Indeed, the public and regulators are not pushing enough, the floor needs to be hotter for the CEO, whoever is in charge.
Google has lost its cute startup image long time ago and people have realized companies are never out there for the social / greater good, just for profits.
> Google has lost its cute startup image long time ago and people have realized companies are never out there for the social / greater good, just for profits.
It's more than that. Their behavior has changed.
Some years ago everyone was on their side because they were fighting for network neutrality and building Google Fiber and supporting Linux and providing Chilling Effects links to notify users of DMCA censorship and generally sticking it to the MPAA/Comcast/Microsoft.
These days they're not only not really doing that anymore, now they're misidentifying videos with YouTube Content ID and infecting web standards with EME and tracking everyone much more comprehensively than they used to.
People only think you're on their side as long as you continue to do things that show you're on their side.
> Those things are what gets HN riled up, but none of those things are noticed or cared about by mass consumer sentiment.
People are always forgetting that tech people are the ones involved in decisions about tech stuff.
When a huge corporation is deciding which cloud provider to use, the decision falls to the IT department, not the transportation department.
When Uncle Bob isn't sure which phone to buy, he asks his nephew the programmer instead of his other nephew the geologist.
When a reporter writing a tech story is looking through their contacts for someone to call for background, they choose the professor of Computer Operating Systems over the professor of Russian History.
When the government is involved in tech litigation, the EFF is there, not the ASPCA.
When some tech issue is in Congress, Wikimedia and Mozilla can put it in front of millions of people, not some blogger with a hundred readers.
It is usually unwise to disregard the interests of the people with the strongest influence.
When a huge corporation is deciding which cloud provider to use, the decision falls to the IT departmen
Cute. The decision is made by an executive based on a magazine article they read on a plane, or on what their buddies on the golf course said, then handed down by diktat to the workers. Same with all outsourcing deals.
> Cute. The decision is made by an executive based on a magazine article they read on a plane, or on what their buddies on the golf course said, then handed down by diktat to the workers.
I'm sure that has happened somewhere at least once. But in general what happens is that the executive reads a magazine article about The Cloud and the IT department gets orders to "do cloud" when the executive doesn't even know what that means. So the details fall to IT, like which provider to use.
And in the cases where the details are decided by people who don't understand the technology, they'll inevitably choose the wrong things and pay five times too much. Which makes it easy for IT to get a lower quote from the provider they actually want.
I mean your argument is essentially that executives are all incompetent and easily swayed by shiny objects and bright colors. But that was sort of the point -- they're as susceptible to being controlled by crafty subordinates as crafty vendors, if not more so.
Agreed, I can't recall a single instance I have seen where a major purchasing decision was influenced by anything out of the tech portion of the company unless the CEO was from the technical side.
Google has a natural monopoly. I am a big supporter of penalties for monopoly abuse but not all monopolies are bad. They do all need thorough oversight and regulation. But having a monopoly is not strictly bad. The illegal actions done to maintain them are strictly bad. They should be allowed to come and go as the markets demand.
A "natural monopoly" is something like the water or sewage or electricity provider where is isn't sensible to physically run more than one set of pipes into everyone's house. That dynamic doesn't apply at all to search engines.
Monopolies that are allowed to exist (e.g. last mile telecom, utilities) are usually very tightly regulated. Probably to the extent that Google would prefer to be broken up instead.
I'm not sure you could break Google up in a meaningful way without destroying it. Considering the majority of their revenue is search how could you divide up search?
I'm not sure that's the case; Apple isn't as dominant in share of any intuitively-described market as, say, Google and search ads, but a more relevant test for monopoly is pricing power, and I wouldn't be surprised if they in fact have that for some of their products/services.
Pricing power isn't defined by descriptive categories, it is defined by behavior (whether they can increase prices without sales moving to competitors.)
It's a test that exists because there are an infinite number of ways to construct named categories of products, which can create any appearance you want, but none of them tell you if things in that category are genuinely competing with each other.
The person I was responding to wasn't talking about pricing power, they were talking about monopolies. Apple isn't anywhere near a monopoly in any commodity or service. In fact, they compete with the near monopolies of Microsoft and Google.
Also, being a monopoly isn't in and of itself illegal, it's abusing your monopoly position to harm competition. You have to be a monopoly first.
Pricing power is a test for whether a monopoly exists; it tests for actual practical competition rather than the presence of other participants in a decriptive category which may not actually compete in practice.
It may be a test but having pricing power doesn't mean they're a monopoly. They have pricing power because they deliver more consumer surplus in their products than what they capture. Even in the case of the iPhone business having rising ASPs most of that has come from segmentation of the customer base into higher end models rather than simple price increases.
You don't need to have a monopoly to have pricing power, your product just needs to be differentiated enough.
One thing regulators could do is force Apple to support the installation of other operating systems on their hardware and allow OS X to be installed on other systems that are reasonably similar to their hardware (i.e. "hackintosh"). Perhaps even demand that Apple support ways to develop iOS that aren't tied to their platform.
How exactly would this benefit consumers? Arguably it would suck — either it’s not well tested or they spend so much time and money testing they don’t ship as much anymore.
Btw, you can already put Windows on their hardware, or Linux for that matter.
That is a really naive view of market share. The market for phones is tiered, and Apple dominates the tiers it wants: The profitable ones. It doesn't take 51% market saturation to have monopoly control.
Anybody who wants to get out of Apple's system can easily pick up a different high-end phone[0], with different tradeoffs, with few repercussions beyond how their Apple Watch (if they have one) works and the color of their messages when texting iPhone users.
That's not monopoly power.
[0] as a consumer I care about the phone's features, not its profit margin for the manufacturer. There's still a healthy ecosystem of non-Apple companies making phones.
It was more of a if you own an iPhone you are required to get all your apps through Apple and are charged accordingly so, reducing competition and ultimately being fleeced with pricing.
But no one is forced to use their eco-system. You can buy an Android and use their ecosystem. You can buy a Blackberry or Microsoft phone (I think) and use theirs.
I'm surprised no comments talk about reducing regulation to help this problem too. If it were easier for small ISPs to thrive, then there would be more competition. The question is: how many areas is Google thriving in which are prohibitively expensive to enter due to regulations?
Another competing factor is that Google makes most of its money in advertising - so every feature of every product has the opportunity to be compromised for the benefit of advertising. Internet advertising needs another revolution!
A "communist country" has rather more monopoly power than Google has today, but why would you wait until the Google States of America are indistinguishable from a communist country (and unassailable) before you break up Google?
They very might have in theory. Other thing is practicing it. Governments understand that too. Who pushes the narrative has the power there is no need for the violent revolution of 1789 style.
Google has lost its cute startup image long time ago and people have realized companies are never out there for the social / greater good, just for profits.
It's time to break up Google.