8 ms·

Break Up Google

180 points by robin_reala 6y ago

ricardo81 6y ago
The author asks how gmail makes money. Their "business email" where you bring your own domain costs about 5GBP a month, and that's their cheapest plan.
- aliante 6y ago
  It is curious to read someone who has clearly never used Google products pontificating about restructuring Google.
mythz 6y ago
Break Up Amazon & Facebook too.
- kevingadd 6y ago
  A lot of his arguments make sense for amzn, facebook, ms, all the big tech players I think. He indirectly mentions this in a couple cases, even if his focus is on Google. I think it's reasonable to focus on them because of the huge impact services like Maps can have on commerce.
- korantu 6y ago
  Current (US) laws, if I understand correctly, designed to prevent leveraging success in one market to harm your competitors in another. For example if Chrome would only work with google docs and not microsoft live. USA does not have laws to break up companies simply for being too big or even for being used by majority of customers.
  - mythz 6y ago
    US Anti trust laws applies to monopolies [1] where one of the penalties for abusing a monopoly is breaking up the company which was famously done to Standard Oil and AT&T. The EU have found Google guilty of antitrust violations and fined them a record €1.5 billion. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Monopoly_and_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Mo...
pmoriarty 6y ago
Unfortunately, this is not going to be nearly good enough. I'd adopt a salt the earth policy with respect to the spying parts of Google. That'd be a start. Sadly, there'll be plenty of companies that'll fill its shoes to continue spying on people, and many more that already do. So much of the modern internet is built on a foundation of spying on users, and most companies will not willingly give up all the dollar signs they see when they think of spying and even more spying on their users and everyone else they can gather data on. It's super depressing.
namanaggarwal 6y ago
How do we decide which companies to break up ? Similar argument can be made for any big conglomerate. Look at Reliance in India or Samsung in Korea, they sell anything and everything possible. Could it make companies hide businesses as well, just to not want to break up.
- kevingadd 6y ago
  Well, this is not a new problem. Antitrust enforcement and breaking up companies has been a thing for decades (if not at least a century) Starting with companies that make over a billion dollars a year and are in multiple markets seems like an uncontroversial place, though.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    Starting with companies that make over a billion dollars a year and are in multiple markets seems like an uncontroversial place, though. The problems don't occur when companies are in multiple markets, arguable that is better for competition and hence the person on the street. The problem is when a company or two dominates a single market.
    - ijpsud 6y ago
      > The problem is when a company or two dominates a single market. It would also be bad if one company dominated multiple markets. (just a nit pick on your phrasing)
    - kevingadd 6y ago
      You're correct that dominating a single market is bad, but using your dominance of a single market to bankroll taking over other markets is pretty nasty and you can't trivially do something like that if you aren't already fabulously wealthy from dominating a market. In the case of the article, it's specifically talking about how Google is doing that.
- mtgx 6y ago
  Just because we don't have a good framework for it now, doesn't mean we shouldn't look at creating one. For instance, we could have companies get into "pre-monopoly" reviews. What would activate such reviews? Stuff like buying out competitors for more than $50 million let's say (the number can be decided from some analyses of harmful mergers), aggressively invading other markets with money from their core business, passing over 40% market share in its core market, exclusive deals with suppliers/clients, competing against your own clients on "platforms," arbitrary bans of clients from said platforms, etc. At the very least, I think attempting to stop/break-up/sue a company for "monopoly" only when it goes over 90% market share is WAY too late in the process and is too short-sighted. By that point whatever measure is taken is too disruptive on the whole while also being too ineffective as a punishment/deterrent for whatever the company did. Not to mention that most of the damage might have already done since a decade prior to that point against customers, smaller competitors, etc. It's not a very useful system at all. It needs to be changed. For all the hype about AI that these companies create, and then that AI gets used to create automatic killer robots, arrests and even convictions, maybe it's also time to turn that against them and use all of the above factors and more to create an "AI solution" that will identify when a company is starting to become a "risk" of turning into a monopoly, and try to restrict/prevent that from happening before it's too late. For instance, I've noticed a lot of anti-GDPR criticism here saying stuff like "but now GDPR will only hurt the new guys, as Google/FB have already gotten all the data on everyone and can use it for their algorithms, etc". Now, wouldn't it be nice if we could've prevented that from happening before it was too late, because we had an "early monopoly alert" system in place go off a decade earlier?
kevingadd 6y ago
Generally interesting article. Makes his case pretty well "But YouTube definitely has to be its own thing; it’s got no real synergy that I can detect with any other Google property." This is a funny observation because YouTube was originally an acquisition and its integration with other Google products is very strange. It has at most points in time had its own rules about anonymity, privacy, multiple accounts, etc. Supposedly the gender setting (now google-account-wide) was originally a YouTube piece of data that got repurposed for use in G+ and other services that needed it.
- luckydata 6y ago
  You gotta be extremely shortsighted to fail to see how YouTube fits inside Google. I’m really shocked Tim would say something like that.
balanced009 6y ago
These type of posts are now starting to sound like propaganda. Just emotional catharsis of some sort. There are plenty of large companies on this planet. Why do you focus on Google? and why do we see these posts frequently making it to top ten of hacker news?
- skinkestek 6y ago
  > Why do you focus on Google? Because there's no thing one hate as much as the one that one loved and that then betrayed you I guess. (Note: I neither loved Google nor hate it now but I'll go as far as admit to being a big fan earlier on and really disappointed now.) > and why do we see these posts frequently making it to top ten of hacker news? Because so many of us agree with them. (FTR, I'm an oldtimer with a fresh account.)
- quonn 6y ago
  Yeah, but there are, for example, at least five car companies at the top end that have kind of equally attractive products and 20 others. But in tech it‘s different. Additionally, I don‘t think anyone working in the tech industry should want a future where a few large companies control everything. In the long run, this is not in our interest.
- FridgeSeal 6y ago
  I agree, a lot of very large companies should be broken up. At the same time, why can't someone's blog focus on one? Why can't a given company be held under the spotlight for something? Being asked to criticise all of them, or none of them seems like an unfair criticism. This post being about google doesn't preclude another one being written about all companies, or Facebook, or amazon, etc etc. Getting the ball rolling on even one of these companies would be a good start, so I don't see the harm in people writing posts focusing on one. > and why do we see these posts frequently making it to top ten of hacker news? Presumably because a lot of people agree with the proposition?
- kryptiskt 6y ago
  You should be grateful, the threat of antitrust action is literally the only thing that is slowing down Google turning Android and Chrome into their own private internet. It's not enough, so far, so the authorities really needs to step up their game. And the idea that you can't name and shame a trillion dollar corporation because there are other big companies around is pernicious. The idea is mistaken, no one should escape scrutiny because there are other bad actors. And if Google isn't big enough to be singled out, who is?
jaspax 6y ago
Here's the rub: I strongly suspect that YouTube is not profitable, or is just barely profitable, such that it would be difficult to run as a separate company from the rest of Google. This is even more true for Maps. Breaking apart Google would substantially risk those businesses. On the other hand, maybe that's a good thing.
- kangaroozach 6y ago
  How could that be? Server costs? Seems like YouTube would be raking in the cash.
  - AndrewUnmuted 6y ago
    Their transcode, storage, and compute costs are what lead me to also believe YouTube is not profitable, or just barely profitable.
    - markdown 6y ago
      If those costs were high they'd have long ago banned the spam accounts that upload autogenerated garbage.
      - ijpsud 6y ago
        "[In Q3 2018] YouTube removed about 1.67 million channels and all of the 50.2 million videos that were available from them. Nearly 80% of the channel takedowns related to spam uploads, YouTube said." https://www.businessinsider.com/r-youtube-under-pressure-for-problem-content-takes-down-58-million-videos-in-quarter-2018-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/r-youtube-under-pressure-for... The remaining 20% were apparently taken down due to nudity and other policy violations. To be clear: I have no idea whether they're profitable or not. Just pointing out this article.
        markdown 6y ago
        Thanks.
skinkestek 6y ago
> When? · The best time would have been sometime around 2015. The second best… This makes sense. Maybe then we would see some attention directed back to search quality and to delivering a quality alternative smartphone os (I finally caved and went for iPhone last year after 8 years of waiting for another good Android. Yes, that means I used to like one or two of the early models.)
CobrastanJorji 6y ago
I know that there's a quota of at least one "Google bad" article at the top of Hacker News each day, and that's fine and all, but I feel like the bar for them is getting lower. There's a pretty good case for breaking up Google, but this article doesn't make it. The word "monopoly" doesn't appear once in the whole article, which is pretty weird in an article about how to break up Google and the justifications for doing so. It lists six reasons, and not one of them is about how anybody would be better off if Google were broken up, nor are there any about the legal burdens that must be satisfied to do so. Instead, we get reasons like "YouTube has become the visual voice of several generations and is too important to leave hidden inside an opaque conglomerate." That's not even an argument. "The world needs Google Cloud to be viable?" That's an argument AGAINST breaking up Google.
- eitland 6y ago
  > I know that there's a quota of at least one "Google bad" article at the top of Hacker News each day, and that's fine and all, but I feel like the bar for them is getting lower. Feel free to make a better one, I'll upvote that as well ;-)
- quonn 6y ago
  > The word "monopoly" doesn't appear once in the whole article „For many years, the astonishing torrent of money thrown off by Google’s Web-search monopoly [...]“
- robbrown451 6y ago
  "The word 'monopoly' doesn't appear once in the whole article" You're correct on that! It appears three times.
  - CobrastanJorji 6y ago
    Ahh shoot, I must've misspelled it when I did a search. You are quite correct! One of the six reasons was in fact that the "maps business has a built-in monopolization risk," which is still a crummy argument, but it IS about monopolies.
MattGaiser 6y ago
Yes, let’s destroy one of the few large companies which has found a viable method of long term innovation instead of endless cost cutting and outsourcing. Let’s force Google to be like every other company in needing to constantly extract money from every project quarter by quarter. Not to mention that it is not clear that any except advertising are viable businesses by themselves. YouTube wasn’t profitable for a while. Even if it is now, it is probably barely so. Not sure how Maps would make sufficient money without deep integration with advertising. Android would just be dead.
- skinkestek 6y ago
  > Force Google to be like every other company in needing to constantly extract money from every project quarter by quarter. I agree with the article but have my upvote: this is good counterargument to parts of it.
- jldugger 6y ago
  I imagine android would probably survive via search engine placement fees similar to safari / iOS / firefox.
  - eloisant 6y ago
    Also funded by all the phone manufacturers who have a vested interest in seeing it not die (like the Linux kernel)
    - majewsky 6y ago
      Phone manufacturers on average aren't particularly famous for their contributions to the Linux kernel. It's still notoriously difficult to get mainline Linux to run on any Android phone even years after its initial release.
      - eloisant 6y ago
        I'm not talking about phone manufacturers funding the Linux kernel, but how they might want to fund an "Android consortium" like Linux is funded by companies like Redhat and IBM.
peteretep 6y ago
> Page and Brin each own 25.9% and 25.1% of Alphabet's voting power, respectively, accounting for over half of the company's controlling shares. That's because of Alphabet's super-voting structure, which gives 10 votes per share of its Class B stock. also: > Mark Zuckerberg owns the majority of the voting rights to Facebook due to a dual class structure that weights certain shares over others. I would like to see eminent domain used to restructure these companies with weird controlling shared structures in to being truly publicly traded companies as a first step. I have no problem with Zuck getting all the money his shares of Facebook are worth, but I have a big problem with him and the unelected Page and Brin having all that power with no recourse for the market. Am I being foolish?
- netcan 6y ago
  > I would like to see eminent domain used to restructure these companies with weird controlling shared structures in to being truly publicly traded companies as a first step. My first question is "why?" What is this trying to fix or achieve, on behalf of who? Shareholders themselves can choose to buy or sell as they please, so I'm not worried about them. The context of this article is monopoly. My feeling on this issue is that (a) it is a major factor in economic and tech progress (2) our current frameworks, in theory and especially in practice, are totally insufficient to deal with it. (3) Monopolistic positions are, paraphrasing Thiel, what most of the tech industry is about. Beyond that, there is a lot that can be wrong with shareholder control too. One underlooked problem (IMO) is that "a committee is a committee." If money managers have all the control, we have the same company over and over again.
- aliante 6y ago
  > the unelected Page and Brin having all that power with no recourse for the market The effective market when it comes to voting shares consists of hedge fund managers like Carl Icahn and Bill Ackman. Nobody else is organized enough to beat the activist investors and they do all sorts of terrible things with that kind of power.
  - peteretep 6y ago
    > Nobody else is organized enough to beat the activist investors I mean, except each other, and I think I'm OK with that? I'm not saying this is a whole solution, but making Zuck and co accountable to investors is an _excellent_ start. We got the Magna Carta as a result of rich people competing with other rich people.
mtgx 6y ago
> For many years, the astonishing torrent of money thrown off by Google’s Web-search monopoly has fueled invasions of multiple other segments, enabling Google to bat aside rivals who might have brought better experiences to billions of lives. When a company makes so much more money than it needs to invest to remain competitive and grow in its primary business, I believe that's a HUGE red flag that the company should be classified as a monopoly or under some much stricter rules, and also that governments should look at anti-competitive practices the company might employ. Because in almost all cases, when a company has more money than it knows what to do with, it must have employed some anti-competitive practices.
jakuboboza 6y ago
It is more dangerous to leave Amazon and Facebook in their current state as Google but yeah all of them could be split into smaller companies. Also Apple also.
- robin_reala 6y ago
  Amazon I can see. Facebook and Apple? Neither of them have a monopoly to leverage that requires breaking up.
nabaraz 6y ago
Is anyone else tired of seeing the same hate Facebook, Zoom and Google narratives every single day. So, we want to break up Google because it has gotten too big. What about Luxottica? It has over 80% market share on eyewear brands. What about Pearson? It has over 60% market share on testing market? What about Paypal? It has over 80% market share on online payments. What about Aetna (merged with Humana) on health care market? List goes on..
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  Aetna shouldn’t be broken up - it should be nationalised!
- robbrown451 6y ago
  Because this is HackerNews and we are more affected by Google than those other companies.
  - searchableguy 6y ago
    I doubt this. Most people here employ ad blocking of some form, use Firefox and religiously de-google. At least this particular thread is probably 90% of those people.
    - robbrown451 6y ago
      If you work in the tech industry or have a web site, I'd say there's a good chance you are affected by Google.
- FridgeSeal 6y ago
  If the ball gets rolling with breaking up one of these companies and the rest follow, isn't that a good outcome? Arguing for all-or-nothing feels like letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. For what it's worth I do think those ones should be broken up as well, no reason to confine our attention just to popular tech companies.
- akira2501 6y ago
zerocrates 6y ago
Funnily it doesn't actually say where the broken-off Search is supposed to go. Along with the ads division? Doesn't really feel in line with the break up idea... Disconnected from the other stuff it subsidizes, what is the massively profitable search business actually supposed to use that money for? Massive dividends? Diversifying into anything just gets them into the same kind of problem immediately, no? It sort of feels like the main benefit here would be from the proposed privacy law vs. breaking up Google.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  Break Google's ad business and their other products. Imo, that is the way to go.
- Aissen 6y ago
  Keep innovating the same way it's doing now, and break-off the next thing that reaches monopoly status ?
kats 6y ago
Yeah, let's break up Google! I've been depending on their software for almost 15 years now, I use something they made practically every hour that I'm awake, and never paid a cent for it! I'm really getting a raw deal here!
- wise_young_man 6y ago
  How would breaking it up affect that in the slightest? Also being an unpaid user doesn’t mean your data you generate is valueless.
- harry8 6y ago
  You paid. You were just asleep and didn't notice. Google, facebook etc. They don't pay tax. Do you? What do you get for your tax? What do they get from tax revenue to which they don't contribute their share? The kicker is going to be when you think "What if I didn't want to use any google product. And I was willing to pay real money to achieve that. Could I?" Then you realise google still have all your mail and browsing history. Paying. Yep. How? Through the nose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
- mvlpn 6y ago
  To be fair you really pay with your data. I know there are different opinions on this topic but fmpov this is the worst type of payment.
- kevingadd 6y ago
  Are you sure you've never paid a cent? Many products or services you buy are probably funneling some money into Google's pockets - perhaps licensing fees or agreements with Google, company profits being handed to Google for advertising. If you've ever bought an Android app or In-App Purchase, 30% of that went directly to Google. If you think you're getting Google products and services for free, you're just not paying attention.
  - kats 6y ago
    I guess Google has received 30 cents from when I bought something on the Play store. It still seems to be a pretty good deal when you compare the bill for GMail, YouTube, Google Search, Drive, Docs/Sheets and Maps to the cost of the phone bill, cable tv, and internet.
Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
I agree with the general premise of this content, but as a non-American I'm curious to know if financials of a public company is not clear, shouldn't it be addressed with the securities exchange(SEC)/companies regulator (or) shouldn't they themselves investigate and penalise obscurity?
blackrock 6y ago
Just do it!
jwilber 6y ago
Didn’t feel much substance in this, though to be fair I felt the same wait from his aws farewell (maybe I just don’t relate to his writing style?). Anyways, I think all the talk about breaking up google/Facebook etc feels performative at best - never seem see any solid reasons Or arguments. Would be nice to see tech people use their clout for actually monopolies, eg intel, ykk group, Tyson, etc.
TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
No court in the US is going to break up Google because Tim Bray thinks “The world needs Google Cloud to be viable” and “YouTube is too important to leave hidden inside an opaque conglomerate“. They May be broken!up, but not for these ludicrous reasons. Read a little about anti-trust first. Matt Stoller has an excellent, approachable email newsletter called BIG about monopolies.
ss7pro 6y ago
Yt infrastructure cost without Google would to be to high ... YT can only exists due to cheap infrastructure that it can leave the thanks to Google scale
opk 6y ago
When breaking up a tech company, an option that never seems to be considered is to give the products to both child companies. That way they start to compete with each other. Admittedly, only one can have, e.g. the youtube domain or associated employees but many things are just a case of making a copy.
- aliante 6y ago
  > youtube domain or associated employees but many things are just a case of making a copy. Who has the domain is not a small problem...
  - kevingadd 6y ago
    You could confiscate the domain so that both products have to compete from scratch, or go with a domain-splitting solution sort of like how the european regulators' "Browser choice" resulted in a randomized list of browser options at first Windows boot. Not sure I'd argue either of those would work, but there are options.
LatteLazy 6y ago
This is another article where the author goes on a flight of fantasy about how these services work. He conflates public good with public provision. He first states he doesn't know where the revenue comes from and then makes a lot of detailed decisions based on revenues (android apparently needs only a few buildings and engineers). I think this is a perfect example of the sort of wooly and confused thinking behind break up X articles. To some extent that's inevitable as no one knows what parts of big businesses make money (the author thinks this is intentional opaqueness but its actually very difficult in a big business to determine who "makes" a profit). But if he really wants to convince people to enact massive change like this, he needs to do better. People need to be clear what they are doing by first being clear what they want to achieve and what the side effects will be. If you want privacy, ask for privacy, and admit that that has costs. Trying to get privacy by smashing Google by dividing it up in ways you know don't work isn't privacy, it's just wrecking a service lots of people need. Similarly, the author isn't upfront about the costs. Are you willing to switch to a Gmail equivalent that costs 50usd a year? Is the average third world user willing to pay the same to have an email address? Do you want to go back to US government issue maps full of errors with no guide to what's in any of the buildings? I'm not willing to do that. I'm actually very pro privacy and anti-advertising but we need a practical working solution. These pieces are the equivalent of luddites saying we should close the Mills and go back to making everything by hand.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  > He first states he doesn't know where the revenue comes from and then makes a lot of details decisions based on revenues (android apparently needs only a few buildings and engineers). He proposes 5 spin off companies. Advertising is fine. It’s not clear that YouTube is profitable. And it does have a big synergy in the immense infrastructure. Android he admits isn’t a business beyond trying to bill every user for using it. I doubt Maps has much value except in combination with the ad business unless they stopped doing consumer stuff and mostly focused on GPS and corporate guidance systems. It would be fundamentally different. With Cloud, he assumes that it is the vendor of every other service. Why would they bother with consumer stuff if they now have to pivot to infrastructure for the successor companies? It would turn into the equivalent of a REIT and would just pay a dividend. That is where investors take companies that have reliable cash cow businesses with limited growth potential.
jldugger 6y ago
> Google Apps and Google Maps are both huge presences in the tech economy. Are they paying for themselves, or are they using search advertising revenue as rocket fuel? Nobody outside Google knows. Arguably Apple also learned the lesson of how valuable Google Maps is. Direct ad revenue from maps is not the only source of revenue. Maps is a key feature of Android phones, (and iOS really) and Android OS is valuable due as a source of search engine traffic. And the money search engine traffic makes is able to invest in more improvements in Maps. > The online advertising business has become a Facebook/Google duopoly which is destroying ad-supported publishing and thus intellectually impoverishing the whole population There is a pretty insightful twitter thread from a journalism prof I can't find just now that made a persuasive case that newspapers killed themselves. They had 30 percent margins in the 90's and instead of adding staff and growing the business they focused on cost cutting. Ad-supported publishers kinda did this to themselves, and it was craigslist who knifed their cash cow (classifieds). And really, Craigslist sat on its ass too. > The world needs Google Cloud to be viable because it needs more than two public-cloud providers. IDK how Tim thinks public clouds are funded. Cloud vendors have massive startup costs -- every server you buy takes years of customer billing to pay off -- and I don't think anyone is gonna be down for a bond issue for 'we promise to just be like Google but smaller' spinoffs. I can name a dozen public cloud venders[1], but none have any where near the clout. And yet for some reason Tim isn't talking about why Amazon is a near monopoly. > the real reason Android exists is that Google needs mobile advertising not to become an Apple monopoly. This is the same reason Apple Maps exists (and dozens of other services you've never heard of). I have no idea what breaking up Android would accomplish though; Android Inc would pretty much have to replicate the same state of affairs via contracts with Alphabet, with diminished ability to integrate. It's super weird that Nokia face planted a decade ago in their role of providing a third option. > What we do know is that people who try to make a living as YouTubers sure do complain a lot about arbitrary, ham-handed changes of monetization and content policy. I don't see how a spinoff saves Youtubers any grief. Tim's general thesis is that Google should spin off it's services, watch the profitable ones thrive and let the break even (or worse) ones die off. If Youtube is a break even affair, I don't see how viewers or content producers benefits from less platform competition in the space. If it's capable of standing alone, what's the harm in Google owning it? [1]: Google, Oracle, AliCloud, Azure, Rackspace, IBM/Softlayer, Digital Ocean, Saleaforce, VMWare, OVH, Hetzner, Linode,
coronadisaster 6y ago
Does the NSA need Google as-is, or could they just as easily get your data from many smaller companies?
Traster 6y ago
I think this article is kind of wild. I would expect someone arguing for the break up of Google would be arguing for it on the basis of a good understanding of the company and the dynamics that would result from the break up. Instead a huge part of the argument is simply that the author doesn't know what makes Google profitable and think it would be great to split them up so we find out. Google Maps is a great example. The author has no idea if Maps is profitable. What happens if it isn't? You spin it off as its own company, it turns out Google is spending billions driving those camera cars around and has no revenue model (because you just split off Google's advertising business) and within a couple of years Maps can't afford to keep itself up to date, its an expensive unsustainable business (which is why no one else does it) and it either has to sell itself cheap and no one can buy it - because they all know what happened to Google and they don't want their business exploded by regulators. If Google Maps is a huge money spinner (seems unlikely but could happen) well great, you've just created a monopoly that no longer has any incentives for anything other than exploiting their position as a monopoly.
- yuhong 6y ago
  This reminds me of the Street View Wi-Fi gathering privacy scandal. And yes I suspect that it is not cheap, especially during the 2007-2008 recession when gas was expensive. To cover one city probably require hundreds of miles of driving.
v7p1Qbt1im 6y ago
Realistically what would happen if you break Google up as described: Microsoft, Amazon, FB, Tencent, etc. swoop in to grab the market share. Besides, subsidized services are a special case. Especially Maps and maybe YouTube. Yes, YouTube makes a lot of money. But imagine paying market rates for storage, egress/ingress. They would need to focus even more on monetizing absolutely every interaction on the platform. For all its faults I value the fact that literally every user can create an account and start uploading (practically) unlimited amounts of video for free and have it be available to over 2.5b+ people. All other issues I would put below that very unlikely accomplishment.
pwinnski 6y ago
After reading Matt Stoller's book Goliath, I've come around on breaking up big companies like this, primarily as an act of undoing mergers and acquisitions that should never have been allowed in the first place. So splitting off YouTube seems obvious, since it should never have happened. Some of the others are more difficult, since they're not the result of acquisitions. Then again, DoubleClick was a large acquisition, so splitting off Gmail and so on as a proxy for undoing the DoubleClick acquisition probably makes sense, too. As Bray points out, Google is deliberate vague about a lot of numbers, but reverting acquisitions always seems like a good first step to me. [0] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Goliath/Matt-Stoller/9781501183089 https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Goliath/Matt-Stoller/...

180 points by robin_reala 6y ago

The author asks how gmail makes money. Their "business email" where you bring your own domain costs about 5GBP a month, and that's their cheapest plan.

aliante 6y ago
It is curious to read someone who has clearly never used Google products pontificating about restructuring Google.

mythz 6y ago

Break Up Amazon & Facebook too.

kevingadd 6y ago
A lot of his arguments make sense for amzn, facebook, ms, all the big tech players I think. He indirectly mentions this in a couple cases, even if his focus is on Google. I think it's reasonable to focus on them because of the huge impact services like Maps can have on commerce.
korantu 6y ago
Current (US) laws, if I understand correctly, designed to prevent leveraging success in one market to harm your competitors in another. For example if Chrome would only work with google docs and not microsoft live. USA does not have laws to break up companies simply for being too big or even for being used by majority of customers.
- mythz 6y ago
  US Anti trust laws applies to monopolies [1] where one of the penalties for abusing a monopoly is breaking up the company which was famously done to Standard Oil and AT&T. The EU have found Google guilty of antitrust violations and fined them a record €1.5 billion. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Monopoly_and_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Mo...

pmoriarty 6y ago

Unfortunately, this is not going to be nearly good enough. I'd adopt a salt the earth policy with respect to the spying parts of Google. That'd be a start. Sadly, there'll be plenty of companies that'll fill its shoes to continue spying on people, and many more that already do. So much of the modern internet is built on a foundation of spying on users, and most companies will not willingly give up all the dollar signs they see when they think of spying and even more spying on their users and everyone else they can gather data on. It's super depressing.

namanaggarwal 6y ago

How do we decide which companies to break up ? Similar argument can be made for any big conglomerate. Look at Reliance in India or Samsung in Korea, they sell anything and everything possible. Could it make companies hide businesses as well, just to not want to break up.

kevingadd 6y ago
Well, this is not a new problem. Antitrust enforcement and breaking up companies has been a thing for decades (if not at least a century) Starting with companies that make over a billion dollars a year and are in multiple markets seems like an uncontroversial place, though.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  Starting with companies that make over a billion dollars a year and are in multiple markets seems like an uncontroversial place, though. The problems don't occur when companies are in multiple markets, arguable that is better for competition and hence the person on the street. The problem is when a company or two dominates a single market.
  - ijpsud 6y ago
    > The problem is when a company or two dominates a single market. It would also be bad if one company dominated multiple markets. (just a nit pick on your phrasing)
  - kevingadd 6y ago
    You're correct that dominating a single market is bad, but using your dominance of a single market to bankroll taking over other markets is pretty nasty and you can't trivially do something like that if you aren't already fabulously wealthy from dominating a market. In the case of the article, it's specifically talking about how Google is doing that.
mtgx 6y ago
Just because we don't have a good framework for it now, doesn't mean we shouldn't look at creating one. For instance, we could have companies get into "pre-monopoly" reviews. What would activate such reviews? Stuff like buying out competitors for more than $50 million let's say (the number can be decided from some analyses of harmful mergers), aggressively invading other markets with money from their core business, passing over 40% market share in its core market, exclusive deals with suppliers/clients, competing against your own clients on "platforms," arbitrary bans of clients from said platforms, etc. At the very least, I think attempting to stop/break-up/sue a company for "monopoly" only when it goes over 90% market share is WAY too late in the process and is too short-sighted. By that point whatever measure is taken is too disruptive on the whole while also being too ineffective as a punishment/deterrent for whatever the company did. Not to mention that most of the damage might have already done since a decade prior to that point against customers, smaller competitors, etc. It's not a very useful system at all. It needs to be changed. For all the hype about AI that these companies create, and then that AI gets used to create automatic killer robots, arrests and even convictions, maybe it's also time to turn that against them and use all of the above factors and more to create an "AI solution" that will identify when a company is starting to become a "risk" of turning into a monopoly, and try to restrict/prevent that from happening before it's too late. For instance, I've noticed a lot of anti-GDPR criticism here saying stuff like "but now GDPR will only hurt the new guys, as Google/FB have already gotten all the data on everyone and can use it for their algorithms, etc". Now, wouldn't it be nice if we could've prevented that from happening before it was too late, because we had an "early monopoly alert" system in place go off a decade earlier?

kevingadd 6y ago

Generally interesting article. Makes his case pretty well "But YouTube definitely has to be its own thing; it’s got no real synergy that I can detect with any other Google property." This is a funny observation because YouTube was originally an acquisition and its integration with other Google products is very strange. It has at most points in time had its own rules about anonymity, privacy, multiple accounts, etc. Supposedly the gender setting (now google-account-wide) was originally a YouTube piece of data that got repurposed for use in G+ and other services that needed it.

luckydata 6y ago
You gotta be extremely shortsighted to fail to see how YouTube fits inside Google. I’m really shocked Tim would say something like that.

balanced009 6y ago

These type of posts are now starting to sound like propaganda. Just emotional catharsis of some sort. There are plenty of large companies on this planet. Why do you focus on Google? and why do we see these posts frequently making it to top ten of hacker news?

skinkestek 6y ago
> Why do you focus on Google? Because there's no thing one hate as much as the one that one loved and that then betrayed you I guess. (Note: I neither loved Google nor hate it now but I'll go as far as admit to being a big fan earlier on and really disappointed now.) > and why do we see these posts frequently making it to top ten of hacker news? Because so many of us agree with them. (FTR, I'm an oldtimer with a fresh account.)
quonn 6y ago
Yeah, but there are, for example, at least five car companies at the top end that have kind of equally attractive products and 20 others. But in tech it‘s different. Additionally, I don‘t think anyone working in the tech industry should want a future where a few large companies control everything. In the long run, this is not in our interest.
FridgeSeal 6y ago
I agree, a lot of very large companies should be broken up. At the same time, why can't someone's blog focus on one? Why can't a given company be held under the spotlight for something? Being asked to criticise all of them, or none of them seems like an unfair criticism. This post being about google doesn't preclude another one being written about all companies, or Facebook, or amazon, etc etc. Getting the ball rolling on even one of these companies would be a good start, so I don't see the harm in people writing posts focusing on one. > and why do we see these posts frequently making it to top ten of hacker news? Presumably because a lot of people agree with the proposition?
kryptiskt 6y ago
You should be grateful, the threat of antitrust action is literally the only thing that is slowing down Google turning Android and Chrome into their own private internet. It's not enough, so far, so the authorities really needs to step up their game. And the idea that you can't name and shame a trillion dollar corporation because there are other big companies around is pernicious. The idea is mistaken, no one should escape scrutiny because there are other bad actors. And if Google isn't big enough to be singled out, who is?

jaspax 6y ago

Here's the rub: I strongly suspect that YouTube is not profitable, or is just barely profitable, such that it would be difficult to run as a separate company from the rest of Google. This is even more true for Maps. Breaking apart Google would substantially risk those businesses. On the other hand, maybe that's a good thing.

kangaroozach 6y ago
How could that be? Server costs? Seems like YouTube would be raking in the cash.
- AndrewUnmuted 6y ago
  Their transcode, storage, and compute costs are what lead me to also believe YouTube is not profitable, or just barely profitable.
  - markdown 6y ago
    If those costs were high they'd have long ago banned the spam accounts that upload autogenerated garbage.
    - ijpsud 6y ago
      "[In Q3 2018] YouTube removed about 1.67 million channels and all of the 50.2 million videos that were available from them. Nearly 80% of the channel takedowns related to spam uploads, YouTube said." https://www.businessinsider.com/r-youtube-under-pressure-for-problem-content-takes-down-58-million-videos-in-quarter-2018-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/r-youtube-under-pressure-for... The remaining 20% were apparently taken down due to nudity and other policy violations. To be clear: I have no idea whether they're profitable or not. Just pointing out this article.
      - markdown 6y ago
        Thanks.

skinkestek 6y ago

> When? · The best time would have been sometime around 2015. The second best… This makes sense. Maybe then we would see some attention directed back to search quality and to delivering a quality alternative smartphone os (I finally caved and went for iPhone last year after 8 years of waiting for another good Android. Yes, that means I used to like one or two of the early models.)

CobrastanJorji 6y ago

I know that there's a quota of at least one "Google bad" article at the top of Hacker News each day, and that's fine and all, but I feel like the bar for them is getting lower. There's a pretty good case for breaking up Google, but this article doesn't make it. The word "monopoly" doesn't appear once in the whole article, which is pretty weird in an article about how to break up Google and the justifications for doing so. It lists six reasons, and not one of them is about how anybody would be better off if Google were broken up, nor are there any about the legal burdens that must be satisfied to do so. Instead, we get reasons like "YouTube has become the visual voice of several generations and is too important to leave hidden inside an opaque conglomerate." That's not even an argument. "The world needs Google Cloud to be viable?" That's an argument AGAINST breaking up Google.

eitland 6y ago
> I know that there's a quota of at least one "Google bad" article at the top of Hacker News each day, and that's fine and all, but I feel like the bar for them is getting lower. Feel free to make a better one, I'll upvote that as well ;-)
quonn 6y ago
> The word "monopoly" doesn't appear once in the whole article „For many years, the astonishing torrent of money thrown off by Google’s Web-search monopoly [...]“
robbrown451 6y ago
"The word 'monopoly' doesn't appear once in the whole article" You're correct on that! It appears three times.
- CobrastanJorji 6y ago
  Ahh shoot, I must've misspelled it when I did a search. You are quite correct! One of the six reasons was in fact that the "maps business has a built-in monopolization risk," which is still a crummy argument, but it IS about monopolies.

MattGaiser 6y ago

Yes, let’s destroy one of the few large companies which has found a viable method of long term innovation instead of endless cost cutting and outsourcing. Let’s force Google to be like every other company in needing to constantly extract money from every project quarter by quarter. Not to mention that it is not clear that any except advertising are viable businesses by themselves. YouTube wasn’t profitable for a while. Even if it is now, it is probably barely so. Not sure how Maps would make sufficient money without deep integration with advertising. Android would just be dead.

skinkestek 6y ago
> Force Google to be like every other company in needing to constantly extract money from every project quarter by quarter. I agree with the article but have my upvote: this is good counterargument to parts of it.
jldugger 6y ago
I imagine android would probably survive via search engine placement fees similar to safari / iOS / firefox.
- eloisant 6y ago
  Also funded by all the phone manufacturers who have a vested interest in seeing it not die (like the Linux kernel)
  - majewsky 6y ago
    Phone manufacturers on average aren't particularly famous for their contributions to the Linux kernel. It's still notoriously difficult to get mainline Linux to run on any Android phone even years after its initial release.
    - eloisant 6y ago
      I'm not talking about phone manufacturers funding the Linux kernel, but how they might want to fund an "Android consortium" like Linux is funded by companies like Redhat and IBM.

peteretep 6y ago

> Page and Brin each own 25.9% and 25.1% of Alphabet's voting power, respectively, accounting for over half of the company's controlling shares. That's because of Alphabet's super-voting structure, which gives 10 votes per share of its Class B stock. also: > Mark Zuckerberg owns the majority of the voting rights to Facebook due to a dual class structure that weights certain shares over others. I would like to see eminent domain used to restructure these companies with weird controlling shared structures in to being truly publicly traded companies as a first step. I have no problem with Zuck getting all the money his shares of Facebook are worth, but I have a big problem with him and the unelected Page and Brin having all that power with no recourse for the market. Am I being foolish?

netcan 6y ago
> I would like to see eminent domain used to restructure these companies with weird controlling shared structures in to being truly publicly traded companies as a first step. My first question is "why?" What is this trying to fix or achieve, on behalf of who? Shareholders themselves can choose to buy or sell as they please, so I'm not worried about them. The context of this article is monopoly. My feeling on this issue is that (a) it is a major factor in economic and tech progress (2) our current frameworks, in theory and especially in practice, are totally insufficient to deal with it. (3) Monopolistic positions are, paraphrasing Thiel, what most of the tech industry is about. Beyond that, there is a lot that can be wrong with shareholder control too. One underlooked problem (IMO) is that "a committee is a committee." If money managers have all the control, we have the same company over and over again.
aliante 6y ago
> the unelected Page and Brin having all that power with no recourse for the market The effective market when it comes to voting shares consists of hedge fund managers like Carl Icahn and Bill Ackman. Nobody else is organized enough to beat the activist investors and they do all sorts of terrible things with that kind of power.
- peteretep 6y ago
  > Nobody else is organized enough to beat the activist investors I mean, except each other, and I think I'm OK with that? I'm not saying this is a whole solution, but making Zuck and co accountable to investors is an _excellent_ start. We got the Magna Carta as a result of rich people competing with other rich people.

mtgx 6y ago

> For many years, the astonishing torrent of money thrown off by Google’s Web-search monopoly has fueled invasions of multiple other segments, enabling Google to bat aside rivals who might have brought better experiences to billions of lives. When a company makes so much more money than it needs to invest to remain competitive and grow in its primary business, I believe that's a HUGE red flag that the company should be classified as a monopoly or under some much stricter rules, and also that governments should look at anti-competitive practices the company might employ. Because in almost all cases, when a company has more money than it knows what to do with, it must have employed some anti-competitive practices.

jakuboboza 6y ago

It is more dangerous to leave Amazon and Facebook in their current state as Google but yeah all of them could be split into smaller companies. Also Apple also.

robin_reala 6y ago
Amazon I can see. Facebook and Apple? Neither of them have a monopoly to leverage that requires breaking up.

nabaraz 6y ago

Is anyone else tired of seeing the same hate Facebook, Zoom and Google narratives every single day. So, we want to break up Google because it has gotten too big. What about Luxottica? It has over 80% market share on eyewear brands. What about Pearson? It has over 60% market share on testing market? What about Paypal? It has over 80% market share on online payments. What about Aetna (merged with Humana) on health care market? List goes on..

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
Aetna shouldn’t be broken up - it should be nationalised!
robbrown451 6y ago
Because this is HackerNews and we are more affected by Google than those other companies.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  I doubt this. Most people here employ ad blocking of some form, use Firefox and religiously de-google. At least this particular thread is probably 90% of those people.
  - robbrown451 6y ago
    If you work in the tech industry or have a web site, I'd say there's a good chance you are affected by Google.
FridgeSeal 6y ago
If the ball gets rolling with breaking up one of these companies and the rest follow, isn't that a good outcome? Arguing for all-or-nothing feels like letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. For what it's worth I do think those ones should be broken up as well, no reason to confine our attention just to popular tech companies.
akira2501 6y ago

zerocrates 6y ago

Funnily it doesn't actually say where the broken-off Search is supposed to go. Along with the ads division? Doesn't really feel in line with the break up idea... Disconnected from the other stuff it subsidizes, what is the massively profitable search business actually supposed to use that money for? Massive dividends? Diversifying into anything just gets them into the same kind of problem immediately, no? It sort of feels like the main benefit here would be from the proposed privacy law vs. breaking up Google.

searchableguy 6y ago
Break Google's ad business and their other products. Imo, that is the way to go.
Aissen 6y ago
Keep innovating the same way it's doing now, and break-off the next thing that reaches monopoly status ?

kats 6y ago

Yeah, let's break up Google! I've been depending on their software for almost 15 years now, I use something they made practically every hour that I'm awake, and never paid a cent for it! I'm really getting a raw deal here!

wise_young_man 6y ago
How would breaking it up affect that in the slightest? Also being an unpaid user doesn’t mean your data you generate is valueless.
harry8 6y ago
You paid. You were just asleep and didn't notice. Google, facebook etc. They don't pay tax. Do you? What do you get for your tax? What do they get from tax revenue to which they don't contribute their share? The kicker is going to be when you think "What if I didn't want to use any google product. And I was willing to pay real money to achieve that. Could I?" Then you realise google still have all your mail and browsing history. Paying. Yep. How? Through the nose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
mvlpn 6y ago
To be fair you really pay with your data. I know there are different opinions on this topic but fmpov this is the worst type of payment.
kevingadd 6y ago
Are you sure you've never paid a cent? Many products or services you buy are probably funneling some money into Google's pockets - perhaps licensing fees or agreements with Google, company profits being handed to Google for advertising. If you've ever bought an Android app or In-App Purchase, 30% of that went directly to Google. If you think you're getting Google products and services for free, you're just not paying attention.
- kats 6y ago
  I guess Google has received 30 cents from when I bought something on the Play store. It still seems to be a pretty good deal when you compare the bill for GMail, YouTube, Google Search, Drive, Docs/Sheets and Maps to the cost of the phone bill, cable tv, and internet.

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago

I agree with the general premise of this content, but as a non-American I'm curious to know if financials of a public company is not clear, shouldn't it be addressed with the securities exchange(SEC)/companies regulator (or) shouldn't they themselves investigate and penalise obscurity?

blackrock 6y ago

Just do it!

jwilber 6y ago

Didn’t feel much substance in this, though to be fair I felt the same wait from his aws farewell (maybe I just don’t relate to his writing style?). Anyways, I think all the talk about breaking up google/Facebook etc feels performative at best - never seem see any solid reasons Or arguments. Would be nice to see tech people use their clout for actually monopolies, eg intel, ykk group, Tyson, etc.

TedDoesntTalk 6y ago

No court in the US is going to break up Google because Tim Bray thinks “The world needs Google Cloud to be viable” and “YouTube is too important to leave hidden inside an opaque conglomerate“. They May be broken!up, but not for these ludicrous reasons. Read a little about anti-trust first. Matt Stoller has an excellent, approachable email newsletter called BIG about monopolies.

ss7pro 6y ago

Yt infrastructure cost without Google would to be to high ... YT can only exists due to cheap infrastructure that it can leave the thanks to Google scale

opk 6y ago

When breaking up a tech company, an option that never seems to be considered is to give the products to both child companies. That way they start to compete with each other. Admittedly, only one can have, e.g. the youtube domain or associated employees but many things are just a case of making a copy.

aliante 6y ago
> youtube domain or associated employees but many things are just a case of making a copy. Who has the domain is not a small problem...
- kevingadd 6y ago
  You could confiscate the domain so that both products have to compete from scratch, or go with a domain-splitting solution sort of like how the european regulators' "Browser choice" resulted in a randomized list of browser options at first Windows boot. Not sure I'd argue either of those would work, but there are options.

LatteLazy 6y ago

This is another article where the author goes on a flight of fantasy about how these services work. He conflates public good with public provision. He first states he doesn't know where the revenue comes from and then makes a lot of detailed decisions based on revenues (android apparently needs only a few buildings and engineers). I think this is a perfect example of the sort of wooly and confused thinking behind break up X articles. To some extent that's inevitable as no one knows what parts of big businesses make money (the author thinks this is intentional opaqueness but its actually very difficult in a big business to determine who "makes" a profit). But if he really wants to convince people to enact massive change like this, he needs to do better. People need to be clear what they are doing by first being clear what they want to achieve and what the side effects will be. If you want privacy, ask for privacy, and admit that that has costs. Trying to get privacy by smashing Google by dividing it up in ways you know don't work isn't privacy, it's just wrecking a service lots of people need. Similarly, the author isn't upfront about the costs. Are you willing to switch to a Gmail equivalent that costs 50usd a year? Is the average third world user willing to pay the same to have an email address? Do you want to go back to US government issue maps full of errors with no guide to what's in any of the buildings? I'm not willing to do that. I'm actually very pro privacy and anti-advertising but we need a practical working solution. These pieces are the equivalent of luddites saying we should close the Mills and go back to making everything by hand.

MattGaiser 6y ago
> He first states he doesn't know where the revenue comes from and then makes a lot of details decisions based on revenues (android apparently needs only a few buildings and engineers). He proposes 5 spin off companies. Advertising is fine. It’s not clear that YouTube is profitable. And it does have a big synergy in the immense infrastructure. Android he admits isn’t a business beyond trying to bill every user for using it. I doubt Maps has much value except in combination with the ad business unless they stopped doing consumer stuff and mostly focused on GPS and corporate guidance systems. It would be fundamentally different. With Cloud, he assumes that it is the vendor of every other service. Why would they bother with consumer stuff if they now have to pivot to infrastructure for the successor companies? It would turn into the equivalent of a REIT and would just pay a dividend. That is where investors take companies that have reliable cash cow businesses with limited growth potential.

jldugger 6y ago

> Google Apps and Google Maps are both huge presences in the tech economy. Are they paying for themselves, or are they using search advertising revenue as rocket fuel? Nobody outside Google knows. Arguably Apple also learned the lesson of how valuable Google Maps is. Direct ad revenue from maps is not the only source of revenue. Maps is a key feature of Android phones, (and iOS really) and Android OS is valuable due as a source of search engine traffic. And the money search engine traffic makes is able to invest in more improvements in Maps. > The online advertising business has become a Facebook/Google duopoly which is destroying ad-supported publishing and thus intellectually impoverishing the whole population There is a pretty insightful twitter thread from a journalism prof I can't find just now that made a persuasive case that newspapers killed themselves. They had 30 percent margins in the 90's and instead of adding staff and growing the business they focused on cost cutting. Ad-supported publishers kinda did this to themselves, and it was craigslist who knifed their cash cow (classifieds). And really, Craigslist sat on its ass too. > The world needs Google Cloud to be viable because it needs more than two public-cloud providers. IDK how Tim thinks public clouds are funded. Cloud vendors have massive startup costs -- every server you buy takes years of customer billing to pay off -- and I don't think anyone is gonna be down for a bond issue for 'we promise to just be like Google but smaller' spinoffs. I can name a dozen public cloud venders[1], but none have any where near the clout. And yet for some reason Tim isn't talking about why Amazon is a near monopoly. > the real reason Android exists is that Google needs mobile advertising not to become an Apple monopoly. This is the same reason Apple Maps exists (and dozens of other services you've never heard of). I have no idea what breaking up Android would accomplish though; Android Inc would pretty much have to replicate the same state of affairs via contracts with Alphabet, with diminished ability to integrate. It's super weird that Nokia face planted a decade ago in their role of providing a third option. > What we do know is that people who try to make a living as YouTubers sure do complain a lot about arbitrary, ham-handed changes of monetization and content policy. I don't see how a spinoff saves Youtubers any grief. Tim's general thesis is that Google should spin off it's services, watch the profitable ones thrive and let the break even (or worse) ones die off. If Youtube is a break even affair, I don't see how viewers or content producers benefits from less platform competition in the space. If it's capable of standing alone, what's the harm in Google owning it? [1]: Google, Oracle, AliCloud, Azure, Rackspace, IBM/Softlayer, Digital Ocean, Saleaforce, VMWare, OVH, Hetzner, Linode,

coronadisaster 6y ago

Does the NSA need Google as-is, or could they just as easily get your data from many smaller companies?

Traster 6y ago

I think this article is kind of wild. I would expect someone arguing for the break up of Google would be arguing for it on the basis of a good understanding of the company and the dynamics that would result from the break up. Instead a huge part of the argument is simply that the author doesn't know what makes Google profitable and think it would be great to split them up so we find out. Google Maps is a great example. The author has no idea if Maps is profitable. What happens if it isn't? You spin it off as its own company, it turns out Google is spending billions driving those camera cars around and has no revenue model (because you just split off Google's advertising business) and within a couple of years Maps can't afford to keep itself up to date, its an expensive unsustainable business (which is why no one else does it) and it either has to sell itself cheap and no one can buy it - because they all know what happened to Google and they don't want their business exploded by regulators. If Google Maps is a huge money spinner (seems unlikely but could happen) well great, you've just created a monopoly that no longer has any incentives for anything other than exploiting their position as a monopoly.

yuhong 6y ago
This reminds me of the Street View Wi-Fi gathering privacy scandal. And yes I suspect that it is not cheap, especially during the 2007-2008 recession when gas was expensive. To cover one city probably require hundreds of miles of driving.

v7p1Qbt1im 6y ago

Realistically what would happen if you break Google up as described: Microsoft, Amazon, FB, Tencent, etc. swoop in to grab the market share. Besides, subsidized services are a special case. Especially Maps and maybe YouTube. Yes, YouTube makes a lot of money. But imagine paying market rates for storage, egress/ingress. They would need to focus even more on monetizing absolutely every interaction on the platform. For all its faults I value the fact that literally every user can create an account and start uploading (practically) unlimited amounts of video for free and have it be available to over 2.5b+ people. All other issues I would put below that very unlikely accomplishment.

pwinnski 6y ago

After reading Matt Stoller's book Goliath, I've come around on breaking up big companies like this, primarily as an act of undoing mergers and acquisitions that should never have been allowed in the first place. So splitting off YouTube seems obvious, since it should never have happened. Some of the others are more difficult, since they're not the result of acquisitions. Then again, DoubleClick was a large acquisition, so splitting off Gmail and so on as a proxy for undoing the DoubleClick acquisition probably makes sense, too. As Bray points out, Google is deliberate vague about a lot of numbers, but reverting acquisitions always seems like a good first step to me. [0] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Goliath/Matt-Stoller/9781501183089 https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Goliath/Matt-Stoller/...