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I'm very curious to see what a breakup looks like. Past breakups involved "uniform" businesses: - American Tobacco: Commodity - Standard Oil: Commodity - AT&

• 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.
    • account42 2y ago
      > Surely the crawling is the easiest part? The AI goldrush has seen dozens of new players gobbling up the entire internet. The AI goldrush also has sites scrambling to block any crawlers other than a short list of approved search engines. Even before this mess Googlebot running on Google IPs often received special treatment. Search itself is still a hard problem but one that can be solved independently. Crawling on the other hand requires websites to cooperate and due to Google's size enough won't care to bother with anyone else.
  • throwadobe 2y ago
    That's a pipe dream and really achieves nothing other than hurting Google.
• bluGill 2y ago
  If they break up the ad business it could be helpful. Otherwise search and youtube are like you say synergistic and there is no obvious way to break them up.
  • oneplane 2y ago
    Keep in mind that without the Ad business, most of Google's products cannot exist. Search gets paid by Ads, same with YouTube. Most of the free product are just Ad delivery platforms, and they are all pretty much on the verge of losing money as-is. The Ad business itself has margin enough to cover that, and without a set of outlets like those services, it wouldn't be able to exist. Vimeo has tried a different approach, but it's hardly in the same league as YouTube.
    • IX-103 2y ago
      YouTube has been profitable in recent years -- thanks to an investment in hardware transcoding reducing costs. So that is potentially separable. One point to mention is that there are two different "Google Ads". Search ads are very different from page ads (DoubleClick). You could certainly take away the DoubleClick part, but separating Search Ads from Search is much harder.
    • bluGill 2y ago
      The larger point is youTube should sell its own ads. As should search. Double click as an agency that sells ads for other websites shouldn't be allowed to sell to the previous google properties, and vice versa.
• deleted 2y ago
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• mcpar-land 2y ago
  Breaking up their individual businesses can cause each business to have incentives that line up better with their customers / users. Example: if Chrome was separated from Google, they won't have as much of an incentive to push back against adblockers with things like Manifest V3. Or include APIs that are only available to google websites (Which it has! https://x.com/lcasdev/status/1810696257137959018 https://x.com/lcasdev/status/1810696257137959018)
  • shadowgovt 2y ago
    It's an interesting hypothesis, but it's entirely possible that separated from Google, Chrome is either not a viable business model (browsers don't make money on their own) or is incentivized to get into bed with some other ad company to make money, to effectively the same result.
    • InsideOutSanta 2y ago
      Aren't you pointing out the exact problem with Google? If Chrome wasn't a viable business without Google's ads subsidizing it, isn't its existence in its current form exactly the kind of anti-competitive outcome we would be better off without? Without Google subsidizing Chrome, a real competitive market for browsers might emerge, with more vendors investing more effort into competing for users, without having to compete against one of the richest companies in the world that sees its browser as a loss-leader for its ad business, has the ability to dump infinite money into its product, and can advertise it on the one website that 90% of people regularly visit?
      • sdenton4 2y ago
        I dunno, man - a competitive market for browsers likely involves the browser itself inserting a bunch of ads all over the place. It becomes another axis for enshittification, rather than a mostly-neutral window into the web. It's not enough to hope that a business model appears... Ask any journalist.
      • abduhl 2y ago
        What possible browser competition can exist? The market price for a browser from a consumer perspective is $0. I will never pay for a browser. All that will happen is new ad placements from smaller companies, directly in the browser.
• oneplane 2y ago
  There are probably only a small number of services that could successfully spin off on their own, but a lot of the value is in integration, which as others point out is also how some things seem 'free'. An easier example would be Microsoft and Office; you could spin off an application like that quite successfully, the same might apply to their ERP. But those examples only stem from the fact that they used to be isolated 'offline' products, and Microsoft is working hard to undo that. Trying to draw parallels between that and Google Workspace, that is a technical nightmare considering the entire distributed nature means that half of workspace can't exist outside of Google. You'd have to copy Google to host it outside of it, and I'm not talking about GCP or Borg or anything like that, it's everything, from the GSLB to Zanzibar, from monorail to the custom hardware everything runs on. Perhaps a double-digit years long refactor could change that, but nobody wants to pay for that.
  • jerf 2y ago
    Microsoft for a good long while made money on two things: Office and Windows. You could break them up into "Office", "Windows", and any combination of "everything else", and for the most part what would happen is that the Office and Windows parts would make more money proportionally, and most if not all of the "everything else" would die. Even products that could nominally have survived on their own if they had grown up on their own would die because by the time the corporate culture adapted to the new realities they'd mostly already be dead. Given that monopoly-breakups are supposed to be in the public interest, it is a complicated argument to make in court that the public is advantaged by all those ancillary services getting killed. Now, I'm happy to declare that; I think the "culture of free" is corrosive, to probably an even greater degree than most other HN users. I'm outright willing to call it morally corrosive, for both the companies and the consumers. You, dear $READER, may not be inclined to go that far, especially perhaps on the consumer side. I'm just putting down my cards so that you can see that when I point out that in court that's going to be a difficult argument, it's an admission against my interests and biases. Google is similar. They make money on ads and everything else is a distant second. Even search might have trouble standing on its own because it is funded on ad revenue; split them up that way and how is search getting funded? Google Cloud could certainly survive on its own for a time, but if it had to reduce investment it could go into an uncompetitive death spiral of having to match investment resources to profits over the years. Gmail could in principle make radically more money if they charged $5/month or something, but how many customers will do that? And how on Earth would you even break up Android? You can't just hack it out as its own thing; it integrates with a lot of Google things and there's no way they'd all end up in the same entity. I'm willing to just hack them to pieces and let the market figure it out. I think in the long term we'd come out stronger. But I'm arguing here in a relatively friendly forum for that and probably a lot of you still disagree with me. I'd hate to be arguing this in court.
• shadowgovt 2y ago
  And, indeed, there's a case to be made that there's net consumer harm to breaking up the synergy. Maybe we do want to make everything a little worse for the average customer so that more businesses can compete in the marketplace. But I, for one, will miss being able to attach Drive content smoothly to my emails, or being able to use my voice to trigger map navigation on my phone.
• brookst 2y ago
  Ads and search are the two businesses that most directly collude and which could both survive and thrive independently. If the search business worked with other ad networks to maximize their revenue, while the ad business worked with other search engines, we’d likely see higher quality search results, less confusion about what’s an ad versus a result, and better as rates for buyers. That said I don’t support that remedy at all. Maybe ten or fifteen years ago, but now it’s too late and the market is evolving around Google. IMO a consent decree that they won’t pay anyone for exclusive search placement is sufficient.
  • nordsieck 2y ago
    > Ads and search are the two businesses that most directly collude and which could both survive and thrive independently. I'm skeptical that search is viable as an independent business at scale. I know DDG is making a go of it, but the business only has to pay a single salary.
    • deepsquirrelnet 2y ago
      I’m skeptical that Google search contains any search results. So maybe that part of their business is already dead and they just need an honest rebranding to ad search.
      • nordsieck 2y ago
        > I’m skeptical that Google search contains any search results. So maybe that part of their business is already dead and they just need an honest rebranding to ad search. I don't know about you, but I remember the time before Google where search engines openly offered paid search listings. Google's search quality has declines over the years, but I don't think we're at the point you're talking about yet.
    • brookst 2y ago
      Why wouldn’t Google search be viable if it could negotiate rates with multiple ad networks? IMO there would be more net revenue generated from competition in the ad space.
• danaris 2y ago
  Search needs to be a utility. Browsers need to be a utility. Email needs to at least have an option that is a utility. Arguably operating systems need to be a utility. Adtech needs to either go back to what it was when Google started out (simple contextual ads, no targeting, no data collection, no flashing or popups or video or or or or...), or just die.[0] The reason these things have all been operated entirely by for-profit entities up to this point is because they're too new for government to have caught up. All the parts of Google that I've named above as needing to be utilities are fundamental, necessary parts of the modern internet, and are basic requirements for the average person to operate in Western society. > How would spinning off an individual business like Chrome, Android, or AdWords reduce their respective dominance? As for this question, Google uses the profit from its dominance in adtech to fund its dominance in other businesses. That's the textbook definition of an abusive monopoly. Take away the ad money from the other parts of Google, and they'll no longer have an unfair advantage over potential competitors. [0] Yes, this would mean that large parts of the internet that have been free-at-the-point-of-service will have to find new business models or dry up and blow away. No, I don't have a silver bullet solution to this. No, I'm not advocating for nuking adtech from orbit overnight with no replacement.
• pahkah 2y ago
  At the very least, spinning off individual businesses prevents self-preferencing. Google can right now leverage its dominance in one area to increase market share in another. For example, if I load my GMail account in a browser other than Chrome, Google will "helpfully" suggest that I change my default browser to the "recommended" Chrome. This behavior makes it harder for upstarts to get a foot in the door across a wide range of products — by removing these synergies we reduce the grip Google has across all its lines of business. I suspect the AT&T example may be more similar to the current situation than you're thinking. AT&T wasn't just the network, they also manufactured the phones themselves through subsidiary Western Electric. They leveraged their monopoly in phone service to drive customers toward leasing their phones, similarly (if more aggressively) to how Google drives customers from one product to another. Whether this remedy will be so far-reaching beyond search I don't know, but in the abstract there would be benefits to splitting up the conglomerate.
  • everfrustrated 2y ago
    People don't realize, you couldn't just buy a phone - you had to use the one provided by your monopoly phone company. It was only after breakup that there could exist an ecosystem of phone peripherals like answerphones, direct-attach modems (this is why acoustic couplers were a thing), cordless phones, etc.
  • twoodfin 2y ago
    I’m frankly shocked that Google continues to think the juice on that annoying, constant Chrome-in-Gmail popup is worth even a marginal additional anti-trust attention squeeze.
    • asadotzler 2y ago
      It's worth a lot. People regularly fall out of Google's funnel and they must get them back. You think every user that switches to Firefox is a user Google's willing to walk away from?
• CivBase 2y ago
  Chrome and Android are particularly interesting to me. What would splitting those projects off from Google possibly look like? Both are open source projects with "ungoogled" options available, but those options are nowhere near as successful as the Google flavors. Would they just forbid Google from offering their own flavor of Chromium? Even though Android itself is open source, Google Play services really are what allow Google to have so much influence on the Android platform. So what happens to Google Play? Would they be forced to split that off with Android? Would they be forced to continue offering their services for free, but with no strings attached? Would Android have to offer a middleware that lets you choose which services to use a la carte? Would Android device manufacturers have to ship their devices with an open source alternative to Google Play like microG? How do you separate Google from Android without driving everyone to the other side of the smartphone duopoly, iOS? If a breakup does happen, it's going to be wild. I wish I had more faith in our government to come up with the best solution. But something has to be done.
• somastoma 2y ago
  I don't know... Would you call the Kodak "moment" a breakup? Or a failure to move quickly into digital photography...
• az226 2y ago
  Remedies don’t always necessitate a breakup. For instances if Android phones were allowed to not make Google the default search engine, for Apple to ask each user which engine they want instead of there being a default, for query and click through data needing to be shared at cost with other search engine companies, Chrome not being allowed to default to Google but require user input, and so on. Lots of options and more than one remedy can be applied simultaneously.
• lccerina 2y ago
  An interesting read on the matter comes from Cory Doctorow (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shat...). The uniform business here is ads. Google controls the supply, the demand and the marketplace, effectively setting whatever price they want and whatever quality of service they want. Smaller business cannot enter the market as competitors, while customers (here the people wanting to put ads on the internet) are chocked out. Then if you add that Chrome enforces how browser experiences are designed and how tracking is done, you see the problem emerging.