They're going to swallow the Internet... Someone please break them down into smaller companies
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Monopoly legislation hasn’t been enforced since the nineties. Thank the lobbyist system.
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I think I read somewhere that things (antitrust-wise) started really going south under Reagan, but I don't know US history well enough to be completely positive about it
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Anti-Trust laws came into being to curtail the powers and abuses of Trusts (precursors to modern-day corporations) in the late 1800s. Anti-Trust has ebbed and flowed over the years, for many reasons, but mainly a combination of economics and abuses.
There is nothing inherently wrong with being a monopoly, it is abuse of being a monopoly that is a problem. (or, where there's no monopoly but a handful fo major players, collusion agreements) The clearer the abuses, and the more noticeable the effect, the greater the likelihood of anti-trust action.
Despite the U.S. becoming more and more an oligarchy, there are very few actual monopolies, and the few companies that come close rarely blatantly abuse their monopoly position. The last flagrant abuses were Microsoft back in the '90s.
With the advent of game theory, and criminal penalties, there is less price collusion among competitors - even though there may only be, say, a handful of car manufacturers, and even though it may appear that they act in concert from time to time, they do not actually get together to discuss strategy, they merely guesstimate what their competitors are going to do, and act accordingly.
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There is nothing inherently wrong with being a monopoly, it is abuse of being a monopoly that is a problem.
That kind of thinking is exactly how we ended up with 1) basically useless anti-trust laws and 2) Google and the likes.
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not talking about google, or tech in general, but, there are plenty of situations where a monopoly is actually desirable. But, in that case, there needs to be strict rules / strong regulation to prevent abuse.
An example is power lines. Nobody wants competing power line companies setting lines up everywhere. it's expensive, inefficient, dangerous, etc. So instead one company is granted a monopoly for installing power lines. In exchange for such monopoly, they may be limited in price, profitability, quality, and in some cases need to take action that would be bad for business (e.g. providing connections to small locales that may never be profitable on their own)
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I agree that for a limited amount of non-digital companies and sectors it can be what works best.
But then as your example shows, it's just for a limited sector (setting up power lines) and in a limited area (at most a country). In the case of Amazon or Google, their quasi-monopolies are almost world-wide (Asia and Russia are the main exceptions, with things like Yandex, Baidu, Alibaba), and covering many domains.
For instance, Google dominates both the search and the online advertising markets (among lots of other things), so they can decide to send visitors only / preferentially to websites that display their ads.
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oh, Amazon and Google certainly have too much power. But what's the alternative? 40% of the internet runs on AWS, but hey, they're a better service than 2nd place Azure (Microsoft), and the distant third is Google.
Google dominates advertising, but, as a business owner, if I spend ad money I want the best bang for my buck, which means reaching the widest target audience - so I'll use google. Bing (again microsoft) and facebook are a lot cheaper, but a lot less successful, and in the end I get the best bang for my buck with google.
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But what's the alternative?
The governments doing their job and splitting those companies, like they would do (and have done) for many much smaller companies. For instance, Google Search should be separated from Adsense and Youtube. The governments should also prevent them for swallowing startups and emerging potential competitors like they've been doing at an outrageous rate (FB, Amazon).
In my country, at some point we had 3 mobile phone operators. The government forced them to make it super easy for a 4th one to enter the market. IMO that wasn't even necessary: 3 companies for just a very specific market at the scale of just one not very big country, that's fair enough. But still, our regulator intervened massively to make a 4th company happen. Why can't they be bothered to do that to companies that are way above those ones on the scales of multinational, multidomain monopolies?
Anti-trust regulators seem to be absolutely oblivious of anything digital. It looks like it's changing a bit, though, as Google has had their share of fines lately in Europe.
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How would separating adsense from google search make a difference? google search would still dominate search, and adsense would still dominate embedded advertising. Youtube would still be the number one video sharing website.
That's like saying Mitsubishi can't make both cars and air conditioners.
monopoly is about dominance in one specific area, and breaking the monopoly means making competition in one area - not preventing a company from operating different businesses
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How would separating adsense from google search make a difference?
The conflict of interests between showing ads on some websites and choosing which websites people are directed to is obvious.
Google search would still dominate search, and adsense would still dominate embedded advertising. Youtube would still be the number one video sharing website.
At least that would make 3 separate companies that don't act together as one. 3 times easier for a competitor to emerge.
monopoly is about dominance in one specific area
That's what a horizontal monopoly is. As it is now, Google enjoys both horizontal and vertical monopolies. Splitting it up would at least break or weaken the vertical part. It might not be enough, but it would already be a jolly good start.
That's like saying Mitsubishi can't make both cars and air conditioners.
The car market is absolutely incomparable to the web search/ad/video hosting markets
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The last time I heard about the US government declaring a company to be a monopoly was in the mid-2000s, when they forced Microsoft to break in to 2 or 3 other companies. I don't remember how that played out, though, other than it happened. I think portions of MS ended up being controlled/owned by someone other than Bill Gates. That's also about the same time he (Gates) stepped out of the spotlight or stepped aside. My memory's too vague for anything greater than what I've stated.
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They already did.
Google Inc. was restructured as a subsidiary directly owned by Alphabet. The roles of these two companies – Google as the owner and Alphabet as the subsidiary – was reversed in a two-step switch. First, a dummy subsidiary of Alphabet was created. Then Google merged with that dummy subsidiary while converting Google stock to Alphabet stock. Under Delaware law, a holding company reorganization such as this can be done without a vote of shareholders, as this reorganization was.
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If you are online, your privacy is already at the stage of a sweet memory
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I'm aware but that doesn't mean i'm just going to give up.
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I'm on the same page with you, but find it increasingly hard to enjoy stuff on the internet and at the same time dust off the pesky privacy invaders.
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We have of our sweet privacy what they deem irrelevant enough to leave to us...
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Google is evil!!! Oh no my privacy!!!!
Insert paranoid gif here
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I mean, they literally even took away their motto of "Do no evil" or whatever :D
Google's not a good company. They're not a bad one either though. There are some privacy fanatics, but they're usually as threatening as a dog without a jaw. They let Google do a colonoscopy of them in their living room in front of their parents, yet they're really worried that Google might also know that they visited Facebook. Doesn't mean you should stop fighting Google's invasion of privacy, just that if you're so paranoid, then why the hell are you even here, a site that has Google widgets all over it.
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You can block those google trackers. But then you will be blocking the ads that keep the site running.
I want to protect my privacy, but I also want to support the sites I visit.
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I want to protect my privacy, but I also want to support the sites I visit.
And you can't. You're actually most likely causing harm to it. The site makes no money, but still pays for your bandwidth. So you basically don't get hidden from Google that well because those tracker blockers aren't blocking everything and you also hinder the sites by making them foot your bill.
With Steamgifts, you can at least pay for their Patreon. I recommend you do that if you're so keen on not letting them earn money through ads.
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It's not that Google is a good company. Well, at least they are way better than Amazon or Facebook
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The way they treat their workers. There are books written about it.
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Because mistreating everyone's personal data is totally not as bad as mistreating workers, right? At least the workers are not forced to work for Amazon, while everyone's having a damn hard time evading Google's mass surveillance (ReCaptcha is virtually impossible to evade if you don't want to be cut out from most websites, programmed by morons who don't know that Captchas aren't supposed to be used as soon as in the first few login attempts)
All Big Tech companies are equally appalling.
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To keep it brief: Wage slavery, tax evasion and the fact that Jeff Bezos performs Fellatio on the devil on a daily basis right before going to bed.
But personally I wouldn't hold that last one against him :D
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Well, there it goes. The end of consoles.
May the PC masterrace live a long an prosper life.
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Seems like it. All the news outlets are reporting Stadia as a cloud gaming service / game streaming service.
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I'm not liking how this presentation is shaping, it might be great for gaming but it also might be the end for the medium I love as it gets replaced by something else. Right now I'm hoping this thing bombs hard and scares every other company for the next decade, but that is most likely just wishful thinking.
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Yea I personally want nothing to do with game streaming, there are just too many potential issues.
Anyone remember OnLive?
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The more I listen to this the more dystopic it sounds, it's almost like something out of a sci fi.
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I can already see the headlines... "Nvidia shifts focus on state of the art AI powered toasters amid GPU market crash." :D :3
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If it's still streaming only then they will crash and burn unless they make massive data deals with all ISPS since the streaming took up a massive amount of bandwidth.
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Netflix doesn't seem to be suffering too much from bandwidth caps.
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I do not believe this will be successful. There were other people in the past who tried this and failed (OnLive).
I have also beta tested Assassin's Creed Odyssey on Google's streaming service. While it worked most of the time, it didn't work so well during busy after-work hours (5 pm - 10 pm). It required a massive amount of bandwidth with low latency, which people in urban areas have, but not everybody has no data caps. In theory, it sounds like it will work, but in practice, we are too limited and bottlenecked by our ISPs to have any streaming game service work.
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Maybe you can add PlayStation Now to that. OnLive fiasco. By the way, Microsoft it's prepping their own cloud thingy.
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As a person that has played every single playstation 3 exclusive and most of 4, without ever owning any sony hardware, I have to admit: Psnow works.
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LiquidSky, Shadow, Geforce Now, Vortex, Paperspace and other Cloud services.
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Yes, Canada. The country still has large chunks of its internet infrastructure running on copper and coax, I can just see millions of Canucks live streaming 4k (or even 1080p) games with a latency under a second…
Same with UK and large chunks of the US, by the way. They might as well just advertise it "the reason you Muricans will ask the town leadership to beg us for bringing Goggle Fiber there".
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Yes, Canada. The country still has large chunks of its internet infrastructure running on copper and coax
That is not even the worse of it. If you happen to live in rural Canada, you're probably going to be stuck with a satellite connection and it is as bad as it sounds. The federal gov finally decided to do something about this year and are now planning to bring at least 50 mbps down / 10 up connection, Canada wide, by 2030.
Streaming may be the future, but nobody wants to pay for the infrastructure to support it :/.
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in all fairness, rural canada is incredibly large and incredibly sparse. Out of 241 countries, Canada is ranked 230 by density. Take away Ontario and Quebec, (25% land, 60% population) and you're talking about one family per square kilometer.
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google closes G-plus and offers a new service?
maybe they will also cancel this in 5-6 years. 🤷
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10mb ADSL here, not gonna have fiber in looooong time.
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Despite having a good connection, I have no interest whatsoever in a streaming game service.
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I did a late test with Assassin's Creed Odyssey, and the gameplay was extremely good.
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Wow this is going to work great on my 2mbps connection and 100ms to anywhere ping.
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never a fan of gaming through a stream, I mean I rather install it and play whenever, sure it's nice that you can play it on whatever device, but I only game at home anyway.
Like people mention, not everyone has a good enough connection for stuff like that.
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"Large parts of Europe". But not the East, right? It's never the East, unless they need cheap labour or a place to dump undesired wares, near expiry dates and so on.
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Well, funny thing, that one is. Eastern Europe has a much better infrastructure and download speeds with good latency for a service like this, but not as likely to fork over hundred bucks for a service like that.
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I wouldn't fork even a quarter of that sum, but I'm sure there are many who would in this Eastern European slice of paradise. Denying them this "generous privilege" strictly on geographical stereotypes, is petty no matter the perspective.
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it's not geographic stereotypes, it's economic reality. Average income in countries like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Czeck, is about half of what it is in countries like Germany, Ireland, Belgium and Austria.
It only makes sense to target richer areas first
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???? I though your case was "geographical stereotypes"???
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It sure is, but since nothing will change, I guess I'll simply stop caring. This isn't limited to Google since all major corporations treat my part of Europe like a second-rate market. Their loss in the end, not mine.
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it is a second-rate market. people have literally half the income of western europe. that means they have less money to spend on games.
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Just look on current Cloud infrastructure map. Possible only for Western Europe. Germany, France, UK, Sweden, Netherland.
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How about we just run our games on our computers and not end up being forced to pay a subscription to access not only games but also hardware in the cloud that runs them. The only way these scummy ideas can get off the ground is if the public embraces them. So, let's not do that.
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This is also why I can't support Origin's subscription service. I prefer to "own" those game licenses on my Origin account, instead of renting them on a monthly basis.
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Eh, it's good if you want to play singleplayer games and finishing them in a month is duable.
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Not having to pay for expensive hardware to play games doesn't sound like a bad idea to me. Spotify and Netflix showed us that the future of everything is in streaming. Those who want to live in the past and still buy CDs and Vinyls can do so, but the rest of us are going forward. 👍
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Well the future is in leaving this earthly body and living in a matrix too, but I don't see you rushing to leave your skin behind. My point is not to attack you, just to say "not every plan for the future equals positive change for the user".
Here's one example. Google thingy works better than anyone expected. All the casuals subscribe. You subscribe. They start getting exclusives you can't play anywhere else. Some HC gamers grumble, but some subscribe. Then in 5 years everyone is subscirbed, no one has a PC anymore... and then they raise the price. Or ban you for a rude comment you wrote in 2013. Good luck playing games.
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That already happens with Steam / Epic / Origin though, so what's the difference? And they will force people to subscribe? Did I miss something? And it's hard to think no one will have a PC anymore, this is just for games.
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its not gaming platform, its game stream platform. Wont live long
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Google unveils its gaming proposition to the world. More details here
No need for really expensive hardware, just good connection to the almighty and privacy wrecking cloud..
Edit:
Probably unrelated... The EU has fined Google €1.49 billion for “abusive practices in online advertising”. Read it here
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