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Not really though.

Discounting is fine, it's done everywhere.

It's 'anti competitive' usually only in the context of international trade rules, when government subsidies business units to 'dump' on other countries.

Changing your price over time for whatever reasons you want is generally fine unless you're price fixing or doing some kind of illegal type of price discrimination.

The competitive bit comes in more due to the fact that G runs chrome and search and therefore will favour their own products, that's much worse.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)




This is plainly incorrect. It's called "Predatory Pricing"[1] and it's illegal.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/predatory-pricing.asp


No, making YouTube free, and then deciding 15 years later to adjust the policy for ads is not 'illegal'.

The amount of narrative promoting here on HN is distressing.

Google does some nice things, some not so much nice things.

Because they adjust their advertising policy doesn't make them either illegal actors or pariahs.

There's no evidence indication that this is 'predatory pricing'.

Again - if there is an issue, it's with their ownership of Search, Mobile towards prioritizing other products.




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