- Before reading the article, I assumed it was about LLMs. It looks like the regulators have perfectly timed their focus on Google’s business. Is Microsoft laughing at this point?by wslh - 1 week ago
- > At some point, they will give up and realize that the writing is on the wall for their current business model.by LegionMammal978 - 1 week ago
I'd sooner think hell would freeze over than Google would ever 'give up' on its business model of its own accord. I can hardly imagine half of its services being viable as separate businesses. Which might well be a boon for competitors (especially in adtech), but not for any of Google's current employees or stakeholders.
- > Neither case is finished. In the Epic Games case, Judge Donato is likely to come out with a proposed remedy shortly, which will basically force Google to allow other app stores to exist.by talldayo - 1 week ago
Android users are all glancing at each other like John Travolta in Pulp Fiction right now.
- Generally an excellent and accurate write up, nervous/excited to see where this goes.by soared - 1 week ago
A bit over the top with some of the things google has done in the programmatic space, but aligns with reality. I disagree with the display/programmatic space innovations being held back by google - there are an insane amount of small players who are doing different things and it’s easy to integrate them into the existing space. IE if I want to measure foot traffic, there are like 6 vendors who all do it slightly differently, 1 huge and 5 small companies, some super anti-privacy and some very pro privacy.
Its is called out in the article but not made extremely clear - the vertical integration google has is insane. They own the sell, intermediary, buy, measure, and operations software for a large percentage of the space. Imagine if NYSE owned Fidelity, SP500, and the SEC.
- This is a well written article. What resources are available for someone to understand more about the online ad tech space?by victor106 - 1 week ago
- Nothing will really change. Even if they are found to be a monopoly. The appeals process and the commensurate change in the world during those years will allow Google to work around any proposed remediation before it is enacted.by danjl - 1 week ago
- Now we have to get rid of "Log on with Google" for non-Google properties. Google has to get out of the authentication-provider business. That allows Google to cross-link usages or other services.by Animats - 1 week ago
Need to raise this issue with the California PUC, about Waymo wanting a Google login.
- > John Maynard Keynes had penned a private letter to Franklin Delano Roosevelt about business leaders. He wrote, “You could do anything you liked with them if you would treat them (even the big ones), not as wolves or tigers, but as domestic animals by nature, even though they have been badly brought up and not trained as you would wish.” FDR tamed big business. Anti-monopolists today are nowhere near that level of accomplishment broadly speaking, as we don’t have a political consensus. But in a few areas, we can start to see the outlines of what a world run with some element of the public interest in mind might look like.by walterbell - 1 week ago
How is "public interest" defined after Citizens United, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC?
- I think reddit recently signing an exclusive deal with google for crawling its website is quite anticompetitive and will be a surprisingly big draw to google.by daedrdev - 1 week ago
- In the end we will all lose, in my opinion. Google will start to charge more for access to YouTube, along with increasing ads. They will begin to pay creators less due to the increased cost in serving the ads. We will see a decline in the quality and quantity of high production video education.by animal_spirits - 1 week ago
- > video sharing, mapping, mobile phones, and the other Google infrastructure. These are all areas ripe for innovation and disruption,by animal_spirits - 1 week ago
This is incredibly wrong. We've had mountains of innovation in all of these areas under Google's leadership and from competitors like Apple, Mapbox, Microsoft, AWS, etc. When Google ends up costing more to use, competitors will _not_ need to innovate to attract customers to their platforms, and the technology will stagnate.
- > However, it does mean that Google will have to give up on its mission, “to organize the world's information.” Though that slogan looks benign, it is in fact anything but. Being the organizer of the world’s information is far far too much power for anyone to have. It’s time to give up on it.by winddude - 1 week ago
Giving up on that is stupid, and would set society back. We need more companies and organisations doing it. AI has brought a few new startups into the search space, but yes, splitting the companies up may make more opportunities for them.
That said, if you can raise the capital you can get into search, because of opportunities presented by AI, and google has been sacrificing quality for optimising ad revenue. Email has also seen some startups making big leaps by adopting AI. I wouldn't touch video sharing platforms, or ad networks.
- It does seem like their cash cow is facing a bit of an existential risk. Things like kagi and perplexity work just as well as search if not better.by Havoc - 1 week ago
And if google search collapses then the rest of the empire won’t be far behind
- Google is so unusable right now that I couldn't care less. I just started paying for Kagi and it's excellent. I forgot how it's possible for a search engine to just find the information I want without blasting my eyes with corporate slop.by joaovitorbf - 1 week ago
- People are addicted to their phones.by zombiwoof - 1 week ago
- The term "enshittification" is used a lot these days. But there is this pattern where human organizations -- be it companies, codebases, countries and many other examples -- undergo this transformation from simple, humble and efficient systems to complex, arrogant and inefficient ones.by notepad0x90 - 1 week ago
I wouldn't dare to speculate on the cause of this devolution. There are theories like becoming publicly traded for companies, and subsequently execs chasing short term profits to make shareholders happy, or elected officials chasing after votes for the next immediate election cycle. But it would be nice if there was some sort of a large scale in-depth study on the topic and research into solutions for it.
Honestly, the more I think about so many issues, the more I feel like there needs to be a dedicated field into the study of incentives and how they shape the systems and organizations humans build and maintain. Everything from google search being terrible to climate change feels like it all has a shared root cause of misaligned or defective incentives.
Perhaps existing fields like game theory, economics or systems design should cover this topic?
Either way, our systems design methodology is faulty and this fault is nearly universal and systemic, affecting all humans in almost every area of our lives.
One theory I have (full disclosure: subjects I am not too familiar with) is economics and game theory, specifically the "Nash equilibrium" game theory, which as I understand boils down to "everyone should participate in the system, only taking into account their own success and profit, and nothing more than that" might be at fault. Or maybe, it simply codified the innate faulty organizational instinct we have?
- interesting parallels are drawn for this opinion, but i would be with it if it was just limited to web search like most people started clamoring after genAI.by rldjbpin - 1 week ago
some comparisons with past american monopolies were made, but there is a key difference between those and google - the direct impact to people across the world. to me it came across slightly myopic to look only inside one large economy, for things that impact everyone's lives but not directly.
we already have large portions of the world not impacted by google - just look at china. but even there android in its different form has been vital. it is not just a matter of "we got a disruptive new tool to replace the current choice". google is able to bankroll key internet services that could stand by itself even when broken up - android, search (people still use it to open websites they literally spell out), youtube, gmail to name the key few.
change is inevitable but i don't see it happening the way it is envisaged here. pretty much all the "disrupters" are backed the same way that made today's big tech. which goes beyond just google. the now-subsiding ai boom has shown that big tech is still swaying investors for immaterial promises.
- Post Google world means android without devlopment and money as well I guess.by methuselah_in - 1 week ago