5 ms·

The split Google "Services" part can still contract other ad networks for revenue, including AdSense if competitive. They just won't be able to bundle.

shadowgovt 3y ago
I think people underestimate how deeply intertwined Google's services and apps are. I don't think a split off "Google Services" could survive. Google's fabric is designed to run Google's apps and vice versa. You can't just cram some other company's software into Google's core fabric and you can't just run AdSense on someone else's cloud. ETA: this is partially because of historical accretion and path dependence, but also because offering services at Google scale and reliability is a legitimately hard, abstraction-breaking problem; most fabrics aren't architected for the fault-tolerance and scaling that Google's fabric is (did you really isolate concerns? Are you sure your backing-store is eventually-consistent lock-free?), and most software isn't designed to run on a fault-tolerant, high-reliability fabric (what does your UI do if half the database is missing for ten minutes? Did you break your storage down into a NoSQL database with massive data denormalization because space is almost free, or are you using a relational database with heavy cross-lookup constraints that require high availability? Are your RPCs doctored with enough data to make for useful full-service traces, or do your microservices just spit JSON at each other?). (Source: was there; I saw enough acquisitions go sideways to know how actually hard it is to reshape software from the outside world to fit Google's way of doing computing).
- hfkwer 3y ago
  That sounds like a problem for Google to solve, not the public. "We setup our business so that it's too difficult to comply with the law" isn't an excuse in any context.
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    In theory, yes. In practice, didn't MS use basically this as one of their arguments when the FTC tried to break them up back in the day?
    - pie420 3y ago
      "The US failed to break up a monopoly that to this day stifles competition and prevents effective capitalism by making itself to complicated to regulate, so lets keep making the same mistakes"
      - shadowgovt 3y ago
        Does modern MS stifle competition and prevent effective capitalism? I don't think I've heard anyone beat that drum and get a band marching behind it in years. This is the same Microsoft that's seen its desktop market share slowly erode since 2013, right? The one holding 1.9% of smartphone marketshare? The one so impossible to regulate that the FTC is regulating it right now (https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/ftc-seeks-block-microsoft-corps-acquisition-activision-blizzard-inc https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/...)?
        AshamedCaptain 3y ago
        > Does modern MS stifle competition and prevent effective capitalism? Of course they do, and anyone who is confused by their marketing into thinking otherwise is just plain blind. The last someone "beat that drum" was none other than the british competition regulator aka CMA not _two months ago_, which among maaany other things literally complained Microsoft was still using their monopoly power to prevent gaming on desktop Linux. Stay classy, MS. > We found that the Microsoft Cloud Remedy had several shortcomings: [..] Microsoft would not have to supply Activision’s full range of games to providers that may decide to operate using a non-Windows PC operating system (eg Linux)
        shadowgovt 3y ago
        The European Commission respectfully disagrees. https://gamerant.com/cma-overstated-microsoft-cloud-gaming-share/ https://gamerant.com/cma-overstated-microsoft-cloud-gaming-s...
        3y ago
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    Keeping in mind that the law wasn't that when the tech stack was built. It would certainly be a problem for Google to solve, but one should note that legally requiring this of the company would be tantamount to legally requiring Google to shut down (which in the long run would harm user privacy because the company would almost certainly be replaced by an ecosystem of companies that care far less about privacy than Google does, and a gaggle of unrelated firms running hither and thither with user data is harder to regulate than one megacorp). There are better ways to serve the public interest here.
    - hfkwer 3y ago
      > legally requiring this of the company would be tantamount to legally requiring Google to shut down What a leap in logic. Care to elaborate? That assertion is insane and the rest of the comment hinges on that.
      - shadowgovt 3y ago
        Most of the value of Google is the services it provides (search and ads, and indeed cloud, which is a separate product and not just "Google's internal fabric exposed") on its internal fabric. Splitting out "Google Services" from ads or search creates a company with one customer (or two, if we've split out ads and search) that is basically in no market position to get more customers because Google's internal fabric is not a "cloud offering" (source: I was listening in when the company decided to offer Google Cloud and not make that "just the bare metal we run everything on;" Google's internal bare metal is too developer-hostile to the common way things are done outside Google to be a viable product). Meanwhile, search and ads would be in a place where there was only one "cloud" company in the world they could run their product on. For all its money, I don't believe Google could afford to re-tool their products to work on someone else's cloud, so once the "Services" company foundered for being unable to compete / having a monoculture of customers, the ads and search companies would die for lack of vendor offering the one bespoke cloud model they can run on.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  I'm sorry, but Google has already dealt with this issue, and they can deal with it again. Quota is a thing there, and they already have process for billing and managing access to Google resources by entities which are quasi-internal because during the "Alphabet" transition many things that were formerly internal -- such as the e.g. "Access & Energy PA", which became "Access", mostly Fiber ... which I happened to work at the time -- became quasi-external, and they started having to pay Google-proper for Borg usage, etc. It's not impossible at all for Google to set up process, billing, and data access boundaries. They just naturally have an interest in avoiding this completely. Which is exactly the point -- right now their ads products in particular have way too much insight into both the buy and sell side of the equation, and Google has gone out of its way to dominate the entire ad supply chain using this knowledge. Forcing an infrastructure separation and an organizational separation for the ads businesses there would do a lot of good for the market as a whole. And not sure we should care too much about how Google does out of it. They're swimming in ad revenues.
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    Good point. I was thinking about this through the lens of how Google looks when doing an acquisition and under-valuing the fact that these spin-offs would be already-constructed Google-shaped offerings. Still, it sets up a monoculture of service fabrics those products can run on where the division between orgs is, at best, paper-thin; at worst, search or ads dies and takes services with it (or vice-versa) because without several eng-decades neither of those sub-companies are kitted to act as an independent company.

shadowgovt 3y ago

I think people underestimate how deeply intertwined Google's services and apps are. I don't think a split off "Google Services" could survive. Google's fabric is designed to run Google's apps and vice versa. You can't just cram some other company's software into Google's core fabric and you can't just run AdSense on someone else's cloud. ETA: this is partially because of historical accretion and path dependence, but also because offering services at Google scale and reliability is a legitimately hard, abstraction-breaking problem; most fabrics aren't architected for the fault-tolerance and scaling that Google's fabric is (did you really isolate concerns? Are you sure your backing-store is eventually-consistent lock-free?), and most software isn't designed to run on a fault-tolerant, high-reliability fabric (what does your UI do if half the database is missing for ten minutes? Did you break your storage down into a NoSQL database with massive data denormalization because space is almost free, or are you using a relational database with heavy cross-lookup constraints that require high availability? Are your RPCs doctored with enough data to make for useful full-service traces, or do your microservices just spit JSON at each other?). (Source: was there; I saw enough acquisitions go sideways to know how actually hard it is to reshape software from the outside world to fit Google's way of doing computing).

hfkwer 3y ago
That sounds like a problem for Google to solve, not the public. "We setup our business so that it's too difficult to comply with the law" isn't an excuse in any context.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  In theory, yes. In practice, didn't MS use basically this as one of their arguments when the FTC tried to break them up back in the day?
  - pie420 3y ago
    "The US failed to break up a monopoly that to this day stifles competition and prevents effective capitalism by making itself to complicated to regulate, so lets keep making the same mistakes"
    - shadowgovt 3y ago
      Does modern MS stifle competition and prevent effective capitalism? I don't think I've heard anyone beat that drum and get a band marching behind it in years. This is the same Microsoft that's seen its desktop market share slowly erode since 2013, right? The one holding 1.9% of smartphone marketshare? The one so impossible to regulate that the FTC is regulating it right now (https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/ftc-seeks-block-microsoft-corps-acquisition-activision-blizzard-inc https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/...)?
      - AshamedCaptain 3y ago
        > Does modern MS stifle competition and prevent effective capitalism? Of course they do, and anyone who is confused by their marketing into thinking otherwise is just plain blind. The last someone "beat that drum" was none other than the british competition regulator aka CMA not _two months ago_, which among maaany other things literally complained Microsoft was still using their monopoly power to prevent gaming on desktop Linux. Stay classy, MS. > We found that the Microsoft Cloud Remedy had several shortcomings: [..] Microsoft would not have to supply Activision’s full range of games to providers that may decide to operate using a non-Windows PC operating system (eg Linux)
        shadowgovt 3y ago
        The European Commission respectfully disagrees. https://gamerant.com/cma-overstated-microsoft-cloud-gaming-share/ https://gamerant.com/cma-overstated-microsoft-cloud-gaming-s...
        3y ago
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  Keeping in mind that the law wasn't that when the tech stack was built. It would certainly be a problem for Google to solve, but one should note that legally requiring this of the company would be tantamount to legally requiring Google to shut down (which in the long run would harm user privacy because the company would almost certainly be replaced by an ecosystem of companies that care far less about privacy than Google does, and a gaggle of unrelated firms running hither and thither with user data is harder to regulate than one megacorp). There are better ways to serve the public interest here.
  - hfkwer 3y ago
    > legally requiring this of the company would be tantamount to legally requiring Google to shut down What a leap in logic. Care to elaborate? That assertion is insane and the rest of the comment hinges on that.
    - shadowgovt 3y ago
      Most of the value of Google is the services it provides (search and ads, and indeed cloud, which is a separate product and not just "Google's internal fabric exposed") on its internal fabric. Splitting out "Google Services" from ads or search creates a company with one customer (or two, if we've split out ads and search) that is basically in no market position to get more customers because Google's internal fabric is not a "cloud offering" (source: I was listening in when the company decided to offer Google Cloud and not make that "just the bare metal we run everything on;" Google's internal bare metal is too developer-hostile to the common way things are done outside Google to be a viable product). Meanwhile, search and ads would be in a place where there was only one "cloud" company in the world they could run their product on. For all its money, I don't believe Google could afford to re-tool their products to work on someone else's cloud, so once the "Services" company foundered for being unable to compete / having a monoculture of customers, the ads and search companies would die for lack of vendor offering the one bespoke cloud model they can run on.
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
I'm sorry, but Google has already dealt with this issue, and they can deal with it again. Quota is a thing there, and they already have process for billing and managing access to Google resources by entities which are quasi-internal because during the "Alphabet" transition many things that were formerly internal -- such as the e.g. "Access & Energy PA", which became "Access", mostly Fiber ... which I happened to work at the time -- became quasi-external, and they started having to pay Google-proper for Borg usage, etc. It's not impossible at all for Google to set up process, billing, and data access boundaries. They just naturally have an interest in avoiding this completely. Which is exactly the point -- right now their ads products in particular have way too much insight into both the buy and sell side of the equation, and Google has gone out of its way to dominate the entire ad supply chain using this knowledge. Forcing an infrastructure separation and an organizational separation for the ads businesses there would do a lot of good for the market as a whole. And not sure we should care too much about how Google does out of it. They're swimming in ad revenues.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  Good point. I was thinking about this through the lens of how Google looks when doing an acquisition and under-valuing the fact that these spin-offs would be already-constructed Google-shaped offerings. Still, it sets up a monoculture of service fabrics those products can run on where the division between orgs is, at best, paper-thin; at worst, search or ads dies and takes services with it (or vice-versa) because without several eng-decades neither of those sub-companies are kitted to act as an independent company.