Comment by dataflow
6 days ago
> I'm very surprised by the number of people in this thread who don't seem to understand that monopolies are _very_ bad for consumers.
Bad for consumers, how? Financially? How does that translate to the current situation? The average "consumer" here is paying $0.00 for Google, Chrome, Gmail, Maps, Flights, Docs, Sheets, Chat, Meet, Books, Scholar, Shopping, YouTube, News, Groups, Voice... how are you going to argue that this "monopoly" (?) is bad for consumers? Do you imagine Microsoft or Apple would've created better search, email, news, etc., or that the mom & pop shop down the store would've done that?
I can think of so many other arguments you could use to suggest the current situation is bad, but monopolies are bad for consumers seems like a really tough argument to apply here.
Edit: You need to argue more than "the current situation is bad". Because that in itself does not imply "removing the 'monopoly' would necessarily lead to the better outcome in my imagination." Exhibit A is all the behemoths trying to compete against Google and still offering objectively worse products.
They are not paying $0. They are manipulated into believing they are paying $0. If people were offered the google suite for 'free','you just have to let us siphon 4 liters of blood from you every year', would people still claim the price was 'zero dollars'. Just because you extract the price from your users in a different denomination/method than ordinary dollars, doesn't mean it's 'free'. Precisely because they are not asking for dollars, indicates they are actually extracting value from their users. They are not giving, they are taking, and it is also clear they are taking more than they are giving, given their revenue and profits.
I could see a similar argument being made by plantation owners in the past "we are lodging these guests from africa for FREE", they don't even have to PAY to live in the houses we offer them! There is only the small detail of the activities they will have to do in OUR fields, which will kill them off in 10-15 years, but that is another matter which should not be confused".
"Deals" of the kind google and facebook offer are not to the consumer's advantage. Insisting on not having a facebook account is akin to choosing not to use the paved asphalt roads the society makes available to you. I could "choose" not to have a facebook account, but it would lock me out of effectively both my friends group and my family's daily communication.
> Just because you extract the price from your users in a different denomination/method than ordinary dollars, doesn't mean it's 'free'
That is, in fact, what it means. "Free" (in the transaction sense) means you didn't pay money for it. Just because Krispy Kreme hopes you buy some donuts while you're in the store doesn't make the loss leader donut not free. Just because Google gets something other than money from the deal doesn't mean that the product isn't free.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre
I know you specified in the transaction sense but it's almost never a one-off interaction. The ecosystem and repeated interactions shape things.
> I could see a similar argument being made by plantation owners in the past "we are lodging these guests from africa for FREE", they don't even have to PAY to live in the houses we offer them! There is only the small detail of the activities they will have to do in OUR fields, which will kill them off in 10-15 years, but that is another matter which should not be confused".
Seriously?
> "Deals" of the kind google and facebook offer are not to the consumer's advantage.
Again -- explain how "splitting up" the "monopoly" would realistically get you out of this situation? Pointing to something and saying it's bad doesn't imply your solution would solve the problem.
Not OP, but the idea is that when split from their massive parents, these products would be much more vulnerable to competition in a way they are very safe from it today. It's not an insurmountable task to create, say, a video-sharing site, or a chat program. Better versions of YouTube and MS Teams could be made with 20 developers in 18 months. However, those would be suicidal uses of capital today, since who's going to actually buy "CorpChat" when Microsoft bundles Teams, and Salesforce bundles Slack? Who's going to want to host their content on a new video sharing site if Google can easily make sure YouTube will always outrank it in Search, and could even ensure the videos don't play right in Chrome?
All products which lose money and are propped up by money firehoses from other parts of their dominant owners, are products that enjoy an unfair advantage in the market leaving less marketshare (often strikingly less) for anyone who might be better.
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This has the same energy as arguing that gathering your private data to give you more accurate ads does not hurt consumers, it's in fact helping them!
Google has been the one pushing for getting rid of the v2 manifest for browsers extensions, which just so happens to seriously nerf ad blockers. Because so many browsers are forks of Chromium v2 will disappear from a majority of browsers. Meanwhile if you try to use a non-Chrome browser like Firefox a lot of websites are buggy and outright don't work. Opening images in issues broke in GitHub for firefox a year ago and they still haven't fixed it.
You are being *very* naive if you think that Google having this sort of monopolistic power over the web does not hurt consumers.
> This has the same energy as arguing that gathering your private data to give you more accurate ads does not hurt consumers, it's in fact helping them!
> You are being very naive if you think that Google having this sort of monopolistic power over the web does not hurt consumers.
No, I think you're being incredibly naive if you think the outcome you imagine would necessarily come to fruition without Google being a "monopoly" (however you define it). It didn't happen for Microsoft (Chrome is an angel compared to Edge), and nobody has managed to create comparable solutions for so many other products Google offers that have nothing to do with the browser or search.
gmail works really badly in firefox, it doesn't show new emails unless you force a refresh while it seamlessly loads them in chrome. There is also a popup whenever you use gmail, youtube or google search telling you to switch to chrome because it's "safer and faster".
Google was also caught giving special treatment to google-related domains in chrome, and had to revert the advantages around cookies that they gave to themselves.
> Because so many browsers are forks of Chromium v2 will disappear from a majority of browsers.
It rather sounds like a great marketing opportunity for anyone trying to compete with Chrome, whether they keep the v2 or just implement ad-blocking themselves.
That's a counter argument that can be used against any monopoly that abuses their position to extract value from the market. It's just a market opportunity for somebody else to topple them!
But in reality it just doesn't work out that way, the negatives from abusing their monopoly can be overshadowed by the power of the monopoly itself, for example Google promoting Chrome every time you you gmail, google search, or youtube. Or making their services not work well in non-Chrome browsers.
Or in the case of microsoft, their monopolistic behavior is overshadowed by the fact that too much important software only works on Windows. It's a tale as old as tech.
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Accurate ads does in fact help consumers. Ads facilitate free stuff. Better ads = less ads. When I was a kid every TV show timeslot was like 25% ads. Do you not remember those days? Do you want to go back to that?
When I was a kid cable TV was the the ad-free alternative, where you paid a monthly sum to finance the channel instead of the channel being financed by advertisements.
Your implication that google services are free is untrue. You are paying with your privacy and data. And the price is such that, if I ever made a better mail service than gmail that openly asked to sell and privately use all your data, nobody would subscribe. You are paying by seeing ads. You are paying by being coerced into a certain ecosystem. You are paying by having one company chose what standards are the de facto web standards of tomorrow. And their main business is selling your data. You are paying by losing access to your data if a company feels like it. etc.
It's very similar to the situation in the nineties where Microsoft used their OS monopoly to push Internet Explorer "for free". You could make the same argument there "now consumers have free access to an internet browser, how is that bad?".
It was bad because it effectively ended innovation in the browser space for decades by pushing Netscape out of business (and discouraging others from entering that space).
Similarly, many consumers are unaware of alternative search engines, if Chrome pushes Google as the default. This kills innovation and puts more power in Google's hands as to what parts of the web get promoted.
Many a business owner can tell you that when Google changes their search ranking it can have an effect on the bottom line. This is also bad for consumers, as only bigger businesses which have the dough to pay for many Google ads get returned in a search.
> Do you imagine Microsoft or Apple would've created better search, email, news, etc., or that the mom & pop shop down the store would've done that?
Yes, enthusiastically yes. With the exception of maybe search, products like gmail, docs, and sheets are basic projects tossed out into the ecosystem for free to suck up all the oxygen for minimal dev cost. How is an upstart supposed to compete with a better mail/doc/spreadsheet app if the basic use case is covered for free by some loss leader funded from a different vertical?
Most of these classes of apps have been stagnant for decades.
The most obvious example is malvertising.
Chrome is pushing ManifestV3 with extreme prejudice and Youtube pushes ever more malvertising by the day. Why can Google do this?
Because there is no competition.
> The most obvious example is malvertising. Chrome is pushing ManifestV3 with extreme prejudice and Youtube pushes ever more malvertising by the day. Why can Google do this? Because there is no competition.
Malvertising? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising
Also, have you missed how terrible e.g. Edge is for user privacy? It's trying hard as heck to compete, and even playing dirty to get there. What happened to competition making things better?
I'm reading this in Firefox.
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>Malvertising?
Yes, malvertising. There is no such thing as non-malicious advertising in this day and age.
>Also, have you missed how terrible e.g. Edge is for user privacy?
I mean, Edge is Chrome.
The only saving grace is that it all goes to Microsoft instead of Google, which probably isn't as damaging because if you're using Edge you're probably using Windows already anyway.
you seems too afraid to lose your big tech salary
If you think I'm saying these out of some personal incentive you're sorely mistaken. I've hated so much of what the tech companies have been doing (very much including Google, like various competition things related to the Play Store). What I don't want to see happen are (a) the world getting worse as a result of a misguided belief that things would necessarily get better if X was done, and (b) regulators pursing a break-up and then losing and thus cementing the behemoths in place even more thus making it even harder to address other problems.