[ralph84]

It’s all so ridiculous. Microsoft got nailed for talking about beating the competition. They’re trying to nail Google for training employees to not talk about beating the competition. What is competition supposed to be if it’s not beating the competition.

Just have extremely progressive taxation on companies as they get larger and stop approving megamergers if you believe large companies are harmful.

[AlbertCory]

They are not being prosecuted for "training employees to not talk about beating the competition." They're being prosecuted for restrictive deals on the search engine default, which prevents competition from gaining the data they need to compete. Udi Manber himself said that's what they're for.

The training bit: personally I think it's a mistake for the government to dwell on that too much. It would be nice if they had a smoking gun email about "cutting off their oxygen," but they don't, so move on. Explaining why you don't have the smoking gun is something you should do only in passing.

[edgyquant]

I don’t think “progressive tax on companies as they get larger,” would be at all helpful. For one thing companies can skirt this with subsidiaries but also there are capital intensive industries where such a system could punish the average company. I agree they shouldn’t allow mergers, this should be very rare and there should have to be a very good case for it, but also just breaking up companies should be a lot more normal.

I also agree there has to be some kind of answer based on company profit, but I think that taxation is not the best answer. It would be much better if there was a way to funnel that money into R&D at other companies and even industries; but admittedly I have no idea how such a system would work or if it’s even possible. Just sounds good in my head.

[trimistermota]

Taxes funds public R&D which it's used by all companies

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> What is competition supposed to be if it’s not beating the competition.

It's supposed to be fair. Microsoft didn't get nailed because they were winning, they got nailed because they were winning by abusing one monopoly to try and create another.

[lazide]

Bwahaha. Since when is business, or hell life in general fair?

Maybe ‘not doing illegal things’ should be the bar? At least they’re written down in advance (hopefully) instead of retroactively defined by folks who didn’t win?

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> Maybe ‘not doing illegal things’ should be the bar? At least they’re written down in advance (hopefully) instead of retroactively defined by folks who didn’t win?

...yes, allow me to introduce you too this little thing called the Sherman Antitrust Act, which has been the law for ~130 years.

[lazide]

Oh that I had no issues with, as you see in my comment history. That’s not what the parent poster I was responding to was implying though.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

You replied to me; what did you think I was implying?

[lazide]

That you first led with if it was fair or not, then tacked on the law as a penalty for it not being fair (seemingly in your opinion, as you provided no particular specifics).

Which is what you wrote.

As it’s hard to find a company that doesn’t at least attempt tactics like this named in the complaint (or much worse), it seemed to leave the implication clear.

They deserved to have the law applied because you felt it was unfair.

[aergoibqer]

>Bwahaha. Since when is business, or hell life in general fair?

Fatalism sounds wise but is not. Life is fairer than it used to be and can be fairer than it is now. We cannot end injustice, but we can end this injustice.

Besides, the US alleges crimes.

[lazide]

It isn’t fatalism, it’s ownership. Fatalism would be saying ‘nothing can ever be fair’. Which isn’t true.

If one assumes life is or should be fair, then when it is not one is a victim of others and has little means to resolve it directly. After all, that should never have even been possible!

If one assumes life is not fair, then one has awareness of risks and choices they can make (and a realistic view of choices they don’t have).

If one wants to make a just and fair society, recognizing it is an abstraction on a fundamentally unfair foundation is important. Or you’ll just end up with a delusion plastered on top of another delusion.

Allegations are also easy. A verdict is a different matter. We’ll see what happens.

And frankly, if life was actually fair - we wouldn’t need a justice system at all, would we?

[AnimalMuppet]

Well, yeah, that was exactly it. It's not that Microsoft was unfair, it was that Microsoft was unfair in ways that were illegal under the current law.

[AlbertCory]

What is being " retroactively defined"? And how much about antitrust law do you know?

[lazide]

‘Fair’ and ‘reasonable’ in this case.

As to the second question, feel free to browse my comment history.

[AlbertCory]

on comment history: I looked at the first four pages.

the only really relevant ones I saw were about attorney-client privilege, where you were 100% right. I saw nothing much about antitrust.

"fair" and "reasonable" definitions probably suffer because there aren't that many antitrust cases tried, period.

[lazide]

Apologies, been too busy posting apparently. I did read the actual Sherman act (and provided links) recently, and experience wise I’ve been in management and senior leadership at several FAANGs in the past where this particular situation was a real and present ongoing concern. Including the one being targeted in this case.

So I’ve had all the training, worked with some talented attorneys, and been directly involved in related decisions - though not the ones being called into question here.

[AlbertCory]

ok. those are two words that are deliberately left up to the judge & jury to decide. Trying to define them would just end up being circular.

[lazide]

So one could only know after it had been ruled on?

Which is by definition after it had occurred. Which is my point on retroactive.

[tennisflyi]

> Since when is business, or hell life in general fair?

100% it's not. It could start with you though.

[lazide]

I’ll let the DOJ know ASAP, with any luck I’ll still be able to file! Or that is complete nonsense in this case.

[tennisflyi]

Great. Keep me updated!

[flangola7]

> Bwahaha. Since when is business, or hell life in general fair?

The entire purpose and objective of the law is to make society just and fair. It is far from perfect, but it is well superior to the selfish mayhem you speak of.

Laws are also not retroactive.

[lazide]

Ho man. Have you ever actually sat in a court room before?

Or been involved in cases?

This is so far from the actual application of the law it’s hilarious.

The purpose of the law is keeping problem cases under control, providing a degree of predictability necessary for social stability, and mediating disputes in a way they don’t escalate into socially disruptive violence.

‘Keeping the peace’.

All the rest is window dressing/PR.

The reason why Google is getting this case thrown at it is not because what it was doing was unfair - but because they were too damn good at doing it.

If they went bankrupt trying or it didn’t work, no one would care. Same if they were only middling successful (but didn’t get so obscenely rich and high profile off it). There are hundreds of examples of this right now in a number of industries, from meat packing to RAM, that will continue to be ignored.

And because they’ve been so good at it, it’s stirring up a lot of anger and resentment that will cause problems. So they need to be “brought back under control”. Just like Microsoft was back in the day.

We’ll see what happens.

[wayfinder]

The government isn’t pursuing this because of the language. It’s because they think Google legitimately did anti-competitive things.

They took down Al Capone not because of the tax evasion but rather because he was a crime lord. Tax evasion was merely the means to the end.

[hot_gril]

About the training: Suppose GCP or Gmail accidentally steps on the toes of a user who happens to compete with Google in some other way, and during some anti-competition lawsuit/hearing, they dig up a message between employees dissing that particular competitor. Maybe things like "let's make X feature better than Y company" are fine, but it can easily slide to less innocent-looking things.

[tennisflyi]

> What is competition supposed to be if it’s not beating the competition.

Wrong question. How about “how can we make our product/service better”? Not, let’s just push the other company over.

[SpicyLemonZest]

It doesn’t really seem like there’s any evidence for a story where Google went out of their way to destroy any competing search engines. The worst thing the article references is an engineer who argued that search engine quality is directly proportional to search volume, which if true would imply that making Google better necessarily implies other search engines will be worse.

[BytesAndGears]

I think paying Apple and Mozilla to be the default search engine, as well as within Chrome, counts as intentionally crippling other search engines.

If Apple made them default because they’re the best, then that’s fine. But spending a ton of money to keep themselves as the default, when they already have the vast majority of market power, seems like an artificial barrier to competition.

Unless another search engine is so much better that Apple is willing to forfeit billions of dollars of pure profit, then nobody else has a chance to be the default.

[fallingknife]

That makes a strange legal argument, though. You can't say that Apple putting the default up for bid is anti-competitive behavior by Google. So would you say that Google can't bid in the auction because that in itself is anti-competitive? That also seems like a tough legal argument to make (though I am not an expert on this) because it means that basically everybody is allowed to be in the auction except for Google.

You could definitely say it was anti-competitive if Google was paying more than they earned from this search traffic. But I seriously doubt they are doing that.

[ummonk]

They aren’t specifically trying to kill other search engines though. They’re just trying to acquire more users, by being the default service.

[karpierz]

Apple made them the default because they are the best at monetization of large volumes of search queries from iOS devices. If another company was better at it, they'd put in a higher bid and rake in the profits.

[Regnore]

> If another company was better at it, they'd put in a higher bid and rake in the profits.

The point is that there is no world in which any other company can outpay Google, regardless of whether or not they are better at search.

[pgeorgi]

I'm not sure if "outpay Google" is necessary for that. Apple and Google are competitors, in some aspects this seemed almost personal (Steve Jobs mentioned "thermonuclear war", see https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2015/01/31/how-apple...)

Another search engine that is 90% there and can offer only 10% of payments might have been good enough (at least in a certain time frame) if it gave Apple an opportunity to snub Google.

[AlbertCory]

Wrong. The assertion is, they got the volume by buying it, not by becoming better.