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U.S. Google antitrust case set to expand with GOP states joining

95 points by aspenmayer 6y ago

actuator 6y ago
That Elizabeth Warren tweet mentioned in the article stands out to me. She has spoken about breaking up big tech in her campaign as well. While I completely agree with regulation ensuring fairer competition; as we are seeing how much abuse total control over a computing platform can lead to in Apple vs Epic case, is breaking them up the right way? R&D is costly, and these companies spend a lot on it which is the reason US is still the leader in a lot of tech areas. The ability to spend that much just comes from their size. Breaking up companies might lead to inability of companies to go for moonshots and invest in cutting edge stuff. With China catching up and it being unlikely of them to restrict their companies this way, will it reduce competitiveness?
- istorical 6y ago
  creating new regulations on tech firms that make it more difficult for them to stop new competitors from arising or from protecting their monopolies makes so much more sense than just artificially deciding to slice up our top performers in industry and hamstring the sector.
  - RandomTisk 6y ago
    That's assuming the monolith is actually doing good for society. I for one am desperate for more options for email providers with actual spam filtration, phones without anti-consumer spyware and eco system lockdowns, and social media that doesn't force users to speak only of things the DNC would approve of.
    - Nasrudith 6y ago
      Haven't we learned from the death of Socrates that "good/bad for society" is a terrible and meaningless metric as it is so values dependent? All of those things already exist by the way - Google ironically can help you find it but so can most other search engines. There are plenty of paid providers in addition to roll your own and many anti-spam solutions. Fairphone/Freephone or even just some unlocked down Androids will run whatever you want and can, federated social media like Mastodon has all sorts of stuff that wouldn't be approved of by the mainstream like niche pornography.
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      You're glossing over all the good things they've done to lay the groundwork for what you want. I'd like a smartphone with better privacy too, but I wouldn't want a smartphone at all if not for tech industry innovation over the past decade. I would (and did) choose a compact flip phone in a world where Blackberry was state of the art.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > R&D is costly, and these companies spend a lot on it To what end? And how efficiently? If there is one lesson from the last millennium, it's that innovation has poor economies of scale and is stifled by centralisation. Capital markets have not been more liquid in our lifetimes. In 2018 alone, venture capital "invested $251 billion," [1] representing the median lifetime earnings of almost 100,000 college graduates [2][3]. "25 percent of all VC deal volume" was in $1 billion+ deals, the median lifetime earnings of over 160,000 high school graduates [4]. Google is no SpaceX or Tesla or Moderna Therapeutics. It has its vanity projects. But those are run in start-up analogs. Google brings no advantage beyond its checkbook, and has a track record of its projects outperforming as spin-outs its internal operations. [1] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/private-equity-and-principal-investors/our-insights/mckinseys-private-markets-annual-review https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/private-equity-and-princ... Venture capital’s very good year [2] https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/collegepayoff-complete.pdf https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/colleg... Figure 1, page 3 [3] $251 billion raised in 2018 / ($2,268,000 Median Bachelor's Degree Lifetime Earnings in 2009 dollars x 1.17 Inflation Adjustment to 2018 dollars per [a]) = 94,590 [a] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com https://www.usinflationcalculator.com [4] $251 billion raised in 2018 / ($1,304,000 Median High School Diploma Lifetime Earnings in 2009 dollars x 1.17 Inflation Adjustment to 2018 dollars per [a]) = 164,517
  - ThrowawayR2 6y ago
    > "If there is one lesson from the last millennium, it's that innovation has poor economies of scale and is stifled by centralisation." When did we learn that? Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and Intel's decades of dominance in semiconductor process research are prime counterexamples but I'm sure there are plenty of others.
    - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
      > Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and Intel's decades of dominance Compare the size of these companies, in their time, to the Soviet-scale bureaucracies of Facebook, Apple, Amazon or Google. Innovation doesn't have no economies of scale. But they peter out around the levels of CERN or NASA. (At private enterprises, that threshold appears smaller.) Also note the difference between invention and innovation, the latter implying successful distribution. Xero PARC developing great things and then abandoning them isn't productive apart from fluke exfiltrations like by way of a tour.
- wmf 6y ago
  It might not be a bad thing if R&D becomes more decentralized back into startups instead of FAANGs. The money is there, but the current market structure doesn't encourage it.
- klyrs 6y ago
  The only "moonshot" I've seen from google is their quantum computing efforts. They held an internal competition, and axed one of the programs because it didn't look immediately viable. When management got bored, they rushed a "supremacy" result out the door (imo supremacy only counts when you're solving an existing problem, not when you're creating a problem that others can't solve, whose solution has no value). Their funding will be a question next year, too If Google's QC efforts fail, we've still got IBM, Rigetti, DWave, now Honeywell, and a smorgasbord of smaller efforts, clamoring for success. So if QC meets the fate of most other Google efforts, or gets lost in a breakup, will we lose much as a society? What other "moonshot" research do we see from FAANG? I can't really think of any, besides the insidious efforts to spy deeper into our homes and personal lives.
- andrewjl 6y ago
  Why should consumers subsidize R&D by a company with no accountability to them what so ever? US is the leader in many tech areas due to free market competition as well as defense spending, not Google's R&D. Google is also happy to sell their R&D to China, but then somehow finds it uncomfortable to transact with the DoD. Hard to make case Google is a net positive for the US with a straight face.
  - actuator 6y ago
    They shouldn't, the accountability should come with regulation ensuring fair competition and respect for user data, not just going ahead and reducing competitiveness of US companies by breaking them up. I will be really surprised if Google sold their R&D to China, as it makes no sense whatsoever, but my comment was in general about all US big tech companies.
    - MiroF 6y ago
      > the accountability should come with regulation ensuring fair competition and respect for user data Yes, so what we're saying is there's clear evidence that they have failed at adhering to those regulation, so should be broken up. > not just going ahead and reducing competitiveness of US companies by breaking them up. Siri, define competition.
      - actuator 6y ago
        > there's clear evidence that they have failed at adhering to those regulation, so should be broken up. If there is clear evidence of them breaking existing regulation, then I am all for taking action. If the existing regulations are insufficient, I am all for introducing new ones as in the case of App Store debate. > Siri, define competition. I meant competitiveness in terms of R&D by cutting their cash flows.
        MiroF 6y ago
        > If there is clear evidence of them breaking existing regulation, then I am all for taking action. Cool, so that is why they are taking Alphabet to court, because of alleged anti-trust violations. If the court determines there is clear evidence of them breaking existing regulation, then Alphabet might be broken up. Glad we agree that we ought to enforce our anti-trust laws.
- ecf 6y ago
  While America wants to break up their big tech, China is directly subsidizing their companies and shielding them from outside competition until they’re ready to launch on a global scale.
  - sjg007 6y ago
    I think the two markets will stay disconnected somewhat. Maybe at the interface level -> e.g. Amazon/Walmart/Target
- bleepblorp 6y ago
  Most of the US tech sector doesn't spend all that much on R&D in comparison to its income and profits. For example, Alphabet reportedly spent $18 billion USD on R&D in 2018[0] but acquired $77 billion in gross revenues and $31 billion in net profits over the same year[1]. In comparison, Volkswagen spent $14.5 billion USD on R&D in 2018[0] but acquired only $54 billion (as converted from Euros at December 2018 exchange rates) in gross revenues and $13 billion in net profits[2]. If VW can spend that much on R&D, particularly as a percentage of revenues, without being an abusive monopoly, then so can Alphabet. [0] https://spendmenot.com/blog/top-rd-spenders/ https://spendmenot.com/blog/top-rd-spenders/ [1] https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/googl/financials https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/googl/financials [2] https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/vow/financials https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/vow/financials
  - tomweingarten 6y ago
    This is meant to be satire, right? The percentage of revenues of the two examples you gave are nearly identical.
    - granzymes 6y ago
      23% vs 26%.... I hope it's satire!
  - forrestthewoods 6y ago
    > Most of the US tech sector doesn't spend all that much on R&D 25% of revenue on R&D seems like a pretty reasonable amount?
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    Looking at R&D by inputs alone is a mistake anyway. You could spend billions on attemptint to revive phrenology but that doesn't mean you'll get anything of worth. There are certainly times when it needs more but spending more into it isn't an intrinsic merit. Plus even if you have a fruitful program it doesn't mean it can always be scaled up meaningfully just because there is more money available. The output of R&D is what justifies it - although great potential may take a lot of time to vindicate. A low ratio would result from a successful matured program which simply cannot expand fast enough to reinvest. Under that metric a program with the top people paid industry leading salaries and pumping out generations of advances would be worse than a lab full of scammers which never produced any applications. That isn't a very useful metric.
gregorythecat 6y ago
Google et al are no saints. However, I can’t help but feel like all this misdirection and grandstanding is the establishment’s territorial reaction against the rise of another powerful opponent. Whoever wins we lose.
- foepys 6y ago
  This isn't just an American move. The EU is preparing similar antitrust cases and the introduction of a digital tax.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    You can trick a Eurocrat into regulating anything, though. The seeds of Euro proceedings against Google were planted years ago by a Microsoft astroturf campaign called FairSearch and the tree was watered since then by incumbent interests like putrescent newspaper conglomerates and software industry also-rans that nobody ever heard of.
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      nobody ever heard of. If I were a European, I would benefit a lot more from a flourishing ecosystem of "also-rans" (yuck, so harsh) building their own local workforces and communities. As an American, I miss the days when it was considered acceptable to run a business that makes yourself and your local area rich, instead of the only "cool" thing being an extractive VC-launched all-or-nothing gluttonous monopoly (joining in the harsh adjectives I guess). We would have many more opportunities for all levels with thousands of $50mil companies instead of a handful of $500bil companies.
      - BrianOnHN 6y ago
        > thousands of $50mil companies instead of a handful of $500bil companies Great point. To me, it seems like those $500bil companies have perfected the art of wrangling those people who could be building the $50 million companies. I mean, why risk failure when, did someone say free lunch?
strbean 6y ago
Everyone loves to saber rattle about FAANG and antitrust, while we all sit back and let Charter and Comcast make contracts to not compete with eachother[0], we rapidly head towards having one major national bank[1] and somehow the big 4 always seem to spontaneously engage in the same bad behaviors, and Ma Bell has much been re-assembled to it's original state[2]. We desperately need a new trust buster president. [0]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/comcast-and-charter-agree-not-to-compete-against-each-other-in-wireless/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/comca... [1]: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-banking-oligopoly-in-one-chart/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-banking-oligopoly-in-on... [2]: https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/24/13389592/att-time-warner-merger-breakup-bell-system-chart https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/24/13389592/att-time-warner...
- reducesuffering 6y ago
  How does that article imply we’re heading for one national bank? Is it that banks have consolidated into the big 4 and that eventually they would continue to merge? That’s already a big assumption. Then there’s the coming disruption of what classical banking looks like. Square, PayPal, and Robinhood are already making inroads. PayPals worth more than most of the big 4.
- fred_is_fred 6y ago
  Ma Bell being reassembled is orders of magnitude less problematic than it would have been in the 1980s. Back when you only had 1 choice for local phone (no cell phones) and long distance calls were a quarter a minute (or more). I haven't made a normal phone call in years and have decent cell options. If I wanted a local phone I could use VOIP or get a real line (via centurylink).
disposable20202 6y ago
Ok interesting-- after this do Experian, Equifax, etc Coal mining and other swine industries that are politically connected and valuable. Of all the bad actors in the world, this seems like a funny prioritization but we live in dumb times Another self-inflicted wound in our economy
- woofie11 6y ago
  Experian: 34.63 billion market cap Google: 1.024 trillion market cap Experian is also really evil, but it's not obvious to me how they're anticompetitive.
- fred_is_fred 6y ago
  Anti-trust regulations are not meant to control "bad actors" but to reign in monopolies.
ABCLAW 6y ago
Wow a lot of comments in the theme of 'but what about this OTHER company acting anticompetitively'. Okay, so let's bring action against them too. The answer isn't to ignore all of them.
- izacus 6y ago
  The gist of it is that those other corporations cowtowed to the administration and could then got away with scummy antitrust behaviour. There doesn't seem to be any cases on the horizon for any of the others. That's the problem - some people would consider that corruption.
  - ABCLAW 6y ago
    "The gist of it is that those other corporations cowtowed to the administration and could then got away with scummy antitrust behaviour" I think the reality is simpler; antitrust enforcement in the states is laughable and historically has been more the exception than the rule. Even the golden age of robber baron breakups was a historical anomaly due to a freak accident. Having worked on a ton of competition filings, I can tell you that this isn't an administration specific issue; competition law itself has been defanged by a history of refusal to enforce.
  - woofie11 6y ago
    I think the other piece to look at is market cap. Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet/Google, Facebook, Tencent, and Alibaba are huge. I'd focus enforcement efforts on those. They're also high-growth. Of all of those, Amazon/Google/Facebook are the most antitrusty. Of those, Google is causing the most immediate anticompetitive harm (not harm in general; Facebook leads there; anticompetitive harm). It seems a natural target.
kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
I don't get why people are so comfortable with the idea of politicians wearing their dislike of certain corporations on their sleeve, such as Senator Warren seems to do for Google. Anti-trust regulations are not supposed to be used as generic legal cudgels against corporations you don't like. They are supposed to be, you know, for making sure that the market remains sane. Right now, it almost feels like "We don't like Google, and we gotta throw the book at them so that at least some page sticks". This attitude is akin to selectively weaponizing the law. Kinda like the landlord finding a reason to evict you so he combs through the lease agreement and finds a clause that your curtains need to be white but you actually have pale yellow ones. Sure, you are technically in violation of the lease, but it's very clear why this is being done, and the curtains have little to do with it. And it explains why, for example, no one cares about Comcast or the fact that a handful of payment processors basically run their personal fiefdoms about who or what they will allow on their platform, while we are asked to be over-worried by vague claims of 'Russian tampering'. Application of these regulations should again focus on the actual harms rather than getting some kind of cruel pleasure 'destroying' companies. The government has a lot of power, and often for good reason, but that power can only be respected when it is wielded dispassionately, not to settle personal scores.
- stale2002 6y ago
  > so that at least some page sticks The alternative is that nothing will ever stick against them. If politicians never engaged in polically motivated anti trust enforcement, then no anti trust enforcement would ever happen. And that sounds much worse.
  - gumby 6y ago
    > If politicians never engaged in polically motivated anti trust enforcement, then no anti trust enforcement would ever happen There’s a largely apolitical organization that is supposed to bring antitrust cases under a structure set up by congress. Sore, politicians can and do champion specific issues (in the case of antitrust, Teddy Roosevelt comes to mind) but by and large you’d prefer that the politicians remained high level (let’s have a structure to help keep the air clean) and the bureaucracy remained low level (let’s see what we can do about NOx emissions). If all antitrust had to originate in congress there would hardly have been any, ever.
m0zg 6y ago
Why aren't "blue" states going after Google, that's the real question. It's as though they might prefer Google to be an insurmountable monopoly with total control of web search or something. Google doesn't know it yet, BTW, but it will benefit from increased competition, just like Microsoft did. I was at MS when Google became a force to reckon with, and we used to joke that if Google did not exist, MS would just consist entirely of sales people, lawyers, and managers of all sorts. It was not uncommon at the time to have 1:1 program manager (aka people who mostly just sit in meetings and report "status" to each other) to dev ratio in teams. This is _excluding_ people managers. With competition in place you have to actually hire people who can do the work, and pay them well so that competition doesn't hire them away from you. Google's org hierarchy when I left a few years ago was already 2 levels deeper than Microsoft's in late 00s, so I'd argue it's well on its way there. It's an inevitable consequence of not having to compete. You grow a massive amount of counterproductive barnacles.
neonate 6y ago
https://archive.is/12VZ4 https://archive.is/12VZ4

95 points by aspenmayer 6y ago

That Elizabeth Warren tweet mentioned in the article stands out to me. She has spoken about breaking up big tech in her campaign as well. While I completely agree with regulation ensuring fairer competition; as we are seeing how much abuse total control over a computing platform can lead to in Apple vs Epic case, is breaking them up the right way? R&D is costly, and these companies spend a lot on it which is the reason US is still the leader in a lot of tech areas. The ability to spend that much just comes from their size. Breaking up companies might lead to inability of companies to go for moonshots and invest in cutting edge stuff. With China catching up and it being unlikely of them to restrict their companies this way, will it reduce competitiveness?

istorical 6y ago
creating new regulations on tech firms that make it more difficult for them to stop new competitors from arising or from protecting their monopolies makes so much more sense than just artificially deciding to slice up our top performers in industry and hamstring the sector.
- RandomTisk 6y ago
  That's assuming the monolith is actually doing good for society. I for one am desperate for more options for email providers with actual spam filtration, phones without anti-consumer spyware and eco system lockdowns, and social media that doesn't force users to speak only of things the DNC would approve of.
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    Haven't we learned from the death of Socrates that "good/bad for society" is a terrible and meaningless metric as it is so values dependent? All of those things already exist by the way - Google ironically can help you find it but so can most other search engines. There are plenty of paid providers in addition to roll your own and many anti-spam solutions. Fairphone/Freephone or even just some unlocked down Androids will run whatever you want and can, federated social media like Mastodon has all sorts of stuff that wouldn't be approved of by the mainstream like niche pornography.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    You're glossing over all the good things they've done to lay the groundwork for what you want. I'd like a smartphone with better privacy too, but I wouldn't want a smartphone at all if not for tech industry innovation over the past decade. I would (and did) choose a compact flip phone in a world where Blackberry was state of the art.
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> R&D is costly, and these companies spend a lot on it To what end? And how efficiently? If there is one lesson from the last millennium, it's that innovation has poor economies of scale and is stifled by centralisation. Capital markets have not been more liquid in our lifetimes. In 2018 alone, venture capital "invested $251 billion," [1] representing the median lifetime earnings of almost 100,000 college graduates [2][3]. "25 percent of all VC deal volume" was in $1 billion+ deals, the median lifetime earnings of over 160,000 high school graduates [4]. Google is no SpaceX or Tesla or Moderna Therapeutics. It has its vanity projects. But those are run in start-up analogs. Google brings no advantage beyond its checkbook, and has a track record of its projects outperforming as spin-outs its internal operations. [1] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/private-equity-and-principal-investors/our-insights/mckinseys-private-markets-annual-review https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/private-equity-and-princ... Venture capital’s very good year [2] https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/collegepayoff-complete.pdf https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/colleg... Figure 1, page 3 [3] $251 billion raised in 2018 / ($2,268,000 Median Bachelor's Degree Lifetime Earnings in 2009 dollars x 1.17 Inflation Adjustment to 2018 dollars per [a]) = 94,590 [a] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com https://www.usinflationcalculator.com [4] $251 billion raised in 2018 / ($1,304,000 Median High School Diploma Lifetime Earnings in 2009 dollars x 1.17 Inflation Adjustment to 2018 dollars per [a]) = 164,517
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  > "If there is one lesson from the last millennium, it's that innovation has poor economies of scale and is stifled by centralisation." When did we learn that? Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and Intel's decades of dominance in semiconductor process research are prime counterexamples but I'm sure there are plenty of others.
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and Intel's decades of dominance Compare the size of these companies, in their time, to the Soviet-scale bureaucracies of Facebook, Apple, Amazon or Google. Innovation doesn't have no economies of scale. But they peter out around the levels of CERN or NASA. (At private enterprises, that threshold appears smaller.) Also note the difference between invention and innovation, the latter implying successful distribution. Xero PARC developing great things and then abandoning them isn't productive apart from fluke exfiltrations like by way of a tour.
wmf 6y ago
It might not be a bad thing if R&D becomes more decentralized back into startups instead of FAANGs. The money is there, but the current market structure doesn't encourage it.
klyrs 6y ago
The only "moonshot" I've seen from google is their quantum computing efforts. They held an internal competition, and axed one of the programs because it didn't look immediately viable. When management got bored, they rushed a "supremacy" result out the door (imo supremacy only counts when you're solving an existing problem, not when you're creating a problem that others can't solve, whose solution has no value). Their funding will be a question next year, too If Google's QC efforts fail, we've still got IBM, Rigetti, DWave, now Honeywell, and a smorgasbord of smaller efforts, clamoring for success. So if QC meets the fate of most other Google efforts, or gets lost in a breakup, will we lose much as a society? What other "moonshot" research do we see from FAANG? I can't really think of any, besides the insidious efforts to spy deeper into our homes and personal lives.
andrewjl 6y ago
Why should consumers subsidize R&D by a company with no accountability to them what so ever? US is the leader in many tech areas due to free market competition as well as defense spending, not Google's R&D. Google is also happy to sell their R&D to China, but then somehow finds it uncomfortable to transact with the DoD. Hard to make case Google is a net positive for the US with a straight face.
- actuator 6y ago
  They shouldn't, the accountability should come with regulation ensuring fair competition and respect for user data, not just going ahead and reducing competitiveness of US companies by breaking them up. I will be really surprised if Google sold their R&D to China, as it makes no sense whatsoever, but my comment was in general about all US big tech companies.
  - MiroF 6y ago
    > the accountability should come with regulation ensuring fair competition and respect for user data Yes, so what we're saying is there's clear evidence that they have failed at adhering to those regulation, so should be broken up. > not just going ahead and reducing competitiveness of US companies by breaking them up. Siri, define competition.
    - actuator 6y ago
      > there's clear evidence that they have failed at adhering to those regulation, so should be broken up. If there is clear evidence of them breaking existing regulation, then I am all for taking action. If the existing regulations are insufficient, I am all for introducing new ones as in the case of App Store debate. > Siri, define competition. I meant competitiveness in terms of R&D by cutting their cash flows.
      - MiroF 6y ago
        > If there is clear evidence of them breaking existing regulation, then I am all for taking action. Cool, so that is why they are taking Alphabet to court, because of alleged anti-trust violations. If the court determines there is clear evidence of them breaking existing regulation, then Alphabet might be broken up. Glad we agree that we ought to enforce our anti-trust laws.
ecf 6y ago
While America wants to break up their big tech, China is directly subsidizing their companies and shielding them from outside competition until they’re ready to launch on a global scale.
- sjg007 6y ago
  I think the two markets will stay disconnected somewhat. Maybe at the interface level -> e.g. Amazon/Walmart/Target
bleepblorp 6y ago
Most of the US tech sector doesn't spend all that much on R&D in comparison to its income and profits. For example, Alphabet reportedly spent $18 billion USD on R&D in 2018[0] but acquired $77 billion in gross revenues and $31 billion in net profits over the same year[1]. In comparison, Volkswagen spent $14.5 billion USD on R&D in 2018[0] but acquired only $54 billion (as converted from Euros at December 2018 exchange rates) in gross revenues and $13 billion in net profits[2]. If VW can spend that much on R&D, particularly as a percentage of revenues, without being an abusive monopoly, then so can Alphabet. [0] https://spendmenot.com/blog/top-rd-spenders/ https://spendmenot.com/blog/top-rd-spenders/ [1] https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/googl/financials https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/googl/financials [2] https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/vow/financials https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/vow/financials
- tomweingarten 6y ago
  This is meant to be satire, right? The percentage of revenues of the two examples you gave are nearly identical.
  - granzymes 6y ago
    23% vs 26%.... I hope it's satire!
- forrestthewoods 6y ago
  > Most of the US tech sector doesn't spend all that much on R&D 25% of revenue on R&D seems like a pretty reasonable amount?
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  Looking at R&D by inputs alone is a mistake anyway. You could spend billions on attemptint to revive phrenology but that doesn't mean you'll get anything of worth. There are certainly times when it needs more but spending more into it isn't an intrinsic merit. Plus even if you have a fruitful program it doesn't mean it can always be scaled up meaningfully just because there is more money available. The output of R&D is what justifies it - although great potential may take a lot of time to vindicate. A low ratio would result from a successful matured program which simply cannot expand fast enough to reinvest. Under that metric a program with the top people paid industry leading salaries and pumping out generations of advances would be worse than a lab full of scammers which never produced any applications. That isn't a very useful metric.

gregorythecat 6y ago

Google et al are no saints. However, I can’t help but feel like all this misdirection and grandstanding is the establishment’s territorial reaction against the rise of another powerful opponent. Whoever wins we lose.

foepys 6y ago
This isn't just an American move. The EU is preparing similar antitrust cases and the introduction of a digital tax.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  You can trick a Eurocrat into regulating anything, though. The seeds of Euro proceedings against Google were planted years ago by a Microsoft astroturf campaign called FairSearch and the tree was watered since then by incumbent interests like putrescent newspaper conglomerates and software industry also-rans that nobody ever heard of.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    nobody ever heard of. If I were a European, I would benefit a lot more from a flourishing ecosystem of "also-rans" (yuck, so harsh) building their own local workforces and communities. As an American, I miss the days when it was considered acceptable to run a business that makes yourself and your local area rich, instead of the only "cool" thing being an extractive VC-launched all-or-nothing gluttonous monopoly (joining in the harsh adjectives I guess). We would have many more opportunities for all levels with thousands of $50mil companies instead of a handful of $500bil companies.
    - BrianOnHN 6y ago
      > thousands of $50mil companies instead of a handful of $500bil companies Great point. To me, it seems like those $500bil companies have perfected the art of wrangling those people who could be building the $50 million companies. I mean, why risk failure when, did someone say free lunch?

strbean 6y ago

Everyone loves to saber rattle about FAANG and antitrust, while we all sit back and let Charter and Comcast make contracts to not compete with eachother[0], we rapidly head towards having one major national bank[1] and somehow the big 4 always seem to spontaneously engage in the same bad behaviors, and Ma Bell has much been re-assembled to it's original state[2]. We desperately need a new trust buster president. [0]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/comcast-and-charter-agree-not-to-compete-against-each-other-in-wireless/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/comca... [1]: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-banking-oligopoly-in-one-chart/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-banking-oligopoly-in-on... [2]: https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/24/13389592/att-time-warner-merger-breakup-bell-system-chart https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/24/13389592/att-time-warner...

reducesuffering 6y ago
How does that article imply we’re heading for one national bank? Is it that banks have consolidated into the big 4 and that eventually they would continue to merge? That’s already a big assumption. Then there’s the coming disruption of what classical banking looks like. Square, PayPal, and Robinhood are already making inroads. PayPals worth more than most of the big 4.
fred_is_fred 6y ago
Ma Bell being reassembled is orders of magnitude less problematic than it would have been in the 1980s. Back when you only had 1 choice for local phone (no cell phones) and long distance calls were a quarter a minute (or more). I haven't made a normal phone call in years and have decent cell options. If I wanted a local phone I could use VOIP or get a real line (via centurylink).

disposable20202 6y ago

Ok interesting-- after this do Experian, Equifax, etc Coal mining and other swine industries that are politically connected and valuable. Of all the bad actors in the world, this seems like a funny prioritization but we live in dumb times Another self-inflicted wound in our economy

woofie11 6y ago
Experian: 34.63 billion market cap Google: 1.024 trillion market cap Experian is also really evil, but it's not obvious to me how they're anticompetitive.
fred_is_fred 6y ago
Anti-trust regulations are not meant to control "bad actors" but to reign in monopolies.

ABCLAW 6y ago

Wow a lot of comments in the theme of 'but what about this OTHER company acting anticompetitively'. Okay, so let's bring action against them too. The answer isn't to ignore all of them.

izacus 6y ago
The gist of it is that those other corporations cowtowed to the administration and could then got away with scummy antitrust behaviour. There doesn't seem to be any cases on the horizon for any of the others. That's the problem - some people would consider that corruption.
- ABCLAW 6y ago
  "The gist of it is that those other corporations cowtowed to the administration and could then got away with scummy antitrust behaviour" I think the reality is simpler; antitrust enforcement in the states is laughable and historically has been more the exception than the rule. Even the golden age of robber baron breakups was a historical anomaly due to a freak accident. Having worked on a ton of competition filings, I can tell you that this isn't an administration specific issue; competition law itself has been defanged by a history of refusal to enforce.
- woofie11 6y ago
  I think the other piece to look at is market cap. Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet/Google, Facebook, Tencent, and Alibaba are huge. I'd focus enforcement efforts on those. They're also high-growth. Of all of those, Amazon/Google/Facebook are the most antitrusty. Of those, Google is causing the most immediate anticompetitive harm (not harm in general; Facebook leads there; anticompetitive harm). It seems a natural target.

kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago

I don't get why people are so comfortable with the idea of politicians wearing their dislike of certain corporations on their sleeve, such as Senator Warren seems to do for Google. Anti-trust regulations are not supposed to be used as generic legal cudgels against corporations you don't like. They are supposed to be, you know, for making sure that the market remains sane. Right now, it almost feels like "We don't like Google, and we gotta throw the book at them so that at least some page sticks". This attitude is akin to selectively weaponizing the law. Kinda like the landlord finding a reason to evict you so he combs through the lease agreement and finds a clause that your curtains need to be white but you actually have pale yellow ones. Sure, you are technically in violation of the lease, but it's very clear why this is being done, and the curtains have little to do with it. And it explains why, for example, no one cares about Comcast or the fact that a handful of payment processors basically run their personal fiefdoms about who or what they will allow on their platform, while we are asked to be over-worried by vague claims of 'Russian tampering'. Application of these regulations should again focus on the actual harms rather than getting some kind of cruel pleasure 'destroying' companies. The government has a lot of power, and often for good reason, but that power can only be respected when it is wielded dispassionately, not to settle personal scores.

stale2002 6y ago
> so that at least some page sticks The alternative is that nothing will ever stick against them. If politicians never engaged in polically motivated anti trust enforcement, then no anti trust enforcement would ever happen. And that sounds much worse.
- gumby 6y ago
  > If politicians never engaged in polically motivated anti trust enforcement, then no anti trust enforcement would ever happen There’s a largely apolitical organization that is supposed to bring antitrust cases under a structure set up by congress. Sore, politicians can and do champion specific issues (in the case of antitrust, Teddy Roosevelt comes to mind) but by and large you’d prefer that the politicians remained high level (let’s have a structure to help keep the air clean) and the bureaucracy remained low level (let’s see what we can do about NOx emissions). If all antitrust had to originate in congress there would hardly have been any, ever.

m0zg 6y ago

Why aren't "blue" states going after Google, that's the real question. It's as though they might prefer Google to be an insurmountable monopoly with total control of web search or something. Google doesn't know it yet, BTW, but it will benefit from increased competition, just like Microsoft did. I was at MS when Google became a force to reckon with, and we used to joke that if Google did not exist, MS would just consist entirely of sales people, lawyers, and managers of all sorts. It was not uncommon at the time to have 1:1 program manager (aka people who mostly just sit in meetings and report "status" to each other) to dev ratio in teams. This is _excluding_ people managers. With competition in place you have to actually hire people who can do the work, and pay them well so that competition doesn't hire them away from you. Google's org hierarchy when I left a few years ago was already 2 levels deeper than Microsoft's in late 00s, so I'd argue it's well on its way there. It's an inevitable consequence of not having to compete. You grow a massive amount of counterproductive barnacles.

neonate 6y ago

https://archive.is/12VZ4 https://archive.is/12VZ4