4 ms·

This has always been a weird case because the propose remedies have more to do with Apple than Google, and impact Apple negatively just as much (or more!) than

This has always been a weird case because the propose remedies have more to do with Apple than Google, and impact Apple negatively just as much (or more!) than Google.

echelon 2y ago
There would be so much opportunity in breaking up Apple and Google. And Amazon and Meta. Just think of all the new startups and money to be made by breaking up big tech. I think the valuation of a broken-up Google and Apple would exceed the monolithic conglomerates that they have become. So many of their business units and products don't even monetize because they're going for an intangible "platform value" that is only achievable at obscene scale. In this hulking form, they can reach into new markets and charge nothing, killing off all the incumbents, just so that they can grow their empires larger and tighten their grips on your attentions and wallets. Amazon gives away Hollywood movies for free because it keeps your eyeballs glued to them. And they're also a grocery store, for god's sake. A big tech breakup would provide much needed oxygen to the ecosystem, lift a bunch of impossible to beat barriers, and result in far more competition and money making. Imagine a web that isn't dominated by Google or a phone market that isn't controlled by a duopoly. Imagine if we could suddenly launch iPhone and Gmail and YouTube competitors. The energy barriers are too high today because the big players have consolidated every angle of attack. No wonder Peter Thiel and Vance want it. This would turn the big tech money siphons over to venture capital, entrepreneurs, and engineering ICs again. We should all be 100% for this.
- tedd4u 2y ago
  >And they're also a grocery store, for god's sake. They're also your primary care doctor! Amazon OneMedical! https://health.amazon.com/onemedical https://health.amazon.com/onemedical Scroll down the page a bit.
- aurareturn 2y ago
  Counter point: Would breaking up Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft decrease the progress in AI since those major companies are forking over hundreds of billions to build out mega AI infraustructure?
  - bigstrat2003 2y ago
    Maybe, but why should we care? So far those billions haven't actually given us anything useful, it's all just toys. I'm not against research, but when the research hasn't yet produced a useful outcome then I don't feel like there is a strong societal good in keeping it going.
    - nonameiguess 2y ago
      I don't think that's a fair assessment. I'm not anywhere near as high on LLMs as many, but Google and Meta's moonshot side projects and insane investments into infrastructure have given us Waymo, TensorFlow, PyTorch, Kubernetes, React, MapReduce, http2, the entire Go programming language, V8, all of Facebook's investments into improving PHP and OCaml. We can quibble over how valuable each of these things individually is, but it's not just toys. It's foundational tooling used all over the place that the larger community pretty just got for free. They've also been some of the biggest contributors to the Linux kernel. To be fair, I don't know that we needed Google et al for this. We used to get this kind of thing from DARPA and university researchers, but Google and Facebook and friends made so much money from ads that they hired away all the best researchers so they no longer work at universities, at the same time government was hollowing out funding for basic research. We could get this thing from real public sources if we made the public investments, but I don't know that the political will or taxpayer willingness exists to do that now. We need to get it from somewhere.
      - scarface_74 2y ago
        Do you really think the government funding this would lead to better outcomes? We see the censorship that China is doing with DeepSeek and we just saw the dictator in chief freezing all spending unilaterally even though that wasn’t in his power
    - vineyardmike 2y ago
      Google Translate (and all the new competing products) alone should be reason enough to demonstrate outstanding societal good. You can now travel anywhere in the world and communicate in the local language. Using offline models that translate between any two languages. That’s almost literally biblical magic levels of social good. (Plus we got amazing image recognition tech, LLMs, voice and NLU stuff, AlphaFold for protein analysis, etc)
- vineyardmike 2y ago
  I don’t want to comment on if a breakup is a “good” thing for society, because I vaguely agree, but I’m not sure I agree with you on many points here. > I think the valuation of a broken-up Google and Apple would exceed the monolithic conglomerates that they have become. So many of their business units and products don't even monetize because they're going for an intangible "platform value". I think a lot of these products aren’t monetized because they’re actually bad businesses or failed ventures and companies have the free cash to support them. A lot more of Google’s (for example) random side projects seem to be getting subscriptions or collapses into existing ones. I also think that vertical integration creates unique value sometimes. I think spinning off these random side businesses could destroy the side businesses, but that this may still raise stock prices as the companies get better margins. I think a lot of these products are bad businesses because big tech salaries are high and that makes labor costs hard to account for. I think the breakups obviously rectify consolidated power. 100%. But I don’t see more mobile phone operating systems coming from a breakup of Apple, for example. Gmail isn’t going to be replaced by a new email provider. Nor would we see a new YouTube, or other dominant businesses. Disrupting these massive aggregators won’t come from direct competition, but rather new product and service experiences. TikTok has shown that tech is already not impenetrable. Finally, I totally agree that this would be a feeding frenzy for VCs, but VCs learned in the last decade how to rip off ICs even more through delaying IPOs and more aggressive dilution. So I wouldn’t be holding my breath as an IC that breaking up Google (or others) will make jobs better.
  - inetknght 2y ago
    > I think the breakups obviously rectify consolidated power. 100%. But I don’t see more mobile phone operating systems coming from a breakup of Apple, for example. Gmail isn’t going to be replaced by a new email provider. Nor would we see a new YouTube, or other dominant businesses. Disrupting these massive aggregators won’t come from direct competition, but rather new product and service experiences. Perhaps you're right. Perhaps breaking these products up would not create more competition. But it would mean that these products must determine how to make money on their own merits. That might mean a better product overall. Or it might mean that the product really doesn't deserve to exist as a consumer product.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Kye 2y ago
  Going from the breakup of AT&T to the reconstitution of AT&T took about 40 years. Standard Oil probably did the same, though I haven't seen any fancy charts showing it on a timeline like with AT&T. There's probably some useful lessons to pick up from that time if they go the breakup route.
bilbo0s 2y ago
It's weird because we're currently trying to use the existing regulatory regime, which was created god knows how many decades ago, to wrangle with new companies that clearly don't fit into the existing definitions. Now we're in this embarrassing situation that people are trying to extricate themselves from because they know if this makes it to the Supremes the whole thing will be called out for the legally laughable farce that it is. This is easy to solve though, just change the laws. Why are we putzing around with courts when we can just change the law? I'll never understand that? Maybe the politicians see court cases as being able to be seen to be doing something, while at the same time having the comfort of knowing nothing will actually be done? Because they could easily just change the laws. The strategy they're pursuing doesn't make sense right now.
- BryantD 2y ago
  It's fairly hard to pass substantial bills these days thanks to polarization -- when a significant portion of your base sees cooperation as a betrayal, the incentives get wonky. (Not pointing that comment at either the left or the right to the exclusion of the other.) The days of Ted Kennedy finding ways to work across the aisle are gone, at least for now.
- alsetmusic 2y ago
  > This is easy to solve though, just change the laws. When a large subset of people only care about culture war, this isn’t easy.
- mgfist 2y ago
  > This is easy to solve though, just change the laws. Changing the law for highly politicized situations is damn near impossible today.
onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
Are there examples of any other outcomes that prohibited two specific companies from exchanging anything of value? This seems like a strange outcome. Why not just prohibit payment for default search? Doesn't Apple use Google's servers to pre-train it's AI models? So that gets banned to? Why? How and why is any better for Apple to pay Amazon or MSFT for that than Google?
- nonameiguess 2y ago
  It's not exactly this, but there is an interesting thing going on right now with the San Diego Padres in American Major League Baseball. The owner died last year and control of the team initially passed to his younger brothers. His wife wasn't happy about that and sued them and the team has ended up with an injunction pending resolution of who gets to actually control it going forward, and they've gone from being one of the most active franchises in the league of the past decade to making literally no new deals this offseason and watching all of their free agents leave. They basically can't buy anything until the court decides who of the surviving family gets to decide what to buy, which effects their own employees who can't get new contracts and any other franchises that otherwise might have traded with them.
  - bell-cot 2y ago
    It would be lovely if the 6th Amendment ("speedy and public trial") also applied to non-criminal proceedings.
    - plagiarist 2y ago
      But then wealthy people might have to pay the entities they would rather defraud indefinitely with eternally delayed judgements.
    - usefulcat 2y ago
      I always thought the right to a 'speedy' trial was more about latency than throughput. I.e., the accused shouldn't have to wait 10 years before the trial begins, but no guarantees about the duration of the trial.
throwaway287391 2y ago
Isn't the "ban the Apple-Google iOS search deal" just one of several proposed remedies, with the most significant one being a Google breakup? Certainly seems like that one would affect Google more than Apple. Or am I confused and the Google breakup thing is a proposed remedy in a separate case?
- madeofpalk 2y ago
  Specifically only selling off Chrome https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/27/24302415/doj-google-search-antitrust-remedies-chrome-android#STIHPQ https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/27/24302415/doj-google-sear... DoJ asserts that owning a browser gave Google an unfair advantage in building a search engine to the degree that it prevented meaningful competition. I don't think Google losing Chrome is too harmful to Google. I would say it's probably equal to Apple losing billions from the default search deal.

This has always been a weird case because the propose remedies have more to do with Apple than Google, and impact Apple negatively just as much (or more!) than Google.

echelon 2y ago

There would be so much opportunity in breaking up Apple and Google. And Amazon and Meta. Just think of all the new startups and money to be made by breaking up big tech. I think the valuation of a broken-up Google and Apple would exceed the monolithic conglomerates that they have become. So many of their business units and products don't even monetize because they're going for an intangible "platform value" that is only achievable at obscene scale. In this hulking form, they can reach into new markets and charge nothing, killing off all the incumbents, just so that they can grow their empires larger and tighten their grips on your attentions and wallets. Amazon gives away Hollywood movies for free because it keeps your eyeballs glued to them. And they're also a grocery store, for god's sake. A big tech breakup would provide much needed oxygen to the ecosystem, lift a bunch of impossible to beat barriers, and result in far more competition and money making. Imagine a web that isn't dominated by Google or a phone market that isn't controlled by a duopoly. Imagine if we could suddenly launch iPhone and Gmail and YouTube competitors. The energy barriers are too high today because the big players have consolidated every angle of attack. No wonder Peter Thiel and Vance want it. This would turn the big tech money siphons over to venture capital, entrepreneurs, and engineering ICs again. We should all be 100% for this.

tedd4u 2y ago
>And they're also a grocery store, for god's sake. They're also your primary care doctor! Amazon OneMedical! https://health.amazon.com/onemedical https://health.amazon.com/onemedical Scroll down the page a bit.
aurareturn 2y ago
Counter point: Would breaking up Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft decrease the progress in AI since those major companies are forking over hundreds of billions to build out mega AI infraustructure?
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  Maybe, but why should we care? So far those billions haven't actually given us anything useful, it's all just toys. I'm not against research, but when the research hasn't yet produced a useful outcome then I don't feel like there is a strong societal good in keeping it going.
  - nonameiguess 2y ago
    I don't think that's a fair assessment. I'm not anywhere near as high on LLMs as many, but Google and Meta's moonshot side projects and insane investments into infrastructure have given us Waymo, TensorFlow, PyTorch, Kubernetes, React, MapReduce, http2, the entire Go programming language, V8, all of Facebook's investments into improving PHP and OCaml. We can quibble over how valuable each of these things individually is, but it's not just toys. It's foundational tooling used all over the place that the larger community pretty just got for free. They've also been some of the biggest contributors to the Linux kernel. To be fair, I don't know that we needed Google et al for this. We used to get this kind of thing from DARPA and university researchers, but Google and Facebook and friends made so much money from ads that they hired away all the best researchers so they no longer work at universities, at the same time government was hollowing out funding for basic research. We could get this thing from real public sources if we made the public investments, but I don't know that the political will or taxpayer willingness exists to do that now. We need to get it from somewhere.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      Do you really think the government funding this would lead to better outcomes? We see the censorship that China is doing with DeepSeek and we just saw the dictator in chief freezing all spending unilaterally even though that wasn’t in his power
  - vineyardmike 2y ago
    Google Translate (and all the new competing products) alone should be reason enough to demonstrate outstanding societal good. You can now travel anywhere in the world and communicate in the local language. Using offline models that translate between any two languages. That’s almost literally biblical magic levels of social good. (Plus we got amazing image recognition tech, LLMs, voice and NLU stuff, AlphaFold for protein analysis, etc)
vineyardmike 2y ago
I don’t want to comment on if a breakup is a “good” thing for society, because I vaguely agree, but I’m not sure I agree with you on many points here. > I think the valuation of a broken-up Google and Apple would exceed the monolithic conglomerates that they have become. So many of their business units and products don't even monetize because they're going for an intangible "platform value". I think a lot of these products aren’t monetized because they’re actually bad businesses or failed ventures and companies have the free cash to support them. A lot more of Google’s (for example) random side projects seem to be getting subscriptions or collapses into existing ones. I also think that vertical integration creates unique value sometimes. I think spinning off these random side businesses could destroy the side businesses, but that this may still raise stock prices as the companies get better margins. I think a lot of these products are bad businesses because big tech salaries are high and that makes labor costs hard to account for. I think the breakups obviously rectify consolidated power. 100%. But I don’t see more mobile phone operating systems coming from a breakup of Apple, for example. Gmail isn’t going to be replaced by a new email provider. Nor would we see a new YouTube, or other dominant businesses. Disrupting these massive aggregators won’t come from direct competition, but rather new product and service experiences. TikTok has shown that tech is already not impenetrable. Finally, I totally agree that this would be a feeding frenzy for VCs, but VCs learned in the last decade how to rip off ICs even more through delaying IPOs and more aggressive dilution. So I wouldn’t be holding my breath as an IC that breaking up Google (or others) will make jobs better.
- inetknght 2y ago
  > I think the breakups obviously rectify consolidated power. 100%. But I don’t see more mobile phone operating systems coming from a breakup of Apple, for example. Gmail isn’t going to be replaced by a new email provider. Nor would we see a new YouTube, or other dominant businesses. Disrupting these massive aggregators won’t come from direct competition, but rather new product and service experiences. Perhaps you're right. Perhaps breaking these products up would not create more competition. But it would mean that these products must determine how to make money on their own merits. That might mean a better product overall. Or it might mean that the product really doesn't deserve to exist as a consumer product.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Kye 2y ago
Going from the breakup of AT&T to the reconstitution of AT&T took about 40 years. Standard Oil probably did the same, though I haven't seen any fancy charts showing it on a timeline like with AT&T. There's probably some useful lessons to pick up from that time if they go the breakup route.

bilbo0s 2y ago

It's weird because we're currently trying to use the existing regulatory regime, which was created god knows how many decades ago, to wrangle with new companies that clearly don't fit into the existing definitions. Now we're in this embarrassing situation that people are trying to extricate themselves from because they know if this makes it to the Supremes the whole thing will be called out for the legally laughable farce that it is. This is easy to solve though, just change the laws. Why are we putzing around with courts when we can just change the law? I'll never understand that? Maybe the politicians see court cases as being able to be seen to be doing something, while at the same time having the comfort of knowing nothing will actually be done? Because they could easily just change the laws. The strategy they're pursuing doesn't make sense right now.

BryantD 2y ago
It's fairly hard to pass substantial bills these days thanks to polarization -- when a significant portion of your base sees cooperation as a betrayal, the incentives get wonky. (Not pointing that comment at either the left or the right to the exclusion of the other.) The days of Ted Kennedy finding ways to work across the aisle are gone, at least for now.
alsetmusic 2y ago
> This is easy to solve though, just change the laws. When a large subset of people only care about culture war, this isn’t easy.
mgfist 2y ago
> This is easy to solve though, just change the laws. Changing the law for highly politicized situations is damn near impossible today.

onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago

Are there examples of any other outcomes that prohibited two specific companies from exchanging anything of value? This seems like a strange outcome. Why not just prohibit payment for default search? Doesn't Apple use Google's servers to pre-train it's AI models? So that gets banned to? Why? How and why is any better for Apple to pay Amazon or MSFT for that than Google?

nonameiguess 2y ago
It's not exactly this, but there is an interesting thing going on right now with the San Diego Padres in American Major League Baseball. The owner died last year and control of the team initially passed to his younger brothers. His wife wasn't happy about that and sued them and the team has ended up with an injunction pending resolution of who gets to actually control it going forward, and they've gone from being one of the most active franchises in the league of the past decade to making literally no new deals this offseason and watching all of their free agents leave. They basically can't buy anything until the court decides who of the surviving family gets to decide what to buy, which effects their own employees who can't get new contracts and any other franchises that otherwise might have traded with them.
- bell-cot 2y ago
  It would be lovely if the 6th Amendment ("speedy and public trial") also applied to non-criminal proceedings.
  - plagiarist 2y ago
    But then wealthy people might have to pay the entities they would rather defraud indefinitely with eternally delayed judgements.
  - usefulcat 2y ago
    I always thought the right to a 'speedy' trial was more about latency than throughput. I.e., the accused shouldn't have to wait 10 years before the trial begins, but no guarantees about the duration of the trial.

throwaway287391 2y ago

Isn't the "ban the Apple-Google iOS search deal" just one of several proposed remedies, with the most significant one being a Google breakup? Certainly seems like that one would affect Google more than Apple. Or am I confused and the Google breakup thing is a proposed remedy in a separate case?

madeofpalk 2y ago
Specifically only selling off Chrome https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/27/24302415/doj-google-search-antitrust-remedies-chrome-android#STIHPQ https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/27/24302415/doj-google-sear... DoJ asserts that owning a browser gave Google an unfair advantage in building a search engine to the degree that it prevented meaningful competition. I don't think Google losing Chrome is too harmful to Google. I would say it's probably equal to Apple losing billions from the default search deal.