[HN Gopher] Google is a monopoly - the fix isn't obvious
___________________________________________________________________
Google is a monopoly - the fix isn't obvious
Author : rntn
Score : 205 points
Date : 2024-08-15 12:02 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| What comes after will be better. Maybe not as integrated, but
| better as far as options go.
| malfist wrote:
| It's almost like monied interests own the papers and want to
| protect their investments
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I've never understood this take because it's possible to make
| money regardless of the direction that the share price moves.
| andybak wrote:
| Are you talking about The Register here? That's a fairly
| strange accusation for a news outlet that goes out of it's
| way to be provocative to the entire industry.
|
| At least it used to - I haven't kept up much recently.
|
| If you know better then please tell - but I'm not clear at
| this point whether you have an informed opinion - or whether
| you have no idea what The Register is.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| You never know but hopefully
| mainecoder wrote:
| breaking it up will also weaken US Dominance in Tech, the fact
| that Android and Chrome are under them same umbrella helps them
| share IP across the company and decreases RD costs because some
| of the costs are shared.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Um, I agree with your first sentence, but I don't think I
| follow the rationale. What are you trying to say?
| mainecoder wrote:
| regulation in the EU may no longer work independently from
| regulation in the US thus US laws they need to collaborate
| and compromise, they are weakening western tech dominance
| thfuran wrote:
| The US Department of Justice isn't exactly an EU regulator.
| dosinga wrote:
| Not sure how NATO enters into this, but as off last month or so
| Mark Rutte is the Secretary General of NATO. He is Dutch
| retskrad wrote:
| 1. Forbid Google from paying Apple and Android OEM's to be the
| default search engine. Also, detach Google search from Android
| and forbid Google from forcing it to be included on every Android
| phone.
|
| 2. Give Google search competitors access to Google's search data
| so these new AI search engine companies can compete. Without
| these huge amounts of data, they have no chance.
|
| Done!
| soared wrote:
| 2 is not how the US breaks up monopolies
| KMag wrote:
| Right. Government-mandated access to proprietary data isn't
| how the US breaks up monopolies, but somewhat along those
| lines, it might make sense for some government to provide
| some similar data. This seems much closer to a European style
| government approach, and I wouldn't expect such a thing in
| the U.S.
|
| The infra for a decent crawl is prohibitive. There's a bit of
| black magic in crawl scheduling, and a bit in de-duplication,
| but most of the challenge is in scale.
|
| I used to work on Google's indexing system, and sat with the
| guys who wrote the Percolator system that basically used
| BigTable triggers to drive indexing and make it less batch-
| oriented.
|
| I know France has made at least a couple of attempts at a
| government-funded "Google killer" search engine. I think it
| would be a better use of government money to make something
| like a government-run event-driven first-level indexing
| system where search engine companies could pay basically
| cloud computing costs to have their proprietary triggers
| populate their proprietary databases based on the government-
| run crawling and first-level analysis. When one page updates,
| you'd want all of the search engine startups running their
| triggers on the same copy of the data, rather than having to
| stream the data out to each of the search engine startups.
|
| Basically, you want to take some importance metric, some
| estimate of the probability some content has changed since
| the last time you crawled it, combine the product of the two
| plus some additional constraints (crawl every known page at
| least some maximum period, don't hit any domain too hard,
| etc.) as a crawl priority. You then crawl the content,
| convert HTML, PDF, etc. to some marked-up text format (UTF-8
| HTML isn't bad, but I think UTF-8 plain text plus some
| separate annotations in a binary format would be better). You
| strip out text that's too small or too close to the
| background color. You calculate one or more locality-
| sensitive hash functions over the plain text, cluster similar
| texts, pick a canonical URL for each cluster. You calculate
| the directed link graph across clusters. The PageRank patent
| has expired, so you could calculate PageRank and several
| other link-graph ranking signals across canonical clusters.
| You'd presumably compute some uniqueness scores, age scores,
| etc. for each canonical URL, and then in parallel run each of
| the search engine startup's analysis over this package of
| analysis data each time you find a change for a particular
| canonical URL.
|
| You might have some startups providing spam scoring or other
| analysis and providing that (for fees, of course) to search
| engine startups, etc. Basically, you want to modularize the
| indexing and analysis to provide competition and nearly
| seamless transition between competing providers within your
| ecosystem.
|
| I think that's the way to drive innovation in the search
| engine startup space and properly leverage economies of scale
| across search engine startups.
| 8note wrote:
| The US can split the crawler yesterday into its own business
| though, which could sell access to that index and the execute
| training operations over it
| matthewfelgate wrote:
| Then do the same for Microsoft with Windows?
| FMecha wrote:
| Don't the court already did #1?
| brookst wrote:
| Nope
| throwadobe wrote:
| #2 will get you laughed out of any room. The goal here is not
| to destroy Google.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| The way monopoly law works in the US, it's not illegal to have
| a monopoly. It's illegal to try to _leverage_ your monopoly to
| acquire a monopoly on a different line of business. For
| example, it was found to be illegal for Microsoft to use the
| Windows monopoly to try to acquire a monopoly on web browsers.
|
| This is kind of going the other way. Google had a monopoly on
| search (arguably - Bing would like a word). All these other
| actions are to keep that from being eroded. They didn't do
| Chrome because they wanted to own the browser market, they did
| Chrome because they wanted browsers to not be owned by somebody
| else who could make the default search engine be not-Google.
| That's entering other businesses to protect your main one.
| IANAL, but that may not be against antitrust law. It's at least
| not the main thrust of antitrust law.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I agree that Google has an inordinate amount of power in the
| market and that it has to be restrained. That said, I do not like
| the 'better' qualifier here. It depends too much on who is
| reading it. Hell, it is not impossible average user will dislike
| the change ( but they always do).
| matthewfelgate wrote:
| Nonsense. It has no more power than Microsoft or Apple.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| To a person like me it sounds like MS and Apple should be
| broken up as well.
| is_true wrote:
| I think Google can win this easily by using the public opinion
| against the regulators.
|
| They just need to say that they are gonna start charging for all
| their services because without the level of integration they have
| it doesn't make sense to keep running businesses that otherwise
| would lose money.
| pydry wrote:
| "If you break us up we will start such an _epic_ tantrum that
| we will end up shooting ourselves in the head "
| bell-cot wrote:
| "...gonna start charging..."
|
| In a world where the competition's price for most of those
| services is "free", charging for used-to-be-free stuff sounds
| like a sure-fire suicidal business strategy.
| StrauXX wrote:
| They don't have to actually do that should Google bbebroken
| up. They can still use that as an argument to rouse public
| support against a breakup.
| bell-cot wrote:
| They can try. But in a world full of free on-line stuff,
| the public may think the "you'll go bust if you try"
| counter-argument is obviously correct.
| viraptor wrote:
| Do you honestly think that would have any effect beyond Gmail
| users? (those would really hurt)
|
| But otherwise I don't think an average non-tech person would be
| likely to notice a difference between Bing and Google. And ms,
| ddg, Kagi and perplexity would love to see lots of people
| actually looking for alternatives.
|
| Docs/sheets/pages/whatever wouldn't change since they're
| supported by the paying users. The rest, Google is going to
| kill at some point anyway like they did with hundred other
| projects.
|
| They only one I really don't know how it would be affected is
| Android.
| stogot wrote:
| I'd pay for consumer tier (which we'll pretend was the former
| free tier) if I got proper customer service number I could
| call. I don't use it enough to pay for a business tier
| vel0city wrote:
| Google One includes phone support.
| ajcoll5 wrote:
| It does, but they're useless for anything that isn't
| already a Google search away. They can't help with actual
| account/service issues, and don't seem to have a way to
| escalate to the right teams that can.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| The public would have been against breaking up Standard Oil
| because they kept oil cheap.
| newsclues wrote:
| Standard oil lacks the ability to shape the narrative that
| google has.
|
| If standard oil had control of the information space history
| would be very different. Not even Ma Bell had the power that
| google has
| vel0city wrote:
| You couldn't even own a phone under Ma Bell.
|
| Meanwhile just about every product Google has I can use
| someone else.
| newsclues wrote:
| Ma Bell didn't have the power to cut off advertising
| revenue to YouTubers who say things the company does
| like, nor the power to shape the global access to
| information with search, nor did they scan people's
| communications
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| >Ma Bell didn't have the power to cut off advertising
| revenue to YouTubers who say things the company does like
|
| They don't even ban you (it's very hard to get banned on
| youtube) and it's the advertisers themselves who decide
| this.
|
| >nor did they scan people's communications They don't
| scan emails and never have.
|
| And you could move to an alternative
| browser/search/youtube (if someone could host one
| profitably) by the end of the day.
| vel0city wrote:
| Ma Bell had the power to make it so you couldn't talk on
| a wire, _at all_. They owned _all_ the wires. They owned
| _all_ the phones.
|
| But sure, being de-monetized on a website, that's _way_
| worse.
|
| And yes, Ma Bell had the ability to listen in to _every_
| conversation had on a wire. Not just some, _all_.
| Meanwhile most conversations I have on the internet don
| 't involve Google in the slightest.
| newsclues wrote:
| More control over a narrower aspect of life, vs control
| over many parts of your life.
|
| Google can be your email, your phone, your ISP, own your
| health data, control what you watch, listen, search for,
| it can control your ability to make money or even control
| access to your data and documents.
| vel0city wrote:
| > Google _can_ be
|
| _Can_ be.
|
| Google doesn't control what I watch. Google doesn't
| control what I listen to. Google doesn't control my
| email. Google doesn't own my health data. Google isn't my
| ISP. Google doesn't control my data and documents. Google
| doesn't control my ability to make money. Google doesn't
| control what I search for.
|
| Meanwhile with Ma Bell, it was Ma Bell _or just don 't
| have telecommunications_.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| That's a good point but my point was more that if we
| listened to public opinion we may not have broken up
| Standard Oil!
| blitzar wrote:
| Google would need to get public opinion on their side first.
| s_dev wrote:
| >I think Google can win this easily by using the public opinion
| against the regulators.
|
| Apple levels of arrogance.
|
| Apple tried the same approach when the EU was slapping them
| down with DMA and few were having it, calling Apple out for
| their immature responses delusionally thinking that because
| people were glued to their phones they would some how value
| that above their representative government.
| snapcaster wrote:
| I don't see this succeeding. Not only is tech extremely
| hateable as a demographic, not everyone is a corporate
| bootlicker (outside of this forum)
| miki123211 wrote:
| > Not only is tech extremely hateable as a demographic
|
| Oh boy is this incorrect.
|
| Outside the Silicon Valley / well-educated upper middle class
| / tech worker bubble, tech companies are more trusted than
| most political parties and government and religious
| institutions, and this is true across the world as polls
| show. People who are not into tech have no idea about
| Google's business deals or App Store anti-steering
| provisions. They use Google as long as it delivers great
| results, and switch to searching on Tiktok or asking Chat GPT
| if it doesn't. HN is probably one of the most anti-tech
| places on the internet, maybe outside of Mastodon.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I'm not so sure. You sound like you're describing the older
| generations and their tech swoon. What I am hearing lately,
| and from coming-up generations, is very much anti-tech.
|
| I think HN is more the bellwether.
| matthewfelgate wrote:
| How is Google more of a Monopoly than Microsoft?
| usrnm wrote:
| Why does it have to be more of a monopoly than Microsoft to be
| considered a monopoly?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| It doesn't. But if B is less of a monopoly than A, and the
| regulators are going to break up B, but not break up A, that
| does lead to questions. Why start with B? Why not start with
| A, and _then_ do B?
| usrnm wrote:
| Because that creates a lot of additional work and
| controversy for no real gain. Do courts rank cases and hear
| them in the order of severity of the crime? It's exactly
| the same situation. I agree that both companies should be
| held to the same standard, but I don't think I really care
| about the particular order
| bearjaws wrote:
| DOJ/FTC cannot possibly sue every company at the same time, and
| probably shouldn't.
|
| Depending on how this goes, companies will need to change how
| they act in fear of the hammer coming down on them next.
| tirant wrote:
| How is google a monopoly at all? There's competition and
| alternative for each of their products. And people can keep
| using the alternatives if they want.
|
| I can choose iOS over Android. Bing over Google. Yahoo over
| Gmail. Dailymotion over YouTube.
|
| Why is it a problem that google makes a superior product and
| people choose it ?
|
| In all studies, when consumers get faced the decision to choose
| freely any search engine, most of them keep going back to
| google. Why is that a problem at all?
| throwadobe wrote:
| Google owns ~90% of the search market and if you don't play
| by their rules, you're out of the game. The argument is that
| there's nothing really superior about their technology today,
| just market dominance to force everyone to operate in a way
| that serves their _ad_ interests as opposed to search
| interests.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| So I signed up for Kagi a while back.
|
| I'll be candid, it's good ... it's a hair less annoying
| than google, the results are just as hit or miss.
|
| Here is the thing, if I need to BUY something Kagi falls
| flat on its face.
|
| I find myself going back to google to shop, and to be
| candid it has drawn a contrast for me on spending. The
| "extra step" to buy has slowed me down.
|
| I dont think breaking up google changes consumer behavior.
| It creates a hydra out of a snake.
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| Google pays $20 billion a year to be default search on Apple.
| Alphabet's net income was $74 billion in 2023. Why would they
| reduce profit by 20% to get Apple users to use the search
| engine that they would use anyway?
| coldpie wrote:
| Good questions! You can find the answers in this article[1],
| and follow the sources linked at the bottom for even more
| information. If you really want to get into the weeds, you
| can read about US antitrust law here[2], which has a bunch
| more articles to other caselaw around monopoly abuse in the
| US.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC
| _(2...
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act_of_1890
| rhdunn wrote:
| It's that Google can do things like force manifest V3 on
| users so that ad blockers are rendered useless, allowing
| Google to push ads onto those users. I.e. use their dominance
| in one area (web browsers) to benefit another area (ads).
| prerok wrote:
| Google may not be a pure monopoly but is a monopoly, by some
| definition of it.
|
| https://www.economicshelp.org/microessays/markets/monopoly/
|
| This article states that 25% of market share may be
| sufficient. That is not how I learned it in my economics
| classes: there we said it's 60% and values below that could
| be oligopoly (a small number of companies holding ~90% market
| share).
|
| As for why it's bad: a single provider may choose to degrade
| their service, or increase charges, or create an unacceptable
| TOS. They would likely not be able to do that if there is an
| acceptable alternative.
| nrclark wrote:
| Globally, I would bet that there are more daily Android users
| than daily Windows users. There is no real competitor to
| Youtube.
| throwadobe wrote:
| Answer the question yourself by first deciding the market(s)
| for which you're making that assessment.
|
| Google commands a higher market share % of search than
| Microsoft does of personal computing OS.
| dosinga wrote:
| Part of the problem is that tech products tend to be natural
| monopolies. If you split android off Google, it will probably
| just lose out against iOS in the West and some Chinese Android
| version elsewhere. As the article says, that's not necessarily
| better.
| newsclues wrote:
| Google has collected multiple businesses in its conglomerate
| structure that gives it far too much power and control over
| society beyond the simple monopoly charge.
|
| YouTube, Search, Email, advertising, are all controlled by the
| same people and that is a problem for freedom and the economy.
| Gormo wrote:
| > Part of the problem is that tech products tend to be natural
| monopolies.
|
| Middleman platforms often become natural monopolies due to
| network effects, but how does this expand to tech products in
| general?
|
| I don't see any structural incentives that lead to natural
| monopolies in search, email, or a wide variety of other
| products that Google is dominant in.
| graemep wrote:
| and other markets where network effects tend to create
| monopolies tend to be very highly regulated or state owned:
| telecoms and financial markets, for example.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Utilities are monopolies because it makes no sense to spend
| tons of resources running extra pipes and wires to each and
| every house. It's called a structural monopoly.
| graemep wrote:
| Yikes! Yes. WIll correct. I do not know what happened to
| my brain there.
| safety1st wrote:
| People say this but there's nothing "natural" about Google's
| monopoly, to get to where they are today, they had to make a
| dozen major acquisitions, and if the last few administrations
| hadn't been bought and paid for, the FTC could have said no to
| any of them. In particular they should have looked very very
| hard at Doubleclick. I mean who are we kidding, they should
| have said no to Doubleclick.
|
| So we are in a world today where things like Android, Chrome,
| and the default search experience on an iPhone are all what
| they are because of Google's need to build moats around the
| GooDubClick cash cow. More importantly it's really hard to
| compete with these things unless you have a GooDubClick cash
| cow of your own, which guess what basically nobody does.
| Decouple them and that will start to change, there will be many
| businesses that will take all sorts of novel approaches, and
| that is what we refer to as "innovation" when we are being
| pragmatic and un-cynical about what innovation is, it's a dozen
| or a thousand companies throwing new stuff out there and sooner
| or later some of it sticks and the world changes.
|
| NOTHING is natural about what Google is today unless you
| consider the FTC not doing its job for 15-20 years "natural."
| dosinga wrote:
| If the marginal cost of delivering your product is close to
| zero, markets will tend to monopoly. A search/ads company
| that has 10% of the market share that Google does (and no one
| gets even to that), has roughly the same costs but only 10%
| of the income (and only that if they are as good as Google is
| in making on money off search). On top of that, having access
| to the query stream is really important keeping search
| quality up.
| pretext-1 wrote:
| As a European I'm still mad at the regulators for allowing
| Facebook to buy WhatsApp.
| Ekaros wrote:
| The issue is that acquisitions have been allowed. We(EU, USA,
| whoever) should have put stop on that long time ago.
|
| Maybe even demanded that certain too effective components were
| separated like adds. Or with Amazon retail from AWS.
| hoosieree wrote:
| > tech products tend to be natural monopolies
|
| Based on what evidence? Isn't the simpler explanation "VC wants
| big return; VC funds tech; therefore VC encourages monopolies"?
| treyd wrote:
| Network effects are just so strong. Once a particular option
| has ingrained itself for a particular use-case they can make
| it extremely difficult for any alternative to become viable
| even if it's technologically superior. Just look at Windows
| vs Linux.
| brookst wrote:
| Network effects are huge. Also consider the velocity of
| tech. A superior product can dominate the market in 10
| years or less, where other industries take decades or more
| and first movers don't get as far ahead.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| The ultimate goal of any breakup would be to promote
| competition and innovation... Will se how it'll end
| epolanski wrote:
| All Androids out there are essentially major forks, all huge
| mobile vendors have their Android flavor.
|
| There are giant incentives to keep the ecosystem as it is.
| pydry wrote:
| "What if we broke up Google and Meta started operating bits of
| it?"
|
| There are some head scratching serious leaps of logic here. Why
| would Meta start running android if it became an independent
| business?
|
| It's never explained.
|
| This article is rather clumsy FUD.
| Rzor wrote:
| Japan tried to curb the Yakuza by enacting laws to specifically
| punish them. Not only it didn't work as well as they thought, but
| other criminals also flourished in the underworld by virtue of
| not being Yakuza. Whatever they do to go after Google must be
| really well thought and coordinated otherwise they will just be
| passing the crown to someone else a little bit smarter.
| immibis wrote:
| Sort of like what happened with Microsoft.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| You're analogy isn't exactly good. In this case, other
| businesses flourishing is a good thing.
|
| If you are specifically referring to Apple becoming an even
| bigger monopoly, that would be a bad thing but I think in the
| US they've already effectively won.
| holografix wrote:
| Google's deal with Apple is def problematic but apart from that I
| really don't think it's a monopoly.
|
| Google leadership (according to public info) was in a panic about
| ChatGPT and rightly so. It was eerily similar to what Google once
| was at its inception: a no bs way to get better answers to your
| questions.
|
| Luckily for Google, hallucination is a significant issue. Just
| "GPT it" is already in the modern vernacular. Google is in
| serious danger of becoming Facebook: only used by boomers (now
| millennials) while the new gen gets their adds on Insta, TikTok
| and could soon be served Llm generated product reviews and
| comparisons with link to buy from ChatGPT.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Generally agree with your points, just not your conclusion that
| "we should just wait".
| Xelbair wrote:
| Yeah, just like with Standard Oil...
| bearjaws wrote:
| If what comes after is not better, then we waited too long to
| break this monopoly up.
|
| We either start ripping this band-aids off or we will just
| continually have a worse and worse internet.
| matthewfelgate wrote:
| What about Microsoft?
| abirch wrote:
| The funny thing is this is going to be benefit Microsoft
| significantly. Much of what Google did Chrome, Android, etc.
| was to prevent Microsoft from destroying it like Netscape,
| Novell, Lotus, Wordperfect, ...
|
| It's probably no coincidence that Google's first external CEO
| Eric Schmidt was the CEO of Novell.
| jonhohle wrote:
| By the time Chrome was released, Google was already a
| behemoth. I can't think of another .com that was anywhere
| near their size. Microsoft was only 2x bigger by market
| cap. They were hardly a small company that Microsoft could
| push around and had the advantage of not being dependent on
| anything MS was doing.
| abirch wrote:
| Google came out with Chrome in 2008. Prior to that they
| were dependent on the Mozilla Foundation.
|
| Microsoft came out with Bing in 2009. Some say that Bing
| is "Bing is not google" Much like Windows NT was rumored
| to be Novell Terminator.
| cma wrote:
| Google toolbar came first. Slipped in a Google search box
| on everyone's browser in exchange for blocking Google's
| competitors' popup ads (Google didn't use popup ads).
|
| Now Google does invasive popovers within the page, etc.,
| and this time with them in charge of the browser they are
| ahout to implement a plan to block extension makers from
| stopping it well.
| card_zero wrote:
| The eternal struggle to control the levers of
| enshittification.
| danaris wrote:
| What this means is that we _also_ need antitrust action
| against Microsoft (particularly since the first one was
| thwarted by the election of a very pro-big-business
| administration, that stopped the implementation of fairly
| sweeping remedies).
|
| It's not exactly a hot take nowadays that _all_ the Big
| Tech companies are probably overdue for serious antitrust
| action.
| monooso wrote:
| I don't have a strong opinion either way, but if that's your
| argument _against_ breaking up Google, it 's a weak one.
| airstrike wrote:
| "What about Y" has no bearing on X. Go ahead and spawn that
| separate thread.
| sensanaty wrote:
| In these types of discussions, people love bringing out the
| "But what about $OTHER_OBVIOUS_MONOPOLY?".
|
| The solution is simple (the word simple here is doing a lot
| of work, I know); Meta, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple and
| any other similarly sized behemoth should be nuked, and not
| just in the tech world. Microsoft should've been properly
| nuked 30 years ago with the original anti-trust, yet alone
| now, same goes for the others.
| sunaookami wrote:
| Not to mention that Microsoft wasn't broken up because Bush
| intervened: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2001/sep
| /07/microsoft...
| tantalor wrote:
| Obviously nothing more than a coincidence, but very
| interesting this news came out days before 9/11. I wonder
| if this would have gotten more attention at the time.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| Amazon is a funny example to imagine being broken up, since
| they famously try to isolate their business units from each
| other and keep them self-sustaining income wise. It might
| kill or dramatically change some business units like
| twitch, or IMDB though.
| danaris wrote:
| _That 's the point._
|
| They use the money from their cash-cow businesses to
| artificially prop up their other lines of business,
| insulating them from having to actually compete on an
| even footing.
|
| That's _textbook_ abuse of monopoly (or market-dominant)
| position.
| bearjaws wrote:
| Why is this always posted as some sort of "gotcha!"
|
| Break them up to? Break everyone up.
|
| Ask me any company over 5k employees. It should probably be
| broken up.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| It appears to me that your two paragraphs contradict each
| other. If we break up Google and what comes afterwards is
| worse, then break it up or we'll get worse? Is it worse if we
| do _and_ worse if we don 't? Which "worse" is worse?
|
| Or do I misunderstand your point?
|
| The whole point of breaking up monopolies is not moral
| principle. It's so that things get better for customers. If
| they don't, then what's the justification for breaking them up?
| throwadobe wrote:
| Immediately worse vs. worse long term.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Breaking up Google gets worse the longer we wait.
| kmmlng wrote:
| That seems to be in support of the parent's point.
|
| So breaking up Google would have resulted in worse outcomes
| for consumers 10 years ago, but it would be even worse
| today? Then it wouldn't have made sense to break them up 10
| years ago and it would make even less sense today.
|
| I'm not claiming there aren't any good reasons to break up
| Google (I don't know), but this line of argumentation
| doesn't work as far as I can see.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| If your of the opinion that Google should not be broken
| up at all, ever, then your point is valid.
| labcomputer wrote:
| If you are neutral on whether Google should be broken up,
| and breaking up the company results in consumer harm,
| then breaking up the company makes no sense.
|
| Your argument only makes sense if you start from the
| premise that Google should be broken up, and then try to
| back into an argument supporting that premise.
| chipdart wrote:
| > If your of the opinion that Google should not be broken
| up at all, ever, then your point is valid.
|
| I don't think it's a good sign that you decided to resort
| to baseless personal accusations in reaction to a simple
| request to support your baseless clams.
|
| The question is very simple: does it still make sense to
| break the company today? Not a decade ago, but today. It
| you believe so, why?
| monooso wrote:
| Maybe so that there is at least the _opportunity_ for things
| to improve?
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| The best time to break up Google was 15 years ago. The second
| best time is now.
| btbuildem wrote:
| Maybe they meant 3x worse vs 2x worse -- as in, we're in a
| death spiral one way or another
| brookst wrote:
| Going to the dentist hurts more than a cavity. Sometimes a
| period of acute pain is better than a lifetime of moderate
| pain.
| soup10 wrote:
| this guy has a shitty dentist
| ulrikrasmussen wrote:
| Things may get worse for a while, but then maybe they'll
| eventually get better than if we didn't break up Google.
| chipdart wrote:
| > Things may get worse for a while, but then maybe they'll
| eventually get better than (...)
|
| This argument is perplexing. Isn't the whole point of this
| sort of intervention to fix things that are broken so that
| everyone is better off? You're arguing for major
| interventions at a time they are arguably not needed at all
| and would expectedly leave everyone worse, and the only
| mitigating factor you could come up was that perhaps who
| knows things might "eventually get better". Maybe. I don't
| know?
|
| What's the point, then?
| deepsquirrelnet wrote:
| The bigger problem is that by conglomerating all of these
| businesses that are operating in different industries, Google
| has cut out competition from companies that would provide those
| services.
|
| Why does Google search use Google adwords? Is it because
| adwords has given them the better terms than their competition
| or because they have no choice by virtue of being the same
| company?
| IX-103 wrote:
| Or because AdWords was designed and specifically optimized
| for search and then only later released (in a modified form)
| as a separate product.
| deepsquirrelnet wrote:
| They didn't have to go into new business sectors under the
| same parent company. They chose to because it allowed them
| to control multiple sectors without competition.
|
| Regardless, there is not competition in their business in
| areas where there should be according to monopoly rules.
|
| I believe this falls under the rules against exclusionary
| conduct. https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-
| guidance/gui...
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| AdWords was primarily built by purchasing the biggest
| competitor, DoubleClick.
|
| Google intentionally built the best ad serving engine, in
| large part by buying the competition out.
| jasode wrote:
| _> AdWords was primarily built by purchasing the biggest
| competitor, DoubleClick._
|
| Your timeline is not right. Google was created in 1998.
| DoubleClick was acquired by Google +9 years later in
| 2008.
|
| AdWords was a _homegrown Google project_ starting around
| 2000. AdWords was an internally built _auction-based
| system selling keywords_ using some ideas from Goto
| /Overture.
|
| In contrast, Doubleclick was an ad-exchange-network
| marketplace for publishers and advertisers. This was a
| different market from AdWords that Google wanted to
| expand into.
|
| Today, yes, both products are more integrated with each
| other.
| nostrademons wrote:
| AdWords came out in 2000. Google acquired DoubleClick in
| 2007. AdWords was much better before the DoubleClick
| acquisition. It turned into crap as DoubleClick
| management forced the engineering-focused AdWords
| management out.
|
| I don't know if you have any personal experience from
| that time period, but AdWords was magical for an online
| business in the mid-00s. You could get conversion rates
| _orders of magnitude_ higher than display ads like
| DoubleClick. Whole businesses were built off of providing
| a solution to a problem that people were searching for.
| It was also a _hell_ of a lot less intrusive than the
| banner ads that occupied the web in the late 1990s -
| AdWords was text only, and worked because you had a need,
| somebody had a solution, and Google matched them up. You
| didn 't have to see all these products that you didn't
| need.
|
| We're unfortunately going back to the brand advertising
| days of a corporate monoculture, largely because Google
| Search (and the web in general) sucks now.
| rubyfan wrote:
| Hard to imagine it getting worse. Browsing search engine
| results these days reminds me of post apocalyptic movie
| scenery.
| oneplane wrote:
| I'm not sure Search is the most important product (for users)
| at this point. It should be, but Gmail and YouTube come to
| mind as much more important services for end-users. People
| haven't really been 'browsing the web' for over a decade now.
| Search hasn't felt good for years, but Gmail for example has
| been pretty good for a long time.
|
| Say the Search product is split off, it would instantly
| collapse as without the crutches of the Ad business it has no
| way to support itself. Maybe if we normalise paying for web
| products, and have some sort of "10 searches for free per
| day" starting point. That could open the door for a
| sustainable product that actually does what it needs to do.
| Perhaps the classic (and not in-line) ad sidebar with clear
| markings (and different markup) could provide some coverage
| there as well. But others have tried that (from scratch, with
| no brand recognition) and haven't really become a household
| name so far...
|
| Google has essentially built a software Ouroboros, and if you
| try to take any of the critical (the most well-known) parts
| out, it fails and everyone is left with nothing.
| ekianjo wrote:
| There are alternatives. You don't have to use Google.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Right. I don't use Google and don't have a Google account,
| and I've no problem finding alternatives.
|
| I even have an Android phone, it still works fine with all
| the Google crap nuked.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Android is a Google product.
| rch wrote:
| Break them all up simultaneously or find a better approach.
|
| My perception is that there are too many politicians trying to
| pick winners for their own benefit.
| danaris wrote:
| The system is very fundamentally not designed to support such
| an approach (much as I agree that it would produce a better
| result).
|
| The way to break up companies is to win antitrust lawsuits
| against them. Except in cases where the companies are
| actually tied together in some meaningful way (ie, they're
| not fully separate companies in practice), there's no way to
| link such suits to each other; each one has to stand or fall
| on its own merits, _and_ on its own timetable.
|
| I think it would be hard to argue that Google, Apple,
| Microsoft, etc are actually arms of the same company. Thus,
| each of these Big Tech antitrust suits needs to happen
| separately, and some of the remedies might end up combining
| in counterproductive ways, because they are generally _not_
| able to consider each other 's situations (the remedies have
| to be based on the facts of the individual case, AIUI).
|
| It sucks, but it's the only antitrust system we've got right
| now.
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| The housing and finance markets seem like a fitting example.
| Under and over investment respectively fueled bubbles that fed
| each other until their inevitable pop took the entire economy
| down and required a decade of artificially suppressed rates
| backed by trillions in debt setting us for bigger problems when
| an actual economic crisis occurs (Covid). We're still
| weathering this storm of financial mismanagement on a national
| scale. Narrowing in, housing is now being over invested in
| fueling a bubble while the communities houses exist in are
| victims of underinvestment.
|
| Zooming back out, whatever pain comes from breaking Google up
| today will be less than the pain of doing so in a decade. Even
| more broadly, the pain of breaking up any monopoly (a matter
| how small) today will be less than when their breakup is as or
| more pressing than any of the historical antitrust cases.
|
| As Senator John Sherman put it, "If we will not endure a king
| as a political power we should not endure a king over the
| production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries
| of life."
|
| Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, ATT/Verizon/Tmobile, and
| hoards of smaller but similarly situated companies behave as
| kings shaping markets, acting without accountability or
| culpability, and shaking down the public at their whims. The
| gospel of the stock market has paralyzed our legislators from
| taking action to put these corrupt, wasteful, polluting and
| abusive businesses in their place or out of operation.
| chipdart wrote:
| > artificially suppressed rates
|
| I don't follow your point. All rates are set arbitrarily
| according to the monetary policy followed on any specific
| moment.
|
| What leads you to believe that arbitrarily setting a rate one
| way is natural, but arbitrarily setting it another way is
| more natural?
|
| > Zooming back out, whatever pain comes from breaking Google
| up today will be less than the pain of doing so in a decade.
|
| Will it, though? Think about the problem for a second. Do you
| think it would be more painful to break up Yahoo now than it
| would have been a decade ago? What about Intel? What about
| IBM? I mean,do you think Google of all companies is doing
| great?
| chipdart wrote:
| > If what comes after is not better, then we waited too long to
| break this monopoly up.
|
| I don't follow your logic, because it does not have any logic.
|
| Can you clarify your line of reasoning? I mean, if breaking up
| a company creates more problems than the ones it solves, what
| leads you to believe that anticipating the breakup would have
| any impact whatsoever in the fact that breaking up the company
| creates more problems than the ones it solves?
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| The main thing I specifically value about Google being whole
| is that there is a part of the business that is a firehouse
| of money, and some sizable % of this money is used in a
| Patronage system, supporting not the arts but open source
| technology & standards.
|
| This world would be much poorer a place without this open
| source work & protocols.
|
| I struggle to think of how else we would have got this, what
| action we would have taken to keep this outcom, while not
| "waiting too long".
| bearjaws wrote:
| > I don't follow your logic, because it does not have any
| logic.
|
| You do not follow it because you do not wish to.
|
| Think of Google as a cancer.
|
| You can ignore it for the rest of your life, and your quality
| of life may get shittier and shittier until you die.
|
| Think of anti-trust like surgery, you may be permanently
| harmed, lose a limb, skin, organ, etc... but you will be
| better in the long run. Sometimes surgery has no side
| effects, sometimes it harms you, we won't know until we are
| out the other end.
|
| In this case, we may have waited so long the cancer might
| kill the host by removing it. I don't believe that to be the
| case however.
| Narhem wrote:
| You could say the same thing about every technology company.
| fny wrote:
| I'm very curious to see what a breakup looks like. Past breakups
| involved "uniform" businesses:
|
| - American Tobacco: Commodity
|
| - Standard Oil: Commodity
|
| - AT&T: Utility
|
| - Northern Securities: Railroads
|
| - Swift & Co: Meatpacking
|
| - Kodak: Film
|
| - Paramount: Movie Theaters
|
| Google is more of a synergistic conglomerate. How would spinning
| off an individual business like Chrome, Android, or AdWords
| reduce their respective dominance?
|
| I support this ruling and more across all industries, but I'm
| trying to square how a breakup should work that actually drives
| competition.
| criddell wrote:
| One of the potential remedies is to require Google to open
| source their crawling data. This should make it easier for
| others who want to build a competing search engine.
| jsheard wrote:
| Surely the crawling is the easiest part? The AI goldrush has
| seen dozens of new players gobbling up the entire internet.
|
| The hard part is turning that staggering amount of
| unstructured data into a useful search engine, and in
| particular fighting off black-hat SEO.
| macNchz wrote:
| Websites these days are often pretty hostile to crawling
| aside from the Googlebot. Other crawlers are asked not to
| by the robots.txt, fully blocked, or put through captchas.
|
| https://knuckleheads.club/
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/technology/how-google-
| dom...
| jsheard wrote:
| Good point. Now I think about it Google is actively
| contributing to that with their Reddit deal which has
| them blocking all scrapers besides Googlebot, even known
| legit search engine crawlers like Bingbot.
| account42 wrote:
| > Surely the crawling is the easiest part? The AI goldrush
| has seen dozens of new players gobbling up the entire
| internet.
|
| The AI goldrush also has sites scrambling to block any
| crawlers other than a short list of approved search
| engines. Even before this mess Googlebot running on Google
| IPs often received special treatment.
|
| Search itself is still a hard problem but one that can be
| solved independently. Crawling on the other hand requires
| websites to cooperate and due to Google's size enough won't
| care to bother with anyone else.
| throwadobe wrote:
| That's a pipe dream and really achieves nothing other than
| hurting Google.
| bluGill wrote:
| If they break up the ad business it could be helpful. Otherwise
| search and youtube are like you say synergistic and there is no
| obvious way to break them up.
| oneplane wrote:
| Keep in mind that without the Ad business, most of Google's
| products cannot exist. Search gets paid by Ads, same with
| YouTube. Most of the free product are just Ad delivery
| platforms, and they are all pretty much on the verge of
| losing money as-is. The Ad business itself has margin enough
| to cover that, and without a set of outlets like those
| services, it wouldn't be able to exist.
|
| Vimeo has tried a different approach, but it's hardly in the
| same league as YouTube.
| IX-103 wrote:
| YouTube has been profitable in recent years -- thanks to an
| investment in hardware transcoding reducing costs. So that
| is potentially separable.
|
| One point to mention is that there are two different
| "Google Ads". Search ads are very different from page ads
| (DoubleClick). You could certainly take away the
| DoubleClick part, but separating Search Ads from Search is
| much harder.
| bluGill wrote:
| The larger point is youTube should sell its own ads. As
| should search. Double click as an agency that sells ads for
| other websites shouldn't be allowed to sell to the previous
| google properties, and vice versa.
| mcpar-land wrote:
| Breaking up their individual businesses can cause each business
| to have incentives that line up better with their customers /
| users. Example: if Chrome was separated from Google, they won't
| have as much of an incentive to push back against adblockers
| with things like Manifest V3. Or include APIs that are only
| available to google websites (Which it has!
| https://x.com/lcasdev/status/1810696257137959018)
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It's an interesting hypothesis, but it's entirely possible
| that separated from Google, Chrome is either not a viable
| business model (browsers don't make money on their own) or is
| incentivized to get into bed with some other ad company to
| make money, to effectively the same result.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| Aren't you pointing out the exact problem with Google? If
| Chrome wasn't a viable business without Google's ads
| subsidizing it, isn't its existence in its current form
| exactly the kind of anti-competitive outcome we would be
| better off without?
|
| Without Google subsidizing Chrome, a real competitive
| market for browsers might emerge, with more vendors
| investing more effort into competing for users, without
| having to compete against one of the richest companies in
| the world that sees its browser as a loss-leader for its ad
| business, has the ability to dump infinite money into its
| product, and can advertise it on the one website that 90%
| of people regularly visit?
| sdenton4 wrote:
| I dunno, man - a competitive market for browsers likely
| involves the browser itself inserting a bunch of ads all
| over the place. It becomes another axis for
| enshittification, rather than a mostly-neutral window
| into the web. It's not enough to hope that a business
| model appears... Ask any journalist.
| abduhl wrote:
| What possible browser competition can exist? The market
| price for a browser from a consumer perspective is $0. I
| will never pay for a browser. All that will happen is new
| ad placements from smaller companies, directly in the
| browser.
| consteval wrote:
| > All that will happen is new ad placements from smaller
| companies, directly in the browser.
|
| I don't think this is going to be the case. This seems
| like an extreme conclusion with virtually no precedent.
|
| Since an ad browser is such an important piece of
| software, I imagine it will receive many donations. The
| reason Chrome doesn't is because it doesn't need them. I
| think that will change.
|
| Also, I think it's possible you will pay for a browser at
| some point. Ultimately software costs money to make and
| we've become desensitized to that because we've exchanged
| that cost for advertising. But advertising sucks. For
| example, I pay double for HBO Max just so I don't see
| ads, and I'm not alone in that.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The precedent is that every browser out there currently
| has one of:
|
| - integration to ad infrastructure
|
| - integration to the vendor's other service
| infrastructure
|
| - a cost of more than $0
|
| Given that the market is full of people who will only
| bear $0, the likely conclusion is that a Chrome separated
| from the ability to integrate to vendor infrastructure
| will turn to integrating to someone's ad infrastructure
| (more poorly and less securely than Chrome currently
| integrates to Google's infra).
| bbarnett wrote:
| No one pays $0. All that slurping of user data is used by
| other corps to maximize their profits.
|
| They're paying for that data, and then believe they're
| making more from consumers as a result. But no matter
| what, the cost of collecting that data, the infra, and
| then corp x or y buying it, comes out of the bottom line.
|
| It's like points credit cards. Where does that cash back
| come from, magical fairies? It comes from retailers'
| bottom lines, eg from you.
| somastoma wrote:
| well, I know that the free cash I get IS from fairies.
| Yours doesn't?
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| "I will never pay for a browser"
|
| ...in the current market, which was created by companies
| like Microsoft, Apple, and Google, who subsidized their
| browsers through other income.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| If Google is broken up, Apple will still have Safari and
| Microsoft will still have Edge. There is no reason to
| believe the market for non-$0 browsers will suddenly
| manifest absent a Google-integrated Chrome.
|
| The people have already spoken with their wallets on this
| topic.
| bsder wrote:
| > The market price for a browser from a consumer
| perspective is $0.
|
| The market price for search is $0. And yet we have Kagi
| because Google is now so ad infested. Ads are now _bad
| enough_ that there is money in killing them.
|
| The market price for email is $0. And yet we have
| Fastmail.
|
| The problem with Google is _dumping_. The cross-
| subsidization means that YouTube, Gmail, Chrome, etc. can
| run at a loss _indefinitely_ and soak up huge chunks of
| the consumer base. Forcing those services to stand on
| their own doesn 't solve all the problems, but it sure
| makes competing with them a hell of a lot easier.
|
| (YouTube, on the other hand, should be sued into oblivion
| for not implementing identity checks for upload. The fact
| that any published video will wind up monetized on
| YouTube 20 seconds later is genuine theft.)
| cardanome wrote:
| I absolutely would have donated large sums of money to
| Firefox development if they had allowed me to do so.
| Sadly you can only donate to the Mozilla Foundation which
| does a lot of other stuff. Wikipedia shows that projects
| can get very stable funding through donations.
|
| Browsers offer incredible value. If there is need people
| will pony up the money. Many corporations have an
| business interest in keeping the web free and easily
| accessible so could serve as potential sponsors. Just
| like some newer programming language get baking from
| different companies and manage to stay independent. You
| just don't want to have one company having total
| influence.
| throwaway87483 wrote:
| AFAIK, the foundation _only_ does "other stuff", and the
| development is fully funded by the corporation (i.e.
| Google), so you can't really sponsor Firefox development
| at all, except by buying unrelated services like Pocket
| and the VPN (and who knows where your money goes then).
| Chabsff wrote:
| The original value-proposal for Chrome was: The more
| people browse the web in general, the more Google
| profits. So the mere existence of a good free, fast, and
| safe browser would inherently benefit Google at large in
| general. And that rationale is why we get to have
| Chromium at all.
|
| Obviously things have evolved quite a bit since then, but
| I think the general pitch that Chrome is primarily a
| value-multiplier for the org at large, rather than a
| direct value generator is still broadly the case, and
| it's really not clear to me that it can exist as anything
| else without a _fundamental_ reassessment of what it 's
| trying to accomplish.
| graeme wrote:
| That's likely not the real rationale. If people browse
| with Chrome, _then google is the default_. That is
| immensely valuable to google, as google 's payments to
| apple, mozilla and android manufacturer's show.
|
| In theory Chrome could exist as an independent business
| if it were allowed to take bids for search default from
| google. But if the US govt broke up google they would
| likely also ban the sort of deal that would let Chrome be
| a viable business on its own.
| hbn wrote:
| By the time Chrome came out Google already was in the
| position where everyone knew to set their default
| homepage to Google in IE in the same way they
| automatically go to install Chrome now.
|
| I'm surprised no one has mentioned the pseudo-control
| Chrome gives them over web standards. They can implement
| experimental APIs in Chrome and immediately use them in
| their webapps.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Correct. Google's real concern was not that people
| wouldn't use them as their favorite search engine; it was
| that relying on Apple and Microsoft to be stewards of
| access to the web was a huge business risk because,
| hypothetically, if Apple or Microsoft decided to block
| google.com at the browser level (or pick your favorite
| equivalent scenario, like failing to implement a standard
| that Google absolutely was going to be relying upon to
| provide service), Google was screwed.
|
| Chrome was a business risk mitigation move.
| nox101 wrote:
| > Without Google subsidizing Chrome, a real competitive
| market for browsers might emerge
|
| Without Chrome there will be only be Safari and Edge
| MrDrMcCoy wrote:
| I don't that Edge would survive without Chrome. I think
| it would be more fair to say that without Chrome, there
| will only be Safari, Firefox, Ladybird, and Verso. Yes,
| the latter two aren't ready yet, but I get they would
| gain fast traction in Chrome's absence.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| An unfortunate additional consequence of this antitrust
| lawsuit is that it is likely it will end The Google
| payments to Mozilla every year. That's 80% of the
| revenue, so the odds of them being a viable business
| afterwards are low.
|
| So I think we can cross that off the list as well and
| conclude that in the short to medium term, if Chrome went
| away it would mean simple web hegemony for Apple.
| ben_w wrote:
| Safari may also be facing the same issues; even before
| this, the rules about browsers in iOS were (to my non-
| lawyer eyes) suspiciously similar in market impact to
| Microsoft's Internet Explorer in Windows 95, for which
| they got in trouble.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_
| Cor....
|
| But Edge will not be the only alternative; Firefox does
| still exist, and the Chromium project has forked into
| several other browsers besides Edge.
| maeil wrote:
| > It's an interesting hypothesis, but it's entirely
| possible that separated from Google, Chrome is either not a
| viable business model (browsers don't make money on their
| own)
|
| No, that's not possible. Google pays $20 billion to Safari
| to be the default search engine. Imagine how much they
| would pay an independent Chrome, which has many multiples
| of Safari's market share. That alone guarantees it would be
| an incredibly viable business model.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Would they be allowed, or would that be more anti-
| competitive behavior?
| labcomputer wrote:
| But Google isn't allowed to pay to be the default search
| engine anymore. So that revenue stream is gone.
| ttoinou wrote:
| It still shows the market value of browsers, even if
| unrealized or illegal this value could be exploited
| differently
| asadotzler wrote:
| You're imagining things. Google hasn't been prevented
| from that at all, yet, and may not be. We are discussing
| remedies here that have not happened yet. You cannot
| discount one possible remedy because of the existence of
| another possible remedy.
| epolanski wrote:
| The more I think about your example the more it is a viable
| business model as you have the incentive to make people bid
| for the data, rather than defaulting it to Google, which is
| the point of the monopoly issue.
| IX-103 wrote:
| I agree with your premise, but you're example is unfortunate.
| The manifest v3 thing was due to an API change to improve
| performance by pulling the renderer out of the critical path
| for network requests. Adblockers can still block ads (as in
| not show them), but they can't throttle or block requests.
|
| It would be better to point out that Chrome is the only
| browser not getting rid of third party cookies. Chrome
| promised to, but then has reneged on that promise in favor of
| "user choice". I don't for a second think Chrome would have
| kept then around if they weren't tied to an advertising
| company.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > The manifest v3 thing was due to an API change to improve
| performance by pulling the renderer out of the critical
| path for network requests.
|
| That is certainly the excuse given, but that doesn't mean
| it's the reason.
|
| > Adblockers can still block ads (as in not show them), but
| they can't throttle or block requests.
|
| Note that this makes them less effective at blocking ads.
| And speaking as a former uMatrix user, filtering/blocking
| the network traffic is a lot of the point.
| EasyMark wrote:
| If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it's a duck.
| They used the "improved security" as an excuse while
| leaving other just as big holes in their security. Show me
| how AdGuard or ublock origin abused the current system in
| v2
| nolist_policy wrote:
| > Show me how AdGuard or ublock origin abused the current
| system in v2
|
| They didn't, but other malicious extensions did.
| aembleton wrote:
| In that case, it should be a permission thing that a user
| can switch on for certain extensions.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It currently is, and it's easy to trick users into
| switching it on.
| nolist_policy wrote:
| I think the third party cookie thing is due to their other
| antitrust lawsuite in advertising.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| They've used the UK regulators as a very convenient
| excuse. But realistically the problem is that Google's
| DoubleClick has a monopoly on both sides of the ad
| marketplace. If that wasn't the case, the regulators
| would not have a problem with Chrome deprecating cookies.
|
| So Google has maneuvered into this position skillfully
| and then blamed the regulars for not continuing on a pro-
| privacy path, while conveniently that also makes them the
| most ad money...
| stefan_ wrote:
| If you believe that I got a bridge to sell you. Look at the
| things they were up to even back in 2017:
|
| https://x.com/jason_kint/status/1821558368659456399
|
| And thats what they dared put into writing.
| nox101 wrote:
| Users are not Chrome's customers. Even if Chrome is separated
| into a separate company that would still be true. Users are
| unlikely to pay for a browser when every OS comes with a free
| one.
|
| Some companies that want to be the default search (unless the
| gov bans that) or, some companies that want to be the default
| new tab page, would likely be the actual customers
|
| An exception might be Chromebook users. It's not clear how
| that would break out. Especially in light of ChromeOS being
| cancelled for Android
| zamadatix wrote:
| Right now the main paying user of Chrome is Google as a
| tool to deliver product integrations and guarantee browser
| based ad delivery. It's just that all of that is seen as
| internal expense in developing Chrome instead of an
| external source of revenue from Chrome. If Chrome were
| split off the main paying user of Chrome would probably be
| large enterprises and educational institutions - that'd be
| a massive change.
|
| I'm not sure it'd really make sense to split Chrome off on
| its own or not though. Maybe Chrome/ChromeOS/Android as a
| base software platform for consumers, businesses, and
| schools.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| Can you explain what large enterprises and educational
| institutions would be paying Chrome for?
| linotype wrote:
| Every OS coming with a browser bundled for free is part of
| the problem.
| spankalee wrote:
| Manifest v3 exists to increase security and privacy, not to
| break ad blockers. I suspect that an independent Chrome would
| implement it even faster because they don't have to worry
| about the perception that they're doing it for ads.
| oneplane wrote:
| There are probably only a small number of services that could
| successfully spin off on their own, but a lot of the value is
| in integration, which as others point out is also how some
| things seem 'free'.
|
| An easier example would be Microsoft and Office; you could spin
| off an application like that quite successfully, the same might
| apply to their ERP. But those examples only stem from the fact
| that they used to be isolated 'offline' products, and Microsoft
| is working hard to undo that.
|
| Trying to draw parallels between that and Google Workspace,
| that is a technical nightmare considering the entire
| distributed nature means that half of workspace can't exist
| outside of Google. You'd have to copy Google to host it outside
| of it, and I'm not talking about GCP or Borg or anything like
| that, it's everything, from the GSLB to Zanzibar, from monorail
| to the custom hardware everything runs on. Perhaps a double-
| digit years long refactor could change that, but nobody wants
| to pay for that.
| jerf wrote:
| Microsoft for a good long while made money on two things:
| Office and Windows. You could break them up into "Office",
| "Windows", and any combination of "everything else", and for
| the most part what would happen is that the Office and
| Windows parts would make more money proportionally, and most
| if not all of the "everything else" would die. Even products
| that could nominally have survived on their own if they had
| grown up on their own would die because by the time the
| corporate culture adapted to the new realities they'd mostly
| already be dead.
|
| Given that monopoly-breakups are supposed to be in the public
| interest, it is a complicated argument to make in court that
| the public is advantaged by all those ancillary services
| getting killed. Now, _I 'm_ happy to declare that; I think
| the "culture of free" is corrosive, to probably an even
| greater degree than most other HN users. I'm outright willing
| to call it _morally_ corrosive, for both the companies and
| the consumers. You, dear $READER, may not be inclined to go
| that far, especially perhaps on the consumer side. I 'm just
| putting down my cards so that you can see that when I point
| out that _in court_ that 's going to be a difficult argument,
| it's an admission against my interests and biases.
|
| Google is similar. They make money on ads and everything else
| is a distant second. Even search might have trouble standing
| on its own because it is funded on ad revenue; split them up
| that way and how is search getting funded? Google Cloud could
| certainly survive on its own for a time, but if it had to
| reduce investment it could go into an uncompetitive death
| spiral of having to match investment resources to profits
| over the years. Gmail could in principle make radically more
| money if they charged $5/month or something, but how many
| customers will do that?
|
| And how on Earth would you even break up Android? You can't
| just hack it out as its own thing; it integrates with a lot
| of Google things and there's no way they'd all end up in the
| same entity.
|
| _I 'm_ willing to just hack them to pieces and let the
| market figure it out. I think in the long term we'd come out
| stronger. But I'm arguing here in a relatively friendly forum
| for that and probably a lot of you still disagree with me.
| I'd hate to be arguing this in court.
| aembleton wrote:
| > how is search getting funded?
|
| With ads, by making deals with ad brokers. Its just that
| they will be able to shop around rather than using their
| own in house one
| labcomputer wrote:
| Sure, but why should we think that those deals will be
| better than what "Search Google" has with "Ads Google"
| today?
|
| Whatever revenue is attributed to Search today is just
| the result of internal horse-trading, perhaps augmented
| with some accountant's estimation of "fair market value"
| for ad space in search results. After the breakup
| anything is fair game. Maybe the ad broker keeps 95% of
| ad revenue.
|
| And, if you believe that Google has been using its
| monopoly to raise ad prices, why _shouldn't_ prices fall?
| trueismywork wrote:
| If things are broken up, we will get open standards for
| integration. The value of open standard would be much higher
| than today. Think how XMPP might have evolved if everyone had
| an interest in keeping it open.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| And, indeed, there's a case to be made that there's net
| consumer harm to breaking up the synergy.
|
| Maybe we do want to make everything a little worse for the
| average customer so that more businesses can compete in the
| marketplace. But I, for one, will miss being able to attach
| Drive content smoothly to my emails, or being able to use my
| voice to trigger map navigation on my phone.
| brookst wrote:
| Ads and search are the two businesses that most directly
| collude and which could both survive and thrive independently.
|
| If the search business worked with other ad networks to
| maximize their revenue, while the ad business worked with other
| search engines, we'd likely see higher quality search results,
| less confusion about what's an ad versus a result, and better
| as rates for buyers.
|
| That said I don't support that remedy at all. Maybe ten or
| fifteen years ago, but now it's too late and the market is
| evolving around Google. IMO a consent decree that they won't
| pay anyone for exclusive search placement is sufficient.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > Ads and search are the two businesses that most directly
| collude and which could both survive and thrive
| independently.
|
| I'm skeptical that search is viable as an independent
| business at scale. I know DDG is making a go of it, but the
| business only has to pay a single salary.
| deepsquirrelnet wrote:
| I'm skeptical that Google search contains any search
| results. So maybe that part of their business is already
| dead and they just need an honest rebranding to ad search.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > I'm skeptical that Google search contains any search
| results. So maybe that part of their business is already
| dead and they just need an honest rebranding to ad
| search.
|
| I don't know about you, but I remember the time before
| Google where search engines openly offered paid search
| listings.
|
| Google's search quality has declines over the years, but
| I don't think we're at the point you're talking about
| yet.
| brookst wrote:
| Why wouldn't Google search be viable if it could negotiate
| rates with multiple ad networks? IMO there would be more
| net revenue generated from competition in the ad space.
| labcomputer wrote:
| 1. Doesn't that bring us back to a monopoly? One dominant
| seller of ad space with many buyers? Do we just
| recursively split out the ad sales and then ask search to
| sell ads?
|
| 2. Why is everyone here so convinced that ad rates will
| go _up_ with this structure? Isn't part of the reason for
| Google's conviction that they are charging _too much_ for
| ads?
| consteval wrote:
| Personally, I think Search should be a public, not private,
| effort. Indexing the internet should be a global endeavor
| beneficial to world governments in unison. The issue is
| that the potential for censorship is rife, but I think
| including many govs on a board might solve this.
| mminer237 wrote:
| Google has already specifically deranked Russian
| government media and media promoting the lab leak theory
| during COVID. Obviously China would require the index to
| exclude any mention of Tiananmen Square. If it's anything
| like the UN, Jerusalem Post will be deranked in favor of
| Al Jazeera on every search relating to the Middle East.
|
| I just think it's a complete non-starter for any
| government to allow foreign governments to decide
| everything your citizens see. If they don't bow to your
| brand of censorship, you're going to pull out.
| MrDrMcCoy wrote:
| You could contribute to the solution by spinning up an
| indexer for Yacy.
| IX-103 wrote:
| Splitting ads and search is a nonstarter. Ads on the search
| page are very different from ads on other pages since search
| ads can leverage information retrieved during the search. Ads
| on other pages have to use contextual or remarketing signals,
| with much poorer results.
| brookst wrote:
| I don't think I follow. Whatever the technical integration
| between Google search and Google ads, why could it not be
| done with multiple, competing ad networks?
| epolanski wrote:
| I really don't see how is it too late, the incentives are so
| huge that competition will bid for the ads.
| danaris wrote:
| Search needs to be a utility.
|
| Browsers need to be a utility.
|
| Email needs to at least have an option that is a utility.
|
| Arguably operating systems need to be a utility.
|
| Adtech needs to either go back to what it was when Google
| started out (simple contextual ads, no targeting, no data
| collection, no flashing or popups or video or or or or...), or
| just die.[0]
|
| The reason these things have all been operated entirely by for-
| profit entities up to this point is because _they 're too new_
| for government to have caught up. All the parts of Google that
| I've named above as needing to be utilities are fundamental,
| necessary parts of the modern internet, and are basic
| requirements for the average person to operate in Western
| society.
|
| > How would spinning off an individual business like Chrome,
| Android, or AdWords reduce their respective dominance?
|
| As for this question, Google uses the profit from its dominance
| in adtech to fund its dominance in other businesses. That's the
| textbook definition of an abusive monopoly. Take away the ad
| money from the other parts of Google, and they'll no longer
| have an unfair advantage over potential competitors.
|
| [0] Yes, this would mean that large parts of the internet that
| have been free-at-the-point-of-service will have to find new
| business models or dry up and blow away. No, I don't have a
| silver bullet solution to this. No, I'm not advocating for
| nuking adtech from orbit overnight with no replacement.
| pahkah wrote:
| At the very least, spinning off individual businesses prevents
| self-preferencing. Google can right now leverage its dominance
| in one area to increase market share in another. For example,
| if I load my GMail account in a browser other than Chrome,
| Google will "helpfully" suggest that I change my default
| browser to the "recommended" Chrome. This behavior makes it
| harder for upstarts to get a foot in the door across a wide
| range of products -- by removing these synergies we reduce the
| grip Google has across all its lines of business.
|
| I suspect the AT&T example may be more similar to the current
| situation than you're thinking. AT&T wasn't just the network,
| they also manufactured the phones themselves through subsidiary
| Western Electric. They leveraged their monopoly in phone
| service to drive customers toward leasing their phones,
| similarly (if more aggressively) to how Google drives customers
| from one product to another. Whether this remedy will be so
| far-reaching beyond search I don't know, but in the abstract
| there would be benefits to splitting up the conglomerate.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| People don't realize, you couldn't just buy a phone - you had
| to use the one provided by your monopoly phone company. It
| was only after breakup that there could exist an ecosystem of
| phone peripherals like answerphones, direct-attach modems
| (this is why acoustic couplers were a thing), cordless
| phones, etc.
| twoodfin wrote:
| I'm frankly shocked that Google continues to think the juice
| on that annoying, constant Chrome-in-Gmail popup is worth
| even a marginal additional anti-trust attention squeeze.
| asadotzler wrote:
| It's worth a lot. People regularly fall out of Google's
| funnel and they must get them back. You think every user
| that switches to Firefox is a user Google's willing to walk
| away from?
| CivBase wrote:
| Chrome and Android are particularly interesting to me. What
| would splitting those projects off from Google possibly look
| like?
|
| Both are open source projects with "ungoogled" options
| available, but those options are nowhere near as successful as
| the Google flavors. Would they just forbid Google from offering
| their own flavor of Chromium?
|
| Even though Android itself is open source, Google Play services
| really are what allow Google to have so much influence on the
| Android platform. So what happens to Google Play? Would they be
| forced to split that off with Android? Would they be forced to
| continue offering their services for free, but with no strings
| attached? Would Android have to offer a middleware that lets
| you choose which services to use a la carte? Would Android
| device manufacturers have to ship their devices with an open
| source alternative to Google Play like microG?
|
| How do you separate Google from Android without driving
| everyone to the other side of the smartphone duopoly, iOS?
|
| If a breakup does happen, it's going to be wild. I wish I had
| more faith in our government to come up with the best solution.
| But _something_ has to be done.
| somastoma wrote:
| I don't know... Would you call the Kodak "moment" a breakup? Or
| a failure to move quickly into digital photography...
| dceddia wrote:
| Yeah I don't know how this will go, but I'm not too optimistic.
|
| It feels like one of those situations where we "get exactly what
| we asked for". Like those movies with an Evil Genie who delivers
| on their wishes in the sneakiest way possible. "You wished for
| $1M, so I burned your house down - but look at all the insurance
| money you got!"
|
| Or maybe a bit like how everyone wanted their cable bills to be
| cheaper ("just let me pay for the few channels I watch!") and
| what we got was 15 different streaming services at $12/month.
| pretext-1 wrote:
| Well so far we tried doing nothing and that didn't work either.
|
| We should have at least prevented them from growing so fast via
| acquisitions but it's too late for that now.
| asadotzler wrote:
| "Let's do nothing then. Let's all just let the megacorporations
| write their own laws and manage themselves autonomously with no
| consumer or competition protections at all. Why bother."
|
| This is how you sound.
| accurrent wrote:
| The best way to tackle this is enforce right for repair and
| require opensourcing of various components. Breaking up google
| will be an impossible job.
|
| If we mandate that our electronics and software must be
| repairable then these companies will automatically no longer be
| able to hold monopolies on their platforms.
| brookst wrote:
| ...and people will buy imported tech and use foreign software
| because it works better than what is legally mandated here.
|
| The idea that the government has to force people to buy things
| they don't want never ends well.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The breakup that needs to happen is ads and search/youtube/etc,
| everything else would work itself out after that.
| account42 wrote:
| Chrome being made by the same company running the websites
| (search/docs/etc.) is still going to provide bad incentives
| even if with ads & youtube seperated out the worst ones would
| be gone.
| uptownJimmy wrote:
| Google's "search results" are the textbook definition of a
| monopolized good/service. The whole thing is almost a casino,
| rigged to the point of absurdity.
|
| There has been nothing in my life so disillusioning as working on
| a Web app for a company that is more or less required to play
| Google's game.
| timmg wrote:
| > There has been nothing in my life so disillusioning as
| working on a Web app for a company that is more or less
| required to play Google's game.
|
| Have you built any iOS apps?
| LeonB wrote:
| Ha, well said. Having both of these experiences makes one
| even more against the tyranny of monopolists.
| brookst wrote:
| While true and a fair point, iOS is Apple's platform in a way
| that the web is most certainly not Google's.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I hardly use Google, and I use the internet.
|
| DDG/Kagi/ChatGPT/Reddit/HN/etc for searching.
| Fastmail/myriad order email providers. Openstreetmap/Apple
| for maps.
|
| YouTube and Chrome Remote Desktop are what I use Google
| for, but those have alternatives too.
| jonhohle wrote:
| The concern is if you are developing for the web, how
| much time do you need to spend appeasing Google to show
| up in search results and be discoverable.
|
| When I was at Amazon the majority of direct product
| traffic did not come internal search, it came from
| Google. In some areas they were competitors, Amazon was
| beholden to Google as the starting point for most
| customer's browsing experience.
| EasyMark wrote:
| It's not just monopoly it's googles abuse. How many times
| have they been sued successfully and fined by the
| government for abusing the position as a large
| corporation, I'd say it's legion. I wish the government
| was more vigilant in using their power to kill
| corporations outright after so many abuses of power
| jonhohle wrote:
| It's odd how this is lost on people. Want to develop a game
| for PlayStation, Sony will need to approve. Want to develop
| a Facebook app, FB will gatekeep. If you wanted to make
| apps for the Danger Hiptop, you published through Danger.
| iOS is Apple's consolized OS for their own hardware. It's
| not a PC platform that anyone can put on whatever device
| they want. For better or worse.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I think there is a reasonable breaking point though,
| where the platform becomes so ingrained in society that
| you are left out of social groups if you don't join.
|
| "iPhone Families" is a very real thing that Apple has
| gone out of it's way to solidify. Or try being an
| (American) 15 year old kid and get included in group
| chats with an android phone.
|
| It's pretty gross when a mega-corp is so powerful that it
| can leverage your friends and family against you, forcing
| you into their walled prison err.. garden.
| consteval wrote:
| Personally, I think the breaking point is when the device
| transitions from "appliance" or niche device to general
| computer.
|
| I think at a time a phone could be considered an
| appliance. But that's changed, and for many people their
| smartphone is their only general personal computer.
| CivBase wrote:
| When you're a part of a duopoly on a product that is
| necessary for participating in the modern economy with as
| much friction as iOS has for switching to the only viable
| competitor... what makes it so fundamentally different
| from the web?
|
| IMO they can either keep the duopoly and deal with
| regulation or they can keep full control of their
| platform. One or the other. Same goes for Android.
| jonhohle wrote:
| So if a business mode is successful, regardless of
| whether it's actively thwarted competition or acted
| anticompetitively, it should be regulated?
|
| It's not the web. It's not a PC. It's a sandboxed
| console.
|
| > MO they can either keep the duopoly and deal with
| regulation or they can keep full control of their
| platform.
|
| Then they'll keep they're platform and not be regulated
| ;-) (I know what you meant).
| CivBase wrote:
| > So if a business mode is successful, regardless of
| whether it's actively thwarted competition or acted
| anticompetitively, it should be regulated?
|
| Yes. If a product becomes essential for participation in
| the economy and lacks substantial competition, regulation
| is the only mechanism we have to protect the people. Why
| should it matter how it got there?
| isodev wrote:
| Just following this thought then the remedy will be forcing
| Apple to allow alternative OS and firmware on their
| devices, allowing consumers to choose what they do with the
| device hardware they purchased?
| ineedaj0b wrote:
| No, it would be buying an android phone
| isodev wrote:
| Buying a phone from another vendor is only viable if
| Apple/Google didn't try to lock you in. Of course we know
| that's not true - you can't _just_ go elsewhere and that
| 's by design.
| mouse_ wrote:
| Ownership and security are at odds. The only remedy would
| be forcing Apple to allow the owner of the device to run
| whatever they would like on it, unfortunately this does
| include malware.
| nolist_policy wrote:
| This is a false dilemma thought.
|
| The secure solution is to treat every app as malicious
| and put it in a sandbox where it can not cause harm. See
| also Android and ChromeOS.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| In the broadest sense, an app that "can not cause harm"
| can't do anything useful. To the industry's dominant
| players, "causing harm" means empowering the user to
| venture outside their walled gardens... or even to _see_
| outside them.
|
| So, no, sandboxing everything in sight isn't a useful
| solution. Your sandbox will just imprison us all.
| brookst wrote:
| I'm not a subscriber to the "if I choose to buy a
| product, I get to dictate product design decisions for
| the company" school of thought. Buy it or don't. If you
| want X there is no right do demand Y turn into X.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| "buy it or don't" does not work with oligopolies. If you
| had a free market, I would agree, but you very much don't
| in this case.
| chipdart wrote:
| > "buy it or don't" does not work with oligopolies. If
| you had a free market, I would agree, but you very much
| don't in this case.
|
| Why do you believe there is no free market on mobile
| phones? I mean, what exactly forces you to pick an iPhone
| over anything?
| antihipocrat wrote:
| That's not quite what the parent meant. There is a choice
| between very few phone manufacturers, and even less
| mobile operating systems.
|
| Don't want to sign up to one multinational behemoth?
| Well, your choice is to sign up to one other
| multinational behemoth.
| wil421 wrote:
| Why should they have to allow it? My smart TVs and video
| game consoles never allowed it, except that short lived
| Linux PlayStation. Nintendo is pretty hostile about
| reverse engineering the switch.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| But those are gaming and entertainment devices, not
| general-purpose computing devices that everyone relies on
| for day-to-day work and life.
|
| A good way to think about it is this: if Windows was as
| closed down as iOS, and took a 30% cut on every
| application purchase, would regulators have intervened?
| labcomputer wrote:
| What physical attributes make them not general purpose
| computers?
| Cyph0n wrote:
| What physical attributes make a smart fridge not a
| general purpose computer? Or a car's infotainment system?
| Or a Bluray disc player?
| skeaker wrote:
| Those should allow it too. Them setting a bad precedent
| doesn't mean we should continue to abide by it, just that
| there's more work to be done undoing it.
| amatheus wrote:
| I think that would be the right decision, to me that
| makes more sense than forcing Apple to allow any app to
| be installed on iOS or allowing alternate stores.
| chipdart wrote:
| > While true and a fair point, iOS is Apple's platform in a
| way that the web is most certainly not Google's.
|
| OP was whining over Google's role in Android. Pointing out
| Apple's control of iOS, and the fact that iPhone is by far
| the dominant platform for handhelds, does refute OP's
| personal assertion.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| >Google's "search results" are the textbook definition of a
| monopolized good/service.
|
| Defining a market as a specific search engine's search results
| is wild. Wouldn't every search engine have a monopoly over it's
| results? A grocery store monopoly over its shelves?
|
| Etc.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| When you are the only grocery store for 500mi yes you
| functionally have a "monopoly over your shelves."
| lenerdenator wrote:
| There's Bing and DDG (aka "Bing without tracking").
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| You can switch your search to bing in less time then it
| took to write this message.
|
| Your 500 mile analogy simply does not apply.
| jonhohle wrote:
| As a business owner you can't tell all of your present
| and future customers you're only going to be in Bing
| results going forward. This isn't about what an
| individual chooses to use. Google is effectively the
| Yellow pages of the internet. In that era you could take
| out ads in the newspaper, but no one was looking there
| when they needed to find a resource they needed now.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Your problem isn't Google, your problem is capitalism and the
| limited attention economy.
|
| If you were in a position where you could just put things
| online and they may or may not be useful to people, you
| wouldn't be having this problem. But you're not; you're working
| for a taskmaster that demands attention or they can't justify
| their existence.
|
| If Google evaporates tomorrow, there's no guarantee that your
| product gets customers. Indeed, in the absence of Google, most
| content on the internet is harder to find, not easier. The knob
| your overseer wants you to turn happens to be attached to
| Google, but when Google goes away there's going to be a
| different knob.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I disagree with this. Capitalism may be a problem, but
| Google's specific technology and size, enabling them to reach
| people at high-speed, is also a problem. The fact is,
| capitalism on a small scale (trade with money in local
| communities) is much less damaging than on a global scale due
| to the anonymizing effects of scale and the economies of
| scale being much more efficient at effecting tragedy of the
| commons.
|
| Yes, capitalism is a problem, but it's also true that Google
| is a problem because Google's scale makes a poor combination
| with capitalism. Which is worse, the match or the gasoline?
| Both, if they are used to cause a devastating fire.
| EasyMark wrote:
| I'll take capitalism controlling the internet any day over a
| communist dictatorship who will censor everything that
| doesn't support the regime
| consteval wrote:
| False dichotomy
| olalonde wrote:
| They're not. Textbook definition: "A market structure
| characterized by a single seller, selling a unique product in
| the market." Google Search has competitors and is not even
| selling its search product.
| dml2135 wrote:
| > Google Search has competitors and is not even selling its
| search product.
|
| The product is not search, it's ad placements.
| olalonde wrote:
| Your comment specifically called out their search product.
| If your argument is that they have a monopoly on ads, I
| don't believe that's true either.
| dml2135 wrote:
| What I mean is that search is not a product in the sense
| that you can say "search is free" and not have that be
| misleading in some way.
|
| YOU are the product, being sold to advertisers, and
| Google search is the channel through which you are sold.
| olalonde wrote:
| That's a bit an unconventional take on what free and
| selling mean, but regardless that wasn't my main point.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| In this context, "selling" can't just mean "exchanging for
| money", it has to mean something like "exchanging for a
| valuable consideration." The valuable consideration that you
| provide in exchange for using Google is your attention on
| their ads, and your behavioral and personal data that can be
| sold.
|
| And I would say that Google can fairly be called a unique
| product in the market. They are the default search engine on
| almost all browsers and operating systems, their mobile phone
| operating system owns 70% of the global market share, and
| most of these devices give Google's search engine
| preferential treatment, their name is synonymous with
| searching on the web, their market share is over 90%, they
| have more data on their users than probably any other company
| and can provide more personalized search results than anyone
| else, their web index is clearly more complete than e.g.
| Bing's (if you do a domain-restricted search, Google often
| finds twice as many results as Bing).
|
| It's true that alternatives to Google exist, but Google's
| overwhelming market dominance makes it imo difficult to argue
| that they aren't a monopoly in practice.
| olalonde wrote:
| They're dominant but mainly due to the quality/cost of
| their products, not because competing with them is
| impossible. Android is open source. There's Bing and many
| other search engines. Google Mobile Services (Android is
| open source) and Google Search could disappear tomorrow and
| would be quickly replaced.
| bentice wrote:
| To exist on the internet you need to pay Google. Google is
| essentially the government of the open web. The problem is that
| government like monopolies do arise especially when there are
| network effects.
|
| We need to regulate search and app stores like it is a public
| utility. Pricing should be dutch auction or something provably
| fair. 20-30% for in-app purchases is obviously insane when
| credit cards do 1.5-3.5%.
|
| I worry that the government will not do sensible regulations
| and instead play investment banker and try to create spin off
| companies.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The question then becomes: Are users going to be willing to
| pay google (or whatever search) now instead?
|
| I don't think the vast majority of the internet understands
| how the business model of the internet works.
| lmpdev wrote:
| Not OP but as a public utility it would be paid for through
| both taxes and usage
|
| The actual computational resources required to provide
| search would be a fraction of Google's operating costs
|
| Added benefit would be pitting private providers against
| each other so they're incentivised to provide better
| outcomes, as opposed to the current decoupling of utility
| and market position
|
| The current situation is immensely wasteful of everyone's
| time and resources (Alphabet shareholders aside)
|
| It really is a Standard Oil situation, but as it's just
| inflaming - but not halting -the global economy, it's been
| flying under regulators' radar until a few years ago
|
| No moat is too wide for the flick of sufficiently powerful
| pens, business models be damned
| jonhohle wrote:
| Credit card companies do one thing - process payments. What
| cut do VOD or music hosting sites take? Bandcamp takes 15%.
| eBay takes 15% on things they never physically touch. It's
| hard finding hard data, but it seems like YouTube, on average
| charges $15CPM and pays $5CPM to the highest paid YouTubers.
| What is the value of download hosting and store platform?
| serial_dev wrote:
| Let's figure it out?
|
| Let's allow anyone to do in-app purchases, and app stores,
| then the market would tell us. Currently, we need to trust
| these quasi-monopolies that there is no way they can make
| it cheaper (and for some strange reason still, they don't
| want to open things up).
| aembleton wrote:
| > Let's allow anyone to do in-app purchases, and app
| stores, then the market would tell us.
|
| Whats stopping that now on Android? I have a second app
| store on my phone.
| thehappypm wrote:
| What are you even talking about? you actually do not need to
| pay Google a dime to be on the Internet, if you have good SEO
| you can be on the top of the page
| pembrook wrote:
| Yes, everybody is still super upset that Microsoft got hit by
| antitrust in 2001 and shifted heavily to B2B. We've really missed
| out on having more fantastic Microsoft software forcibly
| intertwined in our daily lives. I wish Microsoft owned all of
| desktop AND mobile computing AND the internet so I was forced to
| do everything via the fantastic Microsoft Windows!
|
| Darn these regulators for trying to allow competitors to enter
| the market. Everybody knows, competition only makes things worse!
|
| /s
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > and shifted heavily to B2B
|
| Azure, VS code, Github, CoPilot... the emergence of teams...
|
| > I wish Microsoft owned
|
| A large chunk of the engineering stack?
| elforce002 wrote:
| I think... I think the op was being sarcastic.
| arder wrote:
| I feel like the US should have serious conversations about it's
| regulation of monopolies, especially on internet giants. The
| current system seems to be woefully ineffective. On the one hand,
| it's not clear it's necessarily, Google isn't a particularly old
| company it hasn't had a strangle hold for long and it doesn't
| look like it's business is unassailable. So why go after it at
| all. On the other hand, the anti-monopoly moves have been slow
| and ineffective. When Microsoft finally got hit their crimes were
| pretty egregious and they actually never faced any consequences,
| the law suit they lost eventaully got turned over on appeal and
| by the time it was all resolved the market looked markedly
| different.
|
| Isn't it time to think about either (a) just accepting that you
| give them a much wider birth or (b) be much faster and tactical
| in your enforcement. Not every monopoly case needs to result in a
| break up. If you could point at one bad thing Google did - maybe
| the Apple deal for example, get that in court quickly with fast
| penalties that don't require massive corporate interference maybe
| we would be better off.
| mjevans wrote:
| The Apple deal had two sides engaged in monopolistic behavior.
| One was Google buying out that default provider option. The
| other was Apple, having that default option.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > The other was Apple, having that default option.
|
| What UI are you imagining? Perhaps no search engine at all in
| the browser but the first time a user goes to "search" you
| present them with a list of random-sorted search engines?
|
| Maybe the problem was that Apple has "that default option
| _for sale_. "
| mjevans wrote:
| Search without a setting configured should open the
| Settings dialog to the page which configures search.
|
| On that page should be a list of the current well known /
| trusted providers (this can be a cached copy for offline
| config), maybe a refresh button (check for an updated
| version of that list), and a method of providing an end
| user installed search option.
|
| In short: Empower the End User.
| lolinder wrote:
| > Google isn't a particularly old company it hasn't had a
| strangle hold for long and it doesn't look like it's business
| is unassailable. So why go after it at all. On the other hand,
| the anti-monopoly moves have been slow and ineffective. When
| Microsoft finally got hit...
|
| Google was incorporated 26 years ago, in 1998. Microsoft was
| founded in 1975, 26 years before _US v. Microsoft_ was decided.
| Google is exactly as old as Microsoft was at the time, and
| while it 's harder to measure my sense is that their
| stranglehold on search is at least as long and at least as
| unassailable as Microsoft's was in OSes.
|
| You can't have it be both too early to go after Google and yet
| too late to have gone after Microsoft.
| arder wrote:
| Well to push the point a little - Imagine that Microsofts
| anti-trust case was in 2008, not 1997 and the iPhone was out
| and clearly gaining traction. Suddenly Microsoft doesn't look
| like some perpetual juggernaut. That's where we are with
| Google today - we can see the product that's likely to
| displace it. Windows is still big today, but it's not
| anywhere near the strategic force it was in the early 2000s.
| In the same way, I don't think Google is likely to be in the
| same place in a few years time.
|
| I kind of am asking to have it both ways - they should be
| able to move against these companies earlier by levying
| smaller sanctions. That way they don't need 1 big killer case
| to get a judge to order the entire company broken up or spun
| off.
| asadotzler wrote:
| Microsoft still owns 70% of the PC market 15 years after
| your hypothetical and is still a "perpetual juggernaut" in
| that market. Because you don't care about that market and
| think smartphones are more important doesn't mean the rest
| of us stop caring about PCs and the harm Microsoft's
| ongoing monopoly in that market creates.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I think you meant "berth" rather than "birth".
|
| > If you could point at one bad thing Google did...
|
| Agree. But then there are the more nebulous ones -- like
| Google's ad/search entanglement.
| vundercind wrote:
| We ruined antitrust enforcement in the 70s and 80s by switching
| from "we know companies having too much of a market is bad, so
| that's enough" to "we must show specific harm of specific kinds
| before we can do anything".
|
| This is like requiring overwhelming evidence that a radiation
| source caused a particular case of cancer--not other problems,
| like birth defects, just cancer, and we're gonna assume the
| cancer wasn't caused by the radiation source until you can
| convince us otherwise--before being able to move against an
| actor exposing the public to radiation.
| andrewla wrote:
| > A fitting though unlikely outcome would be for Google to be
| forced to turn Chrome and the open source Chromium project over
| to Mozilla. That would probably involve the creation of an
| independent non-profit foundation that didn't reduce browser
| diversity - so Chrome and Firefox could continue to lead
| independent lives.
|
| Okay ... that is some serious wishcasting.
| coldpie wrote:
| Hahah, yeah. That paragraph is where my opinion of the article
| turned from "maybe interesting" to "just some guy on the
| Internet rambling".
| kbaker wrote:
| Mozilla is a bit of a stretch for sure, but I could see
| Chromium and maybe Android moved off onto their own independent
| organizations so they are not beholden to Google/Alphabet's
| whims. I am imagining something like the Linux Foundation.
|
| Chromium especially is so core to being a building block for
| applications and the modern Internet nowadays, it does seem
| like this core infrastructure piece should be more collectively
| owned.
| treyd wrote:
| I really hope that some portions are turned into public
| institutions (either directly or in the weird way organizations
| like USPS is) in some way. They've made themselves so deeply
| ingrained and essential to using the internet as loss leaders in
| some areas that it's impossible to imagine those services
| standing on their own and still making sense. That's what's
| responsible for their monopolization, and natural monopolies
| should be tightly state regulated. I hope we get case law on how
| network effects can kinda _be_ natural monopolies when in the
| right technological context.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| YouTube should be the main platform the government should form
| into a public institution. Not only due to its historical and
| cultural significance, but also due to the fact that it is
| (almost assuredly) unprofitable and thus at-risk.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| It cannot sustain itself on its ad revenue?
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| If a for-profit company does not provide its annual
| profits, it's safe to say it's not doing well. Especially
| as Alphabet does so elsewhere. Additionally, would they
| have become so ad-aggressive in the last few years if they
| have been making a profit?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Looking forward to only being able to stream government
| approved video. It was a success in the last century, I've
| heard.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I'm scratching my head trying to think of something Google does
| that should be a public institution. Can you give an example?
| YouTube is the closest thing I can think of, but it is tightly
| bound to advertising.
|
| Wikipedia, archive.org are two examples of non-Google projects
| that come to mind when I think of internet "public-good". They
| seem to be doing fine without advertising dollars (although
| perhaps they are only hobbling along, I don't know -- but I
| would rather they get "public institution" treatment before
| Google franchises).
| layer8 wrote:
| Web search is certainly something that should be a public
| institution.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Make sure to search only for government-approved topics.
| layer8 wrote:
| Public doesn't imply government-operated, and privacy and
| data-retention laws exist.
|
| The bigger practical problem is that we want it to remain
| a global service and not become a national one.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Can we break up Microsoft too?
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| And open source Windows while we're at it.
| Eumenes wrote:
| Google is about to pull from its war chest to create a PR frenzy
| to make this a very bad thing for consumers/users. They'll appeal
| to conservative and neoliberal circles. Personally, as a former
| Google employee, I want them smashed to pieces.
| aurareturn wrote:
| No need to break up Google because of their search dominance.
|
| Search is about to get disrupted by LLMs. Heck, aren't teens
| searching on Tiktok more than Google nowadays?
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| It is so easy to switch away from Google I just can't take any
| break up attempt seriously.
|
| ATT WAS phone service in the U.S. 90% of the U.S used ATT when it
| was broken up, and much of that 90% had no alternative.
|
| With Google if another better search engine did appear you could
| switch in minutes.
|
| And if you consider Android a monopoly then you'd have to
| consider iOS one too, and that's one much more obvious in it's
| user impact with a 30% cut being taken on the only app store you
| can install apps from.
|
| If you don't like default X being purchased, pass a law.
| Otherwise we'll just be back here in a few years later if some
| other company becomes unpopular.
| bradley13 wrote:
| Easy to switch away from Google? We're techies, so we don't see
| a lot of what is going on. Turn off your blockers for ads and
| trackers. Look at the number of websites that have Google
| trackers. Look at where the ads come from. That doesn't even
| count search, and Google search has also become a platform for
| Google-driven ads. Add in YouTube and other Google properties,
| and "monopoly" is an understatement.
|
| A breakup would separate the major services: Google search,
| YouTube, the ad business (DoubleClick et al), etc.. However,
| even then, the ad business probably needs to be broken up
| further.
|
| This should all have been done much earlier, at least 5 and
| maybe even 10 years ago. Now Google is so entrenched that it
| will be difficult. One assumes that the government is more
| powerful than a corporation, but once you look into just how
| members of Congress so quicly become millionaires, well...
| trueismywork wrote:
| ATTs customers were phone users, hence it was difficult for
| them. Google's customers are ad companies, and for them,
| switching away from Google is impossible. By thinking of how
| easy it is for you to switch, you are not considering the
| correct customers. And this shows in your statement about
| better search engine, better search engine cannot come without
| customers (not you) having option to switch.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > Google's customers are ad companies, and for them,
| switching away from Google is impossible.
|
| Billions (probably trillions) of dollars are spent every year
| on advertising through other channels than Google, including
| online. Let's stick to reality.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| The challenge is ensuring that any changes foster genuine
| competition and innovation rather than just shifting the monopoly
| around.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| > The Chocolate Factory has appealed the Epic verdict and also
| plans to challenge the DoJ's victory.
|
| Is "Chocolate Factory" a typo?
| layer8 wrote:
| Maybe try a Google search? ;)
|
| http://wikibin.org/articles/mountain-view-chocolate-factory....
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2008/11/24/dziuba_on_yang/
| whoisthemachine wrote:
| What about "de-DoubleClicking" Google, iow, separating the ad
| business from the rest of Google/Alphabet? I'm not sure how that
| would work, but IMO what reduces the quality of Google products
| and noticeably makes them worse for consumers is that the
| products either improve ad dollars or they get cut/receive no
| funding.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I'm flumuxed that Google is the first tech company to be ruled a
| monopoly. I would put them fourth on the tech monopoly list,
| behind Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, in that order.
|
| I don't think there would be much benefit to society by breaking
| up google. Whereas I do think there would be great benefit to
| breaking up Apple or MS.
| tgv wrote:
| Apple doesn't match the description of a monopoly, as far as I
| can see. Amazon might. But Google is dominant. You could add
| Facebook to the monopolies, unless you think it shares the same
| space as Twitter.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| You generally cannot have friends as an American under 25
| without owning an iPhone. Outside of HN tech heads, regular
| young Americans use phones that "can send pictures that don't
| look like garbage!".
|
| I consider Apple by far the most insidious, since they
| leverage your friends and family against you to put heavy
| social penalties on not submitting. They then use this
| dominance to bend devs to their will, and take an egregious
| cut of their profits while doing it.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| WhatsApp offers very simple high quality image/video
| sharing. If you are being excluded by your friends, it's
| not because the image quality is bad. It's because they
| want to exclude you.
| merlindru wrote:
| Everyone already uses iMessage. It's like getting
| everyone in the EU to switch to Signal because Meta owns
| WhatsApp: it's impossible. There's not enough incentive
| to switch off of the current solution because the hurdles
| to doing so is getting everyone else to do so.
|
| If your family & friends use WhatsApp, they'll eventually
| be "pressured" by others to use iMessage, simply because
| the people that they know don't use WhatsApp.
|
| This effect cascades, and now everyone is back to
| <existing solution> since the "pain" that solution
| inflicts on a couple individuals is not nearly big enough
| to make everyone switch.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Why would I get a whatsapp when I already have a
| perfectly working messaging app? Everyone needs to
| download this random app because one kid is too broke to
| get an iphone?
|
| Some people are painfully unaware of what it looks like
| on the ground here...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Yes, if your friends and family are too lazy or unwilling
| to take 30 seconds to install a very widely used app for
| you, you are getting a valuable signal from them on where
| you rank in their social graph.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > I'm flumuxed that Google is the first tech company to be
| ruled a monopoly.
|
| Hum... I'm sure you've heard about that famous one called AT&T.
|
| Or Microsoft a decade later.
| xtracto wrote:
| If the US government didn't have the muscle to break up
| Microsoft, which had a pretty evident monopoly in the 90s, I
| am willing to bet they won't manage to put a dent to Google.
|
| Particularly given how more "friendlier" has turned for
| corporations in the last 30 years.
| asadotzler wrote:
| They had the muscle, just not the will.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| In their defense:
|
| - Microsoft's biggest monopoly candidate is Windows, and
| outside of business the PC space is too small for this to be as
| problematic as it once was
|
| - Apple's devices have competitors, although they are really
| bad about sucking people into their ecosystem and mistreating
| the outsiders
|
| - No one is forced to use Amazon, although they do have scummy
| tactics for their sellers I believe (you're not allowed to sell
| it cheaper elsewhere or something like that?).
|
| I'm sure similar arguments could be made for Google though.
| cptskippy wrote:
| Microsoft was arguably the first, the case fell apart and ended
| up a settlement because the Judge presiding over the case
| violated the court code of conduct by discussing the case with
| the media. Something laughable in 2024.
|
| That being said, the trial is the basis for the action taken
| against Google:
|
| > However, the Circuit Court did not overturn Jackson's
| findings of fact, and held that traditional antitrust analysis
| was not equipped to consider software-related practices like
| browser tie-ins.
|
| Another interesting outcome of the trail was that it
| established a playbook that others, namely Google, could follow
| to avoid antitrust litigation. I would argue that Google's
| ability to operate as a monopoly for so long was largely a
| result of the outcomes of the Microsoft trial.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I have no love for Google but, in light of the Google Graveyard,
| I am at a loss to see how to cut it up in a way where almost
| anything can remain profitable on its own.
|
| Imagine chopping Search and Ads out to be their own things.
|
| GoogAds turns into just another advertising company. Perhaps
| viable but uninteresting. GoogSearch, well, almost nobody wants
| to pay for search, so they seek some kind of way to get money,
| and the start up with the integrated ads, soon to result in what
| we have now. I used to run various Google Search Appliances, but
| they bailed out of that market.
|
| Peel off GMail? More than zero people want to pay for email, so
| you _might_ see something like a clunky Fastmail with a free tier
| and a pay tier. The free tier means ads again and you 're
| evolving to a Yahoo model. Ummm, nobody really wanted that.
|
| How about hardware? I dunno, are Pixels a loss leader for Google?
| I'll bow to someone else's insight on this, and I'm not really
| hip to the phone scene: are there a lot of "smartphones, we only
| make smartphones" companies?
|
| Google Docs and various officeware might stand on its own as a
| distant second to Microsoft. I know some people pay for that.
|
| Google Books, maaaaaaaaaaybe. It might stand on its own but here
| we just see people having to pay for what was once free.
|
| I just don't see anything interesting or stimulating coming out
| of carving up Google. Almost everything they did (it has been a
| while since I was "into" them) seemed focused on making things
| that were almost byproducts, wherein their real utility was
| feeding the search <-> advertising cycle.
| taeric wrote:
| Oddly, breaking it up may give some items a better chance at
| living? Ostensibly, one of the main drivers of that graveyard
| is the monorepo nature of how they rollout changes, combined
| with them moving people off of projects. Splitting them
| directly addresses both of those?
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Again, which items?
|
| Google Sets? Ain't nobody gonna pay for that! Chromecast?
| Google Domains? I am scrolling through the list and not
| seeing much that would stand on its own two feet. Stadia?
| Google+?
|
| I'm just not seeing much that can stand on its own, that
| people will pay for without it resorting to an ad model to
| support it.
| taeric wrote:
| I mean, some of the items that have been killed were
| actively used while they were getting killed? Such that
| they may not pay a lot, but that does not mean they won't
| pay.
|
| The problem with a lot of Google services is that they have
| to generate enough ad revenue to offset the high cost of
| development and maintenance that Google's operating style
| leads to. Ostensibly, you could have some of these stand on
| cheaper practices?
| elforce002 wrote:
| While we're at it, we need to break Microsoft and Amazon asap. I
| don't know how Microsoft is not up for discussion when it's a
| behemoth (GitHub, LinkedIn, Azure, Windows, Office, etc.). The
| same applies for Amazon.
| Someone wrote:
| > I don't know how Microsoft is not up for discussion when it's
| a behemoth
|
| Because we think interfering with the free market is necessary
| when a company misuses market power, not solely when it is a
| behemoth.
| jszymborski wrote:
| Public companies exist to enrich shareholders. If you are in
| a position to abuse your market power, you're sorta obligated
| to.
| aembleton wrote:
| But doing so increases risk from regulators
| jszymborski wrote:
| I think if you can get as big as Google, Apple, or
| Microsoft without being broken up, companies haven't much
| to worry about.
| lmpdev wrote:
| That's not my understanding
|
| The Gilded Age Trusts were brought down regardless as to
| whether they misused their power. It wasn't just oil.
|
| Monopolies are like a positive feedback loop which causes the
| market to diverge into a barely functional state
|
| It doesn't matter if they abused their market position,
| monopolies are to be corrected, mens rea present or not
| dmonitor wrote:
| Let's be real: Windows is practically a monopoly. They use it
| to push their online services in ridiculous ways. I doubt
| >10% of the current Edge userbase is through conscious
| decision. Teams obviously cannot compete on its own terms
| with any competitors, its prevalence only comes from being
| part of Microsoft's all in one office suite package that no
| individual company can compete with.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| I don't think it's true that Windows is a monopoly anymore.
| You could always get a mac. Most people I know use macs, in
| fact. I still use Windows but I'm in the minority. I tried
| going to Linux earlier but I still feel Windows has
| smoother performance.
| asadotzler wrote:
| Windows is 60-70% of US PC usage. Mac is 20-25%.
|
| Globally, it's even more lopsided with Windows at about
| 75% and Mac at about 15%.
|
| Hard to say Windows isn't a monopoly.
| tyree731 wrote:
| But Microsoft has misused their market power plenty of times,
| such as when they bundled Microsoft Teams with their
| enterprise contract at zero cost, destroying Slack's market
| value overnight.
| paxys wrote:
| Not just bundled, but force-installed Teams on every
| Windows computer.
| hbn wrote:
| Or how about the fact that basically no one uses Windows by
| choice, they use it because they need to for some app, and
| because of that Microsoft makes the entire OS constantly
| harass everyone to try and trick them into signing up for
| Microsoft services.
|
| Regularly I get an OS update that walks me through "setting
| up" my "new" PC I've had for 3 years, and it involves
| dodging dark pattern UIs to not sign up for Office or Xbox
| Game Pass or set Edge as my default browser. And even if I
| succeed, they'll probably have taught my computer a new way
| to try to sell me something.
|
| One update they added their horrible Copilot chatbot as an
| app to my taskbar, which I promptly unpinned. Then the next
| update they removed my "show desktop" button - which has
| been a consistent part of Windows for 15 years - and
| replaced it with ANOTHER COPILOT BUTTON. I had to look up
| online how to restore a basic navigation button that was
| replaced with an ad for their terrible new AI product.
| FMecha wrote:
| They tried to do this in 2000/2001, but it didn't result in a
| breakup.
| epolanski wrote:
| GitHub isn't making me use Azure, Azure isn't making me use
| Office, Teams isn't making me use Bing.
|
| See the point here? All of Google pieces are a giant machine to
| collude in the same direction: their ad engine.
| dekhn wrote:
| How does Google Cloud (I mean GCP, not Workspace) fit in to
| that idea?
|
| It's not particularly bundled to the ad engine.
| ffgtedggf wrote:
| Bad counter example. Have you tried using Google ads or
| analytics without using BigQuery? What about server
| containers (not the type of containers in the docker sense
| you're thinking of)? The data exfil costs for anything else
| tie you to gcp.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Amusing to me that we have a $3.5T company, and the solution is
| to break up it's only competitor to make it weaker and that
| company an even bigger monopoly.
| asadotzler wrote:
| The solution is to break them both up but you cannot do that at
| the same time because they are different kinds of monopolies
| that require separate government attention. Your assumption
| that we need to allow one megacorporation to get even more evil
| to take on another evil megacorporation is silly. End
| megacorporations instead of empowering them to maybe fight each
| other (or maybe just collude like in the $20B annual Safari
| search payment.)
| zuckerma wrote:
| There is no chance this happens.
| daft_pink wrote:
| It's true. If you look at the history, breaking up companies
| often results in each division doing well and maybe not an
| improvement as Youtube/Android/Search/Gmail/Adwords/Chrome all
| need to earn a profit independently.
|
| At a minimum, not having Google paying Firefox/Apple to promote
| them as the default is a good thing. It's super annoying that
| Safari doesn't allow me to switch to Kagi easily.
|
| I understand a reason they do this is to protect users like my
| father from adware/spyware companies putting in fake search
| engines, but I'm sure not getting money from Google to force a
| default has something to do with it as well.
| tantalor wrote:
| > super annoying that Safari doesn't allow me to switch to Kagi
|
| What does Apple not allowing you to set a custom search engine
| on iOS have to do with Google?
| daft_pink wrote:
| Google pays Apple $20 billion per year to be the default
| search engine. I assume they either have some say or Apple
| want to increase the value in paying or the other search
| engines pay to be listed or there is some reason why safari
| doesn't allow any search engines beyond a very short list. I
| doubt it's an accident that you only get about 5 choices
| where google is the only decent choice
| tantalor wrote:
| Those all sound like complaints the government could take
| up with Apple, not Google.
| koalaman wrote:
| I don't see how a Google breakup can be operationalized. There's
| just no way the company's stack can support it without decades of
| work. It'd be like dismembering a person and expecting all the
| pieces to go off and thrive.
| asadotzler wrote:
| Google's problem, not the government's.
| MongoTheMad wrote:
| break off chrome and enable AD block again.
| rockzom wrote:
| If Gmail isn't 5 dollars a month by 2030 I'll be shocked.
| riku_iki wrote:
| Gmail is super important source of ads targeting data. They
| won't kill it.
| layer8 wrote:
| Gmail is how many people get tied to Google; I doubt it.
| bhartzer wrote:
| Android should almost definitely be split off as a separate
| company.
|
| I could see Android and Chrome as a combined company.
| gigel82 wrote:
| Android and Chrome are not great examples. They already open
| source projects (or 99.9% based on open source AOSP and
| Chromium codebases), which themselves only survive because
| Google is funding tons of engineers to work on them.
|
| The cut should be in the vertical integration stacks. Like in
| Apple's case between the hardware and OS, between the OS and
| the App Store.
|
| In Google's case, their hardware is already open, they mostly
| keep apps in their walled garden (and take their 30% troll tax)
| with things like GooglePlay and other Google "services", not
| sure how that would be something to break apart.
|
| Realistically, the best outcome we can hope for is breaking Ads
| away from Search.
| summerlight wrote:
| The problem of so-called "break-up" option is that there are not
| many buyers who can afford operating those services (those costs
| at least billions every year even if those could be purchased for
| free) and those who can afford are already serious monopolists.
| Imagine MS buying Chrome, Meta buying AdWords, Apple buying
| Android etc etc. You probably don't want that.
|
| Other feasible way to avoid this would be keeping Google ads to
| subsidize them, but then what's the point of change? This is why
| the remedy should touch very specific illegal practices.
| Structural changes need proper legislation which targets the
| entire market. Otherwise, you'll just see balloon effects in
| action.
| pretext-1 wrote:
| It's a publicity traded company they don't need to be sold to
| be broken up. Each division retains its own value and
| shareholders get proportionate shares for the new stocks.
| tonymet wrote:
| Like US vs Microsoft, by the time a resolution arrives, it will
| be 10 years out of date. No one cared about IE bundling, and IE
| had already lost dominance.
|
| Search and web are dead media. in 10 years no one will care.
| layer8 wrote:
| The root of all the "evil" here is ads. I have no particular
| solutions to suggest -- though banning paid ads altogether sounds
| like a worthwhile idea, apart from the definitional difficulties
| -- but I believe that's the aspect that needs to be tackled one
| way or the other.
| amyamyamy2 wrote:
| what happened to employees at companies that were broken up in
| the past? do they generally just leave to competitors?
| missedthecue wrote:
| I think we need a better term than monopoly, that separates it
| from what people usually mean which is 'the best product'. I
| literally cannot think of any sort of product or service with
| lower switching costs than internet search. Typing bing.com takes
| 0.8 seconds and costs $0. Hundreds of orders of magnitude easier
| than switching to a different railroad if only one goes through
| your town.
|
| Google is a big ass company and enjoys outsized market share
| because people choose to use it. Everyone who buys a MacBook or
| Surface computer or smartphone does one thing immediately and
| that's to download Chrome. It's literally the first thing people
| voluntarily choose to do after powering on the device for the
| first time.
|
| I'm not sure why we need government interference here which in
| all likelihood would change no customer behaviour but probably
| just add a few extra clicks in front of the Chrome downloading
| process.
|
| When Alphabet begins doing something like banning Google Fiber
| customers from accessing bing.com, that will be interesting. But
| there honestly very minimal anti-competitive behaviour like that
| happening at the moment.
| ossyrial wrote:
| > Google is a big ass company and enjoys outsized market share
| because people choose to use it.
|
| If this were true, Google could make the immediate and easy
| decision to increase their annual profits by $26 _billion_ , by
| simply stopping to pay browser vendors to make Google the
| default search engine.
| https://untested.sonnet.io/Defaults+Matter%2C+Don't+Assume+C...
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| The person didn't say "all people choose it no matter what".
|
| The statement is true as written.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > because people choose to use it.
|
| Incorrect.
|
| Google spent ungodly amounts of money to make sure that their
| search engine was the default in as many places as possible.
| People didn't "choose" to use it, they use the defaults.
|
| And in some cases, like my Android phone, google is the only
| option for integrated searches. I cannot use another search
| engine without opening a browser then opening up the search
| engine of choice.
|
| Monopoly may not be the right term, but anticompetitive is.
| They outspent every other search provider to make sure their
| product was used. They paid off apple to not develop a search
| engine and instead use theirs as a default. These are things in
| the court documents which caused the ruling to go against them.
| sushid wrote:
| You are literally agreeing with the parent commenter. It's
| anticompetitive but not a monopoly. The parent is also
| talking about Chrome, not Google Search.
| cogman10 wrote:
| I never said I disagreed with their entire comment, I was
| responding to the statements saying "switching search
| engines is easy and google is obviously the superior
| product that's why it's used instead of bing.com".
|
| That should have been clear from my comment and if you look
| at other comments in this thread you'll see others
| interpreted the parent comment similarly.
|
| I suggest you read others comments more charitably.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| Google is offering a free browser, while making a good browser
| costs money. They are subsidising that by their huge ad-
| business.
|
| And by no surprise, their browser is the only major one that
| has no privacy protection features and last month decided to
| abandon the plan to deprecate cookies and tracking.
|
| That browser is competing with someone like Opera (used to be a
| paid for product) and Mozilla in an unfair way, because Google
| is killing others by making it free and taking the loss.
| tim333 wrote:
| Yeah but there's no great shortage of competing free
| browsers.
| sushid wrote:
| But Opera and Firefox and others are all free browsers as
| well. I agree with the parent commenter that its not exactly
| a monopoly in the traditional sense. It's not even the
| default browser on Mac or Windows.
| dwattttt wrote:
| > Opera and Firefox and others are all free browsers as
| well
|
| And yet browser development costs money. If browsers cost
| money, you could make a better product and compete by
| selling it, but when an incumbent is giving theirs away for
| free?
| xp84 wrote:
| Yes! The situation that has been our world since MSIE
| went free over 25 years ago.
| xp84 wrote:
| > last month decided to abandon the plan to deprecate cookies
| and tracking
|
| Make no mistake, all that original plan was about was about
| applying pain to everybody else in the advertising world,
| while their replacement for cookies would have been
| satisfactory only at Google's scale. The whole thing was
| Google astroturfing, taking advantage of everyone's ignorance
| of how the Internet works to further entrench their
| advertising monopoly.
|
| I don't know why they aborted the plan, but I suspect
| regulators had caught on that it wasn't altruism but Anti-
| competitiveness that motivated it.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> and costs $0._
|
| But then you're not the customer, you're the product, as they
| say. What is the cost to the actual customer to transition to
| an alternative?
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| 0. The transition to bing from google costs 0.
| ukblewis wrote:
| Or all of their investment? Considering that very few end-
| users use Bing, ditching Google is like ditching the
| internet for much of their target audience, at least, most
| likely
| georgeecollins wrote:
| Just have to say this again even if everyone already knows it:
| If the US Government / EU hadn't threatened Microsoft they
| would have embedded their browser in Windows and tied it to the
| OS to the extent where normal people would only use their
| browser. I don't know if Google could exist in that alternate
| world, but I suspect Microsoft would have "deprived them of
| Oxygen" and they would be bought or crushed.
|
| You probably can't stop Google from being the most popular
| search (or don't want to) but you should be able to stop Google
| from using the popularity of their product to crush alternative
| ad tech. Or crush some new tech we don't realize will be
| important.
| __loam wrote:
| Google is so critically important to the infrastructure of
| the internet itself that I really struggle to understand why
| a for profit entity with incentives that are not aligned to
| the public should be in charge of the most important search
| engine.
| m463 wrote:
| > Google is a big ass company and enjoys outsized market share
| because people choose to use it.
|
| but not really. the situation is similar to auto-voting the
| incumbent in every goverment election each november.
|
| that is not ok.
| bedhead wrote:
| There needs to be some remedy for these handful of companies
| that manage to break the game like they reached the kill screen
| in Pac Man.
| linotype wrote:
| They just paid Reddit to shut off access to other
| companies/search engines. How is that not anti-competitive?
| seydor wrote:
| I think forcing google to break the buy side from the sell side
| of advertising is the most obvious and probably beneficial way to
| break it apart. This should have never happened in the first
| place , and similar things should be happening to other bigTech.
| Advertising money is the lifeblood of this industry
| bdw5204 wrote:
| With search, there are actually 2 different products. The index
| itself is a textbook natural monopoly. There's no upside in
| having more than 1 web crawler as long as it can be trusted to
| just crawl the web but there's plenty of downside in the form of
| increased bandwidth costs for web sites. The actual search
| rankings are where competition makes sense. So spin the Google
| search index off as a non-profit that makes its product available
| at a reasonable cost to anybody who wants to run a search engine.
|
| Then you spin off the rest of Google as separate companies.
| Android/Pixel, Google Ads/Analytics, Youtube, Chrome,
| Gmail/Docs/Drive and Maps/Cloud would all be separate businesses.
| Chrome would likely be best spunoff as a non-profit as well,
| operating an open source web browser project.
|
| Of course, if you're going to break up Google you also have to
| break up the rest of FAANG too or they're just going to step
| right into the space vacated by Google and probably buy up the
| Baby Googles[0]. Apple would probably need to be broken up into a
| hardware company, a software company and a services company.
| Amazon would need to be broken up into AWS, Amazon Shopping and
| Prime Video. You could arguably even break Amazon Shopping up
| into the online store and the logistics company. Microsoft would
| need to be broken up into Windows, Office, Xbox, Bing and Azure.
| Xbox would then itself need to be broken up to unwind all of its
| purchases of independent video game companies. If you're breaking
| up Xbox, you also have to do the same with Playstation (spinning
| them loose from Sony and unwinding their own acquisitions). It
| might also be a great idea to then do the same with major 3rd
| party video game companies like EA, basically unwinding all of
| their acquisitions. Meta would need to be broken up into
| Facebook, Oculus, Instagram, WhatsApp and Meta Ads.
|
| Once you start breaking up Google, you open up Pandora's box and
| basically have to keep going until you break up the entire tech
| sector. That's why it is so tricky to do it. Once you're done
| with tech, it'd be a good idea to look at other sectors such as
| health care, Hollywood and the news media where consolidation has
| been rampant over the past few decades.
|
| [0]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Bell_Operating_Compan...
| cogman10 wrote:
| > The index itself is a textbook natural monopoly.
|
| I would argue that because of this, the index itself should be
| something operated by the public rather than privately. This is
| especially true because it's within the best interests of the
| public to have an archive of the internet. The wayback machine
| currently supports that and it's on its last legs.
|
| Index the internet with a public search API, then let future
| search engines hit that an optimize based on internal
| algorithms to get better results.
| kajecounterhack wrote:
| > the index itself should be something operated by the public
| rather than privately
|
| I love this but the act of indexing the web is both complex
| and ever-evolving (not to mention expensive), so the market
| needs to have natural incentives for the public crawler to
| continue being good at its job. Google is incentivized to
| have a great index because it feeds into its competitive
| advantage. If the index is a shared resource, what incentive
| does the indexing company have to keep improving it? And what
| guarantees that the indexing company's strategy doesn't end
| up being unfair to those affected by their websites getting
| indexed?
|
| All search companies would have to maintain secondary indices
| to augment the public one. There's probably some artificial
| structure needed to make open indexing viable.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > what incentive does the indexing company have to keep
| improving it?
|
| A publicly owned asset doesn't need to be managed by a
| private entity. The incentive can be exactly the same
| incentive that the NHS and NASA operate on. It's a fun
| problem that you can make a career on making better that is
| ultimately a public good. Not everything needs to be
| operated with pure profits in mind.
|
| > And what guarantees that the indexing company's strategy
| doesn't end up being unfair to those affected by their
| websites getting indexed?
|
| Voting/lobbying/etc. Though I'd assume everyone that makes
| a website will want to be indexed.
| ratorx wrote:
| NHS is a pretty terrible example. Since it relies on
| public funding without a direct monetary profit, it is an
| easy target for defunding when the government needs to
| cut expenses. And lo and behold that is exactly what has
| happened.
|
| I'm not saying privatisation is better (US healthcare is
| the textbook counter-example), but just wanted to make
| the point that socialising something has demonstrably not
| been a good way to drive innovation and improvement in
| some cases.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| The idea that we'd want any type of government entity running
| search is absurd on several dimensions.
| cogman10 wrote:
| It's only absurd if it's ran as a public-private
| cooperative. The government directly running something like
| this can be every bit as efficient as what any private
| entity could do.
|
| It's not as if the gov doesn't already employ in several
| sectors skilled software developers. It only goes haywire
| when Reagan/Clinton style "Send it to the private
| businesses" policies get in the way.
|
| When you start talking about a constrained resource like
| this, it only makes sense to move it to the only entity
| without profit as its primary motivation.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| > The index itself is a textbook natural monopoly.
|
| That is clearly not true. Marginalia has a different index than
| Kagi, which has a different index than Google. You are somewhat
| making the assumption that there is some perfect index that
| works for everyone, when the market shows there is a need for
| different indices for different users.
| schott12521 wrote:
| I can't begin to imagine what this world would look like, but I
| can keep dreaming...
|
| I think splitting up Maps from Google/Apple would make
| OpenStreetMaps see a lot more usage and improvements.
|
| Amazon Shopping should absolutely be split into an online store
| and a logistics company.
|
| I'd like to see something even more radical when splitting up
| Infrastructure (AWS / GCP / Azure), such as the Government
| offering Infrastructure similar to the Postal Service,
| effectively turning AWS / GCP / Azure into Fedex / UPS.
| cut3 wrote:
| Separate ads from them.
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