5 ms·

Every subdivision of Google needs to be broken up, advertising and search especially. Too much in our economy is at stake.

shadowgovt 6y ago
How would that address this situation?
KaoruAoiShiho 6y ago
Why would a smaller company be any more responsive to issues like this? This seems like a technological problem rather than a political one.
- c0nsumer 6y ago
  Because it's easier for competition to arise for the smaller company when it doesn't have the clout of a behemoth behind it.
xenihn 6y ago
I consider myself anti-monopolist but lately I've been thinking...wouldn't breaking up American big tech companies put the US in a worse position to compete against Chinese tech companies?
- f430 6y ago
  Not if you remove China's swiftcode which the USGOV can do and China is very nervous because it would lead to mass unrest. How do you compete when nobody is buying Yuan and the demand disappears overnight in the foreign exchange markets?
- wolco2 6y ago
  Not in search or advertising.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  Being in a more competitive industry generally reduces margins but increases the size of the market. Vertically integrated companies lose to aggressively competitive non-integrated competitors when they exist (and a monopolist is proscribed from buying them all up), because the existence of that competition means they can't be abusive or collect monopoly rents. Vertically integrated monopolies are sticky because you can't replace any individual part of the stack by itself. You can't compete with iMessage just by creating your own messaging app, because to be on a level playing field you would also have to create your own mobile operating system and design your own phone hardware and microprocessors and convince all the customers to switch despite the existing network effect. If we made it to a market where anybody could create a new OS and have it run on the existing installed base of hardware, or create a new app in a write once run anywhere language and it could run on every existing device, vertically integrated competitors are at a disadvantage because they have to be best in class in all of their individual markets or else customers find themselves better off to have the ability to mix and match.
  - bcrl 6y ago
    I'll give an example of a Canadian vertically integrated monopoly: BCE (Bell Canada Enterprises). BCE grew out of the incumbent phone company (Bell) in most of Ontario and Quebec. Over the years it has used the massive profits from telecom to extends its reach into other sectors of the economy. Over the past 10-15 years, it has made quite a few acquisition of various content producers. Most notably to me was the purchase of CTV and Discovery Channel. Back in the 1980s, Ottawa had a local independent broadcast named CJOH. They produced their own local news at 6pm and late night. The CJOH news team was well respected and an active participant in the community. CJOH eventually got purchased by CTV and ultimately landed under the control of BCE / Bell Media. Shortly after Bell Media gained control a few years ago, they laid off longtime anchor Carol Anne Meehan. Not a good move in my view, as they brought on an entirely new and young team. Further cuts to the news staff have happened over the last few years as increasing use of technology has allowed further staff cuts -- everyone from camerapeople to editors and technical support staff. Each cut means one less means by which the news organization can learn about things that are happening in our community. The acquisition of Discovery Channel was even worse in my opinion. From 1995 to 2018 Discovery Channel ran a show called Daily Planet, which was one of the only daily science news shows. This was a wonderful way to find out about all kinds of cool things going on in the world of science and technology. It aired on weekdays at 7pm after the 6 o'clock news. Bell Media cancelled the show on May 23, 2018. The loss of Daily Planet is, in my opion, worse than that of a local news channel. Daily Planet was part of the reason for the existence of Discovery Channel. There are no real replacements being broadcast that I know of. The reason I bring all this up is to show how the priorities of a monopoly impact existing services that are a public benefit. In my opinion, the BCE layoffs were not the result of the company losing money. The reasons were to free up cash flow to pay for Bell Canada's massive investments in building out its Fibre To The Home network. Bell has spent billions of dollars thus far building out FTTH across Ontario and Quebec, acquired the incumbent in Manitoba. Purchasing content producers that were once separate entities, then gutting them and using the savings to pay for FTTH construction is a brilliant strategy. Money that was previously an expense gets turned into capex that builds a new asset. Sadly, our phone and TV bills don't go down in price despite us getting less new content. I had the chance to speak to folks at Discovery Channel at a conference back in the 1990s when I was a teenager, and their enthusiasm about bringing real science content to the public was amazing. I'm sad this has been lost at the alter of corporate greed.
ekianjo 6y ago
If you break advertising and search into two entities they would still be massive regardless. That would not solve anything.
- contravariant 6y ago
  At the very least it would solve the massive conflict of interest where a service that you can pay to make people find your webpage is strongly intertwined with another service people use to find webpages.
  - benlivengood 6y ago
    It's impossible to remove that conflict of interest. The search engine maximizes expected utility when serving ads: argmax(predicted-click-through-rate * cost-per-click). That's the only rational thing to ask for from an advertising network, and it's what the advertiser optimizes for as well by running the ad auction in the first place. It doesn't matter who computes the ad-quality score (the predictor of click-through rate); rational actors with sufficient information will agree on the value. One could artificially prevent the search engine from e.g. sending keywords and viewer profiles to the ad network, but that is a completely separate regulatory approach from monopoly-busting. While we're stumbling around the regulatory possibility landscape why not just ban advertising altogether? It's a ~1% drain on the economy that people who know better go out of their way to block.
- bcrl 6y ago
  AT&T / Bell was broken up in the 1980s into multiple entities. Splitting local and long distance services resulted in significant competition for long distance, while local phone service remained / remains heavily regulated in many markets. Here in Canada I remember having to pay $0.34 per minute to Bell in the 1980s to call a friend that was a 30 km drive away. Overseas long distance was in the dollars per minute ballpark. This wasn't without some losses. Bell Labs lost a lot of funding once the Bell monopoly was split up. The amount of R&D that the telecom giants funded over the years resulted in massive public benefits, creating the tech industry we all know and love.
- 6y ago
ma2rten 6y ago
How would that even work? Search and search ads are one product.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  The company that makes the search engine and the company that sells the ads to the advertiser can be different companies, in the same way that you can put Ad Words on your website and they'll show ads based on the content of the site even though you aren't Google.
  - ma2rten 6y ago
    So assuming the company is splits into Google and AdWords, would Google be forced to work with AdWords or are they allowed to use different providers? Are they allowed to create their own competitor to AdWords? Which problem is this solving?
    - KMag 6y ago
      Yes, they'd be allowed to use other ad providers, and hopefully it would be illegal to penalize them for constantly running some multi-armed-bandit trials across multiple ad providers.
      - ma2rten 6y ago
        Then AdWords would draw the short end of the stick because their product would become commoditized. Google would still hold the same market power as before. Ad quality might go down because there are multiple providers. Overall I don't see the upside. Maybe something that would make more sense is if Google was split into two or more search engines, each of them would get a copy of the current source code and data.
- contravariant 6y ago
  The existence of google adwords on other webpages suggests otherwise.
- 6y ago
m1117 6y ago
Google should reveal it's algorithms to make it transparent and fair to everyone. So we can game the system. [not really!]
remram 6y ago
Search is not making profit and only exists to show ads.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  ...isn't showing ads what makes it profitable? Edit: Oh, I see where you're coming from in light of the parent. Well, Google could place ads inside their product without actually running an ad network—that is in fact what most websites on the internet do. This wouldn't necessarily make sense at Google's scale though, so I don't think that's what GP meant. Rather, Google shouldn't be able to own most of the ad networks on the web while also running massive ad-supported properties in house.
  - bcrl 6y ago
    Ad networks were separate years ago! Strangely enough they were acquired. Google bought AdSense and Sprinks in 2003, dMark Broadcasting in 2006, AdScape and DoubleClick in 2007, AdMob in 2009, Invite Media in 2010, mDialog in 2014, Red Hot Labs in 2015... I'm sure there are more.
    - 8note 6y ago
      Sounds like theres a good business in making ad networks and selling them to google
- bcrl 6y ago
  Cross market subsidies make this possible once you've killed off all the competition. Therein lies the danger of monopolies. To be honest, I'm disappointed that no micropayment schemes have taken off yet. I'm perfectly willing to contribute a few pennies to every site that I visit, but there's no good way to do that today. Instead, every time I read an interesting news article that gets forwarded to me by any of a couple of dozen separate paths, I end up at a different news site that I don't have a subscription to. Should I really have to have 100 subscriptions to news sites that I only read 1 or 2 articles from each month? Some entity needs to aggregate this into a single convenient $30/month subscription. Ideally it would be standardised and be added on to my monthly internet bill (IETF standards ftw).

shadowgovt 6y ago

How would that address this situation?

KaoruAoiShiho 6y ago

Why would a smaller company be any more responsive to issues like this? This seems like a technological problem rather than a political one.

c0nsumer 6y ago
Because it's easier for competition to arise for the smaller company when it doesn't have the clout of a behemoth behind it.

xenihn 6y ago

I consider myself anti-monopolist but lately I've been thinking...wouldn't breaking up American big tech companies put the US in a worse position to compete against Chinese tech companies?

f430 6y ago
Not if you remove China's swiftcode which the USGOV can do and China is very nervous because it would lead to mass unrest. How do you compete when nobody is buying Yuan and the demand disappears overnight in the foreign exchange markets?
wolco2 6y ago
Not in search or advertising.
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
Being in a more competitive industry generally reduces margins but increases the size of the market. Vertically integrated companies lose to aggressively competitive non-integrated competitors when they exist (and a monopolist is proscribed from buying them all up), because the existence of that competition means they can't be abusive or collect monopoly rents. Vertically integrated monopolies are sticky because you can't replace any individual part of the stack by itself. You can't compete with iMessage just by creating your own messaging app, because to be on a level playing field you would also have to create your own mobile operating system and design your own phone hardware and microprocessors and convince all the customers to switch despite the existing network effect. If we made it to a market where anybody could create a new OS and have it run on the existing installed base of hardware, or create a new app in a write once run anywhere language and it could run on every existing device, vertically integrated competitors are at a disadvantage because they have to be best in class in all of their individual markets or else customers find themselves better off to have the ability to mix and match.
- bcrl 6y ago
  I'll give an example of a Canadian vertically integrated monopoly: BCE (Bell Canada Enterprises). BCE grew out of the incumbent phone company (Bell) in most of Ontario and Quebec. Over the years it has used the massive profits from telecom to extends its reach into other sectors of the economy. Over the past 10-15 years, it has made quite a few acquisition of various content producers. Most notably to me was the purchase of CTV and Discovery Channel. Back in the 1980s, Ottawa had a local independent broadcast named CJOH. They produced their own local news at 6pm and late night. The CJOH news team was well respected and an active participant in the community. CJOH eventually got purchased by CTV and ultimately landed under the control of BCE / Bell Media. Shortly after Bell Media gained control a few years ago, they laid off longtime anchor Carol Anne Meehan. Not a good move in my view, as they brought on an entirely new and young team. Further cuts to the news staff have happened over the last few years as increasing use of technology has allowed further staff cuts -- everyone from camerapeople to editors and technical support staff. Each cut means one less means by which the news organization can learn about things that are happening in our community. The acquisition of Discovery Channel was even worse in my opinion. From 1995 to 2018 Discovery Channel ran a show called Daily Planet, which was one of the only daily science news shows. This was a wonderful way to find out about all kinds of cool things going on in the world of science and technology. It aired on weekdays at 7pm after the 6 o'clock news. Bell Media cancelled the show on May 23, 2018. The loss of Daily Planet is, in my opion, worse than that of a local news channel. Daily Planet was part of the reason for the existence of Discovery Channel. There are no real replacements being broadcast that I know of. The reason I bring all this up is to show how the priorities of a monopoly impact existing services that are a public benefit. In my opinion, the BCE layoffs were not the result of the company losing money. The reasons were to free up cash flow to pay for Bell Canada's massive investments in building out its Fibre To The Home network. Bell has spent billions of dollars thus far building out FTTH across Ontario and Quebec, acquired the incumbent in Manitoba. Purchasing content producers that were once separate entities, then gutting them and using the savings to pay for FTTH construction is a brilliant strategy. Money that was previously an expense gets turned into capex that builds a new asset. Sadly, our phone and TV bills don't go down in price despite us getting less new content. I had the chance to speak to folks at Discovery Channel at a conference back in the 1990s when I was a teenager, and their enthusiasm about bringing real science content to the public was amazing. I'm sad this has been lost at the alter of corporate greed.

ekianjo 6y ago

If you break advertising and search into two entities they would still be massive regardless. That would not solve anything.

contravariant 6y ago
At the very least it would solve the massive conflict of interest where a service that you can pay to make people find your webpage is strongly intertwined with another service people use to find webpages.
- benlivengood 6y ago
  It's impossible to remove that conflict of interest. The search engine maximizes expected utility when serving ads: argmax(predicted-click-through-rate * cost-per-click). That's the only rational thing to ask for from an advertising network, and it's what the advertiser optimizes for as well by running the ad auction in the first place. It doesn't matter who computes the ad-quality score (the predictor of click-through rate); rational actors with sufficient information will agree on the value. One could artificially prevent the search engine from e.g. sending keywords and viewer profiles to the ad network, but that is a completely separate regulatory approach from monopoly-busting. While we're stumbling around the regulatory possibility landscape why not just ban advertising altogether? It's a ~1% drain on the economy that people who know better go out of their way to block.
bcrl 6y ago
AT&T / Bell was broken up in the 1980s into multiple entities. Splitting local and long distance services resulted in significant competition for long distance, while local phone service remained / remains heavily regulated in many markets. Here in Canada I remember having to pay $0.34 per minute to Bell in the 1980s to call a friend that was a 30 km drive away. Overseas long distance was in the dollars per minute ballpark. This wasn't without some losses. Bell Labs lost a lot of funding once the Bell monopoly was split up. The amount of R&D that the telecom giants funded over the years resulted in massive public benefits, creating the tech industry we all know and love.
6y ago

ma2rten 6y ago

How would that even work? Search and search ads are one product.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago
The company that makes the search engine and the company that sells the ads to the advertiser can be different companies, in the same way that you can put Ad Words on your website and they'll show ads based on the content of the site even though you aren't Google.
- ma2rten 6y ago
  So assuming the company is splits into Google and AdWords, would Google be forced to work with AdWords or are they allowed to use different providers? Are they allowed to create their own competitor to AdWords? Which problem is this solving?
  - KMag 6y ago
    Yes, they'd be allowed to use other ad providers, and hopefully it would be illegal to penalize them for constantly running some multi-armed-bandit trials across multiple ad providers.
    - ma2rten 6y ago
      Then AdWords would draw the short end of the stick because their product would become commoditized. Google would still hold the same market power as before. Ad quality might go down because there are multiple providers. Overall I don't see the upside. Maybe something that would make more sense is if Google was split into two or more search engines, each of them would get a copy of the current source code and data.
contravariant 6y ago
The existence of google adwords on other webpages suggests otherwise.
6y ago

m1117 6y ago

Google should reveal it's algorithms to make it transparent and fair to everyone. So we can game the system. [not really!]

remram 6y ago

Search is not making profit and only exists to show ads.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago
...isn't showing ads what makes it profitable? Edit: Oh, I see where you're coming from in light of the parent. Well, Google could place ads inside their product without actually running an ad network—that is in fact what most websites on the internet do. This wouldn't necessarily make sense at Google's scale though, so I don't think that's what GP meant. Rather, Google shouldn't be able to own most of the ad networks on the web while also running massive ad-supported properties in house.
- bcrl 6y ago
  Ad networks were separate years ago! Strangely enough they were acquired. Google bought AdSense and Sprinks in 2003, dMark Broadcasting in 2006, AdScape and DoubleClick in 2007, AdMob in 2009, Invite Media in 2010, mDialog in 2014, Red Hot Labs in 2015... I'm sure there are more.
  - 8note 6y ago
    Sounds like theres a good business in making ad networks and selling them to google
bcrl 6y ago
Cross market subsidies make this possible once you've killed off all the competition. Therein lies the danger of monopolies. To be honest, I'm disappointed that no micropayment schemes have taken off yet. I'm perfectly willing to contribute a few pennies to every site that I visit, but there's no good way to do that today. Instead, every time I read an interesting news article that gets forwarded to me by any of a couple of dozen separate paths, I end up at a different news site that I don't have a subscription to. Should I really have to have 100 subscriptions to news sites that I only read 1 or 2 articles from each month? Some entity needs to aggregate this into a single convenient $30/month subscription. Ideally it would be standardised and be added on to my monthly internet bill (IETF standards ftw).