Justice Department to sue Google over search dominance

[miagisan]

7 minutes ago, Morgan MLGman said:

Maybe Bing, or Yahoo are popular and used in the US. I guarantee you that pretty much nobody uses those in Europe because they're terrible for searching stuff here. In my country, Google has pretty much exclusivity. And how many people actually search for simple stuff in three different search engines? That's unrealistic, and frankly quite naive thinking.

And you are thinking about this all wrong. Most people use 2 search engines on a daily basis. How many non tech saavy people buy computers, and think about what their first search daily is.....Google. How many times have you installed windows or bought a new computer, and the first thing you search for is Chrome or Firefox or another browser. People know how to use more than one, its the fact that google is a known commodity that makes people change to google.

[PCGuy_5960]

1 hour ago, Trik'Stari said:

It's a fairly messed up situation. We either punish companies for being too successful, or threaten them enough to limit their success.

Yeah, I'm usually against government interference in the economy, but Google literally controls the vast majority of the information and content that most people in the world consume. That is an insane amount of power, which can be abused if they wanted to, so I can understand why regulations might be unavoidable. 

[Morgan MLGman]

1 hour ago, miagisan said:

so because Bing and Yahoo suck, you want to punish the company that does it well. So you break up google, then you are forced to use Bing and Yahoo, how does that help you if their search engine sucks? 

I never said anything about punishing anyone. I merely explained one of the reasons why the US Government may be involved with Google, because someone asked that question.

1 hour ago, miagisan said:

And you are thinking about this all wrong. Most people use 2 search engines on a daily basis.

Really? I honestly haven't met any in my country, neither in private, nor in professional life. Keep in mind that I work as an IT professional and if anyone, it would be me who knew such people. "Most people" is quite a generalization without any data to back it up.

[miagisan]

2 minutes ago, Morgan MLGman said:

I never said anything about punishing anyone. I merely explained one of the reasons why the US Government may be involved with Gogle, because someone asked that question.

Really? I honestly haven't met any in my country, neither in private, nor in professional life. Keep in mind that I work as an IT professional and if anyone, it would be me who knew such people. "Most people" is quite a generalization without any data to back it up.

think about the older generation. They load up windows, go to the search bar and type in "Google", alot of non tech saavy people dont even know that you can search right from the address bar in internet explorer/edge.

[Teddy07]

4 hours ago, lexusgamer05 said:

why is the US govt wasting their time like this? There are far more important issues at hand rather than a search engine that just happens to be really popular.

I assume due to general popularity and upcomming elections 

[Trik'Stari]

12 minutes ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

Yeah, I'm usually against government interference in the economy, but Google literally controls the vast majority of the information and content that most people in the world consume. That is an insane amount of power, which can be abused if they wanted to, so I can understand why regulations might be unavoidable. 

I agree, but I extend that power to social media in general. Facebook, twitter, instagram, etc.

 

All of them should be classified in such a way that they fall under the first amendment. Their power is simply too great to allow unchecked.

[Kilrah]

  

33 minutes ago, miagisan said:

you could check by using more than one search engine?

 

Ex: I just bought my wife a new car, do you think i went to one dealership (google) without checking a few other dealerships first (bing, yahoo, etc)?

 

 

That's what educated people do, but the masses won't be doing that, and they're the ones who count in an election.

 

That said I don't think it'd be worth giving up on the quality of the Google search engine.

 

There however needs to be tighter control over what companies do, and absolutely massive fines for those who are found doing seriously illegal stuff, so that they don't have the incentive to go and abuse the power they get through their successful creation. Looking in the past decade there are so many startups that from the get go do things that are very questionable legally and given the slowness of the justice system by the time they get scrutinized and eventually found guilty they've grown so much that the fine they'll get is a drop in the ocean and meaningless.

 

If the fines were in the order of 30% of the company's value then maybe they'd think twice. Not enough to kill them, but enough to negate all the profits they did while infringing on laws for years and widely offset any gains they might be contemplating willingly doing illegal stuff for.

[PCGuy_5960]

4 minutes ago, Trik'Stari said:

All of them should be classified in such a way that they fall under the first amendment. Their power is simply too great to allow unchecked.

Not sure if the first amendment is the only thing they need. If I'm not mistaken it doesn't cover privacy and mass surveillance, which are also valid concerns with companies like google and facebook.

[ARikozuM]

 

2 hours ago, Trik'Stari said:

The alternative, isn't great. Perhaps we should simply prevent companies a certain size or larger, from buying smaller companies, or otherwise merging with other companies entirely.

That's how it was supposed to work with merger oversight. Unfortunately DOJ hasn't been very effective in the last few decades. 

[spartaman64]

11 minutes ago, Trik'Stari said:

I agree, but I extend that power to social media in general. Facebook, twitter, instagram, etc.

 

All of them should be classified in such a way that they fall under the first amendment. Their power is simply too great to allow unchecked.

just what we need for them not to be able to do anything about russian bots

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, miagisan said:

so because Bing and Yahoo suck, you want to punish the company that does it well. So you break up google, then you are forced to use Bing and Yahoo, how does that help you if their search engine sucks? 

It's not about "punishing success" as you put it.

If I were to build a nuclear reactor in my kitchen and regulators went "hey, this is very dangerous. You can hurt someone. We're confiscating it" they aren't "punishing me for being successful". They see a threat and act accordingly to remove said threat.

 

Also, the lawsuit isn't about "Google is too big so we should harm them". It's about Google using their dominance in the market to harm competitors. We should be VERY thankful that we have laws which prevents companies from harming competitors. It's okay to build your own product and make it successful. It's not okay to start actively doing things to make competing products worse so that you don't have to compete.

 

 

For example the US government didn't have a problem with Intel making better processors than AMD to the point where Intel had the vast majority of market share. That's fine. Nobody felt like punishing Intel for making better products than their competitors.

But when Intel started telling PC manufacturers "hey, we'll give you rebates on our processors if you stop selling other CPU brands" then the court got involved.

[Doobeedoo]

Um weird move though

[Quinnell]

7 hours ago, lexusgamer05 said:

why is the US govt wasting their time like this? There are far more important issues at hand rather than a search engine that just happens to be really popular.

Monopolies are dangerous.  I think companies like Amazon should be split up (ie separate their AWS business into an independent company for example).  Google has so many things that could/should be broken off into independent companies as well... like Youtube.

[BuckGup]

7 hours ago, lexusgamer05 said:

why is the US govt wasting their time like this? There are far more important issues at hand rather than a search engine that just happens to be really popular.

Because the US government is comprised of 83 year old white men who have no grasp on technology so they do stupid things

[Vishera]

7 hours ago, Moonzy said:

1-2 major companies using huge budget to improve their single service that everyone uses, since revenue isn't split too much.

 

Or

 

Total revenue split into 10 companies, each improving their products by 1/5 the rate of above companies due to less revenue stream to each.

The problem is that the 1-2 corporations will find it comfortable to just get lazy,

They can allow themselves huge budget cuts in order to deliver lesser products with minimum effort - exactly what Intel did in the past decade.

They can decide to not fix problems or deliver a half assed service just because they are a monopoly and there is no competition - just like ISPs in the US.

[Moonzy]

Just now, Vishera said:

The problem is that the 1-2 corporations will find it comfortable to just get lazy,

They can allow themselves huge budget cuts in order to deliver lesser products with minimum effort - exactly what Intel did in the past decade.

yeap, this was brought up in my later posts

 

so there's a balance point between monopoly and too many competitors.

maybe duo/triopoly, as long as they dont gang up on the consumers like NAND manufacturers did.

 

you cant win...

[Quinnell]

14 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

yeap, this was brought up in my later posts

 

so there's a balance point between monopoly and too many competitors.

maybe duo/triopoly, as long as they dont gang up on the consumers like NAND manufacturers did.

 

you cant win...

Nah on duo/triopolies.  The more competition, the better.

[Moonzy]

1 minute ago, Quinnell said:

Nah on duo/triopolies.  The more competition, the better.

so you'd rather have more options than better options?

 

i think there's a balance point, but it's very hard for 2 or 3 companies to progress together

three companies can be equal at start, then 1 company makes something good this generation, everyone flocks to it, they get more budget for next product, then makes better product than other 2 companies, and repeat.

 

positive feedback loop is a bish.

[Quinnell]

2 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

so you'd rather have more options than better options?

 

i think there's a balance point, but it's very hard for 2 or 3 companies to progress together

three companies can be equal at start, then 1 company makes something good this generation, everyone flocks to it, they get more budget for next product, then makes better product than other 2 companies, and repeat.

 

positive feedback loop is a bish.

You just described the downside to a duopoly/triopoly.  Intel and AMD.  Nviida and AMD.  These are two perfect examples of a duopoly where one company took off and left the lone competitor in the dust.  As a result, they almost effectively have a monopoly.  This is more likely to happen when there's fewer competitors.

[Moonzy]

Just now, Quinnell said:

This is more likely to happen when there's fewer competitors

there were more GPU companies in the early 2000s, you should look at what happened to them.

basically Nvidia and ATi made good products while they didnt, everyone flocked to them, then the others died/got bought because of insufficient funding/innovation.

 

no matter how many options there are, people will choose the best few and flock to it, leaving the others to die out.

[Vishera]

6 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

maybe duo/triopoly

Duopolies are too powerful and can easily co-operate in a scheme to gang up on consumers like you mentioned.

And they have huge market shares usually around 50% each.

 

Triopolies make more sense but still in the danger zone,An example for a competitive triopoly is the hard drive market,which is controlled by Seagate,Toshiba and Western Digital.

 

Oligopolies are safer for consumers (as long as they don't gang on you),they are a fine balance between options and quality.An example for an oligopoly is banks.

[spartaman64]

ironically the search engine is one of the few things google built legitimately without acquiring other companies and this is what the justice department want to attack them on LUL

[Bombastinator]

9 hours ago, lexusgamer05 said:

why is the US govt wasting their time like this? There are far more important issues at hand rather than a search engine that just happens to be really popular.

There always are.  Law enforcement has had this problem for a very very long time.  If crime triage is straight up all lesser crimes get ignored and effectively become unenforced laws.  There has been a lot of interest in Facebook and looking at Facebook without also looking at Google becomes impossible.  Also there’s the epic lawsuit which also shines a spotlight on google.  The only countries where literally every law violation is consistently treated are police states which of course also have their own different and bigger problems. 

[Bombastinator]

4 hours ago, miagisan said:

so because Bing and Yahoo suck, you want to punish the company that does it well. So you break up google, then you are forced to use Bing and Yahoo, how does that help you if their search engine sucks? 

I use DuckDuckGo myself.

[Vishera]

7 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

I use DuckDuckGo myself.

I use DuckDuckGo as well,but sometimes it doesn't return the results for what i was searching for so i have no choice but to use Google at those times.