A Serf on Google’s Farm
September 1, 2017 12:39 PM   Subscribe

After the think tank incident, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo reflects on running a business at the mercy of behemoths: Google can say – and they are absolutely right – that every month they send checks for thousands and millions of dollars to countless publishers that makes their journalism possible. But Google’s monopoly control is almost comically great. It’s a monopoly at every conceivable turn and consistently uses that market power to deepen its hold and increase its profits.

Now, Google would rightly say now: Okay smart-alec, and how much do you pay for all of this? Well, good point... as the adage (previously, etc.) puts it, if you don’t pay for the product, you are the product.
posted by RedOrGreen (11 comments total) 19 users marked this as a favorite
 
This TPM essay is the single best explanation of the danger of Google's market power I've ever read. I used to work at Google, I understand how it got that market power in several areas (particularly ads). I also still admire the company and its products. That being said, it is not healthy for the industry or the culture for one company to have this much power.

The European Union has been after this question for years, and recently fined the company a huge amount of money for abusing its market power. This kind of action is complicated.

China has also been after the question of Google's power for years, but their solution has been market protection and censorship that enables home-grown companies to dominate the Chinese market.

(See also the 2014 State of Metafilter, in which "we woke up one day to see a 40% decrease in revenue and traffic to Ask MetaFilter, likely the result of ongoing Google index updates".)
posted by Nelson at 1:00 PM on September 1, 2017 [22 favorites]


Great writeup. It's a shame this is gonna get buried by the Labor Day long weekend in the US.
posted by jeff-o-matic at 1:08 PM on September 1, 2017 [1 favorite]


No need to worry, I'm sure the Trump administration will carefully monitor Google and other tech giants for any abuses of their market power and take antitrust enforcement actions as necessary.
posted by Sangermaine at 1:14 PM on September 1, 2017 [4 favorites]


He might go after Google for antitrust violations, but only if somebody explains James Damore to him.
posted by radicalawyer at 1:47 PM on September 1, 2017 [4 favorites]


That was a good piece, thanks for posting.
posted by smoke at 8:43 PM on September 1, 2017


Isn't Marshall the guy who tweeted a link to hardcore porn by mistake and then tried to excuse by saying he was making a political point?
posted by ShawnStruck at 10:26 PM on September 1, 2017


I was at a company that was being seriously looked at for anti-trust violations. The arrogance of the employees was mind-blowing - they weren't at *all* afraid of the DoJ.

I think their attitude was 'whats the worst they could do? Break us up? Great, now I have stock in a bunch of companies that have market dominance.

At the end of the investigation there was 'action' against the company. No one cared. The market barely noticed. Eventually their market dominance was reduced, but it certainly wasn't because of government interference (it was their own doing).

I imagine googlers feel a similar level of arrogance/apathy about government interference with their market dominant position.
posted by el io at 12:33 AM on September 2, 2017


On being afraid of the DoJ, yeah, that seems to be a common attitude in tech companies. But Google has been skirting near anti-trust issues for years now and does seem to take them seriously. The US isn't going to act, particularly under a Republican administration. But the European Union stuff is a real headache for them.

The one case I've seen anti-trust action really work was against Microsoft, the big case in the late 90s. The denouement of that was disappointing; the Bush Administration basically walked back most of the penalties. But Microsoft did actually change its behavior. I'm convinced that they could have crushed Google in the early 2000s by leveraging Windows and Microsoft Internet Explorer to favor their own search engine over Google. Also to keep Google out of new product areas like Office and Email. But Microsoft didn't do that. MSIE remained a website-neutral browser mostly in good faith. (Even the exceptions like ActiveX were done gingerly, not aggressively.) This was still the Ballmer era, it was not a decision made out of kindness. I think it's because they were afraid of more anti-trust penalties.

Surprised not to see more discussion here; usually Metafilter loves its Two Minutes Hate for Google.
posted by Nelson at 7:05 AM on September 2, 2017


> usually Metafilter loves its Two Minutes Hate for Google.

Well, it's a long weekend, and I think our standards for outrage have changed in this the year of the **** 2017. Also, I thought I went out of my way to choose some fair pull quotes from a pretty fair article, no?
posted by RedOrGreen at 12:04 PM on September 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


BREAK. MONOPOLIES.
posted by en forme de poire at 7:29 AM on September 3, 2017


Now, certainly you’re figuring we could contact someone at Google and explain that we’re not publishing hate speech and racist violence. We’re reporting on it. Not really. We tried that. We got back a message from our rep not really understanding the distinction and cheerily telling us to try to operate within the no hate speech rules. And how many warnings until we’re blacklisted? Who knows?


Every story about Google reps involves them being stupid in the exact same way, which leads me to think it's a tactic, not real stupidity.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:36 AM on September 3, 2017


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