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31 Comments
the_duke
Key quotes:
> "Our experience has been that entrenched monopoly power often deters new entry and chills investment in disruptive innovation."
> "independent venture-capital firms like YC often hesitate to fund startups in the “kill zone” —the area of deadened innovation around a monopolist like Google."
> "We agree with Plaintiffs' proposal that the remedy package should create pathways for startups and innovators to access Google's monopoly-derived datasets and search index."
> "The remedy order should also prevent Google from entering into exclusive agreements to access AI training data…"
> "An effective remedy package should help to leverage the current moment by ensuring that next-generation search and query-based AI tools can reach users free from exclusion, interference, or cooption."
> "the remedy package should prevent Google from anticompetitive self-preferencing, and this prohibition should apply specifically to Google's use of its monopoly search product to boost its query-based AI tools or discriminate against rivals' tools."
I think they have a good point with AI. After lagging behind initially, Google really went at it hard. Gemini is great now, and they are building a good set of tooling.
It's easy for Google to suffocate the startups in that area. They already have a massive advantage with all the data they are sitting on.
sidibe
A. The Remedy Should Open Access to Google’s Datasets and Search Index.
B. The Remedy Should Prevent Google from Extending Its Monopolies into
Query-Based AI Tools.
Good luck with that YC…
darth_avocado
So they want Google’s datasets and search index to be available for other companies and want to prevent Google from being a dominant player in AI based search.
I wonder why a VC firm who is quite heavily invested in AI based startups file an amicus brief like that…
Edit: before this gets downvoted into oblivion, the comment is not against antitrust enforcement. It’s about VC firms having very specific ideas about what the antitrust enforcement would look like.
xyzzy9563
Google is effectively being punished for retaining their earnings and re-investing in tons of software R&D over the years. Their "monopoly" is because people choose to use them, not because they have to. Not to mention they are are being disrupted by ChatGPT and other LLMs anyways right now. There have always been lots of web browsers and search engines, but Google simply did a better job making and refining their software and hiring people to do that.
legitster
None of the proposed remedies benefit consumers.
jeffbee
One wonders how these people imagine accessing a search index, from the practical, technical standpoint. If you believe that Google has only unfair business practices, then it makes perfect sense to believe that your organization will simply access their data.
voytec
> As a result, YC has an interest in ensuring that U.S. technology markets are free from anticompetitive barriers to entry and expansion.
This part reads like a suggestion to loosen anti-competitive/antitrust law.
amazingamazing
Why not make all companies open up their data sets, and stop pay to play?
bloppe
Google is the reason for the current AI boom. Without the transformer architecture they invented by funding basic research, there would be no modern LLMs. YC is arguing that their incentive for funding that basic research should be taken away in order to spur innovation?
hu3
These are the key points as I understand them:
Amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief is being submitted by Y Combinator to pile on the US vs Google anti-trust case.
YC asks court to basically cripple Google in their Search, Advertising and AI endeavours:
– Open access to Google's datasets and search index.
– Restrict Google's expansion into AI through monopolistic practices.
– Limit Google exclusive agreements and pay-to-play distribution deals.
– Enforce anti-circumvention and anti-retaliation mechanisms.
IMO, from a VC standpoint, it's in YC's interest to give their privately funded startups the best chance possible to thrive. If that includes destroying solid giants of the industry, so be it.
ldjkfkdsjnv
This is just a few rich venture capitalists, and the harvard trained founders they back, trying to line their own pockets. AI will democratize search regardless
xnx
Google is a "monopoly" because their competitors with massive cash reserves (Microsoft, Apple, Meta) are too risk averse to compete in the marketplace and are hoping that the courtroom will deliver them a win.
brap
It’s amazing how twisted the term “anti-competitive” has become. Where anti-competitive companies push for anti-competitive regulations under the false pretense of preventing anti-competitiveness.
Google is being competitive.
YC is being anti-competitive.
Because they suck at competing against Google and they want to get unfair, unethical advantage themselves.
Imagine spending years and billions building something and then I show up and say “hey man that’s not fair, give me a slice of that thing for free. Oh and also I’m probably going to sell it back to you someday for a lot of money”.
And before someone tells me “that’s the law”, I don’t care. If that’s the law then it should be changed. Laws have been written (and lobbied) for all sorts of reasons and surprisingly not all of them are fair and ethical.
Workaccount2
Meanwhile, YC has happily and excitedly fed it's start-ups to Google over the years.
So pretty much "We don't want google to develop new things, we want them to have buy those from us"
bionhoward
Google is David and OpenAI is Goliath, excessively nerfing Google will put us all at the mercy of closed AI.
Gemini (the app, not the API or AI studio) is one of the few places where we can use frontier generative AI without a “customer noncompete” (you know, the one where they compete with us and then say we’re not allowed to compete back) … if you use Claude or OpenAI or Grok, you’re prohibited from training on your chat logs, or even using the thing to develop AI. Not so with Gemini app.
Too bad you have to lose your chat history just to deactivate model training (“Gemini apps activity” conflates opt-out of training with opt-out of storing chat history)
I don’t know much about the ads space but I just hope going after Google doesn’t create a vacuum that gets filled by an even worse monopoly (OpenAI)
nickfromseattle
How much blame do we assign Sundar for this outcome? Yes, he was just continuing where Larry / Sergey left off, but it did happen under his watch.
Is there anything he could have done to avoid this outcome? In a way that Google shareholders would have found acceptable?
Or was this outcome inevitable?
xiphias2
AI is the most competitive and healthy large industry I have seen. Having a search index helps just like having tweets for x.ai, but data isn’t the deciding factor.
beambot
This feels a bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face…
Unlike Microsoft's antitrust case of the 90s, Google seems much less anti-competitive by nature. Sure, they have unprecedented scale in search… but even that hegemony is being threatened by others in AI.
If anything, going after Google with a DoJ kludgel will cause a servere freeze on startup M&A across all of FAANG. With IPO windows (mostly) closed, this removes the biggest exit dynamic the startup ecosystem has at its disposal. This is not a good thing from my perspective, and would seem counter to YC's interests.
Someone steelman this for me…?
r0m4n0
As others have pointed out, YC is definitely trying to get some of that Google money. Another important aspect that benefits YC is a turn of events that would improve the talent pool. Google retains tens of thousands of software engineers, I’d argue maybe the biggest reserve in existence. It’s the largest population of experienced engineers that won’t leave because the money and circumstances are too good. Startups would benefit if these circumstances changed
hermannj314
Is an Amicus brief just a way the legal profession sells ad space in high profile cases?
You pay a lawyer a few thousand bucks to write some populist bromides you get to slap your name in the news. Seems like a good ROI.
snielson
The solution proposed by Kagi—separate the search index from the rest of Google—seems to make the most sense. Kagi explains it more here: https://blog.kagi.com/dawn-new-era-search
tiahura
How Orwellian. Free market means buyers and sellers set terms of deal, not G.
adrr
How much things have changed when antitrust used mean unfair practices by real monopolies. Real monopolies. Standard Oil which you had no choice in what gas you used. The Bell System(ATT) controlled all of long distance, you had no choice to use them for making long distance calls. Microsoft owned 95% of the market when they got with antitrust, there was other OSes but your software wouldn't run on those OSes. Consumers had no choice. We got stuck with shitty products that were overpriced.
Now antitrust means punishing companies that are too good. Their product is too superior. Even though Windows, the most used computer OS, literally defaults bing search but consumers change it to google. They are choosing to use google. We're going to punish the company that makes a product so good users don't want to use other products. They clearly have choice. There is no switching cost to what search engine you use. Its sad when companies who can't make a product people that people't don't want to use instead to use regulatory capture to prevent real competition in the search engine market. Just make a better product.
light_triad
It's good for YC to do this and will benefit every startup in the long run. Google has been one of the sources of the AI boom, and provides liquidity by acquiring startups. But as YC argues they've monopolised distribution channels to the point where you need to go through the Google toll booth every time you want to access the market. This tax on founders to reach their audience makes many types of businesses unsustainable and impossible, especially for products where usage != sharing.
creato
It's disappointing to see the historical revisionism in these threads. Say what you will about google now, but the idea that they just bought their way into X industry doesn't seem right. Until maybe 10 years ago, tech people almost universally loved Google's offerings and adopted them eagerly because they were good. I remember the mad scramble on various forums for a gmail invite. I remember when google maps came about, it was a revelation compared to mapquest and so on. You could scroll the map instead of clicking buttons to jump half a screen at a time! For years 0-5 at least, chrome was almost universally loved by tech people. Process isolation, speed, lack of toolbar shitware, etc.
At every company I've been at, half the dependencies came from big tech, and more than half of those were built and maintained by google. bazel, kubernetes, test frameworks, tensorflow, etc. these are just the big ones. There are a lot of smaller libraries from google that we've used too, and more still that aren't owned by google but they invest a lot of engineering time into.
I don't know what the right answer is to the google of today, but the cavalier assumption that google has simply leveraged a monopoly in search to build everything else it has doesn't add up to me.
pingou
As a google's shareholder that terrifies me.
As an european, I am happy to see that the US administration may be ready to kill the one of the most powerful and unassailable company in the world and allow any other country to build a replacement.
mschuster91
The document metadata… ffs: "Microsoft Word – YC for filing FINAL DRAFT Y Combinator Amicus Brief"
People, clean that shit up before publishing. That's an embarrassment. At least it's not "FINAL FINAL2 REWORKED" or something equally grotesque.
dangoodmanUT
A bitly link is an insane choice
Workaccount2
The real killer is that Google perfected the ad-paid model, and launched an entire ecosystem on top of it
Paid competitors cannot compete because people won't pay. People want the death of Google because people hate ads and tracking.
Ultimately it is an everyone loses situation. No one is going to fly in a replace Google without either 1.) Charging a monthly sub or 2.) Invasive (yet most profitable) ad tracking.
This is exactly why youtube stands alone too. What company looks at youtube's userbase and says "Yes, I want to cater to people who despise subscriptions and block ads". Exactly what vid.me did in 2017, which everyone celebrated until the went bankrupt.
Bender
In terms of fairness, competition and monopolies is there a chart that shows how much tax payer funding each search engine has received upon creation, annually and indirectly? e.g. donating NASA hangers for server hosting and experiments, heavily discounted real estate and land, tax breaks for power, etc… Put another way, who has the biggest monopoly on direct and indirect tax-payer funding?
danboarder
This action comes a bit late, at the end of the "Search engine" era, at a time when AI responses from many sources are largely replacing the "Google Search".
Similar action happened against Microsoft Windows around 2000, just as the rise of web-based apps (online email, google docs, etc) largely made the underlying operating system less relevant to how people use their computers and apps.
So I read this as the dominant player can monopolize a market while it's relevant without an issue, and once the market starts to move on, the antitrust lawsuits come in to "make the market more competitive" at a time when that era is mostly over.
And trying to regulate early (as with the last administration's AI legislation that is now being repealed) we can see that only hindsight is 20/20, and regulating too early can kill a market. My conclusion is to just let the best product win, and even dominate for a while as this is part of the market cycle, and when a better product/platform comes along the market will move to it.