I think we need a better term than monopoly, that separates it from what people usually mean which is 'the best product'. I literally cannot think of any sort of product or service with lower switching costs than internet search. Typing bing.com takes 0.8 seconds and costs $0. Hundreds of orders of magnitude easier than switching to a different railroad if only one goes through your town.
Google is a big ass company and enjoys outsized market share because people choose to use it. Everyone who buys a MacBook or Surface computer or smartphone does one thing immediately and that's to download Chrome. It's literally the first thing people voluntarily choose to do after powering on the device for the first time.
I'm not sure why we need government interference here which in all likelihood would change no customer behaviour but probably just add a few extra clicks in front of the Chrome downloading process.
When Alphabet begins doing something like banning Google Fiber customers from accessing bing.com, that will be interesting. But there honestly very minimal anti-competitive behaviour like that happening at the moment.
I read through some of the documents of the original complaint. This is mainly not about Google being the dominant search engine for consumers. It's more to do with their anti competitive behavior in the ad tech market. As a consumer, switching is easy. As a company that wants to advertise, switching is not easy if Google holds all the users. But also they've bought up all sides of the market, so what used to be competitive is now entirely controlled by one company. And, once they had that control, they started squeezing both sides, advertisers and sites that run advertising.
From a consumer perspective it's not about being able to switch search engine. Google is potentially putting a drag on entire economies, both money wise, and innovation wise. If every service you use has to spend extra because Google has an advertising monopoly then every service is passing a cost to you. If every service needs to do it the one way then there's no advancement, no new models, just "give Google money" forever.
Google doesn't have an advertising monopoly. Facebook all by itself does about half of Google's revenue in ads. Then you have twitter, amazon, snap, all kinds of stuff. Google would be lucky to have 40% of online ads, and then once you include all advertising they are way down, maybe 15-20% or something.
The judge found them to be a monopoly. They are strictly a monopoly. Unless the case gets overturned, they are exactly a monopoly.
LLMs are not going to meaningfully upset the balance any time soon. They are a service / product in search of a problem for most people. And if they do something useful for you, that’s great but HN users are not most people so the statement stands.
I agree with you on the premise of the complaint but I think the parent's point still holds, the reason why you don't want to switch to another ad company is because all the people are with Google but they're with Google because they like it.
The judgment makes a lot of hay over google paying to be the default search engine and how google has all this data on how valuable default is and how much people don't tend to switch from them. That's all true but I'm not sure what the proposed solution is. Make it illegal to pay to be the default?
There has to be a default and I think the outcome there is that Google is still the default because people prefer it. Google only pays to be the default because, if they don't, someone else will. Google would love to not have to pay Apple to be the default.
I also notice the lack of acknowledgement that people actively do switch away from default browsers regularly, from their OS defaults, to Chrome, which defaults to Google Search. Bing's market share is basically entirely because Edge is the default browser in windows with Bing as the default search engine. "Solving" this default problem will probably crater Bing if it involves forcing a user to make a choice on install (or something similar).
The problem with talks of "splitting up Google" is that Google is an ad company, not a browser company, not a mobile phone company, not a search company, not an email company, etc. All of those other products exist to serve the ad company, they are loss leaders. Splitting up google is bad for consumers who use gmail, chrome, android and search.
The only real split that I think is possible is Google Ads from Google Cloud.
As far as the idea of Google's position being a drag on the economy, I'd like to see a competitor with a better model that Google used their market advantage to intentionally kill.
> problem with talks of "splitting up Google" is that Google is an ad company
This is a little unimaginative. Google's ad business could be split horizontally or vertically to make space for competition. It's simplistic to say they are an ad business, they are performing several functions in the online ad business space.
Google is offering a free browser, while making a good browser costs money. They are subsidising that by their huge ad-business.
And by no surprise, their browser is the only major one that has no privacy protection features and last month decided to abandon the plan to deprecate cookies and tracking.
That browser is competing with someone like Opera (used to be a paid for product) and Mozilla in an unfair way, because Google is killing others by making it free and taking the loss.
There was exactly the same kind of lawsuit in France some years ago: free Google Maps insidiously put paid cartography companies without any special features out of business.
The antitrust legislation protects consumers, not businesses. If Linux provides for free what a proprietary software offered for money, it's a net win, even if that company goes out of business.
The problem with Chrome is not that it's free. The problem is that it develops more and more anti-customer traits, like making it hard to block ads, and uses its market share and compatibility issues to force these on customers.
The problem with google search is that Google integrates it with Chrome and Android, and buys the default search engine slots in other browsers, so that many customers are not even aware of other options. Sadly, Bing and DDG are not clearly superior, and, say, Kagi is paid. (Kagi is a good example of a paid product that's significantly better than the common free alternative.) Ironically the default search engine deals is how Firefox acquires most of its funding.
I don't see an easy way to find Google guilty of hurting customers through monopoly power in search or browsers: free products, a few alternatives, trivial cost of switching, no price gouging possible. Same with dumping: products start and remain free, most of Chrome is open-source and competitors reuse that same code, and customers are free to use these derivates, or adequate independent browsers and search engines.
It's a bit like coca-cola: alternatives abound, downsides are known, but people just seem to weirdly prefer it.
But Opera and Firefox and others are all free browsers as well. I agree with the parent commenter that its not exactly a monopoly in the traditional sense. It's not even the default browser on Mac or Windows.
> Opera and Firefox and others are all free browsers as well
And yet browser development costs money. If browsers cost money, you could make a better product and compete by selling it, but when an incumbent is giving theirs away for free?
How does your rationale explain Internet Explore/Edge and Safari which both have abundance of money and still can’t outcompete Chrome? This goes back to the original point about Google search being superior to Bing, and not just because it’s free.
Differing priorities. Edge is based on blink now anyway , so as a core browser engine they’re roughly the same. It’s the higher level UX that is differentiated.
Safari has largely caught up now for web standards and mostly only lags behind in experimental features that are largely driven by Google anyway. But Safari has better battery use and privacy.
Chrome is good because Google see it as their play at a web OS. That’s why they shove everything and the kitchen sink into it.
So it’s just different priorities and the resulting differentiators. I don’t think any major browser is actually significantly better anymore today.
The irony there is for a while, I considered Blink based Edge better than Chrome. The issue is they added what are basically a bunch of pre-installed extensions to Edge that I really hated and kept making the UX worse to me.
Honestly if there was a set of plugins that would sync my bookmarks toolbar links I'd have less issue switching browsers and trying others more.
I would love to use safari but for years now it will randomly just start refreshing pages. I have no idea why or even where to begin to debug it so on chrome I stay.
Removing manifest v2 might be the kick to try Firefox again but I’d still like to fix safari
> How does your rationale explain Internet Explore/Edge and Safari which both have abundance of money and still can’t outcompete Chrome?
How do I explain groups that attempt to compete and don't overthrow an incumbent? How much explanation does that need? That's literally the default, most attempts to overthrow the king fail.
And when a king does fall, it's never a guarantee who gets to stay in that throne. Even in actual political overthrows, there is no profession more dangerous than being the guy who led the revolution, and we can count in less than half a hand how many humans in history actually got the spot, got struck down and then made a legitimate democratic comeback afterwards.
More often than not, when a product is replaced, the growth of the replacer is a steady way upwards from 0. Not a meandering stable placement that suddenly shuffles around. I dunno what's the reasoning for that phenomena, I just chalk it up to people refuse change without perceived innovation. But point is, experience states that none of the browsers should be doing too much more than what they already do - the only likely path to victory is waiting for others to fuck, and not even Twitter, a shithole, could do that to themselves.
> How does your rationale explain Internet Explore/Edge and Safari which both have abundance of money and still can’t outcompete Chrome?
Google justified a huge investment in Blink by making effectively making it the application platform of their netbooks. They also justified such an investment because they are afraid of other companies owning the method they get their ads in front of people - Such as dramatically changing and increasing their investment in Android when they saw the first versions of iPhoneOS.
The ChromeBook is why Google has so many non-standardized API in Chrome (that people often refer to under the umbrella of "PWA".) No other browsers saw an urgent need to be able to e.g. scan for and talk to bluetooth devices from a webpage, and in fact the other browsers were somewhat appalled by the security implications.
Edge: Gave up, and now repackages Chromium. They spent over a decade as an incumbent with supposedly only a half dozen developers on the IE team, and that was because they were doing their own monopoly game (protecting the Windows platform from cross-platform applications). They couldn't overcome their lack of momentum, and quite frankly had an inability to attract experienced talent.
Safari: Does fine, but Apple never directly cares about market share - they want profit share. There's no profit maximization for free browsers; WebKit and Safari investment is about owning the best default browser on Apple platforms, and it has better system performance. It is certainly arguable that Safari is better than Chrome on Mac. And let's not forget part of how Chrome got such a quick start is that they are a fork of WebKit.
> last month decided to abandon the plan to deprecate cookies and tracking
Make no mistake, all that original plan was about was about applying pain to everybody else in the advertising world, while their replacement for cookies would have been satisfactory only at Google's scale. The whole thing was Google astroturfing, taking advantage of everyone's ignorance of how the Internet works to further entrench their advertising monopoly.
I don't know why they aborted the plan, but I suspect regulators had caught on that it wasn't altruism but Anti-competitiveness that motivated it.
Taking IBM as an example, they were one of the first in 2000 to make Linux business a reality, because in doing so, it makes their own Aix development costs lower, and eventually played so well that they own Red-Hat, without which, many key projects like GCC and GNOME would lose their main source of income.
The other UNIX vendors that went out of business thanks to Linux's free beer, or Microsoft and Apple's issues trying to sell licenses for their OSes on the server room, both now supporting Linux VMs as "The Year of Desktop Linux", are good examples that when it is free, everyone takes it no matter how it goes.
It's not hard to see that the browser market has suffered from the actions of Google, while the operating system market has not suffered from the actions of Linux.
If anything antitrust action against Google might give Microsoft another kick at the mobile can and they can take on the Linux-based android OS that Google distributes.
> And by no surprise, their browser is the only major one that has no privacy protection features and last month decided to abandon the plan to deprecate cookies and tracking.
Oh they didn't abandon the plans, they chose something worse. They are going to make it a user decision.
Advertising companies can still gain some value for people who have third party cookies enabled, applications which aren't well-maintained enough to remove a reliance on third-party cookies will fail (sometimes), and users will be pushed by things like work SaaS apps to re-enable third party cookies (as a global setting) to be able to use required services.
> Google is a big ass company and enjoys outsized market share because people choose to use it.
If this were true, Google could make the immediate and easy decision to increase their annual profits by $26 billion, by simply stopping to pay browser vendors to make Google the default search engine.
https://untested.sonnet.io/Defaults+Matter%2C+Don't+Assume+C...
Google's payment to Apple isn't advertisement. It's to prevent Apple from rolling their own search engine, or selling the default to the next highest bidder.
Apple has a business agreement to use Google search, and it seems it is a similar agreement to what they made to OpenAI - we as Apple will use your service by default, we pay you nothing, and we take a percentage of your monetization.
Google spent ungodly amounts of money to make sure that their search engine was the default in as many places as possible. People didn't "choose" to use it, they use the defaults.
And in some cases, like my Android phone, google is the only option for integrated searches. I cannot use another search engine without opening a browser then opening up the search engine of choice.
Monopoly may not be the right term, but anticompetitive is. They outspent every other search provider to make sure their product was used. They paid off apple to not develop a search engine and instead use theirs as a default. These are things in the court documents which caused the ruling to go against them.
I used DDG for a long time, it's crap, I switched back to Google, I suspect a lot of people would do the same. There isn't a lot of competition.
I tired Kagi, it's good too, but I didn't feel like the cost was justified when Google is free. I will probably try Kagi again someday though, I did like it and I think their mission is pretty cool.
Worth retrying now. I tried again recently and the results are so much better. Combine that with the domain block/raise/pin feature and the search engine is way ahead.
I'm 10x happier with Kagi than Google, and I was very skeptical (having followed Google's devs very closely as acquisition specialist for ~10+y). If you can afford Kagi, I'm curious to know why you don't stick with it. Or I'll assume that because the Google brand is just too strong, in which case we have a particular case of a monopoly.
You are literally agreeing with the parent commenter. It's anticompetitive but not a monopoly. The parent is also talking about Chrome, not Google Search.
I never said I disagreed with their entire comment, I was responding to the statements saying "switching search engines is easy and google is obviously the superior product that's why it's used instead of bing.com".
That should have been clear from my comment and if you look at other comments in this thread you'll see others interpreted the parent comment similarly.
I suggest you read others comments more charitably.
Just have to say this again even if everyone already knows it: If the US Government / EU hadn't threatened Microsoft they would have embedded their browser in Windows and tied it to the OS to the extent where normal people would only use their browser. I don't know if Google could exist in that alternate world, but I suspect Microsoft would have "deprived them of Oxygen" and they would be bought or crushed.
You probably can't stop Google from being the most popular search (or don't want to) but you should be able to stop Google from using the popularity of their product to crush alternative ad tech. Or crush some new tech we don't realize will be important.
Google is so critically important to the infrastructure of the internet itself that I really struggle to understand why a for profit entity with incentives that are not aligned to the public should be in charge of the most important search engine.
Because they created the search engine, and truthfully profit motives produce better products at lower costs than non-profits generally across the board. The alternative is having government creating software and it’s hard to point to any public US website/app where I’m amazed.
Another alternative could be that the government breaks up entities like Google and regulates the market in a way that segments it so that it is more beneficial to society by providing more safety and stability over the vital infrastructure that is the Internet as well as by creating healthier markets that provide consumers with access to cheaper, better goods from a variety of vendors aren't squeezed by the likes Google, Apple, and Amazon.
True, but the ramifications can be really harmful.
We have two generations now who have born thinking online services and software are supposed to be outrageously cheap or free, just because of companies who have used such services as loss leaders while operating off of their main business or bootstrapping off of VC funding.
We have small businesses who have chosen their revenue model based on what lets them work best within the simplistic financial model of mobile app stores. This is even more apparent now with the EU DMA, where Apple is pushing for a core technology fee that creates a huge financial risk for the freemium product tiering that customers now expect.
Google has the most popular search engine because creating such a thing defends their contextual advertising business. Being the most popular destination allows for higher rates than any incumbent could typically charge. Thus money doesn't exist to fund a competitive commercial search engine from scratch - it needs to being funded by another company as a loss leader (see: Bing) or as part of some other VC-backed product.
Google can be more easily understood as a bunch of businesses that funnel traffic into an ad marketplace. Search, Android, GMail, Maps, Chrome, everything is just about having enough traffic and enough behavioral data to make them the biggest ad seller ever. But they are also the broker and price-setter. That's how they make money, not on the quality of their services --which OK, they have to maintain to a competitive standard: easy to do when you are printing money.
So, the solution is relatively simple: break off their ad marketplace business. Break off their ad display business. Let the funnels fend for themselves.
Monopoly is when they use that market share to compete in _an entire different market_ without actually earning the "best" spot. Or using their dominance to prevent competition entirely from succeeding.
For example: Blocking all ad-tracking on its own browser, except ads purchased through its own ad network.
Remember, _you_ are not the customer of Google. You are the product. The ad companies are the customer. The market is not search: the market is ad sales.
The issue isn't having a monopoly, it's exploiting vertical integration in digital platforms.
- Hardware (Google Pixel, Chromecast, Chromebook)
- OS (Android, ChromeOS)
- Distribution (Google Play Store)
- Browser (Chrome)
- Search (Google)
- Products (YouTube, Drive, Gmail, ...)
- Business (GCP, Workspace)
The only other companies that are similar are Microsoft and Apple... both arguably less extensive.
The issue with this also isn't entirely clear until it's "exploited": Google (and the others) can force certain products on their customers due to controlling the "underlying" product. Ad targeting also becomes incredibly precise and valuable... everyone else has to go through the scraps while Google can "just" read your emails (Gmail), get your location (Hardware/OS), go through your files and photos (Drive) and use your search history (Google).
> I think we need a better term than monopoly, that separates it from what people usually mean which is 'the best product'.
I think the problem is that people don't know what the word means. We don't need to redefine it, people will either respect the importance of definitions of we'll just lose the next term for a monopoly as well.
For anyone following along, Google is a monopoly because they are the market leader in multiple overlapping industries and product lines. They choose to leverage those products together to fain a competitive advantage that no one competing with a single product can reasonably compete with.
It's a fine thesis, google the humble search engine, easy to compete against. Sure. That argument stands. But.. ... google is not a search engine. There's the google duopoly with facebook (ads, user data). There's the google duopoly with apple (phone operating system), there's the gmail system not exactly the same as search. There's google the web browser, duopoly(ish) with firefox. There's the youtube (duopoly with netflix? monopoly?). Probably a bunch of other various duopolies.
Then there's all these other giga-sized "side projects" which seem small proportional to those mega-businesses - google home type stuff, google nest, waze, consumer electronics etc. Arguably the google nest and assistant is duopolistic with amazon alexa.
Which is the state of tech, there's like 5 big companies that share some portion of pies of 20 major duopolies and 100 minor duopolies. And they're all like "SEE! SEE! We're NOT a monopoly". And there's two of them saying that, pointing each at the other one as evidence of their non-monopoly status. To me that's monopoly by another name, and that other name is duopoly, and as such it has many of the same problems as the monopoly. And duopolies all every damn place, not just tech - NYSE and NASDAQ stock markets. Sony and xbox (sorry nintendo). Boeing and Airbus. Visa and Mastercard. Pepsi and Coke. Intel and AMD, AMD and NVIDIA. Windows and Mac. How many "gentleman's agreements" must exist in those duopolies, too many methinks
And so if you ask me it would be quite natural to shatter all these companies according to their duopolistic silos, with the hope being that the duopolies exist in part from the synergy and deep pockets of the whole organization, and so by breaking apart the duopolistic strings to the rest of the org, perhaps there can be a third and fourth phone operating system, home consumer electronic, web browser, youtube, and so on. Because the point of capitalism is an efficient market to serve the public, not to serve the megacorp coffers
I think you're right. It hides a lot. We do need a better
understanding of the problems. But be careful what you wish
for. Google being a monopoly is not a cause, but a symptom. Do a
little 5Y analysis. Even rolling it back one step;
Q. Why is Google/Microsoft etc a monopoly?
A. Because they bought up all the competitors.
So, a deeper problem is the very ability to buy and sell companies.
Is it "the market"? Yet it is possible to create articles of a company
as non LLC/Ltd so that it it can never be bought or sold. People don't
do this because they don't intend to "build a great product/company",
they intend to cash-out and sell a great company. These subtle
incentive structures really matter.
Dig deeper and ask things like "why do people only build companies to
sell?" There's more upsetting answers behind that one too.
In the end, if you want to say BigTech is not to blame and could not
do anything else but agglomerate into problematically large blocs then
we have to concede the environment and incentives of modern business
are harmful to the public/national good. The place to intervene is
then at the level of those values.
>I think we need a better term than monopoly, that separates it from what people usually mean which is 'the best product'.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that literally nobody means that when they say 'monopoly' but I doubt it is common enough for that claim to be made in good faith.
In terms of the control they have over people's livelihoods when it comes to the play store and admob, and their incredible lack of care/customer service, yeah they're getting away with murder and totally a monopoly and acting like one.
Or all of their investment? Considering that very few end-users use Bing, ditching Google is like ditching the internet for much of their target audience, at least, most likely
Nope, you missed the point. Google isn't paying apple for advertisers, they are paying for distribution of eyeballs. You get the eyes, you get the ads.
You’re right that there is a cost to producing a product, but the question was about the switching cost to the customer. At very least there is a direct labour cost to move the ads from Google to something else, so it is obviously not 0 like the out-to-lunch comment claimed earlier. Although I think we all know the switching cost is going to be way higher than that as the aforementioned spend on building the product isn't fruitless.
The person was referring to the user of search. You might think it's clever to point out that the person paying the bills is the ads user, but that's not what they meant, it's clear that's not what they meant, and the concerns about payments to apple to be the default search engine are related to search users.
And you might think it is clever to have no idea what is going on around you, but we are clearly talking about the customer, which was specifically asked about earlier in the thread.
That's the discussion start. Sounding clever about "the actual customer" isn't clever, it's irrelevant. Advertisers just go where the eyeballs are, they are constantly using several different channels. There is a word for it because it's so common - omnichannel. There are companies like TradeDesk which exist to help customers manage because there are so many channels.
The relevant switching cost is the search user. It's 0.
It was in reply to the question that asked the switching costs to the customer. One would have to be completely out-to-lunch to think that the cost is 0.
> The relevant switching cost is the search user. It's 0.
The search user has no relevance. Did you miss the context of monopolies? Monopoly literally requires economic trade, by very definition. The search user is not engaging in economic trade. They are is what is being traded. You even said that yourself, so why play dumb now?
All the more reason for you to stick the topic that is already there. No need to double down on whatever out-to-lunch behaviour that came beforehand.
If you really want to talk about something else, why not start a new thread?
> One of the biggest complaints is the fees Google pay Apple.
Right, because that solidifies their position in the market. That spend provides a more compelling product (more eyeballs, as has been said), which is in no way realistically matched by would-be competition. Clearly monopolistic behaviour. But isn't about search users. Hell, the ruling you link to is literally about the impact on advertisers.
> The thread started by someone saying switching costs are zero.
And as discussion continued, it was asked what the transition costs are for advertisers. He who answered that question clearly claimed it was also zero. This "someone said something about search users earlier", while technically true, is unrelated to anything being talked about here.
In danielmarkbruce speak: Actually read the comments. Whatever it is that you missed is leaving you horribly confused.
Debate is for maladjusted high school students. All we have here is laughing at he who thought that there are no costs to transition from using Google's ad service to something else, and continuing to laugh at the doubling down on the out-to-lunchery that followed.
Google is a big ass company and enjoys outsized market share because people choose to use it. Everyone who buys a MacBook or Surface computer or smartphone does one thing immediately and that's to download Chrome. It's literally the first thing people voluntarily choose to do after powering on the device for the first time.
I'm not sure why we need government interference here which in all likelihood would change no customer behaviour but probably just add a few extra clicks in front of the Chrome downloading process.
When Alphabet begins doing something like banning Google Fiber customers from accessing bing.com, that will be interesting. But there honestly very minimal anti-competitive behaviour like that happening at the moment.