US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

https://www.ft.com/content/f6e84608-e0e5-48c5-a0eb-dde7675fb608

478 846 2 years ago

“The DoJ identified four areas that its remedies framework needed to address: search distribution and revenue sharing; generation and display of search results; advertising scale and monetisation; and gathering and use of data.

…

In addition to potential spin-offs, prosecutors said remedies could include banning the exclusive contracts at the heart of the case — in particular the $20bn that Google pays Apple each year to be its default search engine — as well as imposing ‘non-discrimination’ measures on Google products such as its Android operating system and Play app store.

The DoJ is also considering requiring Google to share its vast trove of data gathered to improve search ranking models, indices and advertising algorithms, which prosecutors argue was accumulated unlawfully.”

gnabgib• 2 years ago

Related DOJ may want to break up Google (84 points, 2 months ago, 98 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41240716

arthurcolle• 2 years ago

break up google for fumbling transformers alone

ImHereToVote• 2 years ago

Yeah that's what monopolies do. Make people use inferior products. The US used to break up monopolies all the time. This was followed with a wave of innovation.

akoboldfrying7• 2 years ago

I can't tell if you're serious.

Not only did Google not "force" anyone to use the LLM tech that they largely developed, most people think they're silly for inventing it and then sitting on their hands until another company (OpenAI) ate their lunch.

ClassyJacket• 2 years ago

They biggest web advertising company definitely shouldn't control the world's most popular browser. Just like we all knew they would, they're blocking ad blockers, and this problem will only get worse.

Tell your friends to use Firefox, people.

Arainach2• 2 years ago

It's fascinating how "preventing web extensions from having full access to everything on every site you visit when there is a repeated history of extensions being bought by companies that turn them into spyware data miners" gets turned into "blocking ad blockers".

cogman103• 2 years ago

Because there were other ways to handle the ad blocker situation. For example, allowing the users to grant access to an extension.

The hard protocol ban is heavy handed.

sensanaty2• 2 years ago

I trust gorhill and UBO infinitely more than any corporation, especially since it's all free and completely open source.

shiroiushi18• 2 years ago

I'm not so sure this is a problem. They're not completely blocking ad-blockers, just neutering them somewhat with MV3. You can still use uBOL (the "Lite" version of uBO) and get a lot of ads blocked on Chrome.

Remember, Chrome is not installed by default on Windows PCs; Edge is. People are using Chrome because they want to. They could just as easily download Firefox and uBO, like more-savvy users do. Unfortunately, too many can't be bothered. Should they be saved from excessive and intrusive ads? Again, they can easily install uBOL on their Chrome instance, or they can download and install FF+uBO. Or use something else like Brave.

Tell your friends to use Firefox, people.

Absolutely, yes. Just don't be too surprised when you visit them later and they're still using Chrome (or Edge) with no ad-blocker at all. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

akoboldfrying7• 2 years ago

Chrome is not installed by default on Windows PCs; Edge is

Whenever this is brought up, the silence is deafening.

Edge is a good browser, and users are notoriously lazy; most won't read a dialog box before clicking it away. And yet... ~everyone on Windows still downloads Chrome.

crazygringo• 2 years ago

they're blocking ad blockers

I've tried uBlock Origin Lite on Chrome and it works... perfectly. I haven't noticed a single ad get through.

And isn't it supposed to be a lot more performant?

Before, I assumed Chrome really was trying to gradually stop ad-blocking. But now that I see it's had literally zero impact, at least on the sites I visit, I'm starting to wonder what all the fuss was about. Was manifest v3 really about performance and security all along, and not about eliminating ad blockers?

Meanwhile, you can't install adblocking on iOS Safari as an extension at all. But I never hear anybody bringing that up.

wilsonnb3• 2 years ago

Meanwhile, you can't install adblocking on iOS Safari as an extension at all. But I never hear anybody bringing that up.

There are a bunch of safari ad blockers in the app store that work the same way manifest v3 blockers work.

musictubes2• 2 years ago

It isn’t brought up because it isn’t true. Plenty of ad blockers for iOS/ipados Safari.

apercu4• 2 years ago

If the ads weren't invasive, covering the content, purposely distracting you and your data wasn't being collected and resold, we wouldn't need ad blockers.

richwater2• 2 years ago

Tell your friends to use Firefox, people.

Mozilla is pretty much entirely funded by Google

teleforce2• 2 years ago

There's side effect benefit of big kahuna companies mainly on the significant breakthrough and game changing research output because these excellent researchers are paid handsome money compared to conventional universities or research institutions.

We saw this with AT&T Bell research labs with their inventions of transistor and Unix, among others. The same thing happened with Google research with (arguably) deep learning and transformer.

Split them up at your own (US) perils, not unlike killing own Golden Goose.

LightHugger• 2 years ago

This is a theoretical benefit which is directly at odds with the benefits of competition in a healthy market. For google, my observation is the "big kahuna" benefit of google basically does not exist and competition needs to be restored. Google is famous for not innovating on anything successfully, they produce graveyards of trash. Instead what they do is buy other companies then enshittify them in an anti competitive dance towards causing more damage than productivity.

You really have to think about exactly how our modern markets work and why buyouts are such dominant strategy. It's only sometimes about taking what you buy then using it, it's mostly about taking what you buy to stifle competition these days.

Look at twitter and Vine, twitter bought then shut down vine as part of a standard operating procedure just to stifle competition, and they had so little interest in capitalizing on what they bought that it left a market gap so wide TikTok filled it instead. But usually these practices do not leave such big market gaps, usually they simply shut down competition successfully and the buyer wins. Then in many cases if the company owners refuse to be bought out, extreme anti-competitive practices begin to destroy their business, which will not be punished until long after the victims get shut down. So owners need to choose between a huge pay out, or their company getting destroyed. Owners tend to choose the former.

teleforce2• 2 years ago

"big kahuna" benefit of google basically does not exist

I just given you the deep learning and transformer benefits.

There's a reason why the darling of AI Renaissance namely transformer was not invented at MIT, Stanford or Berkeley.

akoboldfrying7• 2 years ago

Google is famous for not innovating on anything successfully

PageRank

Gmail

Maps

MapReduce

Chrome

Protocol Buffers

jonas21• 2 years ago

Google is famous for not innovating on anything successfully, they produce graveyards of trash.

- AlphaFold (just won a Nobel prize)

- Transformers (the "T" in GPT)

- Waymo (autonomous vehicles)

- Sycamore (quantum computing)

These are just a few off the top of my head.

If your idea of innovation is a better RSS reader, then sure, I agree with you. But in terms of things that push the forefront of technology, I have a hard time thinking of another company with greater impact in recent years.

iml7• 2 years ago

The split of ATT killed Unix2, so we spent 30 years re-implementing Linux+k8s. These things that existed in Unix2 & Plan9 were re-implemented by Plan9 employees in Google Labs.

Melatonic• 2 years ago

Never even heard of Unix2 - was it a complete replacement ?

fsckboy• 2 years ago

i can't even understand what you are saying? AT&T was good, or bad?

AT&T copyrights led to linux, and linux, independent of unix, has been a huge boon for good, and for unixness.

the threat to unix now is all the people who by nature prefer Dave Cutlerness, and can't see that their way is the wrong way, now they are using linux (because it won) and trying to ruin it.

lfmunoz4• 2 years ago

UNIX exists because ATT was split. They could not profit from software (by law because of an agreement with the government) so early versions of UNIX where made free.

This should be well known, simple google search:

https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/why...

flomo• 2 years ago

Seconding info about "unix2". I used to pour over the trade tabloids, and I've never heard of this.

Novell bought UNIX and has some grand plans for "SuperNOS", which also never shipped. It certainly wasn't anything like K8s.

pjmlp• 2 years ago

UNIX only became a success, because ATT initially wasn't allowed to charge real money for research work.

HillRat• 2 years ago

The AT&T split had nothing to do with monopoly regulation (as opposed to the Bell breakup in 1982), other than the fact that Wall Street wasn't rewarding regulated operating companies with dot-com valuations. AT&T wanted to sell hardware to other telcos and dot-coms, so spun off Lucent, which had no idea what it wanted to do with P9/Inferno (which was a fantastic piece of kit!) other than embed it into a couple of network products. Lucent bet heavily on unstable CLECs like Worldcom, generated a couple of headline-creating network crashes, and then failed to capitalize on their pole position in optical long-haul (to be fair, they also bet heavily on a very unstable Global Crossing for that). There's a lot of mismanagement and failures that can be ascribed to Lucent leadership without government or regulatory intervention being involved.

brendoelfrendo3• 2 years ago

So wait, markets don't work, then? A free market, theoretically, promotes innovation by ensuring that businesses must advance their products in order to compete with one another. You're saying that a lack of competition promotes innovation by concentrating all of an industry's capital under one roof.

eastbound2• 2 years ago

Regalian roles are to ensure fair competition by reducing any actor bigger than the state to something smaller, and ensuring the economy works with transparent information (no lying, rule of law, etc.)

Companies getting too big are natural; Letting them get too big is what happens when your state borrows a trillion per semester: Your state is obese, intervening in every little sector of the economy (thus the opposite of liberal), and not playing its regalian role.

You should indeed reduce the size of both the state and the largest companies, to let the economy self-regulate, but then, how would the US govern the rest of the world?

farts_mckensy• 2 years ago

Both can be true in varying degrees at certain points in time. They're not mutually exclusive. There are benefits to centralization and concentration of capital. Competition is the same exact process that leads to monopolistic entities in the first place.

Kon5ole2• 2 years ago

The thing that makes markets work is the struggle. A Darwinian survival of the fittest in a way. Once the struggle is over and only one contestant remains, the results are generally dystopian.

Also I believe that even when working optimally the Darwinian mechanism can't solve certain problems. Some things need to be dealt with by a group of motivated people working for other goals than profit.

Markets gave us compuserve and facebook while CERN gave us the open web, for example.

waveBidder3• 2 years ago

just skip the middle man skimming off the top and 10x the national labs funding.

qnleigh• 2 years ago

I wish this were a viable option, but it is not. US national labs are horribly, horribly mismanaged. For some slower-moving fields like particle physics where institutional knowledge is key, they hold up alright, but for fast moving fields like quantum they are very behind. They are stagnant bureaucracies. I could tell stories, but better to just compare the output of national labs in many fields to those of the top universities in the States.

fsh• 2 years ago

Clearly this model no longer works. Bell labs had 11 nobel prize winners. What did Google invent? Slightly better generative neural networks whose offsprings now pollute their search results?

fecal_henge• 2 years ago

Google invented the ability to put an animated Gif inside a spreadsheet cell.

GauntletWizard• 2 years ago

You could interpret this the other way - Why has Jeff Dean been snubbed by the Nobel committee? Why hasn't Larry Page gotten a Nobel for inventing the search technology that half the planet now depends on? I don't know what category to put that one in, but there's some important results in lightspeed-limited communications in "The Datacenter as a Computer" that would be worth extending the Physics category for.

laborcontract• 2 years ago

indexing against Nobel prizes is like trying to use patents as a proxy for innovation

fragmede3• 2 years ago

Spanner is one thing I'd say they invented but they built a whole bunch of really neat stuff in order to be able to run search, back in 1998. that they're this behemoth conglomerate that it's cool to hate on doesn't erase the fact that they had to build all sorts of new things when they were just starting out.

novia2• 2 years ago

Two of Google's researchers are getting the Nobel prize for AlphaFold2 this year.

kibwen3• 2 years ago

What on Earth... you do realize that antitrust regulation was the only reason we got Unix in the first place, right?

onecommentman3• 2 years ago

Trying to turn a zoo into a farm, as AT&T attempted to do with Bell Labs post-divestiture, had limited success and incurred great emotional and spiritual cost on the institution. Bleah.

JumpCrisscross9• 2 years ago

side effect benefit of big kahuna companies mainly on the significant breakthrough and game changing research output

“Given that production could be carried on without any organization, Coase asks, 'Why and under what conditions should we expect firms to emerge?' Since modern firms can only emerge when an entrepreneur of some sort begins to hire people, Coase's analysis proceeds by considering the conditions under which it makes sense for an entrepreneur to seek hired help instead of contracting out for some particular task. The traditional economic theory of the time suggested that, because the market is ‘efficient’ (that is, those who are best at providing each good or service most cheaply are already doing so), it should always be cheaper to contract out than to hire.

Coase noted, however, that there are a number of transaction costs to using the market; the cost of obtaining a good or service via the market is actually more than just the price of the good. Other costs, including search and information costs, bargaining costs, keeping trade secrets, and policing and enforcement costs, can all potentially add to the cost of procuring something via the market. This suggests that firms will arise when they can arrange to produce what they need internally, and somehow avoid these costs.

There is a natural limit to what can be produced internally, however. Coase notices ‘decreasing returns to the entrepreneur function’, including increasing overhead costs and increasing propensity for an overwhelmed manager to make mistakes in resource allocation. This is a countervailing cost to the use of the firm.

Coase argues that the size of a firm (as measured by how many contractual relations are ‘internal’ to the firm and how many ‘external’) is a result of finding an optimal balance between the competing tendencies of the costs outlined above. In general, making the firm larger will initially be advantageous, but the decreasing returns indicated above will eventually kick in, preventing the firm from growing indefinitely.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm

DinoDad133• 2 years ago

I love it when the top comments on a hacker news thread is justifying monopolies. Fuck economics right?

cosmic_quanta• 2 years ago

Do you think it's impossible to have a nuanced discussion about monopolies? Their net effect may be wholly negative while having some interesting aspects

benopal64• 2 years ago

Honestly, it's disgusting.

Have these people even read the white papers that Google releases? They are mostly marketing pieces.

When systems and technologies are not publicly reproducible, why should scientists and (most) engineers care? I will not take Google at its word and would not recommend it to others.

belter• 2 years ago

You should know 80% of Hacker News works for either Google or Facebook.

optymizer• 2 years ago

Drawing from own experience working with Harvard, MIT and Google researchers, I could not disagree more.

When you talk to a researcher, do they strike you as someone who chases handsome amounts of money, or someone who chases ideas?

You bring up research labs. I listened to Alan Kay's numerous talks over the years (as an example of a prominent CS researcher), not once does he mention that he joined for the money at Xerox PARC. Yes, he was paid, but the main advantage was being given free reign to conduct research with the best experts in their fields, i.e. to invent and pursue ideas.

The important part from a financial perspective, is to be able to have finances to back a research division, where you can spend billions on building a new type of technology, if need be, that may not pan out. You don't need a monopoly to accomplish that.

You know who does chase handsome amounts of money? Day traders and everyone gambling on the stock market.

logicchains• 2 years ago

is to be able to have finances to back a research division, where you can spend billions on building a new type of technology, if need be, that may not pan out. You don't need a monopoly to accomplish that

A company in an industry with very tight margins has much less money to invest in fundamental research. All the recent growth in generative AI has been driven by companies with very high margins; Google, Facebook, Amazon. If all those FANG were in tightly competitive markets and hence had low margins, they wouldn't have had billions of dollars to spend on the GPU compute necessary to develop modern language models. Which is evidenced by the fact that no companies in more competitive sectors have produced any large language models.

nickff4• 2 years ago

Because you specifically mention Alan Kay, I just finished reading “Dealers of Lightning”, which is about PARC, and says that the researchers there were very handsomely paid. IIRC, they were paid 20% more than their counterparts in ‘regular’ Xerox R&D. Xerox was also a big company, making a lot of money when it started PARC; arguably a monopoly (depending on how you define the term).

tivert• 2 years ago

I think you're getting it backwards. The research operations are a desperate attempt stave off regulation to keep the sweet, sweet monopoly profits coming in (and those profits are so big that the bean-counters allow it). I believe that was the explicit strategy at AT&T. We collectively pay way, way more.

It'd be way more efficient and cost effective to just set up a well-funded government labs to do that research.

dehrmann6• 2 years ago

It's an interesting argument for monopolies possibly being a net-good, but I don't think regulators really look at it. Companies do R&D because they like their monopoly status and don't want to be caught flat-footed by something new.

zaphar• 2 years ago

I am not at all confident that a government lab will be either well-funded or efficient in any sense of the words.

alexpotato• 2 years ago

Rory Sutherland has a great take on this which is (paraphrasing and my own interpretation):

Innovation is a lot easier when you have a lot of money to spend on R&D. In order to get that money, you can't compete on price b/c that's a race to the bottom. Instead, you want to focus on quality and/or customer service so that you become a monopoly and then can use monopoly profits to innovate to higher quality products and services.

Clip: https://www.tiktok.com/@rorysutherlandclips/video/7314765561...

mistrial9• 2 years ago

classical MBA says that a firm can compete on price OR branding, unfair advantages (moat) notwithstanding. Competition in commodities is difficult but not impossible given a rational economic environment. Some would say that the modern expectation of returns on investment are irrational, and warp the economics around them too.

pdonis• 2 years ago

Peter Thiel made a similar argument about monopolies years ago. As I pointed out then [1], the argument only shows that monopoly is good for the monopolist; it doesn't actually show that monopolies are good for society as a whole.

[1] http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/monopoly-money.html

which• 2 years ago

This! And where do people think open source funding, hackathons, bug bounties for software that's not even theirs, oss-fuzz, really incredible but not necessarily profitable research like Project Zero comes from? AdWords largesse.

blackoil2• 2 years ago

That is like wishing a benevolent dictator, who'll be in most cases more efficient then democracy but is a huge risk to take.

a_wild_dandan• 2 years ago

Lina Khan's response to this argument. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/live/L_QaZk5iJOA?si=ZkxBe1CHgagmcBcW...

2OEH8eoCRo03• 2 years ago

So it's OK to burden the whole country with a monopoly as long as they fund a handful of Nobel prizes?

Competition is a prerequisite for healthy Capitalism. Lack of competition is the Achilles heel.

someluccc13• 2 years ago

Please do tell us how Google is a burden to the whole country.

Is it the free maps? free mobile OS? free email? free cloud storage? free video service? free office suite? free desktop OS? free AI chat?

Apocryphon17• 2 years ago

What groundbreaking household name advancements has Microsoft Research yielded? Not all of these labs are equally revolutionary.

Maledictus• 2 years ago

https://archive.ph/DPtgt

kibwen3• 2 years ago

Google is such a rudderless mess that breaking it up may be the only way to salvage anything of societal value from this company.

pixxel• 2 years ago

societal value

Genuine question: what societal value would be lost if Google was erased tomorrow (all technical reliance their services was magically replaced overnight with alternatives by pixies)?

ruthmarx5• 2 years ago

What would happen if you replaced Google with a perfect functional equivalent? Well, nothing.

You don't happen to know where one could find these magical perfectly compatible and functional drop in replacements, do you?

dehrmann6• 2 years ago

You could make that argument for anything, though.

dehrmann6• 2 years ago

One of the pendulums in business strategy is whether companies should be smaller so they can be more nimble and pursue their own destines or larger so the can be more protected from market demands and can capitalize on "synergies" with other business units.

In practice, investors usually discount larger companies for efficiency reasons. You can see this with acquisition announcements where the acquirer usually goes down in price. The synergies often fail to pay off because there aren't actually many synergies between making microwaves and running a TV network, and the sprawling empire turns into mostly independent fiefdoms.

eastbound2• 2 years ago

There has been many announcements of lawsuits based on antitrust in the last 3 weeks.

We can assume the message is “If you reelect the current party, we’ll finish these lawsuits.” There are two perverse effects:

- It positions the alternate party as the party that Google should sponsor,

- The good choice after reelection will then be to delay the next step of those popular antitrust cases to 3 weeks before the end of the next mandate, to tell the electors that they should reelect. Which ironically puts the current party in the position of the one doing nothing on the popular antitrust case (a corollary to “a party’s platform depends on ensuring the problems it’s supposed to solve keep existing”).

chipgap98• 2 years ago

Weren’t some of these cases begun under the previous administration? Neither party is a fan of big tech

dehrmann6• 2 years ago

Harris has been thin on policy, so it's hard to say, but seeing that she's from the Bay Area, she might be more careful more careful to not break one of the country's key industries.

ripped_britches• 2 years ago

It will be really ironic if this kills Mozilla / Firefox

shiroiushi18• 2 years ago

That's one of several scary scenarios.

What if it kills Android, and everyone has to buy an iPhone? (Yeah, I know, Android is OSS and the phone makers could just maintain/improve it as a consortium without Google, but looking at how these companies operate I don't think they're capable of doing this.) (And no, I don't think the USG will break up Apple if this happens. They're already showing highly preferential treatment to Apple compared to Google.)

What if it kills YouTube, and the only viable alternative is TikTok? I recommend everyone start downloading all their favorite YouTube videos with yt-dlp right away, just in case.

What if it kills Google Maps? Again, there's no real viable alternative here unless you have an iPhone.

I can see a lot of ways things could go horribly wrong here if you're someone who doesn't want to be an Apple user.

dehrmann6• 2 years ago

And no, I don't think the USG will break up Apple if this happens. They're already showing highly preferential treatment to Apple compared to Google.

The largest business by far is iPhones. It has 16% market share in the PC business, behind Lenovo, HP, and Dell. The only business that makes sense to peel off is the iPhone services (Apple Music, News, etc.) because that's the place it uses its dominant position to help its own products.

busterarm5• 2 years ago

Samsung could easily maintain Android as they already have their own little Android software ecosystem that differs greatly from Google's. Full of spyware, but yeah.

There's tons of video hosting options but what makes YouTube special is access to a large audience and monetization. TikTok's monetization is garbage and not even a contender really. Large content creators are already negotiating their own brand deals to the point where YouTube's ad money is merely the cherry on top. I actually think breaking up YouTube would be good for audiences and in the long run creators themselves. Content creator networks would make a return in a big way.

There is already OpenStreetMaps. MapQuest existed before Google Maps and still does.

labcomputer2• 2 years ago

Google Maps isn’t going anywhere. They are a profit center from all the search ads within the map.

azemetre4• 2 years ago

Mozilla killed Firefox itself with its poor leadership. They have had nearly 20 years of Google writing them half a billion checks annually. If they can't come up with a better business plan than literal corporate welfare, maybe they don't deserve to exist?

asdff6• 2 years ago

I don't understand where all the money goes for mozilla. Here is the revenue line from wikipedia for 2022:

total revenue | percent from google | total expenses |software dev expenses

$593 million | 81% ($480 million) | $425 million | $220 million

so basically 168 million in the bank in 2022. the math has been basically this the last 10 years. in 2018 they lost 1 million but in 2019 they gained 330 million. a lot of their software expenses probably comes from the busywork features they saddled upon themselves like pocket or whatever, since it was only $63 million in 2010 and has only gone up by a couple hundred million from there.

So just over the last 10 years from my back of the envelope map from that table on wikipedia, they should have a good 1.5 billion in the war chest by today assuming the mozilla foundation did not make investments with it, which they probably have this entire time so probably even more valuable. At a certain point, maybe already, the org should have enough cash socked away in investment to just pay for operating expenses out of dividends alone.

dtquad• 2 years ago

Hilariously shortsighted. Big Tech companies have been a GDP-doubling runaway success for the US economy.

It would be like if we here in Denmark started breaking up Novo Nordisk. Our economists would probably do a public lynching of any government official who suggested doing that.

However as a European I can't help but welcoming the US shooting themselves in the foot like this. Something tells me we will see more of this as more reddit-brained American millennials get political influence.

MathiasPius• 2 years ago

It is precisely the large impact on GDP that poses a threat to the host nation. When companies like Novo Nordisk are such a huge part of the economy, they can exert disproportionate influence on society itself.

Our economy is absolutely benefiting from Novo Nordisk's size right now, but if/when their demand weakens or they're out-competed, we're going to end up with a lot of unemployed biotechnicians and massive roads to Kalundborg which will need to be maintained.

kibwen3• 2 years ago

Hilariously shortsighted. Breaking up Standard Oil created wildly competitive industries and launched Rockefeller's wealth into the stratosphere. Big Tech is a rent-seeking middleman that chokes the life out of innovation.

mandibles• 2 years ago

Standard Oil had already lost a huge portion of its market share when the forced breakup finally happened.

openrisk• 2 years ago

Hilariously confused. Tech is different from Big Tech, which is yet further different from Big Ad Tech.

For the avoidance of doubt, Wintel was Big Tech. The status quo now is Big Ad Tech.

The main economically positive thing for the US (and something Europeans absolutely screwed up in relative terms versus the US and increasingly China) is the early investment and adoption of Tech. Digitization as such is a great enabler.

But you don't need Big Tech oligopolies for a vibrant digital economy.

But even more importantly, you don't need bizarre Big Ad Tech commingled business models that build the economy's entire tech infrastructure - many parts of it having a critical utility like role - on the back of... ads.

But there is little scope for European schadenfreude. Arguably the US antitrust gears are moving precisely because people slowly wake up to the limits on economic opportunity placed by the Big Ad Tech status quo.

In Europe we are good at words and criticizing mistakes but deeds are scarce.

bpodgursky• 2 years ago

Hilariously confused. Tech is different from Big Tech, which is yet further different from Big Ad Tech.

Big Ad Tech has been a money spigot for R&D in both hard and soft tech. This comes via M&A but also spawning a generation of VCs willing to fritter away adtech money on fun hard tech startups.

There is not a big source of VC funding for hardware startups that doesn't come directly or indirectly from Big Tech / Big Ad Tech revenue and valuations.

throwaway484762• 2 years ago

Denmark has separate gdp numbers that don't include novo nordisk because they care about the real economy, not just number go up.

lotsofpulp2• 2 years ago

Developing and selling medicine to solve the number one health problem in the world (in addition to medicines for other health problems) is not real economy?

idle_zealot14• 2 years ago

There is no point in chasing a high GDP when it results in a materially worse world. The point of a society isn't to make the numbers go up. If a monopoly is super efficient at generating some nebulous concept of value by creating and operating the world's largest surveillance system and actively using it to sell influence over people's attention and habits then the only sensible thing to do is to dismantle it.

richwater2• 2 years ago

results in a materially worse world.

Please explain how Google has created a materially worse world

CuriouslyC3• 2 years ago

What you say would have been true 10+ years ago, but not anymore. Big tech is really into rent seeking and competition stifling now, we'd see more innovation by opening up the space so new players can get a foothold.

zer8k• 2 years ago

The point is to not allow a company to be able to buy out the entire country. Maybe Novo Nordisk is a good steward but historically companies like Google and Amazon act only their own best interests. Breaking up these massive companies ends up doing the better thing anyway - a surge of competition emerges and offers better and often cheaper services. Look at the break up of Bell. The short term was marginally negative (higher long distance costs) but the market was better for it.

Google has a substantial amount of control over the flow of information in the United States. To the point it can literally redefine truth. This is a problem - and one that is easily solved by breaking up a de-facto monopoly. Moreover, the acquire-and-kill strategy stifles innovation. Imagine what we would have if Google didnt have the capital to buy and kill so many small companies.

consteval11• 2 years ago

I disagree fundamentally. The fallacy here is that breaking up a company results in it making less money. Usually it's the opposite, because corporate inefficiency stops being as much of a problem.

In my opinion, breaking up Google would only serve to make it even more profitable. Once companies grow to behemoths, they stop doing stuff. They slow down innovation to a crawl, and they essentially exist on life support and inertia until they're overthrown by a much, much smaller company.

We see this pattern of life for a company again and again. We see it RCA, with GE, with GM. The only reason AT&T (Ma Bell) is still around and didn't decay like others before it is BECAUSE it was broken up. It was given new life as a set of new, smaller companies.

molticrystal• 2 years ago

A lot of Google's features when integrated and leading to ads and other Google properties they are justified, but if you were to forbid cooperation between the divisions, they may be shut down or diminished, as on their own they would need to be subsidized considerably and the 3rd party alternatives for ads would take most of the profits probably leading to negative cash flow without decreasing the level of service or charging fees.

apercu4• 2 years ago

If they are shut down but valuable, some other company will produce similar products. That's how the market should work.

hkand2• 2 years ago

What if they are valuable, but only when integrated with other parts of the company? At many of these companies, I can think of several products in big tech that are good for consumers and profitable but can't be done in a different, independent company.

blackeyeblitzar2• 2 years ago

It’s amazing to me that Google is still so rich given how lazy their culture is and how incompetent their product strategy has been. It just goes to show the power of their size and all it brings. Things like capital, monopolies (search), control over platforms (Chrome), network effects (YouTube and ad networks), and just plain old momentum.

This break up is long overdue but we also need a drastic rethink of antitrust law and corporate taxes to shift the economy towards innovative smaller instead of concentrating it in a few megacorps that are as powerful as some governments.

ktosobcy• 2 years ago

As I said in the past - Google and the likes (Meta) should have never been allowed to swallow other companies (DoubleClick, youtube and instagram/whatsapp respecively)...

ilaksh• 2 years ago

I think decentralized technologies should be part of the discussion when you it comes to replacing technology monopolies. For example, there might be some protocols for cooperative web indexing or search or to provide a common layer that companies can build on.

throwaway484762• 2 years ago

Common crawl?

cogman103• 2 years ago

I'd love to see how something like this could handle the bad actor problem. It is what (IMO) is currently killing the web today.

How would you, for example, stop a rouge indexer from spewing an unlimited number of bad indexes to spam their garbage into the distributed protocol? Or how would you address just bad/misleading/faulty indexes?

idle_zealot14• 2 years ago

Web of trust, I guess? Don't accept just anyone doing scraping/indexing. Keep the trust network human-scale. I can imagine a world where the relevant protocols are open and organizations choose their own roots of trust. Common defaults would likely emerge, things like the Wikimedia foundation or Archive would serve as default roots for your average user, but you could add your own or remove those if you knew what you were doing.

onecommentman3• 2 years ago

I’ve never understood why Congress hasn’t mandated the Library of Congress to offer an Internet Archive/Google for content created in the US. Expand to all first-world country content if they wish. This is not a technology-limited problem at this point. Be nice to get fresh high-quality scans of analog content online…the early digital scans available commercially or otherwise are often unreadable.

pseufaux• 2 years ago

Unabashedly one sided, but still a pretty good resource about this case.

https://www.usvgoogleads.com

matthewfelgate2• 2 years ago

I don't understand how Microsoft gets away with being a bigger monopoly for longer.

fyrn_• 2 years ago

Arguably a duopoly with Apple, while ads and web browsing are just google? Not sure just a guess.

matthewfelgate2• 2 years ago

Sure. If you ignore Microsoft Teams, One Drive, LinkedIn, Azure, Bing, Microsoft 365, OneDrive, Outlook, GitHub, Power BI, Skype, Visual Studio and Office...

busterarm5• 2 years ago

A 40 year relationship with every arm of every Government.

EcommerceFlow• 2 years ago

If Google isn't allowed to use search data to train LLMs, would the same apply to X and the tweets found there?

JumpCrisscross9• 2 years ago

If Google isn't allowed to use search data to train LLMs, would the same apply to X and the tweets found there?

If a federal judge finds X/Twitter to have a monopoly on short-form nonsense, yes.

busterarm5• 2 years ago

This is all smoke and mirrors. DoJ does not have any intention of breaking up their friendly neighborhood Google.

What they're doing is seeing the writing on the wall of the upcoming election and seeing all of their jobs on the line and they're trying to shake down Google for golden parachutes.

I guarantee you in the next year, several high-level DoJ officials will secure senior positions at Google in order to defend against upcoming antitrust litigation. Those that don't will try to use their active litigation as an anchor to try and retain their jobs.

heinrich5991• 2 years ago

https://archive.is/DPtgt

geor9e• 2 years ago

HN is a special place but among the average folk, I get why 90% of people use google. I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are. Especially with so many companies scraping the whole web for AI data, and so many GPUs chugging on that data. I suppose they are all focused on replacing the concept of search results with LLM prose. Ironically bing is down at the moment https://downdetector.com/status/bing/

whiplash4512• 2 years ago

Maybe because search is an extremely hard problem and requires hundreds of millions (if not billions) of investment to remain competitive?

Night_Thastus2• 2 years ago

Also: There is a MASSIVE incentive for foul play from everyone being searched. Every single business wants their results at the top. Everyone is grasping for every single advertiser's cents. The monetary encouragement to game the system is so incredibly strong. Google has to fight that uphill battle 24/7.

I have a lot of issues with Google as a company, but I do not envy their position when it comes to the web search. It is a cursed problem no matter how you look at it.

duskwuff2• 2 years ago

It's only getting harder and harder for newcomers to compete. Especially with the rise of abusive AI scrapers, webmasters are increasingly hostile to new web crawlers. Google and Bing get a pass because they're well-known, but any new service is fighting an uphill battle; a lot of sites will block them right off the bat. Nor does it help that some large sites (like Reddit) have inside deals with Google to feed them updates directly.

eviks• 2 years ago

What's incredibly hard allowing client side filtering like kagi is doing?

How many millions do you need to spend to decrease your own spending on AI for every query?

voisin2• 2 years ago

I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are.

I have such a hard time understanding your position on this. Google search results are absolute trash now, compared to DuckDuckGo.

ergonaught• 2 years ago

Google search results are garbage and are still superior to DDG.

I start every search in DDG and have to take it to Google fully 90% of the time.

elevatedastalt2• 2 years ago

DuckDuckGo can have a seat at the table when they implement their own search index.

Putting a sticker on Bing and Yandex results doesn't make a Search company.

mock-possum• 2 years ago

Here are some examples of DDG utterly failing as a search engine compared to google: https://www.tumblr.com/ddgvsggl

AlienRobot4• 2 years ago

Not my experience. I'd like to see you prove this.

blackoil2• 2 years ago

That even if True is irrelevant to discussion. Antitrust isn't mostly against monopoly, but its abuse to gain benefit in another area or uncompetitive practices to stifle potential competition.

enraged_camel• 2 years ago

The alternatives are bad because the ones that were even remotely good were bought and killed by Google over the years. This includes ones we all have heard of as well as countless others.

This is a common tactic of tech giants, and the direct consequence of it is… what we have today.

aednichols• 2 years ago

Google has acquired a lot of ad competitors, but I can't remember any general-purpose search engines. It seemed more like they died out naturally over a long period. I welcome new information if that's not right.

xdennis• 2 years ago

it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are

Hard disagree. Google almost delights in not showing what you want. For political stuff it's very biased. If you search for something more obscure, Google really likes to "correct" your search and eliminate terms.

Although Google is better in my maternal language and for images (but AI is ruining image search for everyone).

AlbertCory• 2 years ago

I use DDG most of the time. Sometimes I try Google, and then I'm disgusted by all the non-result garbage they put at the top nowadays. Once in a while they do have something valuable that DDG misses.

So yeah, I find DDG perfectly adequate.

tannhaeuser• 2 years ago

HN isn't that special a place considering nerds think about Google as a "search engine" lol.

Google/Alphabet, first and foremost, is the largest online advertiser via its acquisitions of YouTube, DoubleClick, and others, in addition to selling ad placement on Google Search via AdWords, plus a growing number of consumer portals for price comparisons etc. integrated with Google Search (leaving out tracking your activity on Android devices, Google's cloud business, and Books/scholar). The immediate antitrust perspective starts by looking at Alphabet/Google subsidiaries both providing search results and ads on the pages listed in search results (and to a lesser degree even by pushing Google services via Google Search). This is what had ruined the web in more than one way.

mvdtnz3• 2 years ago

google.com is a search engine, regardless of what drives Google's revenue. Weird to say it's not.

mm263• 2 years ago

it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are

Kagi

arghwhat2• 2 years ago

After having been a paid subscriber for a number of months, I have to say that it still wasn't cutting it. I still ended up falling back to google all the time.

Plus, https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

ta124310• 2 years ago

The goal of almost all search engines is to direct people to adverts, not to give them the results.

Even when you do get the results your after, and get sent to the page you want, the goal of that page is to serve you adverts, not to give you the content you want.

miohtama• 2 years ago

Alternatives are bad because they do not have 24 years of data how users use the search. They will also never get this data if Google keeps dominating.

JasserInicide• 2 years ago

Unironically Yandex, especially if you're searching for politically sensitive stuff. It is wild how much Google censors.

goryramsy• 2 years ago

Care to elaborate?

wavemode• 2 years ago

it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are

Can you give me an example of a search query which yields acceptable results on Google but does not on Bing?

stephenr4• 2 years ago

With (practically) every website in existence spending fuck knows how many hours/days/weeks optimising for Google search bot, it's baffling? Really?

ein0p• 2 years ago

Idk how you could split it up other than right down the middle, creating 2 of each unit. 2 search engines, 2 browsers, 2 ad exchanges, 2 clouds and so on. Anything else is not going to be viable. Though maybe that’s the real goal.

bfrog• 2 years ago

Imagine an ad company locking up talent for decades. Zzzzzzzz

gerash5• 2 years ago

What an incompetent government where the goal is to pad some DoJ lawyer's resume instead of benefiting consumers or the economy

Clubber3• 2 years ago

The US government has been working solely for their donors for the last 40+ years. Any benefit the voters get from lawmaking is coincidental.

esbranson2• 2 years ago

That thought may be comforting, but no.

Don't mistake the limited-purpose US Government for your state government. Colorado does quite a bit, from healthcare to environment to policing. And so does the US, for those subjects it has jurisdiction, and has been doing so for hundreds of years.

strongpigeon2• 2 years ago

Something I really don't get is the part about Google's monopoly in search text ads. FTA:

Finally, the filing said Google’s dominance over search text ads needed to be addressed by lowering barriers to would-be rivals or licensing its ad feed to others, independently from search results.

What Google has is a monopoly on search (which is bad), but I don't think having a monopoly for advertising on your own property is a bad thing. If anything, from a privacy perspective, I'd rather that only one party (the publisher, in this case Google) gets to see my searches, rather than the publisher and an ecosystem of low-scrupules ad platforms.

For sure I might be biased as I used to work on Google Ads, but I also know quite a bit about how the sausage is made and how the industry is. That being said, I really don't see how "licensing the ad feed" would do any good for end users.

soperj• 2 years ago

low scrupules ad platforms

In this case, the search provider is the low scruples ad platform. Bing as well.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF• 2 years ago

What Google has is a monopoly on search (which is bad), but I don't think having a monopoly for advertising on your own property is a bad thing.

Where one might run afoul is using your monopoly in one market -- search, in Google's case -- to gain an advantage in another market -- advertising. It's kinda interesting because they clearly don't treat "search" as a market given they don't sell it to anyone but it also clearly has value, otherwise people wouldn't use it.

Now I wonder if it is without precedent that the supposedly-monopolistic thing they're using as a carrot for their advantage in a different market doesn't actually generate revenue itself; not sure if that context has ever been tried in court.

strongpigeon2• 2 years ago

The argument that I see that could be made (which is different from what the judge said here) is that Google used their monopoly in search to gain an unfair advantage in Network Ads. I could totally see forcing Google to spin-off their external ad network, but at the same time, these ads sucks and are getting worse CPM wise.

There is another ongoing case regarding Google's Ad business (concerning Display Ads and more specifically the ad auctions) which seems pretty strong. But again, it's not about preventing Google from owning the ad platform for their own properties.

Preventing companies from owning the advertising platform for their own properties is a pretty terrible idea (got an idea for a new ad format that no network supports? Tough luck!). But, preventing a player with a monopoly in one sector from having an ad platform for other players, that's sensible.

carlosjobim3• 2 years ago

It's kinda interesting because they clearly don't treat "search" as a market given they don't sell it to anyone but it also clearly has value, otherwise people wouldn't use it.

They sell access to their search API, even to competitors.

mensetmanusman4• 2 years ago

DeepMind wouldn’t have happened to the level it did had google been broken up prior.

asdff6• 2 years ago

What might deep mind have looked like today if it were given the same resources in an academic or national lab setting and no ultimate profit motive?

mensetmanusman4• 2 years ago

Sans access to the worlds top supercomputer infra.

iepathos• 2 years ago

For some perspective here, The US spends ~$90b on all higher education institution research combined each year with over half of that funding coming from the government. The 42 federally funded national research labs only had something like $29.3b spent on R&D in 2023 and only a portion of that is allowed to be spent on non-weapons research. Google alone is spending over $100b on just deep mind R&D this year. So, all academia and all the federally funded research labs would have to have agreed to stop working on anything else to pool enough resources together to provide equivalent support for deep mind. This would've required many government officials and entities to have the foresight to see the potential impact of deep mind and be willing to sacrifice all the other interests they have asking for funding. imo if federal government were funding deep mind this significantly in this alternate timeline it would be focused towards weapons research and wartime applications cause over half of the national labs funding is spent on weapons R&D.

giobox• 2 years ago

There was no shortage of other deep-pocketed suitors trying to buy DeepMind too during the Google acquisition back in 2014 - I think DeepMind would have likely found a reasonable home regardless.

creato3• 2 years ago

Are those other deep-pocketed suitors not under antitrust scrutiny themselves at the moment? Maybe they would be first in the firing line of the DoJ if they had bought DeepMind instead?

Jyaif• 2 years ago

Among the big tech companies, only Google cared about AI at the time.

mensetmanusman4• 2 years ago

I just bring this up as a reminder that the government did kill Bell Labs by breaking up a trust. There are pros and cons to every corporation system.

asdff6• 2 years ago

If they did this 15 year ago, I bet google reader would still be actively maintained today. More innovation is possible when there are smaller companies working on fewer things. Yes there are economies of scale with large entities, but you then run up against the economy of shareholder attention if your little effort within the larger organization is not the current golden child of the day. When you work at a smaller company, that little effort is the entire company's product. It has to work and get better to succeed. It can't be forgotten about and left to languish like so many potentially great products and technologies that are chained to some large org today.

aiauthoritydev2• 2 years ago

Google engineer's time was not worth Google reader. If you think it was a useful product you could have created it yourself for profit.

asdff6• 2 years ago

Highly useful software is not always profitable. Limiting our species to developing technologies that are profitable rather than merely useful is a severe blow to our path of innovation.

musictubes2• 2 years ago

There are a variety of people that did just that. It’s frustrating to keep seeing the sentiment, on HN of all places, that Google Reader is what is needed for RSS services. RSS readers are a niche business and clearly not worth Google’s opportunity cost of maintaining. I have used NewsBlur as my RSS aggregator since Reader shut down. Pretty sure it is a one man operation.

Madiyan• 2 years ago

85907 54751

1penny42cents• 2 years ago

crazy double whammy:

1. US gov trying to break up your search monopoly

2. ChatGPT disrupting your search monopoly

relistan4• 2 years ago

Hilarious to see all the people lamenting the break-up of AT&T. That break-up sparked the long distance phone race, which became the driving force for the massive laying of fiber optics... which enabled the Internet boom of the 1990s.

CSMastermind2• 2 years ago

My understanding was that most of the internet infrastructure was laid by Bell before their break-up because they projected video calling being a huge use case in the future.

floxy2• 2 years ago

1982 seem a bit early for the massive fiber rollout. My recollection was that Sprint was the driving factor for laying fiber, since they had the railroad right-of-ways. But that was quite a while back. Maybe there was also another dark-horse company laying fiber along railroads, but not operating as a phone company? Something not quite at the tip of my tongue. Seems like someone could have written a good history book about internet infrastructure, especially the mid-to-late 90s. Anyone have suggestions?

nickff4• 2 years ago

AT&T had also been granted a long-term monopoly on long-distance telephony by the federal government; Google has never had such protection.

relistan4• 2 years ago

A monopoly is a monopoly no matter how it got that way.

bityard• 2 years ago

Breaking up AT&T was unquestionably the right call. (So to say.)

Long distance was expensive for quite a while even after the break-up. If you called up an out-of-state friend or relative to catch up, you expected the call to cost you at least a few bucks. (And you hoped they would be the ones to call you next time.) Even into the 90's, long distance at $0.10/minute was considered cheap. And in most rural areas, everywhere past a mile or so out of town was long distance.

I remember buying long-distance calling cards to bring our phone costs down. For about 5 years, it was cheaper to just get a local-only phone line and then buy your long-distance as phone cards. Each card came with a certain number of minutes pre-loaded. You'd dial the 1-800 number on the back, scratch off your PIN, enter it, and then you'd dial your destination number. Other than the hassle of buying and using the card, the major downside was that your own number didn't (usually) show up on the caller ID.

They were also good if you stayed in hotels a lot, since hotels would charge upward of usurious amounts for both local and long-distance calls but they would typically allow toll-free calls to go through without charge.

someluccc13• 2 years ago

This illustrates why breaking up google is a good idea given their egregious charges (free) for things people used to/still spend money on, such as:

- An office software suite

- Global maps and GPS, City Guides

- Video entertainment

- Mobile and Desktop OS

- Web Browsers

Also, pay no mind to their competitors in all of those markets AND in their core business of search, being feeble multi-trillion and multi-billion global corporations

kunwon1• 2 years ago

I was in the USAF in the early 2000s, stationed in Germany. Due to a dispute with DT, I ended up using long distance calling cards to dial (overseas!) into AOL to get online. It was very involved. I imagine I may have been the only person in the country doing this

tightbookkeeper3• 2 years ago

That’s a complicated chain of cause and effect to claim so casually.

relistan4• 2 years ago

Feel free to read up on it. Start with the histories of MCI and Sprint, then NSFNet, etc

timeon4• 2 years ago

which enabled the Internet boom

Now this gives me reason lamenting the break-up of AT&T.

z3ncyberpunk• 2 years ago

The fiber optics that were paid to be delivered to every home and never delivered upon and the money pocketed? Yeah.

dekhn• 2 years ago

My primary interest is how Alphabet will attempt to implement this. In particular, if they break up Search and Ads, or really any major product in google3/borg, Alphabet will have a massive pile of work splitting those up in a way that allows the resulting groups to achieve the same level of horizontal and vertical integration that they currently enjoy.

Personally I am skeptical that they have enough technically capable and charismatic leaders to pull this off.

adamc3• 2 years ago

Not sure that would be a bad thing.

Ajedi324• 2 years ago

If Google doesn't survive being broken up, then this move would be essentially nuking a 2 TRILLION dollar company into the ground for zero gain. Again, that's 2 TRILLION DOLLARS worth of value getting thrown onto a garbage pile and burned up, just because "it seemed like a good idea at the time".

You can speculate that something better would emerge from the ashes. It's possible you're right. But you have to admit this would be a huge gamble.

This isn't like Bell where you can just split the company into geographically distinct regions and call it a day. Google's services are intricately linked together and tightly integrated, and you can argue that's a huge part of where their value lies.

I'm not entirely sure where I stand on this, but I think I'd be more in favor of laws to force interoperability and promote competition rather than a full fledged break up, at least in the short term. Or maybe a slow, carefully planned breakup where individual services get spun out one at a time over a few decades, with time to reverse course if that proves to be a bad idea.

rightbyte• 2 years ago

It might be schadenfreude but I see failure as an option.

eagerpace• 2 years ago

Anywhere there are eyeballs, there will be ads. And wherever there are ads there are privacy concerns.

Netflix waited until they had sufficiently killed off cable TV, then went back to creating the same problem it fixed. No ads in ChatGPT today, but soon as it (or a competitor) gains meaningful marketshare, there will be ads.

tensor2• 2 years ago

What I'd love to see is regulation forcing companies to provide reasonably priced ad-free options. There should be a right to opt out of ads.

yeevs• 2 years ago

I'd argue almost every platform with ads do have this option. You just may disagree about what's reasonably priced.

tick_tock_tick3• 2 years ago

I mean Youtube does people just don't pay for it....

mulmen7• 2 years ago

Competition should solve this. The government’s role is to cultivate competitive markets, not to get bogged down in implementation details.

tqi• 2 years ago

There should be a right to opt out of ads.

What does that even look like, practically speaking? Is sponsored segment an ad? Is wearing branded apparel an ad? Is doing a press junket for a new movie an ad?

ryandrake2• 2 years ago

And wherever there are ads there are privacy concerns.

Not necessarily true. Physical billboards are ads but (mostly) without privacy concerns, until they start putting cameras on them watching who walks by and looks.

feelandcoffee• 2 years ago

I miss old contextual advertising. Like you read a sports website, you see ads for matches, sports gear, etc, all based on the content not the user preferences.

throw4847285• 2 years ago

That's one of my favorite scenes in Minority Report. It's even better that they used a real company (Gap) which likely paid to have their store depicted as a dystopian hellscape. People think of Stephen Spielberg as a director of fluff, but I can't think of a more subversive moment in a mainstream blockbuster.

weberer• 2 years ago

JCDecaux already does that. I make sure to never look at them when passing by. It sucks that they infest all metro stations in Helsinki.

https://www.jcdecaux.com.au/news-around-world/jetstar-and-jc...

sumtechguy• 2 years ago

I remember buying cable tv because it had 'no ads'.

mulmen7• 2 years ago

Anywhere there are eyeballs, there will be ads.

I’m not convinced.

Not running ads is what you do when you care about user experience. If you start running ads it’s because you care more about money than user experience.

As long as there is robust competition the consumer’s preferences will be favored, because success comes at their discretion.

So I think it’s more like “wherever the consumer isn’t the customer there will be ads”.

nox1013• 2 years ago

Company A has no ads because they care about user experience

Company B has ads. Company B makes more money and can therefore provide more features / more content. Company B ends up providing more of what users want.

gaiagraphia• 2 years ago

The free market's great IF there's competition. If the market's dead, it's time to reinject some life and keep the cogs turning.

Scale's great, but it often comes with a societal cost. For every efficiency made, there's less agency and decent jobs to go round.

Seems unfair to make such decisions ad-hoc though, and string it out through years of court cases and m/billions of lawyer fees.

Why not establish rules of the market where once a company gets x% market share, the company 'wins', the CEO gets the ability to run for high office, the nation thanks shareholders and gives them a big payoff for supporting innovation, and those 1 run down the food chain get to spin off their own companies and go for gold.

Life and death is a part of everything sustainable in life. We should embrace these cycles and utilise them, not let old hat stagnation strangle and squeeze all what's good from life.

4star3star• 2 years ago

It would become a game to NOT capture x% market share to the degree that it suited interested parties to avoid it.

gmueckl• 2 years ago

That would have interesting implications. Companies would have to grow by aggressive diversification into other markets. Instead of a Google or Appple that controls your digital life, you'd have an endgame with a few ACMEs that attempt to lock you in in every aspect of your life: Your pots would work best with a stove from the same company. Your washing machine and detergent only do a good on a specific brand of clothes etc. A completely different kind of market regulation would be required.

grumpy_coder• 2 years ago

That game already exists. Intel and Amd had an odd relationship for years when Intel needed Amd so they could claim that competition existed. Cross licensing instruction sets and the like.

s1artibartfast6• 2 years ago

What happens to the company when it wins in your scenario. Did you leave that out or did I miss something?

randomdata• 2 years ago

The free market's great IF there's competition.

If you have a free market finding competition isn't an issue, but maintaining profitability is. If we had a free market when Google came onto the scene, everyone else would have copied PageRank the next day, and then you'd have hundreds of search engines all as good as each other, each sharping their pencils sharper and sharper in an attempt to win customers over on a price basis until there is nothing left. At which point there is nothing left to further innovation.

To combat that, we grant short-term monopolies over technology to allow their inventors time to build up a decent business before opening the flood gates, with the intent to balance what makes mixed-market economies great without ending up with no competition. The problem is that those monopoly procedures were established when time moved slowly. Back then, 20 years was barely enough time to get your product to and recognized in the market. These days, you can get there in a few years, or even less, which leaves nearly 20 more years to focus on killing all the competition.

Ultimately, we would have been better off if Google was pushed out into a free market after a few years. We benefitted from it having some head start, but it went on much too long.

svara2• 2 years ago

Sort of playing devil's advocate here, but well run companies with near monopolies have on many occasions provided massive benefits that would not have been possible at smaller scale.

Think of Bell Labs.

Google has a number of Bell Labs style projects ongoing that massively benefit scientific research. Transformers, AlphaFold, etc.

It's hard to see how a smaller, more focused company would be able to justify that type of R&D.

That said, I do see an issue where some of the smartest people get sucked up by big tech. Instead of working on fundamental advances in image processing they end up working on beauty filters for Instagram. That can't be right.

s1artibartfast6• 2 years ago

Why can't that be right?

I see the sentiment a lot, but it strikes me as reality denialism. People are willing to pay for one thing but not the other.

maccard2• 2 years ago

That said, I do see an issue where some of the smartest people get sucked up by big tech. Instead of working on fundamental advances in image processing they end up working on beauty filters for Instagram. That can't be right.

Can't you say the same thing if you go back 80 years and talk about the smartest minds in the world instead of working on energy for the masses they're working on the atomic bomb?

makeitdouble3• 2 years ago

It's hard to see how a smaller, more focused company would be able to justify that type of R&D.

Typically that's solved with R&D happening in academia or semi-public space.

How much this happens depends on the opportunities to do it in private companies, so entities like Google paying big salaries for R&D probably means we don't see what alternatives they would be if they stopped doing so.

snarf212• 2 years ago

I don't think it would be the company that focused on those Moonshots. The founder types with $Billions get bored and start new things that try these instead.

altpaddle2• 2 years ago

Do you realize what the cost was to society to have a Bell Labs? Telephone service was expensive as hell and you couldn't even own your own telephone. There was no incentive for innovation in many areas like answering machines, cell phones etc

akira2501• 2 years ago

Scale's great

Is it? As consumers you may be noticing the impact now but as a developer I've felt the impact of Google's "scale" for years and it has not been pleasant.

black_puppydog2• 2 years ago

I think that's exactly because too much of a good thing became bad. Scale was good for consumers when it increased efficiency, and decreased cost. But once the lower hanging scale effects were taken, the drawbacks (regulatory capture, monopoly,...) became more noticeable.

makeitdouble3• 2 years ago

I think you're partly describing nationalisation of a business when it becomes so big it can't be left alone and needs to be readjusted to help the market.

It's bought by the gov ("payout to the shareholders"), regulations are enacted to delimit what it can and can't do, and the whole thing is setup to make sure it's for the benefit of the larger public, with additional consideration on how to reintroduce competition on part of its mandate.

We' ve seen it with postal services and telecom, and if the whole thing becomes outdated it can spun out as a private entity again.

CatWChainsaw3• 2 years ago

Thiel himself said competition is for losers. He also said he thinks democracy and freedom are incompatible. His cohort doesn't want a free market, it wants godlike technofeudalism.

eric-hu• 2 years ago

godlike technofeudalism

Interesting term. On a geopolitical scale, how is the US/NATO’s position any different? There are export controls around advanced semiconductors and encryption algorithms.

Is it okay to do this between countries but not within societies? (Genuine question. I really don’t know where I stand on this, for either side.)

hot_gril• 2 years ago

If the tech market is dead, most markets are even more dead

snarf212• 2 years ago

I think you are close, but we need to stop these mega-mergers where the acquisition would give any company X% of the market. We also need to go after the anti-monopoly practices of the mega giants; like what Amazon did to Diapers.com. As we've seen through the pandemic and elsewhere, extreme consolidation is only good for shareholders and more rent-seeking. It is never good for workers or the market or competition. It has affected everything from food to energy to "news" to healthcare.

mmastrac• 2 years ago

Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon -- the US could easily break all of these up. There's a huge risk to stagnation and over-optimization once these companies get as big as they do.

christhecaribou4• 2 years ago

They should. It’s good for the public trust, competition, and innovation. I’d even go so far as to argue it’s good for the shareholders.

hn_throwaway_996• 2 years ago

I'm curious as to why you included Apple. All of the other companies bought up a bunch of potential competitors so they wouldn't get outcompeted, e.g:

Facebook: Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus

Google: DoubleClick, YouTube, Android, Waze, Deep mind

Amazon: Whole Foods, Audible, Zappos, Ring, One Medical

Arguably, I think things would be better if a bunch of these acquisitions were never allowed in the first place. But most of Apple's acquisitions have been of the "acquihire" type where they got specific technologies to enhance their products - Beats is the only one I can think of off the top of my head that has basically remained separate.

I'm not saying acquisitions are the only benchmark for breaking up big tech, but to me it feels like the places where Apple is anti-competitive (e.g. App Store) can be remedied with much smaller changes than a full break up. With the other 3 it seems easier to identify places to "cleave".

azemetre4• 2 years ago

Apple has operating systems, hardware, and software. Maybe Apple should spinoff OSX into its own company? They clearly abuse their positions with OS X and their hardware to push Apple specific software that only they benefit from.

If they had to separate their operating systems into another company, they would have to freely compete to put their app stores on their devices.

Or even better, spin off their hardware divisions if you want.

Either way Apple shouldn't be able to control their operating systems or their hardware unless they open up their devices and allow consumers easier ways to both repair their devices and install alternative operating systems on them.

sadeshmukh• 2 years ago

What completed or competes with YouTube?

EasyMark3• 2 years ago

I think that’s a bad idea, those other companies have lots of competition and haven’t abused their positions nearly as much as google has.

stego-tech3• 2 years ago

Loving the discourse in the comments here. Speaking as someone who grew up alongside Google in a sense, I fall on the side of the "break it up" camp. It was novel at the time to have a single company so nicely provide us with everything digitally that we could need - G Suite, YouTube, Search, Maps, Advertising, Books, Reader, etc - but in hindsight, we gave too much power to too unaccountable an entity, who in turn used it to choke off any avenues to challenge its dominance.

As for the rebuttal of "bUt ThE gDp", there's a counter-argument to be made that the GDP would have grown just as much with a higher diversity and stringent M&A regulations by spurring on new businesses and concepts, as opposed to mainstreaming fad after fad that seemingly solely benefits the established players. There's another argument to be made equating GDP values to desirable targets creates a Goodhart's Law problem, thereby making GDP as a measure of growth or success a bad metric; the rise of income and wealth inequality these past few decades, when there was increased focus on GDP as a target of growth or success, could be viewed as evidence supporting said argument.

It's worth noting that this case against Google is likely to be the bellwether for future divestments and breakups. Whatever comes next will be an invaluable learning experience for both sides, just like AT&T and Microsoft's own anti-trust woes were learning experiences for the current crop of companies.

jajko2• 2 years ago

If I am worried about anybody holding my private data (apart from US' 3-letter agencies and thats a hill I am not going to die upon since I don't have same basic human rights as US citizens), its Meta.

Sure Google is everywhere, but Meta holds much more data on our inner personal sides, which are the easiest things to actually abuse to no end. That and pornhub.

sitkack2• 2 years ago

Are you sure? Google has a search and location data, Google email is on one side if not both of most email chains, receipts, etc.

I don't use meta for much. Google on the otherhand takes some pretty dedicated behavior to avoid.

wonderwonder• 2 years ago

Google actually tracks associates everywhere you visit in incognito mode in chrome and associates it with your main user id. So whatever pornhub knows, so does google.

hightrix10• 2 years ago

nicely provide us with everything digitally that we could need... Advertising

Sorry for the snark, but no one anywhere needs advertising. Advertising in it's current form is a plague on humanity.

loumaciel4• 2 years ago

Tons of small businesses rely on advertising. Tons of legit businesses only exist because online advertising became easy and widespread.

WalterBright10• 2 years ago

I am in the market for a new scanner. I looked at advertisements for them.

bloppe2• 2 years ago

I started a small business selling candles during the pandemic. It's crazy how quickly you change your opinion about advertisements once you start needing to advertise your own business. All of the sudden, they're this amazing benefit for society.

Advertisements can be good (when the business is good and genuinely wants you to know about good new product), and they can be bad (when the business if bad / misleading / scammy). An optimist would say there are more good than bad. I suppose you wouldn't consider yourself an optimist.

2OEH8eoCRo03• 2 years ago

The GDP argument is weird. If Google being huge is good for GDP why don't we just let them own the whole country? One US company for everything, maximum GDP afterall!

Night_Thastus2• 2 years ago

"President Walt Disney Pepsi Comcast has done wonders for the economy! Being that it now is...the economy."

adventured• 2 years ago

Big tech is very good for the US. They're far more difficult to compete with in terms of scale and the resources they can deploy, than small companies. It more easily enables the US to suffocate the tech efforts of other competing nations. Giving this advantage up is extraordinarily moronic by the US. There is no benefit to the US by making it easier for the rest of the world to compete with the US golden geese. The DOJ isn't thinking that far ahead, they're playing a game of agenda.

sirspacey• 2 years ago

What MSFT learned from that was to open offices in Washington DC, lobby and sell to the federal gov.

Hard to find the sense in this action.

duped2• 2 years ago

Maybe if google sold more products to the feds they wouldn't be so brazen as to kill them off

WalterBright10• 2 years ago

Before the anti-trust action against Microsoft, Microsoft did not lobby nor donate to politicians.

After Bill Gates rode on a golf cart with Bill Clinton, he realized the need to pay the expected tribute to the politicians.

inopinatus3• 2 years ago

one may as well complain that outlawing bribery caused everyone to attempt regulatory capture instead

adam_arthur• 2 years ago

Competition usually leads to higher wealth creation and GDP, not less.

If you use real life examples and history as a benchmark

AtlasBarfed• 2 years ago

There's been a lot of comparisons between the gilded age and modern us economic structure with respect to individual wealth.

I contend the even more disturbing mirror is the trust/monopoly/cartel structure of virtually all industries and markets in the United States.

The ultra rich are a symptom, not necessarily the cause: we need a massive breakup of practically every sector in the United States, and it's not just for what the parent of this comment says about wealth creation: increased employment, more job mobility, more innovation, overall competitive advantage in the world, more resilience to global supply chain disruption, and innumerable other national security and economic concerns.

Monopolies are really bad for freedom. As we see with the closed no-appeal ban systems of internet companies and utter lack of customer service, your very day to day freedom can sharply be curtailed at a whim by the centralized power of monopolies.

internet101010• 2 years ago

I have always thought the reason they became alphabet was because of the expectation that they would eventually get broken up and wanted a company for each letter.

mucle6• 2 years ago

I think they already had a company for each letter when they became alphabet

BurningFrog5• 2 years ago

They were also betting on Alpha!

johannes1234321• 2 years ago

Wasn't that for the founders being able to focus on the moonshots and pay there while making Pichain CEO of Google, so they don't have to deal with that day to day? (Which then was ridiculed relatively short after when they made Pichai CEO of all Alphabet ... or was that just him passing the probation period?

utopcell2• 2 years ago

Off-Topic:

I always thought they missed out on a great opportunity to name the umbrella company AlephBet instead of AlphaBet ([1]), perhaps with a tag-line that reads: "stop thinking in constants" (to contrast Googol being equal to 10^100).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph_number

whiplash4512• 2 years ago

With you up to the last sentence. What were the learnings for the current crop of companies?

mathgeek• 2 years ago

Both suits, since they went before several courts, established specific actions that companies should avoid (and ones that they could get away with).

FrustratedMonky2• 2 years ago

Breaking up AT&T lead to innovation.

GDP? Have people forgotten that a vibrant 'Free Market' requires breaking up monopolies?

When did supporting a 'Free Market' turn into, "don't touch our giant corps".

kelnos13• 2 years ago

I won't argue that AT&T's breakup wasn't a good thing and the right move, but unfortunately a lot of that breakup has been undone: today telephony is controlled by a small oligopoly in the US. Better than a single monopoly, I suppose, but still not great.

The Baby Bells started their re-merge back in the 90s. In 2000, when Verizon was formed, it was a combination of Bell Atlantic (New Jersey Bell + Bell Company of PA + Diamond State + C&P), NYNEX, and GTE. (I watched this all in real-time, as my father worked for Ma Bell -> New Jersey Bell -> Verizon for more or less his entire adult life.) I'm sure similar things happened in the rest of the country with other Baby Bells, though I don't know the history very well.

insane_dreamer• 2 years ago

Besides the fact that optimizing for GDP growth only vs other metrics is not necessarily economically healthy for a country and its citizens.

hzia5• 2 years ago

I think most people do not understand that Google funnels a lot of their profits to make Chrome and Android into OSS.

Youtube may be the only viable company that can come out of Google. Rest will either have to charge a lot of money or die.

And we will be left with an even more profitable ad giant, that sends back all profits to it's share holders.

ineedasername5• 2 years ago

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

T-Winsnes• 2 years ago

I think you underestimate the value of controlling the platform that you base all your revenue from. Chrome controls the internet and android has a huge market share on mobile.

The latest changes to chrome that breaks plugins like ublock origin allows them to keep maximising their advertising revenue.

I think these two being open source is a major reason why they have been so successfully adopted. It isn’t direct revenue, but the control and indirect revenue that comes from that which is the driver

krackers• 2 years ago

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

debit-freak• 2 years ago

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

tehjoker2• 2 years ago

The ideological blindness that causes people to speak past each other is this.

Innovation requires reliable funding, such as monopoly profits or government funding. Monopoly leads to undemocratic concentrations of power and various private taxes on the public (e.g. in the case of Google, your personal information). Bell Labs was funded by monopoly funding with a law directing a certain amount to research.

Competition improves the balance of power, but destroys the ability to innovate except on relatively easy to engineer variations of existing tech within a 1-5 year window projects. The recipients of monopolist largess (such as OSS) whither on the vine as competition drives profits to zero over time (which then causes consolidation and monopoly formations...).

The answer I prefer of course is to create the efficiencies and innovative capacity of large scale industry but control them democratically. Nationalize Google.

ulfw• 2 years ago

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

ekianjo2• 2 years ago

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

starspangled3• 2 years ago

Not a lot of their profits. A minuscule fraction of their profits, and far less than OSS has given value to them. And the value from contributing back to open source is generally pretty high by itself because you get a lot of review and maintenance from the community on the features and code you want for your proprietary business, so it's not like they are doing a lot of it out of pure altruism.

OSS would be fine without Google, it was great before Google ever existed. There are intrinsic motivations to contribute, which is why thousands of companies do.

maeil2• 2 years ago

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

danielheath• 2 years ago

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

realusername• 2 years ago

think most people do not understand that Google funnels a lot of their profits to make Chrome and Android into OSS.

Chrome maybe but for Android, it's debatable at best to state it as OSS. AOSP doesn't run on a single phone on earth, not even the emulator and the freedom of users to modify it is very limited in practice.

I'd put it as "mostly source available" instead of open source.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 2 years ago

Pretending that this is a sincere comment, it raises a question: Why is Google fighting the charges. If divestiture creates a more profitable company for the shareholders, according to this HN commenter, then why not settle with the US government.

No one can predict the future. HN commenters love to try, every day. For example, speculating about a "breakup".

If neither side changes their position, Google will be fighting the US government for many years to come. That we can say with reasonable certainty. Regardless of the remedy sought.

As a shareholder I do not want the company to be fighting the US government for years to come. It's not good for business.

But Google fans no doubt read the news and spin it to be positive. No matter what, in their minds only Google can win. Self-delusion.

Meanwhile, the legal process will continue. More money for the lawyers.

davedx4• 2 years ago

Most people do not understand this because Alphabet's financial filings are chronically opaque and break out very little of how the financials of the different parts of the group interact.

How do you know how much Google funnels of its profits (are you sure you mean this?) into Chrome and Android's open source projects? Do you work at Google and have access to this information? Are you sure you know what you're talking about here?

0xEF• 2 years ago

Do you have any sources showing how Google spends its profits? Honest question, you got me curious. From my likely ignorant perspective, the devs I know build open-source products with a barely perceptible fraction of the money Google makes, and they seem fine, so I'm wondering just how much Google dumps into that.

My initial search produces a lot of speculative numbers, but nothing verifiable. Admittedly, this is a realm I have little experience with, so perhaps I am looking for the wrong terms. It was also my understanding that the books of large companies like this are typically closed unless demanded by legal entities.

youngtaff2• 2 years ago

Youtube, Search, Display Ads, and Cloud Compute are probably the four profitable business units

GTM and GA probably live with Display Ads

Chrome and Android probably live with Search

Who knows where ChromeOS, and all the hardware devices go

wvh• 2 years ago

How much effort do Chrome and Android require from a company the size of Google? It's a genuine question.

Jolla/Sailfish make a mobile operating system with a handful of people, and even though that system pretty minimal, I'd say the added value on the Android side is the ecosystem of apps and porting to devices, which is done by other developers and manufacturers than Google. And I'm not sure how many people work on Firefox itself on any given day.

I guess it's just really hard to get a clear picture on what all those people in large companies are really doing day to day. The overhead must be enormous, and likely a lot of engineering effort is thrown at the wall to see what sticks.

briandear5• 2 years ago

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

mumblemumble• 2 years ago

I think that similar arguments were made about Ma Bell and Bell Labs back in the day. And it's true, a lot of great things did come out of Bell Labs.

In fact, it almost seems like the only people able to produce great things in the 1970s were massive entrenched corporations like Ma Bell.

Funny, that.

Come to think of it, wasn't there a much more vibrant browser ecosystem in the late 90s and early 2000s, before Google used its dominant position in the ad market to undercut the competition? There used to be a lot more mobile operating systems out there, too.

I wonder what happened to all that competition? It's almost like some sort of massive anti-competitive influence came into force in the tech scene somewhere in the 2000s. . .

matheusmoreira• 2 years ago

Google funnels a lot of their profits to make Chrome and Android into OSS

No, that is incidental. What is the first and principal thing it does, what needs does it serve by making open source browsers and operating systems?

Control. Google maintains appreciable control over mobile devices and the web by making their own mobile operating system and browser. In cases such as these, it is only a matter of time before they tightening the screws. They already have.

we will be left with an even more profitable ad giant, that sends back all profits to it's share holders

But not one that can kill ad blockers or ram remote attestation down people's throats.

troyvit• 2 years ago

Speaking to search, both DDG and Kagi seem to be doing fine, each with very different models. Google could figure out something there.

Google ads would be fine on its own. They'd continue to dominate.

Google Analytics would probably have a problem. The big thing going for it is that it's free. Without being able to funnel their data hoovering into the rest of the ecosystem they'd probably lose that. If they _did_ have to charge, would they release a simpler tier that isn't so mind-bogglingly complex? That'd be nice.

Docs? Yeah, I don't see a way forward with that unless they charge a lot. There are some competitors, but they suck, and they struggle, and google docs seems one of the major nodes of interoperability between a lot of their products. It's be really hard to replicate that if you're broken up.

Calendar. Hah. Well. Everybody gets to suffer given that google calendar uses its own protocols. It's not like everybody could just switch to DAV and have close to the same functionality, at least out of the gate.

I agree with you re: Chrome and Android, but I will say that current FOSS forks of Android seem to do well. I think they have enough runway to continue making a good product. It would put phone makers into a bind, but I personally think their suffering is also a good thing. Fewer phone makers == less e-waste. Maybe people start holding onto their phones for a few years.

Honestly I couldn't care less about Chrome, except that I hope it does die. But Microsoft could take over the engine and use its hegemony to continue funneling money into developing it.

Firefox would be in a tough spot. They'd have to find another sponsor. I know they've been trying to diversify but I think we'd see a very different browser from them within 3 years of the breakup.

The good news is that there is no shortage of oligarchs to help pick up the pieces. Which is good because I bet Alphabet is going to start whinging about "massive layoffs" soon.

gerash5• 2 years ago

No, Epic vs Apple and Epic vs Google ruling shows how inconsistent the ruling are on such a common sense situation.

So I don't want Google to be broken up and lose business only for MS, Apple, Amazon and Facebook to gobble up its business

ineedasername5• 2 years ago

A lot of people think it's common sense, but plenty of them disagree on what that common sense approach actually is.

foolfoolz• 2 years ago

big breakups don’t make sense in a globalized economy because it empowers foreign companies. i don’t think MS, Apple, amazon, fb would be the only benefactors. i think we entered the age of “too big to fail” about 10 years ago. breaking up very big companies like google is now a national security risk

davedx4• 2 years ago

What's common sense about the App Store rulings?

filloutform• 2 years ago

Monopoly law is based on whether or not consumers are harmed. Consumers want free and cheap and quality, Google gives that thanks to economy of scale. Break up Google and consumers will pay more for the same services. until another company steps up and does the same thing Google does. this could be Baidu or Yandex. Yandex has their own version of drive, maps, Gmail, search etc etc.

forgotoldacc2• 2 years ago

But who's the customer?

Google is an ad business. It sells human eyes and ears to businesses. They own a massive chunk of the ad business and everything they make benefits ads. People who are buying ads (businesses) might benefit with more competition, because as it stands, we have dumb stuff like lawyers in Missouri buying ads and people in Bangladesh clicking them. Google gains money even though that ad was completely ineffective to the customer.

Plus google's goal is to funnel everything into ads. Search sucks ass. It's all astroturfed or straight up fake content these days. Users are getting scammed clicking on these links. Small businesses are getting strangled out because they can't pay protection fees that the megacorps that aren't flooded out by AI generated and SEO-optimized slop can. We all suffer because of that.

Google has a stranglehold on email. Try sending a non-gmail message to a gmail account as a normie and you're probably going straight to the spam bucket. How much has it costed people who had their messages lost because they won't hand all their data over to Google?

Technically, competition "exists", but it's strangled out to the point of basically not existing. Other companies can offer all these services if they grow big. The problem is there's no other company that can compete with google in the US. And whenever a new company comes along that can shake up the game, Google/Apple/Microsoft buy them out and shut them down, unless they're part of the club already (e.g. OpenAI)

johnnyanmac5• 2 years ago

to be blunt: screw the GDP. things get worse for the middle class even when the country does well. Why should I be concerned that money not going to benefit me is dwindling because a company that exploited me can't exploit me anymore? Reap what you sow.

More on topic: It was a neat idea, but given how consistently every single walled garden has ended up hindering progress and exploiting users in the long term, I'd rather go back to that 90's geocities era where users had to be mindful of their content instead of letting an algorithm scroll for them showing what maximizes engagement. The experiment has failed with aplomb.

Break up Google, break up Microsoft (again, kind of), open up Apple, shake down Steam. Make this new money show why old money was historically regulated into being a proper public service instead of a winner take all conglomerate.

thomastjeffery2• 2 years ago

The only people here who are going to materially benefit from a larger GDP are the temporarily embarrassed billionaires.

And that's the entire point here: Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, etc. are hoarding the wealth. For the rest of us to actually benefit from the monetary value of the increased productivity of tech, that money has to be taken back.

In a country where 50 people own more wealth than 50%, the only beneficiaries to GDP growth are those 50 individuals. The rest of us are just getting fucked.

gavin_gee• 2 years ago

clearly, google hasn't paid enough campaign donations vis-a-vis Microsoft.

This is just political corruption feigning as doing the right thing for the country.

we are having the wrong debate and are being distracted by the sideshow.

in many ways this is a test balloon for public support to go after big tech as a narrative around censorship over misinformation that will explode over the next few years

exabrial• 2 years ago

Good. Then Apple, Then Amazon, Then Facebook. All of them are squeezing innovation in this country.

IncreasePosts• 2 years ago

Is there any chance this could occur in the remaining term of Biden? If not, is Harris going to continue on this path? I assume so, since they are both part of the same machine.

anon2914• 2 years ago

I wish that instead of wasting time on antitrust cases, that the government would just directly fund competition by incentivizing it.

I.e, the first company to reach x% browser market share will receive $x million (billion?) in prize money

or, the first company to build an LLM-based search engine with x% market share will receive $n million

Or structure as a direct investment or heavy tax breaks.

Always better to incentivize competition versus punish success.

Or even better, if government wants to break up "ACME corp" then just tell the employees that, if you leave "ACME corp" and start your own company competing with ACME corp, we will waive taxes on all income for your first five profitable years.

crabmusket5• 2 years ago

Instead of spending millions or billions on giveaways to private companies, why not fund a public alternative? Sure, search isn't cheap. But governments should consider information access to be of key importance to democratic participation.

An open source, public benefit search engine would be a really valuable thing to have, which no private company does or ever will find it viable to provide. And I don't even want it to be the only search engine. Commercial search engines will probably still have the edge in various ways, for various use cases. But why not have a public option as one point in the landscape?

If someone is going to "organise the world's information" I'd prefer it to be a democratically controlled government, not an unaccountable for-profit corporation. I know that's an ideological position that many here won't share.

km144• 2 years ago

The bleak reality is that most Americans trust private corporations more than their own government. Government-sponsored search is literally 1984. If it's just a competitor, we've seen that unless there is an external force driving the initiatives, government ventures are often just less successful than unfettered private corporations (e.g. NASA post Space Race).

anon2914• 2 years ago

American society is by-and-large self-organizing and this is an American bias. America has done quite well for itself (better than many countries in fact) and so I see no need to drastically change this simply to have search competition. It's fine to have your ideological position, but there's really no need for it.

mulmen7• 2 years ago

How does cementing early leaders benefit consumers?

This seems like the opposite of what the government should be doing to incentivize competition and innovation.

anon2914• 2 years ago

Doesn't cement early leaders at all, since, the moment you win the prize, there's another one immediately offered for the guy to beat you.

j2kun2• 2 years ago

They're not punishing success, they're punishing illegal behavior.

Breaking up monopolies has a long, successful track record.

anon2914• 2 years ago

From a human rights perspective, there is no unethical behavior. You are allowed to invent things, sell those things, and profit from those things. It's a fundamental human right.

The entire antitrust concept is concerning honestly.

causal3• 2 years ago

The government does a lot to fund and incentivize startups. It can do more than one thing at a time.

mcguire• 2 years ago

A fun thing to do with google's search engine: look for "Scheme tutorial".

For me, the links are:

1. Arun Muthu's Programming in Scheme (https://medium.com/atomic-variables/programming-in-scheme-th...) Part 1 of a 4-year-old series of blog posts (on Medium) that has no other parts.

2. Yet Another Scheme Tutorial (http://www.shido.info/lisp/idx_scm_e.html) A decent looking Scheme tutorial, undated.

3. A Scheme Primer (https://spritely.institute/static/papers/scheme-primer.html) Another decent looking tutorial, 2022.

4. Scheme Tutorial (https://www.cs.rpi.edu/academics/courses/fall00/ai/scheme/re...) A copy of a 1997 tutorial for a 2000 class at RPI; has broken links pointing to http://cs.wwc.edu/~cs_dept/KU/PR/.

5. Kent Dybvig's The Scheme Programming Language 4th ed. (https://www.scheme.com/tspl4/)

6. Reddit "Best beginner friendly "write a scheme" tutorial?" (https://www.reddit.com/r/scheme/comments/klt0af/best_beginne...)

7. A link to the introduction of a copy of Paul Wilson's un-attributed An Introduction to Scheme and its Implementation (https://www.cs.rpi.edu/academics/courses/fall00/ai/scheme/re...) from RPI in 2000.

Google is an advertising company with a big IT department, not a technology company.

burningChrome2• 2 years ago

As someone who spent time researching the Ma Bells breakup and being knee deep in the local telecom deregulation, I see a lot of the same proposals when discussing the breaking up of Google and Facebook.

This is the short story of what happened in the local telecom deregulation, which I'm pretty sure will happen if you were to break up Google. Consider this took place over the course of 20+ years, but I see the same things happening.

After the Ma Bells breakup, there was a huge push to deregulate the regional carriers to increase local market competition. This was put in place in the late 90's here in Minnesota. Suddenly anybody could start a local telecom, lease lines from Qwest Communications (now CenturyLink), resell them and then compete with them in the local market.

This spawned hundreds of companies that were living on razor thin margins. Many were able to exist up to the 2000 initial dot com bust. Many went out of business during the recession. Those who survived? Many of those merged with each other, or were bought by larger regional carriers who wanted to get into the Minneapolis market.

This is what I see happening. You break Google up into smaller companies and within a decade, they will have all merged back together in some form, under different names, or they'll be bought by other companies seeking an advantage by using their technology. Its the same thing I saw happen in telecom. They tried to increase competition by deregulating the market and all it did was create a short-term gold rush and long-term crash.

The problem will be the same with Google. Qwest at the time owned the infrastructure and hardware. Nobody had the financial resources to build out an entirely new network to compete with them so they took the path of least resistance. Which lead to a myriad of other problems. Billing, installation, nefarious things Qwest would do to hamper competitors from switching their lines, etc.

You can break up Google, but over a few decades, we'll look back and understand it wasn't worth it.

christhecaribou4• 2 years ago

So are you implying we shouldn’t’ve broken up Ma Bell? Or shouldn’t breakup Google?

Perhaps Ma Bell taught us lessons to avoid this time around.

burningChrome2• 2 years ago

> Perhaps Ma Bell taught us lessons to avoid this time around.

I hope this is true. I'm not sure breaking up Ma Bell was a good thing long term. All they did was break them up and then all the regional bells and smaller companies just re-constituted themselves again in some other form. The deregulation created more competition, but it was short lived because of economic pressures.

For many business customers, their first dealings with local telecom companies that were competing with Qwest at the time were horrific. Business customers would lose their landline and internet service for days without any idea when it would be restored. Cutovers were problematic and a total crap shoot if they went smoothly. Qwest regularly tagged the wrong lines that needed to be cut over. The billing nightmares of moving off of Qwest to a local company were too numerous to remember. Many businesses would switch for the savings and within a few months, would switch back because it was just one thing after another these companies couldn't get right. Suddenly paying a little more for the peace of mind far outweighed any savings they were getting.

I suspect Google customers will have the same experience so I'm still on the fence whether it will be worth it long term. The one argument you can make is that Google isn't simply a company that needs competition, but that's its actually doing damage by how they manipulate their search rankings and what results they're delivering to people - so in that regard, they absolutely need to be broken up.

wrongotron• 2 years ago

I think you ignore how much the telecom market reshaped itself in the meantime. Pre-breakup AT&T had complete market power over what technologies would or would not get deployed. The use of landlines has plummeted, to be replaced by cell phones. Today the average consumer has significantly greater choice when it comes to carriers, even if many of the usual suspects are still in the game. I question whether the breathing room would have existed in the market without the breakup. If you have an innovative startup idea in a space, and you have exactly one customer to sell to, you have a major uphill battle.

thomastjeffery2• 2 years ago

Suddenly anybody could start a local telecom, lease lines from Qwest Communications (now CenturyLink), resell them and then compete with them in the local market.

Here in Utah, if you are very lucky, you can get an intentionally-designed version of that: UTOPIA. UTOPIA works by leasing a municipal fiber network to anyone interested in running an ISP. Because the same network is sold by many separate ISPs, each ISP must actually offer a competitive price. It's very effective: while Comcast (XFinity) will charge anyone it can >$100/mo. for 1000/40mbit, while every UTOPIA provider has their price set to ~$60/mo. for 1000/1000mbit. Actually, I just checked, and UTOPIA prices have actually gone down to ~$45-50, and ~$75 for 2.5G!

The only problem left is that this only creates competitive pricing for areas where UTOPIA owns the network. Anywhere Comcast or CenturyLink owns still has predatory pricing. The worst part (in my experience) is that a handful of apartment developers have shady deals with specific ISPs, where they write the price, but not the speed, into each tenant's lease. For example, I must pay $100/mo. for what ends up being ~300/300mbit from SenaWave. That's better than my last apartment (owned by the same company) where the price and ISP were the same, but I was lucky to get any more than 100/100mbit.

Competition works, so long as it is actively maintained.

textlapse• 2 years ago

This will also end up breaking up the Ads to Nobel Prize pipeline.

I do wish they had some sort of GSoC style programs to do what Alpha Go Fold Zero did for the world.

gamblor956• 2 years ago

Considering how many great/successful products that Google killed because they weren't successful "enough" compared to the ad business, this would be a good thing.

Products like Reader, News, etc. would still be around if they'd been split off from the Google mothership.

api3• 2 years ago

The most important thing -- and I doubt this would ever happen -- would be to break off the identity (OAuth) provider and make it some kind of public non-profit. One company should not own the identity layer for such a huge chunk of the Internet, and so many people use Google for this.

crabmusket5• 2 years ago

Man that would be really cool. I do wish governments would move a bit faster on providing such generic public benefit services.

api3• 2 years ago

I'm not a huge fan of governments doing Internet services, but the identity layer is something that actually fits within their sphere. Governments already provide the canonical identity layer for society and have since, like, ancient Egypt.

Your drivers' license could have a chip in it capable of FIDO2 etc. and it could be linked with an OAuth provider. I know login.gov already exists but it's not built to be used everywhere.

weeksie• 2 years ago

By the time they break them up search will be less relevant than ever. Barn door/horse, etc.

blufish• 2 years ago

How is google harming clients when their product is free and a click away to something else

crabmusket5• 2 years ago

Google does everything they can to make sure there is no "something else". That's what antitrust enforcement is meant to address.

bsimpson• 2 years ago

It's gonna be wild if they make paying to be default search illegal, and then Google gets to keep all the money it pays out while still being the default (because nothing else is worth using).

AceFromOttawa• 2 years ago

This seems like it would have side effect punishments to companies like Apple, Samsung, Firefox etc.

Sorry guys, but because Google made itself into a monopoly you can no longer sell default positions on your platform (Which is essentially a company buying an ad placement).

I'm really curious what the Judge decides the remedy is for this issue. Anyone have any possible remedies in mind that doesn't completely tank some of these other guys revenues?

willi59549879• 2 years ago

I was interested in that as well. What would be recommendations to break Google up? I am not sure that breaking up Google would work. All their systems are built to run on Google infrastructure. Outlawing tracking of the population (for ads and other things) I think would have a better effect.

whatever14• 2 years ago

Advertising venues that hold auctions need to be opened up to competition and provide full transpancy. These are markets that need regulations.

Today ad auctioning is the ultimate scamming game. The force everyone to pay more, and nobody wins except the ad venue.

ensignavenger3• 2 years ago

If the advertisers weren't winning, they would stop using those platforms.

whatever14• 2 years ago

Many times it's just the fear of losing. Aka if you are hp you are paying for the printer keywords out of fear that Epson might take them instead

crabmusket5• 2 years ago

What is the so-called "ad feed" mentioned in this article? What would it mean to license this to somebody else?

yalogin• 2 years ago

I think the government is late to the game in this instance. I would have been in the “break it up” camp until this year. I see google’s search monopoly going away in the next few years with GenAI.

WalterBright10• 2 years ago

What country wouldn't love to have a Google? And the US wants to break its good fortune up.

Like all dominant companies, Google will eventually fall via strangulation by its internal bureaucracy. There's no reason to hand the market over to another country.

mulmen7• 2 years ago

Why would this breakup hand anything to another country? Competition is good for the economy. Breaking up Google allows new innovators to thrive.

WalterBright10• 2 years ago

Why would this breakup hand anything to another country?

For the same reason Google is dominant today. Hobbling American business creates opportunities for other countries to take the top dog position.

nickpp16• 2 years ago

What do you think innovators will feel when they see the government breaking up a private company? Do you think they’ll be more or less motivated to create one to meet the same fate down the road in the unlikely case of success, after immeasurable difficulties and struggle?

Ever heard of second order effects and chilling effect of regulation?

Apocryphon17• 2 years ago

2017 article so pretty old by now, but:

Microsoft in the year ended June 2016 had $20.1 billion in foreign income and a domestic loss of $300 million. Microsoft’s income tax expense was $3.3 billion, for an effective rate of 16.5%. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, posted a $4.7 billion tax expense, or 19%. Such “avoision” will continue as long as foreign income is subject to lower rates than domestic.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2017/04/18/wh...

There's no reason to hand the market over to another country.

Who's to say that the other country's Google-killer won't prove to be a greater boon to American consumers? Let the global market decide.

WalterBright10• 2 years ago

Who's to say that the other country's Google-killer won't prove to be a greater boon to American consumers?

If you do it by hobbling American businesses, they aren't a greater boon.

causal3• 2 years ago

Nobody's proposing killing Google. You think this is bad because you cannot imagine an alternative history with better competition between multiple Googles

theultdev• 2 years ago

Good. I bet Mozilla is nervous.

alex_young• 2 years ago

https://archive.ph/DPtgt

elisbce• 2 years ago

So they have no problems with Microsoft, Meta, Blackrock, Berkshire, Exxon/Chevron, but Google.

ghostpepper• 2 years ago

The DoJ could also seek to force Google to share users’ search data with rivals

This is a bit scary. Hopefully this would not be retroactive, and only apply to searches made after the enforcement date?

mirchiseth• 2 years ago

Not directly related to antitrust but rather national industrial policy - there is a really good article on "Industrial policy without National Champions"[1] where the author also touches upon antitrust - worth a read.

"During that event, Cardiff Garcia did a fascinating interview with Paul Krugman, at the end of which Joe Wiesenthal asked a critical question. The United States, under Joe Biden, is embarking on an aggressive program of industrial policy even as it pursues increasingly vigorous antitrust enforcement. Aren't there tensions between these goals? Responding to an antitrust investigation of NVIDIA, Dylan Matthews similarly asked, "Here you have a tremendously successful national champion in a strategically critical industry. Is that exactly what you want[?]"

[1] https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/09/27/industrial-polic...

rqtwteye3• 2 years ago

I think as a general principle it would be best to break up companies automatically from a certain size on. We need more competition and less powerful corporations. I don’t see any benefit that these trillion dollar companies are providing for society. Only downside

hkand2• 2 years ago

To say you can't see any benefit at all is probably an overstatement.

These trillion dollar companies were often able to invest into big money-losing moonshot projects that benefited consumers massively - in Google's case, GMail and Google Maps - which were truly unimaginable at the time even though they're taken for granted today, so there's clearly some benefit in the form of innovation. Who else can afford to build things like that?

The questions to ask are, can startups and venture capital take on the role of innovating that these big corps have done? I'm doubtful, since there's been no startup in the past ten years that put out anything nearly as genuinely innovative and helpful as Google Maps was for me, mainly because the risk/profit ratio is so bad without the network effects that these big companies have.

Do the benefits outweigh the costs? Ten years ago, when the big companies were innovating so much to the benefit of consumers, I'd answer unequivocally yes. Now it's much less clear.

And finally, is there any way to rein in the negative effects of these big companies while bringing out the positive effects to the benefit of consumers?

rqtwteye3• 2 years ago

" in Google's case, GMail and Google Maps"

They did this when they were much smaller. I haven't seen anything impressive from the huge tech companies in the last years, be it MS, Google or Apple. All the the cool stuff was done years ago when they were much smaller. Their main achievements is to buy up or just crush potential competition before they become competitive.

lom• 2 years ago

Google maps was launched 7 years after google was founded. If you look up the market share of google at that time (less than half of the search engine market) I think you’re more proving the need for breaking the company up.

Maps was created because it allowed google to be more competitive, not because they were already on top of their game and could just pour billions into any product.

tlss2• 2 years ago

Doesn’t that create an adverse incentive for companies to not grow (invest to make more money) even if they could? YouTube for example might still be stuck in the 480p era if Google hasn’t laid all those Ocean cables on its own dime...

rqtwteye3• 2 years ago

Depends on where you set the limit. A 500 billion dollar company can get a lot done.

sensanaty2• 2 years ago

I'm fully onboard, but only if it's not only Google being broken up here. M$, Apple, Meta (!!!!!!!!) and all the other big tech companies all need to be nuked from orbit.

I'm worried that what's actually going to happen is Google getting broken up and M$ just swooping in to feast on the carcass, leaving us in an even shittier position. Out of all the evils coming from the FAANG world, M$ and Meta are by far the worst IMO, so not breaking them up alongside google is just idiocy

whaaaaat• 2 years ago

You can just type MS. I understand that it was cool to use M$ in the 90s, but like, all the tech giants are bad at this point and M$ looks silly.

AmericanChopper2• 2 years ago

I’m happy for people to keep writing M$. It’s a great way to quickly identify comments to scroll past.

shiroiushi18• 2 years ago

You're forgetting Apple. What happens if breaking Google up ends up destroying Android?

Ntrails• 2 years ago

How would that even work? (I'm not being difficult here, I just don't understand).

Assume Google is split up, Android is not maintained because doing so is not profitable. Each handset manufacture still needs an OS, and will just make custom forks or whole OS. They're not going to wind down operations because Android stops being a thing

I don't think it meaningfully increases IOS market share?

stackskipton2• 2 years ago

Law doesn't work that way. They have to break up the first company THEN using that precedent, they can start on other monopolies.

tonymet• 2 years ago

There’s strong competition in all of Google’s major business lines, and within 5 years they will likely lose top status.

Search engine marketing (search ads) are quickly declining, losing ground to Amazon.

YouTube Video ads have tons of competition from all other streaming providers.

Web search is a dying product, as time spent has moved to streaming video, social video and social media.

Once again FTC and Antitrust are 10+ years behind, just like they were with Microsoft. By the time any action was taken against Microsoft, antitrust concerns resolved themselves.

Meanwhile FTC is spending hundreds of millions on a case, and Google has to spend a similar amount. Consumers will lose out on both ends: higher subscription prices, higher ads prices , higher taxes.

What happened to the constitution?

pneill• 2 years ago

I'm having trouble understanding how a breakup addresses the allegations in the case? Wasn't this all about Google paying Apple for search exclusivity on iPhones? How does a breakup address that?

starspangled3• 2 years ago

In the early days, Google seemed like it promised to give us another Bell Labs or IBM Research, which would have made me think at least something good was coming from their anti competitive behavior.

It never eventuated though. Many of the interesting products and technologies that came out of it were either bought from or copying the actual innovators.

tlss2• 2 years ago

I’m sorry, but what are you talking about? A Nobel Chemistry prize was just awarded for the creation of AlphaFold.

starspangled3• 2 years ago

I don't know what was unclear about what I wrote.

EDIT: AlphaFold was acquired by Google, in case anybody didn't realize that.

0dayz• 2 years ago

I'll admit I'm torn on Google, they got their own skeletons in the garden but at the same time Google have failed so many times with their attempts to gain a foothold in a lot of different markets.

And others they have either competed with other big tech such as Microsoft or Apple, or just is a player in the race.

Compared to say Amazon, Apple, meta or heaven forbid Microsoft that is.

I do think though if they get broken up then I'm fine with Google getting nuked and we all collectively wag the finger against the employees.

kybernetikos• 2 years ago

I'm not sure if I believe there would be consumer benefit from breaking Google up or not but I think that breaking Amazon up is a much clearer and more urgent proposition.

black_puppydog2• 2 years ago

I recently read a proposal in a book that comes down to a new tax that is specifically aimed to integrate these breakup decisions into the market mechanics.

Basically, a company would pay a very progressive tax on its revenue (not profit) which reaches 100% at some high threshold value. This tax would be flat zero for the vast majority of enterprises, but would approach 100% as the company's revenue approaches something that is big enough to be relevant on a countrywide GDP scale. Since it would be applied to individual companies only, splitting a company up wod reduce the tax or more even eliminate it entirely.

The exact point at which it makes sense for a company to split itself up the depends on the industry and other circumstances, but thst ppind exists and as society we can control in which type of scale it lies.

Just thought it was a neat proposal, although it would of course require careful legislation to avoid loopholes and edge cases. It surely ald be quite difficult to implement, given the opaque ownership structure of many companies and the companies they in turn own. But maybe the fact that this is so complicated should already give us pause...

fifticon• 2 years ago

I suspect loopholes will be the big problem here. There will be an incentive to form a sort of cartel of entities that semble being small, but in reality act in unison/coordinated. Sort of like the current scandal with price-fixing for apartment rentals in the US.

coding123• 2 years ago

break up big food. All our problems are there

trod123• 2 years ago

Anyone have a non-paywalled link?

US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

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