Google threatened with being broken up by US

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62504lv00do

69 67 2 years ago

bbqfog• 2 years ago

Google has pushed back hard against the proposals, describing them as "radical" and "sweeping" and claiming they "risk hurting consumers, businesses, and developers."

Breaking up Google would undoubtedly be good for consumers, businesses and developers. Having a monolithic, anti-competitive, closed source, advertising driven behemoth with the bad habit of killing off their own mediocre projects on the regular, would be a huge win for all of us.

justinclift2• 2 years ago

Hopefully it actually happens, in a way that's positive for people.

Maybe Google will even be forced to provide the dreaded "Customer Support" (of reasonable standard) for all of their products and services too. :D

prasadjoglekar• 2 years ago

If that's all that happens, it'll be a loss for consumers. A hefty cash fine will make shareholders pay attention.

FuckButtons• 2 years ago

Surely you can’t be serious.

aabhay• 2 years ago

The article continuously mentions Google, but how does that affect Alphabet, its parent company?

When I read about breaking up google, I had assumed that the division would simply force all alphabet companies to operate fully independently. But this is specific to the Google search engine part.

debit-freak2• 2 years ago

Presumably they would be forced to formally divest.

I had assumed that the division would simply force all alphabet companies to operate fully independently.

I'm not sure this makes sense if the same party has a controlling interest before and after.

pessimizer2• 2 years ago

It doesn't make sense, but it is what the US has traditionally done. The model breakup for antitrust people was the breakup of Standard Oil, and the owners (the Rockefellers) were richer after it was broken up, and still had control. Exxon (Standard Oil New Jersey) is still the largest oil company.

Being political, antitrust enforcement is often largely a ritual to display for the public when corruption has become too obvious for anyone sane to deny. It has no explicit goal (except benefit to the consumer, defined arbitrarily), so it can't actually do anything, because officially nothing is wrong other than "market manipulation" that "harms the consumer."

It's like forcing a rich guy to keep his money in two different wallets. With people making a living arguing about whether two wallets are enough, or should it be three, or even (as argued by dangerous radicals far outside of the mainstream) ten wallets?

The main reason antitrust should be pursued far more aggressively is because there is no harm to the owners other than that their ability to manipulate the market through anti-competitive means (something that they claim not to have anyway) is weakened. It's really just paperwork. Real positive change to markets comes from forcing individuals to divest from competing companies, or by holding companies and their owners responsible for crimes that they commit.

jmyeet• 2 years ago

For context, this relates to an earlier court ruling that Google search was an illegal because it pays others to make Google the default search engine. This isn't about Android or any other thing that might separately be investigated.

So the government wants "structural relief" here meaning to break up Google. But isn't the remedy simply tp make such payments illegal? That's certainly one argument I would make were I Google's lawyers. In addition to just appealing the finding outright of course.

Now I've previously said (and I stand by this) that making such payments illegal would help Google maintain its search dominance. Why? Because Firefox, Apple, etc could no longer extort Apple to make Google the default when that's what most users want anyway.

Mozilla already tried making Bing the default. They went back to Google eventually, probably because Google paid them, but I would guess the user response was probably negative too. That's just a guess however.

Those of us who are old enough will remember the Microsoft antitrust trial and how that really went nowhere in the end. And that was for something that was profoundly much more harmful. There is such a larger barrier to entry to installing a new browser.

And that's the thing: this will take a decade or longer to actually play out. Any administration in the meantime could not have the same resolve or otherwise choose to settle with Google in some form of consent decree that limits their behaviour for a period of time.

So I don't see this going anywhere realistically.

newaccount74• 2 years ago

when that's what most users want anyway

Not sure about that. A lot of people really couldn't care less if their search results came from Google, Bing, Duck Duck Go.

If you ask them, most of them would probably say Google since that's the only search engine they know.

But if you just replaced Google with Duck Duck Go, I'm sure most people wouldn't bother to switch it back.

Defaults are very powerful, otherwise Google wouldn't pay billions to keep them the default.

pessimizer2• 2 years ago

Mozilla already tried making Bing the default. They went back to Google eventually, probably because Google paid them, but I would guess the user response was probably negative too. That's just a guess however.

I doubt that people who would never think to change their default search engine would complain about the choice of search engines. Google vastly overpays for the privilege of being the default search engine because the existence of firefox protects their browser monopoly. Microsoft gets no such benefit, so I assume they wanted to reduce their payment to a more rational value 4 or 5 orders of magnitude smaller than the half-billion from Google.

mikel2053• 2 years ago

Unironically I think this would be a good thing for Google. Lots of smart people, and a lot of amazing technology.

If you took away the firehouse of money from search I'm sure a lot of those other parts of the business would find a way to make some incredible products. Think of everything that came out of the Baby Bells

gradys• 2 years ago

I’m not as familiar with the Baby Bells, so this is a surprising comparison to me. Bell Labs was famously so productive while it had the monopoly money hose, and not as much came from it after Bell was broken up.

What are the most noteworthy accomplishments of the Baby Bells?

jiqiren• 2 years ago

Calling people became cheap. Think about making a cross-country phone call in the pre-broken up AT&T era. It was like 25¢/min. Now I pay $35/month and can literally call most countries for up to 500min before I get metered (Visible+).

linguae• 2 years ago

While I lament the decline of Bell Labs and unfettered research in general (unfettered research labs need protection from market forces that only a monopoly, government, academia, or the very wealthy can provide), I also believe that the breakup of the Bell System was overall a good thing for society. For example, there was a time when AT&T customers had to rent their phones; they couldn’t own them (https://memorial.bellsystem.com/bell_system_property.html). Customers were finally allowed to purchase their own phones once the divestiture was underway. In addition, I’m not sure if we’d have a competitive cell phone market in America today had the Bell System remained in place, not to mention how I haven’t heard anything about long-distance calling charges in about 15 years due to how many modern cell phone plans work.

DowagerDave6• 2 years ago

it's hard to compare without a control, but a few key points: * none of the Baby Bells failed * because they segmented regionally, integration was super important and you could argue paved the way for the modern internet * consumer services under Bell was incredibly expensive and tightly controlled

In hindsight maybe they should have split up horizontally, nationalizing the natural monopoly components/infrastructure (ex: the physical lines)? It's interesting to see what looks like a reconsolidation of wireless now, I wonder what the future will look like.

mikel2053• 2 years ago

My opinion is that Bell Labs created great technology, but had no real incentive to make products and bring them to the public. The Baby Bells needed to compete however, and so they did.

Eddy_Viscosity2• 2 years ago

I think even with firehose monopoly money that Bell Labs would have eventually succumbed to cuts and general enshittification as the CEOs and shareholders wanted ever increasing pay and dividends. "Do more with less guys! You're smart you can figure it out! The Board really needs this 10,000% pay raise, they have families you know."

pphysch• 2 years ago

Being suddenly forced to increase revenues (to make up for lost subsidies) is unequivocally not the way to drive innovation.

mikel2053• 2 years ago

Competitive markets have generally proven to foster innovation?

petesergeant• 2 years ago

Literally the only people this isn't good for is Google's senior management.

tmpz22• 2 years ago

Won’t somebody think of the Mountain View Realtors Association?

freedomben3• 2 years ago

You think this would be good for Android users? What do you see happening to Android if Google were broken up?

ants_everywhere• 2 years ago

Lots of smart people, and a lot of amazing technology....would find a way to make some incredible products

One of the things I think a lot about with open source is that maybe not every amazing idea is profitable (or profitable in the current business climate).

It may be that some ideas have to be subsidized. Google subsidizes them with money from ads. But it also costs them a lot to maintain their monopoly, and the monopoly and the ads are IMO harmful to consumers.

So I think we need some more ways of funding digital public goods. I think governments can and should (and in fact do) play a role, but I think there need to be other sources as well.

Arguably the reputation Google has for killing its projects is a signal that they have more good ideas than they have funding capacity to sustain them. I realize it's also perf/promo driven. But it's also the pattern you see with smart people with ADHD where they start great projects but don't have the resources to continue them all. So we'll have more and cooler software if we find better ways of funding open source.

DowagerDave6• 2 years ago

> Google subsidizes them with money from ads.

if this is true, it's very temporary and very fickle. It is well known that Google rewards (1) big, new initiatives over maintaining long-running projects, and (2) things that power the cash machine over anything else.

Neither of these are good for the OSS ecosystem.

Const-me2• 2 years ago

firehouse of money from search

It’s not just search. They make such vast amounts of money because they hold a monopoly across several layers of the stack: web browsers (65% market share on desktop, 67% market share on mobile), internet search (90% market share), and internet advertising (AdSense and Ads together hold 67%).

Interestingly, this dominance isn’t the result of fair competition, but rather acquisitions. Google was allowed to buy YouTube, Android, and numerous online advertising companies. You can see the list there https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

I believe most of these acquisitions should have been blocked by the FTC or DoJ, but they weren’t, which has allowed Google to become a vertically integrated monopoly.

say_it_as_it_is• 2 years ago

it's like cutting the head off a hydra

esskay• 2 years ago

If this happened it would be great, but I hold out little hope it'll ever actually happen.

Mistletoe• 2 years ago

When the rich and powerful (including politicians) have their positions sold and will make money from the FAANG companies' stocks going down, we will see some real antitrust activity and society will get better and break away from the tech dystopia we are living in. So in a sense Gordon Gekko was right and greed is good. At some point you can't pump stocks anymore on vapors and you make money from them on the way down in shorts, buying lower, etc.

https://www.currentmarketvaluation.com/models/s&p500-mean-re...

paganel2• 2 years ago

The powers that be inside the Beltway will never let this happen in the current geo-political climate, it's like shooting themselves in their own foot. All that the Alphabet leaders/lawyers have to say is something on the lines of: "We can leverage AI better as a big integrated corporation and so we can better defeat the Chinese", and the game is theirs.

This is irrespective of what some minor judge or even a Federal agency not directly connected to the "war-adjacent" institutions in DC might say (i.e. something like the FTC will never have the upper hand against the White House, the CIA, the State Department or the Pentagon, again, not in this geo-political climate).

psunavy032• 2 years ago

As someone who spent 20 years in uniform active and reserve . . . this is unadulterated tinfoil-hattery.

paganel2• 2 years ago

You were most probably still at grunt-like level by the time you left, this is a very recent article co-written by Mark Milley and Eric Schmidt: America Isn’t Ready for the Wars of the Future [1]

You must of have also missed the tens of billions of dollars (and more) that the people in DC are now more than happy to throw at the US IT industry, all in the name of national security. And you think they’re going to kill one of their golden geese for competition-related reasons? That’s just delusional.

[1] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/ai-america-read...

fallingknife• 2 years ago

This doesn't feel like a real solution to the problem. How would breaking Google into pieces solve a monopoly in search? The search part would still have that monopoly. Since it doesn't solve the problem, I doubt it will survive in court. Google's 1% drop in stock price is evidence of this being no real threat. IMO this isn't an honest attempt at anti-trust enforcement and is just more Democratic party vengeance against the tech industry.

foxyv3• 2 years ago

It would prevent Google from using its other companies to engage in anti-competitive practices.

mariusor• 2 years ago

Less incentives for the world's most popular browser having a google search integration, less incentives for one of the leading mobile OSes to have a google search integration, etc.

Ferret74462• 2 years ago

Less incentives for the world's most popular browser having a google search integration

That doesn't seem particularly impactful. Chromium is open source, you can literally go and swap out the search engine right now in a couple of minutes (well, minus the compile time).

Const-me2• 2 years ago

I don’t think search monopoly is an important issue. The main issue Google is a monopoly for multiple levels of the stack.

A good internet search engine would deprioritize low quality stuff like ad-infested clones of Wikipedia, stackoverflow, and similar SEO generated or AI generated web sites. Google won’t do that because it would affect their income from online ads. Ever wondered why google’s search quality is declining over the years? https://mashable.com/article/google-search-low-quality-resea...

They have a similar conflict of interest for web browsers. I use Samsung web browser on my phone which asked me “would you like to enable the ad blocker?” on the first launch. Google won’t do that in Chrome despite end users would love the feature.

FMecha• 2 years ago

Microsoft faced the same threat in 2000 but the outcome of elections that year prevented that. Will it be the same?

Mountain_Skies• 2 years ago

It's the Biden administration pushing this so it's likely a Harris administration would keep on the same course. Trump and the tech industry hate each other so it's far from a given that he would be a typical Republican in favoring a large corporation like Google. Looks like Google is simply out of friends.

snovymgodym2• 2 years ago

Trump and the tech industry hate each other

Do they? I can never tell. I feel like lots of the people working in tech don't like him, but it feels like the VP/Director/C-Suite types secretly do like his policies even if they don't like his attitudes.

jsnell• 2 years ago

There's been a lot of reporting on Harris having a much closer and positive relationship with Silicon Valley than Biden, pretty much from the point where Biden withdrawing became a possiblity. Here's an example, but you could find plenty more:

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-vice-president-harris-vi...

It makes some sense. Biden was an ancient guy from the east cost, for whom the basis of wealth was manufacturing things and technology was confusing. Harris on the other hand built a political career in San Francisco during Silicon Valley's ascendancy. She would naturally view that industry in a more positive light, and would have had a lot of contacts with and backing from that set during her early career.

DowagerDave6• 2 years ago

Everybody seems to love Crypto these days - when they're willing to spend 10's or 100's of Millions of $$$ against your election campaign.

dev1ycan• 2 years ago

I think it should happen for the health of the web, however, sadly too much capital is behind getting rid of Lina Khan so they probably will get rid of her as soon as elections happen. They will just backtrack on the one good thing Biden did which was turn back on the "allow companies to acquire every competitor without worrying about monopolies" that Clinton started.

snovymgodym2• 2 years ago

Frankly, it's really crazy how much of the modern web is controlled by google.

The most common kind of consumer-facing computer is a mobile device, and the most common mobile OS worldwide is owned by Google.

The most common way that people interact with the web is either mobile apps or a web browser, and Google-owned Chrome/Chromium has basically eaten the world.

The most common way that people find new information on the web is a search engine. Once again, Google's namesake search engine is the unambiguous leader in terms of market share by a landslide.

Obviously there's more: YouTube, Google Maps and Waze, GSuite/Drive/Docs. But it's these first three verticals that smell the most monopolistic to me.

Ferret74462• 2 years ago

Frankly, it's really crazy how much of the modern web is controlled by google.

Citation needed. Almost 100% of Web is dominated by the likes of Reddit, Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, etc. All of which are curiously not controlled by Google.

sph• 2 years ago

None of those companies develop web browsers, run the largest search engine, develop the most widespread mobile OS or sit on standards board. You are being obtuse on purpose.

foxyv3• 2 years ago

We need some serious trust busting in the USA. It's been a problem for decades and has culminated in the slow destruction of the middle class. The longer we wait, the harder it will be to fix the issue.

DowagerDave6• 2 years ago

How can Amazon not be an obvious target? Many people say "it's just a website/store/marketplace". This is obviously wrong, but even if that was all they had I believe they use their monopoly position to crush any potential competition. Their model is essentially (the already monstrous) Walmart model at internet scale.

foxyv3• 2 years ago

There is a recent suit that is already proceeding.

https://apnews.com/article/amazon-antitrust-lawsuit-ftc-case...

tannhaeuser• 2 years ago

The US government is considering seeking the break-up of the world's biggest search engine, Google ...

Sorry, that BBC article reads like it was written by a nerd on HN or something. 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.

US antitrust is a lame duck anyway since it allowed the aquisitions of DoubleClick and YouTube in the first place, as well as the aquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook. The US stance of protecting business and turning a blind eye as long as US online hegemony and intelligence superiority is served isn't helping their case against TikTok today. With the antitrust enforcement's glacial pace, it's not clear if and when a breakup will take place to help the deranged market or if it's just political theater anyway, so other countries are well advised to take their own antitrust actions.

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Google threatened with being broken up by US

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