[wwwdonohue]

I sort of agree, but part of me also thinks that if a company builds the world's best mobile OS and search engine and ad platform and video streaming service and internet browser and mapping service... well, good for them! They built the best products and it seems like it would ultimately be anti-consumer to do anything about it.

It's different if a company like Google establishes its dominance via one great product (search) and then wields that power to artificially protect its other lines of business through e.g. contracts, the same way Microsoft did with OEMs.

Sure, nothing "illegal" about it, but ultimately, it fits the de facto understanding of antitrust being about "consumer welfare." A company leveraging its dominance in one business to exert control over others =/= a company having success because it built the best products.

[shliachtx]

Except they purchased their way into many of these.

Their advertising business was built on a number of acquisitions (DoubleClick, AdMob) - strategic acquisitions, surely, and they improved on them since - but it is not as if they bult the business from the ground up. The same goes for video streaming (YouTube - after attempting to create their own), and mobile OS (Android).

With Android in particular it can be argued that it would not be what it is today without them, but they also heavily leveraged their other services to promote and maintain control over Android.

[rstuart4133]

> Except they purchased their way into many of these.

They did. But youtube.com wasn't that big when they bought it. In fact by definition most of the things they bought (like maps.google.com) weren't big. The obvious corollary is Google is very good buy scaling something up while keeping it rock solid.

And, they are. Examples of original things that did come out of Google are Kubernetes, the Site Reliability Engineering Handbook, and pulling off something I thought was impossible: Spanner, a global distributed ACID database. From what I can tell they have constructed the fastest, most reliable distributed computing platform on the planet.

They are the Toyota's of the computing landscape: nothing particularly outstanding in any particular model of car, the secret sauce is the infrastructure and processes they've developed to manufacture those cars that ensures they are both cheap and reliable. And so it is with Google. They aren't particularly good at coming up with new products. In fact they often buy them. But then those products get moved onto best computing infrastructure on the planet. If the products are any good, they seemingly grow without effort to become a dominant player.

[sharkjacobs]

> youtube.com wasn't that big when they bought it

YouTube then wasn't then anything like it is now, but it was by far the largest video website of its type. I felt like they bought it because Google Video failed to compete with it.

[tsycho]

I see this oft repeated comment about Google acquiring YouTube, DoubleClick and Android. Yes they did. But the companies they acquired were tiny upstarts, which might have even died on their own. Google built them into what they are today, and deserve 90% of the credit for their current significance.

The same applies to FB and Instagram as well, fwiw. Though imo, not as much for WhatsApp, which already had 400MM users and would have organically reached 1B+ users on its own.

[john-radio]

YouTube was delivering an average of 100 million video views per day in July 2006, months before the Google acquisition for $1,650,000,000 that same year. It's inaccurate to characterize them as a "tiny startup."

[sam0x17]

Likewise doubleclick was HUGE in the ad space I remember seeing all the doubleclick.com urls in slow page loads

[FlyMoreRockets]

How many views per day does YouTube now deliver per day?

[athms]

>It's inaccurate to characterize them as a "tiny startup."

YouTube had 65 employees when they were acquired.

I do agree that they were not a startup. This word should only be used for companies that are starting up; getting their legal structure together, hiring, and initial R&D. Once you are offering widgets (ad space), you are no longer a startup. Profitability is immaterial to startup status.

[Judgmentality]

Why does the number of employees matter? If anything that's a testament to how valuable they were, to be able to do so much with so little.

[athms]

It doesn't. My comment was about the word tiny" and 65 is tiny especially when compared to Google.

[ulfw]

And Instagram had like what... 8?

Not every company that's successful and has millions of users needs to have a bloated org

[romanoderoma]

WhatsApp had 55 employees before FB acquisition

[redisman]

I'm sorry are you joking? You do realize DoubleClick had it's IPO 10 years before Google bought them?

[akiselev]

YouTube saw the writing on the wall early - Google's capital allowed them to scale without paywalling or drowning viewers in advertisements like they are now.

The Android acquisition is a redherring - manufacturers started adopting Android en mass because it was royalty free(ish) and they had to compete against Apple's new app store mostly with feature phone OSes entirely unfit for the job.

Neither Youtube nor Google's selfless "donation" to the consumer electronics industry would have been possible without the ad business. IANAL but that looks like textbook predatory pricing (and in Android's case, can't be defended by pointing at Apple, since they don't participate in the smartphone OS market).

[LeifCarrotson]

The power that Google used to build those other lines of business was not artificial, but it was very effective. The existence of that power is anti-consumer because no one else can afford to build anything better, because Google makes more money than your hypothetical new world's best product ever by charging absolutely nothing for their competing product.

Step 1, in 1997, was to build the world's best search engine.

Step 2, was that running the world's best search engine allowed them to create an ad network that most accurately knew what the largest number of viewers were looking for, best ad platform and massive revenue. All others follow from that.

Steps 3 and on were to start an email service (what are people talking about), create an image search tool (shows what pictures people are looking for), acquire/develop a mapping application (where are people and where are they going), acquire a video hosting platform (what are people watching), create a mobile OS (get more people on the Internet and especially on their parts of it), create a web browser (get more people on the internet and especially on their parts of it), etc. etc. etc. Those other properties only work because they're financed by and create value for Google's ad network.

[garyfirestorm]

It sounds like you want to punish them for being successful. I still haven't seen the harm to the consumers. They build search and ad networks and email and android. I use them all the time. I now have access to youtube and infinite amount of information on it on my fingertips.

[cj]

> I still haven't seen the harm to the consumers.

IMO the main problem is the existence of an institution that is (arguably) more powerful than any government in the world.

That's not necessarily a problem on its own.

It becomes a problem when those same institutions have a very small number of people with specially concocted classes of shares that give people like Zuckerberg majority control of the company despite owning < 30% of actual shares.

I don't want to live in a world where 1 person can have such immense and unchecked power. Especially when that 1 person is immune from, for example, being removed as CEO.

I'm not sure if it's still the case today, but I believe Sergy / Larry had 51%+ control of the company despite only owning ~10% of shares.

[autoexec]

> IMO the main problem is the existence of an institution that is (arguably) more powerful than any government in the world.

Which is why the US government has been collecting all the data they can from google. It's a perfect means to perform mass surveillance on everyone and google has no power to refuse to hand that data over or even to tell anyone about it.

[fn_bb_sqr_pnts]

if we allow that this combination of market power (search + ads + channels of distribution like youtube, android) wld lead to mass surveillance, what prevents other companies from arising and abusing this power? Other countries would hv to go along. I don't think trading Google dominance outside the US for Baidu solves anything.

[autoexec]

I guess if google went full evil they'd have enough blackmail material to take down just about anybody at this point including politicians. The backlash if they were caught would be huge, but honestly what would we do about it? Switch to Bing who is just hoping to get enough data on us to do the same (and leveraging data collected from our own PCs to do it)?

They only way I can think of to solve this would be to limit the amount of data that companies are allowed to collect, but can we expect the government to vote for that until google does start to abuse what they have on us? Right now they can take that data and benefit from it as well.

[romanoderoma]

> It sounds like you want to punish them for being successful.

People are worried by their power.

Too much power is dangerous.

Google works at global scale, if even the US want to stop them from becoming even more powerful there must mean something.

If you think about it the NBA draft was invented to avoid that the best team chose the best players year after year

It's what you call "punish their success"

I cal it "enable competition"

[garyfirestorm]

Facebook came after google, and managed to compete in ad business, got orkut and google+ discarded pretty quickly. Playing devil's advocate here, but doesnt that prove that no matter how big/powerful you are, some random kid could still take you down. Look at Big 3 and Tesla...etc

[romanoderoma]

Facebook ad business have become a thing after an enormous amount of money have been poured into the company

Google is king of the keywords (products and services), Facebook is king of targeting (brand awareness)

But they are not really competing against each other on the contrary the gap is widening

Google made 61 billions more than FB in 2018 and 65 more in 2019

That's why FB is moving towards a marketplace based on their own cryptocurrency

[TheOtherHobbes]

People who produce content for YouTube and have had content - or entire channels - removed for no good reason might disagree.

Also, there's the issue of public trust. We have no choice but to trust Google not to skew its search results. It's not obvious this trust is justified.

Google can literally make individuals, companies, and events disappear from the Internet. You can put up your site or your business and if Google removes you from search you might as well not exist.

A moment's thought will suggest that this is exactly the same as the YouTube problem, but on a larger scale. And that's an unhealthy amount of power for a corporation that isn't subject to any oversight or accountability.

[Siira]

> charging absolutely nothing for their competing product.

Most people prefer this. What you're suggesting is to subsidize the rich by removing free products thus making everyone share the costs for the premium services.

I.e., this is not a local maximum preventing the global utopia of premium services for the rich. The current design serves the world better than that exclusionary, elitist dream. (Though the market is actually open for such elite products as well, when the rich actually want to pay their own fees; Hey.com is a thing.)

[LeifCarrotson]

In no way am I suggesting that we "subsidize the rich". I'm suggesting that we do the opposite, that we restrict and regulate the richest monopolies (Google) to preserve freedoms for the poor.

We're very much at risk of being a world in which people either have to be rich or not participate in society to avoid privacy invasion by companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. If you're poor, you can have a free email address, but that comes at a cost of allowing Google to read your email (and pass it to their ad customers) so they can serve you ads. The answer to this hegemony is not "Well, Google provides free email addresses, better let them keep doing what they're doing so we don't discriminate against the poor", it's to regulate them so they're not allowed to read your emails, or otherwise provide some alternative service that can provide email addresses for cost plus a small profit margin.

And yes, I know that in this particular example there are other free or inexpensive email providers, but they're not world-dominating products; the market is distorted because the few willing to pay are signalling something pretty strong by rejecting the free, high-quality option offered by Google.

[gundmc]

> If you're poor, you can have a free email address, but that comes at a cost of allowing Google to read your email (and pass it to their ad customers) so they can serve you ads.

Google doesn't show ads based on email contents.

"When you open Gmail, you'll see ads that were selected to show you the most useful and relevant ads. The process of selecting and showing personalized ads in Gmail is fully automated. These ads are shown to you based on your online activity while you're signed into Google. We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads."

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en

[saagarjha]

This is a relatively recently change.

[Siira]

Why would Google continue to provide free emails if this has no benefits for it? Even if it continues because it has already paid most of the cost and the small marketing benefit will be worth the maintenance, it will not develop the product further. This also sends a signal to all the economy that success will be punished, creating distorted incentives and huge deadweights. The reality that you advocate is very much giving the elites what they want, with little innovation and choice power for ordinary people.

> otherwise provide some alternative service that can provide email addresses for cost plus a small profit margin.

As I said, for email specifically, because we already have the necessary interop, there are solutions such as hey.com. What more do you want?

PS: It's much more efficient for your government to just subsidize open-source solutions based on their usage levels.

[smnrchrds]

> part of me also thinks that if a company builds the world's best mobile OS and search engine and ad platform and video streaming service and internet browser and mapping service... well, good for them!

We don't know if they make the best services. Perhaps there would be much better mobile OS or search engines made by others, if it were not for Google's dominant position discouraging new entrants or crushing them in their infancy.

[m4rtink]

I dont think one can cal Android worlds best mobile OS - one that had most money dumped on it to make the abomination usable, sure. Most pushed by a cartel (Open Hedste Aliance) mobile OS - definitely. But definitely not the best.

[hyperpallium2]

They became world dictator fair and square!

[fn_bb_sqr_pnts]

^ this guy gets it! IBM PC dominance didn't mean much when OS became the thing. And Windows PC OS dominance didn't mean much when web became the thing. Search dominance (which is one way of interacting with the web) didn't mean much when social/eCommerce (other ways) became a thing. FB missed messaging (is messenger a thing?). What are we doing here? can we just focus on figuring out digital privacy and call it a day?

[Supermancho]

> They built the best products and it seems like it would ultimately be anti-consumer to do anything about it.

No it's not. The best XXX run by a single company, is super-effective! Allowing it, we know from all of human history, is anti-consumer.

[bumblebritches5]

Except Google didn't build those things except search.

They bought Android in 2005, Youtube in 2004? and all of their other, non-search successes.

[d1zzy]

People say this as if the entire (or majority) of Android's success rests with what they initially purchased. In my opinion it has very little to do with that and a lot more to do with the billions of dollars invested into developing, extending the platform, creating and supporting APIs, establishing contracts with OEMs, developing apps, etc etc. Android wasn't some magic thing that anyone that purchased it would have been sure to be successful. Just look at how well MS did with Nokia's purchase.

So yes, Google did purchase Android but Google didn't purchase their mobile success story by purchasing Android.

[kd913]

The whole way that Google handled Windows Mobile was anti competitive imho.

They prevented Windows Phone users from being able to access Google Maps by checking User Agents.

They didn't release a native Youtube app for Windows phone, and when Microsoft wanted to make one themselves they restricted them to HTML5 and non-native access. This penalized battery life on Windows Phone platforms for 2 very large and important services.

Google got success with Android by frankly bullying every other viable competitor out of the market (Amazon Fire, Windows Phone) by again bullying in regards to play store services.

[larl]

You realize that Amazon Fire is Android, right?

[Filligree]

Didn't GMail start as a 20% project?

[LilPee]

I don't know about Gmail, but Google Maps was originally one.

[winwhiz]

Was it? There is a lot of Keyhole in there too. And remember maps.* and local.* both existed for a long time.