<story><title>Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/news/business-39875417</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>friedman23</author><text>&amp;gt; Even if we assume that allowing Google to exist as a monopoly does bring better services&lt;p&gt;How is google even a monopoly? Bing exists, yahoo still exists. In Asia Google isn&amp;#x27;t even the most popular search engine.&lt;p&gt;Want me to show you how google is not a monopoly? A company with monopoly power would be able to raise the price of its service to the price the market can &lt;i&gt;bear&lt;/i&gt;. If google put search behind a pay wall, Bing would destroy it in market share.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; that&amp;#x27;s a small price to pay for not having to be subjugated by a conglomerate.&lt;p&gt;So now you are not using economic arguments but appealing to emotion.&lt;p&gt;I just need to point this out&lt;p&gt;First you felt the need to off hand mention your (clearly undergraduate) degree in economics which had absolutely zero relevance to the discussion.&lt;p&gt;Secondly, you are using appeals to emotion without any basis in fact. &amp;quot;Google is an extremely successful company and we use them in so many things! They must be evil!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Try using evidence. I&amp;#x27;m not going to argue against your fear mongering only point out that like almost all fear mongering, it is not based on fact.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Countries can already barely withstand pressure from big companies&lt;p&gt;There is absolutely zero evidence of this. None of your arguments are based on evidence. The US just fined Volkswagen billions of dollars. The EU is ready to fine Google billions of dollars. Apple paid japan hundreds millions of dollars in fines. All the banks responsible for the financial crisis in America and the EU paid &lt;i&gt;hundreds of billions&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; In many cases even better services because the prime objective is to make a program that would help the user, not make money for the company.&lt;p&gt;Again you have no evidence of this. If smaller businesses were able to provide better services people would be using dedicated email providers, not gmail. They would be using flickr instead of google and apple photos.</text></item><item><author>0x737368</author><text>Even if we assume that allowing Google to exist as a monopoly does bring better services, that&amp;#x27;s a small price to pay for not having to be subjugated by a conglomerate.&lt;p&gt;Countries can already barely withstand pressure from big companies, by allowing them grow even further everything would just turn in a way that would allow such companies to make even more money, whilst increasing the gap between the rich and the poor.&lt;p&gt;And with regards to better services, I think the open source community has shown us that it&amp;#x27;s possible to make great services without having to work for a company. In many cases even better services because the prime objective is to make a program that would help the user, not make money for the company.</text></item><item><author>friedman23</author><text>Congrats on your degree in econ. You would think that someone with a degree in econ would believe it wise to first establish what the negative externalities are and what externalities regulating away the existence of large business would produce before defending the idea of doing so.&lt;p&gt;We already know that with the existence of Google we get free products like search, mail, video, etc. Do you have evidence that when we destroy google that we will still retain all of these benefits?</text></item><item><author>weirdstuff</author><text>&amp;gt; Divorce the ad-making money machine, and say goodbye to all the services consumers like that are nowhere near as profitable: gmail, maps, photos, chrome, android, translate, youtube, drive, waze, where do you think the money for this stuff all comes from?&lt;p&gt;This needs a citation, as well.&lt;p&gt;This is assuming Google hasn&amp;#x27;t starved out potential competitors who would have provided the same service, or better service, had the playing field been more level.&lt;p&gt;My unsubstantiated opinion is that many talented folks are&amp;#x2F;have been dissuaded from trying their hand at anything that may go up against Google, et. al., unless their looking for an aquihire. (And we know how Google treats those after a few years.)&lt;p&gt;And there&amp;#x27;s another argument to be made: that Google&amp;#x27;s habit of purchasing competition stifles the innovation since it&amp;#x27;s nipping it in the bud.&lt;p&gt;(I majored in Econ in uni.)</text></item><item><author>TulliusCicero</author><text>Disclaimer: I work at Google&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The world is a better place with lots of smaller companies.&lt;p&gt;[citation needed]&lt;p&gt;A lot of things Google does -- a lot of the things people actually like about Google -- are possible only because it&amp;#x27;s a huge monolith. Divorce the ad-making money machine, and say goodbye to all the services consumers like that are nowhere near as profitable: gmail, maps, photos, chrome, android, translate, youtube, drive, waze, where do you think the money for this stuff all comes from?&lt;p&gt;Of course, if you&amp;#x27;re one of the uber technerds that thinks that Google is unabashedly evil and Linux is going to take over the desktop any day now, that probably sounds great to you. I just think the average consumer would have a different take on it.</text></item><item><author>jondubois</author><text>I agree they should be regulated. The world is a better place with lots of smaller companies.&lt;p&gt;These big companies turn regular people into corporate livestock to serve the wealthy.&lt;p&gt;If you were to analyze Facebook as if it were a country, the wealth gap among employees would be atrocious - The top 1% would own maybe 99% of the wealth of the country and everyone else would earn a minuscule fraction of the total value that they produced.&lt;p&gt;If we let monopolies take over, then the economy of the world will start to mirror the economies within these large corporations.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s worse is that the social aspects will also be mirrored. We will gradually lose freedom of speech, in the same way that employees of large corporations don&amp;#x27;t have the freedom to say what they really think to their bosses.&lt;p&gt;Many who have worked for a big corporation will know how suppressing the environment can be. I&amp;#x27;m really glad that I live in a time when there are still alternatives.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>0x737368</author><text>&amp;gt; First you felt the need to off hand mention your (clearly undergraduate) degree in economics which had absolutely zero relevance to the discussion.&lt;p&gt;That was a different person.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;There is absolutely zero evidence of this. None of your arguments are based on evidence. The US just fined Volkswagen billions of dollars. The EU is ready to fine Google billions of dollars. Apple paid japan hundreds millions of dollars in fines. All the banks responsible for the financial crisis in America and the EU paid hundreds of billions&lt;p&gt;Precisely, EU, USA and China(ones that I know, there might be more) are the ones who can actually fight back from the pressure. Once they&amp;#x27;re able to pay enough politicians even more to coax them into bringing laws that help them further, we won&amp;#x27;t even have that(like that hasn&amp;#x27;t happened before).&lt;p&gt;Additionally, you need to consider if the fines are actually painful enough. Sure, sometimes it&amp;#x27;s enough to make them stop doing offences, but sometimes the companies are left with a net profit from illegal actions.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Again you have no evidence of this. If smaller businesses were able to provide better services people would be using dedicated email providers, not gmail. They would be using flickr instead of google and apple photos.&lt;p&gt;Look up Linux. Whilst big companies did have a hand in making it, it&amp;#x27;s still driven a lot by the community. Compare how Linux performs against Windows(fast, no intentional backdoors, free, almost limitless customisability) and MacOS(no upgrades that make your completely fine hardware useless in 3-4 years after purchase).&lt;p&gt;I neither use flickr not google&amp;#x2F;apple photos so can&amp;#x27;t judge the discrepancy in quality. But I do a lot of messengers, text editors, email clients and so on, and they&amp;#x27;re completely fine. You need to consider that perhaps people are using them because they didn&amp;#x27;t bother to look up alternatives and just went with what the company offered them because &amp;quot;hey! it&amp;#x27;s &amp;#x27;free&amp;#x27;! and it&amp;#x27;s right here.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;You seem to be giving off some belligerent vibes, so I&amp;#x27;m not going to argue much further, all I&amp;#x27;m asking is that you consider that companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft and so on are not in the business of making people happy, but in the business of making money. And if that means the best path to that is to manipulate governments and try to control every aspect of people&amp;#x27;s lives for their own profit - they&amp;#x27;ll do it. If you break them apart you give them much less power to do that.</text></comment>
<story><title>Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/news/business-39875417</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>friedman23</author><text>&amp;gt; Even if we assume that allowing Google to exist as a monopoly does bring better services&lt;p&gt;How is google even a monopoly? Bing exists, yahoo still exists. In Asia Google isn&amp;#x27;t even the most popular search engine.&lt;p&gt;Want me to show you how google is not a monopoly? A company with monopoly power would be able to raise the price of its service to the price the market can &lt;i&gt;bear&lt;/i&gt;. If google put search behind a pay wall, Bing would destroy it in market share.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; that&amp;#x27;s a small price to pay for not having to be subjugated by a conglomerate.&lt;p&gt;So now you are not using economic arguments but appealing to emotion.&lt;p&gt;I just need to point this out&lt;p&gt;First you felt the need to off hand mention your (clearly undergraduate) degree in economics which had absolutely zero relevance to the discussion.&lt;p&gt;Secondly, you are using appeals to emotion without any basis in fact. &amp;quot;Google is an extremely successful company and we use them in so many things! They must be evil!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Try using evidence. I&amp;#x27;m not going to argue against your fear mongering only point out that like almost all fear mongering, it is not based on fact.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Countries can already barely withstand pressure from big companies&lt;p&gt;There is absolutely zero evidence of this. None of your arguments are based on evidence. The US just fined Volkswagen billions of dollars. The EU is ready to fine Google billions of dollars. Apple paid japan hundreds millions of dollars in fines. All the banks responsible for the financial crisis in America and the EU paid &lt;i&gt;hundreds of billions&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; In many cases even better services because the prime objective is to make a program that would help the user, not make money for the company.&lt;p&gt;Again you have no evidence of this. If smaller businesses were able to provide better services people would be using dedicated email providers, not gmail. They would be using flickr instead of google and apple photos.</text></item><item><author>0x737368</author><text>Even if we assume that allowing Google to exist as a monopoly does bring better services, that&amp;#x27;s a small price to pay for not having to be subjugated by a conglomerate.&lt;p&gt;Countries can already barely withstand pressure from big companies, by allowing them grow even further everything would just turn in a way that would allow such companies to make even more money, whilst increasing the gap between the rich and the poor.&lt;p&gt;And with regards to better services, I think the open source community has shown us that it&amp;#x27;s possible to make great services without having to work for a company. In many cases even better services because the prime objective is to make a program that would help the user, not make money for the company.</text></item><item><author>friedman23</author><text>Congrats on your degree in econ. You would think that someone with a degree in econ would believe it wise to first establish what the negative externalities are and what externalities regulating away the existence of large business would produce before defending the idea of doing so.&lt;p&gt;We already know that with the existence of Google we get free products like search, mail, video, etc. Do you have evidence that when we destroy google that we will still retain all of these benefits?</text></item><item><author>weirdstuff</author><text>&amp;gt; Divorce the ad-making money machine, and say goodbye to all the services consumers like that are nowhere near as profitable: gmail, maps, photos, chrome, android, translate, youtube, drive, waze, where do you think the money for this stuff all comes from?&lt;p&gt;This needs a citation, as well.&lt;p&gt;This is assuming Google hasn&amp;#x27;t starved out potential competitors who would have provided the same service, or better service, had the playing field been more level.&lt;p&gt;My unsubstantiated opinion is that many talented folks are&amp;#x2F;have been dissuaded from trying their hand at anything that may go up against Google, et. al., unless their looking for an aquihire. (And we know how Google treats those after a few years.)&lt;p&gt;And there&amp;#x27;s another argument to be made: that Google&amp;#x27;s habit of purchasing competition stifles the innovation since it&amp;#x27;s nipping it in the bud.&lt;p&gt;(I majored in Econ in uni.)</text></item><item><author>TulliusCicero</author><text>Disclaimer: I work at Google&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The world is a better place with lots of smaller companies.&lt;p&gt;[citation needed]&lt;p&gt;A lot of things Google does -- a lot of the things people actually like about Google -- are possible only because it&amp;#x27;s a huge monolith. Divorce the ad-making money machine, and say goodbye to all the services consumers like that are nowhere near as profitable: gmail, maps, photos, chrome, android, translate, youtube, drive, waze, where do you think the money for this stuff all comes from?&lt;p&gt;Of course, if you&amp;#x27;re one of the uber technerds that thinks that Google is unabashedly evil and Linux is going to take over the desktop any day now, that probably sounds great to you. I just think the average consumer would have a different take on it.</text></item><item><author>jondubois</author><text>I agree they should be regulated. The world is a better place with lots of smaller companies.&lt;p&gt;These big companies turn regular people into corporate livestock to serve the wealthy.&lt;p&gt;If you were to analyze Facebook as if it were a country, the wealth gap among employees would be atrocious - The top 1% would own maybe 99% of the wealth of the country and everyone else would earn a minuscule fraction of the total value that they produced.&lt;p&gt;If we let monopolies take over, then the economy of the world will start to mirror the economies within these large corporations.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s worse is that the social aspects will also be mirrored. We will gradually lose freedom of speech, in the same way that employees of large corporations don&amp;#x27;t have the freedom to say what they really think to their bosses.&lt;p&gt;Many who have worked for a big corporation will know how suppressing the environment can be. I&amp;#x27;m really glad that I live in a time when there are still alternatives.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thesagan</author><text>A pattern I notice on this site, and reddit: that it&amp;#x27;s far easier to ask left-and-right for evidence than it is producing your own or going on a limb to make a point in your own words. Is open discussion discouraged on HN?&lt;p&gt;Now, I don&amp;#x27;t provide a lot of hard evidence on HN, if only because this probably isn&amp;#x27;t the right type of forum for a courtroom. I like to keep it a bit more casual.</text></comment>