Google is excelling again - as the whole “uncensored” Big-Tech IT now.
The short summary is that for nearly a year, Google was hiding Proton Mail from search results for queries such as ‘secure email’ and ‘encrypted email’. This was highly suspicious because Proton Mail has long been the world’s largest encrypted email provider.
A truly free market have a high likelihood of self-correcting once one group gets too influential.
It never will. You libertarian types say that it will, but it never has and never will. First there are no mythical pure free market and also when you have a lot more capital, resources and bulk. They can comparatively throw endless amounts of money towards a problem and RnD. They can afford to fuck up and have a money buffer, they might just generally stagnate and be ok. When your potential challengers can only usually have one chance and, when they fail they will get bought out and usually by the same monopoly that they were trying to challenge and thus enforcing that monopoly with whatever innovation that the up with, or they just take the patent just so that nobody else gets it. And what has alphabet for example doing. it’s been shopping smaller tech and IT companies all around the world and it integrating them into itself.
Or the alternative: lower the barrier for others to compete.
how will you lower the capital cost that would be required to challenge google/alphabet? Servers, battalions of code monkeys and engineers and RnD don’t just drop from the sky for free you know. That is the biggest problem of challenging any monopoly, it’s just too damn expensive to try when it reaches a certain point. There comes a point when you can’t just anymore get into the market with two shovels and some elbow grease and you need massive loans for fleets of excavators and trained crews to run them just to be competitive. There is also the problem that at some point nobody will fund your venture to dethrone the market leader, because A) it’s expensive as fuck B) there is 1% chance that you will succeed and the investment will provide 100x return and 99% chance that failure awaits and the money will be lost. No sane bank or financier takes that bet and nobody does that kinda things for charity.
Government is most effective as a police to shut down bad behavior, it’s really ineffective at actually providing services
Again, your government just sucks. You draw the incorrect conclusion that therefore every government must suck as badly as yours.
it never has and never will
I gave you examples where it has. Yahoo’s massive search lead was completely destroyed by Google, who offered a much better product at the time, and they even tried the “one-stop shop” thing that Google is known for today.
They can comparatively throw endless amounts of money towards a problem and RnD
But that’s not what companies tend to do. Once companies get a commanding lead, they take their foot off the gas and try to rake in profits. That happened to Intel, and look where they’re at now. As long as there’s no anti-competitive behavior, the system will eventually correct itself, because the dominant company will take its foot off the gas. If it doesn’t, then it really doesn’t matter if they have a massive marketshare because the customer is happy (e.g. Valve), but that’s incredibly rare.
When your potential challengers can only usually have one chance
In a fair market, you won’t just have one challenger though, you’ll have tons. Investors love underdog success stories because going from nothing to significant market share makes a lot more money than maintaining a lead, so there will always be support for challengers to the status quo. Look at cars, Tesla ate everyone’s lunch on EVs to become the most valuable car company. People thought the car market was largely impossible to break into, yet Tesla was able to do it. Why? Lots of capital and a strong, new-ish tech (yes, EVs weren’t new, but fast EVs were).
Yeah, monopolies will try to buy their smaller competitors, and it’s on regulators to block those sales if they’re anti-competitive, and it’s also on those smaller competitors to say no because they believe in their product.
how will you lower the capital cost that would be required to challenge google/alphabet?
By separating the various components so they don’t have as much power.
Right now, a competitor can’t really win at search because it’s not the default everywhere, and Google has basically paid to be the default everywhere. So breaking that anti-competitive behavior is the first step. A company also can’t win at video because Google subsidizes YouTube with its profitable search business, so if that’s forced to be profitable on its own, it’ll have to raise prices, which creates an opportunity for a challenger to step in. For web browsers, Google basically has massive intertia, which it maintains by having Chrome be default on Android, and Chrome is the lynchpin to pretty much everything. The solution there is to force Android to be self-sufficient (i.e. provide it’s own, non-Chrome browser), and for Chromebooks to also be independently successful (i.e. separate it from the Google Search product).
If each of Google’s products had to be profitable on their own merits, competitors would have a realistic shot.
If you’ll look at the market though, there are competitors that are ready to start taking marketshare:
- search - Kagi, Mojeek, Brave Search, MetaGer, etc - they fail because Google is default everywhere
- browsers - Brave, Firefox, Vivaldi, etc - they fail, again, because Chrome is default on Android and has massive inertia on PC
- video - Odyssee, Nebula, Rumble, etc - they fail because YouTube is subsidized by search ad revenue
So if you break up Google, the market is ready for competition, they’re just being suppressed because of Google’s anti-competitive behavior.
1% chance that you will succeed and the investment will provide 100x return and 99% chance that failure
That’s how business generally goes. The successful ones don’t attack the golden goose directly, but instead chip away at the edges. That’s what Proton, Kagi, etc are essentially doing, and AFAIK they are commercially successful, they just have a hard time competing with “free.”
every government must suck as badly as yours
I’m not talking about every government, I’m talking about this one specific government, because that’s the one that’s relevant in this discussion.
I do think that other governments also suck, they just suck differently. I just think the motivations for governments just don’t align properly for certain classes of services. But to make that case, I’d have to talk in the context of a specific government and a specific service, and in this case I’m talking about the US government and services Google provides.
