7 ms·

DOJ may want to break up Google

84 points by CrankyBear 2y ago

novia 2y ago
Google has the closest thing we have to the Bell Labs of the past that invented the transistor. If the DOJ breaks them up, we will lose another valuable industry research facility.
- lulzron 2y ago
  AT&T argued that breaking up its monopoly would harm consumers by reducing service quality, increasing costs, and stifling innovation due to the loss of economies of scale. However, the breakup in 1984 led to increased competition, which drove innovation, improved services, and lowered prices, proving AT&T's claims largely false. The market's diversity and consumer choice expanded significantly post-breakup, contradicting the monopoly's dire predictions.
  - not2b 2y ago
    Back in the 1980s, long distance couples sometimes wound up paying more in long distance phone calls than rent, and 30 miles away counted as long distance. No one could attach anything to the precious network, so acoustic coupler modems had to be used, resulting in very low bandwidth. Yes, a lot of good stuff came out of Bell Labs, funded by the huge amount of monopoly money that came into the company, but that needed to end.
    - SoftTalker 2y ago
      I was in that situation. I was thrilled when Sprint long distance became available at $0.10/minute and I also remember when you could stop renting your home phone from AT&T and plug in one that you bought and owned.
      - wormius 2y ago
        Heh - My first online experience was 1995 (obviously, pre-98 telecom deregulation). Not only did the price include the insane per-hour pricing of Compuserve, but the long distance fees pushed my bill up to 300 dollars the first month. I worked at Taco Bell at the time and made like 4 bucks an hour. Thankfully I lived at home rent free at that point.
  - linguae 2y ago
    I agree with this view; the breakup of the AT&T monopoly was a boon for consumers. However, I also agree that Bell Labs was a casualty of the breakup. Once AT&T was split, Bell Labs was pressured to demonstrate its value by focusing its research on areas with more immediate ROI. Unfortunately, when a research lab focuses more on the short-term instead of fostering long-term, riskier explorations, the magic of the lab fades away, and often the work becomes evolutionary rather than revolutionary, since it’s hard to do revolutionary research when management, executives, and shareholders demand quarterly progress and a promise for ROI in the near future. Bell Labs wasn’t the same since 1984, and the same situation occurred with Xerox PARC after the 1980s when Xerox no longer enjoyed monopoly-level profits on its photocopiers due to increased competition. I believe that fostering long-term, unfettered research is an important element for revolutionary work, though I don’t believe it’s the only way for revolutionary work to happen. However, it’s difficult for most companies to consistently fund this work for an extended period of time. Bell Labs and Xerox PARC in their heydays were special, and I struggle to think of any modern-day equivalents in industry.
  - ayakang31415 2y ago
    This analysis might be selective and hindsight biased. Are there any cases where government intervention to slow or stop monopolies actually impeded innovation?
    - lulzron 2y ago
      Government antitrust actions aim to promote competition but can sometimes slow innovation by disrupting large companies' ability to invest in R&D. Cases like IBM, AT&T, Microsoft, and Qualcomm illustrate how such interventions, while fostering competition, may also delay technological advancements or make companies more risk-averse. While antitrust actions might temporarily disrupt a company's innovation, they ultimately foster a healthier market by encouraging competition, which drives more diverse and widespread innovation across the industry. Breaking monopolies often unleashes creativity and technological advancement by empowering smaller players and preventing market stagnation.
      - Narhem 2y ago
        Total market share, you can’t generate more time to steal from people which is effectively what these companies like Google have done to generate revenue. If the government steps in they would have to break them all up and expect to make entering those sections possible. At the moment it’s nearly impossible.
- immibis 2y ago
  Which lab at Google is going to invent the next transistor?
  - stingraycharles 2y ago
    I guess the parent is talking about Google X, and perhaps the self driving car stuff. Not sure, I don’t think Google is particularly good at innovation, as most of their successes other than search came through acquisitions (YouTube, Google Maps). They’re definitely not at the forefront of AI anymore, which honestly is super surprising given the reputation that had.
    - Alupis 2y ago
      Perhaps user-facing apps/innovations, yes - but what about all of the other things they've contributed to the world? Kubernetes, Golang, V8, Chromium, and so much more. All of which are entirely free, as in beer kind of free. That's amazing. These tools have been used to create amazing things that normal people have come to depend on every day.
      - stingraycharles 2y ago
        But that’s hardly on par with the level of innovation that happened at Bell Labs. Would you see them getting 10 Nobel prizes and 5 Turing awards? I’m not disagreeing that Google is adding value, but it just seems more like incremental improvements rather than innovation. Yes they make free things, but so do Facebook, Netflix, Apple, etc.
        Alupis 2y ago
        > Would you see them getting 10 Nobel prizes and 5 Turing awards? Meh, we give Nobel prizes to anyone these days - they're more symbolic of certain politics than anything else sadly. Turing Awards? Yes, many things Google has contributed to the world are probably worthy of such an award. Http/2/quic/3 were driven by Google if I'm not mistaken, and there is no other browser core like Chromium today that facilitates so much of the world's internet access (a significant amount of which does not use Chrome itself). Tensorflow and early "AI Revolution" tech came largely out of Google as well. The problem we have today is tech is very complicated and requires many organizations working together to really advance groundbreaking technology. When the day finally comes that FSD Vehicles are possible, would we say the first company to market "invented" the technology or would it be the compound experiences of dozens of companies? Gone are the days 5 people can get into a room and 3 months later turn out world-changing technology...
- surgical_fire 2y ago
  Google only seems to innovate in how to extract more dollars from advertisement and in how to make their search worse. Maybe we will all be fine without those.
  - Narhem 2y ago
    It also knows how to bully people trying to entire the space.
- icehawk 2y ago
  What would you consider research Google has done that is close to the level of what Bell Labs did?
  - 0xB31B1B 2y ago
    Attention in deep learning, Maintenance and development of the Linux kernel, Development of advanced databases, Self driving cars, Image recognition
- mapt 2y ago
  I mean... they had it. For ten or fifteen years. In CS, at least. That mostly ended when they became a VC financing & monetization endpoint rather than a novel research platform, and renamed themselves 'Alphabet', cut R&D spending to about 1/12th of revenue, hired a bunch of middle managers and marketing execs, and killed 20% time, because the idea of a thousand engineers making white-paper reports about how they chose to spend their time to one CTO was no longer a favored organizational strategy for executing further growth by shareholders. They still do a great deal of research, but it's less blue-sky and more focused. Google's got 182,000 employees now, with official R&D spending at about four times the National Science Foundation, but still in the 10-15% of revenue band. This is more a condemnation of the NSF and Congress than praise of Google.
- thfuran 2y ago
  If you want applied science, advocate for increased public funding of research. Supporting abusive monopolies in the hopes that they'll do some good with part of their ill-gotten gains is the wrong play.
- bearjaws 2y ago
  Google doesn't even keep the projects they launch alive, what chance does their lab have long term?
wrycoder 2y ago
They are behind the curve at this point.
kdfga 2y ago
Right before the election, what a coincidence. I hope they remember that if Harris wins. But I doubt it.
ApolloFortyNine 2y ago
Do apple at the same time and I'll support it. How long are we going to allow the 30% apple tax to continue? See the recent patreon debacle for how it hurts people (not to mention the 30% being eaten as apple as well...). You could switch from using Google's web products today. Literally.
- Fnoord 2y ago
  Do one now, by focusing on it. Then do other. It is difficult to compete with 'free' services where people pay with their privacy / time (for watching ads). Large masses cannot afford all these subscription-based models, and if then: households need to chose. Amazon does this too. I pay 5 EUR a month, and get Amazon Prime Video, I get free S&H on Prime articles, and this makes me more inclined to order from Amazon. Meanwhile, if I order from AliExpress for more than 10 EUR, I get free shipping. Same story: stimulates me to buy more (or wait till I have more to order). With Apple, people are within the walled garden and circumventing that isn't allowed outside of EU. Small businesses cannot do free/cheap shipping, as they don't have any large volume discounts. So what they do is sell their item on Amazon (and in NL, Bol.com) for a little bit more than their own shop. Either way, they have a tough time to compete. On service perhaps. Amazon has been terrible with warranty on expensive items to me. But if it is within a month I've been able to return the item, with no hassle.
- heavyset_go 2y ago
  I'm hoping precedent is set so that actions can be taken against other companies that abuse their monopoly/duopoly/etc status to dominate markets with anti-competitive policies.
- reissbaker 2y ago
  Apple is so clearly an active, harmful monopoly with clear consumer pricing harm (forced 30% tax, you can't even mention alternative payment processing or they'll ban your app), and the DOJ and FTC consistently ignore it; I've pretty much lost hope in the honesty of the American regulators at this point. Enforce the law consistently, or don't enforce it; trying to pick winners with this degree of selective enforcement should be a crime.
Apreche 2y ago
If somehow this happens, the big question is, how many splits? How many lines do they draw, and where do they draw them? Clearly they want to separate search and advertising, as that was the crux of the case. But advertising is the only place that makes any money. If they split that off by itself, the rest, which is the good parts, may completely crumble. What of the small, but important, products that Google hasn't killed yet? I guess Google Flights is arguably part of search. But what of say, Google Fonts? The goal is to increase competition in the marketplace. A noble endeavor. But all those other Google products, if left to hang out to dry, stand a good chance of dying or being absorbed by competitors. Well and good, there may be increased competition in the realm of search and online advertising. But if Google Cloud Platform can't stand on its own, and merges into AWS or Azure, that's less competition. If Chrome and Chromebooks can't stand on their own and Microsoft acquires it, that's less competition. No matter how the split goes, whichever parts of Google's business are not in the same company as the advertising business will need to find a way to profitability.
- ericd 2y ago
  I’d like to see them split off crawling from indexing/search, and be forced to provide the complete crawl to anyone who wants it, at cost. Currently, they have a privileged position, where almost all websites are willing to let them crawl, while blocking most smaller crawlers pinging them anywhere near as often, and forms a bit of a natural monopoly. Opening that up for all would open up competition in the search interface space a bit, and open things up for more specialized vertical search engines, making it generally a lot easier to start a search site without negatively impacting the sites they're searching with n engines worth of crawler traffic.
- TechRemarker 2y ago
  Agreed. Gmail is probably their best product and while they make money from Google Workspace, imagine without Google Ads, they'd have to start charging those 2 billion users who would then leave for a lesser but cheaper alternative. And Google Maps and Waze and YouTube and YouTube Music. It's always been unsafe to rely on most any Google product since they will eventually evaporate. But Google Search, YouTube and Gmail have always seemed untouchable, but without Google Ads, it's anyones guess.
OptionOfT 2y ago
I think Google, what we initially knew as the search engine company, should spin off the advertisement and the browser division. Not making any statements of the rest of Google, it's just that I'm most familiar with the impact of those 3 together. Google Chrome in the past greatly pushed the quality of web browsers, but now their roadmap isn't for the best of the web, it's for the best of Google. Their browser is going to kill a system (Extensions v2) that will dramatically reduce the quality of adblocking, which will benefit their Advertisement group. The same browser tried to get rid of a system (3rd party cookies) that reduced the useability of tracking for other companies, while they have much more data to link to you (DNS, Search, Mail, etc).
- amstan 2y ago
  How do you propose the browser company will make any money?
  - bigger_cheese 2y ago
    Does a browser need to make money? Chrome is mostly open source as far as I know. Maybe it could move to a model like Linux where you have a benevolent dictator overseeing things and if a company wants something supported in chrome they can fund a developer to make the work happen. As far as security and support perhaps companies like Microsoft which use parts of chrome as basis for Edge could employ people who can fix issues upstream.
  - mixmastamyk 2y ago
    During the split they could invest a matching fraction of the total resources, and have it produce income for the new company. It's what Mozilla should have been doing all this time, but didn't have forward thinking leadership.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Zren 2y ago
    Chromium/Chrome can also get ChromeOS and it's hardware division since most of the complications in chrome are there to reimplement a Phone/Desktop OS.
Narhem 2y ago
If the purpose would be to bust monopolies, being next to impossible to find an email delivery service as a startup which sends emails successfully to Yahoo/Gmail would be more of a hurdle. Even if that means directly setting up a service with the US government to ensure deliveries, would be a bigger step towards getting new technology companies.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
Apple and Microsoft and Amazon next. These companies can simply copy the features of smaller players, take losses for years, bundle products, use existing enterprise contracts, etc to keep growing without fair competition. Break them up, fine them, tax them.
pessimizer 2y ago
The real question is whether Harris or Trump will stop the DOJ from breaking up Google. Is the game to pretend that you're going to get rid of Khan to keep the cash flowing, then to boost her at the last minute for the anti-corruption vote? If it's not, I can't understand why they're not falling over themselves to praise her. Better said, I can't understand why they aren't publicly praising her unless they hate what she's doing and can't wait to get rid of her when nobody is looking - Harris with her media shield, or Trump with the carte blanche he'll have to fire everyone in this administration. Biden used to pretend like he didn't know Khan, or what she was doing. Maybe he wasn't pretending.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
[dupe] Actual article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-13/doj-considers-seeking-google-goog-breakup-after-major-antitrust-win https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-13/doj-consi... more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41239596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41239596
nubinetwork 2y ago
I remember when they tried breaking up Microsoft into Windows and Office... now look at them... Windows and Office / 365 / Skype, and Xbox and Activision / Mojang / Zenimax / Rare / Obsidian, and Bing and Edge... and Nuance... and Github / npm... and Azure... and LinkedIn... all under one roof.
- danaris 2y ago
  > I remember when they tried breaking up Microsoft into Windows and Office... now look at them... And do you remember why that fell apart? The remedy was proposed under President Clinton. Before it could be enacted, George W. Bush came into office and his administration put a stop to it.
6510 2y ago
If a company wins the game of capitalism it should be nationalized. If no one can compete with you anymore the market is better of without you. Print the stacks of money, pay who needs to be paid. The alternative is for them to gradually absorb everything. You cant compete with them. We've done the great privatization experiment. We can experiment with the opposite. We can fabricate arguments for and against anything, as many as we want. Only time will tell. If the US gov takes over Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Apple it would go a long way justifying $35200000000000.- in debt? Credibility would improve dramatically. What would happen if those companies worked together as one big government department? All the logos replaced with big bird... ehh... I mean the great seal. All the money men gravitating towards market companies. Play the game again. Search is actually useful, like roads. No need to have a billboard every 20 meters. It is useful as~is. Who could resist the temptation to make curvy roads so that travelers get to see more billboards?
gdubs 2y ago
The ultimate re-org
dekhn 2y ago
I can only imagine what it would look like to break up the main users of google3. What happens to borg? Colossus and Spanner?
elforce002 2y ago
Good initiative but only Google? Here is but a concise list of companies that are in desperate need to be broken apart to foster innovation and entrepreneurship: Amazon: E-commerce, AWS, Twitch. Microsoft: Azure, Office, Windows, Linkedin. Facebook: Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook.
geor9e 2y ago
I think I'd get laid off if this happens. I'm hard pressed to think of many products that make sense split off. They've always felt like science fair projects that barely break even, but the search ads monster money machine keeps funding us as long as we vaguely promise to funnel people in.
gilmore606 2y ago
Google's monopoly position makes them invaluable to US intelligence and related psyops. They won't be broken up in any meaningful way. At most this is a threat to gain further control.
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
There's plenty of bad blood on the topic/reasons why Google isn't a perfect white knight. But man, I'm gonna miss the hell them when they're gone. The ability to use the big giant firehose of money to make amazing often open source things isn't bad. It's been like 90%+ great, in spite of our frustrations. Chrome is an astounding browser that sets powerful expectations for how good hypermedia ought to be on every on this planet. Android is an incredible mobile OS that powers a bogglingly large number of devices that just would never have gotten made. Google hardware isn't perfect but Pixel has been a brand leader for ages, pushing the way forwards again & again. Without Google as a giant omnibus company whose top problems include figuring out how to spend all that money, I don't know who else is going to have the largest to invest in the technology world's general health & thriving.
matthewfelgate 2y ago
How do Microsoft get away with being a Monopoly?! (And don't tell me about the wrist slap they got in the 1990s.)
throwaway743 2y ago
Would this potentially mean getting meaningful customer service? Looking at admob, ads, and play console...
Barbara230 2y ago
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Barbara230 2y ago
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leo69 2y ago
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84 points by CrankyBear 2y ago

Google has the closest thing we have to the Bell Labs of the past that invented the transistor. If the DOJ breaks them up, we will lose another valuable industry research facility.

lulzron 2y ago
AT&T argued that breaking up its monopoly would harm consumers by reducing service quality, increasing costs, and stifling innovation due to the loss of economies of scale. However, the breakup in 1984 led to increased competition, which drove innovation, improved services, and lowered prices, proving AT&T's claims largely false. The market's diversity and consumer choice expanded significantly post-breakup, contradicting the monopoly's dire predictions.
- not2b 2y ago
  Back in the 1980s, long distance couples sometimes wound up paying more in long distance phone calls than rent, and 30 miles away counted as long distance. No one could attach anything to the precious network, so acoustic coupler modems had to be used, resulting in very low bandwidth. Yes, a lot of good stuff came out of Bell Labs, funded by the huge amount of monopoly money that came into the company, but that needed to end.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    I was in that situation. I was thrilled when Sprint long distance became available at $0.10/minute and I also remember when you could stop renting your home phone from AT&T and plug in one that you bought and owned.
    - wormius 2y ago
      Heh - My first online experience was 1995 (obviously, pre-98 telecom deregulation). Not only did the price include the insane per-hour pricing of Compuserve, but the long distance fees pushed my bill up to 300 dollars the first month. I worked at Taco Bell at the time and made like 4 bucks an hour. Thankfully I lived at home rent free at that point.
- linguae 2y ago
  I agree with this view; the breakup of the AT&T monopoly was a boon for consumers. However, I also agree that Bell Labs was a casualty of the breakup. Once AT&T was split, Bell Labs was pressured to demonstrate its value by focusing its research on areas with more immediate ROI. Unfortunately, when a research lab focuses more on the short-term instead of fostering long-term, riskier explorations, the magic of the lab fades away, and often the work becomes evolutionary rather than revolutionary, since it’s hard to do revolutionary research when management, executives, and shareholders demand quarterly progress and a promise for ROI in the near future. Bell Labs wasn’t the same since 1984, and the same situation occurred with Xerox PARC after the 1980s when Xerox no longer enjoyed monopoly-level profits on its photocopiers due to increased competition. I believe that fostering long-term, unfettered research is an important element for revolutionary work, though I don’t believe it’s the only way for revolutionary work to happen. However, it’s difficult for most companies to consistently fund this work for an extended period of time. Bell Labs and Xerox PARC in their heydays were special, and I struggle to think of any modern-day equivalents in industry.
- ayakang31415 2y ago
  This analysis might be selective and hindsight biased. Are there any cases where government intervention to slow or stop monopolies actually impeded innovation?
  - lulzron 2y ago
    Government antitrust actions aim to promote competition but can sometimes slow innovation by disrupting large companies' ability to invest in R&D. Cases like IBM, AT&T, Microsoft, and Qualcomm illustrate how such interventions, while fostering competition, may also delay technological advancements or make companies more risk-averse. While antitrust actions might temporarily disrupt a company's innovation, they ultimately foster a healthier market by encouraging competition, which drives more diverse and widespread innovation across the industry. Breaking monopolies often unleashes creativity and technological advancement by empowering smaller players and preventing market stagnation.
    - Narhem 2y ago
      Total market share, you can’t generate more time to steal from people which is effectively what these companies like Google have done to generate revenue. If the government steps in they would have to break them all up and expect to make entering those sections possible. At the moment it’s nearly impossible.
immibis 2y ago
Which lab at Google is going to invent the next transistor?
- stingraycharles 2y ago
  I guess the parent is talking about Google X, and perhaps the self driving car stuff. Not sure, I don’t think Google is particularly good at innovation, as most of their successes other than search came through acquisitions (YouTube, Google Maps). They’re definitely not at the forefront of AI anymore, which honestly is super surprising given the reputation that had.
  - Alupis 2y ago
    Perhaps user-facing apps/innovations, yes - but what about all of the other things they've contributed to the world? Kubernetes, Golang, V8, Chromium, and so much more. All of which are entirely free, as in beer kind of free. That's amazing. These tools have been used to create amazing things that normal people have come to depend on every day.
    - stingraycharles 2y ago
      But that’s hardly on par with the level of innovation that happened at Bell Labs. Would you see them getting 10 Nobel prizes and 5 Turing awards? I’m not disagreeing that Google is adding value, but it just seems more like incremental improvements rather than innovation. Yes they make free things, but so do Facebook, Netflix, Apple, etc.
      - Alupis 2y ago
        > Would you see them getting 10 Nobel prizes and 5 Turing awards? Meh, we give Nobel prizes to anyone these days - they're more symbolic of certain politics than anything else sadly. Turing Awards? Yes, many things Google has contributed to the world are probably worthy of such an award. Http/2/quic/3 were driven by Google if I'm not mistaken, and there is no other browser core like Chromium today that facilitates so much of the world's internet access (a significant amount of which does not use Chrome itself). Tensorflow and early "AI Revolution" tech came largely out of Google as well. The problem we have today is tech is very complicated and requires many organizations working together to really advance groundbreaking technology. When the day finally comes that FSD Vehicles are possible, would we say the first company to market "invented" the technology or would it be the compound experiences of dozens of companies? Gone are the days 5 people can get into a room and 3 months later turn out world-changing technology...
surgical_fire 2y ago
Google only seems to innovate in how to extract more dollars from advertisement and in how to make their search worse. Maybe we will all be fine without those.
- Narhem 2y ago
  It also knows how to bully people trying to entire the space.
icehawk 2y ago
What would you consider research Google has done that is close to the level of what Bell Labs did?
- 0xB31B1B 2y ago
  Attention in deep learning, Maintenance and development of the Linux kernel, Development of advanced databases, Self driving cars, Image recognition
mapt 2y ago
I mean... they had it. For ten or fifteen years. In CS, at least. That mostly ended when they became a VC financing & monetization endpoint rather than a novel research platform, and renamed themselves 'Alphabet', cut R&D spending to about 1/12th of revenue, hired a bunch of middle managers and marketing execs, and killed 20% time, because the idea of a thousand engineers making white-paper reports about how they chose to spend their time to one CTO was no longer a favored organizational strategy for executing further growth by shareholders. They still do a great deal of research, but it's less blue-sky and more focused. Google's got 182,000 employees now, with official R&D spending at about four times the National Science Foundation, but still in the 10-15% of revenue band. This is more a condemnation of the NSF and Congress than praise of Google.
thfuran 2y ago
If you want applied science, advocate for increased public funding of research. Supporting abusive monopolies in the hopes that they'll do some good with part of their ill-gotten gains is the wrong play.
bearjaws 2y ago
Google doesn't even keep the projects they launch alive, what chance does their lab have long term?

wrycoder 2y ago

They are behind the curve at this point.

kdfga 2y ago

Right before the election, what a coincidence. I hope they remember that if Harris wins. But I doubt it.

ApolloFortyNine 2y ago

Do apple at the same time and I'll support it. How long are we going to allow the 30% apple tax to continue? See the recent patreon debacle for how it hurts people (not to mention the 30% being eaten as apple as well...). You could switch from using Google's web products today. Literally.

Fnoord 2y ago
Do one now, by focusing on it. Then do other. It is difficult to compete with 'free' services where people pay with their privacy / time (for watching ads). Large masses cannot afford all these subscription-based models, and if then: households need to chose. Amazon does this too. I pay 5 EUR a month, and get Amazon Prime Video, I get free S&H on Prime articles, and this makes me more inclined to order from Amazon. Meanwhile, if I order from AliExpress for more than 10 EUR, I get free shipping. Same story: stimulates me to buy more (or wait till I have more to order). With Apple, people are within the walled garden and circumventing that isn't allowed outside of EU. Small businesses cannot do free/cheap shipping, as they don't have any large volume discounts. So what they do is sell their item on Amazon (and in NL, Bol.com) for a little bit more than their own shop. Either way, they have a tough time to compete. On service perhaps. Amazon has been terrible with warranty on expensive items to me. But if it is within a month I've been able to return the item, with no hassle.
heavyset_go 2y ago
I'm hoping precedent is set so that actions can be taken against other companies that abuse their monopoly/duopoly/etc status to dominate markets with anti-competitive policies.
reissbaker 2y ago
Apple is so clearly an active, harmful monopoly with clear consumer pricing harm (forced 30% tax, you can't even mention alternative payment processing or they'll ban your app), and the DOJ and FTC consistently ignore it; I've pretty much lost hope in the honesty of the American regulators at this point. Enforce the law consistently, or don't enforce it; trying to pick winners with this degree of selective enforcement should be a crime.

Apreche 2y ago

If somehow this happens, the big question is, how many splits? How many lines do they draw, and where do they draw them? Clearly they want to separate search and advertising, as that was the crux of the case. But advertising is the only place that makes any money. If they split that off by itself, the rest, which is the good parts, may completely crumble. What of the small, but important, products that Google hasn't killed yet? I guess Google Flights is arguably part of search. But what of say, Google Fonts? The goal is to increase competition in the marketplace. A noble endeavor. But all those other Google products, if left to hang out to dry, stand a good chance of dying or being absorbed by competitors. Well and good, there may be increased competition in the realm of search and online advertising. But if Google Cloud Platform can't stand on its own, and merges into AWS or Azure, that's less competition. If Chrome and Chromebooks can't stand on their own and Microsoft acquires it, that's less competition. No matter how the split goes, whichever parts of Google's business are not in the same company as the advertising business will need to find a way to profitability.

ericd 2y ago
I’d like to see them split off crawling from indexing/search, and be forced to provide the complete crawl to anyone who wants it, at cost. Currently, they have a privileged position, where almost all websites are willing to let them crawl, while blocking most smaller crawlers pinging them anywhere near as often, and forms a bit of a natural monopoly. Opening that up for all would open up competition in the search interface space a bit, and open things up for more specialized vertical search engines, making it generally a lot easier to start a search site without negatively impacting the sites they're searching with n engines worth of crawler traffic.
TechRemarker 2y ago
Agreed. Gmail is probably their best product and while they make money from Google Workspace, imagine without Google Ads, they'd have to start charging those 2 billion users who would then leave for a lesser but cheaper alternative. And Google Maps and Waze and YouTube and YouTube Music. It's always been unsafe to rely on most any Google product since they will eventually evaporate. But Google Search, YouTube and Gmail have always seemed untouchable, but without Google Ads, it's anyones guess.

OptionOfT 2y ago

I think Google, what we initially knew as the search engine company, should spin off the advertisement and the browser division. Not making any statements of the rest of Google, it's just that I'm most familiar with the impact of those 3 together. Google Chrome in the past greatly pushed the quality of web browsers, but now their roadmap isn't for the best of the web, it's for the best of Google. Their browser is going to kill a system (Extensions v2) that will dramatically reduce the quality of adblocking, which will benefit their Advertisement group. The same browser tried to get rid of a system (3rd party cookies) that reduced the useability of tracking for other companies, while they have much more data to link to you (DNS, Search, Mail, etc).

amstan 2y ago
How do you propose the browser company will make any money?
- bigger_cheese 2y ago
  Does a browser need to make money? Chrome is mostly open source as far as I know. Maybe it could move to a model like Linux where you have a benevolent dictator overseeing things and if a company wants something supported in chrome they can fund a developer to make the work happen. As far as security and support perhaps companies like Microsoft which use parts of chrome as basis for Edge could employ people who can fix issues upstream.
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  During the split they could invest a matching fraction of the total resources, and have it produce income for the new company. It's what Mozilla should have been doing all this time, but didn't have forward thinking leadership.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Zren 2y ago
  Chromium/Chrome can also get ChromeOS and it's hardware division since most of the complications in chrome are there to reimplement a Phone/Desktop OS.

Narhem 2y ago

If the purpose would be to bust monopolies, being next to impossible to find an email delivery service as a startup which sends emails successfully to Yahoo/Gmail would be more of a hurdle. Even if that means directly setting up a service with the US government to ensure deliveries, would be a bigger step towards getting new technology companies.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

Apple and Microsoft and Amazon next. These companies can simply copy the features of smaller players, take losses for years, bundle products, use existing enterprise contracts, etc to keep growing without fair competition. Break them up, fine them, tax them.

pessimizer 2y ago

The real question is whether Harris or Trump will stop the DOJ from breaking up Google. Is the game to pretend that you're going to get rid of Khan to keep the cash flowing, then to boost her at the last minute for the anti-corruption vote? If it's not, I can't understand why they're not falling over themselves to praise her. Better said, I can't understand why they aren't publicly praising her unless they hate what she's doing and can't wait to get rid of her when nobody is looking - Harris with her media shield, or Trump with the carte blanche he'll have to fire everyone in this administration. Biden used to pretend like he didn't know Khan, or what she was doing. Maybe he wasn't pretending.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

[dupe] Actual article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-13/doj-considers-seeking-google-goog-breakup-after-major-antitrust-win https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-13/doj-consi... more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41239596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41239596

nubinetwork 2y ago

I remember when they tried breaking up Microsoft into Windows and Office... now look at them... Windows and Office / 365 / Skype, and Xbox and Activision / Mojang / Zenimax / Rare / Obsidian, and Bing and Edge... and Nuance... and Github / npm... and Azure... and LinkedIn... all under one roof.

danaris 2y ago
> I remember when they tried breaking up Microsoft into Windows and Office... now look at them... And do you remember why that fell apart? The remedy was proposed under President Clinton. Before it could be enacted, George W. Bush came into office and his administration put a stop to it.

6510 2y ago

If a company wins the game of capitalism it should be nationalized. If no one can compete with you anymore the market is better of without you. Print the stacks of money, pay who needs to be paid. The alternative is for them to gradually absorb everything. You cant compete with them. We've done the great privatization experiment. We can experiment with the opposite. We can fabricate arguments for and against anything, as many as we want. Only time will tell. If the US gov takes over Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Apple it would go a long way justifying $35200000000000.- in debt? Credibility would improve dramatically. What would happen if those companies worked together as one big government department? All the logos replaced with big bird... ehh... I mean the great seal. All the money men gravitating towards market companies. Play the game again. Search is actually useful, like roads. No need to have a billboard every 20 meters. It is useful as~is. Who could resist the temptation to make curvy roads so that travelers get to see more billboards?

gdubs 2y ago

The ultimate re-org

dekhn 2y ago

I can only imagine what it would look like to break up the main users of google3. What happens to borg? Colossus and Spanner?

elforce002 2y ago

Good initiative but only Google? Here is but a concise list of companies that are in desperate need to be broken apart to foster innovation and entrepreneurship: Amazon: E-commerce, AWS, Twitch. Microsoft: Azure, Office, Windows, Linkedin. Facebook: Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook.

geor9e 2y ago

I think I'd get laid off if this happens. I'm hard pressed to think of many products that make sense split off. They've always felt like science fair projects that barely break even, but the search ads monster money machine keeps funding us as long as we vaguely promise to funnel people in.

gilmore606 2y ago

Google's monopoly position makes them invaluable to US intelligence and related psyops. They won't be broken up in any meaningful way. At most this is a threat to gain further control.

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

There's plenty of bad blood on the topic/reasons why Google isn't a perfect white knight. But man, I'm gonna miss the hell them when they're gone. The ability to use the big giant firehose of money to make amazing often open source things isn't bad. It's been like 90%+ great, in spite of our frustrations. Chrome is an astounding browser that sets powerful expectations for how good hypermedia ought to be on every on this planet. Android is an incredible mobile OS that powers a bogglingly large number of devices that just would never have gotten made. Google hardware isn't perfect but Pixel has been a brand leader for ages, pushing the way forwards again & again. Without Google as a giant omnibus company whose top problems include figuring out how to spend all that money, I don't know who else is going to have the largest to invest in the technology world's general health & thriving.

matthewfelgate 2y ago

How do Microsoft get away with being a Monopoly?! (And don't tell me about the wrist slap they got in the 1990s.)

throwaway743 2y ago

Would this potentially mean getting meaningful customer service? Looking at admob, ads, and play console...

Barbara230 2y ago

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Barbara230 2y ago

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leo69 2y ago

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