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That’s why we need a regulator. The old AT&T monopoly was dismantled. Based on talking to IBM insiders, IBM actively neutered itself fearing a similar fate in t

That’s why we need a regulator. The old AT&T monopoly was dismantled. Based on talking to IBM insiders, IBM actively neutered itself fearing a similar fate in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But then, with Bush Sr and then Clinton, the rules changed; Microsoft started playing the political game, and essentially avoided a similar fate. There is no antitrust enforcement anymore. Breaking a company once indeed only buys a little time. But getting regulation workiNg again WILL work, and will likely include breaking them. If only the US would vote in politicians that cared about competition. I can’t find any amongst either presidential or congressional candidates, though.

BlueTemplar 6y ago
How would one even break up Google ? You can only shut it down (which would allow competitors to emerge again).
- bambax 6y ago
  You can break it up geographically. Advertising is still very local. Or you could break up search / browser / advertising / mobile; search and browser would need to invent other ways to monetize themselves.
  - tikhonj 6y ago
    Search could still be funded by search advertising. It just wouldn't be combined with AdWords/DoubleClick/etc. Same idea for other products that have their own ads like GMail and YouTube.
- jdietrich 6y ago
  Spin off the major parts of their business into genuinely separate companies - search, cloud compute, advertising, SaaS, Android and Chrome. With Google as a monolith, it's far too easy for them to bundle products and cross-subsidise unprofitable parts of their business to achieve dominance. Those independent companies can make deals that are mutually beneficial, but they'll have to answer to their shareholders and the FTC.
  - why_only_15 6y ago
    Of all the tech companies people advocate breaking up Google is by far the most reasonable.
    - stjohnswarts 6y ago
      Yeah I'm not even sure how you would break up facebook, other than facebook/instagram . It would make you extremely unpopular if they forced FB to break up it's userbase into thirds or something as they'd all just flock to one third and it would just be the same thing again within a few months
      - neckardt 6y ago
        I think a more effective solution than a breakup would be requiring Facebook to interoperate with other social networks. We could force them to implement APIs which would let users from other platforms chat with and send posts to Facebook users. Imagine a tweet or a snap showing up in your Facebook feed, and vice versa. ActivityPub[0] is already a protocol which tries to solve this, but Facebook would never freely implement it because it would breach their walled garden. We might be able to regulate them into doing it. [0]: https://activitypub.rocks/ https://activitypub.rocks/
      - beagle3 6y ago
        As other suggested, forcing interoperability would go a long way (it should be noted that e.g. facebook messenger WAS interoperable when Facebook wasn't as large, but they stopped it when they became the leader). Additionally, separate to instagram / facebook / whatsapp ; possibly also facebook social / facebook marketplace / facebook events ; They should have a level of access that others have. Imagine Yahoo users could subscribe to Facebook events without ever setting foot in facebook.com ... I know it sounds like science fiction, but it's possible. like email....
AJ007 6y ago
Google is both the most dominant it every has been and the most vulnerable it has ever been, at the same time. From what we've seen with GPT-3, we can train one machine learning model by ingesting the entire scraped web and a whole lot of (online/offline?) books, and it can often produce correct answers to questions. The accuracy of those answers, presuming the questions are not subjective ones, is only going to increase. Google's status, as a search engine, in 2025 is not something I would bet money on. The iOS/Safari thing is another issue, which perhaps other anti-trust regulators will address in Google's favor. Assuming they do not, consider that if Google stops paying Apple many billions of dollars a year and another company (or Apple) replaces the default iOS search, Google's search ad business will be severely and irreversibly damaged. Removing iOS defaults would not only remove a large chunk of Google's US mobile search traffic, it would be the more affluent chunk. Everyone who knows about marketplace dynamics knows how damaging that would be to Google if that inventory ended up with Microsoft or Facebook. Even without regulatory intervention (which is almost 100% guaranteed at this point, barring some act of god, though I don't know how large that intervention will be) Google's days atop the mountain are certainly drawing to a close. Perhaps the ground has already given way, they know it, and the maniacal stupidity of trying to coral the web into some AMP graveyard is a reaction of desperation. To address the original blog post, I think the author is way off the mark on video. Youtube is big, but far from the king. Google has repeatedly flopped on the social side, and isn't going to be allowed to buy TikTok. They don't appear to be taking any ground paid streaming services like Netflix or Amazon. They are big, but no where near as important relative to their dominance in search.
- Lammy 6y ago
  > The iOS/Safari thing is another issue, which perhaps other anti-trust regulators will address in Google's favor. Hopefully those same anti-trust regulators also have statistics for browser market shares :)
- erklik 6y ago
  > Youtube is big, but far from the king What other alternatives are there for Youtube, that are even in the same region as Youtube?
- 6y ago

BlueTemplar 6y ago

How would one even break up Google ? You can only shut it down (which would allow competitors to emerge again).

bambax 6y ago
You can break it up geographically. Advertising is still very local. Or you could break up search / browser / advertising / mobile; search and browser would need to invent other ways to monetize themselves.
- tikhonj 6y ago
  Search could still be funded by search advertising. It just wouldn't be combined with AdWords/DoubleClick/etc. Same idea for other products that have their own ads like GMail and YouTube.
jdietrich 6y ago
Spin off the major parts of their business into genuinely separate companies - search, cloud compute, advertising, SaaS, Android and Chrome. With Google as a monolith, it's far too easy for them to bundle products and cross-subsidise unprofitable parts of their business to achieve dominance. Those independent companies can make deals that are mutually beneficial, but they'll have to answer to their shareholders and the FTC.
- why_only_15 6y ago
  Of all the tech companies people advocate breaking up Google is by far the most reasonable.
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    Yeah I'm not even sure how you would break up facebook, other than facebook/instagram . It would make you extremely unpopular if they forced FB to break up it's userbase into thirds or something as they'd all just flock to one third and it would just be the same thing again within a few months
    - neckardt 6y ago
      I think a more effective solution than a breakup would be requiring Facebook to interoperate with other social networks. We could force them to implement APIs which would let users from other platforms chat with and send posts to Facebook users. Imagine a tweet or a snap showing up in your Facebook feed, and vice versa. ActivityPub[0] is already a protocol which tries to solve this, but Facebook would never freely implement it because it would breach their walled garden. We might be able to regulate them into doing it. [0]: https://activitypub.rocks/ https://activitypub.rocks/
    - beagle3 6y ago
      As other suggested, forcing interoperability would go a long way (it should be noted that e.g. facebook messenger WAS interoperable when Facebook wasn't as large, but they stopped it when they became the leader). Additionally, separate to instagram / facebook / whatsapp ; possibly also facebook social / facebook marketplace / facebook events ; They should have a level of access that others have. Imagine Yahoo users could subscribe to Facebook events without ever setting foot in facebook.com ... I know it sounds like science fiction, but it's possible. like email....

AJ007 6y ago

Google is both the most dominant it every has been and the most vulnerable it has ever been, at the same time. From what we've seen with GPT-3, we can train one machine learning model by ingesting the entire scraped web and a whole lot of (online/offline?) books, and it can often produce correct answers to questions. The accuracy of those answers, presuming the questions are not subjective ones, is only going to increase. Google's status, as a search engine, in 2025 is not something I would bet money on. The iOS/Safari thing is another issue, which perhaps other anti-trust regulators will address in Google's favor. Assuming they do not, consider that if Google stops paying Apple many billions of dollars a year and another company (or Apple) replaces the default iOS search, Google's search ad business will be severely and irreversibly damaged. Removing iOS defaults would not only remove a large chunk of Google's US mobile search traffic, it would be the more affluent chunk. Everyone who knows about marketplace dynamics knows how damaging that would be to Google if that inventory ended up with Microsoft or Facebook. Even without regulatory intervention (which is almost 100% guaranteed at this point, barring some act of god, though I don't know how large that intervention will be) Google's days atop the mountain are certainly drawing to a close. Perhaps the ground has already given way, they know it, and the maniacal stupidity of trying to coral the web into some AMP graveyard is a reaction of desperation. To address the original blog post, I think the author is way off the mark on video. Youtube is big, but far from the king. Google has repeatedly flopped on the social side, and isn't going to be allowed to buy TikTok. They don't appear to be taking any ground paid streaming services like Netflix or Amazon. They are big, but no where near as important relative to their dominance in search.

Lammy 6y ago
> The iOS/Safari thing is another issue, which perhaps other anti-trust regulators will address in Google's favor. Hopefully those same anti-trust regulators also have statistics for browser market shares :)
erklik 6y ago
> Youtube is big, but far from the king What other alternatives are there for Youtube, that are even in the same region as Youtube?
6y ago