11 ms·

The worst possible antitrust outcome

268 points by leotravis10 1y ago

aucisson_masque 1y ago
> And if you're waiting for Europe to jump in and act where America won't, don't hold your breath. EU Commission sources leaked to Reuters that the EU is going to drop its multi-billion euro fine against Google because they don't want to make Trump angry: Well no. Europe just confirmed it yesterday.
frogperson 1y ago
Americans have allowed the rich to become too wealthy. The kind of power that comes with billions of dollars just doesnt work with justice or democracy.
- jmward01 1y ago
  I have nothing against rich. I have everything against a single person having a megaphone for themselves and a gag for everyone else and still calling it a democracy. We need strong laws that reduce the voice of money and increase the voice of individuals. Having said that, the practical implication is that money needs to loose power and there are very few ways to truly do that other than just take it away. So, I agree that our only known practical path to a healthier democracy is to make it harder to be pathologically rich.
  - orwin 1y ago
    Yes, ideologically, i had no issue with people being rich, it's people having undue power over other people that i found morally wrong. I was a libertatian almost in the american meaning of the word, a liberal libertarian. Then, i tried to put my ideas real conditions, and came to the realisation that as long as money could buy you power, you can never be free. I don't realistically see how we can limit money influence on power, when you can offshore your company in two days, so in a practical manner, the only way to limit how rich one can get, until we figure out the rest.
  - saulpw 1y ago
    There's rich, and then there's 10x rich, and 100x rich, and 1000x rich, and 10000x rich, and now even 100000x rich. Millionaires are fine, billionaires are bad, and hectobillionaires are supremely terrible. I think once someone gets to a billion dollars net worth, they should get an AmEx black card, and 99% of their assets moved into a sovereign public wealth fund. They can have anything they want, they lose the power of extreme asset allocation, and if they just like competing, they can start over and try to ring the bell again (and can give the second AmEx black card to a person of their choosing).
    - lotsofpulp 1y ago
      So if your business is extremely successful, your reward is losing control if it? To who, politicians? Leaving the large business intact and just changing the leader doesn’t seem like it changes anything.
      - JKCalhoun 1y ago
        Society?
      - mxkopy 1y ago
        You should be forced to invest into all aspects of the social fabric that makes your success possible. Your reward is being able to be a successful philanthropist
        Workaccount2 1y ago
        Your 401k is their social fabric contribution.
        p_j_w 1y ago
        How does a 5 year old use their 401k to increase the quality of their education?
        1y ago
  - idle_zealot 1y ago
    I'm not sure I understand what distinction you're drawing between ideological opposition to rich people existing and opposition to disproportionately powerful people existing. In what hypothetical world are these not the exact same thing? Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action. That's the point of it, and is just another way of saying "power over others". A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.
    - pdonis 1y ago
      > Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action Not in a free market. In a free market, people have the option to refuse to accept your money if they don't want to give you what you want to buy from them with it.
      - teachrdan 1y ago
        > people have the option to refuse to accept your money... This is the contradiction, isn't it? A free market that you or I might define requires safeguards like a social welfare net to make sure individuals are truly free to decline an offer that is harmful to them. Without such a welfare net one is compelled to accept an offer that is harmful (to one's health, morality, etc.) because the alternative is to lose your dignity and all of your belongings, or worse. But then the owning class has every incentive to reduce or remove the safety net. Not least because they will be paying a lot for it! But even more so because that safety net is what gives people some small amount of power to say no to them.
        nielsbot 1y ago
        People like to talk about politically tyranny, but forgot about the tyranny of capitalism. We've financialized servitude is all.
        Supermancho 1y ago
        Many people decry the tyranny of capitalism, but this site tends to lean into it and defend it at every turn because capitalism is painted as the tide that lifts all boats, despite the bodies on the ocean floor. Some believe, wholeheartedly that a few regulations is all that is needed to establish a fair free market, despite evidence to the contrary. ANY niche market where a world-spanning monopoly can be established, makes a mockery of regulation time and time again.
  - JKCalhoun 1y ago
    > We need strong laws that reduce the voice of money and increase the voice of individuals. Seeing the how flaccid "strong" laws have become, I prefer we go back to reducing the voice of money by taxing it away. Maybe our country could then finally have nice things.
    - nielsbot 1y ago
      Agreed. (I'm all in on confiscatory taxation.) No one person should be allowed to accumulate so much power and wealth.
    - culopatin 1y ago
      What do you do when all the money goes away to countries that don’t tax them that hard?
      - spongebobstoes 1y ago
        why do you think that will happen? how could that scenario be prevented, while still taxing money? if you put more effort into making your point, I'm sure you could get better engagement
        Workaccount2 1y ago
        Look at what Texas has been doing to California. People who assign billionaires as being the living manifestation of greed are somehow quick to hand wave away "billionaires will move to protect their wealth".
        thoroughburro 1y ago
        We should be so lucky. They are leeches.
        p_j_w 1y ago
        > Look at what Texas has been doing to California. What might that be? California is still at the forefront of every technological innovation this country is seeing while Texas is at the forefront of theocracy. California may be seeing a smaller share of the world’s innovation in the past, but that hasn’t moved to Texas, it’s moved to China.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  > The kind of power that comes with billions of dollars just doesnt work with justice or democracy. The government has billions of dollars. Thankfully government officials are immune to the corrupting influence of billions of dollars.
  - johannes1234321 1y ago
    Budget (in theory) is controlled by Congress, this is a bunch of people with their agendas who aim for being reelected. The true billionaire doesn't have anybody else to ask and can finance the campaign to get somebody (not) elected.
  - BizarroLand 1y ago
    If you ever need to see what a false equivalence is, look at this comment
  - nielsbot 1y ago
    The bad part is that congress is bought so cheaply. Not with billions. Under our current system you have to be daft to not invest in buying the government--it's a great return on your investment!
  - 1718627440 1y ago
    The government hands out the money. It has as much money wealth as the economy it governs is able to provide.
- thegreatpeter 1y ago
  Plenty of billionaires all over Europe. Relative to salaries the spread is quite worse. Democracy there is perfect
  - bbreier 1y ago
    As far as I am aware, wealth inequality is significantly better in Europe than it is in the United States (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/wealth-inequality-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/wealth-in... as an example) and I still wouldn't characterize democracy in Europe as "perfect" even if we narrowly define the rubrick to be only concerned with money tipping the scales of power
    - aetherson 1y ago
      That site is weird. As far as I can tell, it's measuring income inequality, not wealth inequality, and it doesn't... appear to know the difference? Quoting it: > The Gini index, or Gini coefficient, is a statistical measure of wealth distribution developed by the Italian statistician Corrado Gini. The Gini index is used to gauge economic inequality by measuring income distribution, also called wealth distribution. It's a kinda big red flag if they say that income and wealth are the same thing! There are a few notable cases of European countries having very high wealth inequality despite lower income inequality (my take which may not be shared by many: having low income inequality makes it hard for people who aren't generationally wealthy to overcome old money). Notably, Sweden has a higher wealth inequality than the United States. However, I don't think it's true that Europe in general has higher wealth inequality than the United States. Here's the wikipedia list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_wealth_inequality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_we...
      - lotsofpulp 1y ago
        > It's a kinda big red flag if they say that income and wealth are the same thing! Wealthy and old people love when income is used as a stand in for wealth. It deflects political action onto the young and hard/smart working, and helps keep their dynasties and rent seeking assets intact.
- tart-lemonade 1y ago
  It also doesn't work when the media is either striving to uphold the status quo that got us here or actively going out of its way to try and make things worse.
  - cut3 1y ago
    you mean the megaphones owned by the rich?
  - bilbo0s 1y ago
    Isn't "the media" really just, the rich? From WSJ and The Economist, to CNN, BBC and FOX, right on through to Youtube podcasts.
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  > Americans have allowed the rich to become too wealthy. This consistently happens in a very specific way. A corporation that dominates a concentrated market becomes excessively large, which makes its early shareholders billionaires. In other words, if you want to change this, you need to enforce antitrust laws and break up large corporations.
  - sieabahlpark 1y ago
    [dead]
  - nielsbot 1y ago
    As well as tax like we used to in the 50s. (Ok, we can argue about the specifics, but you get the idea)
    - actionfromafar 1y ago
      Yeah, the regressives (can't call them conservatives anymore with a straight face) never want to go back to that part of the 50s, for some odd reason.
      - account42 1y ago
        This othersideism helps no one. Your beloved democrats haven't squat to reign in big tech either.
        actionfromafar 1y ago
        What should we do? Where do we go from here?
        AnthonyMouse 1y ago
        Stop trying to pretend that higher taxes on Larry Page or the estate of Steve Jobs would change the size of Google or Apple and instead break them up.
- worik 1y ago
  There is no sin in being rich It is a sin to be poor There being poor, is the sin of the rich
drivebyhooting 1y ago
Can I opt out from having my data shared with other companies? Or will some kind of privacy framework like ATT be applied to it?
- inetknght 1y ago
  Would you be shocked to learn that neither will happen?
- wmf 1y ago
  I think it's aggregate data so it's not really yours.
- vkou 1y ago
  > Can I opt out from having my data shared with other companies? Sure, the easiest way you can do that is to move to Europe and petition its regulators to further tighten the screws. They might actually listen.
  - drivebyhooting 1y ago
    How is moving to Europe the easiest solution? What about my family and life?
    - vkou 1y ago
      > How is moving to Europe the easiest solution? Because this can only be solved through legislature, and no matter what black swan event happens, there is no future in which the US legislature will take this problem seriously.
- socalgal2 1y ago
  Google doesn't share your data with other companies.
  - add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
    I've literally written code that takes the firehose of data Google shares "anonymously" and deanonymizes it. They share data, it's just too obfuscated for people to understand it's happening. If this wasn't happening there wouldn't be a million companies in the ad tech space.
msarrel 1y ago
[flagged]
- tomhow 1y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive comments like this to HN.
davmre 1y ago
> The government doesn't have to win an antitrust trial in order to create competition. As the saying goes, "the process is the punishment." Regardless of what you think of Google or this case specifically, this is an argument for authoritarianism: that it is legitimate for the government to "punish" any company at will, based only on them falling into political disfavor. > ... the only punishment Google would have to bear from this trial would come after the government won its case, when the judge decided on a punishment (the term of art is "remedy") for Google. Yes, this is called the rule of law. Punishment comes through the courts, after a guilty verdict. The government has to actually win the argument as to what remedies would be proportionate under the law. In this case the judge didn't buy it. It's fine to disagree with his reasoning (or with the law), but the fantasizing about extrajudicial punishment here is frankly un-American.
- ratherbefuddled 1y ago
  There's very little reason that Google should have been protected from the evidence of its wrongdoing being made public. That's not extrajudicial punishment, that is public record. Justice should be seen to be done as well as done. Who can know how appropriate or not the remedy was when the evidence is hidden? For full disclosure: I'm neither a google employee nor a US citizen.
  - davmre 1y ago
    Sure, there's a strong public interest in having proceedings on record. US civil cases are supposed to have a presumption of openness, which the judge weighs against other interests, like protecting trade secrets, confidential business information, privacy of third parties, etc. The public record argument is fine; it's just a different argument than the extrajudicial punishment advocated by the original post.
    - NotPractical 1y ago
      I think the extrajudicial punishment he's advocating for is the wrath of the court of public opinion though? Unless I'm misreading.
guyzero 1y ago
I generally like Doctorow's writing and agree with a lot of what he says here, but: "Google has stolen every fact about our lives, in service to propping up a monopoly that lets it steal our money, too." I still have all the facts about my life and I don't think any money has been stolen. I get that this is rhetorical, but he's gone over the edge here.
- gleenn 1y ago
  I think your phrase choice is also quite funny. Obviously a fact isn't physically stolen, it has been surveilled and sold to the highest bidder. Every fair chance a competitor had to offer you something better was taken from you, it just wasn't done in front of your face. And that data is becoming more and more valuable as we speak as all this AI data race heats up.
  - tomComb 1y ago
    > and sold to the highest bidder. Yikes, you are doing it too. Does accuracy in prose not count anymore? When you have a strong case you shouldn’t have to bend the facts.
    - gleenn 1y ago
      Google Adwords is quite literally using the data they have harvested from you and selling ad placements based on it to the highest bidder in its ad auction system. There was zero hyperbole in that statement.
      - tomComb 1y ago
        > using the data they have harvested from you and selling ad placements You changed what you wrote to make it accurate now, but refused to admit that and instead just prepended it with "literally"! Wonderfully ironic given that we are talking about being accurate in your writing!
        1y ago
AceJohnny2 1y ago
> One of the facts established in the verdict was that Google had been slipping Apple more than $20b/year in exchange for which, Apple forbore from making a competing search engine. Didn't Apple say that 1) they weren't interested in being in the Search Engine business 2) (in testimony) Google was by far the best search engine that they were going to use anyway ? Certainly, $20B/Y weighs on the scale, but knowing Apple's negotiation tactics they could also have used their weight to do what they wanted anyhow and get paid handsomely for it (<waggle waggle> "if you don't pay us we might start using other defaults and you'll lose that lucrative iOS market") My point is, while Google is clearly at fault in this whole situation, it's not quite as moustache-twirling evil as Doctorow paints it.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- isleyaardvark 1y ago
  His quote is stunningly disingenuous, I'm surprised to hear that coming from Doctorow. That Google has paid Apple to be the default search engine was a business deal that has been open knowledge for a decade or more. Other search engines could've paid to be the default. Apple didn't have a search engine when they created the iPhone, and why would they start? Ever? MS didn't do so well. And why would Apple want to make their own search engine? Even if Apple did, the reaction would certainly be that Apple was abusing their position to promote their own search engine and would be committing an anti-trust violation then. Also I think it's safe to say there is no actual testimony about a quid pro quo arrangement to get Apple to agree to not make a search engine.
  - onlypassingthru 1y ago
    Can you explain why Google Android can use Google search but Apple iOS can't use Apple search because that would be an anti-trust violation?
    - b_e_n_t_o_n 1y ago
      Probably the same reason why iOS can have Safari installed as default but MS got in trouble for IE years ago. These laws are applied very inconsistently.
saurik 1y ago
I agree that the remedy sucks, but I am just not following the logic about private data? I'm totally willing to believe Cory is correct here, but I just need some more do the dots connected :/. I think the premise is that, if we want to have a competitor to Google Search--which I do not think was even the correct goal here, but seems to be what people were trying to optimize for :/--you would need to do something effectively impossible: you need to catch up to Google's search index operation, as, as a user, if I'm going to use a search engine, I'm going to use the one with the most data in it, lest I am just wasting my time. (I appreciate that for a minority of users they might have other things they are optimizing for, but that's always going to be a minority of users, and isn't going to really change Google's ridiculous market power.) And so, if you have that goal--and I will again stress that I don't even think that is the correct primary goal to have at this point, due to Google having effectively taken control of the only browser that matters and being in control of the only video site that matters--breaking apart Google into a bunch of tiny companies along the obvious lines (Android, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, or even Chrome) wouldn't fix the situation, as that isn't going to suddenly allow anyone to create a viable competitor to Google search, as Google Search would still exist, it would still always continue to have more data indexed off the web than anyone else... forever. You thereby have two options: you can try to destroy Google Search and make it so that no one has a search engine as good as Google--at least for a while--or you can figure out how to break up Google Search itself. The former is maybe a good outcome, but it is not only unrealistic, it isn't necessarily helpful in any external sense, which is where I get really confused about Cory's point here: the thing Google is searching over isn't my private data... it's my public data. Yes: they know a lot about my private data, and it could be cool to have that deleted, but that's kind of besides the point, as it has very little to do with Google Search; people aren't searching for my private data, and Google Search is going to find losing all of my private data as, at best, a minor inconvenience. What you need to do, thereby, is figure out how to break up the Google Search product into parts, to separate the wholesale part of the business from the retail part of the business, whether by making it into two separate companies or putting restrictions on the combined whole to offer both services separately... and, it sounds like that is what they are going to try? Now, I don't know if this is going to work--as it might be extremely painful or confusing to actually build a useful search engine accessing Google's catalog--but it certainly isn't as if I have a better idea for how to create a competitor to Google Search. (Again, though: I'm not sold on the idea that the actual problem with Google is that we don't have a competitor to Google Search. Hell: as of recently, my usage of Google Search has plummeted, as I've replaced most of the things I used to use Google for with various uses of large language models... and, yet, I still find Google to be too powerful in a way that distorts markets and should require some kind of antitrust intervention. :/ Maybe, then, the premise is that Cory feels that we should have tried to fix some other problem? But, he's saying that this result is itself a privacy breach... while simultaneously saying Google is going to skirt the benefit by redacting data so hard that they end up in court? I don't get it.) https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/technology/google-search-antitrust-decision.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/technology/google-search-... > Judge Mehta was similarly cautious when forcing the company to share data. The company will need to share parts of its search index, the corpus of web pages and information that feeds its results page. But Google does not need to share other data associated with those results, including information about the quality of web pages, he added. > Google must syndicate its search results to its competitors, Judge Mehta said, adding that the company could do so using the terms it already provides to commercial partners using the company’s results.
Workaccount2 1y ago
The worst thing about Google is that they discovered the ad-model and created an entire generation that is entitled to free tools and services on the internet. People who think Gmail, drive, sheets, translate, Gemini, YouTube, search, android, etc., etc. are all inherently free services that Google is greedily slapping ads on. Google is a monster because people so heavily favor the ad-model over paying for things. Kagi wonderful, but paying for search? Lol that shit is free!
- tomComb 1y ago
  I think the ad model as the document model of the internet consumer was discovered long before Google, but otherwise agree with you.
  - frognumber 1y ago
    I think you're wrong, and you're underestimating the transformational impact of Ad-Words. Free internet existed before paid internet, true, but mostly because people did things for other motives (like fun). Altavista was a tech demo for DEC. Good information was found on personal web pages, most often on .edu sites. Banner ads existed, but they were confined to the sketchy corners of the Internet. Thing today's spam selling viagra. Anyone credible didn't want to be associated with them. What Google figured out was: 1) Design. Discrete ad-words didn't make them look sketchy. This discovery came up by accident, but that's a longer story. 2) Targeting. Search terms let them know what to ads to show. I can't overstate the impact of #2. Profits went up many-fold over prior ad models. This was Google's great -- and ultra-secret -- discovery. For many years, they were making $$$, while cultivating a public image of (probably) bleeding $$$ or (at best) making $. People were doing math on how much revenue Google was getting based on traditional web advertising models, while Google knew precisely what you were shopping for. By the time people found out how much money Google's ad model was making, they had market lock-in.
- pas 1y ago
  commercial TV and radio stations were a very well established thing already by the 90s, the audience paid for their receiver and in exchange for the ads got to see movies and serialized shows. similarly there were free magazines which were basically ad booklets with some minimal original content in between a ton of ads ... there were ISPs experimenting with the model, both for users and for hosting free email boxes were the norm, with 5-10MB storage ... and just as now there was also HBO and fancy cable stations and encrypted stations, and many people did pay for magazine subscriptions ... the real problem is that a hypergiant is cross-financing the development of a browser these cross-financing setups ought to be firewalled, the browser should be in a foundation (of course we know that in practice these are not super useful, see eg. OpenAI, but ... in the end California regulations seem to have helped to keep OpenAI as a "non-profit")
conartist6 1y ago
I read the decision and I thought it did require a choice screen. He says it doesn't. Did I miss something here or did Doctorow?
- conartist6 1y ago
  Seems like maybe the distinction is between a choice screen for default search engine and one for default browser
BrenBarn 1y ago
I basically agree with the post and it's similar to what I was saying in comments on another post a few days ago. Trying to impose piecemeal conditions on monopolists is more trouble than it's worth. They should just be forcibly dismantled. There's a deeper problem with the way antitrust seems to work, though: it doesn't adequately deter prohibited acts, because in many cases the penalty is just that the bad actor has to stop doing what they were doing. This is a pervasive feature of punishment in "white collar crime" and civil suits for various kinds of regulatory violations. It's like, if you engaged in anticompetitive practices, the punishment is you have to stop doing that, and yeah maybe you pay a fine, but the biggest worst thing that can happen is they take away your monopoly after you've gotten the benefits of using it for a while. We need to take the approach that everything derived from anticompetitive practices is ill-gotten gains. If you were a monopoly, everything you did as a monopoly is tainted and the proper remedy is a total rollback in all your gains since the beginning of your anticompetitive acts, plus penalties on top of that. This includes penalties against the individuals who directed and enabled the illegal practices (e.g., a personal fine against Sundar Pichai of several hundred million dollars). What this means is that if Google has held a browser monopoly since, say, 2010, the punishment needs to be that they wind up worse off now than they would have been had they done the right thing and voluntarily taken pro-competitive actions at all times from 2010 until now. Everything they've gained from their monopolistic practices, every success they've built on that, every penny they've earned, every piece of IP they've glommed onto, every scrap of data they've collected --- all of it is forfeit. It may be that certain specific areas could be shown to be sufficiently insulated from the monopolistic practices to avoid such treatment, but the burden of proof is on Google to show that; the assumption should be that everything they accomplished with their monopoly power is poisoned by that wrong. The penalties need to be so brutal that companies will bend over backwards to avoid becoming monopolies. As long as the penalties can be treated as just a cost of doing business, companies will continue to cheat.
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
"But second, because Judge Amit Mehta decided that the Google case should be shrouded in mystery, suppressing the publication of key exhibits and banning phones, cameras and laptops from the courtroom, with the effect that virtually no one even noticed that the most important antitrust case in tech history, a genuine trial of the century, was underway: https://www.promarket.org/2023/10/27/google-monopolizes-judicial-system-information-with-trial-secrecy/ https://www.promarket.org/2023/10/27/google-monopolizes-judi... But Judge Mehta turned his courtroom into a Star Chamber, a black hole whence no embarrassing information about Google's wicked deeds could emerge." I did submit the Order to HN for discusssion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45109044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45109044 People read the Opinion, but probably no one read the Order that accompanied it It seems the limited redactions in the Opinion somehow makes up for the trial's lack of transparency Nor was Google ever sanctioned for its past discovery violations The remedies hearing transcripts should be released to the public
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
daft_pink 1y ago
I feel that the remedy at the end of the trial was really just unworkable. If you want to break up google, you should break it into workable coherent profitable business units like youtube, maps and geo, search, adsense, android, google cloud (including email) or some combination of the above. I think it makes little sense to sell off their loss leading platforms that don’t make up coherent business units.

268 points by leotravis10 1y ago

> And if you're waiting for Europe to jump in and act where America won't, don't hold your breath. EU Commission sources leaked to Reuters that the EU is going to drop its multi-billion euro fine against Google because they don't want to make Trump angry: Well no. Europe just confirmed it yesterday.

frogperson 1y ago

Americans have allowed the rich to become too wealthy. The kind of power that comes with billions of dollars just doesnt work with justice or democracy.

jmward01 1y ago
I have nothing against rich. I have everything against a single person having a megaphone for themselves and a gag for everyone else and still calling it a democracy. We need strong laws that reduce the voice of money and increase the voice of individuals. Having said that, the practical implication is that money needs to loose power and there are very few ways to truly do that other than just take it away. So, I agree that our only known practical path to a healthier democracy is to make it harder to be pathologically rich.
- orwin 1y ago
  Yes, ideologically, i had no issue with people being rich, it's people having undue power over other people that i found morally wrong. I was a libertatian almost in the american meaning of the word, a liberal libertarian. Then, i tried to put my ideas real conditions, and came to the realisation that as long as money could buy you power, you can never be free. I don't realistically see how we can limit money influence on power, when you can offshore your company in two days, so in a practical manner, the only way to limit how rich one can get, until we figure out the rest.
- saulpw 1y ago
  There's rich, and then there's 10x rich, and 100x rich, and 1000x rich, and 10000x rich, and now even 100000x rich. Millionaires are fine, billionaires are bad, and hectobillionaires are supremely terrible. I think once someone gets to a billion dollars net worth, they should get an AmEx black card, and 99% of their assets moved into a sovereign public wealth fund. They can have anything they want, they lose the power of extreme asset allocation, and if they just like competing, they can start over and try to ring the bell again (and can give the second AmEx black card to a person of their choosing).
  - lotsofpulp 1y ago
    So if your business is extremely successful, your reward is losing control if it? To who, politicians? Leaving the large business intact and just changing the leader doesn’t seem like it changes anything.
    - JKCalhoun 1y ago
      Society?
    - mxkopy 1y ago
      You should be forced to invest into all aspects of the social fabric that makes your success possible. Your reward is being able to be a successful philanthropist
      - Workaccount2 1y ago
        Your 401k is their social fabric contribution.
        p_j_w 1y ago
        How does a 5 year old use their 401k to increase the quality of their education?
        1y ago
- idle_zealot 1y ago
  I'm not sure I understand what distinction you're drawing between ideological opposition to rich people existing and opposition to disproportionately powerful people existing. In what hypothetical world are these not the exact same thing? Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action. That's the point of it, and is just another way of saying "power over others". A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.
  - pdonis 1y ago
    > Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action Not in a free market. In a free market, people have the option to refuse to accept your money if they don't want to give you what you want to buy from them with it.
    - teachrdan 1y ago
      > people have the option to refuse to accept your money... This is the contradiction, isn't it? A free market that you or I might define requires safeguards like a social welfare net to make sure individuals are truly free to decline an offer that is harmful to them. Without such a welfare net one is compelled to accept an offer that is harmful (to one's health, morality, etc.) because the alternative is to lose your dignity and all of your belongings, or worse. But then the owning class has every incentive to reduce or remove the safety net. Not least because they will be paying a lot for it! But even more so because that safety net is what gives people some small amount of power to say no to them.
      - nielsbot 1y ago
        People like to talk about politically tyranny, but forgot about the tyranny of capitalism. We've financialized servitude is all.
        Supermancho 1y ago
        Many people decry the tyranny of capitalism, but this site tends to lean into it and defend it at every turn because capitalism is painted as the tide that lifts all boats, despite the bodies on the ocean floor. Some believe, wholeheartedly that a few regulations is all that is needed to establish a fair free market, despite evidence to the contrary. ANY niche market where a world-spanning monopoly can be established, makes a mockery of regulation time and time again.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  > We need strong laws that reduce the voice of money and increase the voice of individuals. Seeing the how flaccid "strong" laws have become, I prefer we go back to reducing the voice of money by taxing it away. Maybe our country could then finally have nice things.
  - nielsbot 1y ago
    Agreed. (I'm all in on confiscatory taxation.) No one person should be allowed to accumulate so much power and wealth.
  - culopatin 1y ago
    What do you do when all the money goes away to countries that don’t tax them that hard?
    - spongebobstoes 1y ago
      why do you think that will happen? how could that scenario be prevented, while still taxing money? if you put more effort into making your point, I'm sure you could get better engagement
      - Workaccount2 1y ago
        Look at what Texas has been doing to California. People who assign billionaires as being the living manifestation of greed are somehow quick to hand wave away "billionaires will move to protect their wealth".
        thoroughburro 1y ago
        We should be so lucky. They are leeches.
        p_j_w 1y ago
        > Look at what Texas has been doing to California. What might that be? California is still at the forefront of every technological innovation this country is seeing while Texas is at the forefront of theocracy. California may be seeing a smaller share of the world’s innovation in the past, but that hasn’t moved to Texas, it’s moved to China.
NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
> The kind of power that comes with billions of dollars just doesnt work with justice or democracy. The government has billions of dollars. Thankfully government officials are immune to the corrupting influence of billions of dollars.
- johannes1234321 1y ago
  Budget (in theory) is controlled by Congress, this is a bunch of people with their agendas who aim for being reelected. The true billionaire doesn't have anybody else to ask and can finance the campaign to get somebody (not) elected.
- BizarroLand 1y ago
  If you ever need to see what a false equivalence is, look at this comment
- nielsbot 1y ago
  The bad part is that congress is bought so cheaply. Not with billions. Under our current system you have to be daft to not invest in buying the government--it's a great return on your investment!
- 1718627440 1y ago
  The government hands out the money. It has as much money wealth as the economy it governs is able to provide.
thegreatpeter 1y ago
Plenty of billionaires all over Europe. Relative to salaries the spread is quite worse. Democracy there is perfect
- bbreier 1y ago
  As far as I am aware, wealth inequality is significantly better in Europe than it is in the United States (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/wealth-inequality-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/wealth-in... as an example) and I still wouldn't characterize democracy in Europe as "perfect" even if we narrowly define the rubrick to be only concerned with money tipping the scales of power
  - aetherson 1y ago
    That site is weird. As far as I can tell, it's measuring income inequality, not wealth inequality, and it doesn't... appear to know the difference? Quoting it: > The Gini index, or Gini coefficient, is a statistical measure of wealth distribution developed by the Italian statistician Corrado Gini. The Gini index is used to gauge economic inequality by measuring income distribution, also called wealth distribution. It's a kinda big red flag if they say that income and wealth are the same thing! There are a few notable cases of European countries having very high wealth inequality despite lower income inequality (my take which may not be shared by many: having low income inequality makes it hard for people who aren't generationally wealthy to overcome old money). Notably, Sweden has a higher wealth inequality than the United States. However, I don't think it's true that Europe in general has higher wealth inequality than the United States. Here's the wikipedia list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_wealth_inequality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_we...
    - lotsofpulp 1y ago
      > It's a kinda big red flag if they say that income and wealth are the same thing! Wealthy and old people love when income is used as a stand in for wealth. It deflects political action onto the young and hard/smart working, and helps keep their dynasties and rent seeking assets intact.
tart-lemonade 1y ago
It also doesn't work when the media is either striving to uphold the status quo that got us here or actively going out of its way to try and make things worse.
- cut3 1y ago
  you mean the megaphones owned by the rich?
- bilbo0s 1y ago
  Isn't "the media" really just, the rich? From WSJ and The Economist, to CNN, BBC and FOX, right on through to Youtube podcasts.
AnthonyMouse 1y ago
> Americans have allowed the rich to become too wealthy. This consistently happens in a very specific way. A corporation that dominates a concentrated market becomes excessively large, which makes its early shareholders billionaires. In other words, if you want to change this, you need to enforce antitrust laws and break up large corporations.
- sieabahlpark 1y ago
  [dead]
- nielsbot 1y ago
  As well as tax like we used to in the 50s. (Ok, we can argue about the specifics, but you get the idea)
  - actionfromafar 1y ago
    Yeah, the regressives (can't call them conservatives anymore with a straight face) never want to go back to that part of the 50s, for some odd reason.
    - account42 1y ago
      This othersideism helps no one. Your beloved democrats haven't squat to reign in big tech either.
      - actionfromafar 1y ago
        What should we do? Where do we go from here?
        AnthonyMouse 1y ago
        Stop trying to pretend that higher taxes on Larry Page or the estate of Steve Jobs would change the size of Google or Apple and instead break them up.
worik 1y ago
There is no sin in being rich It is a sin to be poor There being poor, is the sin of the rich

drivebyhooting 1y ago

Can I opt out from having my data shared with other companies? Or will some kind of privacy framework like ATT be applied to it?

inetknght 1y ago
Would you be shocked to learn that neither will happen?
wmf 1y ago
I think it's aggregate data so it's not really yours.
vkou 1y ago
> Can I opt out from having my data shared with other companies? Sure, the easiest way you can do that is to move to Europe and petition its regulators to further tighten the screws. They might actually listen.
- drivebyhooting 1y ago
  How is moving to Europe the easiest solution? What about my family and life?
  - vkou 1y ago
    > How is moving to Europe the easiest solution? Because this can only be solved through legislature, and no matter what black swan event happens, there is no future in which the US legislature will take this problem seriously.
socalgal2 1y ago
Google doesn't share your data with other companies.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
  I've literally written code that takes the firehose of data Google shares "anonymously" and deanonymizes it. They share data, it's just too obfuscated for people to understand it's happening. If this wasn't happening there wouldn't be a million companies in the ad tech space.

msarrel 1y ago

[flagged]

tomhow 1y ago
Please don't post unsubstantive comments like this to HN.

davmre 1y ago

> The government doesn't have to win an antitrust trial in order to create competition. As the saying goes, "the process is the punishment." Regardless of what you think of Google or this case specifically, this is an argument for authoritarianism: that it is legitimate for the government to "punish" any company at will, based only on them falling into political disfavor. > ... the only punishment Google would have to bear from this trial would come after the government won its case, when the judge decided on a punishment (the term of art is "remedy") for Google. Yes, this is called the rule of law. Punishment comes through the courts, after a guilty verdict. The government has to actually win the argument as to what remedies would be proportionate under the law. In this case the judge didn't buy it. It's fine to disagree with his reasoning (or with the law), but the fantasizing about extrajudicial punishment here is frankly un-American.

ratherbefuddled 1y ago
There's very little reason that Google should have been protected from the evidence of its wrongdoing being made public. That's not extrajudicial punishment, that is public record. Justice should be seen to be done as well as done. Who can know how appropriate or not the remedy was when the evidence is hidden? For full disclosure: I'm neither a google employee nor a US citizen.
- davmre 1y ago
  Sure, there's a strong public interest in having proceedings on record. US civil cases are supposed to have a presumption of openness, which the judge weighs against other interests, like protecting trade secrets, confidential business information, privacy of third parties, etc. The public record argument is fine; it's just a different argument than the extrajudicial punishment advocated by the original post.
  - NotPractical 1y ago
    I think the extrajudicial punishment he's advocating for is the wrath of the court of public opinion though? Unless I'm misreading.

guyzero 1y ago

I generally like Doctorow's writing and agree with a lot of what he says here, but: "Google has stolen every fact about our lives, in service to propping up a monopoly that lets it steal our money, too." I still have all the facts about my life and I don't think any money has been stolen. I get that this is rhetorical, but he's gone over the edge here.

gleenn 1y ago
I think your phrase choice is also quite funny. Obviously a fact isn't physically stolen, it has been surveilled and sold to the highest bidder. Every fair chance a competitor had to offer you something better was taken from you, it just wasn't done in front of your face. And that data is becoming more and more valuable as we speak as all this AI data race heats up.
- tomComb 1y ago
  > and sold to the highest bidder. Yikes, you are doing it too. Does accuracy in prose not count anymore? When you have a strong case you shouldn’t have to bend the facts.
  - gleenn 1y ago
    Google Adwords is quite literally using the data they have harvested from you and selling ad placements based on it to the highest bidder in its ad auction system. There was zero hyperbole in that statement.
    - tomComb 1y ago
      > using the data they have harvested from you and selling ad placements You changed what you wrote to make it accurate now, but refused to admit that and instead just prepended it with "literally"! Wonderfully ironic given that we are talking about being accurate in your writing!
      - 1y ago

AceJohnny2 1y ago

> One of the facts established in the verdict was that Google had been slipping Apple more than $20b/year in exchange for which, Apple forbore from making a competing search engine. Didn't Apple say that 1) they weren't interested in being in the Search Engine business 2) (in testimony) Google was by far the best search engine that they were going to use anyway ? Certainly, $20B/Y weighs on the scale, but knowing Apple's negotiation tactics they could also have used their weight to do what they wanted anyhow and get paid handsomely for it (<waggle waggle> "if you don't pay us we might start using other defaults and you'll lose that lucrative iOS market") My point is, while Google is clearly at fault in this whole situation, it's not quite as moustache-twirling evil as Doctorow paints it.

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isleyaardvark 1y ago
His quote is stunningly disingenuous, I'm surprised to hear that coming from Doctorow. That Google has paid Apple to be the default search engine was a business deal that has been open knowledge for a decade or more. Other search engines could've paid to be the default. Apple didn't have a search engine when they created the iPhone, and why would they start? Ever? MS didn't do so well. And why would Apple want to make their own search engine? Even if Apple did, the reaction would certainly be that Apple was abusing their position to promote their own search engine and would be committing an anti-trust violation then. Also I think it's safe to say there is no actual testimony about a quid pro quo arrangement to get Apple to agree to not make a search engine.
- onlypassingthru 1y ago
  Can you explain why Google Android can use Google search but Apple iOS can't use Apple search because that would be an anti-trust violation?
  - b_e_n_t_o_n 1y ago
    Probably the same reason why iOS can have Safari installed as default but MS got in trouble for IE years ago. These laws are applied very inconsistently.

saurik 1y ago

I agree that the remedy sucks, but I am just not following the logic about private data? I'm totally willing to believe Cory is correct here, but I just need some more do the dots connected :/. I think the premise is that, if we want to have a competitor to Google Search--which I do not think was even the correct goal here, but seems to be what people were trying to optimize for :/--you would need to do something effectively impossible: you need to catch up to Google's search index operation, as, as a user, if I'm going to use a search engine, I'm going to use the one with the most data in it, lest I am just wasting my time. (I appreciate that for a minority of users they might have other things they are optimizing for, but that's always going to be a minority of users, and isn't going to really change Google's ridiculous market power.) And so, if you have that goal--and I will again stress that I don't even think that is the correct primary goal to have at this point, due to Google having effectively taken control of the only browser that matters and being in control of the only video site that matters--breaking apart Google into a bunch of tiny companies along the obvious lines (Android, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, or even Chrome) wouldn't fix the situation, as that isn't going to suddenly allow anyone to create a viable competitor to Google search, as Google Search would still exist, it would still always continue to have more data indexed off the web than anyone else... forever. You thereby have two options: you can try to destroy Google Search and make it so that no one has a search engine as good as Google--at least for a while--or you can figure out how to break up Google Search itself. The former is maybe a good outcome, but it is not only unrealistic, it isn't necessarily helpful in any external sense, which is where I get really confused about Cory's point here: the thing Google is searching over isn't my private data... it's my public data. Yes: they know a lot about my private data, and it could be cool to have that deleted, but that's kind of besides the point, as it has very little to do with Google Search; people aren't searching for my private data, and Google Search is going to find losing all of my private data as, at best, a minor inconvenience. What you need to do, thereby, is figure out how to break up the Google Search product into parts, to separate the wholesale part of the business from the retail part of the business, whether by making it into two separate companies or putting restrictions on the combined whole to offer both services separately... and, it sounds like that is what they are going to try? Now, I don't know if this is going to work--as it might be extremely painful or confusing to actually build a useful search engine accessing Google's catalog--but it certainly isn't as if I have a better idea for how to create a competitor to Google Search. (Again, though: I'm not sold on the idea that the actual problem with Google is that we don't have a competitor to Google Search. Hell: as of recently, my usage of Google Search has plummeted, as I've replaced most of the things I used to use Google for with various uses of large language models... and, yet, I still find Google to be too powerful in a way that distorts markets and should require some kind of antitrust intervention. :/ Maybe, then, the premise is that Cory feels that we should have tried to fix some other problem? But, he's saying that this result is itself a privacy breach... while simultaneously saying Google is going to skirt the benefit by redacting data so hard that they end up in court? I don't get it.) https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/technology/google-search-antitrust-decision.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/technology/google-search-... > Judge Mehta was similarly cautious when forcing the company to share data. The company will need to share parts of its search index, the corpus of web pages and information that feeds its results page. But Google does not need to share other data associated with those results, including information about the quality of web pages, he added. > Google must syndicate its search results to its competitors, Judge Mehta said, adding that the company could do so using the terms it already provides to commercial partners using the company’s results.

Workaccount2 1y ago

The worst thing about Google is that they discovered the ad-model and created an entire generation that is entitled to free tools and services on the internet. People who think Gmail, drive, sheets, translate, Gemini, YouTube, search, android, etc., etc. are all inherently free services that Google is greedily slapping ads on. Google is a monster because people so heavily favor the ad-model over paying for things. Kagi wonderful, but paying for search? Lol that shit is free!

tomComb 1y ago
I think the ad model as the document model of the internet consumer was discovered long before Google, but otherwise agree with you.
- frognumber 1y ago
  I think you're wrong, and you're underestimating the transformational impact of Ad-Words. Free internet existed before paid internet, true, but mostly because people did things for other motives (like fun). Altavista was a tech demo for DEC. Good information was found on personal web pages, most often on .edu sites. Banner ads existed, but they were confined to the sketchy corners of the Internet. Thing today's spam selling viagra. Anyone credible didn't want to be associated with them. What Google figured out was: 1) Design. Discrete ad-words didn't make them look sketchy. This discovery came up by accident, but that's a longer story. 2) Targeting. Search terms let them know what to ads to show. I can't overstate the impact of #2. Profits went up many-fold over prior ad models. This was Google's great -- and ultra-secret -- discovery. For many years, they were making $$$, while cultivating a public image of (probably) bleeding $$$ or (at best) making $. People were doing math on how much revenue Google was getting based on traditional web advertising models, while Google knew precisely what you were shopping for. By the time people found out how much money Google's ad model was making, they had market lock-in.
pas 1y ago
commercial TV and radio stations were a very well established thing already by the 90s, the audience paid for their receiver and in exchange for the ads got to see movies and serialized shows. similarly there were free magazines which were basically ad booklets with some minimal original content in between a ton of ads ... there were ISPs experimenting with the model, both for users and for hosting free email boxes were the norm, with 5-10MB storage ... and just as now there was also HBO and fancy cable stations and encrypted stations, and many people did pay for magazine subscriptions ... the real problem is that a hypergiant is cross-financing the development of a browser these cross-financing setups ought to be firewalled, the browser should be in a foundation (of course we know that in practice these are not super useful, see eg. OpenAI, but ... in the end California regulations seem to have helped to keep OpenAI as a "non-profit")

conartist6 1y ago

I read the decision and I thought it did require a choice screen. He says it doesn't. Did I miss something here or did Doctorow?

conartist6 1y ago
Seems like maybe the distinction is between a choice screen for default search engine and one for default browser

BrenBarn 1y ago

I basically agree with the post and it's similar to what I was saying in comments on another post a few days ago. Trying to impose piecemeal conditions on monopolists is more trouble than it's worth. They should just be forcibly dismantled. There's a deeper problem with the way antitrust seems to work, though: it doesn't adequately deter prohibited acts, because in many cases the penalty is just that the bad actor has to stop doing what they were doing. This is a pervasive feature of punishment in "white collar crime" and civil suits for various kinds of regulatory violations. It's like, if you engaged in anticompetitive practices, the punishment is you have to stop doing that, and yeah maybe you pay a fine, but the biggest worst thing that can happen is they take away your monopoly after you've gotten the benefits of using it for a while. We need to take the approach that everything derived from anticompetitive practices is ill-gotten gains. If you were a monopoly, everything you did as a monopoly is tainted and the proper remedy is a total rollback in all your gains since the beginning of your anticompetitive acts, plus penalties on top of that. This includes penalties against the individuals who directed and enabled the illegal practices (e.g., a personal fine against Sundar Pichai of several hundred million dollars). What this means is that if Google has held a browser monopoly since, say, 2010, the punishment needs to be that they wind up worse off now than they would have been had they done the right thing and voluntarily taken pro-competitive actions at all times from 2010 until now. Everything they've gained from their monopolistic practices, every success they've built on that, every penny they've earned, every piece of IP they've glommed onto, every scrap of data they've collected --- all of it is forfeit. It may be that certain specific areas could be shown to be sufficiently insulated from the monopolistic practices to avoid such treatment, but the burden of proof is on Google to show that; the assumption should be that everything they accomplished with their monopoly power is poisoned by that wrong. The penalties need to be so brutal that companies will bend over backwards to avoid becoming monopolies. As long as the penalties can be treated as just a cost of doing business, companies will continue to cheat.

1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

"But second, because Judge Amit Mehta decided that the Google case should be shrouded in mystery, suppressing the publication of key exhibits and banning phones, cameras and laptops from the courtroom, with the effect that virtually no one even noticed that the most important antitrust case in tech history, a genuine trial of the century, was underway: https://www.promarket.org/2023/10/27/google-monopolizes-judicial-system-information-with-trial-secrecy/ https://www.promarket.org/2023/10/27/google-monopolizes-judi... But Judge Mehta turned his courtroom into a Star Chamber, a black hole whence no embarrassing information about Google's wicked deeds could emerge." I did submit the Order to HN for discusssion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45109044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45109044 People read the Opinion, but probably no one read the Order that accompanied it It seems the limited redactions in the Opinion somehow makes up for the trial's lack of transparency Nor was Google ever sanctioned for its past discovery violations The remedies hearing transcripts should be released to the public

deleted 1y ago

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daft_pink 1y ago

I feel that the remedy at the end of the trial was really just unworkable. If you want to break up google, you should break it into workable coherent profitable business units like youtube, maps and geo, search, adsense, android, google cloud (including email) or some combination of the above. I think it makes little sense to sell off their loss leading platforms that don’t make up coherent business units.