If we ignore all this culture war bullshit for a minute there's a really fascinating issue here.
The concrete issue is flight search. When you google "flight from a to b", rather then seeing search results linking to websites for flight search, the first thing you see is the results of Google's own flight search. Is that wrong? What about image search? When you search for "skyline berlin", you'll see images of berlin's skyline, before you see links to other image search sites.
Same is true for a lot other stuff. If you search "timer", you'll see a timer, not links to various timers that look ugly as shit.
As a consumer, I love it. So much easier.
On the other hand, google could take over almost any business like this. At least, any business that is "functional" in the sense that the only thing you really want is to get some output based on your input.
There's a clear tradeoff here between what's good for consumers, and concerns about democracy, the concentration of power, etc.. And also innovation. Why start a new company, if google can just take over everything?
There are only two clear, non-arbitrary rules: Search engines are only allowed to show a list of links, or search engines can show whatever they want.
google could take over almost any business like this.
That didn't happen to travel companies. Google added flights, but Booking Holdings (aka Priceline) continued to grow each year to 15B in revenue for 2019. (Huge drop for 2020 obviously.)
If I type "<city> weather" google will show me the weather, but which weather company has shutdown because of that?
Google news is in the search results, but there are a lot of news companies. Those info panels often come from wikipedia, but wikipedia is doing great.
This is something that sounds true, but I'm having trouble thinking of an example where it has actually happened. Examples appreciated.
> Google added flights, but Booking Holdings (aka Priceline) continued to grow each year to 15B in revenue for 2019. (Huge drop for 2020 obviously.)
But did advertising on Google become more expensive for competitors once Google entered the market (e.g. did Google Flights also bid on Google Ads) and were those additional costs passed along to customers?
So while your example shows a competitor survived, it over looks the many start ups that did not, it overlooks the increased advertising costs, it over looks the increased cost to consumers and the chilling effect on potential new startups that might have been able to enter the market.
We do not even need to question any of this because before Google acquired the startup which became Google Flights the acquisition was reviewed and only approved under very strict Chinese firewalls between Google flights and Google search…but those restrictions only sought to restrict Google flight’s complete takeover of the market and ignored how it is being used to increase ad costs to the remaining market competitors.
The same has been seen with Google shopping, where Google essentially acquired a startup, it flopped, then Google positioned itself ahead of organic results and began systematically burying competition in the Google results. The fact you can’t name any of the travel or shopping startups that had thriving businesses that fell once Google entered the market is more telling of how Google has dominated the market rather than evidence Google hasn’t actually put anyone out of business.
I think the whole argument is setting up the presupposition that Google kills non competitive businesses, and that's not what antitrust law is about. It's about protecting consumers, not competitors.
Take Android for example. Did Google kill Blackberry with Android? Or was it other factors like the Blackberry CEO cannibalizing their R&D budget, and stubbornly refusing to give consumers what they wanted?
I'd agree that providers are ceding too much control to Google for short-term wins, maybe without even realising the power they're handing over to Google.
Google is quietly inserting themselves between the customer and the business in all sorts of industries. They're not fully utilising that power which only makes them a benevolent (for now) dictator.
> If I type "<city> weather" google will show me the weather, but which weather company has shutdown because of that?
I don't know the answer to your (rethorical?) question but what I know is that weather sites and apps were once nice and useful and now are basically a placeholder for advertisement, sometimes even scammy one.
Bringing bookings in to google maps has been a huge challenge for hospitality. This is flowing through to search as well. I recall someone from the industry doing a great breakdown of changes to the maps UI over time, and tying it to bookings & ad revenue, but can't find it offhand. This article can probably get you started https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2019/06/30...
> If I type "<city> weather" google will show me the weather, but which weather company has shutdown because of that?
I have noticed recently that the Weather.com app has added huge advertisements at the top and has roughly doubled the number of ads within the page. It honestly feels like desperation to me and I’ve been wondering if something bad is happening to the company.
I switched to almost only using Google Flights. I try to use Skyscanner because I want to support the underdog, but Google Flights gives me better, and more results.
For hotels, Google started displaying results from other search engines like Agoda, so I just use Google for that too and clickthrough to whatever is the cheapest. They could also just stop displaying agoda from one day to the next.
I remember reading a comparison on how the hotel search features impacted others vs booking.com and the conclusion was that booking.com has alright because it's more of a destination of its' own rather than driven by search traffic.
> Google added flights, but Booking Holdings (aka Priceline) continued to grow each year
OTAs keep growing, because travel in general keeps growing. But Google takes more and more space there. Right now the "book now" button on Google hotel page takes you to selection of OTAs. But one day it can take you to Google's room selection page and eventually to Google's checkout page - the actual booking can still be done with some external party and they'll handle the customer service etc., but your money will go to Google first.
This is interesting because I always thought Matrix from ITA Software, a company Google acquired in 2010, was quite useful.
Wonder if links to Skiplagged get subjugated in Google SERPs.
If Google thinks it can replace other websites by providing better alternatives, that's great. But then the company should get out of the way and let users have a neutral source for a comprehensive inverted index of the rest of the web. If there is nothing else better out there, then let web users determine that for themselves. The index should be a public resource not controlled by one company that can see what users are searching for and engage in "front-running". (Websites that allow crawls by Googlebot, sometimes exclusively, are of course enabling the Google monopoly.)
1. Google bought Frommers in 2012 and nearly killed it. Thankfully the founder reacquired the rights.
I’ve used a number of those others, and at least via my personal scoring system, google flights is still by far the number one. Your link prioritizes very different things than I do, for example one of its top scoring sites has as a con that you can’t filter out 10+ hour layovers).
>” The index should be a public resource not controlled by one company that can see what users are searching for and engage in "front-running".”
The thing is, it’s the index they built with the technology they built. Google is not the only index. To build a public index, you’d need to have public crawlers, which would bring a whole boatload more questions / regulation / debate. Google’s search ranking is part of the secret sauce that they try very hard to obscure, while hinting at how to be good at it; basically: provide something valuable to visitors, and you’ll rank highly, at least in theory. Get caught cheating and get blacklisted.
Flight info is already public. Ticket prices are not, and vary tons based on all the deals and schemes out there. That’s not Google’s fault, but the fault (if one views it that way) of the airlines playing pricing games. Their business model relies on getting everyone to pay the highest price per seat they can get from a customer, so they benefit from not being open about pricing. Their goal is also to fill flights with paying customers or paying cargo, or the most profitable mix, depending on many factors. Again, not Google’s fault.
Google is in a position to front-run results and provide an experience that other companies cannot by virtue of users already being on their site using their search. It doesn’t seem reasonable to compare Google to a travel site, as it’s pretty clear that one wouldn’t expect e.g. Expedia to list Travelocity results alongside their own with equal priority.
I’m usually really against monopolistic behavior, as many companies use it to screw users and maximize profits (e.g. Comcast). Google isn’t in the same league IMO because they behave a lot more charitably — if it were Comcast running Google, I would wholly expect them to completely de-list every competing travel site and work on lobbying the government to get those competitors shut down, while channeling tax dollars paid to build infrastructure into their own pockets.
It’s a dumb lawsuit that will go nowhere. The lawsuit is disingenuous as they know it will fail. The true purpose is political lip service — accomplish nothing while claiming to be doing something against a perceived enemy.
Google flight search does just as good as Skiplagged for the routes I tend to fly and the UI makes it easier to find the cheapest dates.
If I am doing complicated international stuff I will check multiple locations for prices but for my simple domestic routes the ease and speed of google flights makes it the best option.
Edit: That said, I don't use google as my default search engine as I switched all my devices to DDG a long time ago.
> On the other hand, google could take over almost any business like this.
I have never worked with a technology company that would in danger of being taken over in this way. The examples you list are all free information you can find on the internet, which is precisely google's business. To run afoul of monopoly laws they need to do things like build their own restaurants and route searches to them rather than the other local restaurants the user was looking for. I assume they are doing this in some cases. But the last thing I want is to do a search and find the result list giving a bunch of new pages of lists, with yet more ads of course, to sift through next.
Software engineers are enjoying a nice run, where one can make lots of money applying basic software skills anyone can learn, grabbing free info anyone can get, and utilizing libraries everyone gets with their computer/phone OS but has not been provided access to by their hardware vendor. Hopefully technology will keep changing so fast the run will last forever (as long as you keep hopping to the newest bleeding edge). But this seems like borrowed time to me, access to free info and your own computer's clock or whatever is a commodity anyone can provide, whether it's someone earlier in the chain selling the hardware, or just millions of hungry programmers in developing countries.
Yes, that's true, the info is free in a sense that someone published it on the internet. But taking the weather companies as an example, someone has to measure the weather, and then compute the predictions. That'a real cost someone needs to pay. And that I think is the reason some people don't like what Google is doing - they are displaying the temperature, while someone else paid for it to be measured.
> When you search for "skyline berlin", you'll see images of berlin's skyline, before you see links to other image search sites.
Not to defend Google, but to be fair,
1) when searching for images, you're searching for images, not "image search sites." To search for image search sites, you'd search "all" (not photos) for "image search," which mostly returns Google image search and Google image search help pages as top results, burying other image search engines on subsequent pages. Google's search algorithm does seem biased against competitor image search sites, but maybe Google search is really finding only articles. Searching "all" for "image search sites" returns links to articles listing image search sites. Searching for Yahoo images returns Yahoo Image Search as the top result.
2) the images search results are actually thumbnails, and also links, so you see the thumbs precisely at the same time that you see links to the sites that host each image search result.
> There are only two clear, non-arbitrary rules: Search engines are only allowed to show a list of links, or search engines can show whatever they want.
I want companies to be able to design products that best serve customers, not ones limited by narrowly scoped product definitions. Google's search page has advanced beyond query + results, offering interactivity and shortcuts. I'm not saying we shouldn't be vigilant if they start abusing their position and dominating too many markets, but let's take that case by case.
I also disagree that Google can simply take over other businesses so easily. They've failed so many times. You'd think Youtube Music would dominate, but Spotify is still more popular. YouTube TV? I cancelled that a while ago. What am I surprised about is that we don't have a really strong YouTube competitor. Twitch, TikTok, and Instagram have made some in-roads, but nothing I'd call a strong #2.
I don't see any problem with having arbitrary rules so long as they roughly capture the spirit of the outcome people want. The eight-hour workday is an arbitrary rule. The age of majority is an arbitrary rule. Zoning boundaries are arbitrary.
They all capture something we (most of us) fundamentally want, but the specific lines are approximate or convenient or customary.
Yes, people often don't see the benefit of a discrete boundary - if everyone draws the line in the same spot, even just legally speaking, then everyone can
coordinate their action whenever someone steps over it.
> There are only two clear, non-arbitrary rules: Search engines are only allowed to show a list of links, or search engines can show whatever they want.
Those rules are just as arbitrary as all the possibilities in between.
> There's a clear tradeoff here between what's good for consumers, and concerns about democracy, the concentration of power, etc..
Actually, you can just leave it as tradeoffs between what is good for the consumer short term and what is good for the consumer long term.
Sometimes there are wider issues that affect democracy (e.g. social networks and information silos), but usually it's just an economic issue that people aren't looking at thoroughly enough.
The reason we try to stop monopolies before they happen is not because they are hurting consumers at that point. Often they are underselling competitors to achieve their monopoly so consumers benefit and love them. We stop them because after they have that monopoly they no longer have good incentives to keep being beneficial for the consumer, so we avoid the problem before it is one.
The funny part is that the flight search portion comes from their acquisition of ITA, which I was a part of (worked at ITA when it was acquired). The airlines contract with that system for their own internal search - so who is the real customer there?
As a content creator rich snippets are such a bugbear. If you don't play the game then someone else's content and name shows up. If you do, there's a huge chance people get what they need and never visit your site. It's a Google wins, consumer wins, creator loses situation.
I would argue that bad behavior (“bad” = existing more to get ad revenue than to deliver valuable information to users) made this a viable business model for Google. I don’t love snippets, and sometimes they’re hilariously wrong, but I’d rather get wrong info from a snippet vs having a site waste my time and beg me to sign up, blocking the info from view, forcing me to “open in app”, only to find that it was bad info anyway…
Do companies exist to make things that are valuable for users, or do users exist to make money for companies?
> Why start a new company, if google can just take over everything?
It seems more and more common these days that people start companies specifically with the sole intention of being acquired by Google (or another large tech company).
Regardless of legal aspects it's hard to ignore that Google is now very much in the business of putting to sleep innovative products. Either they acquire the startup and no longer invest in it, or drive it out of the search results, or invent it first in their "moonshot" division and file patents with no intention of executing on them. (Note that the innovators themselves may not fare badly if they get acquired and/or employed by Google. But their product will at best stagnate, at worst be killed shortly.)
In the last decade Google has no longer brought to the consumer anything major like Gmail, Google Maps or Chrome. I doubt it's because of inability to execute - they can and will hire large numbers of very smart people. It seems more like a conscious decision to err on the side of maintaining the ~2010 status quo.
Crucially, I went to Googles business first to look for things.
In the olden days, if I went to AAA for travel advice, I'd get their partners and such recommended, not generic all-encompassing information. But I went to AAA for it. I don' see how this is any different. I can chose to go to not-google and Google then doesn't impact me.
Does Walmart have to put anybody's stuff where they want in the aisles?
> Does Walmart have to put anybody's stuff where they want in the aisles?
That could be an incredible boon to the ecoconomy.
As a younger man I gave up on the idea of making simple consumer products on realizing that the large supermarket chains around here could dash my work on the rocks by just a middle manager arbitrarily saying 'no' to stocking what I had made.
So yes, I think those companies should be forced to work with local businesses.
On the one hand it seems Google is unstoppable. Google can do everything. But I think iPhone showed an alternative path. Now most people are actually using apps (not Google) on mobile for different functionalities. I guess this is the argument that Google has been making but I buy that. My guess is 20 years from now Android, YouTube, Google Maps, etc. would be more valuable for Google than search.
Google having to pay $10-$12B a year to Apple just for being default search engine. All while Apple is working on stopping cookies and now VPN that takes away all the information Google could use for Ads. And Siri Search being Apple's default recommendation results means most of the valuable ads search term revenue are now out of reach for Google. That is ~1.4B Apple Active Devices. ( Apple TV or other Appliance being counted or not is a rounding error ) and Growing.
If App Store spendings are any indication Apple user tends to spend twice as much than Google Play.
Basically Apple is squeezing Google left and right. ( Incidentally they are also what they are doing it to suppliers and developers )
That's known as "tying" - an illegal use of a overwhelming market position to leverage the market position of other products of the same company. That's the key thing that determines illegal monopolistic practice.
That's true if you define Google as a link search engine, but what if you were to define it as a "solution finder"? This way it just fits into the definition.
> Why start a new company, if google can just take over everything?
If your company is defeated by Google turning it into some widget then you don’t have much of a business, you just have a feature you monetized and isn’t really a long term source of revenue. You need rigorous innovation and a clear advantage over your competitors.
Same with sports scores. I’m surprised the various sports websites have not made a cry about this as part of anti-trust investigations. Maybe because those sports sites are still reliant on Google for their other page views? Which only makes it worse.
There is more at stake here, though: If folks cannot easily look up scored and things, who will they blame? Probably the sports sites and team owners. It would be similar to the companies disallowing sports scores to be printed in newspapers.
False dichotomy; when it comes to flights, they could show general information with links to flight companies. When it comes to images, they could limit themselves to small image previews / thumbnails.
Of course, one reason why I for one prefer to stay on Google Images (and have an addon to go directly to an image file instead of the site it's on) is that the sites themselves have so much cruft on them. And they kinda have to, because there's no money to be made on a minimalist image hosting site, while there's plenty of expenses - wouldn't be surprised if the brunt of expenses is abuse prevention.
Those are great examples of how a search engine works better at offering some services than any web site that might be surfaced by the results. It's more useful, more ... utilitarian one might say. That to me is why this lawsuit to declare google a utility is most interesting. Like electricity or natural gas these useful widgets turn a search engine into a substrate that people don't even realize they're using until it breaks.
> There are only two clear, non-arbitrary rules: Search engines are only allowed to show a list of links, or search engines can show whatever they want.
Ohio is asking for a third option; common carrier status. Search and other monopoly infrastructure would be run at arms length from the rest of the business, and anyone could pay (the same as google) to integrate it into their own offerings.
Luckily, search results are getting progressively worse, and these "value add" features also. Maybe there's a time for a web 2.0 (or, 3.0?) that can integrate APIs without HTML/markup specific to do so?
I really just want to send out a query to various search caches, and get back results that are then merged into one dataset and shown in a native GUI. Forget this website shit.
I agree with you on how interesting the issue you raised is. I'm just cynical and I happen to think that won't be the issue that gets decided. I wonder aloud if this will boil down to a question of whether utilities can exist as services on non-utilities, given that we don't presently classify internet service as a utility.
I think that some other example is needed to explain "As a consumer, I love it. So much easier."
Please watch this, it is about not well known company called Luxottica that holds majority of world market for eyewear. There is a good posibilty that if you have sun glasses, they made them. It is not something technical, just simple merchandise, simple to understand:
Since the video came out, they have also bought (actually "merged") one of the largest companies creating perscription lenses.
Now, do you like what you see? Is it "so easy" and "good" for the customers? Do you love it? How is their status impacting you wanting to buy eyewear?
Same is with google, amazon, microsoft, just name it. But yes, until they get a vast majority of market, they will not start to milk the users. As they want majority of market first.
"99% believe they buy an American brand!" she says with horror in her voice. That i so.... American.
While a monopoly is bad this is a very poor source to use to prove a point, even though they do admittedly have a point (like the broken clock being correct twice a day). The problem has absolutely nothing to do with it being an Italian company but that is of course a big point in any 60 Minutes video (US good, others bad) and I highly doubt it would have been made had it been Walmart instead of Luxottica.
But to comment on-topic: I believe Google and/or search engines should be put under the same rules and laws as the EU did with Microsoft. Search engine is searchengine, not search/travelplanner/hotel finder/translator/whatever. It strangles competition and innovation. Google should include those other things from other services if another service will sell the service to Google or keep clear.
Edit: In short, as the EU is already working on, Google and the likes that are gatekeepers, needs to be stopped or broken up.
What if Google did not develop flight search but acquired it by buying someone out. What if they did not develop image search but acquired it by buying someone out. What if they did not develop the good-looking timer but copied it from someone else.
If Google was 100% responsible for developing everything they offer to consumers, then perhaps there is an argument that Google is good for consumers. However the truth is that Google Search is what they developed, it became the only search engine that most people use, and being a gateway tot he web and having the ability to spy on the world's web use is an unfair advantage that virtually no one else has.
Anything that becomes popular Google can gobble it up. Consumers cannot get superior direct benefits from non-Google companies for long. Google will acquire any such companies sooner than later.
My initial thinking behind any business idea was more often than not preceded by "what if Google clones my idea???!?!? :((((". Two things wrong with this line of thinking.
First it assumes Google can execute on said idea better than me and that I can't innovate. Here's the thing though; the bigger a company is the slower it gets. Sure, they can implement processes but big always gets more complex. Being small gives you an edge. What you do with that edge will determine whether FAANG apes your idea or not.
Secondly, big tech isn't immune to market forces. The more features they add, trying to please every last potential user leads to bloat. At some point their search experience is bound to get degraded from adding way too many features in pursuit of every last user. This adds more bureaucracy. More tech debt. More uncontrollable variables.
Search in 2021, especially on mobile, is vastly different from even 5 years ago. There are more ads, more tracking, more fraud, more shady back dealing, more user hostile anti-patterns. Yes, users currently enjoy their product but at some point surveillance capitalism will get its reckoning (see Apple, Europe, regulation in general) and for all the various products they have, search is the only relevant one. Without Search, how 'threatening' is Google really?
Same goes for Facebook and that hot mess of an app. News feed, groups, pages, dating, marketplace, messaging, watch, etc. All this reeks of a co. that's lost focus in pursuit of not ceding users to competitors. This just means when they fail (which they will!), they will fail spectacularly.
My advice to you and myself is focus on a niche. Try to do things that will be hard for FAANG to reproduce by making your users love your product more.
Competing head on with these behemoths is foolish, but a moat is possible nonetheless given proper execution.
Yes, obviously, you as a user are free to find another search engine.
However, you as a creator are not free to find another universe in which the leading search provider does not use their position of influence to squash any competing products by ranking their own products higher.
OP is not arguing the consumer is restricted in choice, more that Google can dominate the market of any information based business by coding a widget because they have a huge amount of data at their disposal.
Much like if you make a good product and sell it on Amazon, Amazon can simply use their might to dupe your product and sell it as AmazonBasics.
So innovation is stifled because the second it becomes profitable a giant can pluck it from your hands and use their power to squash you whilst making money from it.
I am not sure what mechanisms within Capitalism are supposed to protect people from the simple power asymmetry of companies having far more resources money and lawyers doing what the fuck they like.
There should be antitrust lawsuits against all of the giants abusing their power but, because of said power asymmetry, they of course have a huge amount of lobbying power in comparison to anyone else.
No one is forcing you to use an electrical company. You could always power your house with a bicycle generator. Therefore, electrical companies shouldn't be regulated as public utilities.
> When you search for "skyline berlin", you'll see images of berlin's skyline, before you see links to other image search sites.
What's next, should they also show Bing and DuckDuckGo search results when you search for an arbitrary query too?
The goal of Google isn't to link you to websites, it's to get you to your information as quickly as possible. Said information could be a website, just as it can be an image, a flight or a single sentence pulled into an Answer Box.
But I have multiple choices for email, search, video hosting and browsers. I don’t have any choice for water, electricity, sewer, on any other public utility.
I am sure there are a bunch of people on here that don’t use any Google products and are using DuckDuckGo, Firefox, ProtonMail, Vimeo. There are many choices.
I'm surprised I haven't seen much in the responses to this comment that the issue isn't so much that consumers have other options (though given how high Google's search reach is, how relevant is that if hardly anyone does), it's that for most businesses your option is either have a strong search presence on Google or go out of business. There is just no viable path to avoid Google as a business when they control 80+ percent of search market share.
And you not only need to play the SEO game, you have to pray that Google just doesn't decide to get into your business and start returning their own results instead (which is exactly what this lawsuit is about). Especially since Google has had the chance to suck up all the data that you've provided in optimizing your site to provide the most relevant results.
Yes, reading through so many responses it's clear that even on HN in 2021 we need to remind people that you are NOT Google's customer. You are the product!
> ...most businesses your option is either have a strong search presence on Google or go out of business.
Your perspective is a bit skewed here towards the software world. There are businesses on every street-corner in the US, and for that matter world, without any meaningful internet presence or need for great search engine ranking. And for that matter, consumer products and consumer-facing businesses are only a subset of the $20T+ economy of the US.
Do you Google shoes to find shoes,some workout shorts or any consumer product line? Search is irrelevant for any consumer brand from a discovery standpoint point. What do you Google from a consumer perspective?
You have multiple choices for water, dig a well, buy it from the local grocery store. Same for sewage because self composting toilets exist. Also electricity isn't a utility just use a stationary bike as a generator or buy solar panels...
Just because you have multiple choices doesn't mean something is/isn't a utility. Its pretty arbitrary. They also aren't talking about Google products (most of which are completely irrelevant aside from their ability to help Google sell ads) they are focused solely on search. Not saying they are "right" just that Google's search dominance is a thing and they use it support their own stuff. Eg: You can buy our electricity but it only "recommends" appliances we also sell
To a certain extent, utilities differ in that they are regulated monopolies protected by the government. Any competing water company, for example, can’t just start running water mains without government approval. In exchange for that protection, the existing water utility incurs additional regulations, like needing approvals to raise rates and bring required to provide services to areas where it may not be profitable by itself.
Regarding your electrical example, that only works in isolation. You cannot just decide to tie your solar or generator to the grid, for example, because that utility is a regulated public good.
That is a terrible argument. "Go sh*t in a chemical toiled" is not a reasonable alternative, the cost alone is ludicrous. Just have the decency and maturity to admit when you are wrong instead of arguing that you should "go dig a well" in the middle of the city. This is why we can't have reasonable conversations anymore.
> You have multiple choices for water, dig a well, buy it from the local grocery store.
This is a false equivalence. Comparing Google to a municipal water system and other search engines to purchasing bottled water eliminates certain key features of the service, like water conditioning and infrastructure. I use DuckDuckGo and it is no where near the inconvenience implied by "dig a well".
It might be out off topic, but this reminded me of one of the songs that gets recorded and released with every new version of OpenBSD[1], when we're talking about water. It's fun.
1) Google isn't carrying anything. It's your ISP that's actually carrying the bits to your house/work/phone/implants.
2) What google search is providing is literally content that they've created. I really don't see how this suit won't get dismissed on first amendment grounds.
I am not aware of any city or town that has utilities and allows property owners to opt out and dig a well or put in a septic,
Maybe you could use composting toilet however you would still be required by law to hook up and maintain a connect to the public water and sewer system or the city would condemn your home
Is there a single internet savvy person besides stallman who is able to 100% avoid google? Even if you don’t use gmail, almost everyone you message does. You lose access to most online videos. Google domains, fonts, and maps entangle a truly massive number of websites, including healthcare sites. In Covid, lots of clients or employers use google video calling. Schools almost but not quite make you use google drive. If you don’t optimize your website for chrome, you worsen the experience of 90% or more of your users. If you don’t play the seo game, nobody will know your site exists. It’s not a realistic choice for 99% of people
> But I have multiple choices for email, search, video hosting and browsers.
Not video hosting you don't. If you want to build a significant English speaking audience, your only real choice is YouTube, because that's where people search from. Seriously, who has a "Vimeo" app on their phone? On their set-top box?
Same thing if you want to watch interesting videos: most of the content is on YouTube.
These are things that are done locally. You can find a smartphone for under 250 at any phone store. Or by calling a number. I got one by text the other day through my carrier. I can't find an iphone 12 for that online or locally legally and I would have better luck getting a stolen phone cheaper locally.
Small business are finding success through facebook and other social platforms. Not sure google is a player here. Remember google+? I can't believe they shut that down with a decent userbase because it didn't reach some scale meanwhile any startup would have called it a big success and built on it.
Used phones exist, and even more are out there if you are willing to do things like replace a screen at home.
Facebook and instagram exist for advertising: Small businesses aren't going to get much traction on google anyway without specific searches for it, though android is finally catching up and I now get local places in game adverts.
My elderly parents are unable to make the switch from Yahoo to Google. I’ve walked them through it multiple times. It’s just not possible for them. They don’t have the knowledge and skills.
They are smart. Advanced degrees in STEM. Multiple languages. Doesn’t matter.
I can’t imagine the transition from Google to DuckDuckGo/Firefox/ProtonMail being easier.
What step were they unable to complete in the process of changing their browser's default search from Google to Yahoo? (With your walking them through it, I mean?)
> My elderly parents are unable to make the switch from Yahoo to Google. I’ve walked them through it multiple times. It’s just not possible for them. They don’t have the knowledge and skills.
How old are your parents?
Is it search you're referring to or the email platforms of each?
Now put yourself on the other side of the equation. As a business you rely on Google Search because it's effectively the only search engine anyone uses. As a video content creator you rely on Youtube because no one is searching Vimeo for your product, nor are they relying on Vimeo recommendations to find it. As a developer you primarily target Chrome-based browsers because that makes up four fifths of your user base.
Google-avoider checking in! It's actually really easy to avoid it. DuckDuckGo's search quality is better, Firefox is deteriorating daily but still looks and feels better than Chrome does, email should really be avoided but there are dozens of really good email services, and their ad service doesn't need a replacement for obvious reasons (just block it).
Except it's actually not that easy. Most of the web uses google analytics, so its unavoidable when you visit a website. Most of the web's emails are routed through google; I remember reading a post about a guy who set up his own SMTP server and everything, but then realised that everyone he was contacting was using gmail anyway (can't find the post). Every time you see an add that's served by google, that means that there's a google embed in the page your looking at. Also, what alternative is there for YouTube? there isn't a realistic competitor. If you have an android phone (most of the world does) you're forced to use google play services.
In today's world, they're unavoidable. That being said, making them a public utility is a bit forward...
Now try advertising your business while avoiding Google. Keep in mind that if you don't buy ads under your Company's Name from Google, Google will allow your competitors to buy those placements and make them the top results anyone searching your company on Google will see.
What do you do when you have a job interview that is scheduled as a Google Meet meeting? Or when a friend shares a Google Photos album of their newborn's pictures?
I guess you are a Google-avoider, so presumably you still have an actual Google account.
I imagine you avoid Google because you don't want to get locked into their centralized closed source ecosystem and don't want them to track your entire online presence.
So I'm surprised to see you say email should be avoided, as a completely open decentralized communication protocol.
Your stances on these two topics just seem to be in contrast with each other, would you care to elaborate?
I don't use google products much anymore, but the transition takes a long time, especially getting off of gmail.
I'm also not sure it would even be possible to transition if you don't have access to your google account anymore. You would just be literally completely shut out of many of your online accounts.
And for watching online videos there really isn't any viable alternative to youtube.
Other alternatives are fine, but Vimeo isn't alternative for viewer (or even uploader). YouTube is a platform that hosts many unique contents with many worldwide viewers.
How about duck.com? Though it's an extra letter compared to just google). Alternately, setting it as your default search engine sidesteps the issue just as well :)
especially given that they don't seem to be concerned about having internet service providers declared public utilities.
Which is why it will obviously fail at actually doing anything useful.
However, the intended purpose may not be so much to do anything useful, as it is to score some points for incumbent politicians. In that, it could succeed brilliantly. It's actually a very smart move if you consider the political benefits accrued to politicians.
I don't think I've seen anyone get banned from any major platform for their political beliefs. It has always been for hate speech, inciting real-world violence, or spreading blatantly false misinformation that lead to incitements of violence (such as the unfounded claims that the election was stolen).
Funny how none of the Republicans pushing this censorship narrative batted an eye last summer when Facebook was taking down local BLM groups that called for violence.
Let's say the electric company wants to start a restaurant. So they shut the power to the competing restaurants in the neighbourhood. Everyone agrees it would be outrageous.
Now, what about Apple dictating payment policy on apps in the app store?
Google premiering their own services in the results? Forcing their own apps onto all Android devices, impossible to remove?
These platforms turn themselves into natural monopolies, and therefore they can not be treated as "private companies". Decentralisation would be a technical solution, but meanwhile I think regulation is what will happen.
This analogy seems way off to me. It completely misses the fact that Google is doing what it's supposed to do which is giving the user the information they're looking for.
I don't think cutting power is giving the customer (restaurants) or users (not clear in the analogy) what they want.
It's true that with flight search, competitor results are de-emphasized, but as far as I'm concerned Google could even drop them entirely, showing only their internal results if they want to. It's answering the user query, and if the user is unsatisfied they can trivially switch to another source of information.
To make a better analogy, consider that flight search is a specialized version of what Google does more generally. So:
Electric company "EC" wants to start providing DC current to interested customers, so they show the option prominently in their communications with their customers.
This is a tragedy for the existing DC industry because "EC" has the best reputation (highest reliability) in the general electricity industry so most people will first consider them for a DC contract even if they're not necessarily the best for DC power. Still, unhappy customers can easily switch to another DC provider.
> It completely misses the fact that Google is doing what it's supposed to do which is giving the user the information they're looking for.
It used to work that way in the beginning. Now it steers you to whatever the highest bidder wants, whatever their massive opaque ad-revenue-optimizing AI thinks is best, which incidentally seems to be SEO-optimized, pre-digested and ad-laden portals into a whole other ecosystem of in-your-face click farms and garbage results stabbing you in the eyeballs.
Were you not aware of the massive conflict of interest that a search engine with ads represents...from the very beginning?
Making the App Store a public utility instead of preventing Apple from forcing their users to do things is absolutely the wrong response because it ensures Apple will be in power forever.
They have the capacity to be bad, but for example Apple (who are in a similar place WRT this) started with apps you can’t remove and has now made most of them removable; and last time I looked (a while ago now) many unremovable Android apps came from the phone vendor.
I’m all in favour of keeping companies under a close eye to make sure they don’t become an abusive monopoly — my naïve political philosophy is that power should be conserved, so the more e.g. economic power you have the less e.g. free market choice you should be allowed — but I don’t see in Google[0] what you see in them.
Also? If they can easily become a natural monopoly, decentralisation won’t solve anything in the long term.
[0] nor Apple, Netflix, Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, or Microsoft; but that is how I see Facebook and Amazon.
How do these services turn themselves into natural monopolies? There are many non-Apple phones available. There are also non-google search engines. What makes these natural monopolies then?
I'm not GP but a monopoly doesn't mean "we own the market everywhere" or "we have close to 100% of the market-share". We have this same discussion every time someone says monopoly..
Apple for example is a 100% monopoly in the app store. Likewise Google can be a monopoly on their search result page. It would have sounded insane some years back but today, when google search is a gatekeeper (like Facebook), they absolutely can.
You use the example of there being many non-Apple phones (while strictly true there are really only two players, iOS and Android). Can Apple use their power to kill your new innovative Fitness-From-Home app? They are absolutely in a position to do so. There's really not much else to it than that. Can Google strangle travel planner sites by showing flight plans in Google search results? Yes they can and a court would likely see this as abuse of a monopoly no matter if Google have 70% or 99% of the search engine market.
Or use the grandma test: Can you sell your Travel Planner Service to Grandma if Google starts adding the same info to Google search for "free"? Can you sell her a Fitness App for her iPhone if Apple shuts you out because they are going to launch their own iClone fitness app?
If Google goes from Search to Search/travel planner/hotel reservation/translator/and so on they are (ab)using their power to move into other areas and by shutting out competition they get more users thereby becoming a natural monopoly.
And as always happens when "The M" word is used and someone explains something we will have replies yelling Apple's AppStore isn't a monopoly, you can just use Android and we go around in circles.
Well, a public utility also doesn't have the right to do this: "You did something wrong, we won't tell you what it was, there's no chance of appeal, and you are now banned from receiving water service again, ever, for the rest of your life, no matter where you move. And don't try moving in with someone else who's still receiving service, because they'll get banned too."
This is a direct result of their monopoly, which is why Google should be broken up. Because they have such a huge monopoly, they can afford to ignore customers and have a draconian approach to people, and can get away with it. If there were better competition, they wouldn't have been able to ignore their customers. Breaking them up will alleviate this by ensuring that each company needs to be able to survive on their own, of which one aspect is having better customer support and service.
> ...their monopoly, which is why Google should be broken up.
Not denying their monopoly position, but how could Google meaningfully be broken up? It's really just a single business (advertising) with a gaggle of loss leaders adding up to less than 20% of revenue. Even pushing advertising down to 80% took a huge amount of effort.
It's not like Standard Oil which was a vertically integrated trust of several points in the value chain, or the bell system which could be broken up geographically (and manufacturing spun out). Or FB which could divest business units like Instagram and WhatsApp.
Except that this behaviour shows up in non-monopolistic markets as well. Apple does it. PayPal does it. Heck, our European banks have started doing it despite there being ample competition. What the competition did, is made sure EVERY competing entity does that because it's cheaper and costs were brought down with race to the bottom.
I don't get where this bizarre belief that "moar free market" will solve issues. Let's setup proper legal framework where these companies must have a good reason to terminate contract instead - and properly explain it with the ability to appeal.
The government decided that phone numbers are important enough to create regulations that allow phone number portability between carriers.
Email addresses need the same regulation. The arguments that lead to phone number portability apply to email addresses as well. And I would argue that email addresses are even more important than phone numbers at this point (it's the single key to all online accounts, most bills, documents, statements are emailed as PDFs, a lot of government services expect a working email address).
Email addresses have become critical and portability needs to become a requirement for all email services. There are technical issues, for example if someone cancels Gmail service, how can the @gmail.com address be moved elsewhere? It's not as simple as phone number portability. Maybe a regulation that any email service must provide forwarding service to another email address even if the service is no longer active? Or maybe a trusted mapping that exists outside any single service, kind of like a DNS for email addresses.
It would be interesting to have domain-free personal email addresses.
The domain is useful to signify membership in an organization. But for individuals, why should our addresses have hotmail or gmail or yahoo or anything else appended to it?
Although I understand what you're saying, email and YouTube access is not the same as water. Depriving someone of water would be the same as depriving them of life, which is not true of email, YouTube, and whatever g-services.
Actually they can. Someone i know has a restraining order from ohio dmv (bmv) for getting into argument there and can’t get dl there. Hilarious regulation coming from the state that completely privatized their dmv services
And I thought Louisiana charging a fee for using a debit card at state dmv (OMV) offices instead of cash [1] courtesy of Bobby Jindal was something. Sad to see my state of origin has outstripped that.
[1] I should also mention the time I looked at my driving record in Louisiana and discovered the remnant of their pre-1981 practice of putting race on driver's licenses. Under my ethnic category (which I had never filled out or been asked) was 'O'. I turned to the clerk and asked "What does this stand for?" She replied "Other." I said "I thought maybe it would be Oriental" (since I am Pakistani-American). She replied "That would be too politically incorrect." I said, "My expectations for this state in that regard are not high."
I suspect that has more to do with AML programs becoming significantly more automated/data-driven and the increased information sharing between financial institutions. Twenty years ago one bank would ban you. Now they all do.
You are aware that public utilities CHARGE FOR THEIR SERVICE A LOT? Ask Texans and Californians about their power bills in the last months. The level of entitlement of people like you using a free service and expecting to impose the rules as they see fit and getting all angry at the company giving them an absolutely world class amazing service for free because they don't want to piss off the advertisers that pay for the whole deal is very hard to understand.
The level of entitlement of thinking you can exploit private data of millions of people for profit and be above the law, undermining our democracy and paying no tax while cozying up to horile regimes, dictators and tyrants.
Hm. Here's Ohio's definition of a public utility.[1] It might be argued that Google is a telephone company or a messenger company, but that's a stretch.
Regulating Google as a common carrier would make more sense. Common carriers (which, by the way, UPS and FedEx are not, but Union Pacific is) are required to accept and deliver cargoes for anybody who ship according to their posted rates and terms.
But that concept of common carrier implicitly assumes that carrying for party X doesn't harm party Y. You can put a lot of stuff on a train, and if you need to you can run a lot of trains. Shipping is non-rivalous or whatever the economics term is.
But Ohio is pointing out that _ranking_ of results in response to a search (e.g. for flights) is giving preferential placement for Google's own offerings. And only one thing can be shown at the top of the page for "flights to chicago" or whatever. Ranking kind of intrinsically means rivalry.
And further, the common carrier idea is based around serving any customer that pays a posted rate. But the point of search results (as versus ads) is that it's not supposed to be the case that sites need to pay a fee to appear anywhere in the rankings.
I think maybe if the existing laws and categories don't describe this situation well, then we should make new laws and categories.
Seeing what the electric utilities did in terms of essentially buying passage of referenda and laws to their satisfaction in Ohio [1], I'm expecting Google to just open its wallet.
While Google is functionally a public utility, it's not something that I want to be regulated like a public utility. If the government can't be trusted to law lines on a map that aren't blatantly rigged to favor their own political party, I can't trust that they won't tamper with search results the same way.
Unfortunately that skepticism is warranted today. American politics were always somewhat broken in the past, but the blatant partisanship today makes any kind of progress almost impossible.
At least with government we have the powers of oversight and political organizing. It seems like a better bet then a corporation who's accountable to a bottom line, or owners.
The cost-per-search is negligible even if every user had to pay. Instead of running the search the government could implement policies that make search advertising illegal and thus forcing another business model.
Pay-per-search would be cheap enough for municipalities to negotiate subscriptions for their entire broadband network as a part of broadband service.
What an awful idea. A municipality would probably only have one search engine, search engines would serve municipalities which could pressure them to suppress stories, there'd probably be one search engine targeting republican municipalities and one targeting democrat ones, there'd be pressure groups trying to get municipalities to use another search engine that doesn't show results they don't like and it would be incredibly hard to start a new search engine.
A big problem with software and people who write software (often) is that software doesn't like all the ways that human beings misbehave, change their minds, don't have immutable states, and don't fit into the categories you build for them.
So any system that has a duty to serve everyone eventually ends up with an operational component that has almost as much human interaction and problem solving required as the software side of it. Or the software has to be really smart or complex.
Tech companies don't like that because that increases a lot of costs. For some companies, they manage to convince their users to behave well enough to fit into the box. Other companies have to reduce their profits, or go kicking and screaming down the path of accepting the cost of business.
Example: Public electric company wants to switch people to smart meters to reduce the cost of going to read every meter, more reliable operation, easier billing, turn on/shut off, etc. Reduce the number of legacy billing systems. People turn out to irrationally not want smart meters. Now utility needs to maintain 2 systems, and an exception list of people who don't want the smart meter system, and still have to run trucks and meter readers, and procedures for people with old meters.
If something is to be declared a utility, the tech company had better gulp in fear of what's required. But we better as well, if we're thinking of wanting our software to be turned into something that involves those obligations and costs too. There's a reason that Google (well, maybe other tech companies) bring you new things, and the electric company doesn't. It's not all roses.
There are plenty of rational reasons for not wanting a smart meter. Don't let the irrational people detract from the fact that there are many real problems with smart meters. Especially lots of privacy issues.
In the UK, I report my own meter readings and the electrical company probably only really ever goes out once every few years when tenancies change. So I actually don't see what money it saves them asides from the money lost from chasing up issues where people are trying to cheat the system.
In this example it really makes me wonder if replacing all the meters in the country with non-intercompatible smart meters really saves that much money. So you have to start asking what else is in there for them to do this. Probably money for the data I would have to imagine.
Also, given how absolutely atrociously shite the security of these smart meters is (and you'll have to trust me on this, I don't know how public this information is) I wouldn't want that crap anywhere near my house in the eventuality that someone hijacks it to make it look like I'm using more electricity when they're using less (while keeping the overall books balanced so to speak) or some other nefarious purpose.
Certainly these meters won't give you 5G cancer, but they're really a horrible idea as they stand and I don't recommend anyone install them, at least not in the UK.
Sure, but those not-irrational reasons are locale-specific. I've never heard of someone self-reporting the meter reading here in the US. The meter still keeps a local log of how much energy was used, so worrying about being framed for using too much energy still feels a bit irrational to me.
OTOH, smart meters allow the utility to charge TOU rates, which helps even out the load on the grid. It benefits the utility, of course, but also customers. For example, it is minimally inconvenient to set my car to charge or my dish washer to run at night instead of day, but I might not bother to do so unless the utility charges me below average rates to do so. I calculate that I am earning several hundred dollars per hour for the time spent taking advantage of TOU rates.
As for selling the data... the solution to that is banning such sales, not banning smart meters.
In Australia, in the state of Victoria all meters are smart meter for few years now. They are also growing in number in other states. There has been no hacking incident. in fact it makes peoples life easier by allowing them to track energy usage at every 15 mins interval with historical data using an app from the utility company. This data cannot be sold either. In fact under the Govt. Open API scheme very shortly you will be able to give access to your own data for comparison to select the best plan for you (just like open banking).
When it comes to smart meter security and privacy (and perhaps in this day and age diversity and equity) concerns let's discuss them when there's an evidence that they have caused problems.
There's not that many things about the smart meter that are much worse than the vulnerabilities of the plain old spinning disk meter. There were many problems with old meters too. And the benefits far outweigh those issues. Smart meters are not being hacked left and right.
And your privacy concerns are just a matter of granularity of time. You report your usage monthly -- that is also private information. Smart meters just do it on a finer timescale. Not a fundamental difference.
I don't think your argument supports the second conclusion in your penultimate sentence. Seems like a big leap. Power and water “just work” and the utility companies can’t abuse people. As an “end user” I don't get crappier power or worse water because my neighbor is spooked out by smart meters. I highly doubt the savings would be passed on to me anyway. I would 1000 times over rather live in a world where internet utility service providers were required to substantiate service terminations the details of which are governed by civil law not by an abusive EULA written to protect tue company not the user. If it means email costs $1/month so be it. I pay for email on principle anyway.
Then isn't this an argument that tech companies are not utilities because the things they supply don't "just work" and have no nuance to them?
Electricity and water "just work" because you deliver it, you're done. You have no obligations aside from not failing to deliver it, and not exploiting your monopoly market.
Tech companies are not utilities because they're not just something you buy like a commodity and have a right to not have complex terms of usage?
You want the best of both worlds. Maybe that's not possible.
> People turn out to irrationally not want smart meters.
Some people may be irrational, but smart meters are a huge privacy concern - the electricity company can figure out your patterns from the power usage and the "shape" of it.
This is the reason why I don't want a smart meter.
Disclaimer: I actually was involved in building firmware and management software of smart meters.
Not only the electric company, anyone with a hint of ambition. I can read my own meter, along with 60 of my closest neighbors if I so chose (I don't) because every meter emits unencrypted packets several times for each reporting interval (5 minutes in my case)
How do you defend against the argument that it's just a matter of degree?
I can tell from your old spinning mechanical meter that you're at home and not on vacation. That's personal information. Why is a smart meter so different?
Usage patterns seem extremely important for building out a renewable power grid. Meanwhile, what is the privacy concern with the “shape” of your usage?
If the electric company sends someone out to read your meter every day is that objectionable? Every hour? Every minute? At what resolution is energy usage too invasive? Why?
Not just humans can misbehave, machines can also. I work in industrie automation and there is often the question should we produce just errormessages or should or machines produce a product. If you wanna catch ever error, every low or high temp, every whatever, no machine can even start to produce a product ever.
An Example for your Example. Yes i'm one of those people who tried to keep his old electricity meter the longest time possible. I have 36 solar panels installed on my roof and the old disk meter just rotated backwards when I was not using all that electricity during the day. The new meter, that i could only delay a year or 2, is electronic and does not give me anything when I push energy to the net all day. The government in my country can give you money for that energy but that would be the raw price without any tax and the energy you use later on the day still has tax on it so that does not really help, The tax is also 80 to 90% of the price.
So I hope that gives some perspective why people may prever to keep an old system around and not be forced by a big company to change it.
In the UK the government imposed a quota to the utility companies for smart meter installations. Hence they are desperate to boost adoption, recently they have drafted Albert Einstein into their all-out advertising campaign. The government is clearly anxious to push this change which is precisely why i'm not rushing.
Earnest question - Why does the utility have to honor the request of the owner? Doesn't the utility own the meter and is allowed to make changes to it as it sees fit?
The large utility in my state provides the meter, the customer provides the meter socket and everything downstream of the meter.
For 400A (really 320A, 80% of 400) and larger services (commercial) the customer supplies everything beyond the transformer (service disconnect and CT cabinet, typically), but the utility will provide meters or CTs depending on how it’s being metered.
one reason I've heard against smart meters is that it would make it easy for power companies to start charging non commercial users for apparent power rather than real power, as a way to indirectly raise prices.
Readit News
The concrete issue is flight search. When you google "flight from a to b", rather then seeing search results linking to websites for flight search, the first thing you see is the results of Google's own flight search. Is that wrong? What about image search? When you search for "skyline berlin", you'll see images of berlin's skyline, before you see links to other image search sites.
Same is true for a lot other stuff. If you search "timer", you'll see a timer, not links to various timers that look ugly as shit.
As a consumer, I love it. So much easier.
On the other hand, google could take over almost any business like this. At least, any business that is "functional" in the sense that the only thing you really want is to get some output based on your input.
There's a clear tradeoff here between what's good for consumers, and concerns about democracy, the concentration of power, etc.. And also innovation. Why start a new company, if google can just take over everything?
There are only two clear, non-arbitrary rules: Search engines are only allowed to show a list of links, or search engines can show whatever they want.
That didn't happen to travel companies. Google added flights, but Booking Holdings (aka Priceline) continued to grow each year to 15B in revenue for 2019. (Huge drop for 2020 obviously.)
If I type "<city> weather" google will show me the weather, but which weather company has shutdown because of that?
Google news is in the search results, but there are a lot of news companies. Those info panels often come from wikipedia, but wikipedia is doing great.
This is something that sounds true, but I'm having trouble thinking of an example where it has actually happened. Examples appreciated.
But did advertising on Google become more expensive for competitors once Google entered the market (e.g. did Google Flights also bid on Google Ads) and were those additional costs passed along to customers?
So while your example shows a competitor survived, it over looks the many start ups that did not, it overlooks the increased advertising costs, it over looks the increased cost to consumers and the chilling effect on potential new startups that might have been able to enter the market.
We do not even need to question any of this because before Google acquired the startup which became Google Flights the acquisition was reviewed and only approved under very strict Chinese firewalls between Google flights and Google search…but those restrictions only sought to restrict Google flight’s complete takeover of the market and ignored how it is being used to increase ad costs to the remaining market competitors.
The same has been seen with Google shopping, where Google essentially acquired a startup, it flopped, then Google positioned itself ahead of organic results and began systematically burying competition in the Google results. The fact you can’t name any of the travel or shopping startups that had thriving businesses that fell once Google entered the market is more telling of how Google has dominated the market rather than evidence Google hasn’t actually put anyone out of business.
Take Android for example. Did Google kill Blackberry with Android? Or was it other factors like the Blackberry CEO cannibalizing their R&D budget, and stubbornly refusing to give consumers what they wanted?
https://www.cartrawler.com/ct/digital-disruption/googles-ste...
I'd agree that providers are ceding too much control to Google for short-term wins, maybe without even realising the power they're handing over to Google.
Google is quietly inserting themselves between the customer and the business in all sorts of industries. They're not fully utilising that power which only makes them a benevolent (for now) dictator.
I don't know the answer to your (rethorical?) question but what I know is that weather sites and apps were once nice and useful and now are basically a placeholder for advertisement, sometimes even scammy one.
I have noticed recently that the Weather.com app has added huge advertisements at the top and has roughly doubled the number of ads within the page. It honestly feels like desperation to me and I’ve been wondering if something bad is happening to the company.
For hotels, Google started displaying results from other search engines like Agoda, so I just use Google for that too and clickthrough to whatever is the cheapest. They could also just stop displaying agoda from one day to the next.
https://skift.com/2019/11/07/googles-travel-gains-levy-pain-...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephenmcbride1/2019/12/06/how-...
I remember reading a comparison on how the hotel search features impacted others vs booking.com and the conclusion was that booking.com has alright because it's more of a destination of its' own rather than driven by search traffic.
OTAs keep growing, because travel in general keeps growing. But Google takes more and more space there. Right now the "book now" button on Google hotel page takes you to selection of OTAs. But one day it can take you to Google's room selection page and eventually to Google's checkout page - the actual booking can still be done with some external party and they'll handle the customer service etc., but your money will go to Google first.
https://www.frommers.com/slideshows/848046-the-10-best-and-w...
This is interesting because I always thought Matrix from ITA Software, a company Google acquired in 2010, was quite useful.
Wonder if links to Skiplagged get subjugated in Google SERPs.
If Google thinks it can replace other websites by providing better alternatives, that's great. But then the company should get out of the way and let users have a neutral source for a comprehensive inverted index of the rest of the web. If there is nothing else better out there, then let web users determine that for themselves. The index should be a public resource not controlled by one company that can see what users are searching for and engage in "front-running". (Websites that allow crawls by Googlebot, sometimes exclusively, are of course enabling the Google monopoly.)
1. Google bought Frommers in 2012 and nearly killed it. Thankfully the founder reacquired the rights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frommers
The thing is, it’s the index they built with the technology they built. Google is not the only index. To build a public index, you’d need to have public crawlers, which would bring a whole boatload more questions / regulation / debate. Google’s search ranking is part of the secret sauce that they try very hard to obscure, while hinting at how to be good at it; basically: provide something valuable to visitors, and you’ll rank highly, at least in theory. Get caught cheating and get blacklisted.
Flight info is already public. Ticket prices are not, and vary tons based on all the deals and schemes out there. That’s not Google’s fault, but the fault (if one views it that way) of the airlines playing pricing games. Their business model relies on getting everyone to pay the highest price per seat they can get from a customer, so they benefit from not being open about pricing. Their goal is also to fill flights with paying customers or paying cargo, or the most profitable mix, depending on many factors. Again, not Google’s fault.
Google is in a position to front-run results and provide an experience that other companies cannot by virtue of users already being on their site using their search. It doesn’t seem reasonable to compare Google to a travel site, as it’s pretty clear that one wouldn’t expect e.g. Expedia to list Travelocity results alongside their own with equal priority.
I’m usually really against monopolistic behavior, as many companies use it to screw users and maximize profits (e.g. Comcast). Google isn’t in the same league IMO because they behave a lot more charitably — if it were Comcast running Google, I would wholly expect them to completely de-list every competing travel site and work on lobbying the government to get those competitors shut down, while channeling tax dollars paid to build infrastructure into their own pockets.
It’s a dumb lawsuit that will go nowhere. The lawsuit is disingenuous as they know it will fail. The true purpose is political lip service — accomplish nothing while claiming to be doing something against a perceived enemy.
If I am doing complicated international stuff I will check multiple locations for prices but for my simple domestic routes the ease and speed of google flights makes it the best option.
Edit: That said, I don't use google as my default search engine as I switched all my devices to DDG a long time ago.
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I have never worked with a technology company that would in danger of being taken over in this way. The examples you list are all free information you can find on the internet, which is precisely google's business. To run afoul of monopoly laws they need to do things like build their own restaurants and route searches to them rather than the other local restaurants the user was looking for. I assume they are doing this in some cases. But the last thing I want is to do a search and find the result list giving a bunch of new pages of lists, with yet more ads of course, to sift through next.
Software engineers are enjoying a nice run, where one can make lots of money applying basic software skills anyone can learn, grabbing free info anyone can get, and utilizing libraries everyone gets with their computer/phone OS but has not been provided access to by their hardware vendor. Hopefully technology will keep changing so fast the run will last forever (as long as you keep hopping to the newest bleeding edge). But this seems like borrowed time to me, access to free info and your own computer's clock or whatever is a commodity anyone can provide, whether it's someone earlier in the chain selling the hardware, or just millions of hungry programmers in developing countries.
Yes, that's true, the info is free in a sense that someone published it on the internet. But taking the weather companies as an example, someone has to measure the weather, and then compute the predictions. That'a real cost someone needs to pay. And that I think is the reason some people don't like what Google is doing - they are displaying the temperature, while someone else paid for it to be measured.
Not to defend Google, but to be fair, 1) when searching for images, you're searching for images, not "image search sites." To search for image search sites, you'd search "all" (not photos) for "image search," which mostly returns Google image search and Google image search help pages as top results, burying other image search engines on subsequent pages. Google's search algorithm does seem biased against competitor image search sites, but maybe Google search is really finding only articles. Searching "all" for "image search sites" returns links to articles listing image search sites. Searching for Yahoo images returns Yahoo Image Search as the top result. 2) the images search results are actually thumbnails, and also links, so you see the thumbs precisely at the same time that you see links to the sites that host each image search result.
I want companies to be able to design products that best serve customers, not ones limited by narrowly scoped product definitions. Google's search page has advanced beyond query + results, offering interactivity and shortcuts. I'm not saying we shouldn't be vigilant if they start abusing their position and dominating too many markets, but let's take that case by case.
I also disagree that Google can simply take over other businesses so easily. They've failed so many times. You'd think Youtube Music would dominate, but Spotify is still more popular. YouTube TV? I cancelled that a while ago. What am I surprised about is that we don't have a really strong YouTube competitor. Twitch, TikTok, and Instagram have made some in-roads, but nothing I'd call a strong #2.
I think that's exactly what's going on though.
> and dominating too many markets
How many is too many? I could make the same argument for Walmart, Amazon, ...
> but let's take that case by case.
No. Let's not drown people in having too many lawsuits. It's time for a sea of change.
I don't see any problem with having arbitrary rules so long as they roughly capture the spirit of the outcome people want. The eight-hour workday is an arbitrary rule. The age of majority is an arbitrary rule. Zoning boundaries are arbitrary.
They all capture something we (most of us) fundamentally want, but the specific lines are approximate or convenient or customary.
Those rules are just as arbitrary as all the possibilities in between.
Actually, you can just leave it as tradeoffs between what is good for the consumer short term and what is good for the consumer long term.
Sometimes there are wider issues that affect democracy (e.g. social networks and information silos), but usually it's just an economic issue that people aren't looking at thoroughly enough.
The reason we try to stop monopolies before they happen is not because they are hurting consumers at that point. Often they are underselling competitors to achieve their monopoly so consumers benefit and love them. We stop them because after they have that monopoly they no longer have good incentives to keep being beneficial for the consumer, so we avoid the problem before it is one.
Do companies exist to make things that are valuable for users, or do users exist to make money for companies?
It seems more and more common these days that people start companies specifically with the sole intention of being acquired by Google (or another large tech company).
Fortunately, the EU has the upcoming Digital Markets Act, ensuring fair competition in the digital space. You can read more about it here:
https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/euro...
In the last decade Google has no longer brought to the consumer anything major like Gmail, Google Maps or Chrome. I doubt it's because of inability to execute - they can and will hire large numbers of very smart people. It seems more like a conscious decision to err on the side of maintaining the ~2010 status quo.
In the olden days, if I went to AAA for travel advice, I'd get their partners and such recommended, not generic all-encompassing information. But I went to AAA for it. I don' see how this is any different. I can chose to go to not-google and Google then doesn't impact me.
Does Walmart have to put anybody's stuff where they want in the aisles?
That could be an incredible boon to the ecoconomy.
As a younger man I gave up on the idea of making simple consumer products on realizing that the large supermarket chains around here could dash my work on the rocks by just a middle manager arbitrarily saying 'no' to stocking what I had made.
So yes, I think those companies should be forced to work with local businesses.
Google having to pay $10-$12B a year to Apple just for being default search engine. All while Apple is working on stopping cookies and now VPN that takes away all the information Google could use for Ads. And Siri Search being Apple's default recommendation results means most of the valuable ads search term revenue are now out of reach for Google. That is ~1.4B Apple Active Devices. ( Apple TV or other Appliance being counted or not is a rounding error ) and Growing.
If App Store spendings are any indication Apple user tends to spend twice as much than Google Play.
Basically Apple is squeezing Google left and right. ( Incidentally they are also what they are doing it to suppliers and developers )
If your company is defeated by Google turning it into some widget then you don’t have much of a business, you just have a feature you monetized and isn’t really a long term source of revenue. You need rigorous innovation and a clear advantage over your competitors.
Of course, one reason why I for one prefer to stay on Google Images (and have an addon to go directly to an image file instead of the site it's on) is that the sites themselves have so much cruft on them. And they kinda have to, because there's no money to be made on a minimalist image hosting site, while there's plenty of expenses - wouldn't be surprised if the brunt of expenses is abuse prevention.
Ohio is asking for a third option; common carrier status. Search and other monopoly infrastructure would be run at arms length from the rest of the business, and anyone could pay (the same as google) to integrate it into their own offerings.
I really just want to send out a query to various search caches, and get back results that are then merged into one dataset and shown in a native GUI. Forget this website shit.
Nah. That's what server-side cURL requests are for.
Please watch this, it is about not well known company called Luxottica that holds majority of world market for eyewear. There is a good posibilty that if you have sun glasses, they made them. It is not something technical, just simple merchandise, simple to understand:
https://youtu.be/yvTWjWVY9Vo
Since the video came out, they have also bought (actually "merged") one of the largest companies creating perscription lenses.
Now, do you like what you see? Is it "so easy" and "good" for the customers? Do you love it? How is their status impacting you wanting to buy eyewear?
Same is with google, amazon, microsoft, just name it. But yes, until they get a vast majority of market, they will not start to milk the users. As they want majority of market first.
While a monopoly is bad this is a very poor source to use to prove a point, even though they do admittedly have a point (like the broken clock being correct twice a day). The problem has absolutely nothing to do with it being an Italian company but that is of course a big point in any 60 Minutes video (US good, others bad) and I highly doubt it would have been made had it been Walmart instead of Luxottica.
But to comment on-topic: I believe Google and/or search engines should be put under the same rules and laws as the EU did with Microsoft. Search engine is searchengine, not search/travelplanner/hotel finder/translator/whatever. It strangles competition and innovation. Google should include those other things from other services if another service will sell the service to Google or keep clear.
Edit: In short, as the EU is already working on, Google and the likes that are gatekeepers, needs to be stopped or broken up.
If Google was 100% responsible for developing everything they offer to consumers, then perhaps there is an argument that Google is good for consumers. However the truth is that Google Search is what they developed, it became the only search engine that most people use, and being a gateway tot he web and having the ability to spy on the world's web use is an unfair advantage that virtually no one else has.
Anything that becomes popular Google can gobble it up. Consumers cannot get superior direct benefits from non-Google companies for long. Google will acquire any such companies sooner than later.
First it assumes Google can execute on said idea better than me and that I can't innovate. Here's the thing though; the bigger a company is the slower it gets. Sure, they can implement processes but big always gets more complex. Being small gives you an edge. What you do with that edge will determine whether FAANG apes your idea or not.
Secondly, big tech isn't immune to market forces. The more features they add, trying to please every last potential user leads to bloat. At some point their search experience is bound to get degraded from adding way too many features in pursuit of every last user. This adds more bureaucracy. More tech debt. More uncontrollable variables.
Search in 2021, especially on mobile, is vastly different from even 5 years ago. There are more ads, more tracking, more fraud, more shady back dealing, more user hostile anti-patterns. Yes, users currently enjoy their product but at some point surveillance capitalism will get its reckoning (see Apple, Europe, regulation in general) and for all the various products they have, search is the only relevant one. Without Search, how 'threatening' is Google really?
Same goes for Facebook and that hot mess of an app. News feed, groups, pages, dating, marketplace, messaging, watch, etc. All this reeks of a co. that's lost focus in pursuit of not ceding users to competitors. This just means when they fail (which they will!), they will fail spectacularly.
My advice to you and myself is focus on a niche. Try to do things that will be hard for FAANG to reproduce by making your users love your product more.
Competing head on with these behemoths is foolish, but a moat is possible nonetheless given proper execution.
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However, you as a creator are not free to find another universe in which the leading search provider does not use their position of influence to squash any competing products by ranking their own products higher.
Google is stealing ideas and products, that they know are viable through the metrics they gather from the search data.
Then they implement those products and embed them ABOVE the search results.
Effectively killing off the competitors, who invented and build the original products.
HOW are developers free to avoid Google killing off their businesses like that?
Much like if you make a good product and sell it on Amazon, Amazon can simply use their might to dupe your product and sell it as AmazonBasics.
So innovation is stifled because the second it becomes profitable a giant can pluck it from your hands and use their power to squash you whilst making money from it.
I am not sure what mechanisms within Capitalism are supposed to protect people from the simple power asymmetry of companies having far more resources money and lawyers doing what the fuck they like.
There should be antitrust lawsuits against all of the giants abusing their power but, because of said power asymmetry, they of course have a huge amount of lobbying power in comparison to anyone else.
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The scope (of showing nice timer by google on 'timer' search) is much broader spanning many verticals
What's next, should they also show Bing and DuckDuckGo search results when you search for an arbitrary query too?
The goal of Google isn't to link you to websites, it's to get you to your information as quickly as possible. Said information could be a website, just as it can be an image, a flight or a single sentence pulled into an Answer Box.
I am sure there are a bunch of people on here that don’t use any Google products and are using DuckDuckGo, Firefox, ProtonMail, Vimeo. There are many choices.
And you not only need to play the SEO game, you have to pray that Google just doesn't decide to get into your business and start returning their own results instead (which is exactly what this lawsuit is about). Especially since Google has had the chance to suck up all the data that you've provided in optimizing your site to provide the most relevant results.
Your perspective is a bit skewed here towards the software world. There are businesses on every street-corner in the US, and for that matter world, without any meaningful internet presence or need for great search engine ranking. And for that matter, consumer products and consumer-facing businesses are only a subset of the $20T+ economy of the US.
Just because you have multiple choices doesn't mean something is/isn't a utility. Its pretty arbitrary. They also aren't talking about Google products (most of which are completely irrelevant aside from their ability to help Google sell ads) they are focused solely on search. Not saying they are "right" just that Google's search dominance is a thing and they use it support their own stuff. Eg: You can buy our electricity but it only "recommends" appliances we also sell
DuckDuckGo is much more like Google than "dig a well" is like municipal water.
Regarding your electrical example, that only works in isolation. You cannot just decide to tie your solar or generator to the grid, for example, because that utility is a regulated public good.
This is a false equivalence. Comparing Google to a municipal water system and other search engines to purchasing bottled water eliminates certain key features of the service, like water conditioning and infrastructure. I use DuckDuckGo and it is no where near the inconvenience implied by "dig a well".
[1]https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#36
Maybe you could use composting toilet however you would still be required by law to hook up and maintain a connect to the public water and sewer system or the city would condemn your home
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Not video hosting you don't. If you want to build a significant English speaking audience, your only real choice is YouTube, because that's where people search from. Seriously, who has a "Vimeo" app on their phone? On their set-top box?
Same thing if you want to watch interesting videos: most of the content is on YouTube.
Small business are finding success through facebook and other social platforms. Not sure google is a player here. Remember google+? I can't believe they shut that down with a decent userbase because it didn't reach some scale meanwhile any startup would have called it a big success and built on it.
Facebook and instagram exist for advertising: Small businesses aren't going to get much traction on google anyway without specific searches for it, though android is finally catching up and I now get local places in game adverts.
Do a different job.
Jio.
> try advertising any small business on the internet
Facebook is the dominate player here.
> try avoiding meets meeting when you apply for a job
Zoom? Bluejeans?
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They are smart. Advanced degrees in STEM. Multiple languages. Doesn’t matter.
I can’t imagine the transition from Google to DuckDuckGo/Firefox/ProtonMail being easier.
Am I wrong about that?
How old are your parents?
Is it search you're referring to or the email platforms of each?
2. You’re thinking as an individual, but there’s also how Google treats businesses. It’s a lot harder to replace Google Ads than gmail.
I guess you are a Google-avoider, so presumably you still have an actual Google account.
What is the reason? Are the privacy changes affecting this by using more resources or pages are requesting domains that hang for too long?
It gives rust a bad name because this is one of the bigger rust products I know.
I disagree about DDG’s search quality. I tried it for six months and that was not my experience. Eventually went back to Google.
Your stances on these two topics just seem to be in contrast with each other, would you care to elaborate?
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I'm also not sure it would even be possible to transition if you don't have access to your google account anymore. You would just be literally completely shut out of many of your online accounts.
And for watching online videos there really isn't any viable alternative to youtube.
I am pretty sure that number is close to zero. googleapis.com is a Google product, and not using it breaks half the Internet. Trust me, I've tried.
Which is why it will obviously fail at actually doing anything useful.
However, the intended purpose may not be so much to do anything useful, as it is to score some points for incumbent politicians. In that, it could succeed brilliantly. It's actually a very smart move if you consider the political benefits accrued to politicians.
When I build a house, do I have to pay $25k to get my Google pipes hooked up? Seriously where are the parallels?
It undercuts their entire argument by making it look much more like a political stunt than any kind of serious action.
Funny how none of the Republicans pushing this censorship narrative batted an eye last summer when Facebook was taking down local BLM groups that called for violence.
Now, what about Apple dictating payment policy on apps in the app store?
Google premiering their own services in the results? Forcing their own apps onto all Android devices, impossible to remove?
These platforms turn themselves into natural monopolies, and therefore they can not be treated as "private companies". Decentralisation would be a technical solution, but meanwhile I think regulation is what will happen.
I don't think cutting power is giving the customer (restaurants) or users (not clear in the analogy) what they want.
It's true that with flight search, competitor results are de-emphasized, but as far as I'm concerned Google could even drop them entirely, showing only their internal results if they want to. It's answering the user query, and if the user is unsatisfied they can trivially switch to another source of information.
To make a better analogy, consider that flight search is a specialized version of what Google does more generally. So:
Electric company "EC" wants to start providing DC current to interested customers, so they show the option prominently in their communications with their customers.
This is a tragedy for the existing DC industry because "EC" has the best reputation (highest reliability) in the general electricity industry so most people will first consider them for a DC contract even if they're not necessarily the best for DC power. Still, unhappy customers can easily switch to another DC provider.
It used to work that way in the beginning. Now it steers you to whatever the highest bidder wants, whatever their massive opaque ad-revenue-optimizing AI thinks is best, which incidentally seems to be SEO-optimized, pre-digested and ad-laden portals into a whole other ecosystem of in-your-face click farms and garbage results stabbing you in the eyeballs.
Were you not aware of the massive conflict of interest that a search engine with ads represents...from the very beginning?
In what sense is Google a competitor with flight/travel businesses?
Google is an advertising company.
I’m all in favour of keeping companies under a close eye to make sure they don’t become an abusive monopoly — my naïve political philosophy is that power should be conserved, so the more e.g. economic power you have the less e.g. free market choice you should be allowed — but I don’t see in Google[0] what you see in them.
Also? If they can easily become a natural monopoly, decentralisation won’t solve anything in the long term.
[0] nor Apple, Netflix, Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, or Microsoft; but that is how I see Facebook and Amazon.
I don't follow the reasoning here.
Apple for example is a 100% monopoly in the app store. Likewise Google can be a monopoly on their search result page. It would have sounded insane some years back but today, when google search is a gatekeeper (like Facebook), they absolutely can.
You use the example of there being many non-Apple phones (while strictly true there are really only two players, iOS and Android). Can Apple use their power to kill your new innovative Fitness-From-Home app? They are absolutely in a position to do so. There's really not much else to it than that. Can Google strangle travel planner sites by showing flight plans in Google search results? Yes they can and a court would likely see this as abuse of a monopoly no matter if Google have 70% or 99% of the search engine market.
Or use the grandma test: Can you sell your Travel Planner Service to Grandma if Google starts adding the same info to Google search for "free"? Can you sell her a Fitness App for her iPhone if Apple shuts you out because they are going to launch their own iClone fitness app?
If Google goes from Search to Search/travel planner/hotel reservation/translator/and so on they are (ab)using their power to move into other areas and by shutting out competition they get more users thereby becoming a natural monopoly.
And as always happens when "The M" word is used and someone explains something we will have replies yelling Apple's AppStore isn't a monopoly, you can just use Android and we go around in circles.
Not denying their monopoly position, but how could Google meaningfully be broken up? It's really just a single business (advertising) with a gaggle of loss leaders adding up to less than 20% of revenue. Even pushing advertising down to 80% took a huge amount of effort.
It's not like Standard Oil which was a vertically integrated trust of several points in the value chain, or the bell system which could be broken up geographically (and manufacturing spun out). Or FB which could divest business units like Instagram and WhatsApp.
I don't get where this bizarre belief that "moar free market" will solve issues. Let's setup proper legal framework where these companies must have a good reason to terminate contract instead - and properly explain it with the ability to appeal.
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Email addresses need the same regulation. The arguments that lead to phone number portability apply to email addresses as well. And I would argue that email addresses are even more important than phone numbers at this point (it's the single key to all online accounts, most bills, documents, statements are emailed as PDFs, a lot of government services expect a working email address).
Email addresses have become critical and portability needs to become a requirement for all email services. There are technical issues, for example if someone cancels Gmail service, how can the @gmail.com address be moved elsewhere? It's not as simple as phone number portability. Maybe a regulation that any email service must provide forwarding service to another email address even if the service is no longer active? Or maybe a trusted mapping that exists outside any single service, kind of like a DNS for email addresses.
The domain is useful to signify membership in an organization. But for individuals, why should our addresses have hotmail or gmail or yahoo or anything else appended to it?
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[1] I should also mention the time I looked at my driving record in Louisiana and discovered the remnant of their pre-1981 practice of putting race on driver's licenses. Under my ethnic category (which I had never filled out or been asked) was 'O'. I turned to the clerk and asked "What does this stand for?" She replied "Other." I said "I thought maybe it would be Oriental" (since I am Pakistani-American). She replied "That would be too politically incorrect." I said, "My expectations for this state in that regard are not high."
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right?
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Two can play this maralism game, see?
Regulating Google as a common carrier would make more sense. Common carriers (which, by the way, UPS and FedEx are not, but Union Pacific is) are required to accept and deliver cargoes for anybody who ship according to their posted rates and terms.
[1] https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-4905.03
But Ohio is pointing out that _ranking_ of results in response to a search (e.g. for flights) is giving preferential placement for Google's own offerings. And only one thing can be shown at the top of the page for "flights to chicago" or whatever. Ranking kind of intrinsically means rivalry.
And further, the common carrier idea is based around serving any customer that pays a posted rate. But the point of search results (as versus ads) is that it's not supposed to be the case that sites need to pay a fee to appear anywhere in the rankings.
I think maybe if the existing laws and categories don't describe this situation well, then we should make new laws and categories.
[1] https://energynews.us/2020/03/05/dark-money-dominated-ohios-...
Pay-per-search would be cheap enough for municipalities to negotiate subscriptions for their entire broadband network as a part of broadband service.
Yeah, the last thing I would want my search history to be tied to is my payment information.
So any system that has a duty to serve everyone eventually ends up with an operational component that has almost as much human interaction and problem solving required as the software side of it. Or the software has to be really smart or complex.
Tech companies don't like that because that increases a lot of costs. For some companies, they manage to convince their users to behave well enough to fit into the box. Other companies have to reduce their profits, or go kicking and screaming down the path of accepting the cost of business.
Example: Public electric company wants to switch people to smart meters to reduce the cost of going to read every meter, more reliable operation, easier billing, turn on/shut off, etc. Reduce the number of legacy billing systems. People turn out to irrationally not want smart meters. Now utility needs to maintain 2 systems, and an exception list of people who don't want the smart meter system, and still have to run trucks and meter readers, and procedures for people with old meters.
If something is to be declared a utility, the tech company had better gulp in fear of what's required. But we better as well, if we're thinking of wanting our software to be turned into something that involves those obligations and costs too. There's a reason that Google (well, maybe other tech companies) bring you new things, and the electric company doesn't. It's not all roses.
In the UK, I report my own meter readings and the electrical company probably only really ever goes out once every few years when tenancies change. So I actually don't see what money it saves them asides from the money lost from chasing up issues where people are trying to cheat the system.
In this example it really makes me wonder if replacing all the meters in the country with non-intercompatible smart meters really saves that much money. So you have to start asking what else is in there for them to do this. Probably money for the data I would have to imagine.
Also, given how absolutely atrociously shite the security of these smart meters is (and you'll have to trust me on this, I don't know how public this information is) I wouldn't want that crap anywhere near my house in the eventuality that someone hijacks it to make it look like I'm using more electricity when they're using less (while keeping the overall books balanced so to speak) or some other nefarious purpose.
Certainly these meters won't give you 5G cancer, but they're really a horrible idea as they stand and I don't recommend anyone install them, at least not in the UK.
OTOH, smart meters allow the utility to charge TOU rates, which helps even out the load on the grid. It benefits the utility, of course, but also customers. For example, it is minimally inconvenient to set my car to charge or my dish washer to run at night instead of day, but I might not bother to do so unless the utility charges me below average rates to do so. I calculate that I am earning several hundred dollars per hour for the time spent taking advantage of TOU rates.
As for selling the data... the solution to that is banning such sales, not banning smart meters.
I say this as an electronics and software engineer. Companies doing have our best interests in mind.
Want to refute that claim? Show me the source code then
And your privacy concerns are just a matter of granularity of time. You report your usage monthly -- that is also private information. Smart meters just do it on a finer timescale. Not a fundamental difference.
Anyway, back to the main topic.
Electricity and water "just work" because you deliver it, you're done. You have no obligations aside from not failing to deliver it, and not exploiting your monopoly market.
Tech companies are not utilities because they're not just something you buy like a commodity and have a right to not have complex terms of usage?
You want the best of both worlds. Maybe that's not possible.
Some people may be irrational, but smart meters are a huge privacy concern - the electricity company can figure out your patterns from the power usage and the "shape" of it. This is the reason why I don't want a smart meter.
Disclaimer: I actually was involved in building firmware and management software of smart meters.
I can tell from your old spinning mechanical meter that you're at home and not on vacation. That's personal information. Why is a smart meter so different?
There is a solution: Google writes the software. The utility company runs it.
The problem right now is that Google takes too many roles.
So I hope that gives some perspective why people may prever to keep an old system around and not be forced by a big company to change it.
Perhaps this is a fundamental limitation of digital technology, if not all technology
Being the vastly more flexible party in any interaction with it, we tend to adapt to its particular set of affordances and constraints
This is often useful but opening any one door will close others: deployment at scale carries sociotechnical inertia
It also frequently inverts the agentic orientation: we build tools, use them, and before long find ourselves used by them
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For 400A (really 320A, 80% of 400) and larger services (commercial) the customer supplies everything beyond the transformer (service disconnect and CT cabinet, typically), but the utility will provide meters or CTs depending on how it’s being metered.