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50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust investigation of Google
- ihuman 7y agoI had to replace the "50" in the title with "All" since HN doesn't allow titles that begin with a number. Hopefully this doesn't count as editorializing the title, and is allowed. Edit: put "50" back in the title. In this case, the number isn't there to make a clickbait title.
- gamblor956 7y agoIt's not actually 50 states though...
- mieseratte 7y agoTFA says it's 50, you have a source to counter?
- lmkg 7y agoIt says "50 US States and Territories." The most natural parsing is that 50 entities are investigating, and some of those entities are states and some are territories. It's possible to parse it as saying all 50 states as well as (some) territories, although this phrasing would be awkward. If the former parsing is correct, then the number of states is less than 50, with the remainder being territories. For the life of me, I cannot find anything in the article which lets me figure out who is actually investigating.
- mieseratte 7y ago> The most natural parsing is that 50 entities are investigating That's now how I parsed it at all. > For the life of me, I cannot find anything in the article which lets me figure out who is actually investigating. Perhaps we should find another source to corroborate instead of wildly speculating.
- cabaalis 7y agoThe confusion is that there are 50 states, and generally Americans do not know how many US territories there are. So "50 states" is understood as "all states," even though it could be 35 states and 15 territories for all we know. The 50 states part carries so much weight that one's mind may interpret it as "50 US States and X territories" with an implied X.
- SllX 7y agoTechnically says 50 States and Territories, but I can’t read past that because of the paywall so there’s maybe up to 5 territories which are also investigating and maybe up to 5 US States which are not investigating at all. Or alternatively, all US States really are investigating and it was purely an editorial decision to say “50 States and territories”. I’m open to that possibility because I’m cynical about this particular source’s writing and editorial style and wouldn’t put it past them even when they have the facts of the matter largely correct. But, paywall.
- ihuman 7y agoRight now, the article doesn't specify which states and/or territories they are. It says it, "is a developing story and will be updated," so the page may list them in the future.
- SllX 7y agoThanks mate. 50 State-level governments no matter what the exact mix is, makes this a huge story. I would be interested to see what the State omissions are, if any, more out of morbid curiosity than anything because you don’t often see any 50 States and/or Territories do anything in concert like this.
- SllX 7y agoFound the answer in another source. 48 States, the two that opted out are California and Alabama. DC and Puerto Rico are participating in the probe however. https://www.nationalreview.com/news/attorneys-general-for-48-states-open-sweeping-anti-trust-probe-into-google/ https://www.nationalreview.com/news/attorneys-general-for-48...
- nabnob 7y ago>A bipartisan coalition of 48 states along with Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia said Monday it is investigating whether Google’s search and advertising business is engaged in monopolistic behavior. >California and Alabama are the two states that haven’t joined an investigation into Google’s market dominance. https://www.apnews.com/042b0989b2404c34a57e8ff9c8bbd0db https://www.apnews.com/042b0989b2404c34a57e8ff9c8bbd0db
- Tomte 7y agoYou can edit the number back in afterwards (and that's the official solution), but this rewriting by the HN software is still obnoxious.
- ihuman 7y agoThanks, I didn't know that.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ocdtrekkie 7y agoNext time I'd recommend use of the word "Fifty" in this case. Which doesn't work if the number your article starts with is 53,295, but works great for a short number like 50. It maintains the accuracy, as someone pointed out "all" may not be true here.
- izacus 7y agoIronically... reported by a source that bans us Europeans because they can't stop breaking GDPR. -_- Any other source for this news?
- dgzl 7y agoGDPR is hard and I don't blame a business from simply refusing to comply and narrowing their audience.
- rubbingalcohol 7y agoTell your MEP to stop passing dumb laws, but here's an archive link: http://archive.is/25rzP http://archive.is/25rzP
- blub 7y agoThe GDPR is widely-considered to be the state of the art privacy law, and other countries (including states in the US) are drawing inspiration from it.
- rubbingalcohol 7y agoI have no budget to be able to comply with GDPR, my web apps are barely break-even as it is. I don't even cater to EU citizens, and even though I don't do anything shady with personal information, I'm still at risk of running afoul of some regulator in some far off country. So my choice is to keep running this risk or just block all European IP addresses. IMO that's not really "state of the art," and the more countries / provinces / municipalities that pass their own convoluted regulations the more risk it puts me under as a small business owner. The net result is only huge companies have any hope of being able to afford the compliance costs with all of this bullshit.
- freehunter 7y agoEh... if you don't do business in Europe and don't target EU citizens, you don't need to worry about GDPR. It only applies if you sell to EU citizens or ship products to Europe or in some way advertise that your company does business in Europe. [1] The regulation is definitely state-of-the-art in terms of end user privacy, even if some companies don't have a state-of-the-art response to the challenges it poses. [1] https://gdpr.eu/companies-outside-of-europe/ https://gdpr.eu/companies-outside-of-europe/
- williesleg 7y agoSounds like Google needs to transfer $1 billion in Bitcoin out someplace
- hguant 7y agoSo, is this all 50 States, plus assorted territories, or a total of 50 States and territories? If the latter, who isn't taking part? The article links to a piece from a week ago saying that half the US State's AGs were taking part in the investigation. Looking forward to hearing more about how broad this is.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- i_am_proteus 7y agoThe title is slightly confusing. According to AP,[0] current participants are 48 States, Washington DC, and Puerto Rico. California and Alabama are not involved. [0] https://www.apnews.com/042b0989b2404c34a57e8ff9c8bbd0db https://www.apnews.com/042b0989b2404c34a57e8ff9c8bbd0db
- partialrecall 7y agoI can't say California surprises me, but I wonder what the deal with Alabama is.
- zer0faith 7y agoThis is why http://www.madeinalabama.com/2018/04/google-kicks-off-construction-on-alabama-data-center/ http://www.madeinalabama.com/2018/04/google-kicks-off-constr...
- ssalka 7y ago>100 jobs
- rtkwe 7y agoYeah but it'll also provide some good money to businesses during construction too.
- peterebailey 7y agoGoogle has datacenters in other states, too.
- RandomTisk 7y agoAre we so far gone that we can't even expect the largest state by population and GDP to help police it's own mega corps to the benefit of the rest of the country? No doubt Google represents a massive chunk of Democrat donations... it's rather alarming that California is just sitting this out.
- smush 7y agoWhile this is a far shorter list than Luther's 95 theses, I will post this here while I run to get popcorn to see just how Google gets out of this. Sample arguably anti-competitive actions Google has taken: 1. Turning off XMPP federation in Google Talk, moving from an open standard to an archipelago of walled gardens (Hangouts, Allo, GChat, Hangouts again, Messages/RCS that the carriers are gonna give up to Google to host(!?)) 2. Killing Windows Phone by not allowing any Google-based apps on the platform (https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/14/15970082/google-killed-windows-phone-not-iphone https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/14/15970082/google-killed-wi...) 3. Posting map/weather/review content straight to SERPs starving MapQuest/WU/Yelp et al from getting clicks 4. Anyone not browsing on Chrome gets an upsell to install Chrome (MS got roasted for this with Windows Media & best used on IE) 5. Degrading services on competing browsers/platforms via things like U2F in Firefox, slow/wontfix polyfills (https://www.computerworld.com/article/3389882/former-mozilla-exec-alleges-google-torpedoed-firefox-with-oops-excuses.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3389882/former-mozilla...) There are probably more entries to list, and these are complex issues being reduced to a sentence or two, but I've tried to not post things that are not immediately anti-competitive even if I don't like 'em (Google+ forced integration which resulted in me still not commenting on YouTube all these years later, RIP Google Reader)
- enitihas 7y agoI am not sure your list demonstrates anti-competitve behaviour: 1. Did Apple ever offer a XMPP federated iMessage? Facebook offered XMPP messenger? Shall Google bear the eternal burden of keeping their products constant, and not make changes they think are better(even if they are worse overall). 2. When did we have iTunes on windows Phone either? Even Office came for Android and iOS only when the fate of Windows phone was sealed. Lots of developers didn't develop for Windows phone. Shall those be investigated too? (Yes yes, MSFT did make a youtube app, but google has full liberty to decide which platforms they want to make apps for). 4. Now MSFT even specifically tells you that Edge is a better browser in Windows during all sorts of things(while changing default browser, I think while downloading other browsers too). Also iOS will always remind you Safari is there, as it is the default browser and that can't be changed.
- 7y ago
- nafey 7y agoWhat is expected outcome of this? Can Google be expected to be broken up like Bell Corp?
- ProAm 7y agoI think this would be good for everyone. But Bell corp was broken up not only for the monopoly but also because the government essentially created and subsequently funded the monopoly. At the time it was needed (arguably so) to create a reliable nationwide communication network, Im not sure how much the government had a hand in Google.
- blihp 7y agoA breakup is highly unlikely IMO. Not only has the U.S. govt not been keen to break up monopolies in the last ~30 years, but it actually let AT&T reconstitute itself by re-acquiring most (all?) of the former baby Bells ~20 years after breaking them up. In addition, the current administration has taken an absolutely anti-regulation approach if you get/stay in their good graces. I suspect that something closer to a toothless consent decree with certain <cough> accommodations to the administration would make this all go away. Not saying it's right, just that it seems the most likely.
- cameronbrown 7y agoNone of the tech companies are in the US administration's good graces right now if Trump is to be believed: https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1163478770587721729 https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/11634787705877217... Similar comments about most of the tech industry can also be found on his Twitter.
- blihp 7y agoRight, my point exactly. Now given what we've already seen from this administration, imagine Alphabet/Google took the path of least resistance and gave the administration what they want. What is the likely outcome of the antitrust situation then?
- 7y ago
- buharags 7y agoThanks
- sjs382 7y ago50 of [US States & Territories] 48 states are included, all except for California and Alabama.
- simplecomplex 7y agoWhat is the suspected antitrust violation? > Their concerns ran from the way Google processes and ranks search results to the extent to which it protects users’ personal information. Ranking search results isn't anti-competitive and protecting user information isn't relevant to antitrust. Ranking search results is the service a search engine provides. Google doesn't stop other search engines from competing in the search space.
- aviraldg 7y agoIt would be quite amusing to see engineers trying to explain search algorithms to politicians and lawyers, I admit. Not as amusing as the questions they might ask or the solutions they might suggest, though.
- PeterStuer 7y agoAntitrust hit Microsoft's corporate culture to the core. It had a dramatic effect on the company and it's leadership. I wonder whether a serious and prolonged litigation will affect Google as deeply a well.
- smush 7y agoPossibly. I started writing this comment and then ran out of insights to make, but the rough draft is posted below since I already typed it out and it's not utter drivel, if not that deep. Speaking as a layman, the MS corporate culture, at least viewed through the lens of PR releases, system documentation, and MS press tech books through the years somewhat fuzzily expresses the corporate culture. The first books I became aware of were from the 9x era when an ascendant Microsoft was eating Be/Amiga/Apple/Sun and everyone else's breakfast lunch and dinner in the desktop space. Things either worked Microsoft's way, or not at all. Post anti-trust, MS suddenly was markedly open to doing things with inter-operability (which ~= backwards-compatibility) in mind, as long as you used primarly Microsoft's product offerings and kept the unwashed masses of Linux away in a closet somewhere. These days, the culture seems to be a similar idea, but the product offering has moved up the stack from OS, RDBMS, or AD forest to CI/CD pipeline, compute cloud platform, and Office suite. We love Linux and open source, by the way have you tried our new Azure cloud?
- the_duke 7y agoInteresting, do you have some links exploring this topic further?
- macintux 7y agoThis is a too-brief but interesting oral history: https://www.theringer.com/tech/2018/5/18/17362452/microsoft-antitrust-lawsuit-netscape-internet-explorer-20-years https://www.theringer.com/tech/2018/5/18/17362452/microsoft-... Gates was a business shark before the trial. Absolutely ruthless. It’s hard to say how much of the changes are due to the court case, vs a changing technical landscape, vs the company growing to an enormous size, vs Gates simply getting older, but certainly after there were far fewer stories about his passion for crushing any company that might compete with him. And promising to support Office on the Mac after Jobs returned to Apple definitely smells of a response to anti-trust concerns, and it was critical at that point in time to Apple.
- JaceLightning 7y agoWhy Google and not Apple? Apple is worth more, and is extremely anticompetitive. You have to buy and sell apps in their app store. Apple charges a base 30%. All apps must be approved by Apple. And Apple has a history of removing apps from their app store only to release their own clone of the same app!
- smush 7y ago> Why Google and not Apple? It took the various levels of government about 15 years to catch on that all was not well with Google. Apple will not skate by forever, but at the moment there are more egregious fish to fry.
- zaroth 7y agoThe simple answer is all the things you list are things you are allowed to do when you don’t have a monopoly, and while Google has a monopoly on Search, Apple does not have a monopoly on Smartphone.
- chillacy 7y agoI vaguely remember a strachery article on Google's strategy of saying that they weren't a search company so they could claim that they weren't a monopoly because, hey look we aren't winning at self driving cars and reader and google plus etc.
- pb7 7y agoHow does Google have a monopoly on search? Does Bing or DuckDuckGo not exist? Or the dozens of other sizable search engines? Monopoly does not mean majority shareholder.
- jboy55 7y agoBecause most people don't have an iPhone? Only 40% of smartphone users use iOS. Its fine to be anti-competitive, you just can't do so if you hold monopoly powers. MS only got in trouble when they leveraged their monopoly (OS) in one area to gain marketshare in another (browser). Google has a effective monopoly on search traffic, (find me a Bing exclusive SEO firm), if they leverage that to gain Android marketshare or others, they could run into issues.
- spsful 7y agoAs fun as this is, why not investigate companies that actually display anticompetitive behavior? Luxottica? Comcast? AT&T? I feel like this simply won't benefit consumers as much as the attorneys general believe it will.
- smush 7y agoLuxottica can be fought with ZenniOptical and friends. Besides my very first pair of glasses, I've never in my optical-aid-lifetime given money to Luxottica for glasses/frames/contacts. That is not to toot my own horn, but demonstrate that an informed consumer can sidestep their monopoly without adverse impacts. Comcast & AT&T are terrible actors, and they need more regulation, not less, to counter their natural monopoly + rent-seeking behaviors, but there is at least some regulation going on that could be iterated on. Google is, relatively speaking, running amok through the streets.
- tzs 7y agoIt had never occurred to me to try to avoid Luxottica, because until about three years ago I had never even heard of them. Yet I seem to have avoided them by accident. My current frames are Zyloware frames from Walmart. Before that, my frames were made by Safilo. I had those for something like a decade. The frames before that say "Frame Japan". I can't find anything useful about "Frame Japan" on Google, so don't know if those are made by Luxottica or not.
- flokie 7y agoThey also own all of the equipment everyone else uses to make your glasses.
- alanbernstein 7y agoOwn? Or produce? You're not saying lens grinding equipment is always leased from some Luxottica subsidiary, are you?
- moate 7y ago1- Do you believe that Google isn't engaged in anti-competitive behavior? 2- Investigations have to start somewhere. Sure, those would also be some great people to go after, and everyone is going to have all kinds of expectations of "what's important" but that's entirely subjective. Basically, I don't see progress, even if it's maybe not the most important thing, as ever being a bad thing.
- kerng 7y agoWhat is sad is that these investigations are coming always way too late (after the damage is done) and probably won't be resolved until another couple of years.
- sixothree 7y agoOr resolved at all.
- mirimir 7y agoFrom https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/google-antitrust-investigation https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/google-ant... (which I can actually read): > "Amazon Marketplace and Basics, and Google’s ad exchange and businesses on the exchange would be split apart. Google Search would have to be spun off as well," according to the [Warren] plan. I'm all for busting up monopolists, but what would fund Google search? I mean, that's what arguably drove Google to build its ad business, in the first place. But if it could work somehow, maybe we'd get a return to more useful search results. Edit: OK, I get it, ads.
- MiroF 7y agoAds would fund Google search and Google search could still sell ads on the exchange. This is at least how I took it to mean.
- d1zzy 7y agoWhat about all the underlying infrastructure (hardware, software, services, libraries, etc) that both use? Google has a famously single large repository for almost all their products (except Android, Chrome and a few other things): https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stores-billions-of-lines-of-code-in-a-single-repository/fulltext https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stor... Good luck changing billions of lines of code so you can create a clean separation that can work together between different companies.
- MiroF 7y agoI feel like this argument applied to Bell and it still worked. "Too big to refactor" is a pretty silly argument against anti trust action Also that's just not how "single large repositories" even work
- mprovost 7y agoThe entire Unix operating system was developed at Bell Labs which was then broken up by the US government along with the rest of AT&T. This led it to being commercialised and distributed. Who knows what would come out of Google if everything they did wasn't locked in a monorepo inside a single organisation.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y agoIn the past, the tech companies could count on the Republican impulse to protect Big Business to shield them from a lot of these type of investigations (for example, see how the Microsoft Antitrust DOJ investigations got a lot easier for Microsoft after George W. Bush became President). Now, large numbers of Republicans view Big Tech as the enemy, and combined with Democrats historic suspicion of Big Business, this has resulted in a very volatile time with respect to government regulation and investigation.
- beautifulfreak 7y agoThe stories that make me cringe are when some loyal user's account is frozen and there's no recourse to learn why it happened. Can't reach a person to ask why, email queries go unanswered. It happens every day. Or, say, gmail addresses get taken away, and it causes suffering. Sometimes Amazon closes accounts and effectively seizes assets, because the account held funds. Someone else here mentioned youtube's intermittent demonitization of videos when they go viral. These are issues a government could actually be effective at solving, giving consumers guaranteed review, with burden of proof on the corporation, not the consumer. Add fines and penalties to make it meaningful. Make them remember that the customer is important and shouldn't need a lawyer to get an overlord's attention.
- ozymandias12 7y agoHi! I'm from the future!! The title should read: "50 US states receive millionaire donations from Google as 2020 elections around the corner"
- root_axis 7y agoBanning and demonetizing users is not an antitrust issue. Poor customer service is not an antitrust issue. Nothing related to politics or censorship is an antitrust issue. Where I think google could be in trouble. - Using google.com to push chrome installations when non-chrome browsers are detected. - Forcing google services on android users - Giving preferential search rankings to google services over competing services - Ad network exclusivity contracts.
- prepend 7y ago> Poor customer service is not an antitrust issue When you control both ends of the market (advertisers and consumers) it becomes antitrust because of the consumer harm.
- buboard 7y agohow is demonetization not an antitrust issue? They control the ad market, why should they also decide whether their advertisers can reach certain publishers? Shouldn't they be a neutral ad exchange platform, given that they have absolute control in the ad markets? What's the justification behind demonetization other than starving websites to death?
- root_axis 7y agoDemonetization is in service of advertiser prerogatives. YouTube would monetize every video if they could because it would make them a lot of money, they don't do so because advertisers do not want to advertise on controversial videos. YouTube loses a ton of money when they have to stream HD video to millions of viewers for free. Additionally, advertisers are not prohibited from working directly with publishers and this is actually pretty common.
- buboard 7y ago> because advertisers do not want to advertise on controversial videos all of them? proof?
- marmada 7y agoWould I be a bad person for saying I'm sad about this because I want to work at Google and I don't like seeing their future threatened? I also don't get the anti-Google movement, there are far worse things like our broken healthcare and criminal justice system. This seems like one of those "screw the coastal elites" type of thing. Unless someone can give a reasonable explanation of why Google specifically should be targeted instead of other companies that are more conservatively aligned.
- zackmorris 7y agoYour sentiment is understandable, and I still use Google every day because it's still the best in its niches. But here are a few things to keep in mind: * Advertising revenue is practically nonexistent today compared to its heyday in the late 90s. This is because a few key players like Google have created a monopoly/oligopoly where they are so large, with so much more personal information on everybody, that they keep much of the profit for themselves and squeeze out any competition. * The internet still provides lucrative careers for many, but this is in spite of (not due to) monopolistic players like Google. In other words, we'd all profit more, and have more room to innovate, if the big players like Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, etc didn't control nearly every aspect of the internet. * Google is several orders of magnitude bigger than anyone's conception of how big it is. Short of a national monopoly breakup campaign, this will have little to no effect on their profitability or hiring. My personal feeling is that income inequality largely stems from the US no longer enforcing antitrust laws, consumer protection laws, or finance laws like the Glass–Steagall Act. It effects liberals and conservatives alike and leads to global threats like nationalism (a leading contender for World War III) when the vast majority of the population spends so much time working to make rent that it's effectively disenfranchised, no longer has upward mobility/retirement, and doesn't have the means to raise a family.
- yaacov 7y agoIf there was a monopoly on advertising, wouldn’t we expect advertising revenue to grow, rather than shrink?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- otakucode 7y agoLet's see if Eric Schmidt stands by his "if you haven't done anything wrong, you shouldn't have anything to hide" viewpoint in the coming months. Should be fun.
- OrgNet 7y ago5 years too late
- ilaksh 7y agoA big part of the reason we have these technopolies is that people want/need the large networks/platforms they provide. To get that without monopoly companies we will need to turn to open decentralization technologies.
- chrischen 7y agoGoogle search also has a hidden cost and lock in. It’s likely that most products you find through Google and which you also see ads for are forced to pay Google 20-40% of the retail price in ads (passed onto the consumer) due to a lack of competition in search. And this number is not going down over time and Google has no incentive to make it go down (such as by innovating in ways people discover what they need so that it becomes cheaper). Not only that but the consumer doesn’t directly pay this Google tax, and thus does not attribute this cost to Google.
- shmerl 7y agoLet them probe, why all kind of IM services refuse to interoperate, while e-mail does it just fine.
- easytiger 7y agoCash cow identified.
- jimbob45 7y agoThis seems to be dodging the broader point that Google is simply too big and can exert too much power over which companies live and die by virtue of their massively diversified influence. I see this investigation ending with fines, which won't solve the root problem.
- franczesko 7y agoMinimum bid on AdWords/Google Ads is a clear sign of monopolistic practices. Even if there are no competitors for the phrase or if it's very niche, you will have to pay the minimum Google tells you, in order to even appear in SERP.
- Phanyxx 7y ago"I want the best advice, from the best doctors — not the doctor, not the clinic who can spend the most on advertising" says the politician, with no sense of irony.
- tyxodiwktis 7y agoThis is great. Break Google up intro search, corporate services (G Suite, GCP), YouTube, Android and a few others. Then, split Facebook into Instagram and FB. Amazon into retail (split further by category?) and AWS. This will trigger a new wave of innovation. As smaller businesses, more innovations will be big enough to move the needle and will therefore be worth pursuing. Competitors will emerge - the giants are strangling their innovative competition in the crib right now, and we are all missing out as a result. Breaking up standard oil and ma bell had very positive results. Glad to see some movement on breaking up anti competitive monopolies again.
- dodobirdlord 7y ago> Break Google up intro search, corporate services (G Suite, GCP), YouTube, Android and a few others. Supposing that hypothetically any of these products have a monopoly in their market, how does splitting them up into separate companies by market help in any way? Splitting Facebook into FB and Instagram at least makes sense, since the resulting two companies would both be social media companies and could be expected to compete with each other. Will Google search compete with GCP, or G Suite with Android? How does this make any sense from an anti-trust perspective?
- onetimemanytime 7y agonever too late but late for a lot of companies ruined by Google.
- throwawaymanbot 7y agoThis is all because Trump thinks google are deplatforming Nazis? or not giving conservatives a fair shake of the stick? (Even though no one wants their far-right BS on any platform)
- joelx 7y agoI hate this ongoing PR attack on Google now being joined by politically ambitious state AG's. Google has done more positive things than any other company over the last twenty years. Instead of targeting bad companies that destroy people's lives (think gambling or alcohol or junk food), they are trying to destroy the company that gave us free search, maps, and email.
- telltruth 7y agoOn more selfish note... I'm hoping to apply and work at Google. How much can this affect me? What could be the possible timeframe when penalties would go in effect? The antitrust thing had been going on for a decade and Google had managed to vanquish the efforts, thanks to friendly government. Now the Breitbart videos of founders with teary eyes on Trump election victory has shook the conservatives to the core. Trump's bulldog, aka DOJ, is in full revenge mode and they would opt for maximum damage. Google's bad luck is that alt-left also want them to be broken up! It appears that there is nowhere to run for them. My expectation is that Trump would retain presidency due to weak Democratic field and antitrust would go through. This can really tear apart the stock if split is done intentionally to handicap them of capital. As employee who gets vast majority of comp as stock, this could be disaster in high CoL place like CA.