Jan 26, 2023·edited Jan 26, 2023Liked by Noah Smith
I just don't see how one could have a good reason to pursue this lawsuit against google without pursuing apple. Apple is openly and blatantly using it's market power in hardware to extract software rents. There is no question there are network effects and it would probably be a national security plus not minus.
It all makes me wonder if this isn't, in part, driven by a certain resentment in the media sphere that google has eaten into traditional newspaper profits. That's probably just paranoid thinking but it just feels nutty.
I can't compare the overall consumer impact but both the legal case and solution seem much clearer for apple. Bank a win by forcing apple to allow alternative app stores and then think about the less clear cut cases.
Newspapers support anti-Google lawsuits both because digital advertising has displaced print advertising but also because they're website publishers and see a big share of ad spend on their sites get taken by Google. There are some reasonable concerns (e. g. Google appear to have tried to kill header bidding, specifically for their own commercial interests) but the media is unambiguously an interested party that thinks it will benefit from this action.
there’s also something to be said about apple products as a luxury good and upper-middle class status icon, i’d imagine some regulators fear pissing off their brunch buddies by gutting the brand
Also the competition with Apple is extremely visible and persistent, it's just also *bad* (including with respect to software), which makes it harder to get riled up about Apple rent extraction on luxury-priced goods with ubiquitous alternatives.
If alternative phone suppliers (including Samsung) weren't so hellbent on filling up their phones with garbage software and making obnoxious deals with TikTok or whoever at the expense of their customer bases -- and if, for example, Google were committed to providing security updates for *their own OS on their own hardware* for more than 3 years at a stretch, there'd just be more incentive to buy things that aren't iPhones.
It's a real tragedy for the industry that Windows Phone died the death it did and never became a third competitor because (in addition to my understanding that it was actually pretty okay on the phones it released on, the Lumia gotta pretty friendly reviews) AIUI the business proposition for it was closer to a cheap and easily-licensed OS (like Android but closed-source, which in the context of the rest of the market actually may have even been a slight plus for the consumer by limiting carrier and phone manufacturer opportunities for fuckery), but one with respect to which Microsoft intended to exercise a lot more stewardship over the product and its licensees than Google does with Android -- and it's really the absence of that stewardship that leaves Android as the lowest-common-denominator free for all that it's perceived to have become.
But that's a consequence of the very anti-trust pressure we are seeing here. Google would no doubt love to exercise more control over their phone products but they've already had their hands slapped for the level of control they do have (they get shit about making their browser/email/etc default/favored even tho on Android u aren't locked into their app store).
It's a whole lot easier to do long term support for a single hardware platform than for all the random crap Samsung and Nokia and etc stuffed in their phones with who knows what custom kludges.
I'm not taking a position on whether that anti-trust pressure is appropriate but it's kinda messed up if the reason it's hard to get riled up about applying anti-trust rules to apple is because not applying them let's them produce a more coherent product lineup.
Google doesn't support the Pixel, which *is* their hardware, as well as Apple does the iPhone. That's what I meant by the "3 years of security updates" thing. That's not on Samsung and Nokia, that's on Google. And I'm not aware of any anti-trust movement against Google for, e.g., conditioning licenses on a refusal to include uninstallable or mandatory apps, which they could certainly try to do.
Point is that if google could use control over android to force everyone to use their hardware the way apple does I bet they would be building their own hardware from ground up too (not just repackaging) and it would be more appealing to support it for a longer time.
OTOH you'd think they'd have fixed their messsaging efforts by now so who knows.
How is the Apple App Store fee different than Google’s Play Store fee other than the latter applies to devices from other manufacturers as well as Google’s own. If the government forces Apple to allow alternative app stores it should do the same. Most apps in all stores are free anyway so it’s not so much the store itself but the payment processing for subscriptions and add-ons that extract the rent. This isn’t really a hardware tie in, more an OS tie in, but I don’t know of any phones or tablets that allow alternative OS support. A real hardware tie in on Apple and Google devices is that the NFC chip used for Apple Pay is only accessible by the Apple wallet app. But trying to allow any apps to use the NFC chip, or alternate app stores with unknown security checks on apps or alternate payment processing apps could make all phones less secure and harder to use so doing this may benefit app developers but actually make the consumer experience worse.
Google allows side loading. If I want I can use a different app store or even download the app w/o using the store at all. For instance Samsung runs their own app store (tho it may just be a licensing deal for all I know) on the galaxy tablets in addition to the play store.
And from a consumer pov that's what I really care about. I hate the fact that apple gets to decide what kinds of apps I get to use (too porny now, maybe soon it will be too effective at evading the great firewall).
I think Apple is going to be forced to allow side loading, alternative app stores and alternative payment systems by a thousand cuts of regulation, but I'll also guess that only 10%, if that many, of iPhone users are going to enable it. One reason is user inertia and the other is security. There are very few firms out there who have reputations for probity and user security, so a lot people just figure that Apple is the best of a bad lot and put up with its limitations.
Sure but that matters *hugely* . That means if I live in a repressive country the government can no longer force apple to deny me access to tor or other workarounds of their censorship!
Even if the us it means i can use apps they disapprove of and puts pressure on their prices. I mean it probably wouldn't be that hard for me or google to have an iOS store and ppl trust them already.
A repressive government can also simply force Apple to deny sideloading for all devices sold in their jurisdiction. There is no tech solution to political problem.
I mean, if your argument worked then why is it that PCs and macs sold in repressive countries still allow running arbitrary programs? And android allows side loading even in these countries?
The word "still" is doing a bit of work there. You can run an arbitrary program under MacOS, but the system checks the code signature and verifies the code origin. If it recognizes the signature, it will just run the program. If it doesn't recognize the signature, it asks if the user wants to run it anyway and offers a link to a site with more info. If there is no signature, there is still a way to run it, but the user has to explicitly run the program rather than just double clicking, then verify that they really, really want to run it. It's rather obvious that Apple could make this even harder.
Developers using Apple's tools are issued code signing keys that identify them, much the way the old USSR used to require a sample set from each typewriter and modern laser printers uniquely mark each copy. There is already some controversy about Apple's potential ability to stop Mac side loading. Right now, applications have to be checksummed to verify that they haven't been modified and Apple has to approve the execution with an online interaction. In theory, they could shut off the direct execution option and further limit and revoke developers' ability to produce software.
I'm not actually convinced that will work. Once you allow sideloading you don't have the same incentives to be careful about checking signatures and preventing exploits. Right now the programmers at apple are incentivized to plug the holes that might let someone run side loaded apps. Once apple is forced to allow side loading their incentives change considerably as the engineers in the states don't have any incentive to do more than the minimum and certainly not to actively plug security holes.
Allowing sideloading with privilege is not the same as allowing arbitrary privilege escalation. I do agree that the incentives to fix privilege escalation vulnerabilities will weaken somewhat, which is what I worry about allowing sideloading.
That is why PCs and macs are different: they have always given full privileges* to their users, so there is significant cost, both technical and political, for repressive governments to ask for or create non-privileged variants. For iPhone they could simply ask for status quo.
*Almost, as Apple has been locking down hardware components and firmwares. But otherwise they are actively supporting booting other OSes on Macbooks.
Another reason is that sideloading is not all bad for repressive governments: it's also easier for them to sideload surveillance-ware onto their targets. Android phones of journalists and activists are often easy targets, either for ongoing surveillance or bulk data extraction.
A repressive government can even require Android phone manufacturer to pre-load system level surveillance-ware. They can't do that to iPhone because Apple uses the excuse "we distribute one OS version globally", but with sideload open they can load in surveillance-ware at state-owned telecoms selling iPhones instead.
App stores aren't as important as side loading. A repressive government could fairly easily track down publicly accessible app stores and either block them or shut them down. They could also "poison" the apps to make it easier to track dissidents while offering them the illusion of freedom and secrecy. If the general public can find out about the app store, the government can find it as well.
Side loading, especially from phone to phone, would be harder to block, but that would require appropriate developer tools which would have to be similarly side loaded. Another possible approach is to use extremely inexpensive systems, perhaps something like the Raspberry Pi, as the development and distribution system. Even better, build the distribution system on computers already pervasive, for example, the systems running on washing machines in laundromats or car entertainment systems.
Apple's App Store practice was sued by Epic in the context of game distribution. If Apple is to be sued, there then comes the question why PlayStation, XBOX, and Switch are not sued with a similar reason too. They all leverage hardware power to extract software rents, to the rate of 30%. (I remember Noah wrote about this... or was it Ben Thompson?)
From a tech security angle, I am very much against opening up more side loading than the existing XCode / AltServer path on an iPhone with all my personal life on it. Ideally Apple can do it without opening up more vulnerabilities; practically, who knows.
On the other hand, there are none of the security downsides, some downsides about harder anti-cheat for online competitive games, but many benefits to opening up game consoles, such as homebrew gamedev, game history preservation, etc.
As someone who works in the digital marketing world I can tell you that Google has bigger issues, it used to be that we’d get about 1,000 bidders a week from paid search and now even with more spend (their prices have been jacked up) we’re down to about 300 bidders a week even with the same number of UVs, which suggests that their search terms and keywords are not as effective at attracting actual customers as it used to be, plus I’m pretty sure that anyone using Google lately has noticed how much poorer the search function is over the last couple of years
On top of that ChatGPT is gonna eat into search, just this week I was googling some answers about some changes I wanted to make to SQL code and wasn’t finding the answers I needed, back to that search issue it’s not as good as interpreting your questions to deliver the results you want as it used to be
So I decided to try ChatGPT and started with a Google search type thing and got a Google search type answer (but straight away got the closest I got from Google after about 20 minutes of attempts) but then I just dropped on the code with a question for the change I wanted and BOOM it just updated the code for me, there was one issue with the code (it gave me what I wanted but made me lose one thing I already had and needed) so I just typed in ‘but I still need X’ and BOOM it just delivered the updated code
Ppl are looking at ChatGPT all wrong, it’s not about AI conversations or whatever, it’s optimised search and will take a huge chunk of market share off Google, I know I’ll go to ChatGPT first now when looking for any technical help or information and I’m sure they’ll find a way to monetise it soon
Time to bring back meta search engines. If your query is about math, direct it to Wolfram Alpha, news and facts then Google search, and everything else to ChatGPT.
At least until they get Sherlocked. I've been thinking about bringing back a mulitple search engine tool like that lately. Google tends to return garbage lately.
I know it’s more outside the economist’s purview, but I would like to have seen more consideration given to whether and when the power struggle aspect of anti-trust is valid. Google being able to control so much of the pathways people use to access information on the internet between search and ad dominance, along with the prominence of YouTube, seems prima facie to be a valid, serious concern. Maybe breaking them up still is not the answer in this case, but it seems perfectly reasonable for the populace to be worried about a large corporation having outsized, unbalance power like that, completely outside of any economic implications.
‘Why would advertisers and websites together pay 30% of ad dollars to Google? There are two possible reasons. Possibility 1 is that Google’s tool’
That used to be the case but not anymore, see my previous reply, the quality of Google search results both SEO & SEM have dropped off considerably, they still deliver the UVs but they seem more effective at attracting bots than actual ppl when u look at conversion
Because I’m not the decision maker and when you look at the numbers returned for bidders on social they are so bad they just can’t be real
So like paid search returns about 1000 bidders for 20,000 UVs in the good days and about 300 bidders for 20,000 UVs today
But social (inc Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn) if u trusted the numbers from Adobe and GA return about 60-80 bidders from 40,000 UVs
This just can’t be accurate due to the nature of our Paid Social ads (much more product targeted) but we’ve spent 10,s of thousands of dollars on outside consultants to look at this social reporting issue and they can’t find the problem/provide a solution either but everyone agrees that the conversion rate just can’t be that low (we think it has something to do with tracking through multiple pages but can’t find a solution)
Then things like Display, Prospecting and Retargetting don’t deliver either
Personally I would put much now focus on email and hire someone new to help out with paid search (improve our keyword buys etc) and organic search but I’m not the decision maker
One other thing I’d like regulator’s to look at is the reporting tools like Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics
Just one thing you notice is that when traffic drops you also see that average time per visit drops (and same with increases) now there is no reason that the average visit time should go up when traffic goes up or down when traffic goes down, think about it, if 2 ppl visit or 20 ppl visit it shouldn’t make any difference to the average length of those visits (and certainly not when it’s 1.5 million or a million) but as digital marketing analysts we really only have these 2 tools to go on and they do usually pretty much agree, but this issue makes me question many other of their numbers (things like getting 1.5 million UVs per month but 14 million UVs per year, I just don’t buy that we’re getting that few return UVs month to month, or that 2 out of every 3 Australians visited our eCommerce site last year) but because Adobe and GA generally agree and the numbers are high nobody has any motivation to question the numbers being delivered even though any thinking person has to question how real they really are
I’m not suggesting anything, I’m just saying that after 8 years of looking at these numbers day after day after day I have led and less faith that they are real, but the problems/issues/concerns are all on the high side so nobody who uses these tools has any incentive to question them
The iPod being a more lucrative (and superior product) to the MP3 players that came before them is a nice historical irony with windows being a more lucrative take on the Mac operating system
1) AI is overrated. Name a profitable AI application aside from my Zojirushi rice cooker. What percentage of Google's revenues does it represent? AI is just window dressing. It's self driving cars. When Google released an actually useful AI system, Alphafold, it took researchers a few months to release an open source version. When AI actually starts to make a difference, we'll see that Google was nearly irrelevant.
2) If you are looking a monopoly power, one important issue is whether Google demands exclusive rights to place ads on a site. I'm guessing they do. That precludes the development of more focused advertising markets. A lot of them were developing 20 years ago but Google ate them all.
3) If you break up Google, follow the AT&T model. Break out the indexing and ranking component, the web crawler, from the search engines that provide the actual search results to user queries. This would open a market for more focused search markets. Google search is garbage these days, but it's the only game in town. A lot of people will go for natural language query and response while others will go for more sophisticated search. It would be nice to have some options, and the advertisers would like having a segmented market.
To their credit, most of Google’s AI innovations are published freely in conferences and journals. It just turns out that you need to set a bunch of money on fire training the models, so it’s hard for independent labs and companies to compete.
"So it probably was with Microsoft in the 90s and early 00s, when people thought — wrongly, it turned out — that control of desktop operating systems made that company an all-conquering empire."
Not sure of this statement as Apple, current market cap $2.25T and Microsoft, $1.8T, dominate mobile and desktop operating systems today.
The best historical example that is analogous to Google is that of AT&T. The Judge Greene decision in 1983 that broke up AT&T's monopoly on voice and data, absent MCI's competition for long-distance that began in 1973, ultimately led the way to the wide-spread adoption of the internet in the early 1990s, as telecommunications equipment and services became subject to market competition which led to lower prices and better services. You did not have to employ an AT&T branded or "approved" devices to connect to the local phone network anymore, so independent manufacturers of modems, as an example, such as Hayes and Motorola, could innovate and compete with the lagging technology of Ma Bell. AT&T was relentlessly focused on their profit center of long distance calling and sales of automated switches to corporations to reduce labor costs, as well as in their own network. In the 1940s telephone switchboard operators numbered as high as 340,000 persons in the U.S. alone.
Google is similarly situated today to AT&T in the early '80s. A market cap of $1.24T and a stranglehold on search and ads. Apart from Ticketmaster, they are a reasonable target of anti-monopoly legislation or executive action.
And now AT&T does funky things like buying Time Warner, making it worse, and selling it 3 years later at a $40B loss (and both times raising some antitrust concerns). The future is bright for Apple and Microsoft.
Google will never be broken up because it is too useful to the national security state. Google collects all the information that governments can't, because of constitutional protections, and then turns it over when asked to do so. And this doesn't even consider their role in shaping what we are allowed to see, in the guise of protecting the "cognitive infrastructure." It's the same reason the Chinese government prefers monopolies.
I think the issue is a bit simpler, especially once you add in allegations of Bell/Bernanke fraud (collecting $$$ selling a display ad, telling publishers the auction closed at $$ and underpaying them by $, using the $ withheld for seemingly anticompetitive actions in another layer of the display market).
Also, executives involved should maybe search for criminal defense lawyers, just in case, as it appears the allegations point out an intentional criminal fraud.
Right now Google is the auction house and they also want you to let them bid for you. So they are the auction house, and they are your personal bidder. But they are also your competitors personal bidder. And all your other competitors personal bidders.
This actually makes sense despite seeming absurd, they have the data, and you almost always WILL get better results if you turn over your bidding to them to do. Or at least you will now vs manual bidding now, when some of your competition are letting Google run their account.
But if Google runs the auction, and runs all the bids for all auctions (after your competitors also convert to letting Google do it all), what will they optimize the total end result for?
Would it ever be lower prices? They can't save everyone money without lowering revenue, and "monopoly pricing" along a demand curve seems to be exactly what this setup could allow if Google gets to control all pricing and data.
But I agree we do have to worry about what it means to have Google releasing that much data to other vendors (it is not private anymore, and can be assumed to just be out there once duplicated that many times). A semi-strong monopoly power being used to collect extra profit might not be worse than the alternatives, if the alternatives require all auction data and other data being released to a whole market of vendors replicating their bidding automation.
My understanding is that in antitrust at present there are only certain types of reasons that are recognized as legitimate reasons to take action. Now, again as a layperson, it seems what counts as a legitimate reason shifts around and isn't totally set in stone (the consumer welfare paradigm started by Bork is popular among free market types, Tim Wu and Lina Khan want to shift the Overton window here)
But it strikes me as not on the table presently to use anti trust to do industrial policy by the courts. Like it may be true that if Google invested in this stream of innovation rather than just ads it'd lead to cooler AI which would be great in a contest in China - but is that *reason* that could actually be *given* in the anti trust proceedings? I think that would be a pretty bad way to proceed with antitrust because while being competitive against China is good, it doesn't provide anything close to an objective standard to assess anti trust and just seems very far away from any rationale of anti trust.
Don't we have bigger fish to fry? I don't feel that I'm being screwed over by Google and Apple. I think they have improved our lives. We have plenty of competition at the platform level (Google vs. Apple vs. Microsoft vs. Amazon). Security is better with large ecosystems. People trust Apple and Google, so they are incented to regulate themselves in order to keep that trust. Meta, not so much. The technology itself will force it to evolve to stay competitive (see the good comment on ChatGPT here and think about how ad blockers will force Google to innovate to find new revenue streams).
I just don't see how one could have a good reason to pursue this lawsuit against google without pursuing apple. Apple is openly and blatantly using it's market power in hardware to extract software rents. There is no question there are network effects and it would probably be a national security plus not minus.
It all makes me wonder if this isn't, in part, driven by a certain resentment in the media sphere that google has eaten into traditional newspaper profits. That's probably just paranoid thinking but it just feels nutty.
I can't compare the overall consumer impact but both the legal case and solution seem much clearer for apple. Bank a win by forcing apple to allow alternative app stores and then think about the less clear cut cases.
Agree.
Newspapers support anti-Google lawsuits both because digital advertising has displaced print advertising but also because they're website publishers and see a big share of ad spend on their sites get taken by Google. There are some reasonable concerns (e. g. Google appear to have tried to kill header bidding, specifically for their own commercial interests) but the media is unambiguously an interested party that thinks it will benefit from this action.
there’s also something to be said about apple products as a luxury good and upper-middle class status icon, i’d imagine some regulators fear pissing off their brunch buddies by gutting the brand
Also the competition with Apple is extremely visible and persistent, it's just also *bad* (including with respect to software), which makes it harder to get riled up about Apple rent extraction on luxury-priced goods with ubiquitous alternatives.
If alternative phone suppliers (including Samsung) weren't so hellbent on filling up their phones with garbage software and making obnoxious deals with TikTok or whoever at the expense of their customer bases -- and if, for example, Google were committed to providing security updates for *their own OS on their own hardware* for more than 3 years at a stretch, there'd just be more incentive to buy things that aren't iPhones.
It's a real tragedy for the industry that Windows Phone died the death it did and never became a third competitor because (in addition to my understanding that it was actually pretty okay on the phones it released on, the Lumia gotta pretty friendly reviews) AIUI the business proposition for it was closer to a cheap and easily-licensed OS (like Android but closed-source, which in the context of the rest of the market actually may have even been a slight plus for the consumer by limiting carrier and phone manufacturer opportunities for fuckery), but one with respect to which Microsoft intended to exercise a lot more stewardship over the product and its licensees than Google does with Android -- and it's really the absence of that stewardship that leaves Android as the lowest-common-denominator free for all that it's perceived to have become.
Since switching to its own chips, Google is now providing five years of updates for Pixel phones.
But that's a consequence of the very anti-trust pressure we are seeing here. Google would no doubt love to exercise more control over their phone products but they've already had their hands slapped for the level of control they do have (they get shit about making their browser/email/etc default/favored even tho on Android u aren't locked into their app store).
It's a whole lot easier to do long term support for a single hardware platform than for all the random crap Samsung and Nokia and etc stuffed in their phones with who knows what custom kludges.
I'm not taking a position on whether that anti-trust pressure is appropriate but it's kinda messed up if the reason it's hard to get riled up about applying anti-trust rules to apple is because not applying them let's them produce a more coherent product lineup.
Google doesn't support the Pixel, which *is* their hardware, as well as Apple does the iPhone. That's what I meant by the "3 years of security updates" thing. That's not on Samsung and Nokia, that's on Google. And I'm not aware of any anti-trust movement against Google for, e.g., conditioning licenses on a refusal to include uninstallable or mandatory apps, which they could certainly try to do.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/02/androids-february-security-patch-marks-the-last-update-for-the-pixel-3/
Sure, but their incentives to do so are much less because most ppl don't really differentiate between google hardware and non-google hardware. Re: anti-trust see here (even requiring their own apps to be preloaded got nixed): https://www.reuters.com/technology/india-antitrust-body-denies-googles-allegation-it-copied-eus-android-order-2023-01-19/
Point is that if google could use control over android to force everyone to use their hardware the way apple does I bet they would be building their own hardware from ground up too (not just repackaging) and it would be more appealing to support it for a longer time.
OTOH you'd think they'd have fixed their messsaging efforts by now so who knows.
How is the Apple App Store fee different than Google’s Play Store fee other than the latter applies to devices from other manufacturers as well as Google’s own. If the government forces Apple to allow alternative app stores it should do the same. Most apps in all stores are free anyway so it’s not so much the store itself but the payment processing for subscriptions and add-ons that extract the rent. This isn’t really a hardware tie in, more an OS tie in, but I don’t know of any phones or tablets that allow alternative OS support. A real hardware tie in on Apple and Google devices is that the NFC chip used for Apple Pay is only accessible by the Apple wallet app. But trying to allow any apps to use the NFC chip, or alternate app stores with unknown security checks on apps or alternate payment processing apps could make all phones less secure and harder to use so doing this may benefit app developers but actually make the consumer experience worse.
Google allows side loading. If I want I can use a different app store or even download the app w/o using the store at all. For instance Samsung runs their own app store (tho it may just be a licensing deal for all I know) on the galaxy tablets in addition to the play store.
And from a consumer pov that's what I really care about. I hate the fact that apple gets to decide what kinds of apps I get to use (too porny now, maybe soon it will be too effective at evading the great firewall).
I think Apple is going to be forced to allow side loading, alternative app stores and alternative payment systems by a thousand cuts of regulation, but I'll also guess that only 10%, if that many, of iPhone users are going to enable it. One reason is user inertia and the other is security. There are very few firms out there who have reputations for probity and user security, so a lot people just figure that Apple is the best of a bad lot and put up with its limitations.
Sure but that matters *hugely* . That means if I live in a repressive country the government can no longer force apple to deny me access to tor or other workarounds of their censorship!
Even if the us it means i can use apps they disapprove of and puts pressure on their prices. I mean it probably wouldn't be that hard for me or google to have an iOS store and ppl trust them already.
A repressive government can also simply force Apple to deny sideloading for all devices sold in their jurisdiction. There is no tech solution to political problem.
I mean, if your argument worked then why is it that PCs and macs sold in repressive countries still allow running arbitrary programs? And android allows side loading even in these countries?
The word "still" is doing a bit of work there. You can run an arbitrary program under MacOS, but the system checks the code signature and verifies the code origin. If it recognizes the signature, it will just run the program. If it doesn't recognize the signature, it asks if the user wants to run it anyway and offers a link to a site with more info. If there is no signature, there is still a way to run it, but the user has to explicitly run the program rather than just double clicking, then verify that they really, really want to run it. It's rather obvious that Apple could make this even harder.
Developers using Apple's tools are issued code signing keys that identify them, much the way the old USSR used to require a sample set from each typewriter and modern laser printers uniquely mark each copy. There is already some controversy about Apple's potential ability to stop Mac side loading. Right now, applications have to be checksummed to verify that they haven't been modified and Apple has to approve the execution with an online interaction. In theory, they could shut off the direct execution option and further limit and revoke developers' ability to produce software.
I'm not actually convinced that will work. Once you allow sideloading you don't have the same incentives to be careful about checking signatures and preventing exploits. Right now the programmers at apple are incentivized to plug the holes that might let someone run side loaded apps. Once apple is forced to allow side loading their incentives change considerably as the engineers in the states don't have any incentive to do more than the minimum and certainly not to actively plug security holes.
Allowing sideloading with privilege is not the same as allowing arbitrary privilege escalation. I do agree that the incentives to fix privilege escalation vulnerabilities will weaken somewhat, which is what I worry about allowing sideloading.
That is why PCs and macs are different: they have always given full privileges* to their users, so there is significant cost, both technical and political, for repressive governments to ask for or create non-privileged variants. For iPhone they could simply ask for status quo.
*Almost, as Apple has been locking down hardware components and firmwares. But otherwise they are actively supporting booting other OSes on Macbooks.
Another reason is that sideloading is not all bad for repressive governments: it's also easier for them to sideload surveillance-ware onto their targets. Android phones of journalists and activists are often easy targets, either for ongoing surveillance or bulk data extraction.
A repressive government can even require Android phone manufacturer to pre-load system level surveillance-ware. They can't do that to iPhone because Apple uses the excuse "we distribute one OS version globally", but with sideload open they can load in surveillance-ware at state-owned telecoms selling iPhones instead.
App stores aren't as important as side loading. A repressive government could fairly easily track down publicly accessible app stores and either block them or shut them down. They could also "poison" the apps to make it easier to track dissidents while offering them the illusion of freedom and secrecy. If the general public can find out about the app store, the government can find it as well.
Side loading, especially from phone to phone, would be harder to block, but that would require appropriate developer tools which would have to be similarly side loaded. Another possible approach is to use extremely inexpensive systems, perhaps something like the Raspberry Pi, as the development and distribution system. Even better, build the distribution system on computers already pervasive, for example, the systems running on washing machines in laundromats or car entertainment systems.
Yes, I agree but I was kinda assuming that side loading effectively allows alternative app stores.
Apple's App Store practice was sued by Epic in the context of game distribution. If Apple is to be sued, there then comes the question why PlayStation, XBOX, and Switch are not sued with a similar reason too. They all leverage hardware power to extract software rents, to the rate of 30%. (I remember Noah wrote about this... or was it Ben Thompson?)
From a tech security angle, I am very much against opening up more side loading than the existing XCode / AltServer path on an iPhone with all my personal life on it. Ideally Apple can do it without opening up more vulnerabilities; practically, who knows.
On the other hand, there are none of the security downsides, some downsides about harder anti-cheat for online competitive games, but many benefits to opening up game consoles, such as homebrew gamedev, game history preservation, etc.
As someone who works in the digital marketing world I can tell you that Google has bigger issues, it used to be that we’d get about 1,000 bidders a week from paid search and now even with more spend (their prices have been jacked up) we’re down to about 300 bidders a week even with the same number of UVs, which suggests that their search terms and keywords are not as effective at attracting actual customers as it used to be, plus I’m pretty sure that anyone using Google lately has noticed how much poorer the search function is over the last couple of years
On top of that ChatGPT is gonna eat into search, just this week I was googling some answers about some changes I wanted to make to SQL code and wasn’t finding the answers I needed, back to that search issue it’s not as good as interpreting your questions to deliver the results you want as it used to be
So I decided to try ChatGPT and started with a Google search type thing and got a Google search type answer (but straight away got the closest I got from Google after about 20 minutes of attempts) but then I just dropped on the code with a question for the change I wanted and BOOM it just updated the code for me, there was one issue with the code (it gave me what I wanted but made me lose one thing I already had and needed) so I just typed in ‘but I still need X’ and BOOM it just delivered the updated code
Ppl are looking at ChatGPT all wrong, it’s not about AI conversations or whatever, it’s optimised search and will take a huge chunk of market share off Google, I know I’ll go to ChatGPT first now when looking for any technical help or information and I’m sure they’ll find a way to monetise it soon
That's interesting.
Time to bring back meta search engines. If your query is about math, direct it to Wolfram Alpha, news and facts then Google search, and everything else to ChatGPT.
At least until they get Sherlocked. I've been thinking about bringing back a mulitple search engine tool like that lately. Google tends to return garbage lately.
Hmm interesting comment
Display Ads are a foster child in Google:
For Q3’22 the revenue was:
Search: $39.5B
YouTube: $7B
Display Network: $7.9B
Total Ads: $54.5B
Total Alphabet revenue: $69B
So Display Ads revenue is 14.5% of Google Ads revenue or 11.5% of total Alphabet revenue.
So “smaller Google” here would mean like 5% smaller.
That’s a good point, the FTC diagram Noah included shows the display ad path, but how are search and YouTube ads handled?
I know it’s more outside the economist’s purview, but I would like to have seen more consideration given to whether and when the power struggle aspect of anti-trust is valid. Google being able to control so much of the pathways people use to access information on the internet between search and ad dominance, along with the prominence of YouTube, seems prima facie to be a valid, serious concern. Maybe breaking them up still is not the answer in this case, but it seems perfectly reasonable for the populace to be worried about a large corporation having outsized, unbalance power like that, completely outside of any economic implications.
‘Why would advertisers and websites together pay 30% of ad dollars to Google? There are two possible reasons. Possibility 1 is that Google’s tool’
That used to be the case but not anymore, see my previous reply, the quality of Google search results both SEO & SEM have dropped off considerably, they still deliver the UVs but they seem more effective at attracting bots than actual ppl when u look at conversion
If you aren't getting value for the money you are spending on Google ads, why not go somewhere else?
Because I’m not the decision maker and when you look at the numbers returned for bidders on social they are so bad they just can’t be real
So like paid search returns about 1000 bidders for 20,000 UVs in the good days and about 300 bidders for 20,000 UVs today
But social (inc Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn) if u trusted the numbers from Adobe and GA return about 60-80 bidders from 40,000 UVs
This just can’t be accurate due to the nature of our Paid Social ads (much more product targeted) but we’ve spent 10,s of thousands of dollars on outside consultants to look at this social reporting issue and they can’t find the problem/provide a solution either but everyone agrees that the conversion rate just can’t be that low (we think it has something to do with tracking through multiple pages but can’t find a solution)
Then things like Display, Prospecting and Retargetting don’t deliver either
Personally I would put much now focus on email and hire someone new to help out with paid search (improve our keyword buys etc) and organic search but I’m not the decision maker
One other thing I’d like regulator’s to look at is the reporting tools like Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics
Just one thing you notice is that when traffic drops you also see that average time per visit drops (and same with increases) now there is no reason that the average visit time should go up when traffic goes up or down when traffic goes down, think about it, if 2 ppl visit or 20 ppl visit it shouldn’t make any difference to the average length of those visits (and certainly not when it’s 1.5 million or a million) but as digital marketing analysts we really only have these 2 tools to go on and they do usually pretty much agree, but this issue makes me question many other of their numbers (things like getting 1.5 million UVs per month but 14 million UVs per year, I just don’t buy that we’re getting that few return UVs month to month, or that 2 out of every 3 Australians visited our eCommerce site last year) but because Adobe and GA generally agree and the numbers are high nobody has any motivation to question the numbers being delivered even though any thinking person has to question how real they really are
Are you suggesting Adobe and Google are colluding to do this? How would they benefit?
I’m not suggesting anything, I’m just saying that after 8 years of looking at these numbers day after day after day I have led and less faith that they are real, but the problems/issues/concerns are all on the high side so nobody who uses these tools has any incentive to question them
Actually now I think about it, it’s 11 years
Damn I’m old 😞
The iPod being a more lucrative (and superior product) to the MP3 players that came before them is a nice historical irony with windows being a more lucrative take on the Mac operating system
1) AI is overrated. Name a profitable AI application aside from my Zojirushi rice cooker. What percentage of Google's revenues does it represent? AI is just window dressing. It's self driving cars. When Google released an actually useful AI system, Alphafold, it took researchers a few months to release an open source version. When AI actually starts to make a difference, we'll see that Google was nearly irrelevant.
2) If you are looking a monopoly power, one important issue is whether Google demands exclusive rights to place ads on a site. I'm guessing they do. That precludes the development of more focused advertising markets. A lot of them were developing 20 years ago but Google ate them all.
3) If you break up Google, follow the AT&T model. Break out the indexing and ranking component, the web crawler, from the search engines that provide the actual search results to user queries. This would open a market for more focused search markets. Google search is garbage these days, but it's the only game in town. A lot of people will go for natural language query and response while others will go for more sophisticated search. It would be nice to have some options, and the advertisers would like having a segmented market.
Google also prevents developers from mixing their services with a competitor's service. For example, the terms of service prevent using Google Search in conjunction with a Mapbox map. https://www.congress.gov/117/meeting/house/111247/witnesses/HHRG-117-JU05-Wstate-GundersenE-20210225.pdf
There are similar rules in place when using Google Cloud Services.
A Microsoft-like smack down, like Noah mentioned, in his post is probably the answer here.
Let me just be the first to performatively accuse you of being a neoliberal shill without actually reading the article.
Now that we've got THAT out of the way...
Bell Labs a stream of important innovations.
Google, what are their fundamental innovations?
Bell Labs innovations freely licensed at low prices.
Google pricing structure for their innovations?
Break them up.
To their credit, most of Google’s AI innovations are published freely in conferences and journals. It just turns out that you need to set a bunch of money on fire training the models, so it’s hard for independent labs and companies to compete.
"So it probably was with Microsoft in the 90s and early 00s, when people thought — wrongly, it turned out — that control of desktop operating systems made that company an all-conquering empire."
Not sure of this statement as Apple, current market cap $2.25T and Microsoft, $1.8T, dominate mobile and desktop operating systems today.
The best historical example that is analogous to Google is that of AT&T. The Judge Greene decision in 1983 that broke up AT&T's monopoly on voice and data, absent MCI's competition for long-distance that began in 1973, ultimately led the way to the wide-spread adoption of the internet in the early 1990s, as telecommunications equipment and services became subject to market competition which led to lower prices and better services. You did not have to employ an AT&T branded or "approved" devices to connect to the local phone network anymore, so independent manufacturers of modems, as an example, such as Hayes and Motorola, could innovate and compete with the lagging technology of Ma Bell. AT&T was relentlessly focused on their profit center of long distance calling and sales of automated switches to corporations to reduce labor costs, as well as in their own network. In the 1940s telephone switchboard operators numbered as high as 340,000 persons in the U.S. alone.
Google is similarly situated today to AT&T in the early '80s. A market cap of $1.24T and a stranglehold on search and ads. Apart from Ticketmaster, they are a reasonable target of anti-monopoly legislation or executive action.
EDIT to add:
See https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1983/07/09/judge-orders-changes-in-bell-divestiture-plan/ca16d897-5414-425c-8d55-12b5b9eafb15/
See also https://ethw.org/Telephone_Operators
See also https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500_archive/full/1980/
AT&T was only in 19th place in revenue in 1980.
See also https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500_archive/full/1980/
And now AT&T does funky things like buying Time Warner, making it worse, and selling it 3 years later at a $40B loss (and both times raising some antitrust concerns). The future is bright for Apple and Microsoft.
What is now called AT&T is actually one of the spinoff regional operators.
I think it was SBC that ended up buying AT&T and changing its name to AT&T.
Google will never be broken up because it is too useful to the national security state. Google collects all the information that governments can't, because of constitutional protections, and then turns it over when asked to do so. And this doesn't even consider their role in shaping what we are allowed to see, in the guise of protecting the "cognitive infrastructure." It's the same reason the Chinese government prefers monopolies.
I think the issue is a bit simpler, especially once you add in allegations of Bell/Bernanke fraud (collecting $$$ selling a display ad, telling publishers the auction closed at $$ and underpaying them by $, using the $ withheld for seemingly anticompetitive actions in another layer of the display market).
Also, executives involved should maybe search for criminal defense lawyers, just in case, as it appears the allegations point out an intentional criminal fraud.
Right now Google is the auction house and they also want you to let them bid for you. So they are the auction house, and they are your personal bidder. But they are also your competitors personal bidder. And all your other competitors personal bidders.
This actually makes sense despite seeming absurd, they have the data, and you almost always WILL get better results if you turn over your bidding to them to do. Or at least you will now vs manual bidding now, when some of your competition are letting Google run their account.
But if Google runs the auction, and runs all the bids for all auctions (after your competitors also convert to letting Google do it all), what will they optimize the total end result for?
Would it ever be lower prices? They can't save everyone money without lowering revenue, and "monopoly pricing" along a demand curve seems to be exactly what this setup could allow if Google gets to control all pricing and data.
But I agree we do have to worry about what it means to have Google releasing that much data to other vendors (it is not private anymore, and can be assumed to just be out there once duplicated that many times). A semi-strong monopoly power being used to collect extra profit might not be worse than the alternatives, if the alternatives require all auction data and other data being released to a whole market of vendors replicating their bidding automation.
My understanding is that in antitrust at present there are only certain types of reasons that are recognized as legitimate reasons to take action. Now, again as a layperson, it seems what counts as a legitimate reason shifts around and isn't totally set in stone (the consumer welfare paradigm started by Bork is popular among free market types, Tim Wu and Lina Khan want to shift the Overton window here)
But it strikes me as not on the table presently to use anti trust to do industrial policy by the courts. Like it may be true that if Google invested in this stream of innovation rather than just ads it'd lead to cooler AI which would be great in a contest in China - but is that *reason* that could actually be *given* in the anti trust proceedings? I think that would be a pretty bad way to proceed with antitrust because while being competitive against China is good, it doesn't provide anything close to an objective standard to assess anti trust and just seems very far away from any rationale of anti trust.
Don't we have bigger fish to fry? I don't feel that I'm being screwed over by Google and Apple. I think they have improved our lives. We have plenty of competition at the platform level (Google vs. Apple vs. Microsoft vs. Amazon). Security is better with large ecosystems. People trust Apple and Google, so they are incented to regulate themselves in order to keep that trust. Meta, not so much. The technology itself will force it to evolve to stay competitive (see the good comment on ChatGPT here and think about how ad blockers will force Google to innovate to find new revenue streams).