Slashdot Mirror
Obama Anti-Trust Chief on Google the Monopoly Threat
CWmike writes "The blogosphere regularly excoriates Microsoft for being a monopoly, but Google may be in the cross-hairs of the nation's next anti-trust chief for monopolistic behavior, writes Preston Gralla. Last June, Christine A. Varney, President Obama's nominee to be the next antitrust chief, warned that Google already had a monopoly in online advertising. 'For me, Microsoft is so last century. They are not the problem,' Varney said at a June 19 panel discussion sponsored by the American Antitrust Institute, according to a Bloomberg report. The US economy will 'continually see a problem — potentially with Google' because it already 'has acquired a monopoly in Internet online advertising.' Varney has yet to be confirmed as antitrust chief, and she said all this before she was nominated. Still, it spells potentially bad news for Google. It may be time for the company to start adding to its legal staff."
First post!
Last I checked, Google isn't forcing vendors into signing Google-only contracts to bundle only Google software with new computers.
Well well...I guess Democrats take bribe money from MS as well.
Google's ability to combine search data from maps, Google Earth, Web Search, Google News Alerts, etc, and mine it is a much bigger problem.
Only if it is abused, no?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Basically, you have some gung-ho lefty making a bunch of proclamations, admitting a bias against another company, and she's going to be in a position of power in government? Oh wait, I forgot, this is change we can believe in, just another form of chicago cronyism... or really, detroit, judging by the way this administration is driving the country into the ground.
This is my sig.
Hey, Verne, know what I mean.
/fisheye-lens
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
so what are google's anti-competitive practices?
Christine seems to think that Google is a monopoly in the world of online advertising -- that much, I find no fault with. However, thinking that they need antitrust actions seems just foolish to me. Sure, they may be a monopoly, but they have yet to actually abuse this monopoly. Since the purpose of antitrust laws is to avert the abuse of monopolies, surely it would be a far better use of the court's time to go after those who continue to abuse their monopolies, such as Microsoft and cable and phone companies?
Azh nazg durbataluk, azh nazg gimbatul, Azh nazg thrakataluk agh burzum ishi krimpatul! This sig blocked by Slashdot.
MS proved you can buy your way out of these problems. Given Google's wealth, I doubt she'll pass muster with her nomination process.
This is democratic politics in a nutshell
a. regulate in the public interest
b. if a company is profitable than it is criminal, go to step a.
c. if a company is unprofitable, nationalize it, and stuff it with your buddies, return to step a.
This is my sig.
There almost no barrier to entry to advertising on the internet - the costs are negligible. And I've yet to hear how Google is using its leverage to stifle competition and/or gouge its customers. Maybe it IS, but I've yet to hear anything about it...
I thought that having a monopoly was legal, but that protecting it via illegal means was not. What, exactly, has Google done to illegally protect the alleged monopoly?
Also, it's hard to see how they create a barrier to entry in the market. Any idiot can set up an online advertising agency and start making deals (and many idiots have done precisely that).
Forgive me, but I completely fail to see how Google could be considered a monopoly. They offer services that are supported by their advertising revenue.
They collect information about you, yes - we all know this may be evil.
But anti-competitive? AFAIK, their only source of revenue is their advertising business. Are they under-selling ad pricing? My gut feeling is that their services exposure is such that people would probably pay some premium to advertise with Google versus other sites.
Unless my understanding is completely off-base, it almost sounds like you can become a monopoly to this person simply by being better at what you do.
For me, Microsoft is so last century. They are not the problem.
I don't know about you, but my father uses Windows. My mother uses Windows, except for an old machine I've set up for her music library on Linux. My brother uses Windows. His friends all use Windows. Most of my friends use Windows, except the few who have Macs -- and those run Windows in a VM.
Even I use Windows -- VM or dual boot.
I've finally reached a point in my life where I don't have to touch Windows more than once a week, unless I want to play a game. And yet, I still can't design web apps the way I want -- I still have to either force everyone to download Firefox, or spend around 10% extra development time supporting Internet Explorer. (And I can't develop IE-only, or I don't have Firebug.)
If you don't see Microsoft as a problem, you aren't looking. If you see them as "so last century", it's because you let them get away with it last century!
I'm not going to defend Google, but that statement is dangerous thinking. Just because everyone forgot about the problem doesn't mean it's gone.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If by "least of it" you mean "completely non-existent" than I agree with your conclusion, although your premise is a load of crap.
Google's ability to combine search data from maps, Google Earth, Web Search, Google News Alerts, etc, and mine it is a much bigger problem.
Why? Because they've built a better mousetrap, and now people want to use it?
Google isn't even close to being a monopoly. I'm not a slobbering fanboy of Google the way some other people are, but I also fail to see a business boogeyman behind every corner as some people do. Some people's concept of "anti-trust" would be more correctly called "anti-success"... this notion that a company that's been very successful must have cheated or done something nefarious to get that way.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
... abusing your monopoly is. I read the article hoping to see some indication of how Google is keeping other competitors down or acting against the public good; didn't find it. My conclusion: not yet an issue.
...it's when companies start abusing their monopoly that watchdogs should (potentially) step in.
Microsoft has had a few clear cases where it abused its monopoly. Google? I am not so sure, though of course any monopoly bears keeping a close eye on.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
what happens to all the "Google Code"?
Yours In Socialism,
Kilgore Trout
Assuming they're a monopoly for online search advertising, in what way are they either abusive, or even able to abuse their monopoly status? With Microsoft, the monopoly is/was harmful to the marketplace of ideas because they wrestled to own and exploit shared standards, used bundling agreements and legal manipulation to hinder competition, and so on.
Even assuming Google could be considered a relative monopoly, if they were to use most of the problematic parts of that monopoly status, another company could just swoop in to replace them. Their power lies in their perceived results and goodwill with their large user base, rather than just being the only choice for most people.
I'm not normally a libertarian philosopher, but it seems to me this is one of the truest cases where the marketplace really can sort things out almost completely.
Ryan Fenton
Google for some reason reminds me of an Octopus, due to all the stuff they're getting involved in. It's enough to concern me, but so far not enough to convince me that any kind of intervention is required. I do, however, wish we'd stop thinking they do no evil simply because it's their motto.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
It's been pretty obvious to the more slug-like of us (intelligence wise) that Google is the new Microsoft. Microsoft was the new IBM. IBM was the new Standard Oil.
Nothing changes is business or human nature.
By the way, I came up with a new Pithy Saying(TM) today. Feel free to call it Turgid's Law:
Sorry, I forgot what it was.
Stick Men
Its hard to not sound like a fan boy of google, but I'm currently not understanding why google would be considered as a monopoly, but if I was to play devil's advocate here I might argue the following:
I don't agree with these, but some could argue (if you really didn't like google anyway).
Pete/Petri "damn, my chainsaw is clogged with 1's and 0's again." --clyde
That word made me chuckle and remember a line from Family Guy. For your enjoyment:
Brian Griffin: Ah... Sorry Doc. I don't usually let Peter talk me into this kinda stuff.
Lady: Wait a minute... Brian you have a pre-existing relationship with this degenerate?
Peter Griffin: A degenerate am I? Well you, are a vestiggio! See? I can make up words too sister!
Webcrawler can once again rise to power and rule the intarwebs!
Agreed. Sure Google is dominating the online advertising market, but maybe it's largely because their ads are not overtly obtrusive and are often relevant. I consciously refuse to click on ads I find annoying, but I've actually used Google ads to find obscure products that I am looking to buy.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
I associate a monopoly with crappy service/no communication with customers, overpriced products and a lack of innovation or change. So I'm finding Google's version of a monopoly quite refreshing.
2009, already almost a decade of blatant monopoly abuse by Microsoft in the new century, and she comes out with a statement like this?
Wow, words can't describe what wonders she can perform as antitrust chief. Yes She Can.
Wait a minute, are you saying that anti-trust lawyers that might, at some point in the future, end up working for the FTC should refuse to express an opinion of any kind about any company that may or may not be the subject of future regulatory action in a job they do not yet have and may never have? (Yes, that is a long sentence.)
You know, this kind of attitude might be something of a problem when it comes to Supreme Court Justices. Since we kind of expect Justices to have actually written legal papers expressing opinions of various kinds (as lawyers, and maybe judges), written opinions, and represented clients, at some point before they join the Supreme Court.
People are allowed to have, (and express in a public forum), opinions before they are government employees. Certainly those views can be brought up and considered during confirmation hearings, but having and expressing an opinion does not disqualify somebody from appointment to an executive branch position.
Indeed, since they are appointed positions, all but the most extreme people completely unfit for office are supposed to be confirmed, no matter which side of the political spectrum they are on.
SirWired
Having a monopoly (in legal terms) is not, as many have pointed out, illegal, but it does constrain your behavior somewhat, and it does mean that the Justice Dept is probably going to want to keep an eye on you. I don't see anything in TFA suggesting that Google is going to be prosecuted--merely that they're going to be scrutinized, and frankly I think that's a good thing. I'm more worried about the suggestion that Microsoft is no longer a problem.
Intel and Cisco have both also been judged to have monopolies in their respective fields, but unlike Microsoft, they've (mostly) played by the rules, and haven't ended up in serious trouble. Doesn't mean the Justice Dept won't continue to keep an eye on them, though. I have no problem with Google being lumped in with Intel and Cisco. On the other hand, I don't want them lumped in with Microsoft until someone finds evidence of similar anti-competitive behavior. On the gripping hand, if evidence of anti-competitive behavior is found, I want them prosecuted, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for that day.
Really?
Google dominates some spaces, that is certain. But what makes them different from say MS, or many other companies is that they don't leverage one product to "help" another. For instance Google Chat/Video- open standards. No Google services require Chrome, or are dumbed down like MS often does with competing browsers. Heck even most of Google's apps are multi-platform. Now I'm not all pro-Google, I think they are big enough they should be watched, carefully, but so far I think they are doing a good job of not illigal leveraging one biz segment to prop up another.
Microsoft was anti-trust defense for losers. If the original judge was not such a completely bone-headed moron, MS would have lost, and lost badly. Gates made a complete fool of himself on tape, Boises (sp?) walked all over their lawyers, and the judge seemed to enjoy them twisting in the wind. The only thing that saved them was a change in administrations.
IBM, when accused of anti-trust, they built an in-house team larger than most law firms, and then dragged out the case so long, the judge in charge of the proceedings literally died before the case could be concluded.
SirWired
There is a whole galaxy of online ad networks. When you create ads you get this giant spreadsheet of the different vendors who will be serving up the ads and what the tech specs of the ads must be. Then you have to either make one ad that fits in the least common denominator of specs or n ads that meet the specs of each one.
If you've ever had to unroll the 'ninja scroll' and do 2 weeks of production on these things, the idea that any one ad network holds a monopoly becomes high comedy.
perhap's Ubama should take some of google code and advertising revenue and give them to yahoo and that other search engine whatever it's called because it's not fair that google win's, some one call the whaambulance.
that's what the dumb fuck's morgadge bailout amounts to.
I will have a sig when the market demands it.
It was a little tough to glean from TFA (let alone TFS), but what she actually seems to be saying is that Google is positioning itself to acquire the same type of monopoly on cloud computing that MS has in the OS space. Seems like a valid concern, and as long as all she's arguing for is increased scrutiny as enterprises move more and more to cloud computing, I can't really see an issue with it. It also explains the comment about MS being "so last century" - as companies move to cloud computing (assuming they really do), the OS should become less important.
Do the lawyers have to do the puzzles too before they are hired?
More music, fewer hits
How are Microsoft "so last century"?
Not only are they still a monopoly by a huge factor (what, 90% of the desktop market give or take, 75% of the browser market, some other huge percent of the office suite market?), they're actually still embroiled in anti-trust suits as we speak both in the US and EU. And despite releasing a shoddy last line of products and being on the receiving end of several anti-trust verdicts already, the monopoly shows no sign of going south anytime soon.
Google, on the other hand, only has a monopoly on the (generally low/non-profit) search engine market and the online advertising market (which is near enough impossible to lock people in to, and pretty tricky to abuse). They've as yet shown little anti-competitive behaviour, not been called up on any anti-trust issues, and their brand power has shown to be far from almighty (demonstrated by the lackluster performance of the G1).
I mean I'm not saying Google won't turn out to be the next big evil, but to say that they're the the big problem that needs tackling and that Microsoft isn't an issue, that just makes absolutely no sense.
Wait...what?
Nearly every computer sold comes with some form of Microsoft tax, forcing users to pay for software (XP) that they already have several licenses for, or even worse, pay for software (Vista) that they don't even want just so they can downgrade it to what they *do* want (XP). This is only possible because Microsoft uses their monopoly power to force the PC distributors to bundle what Microsoft wants (Vista) and not what users want (XP).
Meanwhile, Google... sells advertising space on search results? OOOOoooohh, what a HUGE PROBLEM FOR GUVBINT this is.
Dude, companies like Experian and Acxiom have been mining your every credit card and club card purchase, among many other things (they can even tell you if a given person's current vehicle lease is about to expire), for *years*. If you're really worried about Google, I hate to break it to you, but you're a little late to the game.
Obamonopoly - half monopoly, half not, but everyone likes 'em
As in the Microsoft case, "there will be companies that will begin to allege that Google is discriminating" against them by "not allowing their products to interoperate with Google's products."
Kind of a long shot here. Google's products aren't bundled with anything, aren't hardwired into anyone's machine, and for the most part come at no cost to the end-user. People use Google's search engine because...well, it works better than other search engines. Its advertising "monopoly" (is it really?) is in part a side effect of its enormous popularity.
Also, not "allowing their products to interoperate with other products?" This always sort of befuddled me, even in Microsoft's case. If I have a really popular piece of software, am I legally required to tailor it to work with other market products? Including products that may not exist yet? Alleging that another company's products don't "interoperate" with yours as the basis for seeking some compensation seems oddly analogous to patent trolling to me...
The first thing to consider is is Google a monopoly?
Both the Computerworld article and Bloomberg's mention Google's online advertizing but neither says that both Microsoft and Yahoo! also has online advertizing. According to CNN Google's market share in online advertising is 75%, MS's is 5%, and Yahoo's is 20%.
Next they both talk about Google being in cloud computing, however they don't say Google faces competition there too, from Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce, and other businesses.
The third to consider, actually it should be the first, is is being a monopoly illegal? And the answer is no. What is illegal is using a monopoly position to stifle competition in another business. And Google hasn't even been accused of that.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Okay, I can't take someone seriously who uses teen-speak. What is she? 16?
Behold your government.
By your logic, cherry picking a timeline to suit an argument is ok. Microsoft may have grown to a point - based on their abilities and success, but then they started abusing their monopoly to maintain/expand upon it.
As a brief example, I don't see Google removing competitors from search results nor making gmail non-compliant with other hosts. Sorry, but no.
Some might say that Obama's campaign was publicly financed to a larger degree than any in recent memory. They got so many more contributions from individuals -- what's that if not publicly financed in spirit?
Every day I add a new ad company to my NoScript untrusted list. doubleclick, casalemedia, adstream, quantserve, just to name a few. While google-served ads are generally present as well, these sites continue to be a huge presence in online advertising. Claiming Google has a monopoly in this area is either misunderstanding the issues, not doing any research whatsoever, or extreme bias against anything "mainstream." Any of these things would probably be something we don't want in a government official, especially one so heavily connected to the technology sector.
Why? Because they've built a better mousetrap, and now people want to use it?
No, people are getting trapped IN it.
Google isn't even close to being a monopoly.
In the US & Canada for search (perhaps Europe too?), yes it is close. Close enough that online businesses, site profitability, etc, etc, live and die in large part based on their google page ranks.
I'm not a slobbering fanboy of Google the way some other people are, but I also fail to see a business boogeyman behind every corner as some people do.
Google is a serious threat to privacy, and has easily reached the critical mass that gives it monopoly power.
Some people's concept of "anti-trust" would be more correctly called "anti-success"
Enough success to the point that they achieve monopoly power is a reason for anti-trust.
this notion that a company that's been very successful must have cheated or done something nefarious to get that way.
Say what now? Nobody is accusing google of necessarily having done something nefarious or of cheating to get where they are, but the point remains that they are in fact where they are. They have reached a level of success, size, and influence now in some markets that normal market forces no longer really apply to them. As such, they now need to be watched closely. That is all.
Google is a big threat now, whether they abuse it or not, they need to be watched. Microsoft is sill big, but they are off their peak, and while they should be watched they are less of a threat these days. Personally I applaud the administrations frank recognition of that.
companies like Experian and Acxiom have been mining your every credit card and club card purchase, among many other things (they can even tell you if a given person's current vehicle lease is about to expire), for *years*. True, but they don't know which news stories I am monitoring thru Google News Alerts, or what terms I am searching on, or which address I am asking directions for, nor can they combine that information. Google's ability to aggregate data is truly staggering.
Democrats just want to destroy companies
Google's online ads market share: as 59.2%
Microsoft Window's market share:89.62%
I don't know what the GP's threshold for monopoly status is, but it's apparent he thinks it's more than 59% market share. You are the one with faulty logic to then reason that because he doesn't think 59% is enough that he must not think 89% is enough.
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!
Did anyone else read that as "Microsoft has enough lobbyists and has given us enough money, so we can let them slide. Google, it's your turn to line our pockets so we'll leave you alone after a mock trial and a slap on the wrist" ?
-
Many people would disagree with your assessment of Microsoft making a better product than the other guys at any point in history, even if you weren't wildly extrapolating from DesScorp's statement.
The real problem is that an operating system locks you into using it far more than anything Google's done so far--a problem which isn't Microsoft-specific. At this point, it'd be far easier for me to move cross-country than change my OS. Once a lot of people are in a similar position and have major incentives to use the same OS as everyone else, it's difficult NOT to be an abusive monopoly.
If they are looking for a company that hods a monopoly in advertising, they should look somewhere else
And I have faulty logic because I got those mixed up. 23.7% is their online ad market share. 59.2% is their search share.
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!
So instead of going after the phone companies like ATT or the broadband companies like Mediacom which routinely screw customers and ARE monopolies, its going after google who has been pretty good to everyone. Ok, makes sense. /dripping sarcasm
more lawyers. NOT
How come I haven't seen a car analogy yet?
Microsoft still has a massive network-effect supported 90%-or-so share of desktop OSes and something huge on office suites. Even the relative disaster of Vista hasn't dented them more than marginally. Further, Microsoft has a repeated historical pattern of abusing this power.
Google has a 70% share of online advertising, a business where it's the next thing to trivial to switch suppliers on, whether you buy them or sell them.
But, hey, because all the buzz is around Google, not Microsoft, let's ignore the company that actually has and has used monopolistic power. Real antitrust is boring; let's be trendy instead.
Varney is a moron, and Obama is a moron for nominating her.
And other companies (which will remain nameless) are forced to keep at least seven years records for every time you spend money. 'At least' here might as well be the same as saying 'forever'.
The only thing that they haven't figured out how to track is cash, and they still monitor how much you take out of the bank and put back in.
The probability that this AC works for such a company is very low. There are millions of jobs out there and AC only has one.
You say, "Oh nose, teh Google will know when I look up where the nearest Burger King is." Screw that. I can know the when and how much you've spent at strip club for your entire life.
Sounds like Microsoft's got him in their pocket already. Ignore M$ but concentrate on their #1 target ... suspicious.
I fail to see how google is a monopoly? Most people use google to search so most people want to advertise with google. Yet you go buy an off the shelf PC, turn it on and the default browser (IE) on the default OS (Microsoft Windows) already has a default homepage for you (MSN).
*DrugCheese rants*
This is too short, you need to start at the beginning with Jimmy going to a LUG then progress onto the anal sex later.
Also the name Jimmy is too obvious, have something common like Jim, or Bill. A manly name would be better because it shows that Linux turned the manly man into a fag.
Now that's covered you got to get people actually reading your piece of shit, so you should start off "I had a friend named Bill...". It makes it sound like you're actually telling an interesting story rather then trolling.
Last but not least, do this shit in a story about Linux. Having it in an unrelated story is pointless and makes you look stupid.
Signed Bob,
Senior ITO Executive
International Trolling Organisation ltd.
the blogosphere blame Microsoft for being monopoly wrongly. is not Microsoft fault. only name Microsoft begin with same letter like name monopoly. the both have number of letters almost same. Microsoft have 9. monopoly have 8. is similar. by this reasons is Microsoft blame of being monopoly but blame is wrong. Microsoft not being monopoly. Microsoft being good company. Microsoft make good products.
But in Libertarianworld all the competitors would have to do would be to make a better product and suddenly everyone would abandon the multi-billion dollar investment they have in Windows and Office and live happily ever after.
Except some libertarians do not support Intellectual Property and Microsoft is built on IP.
Should there be a Law?
No, because they've built a better mousetrap, and some bad people will be using it in the future against us, unless we think about ways, now, of defusing it.
What the fanbois miss is that even if we assume that the current Google management is ethical, there's no guarantee that future management will be, and there's also no guarantee that future governments won't impose their will against the management's wishes. Would you be happy if Ballmer was CEO of Google, or if another Dick Cheney decided to issue instructions to Google that they cannot refuse?
It's important to have legal scenarios and other tools available to cut Google down to size if it ever comes down to them or us, for whatever reason. And it will be too late to build those tools from scratch when they're needed. Every company that collects a sizeable amount of information about a sizeable portion of the world should be viewed with serious suspicion, as a matter of course. Kudos for technical achievement don't come into it.
What an idiot.
Google had ~63% of the search market. Hard to corner advertising - even search advertising, which is their best niche - with 63%. By contrast, in Jan '09, Windows controls some ~89% of the Desktop OS market.
But this just in - having high market share isn't illegal. What's bad is leveraging your monopoly in one market to injure competition in other markets.
For example, bundling your Web Browser product with your OS, and even integrating it as a half-assed file browser, so that everyone would have it and it would be difficult or impossible to remove. Add in some license agreements that forbid OEMs from removing it or installing a competitor.
Who did Google leverage their "monopoly" to injure? Instead, Google continues to enter markets where the competition is basically screwing the customer, and drastically improves it with their product. Witness the webmail battle between Hotmail and Yahoo. Ridiculously small disk allotments; tons of spam; horrible user interfaces; feeble POP/IMAP policies. How are we not better off with gmail in the world?
Even if Google were a monopoly - which they are not - it's a stretch and a half to imply they have violated anti-trust laws.
And - this just in - even IF Google had a monopoly on search advertising, you can still select advertising on TV, print, Internet "display" ads, radio, flyers on windshields, sports sponsorship, or a thousand other things.
Want to talk about a concerning monopoly?
Monsanto owns 70-100% of the market share for a lot of crops. Monsanto has shown interest in producing and marketing "terminator" seeds; seeds which would produce sterile plants, so every crop would require a new batch of seeds to be grown. I don't know about everyone, but I'm thinking we should be a bit more concerned with a monopoly in the food supply than in search engine advertising, especially when the company involved in pushing genetically modified seed appears to have a blatant disregard for the risk of starving half the planet.
Nice pick Obama. Of course, McCain would probably have made Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant the Secretary of Agriculture.
Gee, what a nice little website you got here. Be a real shame if anything happened to it, ya know...
Looks like Google fell behind on it's "Civic Association" dues. Meanwhile, Microsoft has been paid up for quite some time.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
So, if she had given a speech telling all the world that Google is in no way a monopoly, and that all corporations should be given the benefit of the doubt... would you be posting here about some "gung-ho righty making a bunch of proclamations, admitting a bias for another company?" I think not.
Your problem is not that she is biased, it's that her bias doesn't agree with yours.
Nice work Bloomberg!
And when are we getting FBI agents to lock up the banksters and CONgress for fraud and corruption?
What about having a couple of media companies owning almost all the newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations in the entire country?
Except there aren't just a couple of media companies that own own almost all newspapers or radio and TV stations in the US. There are literally dozens of media companies.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Doesn't it suck when you throw out unsupported allegations like "In the US & Canada for search (perhaps Europe too?), yes it is close. [to being a monopoly]" when the post a little above yours proves, with references, that you are wrong? Google has 23.7% online market share. In what way is 23.7% close to a monopoly?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
perhap's ... win's, ... morgadge
On a scale of 1-10, how many grades of school did you complete?
This is democratic politics in a nutshell
a. regulate in the public interest
b. if a company is profitable than it is criminal, go to step a.
c. if a company is unprofitable, nationalize it, and stuff it with your buddies, return to step a.
If you replace "profitable" with "dangerously large" or "too big to fail" or "abusive to its market segment" then you have the truth.
Systematic risk is the reason why we are forking over 1.6 trillion dollars and climbing to bail out the economy. Serious regulation needs to be put into place to keep these companies structured in a way in which they cannot fail (set a maximum net worth of a subsidiary, force a company to keep each subsidiary financially independent)
This said, I do have concerns these people are eyeing google and ignoring M$ elephant, who is sitting in the room.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
For me, Microsoft is so last century. They are not the problem
What? I mean ... what? This woman seems to confuse having a legitimately-acquired monopoly with abuse of monopoly power. There's a big difference there. If Google has a monopoly of online advertising it's because they provide a worthwhile service, and make a lot of people money, not because they're suppressing competition. Ha ... in Microsoft and Yahoo's case, they pretty much suppress themselves, from a competitive standpoint.
Typical appointment for a Democratic President, I suppose.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Varney has yet to be confirmed as antitrust chief, and she said all this before she was nominated.
Is it just me, or is someone with an agenda/grudge not the kind of person we should be putting into a position of power? Last time I checked, the purpose of the government is to serve the will of the people, and I have not heard too much of a public outcry against Google.
Besides, aren't these claims kind of... libelous? It seems, at the very least, extremely inappropriate.
except cookies, and malware like other internet advertisers do. So if they're a monopoly and they're keeping smaller outfits with infected banner outs out of the business, they're doing the internet a favour. If every other advertiser wasn't so pushy they drove customers away, they might be get some market share too. Let google have their monopoly until others can figure out what they do that consumers want.
Get out of my dreams!!!
Property is theft.
-1, Hopelessly Naive
True, and if you look in more depth at what Google is trying to do with Chrome (let's face it, they're working towards a distributed applications platform) they're on target to be the next Microsoft. Not saying they'll ever be as overbearing and generally obnoxious as the firm of Gates, Ballmer & Satan have been, but they may ultimately acquire a similar level of power over how we use our computers.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
"Google's ability to combine search data from maps, Google Earth, Web Search, Google News Alerts, etc, and mine it is a much bigger problem.
Why? Because they've built a better mousetrap, and now people want to use it?"
Maybe Google could MINE (boobytrap) the path others try to take to success? But, as long as Google seems to not be making people and companies "fatal exceptions", then i don't see how Google's monopoly will be a bad one...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Google has 23.7% online market share. In what way is 23.7% close to a monopoly?
Re-read what I said, and then re-read the reference you provided, and see if you can spot the disconnect. Hint: "search" for it.
In what way is 23.7% close to a monopoly?
In the way that 23.7% has nothing to do with what I was talking about.
Google search in US: 70%
Google search in Germany: 88%
Google search in France: 89%
Google search in the UK: 90%
Google search in Europe overall: 80%
70-90% is fast closing in on monopoly territory. In the US, for exampe, Google captured 90% of all growth in search, meaning, it is is steadily increasing its market share.
Doesn't it suck when you throw out unsupported allegations...
I accept your apology.
Cites:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2008/jun/10/googleukclosesinon90mark
http://www.searchenginepromotionhelp.com/m/articles/search-engine-optimization/search-engine-market-shares-europe.php
http://lab.77agency.com/marketing-analysis/google-leads-the-search-engine-industry-holding-80-of-the-european-market-share-485/
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-9991866-93.html
Damm straight!
Google came into an advertising market filled with popups, flash ads, animated gifs, and all manner of nonsense that chose annoying the user over usability. Now the market is based on relevant advertising, and the ads are text. They've been nothing but positive for the industry.
I often click on google ads because they're showing me what I'm looking for, but they don't annoy me if I don't
If you don't like the way google advertises, you're welcome to go back to pop-unders and the methods used by the dominant players prior to google.
True, but they don't know which news stories I am monitoring thru Google News Alerts, or what terms I am searching on, or which address I am asking directions for, nor can they combine that information. Google's ability to aggregate data is truly staggering.
Uhuh. So? Again, this is only a leveling up in what has been a constant effort to erode your privacy. The simple fact is, for decades now, your every purchase, what magazines, newspapers, and TV's you subscribe to, what charities you donate to, and so on, and so on, has been available to these data mining companies, and they use it every day to help advertisers target things to you.
The simple fact is, your privacy disappeared a *long* time ago. Your worries about Google are too little, too late. They're but one (currently small) fish in a pond of big players who've spent years learning about who you are and what you buy.
Go slit your fucking wrists fucktard
-spun
From TFSummary: "It may be time for the company to start adding to its legal staff."
That's funny, somehow I don't think Slashdot's response to a growing Microsoft monopoly would've been for them to just add more lawyers.
Where's the fine line between successful strategy and abuse? It seems to be the point at which it becomes popular to hate a company.
Let's look at the sins of which Microsoft has been accused.
If I'm not mistaken, one criticism is that it's taking advantage of having huge stockpiles of money, in order to "dump" its products at low cost into markets to gain control. Well, Google's playing that same game, more successfully. They've put out a ton of software at *no* cost, in order to promote their company. That's taking advantage of a large size, at least. And it's hard to get mad at them for it, because their free products are actually good.
The other act that's coming to mind is bundling - using large share in one market to gain an advantage in another (operating systems and browsers... which don't even seem like that far a stretch from each other, imho). Is this all that different from what Google is doing when Gmail serves up Google's own advertisements? Their tremendous resources let them built a wildly popular webmail product, and which in turn increases the scale of their booming advertising business. Once again, nobody is really bothered by this, because we (seemingly) all use Gmail, willingly.
Despite the lovefest shielding their public image, Google's monopoly surely does have "victims". Even if they don't directly piss off consumers, they must have driven out more then a few competitors from the advertising market. And the ad-supported webmail market. And anything else they've touched.
I've never liked Microsoft, but I've never liked the antitrust claims against them either. Google's actions are awesome, and Microsoft's are evil, and I'm not sure why. I certainly hope there's more to it than the popularity contest.
Microsoft did lose. They just got such a light punishment that no-one seems to remember that they lost.
With a presidency that is socialist-leaning and big-government-oriented, it seems we are backsliding into a kind of pre-Reagan era where business is viewed as a necessary evil, the best and brightest should work for the Feds or community organizations, and we shouldn't even try to compete with our ultra-capitalistic competitors in East Asia and elsewhere.
Let me guess where you heard that -- Rush Limbaugh? John McCain? Get a grip on yourself, man; if Obama was "socialist-leaning," how the hell did he get support from Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, Google, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and other capitalist corporations? How did he get endorsements from such well-known millionaire capitalists as Warren Buffett, Hilary Rosen, Craig Newmark, David Geffen, etc.? How about Ben Bernanke? Or Brink Lindsey of CATO?? Do you really believe any of these people would endorse a "socialist"??
You do know those numbers are a lie? Linux has far more than 1% market share. I think your numbers are for "desktop" OS's. In the server market Linux has far more usage.
I've found their ads to be the least annoying on the internet. The reason I find their ads the least annoying is because 9 times out of 10 they only have text and no irritating graphics or flash crap.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
You're a retard. Like the shit-dripping retarded interpretation that "proves" Microsoft is a monopoly, any accusation of Google being a monopoly is just retarded.
Customers have many viable alternatives. If Google was hit by an asteroid tomorrow and went down, "oh shit, guess I better go to www.yahoo.com or any one of the other web search sites". Or "oh shit, I better wait a few days for someone to popup and take their place.
Any "thinking" that labels as a monopoly a company based on intellectual property they created versus a physically limited resource is irrational.
Here's an idea then.. Don't use fucking google! How hard is that? Or better, use Tor. God you people whine like little baby girls.
I've never liked Microsoft, but I've never liked the antitrust claims against them either. Google's actions are awesome, and Microsoft's are evil, and I'm not sure why. I certainly hope there's more to it than the popularity contest.
One company leveraged their dominant product directly to push a secondary product that might otherwise have been supplanted in favor of a rival. The other created a product so superior to everything on an already saturated market that they outstipped the competition on sheer technical prowess alone. One company put something free into a product that everyone had to pay for to coexist technologically. The other put their money-making product into a free offering that was among a huge field of other free offerings. Microsoft can subsidize products with their massive revenues, but for them to gain the traction that they do requires that they be incorporated into the one product that many people have to have: their operating system. Google can subsidize their products with their massive advertising revenue, but can't actually tie their products to the purchase of ad space. They still have to rely on technical superiority for adoption. If nobody has a reason to use it (i.e. Chrome), they don't have a customer base that they can foist it off on by unnecessarily tying it to a product many people need. That their advertising revenues benefit from ad placement in their free products attests to the popularity of the product rather than to the tying between it and the advertising. Gmail is a delivery channel for advertising, but had to be compelling in some way to encourage users to voluntarily sign up for the advertising channel over Yahoo! Mail or MS Live (among others in the field).
On first blush, Google and Microsoft can be compared readily. They are dominant in their fields. When you get past that, however, the ways they achieved (and used) their dominance are nearly polar opposites.
I'm not a huge fan of either of them. One is useful but otherwise unremarkable aside from sheer popularity, one is barely tolerated out of necessity. For many people it probably is a knee-jerk popularity contest, but that's to be expected since the vast majority of people have no reason to consider the issue any deeper than what they garner from passing comments and opinions of others.
...ahead of time. Besides, it's no secret that several copyright hawks have been appointed to the top positions in the Justice Department.
How this will play out, I don't know. I think it is interesting to see these appointments. Consider that these people will actually have to justify their positions if they really wanted to take action anyway.
I do agree that just because she expresses an opinion she shouldn't be disqualified. If she can do the job, put her in there. If she really wants to go after Google, she's going to have to prove her case.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
I think the problem with this opinion is that it's pretty bad.
It's not that she has it, but it resembles something Bush might have said.
Go slit your fucking wrists fucktard
-spun
Aw, cute, chickenshit is afraid of the mods?
Her opinion reminds me of Cheney's statement that the there are new jobs like the many people who make a living off of selling things on eBay.
It is all too apparent that Christine doesn't have a clue what is happening.
Look, I'm regular but I still don't get enough fiber. How did you get 100mb fiber for that price? Please share that with us. Thank you.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
For voting for Obama.
.
Considering MS still controls over 75% of the OS market and over 50% of the mobile device OS market, her comment sure says a lot about how much she knows. Just because your boss setup a couple of cool AJAX websites for recovery.gov, change.gov and even the obama.gov doesn't mean you're qualified as a techie, and the whole technology infrastructure (which Obama is promotion in his stimulus) is just Google.
.
This lady is just thinking that when the infrastructure plan is complete, that everyone, I mean everyone will be 'googling' and that make Google all powerful and threatening to the gov't. It's not Google being monopolistic, but the gov't's fear of losing control. Gov't's business is services and information (which is google's) and this is a turf protection manuver.
.
Sounds like the same old gov't to me: not getting the big picture on tech, and narrow minded thinking (i.e. turf protection).
# Do not remove the following line, or various programs # that require network functionality will fail. 127.0.0.1 localhost pagead2.googlesyndication.com
... the increasing rhetoric from google on being pro-open source. Google perhaps is anticipating anti-trust movement, and has been tactfully not appearing anti-competitive. They have actually released a lot of code to the community and mark my words this would be part of their defence, with mandatory comparison to Microsoft.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
You are so correct. Back when I used to work at Acxiom...way back...we were working THEN to devising a way to generate a unique identifier for every US citizen out there. Something we could used to track people as they moved, changed names, etc...basically to track them from birth to death. More than a decade ago, we had information on like 95% or more of the people in the US, and were starting to track people in the UK, and other nations.
Heck, after 9/11 the Feds used them to try to get info on terrorists, etc...and US citizens. Hell, I've seen a video of Charles talking about it.
I'd have to guess with all the information they have from so many sources (among which are the USPO change of address forms, states that sell drivers licenses, any time you send in a warranty card, etc)...if they could hook it to Google information, it would be a literal gold mine of info. I'd almost have to guess someone has thought about combining them already by this point in time.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The judge is not as boneheaded as you think. The judge found Microsoft guilty. The judge even passed sentence. Microsoft appealed the sentence, and then there was a change of administration and the political will to continue the penalty phase was lost, and Microsoft got away with a slap on the wrist.
The boneheads in this case were Bush and the people who allowed him to get elected.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
"For me, Microsoft is so last century. They are not the problem".
Apparently, being a monopoly simply expires with time. Just stay long enough.
I hope she is being funny or misquoted. If not, Google better quit the hip image and move into a Pittsburgh steel mill to become "so last millenium".
Her lips were softer than a duck's bill, but her quacks
One thing I thought was a bit fishy is Mozilla Firefox's results from Google's "I'm feeling lucky" in their address bar.
It's fine if they were unbiased, but last week the first result returned by Google's lucky button with the query 'email' was Yahoo mail. Firefox redirected to a Google search result page with Ymail on top followed by Gmail. This week, Gmail is returned as the first result and Firefox redirects directly to Gmail. Same deal with Google maps vs. Yahoo maps.
Wired Magazine has a story titled "The Plot to Kill Google". It is very much worth reading. The story basically details how Microsoft and AT&T have been lobbying the Federal government that Google is a monopoly and needs to taken down.
From the article: ...
Microsoft's arguments weren't just winning over advertisers. Back in July, the company penned one of a series of confidential memos titled "Google + Yahoo Competition" and sent it to its allies and the Justice Department. The memo claimed that the Google-Yahoo deal was illegal on its face, mentioning as precedent the 68-year-old case United States v. Socony-Vacuum Oil Co. Inc., which Microsoft also cited in congressional testimony that same month. When Yahoo lawyer Dan Wall heard the argument, he didn't see how a 1940s case against conspiring oil companies bore much relevance to a deal in which prices are set by electronic auctions. But then a Justice official brought up Socony during one of their regular phone calls. "I thought, 'Good grief, they're buying the Microsoft BS,'" Wall says. "I don't have any doubt that Microsoft put that in DOJ's mind."
Other companies joined in, including AT&T. Many observers believe that the telecom company hopes to compete directly with Google someday by going into the business of serving online ads to its users, and it was happy for the opportunity to beat up on its future rival. On September 24, 10 members of Congress sent a letter to the DOJ opposing the deal. All of them have received donations from AT&T over their careers (average total contribution since 1996: $29,000), and most counted the telecom giant as one of their largest contributors. ...
Google barely had time to recover from the failed Yahoo deal before its staff learned of a 94-page document titled "Google Data Collection and Retention," that had been circulating around Washington. The treatise listed all the ways that Google hoards user information. Google Checkout remembers credit card numbers. Gmail reads private email. Blogger saves draft posts. As one annotation on the document helpfully notes, Google's privacy policy "gives Google the right to retain personal information over the wishes of a user." Overall, Google is painted as a Big Brother with an insatiable desire for private data.
The document, written by a consulting firm, was commissioned by AT&T, which says it was intended only for internal use. Protection from snooping, says AT&T public policy chief James Cicconi, is one of his firm's top priorities. "We sell our customers access to the Internet," he says, "and we want them to have a good experience." Privacy is a newfound concern for the company, which in 2005 was one of the telecoms that allowed the National Security Agency to listen in on millions of phone calls. AT&T was accused of "warrantless wiretapping" before successfully lobbying Congress to grant it immunity against suits by its customers. But now AT&T is trumpeting the cause of consumer privacy, unveiling an elaborate policy stating that it will not sell its customers' browsing histories to advertisers without explicit permission.
In all the multiple page article paints a very ugly picture of the situation and leaves me amazed that politicians don't realize they are being played, or don't care as long as the donations keep coming in.
(Also seems like the slashdot community could easily match the $29K of AT&T's donations. Apparently being politicians is cheaper than I would have thought.)
Think Deeply.
Any "thinking" that labels as a monopoly a company based on intellectual property they created versus a physically limited resource is irrational.
When and if that "IP" is BS patents (or any patents) that prevent competition, then it might as well be a physical resource as that is more limited than any physical resource. You can find more oil or synthesize most petrochemicals from coal. You can't synthesize around a court injunction.
Google never used illegal business practices and other restrictive methods to artificially increase their market share. If Microsoft had built up its empire fairly and squarely, no-one would be complaining anbout them. But they didn't. They're crooks and have been found to be crooks. The problem is that no-one has yet forced them to give up the monopoly their crooked dealing have created; it's always been "pay the fine and keep the winnings".
Good idea..... Look www.pensearch.t35.com
Or, "Woooosh"
Jimmy vowed never to try Linux again.
Are you saying that this linux can assrape a guy without windows underneath it, at all ? As in, without a boot disk, without any drivers, and without any services ?
That sounds preposterous to me.
If it were true (and I doubt it), then companies would be selling buttplugs without a windows. This clearly is not^W happening, so there must be some error in your calculations. I hope you realise that windows is more than just Office ? Its a whole system that runs the buttplug from start to finish, and that is a very difficult thing to acheive. A lot of people dont realise this.
Microsoft just spent $9 billion and many years to create Goatse, so it does not sound reasonable that some new alternative could just snap into existence overnight like that. It would take billions of dollars and a massive effort to achieve. IBM tried, and spent a huge amount of money developing BP/2 but could never keep up with Windows. Apple tried to create their own system for years, but finally gave up recently and moved to Intel and Microsoft.
Its just not possible that a freeware like the Linux could be extended to the point where it runs the entire stimulation fron start to finish, without using some of the more critical parts of windows. Not possible.
I think you need to re-examine your assumptions.
In simpler words, she is saying:
"Look at me! I am going for a government office position so if you want anything, start bribing me now!"
No, people are getting trapped IN it.
Catchy one liner. I can use my ISP's mail, or yahoo mail, instead of google mail. I can use yahoo search, or live search instead of google search. I can use microsofts map solution instead of google maps. Google calendar? So many other options. Please explain how people are trapped in using google services.
Enough success to the point that they achieve monopoly power is a reason for anti-trust.
Wrong. Abuse of monopoly power is a reason for anti trust under US law (IANAL). Simply being a monopoly is not.
Nobody is accusing google of necessarily having done something nefarious or of cheating to get where they are, but the point remains that they are in fact where they are. They have reached a level of success, size, and influence now in some markets that normal market forces no longer really apply to them. As such, they now need to be watched closely.
2 problems here: you claim that 'normal market forces' do not apply to them, but fail to back that statement up. I say normal market forces still apply. I can take my advertising somewhere else on the web, or use television ads, newspapers ads, etc. Compare this to the microsoft os monopoly, where my hardware and software are tied together and I cannot simply switch over, because my business processes are at risk and it will cost me a lot of effort to switch.
Second problem: You say google has done nothing wrong, but because of what they can or might do, they need to be watched. That is faulty reasoning, because if you follow that same line you can come the conclusion that every company or every human being needs to be closely watched because of the possibility to commit a crime.
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
Besides the point that Google is simply good at their job which is why everyone uses them since Yahoo looks like some fucking Fisher Price search engine, caring about this type of a monopoly is incredibly hypocritical. A monopoly in my eyes seems to stem down further to the local towns. For example in my area there's only ONE cable company to chose from. And you have absolutely NO CHOICE to go with another cable provider. That is the point, when you have no choice but to deal with some particular company, then it is a monopoly. Google isn't a monopoly because people have the freedom to choose whoever they hell they want to search with and to advertise with. they're just better at their job than everyone else.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
As Emperor Gates has foreseen ...
But you are not a monopoly YET!
I can't for the life of me figure out why companies are so hesitant to split into separate business entities. There can still be close collaboration between them... look at the defense contracting business... contractors from different firms regularly work together on the same project in the same office in cubes adjacent to each other. There's no reason that the IT industry could not do the same to avoid governments calling "monopoly" on them. In the long run, this strategy would help keep us all more honest I think.
Conservatives do not oppose Barrack Obama's 800 billion welfare bill because they are afraid it might work. Rather, it is because we know it won't.
Regardless of the merits of the traditional Republican free market system - that incidentally, was an invention of the Democrats, the fact of the matter is, we absolutely know that doling out government cheese to everyone isn't going to work. Liberal socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried, and never even had the upsides that came with a free trade environment.
If we were really going to reach back in history and do something that did work, then historically the greatest period of economic expansion for the USA is the mercantile era from the post civil war up until around the 1920s. US manufacturers were protected, unemployment was generally low and the lot of the middle class improved dramatically. Then, you could have some liberal stuff of putting unions together because a company could just pass the costs of higher wages to the consumer without getting undercut by slave labor from overseas.
Contract this to Obama's book. His economic vision is the worst of all possible worlds, and, its a vision that matches that of Krugman and company. What they advocate is having a big socialist nanny state to protect people from the effects of global trade, and I would argue, if you didn't have global trade, you wouldn't need to protect them at all.
So yeah, Obama's plan of ultimately raising taxes - via carbon or whatever else, to pay for global trade, is really just a bandaid over something that we already know has failed.
This is my sig.
The nation as a whole is now the proud owner of billions of dollars worth of debt previously owed by the super-rich.
No, it wasn't owned by the "super-rich." It was owned by us, everyone that owned stock in these banks.
Should human activity benefit humanity? People who say "no" scare the shit out of me
What gives you or any man the right to judge what is best for humanity? That's the point.. its just a vast amount of religious intolerance in that one for a species that can't even agree on what is human and what is not.
Do you know why companies exist? To make profit for the owner(s)
The owners are the public. That's what you don't get. Put down your Karl Marx, go to e-trade.com, and if you want to own a piece of any company, it won't cost you all that much, especially these days.
This is my sig.
Imagine any situation wherein if person A uses Google, that any other person B is *required* to use Google to interact with that person.
Can't think of any? Neither can I.
Now consider random users and business than routinely send/distribute (or demand from others) information, applications, reports, homework, etc, in "DOC" format.
Now imagine a situation where one business has such complete and total control over the resource and entry points to a particular market, that it is impossible for anyone else to even enter that market, let alone try to compete if they have a better offering. Microsoft, and the incumbent phone companies both fit that scenario.
Yet if someone has a 'better idea' for Internet advertising, nothing is stopping them from trying to market it. Anyone can set up a website and do anything they want on it, with very little investment.
Yet in the "OS" market, the primary mechanism by which the vast majority of users gets it OS is 'with the computer'. Everyone here should be aware of the vast history of people trying to get a PC even without Windows, let alone with something else. For wired telecom, good luck getting those rights of away, or the financing to build out your own outside plant.
Incumbent telecom, and Microsoft are and were the primary 'abusive' monopolies in the US. Google doesn't even register on the meter.
By your logic, cherry picking a timeline to suit an argument is ok.
It works for Global Warmists.
So... someone who is trying to nationalize the banking system, the auto industry, etc. is a capitalist?
"Government is the only one who can fix the economy." Sounds a bit socialist to me.
Look at the "stimulus" bill - yay, putting a whole $13 more in our pockets a month. At the same time putting billions into the pockets of pet projects / pork? Giving the government more power? That sounds like growing the government to me.
No, some asshole is trying to make me look bad. I never post AC. Whoever it is isn't very creative, they use the exact same lame phrase on me.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Ah, the 'go slit your wrists fucktard' troll. Classy. Here's a tip: I never post AC. And there is a poster here who LOVES the phrase 'go slit your wrists fucktard.' So all we need to do to find out who this REALLY is is search on that phrase. I've never used it, but SOMEONE uses it quite frequently.
Nice try, dimwit. I thought you'd at least be entertaining, but no. You are the lamest cyber-stalker I've ever met. When are you going to downmod me into oblivion? I'm shaking in my boots, LOL.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Yeah. I See that now. Sorry for falling for.
Wrong. Abuse of monopoly power is a reason for anti trust under US law (IANAL). Simply being a monopoly is not.
Abuse of monopoly power is a reason for an anti trust lawsuit.
Simply being a monopoly is a reason to be watching for anti-trust activity.
I say normal market forces still apply. I can take my advertising...
But I'm talking about search, not advertising. And sure you can switch to yahoo if you want. But if google removes your site from their results, for most people that would mean your site may as well not be on the web. As I said, there are millions of online businesses that live or die based on their pagerank.
Compare this to the microsoft os monopoly, where my hardware and software are tied together and I cannot simply switch over, because my business processes are at risk and it will cost me a lot of effort to switch.
Explain to me how an online business can mitigate the risk that google will not list them, other than to 'trust google'.
That is faulty reasoning, because if you follow that same line you can come the conclusion that every company or every human being needs to be closely watched because of the possibility to commit a crime.
Not because of the possibility to commit a crime, because the market no longer regulates how they operate, so manual regulation is required, even if its just a hands off 'keep an eye on it'. So it only applies to corporations, not people, and only corporations in a monopoly position, not everyone.
That's okay, my post in response to yours came out WAY more snarky than I intended it to, so I can see why you might have thought that was me.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
...
How can any entity that has plenty of competitors be considered a monopoly? Do lawyers, especially government lawyers, ever manage to learn the English language?
in Charlotte. "You can have any broadband cable system, as long as its Time Warner".. yea.. that one. Speaking of MONOPOLY.
If you ask me, I have no problem with monopolies by themselves.. They're the natural result of a capitalistic system.
The problem occurs when the company with the monopoly becomes abusive of its users or detrimental to the industry due to lack of competition.
For example, Microsoft has become detrimental. There are quirky, broken, useless things in Windows because they haven't had to compete on merit for years. They're still using a drive addressing system invented on the VAX. You can't even cd directly to a directory on another freaking drive. It's still a two step process. The font dialogs in Vista are the same ones from Windows 3.1! IE, the worst, most painful, browser on the market came to dominate via coupling with the monopolistic OS, not by merit. Windows Media Player became hugely popular despite being DRM friendly (user abusive) and a steaming bloated pile compared to winamp, once again by being bundled with the OS and harnessing the power of defaults. Vista includes DRM code in the kernel execution path that makes it slower than XP - and this wasn't done for the users of the OS, but for the interests of other big companies.
Adobe has become abusive with their Acrobat reader. Bundling so much crap with it that's is a steaming pile that takes 10s of seconds load, will no longer allow you to disable its automatic updates, etc.
Most Telecoms and ISPs are abusive. The cost of text messages goes up even though their costs didn't. Verizon is particularly bad, they'll deliberately cripple Bluetooth OBEX profiles on phones you get from them to try and force you to buy ringtones & crap at an estimated 20,000% markup, they brand their phones with hideous schemes that reduce usability, they've been guilty of padding HTTP headers with junk data to arbitrarily increase data usage. (I can understand the contract severance penalties since their subsidizing the phones - provided the fee diminishes to zero by the end of the contract).
Even apple has done this. Way back around iTunes 3, you could download songs from the ipod to iTunes. They subsequently removed this functionality that was useful to their users because of interests of third parties.
These are the companies that need investigation.
Google on the other hand seems to have gotten nothing but better as their power grows. Google searches are still fantastic, they've added tons of incredibly useful free services out of the blue. They keep giving more, awesome, free stuff. More importantly, their existing free stuff keeps getting better not abusive. Maybe I missed something awful they're doing, but so far even their use of my pseudo-private data seems more useful than harmful - I get non-abusive, non-intrusive text based ads for things that are actually relevant. This is the key to long term success. Give your customers what they want and they'll keep coming back and telling their friends. It leads to long term profits, not the short quarterly gains that MS, Adobe, Verizon, Sprint, Comcast, Cox, *IAA, etc seem to be more focused on.
Question everything
That was verging on verbal abuse. Break the cycle!
This isn't about anti-success, it's about anti-monopoly. Let's say overnight, Yahoo, Jeeves, Microsoft search, all drop off the map and Google gets over 99% of searches. Google can now charge advertisers an arm and a leg charge even more than $60 per click for things like 'mesothelioma'.
Er, MS did lose. But GWB effectively gave them a pardon because they lined his wallet. Money trumps actual justice. Don't expect BHO to be any different.
Simply being a monopoly is a reason to be watching for anti-trust activity.
No. When competitors complain about misuse of monopoly powers, then there is a reason to start an investigation.
But if google removes your site from their results, for most people that would mean your site may as well not be on the web. As I said, there are millions of online businesses that live or die based on their pagerank.
That is their problem; you should NOT base you business model on a changing proprietary algorithm of another company. And there are still loads of other ways to get more market penetration. Having a good product helps, reaching the right blog-writers, and good ol' fashioned word of mouth works as well.
Explain to me how an online business can mitigate the risk that google will not list them, other than to 'trust google'.
Again: any company that relies on only 1 other company for customers puts itself in high risk; it is a very bad business model. Businesses simply should not do that. And there are other ways to get customers than through high rankings in a search engines.
(...) because the market no longer regulates how they operate, so manual regulation is required (...)
No. Investigation is only required when competitors have reasonable complaints. Regulation is only required when the investigation shows that a monopoly is abused. And stating that your reasoning only applies to corporations does not make it any less faulty reasoning: it is quintessential in western law that you cannot simply put tabs on a company (nor on a person) if there are no indications that that company has done something wrong. And having a very large market share is not by definition wrong.
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
That is their problem; you should NOT base you business model on a changing proprietary algorithm of another company. And there are still loads of other ways to get more market penetration. Having a good product helps, reaching the right blog-writers, and good ol' fashioned word of mouth works as well.
And after hearing about how good your product is, by reading a blog or hearing about it via word of mouth, a more than sizeable chunk will still use google to try and find you.
Again: any company that relies on only 1 other company for customers puts itself in high risk; it is a very bad business model.
And that is how life works when there are monopolies. I don't get to choose what company supplies my electricity either, but you don't see people wandering around saying "Any company that relies on only 1 other company for electricity puts itself in high risk; its a very bad business model."
And after hearing about how good your product is, by reading a blog or hearing about it via word of mouth, a more than sizeable chunk will still use google to try and find you.
Oh, please... Blogs can have (gasp!) hyperlinks to other sites! And any business who makes a new product named, say rabostak, but fails to register rabostak.com, has no idea how the net works. No search engine is needed to find rabostak.com. And pagerank works in such a way that if the search term is part of the host name, the ranking is pretty high. If google would not return rabostak.com on the first page when I search for 'rabostak', the rabostak business has a very valid reason for either making a fuss through the press (streisand effect), making a complaint at the anti-trust authorities or even starting a civil lawsuit.
I don't get to choose what company supplies my electricity either (...)
I fail to see the relevance. We were talking about monopolies and possible abuse of it by google. Do you mean to say that delivering electricity is comparable to how google present search results on lists? Delivery of electricity is between the electric co. and you. 2 parties. Showing search results concerns the search engine, the sites found and the end-user. 3 or more parties. And google is not the only souce of customers. In all ways totally not comparable.
"Any company that relies on only 1 other company for electricity puts itself in high risk; its a very bad business model."
Do you have any idea how silly you are starting to sound to me? You cannot take an argument, change a term in that argument to create a new argument and say that the validity of the two arguments should be the same. Look:
See? The invalidity of your electricity claim says nothing about the validity of my customers claim.
Also, google is NOT a monopoly when it comes to getting your customers. You DO get to choose where to get your customers, you DON'T get to choose your electric co. (actually, in The Netherlands, you do have that choice, but for the sake of argument let's leave that out). Electric co.-s _must_ supply you with electricity because of their monopoly. Building your business on the assumption that most of the time you will get electricity is not high risk. Building your business and artificialy resticting your source of customers to one source is very much high risk.
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
I'll see your "allowed to have an opinion", and raise to "it's a good thing they express it". Nobody who's fit for that sort of position should not have an opinion. I mean, if you're "Anti-Trust Chief" (whatever that means in official terms), you'd better be aware that Google has a very, very powerful position that might be abused by someone creative (and I'll be damned if that's not a company with creative potential), and you'd better have an opinion on whether you think it's likely it will happen. That opinion needn't even be correct, you only need to show an interest (provided you're open minded enough to change your mind given enough evidence).
Now, what would you rather have? Someone who keeps quiet about their opinions, or someone who's vocal enough about them that those opinions are, for all intents and purposes, subject to public scrutiny?