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I think most people do not understand that Google funnels a lot of their profits to make Chrome and Android into OSS. Youtube may be the only viable company th

by hzia 2y ago

I think most people do not understand that Google funnels a lot of their profits to make Chrome and Android into OSS. Youtube may be the only viable company that can come out of Google. Rest will either have to charge a lot of money or die. And we will be left with an even more profitable ad giant, that sends back all profits to it's share holders.

ineedasername 2y ago
The Android Play Store alone generates about $100B/year for Google. I saw $40B as what Google has spent over the years on Android. That seems like a viable business.
- threeseed 2y ago
  At least according to this, Google generated ~$47B/year. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/google-play-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/google-play-statistics/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/444476/google-play-annual-revenue https://www.statista.com/statistics/444476/google-play-annua...
  - hzia 2y ago
    That’s revenue not profits. Majority goes to app devs. Profits are all that matter
    - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
      I disagree, the government should absolutely consider how much app devs would lose out on before they decide on how to carve up google.
      - meiraleal 2y ago
        We would gain a lot from an independent Chrome and app store that needs and respect devs.
        __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
        That's my point. Let's ensure that however we carve up Google, whatever pieces are left continue to support the developers.
    - nl 2y ago
      Profits are not all that matters. The money Google spends internally either on development or on cross subsidies is no profit and is what most of the issues in this discussion are addressing. Profits is just money they couldn't find a place to spend on growth. (Also a maximum of 30% goes to app devs which isn't a majority any way you measure it)
      - bobviolier 2y ago
        70% goed to app devs (right?)
        yreg 2y ago
        of course
    - ThunderSizzle 2y ago
      This is a naive take. Companies want their book-profit to be as close to zero, because they make their income tax to the IRS close to 0. Most companies intentionally waste money on expenses to help drive future growth, or atleast avoid taxes. This is why you hear constantly Amazon pays almost no taxes compared to their revenue.
      - gizmo 2y ago
        Amazon was the exception actually. That's why it's the poster child for being perpetually break-even. The surge in AI capex spending of the last couple of years is partially because big tech has finally found something to shovel their billions into. Before that big tech just sat on their billions with no plan of what to do with it. But even AI spending doesn't really put a dent in the money pile because big tech is so astonishingly profitable. Apple makes $100 billion in accounting profit annually. Google and Microsoft each $75 billion. How can you reinvest that kind of money? You can't. It's too much. Even Amazon gave up and booked $44 billion in net profit.
        homebrewer 2y ago
        So they effectively burn money, and yet OSS funding is an unsolved problem, and large parts of our foundation rely on unpaid volunteers "in Nebraska". Fantastic. I love the industry more and more with every passing day.
      - triceratops 2y ago
        Some real "they just write it off Jerry" energy in this comment.
        ThunderSizzle 2y ago
        No. Your confusing different accounting methodologies. For tax accounting purposes, the goal is to show the IRS near-zero profit. Their internal books will track expenses in a different way so as to produce a non-tax profit, buy that's all internal non-tax accounting, and tends ro be private compared to SEC filings.
- ekianjo 2y ago
  People still consider revenue = profits?
T-Winsnes 2y ago
I think you underestimate the value of controlling the platform that you base all your revenue from. Chrome controls the internet and android has a huge market share on mobile. The latest changes to chrome that breaks plugins like ublock origin allows them to keep maximising their advertising revenue. I think these two being open source is a major reason why they have been so successfully adopted. It isn’t direct revenue, but the control and indirect revenue that comes from that which is the driver
- IX-103 2y ago
  People keep bringing up Manifest v3 like it's some evil plot to show people ads. Nevermind that Chrome already ships with its own adblocker which blocks bad ads. The fact is that with the Spectre mitigations added to Chrome, the performance of networking with manifest v2 was bad. Having to keep sending every network request through 3 different processes just in case there is a plugin (uses by the minority of users) that wants to filter the requests before they are made. Of course, blocking resource fetches like that could have easily been detected by any server that cares about it, and the interaction with service workers was...weird. With manifest v3 you can still block ads. You can remove them from the DOM, you can make them invisible, you can replace them. You just can't programmatically decide which resources to filter - only a declarative model for resource filtering is supported.
  - ledauphin 2y ago
    it's at the very least an evil plot to stop users (and extension authors) from _making their own decisions_ about the efficiency trade-off. which is really just absurd when you think about it. I don't care about another hour of battery life, but even if I did, I'd be perfectly happy if Chrome just told me "hey these extensions aren't very battery-efficient!" and I got to make my own decision about that.
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      >I don't care about another hour of battery life If you're stuck having to run a ton of shitty JS code with ad malware in it, because your web browser doesn't allow you to effectively block it, that's probably going to cost you more in battery life than the overhead needed by MV2 to block that stuff.
krackers 2y ago
So if Google dies then we'll have more diverse browser and mobile ecosystem? Where exactly is the downside?
- agent281 2y ago
  Google funds Chrome. Other browsers use Chrome as a base. The majority of Firefox's funding is from Google. They will suffer as well. MS would need to step back up with browsers and you would also have Safari left over. I think it would be a major shock to the browser ecosystem.
  - brendoelfrendo 2y ago
    Other browsers use the open source Chromium project as their base, not Chrome. If Google killed off Chrome tomorrow, those other browsers could continue using the Chromium codebase, and new maintainers could step up to manage the Chromium project. Nothing needs to change.
    - diffeomorphism 2y ago
      Wishful thinking. It is much too large of a project for "new maintainers could step up" once google jumps off both chrome and chromium. Chromium would either slowly wither away or the new maintainers would be MS Edge or Amazon or some other large company.
      - stephenr 2y ago
        Before the current Chromtastrophe, multiple companies maintained their own, fully independent rendering engines, according to web standards. Microsoft didn't stop developing EdgeHTML because it's too hard, they stopped because Google kept giving them the fuck around on sites like YouTube. The whole point of web standards is that you can have multiple implementations for the same thing - there's zero reason that post-Google, Blink needs to be maintained by a single entity. Microsoft can maintain their own fork of Blink, or bring back Edge, or adopt WebKit, or whatever works for them. Opera and <insert laundry list of chrome-but-not-chrome browsers> have the same options, sans EdgeHTML. The whole reason these companies are using Chromium/Blink is that Google has a stranglehold on web standards, and by being a me-too Chrome-alike they get support for Google's half baked ideas for free, to prevent the ever-fickle user base from switching browser because their browser doesn't support the latest half-written web standards draft.
debit-freak 2y ago
Sure, a lot in absolute terms. A pittance in relative terms.
tehjoker 2y ago
The ideological blindness that causes people to speak past each other is this. Innovation requires reliable funding, such as monopoly profits or government funding. Monopoly leads to undemocratic concentrations of power and various private taxes on the public (e.g. in the case of Google, your personal information). Bell Labs was funded by monopoly funding with a law directing a certain amount to research. Competition improves the balance of power, but destroys the ability to innovate except on relatively easy to engineer variations of existing tech within a 1-5 year window projects. The recipients of monopolist largess (such as OSS) whither on the vine as competition drives profits to zero over time (which then causes consolidation and monopoly formations...). The answer I prefer of course is to create the efficiencies and innovative capacity of large scale industry but control them democratically. Nationalize Google.
- typewithrhythm 2y ago
  This is a completely strange idea to me... You are seemingly measuring innovation within a specific product and forgetting that the product itself is a new creation that came without any monopoly as it built. People eventually recognise a good idea, you don't need a well funded research group to have one. You need an environment where it's plausible for the new thing to work and be profitable. Breaking up a giant like google seems that it would make it easier to promote an new idea, as it has less risk of being crushed by the interests of a tangentially related company.
  - tehjoker 2y ago
    The idea behind nationalization is that it takes Google out of the market economy and the profit motive. It's then possible to rationally design supports for new ideas, and removes one of the biggest reasons for fighting new ideas.
    - typewithrhythm 2y ago
      My experiences with actual nationalised companies does not support this; in general they are no more likely to support innovation or good design that supports other industries than the private sector, but they absolutely will create legal issues when trying to innovate around them. Telecoms in Australia is probably the best modern example I can think of, the nbn was given a monopoly and now delivers an expensive inferior product, and there is no real way to compete or innovate around it. It doesn't exactly take them out of the market, it just creates a enterprise with legal protections and non market motivations for what it actually does.
ulfw 2y ago
If you think Android couldn't survive on revenues from whatever they may rebrand their Store / "Android Play Store" as, I got a robotaxi to sell ya.
- fragmede 2y ago
  The self-driving car taxi service Waymo is another Google division that could do well in terms of being a company and having a product.
ekianjo 2y ago
Android is hardly the best example of OSS out there. It's clearly controlled by Google.
starspangled 2y ago
Not a lot of their profits. A minuscule fraction of their profits, and far less than OSS has given value to them. And the value from contributing back to open source is generally pretty high by itself because you get a lot of review and maintenance from the community on the features and code you want for your proprietary business, so it's not like they are doing a lot of it out of pure altruism. OSS would be fine without Google, it was great before Google ever existed. There are intrinsic motivations to contribute, which is why thousands of companies do.
maeil 2y ago
Chrome would be absurdly profitable. Imagine selling the default search engine setting to the highest bidder on Chrome when it already goes for $20 billion/year on the far less popular Safari.
- creato 2y ago
  But that behavior was just determined to be illegal, at least when the bidder is Google. It seems ridiculous if the sequence of events that happens here is: 1. Google is fined/broken up due (in part) to paying for the default search engine position. 2. In the newly broken off chrome company, they auction the default search engine position. 3. Google cannot bid on it. So I guess Microsoft is going to win that position? Who else is going to pay for it? I can't imagine this is what happens. This would just make the DoJ look absolutely foolish and would basically put the DoJ in the position of being Microsoft's personal attack dog. But on the other hand, what else could happen? It's still ridiculous even if it's anyone other than Microsoft that is the winning bidder.
  - kelnos 2y ago
    Perhaps that behavior wouldn't be illegal in a scenario where Google has been broken up, and Chrome and Google Search are separate legal entities.
    - creato 2y ago
      Why would that matter though? Google owning chrome doesn't really have anything to do with them paying Apple for the safari default.
  - thayne 2y ago
    > what else could happen? It prompts the user to pick a search engine on install? And let's be honest, most people will probably pick google anyway. But then the question is, how will companies like Mozilla and a spin-off company for chrome make money if they can't auction off the default search engine anymore?
danielheath 2y ago
I have always viewed android as a hedge against another player (eg apple) controlling advertising on mobile and undermining their dominance of the sector.
realusername 2y ago
> think most people do not understand that Google funnels a lot of their profits to make Chrome and Android into OSS. Chrome maybe but for Android, it's debatable at best to state it as OSS. AOSP doesn't run on a single phone on earth, not even the emulator and the freedom of users to modify it is very limited in practice. I'd put it as "mostly source available" instead of open source.
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
Pretending that this is a sincere comment, it raises a question: Why is Google fighting the charges. If divestiture creates a more profitable company for the shareholders, according to this HN commenter, then why not settle with the US government. No one can predict the future. HN commenters love to try, every day. For example, speculating about a "breakup". If neither side changes their position, Google will be fighting the US government for many years to come. That we can say with reasonable certainty. Regardless of the remedy sought. As a shareholder I do not want the company to be fighting the US government for years to come. It's not good for business. But Google fans no doubt read the news and spin it to be positive. No matter what, in their minds only Google can win. Self-delusion. Meanwhile, the legal process will continue. More money for the lawyers.
davedx 2y ago
Most people do not understand this because Alphabet's financial filings are chronically opaque and break out very little of how the financials of the different parts of the group interact. How do you know how much Google funnels of its profits (are you sure you mean this?) into Chrome and Android's open source projects? Do you work at Google and have access to this information? Are you sure you know what you're talking about here?
0xEF 2y ago
Do you have any sources showing how Google spends its profits? Honest question, you got me curious. From my likely ignorant perspective, the devs I know build open-source products with a barely perceptible fraction of the money Google makes, and they seem fine, so I'm wondering just how much Google dumps into that. My initial search produces a lot of speculative numbers, but nothing verifiable. Admittedly, this is a realm I have little experience with, so perhaps I am looking for the wrong terms. It was also my understanding that the books of large companies like this are typically closed unless demanded by legal entities.
youngtaff 2y ago
Youtube, Search, Display Ads, and Cloud Compute are probably the four profitable business units GTM and GA probably live with Display Ads Chrome and Android probably live with Search Who knows where ChromeOS, and all the hardware devices go
wvh 2y ago
How much effort do Chrome and Android require from a company the size of Google? It's a genuine question. Jolla/Sailfish make a mobile operating system with a handful of people, and even though that system pretty minimal, I'd say the added value on the Android side is the ecosystem of apps and porting to devices, which is done by other developers and manufacturers than Google. And I'm not sure how many people work on Firefox itself on any given day. I guess it's just really hard to get a clear picture on what all those people in large companies are really doing day to day. The overhead must be enormous, and likely a lot of engineering effort is thrown at the wall to see what sticks.
- lolinder 2y ago
  > Jolla/Sailfish make a mobile operating system with a handful of people My biggest question is how long they can stay at a handful if they become popular. The increased burden of security patches alone would likely turn that handful into a small army. Security through obscurity is often mocked (for good reason), but it actually does work in cases like this as long as you don't reach Android's scale.
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    I wonder what percentage of the workforce Google has working on Android is dedicated to fixing security issues. Probably a sizable minority... Maybe one in ten? I'd love to know the real numbers.
briandear 2y ago
I don’t really care about Chrome or Android. Sounds like helping Chrome and Android has nothing to do with the acceptability of a near monopoly.
mumblemumble 2y ago
I think that similar arguments were made about Ma Bell and Bell Labs back in the day. And it's true, a lot of great things did come out of Bell Labs. In fact, it almost seems like the only people able to produce great things in the 1970s were massive entrenched corporations like Ma Bell. Funny, that. Come to think of it, wasn't there a much more vibrant browser ecosystem in the late 90s and early 2000s, before Google used its dominant position in the ad market to undercut the competition? There used to be a lot more mobile operating systems out there, too. I wonder what happened to all that competition? It's almost like some sort of massive anti-competitive influence came into force in the tech scene somewhere in the 2000s. . .
- hzia 2y ago
  I agree on the Bell Labs analogy Most browsers have consolidated over time because we are constantly updating web standards and bar for security is so high. On top of that everything has to be insanely backward compatible WebGPU is a good example. Implementing that securely in a nightmare
  - verdverm 2y ago
    It might be time more of us think about the browser/chromium like Linux/kernel There are lots of distos out there, but we all use the same core and make it better & safer together.
    - stego-tech 2y ago
      > It might be time more of us think about the browser/chromium like Linux/kernel Coming from Enterprise Architecture world, if you're not already treating browsers as full-fledged operating systems to manage and secure, then you're operating dangerously. In fact, that's actually why I'm resistant to further "webification" of software and applications, as it's the same drawbacks as nested virtualization: now we have the OS layer that makes the computer run and the web browser layer to interact with stuff to worry about, both of which have their own performance penalties and threat profiles. As much as I love REST APIs (and boy, do I love them and their simplicity), I don't like the idea of everything running a web server when it doesn't have to be.
matheusmoreira 2y ago
> Google funnels a lot of their profits to make Chrome and Android into OSS No, that is incidental. What is the first and principal thing it does, what needs does it serve by making open source browsers and operating systems? Control. Google maintains appreciable control over mobile devices and the web by making their own mobile operating system and browser. In cases such as these, it is only a matter of time before they tightening the screws. They already have. > we will be left with an even more profitable ad giant, that sends back all profits to it's share holders But not one that can kill ad blockers or ram remote attestation down people's throats.
troyvit 2y ago
Speaking to search, both DDG and Kagi seem to be doing fine, each with very different models. Google could figure out something there. Google ads would be fine on its own. They'd continue to dominate. Google Analytics would probably have a problem. The big thing going for it is that it's free. Without being able to funnel their data hoovering into the rest of the ecosystem they'd probably lose that. If they _did_ have to charge, would they release a simpler tier that isn't so mind-bogglingly complex? That'd be nice. Docs? Yeah, I don't see a way forward with that unless they charge a lot. There are some competitors, but they suck, and they struggle, and google docs seems one of the major nodes of interoperability between a lot of their products. It's be really hard to replicate that if you're broken up. Calendar. Hah. Well. Everybody gets to suffer given that google calendar uses its own protocols. It's not like everybody could just switch to DAV and have close to the same functionality, at least out of the gate. I agree with you re: Chrome and Android, but I will say that current FOSS forks of Android seem to do well. I think they have enough runway to continue making a good product. It would put phone makers into a bind, but I personally think their suffering is also a good thing. Fewer phone makers == less e-waste. Maybe people start holding onto their phones for a few years. Honestly I couldn't care less about Chrome, except that I hope it does die. But Microsoft could take over the engine and use its hegemony to continue funneling money into developing it. Firefox would be in a tough spot. They'd have to find another sponsor. I know they've been trying to diversify but I think we'd see a very different browser from them within 3 years of the breakup. The good news is that there is no shortage of oligarchs to help pick up the pieces. Which is good because I bet Alphabet is going to start whinging about "massive layoffs" soon.

by hzia 2y ago

ineedasername 2y ago

The Android Play Store alone generates about $100B/year for Google. I saw $40B as what Google has spent over the years on Android. That seems like a viable business.

threeseed 2y ago
At least according to this, Google generated ~$47B/year. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/google-play-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/google-play-statistics/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/444476/google-play-annual-revenue https://www.statista.com/statistics/444476/google-play-annua...
- hzia 2y ago
  That’s revenue not profits. Majority goes to app devs. Profits are all that matter
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    I disagree, the government should absolutely consider how much app devs would lose out on before they decide on how to carve up google.
    - meiraleal 2y ago
      We would gain a lot from an independent Chrome and app store that needs and respect devs.
      - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
        That's my point. Let's ensure that however we carve up Google, whatever pieces are left continue to support the developers.
  - nl 2y ago
    Profits are not all that matters. The money Google spends internally either on development or on cross subsidies is no profit and is what most of the issues in this discussion are addressing. Profits is just money they couldn't find a place to spend on growth. (Also a maximum of 30% goes to app devs which isn't a majority any way you measure it)
    - bobviolier 2y ago
      70% goed to app devs (right?)
      - yreg 2y ago
        of course
  - ThunderSizzle 2y ago
    This is a naive take. Companies want their book-profit to be as close to zero, because they make their income tax to the IRS close to 0. Most companies intentionally waste money on expenses to help drive future growth, or atleast avoid taxes. This is why you hear constantly Amazon pays almost no taxes compared to their revenue.
    - gizmo 2y ago
      Amazon was the exception actually. That's why it's the poster child for being perpetually break-even. The surge in AI capex spending of the last couple of years is partially because big tech has finally found something to shovel their billions into. Before that big tech just sat on their billions with no plan of what to do with it. But even AI spending doesn't really put a dent in the money pile because big tech is so astonishingly profitable. Apple makes $100 billion in accounting profit annually. Google and Microsoft each $75 billion. How can you reinvest that kind of money? You can't. It's too much. Even Amazon gave up and booked $44 billion in net profit.
      - homebrewer 2y ago
        So they effectively burn money, and yet OSS funding is an unsolved problem, and large parts of our foundation rely on unpaid volunteers "in Nebraska". Fantastic. I love the industry more and more with every passing day.
    - triceratops 2y ago
      Some real "they just write it off Jerry" energy in this comment.
      - ThunderSizzle 2y ago
        No. Your confusing different accounting methodologies. For tax accounting purposes, the goal is to show the IRS near-zero profit. Their internal books will track expenses in a different way so as to produce a non-tax profit, buy that's all internal non-tax accounting, and tends ro be private compared to SEC filings.
ekianjo 2y ago
People still consider revenue = profits?

T-Winsnes 2y ago

I think you underestimate the value of controlling the platform that you base all your revenue from. Chrome controls the internet and android has a huge market share on mobile. The latest changes to chrome that breaks plugins like ublock origin allows them to keep maximising their advertising revenue. I think these two being open source is a major reason why they have been so successfully adopted. It isn’t direct revenue, but the control and indirect revenue that comes from that which is the driver

IX-103 2y ago
People keep bringing up Manifest v3 like it's some evil plot to show people ads. Nevermind that Chrome already ships with its own adblocker which blocks bad ads. The fact is that with the Spectre mitigations added to Chrome, the performance of networking with manifest v2 was bad. Having to keep sending every network request through 3 different processes just in case there is a plugin (uses by the minority of users) that wants to filter the requests before they are made. Of course, blocking resource fetches like that could have easily been detected by any server that cares about it, and the interaction with service workers was...weird. With manifest v3 you can still block ads. You can remove them from the DOM, you can make them invisible, you can replace them. You just can't programmatically decide which resources to filter - only a declarative model for resource filtering is supported.
- ledauphin 2y ago
  it's at the very least an evil plot to stop users (and extension authors) from _making their own decisions_ about the efficiency trade-off. which is really just absurd when you think about it. I don't care about another hour of battery life, but even if I did, I'd be perfectly happy if Chrome just told me "hey these extensions aren't very battery-efficient!" and I got to make my own decision about that.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    >I don't care about another hour of battery life If you're stuck having to run a ton of shitty JS code with ad malware in it, because your web browser doesn't allow you to effectively block it, that's probably going to cost you more in battery life than the overhead needed by MV2 to block that stuff.

krackers 2y ago

So if Google dies then we'll have more diverse browser and mobile ecosystem? Where exactly is the downside?

agent281 2y ago
Google funds Chrome. Other browsers use Chrome as a base. The majority of Firefox's funding is from Google. They will suffer as well. MS would need to step back up with browsers and you would also have Safari left over. I think it would be a major shock to the browser ecosystem.
- brendoelfrendo 2y ago
  Other browsers use the open source Chromium project as their base, not Chrome. If Google killed off Chrome tomorrow, those other browsers could continue using the Chromium codebase, and new maintainers could step up to manage the Chromium project. Nothing needs to change.
  - diffeomorphism 2y ago
    Wishful thinking. It is much too large of a project for "new maintainers could step up" once google jumps off both chrome and chromium. Chromium would either slowly wither away or the new maintainers would be MS Edge or Amazon or some other large company.
    - stephenr 2y ago
      Before the current Chromtastrophe, multiple companies maintained their own, fully independent rendering engines, according to web standards. Microsoft didn't stop developing EdgeHTML because it's too hard, they stopped because Google kept giving them the fuck around on sites like YouTube. The whole point of web standards is that you can have multiple implementations for the same thing - there's zero reason that post-Google, Blink needs to be maintained by a single entity. Microsoft can maintain their own fork of Blink, or bring back Edge, or adopt WebKit, or whatever works for them. Opera and <insert laundry list of chrome-but-not-chrome browsers> have the same options, sans EdgeHTML. The whole reason these companies are using Chromium/Blink is that Google has a stranglehold on web standards, and by being a me-too Chrome-alike they get support for Google's half baked ideas for free, to prevent the ever-fickle user base from switching browser because their browser doesn't support the latest half-written web standards draft.

debit-freak 2y ago

Sure, a lot in absolute terms. A pittance in relative terms.

tehjoker 2y ago

The ideological blindness that causes people to speak past each other is this. Innovation requires reliable funding, such as monopoly profits or government funding. Monopoly leads to undemocratic concentrations of power and various private taxes on the public (e.g. in the case of Google, your personal information). Bell Labs was funded by monopoly funding with a law directing a certain amount to research. Competition improves the balance of power, but destroys the ability to innovate except on relatively easy to engineer variations of existing tech within a 1-5 year window projects. The recipients of monopolist largess (such as OSS) whither on the vine as competition drives profits to zero over time (which then causes consolidation and monopoly formations...). The answer I prefer of course is to create the efficiencies and innovative capacity of large scale industry but control them democratically. Nationalize Google.

typewithrhythm 2y ago
This is a completely strange idea to me... You are seemingly measuring innovation within a specific product and forgetting that the product itself is a new creation that came without any monopoly as it built. People eventually recognise a good idea, you don't need a well funded research group to have one. You need an environment where it's plausible for the new thing to work and be profitable. Breaking up a giant like google seems that it would make it easier to promote an new idea, as it has less risk of being crushed by the interests of a tangentially related company.
- tehjoker 2y ago
  The idea behind nationalization is that it takes Google out of the market economy and the profit motive. It's then possible to rationally design supports for new ideas, and removes one of the biggest reasons for fighting new ideas.
  - typewithrhythm 2y ago
    My experiences with actual nationalised companies does not support this; in general they are no more likely to support innovation or good design that supports other industries than the private sector, but they absolutely will create legal issues when trying to innovate around them. Telecoms in Australia is probably the best modern example I can think of, the nbn was given a monopoly and now delivers an expensive inferior product, and there is no real way to compete or innovate around it. It doesn't exactly take them out of the market, it just creates a enterprise with legal protections and non market motivations for what it actually does.

ulfw 2y ago

If you think Android couldn't survive on revenues from whatever they may rebrand their Store / "Android Play Store" as, I got a robotaxi to sell ya.

fragmede 2y ago
The self-driving car taxi service Waymo is another Google division that could do well in terms of being a company and having a product.

ekianjo 2y ago

Android is hardly the best example of OSS out there. It's clearly controlled by Google.

starspangled 2y ago

Not a lot of their profits. A minuscule fraction of their profits, and far less than OSS has given value to them. And the value from contributing back to open source is generally pretty high by itself because you get a lot of review and maintenance from the community on the features and code you want for your proprietary business, so it's not like they are doing a lot of it out of pure altruism. OSS would be fine without Google, it was great before Google ever existed. There are intrinsic motivations to contribute, which is why thousands of companies do.

maeil 2y ago

Chrome would be absurdly profitable. Imagine selling the default search engine setting to the highest bidder on Chrome when it already goes for $20 billion/year on the far less popular Safari.

creato 2y ago
But that behavior was just determined to be illegal, at least when the bidder is Google. It seems ridiculous if the sequence of events that happens here is: 1. Google is fined/broken up due (in part) to paying for the default search engine position. 2. In the newly broken off chrome company, they auction the default search engine position. 3. Google cannot bid on it. So I guess Microsoft is going to win that position? Who else is going to pay for it? I can't imagine this is what happens. This would just make the DoJ look absolutely foolish and would basically put the DoJ in the position of being Microsoft's personal attack dog. But on the other hand, what else could happen? It's still ridiculous even if it's anyone other than Microsoft that is the winning bidder.
- kelnos 2y ago
  Perhaps that behavior wouldn't be illegal in a scenario where Google has been broken up, and Chrome and Google Search are separate legal entities.
  - creato 2y ago
    Why would that matter though? Google owning chrome doesn't really have anything to do with them paying Apple for the safari default.
- thayne 2y ago
  > what else could happen? It prompts the user to pick a search engine on install? And let's be honest, most people will probably pick google anyway. But then the question is, how will companies like Mozilla and a spin-off company for chrome make money if they can't auction off the default search engine anymore?

danielheath 2y ago

I have always viewed android as a hedge against another player (eg apple) controlling advertising on mobile and undermining their dominance of the sector.

realusername 2y ago

> think most people do not understand that Google funnels a lot of their profits to make Chrome and Android into OSS. Chrome maybe but for Android, it's debatable at best to state it as OSS. AOSP doesn't run on a single phone on earth, not even the emulator and the freedom of users to modify it is very limited in practice. I'd put it as "mostly source available" instead of open source.

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

Pretending that this is a sincere comment, it raises a question: Why is Google fighting the charges. If divestiture creates a more profitable company for the shareholders, according to this HN commenter, then why not settle with the US government. No one can predict the future. HN commenters love to try, every day. For example, speculating about a "breakup". If neither side changes their position, Google will be fighting the US government for many years to come. That we can say with reasonable certainty. Regardless of the remedy sought. As a shareholder I do not want the company to be fighting the US government for years to come. It's not good for business. But Google fans no doubt read the news and spin it to be positive. No matter what, in their minds only Google can win. Self-delusion. Meanwhile, the legal process will continue. More money for the lawyers.

davedx 2y ago

Most people do not understand this because Alphabet's financial filings are chronically opaque and break out very little of how the financials of the different parts of the group interact. How do you know how much Google funnels of its profits (are you sure you mean this?) into Chrome and Android's open source projects? Do you work at Google and have access to this information? Are you sure you know what you're talking about here?

0xEF 2y ago

Do you have any sources showing how Google spends its profits? Honest question, you got me curious. From my likely ignorant perspective, the devs I know build open-source products with a barely perceptible fraction of the money Google makes, and they seem fine, so I'm wondering just how much Google dumps into that. My initial search produces a lot of speculative numbers, but nothing verifiable. Admittedly, this is a realm I have little experience with, so perhaps I am looking for the wrong terms. It was also my understanding that the books of large companies like this are typically closed unless demanded by legal entities.

youngtaff 2y ago

Youtube, Search, Display Ads, and Cloud Compute are probably the four profitable business units GTM and GA probably live with Display Ads Chrome and Android probably live with Search Who knows where ChromeOS, and all the hardware devices go

wvh 2y ago

How much effort do Chrome and Android require from a company the size of Google? It's a genuine question. Jolla/Sailfish make a mobile operating system with a handful of people, and even though that system pretty minimal, I'd say the added value on the Android side is the ecosystem of apps and porting to devices, which is done by other developers and manufacturers than Google. And I'm not sure how many people work on Firefox itself on any given day. I guess it's just really hard to get a clear picture on what all those people in large companies are really doing day to day. The overhead must be enormous, and likely a lot of engineering effort is thrown at the wall to see what sticks.

lolinder 2y ago
> Jolla/Sailfish make a mobile operating system with a handful of people My biggest question is how long they can stay at a handful if they become popular. The increased burden of security patches alone would likely turn that handful into a small army. Security through obscurity is often mocked (for good reason), but it actually does work in cases like this as long as you don't reach Android's scale.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  I wonder what percentage of the workforce Google has working on Android is dedicated to fixing security issues. Probably a sizable minority... Maybe one in ten? I'd love to know the real numbers.

briandear 2y ago

I don’t really care about Chrome or Android. Sounds like helping Chrome and Android has nothing to do with the acceptability of a near monopoly.

mumblemumble 2y ago

I think that similar arguments were made about Ma Bell and Bell Labs back in the day. And it's true, a lot of great things did come out of Bell Labs. In fact, it almost seems like the only people able to produce great things in the 1970s were massive entrenched corporations like Ma Bell. Funny, that. Come to think of it, wasn't there a much more vibrant browser ecosystem in the late 90s and early 2000s, before Google used its dominant position in the ad market to undercut the competition? There used to be a lot more mobile operating systems out there, too. I wonder what happened to all that competition? It's almost like some sort of massive anti-competitive influence came into force in the tech scene somewhere in the 2000s. . .

hzia 2y ago
I agree on the Bell Labs analogy Most browsers have consolidated over time because we are constantly updating web standards and bar for security is so high. On top of that everything has to be insanely backward compatible WebGPU is a good example. Implementing that securely in a nightmare
- verdverm 2y ago
  It might be time more of us think about the browser/chromium like Linux/kernel There are lots of distos out there, but we all use the same core and make it better & safer together.
  - stego-tech 2y ago
    > It might be time more of us think about the browser/chromium like Linux/kernel Coming from Enterprise Architecture world, if you're not already treating browsers as full-fledged operating systems to manage and secure, then you're operating dangerously. In fact, that's actually why I'm resistant to further "webification" of software and applications, as it's the same drawbacks as nested virtualization: now we have the OS layer that makes the computer run and the web browser layer to interact with stuff to worry about, both of which have their own performance penalties and threat profiles. As much as I love REST APIs (and boy, do I love them and their simplicity), I don't like the idea of everything running a web server when it doesn't have to be.

matheusmoreira 2y ago

> Google funnels a lot of their profits to make Chrome and Android into OSS No, that is incidental. What is the first and principal thing it does, what needs does it serve by making open source browsers and operating systems? Control. Google maintains appreciable control over mobile devices and the web by making their own mobile operating system and browser. In cases such as these, it is only a matter of time before they tightening the screws. They already have. > we will be left with an even more profitable ad giant, that sends back all profits to it's share holders But not one that can kill ad blockers or ram remote attestation down people's throats.

troyvit 2y ago

Speaking to search, both DDG and Kagi seem to be doing fine, each with very different models. Google could figure out something there. Google ads would be fine on its own. They'd continue to dominate. Google Analytics would probably have a problem. The big thing going for it is that it's free. Without being able to funnel their data hoovering into the rest of the ecosystem they'd probably lose that. If they _did_ have to charge, would they release a simpler tier that isn't so mind-bogglingly complex? That'd be nice. Docs? Yeah, I don't see a way forward with that unless they charge a lot. There are some competitors, but they suck, and they struggle, and google docs seems one of the major nodes of interoperability between a lot of their products. It's be really hard to replicate that if you're broken up. Calendar. Hah. Well. Everybody gets to suffer given that google calendar uses its own protocols. It's not like everybody could just switch to DAV and have close to the same functionality, at least out of the gate. I agree with you re: Chrome and Android, but I will say that current FOSS forks of Android seem to do well. I think they have enough runway to continue making a good product. It would put phone makers into a bind, but I personally think their suffering is also a good thing. Fewer phone makers == less e-waste. Maybe people start holding onto their phones for a few years. Honestly I couldn't care less about Chrome, except that I hope it does die. But Microsoft could take over the engine and use its hegemony to continue funneling money into developing it. Firefox would be in a tough spot. They'd have to find another sponsor. I know they've been trying to diversify but I think we'd see a very different browser from them within 3 years of the breakup. The good news is that there is no shortage of oligarchs to help pick up the pieces. Which is good because I bet Alphabet is going to start whinging about "massive layoffs" soon.