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> Wouldn't breaking up Google into companies with complete control over their respective markets not really achieve the desired goal? As I understand, the desi
by pgcj_poster 8y ago
> Wouldn't breaking up Google into companies with complete control over their respective markets not really achieve the desired goal?
As I understand, the desired goal is to stop the dominant player in one domain (search) from getting an unfair competitive advantage in another (advertising backends). It might also be true that allowing one company to have complete dominance in a particular domain stifles competition within that domain, but that's a seperate problem.
> Admittedly, I wasn't around at the time, but what use was breaking up Ma-bell into the sub companies, from a choice perspective? I certainly understand that from a telephony devices perspective, consumer choice drastically increased, since third parties could now make telephones, but you still ended up with local monopolies for all of the fractured components.
I know nothing at all about this particular topic, but I have two immediate thoughts:
1. It would be easier to break a monopoly held by a company that made just one component, because once you finished your replacement for that component, you'd be able to ship a product, whereas if one company had a monopoly on every component, you'd need to make replacements for every component.
2. I don't find "It might stay just as bad as it is now" to be a very strong criticism if the alternative is doing nothing.
> Also, how is search's integration into other products harmful in all circumstances? It's extremely convenient that typing the name of a restaurant into Google search gives me reviews, the menu, directions, etc.
Sure, but Duckduckgo does those things as well and doesn't own any products that do those things. Whereas there are some google products that seem really tightly coupled, like Drive and Docs that I can't really imagine working as well if they came from different companies. As for harming consumers, I was mostly thinking about search data → advertising.