Justice Department to sue Google over search dominance

[Bombastinator]

2 minutes ago, lexusgamer05 said:

I wouldn't exactly consider it a monopoly, there are many other search engines you can use, but Google just happens to be popular

The anti competition waivers given to gigantic conglomerates in general over the last 20 years seem to have been over lenient  in a lot of cases. It’s caused problems.

[Zodiark1593]

4 hours ago, Quinnell said:

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.

Smart corporations diversify to achieve long term stability and growth, which often means pursuing different avenues of business. Where exactly is the line where diversification must stop? Should a side business be forced to spun off once it becomes profitable?
 

AWS is an interesting example as it was a business Amazon built themselves rather than acquired, which makes this more challenging for regulators to make a determination. 

[TigerHawk]

31 minutes ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

It depends: does the athlete use the fact that he's already fit to beat you up and block the door when you try to enter the gym? Because that's what "anti-competitive" practices and anti-trust regulations are all about.

Things like paying to be the default search engine, like Intel paying not to use AMD CPUs back in the day, are not about who made the best product. If default search engines were chosen based on which one is the best, there would be no payment. Using your monopoly rents (or worse, the monopoly rents from a different business branch) to pay for the spot has nothing to do with "getting good".

IMO if they want to compete with google they should have to put in the decades of R&D and work google did to get where it is today. You can't tell me Microsoft can't afford it with Bing. If Apple wanted to, they definitely could. If the old search engines wanted to compete back in the day, they should of had a clean ad-free front page like Google did. I still remember an old comparison from like...idk 2006? Comparing Google to Yahoo and Ask Jeeves and Lycos and all of them. All full of ads and other bs and Google is just a plain white page with a search bar. There is a reason people chose them back in the day.

Don't get me wrong, I am not naive enough to think google isn't making serious bank on selling statistics and userdata from everything people search. Common searches from domains in this part of the world, etc. I am just saying it doesn't feel right for people to get a free ticket on the back of someone who invested billions of dollars and probably millions of man-hours to get where they are.

[Bombastinator]

1 minute ago, TigerHawk said:

IMO if they want to compete with google they should have to put in the decades of R&D and work google did to get where it is today. You can't tell me Microsoft can't afford it with Bing. If Apple wanted to, they definitely could. If the old search engines wanted to compete back in the day, they should of had a clean ad-free front page like Google did. I still remember an old comparison from like...idk 2006? Comparing Google to Yahoo and Ask Jeeves and Lycos and all of them. All full of ads and other bs and Google is just a plain white page with a search bar. There is a reason people chose them back in the day.

Don't get me wrong, I am not naive enough to think google isn't making serious bank on selling statistics and userdata from everything people search. Common searches from domains in this part of the world, etc. I am just saying it doesn't feel right for people to get a free ticket on the back of someone who invested billions of dollars and probably millions of man-hours to get where they are.

You’re talking about history though.  Things aren’t like that any more.

[wanderingfool2]

54 minutes ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

Maybe they would be forced to look for a legitimate, sustainable business model. Maybe having a browser on life support from the makers of their main competitor isn't exactly healthy, not just if such financial support is severed, but also while it remains in place...

You don't think they would think of alternatives.  The reality is Mozilla has limited ways of making outside of things like selling the default browser rights.

 

1 hour ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

Yes, monopolistic positions are a way to make profit, and eliminating those rents is an intended outcome.

Okay, then no Google Fiber, less youtube, google maps goodbye, etc.  Some divisions don't really make much sense as a separate company.

 

1 hour ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

Maybe, just maybe, if Youtube was such a money-bleeding machine it should have fallen to upcoming, more streamlined competitors? I can run the most popular bar in town too, as long as someone pays all my costs while I offer all drinks free to everyone, and shutting every other bar down, it doesn't mean that the town will be left with the best bar or bar owner...

Like what competitors?  It's a logistics thing, providing that many videos on demand.  The competitors to youtube, before Google are all former shells of themselves/annoying ad ridden (worse than youtube) or worse quality.

[Not_A_Spider]

I can't tell if this is a good or bad sign of what's to come in the Epic/Apple thing going on.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

3 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Okay, then no Google Fiber, less youtube, google maps goodbye, etc. 

Am I suppose to cry for them?  

3 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Some divisions don't really make much sense as a separate company.

and that goes to show how uinlawful competitors they are. I mean, Google Fiber? So an entire ISP can't survive on its own without being part of a huge conglomerate? As if the ISP market couldn't get any less competitive, you want to bring dumping into it?

 

3 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Like what competitors?  It's a logistics thing, providing that many videos on demand. 

Basically service that provide videos on demand. What's so special about streaming logistics that precludes competition?

 

3 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

The competitors to youtube, before Google are all former shells of themselves/annoying ad ridden (worse than youtube) or worse quality.

Of course they are. How are they going to compete against a company backed by Google's financial doping? 

[miagisan]

Take away my google maps and yes I will be very pissed lol

[LAwLz]

19 hours ago, TetraSky said:

So... It's Google's fault that their search engine is being used by most and nobody in their right mind wants to use Bing and the others ?

They are not forcing anybody to use their search engine, last I checked. Even if they do pay companies (like Mozilla) to prefer Google Search over alternatives, you as the user are never locked down specifically to only Google Search.

Imagine getting sued because you made a product that's widely used, but the competition is garbage so you must be bought down a peg...

See:  

23 hours ago, LAwLz said:

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.

 

The lawsuit is not about "Google are too big". It's about "Google is using their market dominance to do bad things".

 

 

17 hours ago, TigerHawk said:

I mean...I get the whole anti-monopoly thing but seriously, Google is the most used search engine for a reason. It gives the cleanest, most relevant results for like 99% of searches. Try anyone else's search engine and its usually a waste of your god damn time because they don't index pages even half as well.

 

If they want to complain Google has a monopoly on search engines, how about you just make your own damn search engine better. It's like a fat guy complaining an athlete is faster than him at the 100m sprint. How about you just work harder and try to keep up instead of trying to feed the athlete abunch of cheese burgers so you might have a chance.

That's what the lawsuit is about.

Google have actively prevented others from making competitive products. The lawsuit isn't about "Google are too big so they must be made smaller". It's about "Google are big because they are abusing their powers to make sure competitors can't create services as good as theirs".

 

If you want competing products to be able to become as good as Google search then you should be cheering on this lawsuit, because it will hopefully result in Google no longer actively trying to make competing services worse.

 

 

Seriously, does nobody here actually read the article? Does everyone just read the headline, think they understand the situation completely and then comment?

[LAwLz]

16 hours ago, TigerHawk said:

IMO if they want to compete with google they should have to put in the decades of R&D and work google did to get where it is today. You can't tell me Microsoft can't afford it with Bing. If Apple wanted to, they definitely could. If the old search engines wanted to compete back in the day, they should of had a clean ad-free front page like Google did. I still remember an old comparison from like...idk 2006? Comparing Google to Yahoo and Ask Jeeves and Lycos and all of them. All full of ads and other bs and Google is just a plain white page with a search bar. There is a reason people chose them back in the day.

Don't get me wrong, I am not naive enough to think google isn't making serious bank on selling statistics and userdata from everything people search. Common searches from domains in this part of the world, etc. I am just saying it doesn't feel right for people to get a free ticket on the back of someone who invested billions of dollars and probably millions of man-hours to get where they are.

This lawsuit isn't about that!

 

This lawsuit is about Google using their market dominance to harm competitors by gaining unfair advantages. 

 

If you want an analogy that might be a big simpler to understand, this is like if Intel noticed AMD processors beating them in benchmarks, so Intel just paid benchmark makers to artificially lower AMD scores.

Imagine if Intel had paid Cinebench to just remove 20% of the performance score if it detected an AMD processor, or if Nvidia paid game developers to make the game deliberately lag on AMD graphics cards. Both Intel and Nvidia have more than enough money to do those things, but we have laws that prevent it. If we were in such a situation then it doesn't matter if AMD put in a ton of R&D effort into their CPUs or GPUs because Nvidia and Intel control how well AMD's products perform. That's fucked up, don't you agree?

That's why we have laws that prevent dominant companies from actively harming competitors. That is what this lawsuit is about. About Google not earning their top stop and reputation as the "best search engine" legitimately, but rather through dirty tactics which has made competing services worse.

[kpluck]

On 9/23/2020 at 12:06 AM, Spotty said:

…but there's a reason why Google is synonymous with search engine.

 

Correct. It is because people are so stupid that they can't figure out how to change a default setting.

 

-kp

[Bombastinator]

3 hours ago, kpluck said:

 

Correct. It is because people are so stupid that they can't figure out how to change a default setting.

 

-kp

Sort of.  There was a time when Google took less and gave more.  To a degree it’s inertia.  I suspect a lot of people don’t even know it can be changed.  When AOL finally had to close up their dial up service it turned out they had tens of thousands of “customers” still who didn’t even know they had the service in the first place.

[Guest willies leg]

I'm always amazed how free products are so free and have such huge datacenters and staff.

Is my private information really worth that much? Where's my share?

[wamred]

On 9/23/2020 at 2:59 AM, 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.

Anti-trust is huge here. Although, there isn't anything Google or Alphabet can do about people using Google as opposed to Bing or duckduckgo. It is going to be interesting to see who wins though. I could see something in the future limiting Google's involvement in the tech world. 

[Mark Kaine]

13 minutes ago, wamred said:

there isn't anything Google or Alphabet can do about people using Google as opposed to Bing or duckduckgo

that's exactly what this is about, they obviously don't want to, but they can easily.

 

example: have duckduckgo preinstalled on every android phone instead of google. there, they did something...

 

again, this is exactly what this is about. allegedly illegal shenanigans to make google the most popular and often the default search engine on many devices.

 

this does at first sound like why would it be against the law to do everything to kill and undermine the competition , survival of the fittest! 

but this is indeed what this is all about.

 

 

[wamred]

1 minute ago, Mark Kaine said:

that's exactly what this is about, they obviously don't want to, but they can easily.

 

example: have duckduckgo preinstalled on every android phone instead of google. there, they did something...

 

again, this is exactly what this is about. allegedly illegal shenanigans to make google the most popular often the default search engine on many devices.

 

this does at first sound like why would it be against the law to do everything to kill and undermine the competition  survival of the fittest! 

but this is indeed what this is all about.

 

 

True. I hadn't really thought about the default search engine thing. I am curious as to what is going to happen from this though. 

[Bombastinator]

Whether it is right or not is one issue.  Why it is being done is separate, as is what would repercussions  of a decision in either direction be.  Any of the three can inform the other but they don’t actually have to. 

[sbllime]

On 9/23/2020 at 2:04 PM, lexusgamer05 said:

I wouldn't exactly consider it a monopoly, there are many other search engines you can use, but Google just happens to be popular

Google is 'popular' because of the monopolistic/anti-competitive strategy it has used. They are currently under investigation for violation of anti-trust laws. When a company pays for exclusivity from hardware and software manufacturers for example, it steers revenue and market share away from competing products resulting in less resources to innovate. In turn, the competitive products are now less able to compete effectively and the products reflect that. Google is 'popular' through potentially competition damaging practices. If Google had not paid to be the default provider on devices/software as ubiquitous as iPhones, Android devices, Chrome, and Firefox among others, the competition potentially would not have lost market share and resources as quickly, and would have been afforded a better opportunity to innovate.

[PocketNerd]

Something tells me that somebarrdy didn't like Google's refusal to give the DOJ access to search/customer data.

[Unclescar]

On 9/23/2020 at 12:59 AM, lexusgamer05 said:

why is the US govt wasting their time like this?

this implies that this is the only thing they are doing right now.

 

if it falls within their realm and it does not prevent other efforts then it is not 'wasting time'.

[eeeee1]

damn speaking about justice...

[Unclescar]

32 minutes ago, lexusgamer05 said:

I didn't imply that. I meant there were more important issues at hand to use resources on.

It's not an unimportant issue, and it is not preventing necessary resources from other issues.

[Joduko]

On 9/23/2020 at 3:18 AM, Moonzy said:

Sometimes I wonder why monopoly happens

[ACEHACK]

i use duckduckgo, sometimes, but god its awful when your using it to search for technical stuff. yahoo has been practically dead since google punched them to the face, and the only reason yahoo exists is verizon. i can understand how google has dominance, but maybe instead of punishing the product that everyone uses because its good and therefore successful, ask the companies like Microsoft to put effort t on bing so there is competition.  i hope this case gets thrown out of court, cause its not good for anybody. without google Mozilla wont exist, isnt that ironic. without half the stuff google does, modern internet wont exist. 

 stop punishing companies that are successful, because their products are actually good, and therefore most popular. its not googles fault bing is hot garbage and microsoft could not be bothered to fix it, or yahoo is  a walking corpse, or the 100s of other search engines that are complete crap.  

 

i call total bullshit. this is not for monopoly, its for the US elections. 

[Random_Person1234]

UPDATE: The lawsuit has been filed by the DOJ, joined by 11 states. In the lawsuit, the DOJ accuses Google of gaining a monopoly in “general search services, search advertising, and general search text advertising.” The Justice Department also claims that Google has maintained their monopoly through “anticompetitive and exclusionary practices.”

Articles: www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/10/20/doj-antitrust-lawsuit-against-google.html

https://apnews.com/article/google-justice-department-antitrust-0510e8f9047956254455ec5d4db06044

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54619148

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/technology/google-antitrust.html

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/20/tech/doj-google-antitrust-case/index.html

https://www.cnet.com/news/google-sued-by-department-of-justice-and-11-states-in-landmark-antitrust-case/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/20/google-antitrust-doj-lawsuit/

https://www.pcmag.com/news/heres-why-the-justice-department-says-google-is-an-illegal-monopoly

Full lawsuit: https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1328941/download