As Tech Goliaths Face a Reckoning, Small Businesses Say They Finally Feel Heard

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/10/technology/big-tech-antitrust-scrutiny.html

by pseudolus • 7 years ago

122 62 7 years ago

nytimes.com

mojuba• 7 years ago

(Off-topic: so The New York Times is no longer available in private mode. How do they detect it?)

genzoman• 7 years ago

maybe they try to write to local storage? local storage isn't available in private mode, at least incognito in chrome.

jimbob45• 7 years ago

Would you be kind enough to educate the rest of us on what you mean? Local storage must exist on some level so that the images/text/etc can be stored to be viewed.

espeed• 7 years ago

It is if you open it incognito from a SERP.

Re: "how do they detect it?" -- without investigating it, I would suspect browser fingerprinting within a window time slice.

heymijo• 7 years ago

SERP = Search Engine Results Page

For anyone else who didn't know.

gnicholas• 7 years ago

This didn't work for me (Brave incognito on a Mac). I have a free subscription through my library, but I do run into the paywall when I search things on my phone in Firefox Focus.

In that case, I just share to Pocket and read there (never a problem, even without an account). I assume they have some sort of deal with Pocket where they share analytics with the publishers in exchange for giving unpaywalled access.

cameronbrown• 7 years ago

Newspapers are perfectly happy to complain about big tech's privacy issues, but are completely fine being beneficiaries of it and don't care about the serious implications of removing one's choice to use private browsing mode.

mc32• 7 years ago

Exactly. Gizmodo, TechCrunch etc continually run stories about tech doing bad things (which is a good thing) but they are happy to be hypocrites and do those same exact bad things they denounce, as if...

joshe• 7 years ago

They use the Filesystem api.

There is experimental support to stop this detection in chrome now (74 and later). Go to chrome://flags/ and Enable "Filesystem API in Incognito". It should be on by default in an upcoming version.

compuguy2• 7 years ago

Good to know (though I have a subscription to the NYT).

compuguy2• 7 years ago

Not sure. Here is a archive.is mirror: http://archive.is/Fhnb3

saagarjha• 7 years ago

They don't; The New York Times detects my Safari as being in private mode when it's not.

helloindia• 7 years ago

Open page in Firefox, while page is loading quickly toggle reader(right of address bar) view, before the subscription pop-up shows up. If you miss the short window, refresh page and try again.

zsgoldberg• 7 years ago

When people here read these articles, is the platforms-vs-publishers relationship top of mind for you?

I don't really know what headspace I should be in when I open these articles. I generally want to understand the underlying motivations of the publishers. How are y'all feeling?

Let's not limit it to antitrust issues since it's usually been about privacy, free speech, the rest

Despegar3• 7 years ago

After the GFC, besieged bankers had a similar sentiment about the press. How to frame it in your mind is that you're now the bankers.

Read all the threads on HN about the Boeing 737 MAX, many from the same publications writing about Big Tech like the NYT, you never see any commentary about the publications and their motives like you do in the Big Tech threads.

The Occam razor's explanation for the difference is that the reaction to critical coverage when it's about your industry will be different in a predictable way.

malvosenior3• 7 years ago

The Occams razor is that Facebook and Google threaten The New York Times business model where bad banking and faulty jets do not. Big media is way too involved in these stories to report them objectively.

mncharity• 7 years ago

is the platforms-vs-publishers relationship top of mind for you?

More that the press does narratives, which are often the creation of, or strongly influenced by, long-term PR campaigns.

My very fuzzy understanding is, atleast after the Microsoft-Google nonaggression pact some years ago, the largest interest pushing the anti-BigTech narrative has been Hollywood, wishing to regulate the lawless internet and reduce tech industry influence.

One thing that's puzzled me, and I'd appreciate any insight, is how Microsoft got dropped from the Big Tech set.

marssaxman• 7 years ago

I have wondered the same thing - Netflix is an obvious outlier among the Big 5, and Microsoft an equally obvious omission. Apparently the "FAANG" idea is a Wall Street thing, a grouping based on financial rather than technical impact.

Legogris• 7 years ago

Microsoft simply isn't a big player for the consumer/luser segment anymore when it comes to the services that tend to come up in these conversation (e-mail, social, ads, etc). For these services they're more B2B. They're not a data company like Google or Facebook.

Interesting, though, how their compliance with censoring and filtering etc in China for years barely register compared to the outrage Google gets for even preparing for it.

And thinking about it, Microsoft IS big in social with acquisitions like LinkedIn, Skype and GitHub. But no one's getting concerned or outraged on those accounts. After being the nemesis for so long, I think they have learned to play this game very well this time around.

Macross8299• 7 years ago

Meanwhile, traditional news media is currently lobbying congress to make news organizations and online publishers exempt from anti-trust law in order to secure a better negotiating position with tech companies. [0]

I don't trust them to report on tech companies objectively one bit. And why should I? They have a vested interest in presenting negative coverage.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/09/media/house-of-representative...

leereeves• 7 years ago

That actually seems reasonable. Anti-trust laws were intended to protect consumers, not enable abuse by even bigger monopolies. An exception for colluding in negotiations with monopolies might be a good idea, and not only for media companies.

Similar to the exception that already exists for unions.

narag• 7 years ago

I'm not American (maybe better so?) but this piece sounds a lot like the author is anti-google.

Oracle is unpopular, so let's add the noodle shop to compensate. You won't like EU fines, so we say that USA should fine before. Epic photo of the noodles guy. Very nice photo of Yelp people, who wouldn't like to work there?

To be honest, I believe that Google and friends are very dangerous right now. But with all HN limitations, any discussions here is light years deeper than this fluff.

colpabar• 7 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20150813

bryan_w• 7 years ago

Exactly! People get down right indignant if you suggest that the negative reporting on tech is a conflict of interest for old media institutions like the NYT, but turns out these institutions are just as corrupt as you would expect

pnathan• 7 years ago

I think about the lack of accountability inherent in large corporations. Tech is foregrounded in our lives right now, but it plays out in more quiet industries too.

dmitrygr2• 7 years ago

The shop’s Google listing is how most customers find his restaurant, yet, he said, he has no control over how his business is represented. There is no way for him to get rid of the ad next to the Google listing.

So he wants the free traffic but not to pay for it in any way?

Ah, the "i want my cake and to eat it too" argument. A classic

i_am_proteus• 7 years ago

Does he have a way to pay for the Google advertising such that he has more control of the content?

dmitrygr2• 7 years ago

Yes. You can buy ads for your own keywords. Some companies do, to deny their competition the option to. Much like you can buy the billboard outside your office to prevent your competitors from putting up a huge sign saying "i_am_proteus is a bad person, don't do business with him, do it with us: evilcorp7!"

walshemj• 7 years ago

There is a lot as a business owner you can do with the google business listings and Bings equivalent.

There is plenty of shady stuff with spammers in say the locksmith area but not heard of problems with single ton restaurants - yelp reviews are a lot more sketchy IMO

will_brown4• 7 years ago

There is no way for him to get rid of the ad next to the Google listing. So he wants the free traffic but not to pay for it in any way?

If people are specifically looking for his business he doesn’t want the competitors business to be able to buy an ad that pops up before the user searching for his business.

That has nothing to do with wanting free traffic for nothing. This guy has likely already built a website that is optimized for google search, likely uses paid gmail/google apps, probably registered all his info in google maps...that’s a lot of free data entry for google so their product is better and some of those business services are paid.

So now that you use their paid services and probably paid for web development/SEO up to Google’s lastest standards, your business comes up #1 on google searches...and they sell an ad before your result.

There is no great real world example, but imagine you have a brick and mortar and sign a commercial lease in a shopping center, then the landlord rents signage in front of your sign to a competitor. Of course he’d always be happy to rent you the 2nd signage if you beat your competitors bid.

ariwilson• 7 years ago

What is the lease in this example? I don't think "optimizing your website for SEO" or "using other Google products" is anywhere close to the kind of specific relationship a lease implies.

Zak3• 7 years ago

I think a better real-world example would be paying a third-party for a billboard near a competitor's location.

Nobody's rights are violated by that. There's no conflict of business interests. That's just competition. I think it's the same with running ads against searches for a competitor; Google does not take payment for search placement nor provide unrelated benefits to paid users of its services.

wbl• 7 years ago

And? Yellow Pages did the same thing. Every ad was next to dozens of competitors.

CPLX• 7 years ago

There’s actually a pretty good real world metaphor when you realize that Google is a telecommunications company.

Imagine if when people called your restaurant to make a reservation the phone company had someone else answer the phone first and suggest you try a different restaurant.

No metaphor is perfect but that’s pretty reasonable. Conceptually Google is some kind of an amalgamation of a common carrier and natural regulated monopoly at this point and should be treated as such.

frequentnapper• 7 years ago

It's fresh of Yelp to complain about anti-competitive behaviour whilst using their well-documented, mafia-like tactics to extort money from small business owners.

v7p1Qbt1im• 7 years ago

This. Has Stoppelman done anything other than rant about his unfair situation for the last 10 years?

pryce• 7 years ago

What planet is this from where Tech Goliaths face any kind of "reckoning"? What they are facing is a man-child who feels as though they don't fawn over him enough, who is making noise to injure share prices to compel them to do what he wants, while simultaneously making clear that -should he be sated- he will make his 'concerns' over monopolistic business practices swiftly evaporate.

Neither party here is guided by principles about monopolistic business practices.

Regulating monopolistic business practices is incredibly difficult to achieve in even a stable regulatory climate by genuinely interested lawmakers and regulators. In a White House environment driven primarily through personal animus, this shares vastly more in common with a shake-down than with small-business emancipation.

jaggednad• 7 years ago

While I agree with you re trump’s motivations, it’s also true that the leading democrats are making similar statements about regulating/breaking up big tech (for better reasons). It seems that, in this time of hyper partisan polarization, one of the few things the two major parties agree on is a hatred of big tech. That’s a bad place for big tech to be in. While agree big tech, especially Facebook, are no angels, it’s tragic that big tech is catching so much flack while the big banks and hedge funds, whose crimes are far, far worse, seem to be forgotten.

fredgrott• 7 years ago

Really, what reckoning?

Any antitrust movement has a play out of over ten years.

The current g20 progress towards closing tax loopholes via digital tax is also a ten year process..

The Reckoning has not occured yet...not even close...

As Tech Goliaths Face a Reckoning, Small Businesses Say They Finally Feel Heard

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