I suspect if you're under investigation for abusing monopoly power and you tell your employees not to use phrases like "We'll crush the competition" and instead talk about how "You'll try to maintain a competitive environment while doing your best to excel" it's probably better than your legal opponents finding evidence that people in your company are constantly talking about abusing their power to "crush the competition".
I guess we'll get an idea by the result of this lawsuit.
I'm still suspicious of the idea that Google can have a monopoly anywhere except maybe in the Android ecosystem. It is too easy to move away from their products and go use something else. Nobody is under any pressure to use Google's search. Literally Google "alternatives to google search" and get a list of reasonable alternatives. If they have outstanding market share it is because they are just better, not because they have a monopoly [0].
But the problem I'm looking at here is the phrase "...you're under investigation for abusing monopoly power..." anticipates the result to some degree. This is a an exhaustive list of the guidance lawyers can provide. Both seem to anticipate that some wrongdoing has been done. It leads to shallow thinking:
... you're under investigation for abusing monopoly power and lawyers tell employees not to use phrases like "We'll crush the competition".
... you're under investigation for abusing monopoly power and lawyers provide no guidance, then employees use phrases like "We'll crush the competition".
Most of the work is actually being done by the initial frame, not what the employees are told.
Google used the search monopoly to grow chrome into another monopoly, placing it on their front page, a place where absolutely no one else can ever get advertising.
Chrome's engine is open source, and there is literally nothing stopping someone from installing Brave, Firefox or Opera. They all render the same pages and are all standards compliant enough.
Did Google give Chrome a boost? Yes. Was that a good thing? Also yes. Chrome was the better browser at the time they did that - still arguably is. But that doesn't mean monopolies are involved. Apple gives privileged advertising to the iPhone, iPod and iPad on their website and they aren't a monopoly in any sense.
Google is arguably less of a monopoly in pushing Chrome because they sell advertising to other people. I'm sure Samsung would pay an absurd amount of money to get an ad on apple.com with any URL path. In theory Google could be a monopoly and put a chrome ad on google.com but the fact is that they aren't a monopoly and pushing chrome did good for the world, not harm. They're just providing exceptional products and people trust the brand [0].
roenxi: "Google doesn't have a monopoly. [argument]"
AlphaSite: "Google has a monopoly and used it to build a second monopoly [argument]"
There isn't much there to address. But I did directly address it.
(1) He claimed that Google had a monopoly, I ignored that because I'd addressed that in my original comment.
(2) He claimed that Chrome had a monopoly. I provided an argument that it wasn't (it is really easy not to use Chrome. You give up literally nothing switching to Brave for example).
(3) He claimed that Googe used monopoly tactics to build Chrome's market share. I provided a counterexample that the tactics used aren't monopoly tactics because other companies do more or less the same thing. Advertising your own products on your own site isn't monopoly behaviour. And even if Google was a monopoly and that is monopoly behavior - both of which I don't think are true - that isn't exactly an abuse of monopoly power, it is pretty tame.
It'd be helpful for me if you pointed out why you don't think that is addressing the comment. It seemed pretty direct to me.
* Internet Explorer came bundled with the OS and therefore had a leg up on the competition. They made it impossible to remove that browser, so people targeting Windows would likely also automatically target IE in the knowledge that it would be available on the system.
* Microsoft controlled the Windows API and appeared to be sabotaging attempts to build cross-platform applications. And they seemed to think it was substantial interference. Take this for example:
"Microsoft's videotape showed the process as being quick and easy, resulting in the Netscape icon appearing on the user's desktop. The government produced its own videotape of the same process, revealing that Microsoft's videotape had conveniently removed a long and complex part of the procedure and that the Netscape icon was not placed on the desktop, requiring a user to search for it. Brad Chase, a Microsoft vice president, verified the government's tape and conceded that Microsoft's own tape was falsified." [0]
If MS had restricted itself to a banner on their website saying "Download and Install IE!" they'd have been fine; the issue was that they were creating an environment to destroy Netscape for no good technical reason, they just wanted to destroy Netscape. And that was part of a pattern of behaviour where they were employing consistent tactics against anyone trying to create cross-platform software.
I did say about 3 comments up that I could see them being a monopoly maybe in the Android ecosystem. I don't want anything to do with Android phones because I don't like Google, so I don't understand what is happening in that world.
Then IMO they would be a monopoly on iOS in a similar way. You change the default search engine on Android too, most people don’t know how/don’t care/etc.
Now I’m not sure that something you could actually define as a monopoly but they do control almost the entire search market on mobile because they directly control Android and pay Apple huge amounts of money to achieve the same on Safari.
This is kind of what's sad at working at a big company. If the same team was doing the same work at a startup, every one of their meetings can be "this feature will kill the competition". Personally I think it's a great attitude; if your technology is better than everyone else, you deserve to put them out of business. And you're certainly entitled to try. (And, sometimes ideas do kill their industry. Called someone on your landline recently? Bought a DVD at the store? Listened to music on a Walkman? It happens.)
The devil is always in the details. If you kill the US steel industry by being a government that pays people to buy steel from your country, that's problematic. If you just make shit and people like it, though, that should never be illegal.
> if your technology is better than everyone else, you deserve to put them out of business.
The issue is that, once you reach Google scale, you have so many tools to put the competition out of business that are unrelated to product fit. And, in the case of Google, they've been known to do just that.
So yeah, you can't really compare an incumbent with monopoly power to an underdog, just like some sentences from young kids are hilarious, that would be chilling if adults said them.
It is not problematic to put people out of business by having a superior product. It is problematic to abuse the fact that you have more money, connections, lawyers, political power, market control, customer interaction control, etc.
Absolutely, and the fact that our lawmakers cannot distinguish the two, and rely on fighting the last war with dumb heuristics based on phraseology is a real social problem.
> Personally I think it's a great attitude; if your technology is better than everyone else, you deserve to put them out of business.
I think this "Others must lose so that I win" attitude is one of the more toxic attributes of this Thunderdome Capitalism so many industries have somehow ended up in. Wouldn't it be great if we could have dozens of businesses all successful, all doing "somewhat good" rather than having to always have a small number of winners that take everything?
If I'm going to open a laundromat a block away from Paul's competing laundromat, I'm not doing it to try to put Paul out of business. I'm just trying to capture enough business so that we can coexist comfortably. Some entrepreneurs just don't know the meaning of the word "enough".
I'm not sure how applicable this is to software. If you're making nails or something, then sure, your factory can only turn so many tons of coiled steel into nails per day. So other companies can exist that also make nails. In software, it's a little different; you moving a billion copies doesn't necessarily take any more work than selling one copy, so even if you "want to leave enough for everyone", you might not be able to. I doubt the Chrome team was saying things like "we shouldn't add tabs, that would be so bad for Internet Explorer".
But if your laundromat is better in some way (service, cost, marketing), why wouldn't you want to grow? And if the market is a fixed size, (which just about every market is) doesn't that inevitably result in Paul adapting to keep up or closing down? When did it become immoral to realize this and strive for it? In this scenario everyone besides Paul benefits. And so it will be when you become the incumbent and face a competitor with a similar edge.
In Google's case, I suspect "search" will die to AI like Blackberries died to iPhones. Google is already proving that its size and bureaucratic unwieldiness are major obstacles to its competing in the AI space. Would we really hold back the vast social benefits of this progress because we object to some people becoming obscenely wealthy?
I feel like this comment exists in a capitalist fairy tale where the only way a business could grow to overtake its competitors is by being better for consumers. Or where a business that has done so will always continue to do so once it has achieved market dominance.
> But if your laundromat is better in some way (service, cost, marketing), why wouldn't you want to grow?
Maybe you just want to run a laundromat? Is that not enough these days?
I mean, in the medium term, isn't this exactly how it goes? Aren't current incumbents relatively recent, and didn't they get there by being substantially better than their competition (Amazon, Google, Apple, Uber) or creating an entirely new business model (Facebook, Twitter). Isn't the dominant position that these companies enjoy only as fragile as the continued use of their product? If everyone switches to OpenAI for their search needs, Google will have a hard time surviving.
> Maybe you just want to run a laundromat? Is that not enough these days?
It's enough, until someone comes up with something that disrupts the industry. In a fast-evolving world, standing still is a doomed strategy. Do you really want to be the bookseller when Amazon comes along? Or the taxi driver competing with Uber? or on the board of RIM watching the Apple keynote in 2007?
Edit: Come to think of it, this rather parallels the natural world. Very few creatures have been able to stay relatively unchanged for tens of millions of years. They have been able to do so because the niche the evolved to optimally fill has remained unchanged and undisrupted. The rest of the natural world undergoes constant churn as new species emerge and others go extinct. It's the same in business. The less likely your niche is to be disrupted the more insulated you'll be from the necessity to change (assuming you've optimally adapted). Prime examples are best-in-class restaurants, whose proprietors often do just about the same thing their entire lives very successfully.
Just as an example, google has recently enshittified chrome to include gross invasions of privacy. How much has this moved the needle on chrome's browser share?
If it was as simple as people just ceasing continued use of the product, one would expect a large dip. If there are other effects in play besides "use that which is better, switch anytime" (e.g. anticompetitive behaviors), one would expect there not to be.
So, what reality do the numbers reveal?
p.s. the same exercise can be done regarding google's enshittification of search, and seeing how many people change the default search in chrome as a result
> How much has this moved the needle on chrome's browser share?
It depends on your timescale. Early adopters are already shifting away from it. I don't expect these effects to be immediate, but do you expect that everyone will still be using Chrome in 10 years? 20? 30? The same can be said of search. Early adopters are already using ChatGPT for many queries.
I do, if this efficient market hypothesis were to hold true
The changes to the browser were immediate from one version to the next, what would stop everyone who doesn't like that from switching browsers instead of upgrading?
The fact that it isn't immediate kind of proves the point: the market doesn't always favor the best product, because dominant players can exploit their market position to make anti-features and hide them from users
If there was a truly efficient market, this behavior would be immediately punished. That it was not, proves that there is not.
If a dominant company can abuse its users for a decade or more before the market handles the problem, that speaks to a lack of a competitive environment, or anticompetitive behavior. The market has failed, and thus some intervention is warranted to stop the abuse sooner than that. I propose for your economic theory, though, the title of "eventual efficiency" in markets :)
Markets are exceptionally efficient over time, just like nature. Barring cataclysm, organisms that are displaced from their niches take ages to go extinct. It's the same with businesses. And what do you mean "immediate"? Days? Months? Years? Market effects take time, as anyone who has studied marketing will tell you.
> what would stop everyone who doesn't like that from switching browsers instead of upgrading?
The fact that they're human beings with their own lives and finite attention spans. There is an entire body of work segmenting markets into categories like innovators, early adopters, early majority, etc.
Did you wait in line for an iPhone on launch day? Why not?
> that speaks to a lack of a competitive environment
The environment is plenty competitive. There is no further proof required of this than the continued rise of new companies that displace their competition. In a thriving ecosystem there is lots of death as well as lots of birth.
> The market has failed
It hasn't, it just doesn't move on timescales you can relate to easily. Organizing people to make and distribute things takes unimaginable time and energy. Supposing that a centrally planned intervention can be more efficient is the height of communist fallacy. It has failed every time it has been tried.
the environment is not competitive enough. There is no further proof required of this than that google can abuse its users and make products worse for years, perhaps decades, without experiencing market punishment for it
the end determines the sufficiency of the means: if the end is that google can do that, the current means are insufficient, because that is bad
> Organizing people to make and distribute things takes unimaginable time and energy.
it absolutely does, far, far moreso when you're going up against a giant like google
solution: slay the giant. We've tried not doing so, and it brought us here, to this failure point.
I think the “winner takes all” attitude is the problem. It’s perfectly fine to run a tech company with a limited market but it doesn’t generate the spectacular returns current investors are looking for.
That depends entirely on the details of how it is said.
If it is said in a way clearly making it obvious that not just the words, but the intent is bad, and to instead do the other thing? Seems likely to not be an issue.
If it is saying the intent is fine, just use the other words? Then yeah.
If it gets to the press, chances are it’s being spun the opposite way that context would show it was being used, because that’s how it usually works to get clicks.
I guess we'll get an idea by the result of this lawsuit.