4 ms·

It’s really sad to see the anti-success rhetoric. I was around during the “search wars”, and what’s usually forgotten is that well, they were by far the best b

It’s really sad to see the anti-success rhetoric. I was around during the “search wars”, and what’s usually forgotten is that well, they were by far the best behaved as a corporate entity. This “romantization” of this ideal state, devoid of historical context or acknowledgement of the world we live in is extremwly counter productive. Should google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple do better? Absofuckinglutely!!! Regulate them, hold them to a higher standard! But Will breaking them up do anything except destroy them and just empower the next competitor ( who will have to learn the same lessons? Even worse, likely in a country that won’t match your same values of “freedom” Are imbalances in power great? Nope Are monopolies awesome? Most never Are billionaires awesome? Nope But this is the stage we are at due to an interconnect global economy. We built this. Knee jerk solutions don’t and have never fixed anything

throwthisaway2 7y ago
They are not a gov agency, i dont see the problem. To the victor goes the spoils. Are they doing something illegal? What number of search engines is a good number, why? This line of thinking is subjective.
SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
I was around too. The problem is you think the Google of 2000 is the Google of 2019. It is not. Apparently some people are still fooled by the doodles and dinosaur jump game. It’s easy to say MORE REGULATIONS... just as after any tragedy people claim “we just need one more law”! The truth is government has proven toothless in tax collection and regulation of these giants.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
sophacles 7y ago
I'm not sure applying antitrust laws (which have been in place for longer than anyone has been alive) to a monopoly (which has been acting monopolistic for years) qualifies as knee-jerk.
mikl 7y ago
> I was around during the “search wars”, and what’s usually forgotten is that well, they were by far the best behaved as a corporate entity. They were well behaved when they had competition to worry about. Once they effectively achieved a monopoly, ethics slowly got relegated to the back seat. They started leveraging the search monopoly to take over other industries, to undermine the open web, to engage in political censorship (hello Project Dragonfly) and much more. Everything you say here is an excellent argument why search should not be a monopoly. We need competition to keep the search engines honest. Regulation won’t help, since orgs like the FCC are vulnerable to regulatory capture, and there’s no other way to "hold them to a higher standard" than taking your business elsewhere. As long as you continue using their products and thus earning them money, they don’t have any reason to care what you think about their business practises.
- candiodari 7y ago
  Isn't "project dragonfly" the Google search engine version for China? Google was trying to comply with the law. It's a law you might not agree with, but come on. The reason all these governments want Google split up is more censorship, not less. From torrents to negative reporting on EU commissars. From everyone's interpretation of hate speech to pages pointing out that sometimes social services are the abusers in children's lives, not so much their savior. Scihub, Schwartz, Snowden, Yellow vest demonstrations, Hong Kong student injuries and disappearances, Twitter making some tax agency officer's abuse of power a big deal, ... That's why they want Google and Facebook broken. And of course, they're unwilling to spend any money, change any law anywhere, accommodate anyone, or put in any kind of effort whatsoever. Fundamentally they want the internet to disappear. They want the control of information out of the hands of these idiotic American nerds that refuse to control information !
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    How would breaking up a company help censorship? Surely it's easier to censor one entity than many.
    - asciident 7y ago
KirinDave 7y ago
It's not so much the "anti-success" wars as that Google's story is a microcosm of the "tendency towards monopolies" that ultimately plague the upper end of capitalism. Even as a Google Employee I agree that the concentration of marketshare and infrastructure that Google has distorts the market. But without radical intervention either by normal humans collectively or by governments using legislative and military power to shape corporations into their vision (again, probably collectively to be effective) the problem can't go away. At the very least, we need to stop pretending that pointing our the problems of rent economies and monopoly tendencies in capitalism is not "an anti-success rhetoric" but rather a candid and informed discussion. Markets do not function well (defined as delivering utility to the largest number of people, we could of course define this in other ways) when you need to render the player's assets on a log scale.
kuschku 7y ago
> Even worse, likely in a country that won’t match your same values of “freedom” For many people in the world, the US already is a country that matches this exact description - what with toothless antitrust laws, anti-union actions being tolerated, and what the ICE camps look like is something we don't even have to talk about. Sure, China would be worse, but you should strive for more than just "the second worst developed country(tm)" In fact, yours is the perfect argument why we in Europe should try to end the dominance of Google and break it up.
- antepodius 7y ago
  The US is far less restricted than europe for freedom of speech, the major principle that matters when you're talking about information technology. In the case of search engine balkanisation (I'd be in favour of it), I'd think that eurosearch would, on average, be more censorious than amerifind.
  - green1 7y ago
    Aside from Holocaust denial, hate speech and libel how does the US differ from "Europe" in terms of free speech?
    - KirinDave 7y ago
      The US has what we might call "better" libel and slander laws than some actors in the EU and with the UK being a popular example of the most ridiculously bad laws historically.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - green1 7y ago
        >> Aside from [...] libel
        7y ago
cmsonger 7y ago
> It’s really sad to see the anti-success rhetoric. The title may be, but the article was not. Was a reasoned statement for why those folks bothered to build another search engine.
paul7986 7y ago
As Google has gotten bigger it seems to forgotten its motto of "Do No Evil," and done the total opposite for the sake of profits! It was an inspirational company and story that many rooted for due to its culture and mission.
- thsowers 7y ago
  IIRC, they actually removed the "Don't be Evil" motto in may of 2018
  - r00fus 7y ago
    They moved it to the end of the mission statement.
axaxs 7y ago
If Google were still as well behaved after success, I don't think posts like this would exist.
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
> they were by far the best behaved as a corporate entity Were. When though? The founders said in their original university paper that selling advertising was wrong and would inherently corrupt a search engine. Of course once they realised how much money was being made in search, that fundamental tenet of don't be evil lapsed before the phrase was even coined. History and Google's progress of updates seems to have borne their claim out. Google is worse than it was, in good measure as they have twisted results to push more sales. It's a shopping search first and foremost, and frankly not a very good search any more. With an obscene overreach of data gathering that is almost impossible to evade. Every opportunity to gather data they gather more. Remember the Google war driving guy who "accidentally" gathered all that extra wifi info from streetview cars? Entirely by accident. How many believe in that "accident" who isn't on Google payroll? So no, I don't see it as anti-success, more that they became far too large, far too greedy, and far too abusive - e.g. demanding everyone train the self-driving fleet to pass a captcha. Scanning the world's books was a far more appealing proposition. Given they have the data, and the holy trinity of search, advertising and monitoring, regulation is not enough. Split off advertising or analytics and monitoring, or break it up some other way. That's to serve the public interest, not as some anti-success crusade.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  > Scanning the world's books was a far more appealing proposition. That proposition failed precisely because it was regarded - rightly or wrongly, it's not clear that it matters - as a "far too large, far too greedy, and far too abusive" endeavor.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    I thought it was more that the necessary licensing fell through, or was agreed and then fell apart. Added to which the Google Books interface was and is dire.
patient_zero 7y ago
Your post and post history is a great illustration of what I've talked about before here on ycombinator. Lots of your posts I can agree with, you're a reasonable individual. so why the huge blind spot when it comes to this topic? When they colluded to force wages down, you defended them. There is absolutely no need for you to. And yet I know you will not stop even after this comment to you. For what purpose have you written this abolute garbage bag of neoliberal-strung-together-with-gum-and-baling wire comment? Your post has far too many platitudes and half-ideas and gobbledeygook. "anti success rhetoric"? how bout I classify your post in 3 words too? "Corporate apologist rhetoric" not a single. sentence. has merit. it reads like ad copy or a poorly programmed bot. You even put air quotes on "freedom" I mean, come. ON. I try not to make too big a habit of calling people out, because that leads to poor commenting quality on my end but you sir have put a really, really bad comment on display. I invite others to read each sentence, one by one, and see if they even follow. Do they? They do not. They read like someone who wants to defend google and just threw up a bunch of worthless words in order to confuse. Now I already suspect your reasons, but perhaps you can enlighten me and the others here how I could possibly take your opinion seriously?
- tracer4201 7y ago
  The key piece missing is regulation, which he called out. It sounds like you disagree with him on going as far to break up a company like Google (which it sounds like you support). But then you turned this into a personal attack and questioning his motivation, which you already “suspect”. Regulation is missing, in my opinion, and breaking them up doesn’t address the problem and is a dicey proposition all together. But attacking people is breaking rules and only makes you lose credibility.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > what I've talked about before here on ycombinator Please don’t lower the quality of discussion like this. It’d be nice if you could discuss the content of the comment itself, politely, and refrain from attacking the poster by claiming they have a hidden agenda.
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN, and especially please don't cross into personal attack. We're here for curious conversation. The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
rdiddly 7y ago
Are you reacting to the blog post, or something else? I didn't see any anti-success rhetoric, only anti-monopoly rhetoric. But for the record, success isn't sacred, especially if people succeed at something that sucks. I'd be decidedly anti-success where genocidal dictators were concerned, for example. I'd be explicitly against their ambition, their drive, and their personal fulfillment and growth journeys, sorry.
- tracer4201 7y ago
  What behavior here is breaking anti trust laws? And please be specific. Amazing that you compare Google and genocidal dictators.
  - rdiddly 7y ago
    Did I mention anti-trust laws? And do you understand the concept of an example?
beatgammit 7y ago
> Are billionaires awesome? Nope I disagree here. Billionaires are often pretty awesome. Once someone gets way more money than the could ever need, they tend to pursue other activities that they enjoy more than making money, which is frequently giving it away (Bill Gates, Warren Buffet) or starting moonshot space companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, or Virgin Galactic. Even Zuckerberg donates to projects like these. Rich people take on projects that may not be viable yet, but are important nonetheless, essentially filling the role that government used to play in R&D.
- bagacrap 7y ago
  Yeah. And even if their hobby is tearing up cash to mulch their back yard, I don't think it inherently harms anyone. There's a lot of talk about a wealth gap but it still feels like those caught on the wrong side are more prosperous than they used to be (eg they have smart phones and many other modern conveniences which didn't exist a few decades ago).
OrgNet 7y ago
>Knee jerk solutions don’t and have never fixed anything generalizations are false a lot of the times
ddingus 7y ago
It is not anti success. Tons of us got good value and watched Google do great things. Now that they have that success, lacking threats, the value is evaporating. Lots of people do not care how much others make. If the value is there, world better, game on! But, getting very large amounts of money and those things aren't really happening and lots of people will definitely express negatives about it. As they should. I see links are back in my search results now. But my trust is not back with those links. I have found all the other search tools I need and am using them, encouraging greater success. These companies with almost impossible to think about type large amounts of money can be doing better by people. Expecting that makes great sense. And where that is not effective, seeking various remedies does too. Competition, use of the State, protest, all on the table. Anyone concerned about the potential impact of those things is completely free to avoid them. Just make sure the value to people is there and they won't really care about the money. Knee jerk, break them up helped create this net we are seeing consolidated and increasingly devoid of value. People calling for that again is understandable. Finally, breakups are super expensive. A real, material threat of that happening makes for a real, material cost and risk assessment, which can justify hedging all of that with better value to the people too.
jdjdjjsjs 7y ago
It's funny because Google had a very different perspective when MS was the Monopoly we were worried about.
chinesempire 7y ago
> It’s really sad to see the anti-success rhetoric Oh, come on! Google is not doing its job well, other could do parts of it much better, but Google is too big to allow others to enter its same space, so we need alternatives that can put pressure on Google more than we need Google. The "people hate success" rhetoric is so sad it can't even be measured.
clairity 7y ago
i don't see anywhere in the linked article that talks about breaking up google, so it's hard to know what you're responding to. the article does make a central claim that google has an information monopoly, and that the search market needs competition (and oh, look at that, they made a new search engine!). search isn't a naturally monopolistic market, because although there are some initial high fixed costs, much of those costs can be roughly scaled with size. there aren't really any other significant barriers to entry. marginally but noticeably better search results (e.g., pagerank) did provide an early advantage for google, which is how it established its monopoly over time in the first place (combined with the ad auction model from overture, which gave it economic & political might), but that advantage has eroded with its lack of focus on search. google also has a giant suite of data gathering products but it's not clear that those provide a true competitive advantage in search (again, search results aren't much better than the competition). the other interesting characteristic of search is that its competition isn't necessarily zero-sum. a user might do the same search on multiple search engines, providing each competitor with a full marginal revenue opportunity, rather than only one competitor winning the business (as in classic competition). because of all this, i'm neutral on the breakup argument but am bullish on the "increasing competition" argument for search.

throwthisaway2 7y ago

They are not a gov agency, i dont see the problem. To the victor goes the spoils. Are they doing something illegal? What number of search engines is a good number, why? This line of thinking is subjective.

SlowRobotAhead 7y ago

I was around too. The problem is you think the Google of 2000 is the Google of 2019. It is not. Apparently some people are still fooled by the doodles and dinosaur jump game. It’s easy to say MORE REGULATIONS... just as after any tragedy people claim “we just need one more law”! The truth is government has proven toothless in tax collection and regulation of these giants.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

sophacles 7y ago

I'm not sure applying antitrust laws (which have been in place for longer than anyone has been alive) to a monopoly (which has been acting monopolistic for years) qualifies as knee-jerk.

mikl 7y ago

> I was around during the “search wars”, and what’s usually forgotten is that well, they were by far the best behaved as a corporate entity. They were well behaved when they had competition to worry about. Once they effectively achieved a monopoly, ethics slowly got relegated to the back seat. They started leveraging the search monopoly to take over other industries, to undermine the open web, to engage in political censorship (hello Project Dragonfly) and much more. Everything you say here is an excellent argument why search should not be a monopoly. We need competition to keep the search engines honest. Regulation won’t help, since orgs like the FCC are vulnerable to regulatory capture, and there’s no other way to "hold them to a higher standard" than taking your business elsewhere. As long as you continue using their products and thus earning them money, they don’t have any reason to care what you think about their business practises.

candiodari 7y ago
Isn't "project dragonfly" the Google search engine version for China? Google was trying to comply with the law. It's a law you might not agree with, but come on. The reason all these governments want Google split up is more censorship, not less. From torrents to negative reporting on EU commissars. From everyone's interpretation of hate speech to pages pointing out that sometimes social services are the abusers in children's lives, not so much their savior. Scihub, Schwartz, Snowden, Yellow vest demonstrations, Hong Kong student injuries and disappearances, Twitter making some tax agency officer's abuse of power a big deal, ... That's why they want Google and Facebook broken. And of course, they're unwilling to spend any money, change any law anywhere, accommodate anyone, or put in any kind of effort whatsoever. Fundamentally they want the internet to disappear. They want the control of information out of the hands of these idiotic American nerds that refuse to control information !
- lonelappde 7y ago
  How would breaking up a company help censorship? Surely it's easier to censor one entity than many.
  - asciident 7y ago

KirinDave 7y ago

It's not so much the "anti-success" wars as that Google's story is a microcosm of the "tendency towards monopolies" that ultimately plague the upper end of capitalism. Even as a Google Employee I agree that the concentration of marketshare and infrastructure that Google has distorts the market. But without radical intervention either by normal humans collectively or by governments using legislative and military power to shape corporations into their vision (again, probably collectively to be effective) the problem can't go away. At the very least, we need to stop pretending that pointing our the problems of rent economies and monopoly tendencies in capitalism is not "an anti-success rhetoric" but rather a candid and informed discussion. Markets do not function well (defined as delivering utility to the largest number of people, we could of course define this in other ways) when you need to render the player's assets on a log scale.

kuschku 7y ago

> Even worse, likely in a country that won’t match your same values of “freedom” For many people in the world, the US already is a country that matches this exact description - what with toothless antitrust laws, anti-union actions being tolerated, and what the ICE camps look like is something we don't even have to talk about. Sure, China would be worse, but you should strive for more than just "the second worst developed country(tm)" In fact, yours is the perfect argument why we in Europe should try to end the dominance of Google and break it up.

antepodius 7y ago
The US is far less restricted than europe for freedom of speech, the major principle that matters when you're talking about information technology. In the case of search engine balkanisation (I'd be in favour of it), I'd think that eurosearch would, on average, be more censorious than amerifind.
- green1 7y ago
  Aside from Holocaust denial, hate speech and libel how does the US differ from "Europe" in terms of free speech?
  - KirinDave 7y ago
    The US has what we might call "better" libel and slander laws than some actors in the EU and with the UK being a popular example of the most ridiculously bad laws historically.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - green1 7y ago
      >> Aside from [...] libel
      - 7y ago

cmsonger 7y ago

> It’s really sad to see the anti-success rhetoric. The title may be, but the article was not. Was a reasoned statement for why those folks bothered to build another search engine.

paul7986 7y ago

As Google has gotten bigger it seems to forgotten its motto of "Do No Evil," and done the total opposite for the sake of profits! It was an inspirational company and story that many rooted for due to its culture and mission.

thsowers 7y ago
IIRC, they actually removed the "Don't be Evil" motto in may of 2018
- r00fus 7y ago
  They moved it to the end of the mission statement.

axaxs 7y ago

If Google were still as well behaved after success, I don't think posts like this would exist.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago

> they were by far the best behaved as a corporate entity Were. When though? The founders said in their original university paper that selling advertising was wrong and would inherently corrupt a search engine. Of course once they realised how much money was being made in search, that fundamental tenet of don't be evil lapsed before the phrase was even coined. History and Google's progress of updates seems to have borne their claim out. Google is worse than it was, in good measure as they have twisted results to push more sales. It's a shopping search first and foremost, and frankly not a very good search any more. With an obscene overreach of data gathering that is almost impossible to evade. Every opportunity to gather data they gather more. Remember the Google war driving guy who "accidentally" gathered all that extra wifi info from streetview cars? Entirely by accident. How many believe in that "accident" who isn't on Google payroll? So no, I don't see it as anti-success, more that they became far too large, far too greedy, and far too abusive - e.g. demanding everyone train the self-driving fleet to pass a captcha. Scanning the world's books was a far more appealing proposition. Given they have the data, and the holy trinity of search, advertising and monitoring, regulation is not enough. Split off advertising or analytics and monitoring, or break it up some other way. That's to serve the public interest, not as some anti-success crusade.

zozbot234 7y ago
> Scanning the world's books was a far more appealing proposition. That proposition failed precisely because it was regarded - rightly or wrongly, it's not clear that it matters - as a "far too large, far too greedy, and far too abusive" endeavor.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  I thought it was more that the necessary licensing fell through, or was agreed and then fell apart. Added to which the Google Books interface was and is dire.

patient_zero 7y ago

Your post and post history is a great illustration of what I've talked about before here on ycombinator. Lots of your posts I can agree with, you're a reasonable individual. so why the huge blind spot when it comes to this topic? When they colluded to force wages down, you defended them. There is absolutely no need for you to. And yet I know you will not stop even after this comment to you. For what purpose have you written this abolute garbage bag of neoliberal-strung-together-with-gum-and-baling wire comment? Your post has far too many platitudes and half-ideas and gobbledeygook. "anti success rhetoric"? how bout I classify your post in 3 words too? "Corporate apologist rhetoric" not a single. sentence. has merit. it reads like ad copy or a poorly programmed bot. You even put air quotes on "freedom" I mean, come. ON. I try not to make too big a habit of calling people out, because that leads to poor commenting quality on my end but you sir have put a really, really bad comment on display. I invite others to read each sentence, one by one, and see if they even follow. Do they? They do not. They read like someone who wants to defend google and just threw up a bunch of worthless words in order to confuse. Now I already suspect your reasons, but perhaps you can enlighten me and the others here how I could possibly take your opinion seriously?

tracer4201 7y ago
The key piece missing is regulation, which he called out. It sounds like you disagree with him on going as far to break up a company like Google (which it sounds like you support). But then you turned this into a personal attack and questioning his motivation, which you already “suspect”. Regulation is missing, in my opinion, and breaking them up doesn’t address the problem and is a dicey proposition all together. But attacking people is breaking rules and only makes you lose credibility.
saagarjha 7y ago
> what I've talked about before here on ycombinator Please don’t lower the quality of discussion like this. It’d be nice if you could discuss the content of the comment itself, politely, and refrain from attacking the poster by claiming they have a hidden agenda.
dang 7y ago
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN, and especially please don't cross into personal attack. We're here for curious conversation. The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

rdiddly 7y ago

Are you reacting to the blog post, or something else? I didn't see any anti-success rhetoric, only anti-monopoly rhetoric. But for the record, success isn't sacred, especially if people succeed at something that sucks. I'd be decidedly anti-success where genocidal dictators were concerned, for example. I'd be explicitly against their ambition, their drive, and their personal fulfillment and growth journeys, sorry.

tracer4201 7y ago
What behavior here is breaking anti trust laws? And please be specific. Amazing that you compare Google and genocidal dictators.
- rdiddly 7y ago
  Did I mention anti-trust laws? And do you understand the concept of an example?

beatgammit 7y ago

> Are billionaires awesome? Nope I disagree here. Billionaires are often pretty awesome. Once someone gets way more money than the could ever need, they tend to pursue other activities that they enjoy more than making money, which is frequently giving it away (Bill Gates, Warren Buffet) or starting moonshot space companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, or Virgin Galactic. Even Zuckerberg donates to projects like these. Rich people take on projects that may not be viable yet, but are important nonetheless, essentially filling the role that government used to play in R&D.

bagacrap 7y ago
Yeah. And even if their hobby is tearing up cash to mulch their back yard, I don't think it inherently harms anyone. There's a lot of talk about a wealth gap but it still feels like those caught on the wrong side are more prosperous than they used to be (eg they have smart phones and many other modern conveniences which didn't exist a few decades ago).

OrgNet 7y ago

>Knee jerk solutions don’t and have never fixed anything generalizations are false a lot of the times

ddingus 7y ago

It is not anti success. Tons of us got good value and watched Google do great things. Now that they have that success, lacking threats, the value is evaporating. Lots of people do not care how much others make. If the value is there, world better, game on! But, getting very large amounts of money and those things aren't really happening and lots of people will definitely express negatives about it. As they should. I see links are back in my search results now. But my trust is not back with those links. I have found all the other search tools I need and am using them, encouraging greater success. These companies with almost impossible to think about type large amounts of money can be doing better by people. Expecting that makes great sense. And where that is not effective, seeking various remedies does too. Competition, use of the State, protest, all on the table. Anyone concerned about the potential impact of those things is completely free to avoid them. Just make sure the value to people is there and they won't really care about the money. Knee jerk, break them up helped create this net we are seeing consolidated and increasingly devoid of value. People calling for that again is understandable. Finally, breakups are super expensive. A real, material threat of that happening makes for a real, material cost and risk assessment, which can justify hedging all of that with better value to the people too.

jdjdjjsjs 7y ago

It's funny because Google had a very different perspective when MS was the Monopoly we were worried about.

chinesempire 7y ago

> It’s really sad to see the anti-success rhetoric Oh, come on! Google is not doing its job well, other could do parts of it much better, but Google is too big to allow others to enter its same space, so we need alternatives that can put pressure on Google more than we need Google. The "people hate success" rhetoric is so sad it can't even be measured.

clairity 7y ago

i don't see anywhere in the linked article that talks about breaking up google, so it's hard to know what you're responding to. the article does make a central claim that google has an information monopoly, and that the search market needs competition (and oh, look at that, they made a new search engine!). search isn't a naturally monopolistic market, because although there are some initial high fixed costs, much of those costs can be roughly scaled with size. there aren't really any other significant barriers to entry. marginally but noticeably better search results (e.g., pagerank) did provide an early advantage for google, which is how it established its monopoly over time in the first place (combined with the ad auction model from overture, which gave it economic & political might), but that advantage has eroded with its lack of focus on search. google also has a giant suite of data gathering products but it's not clear that those provide a true competitive advantage in search (again, search results aren't much better than the competition). the other interesting characteristic of search is that its competition isn't necessarily zero-sum. a user might do the same search on multiple search engines, providing each competitor with a full marginal revenue opportunity, rather than only one competitor winning the business (as in classic competition). because of all this, i'm neutral on the breakup argument but am bullish on the "increasing competition" argument for search.