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> Mehta’s decision is expected to trigger a separate proceeding to determine what penalties Google will face – and the company is also likely to file an appeal

> Mehta’s decision is expected to trigger a separate proceeding to determine what penalties Google will face – and the company is also likely to file an appeal As a Google antitrust watcher, I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop with what remedies the court will actually recommend to correct this monopoly. If you ask 20 experts, who all otherwise agree that Google is a monopoly, you might get 40 different answers about what to actually do to fix that monopoly. It'll take a while to get the answer and to work through all the appeals to this ruling and whatever remedy the court will put forth, and it's not clear or really possible to know ahead of time whether the courts will put forth small, medium or huge changes to the search engine market. Exciting times!

tootie 2y ago
I can envision a gnarly Venn diagram of search, ads, AI, analytics, Chrome. You could easily make this 5 separate companies (ads and analytics were acquired), but you probably just need to split it somewhere in the middle.
- pklausler 2y ago
  "easily?" Which one would own Platforms? Which one would own the google3 monorepo?
  - tootie 2y ago
    Haha, I mean they could easily survive as separate companies. Not that separating them would be easy.
  - coliveira 2y ago
    This is not the courts problem. Google needs to solve this before the split.
    - fallingknife 2y ago
      It is always the court's problem. A judge does not have arbitrary or absolute authority. If Google can convince an appeals court that the judge has imposed an impossible or unreasonable remedy it will be overturned.
      - idle_zealot 2y ago
        So if you make your anticompetitive business a tangled hairball then you're immune from being broken up because it would be "too hard"? Genius strategy.
      - coliveira 2y ago
        All monopolies try this old scheme, that's why they became a monopoly in the first place. No reasonable judge will fall for this.
- fallingknife 2y ago
  But this verdict only involves the search business. All that other stuff is out of scope. And breaking it up like that leaves the search monopoly intact anyway.
- tomjen3 2y ago
  Search would just farm out ads or develop their own again: its two sides of the same paper, by necessity. Chrome is a loss leader and if cut out to it’s own company will die, because browsers are not a business that can make money anymore (same with eg C compilers for x86), AI maybe, but the only advantage AI has at google is that it has a crap-ton of data to train it with. Without that? The market just has one less AI product. Regardless of how you split it, whomever ends up with search ends up with the value. And I guess the only way to split search would be into a background service api you could query and then have the front page be its own business. Others could then buy access, but the problem with that is that you then have a supplier that has all the power…
  - account42 2y ago
    > Chrome is a loss leader and if cut out to it’s own company will die, because browsers are not a business that can make money anymore That's the definition of anti-copetitive monopoly abuse, not an argument against doing something about it.
    - tomjen3 2y ago
      Except that Firefox was there first with a free unbundled browser.
o-o- 2y ago
I always thought that the idea behind antitrust laws was that if an entity reaches total market dominance and uses that dominance to keep other out of the game, the entity should be split into competing entities. What I'm seeing however is nothing more than toothless, political pointing sticks. Both IBM, Microsoft and Google have clearly at some point obtained total domination of their markets. Consequently they've all found themselves at the antitrust chopping blocks, however these companies have become so important to the economy that actual verdicts are reduced to a "carry on, just don't exert your dominance too much". Or have I misunderstood antitrust laws? Edit: s/excert/exert
- taeric 2y ago
  Splitting companies that have physical presence is something that is a bit easier to do? That is, my gut would be that the examples you have in your mind for how companies that hit market dominance were split, are dominated by markets that required a bit more physical connection to the consumers they were serving. You could also see easy ways to force a company that is using a dominant position in one industry to gain an upper hand in another to divest from that expansion. Most of that falls apart with the nature of these markets, though?
- singron 2y ago
  The original Sherman Act specifies imprisonment for 1 year, a $5,000 fine, and the seizure of property due to the violating behavior. It also gives courts the authority to "prevent and restrain such violations". It makes no specific note of splitting up corporations. Obviously this isn't the modern understanding, and the act was later amended.
- 762236 2y ago
  How would you split Google? Any type of split would kill that which makes Google so great.
  - meiraleal 2y ago
    Chrome, Android and the Play Store being separated companies would be great.
groovecoder 2y ago
Do you know which will happen first? Specifically, will the court put forth its remedies before the appeals begin? Or will those actions happen in parallel? Or what?
shuntress 2y ago
The issue is that there is no direct fix. It depends instead on the overall health of the Internet. We are moving away from open commerce and into walled gardens. Once Google makes deals similar to their Reddit deal with Meta and Bytedance, it's going to become basically impossible for an upstart search engine to index anything competitively.
- Spivak 2y ago
  On the flip side once you leave the dark forest you stop needing search engines as much since you're contributing to a community you exist on the inside of.
slaymaker1907 2y ago
I’m not really sure how you fix it. Considering it specifically calls out being the default option on iOS, we can assume that’s going to change. However, I could also see Chrome’s market dominance challenged. Maybe they’ll be forced to somehow split that off and Chrome will need to be funded through some combination of donations or selling its own ads/data.
- meiraleal 2y ago
  An independent Chrome App Store would easily achieve profitability. There are more than 3 billion chrome users.
  - riscy 2y ago
    Are Chrome plugins capable enough to sustain a paid store model? I thought they were becoming more restricted to stifle ad blockers.
    - majewsky 2y ago
      In this scenario, if Chrome were a separate business from the rest of Google, they would not be incentivized to stifle adblocking.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
g15jv2dp 2y ago
Nothing is ever going to happen. Google, Apple etc are the US's international economic arm that ensures competing countries never develop a threatening IT sector. They're very happy to let any foreign startup be gobbled up, for example. Negative consequences on the domestic market are just an unfortunate byproduct.
- j_maffe 2y ago
  I think in this case it could, simply because all of the competitors are American, none are foreign.
  - g15jv2dp 2y ago
    No, there are non-US competitors. Qwant, Mojeek, Seznam... You might reply, "but they're small" or "I haven't heard of them". Well, how do you think that came to be? Besides, I'm replying to a comment about the wider trust case against google. It's not just about search engines.
    - dangus 2y ago
      Seznam took over 10 seconds for me to load start to finish and I'm on gigabit fiber. It has no English language option. Maybe that's why I haven't heard of them? Although Qwant looks kind of nice and obviously localized. I also think it's interesting that I know about Kagi already but don't know about Mojeek despite Kagi using their results. I fully agree that Google is a monopolist that has been oppressing the search engine market but at some point if you're going to start a company you need to do some marketing. DuckDuckGo is an example of success in that realm, it's nearly overtaken Yahoo.
      - ricardo81 2y ago
        DDG have done very well with their marketing. It may have a lot to do with them not having to develop a search engine from scratch though, since they use the Bing API for their results. Mojeek predates them by some years but does their own crawling/indexing/ranking. Even Ecosia who are essentially identical on the back-end (Bing results) market themselves on planting trees for every search and I see them mentioned a bunch. Interestingly they don't seem to factor in the energy consumed on Bing's side of the search - where the heavy lifting of data is done. Also that US investors have a much bigger risk appetite means the likes of Neeva (who IIRC were also using other's results) can spring into existence and seemingly get a love in from the press because of their big tech connection.
arendtio 2y ago
An aspect often overlooked is that the tech giants have an enormous advantage because they have harvested information for decades. In addition, highly targeted advertising creates all kinds of troubles for democracy when done on a scale like Google and Meta. So, a powerful solution would be to make targeted advertising illegal. This would make it easier for new competitors to enter the market and make it visible if someone abuses the ad industry to push political agendas.

tootie 2y ago

I can envision a gnarly Venn diagram of search, ads, AI, analytics, Chrome. You could easily make this 5 separate companies (ads and analytics were acquired), but you probably just need to split it somewhere in the middle.

pklausler 2y ago
"easily?" Which one would own Platforms? Which one would own the google3 monorepo?
- tootie 2y ago
  Haha, I mean they could easily survive as separate companies. Not that separating them would be easy.
- coliveira 2y ago
  This is not the courts problem. Google needs to solve this before the split.
  - fallingknife 2y ago
    It is always the court's problem. A judge does not have arbitrary or absolute authority. If Google can convince an appeals court that the judge has imposed an impossible or unreasonable remedy it will be overturned.
    - idle_zealot 2y ago
      So if you make your anticompetitive business a tangled hairball then you're immune from being broken up because it would be "too hard"? Genius strategy.
    - coliveira 2y ago
      All monopolies try this old scheme, that's why they became a monopoly in the first place. No reasonable judge will fall for this.
fallingknife 2y ago
But this verdict only involves the search business. All that other stuff is out of scope. And breaking it up like that leaves the search monopoly intact anyway.
tomjen3 2y ago
Search would just farm out ads or develop their own again: its two sides of the same paper, by necessity. Chrome is a loss leader and if cut out to it’s own company will die, because browsers are not a business that can make money anymore (same with eg C compilers for x86), AI maybe, but the only advantage AI has at google is that it has a crap-ton of data to train it with. Without that? The market just has one less AI product. Regardless of how you split it, whomever ends up with search ends up with the value. And I guess the only way to split search would be into a background service api you could query and then have the front page be its own business. Others could then buy access, but the problem with that is that you then have a supplier that has all the power…
- account42 2y ago
  > Chrome is a loss leader and if cut out to it’s own company will die, because browsers are not a business that can make money anymore That's the definition of anti-copetitive monopoly abuse, not an argument against doing something about it.
  - tomjen3 2y ago
    Except that Firefox was there first with a free unbundled browser.

o-o- 2y ago

I always thought that the idea behind antitrust laws was that if an entity reaches total market dominance and uses that dominance to keep other out of the game, the entity should be split into competing entities. What I'm seeing however is nothing more than toothless, political pointing sticks. Both IBM, Microsoft and Google have clearly at some point obtained total domination of their markets. Consequently they've all found themselves at the antitrust chopping blocks, however these companies have become so important to the economy that actual verdicts are reduced to a "carry on, just don't exert your dominance too much". Or have I misunderstood antitrust laws? Edit: s/excert/exert

taeric 2y ago
Splitting companies that have physical presence is something that is a bit easier to do? That is, my gut would be that the examples you have in your mind for how companies that hit market dominance were split, are dominated by markets that required a bit more physical connection to the consumers they were serving. You could also see easy ways to force a company that is using a dominant position in one industry to gain an upper hand in another to divest from that expansion. Most of that falls apart with the nature of these markets, though?
singron 2y ago
The original Sherman Act specifies imprisonment for 1 year, a $5,000 fine, and the seizure of property due to the violating behavior. It also gives courts the authority to "prevent and restrain such violations". It makes no specific note of splitting up corporations. Obviously this isn't the modern understanding, and the act was later amended.
762236 2y ago
How would you split Google? Any type of split would kill that which makes Google so great.
- meiraleal 2y ago
  Chrome, Android and the Play Store being separated companies would be great.

groovecoder 2y ago

Do you know which will happen first? Specifically, will the court put forth its remedies before the appeals begin? Or will those actions happen in parallel? Or what?

shuntress 2y ago

The issue is that there is no direct fix. It depends instead on the overall health of the Internet. We are moving away from open commerce and into walled gardens. Once Google makes deals similar to their Reddit deal with Meta and Bytedance, it's going to become basically impossible for an upstart search engine to index anything competitively.

Spivak 2y ago
On the flip side once you leave the dark forest you stop needing search engines as much since you're contributing to a community you exist on the inside of.

slaymaker1907 2y ago

I’m not really sure how you fix it. Considering it specifically calls out being the default option on iOS, we can assume that’s going to change. However, I could also see Chrome’s market dominance challenged. Maybe they’ll be forced to somehow split that off and Chrome will need to be funded through some combination of donations or selling its own ads/data.

meiraleal 2y ago
An independent Chrome App Store would easily achieve profitability. There are more than 3 billion chrome users.
- riscy 2y ago
  Are Chrome plugins capable enough to sustain a paid store model? I thought they were becoming more restricted to stifle ad blockers.
  - majewsky 2y ago
    In this scenario, if Chrome were a separate business from the rest of Google, they would not be incentivized to stifle adblocking.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

g15jv2dp 2y ago

Nothing is ever going to happen. Google, Apple etc are the US's international economic arm that ensures competing countries never develop a threatening IT sector. They're very happy to let any foreign startup be gobbled up, for example. Negative consequences on the domestic market are just an unfortunate byproduct.

j_maffe 2y ago
I think in this case it could, simply because all of the competitors are American, none are foreign.
- g15jv2dp 2y ago
  No, there are non-US competitors. Qwant, Mojeek, Seznam... You might reply, "but they're small" or "I haven't heard of them". Well, how do you think that came to be? Besides, I'm replying to a comment about the wider trust case against google. It's not just about search engines.
  - dangus 2y ago
    Seznam took over 10 seconds for me to load start to finish and I'm on gigabit fiber. It has no English language option. Maybe that's why I haven't heard of them? Although Qwant looks kind of nice and obviously localized. I also think it's interesting that I know about Kagi already but don't know about Mojeek despite Kagi using their results. I fully agree that Google is a monopolist that has been oppressing the search engine market but at some point if you're going to start a company you need to do some marketing. DuckDuckGo is an example of success in that realm, it's nearly overtaken Yahoo.
    - ricardo81 2y ago
      DDG have done very well with their marketing. It may have a lot to do with them not having to develop a search engine from scratch though, since they use the Bing API for their results. Mojeek predates them by some years but does their own crawling/indexing/ranking. Even Ecosia who are essentially identical on the back-end (Bing results) market themselves on planting trees for every search and I see them mentioned a bunch. Interestingly they don't seem to factor in the energy consumed on Bing's side of the search - where the heavy lifting of data is done. Also that US investors have a much bigger risk appetite means the likes of Neeva (who IIRC were also using other's results) can spring into existence and seemingly get a love in from the press because of their big tech connection.

arendtio 2y ago

An aspect often overlooked is that the tech giants have an enormous advantage because they have harvested information for decades. In addition, highly targeted advertising creates all kinds of troubles for democracy when done on a scale like Google and Meta. So, a powerful solution would be to make targeted advertising illegal. This would make it easier for new competitors to enter the market and make it visible if someone abuses the ad industry to push political agendas.