Open Up vs. Break Up

https://avc.com/2019/06/open-up-vs-break-up/

by PretzelFisch • 7 years ago

57 37 7 years ago

topkai22• 7 years ago

1) Wait, does DuckDuckGo use Bing’s search index?

2) A good solution would do both- open up the underlying data while breaking up the various ad sales businesses. A great example is YouTube- YouTube should not be able to single handedly demonetize videos- creators should be able to opt in to alternative ad networks so long as they aren’t violating the TOS, keeping Tuba instructional videos in the black (https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/04/youtube-demonetized-m...)

guyzero• 7 years ago

Yeah, I love how he basically admits in public that DDG is just a skin on Bing.

beebmam• 7 years ago

In my humble opinion, I think the "monetization" of youtube videos has produced a marketplace of clickbait and extreme content.

I'd like to roll back the clock to when youtube itself took all (or at least most) of its advertising income from its users' videos.

furst• 7 years ago

I mean, it's not hard to avoid clickbait or poor quality content. I'd say that without the prospect of earning money a lot of quality content wouldn't exist. Of course wherever there's income there will be people trying to exploit it, but I think that YouTube wouldn't be what it is today if content creators didn't get paid.

ocdtrekkie2• 7 years ago

DDG's statement on their sources is that they have over 400: https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/?redir=1

But that is largely with respect to "answers" type responses, which they are not lifting from Bing. Search results come from partners "including" Oath/Yahoo and Bing. And I think Yahoo uses Bing. But I know that DDG uses Yandex sometimes as well, so there's probably a handful of potential sources they draw from for search.

gist• 7 years ago

1) Wait, does DuckDuckGo use Bing’s search index?

They do what a company called metacrawler did back in the 90's (and I see still does now) but w/o the privacy angle and whatever other bells and whistles DDG adds. It also crawls but I don't know what percentage of that makes up the index. Generally I don't believe it's a very large part from memory.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/duckduckgo-seo/252165/#c...

ChrisCinelli2• 7 years ago

On (1), I always wondered how DuckDuckGo's search works. I just run some queries on Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo. For long tail queries the DuckDuckGo's and Bing's results are almost identical.

aychedee• 7 years ago

Isn't this ignoring the more obvious solution? Why not nationalise them? The value of these networks is in the users. Not the companies themselves.

syshum3• 7 years ago

Nationalizing them is neither obvious nor a solution.

Nationalizing them would make any problems, real or perceived, 100x worse.

adamc2• 7 years ago

It would be more persuasive if you actually made the argument, rather than just asserting the conclusion.

idlewords2• 7 years ago

Who would run them? Amtrak? The post office?

AlphaSite• 7 years ago

This is the model the UK followed when dealing with BTs natural monopoly on phone lines. Openreach owns and is obligated to maintain service to every home in the country and all providers compete to build differentiated services atop the physical hardware.

dpwm• 7 years ago

Openreach owns and is obligated to maintain service to every home in the country

Except Hull [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KCOM_Group

dluan• 7 years ago

This is so uncreative. Besides conveniently forgetting how Twitter starved out its third party apps with breaking API changes, and Amazon's similar strong arming of smaller vendors and services, he doesn't seem to understand why that is bad.

Breaking up a company is to address a singular problem - that there are too many interests being held under one roof. By breaking up, you are addressing a need for broader governance and ownership that "opening up" doesn't allow for. Let Whole Foods sell groceries, and let Twitch stream games.

codesushi42• 7 years ago

Exactly. What a feeble and unabashed attempt by Fred Wilson to shield his investments and SV buddies.

The fourth amendment is such a 1776 solution, it is 2019 already and time to move on. Cringe

Breaking up monopolies is not an idea that's stuck in the 19th and 20th centuries. It's an idea stuck in reality and reason, and it has a history of working.

Many times it is the simplest and most obvious solution that is best.

rwmj• 7 years ago

I'm assuming that he means the companies would be ordered by the force of court rulings and the law to supply the third parties equally and without prejudice.

A similar thing has happened in the UK with telecoms. The monopoly supplier of the phone network is gradually being split into a company which owns the wires in the ground but cannot offer services, and competing companies that rent the wires to provide services, the rental being at an open, non-discriminatory price. At least to some degree it works well (although the regulator needs a lot more teeth).

ocdtrekkie2• 7 years ago

A fun story is that this is more or less the conversation we were in with AOL Instant Messenger 19 years ago: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2596085/aol-foes-accus...

dageshi• 7 years ago

I find it kind of fascinating the different mindsets you see around HN regarding Google/Facebook vs say Netflix/Hulu.

With conversations about Netflix and other online content producers people want all the content in the world, at their fingertips for about $15-20 per month and if they can't get it they'll threaten to pirate instead. For them cost but also convenience really trumps all, the idea of having too many services, even if cheaply priced is too much, they just want one.

Compare that to this kind of thread where we have these easy to use single platforms in the form of Google Search, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Amazon but here everyone is doing their hardest to try and break them up, make them less convenient and perhaps more expensive (how do you get cheaper than free with more competition?).

Perhaps though, both sentiments are at extremes when it comes to public opinion.

mushufasa• 7 years ago

Perhaps one distinction is that 'breaking up Google' is really disentangling separate services from one vertically integrated company (Search != GDocs), while what is happening with 'breaking up Netflix' is taking a single category of service and making it worse, less convenient, and more expensive, because it now takes 4 different subscriptions + ui's to navigate to find what used to be under a single service.

CodeMage2• 7 years ago

You're conflating way too many things and oversimplifying the whole situation into a fictitious idea of conflicting mindsets.

First of all, you're treating two very different types of services as equal and identical. Netflix and Hulu are subscription content providers. Google and Facebook can be defined and described in many ways, but subscription content providers is not among them [1]. It's quite natural and understandable that people would have different expectations and complaints.

Second, the situation with content providers isn't binary. The solution to the problem of not being to afford a whole bunch of subscription content providers is not limited to having one become a monopoly.

Third, it's not just cost and convenience when it comes to access to content. Take Spotify Premium, for example. It's a subscription service that gives you access to all the music in its catalog as long as you pay your subscription. Except that there is absolutely no legal way for you to ensure access to any subset of the content. Have a favorite song, album or artist? Tomorrow it might disappear from Spotify's catalog and you have no way of hanging on to it.

Fourth, the concerns that lead people to suggest that Google, Facebook or Amazon should be broken up are varied and nuanced, and they go way beyond cost and convenience.

So no, I don't think you can sum up people's opinions into two seemingly contradictory mindsets.

[1] Yes, I'm aware of YouTube and Spotify having a similar model. That actually happens to be a pretty good argument to break up Google.

ethbro2• 7 years ago

I think part of the difference in HN opinion color is somewhat related to transparency.

Subscription content business models are straightforward and marketed as such: $ for access.

Ad supported business models are... murkier. And I'd say Google and Facebook haven't done a sufficient job in proactively informing the public about what they collect, how they generate revenue from it, and what's currently stored about a user.

Also, ad supported models have the unfortunate side effect of having revenue directly tied to the greatest possible exploitation of existing data (and collecting greater amounts going forward). Which... aren't great ethical incentives.

adamc2• 7 years ago

Breaking up may be an early 20th-century solution, but it has the virtue of being a solution that works.

idlewords2• 7 years ago

There are some natural fracture planes in the big tech companies where it's clear consumers would be better served by antitrust action:

1) Cleave Instagram and WhatsApp off of Facebook, to reduce the consolidation in Facebook's ad business model, and re-introduce competition both in the messaging and influencer-pouting-at-camera space.

2) Break off Android and Chrome from Google (and each other). Both are products that would do fine on their own, but where right now consumer interests are diametrically opposed to Google's advertising business model.

It's pretty clear that AVC wants to keep the entrenched surveillance business model, but create APIs on top of it for more startups they can fund. But there are ways to apply antitrust that won't make the surveillance problem worse, while reintroducing some competition, and better aligning company incentives with what their consumers want (e.g., allowing Chrome to go all-in on ad blocking).

ethbro2• 7 years ago

The biggest change would be separating Facebook and Google's ad businesses into separate companies.

They should be able to sell ads to support their free products if they choose. But having the advertising business under the same roof as the product business creates an inherent conflict of interest, not least towards centralization and lock-in.

If Google instead sold ad space and data to AdWords (the external company), responsibilities would be more clear.

ChrisCinelli2• 7 years ago

What does "pushing them to move from platforms to protocols" mean?

Opening up Facebook is what led to the Facebook APIs and data going in the hands of thousands of 3rd parties (ex: Cambridge Analytica).

Assuming it is possible to "open up" those monopolies, it would require a completely new paradigm.

jbarberu• 7 years ago

"In mobile, a good first step is to open up the app stores and allow the browsers to have the same access to the operating system as native mobile apps."

From a security perspective this sounds like an absolute nightmare.

tlb• 7 years ago

Breaking up companies can be a mechanism to enforce openness. For instance, the proposal to separate Microsoft's application business from their OS business (in the late 90s) was in reaction to them giving their own apps special treatment in their OS, so their apps ran better than third party apps. By separating the two business units into separate companies, they would lose the incentive to do stuff like that.

Separating Android and Chrome from Google Search would limit the obvious temptation for abusing their browser business to help their advertising business. Google has (so far) shown pretty good restraint in their tactics compared to what would be technically possible, but the incentives are massive and might be hard to resist when times get tough.

Enforcing openness in the face of massive incentives to the contrary requires prompt and wise government oversight, which is hard to achieve. The range of subtle tricks that platform companies can pull to slightly break their competitors software is beyond the ability of regulators to control.

wrs• 7 years ago

Instead of a breakup, something close to what OP is asking for was imposed on Microsoft — a "technical committee" was empowered to ensure that all Windows protocols were fully documented. [1]

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/04/depar...

yonran• 7 years ago

I think this is the right approach: to require third-party companies to have access to a dominant company’s network after the network has reached a certain threshold of size or age. I like to use the craigslist.org example: a company that is still dominant basically because it is free and was launched in 1995. We’re stuck using the ugly craigslist UI because their network is the oldest and biggest. Several companies have attempted to innovate on the craigslist.org experience but were forced to stop due to lawsuits (e.g. padmapper, 3taps, RadPad). If we wish to allow competition and innovation in the classified advertising space, then I don’t think there is a good dimension to split up the craigslist company (by metro area? by apartments vs for sale?). Instead, we should promote competition by allowing competitors to access their APIs for free or for a reasonable price. The network that a web company creates should not belong to one company forever.

her_tummy_hurts• 7 years ago

“In mobile, a good first step is to open up the app stores and allow the browsers to have the same access to the operating system as native mobile apps.”

Yeah no, I don’t want just any website to have native control over my phone. That’s just asking for trouble

IlegCowcat• 7 years ago

I wonder how much annually these monopolies collectively spend on lobbying gov against the populist temptation to break them up? Huge sums i assume. Huge.

I would first favour opening them up, see how it goes, and then consider alternative approaches if the desired outcome is not seen. I think it's critical to have a very clear idea of what the desired outcome would be before taking action. That would require a 20/ 20 view of what the problems are, but the monopolies are working hard to hide the problems from view. Google tries to present itself as not being a search dominant corporation (the Alphabet deception). Facebook is now a very big book and definitely needs 'editing'.

UglycupRawky• 7 years ago

A DOJ requirement to divest assets is one extreme, while a requirement to spinoff assets and have them operate autonomously could unlock even greater value for a parent company. What’s App, Instagram, You Tube, etc., trading as separate stocks could spread market share and in theory create more competition, while not diluting, and possibly increasing, overall corp value. A not likely scenario, but perhaps a possible one.

Open Up vs. Break Up

Related Stories