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I'm not sure people understand what the consequences of taking away Google's ad revenue is. If a large enough bank goes under, it takes out not just the bank, b

• stevage 1y ago
  How do you get from "google loses ad revenue" to "android dies"? Even if for some reason Google went bankrupt all these divisions would just be sold off.
• wpm 1y ago
  Too big to fail means too big to exist. Google et. al should never have been allowed to get this large, same as those banks. Better late than never.
  • worik 1y ago
    > Too big to fail means too big to exist. Google et. al should never have been allowed to get this large I agree But placing limits on private property accumulation is a controversial idea But it is an idea who's time must come, or we face a dreadful future of robber barrons and peons
    • michaelt 1y ago
      > But placing limits on private property accumulation is a controversial idea The US wouldn't need a legal limit on wealth to prevent Google from becoming this large. Every major Google product since gmail in ~2004 was acquired. Google Maps? Acquired from Where 2 Technologies. Google Docs? Acquired from Writely. Android? Acquired as a startup. Google Analytics? You guessed it, acquisition. DoubleClick? Once again, acquisition. Deepmind? Acquisition. reCAPTCHA? Acquisition. Youtube? Believe it or not, acquisition. This isn't a story of a business getting big because of their innovation and the vast demand for their much-loved products. This is a story of US competition regulators sleeping on the job for 20 years.
      • pests 1y ago
        I believe they had an analytics offering before they purchased Urchin. Same for DoubleClick.
      • creato 1y ago
        One of the acquisitions you are talking about was 4 people that started a company and was "acquired" by google less than a year later. The idea that something like this should be blocked by competition regulators is frankly, totally insane. Aside from that, in 2004, Google was a ~30B company, 1/3rd the size of e.g. UPS. For comparison, Microsoft was ~10x bigger. The rewriting of history in this thread is just crazy. I don't disagree that google today is huge and some regulation is necessary, but what you are proposing should have been done in 2004 is off the charts ridiculous. Not even totalitarian dictatorships exert that much control over their populations.
        • 1y ago
• wavemode 1y ago
  It's not clear to me why you believe that an antitrust ruling against Google would make them bankrupt. At worst they will lay off workers. But a post-antitrust google is still a viable company
  • The_Blade 1y ago
    somehow, after the ATT, Microsoft, Standard Oil, or American Tobacco antitrust suits, the constituent parts and country soldiered on
    • const_cast 1y ago
      Yeah, especially Tobacco. I mean, there hasn't been an industry gutted that hard ever. They were attacked from all sides. They can't even fucking advertise anymore, and when they can, they have to tell you "hey don't buy this it kills you". And then, cherry on top, when consumers do buy this product, they're allowed to use it in like < 1% of spaces. And yet, somehow, Tobacco is still profitable.
      • AlexandrB 1y ago
        This is very North America-centric. Smoking is still rampant in many countries, including parts of Europe. It was actually a bit of a culture shock for me.
        • const_cast 1y ago
          Oh yes I'm aware, I have family in Eastern Europe and yeah... it's different. When I went in the 2010s you could still smoke in most restaurants. I actually have a strange place for that kind of environment. It's charming, it's endearing, in a way. But it probably sucks for public health.
• x0x0 1y ago
  This is nonsense. Some people may have to sign up to Google One to pay them a fee starting at $20/year to access gmail/drive/docs/groups/forms. We, and they, will all live through. etc.
• dataflow 1y ago
  Would YouTube not also be affected here? I don't have numbers but it seems to me a huge number of people depend on it as both consumers and producers, and I'm not sure it has any viable alternatives. My even bigger worry is actually the effects on privacy, security, and people's data. I'm very curious what other companies people would trust more with their data.
  • cyberax 1y ago
    Why would it? Youtube sells ads (and premium subscriptions) on its own. It doesn't really need the rest of Google, and can just continue living as a separate company.
  • worik 1y ago
    > ta. I'm very curious what other companies people would trust more with their data. The problem is one company with all the data.
    • dataflow 1y ago
      > The problem is one company with all the data. I realize, but the idea that we won't have another giant company succeeding at achieving the same seems like wishful thinking.
      • int_19h 1y ago
        Making sure another company doesn't get into the same position is precisely what antitrust laws and enforcement agencies are for. The only reason why we have the mess we do is because we have made our antitrust toothless starting in 1980s, and it's only gradually coming back now.
• ardacinar 1y ago
  Are we sure that the things listed here will not go away in a few years if Google continues to exist? https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
  • suddenexample 1y ago
    People bringing up this site in this specific way is a pet peeve of mine. What's the largest product that they sunset with no replacement? Stadia? Given the number of products Google has, I wouldn't consider their track record below average.
    • sofixa 1y ago
      And they reimbursed all purchases, including hardware you got to keep. As sad as killing Stadia was (it's still the best cloud gaming service, the UX was marvelous), it couldn't have been done better.
    • satvikpendem 1y ago
      I agree. The vast majority of products "killed by Google" were ones no one were using and many were consolidated into other products.
      • The_Blade 1y ago
        i'm a rageaholic! i just can't live without rageahol!
      • ryao 1y ago
        Google Reader was fairly popular.
        • satvikpendem 1y ago
          > vast majority
    • throwaway314155 1y ago
• fsh 1y ago
  This list is very telling. Instead of a healthy marketplace of companies competing to sell their software and services, we end up with one monopolist who gives away mediocre products and in return taxes everything you buy (in the form of ad spending), and then annoys you with the same ads. How is this a desirable outcome?
  • sofixa 1y ago
    Because the vast majority of people don't want to and have zero intention pf paying separately for email, maps, navigation, browser, etc. In fact, that's how things used to be before Google and their ilk used ads to make an ecosystem, and their ecosystem was better and free at the point of use than what came before
    • fsh 1y ago
      The vast majority of people are paying separately for all kinds of stuff. I don't see a reason why software and digital services have to be different. In the early days, payment was difficult, but this has been long solved. I am convinced that the quality would improve dramatically if there was some actual competition. Also most people would probably prefer not to pay for the ad fees that google extorts from pretty much any company.
      • ikiris 1y ago
        With the exception of fi, If you think any of those services are something people want to pay yet another saas subscription for, you’ve been hitting your own supply too much.
      • tokioyoyo 1y ago
        Everyone would be subscribed to YT premium, if people were ok with paying for ad-free experience.
        • jorvi 1y ago
          Honestly, I feel like people are subconsciously aware that Google is trying to bludgeon them into getting YouTube premium, and they're simply sticking it to Google rather than giving in. Google's gone through: - one skippable 5s ad - two skippable 5s ads - one unskippable 5s and one skippable 15s ads - aforementioned or two 15s ads, one skippable - two 15s unskippable ads - removed the prerenderer 'skip' button to make it more difficult to immediately skip - removed the ad amount indicator and precise length indicator (now just a bar) to psychologically drive people into sunk cost feelings God knows what they're cooking up next. And for large swathes of content, there is no alternative to YouTube.
• ocdtrekkie 1y ago
  Google collapsing would be an incredible gift to the economy. Some companies are paying 30% in their advertising budget, before we even talk about the Play Store tax. We all pay an incredible amount for Google's existence, and a massive renaissance of technology development would occur if it stopped sucking all of the air out of the room. Apart from all of the illegal things, it's just bad that it exists.
• ardit33 1y ago
  This is juvenile thinking... none of them will go away. They can be independent services themselves, and be pretty profitable at it. The upshoot is if they are independent, they will be forced to compete fairly with other services. Which, does increase competition and choice.
  • root_axis 1y ago
    Most would go away and be replaced by another monopolist. Likely Microsoft or Apple.
    • int_19h 1y ago
      So do the same thing to them.
• hamilyon2 1y ago
  Android in this list stands out. If Android goes away, I am not sure who is there to pick up The OS of the world, not IOS, certainly, but who? All else, good riddance. More competition will make better products.
  • nativeit 1y ago
    A non-profit collective of device manufacturers and software developers could probably create a very effective and potent steward for Android's long-term development. But I wouldn't hold my breath.
    • worik 1y ago
      Linux?
      • const_cast 1y ago
        Kinda, yeah. I mean Android is already Linux, just with suspicious, proprietary drivers that hold it back. Some Android phones are still running kernel 3! If manufacturers would just upstream their drivers and make them less shit, then android could take advantage of the entire body of work in GNU/Linux userland.
  • rs186 1y ago
    I can imagine manufacturers that are fully in the Android ecosystem come together to maintain Android, including Xiaomi, Samsung, Oppo etc. There won't be as many feature updates, but it's not like Google puts a lot of resources in Android, or Android is delivering many features these days -- Google moved/laid off many people on Android teams, and many of the recent updates are very minor features. Just look at what's new in Android 14 or 15 -- barely anything. I stopped getting excited about or even caring about major version updates for a while. The pace has already slowed down quite a bit compared to a decade ago, and the ecosystem is very mature and stable.
  • p1necone 1y ago
    The bulk of Android is open source, the only proprietary bits are the google services.
• nataliste 1y ago
  What happens to the assets of the dead Google? Will regulators actually let FAAN take over broad swaths of it? Not likely. It's much more likely that regional or smaller businesses will enter the vaccuum. Similarly but from the consumer side, I already know for many of these, there are already viable alternatives that would easily scale with demand. Even further, if your business is coupled entirely to the continued existence of a single corporation, or if the totality of your economy is entirely coupled to the continued existence of a single corporation, we have a word for that: a monopoly. As far as I know, permitting the existence of monopolies is broadly agreed upon by experts to be a bad idea for many reasons, the least of which is the stifling of viable alternatives. The most severe is that it threatens the legitimacy of the entire government through regulatory capture and, at root, there is no organization that I think is actually "too big to fail" except the actual government. Breaking up Google creates short-term disruptions and penalizes those that let the market even get to the point that the FTC and DOJ needed to intervene (I'm looking at you Mozilla). Everyone, including those now dependent on Google, is benefited in the longterm.
• ccppurcell 1y ago
  I think comparing to banks is silly. Banks don't have competitive advantages like Google has. When banks fail it is not because they lost a competitive advantage (other than the competitive advantage of competent management). The catastrophe associated with a major bank collapse has to do with the specific function of banks in the financial system, not just: oh where are all their customers going to go?
  • janalsncm 1y ago
    Exactly. Even if Google search shut down tomorrow the economy would go on. It’s competitors are probably worse but it wouldn’t cause a run on the banks, which is a specific financial emergency.
    • ccppurcell 1y ago
      I was going to write words to that effect also. I agree but feel I don't have a strong enough argument. I think if Google winked out of existence entirely tomorrow, the world would continue as normal except for the Googler job losses obviously.
• worik 1y ago
  Yes please The existence of none of those services depend on Google, and Google's cross subsidisation distorts the environment dreadfully Worse it puts Google at the centre of so many data flows, and now we realise we do not want a single index of all data, it is positively destructive Good riddance Google.
• janalsncm 1y ago
  Because Google has monopoly power, they can charge whatever they want for ads, and every company in the economy has to pay it. So there’s a pretty good argument the economy is being held back by a “Google tax”. Most of the services you listed above are hardly best in class, and giving them away for free is basically scraps off of the table. The ones which are best in class like Waymo have a good shot at being commercially successful on their own.
• cyberax 1y ago
  > Here's a small number of things that will die when Google dies. I dispute that. Google Docs/Drive/Mail are supported by enterprise subscriptions. Android Auto is also a commercial product that can live off license fees. Fi/Fiber/Pay/Waymo are also not free services, and can survive on their own. Free GMail/Forms/Groups/Translate can probably survive off ad revenue that they can get from third parties. They are pretty trivial expenses at this point. Android and Chrome are the main projects at risk.
  • rs186 1y ago
    To be fair, nobody outside the company knows if Fi/Fiber/Pay are viable businesses, or they are on life support but still around because of the unlimited cash Google has. One can guess they are profitable because they have been around for quite a while and still kicking. But nothing says they won't be the next thing in Google graveyard -- plenty of services seemed to be doing ok before a major reorg sent them to death.
    • cyberax 1y ago
      Google Fi is just an MVNO, and there are quite a few competitors in this area (e.g. I'm using US-Mobile). They have comparable prices, so I'd guess that Fi is at least not operating at a loss. Existing Fiber customers are basically a free money printing press. That's not going to change. But the new area buildouts can slow down. Honestly, Google has been so un-innovative for so long, that it's hard to make a case for them. They just don't have a lot of products that are really benefiting from being under the umbrella of a large company. I can definitely see an argument that back in 2006, Google Docs would have been impossible without access to the internal Google infrastructure and the unique expertise of Google engineers. These days? It's just a run-of-the-mill cloud application that can be trivially hosted on commercially available AWS or Google Compute. Perhaps treating Google as a huge VC company would be more fair.
    • tcmart14 1y ago
      My guess is that even if Google Pay isn't profitable, its probably a 'have to have' feature to ensure an Android equivalent to Apple Pay.
• karaterobot 1y ago
  For the sake of argument, let's grant the implication that Google is in danger of going out of business. Even so, if our economy is at the point where one company going out of business would cripple it, it's almost certainly worth the pain of decoupling from that company. It would hurt, but we would get through it, and it would be better in the long run. On the other hand, if we just threw up our hands and said "do whatever you want, Google, you're too important for us to tell you what to do" then we're pretty much at their mercy. I can't imagine things getting better or fixing themselves in that situation.
• rs186 1y ago
  Let them die. The world will be a better place. Some of the services you mentioned are already very irrelevant: * Fitbit -- no explanation necessary * Google translate -- I don't know about if people use their APIs, but for me personally, I have not used translate for a few years. ChatGPT has been my go-to. * Google Pay -- it has a smaller market share than Samsung Pay. Then next tiers of services -- they are doing ok but there are plenty of competitors in the field: * Gmail, Drive, Docs, Groups, Forms, Cloud, Flights, Fi I even use some of them, but I really don't care if they go away. Life gets a bit more difficult if Maps, Chrome and Android are gone all of a sudden. Maybe we'll be back to using Garmin. Heck, I love the idea that everybody uses Nokia, Bing or Garmin for navigation, and we actually have a decent website -- like the Yelp or Zagar in the old days -- for restaurant reviews. I still see "#1 Rated Zagat" stickers from near two decades ago at many restaurants. Anyway, personally, for the vast majority of the things listed here, I don't see them going away being a bad thing that would even affect as many people as you think.
  • doctorpangloss 1y ago
    YouTube, Gmail and Docs are pretty good. All the alternatives to them really suck...
    • zelphirkalt 1y ago
      YouTube sucks in terms of usability. It only survives, because it is at no cost except for ads viewing and not even that, when using uBlock Origin properly and because of most of the content being there. Other than that is has become so enshittified, it is one of the worst sites I visit. Gmail and Docs are children's toys for people, who don't know much about e-mail and proper documents. Those are the majority of people on the Internet these days though, so Gmail and Docs are going nowhere any time soon.
      • JoshTriplett 1y ago
        > proper documents If by that you are talking about anything that doesn't have built-in version control and simultaneous editing, good riddance to it and the v4-edited-copy-FINAL-edited it rode in on. But there are a few actual competitors to Google Docs that have built-in versioning and simultaneous editing.
• light_hue_1 1y ago
  Good. Every one of those products makes our lives significantly worse. Almost all of these products are subpar garbage that would never survive in a competitive world. Almost none of them have done anything different or interesting or new for over a decade. All these products do is use the search monopoly to take away the opportunity for us to have good versions of them.
• trevor-e 1y ago
  When I worked in the travel tech industry several years ago, it was basically unfair to compete against Google Flights. We just accepted they didn't have to pay for marketing and had infinite compute to work with, and had to differentiate in other ways. They could operate the business at a loss and not really care because it was still good for Google as a whole to have user's travel data. They built a great product but didn't have to play by the rules everyone else had to follow.
  • cmrdporcupine 1y ago
    It's also stopped being great.
    • josephg 1y ago
      Are there better alternatives? I booked flights from Australia to Europe the other day through google flight search. I would never have found the flights I ended up booking via the airline websites directly.
• AlexandrB 1y ago
  Just to pick one of these: google Flights sucks. It had a better competitor - Hipmunk - which went under because Google ate their lunch by integrating flights search into the main search product. Don't know how many of these Google products have similar stories, but it's probably a non zero numbers. What we're getting, in many of these cases, is an inferior product that drove out better competitors through Google search integration.
  • sandipagr 1y ago
    I remember Hipmunk, it was horrible! Google flights is by far the best flight search platform, competition aren't even close. 10x faster search of flights and the calendar view for prices is incredible! I consider Google Maps to be the best application ever created. Products like Google Mail, Calendar, Search, Chrome, Android are absolutely best in class. To call them inferior is laughable.
    • latentcall 1y ago
      Why am I on Reddit
• aucisson_masque 1y ago
  That's the very reason we need to break down Google. It's already too late, Google is already a monopolistic beast. Waiting even more will only make things much worst with the a.i revolution.
• Xelbair 1y ago
  And? If monopoly is attained over such segment failure of those products and services is less bad outcome.
• theptip 1y ago
  > In the best case, killing these will force consumers to move to Apple. I think there are better options than you suggest. The whole doc suite can be had from Microsoft. Maybe folks need to ten bucks a month for something that used to be free, but it’s not like we fundamentally lose capabilities. This is a completely different order of magnitude than banks going under, where people were impacted to the tune of thousands or millions of dollars when they lost their homes.
  • 0xbadcafebee 1y ago
    You're only thinking of consumers. That's still not small potatoes - Google Workspace has 3 billion active users every month (37% of the planet). Office365 has 270 million. But on the business side, there are 6 million businesses that use Google Workspace to manage their company - their drives, documents, email, distribution lists, SSO, etc. They can't just flip a switch and migrate their entire company to another provider. It would take months to years for most companies to fully migrate. And that's for the products/services that there's an analogue for. Not every Google feature and product has a 1:1 replacement. Back to the consumer side - it will be insane the number of things affected that nobody is thinking of. Off the top of my head, imagine the billions of people who have used Google SSO to sign up for random websites, and imagine that just stops working. And on top of that, they were all using Gmail. So now they can't login to all the websites they're signed up for, and they can't send a password reset, because their email no longer works. This is just a few of the thousands of issues there will be, for a large chunk of the planet.
    • int_19h 1y ago
      > But on the business side, there are 6 million businesses that use Google Workspace to manage their company - their drives, documents, email, distribution lists, SSO, etc. They can't just flip a switch and migrate their entire company to another provider. Sounds like it'll be plenty profitable as a business in its own right, then. > Off the top of my head, imagine the billions of people who have used Google SSO to sign up for random websites, and imagine that just stops working. Why would it suddenly stop working? Lots of third party websites use Google (or Microsoft) SSO.
• gazpacho 1y ago
  I agree. At risk of being totally off base because I have not been keeping up with the details of the legal matter it seems to me that the solution isn't to kill Google's core business but rather to force it to sell off some of these branches, with thought and strategy. E.g. one of the comments below pointed out that Google Flights competes with other sites / businesses. Seems like a good candidate to spin off: it could probably be a profitable business in it's own right. Android? Chrome? Idk about those: who / how are they going to be funded? Each piece needs to be analyzed and a deal needs to be struck that's not based on principles as much as it is on what is pragmatically the right balance that benefits people (the American people in particular) the most in the medium to long term.
  • michaelt 1y ago
    > Android? [...] who / how are they going to be funded? Given that Android gets to take a 30% cut of every app sale and in-app purchase, I think they'll survive.
  • andelink 1y ago
    My understanding is that the legal remedies/repercussions being considered involve divesting Android, Chrome. Splitting these off is not in any way killing Googles core business.
• notepad0x90 1y ago
  Google/Alphabet made a critical mistake. When the Alphabet parent company was founded, Google search and AD should have been divested. All those product lines you mentioned should have been part of separate corporations where at most Google is a minority owner in a joint venture. Google will still rip benefits including profits and some exclusivity but it won't stifle competition by directing those product to align with what benefits its AD revenue stream. DOJ is in the wrong when trying to open up search and ad, it should simply split Google up in the way I mentioned earlier. Search and advertising should be their own completely independent company. Mostly everyone wins that way: Competitors, the public , shareholders (one product line won't sink the rest, no "all your eggs in one basket" situation) and even majority shareholders.
• taormina 1y ago
  We understand the consequences. The only projects listed that matter are the open source ones. They’ll survive. The rest don’t matter and will die as they frankly would’ve already if not for Google unfair position in the market.
• randall 1y ago
  Google Cloud is a decent business though, as is YouTube.
• BeetleB 1y ago
  Of this list, the only things I'd miss are Search (because Kagi relies on it) and Maps. I do use Android, but I'll be frank: It sucks. And I'm sure Translate is easily replaceable by a 3rd party.
  • int_19h 1y ago
    Google Translate has been inferior to DeepL for a very long time now. More recently, LLMs will offer far better translation than anything else.
• quitit 1y ago
  They'd have to adapt their business models, the likelihood of the services disappearing are minimal because they each have multiple revenue streams beyond just collecting user data. Indeed we know it's possible because much of the list are me-too products from those which have different business models. Also we don't need a hypothetic situation: Google already kill off a fair chunk of their tools and services, and alternatives rapidly come to fill their place. Google's position largely exists because loss leaders tied against leveraging network effects – and as others have noted, many of their services are piss poor. Google's loss won't be Apple's benefit in any meaningful way, the masses are with Google because it's free, and that's precisely what Apple isn't, and there isn't a great overlap in their services. As a counterpoint I don't think the government's case is the right approach, they should be establishing the rules of the game at the legislative level, everyone needs to be affected by the potential changes, Google didn't form in a vacuum.
• morkalork 1y ago
  Why is this bad? All those services are areas where there could be interesting competition if google didn't strangle them at birth by subsidizing their own version with infinite ad monies. Take google docs as an example, everyone is talking about on shoring essential services now that the USA has become a security threat to other countries. Before now, imagine any European company trying to justify investment for building a docs competitor when google just gives it away? Yeah sure, your data stays on the continent but that wasn't put into perspective until recently.
• everdrive 1y ago
  You just listed a bunch of things I'd like to see go.
• 627467 1y ago
  Isn't it depressing that a single private company wield such influence in society that Stockholm syndrome develops? I don't know about you, but accepting this is true is way worse than loosing gapps
• dannycastonguay 1y ago
  Why do antitrust proposals always suggest breaking up Google by function—Search, Ads, Gmail, etc.? What if, instead, we cloned the whole company? Start by splitting Google into two identical, full-stack companies, each with all the core products. A year later, split them again. Over time, you get 4 or 8 Googles competing across the board. Employees could be assigned algorithmically to avoid chaos. This feels more like cell division than amputation—preserving the synergies while creating competition.
  • zelphirkalt 1y ago
    I would rather have us all weaned off the Google services. That would be a great outcome actually. I am guessing your idea is, that those 2 or 4 Googles would then compete and make better products. But I am not sure how likely it is, that they can fix the mess and pile of bloat, that their software is.
  • jodrellblank 1y ago
    Because that's conceptually simple. With your idea, you cannot clone the domain 'gmail.com' so one of these must happen: - one company gets control of gmail.com and the other has to register a new domain nobody has ever heard of. - the companies share control of gmail.com and users see no changes. Anyone who must upend their digital life (email, contacts, Android login, YouTube login, analytics, 'login with Google' around the web, payment data, etc. etc.) has a problem, the company which gets the domain has a massive advantage. If they share it how are they competing with each other, which one can change the Gmail experience or pricing scheme? Similar with GCP, which split gets to run a big customer's services? The customer isn't going to pay twice for them to be cloned. Does the customer have to update all their logins and API keys and contracts and payment details? Who owns all the Exabytes of pre-existing YouTube data and what happens to all the ISP peering and CDN server hosting contracts which run it? What happens to the legal contracts, tax deals to have offices in certain countries, employee visas, paying the datacenter maintenance bills or office cleaning bills? If the employees sit next to each other and now one works for Google_A and keeps everything the same, the other works for Google_1 and has to move to a new office which hasn't been built yet... same problem as Gmail but internally, one company gets a big advantage the other gets a big disruption. What happens when you algorithmically split employees 'to avoid chaos' but one company ends up with no senior people who have access to a certain system? Since we didn't ask for our accounts to be copied to Google1, do hundreds of millions of us have send Google1 a 'delete my account' request to get rid of them? If I delete my account from GoogleA do they have access and legal right to delete the copy from Google1 as well? If they don't, does my deleted login to GoogleA still work backed by the copy of my account on Google1, because there is only one GMail.com domain and it has to keep working? It's conceptually easier to say maps.google.com is under control of a new company, not subsidised by Google Advertising income, and it needs to compete with other map providers, even if technically it's hard to extract the accounts and data from Google's server infrastructure.
• Jach 1y ago
  It's important to try and de-googleify your life if only so you don't get caught up in making such an exaggerated sky-is-falling point. All of these could literally vanish tomorrow and the world would go on, they all have their alternatives, some of them arguably superior. For some, the near term pain would be greater than for others -- even just on my personal level I'd be caught with my pants down for email, because while I have over the years moved a lot of email addresses to something at my own domain name, I haven't done it for all of them, and I'd still need to update the forwarding to not-google. Not a huge deal though. A big one you didn't even list that's more important than several you did combined is Youtube, but again there are alternatives. The world would change, but I think quite a bit less than you seem to think. To put it another way, the world was undeniably changed by Google, but the change has been done, and they're no longer necessary to keep the biggest changes from reverting. (I'd be more worried about SBCL development if google flights' backend couldn't find a new home -- the product itself has tons of competition + just going directly to airlines.) In actual reality, of course, these things don't disappear overnight, making the pain of switching much, much less for businesses and individuals heavily dependent on some of these things. Even if "google collapsing within a few years" was likely (they have something like a third or more of annual operating expenses saved as cash on hand), a few years is more than enough time. If a business can migrate off of Salesforce or SAP (it can be expensive and time consuming but you can do it!), it can migrate off these.
  • josephg 1y ago
    Yeah. It’s also hard to overstate how many incredible engineers work at Google. Many - perhaps most of them are doing very low value work of adding marginal features nobody cares about to mature products. And in many cases doing so at a glacial pace. Every year thousands of brilliant engineers add ~1m lines of code to Google chrome. And almost nobody notices or cares. As browsers get faster, companies respond by adding more bloat to their websites. If Google suddenly went out of business and 5% of xooglers started companies, we would see a gigantic burst of innovation in computing.
    • zelphirkalt 1y ago
      I am sure there are many capable people working at Google, but the exaggerating of their skill level needs to stop. Some leet coder doesn't necessarily deliver better designed systems than any another engineer. And with that, the cult of believing in whiteboard coding interviews also needs to go away.
• madeofpalk 1y ago
  Waymo has zero business existing as some adtech-funded side project. If Waymo cannot make the case that it should exist or be funded by itself, then it’s just not viable. Kill it.
• fibers 1y ago
  - Google Maps - this would be a big loss but at least this will open the field for Apple Maps and OSM (and I wonder if a competitor will be able to properly leave OSM as is an perhaps integrate traffic data like with Waze or another product like it) - Google Mail - I dumped gmail after Google google'd GDomains and sold it to squarespace so I moved to proton - Google Drive - lol, this is a literal multibillion industry with dropbox, box.com, etc - Google Docs - lol, maybe high schoolers will finally use paper and pencil now? either way proton docs looks promising and perheps a new competitor will take the space - Google Groups - email listservs are still a thing, use that - Google Forms - this seems like a serious loss but surely there will be another competitor - Google Cloud - there are better ways to do on prem now, either way you can use AWS or Azure - Google OAuth - ok this one will be a big loss but also people need to get it together that google isnt mail. - Google Search - this product has been going through a collapse since pre covid give me a break - Google Analytics - lol - Chrome - web standards have been cannibalized by google already so like who cares at this point. just switch to Firefox - Android - another major loss but it still suffers from fragmentation, hopefully Chinese competitors fill the void? - Android Auto - lol - Fitbit - lol didn't they just release an update where you cant export your data anymore - Google Fi - another MVNO that may die out? I mean cricket is still good right? - Google Fiber - a genuine loss and hope they will be treated with care but probably not given the large legacy telcos that will acquire it - Google Flights - another major loss? but even as someone who loves flying it is becoming an untenable situation given the current regime in the White House and ATCs getting knocked out - Google Translate - another major loss but this can be solved with LLMs - Google Pay - lol - Waymo - lol
  • matheusmoreira 1y ago
    I like your style, "lol" is the appropriate response to the notion of losing Google's entire list of products. Android? It's not a big loss. It's no longer the open platform it used to be. Hardware remote attestation will get us locked out of every app if we "tamper" with our devices. It's just a shitty version of iOS now so who cares?
    • fibers 1y ago
• philistine 1y ago
  Google has built all these free products for one reason: your comment. They want people to genuinely believe that they can't be treated like a monopoly in ads. Not because they're not a monopoly in ads. No no no. They want us to believe they're a good monopolist that can't be broken up because they're giving us so many good things. Don't let it sway you for a second that Google is proven to hinder competition and raise ad prices. I don't buy it.
  • redwall_hp 1y ago
    Exactly. Each one of the products in that large list is a separate market that's being distorted by a monopoly. This is all the more evidence that Google needs to be broken up into very tiny pieces. If Google is an ad business, then each of those non-ad products they're giving away for free, supported by the money from the ad machine, is another market they're gaining dominance in by leveraging their position in another market. That's textbook monopolist behavior.
• bernardom 1y ago
  They won't be killed, they'll be forced to stand up as their own businesses, like the Baby Bells after Ma Bell broke up, or the split of Standard Oil. I can see most of these being reasonable standalone businesses. And if they can't be they'll die and get replaced by one that is better.
  • Workaccount2 1y ago
    The problem is that it is ingrained in people that these services are free, and the only way they are free is by having them feed a centralized ad network.
    • lolinder 1y ago
      It's about time that people get used to the idea that you have to pay for some of these things. In aggregate it won't even hurt to transition to that: consumers are, in aggregate, already paying for these things in the form of increased spending on unrelated products they were sold by the ads and increased prices on goods (because their suppliers pay Google monopolistic prices for ads).
    • HWR_14 1y ago
      There is no reason that the ad network needs to be centralized. Thats more convenient, but not required.
• matheusmoreira 1y ago
  Most of those products don't really matter much. I'm sure humanity will survive without them. Maps? Switch to the many alternatives. Android? Now that they've got hardware remote attestation all of the "openness" has been lost so it's become nothing but a worse version of iOS. Only the loss of gmail would be painful and the suffering would not last long. Let it happen. > In the best case, killing these will force consumers to move to Apple. Break Apple up too. Don't forget about Meta and Amazon and all the others. > Apple has no alternative for much of the Business-focused products, so that will take considerable time for companies to adopt alternatives. Not a big deal. Adapt or go out of business. Better yet, price it in by adapting ahead of time: ditch Google now. Moving to Proton Mail with my own domain was much easier than I'd anticipated. It's great. > The whole web will shrink Welp. Sounds like the web is gonna go back to its roots. Sign me up. > huge swaths of the worldwide economy will disappear This distorted economy that rewards total nonsense just because it attracts attention? Let it disappear. Things are just too screwed up and I don't think they're ever gonna be fixed unless something biblical happens. This might just be it.
• davidgerard 1y ago
  You've made literally an argument to nationalise Google and make it into a government department - not to leave it to fester.
• BrenBarn 1y ago
  > If a large enough bank goes under, it takes out not just the bank, but huge sectors of the economy, affecting many more businesses and jobs. That's why the government bailed out the banks when they failed. That is why the banks should have been broken up into smaller banks long before we reached that point, and it is why Google should have been broken up long ago. The only way to prevent the situation you describe is to never allow any single entity to become so important to so many people. It's like planting a tree. The best time to break up a big company is twenty years ago (before it became so big). The second-best time is now.
  • itsoktocry 1y ago
    Smaller banks aren't competitive with larger (global) banks.
    • int_19h 1y ago
      Smaller anything isn't competitive with larger anything, because the larger guys can always price-dump and bundle their way to full market dominance. That's why we need anti-trust in the first place.
      • 1123581321 1y ago
        Customers frequently prefer cheap bundles. The right time for an antitrust decision is often when the company is large and stops behaving competitively.
        • int_19h 1y ago
          Customers acting individually have a short-term perspective which leads them to prefer low prices in general, which is why strategies like price dumping work - yet they are illegal for a reason. The problem is that once the monopolist is entrenched and all competition killed off, those cheap bundles stop being cheap. Hence why you need someone to take the long term view and nip these kinds of things in the bud. A democratically elected government is the best avenue for that.
• brookst 1y ago
  This is an incredibly hyperbolic take. Google, as a search provider, has billions of eyeballs a day. They will still have ad revenue from that. Their basic business model of surveillance capitalism is intact. It just says they can’t control both sides of the ad market. If history is any lesson (the AT&T breakup specifically), divesting ad would create a more competitive ad market and Google the search engine would make more money by playing multiple suppliers against each other, fostering competition. From a principles perspective, if feels like too severe of a remedy and I don’t support it. But “if AT&T is broken up nobody will ever be able to make a phone call again” is too extreme to take seriously. Money follows value. Google has plenty of value outside of its monopoly position.
• FridgeSeal 1y ago
  Oh no. What a shame. Opens popcorn, unfolds garden chair
• mathfailure 1y ago
  We're gonna be fine without all those items from that list. There are plenty of alternatives and plenty more would arise once the monopolist sinks.
• dangus 1y ago
  What a lame take on this. To you the only implied solution is to just let Google eating all the money in the market? Most of the products on your list are products that are or can be profitable on their own and have profitable competitors. Google could be broken up and Apple wouldn’t just take over the world as you assert. Google wouldn’t just magically go out of business just because of the scenario you describe. They’d still command a huge part of ad spend because they’re a huge brand name. Even if competitors get a much-deserved leg up, it would take a whole lot of sustained momentum to unseat them.
• apwell23 1y ago
  > Fitbit google is killing that themselves. - Google Fi - Google Fiber - Google Flights - Google Translate - Google Pay won't miss these
• joe_the_user 1y ago
  Yeah, the unfortunate thing is reigning in one monopolist today seems like more an invitation to the other monopolists. How many potentially world dominating mega-corps are there? Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Musk-corps, OpenAI, Nvidia... It seems like any reasonable rejigging of things would require attacks on multiple sources of monopoly. And any other attack on a given player is just going to strengthening other players.
• yellow_postit 1y ago
  This list makes the case this is long overdue.
• double0jimb0 1y ago
  Yup, ok with all of those.
• windexh8er 1y ago
  I have actively moved away from all of these services you listed years ago. The only one that is truly impactful is Gmail, again because of the monopoly they have in mail. But I don't understand your argument. There are options and you're worried about Apple, yet admit they don't have competing products in many of those segments. Google is exactly the monopoly we need less of. These arguments for it are uninformed. You don't need any of these products. In fact, when Google is out of the way it opens the door for new and better options. Google's products aren't great. They're good enough. And they're only good enough to keep users in the platform to continue to siphon off user data and serve as a conduit for their true business: ads.
• jofzar 1y ago
  My favourite one that you somehow missed, which should probably be at the top, YouTube.
• jmatthews 1y ago
  You essentially outline why it should be broken up. I'm not convinced making the ad tech sector more competitive would prompt that outcome but, "It would disrupt mature products" isn't a compelling argument to allow the existence of a monopoly. Google is a monopoly, they exert monopoly power and enjoy monopoly pricing. I think the more likely outcome would be more dynamic products under smaller bannerheads.
  • gpt5 1y ago
    > Google is a monopoly This argument was stronger a couple of years ago. But search is being commoditized at such a rapid pace that it's not clear that this is true anymore. When analyst measure companies moats, they measure their strength in years/decades. How many years would you give Google Search at this point?
    • raydiak 1y ago
      https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share looks pretty clear to me. If this suit turns into another nothingburger, that moat probably extends from here to the AI apocalypse.
      • azinman2 1y ago
        What I don’t see on there is ChatGPT, perplexity, etc. people’s behaviors and needs are changing.
        • raydiak 1y ago
          That's a fair point. If we saw a downward trend in google search usage in the last year or two, it might support your theory. Whether AI and search are similar enough to call them competitors, at least right now, is highly debatable. I don't know about other people, but I for one have definitely not started asking chatbots questions instead of looking for informed, human-authored content. EDIT: Note that I mean downward trend in total, not the percentages shown by statcounter. Statcounter does have a separate chatbot page though, if you're interested in that. Still doesn't answer your totally valid question of how many people are chatting instead of searching, though. Maybe Google or ChatGPT could tell us :)
• dcow 1y ago
  I genuinely do not use a single service on your list and my life is absolutely indistinguishable from that of one who does. I’m digitally literate and normally functional. Do people really believe these services are irreplaceable let alone the best of the best? That’s the trap…
• scarface_74 1y ago
  Or it will force Google to charge for services - a much more honest transaction. And you’re just naming random services most of which are already paid products like Google Cloud.
• alextingle 1y ago
  Killing Gmail would be a massive win for email deliverability. It's got so big now that they simply don't give a shit about delivering emails from smaller players. That gives users the impression that other providers are unreliable, and further bolsters their monopoly.
• FilosofumRex 1y ago
  They're too big to fail argument of Obama, is now they're too big to break up. No, they are not, by historical standard. When the Standard Oil Trust was broken up in 1911, it controlled nearly 80% of gasoline market in the US and kept prices too low, so no one could enter the market. Exxon, Mobile, Chevron, Texaco, Amoco, Gulf oil, and 30 other oil companies emerged. Today only 4 are still around, because anti-trust enforcement has been guted by both parties since WWII. Google babies will merge and raise, yet again.
• seangrogg 1y ago
  And nothing of value was lost.
• odyssey7 1y ago
  I don’t buy it. I suspect that a reason Google Cloud remains a laggard in market share is that Google’s core business, as an advertiser that feeds off user data, gives parts of the available market the heebie jeebies. The monopoly is possibly self-defeating at this point. Maybe the reason for the Google graveyard is that too big to fail has somehow turned into too big to succeed.
  • airspresso 1y ago
    Yes, some companies certainly avoid using Google Cloud due to the strong link between Google and advertising. Especially in Europe you'll find that kind of sentiment. Pushing them to strongly prefer AWS for all things cloud.
• crossroadsguy 1y ago
  I don't have the right answer for this as in how to handle this - but this is needed. Today I hear often people asking me "What's your Gmail" and that is fucking dangerous!
  • DashAnimal 1y ago
    No more dangerous than somebody photoshopping when we saw the rise of figma, ubering when Lyft just posted a great quarter with stock buybacks, or skyping when, well, the product doesn't exist anymore.
• yoaviram 1y ago
  If what you are saying is that significant parts of the tech landscape will change, then that's exactly the point.
• dev_l1x_be 1y ago
  Some of us still remembers pre-Google internet. Imagine how we were able to send emails and navigate on the streets. The image you are painting here is a classic false dichotomy. If Google goes under people won’t be moving to Apple, they are going to move to Fastmail, Yandex Maps, and so on. We might even see a new mobile platform that does not collect every single bit of your life.
• rootsudo 1y ago
  You mean the internet would return back to how it was in the 00's? I don't see how that's bad... I 100% admit everything above has value and has decreased friction for interconecting people and internet services but the idea is that should one corporation control everything listed there? And IMO no. Microsoft had the same for them in the 90's and while I can see a rush into Microsoft and Apple Ecosystems, it will also give a window for new companies, new people to create products to fill in the gaps created by google being forced to spin off it's ecosystem.
• hilbert42 1y ago
  "The whole web will shrink, and huge swaths of the worldwide economy will disappear." Even if that were to be true and comes to pass then who is to blame? Clearly both Google and Government and its regulators who let Google get out of hand and allowed it to violate monopoly laws for so long when it's been obvious for years. OK, what's to be done? You can't allow the law to continue to be violated especially now that everybody knows that it has been—if you do then you are giving all and sundry carte blanche to ignore laws as they see fit. That's a recipe for the break down of law and order. If the Government legislates to give Google exemptions or some form of special privilege then it's not only further entrenching Google's monopoly but also further weakening democracy by favoring the rich and powerful (they'd be further privileged). Now let's assume some compromise or whitewashing where Google is restructured or bits sold off without strong financial sanctions/fines etc.—ones that actually hurt shareholders' stocks significantly then no one will be happy. Google won't be happy because its already optimized its business structure for maximum income and a restructure would reduce revenues, and those who've been hurt would claim it was too little too late and they'd cry foul. Yes, government has to take much of the blame but so do shareholders and Google executives. If little is done and there are no penalties that actually hurt the pocket of the perpetrators to a significant extent then it'll be back business as usual in short order. We need strong penalties to set an example to the world that violating the law won't be tolerated. I'm not a Google shareholder but if I were I'd be selling my shares just in case. Now with that in mind give me your solutions.
• hilbert42 1y ago
  "The whole web will shrink, and huge swaths of the worldwide economy will disappear." Even if that were to be true and comes to pass then who is to blame? Clearly both Google and Government and its regulators who let Google get out of hand and allowed it to violate monopoly laws for so long when it's been obvious for years. OK, what's to be done? You can't allow the law to continue to be violated especially now that everybody knows that it has been—if you do then you are giving all and sundry carte blanche to ignore laws as they see fit. That's a recipe for the break down of law and order. If the Government legislates to give Google exemptions or some form of special privilege then it's not only further entrenching Google's monopoly but also further weakening democracy by favoring the rich and powerful (they'd be further privileged). Now let's assume some compromise or whitewashing where Google is restructured or bits sold off without strong financial sanctions/fines etc.—ones that actually hurt shareholders' stocks significantly then no one will be happy. Google won't be happy because its already optimized its business for maximum income and a restructure of any significant size would reduce revenues, and those who've been hurt by Google's monopoly would claim it was too little too late and they'd cry foul. Yes, Government has to take much of the blame but so do shareholders and Google executives. If little is done and there are no penalties that actually hurt the pockets of the perpetrators to a significant extent then it'll be back business as usual in short order. We need strong penalties to set an example to the world that violating the law won't be tolerated. Perhaps the dominoes have to fall to right things. I'm not a Google shareholder but if I were I'd be selling my shares just in case. Now with that in mind give me your solutions.
• ramijames 1y ago
  + Waze.
• Uptrenda 1y ago
  Yep, an over-sized, parasitic worm with control over most of the worlds communications, search, navigation, web browsing, and a size chunk of mobile software. That is definitely good for the Internet, security, privacy, and society at a whole. We can trust Google to always do what's right for the individual and to put profits second. Google makes money through donations and doesn't depend on the personal information of users it extracts to manipulate them into product purchases.
• franga2000 1y ago
  A lot of Google's products could be completely sustainable businesses on their own, but of course they couldn't offer them for free for personal use as they do now. Plenty of companies pay for Google Workspace, so that surely wouldn't die. Android could be spun out and returned to a more open development model, with phone manufacturers contributing money and developer time to the project instead of mostly freeloading from Gooogle. Google Cloud is supposedly profitable, (although I don't get why anyone would want to pay for that...). Really the only things that I'd worry about are Google Search, Maps and Gmail, as they don't seem like they would work if they weren't free to use and I don't see a way to monetize them. It might be interesting to also put Google Maps under the same umbrella as Android, so it could be jointly owned by the phone manufacturers who ultimately benefit from its existence. Gmail could surely survive for quite a few years by optimizing their costs like crazy and burning Workspace profits. The rest of the things you listed have existing competition, so it could probably survive and if not, alternatives exist.
• bradley13 1y ago
  So Google is "to big to fail" - that's what you are really saying. The lesson that we should have learned from 2008 is that businesses should never be allowed to reach that kind of size. Google should have been prohibited from the M&A that created such a behemoth.
• Create 1y ago
  - OpenStreetMap, MapLibre - GMX, ProtonMail, Tutanota - Nextcloud, Seafile - Collabora, Etherpad, CryptPad - Discourse, Flarum - LimeSurvey Framaforms - Nextcloud, OpenStack, Hetzner, OVHcloud, Wix - Keycloak, Gluu, eduID, SAML2, OAUTH - Qwant, DuckDuckGo - Matomo, Plausible Analytics - Firefox, Brave - LineageOS, /e/ OS - OpenAuto, AGL (Automotive Grade Linux) - Open Health, Gadgetbridge - Fairphone, Various MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operators) - Community Fiber Networks, Local ISPs (various) - Skyscanner, Kiwi.com, Amadeus - LibreTranslate, Apertium, Mistral - CB, Swish, Klarna, SumUp, Revolut (UK) - EasyMile, Navya, Aurora, Apriv, BMW, Daimler, Renault, Volvo, VW, Oxbotica, Zenuity
  • FMecha 1y ago
    >Firefox Mozilla is dependent on Google money. >Brave Chromium-based (another engine monopoly on itself) and crypto connections (if you're not a fan of them).
  • fibers 1y ago
    thank you for these good alternatives. I will take a look at them later
  • openplatypus 1y ago
    > Collabora, Etherpad, CryptPad + OnlyOffice > Qwant, DuckDuckGo + Mojeek > Matomo, Plausible Analytics + Wide Angle Analytics, Simple Analytics > Firefox, Brave + Vivaldi > GMX, ProtonMail, Tutanota + Infomaniak, Mailo, Runbox and tons of others
• coderatlarge 1y ago
  i’ve been using google products for over twenty years and they touch almost all aspects of my life and communications. in the past couple of years I’ve been working to de-couple by going to apple and local vs cloud data. it’s an extremely lengthy and error prone process. apple is workable but not great.
• DyslexicAtheist 1y ago
  digital advertisement is a mass-surveillance technology in the hands of corporations. I cheer its collapse
• ArinaS 1y ago
  If this is the price we'll pay to break up a monopoly, then be it. Maybe we don't need these services, and maybe people will finally learn to not be dependent on a single provider for everything they have on the Internet.
• ironbound 1y ago
  Yes, we should break it up so new startups can work in the space!
• starfezzy 1y ago
  > That's why the government bailed out the banks when they failed. Who's gonna tell him?
• imiric 1y ago
  You're talking like there are no alternatives to all of these products. There are, and not just from Apple. The reason Google's products are popular is because they're advertised as being "free", and Google has enough resources to run them as loss leaders, while also exerting pressure as a giant corporation and monopoly. If they happen to disappear tomorrow it would cause a minor disruption in the markets, but the world would quickly adjust, and smaller companies would have a chance at competing. Until a new monopoly pops up, and governments are "forced" to break them up again. The circle of capitalism.
• necovek 1y ago
  The point is that splitting Google Ads business from eg. Google Maps business will make GAds company and GMaps company set up a mutually beneficial business arrangement — not much needs to change there! The problem with monopolies is that a company like Google, by dominating one space (be it Maps tech or Advertising marketshare), it can use that as a moat to start dominating other areas, even at a loss (which is what it has done starting from Google Search which it never really monetized as a business but instead jumped into advertising even though it was set up because founders hated online ads). It's tricky to stop this from the get go, because you want to encourage investment into different markets from established companies. Free markets are known not to be able to stop this, which is why we've got anti-monopoly laws all around the world.
  • stingraycharles 1y ago
    Yes, the point is that the ad company should become the middle man, like things used to be before everything consolidated into Google. People have valuable data? Sell it to a middle man. People want to display targeted ads? Sell it to a middle man. People want to buy targeted ads? Buy it from a middle man. Not everything consolidated into a single company. The whole infrastructure and market already exists, the problem is that Google has a monopoly on certain data and it’s abusing its position.
• perlgeek 1y ago
  Let's take Android. Who has a revenue stream and needs Android? All the major phone vendors except Apple. They could join up and finance Android development, and presumably Android Auto too. Yes, there would be a disruption, a consortium likely isn't going to work as efficiently as google did, but it won't be Android's death. Google Drive has competitors (Dropbox, OneDrive), so it to be possible to operate without sponsorship from other business units. And so son...
• casey2 1y ago
  Firstly you forgot YouTube. The vast majorities of these have alternatives that have existed before and currently, and of course none of these will "die". If they can’t be profitable without a monopoly, then consumers and businesses shouldn’t be overcharged for the services they depend on just to keep "Fitbit" afloat. >In the best case, killing these will force consumers to move to Apple Then Apple will be broken up.
• yujzgzc 1y ago
  All monopolies plow a fraction of their wins into loss leaders that look generous. Apple grabs a take on developer sales? It's to maintain a high quality app environment. AT&T is distorting prices in the long distance market? They use it to make local telephony a lot more affordable. Etc etc. It often kills competition. Absent cross subsidies from the gusher of ad money, maybe Opera, Firefox, Garmin would have a chance to compete again in the browser and GPS world. Maybe Chinese companies that develop entry-level Docs alternatives (Lark) would enter the Docs market more favorably. The alternative is not that all of Google's services stop existing, but that competition gets restored on a more even playing field.
• mlsu 1y ago
  God forbid we allow other browser vendors and email providers to compete! Look outside. Competitors to _all_ of those product segments exist, there is a huge amount of untapped value waiting to be provided to consumers! They’re limping along, because there is a monopoly in the market distorting prices to maintain their market share. “But just think: wherever will you get high quality oil if not for Standard! Think of the global economy!”
• ReptileMan 1y ago
  If it is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.
• openplatypus 1y ago
  > Here's a small number of things that will die when Google dies. Can you imagine how the world will be affected when these go away? From your list, I (+family, circle of friends and most non-StartUp businesses) only use Android so yes, I can imagine a life without these. Bring it on.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• rzwitserloot 1y ago
  I think it was Heinlein who came up with it, but it's a principle that basic logic dictates is obvious: Power and Responsibility - those must be 2 sides of the same coin, or very very bad things happen. The mindset of 'too big to fail', i.e. if things go badly wrong there, government must bail it out for the sake of avoiding seriously deleterious effects on the wider populace, more or less nixes out the responsibility part of the chain there, at least for 'the company' as a whole. At least, the way bailouts have so far been done with banks, which is basically: Give em money, _possibly_ require some sacrifices amongst the board or c-level execs, but the company continues effectively independently. And, wouldn'tcha know it, bad things happen when you do that. "Too big to fail" is, to me anyway, all I need to hear. If that's true: Kill that company. Right now. And do a governmental post mortem on how government could have failed so badly as to have just let it happen without writing out laws and regulations to stop it. Too big to fail is a really, really bad thing to ever happen. The only thing that should ever be too big to fail is the government itself. Where there certainly _is_ a balance between power and responsibility: If government fucks up badly enough, very bad things happen to what it represents, namely, the people. Therefore then, if the consequences are indeed as gigantic as you say they are, then there are only two options: 1. Bite the bullet, split up google, suffer the consequences, and then find ways to break up any other companies that are 'too big to fail', and find out ways to write laws to avoid it from happening again. 2. Government writes some laws to eminent-domain it, so that it becomes part of government, so that bailouts can be done without breaking the balance between power and responbility. Of course, given the current political climate in the US, that will never happen. But logic dictates that it should. At any rate: Yeah, it's going to hurt. And it should be done. Your final 3 paragraphs are missing the mark entirely. They just do not make any logical sense. If google gets completely asploded by law, you think they all move to apple and apple will turn itself into a monopoly? After it just saw government make a meal out of google? That seems epically stupid, but then a judge just more or less literally called Tim Cook epically stupid for deciding to just flaunt a court judgement, so, sure, let's say Tim Cook did not learn his lesson and remains blind to this. Then.. government will make a meal of apple just the same. Once the first 'tech company too big to fail breaking monopoly laws gets thrown through a meat grinder' has concluded, the meat grinder is built and functional, so (threatening to) toss apple through it is easy at that point, relatively speaking. I also think you're underestimating the viability of the web and the pernicious brokenness of where we are at today. If google ads just collapses overnight, however will people find stores? That's your argument? That it will simply be impossible to find the online presence of some store or other? I.. doubt that. A whole company will just disappear because gmail failed? Proton costs 3.50 a seat a month, and that's just to make the point that the most gold plated alternative I know about does not seem like a company killer. Everything google does has an alternative. If a company cannot deal with the fallout of inventorying the services that it uses and making a decision on which alternative to employ plus the costs associated with updating their employees and policies to deal with it, that company was operating on a highly risky precipice already, if the margins are that low. Something was going to unbalance that company and it would fall into the abyss sooner rather than later. Might as well be this.
• f1shy 1y ago
  Of all the things you listed, I swear, only used maps in the last decade. All other I avoid them because I find them terribly bad. And I only use maps because is the one I remember the URL fast.
• grues-dinner 1y ago
  > Chrome Breaking Google's stranglehold on how people access the Internet sounds pretty good. Firefox would need to find a better deal than being slowly choked out by Google in exchange for the "it's not antitrust if we pay these guys while we do it" money. Maybe they can finally double down on ad-freedom as their PR rather than keeping it at arm's length and letting Brave take the credit.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
  "Here's a small number of things that will die when Google dies." How many were developed by Google; how many were Google acquisitions. These "arguments" are so weak, so desperate, they only expose Google's culpability even further. Silicon Valley routinely obfuscates, misdirects and even lies under oath. It's difficult to make convincing arguments absent any credibility.
• legtar3 1y ago
  You are completely wrong here, where are lots off alternative for these tools.