22 ms·

Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

266 points by rntn 2y ago

ErigmolCt 2y ago
The challenge is ensuring that any changes foster genuine competition and innovation rather than just shifting the monopoly around.
matthewfelgate 2y ago
How is Google more of a Monopoly than Microsoft?
- usrnm 2y ago
  Why does it have to be more of a monopoly than Microsoft to be considered a monopoly?
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    It doesn't. But if B is less of a monopoly than A, and the regulators are going to break up B, but not break up A, that does lead to questions. Why start with B? Why not start with A, and then do B?
    - usrnm 2y ago
      Because that creates a lot of additional work and controversy for no real gain. Do courts rank cases and hear them in the order of severity of the crime? It's exactly the same situation. I agree that both companies should be held to the same standard, but I don't think I really care about the particular order
- bearjaws 2y ago
  DOJ/FTC cannot possibly sue every company at the same time, and probably shouldn't. Depending on how this goes, companies will need to change how they act in fear of the hammer coming down on them next.
- tirant 2y ago
  How is google a monopoly at all? There’s competition and alternative for each of their products. And people can keep using the alternatives if they want. I can choose iOS over Android. Bing over Google. Yahoo over Gmail. Dailymotion over YouTube. Why is it a problem that google makes a superior product and people choose it ? In all studies, when consumers get faced the decision to choose freely any search engine, most of them keep going back to google. Why is that a problem at all?
  - throwadobe 2y ago
    Google owns ~90% of the search market and if you don't play by their rules, you're out of the game. The argument is that there's nothing really superior about their technology today, just market dominance to force everyone to operate in a way that serves their _ad_ interests as opposed to search interests.
    - zer00eyz 2y ago
      So I signed up for Kagi a while back. I'll be candid, it's good ... it's a hair less annoying than google, the results are just as hit or miss. Here is the thing, if I need to BUY something Kagi falls flat on its face. I find myself going back to google to shop, and to be candid it has drawn a contrast for me on spending. The "extra step" to buy has slowed me down. I dont think breaking up google changes consumer behavior. It creates a hydra out of a snake.
  - ToValueFunfetti 2y ago
    Google pays $20 billion a year to be default search on Apple. Alphabet's net income was $74 billion in 2023. Why would they reduce profit by 20% to get Apple users to use the search engine that they would use anyway?
  - coldpie 2y ago
    Good questions! You can find the answers in this article[1], and follow the sources linked at the bottom for even more information. If you really want to get into the weeds, you can read about US antitrust law here[2], which has a bunch more articles to other caselaw around monopoly abuse in the US. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2020) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act_of_1890 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act_of_1890
- nrclark 2y ago
  Globally, I would bet that there are more daily Android users than daily Windows users. There is no real competitor to Youtube.
- throwadobe 2y ago
  Answer the question yourself by first deciding the market(s) for which you're making that assessment. Google commands a higher market share % of search than Microsoft does of personal computing OS.
datadrivenangel 2y ago
What comes after will be better. Maybe not as integrated, but better as far as options go.
- malfist 2y ago
  It's almost like monied interests own the papers and want to protect their investments
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
    I've never understood this take because it's possible to make money regardless of the direction that the share price moves.
  - andybak 2y ago
    Are you talking about The Register here? That's a fairly strange accusation for a news outlet that goes out of it's way to be provocative to the entire industry. At least it used to - I haven't kept up much recently. If you know better then please tell - but I'm not clear at this point whether you have an informed opinion - or whether you have no idea what The Register is.
- ErigmolCt 2y ago
  You never know but hopefully
mainecoder 2y ago
breaking it up will also weaken US Dominance in Tech, the fact that Android and Chrome are under them same umbrella helps them share IP across the company and decreases RD costs because some of the costs are shared.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
  Um, I agree with your first sentence, but I don't think I follow the rationale. What are you trying to say?
  - mainecoder 2y ago
    regulation in the EU may no longer work independently from regulation in the US thus US laws they need to collaborate and compromise, they are weakening western tech dominance
    - thfuran 2y ago
      The US Department of Justice isn't exactly an EU regulator.
- dosinga 2y ago
  Not sure how NATO enters into this, but as off last month or so Mark Rutte is the Secretary General of NATO. He is Dutch
retskrad 2y ago
1. Forbid Google from paying Apple and Android OEM’s to be the default search engine. Also, detach Google search from Android and forbid Google from forcing it to be included on every Android phone. 2. Give Google search competitors access to Google’s search data so these new AI search engine companies can compete. Without these huge amounts of data, they have no chance. Done!
- soared 2y ago
  2 is not how the US breaks up monopolies
  - kaptainscarlet 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - KMag 2y ago
    Right. Government-mandated access to proprietary data isn't how the US breaks up monopolies, but somewhat along those lines, it might make sense for some government to provide some similar data. This seems much closer to a European style government approach, and I wouldn't expect such a thing in the U.S. The infra for a decent crawl is prohibitive. There's a bit of black magic in crawl scheduling, and a bit in de-duplication, but most of the challenge is in scale. I used to work on Google's indexing system, and sat with the guys who wrote the Percolator system that basically used BigTable triggers to drive indexing and make it less batch-oriented. I know France has made at least a couple of attempts at a government-funded "Google killer" search engine. I think it would be a better use of government money to make something like a government-run event-driven first-level indexing system where search engine companies could pay basically cloud computing costs to have their proprietary triggers populate their proprietary databases based on the government-run crawling and first-level analysis. When one page updates, you'd want all of the search engine startups running their triggers on the same copy of the data, rather than having to stream the data out to each of the search engine startups. Basically, you want to take some importance metric, some estimate of the probability some content has changed since the last time you crawled it, combine the product of the two plus some additional constraints (crawl every known page at least some maximum period, don't hit any domain too hard, etc.) as a crawl priority. You then crawl the content, convert HTML, PDF, etc. to some marked-up text format (UTF-8 HTML isn't bad, but I think UTF-8 plain text plus some separate annotations in a binary format would be better). You strip out text that's too small or too close to the background color. You calculate one or more locality-sensitive hash functions over the plain text, cluster similar texts, pick a canonical URL for each cluster. You calculate the directed link graph across clusters. The PageRank patent has expired, so you could calculate PageRank and several other link-graph ranking signals across canonical clusters. You'd presumably compute some uniqueness scores, age scores, etc. for each canonical URL, and then in parallel run each of the search engine startup's analysis over this package of analysis data each time you find a change for a particular canonical URL. You might have some startups providing spam scoring or other analysis and providing that (for fees, of course) to search engine startups, etc. Basically, you want to modularize the indexing and analysis to provide competition and nearly seamless transition between competing providers within your ecosystem. I think that's the way to drive innovation in the search engine startup space and properly leverage economies of scale across search engine startups.
A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
I agree that Google has an inordinate amount of power in the market and that it has to be restrained. That said, I do not like the 'better' qualifier here. It depends too much on who is reading it. Hell, it is not impossible average user will dislike the change ( but they always do).
- matthewfelgate 2y ago
  Nonsense. It has no more power than Microsoft or Apple.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
    To a person like me it sounds like MS and Apple should be broken up as well.
    - matthewfelgate 2y ago
      Then why pick on Google?
      - A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
        No one is picking at anyone. I want the basic law enforced. I want all the "too big" companies brought to heel. Those entities already have way too much power at their disposal and there is a real social interest in reining it in. I do not think it is too much to ask. You want me to pick at MS too? Show me a path to breaking them up as well and I will gladly sign on to the appropriate effort to make it happen. I guess I am weird. I want the rules enforced for all players.
        matthewfelgate 2y ago
        My issue is of unfairness: you shouldn't do something to one company you haven't done to others. Microsoft has been a too big company since the 1990s.
is_true 2y ago
I think Google can win this easily by using the public opinion against the regulators. They just need to say that they are gonna start charging for all their services because without the level of integration they have it doesn't make sense to keep running businesses that otherwise would lose money.
- pydry 2y ago
  "If you break us up we will start such an epic tantrum that we will end up shooting ourselves in the head"
- bell-cot 2y ago
  "...gonna start charging..." In a world where the competition's price for most of those services is "free", charging for used-to-be-free stuff sounds like a sure-fire suicidal business strategy.
  - StrauXX 2y ago
    They don't have to actually do that should Google bbebroken up. They can still use that as an argument to rouse public support against a breakup.
    - bell-cot 2y ago
      They can try. But in a world full of free on-line stuff, the public may think the "you'll go bust if you try" counter-argument is obviously correct.
- viraptor 2y ago
  Do you honestly think that would have any effect beyond Gmail users? (those would really hurt) But otherwise I don't think an average non-tech person would be likely to notice a difference between Bing and Google. And ms, ddg, Kagi and perplexity would love to see lots of people actually looking for alternatives. Docs/sheets/pages/whatever wouldn't change since they're supported by the paying users. The rest, Google is going to kill at some point anyway like they did with hundred other projects. They only one I really don't know how it would be affected is Android.
dosinga 2y ago
Part of the problem is that tech products tend to be natural monopolies. If you split android off Google, it will probably just lose out against iOS in the West and some Chinese Android version elsewhere. As the article says, that's not necessarily better.
- newsclues 2y ago
  Google has collected multiple businesses in its conglomerate structure that gives it far too much power and control over society beyond the simple monopoly charge. YouTube, Search, Email, advertising, are all controlled by the same people and that is a problem for freedom and the economy.
- Gormo 2y ago
  > Part of the problem is that tech products tend to be natural monopolies. Middleman platforms often become natural monopolies due to network effects, but how does this expand to tech products in general? I don't see any structural incentives that lead to natural monopolies in search, email, or a wide variety of other products that Google is dominant in.
  - graemep 2y ago
    and other markets where network effects tend to create monopolies tend to be very highly regulated or state owned: telecoms and financial markets, for example.
    - lotsofpulp 2y ago
      Utilities are monopolies because it makes no sense to spend tons of resources running extra pipes and wires to each and every house. It’s called a structural monopoly.
      - graemep 2y ago
        Yikes! Yes. WIll correct. I do not know what happened to my brain there.
pydry 2y ago
"What if we broke up Google and Meta started operating bits of it?" There are some head scratching serious leaps of logic here. Why would Meta start running android if it became an independent business? It's never explained. This article is rather clumsy FUD.
Rzor 2y ago
Japan tried to curb the Yakuza by enacting laws to specifically punish them. Not only it didn't work as well as they thought, but other criminals also flourished in the underworld by virtue of not being Yakuza. Whatever they do to go after Google must be really well thought and coordinated otherwise they will just be passing the crown to someone else a little bit smarter.
- immibis 2y ago
  Sort of like what happened with Microsoft.
- brigadier132 2y ago
  You're analogy isn't exactly good. In this case, other businesses flourishing is a good thing. If you are specifically referring to Apple becoming an even bigger monopoly, that would be a bad thing but I think in the US they've already effectively won.
holografix 2y ago
Google’s deal with Apple is def problematic but apart from that I really don’t think it’s a monopoly. Google leadership (according to public info) was in a panic about ChatGPT and rightly so. It was eerily similar to what Google once was at its inception: a no bs way to get better answers to your questions. Luckily for Google, hallucination is a significant issue. Just “GPT it” is already in the modern vernacular. Google is in serious danger of becoming Facebook: only used by boomers (now millennials) while the new gen gets their adds on Insta, TikTok and could soon be served Llm generated product reviews and comparisons with link to buy from ChatGPT.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  Generally agree with your points, just not your conclusion that "we should just wait".
fny 2y ago
I'm very curious to see what a breakup looks like. Past breakups involved "uniform" businesses: - American Tobacco: Commodity - Standard Oil: Commodity - AT&T: Utility - Northern Securities: Railroads - Swift & Co: Meatpacking - Kodak: Film - Paramount: Movie Theaters Google is more of a synergistic conglomerate. How would spinning off an individual business like Chrome, Android, or AdWords reduce their respective dominance? I support this ruling and more across all industries, but I'm trying to square how a breakup should work that actually drives competition.
- criddell 2y ago
  One of the potential remedies is to require Google to open source their crawling data. This should make it easier for others who want to build a competing search engine.
  - jsheard 2y ago
    Surely the crawling is the easiest part? The AI goldrush has seen dozens of new players gobbling up the entire internet. The hard part is turning that staggering amount of unstructured data into a useful search engine, and in particular fighting off black-hat SEO.
    - macNchz 2y ago
      Websites these days are often pretty hostile to crawling aside from the Googlebot. Other crawlers are asked not to by the robots.txt, fully blocked, or put through captchas. https://knuckleheads.club/ https://knuckleheads.club/ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/technology/how-google-dominates.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/technology/how-google-dom...
      - jsheard 2y ago
        Good point. Now I think about it Google is actively contributing to that with their Reddit deal which has them blocking all scrapers besides Googlebot, even known legit search engine crawlers like Bingbot.
Xelbair 2y ago
Yeah, just like with Standard Oil...
bearjaws 2y ago
If what comes after is not better, then we waited too long to break this monopoly up. We either start ripping this band-aids off or we will just continually have a worse and worse internet.
- matthewfelgate 2y ago
  What about Microsoft?
  - abirch 2y ago
    The funny thing is this is going to be benefit Microsoft significantly. Much of what Google did Chrome, Android, etc. was to prevent Microsoft from destroying it like Netscape, Novell, Lotus, Wordperfect, ... It's probably no coincidence that Google's first external CEO Eric Schmidt was the CEO of Novell.
    - jonhohle 2y ago
      By the time Chrome was released, Google was already a behemoth. I can’t think of another .com that was anywhere near their size. Microsoft was only 2x bigger by market cap. They were hardly a small company that Microsoft could push around and had the advantage of not being dependent on anything MS was doing.
      - abirch 2y ago
        Google came out with Chrome in 2008. Prior to that they were dependent on the Mozilla Foundation. Microsoft came out with Bing in 2009. Some say that Bing is "Bing is not google" Much like Windows NT was rumored to be Novell Terminator.
      - cma 2y ago
        Google toolbar came first. Slipped in a Google search box on everyone's browser in exchange for blocking Google's competitors' popup ads (Google didn't use popup ads). Now Google does invasive popovers within the page, etc., and this time with them in charge of the browser they are ahout to implement a plan to block extension makers from stopping it well.
dceddia 2y ago
Yeah I don’t know how this will go, but I’m not too optimistic. It feels like one of those situations where we “get exactly what we asked for”. Like those movies with an Evil Genie who delivers on their wishes in the sneakiest way possible. “You wished for $1M, so I burned your house down - but look at all the insurance money you got!” Or maybe a bit like how everyone wanted their cable bills to be cheaper (“just let me pay for the few channels I watch!”) and what we got was 15 different streaming services at $12/month.
- pretext-1 2y ago
  Well so far we tried doing nothing and that didn’t work either. We should have at least prevented them from growing so fast via acquisitions but it’s too late for that now.
- asadotzler 2y ago
  "Let's do nothing then. Let's all just let the megacorporations write their own laws and manage themselves autonomously with no consumer or competition protections at all. Why bother." This is how you sound.
  - dceddia 2y ago
    Oh yeah that’s not what I was going for here. Doing things is great. I just hope that they think through the pitfalls and loopholes of whatever they decide to do. I want to avoid the fates the article hinted at, stuff like “since you broke us up, we can’t possibly maintain Chrome for free anymore, that’s gonna be a subscription now”. Another example of this was Apple’s response to being forced to allow alternate app stores, where they added enough fees and restrictions that it was effectively unusable. The spirit of the law (allow anyone to make apps without a gatekeeper and fees) was not what happened.
accurrent 2y ago
The best way to tackle this is enforce right for repair and require opensourcing of various components. Breaking up google will be an impossible job. If we mandate that our electronics and software must be repairable then these companies will automatically no longer be able to hold monopolies on their platforms.
- brookst 2y ago
  …and people will buy imported tech and use foreign software because it works better than what is legally mandated here. The idea that the government has to force people to buy things they don’t want never ends well.
CuriouslyC 2y ago
The breakup that needs to happen is ads and search/youtube/etc, everything else would work itself out after that.
- account42 2y ago
  Chrome being made by the same company running the websites (search/docs/etc.) is still going to provide bad incentives even if with ads & youtube seperated out the worst ones would be gone.
ourmandave 2y ago
[flagged]
uptownJimmy 2y ago
Google's "search results" are the textbook definition of a monopolized good/service. The whole thing is almost a casino, rigged to the point of absurdity. There has been nothing in my life so disillusioning as working on a Web app for a company that is more or less required to play Google's game.
- timmg 2y ago
  > There has been nothing in my life so disillusioning as working on a Web app for a company that is more or less required to play Google's game. Have you built any iOS apps?
  - LeonB 2y ago
    Ha, well said. Having both of these experiences makes one even more against the tyranny of monopolists.
  - brookst 2y ago
    While true and a fair point, iOS is Apple’s platform in a way that the web is most certainly not Google’s.
    - lotsofpulp 2y ago
      I hardly use Google, and I use the internet. DDG/Kagi/ChatGPT/Reddit/HN/etc for searching. Fastmail/myriad order email providers. Openstreetmap/Apple for maps. YouTube and Chrome Remote Desktop are what I use Google for, but those have alternatives too.
      - jonhohle 2y ago
        The concern is if you are developing for the web, how much time do you need to spend appeasing Google to show up in search results and be discoverable. When I was at Amazon the majority of direct product traffic did not come internal search, it came from Google. In some areas they were competitors, Amazon was beholden to Google as the starting point for most customer’s browsing experience.
pembrook 2y ago
Yes, everybody is still super upset that Microsoft got hit by antitrust in 2001 and shifted heavily to B2B. We've really missed out on having more fantastic Microsoft software forcibly intertwined in our daily lives. I wish Microsoft owned all of desktop AND mobile computing AND the internet so I was forced to do everything via the fantastic Microsoft Windows! Darn these regulators for trying to allow competitors to enter the market. Everybody knows, competition only makes things worse! /s
- zer00eyz 2y ago
  > and shifted heavily to B2B Azure, VS code, Github, CoPilot... the emergence of teams... > I wish Microsoft owned A large chunk of the engineering stack?
  - elforce002 2y ago
    I think... I think the op was being sarcastic.
arder 2y ago
I feel like the US should have serious conversations about it's regulation of monopolies, especially on internet giants. The current system seems to be woefully ineffective. On the one hand, it's not clear it's necessarily, Google isn't a particularly old company it hasn't had a strangle hold for long and it doesn't look like it's business is unassailable. So why go after it at all. On the other hand, the anti-monopoly moves have been slow and ineffective. When Microsoft finally got hit their crimes were pretty egregious and they actually never faced any consequences, the law suit they lost eventaully got turned over on appeal and by the time it was all resolved the market looked markedly different. Isn't it time to think about either (a) just accepting that you give them a much wider birth or (b) be much faster and tactical in your enforcement. Not every monopoly case needs to result in a break up. If you could point at one bad thing Google did - maybe the Apple deal for example, get that in court quickly with fast penalties that don't require massive corporate interference maybe we would be better off.
- mjevans 2y ago
  The Apple deal had two sides engaged in monopolistic behavior. One was Google buying out that default provider option. The other was Apple, having that default option.
  - JKCalhoun 2y ago
    > The other was Apple, having that default option. What UI are you imagining? Perhaps no search engine at all in the browser but the first time a user goes to "search" you present them with a list of random-sorted search engines? Maybe the problem was that Apple has "that default option for sale."
    - mjevans 2y ago
      Search without a setting configured should open the Settings dialog to the page which configures search. On that page should be a list of the current well known / trusted providers (this can be a cached copy for offline config), maybe a refresh button (check for an updated version of that list), and a method of providing an end user installed search option. In short: Empower the End User.
andrewla 2y ago
> A fitting though unlikely outcome would be for Google to be forced to turn Chrome and the open source Chromium project over to Mozilla. That would probably involve the creation of an independent non-profit foundation that didn't reduce browser diversity – so Chrome and Firefox could continue to lead independent lives. Okay ... that is some serious wishcasting.
- coldpie 2y ago
  Hahah, yeah. That paragraph is where my opinion of the article turned from "maybe interesting" to "just some guy on the Internet rambling".
- kbaker 2y ago
  Mozilla is a bit of a stretch for sure, but I could see Chromium and maybe Android moved off onto their own independent organizations so they are not beholden to Google/Alphabet's whims. I am imagining something like the Linux Foundation. Chromium especially is so core to being a building block for applications and the modern Internet nowadays, it does seem like this core infrastructure piece should be more collectively owned.
- warkdarrior 2y ago
  Not Mozilla, no way! If Chrome gets split off, give it to anyone but Mozilla. They already ran one browser into the ground, they don't need to destroy a second one.
treyd 2y ago
I really hope that some portions are turned into public institutions (either directly or in the weird way organizations like USPS is) in some way. They've made themselves so deeply ingrained and essential to using the internet as loss leaders in some areas that it's impossible to imagine those services standing on their own and still making sense. That's what's responsible for their monopolization, and natural monopolies should be tightly state regulated. I hope we get case law on how network effects can kinda be natural monopolies when in the right technological context.
- tourmalinetaco 2y ago
  YouTube should be the main platform the government should form into a public institution. Not only due to its historical and cultural significance, but also due to the fact that it is (almost assuredly) unprofitable and thus at-risk.
  - JKCalhoun 2y ago
    It cannot sustain itself on its ad revenue?
    - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
      If a for-profit company does not provide its annual profits, it’s safe to say it’s not doing well. Especially as Alphabet does so elsewhere. Additionally, would they have become so ad-aggressive in the last few years if they have been making a profit?
  - carlosjobim 2y ago
    Looking forward to only being able to stream government approved video. It was a success in the last century, I've heard.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  I'm scratching my head trying to think of something Google does that should be a public institution. Can you give an example? YouTube is the closest thing I can think of, but it is tightly bound to advertising. Wikipedia, archive.org are two examples of non-Google projects that come to mind when I think of internet "public-good". They seem to be doing fine without advertising dollars (although perhaps they are only hobbling along, I don't know — but I would rather they get "public institution" treatment before Google franchises).
yoyohello13 2y ago
Can we break up Microsoft too?
- tourmalinetaco 2y ago
  And open source Windows while we’re at it.
Eumenes 2y ago
Google is about to pull from its war chest to create a PR frenzy to make this a very bad thing for consumers/users. They'll appeal to conservative and neoliberal circles. Personally, as a former Google employee, I want them smashed to pieces.
- wildrhythms 2y ago
  >They'll appeal to conservative and neoliberal circles. So, no different than every company on any given day under capitalism?
aurareturn 2y ago
No need to break up Google because of their search dominance. Search is about to get disrupted by LLMs. Heck, aren't teens searching on Tiktok more than Google nowadays?
ApolloFortyNine 2y ago
It is so easy to switch away from Google I just can't take any break up attempt seriously. ATT WAS phone service in the U.S. 90% of the U.S used ATT when it was broken up, and much of that 90% had no alternative. With Google if another better search engine did appear you could switch in minutes. And if you consider Android a monopoly then you'd have to consider iOS one too, and that's one much more obvious in it's user impact with a 30% cut being taken on the only app store you can install apps from. If you don't like default X being purchased, pass a law. Otherwise we'll just be back here in a few years later if some other company becomes unpopular.
- bradley13 2y ago
  Easy to switch away from Google? We're techies, so we don't see a lot of what is going on. Turn off your blockers for ads and trackers. Look at the number of websites that have Google trackers. Look at where the ads come from. That doesn't even count search, and Google search has also become a platform for Google-driven ads. Add in YouTube and other Google properties, and "monopoly" is an understatement. A breakup would separate the major services: Google search, YouTube, the ad business (DoubleClick et al), etc.. However, even then, the ad business probably needs to be broken up further. This should all have been done much earlier, at least 5 and maybe even 10 years ago. Now Google is so entrenched that it will be difficult. One assumes that the government is more powerful than a corporation, but once you look into just how members of Congress so quicly become millionaires, well...
- trueismywork 2y ago
  ATTs customers were phone users, hence it was difficult for them. Google's customers are ad companies, and for them, switching away from Google is impossible. By thinking of how easy it is for you to switch, you are not considering the correct customers. And this shows in your statement about better search engine, better search engine cannot come without customers (not you) having option to switch.
  - carlosjobim 2y ago
    > Google's customers are ad companies, and for them, switching away from Google is impossible. Billions (probably trillions) of dollars are spent every year on advertising through other channels than Google, including online. Let's stick to reality.
cactusplant7374 2y ago
> The Chocolate Factory has appealed the Epic verdict and also plans to challenge the DoJ's victory. Is "Chocolate Factory" a typo?
- layer8 2y ago
  Maybe try a Google search? ;) http://wikibin.org/articles/mountain-view-chocolate-factory.html http://wikibin.org/articles/mountain-view-chocolate-factory.... https://www.theregister.com/2008/11/24/dziuba_on_yang/ https://www.theregister.com/2008/11/24/dziuba_on_yang/
  - cactusplant7374 2y ago
    I don't use Google for most searches anymore. Unfortunately, with relatively newer search engines it's taking time for them to be at parity with Google.
whoisthemachine 2y ago
What about "de-DoubleClicking" Google, iow, separating the ad business from the rest of Google/Alphabet? I'm not sure how that would work, but IMO what reduces the quality of Google products and noticeably makes them worse for consumers is that the products either improve ad dollars or they get cut/receive no funding.
Workaccount2 2y ago
I'm flumuxed that Google is the first tech company to be ruled a monopoly. I would put them fourth on the tech monopoly list, behind Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, in that order. I don't think there would be much benefit to society by breaking up google. Whereas I do think there would be great benefit to breaking up Apple or MS.
- tgv 2y ago
  Apple doesn't match the description of a monopoly, as far as I can see. Amazon might. But Google is dominant. You could add Facebook to the monopolies, unless you think it shares the same space as Twitter.
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    You generally cannot have friends as an American under 25 without owning an iPhone. Outside of HN tech heads, regular young Americans use phones that "can send pictures that don't look like garbage!". I consider Apple by far the most insidious, since they leverage your friends and family against you to put heavy social penalties on not submitting. They then use this dominance to bend devs to their will, and take an egregious cut of their profits while doing it.
    - lotsofpulp 2y ago
      WhatsApp offers very simple high quality image/video sharing. If you are being excluded by your friends, it’s not because the image quality is bad. It’s because they want to exclude you.
      - merlindru 2y ago
        Everyone already uses iMessage. It's like getting everyone in the EU to switch to Signal because Meta owns WhatsApp: it's impossible. There's not enough incentive to switch off of the current solution because the hurdles to doing so is getting everyone else to do so. If your family & friends use WhatsApp, they'll eventually be "pressured" by others to use iMessage, simply because the people that they know don't use WhatsApp. This effect cascades, and now everyone is back to <existing solution> since the "pain" that solution inflicts on a couple individuals is not nearly big enough to make everyone switch.
at_a_remove 2y ago
I have no love for Google but, in light of the Google Graveyard, I am at a loss to see how to cut it up in a way where almost anything can remain profitable on its own. Imagine chopping Search and Ads out to be their own things. GoogAds turns into just another advertising company. Perhaps viable but uninteresting. GoogSearch, well, almost nobody wants to pay for search, so they seek some kind of way to get money, and the start up with the integrated ads, soon to result in what we have now. I used to run various Google Search Appliances, but they bailed out of that market. Peel off GMail? More than zero people want to pay for email, so you might see something like a clunky Fastmail with a free tier and a pay tier. The free tier means ads again and you're evolving to a Yahoo model. Ummm, nobody really wanted that. How about hardware? I dunno, are Pixels a loss leader for Google? I'll bow to someone else's insight on this, and I'm not really hip to the phone scene: are there a lot of "smartphones, we only make smartphones" companies? Google Docs and various officeware might stand on its own as a distant second to Microsoft. I know some people pay for that. Google Books, maaaaaaaaaaybe. It might stand on its own but here we just see people having to pay for what was once free. I just don't see anything interesting or stimulating coming out of carving up Google. Almost everything they did (it has been a while since I was "into" them) seemed focused on making things that were almost byproducts, wherein their real utility was feeding the search <-> advertising cycle.
- taeric 2y ago
  Oddly, breaking it up may give some items a better chance at living? Ostensibly, one of the main drivers of that graveyard is the monorepo nature of how they rollout changes, combined with them moving people off of projects. Splitting them directly addresses both of those?
  - at_a_remove 2y ago
    Again, which items? Google Sets? Ain't nobody gonna pay for that! Chromecast? Google Domains? I am scrolling through the list and not seeing much that would stand on its own two feet. Stadia? Google+? I'm just not seeing much that can stand on its own, that people will pay for without it resorting to an ad model to support it.
elforce002 2y ago
While we're at it, we need to break Microsoft and Amazon asap. I don't know how Microsoft is not up for discussion when it's a behemoth (GitHub, LinkedIn, Azure, Windows, Office, etc.). The same applies for Amazon.
- Someone 2y ago
  > I don't know how Microsoft is not up for discussion when it's a behemoth Because we think interfering with the free market is necessary when a company misuses market power, not solely when it is a behemoth.
  - jszymborski 2y ago
    Public companies exist to enrich shareholders. If you are in a position to abuse your market power, you're sorta obligated to.
    - aembleton 2y ago
      But doing so increases risk from regulators
      - jszymborski 2y ago
        I think if you can get as big as Google, Apple, or Microsoft without being broken up, companies haven't much to worry about.
    - azemetre 2y ago
      Agreed. Free markets is such a massive misnomer. The only thing that matters is competitive markets. “Free markets” is typically associated with regulatory capture, buying out your competitors, and abusing your monopoly status to thwart others. Governments should care about competition, not that abusive corporations stay at the top.
  - lmpdev 2y ago
    That’s not my understanding The Gilded Age Trusts were brought down regardless as to whether they misused their power. It wasn’t just oil. Monopolies are like a positive feedback loop which causes the market to diverge into a barely functional state It doesn’t matter if they abused their market position, monopolies are to be corrected, mens rea present or not
onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
Amusing to me that we have a $3.5T company, and the solution is to break up it's only competitor to make it weaker and that company an even bigger monopoly.
- asadotzler 2y ago
  The solution is to break them both up but you cannot do that at the same time because they are different kinds of monopolies that require separate government attention. Your assumption that we need to allow one megacorporation to get even more evil to take on another evil megacorporation is silly. End megacorporations instead of empowering them to maybe fight each other (or maybe just collude like in the $20B annual Safari search payment.)
zuckerma 2y ago
There is no chance this happens.
daft_pink 2y ago
It’s true. If you look at the history, breaking up companies often results in each division doing well and maybe not an improvement as Youtube/Android/Search/Gmail/Adwords/Chrome all need to earn a profit independently. At a minimum, not having Google paying Firefox/Apple to promote them as the default is a good thing. It’s super annoying that Safari doesn’t allow me to switch to Kagi easily. I understand a reason they do this is to protect users like my father from adware/spyware companies putting in fake search engines, but I’m sure not getting money from Google to force a default has something to do with it as well.
- tantalor 2y ago
  > super annoying that Safari doesn’t allow me to switch to Kagi What does Apple not allowing you to set a custom search engine on iOS have to do with Google?
  - daft_pink 2y ago
    Google pays Apple $20 billion per year to be the default search engine. I assume they either have some say or Apple want to increase the value in paying or the other search engines pay to be listed or there is some reason why safari doesn’t allow any search engines beyond a very short list. I doubt it’s an accident that you only get about 5 choices where google is the only decent choice
    - tantalor 2y ago
      Those all sound like complaints the government could take up with Apple, not Google.
koalaman 2y ago
I don't see how a Google breakup can be operationalized. There's just no way the company's stack can support it without decades of work. It'd be like dismembering a person and expecting all the pieces to go off and thrive.
- asadotzler 2y ago
  Google's problem, not the government's.
MongoTheMad 2y ago
break off chrome and enable AD block again.
rockzom 2y ago
If Gmail isn't 5 dollars a month by 2030 I'll be shocked.
- riku_iki 2y ago
  Gmail is super important source of ads targeting data. They won't kill it.
- layer8 2y ago
  Gmail is how many people get tied to Google; I doubt it.
bhartzer 2y ago
Android should almost definitely be split off as a separate company. I could see Android and Chrome as a combined company.
- gigel82 2y ago
  Android and Chrome are not great examples. They already open source projects (or 99.9% based on open source AOSP and Chromium codebases), which themselves only survive because Google is funding tons of engineers to work on them. The cut should be in the vertical integration stacks. Like in Apple's case between the hardware and OS, between the OS and the App Store. In Google's case, their hardware is already open, they mostly keep apps in their walled garden (and take their 30% troll tax) with things like GooglePlay and other Google "services", not sure how that would be something to break apart. Realistically, the best outcome we can hope for is breaking Ads away from Search.
summerlight 2y ago
The problem of so-called "break-up" option is that there are not many buyers who can afford operating those services (those costs at least billions every year even if those could be purchased for free) and those who can afford are already serious monopolists. Imagine MS buying Chrome, Meta buying AdWords, Apple buying Android etc etc. You probably don't want that. Other feasible way to avoid this would be keeping Google ads to subsidize them, but then what's the point of change? This is why the remedy should touch very specific illegal practices. Structural changes need proper legislation which targets the entire market. Otherwise, you'll just see balloon effects in action.
- pretext-1 2y ago
  It’s a publicity traded company they don’t need to be sold to be broken up. Each division retains its own value and shareholders get proportionate shares for the new stocks.
tonymet 2y ago
Like US vs Microsoft, by the time a resolution arrives, it will be 10 years out of date. No one cared about IE bundling, and IE had already lost dominance. Search and web are dead media. in 10 years no one will care.
layer8 2y ago
The root of all the “evil” here is ads. I have no particular solutions to suggest — though banning paid ads altogether sounds like a worthwhile idea, apart from the definitional difficulties — but I believe that’s the aspect that needs to be tackled one way or the other.
- gerash 2y ago
  Of course you think this way because you're the consumer of the free ad-funded internet services.
  - layer8 2y ago
    I'd gladly pay for all internet services I use in an ad-free world. Indeed I already do pay for a quite number of services.
amyamyamy2 2y ago
what happened to employees at companies that were broken up in the past? do they generally just leave to competitors?
missedthecue 2y ago
I think we need a better term than monopoly, that separates it from what people usually mean which is 'the best product'. I literally cannot think of any sort of product or service with lower switching costs than internet search. Typing bing.com takes 0.8 seconds and costs $0. Hundreds of orders of magnitude easier than switching to a different railroad if only one goes through your town. Google is a big ass company and enjoys outsized market share because people choose to use it. Everyone who buys a MacBook or Surface computer or smartphone does one thing immediately and that's to download Chrome. It's literally the first thing people voluntarily choose to do after powering on the device for the first time. I'm not sure why we need government interference here which in all likelihood would change no customer behaviour but probably just add a few extra clicks in front of the Chrome downloading process. When Alphabet begins doing something like banning Google Fiber customers from accessing bing.com, that will be interesting. But there honestly very minimal anti-competitive behaviour like that happening at the moment.
- ossyrial 2y ago
  > Google is a big ass company and enjoys outsized market share because people choose to use it. If this were true, Google could make the immediate and easy decision to increase their annual profits by $26 billion, by simply stopping to pay browser vendors to make Google the default search engine. https://untested.sonnet.io/Defaults+Matter%2C+Don't+Assume+Consent https://untested.sonnet.io/Defaults+Matter%2C+Don't+Assume+C...
  - danielmarkbruce 2y ago
    The person didn't say "all people choose it no matter what". The statement is true as written.
  - throwaway48540 2y ago
    Their need to buy advertising proves it is not a monopoly. If they were, they'd make that easy and profitable decision immediately.
    - 2y ago
seydor 2y ago
I think forcing google to break the buy side from the sell side of advertising is the most obvious and probably beneficial way to break it apart. This should have never happened in the first place , and similar things should be happening to other bigTech. Advertising money is the lifeblood of this industry
bdw5204 2y ago
With search, there are actually 2 different products. The index itself is a textbook natural monopoly. There's no upside in having more than 1 web crawler as long as it can be trusted to just crawl the web but there's plenty of downside in the form of increased bandwidth costs for web sites. The actual search rankings are where competition makes sense. So spin the Google search index off as a non-profit that makes its product available at a reasonable cost to anybody who wants to run a search engine. Then you spin off the rest of Google as separate companies. Android/Pixel, Google Ads/Analytics, Youtube, Chrome, Gmail/Docs/Drive and Maps/Cloud would all be separate businesses. Chrome would likely be best spunoff as a non-profit as well, operating an open source web browser project. Of course, if you're going to break up Google you also have to break up the rest of FAANG too or they're just going to step right into the space vacated by Google and probably buy up the Baby Googles[0]. Apple would probably need to be broken up into a hardware company, a software company and a services company. Amazon would need to be broken up into AWS, Amazon Shopping and Prime Video. You could arguably even break Amazon Shopping up into the online store and the logistics company. Microsoft would need to be broken up into Windows, Office, Xbox, Bing and Azure. Xbox would then itself need to be broken up to unwind all of its purchases of independent video game companies. If you're breaking up Xbox, you also have to do the same with Playstation (spinning them loose from Sony and unwinding their own acquisitions). It might also be a great idea to then do the same with major 3rd party video game companies like EA, basically unwinding all of their acquisitions. Meta would need to be broken up into Facebook, Oculus, Instagram, WhatsApp and Meta Ads. Once you start breaking up Google, you open up Pandora's box and basically have to keep going until you break up the entire tech sector. That's why it is so tricky to do it. Once you're done with tech, it'd be a good idea to look at other sectors such as health care, Hollywood and the news media where consolidation has been rampant over the past few decades. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Bell_Operating_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Bell_Operating_Compan...
- cogman10 2y ago
  > The index itself is a textbook natural monopoly. I would argue that because of this, the index itself should be something operated by the public rather than privately. This is especially true because it's within the best interests of the public to have an archive of the internet. The wayback machine currently supports that and it's on its last legs. Index the internet with a public search API, then let future search engines hit that an optimize based on internal algorithms to get better results.
throawayonthe 2y ago
[dead]
cut3 2y ago
Separate ads from them.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
novia 2y ago
They could take the search team, flip a coin for each employee, and split it, maintaining rank. The team that's forced to leave to start their own search company will be able to leave with the full Google search codebase and dependencies (yes I know they have a monorepo, but figure it out). That team will from that day forward be able to create a forked version of the product. Every gripe they had about it will be able to be fixed. They'll also be given half of Google's cash to hire the best people. If search & ads are the main money makers, then force the existing company to compete with itself in those fields. Also, instead, they could just unmerge doubleclick from Google. Let them make money by having ads on search and other places without BEING the advertising company.
h_tbob 2y ago
I think Google is really big, but the mail in the coffin for me is that android is open source. I don’t see how apple beat epic but google lost. Lawyers
ProllyInfamous 2y ago
My major complaint is when cities/states/governments only use a Google product for hosting allegedly-public data — which is otherwise inaccessible (unless you allow access to e.g. Google Drive). Even worse is when these "public forums" are hosted entirely within walled gardens, e.g. Facebook; then you need an account (and not just DNS whitelisting) to participate in this public forum. All government entities should be required to post public documents on their own servers/equipment/hostname.
webninja 2y ago
The obvious and least painful change for Google is to make the top 3 most popular browsers on any platform have to allow any search engines supplied by the user. The user has to paste a custom url into a text box supplied by their favorite search engine’s website. That way people can use meaningful search engines like Marginalia, Kagi, or others. It’s such a simple change that would have a massive impact in forcing meaningful competition in the search sphere. Google funds Apple for search dominance and Firefox for reasons I don’t know of. Neither Safari (on mobile nor desktop) nor Firefox allow custom user supplied search engines. The presets they supply appear to be controlled opposition. I want to be able to use Marginalia, Kagi, Yandex, MWMBl and SearXNG by default after a few settings changes.
Stopmonopoly 2y ago
[dead]

266 points by rntn 2y ago

The challenge is ensuring that any changes foster genuine competition and innovation rather than just shifting the monopoly around.

matthewfelgate 2y ago

How is Google more of a Monopoly than Microsoft?

usrnm 2y ago
Why does it have to be more of a monopoly than Microsoft to be considered a monopoly?
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  It doesn't. But if B is less of a monopoly than A, and the regulators are going to break up B, but not break up A, that does lead to questions. Why start with B? Why not start with A, and then do B?
  - usrnm 2y ago
    Because that creates a lot of additional work and controversy for no real gain. Do courts rank cases and hear them in the order of severity of the crime? It's exactly the same situation. I agree that both companies should be held to the same standard, but I don't think I really care about the particular order
bearjaws 2y ago
DOJ/FTC cannot possibly sue every company at the same time, and probably shouldn't. Depending on how this goes, companies will need to change how they act in fear of the hammer coming down on them next.
tirant 2y ago
How is google a monopoly at all? There’s competition and alternative for each of their products. And people can keep using the alternatives if they want. I can choose iOS over Android. Bing over Google. Yahoo over Gmail. Dailymotion over YouTube. Why is it a problem that google makes a superior product and people choose it ? In all studies, when consumers get faced the decision to choose freely any search engine, most of them keep going back to google. Why is that a problem at all?
- throwadobe 2y ago
  Google owns ~90% of the search market and if you don't play by their rules, you're out of the game. The argument is that there's nothing really superior about their technology today, just market dominance to force everyone to operate in a way that serves their _ad_ interests as opposed to search interests.
  - zer00eyz 2y ago
    So I signed up for Kagi a while back. I'll be candid, it's good ... it's a hair less annoying than google, the results are just as hit or miss. Here is the thing, if I need to BUY something Kagi falls flat on its face. I find myself going back to google to shop, and to be candid it has drawn a contrast for me on spending. The "extra step" to buy has slowed me down. I dont think breaking up google changes consumer behavior. It creates a hydra out of a snake.
- ToValueFunfetti 2y ago
  Google pays $20 billion a year to be default search on Apple. Alphabet's net income was $74 billion in 2023. Why would they reduce profit by 20% to get Apple users to use the search engine that they would use anyway?
- coldpie 2y ago
  Good questions! You can find the answers in this article[1], and follow the sources linked at the bottom for even more information. If you really want to get into the weeds, you can read about US antitrust law here[2], which has a bunch more articles to other caselaw around monopoly abuse in the US. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2020) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act_of_1890 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act_of_1890
nrclark 2y ago
Globally, I would bet that there are more daily Android users than daily Windows users. There is no real competitor to Youtube.
throwadobe 2y ago
Answer the question yourself by first deciding the market(s) for which you're making that assessment. Google commands a higher market share % of search than Microsoft does of personal computing OS.

datadrivenangel 2y ago

What comes after will be better. Maybe not as integrated, but better as far as options go.

malfist 2y ago
It's almost like monied interests own the papers and want to protect their investments
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  I've never understood this take because it's possible to make money regardless of the direction that the share price moves.
- andybak 2y ago
  Are you talking about The Register here? That's a fairly strange accusation for a news outlet that goes out of it's way to be provocative to the entire industry. At least it used to - I haven't kept up much recently. If you know better then please tell - but I'm not clear at this point whether you have an informed opinion - or whether you have no idea what The Register is.
ErigmolCt 2y ago
You never know but hopefully

mainecoder 2y ago

breaking it up will also weaken US Dominance in Tech, the fact that Android and Chrome are under them same umbrella helps them share IP across the company and decreases RD costs because some of the costs are shared.

A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
Um, I agree with your first sentence, but I don't think I follow the rationale. What are you trying to say?
- mainecoder 2y ago
  regulation in the EU may no longer work independently from regulation in the US thus US laws they need to collaborate and compromise, they are weakening western tech dominance
  - thfuran 2y ago
    The US Department of Justice isn't exactly an EU regulator.
dosinga 2y ago
Not sure how NATO enters into this, but as off last month or so Mark Rutte is the Secretary General of NATO. He is Dutch

retskrad 2y ago

1. Forbid Google from paying Apple and Android OEM’s to be the default search engine. Also, detach Google search from Android and forbid Google from forcing it to be included on every Android phone. 2. Give Google search competitors access to Google’s search data so these new AI search engine companies can compete. Without these huge amounts of data, they have no chance. Done!

soared 2y ago
2 is not how the US breaks up monopolies
- kaptainscarlet 2y ago
  [flagged]
- KMag 2y ago
  Right. Government-mandated access to proprietary data isn't how the US breaks up monopolies, but somewhat along those lines, it might make sense for some government to provide some similar data. This seems much closer to a European style government approach, and I wouldn't expect such a thing in the U.S. The infra for a decent crawl is prohibitive. There's a bit of black magic in crawl scheduling, and a bit in de-duplication, but most of the challenge is in scale. I used to work on Google's indexing system, and sat with the guys who wrote the Percolator system that basically used BigTable triggers to drive indexing and make it less batch-oriented. I know France has made at least a couple of attempts at a government-funded "Google killer" search engine. I think it would be a better use of government money to make something like a government-run event-driven first-level indexing system where search engine companies could pay basically cloud computing costs to have their proprietary triggers populate their proprietary databases based on the government-run crawling and first-level analysis. When one page updates, you'd want all of the search engine startups running their triggers on the same copy of the data, rather than having to stream the data out to each of the search engine startups. Basically, you want to take some importance metric, some estimate of the probability some content has changed since the last time you crawled it, combine the product of the two plus some additional constraints (crawl every known page at least some maximum period, don't hit any domain too hard, etc.) as a crawl priority. You then crawl the content, convert HTML, PDF, etc. to some marked-up text format (UTF-8 HTML isn't bad, but I think UTF-8 plain text plus some separate annotations in a binary format would be better). You strip out text that's too small or too close to the background color. You calculate one or more locality-sensitive hash functions over the plain text, cluster similar texts, pick a canonical URL for each cluster. You calculate the directed link graph across clusters. The PageRank patent has expired, so you could calculate PageRank and several other link-graph ranking signals across canonical clusters. You'd presumably compute some uniqueness scores, age scores, etc. for each canonical URL, and then in parallel run each of the search engine startup's analysis over this package of analysis data each time you find a change for a particular canonical URL. You might have some startups providing spam scoring or other analysis and providing that (for fees, of course) to search engine startups, etc. Basically, you want to modularize the indexing and analysis to provide competition and nearly seamless transition between competing providers within your ecosystem. I think that's the way to drive innovation in the search engine startup space and properly leverage economies of scale across search engine startups.

A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago

I agree that Google has an inordinate amount of power in the market and that it has to be restrained. That said, I do not like the 'better' qualifier here. It depends too much on who is reading it. Hell, it is not impossible average user will dislike the change ( but they always do).

matthewfelgate 2y ago
Nonsense. It has no more power than Microsoft or Apple.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
  To a person like me it sounds like MS and Apple should be broken up as well.
  - matthewfelgate 2y ago
    Then why pick on Google?
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
      No one is picking at anyone. I want the basic law enforced. I want all the "too big" companies brought to heel. Those entities already have way too much power at their disposal and there is a real social interest in reining it in. I do not think it is too much to ask. You want me to pick at MS too? Show me a path to breaking them up as well and I will gladly sign on to the appropriate effort to make it happen. I guess I am weird. I want the rules enforced for all players.
      - matthewfelgate 2y ago
        My issue is of unfairness: you shouldn't do something to one company you haven't done to others. Microsoft has been a too big company since the 1990s.

is_true 2y ago

I think Google can win this easily by using the public opinion against the regulators. They just need to say that they are gonna start charging for all their services because without the level of integration they have it doesn't make sense to keep running businesses that otherwise would lose money.

pydry 2y ago
"If you break us up we will start such an epic tantrum that we will end up shooting ourselves in the head"
bell-cot 2y ago
"...gonna start charging..." In a world where the competition's price for most of those services is "free", charging for used-to-be-free stuff sounds like a sure-fire suicidal business strategy.
- StrauXX 2y ago
  They don't have to actually do that should Google bbebroken up. They can still use that as an argument to rouse public support against a breakup.
  - bell-cot 2y ago
    They can try. But in a world full of free on-line stuff, the public may think the "you'll go bust if you try" counter-argument is obviously correct.
viraptor 2y ago
Do you honestly think that would have any effect beyond Gmail users? (those would really hurt) But otherwise I don't think an average non-tech person would be likely to notice a difference between Bing and Google. And ms, ddg, Kagi and perplexity would love to see lots of people actually looking for alternatives. Docs/sheets/pages/whatever wouldn't change since they're supported by the paying users. The rest, Google is going to kill at some point anyway like they did with hundred other projects. They only one I really don't know how it would be affected is Android.

dosinga 2y ago

Part of the problem is that tech products tend to be natural monopolies. If you split android off Google, it will probably just lose out against iOS in the West and some Chinese Android version elsewhere. As the article says, that's not necessarily better.

newsclues 2y ago
Google has collected multiple businesses in its conglomerate structure that gives it far too much power and control over society beyond the simple monopoly charge. YouTube, Search, Email, advertising, are all controlled by the same people and that is a problem for freedom and the economy.
Gormo 2y ago
> Part of the problem is that tech products tend to be natural monopolies. Middleman platforms often become natural monopolies due to network effects, but how does this expand to tech products in general? I don't see any structural incentives that lead to natural monopolies in search, email, or a wide variety of other products that Google is dominant in.
- graemep 2y ago
  and other markets where network effects tend to create monopolies tend to be very highly regulated or state owned: telecoms and financial markets, for example.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    Utilities are monopolies because it makes no sense to spend tons of resources running extra pipes and wires to each and every house. It’s called a structural monopoly.
    - graemep 2y ago
      Yikes! Yes. WIll correct. I do not know what happened to my brain there.

pydry 2y ago

"What if we broke up Google and Meta started operating bits of it?" There are some head scratching serious leaps of logic here. Why would Meta start running android if it became an independent business? It's never explained. This article is rather clumsy FUD.

Rzor 2y ago

Japan tried to curb the Yakuza by enacting laws to specifically punish them. Not only it didn't work as well as they thought, but other criminals also flourished in the underworld by virtue of not being Yakuza. Whatever they do to go after Google must be really well thought and coordinated otherwise they will just be passing the crown to someone else a little bit smarter.

immibis 2y ago
Sort of like what happened with Microsoft.
brigadier132 2y ago
You're analogy isn't exactly good. In this case, other businesses flourishing is a good thing. If you are specifically referring to Apple becoming an even bigger monopoly, that would be a bad thing but I think in the US they've already effectively won.

holografix 2y ago

Google’s deal with Apple is def problematic but apart from that I really don’t think it’s a monopoly. Google leadership (according to public info) was in a panic about ChatGPT and rightly so. It was eerily similar to what Google once was at its inception: a no bs way to get better answers to your questions. Luckily for Google, hallucination is a significant issue. Just “GPT it” is already in the modern vernacular. Google is in serious danger of becoming Facebook: only used by boomers (now millennials) while the new gen gets their adds on Insta, TikTok and could soon be served Llm generated product reviews and comparisons with link to buy from ChatGPT.

JKCalhoun 2y ago
Generally agree with your points, just not your conclusion that "we should just wait".

fny 2y ago

I'm very curious to see what a breakup looks like. Past breakups involved "uniform" businesses: - American Tobacco: Commodity - Standard Oil: Commodity - AT&T: Utility - Northern Securities: Railroads - Swift & Co: Meatpacking - Kodak: Film - Paramount: Movie Theaters Google is more of a synergistic conglomerate. How would spinning off an individual business like Chrome, Android, or AdWords reduce their respective dominance? I support this ruling and more across all industries, but I'm trying to square how a breakup should work that actually drives competition.

criddell 2y ago
One of the potential remedies is to require Google to open source their crawling data. This should make it easier for others who want to build a competing search engine.
- jsheard 2y ago
  Surely the crawling is the easiest part? The AI goldrush has seen dozens of new players gobbling up the entire internet. The hard part is turning that staggering amount of unstructured data into a useful search engine, and in particular fighting off black-hat SEO.
  - macNchz 2y ago
    Websites these days are often pretty hostile to crawling aside from the Googlebot. Other crawlers are asked not to by the robots.txt, fully blocked, or put through captchas. https://knuckleheads.club/ https://knuckleheads.club/ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/technology/how-google-dominates.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/technology/how-google-dom...
    - jsheard 2y ago
      Good point. Now I think about it Google is actively contributing to that with their Reddit deal which has them blocking all scrapers besides Googlebot, even known legit search engine crawlers like Bingbot.

Xelbair 2y ago

Yeah, just like with Standard Oil...

bearjaws 2y ago

If what comes after is not better, then we waited too long to break this monopoly up. We either start ripping this band-aids off or we will just continually have a worse and worse internet.

matthewfelgate 2y ago
What about Microsoft?
- abirch 2y ago
  The funny thing is this is going to be benefit Microsoft significantly. Much of what Google did Chrome, Android, etc. was to prevent Microsoft from destroying it like Netscape, Novell, Lotus, Wordperfect, ... It's probably no coincidence that Google's first external CEO Eric Schmidt was the CEO of Novell.
  - jonhohle 2y ago
    By the time Chrome was released, Google was already a behemoth. I can’t think of another .com that was anywhere near their size. Microsoft was only 2x bigger by market cap. They were hardly a small company that Microsoft could push around and had the advantage of not being dependent on anything MS was doing.
    - abirch 2y ago
      Google came out with Chrome in 2008. Prior to that they were dependent on the Mozilla Foundation. Microsoft came out with Bing in 2009. Some say that Bing is "Bing is not google" Much like Windows NT was rumored to be Novell Terminator.
    - cma 2y ago
      Google toolbar came first. Slipped in a Google search box on everyone's browser in exchange for blocking Google's competitors' popup ads (Google didn't use popup ads). Now Google does invasive popovers within the page, etc., and this time with them in charge of the browser they are ahout to implement a plan to block extension makers from stopping it well.

dceddia 2y ago

Yeah I don’t know how this will go, but I’m not too optimistic. It feels like one of those situations where we “get exactly what we asked for”. Like those movies with an Evil Genie who delivers on their wishes in the sneakiest way possible. “You wished for $1M, so I burned your house down - but look at all the insurance money you got!” Or maybe a bit like how everyone wanted their cable bills to be cheaper (“just let me pay for the few channels I watch!”) and what we got was 15 different streaming services at $12/month.

pretext-1 2y ago
Well so far we tried doing nothing and that didn’t work either. We should have at least prevented them from growing so fast via acquisitions but it’s too late for that now.
asadotzler 2y ago
"Let's do nothing then. Let's all just let the megacorporations write their own laws and manage themselves autonomously with no consumer or competition protections at all. Why bother." This is how you sound.
- dceddia 2y ago
  Oh yeah that’s not what I was going for here. Doing things is great. I just hope that they think through the pitfalls and loopholes of whatever they decide to do. I want to avoid the fates the article hinted at, stuff like “since you broke us up, we can’t possibly maintain Chrome for free anymore, that’s gonna be a subscription now”. Another example of this was Apple’s response to being forced to allow alternate app stores, where they added enough fees and restrictions that it was effectively unusable. The spirit of the law (allow anyone to make apps without a gatekeeper and fees) was not what happened.

accurrent 2y ago

The best way to tackle this is enforce right for repair and require opensourcing of various components. Breaking up google will be an impossible job. If we mandate that our electronics and software must be repairable then these companies will automatically no longer be able to hold monopolies on their platforms.

brookst 2y ago
…and people will buy imported tech and use foreign software because it works better than what is legally mandated here. The idea that the government has to force people to buy things they don’t want never ends well.

CuriouslyC 2y ago

The breakup that needs to happen is ads and search/youtube/etc, everything else would work itself out after that.

account42 2y ago
Chrome being made by the same company running the websites (search/docs/etc.) is still going to provide bad incentives even if with ads & youtube seperated out the worst ones would be gone.

ourmandave 2y ago

[flagged]

uptownJimmy 2y ago

Google's "search results" are the textbook definition of a monopolized good/service. The whole thing is almost a casino, rigged to the point of absurdity. There has been nothing in my life so disillusioning as working on a Web app for a company that is more or less required to play Google's game.

timmg 2y ago
> There has been nothing in my life so disillusioning as working on a Web app for a company that is more or less required to play Google's game. Have you built any iOS apps?
- LeonB 2y ago
  Ha, well said. Having both of these experiences makes one even more against the tyranny of monopolists.
- brookst 2y ago
  While true and a fair point, iOS is Apple’s platform in a way that the web is most certainly not Google’s.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    I hardly use Google, and I use the internet. DDG/Kagi/ChatGPT/Reddit/HN/etc for searching. Fastmail/myriad order email providers. Openstreetmap/Apple for maps. YouTube and Chrome Remote Desktop are what I use Google for, but those have alternatives too.
    - jonhohle 2y ago
      The concern is if you are developing for the web, how much time do you need to spend appeasing Google to show up in search results and be discoverable. When I was at Amazon the majority of direct product traffic did not come internal search, it came from Google. In some areas they were competitors, Amazon was beholden to Google as the starting point for most customer’s browsing experience.

pembrook 2y ago

Yes, everybody is still super upset that Microsoft got hit by antitrust in 2001 and shifted heavily to B2B. We've really missed out on having more fantastic Microsoft software forcibly intertwined in our daily lives. I wish Microsoft owned all of desktop AND mobile computing AND the internet so I was forced to do everything via the fantastic Microsoft Windows! Darn these regulators for trying to allow competitors to enter the market. Everybody knows, competition only makes things worse! /s

zer00eyz 2y ago
> and shifted heavily to B2B Azure, VS code, Github, CoPilot... the emergence of teams... > I wish Microsoft owned A large chunk of the engineering stack?
- elforce002 2y ago
  I think... I think the op was being sarcastic.

arder 2y ago

I feel like the US should have serious conversations about it's regulation of monopolies, especially on internet giants. The current system seems to be woefully ineffective. On the one hand, it's not clear it's necessarily, Google isn't a particularly old company it hasn't had a strangle hold for long and it doesn't look like it's business is unassailable. So why go after it at all. On the other hand, the anti-monopoly moves have been slow and ineffective. When Microsoft finally got hit their crimes were pretty egregious and they actually never faced any consequences, the law suit they lost eventaully got turned over on appeal and by the time it was all resolved the market looked markedly different. Isn't it time to think about either (a) just accepting that you give them a much wider birth or (b) be much faster and tactical in your enforcement. Not every monopoly case needs to result in a break up. If you could point at one bad thing Google did - maybe the Apple deal for example, get that in court quickly with fast penalties that don't require massive corporate interference maybe we would be better off.

mjevans 2y ago
The Apple deal had two sides engaged in monopolistic behavior. One was Google buying out that default provider option. The other was Apple, having that default option.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  > The other was Apple, having that default option. What UI are you imagining? Perhaps no search engine at all in the browser but the first time a user goes to "search" you present them with a list of random-sorted search engines? Maybe the problem was that Apple has "that default option for sale."
  - mjevans 2y ago
    Search without a setting configured should open the Settings dialog to the page which configures search. On that page should be a list of the current well known / trusted providers (this can be a cached copy for offline config), maybe a refresh button (check for an updated version of that list), and a method of providing an end user installed search option. In short: Empower the End User.

andrewla 2y ago

> A fitting though unlikely outcome would be for Google to be forced to turn Chrome and the open source Chromium project over to Mozilla. That would probably involve the creation of an independent non-profit foundation that didn't reduce browser diversity – so Chrome and Firefox could continue to lead independent lives. Okay ... that is some serious wishcasting.

coldpie 2y ago
Hahah, yeah. That paragraph is where my opinion of the article turned from "maybe interesting" to "just some guy on the Internet rambling".
kbaker 2y ago
Mozilla is a bit of a stretch for sure, but I could see Chromium and maybe Android moved off onto their own independent organizations so they are not beholden to Google/Alphabet's whims. I am imagining something like the Linux Foundation. Chromium especially is so core to being a building block for applications and the modern Internet nowadays, it does seem like this core infrastructure piece should be more collectively owned.
warkdarrior 2y ago
Not Mozilla, no way! If Chrome gets split off, give it to anyone but Mozilla. They already ran one browser into the ground, they don't need to destroy a second one.

treyd 2y ago

I really hope that some portions are turned into public institutions (either directly or in the weird way organizations like USPS is) in some way. They've made themselves so deeply ingrained and essential to using the internet as loss leaders in some areas that it's impossible to imagine those services standing on their own and still making sense. That's what's responsible for their monopolization, and natural monopolies should be tightly state regulated. I hope we get case law on how network effects can kinda be natural monopolies when in the right technological context.

tourmalinetaco 2y ago
YouTube should be the main platform the government should form into a public institution. Not only due to its historical and cultural significance, but also due to the fact that it is (almost assuredly) unprofitable and thus at-risk.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  It cannot sustain itself on its ad revenue?
  - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
    If a for-profit company does not provide its annual profits, it’s safe to say it’s not doing well. Especially as Alphabet does so elsewhere. Additionally, would they have become so ad-aggressive in the last few years if they have been making a profit?
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  Looking forward to only being able to stream government approved video. It was a success in the last century, I've heard.
JKCalhoun 2y ago
I'm scratching my head trying to think of something Google does that should be a public institution. Can you give an example? YouTube is the closest thing I can think of, but it is tightly bound to advertising. Wikipedia, archive.org are two examples of non-Google projects that come to mind when I think of internet "public-good". They seem to be doing fine without advertising dollars (although perhaps they are only hobbling along, I don't know — but I would rather they get "public institution" treatment before Google franchises).

yoyohello13 2y ago

Can we break up Microsoft too?

tourmalinetaco 2y ago
And open source Windows while we’re at it.

Eumenes 2y ago

Google is about to pull from its war chest to create a PR frenzy to make this a very bad thing for consumers/users. They'll appeal to conservative and neoliberal circles. Personally, as a former Google employee, I want them smashed to pieces.

wildrhythms 2y ago
>They'll appeal to conservative and neoliberal circles. So, no different than every company on any given day under capitalism?

aurareturn 2y ago

No need to break up Google because of their search dominance. Search is about to get disrupted by LLMs. Heck, aren't teens searching on Tiktok more than Google nowadays?

ApolloFortyNine 2y ago

It is so easy to switch away from Google I just can't take any break up attempt seriously. ATT WAS phone service in the U.S. 90% of the U.S used ATT when it was broken up, and much of that 90% had no alternative. With Google if another better search engine did appear you could switch in minutes. And if you consider Android a monopoly then you'd have to consider iOS one too, and that's one much more obvious in it's user impact with a 30% cut being taken on the only app store you can install apps from. If you don't like default X being purchased, pass a law. Otherwise we'll just be back here in a few years later if some other company becomes unpopular.

bradley13 2y ago
Easy to switch away from Google? We're techies, so we don't see a lot of what is going on. Turn off your blockers for ads and trackers. Look at the number of websites that have Google trackers. Look at where the ads come from. That doesn't even count search, and Google search has also become a platform for Google-driven ads. Add in YouTube and other Google properties, and "monopoly" is an understatement. A breakup would separate the major services: Google search, YouTube, the ad business (DoubleClick et al), etc.. However, even then, the ad business probably needs to be broken up further. This should all have been done much earlier, at least 5 and maybe even 10 years ago. Now Google is so entrenched that it will be difficult. One assumes that the government is more powerful than a corporation, but once you look into just how members of Congress so quicly become millionaires, well...
trueismywork 2y ago
ATTs customers were phone users, hence it was difficult for them. Google's customers are ad companies, and for them, switching away from Google is impossible. By thinking of how easy it is for you to switch, you are not considering the correct customers. And this shows in your statement about better search engine, better search engine cannot come without customers (not you) having option to switch.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  > Google's customers are ad companies, and for them, switching away from Google is impossible. Billions (probably trillions) of dollars are spent every year on advertising through other channels than Google, including online. Let's stick to reality.

cactusplant7374 2y ago

> The Chocolate Factory has appealed the Epic verdict and also plans to challenge the DoJ's victory. Is "Chocolate Factory" a typo?

layer8 2y ago
Maybe try a Google search? ;) http://wikibin.org/articles/mountain-view-chocolate-factory.html http://wikibin.org/articles/mountain-view-chocolate-factory.... https://www.theregister.com/2008/11/24/dziuba_on_yang/ https://www.theregister.com/2008/11/24/dziuba_on_yang/
- cactusplant7374 2y ago
  I don't use Google for most searches anymore. Unfortunately, with relatively newer search engines it's taking time for them to be at parity with Google.

whoisthemachine 2y ago

What about "de-DoubleClicking" Google, iow, separating the ad business from the rest of Google/Alphabet? I'm not sure how that would work, but IMO what reduces the quality of Google products and noticeably makes them worse for consumers is that the products either improve ad dollars or they get cut/receive no funding.

Workaccount2 2y ago

I'm flumuxed that Google is the first tech company to be ruled a monopoly. I would put them fourth on the tech monopoly list, behind Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, in that order. I don't think there would be much benefit to society by breaking up google. Whereas I do think there would be great benefit to breaking up Apple or MS.

tgv 2y ago
Apple doesn't match the description of a monopoly, as far as I can see. Amazon might. But Google is dominant. You could add Facebook to the monopolies, unless you think it shares the same space as Twitter.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  You generally cannot have friends as an American under 25 without owning an iPhone. Outside of HN tech heads, regular young Americans use phones that "can send pictures that don't look like garbage!". I consider Apple by far the most insidious, since they leverage your friends and family against you to put heavy social penalties on not submitting. They then use this dominance to bend devs to their will, and take an egregious cut of their profits while doing it.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    WhatsApp offers very simple high quality image/video sharing. If you are being excluded by your friends, it’s not because the image quality is bad. It’s because they want to exclude you.
    - merlindru 2y ago
      Everyone already uses iMessage. It's like getting everyone in the EU to switch to Signal because Meta owns WhatsApp: it's impossible. There's not enough incentive to switch off of the current solution because the hurdles to doing so is getting everyone else to do so. If your family & friends use WhatsApp, they'll eventually be "pressured" by others to use iMessage, simply because the people that they know don't use WhatsApp. This effect cascades, and now everyone is back to <existing solution> since the "pain" that solution inflicts on a couple individuals is not nearly big enough to make everyone switch.

at_a_remove 2y ago

I have no love for Google but, in light of the Google Graveyard, I am at a loss to see how to cut it up in a way where almost anything can remain profitable on its own. Imagine chopping Search and Ads out to be their own things. GoogAds turns into just another advertising company. Perhaps viable but uninteresting. GoogSearch, well, almost nobody wants to pay for search, so they seek some kind of way to get money, and the start up with the integrated ads, soon to result in what we have now. I used to run various Google Search Appliances, but they bailed out of that market. Peel off GMail? More than zero people want to pay for email, so you might see something like a clunky Fastmail with a free tier and a pay tier. The free tier means ads again and you're evolving to a Yahoo model. Ummm, nobody really wanted that. How about hardware? I dunno, are Pixels a loss leader for Google? I'll bow to someone else's insight on this, and I'm not really hip to the phone scene: are there a lot of "smartphones, we only make smartphones" companies? Google Docs and various officeware might stand on its own as a distant second to Microsoft. I know some people pay for that. Google Books, maaaaaaaaaaybe. It might stand on its own but here we just see people having to pay for what was once free. I just don't see anything interesting or stimulating coming out of carving up Google. Almost everything they did (it has been a while since I was "into" them) seemed focused on making things that were almost byproducts, wherein their real utility was feeding the search <-> advertising cycle.

taeric 2y ago
Oddly, breaking it up may give some items a better chance at living? Ostensibly, one of the main drivers of that graveyard is the monorepo nature of how they rollout changes, combined with them moving people off of projects. Splitting them directly addresses both of those?
- at_a_remove 2y ago
  Again, which items? Google Sets? Ain't nobody gonna pay for that! Chromecast? Google Domains? I am scrolling through the list and not seeing much that would stand on its own two feet. Stadia? Google+? I'm just not seeing much that can stand on its own, that people will pay for without it resorting to an ad model to support it.

elforce002 2y ago

While we're at it, we need to break Microsoft and Amazon asap. I don't know how Microsoft is not up for discussion when it's a behemoth (GitHub, LinkedIn, Azure, Windows, Office, etc.). The same applies for Amazon.

Someone 2y ago
> I don't know how Microsoft is not up for discussion when it's a behemoth Because we think interfering with the free market is necessary when a company misuses market power, not solely when it is a behemoth.
- jszymborski 2y ago
  Public companies exist to enrich shareholders. If you are in a position to abuse your market power, you're sorta obligated to.
  - aembleton 2y ago
    But doing so increases risk from regulators
    - jszymborski 2y ago
      I think if you can get as big as Google, Apple, or Microsoft without being broken up, companies haven't much to worry about.
  - azemetre 2y ago
    Agreed. Free markets is such a massive misnomer. The only thing that matters is competitive markets. “Free markets” is typically associated with regulatory capture, buying out your competitors, and abusing your monopoly status to thwart others. Governments should care about competition, not that abusive corporations stay at the top.
- lmpdev 2y ago
  That’s not my understanding The Gilded Age Trusts were brought down regardless as to whether they misused their power. It wasn’t just oil. Monopolies are like a positive feedback loop which causes the market to diverge into a barely functional state It doesn’t matter if they abused their market position, monopolies are to be corrected, mens rea present or not

onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago

Amusing to me that we have a $3.5T company, and the solution is to break up it's only competitor to make it weaker and that company an even bigger monopoly.

asadotzler 2y ago
The solution is to break them both up but you cannot do that at the same time because they are different kinds of monopolies that require separate government attention. Your assumption that we need to allow one megacorporation to get even more evil to take on another evil megacorporation is silly. End megacorporations instead of empowering them to maybe fight each other (or maybe just collude like in the $20B annual Safari search payment.)

zuckerma 2y ago

There is no chance this happens.

daft_pink 2y ago

It’s true. If you look at the history, breaking up companies often results in each division doing well and maybe not an improvement as Youtube/Android/Search/Gmail/Adwords/Chrome all need to earn a profit independently. At a minimum, not having Google paying Firefox/Apple to promote them as the default is a good thing. It’s super annoying that Safari doesn’t allow me to switch to Kagi easily. I understand a reason they do this is to protect users like my father from adware/spyware companies putting in fake search engines, but I’m sure not getting money from Google to force a default has something to do with it as well.

tantalor 2y ago
> super annoying that Safari doesn’t allow me to switch to Kagi What does Apple not allowing you to set a custom search engine on iOS have to do with Google?
- daft_pink 2y ago
  Google pays Apple $20 billion per year to be the default search engine. I assume they either have some say or Apple want to increase the value in paying or the other search engines pay to be listed or there is some reason why safari doesn’t allow any search engines beyond a very short list. I doubt it’s an accident that you only get about 5 choices where google is the only decent choice
  - tantalor 2y ago
    Those all sound like complaints the government could take up with Apple, not Google.

koalaman 2y ago

I don't see how a Google breakup can be operationalized. There's just no way the company's stack can support it without decades of work. It'd be like dismembering a person and expecting all the pieces to go off and thrive.

asadotzler 2y ago
Google's problem, not the government's.

MongoTheMad 2y ago

break off chrome and enable AD block again.

rockzom 2y ago

If Gmail isn't 5 dollars a month by 2030 I'll be shocked.

riku_iki 2y ago
Gmail is super important source of ads targeting data. They won't kill it.
layer8 2y ago
Gmail is how many people get tied to Google; I doubt it.

bhartzer 2y ago

Android should almost definitely be split off as a separate company. I could see Android and Chrome as a combined company.

gigel82 2y ago
Android and Chrome are not great examples. They already open source projects (or 99.9% based on open source AOSP and Chromium codebases), which themselves only survive because Google is funding tons of engineers to work on them. The cut should be in the vertical integration stacks. Like in Apple's case between the hardware and OS, between the OS and the App Store. In Google's case, their hardware is already open, they mostly keep apps in their walled garden (and take their 30% troll tax) with things like GooglePlay and other Google "services", not sure how that would be something to break apart. Realistically, the best outcome we can hope for is breaking Ads away from Search.

summerlight 2y ago

The problem of so-called "break-up" option is that there are not many buyers who can afford operating those services (those costs at least billions every year even if those could be purchased for free) and those who can afford are already serious monopolists. Imagine MS buying Chrome, Meta buying AdWords, Apple buying Android etc etc. You probably don't want that. Other feasible way to avoid this would be keeping Google ads to subsidize them, but then what's the point of change? This is why the remedy should touch very specific illegal practices. Structural changes need proper legislation which targets the entire market. Otherwise, you'll just see balloon effects in action.

pretext-1 2y ago
It’s a publicity traded company they don’t need to be sold to be broken up. Each division retains its own value and shareholders get proportionate shares for the new stocks.

tonymet 2y ago

Like US vs Microsoft, by the time a resolution arrives, it will be 10 years out of date. No one cared about IE bundling, and IE had already lost dominance. Search and web are dead media. in 10 years no one will care.

layer8 2y ago

The root of all the “evil” here is ads. I have no particular solutions to suggest — though banning paid ads altogether sounds like a worthwhile idea, apart from the definitional difficulties — but I believe that’s the aspect that needs to be tackled one way or the other.

gerash 2y ago
Of course you think this way because you're the consumer of the free ad-funded internet services.
- layer8 2y ago
  I'd gladly pay for all internet services I use in an ad-free world. Indeed I already do pay for a quite number of services.

amyamyamy2 2y ago

what happened to employees at companies that were broken up in the past? do they generally just leave to competitors?

missedthecue 2y ago

I think we need a better term than monopoly, that separates it from what people usually mean which is 'the best product'. I literally cannot think of any sort of product or service with lower switching costs than internet search. Typing bing.com takes 0.8 seconds and costs $0. Hundreds of orders of magnitude easier than switching to a different railroad if only one goes through your town. Google is a big ass company and enjoys outsized market share because people choose to use it. Everyone who buys a MacBook or Surface computer or smartphone does one thing immediately and that's to download Chrome. It's literally the first thing people voluntarily choose to do after powering on the device for the first time. I'm not sure why we need government interference here which in all likelihood would change no customer behaviour but probably just add a few extra clicks in front of the Chrome downloading process. When Alphabet begins doing something like banning Google Fiber customers from accessing bing.com, that will be interesting. But there honestly very minimal anti-competitive behaviour like that happening at the moment.

ossyrial 2y ago
> Google is a big ass company and enjoys outsized market share because people choose to use it. If this were true, Google could make the immediate and easy decision to increase their annual profits by $26 billion, by simply stopping to pay browser vendors to make Google the default search engine. https://untested.sonnet.io/Defaults+Matter%2C+Don't+Assume+Consent https://untested.sonnet.io/Defaults+Matter%2C+Don't+Assume+C...
- danielmarkbruce 2y ago
  The person didn't say "all people choose it no matter what". The statement is true as written.
- throwaway48540 2y ago
  Their need to buy advertising proves it is not a monopoly. If they were, they'd make that easy and profitable decision immediately.
  - 2y ago

seydor 2y ago

I think forcing google to break the buy side from the sell side of advertising is the most obvious and probably beneficial way to break it apart. This should have never happened in the first place , and similar things should be happening to other bigTech. Advertising money is the lifeblood of this industry

bdw5204 2y ago

With search, there are actually 2 different products. The index itself is a textbook natural monopoly. There's no upside in having more than 1 web crawler as long as it can be trusted to just crawl the web but there's plenty of downside in the form of increased bandwidth costs for web sites. The actual search rankings are where competition makes sense. So spin the Google search index off as a non-profit that makes its product available at a reasonable cost to anybody who wants to run a search engine. Then you spin off the rest of Google as separate companies. Android/Pixel, Google Ads/Analytics, Youtube, Chrome, Gmail/Docs/Drive and Maps/Cloud would all be separate businesses. Chrome would likely be best spunoff as a non-profit as well, operating an open source web browser project. Of course, if you're going to break up Google you also have to break up the rest of FAANG too or they're just going to step right into the space vacated by Google and probably buy up the Baby Googles[0]. Apple would probably need to be broken up into a hardware company, a software company and a services company. Amazon would need to be broken up into AWS, Amazon Shopping and Prime Video. You could arguably even break Amazon Shopping up into the online store and the logistics company. Microsoft would need to be broken up into Windows, Office, Xbox, Bing and Azure. Xbox would then itself need to be broken up to unwind all of its purchases of independent video game companies. If you're breaking up Xbox, you also have to do the same with Playstation (spinning them loose from Sony and unwinding their own acquisitions). It might also be a great idea to then do the same with major 3rd party video game companies like EA, basically unwinding all of their acquisitions. Meta would need to be broken up into Facebook, Oculus, Instagram, WhatsApp and Meta Ads. Once you start breaking up Google, you open up Pandora's box and basically have to keep going until you break up the entire tech sector. That's why it is so tricky to do it. Once you're done with tech, it'd be a good idea to look at other sectors such as health care, Hollywood and the news media where consolidation has been rampant over the past few decades. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Bell_Operating_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Bell_Operating_Compan...

cogman10 2y ago
> The index itself is a textbook natural monopoly. I would argue that because of this, the index itself should be something operated by the public rather than privately. This is especially true because it's within the best interests of the public to have an archive of the internet. The wayback machine currently supports that and it's on its last legs. Index the internet with a public search API, then let future search engines hit that an optimize based on internal algorithms to get better results.

throawayonthe 2y ago

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cut3 2y ago

Separate ads from them.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

novia 2y ago

They could take the search team, flip a coin for each employee, and split it, maintaining rank. The team that's forced to leave to start their own search company will be able to leave with the full Google search codebase and dependencies (yes I know they have a monorepo, but figure it out). That team will from that day forward be able to create a forked version of the product. Every gripe they had about it will be able to be fixed. They'll also be given half of Google's cash to hire the best people. If search & ads are the main money makers, then force the existing company to compete with itself in those fields. Also, instead, they could just unmerge doubleclick from Google. Let them make money by having ads on search and other places without BEING the advertising company.

h_tbob 2y ago

I think Google is really big, but the mail in the coffin for me is that android is open source. I don’t see how apple beat epic but google lost. Lawyers

ProllyInfamous 2y ago

My major complaint is when cities/states/governments only use a Google product for hosting allegedly-public data — which is otherwise inaccessible (unless you allow access to e.g. Google Drive). Even worse is when these "public forums" are hosted entirely within walled gardens, e.g. Facebook; then you need an account (and not just DNS whitelisting) to participate in this public forum. All government entities should be required to post public documents on their own servers/equipment/hostname.

webninja 2y ago

The obvious and least painful change for Google is to make the top 3 most popular browsers on any platform have to allow any search engines supplied by the user. The user has to paste a custom url into a text box supplied by their favorite search engine’s website. That way people can use meaningful search engines like Marginalia, Kagi, or others. It’s such a simple change that would have a massive impact in forcing meaningful competition in the search sphere. Google funds Apple for search dominance and Firefox for reasons I don’t know of. Neither Safari (on mobile nor desktop) nor Firefox allow custom user supplied search engines. The presets they supply appear to be controlled opposition. I want to be able to use Marginalia, Kagi, Yandex, MWMBl and SearXNG by default after a few settings changes.

Stopmonopoly 2y ago

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