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Google will continue to make money as it does now, through adwords as a "search partner." This is also how other SEs make money. The biggest antitrust case Goog

Google will continue to make money as it does now, through adwords as a "search partner." This is also how other SEs make money. The biggest antitrust case Google has lost so far has related directly to this. Would they make less money? Yes, probably. It's hard to say how much, but it would still likely be enough to run Google. I think it's easier to understand the paradigm with Twitter or FB, since they're simpler. Facebook currently makes about $100bn pa from ads. Circa 2015, they were operating profitably on about $10bn ad revenue. Twitter has had a similar (more modest) trajectory. They spend a lot of money running FB & Twitter, because they can, but there's no reason to think FB or Google Search on far less revenue than they bring in currently. There are versions of what I'm suggesting that likely affect revenue moderately, and versions that could hit harder. IMO, in either case, I don't believe there is any meaningful consumer harm or ill effects outside of FB's shareholders or perhaps employees. This isn't true of all monopolies/sectors. It's true of FB, Google, maybe twitter.

thegrimmest 5y ago
> it would still likely be enough to run Google. [emphasis mine] Is this arbitrary guess really worth risking the whole farm?
- dalbasal 5y ago
  The farm is at risk at all time. That said, I think the risks are way smaller than previous era's trustbusting. I like FB as an example, as I said. I'm pretty confident that FB would be pretty much the same on far less revenue because they were pretty much the same on less revenue in recent years. Comparable social media services run of far less revenue (scaled whichever way you like). You can also look at their accounts, which reveal a lot. The simplest clue is profit margins. If we're wrong... one social media service declines and another takes its place. Personally, I see very little risk. The actual risk, IMO, is not really about keeping these services viable. There no "shit! I broke auto-manufacturing and now we don't have cars" risk. It's about share price. Smallish declines in revenue can mean big declines in profit. Any decline in revenue can lead to a collapse of share prices, regardless of profit. The big techs are a big part of the S&P, and high profile. Quite a lot of the S&P's value relates directly to monopoly, so antitrust (IMO) directly conflicts with equity values... and things could get "macroeconomic" from there. All that said, I'm not advocating anything intentionally destructive. Google is, I suspect, expecting to be broken up eventually. I think that was part of the Alphabet restructuring logic. The primary objection that comes to my mind, in the vein of your comment,is a hayek-esque information argument. A Hayekian logic though, is totally incompatible with paragraph 5 above though, and I'm quite confident about that... so I don't know where it fits in.

thegrimmest 5y ago

> it would still likely be enough to run Google. [emphasis mine] Is this arbitrary guess really worth risking the whole farm?

dalbasal 5y ago
The farm is at risk at all time. That said, I think the risks are way smaller than previous era's trustbusting. I like FB as an example, as I said. I'm pretty confident that FB would be pretty much the same on far less revenue because they were pretty much the same on less revenue in recent years. Comparable social media services run of far less revenue (scaled whichever way you like). You can also look at their accounts, which reveal a lot. The simplest clue is profit margins. If we're wrong... one social media service declines and another takes its place. Personally, I see very little risk. The actual risk, IMO, is not really about keeping these services viable. There no "shit! I broke auto-manufacturing and now we don't have cars" risk. It's about share price. Smallish declines in revenue can mean big declines in profit. Any decline in revenue can lead to a collapse of share prices, regardless of profit. The big techs are a big part of the S&P, and high profile. Quite a lot of the S&P's value relates directly to monopoly, so antitrust (IMO) directly conflicts with equity values... and things could get "macroeconomic" from there. All that said, I'm not advocating anything intentionally destructive. Google is, I suspect, expecting to be broken up eventually. I think that was part of the Alphabet restructuring logic. The primary objection that comes to my mind, in the vein of your comment,is a hayek-esque information argument. A Hayekian logic though, is totally incompatible with paragraph 5 above though, and I'm quite confident about that... so I don't know where it fits in.