In what way does everyone "have to use Google's search engine"? There are no barriers to switching; you could switch to Bing forever in about five seconds.
Unlike switching from Facebook, you don't need to get all your friends to come along. Unlike switching from GMail, you don't need to move a bunch of data. Unlike switching your company away from Windows, you don't need to buy all new software, retrain all staff, or get your partners to change the format they use to interchange data with you.
If someone were to build a better search engine, we would all just switch. Like when everyone left Altavista in 1999.
I think there's something to say about having a monopoly, because the product is better than the alternatives. That's better for consumers than having a monopoly, because there are no alternatives.
Usually preventing better products is done through legal assistance:
1. Abusive use of patents to prevent small upstarts that can't afford litigation
2. Getting regulations passed that are so expensive only established players can afford them.
3. Making visa requirements so complex and expensive that it becomes a competitive advantage to have an entire department dedicated to it in your largco.
Having so much money that you can put out a product that integrated better with yours is just another spin on putting out a great product as far as I'm concerned, and thus never worries me.
IMHO doing away with patents would do much more to "curb bad monopolies" than any litigious strategy.
Isn't that Google bought duck.com? Isnt' that google demanding Android manufacturers to prioritize its apps (that's why Yandex sues the Google)? and so on.
I've tried switching from Google to reasonable alternatives, and I usually have to go back to Google to search twice because the results are not what I was expecting, nowhere near. I'm not sure if this is only my own experience, no offence to other engines (and their engineers), but if you can't find what I'm looking for I'm going somewhere else to find it.
Getting a bit tangential: I've been trying Bing again recently out of curiosity, and at least for my usage I find it now pretty reasonable. A few years ago it was barely usable, but now I'm fairly happy with it. It also feels slightly snappier to me than Google on loading results. The main problem is that a small but significant number of sites have a robots.txt that excludes all non-Google crawlers, making it impossible for other search engines to display equally good results in cases where that site has something relevant (unless they blatantly ignore robots.txt).
If a site owner wants traffic on their site - and most do - they want to make their site as easily discoverable as possible. That means being in all the search engines. Blocking one engine (or all except one) flies in the face of most business models.
The only exception I can think of is Google properties. By blocking out competitors, they can try to worsen the experience on other engines. Like imagine a video search on Bing that didn't include YouTube? But even then, it seems like someone finding a Google property via Bing still furthers their interests.
Few deliberately block Bing specifically, it's just a sloppy attempt to block unwanted crawlers, like the billions of crawlers running on AWS and DigitalOcean boxes. A quick-but-not-great hack is to have an entry blocking * by default, and then specifically whitelist GoogleBot to avoid getting delisted from Google. You could also whitelist other search engines, but that requires you to know and care about them, and for a long period Google was the only engine people really cared about, since it drove >95% of organic search traffic. I do feel we're past the peak of that period, however, and site owners are now getting more cognizant of non-Google search engines having at least some value in driving traffic.
Bing's image and video search have been superior to Google's for over a year now, in my opinion.
I use Bing as my default search engine, but it falls short of Google's results for a lot of programming-related queries. I still end up having to use Google a few times per day when I'm working.
So wait, who actually blocks Bing but not Google? That is just completely odd sounding to me... But Bing is definitely one engine I'm trying to switch to, it just isn't reliable when I'm looking up programming related queries sometimes. Then again I always know all the key words to throw at Google to find whatever I'm looking for. Googling is a (query) programming language by itself.
It's hard to say whether we're bubbled or if Google is really better. I tried duckduckgo for a while. There's a lot to love in ddg, but every time I needed something not obvious, I needed to check Google results too, just to be sure. And quite often, ddg results were, even if I'm not entirely fond of Google trying to understand meaning in my request, a bit too mechanical for my tastes.
Been using duckduckgo for a year or two now. If the results are not satisfactory i can always drop a !g into he query to have them send me to the Google results.
That said, DDG is damn good at giving me relevant stuff on clear queries. But i find that Google and DDG alike gets into a bind if i get a bit technical.
That's mostly my barrier for switching out of Google. Thanks for the tip, I always seem to forget that DDG can quickly push you back to Google when convenient.
The real fun part is when you set it as default engine for a browser. Then you can do things like !w to search just wikipedia's articles etc right in the url bar.
There is also startpage.com (!s(tartpage) in DDG) to give anonymized Google results. And also ixquick (!ix(quick), natch) for a meta-search (not sure exactly what engines they cover).
I use Waterfox, which is the 64bit version of Firefox. I always use the builtin search located in the upper-right corner of the browser which allows me to choose which search engine to use on the fly. I use all of the most popular search engines depending on what I'm looking for. I find when I'm looking for services and products, Google seems to work best. The default I use is the Storm search engine which seems to return results that avoid commercially driven items. I would have to recommend that everyone not fall in love with a single source for web searching.
From the article, Reich is saying that Google used its dominant market position to unfairly promote its own products. Antitrust isn't only about lack of alternatives.
Well, on second reading, you're right. He does slip in there next to Microsoft Windows that you somehow have to use Google Search because everyone else does, and doesn't explain how that supports the rest of his article. I don't think that's the main thrust of it, though.
I am as skeptical as anyone about giant corporations, but this is a stretch. How and why does our society expect players to refrain from using their current position to advance to a better position?
You mean the guy that had the audacity to include a web browser with an operating system? Good thing we shut that sort of thinking down, no telling how much the tech industry would have been hurt if we hadn't prevented that sort of practice.
Although Microsoft was sued for browsers and APIs, their true anti-competitive behavior lied elsewhere - pricing strategies. They will probably do it again too. I can't wait for all the surprised faces "but, but, but... windows had 3% market share".
One potential issue is data -- Google can leverage its huge number of historical searches to improve search for everyone. I doubt this is a huge issue for players such as Microsoft, but it probably poses difficulties for a small start-up.
True, but that misses the bigger picture of what these tech giants are doing. It also fails to account for how difficult it is to switch to something else once something has become entrenched. You could switch, but the answer is that you likely won't and the reason you won't isn't necessarily because the product is "better". One of the article's central ideas is that entrenchment can breed more entrenchment that hurts the common good. You might get a better overall search engine, but that search engine is bound up with power that goes beyond search.
If someone were to build a better search engine, yes. However, how do you do that if Google has its own data centers across the world, has special arrangements with ISPs so they can run edge servers directly in their networks and can cross-correlate their search results with data from all their other services - which include the aforementioned GMail, many millions of Chrome and Android installations and ad/analytics code embedded in a sizable percentage of all websites? Not to mention all the websites which will optimize their coffee for Google, not for your engine.
Note that I'm not talking about some clever algorithms or UI or any other kind of actual innovation. All that stuff is solely "capital" they could accumulate due to their existing power and reputation, but which gives them a huge advantage. A startup, no matter how genius their algorithms are, couldn't beat them in that field, simply because they don't have those resources.
Of course you could say "so what, that's the free market" - and of course building capital is a normal post of business - but when this inequality is so severe that it makes competition practically impossible (or only possible between 3 or 4 well-established players, as we see now) then I'd argue that something sounds be done.
What a joke. Big Tech too powerful? How about the military industrial complex? Pharmaceutical companies? THE BANKS? THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ITSELF?
No, those are all OK because they fit the agenda of total control. Technology is the only industry putting up a fight, the only industry that is solving problems for people instead of creating them.
Claims of hypocracy or some kind of inconsistent total position say absoutely nothing meaningful or interesting about the claims somebody makes, and are frankly, a really stupid reason to dismiss them.
Especially when the claimed inconsistency is so massively general that they can apply to anybody that somehow dosent like something about "the system".
Don't like the amount of corporate money in politics? Well you surely buy things from corporations! How can you justify such an obviously inconsistent position!
Don't forget big ag, "major" media, and the private prisons / police unions. They're big players too, and the entirety of their influence isn't evident by their market caps.
> only industry putting up a fight
Firearms? Gun companies are starting to refuse to sell to police in states where ownership by other citizens is prohibited. And, predictably, we're suddenly in the middle of a "gun control" debate, despite firearms deaths and especially murders on a steady decline over decades.
This. Our society happily tolerates so many entrenched monopolies and cartels that are actively hostile to their customers and blatantly manipulate government to keep competitors out. The tech industry is the least of our worries.
While true, the main concern I have with tech companies becoming too powerful is their access and control of personal data. This becomes even more concerning when they're so big they have significant data on individuals who actively avoid their services.
You don't think that those others are solving problems for people? If they weren't, they'd be easy to unseat, or more likely would collapse under their own weight. Are there all sorts of undesirable consequences of their success? Of course! But tech isn't exempt from that. And even if, for the sake of argument, the undesirable side effects of tech's businesses was magically orders of magnitude less than any other segment, it's not unreasonable to talk about it in addition to the others.
The thing about "Big Tech" is that you think the word "Tech" has anything to do with technology. It doesn't. It's just how the companies in question managed to get into a position of power. At the level of business this article deals in, it's just an identifier for a market segment.
Tech business is no longer the scrappy young underdog doing good and fighting the good fight. Sometimes their interests align with the people's and we benefit when they fight to protect their interests. But they also fight to protect their interests when they're at odds with the end user's best interests.
But I think you are missing the fact that all the big tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. went to the dark side a while ago. They have become big corps looking to squeeze proftis/blood out of a stone. So the article is really about the old guard having to contend with the newcomers.
I take issue with the characterizations of industries as "Big X". Big Pharma, Big Tech... It's clearly an attempt at demonizing larger players in the tech industry.
My opinion is that antitrust laws and such are not applicable here because even though the companies in question have an effective monopoly on traffic, it does not make it impossible for other players to create a profitable business.
Google is not a domineering empire like Standard Oil or Ma Bell once were. They do not have total control over everything. Even if they have a certain product (for example, Google Drawings), it doesn't stop other smaller players from making quality products that people buy (Sketch, Illustrator, Inkscape, etc.)
I don't really think this is a problem. (And where it is, existing antitrust laws are performing as they should.)
I do have a problem with Apple forcing the iPhone app developers to use MacBooks, given that about 90% of the purchases from cellphone app stores are made using iPhones (as far as I remember). This is the kind of anti competitive behavior that an anti trust law is supposed to punish. I don't know the legal technicality they are using to avoid it.
Big Tech also formed a cartel to lower engineers salaries. This is also something that should be punished by law (and AFAIK, they did win a class action suit).
I do think this is a problem and needs to be addressed.
Antitrust law can't force you to develop your products for platforms you don't want to target. You will never see an antitrust decision that Apple must develop a Windows version of XCode, and in fact doing so would probably require a total re-architecture of the iOS platform.
You might see antitrust law force Apple to allow sideloading, including apps built by toolchains third parties have hacked together.
You're also not required to use a Macbook; the Mini is $500.
The second point was addressed, though, by your own admission. It was punished (and if it happens again, I can only imagine the hammer will strike even harder).
If you don't like the MacBook, you can buy a Mac mini and use it as a build server from other (non-Macintosh!) computers. There are tools for other platforms, and Apple isn't obligated to maintain their platform for "non-standard" use. It's not antitrust, and it's not a technicality. They're not obligated to open their platform, because they're not restricting something that was previously open.
I don't like it either. That doesn't mean it's illegal.
I take issue with the characterizations of industries as "Big X"
They are Big. It's a word that describes how they can shape policy and public opinion in a way that smaller businesses can not, and that competitors' interests are aligned enough that they routinely collude via lobbying organizations or other means (Big Tech is catching up in this area).
I think this problem takes care of itself, but it takes time, more time perhaps than people are willing to allow.
1. As organizations metastasize, the negative tail of the competence distribution becomes more and more populated. In response, the organization clamps down with restrictive rules that retard its innovation in exchange for protecting itself from the invisible stupid within. See Microsoft, see IBM, and see increasingly Google and Facebook as they turn to acqui-hires over internal expertise.
2. It's nice to rant yet again about 20-year patent cycles, but when are we going to fix the copyright system? Or will we eternally be Mickey Mouse's beeyotch? At this point, I'd be happy with a Mickey Mouse Forever Amendment(tm) to the constitution if it would free up all the other copyrights.
3. Working around patents is what clever people do best. Make more or import more clever people and you'll eventually get the companies that knock Google and Facebook onto their increasingly lethargic keesters. And free bonus, if you make more technically literate young adults, they'll have a lot less to fear from looming technological unemployment.
i recently was having a discussion about #1 with some folks. I'm not sure its about the competence fall off, i think it's the desire to draw on productivity gains by orienting themselves in a process-centric fashion, versus the original product-centric design. Process centric makes sense for specialization and squeezing productivity gains out (standardized tooling/platforms, bureacracy, layers of middle management to bring it all together). Product-centric makes sense for innovation, but its inefficient in the long-term (small teams, wide range of responsibility).
So unless you want your core talent to flee for startups and begin the cycle anew, one has to find a middle ground, no? The moonshots seem like a reasonable attempt to do so to me.
But perhaps that because I'm 100% progress-driven. Process drives me nuts. It's great to have someone who can drive your progress through the channels of process, but I find that talent exceedingly rare. That said, my best work has happened the few times I've found that magic combo.
It's interesting he points to acquisition of patent portfolios of the big 3 (Apple, Amazon, Google) but no real mention of their defensive necessity given the current patent climate (vs using them offensively to sue competitors)
Seriously. This is possibly the most important comment in the thread. End software patents, restrict the use of other patents, and then watch the rate of portfolio expansion plummet.
If there's anything I take away from this discussion, it is that I miss the days when technology was about technology and people where skeptical about big corporations rather than having some weird personal relationship with them. Things have overall gotten better and better for people that want to create rather than consume, but I'm not sure it's going to last. It's weird to me that people put forward disruption as something prevalent in the industry, but they assume everything will somehow magically only get better.
It looks like they changed the headline on the website. The slug usually reflects the original headline and they don't want to change it later to keep links working. (I'm assuming this is the case here since I didn't personally see the original headline).
News sites are much too fond playing with their headlines to drum up hits, and with New York Times in particular I can't help but think of this quote from one of their editors:
I often hear from readers that they would prefer a straight, neutral
treatment — just the facts. But The Times has moved away from that,
reflecting editors’ reasonable belief that the basics can be found in
many news outlets, every minute of the day. They want to provide
“value-added” coverage.
That's awesome, the editors spitting in the face of their readers and the graves of their ancestors. It puts a clear point on what's wrong the Times, though: rich kid rambligs in a classic font.
Consolidation of resources and broadness of ecosystem produces synergistic effects that advance tech. Google benefits in its pursuit of self-driving cars and drone delivery from existing investments in maps, AI, machine learning, and data centers. Plus, the ad revenue stream funds R&D.
This is backwards. More of humanity is empowered to go into business and compete today than ever in history.
There are forces that level the playing field: Open source; Utility-Grade Internet services (where Google and Amazon compete head-to-head); cheap, ubiquitous connected computers; billions of Internet-connected customers...
It has never been easier for a couple of people to build and launch an app or online business and sell to the entire planet. If you consider anyone who has done this a 'business' I am skeptical that there are in fact fewer businesses being created.
Big Tech is a total monster. But it's not the current Google, Apple, Amazon who are the monsters of Big Tech. It's the company being born today that will be the Big Tech of the future that will be the true monster. I'm not looking forward to it...
EDIT: Or maybe I am. Is it better to live in a cage if the cage is nice enough? Who knows. Humanity possibly just hasn't developed a good enough cage yet.
The monopoly concern is legitimate, especially if the accusations against Apple, Google and Amazon have validaty in them. I think the real issue at hand is the bullying that is taking place for new entrants. Google arm restling a new entrant is like a child trying to wrestle with a boxer. There should be better policies in place to prevent frivilous litigations from tech giants.
Unfortunately they are big enough to fuel a lot of the irrational valuation exuberance in the startup world as exiting to e.g. Facebook is a valid exit strategy instead of building a standalone (and profitable) business.
Besides, the giants diversifying into experimental R&D moonshot projects is a bad sign too. Shareholders should not support that and probably wont in the mid- to long-term.
So right now the moonshots are privatized and the liberals are unhappy about it. When the pendulum shifts, the moonshots will be publicly funded again and the conservatives will be unhappy. Takeaway: happiness is unattainable.
Really? IMO as a former Ph.D. academic who chose industry because there was no future there, science funding in America has dried up into a shriveled husk of its former self in an age of bottomless pockets for overseas military adventures and an educational system that isn't creating the next generation we need.
So we're left with mostly Elon Musk to carry the embers of our space program while Craig Venter, Google and a few other companies are increasingly taking on aging research, something I think will ultimately have enormous returns in the private sector. Just not in time for next quarter's results so David Einhorn (and his net worth of 1/40th that of Bill Gates) can go @#$% himself.
And for all the supposedly wasted public money on science cited by conservative sorts that got us here, it's trivial to find yet another dead-end weapons system or overseas military adventure that cost the taxpayers exponentially more.
To be fair, there is the Connectome Project ($100M annually) and also the Exascale Project ($126M) but those won't even cover the cost of a single F-22 fighter jet ($339M).
Does SpaceX have any contracts that aren't for the U.S. government? Aren't most of their aeronautical engineers former NASA employees? I'm sorry to get stuck on the Elon Musk side comment, but NASA is still doing really important stuff such as the Mars rover, comet landing, etc.
Defense R&D spending is way higher but nondefense spending is still keeping up with inflation [1]. There are some agencies who have had reduced budgets, such as National Institutes of Health, while DoE and NSF have enjoyed increased budgets. [2]
Overall I find your post hyperbolic and not consistent with the stats and figures. I'm assuming that your university's research was defunded and that's why you have adopted this world view. It's consistent with your experience but I believe that it doesn't represent funding in general.
I'd throw stupid money at NASA any day, just maybe not so much for manned exploration until it's cost-effective. We both want more space probes I suspect.
But from the above articles, I see two trends.
From (1) Nonmilitary science funding has been effectively flat for a decade while military research was increasing annually roughly until a year or so into the Obama administration.
From (2) and its responses, the money itself is being misallocated to the top (just like everywhere else) and also into a metastasizing tumor of administrators:
OT: This page loads the full article, flickers for a moment, and then hides everything but the first three paragraphs. Instead I see a button to 'Show the full article'.
What is the reason for this? I've seen this pattern in a few places and assumed it was to speed up mobile page loads. But seeing as it loads the full page before hiding it I'm now not sure.
I do not think this is the case. I tested this out by clicking on several articles without hitting "Show Full Article" on any of them. On the first article, I was told I was reading 2 of 10 free articles. After 8 clicks I hit my quota.
It's to expose you to the links underneath the article.
After reading the headline and first paragraph, many people would bounce (especially on mobile). By giving them alternative exit strategies, the button marginally increases traffic.
Most likely, the page is being rendered to HTML on the server and then client side javascript picks up where the server left off, once it has loaded and launched. So, you get the full page load, and >then< the javascript checks to see if it should display it.
The alternative is to have the page hide the content initially and have the javascript re-enable it, but this would involve a flash of 'closed page' for actual subscriber and people who came via google.
I always assumed that was done as a metric, so they could see what percentage of people who saw the page actually read it. But admittedly that is just conjecture.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that the OSS Movement in general is a response to the problems that this article is enumerating. And yet, there's no mention of open source in the NY Times article.
Perhaps a better-researched version of this article would merely lament that OSS hasn't been more successful than it has.
I forget the context, but I saw someone (a writer for the National Review, I think) say this to someone:
You must be one of those people that think that airplanes fly not because physicists and engineers found a way to propel steel through the air, but because the FAA allows them to.
It is fair to say that planes don't come crashing down much, because the FAA prohibits it. Private enterprise had a very low bar for safety, when left to its own devices.
>Contrary to the conventional view of an American economy bubbling with innovative small companies, the reality is quite different. The rate at which new businesses have formed in the United States has slowed markedly since the late 1970s. Big Tech’s sweeping patents, standard platforms, fleets of lawyers to litigate against potential rivals and armies of lobbyists have created formidable barriers to new entrants.
Eh... nice try on that stolen base. The internet, which is what drives "big tech", wasn't really an economic force until the mid '90s. If business formation has slowed since the '70s it's more likely to be a result of rise of the regulatory state. You can't do anything without a permit any more, something that wasn't true in 1970.
"Big Tech" should told Big Media to piss off when content protection was first introduced. Then we'd have smaller attack surfaces and better business models.
Unlike switching from Facebook, you don't need to get all your friends to come along. Unlike switching from GMail, you don't need to move a bunch of data. Unlike switching your company away from Windows, you don't need to buy all new software, retrain all staff, or get your partners to change the format they use to interchange data with you.
If someone were to build a better search engine, we would all just switch. Like when everyone left Altavista in 1999.