4 ms·

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 a

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.
- voisin 2y ago
  > they'd have to start charging those 2 billion users Why couldn’t they simply show ads like any third party site? Ads can still be a business model for them, but those separate businesses couldn’t be subsidized by ads shown on other sites as the case currently is.
- Narhem 2y ago
  Daily Motion seemed like a good alternative to YouTube, but how do you funnel people to the site and make money from it. YouTube has been catering towards children, which is kind of strange to me.
SoftTalker 2y ago
I'd split it into at least: Advertising Google Search Google Drive/Docs/Gmail/Gemini/Maps i.e. apps and office productivity Google Cloud VC activities Waymo and Robotics Health Care/Drugs And I'd do the same with Meta, Apple, etc. There's just no good reason to have mega-conglomerates that own such huge shares of the market. It leads to regulatory capture and locks out potential new competitors.
- voisin 2y ago
  > And I'd do the same with Meta, Apple, etc. I agree re Meta, but I am not sure Apple should be in the same category. I think Google and Meta use a small subset of golden goose businesses to subsidize perpetual money losers that prevent competition and actual self sufficient business models from emerging, all for the sake of preventing the emergence of another conglomerate that might come for the original golden goose. Apple doesn’t seem to fit this model - all of its businesses more than 3-5 years old seem to be wildly profitable. It isn’t like the iPhone is subsidizing the Watch, or Services. They are all successful, self sufficient businesses.
  - br0wnr1c3 2y ago
    I think yes and no for Apple. It's certainly making a ton of money off of each of its devices (Watch, iPad, Mac, etc.), but none of those devices (with the exception of the Mac, probably) would sell as well without the iPhone's ecosystem. In some hypothetical universe where the Watch and iPad were from distinct companies, they might have to force interoperability with other products like the Pixel or Galaxy Watch to make the iPhone a compelling product.
    - Spartan-S63 2y ago
      I think the only case for Apple exerting monopoly power is in the App Store and the iOS walled garden model. If the EU DMA was brought to the US, I don’t see a valid antitrust case against Apple for any other business they do. You could argue separating the services components (App Store, TV+, Apple Music) from the devices business, but I don’t think there’s any validity in segmenting iPhone from anything else or any of their hardware business as a whole.
vineyardmike 2y ago
> But if Google Cloud Platform can't stand on its own, and merges into AWS or Azure, that's less competition. The other complexity is the actual infrastructure and IP. Inside, Google is very “vertically integrated” to making software services. They have a huge toolbox of custom software and a ton of custom magic they built into the data centers and infrastructure. I’m not sure that there have been any modern cases of antitrust breakups that would have as much complexity and nuance. Bell could easily be divided geographically but of course that makes no sense here. I can’t imagine a breakup doing anything but destroy value and competition, even if you support antitrust intervention. What happens to Google’s famous monorepo? Does it get chopped up? Are the libraries and tools shared and each child company gets a fork? What about the SRE team that manages the shared database infrastructure for every team at Google? What happens to the database that stores users accounts? Each user has basically one identity across each Google product. What happens to your YouTube account if it ends up in a different company than your GMail account? And of course, who gets the physical data centers? If that goes to GCP, does that mean that search needs to negotiate a usage price as part of the breakup negotiations? Imagine the contract YouTube would have to write for renting storage?
- throwup238 2y ago
  How is that different from Bellcore [1][2]? Bell was broken up in the early 1980s, they already had plenty of shared software infrastructure by then. The monorepo is an interesting complication but hardly a dealbreaker that can't be restructured around. [1] https://journal.businesstoday.org/bt-online/2017/3/18/the-legacy-of-bellcore https://journal.businesstoday.org/bt-online/2017/3/18/the-le... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iconectiv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iconectiv
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- jart 2y ago
  lool monorepo regulators are already checkmated 100 moves ahead. open sourcing it is the only way they'll break that monster up. doj clowns should go home they're out of their depth.
troad 2y ago
I think you're overlooking the disincentives to competition that exist while Google is so consolidated. Google funds things like hardware, cloud, and Android so that they constitute a hundred-mile moat around its core Advertising and Search business. Android could lose basically unlimited money without Google winding it up, because its key role is to prevent the emergence of a competitor that would threaten to become another intermediary between Google and consumers. A lot of these secondary products and services are not there to be profitable, they're sold at unrealistic prices (or given away for free) to kill competition. Once spun off, these products or services would have to become profitable on their own feet, which would - after an initial spike in prices - make the space a lot more competitive for other firms seeking to enter that market.
bluGill 2y ago
Advertising needs to split. Search, youtube, ... need to bring their own ad sales with, with a few of the external customers.
fuzztester 2y ago
>What of the small, but important, products that Google hasn't killed yet? Indeed, what of them, fellow traveler on this noble software path? Inscrutable are the ways of existence. The department thou speaketh of is well named. It meteth out justice. With one hand it giveth, with the other hand it taketh away. Ours not to reason why, ours but to innovate or die. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45319/the-charge-of-the-light-brigade https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45319/the-charge-of-t...
alemanek 2y ago
Splitting ads off from Search doesn’t mean Search doesn’t show ads. It just means that now multiple ad networks get to bid for those ad slots. Whoever wants to share the most money with the Search division wins. All their major properties get crazy traffic and will do just fine on their own. Chrome can make search deals and again they are siphoning off all kinds of data. They can start selling that to data brokers instead of using it internally. Not to mention regional default search engine deals. Android is on 80% of devices worldwide. You are telling me they can’t monetize that? YouTube isn’t a loss leader anymore. Google should be broken up. Same for most of Big Tech.
- luckydata 2y ago
  I was sort of following you until Android but you completely lost me there. That just doesn't make sense trust me. Disclosure: I work at Google in Cloud but I'm a product manager and I'm used to think about where money goes to do what. Android as a company makes no sense.
  - macilacilove 2y ago
    What is your argument? Android is one of the most successful software projects of all time. It seems easily monetizable.
  - alemanek 2y ago
    I do not work at Google so I am sure you have more inside information than me. But, here is my thinking. Android is operated the way it is because it cements Googles dominance with its other services. Maps, Chrome, ..etc always ship with the certified Android phones. Google proper doesn’t pay anything for that privledge currently. If broken up that first class “ships with the phone” stuff is now up for grabs and seems like it would be a valuable revenue stream. Also there is usage data which can be monetized. Play store revenue would still be there as well. Custom spins of the OS for specific industry use cases with professional support might be attractive to a smaller company which just had Android whereas it isn’t lucrative enough for Google as a whole. Also these custom flavors might not ship with Google services so there is a natural disincentive to explore this. Android on its own would likely monetize very differently than it currently is as part of the Google mothership. It would need to have a diverse set of partners. Even if it was just as a regional service reseller where it is taking a cut of service revenue in exchange for first class support on the OS. I can’t help but think that this realigning of incentives would be beneficial for the market as a whole.
Zren 2y ago
> What of the small, but important, products that Google hasn't killed yet? ... But what of say, Google Fonts? Google Fonts can act as a tracking pixel, the bandwidth cost is probably offset by the slight amount of user data it obtains.
bitnasty 2y ago
Google search sucks now anyway. It’s been getting progressively worse in the past few years since they have decided that selling ads is more important than relevant search results, and don’t even get me started on the AI dribble they’ve been pushing. If they can’t keep up in a fair market then they deserve to fail just like everyone else.

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.

voisin 2y ago
> they'd have to start charging those 2 billion users Why couldn’t they simply show ads like any third party site? Ads can still be a business model for them, but those separate businesses couldn’t be subsidized by ads shown on other sites as the case currently is.
Narhem 2y ago
Daily Motion seemed like a good alternative to YouTube, but how do you funnel people to the site and make money from it. YouTube has been catering towards children, which is kind of strange to me.

SoftTalker 2y ago

I'd split it into at least: Advertising Google Search Google Drive/Docs/Gmail/Gemini/Maps i.e. apps and office productivity Google Cloud VC activities Waymo and Robotics Health Care/Drugs And I'd do the same with Meta, Apple, etc. There's just no good reason to have mega-conglomerates that own such huge shares of the market. It leads to regulatory capture and locks out potential new competitors.

voisin 2y ago
> And I'd do the same with Meta, Apple, etc. I agree re Meta, but I am not sure Apple should be in the same category. I think Google and Meta use a small subset of golden goose businesses to subsidize perpetual money losers that prevent competition and actual self sufficient business models from emerging, all for the sake of preventing the emergence of another conglomerate that might come for the original golden goose. Apple doesn’t seem to fit this model - all of its businesses more than 3-5 years old seem to be wildly profitable. It isn’t like the iPhone is subsidizing the Watch, or Services. They are all successful, self sufficient businesses.
- br0wnr1c3 2y ago
  I think yes and no for Apple. It's certainly making a ton of money off of each of its devices (Watch, iPad, Mac, etc.), but none of those devices (with the exception of the Mac, probably) would sell as well without the iPhone's ecosystem. In some hypothetical universe where the Watch and iPad were from distinct companies, they might have to force interoperability with other products like the Pixel or Galaxy Watch to make the iPhone a compelling product.
  - Spartan-S63 2y ago
    I think the only case for Apple exerting monopoly power is in the App Store and the iOS walled garden model. If the EU DMA was brought to the US, I don’t see a valid antitrust case against Apple for any other business they do. You could argue separating the services components (App Store, TV+, Apple Music) from the devices business, but I don’t think there’s any validity in segmenting iPhone from anything else or any of their hardware business as a whole.

vineyardmike 2y ago

> But if Google Cloud Platform can't stand on its own, and merges into AWS or Azure, that's less competition. The other complexity is the actual infrastructure and IP. Inside, Google is very “vertically integrated” to making software services. They have a huge toolbox of custom software and a ton of custom magic they built into the data centers and infrastructure. I’m not sure that there have been any modern cases of antitrust breakups that would have as much complexity and nuance. Bell could easily be divided geographically but of course that makes no sense here. I can’t imagine a breakup doing anything but destroy value and competition, even if you support antitrust intervention. What happens to Google’s famous monorepo? Does it get chopped up? Are the libraries and tools shared and each child company gets a fork? What about the SRE team that manages the shared database infrastructure for every team at Google? What happens to the database that stores users accounts? Each user has basically one identity across each Google product. What happens to your YouTube account if it ends up in a different company than your GMail account? And of course, who gets the physical data centers? If that goes to GCP, does that mean that search needs to negotiate a usage price as part of the breakup negotiations? Imagine the contract YouTube would have to write for renting storage?

throwup238 2y ago
How is that different from Bellcore [1][2]? Bell was broken up in the early 1980s, they already had plenty of shared software infrastructure by then. The monorepo is an interesting complication but hardly a dealbreaker that can't be restructured around. [1] https://journal.businesstoday.org/bt-online/2017/3/18/the-legacy-of-bellcore https://journal.businesstoday.org/bt-online/2017/3/18/the-le... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iconectiv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iconectiv
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jart 2y ago
lool monorepo regulators are already checkmated 100 moves ahead. open sourcing it is the only way they'll break that monster up. doj clowns should go home they're out of their depth.

troad 2y ago

I think you're overlooking the disincentives to competition that exist while Google is so consolidated. Google funds things like hardware, cloud, and Android so that they constitute a hundred-mile moat around its core Advertising and Search business. Android could lose basically unlimited money without Google winding it up, because its key role is to prevent the emergence of a competitor that would threaten to become another intermediary between Google and consumers. A lot of these secondary products and services are not there to be profitable, they're sold at unrealistic prices (or given away for free) to kill competition. Once spun off, these products or services would have to become profitable on their own feet, which would - after an initial spike in prices - make the space a lot more competitive for other firms seeking to enter that market.

bluGill 2y ago

Advertising needs to split. Search, youtube, ... need to bring their own ad sales with, with a few of the external customers.

fuzztester 2y ago

>What of the small, but important, products that Google hasn't killed yet? Indeed, what of them, fellow traveler on this noble software path? Inscrutable are the ways of existence. The department thou speaketh of is well named. It meteth out justice. With one hand it giveth, with the other hand it taketh away. Ours not to reason why, ours but to innovate or die. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45319/the-charge-of-the-light-brigade https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45319/the-charge-of-t...

alemanek 2y ago

Splitting ads off from Search doesn’t mean Search doesn’t show ads. It just means that now multiple ad networks get to bid for those ad slots. Whoever wants to share the most money with the Search division wins. All their major properties get crazy traffic and will do just fine on their own. Chrome can make search deals and again they are siphoning off all kinds of data. They can start selling that to data brokers instead of using it internally. Not to mention regional default search engine deals. Android is on 80% of devices worldwide. You are telling me they can’t monetize that? YouTube isn’t a loss leader anymore. Google should be broken up. Same for most of Big Tech.

luckydata 2y ago
I was sort of following you until Android but you completely lost me there. That just doesn't make sense trust me. Disclosure: I work at Google in Cloud but I'm a product manager and I'm used to think about where money goes to do what. Android as a company makes no sense.
- macilacilove 2y ago
  What is your argument? Android is one of the most successful software projects of all time. It seems easily monetizable.
- alemanek 2y ago
  I do not work at Google so I am sure you have more inside information than me. But, here is my thinking. Android is operated the way it is because it cements Googles dominance with its other services. Maps, Chrome, ..etc always ship with the certified Android phones. Google proper doesn’t pay anything for that privledge currently. If broken up that first class “ships with the phone” stuff is now up for grabs and seems like it would be a valuable revenue stream. Also there is usage data which can be monetized. Play store revenue would still be there as well. Custom spins of the OS for specific industry use cases with professional support might be attractive to a smaller company which just had Android whereas it isn’t lucrative enough for Google as a whole. Also these custom flavors might not ship with Google services so there is a natural disincentive to explore this. Android on its own would likely monetize very differently than it currently is as part of the Google mothership. It would need to have a diverse set of partners. Even if it was just as a regional service reseller where it is taking a cut of service revenue in exchange for first class support on the OS. I can’t help but think that this realigning of incentives would be beneficial for the market as a whole.

Zren 2y ago

> What of the small, but important, products that Google hasn't killed yet? ... But what of say, Google Fonts? Google Fonts can act as a tracking pixel, the bandwidth cost is probably offset by the slight amount of user data it obtains.

bitnasty 2y ago

Google search sucks now anyway. It’s been getting progressively worse in the past few years since they have decided that selling ads is more important than relevant search results, and don’t even get me started on the AI dribble they’ve been pushing. If they can’t keep up in a fair market then they deserve to fail just like everyone else.