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So if Google is a monopoly, what should be done about it? Split it up into separate, competing mini-Googles? Keep fining them more and more money until they sto

• amerine 8y ago
  Ignoring the cynic in me that tells me that nothing will change, makes me think that the right answer is probably less to do with breaking apart or changing google but more likely the establishment of personal data privacy rights in the US. Once it’s more expensive to collect everything about us, companies like google will have a hard time. I don’t think we’d realistically introduce laws like this until the citizens united decision is overturned. Until then the US political system is owned by the rich.
  • paulpauper 8y ago
    I don't see what the problem with google collecting my information is. You are more likely to have your data leaked by a careless or vengeful webmaster after visiting a small personal website than a massive corporate website like google.com. If you visit any website , your IP can be logged.
    • binomialxenon 8y ago
      If I visit a "small personal website" such as a blog, they're not going to know much more about me than my IP address, which pages I viewed, and possibly an inbound link ID. One of the big things I find scary about Google is the sheer centralization of data. For a typical user of Google services, Google will have their complete browsing and search history, including "incognito", 24/7/365 location history, hundreds of voice recordings (perhaps some taken without user intent), advertisement tracking data, the complete email inbox and outbox, IM history, Android application history, documents and other files stored on Drive, contacts, possibly call and text history, and thousands of photographs (including ones intended to be private). There's a lot of harm one could do against a person with that kind of information.
• ProAm 8y ago
  Im pretty sure this is why Alphabet was formed, they sort of split themselves up as a preventative measure.
  • neap24 8y ago
    I've always been curious about that. Is a parent company + subsidiaries immune from anti-trust laws in the US? I mean, I'm sure Alphabet still shares Google search data across its subsidiaries--which is the real monopoly power concern.
    • fixermark 8y ago
      It's probably a lot less about anti-trust and a lot more about bankruptcy protection. With the companies logically divided, Alphabet can choose devote $XYZ money to some specific initiative and have a guarantee that they're liable for AT MOST that much money. If the sub-company completely mis-manages its assets and goes belly-up, its failure doesn't impact e.g. Google or Waymo (in any deeper way than opportunity cost of the money going to the other sub-company instead of those). Bankruptcy responsibility stops at the owning company and doesn't trickle up to the assets of the company that owns that company, in general. It's a common pattern for movie studios---Hollywood studios build out a short-lived company to own every film production to insulate themselves from liability and financial disaster.
  • devmunchies 8y ago
    Well android, maps, gmail, cloud, youtube are all still under Google so not really.
    • nashashmi 8y ago
      Structurally, youtube and cloud co have their own CEOs. And they all make money. so they can be split from the rest of the company.
  • JKCalhoun 8y ago
    I think they did it for investors, not for the sake of regulators. Investors were, I think, beginning to get a little tired of Google's string of goofy product flops — investors wanted Google to focus on what makes it money: ads.
• thekingofh 8y ago
  There's nothing objectively wrong with a large company unless they begin to squash competition with regulatory lock-in. This is what led to the breakup of AT&T/Bell. As far as I can tell, Google doesn't keep others out of the search market through any other means than just being better than the other guys. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I certainly haven't seen any shortage of search engines and alternative cloud services providers.
  • lovich 8y ago
    They routinely put their other products on top of the search pages, such as Google reviews over Yelp or Google maps over OpenMap results. The issue isn't even so much as Google is dominating search, because they have been providing a better product in almost all cases until recently. The issue is that they are using their dominance in search to try and dominate other markets
    • TomMarius 8y ago
      It's their product after all; do you point people to your competition from your product? Everyone is free to use anything else. Anti-competitive would be if you couldn't use anything else.
      • xg15 8y ago
        "Your product" is something completely different if you're a mom-and-pop shop or startup or if you have 90% market share. This is why antitrust exists and what arguments like this always seem to ignore.
        • TomMarius 8y ago
          Can you be more specific, what exactly is and when exactly it becomes different?
          • xg15 8y ago
            In short, network effects. Longer: the amount of power their decisions have to affect society. If the mom-and-pop shop would refuse to serve readheads, that's (mostly) their decision. If Google decided to lock redheads out of their accounts, or block from using Chrome, Android or Search, those people would have serious disadvantages simply going around their daily life.
• avar 8y ago
  > Keep fining them more and more money > until they stop anti-competitive practices? I believe you're referring to the EU's fines against Google here. In that case that's pretty much the only weapon the EU has. They can ultimately deny Google market access to the EU, and argue that case at the WTO, or seize Google's assets in the EU, but they can't decide to split up a US-based legal entity.
  • trhway 8y ago
    Due to various double sandwiches there a lot of non US Googles with good assets to go after.
  • tobias3 8y ago
    The EU also cannot prevent Google from buying US startups, furthering they monopoly position. And US startups get more funding because they might be bought by Google.
• acover 8y ago
  Technology often leads to a natural monopoly as it has high fixed costs and low variable costs. One way I can see changing this dynamic is using open source services. That way anyone is able to clone, improve or change them. Provide consumer choice. However businesses are aiming for monopolies. Crowd funding and open source might change the dynamic. It's probably too late for search as the lead is too far. I also doubt most people care to solve a problem before it happens.
  • komali2 8y ago
    Even if everything about search was open source, how would an upstart competitor possibly compete on the hardware front? A single Google-style data center would imo be an insurmountable capital cost.
    • fixermark 8y ago
      They could start on Google Cloud and work their way out from there. ;)
      • HillaryBriss 8y ago
        if there were an anti-trust court case, maybe a court would decide that Google is required to allow, say, a restaurant review site, to use Google Cloud on an equal footing with Google's own restaurant review service. it reminds me of the decision where ATT was ultimately required to allow user-owned telephones to connect to its wired network. (in earlier times, ATT only let phones leased from and owned by ATT to connect to its network)
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • briandear 8y ago
      You could say the same about shipping companies, airlines or car companies. Yet, competition is everywhere despite high capital costs. Even space exploration has competition. High capital costs aren’t anti-competitive.
• nugget 8y ago
  If you required Google to license either their algorithmic search index or their search ad marketplace to other companies, it would have a dramatic effect on the competitive dynamics of the search market worldwide.
  • fixermark 8y ago
    Would it? Is the algorithm the source of value or the massive store of data harvested over a decade and stored globally in myriad datacenters?
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  • jacksmith21006 8y ago
    Google has never charged a cent in royalities. They give away much of their IP through papers in the past and now actual software. Which is what we should hope for and makes zero sense to then penalize Google for simply providing a better product. Heck Google gave Amazon Android to build the Echo and Dot and show and fire, etc. Amazon even turned around and banned competing Google products from their marrket place.
• zjaffee 8y ago
  This is how they would do it. When Microsoft ware being ruled against for anti trust, they would have forced them to split the operating systems business from the rest of their product businesses. My guess would be that google would get broken up in a way that separated things that were strategically vertically integrated, say, search+android (their big platforms for directing you at their services) and things like youtube, maps, ect. which are services to be consumed.
  • Aunche 8y ago
    Technically, it would almost be easier to rewrite Google from scratch than to split it up. Google is a giant monorepo, so anything can depend on anything else. Also, all their services run on the same data centers.
  • briandear 8y ago
    How does splitting Google benefit the consumer? Is the consumer being harmed right now? Are they being price gouged or forced to use inferior products?
    • xvector 8y ago
      It benefits the consumer by creating two or more highly competitive organizations, thus leading to a breeding ground of growth and innovation. This is the basis of all antitrust laws.
    • zjaffee 8y ago
      The need to break up monopolies isn't about the consumers as much as it is about having a competitive marketplace, where other businesses didn't have to struggle against googles ability to self promote itself. Markets work best when companies can compete on as close to equal terms as possible (which these days we only really see during the emergence of a new industry).
    • stuckinarut 8y ago
      > or forced to use inferior products? Potentially, yes. Google abuses their search monopoly and ads duopoly to kill off competition in other areas. They use their browser control to control internet standards. They do things like effectively kill RSS via EEE style tactics.
• nashashmi 8y ago
  Forcing the search business to open up and be overseen and governed by a transparent boardroom is probably the best way to go about it. Since search has 90% market share and creates 90% of revenue, it needs to be both made into a standards organization and separated from google sufficiently enough that Google begins to pay better attention to the profitability and development of the other products and other bets.
• turc1656 8y ago
  It's not complicated. But for some reason everyone misses the obvious. You go after the people responsible for taking these actions, not the "company" itself as an ethereal creation. If someone (or multiple people, as here) are in violation of Title 15, they are committing felonies according to the law. These felonies happen to be punishable by up to 10 years in prison, in addition to steep fines. However, the fines for the people who would be found guilty wont' make a dent so it won't deter them. Which is why you send them to jail. And, BTW, that's 10 years per count. If, for example these people are found guilty of multiple violations, send them to jail for a decade for each violation. Problem solved. No executives would be engaging in this activity anymore. And Title 15 definitely, absolutely supports the prosecution of both companies as entities and the individuals behind it. It also makes the mere attempt to monopolize any aspect of trade or business a felony. You don't even have to succeed - you just need to try to fuck people over. Also, it should be noted that harm does not need to be proved under this law. This was by design because the original architects of these antitrust laws recognized that prices could actually be lower because 1) they can afford to seek lower profit margins due to size/scale or that 2) these large companies can subsidize a business unit with a more profitable one to destroy competitors in the other. This is the tactic Amazon is using. Amazon has small profits margins when you look at the company as a whole. If you look at the retail business, which is what they are most famous for, they have staggering losses every quarter, usually to the tune of 15-20% for that massive business unit. If they didn't have their other business units they would be force to raise product prices and fees substantially just to break even, let alone profit. What Amazon is doing in this regard is supposedly illegal. Like blatantly, black-letter-law illegal - and has been for around 100 years. Yet no one is prosecuting them. That doesn't even touch upon the crap they do with sales taxes and determining nexus. And let's not forget that for anything Amazon sells on its own marketplace they won't face their marketplace fees, which usually are around 15%. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/2 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/2 "Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $100,000,000 if a corporation, or, if any other person, $1,000,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding 10 years, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court." And the term "person" includes both companies/entities as well as people. "The term “person” means a natural person or an organization." https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?width=840&height=800&iframe=true&def_id=15-USC-991716523-852328090&term_occur=7&term_src=title:15:chapter:1:section:2 https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?width=840... Send these pricks to jail.
• casabarata 8y ago
  What if nobody has to do anything about it. Being a monopoly is a matter of perspective.
• stuckinarut 8y ago
  > Split off Maps/Android/Drive/etc into separate companies so that Google can't use their search monopoly to dominate those fields? That's what I want.