Comment by ryandrake
9 months ago
It's always struck me as very risky to have a business that is utterly dependent on the actions/policies of a separate business with whom you have no formal business relationship. This is just a risk that one acknowledges when they decide to go for it. If I ran an eBay store, I'm totally dependent on the whims of eBay, and my business plan should include the risk that they can do anything they want--up to and including kicking me out. Same if I had a business that ran off of Facebook.
Not taking sides here or saying anyone is right or wrong, but it's reality of operating on the Internet that small businesses probably just have to go into with both eyes open. Personally, I wouldn't want to be in the situation where my revenue could dramatically go up and down purely because Some Company X making some kind of routine algorithm change. I wouldn't be able to sleep.
This is a serious problem. Internet marketplaces are so big now that its really hard to even have a business without them at all.
I think that after a certain size, these marketplaces should be regulated to insure due process between the parties. That way the whims of the marketplace owner can't destroy thousands of prosperous businesses at the push of a button.
We have similar regulations for utilities. The power company can't kick you out on a whim. I think the same rationale applies here.
I've argued this before; these companies have taken on a utility role and need utility-type regulation, i.e. an obligation to provide service fairly and universally, an ombudsman, viable oversight, physical presence, a local call center to provide local employment and to give back to the community, etc.
This situation where 100% of the taxi and food delivery profit from every small town in the world gets siphoned off back to a single office in California just isn't viable. Even from a within-US perspective it isn't viable.
That's exactly the thinking that led to the Digital Markets Act in the EU. Those marketplaces are effective monopolies or oligopolies in their space, so access to them needs to be regulated to ensure a level playing field.
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> I think that after a certain size, these marketplaces should be regulated to insure due process between the parties.
The solution is not for them to be big and regulated, it's for them not to be so big.
The main thing that would help here is to inhibit vertical integration. For example, suppose people had a legal right to pricing information. Companies like Amazon and eBay would be encouraged to provide an API and have no right to stop anyone from scraping their site for anything it doesn't provide.
Now anyone can make a product search engine that will show you results from any site. You're not stuck with Amazon's gawdawful search. And since anyone can do this, it's easy to enter the market and none of them will have dominance. Conversely, if you want to start a new retailer, or sell your own products directly from your own site, you just submit your site for indexing to the popular product search engines and customers appear. But none of the search engines can destroy you because there are dozens of them and the biggest one is only 15% of the market.
We need more competition. The target of the rules should be to lower barriers to entry.
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Look we all know governments can do some crazy things and regulatory capture is awful, but you libertarian types really have some strange ideas about regulation.
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It would be probably better to just ban the «too big to fail» ones.
Regulations tend to only help them at the expense of smaller competitors.
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> It's always struck me as very risky to have a business that is utterly dependent on the actions/policies of a separate business with whom you have no formal business relationship.
Right, but the "separate business" here -- in a real-world analogy -- is akin to a commercialised offshoot of the department of transport.
They may not make the roads, but they decide what goes on all the maps, they control most of the road signs, they benefit from the traffic monitoring data, and if you were to open up a shop selling only advice on where to shop, they determine whether your shop can be seen behind their signs. They profit from how they manage this, and the only way to get better management is to pay for it. Everyone pays for it, so the advantage dissipates until you pay more for your signs.
There is little to no way to do business without these people, short of setting up a stall at the local covered market or farmer's market (Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Etsy) where you are beholden to another set of signage issues as well as the secondary knock-on effects of large-scale signage issues on the way to the market, over which you have even less influence.
Beyond that: it's literal word of mouth.
> Beyond that: it's literal word of mouth.
This is the key.
If you have enough enthusiastic, loyal, (rich and/or generous) devotees, then you can make a living from their donations (e.g. Liberapay) or subscriptions (e.g. Patreon). If you're doing something worthwhile or even just fun, you've probably got some.
But if you don't — and this going to sound harsh about a labour of love — then evidently other people aren't (yet!) willing to pay you to focus solely on it. Maybe there's enough to cover some or all of the costs, or even make a surplus (but not a living), and you can carry on as a hobby/part-time/side-project.
But for the thing to continue existing, someone (maybe you!) has to care about it enough to pay for it, and Google certainly doesn't. Google doesn't know anything about the unique service you provide; it only knows about the words on your website, and it can get those same words ten-a-penny from other websites.
If Google's killing your site now, that means Google's been keeping it on life support since… whatever your previous strategy was. They're selfish money-getters, they never promised you page views or ad revenue, and you're not useful to them any more.
Google can still kill your site even if you're a word of mouth, pateron, liberapay funded site...
That is by having scammers feed of the keywords of your product and selling shitty bullshit/scams siphoning the people that were told 'word of mouth' yet use browsers like chrome.
Patreon has a similar issue : they've banned some people for political reasons.
What if eBay were the only way to sell your goods on the internet? Because that's what the problem is with search - if Google doesn't weight your page high enough in results you're screwed. There's no other game in town.
eBay already acts like it still is the only place to sell goods on the internet. But I'd say eBay was actually better back when it was the only mainstream way/place to sell many goods on the internet.
eBay now sells promoted rankings. Funny when a vendor selling 1 product has it listed at several different prices, so you can save some money by finding the lowest priced one in their "other listings" that they don't promote.
eBay sells Google ads on its pages. (sad seller noises).
and eBay is one of the biggest ad buyers on Google.
And that's why I utilized eBay's api to create a better, curated version of their site for personal use. On average my filters end up removing like 90% of the listings for various reasons. All I see is the stuff that is actually worth considering now. It's great.
I find eBay's optimizations have made it somewhat toxic.
Once you get to a product page, any further navigation of the form "similar/related products" is sponsored listings only these days.
They've narrowed a catalog that might have 1,000 relevant products into a pinball bouncing you between the same 12 sponsored listings. It's easy to figure "this is all they've got" and move on.
The model probably works okay for rebadged Alibaba tat with no meaningful differentiation; the 200 sellers with the same widget can be forced to bid against each other for visibility.
But for the classic line of "eBay as the world's garage sale", the last thing you want is to deliberately narrow your visible inventory. Customers are here for variety and the obscure, and restricting the market to "that which we can get placement revenue from" eventually drains them away.
It is very risky but making your own website and having it be easily found should be the way the internet is supposed to work.
One shouldn't have to make a youtube channel, constantly tweet, and manage a facebook group when a single website should have sufficed.
I miss that old Internet. Nowadays it's all social shit.
Do you have your own website? Because that old internet still exists, it's just hidden behind all the commercialized shit. You can participate if you want to:
Make your own website. Link to others you like. Use old-school forums instead of modern social media. Rely on user-curated lists instead of algorithmic feeds. There is enough geuine content out there to last you a lifetime and plenty of people to interact with.
Almost any site on the internet is going to depend on Google. It's too big and too important. They have a monopoly, I'm amazed it hasn't been broken up yet.
The question here is how to break out of it. If you go to Bing for example you fall under Microsoft hood, which isn't really solving the problem.
"I wouldn't want to be in the situation where my revenue could dramatically go up and down purely because Some Company X making some kind of routine algorithm change. I wouldn't be able to sleep. "
If we compare to a small business on a highway and a company decides to move the highway so far away from them as to diminish their customer base effectively driving them out of business; this can't happen, since roads are governed as public resources. This is what the Internet needs.
Roads do in fact change, and traffic patterns and access costs change with them. Lots of small towns are intimately familiar with this, booming or busting because of a new major road nearby.
They change more slowly than internet traffic and are less globally impacting than a gigacorp's shuffling though, of course.
I agree with this, but then look at Uber: Without the cooperation and approval of Apple and Google via their respective developer programs and app stores, they wouldn't exist because you couldn't do notifications or location in webapps at the time.
There are myriad examples like this of downright giant startups that would not exist if they refused to proceed just because Apple can veto them. Instagram is probably the largest example. Look what happened to Tumblr.
Depends on the size of the business. Apple/Google can screw over small businesses all day long, but once they start getting bigger there is some assumed risk on A/G's part in future anti trust lawsuits if they screw over companies with enough wealth to hurt them in court.
These are inspite of.
The moving fear is being vetoed only works for well funded startups. A small independent startup would have to consider this before betting the farm on a product that might get smashed by the feeling of the day Google and Apple app moderators have.
But should those app stores even be the sole judge of whether or not those apps can exist?
Uber could sell their own devices to users and drivers. The app is _that_ useful for millions (billions?) of people, that people would buy it. People used to buy separate GPS devices, so it's not something out of the ordinary.
Spotify tried this, did not go well for them. Amazon and Meta learned the same many years ago
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These companies enjoy special legal protections that shield them from the liabilities of their actions which they say are absolutely required for them to exist.
Perhaps those protections should now be rescinded and they should be held liable for their conduct.
How many businesses are utterly dependent on AWS?
AWS has competition. I can run on 1000 other hosting providers and the users of the site won't be able to tell the difference.
I can rank on every search engine except Google and it would still kill my business. They own 90% of all the traffic.
Your analogy isn't valid.
As customers - which is different.