Generally an excellent and accurate write up, nervous/excited to see where this goes.
A bit over the top with some of the things google has done in the programmatic space, but aligns with reality. I disagree with the display/programmatic space innovations being held back by google - there are an insane amount of small players who are doing different things and it’s easy to integrate them into the existing space. IE if I want to measure foot traffic, there are like 6 vendors who all do it slightly differently, 1 huge and 5 small companies, some super anti-privacy and some very pro privacy.
Its is called out in the article but not made extremely clear - the vertical integration google has is insane. They own the sell, intermediary, buy, measure, and operations software for a large percentage of the space. Imagine if NYSE owned Fidelity, SP500, and the SEC.
The issue is not whether startup alternatives exist, it is more in my mind that no mid-market companies exist because they are taken out at the knees before they threaten the incumbents through acquisitions.
It eventually becomes impossible to avoid doing business with them.
I guess it’s hard to know if there should be significantly more mid market companies or not - I work in the space and am aware of hundreds of them, but perhaps with the size of adtech that number should really be thousands
At least with NYSE, Fidelity, SP500 and the SEC, one could avoid them, eg., by choosing not to invest, working for unlisted employers, etc.
But avoiding the web or mobile apps is becoming nearly impossible. Google tentacles are all over this stuff. No escape. For example, one visits a US government website and it needlessly sends data to "google-analytics.com".
The blog tends to be a bit hyperbolic but the author does do the research. If his facts were wrong and he was notified, I suspect he would publish a correction.
In general I do not understand how auctioning for a thing with fixed cost aligns with the principles of free market.
Google owns the infrastructure of search, maintaining them and showing ads has a finite cost. How does piting ad buyers in an auction is different than price gauging?
Imagine apple every year introducing the new iPhone without a price and when you go to the cart it asks for your credit limits before it creates a unique price that magically matches exactly your credit limits.
Reading between the lines, what you're pointing out beyond the ideas of "free market" and "price gauging" (I don't see any difference between the two TBH) is exactly that Google has monopolistic power in the space.
They can set arbitrary prices and have customers pay anyway, with little fear of competition or market loss.
An ad for a specific user is worth a different amount to each advertiser for a couple reasons. You don’t sell something based on what it costs, you sell it based on what it worth.
Search is a bit different than display which is covered in the article, but imagine 2 jewelry companies that are exactly the same. A user searching for “necklaces” you’d think each company would bid the same amount to advertise there. But say one company is trying to raise a round of funding and needs to drive sales, they’ll bid higher to increase sales but at a lower roas. The other company is satisfied with their revenue and doesn’t bid higher.
In display each bidder has different information about a user (they may have their own data about a users behavior on their website, or it may be provided by a vendor that other bidders aren’t using). So the difference in price is largely a difference in information.
"a thing with fixed cost", just imagine the billboard in downtown. The cost is finite. But you'll know that the price would be aligned with ups and downs of the demand. You may use auction model, or you can continuously tune the price. Actually they may converge similarly, to the principles of free market.
Same thing with real estates, or stocks.
However the iPhone example you mentioned follows a different scheme. iPhone is not something people competing for, as long as stock lasts.
> In general I do not understand how auctioning for a thing with fixed cost aligns with the principles of free market.
Isn't it kind of like real estate?
In theory, it should cost roughly the same amount to build a house in the middle of nowhere versus the center of Manhattan. But more people want to live in Manhattan, and there's a limited amount of space, so buyers effectively bid up the price.
On any given website, there is a limited amount of ad space.
Why is it wrong for apple to charge differently.fpr different people? This already happens I'm different geographic regions. Apple devices are not essential goods. Why not charge people who get more value out of a product more?
> In general I do not understand how auctioning for a thing with fixed cost aligns with the principles of free market.
Simple: the 'free market' exists to maximize the price for a given good or service with respect to the demand for such. That's really the whole story here.
> Imagine apple every year introducing the new iPhone without a price and when you go to the cart it asks for your credit limits before it creates a unique price that magically matches exactly your credit limits.
This is how sevreral 'free' markets work already. Anything involving credit or finance, real estate.
It is a grave mistake to assume that the actions of a free market have anything whatsoever to do with what is morally right, or even what is legal.
The market makes line go up and that is the only thing it cares about. Capitalism does not give one good goddamn about who or what it may hurt, it can only ever consider the bottom line.
> However, it does mean that Google will have to give up on its mission, “to organize the world's information.” Though that slogan looks benign, it is in fact anything but. Being the organizer of the world’s information is far far too much power for anyone to have. It’s time to give up on it.
Giving up on that is stupid, and would set society back. We need more companies and organisations doing it. AI has brought a few new startups into the search space, but yes, splitting the companies up may make more opportunities for them.
That said, if you can raise the capital you can get into search, because of opportunities presented by AI, and google has been sacrificing quality for optimising ad revenue. Email has also seen some startups making big leaps by adopting AI. I wouldn't touch video sharing platforms, or ad networks.
After traveling through the middle east: Google is far from present here, it’s Yandex territory. And I bet Asian countries can be conquered by Chinese companies the same way.
I use both for reverse image searches. It's crazy how much is missing from either (or both). At least from my use Google's index still seems to be bigger but I imagine that varies depending on what you are looking for.
While my main search engine is still Google, I use Yandex more and more. I have no specific example right now but it's not unusual for Y to give me meaningful result when G, with the same search string, give me crap.
China, Korea and Japan have never depended on google for search. Baidu, Naver and Yahpo reign supreme. Their bussiness model is very similar to goofle tbf.
ASEAN and India however rely on google heavily. Googles ad based subsidies for their other products mean that less well of consumers can have access to technology as well. I worry that the freebies will be very hard for many people to ween of.
> We need more companies and organisations doing it.
The current issue IMHO is having a single for-profit company doing it at such scale. They're inherently motivated to keep competition away and keep themselves relevant.
Companies shouldn't own the core data (yes, even when they farmed it themselves running cars through millions of km of streets), perhaps we could come up with a fixed price they have to abide to to sell their data to any eligible entity, with governing bodies being a potential reseller of it.
Meteorology wouldn't be what it is today if some single US company owned and organized the world's info. We need a similar model for the rest of it.
> Google'a mission "to organize the world's information"
Google already gave up on this long ago. Their mission now is to print as much money as possible (late stage capitalism).
It's unfortunate, because 2004-2014 was unlike anything we'd seen before, even in the dot-com days.
Compared to anything before or since, ElGoog was Incredibly good for the 10's of thousands of rank-and-file employees.
Thanks Ruth Porat! (For serving as the instrument that ended the party.. at the board's request, ofcoz.)
You’re not giving Sundar enough credit for Google’s slide to the evil side. Ruth is as you mentioned merely an instrument. Sundar “McKinsey” Pichai is the Ballmer of Google. For as long as he’s at the helm I’m extremely bearish about Google’s long term prospects.
> video sharing, mapping, mobile phones, and the other Google infrastructure. These are all areas ripe for innovation and disruption,
This is incredibly wrong. We've had mountains of innovation in all of these areas under Google's leadership and from competitors like Apple, Mapbox, Microsoft, AWS, etc. When Google ends up costing more to use, competitors will _not_ need to innovate to attract customers to their platforms, and the technology will stagnate.
Apple is not really a competitor though, is it? The post was focused on search but let's not forget Apple is experiencing their own version of sinking deeper into anti-trust lawsuits following years of market abuse.
One thing I appreciate is how much better maps have gotten for non-drivers: bike and pedestrian paths, public transport (especially live schedules, delays, alerts) and legitimately good directions generated for walking, biking and taking transport.
I believe that using wifi to improve localization on phones also happened within the last 19 years—quick Google found me an article from 2010 about how they started gathering data for this in 2007. I definitely remember this having a real improvement on how accurate my phone's location could be, which made using maps much nicer day-to-day.
Didn’t better pedestrian maps come as a result of the size of the market, really? Suddenly everyone in the world had a smart GPS device in their pocket and adding some more routes onto existing maps would have made sense for any map maker, regardless if it was Google or some other hypothetical company.
SEO for maps. [1] I didn't say the world has got better.
[1] Yes this is a thing. A "maps SEO consultant" popped up offering me his services a few months back, and after a bit of digging it's clear this is a new and hideous barnacle of a subsector has appeared to make money out of making maps and everyone's lives worse
Not just innovation with Google's Maps product, but innovations among all competing map products. For one, wildfire maps and air quality maps have been important for me living in the PNW. Trail maps, terrain. Mapbox has innovated a lot, creating a whole developer platform focused on map creation, direction APIs. Apple Maps has been improving a lot too. OSM is incredibly well built out, and all the related technologies built on top of OSM. Weather maps from DarkSky now Apple Weather. There's so much
> At some point, they will give up and realize that the writing is on the wall for their current business model.
I'd sooner think hell would freeze over than Google would ever 'give up' on its business model of its own accord. I can hardly imagine half of its services being viable as separate businesses. Which might well be a boon for competitors (especially in adtech), but not for any of Google's current employees or stakeholders.
If profits degrade for Google society will feel the impact pretty quickly. Think about how many schools rely on Google for Education for email, SSO, and Chromebooks. Think about people who rely on Google Maps, Sheets, Docs, and other loss-leading products. Think about all the data they scoop up in all their apps.
Late game capitalism applied to Google's portfolio would be catastrophic.
I think about this a lot and feel like we are in a horrid position.
All of our core service and software is locked up in a handful of companies.
For humanity and the future of software’s sake we need to go back to users of software owning their software, preferably by being free and open source.
It hurts me as somebody who wants to make money off software, but SaaS is just a bad deal for everybody. My compromise is in prim solutions.
I’m reminded of a situation that happened in a small town in Sweden.
Lots of boutique stores in the city centre moved into the newly created mall (due to the economics of malls being as they are)- the mall was also centrally located so: nothing lost.
Almost immediately after this happened; another mall was built outside of town (requiring a car to get to), but as you might expect: rents were substantially cheaper.
All those stores (via peer pressure, cost saving and so forth) moved into the new mall.
Those boutiques never returned and the high-street is dead.
— we have this same situation in tech,
We have lost the ability to function without loss leading technologies (all US based, tying those needs to whatever economic and political situation is happening in the US to the entire world), and, at some point that will have to end, but the oxygen has already left the room for anything else to exist - everything else is starved.
And, Microsoft will not save us, they are leaning into these practices and will suffer the same if US tech is regulated (as it should be). There’s no space for competition.
> We have lost the ability to function without loss leading technologies (all US based, tying those needs to whatever economic and political situation is happening in the US to the entire world)
Many countries have their own tech stack for what Google provides (think Japan, Korea, China, Russia). It's a shame how EU has completely given up its market for Google.
We sort of limp along with corporate cooperation on key technologies. Unfortunately, there are a number of places uncomfortably controlled/owned by single organizations. Think things like the npm repository.
I wonder if something like a NIH style grant system would make sense to keep opensource software funded and supported without needing corporate support. I have xz on the mind. Would that have fallen under the control of a bad actor if the original maintainer (or others) had the financial ability to dedicate their time to it's maintenance? Who knows.
So should Google be regulated as a public utility? I am leaning towards search being a natural monopoly due to the huge resources required to build an index/algorithms/etc
I have been wondering how hard modern search would be to implement. More and more of the world is getting hidden behind walled gardens denied to search.
Reddit, newspapers, Facebook, Twitter, are all locked down or heavily restricted. I am sure there is still a burgeoning small web, but it is increasingly hard to find. Would many consumers notice/care if your search engine only surfaced pages from the top 1000 highest ranked domains? You would actually decrease the amount of SEO garbage you hit from Stackoverflow clones, Amazon listicles, or Grandma's cookie recipe #9381.
We should create non-profit versions of each of the archetype sites that exist. Reddit (forums), Twitter, Search, Email hosting should all have non profit versions ala Wikipedia.
>For humanity and the future of software’s sake we need to go back to users of software owning their software, preferably by being free and open source.
I'm in the process of setting up a Community Interest Company to facilitate this very thing. I spent a couple of decades in the world of Drupal, which is the largest open source community in terms of contributors, and have spent the last few years following and supporting the ceptr.org project which is rebuilding the tech stack aligning as to how nature works.
One of CEPTR's subprojects is Holochain.org, a distributed agent-centric open source language, and I'm using https://theweave.social/moss/ which is built on Holochain, to collaborate with my as of current one collaborator who is my support worker, funded by an Access to Work grant as I discovered and was diagnosed last year aged 50 as autistic and ADHD.
Free/Libre Open Source Software can work and be sustainable, it just takes more people getting involved in every aspect of it, and I find the biggest issue there is the majority simply don't know this stuff exists, let alone they can use it and adapt it to their needs.
So times are changing, we have the power, we just give it away every day by not making the most of what we have control over.
It's not so horrid once you realize physical resources we all need for daily existence are locked up by a handful of countries, run by buffoons who have no interest in or understanding of philosophy, science or engineering.
Your existence is contingent upon people the best of whom (ones who at least read) think 48 laws of power is a how-to manual. You live among people who know less than nothing.
Software is a land of idealistic, capable angels by comparison.
So many people have never known any different. Gmail launched in 2004. Google Docs in 2006.
So anyone who’s 18 today has never known a world without it.
People don’t know what the save icon is in reality.
Paying for things is interesting as media streaming is frequently valued by paying for it, collaboration and things like Google Maps not so much.
I remember using a Palm Pilot with Tom Tom, and an old maps pack that didn’t have half the new main roads included in the UK! I’d honestly pay for Google Maps for the value I get from it.
OTOH something you pay for is much safer and more reliable in multiple ways. I've been in "interesting" situations before with Google Maps, here's one scenario:
You begin a trip with driving directions, but 2/3 of the way in your phone shuts off because you forgot to plug it in. When you get it going again you have no service. You open Google Maps and... nothing. Your directions are gone, and you can't load them again because you don't have network connectivity. I believe due to the restart this is even the case if Maps happens to give you the "download offline directions" option and you accept (which they don't always do). AFAICT there is no way to "reload" downloaded offline directions, only a search bar which does nothing without network connectivity.
Google only really makes things that serve Google's interests, that's why they'll never fix this. If you, the user, put yourself in a situation where you depend on them, you're the sucker. Google has no incentive to actually make the product good for users, they just have to make it good enough that a sufficiently large number of users look at the advertisements in it. I'd much rather buy software and services from a company that has better aligned incentives. That's why I keep a paperback road atlas in my car.
Google used to be Writely and Google has improved it very little after the acquisition and integration.
We had Google docs before Google released it and it would have prevailed as an independent company if the authorities had had any interest in preventing trust and oligarchy
> Google used to be Writely and Google has improved it very little after the acquisition and integration.
I don't think you're correctly remembering Writely or early Google docs. Expectations were very different back when ajax was still a cutting edge buzz word.
I feel like this discussion is like squabbling over weather the private highway conglomerate should be broken up and what the consequences would be for users who have been benefiting from toll-free road usage subsidized by billboards and other shady tactics. In both cases the real answer is that what is effectively public infrastructure should neither be run as one private corporation nor split into many private corporations but deprivatized entirely.
I honestly think SaaS - which I think is more honestly described as "renting software" - is a business model that would have never worked if we hadn't curtailed so many threats to it with draconian laws
The most natural analogy for software is infrastructure. Lots of money to be made in building, maintaining, and supporting it, but as with any technology, the proposition of renting the right to use it is one that is obviously a bad deal for everyone but the rentier, and all the moreso for the fact that they can constantly make changes to the deal, including how the software functions, what one must pay for it, and what other benefits your use of it may extract from you on the behalf of its owner
I make money building software and think this feudal status quo is a terrible one that we should welcome the destruction of. Its benefits are ill-distributed and temporary, its drawbacks are dystopian, pervasive, and long-lasting, not only creating these awful deals for a wide swath of the economy, but also creating massive incentives for the rentiers in this equation to hoard competence in using these new technologies, stymying untold amounts of innovation and progress by making criminals out of tinkerers and discouraging even non-technical users from adapting them to their own needs
Isn't most infrastructure rented? I fail to see how SaaS is special in this respect. You rent internet access from your ISP, you rent roads when you pay tolls, you rent sewage access, etc.
Saying that software is infrastructure only supports the renting model.
From the perspective of thinking that this model of infrastructure is working well, I suppose. ISPs are a great example of where it kind of isn't, and the degree to which the municipality imposes regulations on infrastructure-providing companies basically predicts the degree to which the service functions well
> For humanity and the future of software’s sake we need to go back to users of software owning their software, preferably by being free and open source.
That ship has sailed in my opinion. I am under the impression most enterprise and public facing open source projects are fauxpen-source and use FOSS as bait for commercial support and freemium plugins. I am at the point where between two solutions, one fully commercial where I don't even host but can export data out and has strong GDPR compliance and an open source one with a locked-in scheme then I'd rather go with the commercial one because at least I am not under the delusion that I am financing feature-parity open source alternatives to commercial products. I draw the line at formats and protocols, maybe ? /rant
> All of our core service and software is locked up in a handful of companies.
> For humanity and the future of software’s sake we need to go back to users of software owning their software, preferably by being free and open source.
This sounds like a decent plan. Why not start executing the first step of it today?
What is the first step? Surely you can't mean the author using open source software (which they might already), or writing new open-source software like they envision? In the face of the societal changes they are talking about, one person will accomplish nothing. So the first step must be writing about it, trying to convince other people, or maybe developing their ideas so that instead of just a goal, they have a reasonable mechanism to get there.
Or is that the actual first step to make a societal-level change? Maybe it's better to make millions of dollars under the existing regime, and then found or fund a think-tank to get certain politicians elected.
I don't think it's going to be bad at all. These are not irreplaceable things and they're not even the best options. Email, SSO can be found from many providers, or self hosted. Docs/sheets have lots of online and offline alternatives. There's at least 4 large maps providers including OpenStreetMaps. I think there would be some pain for a few months as other companies deal with the user influx and then we'd get over it.
lol no. There already exists alternatives to every Google service. The only moat any of them have is that Google can give them away for free as a loss leader.
There’s nothing special about Gmail in 2024. But Gmail is totally free which prevents anyone from investing in a significant competitor.
>There already exists alternatives to every Google service. The only moat any of them have is that Google can give them away for free as a loss leader.
The irony behind Google is that Google in the early days was the antonym for Yahoo; just a simple looking search engine with a search box, minimalistic UI and a better search ranking compared to Yahoo which was crammed internet portal which looked and felt messy.
Nowadays Google still has minimalistic UI but lousy search and shit ton of web apps that try to capture as much attention as they can while sucking your data and doing God knows what with it.
>There’s nothing special about Gmail in 2024. But Gmail is totally free which prevents anyone from investing in a significant competitor.
Yea, Gmail is free and it somewhat feels OK to use so many people use it but I don't see how Gmail evolved substantially over the let's say last 10 years, there is still room for competition. And there are competitors, idk how "significant" they are but they do exist e.g. Proton Mail, Tuta, Fastmail, GMX Mail etc.
It will read your email for you, reply, make major life decisions (eg respond to marriage proposals, banking transactions, etc), and much more - all in the inbox you know and love!
If there’s one thing I know about Google under Sundar it’s that he’s a man of rare vision, foresight, and leadership. I’m sure things are going to go great!
We lived well without Google knowing everything we do, and I live well without almost any Google. I only have contact with Google on shitty-made websites, that for some reason I have to use. For everything Google does we have alternatives, and better ones than what Google is offering at that.
So yes, society would quickly feel the positive impact of Google no longer being.
Inertia and lack of knowledge. Alternatives to Gmail are better in ways that must people don't understand and/or care about. And even if they do, the improvement may not be worth the effort. But, they're definitely good enough if people have to make a switch for some reason.
Email, SSO and Chromebooks all have competitors. And the Google offerings wouldn't disappear, they're profitable products that can be sold. They compete with Microsoft in that space.
There are many alternatives, some better than others. They would swoop in and fill the void. Sure, some things would take longer than others to replace and get up running but it's not like Google is the only provider of such services
maps and email are solved technologies. Even I can deploy a great email service given time. The hard part is managing reputation of public ips and scanning outgoing mail for spam
> Late game capitalism applied to Google's portfolio would be catastrophic.
This is probably my biggest fear about the eventual fate of Google. The amount of data they have is staggering and would be very short-term profitable for PE firms looking to make a quick buck.
Google may not be a privacy champion, but they still have some rules. A PE company will do anything for more money if they're in the value extraction mode.
I honestly feel like that would be a good thing. It would push people towards alternatives and create competition.
If Gmail had a $5/10/20 per month fee, I would probably migrate to a more privacy/security focused provider.
I wouldn't pay much for YouTube, but video hosting is relatively easy and YouTube has degenerated so much that I'd like to watch content elsewhere.
I would pay for Kagi and ChatGPT each twice before I would pay the same amount for Google Search.
Good luck charging for Chrome and any of their developers tools.
I know there's a million services by Google and I would probably demean most of them and I'm not near the typical consumer. However, if the typical consumer at least had to consider whether to pay, there would be so much breathing room in many industries. Something as large as Google trying to explicitly monetize all those services could also tremendously change consumer attitudes towards being willing to pay for things thus making more businesses viable that do less of the shitty stuff that Google does. For a bit, there would be some bad will as people notice extra bills. It sucks that those extra fees would disproportionately affect the poor. The most likely case would be something like Google Prime with a monthly $15 or yearly $140, which I don't think is a gross value proposition for an individual of even low means.
And one of the main political parties here is dead set on strangling the post office's finances by requiring it to prefund retiree health benefits. It's a cash strapped organization that's barely hanging on. If the nationalization comes to fruition, you can count on them to strangle its finances until it's dying a slow death.
Microsoft knows this how to 'avoid getting broken up but still continue our monopoly game' better than anyone else after escaping getting broken up in US v Microsoft Corp and other huge acquisitions.
There needs to be a very strong case this time to go after Microsoft to argue for a break up of their business. Whoever is to bring the case (either the DOJ or the FTC), would have to go after Meta and Amazon first before targeting Microsoft.
It won't be easy, but Microsoft has been able to avoid scrutiny for years.
>> If Google gets broken up, ... then Microsoft is next on the chopping block.
Many regulatory agencies would target Microsoft next, but they have played this game and are willing to do whatever is needed to avoid extreme measures like forced break ups and sell offs.
“If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later.”
I would think the sense of seamless integration contributes to the experience. Almost all third party software systems have integrations and plugins that make crossing over between Google suite and these near painless.
Obviously this would be solved if we had a way to centralize our identity and file storage and such across platforms and systems. Yet at the moment the silo is what makes it seems painless and increases its value beyond the fact there’s a substitute to each platform and product.
Integration, management, accessibility, auditing and compliance for starters.
Tech folks love to say "X is is perfect substitute for Y" in the same way they say "what's so hard about X, I could write that in a week" by considering only simple ideal workflows.
The real value, and the real moat for these products, is that they're tied in with SSO and other products, easy for organizations small to huge to manage, have dozens or hundreds of specialized features crucial to large organizations. They comply with legal regulations, accessibility standards (which ARE legal regulations in many jurisdictions such as if you want to sell to the government), and more.
Writing an email server is perhaps 2% of the work involved in building an email product.
Nothing will really change. Even if they are found to be a monopoly. The appeals process and the commensurate change in the world during those years will allow Google to work around any proposed remediation before it is enacted.
In the end we will all lose, in my opinion. Google will start to charge more for access to YouTube, along with increasing ads. They will begin to pay creators less due to the increased cost in serving the ads. We will see a decline in the quality and quantity of high production video education.
If we get independence in ad space, we may see publications flourish again, which is a net win. I would prefer a local newspaper be profitable than have youtube creators be paid more.
It's difficult to imagine margins in advertising and app store management would remain as high as they are when opened to competition.
The primary reason Google has fought so hard is because it knows, even if left whole, its margins would drastically shrink once it has to compete on price.
The economics of youtube being what they are now, most content is already extremely low quality. The quality of YouTube content was much higher when it wasn't a viable platform for monetization
I'm sorry but that's just abundantly wrong. There are whole educational companies built on top of YouTube, Complexly for example. We also have all kinds of university courses recorded and publicly available for free.
The problem here is Nebula doesn't have to do any more innovation to attract customers. There are two ways to compete; sell the same product for a better price, or sell a better product for the same price. You can sell the same product for a better price by innovating on technology/business, but when we artificially increase the cost of Google's product, it makes competitors artificially cheaper. The competitors don't need to actually do anything better than Google and they win out at the expense of the consumer.
I think reddit recently signing an exclusive deal with google for crawling its website is quite anticompetitive and will be a surprisingly big draw to google.
> Neither case is finished. In the Epic Games case, Judge Donato is likely to come out with a proposed remedy shortly, which will basically force Google to allow other app stores to exist.
Android users are all glancing at each other like John Travolta in Pulp Fiction right now.
Sort of but not in any practical reality. Besides the scare screens to make any alternatives look like malware, Google has actively paid developers to not compete with the Play Store and launched secret codenamed projects to undermine individual third party stores. Google has even tasked security teams with finding exploits in competing solutions to try to destroy the reputation of anyone who could launch an effective competing store.
That doesn't seem like abuse of monopoly positioning, though. It's dirty, but bug-hunting for your adversaries and responding to the proliferation of competitors is entirely normal and accessible. Google's biggest "scare screen" is the developer menu which rightfully warns you of the danger associated with third-party packaging. The only other mandatory menu is the one that asks for user consent to install a package, which is not scary so much as mandatory to prevent obvious exploit chains.
Google's approach to sideloading is borderline inscrutable, and I say that as someone that will gladly sell them out for their abuse of the advertising market. This lawsuit exists to grant faux parity for the Apple lobbyists due in their government mandated reaming. As long as the AOSP exists, it is literally impossible for Google to abuse Android as an anticompetitive environment for other companies. OEMs control
Android as much as Google does. The same cannot be said for Microsoft or Apple.
Huawei phones are still popular in my part of the world and users can pretty much use everything on them, including the banking apps. In the end, increased popularity of non-Google phone just made developers not require Play Services.
I guess the only notable exception is the... YouTube app? So what are you talking about exactly?
I don't see how this is a problem. Back in the days when we used to buy software for PCs you could go pick up WordPerfect or Lotus or whatever at any number of bookstores, office supply stores, or mail order outlets.
Fundamentally I see no problem with multiple app stores, it will be a boon for developers as the stores will have to compete over how much of a cut they take. Or developers can sell direct.
You definitely can; just get the Kindle app from anywhere[1][2] besides Google Play Store. I installed it via Samsung's "Galaxy Store" and I buy books in-app often.
I don't know about the samsung app store, but it's not available through the amazon app store. It's marked as "incompatible with my device" a OnePlus 10.
> John Maynard Keynes had penned a private letter to Franklin Delano Roosevelt about business leaders. He wrote, “You could do anything you liked with them if you would treat them (even the big ones), not as wolves or tigers, but as domestic animals by nature, even though they have been badly brought up and not trained as you would wish.” FDR tamed big business. Anti-monopolists today are nowhere near that level of accomplishment broadly speaking, as we don’t have a political consensus. But in a few areas, we can start to see the outlines of what a world run with some element of the public interest in mind might look like.
interesting parallels are drawn for this opinion, but i would be with it if it was just limited to web search like most people started clamoring after genAI.
some comparisons with past american monopolies were made, but there is a key difference between those and google - the direct impact to people across the world. to me it came across slightly myopic to look only inside one large economy, for things that impact everyone's lives but not directly.
we already have large portions of the world not impacted by google - just look at china. but even there android in its different form has been vital. it is not just a matter of "we got a disruptive new tool to replace the current choice". google is able to bankroll key internet services that could stand by itself even when broken up - android, search (people still use it to open websites they literally spell out), youtube, gmail to name the key few.
change is inevitable but i don't see it happening the way it is envisaged here. pretty much all the "disrupters" are backed the same way that made today's big tech. which goes beyond just google. the now-subsiding ai boom has shown that big tech is still swaying investors for immaterial promises.
Now we have to get rid of "Log on with Google" for non-Google properties. Google has to get out of the authentication-provider business. That allows Google to cross-link usages or other services.
Need to raise this issue with the California PUC, about Waymo wanting a Google login.
Simple authentication is not as strong a chokehold as it appears, and most "log on with" integrations are very simple, just doing auth and passing across name and email.
You wouldn't see e.g chatgpt having login with Google if it was such a threat.
Google is so unusable right now that I couldn't care less.
I just started paying for Kagi and it's excellent. I forgot how it's possible for a search engine to just find the information I want without blasting my eyes with corporate slop.
Not every tom, dick and harry is going to be able to pay for services.
Personally, If I dont own the software and cant change its source code I dont trust the company. Hopefully at some point in the far future computing and AI will become so efficient that we will be able to own our own search infrastructure.That being said once this future arrives Im probably going to have to search for a new job as I dont see software engineering as being particularly lucrative.
I am unsure about that last bit. From website design (style) to UX to how a given application works, I have found the people who want these things to be unable or unwilling to articulate what it is they actually desire, nor are they likely to go anywhere but the Happy Path. Instead, one ends up looking at the actual logged usage of previous or similar software, doing interviews with a multitude of different people who will use the application in different ways, and finally a deep contemplation of How This Will Actually Need to Work (and Break) to get anywhere.
I was a paid Kagi subscriber. I unsubscribed due to my temporary financial difficulties, but I'm resubscribing as soon as I'm able to afford expenses like this. I'm VERY happy with them.
You do you. To be entirely frank 90% of the world is not software engineers. If I were to ask the guy who sells food at my local food stall to pay for a search engine where free (as in dollars) alternatives exist he is going to pick the free one. To be entirely frank he probably does not have enough money to pay for yet another service.
My major concern with kagi is that its good now, whos to say it will ne good in the future. Plenty of SAaS have ebshitiffied. We NEED open infrastructure fpr search. What that lools like Im not sure but it may be possible in the far future.
The term "enshittification" is used a lot these days. But there is this pattern where human organizations -- be it companies, codebases, countries and many other examples -- undergo this transformation from simple, humble and efficient systems to complex, arrogant and inefficient ones.
I wouldn't dare to speculate on the cause of this devolution. There are theories like becoming publicly traded for companies, and subsequently execs chasing short term profits to make shareholders happy, or elected officials chasing after votes for the next immediate election cycle. But it would be nice if there was some sort of a large scale in-depth study on the topic and research into solutions for it.
Honestly, the more I think about so many issues, the more I feel like there needs to be a dedicated field into the study of incentives and how they shape the systems and organizations humans build and maintain. Everything from google search being terrible to climate change feels like it all has a shared root cause of misaligned or defective incentives.
Perhaps existing fields like game theory, economics or systems design should cover this topic?
Either way, our systems design methodology is faulty and this fault is nearly universal and systemic, affecting all humans in almost every area of our lives.
One theory I have (full disclosure: subjects I am not too familiar with) is economics and game theory, specifically the "Nash equilibrium" game theory, which as I understand boils down to "everyone should participate in the system, only taking into account their own success and profit, and nothing more than that" might be at fault. Or maybe, it simply codified the innate faulty organizational instinct we have?
You're right about "everyone should participate in the system, only taking into account their own success and profit, and nothing more than that" being (at least part of) the root problem. However, this is not a description of a Nash equilibrium. It uses the word “should”. It's a philosophy. It is, in fact, the philosophy of capitalism. It creates incentives for short-term thinking, profit-seeking at the detriment to the public good, and competition in areas where collaboration is more appropriate. It doesn't have to be that way, no matter how much the rich and powerful less us that it should.
A Nash equilibrium is a state of affairs in which no single person can improve their position without the collaboration of others. A frequently cited example is a bank run: if the bank goes bust, you better get your savings out quickly, but if everyone does it, the bank goes bust. The solution is for everyone to cooperate and agree to refrain from a run on the bank. Such collaboration is not easy to organize and not easy to convince a majority to participate in; but the ego-centric philosophy of capitalism makes it infinitely harder.
> Honestly, the more I think about so many issues, the more I feel like there needs to be a dedicated field into the study of incentives and how they shape the systems and organizations humans build and maintain.
That currently falls under economics, sociology and game theory. It’s not really a dedicated field sure but it’s well covered
Before reading the article, I assumed it was about LLMs. It looks like the regulators have perfectly timed their focus on Google’s business. Is Microsoft laughing at this point?
Only in the narrow sense that Microsoft managed to avoid structural remedies due to Bush Jr. shenanigans that were forgotten because the case was settled three days before 9/11. In the broader sense they've got loads of consent decrees on them, first from the US, then from the EU. They can't even kick CrowdStrike out of the NT kernel!
Even among big tech, Google is an unusually meaty target because:
1. Literally all but two of their consumer product lines are acquisitions. A significant part of their ads network is also acquisitions. Most of those product lines and ad network divisions were preceded by internally-developed business units that were marketplace failures. Google does not build, it buys.
2. Android is FOSS, which neatly tidies away a lot of the "we have a right to monetize our IP" arguments that Apple loves to trot out.
3. They paid Facebook bucket-loads of money to keep them from launching a competing ad network under the "Jedi Blue" program. This is textbook illegal behavior and doesn't require any new theories of antitrust like, say, the Epic lawsuit did.
4. Google doesn't comply with litigation holds. Civil litigation is a Constitution-free zone, you can't take the 5th in this kind of trial, meaning that you can be forced to self-incriminate, and if you do not do so, the judge is free to make adverse inferences.
5. Google doesn't have a single charismatic(?) leader. Apple had Steve Jobs, who could invent the monopolistic business model and then conveniently die[0] before anyone with power started to question it. Google has a bunch of executives that all have to e-mail one another, which means that even with their cavalier attitude towards recordkeeping, something winds up getting recorded, making the missing information even more incriminating.
The one thing I can't answer with this set of answers is why Facebook isn't getting as much scrutiny as Google is, especially since Facebook has proven to be such a good conduit for scammers and disinformation. Facebook has even less ability to leverage "copyright disclaims antitrust" than Google does.
[0] Constitution or no, a judge can't compel a corpse to testify.
Regarding point 1, and in comparison to Microsoft, the company has historically acquired other businesses to fuel its growth (DOS, cough cough...). This is a normal playbook.
Generally an excellent and accurate write up, nervous/excited to see where this goes.
A bit over the top with some of the things google has done in the programmatic space, but aligns with reality. I disagree with the display/programmatic space innovations being held back by google - there are an insane amount of small players who are doing different things and it’s easy to integrate them into the existing space. IE if I want to measure foot traffic, there are like 6 vendors who all do it slightly differently, 1 huge and 5 small companies, some super anti-privacy and some very pro privacy.
Its is called out in the article but not made extremely clear - the vertical integration google has is insane. They own the sell, intermediary, buy, measure, and operations software for a large percentage of the space. Imagine if NYSE owned Fidelity, SP500, and the SEC.
The issue is not whether startup alternatives exist, it is more in my mind that no mid-market companies exist because they are taken out at the knees before they threaten the incumbents through acquisitions.
It eventually becomes impossible to avoid doing business with them.
I guess it’s hard to know if there should be significantly more mid market companies or not - I work in the space and am aware of hundreds of them, but perhaps with the size of adtech that number should really be thousands
At least with NYSE, Fidelity, SP500 and the SEC, one could avoid them, eg., by choosing not to invest, working for unlisted employers, etc.
But avoiding the web or mobile apps is becoming nearly impossible. Google tentacles are all over this stuff. No escape. For example, one visits a US government website and it needlessly sends data to "google-analytics.com".
The blog tends to be a bit hyperbolic but the author does do the research. If his facts were wrong and he was notified, I suspect he would publish a correction.
In general I do not understand how auctioning for a thing with fixed cost aligns with the principles of free market.
Google owns the infrastructure of search, maintaining them and showing ads has a finite cost. How does piting ad buyers in an auction is different than price gauging?
Imagine apple every year introducing the new iPhone without a price and when you go to the cart it asks for your credit limits before it creates a unique price that magically matches exactly your credit limits.
Reading between the lines, what you're pointing out beyond the ideas of "free market" and "price gauging" (I don't see any difference between the two TBH) is exactly that Google has monopolistic power in the space.
They can set arbitrary prices and have customers pay anyway, with little fear of competition or market loss.
An ad for a specific user is worth a different amount to each advertiser for a couple reasons. You don’t sell something based on what it costs, you sell it based on what it worth.
Search is a bit different than display which is covered in the article, but imagine 2 jewelry companies that are exactly the same. A user searching for “necklaces” you’d think each company would bid the same amount to advertise there. But say one company is trying to raise a round of funding and needs to drive sales, they’ll bid higher to increase sales but at a lower roas. The other company is satisfied with their revenue and doesn’t bid higher.
In display each bidder has different information about a user (they may have their own data about a users behavior on their website, or it may be provided by a vendor that other bidders aren’t using). So the difference in price is largely a difference in information.
"a thing with fixed cost", just imagine the billboard in downtown. The cost is finite. But you'll know that the price would be aligned with ups and downs of the demand. You may use auction model, or you can continuously tune the price. Actually they may converge similarly, to the principles of free market.
Same thing with real estates, or stocks.
However the iPhone example you mentioned follows a different scheme. iPhone is not something people competing for, as long as stock lasts.
> In general I do not understand how auctioning for a thing with fixed cost aligns with the principles of free market.
Isn't it kind of like real estate?
In theory, it should cost roughly the same amount to build a house in the middle of nowhere versus the center of Manhattan. But more people want to live in Manhattan, and there's a limited amount of space, so buyers effectively bid up the price.
On any given website, there is a limited amount of ad space.
Why is it wrong for apple to charge differently.fpr different people? This already happens I'm different geographic regions. Apple devices are not essential goods. Why not charge people who get more value out of a product more?
> In general I do not understand how auctioning for a thing with fixed cost aligns with the principles of free market.
Simple: the 'free market' exists to maximize the price for a given good or service with respect to the demand for such. That's really the whole story here.
> Imagine apple every year introducing the new iPhone without a price and when you go to the cart it asks for your credit limits before it creates a unique price that magically matches exactly your credit limits.
This is how sevreral 'free' markets work already. Anything involving credit or finance, real estate.
It is a grave mistake to assume that the actions of a free market have anything whatsoever to do with what is morally right, or even what is legal.
The market makes line go up and that is the only thing it cares about. Capitalism does not give one good goddamn about who or what it may hurt, it can only ever consider the bottom line.
Can't wait for Google to be broken up and made an example of. Same with Amazon soon, I hope.
And the CIA not being able to read the Google Docs spreadsheets of all companies, NGOs and diplomats of the world?
Why would that stop if they got got broken up?
> However, it does mean that Google will have to give up on its mission, “to organize the world's information.” Though that slogan looks benign, it is in fact anything but. Being the organizer of the world’s information is far far too much power for anyone to have. It’s time to give up on it.
Giving up on that is stupid, and would set society back. We need more companies and organisations doing it. AI has brought a few new startups into the search space, but yes, splitting the companies up may make more opportunities for them.
That said, if you can raise the capital you can get into search, because of opportunities presented by AI, and google has been sacrificing quality for optimising ad revenue. Email has also seen some startups making big leaps by adopting AI. I wouldn't touch video sharing platforms, or ad networks.
After traveling through the middle east: Google is far from present here, it’s Yandex territory. And I bet Asian countries can be conquered by Chinese companies the same way.
I have to use Yandex almost daily, because Google has stopped indexing a massive amount of the Internet.
It's almost more useless than Yahoo was after Google came along, which is crazy.
I use both for reverse image searches. It's crazy how much is missing from either (or both). At least from my use Google's index still seems to be bigger but I imagine that varies depending on what you are looking for.
What kind of stuff do you find missing? Is it strictly regional/firewalled content?
While my main search engine is still Google, I use Yandex more and more. I have no specific example right now but it's not unusual for Y to give me meaningful result when G, with the same search string, give me crap.
China, Korea and Japan have never depended on google for search. Baidu, Naver and Yahpo reign supreme. Their bussiness model is very similar to goofle tbf.
ASEAN and India however rely on google heavily. Googles ad based subsidies for their other products mean that less well of consumers can have access to technology as well. I worry that the freebies will be very hard for many people to ween of.
> We need more companies and organisations doing it.
The current issue IMHO is having a single for-profit company doing it at such scale. They're inherently motivated to keep competition away and keep themselves relevant.
Companies shouldn't own the core data (yes, even when they farmed it themselves running cars through millions of km of streets), perhaps we could come up with a fixed price they have to abide to to sell their data to any eligible entity, with governing bodies being a potential reseller of it.
Meteorology wouldn't be what it is today if some single US company owned and organized the world's info. We need a similar model for the rest of it.
Being the organizer of the world’s information is far far too much power for anyone to have
It's what they said their mission was. It's not like it's true or anything :)
> Google'a mission "to organize the world's information"
Google already gave up on this long ago. Their mission now is to print as much money as possible (late stage capitalism).
It's unfortunate, because 2004-2014 was unlike anything we'd seen before, even in the dot-com days. Compared to anything before or since, ElGoog was Incredibly good for the 10's of thousands of rank-and-file employees.
Thanks Ruth Porat! (For serving as the instrument that ended the party.. at the board's request, ofcoz.)
You’re not giving Sundar enough credit for Google’s slide to the evil side. Ruth is as you mentioned merely an instrument. Sundar “McKinsey” Pichai is the Ballmer of Google. For as long as he’s at the helm I’m extremely bearish about Google’s long term prospects.
> video sharing, mapping, mobile phones, and the other Google infrastructure. These are all areas ripe for innovation and disruption,
This is incredibly wrong. We've had mountains of innovation in all of these areas under Google's leadership and from competitors like Apple, Mapbox, Microsoft, AWS, etc. When Google ends up costing more to use, competitors will _not_ need to innovate to attract customers to their platforms, and the technology will stagnate.
Apple is not really a competitor though, is it? The post was focused on search but let's not forget Apple is experiencing their own version of sinking deeper into anti-trust lawsuits following years of market abuse.
Apple competes with Google's loss-leader products, which will be impacted by these anti-trust lawsuits
What innovation has happened in Maps in the last 19 years?
Aside from buying Waze in 2013?
One thing I appreciate is how much better maps have gotten for non-drivers: bike and pedestrian paths, public transport (especially live schedules, delays, alerts) and legitimately good directions generated for walking, biking and taking transport.
I believe that using wifi to improve localization on phones also happened within the last 19 years—quick Google found me an article from 2010 about how they started gathering data for this in 2007. I definitely remember this having a real improvement on how accurate my phone's location could be, which made using maps much nicer day-to-day.
Didn’t better pedestrian maps come as a result of the size of the market, really? Suddenly everyone in the world had a smart GPS device in their pocket and adding some more routes onto existing maps would have made sense for any map maker, regardless if it was Google or some other hypothetical company.
Mobile, gps navigation, transit features, ride hailing, fuel efficient routes, pedestrian routes, live traffic, to name a few.
SEO for maps. [1] I didn't say the world has got better.
[1] Yes this is a thing. A "maps SEO consultant" popped up offering me his services a few months back, and after a bit of digging it's clear this is a new and hideous barnacle of a subsector has appeared to make money out of making maps and everyone's lives worse
Anti-features like copying a location being a gmaps unique URL instead of the actual location
Ads in the map is another.
Pedestrian navigation, much better quality maps, faster load times etc.
I also occassionally enjoy the AR features for walking in cities.
Streetview was only 17 years ago.
Not just innovation with Google's Maps product, but innovations among all competing map products. For one, wildfire maps and air quality maps have been important for me living in the PNW. Trail maps, terrain. Mapbox has innovated a lot, creating a whole developer platform focused on map creation, direction APIs. Apple Maps has been improving a lot too. OSM is incredibly well built out, and all the related technologies built on top of OSM. Weather maps from DarkSky now Apple Weather. There's so much
Street View
> At some point, they will give up and realize that the writing is on the wall for their current business model.
I'd sooner think hell would freeze over than Google would ever 'give up' on its business model of its own accord. I can hardly imagine half of its services being viable as separate businesses. Which might well be a boon for competitors (especially in adtech), but not for any of Google's current employees or stakeholders.
If profits degrade for Google society will feel the impact pretty quickly. Think about how many schools rely on Google for Education for email, SSO, and Chromebooks. Think about people who rely on Google Maps, Sheets, Docs, and other loss-leading products. Think about all the data they scoop up in all their apps.
Late game capitalism applied to Google's portfolio would be catastrophic.
I think about this a lot and feel like we are in a horrid position.
All of our core service and software is locked up in a handful of companies.
For humanity and the future of software’s sake we need to go back to users of software owning their software, preferably by being free and open source.
It hurts me as somebody who wants to make money off software, but SaaS is just a bad deal for everybody. My compromise is in prim solutions.
I’m reminded of a situation that happened in a small town in Sweden.
Lots of boutique stores in the city centre moved into the newly created mall (due to the economics of malls being as they are)- the mall was also centrally located so: nothing lost.
Almost immediately after this happened; another mall was built outside of town (requiring a car to get to), but as you might expect: rents were substantially cheaper.
All those stores (via peer pressure, cost saving and so forth) moved into the new mall.
Those boutiques never returned and the high-street is dead.
— we have this same situation in tech,
We have lost the ability to function without loss leading technologies (all US based, tying those needs to whatever economic and political situation is happening in the US to the entire world), and, at some point that will have to end, but the oxygen has already left the room for anything else to exist - everything else is starved.
And, Microsoft will not save us, they are leaning into these practices and will suffer the same if US tech is regulated (as it should be). There’s no space for competition.
> We have lost the ability to function without loss leading technologies (all US based, tying those needs to whatever economic and political situation is happening in the US to the entire world)
Many countries have their own tech stack for what Google provides (think Japan, Korea, China, Russia). It's a shame how EU has completely given up its market for Google.
We sort of limp along with corporate cooperation on key technologies. Unfortunately, there are a number of places uncomfortably controlled/owned by single organizations. Think things like the npm repository.
I wonder if something like a NIH style grant system would make sense to keep opensource software funded and supported without needing corporate support. I have xz on the mind. Would that have fallen under the control of a bad actor if the original maintainer (or others) had the financial ability to dedicate their time to it's maintenance? Who knows.
The Dept of Commerce should be funding such an effort.
So should Google be regulated as a public utility? I am leaning towards search being a natural monopoly due to the huge resources required to build an index/algorithms/etc
I have been wondering how hard modern search would be to implement. More and more of the world is getting hidden behind walled gardens denied to search.
Reddit, newspapers, Facebook, Twitter, are all locked down or heavily restricted. I am sure there is still a burgeoning small web, but it is increasingly hard to find. Would many consumers notice/care if your search engine only surfaced pages from the top 1000 highest ranked domains? You would actually decrease the amount of SEO garbage you hit from Stackoverflow clones, Amazon listicles, or Grandma's cookie recipe #9381.
We should create non-profit versions of each of the archetype sites that exist. Reddit (forums), Twitter, Search, Email hosting should all have non profit versions ala Wikipedia.
For Reddit and Twitter there's already Lemmy and Mastodon.
> I am leaning towards search being a natural monopoly due to the huge resources required to build an index/algorithms/etc
A bigger issue are the network effects - no website can afford to block Google; not so much for your startup search engine.
>For humanity and the future of software’s sake we need to go back to users of software owning their software, preferably by being free and open source.
I'm in the process of setting up a Community Interest Company to facilitate this very thing. I spent a couple of decades in the world of Drupal, which is the largest open source community in terms of contributors, and have spent the last few years following and supporting the ceptr.org project which is rebuilding the tech stack aligning as to how nature works.
One of CEPTR's subprojects is Holochain.org, a distributed agent-centric open source language, and I'm using https://theweave.social/moss/ which is built on Holochain, to collaborate with my as of current one collaborator who is my support worker, funded by an Access to Work grant as I discovered and was diagnosed last year aged 50 as autistic and ADHD.
Free/Libre Open Source Software can work and be sustainable, it just takes more people getting involved in every aspect of it, and I find the biggest issue there is the majority simply don't know this stuff exists, let alone they can use it and adapt it to their needs.
So times are changing, we have the power, we just give it away every day by not making the most of what we have control over.
>the ceptr.org project which is rebuilding the tech stack aligning as to how nature works.
I like the idea of building communities and software that is inspired by nature. Btw homepage looks nice.
It's not so horrid once you realize physical resources we all need for daily existence are locked up by a handful of countries, run by buffoons who have no interest in or understanding of philosophy, science or engineering.
Your existence is contingent upon people the best of whom (ones who at least read) think 48 laws of power is a how-to manual. You live among people who know less than nothing.
Software is a land of idealistic, capable angels by comparison.
SaaS is not a bad deal when users pay for the service directly.
And Google have provided tremendous value with their free tools. People forget what it was like before Gmail and Docs.
I sincerely hope we can move away from their business model, but looks to me consumers rather pay with anything but their money.
So many people have never known any different. Gmail launched in 2004. Google Docs in 2006.
So anyone who’s 18 today has never known a world without it.
People don’t know what the save icon is in reality.
Paying for things is interesting as media streaming is frequently valued by paying for it, collaboration and things like Google Maps not so much.
I remember using a Palm Pilot with Tom Tom, and an old maps pack that didn’t have half the new main roads included in the UK! I’d honestly pay for Google Maps for the value I get from it.
OTOH something you pay for is much safer and more reliable in multiple ways. I've been in "interesting" situations before with Google Maps, here's one scenario:
You begin a trip with driving directions, but 2/3 of the way in your phone shuts off because you forgot to plug it in. When you get it going again you have no service. You open Google Maps and... nothing. Your directions are gone, and you can't load them again because you don't have network connectivity. I believe due to the restart this is even the case if Maps happens to give you the "download offline directions" option and you accept (which they don't always do). AFAICT there is no way to "reload" downloaded offline directions, only a search bar which does nothing without network connectivity.
Google only really makes things that serve Google's interests, that's why they'll never fix this. If you, the user, put yourself in a situation where you depend on them, you're the sucker. Google has no incentive to actually make the product good for users, they just have to make it good enough that a sufficiently large number of users look at the advertisements in it. I'd much rather buy software and services from a company that has better aligned incentives. That's why I keep a paperback road atlas in my car.
Very off-topic by now, but I have Organic Maps as a backup on Android. Downloaded the entire Eastern US and that works surprisingly well in a pinch.
It's hard to beat Google Maps for POI discovery though
For maps specifically, OpenStreetMap is free and better in a lot of ways (not least being able to easily download everything offline)
Google used to be Writely and Google has improved it very little after the acquisition and integration.
We had Google docs before Google released it and it would have prevailed as an independent company if the authorities had had any interest in preventing trust and oligarchy
> Google used to be Writely and Google has improved it very little after the acquisition and integration.
I don't think you're correctly remembering Writely or early Google docs. Expectations were very different back when ajax was still a cutting edge buzz word.
I can only speak as one consumer, but I definitely prefer paying for things once instead of multiple times and also I don't actually own them.
I feel like this discussion is like squabbling over weather the private highway conglomerate should be broken up and what the consequences would be for users who have been benefiting from toll-free road usage subsidized by billboards and other shady tactics. In both cases the real answer is that what is effectively public infrastructure should neither be run as one private corporation nor split into many private corporations but deprivatized entirely.
I honestly think SaaS - which I think is more honestly described as "renting software" - is a business model that would have never worked if we hadn't curtailed so many threats to it with draconian laws
The most natural analogy for software is infrastructure. Lots of money to be made in building, maintaining, and supporting it, but as with any technology, the proposition of renting the right to use it is one that is obviously a bad deal for everyone but the rentier, and all the moreso for the fact that they can constantly make changes to the deal, including how the software functions, what one must pay for it, and what other benefits your use of it may extract from you on the behalf of its owner
I make money building software and think this feudal status quo is a terrible one that we should welcome the destruction of. Its benefits are ill-distributed and temporary, its drawbacks are dystopian, pervasive, and long-lasting, not only creating these awful deals for a wide swath of the economy, but also creating massive incentives for the rentiers in this equation to hoard competence in using these new technologies, stymying untold amounts of innovation and progress by making criminals out of tinkerers and discouraging even non-technical users from adapting them to their own needs
Isn't most infrastructure rented? I fail to see how SaaS is special in this respect. You rent internet access from your ISP, you rent roads when you pay tolls, you rent sewage access, etc.
Saying that software is infrastructure only supports the renting model.
From the perspective of thinking that this model of infrastructure is working well, I suppose. ISPs are a great example of where it kind of isn't, and the degree to which the municipality imposes regulations on infrastructure-providing companies basically predicts the degree to which the service functions well
Even the city kind of rents the maintenance to maintenance companies. Everything is a subscription, for example the maintenance of traffic lights.
> For humanity and the future of software’s sake we need to go back to users of software owning their software, preferably by being free and open source.
That ship has sailed in my opinion. I am under the impression most enterprise and public facing open source projects are fauxpen-source and use FOSS as bait for commercial support and freemium plugins. I am at the point where between two solutions, one fully commercial where I don't even host but can export data out and has strong GDPR compliance and an open source one with a locked-in scheme then I'd rather go with the commercial one because at least I am not under the delusion that I am financing feature-parity open source alternatives to commercial products. I draw the line at formats and protocols, maybe ? /rant
> All of our core service and software is locked up in a handful of companies.
> For humanity and the future of software’s sake we need to go back to users of software owning their software, preferably by being free and open source.
This sounds like a decent plan. Why not start executing the first step of it today?
What is the first step? Surely you can't mean the author using open source software (which they might already), or writing new open-source software like they envision? In the face of the societal changes they are talking about, one person will accomplish nothing. So the first step must be writing about it, trying to convince other people, or maybe developing their ideas so that instead of just a goal, they have a reasonable mechanism to get there.
Or is that the actual first step to make a societal-level change? Maybe it's better to make millions of dollars under the existing regime, and then found or fund a think-tank to get certain politicians elected.
Run for office, propose a bill. Do anything other than just sit here and complain about it on a forum.
I don't think it's going to be bad at all. These are not irreplaceable things and they're not even the best options. Email, SSO can be found from many providers, or self hosted. Docs/sheets have lots of online and offline alternatives. There's at least 4 large maps providers including OpenStreetMaps. I think there would be some pain for a few months as other companies deal with the user influx and then we'd get over it.
lol no. There already exists alternatives to every Google service. The only moat any of them have is that Google can give them away for free as a loss leader.
There’s nothing special about Gmail in 2024. But Gmail is totally free which prevents anyone from investing in a significant competitor.
Society will be just fine.
>There already exists alternatives to every Google service. The only moat any of them have is that Google can give them away for free as a loss leader.
The irony behind Google is that Google in the early days was the antonym for Yahoo; just a simple looking search engine with a search box, minimalistic UI and a better search ranking compared to Yahoo which was crammed internet portal which looked and felt messy.
Nowadays Google still has minimalistic UI but lousy search and shit ton of web apps that try to capture as much attention as they can while sucking your data and doing God knows what with it.
>There’s nothing special about Gmail in 2024. But Gmail is totally free which prevents anyone from investing in a significant competitor.
Yea, Gmail is free and it somewhat feels OK to use so many people use it but I don't see how Gmail evolved substantially over the let's say last 10 years, there is still room for competition. And there are competitors, idk how "significant" they are but they do exist e.g. Proton Mail, Tuta, Fastmail, GMX Mail etc.
Hey now - any day now Gemini is going to pop off!
It will read your email for you, reply, make major life decisions (eg respond to marriage proposals, banking transactions, etc), and much more - all in the inbox you know and love!
If there’s one thing I know about Google under Sundar it’s that he’s a man of rare vision, foresight, and leadership. I’m sure things are going to go great!
I personally pay for Hey email. But almost all people aren’t interested in paying for email when gmail is free.
If google suddenly disappeared, it would suck... for a year or two. Then everyone would have figured out how to operate, just like pre-google.
More like Microsoft would just swoop in and fill the void.
Miss me with that “Too big to fail” nonsense.
Lots of people I know have been migrating away from these Google services though without much trouble.
They are a lot more replaceable than most people think.
What's a good alternative to Google Docs and Sheets that has live collaborative editing?
We lived well without Google knowing everything we do, and I live well without almost any Google. I only have contact with Google on shitty-made websites, that for some reason I have to use. For everything Google does we have alternatives, and better ones than what Google is offering at that. So yes, society would quickly feel the positive impact of Google no longer being.
Why isn't everyone using these better alternatives already?
Inertia and lack of knowledge. Alternatives to Gmail are better in ways that must people don't understand and/or care about. And even if they do, the improvement may not be worth the effort. But, they're definitely good enough if people have to make a switch for some reason.
Cost too.
Email, SSO and Chromebooks all have competitors. And the Google offerings wouldn't disappear, they're profitable products that can be sold. They compete with Microsoft in that space.
There are many alternatives, some better than others. They would swoop in and fill the void. Sure, some things would take longer than others to replace and get up running but it's not like Google is the only provider of such services
maps and email are solved technologies. Even I can deploy a great email service given time. The hard part is managing reputation of public ips and scanning outgoing mail for spam
SSO is also solved. People will survive
> Late game capitalism applied to Google's portfolio would be catastrophic.
This is probably my biggest fear about the eventual fate of Google. The amount of data they have is staggering and would be very short-term profitable for PE firms looking to make a quick buck.
How would they make more money off it than what Google is already doing?
Google may not be a privacy champion, but they still have some rules. A PE company will do anything for more money if they're in the value extraction mode.
By doing what Google is doing and also charging users to use services.
I honestly feel like that would be a good thing. It would push people towards alternatives and create competition.
If Gmail had a $5/10/20 per month fee, I would probably migrate to a more privacy/security focused provider.
I wouldn't pay much for YouTube, but video hosting is relatively easy and YouTube has degenerated so much that I'd like to watch content elsewhere.
I would pay for Kagi and ChatGPT each twice before I would pay the same amount for Google Search.
Good luck charging for Chrome and any of their developers tools.
I know there's a million services by Google and I would probably demean most of them and I'm not near the typical consumer. However, if the typical consumer at least had to consider whether to pay, there would be so much breathing room in many industries. Something as large as Google trying to explicitly monetize all those services could also tremendously change consumer attitudes towards being willing to pay for things thus making more businesses viable that do less of the shitty stuff that Google does. For a bit, there would be some bad will as people notice extra bills. It sucks that those extra fees would disproportionately affect the poor. The most likely case would be something like Google Prime with a monthly $15 or yearly $140, which I don't think is a gross value proposition for an individual of even low means.
You got the causality wrong. Profits would degrade because these services stop getting used, not the other way around.
Nationalize it and fold the services into the post office.
And one of the main political parties here is dead set on strangling the post office's finances by requiring it to prefund retiree health benefits. It's a cash strapped organization that's barely hanging on. If the nationalization comes to fruition, you can count on them to strangle its finances until it's dying a slow death.
Meh, they'll switch to Microsoft.
If Google gets broken up (which I'm rooting for, but not even remotely holding my breath for), then Microsoft is next on the chopping block.
Microsoft knows this how to 'avoid getting broken up but still continue our monopoly game' better than anyone else after escaping getting broken up in US v Microsoft Corp and other huge acquisitions.
There needs to be a very strong case this time to go after Microsoft to argue for a break up of their business. Whoever is to bring the case (either the DOJ or the FTC), would have to go after Meta and Amazon first before targeting Microsoft.
It won't be easy, but Microsoft has been able to avoid scrutiny for years.
>> If Google gets broken up, ... then Microsoft is next on the chopping block.
Many regulatory agencies would target Microsoft next, but they have played this game and are willing to do whatever is needed to avoid extreme measures like forced break ups and sell offs.
Rip the band-aid off.
“If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later.”
From the Unabomber Manifesto: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national...
That bad, huh? I reckon everything you mentioned has a perfect substitute. What am I missing?
I would think the sense of seamless integration contributes to the experience. Almost all third party software systems have integrations and plugins that make crossing over between Google suite and these near painless.
Obviously this would be solved if we had a way to centralize our identity and file storage and such across platforms and systems. Yet at the moment the silo is what makes it seems painless and increases its value beyond the fact there’s a substitute to each platform and product.
Integration, management, accessibility, auditing and compliance for starters.
Tech folks love to say "X is is perfect substitute for Y" in the same way they say "what's so hard about X, I could write that in a week" by considering only simple ideal workflows.
The real value, and the real moat for these products, is that they're tied in with SSO and other products, easy for organizations small to huge to manage, have dozens or hundreds of specialized features crucial to large organizations. They comply with legal regulations, accessibility standards (which ARE legal regulations in many jurisdictions such as if you want to sell to the government), and more.
Writing an email server is perhaps 2% of the work involved in building an email product.
Nothing will really change. Even if they are found to be a monopoly. The appeals process and the commensurate change in the world during those years will allow Google to work around any proposed remediation before it is enacted.
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In the end we will all lose, in my opinion. Google will start to charge more for access to YouTube, along with increasing ads. They will begin to pay creators less due to the increased cost in serving the ads. We will see a decline in the quality and quantity of high production video education.
If we get independence in ad space, we may see publications flourish again, which is a net win. I would prefer a local newspaper be profitable than have youtube creators be paid more.
It's difficult to imagine margins in advertising and app store management would remain as high as they are when opened to competition.
The primary reason Google has fought so hard is because it knows, even if left whole, its margins would drastically shrink once it has to compete on price.
They won't be as high, but the profit will be more dispersed.
The economics of youtube being what they are now, most content is already extremely low quality. The quality of YouTube content was much higher when it wasn't a viable platform for monetization
I'm sorry but that's just abundantly wrong. There are whole educational companies built on top of YouTube, Complexly for example. We also have all kinds of university courses recorded and publicly available for free.
I didn't say all content
Google will charge more for access to YouTube, which makes competitors like Nebula more appealing.
The problem here is Nebula doesn't have to do any more innovation to attract customers. There are two ways to compete; sell the same product for a better price, or sell a better product for the same price. You can sell the same product for a better price by innovating on technology/business, but when we artificially increase the cost of Google's product, it makes competitors artificially cheaper. The competitors don't need to actually do anything better than Google and they win out at the expense of the consumer.
Nebula is not a competitor to YouTube for creators, only for consumers. A true competitor to YouTube needs to allow anyone to upload videos.
I think reddit recently signing an exclusive deal with google for crawling its website is quite anticompetitive and will be a surprisingly big draw to google.
It was not an exclusive deal. Other companies can also sing similar deals.
Thats a good point I didn't realize, thanks. I guess this is reddit cashing in on being the most useful search result for many topics.
> Neither case is finished. In the Epic Games case, Judge Donato is likely to come out with a proposed remedy shortly, which will basically force Google to allow other app stores to exist.
Android users are all glancing at each other like John Travolta in Pulp Fiction right now.
That passage doesn't make sense. Android already allows other app stores, just not entirely without friction. It's iOS which doesn't allow them.
Sort of but not in any practical reality. Besides the scare screens to make any alternatives look like malware, Google has actively paid developers to not compete with the Play Store and launched secret codenamed projects to undermine individual third party stores. Google has even tasked security teams with finding exploits in competing solutions to try to destroy the reputation of anyone who could launch an effective competing store.
That doesn't seem like abuse of monopoly positioning, though. It's dirty, but bug-hunting for your adversaries and responding to the proliferation of competitors is entirely normal and accessible. Google's biggest "scare screen" is the developer menu which rightfully warns you of the danger associated with third-party packaging. The only other mandatory menu is the one that asks for user consent to install a package, which is not scary so much as mandatory to prevent obvious exploit chains.
Google's approach to sideloading is borderline inscrutable, and I say that as someone that will gladly sell them out for their abuse of the advertising market. This lawsuit exists to grant faux parity for the Apple lobbyists due in their government mandated reaming. As long as the AOSP exists, it is literally impossible for Google to abuse Android as an anticompetitive environment for other companies. OEMs control Android as much as Google does. The same cannot be said for Microsoft or Apple.
Google's sin was paying other people off which Apple doesn't do because the option to create a competing store doesn't exist.
Except for the Android users who actually tried not using Google Play and know it usually results in a "Play Services are required" error message.
An application written using Play Services requires Play Services - shocking.
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That is an outright lie.
Even applications not using any of these services often require it.
Can you provide an example how would that work?
https://microg.org/ can replace services as needed.
It can't replace Play Services.
It can replace pretty much everything that isn't explicit DRM, in my experience. Google's own lawsuit against Oracle actually set the precedent for the legality of programs like microG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America%2....
That's a shallow dismissal. Which part, why, for how long?
Huawei phones are still popular in my part of the world and users can pretty much use everything on them, including the banking apps. In the end, increased popularity of non-Google phone just made developers not require Play Services.
I guess the only notable exception is the... YouTube app? So what are you talking about exactly?
I don't see how this is a problem. Back in the days when we used to buy software for PCs you could go pick up WordPerfect or Lotus or whatever at any number of bookstores, office supply stores, or mail order outlets.
Fundamentally I see no problem with multiple app stores, it will be a boon for developers as the stores will have to compete over how much of a cut they take. Or developers can sell direct.
Android already has alternative app stores.
Nevertheless you can't install a Kindle app that you can actually buy books through: Google's monopoly has prevented this.
You definitely can; just get the Kindle app from anywhere[1][2] besides Google Play Store. I installed it via Samsung's "Galaxy Store" and I buy books in-app often.
* [1]: https://galaxystore.samsung.com/detail/com.amazon.kindlefs?l...
* [2]: https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-com-Kindle-for-Android/dp/B004...
I don't know about the samsung app store, but it's not available through the amazon app store. It's marked as "incompatible with my device" a OnePlus 10.
> John Maynard Keynes had penned a private letter to Franklin Delano Roosevelt about business leaders. He wrote, “You could do anything you liked with them if you would treat them (even the big ones), not as wolves or tigers, but as domestic animals by nature, even though they have been badly brought up and not trained as you would wish.” FDR tamed big business. Anti-monopolists today are nowhere near that level of accomplishment broadly speaking, as we don’t have a political consensus. But in a few areas, we can start to see the outlines of what a world run with some element of the public interest in mind might look like.
How is "public interest" defined after Citizens United, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC?
interesting parallels are drawn for this opinion, but i would be with it if it was just limited to web search like most people started clamoring after genAI.
some comparisons with past american monopolies were made, but there is a key difference between those and google - the direct impact to people across the world. to me it came across slightly myopic to look only inside one large economy, for things that impact everyone's lives but not directly.
we already have large portions of the world not impacted by google - just look at china. but even there android in its different form has been vital. it is not just a matter of "we got a disruptive new tool to replace the current choice". google is able to bankroll key internet services that could stand by itself even when broken up - android, search (people still use it to open websites they literally spell out), youtube, gmail to name the key few.
change is inevitable but i don't see it happening the way it is envisaged here. pretty much all the "disrupters" are backed the same way that made today's big tech. which goes beyond just google. the now-subsiding ai boom has shown that big tech is still swaying investors for immaterial promises.
Now we have to get rid of "Log on with Google" for non-Google properties. Google has to get out of the authentication-provider business. That allows Google to cross-link usages or other services.
Need to raise this issue with the California PUC, about Waymo wanting a Google login.
Simple authentication is not as strong a chokehold as it appears, and most "log on with" integrations are very simple, just doing auth and passing across name and email.
You wouldn't see e.g chatgpt having login with Google if it was such a threat.
You have to have a Google account. This is a problem if you cancelled Google.
Three assertions, no supporting argument. Why do "we" need to eradicate Google as an authentication service?
"That allows Google to cross-link usages or other services" is the justification, or argument, if you prefer.
Google is so unusable right now that I couldn't care less. I just started paying for Kagi and it's excellent. I forgot how it's possible for a search engine to just find the information I want without blasting my eyes with corporate slop.
Not every tom, dick and harry is going to be able to pay for services. Personally, If I dont own the software and cant change its source code I dont trust the company. Hopefully at some point in the far future computing and AI will become so efficient that we will be able to own our own search infrastructure.That being said once this future arrives Im probably going to have to search for a new job as I dont see software engineering as being particularly lucrative.
I am unsure about that last bit. From website design (style) to UX to how a given application works, I have found the people who want these things to be unable or unwilling to articulate what it is they actually desire, nor are they likely to go anywhere but the Happy Path. Instead, one ends up looking at the actual logged usage of previous or similar software, doing interviews with a multitude of different people who will use the application in different ways, and finally a deep contemplation of How This Will Actually Need to Work (and Break) to get anywhere.
I was a paid Kagi subscriber. I unsubscribed due to my temporary financial difficulties, but I'm resubscribing as soon as I'm able to afford expenses like this. I'm VERY happy with them.
You do you. To be entirely frank 90% of the world is not software engineers. If I were to ask the guy who sells food at my local food stall to pay for a search engine where free (as in dollars) alternatives exist he is going to pick the free one. To be entirely frank he probably does not have enough money to pay for yet another service.
My major concern with kagi is that its good now, whos to say it will ne good in the future. Plenty of SAaS have ebshitiffied. We NEED open infrastructure fpr search. What that lools like Im not sure but it may be possible in the far future.
This is a well written article. What resources are available for someone to understand more about the online ad tech space?
https://clearcode.cc/adtech-book-pdf-download-hardcover/
https://www.playwire.com/blog/adtech-landscape
It does seem like their cash cow is facing a bit of an existential risk. Things like kagi and perplexity work just as well as search if not better.
And if google search collapses then the rest of the empire won’t be far behind
Post Google world means android without devlopment and money as well I guess.
People are addicted to their phones.
The term "enshittification" is used a lot these days. But there is this pattern where human organizations -- be it companies, codebases, countries and many other examples -- undergo this transformation from simple, humble and efficient systems to complex, arrogant and inefficient ones.
I wouldn't dare to speculate on the cause of this devolution. There are theories like becoming publicly traded for companies, and subsequently execs chasing short term profits to make shareholders happy, or elected officials chasing after votes for the next immediate election cycle. But it would be nice if there was some sort of a large scale in-depth study on the topic and research into solutions for it.
Honestly, the more I think about so many issues, the more I feel like there needs to be a dedicated field into the study of incentives and how they shape the systems and organizations humans build and maintain. Everything from google search being terrible to climate change feels like it all has a shared root cause of misaligned or defective incentives.
Perhaps existing fields like game theory, economics or systems design should cover this topic?
Either way, our systems design methodology is faulty and this fault is nearly universal and systemic, affecting all humans in almost every area of our lives.
One theory I have (full disclosure: subjects I am not too familiar with) is economics and game theory, specifically the "Nash equilibrium" game theory, which as I understand boils down to "everyone should participate in the system, only taking into account their own success and profit, and nothing more than that" might be at fault. Or maybe, it simply codified the innate faulty organizational instinct we have?
You're right about "everyone should participate in the system, only taking into account their own success and profit, and nothing more than that" being (at least part of) the root problem. However, this is not a description of a Nash equilibrium. It uses the word “should”. It's a philosophy. It is, in fact, the philosophy of capitalism. It creates incentives for short-term thinking, profit-seeking at the detriment to the public good, and competition in areas where collaboration is more appropriate. It doesn't have to be that way, no matter how much the rich and powerful less us that it should.
A Nash equilibrium is a state of affairs in which no single person can improve their position without the collaboration of others. A frequently cited example is a bank run: if the bank goes bust, you better get your savings out quickly, but if everyone does it, the bank goes bust. The solution is for everyone to cooperate and agree to refrain from a run on the bank. Such collaboration is not easy to organize and not easy to convince a majority to participate in; but the ego-centric philosophy of capitalism makes it infinitely harder.
> Honestly, the more I think about so many issues, the more I feel like there needs to be a dedicated field into the study of incentives and how they shape the systems and organizations humans build and maintain.
That currently falls under economics, sociology and game theory. It’s not really a dedicated field sure but it’s well covered
Before reading the article, I assumed it was about LLMs. It looks like the regulators have perfectly timed their focus on Google’s business. Is Microsoft laughing at this point?
Only in the narrow sense that Microsoft managed to avoid structural remedies due to Bush Jr. shenanigans that were forgotten because the case was settled three days before 9/11. In the broader sense they've got loads of consent decrees on them, first from the US, then from the EU. They can't even kick CrowdStrike out of the NT kernel!
Even among big tech, Google is an unusually meaty target because:
1. Literally all but two of their consumer product lines are acquisitions. A significant part of their ads network is also acquisitions. Most of those product lines and ad network divisions were preceded by internally-developed business units that were marketplace failures. Google does not build, it buys.
2. Android is FOSS, which neatly tidies away a lot of the "we have a right to monetize our IP" arguments that Apple loves to trot out.
3. They paid Facebook bucket-loads of money to keep them from launching a competing ad network under the "Jedi Blue" program. This is textbook illegal behavior and doesn't require any new theories of antitrust like, say, the Epic lawsuit did.
4. Google doesn't comply with litigation holds. Civil litigation is a Constitution-free zone, you can't take the 5th in this kind of trial, meaning that you can be forced to self-incriminate, and if you do not do so, the judge is free to make adverse inferences.
5. Google doesn't have a single charismatic(?) leader. Apple had Steve Jobs, who could invent the monopolistic business model and then conveniently die[0] before anyone with power started to question it. Google has a bunch of executives that all have to e-mail one another, which means that even with their cavalier attitude towards recordkeeping, something winds up getting recorded, making the missing information even more incriminating.
The one thing I can't answer with this set of answers is why Facebook isn't getting as much scrutiny as Google is, especially since Facebook has proven to be such a good conduit for scammers and disinformation. Facebook has even less ability to leverage "copyright disclaims antitrust" than Google does.
[0] Constitution or no, a judge can't compel a corpse to testify.
Besides 3, what does any of this have to do with anti-trust law?
Regarding point 1, and in comparison to Microsoft, the company has historically acquired other businesses to fuel its growth (DOS, cough cough...). This is a normal playbook.
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