> Schmidtlein has derided the excerpts as cherry-picked and “out of context.”
"out of context" is the standard BS answer to anything. "What context, exactly, is missing?" should be the followup question.
Odd that they don't mention that Sridhar Ramaswamy is not merely the "founder of Neeva" but he was head of Google AdWords for almost 10 years! I guess you can't expect these reporters to read their own site.
> "out of context" is the standard BS answer to anything. "What context, exactly, is missing?" should be the followup question.
Quoting things out of context is also the standard BS way to smear someone. In any case, i agree that the person asking the questions should expect this response. If they're prepared for that response and the quote really wasn't taken out of context, it shouldn't be too hard to make the person using it look like an idiot.
The problem with all of this is that it's a performance.
Google does something actually anti-competitive, but it's subtle and requires a thorough understanding of industry dynamics to fully understand. But one of their employees said something that sounds bad, so guess what the headline is.
Whether the quote was taken out of context or not isn't even the interesting question, because it's independent of whether they're actually doing something wrong.
The quote could be completely in context and the employee was a fool who didn't know what they were talking about, or it could be completely out of context even though they actually did the bad thing.
What exactly is so hard to understand? It's a well known fact that they pay to be the default search engine. Either that's against the rules or it is not. It sounds like the DOJ doesn't want to be blamed for any potential negative consequences for establishing clear rules, so instead they'll bully Google into settling so that they can get an easy win.
The Department of Justice isn't a rulemaking entity, it's the federal prosecutor's office. The antitrust laws we have are quite old and passed during the era of robber barons in order to do something about them, with extremely broad language that by its terms would prohibit not only anything you might like them to but a lot of things you might not.
The result is that the courts get to make something up about when they apply, and have made a bit of a mess of it.
Sure, it says, "Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal." But that doesn't mean Sprint can't merge with T-Mobile. Or maybe it does. Anybody have a coin to flip?
What the DoJ can do is dump a bunch of allegations into an indictment and hope some of them sound plausible enough to induce a settlement. Which will ideally actually promote competition and not be some political quid pro quo.
> The Department of Justice isn’t a rulemaking entity
Yes, it is. [0]
> it’s the federal prosecutor’s office.
That is among its functions, yes.
> The antitrust laws we have are quite old and passed during the era of robber barons in order to do something about them, with extremely broad language that by its terms would prohibit not only anything you might like them to but a lot of things you might not.
Among the antitrust laws we have are:
* the Antitrust Criminal Penalty Reform and Enhancement Permanent Extension Act (2020); whose main effect was, as the names suggests, to make permanent the provisions of the Antitrust Criminal Penalty Reform and Enhancement Act (2004).
* the Criminal Antitrust Anti-Retaliation Act (2020)
* the antitrust provisions of the Competitive Health Insurance Reform Act of 2020 (oddly enough, 2021)
Some of our antitrust laws were written in the so-called “age of robber barons”, but antitrust law (even purely statute law) hasn’t been static since.
> you probably mean, though, that its not the rulemaking entity with regard to competition, since that’s mostly the FTC.
I actually wasn't aware that they issued rules at all and now that I know that they do I kind of wish they would stop.
Sometimes we separate government functions for a reason.
> Some of our antitrust laws were written in the so-called “age of robber barons”, but antitrust law (even purely statute law) hasn’t been static since.
It's not that Congress hasn't passed a law since then, but I believe they're being accused of violating[0] the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890.
> It's not that Congress hasn't passed a law since then, but I believe they're being accused of violating[0] the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890.
All three of the “core” anti-trust laws (the Sherman Act, the Clayton Act of 1914, and the FTC Act of 1914) have been amended several times since by later acts. They aren't ancient relics that haven't been reconsidered and adjusted based on experience and changing conditions.
I feel like the problem with them is actually the modern courts rather than the old law. These rules were meant to have teeth, but they're also targeting entities that by their nature have power, and then you're consistently going to have trouble with vigorous enforcement being debased through political influence.
What we need is something that prevents market concentration to begin with rather than trying to claw it back once it's already entrenched.
Consolidation of power has been happening at least since the agricultural revolution 10000 years ago.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to limit it, and there have been periods of relative equality. Just that it's always going to be a battle, there isn't something we can do to change this behavior once and for all.
There isn't something we can do to make people stop trying to consolidate power, but we can do quite a lot of things to put hurdles in their way, or at least stop actively providing them the tools to do it with.
The problem is that it was written to smash trusts to smithereens but has had a century of being eroded by well-funded monopolists with expensive lawyers.
If it was working the way it was supposed to, none of these companies would be this big.
There are entire books and law review articles written about antitrust law since the Sherman Act. Maybe you've read some of them?
Being "quite old and passed during the era of robber barons" is not quite the killing argument you think it is. The 13th Amendment is even older. So is Marbury vs. Madison.
If the rules were actually that simple, the world would need far fewer lawyers.
But - whether you say "rules that simple can't work when the world is vastly more complex", or "rules-writing lawyers aren't stupid enough to write their own kind out of their jobs" - the rules are definitely not that simple.
Simple rules aren't very feasible though, laws need to be well defined and the sheer scale of societies today makes that anything but simple.
I'd argue that's the main reason for not making a law though, if it's too complicated for the average person to read and understand where the line is drawn then we shouldn't draw it.
As has been said so many times on HN, individual users of Google resources are not the customer, they are the product. Browser defaults are an annoying way that Google exerts pressure on everyone to be their product, but I'm more annoyed by their stupid Captcha API integrated into many pages Google has no business monitoring.
I feel harmed every day being coerced to be an unwilling and unhappy product of Google's adtech leviathan. I don't know what that means for this particular case, but hopefully Google gets the message and builds a better off-ramp.
I would suggest that since this is a court case, the rhetorical / commentary-like (aspects of) statements made by the attorneys in court will (especially at this level) almost certainly be 'parsed out' in facts.
You're both right that this kind of language is used non-stop by people in certain roles today - especially politicians. Of course, that has always been the case in politics at any point in history I have any real knowledge about. In a courtroom, there are some real differences.
First, certain types of statements may be considered impermissible, and challenges are possible in various forms during various phases of a trial or hearing. Further, people who work in these environments tend to acquire a sort of "rhet-dar" (and a rather explicit form) that too many who don't get this kind of 'practice' every (work) day don't. And, of course, instructions can be provided to juries to disregard certain statements / evidence depending on challenges / various issues with something brought into a legal proceeding. Finally, at actual decision time, while rhetoric can influence, whether the decision is made by a judge or jury, the emphasis will be on facts, laws, interpretations of laws, etc.
Fluff rhetoric like "out of context" in an opening statement is quite empty, especially by the time a proceeding is wrapping up. Always makes a good sound bite for the external world though.
I can't personally be much more specific since my own legal experiences (of various types) have been ad hoc and infrequent. I considered pursuing a degree several times, never did. In particular, anyone reading would be right to not consider this in any way an authoritative comment. I will provide one ref though that has some pretty good additional info from what I had a chance to skim when looking for a bit more to give y'all. I'm sure there are others here far more expert than I, perhaps one will flesh things out better than I may have - but, giving at least a sense of the role that that kind of journalist-bait might play in an actual legal proceeding seemed worth something...
Sigh, it's bad enough listening to lawyers play at this game of rigor/formality/objectivity, so it's even more tiresome to listen to others make their excuses/apologies for them. Lawyers and judges ARE politicians, not some scholars or scientists, and our courts do a bunch of batshit arbitrary stuff every day. Appealing to facts and "words mean things" and defending the profession as even meaningfully skilled, much less noble, seems silly these days when you take a look at most stuff in the real world. Roe v Wade comes to mind here- there's no esoteric and learned moral calculus going on, and we see that precedent matters only up until it does not. Judges invent the rules and ignore them when convenient. At least the other opinion engineers and spin doctors in society aren't as hypocritical about it. The outcome of this case is probably already decided, and the rest is theater..
I don't really agree with that - I've seen plenty of things that have been taken out of context, and portrayed actions in a really false light. It's really not hard to take some off the cuff email or Slack remark and present it as something like official company policy.
More importantly, though, I think anything a company says internally should be 100% irrelevant in an antitrust case. It's like the famous advice parents should give their kids when it comes to relationships: "Just ignore everything a potential partner says, and only focus on what they do."
I mean, it's not like corporations need to have any sort of "mens rea" to be found a monopoly abuser. IMO all that should be evaluated are the actual actions a corporation took to stifle competition. I don't really see why internal communications are relevant at all in these trials.
Care to explain why? When evaluating whether a company has abused its monopoly, why isn't it enough to simply look at its actions?
To be clear, I don't feel this way to give companies a break. I feel this way because whatever employees were thinking behind the scenes shouldn't matter. If a company locks up the defaults on pretty much all browsers, why isn't that fact alone enough to come to a conclusion?
On some level, I don't think a company has actions. Everything a company does are effects of what their employees do. Then it boils down to, is the action of an employee sanctioned by management? This you can only tell by looking at the internal communication.
But your response and the other responses here about "intent" highlight my exact point:
1. No individuals were charged with anything in this situation. When determining the remedy in an antitrust case, it's always about changes to the company structure or behavior: breaking them up, restricting areas where they can do business, etc. I think whether something was "sanctioned by management" is totally irrelevant here. Also, the types of decisions we're talking about here (acquiring companies, paying off other companies to be the default search engine, etc.) are usually so big they are always done with management approval. What, "Sorry, Bob in accounting accidentally paid Apple a billion dollars to be the default search engine on iOS"?
2. "Intent" here should be totally irrelevant. At the corporate level of behavior, "well, I didn't mean to shoot them" is a nonsensical response. Whether Google's "intent" was to crush the competition or to just vacuum up all the revenue for themselves, who cares? The outcome is the same, and what should be judged is whether the actions Google took as a company were anticompetitive.
Everything a human does are the effects of what its cells do. This logic doesn’t hold, we treat the entity as an entity and acknowledged that it’s intentions are often beyond the scope of its individual parts. Just as the grouping of cells have goals independent of any one, so does a group of men.
Yes it is a legal entity, but it does not have own motives. It is just a vehicle for human activities. You can't call a company to the witness stand, and you can't put it in jail. Even if you could, it would not suffer.
I'm guessing some actions that could be interpreted as abusive, could to some extent have been random. But internal communications tell you if they were random or planned out.
I think that maybe goes for going after the decision makers.
As for deciding if the company needs regulation or being broken up because it's operating as a monopoly, there I would agree with you. It wouldn't really matter if it just happened as an accident of the market, or as a planned outcome, if it creates a bad market dynamic, it should be corrected.
The materials found during discovery are not always relevant. You can discover all of them, but then some of them shouldn't be presented to the court or jury.
> I've seen plenty of things that have been taken out of context, and portrayed actions in a really false light
And in those situations, the answer to "What context, exactly, is missing?" would be exculpatory. If it is out of context, the context would demonstrate that. If it's as damning as it seems, then "you're taking that out of context" will be demonstrated to be BS when context is provided.
> "out of context" is the standard BS answer to anything.
You are completely wrong on this one. People routinely take things out of context on purpose to defame others. Thats so common I am surprised you can make the opposite claim.
Why do you expect anyone here to answer you? You're not the judge, and presumably no one posting in this thread is an attorney representing Google in this case.
why do I expect anyone to answer? They said, "out of context" as if there's some broader context that would put it in a different light. OK, what is it?
Otherwise, it's just empty legal boilerplate, i.e. performance art.
I have to say I'm disappointed with the focus on defaults here. Defaults are important, but they're also mostly a bidding war. It's not like Microsoft has no money.
The real issue is the tying. They build this conglomerated system that all comes together as one blob, and get third parties to depend on various parts of it to prevent them from being swapped out individually. Then to replace one of them you have to be able to replace the others, which makes it very hard for any but the largest corporations to compete.
Capturing the search default on Android is a tiny piece of what they do with it, and the part that would barely make any difference to the search market when the alternative would be that they just pay for it. Or let people choose them, since that's the market where they have the strongest brand and it's all the ancillary markets that they might not have dominated where the consequences are greater.
And then they wouldn't have to deal with this:
> The question that matters most, though, is whether Judge Mehta can be convinced that consumer harm applies to free products like search engines.
Because they could get them for the 30% cut on Google Play.
Advertising isn't a dissimilar tack when you cast the advertiser as the customer, but then you're stuck trying to prove that Google wouldn't have had a dominant search engine without doing this, when they had one before doing this.
> They build this conglomerated system that all comes together as one blob, and get third parties to depend on various parts of it to prevent them from being swapped out individually. Then to replace one of them you have to be able to replace the others, which makes it very hard for any but the largest corporations to compete.
The case doesn't focus on this because it's not illegal. There are definite benefits to the user in terms of convenience here. And building a product that people want more is not anti-competitive behavior just because it requires a larger company to compete. Anti-competitive behavior is when you get customers by means other than building a product they want more.
The entire point is that it isn't something the customer wants more, but they get stuck with it because they need a subset of it and it's all glued together.
This is quite distinct from providing two products together. You can go to the store and buy an entire PC with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Edge. Then you can install Firefox on it, or remove Windows entirely and install Linux. The trouble comes when you can't separate them anymore.
Then in order for a competitor, and therefore the customer, to replace the banana the customer wants to replace, and which would otherwise be easy to replace, the competing product also has to replace the gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle. Which is bad for the customer.
And tying is illegal. Typically it was in the context of a company with a dominant market position requiring you to buy products in a related market if you want the product you had to get from them, but now they're doing a new thing. Not only can you not buy them separately, you can't even separate them after you've bought them -- which should be a violation regardless of what kind of market position you had to begin with, because its primary effect is to harm competition. But this stuff is pretty much invented by judges as they go along, so who knows what they're going to do.
What do you mean that you can't separate them? Seems to me that "tying" has no meaning for free services. You have access to the whole thing, but you are free to pick and choose exactly what parts you use. It's one thing when you want a banana that costs $1, but you have to pay $100 for the gorilla/banana combo. But if the banana + gorilla is free, then it's hard to complain that you are being abused because you got a free gorilla with your banana.
How the start menu search always uses Bing with Edge? And every couple months you get a new notification or modal welcome screen trying to switch you back to Edge? And they add new features that insist on launching Edge. Oh, and the idea of uninstalling Edge has gone way out of the Overton window.
Same with Chrome, you can go without it but you will need to dismiss hundreds of nagboxes on Google sites.
> It's one thing when you want a banana that costs $1, but you have to pay $100 for the gorilla/banana combo. But if the banana + gorilla is free, then it's hard to complain that you are being abused because you got a free gorilla with your banana.
A phone is $100 (or $1000) and an app is $1.
Or to take it from the perspective of the device OEM, the price isn't the money, it's having to agree to take the apps and services the customers might prefer alternatives to as a bundle with the services the customers demand you include with your product. Which has market value in the same way as paying for the default search engine does, and could have reduced the price of the device for the end user. Or increased competition for those services (like Google Play) that currently operate with high margins.
You're talking about tying things together like Microsoft Word with onedrive etc.? This sounds backwards to me. The "tying together" only feels like "tying" because you get used to the extent the services interact with each other, which is very convenient, and feel like you're unable to change, because you're unwilling to let go of those easy ways of interacting with other services.
But that doesn't make the interaction anti-competitive; it makes them a nice product. It wouldn't make sense for MS to allow, say, other clients to MS Word to interact with their cloud, that would be anti-competitive in that they're actively shooting themselves in the foot while doing it. I don't see why this is a bad thing.
And in general, the fact that we're even converging from multiple services towards one is purely historical. The reason MS word & excel are two separate programs rather than one is due to the tech landscape on the past. Google Docs or Notion or Coda are all supersets ot Word vs Excel, using newer tech & hardware to provide a more unified experience, which IS in the interest of the user.
> The "tying together" only feels like "tying" because you get used to the extent the services interact with each other, which is very convenient, and feel like you're unable to change, because you're unwilling to let go of those easy ways of interacting with other services.
The tying together is tying together because you can sensibly separate them and the customer might like to use Microsoft Word with Google Drive or LibreOffice with OneDrive.
> It wouldn't make sense for MS to allow, say, other clients to MS Word to interact with their cloud, that would be anti-competitive in that they're actively shooting themselves in the foot while doing it.
It would be anti-competitive in that it would make it easier to compete with them?
> Google Docs or Notion or Coda are all supersets ot Word vs Excel, using newer tech & hardware to provide a more unified experience, which IS in the interest of the user.
The problem with the "unified experience" argument is that it only justifies putting them together, not inhibiting the customer from separating them. If the "unified experience" is actually in the interest of the customer then they'll choose it even when the alternative is available.
> The tying together is tying together because you can sensibly separate them and the customer might like to use Microsoft Word with Google Drive or LibreOffice with OneDrive.
They might like to, but those options are just not available in the market, and that's not an anti-trust issue. I might like to have a Tesla with Apple Car play. I might like to have Ford Ranger with an engine made by Toyota. But these companies are under no obligation to satisfy my desires. I am free to make those combinations happen at great inconvenience to myself, but those companies are in no way expected to help me do that.
The issue is not the inconvenience unless they took action to make it inconvenient on purpose. It's when they do take action to make it inconvenient on purpose, or prohibit it through contracts or DRM.
Really? The reason it's not possible to put a Ford engine in a Toyota is not that Toyota purposefully make their cars not fit Ford motors; it's because they're not keen on making it so. It takes way more effort to create a unified standardized interface that 3rd parties can connect to rather than just making the interface fit your product. That's what I mean about actively shooting themselves in the foot: They spend money exposing the interface such that others can connect to it, and then loose money by others providing 3rd party services connecting to them.
It is possible to put a Ford engine in a Toyota. People have done it. It's not as simple as dropping it in but it's fundamentally a thing of approximately the same size that runs on gasoline and produces torque.
> That's what I mean about actively shooting themselves in the foot: They spend money exposing the interface such that others can connect to it, and then loose money by others providing 3rd party services connecting to them.
Let's separate this into two pieces. One of them is the benefit of the anti-competitive action: If you want Office you need OneDrive which drives more business to OneDrive, and vice versa. The other is the benefit to each of the services of compatibility with other services. This is not losing money, it's making money because now customers with LibreOffice can use OneDrive (increasing use of OneDrive) and customers of Google Drive can use Office (increasing use of Office).
The problem, which is why the law is supposed to proscribe this, is that the company profits more from the anti-competitive tying than it does from the compatibility. The "loss" attributable to customers having more choice is the evil the law is intended to prevent.
The annoying thing about this is that it's squishy. Active Directory is basically DNS and Kerberos and LDAP, except that it isn't. If you try to swap in some standard third party LDAP server for Microsoft's, it breaks. Is that because they made some valuable integrations that customers prefer, or because they're Microsoft doing EEE? What if it's a little of both, does that mean they should get away with it?
But if Samba then does the work to make a Microsoft-compatible implementation and then Microsoft breaks it or enters into contracts with customers that prevent them from using a Microsoft product with the competing directory implementation, that is no longer ambiguous.
>You can go to the store and buy an entire PC with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Edge. Then you can install Firefox on it, or remove Windows entirely and install Linux. The trouble comes when you can't separate them anymore.
If you don't want Windows why would you buy a PC that has it pre-installed and the license price thus included in the total? The fact that you couldn't get a PC without Windows on it was one of the points made in the Microsoft antitrust case of the late 90s.
It’s all so ridiculous. Microsoft got nailed for talking about beating the competition. They’re trying to nail Google for training employees to not talk about beating the competition. What is competition supposed to be if it’s not beating the competition.
Just have extremely progressive taxation on companies as they get larger and stop approving megamergers if you believe large companies are harmful.
They are not being prosecuted for "training employees to not talk about beating the competition." They're being prosecuted for restrictive deals on the search engine default, which prevents competition from gaining the data they need to compete. Udi Manber himself said that's what they're for.
The training bit: personally I think it's a mistake for the government to dwell on that too much. It would be nice if they had a smoking gun email about "cutting off their oxygen," but they don't, so move on. Explaining why you don't have the smoking gun is something you should do only in passing.
I don’t think “progressive tax on companies as they get larger,” would be at all helpful. For one thing companies can skirt this with subsidiaries but also there are capital intensive industries where such a system could punish the average company. I agree they shouldn’t allow mergers, this should be very rare and there should have to be a very good case for it, but also just breaking up companies should be a lot more normal.
I also agree there has to be some kind of answer based on company profit, but I think that taxation is not the best answer. It would be much better if there was a way to funnel that money into
R&D at other companies and even industries; but admittedly I have no idea how such a system would work or if it’s even possible. Just sounds good in my head.
> What is competition supposed to be if it’s not beating the competition.
It's supposed to be fair. Microsoft didn't get nailed because they were winning, they got nailed because they were winning by abusing one monopoly to try and create another.
Bwahaha. Since when is business, or hell life in general fair?
Maybe ‘not doing illegal things’ should be the bar? At least they’re written down in advance (hopefully) instead of retroactively defined by folks who didn’t win?
> Maybe ‘not doing illegal things’ should be the bar? At least they’re written down in advance (hopefully) instead of retroactively defined by folks who didn’t win?
...yes, allow me to introduce you too this little thing called the Sherman Antitrust Act, which has been the law for ~130 years.
That you first led with if it was fair or not, then tacked on the law as a penalty for it not being fair (seemingly in your opinion, as you provided no particular specifics).
Which is what you wrote.
As it’s hard to find a company that doesn’t at least attempt tactics like this named in the complaint (or much worse), it seemed to leave the implication clear.
They deserved to have the law applied because you felt it was unfair.
That law exists to explicitly make certain types of unfair competition illegal. That's the point. So yeah, I pointed out that there's an underlying ethical principle, and that principle got encoded into the law, and MS (and now Google) violated both the ethical principle and the actual law.
The law is very vague and never says ‘unfair’ anywhere. Lots of competitive practices many consider unfair is de-facto legal (in that large companies like Comcast are literally doing them in the open right now, and have been for a decade plus with nary a peep from regulators).
Feel free to read the code, sections 1 through 7.
It says ‘in restraint of trade or commerce’. But how is Google restraining trade or commerce in a way any different (or even more than!) a broadcaster getting exclusive rights to broadcast the Olympics for instance? And how is that not Unfair too?
In law the general definition of monopoly covers so many markets, and is also based on ‘unreasonable’ efforts to restrict competition. Reasonable is doing a lot work here, as that can go pretty far!
So what law exactly do you think they are breaking and why? Are they taking unreasonable steps to prevent others from competing with them? If so, what would be reasonable for them to do instead?
>Bwahaha. Since when is business, or hell life in general fair?
Fatalism sounds wise but is not. Life is fairer than it used to be and can be fairer than it is now. We cannot end injustice, but we can end this injustice.
It isn’t fatalism, it’s ownership. Fatalism would be saying ‘nothing can ever be fair’. Which isn’t true.
If one assumes life is or should be fair, then when it is not one is a victim of others and has little means to resolve it directly. After all, that should never have even been possible!
If one assumes life is not fair, then one has awareness of risks and choices they can make (and a realistic view of choices they don’t have).
If one wants to make a just and fair society, recognizing it is an abstraction on a fundamentally unfair foundation is important. Or you’ll just end up with a delusion plastered on top of another delusion.
Allegations are also easy. A verdict is a different matter. We’ll see what happens.
And frankly, if life was actually fair - we wouldn’t need a justice system at all, would we?
Apologies, been too busy posting apparently. I did read the actual Sherman act (and provided links) recently, and experience wise I’ve been in management and senior leadership at several FAANGs in the past where this particular situation was a real and present ongoing concern. Including the one being targeted in this case.
So I’ve had all the training, worked with some talented attorneys, and been directly involved in related decisions - though not the ones being called into question here.
Jurisprudence is about establishing consistent interpretations of those words. The point of "legal certainty" is that an ordinary citizen can predict what will and won't be judged fair and reasonable. "Courts have ruled" is what you go by. The Supreme Court in whatever country is the final judge of that.
If your point is that it's inconsistent, that's trivially true. Human beings are involved.
After this exchange, I thought of a use that's been reduced to one syllable: FRAND, for "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory."
In this thread, for instance, when asked what unreasonable thing Google was doing, no one has an answer apparently. Let alone, alternatives.
Same with Fair vs Unfair.
So when it gets to the courts, and some line gets drawn - many people will get surprised, because what they thought was illegal/legal will not be the case.
And they were not likely unreasonable or wrong before hand either.
It’s not literal (as in de jure) ex-post facto of course, but it’s pretty close to de-facto.
Frankly, it’s awfully similar to the SEC’s handling of crypto regulation (and the confusion and BS resulting from it).
Have a vague enough rule that almost anything could apply. Refuse to provide any guidance or enforce it consistently. Come down on someone you don’t like later (after they’ve been doing it for decades), and claim they’ve been violating it the whole time and they should have known (somehow).
It may be legal (or not, we’ll find out), but it doesn’t seem just.
As for what Google is or isn't doing wrong: the prosecution has to lay that out. I would think the opening statement would have said that, but I didn't read it. If it was really weak, Google would have moved for a dismissal or directed verdict.
> Bwahaha. Since when is business, or hell life in general fair?
The entire purpose and objective of the law is to make society just and fair. It is far from perfect, but it is well superior to the selfish mayhem you speak of.
Ho man. Have you ever actually sat in a court room before?
Or been involved in cases?
This is so far from the actual application of the law it’s hilarious.
The purpose of the law is keeping problem cases under control, providing a degree of predictability necessary for social stability, and mediating disputes in a way they don’t escalate into socially disruptive violence.
‘Keeping the peace’.
All the rest is window dressing/PR.
The reason why Google is getting this case thrown at it is not because what it was doing was unfair - but because they were too damn good at doing it.
If they went bankrupt trying or it didn’t work, no one would care. Same if they were only middling successful (but didn’t get so obscenely rich and high profile off it). There are hundreds of examples of this right now in a number of industries, from meat packing to RAM, that will continue to be ignored.
And because they’ve been so good at it, it’s stirring up a lot of anger and resentment that will cause problems. So they need to be “brought back under control”. Just like Microsoft was back in the day.
About the training: Suppose GCP or Gmail accidentally steps on the toes of a user who happens to compete with Google in some other way, and during some anti-competition lawsuit/hearing, they dig up a message between employees dissing that particular competitor. Maybe things like "let's make X feature better than Y company" are fine, but it can easily slide to less innocent-looking things.
It doesn’t really seem like there’s any evidence for a story where Google went out of their way to destroy any competing search engines. The worst thing the article references is an engineer who argued that search engine quality is directly proportional to search volume, which if true would imply that making Google better necessarily implies other search engines will be worse.
I think paying Apple and Mozilla to be the default search engine, as well as within Chrome, counts as intentionally crippling other search engines.
If Apple made them default because they’re the best, then that’s fine. But spending a ton of money to keep themselves as the default, when they already have the vast majority of market power, seems like an artificial barrier to competition.
Unless another search engine is so much better that Apple is willing to forfeit billions of dollars of pure profit, then nobody else has a chance to be the default.
That makes a strange legal argument, though. You can't say that Apple putting the default up for bid is anti-competitive behavior by Google. So would you say that Google can't bid in the auction because that in itself is anti-competitive? That also seems like a tough legal argument to make (though I am not an expert on this) because it means that basically everybody is allowed to be in the auction except for Google.
You could definitely say it was anti-competitive if Google was paying more than they earned from this search traffic. But I seriously doubt they are doing that.
Apple made them the default because they are the best at monetization of large volumes of search queries from iOS devices. If another company was better at it, they'd put in a higher bid and rake in the profits.
Another search engine that is 90% there and can offer only 10% of payments might have been good enough (at least in a certain time frame) if it gave Apple an opportunity to snub Google.
Surprised there's not much coverage on this on HN. I suspect this is the first of many legal cases against the tech empires, and if this goes south you may be able to conclude the rest will as well.
How much power and influence can Google buy (absolute best attorneys, call in favors...) vs the power of the US government? If the US government can't do anything, what does that mean?
> If the US government can't do anything, what does that mean?
It means the US people would need to - if they wanted to - pass new laws specifically to target tech company's anti-competitive behaviors because they aren't exactly the same thing as what was being done by the companies the laws originally targeted.
I'm not convinced there is broad >60% popular support for expanded antitrust laws, so you'd really have to start with that in terms of what it means.
Some of us lived to see Microsoft be found to be in violation of antitrust statutes and forced to break up only for them to become the behemoth they are today. Its hard to get excited about the Google since its already been proven with enough power and influence, not too much of this matters a whole lot.
It worked. The lawsuit had a tremendous impact on Microsoft's culture and had them running scared from the government for years. It made them less ambitious, more bureaucratic and reluctant to just buy up any Internet startup that posed a threat. Source: I was working there at the time.
What worked was the decline of home PC users in favor of smartphones; Microsoft was never able to do well in this space despite buying Nokia's phone business (let alone dominating it as they still do on the desktop). Modern Microsoft has entirely switched to being cloud focused from just an OS vendor - their big money spinner these days is Azure, followed by Office 365 and then only Windows. It's also why Windows 10 and 11 are so user hostile compared to earlier versions; Microsoft doesn't have to care about a good user experience and will inevitably push the OS itself to a subscription model.
Which is honestly a shame. Even as a budding software engineer I didn't really understand the Microsoft anti-trust case at the time. It's only now that I appreciate the problem and do think it would have been better for everyone, Microsoft included, had they been broken up.
> On June 7, 2000, the District Court ordered a breakup of Microsoft as its remedy.
Then
> Ultimately, the Circuit Court overturned Jackson's holding that Microsoft should be broken up as an illegal monopoly. However, the Circuit Court did not overturn Jackson's findings of fact, and held that traditional antitrust analysis was not equipped to consider software-related practices like browser tie-ins.
It wasn't exactly intentional but the results were great for competition. They were forced to invest in Apple and to stop bullying them, and now Microsoft is completely dominated by them in terms of personal computing.
Looks to me that Googlers reading the news of this are quite concerned about their employer being held to account for not only their monopolistic actions, but as a result of that and retaining 90% of the market share, also having virtually close to no serious competition to challenge their monopoly.
It appears that this is the beginning of the end of the big tech party.
> It appears that this is the beginning of the end of the big tech party.
I think about it differently. First, the government going after a company for being a monopoly is the goal for every company in a capitalist system. It means they won the game by cornering markets and crushing every possible competitor.
Second, breakups will grow the big tech pie and increase shareholder and employee value. How many small, but growing endeavors has a company like Google killed? How many internal projects never see the light of day because they aren't Google scale day 1? Breaking up some of the current big tech behemoths will unlock and trigger a new big tech party, it will just be spread across more different companies.
There are a lot fewer FOSS diehards and old school hackers than there were in 2001. And those that are still around are not going to be that anxious to admit that their darling Google, their ally and great hope for destroying "M$", turned out to be an even more heinous monopolist than them.
I don't think free/paid is the thing that will stop the decline because the downfall is adversarial input. If Kagi got huge people would start trying to SEO against them and they would end up like Google. Because I really don't think Google is bad because of the ads, it's bad because people desperately want their shitty site to be the first organic result rather than pay for the ad spot.
Having a huge behemoth that competitors like Kagi can fly under the radar with might be the only way for any search engine to maintain quality.
It's mostly an academic exercise since paid search will always be small, but I think both ads and SEO are at fault here.
Google profits from ad impressions and ad clicks. That is what they're incentivized to maximize, which means that for Google the ideal mix of search results is a few high quality ads on top of a lot of pages that are loaded with Google advertising. Far from having an adversarial relationship with SEO content farms, Google is symbiotic with them: the more time people spend on the content farms, the more ad impressions Google gets to sell. If the content farm doesn't actually answer the user's query and they return to Google for another round of first party ads, all the better.
They only need to provide relevant enough searches to keep people from trying a different search engine, which as we've seen isn't difficult.
Make a ton of test websites to try and reverse engineer how Kagi ranks websites, and then prioritize that over actual good content. The same way people manipulate Google results through SEO.
I've been at a job where we did this with Google. We had about 20 websites and 40 ad campaigns on adwords for fake companies where you could buy used dirty dishes. We wanted a topic that would have zero real-world results aside from us so we could easily compare our hypotheses and someone suggested pre-dirtied dishes. It was hilarious and had almost no search results so we went with that.
Strangely enough after a few weeks we noticed eBay and Amazon were buying the top ad slot for those queries. They probably had some automated way of tracking new trending Google search keywords matching "Buy ____" or "____ for sale".
Seeing "Amazon is the best place to buy Dirty Dishes" as a top ad was also hilarious. In fact if you Google "Buy Dirty Dishes" right now, Etsy is the top result. "Check out our dirty dishes selection for the very best in unique or custom, handmade pieces from our dining & serving shops"
We took our findings from that "research" and applied them to our real customers websites.
> I've been at a job where we did this with Google. We had about 20 websites and 40 ad campaigns on adwords for fake companies where you could buy used dirty dishes. We wanted a topic that would have zero real-world results aside from us so we could easily compare our hypotheses and someone suggested pre-dirtied dishes. It was hilarious and had almost no search results so we went with that.
But... is that manipulation or genuine optimization? I mean, if there were people who wanted dirty dishes, and you were selling them, then helping Google help dirty-dish searchers find you is making Google better (and overall making the world a better place).
SEO is a problem when it causes mediocre, crappy, or completely irrelevant sites to be promoted over actually good sites.
We managed websites for hotels/inns/ other travel related things. We obviously did not sell pre-dirtied dishes and there is no one buying those.
We figured out what made some experiments rank higher than others, and then used those techniques on tourism related websites.
The point is our customer's websites did not rank higher based on actual merit. They ranked higher because we learned how to abuse Google. And no, the sites were not high quality. We shuttered out higher quality websites who were not abusing SEO.
Kagi's ranking algorithm is already public. Kagi downranks sites with ads/trackers and promotes sites that do not have them.
The motive people manipulate Google is financial gain, most commonly monetizing traffic with ads/affiliate links.
That does not work for Kagi, first because there is no financial gain, second the amount of traffic you would get would be a fraction you would get from Google and that is not going to change any time soon.
Not saying it is immune to manipulation, I would love to know what a good attack vector and motivation behind it would be.
SEO spam doesn't exist because Google sells ads. SEO spam exists because there's money in getting people to visit your site and Google is the largest search engine.
SEO spam is also something Google themselves are already generally incentivized to eliminate. It's not like their ad model does better if users lose faith in their results.
> It's not like their ad model does better if users lose faith in their results.
Yes but not really: if the results are so bad that they're useless, yes, the users leave, but Google profits maximally when the results are only barely good enough that you don't leave but still filled with a ton of ad-bloated crap.
I’m not a fan of it either because yandex always thinks I’m a bot and makes me do a captcha every 2-3 pages. But it’s significantly better than Google or bing at finding stuff.
I find that if I can’t find it through there, it most likely just doesn’t exist.
The nice thing about DDG is that you can always use !g to go to Google. But even after using them for years, I still find myself using !g 30-40% of the time.
me too. Google search result is low quality, but the overall quality of searchable text content has declined. I do most of my information search on Reddit or Youtube.
However.
Lately, I'm enjoying the integration of the generative AI at the top of the search result.
Try searching for a quote from an obscure show you watched when you were young. Not long ago Google would return pages of results. These days it's likely to return none.
I want to see Google slapped for being naughty, but this case is weak.
Defaults are defaults. What matters to users is choice. The choice is there to use a different search engine. Google widgets can be removed from phones.
Much worse is when Big Tech removes choice. Recent example: Microsoft mandating their Authenticator App as MFA, removing other options like SMS. If my workplace doesn't pay for my phone, and I don't want to install Microsoft crap on my phone, I'm in a bizarre predicament where I could be locked out of work because I refuse to install Microsoft apps on my personal device. This is wrong, much worse than "Google paid someone to be the default".
I disagree. Browsers like Chrome and Firefox have the ability to install different engines, yet I'd be shocked if Google wasn't at least 90% of the current default search engine on both browers. Most users might be technical enough to change their default, but unless Bing/DDG/et al are demonstrably better in their results, users won't switch.
Getting a meaningful market share of browser usage is very hard.
First, because most statistics are based on self reported user agent metrics from the top websites. But my parents don't go to Reddit, PornHub, YouTube or LinkedIn, etc.
Second, culturally speaking, I don't think we have accurate reporting of non-western websites. I bet most of China, India and Russia websites don't care about reporting their metrics publicly.
And last, internet usage distribution is very skewed. I myself probably generate 1000x more internet traffic as my parents, so I probably count as 1000x more market share than them. Yet, in terms of "users", I would count the same as they do.
The result I want is that Chromium becomes an independent foundation with Google having no more than 20% contribution and other major users (Microsoft, Opera, Brave, etc) making up the rest.
Mozilla is in a rock and a hard place since their #1 revenue source is getting scrutinised with a significant anti-trust suit in decades.
We need to admit that not even a new so-called AI tool called ChatGPT could compete and make a dent on Google's 90% market share [0] as a 'search engine' [1]. The new Bing made no significant change to challenge Google [2][3] and Neeva (by former Google employees) believed they could challenge them and failed. [4]
No contest on competition since there is little to no competition against Google in search.
Mozilla is one of the parties most damaged by Google’s anti-competitive efforts, though. If Chrome had to be self-sufficient and couldn’t rely on paid promotion on Google sites, not to mention other Google apps “accidentally” having bugs or performance issues in Firefox, the browser market would be a lot more competitive. Mozilla has already been in a bad place since Google decided to keep them just viable enough to serve as an antitrust defense, breaking the stranglehold would be tumultuous but also the first chance of getting into a better position for the first time in years.
I also wouldn’t read too much into Bing’s first AI round. It’s better than Google Bard but neither is trustworthy and the search market isn’t going shift to treacherous chat bots. The general quality of the regular search has been improving, however, and they seem to be getting better at least as quickly as Google is making their service worse. When I’ve done side-by-side comparisons they’re a lot closer than used to be the case - Google updates their index notably faster, but has less spam control and neither is as good as Google was half a decade ago.
How can you ban cross promotion, though? It's such a common practice across most industries. Chains like CVS put their generic versions right next to the name brands on the shelf, and even have signs that say "compare to <product being copied>." And it would actually be terrible for consumers if that were banned.
> Google apps “accidentally” having bugs or performance issues in Firefox
I would bet everything I own that this isn't happening. Would not be remotely worth the risk to Google. Besides, these bugs are rare enough and small enough impact that I don't even really notice them, and have never considered switching off of Firefox because of them, and I am a software engineer who is much more likely to notice this stuff than 99% of users.
Re:cross promotion, I think the big thing would requiring it to be open to anyone and/or paid. When CVS says “compare to Tylenol” they still have the name brand right there and don’t pretend their generic is somehow better. The web is different but I think it’d be useful to have a rule that, say, they can’t put Chrome ads in Gmail unless Microsoft can buy the same spot at the same price for Edge ads.
> I would bet everything I own that this isn't happening
As a daily Firefox user they’re pretty common - there was a long period where Meet, and only Meet, dropped Firefox calls frequently, GCP would get stuck in a redirect loop at login if you used a browser other than Chrome, etc.
I would be surprised if there was a smoking gun “break Firefox” instruction - more that it’s not a testing priority, they jump use Chrome proprietary APIs as quickly as possible and delay switching to the standard versions (like they did with YouTube with that slow web component polyfill), etc.
Mozilla needs to outgrow its dependence on Google anyway—it cannot effectively guard against Chrome's monopoly in the browser space while being wholly dependent on Google, any more than Google can be a good search engine while being wholly dependent on ads—the monetary incentives are off.
Give me a Firefox subscription and I'll pay for it in a heartbeat.
> Give me a Firefox subscription and I'll pay for it in a heartbeat.
I want to do this but I can't support Mozilla until the board stops giving Baker raises at mind-boggling rates and make a commitment to never do anything like acquiring Pocket again, as well as generally make a strategic shift to lessen reliance on one competitor who is obviously massively overpaying them.
They need to call Baker's bluff about her saying that her compensation (now an eye-watering $5.6MM - $4.8MM of which is bonus for... something[0], I'm sure she's paid even more now) is under market value before she continues her mission of driving Mozilla's userbase down so much that the two do indeed match in her eyes. It was extremely obvious how vulnerable Mozilla was by having their primary competitor also be their main source of revenue from the moment Chrome released. It is now 15 years since then and Google are still[1] 75% (!) of their annual revenue.
2021 was a decent year for contributions for Mozilla, yet it would take 46 years of 2021-level contributions (excluding all other revenue streams e.g. VPN) to pay for 1 year of 2021-level (after significant layoffs) annual expenses at Mozilla. If we include subscriptions that goes up to a 'measly' 5.3 years at 2021 levels for 1 year of 2021 expenses. They've got assets, but not enough to keep a 9 figure annual burn rate for more than a few years.
I'm not entirely opposed to their VPN service as a way to generate money, it makes more sense than buying Pocket. What doesn't make sense is how they treat security researchers and deal with critical bugs[2], committing the fixes on GitHub before the patch goes live - always a great idea with sensitive applications[3].
I still use Firefox sometimes, I still prefer it on my phone, but it's clear there's a poisonous culture within the company that makes it simply not the company it was in the 00s. I want to see it back to its glory days, but at the moment all it takes is for Google to start the squeeze and it'll all be over.
I'm not ready to support Mozilla. I'm ready to support a Mozilla revolution.
They also did almost no promotion - I’m assuming the plan was to push the product further ahead and then start a big campaign but the VC money drying up killed that.
Would help a lot if they stopped obsessing over the search engine and focused more on their browser engine and HTML standards as good as monopoly, while pointing out that Firefox exists as controlled opposition, given Mozilla is massively dependent on Google search engine revenue for their finances.
I’m currently reading Michael Lewis’ New New Thing and it’s interesting contrasting this reporting with the reporting in the book of the US vs Microsoft case. An excerpt of which can be read here https://slate.com/news-and-politics/1998/10/the-microsoft-tr...
Google's strategy has been obvious for decades, slowly become the infrastructure, make yourself into a dependancy and then start to squeeze out profits. Too bad corporations won and monopolies aren't broken up anymore.
"out of context" is the standard BS answer to anything. "What context, exactly, is missing?" should be the followup question.
Odd that they don't mention that Sridhar Ramaswamy is not merely the "founder of Neeva" but he was head of Google AdWords for almost 10 years! I guess you can't expect these reporters to read their own site.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/20/23731397/neeva-search-eng...