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U.S. states lean toward breaking up Google's ad tech business

502 points by TangerineDream 6y ago

mayneack 6y ago
Seems like it just refers to (but doesn't link to) https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/05/states-lean-toward-pushing-to-break-up-googles-ad-tech-business.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/05/states-lean-toward-pushing-t...
- dang 6y ago
  Yes, that was bad. Changed now. More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23432441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23432441.
joelbluminator 6y ago
Anyone good with investments here? How worried should I be if I own alphabet stocks?
- austincheney 6y ago
  If this works out like it did for the breakup of Standard Oil you will be very wealthy.
  - mikestew 6y ago
    I don't mean to be snarky, but do you think a comparison to a company that was dissolved over 100 years ago by people long dead is apt?
    - vorpalhex 6y ago
      Standard oil may have a different name now, but it still very much exists and those children companies are still amongst the wealthiest companies in the world.
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    If it works like AT&T though, not so much.
- thoughtstheseus 6y ago
  No one knows, it depends how they breakup or regulate. On the flip side google will likely stop spending money on random projects.
- timwaagh 6y ago
  Worried if this is true
- mywittyname 6y ago
  You will get a stake in any spin-off companies that result from DoJ action. So there's no worries from that perspective. However, this will take years to litigate and a lot can happen to a tech company over that timeframe.
- jedberg 6y ago
  If they even decide to go through with it it would be years before anything actually happens. But, assuming they do and it does, I suspect it would go down like this: Google is split into Google Ads and Google Data Collection. Search, Youtube, and all the other things they use to collect data on you will go to DC, and GA will just do ads. DC will need to find a source of revenue, and will start bundling up selling the data they collect on you. One of their customers will be GA. But maybe some upstart company or Amazon or Microsoft will be their customers too. GA will lose value because they will have to increase payouts/lower prices to compete with their new competitors. DC will go up in value because of all their new sources of revenue. You'll be a shareholder in both and probably see your total value go up because Data Collection will probably make more money than Google Ads loses.
- empath75 6y ago
  I'd say not worried at all in the long term and maybe slightly worried in the short term. Microsoft is doing fine after a few years of bad returns. The successor companies to AT&T and Standard Oil did fine.
- hogFeast 6y ago
  The value will go up. Biggest issue with Alphabet is that it is run like a govt bureaucracy. You have one business that is very valuable, and to own that you have to pay the tax of owning all the other stuff that does nothing but burn cash for the benefit of employees.
kediz 6y ago
How do you achieve this technically? Monorepo would be a pain to break. Or just break up Google into two but let both of them keep the access to the same repo? Then what would this achieve?
- coldtea 6y ago
  >How do you achieve this technically? Monorepo would be a pain to break. Well, that's Google's problem... Plus, it's not like they can't follow an API and versioned libs and have to have it all bundled...
  - duskwuff 6y ago
    The big question would be how you deal with shared infrastructure -- compute, data storage, logging, etc. Google has a significant amount of highly proprietary code in those areas which they're undoubtedly using within their ads product; it'd be tricky to figure out how to deal with that in a split.
- mayank 6y ago
  > Monorepo would be a pain to break. It's generally acknowledged in technical circles that antitrust action is a highly effective way to break up a monorepo.
  - kediz 6y ago
    It would be a case of LDD (Lawsuit driven development). The engineers would need to redo a lot of the infra and products
- jrockway 6y ago
  To some extent, Google broke themselves up when it became Alphabet.
- alecb 6y ago
  They should have spun off DoubleClick for Publishers and other server/ad mediation into separate companies and is likely what will happen if the government is successful in their case.
nugget 6y ago
I took a course taught by a former Microsoft exec who worked at the company before and after the DOJ's anti-trust settlement. He said the settlement profoundly changed the internal culture of competitiveness and innovation. Lawyers were embedded on many product teams, review cycles became slower, and execs became complacent. I think the only way Amazon or Google ever start to stagnate is if a similar fate befalls them.
- wtvanhest 6y ago
  I worked at Intel for a brief 3 month summer internship in finance (2010). One thing that struck me was that I was not allowed to put certain words in presentations because they didn't want those words used against them in court. Its been a long time so I don't remember what words, but that was a long time after the first set of anti-trust actions. Maybe someone that has been there more recently can attest or counter my point, but it seemed to at least leave a surface wound on the culture.
  - refurb 6y ago
    I work in healthcare, a highly regulated industry and we do the same thing. It’s to the point that we’ve developed euphemisms for all these words.
  - mrep 6y ago
    Not intel, but I definitely have seen training videos about not saying "dominate the market" or "crush the competition".
    - pradn 6y ago
      There's similar guidance inside Google. These exact phrases are used as "no-no"s.
  - kudokatz 6y ago
    There has been official training at multiple, large tech companies other than Intel specifically geared towards preventing even accidental use of language that can be taken out-of-context. The practice is alive and well.
moneywoes 6y ago
Does Facebook not bundle their products?
- dr-detroit 6y ago
  https://www.cbsnews.com/news/social-media-is-a-tool-of-the-cia-seriously/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/social-media-is-a-tool-of-the-c...
kanox 6y ago
I don't understand how a google breakup would work. Would it just split off the ad business from ad-supported businesses like gmail and youtube? Some google products could stand on their own (Google Cloud) but most would have a lot of trouble. The worst case is open-source offerings like Android and Chrome which only make sense as part of a wider corporate strategy.
- TACIXAT 6y ago
  It would be really cool for people to be able to make money in those markets. It's really lame right now to face competing with free offerings. We're in a post chat client scarcity world.
  - kanox 6y ago
    Nobody has made serious money by selling browser because nobody is willing to pay for browsers. Without Chrome the web would just stagnate. Nobody is willing to pay for mobile operating systems either. Maybe hardware manufacturers would pay to move Android forward as an open-source project but most likely outcome is a stagnant fragmented mess.
    - criddell 6y ago
      > Nobody is willing to pay for mobile operating systems either. Why not just bundle it in with the cost of the hardware like Apple does?
    - chx 6y ago
      > Without Chrome the web would just stagnate. Microsoft would take over. They are in position already, contributing to Chromium.
    - rvp-x 6y ago
      Microsoft used to have licensing deals with Android phone manufacturers for their use of FAT, it was just bundled in the cost of the phones sold. With the choice of Android effectively costing them $5-15 per device sold, manufacturers still chose it. https://www.howtogeek.com/183766/why-microsoft-makes-5-to-15-from-every-android-device-sold/ https://www.howtogeek.com/183766/why-microsoft-makes-5-to-15...
coldtea 6y ago
Amen! E.U should do the same...
- tiborsaas 6y ago
  Break up to separate countries? We tried it, it sucked.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    No, break up Google. As for EU breaking up into separate countries, that would be great too. As opposed to a big entity that passes laws and handles monetary policy in favor of 1-2 top dog countries and big coporations. The whole reason the EU was founded (as ECC and before) was to contain Germany [it was a stated goal of the politicians and diplomats involved]. Some irony, huh?
keiferski 6y ago
I don't know enough about antitrust law, but it's my (possibly wrong) assumption that it is legal to use the profits from Product A to subsidize lower prices for Product B, a sort of "sell stuff to Peter in order to give Paul a discount." I imagine it would be difficult to determine if this is happening, but it would seem logical to say that if this subsidization leads to an unfair advantage over competitors (who otherwise couldn't match the low price), it should be regulated, at least according to antitrust theory. The problem for Google is that this describes a solid chunk of their product portfolio.
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iron0013 6y ago
Which is preferable, politically “neutral” search results, or search results that prioritize truth and accuracy? I prefer the latter, which is what google provides now, but I’d be interested to hear from those who would prefer the former. If one party says that little green aliens are going to raise ATM fees and another party doesn’t, should google be obligated to return search results supporting both perspectives?
- theduder99 6y ago
  politically neutral search results? you've got to be kidding. guess you don't remember the multiple "auto-complete fiascos" involving hillary, obama, trump, etc.
- blockmarker 6y ago
  I do not trust Google to give me accurate and truthful results. Not the engineers, not the executives, not the company. They are my political opponents. They are people and Google is still a corporation: they can all be bought, infiltrated, deceived, manipulated and threatened. I would not allow such a centralized point of failure for all information and knowledge to be controlled. Given that not even soft sciences academics, who are supposed to be erudites, can separate themselves from their biases and look at things objectively, and their whole job is supposed to be that, I do not trust that the engineers at Google are able to do that. And finally, simply giving an incredibly small elite what the rest of the population can see and know, is a bad idea. These are the reasons why I oppose prioritizing "truth and accuracy". It would not be such thing. I, personally, would add that just the two American political parties deciding what is politically neutral is pretty bad. Even if the Republicans are nominally on my side, I do not trust such people to treat fairly all other politics than the ones chosen by the leaders of each party. And all the other points I have raised wholly apply even to those on my side of politics. It would still, however, be better than letting my political enemies controlling the internet. If the roles were reversed, you would think the same.
  - downerending 6y ago
    "Truth and Accuracy" sounds like a good name for a government ministry. Wonder if it's been done.
jeffbee 6y ago
It is fairly amazing that this action would come against a player with a minority and shrinking share of a market where prices are rapidly falling. Antitrust actions under US doctrine are supposed to benefit consumers, but how can this action do anything other than increase profits for Facebook and Amazon?
- ProAm 6y ago
  Hopefully they are broken up next.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    Is there a precedent for breaking up the top three players in a marketplace? By what means would that give relief to ad buyers? If you were to impair the ad business of Google, Facebook, and Amazon, wouldn't that simply shift profits to Verizon, Microsoft, Snap, ByteDance, etc?
    - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
      I think it's a huge mistake to group Google, Facebook and Amazon all in the same bucket and say "look, they don't have a monopoly because they each only have X% of 'total digital ad spend'". If I want to advertise my vacation house for rent, I sure as hell am not going to do it on Amazon, and FB would hardly make any sense (maybe if I had a whole network of houses for rent to do brand marketing, but not if I just had one). Google is pretty much the only option that makes sense here. I mean, just ask a digital marketer. While there are some potential areas of overlap they all view Adwords, FB ads and Amazon ads very differently and not much in 'competition'.
      - jeffbee 6y ago
        Weird example because I am sure Facebook is a major outlet for vacation rental marketing. Here's the Vacation Rental Management Association's advice on using Facebook: https://www.vrma.org/p/bl/et/blogaid=1253 https://www.vrma.org/p/bl/et/blogaid=1253 I imagine other large players in vacation rental marketing are VRBO, TripAdvisor, and AirBnB. Anyway if you redefine the online advertising market to include only the things that Google dominates, such as search ads on Google itself, then sure you can make it look anyway you want.
dang 6y ago
The submitted article was https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-google/u-s-states-lean-toward-breaking-up-googles-ad-tech-business-cnbc-idUSKBN23C2NZ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-google/u-s-states-lea.... There's nothing in there beyond "CNBC reported on Friday, citing sources". That broke the site guidelines, which ask: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." We've switched to the CNBC article now, but it clearly should have been the one submitted in the first place.
deleted 6y ago
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somethoughts 6y ago
I feel like Google would have been better off if they had stayed out of the newspaper aggregation business and stuck with Search and long tail media content, GCP, GSuite and did R&D in AI (Waymo, Verily) and AR/VR. There is just too much baggage when wading into politics. I think there are too many well connected, well funded media companies that are lobbying and retaliating behind the scenes as they see their news publishing business models get disrupted by the Google News aggregator. Couple that with politicians frustrated by the Google News opaque aggregation algorithm and that leads to anti-trust rulings.
- alecb 6y ago
  Their issue isn't that they are in the newspaper business. Their issue is that they own almost all of the ad tech business from top to bottom.
  - spaced-out 6y ago
    If that's true, why is their market share in the online advertising dropping? https://www.investopedia.com/news/facebook-google-digital-ad-market-share-drops-amazon-climbs/ https://www.investopedia.com/news/facebook-google-digital-ad...
  - meowface 6y ago
    And owning almost all of the ad tech business also complements well with owning a huge chunk of the tech business in general.
  - somethoughts 6y ago
    My general sense is that fewer power brokers in DC would complain if they had stuck with the bottom part and complemented that with GCP. Its one thing to serve ads on the bottom (i.e. ads for pentalope screw drivers against articles about pentalope screw drivers). Its another thing to encroach on establish media outlets turf, AMP up their content and sell ads to Auto, CPG and Airline companies based on that content.
Barrin92 6y ago
Good decision. Then do the same thing to AWS and Amazon's media branch, and then go undo the whatsapp acquisition. Then stop platforms from subsidizing competing products while they charge competitors high fees like Spotify vs Apple Music. The increasing trend of large tech conglomerates to use one money printing product like AWS or search or the Apple Store to tactically snipe competitors to destroy or acquire them is absolutely abysmal in the long run. I don't care if it increases consumer prices by 10 cents or whatever, it's time to look at the long term health of the ecosystem overall. It's really the private analog to a state capitalist country subsidizing its own firms while foreigners have to compete on a one-by-one basis. Everyone considers that to be detrimental when it happens between two nations, I don't see why it's not detrimental when it happens in the tech industry.
- mrharrison 6y ago
  The counter argument is that the US needs to keep FAANG companies large as a weapon/counter measure against large rival Chinese companies.
  - ambicapter 6y ago
    Depends on if you want one very large but somewhat lazy defender or a swarm of small, fast and aggressive defenders.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    People used to make this exact argument in the 80s when it came to Japan, and even when it came to the Soviet Union[1]. There were countless of people who had already written off competitive markets in favour of supporting domestic industry. In the car industry people actually listened and enacted domestic protection, what did that get the US? Two lost decades of shoddy cars. Have Japanese conglomerates overtaken the world? Nope. I think it's an absolute smokescreen and such a blatant attempt by Facebook to use nationalism to protect their status. In the long run we're better served by trusting in innovation than trying to protect domestic business. It was always the right bet. And if China continues to prop up giants they'll just stagnate. The reason they caught up in the first place is because, for at least a short time, they allowed free-wheeling fierce competition. [1]https://www.econlib.org/archives/2009/12/why_were_americ.html https://www.econlib.org/archives/2009/12/why_were_americ.htm...
Vysero 6y ago
"companies like Google censor conservative content" Certainly, isn't all their censoring.. in fact, I am less concerned about it than other things.
tosser0001 6y ago
Would this benefit China or Chinese companies in any way that would be detrimental to U.S. interests?
- jjcon 6y ago
  I’ll probably get hounded for saying this here but: I genuinely believe that one of the biggest things harming American society right now is adtech. From social media to traditional media they have become obsessed with clicks and view time. This leads to negativity and extremism getting promoted and sensationalism overtaking authentic journalistic approaches. Not only that but it means a population that is getting constantly bombarded with terrible, often overinflated stories. Why? Because all this sells because the human brain is wired to focus on danger before all else. China doesn’t have this same problem because it controls the media and censors social media. From a purely psychological standpoint this is a positive but there are obviously deep implications for what that censorship does to a society as well. To answer your direct question, any losses by Google due to this will be dwarfed by the positive implications for the American society. I’m not saying this will fix the above problems but the amount of good it will do (in conjunction with other legislation especially, ie link tax and repealing section 230) is greater than the amount of bad by a mile.
game_the0ry 6y ago
Google, Amazon, FB are not the monopolies that you should be worried about. They are fun to talk about and tech is sexy, but there are bigger problems - ISPs / telecoms, for example. Remember the baby bells? In 1982, AT&T (ma bell) lost an anti-trust lawsuit and was broken up into 8 companies (the baby bells). Guess what happened since? If you guessed they merged back together, you would be correct. The baby bells merged back together and became 3 companies - AT&T, Verizon, and CenturyLink. For those who are customers of AT&T - how do you like your service? Is it as good as Google? Oligopoly is the new monopoly. Financial services, airlines, oil majors, media, pharma, auto, etc. Those are the industries that need breaking up. You pay for their services / products and they price fix (airline baggage fees, overdraft fees, etc), you don't even pay for Google. You can easily use duckduckgo and delete your FB / Insta with no consequence. Edit - to address the comments saying that the tech companies should be broken up: sure, but how exactly? Google and Facebook in particular. You don't even pay for their services, so you (the citizens) can't claim consumer protection from their business. Only the companies / individuals that pay for Google and Facebook ads can. Again, I get the frustration of the times and misinformation sucks, but Google and Facebook are not the cause. They are the means of distributing info (including ads that are sometimes just fake new), not the root source of all evil.
- speeder 6y ago
  My business, despite being quite critical (we sell parts for maintenance of machinery, today one of my clients for example was a medical equipment factory) relies heavily on ads, people come, buy what they want, and if I solves the problem, it is over, they don't recommend or talk about us, and often aren't return costumers either unless another machine break... So our clients often are people googling desperately trying to make their suddenly stopped factory resume work, then they see our ads and buy from us. It became obvious to us that Google is a threat, they changed rules multiple times in the past to encourage fraud (instead of stopping fraud), our revenue is directly proportional to the Google ads spend, and whenever we find a better ad provider, Google buys it. Only possible competitor for Google is TV, but TV ads are way beyond our budget and we have no idea of they would work, considering our niche. So... Google is not only a monopoly, it is an obvious one, and they abuse their power freely.
29athrowaway 6y ago
The problem when you break up a domestic giant is that opens the door for foreign giants to enter the market. What would you rather have, Amazon and Google, or Alibaba and Baidu?
nojito 6y ago
Very interesting!! I wonder if through the course of the investigation we finally get a definitive reason why Alphabet was created. My gut tells me that it is to hide data sharing between entities.
rch 6y ago
This effort seems fundamentally out of touch, misdirected, and politically motivated.
esoterica 6y ago
I wonder if any of the tech workers here cheering on the breaking up of Google or Facebook realize that the obscene FAANG compensation packages are only made possible by their massive profit margins, which are in turn enabled by their pseudo-monopoly status. Monopolies are "bad" because they have the pricing power gouge their customers at the expense of boosting profits. But Google's and Facebook's customers are advertisers! When you support "breaking up tech monopolies" you are basically saying programmers should get paid less money so advertising companies can buy cheaper ads. What an utterly ridiculous and self-destructive thing for tech workers to advocate.
astan 6y ago
I am really worried about Chinese cyberwarfare while we keep shooting ourselves in the foot. Just look at how easy it is to spy on millions of americans with things like TikTok and Huawei. Google could be a lot worse at the size it currently is. I view Google as almost a kind of university that tries to enhance technology by "poaching" good people and in some sense, allowing them to work on whatever they want while guaranteeing them a very good wage. Aside from the standard Chrome, Android-tier projects, let's think about all the stuff that they've done that has been pretty radically useful. I'm not talking about products, they do a terrible job with maintenance and shutting down products is very infuriating to any user. But it is almost like research projects. So let's just focus on technical contributions to the software engineering field. Golang, gRPC, Protobuf, Kubernetes, Tensorflow, WebRTC, QUIC protocol, very interesting innovations in camera technology such as NightSight, Google Maps which has changed my life completely. Furthermore, millions of contributions to open source projects and protocols, so many security improvements by the Security & Cryptography teams that I have on occasion worked with. Personally I wouldn't work for Google because I don't enjoy the kind of atmosphere where there's no real "mission". But doing this much innovation is impossible unless you are funded by the government, or have a money printing business.
ravenstine 6y ago
> Google, Amazon, FB are not the monopolies that you should be worried about. Not at all? > For those who are customers of AT&T - how do you like your service? Is it as good as Google? Google's "support" for their products has one of the worst reputations.
- jasonvorhe 6y ago
  Google's "support" for their products has one of the worst reputations. Unless you pay for it, e.g. for Google Cloud Platform.
mrkramer 6y ago
I think government should not be breaking up big successful companies only because they control >50% market share. What Microsoft did with IE was nasty but Google acquiring DoubleClick, AdMob, YouTube etc. is not nasty at all. If Google for example made the same exact product like YouTube and then leveraged its massive resources and distribution channel to destroy YouTube and claim the market share that would be problematic but otherwise I don't see a problem. Punishing the best student in class only because he or she is the best is not cool at all.
- jldugger 6y ago
  > Google acquiring DoubleClick Allowing that was probably a mistake. IDK if it's possible to undo, but letting the two biggest advertisers merge was is like almost definitionally anticompetitive.
  - mrkramer 6y ago
    Why they didn't block the merger when it happened? they could've but now it is too late. The same thing would be splitting up Facebook and Instagram when they all already so interconnected.
- sumedh 6y ago
  > If Google for example made the same exact product like YouTube and then leveraged its massive resources and distribution channel to destroy YouTube Like what it did to Firefox?
  - mrkramer 6y ago
    Is Mozilla for profit or non profit I don't even know but they didn't complain back in the day when Google Chrome took over.
tracerbulletx 6y ago
I will say both of the eCommerce businesses I worked at were 100% in thrall to google's decisions. Unless you are a brand the size of amazon that can get attention directly, everyone just does a google search. Which mean's if google decides to do something that impacts your ranking or ads you might just be completely out of business with in a matter of days, or slowly bleed out. They might even decide to compete with you or partner with one of your competitors. It's like if the owner of the streets could make a deal with walmart to build more lanes there and always have construction in front of your building. Or even not have a turn off. It controls online commerce basically.
- Mistredo 6y ago
  It almost feels like internet search should be a public property in the same way roads are.
  - kart23 6y ago
    I definitely do not trust the government to give better results than google. In fact, I would expect them to actively censor and promote their interests. Also, would other people just not be allowed to make search engines? Wouldn't google v2 just take over again?
    - deleted 6y ago
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  - O_H_E 6y ago
    There is definitely a case to be made there. In a very idealistic case, I would even go further and say it should be under the umbrella of the UN to accommodate other cultures, and be politics-agnostic. I do believe that we are at the time when decent internet access should be pushed by the UN (or any other entity, hopefully in a non-commercial non-political way like food, shelter, and education.
    - O_H_E 6y ago
summerlight 6y ago
The core issue here is that this regulation doesn't directly introduce any new competition while it only tries to weaken Google's network effect. Network effect is a new corporate tool to fight against antitrust regulation; it's not that straightforward to handle it within the scope defined by the US antitrust jurisprudence especially when it actually benefits the consumers (in this case, advertisers). I personally believe that we need to deal with those aggregators but not sure if this kind of breaking up will result anything other than lost opportunity costs from several years wasted from a lawsuit. I hope DoJ to develop a new effective framework to regulate aggregators but it's very unlikely since William Barr seems to be mostly driven by political motivation.
4636760295 6y ago
I feel strongly that ads are a net-negative to society in their current form. They provide some value (a way for people offering products to reach an audience) but the current implementation doesn't work. Ads make sense in certain scenarios: for example, if I'm explicitly searching for a product I want. But in most cases it's just noise and it incentivizes the wrong behaviours.
nickreese 6y ago
What happens to shareholders when a company is broken up? Do they end up with shares in both companies?
ericmcer 6y ago
Can they do this with all sectors? Instead of targeting the last sector they haven’t completely brought to heel.
enitihas 6y ago
More like lean toward a future where Bing (giving MSFT a monopoly on search, OS, Office Suites, browsers and whatnot), or worse, giving Chinese companies the lead in the rest of the world, and maybe even the US (if the US doesn't regulate them out). I don't see how a lot of Google products survive without the ad revenue. 1. Android -> Difficult to compete against a well financed Chinese competitor here for whatever new subpart of Google takes over android. 2. Chrome -> Again, either MSFT or a chinese fork. 3. Gmail -> Outlook, or maybe some chinese/russian mail service 4. Google Cloud -> This might be gone fully. I don't see them having any advantages if they can't piggyback on the world class google Infra. Even if the US regulates out Huwaei and Alibaba, almost all of Asia and Africa will surely be dominated by big Chinese tech, rather than small US tech if the US big tech get broken up. Not to mention they might dominate Europe too.
- echelon 6y ago
  > Africa will surely be dominated by big Chinese tech What are we waiting on?
- DethNinja 6y ago
  I completely disagree with you, in reality more competition will open up and smaller US/EU firms will take place of larger firms. This will result in decreasing inequality and help the general society as well. There is a good reason why anti-trust laws exist people. Billionaires are already a policy failure, we don’t need trillionaires in future as well.
  - enitihas 6y ago
    > smaller US/EU firms will take place of larger firms. Why do you think smaller EU/US firms are more likely to take their place than Big Chinese firms. The Big Chinese firms will have economies of scale and more capital. > This will result in decreasing inequality and help the general society as well. I don't know how is that going to decrease inequality. Even if big tech is replaced by 5 small tech, there is no way on earth it will decrease inequality. Do you have any basis for such an extraordinary claim? > There is a good reason why anti-trust laws exist people. Billionaires are already a policy failure, we don’t need trillionaires in future as well. Sure. In the totally globalised world, you can decide you don't want big companies. This will just ensure a Chinese company dominates the market.
m0zg 6y ago
I'm pleasantly suprised to find relatively little knee-jerk in the comments. For the record, even as an ex-Googler and as a business-friendly conservative, I support the move and not just for Google but for all of the FANGs. It's verifiably impossible for anyone to compete with these companies in the markets they dominate, so they'll sort of have to compete with themselves after the breakup, and perhaps allow more competition to emerge (or enter the market from abroad). Disclosure: I do not own any stock in Google. I do own stock in Facebook and Amazon however.
jackcosgrove 6y ago
US antitrust law uses the test of whether consumers are worse off as a measure of anti-competitive practices. This assumed that consumers and customers were one and the same. Does this doctrine still hold given that many online business models put consumers and customers in different buckets? Most of Google's services are free for consumers, but customers are less fortunate.
bogwog 6y ago
About damn time regulators start paying attention to the blatant anti-competitive practices all the tech giants have been engaging in for years. And if you're one of those people who are worried that doing this would hurt innovation, don't be. The free market was what got us here, and regulators will ensure the market stays free so we keep moving forward.
kgin 6y ago
Other commenters are suggesting that this would mean the end for YouTube and Gmail. My understanding is that a hypothetical breakup here wouldn't mean that YouTube and Gmail would have no ads. They would become clients of an independent "Google Adtech" company. That certainly changes the economics of the business, but ad-supported Google services would be here to stay. What would likely change is Alphabet would no longer profit from "Google Adtech's" ads on third party services.
alkibiades 6y ago
if you comment on a post like this and work at the company it’s talking about you really should disclose it
trianglem 6y ago
What a bunch of nonsense. You can advertise anywhere and no one has a monopoly over it. This is just scared media companies running their propaganda so they can protect their failing cable advertising markets.
MR4D 6y ago
A clean Google breakup seems to look like : 1 - Search, 2 - Youtube, 3 - Gmail The rest can go anywhere, as they don't seem to be powerful enough to control a market (although that may change in the future). For Amazon, it seems clean to do it like this: 1 - AWS, 2 - Amazon (shopping website + logistics) Audible & IMDB are nice, but to me not big enough to be trouble. Audible might be, but I don't know enough about that market. Facebook seems straightforward: 1 - Facebook, 2 - Instagram, 3 - Whatsapp Apple would be hard to break up, but allowing other stores on their devices might be all that's needed. Microsoft seems to be under the radar compared to 20 years ago. Splitting Office and Windows seems less important to me now than it did back then.
- deleted 6y ago
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- 1propionyl 6y ago
  > A clean Google breakup seems to look like: > 1 - Search, > 2 - Youtube, > 3 - Gmail And where does advertising go? I doubt any of those 3 are profitable on their own.
  - MR4D 6y ago
    Search. It doesn’t really work without it. Plus, that allows YouTube to have its own advertising, or a third party advertising network.
sytelus 6y ago
How much of a connection of this with Trump's pledge to bring on antitrust after the videos of Google leaders in distraught got leaked> I understand Trump can't decide to bring on antitrust just like that but Republican machinery can activate all red states to rally for it. Unfortunately, many blue states would join as well. I suspect if Trump gets 2nd term, big tech would look very different in coming years given they consider them as powerful machines for progressive movement. Very likely Amazon and FB might also get targetted on similar grounds. PS: I'd like to remain this discussion remain apolitical and have more rational discussions than folks leaning on either side.
occamrazor 6y ago
If you carve off the ad-tech business, what revenue-generating activities are left at Google? I don’t understand what kind of break-up would make economic sense.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
Regulators have said this is going to be challenging to do in court because laws currently are focused on the consumer in a very dollars and cents kind of way. As many have mentioned below, this will increase cost to consumers because there is an inherent connection between price and economies of scale. This is why so many startups (and their backers) are willing to lose money on every sale for the first decade to build dominance. Now, if politicians are going to fight to raise prices for their constituents, they need a strong argument that will convince Joe Sixpack it needs to be done. I challenge anyone here to describe the benefit for the average American in a politically feasible way (many of whom are struggling to pay bills, struggling to affordhealth care for their children, or dealing with drug addiction and racism, etc.)
machinehermit 6y ago
I have started using DuckDuckGo more and more but the biggest issue I have with it is that DuckDuckGo is such an incredibly poor choice for the naming of a search engine brand. The results almost seem better in many instances for what I am actually looking for. We are never going to say "Just DuckDuckGo go it" though. It sounds just so stupid.
yuhong 6y ago
Good WSJ article: https://wiki.fuckoffgoogle.de/index.php?title=Google_Agonizes_on_Privacy_as_Ad_World_Vaults_Ahead https://wiki.fuckoffgoogle.de/index.php?title=Google_Agonize...

Seems like it just refers to (but doesn't link to) https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/05/states-lean-toward-pushing-to-break-up-googles-ad-tech-business.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/05/states-lean-toward-pushing-t...

dang 6y ago
Yes, that was bad. Changed now. More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23432441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23432441.

joelbluminator 6y ago

Anyone good with investments here? How worried should I be if I own alphabet stocks?

austincheney 6y ago
If this works out like it did for the breakup of Standard Oil you will be very wealthy.
- mikestew 6y ago
  I don't mean to be snarky, but do you think a comparison to a company that was dissolved over 100 years ago by people long dead is apt?
  - vorpalhex 6y ago
    Standard oil may have a different name now, but it still very much exists and those children companies are still amongst the wealthiest companies in the world.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  If it works like AT&T though, not so much.
thoughtstheseus 6y ago
No one knows, it depends how they breakup or regulate. On the flip side google will likely stop spending money on random projects.
timwaagh 6y ago
Worried if this is true
mywittyname 6y ago
You will get a stake in any spin-off companies that result from DoJ action. So there's no worries from that perspective. However, this will take years to litigate and a lot can happen to a tech company over that timeframe.
jedberg 6y ago
If they even decide to go through with it it would be years before anything actually happens. But, assuming they do and it does, I suspect it would go down like this: Google is split into Google Ads and Google Data Collection. Search, Youtube, and all the other things they use to collect data on you will go to DC, and GA will just do ads. DC will need to find a source of revenue, and will start bundling up selling the data they collect on you. One of their customers will be GA. But maybe some upstart company or Amazon or Microsoft will be their customers too. GA will lose value because they will have to increase payouts/lower prices to compete with their new competitors. DC will go up in value because of all their new sources of revenue. You'll be a shareholder in both and probably see your total value go up because Data Collection will probably make more money than Google Ads loses.
empath75 6y ago
I'd say not worried at all in the long term and maybe slightly worried in the short term. Microsoft is doing fine after a few years of bad returns. The successor companies to AT&T and Standard Oil did fine.
hogFeast 6y ago
The value will go up. Biggest issue with Alphabet is that it is run like a govt bureaucracy. You have one business that is very valuable, and to own that you have to pay the tax of owning all the other stuff that does nothing but burn cash for the benefit of employees.

kediz 6y ago

How do you achieve this technically? Monorepo would be a pain to break. Or just break up Google into two but let both of them keep the access to the same repo? Then what would this achieve?

coldtea 6y ago
>How do you achieve this technically? Monorepo would be a pain to break. Well, that's Google's problem... Plus, it's not like they can't follow an API and versioned libs and have to have it all bundled...
- duskwuff 6y ago
  The big question would be how you deal with shared infrastructure -- compute, data storage, logging, etc. Google has a significant amount of highly proprietary code in those areas which they're undoubtedly using within their ads product; it'd be tricky to figure out how to deal with that in a split.
mayank 6y ago
> Monorepo would be a pain to break. It's generally acknowledged in technical circles that antitrust action is a highly effective way to break up a monorepo.
- kediz 6y ago
  It would be a case of LDD (Lawsuit driven development). The engineers would need to redo a lot of the infra and products
jrockway 6y ago
To some extent, Google broke themselves up when it became Alphabet.
alecb 6y ago
They should have spun off DoubleClick for Publishers and other server/ad mediation into separate companies and is likely what will happen if the government is successful in their case.

nugget 6y ago

I took a course taught by a former Microsoft exec who worked at the company before and after the DOJ's anti-trust settlement. He said the settlement profoundly changed the internal culture of competitiveness and innovation. Lawyers were embedded on many product teams, review cycles became slower, and execs became complacent. I think the only way Amazon or Google ever start to stagnate is if a similar fate befalls them.

wtvanhest 6y ago
I worked at Intel for a brief 3 month summer internship in finance (2010). One thing that struck me was that I was not allowed to put certain words in presentations because they didn't want those words used against them in court. Its been a long time so I don't remember what words, but that was a long time after the first set of anti-trust actions. Maybe someone that has been there more recently can attest or counter my point, but it seemed to at least leave a surface wound on the culture.
- refurb 6y ago
  I work in healthcare, a highly regulated industry and we do the same thing. It’s to the point that we’ve developed euphemisms for all these words.
- mrep 6y ago
  Not intel, but I definitely have seen training videos about not saying "dominate the market" or "crush the competition".
  - pradn 6y ago
    There's similar guidance inside Google. These exact phrases are used as "no-no"s.
- kudokatz 6y ago
  There has been official training at multiple, large tech companies other than Intel specifically geared towards preventing even accidental use of language that can be taken out-of-context. The practice is alive and well.

moneywoes 6y ago

Does Facebook not bundle their products?

dr-detroit 6y ago
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/social-media-is-a-tool-of-the-cia-seriously/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/social-media-is-a-tool-of-the-c...

kanox 6y ago

I don't understand how a google breakup would work. Would it just split off the ad business from ad-supported businesses like gmail and youtube? Some google products could stand on their own (Google Cloud) but most would have a lot of trouble. The worst case is open-source offerings like Android and Chrome which only make sense as part of a wider corporate strategy.

TACIXAT 6y ago
It would be really cool for people to be able to make money in those markets. It's really lame right now to face competing with free offerings. We're in a post chat client scarcity world.
- kanox 6y ago
  Nobody has made serious money by selling browser because nobody is willing to pay for browsers. Without Chrome the web would just stagnate. Nobody is willing to pay for mobile operating systems either. Maybe hardware manufacturers would pay to move Android forward as an open-source project but most likely outcome is a stagnant fragmented mess.
  - criddell 6y ago
    > Nobody is willing to pay for mobile operating systems either. Why not just bundle it in with the cost of the hardware like Apple does?
  - chx 6y ago
    > Without Chrome the web would just stagnate. Microsoft would take over. They are in position already, contributing to Chromium.
  - rvp-x 6y ago
    Microsoft used to have licensing deals with Android phone manufacturers for their use of FAT, it was just bundled in the cost of the phones sold. With the choice of Android effectively costing them $5-15 per device sold, manufacturers still chose it. https://www.howtogeek.com/183766/why-microsoft-makes-5-to-15-from-every-android-device-sold/ https://www.howtogeek.com/183766/why-microsoft-makes-5-to-15...

coldtea 6y ago

Amen! E.U should do the same...

tiborsaas 6y ago
Break up to separate countries? We tried it, it sucked.
- coldtea 6y ago
  No, break up Google. As for EU breaking up into separate countries, that would be great too. As opposed to a big entity that passes laws and handles monetary policy in favor of 1-2 top dog countries and big coporations. The whole reason the EU was founded (as ECC and before) was to contain Germany [it was a stated goal of the politicians and diplomats involved]. Some irony, huh?

keiferski 6y ago

I don't know enough about antitrust law, but it's my (possibly wrong) assumption that it is legal to use the profits from Product A to subsidize lower prices for Product B, a sort of "sell stuff to Peter in order to give Paul a discount." I imagine it would be difficult to determine if this is happening, but it would seem logical to say that if this subsidization leads to an unfair advantage over competitors (who otherwise couldn't match the low price), it should be regulated, at least according to antitrust theory. The problem for Google is that this describes a solid chunk of their product portfolio.

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iron0013 6y ago

Which is preferable, politically “neutral” search results, or search results that prioritize truth and accuracy? I prefer the latter, which is what google provides now, but I’d be interested to hear from those who would prefer the former. If one party says that little green aliens are going to raise ATM fees and another party doesn’t, should google be obligated to return search results supporting both perspectives?

theduder99 6y ago
politically neutral search results? you've got to be kidding. guess you don't remember the multiple "auto-complete fiascos" involving hillary, obama, trump, etc.
blockmarker 6y ago
I do not trust Google to give me accurate and truthful results. Not the engineers, not the executives, not the company. They are my political opponents. They are people and Google is still a corporation: they can all be bought, infiltrated, deceived, manipulated and threatened. I would not allow such a centralized point of failure for all information and knowledge to be controlled. Given that not even soft sciences academics, who are supposed to be erudites, can separate themselves from their biases and look at things objectively, and their whole job is supposed to be that, I do not trust that the engineers at Google are able to do that. And finally, simply giving an incredibly small elite what the rest of the population can see and know, is a bad idea. These are the reasons why I oppose prioritizing "truth and accuracy". It would not be such thing. I, personally, would add that just the two American political parties deciding what is politically neutral is pretty bad. Even if the Republicans are nominally on my side, I do not trust such people to treat fairly all other politics than the ones chosen by the leaders of each party. And all the other points I have raised wholly apply even to those on my side of politics. It would still, however, be better than letting my political enemies controlling the internet. If the roles were reversed, you would think the same.
- downerending 6y ago
  "Truth and Accuracy" sounds like a good name for a government ministry. Wonder if it's been done.

jeffbee 6y ago

It is fairly amazing that this action would come against a player with a minority and shrinking share of a market where prices are rapidly falling. Antitrust actions under US doctrine are supposed to benefit consumers, but how can this action do anything other than increase profits for Facebook and Amazon?

ProAm 6y ago
Hopefully they are broken up next.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Is there a precedent for breaking up the top three players in a marketplace? By what means would that give relief to ad buyers? If you were to impair the ad business of Google, Facebook, and Amazon, wouldn't that simply shift profits to Verizon, Microsoft, Snap, ByteDance, etc?
  - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
    I think it's a huge mistake to group Google, Facebook and Amazon all in the same bucket and say "look, they don't have a monopoly because they each only have X% of 'total digital ad spend'". If I want to advertise my vacation house for rent, I sure as hell am not going to do it on Amazon, and FB would hardly make any sense (maybe if I had a whole network of houses for rent to do brand marketing, but not if I just had one). Google is pretty much the only option that makes sense here. I mean, just ask a digital marketer. While there are some potential areas of overlap they all view Adwords, FB ads and Amazon ads very differently and not much in 'competition'.
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      Weird example because I am sure Facebook is a major outlet for vacation rental marketing. Here's the Vacation Rental Management Association's advice on using Facebook: https://www.vrma.org/p/bl/et/blogaid=1253 https://www.vrma.org/p/bl/et/blogaid=1253 I imagine other large players in vacation rental marketing are VRBO, TripAdvisor, and AirBnB. Anyway if you redefine the online advertising market to include only the things that Google dominates, such as search ads on Google itself, then sure you can make it look anyway you want.

dang 6y ago

The submitted article was https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-google/u-s-states-lean-toward-breaking-up-googles-ad-tech-business-cnbc-idUSKBN23C2NZ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-google/u-s-states-lea.... There's nothing in there beyond "CNBC reported on Friday, citing sources". That broke the site guidelines, which ask: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." We've switched to the CNBC article now, but it clearly should have been the one submitted in the first place.

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somethoughts 6y ago

I feel like Google would have been better off if they had stayed out of the newspaper aggregation business and stuck with Search and long tail media content, GCP, GSuite and did R&D in AI (Waymo, Verily) and AR/VR. There is just too much baggage when wading into politics. I think there are too many well connected, well funded media companies that are lobbying and retaliating behind the scenes as they see their news publishing business models get disrupted by the Google News aggregator. Couple that with politicians frustrated by the Google News opaque aggregation algorithm and that leads to anti-trust rulings.

alecb 6y ago
Their issue isn't that they are in the newspaper business. Their issue is that they own almost all of the ad tech business from top to bottom.
- spaced-out 6y ago
  If that's true, why is their market share in the online advertising dropping? https://www.investopedia.com/news/facebook-google-digital-ad-market-share-drops-amazon-climbs/ https://www.investopedia.com/news/facebook-google-digital-ad...
- meowface 6y ago
  And owning almost all of the ad tech business also complements well with owning a huge chunk of the tech business in general.
- somethoughts 6y ago
  My general sense is that fewer power brokers in DC would complain if they had stuck with the bottom part and complemented that with GCP. Its one thing to serve ads on the bottom (i.e. ads for pentalope screw drivers against articles about pentalope screw drivers). Its another thing to encroach on establish media outlets turf, AMP up their content and sell ads to Auto, CPG and Airline companies based on that content.

Barrin92 6y ago

Good decision. Then do the same thing to AWS and Amazon's media branch, and then go undo the whatsapp acquisition. Then stop platforms from subsidizing competing products while they charge competitors high fees like Spotify vs Apple Music. The increasing trend of large tech conglomerates to use one money printing product like AWS or search or the Apple Store to tactically snipe competitors to destroy or acquire them is absolutely abysmal in the long run. I don't care if it increases consumer prices by 10 cents or whatever, it's time to look at the long term health of the ecosystem overall. It's really the private analog to a state capitalist country subsidizing its own firms while foreigners have to compete on a one-by-one basis. Everyone considers that to be detrimental when it happens between two nations, I don't see why it's not detrimental when it happens in the tech industry.

mrharrison 6y ago
The counter argument is that the US needs to keep FAANG companies large as a weapon/counter measure against large rival Chinese companies.
- ambicapter 6y ago
  Depends on if you want one very large but somewhat lazy defender or a swarm of small, fast and aggressive defenders.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Barrin92 6y ago
  People used to make this exact argument in the 80s when it came to Japan, and even when it came to the Soviet Union[1]. There were countless of people who had already written off competitive markets in favour of supporting domestic industry. In the car industry people actually listened and enacted domestic protection, what did that get the US? Two lost decades of shoddy cars. Have Japanese conglomerates overtaken the world? Nope. I think it's an absolute smokescreen and such a blatant attempt by Facebook to use nationalism to protect their status. In the long run we're better served by trusting in innovation than trying to protect domestic business. It was always the right bet. And if China continues to prop up giants they'll just stagnate. The reason they caught up in the first place is because, for at least a short time, they allowed free-wheeling fierce competition. [1]https://www.econlib.org/archives/2009/12/why_were_americ.html https://www.econlib.org/archives/2009/12/why_were_americ.htm...

Vysero 6y ago

"companies like Google censor conservative content" Certainly, isn't all their censoring.. in fact, I am less concerned about it than other things.

tosser0001 6y ago

Would this benefit China or Chinese companies in any way that would be detrimental to U.S. interests?

jjcon 6y ago
I’ll probably get hounded for saying this here but: I genuinely believe that one of the biggest things harming American society right now is adtech. From social media to traditional media they have become obsessed with clicks and view time. This leads to negativity and extremism getting promoted and sensationalism overtaking authentic journalistic approaches. Not only that but it means a population that is getting constantly bombarded with terrible, often overinflated stories. Why? Because all this sells because the human brain is wired to focus on danger before all else. China doesn’t have this same problem because it controls the media and censors social media. From a purely psychological standpoint this is a positive but there are obviously deep implications for what that censorship does to a society as well. To answer your direct question, any losses by Google due to this will be dwarfed by the positive implications for the American society. I’m not saying this will fix the above problems but the amount of good it will do (in conjunction with other legislation especially, ie link tax and repealing section 230) is greater than the amount of bad by a mile.

game_the0ry 6y ago

Google, Amazon, FB are not the monopolies that you should be worried about. They are fun to talk about and tech is sexy, but there are bigger problems - ISPs / telecoms, for example. Remember the baby bells? In 1982, AT&T (ma bell) lost an anti-trust lawsuit and was broken up into 8 companies (the baby bells). Guess what happened since? If you guessed they merged back together, you would be correct. The baby bells merged back together and became 3 companies - AT&T, Verizon, and CenturyLink. For those who are customers of AT&T - how do you like your service? Is it as good as Google? Oligopoly is the new monopoly. Financial services, airlines, oil majors, media, pharma, auto, etc. Those are the industries that need breaking up. You pay for their services / products and they price fix (airline baggage fees, overdraft fees, etc), you don't even pay for Google. You can easily use duckduckgo and delete your FB / Insta with no consequence. Edit - to address the comments saying that the tech companies should be broken up: sure, but how exactly? Google and Facebook in particular. You don't even pay for their services, so you (the citizens) can't claim consumer protection from their business. Only the companies / individuals that pay for Google and Facebook ads can. Again, I get the frustration of the times and misinformation sucks, but Google and Facebook are not the cause. They are the means of distributing info (including ads that are sometimes just fake new), not the root source of all evil.

speeder 6y ago
My business, despite being quite critical (we sell parts for maintenance of machinery, today one of my clients for example was a medical equipment factory) relies heavily on ads, people come, buy what they want, and if I solves the problem, it is over, they don't recommend or talk about us, and often aren't return costumers either unless another machine break... So our clients often are people googling desperately trying to make their suddenly stopped factory resume work, then they see our ads and buy from us. It became obvious to us that Google is a threat, they changed rules multiple times in the past to encourage fraud (instead of stopping fraud), our revenue is directly proportional to the Google ads spend, and whenever we find a better ad provider, Google buys it. Only possible competitor for Google is TV, but TV ads are way beyond our budget and we have no idea of they would work, considering our niche. So... Google is not only a monopoly, it is an obvious one, and they abuse their power freely.

29athrowaway 6y ago

The problem when you break up a domestic giant is that opens the door for foreign giants to enter the market. What would you rather have, Amazon and Google, or Alibaba and Baidu?

nojito 6y ago

Very interesting!! I wonder if through the course of the investigation we finally get a definitive reason why Alphabet was created. My gut tells me that it is to hide data sharing between entities.

rch 6y ago

This effort seems fundamentally out of touch, misdirected, and politically motivated.

esoterica 6y ago

I wonder if any of the tech workers here cheering on the breaking up of Google or Facebook realize that the obscene FAANG compensation packages are only made possible by their massive profit margins, which are in turn enabled by their pseudo-monopoly status. Monopolies are "bad" because they have the pricing power gouge their customers at the expense of boosting profits. But Google's and Facebook's customers are advertisers! When you support "breaking up tech monopolies" you are basically saying programmers should get paid less money so advertising companies can buy cheaper ads. What an utterly ridiculous and self-destructive thing for tech workers to advocate.

astan 6y ago

I am really worried about Chinese cyberwarfare while we keep shooting ourselves in the foot. Just look at how easy it is to spy on millions of americans with things like TikTok and Huawei. Google could be a lot worse at the size it currently is. I view Google as almost a kind of university that tries to enhance technology by "poaching" good people and in some sense, allowing them to work on whatever they want while guaranteeing them a very good wage. Aside from the standard Chrome, Android-tier projects, let's think about all the stuff that they've done that has been pretty radically useful. I'm not talking about products, they do a terrible job with maintenance and shutting down products is very infuriating to any user. But it is almost like research projects. So let's just focus on technical contributions to the software engineering field. Golang, gRPC, Protobuf, Kubernetes, Tensorflow, WebRTC, QUIC protocol, very interesting innovations in camera technology such as NightSight, Google Maps which has changed my life completely. Furthermore, millions of contributions to open source projects and protocols, so many security improvements by the Security & Cryptography teams that I have on occasion worked with. Personally I wouldn't work for Google because I don't enjoy the kind of atmosphere where there's no real "mission". But doing this much innovation is impossible unless you are funded by the government, or have a money printing business.

ravenstine 6y ago

> Google, Amazon, FB are not the monopolies that you should be worried about. Not at all? > For those who are customers of AT&T - how do you like your service? Is it as good as Google? Google's "support" for their products has one of the worst reputations.

jasonvorhe 6y ago
Google's "support" for their products has one of the worst reputations. Unless you pay for it, e.g. for Google Cloud Platform.

mrkramer 6y ago

I think government should not be breaking up big successful companies only because they control >50% market share. What Microsoft did with IE was nasty but Google acquiring DoubleClick, AdMob, YouTube etc. is not nasty at all. If Google for example made the same exact product like YouTube and then leveraged its massive resources and distribution channel to destroy YouTube and claim the market share that would be problematic but otherwise I don't see a problem. Punishing the best student in class only because he or she is the best is not cool at all.

jldugger 6y ago
> Google acquiring DoubleClick Allowing that was probably a mistake. IDK if it's possible to undo, but letting the two biggest advertisers merge was is like almost definitionally anticompetitive.
- mrkramer 6y ago
  Why they didn't block the merger when it happened? they could've but now it is too late. The same thing would be splitting up Facebook and Instagram when they all already so interconnected.
sumedh 6y ago
> If Google for example made the same exact product like YouTube and then leveraged its massive resources and distribution channel to destroy YouTube Like what it did to Firefox?
- mrkramer 6y ago
  Is Mozilla for profit or non profit I don't even know but they didn't complain back in the day when Google Chrome took over.

tracerbulletx 6y ago

I will say both of the eCommerce businesses I worked at were 100% in thrall to google's decisions. Unless you are a brand the size of amazon that can get attention directly, everyone just does a google search. Which mean's if google decides to do something that impacts your ranking or ads you might just be completely out of business with in a matter of days, or slowly bleed out. They might even decide to compete with you or partner with one of your competitors. It's like if the owner of the streets could make a deal with walmart to build more lanes there and always have construction in front of your building. Or even not have a turn off. It controls online commerce basically.

Mistredo 6y ago
It almost feels like internet search should be a public property in the same way roads are.
- kart23 6y ago
  I definitely do not trust the government to give better results than google. In fact, I would expect them to actively censor and promote their interests. Also, would other people just not be allowed to make search engines? Wouldn't google v2 just take over again?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- O_H_E 6y ago
  There is definitely a case to be made there. In a very idealistic case, I would even go further and say it should be under the umbrella of the UN to accommodate other cultures, and be politics-agnostic. I do believe that we are at the time when decent internet access should be pushed by the UN (or any other entity, hopefully in a non-commercial non-political way like food, shelter, and education.
  - O_H_E 6y ago

summerlight 6y ago

The core issue here is that this regulation doesn't directly introduce any new competition while it only tries to weaken Google's network effect. Network effect is a new corporate tool to fight against antitrust regulation; it's not that straightforward to handle it within the scope defined by the US antitrust jurisprudence especially when it actually benefits the consumers (in this case, advertisers). I personally believe that we need to deal with those aggregators but not sure if this kind of breaking up will result anything other than lost opportunity costs from several years wasted from a lawsuit. I hope DoJ to develop a new effective framework to regulate aggregators but it's very unlikely since William Barr seems to be mostly driven by political motivation.

4636760295 6y ago

I feel strongly that ads are a net-negative to society in their current form. They provide some value (a way for people offering products to reach an audience) but the current implementation doesn't work. Ads make sense in certain scenarios: for example, if I'm explicitly searching for a product I want. But in most cases it's just noise and it incentivizes the wrong behaviours.

nickreese 6y ago

What happens to shareholders when a company is broken up? Do they end up with shares in both companies?

ericmcer 6y ago

Can they do this with all sectors? Instead of targeting the last sector they haven’t completely brought to heel.

enitihas 6y ago

More like lean toward a future where Bing (giving MSFT a monopoly on search, OS, Office Suites, browsers and whatnot), or worse, giving Chinese companies the lead in the rest of the world, and maybe even the US (if the US doesn't regulate them out). I don't see how a lot of Google products survive without the ad revenue. 1. Android -> Difficult to compete against a well financed Chinese competitor here for whatever new subpart of Google takes over android. 2. Chrome -> Again, either MSFT or a chinese fork. 3. Gmail -> Outlook, or maybe some chinese/russian mail service 4. Google Cloud -> This might be gone fully. I don't see them having any advantages if they can't piggyback on the world class google Infra. Even if the US regulates out Huwaei and Alibaba, almost all of Asia and Africa will surely be dominated by big Chinese tech, rather than small US tech if the US big tech get broken up. Not to mention they might dominate Europe too.

echelon 6y ago
> Africa will surely be dominated by big Chinese tech What are we waiting on?
DethNinja 6y ago
I completely disagree with you, in reality more competition will open up and smaller US/EU firms will take place of larger firms. This will result in decreasing inequality and help the general society as well. There is a good reason why anti-trust laws exist people. Billionaires are already a policy failure, we don’t need trillionaires in future as well.
- enitihas 6y ago
  > smaller US/EU firms will take place of larger firms. Why do you think smaller EU/US firms are more likely to take their place than Big Chinese firms. The Big Chinese firms will have economies of scale and more capital. > This will result in decreasing inequality and help the general society as well. I don't know how is that going to decrease inequality. Even if big tech is replaced by 5 small tech, there is no way on earth it will decrease inequality. Do you have any basis for such an extraordinary claim? > There is a good reason why anti-trust laws exist people. Billionaires are already a policy failure, we don’t need trillionaires in future as well. Sure. In the totally globalised world, you can decide you don't want big companies. This will just ensure a Chinese company dominates the market.

m0zg 6y ago

I'm pleasantly suprised to find relatively little knee-jerk in the comments. For the record, even as an ex-Googler and as a business-friendly conservative, I support the move and not just for Google but for all of the FANGs. It's verifiably impossible for anyone to compete with these companies in the markets they dominate, so they'll sort of have to compete with themselves after the breakup, and perhaps allow more competition to emerge (or enter the market from abroad). Disclosure: I do not own any stock in Google. I do own stock in Facebook and Amazon however.

jackcosgrove 6y ago

US antitrust law uses the test of whether consumers are worse off as a measure of anti-competitive practices. This assumed that consumers and customers were one and the same. Does this doctrine still hold given that many online business models put consumers and customers in different buckets? Most of Google's services are free for consumers, but customers are less fortunate.

bogwog 6y ago

About damn time regulators start paying attention to the blatant anti-competitive practices all the tech giants have been engaging in for years. And if you're one of those people who are worried that doing this would hurt innovation, don't be. The free market was what got us here, and regulators will ensure the market stays free so we keep moving forward.

kgin 6y ago

Other commenters are suggesting that this would mean the end for YouTube and Gmail. My understanding is that a hypothetical breakup here wouldn't mean that YouTube and Gmail would have no ads. They would become clients of an independent "Google Adtech" company. That certainly changes the economics of the business, but ad-supported Google services would be here to stay. What would likely change is Alphabet would no longer profit from "Google Adtech's" ads on third party services.

alkibiades 6y ago

if you comment on a post like this and work at the company it’s talking about you really should disclose it

trianglem 6y ago

What a bunch of nonsense. You can advertise anywhere and no one has a monopoly over it. This is just scared media companies running their propaganda so they can protect their failing cable advertising markets.

MR4D 6y ago

A clean Google breakup seems to look like : 1 - Search, 2 - Youtube, 3 - Gmail The rest can go anywhere, as they don't seem to be powerful enough to control a market (although that may change in the future). For Amazon, it seems clean to do it like this: 1 - AWS, 2 - Amazon (shopping website + logistics) Audible & IMDB are nice, but to me not big enough to be trouble. Audible might be, but I don't know enough about that market. Facebook seems straightforward: 1 - Facebook, 2 - Instagram, 3 - Whatsapp Apple would be hard to break up, but allowing other stores on their devices might be all that's needed. Microsoft seems to be under the radar compared to 20 years ago. Splitting Office and Windows seems less important to me now than it did back then.

deleted 6y ago
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1propionyl 6y ago
> A clean Google breakup seems to look like: > 1 - Search, > 2 - Youtube, > 3 - Gmail And where does advertising go? I doubt any of those 3 are profitable on their own.
- MR4D 6y ago
  Search. It doesn’t really work without it. Plus, that allows YouTube to have its own advertising, or a third party advertising network.

sytelus 6y ago

How much of a connection of this with Trump's pledge to bring on antitrust after the videos of Google leaders in distraught got leaked> I understand Trump can't decide to bring on antitrust just like that but Republican machinery can activate all red states to rally for it. Unfortunately, many blue states would join as well. I suspect if Trump gets 2nd term, big tech would look very different in coming years given they consider them as powerful machines for progressive movement. Very likely Amazon and FB might also get targetted on similar grounds. PS: I'd like to remain this discussion remain apolitical and have more rational discussions than folks leaning on either side.

occamrazor 6y ago

If you carve off the ad-tech business, what revenue-generating activities are left at Google? I don’t understand what kind of break-up would make economic sense.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

Regulators have said this is going to be challenging to do in court because laws currently are focused on the consumer in a very dollars and cents kind of way. As many have mentioned below, this will increase cost to consumers because there is an inherent connection between price and economies of scale. This is why so many startups (and their backers) are willing to lose money on every sale for the first decade to build dominance. Now, if politicians are going to fight to raise prices for their constituents, they need a strong argument that will convince Joe Sixpack it needs to be done. I challenge anyone here to describe the benefit for the average American in a politically feasible way (many of whom are struggling to pay bills, struggling to affordhealth care for their children, or dealing with drug addiction and racism, etc.)

machinehermit 6y ago

I have started using DuckDuckGo more and more but the biggest issue I have with it is that DuckDuckGo is such an incredibly poor choice for the naming of a search engine brand. The results almost seem better in many instances for what I am actually looking for. We are never going to say "Just DuckDuckGo go it" though. It sounds just so stupid.

yuhong 6y ago

Good WSJ article: https://wiki.fuckoffgoogle.de/index.php?title=Google_Agonizes_on_Privacy_as_Ad_World_Vaults_Ahead https://wiki.fuckoffgoogle.de/index.php?title=Google_Agonize...