfered with Netscape running on Windows, prevented IE from being removed and discontinued IE for non-Windows platforms as soon as it gained share), and then at the same time filling Chrome with non-standard proprietary APIs with no public spec (as Microsoft did with IE/ActiveX/etc.) so that third party pages would only work in the browser that only worked with Google search, and competing browsers would have no efficient way to know how to produce the same behavior.

Just promoting a free standards-compliant browser with published source code isn't anywhere near that.

[ArchTypical]

> But so can anybody else. Google sells ads on their search engine to anyone.

There's no guarantee (read the demand partner legal disclaimers, there's specifically NO guarantees) that there's an equitable distribution. There have been analyses to show that the algorithm has short-circuits to benefit Google products, featured here on HN and other places. I don't have them onhand, but it's openly discussed (meaning beyond being taboo):

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/21/google-staff-discussed-tweak...

[AnthonyMouse]

> There have been analyses to show that the algorithm has short-circuits to benefit Google products, featured here on HN and other places.

Analyses by competitors who don't like their search ranking. The analyses show a bias alright, but whose?

> I don't have them onhand, but it's openly discussed (meaning beyond being taboo)

That's not a discussion of purposely harming competitors, it's partisans being partisan -- and getting shut down by internal processes designed to prevent exactly that.

Large organizations don't prevent misbehavior by hiring perfect humans. They do it by having layered defenses against it. The fact that the partisans failed is if anything evidence that the internal controls are effective.

[toast0]

How much would Google charge me to put a prominent banner next to the search box saying that Google recomends w3m for the best browsing experience on Google search?

My guess is they would have considered it before they had their own browser, but now that chrome is something they've invested in, it seems like something that is not for sale.

How much of an impact is that placement? I don't really know, but I bet Google has data on it. Discovery on a case like this would be interesting.

Anyway, the point is that's something they can do, because they control so much of search. Bing putting up a banner that says hey, why don't you use Edge, pretty please doesn't have as much impact, because Bing has a smaller market share.

[AnthonyMouse]

> How much would Google charge me to put a prominent banner next to the search box saying that Google recomends w3m for the best browsing experience on Google search?

They're under no obligation to sell their endorsement. And what difference does the specific price make for placement? Suppose it was a lot.

> Anyway, the point is that's something they can do, because they control so much of search. Bing putting up a banner that says hey, why don't you use Edge, pretty please doesn't have as much impact, because Bing has a smaller market share.

How is it different than a company that just has more money and can therefore afford to buy more advertising? It's effectively what they're doing -- they could have sold the space they're using to advertise Chrome to a third party for its market value. By using it themselves they're foregoing that revenue, essentially the Chrome division purchasing the space from the search division.

[sonnyblarney]

There are two arguments, one is about Search as a monopoly the other is about that power as it relates to other parts of the value chain.

Google search is fundamentally better than DDG (for most purposes) because it has massive advantages that make it effectively unassailable. For example, I stopped using DDG because I rely on reverse image search. FYI DDG does not have its own crawler, it gets data from other sources. And it won't get reverse image search unless it does it itself ... which I doubt will happen. Maybe. And of course Yahoo is not a search engine either, it's not really an alternative at all.

In order to compete with Google effectively, you'd have to build your own crawler etc.. It's essentially impossible. The number of engineers, data centres other components ... my gosh man.

Consider for a moment that Google is a massive cash printing machine. Do you not think that VC's would be lining up, piling billions of dollars into competitors in order to take a piece of the action?

Why is nobody - not even intelligent actors with a lot of cash to burn - investing in the most profitable business model of our era?

Because the barriers to compete are absurdly high.

It's a monopoly.

And if it is - then we have to be very concerned about their relationship to adjacent layers of the value chain because of their ability to subsidize products to put others out of business.

So you're aware that in free trade deals between nations, part of the deal includes measures to bar state actors from participating in some economies, and also, rules against 'dumping'. This is because if a nation state actor wants to, they could subsidize their own industries, wipe out competition in other nations, and then let their industry dominate.

The same applies in value chain monopolies.

Standard Oil didn't have 'better oil' or better practices than other Oil companies - they used control and ownership of the railroads to increase prices on their competitors and put them out of business. In a truly competitive landscape, there would be no Standard Oil.

When Microsoft uses their ownership of the OS to put all other 'Office' solutions out of business, is that good for consumers?

By the way - MS is still printing money hands over fist in Office Software. They are making billions. They are a de-facto standard, arguably a monopoly there. Why aren't investors lining up to create competitive solutions? (Because it's an unassailable monopoly).

If Google decides to get into your line of business, and you are small, they will absolutely wipe you out if they want to, and it has nothing to do with having 'a better product'.

Also consider for a moment how many of Google's other business parts could stand on their own as businesses?

Google Analytics? Android? Chrome? Google Docs? Maps?

They are all all money pits, strategic investments (i.e. 'moats') by Google to ensure the dominance of Google Search.

How could a mobile OS vendor compete in a market where Google is using billions from one market, to dominate a different one, like mobile OS? They can't. Maybe in China, wherein there are non-market factors to protect their own makers.

For the same reason that governments have mostly separated the transport of electricity from electricity production, for the same reason we have net neutrality, Google Search should possibly be pared off from the other businesses.

Amazon is using massive profits from AWS to put retailers out of business. Amazon is not hugely profitable, but their AWS business unit is, ergo, the retail unit is probably losing money.

How can retailers compete against Amazon, which is effectively selling at a loss? They can't.

Consumers generally don't win when a de-facto or real monopoly in one market, uses that power to wipe out competition in others.

There is essentially no real competition in search, nobody is putting money in it. Same for office software. Given how much money is being minted in those markets, it's a sure sign of monopoly.

[AndrewKemendo]

This is well written and I would add that the counterargument people are throwing up about how there are no "barriers to entry" for search etc... is a red herring. Really, it's misunderstanding what is required for entry.

As a thought experiment, lets say that three people came up with a WAY better search engine than google. Like way better. Will this new company be able to take search market share away from Google? No.

Why? Chrome is now the dominant browser with Google search built in. Google is the default search on Apple and Android Devices. Google has Billions in marketing for search.

But most importantly, Google has the best engineers on the planet and they can re-build what this crack team did, deploy it to a billion people and drain you in court if you decide to fight them.

Wouldn't you rather just sell to them and cash out instead of getting taken out?

That's how this game goes.

[AnthonyMouse]

> In order to compete with Google effectively, you'd have to build your own crawler etc.. It's essentially impossible. The number of engineers, data centres other components ... my gosh man.

The Internet Archive does this with an annual budget of $10M. That is clearly not a lot of money compared to the amount on the table.

> If Google decides to get into your line of business, and you are small, they will absolutely wipe you out if they want to, and it has nothing to do with having 'a better product'.

That is what happens if any multi-billion dollar company decides to get into your line of business.

> How could a mobile OS vendor compete in a market where Google is using billions from one market, to dominate a different one, like mobile OS?

This is conspicuously disproven by basically every mobile device maker around, who all maintain their own Android forks, plus Apple.

The point of Android wasn't to dominate the OS market, it was to commodify it -- which it did. But that's the opposite of anticompetitive. Now entering the OS market is trivial because you can start with Android, make zero or more changes to it and you have yourself an OS without paying Google or anyone else a dime. You don't even have to use Google search.

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

DDG is proof positive that the barriers to entry are extraordinarily low. It is incredibly easy to start a search engine. Now, to make one that is considered good relative to Google, that is hard, because if Google is known for one thing, it's known for executing in search. But if someone wanted to invest billions and billions of dollars, they could take a shot. Microsoft has been taking their shot for years, and so far it isn't working, but that's not because of barriers to entry. It's because they do not execute as well as Google does.

It's also hard to build a new car company, or a new chemical manufacturing conglomerate, or a new anything. That is not a defining feature of a monopoly.

[kinkrtyavimoodh]

DDG doesn't maintain its own indexes. It uses Bing and Yandex, the only two other global-level English language web indexes. So DDG isn't proof positive of anything.

[sonnyblarney]

"It is incredibly easy to start a search engine"

Yes, but it's impossible to build a quality one, that will compete with Google.

"Microsoft has been taking their shot for years, and so far it isn't working, but that's not because of barriers to entry. It's because they do not execute as well as Google does."

MSFT is one of the greatest companies in the world, with tons of high tech workers, brand recognition and the like. If they can't make a dent in search, then again I hold this up as evidence of monopoly.

When there is only 1 primary player, despite everything else, then that alone is evidence of monopoly.

If VC's could spend 1 Billion and take a piece out of Google - they would in a heartbeat.

[rifung]

> Microsoft has been taking their shot for years, and so far it isn't working, but that's not because of barriers to entry. It's because they do not execute as well as Google does.

I think that's a little unfair to Microsoft.

Google has spent way more engineer team on all the infrastructure required to make Search great. Microsoft's main products were a desktop OS and application, so presumably their existing internal tooling probably wasn't as mature for scalable web services.

I work at Google but opinions are my won.

[twtw]

IMO, the right approach to regulating Google is similar to the regulations pre-breakup imposed on AT&T. Stuff like all patents and technology must be made public, interoperability, etc.

[AnthonyMouse]

What is that expected to change? Google is not exactly known for initiating patent litigation. They use standard SMTP, HTTP, DNS etc. -- all open standards, and when they do something like QUIC they write it up and standardize that too. They've had that "download your data" thing for years.

The biggest problem with Google is that they're collecting too much data on people. But that has basically nothing to do with market share or market power or competition. It would be exactly the same problem if they had a dozen competitors.