Comment by SpEd3Y
6 days ago
Arguably out of the big 4 (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon) Google gave the most back to humanity: Android, Chromium, Kubernetes, Google Office suite, the Go programming language, Tensor Flow, Alpha Fold (and Google DeepMind), donating to Linux, etc. All these are things everyone has access to precisely because Google is such a big player and can afford to lose money on innovation that fails. What did Microsoft and Apple gave us? Yet Google gets targeted while Microsoft, Apple and Amazon are left alone. Why is that?
Google isn’t “getting targeted”.
But to answer your question.
1. Microsoft gets left alone - Really? You may want to ask the closest adult near you about this.
2. Amazon - The government has looked into Amazon multiple times. It’s hard to see where Amazon does anything to illegally use its monopoly (they don’t use their shopping advantage to cross sell AWS in any way, or Vice versa). Amazon is genuinely not a bad monopoly (they have pushed down prices), but they are a terrible monopsony (basically destroying retailers that are not Chinese knockoffs), but monopsony protection laws are weak to non-existent world wide.
3. Apple - Apple is not a monopoly in nearly anything, which makes antitrust action against them very difficult. The EU has better laws around this, which has allowed them to force Apple to do the right thing in many cases (USB-C, opening up the App Store, although Apple complies in the worst ways possible, even though compliance has often been beneficial for them, like in the case of USB-C connectivity), but US laws are far too rigid to be able to really do much with them, as long as they are not monopolies.
> It’s hard to see where Amazon does anything to illegally use its monopoly
Amazon literally uses the marketplace data to determine which products to make Amazon Basic versions of.
I think the better argument of "Google isn't getting targeted" is that literally all of those companies have been sued in the past (and will be in the future and probably currently have cases being worked against them).
> Amazon literally uses the marketplace data to determine which products to make Amazon Basic versions of.
So does BestBuy, Kroger, WalMart, drug manufacturers, and literally ever single other industry where there are generics, private brands, and copycat products/services of all types.
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> Microsoft gets left alone - Really? You may want to ask the closest adult near you about this.
I've got some bad news for you: 2001 was 23 years ago. It's possible to not just be a legal adult (18) but also old enough to drink (21) and still not have been born yet when that was going down.
Thank you for making us all feel very old.
Slight aside on the original post:
* Microsoft did just fight off a huge government battle on Activision. I believe they lost a battle on Teams bundling. Last week the FTC announced they were looking into Azure.
* Apple, their store & mobile browser has been a topic of monopoly discussions for years.
* Amazon wasn't allowed to buy Roomba just this past year. They've had tons of inquires over the past decade.
Or run for Congress in the midterms if they are 25 by the time of the next election two years from now.
I look back and I honestly wonder if that lawsuit actually had the effect they intended.
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> hey don’t use their shopping advantage to cross sell AWS in any way, or Vice versa
Isn't AWS directly sponsoring Amazon by essentially letting them run the biggest online retailer for free, which other retailers can't? And Amazon in itself is a terrible monopoly because it has unfair access to all user purchase data, while also selling their own amazon products on their platform.
AWS charges Amazon to use their servers as it does any other big business. If your department can’t be profitable taking into account your AWS bill, questions will be asked.
It happened to something related to an internal game studio (???)
When I was there, our department’s use of the internal system for creating sandbox accounts (Isengard) was charged against our profit and loss.
If you are a big enough customer, you can get rates similar to what AWS charges Amazon.
> You may want to ask the closest adult near you about this.
This doesn't belong on this site. Find another way to say it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
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I'm not sure that misunderestimating the amount of time that's passed invalidates the point that it was pretty widely known before apparently being lost to the mists of time.
> they are a terrible monopsony (basically destroying retailers that are not Chinese knockoffs)
Wondering if you or someone could explain this. I looked up monopsonies but still confused.
By that logic, people should still be at the mercy of AT&T because Bell Labs gave so much back to humanity. Not to mention that multiple items on your list were bought by Google.
The world's biggest ad and surveillance company having control over the most widely used browser on the planet is a recipe for disaster. That's the only thing that matters in this discussion.
> By that logic, people should still be at the mercy of AT&T because Bell Labs gave so much back to humanity.
So your argument is that Bell Labs should have never happened since it's the result of a monopoly?
My argument is that Monopolies are trade offs. In a world without monopolies you have very little innovation in peace time. Monopolies are bad for consumers but the trade off is that they can afford to innovate and push the world forward. It's not as black and white as people like to think.
Getting rid of all monopolies and having a market in perfect competition will make Bell Labs impossible and all the innovation that came from there. A ballance is required. "There are no solutions only tradeoffs" - TS
Edit: Clarify my question about Bell Labs happening.
In case I wasn't clear enough, my argument is this:
> The world's biggest ad and surveillance company having control over the most widely used browser on the planet is a recipe for disaster. That's the only thing that matters in this discussion.
And no, I don't buy that innovation can only happen through monopolies with a savior complex. That absurd amount of money those monopolies acquired through questionable means? It's going to lawyers, lobbyists, investors, and C-suites. It's being used to stifle innovation and uphold the status quo. Without the breakup of AT&T, the internet as we know it might not have even existed.
You have made the argument that monopolies are trade-offs only to the extent of muddying the waters about the matter. You have not demonstrated that the innovation benefit of monopolies offsets opportunity cost of the monopoly. If you want to make that case, you need to evidence it. You have not evidenced your claim that there is less innovation in low-monopoly situations than in high-monopoly situations. That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
(I agree with your earlier sentiment that Google has a history of giving out more than other companies you listed.)
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> So your argument is that Bell Labs should have never happened? It was a bad thing for humanity?
Yes! next question please. ;) No in all seriousness. that's not what they said.
> My argument is that Monopolies are trade offs. In a world without monopolies you have very little innovation in peace time. Monopolies are bad for consumers but the trade off is that they can afford to innovate and push the world forward. It's not as black and white as people like to think.
I find this argument funny, as it states: "not as black and white as people think" to then paint a black and white argument... Yes monopolies are not always bad. But one can't be serious and not acknowledge that for the most part they stifle innovation.
Also, I would say some of humanities best inventions and innovations where before monopolies. But hey, that's just my "black and white" view on history ;)
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Why? What disaster? There can be no disaster when the product is free and there are many free alternatives with equal capability except for small conveniences. If you don't like Chrome because Google is being shady you can immediately seitch at zero cost. There is no disaster.
The disaster of global surveillance? Just because you don't pay with money doesn't mean the product is free. Expecting users beyond the HN crowd to have an informed opinion about the browser war is not realistic, especially given the substantial amount of dollars that Alphabet spent to market "Chrome == Internet". Which antitrust laws are supposed to prevent.
It tickled me how much power they have over the web. Do web standards even matter when Chromium's implementation is all that matters for 90% of users?
I never got over that one either: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/youtube-responds-to-delaye...
Yeah, that kind of sucks. I liked a sibling suggestion that splitting off YouTube would make more sense because at least it could be a self-sustaining product.
Thing is Google lost money for many years in YouTube. Nowadays I think it's profitable but it seems unfair to ask a company to take loses for a decade or more and then force to sell it when it's making profit. If we set that precedent nobody will take risks with the next YouTube like company that loses money initially.
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I know it's not comparable to Google, but Microsoft did significantly invest in open source, they also open sourced .NET, made TypeScript, VS Code
It also made Linux viable on desktop :P
WSL is my favourite Linux distro...well favourite is too strong. It's the one I hate the least.
Curious, do run into any network/IO performance issues? Last time I checked, networking is horrible, I mean `npm install ` would time out when it works on the host without issues, and this was a well known issue. Haven't touched WSL for a while because of this.
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Fair. These are good examples of open source that Microsoft did! I love all 3 of those.
The average joe can't do shit with open source. The average coder cannot sell the fruits of the progession, because of open source. And most individuals can't do anything with open source, since they lack funding. Who profit from open source? Big companies.
Don't you get it? The whole initiative is a trojan horse.
> Chromium
> What did Microsoft and Apple gave us
Chromium was in the wild for five years running on WebKit, and the Blink engine they use today is an evolution of that codebase, not a rewrite. Of course, Apple did not create WebKit from scratch, it was based on KHTML/KJS, but it was WebKit that Google Chrome was built on top of, not the previous project.
> What did Microsoft and Apple gave us?
Microsoft: VSCode, Typescript, ONNX/ONNXRuntime (TensorFlow is pretty much dead), Github, npm (they bought it but so did Google with Android - m$ still paying repo/packages hosting bill)
Also worth to mention Meta: Pytorch, LLama, React, React Native, Segment-Anything
"What have the Romans ever done for us?"
Monopolies are bad, and it's not because some players were not punished that others shouldn't be (they all should).
Maybe this sets a precedent, and they are all targeted.
Google didn’t “give back” any of those things to humanity. Those are all products that Google is selling to you in exchange for your privacy so that they can make a profit. Don’t mistake Google for some benevolent entity that deserves special treatment for being “good”.
If you want to go that path, then Apple also “gave” iPhones to humanity, as well as AirPods, iCloud, iTunes, and is a primary reason that mouse-based graphical interfaces exist. Microsoft “gave” humanity the largest home operating system, the dot net programming languages, Microsoft Office, Xbox, and more. Should we give them all a “get out of jail free” card for their good deeds?
How is Google selling Go or Kubernetes in exchange for your privacy?
Even if you assume the situations are comparable and equitable, which most commenters are focusing on, there is still a problem:
There is no reason to expect the DOJ to pursue antitrust suits against all potentially relevant companies at the same time for analogous reasons. These are complex, labor-intensive cases that frequently play off precedent established by other earlier cases. The idea that Google is being "targeted," by implication unfairly so, is out of line with how complex antitrust law can be, and the simple fact that such cases are typically serialized rather than prosecuted in bulk.
Yes, they provide those things. They also have an illegal monopoly on search, and use those free offerings to entrench their monopoly.
Microsoft has the most monopoly. Bundle azure with office365, bundle teams with office365, bundle windows with azure, pushing bing, edge, OneDrive on windows. Why no one investigate them? Because they stay under off consumer minds, and has good lobby
Microsoft famously lost an antitrust case two decades ago. They’re also currently under investigation for Azure: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft/ftc-to-probe...
> illegal monopoly on search Just by being better than bing
> Google gave the most back to humanity: Android, Chromium, Kubernetes, Google Office suite, the Go programming language, Tensor Flow, Alpha Fold (and Google DeepMind), donating to Linux, etc.
Most of them are tools for making money for Google. Some others are on similar level that others are contributing to open source and the world. I mean you get Microsoft Office for free too, and even with more services than Google. And, most of Googles contributions started out one or two decades ago, but are just now moving into more harmful directions. Which is a relevant point with Google. The company today, is not the same it was 10-15 years ago when they were still heavily gaining goodwill.
> Yet Google gets targeted while Microsoft, Apple and Amazon are left alone.
They are also getting targeted all the time. Microsoft had a long, deep anti-trust-process around two decades ago, which still sees some restriction imposed onto them. Apple and Amazon do see some targeting, but more outside the USA or by competitors, which means there is less demand for official influence on them, at the moment. Additionally, their specific influence is simply not as big and harmful as Google has it on some parts.
As if Google didn't take anything from us. Google makes money selling your attention and brainpower to the highest bidder. Hands down. They are the biggest entity in the attention economy and their real customers are advertisers.
Google has two billion lines of code that determine the course of your daily life. It processes incredibly sensitive information, like every interaction you have with another person in a digital medium, and has a rootkit on basically every phone that collects "anonymous usage data" that is processed in a completely opaque manner and is subject to information "requests" from illiberal and sometimes even totalitarian governments, and a few open source contributions aren't going to change that.
Open source at Google is driven by engineers and contributors, not by executives or strategy. It's a fig leaf over one of the world's largest, most valuable, and well-guarded code bases that absolutely will not be made open.
How is that different from any other big tech company? Show me a single large company that doesn't comply with NSLs.
There are good examples: https://www.eff.org/wp/who-has-your-back-2019
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None of them are good players for humanity. "Don't be evil" is long gone. They don't pay taxes, pollute, give means to manipulate billions of humans, concentrate wealth in a few hands. They all give with ulterior motives, never from the goodness of their heart.
While I don’t disagree with your argument, it is bad form to claim that companies like these don’t pay massive amounts of taxes, specifically payroll taxes. They do and it’s a huge amount.
I' m European. Apple got charged by the European Union for $14.4 billions of unpaid taxes between 2019 and 2021. Back of the mapkin they employ 22k people in EU (data Apple), average salary $80k (Apple), taxes at 30% per employee (my own understanding). Thats $550M. So their payroll taxes is about 15% of their tax package. If you have any contradictory data, I would love it, but your point is moot for 95% of the world outside California.
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>pollute Seriously? You can't blame Google for its emissions.
> What did Microsoft and Apple gave us?
“A computer on every desk and in every home”
Google Office suite isn't open source, is it?
It's not but it is free to use.
No it’s not. You have to give up your civil right to a jury trial via agreeing to a contract with Google. Just because something costs zero dollars doesn’t mean it’s free.
You also give up your identity; you cannot make a Google account from a VPN without providing a non-voip mobile number. Privacy has value too.
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https://workspace.google.com/pricing
"Monopoly" is a technical definition, not another way of saying "has a lot of money."
Google has been proved to be a monopoly precisely BECAUSE it gives away so much. By entrenching themselves with free products that outcompete just about anyone, they get access to a massive firehose of data that they then monetize with no competition in sight
Long story short: Giving away free stuff to cripple competition who don't have scale is anti-competitive (see: Microsoft IE case)
They "gave away" to make more profits. It's strategic.
Also: Google Project Zero.
Doing Apple's work for free.
Microsoft had significant antitrust penalties back in the early 2000s due to windows/IE.
The other 3 all have antitrust lawsuits currently going. Google’s is just the furthest along.
>What did Microsoft and Apple gave us?
Windows, Office (Excel), .NET / C#, Vs Code, Visual Studio, free GitHub and more?
I meant OSS or free products. Windows / Office / Visual Studio are for profit products? GitHub was free before Microsoft bought it, they just made the private repos free as well. But arguably GitHub was better before.
But I do agree C#, VS Code and TypeScript are nice Microsoft OSS/Free gifts to the world.
Online office is free, just like Google's.
Visual Studio has a free version.
Windows can be used for free (unactivated) if you're okay with the limitations.
> Android [..] everyone has access
One of the key issues. Google has not given me a phone OS. They have taken away my ability to chose a viable competitor, one that does not run on selling my data.
But you can buy a pine phone or a Purism Librem phone.
Yes, target them all.
Giving back doesn't mean you should be allowed to be a monopoly. Other companies you listed are or have been targeted by DOJ as well.
you might need to go outside if you think Kubernetes is "giving back to humanity"
"Your honor, I made a bunch of cool stuff, anti-trust should apply to me last!"
That's obviously not how it works
You're missing my point. In a perfect competition environment all profits go to 0. This is great for customers horrible for innovation. Innovation happens when there's enough capital to take huge risks and lose. Google had a ton of innovation attempts that flopped really hard and lost ton of money. Without the extra capital none of the attempts would have happened.
I'm not sure I agree with you on innovation. One of the largest drivers of innovation, historically, has been war and desperation. In those circumstances, you generally can't afford to lose. So the idea of innovation needing the comfort of a soft landing doesn't really seem to fit reality.
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> In a perfect competition environment all profits go to 0.
Competition drives prices down to the lowest sustainable point but not to zero. If one company drives prices below a sustainable (profitable) point that’s market failure because it starves the competition. It’s the thing Google did and the reason we have anti-trust law.
Google created a situation where they had no competition. Necessity being the mother of invention suggests that they innovate less in the absence of competition. Monopolies are poison to innovation.
I'm still missing it
We're not in a perfect competition environment ; profits are not to 0. There is an incentive for innovation.
Monopolies stifle innovation just the same. Imagine having an "amazon basics" product as your competitor. Or competing with something that embeds well in a closed off ecosystem like Apple's or Google's when 90% of your target demographic will value that integration.
Innovation breeds from a middle ground
The goldilocks is closer to 0 than not
leave-the-multibillion-dollar-company-alone.jpg, literally
microsoft gave us VSCode from the top of my head, I could probably list 50 other things
I find selling product for money more honorable than buying indulgences with open source.
I agree regards Google (just beware I'm a massive Google fanboy) but I think that Microsoft do deserve at least a little bit of credit.
Microsoft gave us (counting only OSS and things they effectively gave away):
1. Microsoft Basic, the first language of a large number of developers in the 35+ age group. This was effectively given away which is part of why it was so popular (it was a small, fixed-price fee instead of the per-unit licensing)
2. TypeScript
3. C# and the CLR
4. Visual Studio Code
5. Since 2010 they've made large contributions to Open Source.
Commercially they've also been strong competition to enterprise players like Oracle and IBM and of course have done a huge amount for gaming.
Apple are narcissists, they're all take take take. They do, however, provide very strong competition which pushes other players to improve.
I agree. Love C#, VS Code and TypeScript. Microsoft changed a bit lately. But there's a lot of history with Microsoft and the recent CoPilot ripping off OSS code and blocking C# support in VS Code are still mudding the waters.
"Leave the multibillion dollar company alone!"
* The Apple I arguably changed the course of computer history. [0] * The Laserwriter and the Mac inspired desktop publishing -- the Mac was the first computers with a font library.[1] * The iPod literally changed culture. [2] * The iTunes Store made piracy less desirable changed the music industry forever. It also led the way with digital video streaming -- while Netflix was still mailing out DVDs. [3]
And iPhone? Changed the world. [4] People have a hard time remembering pre-iPhone days. Samsung literally copied the iPhone. A judge in South Korea, in Samsung's home jurisdiction even ruled that Samsung copied iPhone. Android would still be a failed camera operating system if it were for iPhone leading the way.
* Kubernetes -- we lived just fine without it. * Chromium? Who cares. My life isn't any different with or without it. * Google Office? Aa cloud-based productivity suite? Nothing groundbreaking there, another competitor could have (and have) built the same thing. * Go programming language? Apple gave us Swift and Objective C -- languages that are used for software running on over a billion devices. Go is a niche language. If Go didn't exist, humanity wouldn't notice.
We can have a difference of opinion on the relative merit of these details, but the idea that Google gave the _most_ to humanity is absolute nonsense. Amazon for example, empowered many small sellers around the world -- giving them access to a logistics network that would be impossible for a small business to recreate. Instead of selling on Main Street, sellers now can sell to literally any street in the world. I'm not the biggest fan an Amazon, however that being said, their contribution to humanity is enormous, especially in logistics. It has also changed publishing forever in ways that provide a significant benefit to independent authors -- many of whom have made careers out of self-publishing because of Amazon.
I'm not a fan of Microsoft, but their contribution to humanity is undeniable. Excel is probably the most important piece of software ever written. I'm sure others can expand on Microsoft's contributions to humanity.
By the way, I'm not saying all of these companies are "good" or altruistic, I'm only rating them on "contribution to humanity."
[0] https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_16921... [1] https://multimediaman.blog/tag/apple-laserwriter/ [2] https://www.futureplatforms.com/blog/death-of-the-ipod-and-w... [3] https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/seven-ways-itunes... [4] https://www.vox.com/2017/6/26/15821652/iphone-apple-10-year-...
You're comparing Golang and Kubernetes to products that happen to have big market share. There are loads of spreadsheet apps and smartphones out there. They are replaceable. The iPhone definitely advanced the field, but it wasn't a sacrifice on Apple's part. They made boatloads of money from it. How much money did Google make from selling Golang and K8s? A large negative sum. Yet those techs have contributed enormously to economic efficiency.
All of these companies provide values, that's why they are so successful.
In particular (as opposed to Google), Apple is giving us products where the user isn't just an entity that you try to get as much data from as you can.
Without Apple we'd be stuck with tiny initiative such as GrapheneOS on mobile, limited to a small subset of apps and phones.
With AI, Apple is also being privacy conscious, i think they are doing interesting work with their private cloud compute setup.
But does it mean that Apple and Google should get a free pass? Hell no!